Theirs Was The Kingdom (71 page)

He saw Fraser and got his agreement to stand in for a period, subject to Headquarters’ approval, and said goodbye to the Higsons at Waverley Station, rushing south at eighty miles an hour. His senses, caught up in the beat of the iron wheels, isolated the theme that had launched him on this odyssey half a year ago, Arnold’s scholar gypsy crying,

O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its head o’ertaxed…

There was more than a poet’s lament here. “This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims…” But Arnold, like all the poets, had shirked the issue. He had made his protest and then withdrawn himself, leaving the healing—if healing could be achieved—to workaday people like Lovell, to Owen Williams who walked lame, to the hard-bitten Catesby, juggling with the demands of capital and labour, and to the Higsons, man and wife, looking for the answers in textbooks. To himself also, perhaps, when he had time to digest all he had seen and experienced since he set out so hopefully in the spring.

Five

1

I
T BEGAN AS A RICH, SECRET JOKE, THE CULMINATION, IN A WAY, OF ALL HIS SECRET jokes at the expense of the English, with their whorehouses and Bible Societies. But then, taking a twist, it became an embarrassment, a source of disquiet, an adventure, and finally, in retrospect, a kind of conversion.

Those who knew him, of course, did not see it in this sequence. He was fifty-six then, and had learned how to keep a change of heart to himself. But Deborah Avery was aware of it and years later, when the steamy summer of the Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon was forgotten, she remembered his part in it, summing it up for Swann posterity as “the time of Adam’s softening of the arteries.”

That was June-July 1885, when he was riding high, higher than he had ever hoped to ride. A period in his life when the sun shone for weeks at a time, when he and his affairs prospered, when it seemed to him and those about him that nothing could dent the armour of his self-sufficiency, and when Henrietta began to see signs of his two families fusing and federalising.

And why not, indeed? The evidence was all around them, both at the yard and at Tryst, with family trends emerging and the diversification and expansion of his other children in the network. There was no room for doubt anywhere.

Late spring and early summer, 1885, a time approaching Henrietta’s forty-fifth birthday and change of life. A time she saw the more mature among her reapers harvesting a little on their own account. A time, like so many other times, that she would look back on with laughter, regret, and thankfulness but also, as summer wore on, with a certain amount of dismay.

His policy of giving the viceroys their head, of letting them run free to their own profit or ruin, was proving as successful as his breakout in the winter of ’62, when, teetering into bankruptcy, he had taken them into his confidence at the first annual conference.

He had had his doubts about some of the more bizarre aspects of diversification, but he was obliged to admit, some eighteen months later, that they had been unjustified. Young Markby, up in Crescent North, was showing a profit on his fleet of fish waggons (known, within a network renowned for its slang, as iceboxes), and Godsall’s early ventures into the field of short-haul public transport were settling down after a shaky start with a few ramshackle vehicles acquired from failed companies in the Kentish Triangle. Tom Wickstead was trying his luck in the same field in the Peterborough area, but Wickstead’s main efforts had been concerned with his four-footers, the purpose-built cattle waggons he had urged on the company. Edith had written to say they now had contracts with more than fifty farmers specialising in fatstock, and that prospects in the new departure looked excellent. But then, he supposed, Edith would say that, for anything Tom did was right in her eyes. She might even be hopelessly out of touch with trends, now that her family was growing up and she spent all of her time at home.

Two of Catesby’s Goliaths were on the road, crawling across the Polygon like gigantic, humped-back centipedes, and Tybalt, noting the profit margin on successive hauls of heavy machinery, had lost his head over this venture and talked Waggonmaster Keate into ordering one for the Border Triangle, the only other region where there was likely to be a demand for such a dinosaur.

All in all, as Adam was ready to admit, they had been right and he had been wrong. It made him wonder if he was getting too set in his ways and whether, as time went on, he should begin clearing the ground for retirement, say as soon as he slipped over the hill into his sixties. Not seriously, however, for he found it impossible to imagine what he would do with himself when someone else was sitting here, or in some more comfortable perch they had built themselves, sifting through contracts, estimates, and breakdown costs, comparing one set of returns with another, and juggling, during spells of bad weather, with the movement of frigates, pinnaces, men-o’-war, iceboxes, four-footers, and Goliaths, on a thousand roads between the German Ocean and Dublin Bay.

The other area where he had had to climb down a rung or two lately was that of the family, for Henrietta was never slow to remind him of her prophecy that they would all do him proud if he had the patience to look for a long-term profit instead of a succession of overnight miracles.

He was mellowing, she noticed, just a little year by year, and she was the first to notice his improved relationship with the elder children. In this way, as in so many other ways, he seemed to differ from other patriarchs, who were given to sentimentalising over children when they were in the knee-climbing stage but frowned on their shortcomings the moment they were old enough to express an opinion of their own.

His favourite, she suspected, was still George, but he had warmed towards Stella now that he had adjusted to Denzil and evaluated his worth as a farmer. The prickliness apparent between father-in-law and son-in-law in the first years of the marriage had amused Henrietta, but she had the sense to keep the joke to herself. Their lack of accord stemmed, she suspected, from the one’s disapproval of watching a man defer to a woman (even when that woman was his own flesh and blood) and Denzil’s obstinate belief that Stella had been hustled into marriage with a seedy aristocrat. By the time the second child arrived, however, mutual wariness had moderated. It only needed the news that Denzil had made a down payment on Underhill, an adjoining smallholding, for Adam to admit that he might have misjudged the boy by regarding him, up to that time, as a handy life jacket for a daughter going down for the third time. He had no interest in agriculture, seeing it as a dying way of life, but he had to admit that the boy qualified as a trier, always a passport to Adam Swann’s good graces.

As for Alex, he was coming to terms with him too, though he still thought of him as a little dull and what he dismissed as “mess-pompous.” Mess-pompous or not, Alex was making steady progress in his profession, a captain at twenty-four, with three campaigns behind him and the possibility, she had heard, of marrying as soon as he got his next step.

It was George and Giles, however, who were showing the best pair of heels, and Adam made no bones at all about having been impressed by their recent showing. George may have racketed about during his long spell away from home but he had clearly benefited by his travels, for he and Adam could now baffle a croquet party with a laconic exchange of technical jargon. He was also, she gathered, a first-class salesman and had already hooked some lucrative fish into the Swann network. Indeed, the only complaint Adam voiced about him nowadays was his neglect of his pretty little bride, whom he often forsook in favour of a stinking mechanical contrivance he had found somewhere and shipped home in crates, each as heavy as a cannon.

Adam, she noted, had been mildly impressed by the machine when it was assembled but she soon realised he did not regard it as anything more than a toy. One night, when they were going to bed and could hear the cough and splutter of the stinking thing from its new home in the old stable block, he growled,

“Beats me how a boy his age, less than a year married, can stay tinkering with that contraption, when there’s a girl like Gisela warming the bed for him!” She laughed, reminding him of a time when he was much older than George, with an equally dutiful wife at home warming the bed, but had preferred to spend nights on the road and had been absent for weeks at a stretch.

He rejected this argument, dismissing it as unrealistic. In those days he had had his way to make in the world for both of them, and in any case, he had more than made up for time lost the moment he returned and had a family of nine to prove it.

“Well, at least George is home
every
night,” she argued, “and I haven’t heard Gisela complaining, have you?” He had to admit that he had not, adding that the one thing all their children seemed to have in common was an ability to bewitch members of the opposite sex.

“Damned if I don’t go hot under the collar whenever I drop in at Dewponds to pass the time of day with young Fawcett,” he went on. “He talks sense just so long as Stella stays out of the way, but the minute she comes into the room, looking like a sack tied round the middle if she’s been out meddling with his concerns, you might as well expect a conversation from a mute under hypnosis. All the boy does is gape at her, as if he’s married the Queen of Sheba. Then there’s young George, confound him. Why, a girl as pretty and dainty and lissom as Gisela could have married any man in her community I’d say, but no, she has to turn her back on home and family at a nod from him, and come trotting like a bitch to the whistle.”

“I really don’t know why you’re quarrelling with such a happy state of affairs,” she said. “In a way it’s reflected glory, isn’t it?” That made him grin and say he wasn’t quarrelling with it, merely commenting on it as a phenomenon that young Giles had underlined by capturing the only child of a millionaire during a tramp across the Welsh mountains.

In fact, it had taken him a week to absorb the shock of Giles’s conquest and what it was likely to mean in dynastic terms. Already Sir Clive Rycroft-Mostyn had steered a sizeable contract their way in the Mountain Square, and there was every likelihood that he would soon be backing Swann waggons against the loading bays of all manner of enterprises, if only to keep the money in the family. That George, or even Alex, should achieve something on this scale was conceivable, but that Giles, not yet twenty, had attracted the daughter of a man owning a coal-mine, a dye works, a cable factory, God only knew what else, and who lacked a male heir, was the kind of coup one read about in one of those trashy novels Henrietta used to borrow from Mr. Mudie before he weaned her on Dickens and the Brontës.

Henrietta found it less surprising. She had always seen Giles as the dark horse of the family, and no one could ever be sure what was going on behind that anxious brow. She never had, and she was virtually certain nobody else had, unless it was that overpowering little minx he introduced into the house last Christmas, without paying anyone the compliment at the time of announcing they were engaged to be married.

She had eventually prised this tremendous secret from Sir Clive himself, who used Adam as a go-between when he dropped in at the yard to discuss, of all things, the transport of a twelve-ton anchor from his chainworks in Wales to Avonmouth, letting it be known that he not only approved of Giles but would consent to them marrying as soon as the boy came of age.

She had the greatest difficulty then in not making an immediate descent upon Giles, with a demand to be kept fully informed on the subject, but Adam had talked her out of it. Giles, he reminded her, had more sensibility than the rest of the brood lumped together and would doubtless tell them in his own time and probably had reasons for reticence. He had, in fact, half-guessed what they were, but here it was he who kept his own counsel. A man as well-heeled as Rycroft-Mostyn would naturally assume he was buying a son-in-law, and Giles, if he knew the boy, wasn’t for sale, not even at the price Rycroft-Mostyn was in a position to pay. As to the girl herself, he could not come to any definite conclusions about her, save that she was very fetching, and as unpredictable as a two-year-old filly whose training had been botched somewhere along the line. She did offer a clue, however, of Sir Clive’s willingness to see her settled in the not-far-distant future, and to someone who was not an obvious fortune-hunter. A girl like that, he wouldn’t wonder, had a trouble-record somewhere. It wouldn’t have surprised him to learn that, not so long before Giles came drifting down the Aberglaslyn pass, she hadn’t cost her father a pot of hush money one way or another, got herself involved with a married man, maybe, or headed for Gretna Green with some young scoundrel. Watching them, as they played charades at Christmas, however, he had no doubts concerning her feelings regarding Giles, and this made him remember again the inexhaustible stock of charm his sons and daughters seemed able to pool. There wasn’t one of them, baby Margaret included, who hadn’t mastered the trick of making themselves agreeable when they chose. They hadn’t inherited it from
him
, and Henrietta in her younger days had been as wild and hard-mouthed as that Rycroft-Mostyn filly. Maybe it was a legacy from much further back, from her saucy Irish ancestors possibly, blended with the geniality of the old Colonel, who could coax a mastiff out of the sulks with a smile and a couple of pats.

Henrietta was right, of course. One should not quarrel with one’s luck, providing it was fair to middling, and they had all had their share over the last twenty years, notwithstanding that brush with bankruptcy and the loss of a leg in that crash over at Staple-hurst in ’65. The business was booming along under a full-spread of canvas; Stella, after that idiotic first marriage of hers, seemed as contented as a cow put out to permanent pasture; George, notwithstanding his eccentric interest in engineering, was more than proving his worth at the yard; Alex was staying alive and in line for promotion; and Giles had already succeeded in winning the friendship of at least three of the regional managers. As to the younger ones, they were as handsome and healthy a spread as one was likely to find anywhere in Kent. Taken all round, he supposed, he was much luckier than most men who had had to make their own way in the world and he meant things to stay that way, as he told Henrietta one stifling July night, when sleep evaded them and they passed the time counting their blessings.