Give Us This Day (75 page)

“Helen has no children.”

“No, and more’s the pity, for if she had she wouldn’t have made such a fool of herself. Think yourself fortunate, Jo. Go back to yours and forget this happened. That’s my advice, and that’s what I want for all of us.”

“Is that all you have to say, Mamma?”

“Almost all.” She got up and went over to the fireplace, lifting a photograph framed in silver from its pride of place above the hearth. Adam wasn’t overfond of displaying family photographs—“sentimental clutter” he called them, much preferring to decorate his walls with oils and water-colours acquired in his forays up and down the country, some of them worth a penny or two, or so he claimed. She took his word for it, but this group photograph meant a lot to her. It was a silver wedding photograph, taken on the lawn in September 1883, and they were all there, every last one of them, together with the three senior in-laws, Denzil, Lydia, and Gisela, and the first brace of grandchildren, Robert and Martin Fawcett. Sixteen all told, less than half the Swann muster today. She studied the group, forgetting Joanna was still there. Jo and Helen were sitting crosslegged in the foreground, sixteen and thirteen respectively and very conscious, judging by the exceptional solemnity of their expression, of the great occasion. She said, passing the picture to her daughter, “It doesn’t seem long ago, does it? But three of that group are dead, and now Helen is dead to you. That makes four. Providing you wish it so, that is.”

“Are you really saying I should pretend to myself it never happened?”

“I don’t know. It’s for you to decide. You and Helen, as you get older, and fewer of you are left who remember how it was at Tryst when this picture was taken. I can’t tell either of you what to do or what not to do at your age, with homes and husbands of your own. Apart from sparing your father more worry, that is, and I’m in no doubt about that. But I can tell you something I’ve learned here in all these years. The family is the only thing worth a row of beans in the end, and that’s about the only thing in life I learned in advance of your father. I’ll tell you something else. When I was a girl, I thought the only sons worth having were soldiers. I don’t think so any more. No woman does once she’s gone to the trouble of bearing children, and, what’s a great deal more tiresome, raising them until they can stand on their own feet. You think hard about that. Helen and you were as good as twins once. Well, I’d value that high above a piece of foolishness hatched up by men, for men never grow up anyway, or not in the way women do.” She took the photograph back and rehung it, glancing as she did at the mantelshelf clock. “Go and find your father. Tell him luncheon will be ready in about twenty minutes. He has to be coaxed to eat just now.”

* * *

As soon as Joanna had left, she went over to her bureau beside the window, taking out her address book and leafing through it until she came to the C’s. She could rarely remember these outlandish Irish addresses, and even when she did she couldn’t spell them without a copy. When she came on Helen’s address, she put a marker in the book and sat thinking, grateful for a brief interval of solitude. But presently, having watched Joanna pass beyond the lilac clump and cross the area of lawn where it sloped down to the lake, she took up her pen and began to write, continuing to do so until she had filled one sheet and half another.

The words came easily, for somehow the act of writing restored to her some measure of the authority she had once wielded but had lost since the brood had grown up and gone about their own affairs.

My dear Helen,

Thank you for your letter about Stella and for the lovely wreath that arrived in time. We did not expect you to travel over at such short notice and by now you will have received the newspaper I sent, explaining everything, or everything that matters.

You might like to know your father was wonderful throughout it all. Without him I can’t imagine how Denzil and I would have managed, but he feels it as much as either of us, and so does George, who regards himself as responsible for what happened. But this letter isn’t about Stella. What happened to her, all the sadness and waste of it, is behind us now and can’t be altered, one way or the other. That doesn’t apply to you and Jo, however, and I’ve told her so a moment since, together with advice—that I mean to see she takes—to never breathe a word of it to her father or Alex. That way, given time, you can both pretend it didn’t happen. You can do that with most things if you’ve a mind to, for I have and still do where there’s no other way out. And there isn’t for you and Jo, or not as I see it. But even supposing either or both of you can’t or won’t, this is to say that I mean to, because that way, if you ever want to come back here, with or without Rory, there’s nothing to stop you, and why should there be? This is still home for all of you, and as long as your father and I are alive I mean it to stay so.

She signed and sealed it and put it in her tray among a dozen others, each acknowledging wreaths and messages of sympathy. It was the only letter there, she reflected, that really said anything.

To Adam and Joanna, slowly climbing the drive in sunshine that was exceptionally strong for the time of the year, the luncheon summons seemed very sonorous, almost like a judgment.

Eight

As From a Pinnacle

I
n the two years left of the old world, and what some (half-forgetting that Teddy had been replaced by the blameless George) would call “The Edwardian Afternoon,” Adam watched as from a pinnacle, armoured against the byblows of fate and able, to some extent, to disassociate himself from all but the process of growing old and that detached curiosity about men and their affairs that had made him the oracle others thought him.

He was like a veteran general, with countless battles behind him, who was yet peripherally caught up in the current war and in receipt, from time to time, of scribbled despatches brought him from afar. And having, as it were, studied their content, he would listen gravely, or sympathetically, or half-humorously, to what the messengers had to say and then prophesy, so that they went away stimulated, or sobered, or mildly fortified by his wisdom.

In the late spring, summer, and early autumn months, he could usually be found out of doors, pottering about his Hermitage museum, or seated on a log in one of the patches of wild wood that varied the pattern of his planted areas, or on one of the stone seats or balustrades that embellished his demesne. But when the rains came and the winds went whooping over the Weald, he retired to his study fireside, browsing among his books.

He was here, one day, when Deborah called for consolation as regards her old and trusted mentor, W. T. Stead, lost on the Titanic and last seen, so survivors said, absorbed in a book as the great liner, symbol of all the new technologies, poised for her final plunge, making nonsense of the claims that she was unsinkable.

“Her sinking seems to me symbolic of all I’ve observed over the last few years,” he said, shaking his head. “Of my generation, too, I suppose, tho’ to a lesser extent. For my lot were improvisers, whereas those who came after us—like George— relied on sums worked out in the office instead of in the market-place. Sad that Stead had to be sacrificed to their pride, however. The old warrior deserved better. Reading a book, you say? Well, that was in character, I suppose. He had a high opinion of you once. What did he think about you and the suffragettes?”

Deborah replied that he didn’t really approve, for Stead’s violence was always confined to words, and edited words at that. “But he was a bonnie fighter,” she added, “and I’ll always remember him as that.”

“Me too.” And there returned to him, over an interval of thirty years, the memory of a distraught man awaiting him in his turret at the time of the
Pall Mall Gazette
‘s strident campaign on behalf of child prostitutes, served up to satyrs for five pounds a hymen, a man he had been ultimately to champion.

“Well,” he said, by way of valediction, “Stead won most of his battles, so maybe the pen does have the edge on the sword.”

She knew then that he was debating with himself the old imponderable. Did the end ever justify the means? Or did the end get grotesquely distorted by the means, in their case assaults on the person of the Prime Minister, on the Lossiemouth golf links, the slashing of the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, a bomb in the house of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, another against the walls of Holloway Prison and the militants’ Calvary. She had pondered this herself many times, waiting, pinched with hunger, to be released under the Cat and Mouse Act, but had never arrived at any irrevocable decision. Yet she knew that he had and tried to coax it from him.

“You’re wavering, Uncle Adam. You’ve probably decided we’re our own worst enemies.”

“No, no, not that, for no one can say you didn’t give the pen a fair trial,” he replied, smiling. “Why, I was reading your pamphlets forty years ago. Aye, and averting my eyes from the first knickerbocker suit, too! It’s just that sometimes I wonder if Britain is the best place for you. In France you would have been home and dry long ago, riot being the staple diet over there.”

“But that isn’t why they hate us, is it?”

“No, it isn’t,” and his eyes twinkled for a moment.

“Why then?”

“Because you deny what’s meat and drink to the politician. Patronage. He can’t get along without that. But tell your friends not to despair, my dear. The moment the Government of the day finds it convenient to pat your heads instead of kicking your backsides, you’ll get your vote.”

He had one of his rare visions then, of a time when every pair of hands, white and gloved, red and calloused, would be needed at the pumps, and out of it, no doubt (providing the ship of state did not follow the
Titanic
), might come universal suffrage, so effortlessly perhaps that even Mrs. Pankhurst would be caught on the hop. But he said nothing of this to her, for he knew that she, and that clever husband of hers, and George, and all the rest of them, did not believe in his Armageddon.

* * *

One of his most regular visitors these days was George. A George, he was glad to note, who had recovered most of his natural ebullience once he was satisfied he had stolen yet another march over his competitors by shunting his SwannMaxie fleet into regions where they could do the kind of work Swann’s one-horse pinnaces had once done, leaving the heavy hauls to his latest nine-day wonder, the articulated trailer, an improvement on the prototype that had cost Martin his life on a Pennine slope.

There were far less Clydesdales and Cleveland Bays on the Swann roster nowadays, and horse-drawn transport was now confined to local runs or over routes where, even yet, motor-vehicles jibbed at the terrain.

A visit from George was usually an ego-booster to the prophet on the pinnacle. For a long time now he had been aware that his advice was no longer sought out of deference but as insurance, in premiums George had been more than willing to pay since the night he rehearsed them in the parts they were to play at Stella’s inquest.
You could say that for George
, he thought, and it was one reason why he backed him to stay out in front.

Just as Debbie kept him up to the minute on what was happening in the suffragette sector, and Giles briefed him on the national issues, so George kept him abreast on the latest trends in transport.

Their relationship had deepened and broadened appreciably since Stella’s death. The partnership had steadied of late, not only because George had evaluated his shrewdness and steadfastness but because Adam had at last adjusted to the stupendous changes in the transport scene since the arrival of the self-propelled vehicle. George saw himself as a master of tactics but when it came to strategy he was always ready to defer to a man who carried in his head a large-scale map of Britain, and indices of all the products that kept the country in the forefront of the world’s trading nations.

* * *

It was different again with the younger children, whom he saw less frequently, or with one or other of his many grandchildren, who saw him as a kind of eccentric sage, excessively tolerant in most areas but obstinate and adamant in others, and sometimes giving advice of a kind they did not comprehend at the time.

It was this way with his daughter Helen, devilishly wary, he thought, when he quizzed her on southern Ireland’s response to Carson’s bloodcurdling threats from Ulster. When she told him the Catholic south was recruiting to raise a force capable of confronting the Orangemen, he said, “Will you carry a message from me back to that husband of yours, my dear? Tell him to leave the sealing of this business to the British. I speak as a Home Ruler from Gladstone’s day and that bill is law. Only one thing can stop you going your own way now, and I’ll tell you what it would be—if you people jump the gun
ahead
of Ulster and put yourselves in the dock!”

She was still digesting this when he added, with a smile, “You can remind Rory Clarke of something else. Tell him that your mother’s mother was as Irish as the shamrock, and landed penniless in Liverpool ahead of the potato famine. So you’ve really no call to feel an exile over there.”

In truth she had forgotten and it made her thoughtful during the remainder of her stay. It went some way to explain, perhaps, her identification with the Irish and her tendency, since her second marriage, to look at history through Irish eyes, and she said to him, on the last day of her visit, “You’re as English as anyone I know. What made you back Home Rule all those years ago? You never set eyes on your mother-in-law, or so Mamma tells me.”

“No, I never did, but I served in Ireland in the ‘fifties, a year or so after the Great Hunger as they call it, and I understood their grievances. It didn’t take me all that long to realise the English had been asking for this how-de-do for seven centuries. Bad as things were, they weren’t peculiar to Ireland and the Irish. You’re looking at a man old enough to recall seeing men transported for poaching and petty theft. Not all were from County Cork and County Mayo. Some were from Hampshire, Dorset, and right here where we’re sitting.”

* * *

Giles called less often, spending an occasional weekend at Tryst between his parliamentary chores in Westminster and Wales. Adam felt great sympathy for a man who, at the age of forty, had been robbed not only of the woman he loved but also his faith in British democratic traditions. There was no more talk of Giles joining the Labour Party, however (although the presence of Keir Hardie as his constituency neighbour at Merthyr Tydfil was a permanent temptation) but he was disenchanted with the conformity of the Liberals. He said, when they were discussing Women’s Suffrage one day, “Do you remember what Abe Lincoln said on the practice of slave-owning before the Civil War out there, about it being impossible for a nation to remain half-free and half-slave? Well, that’s how I’ve come to feel about us. For as long as we deny women the vote how can we prattle on about the home of the free, Father?” When Adam said he should use the analogy in a speech in the House, he replied, with a smile, “Oh, I plan to. The next time we get a debate on the issue. And don’t think I begrudge the chances of preferment I’ve given up by identifying myself with the suffragettes. I owe that much and more to Romayne, wouldn’t you say?”

Adam said, gently, “You still miss her, don’t you?”

Giles nodded. “The only relief I get from the permanent ache is in the valleys, doing what little I can for the people who sent me to London.”

“Well, you can warm your hands there, boy,” Adam told him. “Personal local representation is the only justification for your profession, and from what I hear and read most of ‘em up there forget as soon as they’ve counted the votes.” And then, taking a chance, “Have you ever thought of marrying again, my boy?”

“Oh, I’ve thought of it,” Giles said, and then, perking up somewhat, “I might even surprise you and mother one of these days.”

And before very long he did, confounding them utterly by turning up, uninvited, with a very pleasantly disposed but rather sad-looking woman of what Henrietta described as “a sensible age.” Giles introduced her as Sister Gwyneth Powell, presently on the staff of Westminster Hospital, whose home was close to his headquarters at Pontnewydd.

Long before he told them how they had met on the night of Romayne’s death (he withheld the story of Miss Powell’s part, years ago, in that flare-up over a hat in an Oxford Street store) they had wholeheartedly approved of her, although neither Giles nor Gwyneth hinted at anything more than friendship and mutual political sympathies. Even so, when the carriage taking them back to Bromley Station was out of sight, Henrietta said, “Well, Adam?” And there was no mistaking the matchmaking gleam in her eye.

“I’d put it at odds on. In less than a twelve-month, m’dear.” And then, “When will I learn to mind my own business? I advised him to remarry the last time he was over. If it goes off at half-cock I’ll feel responsible.”

“She seems very steady and sensible,” Henrietta said, disregarding him. “For my part, he could go further and fare worse.”

2

He had his silent visitors, too, what he called his Grace and Favour tenants whom he encountered pottering about his terraces and coppices, or taking a breather up on the wooded spur, or when he was immersed in his newspapers on the knoll behind the Hermitage museum.

There was the pair of nuthatches, rare in these parts, who nested in the bole of an elm and were, he would have said, the least demanding of his charges, for their neighbours, an army of tits, were forever swooping on the bird tables he had set up hereabouts, squabbling among themselves for the fat he hung there and the split maize he spread upon the ground. Every kind of tit—great tits, with their neat black skullcaps, blue tits by the dozen, and an occasional crested tit or marsh tit, though only once did he catch a glimpse of the long-tailed variety. There were finches, too, a swarm of them, but one particular chaffinch, who seemed to him not only extraordinarily long-lived but unusually perceptive, for he ignored the largesse on the tables and always made a personal approach for crumbs of cheese Adam balanced on his boot. He told Giles—the only one among his children who shared his tolerance for this army of blackmailers—that Joe, the chaffinch, not only knew the whole range of cheeses but could distinguish between his sound and his artificial leg, distrusting the latter’s stability, for if, by chance, he put cheese on his left boot, Joe would execute a furious little dance about his feet, waiting for it to fall. But if he placed it on his sound leg he would hop right up and eat it on the spot, waiting until Adam spread his hand with more cheese, when he would perch on his thumb.

Giles, smiling at this recital, said, “It’s queer, I always thought of you as a city man. You seemed to belong in that slum beside the Thames in my younger days, and I can remember you jeering at city merchants who turned themselves into squires the moment they made their pile. At what point in your life did Wordsworthia set in?”

“Around the time of that yard fire, I imagine. I was seventy then, late in the day but not too late. I saw everything I’d slaved for for over forty years go up in smoke in two hours. It struck me then, for the first time, I think, that everything but land, and what thrives on it free and wild, is a short-term credit, likely to be called in any time. I begrudged every day I spent there after that.”