God Is an Englishman (45 page)

Below him the yard was still and empty, save where the duty stable man and watchman pottered among the sprawl of sheds. Hours ago Keate, Tybalt, and all their minions had departed, wishing him good night, but before he left Tybalt had laid before him a breakdown of their progress up to the end of November 1861, comprising the outlay and expenditure involved in three years’ trading and expan sion.

It was compiled in the form of a graph, climbing slowly upward to the point of the July breakout, dipping as he had invested in more teams, drivers, and premises, and then rising again to within an inch of the edge of the paper where it levelled off, before showing a final dip that represented his latest ventures in the Border Triangle and Tom Tiddler’s Ground.

He would have been hard to please if the graph, and the figures it represented, had not induced a glow of satisfaction. Despite a heavy financial outlay, and a weekly wage and fodder bill topping three hundred pounds, he was making money fast, particularly in the older established areas, like the London suburbs and the Kentish Triangle, and it occurred to him that he had been extremely GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 235

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fortunate in his choice of executives. Keate and Tybalt were now as deeply involved in the success of the venture as he was himself, and between them they had enlisted the personal loyalty of a majority of waggoners and vanboys, particularly those in the latter group Keate had gathered in from the banks of the Thames. In the provinces he could depend utterly upon Catesby, Fraser in the Border Triangle, and Wadsworth and his daughter, Edith, in the Crescents.

Looking at the list of bases and personnel his eye paused on the name

“Wadsworth” and he thought again of the lasting impression the girl had made on him. He had met many young women during his jaunts about the country but none remained in his mind as a personality like Edith Wadsworth, with her buxom good looks, nut-brown hair, and gay self-confidence or, for want of a better word, thrust, and now that he had decided to award Christmas bonuses it seemed just that he should include her, as though she had been a base manager in fact as well as fancy.

The list was long and likely to prove expensive, but he did not be grudge the demands it would make upon his bank account. Keate and Tybalt were earmarked for ten pounds, as were Wadsworth and Catesby. Below them, underwritten for eight pounds, came Blubb, at Maidstone, Ratcliffe, still waging an uphill fight in the far west, the Welshman, Bryn Lovell, at Abergavenny, and Fraser in the far north. The newcomers, yet to prove their worth, were represented by Vicary, manager in The Bonus, and Dockett, in Tom Tiddler’s Ground, who were to receive five pounds apiece.

There remained Edith and he was by no means sure how to express his appreciation of her unpaid services as deputy when Wadsworth’s work took him out of the Boston area. A gift of money might be mis construed, but a trinket, or a gown accompanied by a letter of ack nowledgement would be appreciated. He exchanged pencil for pen, took a sheet of paper embossed with the Swann device, and wrote,

“Dear Miss Wadsworth; I am enclosing a draft for ten pounds in res pect of your father who may or may not be on hand. Give it to him with my compliments, and thanks for all his work in establishing us in such a vast stretch of territory. In due course, as I have told him already, I will pursue the original plan to split the area into three—north, central, and south, and whilst he will retain overall authority, I hope to engage two sub-managers, leaving him based on Boston as now. In the meantime, aware of the very real contribution you per sonally have made in the area, I am sending you a Christmas gift under separate cover, to arrive within the next two or three days. My warmest regards to you for the festive season and the new year. I remain, very sincerely, Adam Swann.” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 236

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He read the letter through and it seemed too formal to harmonise with their relationship, so he added a postscript: “I expect to be in Boston in late January or early February, and look forward very much to seeing you again. I don’t feel obliged (in view of what I ob served on the last visit) to ask you to keep the carters up to their work and safeguard our reputation for undamaged deliveries!” He made out the other drafts, stamped the envelopes, and then, looking at the clock, noted it was coming up to eleven. Shrugging himself into his topcoat and muffler he extinguished the lamp and descended the spiral staircase to the yard gates.

When he remained overnight in London he used a hotel in Nor folk Street, and on occasions like this, when the night was free of fog, he would compensate for his hours spent at the desk by walking the distance across London Bridge, down Cannon Street to Ludgate Circus, into Fleet Street and on past the Law Courts to the Strand. Tonight, because the frosty air invigorated him, he took pleasure in the walk and arriving at the junction of Norfolk Street decided to extend it, moving on down the Strand and past Charing Cross into the Mall.

As the moon rose its pale light subdued the yellow glow of the gas lamps, set at regular intervals along the thoroughfare. Traffic was very light, a few roysterers driving to or from the stews in Covent Garden, handbarrows and a dray or two, making overnight deliveries to restaurants and hotels, and every few paces a beggar or a per fumed drab, wan and hesitant in the guttering lamplight. Two or three women accosted him halfheartedly, but he moved on, minding them no more than the grind of traffic, or the acrid whiff of horse manure awaiting collection by the scavengers.

Once in the Mall, with the spectacular facade of Carlton House on his right and St. James’s Park, still under frost, to his left, he went on down towards the Palace, intending to make his way back to his hotel via Victoria, but as he approached the railings of the Palace a smart, gaily painted equipage dashed out of the double gates, and the ele gance of the coachman told him that it was not one of the ordinary mail vans, for whom everyone else was expected to make way, but one of the vehicles from the royal mews. He was watching it dis appear, wondering a little at its reckless speed, when he saw an officer of the Grenadier Guards making his rounds of the sentries, and his professional eye registered something unusual about the man’s uni form so that he looked at him carefully, noting the crepe band tied above the elbow of the right arm.

The significance of this was not immediately apparent, not even when the lieutenant stopped outside a sentry box and the sentry slapped the butt of his GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 237

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weapon, the sound echoing in the frosty air. Then a police constable confronted him, a friendly, full-bearded officer who half-hesitated, as though he was finding his night patrol tedious and sought contact with another night-prowler. He said, in a respectful tone prompted by the quality of Adam’s braided topcoat and calf-length boots, “Very sad news, sir. Her Majesty is going to be might put out over this,” and Adam said, with the eagerness accorded any sensational news-item, however shocking, “The Prince Consort? Is he dead?” and the man nodded, gravely and deliber ately, as though it was his duty to put the worst possible face on such a national calamity.

“You saw the mail dashing off to catch the boat train? I thought there might be a special edition on sale but it’s too late, I imagine. The papers will make hay out of it in the morning, I wouldn’t won der. Did you ever see His Royal Highness, sir?”

“No,” Adam said, “I never did,” and at once the man expanded, saying proudly,

“I did, often enough. I was a stone’s-throw from here, as a youngster, of course, when that lunatic took a pot shot at ’em. And now he’s gone, and him only forty-two.” He leaned towards Adam conspiratorially. “Typhoid, they say, and it don’t say much for the doctors, does it? If they can’t cure
him
how would the rest of us fare, I wonder?”

The man was not unsympathetic but a generous part of him was already responding to the enormity of the occasion, and Adam sup posed, by the time the winter’s sun rose over the city, that this would be true of millions of Englishmen.

There would be an orgy of mourn ing, of crêpe hangings, with black-bordered newspapers, flags at half-mast, and pulpit eulogies without number. But he remembered a time when these same Londoners had begrudged Albert his Parliamentary grant for, although the Queen’s husband, he was yet a foreigner, with foreign notions about how to conduct himself. They had even sneered at his Hyde Park exhibition until it had proved such a thump ing success, and it was only dogged persistence that had won their respect, although never their affection. He said, suddenly, “What did
you
make of him, constable?” and the officer, stroking his beard, said, “Oh, he wasn’t at all a bad sort for a foreigner.

And Queen Vic must have liked him, for they’ve a rare tribe of children.” It was, Adam supposed, as kindly an epitaph as a foreigner could look for this side of the Channel.

He said good night to the policeman and crossed the gardens to wards the Horse Guards. With him, consciously assembled, went a hotchpotch of history, for he remembered that the amiable, whoring Charles the Second had walked these same paths with his spaniels, and that, within a couple of hundred yards, was GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 238

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the spot where his father’s head had been hacked off by a masked butcher’s as-sistant. The place reeked of history. From close by, Charles’ brother James, had fled his capital throwing the Great Seal into the Thames, to be recovered by a water-man, and then, as the next century wore on, a workable compromise between king, grandees, country squires, and people had been hammered out and labelled

“Democracy.” Yet it had never deserved that name until the Chartist mobs had scared the Government into extending the franchise, and the new iron age had dawned, driving the Blubbs and the Frasers from the roads, and filling vast areas of a green countryside with filthy, urban sprawl. He sup posed now that there would be a State funeral, like the funeral of the old Duke that his father had travelled all the way from Keswick to attend ten years ago, and as he remembered this he had a sense of crossing a watershed that was both national and personal, for the Duke and his peers were mostly dead and buried under the new civil isation that the German Prince and a few like him had traced out, often in the teeth of reaction.

Now there would be more changes, thousands of changes, proliferating with the years, and if he lived out his normal span he would doubtless play a part in some of them, but change would soon leave him behind. His two children would be a year or two younger than Albert when the century drew to a close, and by then who knew what kind of England would have emerged, or how close the rest of the world had come to overhauling her?

The inevitable drab emerged from the belt of shadow between two gas lamps.

“Hello, Mister…
hey, Mister
…!” one of the twenty thousand said to be making a living on the London streets, the streets of the capital of the world. He walked on into Whitehall and crossed it, heading for the Strand. Bengy Hall’s gigantic clock at West minster struck the first stroke of midnight, and the reverberations of the ponderous strokes followed him as he drew level with Charing Cross. There was a kind of fatalism in the long, booming sounds, and they seemed to have a message for him but what it was he could not tell. Perhaps it was a lap bell, warning him that he still had a long way to travel. Or maybe a knell for the earnest humourless man, now lying dead. He reached the corner of Norfolk Street and hurried down it, suddenly eager for his hot toddy and sleep.

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paRt 1ii

cob at Large:

1862–1863

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One

swann tReble

1

When, towards the end of the nineteenfifties, Algy Swann, four times married and the father of nine children (five of them legitimate) saw fit to make public his denial of the rumour that he and two of his most powerful rivals were merging, a good deal appeared in the press concerning the origins of Swann-on-Wheels Limited, and Algy, smiling over it, promptly commissioned an official history of the firm, then within a year or so of its centenary.

It was a shrewd move, for a book of this kind, tracing the history of Swann-on-Wheels through nearly ten decades of national and international hurly-burly, bestowed upon the enterprise that accolade of antiquity so dear to the heart of every English tradesman, as pro claimed by foundation dates adorning the premises of ten thousand businesses up and down the country. Algy, as it happened, did not sell, but the book put a higher value on his principal asset. For even men who make their millions on the telephone, without knowing more than a dozen of their five thousand employees by name, like to think they are buying history as well as stock-in-trade and goodwill. It flatters the least romantic among them to reflect that they are now the masters of something that has resisted the buffets of time, and it offers a challenge to late arrivals bent on grafting a chromium-plated personality on a venture that is more of an institution than a going concern, as though they were buying the Monument, or the Tower of London, with licence to demolish and redesign the one, and open the other as a self-service store, selling their own brands of margarine and quick-mix baking powder.

The book that resulted from the researches of two hacks, however, made only tolerable reading, for it skipped nimbly across the ear liest years of the enterprise and dwelt lovingly on the dawn of the motor-age, and yesterday’s post-war boom, when Swann’s wheels, eight and ten to a vehicle, could be numbered in thousands.