He fumbled in his jacket pocket and took out a small studio portrait of a girl with dark hair and merry eyes—George's kind of eyes—that looked out on life with confidence, and an expectation of jokes dredged from the small change of the day. She had, however, a very determined chin, a good figure slightly on the plump side, and her costume, an inexpensive one, was worn with panache.
"Weren't her parents very angry about it?"
He grinned, then wiped the grin from his face.
"Well, no, not really, or not once they understood how things were between us. I like them all. They're a very jolly family. He's a lock keeper on the Canal, and all her sisters and brothers are spinners in Rowton Mill. To be honest I suppose they think Evie's done well for herself, but that's only to be expected, isn't it?"
"Yes, I suppose it is, but I hate to think of you hurting your mother's feelings. She thinks a rare lot of you boys. What exactly do you want me to do about it?"
"Break the news, as soon as you get back. Maybe the baby will have arrived by then, and if it's a boy mother won't mind so much. She was always on at Max and me to get married and give her some grandchildren. I think she really worried about us staying bachelors so long."
It was true. She knew Gisela well enough to realise that the prospect of growing old without a tribe of grandchildren would not appeal to her, or to George either for that matter. It really was a little odd that, with four children, they had neither sons-in-law nor daughters-in-law, for two of Stella's boys were married now, and Alex's daughter, Rose, and Joanna's eldest daughter, Valerie, were engaged to be married this summer. Robert and Richard, respectively eldest and youngest sons of Stella, had so far produced three daughters between them, her first batch of greatgrandchildren, but if, as she fervently hoped, Rudi's child was a boy, he would qualify as the first Swann great-grandson, so who cared whether he "came across the fields" as her old nurse used to say? She said, "I'll do what I can, but the very first chance you get bring that girl down to Tryst, for I'm sure I'd like to meet her and so would your grandfather. If it is a boy, have you decided what to call him?"
"Sam. For Grandfather Rawlinson. After all, he'll be a Lancastrian, and Grandfather Sam did a lot to help my father when he was working to perfect his prototype up here."
She had forgotten that—Sam Rawlinson's part in sponsoring George at a time when he had quarrelled bitterly with his father—and it touched her a little that the boy should want to make this gesture. She had never been close to her father, always having regarded him as a bit of a ruffian, but there was no doubt about it: Sam's strong, mechanical strain was present in the family and his aggressiveness, too, when you came to think about it.
"You won't say anything to Grandfather yet?"
"I won't say anything to anyone until I've seen your mother, and that can't be for a fortnight or more. We're supposed to be going on to Scotland."
"How do I keep in touch then?"
"Well, tomorrow your grandfather has promised to take me to the place where I grew up, Sedley Mills. Then we shall return to Manchester and catch a train on to Ambleside and stay a day or so at The Glades Hotel before going on to Edinburgh."
She took out her purse and extracted a gold half-sovereign. "The day he's born put this in his hand and close his fingers over it. Then put it away somewhere. It's an old good-luck custom. Adam's father, the old Colonel, did it with all the children, right up to the time he died."
He kissed her, saying, "You're a good sport, Grandmam, and you never seem like a grandmother to me. More like a… well… like a sister."
It was worth more than half-a-sovereign to get a compliment of that kind.
3
It was surprising how little the vista beyond what she thought of as The Rampart had changed. The Rampart was a string of towns following the course of the greatgrandfather of all railways, Stephenson's Manchester-to-Liverpool line over Chat Moss where, for weeks on end they said, Irish navvies had tipped thousands of fascines to form a base under the track. Here town and country met on the northern edge of the Cheshire plain, the vast jumble of mills, shops, warehouses, sidings, and cobbled streets straggling west in what now seemed one huge ugly city and beyond it; and to the south, hedgerow land, ploughed furrow, neat black and white farmsteads, and the house where she had grown up, Sam Rawlinson's mock-Gothic lodge, known by millhands in those days as "Scab's Castle."
She had no fond memories of Seddon Moss, the town where her father had made his first fortune, but the moor to the south of it was dear to her and she became very silent and absorbed as the trap rattled over the winding road towards the familiar clump of woodland on the horizon.
He respected her silence, having memories of his own, of a saddlesore young man riding north across the swell of gorse common fifty summers ago and coming upon a scene of riot and arson that turned him back, sick with disgust at the cruelty he had witnessed. Yet something sweet and wholesome had emerged from it, for it was only hours later that he came upon her in a dip beside a shepherd's hut; their life's odyssey, in convoy, had begun right there, weeks before the first Swann waggon, bearing its strange device, moved out across Kent in search of customers.
"It was about here, wasn't it, Hetty?"
"No," she said, "a little further on. Just past the Nantwich fork coming this way."
He wouldn't have remembered, or not with that degree of accuracy, but was prepared to trust her judgment. The moment, he guessed, would have even more significance for her. He had taken a long time to evaluate her, some seven years if he was honest with himself. Until then he had been almost entirely absorbed in his work and the terrible demands it had made upon him.
"Here, Adam. Why, you can still see where the hut stood. There, over on the left, just at the foot of the dip."
It was true. An oblong of flattened gorse was marked out by what he could identify as the holes where the posts had been driven in, and he checked the horse and climbed down, helping her to alight and tethering the skewbald to a bush. They moved off the road and stood silently on the patch of open ground, holding hands lightly and seeing themselves, a little ironically in his case, as they had been the morning of the encounter. He said, finally, "Tell you something, Hetty. When I realised you were Sam Rawlinson's daughter I came damned close to leaving you to fend for yourself. The smoke from old Sam's burned-out mill was still on the skyline yonder, and I kept thinking of that boy he had ridden down in the town."
"What stopped you?"
"Oh, a variety of reasons. At least you'd had the sense to run out on him, and you didn't seem much more than a child at the time. Then you coaxed me into a more tolerant humour, thinking Birmingham was a seaport, and that story about deportment."
"I don't recall that."
"You don't? I'll never forget it. Something your governess taught you—'Never accept a chair from a gentleman until you are satisfied it is no longer warm from his person!' And then again, I hadn't thought about a woman as a woman in more than a year."
"That isn't much of a compliment, is it?"
"A better one than it sounds. Emptying that well at Cawnpore, crammed full of butchered women and children, must have petrified my emotions. You started the thaw."
She wondered how much truth there was in this and how, exactly, she had appealed to him as a woman in that bedraggled green crinoline she was wearing, with her hair uncombed and mud on her face. Hardly at all, she would say, remembering his first embrace beside Derwentwater a few days later that left her in a turmoil, but had not seemed to make much impression on him. She had worshipped him from the beginning, from the moment he hoisted her on to the rump of his mare and told her to put her arms around his waist, but responsive affection, of the kind that flowered early in their marriage, had not been evident until they were man and wife. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps the horrors of the Sepoy Mutiny had blunted his sensibilities and they had been sharpened, over the ensuing weeks, by physical access to her that had begun in a mood of tolerance and developed i
n a way that lasted them down the years. She said, "Hold me, Adam. Just for a moment," and he put his arms round her and kissed her gently on the mouth.
They climbed back into the trap and moved on over the crest towards the trees, catching a glimpse of the lodge turrets as they drew near and reining in at a spot where they could see the house through the trees. To her it looked much smaller than she remembered. To him it was one of the ugliest dwellings he had ever seen, a monstrous multiple marriage between domestic Cheshire, mock Tudor, mock Gothic, and neo-classical, precisely the kind of monument a vulgarian like old Sam would erect to his brigandage and avarice.
"Great God!" he exclaimed. "No wonder you fled from it!"
"But I didn't, not in that sense, for it seemed a grand house to me. I fled from that awful man Goldthorpe Sam had decided I should marry in exchange for a loading bay area on Goldthorpe's father's land."
"Oh, yes. I'd forgotten the bartered bride angle." And then, with an approving glance, "Nobody would have married you against your will, Hetty. You've far too much spunk."
"I'm not so sure. It was touch and go until you spoke up for me. Come, I've seen all I want to about here. Let's get back to Warrington if we're to catch that train, for I wouldn't care to spend a night hereabouts, not even in a shepherd's hut with you on hand. That's another thing I learned from you early on."
"What exactly?"
"To value comfort. I remember you telling me, when I remarked on the trouble you took to make a bivouac weatherproof and cosy, 'Any fool can be cold, wet, and miserable.'"
* * *
The Glades Hotel, overlooking Windermere where they had spent their first night together, was still in business, but much larger and more pretentious than it had been half a century ago. They dined in the same room where he had made her half tipsy on claret and she had suffered agonies of embarrassment wondering how to tell him she was desperate to be excused. The miseries we inflict on ourselves at that age, she thought, smiling as she recalled the relief attending the release of her corset tapes in the ladies' room.
It was still light when they took an after-dinner stroll along the lakeside, with the sun setting over Hawkshead and Coniston Water and the blue peaks of the fells on the far side of the lake. It was surprising, she thought, that they had never retraced their steps here in all this time, for her thoughts, all of them pleasant, had returned here time and again, remembering so much of that stupendous occasion when, or so it had seemed to her at the time, all the secrets of the universe had been revealed to her. And as she thought this she was aware of a rare spurt of rebellion against growing old, reflecting that their relationship had entered a new phase in the last few years, a burned-out phase she supposed, although his touch and nearness still awakened in her echoes of the fearful ecstasy of that splendid time.
The red-jacketed hall porter greeted them in the foyer, holding a buff telegram form, saying, "The telegraph boy arrived with it just after you and the lady went out, sir. There's no prepaid answer but the telegraph office is open until midnight if you want the boots to send a reply."
He took the envelope, drew out the message, and read it with an expression of mystification, passing it to her and saying, "Can you make anything of this, Hetty? It's gibberish to me." She took the form and moved nearer the chandelier. The message read, "Sam descended on us today stop All eight pounds of him stop Love Rudi." She realised then that the telegram had been addressed to her and laughed outright, partly at the sauciness of the message, partly at Adam's baffled expression.
"What's the joke? What the devil is the boy driving at? It is George's Rudi, I imagine?"
"Oh, it's George's Rudi all right," and she began laughing again, so that he looked quite irritated for a moment and the porter, sensing domestic contention, moved away and pretended to be absorbed in the letter rack beside the receptionist's desk.
"There's no answer," she called across to him. To Adam, "Come up to our room, Adam, and I'll explain."
His exasperation was really quite comic as she closed the door, laid down the telegram, and said, removing her hat and veil, "It's really quite an occasion, Adam. Nothing whatever to scowl about. The arrival of our first great-grandson, no less. That's worth a telegram, isn't it?"
"Great-grandson? But, dammit, woman, the boy's a bachelor!"
"Oh, no, he isn't. He's been married six months or more."
"Six months you say?" He picked up the telegram and re-read it. "How do you know? And why is this addressed to you?"
"Well, it wouldn't have made much sense addressed to you, would it? He confided in me when you were out looking at the new docks. He married his book-keeper, a girl called Eve—I don't know what her maiden name was. I imagine they married a week or so after she discovered she was expecting his child."
"He told you that?"
"He had to tell someone, poor lad. They were hoping for a boy and decided on Sam, remembering how close Sam and George were in the old days."
He sat down on the bed. "Haven't George and Gisela been told yet?"
"No. They were going to be married anyway as soon as Rudi had settled in as manager of the depot but it seems—well, you know what young men are better than I do. It isn't that kind of marriage, however. They're very much in love and she looks such a pretty, forthcoming sort of girl."
"You've met her?"
"No. He showed me a picture of her."
Humour finally triumphed over his bewilderment and he smiled, but then, giving her a steady look of appraisal, "I find that very interesting, Hetty. That a boy in that situation should confide in his grandmother, when he could have made his choice from a whole tribe of uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, and cousins. It establishes something important."
"Only that he needed someone to break the news gently to his mother."
"No, something beyond that. I could have done that for him. So could his father, or Max, his brother, or even Giles, whom we all seem to use as a go-between. But he didn't, he went straight to you, and do you know why? Because he sees you as the real power behind the throne, the one person with the broadmindedness and authority to ease him and that girl he's married out of a ticklish corner. I've a notion any one of them would do the same if it came to the pinch, and that means you've kept overall command of 'em. Not as a grandmother but as a person, and it's a credit to you if you think about it. They'd confide in me soon enough if it was a business matter, but a human problem, that's something different."
His eyes returned to the form again. "Sam, eh? Well, it's fitting, I suppose, for a first great-grandson. Your father would have been tickled. Especially by us getting the news here of all places. Come over here, you witch."
She came and stood before him and his big hands enclosed her tightly corsetted waist, inclining her towards him and then, in a way that was reminiscent of the man she recalled so vividly from the past, his hands slipped over the rim of the corset to pinch her bottom. "You're a very singular woman, Henrietta Rawlinson. I had a lot more sense than I realised when I scooped you off that moor, showed your father the door, and brought you here to this hotel, as green a woman as a man ever coveted. By God, I'd give something to be that young again."
"Who wouldn't?"
"You'll always be young and this is proof of it," and he released her, folded the telegram carefully, and put it in his pocket. And then, in the last blink of twilight reaching them from the darkening surface of the lake, she saw his eyes light up. "To blazes with trailing further north," he said. "Let's go south again, stop off at Manchester, meet that wife of his, and wet the baby's head. After that I'll bow myself out and leave you to introduce Sam Swann to his grandmother."
Five
Landmark
The Swann tribe, together with their leading henchmen dotted about the country, had many common characteristics, uniformity being the product of the strain, as far as the family was concerned, added to Adam Swann's skill in selecting deputies capable of measuring up to his standards. First, all of them, to some
degree, were dogged and purposeful, not easily turned aside from the pursuit of what they sought in the way of glory, rewards, and the satisfaction that stemmed from doing a job well. In addition, almost all of them were capable of a strenuous effort and an occasional sacrifice demanded by loyalty to one another and to the firm, for they saw themselves as a unit constantly confronted by rivals and what Adam referred to as the "Johnny-Come-Latelys," whose watchwords were quick profits with no real regard for the quality of service rendered. They had in common a sense of living in the present that promised endless possibility, of being members of an elite among their fellows, especially those (poor devils) who had the misfortune to be born the far side of the English Channel, so that the pulse of nationalism, quickened by three generations of success, beat strongly in each of them, even in Giles, who sometimes saw the strident nationalism of the British as a threat to the harmony of nations. But that was as far as it went in terms of collectivity, really no more than a loose but effective alliance of some three thousand men and a hundred or so women, who respected the past and embraced the present but gave little thought to the future and were therefore not equipped to anticipate the rhythms of destiny.
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