Theirs Was The Kingdom

by R. F Delderfield

  The touch did more than anything else to clarify his complex feelings concerning her essential place in his life, if it was to be the life he had contemplated in happier days and not the drab, day-to- day existence that had been his ever since he had turned on his heel in Eaton Place. He had to make a decision for both of them then, whether to claim her here and now, in this stuffy, cluttered room, or exercise an entirely different kind of restraint from that of the past, when she had done her utmost to make him run contrary to his instincts concerning their association. He wanted her most desperately, but not solely in the physical sense. He wanted to exorcise any lingering doubt in her mind that they had somehow attained new levels in their awareness of one another as man, woman, and, above all, comrades. Her insistence that possession of her could achieve this did not seem extravagant and fanciful now, but logical and necessary, so that he was on the point of telling her this between kisses when his eye met the steady gaze of the late Mr. Rawson, staring down at them from his fumed oak frame over the mantel. Then, most improbably, humour took a hand, the kind of humour that had never been absent from their relationship and had played its part in repairing so many ruptures up to the moment of their parting. He said, kissing her lightly, “Not here. Not in front of Rawson,” and magically she laughed, the familiar dancing light returning to her eyes as she looked from him to Rawson and back again. She withdrew from him then, sitting and unlacing her dusty boots. Through a threadbare patch in the blind he watched a last gleam of evening sunshine light on a copper curl behind her ear. He left her to get into bed, gathering the crockery and cutlery from the table and taking it out into the narrow passage.

  Nine

  1

  BETWEEN THE POSTS, WHEN ONE SHEAF OF CORRESPONDENCE HAD BEEN reviewed, annotated, mulled over, and either consigned to the wastepaper basket or tossed into Tybalt's tray, Adam would sometimes spare an hour or so to make an objective survey of that other family of his, the British tribe, in whose concerns he was still involved although he had no means of regulating them other than by writing letters to The Times and his Member of Parliament.

  He would see British concerns as extra-European. That is to say, in no way related to the junketings of other tribes across the Channel and the Atlantic, but this did not mean he ignored what was occurring elsewhere. On the contrary, he regarded foreign news columns, in the stack of newspapers he read each day, as his light relief, a splodge of jam on the rice pudding of relevant, national affairs.

  The post had been exceptionally light that morning, so that by ten thirty he was free to turn to his newspapers. He read first of the continuing dock strike over what they were calling “The Dockers’ Tanner,” telling himself he knew precisely how it would end. The dockers would get their tanner, and the furore would evaporate, with the fire-eating Ben Tillett, organiser of the dockers’ union, getting himself canonised. Just like old Tom Paine. Just like Sam Bamford of Peterloo fame, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and all the other saints in John Catesby's calendar. All of which was only one more shred of evidence that he, Adam Swann, had been more prescient than others when he started out in business, writing his labour force into the order book as an ally, not a potential liability to be set against profits.

  He read a thousand words or so of the interminable Parnell Commission wrangle, making a private bet with himself that the Irish leader would come out of it unscathed and be judicially vindicated of complicity in the Phoenix Park murders. Lately he had come to regard Ireland as a fractious near-relative all but excluded from the inner councils of the tribe and occupying, say, the position of an alien who had acquired the protection of the flag but did not regard it as a privilege.

  His Irish concerns were prospering under that saucy young spark, Jack-o’-Lantern, who had run away with his daughter, following a seduction that Henrietta obstinately refused to acknowledge. But Adam never viewed his Irish bridgehead with the permanence he attached to regions like the Polygon and the Western Wedge. Sooner or later the Irish would hive off and seek their own way to perdition, and the sooner the better so far as he was concerned. Their affairs had a habit of clouding all manner of more important issues at Westminster and claiming too much space in the national journals.

  After reading that the Act of Parliament to prevent cruelty to children was at last on the Statute Book, he turned with relief to European affairs, much as a man stirs his coffee after enjoying three courses of solid fare. There was a column and a half dealing with the frightful clamour aroused in the Habsburg capital over the death, by shooting, of the Austrian Crown Prince Rudolf and his eighteen-year-old mistress, Marie Vetsera, in January. The handling of this affair, he thought, was typical of methods employed by foreigners when something went awry in high places. Unable to face the music, they at once worked themselves into a lather in egregious attempts to lie their way out of the social and diplomatic consequences. He could spare sympathy for that bewhiskered old pedant, Franz Josef. At least the old chap was showing remarkable staying power, concerning the troubles that rained down upon him year by year, but he had no patience at all with the official versions that were being leaked by palace flunkeys. The fate that had overtaken Rudolf was predictable, a young man enmeshed in a tangle of protocol and given nothing constructive to do whilst waiting around for his father to die. Rudolf, clearly, had killed the girl and then himself, and that was that. What on earth was gained by all this drivel about accidents and terrorists and assassination by Hungarian nationalists? Nobody was likely to miss a Habsburg. There were more than enough of them to go round.

  He studied the faces of the leading players in the tragedy, finding in Rudolf 's features the pop-eyed blankness he found in portraits of all highly placed Continentals. Inbreeding was the trouble, of course, and it was even beginning to show over here. But there it was, these royal popinjays were scared stiff of new blood, preferring to entail their physical and psychological weakness as if they were priceless heirlooms. He found the portrait of the girl more interesting. A sensual little partridge with her rounded face, dark fringe, soulful eyes, and well-developed bust. He could understand a rake like Rudolf finding pleasure in her and made a mental note to show the newspaper to Henrietta as soon as she returned home. It was the kind of story that would interest her more than Ben Tillett's tanner.

  He read an item dealing with Italy's protectorate over Ethiopia, reflecting that the Italians were welcome to that slice of the African continent. The British had been there twenty years ago and had come away again, and the British never did that if there was anything worth having. Portugal was losing its grip on Brazil, he noticed, and this too was to be expected. You couldn’t hold on to an empire of that size without sea power, of a kind that Portugal had once had but had no longer. He turned to news from Paris, noting that the French were going to extraordinary lengths to ensure that no one overlooked the centenary of the fall of the Bastille come July. Well, much good had come of that fracas in the long run. After a hundred years of street riots and short-lived autocracies and republics, they were still, to his way of thinking, as politically immature as England about the time of Magna Carta. Gouty old Louis and his tribe of pensioners were said to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing when they returned from exile during his father's youth, and this applied to the French as a tribe. They still made a practice of solving their problems with brickbats, and there was precious little evidence of the famous Gallic logic one heard so much about. Gustave Eiffel's tower interested him, however, and he told himself he would take a look at it if he ever went to Paris again, which was very unlikely. He was getting more and more insular these days, less and less inclined to try anything new. Tybalt, confound the man, was always urging him to become a subscriber to the new London telephone exchange, but he resisted the old clerk's importunities. It was the kind of innovation Old George would have installed within days of settling in here. But George, it seemed, was lost to him, so the new telephone could wait upon whoever succeeded him as managing director.


  He was still thinking ruefully of George when the speaking tube whistled and he lifted the mouthpiece, learning that he had a lady visitor who was on her way upstairs, without so much as a by-your-leave. It must be Edith Wickstead, he thought, or maybe the newly married Debbie. They were the only two women Tybalt would pass on without his permission.

  When the door opened, however, and he rose stiffly to his feet, angling his tin leg round the corner of the desk, he saw that it was neither Edith nor Debbie, but his Austrian daughter-in-law, Gisela. This, he thought, was odd, seeing that he had been thinking of George at that precise moment. He welcomed her, however, for he had always liked Gisela, ever since that impulsive son of his had brought her back from the Danube, along with all those crates containing his infernal machine. Gisela, to his mind, was all that a wife should be. She was pretty, shapely, mild-mannered, and dutiful, so that sometimes he thought George didn’t deserve her, and should have married someone like Alex's Lydia, who would have tossed that machine of his in the dustbin.

  She said, with a shy smile, “Do I disturb you, father? Is it convenient?” He said, motioning her to a chair, that it was not only convenient, but that he was delighted to see her looking so well and pretty.

  She blushed at the compliment but he saw that it pleased her, telling himself that she did not get all that many. George would reserve all his gallantry for the gizzards of that damned machine. He said, eagerly, “Are you on your way to Tryst? Hetty will be happy to see you, my dear,” but she said she was not and had made arrangements to catch the afternoon train back to Manchester, having promised the children she would be home in time for supper.

  “Ah, then,” he said, with a touch of masculine patronage, “it will be shopping, no doubt, although I had the impression you made your own clothes, except for special occasions. Don’t tell me George leads a social life up there, for I wouldn’t believe you. Would you care for some coffee? I brew it myself and can recommend it.”

  She said gravely that she would enjoy a cup of his coffee, and he set about making it on his stove, noting as he did so that she seemed more than a little nervous. She had always been diffident and had needed, Hetty would say, “bringing on a little,” but there was more than natural shyness in her manner today. She sat primly on the edge of his visitor's chair, her neat little hands fidgeting with her gloves, her face frozen in a smile that had to be kept there by willpower.

  She said, carefully, “I came to confer with you, father. George does not know I am here. I think he would be much displeased if he found out. I would be happy if you would promise not to inform him.”

  He liked her quaint, didactic English, and the pretty, lisping accent she had never succeeded in discarding. Handing her the coffee, he decided he liked everything about her and that she qualified as his favourite daughter-in-law. Lydia, Alex's doughty wife, was all right in her way, but she reminded him of the tubby daughters of the regiment he had been compelled to squire in India during his mercenary days. Romayne Rycroft, that madcap Giles had married in such a hurry last autumn, was very fetching, and said to be tamed, but a girl who had run out on her wedding, and had to be rescued from a draper's sweatshop in Blackpool, was surely capable of anything. He did not wholly credit Giles's assurances that she had done this crazy thing with a specific purpose in mind— that of discovering how the poor lived, if you please!

  When he had resettled himself at the desk he said, trying to prompt her a little, “Is it about George, my dear? You want my advice on something?” At that she looked flustered but replied, after a pause, “Yes, indeed. Or perhaps not advice. What is the word I seek? ‘Alliance’?”

  “Cooperation,” he suggested and she nodded eagerly.

  “That machine of his, the one my Uncle Max gave him. After two years’ toil it is ready. He is about to try it on the road. At a place near Altrincham, in Cheshire.”

  She spoke, he thought, remarkably good English, even though Altrincham emerged as “Alshingham,” and Cheshire as “Seshire.” It must be difficult, he reflected, for the girl to get her pretty little tongue round these English place-names. An English girl would have made heavier going of, say, “Szeged” or “Ischl.”

  She went on, with a rush, “I would much like for you to be there, father. No, no—” as he opened his mouth to protest, “not for him to see, but as a spy. Is that right? ‘Spy’?”

  “Hardly,” he said, chuckling, and now thoroughly intrigued. “I think you mean as an observer. An uninvited guest, who keeps out of the way. Behind a hedge, for instance.”

  She clapped her hands like a child. “Ach, yes! That is what I came here to say! That is very much how I would like it!”

  “You came all the way to London without George's permission to ask me that?”

  She nodded, her eyes sparkling with excitement or pleasure. She really was an extraordinary girl, and suddenly he felt very drawn to her, and very sorry for her too, in a way. It must have demanded a great deal of resolution to bring her to the point of coming here as a secret advocate of the boy. He said, thoughtfully, “How can you be sure he wouldn’t regard this as a piece of unwarranted interference on my part and yours? He's a hot-headed chap, as obstinate as the pigs in Ireland, as we say here. He might be very angry with you for suggesting it.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, giving him the impression that this prospect did not bother her overmuch, “but I was determined to ask you, nevertheless. This… this quarrel between you. It is very stupid. It makes me unhappy. You too, I think.”

  “Ah,” he said, grumpily, “that's neither here nor there. The point is, how does George regard it?”

  She was more at ease now and had stopped fidgeting. “He is unhappy, too. He loves you very much. He has much respect for you, I think. It is just that he is… how did you say? Like an Irish pig?”

  “Not exactly,” he said, chuckling, “but you’ve got his measure and that isn’t surprising. You should have by now.” He went off at a tangent. “You get along well, don’t you? As man and wife, I mean.”

  She drew herself erect and it struck him he had touched her pride. “George is a genius,” she said. “Uncle Max was a genius too, and he understood George from the beginning.”

  “But I didn’t?”

  “It is more difficult for a father. You see him still as a little boy, I think.”

  He pondered this for a moment. Did he? Not really, for somehow George had never qualified as a little boy, or not in the manner of Alex, Hugo, and Edward. In a way, in a very different way, he was closer to Giles, someone who had skipped the intervening stages between infancy and a sort of precocious maturity. But in George's case, development seemed to have stopped at around twenty, so that he remained an intelligent youth, with a youth's lack of balance. He said, “Where is this test to be? Precisely, I mean. Could you show me on that map?” and he pointed to the wall-map of the Polygon.

  She got up and crossed the room, standing back with her little blonde head on one side as she studied the Lancastrian and Cheshire complex, drawn up by him so long ago and overwritten, here and there, with all manner of markings in red and blue pencil. She pointed to a spot two or three miles west of Altrincham, where the river Bollin wound its way across the plain. There were one or two villages marked alongside the railway and one of these, where her finger rested, was called Dunham.

  “Here,” she said, authoritatively, “between here and a farm a mile along the road. I have listened to his discussions with Grandfather Sam and the engine that has already been taken there. It is against the law, of course, but George, and Grandfather too, make their own laws. The spot was chosen because it was secluded and level. It is to be very early in the morning, as soon as it is light. The crates went there by rail and are being assembled in one of the barns. They have measured a mile and will make two journeys, one to the station and one back to the farm. It is planned for Friday, three days from now, and I wish very much for you to witness it. Then I will have done my part and will be satisfied. Will
you do this small thing for me?”

  It was impossible to refuse her, even if he had been inclined to, and he was not. The stratagem appealed to his sense of fun and adventure. The very idea of lying in ambush, watching Old George try out his stinking engine on a deserted stretch of road at crack of dawn, was like a return to his venturesome youth when he had made a habit of this kind of frolic. He said, laughing, “Why, of course I will, with all my heart. And if I don’t like what I see I’ll go away again, without showing myself. What time does your train leave Euston? Do you intend to catch the three-twenty express?” and when she nodded, too pleased with herself to speak, “Then I’ll give you lunch at the George. And talking of the George, I’ll let you into a family secret. That headstrong husband of yours was conceived there, one hot summer night in 1863, and that's how he came by his name. That's something you didn’t know, I’ll wager.”

  “No,” she said, “I never heard it. But neither, I think, did George.” Then, shyly, “Some news for you. You are to be a grandfather again in September, and I will promise you something. I will ask George to call the boy Adam. Because of this kindness you do me.”

  “It might not be a boy. What then? Shall we say Eve?”

  “It will be a boy,” she said, with some of Henrietta's assurance on the same subject. “All my children will be boys.”

  2

  It was, he thought, one of the coldest mornings he was ever abroad in, the knife-edge wind boring through his topcoat and setting him squirming with discomfort in his cramped, uncomfortable ambush, a holly bush that formed part of the hedge dividing the local rectory appropriately called The Hollies, and a straight stretch of road that ran between a large farm and Dunham Halt on the Liverpool branch line.