God Is an Englishman (81 page)

Dockett’s accompanying letter, moreover, was very encouraging. He claimed that the van was spoken for as far ahead as May, and that he could use another if others had doubts about their usefulness. He was out of luck, however, for the mail included a request from Blubb for the second van off the stocks, and Adam approved it, wondering if the request had anything to do with Blubb’s yearning to drive a four-horse team across Kent again and relive part of his splendid youth.

In rising good humour he went swiftly through reports from the Border Triangle, the Northern Pickings, the Southern Square, and Crescent South.

There was nothing from Catesby, in the Polygon, where the cotton famine was grinding through its third year, or from Edith Wadsworth, again deputising for her father who had been in hospital with a hernia since January. Then, with Dockett’s photo graph clamped to the wall by a drawing pin, and the sheaf of reports earmarked for circulation among the clerks below, he opened a letter addressed to him personally from Morris, manager of the Southern Pickings, the man who had been so insistent about canvassing porce lain factories for the transport of high-risk goods.

It was regarding this that he now wrote, enclosing another letter in the spinstery hand of Bryn Lovell, of the Mountain Square. It seemed that the two managers, who were neighbours, had got as far as hatching a scheme in their mutual advantage, and all they needed to secure an impressive contract was headquarters’

approval. Asses sing the importance of the letters at a glance, he rang for Tybalt, who must have been anticipating a summons for he popped in at once, wearing the expression Adam had learned to associate with good news.

Responsibility had aged Tybalt but it had also given him a dignity he had not possessed when Keate introduced him into the firm more than five years before.

He was now almost bald, with a grey, monkish fringe coaxed into a blunt point between his pink, flattish ears. He wore steel-rimmed eyeglasses secured by a strip of black tape to his lapel and security, plus three rises in pay in as many years, had given him a paunch. He trotted across to the desk flourishing a brace of letters that had apparently been held back, and Adam did not need to be told that they related to staff appointments, for Ty balt was a slave of method and invariably GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 433

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withheld letters of this kind to check against the day book in order that he could tell Adam whether or not he would be in London on the dates suggested. He said, breathlessly, “Things seem to be crowding in on us, Mr. Swann. Everything seems to be happening at once. You’ve looked at the mail, sir?” Adam told him he had and before showing him Morris’ letter sounded him out on Dockett’s slogan. He had almost abandoned hope of finding Tybalt ready to welcome an innovation that did not stem directly from him, or from his bosom friend, Saul Keate.

“What do you think of it, Tybalt?” he asked, and the head clerk’s mouth contracted, as though he had bitten into an unripe plum.

“Frankly, sir, rather vulgar,” he said, unequivocally, and then, as Adam raised his eyebrows, “Oh, I don’t have to be reminded that vulgarity is very much in vogue, sir. One has only to study news paper advertisements to be aware of that, but it doesn’t match up to my conception of a sober concern. Too…er…facile, Mr.

Swann, a catch-phrase that would come better from an American salesman.”

“But that’s the point,” Adam said, seriously now. “It
is
a catch-phrase, just as you say, but catch-phrases stay in the mind. Think about it. “
From drawer to drawer
,”

it’s got a music-hall ring.” and Tybalt said, primly, “Quite, Mr. Swann!” indicating that this in itself was enough to condemn it. Like his friend Keate he equated music-halls with Sin and Saturday.

“Well, whether you approve or not I’m telling Dockett he can keep it, so long as he only stencils it to box-vans. It wouldn’t make much sense on the side of a waggon shifting pig-iron or milk. However, that wasn’t what I rang about. Run your eye over this, for it seems that Dockett isn’t the only one who has been taking vice-regal liberties with headquarters,” and he passed over Morris’ letter and the letter from Lovell that Morris had enclosed.

News of a big contract always acted as balm to Tybalt’s dignity. He said, absorbing the text at a glance, “That’s promising, sir! That’s very promising indeed!

Mind you, it doesn’t come as a surprise to
me.
Mr. Morris hinted at the possibility when he was down here.”

“He didn’t hint to me,” said Adam, and Tybalt said, apologeti cally, “Oh, don’t misunderstand me, Mr. Swann. I wouldn’t like you to think Mr. Morris took me into his confidence as regards de tails, but after he mentioned those china hauls, I…er…took the liberty of asking him if he had any particular factory in mind.

He admitted he had, mentioning Royal Worcester. It’s my opinion, Mr. Swann, he had as good as secured this contract before he mentioned it at conference, but I had no idea Mr. Lovell would be involved.” He held a letter in either hand GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 434

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and his glance darted from one to the other so that Adam thought, “By God, he might be stuffy but nobody could be quicker off the mark for he’s already reading more between the lines than Morris or Lovell put on paper,” and he said, hoping to draw Tybalt out, “An overland haul from the factory to Cardiff docks. The entire distance by road, and half of it through an area well served by rail.
Why?
At first glance it wouldn’t seem economical from Royal Worcester’s standpoint. Turn up those conference notes, and let’s see exactly what Morris had to say about it at the time,” but here Tybalt became tutorial saying, with a hint of unction, “I don’t need to do that, Mr. Swann. What is it you want to know?”

“Why Royal Worcester have stopped shipping high-grade china from Bristol and switched to Cardiff. Also, given current rates of insurance, why they seem prepared to pay more for a much slower haul than they could get from the railways.”

“I can help you there,” said Tybalt. “Cardiff is a longer haul cer tainly but they’ve been dispatching via Cheltenham or Gloucester over the permanent way of two rival companies. That means the goods are either manhandled or switched in the original waggon over a link line. It doesn’t need much imagination, sir, to decide what that kind of usage might do to fine porcelain, no matter how care fully it was packed. If we could examine the claims departments of the Grand Central and Great Western, I think we should be in a position to discover why consignor and consignee have decided to part company.”

“There’s more to it than that,” said Adam, and Tybalt agreed that there almost certainly was, and that it would probably have to do with Mr. Morris’ hard bargaining with local insurance companies and also interminable delays due to overcrowding at Avonmouth Docks.

They had formed the habit of communicating one with the other in this rather artful way, Adam using the less imaginative man as a sounding board while they nibbled at an idea, a problem, or a pros pective source of income, like two schoolboys planning a raid on an orchard. Adam had often made up his mind on most of the questions and Tybalt was aware of this, but sometimes the gambler in Adam would over-reach himself and Tybalt, drawing on a reserve made up of his prodigious store of trivia, would apply the curb, citing the odds Frankenstein made available to them. Frankenstein helped them now, assessing the profit margin on a four-day haul, two over metalled roads, two down the winding valleys of Bryn Lovell’s territory, where gradients were steep and the surfaces execrable. All things being equal, Adam decided, there was certain profit in a quarterly contract with an undertaking as rich and as rooted as the Royal Worcester, but risks in transit made him cautious, notwithstanding Morris’ carefully-worked-out insurance schedules. He said, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 435

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thought fully, “We should look for a way to narrow that risk without lengthening the haul. Morris suggests specially built waggons but the fact is, notwithstanding the obvious benefits of a long-term contract like his, we simply can’t afford to invest in new rolling stock. We’ll be damned hard pressed to pay for what we have on order.”

He knew Tybalt, with his hand forever poised over the purse-strings of the enterprise, would agree with this, but the clerk, it seemed, had given the matter a great deal of thought after his exploratory talk with Morris and now he introduced what was, for him, a revo lutionary compromise. He said, “I’m with you there, Mr. Swann. It would be folly to spend this income before we get it.

But couldn’t existing waggons be adapted to Lovell’s specifications? A thing like that could be done locally. I could take it up with Mr. Keate.”

“Over a period of a year, with bi-weekly hauls using two frigates, how much gross would a contract like that bring in?”

Tybalt had the answer in five seconds. “A hundred pounds a quarter, give or take a sovereign or two, Mr. Swann.”

“Right. Then we’ll invest the first half-year’s income in double-springing and fitting compartments in half-a-dozen waggons, but, as you say, let it be done locally and at a cut price. Take the letters to Keate, put the problem to him, then write Morris at Keate’s dicta tion. I’ll make one condition. Our limit on adjustments mustn’t ex ceed a hundred pounds.”

They went on to discuss other matters; the demand of Lawrence, the master smith, for a new forge; Fraser’s discharge of two dishonest carters, against whom he wished to press charges; the withholding of a quarter’s rent for stables in Crescent South that were threatening to fall down, the loose ends of a web in which hundreds of waggons, twice as many horses, and an army of clerks, carters, smiths, and sad dlers were trapped. Much of it, by now, had become routine to him. He made his decisions quickly, lightly balanced on a see-saw of expenditure and income, short-term and long, seeing himself as a man liable to fall flat on his face at any moment yet relishing the never-ending challenge to his wits, judgement, nerve, and initiative. Tybalt said, hovering at the threshold, “Well, that would seem to be all for today, sir. Will you be going north this week?” and Adam, making another off-the-cuff decision, said, “No, but don’t ask me why. I planned to go today, at least as far as the Polygon and down through the Pickings to call in on Abbott at Salisbury, but I’ve just changed my mind. I’ve got a conviction we’ve turned the corner. I’ve no real grounds for thinking that, apart from Dockett’s slogan, and this Royal Worcester contract, but it’s in there, GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 436

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just the same,” and he tapped his chest. “Do you ever pull certitude out of thin air, Ty balt?” and Tybalt said, respectfully, that he did not, preferring to base hopes and fears on the answers to sums in the master ledger.

He went out then and Adam, crossing to the window, watched him cross the yard to the waggonshed where he and his friend Keate would soon be immersed in the agreeable task of cheeseparing. He thought, “Those two run on rails and I can understand men like Morris and Dockett getting impatient with them, but an undertaking as complex as ours needs a couple of sheet-anchors to hold it steady. The best turn I ever did myself was to sign on Keate and Tybalt at the start of it all.” In spite of a surge of optimism amounting almost to glee he did not feel like sitting still at a desk, and reassessing his chances of paying off Blunderstone and McSawney inside the time limit. His fancy continued to conjure with irrelevancies, the impact that lov able child of Avery’s had had upon his household, the impersonal approach his wife had brought to the child she was about to bear, almost as though she was having it by proxy, the health of the old Colonel, now approaching his seventy-fifth birthday, but, above all, his absorbing theories concerning the segments of the English work ing-class, represented by his own work force. There was an answer here somewhere to the astounding lead the country had gained over all its Continental competitors in the last forty years, and he did not think it had to do with steadfastness on Continental battlefields but was buried somewhere in the seams where the nation’s commercial instincts were mined. There were the Keates and the Tybalts, sober, plodding men, buttressed by moral purpose, and at the other end of the scale men like Tim Blubb, who saw any change as a flaw in the national character but who could still be coaxed into adapting, as Blubb had adapted once pride was restored to him.

There were the Catesbys, slaves of another kind of morality that had nothing to do with the beatitudes but was the legacy of the Saxon peasant who had made up his mind to screw advantages from his Norman over lord, and dotted here and there, as though to give an added shape and colour to the social kaleidoscope, were young sparks like the ex-ensign Godsall, oddities like Hamlet Ratcliffe, men who walked alone like Bryn Lovell, arrant thrusters like his father-in-law, astute, ambitious men like Morris, and imponderables like Dockett, who looked like yokels but possessed something more than a yokel’s brain. What the devil did all these men have in common apart from obstinacy? And what common denominator had enlisted them under his banner? For that matter, what was
he
doing at the head of them, when he might, on the proceeds of that necklace, have lived a life of ease and idleness?

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The clock struck ten and he turned away from the window to scan his newspapers. The column headings told him what was happen ing in the world outside. Federal troops were mounting yet another offensive to bring the South to heel, and nearer home Bismarck was rattling the Prussian sabre at the inof-fensive Denmark over the pro vinces of Schleswig and Holstein. Palmerston, he suspected, despite a matching bluster, would do nothing about it, for the Court was against him, the Queen continuing to think of Germany as a pixied fairyland of scented woods and sugarloaf castles where she had once dallied with her adored Albert. Gladstone, who, at fifty-four, was beginning to look like the popular conception of Jehovah, was thun dering out more theories of retrenchment.