Theirs Was The Kingdom (87 page)

Adam was in the tower, Tybalt said, and had been asking for him, so he went up the narrow staircase to find his father sitting at his littered desk, with his gammy leg stuck out at the familiar angle, and his long chin supported by his right hand, as if he was assessing the imponderables of some complicated cross-country haul of fish, fruit or hardware. His eyes lit up when Giles entered, but he still looked tired and curiously dispirited, for Giles had noted that up here, immersed in his own concerns, he was almost invariably brisk and cheerful. He said, gruffly, “Tybalt tell you?”

“No, sir,” Giles, momentarily forgetting his own wretchedness, “tell me what?”

“About George.”

“What’s happened to George?”

“He’s gone. Walked out. Thrown in with Sam Rawlinson, your grandfather, of all people. We haven’t seen eye to eye on a number of things lately, but there was nothing we couldn’t have ironed out, given time. It was that damned machine of his. Seems to have taken possession of his senses, to the exclusion of everything else, including his wife and children. Well, so be it, and to the devil with him and his thunderbird. But I don’t mind admitting I was badly upset by your mother’s attitude.”

“What’s mother got to do with George’s Maximus?”

“What indeed?” He never recalled his father sounding so embittered. “I daresay that will emerge, but the short answer is she backed him to the hilt. It was at her insistence that he threw in with his grandfather for, believe it or not, the old fool sees yet another fortune in that contraption. You’d think he knew better at his age. You’d suppose he’d had enough of fortunes and what they cost a man to make. However, there it is.” He paused a moment, toying with a paper-knife made in the shape of a cavalry sabre. “It’s hit me damned hard, son. Particularly with you going, too.”

“I won’t be going. For what I’m worth I’m your man, not Rycroft’s, from here on.” And then, carefully, “Can you stand another buffet, sir?”

He was relieved to see Adam’s grin, the grin he had always associated with an overgrown schoolboy planning a practical joke.

“Why not?” He cut the air with the paper knife. “I survived a good many when I earned my keep with one of these. A straightforward business, that. Sometimes I think I should have stuck to it. You’re the brandy man. Alex is port, George is beer. You
are
the brandy man, aren’t you?”

“I’m becoming one,” Giles said, as Adam rose and stumped over to his cellar-ette beside the ready-reckoner that the network knew as Frankenstein. “I’ve just had a double from my ex-father-in-law.”

He saw his father’s face narrow as he paused in the act of pouring, “Well?”

“I walked out on Romayne, and she walked out on him. Then I made it a treble by throwing his job in his face. I’m glad about that part of it at least.”

“You want to tell me?”

“Eventually. Not now.”

Adam came forward with the drinks. “ To abdication, then.”

“We’ll survive, sir.”

“By God, we will.”

A shaft of late afternoon sunshine stole through the little Gothic window and picked out the dust that always gathered up here, no matter how often Tybalt sent the yard men up with their brooms. To Giles, to Adam also possibly, it brought a little warmth into the turret.

Four

1

T
HAT WAS THE SUMMER OF THE FIRST JUBILEE AND THE TRIBES AS A WHOLE— half-exiled Celts, ponderous Saxons, predatory, far-ranging Scandinavians, and methodical, hard-fisted Norman French who had travelled this far together—were aware of a sense of fusion and common purpose that had eluded them (save in widely spaced moments of peril) for more than eight centuries. There were still dissidents, of course, but their voices were muted, submerged in the thrum of national breast-beating, lost in the flutter of unfurled flags and the drift of bonfire smoke. For this was a time when the nation made ready to pay ritual homage to the dumpy, toothy little widow who had come to see herself, not merely as a queen and queen-empress, but also as the powerhouse of a new centre of gravity sited somewhere between the Pool of London and Windsor. Or perhaps carrying it about with her, like a celestial seal of office, on her annual migrations to country houses in Norfolk, the Isle of Wight, and the banks of the Dee.

But for Swann-on-Wheels and for Adam Swann particularly, who had always identified with the epoch, there was an anomaly here. For that same summer, the summer of 1887, was a period not of fusion and closing ranks but the reverse, with the network showing unmistakable signs of stress, and a feeling of unease and uncertainty at the very hub of the thirty-year-old venture that had seemed, less than a year since, as durable as the monarchy and far more adaptable to external pressures. Or so he would have claimed.

Yet it was not so. From his truncated turret above the curve of the brown river he could sense the tremors of dissolution and they frightened him, for he was turned sixty now, aware of the ache of old wounds, and that sense of doubt that accompanies shortness of wind, rotting teeth, and, above all, a hazing of that clarity of thought and diabolically accurate memory that had proved so invaluable in his triumphant years.

Somewhere—he took his time locating its source—there was grit in the axle and it did not stem from the regions, now enjoying a devolution of power that he himself had initiated but from much nearer home, from the very foundations of the tower in which he sat, and the knowledge of this, notwithstanding his enormous experience, made him less sure of himself than he had ever been since he first came here in his thirty-first year to play chuck-farthing with destiny. Around him, sometimes seen but more often heard as a rustle in the dark, was a spirit of near-mutiny and he came at last to identify its storm-centre as George, the heir-apparent. But identification enabled him neither to scotch it nor adapt to it, for it was too nebulous a thing to be defined and studied in the way he had tackled successive crises in the past. It centred on George certainly, drawing inspiration from the boy’s tremendous thrust (so like his own in the very earliest days), from his easy affability with staff and customers that Adam had never really acquired, from the boy’s outward-looking optimism or arrogance, however you were disposed to view it, from his ready command of three languages against Adam’s one, but, above all, from his expressed certainty that the horse and cart era was nearly over, and along with it the patriarchal tone and regional autonomy of the enterprise. It was a view that Adam was too long in the tooth to share.

George Swann, at twenty-four, had not only succeeded in astonishing his father’s acolytes, but he had also astonished himself. More than three years of free-ranging abroad, with no real necessity to work, and the emphasis, if he was honest with himself, on diversion rather than furthering his technical education, had made him wary of the disciplines inherent in a permanent position at the yard, where he had perforce to adjust to the rhythms of men like Tybalt, the clerk, and Keate, the waggonmaster. Yet he did adjust, and in a matter of weeks, making a unique place for himself as a powerfully placed referee, to whom the younger men began to defer and to look to for support of any change in regional policy that smacked of modernisation.

Nor was this all. As a young man, with first-hand experience of important Continental firms, he discovered that middle-aged customers were willing to give him a hearing and, having heard him, to follow his advice. In this way, aided by his natural enthusiasm and amiability, he soon emerged as the most successful prospector of new business Swann-on-Wheels had thrown up in its thirty years’ handling of the nation’s goods. In the first six months, he landed thirty-eight new contracts, all in the Headquarters’ area, but when Adam, applauding his initiative, suggested he should go out into the regions and break fresh ground, he did not take kindly to the proposal. Instead, he fired his first warning shot across the provincial bows. He did not see Swann-on-Wheels as drawing its inspiration from the shires, he said, or even from territories as large as Jake Higson’s beat in the North, that included several industrial centres. The future, he hinted (and it was scarcely more than a hint at that time) lay right here beside the Thames. In other words, with improved rail services and faster hauls, centralisation was imperative. He went even further down a road the old stagers would be likely to see as heresy. To his mind, the regions already enjoyed too much autonomy, were already too parochial in their thinking. What was needed now, what would have to come in the near future, was some form of centralisation and, more particularly, the appointment of managers each responsible for a particular branch of the system. Devolution, that is, based not on geography but on the nature of the goods hauled and on the vehicles used in performance of a specific job.

Adam challenged this at once, pointing out that a change of policy as revolutionary as this would embitter relations between Headquarters and the regions, particularly men like Lovell and Ratcliffe, who were very jealous of their frontiers and had never taken kindly to Headquarters’ writ, although they had always been ready to abide by policy decisions carried by majority vote. Semi-independence of the regions, Adam insisted, had always been a cornerstone of the firm’s policy and when George had moved about a bit, and taken the measure of old hands scattered about the shires, he would tread warily as regards the imposition of London decisions on men who, whatever their other failings, knew their customers and territory far better than anyone beside the Thames.

“My line was always to pick a local man and give him a free hand,” he argued, but George, with one of his infectious chuckles, said that here and there, unless he was much mistaken, tree hands were twiddling thumbs, as in the case of that old peasant Ratcliffe in the Western Wedge, who was beginning to regard himself as wholly independent west of the Dorset-Somerset borders. “I’m not advocating any diminution of their powers,” he urged. “In some ways I’m giving them more. Centralisation would take some of the workload from their shoulders, give them an opportunity to get into the four corners of their beats, exploit their local knowledge, pull in more customers, and increase turnover and dividends, the way I’ve been able to do in the suburbs. They can’t do that when so much of their time is occupied in paperwork, in running repairs, in scratching around for the right type of vehicle at the right time. The fact is, Guv’nor, if you talked to some of the younger men out there you might find my views regarding a breakdown of hauls under Headquarters-based specialists, might be welcomed. Why don’t you try it sometime, if only to prove to yourself that I’m talking through my hat? I’ll withdraw if I’m proved wrong!”

That was the way of George. He put forward his views and then invited the opposition to test them, and this was what Adam did, in the autumn of 1886, when they were still coasting along the level stretch. He learned to his secret chagrin that George was indubitably right, that the regional thrusters, men like Godsall of the Kentish Triangle, Rookwood of the Southern Square, and even the Scottish viceroy, Jake Higson, would indeed welcome the appointment of specialist managers based on London, who would accept responsibility for distinctive hauls such as house-removals and the holiday-brake traffic that threw a heavy strain on their teams throughout the summer months. He learned something else, too. That some of the older men, notably Hamlet Ratcliffe in the West, and Bryn Lovell in the Mountain Square, were ageing faster than he had been led to believe and that, here and there among their senior staffs, were some who were well past their prime and by no means up to their work.

Grudging admiration for his son’s prescience did battle with his own obstinacy and also with his loyalty to old friends. But what really prevented him from a frank admission that there was something to be said for centralisation and the appointment of specialists to handle traffic outside the regional bread-and-butter categories, was a reluctance to tamper with a system that had proved so successful over such a long period. Something deep inside him mistrusted any rigid form of centralisation and stemmed, possibly, from the memories of all he had suffered in the field at the hands of high-ranking nincompoops operating ten miles outside the range of enemy’s shot and shell. At all events, he did nothing beyond ponder his findings, promising himself that he would take another look at the situation in the spring.

Then winter closed in, a savage winter, with all its attendant vexations and unforeseeable contingencies, and everyone was working round the clock, feeding reserves to every region as snow, frost, and mire strained resources right across the board.

Reserve capital dipped badly that winter, with a heavy outlay on new pinnaces and expensive Cleveland Bays to pull them, mostly to cover the flood of new business George had drummed up in and around the capital. The long spell of bad weather also exposed weaknesses apparent to him in his autumn tour and by March, when everyone was drying out a little, he was ready to compromise. He said, tossing George a spring balance sheet and the latest returns from the regions regarding vehicles and teams, “Take a long look at them, lad. Then draw up a scheme to include those policies you advocated in the fall. But make it conservative, mind. I shall have to lay it before a special conference in any case, and I don’t want a mutiny among those rascals now that we’ve weathered the winter and can take a breather right across the country.”

George took the papers, together with others he coaxed from Tybalt and Keate, and was not seen for more than a week, so that Adam had all but forgotten his directive when, on the first day of April, George appeared in the tower looking a little less sure of himself than usual. He said, with a nonchalance that did not fool a man with thirty years’ experience in dealing with juniors, “Are you specially busy, Guv’nor? Could you give me an hour this afternoon? After you’ve had time to study this?”

“This” was a file containing a score of closely written foolscap pages in George’s rather dashing hand. Recognising it as a detailed breakdown of what he had learned to think of as “the state of the poll” Adam said, “By thunder, you took me seriously, didn’t you? Damned if I hadn’t forgotten all about this memorandum. When your mother asked where you were I said you had been out drumming up new customers all the week. Yes, I’ll look into it right away. We’ll do it together if you’ve a mind to,” but George jibbed at this, saying he had a backlog of calls to make in and about the city and that it was better that Adam should study the recommendations alone.

“You could make notes as you go along,” he added, guardedly. “I’ve left a wide margin for that purpose,” and he ducked out, whistling his way down the stairs— “to keep his pecker up,” thought Adam, grinning—but his heart warmed towards Old George (he had always thought of him as “Old George,” even when he was a toddler) for here, if he needed it, was evidence that the boy was settling to the collar like a thoroughbred.

His expression hardened, however, before he had progressed beyond the second page of the report. By the time he was halfway through he was bewildered and resentful. By the time he had caught the general drift of the report he had an unpleasant certainty that they were on collision course. For running like a thread through the pages of the report was something far more comprehensive than a straightforward championship of centralisation, and a reasoned argument in favour of relieving the regional managers of responsibility for specialised traffic. It was no more no less than a relentlessly argued case for restructuring the entire enterprise, and some of its more telling paragraphs made him gasp. For here was George, at twenty-five, calling his entire system to account for the winter’s muddles and losses, for its needless drain on capital, for any amount of blunderings on the part of men who refused to see Swann-on-Wheels as a national concern but persisted in regarding it as a shire-based enterprise; men so parochial in outlook, so dedicated to methods they had used over three decades, that they were quite unable to make an unprejudiced assessment of their responsibilities to Headquarters, to colleagues in other regions and even, in the final analogy, to their own customers.