Theirs Was The Kingdom (25 page)
In spite of the efforts they made to please, an atmosphere of strain remained present in the group, and he was relieved when the clock on the mantelpiece struck ten and he could excuse himself on the grounds of being fatigued by the long journey north. Mrs. Broadbent had put a hot-water bottle between his stiffly starched sheets and when he thanked her she said that Mr. Broadbent had instructed her to do all she could to make his stay up here a pleasant one, and she was glad to do it, for he was young to be so far from home and at the mercy of the climate that prevailed up here in winter.
“I’m Welsh, myself,” she said, “from Denbighshire, and although it isn’t so far from here it seems a long way sometimes.”
She left then, presumably to see her daughters to bed in a room they shared along a corridor, and later, as he drifted off to sleep, George could hear them talking and giggling and concluded they were speculating about him. The thought led him on to the improbable subject of marriage, and how it affected people as they approached middle age. His travels were teaching him other things besides how to run a haulier’s business. Down in the Southern Square, Young Rookwood’s home ran on patriarchal lines, his wife deferring to him on everything. In the Western Wedge, the true if unacknowledged gaffer of the household was Augusta, Hamlet Ratcliffe’s ageing wife, who treated her little husband like a pet bantam. Up here there was obvious tension between man and wife and half-consciously he compared it with the balance of power that existed between his mother and father at home, the one mistress of the home, the other absorbed in his role of provider and using Tryst as a hotel at weekends. Marriage of one sort or the other, he decided, was not for him. Whatever else it did it anchored a man, and the last year or so had given him a taste for movement and personal freedom. He went to sleep, lulled by the prospect of indefinite bachelorhood.
3
As the weeks passed, and he came to know the hub of the Polygon with its slippery setts, its winter sleet and fog, and its traffic problems that rivalled those of London, the character of Broadbent and Broadbent’s real attitude towards him remained elusive, as did certain aspects of Swann’s new rush of business in the area, almost all of it based on Manchester and its environs.
In all the other regions he had visited, business was far more broadly based, no one town having a virtual monopoly of teams and waggons. Here it looked as if the new manager had decided to let the country traffic wither, placing all his resources at the disposal of half a dozen large concerns, like the huge packing warehouse of Barlow, at Old Trafford, and a new engineering works a mile or so nearer Manchester.
Every day, George noted, teams of waggons, most of them three-horse flats that his father always referred to as men-o’-war, went off to haul Barlow’s bolts of cloth, the greater part consigned for Liverpool, and thence to the Near East and India. It puzzled him that a firm as large as Barlow’s should not use its own transport or, alternatively, and seeing its premises were astride a railway, send its goods to the docks by rail, but when he put this to Broadbent the manager had an explanation. He could quote cheaper rates than the railway, he said, and all Barlow’s waggons were used for home market distribution.
It was difficult, George found, to gather much basic Swann data from Broadbent, who continued to treat him as a guest rather than an apprentice learning the trade. Once he came near to admitting this, saying, “Of course, there’s no harm at all in you seeing things firsthand in the regions. But when you settle in you’ll surely be based at Headquarters along with your father. Meantime, make the most of it, Mr. Swann, for I should, given your opportunities. You’re under no obligation to stay around this yard all day and are quite welcome to make free of my home. And my carriage and pair for that matter.”
No such invitation had been offered him in more southerly and westerly regions, where it was taken for granted that he was there to work and not amuse himself, so he took occasional advantage of Broadbent’s invitation and sometimes drove out with Mrs. Broadbent and her two stepdaughters. Once, joined by Broadbent after dinner, they all went into town to see the new Gilbert and Sullivan opera,
H.M.S. Pinafore
, at the beginning of its first provincial tour.
He also accepted Broadbent’s invitation to join him in a glass of whisky at one or other of the local taverns, making himself very drowsy in the afternoon after endeavouring to match his host drink for drink. He was given no chance to study the paperwork, for Shawe, the chief clerk, a crony of the manager, watched over his ledgers and day books like a miser guarding his coffers.
Time passed pleasantly enough, however, and he came to enjoy Mrs. Broadbent’s company, especially when her stepdaughters were out visiting, or at one of their singing or piano lessons in nearby Altrincham. Someone far less perceptive than George would have concluded that Laura Broadbent was not a happy woman, for Broadbent was absent all day and when he returned, usually pretty well oiled George would say, he lavished his attention on Lizzie, who seemed to be his favourite. His inspired geniality towards George, however, never wavered, and the latter found it difficult to decide why he found the man repellent. Privately Mrs. Broadbent admitted that he was a hard case, driving others as ruthlessly as he drove himself, and added that his first marriage had not been a success, the first Mrs. Broadbent having left him on two occasions before dying of an illness brought on, it was whispered, by her overfondness for port.
“I don’t know why I should tell you that, Mr. Swann,” she said, colouring, “it just slipped out. That comes of having no one to talk to, I imagine, and I was always one for a bit of company before I married Harry.” She paused a moment, whilst George, anxious to hear more, made sympathetic noises. She went on, “He or the girls will have held their tongues about something else, for they’re on the way to becoming regular lah-di-dahs since he was made manager. But I was never ashamed of it. It’s honest work, and you soon learn how to keep the men at arm’s length, so long as you don’t mind them thinking you’re gormless. I’m talking about when I was a barmaid, at a place in the Shambles. They had a concert hall there, and first-class turns, try-outs for the big musical halls. I waited on the tables sing-song nights, and it paid well, what with the tips. I didn’t come to Harry empty-handed.”
He said, unguardedly, “Why did you marry, then, Mrs. Broadbent?” She did not seem offended but smiled, so that her rather crumpled mouth curved upward instead of down. He saw her as her chorus-bawling customers must have seen her on a Saturday night at the Cock and Hen—a pretty, vivacious woman, who enjoyed her bit of fun and would likely extend a helping hand to anyone who needed it, drunk or sober.
“Why do any of us get married?” she asked. “It’s a man’s world, there’s no denying that. We’re brought up to look for it above all else, I suppose. He was a good-looking chap, and you’ve heard how he can talk when he’s out to please. That wasn’t all either. He played his cards well, did Harry Broadbent, not forgetting the trump. A widower, wi’ two daughters, sore in need of a mother. Well, it didn’t take long to spot that as a misdeal. Those two girls of his don’t need a mother so much as a bottle of castor oil to improve their complexions and a switch to their backsides to teach them manners. They’d get that, the pair of them, if I had any say in bringing them up.”
It seemed to him then, interested as he was in Laura Broadbent’s troubles, that she was a little vindictive. “They aren’t so much to write home about, Mrs. Broadbent,” he said, “but they’ve been civil enough to me,” whereupon she looked at him very steadily and seemed inclined to elaborate her point, but then dropped her gaze, saying, with a shrug, “Aye, they have, so let it pass. They’ve had their orders, same as me. Especially that Lizzie.”
She moved off then, on the excuse of attending to her baking, and did not seem disposed to renew the conversation later. From then on she went out of her way to mother him and in a way that made a direct appeal to his chivalry, so that he found himself beginning to dislike Harry Broadbent against all reason, and look forward to the time when he moved over the border to the Edinburgh base, his next port of call.
It was February by then and he inadvertently let it be known that St. Valentine’s Day marked his eighteenth birthday, regretting it instantly when Lizzie exclaimed, “St. Valentine’s Day! Why, then we must celebrate!” and Mrs. Broadbent promised to bake a cake and set it with eighteen candles. But the day prior to his birthday he stumbled on a partial answer to one of the imponderables surrounding Broadbent and his change of policy in the Polygon.
The manager had gone off early, taking Shawe the clerk with him, and during the breakfast break George wandered into the clerk’s office to warm himself by the coke fire. Lying on the desk, apparently overlooked by Shawe, was the big ledger with its alphabetically listed sections, each devoted to a Swann customer in the region. Without looking for anything specific, he opened it at “B,” running his eye down the quarterly returns for Barlow, the packer. Then he noticed a loose slip of paper, pencilled with two short columns of figures that he identified at once as percentages of the daily yield of hauls credited to the warehouse. He looked at the ledger again and made a rough cast of the total since the first day of the year. The figure astonished him. It was far larger than that of any two other customers combined, and this caused him to check the slip of paper again, noting that each column was headed by an initial letter. One, the longer column, was equivalent to exactly five per cent of the total and was headed “B.” The other, representing three per cent, ran under the letter “S.” It did not take much intelligence to deduce that the “B” stood for Broadbent and the “S” for Shawe, the clerk, or that the percentages represented personal commissions.
He knew the system of rewarding regional managers on turnover, Tybalt having explained it in London. Swann’s senior representatives in the provinces were paid a quarterly percentage on their gross, reckoned by Tybalt himself. There was no provision made for managers deducting their own commissions, and, in any case, it was fixed at two-and-a-half per cent, not five, whereas clerks received a wage and did not qualify for commission. It all seemed to indicate that Broadbent, with Shawe as the jackal, was systematically helping himself to a substantial private commission, and this explained a good deal, notably the manager’s eagerness to keep him at arm’s length during office hours, Shawe’s jealous hold on the paperwork of the yard, and above all Broadbent’s prosperity, that could not be accounted for by his official income, however successful he had been in increasing turnover.
He looked again at the paper before folding it and putting it in his pocketbook. At the bottom of the slip was the single word “Drayton,” and George recalled that Drayton was the name of the man who supplied the yard with forage. He turned to a page in the day book devoted to Drayton and found there the monthly sum expended for first-grade hay, making a note of the total and the price per bale. He then turned back to Barlow’s entry and jotted down the daily totals on a pad, after which he went across the yard to locate Steedman, the head stableman.
Steedman was in the tack room, making an inventory of harness, and in reply to George’s query concerning forage he said the price of hay had come high this winter, owing to a wet summer, and all the teams used for short hauls were fed on second-class bales, delivered in bulk the first of every month. “It’s poor stuff,” he added, “and I’ve complained to the Gaffer about it. It’s well enough for a short period, but the teams will drop back if it continues indefinitely. Seeing you’re a privileged man up here, Mr. Swann, I’d take it kindly if you backed me in the matter. If the teams are under strength by early spring it’ll be me who gets the rap over the knuckles, not Mr. Broadbent.”
George said he would discuss the matter with the manager and left him, wondering whether to double check on his suspicions by making a call on Barlow, but decided against it. The slip of paper in Shawe’s handwriting, plus the information concerning the hay, converted his suspicions to near certainties, warranting a report to Tybalt or his father. But then, reflecting on what might happen as a result of disclosures, he began to feel uncomfortable about his detective work, reasoning that not only Broadbent would be dismissed, and possibly prosecuted, but that also the penalty would extend to Laura Broadbent and Broadbent’s daughters, none of whom could have been aware of what was going on at the yard or how Broadbent could afford a detached house, two servants, a carriage and pair, and regular pianoforte and singing lessons for the girls. Disclosures, so far as he could determine, would rebound upon the entire family, and whilst he had no special regard for the Misses Broadbent, he had a real affection for their stepmother, who had gone out of her way to make him welcome at Bowdon.
The thought caused him to examine his attitude to Laura Broadbent closely. Was it, he wondered, more than affection he felt for the lonely, hard-pressed woman? She had stirred something in him that had not been there a few weeks ago. He could not say what exactly, except that it amounted to an awareness of women that had nothing in common with the feelings he had for his sisters, or the girls of the West Kent Hunt, with whom he had skylarked during school holidays. Laura had charm and a prettiness that grew on a man, together with other things that were new to him—an appreciation of her figure, of the way she moved, of the way she sometimes looked at him with a half-smile during one of Hester’s warbling Irish songs, and, above all, that towering pile of Titian hair, fastened by a row of combs. It occurred to him then how exciting it would be to see Laura with her hair down, and the fancy excited him in a way that made him feel restless and at odds with himself. He thought, with a spurt of exasperation, “What the devil’s happening to me up here? What is she to me anyway? A married woman getting on for thirty and married to a thief milking something like three hundred a year from the firm…” But he knew he lacked the inclination to sit down and write the report that, sooner or later, would have to be posted to Tybalt.
