Theirs Was The Kingdom

by R. F Delderfield

  Adam said nothing for a moment. He had a feeling that it had cost George dear to come this far in search of a peace formula. Through the window of the lean-to he saw two of George's team working at a portable forge, one man beating, the other holding a glowing bar to the anvil. Sam Rawlinson waddled slowly across his view, and there was something to be learned from the old chap's uncertain gait. He thought, “There's someone who has never learned when to call ‘Whoa’! He’ll die down here in the muck, and maybe that's how he wants it, but not me, by God!” He said, suddenly, “Suppose there aren’t any terms?” and the boy's head came up sharply. “Suppose I had other plans, entirely unconnected with Swann-on-Wheels. Do you feel qualified to take over at Headquarters?”

  “You mean… retire? Hand it over? All of it?”

  “All of it. To back out, and to the devil with grace and dignity.”

  “But that… that isn’t you, Governor!”

  “How can you say it isn’t me? I’m almost sixty-three, and I know when I’ve had a bellyful. I’m not your grandfather, without a thought in his head save money and how to make it. He was born and raised up here. Foul air, grime, and clatter are meat and drink to him. But I’m a countryman at heart and I’ve a notion I’d like ten or twelve years left to me at Tryst, along with your mother and the younger children. Well?”

  “You’re asking me to take over? In a single jump?”

  “It's the only way to do it. You’re too much like me, George. Neither of us could work with the other without a weekly display of fireworks. Occasional fireworks are well enough in any concern, but not when two men are competing for the honour of lighting all the fuses. Don’t tell me you couldn’t do it, either. I know damned well you could and so do most of the regional managers, particularly the thrusters. How long would it take you to pack and come south?”

  “A few days. No more, but…”

  “Then do it. As to the scratch team you’ve got together for putting that engine on the road, bring them along if you care to. Set up a workshop in London, somewhere close enough to the yard to keep an eye on them. How you divide your time is your business. Yours, and the men from the regions who are your partners.” He took out his watch. “That train of mine. I mustn’t miss it. I promised your mother I’d be home tonight.”

  They shook hands and Adam noted, with sardonic amusement, that Old George seemed lost for words. The boy's bewilderment was something of a sop and as George followed him across the yard to where the cab waited he thought, with a tinge of malice, “That's his first lesson in overall responsibility anyway! It's one thing to dream of it, but quite another when it falls on you like a ton of bricks!” But then, as the cabby cracked his whip, and Adam caught a final glance of George standing by the kerb, he had a more generous thought. “He’ll rise to it, nonetheless. If my lease is a long one I might even live to see every damned vehicle we own moving at twenty-two miles an hour!”

  1

  HE WOULD HAVE IMAGINED THAT IT WOULD TAKE HIM A LONG TIME TO PACK up and go when it came to the point. Thirty-two years of his life had been based on this octagonal remnant of a mediaeval nunnery, and there was more up here than personal files and mementoes, scattered like a trail over three toilsome decades. And yet, when the final week ran out, and George wrote saying that he would begin his tenancy of the tower on the first Monday in May, the clutter of his life was stowed away in a couple of crates in two hours, leaving him something in excess of seventy minutes before he made his last, almost ritualistic descent of the spiral stair to the yard, stumped the seven minutes’ walk to London Bridge, and caught the five-forty for home.

  He soon disposed of Keate and Tybalt, who had been fussing about him like a couple of overzealous soldier-servants equipping a testy brigadier for a campaign. They were jointly charged with the job of dismantling Frankenstein, the outmoded ready reckoner, and carting him piecemeal down to the frigate chartered for his private exodus. He could not have said what he wanted with such an unlovely antique, but it seemed a shabby trick to abandon him to the mercy of George's caprice. Frankenstein, the apparatus that every visitor mistook for a postcard stand made from a tailor's dummy, belonged to the very earliest days of the adventure, conceived in a single night and assembled by the master carpenter in a five-hour stint. Something peculiarly Swann's, for surely nobody else would have invented such a means of equating routes and distances with timetables and the idiosyncrasies of a thousand shire-based customers.

  They got him down somehow, and from the narrow window overlooking the river Adam saw him stowed aboard, alongside the cardboard folders containing the original maps, a stack of box files, the swivel chair that had adapted itself to the awkward seat of a man with an artificial leg, and some framed newspaper cuttings recording the feats of Hamlet Ratcliffe, lion-tamer; Bryn Lovell, mine-disaster hero; and Tim Blubb, slayer of Fenians. There were two other relics of Blubb's in that waggon. One was the blunderbuss with the shattered stock that the ex-coachman had used to break the skull of a highwayman. The other was a printed replica of Dickens's letter to The Times, acknowledging the old drunkard's heroism the day of the rail smash at Staplehurst, in June 1865. One or two other curiosities were carried down and stowed away. A faded photograph of Dockett's first furniture pantechnicon, with its saucy slogan, “From Drawer to Drawer,” painted under the trademark; a piece of coal in a labelled jar, evidence of Fraser's first foray over the Border at the time of the wreck of an Eyemouth collier; and the copy of Longfellow's poems, given him by Edith Wickstead at the end of the momentous conference when he first shed the overall load, together with other private curiosities he had never cared to discard. One relic of the past he would entrust to no one but had wrapped to carry under his arm. It was the silver model of a Swann-on-Wheels frigate, bearing the names of all his regional managers, that had been presented to him on his return here in July 1866, after a year in hospital. It was something that epitomised his intense personal pride in having learned to walk again at the age of thirty-nine.

  Keate, essentially a practical man and lacking even a thin streak of sentimentality, said, “What will you do with all these odds and ends, Mr. Swann? Will Mrs. Swann care to have them lying about in that fine place of yours?”

  No, he said, Mrs. Swann would not, but Mrs. Swann was unlikely to see them. They would be consigned to one of the attics as soon as the frigate arrived at Tryst.

  “Then why not let me dispose of most of them now, sir? I could get the scavenger squad to…” but he stopped, sensing that he was treading on corns. He had liked and respected this spare, dark-browed man ever since they had taken their first Dockside stroll together, recruiting wharf rats as vanboys in 1858, but he could not honestly say that he had ever come close to understanding him. Keate went away and left Adam to his thoughts, Keate grumbling to his friend Tybalt that things wouldn’t seem the same with the Gaffer gone, and young Mr. George sitting up in that tower.

  Adam had gone the rounds by then and said his private farewells. If he ever did return here, which he doubted, it would be as a visitor, with a careful guard on his tongue. By then, no doubt, most of the old hands would be dead or retired, with strangers in their places. He doubted if George would renew the lease on the ratty old place when it ran out in a year or so. Doubtless he would shift his Headquarters to some more salubrious spot, away from this fume, grime, and racket, to somewhere in an outer suburb maybe, where the inflow of waggons was not at the mercy of traffic jams that made nonsense of delivery schedules. As for Adam, he could never do anything so positive. The view of the river had imprinted itself on his inner consciousness by now, so that he saw the ebb and flow of the tideway as a graph of his own progress and the nation's. As for the reek of the soap factory and the adjacent tannery, he had long ceased to bother about it. It was the smell of challenge, and what was unsavoury about that?

  Less than an hour to go now, and he felt the weight of his decision for the first time as he glanced around the uncluttered room. For the first time in h
is long reign here it looked like a belfry again. He fancied he could almost hear the soft patter of the nuns’ feet, the swift rustle of their habits, the monotonous, one-note clang of the bell that had hung from the blackened crossbeam. The place was full of ghosts and he was already one of them.

  He got up, his eye searching for something to exorcise his touch of melancholy and found it, as always, in the booming traffic of the river beyond the sea of slate and tile outside the yard boundaries. It never stopped. It never had stopped in all his years here. Not even on Christmas Eve or New Year's Day. Not even when Ben Tillett had all the dockers out on strike. Strings of barges, tugs, and wherries went shooting through the arches and down beyond the forest of masts that marked the Commercial Dock. Over on the far bank, a square whitish tower, brooding over a hotchpotch of greyish round ones, stood eternal guard over the busiest reach of the river. Eight hundred years it had stood there, planted by a taciturn Norman with a flair for administration. Eight hundred years against his own thirty-two. It would still be there when George drew stumps forty years from now. So would the river traffic, no doubt, but by then sail would have disappeared altogether. Every vessel in the Pool would be sporting funnels and screws, as half of them were today. In a way it was a comforting thought. It meant that he was not alone in growing old and hidebound. The whole way of life was changing at a prodigious pace, much faster than it had changed in his youth, when Stephenson and Telford and Brunel delved and blasted their way into every corner of the land, and set blood pressures soaring in every English fox covert.

  Twenty minutes to go. Down river a ship's hooter honked, and closer at hand, in the cavernous street leading to the bridge, a coster's barrow was overset by a passing dray. He was too far off to hear the lively altercation that followed, but he could imagine it as coster and drayman squared up to one another and were parted by an officious policeman.

  The tiny incident touched off a train of memories that came running like beggars to pocket their Maundy Money, some of them old and bedraggled, others young and sturdy. Tim Blubb, sitting on the box of the first three-horse man-o’-war, about to drive into the Kentish Triangle in 1859. Edith Wickstead (not Wickstead then) in 1863, here on some trivial pretext to tell him she was emigrating to Australia. Edith here again on that fabulous St. Valentine's Day three months later, demanding a managership as the price of her not going to Australia. Little Tybalt feeding Frankenstein with county statistics, pending their first real breakout in the spring of 1860. Sam Rawlinson home from Egypt, telling him to invest in that bloody great ditch that was now the Suez Canal. Himself flexing the muscles of two sound legs one frosty December night in 1861, before walking as far as the Mall to hear of the Prince Consort's death from typhoid.

  And one deeply personal memory, of a summer afternoon in ’63, when Henrietta, fresh as a rose, had come sidling in here with that drooling young gunner on her conscience, to be whisked off to the George, fed, wined, and propositioned as regards the new articles of their alliance—he to his work, and she to hers at Tryst, providing she had the capacity to command. He had an odd thought then. When, as it were, the treaty was signed, he had made love to her twice within a few hours, and out of that rollicking encounter came George, to initiate this renunciation on his part. He had always wanted continuity and here it was, but he wondered, briefly, how the men of the regions would take it. Doubtless Old George would set himself to retire the originals, replacing them with youngsters of his own generation. Well, that was the way of the world, he supposed, and he no longer quarrelled with it. He was sure about one thing. He was not going home to vegetate. He had his own ideas about the way he would take up another entirely different challenge.

  He looked at his watch again, took his hat, stick, gloves, and the parcelled presentation frigate, and lumbered down the narrow staircase to the yard. Nothing much had changed here, but changes were surely on the way. In place of those half-laden pinnaces, frigates, and men-o’-war, with their sleek, patient teams, vehicles approximating to George's vapour-trailing engine would trundle in to receive and discharge freight. But that, surely, would not be for a long time yet. For the time being the overriding smell of dung and sweating horseflesh would persist hereabouts, and from over there near the warehouse would come the musical clang-clang of the smith's hammer on the anvil. He moved out into the April sunshine and over the weighbridge to Tooley Street. He carried his head high, and why not? In a way he was beginning all over again.

  2

  He knew, more or less, how he would go about it. The project had been in his mind for some years now, growing from a seed planted there during a chance conversation with Henrietta about how he would occupy himself if and when he turned his back on that Thameside slum.

  The project divided naturally into two separate endeavours, or three if you included landscaping on the scale he had decided upon. There was the house and its fabric and furnishings. There were the immediate surroundings, including the drive, laurel plantation, and walled garden. And there was the general setting, made up of the paddocks, the wooded hill to the north, the coppices to the south, and that stretch of the river that touched his property to the east, a reach he meant to use as a source for his ornamental lake.

  As a man who, in his time, had handled virtually every product that every type of merchant bought and sold in the Western world, he knew precisely where to go for his labour and materials. He would need hundreds of tons of stone, hundreds of seedlings and young trees that would survive transplantation, a thousand or more shrubs, an army of diggers, and an ironmaster who knew his business when it came to forging the decorative work that he had in mind.

  He knew how to draw up his plans too, the way he had set about conjuring an enormous volume of traffic out of a few maps, some county almanacks and gazetteers, and a handful of stolen rubies as capital. That first summer, when he was largely prospecting, he used identical methods to organise his ideas, jotting them down in a fat red notebook filled with figures, estimates, and sketch-maps. Particularly sketch-maps.

  He had always been an excessively neat cartographer and soon the rearward pages of his notebook were filled with detailed sketches of how he saw the new Tryst and its environs in his mind's eye. All the big, initial changes were here. The diversion of a short arm of the river. The rectangular lake, with its island folly southeast of the drive. Two levels of greensward—Cumberland turf if it wasn’t too costly—and a long, stone balustrade, broken by niches for urns and statues he had acquired from a bankrupt importer of Italian masonry.

  Lower down, where the larch coppice now stood level with the road to Twyforde Green, the pinetum would be planted, imported trees supplementing the many conifers down there, some fifty or so, planted at sixty feet apart. That clump, following through from the lake, lawns, and an islet, would give a focus for the eye to anyone looking south and southeast from the terrace, but the two supplementary gardens—one on the Italian style, the other laid out as an English Hermitage-style enclosure—would fill the existing areas of meadow and woodland right and left of the pinetum. He would have to take professional advice on the Italian garden, but he knew what he would make of the Hermitage. Down there, west of the coppices, was a fine stand of oak and beech, self-seeded from trees the first Conyer had planted high up the slope. Here he would build the summer house, and thinking this he had an idea that made him smile. It linked up with Keate's question as to what Henrietta would make of the clutter he had taken out of the tower. He knew now that it would not, as he had told himself, be consigned to one of the attics, but would form the basis of a transport museum, a Swann-on-Wheels museum, housed in a commodious bower built under the oaks and beech and occasional elm growing there. Here would be the final resting place of Frankenstein and all his other mementoes, so that anyone who wanted to trace the history of the enterprise, when he was safely tucked away in Twyforde Green churchyard down the road, could come and potter among the flotsam of his youth. The notion made an immediate appeal to his vanity
and he noted it down, on the page following that containing the detailed sketch of the Hermitage.

  The lake would be a straightforward job. All that was necessary was to dig a canal behind a group of willows, linking the backwater to a natural depression in the left-hand paddock, a place that had always cried out for a sheet of water. Lilies and water-iris would do well down there, and fish too, no doubt, with a fountain on the islet but no provision for a boathouse. What he was seeking, what he meant to have from here on, was tranquillity, of a kind that had escaped him all his life. Beauty and colour certainly, but the singular beauty he had always associated with English landscapes. Order imposed on natural contours that were predominantly green all the year round.

  He turned then to the herbaceous borders nearer the house. He had never liked laurels or, indeed, the Teutonic formality McCready, the gardener, had brought to the circular and half-moon beds fronting the house. To his mind they were beginning to look like part of a city park and he had other, more ambitious plans, that included a small forest of rhododendron, any number of lilacs, forsythia, clematis, camelia, acacia, magnolia, and flowering cherry. In the spring, say from late March until early June, there would be a riot of colour out here, supplementing the carpet of yellow provided by the primroses, daffodils, and narcissi that already ranked themselves by the thousand under the copper beeches of the drive. He half-closed his eyes and had a swift, satisfying vision of the place ten years from now. “By God,” he said aloud, “I’ll make ’em sit up around here, just the way I did thirty-odd years ago! I’m not done yet by many a long sea-mile, and they’ll all have to acknowledge it… George along with the rest of them, although I doubt if George knows the difference between a Japanese maple and an Irish yew!” For a pleasurable moment he conjured with a string of names in the pages of his notebook devoted to imported trees—giant silver fir, Korean fir, and Algerian fir; bitter nut, king nut, and cow's-tail pine; Leland cypress, Sawara cypress, Monterey cypress and Arizona cypress, red spruce, Honda spruce, Norway spruce, and weeping spruce; cider gum, spotted blue gum, and white Sallee.