Theirs Was The Kingdom (61 page)

There was a great deal of feasting and jollity after that, Gisela’s sisters, somewhat to George’s surprise, extracting what seemed to him an inordinate amount of fun out of the situation, and showing no indication at all that they resented Gisela’s swooping capture of the English milord. For that, it appeared, was how the village had come to regard him. They drank each other’s healths in rivers of local wine, and he managed to evade the traditional local custom of seeing bride and groom to bed by whisking Gisela away to the city by late afternoon for a brief stay at the most luxurious hotel on Baedeker’s list. By then, however, arrangements were well advanced for his return home, and he had written a series of cunningly worded letters hinting that he might in the near future be marrying and bringing his Austrian wife back to Tryst for family approval.

His first letters in this vein made little impression on Henrietta, who found it impossible to take them seriously but Adam was not fooled and when, on the day of the wedding, a telegram arrived announcing that he was married and would be returning home in early December, he set to work to moderate Henrietta’s extreme indignation by saying, “Might even be a damned good idea. Steady the boy, and by God he needs steadying! Anyway, it’s brought him back, hasn’t it? And with the intention of going in for some steady work, I hope. That’s something to rejoice over, for I’d half come to believe we should never see him again.”

“But an Austrian girl,” Henrietta wailed, “it’s… it’s so
silly
, when there are plenty of pretty English girls about here who would regard any one of the boys a splendid match. She obviously hasn’t a penny or he would have said so, if only to soften the blow!” But Adam said, mildly, “Good God, woman, do you suppose any one of our children ever gave a thought to money? They’ve lived soft for the whole of their lives and that’s your fault and mine more than theirs. However, I’ll wager one thing, knowing George. She’ll be very fetching, and it’s time we had more grandchildren. Perhaps the second generation will prove a sober, predictable lot, to comfort our old age.”

“You seem to take it all as a great joke,” she grumbled. “As for me, I simply can’t imagine why he was in such a tearing hurry. He could have invited us, couldn’t he?”

“If he had you wouldn’t have got me as far as the Danube in winter,” he said. “I’ve done my globe-trotting. Movement within the network keeps me sufficiently exercised.” But he did not see fit to voice thoughts that occurred to him as he reread George’s telegram in the train between Croydon and London Bridge that same morning. The hurry, he suspected, might indicate that a fresh source of grandchildren had already been tapped. He had always suspected that women were more important to George than to any of his other boys, but that, on the whole, was nothing to wring one’s hands over. He himself had never got started in life until he found a mate.

As to the boy’s mother’s misgivings, he could understand them well enough, although he intended to keep his own counsel concerning them. Their source was probably threefold and there was nothing to be done about them, beyond hoping that the young Mrs. George Swann was amiable and possessed plenty of tact. Henrietta and George had never really hit it off and one did not have to probe deeply to decide why. In one respect they were too much alike, both having predominantly sensual natures, but sensuality in a man and a woman meant different things, he supposed, and she would be very unlikely to make allowances for George on that account. Then there was George’s strong sense of humour and Henrietta’s lack of one, but the absence of any channel of communication between them went back to the day of George’s birth, almost, one might say, to the night of his conception, at the old George in Southwark. For George had been a pledge on her part, and she had never ceased to regard him as such, a son intended from the very beginning to follow his father, that she might have a free rein with the others who preceded him and followed him. For the rest there was nothing to do but wait and hope that this girl, the first of their daughters-in-law, would do something to bridge the gap.

So it was that George Swann landed at Folkestone a week or two later accompanied not merely by a wife, whose undeniable modesty, lisping English, daintiness, and general air of malleability conditioned her mother-in-law’s approach from the first embrace, but by twelve immensely heavy crates that required a small waggon train to convey them from the nearest off-loading point to the old stables the gardeners had been using as potting sheds since the new stable block was added at Tryst four years before. When Adam queried this avalanche of heavy luggage, wondering what on earth the boy had brought back with him, George said, with a grin, “That can wait, sir. It’s a very long story and likely to give you more to think about than a routine event like a wedding in a family of nine!” So he forgot the crates for the time being and let his fancy play on George’s other acquisition, deciding at once that he was going to like her, that she would be a sobering influence on the boy, and also, as Henrietta cheerfully admitted when they went to bed that night, that George was what the younger generation would call a rare picker when it came to girls.

Three

1

I
T WOULD BE EXTRAVAGANT TO SAY THAT HENRIETTA SWANN EQUATED THE timespan of her existence with the rhythm of a solar system, but that, in a sense, was how it communicated itself to her senses in the years succeeding her fortieth birthday. It was, in fact, an interlocking series of rhythms, centred on a dominant theme that was Adam, and about Adam the Swann network.

Beyond that—an immeasurable distance beyond it—was the wider orbit of the family, with its little clusters of planets and its lonelier, more distant star, Alexander, looming largest among them. Beyond that again was the rhythm of the tribe to which they all belonged, that cohort of swashbuckling, purse-proud argonauts, ranging the five continents and coordinating everything and everybody under a symbol that was the Union Jack, and the remote, disgruntled little figure who had achieved, in Henrietta’s lifetime, the status of legend.

Victoria.
Victoria Regina et Imperiatrix.
Pudgy and rather drab. Imperious, arch, mulish, and rabbit-toothed. Surely the most unlikely symbol of splendour and permanence in the history of kings, courts, and federations of tribes.

To Henrietta, however, the more general aspect of the planetary system was of small significance and she was able to consider it with a certain detachment, the way one thought of mountains, seas, and islands. Her base and her being were here, in the heart of the Weald, midway between the North and South Downs, and her focal point was, and always had been, the tall, far-ranging black-browed figure, who rode and drove and stumped between his base and hers, dominating both and issuing his edicts off the cuff, so that all manner of men serving him scurried to obey, but cheerfully, sometimes almost gaily. For under the bark, and the gruff certainty of command, was a broad strain of geniality and boyishness that sometimes reminded her vividly of the young, erect horseman who had come riding out of nowhere at crack of dawn one summer morning and pounced on her when she was halfway through her nineteenth year.

It seemed so long ago now, that improbable (and, still to Henrietta) intensely romantic incident. So distant that it was as though she had lived all of half a dozen lives, the first spent in waiting and wondering in rural Cheshire, the rest as his consort, bearing him children and queening it here in a house that was already more than three centuries old; deferring to him, arguing the toss with him, sometimes digging in her heels against him, but, on the whole, sharing his life and hopes and attainments as a near-equal partner. And sometimes, even now, romping with him in that great canopied bed the Conyers had used to perpetrate their tribe, the one place where he seemed to her able to relive his youth at will and then stow it away again in order to shoulder the monstrous burden he seemed to enjoy lugging the length of the country.

Whenever he was absent, however, she was able, without much difficulty, to readjust to a wider orbit where the house itself, and its rural environs, replaced him as pace-setter and generator. Over the years she had, perforce, to learn the trick of making this adjustment a hundred times a year, if only to fill the vacuum he created the moment he rattled off to that slum of his beside the Thames. Now, to a degree at least, abrupt substitution of Home for Husband had become an easy habit of mind. After the birth of Margaret, the last of her children, the importance of background had increased year by year, season by season, so that she was able to separate, study, and evaluate each successive spring, summer, autumn, and winter, thinking of them in terms of daily rotas, with their individual demands upon her time and patience.

She enjoyed them all in their several ways and was never able to decide which season exerted the most compelling demands, or brought with it the most delight, disappointment, and dismay. They were four mettlesome, highly unpredictable steeds, ruled by caprices that encouraged them to behave well or ill, according to mood or perhaps the contents of their nosebags. For this was England, where one could never be absolutely sure whether it was January or June, April or October, and it was weather, above all else (given Adam’s absence) that governed Henrietta’s spirits and ordered Henrietta’s schedule from time of rising to time of going to bed.

In the spring, that began for her any time between early March and late April, she was always aware of a personal renewal that kept step with her surroundings. She would ignore the snowdrops, that rightly belonged to winter, and concentrate on the humped up verges of the long, winding drive down to the stone gate pillars where Dancer, the homing carriage-horse, had flung her one April evening half an hour before the birth of Stella, her eldest daughter. She always regarded these pillars with the greatest respect, for she had come to think of them as the most prominent mileposts of her life. Had it not been for them, perhaps, she would never have spent her life here under the wooded spur, so that the pillars acquired, over the years, a mystical significance, a couple of cromlechs that held all the secrets of past, present, and future.

To approach them, however, one had to half-circle the rhododendron clump at the head of the drive and move down between the double avenue of copper beeches where, in spring, the daffodils and narcissi showed in great, sprawling clusters, a double wave of yellow and white that was never still, not even on a windless day, but danced and joggled and shifted under mottled patterns of sunlight formed by the branches overhead, so that Henrietta would see them as Wordsworth had, a million children full of glee and ripe for mischief.

In spring she rarely went far afield on foot or on horseback. Her tours of inspection were usually limited to the paddocks, where the children’s ponies were out to grass, or the walled kitchen garden west of the house, where the gardener and his two adjutants were to be found at this time of year. For by then, of course, she had had a surfeit of the house and spent a great deal of the day outside, sometimes climbing the zig-zag path to the summit of the spur above the house and pausing for a moment at the worm-eaten shelter made of half a whaler, that the old Colonel had used as a painting perch all the years he had lived with them.

Up here the old man never seemed dead. His gentle, jovial ghost pottered about among the fronds of pea-green bracken fighting for living space among the rusty spurs of last year’s growth. The tenuous cord that had linked her to the dear old fellow had never really been severed by his death and burial; here, in his favourite spot, it seemed to strengthen a little so that she could, if she wished, commune with him and perhaps enjoy one of his sly, gentlemanly jokes.

Then she would move on to the level stretch that directly overlooked the house and stare down on the weathered pantiles and crazy cluster of crooked chimneys that looked like drunkards helping one another home. She wondered at all that had gone on down there since the first Conyer had chosen this very spot to set the seal on his conquest of the handsome, long-nosed Cecil girl, whom he had wooed and at last won, buying her, as it were, with the profits of a privateering foray along the Dutch coasts in the years preceding the sailing of the Armada.

It was pleasant up here so long as you didn’t mind the strong gusts of wind that coasted down from the higher ground to the east. Wild flowers grew here in great profusion beneath the squat oaks and tall, bosomed beeches, under the odd, self-seeded sycamore or mountain ash, primroses and peep-shy dog violets, crimson campion and hawkweed, sunspray dandelion, daisy, herb robert, stitchwort, and bugloss, and always, of course, huge lacy umbrellas of cow-parsley that were, when one came to acknowledge them, the most splendidly fashioned of all.

Then Phoebe Fraser’s lunch gong would begin to throb and she would retrace her steps, remembering the myriad of things she had to do. Within minutes she would be reabsorbed into the rhythm of the house but refreshed, somehow, by that pottering interval of solitude on the perimeter of her realm.

2

Summer, full summer that is, was a very different time, more demanding in every way for then, though there was no hunting, the young children spent almost all their time out of doors, where they soon grew berry-brown and even more vociferous and high-spirited than at Christmas, when the place erupted like a violated hive.

Sometimes, around and beyond midsummer day, it could be baking hot beyond the shade of the chestnuts, and whenever she walked south from the terrace she hugged the crown of the drive until she reached a gap in the fence that led through the little pine wood to another of her favourite spots, the pheasant hide alongside the road to Twyforde Green where, one sultry June day in 1865, Giles had been conceived, minutes after she had ambushed Adam on the way home.

She could never pass here without chuckling, and sometimes the place seemed to chuckle back at her, reminding her of that ridiculous tumble, performed almost in public, that neither of them had ever forgotten or ever could forget. For it was another milestone, and almost a year was to pass before she held him in her arms again; then he was not the same man and she was not the same woman, one being shorn of a limb, the other having matured in a way she found incomprehensible in retrospect. Yet the seed of that riotous encounter had remained in her, surviving a terrible season of stress and despair, and the result was young Giles, somehow, perhaps by reason of this very circumstance, apart from them all in some way, half child and half man and, so far as she was concerned, as symbolic as the pillars the far side of the hedge.

She would sit here deliberately recreating the scene, reminding herself of what they had said to one another on that occasion, and even recalling what she had worn: a sprigged muslin dress that afterwards had to be discarded, although it was almost new. She could recall, even at this distance, every trivial circumstance of that hour-long idyll, her mingled shame and defiance, her underlying sense of triumph at her ability to slip from role of wife to mistress at the first touch of his hand on her breast, and of a curious awareness of having, at long last, anchored the man who later sped her on her furtive return to the house with a jovial slap on the bottom.

God knows how young and zestful they had been in those days! And how long, how improbably long, this relationship had endured, for even now, with him fifty-seven, and herself nearly thirteen years younger, they were still lovers, as inseparably bound to one another as they had been when he hustled her into that hide and rumpled her to such an extent that she had to sneak back to the house like a village wanton, terrified of being spotted by one of the children or maids.

But the summer, for the most part, was not really a time for ruminating. There was always a round of fetes and garden parties and birthday celebrations, with any number of visitors to entertain and gossip with, and croquet matches on the lawn over by the solitary cedar, and, more recently, lively games of tennis that were too strenuous for her but served to demonstrate the astonishing agility of the Inseparables, Joanna and Helen.

Alex, home to take up a special appointment—something to do with a new quick-firing gun somebody clever had invented—watching them whirl their long-handled rackets and leap this way and that in a flurry of skirts and petticoats, had called them dervishes. Henrietta, who had never seen a dervish, took his word for it. For her part she thought of them as tomboys, reflecting a little glumly that, when she was their age, such a pastime would have been out of the question for young ladies, who were taught instead to glide like ghosts in their bell-crinolines, and acquire poise by parading round the schoolroom with books balanced on their ringlets. Adam had always been extremely liberal in his attitude towards the girls but she supposed freedom was in the air nowadays, for when she repeated that silly story, about having to refuse a chair offered by a gentleman because it was warm from his bottom, the Inseparables had almost split their sides. Adam, recalling how he too had laughed when she recounted it the first day they met, admitted that some of the stuffiness was being beaten from society by the rising generation. “Not before time, either,” he had added. “I remember I was appalled when I got back here, after seven years out east, and found the British were raising their women under glass.”

“I didn’t do much to steady your gallop,” she had reminded him but he replied, gaily, “You were already running from your hothouse when I met you,” and she had laughed with him, remembering that this was true.

She had always enjoyed solitary rides along the river bank on her gelding, Patch, pretending she needed the exercise, but actually using the outing to escape from the ceaseless clamour of the children. Round about June or early July she would alternate between riding upstream to Dewponds and passing the time of day with Stella and that enslaved husband of hers, or downstream to the tail of the islet that she had always thought of as Shallott, a triangle of wooded shingle where the stream formed an ox-bow a mile below Tryst bridge.