God Is an Englishman (75 page)

We’ve been working them hard now for five years plus. I daresay one can give or take a year in the case of a few of them but only at the cost of sacrificing our principal sell ing point, speed. At all events, that’s his view and I promised him I would put it to you.”

“That’s what I pay you for,” growled Adam. “What else have you to say?” Tybalt went on, red in the face, “Over a hundred new waggons are needed and twelve quarter-rents are due on stables and warehouses. You’ll need to find something in the region of five thousand by this day twelvemonth. How do you propose to do it? By mortgaging Tryst?”

“You can’t mortgage what you haven’t paid for. I’ve got a better idea. When you’re surrounded, and expect an attack, the manual recommends a breakout in force and feints on other sectors, what the French call a
sortie torrentielle.
These weekly conferences we have, the departmental pow-wows within our parish, would you say they have been productive?”

“Very much so,” Tybalt said, “you know I’ve always approved of them.”

“What actually emerges from them?”

Tybalt looked at him doubtfully, as though he had a strong suspicion his leg was being pulled. “They clear the air. Each of us knows what the others are doing.

There is another aspect too…I don’t know how to amplify that without seeming to take a liberty, sir.”

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“You wouldn’t have the smallest idea how to take a liberty, Tybalt.”

“Then put it this way, sir. They give subordinates like Mr. Keate, myself, and the resident farrier and carpenter, a sense of…well…of being consulted, sir, of being something more than hired hands.”

“That’s precisely what I’m driving at. We call a network con ference right here at headquarters and lay the facts before everyone concerned.” The finality of the suggestion startled the clerk. “You don’t
mind
these figures becoming generally known, sir?”

“If I continued to work used-up teams and run waggons that spend half their time in the repair sheds every man on the pay-roll will draw his own conclusions, and those conclusions won’t be flattering to me or the firm. Convene a general meeting here on Friday, and say I’ll pay for return fares and an overnight stay in London. Mean time I’m going to see Blunderstone about new waggons, then McSawney about fresh teams, bought on credit.” He stalked out of the tower, leaving Tybalt stuttering, and button ing his topcoat set off towards the river at a fast walk.

It was raining, and winter was marching on the city from the east but he had never found the interior of a cab conducive to thought, and it crossed his mind that he ought to keep a saddle horse in the yard for rapid movement through streets where the traffic situation was going from bad to worse, and there were sometimes blocks a mile long in the busiest periods of the day. It occurred to him then that, notwithstanding the gridiron, the pace of the new age inside the big centres of population was still regulated by the speed of a horse, for even as recently as twenty years ago there had never been cities as populous as this, where villages, orchards, and stubble fields were being devoured at the rate of acres a week. What would happen, he wondered, if London, and all the rival Londons in the Midlands and North, continued to grow at this pace, and people were edged out of the heart of them to make room for more and more offices, factories, warehouses, and docks? The London suburbs al ready lapped halfway across Middlesex and were nibbling the farmlands of Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent, Surrey, and Berkshire. Soon, in his lifetime perhaps, it would take a man days to walk the diameter of the capital and perhaps a week to work his way round the circumference. With only an odd glimpse of cherry-garden and cornfield. Change.

Movement. Speed. Money. Expansion. Innovation. These were the factors upon which one had to base one’s cal culations today if one was determined to remain in the swim, and he thought it surprising that this was not generally accepted by a maj ority of Englishmen. Most of whom were as conservative as their pastoral GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 402

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ancestors. There had been that one big leap forward a gener ation ago, but by now the sons of the Stephensons and the Brunels had absorbed it and settled on an even course, as though England had always been a workshop with an insatiable hunger for new markets overseas. Men, and women too, thought in terms of hardware and cotton instead of in terms of turnips and the next hay crop, but that was the only concession they made to the century. They still put their trust in eighteenth-century legislation and the navy and at base the social structure of the nation was still rooted in the petty squire and the arrogant politician, typified by Palmerston, who thought of Tra falgar and Waterloo as last week’s triumphs.

Here and there certain prophets had raised their voices—John Stuart Mill, Peel, Shaftesbury, that solemn, clever fellow, Gladstone, and the persuasive chap, Disraeli, and because they were vocal they were heard at Westminster but not beyond it, not in the shires, not even in big provincial communities that were becoming semi-auton omous states, ruled by families whom sudden wealth had invested with power that was as parochial as feudalism. Unashamedly these people, who ought surely to have enlisted in the vanguard of progress, were preoccupied with conserving, and conservation was a word that made no appeal to him. Perhaps it should have done. Perhaps he should have taken things more slowly, limiting his field of action, and remaining the tenant of Tryst while he built up his reserves.

Then, because he knew himself better than most men, he realised that he would stay on the offensive to the day he died for that was the way he was made, and a man never got far if he ran contrary to his nature. Now, with his future in the balance, he could see no other course but to attack, and it was Blunderstone and McSawney who gave ground before the first onrush of his
sortie torrentielle.

He marched into Blunderstone’s waggon yard and declined the clerk’s invitation to be fobbed off with Blunderstone’s son, a product of the new type of gentleman currently being turned loose on the city by imitators of the pious Doctor Arnold of Rugby, and better fitted, to his mind, to lead a cavalry squadron than kick their heels here, where a man’s word did not rest on a handshake and a work force was not to be rallied by a bugle call.

Blunderstone senior waddled out on demand, and Adam, who had always found the coach-builder an honest, imaginative crafts man, was as blunt with him as he had been with Stock. Having told him his needs, he asked for a fleet of two hundred men-o’-war and frigates, in proportions of two to one, delivery to be made in time for the spring hauls.

Blunderstone said, rubbing his hands, “I thought it was time you came to me for replacements, Swann. Some of those vehicles I sold you were refits if I remember GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 403

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rightly, for you were short on capital then. The way you’ve been working them they must be held together by wire by now. A hundred and thirty flats and seventy two-horse vans? My word, that’ll make a hole in your pocket, won’t it?”

“That depends on you, for I can’t confirm the order if you want cash. Either you accept it on the basis of a spread-over, carrying us into 1865, or I make do with replacements at Gideon’s.”

Blunderstone looked almost as horrified as Tybalt when told that his employer’s personal account was overdrawn.

“Gideon?”
he said. “You’d haul your customers’ goods in a Gideon-built vehicle? They told me you prided yourself on speed and minimum wastage. How can you do that with waggons built for door-to-door deliveries?”

“I should have to overload and make allowances for breakdowns in my quotations. The fact is, Blunderstone, I’m faced with a very heavy outlay this year, and although prospects never looked better I could only pay you twenty-five per cent on delivery and the rest over the next nine months. I’ve been a good customer to you, and I’ve never had reason to complain of your vehicles. I’ve built my reputation on your waggons but now it’s Hobson’s Choice so far as I’m concerned.

You can take it or leave it, I’m not here to beg favours.”

“Now hold hard,” Blunderstone protested. “Say forty per cent on delivery.”

“I couldn’t meet it. It’s no use pretending that I could.”

“Two hundred new waggons will occupy more than half my work force over the next four months. It would mean putting off other customers, with cash in their hands.”

“Orders for odd vehicles,” Adam reminded him. “I’m buying in bulk and that entitles me to credit.”

“What about security?”

“I could offer you existing teams and stock, plus goodwill. Nothing more, I’m afraid.”

“I hear you’ve bought yourself a big place on the Kent-Surrey border. Now I’ve always fancied myself as a country squire in my declining years. Suppose you deposit the deeds?”

Adam could chuckle at this. “You heard right but you didn’t hear enough. Tryst is barely one-third paid for and the rest is left on at six per cent.”

“You think too big for an amateur,” Blunderstone said, but there was friendli-ness in his tone. “Suppose you give me a week to mull it over?”

“I can give you two days. I’ve got a depot managers’ conference on Friday, and I’ll need your answer by Saturday.”

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“Waggons are no good without teams,” Blunderstone said, “and unless you take half your vehicles off the road you’ll have to buy in fresh from McSawney.

You won’t find him as accommodating as me, he’s from Aberdeen.”

“I hope to talk him round,” Adam said, “for McSawney wouldn’t care to see me buy crossbreds in Suffolk.”

“Nay, lad,” said Blunderstone, paternally, “stick to the beasts you built your reputation on and if necessary double up on heavy loads.” He looked at Adam thoughtfully, rolling a cheroot from one side of his mouth to the other. “How old are you, Swann? Thirty-four? Thirty-five?” and when Adam told him he was thirty-six he said, “I wish to God you were my lad. I made a bad mistake about Charlie. Sent him to one of those new gentlemen’s schools thinking he’d amount to something and so he has, providing a man’s look ing for someone who can read Latin on a tombstone. But I see my error now. I should have put him clean through the trade—joinery, wheelwright, and coach-builder, same as my old father did for me. Away with you then, to gammon McSawney, and damned good luck to you!”

McSawney, however, was not so easily gammoned. As Blunder stone had predicted he drove a hard bargain and refused to supply teams on the basis of twenty-five per cent down and the rest spread over a year. The best terms Adam could get, and they kept him in McSawney’s stables for the rest of the day, was fifty per cent on de livery and the balance in nine months, with a flat rate of three per cent interest on the outstanding debt. Adam would have agreed to harsher terms. Like Blunderstone he had an unshakable faith in his Clydesdales and Cleveland Bays, and his teamsters were now well accustomed to them and knew to a few pounds how much they could draw over a specified route.

It was dusk when he made his way back to London Bridge Station and caught a train for Croydon, and supper time when he drove his gig between the leafless copper beeches and saw the glow in the tall downstairs windows and the one patch of light above, where Phoebe Fraser was patrolling the nursery. He stopped short of the stableyard and looked along the rambling frontage of the old house, reflecting that, when all was said and done, it had been these bricks and mortar, and all they meant to Henrietta, that he was fighting to retain. He thought, “I daresay I’m a fool to hamstring myself this way. With that four thousand in my account I could have ridden this out in less than a year,” but then he remembered the strik ing change in Henrietta since the night at the George where they had drove their bargain, and after that the queer satisfaction he derived from meeting a challenge that was tantamount to starting all over again. “I don’t give a damn GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 405

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what figures tell me,” he re flected, “I’m happier following my nose. Josh was right about one thing. It’s folly to dig in when your instinct tells you digging in means getting bogged down, and as for Edith’s advice, there aren’t many city men who can ask for loyalty over an empty cash-box and be pretty sure of getting it!” He shook out his reins and drove into the yard as Henrietta, hearing the scrunch of gravel, came to the yard door to greet him. He called cheerily to her and she must have gauged his mood by his tone of voice for she hitched her skirts and ran trip ping down the stone stair and round the angle of the stable door to a point where they could not be overlooked from the kitchen windows. He said, throwing out his arms, “By God, I’ve had a day of it and I’m damnably glad to be home!” and then kissed her and slid his hands over her hips in a way that confirmed her belief that she was growing on him at a pace that she would have thought very unlikely a few months ago. She said, trying to keep gaiety from her voice, “The Colonel’s gone to bed to nurse a cold so there’s only the two of us.

Will you say good night to the children while I see about supper?”

“Ten minutes,” he said, throwing off the last buckle and turning the horse into the loose box, “and send down for a bottle of Beaune. It’s a celebration of a sort.” They went out of the yard and up the steps, and he walked with his arm round her. It was a gesture, she reflected, that he had not made in public since their clash over the chimney sweep.

2

It was as though, between them all, they were reassembling an engine that had been known to work but did not work now, for it stood in need of so many adjustments and modifications and had, moreover, run clear out of steam.