God is an Englishman

by R. F Delderfield

  The rattle of china awakened her and she sat up, at a loss to know where she was and then, half recollecting, astonished to find it still daylight.

  The door was opening and the maid appeared, a smile on her rosy face, and before Edith had knuckled her eyes he appeared, striding across the room in his high, brown riding boots, saying, with quite unnecessary gusto, “Why, there you are, my love! God bless my soul, what a pleasant surprise! Have I disturbed you?” and to the girl, “Over there by the window and draw the curtains. Here, catch!” and he spun her a coin that earned him a curtsey. Then she was gone and he was standing over the bed looking down at her with laughter in his eyes and the corners of his mouth puckered with the joviality he had apparently assumed for the benefit of the girl. The expression left him, reluctantly she thought, as though he had not yet made up his mind what expression should succeed it.

  Suddenly, and treacherously, all the confidence that had carried her across the full width of England was banished from the room by his presence and she saw now, when it was too late to do anything but blink, that she had lost the initiative by falling asleep in that inexplicable fashion and that he was not a man to let her regain it. She wondered why, having gone to such pains to obtain the advantage, she had neglected to rehearse a speech, or at any rate an attitude. As it was, with him standing there like a doctor attending a scared child, her mind had never been so blank, or her tongue less ready to frame words, and this sense of bewilderment persisted, even when he sat down on the bed, saying, “Oh, come now, don’t look at me as if I was demanding the ransom. I was obliged to put on some kind of show, wasn’t I? They said you had gone to your room supper-less, but it didn’t occur to me that you…” and suddenly he stopped and she saw, with tremendous relief, that his quick wits were already at work on the reason for her stupefaction. He said, laughing, “You didn’t intend to be caught asleep. You just dropped off,” and she nodded, so that the expression in his eyes was tolerant and he lifted his hand touching her hair, still dressed in its chignon, with the carefully poised coils specially arranged to offset the new puff bonnet she had travelled in.

  His touch was light and playful, and again she had a vivid sense of being whirled back to her girlhood, this time into the presence of a cheerful young doctor, who was kindness itself but represented, by his presence at the bedside, a crisis of some magnitude. She said in a voice that did not seem to be hers, “You… you don’t have to stay, Tom. Not from kindness, that is,” and then, despairingly, “It seemed a simple thing to do. I just thought of it and then…well, I did it. Without thinking. In a kind of trance.”

  “You regret it now?”

  “Yes, I do. Very much. It's a trick. A silly, shabby trick, and I can’t begin to think…” and she stopped because suddenly the enormity of her behaviour, and the cold, calculating way in which she had gone about the business, revealed her to herself as someone who was incapable of unselfish affection.

  “Not a trick. Let's say a hoax.”

  “No, not a hoax! I didn’t come here to play a joke on anybody. I had quite a different idea when I set out and after I actually got here until…well, until just a moment ago, when you came in with that girl.”

  “I see. And then?”

  “Now it seems quite monstrous that I should do this to you. For the purpose I did do it.”

  “You left the backdoor open. The woman said something about my room being available, on account of an early start I’m supposed to make. That puzzled me but I played up. I said I’d take the key, and perhaps go to my room after supper, and that puzzled her; that a man should occupy two beds in one night.”

  His tolerance began to mellow her, not dramatically but gently, so that she was at least capable of peeping round the door of incredulity and contemplating anew the motives that had brought her to this sorry pass. She said, “That note…I must have been coming to my senses even then. I said it was up to you, didn’t I, and it is, even now. You’ve got your key. Take your supper along and go about your business in the morning.”

  “Don’t make my decisions. Make your own, Edith.”

  She considered, thinking it strange that he could command that much generosity, and also, perhaps, that he should confuse her embarrassment with fear, or modesty.

  “I made mine by putting myself in this position.”

  “That's true, but you mentioned the word “trance.” People can think themselves into extraordinary situations and still be scared of the consequences. That's something I have to be sure about, my dear.”

  It was true, she supposed, and it meant that she owed him an explicit explanation.

  “I haven’t the least doubt that I’m very much in love with you, Tom. I didn’t think myself into that.”

  “It's possible.”

  “Not at my age it isn’t. What's the time?”

  “What the devil does it matter what time it is?”

  “It matters very much.”

  “About ten.”

  “In two hours I’ll be thirty. That's one reason why I’m here. If you hadn’t written, to say you couldn’t get back as arranged, it's possible I shouldn’t have made such a fool of myself.”

  He put his hand in his breeches pocket and drew out a little package that he tossed on the bed. ‘‘Open it.”

  Her fingers plucked awkwardly at the wrapping and it came away, revealing a small, five-sided leather box, fitted with a tiny thumb-spring. She pressed the spring and the lid popped up. Inside, on a bed of blue velvet, was a thin circlet of gold, set with three small diamonds, hardly more than large chippings. There was something else too, a screw of tissue paper, and for some reason this deflected her attention from the ring so that she set the box in the hollow of the coverlet and unwrapped the paper. It was a broader, heavier ring, gold and unembellished.

  She held it in the hollow of her hand, sensible of its weight and peering down at it in the fading light. She heard him say, “Not quite up to Hatton Garden standards but I at least acquired both conventionally. They’re the first rings I ever handled in that respect.”

  She could have wept for him and for herself too. She knew very little about jewellery but enough to tell her that what she held in her hand represented about two months’ wages on his rates. She wondered why, since he had gone this far, he had not tossed the latest batch of Headquarters’ directives over the nearest hedge, and come flying to her from wherever he was the minute he walked out of the shop with that package in his breeches pocket, but then she saw that this would have undermined the flimsy structure of a life he was rebuilding, not only for himself but for her.

  She said, “Dear God, Tom, if I’d known…guessed…This makes my coming here so wrong…so unfair. I should ask you if you’ve got second thoughts?”

  “Well, now,” he replied, with his characteristic blend of irony and gaiety, “that's one way of looking at it, for you do have a tendency to stampede a man. But I’d be a fool to hold that against you. Nobody could say I was much of a catch and to have a busy woman chase one across England could be regarded as very flattering.”

  She held out her arms and he threw himself forward, showering her face with kisses. The box slipped away in the folds of the bedclothes and her hand blindly pursued it, capturing it and pressing it or him but without separating her mouth from his.

  “Slip it on, Tom. Now!”

  “You mean both, I take it?” and, finding her hand, “Since you announced yourself as Mrs. Wickstead. didn’t it occur to you to wear ring?”

  “I kept my gloves on.”

  He slipped both rings on her finger with a flourish that seemed to her to proclaim all those aspects of him that she found so boyish and endearing, aspects that most men seemed to leave behind with their childhood. He was tremendously elated by the neatness with which he had trumped her ace, and she supposed many women would have thought of this as naïve but she did not. It was an essential part of him explaining, to her mind, both his male gentleness and his joie de vivre. He said, ki
ssing her ringed hand with a final flourish, “Are you hungry, Mrs. Wickstead? There's cold ham, tongue, and pickles over there. Raspberry tart, too, with custard pie and a bottle of Beaune.”

  “Later,” she said, “I don’t think I could do justice to it yet. Could you?” “No,” he said, “It's too late for supper and too early for breakfast.” He stood up and she saw him whirling his key on his forefinger. “How soon can a man get married if he's in a prodigious hurry?”

  “Three weeks, I believe, since you’ve already established residence in Peterborough.”

  “It's far too long,” he said, tossing the key on the night table, “so I’ll have to trouble you to help me pull off these boots, Mrs. Wickstead. They’re a snug fit.”

  She skipped out of bed and pushed him into the basket chair, kneeling and grasping heel and toe as he wiggled his toes, bracing himself against the pull. They struggled then for a moment and when his boots were off he lifted her back on the bed, saying, “Now do something else for me. Loosen your hair,” and she reached up, withdrawing the fastenings, so that the carefully arranged chignon dissolved and cascaded over her shoulders. He reached behind her, stroking it gratefully. “You’ve never made enough of your hair,” he said. “It's pretty and strong and plentiful but whenever I’ve seen it it's been bundled up any old how as though it was a nuisance.”

  “Sometimes it is,” she said, “when I’m busy and doing a man's work.”

  They might, she reflected, have been man and wife a very long time and gaily celebrating some private occasion of their own, a homecoming or an anniversary. He ran his hand down her cheek, his fingers moving deliberately and possessively. “Somebody has been tinkering with your entry in the parish register,” he said. “Thirty, indeed! We’ll give it as twenty-three. That gives me a five-year start and the necessary authority. Get back to bed, wife,” and crossed to the closet, loosening his cravat.

  RE-ENCOUNTER:

  1866

  1

  Diligently and with characteristic tenacity, he went in search of compensation. His ensign, in the earliest days, was desperation, but later on, when he had adapted to the routine of the clinic, and had been fitted with his leg, his inspiration and talisman was Jolly Jack Wickett, the maimed lancer, so that he began, little by little, to graft humour on to his hurt like a new skin.

  Humour, until then, had never been a strong point with Adam Swann. He could see a joke with the next man, and was far from being a solemn man, of the type common enough in the mess and the city, but he had always regarded the antics of clowns like “Circus” Howard and Hamlet Ratcliffe with mild impatience. Later on, when he was waging his own private war, there had been no time for levity, but now, committed to the battle of his life, humour stole upon him like a genial, uninvited guest, and was presently made welcome and accepted as the life and soul of the sorry party.

  The hall of mirrors was his playground for here, with reflections cavorting along on four sides of a room adjoining the gymnasium, he could keep track of his progress, from the first lurching stagger to the ultimate sailor's roll, and glimpses of his profile, as well as his gait, sometimes struck him as droll, so that the transition from the first ironic smile to a full-blooded chuckle was inevitable. He acquired the trick of escaping from the bumbling, lopsided creature who moved clumsily between the handrails, and learned to study it from afar, noting its slow, desperately earnest grapple for balance and dignity. And presently, in a strange and secret way, he formed an alliance with it, so that the relationship between them ripened into affection, and the essential Adam Swann would goad it to perform prodigies of enterprise, despite the nag of the tender stump under the pad.

  His initiative came to play too, so that he evolved, as time went on, all manner of tricks, subterfuges, and even mechanical adjustments, and had the more conservative of the doctors trying to slow his pace but he ignored their cautionary protests. He knew precisely what he was about and by the turn of the year was virtually his own physician, so that they said of him, among themselves, “Let Swann set his own pace,” and he did, stumping along the gravel paths as far as the lodge gates, and presently, when spring sunshine glittered on the snow-capped peaks across the lake, as far as the lake itself, where he would watch paddle-steamers churning the bilious blue water and test his footing on the slippery planks of the jetty.

  Ultimately, to their collective astonishment, he demanded a horse, and they stood around watching him master the art of mounting from the right and settling himself in the stirrups with his left leather four holes lower than his right, because he still found difficulty in adapting to the springs of the kneecap; after that, of all things, he wanted to row and did, learning to offset the stronger pull to starboard induced by the superior brace of his sound leg. From the first stumbling weeks he had been their star pupil but now, as he worked his way doggedly towards a provisional discharge date, he became a kind of elder statesman in a cabinet of cripples, and they took to consulting him on points involving techniques and new apparatus for patients less equipped for such a struggle. It was, they all decided, a virtuoso performance, and secretly he thought so himself. Jolly Jack, he decided, would have to look to his laurels if they ever met in the future.

  He was not alone in his sense of renewal that spring. Unknown to him, the experience was shared all over the network, from Fraser away in the far north, to Dockett, reining in above Freshwater Bay to watch a full-rigged ship cresting up Channel before a westerly that would soon carry it beyond Beachy Head if the skipper knew his business, and the crew were not as worked over as Dockett felt after such a winter.

  A sense of survival permeated the network. Fraser had shifted his main base from Hexham to Berwick, reckoning that at least half his hauls struck north and north-west across the Border, so that his present headquarters might have done duty for the camp of a mediaeval raider planning a big-scale foray as soon as the Cheviot streams were fordable. And this, in a sense, was how Fraser thought of it, as he planned his routes and costed his hauls under the walls of a town Scotsmen had coveted for a thousand years.

  Over in Salford, where Catesby's pinnaces plied in enclaves formed by the most congested rail network in the island outside the metropolis, the man Adam thought of as a visionary, and his father-in-law regarded as a potential Danton or Marat, had his worries, but they were of a private nature. The much-publicised lockout of the Sheffield file trades in February acted as a spur to men like Catesby, who had never lost faith in the dream of a Trades Congress, embracing every factory, yard, mine, ropewalk, and distillery in Britain. Now that the winter crises were behind him he could devote time to stump oratory, preaching with the fervour and consistency of Peter the Hermit recruiting for a crusade. Unite! Amalgamate! Select your delegates! Eschew parochialism! Take up the cause of unity in every sphere of exploitation of man by man! Oh, hear ye and heed ye, at pithead and foundry! Pass the word among the spinners, the weavers, the colliers, the potters, yes, even among the Swann carters, secure in their minimum wage and maximum working day. For in unity alone at the Sheffield conference, planned for July, could reciprocal agreements pioneered by men like Swann be forced on diehards like his father-in-law, to whom the workshop was still an arena.

  Over in the Mountain Square, Bryn Lovell heard echoes of these rumblings, but he paid small heed to them. His reading taught him that justice was not to be sought in platform resolutions but in the observances of certain moral laws, of which keeping faith with the source of one's bread and cheese was the most important. His industrial philosophy was very simple. One contracted and was therefore obligated, and the dedicated would have dismissed him as a lickspittle, which he was not. Of all Swann's mandarins in the period that was just behind them only Lovell had never botched a run, or failed to deliver on time. It was on this, inside his own patch, that Swann's reputation rested, but it was equally characteristic of Bryn Lovell that he worked less overtime than his contemporaries, for he had other matters in train, among them teaching a flock of
stepchildren to read and write. As the days lengthened he could have been seen any evening in the garden of his cottage, hard at work with primer and blackboard, and surrounded by his attentive coffee-coloured class, so that passers-by (if they were strangers to the district) might have mistaken him for an usher rather than what he was, the man who earned his bread hauling goods all over the Principality and had won his footing winkling fifty-seven Welshmen from a living tomb.