Give Us This Day (57 page)

“Why, that’s a perfectly splendid idea,” Adam exclaimed. “Who thought of it?”

“Who else but Debbie? I earn a good living but the Street is a young man’s life and a three-day-week editorial job of that sort would be a wonderful standby. You approve of it, then?”

“Wholeheartedly,” Adam said. “What will you call it?”

“We haven’t decided. How about
The Swann Bulletin
?”

“Too dull,” Adam said, “we’ve always had a reputation for quirkish titles. How about
The Swann Migrant
?”

Jeffs laughed, saying, “You really are on top of your form tonight, Gov’nor.”

Henrietta, he noticed, was surrounded by wives and daughters, and he needed a breath of fresh air, so he slipped out into the yard and stood by the old horsetrough, reviewing a scene bathed in silver moonlight, with the outline of the new buildings stark and clear against the sky and, hard to his left, the slender tower of the belfry that was still the ark of the tabernacle as far as he was concerned.

Moved by an impulse, he drifted across to it, aware of stirrings and giggles in the patches of shadow where, no doubt, some of the younger ones were making the most of their opportunities. He went in and tackled the winding stair, needing no light on ground as familiar as this and stumping his way up to the queer, octagonal room at the summit, where the door stood open and moonlight flooded the floor about the narrow casement. And then he stopped, sniffing Turkish tobacco and vaguely aware of a figure standing by the embrasure, looking out on the wide curve of the Thames. He said, jocularly, “Hello there? Who’s been sleeping in my bed on this night of nights?”

The figure turned, moving into the moonlight, and he saw to his surprise that it was Edith, her mantle thrown over her shoulders and a cigarette in her hand.

“You? Well, I don’t know! What drew you up here, I wonder?”

“Memories, mostly. Whenever I thought of you in the old days, and it was every day before I married Tom, it was always here, Adam. Never at Tryst, and never out on the network,” she said.

“I didn’t know you were a smoker.”

“Just occasionally, when I want to think. They’re Turkish. Will you have one?”

“No, thanks, I’ll stick to my cheroots.” He lit one, blowing the smoke up to the cobwebbed rafters as he said, gaily, “Edward introduced me to that girl of yours. She’s a rare beauty, Edith. Tom would have been very proud of her.”

“Yes, he was,” Edith said, “although he didn’t have long with her. He died before she put her hair up.”

He might have been wrong but he thought he noted a drag in her voice, enough to prompt him to say, “You still miss him terribly, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. I thought it would get a little easier every day, but it doesn’t. Times like this, when all the survivors get together, are the worst. It wasn’t so bad when the boys were at home, but they had to move on. I was glad when George gave them a chance to prove their mettle in a busier sector.”

“Well, you’ve got Gilda home now, I hear.”

“Gilda isn’t the same, Adam.”

“How do you mean?”

She turned, drawing thoughtfully on her cigarette. Its aromatic whiff reminded him, momentarily, of the military base at Scutari, where he had spent a month recovering from a wound received in the Sebastopol trenches. “Your boy has proposed to her, Adam.”

“He has? Well, I’m delighted to hear it, and Hetty will be, too. She has a great deal of respect for you, Edith, and I don’t have to tell you how pleased I should be to acknowledge a daughter of yours as my own.”

“I didn’t say she’d accepted him.”

“A girl as pretty as Gilda would be sure to keep a man on a string for a month or two.”

“There’s more than that in it. Gilda… well, she’s different somehow. Very sure of herself. Too sure, I sometimes think. That’s the penalty of over-educating a girl. It would take her a long time to settle down after all her travels abroad, and the kind of people she met and mixed with in France, Switzerland, and Italy.”

“Well, that’s her prerogative. How old is she, exactly?”

“Twenty-two. She’s already had half-a-dozen proposals. One was from a French count, I believe.” Then, hesitantly, “I don’t know Edward very well, Adam, but what I’ve seen of him I like. He seems a very practical lad, more like George than any of the others.”

“He’s practical all right. George tells me he’s shaping up wonderfully.”

“Sensitive? Easily hurt?”

“I couldn’t say. No more or less than most lads his age. He’s very dedicated to his work. That’s all I could say. I didn’t have much part in raising them, you recall. Right here was my family, up to the time I retired, and by the time I did they had all grown up and most of them had gone.”

“Well, I wouldn’t like to see a boy of yours hurt or humiliated, and I’ve even gone so far as to tell Gilda as much. If she means to marry him, fair enough. If she doesn’t, I won’t have her encouraging him too much.”

It surprised him to hear her talking like this, indicating as it did the underlying reason for her presence up here alone, as if doubts concerning her daughter’s romance had driven her here, clear away from the noise and high spirits below. He said, “Look here, Edith, don’t you concern yourself. Edward’s a grown man and must learn to look to himself in matters of this kind. Was that why you came up here? To mull it over in solitude?”

“Partly,” she said, “but not altogether. I had a queer sensation down there tonight, when they were all congratulating one another on the past, present, and future prospects of the firm. I can’t describe it, exactly, but it wasn’t altogether removed from… well, a sense of foreboding. So silly on an occasion like this.”

“Not so silly,” he said. “I’ve had a niggle or two under my own ribs just lately. Not about the firm, however, about the country generally.”

“Tell me.”

“I can’t, or not precisely. It’s old age, I daresay, and the rate of change I see about me. But the fact is, as I see it, we’re too damned confident, the whole boiling of us. We’ve all had a wonderful run for our money, had it all our own way for too long. As a trading nation, I mean. I thought we would slow down and take stock when we got that drubbing from the Boers a few years since but we didn’t. The minute we had ‘em on the run we were the same arrogant, overweening tribe of chest-beaters. It never seems to occur to anyone that the Continental and American competition is getting tougher every day. There’s a lot I don’t like about the international scene for that matter. These constant confrontations between Russia, Austria, Germany, and France, and our politicians’ tendency to stick our nose in, instead of minding their own till and exploiting the tremendous potential in the dominions and colonies. The Continent’s business isn’t our business, and I never did trust the French any further than you could throw the Arc de Triomphe!”

He had succeeded in cheering her up anyway, for she laughed, saying, “You don’t change a bit, Adam. And I’m glad, and so is everyone down there. Come, I’ve not had more than a word with Henrietta, and if anyone finds us up here in the dark the old rumours will start circulating on the Swann grapevine.”

“Not,” he said, mournfully, “at my age. At yours, maybe, for you don’t look more than forty in moonlight.” He took her hand and led her across the threshold and down the stairs into the brightly-lit yard, thinking as he did of a time she came up here with some tomfool notion of emigrating to Australia simply because she believed herself hopelessly in love with him.
But that was before she met Tom
, he thought.
After that I might not have existed
. This prompted him to ask her, as they crossed the yard to the warehouse, whether she had ever told Gilda and the boys about Tom Wickstead’s past as a man who had once walked abroad with a revolver strapped to his wrist. “Never,” she said. “What purpose would it have served? Besides, he never was a bad ‘un in that sense, not even before I met him. He was only hitting back at a society that had stamped on him and his. His father was transported for twelve years for stealing a piece of cloth to make clothes for his mother and sisters. His mother died in the workhouse at thirty-five and his eldest sister went on the streets, for it was a case of that or starve. Incidentally, he named Gilda for her. It’s ironic how the wheel turns full circle, don’t you think?”

He had no time to answer for, seeing them, half-a-dozen people converged on them, but he thought about it at intervals all the evening and later when Henrietta said, as they undressed, “I had a talk with that girl of Edith’s. She seems terribly brainy—Deborah’s sort of braininess. I do hope Edward hasn’t bitten off more than he can chew.”

He replied, a little grumpily, “If he has he can spit it out. The same as we all have to from time to time. Turn out the light, woman. I’m dog-tired and you ought to be.”

And then, as she climbed into bed and settled herself, he forgot Gilda and Edith, too, his mind basking a little in the splendour and fulfilment of the Jubilee, and all it represented in terms of personal and collective endeavour. As to the nation, he supposed it was like Edward, mature enough to absorb any shocks and disappointments that lay ahead and equipped to ride them out, the way he had done since he came to this city to prise up a few of those golden paving-stones they were always talking about in the shires.

PART FIVE

Journey into Chaos

One

Win One, Lose One

I
n the long afterglow of her life, when warmth had stolen back into her bones, when she had adjusted, more comfortably than most women who had worn crinolines, to short skirts, sounding brass, and the rootlessness of the post-war era, Henrietta Swann would challenge those who claimed that the old world died in August 1914. Her memory calendar was at odds with those of her contemporaries, showing a discrepancy of some five years, and there was a logical reason for this. For Henrietta the onrush of the terminal sickness of the age began as early as the summer of 1909, when the first of a string of domestic catastrophes occurred, shattering her serenity and undermining her abiding faith in her destiny. And after that, in quick succession, came a long run of crises demanding more and ever more of her impressive stocks of resilience, and resource—and all this at a time of life when one could reasonably look for repose. For she had then entered upon her seventieth year and was ready, if only occasionally, to sit back and assume the role of an interested spectator.

It was not to be, however, and perhaps the scurviest trick fate played upon her at that time was to open the year with a discharge of Swann rockets designed to light up the achievements of the dynasty, enabling her to look back into the past and forward into the future with a grandiloquence that Adam had always found comic, particularly after she passed her sixtieth birthday and he came to see her as equating, on county level, with Victoria in that photograph showing her surrounded by a swarm of dutiful, popeyed relations, the least of them a duke.

The family firework display began on New Year’s Day when the newspapers carried reports, some of them flatteringly detailed, of sovereign recognition of Hugo Swann, Layer on of Hands. The bombshell was not entirely unexpected. His wife, Lady Sybil, had been over at Tryst in late autumn dropping mysterious hints on the subject, but neither Adam nor Henrietta, or indeed anyone else outside Lady Sybil’s exclusive charity circle, had regarded them as pointers to the fact that Hugo, least promising of all the Swann boys, would be the first to attain the rank of knighthood. Even when she saw it in print, Henrietta wondered, a little fearfully, if there had not been an embarrassing mix-up somewhere and Hugo’s name had emerged from the hat in error.

For it seemed preposterous to think of dear, bumbling Hugo, one-time athlete, sometime war hero, latterly, she gathered, a kind of doctor’s auxiliary at a hospital, as Sir Hugo Swann. She had never been one to minimise the achievements of any of her brood. Indeed, it had crossed her mind many times during the last thirty years that her husband’s contribution to commerce should have earned him an official accolade of some kind. But Hugo, even in his heyday when he sometimes brought home two trophies a week, had never figured in her dynastic daydreams. There was no reason why he should when he faced such formidable competition on the part of his brothers, three of them well advanced upon their careers and winning mention, from time to time, in the national press. Alex had earned his first headline as long ago as 1879, when he sent home an account of that battle with the Zulus at a place with an unpronounceable name. George had fought his way to the forefront on four wheels and carried, or so it seemed to her, the whole country with him, for she never saw a motor-bus or a motor-car nowadays without reminding herself that the very first of them, so far as she was aware, had arrived in England with George’s baggage when he landed with his Austrian bride in 1885. As for Giles, his present place in the high counsels of the nation could have been predicted when he was a boy of thirteen, reading his way through his father’s library at the rate of one tome a day. Even Edward, they said, nine years younger than Hugo, was considered a gifted engineer and currently a Swann viceroy in one of the network’s most lucrative sectors. Was it to be wondered at that she had overlooked Hugo, a man who walked with a white stick and was followed about by an ex-rough-riding sergeant who barked like a collie every time his master had need of him?

Yet there it was: Sir Hugo Swann, honoured, it seemed, for his work among the human wreckage of that awful war in South Africa. This had been the war that everybody had thought so splendid at the time but which was now dismissed as a faraway squabble that had been settled, in the way of all these colonial squabbles, by Earl Roberts’s tact, Lord Kitchener’s scowl, and promises of good behaviour all round.

Even Adam, so rarely surprised these days, had been stunned by the news, yet not so much as not to quarrel with the rumour that the honour was the result of canvassing behind the scenes on the part of Lady Sybil. He said when this story was relayed to him, “Once in a while, every hundred years or so, those honours brokers reward someone deserving by accident. Go down to Netley and watch him at work on patients. I did just that, admittedly out of curiosity, and I came away humbled. I’m not a religious man, but I believe in some miracles. One has to when one hears a blind man preach a sermon through his fingertips.”

He did not say this to her, but his comments were repeated to Henrietta by Debbie’s husband Milton. Neither did she take it up with him later, sensing that she would not comprehend any clarification he condescended to make and also (he was oddly touchy in some areas) that questioning on the subject would embarrass him. She was prepared, as always, to take his word on matters that baffled her and assumed, from then on, that Hugo’s endowments, unlike those of his splendid brothers, had been hidden from her by an inscrutable Providence.

Adam’s verdict was only part of the truth. Lady Sybil had, indeed, been tireless on Hugo’s behalf, but his selection from a swarm of probables was really another kind of miracle, brought about by a flash of inspiration in the minds of what Adam called the honours brokers and what others called the Faceless Ones; it was an inspiration, lighting up the imagination of men rarely responsive to romantic impulses and national moods. Men who, for the most part, were guided by motives far too complex to be comprehended by the man in the market-place, who might regard Hugo Swann’s services to the nation as more deserving than, say, the transfer of a small part of a large fortune to areas where its arrival would make the maximum noise.

But circumstances, on this unique occasion, combined to answer Lady Sybil’s prayers. When the list of candidates for New Year’s honours were being considered, it was apparent, even to the Faceless Ones, that to elevate them en bloc would be to give substance to recent murmurs that knighthoods had ceased to be earned with anything but hard cash, discreetly distributed, later “discovered” by the press. Thus it was that Hugo came to be seen as a kind of minority candidate, isolated among a swarm of contenders whose prospects, on the face of it, were infinitely brighter, almost as though the adjudicators had reasoned, “As God is our witness, his claims upon us barely exist. He was once acclaimed by the great unwashed as a pot-hunter. He was careless enough to lose his sight in a conflict that is now regarded as a national blunder. He has since buried himself alive in an infirmary without so much as an M.D. to explain his presence there. He has no influence anywhere, has never contributed a pennypiece to either great political party and his nod in anyone’s direction would count for nothing in the way of preferment. But stay! We are overlooking the obvious! Sporting laurels, sacrifice on the field of battle, and political anonymity are the very ingredients capable of producing a compound capable of exploding the myth that our rewards are bought and sold.”

So it was that Hugo’s name went forth and Lady Sybil, bringing the news to him, was taxed to convince him that it was deserved.

”
Me? Knighted?
But it’s quite absurd, Sybil! What have I ever done to get knighted?” he asked her, quite amazed.

“Hugo, dear,” she said, taking his hand, “it’s for what you’ve done right here.”

“Here? In Netley? A bit of massaging?”

“Yes, dear, for… a bit of massaging.
They
see it as important.”

She realised she could never hope to make him understand that and did not try. She had watched him expand day by day, coming to terms with his disability in a way that a man learns to adapt to the customs of a strange country and create, within himself, a sense of belonging. He had learned to dispense with eyes, not so much because his other senses had enlarged themselves but because, through his bones, sinews, and nerve ends, he had regained his old ascendancy over competitors in the field.

“I couldn’t accept, Sybil,” he said. “The fellows here would see it as swank.”

“That isn’t so, Hugo dear. You
must
take it. There’s a very good reason why you should.”

“What reason?”

“Because it signifies official acceptance of the work you are doing here. I don’t mean personally, but in the wider sense, of men like you helping and encouraging one another, of establishing the value of expert massage inside the medical profession, of proving that a man without sight can play a useful part in society. That’s why I insist you accept, Hugo.”

It was, of course, a shoal of red herrings. She did not give a button about the abstract aspects that tripped so glibly from her tongue, but she understood the regenerated Hugo Swann well enough to realise that these were the likeliest means of overcoming his essential humility, and she was right. He sat thinking a moment, hands resting on his enormous thighs, and presently he said, “Would it help to persuade them to set up that training centre I suggested? Would it convince some of those stick-in-the-mud army surgeons that a masseur and an osteopath isn’t necessarily a quack?”

“I think it would.”

“Very well, then. I’ll accept.”

“Thank you, Hugo. I knew you’d be sensible,” and she was glad she could safely indulge herself in a smile of triumph and went her way rejoicing. For although she was glad for him, she was even more relieved for herself, seeing the recognition she had won for him as the last and most impressive of the string of penances laid upon her for her share in encompassing his fate. She had no way of knowing that his enlargement since he had been caught up in rehabilitation work had been brought about by an almost parallel process, that his successes here had in themselves been acts of atonement for taking the life of a child on a ridge thousands of miles from Southampton Water. It was some time since he had been troubled by the dream that had returned to him time and again over the years, a dream of looking down on the face of an enemy in a slouch hat who lay flat on his back staring sightlessly at the sky and then, although manifestly a dead face, transformed its features into those of a child he had never seen, his own seven-year-old son.

2

The second rocket soared a month or so later when Edward, coming into the hall at a run, announced that Gilda Wickstead had at last capitulated and agreed to marry him at Easter.

The news, long expected but unaccountably delayed, delighted Henrietta so much that she found she could forgive the stupid girl for keeping everybody on tenterhooks for the better part of six months. It was a relief to see the youngest of her sons released from the private purgatory to which that Wickstead girl had consigned him, and there had been times, over the last few months, when she could have shaken his beloved until her teeth rattled, notwithstanding her sincere regard for Edward’s mother-in-law elect.

Time and again she had tried to coax from Edith the source of her own and her handsome daughter’s reservations on the match, but no important information had been forthcoming. Edith hinted that the girl had been spoiled, first by her father and then by her brothers, that she wasn’t ready for marriage, that she might not be content to vegetate in the English provinces after so much acclaim in foreign cities, and even that Gilda might have ambitions of her own that did not include marriage. It was this hint that alarmed Henrietta, for she had a suspicion that Edith, known to be sympathetic to the Pankhurst hell-raisers, was hinting that Gilda was a suffragette, as if two martyrs in one family wasn’t enough to get on with. But Edith, challenged on this point, smiled and shook her head.

“A militant? Our Gilda? No, you can put that aside, Henrietta. If Gilda campaigns, it will be for Gilda.”

It was strange and rather chilling, Henrietta thought, that a mother could talk that way about her daughter, almost as though she neither liked nor trusted her. Gilda was exasperating, certainly, and probably more experienced mashers than Edward had succumbed to her undeniable charms, but she wasn’t unlikeable, or even particularly vain. Reluctantly, for Henrietta was very fond of Edith, she put it down to maternal jealousy, of the kind she herself had sometimes felt (although never admitted to) for Helen and Joanna, when they were young, slim, pretty, and licensed by a tolerant father to play fast and loose with a troop of young gallants in a way that would never have been allowed a generation before.

But then, just when Henrietta was beginning to resign herself to having a bachelor son at the tail of the family, everything sorted itself out and she was plunged into preparations for what she thought of as the last of the first generation weddings, and grandchildren’s weddings were not the same, for you hadn’t the fun and the bother of helping to stage them. Henrietta always put as much effort into her sons’ weddings as those of her daughters. It was a wonderful excuse to try out the very latest fashions seen in one or other of the dozens of costumiers’ catalogues that found their way into Tryst at all seasons of the year.

Her pleasure might have been muted had she known the background of Gilda Wickstead’s hesitation, aired during a rare, serious discussion between mother and daughter a day or so before Edward came pounding into the house with news of his reprieve.

Edith had not enjoyed watching the son of her oldest and dearest friends waiting on her doorstep. Like Henrietta, she would have preferred to take some positive action calculated to hasten a climax. Nothing would have given her greater satisfaction than seeing Gilda marry into the Swann family, but all her life—as regional manager, as wife, and as mother—Edith Wickstead had been excessively irritated by ditherers.