Theirs Was The Kingdom (91 page)

“What investment was that?” she asked, innocently.

“You,” he said. “Damn it, woman, if he’d played his hand better he could have married you to real money, and would have been in the House of Lords by now. Lord Rawlinson, of Seddon.”

“I had my own ideas about that,” she said, “but maybe you’ve forgotten.”

“I haven’t forgotten a thing about you,” he said, pinching her thigh as the pony toiled up the slope at a snail’s pace. “Not a thing, d’you hear? I was telling myself just that down by that copse and if you hadn’t needed your breakfast I might have played you at your own game down there.”

“I could have waited,” she said, calmly. “It would have been the quickest way of getting you off my conscience,” and he laughed.

They ambled into the yard and he handed her down, calling to the lad to bring her bags inside and give the pony a rub down before turning him out to grass. She moved ahead of him up the steps to the kitchen and this was just as well, for he was chuckling and she would have found too much satisfaction in that.

Five

1

I
T WAS LIKE A DYNAMO SWITCHED ON TO WARM UP LONG BEFORE IT WAS REQUIRED to run at full power, that had then somehow got out of hand, generating current that pulsed far and wide across the length and breadth of the country, quickening everything within its orbit, so that mundane concerns were forgotten as everything and everybody was caught up in the swirl and thrust of the runaway engine.

Or like a placid hay ride that had developed into a raucous free-for-all outside the alehouse, where dignity was forgotten in a wild, tribal orgy involving chants, dances, and merrymaking of a kind ordinarily discouraged in a nation dedicated to the till and family prayers.

It was licence to get roaring drunk after a lifetime of sobriety, amorous after a life of celibacy, spendthrift after years of parsimony, and, within it all, an awareness amounting to certainty that, in the decades leading up to this magic moment, the human species had subdivided, a minority (that was British) hiving off to occupy the seats of the elect, a majority (foreigners, poor devils) standing off to admire, much as Sunday morning loiterers watched the parade of the privileged after church in Hyde Park. But with a qualification. The loiterers, given British citizenship, were now numbered with the carriage folk.

Its effect upon the network was uneven, the regions responding according to the men who reigned there. In the past, the meeting of a crisis caused by bad weather, shortage of cash at Headquarters, or a trade recession, could be gauged to some extent by reflection on the several temperaments of the viceroys and their key men. But there was no gauging this, so that no specific directive went out advising the satellites how to celebrate, how much money to spend, how to go about using the occasion as an excuse to project themselves and their concerns. It was left to each of them to caper or to stay at home, taking advantage of the national holiday to put their feet up, so that the Jubilee meant different things to different men; a splendid occasion to some, an extra Bank Holiday to others.

To a degree, reaction was governed by geography. The regions within excursion range of the capital, where the national celebrants operated, made no significant contribution of their own, executives and small fry alike preferring to travel up to town overnight and scramble for kerbstone vantage points along the royal route from Buckingham Palace to St. Paul’s. Thus, Godsall of the Kentish Triangle, Vicary of The Bonus north of the Thames estuary, and Headquarters personnel, who lived in the very hub of the rituals, looked to officialdom and flunkeydom for a free spectacle, not even bothering to spend their regional allocation on rosettes for the teams and bunting for their premises. On the day itself their employees and customers were left to their own devices, to let off a few fire-crackers and sing a few music-hall ditties round bonfires.

Adam himself was among this idle group, standing with Henrietta and his four youngest children at the office window of a customer within fifty yards of St. Clement Danes in the Strand. The three girls got very fidgety during the interminable wait, for they had to be in position long before breakfast-time.

When, at last, the glittering cavalcade passed below, Henrietta and the children judged it had been worth the effort to get here, but Adam had his doubts. He had never cared very much for the plump little woman, whose longevity had touched off this hulla-balloo. His allegiance, and that was qualified, had been to her German husband, one of the few surrounding her who had foreseen the technical revolution and been able to isolate trade from trappings. But Albert had died long ago, when the network was in its infancy, and hardly anyone remembered him now, looking upon his sixty-eight-year-old widow as the catalyst of the new imperialism. He watched her pass, with her jingling escort of Household Cavalry, her horde of relatives, and her scarlet-clad janissaries, and it struck him that this whole affair was an anachronism, for both she and they represented an England that belonged more to his father’s day than his. He said nothing of this to Henrietta. For her, somehow, the pageant was the enactment of a girlish dream that had been concerned with moustached warriors and the panoply of conquest. In this context it was a pity that her single contribution to the set-piece was far away in India, with his homely bride, the Colonel’s daughter. It crossed Adam’s mind then how her eyes would have sparkled if Alex had been numbered among the royal escort.

After that there was nothing to do but go home and preside over the local celebrations at Twyforde Green, where there was an athletic meeting, a public tea, the distribution of mugs, and, as darkness fell, the discharge of sky-rockets to light a sky already reflecting the glow of hilltop beacons. Personally there was not much to celebrate just now. George was lost to him, and with George went the sense of continuity, whereas Giles, poor chap, was all dressed up with nowhere to go, save as coat-holder for Hugo at the Crystal Palace sports rally.

It seemed very quiet when, around midnight, they saw the two youngest to bed, Joanna and Helen having already changed and left to dance the night away at one of their country-house balls, occasions that were always promising to lead to a double engagement and double wedding at Twyforde Green parish church but somehow never did. For the Inseparables, although by no means short of suitors, put an impossibly high price on youth and freedom.

It was around one in the morning when he came stumping out of his dressing room to find Henrietta asleep, her Jubilee finery strewn about the room. He stood by the window a moment, counting the twinkling points of light on the Kentish hillsides, trying hard to identify with the national occasion. Alone among them, save for an elderly servant or two, he could remember a time when the adjective “Victorian” had no significance, and it seemed to him, standing there counting the beacons, almost as long ago as the day the first Conyer built under this wooded spur. He had a sense of hurrying time, and no compensating sense of achievement that he had so often experienced in this house, where so many of his plans had been laid and all his children had drawn their first breath. Somewhere along the line, he supposed, he had taken a wrong turn that was threatening to run him into a cul-de-sac in his old age, but maybe he was not alone in this. He had an intuitive sense that the nation had made a similar miscalculation and that backtracking, for man and tribe, might prove a long and tiresome business. Pride in one’s achievements was well enough. But pride was no substitute for a compass.

2

Albert Rookwood, forty-three years of age, and Gaffer of the Southern Square since he was a lad of twenty and rubbing Howarth’s Moustache Oil on his upper-lip, had no such misgivings.

Alone among Swann’s viceroys (with the possible exception of Jake Higson, his fellow ex-gamin in the network hierarchy), Rookwood had seen profit in using the national mood as a springboard for promoting an advertising campaign clear across his territory, from the Solent to the southern slopes of the Cotswolds. He was very careful, however, to ensure that dignity was not sacrificed to vulgar display, of the kind they seemed to be encouraging among hucksters and back-street shopkeepers. Whatever he did by way of telescoping the House of Windsor and the House of Swann would be characterised by the sobriety and restraint that had sat upon Rookwood like an undertaker’s frock-coat ever since he had married his landlady’s daughter, raised a family, taken his place among the city worthies, and erased from his mind any lingering doubts concerning his obscure origins.

He lectured his sub-depot managers, marshalled and inspected his teams, doled out his Union Jacks and rosettes, and issued a stream of crisply worded bulletins concerned with shining brass-work, well-oiled saddlery, decoration of premises, and general deportment on The Day. Then, as a final concession to the national mood, he gave orders that every vehicle that left one of his yards bore on its tailboard a sedate cut-out of Windsor Castle, and that waggoners’ whips could be decorated by a neatly tied bow in red, white, and blue silk. The general effect of all this was a stunning uniformity.

Having, as it were, dressed a colourful window, he gave careful thought to what he could offer the customers who stepped inside. Broadsheets were distributed offering ten per cent cuts in rates during Jubilee month, and notices were placed in the local press to the effect that, in the week leading up to the day itself, Swann waggons, free of charge, would be placed at the disposal of any municipality in the territory concerned with organising loyal festivities. A gesture such as this, he reasoned, would get him and Swann-on-Wheels talked about, and he was right. Almost at once he was co-opted on to the Salisbury Jubilee Committee, where his opinion was solicited on a variety of matters, by no means all of them concerned with transport. Already a city councillor, people began to see him as a future mayor, so that even those in the network who remembered him as a lad came to forget that he was the very first jewel the evangelist Keate had dredged from the Rotherhithe mud, or that he had paid good money to have South Bank parish registers searched in an effort to discover his identity.

But there was one person about him who did not forget, who marvelled as she heard him booming responses at the Cathedral thanksgiving service on The Day. This was Mrs. Gilroy, his mother-in-law and onetime landlady, who had always seen “Young Rookwood” as the son she longed for but never had. To her, grandmother to the quiverful of handsome children who surrounded her on that occasion, Albert Rookwood was the living embodiment of the Whittington legend.

The thought remained with her all day, warming her old heart as she recalled the occasion when That Dear Boy (she never thought of him under any other title) had been on the point of leaving them, having fallen hopelessly in love with her pretty, flighty, over-educated daughter, and being unable to imagine that such a splendid creature would look favourably upon the suit of a spillover of a baby farm or worse. But Mrs. Gilroy had had her own ideas about that. Within no time at all she had made her dispositions and had the extreme satisfaction of seeing That Dear Boy walk down the aisle with Little Madam on his arm and now, praise God, Little Madam was as tame in his presence as the latest local chawbacon, signed on as an off-loader at the Swann yard. And dutiful to boot, judging by the biennial proofs of affection she offered.

She stood very close to the Dear Boy during the last event of that memorable day, when a set-piece of Her Majesty, forty feet high, red-eyed, blue-haired, and veiled with golden rain, coaxed a long, satisfying “
Ahhh
” from the onlookers, whereupon Councillor Rookwood, never at a loss for an original phrase, murmured, “God Bless Her! She’s come a long way, mother!” And mother was moved to reply, sharply, “No further and not so fast as you, Albert!”

He did not deny it. Why should he? It was undeniable.

His waggons, wherever they rolled that summer, caught and held the eye in a way that somehow suggested Swann-on-Wheels teams and vehicles had the right, had they wished to exercise it, to display the royal arms, and the legend “
By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen
,” but modesty dictated that they adhered to the nationally recognised insignia of a swan with a waggon-wheel in place of a port wing.

3

Rookwood’s realm was patriarchal. It was otherwise with another Swann manager who decided to make hay of the loyal harvest.

Four hundred miles to the north, where Jake Higson administered the largest of the Swann regions between Hadrian’s Wall and the Grampians, hirelings close enough to the Gaffer to know how things stood at the Edinburgh depot thought of him as henpecked, and under the thumb of his volatile Scots wife, Mary. In the broadest terms they were right. Jake never made an important decision without consulting her, but this was not because he adored her, or thought of her as an oracle. It was because, being a McKenzie of the Jedburgh branch, she was his direct channel of communication with all his customers, Lowland and Highland. She told him what to say and how to say it and, what was more important, whom to seek and say it to. Thus, when Jake, who had retained his cockney opportunism whilst shedding every other Sassenach trait, decided to follow that stuffy chap Rookwood’s suit and carve himself a slice of Jubilee cake, he naturally consulted Mary, who promised to give the matter careful thought. In a day or so she presented him with what he regarded as a masterly approach to the problem.

She pointed out that anyone seeking commercial exploitation of the event should take into account the fact that Her Majesty favoured Scotland far beyond any other sector of her domains, and, moreover, made no secret of the fact, for London-based Cabinet Ministers were now resigned to making the round trip to Balmoral and back simply in order to get her signature on a document. And as though to underline her preference, she had employed John Brown, a gillie with a known liking for good Scots whisky, as her body servant for time out of mind, and even gone so far as to excuse his staggers in the Royal Presence on the grounds that “poor John was not well.” All this surely pointed in one direction. Whatever steps Jamie took to identify the firm of Swann-on-Wheels with fifty-years-a-queen, had better be directed towards Scotland, dismissing England, Wales, and Ireland as mere appendages to the Crown. For herself, she would make a special contribution, writing and staging a royal pageant, to be acted by a combined cast of children drawn from the western districts of Edinburgh where she had once taught school.