Theirs Was The Kingdom (15 page)

Adam said, quietly, “No, I’m not, John, for white elephants are as much a drag on those who tend them as to the man who owns them. However, you’ll admit I’ve never been a man to put short-term profit before everything else. When this yard was stagnant, without one haul a day coming in or out, I gave you authority to use my waggons to help feed empty bellies and you’ll recall how well it paid us when the looms were busy again. With you running the mill the way you wanted it run I wouldn’t breathe down your neck until you’d had a fair crack of the whip. After that, I reckon, it’d be up to you to climb down, and admit your radical theories weren’t good arithmetic. What do you say to that?”

The manager’s expression remained clouded for a moment but then the lips parted in one of Catesby’s rare, sardonic grins. “I’ll tell you what I say. You’d gammon the devil into attending a prayer meeting on a promise to give him a free hand wi’ bloody collection. Well then I’ll do it, and by Gow it won’t be any fault if I don’t show the scabs how they can treat men and lasses like human beings an’ still look t’bloody bank manager in t’face! Here’s my hand on it, and be damned to any lawyer’s contract between us until this day twel’month.”

“Safest way to do business,” Adam said. “I use lawyers when I have to, but not with men I picked myself.”

They shook hands and Swann declined an offer to join Catesby in a chop and a pint of ale at his favourite eating house across the street. He was near enough to Fraser’s beat to move northeast to the Scottish manager’s headquarters at Edinburgh, reminding himself that Fraser would be retiring before he came north again in the autumn. He took a four-wheeler for London Road Station and within forty minutes of leaving the Salford yard had boarded a northbound express. His doctor, whom he consulted very rarely these days, had warned him that a sensible man should apply the brake when he had passed the fifty mark and was short of a limb, but here he was proving his private theory that most doctors were fools.

2

When he was launched on one of his tours, Adam Swann cast more than his own balance sheets. He had always been fascinated by the slow tides of history, as they affected succeeding generations of Englishmen, Scotsmen, Welshmen, and, to a lesser degree, the Irish. Continentals he discounted altogether, with the possible exception of the Prussians, whose efficiency had succeeded in astonishing him nine years back, when they had given the French such a drubbing. The Americans, he reasoned, were unlikely to prove serious competitors for another generation. It would take them that long to recover from their civil war, with close on a million dead. So mostly he thought in terms of his own countrymen, relating his passage to various parts of the realm with their insular struggle to shape themselves an identity.

When he was in what his maps labelled “Bonus Country,” based on the slow-moving rivers of the southeastern plain, he would ponder the long struggle of the original inhabitants against Rome; and later, when the legions had packed up and gone, their absorption of land-hungry Balts and Saxons, who came plundering up the estuaries and slowly enlarged their grip on the eastern farmlands. When his work took him into the coastal areas of Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, and Northumberland, he would remember the legacy of the Scandinavian invaders that had equipped the islanders with a sound knowledge of ship-handling that had, in turn, enabled them to plant the English standard in every part of the world. When he moved west, chivvying his more leisurely managers in the pastoral areas of Devon, Cornwall, and Wales, marked on his maps as “The Western Wedge” and “The Mountain Square,” he would remind himself that the original Celt had shown remarkable staying powers down the centuries. For here, in far less profitable lands, they were unchanged in habit of thought and seemed, almost, to have made a cult of survival.

From his schooldays he had been a diligent reader of history, so that the names of towns and villages that had grown up at river crossings and road junctions often meant something specific to him in terms of the island’s story. He never crossed from Oxfordshire into Warwickshire, for instance, without thinking of the men who had fought and died in that first constitutional clash at Edgehill. He seldom passed the Severn at Tewkesbury without remembering the final defeat of feudalism at the hands of the first commercial king, the genial, womanising Edward IV. Battlegrounds, cromlechs, cathedrals, stone crosses marking martyrdoms of one sect or another, were all memoranda to him in his unceasing assessment of the nation’s purpose and potentialities. When his express roared across the border into Scotland he was able, by looking out across the undulating moor where Hadrian’s Wall still divided the two realms, to recall Ian Fraser’s real motives in battling away to enlarge Swann Territory at the expense of Scottish hauliers.

Fraser, himself a Borderer, had never acknowledged the Act of Union, had continued to regard all those north of his Berwick and Hexham bases as quiescent cattle thieves, who would oust him the moment he lowered his guard. This was surely why, Adam reasoned, the man had proved such a thumping success up here, after a local collier wreck had presented him with a chance to get his foot inside the Lowland door. That had happened in the early days of the enterprise, but since then Fraser had gone from strength to strength and was now, he supposed, the best-known haulier between the Tweed and the Grampians. He had bases at Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Perth, and plans to break into the Highlands and skim the cream from the beef trade linking the breeding grounds and its meat market at Smithfield.

The entire enterprise, he reflected, had changed its character over the last ten years. When he first launched it, in the autumn of ’58, he had been concerned with filling in the spaces between the main railways that bisected the country and left isolated country districts to wither. Now Swann-on-Wheels and the railways (that his ex-coachee waggoners had once reviled as “the bliddy ole gridiron,” or “the stinking tea-kettle”) were in cahoots, having abandoned attempts to cut one another’s throats for the odd shilling to be earned in transportation of goods.

Swann-on-Wheels’ sacks, carrying almost everything portable made in the country, now travelled vast distances by rail to be offloaded for local distribution at specified points. It was a system originally devised by Edith Wickstead, then Edith Wadsworth, in an attempt to justify her existence after she had come to terms with spinsterhood, but since then it had been enlarged and perfected until it now carried nearly half the traffic in the Swann regions. Latterly Adam assured himself that he had the better of the bargain. The elimination of small, pettifogging hauls left his waggons free to compete for heavier traffic, yet without sacrificing his bread-and-butter runs.

With Fraser close to retirement the enterprise had now come to maturity, its teething troubles behind it and an enormous accumulation of experience to ensure its steady advancement. There was now hardly a village or hamlet in the land where his insignia—the swan with a wheel where the wing should have been—was not accepted as a guarantee of safe and rapid transportation of goods. New aspects of its drive and expansion were seen every year, like the establishment of Swann excursions to beauty spots in the holiday season, and the scheme his lawyer Stock was working on for a small fleet of coasters. Perhaps, one day, someone less insular than he—his son George possibly, or George’s son if he had one—would convert the business into a global enterprise, opening depots at places like Capetown, Sydney, and Toronto. But gambler that he was he would never adventure that far. His best years were already behind him. A man could only do so much, before his memory and judgement began to play tricks with him, and in a trade like this memory and judgement were everything.

Fraser was waiting for him at Waverley Station, tricked out in his Sunday best and trying to pretend that the accolade of senior manager, bestowed upon him at the annual conference, had not gone to his head and was no more than his due.

Driving to the hotel in Princes Street, where the vast bulk of the castle was silhouetted against a herring-bone sky, the city seemed to crouch under its ramparts as though fearing a descent of claymore-swinging clansmen. Adam recalled the day he had first met this man, a defeated haulier, with a few battered carts and half a dozen knock-kneed teams, a man on the point of throwing in the sponge because, like so many others, that “bliddy ole gridiron” was heading him to the poorhouse.

He said, gravely congratulating the Borderer on his fantastic turnover, “I remember when I came north to buy up your ramshackle business, Fraser. You told me then you were going back to peddling from a single van because railway competition had made you exchange the whip for pen. You’ve come a long road since then, longer than any of them. What kept you so interested all these years?”

And Fraser replied, with a tight smile, “The bad blood between me and the kilt I’d say, although it sounds fanciful. I’m Scots originally but my family crossed the border when they were still cattle raiding thereabouts. For long enough we were looked on as renegades, who could expect no quarter if we were laid by the heels. I took it into my head to best them at their own game, and I have, for here I am, gaffer of all Scotland, with any number of Macdonalds and Campbells and Douglases using my waggons. Up here a grudge dies hard. Folk still talk of Glencoe and Culloden as if they were last week’s news.”

“You’ll be wanting to retire now, I imagine,” Adam said. “Have you anyone in mind as a successor?” and Fraser said he had not, for there was no Scotsman he knew whom he would recommend to run a firm based in London. “It’s not that he’d cheat you,” he added, “but he couldn’t help letting clan feuds come between him and a quotation for a haul. A Macdonald, for instance, would tend to overcharge a Campbell, and a Macgregor or a Gordon would shortchange the pair of them. No, Mr. Swann, if you’ll take my advice you’ll put an Englishman in here.”

“It’s breaking my rule,” Adam said, “but I had it in mind on the way up. Do you recall that time a chimney sweep choked to death in one of my flues, at Tryst?”

Fraser said he did, for it got about at the time that the incident had rattled the Gaffer so badly that he was rumoured to be selling up and standing for Parliament. Was that a grapevine scare or true in substance, he asked and Adam admitted that it was true, smiling at further evidence of the grapevine’s efficiency. He wondered how many other rumours had reached Fraser by this means, and whether one of them was that Edith Wadsworth was his kept woman before she met and married that chap Wickstead at the time of his accident. Fraser said, “Would there be some connection with that incident and the man ye have in mind to follow me up here?”

“A close one,” Adam told him. “There were two boys in that flue and one got out alive. A tough little devil called Jake Higson. I took charge of the boy afterwards and put him to work as a van-lad in the yard. He’s a man rising thirty now. Quick with his tongue, and just as quick with his fists, I’m told, but a rare hard worker and good with horses. If I send him up here for training, would you coach him until you qualify for your pension in October?”

“Be glad to if you recommend him,” Fraser said, “for you’ve never sent me a dud yet.”

“Then it’s done,” Adam said. They went on to talk of other things, of the establishment of a central clearinghouse for the handicrafts that reached them in driblets from the west coast, of the need for more heavy vehicles in the east, where Fraser had captured a sizeable slice of the haulage between scattered factories and Leith, Dundee and Aberdeen but, above all, the rumour that Gladstone was to emerge from retirement in the autumn and wrest the Midlothian seat from Lord Dalkeith, the popular Tory member. Up here, Fraser assured him, people took their politics as seriously as their kirk. Gladstone was revered as a demigod. “If he fights it will set the whole of the North alight,” he added, “and if he wins, why then, all Scotland will be Radical for a generation.”

“I take it you’re one yourself,” said Adam. Fraser seemed slightly offended by the remark, but said, solemnly, “ To be sure I am, Mr. Swann. Aren’t you? You’ve behaved as one ever since I’ve known you.”

“Less dedicated than I was,” said Adam. “I’ve heard them all in my day and Gladstone is more convincing than most, but I sometimes wonder if he thinks he’s down here deputising for God Almighty. I can’t say I care for the political company Disraeli keeps, but I’ve always seen him as a man with a clearer vision of the future than anyone else at Westminster.”

He saw Fraser’s mouth tighten and reminded himself that he was breaking another rule: discussing politics with senior staff. It didn’t do to take sides in these matters. Half his working force of close on a thousand men were keen Radicals, but the other half hero-worshipped the Jew with the fervour Fraser and his like reserved for his rival. One could easily get oneself accused of favouritism when sharp differences between the regions flared at the annual conference, or someone was in line for promotion or a rap over the knuckles. He said, withdrawing from the subject, “If Gladstone fights up here he’ll win, but the man to watch among the Liberals they tell me is Joe Chamberlain.”

“Aye, maybe he is,” growled Fraser, “but he’s Brummagem and that’s just another word for counterfeit. For my part Chamberlain
needs
watching, Mr. Swann.”

“They all need watching,” Adam said, reflecting that one of the things that made Britain a rare place for sharpening the wits was the passionate regionalism of its sons and daughters. One had only to sit in at a conference to watch it work on tempers, like yeast on bread, the Celts siding with one another against the Easterners, the countrymen trying to convince the townsmen that city sophistry was no substitute for brains and that they were not necessarily half-witted because they lived a hundred miles from London.