"You married her on that account?"
"I didn't even know she was pregnant."
"Then what's all this got to do with you staking everything you worked for on a frolic with a high-class whore, like that Lockerbie woman?"
"As I say, it goes all the way back to Max and his engine. Until I found myself hooked to that, life was all cherry pie. Afterwards? Well, it was never quite the same again. I put everything I had and hoped for into that brute Maximus and I still think I was on the right track. About transport, I mean, about petrol-driven vehicles being much more than fussy little toys, replacing the carriage and pair. Then, when I thought I'd made a breakthrough, you handed the business to me on a plate and the fact is I wasn't ready for it. I had no idea how much it involved, and how many demands it made on a man."
"You seemed content enough. You appeared to be making a rare go of it."
"I was content, and I was making a go of it. But then, one day last spring, I suddenly realised it was taking over. To the exclusion of everything else, including Gisela and the children. It was my bad luck that this should hit me in Barbara Lockerbie's company. Do you want to hear the rest?"
"Only if you want to tell me."
"We met at that launching of mine. The Lockerbies invited me to spend a weekend with them at their lodge in Skye. Have you ever been to Skye?"
"No, though I've looked across at it."
"It's a magic place. Or it seemed so to me at that time and in her company. Sir James didn't turn up and I see now she planned it that way. We were out on the lower slopes of a mountain and the weather was fine and warm for the time of year. I suddenly realised what I'd been missing all these years and that soon I'd be forty. It all stemmed from that realisation, a matter of letting off steam, I imagine. The trouble was I didn't realise, until I heard your voice over the telephone last night, how much steam was there. That, and the fact that women have always been more important to me than they seem to be to you and Alex and Giles and the others. I don't mean all women. I mean lively, high-spirited women like Barbara Lockerbie, and that landlady of mine I once told you about in Munich."
He understood. Far better, perhaps, than George knew, for in her own way Henrietta was such a woman. Had it been otherwise it seemed probable that he too might have needed a change when he was George's age. The trouble lay, he supposed, in the fact that Gisela was a serious-minded little body and wouldn't know how to coax him out of such a mood, whereas Henrietta would, and had done so time and again without him being fully aware of it until now. He said, "Well, some of us drive ourselves hard and when we do there's generally a price to pay. You've paid yours, lad, and been overcharged to my way of thinking. I'm glad you told me as much as you did, but where do you go from here?"
"I know the answer to that," George said, "but I haven't the gall to tell you. Maybe I'll tell you when this place is ticking over again."
"No, tell me now. You've laid all your other cards on the table. Play out the hand."
George said, with a ghost of a grin, "You'll kick me downstairs I daresay, but I'll chance it. I need a longish spell clear away from this place. Not to blow off more steam, at least not that kind of steam, but to follow a dream. Your kind of dream."
"Something new?"
"Not entirely. We went over the same ground when we parted company that last time. As I say, I've never ceased to believe the real future of road transport is in the mechanically propelled vehicle, but everything I've attempted so far has gone off at half-cock and I know why. You can't approach a job as demanding as that with half your mind on a business this size. You need isolation, and time to concentrate on every last detail, every modification, every scrap of information that comes in from the States and the Continent. Steam waggons aren't the answer, not for our kind of work. But there is an answer and I'd find it if I had the time and money."
"You've got the money, haven't you?"
"Not really. All I've put by is earmarked to pay shareholders what Wesley Tybalt filched, but I could scrape by on next-to-nothing until I had a blueprint that satisfied me. Do you remember Jock Quirt, that Scots mechanic I had by me, when I was working on Maximus up at Sam's place in Manchester? He was an ugly little chap, with very little to say for himself, but he was a bit of a genius to my way of thinking. He's still working on that prototype up in the north."
"You're suggesting you set him to work right here?"
"No, I'm suggesting I go to him and we work on it together, but it would mean someone who really knew the ropes taking over here until next spring. I think I could guarantee results by then, and we'd have motor transport that would give us a two-year start over every haulier in the country. I've absolutely no right to ask this…"
"But you are asking it?"
"Yes."
His head came up and the quick gesture reminded Adam again that, of all his children, George came closest to the Adam Swann who had made his grab on the strength of three guarantees: the yield of a looted necklace, sold to shady rascals in the city; a dream, not unlike George's; and an invincible belief in his own star. He said, doubtfully, "I'm turned seventy, George, and past it. Go ahead with your dream if you have to and you'll be no use to me or anybody else if you don't. But find someone else to sort this lot out and get things moving again."
"There isn't anybody else. And you aren't past it. It's my belief you don't really think you are either."
"I wonder."
He turned and crossed to the narrow window, and this time he did not see the desolation below but the broad curve of the river and the many-turreted tower he had explored only yesterday. He stood there a long time, thinking back and assessing himself in terms of profit and loss, failure and achievement, hopes fulfilled and unfulfilled. He thought of Tryst, too, and the showplace he had made of it in the years that had passed since he turned his back on this slum. He would miss that and he hadn't much time to squander. How would Henrietta think of it? What would his doctor have to say about him shouldering a packload like this at his age? But did it matter what Henrietta, or the doctor, or anybody else thought? He did a kind of equation with the various factors of the case. A headquarters burned to a cinder. A criminal prosecution in the offing that would expose him and his as fools, milked by their own employees. George himself, at a crisis in his life, wanting desperately to atone but in his own way and on his own terms. He thought, distractedly: I wonder if he's right and whether I'm right to sympathise with him? I was wrong about mechanical transport. It's plain enough it's almost here now. I might even live to see the day they put the last of the horses out to grass and clutter the roads with clumsy galleons, like his precious Maximus. Everyone said I was mad to carve up the area the new railways had neglected, but I saw further than most of 'em. Maybe George does now, for he's my flesh and blood, and there's a lot of old Sam Rawlinson in him. But none of these things count in the long run. The heart of the matter is, would I care to come back here and spend a St. Martin's summer in this room, gathering all the loose ends together and adapting, if I could accept them, to all the changes he's made already? And suddenly his heart gave him the answer and he understood that, in an odd, clownish way, he would enjoy the exercise enormously, would relish being fully extended again and needed, not only by George, but by all those JohnnyCome-Latelys George had planted out along the network, cocky youngsters mostly who had long since written him off as an old codger, well past his prime. He said, "I'll do it, George. For one year from today. And God help the whole boiling of you if I prove unequal to it, for then you'll all be in a worse mess than ever. As to money, well, you don't have to worry on that score. Your grandfather didn't trust any one of you come to the end. He left his pile to me, with orders to dole it out as I saw fit, and you'll get your slice of it. If you want to pour it down the drain in some murky workshop that's your business. I only want two pledges from you and here they are. You'll be back here to take over twelve months from now, hit or miss. And you take that wife of yours north with you."
"You can dump the family with Henrietta. It'll keep her out of mischief while I'm slumming it right here."
George said, eagerly, "You won't regret it, Gov'nor. Not when the final score is totted up."
"I'm not so sure about that but I've followed my nose in situations like this all my life and I'm too long in the tooth to change. I see too much of myself in you, George, and that's a fact. Though I do flatter myself I had better brakes at your age."
"Giles will back you."
"Oh no, he won't. In case you haven't looked hard enough, Giles has a dream of his own and it doesn't run on four wheels. As for Hugo, well, I've never seen him as anything more than Swann's barker in the marketplace. Young Edward is more promising. He showed his mettle yesterday. I'll take him under my wing, for he's merchant through and through, I wouldn't wonder."
He got up stiffly. "Go down and get a wash under the pump and we'll drink to it before I catch my train. I've still got to break this news to your mother. She won't have heard of it, tucked away down there."
George went out without another word and a moment later, watching from the window, Adam saw him splashing head and shoulders in the pump trough. He thought, I don't know… I could have wrung his neck twelve hours since, and here I am, giving him his head again just as if he was all I had to show for my years here. And suddenly, as clear as a picture on the wall, he had a memory of coming home to Tryst one frosty February night, in 1864, and being greeted by the news that Hetty had been delivered of her third child and second boy, and going upstairs to look down on a merry little bundle in the cot, wide awake, knuckling his mouth, and staring back at him with an expression he could only describe as conspiratorial. And then, he recalled, a droll thing had happened, reminding him of the pact he and Hetty had made nine months before, after he learned from his father she had gone off the rails in his absence and come near getting herself seduced by a gunner who had fancied her. As if the baby in the cot was aware of the circumstances accounting for his presence, he had winked in a way that made Adam laugh aloud. He understood then why George was so easy to forgive.
Seven
A Titan, Fishing
The narrow coastal road, reaching the tiny village of Llanystumdwy, crossed the boulder-strewn river Dwyfor by a humped-back bridge, just beyond a cottage on the right. Where the bridge wall was broken, giving foot access to the river below, she stopped the dogcart, saying, "Down there, Giles. That cottage is his old home but I learned from that man back there he'd gone fishing. He spends a lot of time fishing when Parliament's not sitting and he can slip away up here."
He looked at her with amused incredulity. "I can't just buttonhole him in that way, Romayne. Not him, not a man with his reputation. He'd snub me and I'd deserve it."
"L.G. has never snubbed anyone in his life. Sat on them, talked them down, and carried them along in his wake, but not snubbed. It's not his nature and I should know, for I'm one of his constituents, seeing that Beddgelert house is still in my name. You do as I say. March right up to him and tell him what you have in mind, and he'll admire you for it. Nobody in the world is cheekier than Lloyd George."
"Let me see that letter again."
Romayne opened her reticule and took out a single folded sheet, straightening it and passing it to him. The secretary's reply was couched in a single paragraph on House of Commons paper. It said:
Dear Madam,
Further to your enquiry concerning your husband, Mr. Giles Swann, Mr. Lloyd George has asked me to say that he will be in your area for one week when the House rises and would be happy to see Mr. Swann if he could come to Llanystumdwy before midday between Monday, 15th, and Thursday, 18th.
Nothing else but the signature was written on the paper.
He said doubtfully, "It's a bit chilly, isn't it? A chap like that must get hundreds of similar requests and if he's on holiday…"
"Trust me, Giles. I know exactly what I'm about!" and he thought, Well, I can stand a snub from a stranger, and afterwards, maybe, she'll let me go about things in my own way. And he got down and went through the gap to the steep, fern-clad bank where there was a tiny path, hardly more than a rabbit run, leading inland through close-set trees growing above the stream. He had only gone about fifty yards when he saw him, sitting on a rounded boulder holding what looked like a boy's fishing rod made from a bamboo cane and a ball of twine.
He recognised him instantly, not only as the rumbustious politician who was always getting into the news and its backspread of photographs, but at a much longer remove—a jaunty, rather cocky young man he had encountered all those years ago at the door of the empty Chamber of Commons, on his very first visit to Westminster, the incident that had inspired Romayne's impulsive letter to the member for Caernarvon Boroughs.
He recalled the circumstances vividly. Himself a shy, thirteen-year-old, awed by the place where he stood; the young Welshman, brash and confident, despite his sing-song accent and country clothes. Slightly patronising yet friendly and informative, with his talk of the miserly wages Llanberis quarry-workers were paid and his intention, implied rather than uttered, of doing something about it if the opportunity offered. And since then he had, proving that his talk on that occasion was no adolescent boast but the pledge of a man already aware of his potential.
All that, however, had happened eighteen years ago and since then "Mr. George" (who had dismissed the hallowed Chamber as "crabbed and poky") had moved on to capture headlines as the noisiest, wittiest, most trenchant member of the Liberal Party whereas Giles, by his own reckoning, had stood still looking on.
He went down the narrow path until the fisherman, hearing the crackle of dry twigs, looked up and smiled, calling, in a slightly moderated brogue, "Lovely morning, Johnny Peep! Come and join me in the sun. The fish aren't rising. I did much better here as a boy poacher!"
He still wasn't sure of his welcome, despite Lloyd George's jocular greeting. "Johnny Peep" implied an intrusion, and he could pinpoint the source of the gibe:
Here I am, Johnny Peep, And I saw three sheep,
And those three sheep saw me.
Half-a-crown apiece pays for their fleece,
And so Johnny Peep goes free…
It was a verse quip of Robbie Burns, who had used it to win an evening's entertainment from three North Country drovers.
He said, "I'm Giles Swann, Mr. George. My wife wrote for an appointment and later persuaded me to follow you here. I realise that's a liberty, but she seems to think you don't mind seeing constituents."
"I never mind meeting an old acquaintance, Mr. Swann."
"You remember me?"
"Perfectly. A small, over-awed boy with knobbly knees and a reverence for politicians they don't deserve."
It was astounding, he thought, that he should recall their first meeting, but the politician had another surprise for him. "Why do you suppose I addressed you as Johnny Peep?"
"That was understandable, me dropping in on you in this way. You must value the few hours you get to yourself."
"Not all that much. I never did care for my own company. The truth is I like an audience. Anyone about here will tell you that. As to recalling you, it came back to me the moment I saw the name 'Swann' on your wife's letter, and why not? It's a very famous name and you mentioned your father's profession on that occasion." He laid his improvised rod aside. "So you know the identity of Johnny Peep?"
"It was Burns, wasn't it?"
"One of my best stories. Robbie was a rare spirit. Do you read him still?"
"Not in dialect," Giles said. "He's too broad for me." Then, "I… er… didn't see my wife's letter. To be frank, she wrote it without my knowledge and sprang it on me when she got a reply."
"Sounds an enterprising lass, Mr. Swann."
"She's Welsh."
"That accounts for it. Join me," and he made room on the boulder. "I take it you know what she wrote about?"
"She knew that I was anxious to be
considered by the Liberal Party as a prospective candidate and thought a direct approach to you was the best hope. I must be frank again, however. I live and work in London. We have a holiday house up here, and come as often as we can. We met about here when we were eighteen."
"Where exactly?"
"I fished her out of the river at Aberglaslyn. I thought she was drowning but she wasn't, just fooling. She's the daughter of Sir Clive Rycroft-Mostyn, the industrialist."
The politician whistled softly. "Dynastic alliance?"
"Far from it. My father-in-law and I are not on speaking terms, and haven't been since before Romayne and I married, eight years ago."
"Political differences?"
"Not really, although I never did care for his way with people. He's a big Tory subscriber."
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