Theirs Was The Kingdom

by R. F Delderfield

  There was absolutely nothing she could do about it, however. The couple had clearly made up their minds about one another and were not disposed to wait the three years or more that Rowland would be away on his first assignment. And in support of haste (almost indecent haste, to Henrietta's way of thinking) Helen was saucy enough to quote her own words at her, reminding her that she had often expressed strong disapproval of Giles's long engagement to that Rycroft girl, and events had proved her right. The silly girl had tired of waiting, run off in a tizzy, and had never been heard of since.

  Helen and Rowland (somehow Henrietta could never learn to call such an earnest young man “Rowley”) were married in July. Ten weeks after that they followed Alex and Lydia overseas and were lost to her almost as surely as if they had gone to the moon. How long did it take a letter to come from Papua, granted that a place as outlandish as Papua had a postal service?

  They had been gone less than a fortnight before the kaleidoscope was given another violent shake, this time by someone whom Henrietta had thought incapable of surprising her. Deborah, thirty-one if you please, suddenly announced her intention of quitting the London scene and marrying a penniless young man no one at Tryst had heard of until his moment of presentation.

  Luckily for all parties, Adam was on hand to act as buffer on this occasion. Indeed, it was Adam, shamelessly enjoying the joke, who broke the news to Henrietta. Unlike all the other children (not excluding George) Deborah had always maintained direct access to the titular head of the family. On this occasion the hussy made full use of it.

  2

  It happened towards dusk one blustery October afternoon, when Adam, watching the slate-coloured storm clouds over Wren's dome, decided to make an early start for home and blew down the speaking tube to ask Tybalt to send a lad for a cab. Tybalt said, apologetically, “Er… excuse me, sir—if you’ve time, that is—you have a visitor. Miss Avery, sir…” When Adam said he was to tell Miss Avery to wait, pending his descent, and that she might as well accompany him to the station, Deborah spoke into the tube, saying, with laughter in her voice, “What I’ve to say to you can’t be said in a five-minute cab-ride, Uncle Adam! I’ll come up, if you don’t mind!”

  He had, it seemed, no choice in the matter for the click told him the speaking tube stopper had been replaced and it was this that put him on his guard, implying that Deborah was taking no chances with countinghouse eavesdroppers.

  A moment later she appeared and he saw at once that she was very elated about something. Her eyes sparkled and she was very breathless, as though she had run the length of the spiral staircase.

  He said, with the counterfeit crustiness he reserved for enthusiasts of all kinds, “Well, what is it now? An assignment to look into the sanitary conditions of the gaols? Or my blessing on a trip to the leper colonies in the South Seas?”

  But she kissed him on both cheeks, perched herself on the corner of his desk nearest the window and said, gaily, “Don’t be such a bear. It doesn’t become you, but I’ll put your mind at rest right away. What would you say if I told you I was to be married this day week?”

  She had her revenge if she had looked for one. His jaw sagged and he half-rose, bringing both hands down on the letter trays and upending one of them so that a Bradshaw lying there spun and fell with a thump on his sound leg.

  “Oh, come now, not you! You’re catching it from Alex and Helen…?” but then, more seriously, “It's a proposition, I take it, not a fact.”

  “A fact, I’m afraid,” she said, laughing at his confusion, “but it's been a near certainty for several months now. For Heaven's sake, Uncle, don’t look so astounded! It really is most unflattering. Oh, I’m well aware that both you and Aunt Hetty have resigned yourself to having an unclaimed blessing on your hands, but claimants do show up from time to time, even for leftovers.”

  “Who is he?” he managed to say. “Do I know him?”

  “Not personally. Though you must be acquainted with him by remove.”

  “Now what the devil is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you have read his articles. You must have done, since you’re a regular subscriber to the Gazette. His name is Jeffs, Milton Jeffs, and he asked me to marry him when we were working on the dock strike in the summer. I refused then but we’ve both had a change of heart.”

  “You’ve both had?”

  “He's going to buy and run a local paper in the West, where I can be more than a pencil-sharpener to him, all I’ve been so far. So I said yes. Please. And soon!”

  He had to laugh at her. She was a feminist of the deepest conviction, but there was little about her that characterised all the other feminists he had met and read about—aggressive young hoydens or sour old biddies for the most part, making a lot of noise about what they called their back seats and second-class citizenship. He knew Jeffs too, now that he came to think about it, a cool and very precise journalist, who dealt in facts rather than sermons, itself an unlikely qualification for a post on Stead's journal.

  “How old is he? Around Stead's age?”

  She swung her legs to the floor and crossed to the window. “See for yourself, Uncle.”

  “He's here?”

  “I very much wanted you to meet him. I want your approval, too. It's very important to me.”

  He was glad she had said that. Their relationship had always been close and suddenly he realised that her happiness was something he cared about very much. More than the future of any one of them, if he was completely honest.

  He glanced down into the yard and saw a tall, hatless young man standing beside a half-laden frigate outside the warehouse. He had curly hair and was not, he would have said, as old as Deborah. His loose-jointed stance, together with the expression of profound concentration on his face as he watched the warehousemen, made him look boyish.

  Deborah said, “I won’t be coy with you, Uncle Adam. Milton is five years younger than I. But he's the kindest, the most discerning, and the most intelligent man I’ve ever met. I love him very much.”

  “I suppose I should say ‘That's all that matters,’” he said, “but it's a phrase that always sticks in my gullet. The one thing Continentals arrange much better than us is their marriages. Has he got any money?”

  “Two thousand pounds. And every penny of it has gone into his newspaper. ”

  “Does he know about your father and how we stand in relation to one another?”

  “He knows as much as I know.”

  It was not a rebuke but perhaps it could be interpreted as a query, so that he thought, “And that isn’t so much either! But now isn’t the time to rake over Josh Avery's middens!” He threw the casement open and called, “Mr. Jeffs! Come up and take the chill off the evening!”

  The boyish face looked up and smiled. “At your service, sir!” Adam, turning back into the room said, “I’m going to like him, Debbie. Don’t ask me why. Just a feeling here,” and he patted his stomach.

  The conviction stayed with him even when he learned that Milton Jeffs came from a Quaker family and subscribed to many of their beliefs. There was something about him that reminded Adam of the gay young men with whom he had shared hard tack in the trenches before Sebastopol, and on long, dusty marches across a sub-continent at war. The type, he told himself, was common enough in the field, and even here in the city. Youngsters who made no bones about their worth in the open market, who were prepared to grab joyously at any opportunity for advancement that came their way.

  Jeffs's ethos was a blend of idealism and realism, with a generous dash of humour thrown in, so that it was easy to see what attracted him to a woman like Deborah Avery. He approved the way the man looked at her, with laughter behind eyes that were shrewd as well as kind, and found himself thinking “I’m glad she took her time… In a way she reminds me of Edith in the presence of her Tom. But in another way he reminds me of myself, when I was around his age, although I never harboured his expectations of human decency.”

  The ag
e gap between them did not worry him as it seemed to worry Henrietta. What was five years at their age, particularly as they had both knocked about a bit? It was not, of course, Hetty's type of marriage, with the emphasis on mutual physical appeal, but a match between two young people who had their instincts under control, who were looking for something more than physical accord, of the kind that had proved so important to her all these years. Privately, he suspected, Henrietta would have reservations about it, particularly after that embarrassing, Quaker-type wedding, where a prayer-meeting free-for-all replaced the traditional marriage service. For himself, he was equipped to probe a little deeper, assuming that Milton Jeffs's participation in the ceremony—if it could be called a ceremony—was no more than a warmhearted gesture towards his elderly father and mother, two very gentle creatures, overawed by what they would think of as Henrietta's grand manner and his own wealth and social position. But Milton wasn’t, thank God, and set to work to charm Hetty from the moment he met her. Soon there was no more talk of his marrying the girl for what she was likely to inherit, either from her foster parents or that seedy rascal Josh.

  There was no point in inviting Josh Avery to attend. Apart from all other considerations, he was hardly a man to grace a Quaker wedding. But he heard about it, as Adam knew he would, and wrote care of the bank, enclosing a draft for five thousand pounds made out to Adam, together with a request for a personal report on young Jeffs.

  Adam invested the money, without telling Debbie too much about it. He was determined to keep Avery's secret as long as he could. For ever if possible. He wrote back briefly, giving it as his opinion that Debbie had made an excellent choice and that he thoroughly approved the match, leaving Avery to make what he could of this. He had a feeling that Josh would be relieved after that unpleasant business in Brussels. Transition from Stead's controversial journal to a tin-pot newspaper in the West meant that there could be no repetition of what had happened when the girl was out scavenging for the Lord's Anointed.

  His insight into Jeffs was carried a stage further whilst they were hanging about waiting for Debbie to change and catch the boat train for Paris. He said, suddenly, “Why a small-town newspaper, Milton? You’ve already made your mark in Fleet Street and done very well for a chap your age. If you prefer the provinces, why not one of the big dailies up North?”

  Jeffs replied, “Two reasons, sir. In the first place, we’ve decided we want to shape our own editorial policy, even if it is limited to the design of the parish pump.”

  “And the second reason?”

  “A private statute of limitations. At twenty-one both of us believed ourselves capable of shifting the Alps. Now, after several years with Stead, we’re ready to settle for a few tons of topsoil from the Mendips.”

  “Something in that,” Adam grunted, “but I daresay Debbie will say I’m the wrong man to admit to it.”

  3

  Alex and Lydia, Helen and Rowley, Debbie and Milton Jeffs, George and Gisela. Four couples paired off, three couples moved out of reach all in little over a year, yet the house was not noticeably empty on their account.

  Giles looked like developing into a confirmed bachelor, but Henrietta, for one, did not underestimate the bruises left on him by that madcap Romayne, still mustered among the missing.

  Hugo was living at home when he wasn’t plunging all over the country collecting cups and medals. The two younger ones, Edward and Margaret, were growing fast and filling the house with pony-mad friends. There remained Joanna, rising twenty-two, and Henrietta was not at all sure what to make of Joanna nowadays.

  It was natural, of course, that she should miss Helen more than any of them. They had been closer than any two of the children since their nursery days, but she had seemed lively enough up to the time of the wedding, and through the fag-end of the summer after Helen and Rowley had sailed. Latterly, however, particularly since Christmas, she seemed to droop a little and Henrietta, quick to notice such things, detected what she could only describe as a loss of the dash and sparkle for which Jo had always been famous, particularly among the hearty hunting set she and Helen had favoured. She was still very much in demand, but Henrietta had the impression she was beginning to tire of the nonstop round of hunt balls, soirees and bicycle picnics that had been her steady diet for so long now, and wondered if Helen's marriage had set her thinking about the advantages of settling down. There was no real evidence of this. She saw a good deal of that jolly, rakish brother of Rowley's, Clinton Coles, but showed him no particular preference, continuing to flirt with half a dozen other young bucks, none of whom, in Henrietta's opinion, merited more than a kiss or two under the mistletoe. She might have spoken to Joanna about prospects of marriage, but she did not. She had never enjoyed the confidence of the Inseparables. All the time they were growing up they seemed to turn to one another rather than her. In some ways she felt more at ease with Alex or Giles than with either of them. She was certainly closer to George's Austrian wife, Gisela.

  So she said nothing but kept her eyes and ears open. It was the latter that served her in the end, one windy night towards the end of March, when Adam was away in the North seeking a replacement for O’Dowd, his Irish manager, who had suddenly decided to emigrate to the United States.

  It was by the merest accident that she stumbled on the cause of Joanna's loss of appetite and partial withdrawal. Nine-year-old Margaret, down with a feverish cold, had been sleeping in Phoebe Fraser's room for a week and had run a temperature three nights in a row. Phoebe had seemed tired out at luncheon and readily acceded to Henrietta's suggestion that Margaret was now well enough to go back to her own room at the far end of the corridor, where she could keep an eye on her until Doctor Birtles pronounced her fit to come downstairs.

  Henrietta was late to bed that night. She usually was when Adam was away, preferring to sit reading into the small hours, always half-hoping that he would reappear out of the darkness, as he often had in thirty years of coming and going. It was thus around one o’clock when Henrietta went the rounds and trudged upstairs, remembering to look in on Margaret before she went to bed. The invalid was sleeping quietly so she turned back along the corridor and was passing Joanna's door when she heard what she took to be a cough and paused to listen, thinking irritably, “So now Jo has taken it.” But then, as the sound was repeated, she realised it wasn’t a cough but a muffled sound like a sob, and unrestrained enough to be positively identified as such if you stood there a moment or two.

  She followed her instincts then and went in without knocking. Joanna might be of age but if something was causing one of her daughters that much distress, and in the middle of the night, then she regarded it her inalienable right to know what it was.

  She was concerned but in no way prepared for what she saw when she pushed the door shut and moved across to the bed where Joanna was lying with her head half-buried in the pillow, her lovely, tawny hair spread like a flame. She was half undressed and the bedside lamp, turned low, threw elongated shadows across the patterned wall in a way that caused Henrietta, now deeply disturbed, to remember another night long ago, when she had heard the paddock oak crash down and had gone downstairs to find Denzil Fawcett at the door with news of Stella's flight from the Moncton-Prices.

  There was no special reason why she should remember that wretched incident, but she did and it sharpened her perceptions. She understood at once that this was no mere tantrum on Joanna's part, and that the girl was in real trouble of one kind or another. She said, gently, “What is it, Jo. What's upset you?” but then she had another shock.

  Joanna, who seemed not to have heard her entry above the rush of the wind outside, suddenly jerked herself out of range of her mother's outstretched hand and blurted out, “You’ve no right! This is my room! You always said…”

  “‘All of us should have somewhere no one else has the right to enter without invitation.’ Yes, yes, I know that, and I’ve always held to it and still do.”

  The girl said nothing to
this but continued to crouch there like a sick animal so that Henrietta, running an eye over her, saw that she had not imagined her strange loss of vitality since Christmas-tide. Even in this subdued light it was all too evident, so that she thought herself a perfect fool not to have made a direct approach long ago.

  Of all the girls, Joanna had been the liveliest and, in some ways, the most original. She had Stella's self-sufficiency and Helen's daring, tempered with a cool judgement, of a kind Henrietta associated with Adam. Her rare pink and white prettiness, however, was all her own. As she passed from childhood to adolescence and then to womanhood she had ceased to suggest a Swann, a Rawlinson, or even a D’Auberon, but one of the elegant models in the fashion journals Henrietta studied; the type of girl most people thought of as typically Anglo-Saxon, with strong features that would serve her well until she was past thirty when they might need regular massage.

  The change, now that she looked for it, was quite startling. Her face was much thinner, almost pinched, and her eyes, red with weeping, looked as if they would never sparkle again. Her mouth, so full and generous, was drawn down at the corners, like the mouth of a nag, and suddenly, amalgamating and assessing these manifestations, she cried, “In God's name, what is it? What's the matter with you? Why are you crying like this?” But Joanna's reply was limited to a sullen, “Leave me alone! You make rules, then break them. Go away, do!”