Give Us This Day (64 page)

“Things have got better, haven’t they?”

“In some respects. We still resort to eighteenth-century diplomacy in our chancellories. And then think of the scramble for Africa, and this naval arms race between us and Germany. I sometimes wonder where it will lead us all. Down the Gadarene slope, if we don’t look sharp. Mind, we’ve always had to contend with the gluttons. I once knew a merchant in The Polygon who boasted of running his business on boys and old men. He sacked the boys the day they finished their apprenticeship and paid the old-stagers half the current rate, since it was that or the workhouse. You can legislate against that kind of thing nowadays, but you can’t frame laws against secret treaties made by the idiots who find reassurance in musichall ditties written on red, white, and blue scores. Those are the jokers who worry me the most, and the sickness is spreading fast. It started here, back about the time you were born, and it’s taken hold in Potsdam, Paris, and even Washington. All over the West, people who should know better think money and prestige are the touchstones. They aren’t and you’ve only got to read the history books to prove it.”

“What are the touchstones, Father?”

The old man knitted his brows. “Ah, now you’re asking. Respect for human dignity, maybe, and for Donne’s dictum—‘Each man’s death diminishes me.’ Mercifully there’s still evidence of that here.” He paused as they drew level with the river, low for this season of the year and fringed with frosted brushwood sparkling like a long row of Christmas trees. “As for your loss, try and regard her as the French view the loss of Alsace-Lorraine—‘Speak of it never, think of it always.’”

Giles reached out and touched his father’s arm. “A walk with you is the best tonic I know, Father.”

“Glad somebody thinks so. If you can serve any purpose at my age, one shouldn’t complain.”

“You’re good for a long time yet, Father.”

“A year or so, given mild winters,” and in his bones he believed it, for at eightytwo he had less aches and pains to bother him than many men twenty years his junior.

He would not have believed, however, that he would live to see yet another royal funeral.

Three

The Last Rally

I
t was the final rally. Surely the last he would live to see and perhaps— who knew?—the last occasion when a constellation of kings, princes, and grand dukes, garnished, gilded, splendidly mounted, and serenely untroubled in their Godgiven right to occupy the centre of the world’s stage, would use the passing of one of their number as an occasion to catch up on family gossip and practise a little harmless skulduggery on one another once the royal corpse was decently below ground at Frogmore.

There was no logical reason why he should view it in this cryptic manner, or none save that slight stir of uneasiness somewhere near the bottom of his rib cage, the pulse he had sometimes referred to as “the little feller in here” when expressing undefined doubts about a project. This was no cause, however, for foregoing the occasion to celebrate (for that was how Henrietta regarded it) his own longevity and go posting up to town to bribe or bully one or other of his old cronies to find him a place on a balcony or a window overlooking the funeral march.

He saw it as a rally of the privileged, most of them stemming, in one way or another, from the loins of that gloomy German chap Albert. “The stud house of Europe,” Napoleon had called the House of Coburg. For here they were, a whole shoal of them, in their frogged tunics, glittering orders, and absurd headgear, assembled to pay homage to a corpulent man whom some thought of as a peacemaker and others a mere womaniser, but whose death that summer had caught everyone off balance. For these days, a monarch was not reckoned old at sixty-nine. After all, the fellow’s mother had reigned almost as long and even his great-grandfather, Farmer George, had made eighty-plus.

Yet there it was. He was gone, and his bright new halo with him, and Adam could find cause to regret him, for, just as he had grown to dislike his tetchy old mother, he had come to respect her roystering son for the dignity and despatch he brought to his job when he was summoned after such a long and frustrating wait in the wings.

He did not know whether most people had had time to adjust to his style, so different from Victoria’s, with its opening of social doors, and the application of shrewd personal judgment in foreign affairs, sound but not showy. At least the foreigners respected him in a way they had never respected his mother. Somehow he had taken the measure of them, especially of his nephew Wilhelm, with his fierce upturned moustaches and loud-mouthed braggadocio. He had brought to his job the dignity that had been lacking for over three centuries, since the time Elizabeth rallied the nation at Tilbury.

Mainly, of course, they were here to show off their plumes, but he suspected there was another reason for their assembly. Deep down the more responsible of them were genuinely worried by his abrupt departure from their midst. He was, in essence, a kind of stabiliser in the chancellories, a factor that had to be reckoned with in small matters and great, and it was no time for the vacuum to be filled by that unassuming Prince George, whose experience, outside the navy or a pheasant shoot, was very limited.

It might well be, of course, that he too would surprise the cleverdicks. He was known to be an amiable man, anxious to play out his life on a low key. Most of them, no doubt, would hope that he would continue in this way, enabling time for their personal plans to mature, but with a Coburg one could rarely take such things for granted. Nobody had rated Albert very high when he married Victoria two generations ago, yet he had succeeded in surprising most people, just as Edward, his scrapegrace son, had only a few years back.

Meantime they composed their expressions and marched a dutiful slow-step, eyeing one another with a certain caution.

* * *

They did these things superbly well, did the English, he thought, his mind returning to Victoria’s funeral in 1901 and her glittering Jubilees of ‘87 and ‘97. Weather as good as this, of course, was sure to increase the demand on vantage points, so he went up to town the day before and was in position before the procession set out from the palace at nine sharp. Yet even he, used to such spectacles, had not anticipated a show on this scale, with eight kings and a royal duke, riding three by three, followed by five heirs-apparent, forty imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens, and ambassadors from every country on the map.

They had talked about Queen’s weather at the Jubilee, but here was King’s weather, with the sun riding high in a cloudless sky, temperatures soaring into the seventies, and not even the lightest breeze to ruffle the white plumes of Kaiser Wilhelm’s field-marshal’s hat as he reined back slightly to give Cousin George the precedence demanded by protocol. He was worth a look, this plunging grandson of the old queen, who was reported to have said of Britain, “I am proud to call this place home…” But it didn’t seem to stop him reviling it when he was in one of his encirclement moods. They said he had a withered arm, but if it was true it didn’t show. His right hand held the marshal’s baton, his left the reins of the docile grey he was riding, and, as at his grandmother’s funeral, he seemed to be on his very best behaviour, although even a mild-mannered man might have been forgiven irritability under all that sweaty clobber he was wearing.

The leading trio passed—the new King, Wilhelm, and the dead monarch’s only surviving brother, the Duke of Connaught—and in their wake the kings of Denmark and the Hellenes, brothers of the widow, flanked by her nephew, Haakon of Norway, and after them Alfonso of Spain, Manuel of Portugal, and a mourner wearing a silk turban whom he had some difficulty in recognising as Ferdinand of Bulgaria.

He thought, cynically,
Well, they carry themselves well enough, I suppose, but they’re always getting bombed or shot at. And that chap Ferdinand has to bolster himself by calling himself “Czar” and buying Byzantine jewellery from a theatrical costumier…

His sharp eye roved beyond to the next trio, Franz Ferdinand, heir to old Franz Josef’s ramshackle empire, God help him; Yussuf, heir to the Sultan’s Turkey; and a tall, less showy man who seemed to Adam to sit his horse as an expert. He recognised him as Albert, King of the Belgians, and thought,
He’s the only one among ‘em embarrassed by all this and wishing to God he was anywhere else…
His scrutiny returned to the corpulent Franz Ferdinand, who had replaced Prince Rudolf after the poor bemused devil shot himself and his mistress in a hunting lodge, and placed such a fearful strain upon Habsburg flunkeys to explain how it happened. And an equal strain on the credibility of the journalists, obliged to select one of a dozen contradictory theories.

The great thing about an occasion like this was that it gave a man an opportunity to ponder the infinite variations in the pattern of the Continental carpet as it unrolled, little by little, year by year. Not by everybody, of course, but by the privileged like himself, who kept pace with events, who had lived a long, long time, and who was endowed with a selective memory. There wasn’t one of these gilded popinjays concerning whom he could not have told a story or two they would have preferred forgotten, and it gave him a feeling of thankfulness that he had been able to pick his own way through life, unfettered by protocol and tradition, responsible to himself, his family, and his work force certainly, but to no one else alive. And as he thought this, there came to him a conviction that he was watching a cavalcade out of a dead century, mounted in an era long before that of universal male suffrage and the rise of the new commercial aristocracy, the twin nineteenthcentury forces that had made these people as obsolete as dodos.

Japan was represented by the brother of the Emperor; Russia by the Grand Duke Michael; Italy by the Duke of Aosta (what fancy handles they attached to these royal jugs!). Then came Carl of Sweden, Henry of Holland, any number of Balkan nabobs, and in their wake a flock of grand dukes, petty princelings, and top-hatted civilians from the world’s republics. His old friend, Lord Roberts, was there, as always upon these occasions, together with as colourful a display of military detachments as he had ever seen assembled in line of march— Goldstreamers, Gordon Highlanders, Household Cavalry, lancers, dragoons, and hussars of every crack Continental regiment, and even a handful of goldepauletted admirals. And between these and the swarm of British office-holders, all in their traditional best bibs and tuckers, a typically British touch—the dead man’s charger, that had never once been called upon to charge, followed by his wire-haired terrier, Caesar, led by an academic-looking chap in a college gown.

It was all very splendid, a little too splendid for anyone like himself, who had walked by night among the London destitute, reflecting sometimes upon the strange idiosyncrasies of a race that valued its dogs and horses above most of its children, and spent far more on the dead than the living. For this was really no more than a dazzling reflection of an East End coster’s funeral, paid for by the indigent widow out of her twopenny-a-week insurance policy. People were the slaves of their tribal rituals.

* * *

The heat was beginning to distress him so he made his way through the crowds to the Strand and thence to his hotel, where he took a tepid bath and, after that, a light luncheon and a refreshing afternoon nap. By twilight he was back at Tryst, and Henrietta, perhaps remembering earlier homecomings, came down the yard steps when the coachman (he had never let George talk him into selling his carriage bays and replacing them by a motor) was giving the horses a rub down. She led the way across the hall and into the dining-room where it was dark and cool, and he regaled her over supper with a detailed account of the procession, noting that even here, in deference to the servants he supposed, she had tied a black crepe bow on the sleeve of her blouse.

“King George, what kind of man is he, Adam?” she asked. “I don’t recall much about him. It was always his brother, the one who died, who was going to be king.”

“George? He’s all for a quiet life and I hope he gets it. But I doubt it very much after a close look at the poor chap’s relations,” he replied.

“You mean they’ll make trouble for him? But how could they? I mean, after all, he’s King of England now.”

“King of Britain, my dear. I’m always afraid you’ll say that in front of old Phoebe Fraser, who went to such frightful pains to get it straight with the children.”

“Well, Britain then. Are you referring to that silly man, the Kaiser?”

“Him among others,” Adam said.

“Oh, he’s just a braggart,” she said. “The King will soon put him in his place. And as for all those others you were telling me about, well, they wouldn’t care to pick a quarrel with us, any one of them.”

“No,” he said, stifling a yawn, “I don’t suppose they would, Hetty. I’m quite worn out. It was so devilishly hot in town. Shall we make an early night of it?” He rose, foregoing his final cheroot of the day and the stroll in the forecourt he enjoyed at this season of the year.

But sleep, perversely, evaded him. He woke up soon after midnight and, slipping on his dressing-gown, went downstairs and let himself out of the tall windows opening on to the balustraded terrace he had built along the front of the house during his renovations twenty years ago.

The front of the house was bathed in moonlight and between the lilac clumps, at the head of the drive, he could see as far as The Hermitage beyond his artificial lake. It was very quiet out here, and reassuring, too, in an odd sort of way, for the presence of the old house behind him, and the broad, down-sloping vista studded with imported trees now growing to an impressive height and looking as if they belonged here, gave him a sense of permanence and stability. I shall hate leavin
g it, he thought, not the network and the family so much, for the one is in safe hands with George and Edward, and the other will manage. But this… these coppices and fields and flowering shrubs that smell of England all the year round… As his min
d returned to that gun-carriage and the empty saddle of the royal horse…
How much longer can I expect? I’ve already overstayed my welcome by several years but, by gum, I’ve had a wonderful innings and ought not to resent making way for others. If only they’ll learn to value it—this corner of an old landscape, and the way of life that goes with it—peace, order and progression…

He looked up at the sky, searching for familiar stars, and it occurred to him for a moment to contemplate the infinite, something he rarely did. Was there anything to follow? Did it matter one way or the other? He had never had any deep convictions about it and felt no special need of them now that his time was running out.

He extinguished his cheroot in a flower urn trailing geraniums and went in, closing the windows. A few minutes later he was back in bed and drifting off to sleep, his arm resting across the generous hip of his wife, who stirred slightly and murmured something unintelligible.