“You can’t guess?”
“If I had to I’d say a boy.”
“You’d be right.”
They were silent for a moment. Then he said, “Is he christened, or were you waiting for me?”
“We were waiting.”
“Ten weeks and not even a name!”
She hesitated, wondering if it was possible to convey to him the communion she had established with the child without sounding like one of those heroines of Mrs. Henry Wood or Miss Braddon.
“I thought we’d call him Edward, after your father. Unless you had a preference. I think of him as Friday, Man Friday. I even call him that when we’re alone.” Suddenly she felt closer to him in every way than at any time in the past, and this had nothing to do with that clutter downstairs in the sewing-room, but everything to do with the child he was holding. She said, “It isn’t easy to explain, Adam, not even to myself. But it isn’t fanciful either. Stella, Alex, even George who seemed to represent something special between us, didn’t really exist for me until they were born, but he did. He was always a person—no, person isn’t what I mean—a presence. Could a man understand that, I wonder?”
“I daresay this man could if he put his mind to it.”
“Well, then, suppose I put it like this. When we knew you stood a chance, and afterwards, when it was clear you would be away almost a year, everyone helped, particularly Deborah, who was a tremendous comfort, so much so that I can never look on her as anyone else's child. But with him it was more than that. We were never separated you see and we did everything together, and that meant I was never really separated from you, not for a single moment. I don’t have to tell you where and when he was conceived. You were remembering it a moment ago, but perhaps you’ve forgotten that that day, when I met you on the edge of the copse, everything changed between us, and I suppose this had a lot to do with how I felt about what came of it.”
She stopped, wondering if she was making sense to him.
“Go on,” he said, prompting her, “there's far more to it than that.”
“Yes, there is. He wasn’t just you in the physical sense, but in every way. That's what I mean when I say he was a person months before he was born. Up at the yard, and through all the worrying times when your letters didn’t mean much and there was so much to see to he was you. We sorted things out together and waited and hoped as one person. There, I can’t do better than that, no matter how hard I try.”
“You’ve done very well,” he said. “I doubt if that chap Dickens could do much better. There's one thing, however. You asked if I had any preference for a name and I have, in view of what you’ve just told me. Call him Giles.”
“Giles.” She savoured the name and found it crisp and pleasing. “I like that. Yes, I like that very much. It suits him.”
“You can be sure as to that,” he said. “Giles is the patron saint of cripples.”
“Nobody will ever think of you as a cripple.”
“No,” he said, cheerfully, “I’ll make sure of that. But I think you might have, if it hadn’t been for him,” and he lifted the child and kissed it. The salutation had a proud and possessive element she had never witnessed in greeting his other children. There was nothing more to be said and even Giles acknowledged this for he began to whimper, so that she reached up for him, saying, “Give him to me. Any other child would have been bawling his head off long since but even Father Confessors have to be fed,” and she sat and settled the child on her lap and unbuttoned her blouse.
He stood there musing, his back to the light, and although she was absorbed with the child she knew that his mind was occupied assembling the pieces of the new pattern of their lives, and that whatever he might make of the task it would bring him infinitely more fulfilment than he had derived from the years behind them. He said, as she freed the top tapes of her corset and shrugged herself half out of her chemise, “Would it embarrass you if I watched?” and she replied, “That's a silly question coming from you. Especially in the circumstances.” She lifted the child to her full rounded breast and then, without being aware of her absorption, settled herself more comfortably and forgot him.
She would have been interested, however, had she happened to glance up, for he was looking at her more objectively than he had ever looked at anyone. He would have said, an hour ago, that she could never hope to surprise him much, not if they shared another half-century as man and wife, and yet she had and that very dramatically, and he wondered how he could have been so blind and deaf to her potentialities, for until then he had always thought of himself as more discerning than most. He told himself that all her best qualities had been latent, awaiting a time to emerge and proclaim themselves, but he knew this was a makeshift excuse. He had hints over the years but had ignored them and wryly, half-reluctantly, he acknowledged why. Obsessed with her physically he had never deployed her as he might have done, to the advantage of both of them. It had taken circumstances that would have crushed most women to establish beyond doubt that the role she had played in his life up to this moment had been no more than adequate, and the fault for this omission lay with him not with her, for what had he ever demanded of her but functions that could have been performed by a middling-to-good housekeeper, and one of those forlorn girls in Kate Hamilton's establishment? He thought, “Well, I’ve had my lesson, and I’m not likely to forget it in a long time,” and he bent over her, brushing her hair with his lips. Then he stumped across the room and out into the corridor as she called, gaily, “We’ll have supper at seven. Take them all outside, I’ll be down in thirty minutes!” and he lifted his hand in acknowledgment as he closed the door. He could not trust himself to speak.
4
At this season of the year it was light on the flat lands of The Bonus a few minutes to five and if the sky was clear, as it was today, the first rays of the sun went exploring up the estuaries of the rivers, skimming over the surface of slow-moving currents and under bridges that Vicary, Swann's adjutant hereabouts, had hauled timber to rebuild after the spates of the winter. The river levels were very low now after a month without so much as a shower, and Vicary's teams, still on charter to the bridge builders, could cross at a dozen points, saving as much as a mile in a five-mile haul, but Vicary never harried his carters. Working for municipalities he was acquiring municipal habits and took his time about things. He could not be chivvied, as his colleagues in the Crescents further north had been chivvied by that hustler in petticoats at Peterborough.
At precisely twenty-nine minutes past seven, therefore, when the sun was already high, Vicary lit his pipe, gave the yard porter a nod, and watched him draw back the bolts to let the first frigate through. Then, pondering the morning's mail, he returned to his office, glancing anew at the round robin Tybalt had distributed with a view to collecting for a staff presentation to the Gaffer, now back at his post after an absence of almost twelve months. Vicary, an amiable, unambitious man, wondered if the loss of a leg would slow Swann down and hoped, without malice, that it would. To Vicary's mind there was altogether too much bustle about the world these days and for himself he could not see where it was leading or what it achieved. Settling himself in his chair he waited for his kettle to boil on the spirit stove that a grateful Harwich skipper had given him when he had delivered a spare sail days ahead of schedule. There would be time enough to go through the day's invoices and begin the day's route-plotting when he had finished reading what his newspaper had to say about the defeat of Mr. Gladstone's reform bill, and the current shindig brewing between Austrians, Prussians, and Italians. Vicary took a mild interest in world politics, but it was the kind of attention a man at home in bed might pay to a gale that was rattling his windows.
Up-to-date as regards what was happening at Headquarters, in Westminster and the Chancellories of Europe, Vicary was out-of-date as regards affairs on his doorstep. His sympathy for Goodbody and Horncastle, deputy managers of the Crescents Central and North, was wasted for, by now, they were both a
ware that a happy set of circumstances had shifted them beyond the range of Edith Wadsworth's goad, and each approved heartily of Edith's successor, a very amiable young fellow called Tom Wickstead, who had appeared from nowhere and succeeded, to everyone's astonishment, in belling the cat. He had not only prised the Wadsworth lass from the seat of power along the East Coast but had unaccountably married her and given her something to think about apart from goods consigned for Grimsby that somehow found their way to Hull. For Wickstead, it was decided in territory reaching from Spalding to Redcar, was a coaxer not a chivvier, and men like Goodbody and Horncastle were relieved to get their orders from a man again. They had conceded Edith Wadsworth's ability, initiative, and diabolically accurate memory but both, at one time or another, had cowered under the lash of her tongue. Now, with male arrogance, they were satisfied that they could identify the source of the Wadsworth woman's tiresome pursuit of perfection. She had not been Swann's mistress after all, it seemed. All she had wanted, when it came to bedrock, was someone—anyone—to tuck her up at nights and someone, thank God, had volunteered for the job. Throughout the whole network that season a period of unwonted somnolence succeeded the ardours of a long, hard winter, but nowhere was the respite more noticeable than in the Swann provinces reaching from the north bank of the Thames to the south bank of the Tees, where Wickstead shared the credit with the June weather. There was, in fact, a grain of truth in this, for once Wickstead's appointment was confirmed Edith was seldom seen about the yard but could be sought more profitably in the market, where her familiarity with wholesale prices enabled her to fill a shopping basket at half the cost demanded of the average housewife. Cooking and house-scouring kept her busy during the day, but in the evenings she had leisure to address herself to a more familiar task and might be said to have adopted the role of governess between supper and bedtime. Anyone passing the Wicksteads’ uncurtained downstairs window at this time of day could have seen her putting her pupil through his paces with a day book, a Bradshaw, various ordnance maps, and other primers. The exchange of conversation on these occasions was not what one might expect between newlyweds, home from a three-day honeymoon at Cromer, but was concerned, in the main, with haulage rates, weight capacities, distances between points A and B, and the integrity of a thousand and one local merchants who used Swann-on-Wheels to shift goods from warehouse to customer.
Perhaps it was these evening lessons that enabled Tom Wickstead to surprise old hands like Goodbody and Horncastle that summer and later, when the quarterly returns were sent in, to confound Tybalt, who remarked to his friend Keate, “That new chap, Wickstead, the one who married Miss Wadsworth. We were mighty lucky to find him. For a Johnny Raw he seems to me to have an astonishing grasp of essentials!”
The early morning sun that probed the sluggish rivers of Bonus country never caught Fraser by surprise. Often, by the time it had touched the eastern folds of the Cheviots, or the long slopes of the Pennines where they fed the Tees, Tyne, and Tweed, it would light on a load of plate glass he was hauling inland from the coastal industrial complex, flashing a heliographic message across the heedless dales. Fraser was now indifferent to who ruled at Headquarters, being obsessed with a personal ambition, or rather two ambitions. He meant, before he put his feet up, to win the Swann accolade for the highest annual turnover, and was in fact already lying third to Catesby in the Polygon, and Godsall in the Kentish Triangle. He reckoned on doing this within two years, when he would be sixty but in the meantime his sights were set on another target. Week by week he was slowly enlarging his Scottish bridgehead, and if this luck held he would soon be hauling as far north as the Tay, and perhaps even beyond, into the heartlands of his ancestors. The time would come, perhaps, when Swann would open a Scottish depot, and if he did who was better qualified for the post of gaffer up here? He would sit pondering this under the walls of Berwick during his rare slack periods. It would be very pleasant, he told himself, to return home after a lapse of two centuries with a title of Viceroy bestowed on him by the English.
West of the Pennines, in the rich agricultural districts where Catesby could sometimes be found roving the triangle between the cotton belt, the northwestern coalfield, and the pastoral country watched over by Skipton Castle, the men of the Polygon were forgetting there had been a four-year famine, due to a bloody family quarrel on the far side of the Atlantic. But Catesby did not forget. Whenever he came out here—to give his lungs a spring-clean as he put it—he would reflect upon the tendency of Lancastrians to cram all their eggs in one basket. To the north and east, over the fells and the backbone of England, the sky was washed clean, but to the south the pall of a resurrected King Cotton hung like a saffron banner over a score of cities, all within artillery range of Manchester, and it would occur to him that the Belt might not survive a second beating like the one administered by the war between the states. He did not mourn his son Tarn now, having satisfied himself that the boy had died in a bonny cause, but he would have preferred to see mill owners like Rawlinson learn something useful from the long ordeal, if only for the sake of the men and the lasses who looked to them for wages. For of all Swann's managers, Catesby was the only one who understood the real reasons for his employer's spectacular success. First Swann had won the confidence of his employees by letting it be seen that he did not regard them as surly beasts, or expendable machines. Secondly, he made sure that the net he threw across England was so finely meshed that it could trap anything from a pin to a blast furnace, and this, to Catesby's way of thinking, was proof of a prescient mind. Lancashire would do well to follow Swann's example and diversify while there was still time, for who could say when some other calamity halfway across the world would bring every loom in the country to a standstill? It had happened once and it could happen again, but next time, please God, it would not find the workers defenceless. A way must be found to divert some of the wealth accumulating to the few to the many, and the only way this could be achieved short of revolution was by instituting a system of collective bargaining. It seemed to Catesby that there was more chance of squeezing this kind of concession from a variety of trades than from the closely knit, brass-knuckled association of master-spinners, who ruled Lancashire like a consortium of feudal barons. The war in the States was over, but it would be a long time, he supposed, before the bugles blew the cease-fire up here, or in the mines, or in the Black Country beyond the southern skyline.
Bryn Lovell was the last manager to hear that Adam Swann was back at work. When Tybalt's round robin reached the Mountain Square Lovell was not at his headquarters. He was enjoying his first holiday in ten years. The day his mulatto wife opened the Headquarters’ letter marked “urgent” Bryn was in the far northwestern corner of his domain, having made up his mind that it was time his coffee-coloured stepsons learned something of their national heritage. Nobody was likely to mistake Bryn's stepsons for Welshmen, but they were Welsh for all that, having been born and raised in the Principality, and it did not seem right to Lovell that they should grow to manhood unaware of the privilege conferred upon them in this respect.
He took advantage of the warm weather and a long, cross-country haul to Llanberis quarries, packing them all into a frigate as supernumerary teamsters, even though the eldest was not yet twelve, and the youngest, a merry little fellow called Shadrach, only six. Sleeping in the waggon, and cooking meals by the roadside, they crossed Wales from south-east to north-west, and while the waggons were loading Bryn accompanied them on an ascent of Snowdon by the Beddgelert track.
They made an improbable picture climbing the steep, tussocky path in single file, and occasionally disappearing into streamers of mist that drifted across the mountain buttresses like bonfire smoke. With Bryn in the van, and his four dark-skinned boys in his wake, anyone could have taken the procession for a safari that had strayed ten thousand miles off course and when at last they reached the summit and the mist lifted, as Bryn had promised it would, there below was half Wales, “the real Wales” as Bry
n was careful to explain, adding that they were looking down on it from 3,560 feet, the highest vantage point in the land.
“Except Pen Nebblis,” prompted Enoch, the eldest and most promising of Bryn's geography class.
“Ben Nevis,” said Bryn, gently, “and that's in Scotland, Enoch.” They gazed at the unimaginably beautiful vista of lake, peak, and forest, elated by the view but even more by their achievement in getting here.
“There's another thing,” Bryn said, solemnly, “that as Welshmen you must never forget. The English took the plain from us and built their castles there, but they never reached us here, you understand? And now let's eat our snap and go down again, for they’ll have finished loading and we’ll have to go part way home by train or your mother will wonder what has happened to us.” They sat under the lee of a great boulder and ate their sandwiches, one spare, greying man, and four copper-coloured, woolly-headed boys, munching, gazing, and wondering, and it crossed Bryn Lovell's mind that a day like this was worth a lifetime of book-reading and that he was fortunate to have discovered this before it was too late and the years had nothing to offer but a lonely dotage.
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