Theirs Was The Kingdom

by R. F Delderfield

  A few weeks ago Giles would have been completely mystified by Mrs. Broadbent, but Romayne had taught him to distinguish between a polite enquiry and a concealed canvass, of the kind she was pursuing now. He said, “George has been abroad ever since he left here, Mrs. Broadbent. Paris, Munich, and now Vienna. He's been learning the haulage business with Continental firms and I believe he's expected home around Christmas. We exchange letters occasionally. Could I give him any message from you?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, suddenly alarmed, “no message… it was just… well, I’ve wondered how he was getting along. He wasn’t very happy here.” She broke off there, rather pointedly, but then, as though forcing herself to continue, “He… he wasn’t sent abroad? Because of me, I mean?”

  “Indeed no. My father thought it was a good idea to learn the languages and broaden his experience. We deal with many Continental wholesalers and he's to take over when my father retires. He and my father get along very well. They always have because… well, because, George is cut out for a business career, more than any of us.” And then, because by now she was twisting her handkerchief into a knot, and seemed close to tears, he said, “Look, ma’am, it's none of my business, but if you would like to send a message or write it wouldn’t go any further than these four walls. George and I have always been friends. Who could help liking George?”

  She seemed to consider this for a long minute. When she looked up she had herself well under control and smiled. She was, he decided, a very handsome woman, with a curious combination of fragility and dignity. At the same time she somehow conveyed an impression that life had not used her kindly.

  “Very well,” she said, with a kind of forced brightness, “just give him my very best wishes, and say I’ll always be interested in what he does when he becomes as important as your father. He was extremely kind and considerate to me when I badly needed a friend and because of that I won’t ever forget him. Don’t tell him that, of course. It wouldn’t do, would it, although my husband and I parted company long ago, and perhaps he would like to know that. Tell him that I went back to my old job at the pub in the Shambles. There!”

  She stood up, very relieved it seemed to bring the interview to a close. “Thank you for listening, Mr. Swann.” She paused, regarding him intently with serious grey eyes. “You aren’t much alike, are you? Temperamentally, maybe, but to look at I mean?”

  “My mother always tells me I’m the odd man out,” he said. “George is more like Alex, the eldest, and Hugo, the one after me. There are nine of us altogether, you know, and we’re a mixed bunch. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to write to him yourself, Mrs. Broadbent? I could enclose it in a letter.”

  “Quite sure,” she said, and sounded as if she meant it.

  He saw her out to a cab waiting on the far side of the weighbridge, handed her into it, and returned her surprised smile at the courtesy. “Nine!” she said, after a nod towards the cabby. “My word, but your mother must be right proud of you! Goodbye, Mr. Swann, and thank you so much.”

  He watched the cab move off and returned thoughtfully to the yard, wondering just what to make of Mrs. Broadbent and her emotional involvement with George. He had always envied his brother's high spirits, and the ease with which he established a personal relationship, but perhaps he had taken too much for granted and now he found himself hoping that George would enlighten him when he passed the message on. The encounter, however, explained something that had puzzled not only him but all the family. That was the sudden termination of George's apprenticeship on home ground and the abruptness of his departure abroad. The key was obviously Mrs. Broadbent and he was glad he had made her acquaintance. In a roundabout way it enlarged George and brought him that much closer as a brother.

  5

  North along the western edge of the Pennines, round the elbow of the Ribble and seaward towards Kendal in dry, August heat. Then, having got his second wind, and adjusted to the demands of the rough hill tracks he chose in preference to roads, on to Windermere, Ambleside, and the pass that ran under the western shoulder of Helvellyn, pausing hereabouts to visit Wordsworth's cottage and wonder what secret lay behind the self-imposed exile of a man who had blown such a lusty trumpet on behalf of the French Revolution and then hidden himself away in this lonely spot, where Sister Dorothy had written of gathering foxglove seeds, tying up scarlet beans, nailing honeysuckles and listening, long after William had retired to bed, to Coleridge reading part of Christabel. Fresh from his tours of the coalfields and the cotton belt, Giles saw it as a kind of defeat, a rather shameful opting out of the role of zealot that had inspired the Sonnet to Liberty. Or maybe it had something to do with the springs of creativity. Having reached the age of thirty, the man's genius had seemingly spent itself so that he turned his back on everything but the cycle of the year under these fells. He realised then that his journey had confirmed something important. Poetry was well enough but he could no longer think of a poet as a man marching with the vanguard. Poets had a job as standard-bearers but the real fighting was for more down-to-earth chaps, the Lovells and the Catesbys maybe, who would probably regard poor old Willie Wordsworth as a windbag.

  He pushed on, leaving Wordsworth to his soul-searching and daffodils, passing along the margin of Thirlmere and over level ground to Keswick, visiting the church where his father and mother had been married twenty-six years before. Later he viewed Derwentwater from Friar's Crag, remembering that the old Colonel had often sat here trying to capture a lakeland sunset but had never once succeeded if his watercolours at Tryst were anything to judge by.

  Twenty-four hours later he crossed the border at Stanwix and turned east for a mile or two to look at Hadrian's Wall where it began its wandering journey to Wallsend, on the shore of the North Sea. Then, welcoming cooler weather, he followed the course of the Esk into Selkirk and the Lothians, covering twenty miles a day until, on the first day of September, he saw the violet smoke haze over Edinburgh and dropped down into the crowded, bustling wynds of the old city to seek out Higson, youngest of the regional managers, who had charge of the largest slice of territory in the network.

  He had heard rumours of Higson's zeal up here. Word had travelled south that he had set the seal on Swann enterprises in the far north by marrying a Scots teacher. He was said to be so bemused by the Scots that Headquarters were expecting any day to hear he was wearing a kilt, calling himself MacHigson, and learning to play the bagpipes.

  The Scottish viceroy showed him more deference than Lovell or Catesby and this, Giles realised, was not because they were more of an age but because Higson was unsure of himself in the presence of a son of the man who, almost literally, had plucked him out of a flue. Adam Swann, indeed, was a subject Higson was prepared to discuss without reserve. It was clear that he idolised the man.

  Giles, knowing little of the circumstances of their association, gave him the opening he needed by saying, “Everywhere I’ve been so far, Mr. Higson, I’ve been living off my father's fat. Weren’t you one of Mr. Keate's original trainees?” Higson, indignant that Giles should remain in ignorance of the manner in which he became associated with Swann-on-Wheels, said, “You never heard the truth about me? Maybe you’d best ask your father. It ain’t my place ter gab, except to out an’ say I owe everything to ’im, an’ no other. Bin more’n a father to me, he ’as, though I don’t reckon he’d own to it. He's not one o’ them Holy Joes, who do a good turn an’ never stop slippin’ it into their prayers to make sure Gawd A’mighty don’t forget it!” At this, Giles laughed.

  Higson asked him if he would be his guest during his stay in the region and when Giles protested that this would impose on a man who was newly married and hoping to become a father soon (Catesby had fed him this titbit) Higson blurted out, “It's not that way at all, Mr. Swann. Mary, my missus that is, told me I was to insist, for the ’otels this side o’ the town ain’t up to much, and the fact is we’d like a chance to pay yer Dad back a bit, if you see what I mean.”

 
So Giles had no alternative but to hump his knapsack across to Higson's ground-floor flat in a little Georgian house in the Toll-cross, a few minutes’ walk from the yard, where Mary Higson, several months pregnant by the look of her, made a prodigious fuss of him, as though he had arrived in Edinburgh by royal train instead of on foot. He was at once given a tin bath-tub, four cans of boiling water, and a plate of buttered scones to stay his hunger until supper.

  He understood then why Higson had been so insistent about lodging him, for Mary, like any prudent Scots wife, had obviously decided that she must put herself out in any way likely to improve her husband's standing with the firm. Her eagerness to do this was touching, Giles thought, for it did not take him long to come to a number of interesting conclusions about this oddly matched couple, the one sufficiently close to the gutter to congratulate himself on having escaped it, the other a self-contained, exceptionally intelligent young woman who, for a reason difficult to perceive at first, worshipped the ex-waif she had married a few months before.

  Being in love himself, Giles found he could look benevolently (and sometimes enviously) at Jake and Mary Higson during the month he spent in the territory. Their delight in one another was so uninhibited that it was embarrassing to share a meal with them, or to be present, kicking one's heels in the hallway, when he and Jake were on the point of setting out on a trip to one of the more remote areas of the beat. It was often difficult to decide which of the two was the more besotted by the other; Jake dodged about her as though her “pledge of affection” was liable to appear on the hearthrug any moment, and Mary, for her part, insisted that Jake's needs took precedence over everything else, including the honours due to a house guest, who, in Jake's view, happened to be the son of the most important man in the world.

  Having grown up in a patriarchal household, Giles was accustomed to male dominance, but never in the whole of her life had Henrietta Swann shown his father this kind of deference, catching his tender solicitude in mid-air as it were, and feeding it back tenfold, showering him with soothing words and soft glances, and despatching him on a routine journey as though he was embarking on a trip to Cathay and facing untold hazards. It could have been cloying, but somehow, perhaps because he saw their reciprocal affection as utterly sincere, it was encouraging, so that he thought, “He's a lucky chap to be sure, tho’ she is inclined to overdo it. I can’t see Romayne fussing over me in that way, and I’m not sure I should welcome it if she did.” But he wondered about it nevertheless. It made nonsense of the precept that, to ensure harmony, like should marry like.

  It was Jake himself who went some way towards explaining the phenomenon once he had had an opportunity to demonstrate his talents as a regional gaffer and could begin patronising his guest as a lad fresh from the schoolroom. He said, as they were driving through a village near Jedburgh, “That's where it ’appened, Mr. Swann! Right over there, on that green!” When Giles asked what had occurred there, supposing the spot to be hallowed in some way, the cockney said, solemnly, “A miracle, that's wot. You carn’t call it less. Leastways, I carn’t,” and went on to describe how he had met Mary McKenzie whilst gazing at the memorial to the famous Denholm scholar, John Leyden, and how this encounter had reoriented his life, providing him, progressively, with an education and a wife.

  “Sometimes,” he mused, as they left the Rubicon behind, “sometimes I get the feelin’ it really ain’t ’appened, that I’ll wake up sudden and find meself the man I was. What I mean is, you ’ear of things like it, and even see ’em sometimes, at one o’ them Saturday night Come-to-Jesus kerbside meetings in the Old Kent Road, when a drunk gets to seein’ blue monkeys an’ swears orf it on the spot, but it was just like that an’ no kiddin’, Mr. Swann. I mean, there I was, feelin’ right sorry for meself, telling meself I’d ’ad all the luck I deserved getting picked up by your Pa, and sent up ’ere on trial. God's truth, I didn’t think I could ’old on to the job for long. Not for want o’ tryin’, mindjew, but lack of education, of not bein’ able to write an’ figger properly. And then, there she was, like a bloomin’ fairy godmother, and nex’ thing you know I was ’avin’ lessons from ’er, and after that standin’ beside her in the kirk—church that is—with her own father tellin’ me we was man and wife. A miracle. That's what it was, and if ever anything like it ’appens to you—with a woman I mean, because you got education, why then, grab it. Grab it with both ’ands. Like that!” And to make his point clear Higson dropped the reins of the trap to the buckboard, clapped a double handful of nothing, and scooped up the reins with a flourish in the manner of a veteran cabby negotiating London Bridge traffic.

  It was a miracle, right enough, Giles decided, as he watched them greet one another on the doorstep of the little Georgian house on their return, and any doubts concerning this would have been erased by Mary Higson's lightning seizure of the opportunity she must have been awaiting.

  Jake had darted across the street to a druggist with a prescription left by Mary's doctor, letting his supper go cold rather than risk the shop closing in the interval, scudding from the house as though charged with saving the lives of mother and child.

  She watched him go, standing by the window and then, drawing the curtains on the gloaming, turned to Giles with an expression very different from the rapturous one she reserved for Jake whenever he had been absent from the house for ten minutes. Aware, no doubt, that her husband would come thundering back into the room within minutes, she came straight to the point, saying, “He’ll ha’ told ye how it came about, Mr. Swann. Jamie and me, that is?” and when Giles acknowledged that this was so, “Then I’ll ask a favour if I may, Mr. Swann. One I couldnae ask in his presence, or not without shaming him, poor lamb. You’ll own he's worth his salt to the firm?”

  “Worth his salt, Mrs. Higson? As my father's gaffer, north of the Border?”

  “Aye, aye,” she said, impatience broadening her accent, “that's what I mean. Ye’ll own it, will ye no’?”

  “Why, of course I’ll own to it,” he said, a little startled by her vehemence, “he's reckoned a great success up here. What makes you think otherwise?”

  “Did I say I thought otherwise? My Jamie can do anything he's a mind to do.”

  “He has doubts about himself?”

  She regarded him so unwinkingly that he had a notion that, even when Jamie was absent, she was subconsciously addressing him, not being equipped to acknowledge the existence of other men.

  “Aye,” she said, “cruel doubts sometimes.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Could a woman love a man as I love yon Jamie without being sure of a thing like that?”

  “Well, then, he's young for a job of this size. Isn’t it understandable that he should sometimes have second thoughts…?”

  “No!”

  She almost shouted the word at him. “A gentleman like you, maybe. But not Jamie, not someone who was used so cruel as a bairn!”

  He was not in the least sure that he followed her. From his own viewpoint, and within his limited experience, he saw Higson as a rather forceful man, but clearly something was amiss, and she was making some kind of appeal for help. Jake would be back any moment and there was no time to waste on reassuring her. He said, “If you think I can help, Mrs. Higson, tell me how. I’d like to, and I’m sure my father would. In spite of what you say, however, they think a deal of him in London. He's reckoned a trier and that's what counts, isn’t it?”

  “No,” she said, again, “it's no’ what counts. See here, he could hardly read nor write when I took him in hand, and I’ve done my best with him. But my best isn’t good enough. With that load of work he can’t spare me more than an odd hour or so, and only then when he's fair fagged out, and needs his sleep. I’ve a notion how it could be done, though, how I could work wonders with him. But it would have to have your father's blessing and Jamie mustn’t know I brought it about, for that would hit him hard. His pride, do ye ken?”

  “You’re asking me to try and
get him relieved of the job for a time?”

  “Aye, for six months. Mr. Fraser, who taught him the ropes up here, is still active. At a word from your father he’d stand in for us, and I could go back to work on Jamie. It's the right thing to do, Mr. Swann, believe me! Up here, we set great store by education and if there's one thing a Scotswoman can’t abide it's a botched job o’ work. I had Jamie at his lessons for two hours a night, three nights a week. It's not enough. He needs to stick at it six days a week, from morn till night, with nothing else on his mind—with no interruptions!”

  They heard his steps clattering up the short flight of steps to the front door and she looked across at him with desperate urgency, as though the completion of Jake Higson's education was the most important issue in the world.

  “I’ll see Fraser myself and arrange it if it can be arranged,” he said, hastily. “Then I’ll get my father to confirm from Headquarters…”

  “You’ll not regret it, none of you! I’ll swear to that!” and as though changing a mask, she wiped the expression of urgent concentration from her face and replaced it with the eager smile that he had come to recognise as Jamie's standard welcome over the threshold.

  It made a kind of pattern, a theme for all his wanderings, all the signposts and stages he had passed in the years since he was first aware of people and their complex concerns. It was a thread that strung his experiences together, offering him a guideline that led on into the future. And whenever he stopped to wonder what awaited him out there he would go back, like a man restringing beads, to the very first of them, the glimpse of that broken old couple at Twyforde Green, dispossessed of their tied cottage and going their separate ways to paupers’ graves.