God Is an Englishman (84 page)

The bulk of lightweight traffic carried over the rail in this country is carried at a GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 448

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loss. Some of their sacks and crates go half-empty, except at Christ mastime. On the figures I squeezed out of Brockworth on the strength of a pigeon pie I baked him, it never has paid a railway to haul small parcels from door to door. You’ll find most companies ready to sub contract, providing you cut them in on the profits.

You can’t absorb all this at once Adam, it’s too complex and will need time and thought. That’s why I wrote a detailed report, summarising the in formation I coaxed out of Brockworth.”

She opened her reticule again and produced a little black book. He flicked through the pages, finding them covered with her handwriting and close columns of figures. Here was the answer to most of the doubts and queries he was likely to raise, methodically indexed and cross-referenced, in a style that would have earned the unhesitating approval of Tybalt.

He said, “You’re right, Edith. It would need thought and very care ful calculation before we were in a position to offer quotations, but the idea itself doesn’t need a moment’s thought. You’ve done most of the thinking and I don’t have to tell you what this could mean if it comes up to expectations, yours or mine. It’s the biggest single advance we’ve ever made, or are likely to make, and I’d be a fool not to see that at once and give you credit for it. Now let’s consider the personal element. Do you think I could go forward with this without making some kind of recompense? This map, this report you’ve compiled must have represented weeks of hard grind on your part, and it doesn’t fit in with what you hinted about emigrating the last time you wrote. What’s happened in the interval? I have to know that because, if I go forward with the scheme, you would have to be part of it. The most important part.”

For the first time since she had slipped into the room some of her composure left her. Then, looking at him frankly, she said, “Nothing very complicated. I suppose I saw myself more clearly than I have in a long time and I didn’t like what I saw, a woman racing down the years to middle-age and living off a diet of self-pity and regrets. First Matt, drowned at sea, then you, married to a woman who loves you well enough to change into the person you need.”

“Just what am I to make of that?”

She stood up, brushing shreds of tobacco from the sleeves of her dress where her arms had rested on his desk. “I made up my mind once and for all about you the last time I was here. I’ve been un lucky myself but that doesn’t give me the right to steal some other woman’s happiness. I’ve always despised weaklings, men and women, and I was fast becoming one myself, incapable of standing on my own feet and looking the world in the eye.” She paused. “You want the whole GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 449

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truth? Very well, here it is. I’ve gone through a bad time since you came to me at Richmond last summer. I knew then there would never be anyone else but you and for a time, and I don’t mind admitting this, I half made up my mind to get you if I could. I lay awake thinking of little else right up to the time of that conference, and even afterwards. It wasn’t fear of scandal that held me back but the difference in you since you put your foot down at home and kept it down.

You were still growing, and who was I to check that for purely selfish reasons?

I suppose some people would call that con science but, believe me, it wasn’t.

Women don’t have consciences about men they covet and besides, I’m not a religious person, and I don’t even believe in an after-life. It was something more earthy, a sense of fair play if you like, or my own long-term interests and yours.

I was quite serious about emigrating and went right ahead with my plans. Then, one night, I found myself looking in the mirror saying, ‘Stand up, for God’s sake!

Be
someone in your own right. Running away to Australia won’t help for over there, a man’s country if ever there was one, you won’t even get a chance to express yourself, as you can right here on your own doorstep.’ I went downstairs in my night dress, stoked up the stove and burned those emigration papers. You want to hear more?”

“Every word.”

“Well, then, the next morning I went out after Brockworth and from there on it was easy, or easier every day. I was doing something, using my brains, being somebody with a job on hand.”

“You always had a job on hand, Edith.”

“A makeshift one, that didn’t require anything more than manag ing a team and keeping an eye on a few beer-swilling waggoners. This was different. This was creative. I suppose that’s why I under stand you better than anyone in the network. I don’t know what’s in your mind but I’ll tell you what’s in mine. Father is about finished. He’s still good for work but only work at a desk, and that isn’t good enough in our kind of business. If you adopt that scheme make me boss of all the Crescents and you’ll never have cause to regret it. It isn’t a woman’s role, maybe, but I’m not a fashionable woman and never was. My brain is as good as any man’s on your list and a lot better than some—Ratcliffe’s for instance, and Vicary’s, down in The Bonus. I’d get a different kind of fulfilment out of that and you’d profit by it. But perhaps that’s another thing you’d like to think on.”

“No,” he said, sharply, “not for a second. I would have done that much for you before you came to me with this scheme. I never had any doubts about your ability or judgement or initiative. I’ve never heard a word out of you that GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 450

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I didn’t recognise as good sense, and as for your loyalty to me and to all of us in the network, that was never in question, not even when you talked about turning your back on us.”

“Then it’s done? I take over from my father and I leave here with full authority over Goodbody and Horncastle in the Crescents?”

“Yes,” he said, “overall manager of all three territories, back dated from the first of the year on your father’s salary, plus a five per cent bonus on turnover.”

“It’s generous,” she said, “but I can justify it.” There was no more to be said. They went down into the yard and out into Tooley Street, where he found her a growler to take them over to King’s Cross.

In the semi-darkness of the cab he held her hand and she let him, saying little as they trotted through trailers of river mist. Each had a sense of having arrived at a new point of departure in their relationship, and when they parted, after he changed her second-class ticket for a first-class with a small joke about her new managerial status, it gave him the greatest satisfaction to see that the strain and uncertainty that had attended all their other part ings was no longer there. He said, taking her hand, peeling down the glove and raising it to his lips, “Pay no attention to what I said about grudging you a good husband, Edith. I never met a woman who deserved one more. Whatever happens from here on you can count on me,” and she said, with a smile, “I always could, Adam. In that way I imagine I’ve been luckier than most women. I’ve crossed paths with two men who didn’t have to resort to pomposity and whiskers to prove their masculinity. Poor Matt drowned but you’ll swim on. Away into the next century I wouldn’t wonder.” The guard’s whistle shrilled and the long train gave its first, con vulsive jerk.

He stood watching her face until it was swallowed up by the February murk, a small, pale triangle that somehow reminded him of Avery’s in its assertiveness and singularity. Then, like a man who has dined well and is conscious of a spring in his limbs, he walked with long strides to the cab rank and made his way to his own terminus.

He could see that something tumultuous was afoot the moment the gig passed the last of the leafless copper beeches. The entire frontage of the house was lit up, as though for a celebration, and the old Colonel, muffled to the eyebrows, met him in the yard, as excited as a schoolboy greeting a companion at the start of a new term. “It’s a boy!” he cried, exultantly, “Lively as a cricket and caught the whole damn lot of of ’em on the hop! It was over by late afternoon and the gel is splendid!”

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He said, catching his breath, “That about crowns a remarkable day but you oughtn’t to be out here with your chest. Let’s hurry in and mix you a hot toddy!”

“I’ve already had three,” the old Colonel said, chuckling, and Adam thought the old fellow could have shown no more jubilance had he been the father.

Inside all was controlled bustle. He went softly upstairs and peeped at Henrietta.

She looked, he thought, radiant, with a clear, bloom ing skin and her copper hair spread across the pillow in delightful disorder. Nurse Hoxton told him she had a moderately easy time of it, and had taken her broth and toast before going to sleep. He went along the corridor and looked down at the gurgling, winking George and it was then that the sense of purpose that had dominated the last twelve hours crystallised in an impression of cresting a steep hill and looking down on the prospect below. It had shape and a promise that enfolded him and his, insuring them all against the future. He thought too of Edith, speeding through the dark ness towards her private destiny and somehow, he could not have said why, it all converged on that saucy little bundle winking up at him from the cot. He went down again and warmed his hands at the fire. Outside the wind got up, soughing through the bare branches of the beeches and stirring Henrietta’s curtains, part of the material ordered for a party that was never held because an unknown waif had died in a chimney flue. He thought, “Well, that’s all behind us now and we’re set fair, I suppose, the whole lot of us. It’ll be up to me to keep on course.” A little over six years had passed since he opened his eyes on the littered field behind Jhansi and seen what he thought of as a half-circle of cobras’ eyes that were not cobras’ eyes but the genesis of everything he had achieved, and looked to achieve in the years ahead. He thought briefly of Avery, and of Avery’s child down at Folkestone, of Henrietta asleep upstairs relieved, he supposed, of the unspoken pledge of continuity she had made him that night at the George inn. The identification of the child’s name with the place where he had been conceived made him smile, a rather vain, self-satisfied smile of propri-etorship over a higgledy-piggledy assortment of men and teams and waggons and the generous body of the woman sleeping upstairs who had somehow, in these last few months, found a new identity, much as he had done when he came crashing down at Jhansi and fallen on the means to adopt it. Then, yawning, he was conscious of the demands of the day and climbed slowly upstairs, too tired to eat the supper laid for him but more composed in his mind than he had ever been, at any time in his life.

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Four

aDvance on

most FRonts

1

There is a certain affinity between the growth of a commercial en terprise and the tactics a trained athlete brings to a long-distance event upon which reputation and prize-money are staked.

It was in these terms, or something like them, that Adam Swann gauged the strength of the tide that turned so definitely in his favour on St. Valentine’s Day, 1864, seeing himself as a marathon runner nearìng the halfway mark, with a prospect of not merely holding on but finishing well ahead of his rivals.

By the late spring of 1864 Swann-on-Wheels had, as it were, caught its second wind, and was settling down to a steady, mile-consuming pace, aware of the hazards of the future but fortified by the achievements of the past. The first, spirited attack of the
sortie torrentielle
had all but spent itself, its ripples spreading out across England and Wales, there to be absorbed in any number of minor forays, but while this was taking place new energy was being gene rated at headquarters, where the hard-won gains of farflung storming parties were being assessed in ledgers and consolidated on staff maps, so that by midsummer the enterprise was ripe for a second offensive to be mounted on a larger scale than its predecessor.

Sortie torrentielle
had, in effect, transformed itself into an advance on all fronts.

The advance, like any successful breakthrough, was uneven. Here and there, across a front that embraced all England, progress could be measured in yards, while in other sectors the breakthrough yielded sizeable territorial gains and a rich haul of booty. Then, for one reason or another, a promising local advance would falter, to be taken up elsewhere, so that Adam, studying his wall maps in his belfry, and feeding them with Tybalt’s returns and information fil tered to him through the post, could never be quite sure where progress would continue, or where reserves were most urgently needed. For the first time in his life he was able GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 453

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to generate sympathy for a general like poor Lord Raglan, whom he had once written off as a hopeless dolt. It was not so easy, he decided, to make wise, overall decisions on the basis of a dozen conflicting reports, or to make accurate allowance for a time-lag that sometimes tricked him into despatching reserve teams to sectors that no longer needed them, thus depriving those that did. Freakish accidents, and equally freakish weather, often had an important bearing on a situation, and neither Frankenstein nor his experience could warn him in advance of the breaking strain of a worn axle in Cumberland, or an unseasonal downpour that turned a Dorset road into a morass overnight. By and large, however, he made few serious mistakes and even managed to learn something from those errors he did commit. By that summer, when the business was on an even keel again, he had learned how to use philosophy as a recoil and also to rely less upon judgement (his own and his adjutants’) than upon luck. One lesson he learned well. Of all the apparatus needed to haul goods from one end of the country to the other the least predictable was human. By June 1864, he was incapable of being surprised by those who manned his picquet-lines and sapheads from Berwick to Brixham, from Cockennouth to Canterbury. Dockett, who looked and spoke like an overgrown shep herd lad, had cornered the house-removal market in his territory with a slogan and in a sense they were all Docketts. One never knew what would emerge from any one of them.