Theirs Was The Kingdom (105 page)

Nine

1

B
ETWEEN THE POSTS, WHEN ONE SHEAF OF CORRESPONDENCE HAD BEEN reviewed, annotated, mulled over, and either consigned to the wastepaper basket or tossed into Tybalt’s tray, Adam would sometimes spare an hour or so to make an objective survey of that other family of his, the British tribe, in whose concerns he was still involved although he had no means of regulating them other than by writing letters to
The Times
and his Member of Parliament.

He would see British concerns as extra-European. That is to say, in no way related to the junketings of other tribes across the Channel and the Atlantic, but this did not mean he ignored what was occurring elsewhere. On the contrary, he regarded foreign news columns, in the stack of newspapers he read each day, as his light relief, a splodge of jam on the rice pudding of relevant, national affairs.

The post had been exceptionally light that morning, so that by ten thirty he was free to turn to his newspapers. He read first of the continuing dock strike over what they were calling “The Dockers’ Tanner,” telling himself he knew precisely how it would end. The dockers would get their tanner, and the furore would evaporate, with the fire-eating Ben Tillett, organiser of the dockers’ union, getting himself canonised. Just like old Tom Paine. Just like Sam Bamford of Peterloo fame, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and all the other saints in John Catesby’s calendar. All of which was only one more shred of evidence that he, Adam Swann, had been more prescient than others when he started out in business, writing his labour force into the order book as an ally, not a potential liability to be set against profits.

He read a thousand words or so of the interminable Parnell Commission wrangle, making a private bet with himself that the Irish leader would come out of it unscathed and be judicially vindicated of complicity in the Phoenix Park murders. Lately he had come to regard Ireland as a fractious near-relative all but excluded from the inner councils of the tribe and occupying, say, the position of an alien who had acquired the protection of the flag but did not regard it as a privilege.

His Irish concerns were prospering under that saucy young spark, Jack-o’-Lantern, who had run away with his daughter, following a seduction that Henrietta obstinately refused to acknowledge. But Adam never viewed his Irish bridgehead with the permanence he attached to regions like the Polygon and the Western Wedge. Sooner or later the Irish would hive off and seek their own way to perdition, and the sooner the better so far as he was concerned. Their affairs had a habit of clouding all manner of more important issues at Westminster and claiming too much space in the national journals.

After reading that the Act of Parliament to prevent cruelty to children was at last on the Statute Book, he turned with relief to European affairs, much as a man stirs his coffee after enjoying three courses of solid fare. There was a column and a half dealing with the frightful clamour aroused in the Habsburg capital over the death, by shooting, of the Austrian Crown Prince Rudolf and his eighteen-year-old mistress, Marie Vetsera, in January. The handling of this affair, he thought, was typical of methods employed by foreigners when something went awry in high places. Unable to face the music, they at once worked themselves into a lather in egregious attempts to lie their way out of the social and diplomatic consequences. He could spare sympathy for that bewhiskered old pedant, Franz Josef. At least the old chap was showing remarkable staying power, concerning the troubles that rained down upon him year by year, but he had no patience at all with the official versions that were being leaked by palace flunkeys. The fate that had overtaken Rudolf was predictable, a young man enmeshed in a tangle of protocol and given nothing constructive to do whilst waiting around for his father to die. Rudolf, clearly, had killed the girl and then himself, and that was that. What on earth was gained by all this drivel about accidents and terrorists and assassination by Hungarian nationalists? Nobody was likely to miss a Habsburg. There were more than enough of them to go round.

He studied the faces of the leading players in the tragedy, finding in Rudolf ‘s features the pop-eyed blankness he found in portraits of all highly placed Continentals. Inbreeding was the trouble, of course, and it was even beginning to show over here. But there it was, these royal popinjays were scared stiff of new blood, preferring to entail their physical and psychological weakness as if they were priceless heirlooms. He found the portrait of the girl more interesting. A sensual little partridge with her rounded face, dark fringe, soulful eyes, and well-developed bust. He could understand a rake like Rudolf finding pleasure in her and made a mental note to show the newspaper to Henrietta as soon as she returned home. It was the kind of story that would interest her more than Ben Tillett’s tanner.

He read an item dealing with Italy’s protectorate over Ethiopia, reflecting that the Italians were welcome to that slice of the African continent. The British had been there twenty years ago and had come away again, and the British never did that if there was anything worth having. Portugal was losing its grip on Brazil, he noticed, and this too was to be expected. You couldn’t hold on to an empire of that size without sea power, of a kind that Portugal had once had but had no longer. He turned to news from Paris, noting that the French were going to extraordinary lengths to ensure that no one overlooked the centenary of the fall of the Bastille come July. Well, much good had come of
that
fracas in the long run. After a hundred years of street riots and short-lived autocracies and republics, they were still, to his way of thinking, as politically immature as England about the time of Magna Carta. Gouty old Louis and his tribe of pensioners were said to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing when they returned from exile during his father’s youth, and this applied to the French as a tribe. They still made a practice of solving their problems with brickbats, and there was precious little evidence of the famous Gallic logic one heard so much about. Gustave Eiffel’s tower interested him, however, and he told himself he would take a look at it if he ever went to Paris again, which was very unlikely. He was getting more and more insular these days, less and less inclined to try anything new. Tybalt, confound the man, was always urging him to become a subscriber to the new London telephone exchange, but he resisted the old clerk’s importunities. It was the kind of innovation Old George would have installed within days of settling in here. But George, it seemed, was lost to him, so the new telephone could wait upon whoever succeeded him as managing director.

He was still thinking ruefully of George when the speaking tube whistled and he lifted the mouthpiece, learning that he had a lady visitor who was on her way upstairs, without so much as a by-your-leave. It must be Edith Wickstead, he thought, or maybe the newly married Debbie. They were the only two women Tybalt would pass on without his permission.

When the door opened, however, and he rose stiffly to his feet, angling his tin leg round the corner of the desk, he saw that it was neither Edith nor Debbie, but his Austrian daughter-in-law, Gisela. This, he thought, was odd, seeing that he had been thinking of George at that precise moment. He welcomed her, however, for he had always liked Gisela, ever since that impulsive son of his had brought her back from the Danube, along with all those crates containing his infernal machine. Gisela, to his mind, was all that a wife should be. She was pretty, shapely, mild-mannered, and dutiful, so that sometimes he thought George didn’t deserve her, and should have married someone like Alex’s Lydia, who would have tossed that machine of his in the dustbin.

She said, with a shy smile, “Do I disturb you, father? Is it convenient?” He said, motioning her to a chair, that it was not only convenient, but that he was delighted to see her looking so well and pretty.

She blushed at the compliment but he saw that it pleased her, telling himself that she did not get all that many. George would reserve all his gallantry for the gizzards of that damned machine. He said, eagerly, “Are you on your way to Tryst? Hetty will be happy to see you, my dear,” but she said she was not and had made arrangements to catch the afternoon train back to Manchester, having promised the children she would be home in time for supper.

“Ah, then,” he said, with a touch of masculine patronage, “it will be shopping, no doubt, although I had the impression you made your own clothes, except for special occasions. Don’t tell me George leads a social life up there, for I wouldn’t believe you. Would you care for some coffee? I brew it myself and can recommend it.”

She said gravely that she would enjoy a cup of his coffee, and he set about making it on his stove, noting as he did so that she seemed more than a little nervous. She had always been diffident and had needed, Hetty would say, “bringing on a little,” but there was more than natural shyness in her manner today. She sat primly on the edge of his visitor’s chair, her neat little hands fidgeting with her gloves, her face frozen in a smile that had to be kept there by willpower.

She said, carefully, “I came to confer with you, father. George does not know I am here. I think he would be much displeased if he found out. I would be happy if you would promise not to inform him.”

He liked her quaint, didactic English, and the pretty, lisping accent she had never succeeded in discarding. Handing her the coffee, he decided he liked everything about her and that she qualified as his favourite daughter-in-law. Lydia, Alex’s doughty wife, was all right in her way, but she reminded him of the tubby daughters of the regiment he had been compelled to squire in India during his mercenary days. Romayne Rycroft, that madcap Giles had married in such a hurry last autumn, was very fetching, and said to be tamed, but a girl who had run out on her wedding, and had to be rescued from a draper’s sweatshop in Blackpool, was surely capable of anything. He did not wholly credit Giles’s assurances that she had done this crazy thing with a specific purpose in mind— that of discovering how the poor lived, if you please!

When he had resettled himself at the desk he said, trying to prompt her a little, “Is it about George, my dear? You want my advice on something?” At that she looked flustered but replied, after a pause, “Yes, indeed. Or perhaps not advice. What is the word I seek? ‘Alliance’?”

“Cooperation,” he suggested and she nodded eagerly.

“That machine of his, the one my Uncle Max gave him. After two years’ toil it is ready. He is about to try it on the road. At a place near Altrincham, in Cheshire.”

She spoke, he thought, remarkably good English, even though Altrincham emerged as “Alshingham,” and Cheshire as “Seshire.” It must be difficult, he reflected, for the girl to get her pretty little tongue round these English place-names. An English girl would have made heavier going of, say, “Szeged” or “Ischl.”

She went on, with a rush, “I would much like for you to be there, father. No, no—” as he opened his mouth to protest, “not for him to see, but as a spy. Is that right? ‘Spy’?”

“Hardly,” he said, chuckling, and now thoroughly intrigued. “I think you mean as an observer. An uninvited guest, who keeps out of the way. Behind a hedge, for instance.”

She clapped her hands like a child. “Ach, yes! That is what I came here to say! That is very much how I would like it!”

“You came all the way to London without George’s permission to ask me that?”

She nodded, her eyes sparkling with excitement or pleasure. She really was an extraordinary girl, and suddenly he felt very drawn to her, and very sorry for her too, in a way. It must have demanded a great deal of resolution to bring her to the point of coming here as a secret advocate of the boy. He said, thoughtfully, “How can you be sure he wouldn’t regard this as a piece of unwarranted interference on my part and yours? He’s a hot-headed chap, as obstinate as the pigs in Ireland, as we say here. He might be very angry with you for suggesting it.”

“Perhaps,” she said, giving him the impression that this prospect did not bother her overmuch, “but I was determined to ask you, nevertheless. This… this quarrel between you. It is very stupid. It makes me unhappy. You too, I think.”

“Ah,” he said, grumpily, “that’s neither here nor there. The point is, how does George regard it?”

She was more at ease now and had stopped fidgeting. “He is unhappy, too. He loves you very much. He has much respect for you, I think. It is just that he is… how did you say? Like an Irish pig?”

“Not exactly,” he said, chuckling, “but you’ve got his measure and that isn’t surprising. You should have by now.” He went off at a tangent. “You get along well, don’t you? As man and wife, I mean.”