Give Us This Day (55 page)

“Sam. For Grandfather Rawlinson. After all, he’ll be a Lancastrian, and Grandfather Sam did a lot to help my father when he was working to perfect his prototype up here.”

She had forgotten that—Sam Rawlinson’s part in sponsoring George at a time when he had quarrelled bitterly with his father—and it touched her a little that the boy should want to make this gesture. She had never been close to her father, always having regarded him as a bit of a ruffian, but there was no doubt about it: Sam’s strong, mechanical strain was present in the family and his aggressiveness, too, when you came to think about it.

“You won’t say anything to Grandfather yet?”

“I won’t say anything to anyone until I’ve seen your mother, and that can’t be for a fortnight or more. We’re supposed to be going on to Scotland.”

“How do I keep in touch then?”

“Well, tomorrow your grandfather has promised to take me to the place where I grew up, Sedley Mills. Then we shall return to Manchester and catch a train on to Ambleside and stay a day or so at The Glades Hotel before going on to Edinburgh.”

She took out her purse and extracted a gold half-sovereign. “The day he’s born put this in his hand and close his fingers over it. Then put it away somewhere. It’s an old good-luck custom. Adam’s father, the old Colonel, did it with all the children, right up to the time he died.”

He kissed her, saying, “You’re a good sport, Grandmam, and you never seem like a grandmother to me. More like a… well… like a sister.”

It was worth more than half-a-sovereign to get a compliment of that kind.

3

It was surprising how little the vista beyond what she thought of as The Rampart had changed. The Rampart was a string of towns following the course of the greatgrandfather of all railways, Stephenson’s Manchester-to-Liverpool line over Chat Moss where, for weeks on end they said, Irish navvies had tipped thousands of fascines to form a base under the track. Here town and country met on the northern edge of the Cheshire plain, the vast jumble of mills, shops, warehouses, sidings, and cobbled streets straggling west in what now seemed one huge ugly city and beyond it; and to the south, hedgerow land, ploughed furrow, neat black and white farmsteads, and the house where she had grown up, Sam Rawlinson’s mock-Gothic lodge, known by millhands in those days as “Scab’s Castle.”

She had no fond memories of Seddon Moss, the town where her father had made his first fortune, but the moor to the south of it was dear to her and she became very silent and absorbed as the trap rattled over the winding road towards the familiar clump of woodland on the horizon.

He respected her silence, having memories of his own, of a saddlesore young man riding north across the swell of gorse common fifty summers ago and coming upon a scene of riot and arson that turned him back, sick with disgust at the cruelty he had witnessed. Yet something sweet and wholesome had emerged from it, for it was only hours later that he came upon her in a dip beside a shepherd’s hut; their life’s odyssey, in convoy, had begun right there, weeks before the first Swann waggon, bearing its strange device, moved out across Kent in search of customers.

“It was about here, wasn’t it, Hetty?”

“No,” she said, “a little further on. Just past the Nantwich fork coming this way.”

He wouldn’t have remembered, or not with that degree of accuracy, but was prepared to trust her judgment. The moment, he guessed, would have even more significance for her. He had taken a long time to evaluate her, some seven years if he was honest with himself. Until then he had been almost entirely absorbed in his work and the terrible demands it had made upon him.

“Here, Adam. Why, you can still see where the hut stood. There, over on the left, just at the foot of the dip.”

It was true. An oblong of flattened gorse was marked out by what he could identify as the holes where the posts had been driven in, and he checked the horse and climbed down, helping her to alight and tethering the skewbald to a bush. They moved off the road and stood silently on the patch of open ground, holding hands lightly and seeing themselves, a little ironically in his case, as they had been the morning of the encounter. He said, finally, “Tell you something, Hetty. When I realised you were Sam Rawlinson’s daughter I came damned close to leaving you to fend for yourself. The smoke from old Sam’s burned-out mill was still on the skyline yonder, and I kept thinking of that boy he had ridden down in the town.”

“What stopped you?”

“Oh, a variety of reasons. At least you’d had the sense to run out on him, and you didn’t seem much more than a child at the time. Then you coaxed me into a more tolerant humour, thinking Birmingham was a seaport, and that story about deportment.”

“I don’t recall that.”

“You don’t? I’ll never forget it. Something your governess taught you—‘Never accept a chair from a gentleman until you are satisfied it is no longer warm from his person!’ And then again, I hadn’t thought about a woman as a woman in more than a year.”

“That isn’t much of a compliment, is it?”

“A better one than it sounds. Emptying that well at Cawnpore, crammed full of butchered women and children, must have petrified my emotions. You started the thaw.”

She wondered how much truth there was in this and how, exactly, she had appealed to him as a woman in that bedraggled green crinoline she was wearing, with her hair uncombed and mud on her face. Hardly at all, she would say, remembering his first embrace beside Derwentwater a few days later that left her in a turmoil, but had not seemed to make much impression on him. She had worshipped him from the beginning, from the moment he hoisted her on to the rump of his mare and told her to put her arms around his waist, but responsive affection, of the kind that flowered early in their marriage, had not been evident until they were man and wife. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps the horrors of the Sepoy Mutiny had blunted his sensibilities and they had been sharpened, over the ensuing weeks, by physical access to her that had begun in a mood of tolerance and developed in a way that lasted them down the years. She said, “Hold me, Adam. Just for a moment,” and he put his arms round her and kissed her gently on the mouth.

They climbed back into the trap and moved on over the crest towards the trees, catching a glimpse of the lodge turrets as they drew near and reining in at a spot where they could see the house through the trees. To her it looked much smaller than she remembered. To him it was one of the ugliest dwellings he had ever seen, a monstrous multiple marriage between domestic Cheshire, mock Tudor, mock Gothic, and neo-classical, precisely the kind of monument a vulgarian like old Sam would erect to his brigandage and avarice.

“Great God!” he exclaimed. “No wonder you fled from it!”

“But I didn’t, not in that sense, for it seemed a grand house to me. I fled from that awful man Goldthorpe Sam had decided I should marry in exchange for a loading bay area on Goldthorpe’s father’s land.”

“Oh, yes. I’d forgotten the bartered bride angle.” And then, with an approving glance, “Nobody would have married you against your will, Hetty. You’ve far too much spunk.”

“I’m not so sure. It was touch and go until you spoke up for me. Come, I’ve seen all I want to about here. Let’s get back to Warrington if we’re to catch that train, for I wouldn’t care to spend a night hereabouts, not even in a shepherd’s hut with you on hand. That’s another thing I learned from you early on.”

“What exactly?”

“To value comfort. I remember you telling me, when I remarked on the trouble you took to make a bivouac weatherproof and cosy, ‘Any fool can be cold, wet, and miserable.’”

* * *

The Glades Hotel, overlooking Windermere where they had spent their first night together, was still in business, but much larger and more pretentious than it had been half a century ago. They dined in the same room where he had made her half tipsy on claret and she had suffered agonies of embarrassment wondering how to tell him she was desperate to be excused.
The miseries we inflict on ourselves at that age
, she thought, smiling as she recalled the relief attending the release of her corset tapes in the ladies’ room.

It was still light when they took an after-dinner stroll along the lakeside, with the sun setting over Hawkshead and Coniston Water and the blue peaks of the fells on the far side of the lake. It was surprising, she thought, that they had never retraced their steps here in all this time, for her thoughts, all of them pleasant, had returned here time and again, remembering so much of that stupendous occasion when, or so it had seemed to her at the time, all the secrets of the universe had been revealed to her. And as she thought this she was aware of a rare spurt of rebellion against growing old, reflecting that their relationship had entered a new phase in the last few years, a burned-out phase she supposed, although his touch and nearness still awakened in her echoes of the fearful ecstasy of that splendid time.

The red-jacketed hall porter greeted them in the foyer, holding a buff telegram form, saying, “The telegraph boy arrived with it just after you and the lady went out, sir. There’s no prepaid answer but the telegraph office is open until midnight if you want the boots to send a reply.”

He took the envelope, drew out the message, and read it with an expression of mystification, passing it to her and saying, “Can you make anything of this, Hetty? It’s gibberish to me.” She took the form and moved nearer the chandelier. The message read, “Sam descended on us today stop All eight pounds of him stop Love Rudi.” She realised then that the telegram had been addressed to her and laughed outright, partly at the sauciness of the message, partly at Adam’s baffled expression.

“What’s the joke? What the devil is the boy driving at? It
is
George’s Rudi, I imagine?”

“Oh, it’s George’s Rudi all right,” and she began laughing again, so that he looked quite irritated for a moment and the porter, sensing domestic contention, moved away and pretended to be absorbed in the letter rack beside the receptionist’s desk.

“There’s no answer,” she called across to him. To Adam, “Come up to our room, Adam, and I’ll explain.”

His exasperation was really quite comic as she closed the door, laid down the telegram, and said, removing her hat and veil, “It’s really quite an occasion, Adam. Nothing whatever to scowl about. The arrival of our first great-grandson, no less. That’s worth a telegram, isn’t it?”

“Great-grandson? But, dammit, woman, the boy’s a bachelor!”

“Oh, no, he isn’t. He’s been married six months or more.”

“Six months you say?” He picked up the telegram and re-read it. “How do you know? And why is this addressed to you?”

“Well, it wouldn’t have made much sense addressed to you, would it? He confided in me when you were out looking at the new docks. He married his book-keeper, a girl called Eve—I don’t know what her maiden name was. I imagine they married a week or so after she discovered she was expecting his child.”

“He told
you
that?”

“He had to tell someone, poor lad. They were hoping for a boy and decided on Sam, remembering how close Sam and George were in the old days.”

He sat down on the bed. “Haven’t George and Gisela been told yet?”

“No. They were going to be married anyway as soon as Rudi had settled in as manager of the depot but it seems—well, you know what young men are better than I do. It isn’t that kind of marriage, however. They’re very much in love and she looks such a pretty, forthcoming sort of girl.”

“You’ve met her?”

“No. He showed me a picture of her.”

Humour finally triumphed over his bewilderment and he smiled, but then, giving her a steady look of appraisal, “I find that very interesting, Hetty. That a boy in that situation should confide in his grandmother, when he could have made his choice from a whole tribe of uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, and cousins. It establishes something important.”

“Only that he needed someone to break the news gently to his mother.”

“No, something beyond that. I could have done that for him. So could his father, or Max, his brother, or even Giles, whom we all seem to use as a go-between. But he didn’t, he went straight to you, and do you know why? Because he sees you as the real power behind the throne, the one person with the broadmindedness and authority to ease him and that girl he’s married out of a ticklish corner. I’ve a notion any one of them would do the same if it came to the pinch, and that means you’ve kept overall command of ‘em. Not as a grandmother but as a person, and it’s a credit to you if you think about it. They’d confide in me soon enough if it was a business matter, but a human problem, that’s something different.”

His eyes returned to the form again. “Sam, eh? Well, it’s fitting, I suppose, for a first great-grandson. Your father would have been tickled. Especially by us getting the news here of all places. Come over here, you witch.”

She came and stood before him and his big hands enclosed her tightly corsetted waist, inclining her towards him and then, in a way that was reminiscent of the man she recalled so vividly from the past, his hands slipped over the rim of the corset to pinch her bottom. “You’re a very singular woman, Henrietta Rawlinson. I had a lot more sense than I realised when I scooped you off that moor, showed your father the door, and brought you here to this hotel, as green a woman as a man ever coveted. By God, I’d give something to be that young again.”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“You’ll always be young and this is proof of it,” and he released her, folded the telegram carefully, and put it in his pocket. And then, in the last blink of twilight reaching them from the darkening surface of the lake, she saw his eyes light up. “To blazes with trailing further north,” he said. “Let’s go south again, stop off at Manchester, meet that wife of his, and wet the baby’s head. After that I’ll bow myself out and leave you to introduce Sam Swann to his grandmother.”

Five

Landmark

T
he Swann tribe, together with their leading henchmen dotted about the country, had many common characteristics, uniformity being the product of the strain, as far as the family was concerned, added to Adam Swann’s skill in selecting deputies capable of measuring up to his standards. First, all of them, to some degree, were dogged and purposeful, not easily turned aside from the pursuit of what they sought in the way of glory, rewards, and the satisfaction that stemmed from doing a job well. In addition, almost all of them were capable of a strenuous effort and an occasional sacrifice demanded by loyalty to one another and to the firm, for they saw themselves as a unit constantly confronted by rivals and what Adam referred to as the “Johnny-Come-Latelys,” whose watchwords were quick profits with no real regard for the quality of service rendered. They had in common a sense of living in the present that promised endless possibility, of being members of an elite among their fellows, especially those (poor devils) who had the misfortune to be born the far side of the English Channel, so that the pulse of nationalism, quickened by three generations of success, beat strongly in each of them, even in Giles, who sometimes saw the strident nationalism of the British as a threat to the harmony of nations. But that was as far as it went in terms of collectivity, really no more than a loose but effective alliance of some three thousand men and a hundred or so women, who respected the past and embraced the present but gave little thought to the future and were therefore not equipped to anticipate the rhythms of destiny.

Adam, the patriarch, had the advantage of all of them in this respect. He had lived far longer than most of them and the jeopardies of his youth had developed in him a deeper awareness of the wanton twists of fortune. A guarded optimist in most respects, he had yet learned over the years to live like a boxer squaring up to an opponent of unknown reputation, poised on the balls of his feet and conserving his wind, even when he had an adversary sagging against the ropes. As a soldier and trader over more than six decades of high adventure, entailing so many brushes with sudden death and slow bankruptcy, he understood that it did not profit a man to underestimate the opposition, or overextend himself, or squander reserves of patience. Someone or something was always lurking behind the hill to exploit any such lapse and he had tried, in his gruff, solitary way, to instill this precept into his children and employees. With very little success, however, for neither the Swanns nor their henchmen had had much personal experience with failure, and even Henrietta could look back on the successive crises of the ‘sixties with a sense of having met and surmounted them. As for the others, for the children and even the middle-aged among the pashas, not one of them could recall a time when Swann had not been a household word, when there had not been reserves of cash and credit in the bank, and, above all, a time when British citizenship did not carry, as it were, the golden star of precedence over every competitor in the world of commerce.

God knows, Adam sometimes thought, they had grounds for such confidence. Ever since the dawn of the new century, and particularly since the general advance of 1905–1908, family and firm had been riding high. George Swann was now acknowledged the most successful haulier in the country, with over two hundred petrol-driven vehicles on the road and still as many horse-drawn vehicles as his father had fielded in the days when the term “horseless carriage” was a carter’s gibe. The Swann insignia was now seen in every corner of the country save only the Western Isles, where there was little or no profit in hauling, whereas the overall yield of the firm rose year by year, from fifteen per cent in 1901 to just over thirty per cent in the Swann Jubilee year of 1908. George had achieved his headstart and viceroy investors sometimes asked themselves where their wits had been holidaying in 1904, when he had been voted down by his fellow directors. Now his position was even more secure than his father’s had been, for he was reckoned a general who had won not merely Waterloo but the peace that followed it. With his privately owned concern adding to the fleet of Swann-Maxie waggons at the rate of one a week, there seemed little prospect of anyone coming abreast of him.

In other fields, seemingly remote from transport, the Swanns had made their mark. Alexander Swann, close confidant of the War Minister and acknowledged expert on small arms, was a force to be reckoned with among the polo-enthusiasts who still thought of Haldane’s Territorials as a kind of last-ditch reserve.

Giles Swann, although a little-known back-bencher, cold-shouldered by the patricians of his party, was known to have personal access to two or three powerful men in the Cabinet, notably the Welsh Wizard and the pacifist, John Burns. He was also enlarging his grip on his constituents in the valleys where he was known as that rare breed of politician who could be approached anywhere, anytime, and the prospect of unseating him now was considered remote. In the meantime, Hugo Swann, war-hero, not only lived on in the after glory of earlier athletic prowess but also had won fresh laurels at Netley Military Hospital. He was known as “Flexer” Swann among staff and patients, and there were some, among them the men he treated, who declared there was magic in his hands, a legend that his wife helped to foster among the splendid ones who attended her fêtes and garden parties organised on behalf of ex-servicemen.

Of the Swann girls, two had married men of substance, and even Edward Swann, a solitary young man seldom seen in the metropolis, had a high reputation as a mechanic among manufacturers and exporters in the great Midland swathe marked out on Swann’s new maps as The Funnel.

And yet, into the heart and mind of the ageing Adam Swann, head of the tribe, there stole, on this high tide of fortune, a sense of unease as he stumped about his arbours, flowering shrubs, and exotic trees on that estate of his sixteen miles southeast of London Stone, and if you had taxed him with it he would have found it very difficult to express in words. It was not that prospects, after so far a run, were due for a change on that account alone, for to accept this would have been admitting to superstition and Adam was the least superstitious of men. Neither did it stem from the stridency of firm and family but from the mood of the tribe as a whole, that had now, seemingly, made a complete recovery from the blight of selfdoubt of a few years ago, when sixty thousand farmers had beaten them thrice in a single week. National preoccupation with what he saw as the fairground aspects of the new era might have contributed to his apprehension, for everywhere there was prattle about the garish stucco city they had erected at Shepherd’s Bush and were comparing, to the former’s advantage, with the Great Exhibition of 1851. And this, he thought, was nonsense, for alone among them he could remember the Great Exhibition and its air of earnest exploration, whereas now, at this fun parlour they called the White City, the most talked-of exhibit was the giant flipflap, a joyriding contraption of extraordinary silliness. Then there was the everincreasing emphasis on outdoor sports, as if German and American competition could be held at bay by an army of cricketers, yachtsmen, prizefighters, jockeys, lady archers, and lady tennis champions. Tremendous coverage was given, even in sober journals, to the antics of these tumblers and less and less, or so it seemed to him, to the real business of the nation, so that the British Empire might be going the way of Rome when the approach of the barbarians failed to deflect citizens from gladiatorial conventions in the Coliseum.

The very titles of current successes in West End theatres underlined the pervading frivolity of a nation hitherto dedicated to the pursuit of profit—
The Merry Widow
,
A Waltz Dream
,
The Flag Lieutenant
, and
My Mimosa Maid
. Slang was finding its way into the verbal currency of debutantes and top-hatted city gents, as well as that of street urchins. A serious campaign, aimed at extending the franchise to educated women, was treated, by press and public alike, as a lively sideshow running a close second to the White City’s flip-flap, so that sometimes he began to equate London—in his day the most industrious city on earth—as a new Vienna, awaiting, indeed sometimes seeming to invite, total eclipse by Berlin and Chicago.

There had been a time, less than twenty years ago, when he would not have wagered a sixpence on the prospects of a successful overseas challenge, but it did not require a dedicated newspaper reader like himself to see Germany and the United States as strong contenders for the title of top dog today. Over on the Continent, he sensed, people still had their noses to the grindstone, whereas over here Bank Holidays, seaside trips, beanos, regattas, day excursions by motor brakes, and all manner of diversions were beginning to rank high on the programme of thirty-shilling-a-week clerks and even, he suspected, collarless artisans, among whom were a thousand or more Swann carters.

He was all for giving the underdog a fair crack of the whip, but underdogs ought never to forget that the only road to advancement lay through the portals of application and self-development. Certainly not through the turnstile of the White City or the nearest professional football stadium.

He wondered sometimes how that tough old warrior, John Catesby, he who had fought so hard and so courageously to establish the Trades Union Congress, would have regarded it. Contemptuously, he would say, remembering The Polygon manager’s passionate avowal of the dignity of labour, but there it was—the sons of men whom Catesby had helped to liberate from stupefying labour in mill and factory were now more elevated by news that Britain had won four out of the first five prizes in the International Balloon Race than in improving machinery designed to strike a bargain between boss and hired hand. They did their work—shoddily if some of the new products he had handled lately were their judge—then rushed off to an athletic field somewhere, more often to watch than to play, for the gladiators who drew the largest crowds nowadays were professionals and even village cricket, they told him, was entering a decline.

Glum as they were, however, he kept these thoughts to himself apart from a hint or two to Giles, still struggling towards the Millennium, for it gave him no pleasure to puncture the self-confidence of George, Alex, and Edward, and he saw little of the girls now they were all off his hands.

So it was, when George came to him with an invitation to occupy the seat of honour at the forthcoming Jubilee banquet he was planning for late September, he thanked him and accepted, saying, “You’ll not want me to make a speech, I hope?” And at that George laughed and said he most surely would be required to speak, for he was down to reply to the toast “Swann-on-Wheels, 1858–1908.”

“Who else could do it with your style?” he demanded. “Come to that, who else has survived to challenge the authenticity of all the I-remembers you’ll weave into your text?”

“Oh, I daresay a few old crocks will shake the moths out of their festive rig on the promise of free liquor. Not poor old Keate, the original waggonmaster, for he’s ninety and anyway he’s a teetotaller. But I daresay a few old stagers like Bryn Lovell, Young Rookwood, and Jake Higson will want to boast about their long service records. Where are you holding it? At the George Inn?”

No, George told him, it was planned to take place in the largest of the new warehouses, specially decorated for the occasion, and every region was balloting for a deputation of twenty employees, for even the warehouse could not accommodate everyone who would want to come.

“There’ll be over three hundred by my reckoning,” he added, “and on the same night every region is holding its own celebration dinner. I’ve allocated a grant of fifty pounds to every depot.”

“Wives?”

“A few of them. Would mother be interested, do you suppose?”

“I wouldn’t care to be the one who told her she hadn’t been invited.” Noting George’s smile added, “Why do you ask such a question, boy?”

“I don’t know… maybe because I’ve always sensed she regarded the network as a rival.”

“So she did. But your mother’s far too sharp to turn her back on the Other Woman. I found that out when you were a toddler.”

It crossed his mind then to wonder how much they knew of Henrietta’s achievement when she had hauled the business out of the doldrums that time he lost his leg and was out of action for a year. Little enough, he imagined, for it was all so long ago, and so wildly improbable at the time. It was a transformation, overnight, of a feckless girl into a merchant princess, and it gave him the bare bones of the speech George wanted him to make.

“Send her a card and all the trimmings,” he said. “She’d appreciate that, boy.”

2

Edith, he recalled, had once seen them as privateers-men, converging on the Thames to plan a string of piratical affrays, but when he reminded her of this, in the interval when they were milling around before taking their seats, she smiled and said, “But they’ve come
en masse
today, with their private retinues, so I see them a little differently. As trained bands, converging on the capital to squeeze the best terms out of the man who hires them. Or as a company of mercenaries, assembling under some old brigand like Sir Robert Knollys before cutting a swathe from Lower Normandy to Gascony.”

He liked that and thought about it for a moment as he watched them exchanging banter round the seating plan George had fastened to a blackboard near the double doors. A White Company, well versed in the use of weapons, and masters of their own tactical skills, yet still needing the strategical direction of a veteran like George, a man they had come to trust and admire, forgetting the occasions when he had led them on unprofitable ventures and remembering only more recent triumphs in which every one of them had shared.

They had come here from every corner of the islands, bringing with them their local prejudices and babel of dialects, but disposed for once to set aside old rivalries and frontier skirmishes, for they would see themselves as meeting on neutral ground.