Give Us This Day (24 page)

It was the first time in his life Hugo had aspired to such an intimate level of conversation with his father, and confrontation of this kind embarrassed him horribly. He said, grimacing, “I dunno, Gov’nor, I always reckoned I’d marry and settle down sometime. It didn’t seem to matter when or how but Sybil, well, she’s a rare sport for a woman.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Adam, relentlessly. “‘Sport’ is an ambiguous word in that context, isn’t it? Are you implying she was free with her favours among her kind before she met you?”

“Lord, no, Gov’nor, not that! She doesn’t give a fig for polite society and never did, according to her sisters. They told me she could have married time and again but she wouldn’t have anyone picked out for her, the way all those girls do.” He snuffled a moment. “What I mean is—she, well… she doesn’t
crowd
a man, and tag him along to all those soirees and at-homes. She’s a top-class tennis-player, she’s bicycled across France and can handle a racing skiff better than some of the undergrads you see at Henley.”

“She sounds tailor-made for you, Hugo. Grab her while the going’s good, boy. Your mother will be delighted, I’m sure, for it’ll be a dressy wedding, no doubt.”

“I haven’t said a word about a wedding,” protested Hugo but when he saw his father’s twinkle he grinned and mumbled, “Well, everyone seems to
think
I’m spoken for, tho’ I haven’t actually proposed so far.”

“You leave that to her. She’ll do it more gracefully than you and it’s my belief she won’t be long about it,” and it seems that he had sized up Sybil Uskdale as accurately as he had been wont to take the measure of his customers, for the announcement of the engagement appeared in
The Times
the following week, and within twenty-four hours (another accurate prediction) Henrietta came to him wailing she had nothing to wear for the great occasion.

All of which, he supposed, was run-of-the-mill stuff, no more than his due as the father of nine.

* * *

It was otherwise with Alexander, when he looked in to ask his father to use his friendship with Lord Roberts in order to enlist him as an ally in the campaign to increase the number of Maxim guns per infantry battalion.

The prospect of button-holing anyone as celebrated as “Bobs” (as everybody seemed to call him these days) and then preaching him a secondhand sermon on field tactics was not one that Adam relished. There had been a time when this would have presented no difficulties to a man holding equal rank with the old campaigner, but that was so long ago that it belonged to another age. They had kept in touch over the last forty years but their correspondence had been intermittent and more or less formal, a matter of mutual congratulations mostly, although he remembered he had turned to Roberts for help once before, when Henrietta badgered him into using his influence to get the boy into a good regiment. Roberts had been kind and helpful about that, he recalled, and there might be no harm in an invitation to luncheon at Pall Mall Club, to which they both belonged; although, now that he thought about it, he had rarely seen Roberts about the place. He considered very carefully before he assented, however, saying, “You’re absolutely sure you want me to do this, son? I don’t mind getting snubbed, or not so long as I’m persuaded it’s in a good cause. But if it got around that you had been using backstairs methods with a lion like Roberts, it could spell trouble for you, I daresay.”

Alex said, emphatically, “I don’t mind a snub either, Gov’nor. I’ve already had more than my share in that direction, nor do I mind the backdoor, for they all use it whenever they can. That’s why chaps like me, who take their work seriously, get more kicks than ha’pence. Ninety per cent of the men who outrank me got where they did by a word in the right ear at the right time, and the cavalry have the edge on all of us when it comes to patronage. Suppose you invited him to lunch, I was around, and you called me in and introduced me when you’d got as far as coffee and cigars? That’s all I’m asking. I’d play it from that point on.”

And thus it was arranged, so blatantly yet so neatly that Roberts went to his grave without knowing the “chance” encounter had been stage-managed; and because Roberts was another man who took his profession seriously, he listened attentively, Adam noticed, when Alex paraded his hobby-horse round the most famous soldier in the Empire, showing it off like a nagsman at a fair.

Roberts said, when Alex excused himself, “Does you credit, Swann. More than you deserve, a straight-talking young chap like him. Sound on theory, and far more battle experience than most of the well-heeled youngsters you meet in the mess nowadays. How old is he?”

“Thirty-eight. Eight years older than I was when you and I parted company in India.”

Roberts smiled and Adam remarked that, although his face was furrowed, and burned the colour of elm bark after half-a-century in the sub-tropics, his eyes were still young.
And nothing remarkable about that
, he thought,
for if they weren’t so he wouldn’t have given me the time of day after all these year
s. They would have reverted to talk of scenes and companions of their youth had not Roberts said, suddenly: “Matter of fact, I’ve had my eye on him, Swann. Ever since you wrote and told me how he survived that shambles in Zululand. Did you know the subs dubbed him ‘Lucky’ Swann on account of that?”

“Yes, I did,” Adam said, quick to seize his advantage, “but they have less flattering names for him now. One of them is ‘The Barker’ he tells me. I don’t have to tell you that one pays a price for setting up as an expert before one’s within a step of retirement, or that most professionals play at soldiers all their lives. Those who don’t usually acquire reputations as mess-bores.”

“And that’s happening to him because he’s refused transfers that meant promotion to stay on as a small-arms specialist? Well, that’s you emerging in him, I daresay. You always were an obstinate cuss, Swann.”

“No more than you, although your convictions were the more fashionable, even then.”

“Not everywhere,” Roberts said, thoughtfully. “My concept of Empire was rejected by you, if I remember correctly, but it’s true that a majority of career men aren’t interested in anything but polo, pigsticking, and cutting a dash with the ladies. I wouldn’t have got this far if I hadn’t had more than my share of luck. Kitchener, too, I can tell you, and some of the others. We chaps need luck more than most, and we’re all going to need a lot more before we’re much older.”

“Where, particularly?”

“South Africa. Nobody will frighten Kruger into toeing the Imperial line and anyone who argues otherwise is a fool. You’ve read it all in the newspapers, I daresay.”

“I’ve read a lot of bluff on both sides. The question is, if it did come to a showdown, who is likely to back Kruger? The German Kaiser wouldn’t, and the French wouldn’t. As for the Austrians and Russians, I daresay they’d have to be told who Kruger was. So who is bluffing who?”

“Kruger is bluffing himself,” Roberts said. “That’s his grief and ours, so long as those get-rich-quick Johnnies in the gold mines keep clamouring for the franchise and want us to take over the Transvaal.” And then, as though his mind was off at a tangent, “The Barker, eh? Well, if I read that youngster correctly it’s not promotion he needs so much as a backer or two on the staff, and that shouldn’t be difficult to arrange. After all, he’s talking sense. How many casualties did Kitchener’s outfit suffer at Omdurman? Twenty-eight, and they killed ten thousand of the Mahdi. That was only achieved by automatic fire-power. I’ll turn up the boy’s file the minute I get a chance.”

He sipped his brandy and they smoked in silence for a minute. Then Roberts said, “I’ve got a son about his age. Fine young chap who might go far, but not as far as your boy. Too amiable for one thing. I’m glad you put one of them in the army.”

“It wasn’t my choice, it was his own and his mother’s. Tell me—that dream of yours about the destiny of the British. Does it look as rosy as it did to you then?”

“Can’t answer that,” Roberts said. “It’s only half-fulfilled as yet. Need a century at least to bring something as big as that to full growth.”

“But you must have a good idea how it’s shaping.”

“It needs pruning, I can tell you that.”

“Ah, then you’re coming round to my way of thinking. When I watched you ride by in that procession it crossed my mind that I was watching a lot of greedy children who had eaten enough confectionery to make ‘em tolerably sick.”

“They can do with a purgative,” Roberts said, “but there’s one coming and they’ll be the better for it, so set your mind at rest as to that.” He got up, moving briskly as a boy. “Pleasure to see you again, Swann. We should do this more often. There aren’t so many of us left nowadays.”

They went out into the sunshine, a slim, short man loaded with honours and a very tall one, loaded with cash, and as they shook hands and took separate cabs, it occurred to Adam that they represented two sides of the national coin. Glory, a more mystical, less strident equivalent of the French “gloire,” and trade. The bray of the trumpet and the chink of the till, combining to produce a jingle that could be heard all the way round the world.
Well
, he thought,
I don’t know what will come of all that in the end, but something might. Can’t but help the boy to have someone like Roberts behind him. Queer that… what he said about South Africa. Hadn’t thought it was that serious myself, but he should know…
He used the train-journey to Bromley to study the political correspondent’s column in the
Pall Mall Gazette
—“that chap Stead’s rag,” as he still thought of it.

There wasn’t much about South Africa there, only a paragraph announcing Paul Kruger’s steadfast refusal to extend the franchise to the riff-raff that had invaded his Old Testament domain once gold and diamonds had been discovered in the Witwatersrand. He wondered what he would do in Kruger’s place: bow the knee, to what most men would accept as the inevitable march of progress, or fight to the last ditch for the way of life adopted by the Cape Dutch after they had trekked north to their Promised Land?

The train ran into the station and he left his
Pall Mall Gazette
on the seat to beguile someone else’s journey. The older he grew the more insular he became; the slow growth of his own cypresses and Himalayan pines interested him more than international rivalries these days. That was one of the troubles about growing old—one ceased to have any convictions about anything save those affairs, necessarily trivial, that lay under one’s own hand.

2

Henrietta remembered other wars but never one like this one, with everyone from scullerymaid to Duchess caught up in it—knitting, nursing, arguing, advising, one could almost say advancing against Kruger alongside the Yeomanry and any number of fancy volunteer units, all falling over themselves to singe Kruger’s beard.

The earlier wars had been occasions for ceremonial for all who were not actually fighting, and so few had been in those days; hardly anybody one knew, more’s the pity, for she had always wanted to be personally involved in an Imperial adventure.

There had been those colourful cutouts of Imperial warriors to paste on to nursery screens, awarded as Sunday School prizes; and reports in the weekly journals were of last stands, broken squares, and Highland pipers sitting on rocks puffing away at their bagpipes while shot and shell exploded all around them. But everything had always been at a remove, an intriguing succession of slides projected on to a magic-lantern screen.

Today, as the mother and grandmother of Imperial soldiers, she knew that it wasn’t quite like that, that sometimes men were speared and mutilated, as Alexander had so nearly been at that Zulu battle with the long unpronounceable name, but she had no earlier experience to guide her when Stella appeared at Tryst demanding to know how she could go about erasing young Robert Fawcett’s name from the muster roll of the Kentish Yeomanry, after the boy had been silly enough to sign on for the duration. Robert was still a month or two short of his eighteenth birthday and had no business at all to do a thing like that without consulting his father.

Stella was right to be angry, of course, and Robert, senior among Henrietta’s tribe of grandchildren, deserved a severe scolding, but she could not stifle a thrill of pride at the lad’s spirit, prompting him to go all that way from home in order to confound the Queen’s enemies. She said, distractedly, “I really don’t know how to advise you, Stella. In my day wars were fought by soldiers, not farmers’ lads. Even Alex, only a year older than Robert when he went off to fight the Zulus, was preparing to be a soldier and Robert isn’t, is he?”

“I really couldn’t say,” Stella grumbled, “but he’ll feel the weight of my hand alongside his ear the minute he comes home. His father has learned to rely on him, for he does two men’s work around the place, or so Denzil says.” Henrietta thought it odd that Stella should put Denzil’s crops and cattle before the honour of the flag. She was therefore mildly shocked when Adam took an identical view, dismissing Robert’s gallant gesture as a piece of schoolboy nonsense.

“He’s absolutely no call to risk his skin in that quarrel,” he growled. “The Boers are outnumbered by ten to one to begin with, poor benighted devils.” Although she had always entertained great respect for Adam’s knowledge of public affairs, she did not feel she could let this pass without protest.

“But surely the boy feels he
ought
to do something,” she said. “I mean, I think Stella is being very parochial about it. She’s got two younger boys and three lumping great farmhands…” But she stopped, seeing his brow cloud and feeling, in any case, out of her depth on a topic of this kind.

By then, of course, Alex had sailed, but this was in the natural order of things. Fighting the Queen’s enemies was what he was paid to do, and she had come to believe nothing much could happen to Alex, for he obviously had a charmed life, like a sailor born in a caul. The situation grew even more perplexing when Croxley, Trysts’s second gardener, left at a day’s notice, explaining that he was a reservist and had no choice. And after Croxley young Ricketts, the stable-lad, took himself off, also volunteering for the Yeomanry, so that Henrietta decided privately that Adam must be in error for once, for surely all these people would not be needed to deal with an enemy outnumbered ten to one.