“The children are expecting you home,” the old man said, at a loss to know what to make of his son, but Adam said, grimly, “The children can wait. They’ve got the whole of their lives ahead of them. Hustle on back now, and tell her to put on her smartest clothes and pack an evening gown. But don’t plague me with a mountain of hand luggage.”
“I hope you know what you’re about, boy. It sounds to me as if you were going to indulge her rather than teach her how to behave when your back is turned.”
“I’ve got several surprises for her,” he said, “but I’ve a notion she’ll be dipping into a very mixed Christmas stocking,” and he led the way down the spiral stairway and handed his father into the gig.
“Take the Peckham route,” he said, “the traffic will be lighter,” and then disappeared into one of the warehouse sheds.
“Damn my eyes, but he's more of a puzzle than he was as a lad,” the old man reflected, as he gathered the reins and moved off. “There's more of a French strain in him than there was in his mother and he's even beginning to sound like a merchant, with his bustling ways and that trick of his of keeping all his important thoughts safe in his head. I wonder how his children will turn out, whether they’ll be Swanns or D’Auberons?” and he let the horse find its way through the traffic, turning right halfway along the Old Kent Road and threading a way through side streets until he could cross Peckham High Street and head south towards Sydenham. He wondered then why he had not caught a train to carry him across this maze in under the hour, telling himself he had been born too long ago to adapt to the nonstop hustle of the age. More and more these days, and not only in the matter of personal relationships, he felt himself a castaway in a world that had died even before the Duke's funeral carriage went rattling up Ludgate Hill to St. Paul's.
It was like a recurrence of the sultry summer night when, as a chit of a girl, she had escaped from her father's house in a green crinoline, a fugitive without a destination, at the mercy of any destiny that blew up out of the storm.
So many experiences had come her way since then, but she wondered, settling herself in the first-class compartment and watching Michelmore stow her hand-luggage on the rack, whether she had learned very much from them for, if truth were known, she was more scared now than then, and even more dependent upon the whims of the horseman who had come riding over the moor to catch her washing herself in a puddle. She had never made a train journey alone, and reflected that nobody passing up and down the platform would identify her as the mother of two children. She even wondered whether anxiety about the approaching confrontation showed in her face and in her fidgetings with the jet buttons on her jacket bodice, and it was thinking this, and the vast amount of space a small person like herself occupied, that reminded her of the earlier occasion when she had been similarly encumbered. The only essential difference between then and now was that she would at least recognise the man to whom she had been consigned and that the uncertainties attending his reception of her were now confined to something definite, that is, what he was likely to make of her involvement with Manaton.
The Colonel had been small help in this respect, notwithstanding her importunities. She still had no clear idea of what Adam had been told, or how much his father had left him to guess. The only reassurance the old man had offered was a hint hidden in the advice he had given her when he kissed her good-bye; “There now, put a bold face on it. A man doesn’t tell his wife to pack an evening gown if he has it in mind to wallop her. It wouldn’t surprise me if you didn’t get off with a finger-wagging.”
For herself, bowling towards him at fifty miles an hour, she wasn’t so sure, and perhaps her doubts had had time to crystallise for even the old man was unaware of what had actually occurred in that dreadful little summerhouse, or how near Manaton had come to condemning her to live out the rest of her life like a felon on ticket-of-leave.
For a day or so she had refused to contemplate what might have happened had her hand not brushed against the projecting edge of that stone. Then news came that Adam was back, and that the Colonel had intercepted him, and she had been obliged to take a closer look at the encounter. It struck her at once that she must have been as innocent as a three-year-old to trust Manaton to the extent that she had, and that she would consider herself fortunate if she was able, in due time, to put it out of mind, in the way she invariably dealt with unpleasant experiences. She had a feeling that this would rest upon Adam's attitude, and that attitude would depend upon how much he surmised rather than how effectively his father had pleaded her case.
Forebodings of this kind occupied her until the train chuffed out of Sydenham, heading into the golden-brown pall that stood over the city like a giant toadstool but then, little by little, her anxiety lessened, and she began to feel a small, comforting glow at the prospect of seeing him again for it seemed that he had been absent much longer than usual. Remembering the original quarrel she gave herself a little shake, calling her scattered thoughts to order, and taking advantage of the fact that she was alone in the compartment, she murmured aloud; “I’ll be myself so long as we’re in public and when he brings it up, as he's certain to do the moment we’re alone, I’ll burst into tears and bury my head in his shoulder!” It was a promise she knew herself capable of carrying out. She had done it several times in the past over trivial matters and made the discovery that tears muddled his thoughts.
He was not at the London Bridge barrier, a fact that surprised her, but his clerk Mr. Tybalt was there, and lifted his tall hat as she handed in her ticket and broke into a trot in order to keep the porter carrying her hand luggage in view. He called, excitedly, “Mrs. Swann…I’ve a carriage waiting…! I’m to drive you to the yard where Mr. Swann is detained, completing some business!” and she allowed the little man to pilot her to a four-wheeler and watched him make a great show of stowing her luggage and tipping the porter. His air of self-importance amused her, but she helped him indulge it, reflecting that all the men Adam had assembled around him paid him more genuine deference than the millhands had paid her father and that this was odd, because Adam never struck them or swore at them. It had to do, she supposed, with his army training and it crossed her mind, as the cab passed through the gates of the yard and ran between phalanxes of waggons bearing her trademark, that he was still serving in a kind of army, only now he was the general with the power of life and death over everyone else.
She looked about her with a keener interest than she would have expected, wondering why she had never visited this hub of his life, and deciding that it had more to offer in the way of a spectacle than Sam's mill that was really no more than a large brick box, enclosing a nonstop racket. Tybalt must have noticed her interest for he began pointing out various features of the place, as though he had been a Beefeater at the Tower of London showing a distinguished visitor the Crown Jewels. “There, Ma’am, straight ahead, that's the counting house where I spend my time. Those sheds are our transit warehouses, where we stow goods consigned to the docks for shipment overseas. That's the weighbridge— the checker holding the lading bills is weighing the contents of the pinnace—a one-horse van, and people new to the game always want to know how he arrives at a total when the waggon is weighed with the goods. He knows the unladen weight of the vehicle you see, and all he has to do is subtract…Ah, there goes the whistle. That means the end of the day shift and two-thirds of the men will leave now, but the late shift will stay until the last waggon comes in from the Triangle or The Bonus. There might even be a long-distance delivery, for if we’re transporting priority goods it's often quicker to send them the full distance by road on account of the delays in the goods yards, especially the London termini.”
Most of his commentary went over her head, but enough made a lodgement to introduce an element of wonder concerning the size and complexity of the undertaking. Not once, in all the time she had been married to him, had this occurred to her, for she had always thought of his obsession as something childish, almost like a
boy building a dam in a stream at the bottom of his father's garden, or a man of fashion slum-visiting in the company of other men of an equally eccentric turn of mind. Now she realised that it was not like that at all, that this was a real place of business, just like Sam's mill and just like Matt Goldthorpe's rent-collecting agency, and that all this time he and she and the children and everyone else at Tryst had been fed and housed on the proceeds of what was done about here. She said, sombrely, “Where does he…where does Mr. Swann work when he's here in London, Mr. Tybalt?” and Tybalt blinking, said, “Why right here, ma’am. Here with us. Up there in that little tower, for that's the hub of the place and always has been!” and as the cab ran down alongside the warehouse and came to a stop he pointed through the window at a square tower that looked like a church lost in a welter of bricks and sheds, as though it represented all that survived of an age of piety.
Tybalt handed her out, telling the cabby to wait for luggage and a fare to the George, and she followed the clerk up a narrow winding staircase into an octagonal room with latticed windows overlooking the river. Coloured, hand-drawn maps, of a kind she had seen him working on, covered every wall, and between the desk and the door was a strange-looking object like a huge, dress-display stand that moved on a pivot, but she only glimpsed it for he was sitting at the desk working and she noticed at once how fit and tanned he was looking, and also how pleased he was to see her. As he looked up his quick smile made her heart beat in a way that not only surprised her but convinced her there was really nothing much to worry about, for he was clearly in one of his exuberant moods. He said, leaping up, “Ha, Tybalt, thank you. Train on time?” and Tybalt replied, “Bang on time, sir. That superintendent at London Bridge has a reputation to maintain,” and then bowed himself out, ostentatiously closing the door so that they were alone in this queer, ecclesiastical-looking room, crammed with the apparatus of his life.
It was absurd, she thought, but she found herself blushing furiously, as though she was alone in a room with him for the first time, and he was not slow to notice it saying, gaily, “Why, Henrietta, you’re bringing us Tryst roses in your cheeks!” and he moved round the desk and put both hands on her shoulders, holding her off but looking at her very intently, as though searching out traces of Miles Manaton's kisses. She thought that if he did this a moment longer she would have no need to conjure up tears in order to postpone his cross-examination, so she dropped gloves and reticule on the desk and threw her arms round his neck, kissing him hungrily on the mouth and saying, “Oh, Adam…dearest! I’m so glad to be here, so glad you asked me! I’ve been very wretched, for such a long time it seems…” and then he embraced her in the way he usually did when they had been parted, and she wished heartily they were anywhere but here, where any one of his acolytes might come tapping at the door and there was nowhere they could sit apart from his swivel chair and a stool under the maps.
Some such thought must have occurred to him for he said, passing his hands over her and finally (reluctantly, she thought) letting them rest on her hips, “I’ve reserved a room at the George. We’ll stay in London a day or two for I want to show you the city. You’ve seen most of the famous places but never this London, the liver and lights of the country, and I should like that because I’ve something to explain that concerns you more than it does me.” He bent to retrieve her gloves and reticule and she noticed how young and supple were his movements, as though he had been two and twenty instead of a man approaching middle-age. She said, knowing it would please him, “Tybalt explained all manner of things as we went along. I had no idea it was so…well, so organised,” and at this one of his booming laughs escaped and he said, “What did you suppose we did up here? Play skittles? Look, I’ll give you some idea before we have dinner and later on, if you’re interested, I’ll show you the stables, forge, yard, and warehouses, but that can wait on a meal. I don’t know about you but I’m very peckish. I’ve been arguing with lawyers all day.” He led her across to the window that looked directly across a jumble of tile and slate, sliced here and there by narrow threads of traffic moving towards the river that swept in a brown curve both sides of the bridge. To the left she recognised the great dome of St. Paul's and to the right, a reach down-river, was a dock that seemed to contain all the ships in the world. Straight ahead, on the far bank, was the Tower, crowned by the familiar centrepiece that reminded her of a toy fort owned by David, the younger brother of her onetime friend Sarah Hebditch. The atmosphere, for a city far larger than Manchester or Liverpool, was relatively clear at this season of the year, but the brown mushroom of smoke she had seen from as far away as Sydenham had now changed into a semi-transparent pyramid, rose pink and chrysanthemum gold under the westering sky. The smoky smell, that found its way through the upper part of the casement, was much homelier than the reek of Seddon Moss. It wrinkled the nose, and made the eyes smart, but it contained elements other than grime and furnace belch, a whiff or two of cooking and the acrid, not unpleasant smell of horse droppings churned under wheels.
He said, cheerfully, “Well, there it is, and it's never the same from one hour to another. Granted it hasn’t the fragrance of the view from our windows at Tryst but it's a permanent reminder to keep at it, at least, that's how it always strikes me. I drew these maps in the first weeks I was here, and never a day passes when I don’t study them, and old Frankenstein over there.” He pointed to the nondescript thing she had thought of as a display stand and she saw that it was an encyclopaedia with a hundred faces, made up of well-thumbed wedges of cardboard, scrawled all over with squiggles of the kind one might expect to find on an Egyptian monument, but when she looked closely at a particular section she was aware that the squiggles were really lists of minutely written names, flanked by columns of figures and, here and there, pieces cut from the maps like those used as wallpaper in this mysterious sanctum.
“You surely know I can make nothing whatever of that,” she said, and he told her, smiling, that nobody save him could, now that Frankenstein absorbed the entire network. “Tybalt could make it produce information in its infancy,” he said, “but now he prefers the long way round.” He stood thinking a moment, “See here, I could give you the idea by a random example. Think of it as a railway Bradshaw, an atlas, and a trades directory rolled into one. What did you have for breakfast this morning?”
“Two cups of tea and a piece of toast,” she said, unhelpfully, “I was too excited to eat.”
“Well, then, yesterday?”
She pondered, entering into the spirit of the game, for she understood that it might be important to their relationship at this point. “Eggs and bacon,” she said, “two rashers, nice and thick.”
He turned to the apparatus and spun it. “Eggs—Bacon, Poultry—Pigs. Eggs we can discount, they come in from all areas by short haul, but bacon means Wiltshire, and a Southern Square bread-and-butter line. Wiltshire…” He spun the frame again, his long fingers probing here and there among the cards. “Bacon— Wiltshire—Eli Dawson & Son. Eli has a curing depot and a cut-price contract, on account of him being the first pigman we nailed down in the Southern Square. Calne is five-and-a-half miles south-east of Chippenham, and Chippenham is on the Great Western.” His fingers were flying now, reminding her of a spinner mending broken yarn. “Five-miles-plus is a short haul but bacon is heavy freight so we use frigates—two-horse vans.” He flipped out a card. “Three miles on an unsurfaced road, two miles plus over a macadamised route. In good weather an hour's run, including loading at the factory and offloading at Chippenham.” Another card emerged. “A goods train goes out of Chippenham at six-five every week night. Dawson's bacon is in a London siding by midnight and collected by the wholesaler before breakfast. If you like Wiltshire rashers for supper you could be eating them the same evening at Tryst, and you would be putting…wait a minute…three-halfpence per pound in my pocket for getting them there!”
She was so delighted that she clapped her hands, bobbing from one small foot to the other
. “Why, that's marvellous! It's like a magician taking doves out of a hat! Who ever invented that wonderful machine?”
“I did,” he said, puffing himself up like a robin in the snow, so that she squealed with laughter and then he laughed too, as much at himself as at her.
They went down the stairway to the four-wheeler where the giant Keate, whom she recognised as an occasional visitor to Tryst, was talking to the cabby. Keate said, touching his hat, “Good day to you, Mrs. Swann. Forgive me a moment…” and he turned to Adam, saying, “I’ll wait and see Goshen's haul in from The Bonus, sir. He was due an hour ago. He's probably caught up in a cart jam the other side of the bridge. Will you be in tomorrow?”
“Not until about this time. I’m hoping to show Mrs. Swann our workshop after taking her to look at the docks.”
“Very good, sir,” he said, just like a sergeant-major, and stepped forward to open the cab door and hand her inside.
It was all rather like playing a stately role in a play, she thought, a military pageant, perhaps, with undertones of comedy in which Adam was a field-marshal surrounded by a swarm of adjutants, each hanging on his commands. The force and the rhythm of his enterprise began to stir in her imagination, and its surge swept her along, as though she was a passenger on one of those expresses that had whirled her south as a bride nearly five years ago. For the first time since she had sat beside him she was conscious of privilege in a way far beyond the conventional sense, for if he was king here then it followed that she was queen, and it was surely something to be queen of an empire that engaged the attention of so many solemn-looking men and so much bustle and precision, even if it was concerned with humdrum things like breakfast rashers of Wiltshire bacon. The thought comforted her, as did the touch of his hand on hers and suddenly she felt very safe and relaxed in his presence, a sensation not entirely unfamiliar to her but one that had never previously made itself felt unless they were alone. She exclaimed, rapturously, “Oh, Adam, I do love you! You’re so good to me, you’ve always been good to me!” and lifted his hand, pressing it against her cheek.
God is an Englishman Page 50
