Theirs Was The Kingdom (37 page)

“On one condition. That we part at the barrier, for I wouldn’t care to be identified with tub-thumpers like Josephine Butler and that fellow Stead. Unlike them I can’t afford to play gadfly to men with big bank balances.”

“The train leaves at two,” she said and he growled, “You don’t have to tell me the time trains leave for anywhere. I know. That’s what comes of minding my own business.”

It cheered him a little to see that she had taken his advice concerning her travelling clothes. She was wearing what he knew they were calling a sheath tie-back, a skirt stretched tautly over a bustle and held there by elastic, with a high-necked jacket frogged with astrakhan and a highwayman’s hat, trimmed with fleur-de-lys in blue velvet.

He said, greeting her, “You’d best look out for your own virtue in that getup,” but she was ready for this.

“If I’m representing Swann-on-Wheels I should want it known that you were a man of taste and discrimination. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to be introduced to Mrs. Butler and Ned Gordon? Mr. Stead is here too, to wish us good luck,” and she nodded towards the ticket window where the little group was standing.

“No,” he said, “and it isn’t because I’m unsociable. Or, for that matter, because I disapprove of the business. If you’re purporting to be on a commercial mission it wouldn’t do for me to be seen talking to Stead or Mrs. Butler. I like the cut of your partner. He seems more qualified to look out for himself than you.”

He did at that, Adam thought, letting his eye run over the broadshouldered young man in mufti, who looked more like a burly lieutenant embarking for a foreign station than a parson getting marching orders from a London editor. Stead he already knew by sight, a bearded, strong-jawed man, with fanatical eyes and any number of swift, nervous gestures that marked him down as a man of action. He had seen magazine photographs of the famous Mrs. Butler too, a handsome, fashionably dressed woman, who carried herself like a Celtic queen. They were untypical, he decided, of the swarm of busybodies infesting London at present. At least they had money and a powerful press organ behind them, and it struck him that the victory of Daemon Lust might not prove the walkover he had assumed.

They passed into the buffet where he bought two cups of tea and Deborah said, “Did you ever hear how Mrs. Butler became associated with this kind of work?” and he said. He supposed it to be a cure for boredom, common enough among wealthy women who were well educated and then turned loose in a world where intelligent women were regarded with suspicion.

“Wrong again, Uncle Adam,” she said, “it was one of those Road-to-Damascus conversions that you never believe in. She is happily married to a cultured and very charming man. He was Vice-Chancellor of Cheltenham College some twenty years ago, when they lost one of their children under tragic circumstances. They had been out for the evening and on their return their little boy ran on the landing to greet them. The banister gave way and he crashed to his death on the stone floor in front of her eyes. From that day on she and her husband have devoted their lives to people less fortunate than themselves.”

“She would have done something of that kind anyway,” said Adam. “One only has to look at her chin. I still don’t put much trust in instant conversions. It’s a slow and very laborious process. Like Stella’s,” he added, with a touch of malice.

“Stella is over that dreadful business now?”

“Never gives it a thought. She looks at that lumping great farmer’s son as if he was young Shelley, writing a sonnet. That’s the way it should be with all you women, notwithstanding your involvement in all manner of fashionable causes.”

“That’s a very old-fashioned point of view.”

“It may be. I’m fifty-six and getting old-fashioned. Your Aunt’s father, old Sam Rawlinson, once put it to me neatly. ‘Tuck t’lass in bed an’ give her plenty o’ children,’ he used to say. Taking the long view, I’m inclined to think he was right.”

She said, slyly, “Yet I can recall a time when you had to take a more generous view. It was when you came home with one leg and found Aunt Henrietta had taken over your business and was running it as well as you ever did.” But he refused to withdraw.

“Your Aunt Henrietta is a very extraordinary woman,” he said. “I came to that conclusion long since and get confirmation of it every day. I’m no longer gaffer in my own house, but I daresay you noticed that.”

“You never were to my recollection,” she said, mischievously, “you just pretended to be.”

Passengers were picking up their baggage and leaving. They went out on to the platform approach and watched the trio of missionaries passing through the barrier. He said, kissing her, “Watch out for yourself, Debbie. You mean as much to me as any one of them,” and she replied, “Do you think I haven’t known that, from the day you walked into that convent with the Dutch doll under your arm?”

She kissed him and hurried away towards the barrier, and he watched her until she caught up with her friends. The complexity of human affairs came with the realisation that he was witnessing a kind of moral somersault. Josh Avery, a sensualist if ever there was one, had spent the whole of his life popping in and out of whorehouses, but here was his daughter, the fruit of a brief liaison between Josh and that silly woman who had been the wife of Avery’s colonel, staking her entire future, her life possibly, on an attempt to deny whorehouses their raw material. He turned away and stumped through the arcade to the cab-rank, thinking briefly of all his children and the courses they were charting for themselves, each a course that he would never have chosen for them, but why not? Training, parental influence, even education didn’t amount to a damn when everything was totted up. The only thing that mattered was what was there to begin with, what you might call a man’s starting-out capital.

3

Far away to the southeast Lieutenant Alexander Swann watched the white façade of Valetta harbour melt into the morning heat haze as the ship bore him due east to the Nile delta. He was glad to be going at last, a trained blade in the company of other trained blades, few of whom, he reflected with a certain smugness, had ever seen a shot fired in anger.

He was able to think of his life now on two distinct levels: professional and individual. Professionally he identified, perhaps too glibly, with the rituals and affectations of the regiment, interspersing his sentences with the obligatory “
haw-haw
,” the fashionable hallmark of a professional officer, taking care to dress well and spend freely, to drink with gusto but moderation, and to cultivate the regard of seniors who could be useful to a man with his way to make in his chosen profession. At the deeper level he had more confidence. The brief campaign in Zululand had taught him many things, not least among them that no man could lay automatic claim to courage, even a man who lived by the sword and came from a long line of professional swordsmen. Courage—real courage and not bravado, that is—had to be buttressed by training, as he had learned during the scramble from the lost field of Isandlwana and afterwards, staring down on the embattled mission station at Rorke’s Drift. Men like those four V.C.s—Cogshill, Melville, Chard, and Bromhead—were not heroes because they wore scarlet coats and thought of themselves as warriors, but because they had been trained to order their reflexes in any given situation. He was very glad now that he had had the supreme advantage of witnessing the deeds that had won all four recognition. Without their example he would have continued to identify the outward panoply of war with reality and its reality, even now, still had the power to make his stomach contract when he contemplated the prospect of facing fire again. He was sure of one thing, however. He would not, under any circumstances, take part in a rout again and flee blindly and hysterically from involvement, as had almost every white man under that sandstone peak in South Africa. Death was preferable to that, for it still made him squirm with self-disgust when professionals congratulated him on his escape, and behaved towards him as someone who had shown initiative and carried himself gallantly. He knew the reason for this, of course. He was identified not with Isandlwana, that had brought shame on the flag, but with Rorke’s Drift, an incident that politicians, publicists, and military men alike had seized upon to obscure the real upshot of that terrible day. He was one of the very few men alive who understood that, man for man and weapon for weapon, they would never have beaten the Zulus in the field, and that burning a royal kraal and wiping out the last of Cetywayo’s impis with Gatling guns and controlled volley fire reflected no credit at all on the nation that had achieved it, much as it was needed to make South Africa safe for whites. One other thing he had learned during that short, murderous campaign, and it was to stand him in good stead for the rest of his life. Never, on any account, would he underestimate an enemy.

4

A few hundred miles north of Alexander’s shipping lane, as the transport ploughed into the eastern Mediterranean, another Swann was poised on the threshold of a career but was, as yet, only dimly aware of it.

The shame and confusion of mind brought about by his ridiculous involvement with Broadbent and Broadbent’s wife had soon cleared in the head of George Swann, leaving him very much the man he was when he had taken lodgings with the Polygon manager.

George Swann’s natural ebullience was boosted by the glorious sense of personal freedom he enjoyed now that the Channel was between him and his father’s concerns. At eighteen it was difficult to take anything seriously, especially in new surroundings where, at every turn of the road, he came upon something amusing, or interesting, or both.

He went to Paris first, where he was at once aware of a mood of feverish gaiety and irrelevance that was beginning to succeed the terrible humiliation of France at the hands of the Prussians ten years before. Here, within a week of latching on to a firm of hauliers supplying the wholesalers of the Paris vegetable market at Les Halles, it seemed to George that nobody was concerned with anything save sharp dressing, loose change, frolic, food, and girls. In the company of a group of lively young executives, he spent that first heady spring as a boulevardier, a role that suited him exactly. He visited all the music halls and some of the more notorious cafes, where he witnessed things that taught him more in ten minutes than he could have learned in a year travelling the British provinces.

Parisians, as a species, intrigued him. Like all young Englishmen, he had been reared in the belief that Paris was the modern Gomorrah, and that its recent tribulations at the hands of Bismarck, the Communards, and the reactionaries had been an expression of Divine displeasure. The theory, he soon discovered, did not fit the facts. The bourgeoisie were very respectable folk, though stuffier, if that was possible, than their counterparts across the Channel, and such vice as he witnessed in the Montmartre and Montparnasse districts was staged for the benefit of English and German tourists and regarded by the French as a kind of extension of the Louvre, or a visit to the Palace of Versailles.

Over here, he discovered, existed a class system that made its English counterpart relatively fluid, and that despite everything he had read of murdered aristocrats and anarchy stalking the streets. The working men at the depots were simple, amiable chaps, generally half-bottled by the quantities of cheap local wine they drank, and devoted, in the main, to pleasures of the table, schoolboy practical jokes, and noisy but indeterminate political discussion. The middle-class families, of which his host’s menage was a fair example, were very straitlaced, devout, and parsimonious. The wealthy people, represented by the directors of the firm to which he had been attached as a student, kept very much to themselves, communicating their orders through a long string of underlings. Two things, he decided, all Frenchmen had in common: a repellent preoccupation with food that converted the simplest meal into a ritual, and an unremitting hatred of Prussians, which incubated the idea of
la revanche.
They held to this, he thought, in the way the British pursued the concept of empire.
La revanche
was the national Holy Grail that would one day redeem their tribal honour.

These observations, however, were acquired subconsciously, like the language that he found easy to learn by ear, so easy, in fact, that he began to have a poor opinion of the methods employed to teach it in English schools. For the most part he lived, as he would have said, the life of Old Reilly. Nobody expected industry from a student and he spent most of his time in the company of genial cicerones exploring the city, watching the crowds go by, and drinking, but modestly, at boulevard cafes, while savouring the delights of freedom in warm, spring sunshine among folk who accepted him for what he seemed to be—a convivial English boy sent abroad by indulgent parents to pick up a smattering of their language.

He took to Paris and Paris took to him so that he might have stayed on indefinitely had not his sense of self-preservation been whetted by his unhappy involvement with the Broadbents, particularly Broadbent’s daughter, Lizzie, who had marked him down as such a good catch. He owed his escape from a somewhat similar situation to his quick ear for the French idiom, his hostess having no fewer than four unmarried daughters on her hands, whom she was prone to push forward one by one, unaware, it seemed, that her pink-cheeked, courteous lodger had learned to conjure with more than a couple of dozen conventional phrase-book gambits.

Thus it was that George, at first to his amusement, but later to his dismay, heard himself described by Madame Drouet in terms that made him feel like a prize bull due to be awarded to the most diligent of the Drouet daughters. A change of lodgings, to a pension nearer the warehouse, did nothing to secure his retreat. Showered by invitations to soirees, Sunday picnics, and “improving” expeditions, the object of Madame Drouet’s unrelenting social pressures and felicitations (and inhibited, on this account, from making the most of his opportunities with Clothilde, the prettiest of the Drouet girls) he began to realise that his name, the cut of his English tweeds, and the sufficiency of spending money that reached him by banker’s draft from across the Channel, could be fatal disadvantages to a young man who valued his freedom. After Clothilde, whom he had regarded as a somewhat prim girl, had hinted that the only real place to learn French was in bed, he began to see the Broadbent pattern repeating itself in tricolore and decided that it was time to cross the Rhine. Without communicating his plans to anyone at home or abroad, he slipped out of the city on a bright June morning and boarded an express for Munich, where he presented a letter of introduction to a firm engaged in manufacturing sewing machines, with whom his father had a distribution contract in that part of the network known as “The Border Triangle.”