Theirs Was The Kingdom (28 page)
It was Shawe’s nonstop racket that recalled George to his senses so that he retreated to the centre of the room and was still standing there, dazedly surveying the damage, when the watchman ran in, shouting, “Gor’ dammit, Mr. Swann, what’s to do? What the hell’s goin’ on…?”
George said, “Broadbent’s not hurt. See to Shawe. He burned his hands on the stove-lid,” and Shawe was led away, still yelling. George picked up his bag and went out into the yard where two stable lads were dousing Broadbent’s head under the pump.
The manager did not look up when he paused in front of the group. He seemed fully occupied in an attempt to check the bleeding of his tongue, lacerated by the dislodged tooth.
George said, to no one in particular, “He could do with a wash. Particularly about the mouth. When the deputy comes on duty tell him I’ve gone south, but no one is to take any more orders from Broadbent. I’m suspending him on my own responsibility. Headquarters will confirm that by telegram tomorrow.”
The watchman followed him out, saying, “You’re cut over the ear yourself, Mr. Swann.” George, lifting his hand, saw a streak of blood on it but said, “It’s nothing. I’ve a train to catch,” and went out to the cab rank opposite the station, telling the cabby to drive straight to London Road.
He was well on his way before it occurred to him that it might have been wiser to go to his grandfather, or more chivalrous, possibly, to check on Broadbent’s statement that he had given his wife a hiding. For a few moments he pondered the alternatives but then made his decision. Nothing much would be gained by involving Sam at this stage, whereas he thought it more than likely that Laura would have cut her losses and walked out on Broadbent to seek re-employment at the Cock and Hen, in the Shambles. As for himself, there seemed no real alternative now but to make a clean breast of it to Tybalt, the head clerk, if his father happened to be absent from the yard, or to Adam himself if he was lucky enough to find him alone in his tower. He stopped off at the post office in Market Street and cashed his two pound money order. Ten minutes later he caught the eight forty-five for Euston. The journey gave him five hours to convince himself that life as a Swann travelling scholar was not simply a matter of opening one oyster after another.
5
The thing that astonished him was his father’s calmness, as though it was commonplace to learn that his son had been involved in a fist fight before witnesses with one of the regional managers, that the same manager had been milking the firm’s till for almost a year, that, tucked away in a south Manchester suburb, was a woman whose body was laced with welts on his account, or that Broadbent would almost certainly charge the Gaffer’s son with seducing his wife and probably his daughter into the bargain.
Now that he had told his tale, and submitted his one insignificant-looking piece of evidence to back it, the entire episode appeared to him as indescribably muddled, a chain of sordid blunders culminating in him giving Broadbent the undoubted advantage by striking the first blow and being the agent of Shawe’s burns. Now that he considered it there were so many things he might have done, so many more rational courses open to him after he had proof of the manager’s dishonesty. Surely a man as experienced as his father would fasten on this and look on him as a hysterical fool, with less initiative than one of the vanboys swinging from the tailboard rope of a frigate in the yard.
He said, dismally, “Well, that’s about it, sir. I’m sorry I made such a howling mess of it, but the fact is I lost my head when that swine took it for granted I was involved with his wife. I wasn’t, upon my honour, and that’s the truth, although I see now that Lizzie might have grounds for believing I was. There was something odd about that place from the start and I should have made it my business to look for facts, instead of relying on luck and guesses.”
Adam said, turning the slip of paper over and staring at the back of it that was quite blank, “This isn’t a guess, George. As regards ferreting out what was amiss up there, you did better than a man has a right to expect of someone a year out of school.” He laid the paper aside. “Tybalt can look into this and do a back-check on the Polygon returns since Broadbent replaced Catesby. He’ll enjoy that, especially as I promoted the man against his advice. How does one go about solving a problem of this kind? Don’t ask me that, son. I’ve been at the game all my life and experience doesn’t insure you against a blunder, although it’s a long time since I made one as big as installing Broadbent up there. It happened once before in the Southern Square but that was a different kind of mistake. That time I put in a manager with a penchant for pretty stable lads.”
He got up, seemingly preoccupied with his own mistakes rather than his son’s and lounged over to the window, looking across the range of angled roofs to the sluggish river. “The important thing is to learn from one’s mistakes. Did you learn anything useful up there?” And George saw his mouth twitch, as though he was finding it hard to restrain a smile.
“Only to take no one on trust,” said George. At that, the smile broke through as Adam said, “Well, that’s worth the price of a fleet of waggons. Or would be to most men of business. Two let-downs in a hundred isn’t a bad average, and at least your experience was offset by this woman… what was her name again?”
“Laura. She’d been a barmaid before she married Broadbent.”
“Care to tell me about her?” And when the boy flushed, “Oh, you don’t have to. It’s only that it might help to get the whole silly business in focus. She seems to have been a good sort. I know women who would have gone to work on you in quite another way. If that had happened we should have been stuck with Broadbent, like it or not.”
George said, slowly, “I can’t forgive myself for what happened to her on my account. She was, well… different somehow.” He hesitated a moment and Adam made no attempt to prompt him. Finally he went on, “Look sir, you’ve been far more decent about this than I’ve any right to expect. I’ve let you and H.Q. down badly, haven’t I? I mean, as soon as it gets around that I pitched into Broadbent on account of his wife, everyone in the network will read more into it than a scuffle in the office, or a manager and clerk turning a guinea or two on the side. But you ought to know the real facts. The truth is there
was
something between me and Mrs. Broadbent. Nothing like he implied. Just a bit of flirting you could say. Well, no, more than that. She wasn’t the kind of woman one flirted with.”
“Was it because you felt sorry for her?”
“No, it wasn’t. She gave me this seal for my watchchain yesterday and until that moment I’d never thought of her as anyone but a woman who was… well, a good sport, and pretty with it. I kissed her then. His daughter Lizzie might have seen me and told her father. And then, when Laura let me out through the back door last night, I kissed her again but in a dif… well, as if I meant it. That was all, but it was enough to give a swine like Broadbent a hold over me. So in that sense I suppose I asked for it.”
Adam said, “Well, you might have asked for it, but he seems to have got it. And don’t think I fail to appreciate the epilogue, boy. Tell the truth and shame the devil, they say, but there’s more to the truth than that if you’re dealing with people one’s obliged to take on trust. You’re right about the network’s construction, however. There never was a concern like this for silly gossip. I sometimes think of it as an internal telegraph system, so God knows what they’ll make of Broadbent being beaten up and shown the door. However, there are ways to anticipate that, thank God. I’ll sack him, of course, but I’ll keep Shawe on. That way I’ll be insured against anything Broadbent spreads around. It shouldn’t be much, or not so long as we hold the threat of a prosecution over him. That takes care of that, but it still leaves you in the air. You can’t complete what I had in mind, a stop-off at all the regions. Did that occur to you on your way to confessional?”
“Yes, it did, sir. Perhaps you’d prefer me to back out and find something else. The army, maybe…”
“I damned well would
not
,” Adam said, emphatically, “for although you can’t be expected to see it from where you stand, I can assure you that you’ll do very well, once you learn to keep your temper in a crisis. Aye, and stay clear of disconsolate wives. No, don’t take that seriously. You’ll laugh at it yourself in a month or so. Listen here then, and tell me what you think of a change of plan. Suppose you spend a year or so abroad, somewhere in Europe, where they’re catching up on us in many ways and improving on every idea we originate but are too lazy to market? Would that appeal to you? Somewhere new, where you were obliged to learn the language and stand on your own feet?”
“I’m not sure, sir. Granted that I’m to work here eventually, would it help? Apart from giving gossip time to die down?”
“It might. I’ve done all the travelling I intend doing outside this country, but I learned from what I saw overseas when I was your age. You’ve had a close look at five regions, and the other ten won’t run away. After all, there’s a technical side to our business, and somewhere among this desk litter are coach-building and packing warehouse catalogues from Paris, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, and other centres. I’ll sift through them, but in the meantime don’t mope. It isn’t the end of the world. Care to go on home now?”
“No, sir. I’d sooner wait and go back with you.”
It warmed him to hear George say that. He got along well enough with all his children but although some of the older ones were, he suspected, beginning to have second thoughts about him as a man dedicated to something outside their comprehension, he had never looked for real affection from any one of them. George had always been the most extroverted of the bunch, making friends easily wherever he went and, until this moment, had seemed entirely self-sufficient. He did not need a more explicit statement of the boy’s involvement with this Broadbent woman. Somewhere along the line his emotions had been stirred and that, he supposed, signified growth. It was hopeful, to say the least, and suddenly he felt grateful to a woman he had never seen and never would see.
He said, “Suit yourself then and go down and tell Tybalt precisely what you discovered concerning our friend’s sidelines. Stick to figures. There’s no call to make a personal statement, of the kind you made up here,” and, to spare George further embarrassment, he at once readdressed himself to a mountain of correspondence on the desk.
He waited until he could hear George’s footsteps on the stairs before he looked up and permitted himself the luxury of a chuckle that had been waiting to surface for twenty minutes. He thought, having tried and failed to project himself back to the age of eighteen, “ We start out thinking we know the lot… how the cards fall… how all the tricks are ours in advance. But maybe it’s as well we do, or we should throw the hand in before we were thirty…” He frowned down at his desk, finding it difficult to concentrate, and after a moment or two he rose and went over to his look-out post. The inevitable string of barges drifted down on the tide and the mastheads of shipping down river were barely visible under a low canopy of ochre-tinged murk. For once, however, he was not thinking of Thames traffic and Thames argosies, but of his own flesh and blood, the clutch of isolated entities owing their existence to his chance meeting with a runaway girl of eighteen in the parched summer of 1858. One took it for granted that sons and daughters would inherit all manner of characteristics from parents and grandparents but they rarely did, or not to any great extent. One could look in vain among the new generation of Swanns for unmistakable traces of Sam Rawlinson, the Colonel, himself or Henrietta. Mostly it was a business of finding one’s own way, without benefit of anything more than instinct, with the real sources and guidelines as far away in time as the Pyramids and Babylon. Environment, that the social prophets were always prattling about, played little or no part in determining the end product that resulted from the drift from childhood to adolescence, adolescence to maturity, maturity to dotage. Stella, Alexander, and now George had all in turn bitten off far more than they could chew before they were twenty, and each was now occupied in spitting some of it out and digesting what remained. In their own ways and in their own times. It would be the same, he imagined, with Giles, and with all the others once they emerged from the nursery and were launched on a life unregulated by bells. The only way one could help was to show each of them a little patience, a little tolerance, a gleam or two of humour. He was not given to regretting his lost youth, as Henrietta was inclined to do when she peeled off her corsets at night and postured in front of her mirror, not knowing that he was sometimes watching and laughing at her through the chink of his dressing-room door. Today, more than ever, he was sure he was right in preferring the present to past or future. “Damned if I envy any one of them,” he muttered. “What man in his senses would want to start out all over again?” He turned away from the window and settled to his papers again. In five minutes he had forgotten Broadbent and George.
Eight
1
H
ENRIETTA SWANN RECALLED LITTLE OF HER CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE. Her life had not seemed to begin until the day Adam rode over the crest of the moor, scooped her into the saddle, and carried her off like a mercenary looting a city. The years preceding this stupendous event were humdrum, when she was growing up in the neo-Gothic monstrosity that her father had tortured from an erstwhile hunting lodge a few miles south of the Manchester to Liverpool railway. The countryside about her home had been pleasant but rather featureless. Company was rare and a succession of amateur governesses came and went, so that it was only the odd moment of passing seasons she recalled at this distance, insignificant cameos that had no special significance at the time but had, for one reason or another, taken root in the memory of a woman now breast-feeding her ninth child.
One such cameo she thought of as the advance of the reapers, the slow, purposeful march of September scythesmen, spaced the full width of a long, upsloping corn-field on the westerly edge of her father’s land, men advancing under a flaming noonday sun, slashing their way across the forest of stalks like a small, disciplined army operating in extended order; shoulders braced, blades flashing, unswerving in their progress to the tree-clad crest so that it had seemed to her at that time no routine chore, of the kind men must have been performing on fifty thousand farms at that season, but something splendid and inexorable, something hatched by a professional and executed by minions, whose several destinies he ordained from afar. It was, she told herself in retrospect, a childish fancy, but when her older children were grown and beginning to scatter, it acquired a curious relevance. She began to identify her sons and her daughters as the reapers and herself as the unseen mastermind who directed their advance on the horizon.
She was not an introspective person. Mostly she lived her life, and exerted her influence on other lives, casually and intuitively. Because her vocabulary was limited (despite the improving books Adam read aloud to her of an evening) she would have been puzzled if someone had told her that all her sources of energy and most of her random thoughts led back to a single, subconscious compulsion, an unrelenting quest for permanency that governed everything she did as a wife and mother. For she looked on her children and the rambling house in which all nine of them had been born, as guarantees against rootlessness and obscurity, spectres that had dogged innumerable ancestors on both sides of her family. Something less identifiable than the land and money-hunger, transmitted to her by generations of Irish and Lancastrian cottagers; something less tangible than soil, less time-serving than gold and silver.
Adam, who had always been aware of the half-hidden secret, would have called it by different names, depending upon his mood. Generally he saw it as the female equivalent of getting-on-in-the-world, a twin sister of his own thrust and power lust, and so it was but not wholly so. It was more deeply rooted and more broadly based than it appeared to his wholly practical mind and it was also more generous, inasmuch as it embraced not merely Henrietta’s family but also her race. For she was Celt all through and Celts have been on the defensive for forty generations.
Her mainspring was thus deeply personal and unconsciously tribal, an unremitting, undaunted, unwearied, implacable, ineradicable determination to found a dynasty and see it advance in her lifetime, as a flood seeps across a passive countryside.
It was this resolve, that she could never have put into words, that had been the strongest link forged by her relationship with Adam Swann. For the Swanns had insinuated themselves into the fabric of the nation centuries before she met and married one of them. The grafting of her stock upon his had thus been no more than a first step towards fulfilment. She saw each of her children as adding, one might say, to her stockpile, a further guarantee of the course the dynasty would take into the future. That she would live to witness this she did not doubt and the certainty of this made child-bearing a privilege. She had always taken pleasure in physical communion with a demigod, but the act of receiving and bringing forth his seed was more than physical. It was a mystical and devotional experience, a benison granted to very few.
A man as perceptive as Adam Swann might have read something very significant in all this, and perhaps he did when Henrietta speculated aloud on the various possibilities available to the generation of Swanns hatched under a Kentish spur between 1860, when they first settled here, and 1880, when the two eldest of them returned after clumsy trial flights. He would have seen his chubby, indomitable wife as an unmistakable product of their times, a living symbol of all that preoccupied the tribal unit to which both of them belonged. For it sometimes seemed to him, as he clumped about his business up and down the country, that every Jack and Jill between Land’s End and Cape Wrath was driving towards the goal that had been Henrietta’s from the moment he first saw her a mile or so from Sam Rawlinson’s gaudy perch. One and all they were obsessed, to the exclusion of all else, with getting on, making their mark, and founding, if not a dynasty, then a unit of one kind or another capable of staking a claim in the spoils that were going to the swift and the sharp-witted. In a tribe bedevilled by class, this was one area where every class barrier was down and had been for a generation.
In the England into which he had been born, blood and breeding were still paramount and continued to call the national tune. Ancient wealth was still the legislator and determiner of the national destiny. But all this had changed when he was still a lad. By then the man of brass and the man of iron had come into their own, elbowing their way forward and demanding, at the top of their voices to be heard and heeded. The newcomer was no longer content to be patronised and used as a pawn in the game of diplomatic chess played across the board of the Western world. He rated, he said, the rank of knight or bishop, and by the time Adam was launched this claim had been all but written into the statute books. By the early seventies the real men of brass and iron were not only on equal terms with the blue-blooded. In some areas, notably the northwest, the midlands and the metropolis, they were also dominating every field of affairs, if one excluded the cricket-pitch and the racetrack. In every one of Swann’s regions they were the men who had to be deferred to and consulted in all matters concerning the public weal, so that as the century advanced, creating the maximum noise and fume, ruling families of earlier generations were edged aside, obliged to be satisfied with local lip-service and seek refuge in a kind of archaic withdrawal that was quickly recognised and caricatured by the editor of
Punch.
Adam, who sometimes conjured with these abstracts, saw the process as a second Reformation, a phase of history repeating itself, with inventors, engineers, and their sponsors matching the hard-faced adventurers of Tudor times, who had appropriated to themselves the temporal powers and spiritual leadership of the Church, as well as that section of the nation’s acres owned and farmed by monks. For his part, he welcomed the transformation. To him it was a cleansing tide, notwithstanding the mountains of muck and rubble it left behind. He did not quarrel with it until, to his amused disgust, it seemed to be doubling in its tracks, not only across the spectrum of the nation but also under his nose, where the Henriettas of the era, consciously or unconsciously, were striving to reproduce the very pattern of society their fathers and husbands had cast aside.
He never did succeed in coming to terms with this enigma and ultimately dismissed it as yet another indication of the astonishing capacity of the British for self-delusion. For it seemed to him that the wives and daughters of the men of brass took no pride in their menfolk’s astounding victory. All they wanted, it appeared, was to replace their former masters without deviating by as much as a single inch from their ways of life, or discarding a single one of their prejudices. They counted their pile, nagged their providers into finding a place in the shires clear of the muckheaps they had raised, sent their sons to gentlemen’s schools, cultivated the manners and speech idioms of the grandees, and then sat back to watch promoted foremen and industrious apprentices repeat the metamorphosis all over again.
Adam Swann, practical above all else, could not or would not see this game of swings and roundabouts as something giving expression to the deepest yearnings of the English who remained, despite all, agriculturalists at heart. This was one reason why he had not opposed his daughter’s alliance with what he thought of as a poxed-out family of patricians. People like the Moncton-Prices were irrelevant, and to him, notwithstanding his essential liberality, daughters were expendable, there being no place for them in the present scheme of things. Thus, although tolerant with Henrietta’s fanciful theories, he gave her no credit for the ability to take a more embracing and long-term view than himself.
As it happened, it did not matter, or not all that much. By now Henrietta had his measure to the thousandth part of an inch. A business as large and involved as his was likely to occupy him for the rest of his days. When her final attempt to involve him, more than marginally, in her scheme to promote a Swann offensive on all fronts had failed at the time of Stella’s flight, she decided to make the best of what could not be altered and went about her self-appointed task alone. By now, of course, her ambition, once restricted to breeding scarlet-coated warriors of the kind that had decorated the toffee tins and scrapbooks of her nursery days, had evolved into something more practical. She still retained her reverence for scarlet and gold, but one, or at the most two, inheritors of the Swann military tradition would suffice. The Swanns, she decided, could be trained and trusted to do far more than add lustre to the flag in faraway places. They could take their places beside her as future masterminds of the advance of the reapers. By the summer of 1880 she was fully engaged, savouring her limited triumphs and surmounting, sometimes by storm sometimes by guile, all the incidental hurdles.
Alexander, the eldest boy, was spoken for. Seasoned by his hair-raising experiences in Zululand, he was now enrolled at Sandhurst, a cadet whose personal association with the epic at Rorke’s Drift had already singled him out. Alexander, Henrietta decided, could be left to himself for a spell. Not only had he been mentioned in despatches for killing Zulu snipers overlooking the embattled compound, he also had the unique advantage of a father on friendly terms with Roberts of Khandahar.
George was clearly destined to be a merchant and could, therefore, be left to Adam. The prospect did not dismay her. Her prejudice against merchants had moderated since the time when she had felt called upon to apologise for a husband in trade.
Giles, the next in line, had baffled her for a time, but she had come to accept his separateness and what seemed to her his astonishing precocity. He was, she felt, tailor made for the role of a mastermind, but she was not yet sure which of three fields he should be encouraged to till, that of statesman, scholar, or priest. He might even write a book, and the prospect of seeing the words “
By Giles Swann
” on the title page of one of Mr. Mudie’s weekly offerings was as alluring as that of seeing him in bishop’s gaiters, or rising to speak at Westminster. Meanwhile, he was doing well at his new school and seemed so much happier, healthier, and better adjusted than during his first period away from home. She did not know whether that new college he attended had produced any statesmen or divines as yet, but she was confident that Giles, with her sponsorship and his father’s capital, would do it proud before long.
Hugo and Edward, the two younger boys, qualified as reserves. She might encourage Hugo to follow Alexander’s footsteps and take a commission in a smart regiment. But equally well, considering the boy’s glibness in manufacturing watertight excuses for bad behaviour, he might provide excellent material for the law. Edward was only just beginning to talk, although he had walked upright at the age of fifteen months and promised to be the liveliest of the flock, so that it was possible he could be encouraged to shine in the field of athletics. The English seemed increasingly preoccupied with activities of that kind nowadays, although Henrietta belonged to a generation that still thought of them as the outdoor equivalents of forfeits and blind man’s buff.
As to the younger girls, she had noted, with satisfaction, that each of them gave promise of being even prettier than Stella. Helen was already a prize-winner at local gymkhanas, whereas Joanna, a creature of extreme grace, showed a more-than-average aptitude for ballroom dancing.
There was, of course, the family’s one lame duck, Stella, concerning whom they had all made such a hideous mistake, and secretly Henrietta was beginning to fret about Stella. With her usual optimism Henrietta had assumed that the scandal of an annulled marriage, whilst having an inevitable effect upon the girl’s future prospects, would not have crushed her to the degree that it had, and this despite the fact that the wretched business had been effectively hushed up and piloted through the courts in under a year with the minimum of publicity.