Give Us This Day (2 page)

Gladstone, that self-righteous old thunderer, had told them that years ago, and every city clerk who could balance a ledger must be aware of it today. Yet all the time, across the Channel, the laggards, no less greedy and certainly no less vainglorious, were jostling for what they called “a place in the sun” and he isolated them one by one. There was Germany, led by that loud-mouthed ass Wilhelm; there was France, obsessed by her sense of inferiority since the 1870 debacle; and across the Atlantic there was America with a commercial potential that could, given time, reduce the status of all his rivals to those of nonentities. And thinking this he did what he had always done when his mind ranged far beyond his concerns. He withdrew, thankfully, into the realm of the predictable, represented by his own brood and his own business.

George, no doubt, would forge steadily ahead, pushing the network to its limits. And beside him, as a safety-valve operator, was Giles, placator of ruffled clients, temperature-taker of the Swann work force, adjudicator of every grouse and dispute that came humming down the threads of the network to the heart and brain of the enterprise beside the Thames. It was enough, he supposed, for a man of seventy that morning, with a tumultuous family dinner party in the offing and little hope of repose until his own and the nation’s affairs had steadied. He tucked his unread
Times under his arm and descended to level ground, sniffing the fragrance all abou
t him and cocking a countryman’s ear to the murmurous summer noon.

* * *

The wire came within an hour of the family exodus, when the last touches were being added to her Jubilee ensemble and the gardener had delivered the carnations and roses for the ladies’ corsage sprays and the buttonholes the men would wear in the lapels of their newly pressed frock coats.

Henrietta, her mouth full of pins, could have wept with vexation as she glanced at the buff slip from Hilda, her step-mother:
“Father worse. Advise coming immediately”—
a mere five words capable, providing convention took precedence over inclination, of spoiling an occasion she had been anticipating for months.

For a moment, without removing the pins from her mouth, Henrietta Swann weighed the substance of the message, calculating, on the minimum of evidence, Sam Rawlinson’s chances of hanging on to life for an extra twenty-four hours or so, long enough for her to sandwich the Imperial spectacle between the present moment and a long, hot journey to Manchester in order to put in a dutiful deathbed appearance.

Almost forty years had elapsed since Sam had forfeited any affection she had for the old ruffian, for how could anyone love a father prepared to bargain a daughter for a scrap of wasteland adjoining his loading bays in the mill town where she had waited for Adam, or Adam’s equivalent, to rescue her from obscurity. A wily old rascal, ruthless and disreputable, who had kicked his way up from bale-breaker to mill-owner, who had reckoned everything, including his own daughter, in terms of brass and done his level best, God forgive him, to mate her with a simpering nobody. Adam, of course, had forgiven him long ago, and had even tried, over the years, to soften her approach, but he had made little or no headway. For her, Sam Rawlinson continued to stand for vulgarity, male arrogance, and the seediness that attached itself to his entire way of life; and remembering this like a line out of her catechism, she removed the row of pins from her mouth, hitched her petticoat, and called, “
Adam!
It’s from Hilda! A wire, saying we should go at once… What
are
we to do, for heaven’s sake? Today, of all days!”

He came out of his dressing-room, took the wire, read it, and laid it on her dressing-table among her vast array of bottles and lotions.

“That’s for you to say, isn’t it, m’dear?”

She said, bitterly, “No, it isn’t! Or not altogether. Everything’s so nicely arranged. We were very lucky indeed to get that balcony and a thing like this…well… it’s once in a lifetime, isn’t it?”

“I fear so,” he said, making no effort to keep the chuckle from his voice. “The Old Vic isn’t likely to last another ten years even if we do.”

He picked up the wire again and took it over to the window, musing. Her frown disappeared then, for she knew very well what he was about. Calculating times and distances, as though the dying Sam was an impatient shipper and he had been asked to deliver a haul of goods within a specified time. He said, “I don’t know… family obligations… how would it look, Hetty? An only child, exchanging final farewells in favour of the Lord Mayor’s show?” and hoisted himself round, sitting on her plush dressing-table stool, sound leg bent and tin leg, as he always called it, thrust out.

She knew then he was teasing her as he so often had over the years in this room where few serious words ever passed between them. She said, protestingly, “Really, Adam, it’s not a thing to joke…!” but he reached out, grabbed her by the hips, and pulled her close to him.

There had been a time when his big hands comfortably encircled her waist. They didn’t now and recalling this he thought,
Even so, she’s trim for a woman who has produced a tribe of nine
. His hands passed over the rampart of her corset to her plump behind, straining below the rim of a garment that he sometimes referred to as her cuirass. It was an aspect of her that had always captivated him and he pinched so hard that she exclaimed, “Adam! Be serious! We’ve simply
got
to make up our minds, haven’t we?”

“You’ve already made up your mind,” he said, genially. “All you want now is to shift the guilt on to me. Well, here’s how I see it. Sam’s eighty-eight and Hilda’s a born worrier. But the fact is anybody would find it damned difficult to travel north until the exodus begins tomorrow night. Nine trains in ten will be heading southeast and most of the upcountry traffic will be shunted to make room for them. We’d best make arrangements to travel on overnight from London. I’ll wire Hilda. Finish dressing. The carriages will be round at noon. If we get up to town by four we’ll take a stroll and have a preview of the decorations.”

She kissed him then, impulsively and affectionately, and he stumped across to the door to tell one of the girls to bicycle into the village with a reply. But then, on the threshold, he paused. “He’s had a damned good innings, Hetty. And any last words he wants to say will be to me, not you. He was proud of you, mind, in his own queer way, but he saw me as the son he never had. Don’t let it spoil your day.”

2

In the old days, the Swanns, in the way of the middle-class, celebrated national occasions
enfamille.
As recently as the Golden Jubilee, ten years ago, a small balcony near St. Clement’s Dane had accommodated man, wife, and such of their family who were still home-based. But in a single decade the tribe had proliferated to an extent that astounded Adam whenever he thought about it. Unlike Henrietta, he had never had it in mind to found a dynasty.

Today the royal balcony at Buckingham Palace would have been taxed to accommodate the entire Swann tribe even though two offshoots were out of the country, one in faraway China and another across the Irish Sea. But proliferation was not the only reason for dispersal. In spreading their wings each Swann had swung into an individual orbit, so that their occupations, their associates, and indeed their whole way of life and cast of thought presented a kind of spectrum of Imperial enterprise.

Thus it was that an occasion like this found them, as it were, picketing the royal route, dotted here and there at intervals along its four-mile route. Each of them prepared to cheer certainly, and wave hat, handkerchief, or miniature Union Jack, but for different reasons, dictated by private conceptions of what excused this display of self-aggrandisement. Their individual and often contradictory standpoint was highlighted by their acceptance of what the newspapers were already calling “Queen’s Weather,” as though, in dominating one-fifth of the world’s surface, the British had tamed not merely tribes but elements.

Stationed at Hyde Park Gardens with his eldest daughter Stella, her farmer husband Denzil, four of Stella’s children, his own youngest son Edward, and youngest daughter Margaret, Adam was content to view it as “appropriate” weather. There had been times, during his long climb to affluence, when he had quarrelled with the cult of national arrogance, but success had mellowed him. At seventy, he saw nothing remarkable about a cloudless day for a tribal rite of these dimensions. It was to be looked for and, in the nature of things, it had arrived. God, he had often jested, was an Englishman. Nothing else could account for the astounding luck of the English since Waterloo. Today the jest was muted. It had to be in the face of the evidence spread below as the procession unrolled, before his eyes, like a vast, varicoloured carpet. There would come a time, his commonsense predicted, when the balloon would burst, possibly with a God almighty bang, but that time was not yet; and it occurred to him, as the throb of martial music was heard from the direction of Constitution Hill, that he might have been over-hasty in his claim that national pride was hurrying towards its inevitable fall. Every race and every creed under the sun was parading down there and at the very head of the procession, mounted on the huge grey he was said to have ridden to Khandahar, was a small, compact figure; this reminded him vividly of an occasion forty years ago when he and Roberts of Khandahar had shared barrack and bivouac in an India torn by strife and had later parted company with a touch of mutual acrimony, Roberts in pursuit of the new Rome, himself to join in the free-for-all at home.

Forty years had not blurred the clarity of his recollection of that parting. He had been convinced then that the little man on the grey was a romantic visionary, who would soon get himself killed in a village that was not even marked on a map. Well, he never minded admitting a misjudgment, and here was the most glaring of his life. Roberts had not only survived and seen his boyish dreams translated into fact; he had also gone forward to become a legend in his own lifetime and here were the cheers of a million Cockneys to prove it. He said, as the grey curvetted below, “He had it right after all then…!” and when Henrietta asked him what he had said he smiled and shook his head, saying, “Nothing…nothing of any consequence, m’dear. Simply reminding myself that Roberts and I once rode knee to knee in battles neither of us expected to survive.” But although he dismissed his association with Roberts in such lighthearted terms, Henrietta took pride in it and showed as much by squeezing his hand. It wasn’t something you could let drop at a garden-party or a soiree—that one’s husband was on Christian-name terms with the most famous soldier in the world—but one could bask in the knowledge just the same.

* * *

Half-a-mile to the east, at a tall window looking over Green Park, Major Alexander Swann, eldest of the Swann boys, and the only one among them to follow the traditional Swann profession of arms, might have seen it as good campaigning weather. Under a sun as brassy as this the ground would lie baked and the rivers would run low, permitting the rapid movement of troops across almost any kind of terrain, yet there was scepticism in his survey of the colourful assembly that passed, with its companies of colonials, its emphasis on variety, sounding brass, good dressing, and spit-and-polish turnout. Alex, who regarded himself as a forwardlooking professional, saw it as a circus rather than a demonstration of military might. It was a parade rooted, not in the future and not even in the present, but in an era when his grandfather had ridden down from the Pyrenees to bring Marshal Soult to battle. A single Maxim gun, well-sited and well-served, could cut it to ribbons in sixty seconds flat, and the thought occurred to him, as he watched the company of Hong Kong police step by in their comical coolie hats, that this was mere window-dressing and had nothing to do with the art of war. And it was no snap judgment either. Not only had he fought tribesmen and savages in half-adozen Imperial battle areas, but his had also been the hand that guided the hand of the Prince of Wales to the trigger of the first Maxim gun ever fired in England. He said, voicing his scepticism, “All very pretty, so long as it never comes up against anything more lethal than an assegai or muzzle-loader…” And his wife, Lydia (she who had transformed him from regimental popinjay to professional) concurred, but, being herself a daughter of the regiment, added a rider: “They’d learn,” she said, “just so long as some of us bear it in mind.”

* * *

A muzzle-loader’s range from the vantage-point of Alex and Lydia was the third Swann picket, denied the privilege of a first-storey view but not needing one, for he measured six feet three inches in his new boots and could see over all the heads between himself and the kerb.

Hugo Swann, Olympic athlete and winner of as many cups and medals as Victoria had colonies, would think of it as good track weather, the ground being hard underfoot, and it even put the thought into mind. “Hope it holds,” he told Barney O’Neill, the celebrated pole-vaulter. “If it does, we’ll get a record gate at Stamford Bridge tomorrow and they need the cash, I’m told.”

It would be difficult to define Hugo’s conclusions on the spectacle, other than a spectacle. His father and brothers had long since come to the conclusion that Hugo, bless his thick skull, had never had a serious thought in his life and his presence in the network, where he put in token appearances from time to time, was that of a thirteen-stone sleeping partner. None of them resented this, however, for Hugo, as a Swann advertisement, was worth five thousand a year on George’s reckoning. His name appeared on the sporting pages of every journal on Fleet Street nowadays, so that when it cropped up, as it frequently did in coffee house and country house, no one could ever be sure whether the speaker was going to pronounce upon sport or commerce. All one could guarantee was that the name stood for rapid movement of one kind or another, and time schedules had always rated high on the list of Swann priorities.

* * *