Give Us This Day (6 page)

“I don’t want his money.”

“You’re not getting any, m’dear,” he said, enjoying her swift change in expression that told him that, in so many ways, and notwithstanding her lifelong disapproval of Sam’s ethics, she was still Sam Rawlinson’s daughter.

2

He was wrong. Sam died in his sleep three days later, and they were obliged to stay on for the funeral. In the interval, Adam had chatted with the old chap several times, but neither made further reference to that curious warning about the dash George was cutting with the quality or the dubious reliability of his yard manager, Tybalt. Instead they talked about old times, and mutual acquaintances in the cotton world, and Adam was not surprised to see several of his cronies at the graveside, heavy, unsmiling men, watching the committal of Sam as though his coffin contained money as well as a corpse. It was not until the journey home that Adam re-addressed his mind to the hints Sam had dropped, turning them over and over as the train rushed southwards at nearly twice the maximum speed it had attained when he escorted Henrietta, an eighteen-year-old bride, on her first journey out of the north. George was cutting a dash among the quality. George was taking time off to squire a woman, obviously not Gisela, his pretty little Austrian wife. George was leaving too much to his manager and the manager needed watching. It didn’t add up to much and finally he asked of Henrietta, who was deep in the
Strand Magazine
he had bought her at the bookstall, “Is everything all right between George and Gisela, Hetty?”

She looked up a little irritably. “All right? So far as I know. Whatever made you ask a question like that?”

“Just something Sam said, but he might well have been rambling. George was there a few weeks back and looked in on them. ‘Dressed to the nines an’ smellin’ like a garding’ according to Sam.”

“Is that all he said?”

“More or less. He hinted that George was gadding about and maybe neglecting the business, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of it at the time. Do you see much of Gisela these days?”

“Not as much as I did but that doesn’t signify anything. She’s four children now, and a big house to run.” She prepared to re-address herself to her magazine and he said, with a grin, “Don’t you care that much, Hetty?”

“No,” she admitted, frankly. “I can’t say as I do. They’re all old enough and ugly enough to watch out for themselves, as my nanny Mrs. Worrell would have said. George in particular, for George has always gone his own way. How old is he now?”

“Thirty-three last February.” He had a wonderful memory for trivia but he had a special reason for remembering George’s exact age. The boy had been born on St. Valentine’s Day, 1864, a day when the fortunes of Swann-on-Wheels, near to foundering at that time, had taken a dramatic turn for the better, paving the way for what Adam always thought of as their
sortie torrentielle
into big business. Because of this, and the boy’s temperament, he had always seen George as a goodluck talisman. They had never looked back from that moment, not even when he was away from the yard for a whole year learning to walk on one sound leg and an ugly contraption made up of cork and aluminium.

“Well,” she said, “there’s your answer. He was always a wild one but Gisela knows how to manage him. You’ve said so yourself many a time.”

“So I have. Go back to that story you’re reading. It must be a good one.”

“It is,” she told him, “it’s a Sherlock Holmes.” The conversation lapsed, but he continued to think about it, trying to make a pattern out of the few stray pieces but not succeeding, no matter how many times he fitted one into the other, so he fell to marshalling his recollections on the boy’s past.

For years now George had been a slave to that yard, devoting even more time to it than had Adam himself in his early, strenuous days. That much was known about George, not only inside the family and firm but all over the City, where men talked shop over their sherry and coffee. It was hard to imagine George as a masher, a gadabout, or even a dandy. He had an eye for the girls, certainly always had, ever since, as an eighteen-year-old, he was all but seduced by one of the manager’s wives up in the Polygon. What was her name again—Lorna? Laura?—Laura Broadbent, that was it, who had a brute of a husband, a man George had ultimately unmasked as a thief. It was on account of that he had sent the boy abroad and he seemed to remember that George had had a high old time in Paris, Munich, and ultimately Vienna, where he lodged in the house of a carriage-builder, with four pretty granddaughters. One of them, Gisela, George had married and not before time, if Adam’s arithmetic was correct.

Since then, so far as he knew, George had never had time to sow wild oats. For two years or more he had been besotted by that engine he brought home and after that, when he had proved his point by actually making the thing run, he had taken over as gaffer at the yard. The relationship of father and son, once strong, had weakened over the years. Since his retirement eight years ago, Adam had leaned on Giles harder than any of them, but he seldom talked shop with Giles. Mostly they discussed politics and social issues, subjects that interested them both. As for young Tybalt, he would take a lot of persuading that a young fellow in his position would play fast and loose with his future. Wesley Tybalt came from exceptionally sober stock, and his father was always on hand to hold a watching brief. It therefore seemed very unlikely that a man like Levison, head of a shipping business in Liverpool, could have heard anything but a rumour to the contrary, and yet… old Sam was certainly no fool when it came to a man’s commercial worth.

He recalled then that Levison’s firm used a rival haulage line. Linklater’s it was, a tinpot outfit, not regarded by any big haulier as a serious rival, and maybe it was there he should look for clues. A dispute between Swann-on-Wheels and Linklater’s maybe, in which the latter had been worsted by young Tybalt or George, or both, and had gone away with a grudge of some sort? A long shot, so long that it was hardly worth looking into, especially as he was supposed to be out of it these days. But he knew he was not out of it, and would never be out of it. Swann-on-Wheels had been his life for thirty-odd years. All his possessions and personal triumphs derived from it, and a man could never slough off a burden as big as that, certainly not when his own kin were carrying it forward into the new century.

He was glad then that he had arranged for Hetty to travel home while he stayed a night in town to view a furniture sale at Sotheby’s. Some choice pieces were coming up, part of the collection of Sir Joseph Souter, and he rarely missed an important furniture, picture, or porcelain sale these days. They filled the vacuum caused by his exchange of the roles of haulier and connoisseur. He would drop in at the yard after the viewing and have a word with both George and Tybalt, scratching around for confirmation of Sam’s hints if any was to be found. And having decided this, he made his mind a blank, as he had trained himself to do over so many tedious train journeys in the past. In seconds he was asleep.

3

He stood with his back to the familiar curve of the Thames looking the width of Tooley Street at the sprawling rectangle that had been the heart and pulse of his empire since he came here in the steamy summer of ‘58. A jumble of sheds, lofts, and stables crouched around the slender belfry tower, all that remained of the medieval convent that had once occupied the site. When the Plantagenets had used that bridge, the tower had doubtless summoned a few dozen nuns to prayer. During his long tenure up there it had overseen hauls the length and breadth of the island, a lookout post from which, in a sense, he could see the Cheviots and the Cornish moors, the Welsh mountains running down to the Irish Sea, and the fenlands that drained into the German ocean.

A slum, his wife and customers called it, and technically it was, pallisaded by a tannery, a glue factory, a biscuit factory, a huddle of tiny yellow-brick dwellings, and the grey-brown tideway where a thousand years of South Bank sewage had hardened into a belt of sludge, making its unique contribution to an overall smell of industry that he never noticed, not even now, after he had been inhaling the furze and heather scents of the Weald throughout years of lazy-daisy idleness. He knew every cranny of the enclosure and loved what he knew, seeing it as the powerhouse of the four clamorous tribes that had used this tideway as a base to conquer half the world. Not with sabres and muzzle-loaders like traditional conquerors (although the British had resorted to these times enough) but latterly with merchandise, spewed from their clattering machines and the gold that poured into these few square miles of avarice, expertise and grimed splendour.

He was proud of his contribution, although he would never admit it, not even to his intimates. It was a pride he kept locked away in his big body and restless brain, to be taken out and contemplated at moments like this when he thought, vaingloriously: All the others had a part in it. Josh Avery, who traded it all for a Spanis
h
whore; Keate, the waggonmaster and Tybalt the clerk, whose hearts were in piling up credit in heaven; that foul-mouthed old rascal Blubb, who pulled us out of that shambles at Staplehurst and died doing it; Lovell, the erudite Welshman; Radcliffe, the West Country clown and all the other viceroys. But it was me who created it and set it in motion. And “the fruit of my loins,” as old Keate would put it, are keeping it rolling to this day.

He crossed the road and entered the open gate that led to the weighbridge, and the weighbridge clerk jumped off his perch, giving him the quasi-military salute all the veterans reserved for him after it got about that he had seen the Light Brigade go down at Balaclava, and later helped Lord Roberts, the nation’s darling, to empty that stinking well at Cawnpore. The clerk said, “Afternoon, Mr. Swann. We don’t often see you nowadays.” He replied, jovially, “No, Rigby. I was seventy this month and I make damned sure you don’t! Is Mr. George in his office?”

“No, sir, I think not. Can’t be sure, sir, but I think he’s off in the regions somewhere. Mr. Tybalt’ll know.”

“Thank you, Rigby.”

He had a continuing liking for the older men still seen about the yard, but falling away year by year now that younger ones were pushing from behind. Lockhart, the master smith, was one, directing his four journeymen and three apprentices at the glowing forge. Bixley, the night watchman, was another, but he wouldn’t show up for an hour or so. Everyone, old and young, greeted him respectfully and it occurred to him that they still thought of him as the real gaffer, despite the New Broom’s many innovations, of which there was evidence everywhere in enlarged warehouses: a new exit in Tower Street, the new clerical block where the old wooden stables had stood, now replaced by the red-brick building running the full length of the northside.

His own quarters in the tower were used as a lumber room now and he climbed the narrow, curving staircase to find the queer octagonal room strewn with crates, sacks, and discarded harness, its narrow window, where he had watched many sunsets and not a few dawns, opaque with dust and grime. He took a piece of sacking and rubbed a pane, catching a glimpse of the Conqueror’s Tower on the far bank and the swirl of river traffic east of the bridge. It was still as heavy and continuous, a never-ending stream of barges and wherries skimming down to the docks where funnels outnumbered masts by about two to one. It made him feel old and lonely up here among debris that was not his any more, and he stumped down into the open again, pausing to examine a heavy double padlock on one of the last original warehouses, with its own exit into Tooley Street.

In his day they never locked warehouses in the daytime and he wondered whether this was the result of one of George’s edicts, or whether the place contained a particularly valuable consignment. He hoisted himself up on a baulk of timber and glanced through the grilled window, but all he could see in the gloom beyond was a tall stack of packaged cotton goods, awaiting shipment to Madras or Calcutta, no doubt. A polite voice at his elbow startled him a little.

“Can I be of service, Mr. Swann?”

He turned, stepped down, and faced Wesley Tybalt, sleek and tidy as a solicitor’s clerk in his dark, waisted frock coat and high cravat stuck with a gold pin.
George must pay the fellow well to enable him to dress like that
, he thought, remembering that Tybalt’s father had always worked coatless with slip-on sleeves to spare his shirt-cuffs. He said, casually, “No, no, Tybalt, I was only poking about, taking in all the changes you’ve made. What’s in there, for instance?”

Wesley said, very civilly, “Long-term storage, sir. We’ve taken to locking the warehouses that aren’t in daily use. We had an epidemic of pilfering last year. Mr. George thought it a good idea, sir.”

“It is,” Adam said. And then, “Do you get much yard pilfering these days? In my time it was limited to waggons making overnight stops.”

“We’ve put a stop to it, sir. No reported case since just before Christmas and then we nailed our man. He’s doing two years’ hard, I’m glad to say. Can I offer you tea in my office, Mr. Swann?”

“No, thank you,” Adam said, wondering what it was about the fellow he didn’t like, and asking himself why he found himself making an unfavourable comparison between the spruce Wesley and his fussy little father. “I’m catching the five-ten from London Bridge and merely looked in to have a word with Mr. George. The weighbridge clerk said he was away in the regions.”

“Yes, sir, that’s so. Since the weekend, sir.”

“Do you know where, exactly?”

“Er… no, sir, or not since he moved on into Central. He’ll let me know, however. He always wires or telephones in when he’s away. Any message, sir?”

“No, no message. You’ll give my regards to your father when you see him?”

“Certainly, sir. But I don’t see a great deal of him now. I moved out to Annerley when I married.”

“How often do you see him?”

“Oh, whenever he looks in, sir. Are you sure you won’t take tea, sir?”