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, w
hereas 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.
People enquired about it, naturally, but Henrietta had anticipated that and fobbed them off with a volley of incomprehensible medical terms, all rehearsed in private and all aimed, as a matter of course, at the groom, so that local nosey-parkers went away with a vague impression poor Lester was a chronic invalid and the victim of a nameless disease or possible diseases.
Taken all round, therefore, she had been gratified by the smallness of the stir in the locality but Stella's low state of mind remained unaltered. Indeed, it sometimes seemed to her mother that the girl's experience could hardly have had a more lowering effect on her had the matter been fully aired in all the newspapers and picked over at every fete and soiree from here to Maidstone. She would go nowhere and take no interest in anything. Indeed, she rarely spoke unless spoken to so that sometimes it seemed to Henrietta that she had not yet emerged from the trance-like state in which she had found her the morning Denzil Fawcett came tapping on the kitchen door.
The doctors were no help at all. Privately they assured her there was nothing much amiss with the girl and prescribed iron tonics, exercise, good food, and the company of people her own age. They did not tell her how this could be achieved so long as the girl flatly refused to reintegrate herself into the life of the county and spent her days mooning about like a wraith, listlessly helping Phoebe Fraser in the care and education of her younger brothers and sisters. When she was not in demand in the nursery, she would efface herself, riding alone across the downs or taking a solitary walk along the banks of the river in a direction she was unlikely to meet neighbours or villagers.
Adam, confound him, did not seem to see anything sinister in this prolonged withdrawal, and sometimes appeared to approve of it. “Damn it, woman,” he told her irritably when she returned yet again to the subject, “she's had a bad shock and a frightful disappointment. Naturally she doesn’t want to discuss it with every old trout who attends those gabby functions of yours! And that's what she’d be obliged to do if she made herself available. We were lucky to get off as cheaply as we did, implying that young waster sought annulment on medical grounds. I daresay the gossips find plenty in that to keep them happy. Believe me, in six months it’ll all be forgotten, in favour of some other scandal, so my advice is to leave well alone, and let her ride it out as best she can.”
It was thoroughly typical, Henrietta told herself, of masculine logic in matters of this kind. How could any male appreciate the need of a personal triumph of some kind, something to offset the dreadful humiliation of being bandied about between two men, one who had bought her for the price of a dowry, the other who heaped one outrage on another by doing his best to use her as a brood mare? For Henrietta, although she had no difficulty in viewing the dismal business through a woman's eyes, had no idea how to set about restoring pride and self-respect to someone from whom it had been gouged with a butcher's knife, and a blunt knife at that. That, she reasoned, was a task for someone with more knowledge of the world than she possessed, someone trained in finding their way among the shoals and reefs of the human soul and that, she supposed, implied a priest of some kind. Neither did this line of reasoning help, all priests being male.
The problem of rehabilitating her eldest daughter, and launching her on a second trip to the matrimonial market, occupied Henrietta Swann's thoughts right through the winter of 1879 and 1880, and into the succeeding spring and summer, until they were approaching the first anniversary of the annulment. By then she had begun to think about it almost exclusively, to the neglect of plans concerning her other reapers. And as the weeks passed she became more and more edgy with everyone about her, including Stella, for it maddened her that the girl's apathy remained, that she still drew back from any attempt to be reabsorbed into the happy-go-lucky scene of which she had been a part before Lester Moncton-Price had appeared as suitor.
The weather was hot and sultry for mid-September and the impending return of Giles to school had the effect of increasing her preoccupation, for Giles, throughout the holidays, had devoted a great deal of time to Stella, even accompanying her on disconsolate wanderings about the local countryside. If she had communicated anything of importance to him, however, Giles kept it to himself. Indeed, Henrietta got the impression that Stella's gloom was rubbing off on the boy, who became increasingly preoccupied as the summer holiday drew to its close. “Drat that boy,” she told herself one day, as she saw them pacing the forecourt together, “it looks as if I shall soon have a pair of professional mutes about the place! This house used to quake with laughter…” and she thought how cheerfully she would have gone about the task of tying a stone to Lester's neck and heaving him into the river for playing such havoc with her peace of mind.
It was about then that she decided to attack, descending on Giles as he was packing his school trunk, determined, if necessary, to shake information from him as she had once upended him and relieved him of a halfpenny he had swallowed. It was not a task she found congenial. He had studiously avoided her during the last few days, as if half-suspecting a grilling, and it was humiliating to have to beg help in a situation of this kind from a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, but there seemed no alternative. Something told her that what she was seeking, what could help her formulate a practical plan concerning Stella's future, was a clue, or a hint of a clue, as to whether or not Stella herself was pondering what life still had to offer her. This, she reasoned, would at least give her a lever to open a discussion that would not be terminated (as all previous conversations had been) by disconsolate negatives and, if pressed, a storm of tears. There was no time to beat about the bush. Staking everything on a single direct question, she said, “You’ll be off tomorrow, about your own affairs. Before you go I just have to know something and I don’t care how many promises you’ve made that girl since you’ve been hobnobbing with her. Has Stella discussed her recent trouble with you? For if she has, then you’ll oblige me by repeating exactly what was said, for the fact is I’m very concerned about her and she refuses to confide in any one of us. There now, it's out! Have you anything to say to me? Anything at all?” When he betrayed himself by looking away, she had the greatest difficulty in preventing herself from boxing his ears. But then she noticed something that deflected her mind from Stella for a moment. He had suddenly turned pale and his hands, clutching a neatly laundered football jersey, were shaking, so that Henrietta at once regretted her sharp tone and took the jersey, placing it in the trunk and saying, gently, “There, now, Giles, I don’t mean to bully you. I came to you because… well… there was no one else to go to. I want so much to help Stella but apart from yourself she goes out of her way to avoid us all, almost as though we wanted to pry.”
He said, rising from his knees, “Wait,” and crossed to the door, looking out across the landing to the stairhead before closing the door and rejoining her.
“It means breaking my word of honour,” he said, at last, “but the fact is I think she's wrong. Wrong not to tell you, that is, before she finally makes up her mind. Would you promise to say you stumbled across it some other way? Or maybe just guessed it? She trusted me, you see.”
“I promise, of course I promise!” She would have promised him anything, so alarmed was she by his expression and the implication that Stella was on the verge of making another disastrous decision. “There, I’ve promised. Before she makes up her mind about what?”
“About becoming a n
un.”
He said it without emphasis, as though he had been relaying some trivial piece of family memoranda—the time Stella would be home from a party, or where he had left his cricket bat, or how many kittens the cat had had in the cistern loft. She wondered whether he could be aware of the impact his words made upon her and heard herself echoing his words of doom in the voice of a terrified child, utterly rejecting their fearful portent.
“Becoming a nun? A nun, you said?”
“That's what she's thinking about. She's almost decided. She's made up her mind to go to Father Gregory, over at Copley Priory.”
The pieces of the puzzle representing Stella's enigma began to fall into place and each seemed to press cruelly on her chest, so that she seemed to stagger under their weight. He was beside her then, his face full of solicitude, but, behind solicitude, a harassed expression she remembered seeing on his face when he was going through that difficult period at his first school. She knew all about Father Gregory and where Stella had conceived the notion of entering a convent. As a child she had been very devoted to Deborah Avery, Joshua Avery's daughter, who had been absorbed into the family after her father fled abroad and whom they all regarded as sister. Deborah, herself a Roman Catholic, had been brought up in a Folkestone convent, and there had even been talk of her taking the veil when she was passing through a religious phase about the time she was sixteen or seventeen. But Adam, thank God, had talked her out of that, and entered her at that smart ladies’ college over at Cheltenham. Once there, Deborah had been absorbed in a variety of interests, some of which seemed very eccentric to Henrietta. But whatever they were they all fell short of turning one's back on life and burying oneself behind the grey walls of a place Henrietta could only think of as a prison.
Theirs Was The Kingdom Page 25
