Theirs Was The Kingdom (78 page)

Not one of these dire prophecies had substance so far as she was concerned. All were seen to be as far-fetched as the old wives’ tales fed her long ago concerning the alleged indignities of the marriage bed. Apart from a few hot flushes, and an increased impatience with the younger children and the maids, she hardly realised the change had caught up with her, whereas Adam, bless his heart, had been quick to notice and sympathise. No one could be more tolerant in this kind of field, as she had told herself many times over the last thirty years. Most women would have found it excessively embarrassing to raise the subject with their doctor, much less their husband, but he was prepared to joke about it, telling her it was years since he had seen her blush, and afterwards packing her off to the doctor, having smoothed the ground in advance.

That same night, when she showed him a bottle of the medicine old Dr. Birtles had given her, he sniffed it and said, gaily, “Well, I daresay you’ll get through it with very little trouble. For my part I’m relieved to learn we’ve bolted the door on the stragglers. Nine is more than enough and I’ve heard they have a tendency to slip through at a minute to twelve.” He looked at her fondly, “It wouldn’t have bothered you if we had made it a baker’s dozen, would it?” She admitted that it would not, although it did occur to her that another baby, at her time of life, might have been a great nuisance, for it would have prevented their summer treks around the regions, an annual expedition she enjoyed immensely, especially when good weather enabled them to cover long distances in the waggonette.

She said, as she was getting into bed, “It isn’t… well… it won’t make any difference to us, will it?” and he replied, with feigned innocence, “Just how do you mean, dear?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean!” she snapped, and that made him laugh in the way he invariably did at any hint of modesty on her part.

“Well, it certainly won’t affect me,” he said, “for I’m spry enough, thank God. As to you, I can’t say. I’ve not noticed any loss of interest lately.” She said he was beyond redemption but kissed him gratefully and went on to enquire if it was true that there was an equivalent change in men when they entered their fifties.

“I’ve always thought there was,” he said, with a seriousness that took her by surprise, “but it’s not a physical change. More of a change of heart, such as I had when I made up my mind I was carrying too much responsibility and passed some of it to those rascals in the provinces. You could call it a loss of drive, I suppose—no, not that exactly, more of a change of direction. At my time of life a man tends to look around and ask himself what he intends to do with what’s left.”

It was only rarely she had heard him talk in these terms, even in jest. Ever since she had known him, a matter of almost thirty years now, he had been utterly dedicated to that complex centred on the Thames-side slum. She said, doubtingly, “I can’t see you devoting yourself to anything new, Adam. It’ll always be that yard and those cronies of yours. If you turned your back on it all, whatever would you do with yourself all day?”

“I’d start fresh right here,” he said, unexpectedly. “I’d make this place something to set tongues wagging all over the southeast. A showpiece, that’s what I’d make of it, and one of the most impressive of its kind in the land.”

“You mean like Lord de L’Isle’s place over at Penshurst, or Knowle House in Sevenoaks?” But this only made him laugh.

“Good God, no! Nothing on that scale, woman. I haven’t got that kind of capital lying around and even if I had it would go into the network. What I have in mind is something more intimate—cosier if you like, with landscaping and furniture and pictures typical of the English domestic arts over the three centuries the house has stood here. Something as unique as the network to hand over to Alex, or whoever takes on from us. Giles is the more natural heir, I suppose, for he’s the only one among them with real taste to my way of thinking. Maybe Alex wouldn’t care to settle here permanently, and George certainly wouldn’t, so I daresay they could make some kind of arrangement after I’d gone.”

“Well, don’t talk as if you were in your dotage,” she said. “Fifty-nine isn’t old, and I’ve never known you spend a day abed since your accident.”

“No,” he said, “that’s so, and I may even be good for another twenty years, given luck. But that isn’t what I meant. It’s not just a matter of furnishings, and keeping an eye open for good landscapes and portraits going cheap at the auctions. It’s leaving something permanent. Trees, for instance.”

“Trees? We’ve already got scores of trees, haven’t we?”

“Yes, we have, but they’re all English trees—oaks, beeches, and elms mostly. I’d like to plant exotic trees, of the kind that do so well over here. Incense cedars, Hinoki and Sawara cypresses, Californian redwoods, Grecian and Himalayan firs, and Monterey pines. We could have a wonderful spread down at the foot of the paddocks and some of them are fairly quick growing. By the time I took my final look out of that window they’d be a rare sight, I can tell you.”

That was one of the rewarding things about Adam Swann, she decided. You never stopped learning about him. Until this moment she had no idea he was even interested in trees and certainly none that he could talk about them knowledgeably. It took her a few moments to absorb his plan and assess the probability of him achieving it. She said, after a lengthy pause, “You really are the oddest man, Adam, but it’s a pleasant thought. Do you know what? I think you ought to go about it at once. Where could you buy trees of that sort?” But, to her annoyance, he was asleep, and again she envied him the trick of slipping away so effortlessly, supposing it to be a legacy of his campaigning years, wasted years so far as she was concerned, for that was a time before she had the extraordinary good fortune to be thrown from a trap and abandoned on a moor in the middle of a thunderstorm. Did ever a few flickers of lightning bring a woman that much luck?

3

His talk of succession fired a train of speculative thought in her mind, so that she became a little absent-minded over the next few days, making an inventory of the family in a way she hadn’t done for quite some time. Taken all round, she decided, it was as satisfactory a balance sheet as he was likely to cast up in that tower of his, and prospects, with one exception, looked very promising indeed.

Foremost in mind came George and Stella, both paired off and set fair for life she would say, at least in Stella’s case. One could never be sure about anyone as free-ranging and unpredictable as George.

Whenever she thought of her eldest daughter (as a wife, that is, and not as a woman) she awarded herself full marks for her foresight, remembering that she had practically thrown the girl at that clodhopper down the valley. Since then, however, shocked as everyone had been at the time, Stella had never looked back and had certainly never pined for the days when she had every young buck in the county making sheep’s eyes at her. She supposed, studying the marriage objectively, that something similar had happened to Stella as had happened to her, when she came within a hairsbreadth of being married off to that toad, Makepeace Goldthorpe, a piece of merchandise bartered for a strip of land adjoining her father’s loading bays. But in Stella’s case, of course, the poor girl had to undergo the actual experience of a loveless marriage. It seemed probable that she was still drawing on her stock of relief at having escaped the clutches of that old goat Moncton-Price and his wretched son. Any woman, given those circumstances, could be expected to look on a man like Denzil Fawcett as a knight in rustic armour, but it was odd, Henrietta reflected, that this attitude should have survived the first transports of marriage. With the best will in the world nobody could call Denzil much of a catch, and yet there could be no doubt at all that the girl had adjusted to him and his background in a way that was really quite astonishing when one thought about it. They had three sons now, and a fourth child on the way, so that there seemed every prospect (seeing that Stella was still only twenty-six) that she would fill the Fawcett farmhouse with children before she was done. Henrietta was sure, however, that the children were incidental and there was another parallel here if one looked for it, between the girl’s attitude as a mother, and Adam’s attitude as a father, something he had handed down to her like a birthmark. Stella’s preoccupation was not with the children at all but with the farm, just as Adam’s had always been with the network. And after the farm came the peasant who went along with it, as though the boy’s adoration over the years had been absorbed, stored, and then fed back to him in the form of glances and gestures that any experienced woman could recognise as the sign language of love, and a very earthy love she would say, noting the way her daughter’s eye sparkled when he came stumping into the kitchen, threw his arm over her shoulders, and paid her some commonplace compliment. Well, so be it, and good luck to the girl, for that was a byproduct of being happily married oneself. One found oneself wishing that every woman in the world took the same pleasure in the man who shared her bed and board.

Thus, in a sense, Henrietta was able to discount Stella whenever she did her family sums. There was nothing to worry about over at Dewponds. All one had to do was to sit back and await the arrival of grandchildren at brief intervals, and if Stella became shapeless in the process, that was her business and Denzil’s.

As to George, her source of satisfaction concerning him was twofold, for although he seemed settled enough with that pretty little Austrian girl hanging on his words and trotting at his heels, his obsession, as she well knew, was not with Gisela, or the fat little boy Gisela had produced a few months after her arrival here, but for that ponderous great engine he had assembled and was forever tinkering with over in the old stables.

Adam had given them the old millhouse, the house right of the drive entrance where the Michelmores had once lived, and with a little help from the Twyforde Green joiner, George had converted it into a comfortable home. Unlike any of the others, including Adam, he was an expert handyman and could have learned any craft that took his fancy, she supposed, apart from his overriding interest in engineering that must have come from Sam.

Aside from his absorption with the smelly old machine, however, George was more than pulling his weight at the yard, or so she gathered from odd remarks let fall by Adam. In addition to being clever with hands, it seemed, he was extremely shrewd when it came to dealing with customers, and his command of three languages gave him unique advantages as a salesman, or so Adam said, although, up to that time, she had been unaware that merchants spoke anything but English.

So George, too, was settled, and Adam had what he badly needed—a son to take his place when he turned his back on that slum and addressed himself to planting Tryst with exotic woodlands, making an Italian garden over by the fruit cage, and turning the house into a kind of museum that would find a place in Kentish guidebooks by the time they were coining up to their golden wedding anniversary.

There was even more abundant promise in Giles’s future, for by now Henrietta had taken the measure of that Rycroft filly. Wild and wilful she might be, and a rare handful, no doubt, for a husband with a gentle disposition, but he had the advantage of her in one respect. Watching them clearly, Henrietta had made up her mind that she was madly in love with the boy and that, surely, was all that mattered in the long run.

They were to be married, so Romayne told her, on his twenty-first birthday, a date that had been selected by the lawyers arranging her settlement. It awed her a little to reflect that at least one of her sons would be marrying an heiress, and sometimes seemed too good to be true, for Giles had never struck her as a boy likely to attract luck in the way his brothers did—Alex by surviving that awful battle, George in lighting upon a dutiful little wife who was prepared to play second fiddle to an infernal machine. As regards Giles, in fact, Henrietta had only one source of disquiet these days and this was centred on the girl’s impatience, almost publicly proclaimed at a Tryst birthday party when, claiming a forefeit, she plumped herself on Giles’s knee and gave him the kind of kiss that many young men would be lucky to get in private from a girl as richly endowed as Romayne. Had she been the girl’s mother, instead of her mother-in-law elect, she might have had cause for concern. As it was, well, it was up to the boy, she supposed, and none of her business.

It was after that little give-away, however, that she began to watch them, and it occurred to her that a shorter engagement, lawyers notwithstanding, might have been wiser for all concerned. A year was a long time at that age and she found herself thinking, half-sympathetically, “I know precisely how she feels… but it wouldn’t do to rush fences with so much money in the offing—might even create bad blood between the families.” It made her think of her own waiting time, however, when she was a year younger than Romayne, and Adam was about his business and never on hand to court her. “I can remember a rash of goose-pimples when he touched me, so maybe it was as well he wasn’t, although nobody can tell me that little madam doesn’t know far more about men than I did in those days…”

Stella… George… Giles. She could contemplate all three clearly and coolly, for they were out in the open with their courses set. But the others, the younger ones, were still in shadow, so that her thoughts concerning them were more random. What, for instance, was one to make of Hugo, eighteen and already serving an apprenticeship at the yard. She remembered that curious letter Giles had written home from school, suggesting the boy made a career of athletics, and it really did begin to look as if Adam, so hard-headed in most respects, had been taken in by that gaff, for he seemed not to mind Hugo spending most of his time travelling about the country competing in sports events and even took a pride in his succession of triumphs and trophies. Already a dozen or more of the latter crowded Hugo’s mantelshelf and when she went in there to give them a polish (Hugo did not like the maids to touch his paraphernalia) she wondered how on earth one conducted serious business on a cindertrack. Yet there was logic in it somewhere for Hugo, in high starched collar and dark serge business suit, looked no more than an amiable oaf, whereas Hugo, loping across the forecourt in shorts and singlet, was quite beautiful. There was no other word for it and she had watched him until he passed behind the rhododendron clump. She knew nothing at all of athletics but it did not need a practised eye to recognise the grace of his movements, the long measured stride that set his calf-muscles rippling, the proud way he held his head, reminding her of a Greek god she remembered seeing in a catalogue of the Great Exhibition when she was a girl. Pride possessed her then, that she had given birth to such a specimen, so that she remembered something else from her girlhood—old Mrs. Worrell, who had known her Irish mother, telling her that the Irish were all the descendants of kings. Where would Hugo’s path lead, she wondered. Many women, particularly the flighty variety, would go crazy over him, but Hugo, more than any of them, was going to need a wife with both feet on the ground. Where was such a one to be found in rural Kent?