Theirs Was The Kingdom (70 page)

He pushed on, leaving Wordsworth to his soul-searching and daffodils, passing along the margin of Thirlmere and over level ground to Keswick, visiting the church where his father and mother had been married twenty-six years before. Later he viewed Derwentwater from Friar’s Crag, remembering that the old Colonel had often sat here trying to capture a lakeland sunset but had never once succeeded if his watercolours at Tryst were anything to judge by.

Twenty-four hours later he crossed the border at Stanwix and turned east for a mile or two to look at Hadrian’s Wall where it began its wandering journey to Wallsend, on the shore of the North Sea. Then, welcoming cooler weather, he followed the course of the Esk into Selkirk and the Lothians, covering twenty miles a day until, on the first day of September, he saw the violet smoke haze over Edinburgh and dropped down into the crowded, bustling wynds of the old city to seek out Higson, youngest of the regional managers, who had charge of the largest slice of territory in the network.

He had heard rumours of Higson’s zeal up here. Word had travelled south that he had set the seal on Swann enterprises in the far north by marrying a Scots teacher. He was said to be so bemused by the Scots that Headquarters were expecting any day to hear he was wearing a kilt, calling himself MacHigson, and learning to play the bagpipes.

The Scottish viceroy showed him more deference than Lovell or Catesby and this, Giles realised, was not because they were more of an age but because Higson was unsure of himself in the presence of a son of the man who, almost literally, had plucked him out of a flue. Adam Swann, indeed, was a subject Higson was prepared to discuss without reserve. It was clear that he idolised the man.

Giles, knowing little of the circumstances of their association, gave him the opening he needed by saying, “Everywhere I’ve been so far, Mr. Higson, I’ve been living off my father’s fat. Weren’t you one of Mr. Keate’s original trainees?” Higson, indignant that Giles should remain in ignorance of the manner in which he became associated with Swann-on-Wheels, said, “You never heard the truth about me? Maybe you’d best ask your father. It ain’t my place ter gab, except to out an’ say I owe everything to ’im, an’ no other. Bin more’n a father to me, he ’as, though I don’t reckon he’d own to it. He’s not one o’ them Holy Joes, who do a good turn an’ never stop slippin’ it into their prayers to make sure Gawd A’mighty don’t forget it!” At this, Giles laughed.

Higson asked him if he would be his guest during his stay in the region and when Giles protested that this would impose on a man who was newly married and hoping to become a father soon (Catesby had fed him this titbit) Higson blurted out, “It’s not that way at all, Mr. Swann. Mary, my missus that is, told me I was to insist, for the ’otels this side o’ the town ain’t up to much, and the fact is we’d like a chance to pay yer Dad back a bit, if you see what I mean.”

So Giles had no alternative but to hump his knapsack across to Higson’s ground-floor flat in a little Georgian house in the Toll-cross, a few minutes’ walk from the yard, where Mary Higson, several months pregnant by the look of her, made a prodigious fuss of him, as though he had arrived in Edinburgh by royal train instead of on foot. He was at once given a tin bath-tub, four cans of boiling water, and a plate of buttered scones to stay his hunger until supper.

He understood then why Higson had been so insistent about lodging him, for Mary, like any prudent Scots wife, had obviously decided that she must put herself out in any way likely to improve her husband’s standing with the firm. Her eagerness to do this was touching, Giles thought, for it did not take him long to come to a number of interesting conclusions about this oddly matched couple, the one sufficiently close to the gutter to congratulate himself on having escaped it, the other a self-contained, exceptionally intelligent young woman who, for a reason difficult to perceive at first, worshipped the ex-waif she had married a few months before.

Being in love himself, Giles found he could look benevolently (and sometimes enviously) at Jake and Mary Higson during the month he spent in the territory. Their delight in one another was so uninhibited that it was embarrassing to share a meal with them, or to be present, kicking one’s heels in the hallway, when he and Jake were on the point of setting out on a trip to one of the more remote areas of the beat. It was often difficult to decide which of the two was the more besotted by the other; Jake dodged about her as though her “pledge of affection” was liable to appear on the hearthrug any moment, and Mary, for her part, insisted that Jake’s needs took precedence over everything else, including the honours due to a house guest, who, in Jake’s view, happened to be the son of the most important man in the world.

Having grown up in a patriarchal household, Giles was accustomed to male dominance, but never in the whole of her life had Henrietta Swann shown his father this kind of deference, catching his tender solicitude in mid-air as it were, and feeding it back tenfold, showering him with soothing words and soft glances, and despatching him on a routine journey as though he was embarking on a trip to Cathay and facing untold hazards. It could have been cloying, but somehow, perhaps because he saw their reciprocal affection as utterly sincere, it was encouraging, so that he thought, “He’s a lucky chap to be sure, tho’ she is inclined to overdo it. I can’t see Romayne fussing over me in that way, and I’m not sure I should welcome it if she did.” But he wondered about it nevertheless. It made nonsense of the precept that, to ensure harmony, like should marry like.

It was Jake himself who went some way towards explaining the phenomenon once he had had an opportunity to demonstrate his talents as a regional gaffer and could begin patronising his guest as a lad fresh from the schoolroom. He said, as they were driving through a village near Jedburgh, “That’s where it ’appened, Mr. Swann! Right over there, on that green!” When Giles asked what had occurred there, supposing the spot to be hallowed in some way, the cockney said, solemnly, “A miracle, that’s wot. You carn’t call it less. Leastways, I carn’t,” and went on to describe how he had met Mary McKenzie whilst gazing at the memorial to the famous Denholm scholar, John Leyden, and how this encounter had reoriented his life, providing him, progressively, with an education and a wife.

“Sometimes,” he mused, as they left the Rubicon behind, “sometimes I get the feelin’ it really ain’t ’appened, that I’ll wake up sudden and find meself the man I was. What I mean is, you
’ear
of things like it, and even see ’em sometimes, at one o’ them Saturday night Come-to-Jesus kerbside meetings in the Old Kent Road, when a drunk gets to seein’ blue monkeys an’ swears orf it on the spot, but it was just like that an’ no kiddin’, Mr. Swann. I mean, there I was, feelin’ right sorry for meself, telling meself I’d ’ad all the luck I deserved getting picked up by your Pa, and sent up ’ere on trial. God’s truth, I didn’t think I could ’old on to the job for long. Not for want o’ tryin’, mindjew, but lack of education, of not bein’ able to write an’ figger properly. And then, there she was, like a bloomin’ fairy godmother, and nex’ thing you know I was ’avin’ lessons from ’er, and after that standin’ beside her in the kirk—church that is—with her own father tellin’ me we was man and wife. A miracle. That’s what it was, and if ever anything like it ’appens to you—with a woman I mean, because you got education, why then,
grab
it. Grab it with both ’ands. Like
that
!” And to make his point clear Higson dropped the reins of the trap to the buckboard, clapped a double handful of nothing, and scooped up the reins with a flourish in the manner of a veteran cabby negotiating London Bridge traffic.

It was a miracle, right enough, Giles decided, as he watched them greet one another on the doorstep of the little Georgian house on their return, and any doubts concerning this would have been erased by Mary Higson’s lightning seizure of the opportunity she must have been awaiting.

Jake had darted across the street to a druggist with a prescription left by Mary’s doctor, letting his supper go cold rather than risk the shop closing in the interval, scudding from the house as though charged with saving the lives of mother and child.

She watched him go, standing by the window and then, drawing the curtains on the gloaming, turned to Giles with an expression very different from the rapturous one she reserved for Jake whenever he had been absent from the house for ten minutes. Aware, no doubt, that her husband would come thundering back into the room within minutes, she came straight to the point, saying, “He’ll ha’ told ye how it came about, Mr. Swann. Jamie and me, that is?” and when Giles acknowledged that this was so, “Then I’ll ask a favour if I may, Mr. Swann. One I couldnae ask in his presence, or not without shaming him, poor lamb. You’ll own he’s worth his salt to the firm?”

“Worth his salt, Mrs. Higson? As my father’s gaffer, north of the Border?”

“Aye, aye,” she said, impatience broadening her accent, “that’s what I mean. Ye’ll own it, will ye no’?”

“Why, of course I’ll own to it,” he said, a little startled by her vehemence, “he’s reckoned a great success up here. What makes you think otherwise?”

“Did I say I thought otherwise? My Jamie can do anything he’s a mind to do.”

“He has doubts about himself?”

She regarded him so unwinkingly that he had a notion that, even when Jamie was absent, she was subconsciously addressing him, not being equipped to acknowledge the existence of other men.

“Aye,” she said, “cruel doubts sometimes.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Could a woman love a man as I love yon Jamie without being sure of a thing like that?”

“Well, then, he’s young for a job of this size. Isn’t it understandable that he should sometimes have second thoughts…?”

“No!”

She almost shouted the word at him. “A gentleman like you, maybe. But not Jamie, not someone who was used so cruel as a bairn!”

He was not in the least sure that he followed her. From his own viewpoint, and within his limited experience, he saw Higson as a rather forceful man, but clearly something was amiss, and she was making some kind of appeal for help. Jake would be back any moment and there was no time to waste on reassuring her. He said, “If you think I can help, Mrs. Higson, tell me how. I’d like to, and I’m sure my father would. In spite of what you say, however, they think a deal of him in London. He’s reckoned a trier and that’s what counts, isn’t it?”

“No,” she said, again, “it’s no’ what counts. See here, he could hardly read nor write when I took him in hand, and I’ve done my best with him. But my best isn’t good enough. With that load of work he can’t spare me more than an odd hour or so, and only then when he’s fair fagged out, and needs his sleep. I’ve a notion how it could be done, though, how I could work wonders with him. But it would have to have your father’s blessing and Jamie mustn’t know I brought it about, for that would hit him hard. His pride, do ye ken?”

“You’re asking me to try and get him relieved of the job for a time?”

“Aye, for six months. Mr. Fraser, who taught him the ropes up here, is still active. At a word from your father he’d stand in for us, and I could go back to work on Jamie. It’s the right thing to do, Mr. Swann, believe me! Up here, we set great store by education and if there’s one thing a Scotswoman can’t abide it’s a botched job o’ work. I had Jamie at his lessons for two hours a night, three nights a week. It’s not enough. He needs to stick at it six days a week, from morn till night, with nothing else on his mind—with no interruptions!”

They heard his steps clattering up the short flight of steps to the front door and she looked across at him with desperate urgency, as though the completion of Jake Higson’s education was the most important issue in the world.

“I’ll see Fraser myself and arrange it if it can be arranged,” he said, hastily. “Then I’ll get my father to confirm from Headquarters…”

“You’ll not regret it, none of you! I’ll swear to that!” and as though changing a mask, she wiped the expression of urgent concentration from her face and replaced it with the eager smile that he had come to recognise as Jamie’s standard welcome over the threshold.

It made a kind of pattern, a theme for all his wanderings, all the signposts and stages he had passed in the years since he was first aware of people and their complex concerns. It was a thread that strung his experiences together, offering him a guideline that led on into the future. And whenever he stopped to wonder what awaited him out there he would go back, like a man restringing beads, to the very first of them, the glimpse of that broken old couple at Twyforde Green, dispossessed of their tied cottage and going their separate ways to paupers’ graves.

There was that, and his talk with his father a day or so after he changed schools. And hard on its heels was another pointer, the finding of a frozen shepherd in an Exmoor hovel after a week of snowstorms. There were all the social prophets he had read and pondered, from Kingsley to Carlyle, from Tom Paine to Cobden. Then, like runaway railway trucks mounting one another, there was the glimpse of Owen Williams rumbling past the bay with crushed toes that would get him a job on top, the half-grown boys eating their snap in the gallery, the permanent pall of smoke over the teeming towns of the cotton belt, the expressionless men and girls standing like rows of automata at chattering machines. But within all this there were more explicit pointers, each involving a woman and a woman’s viewpoint, as distinct from a man’s: Romayne, content to buy a husband with the profits of dye works, mines, and foundries; Mrs. Broadbent’s hesitant enquiries after George; and finally, the desperate concern of Mary Higson for time to groom an ex-chimney sweep into a scholar. In some way it all had a place in his personal destiny, but just how and why he had no way of knowing and doubted if he would ever find out. All one could do was to follow his nose and see where it led, and it was time, he felt, that it pointed him south, to the slum overlooking the Thames where he would be based for the next three years but also, praise God, to Romayne, who might one day do battle for him as Mary Higson battled for Jake.