God is an Englishman

by R. F Delderfield

  “Yes, it did. But that isn’t the reason you’d run counter to the law to get me clear of the country.”

  “It's reason enough.” He got up, stepped over the man on the floor, and went to the window.

  A line of cabs were dropping fares at the Chanticleer and using the mews to turn. The harsh thump of a brass band had replaced the piano, and the sound seemed wildly incongruous in that setting, like fiddlers on a hearse.

  “When does that place down there slacken off ?”

  “Round about three in the morning.”

  “It's not light until seven. I could get in touch with Vosper…”

  “Leave Vosper alone. If the police have called they’ll have a man watching. Either that or the bailiff's men.” He smiled. “If you’re contemplating cloak and dagger work you’d best leave it to me. I’ve had more practice over the years.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Nothing until you know the full facts. I talked of picking your pocket from the beginning. Well then, before you try and stick your head in my noose you’d best hear I sold those stones for nearly twice the sum I quoted. Notwithstanding that I’ve still been collecting interest on the initial outlay, plus fifty per cent of your net profit over a long time. I’ve done pretty well out of you already. I was always one to drain the cup to the dregs, Adam.”

  “I’ll come myself in a frigate and turn in the mews at around three-ten, give or take a few minutes. You be at the foot of the stairs, ready to climb in the moment I stop level with the door. That's your only chance as I see it.”

  “There are conditions. With a Puritan there always is.”

  “There's one. Leave that revolver on your shrine in there. It's just possible they’ll conclude they killed each other and give us a longer start. If they come before I’m back give yourself up. These people are nothing to me, but I’m damned if I’ll have a police officer's death on my conscience.”

  He went over, unfastened the door and let himself out without looking back. At the foot of the stairs the blare of sounding brass hit him in the face like a wind and behind it was a confused uproar of laughter and squealing women. He thought, gloomily, “Uproar and violent death—they go hand in hand,” and three separate images appeared to him, the carnage at Jhansi, the roar of the Seddon Moss rioters, and general lamentation in his own drawing room, the morning Luke Dobbs died in the flue.

  3

  He came down from the tower about one carrying his overnight bag and a spare topcoat he kept there. The counting house was locked and it occurred to him that if he opened it and the safe with his private keys the night-watchman and stableman would be disinclined to believe the story that he was driving a frigate down to Blubb for a rush removal job within a few miles of Tryst. They had both looked startled when he had issued orders for the team to be harnessed up, and a large, straw-filled crate placed inside the waggon, but it was not for either to question a gaffer renowned for his eccentricities. He managed to borrow a carter's uniform cloak and cap without their knowledge, guessing there would be a hue and cry among the first shift when it was found to be missing from the rack in the waggoners’ shed. It was a detail, he thought, that he would have to explain away on his return, like his own two-day absence, and the non-existent house removal in Kent. Money was a problem. He had less than ten sovereigns about him, and the petty-cash box in the tower had yielded five more. It looked as though Josh Avery would have to start again from scratch if his passage money cost him more than fourteen pounds.

  The traffic at that time of the morning was light and he could take his time, pulling into a waggon park at Waterloo to change his hat and greatcoat for the uniform concertina cap and cloak of a regular driver. It seemed strange to the point of absurdity to be wearing his own livery and driving one of his own teams, as though he was taking part in some kind of charade that would result in ribald laughter at the yard, and perhaps as far away as the regions if he was seen and identified, but he thought this unlikely. With luck he and Avery should be clear of London by daylight, and he had taken care to choose the best team in the stable, as well as the least worked over during the last thirty-six hours.

  He crossed Westminster Bridge in thin drizzle and noted the tower clock pointed to ten past two, holding the horses at a plodding walk to save them for the long haul to the coast and trying to put his own pressing concerns out of mind. He told himself that this was not due to despair, and the prospect of running the business from here on turnover alone, but to the experience of his campaign days, when the immediate problem took precedence over the grand design. He thought, bitterly, “One damned thing at a time! As long as Avery is on the run we’re all in pawn and Tryst into the bargain. With the German Ocean between us I can at least start thinking and planning again. It’ll mean an end to expansion for years probably, and retrenchment all round,” and then he wondered if, in the end, he could hold on to both business and Tryst in the years ahead, and how back-tracking on his bargain with Henrietta might affect the recently established equilibrium of their relationship. But the thought of Josh Avery's plight obtruded and it struck him how shallow were the judgements of one man on another. He had seen Josh as a man of action, a voluptuary, a gambler, and a person who, stripped of his veneer of cynicism, was capable of projecting highly original ideas. He had never thought to see him as a fugitive from himself and even now did not see him as a scoundrel who had emptied a large sum of money held on trust into the body of a harlot. An idea that had occurred to him when Josh had first admitted the discrepancy between the real and acknowledged value of the stones had taken root in his mind. Avery, a man who had always spurned prudence, had none the less demonstrated it pretty obviously by holding on to the rubies for so long, and feeding money into the business piecemeal. Adam was virtually sure that the same prudence, the same underlying determination to buttress expansion with reserve capital, had encouraged him to lie about the extent of that capital. What had happened to it ultimately was irrelevant. It had no real bearing on their relationship, having been sucked into the vortex of the man's emotional maelstrom. There was another factor that helped to persuade him he owed loyalty to the broken man. Avery's stated reasons for remaining in that apartment for two days and a night with the dead for company had been no more than half-truths. A stronger reason was his need to confess, and Adam had a conviction that, if he had not gone to Avery then Avery, in defiance of all risk, would have come to him.

  It was coming up to three o’clock when he crossed into Chelsea and walked his team along deserted streets towards the blur of orange lights that represented a subsiding Chanticleer. The place had crowed itself hoarse. One or two drabs passed in and out, and two men, supporting one another in the penultimate stage of intoxication, emerged and staggered off in the direction of the river. The bandsmen had gone, replaced by the tinkling piano, playing the same sentimental dirge.

  It was accomplished in a moment. Wisps of river mist merged with the persistent drizzle and the mews itself was dark and silent. He turned the team, drew level with the stairway door, and checked the Clydesdales, watching their breath rise like the smoke of half-seen cannon. A figure ran crouching from the archway and scrambled through the flaps of the tarpaulin—Josh Avery on the run again at fifty, with another episode of his planless life receding into the murk.

  He took his time about it. North of the river market traffic was steady, but after Ilford, on the road to Brentwood, he turned east, choosing country routes, crossing the Crouch on the Hullbridge ferry, and moving at about seven miles an hour up the road to Maldon where he stopped to buy beer and bread and cheese. Avery made no attempt to communicate with him through the driving-box curtains, and when, on an empty stretch of road, Adam glanced through the chink, he saw him stretched full-length on the sacks and sound asleep, bluish stubble showing on his pale cheeks and small, aggressive chin. Beyond Tolleshunt Major, as dawn crept over the misted fields, he gave the team a breather and took a short nap himself but still Avery did not
stir and Adam saw no reason to wake him, calculating that this was his third night on the run. He thought, “It's under ten miles to Colchester but if we skirt it, and bear east for Wivenhoe, we’ll fetch up outside Harwich by dusk,” and remembered then that Clydesdales were tireless and could haul two to three tons over a metalled road for hours on end if they weren’t pushed.

  They jogged on through a sparsely populated countryside, with here and there a cottage light winking through the early morning mist. Now and again they passed south-moving drays but on some stretches they might have been the only living creatures moving across a flat, half-seen landscape. The day wore on but the sun remained hidden, seen as a coy glow over the estuary. By late afternoon beyond Wivenhoe and, by Adam's reckoning, halfway between Goose Green and Wix, Avery's grizzled head popped through the curtains like the devil in a puppet-show. “Where are we?” he demanded, and Adam noted that his long sleep had wrought a decided change in him. Here was something approximating the familiar Avery again, picking his way among a world of fools, all of whom could be bought or cozened, and when Adam told him he said, brusquely, “You don’t have to go any farther. I can contact my man at a tavern just beyond the Ramsey fork. Pull in and bivouac. I need a shave and we could both use a hot toddy.”

  The man's resilience ruffled him slightly so that as soon as they had a fire going under the lee of a clump of pines he pretended to busy himself in the waggon. He was still there when he heard Avery whistling “Lillibulero” and thought, “Damn him, he's like a cork. A good sleep, and the prospect of showing a clean pair of heels, is all he needs to salve his conscience,” and for a moment his disapproval did battle with his envy at the ability to grow such a damnably thick skin and whistle “Lillibulero” while someone else pulled your chestnuts out of the fire.

  His sourness survived the first pannikin of toddy brewed over the fire, and when Avery said, cheerfully, “Well then, it seems we got off without much trouble,” he growled, “Aye, without much on your part. Now I’m left to salvage what's left, while you beg your way across a Continent, I suppose. But you’ll manage, no doubt. In a few months’ time you’ll be wining and whoring again, while I’ll still be here with my nose to the grindstone!”

  Avery was a hard man to deflate. “You could always come along,” he suggested, and Adam said, with a snort, “I like a pattern to my life,” and then, as the spirit warmed him, his boorishness moderated and he produced the fourteen sovereigns he had scraped together, saying it was all he could raise without leaving himself open to awkward lines of inquiry from Tybalt and others. Avery pocketed the money and produced the ring taken from Esmerelda's finger. For a moment he studied it thoughtfully, then said, “This is yours. It's a little joker and there's a flaw in it but I daresay you could raise a few hundred on it. No one is likely to question it after all this time. The Sepoy Mutiny is ancient history now.”

  “I won’t touch that either. Fourteen pounds won’t get you far and you’ll need a stake. Don’t look for one from me, Josh. I’ll be hard put to it to keep the service running.”

  Avery glanced at him across the fire, jigging his pannikin on his thumb. Finally he said, “I won’t thank you for, in that respect at least, we’re alike. Neither of us care to be under an obligation to anyone but I’ll give you a piece of advice to reflect on in case you’re inclined to take up panic stations as soon as I’m over the hill. You might say I’m not qualified to give a law-abiding citizen like you good advice but I am for all that. I’ve knocked about, and met most kinds and so have you, but there's a difference. I’ve little enough character of my own but I’m interested in character. I’ve made it my business to study other people's and sometimes I bet with myself on their prospects. I’m not often wrong. Those stones aren’t important to you and never were really. I’d wager twice their value against a crooked sixpence that you’ll achieve any damned thing you want to achieve and no time lost on the way. Why? Because you’ve got the right combination of qualifications; patience, staying power, a monstrous self-conceit, and a streak of enterprise into the bargain. A good many men who make up their mind to be someone have all that but still come a mucker. You won’t, if only because you’re uniquely endowed to run a business, any kind of business that involves a big labour force.”

  “It's late in the day to sit there giving me a character reference, Josh.”

  “No charge. The fact is you’ve got what's known as the common touch and don’t deceive yourself into thinking it's at all common in this day and age. It's rare, especially among individualists. You’ve seen very little of me these five years, but I’ve had my eye on you, and I wouldn’t have encouraged you to spread your wings if I hadn’t known precisely what I was doing. You can command loyalty and that's worth all the backing in the Bank of England. If you find yourself within hailing distance of Queer Street go forward, not back. Double the stakes and push on, so long as you remember to take the men who trust you into your confidence.”

  It was curious, Adam thought, how the wheel made a full turn every so often and found him sitting over a bivouac fire with a single companion, being preached at concerning his fitness to go out and smite the Amalekites. In his mind's eye he saw his wife, then a slip of a girl and herself a fugitive, suggesting he used his name as a trade mark as they sat under the Pennines. And as recently as last summer another woman, Edith Wadsworth, had given him advice very similar to Avery's—to stick it out, without deviating from his original course, to push on, believing in the certainty of arriving with trumpets in the years left to him. And now here was Josh, a man fleeing for his life, telling him that he could run a freight line on a compound of credit and loyalty, urging him to put aside all thoughts of retrenchment and rely on his own judgement and the men who marched under his banner, notwithstanding the period of extreme financial stringency that awaited him.

  He said, “That's well enough so far as the firm goes, Josh, but there's Tryst. I’ve paid out four thousand on it and am obliged to find the other seven by the end of the year. How's that to be done? Every penny I earn between now and then is earmarked for wages, stable rents, running expenses, and renewals. Suppose I found a way to shed that millstone, wouldn’t the wisest course be to shut down the least profitable districts?”

  “You want to do that?”

  “No, I don’t want it, I hate retreat. I’ve got a good marriage but ownership of that house hangs on it. I don’t expect you to understand that, and I’m disinclined to spell it out, but you can take it from me that it is so. Tryst is to her what Swann-on-Wheels is to me.”

  “Then dig your heels in. You can mortgage most things but not dreams. Bluff it out. Bluff your customers, bluff your creditors, and match those tightfisted Conyer lawyers with a better lawyer of your own. But don’t bluff your work force. Lay out your hand and let them see you play it. You’ve lost a partner but I was never important to you. Tybalt, Keate and the depot managers are your real partners.”

  He stood up, dusting his breeches, and Adam, also rising, held out his hand. Avery did not appear to see it. He said, carefully, “There's just one more thing. You can always give a busy man another job but this one at least won’t involve you with the law. You remember Charity Stanhope?”

  Adam remembered Charity, the wife of Colonel Stanhope, whose involvement with Avery had rocketed him out of the Company service more than eight years ago. He remembered her as a silly, pretty woman, with a soft mouth and the limpid expression of a not-too-intelligent child, and also that she had believed at least half the lies Josh Avery had whispered in her ear at regimental soirees in Bengal. “She was packed off home, wasn’t she? Soon after the scandal broke?”

  “Shortly before,” Avery told him, “but that old fool Stanhope took her back as soon as he went on half-pay. He's dead now, and she was sharp enough to wriggle back into his will. He didn’t leave much but it was enough to get her another husband. She's living near Bath.”

  “You went on seeing her?”

  “God no, not f
or years. But we had a child. A girl.”

  “She's with her mother?”

  “No. It was a condition of Stanhope's that she should ditch the child before she was invited back to bed. I had the child placed in a convent near Folkestone, the Convent of the Holy Family. She's about eight now, a whimsical little thing, called Deborah.”

  “Deborah what?”

  “Avery. I acknowledged her. Why not? I’m not much for sentiment, and I’ve no business bringing up children, but I made it my business to call and see her now and again. I daresay she’ll miss me. It's been known from time to time. Will you look in when you’re that way and see if she needs anything?”

  “If she's eight years old she’ll want to know what's happened to you. What the devil am I to tell her?”

  “Oh, you’ll think on something. A man who replaces a swan's wings with a pair of wheels shouldn’t be short on fairytales.” He held out his hand and Adam shook it. Now that they were parting, with little prospect of meeting again, the last of his impatience with the man evaporated. He saw him as little more than a picturesque vagabond, a leftover from the days when men of good family took it into their silly heads to walk to Jerusalem in topboots, to drive hell-for-leather along the Brighton turnpike with beery old rascals like Blubb, or wager a thousand guineas on the result of a snail race. He had managed to fit Blubb into the pattern, but there was no place for an Avery in the new society, where even royalty had become respectable, and where grocers, tailors, and ship's chandlers were attending church regularly and building stucco villas to accommodate purse-proud wives and a swarm of dutiful children. He said, “Good luck, Josh. I should take it as a favour to hear how you’re faring from time to time.”