Theirs Was The Kingdom (40 page)

He looked up at the great crimson ball suspended over Barnstaple Bay in the west, as though judging the distance it had yet to fall. “Come now, we can make it back in twenty minutes and change before tea bell. Take it slowly to the level and I’ll pace you over the last mile.”

They set off one behind the other, picking their way unerringly over tussocks of coarse grass, heather clumps, and outcrops of stone that studded the reverse slope. Nothing more was said about how the western edge of Exmoor had looked to Giles four thousand years before Caesar landed in Kent or, indeed, about anything more important than a pot of apricot jam enclosed in a recent parcel from home. After tea, of course, they had to separate—Hugo to sit at prep in lower school, Giles, as a prefect, to take his turn supervising middle school prep. It was not until several hours later, when everybody else in the Brereton dormitory was asleep, that they resumed communication.

It was after silence bell then, but down at this end of the long room, where a shaft of moonlight fell across the line of washstands touching the upper half of Giles’s bed, that their discussions were never overheard. They had come to regard their bedspace as another area of privacy.

Hugo had noticed long ago that Giles never seemed to need sleep. Perhaps old souls didn’t. Perhaps they took their rest in long hibernations between spells on earth. He could see him now, flat on his back, fingers interlocked behind his head, gazing up at the ceiling, as though it guarded all the secrets of the Universe and was feeding them, one by one, into the head of the only person Hugo regarded as fully qualified to absorb them. Presently he said, “What will you
do
, Giles? After you leave here, I mean. Will you go to Cambridge like they say? And then into the business?”

“No. I won’t do that. I’m not sure what I shall do. But whatever it is it won’t be that.”

“Why not? Fulbrooke Major told his brother he heard Tommy tell Mr. Shaw you could pass any examination they set if you wanted to.”

Tommy—the Reverend J. H. Thompson, M.A.—had been headmaster of West Buckland more than twenty-five years now, and enjoyed Giles Swann’s respect and affection. Nevertheless, Giles replied, “Tommy’s a schoolmaster. He has to think in terms of examinations. But they aren’t any guide at all to a man’s capabilities and never will be. Don’t forget that. It’s very important that you shouldn’t, because you’ll never pass any.”

Hugo, reflecting that this was almost certainly true, asked, “If that’s so then what should I go for when I move up next year. I’ll be nearly as old as you then and they’ll be sure to write home and ask.”

“What you can do better than anyone else.”

“But no one can make a living running and playing games,” Hugo said, but then wished he hadn’t. It was only rarely that he questioned Giles’s pronouncements and what was surprising about that? It was ridiculous to argue with someone who knew what the Bray Valley had looked like thousands of years ago.

Giles said, without taking his gaze off the ceiling, “Some people can. If they’re as fast and beefy as you are.”

“How, Giles?”

“People are beginning to think very highly of athletes. Nobody expects an athlete to be clever, or to cram for examinations and degrees. George will be home by then and I daresay Father will put you in his charge. You won’t work all that much but your being there will make it worth their while.”

“Why, Giles? How will it?”

“In the way Hamlet Ratcliffe boosted the firm by catching that lion. They’ve never forgotten that. But the boost was local and yours could be national— international, if you’re as good as I think you are. That’s why I intend to keep you hard at it so long as I’m here.”

He paused, waiting for the obligatory hiss of indrawn breath that passed for Hugo’s assent to almost everything he said. When it did not come he went on, “Maybe you’re too young to understand it yet but it is so. Someone who can break track records, and get his name in all the papers, would be the best advertisement Swann-on-Wheels ever had. You’ll enjoy doing it, too.” Hugo’s silence puzzled Giles so that he raised himself, propping chin with hand. “It’s
all
you think about, isn’t it? Ever since you staggered everybody walking off with the under-sixteen mile your first term here. And you, a kid of thirteen.”

“Not ‘thought’ exactly. Dreamed tho’; the same dream over and over again.”

“Tell me. Tell me about the dream.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“You try. It’s important that I know.”

“It’s just a sound.”

“What kind of sound?”

“A sound like a waterfall. Or a gale, like the one we had the first week of term that brought all the trees down.”

“How do you and that sound come together?”

“I don’t know. It sounds so silly.”

“It won’t sound silly to me.”

“You wouldn’t tell anyone? Ever?”

“Of course I wouldn’t.”

“God’s honour?”

“God’s honour.”

“Well then, I’m running you see, running hard, much harder than anyone runs here, and I’ve got a clear lead, half a lap maybe. I don’t even have to look over my shoulder, you see?”

“Go on.”

“That sound is all round me. It’s
for
me and
because
of me, and it’s… well, wonderful, the most wonderful thing you could imagine. It gets louder and louder, until it seems like everyone in the world is shouting. But then it stops and everything goes quiet and I’m by myself but glad, you see? Glad and comfortable and… well, satisfied. The way you feel when you’ve finished a Christmas dinner. Is that just a dream, Giles? One of those dreams you keep on having and not always when you’re asleep? Sometimes I think…” but here, conscious of his brother’s unwinking gaze across the narrow strip of moonlight separating their cots, he stopped, feeling himself blushing.

Giles said, “You don’t have to be ashamed of dreams of that sort. Everyone dreams of doing something splendid, of being someone important, but mostly they accept the fact that they
are
dreams and go on doing something ordinary. And you don’t, do you?”

“No. That sound is more real than real sounds. More real than bells, for instance. Sometimes I don’t even hear the bell at the end of a period. Sometimes I think that’s the reason I don’t remember anything much and why everyone here thinks I’m bone from the neck up.”

“Don’t let that bother you,” Giles said, grimly, “they’ll all be glad enough to have known you when they hear that sound, kid.”

“You think it’ll come true, then?”

“Certainly it will. I’m glad you told me. I wasn’t sure I was right about you but now I know I am.” He lay back, lifted the blanket level with his chin and clasped his hands behind his head in what Hugo always thought of as his secret-probing posture. “It’s after eleven now. Go to sleep, kid.”

“Yes. Goodnight, Giles.”

“Goodnight, kid.”

Streamers of blue-black cloud moved to obscure the moon and Giles watched them fight a losing battle. Finally they gave up, slipping past in wisps and tatters as the moon rode out high and full into a clear sky. He saw it as a kind of object lesson in purpose. In the pursuit of purpose. In the end it was all that mattered.

Everybody had to have purpose. Almost everybody he knew had. His father had the business. Alex had glory. His mother had the family. His sister Stella, now that she was married again, had a husband, a baby, and a farm. If George’s letters home were anything to go by, George’s purpose was to wander the earth, watching and learning, but even this was not profitless, or not to Giles’s way of thinking. Neither was young Hugo’s obsession with a sound that he had not yet identified as applause from a crowd at a sports stadium. The really difficult thing was to find the purpose, identify with it, train for it, and then hold fast to it, the way his father had when he founded Swann-on-Wheels all those years ago; the way Phoebe Fraser did when she rose at six-thirty in winter and summer and tackled the endlessly repetitive task of teaching children to mind their manners. The headmaster’s purpose here was to mould a young school into the pattern of older, more famous schools. The purpose of Gladstone was to build a new society so universal that it might even make sense of his father’s jovial boast that God was an Englishman. They all had a purpose and it piqued him that here he was, turned seventeen and still without one.

He had hints. That old couple being turned out of their cottage and Gladstone’s thunderous proclamation of the power of the common people meant something, but as signposts they were not explicit. Perhaps they would be, for purposes did not always define themselves as clearly as his father’s, Alexander’s, and Hugo’s. Tomorrow, mulling over Swift, or Shakespeare, or Bacon, he would give it more thought. It was impossible to hurry these things. You waited and thought and read. Sooner or later a phrase jumped at you out of a page and there was another signpost you hadn’t seen before. He lay back and looked up at the high-riding moon. A dead planet, they said. But it knew its purpose in the scheme of things.

Three

1

H
IS DAILY MAIL, REACHING HIM IN TWO STREAMS, ONE AS A STEADY FLOOD AT the yard, and the other as a slow trickle at Tryst, were in great contrast judged by the relative pressures they applied to him, the concentration they demanded, and the effort needed, here and there, to read between the lines.

The yard mail arrived by the sack but was winnowed by Tybalt and his industrious clerks. Only regional reports and letters demanding urgent decisions were passed directly to him and most of these were annotated and clipped into relevant files. Heavy as it was, his office mail never occupied him more than an hour or so. He worked at it like one of those new sorting machines, recently installed at the General Post Office: papers flying this way and that, with a dash of a pen here, a marginal note there and, just occasionally, a well-aimed flourish in the direction of the gluttonous wastepaper basket that stood between the window and Frankenstein.

It was very different with his private mail, laid on his study desk against his return home in the evening, or sometimes handed to him opened by Henrietta. These letters could not be dealt with quickly, for they were not overt communications, involving waggons, teams, infringements of territorial frontiers, bad debts, new customers, new contracts, the fabric of regional premises, tiresome changes in railway timetables, complaints concerning dilatory employees, pleas of extenuation involving bad roads and dishonoured promises—all the small change that came cascading from the tailboards of twelve hundred waggons and two thousand hired hands dotted about Britain, from the Grampians to the Kentish Weald, from the Cornish tin mines up through the Mountain Square to the Polygon and the Cumberland fells that knew him as a boy.

The letters he pondered in the great study at Tryst were about people, and herein lay the difference. Whereas one could base a decision concerning, say, the gross weight of a haul of Llanberis slate, on past experience, experience was of little use to a man on the look-out for unspoken thoughts in the artful phrase or the telltale postscript.

Usually the despatches arrived singly but one raw evening in November of that year he found four such letters on his desk, three with broken seals, proclaiming that Henrietta had passed a pleasant (and almost surely an idle) forenoon, and one more bearing a Brussels postmark that was sealed and marked “personal.” He recognised the handwriting as that of Deborah Avery.

He scooped them up, crossed to the open fireplace, kicked a smouldering log into flame, lit one of his Burmese cheroots, and made a random grab at the sheaf, coming up with the envelope postmarked “Cairo” and addressed in Alexander’s schoolboyish block capitals.

The first paragraph told him the boy had been in action again, at a place called Tel-el-Kebir in the Nile Delta, and the realisation of this stirred in Adam a near-extinct ember of his military past. He had never fought in Africa, had no more than glimpsed the Continent as a troopship passenger en route for India, but he had taken note of newspaper reports concerning Sir Garnet Wolseley’s expedition to bring Ahmed Arabi’s firebrands into line with Imperial policy in that part of the world. The tone of the letter was jubilant. Official despatches, it seemed, had not exaggerated the importance of the victory out there. Egypt had passed into the sphere of British influence. Cairo was occupied. The Arabi revolt was crushed. And all in less than a month from the day of disembarkation.

Alexander’s regiment, Adam learned, had played a vital part in the one decisive engagement, and Alexander himself had taken part in the night march across the desert and the dawn attack on a strongly fortified position. He had come off unscathed, thank God, although regimental casualties had been high. What elated him, however, was not the victory itself so much as the fact that the infantry had stolen a march over the cavalrymen, leaving them nothing to do in the way of pursuit.

Adam found he could still smile at this, one of those gambits as old as war—the rivalry between mounted men and the footsloggers—and the footnote told him something he was anxious to know. Alexander had lived down his initial disappointment, very bitter at the time, caused by his failure to get a place in the dragoon guards or the lancers. It told him something else; to some extent the boy had vindicated himself in his own eyes and exorcised, possibly for good, the secret shame of having shown a clean pair of heels at Isandlwana.

He read George’s letter next, posted in Munich three days earlier, which hinted that George might soon be on the move again, this time across the frontier into Austria, where he hoped to make contact with the Viennese waggon-maker, whose products had prompted Adam to send him abroad eighteen months ago. The letter puzzled him a little. It had, he would say, a rather wistful note, as though the boy was finding it difficult to up stumps and turn his back on Munich, and mentally he compared it with the racy letters George had written since his arrival in Bavaria. There was camouflage here. He had never had a doubt but that George found Munich very much to his taste and could hazard a guess why. There was a woman in it somewhere.

Giles’s letter absorbed Adam more deeply than those of his brothers. It was not about Giles, as he had learned to expect from a boy compulsively attracted to lame ducks, but young Hugo, for whom Giles seemed to have formed a particularly close attachment now that Stella was off his conscience. Hugo’s athletic prowess was developing rapidly and clearly the boys had been conferring on where it could lead, for here was Giles, confound him, soliciting parental sanctions of a fourteen-year-old’s determination to make a career of athletics, with the ultimate idea, if you please, of adding it to the Swann assets!

Always open to a new idea, Adam toyed with this one, projecting his mind forward to coffee-house conversations six, seven, and eight years from now, and to sportswriters’ comments of the kind that were beginning to appear on the back pages of all the national journals, even such journals as Stead’s crusading rag, the
Pall Mall Gazette.

Adam had been an early convert to the cash value of publicity. The triple exploits of Hamlet Ratcliffe, lion-catcher; Bryn Lovell, rescuer of entombed miners; and Tim Blubb, executioner of marauding Fenians, had convinced him long ago that a man’s success in business did not necessarily rest upon the excellence of his service. Something else was needed in these days of cut-throat competition—a flair for keeping the name of one’s firm in the national consciousness so that coffee-house gossips, and even croquet-lawn tittle-tattlers, came to associate name and product with high adventure and romance, of the kind people looked for in war correspondents’ despatches. And here, in his hand, was proof that Giles understood and appreciated as much at the age of seventeen!

It gave Giles, if not Hugo, a new dimension in Adam’s eyes. If a boy could come up with a suggestion as sophisticated as that before he left school, what might be his potential at the age of thirty? What a hopelessly unmanageable team they were to drive! A man could plan a business down to the last detail, but how, in the name of God, did he go about organising a string of youngsters with the blood of Irish peasants, Anglo-Saxon mercenaries, and Lancastrian factory-hands in their veins? He gave it up and opened Deborah Avery’s letter.

There was the greatest difficulty in reading between the lines here. Deborah Avery had inherited her father’s trick of hoarding secret thoughts, so that her letter told him very little concerning her approach to the chancy work she was about. They had done this. They intended doing that. They had gone here. They hoped to go there. The Belgian police were outwardly cooperative. The police were secretly hostile, so that he formed the opinion that she was laughing at him a little, just enough to convey to him that she was old enough, and certainly intelligent enough, to take good care of herself and he would be well advised to stop assuming she would be drugged, whisked into a pander’s cab, and sold to a Turkish satyr in Asia Minor. Yet the fears were real enough. He loved her and his sense of responsibility concerning her was that much keener because he was all she had in the way of a refuge. He thought, sourly, “Damn that rascal, Avery, for saddling me with a responsibility of this kind at my time of life! It was well enough when she was a child, and a biddable one at that, but she’s now thinking of me as a man set in a money-making mould and only marginally interested in anything outside the countinghouse; and she’s wrong at that! The trouble with people like her and Stead, and that sainted Mrs. Butler, is that they deal in abstracts, like their nightshirted Jehovah. They’d do better to take an objective look at humanity and see things for what they are: neither good nor bad but a matter of maintaining the struggle from nursery to funeral parlour. And yet, if anything happened to her I’d never forgive myself for sanctioning the silly caper in the first place.”

He stuffed the letter in his desk drawer but the self-questioning it had provoked remained with him for the rest of the evening, so that he contributed little to Henrietta’s supper chatter, concerning the avalanche of news from the family outposts. He said, in response to her query as to what he thought of the day’s mail, “No more than I always think. They’re young bears, as the saying goes, with all their troubles before them. There’s hope, though. Alex is settling in, I’d say, and even George seems to be maturing a little.”

“And Giles’s silly notion concerning Hugo?”

He said, to her surprise, “It isn’t so silly. The idea behind it is sound enough.”

He was slow to rise to the bait, and when, baulked by his taciturnity, she asked a direct question concerning Deborah, he replied, guardedly, “She’s working on a social survey for that Holy Joe, Stead.”

“In Brussels? Not alone, I hope?”

“Certainly not. Don’t you know missionaries hunt for lost souls shoulder to shoulder, like a shooting party on a grouse moor?”

He left it at that, not relishing the prospect of spending half the night reassuring her that Debbie was in no kind of danger but he should have known better. She had been living with him and his concerns a very long time, and could read his prejudices and apprehensions as easily as Tybalt, the clerk. He was a long time getting off to sleep and this, if nothing else, confirmed her in her private opinion that he still worried about Avery’s child. “It’s like him,” she told herself, as soon as he began to snore. “I might have known Debbie would bother him more than the prospect of Alex getting a bullet, or George getting himself into another scrape, or Giles trying to get our sanction for Hugo’s idleness…”

She told herself then that she had been a fool not to steam Deborah’s letter open and reseal it. He had always thought of Avery’s child as the most vulnerable of the flock. The others were Swanns and capable, in his mind, of making their own way in the world. And yet he was wrong, for Debbie had something better than brains to sustain her. She had her deeply rooted faith in God, and that was something neither she nor Adam had been able to instil into the others, despite regular churchgoing and any amount of encouragement from Phoebe Fraser. As for herself, she believed God was around somewhere, but he had always taken second place to Adam. Whenever they sang “Rock of Ages” at morning service, it was not God in His heaven she visualised but Adam Swann, riding out of the morning mists on Seddon Moor when she was a slip of a girl.

For all his doubts, Adam’s reading between the lines had been reasonably accurate in every case. Deborah Avery, her mission all but complete, was cock-a-hoop over the pile of damning evidence they had accumulated without directing attention to themselves, whereas her feelings for her co-worker, Ned Gordon, were approaching those of a hero-worshipper. She was beginning to see him as a Launcelot of the Bordellos, a man of endless resource and matchless courage, prepared to risk life, limb, and reputation in order to lay hands on a witness they could smuggle back across the Channel and use to confound the bigots in Westminster, who had declared over and over again that girls found in Continental brothels would have got there without the help of agents working on commission in London.

As for George, Adam was nearer the mark than he suspected. George was now entering upon the most bewildering period of his life, alternatively uplifted and downcast, in the way of all young men who fancy themselves enslaved. He sometimes half-believed Rosa Ledermann when she told him it was preposterous to imagine himself in love with a woman old enough to be his mother, but he wanted time to satisfy himself on this account. He still found it puzzling when she welcomed him into her bed after the merest pretence at reluctance, and then spent the precious moments urging him to move on to Vienna where, she assured him, he would forget her and Munich in less than a week.