Give Us This Day (40 page)

“Very,” Adam said, “and they still are. And Hugo isn’t bitter about what happened to him. If you can get him to talk about it, which I doubt, he’ll probably express concern at making several Boer women widows before they got him down. Kitchener wants peace, doesn’t he?”

“We all do,” Alex said, “and you don’t have to preach to me about the cost of war. I’ve been through half-a-dozen. But a man’s loyalty should rest with his tribe, shouldn’t it?”

“I’m not so sure about that. There have been reports here that some Boers are coming over to our side, and wishing to God Cronje and his commandos in hell for prolonging the agony.”

“Well, as to that, I think no more of them than I do of Giles,” Alex said, stiffly. “I’ll keep out of his way, that’s all,” and he went out quickly, his tall boots striking hard on the stone flags as though to emphasise his flat rejection of pro-Boers, Frocks, and Boers who were eager to compromise.

Adam thought, gloomily: Now here’s a how-de-do, to be sure… I hope he has enoug
h horse sense to limit his prejudices to a scowl or two. We don’t want a family shindig on a day like this… He looked out into the hall, caught one of Stella’s boys hurrying pas
t carrying a pyramid of muffins hot from the kitchen, and called, “Hi, there, lad! Find your Uncle Giles and tell him I want to see him in the sewing-room. Tell him it’s urgent and he’s to come whatever he’s doing.” The boy said, “Yes, sir!” and scuttled off while Adam, retreating into the little room again, lit one of his favourite Burmese cheroots and puffed at it gratefully until Giles came in, closing the door and saying: “You don’t have to break it to me gently. Romayne was bothered about it the moment they showed up, and she’s slipped away to pack. If Martindale can run us over to Bromley, we could get an evening train into town.”

He said, sullenly, “I won’t have that! You’re under my roof and your mother’s.”

“Wouldn’t it be better all round? I’ve got two choices. To tell Alex and Lydia what I felt about that war, or back down and apologise for myself. I couldn’t do that, Father.”

“I’m not asking you to, son.”

“Then what?”

“Let ‘em both stew awhile. Bury ‘em under a load of paper, in this case Christmas wrappings. I don’t ask that for my sake but for your mother’s.”

“Suppose Alex raises it with Hugo and Sybil?”

“I’ve ordered him not to and he’ll mind what I say. Meantime, steer clear of him, as he means to of you.”

“What a mess it all is,” Giles said, dismally.

“Nothing new about it, son. It always has been a mess one way and another. That’s your problem if you ever get into Parliament. Find a way through it, treading on as few corns as possible.”

“Compromise? With people like that mob who tried to lynch Lloyd George a week ago?”

“Not compromise, wait. Give ‘em a chance to cool off. They will, if someone throws ‘em another bone to gnaw. They’ll soon be hurrahing L.G. and throwing their brickbats at Joe Chamberlain. Some people would call that proof of national instability, I suppose, but it never struck me as that. It’s the way a democracy functions. The public take the soundings and you chaps trim your sails to the wind, the way the Frocks do in a free country. It oughtn’t to warp your private convictions. Never did mine.”

Giles smiled. “You’re a wise old bird,” he said.

“Not wise, son,” Adam replied. “Wily. And I should be. I’ve had time enough to learn. I’ve always got my way in the end, and I promise you that you and the fire-eater L.G. won’t have so long to wait for a swing around in public opinion. You’ll sweep the board at the next election, then everyone will scramble to get on the winning side. You’ll have to search for a man who owns up to ever having wanted to wring Kruger’s neck.”

“You really believe that?”

“I believe it. Seen it happen over and over again in the last fifty years. Go up and tell that gel of yours to leave her packing until tomorrow. You’ll leave with the rest of ‘em and keep the peace meantime.”

And so it might have been but for an unlucky chance the following day when Giles, carrying his grips out to the carriage that was to run Romayne and himself over to the station for the first leg of their journey home to Wales, passed under the horse’s head at the entrance of the courtyard archway and came upon Alex at the precise moment he was riding one of the hacks into the forecourt for a canter across the Downs.

There was no way they could avoid one another, short of a deliberate attempt on Alex’s part to ride his brother down. He reined back, staring hard over Giles’s head to the leafless trees of the avenue and looking so pompous that Giles had to smile. He said, on impulse, “Come, Alex, can’t we even shake hands? None of us hold a thing against you chaps. We’re opposed to the fools who sent you over there to protect city interests,” and when Alex did not respond he shrugged and stood aside, giving Alex room to pass under the arch. He would have passed, no doubt, had not everybody’s luck been out.

At that moment Hugo’s sergeant emerged leading Hugo’s hack and Hugo himself came out of the tackroom carrying his crop and hard hat. Alex said, glancing at him, “How about Hugo’s interests? Don’t they count?”

“Good God, of course they do! Do you imagine I get any satisfaction out of what happened to him in a rough and tumble for South African gold and diamonds? He lies as heavy on Chamberlain’s conscience as the women and children dying in those damned camps you fellows have set up! Try and see it from the human angle!”

“I’m not concerned with one angle or another,” Alex said, slowly. “Only as the difference between one man, doing his duty as he saw it, and another trailing round the country preaching treason,” and he gave his mount a sharp cut and cantered off across the forecourt.

Hugo called, urgently, “Hold on, Giles…!” and Giles, roused now, tossed the grips in the carriage, and stalked round behind the vehicle to where Hugo was standing with an expression of pain on his broad, good-natured face. He said, in a low voice, “I couldn’t help hearing that. I’d like you to know I don’t see it that way, Chaser.”

The use of his forgotten nickname, Chaser, acquired after their schoolfellows had learned that he was the son of the Swann whose Western Wedge manager had cornered a circus lion on Exmoor, touched Giles. So sharply that it brought him close to tears, evoking as it did a halcyon period twenty years ago when he and Hugo had loped across the moor together, building calf muscles that were to earn Hugo so many trophies yet lead, ultimately, to the incident that had cost him his sight. He said, “Don’t let it worry you. We’re well enough used to that kind of abuse, Hugo.”

But Hugo muttered, “Take my hack and unsaddle him, Sergeant. I won’t be going out on the rein after all.”

“Now, sah!” the sergeant protested. “M’lady won’t care to hear you’ve dodged the column! What’ll I tell her?”

“Tell her I’ve gone for a walk instead. With Mr. Giles. Give me a hand, Giles,” and Giles took his hand and led him into the forecourt.

“Go up behind, on to the hill. It’s a rare place for blowing the cobwebs away.”

They went slowly up the winding path, worn into the rocky outcrop behind the house, heading for the wooded plateau where old Colonel Swann had spent so much of his time painting indifferent water colours from the upended whaler on the summit. The old, makeshift shelter was still there, its timbers seamed and split by a thousand southwesterlies. They sat together, Giles looking over the winter landscape. Hugo said, at length, “You never heard it, did you? Not the real story?”

“I heard how you got word from an ambushed column and tackled a Boer outpost singlehandedly. It was in the papers, the time they pinned the medal on you.”

“Ah, the medal.”

Hugo moistened his lips and sat very still, hands resting on his enormous thighs. “The Boers didn’t traffic with medals, did they? If they did that kid would have earned one, I daresay.”

“What kid, Hugo?”

“The kid I shot, just before I was hit. Last shot of the battle barring this,” and he raised his hand to the bluish circular depression at his temple. “The last I’ll ever fire. Thank God.”

“Tell me if you want to, Hugo.”

“Don’t know how, really.” He smiled. “You were the one who always did the telling, Chaser.”

That was true, of course. All through their time on Exmoor, Hugo had come to him with questions. Questions on every conceivable subject, and had been content to accept any answer Giles gave as the voice of the oracle. To Giles he still seemed pitifully young to carry such a cross, but his helplessness and unwonted stillness were beginning to work on him, as though, for the first time in his life, he could sit in one place long enough to think things out and form independent judgments.

“I’ve come to believe it was tit-for-tat, Giles. My stopping that bullet, I mean, a second or so after I’d shot the kid. I didn’t know he was a kid until I looked at him. We’d heard they were using kids that age but I hadn’t believed it, not until then. He was about your age when you first went down to West Buckland. I had a quick look at him lying there. Just a second or two. Then it was curtains. Matter of fact, he was the last person I saw. You get to remembering that, you know. At least, I did, sitting about and night times.” Then, very levelly, “Do you still believe in God, Giles?”

“Some kind of God, Hugo. I’m never sure what kind.”

“Not one that looks out for folks, the way they tell you in the church?”

“No, or not the way they tell you in church. And God is only a word. A useful word, but it can fool people, to my way of thinking.”

“How about your kind of God?”

“Maybe it’s a plan, a providence, with good and evil roughly balanced. Part of the plan is how we tip it, one way or the other and it’s our choice. Otherwise there’s no sense at all in any of it. But you don’t have to go on blaming yourself about that youngster. He was trying to kill you from cover. How were you to know how old he was? The fault lies with the men who gave him a rifle, and sent him out to do a man’s job. And even more with our people, who drove those chaps into a corner where they had to fight or hand over to a lot of city sharks. The fault certainly doesn’t lie with you, so get that into your head, once and for all.”

“Ah,
she
said that. The only other person I ever told.”

“Sybil?”

“Yes.” Then, “She’s a wonderful person, Giles.”

“I know. I’ve watched. You’re glad about the baby, aren’t you?”

Hugo smiled and seemed, fleetingly, almost himself again. “You bet I am. That’s a turn-up for the book, isn’t it? Sybil’s thirty-three.”

“Romayne was almost as old. I daresay you’ll have a string now you’ve started.”

“Can’t imagine. Me being a father, I mean. Don’t think I was cut out for one.”

“Neither did I, but you’d be surprised when it happens.”

They sat in silence for a spell, Giles fighting an impulse to take his big hand and squeeze. It was a long time since he had been so close to tears. Finally Hugo said, “You remember that dream I told you about once?”

“The one you kept having? That dream where you were lapping everyone else and there was a lot of cheering?”

“You remember it that well?”

“I remember it.”

“Funny thing. I never had it once I left school and that kind of thing began to happen all the time. Then I had it again, the first night I was back here, only it was different. I was sprinting across the veldt in those damned great boots, and they were like ton weights, dragging me back. I got there, though, and there was that Boer kid at the tape. Cheering and waving his hat like mad.”

Tears began to flow and nothing he could do would stop them. What did one say to that? What was there to say? And anyway, Giles could not trust himself to speak. Hugo said, after half a minute had elapsed, “Does that mean anything, d’you reckon?”

“I… I’d say it did, Hugo.”

“What, exactly?”

“That the kid understood, sympathised even.”

The heavy features relaxed. He said, sniffing the air, “Maybe. Glad I told you.” Then, “I always liked it up here. Especially early on, when I was out training before breakfast. I’ll get that chap to teach me the way up here on my own.”

“You do that, Hugo.”

He took his hand now and drew him up. Together they moved off down the twisting track to the forecourt and Adam, standing musing at the long window of the drawing-room, watched their approach. He thought,
I’m damned sorry Alex isn’t here to see that. Might loosen him up somewhat.

Four

Dreams at Tryst

W
ho knew how many dreams still hibernated under the russet-coloured pantiles of the old house? How many and how varied, but they were there all right. They waited in odd corners. Distilled hopes, suppressed hatreds, thwarted and fulfilled loves, and secret fears often generations of islanders, all waiting for a chance, maybe, to slip out of the shadows and find a new post. For the house itself was the product of a dream, old Conyer’s dream of dredging enough loot from the Lowland banks to build a home under the crag that had been his trysting place with the Cecil girl when he was a nobody.

Adam had dreamed there often enough, and so had Henrietta, but Adam and Henrietta were rarely oppressed by dreams and when they awoke it was not often they recalled their substance. No more than an elusive expectation of the good luck or bad they could look for before the sun set again.

All the children had dreamed here in their growing-up days, and sometimes Phoebe Fraser, nanny to nine, had been awakened by a cry and hurried in to them, soothing them in her broad Lowland brogue. Now Phoebe was past all that, even though she still regarded Edward and Margaret, the two youngest, as children. She was not qualified to interpret Hugo’s dream, or hoist Helen out of the slough of the dreams she had had since returning to Tryst.

Phoebe Fraser might, conceivably, have gone some way towards interpreting Hugo’s dream, but Helen’s would have shocked her half out of her spinsterish mind, and this was predictable. Phoebe knew much of boys but nothing of men, and her deep Calvinistic convictions had long since succeeded in repressing any stirrings of the flesh, stirrings she would have accepted as subtle overtures of Satan. In all the years she had worked there, nobody had ever seen her so much as flirt with a man, much less lie down in a ditch with one, as some of the maids had when it was high summer and they were out of sight and sound of the house.

Helen Coles’s dreams of public ravishment would have struck Phoebe as evidence that she had grossly neglected her duties in the process of Helen’s upbringing, for a woman, even a married woman, had no business with dreams of that kind. They belonged, if anywhere, in the mind of a harlot. Certainly not in the subconscious of a widowed Christian missionary.

And yet, in a perverse way, Helen welcomed them, for they replaced something more sinister. A recurrent dream she had dreamed often on the long voyage home and during her first weeks in Ireland, surrounded by Joanna’s jolly family. In this dream, from which she awoke moaning and shuddering, she saw Rowley’s head perched on that gate post, but there was a difference that made her flesh creep. It leered at her, in a way that was altogether uncharacteristic of Rowley, even when his head had been firmly attached to his shoulders. The dream persisted, with variations, for a long time, so that she grew to fear the prospect of sleep.

But then, settled in the midst of the noisy Dublin family, her night fancies took a sharp new turn. Rowley, and Rowley’s severed head, had no place in them. Instead they were dominated by the courteous, businesslike presence of Colonel Shiba, the Japanese military attache. He who had made such a gallant showing in the Fu area of the legations during the siege. Yet Colonel Shiba’s recurrent behaviour in Helen’s dream was not gallant. Methodically, as though dismantling a barricade prior to a planned withdrawal, he stripped her naked and smilingly conducted her to his couch, a makeshift couch of sandbags sewn in patchwork. And there, with the same quiet deliberation, and in full view of the entire garrison, he ravished her, night after night, with a skill and despatch that Rowley had never once displayed, not even after they survived the awkward, experimental stage of the earliest days of the marriage.

The act of ravishment, taken in isolation, was by no means abhorrent to her. Indeed, once she had recovered from the shock of finding herself stark naked in the presence of a passive audience, she offered him no resistance. But when, at the climactic moment, he vanished in a shell-burst, she had a sensation of having violated not only her body but also her entire conception of decency and the civilised code, and this was reinforced by the mournful gaze of some European defenders at an adjoining barricade. Including, unfortunately, Miss Polly Condit Smith, the pretty American girl who was the toast of the garrison.

It might have been with the prospect of keeping such startling dreams at bay that she drank far more than her quota at the Tryst supper table during her Christmas stay. Adam kept a good cellar and a particularly fine claret, so that she sometimes went to bed gay, flushed, and temporarily at peace with the world, feeling herself secure in these familiar surroundings where everyone behaved towards her as someone sorely in need of a little cheering up. But no sooner was she asleep than the businesslike Colonel Shiba appeared and went to work, methodically, on the hooks and buttons of her bodice, and now there was an added embarrassment for, in addition to the silent garrison, her brother-in-law Clinton Coles was watching.

One night early in the new year, when all but the Irish party had packed up and left (Clint had stayed on to attend the January conference) the dream was particularly vivid and she awoke from it, less than an hour after lying down, with the virtual certainty that she had indeed been ravished. The claret had left her mouth parched and her head throbbed as she sat up, and when she was fumbling with the candle she had a distinct impression that its glow would reveal Colonel Shiba stretched beside her.

But then, coming to terms with the familiarity of the room, and the night sounds from the coppices that were inseparable from Tryst, she realised that it was not Colonel Shiba’s ministrations that had awakened her but the rumble of voices in the room adjoining hers, a room occupied by Clint and Joanna. She heard Clint’s boisterous arrival, guessing that he was the worse for drink, then Joanna’s mellow laughter following a stumble on his part, and the sounds, together with evidence of such cosy intimacy on the far side of the wall, renewed in her a desperate awareness of her own loneliness and deprivation, whirling her back to the days when she and Joanna were the conspirators on this corridor, flitting in and out of one another’s rooms in order to giggle and gossip about their beaux. So poignant was the memory that tears began to flow and a sense of terrible injustice bore down on her, projecting her from bed to window, there to contemplate the western prospect of the slope bathed in moonlight as far as the blur of woods where Adam’s Hermitage sat on the knoll marking the northern boundary of the estate.

It was a prospect that might have soothed her had it not been for the persistent rise and fall of voices in the next room punctuated by Joanna’s ripples of laughter. Evidence of such accord and conviviality increased her melancholy, so that she was suddenly aware of an overpowering need to make closer contact with human beings untroubled by her terrible sense of isolation. It was then, with a suppressed cry of excitement, that she remembered the cistern telegraph, a device she and Joanna had sometimes employed when the rest of the household was asleep and they had secrets to exchange. An array of superannuated leaden pipes, that ran the length of the western wing, had long since ceased to serve any practical purpose. They were a relic from an earlier tenant, installed some seventy years ago as a crude means of conveying stored rainwater from the huge cistern in the loft to a few of the more important bedrooms on this side of the house. Adam, reorganising the entire plumbing system soon after he bought the place in the early ‘sixties, had done little to disturb the existing network, judging, no doubt, that its dismantlement would do more harm than good to the old structure, and the girls, discovering a practical purpose for this in their early teens, had often used it to communicate with one another after they had been granted the privilege of separate and adjoining rooms.

By removing oaken plugs in the section of pipe that ran under the window, it had been quite practical (and very stimulating!) to communicate with one another, and it now occurred to Helen, standing in her nightgown and listening to the amiable sounds from the next room, that she had only to put her ear to the pipe to be certain of hearing more, if not all, of the exchanges between man and wife.

Ordinarily it might have struck her as a Peeping Tom device, but in her present mood she did not give a row of pins about such niceties. She had her ear to the pipe within seconds of remembering its presence, and it was just as she thought. Although, presumably, a plug was still in place next door, the voices became distinct and she could hear everything that was said, as well as every movement about the room.

* * *

The relationship of Joanna and Clint had been genial and uncomplicated from the earliest days of their association, and marriage had simply broadened and deepened it. Joanna, by now, had few illusions about him, seeing him as an amiable, overgrown adolescent, particularly when he was in liquor, but Joanna did not look for rectitude in a husband. Of all the Swanns, she was the least exacting. Clint was kind, easygoing, fond of the children, a good provider, and a roystering, affectionate lover. What more could a woman expect of a man, seeing that few men matured in any case?

From time to time, in the early days of their marriage, she had been bothered by his extravagance and hurt by his over-fondness for lively company, male and female, but he always returned to her after a brief lapse, and she had a serene conviction that he was glad he had married her. Marriage not only provided him with an anchorage, of the kind all men of his stamp needed. It also enabled him to sidestep the gloomy certainty of inheriting his father’s pill business, leaving him free to throw in his lot with the free-ranging Adam. When she looked back on their absurd elopement (she thought of it as that although it had been mounted and stage-managed by Henrietta after she had confessed to being two months pregnant) she concluded that Clinton Coles had been a beneficiary rather than a victim of embarrassing circumstances.

On this particular night George had been over again, plotting family tactics for the forthcoming January conference, and when Clint and George hobnobbed they could make substantial inroads into Adam’s wine stocks, so that she was not in the least surprised when Clint appeared, about one-thirty a.m., drunk as a fiddler and falling flat on his face when he tried to slip his braces and trousers off. He became clumsily amorous the moment she slipped out of bed to assist him, landing a hearty slap on her bottom and grabbing her by the waist as she bent to seize his trouser legs. Together they rolled on the rug, Clint taking advantage of the frolic to hoist her nightgown, but he seemed incapable of pressing his advantage. She said, not minding this horseplay in the least, “
Wait
, Clint! For heaven’s sake, boy. Stay
still
a minute while I get you to bed!” where she would almost surely have accommodated him, as the quickest method of getting a good night’s rest, had she not, at that moment, heard a sound close at hand that drove all thoughts of him out of mind.

It was unmistakably a sob. A long, dry sob, indicative of acute wretchedness, and it came, unaccountably had she been a stranger to the house, from the direction of the window-seat. She scrambled up then, leaving Clint in disarray on the floor, and hurried across the room, where, on the instant, she identified not only the source of the sob but the way in which it had been relayed to her. It came from Helen’s room next door via the old cistern telegraph they had used as girls.

It sobered her on the instant. She felt neither shame nor resentment in the realisation that Helen had been eavesdropping. Only pity and concern that she should be driven to seek such a means of sharing an intimate moment of a man and woman whose lives, in contrast to her own, were so free of strain and misery.

Although excessively outward-looking she was by no means insensitive, particularly as regards Helen, her girlhood ally. She had been all too aware of her sister’s taut nerves since her return home and had done everything she could think of to comfort and relax her, introducing her into the uninhibited Dublin scene in the hope that, sooner or later, she would form an attachment with someone that could lead to remarriage and a chance to forget her frightful experiences in the East. She was a generous soul and her sincere affection for her partner in so many youthful adventures had survived their long separation. She had a certainty now that Helen’s marriage had not been a success, or not as she understood the word. Rowley had been a worthy, solemn, self-opinionated old stick, so dedicated to his work that he would have neither time nor inclination for frolics that made married life so agreeable, despite the tendency among men, even men like Clint, to dismiss women as frail, fluttering creatures, entirely dependent on their mates. Perhaps alone among the Swann girls, she had taken accurate soundings of her parents’ marriage, particularly her mother’s approach to her father. A woman—a wise woman, that is—did not quarrel with the fact that it was a man’s world. She set about making the best of it, and one certain way of doing this was to pander to male appetites, giving them free rein everywhere but in the kitchen. This, at least, kept them even-tempered, and any woman with an ounce of sense could manipulate an easygoing man wholly preoccupied with his own concerns that were limited, in the main, to food, bed, counting-house profits, and the raising of progeny, approximately in that order.

She turned away from the pipe, jerked Clinton’s trousers free, removed his shirt, underpants, and shoes, and took a firm grip under his armpits, saying, “Now get to bed and sleep it off. I won’t be a minute.”

His renewed clutch at her was easily evaded, and he flopped back on to the bed, grinning foolishly, and saying, in the assumed Irish accent he adopted for these occasions, “You’re a
foine
woman, Jo! Said it often and say it again!… A
foine
woman!” But by then she was gone, not even waiting to slip into her bedgown, and had hurried into the gallery and along to Helen’s room where, as she half-expected, she found the candle burning and her sister sitting on the edge of a rumpled bed, the very picture of melancholy.