Give Us This Day (25 page)

The news, that autumn of 1899, seemed to prove her right. Nobody, it seemed, could get within singeing range of Kruger’s beard, and anyone who tried was shot down like a partridge. Defeat followed defeat and the sense of shame they brought spread outwards from London, like a wave of bitter-tasting medicine that everyone was obliged to swallow in droplets. Larger doses were on their way. When everybody was busy dressing their Christmas trees, news came of three shattering reverses in a single week, a week the newspapers called, justifiably in Henrietta’s view, “Black Week,” for she could not recall a single occasion (apart from that temporary one at the hands of Zulus) when anyone challenging the British on the field of battle had come away the victors.

Adam, for all his lofty talk of the Boers being outnumbered ten to one, was clearly depressed, especially when he heard that his old friend Roberts had lost his only son, killed trying to save guns at Colenso. He said, gloomily, “Only mentioned him to me last occasion we met, that time I put in a word for Alex at the club. I gathered he was the gallant-idiot type. They invariably get themselves killed in the first skirmish. But how the devil do they expect a father, facing grief of that kind, to pull Buller’s chestnuts out of the fire, now we’re fully committed? Damned politicians should never have let it come to this. The country’s gone mad and the whole world is laughing at us. Giles is the only chap I’ve met who takes a sane view of the silly business.”

Henrietta was intrigued to learn that Giles, by nature such a quiet, studious boy, had taken the war fever, and said, innocently, “What does Giles think we ought to do, dear?” and Adam administered one of the biggest shocks of their married life by growling, “
Do?
Why, what any Government in their senses would do in the circumstances. Find a face-saver, pull out, and let the Boers go their own way.”

She did not think she could have heard him correctly. It was so uncharacteristic of all she knew of him to advocate such a craven course and concede victory to the enemy, just as if positions had been reversed and the British were a small republic facing an opponent with vastly superior resources.

“Pull out!” she gasped. “You mean… let them
win
?”

“Dammit, woman, they are winning!”

“But only temporarily. I mean, they’re bound to be beaten in the end, aren’t they?”

“Yes, they are,” he said, “but we won’t emerge with any credit. They’ve already given us the hiding of our lives and demonstrated that the only possible way to beat them is to wear ‘em down, burn their farms, and slaughter or capture every able-bodied male between fourteen and seventy. By God, if I met a Boer now I wouldn’t have the gall to look the chap in the face. We’re behaving more like Prussians than Englishmen.”

She gave it up after that. Clearly he had got some bee in his bonnet about the Boers and was deaf to the opinions of everyone around him. She only hoped he would keep his mouth shut in the presence of any of her friends she invited in over the Christmas holiday.

There was to be the usual family party, with a coming and going of the whole tribe of children and grandchildren, and she wanted to make a special impression this year. Hugo would be bringing his aristocratic wife on Boxing Day, the first time she had been offered an opportunity of getting to know the exalted creature, for the brief introductory visit before the wedding didn’t count and at the ceremony itself she caught no more than a glimpse of the bride among all those fashionably dressed guests.

* * *

As it happened, however, Hugo and his wife appeared long before Boxing Day, bowling up to the forecourt in a very elegant equipage just as she was emerging from the kitchen in a grubby apron, after helping one of the girls to unstop the clogged runaway of the well-trough. She found it hard to believe that even Hugo could be so dense as to spring the girl upon her without a warning and would have blushed scarlet if she had not had her mind switched by the vision of Hugo in a well-tailored uniform of dark blue, with a broad yellow stripe running down his trouser-leg. Daughter-in-law Sybil escorted him up the steps and presented him like an impresario introducing his star-turn.

“There now!” she cooed. “Doesn’t he look perfectly
splendid
? Aren’t you proud of him, Mrs. Swann? My word, but that tailor did a wonderful job once I put a flea in his ear! ‘Swamped with orders, ma’am,’ he said, if you ever heard such nonsense. As if Hugo didn’t take precedence over a queue of stockbrokers and pen-pushers! Kiss your mother, Hugo, I’m sure she expects it.”

Henrietta wasn’t at all sure what she expected, apart from the floor to open and engulf her after being confronted by the daughter of the Earl of Uskdale in a flowered apron and a sewing dress, two years old. She was seized in Hugo’s bearlike embrace and lifted clear of the floor, but Sybil did not seem to pay the least attention to her embarrassment. She had no eyes for anyone but Hugo. Henrietta had time to note the soft shine in her ice-blue eyes as she patted and prodded her exhibit, straightening non-existent tunic creases and flicking imaginary specks of dust from the frogging. And then, to make bad worse, Adam had to come downstairs, pause on reaching hall level and exclaim, “Lord God Almighty! What’s he joined, a German band?” and she could have cracked him over the head with the sewing-room door-stop. Luckily his daughter-in-law was not only blind to everyone, but Hugo but deaf to opinions that he looked anything but every inch a soldier. Then Adam moved all the way round him in a cautious circle and said, “That’s a City of London badge, isn’t it?” Lady Sybil said that it was, and that Hugo was now a member of the Inns of Court Volunteer Company.

“But how does that come about?” he protested, giving Henrietta a chance to doff her apron and stuff it behind a row of leather fire buckets that stood alongside the stair cupboard. “He’s not reading law, is he?”

“Oh, I managed that easily enough,” Lady Sybil said, implying that she could, if she wished, secure Hugo a seat in Kruger’s war cabinet. “All it needed was a word here and a push there, and here he is, come to say his good-byes before joining General Gatacre’s staff as a supernumerary. We’re both sailing on the
Empress of India
the day after tomorrow.”

“You’re going too?” Henrietta gasped.

“The entire nursing unit is going,” confirmed Sybil. “Eighty-six of us, not counting the surgeons. Daddy telephoned me before it was released to the newspapers.”

“But Hugo has had no training for staff work, has he?” asked Adam, whose face still expressed incredulity. “He’s only fooled about in the Yeomanry.”

“Does one
need
training for a post of that kind?”

“Well, military men are in two minds as to that, my dear,” said Adam, his features relaxing somewhat.

Lady Sybil said, “I daresay they’ll see you get trained in the field, Hugo. And now…” she turned her best hospital-fete smile on the cringing Henrietta, “I really
would
like a cup of that nice China tea you gave us when Hugo first brought me here, and we’ve at least an hour for a gossip, because we aren’t due at the Overseas Comforts concert until ten o’clock, and that will give us plenty of time to change. It’s a nuisance really but I did promise to appear.”

It was not Henrietta’s idea of a gossip. She hardly contributed a word and Hugo said very little, but sat there beaming at his wife as she described in detail how she had set the stage for Hugo’s debut as a national hero. When they were leaving, and Hugo embraced her again, Henrietta shed a tear or two, for the bovine Hugo had always seemed the most helpless of her sons. But then she reflected that he was in extremely capable hands and Lady Sybil’s manipulations would almost certainly ensure that he climbed the military ladder at twice the speed of his brother Alex.

Adam, it seemed, had more sombre thoughts as they watched the brougham sweep round the curve that ran between the leafless limes to the gate. “I don’t know, I never did credit Hugo with much grey matter, but I would have thought he had sense enough to stay clear of that shambles. That woman’s a menace. And to think I urged the boy to marry her!”

“She’s obviously very much in love with him,” Henrietta said.

But he replied, glumly, “Is she? Is that love? I don’t think it is. Not our kind of love, at all events. She’s using him as a kind of reflector, something to catch the public’s eye and bend it in her direction,” and he withdrew to his study without another word.

3

He could talk to Giles, had always been able to talk to him ever since he was a boy, with his nose stuck in all those heavy tomes in the library and his flow of questions about the meaning of existence.

Giles and Romayne were among the Christmas visitors, and Romayne was far gone with child and seemingly happily settled in that Welsh valley where Giles had at last found anchorage. He used this as an opening gambit when they took a walk together on the last afternoon of the old century, climbing the spur behind the house and crossing the bracken-clad slope towards the river that fed Adam’s lily ponds. He said, “That wife of yours, boy, she seems to have found contentment that eluded her all this time. I must say I never realised she was genuinely interested in social reform. To be honest, I always saw it as a bit of a fad.”

“I don’t think she’s more than marginally involved in politics,” his son told him, “or not in the way Debbie is. You’re right about her adjusting, however. Our relationship has changed in Wales. I’m not saying we were unhappy before but… well… she always seemed to me to be looking for something.”

“Want to tell me?”

“If I can.”

They walked on down the gentle slope to the river where it split into two streams to form the islet that Henrietta always thought of as Shallott, a grey-haired man, born in George IV’s reign, and his serious-faced son of thirty-four, who always seemed detached from everybody around him.

“She’s identified with me now,” Giles said, “in a way that’s almost miraculous. Or so it appears from my standpoint. It was she who brought it about, you see, something she did without prompting from anyone, and it’s made a place for her that didn’t exist before. Given her a clearly defined purpose, I suppose, that was missing all the years she was growing up surrounded by lackeys and neglected by that old devil of a father. I’ve got to win that seat, if only for her.”

“How do you rate your chances?”

“Fair to middling. Better now that I’ve taken L.G.‘s line on the war.”

“How can that be? It’s a very unpopular line, isn’t it?”

“Not among my people. They’ve been an oppressed minority for generations and some of them see Kruger as a South African Llewellyn, fighting for freedom. L.G., and all the other pro-Boer Liberals, have had a very rough ride these last few months, but I haven’t. I’ve had some rousing meetings and our party machinery improves all the time. If I don’t win the next election, I’ll win the one after that, once reaction sets in and people begin to see that L.G.‘s line was the right one. This jingo mood isn’t a natural one for the British. By and large they’re a fair-minded lot when they’re sober. Right now, of course, most of them are blind drunk.”

It was a good enough analogy, Adam thought, approving his son’s clearheadedness. He said, pausing for breath and looking between the willows at the winter flood swirling round the butt end of the islet on its way to the sea, “By God, I’ve seen a thing or two in my time, since I was a boy growing up in the fells. Railways lacing the country. Trade figures multiplying fifty times over. The nation swelling itself up like the frog in the fable and edging everyone else out of the sun. It took Rome five centuries to do what the British have done since Waterloo, yet how long is it in terms of the calendar? Eighty-five years. Just over a single life-span. Would you believe I once saw a poor devil hanged in Carlisle for setting fire to a barn? When I fought my first skirmish in India, Germany, as we know it today, didn’t exist, and most of America was a desert. It’s the pace that makes one dizzy. The entire cast of society has been broken and remade since those days. Everyone’s expectations are upgraded, even those of your miners, although you probably wouldn’t get them to admit there had been much change in their standard of living. There has, tho’, and I don’t know where it began, exactly. Was it with steam-power and greater mobility? Or with the emergence of trade unions? Or with Gladstone’s compulsory education acts? Or a social conscience among an elite minority, with leisure and time to digest the philosophy of Tom Paine and company? Damned if I could pinpoint it, or predict its future course. It’s like that river there, made up of a hundred streams welling out of the hills until it’s strong enough to carry everything along. Can you make a guess where we’re heading, lad?”

“I try every time I make a speech or finish a canvass,” Giles said, smiling, “but I come up with different answers once a week. I suppose it depends on the calibre of the men on top, and what kind of course they’ve set themselves.”

“What course are you setting after midnight? The end of a century is a good time for stocktaking, isn’t it? Not at my time of life, mind, but certainly at yours.”

“To adapt the new technologies to the needs of the average man, woman, and child, I’d say. That’s the heart of the problem. All those innovations you’ve been spouting at me aren’t worth a damn if all they do is to help make rich men richer, and are used to browbeat sixty thousand Boer farmers into changing their way of life to please diamond diggers and gold prospectors. You can only work, argue, and fight within the law. The law’s very far from perfect and still bears down on the majority, but less than it did. And, anyway, it’s a lot better than a street full of people throwing bricks at one another.”

They took the short way home across the bridge and through the five-acre ornamental landscape Adam had conjured out of the two paddocks, a few coppices, and some rough pasture. He was silent as they climbed the rise, but as they emerged in the forecourt he said, thoughtfully, “We’ll be lifting our glasses tonight, when the village bells ring the old year out and the twentieth-century in. I don’t know what the others will be drinking to, but I’ll raise my glass to you, boy. At least two of us speak the same language, and that’s a comfort for a man with a family as big as mine.”