God Is an Englishman (108 page)

That’s clearly something Mr. Swann meant to guard against when he opened that account!” and then, “I…er…don’t suppose you’ve con sulted Mr. Swann about it?

If you have we could wait…”

She flushed, perhaps at the implication that the idea was not strictly original.

“
No
, Mr. Stock. I haven’t written and I don’t intend to! He’s not to be worried and I’ve had the strictest instructions to that effect.” Keate said, slowly, “Teams like that…dotted all over the coun try. They wouldn’t be earning anything…” and then Tybalt, wear ing that agonised expression that settled on him whenever the outlay of capital was proposed, said, “Four hundred wouldn’t cover the cost of a scheme of that kind, Mrs. Swann. It would only buy around half-a-dozen teams, to say nothing of waggons to go along with them,” and Stock thought it a stupid remark, for he must have known Hen rietta had already calculated the sum needed. She said, patiently, “Why, of course it wouldn’t be enough, Mr. Tybalt. We should have to dip into the general reserve, to the extent of at least another thou sand, but who knows what a hard winter in the north and Midlands might cost us in lost business, spoiled goods, ruined waggons, and worn out teams? How many Clydesdales could we buy for fifteen hundred, Mr. Keate?”

Keate did a sum in his head and said round about fifty, making available an additional twenty-five frigates or seventeen men-o’ -war. He wouldn’t recommend the use of pinnaces, they were too light for hard work in heavy weather. Stock gathered from this that he was all but won over to the proposal already.

“Well, then,” she went on, gaily, “let’s put it in hand tomorrow morning. Mr.

Stock will tell you I’ve got power of attorney, and can draw eleven hundred from GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 581

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the general account and put it into the other one but Mr. Tybalt would have to countersign, so it’s import ant he should agree. You’d best say now if you don’t, Mr. Tybalt, for then I should have no alternative but to write to Switzerland.” It was a naked threat and Tybalt cowered under it, inserting a finger between his thin neck and what the van boys called his “Come-to-Jesus” collar. He said, miserably, “It’s more a matter for Mr. Keate, ma’am. After all, he’s waggonmaster,” and at once looked relieved at having found a way of shifting the burden of responsi bility on to the shoulders of his friend.

“Well, Keate?” asked Stock, thoroughly enjoying the session, and Keate said, deliberately, “If time is a factor we can forget new wag gons. Blunderstone couldn’t supply them at such short notice, but we can make do with what we have if we’ve available horses to double up in overtaxed regions. That’s the real answer. With fifty more Clydesdales we could keep moving, short of a month of blizzards.” Suddenly he became enthusiastic. “It’s a good idea, Mrs. Swann, and we’ll set about it at once. If I could make one suggestion—we’ll need five reserve stables, not three. Harrogate and Derby are well enough. Harrogate will serve the Polygon, the Border Triangle, and Crescent North, Derby the Crescent Centre, Northern Pickings, and the northern half of Mountain Square. Teams can be rushed where they’re needed, by train if necessary. Down south we’ll need to divide our strength, and one depot at Oxford couldn’t serve such an area. I suggest we make Oxford the main depot but put in a couple of teams at Cheltenham and one or two more between Aylesbury and Chesterford, to keep an eye on The Bonus and Crescent South.” He got up, looking, Stock thought, like an Old Testament prophet about to address himself to the task of chastening the ungodly. “I’ll go and see McSawney if you’ll excuse me. No sense in wasting a day. None at all,” and stalked out, his boots hammering the stairs as if to emphasise the completeness of his conversion.

“That’s splendid,” said Henrietta, clapping her hands like a child at a party.

“Now I wonder if you would be so good as to go and see to the money side of it, Mr. Tybalt?” and Tybalt rose but without taking his eyes off her and slowly backed away so that Stock, unable to see him as a recognisable Old Testament character, thought of him as the murderer in
Maria Marten
withdrawing from the grave of his victim. He said, chuckling, as soon as the clerk and Godsall had excused themselves, “Well, you’ve got them all tamed, Mrs. Swann. I can’t think they would jump through hoops that readily for your husband. Have you got any one in mind for the job of supervising these depots?” and she said, “Indeed I have, Mr.

Stock. Miss Wadsworth has a new yard foreman called Wickstead, and she seems GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 582

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to think of him as a real treasure. He’s worked at Newmarket racing stables, and I’m going to propose him. Subject to Miss Wadsworth’s agreement, of course.” He said nothing to this, reflecting, as he shook hands, that whether Miss Wadsworth agreed or not there would be a vacancy on her Peterborough staff before the week was out.

2

The new year was hardly more than a fortnight old, when the snow Henrietta had predicted was blocking the old turnpike roads that ran east and west of the Pennines, and over the two-thousand-year-old mosstrooper tracks of the Cheviots.

Down south the weather had moderated, giving men like Ratcliffe and Rookwood time to lick their wounds and marshal their scattered forces against the prospect of fresh assaults from the North Atlantic. Flood levels had receded, and there was even some bleak sunshine in and around the pitheads of the Cornish tin mines, but further east Rookwood had already made his first call on the reserve depot at Cheltenham, and over in The Bonus country Vicary had reason to be grateful for the availability of two spare teams to double up on a haul of timber for repairing damaged bridges that spanned his bread-and-butter routes.

Kent, for once, escaped the snow, and Godsall thanked his stars, for it gave him a chance to settle to the collar in Blubb’s old terri tory. He found it less difficult than he had imagined for down here, where there were innumerable military depots, he was able to add to the old coachee’s long list of contracts by using his army back ground to make new friends in the garrison towns.

It was bitterly cold in the Crescents, but the snow held off and the teams stationed there were not called to face the hazards and hard ships in the north where Fraser was fighting it out both sides of the Border, sometimes in drifts of upwards of six feet. The northern reserve depot was a great boon to him and three times in fourteen days he called up reinforcements by rail, enabling him to make hauls he would have had to cancel without means of harnessing six horses to flats pulled usually by three.

Over in the Polygon Catesby was also fighting a nonstop battle with the weather, and in some ways it recalled the cotton famine, for in this kind of situation railway spurlines, on which a score of towns depended for food and raw materials, failed in a way that confirmed arguments Blubb had often advanced GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 583

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against the gridiron. Points froze at several junctions, and even main line locomotives were sometimes baulked by iced inclines, proving that there were still times when horseflesh was the more reliable form of transport.

Bryn Lovell, down in Abergavenny, had trouble in the central part of his region, where every road was treacherous and even double teams could not pull full loads over the icy hills of Brecon and Rad norshire, but the reserve depot at Derby helped him out with his more northerly hauls, and when it came to his knowledge that the scheme had been proposed and pushed through by Swann’s flibberty-gibbet wife, he asked Morris of Southern Pickings, if this titbit of network gossip was well-founded. Morris, who missed very little in his interpretation of day-to-day grapevine intelligence, admitted that it was, but he was not so surprised as his colleague. He had quite a different attitude to women and simply said, with a shrug, “That accident of his was the making of her. Maybe he didn’t know the woman he married before it happened and she had a chance to show her mettle.”

She had the business, that demanded most of her physical and ner vous energy, and she had the family, still looking to her for comfort and affection, but neither business nor family could claim any credit for keeping loneliness at arm’s length throughout the long winter. This was the achievement of the child within her, after it had assumed a unique identity round about the fourth month of pregnancy.

Private communion with a child she was carrying was not new to Henrietta Swann. Through her first pregnancy Stella had been her EXPERIENCE, and she always thought of her that way, that is to say in capitals. She had presupposed Stella to be a boy and the overriding aspect of her first pregnancy period had been curiosity that remained as a permanent guest in Henrietta’s mind when Stella assumed an identity. For she never did succeed in coming to terms with the child’s unwavering idolisation of Adam, to the virtual exclusion of herself. She admired Stella’s prettiness, and what Phoebe Fraser called “the bairn’s biddability,” but she was never able to identify herself with her in the way she could identify with Alex ander and George, whose pre-natal personalities persisted in a way that almost persuaded her she had made their acquaintance months before they were born and that they were only following a plan mutually agreed upon in advance.

Alex, stocky, masterful, and entirely untroubled by imagination, was clearly destined for the bar racks, whereas George, adventurous and highly original from his earliest infancy, was also adapting to the role he had been allocated, that of GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 584

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inheriting responsibility for the network and, very possibly, carrying it into the twentieth century.

It was not like this at all with the child conceived twenty-four hours before calamity had engulfed them. For a long time, throughout the initial shock period and the slow, agonising acceptance of the new situation, she had been unaware of its existence, and later on, when there was no longer any doubt that she was pregnant, she had resented the physical handicap the baby represented in her new role. But then, by a process that seemed to have no real starting point, something rather dramatic happened. The child stirred in more than the physical sense, virtually announcing itself as a confidante and a co-conspirator, so that it seemed eager to share with her the sense of adventure and achievement that carried her through the eventful autumn and into the new year, their comradeship maturing day by day and more so by night, when she was alone with those grey-faced twins, fear and uncertainty. Then the child that was part of her stood sentry, and she was tremendously comforted by its pres ence, its serenity, and its steadfastness, and found that she could commune with it as readily as she had once exchanged confidences with Sarah Hebditch, her Seddon Moss friend, or Mrs. Worrell, when she was not much more than a child herself.

It was a weird, exhilarating sensation, this reliance upon a foetus for solace, for although she could recall the exact circumstances of its conception it seemed to have neither physical nor spiritual links with the man fighting his private battle far away to the south-east. Its duty, its very purpose there in her womb, was to sustain her and her alone, and its message was always one of hope that more than compensated for the aridity of his short, impersonal letters, that seemed to have been penned by a polite stranger marginally involved in her concerns.

Sir John Levy, who had been to Switzerland in November, paid her a visit around Christmas time, perhaps with the object of setting her mind at rest about those letters and said, with a frankness she had learned to expect from him, “No matter how ridiculous it might sound to you the truth is he hasn’t time to write.

Writing a letter, particularly a letter to you in these circumstances, would call for con centration. His working day is entirely given over to a very compli cated and demanding schedule of exercises. Let me tell you something, dear lady. I’ve seen many people address themselves to the task of learning to live with an artificial limb, and roughly speak ing they fall into three categories, the Can’t-be-Dones, the That-will-Doers, and the Perfectionists.”

“But even a Perfectionist would be likely to show an interest in those most anxious about his progress, wouldn’t he, Sir John?” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 585

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He rubbed his nose at that, contemplating her gravely for a moment. Finally he said, “To be frank, dear lady, I don’t think he has a thought in his head beyond learning to walk and how to dis guise his disability, but does that surprise you?” She had a mental picture of him then, a lean, tall, thrusting man, fanatically self-contained but capable of odd impulses of humour, tenderness, and compassion.

But he was the last man in the world to spare himself and from her new standpoint she could relate this ab sent, lonely figure to the great web of enterprise that ran out from that belfry tower to the remotest corners of the country. She said, “No, not really. Not at all when I think about it. Thank you for coming,” and relieved him of the slim bundle of letters she had produced as evidence.

After that she went back to her confessor and together, without haste or exasperation, they examined this phenomenon, a man rising forty with a great lust for life, learning to walk again and gammon everybody into believing that he was afflicted with a slight limp but nothing worse.

3

Edith had no wish to hurry him. As the weeks passed and he showed no sign of backsliding, she understood that it was vital not to harass him in any way, neither as a man finding a foothold in unfamiliar country or as a lover. His past stood between them like a wall of glass, very thin glass but able to distort the glimpses they caught of one another as man and woman each in search of solace.