Give Us This Day (54 page)

“He was our boarder,” Mrs. Rookwood told her, “when he first came to these parts as a… well, not much more than a boy. Do you know anything about his past, Mrs. Swann?”

“I know he was an orphan, brought into the business as a vanboy by Mr. Keate, our waggonmaster. Keate was always rescuing orphans in those days.”

“Ah, the marshal’s baton in the Swann knapsack. But there’s rather more to it than that. The poor boy spent all his spare time trying to discover who he was, and his failure bothered him so much that he never would have proposed to me if my mother hadn’t given him a series of pushes! After that I persuaded him to concentrate on his future rather than his past. I expect your husband will have told you how well he’s done down here, and I can tell you he’s been a wonderful husband and father.”

The story, she thought, had all the hall-marks of a Mudie’s Library book, so she asked, “Do
you
ever wonder who he is, Mrs. Rookwood?”

“No,” she said, firmly. “I don’t and never did! I wouldn’t change anything about my life if I had to live it all over again but then…” and she looked at her shrewdly, “I don’t suppose
you
would, would you, Mrs. Swann?”

“No,” said Henrietta, fervently, reflecting what a pleasure it was to meet a woman who was not ashamed to sing her husband’s praises in public and to regard him, as Mrs. Rookwood obviously did, as the equal of any man on earth. She had always spoken of Adam in that way, but few of her intimates followed suit. Most of them carped at their men as soon as the door was shut on them, and she sometimes got the impression they regarded her as very naive and fair game for any husband with a trick or two up his sleeve. All the same, she could not readily picture the solemn Rookwood as an ardent lover, although it was abundantly clear that he was an excellent provider, and had she known Mrs. Rookwood better she would have liked to have pursued the subject, for curiosity about men in this respect had remained with her since marriage, and so few women would discuss it. Most of them, when they did, gave the impression that a man’s demands on his wife, outside the purely domestic sphere, were tiresome and vulgar, and none seemed able to prolong the early excitements of marriage into later life. And yet, as she was ready to admit to herself any time since her wedding day in 1858, it had been of paramount importance to her, converting what might have been a humdrum marriage, of the kind that seemed the norm nowadays, into an adventure more exciting than any to be lived second-hand between the covers of a book. Even now, after all this time, she still felt a stirring under her heart when his arm went round her or he inclined his weight against her. It would be very interesting to know if she (or he, for that matter) were singular in this respect. She made a mental note to raise the subject with Edith Wickstead again when she next saw her, for Edith’s admission that she had once been in love with Adam had broken the barriers of reserve between the two women. They had few secrets from one another.

They moved off the next morning for Exeter and booked into a hotel in the Cathedral Yard, within three minutes walking distance of the Swann depot in South Street, ruled over by that funny West Country character Bertieboy Bickford, nephew of an even funnier uncle, the late Hamlet Ratcliffe, he who had captured a circus lion and died hauling a statue of Queen Victoria up the Exe Valley on the eve of the Golden Jubilee.

She had always enjoyed visiting the West Country. The lilting names of villages and the buzz-saw brogue of the locals fascinated her and she spent a pleasant day with Adam on one of Mr. Bickford’s two motor excursion wagons—“charrybangs” he called them, for some unexplained reason. The charrybang, puffing like a grampus at some of the inclines about here, took them all the way to Teignmouth and back in a day, and although she was half choked with dust, and felt as if all her bones had been put in a box and rattled like a set of dice, she enjoyed the experience, her very first aboard one of George’s mote-waggons, vehicles she had come to regard as George’s private invention, owing nothing to anyone else, alive or dead.

She remembered earlier, smoother rides in four-horse brakes, and when they retired to bed that night she ventured to ask Adam how it was that so many people preferred to be trundled about in this rough and ready manner, when they might so easily have relaxed on a horse brake.

“It’s a lot faster for one thing,” he said, chuckling, “and almost everybody wants to move faster and further afield these days. I shouldn’t quarrel with that, I suppose. I built the business on speed, and a point to remember is that those motors of George’s are constantly improving in comfort and reliability. Ten years ago that thing we were on today would have broken down a dozen times, and as for noise and vibration, well, it was a duckpond sail compared with a ride aboard that first juggernaut he brought home from Austria. In another ten years, I daresay, motors will be bowling along the roads so fast that you’ll barely notice their passage. Some of the expensive private motors now can travel at fifty miles an hour, pretty well as fast as a train.”

“Well, they won’t get my custom,” she said, emphatically. “If we do any more excursions on this holiday, we’ll hire a gig and you can drive, as you used to in the old days.”

Bryn Lovell’s boys, Enoch and Shad, met them at Newport and took them on to Cardiff, where the Mountain Square depot was now established. All the motorvehicles about here, they told her, were concentrated in the coal, steel, and tinplate areas of the south. They never used them in Central or North Wales, where road surfaces were poor, hauls were mostly agricultural, and no one was in a hurry. She had never seen the mountain country of North Wales and persuaded Adam to break the journey north at Chester, hire a trap, and make a leisurely circuit of the mountain country where, at a place called Beddgelert, he showed her the spot where Giles met Romayne, “rescuing” her from a counterfeit drowning. It was the kind of prank one would expect of a minx like Romayne Rycroft-Mostyn and, judging by her recent performance outside No. 10 that had earned her a spell in gaol, she was still untamed, despite years of marriage to a gentle creature like Giles. She said, voicing her thoughts, “Have you ever come close to understanding that girl, Adam?” He said he had not, and neither, he suspected, had Giles, although it was fortunate for him he had been able to channel her nervous energy into politics.

“But doesn’t that kind of publicity do him harm?”

He replied, after pondering the question a moment, “No, not in the long run. It would have ruined him a generation ago, but today almost any publicity is good publicity. It’s the way the world’s going, I’m afraid. Stridency is replacing common sense. I imagine, in time, Romayne’s involvement with the suffragettes will give Giles that extra boost thar every public man needs, and Giles more than most, for he’s a very modest chap and modesty is a handicap in a politician.”

“But you advised both him and Milton to stay clear of that welcome party outside the gaol in January.”

“Yes, I did, and you saw for yourself how wrong I was. You can still learn at my age, providing you keep an open mind.”

It set her thinking, as did these stirring, age-old vistas about here, about the size of the tapestry they had woven about them in half-a-century of marriage. It was like a piece of embroidery that began life as a child’s sampler and grew bigger and bigger until it was an epic scene, embracing every aspect of life. The name Swann now seemed to her as permanent as Snowdon, whose bulk dominated every other mountain about here. They were now drawing near the scene of her first encounter with the real founder of the dynasty, and the place, some miles to the north of it, where she had suggested the device still used on all his vehicles, billheads, and in all his newspaper advertisements. It hardened her resolve, when they entered the Polygon area of North Cheshire, to make a pilgrimage to the place where, on a hot July morning in 1858, she and her splendid destiny had merged on a desolate stretch of moorland.

He acceded readily enough. They travelled on to Manchester where her grandson Rudi, second son of George and his Austrian wife, Gisela, was winning his spurs, managing the depot sited at Salford. Here The Polygon’s generous quota of petrol-driven waggons were fully extended over flattish terrain, serving both Lancashire’s cotton interests and the vast volume of shipping that steamed in and out of Liverpool’s docks.

Rudi, liveliest and most winning of George’s flock, had always been a great favourite of hers, so that it did not surprise her much when, after handing Adam over to his manager to visit the new Ship Canal docks, he drew her aside and said, shyly for him, “I… er… I should like to ask your advice on something, Grandmam.”

She at once jumped to the conclusion that the handsome young scamp had got into debt and was seeking a loan, and was therefore dumbfounded when, the moment the office door closed on them, he said breathlessly, “Grandmam… I can tell you. Nobody down south has an inkling as yet. The fact is… I’m… well… married!”

”
Married!
And your father and mother don’t know?
Nobody
knows?”

“Well,”—and he gave something between a wink and a grimace—“Evie’s parents know, for her father had to give her away. And her brothers and sister know, but nobody in the yard does, not even the foreman. I haven’t even told Max, my brother, although I could trust him to keep mum until I’d sorted things out.”

“But this is quite ridiculous, Rudi, and you must know it is,” she said, severely. “I mean, why all this secrecy? And how did it come about? Your mother would be very upset indeed to think you have married without even telling her. And anyway, why are you telling me now?”

He said, avoiding her eye, “I’ve got to tell somebody and I knew I could rely on you. As for keeping it secret… well, it was all a bit of a rush, and my first responsibility, as I saw it, was to Evie.” He looked up, a little desperately, “Can’t you
guess
the rest, Grandmam?”

She could guess, and thought herself slow not to have guessed at once. “You mean you
had
to get married?”

“No!” He looked quite truculent, his expression reminding her vividly of Georg
e when he was thwarted as a child. “I didn’t ‘have’ to get married, as they say. We would have married anyway, as soon as I was thoroughly established here. I love Evie. I loved her from the first day I saw her sitting perched on that chair!”

“What chair?”

“That one over there, the high one by the ledger rest. She was a girl clerk, you see, taken on by Bagshawe, our chief clerk, when I was away on a trip. We take girl clerks now, like a lot of firms up here. They’re cheaper for one thing, and the best of them are more conscientious than men. Evie’s very sharp. She left school at thirteen to go in a mill, but she had the sense to go to evening classes and learn book-keeping. You’ll like her, Grandmam. She’s not just pretty. She’s so much, well… so much
fun!”

She thought, only just succeeding in suppressing a smile,
She sounds it, my lad!
But then the desperate sincerity of the boy touched her and she made a quick mental review of the probable consequences down south once his secret was out. George, whose gallantries at Rudi’s age were still remembered, would probably give the boy a dressing down and forget it, but Gisela, who had been at such pains to adopt English proprieties since she had left the Danube, would be very upset, seeing a marriage of this kind as a blot on the record. She said, “When did you marry, Rudi? And when is the child due?”

“We’ve been married six months now. The baby is expected any day. We’ve got a little house out at Timperley, a few miles from here, and I’d love you to meet Evie, Grandmam, but maybe you would prefer to wait. I’ve got a picture of her here. It’s a wedding photograph actually. She didn’t wear white, of course. Naturally it was very quiet, just her mother, father, and sister as witnesses. We managed to arrange it early in the morning.”

He fumbled in his jacket pocket and took out a small studio portrait of a girl with dark hair and merry eyes—George’s kind of eyes—that looked out on life with confidence, and an expectation of jokes dredged from the small change of the day. She had, however, a very determined chin, a good figure slightly on the plump side, and her costume, an inexpensive one, was worn with panache.

“Weren’t her parents very angry about it?”

He grinned, then wiped the grin from his face.

“Well, no, not really, or not once they understood how things were between us. I like them all. They’re a very jolly family. He’s a lock keeper on the Canal, and all her sisters and brothers are spinners in Rowton Mill. To be honest I suppose they think Evie’s done well for herself, but that’s only to be expected, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose it is, but I hate to think of you hurting your mother’s feelings. She thinks a rare lot of you boys. What exactly do you want me to do about it?”

“Break the news, as soon as you get back. Maybe the baby will have arrived by then, and if it’s a boy mother won’t mind so much. She was always on at Max and me to get married and give her some grandchildren. I think she really worried about us staying bachelors so long.”

It was true. She knew Gisela well enough to realise that the prospect of growing old without a tribe of grandchildren would not appeal to her, or to George either for that matter. It really was a little odd that, with four children, they had neither sons-in-law nor daughters-in-law, for two of Stella’s boys were married now, and Alex’s daughter, Rose, and Joanna’s eldest daughter, Valerie, were engaged to be married this summer. Robert and Richard, respectively eldest and youngest sons of Stella, had so far produced three daughters between them, her first batch of greatgrandchildren, but if, as she fervently hoped, Rudi’s child was a boy, he would qualify as the first Swann great-grandson, so who cared whether he “came across the fields” as her old nurse used to say? She said, “I’ll do what I can, but the very first chance you get bring that girl down to Tryst, for I’m sure I’d like to meet her and so would your grandfather. If it is a boy, have you decided what to call him?”