She did not resent her bluff being called. Their relationship was like this, jocular, matter-of-fact, not in the least like she had imagined it would be during that period of waiting at Derwentwater.
“You won’t explode?”
“Have I ever exploded?”
“No,” she said, “you’re very kind to me, Adam, and I do appreciate it, but there is something needed to make me—well—the happiest woman in England.”
“Ah,” he said, still humouring her, “then you don’t need to tell me what this is. To have me sell up and put on a uniform again.”
“Indeed no,” she said, seriously, “I did want that but it's very clear you enjoy what you’re doing, and I wouldn’t presume to suggest anything to the contrary. I’d like—I’d like a house of my own, really my own. An old house. A real house. Somewhere I could—well—however can I put it, so that you won’t think me quite stupid? Somewhere to begin!”
She had certainly succeeded in surprising him now, and the fact that she had gave her a certain inner satisfaction, for he was a man she very rarely surprised.
“Begin what exactly?”
“Why, a family—your kind of family, what else?”
Suddenly he remembered and remembering he understood. It had to do, he supposed, with this curious obsession she had, not so much with soldiers but with tradition, with belonging to a caste that seemed to her to possess stability and dignity, of a kind lacking in the families clustered round the chimney stacks along the Manchester-Liverpool railroad, a caste of which the archetype was the Colonel, whose ways were predictable and whose watchword was continuity, and perhaps it was not altogether remarkable that the seed of a filibuster like Sam Rawlinson should find the need for roots and permanence and predictability necessary to her peace of mind. To a degree the same urge prompted half the merchants he met in his comings and goings about the city and the industrial belts, as though these men, whom he had at first mistaken for the missionaries of the new iron age, were only innovators by chance. They wanted nothing better, once they were buttressed by wealth, than to sink back into a pastoral England of green fields and lush pastures and petty squires discussing crops and cattle with a race of bucolic peasants. It was an interesting thought for it had, in a way, a direct bearing on his own concerns and made him, in one sense, even more isolated than he had felt in the mess. Hardly one of them, he thought, man or woman, was more than half aware of what was happening around him, or how utterly and finally the impact of men like Stephenson, Brunel, Watt, Crompton, and Arkwright had changed the traditional pattern of the nation's tapestry.
They had passed through the garden door to the small enclosure at the back of the house. From here the winter fields sloped gently away towards the Kentish border, a patchwork of green and red and russet, studded with clumps of elms and oaks where, in summer, cattle browsed in the shade. On the horizon the long village of Wickham ran along the skyline, and the top of Shirley church spire could be seen to the right. He said, carefully, “If that's what you want I daresay we could make Trowbridge an offer for this place. I can understand your not caring to put too much of yourself into rented property,” but she said, eagerly, “Oh, no, Adam, you haven’t understood. It's not just that this place doesn’t belong to us, it's because it's almost new. When I was a little girl…” and she stopped, biting her lip.
He was sure then that she was going to confirm his thesis and prompted her. “Go on.”
“Oh it sounds very silly, I suppose, seeing that I was raised in a place like Seddon Moss, and have a dreadful, money-grubbing father like Sam, but it's there just the same.”
“What's there? Tell me in your own words if you can.”
“A kind of longing for starting something and—well—being someone who counted, and that means living in a house covered with creeper, with old furniture inside, and drawers that smell of lavender. Oh, you can smile, and I know I’m not putting it very clearly, but it isn’t so different from what you’re so set on doing.”
“Oh, yes, it is. It's as different as it can be.”
“No, no it isn’t! It's not wanting to be grand, or anything of that kind, but making something lasting out of money instead of…well, more money, if you see what I mean.”
Her naïveté touched him even though there was no real bridge between his dreams and hers. He already belonged to an established line, and everything he had done since returning to base had been concerned with the breaking of new ground and identifying with the new century rather than the old. He had never taken pride in his lineage, or in the Swann military tradition, thinking of both as anachronisms that discouraged a man from meeting the challenges of his own generation. And yet, because of his father and background, he understood its pull, and was prepared to tolerate it in a girl, although he might well have despised it in a man younger than his father.
He said, putting his hands on her shoulders, and drawing her to him, “Very well, we’ll start looking for such a place when I’m well launched, and providing we can afford it. But that boy of yours, if it is a boy and not a girl as I’m half-persuaded, comes into the business when I feel like putting my feet up. I’ll go part way with you. There's no sense in creating something if you can’t hope to pass it on to your children. You see, I’ve got my own notions about continuity, and they seem to me more realistic than yours. Meantime make the best of this overnight stop, for I’m likely to need every penny I possess until this time next year. You’ll have your child by May, and that’ll give you plenty to think about while I’m away setting up provincial depots.”
She knew him well enough by now to understand that he would keep this half-promise if he could, and although, to some extent, it satisfied her as a first step, she was dismayed by the prospect of him being away again throughout the best months of the year.
“Are you going to be travelling all spring and summer?” she demanded, but he was not willing to commit himself about this and only said, bending to kiss the top of her head, “I’ll go wherever I’m needed to safeguard the money I’ve already invested. And it's not just on my account. I’ve got a responsibility to all the men I employ, and to all those urchins that idiot Keate landed me with,” and when she said, carelessly, “Pooh, I wouldn’t worry my head about them, for if they don’t draw wages from you they’ll have to draw them from somebody,” he realised that there was, after all, a considerable gulf between his outlook and hers. Like Sam, she was unable to think of an employee as anything more than a piece of animated equipment, like one of Sam's machines, or one of his own carthorses.
Four
1
AN OLD PLACE, WITH CREEPER-COVERED WALLS, AND SOMETHING LEFT BEHIND of long-dead families.
In spite of his initial impatience it insinuated itself and sometimes, between bursts of energy that ate up the last days of winter and early spring, he found himself returning to the fanciful notion. But then, with May Day as the target date for launching the first batch of depots, it was buried under the avalanche of hopes, fears, and figures that attended the approach of the expansion, especially as this seemed likely to coincide (and with maddening exactitude) with the birth of his child. The prospect would almost surely have escaped out of his consciousness had it not been for Dancer, the elderly carriage-horse that he bought for their rig during the last stages of Henrietta's pregnancy, for he judged the cob rented with the house too inexperienced for sedate drives along the deep wooded lanes towards Cudham and Westerham and Keston; Dancer, a dappled grey with a long, sad face, an old warrior who had his own notions of country seats, with creeper-clad walls, and his own way of making his passengers aware of them.
Henrietta's health during the last months had been a source of satisfaction to herself and old Doctor Groom who attended her. She had cause enough to pout at her waistline now and sometimes, when she was waddling about the bedroom, she would pause a moment to wonder why she had worried so much on this account in what she already thought of as her “silly days.” She looked, she decla
red, as thick as one of Farmer Still's elms, and even a new French crinoline could not disguise the fact, for under stern instructions from both husband and doctor she had laid aside her corsets and some of her petticoats with them, having more than enough weight to drag about the house. Whenever she looked at herself in the mirror she bewailed her lack of inches and smallness of bone, reasoning that a tall, willowy woman could get through a pregnancy without changing herself into a penguin. It was a relief, she told herself more than once, that Adam was so preoccupied with his work and was, moreover, the kind of husband who saw nothing shocking in her appearance, and could even joke about it in that rather coarse campfire way of his. His attitude not only made the sacrifice of her figure bearable but also helped to batten the hatches on fear for although in the main she accepted the reassurances of old Doctor Groom, fear was never absent from her mind, not on account of the fact that she would soon bring forth, but because her size surely implied that the child inside her must be enormous, at least ten pounds by her reckoning, and quite definitely male. It might even be twins and sometimes, in her calmer moments, she wondered how she and Adam would view the sudden arrival of a brace of sons, and whether, in that case, they could have one apiece, the elder earmarked for the army, his brother a predestined cygnet on wheels.
During those final weeks he showed her more tenderness than she had expected, even returning home each evening well before dusk, and keeping her near him on Sundays. She appreciated this very much although she did not mention it, and when, one sunny April afternoon, he came home an hour after luncheon, proposing to take her for a drive, she was delighted, for the cob's unreliability had kept her housebound for almost a month.
He said, “We’ll try that grey, Dancer. He’ll be quiet enough at his age. I bought him at that auction over in Beckenham. They tried to tell me he was twelve, but he's sixteen if he's a day, and that's really why I bid for him. You’ll need something that ambles along when Mandrake takes you and the baby out while I’m away. He's called Dancer and the nagsman said he came from somewhere round here. Wouldn’t surprise me to learn he had begun life in the Company's riding-school down the road.”
She remembered then how it came that they had settled here when they moved south. The East India Officers’ College, where he had been trained a dozen years ago, was only a few minutes’ walk nearer Croydon, and she suspected that he had always had an attachment for the district, with its miles of open heath, stony hills, and old woods of beech, oak, chestnut, and elm. He would never admit to this, of course, for he hated to be thought of as a man who lived in the past. It was not often, in fact, that she could get him to talk about the Light Brigade, or the excitements of the Sepoy Rebellion. He much preferred to gossip about his waggons and his contracts and the odd characters he encountered in that stale old yard beside the Thames. Perhaps, she thought, he would be more communicative about his real adventures when he had a son for an audience, for men would talk to men about that kind of thing but always assumed it curdled the blood of a woman. And thinking this she sighed, as she always did when she remembered how gladly he had exchanged scarlet and gold braid for topper, frock coat, and the strapover trousers of the city uniform. He had had his way over that, of course, but there was another battle looming that she was resolved to win. The young man who seemed so impatient to view the world was going to wear scarlet whether his father liked it or not. She had quite made up her mind about that.
Their route took them up the long slope of a dust road that wound its way between gorse-studded hills, then down the sharp descent of the Spout Hill towards the open country beyond Addington. He drove very soberly, holding the grey closely in hand, and the little carriage was so comfortably sprung, and so well-cushioned, that behind the box-seat she seemed to be floating into the sunset. He said, over his shoulder, “Make the most of it, my dear. I’m not risking an outing even behind an old stager like this when you’re nearer your time. Are you quite comfortable back there?”
Very comfortable, she told him, admiring his straight back and the military way he held himself when handling the reins. It was the most perfect kind of evening for late April, with the sun sinking like a great, burnished plate behind streamers of heliotrope cloud, and the scent of honeysuckle coming from the hedgerows. They turned off the main road just beyond a hamlet, crossed a shallow watersplash, and entered a straight narrow lane that ran between a park wall and a piece of woodland overgrown with rhododendrons. Beyond the low bank on the left she could see great drifts of bluebells in the bud, and their scent, the most country scent in the world, seemed to linger in the hollow like bonfire smoke.
Then, almost imperceptibly, Dancer lengthened his stride and began to trot so that Adam said, “By George, he's lively. It must be spring,” and then, but without urgency, “Whoa, there! Whoa, you old badger!” But Dancer had no disposition to whoa, and broke into a loping canter and then, as they rattled round a bend in the lane, into a long, uneven gallop.
She saw at once that he was alarmed. He braced himself against the rail, bunching the reins and throwing a harassed glance over his shoulder before addressing himself wholly to the task of checking the horse, but his anxiety did not communicate itself to her until she was assailed by the first pain. It advanced on her slowly, brought on by the first yards of jolting, but its final pounce was swift and devastating, so that she set her teeth and pushed her feet down into the well of the carriage, taking a frantic grip on the rail of the seat. Then, quite suddenly, she was deluged in pain, and a wild cry broke from her, so that he swung half-round and at the moment of his turning a cock pheasant, startled by her yell, blundered out of the covert, soared and flew a diagonal course across the lane under Dancer's nose.
It was all he needed, apparently, to defy the bit and settle to a mad, weaving dash towards a huddle of buildings at the junction of the lane and a private drive marked by a pair of stone pillars topped by enormous stone balls. With ears laid back he seemed almost to fly over the ground, so that she was flung first to one side and then to the other, and all the time the great waves of pain crashed over her like breakers.
She thought then that she was going to die, for surely no one could survive such an experience and live. She opened her mouth to scream, but whether or not the sound reached him she never knew for, obeying some mad instinct, the horse suddenly checked its stride and swung left between the pillars, dragging the carriage round in a quarter circle and bringing its nearside rear wheel into violent collision with a pillar. Then, as the pain subsided, she was conscious of a number of things; of a man with white hair running out of an enclosure behind the buildings to the right, of a tumbling stream and a slowly-turning mill-wheel, of Adam standing up on the box-seat and cursing at the top of his voice, and of the carriage coming to an uncertain halt just inside the drive. Then the pain was gone, leaving her limp and exhausted, so that she could only listen, half-hearing, to the brief conversational exchange between Adam and the miller, the latter saying, in tones of wonder, “Christ A’ Mighty, it's Dancer! It's Dancer found his way home again…” but Adam cut in with, “Where's the nearest doctor? My wife is expecting a child and a thing like this could…” but she did not hear if he shared her conviction that she was dying, for he leapt down and keeping the reins in his hand edged the man towards the railing enclosing the mill and here they had begun a consultation when the second wave of pain rushed upon her and she cried out in anticipation of the torment it promised.
The next thing she remembered was being carried bodily from the carriage and over the threshold of a building that seemed, improbably, about twenty times as large as the mill, but she could not be sure for a haze surrounded it, and now she hoped fervently that she would die and be done with it, for every nerve in her body was twanging and quivering like violin strings under the blundering fingers of an amateur. The intervals between the waves of pain became shorter, and her body reacted in a kind of mad and defiant despair. This seemed to her to continue indefinitely, and the cont
est was so absorbing that she hardly noticed the presence of a fat woman bobbing in and out of her limited range as she threshed and twisted on a couch or pallet. She noticed one or two other things, irrelevant things, like a moulded ceiling high above her, a latticed window pane from which, unaccountably, daylight had departed and a yellow half-moon could be glimpsed, and then the sound of heavy boots and male voices and after that, with a sense of relief surpassing anything within her experience, came a gradual receding of the storm of agony until it was no more than a whisper. The lull was accompanied by a lassitude like that immediately prefacing a deep sleep, and she yielded to it gratefully.
2
His experience of women in labour was wider than might have been supposed. As a dismounted lancer he had been attached, for a time, to the regimental surgeon of the Horse Guards outside Sebastopol, and had been present on several occasions when the major had delivered some of the canteen women who had followed the army to the Crimea. Later, at Cawnpore and elsewhere, he had been billeted near the married quarters when the wives of resident officers had been brought to bed, usually of children who did not survive long in that climate and under those primitive conditions. This was why he was able to assess the situation even before the collision with the gatepost, and the appalling possibilities had brought him to his feet so that he could throw his whole weight on the reins, boots braced against the splash-board. It must have had some effect upon Dancer for the grey faltered after swinging round in that unpredictable quarter-circle, and then Adam saw the miller run across the drive and grab Dancer's noseband, bringing the lathered horse to a standstill. He understood then what had led up to the incident. Dancer had recognised the lane as the approach to stables he had occupied for years before being put up to auction. It was nobody's fault, not even Dancer's, for who could have predicted that his first outing with a new owner would lead him here? But in the meantime it was quite clear, even to the miller, that Henrietta was now in labour. That fool of a doctor must have muddled the dates, or perhaps the fright and jolting had induced a premature birth. There was no profit debating this now. Something had to be done at once, and the old, instinctive disciplines of the battlefield returned to him as he said, sharply, “Where are we? Where is this place?” and the miller said, “Tis ‘Tryst,” the Collinwood seat, zir, but they’m all gone, everybody but me and the missus. I got a key tho’, I could tak’ the lady there. It’d be best, for there ain’t room to swing a cat in my cottage an’ the mill's fair cluttered on account o’ yesterday's flood. Wait on, zir, I’ll fetch missus.”
God is an Englishman Page 25
