Theirs Was The Kingdom (86 page)

The silver-buttoned flunkey standing outside the revolving door recognised him and touched his rosetted beaver, saying that Sir Clive had returned from luncheon less than ten minutes ago and was almost surely in his office. Giles climbed the broad staircase to the heavy mahogany door that was the magnate’s sanctum and around him, as he moved along the corridor, he could hear the muted hum of high-pressure enterprise: bells ringing, the heavy, hesitant clack-clack of Rycroft’s new typewriter girls, an ambassadorial clerk treading softly to and fro carrying files and correspondence. He thought, bitterly, “All this, and the man can’t raise one daughter properly…” and without waiting to be announced he knocked on the door at the blind end of the corridor and walked inside.

His man was seated at an enormous desk on which everything was neatly arranged and even the pen tray looked as if it merited a private auction. Sir Clive raised his neat head and smiled, extending his hand across the desk and saying, genially, “Ah, I wondered when we should see you. I had almost made up my mind to write but I guessed you would call here or at Eaton Place. Sit down, sit down, my boy. That one is the most comfortable. Cigar? No, you can’t smoke them, can you? Help yourself from the box— Turkish, Russian, or Virginian. I have to cater for all tastes up here.”

It occurred to Giles then that he must know nothing of the broken engagement and this disconcerted him for a moment. But then he reasoned that it would be typical of Romayne to pretend it hadn’t happened, to say nothing about it until she was convinced he was not bluffing. He said, quietly, “Clearly Romayne hasn’t told you I broke our engagement, sir?” but the man did not even blink. “Haven’t seen the minx,” he said. “Haven’t set eyes on her since luncheon, Saturday. All I know is that she’s gone off somewhere, and she hasn’t paid me the compliment of saying where. Have you any notion where she might be?”

For a moment Giles was too astonished to comment. He had always known Sir Clive Rycroft-Mostyn was an exceptionally cool customer, but this casual approach to his only child’s abrupt disappearance was almost beyond comprehension. He said, falteringly, “Romayne isn’t at home? You say she’s run off somewhere? When? When did she go?”

Sir Clive did not answer at once. He was occupied getting his cigar to draw. When it did he said, with a lift of his shoulder, “Couldn’t say for sure. Early on Sunday, probably.”

“Three days? Did you suppose she was with me? At Tryst, maybe?”

“Oh, dear no, I knew about your tiff, dear boy. She left this letter for you on her dressing table. It was sealed but one doesn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to guess what’s in it.”

He took a sealed envelope from his inside pocket and handed it across the desk. On it was written Giles’s name in Romayne’s childishly round hand, and as his fingers closed over it he felt the outline of his ring, a single sapphire mounted on a high shank. He thumbed open the envelope but there was nothing inside save the ring wrapped in a wisp of tissue paper. He stared down at it, saying, “You’re not worried about her? Where she is? What she could be doing?”

“Not in the least,” Sir Clive said. “Would you be, if she was your daughter?”

“Yes,” he said, slowly, “I would be. I’d be very worried indeed in the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?” But then, carefully, “You don’t have to tell me if you prefer not.”

“I came here to tell you. We had a particularly bad quarrel. It doesn’t matter what it was about. I don’t think that would interest you in the least, but it was one of many and this finally decided me. I told her if we went ahead with the wedding we should only succeed in making one another miserable. And in disappointing you, too. So I broke it off, outside your house, about midnight on Saturday. I told her I’d write to you but it seemed a shabby thing to do after all the kindness you’ve shown me, and the fact that I was going to work for you.”

For the first time the man looked concerned. “So you’ve decided to welsh on that, too?”

“Welsh on it?” He fumbled for one of his own cigarettes but made a bad job of lighting it so that Sir Clive pushed matches in his direction. He said, taking the cigarette from his mouth, “How could I work for you in the circumstances? You must see that isn’t possible. She could bring a breach of promise action against me if she wished. I’ve no kind of defence, for it wasn’t a mutual decision. She wanted me to run off to Gretna Green on the spot, without telling you or anyone else. She seemed to think marriage would transform her into somebody quite different.”

“Now that’s quite original,” Sir Clive said. “It’s generally a case of the lady making up her mind to transform us.”

Quite suddenly Giles had difficulty in restraining an impulse to walk round the desk and do something positive. Hit Caesar over the head with his ebony ruler, for instance. Or empty a bottle of green ink down his shirt front. Anything to bring home to the man his personal involvement in the situation. He said, between his teeth, “This isn’t a joke, Sir Clive. Hasn’t it occurred to you that she might—well—that something awful might have happened to her running off like that? Without a note or message. In the middle of the night?”

“Indeed it hasn’t. She took a change of clothes and that dog of hers. Jilted brides don’t clutter themselves to that extent if they have it in mind to jump off Westminster Bridge.”

In a way it was a relief. He had no idea at all, if one ruled out North Wales, where she could have gone or why, but there was logic in her father’s assumption. She was extremely attached to Prune, the floppy black Labrador that had trotted at her heels ever since he had known her. It seemed likely, in the circumstances, that she had returned to the Beddgelert holiday home, perhaps in the hope that he would pursue her there. Sir Clive seemed to guess his line of thought.

“I wired Wales this morning,” he said, offhandedly. “Not because I’m bothered to any great extent, but because I thought it likely you might want to know. She isn’t there at the moment. If she turns up there will you go after her?”

“No, sir. I’ve made my decision and I think she understands that.”

“I see. Well, then, where does that leave us? With an obligation to put a cancellation notice in
The Times
I suppose. And I understand a few of the invitations have gone out, so I daresay your people will want some kind of explanation. But let’s take all that as read, eh? So far as I’m concerned the arrangement between ourselves still stands. I don’t make important decisions of that kind as lightly as my daughter. I still say you’re the right man for that job.”

“I told you it was I who broke the engagement, Sir Clive.”

“Oh, I daresay, technically.”

“I don’t think I follow you there, sir.”

Suddenly Sir Clive pushed back his chair and stood up, moving clear of the desk and over to the window, where he planted his feet with his back to Giles, puffing thoughtfully at his cigar. He said, finally, “How much did she admit of earlier pranks, Swann? Did she ever mention, say, a stable lad called Gilpin? Or a music teacher called Bellocq?”

“She mentioned someone called Gilpin once. She said he thrashed her with a riding-crop, for riding a dangerous horse when you lived in Hampshire.”

“And the foreign chap, Bellocq? Or a young manservant called Dodge?”

“No, sir. And she only mentioned Gilpin in passing.”

“How did his name come up?”

“I took your advice and gave her a spanking after she took a crazy risk when we were rowing on the canal. She didn’t resent it. As a matter of fact, she admitted she had acted stupidly and apologised.”

“I see. And since?”

“ We never had a cross word until late Saturday night. Then, to my mind at least, she behaved outrageously in a shop in Oxford Street, and it came to me that we were hopelessly incompatible.”

He moved back to the desk, puffing steadily at his cigar.

“If you want my opinion, free of bias, that is, you’re well rid of her.”

“
You
can say that?”

“Who has a better qualification to say it? I was obliged to suffer her tantrums until she was of age last January. Then she came into a small income from her mother’s estate, enough to keep her off the streets. But she’ll gravitate there, given time, mark my words. Did you ever hear of homesickness for the gutter?”

“Yes, I did. But she never once struck me as suffering from that. The reverse, I’d say.”

“She generally made a good job of concealing her tracks and that must mean something, I suppose. Possibly that she has a deep affection for you. Saw you as a lifeline perhaps. As I did, and freely admit to it.”

The sensation of lightheadedness that had troubled him ever since the doorstep parting returned. It was as though he was looking across the desk at Sir Clive through a slightly distorted glass. He was conscious of a persistent buzz in his ears and his stomach rumbled, reminding him that he had eaten practically nothing in the last forty-eight hours. When his head cleared somewhat he saw that Sir Clive was offering him brandy, taken from a cabinet from behind the desk.

“Drink it,” he said. “You look as if you need a drink, boy,” and Giles took the goblet, swallowing half the contents in a gulp.

“I’m not renowned for making my motives public,” Sir Clive went on, “but as regards yourself I think I owe it to you. If only because I admire staying-power, particularly in the young, and you’ve shown it, God knows. There’s a streak of madness somewhere in that branch of the family. Or maybe it’s in mine, for I was never one for excavating ancestors. Anyway, it’s there, and in her it takes the form of wantonness, coupled with extreme indiscipline, hatred of any kind of restraint. I daresay you’ve noticed that and I’m not going into details. What’s the point now? There was this young manservant, Dodge. I surprised him fumbling her in a guest room when she was around fifteen. There was a far more serious affair with the music teacher. He was married, and I had to pay him off and ship him back to Belgium. And finally, a year or so before you showed up, there was Gilpin. Up to then she had a penchant for brutes. That’s why I was surprised when she stuck to you for so long. Well, I paid Gilpin off, too, but there’s a limit to this kind of recklessness. As I say, she’s reached her majority now, and is well aware I’m not to be counted on any longer.” He flicked the ash from his cigar and looked at Giles shrewdly. “I imagine you acted the gentleman throughout and you never became lovers. Well, that wasn’t wise, but how could you be expected to know that? If you had we might at least have got her married. And divorces are easy enough to come by these days, provided you’d wanted one.”

What puzzled him far more than the account of Romayne’s string of lovers was the detachment the man was able to bring to a discussion of his own daughter’s follies and deficiencies, as though he had been making a brief, factual report on the shortcomings of a scullery maid concerning whom somebody had called seeking a reference. His cold-bloodedness was as chilling as standing neck-deep in a barrel of ice, and as repugnant, in another way, as handling something dredged from a drain. In yet another way, however, it had the effect of rallying him, for he thought, “He talks of her as if she was a consignment of spoiled goods that had been returned to one of his damned warehouses…” and with this rage mounted in him so that his resentment was switched clear away from Romayne and concentrated on this bland, bloodless merchant, who thought of everyone, including his own flesh and blood, in terms of marketability. He said, cutting into the man’s smooth, rambling talk, “Suppose she isn’t in Wales? Will you mount some kind of search for her?”

“Not I! That’s up to you, young feller-me-lad, if you feel so inclined. I tell you I’m done with her. I’ve got other and far more important things to think about.”

“You don’t regard yourself as being responsible for the way she ran wild? For the silly scrapes she got herself into?”

“No. And don’t give me that fool’s talk. People are what they are, or so I’ve always found.”

“But, God damn it,” Giles burst out, “she needed help! She’s always needed help.”

“Then find her and give her help, if you feel so disposed. But don’t look to me for backing. I hate weaklings. I always have, and your father would say ‘Amen’ to that, I daresay.”

“No,” Giles said, slowly, “my father wouldn’t. He’s enjoyed making money, but he’s never made a god of it the way you have. And with him flesh and blood have always had a certain value, apart from what they were worth to him in hard cash.”

He never discovered what Sir Clive Rycroft-Mostyn made of that, for he was not looking at him when he said it, and the moment it was said he turned away, tugged open the heavy door, and walked out into the corridor. The typewriter girls were still slamming away at their machines. The ambassadorial clerks were still padding about with files and memoranda. The silver-buttoned flunkey at the door had not forgotten how to convey the impression that it would be a pleasure to be stepped on by anyone with personal access to Sir Clive Rycroft-Mostyn. This, he reflected, was big business as most city men recognised it, and everyone involved in it was a cog or a screw. Dehumanised, sealed off from the mainstream of Christian civilisation. It was comforting to reflect that Swann-on-Wheels was not run on these lines. It never had been and it never would be. It was still, and would always remain, a family concern, no matter how many and how varied were those involved in its practice and policy-making. Goods and capital investment and profits counted, but neither one of them so much as people. He turned his steps towards the Thameside slum, a drunk instinctively making his way home.