God is an Englishman

by R. F Delderfield

  She wriggled back into his embrace, running a hand half the length of his firm, muscled body and then, again recalling her wedding night, she lifted his hand and tucked it firmly under her breasts. Its limp presence there had always given her comfort. Tonight it represented permanence and continuity.

  Six

  1

  WHEN, IN HIS OLD AGE, ADAM SWANN LOOKED BACK ON WHAT HE LEARNED to think of, in retrospect, as the cleansing of his domestic stables, he was able to do so with humour for he saw himself in good company, notably that of the lately lamented Prince Consort, who had faced a similar situation earlier in his career as Master of Windsor.

  Albert, Adam recalled, had finally prevailed upon his wife to let him examine the royal accounts and had found, to his astonishment, that he was footing a large annual bill for candles, and that after gas had been installed in the royal apartments for time out of mind. Candles, he learned, had been ordered in bulk during the reign of his wife's grandfather and were now regarded as the perquisites of court flunkeys and this was only one sideline exploited by the swarm of servants whose duties, to say the least, were very loosely defined.

  Albert, frugally reared in faraway Saxe-Gotha, had solaced his isolation among the islanders by applying a touch of Teutonic thoroughness to a resentful household but Adam Swann, a man cast in the same mould, went further for, unlike Albert, nobody had ever implied that he was not master of his house in fact as well as title. His cyclonic descent upon Tryst a day or so after he and Henrietta had arrived at their new understanding soon passed into local legend. It was sometimes spoken of, in Twyforde Green cottages and shop-parlours, in terms of a visitation, rather as the ancestors of those same villagers might have referred to the reign of Stephen as “a time when God and all His Angels slept.”

  Having carried all Henrietta's housekeeping books into his study he remained there for two hours, emerging to make a storming descent upon the kitchen. Half an hour later a red-eyed Mrs. Hitchen, the cook, was collecting her things, assuring God and His Angels that a halfpenny-per-pound butcher's meat commission was the acknowledged perks of every cook in Kent, and that “real gentry” had been known to wink at double the rate. “I haven’t a doubt that she is speaking the truth there,” said Adam, when Mrs. Hitchen's recriminations were relayed to him. “Her error lies in the fact that we are not gentry, real or counterfeit, but tradesmen, and she must be aware that no tradesman worth his salt would pay over the odds for a joint to adjust to her preference for one butcher or another.”

  After that it was Miss Gage's turn. Celia Gage, a relative of the local rector, had enjoyed a sinecure at Tryst for more than a year as combined governess-nanny. She was not the kind of governess readily recognisable by readers of Miss Charlotte Bronte. There was nothing retiring or self-effacing about Celia Gage, or not after she had taken the measure of her situation and decided that she was answerable to no one but Ellen Michelmore, with whom she shared a predisposition to indulge in what the hen-pecked Ned Michelmore would have labelled “women's clackety-clack.” It seemed that Celia's fondness for clackety-clack had resulted in overlooked obligations in the nursery and Adam, having satisfied himself that Stella was convinced that “elephant” began with an “H,” told the governess that he was prepared to overlook this but not the fact that his infant son was still eating porridge with his fingers . The only concession he would make as regards Miss Gage was that she could stay while she sought alternative employment. Her sins, as he saw it, were those of omission, not to be bracketed with those of the cook in the matter of farming out kitchen contracts.

  All this, however, was in the nature of an overture, and no one was surprised when the outside staff was slashed from five to two after a brisk inspection of the orchard and vegetable garden behind the house. For an hour or so, pending the investigation by Adam into the distributing end of a steady traffic in plums, peaches, and greenhouse grapes, the fate of the gardener Dawson hung by a thread, but it was then discovered that Dawson's lieutenant, a man called Moffat, had a weekly rendezvous with some notable bottlers of fruit, who were marketing his produce as far afield as Purley. So Dawson stayed on, converted overnight into a hawkeyed martinet whom even the Old Duke would have promoted to the rank of provost sergeant.

  There were other minor changes and many adjustments in procedure and the chain of command, but most of them pointed in a single direction. Less than a week after the upheaval Ned Michelmore was summoned to the presence and came away with a gleam in his eye that directed him straight into his wife Ellen's quarters, where a loud outcry was heard within seconds of him slamming the door on all that remained of the indoor staff. Not even Henrietta learned what passed between “dear Ellen” and her husband, but Stillman, the handyman, whose principal duties at Tryst were to attend to the few wants of the Colonel, formed an opinion of what had been said, recognising the relayed ultimatum for what it was, a choice between instant dismissal and a shift to the county town, where Ned Michelmore had been offered an alternative post as stableman for Blubb's teams on condition he took Ellen with him. Here again Adam found himself in sympathy with the late Prince Albert, having no difficulty in recognising Ellen Michelmore as his wife's Lehzen. So long as she was entrenched, exercising control over the entire household, and flattering Henrietta into believing that no lady of the manor would be seen in her own kitchen or nursery (save for the permitted bedtime visit), it was unlikely that much progress would be made along the lines laid down over the supper table at the George.

  The handyman, Stillman, a confirmed woman-hater, had noted the expression on Ned Michelmore's face and had listened outside the housekeeper's door from the moment the first of Ellen's cries of dismay had penetrated to the bootroom. He had gifts as a raconteur and demonstrated them that same night in the bar of the “King Cade,” where he supped his ale.

  “In marches Ned, pale about the gills,” he recounted, “and when you mind his wife had come to reckon it was her who pays the quarter-rent for the place, tis no wonder Ned was slow in getting round to tellin’ her young gaffer's decided to call the tune, and time enough too, as anyone up there could tell you if they’d had an ear to the ground. Ned's bin given the choice o’ restartin’ the mill, or taking over as stableman at Maidstone, and I don’t have to tell none o’ you that that ain’t a choice at all for that mill been losin’ money since Conyer's time and couldn’t be restarted on account o’ the floods back along. Ned was for taking the job but his missis, ’earing she was to go along whether she liked it or no, threw a fit, an’ after that a shelf full o’ crocks to keep it company. Then out comes Ellen, with her hairpins fallin’ out in a shower, and stampedes all over the damned house in search o’ the missus but when she found her she come away without change. What was said between ’em I can’t tell, for I got no business upstairs, where they did their talking. All I see is Ellen comin’ down again, blotchy about the face but quiet, thank Christ, quieter’n I ever recall, an’ now they’m packing. Later on down comes the missis to me with a sparkle in her eye and a rare edge to her voice, telling me I’d best put a rare shine on the master's boots, and I take this as a friendly nod from her ladyship that there's been a sorting-out all round. Not that I didn’t see it comin’, mind, wi’ that fat thief of a cook sacked, and that Moffat, who was so generous with other folks’ fruit gone, and parson's nominee for governess under notice to quit. Come to think on it, it began brewing a week since, the day young missis comes home on the Colonel's skewbald drenched through, and with her clothes in tatters. There's more’n one story as to how that come about, but you’ll get none of ’em from me, for I’m walking a tightrope up there myself.”

  At this stage in the long recital one of Stillman's audience suggested that Swann was a hard man to please but Stillman, after a moment's thought, denied this.

  “Nay,” he said, finally, “but he's a hard man to best, or to turn aside once he's put his mind to something. Looks to me he's decided it's the missis and not them women who run the place,
and good luck to him, and to all you other mugwumps who have been soft enough to let your ole John Thomas steer you to church and lived on to regret it.”

  The majority of ex-Rifleman Stillman's audience accepted this gibe as the price of a first-class story, that would be something to carry home to their wives when their tankards were empty, but Stillman's summing-up was a fair estimate of what had occurred, for the Henrietta who returned from London was a markedly different woman from the one who had set out forty-eight hours previously, and even Adam, who looked for a change, was not fully aware of this at first. It was as though, with the title to Tryst in the family deed-box, she summoned the spirits of long-dead Conyers to witness the fact that she had it in her to equal the best of them, and it would not be too much to say she sought counsel in the building itself, pausing to listen to the whisper of old timber at the turn of the staircase, or reading something intelligible in the creak of the scullery pump-handle that had witnessed innumerable kitchen feuds down the generations. She seemed to enlarge herself not only in assertiveness and positivity, but in stature, and this despite the fact that she was soon showing unmistakable signs of pregnancy and took no pains to hide the fact. She had plodded through her previous pregnancies with a certain modest pride but concerning this one she seemed to go out of her way to advertise the fact that a third cygnet would make his appearance around February. For she had no doubt whatever that the child had been conceived, as though by decree, in the course of what she had come to regard as their truce talks at the old George where they had, one might say, agreed terms, signed articles, and dutifully exchanged hostages.

  It was because she herself viewed it in this light that she never once thought of the child as hers in the way she had indulged herself regarding the foreseeable future of Stella and Alexander. This boy (the child would hardly have the effrontery to be female) was city spawned, a living amalgam of his father's involvement with the capital, as though Adam had set himself to the task of siring an heir to his Thameside sprawl and had gone about it with the thrust and singlemindedness that he brought to all his commercial concerns. It pleased her, indeed, that it should be so. After all, on that memorable evening he had not only presented her with Tryst, but had invested her with the authority of a person who was expected to exercise supremacy in her own right and not as a cosseted deputy, and this made the loss of dear Ellen, the cook, the governess, and their cohorts, easy to bear, their very removal from the scene enabling her to settle to the business of grafting a new personality on to the house and finding in this a task that was not only absorbing but extremely satisfying.

  This was before he found her Phoebe, who arrived a month or so later, her few belongings enclosed in a basket-trunk of the kind Henrietta had carried out of Scab's Castle. It might have been the trunk that established a rapport between the two women from the moment Adam ushered her into the sewing-room, introducing her as Miss Phoebe Fraser, the daughter of his Border Triangle manager, who had had the advantage of a Scots education, and, for good measure, four years in the service of a Galloway laird, with a reputation for counting the groats and living almost exclusively on gruel.

  Phoebe was a small-boned, fresh-complexioned girl of about two and twenty, unobtrusive up to a point but extremely forthright once she had pondered a problem and made her decision. She had, everyone soon discovered, very definite opinions on a wide range of subjects, the benefit of fresh air, good table manners, the improving habit of selective reading, diet, exercise, the hour of lying down and getting up, and particularly the importance of inculcating into children at a very early age the social obligations of the fortunate towards the less fortunate. And yet she was far from being sanctimonious and was certainly not a prig, for she could be very lively and original on occasion. The children took a liking to her at once and Henrietta had never seen them better behaved than they were at the nursery table under the eye of Phoebe Fraser. As time went by she began to consult Phoebe on all kinds of matters; the best way of getting Stella's front teeth to go straight, and the likeliest means of removing claret stain from table linen, but they were never intimate, as she had once sought intimacy with Ellen, instead a partnership and mutual respect developed between them, based upon the fact that each secretly admired the other. Henrietta, a naturally impulsive and slapdash person, conceived an awesome regard for the little governess's deftness and self-discipline, whereas Phoebe looked upon Henrietta as a kind of gay adventuress, whose life had been as rich and colourful as her own had been grey and uneventful. She had, Henrietta discovered, a more reverential respect for Adam, looking upon him as a far-ranging and almost celestial being, charged with the fearful responsibility of shifting every product in the country from one point to another with despatch and safety. Perhaps she had gathered this from her father, whom Henrietta had never met or, perhaps, with her traditional northcountry acceptance of the natural superiority of the male, she was only expressing gratitude to the man responsible for winkling her out of a dull and dismal servitude in the bleak borderlands to a comfortable home in a countryside where the sun shone for at least six months of the year. At all events, Phoebe Fraser settled down very quickly, and Adam, watching from afar, congratulated himself once again on his knack of spotting a promising deputy when he met one. The children, he decided, were in good hands. Stella was soon learning her alphabet and little Alex, his tantrums exorcised by two sharp slaps on the behind, learned to use a spoon and fork instead of relying on his fingers . Peace and accord descended on the house as the paddock beeches turned to gold and warm September sunshine lit the long facade of the old house where it crouched in its half circle of woods and rhododendrons. Sometimes, as she bustled about her work, Henrietta could be heard singing one of the lively songs Mrs. Worrell had learned from the handsome girl Sam Rawlinson had found on a Liverpool quay a quarter century before, and sometimes, when Adam drove out of blue dusk, he caught a rewarding glimpse of mother, governess, and children standing in a group on the balcony under the nursery window and would run up the shallow staircase to greet them before Phoebe Fraser announced, in a voice that brooked no appeals for a respite, “Awa’ to your beds, the pair o’ ye!” and Henrietta would say, in response to his query as to how she felt, “Never better in my life. At least he spares me that dreadful vomiting the others brought on. This one seems occupied with his own concerns, for he's never still a moment. I daresay it's on account of having started life among all that bustle alongside that yard of yours.” In the next few months she said something approximating to this so often that he began, subconsciously perhaps, to read into her hints that the conception had been a deliberate act, representing a gift from her to him in return for Tryst and the new personality he had willed upon her. And although he did not comment he was none the less grateful for, unknown to her or anyone else save Tybalt, he was himself going through a period of anxiety set in train by the abrupt withdrawal and ultimate disappearance of Josh Avery, his banker and source of credit. By October of that year, the fifth since he had set out to cut his swathe across England, Adam Swann was a desperately worried man.