God Is an Englishman (37 page)

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symbolised feminine qualities and Eve was an obvious choice, but then he had another thought and a very arresting one. There was that child’s body he had lifted from the well at Cawnpore just as dusk was falling, and a single bright star hung in the sky, witness to the ghoulish task that he and Roberts were performing on that sombre occasion. He re called that the presence of the star had seemed to him a kind of requiem and now, looking down at his own child, he remembered that a solitary star had hung low over the woods when he set off on that mad gallop for the doctor.
Stella.
She should be Stella. To him at least it represented renewal and suddenly he was resolved upon it, whether Henrietta approved or not. He replaced the hand under the coverlet and went upstairs, ranging along the corridors, glanc ing into the bedrooms, and wondering how much of the furniture was Collinwood’s and how much went with the house. In a row of intercommunicating attics, he saw a huge cistern, presumably installed with the object of building a modern plumbing system, and made a mental note to pursue inquiries in this direction, but now his examination was no more than cursory. He had made up his mind and was already casting around for a formula that would save his face. Ordinarily he was not a man to bother about such nice-ties but with Henrietta it was always advisable to take this kind of precaution.

She said, when he rejoined her, “Well, what do you think?” and he replied,

“Stella. We’ll call her Stella. It’s an easy name and she’s going to have starry eyes.” Then, before she could exclaim, “As for the house, it’s more intelligently planned than I supposed, and there’s pasture here for half-a-dozen horses. I’ll see Phillips before I go up to town in the morning and find out what he’s asking. More I don’t promise. Let’s have supper.”

His nonchalance did not deceive her but she was wise enough to let the subject drop. All she did, in the way of bolting the door on him, was to slip a message to the miller’s wife to get word to Phillips to be available the following day until noon. She had no need to do more than hint at the reason. Ellen Michelmore was already her sworn ally.

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Five

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shiRes

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On her account he had missed his target date. it was hopeless, in view of all that followed that eventful evening drive across the Kent ish border, to adhere to his plans to break out into even a few of the mapped-out territories, yet some good came of it. She was still, if unwillingly, mascot and talisman of Swann-on-Wheels.

If this was her function, the role of Tybalt, the old-maidish clerk Keate had introduced into the business, was that of power-house, for it was Tybalt who collected and scrutinised the county alman acks, Tybalt who hit upon the idea of compiling a list of potential customers from Berwick to Fishguard, across the empty pockets of the west to the sheep farms of Dorset, then eastward to where the South Eastern Railway ran almost within sight of Tryst. More important still, Tybalt put into practice Adam’s own notion of con solidating this vast amount of information and relating it to all the data reposing between the covers of the red travelling diary.

Tybalt, a man who did not indulge in frivolities, called his appar atus “The System” but Adam, always inclined to romanticise com merce, soon found another name for the ungainly object they built to make the information readily available. He called this aide-memoire “Frankenstein,” for that is how it looked to him when it was complete, a method of fact-assimilation that seemed to him, when he consulted it and got an unexpected answer, to combine the logic of Solomon and the willingness of the Genie of Aladdin’s lamp.

The almanack survey came first, for without it Frankenstein would never have been invented. Adam estimated that he had lost six weeks’ leeway on account of Stella and her mother’s infatuation with Tryst, but the time sacrificed was not wasted. It was put to good use by Tybalt and Keate, and led to all manner of GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 193

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changes and adjustments in the original plan, not least the introduction of some medium-sized waggons that he came to call frigates, because they were handier than the drays and possessed twice the carrying capacity of the one-horse pinnaces. He invested another five hun dred pounds in frigates and teams to pull them, and because their design was his, and had been disowned by Blunderstone the coach-builder, he took a proper pride in their arrival in the yard, a fleet of handsome, high-sprung, canopied waggons that would stand up to any amount of hard usage on country roads but were yet light enough to come within a mile or two of the records set up by coaches like the Bagshot to Staines “Quicksilver” and the Leicester to Not tingham “Lark.” For in the territory they were designed to exploit the emphasis would be on light merchandise rather than on the heavy hauls requiring three-horse drays.

Tybalt came to him with the almanack idea on his first day back at the yard, soon after he had signed his five-year lease and des patched Henrietta, gibbering with glee, about the business of packing their belongings for transport into rural Kent. The clerk appeared in his office carrying a stack of grubby, paper-bound books that looked like an assortment of railway timetables, and when Adam asked if they were Bradshaw guides Tybalt replied, “No, sir, almanacks,
county
almanacks.

I have been accumulating them by post, and I have a conviction that a great deal might be learned from them.”

Tybalt addressed everybody in this fashion, rarely using a short word or an idiom if he could avoid it, and Adam formed a theory that it was a habit he had developed a long time ago in order to com pensate for his insignificant appearance and lack of inches. The clerk went on to explain that every county in England now had its own almanack and that, whereas this had been so in the earliest days of the century, the scope and format of these brochures had been greatly enlarged by the spread of railways. Nowadays, he said, they were not issued for the benefit of the man of means travelling across un familiar country but offered information that was needed by the penny-a-mile, fare-paying passenger, and the commercial traveller humping his skip up and down the country. Most of them contained classified lists of local business houses, summaries relating to agricultural yields, commentaries on local monuments, road-systems, geological strata, the personnel of county notabilities, and, indeed, everything relevant to a specific shire.

“I have no doubt, sir,” he went on earnestly, “that some of the facts published here have already found their way into your diary but nothing can be lost by verification. It was with this in mind that I compiled a detailed list of all the established businesses in two of the five areas under review for GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 194

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expansion. I chose, for reasons I will explain, the er…the ‘Western Wedge’, and the ‘Southern Square.’”

Adam smiled when Tybalt mentioned the two territories by nick name, knowing that he would have preferred to call them what they were named on the ordnance maps.

“It sounds as if you have been putting my absence to good use, Tybalt,” he said.

“Let’s see what you extracted from those alman acks,” but he was quite unprepared for the spate of information written on a sheaf of foolscap sheets covered with Tybalt’s copper plate handwriting.

It was astounding how much information Tybalt had milked from the pages of dry-as-dust guides issued by Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Devon, Somerset, and Cornwall. Here was everything that mattered, set down in precise, alpha-betical order. The cereal, fruit, and dairy areas in the Hampshire plain, the milk-processing plants and bacon-curing factories further west, the cider apple output, the fish tonnage landed at a string of points between Poole and Mevagissey, the flower-growing districts and tin mines of the Cornish peninsula, and a couple of pages devoted to the china clay industry and the staple product of beef on which Adam realised he must depend in most isolated districts. It was all there, with the names and addresses of men involved in each industry, and Adam’s sole doubt concerning the indispensability of the breakdown rested on the belief that many of these producers must have established their own transport links with the nearest railhead. Tybalt, however, had foreseen this and said, with a tincture of superiority, “I did not include the front-rank men, sir. Producers in a fair way of business would have their own carts and carters, but if you succeed in estab lishing a faster and more reliable service, linked to goods trains running over the main lines, you could soon under-cut monopolists in most areas. Look at it this way, Mr. Swann.
A
has his own transport and
B,
in a much smaller way of business, depends on local markets, with no chance of selling in Covent Garden, Billingsgate, or the like. With our service, timed to the minute if I might emphasise that, sir,
B
’s products will be in London before
A
’s, and
A
will come knocking on your door the moment he is aware of this.”

The logic made instant appeal to him, and it seemed to him that Tybalt should be given credit for some very original thinking.

“I’ve gone over this ground very thoroughly and made what I thought an exhaustive survey,” he admitted, “but it’s a very inadequate one compared to yours.

I discounted the smaller men, assum ing that everything they produce would find its way on to the stalls of local markets. But how could we possibly make personal GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 195

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contact with all these smallholders and cottage craftsmen? It would take a team of men a two-year canvass, wouldn’t it?”

“By direct approach it would, Mr. Swann, so there remains the postal service.

To break new ground in any of these counties would mean a postal canvass, stating our rates and schedules and that, of course, is what I had in mind when I compiled the list.”

“You can’t undertake a job of that size. Are you saying we should sign on some junior clerks?”

“Why, yes, sir, but not from outside. There are two or three of Mr. Keate’s van boys who could be taught something more useful than swinging on a tailboard rope. I…er…took the liberty of discussing the matter with the waggonmaster.

He has at least one lad I can lick into shape, and two or three others who have expressed a desire to improve their education.”

“Damn it all, man, none of those urchins have ever been near a school. Hardly one of them can write his own name. Why not ad vertise for a couple of trained clerks and start ’em off at a pound a week?”

“If you have no objections, sir,” said Tybalt, huffily, “I prefer to train youngsters in my own methods.”

“Very well. Get Keate to assign them to you from today. How can I argue with you when you produced a scheme as good as this? But wait a minute, come over here with me and take a look at the maps. To begin with, why did you choose those particular areas?”

“They were two of the five earmarked for expansion. The other three, if you recall, sir, were The Polygon, north of the cotton belt, The Mountain Square in Wales, and The Bonus embracing, I take it, the Essex and Suffolk coast.”

“Have you done a breakdown on all those areas?”

“Yes, sir, and I suggest we should find a substitute for the last of them. That is, if you still intend to open four depots instead of three, as I believe Mr. Keate prefers. He has had no success in find ing a waggonmaster for that east coast area, although the lists show the potential is there. The fact is, it is too near London and we’re likely to meet stiff competition.”

Adam conceded this but added that there was another good reason for a switch.

“You’ll have heard I’ve just settled myself in north-west Kent? I’ve made some useful contacts through the agent and the solicitors I’ve been dealing with. We’ll shelve The Bonus for the time being and set up a depot at Tonbridge to serve the Kent ish Triangle. I daresay, once we’re established, we shall need a sub-depot at Horsham or thereabouts. You’ve studied these maps, Tybalt?” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 196

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Tybalt said he had used the maps extensively when compiling his lists and had no quarrel with their boundaries, or the siting of depots. Together they searched the areas again, applying a slide rule to the distances between individual producers and the nearest railheads and making detailed notes on contours and river obstacles that would have a bearing on time schedules. It was this task, a complicated one involving a good deal of guesswork, that was directly responsible for the birth of Frankenstein.

He was calculating the distance between Bristol and Bridport, the dividing line between the Southern Square and the Western Wedge, when it struck him that there must be an easier way of arriving at a figure equating time, distance, and the quality of available roads. He said, suddenly, “What we need, Tybalt, what we must have, if we’re to make full use of your almanack material, is some kind of ready reckoner, something that helps us to make on-the-spot decisions by comparison. Can you dredge something more from that dome of yours before we start the canvass?”

Tybalt admitted readily that he could not, having already wasted a great deal of time checking distances and railway timetables when they were planning their suburban runs in and around the capital.

“An index is what we need,” Adam said, “but it has to be one that doesn’t involve trotting to and fro between ledgers, invoices, maps, and Bradshaws. What we want is something we can use to give us an approximate answer to any one set of queries. Go and clear the ground for that canvass in the areas we’ve selected and steal those boys of Keate’s while you’re about it. I’ll think of something, if I have to walk round this belfry all night.”