Theirs Was The Kingdom (62 page)

This place too had its memories. It was here that that insolent puppy of a gunner (his name she had conveniently forgotten) had tried, rather clumsily, to seduce her a year or so after they settled at Tryst. Her way of paying forfeit for that liberty, however, more than exorcised any fears she had of the place now; she would smile a self-congratulatory smile as she reined in to let Patch drink his fill in the shallows, remembering how she had plucked a sharp stone from a drystone wall and drawn blood from her assailant’s scalp, and afterwards—as the old Colonel had so aptly put it—landed a second blow in that part of his anatomy where his conceit lived. She had never seen him since and had never wished to, but she sometimes wondered if she had done him a permanent injury and rather hoped she had not. She could see now that he had reason to suppose she was genuinely flattered by his attentions, instead of using him to mitigate her boredom while Adam was off on one of his trips.

Summer was a time of splendour for their Scots gardener, but Henrietta had never cared for cultivated flowers. The old Colonel had prejudiced her in favour of the flowers that ran riot down here about this time—huge, multi-belled foxgloves, yellow iris, purple orchis, and toadflax that he had loved to reproduce in old-maidish watercolours, many of which were still about the house.

September and October brought their own round of activities: the fruit-gathering and bottling, the nutting, and, of course, the harvest home, her favourite church service, when churchgoing had a meaning for people who spent most of their days in the country. She loved the autumn smells, particularly the acrid whiff of burning leaves and weeds, that seemed to hang over Tryst for weeks and help her come to terms with shortening days and remind her of the compensations of winter.

Not least among these was the opening of the hunting season on the first Saturday of November, and although Henrietta had never ridden to hounds she took the greatest pride in seeing her little clutch of equestrians and equestriennes set off booted and spurred for Long Copse where, by tradition, they always held the opening meet. On these occasions, particularly when there was a meet at Tryst, she followed the hunt in the dogcart, expertly driven by old Stillman, the old Colonel’s batman, who had been a hunt servant for the 16th Light Dragoons in Ireland during his youth and was a great favourite among all the young bloods within riding distance of Tryst.

Stella was still the most accomplished horsewoman of the family and Denzil, bless the boy, encouraged her to hunt, even though she was now the mother of two boys. Joanna and Helen, however, could hold their own with the thrusters of the local hunt, and if Alex was home, and a local meet coincided with school holidays, Hugo went out, but never Giles. Giles had renounced hunting on principle, something to do with organised bullying, he said, although how one set about bullying an artful rascal like the fox was more than Henrietta could say.

She would sit on the grass hillock opposite Long Copse, absorbing the rich panoply of the scene, excitement charging the crisp autumn air and all the neighbours coming and going on their glossy mounts as the hounds trotted in about the oaks and chestnuts and beeches of the wood until the warbling blare of the horn echoed across the valley and the field resolved itself into a thunderous, hallooing, shouting, stamping, jingling, leather-squeaking storm-column of pink and black and white and grey, every rider jostling for a place as the pack broke for open country. Then Henrietta, wildly exhilarated, would risk a broken neck by standing up in the jolting dogcart, in an effort to pick out Alex or Hugo or Stella or one of the Inseparables stampeding into the east, the line the fox always took early in the season.

At times like these, pride would stir in her, for it seemed to her a very remarkable thing that she was the mother of four or five of these spirited young things, spattering mud in all directions. She had a sense of having done something quite splendid by producing them and endowing them all with such health and high spirits, something as impressive as Wren had done by raising St. Paul’s, or the original Conyer by founding a dynasty and building this house where every one of them had been born and reared.

She never had any credit left over for Adam on these occasions. Somehow it seemed to her that his share in creating them had been so casual, and so relatively trivial, that it could be discounted altogether. After all, she had not only conceived them but had carried them in her belly for months on end, and now here they were, dashing across the Kentish countryside like a race of warriors, of the kind she had always promised herself when she and her friend Sarah Hebditch whispered of husbands and babies, at a time when such talk, had it been overheard, would have earned her a scolding and Sarah (whose mother was very frumpish) a sore backside for a week.

Although Henrietta did not hunt, she enjoyed a hack, particularly a solitary hack. Sometimes, of an autumn afternoon, she would urge Patch up the eastern escarpment and through the straggling timber to the open country beyond where she had a rich choice of views. She could look north to the pastures of Dewponds, that she had come to think of as acres belonging to the Swanns rather than the Fawcetts; or west, where the Sussex Weald melted into the blue-grey distance; or east, over the Kentish Weald, dotted with patchwork fields, farms, half-timbered manor houses and oast houses; or south, across uncultivated country to the Channel. Then, whichever way she had looked, her imagination would quicken in the rush of wind, so that she could think herself into an extravagantly fanciful role; the scion of a family that had dominated this corner of civilised England for generations, someone like the Cecil girl, who had been the original mistress of Tryst and rode, not a bottle-nosed cob like poor old Patch, but a mettlesome bay of sixteen hands or more. Often the illusion was so sharp and sparkling that Henrietta would shout into the wind and canter back along the leaf-sodden path to the clearing where the chimneys of Tryst gulped the down-draught of the hollow. Here, on the instant, she would become herself again, remembering there were muffins for tea and a little sewing to be finished before supper was laid against Adam’s escape from that stationary sulphurous cloud on the far horizon.

Then, almost before she knew it, Christmas was upon them and the old house would erupt with chatter and laughter. Its rooms were strewn with festive litter and a twelve-foot tree, tubbed by the head gardener and trimmed by Phoebe Fraser, herself, and the children, would glow and glitter in the hall. Everybody would eat too much, and have too much to say, so that the house might have been prised from its bed under the spur, trundled across the county, and set down within shouting distance of London Bridge Station.

It was at Christmas time that she cherished another illusion, seeing herself as a cosier miniature of the queen at Windsor, surrounded by gay (but respectful) relatives, each a prince or princess of the blood, and some, like George or Stella, having a consort, summoned to the presence to perform Yuletide homage.

It was then too that she would note the inevitable cliques and alliances that existed within a family of this size, and she would speculate on the sympathies that had resolved them and the rivalries that kept them in being. Alex and George, so dissimilar in temperament, had always been close, and so had Deborah and Stella, another ill-matched pair. Then there was the alliance between the two younger girls, Joanna and Helen, that dated almost from babyhood, and the later partnership, again curiously unbalanced, that was developing between Giles and Hugo, the bonehead of the family. By reason of age alone the two youngest, Edward now six, and Margaret, less than a year behind him, were easily paired. Within these groupings they all seemed to move freely, with the possible exception of Giles, who, despite his patronage of Hugo, walked alone, would always walk alone, holding himself in readiness, for what? As referee, perhaps?

Watching them, listening to their banter and amiable bickering on these festive occasions, Henrietta would smile her complacent smile. For a quarter-century now Adam had been making prodigious hauls about the country, but could his network look back on a haul as long and as triumphant as hers? For here she was, the queen of Tryst, and who was she, now that she thought about it? The sole issue of an exiled Irish peasant and a coarse old rascal who had started out as a bale-breaker in a small-town mill and made his pile by clubbing his way to the front. Not that she held that against herself. Indeed, it went some way to sustain her pride, for how, she would proceed to ask herself, had she achieved such a peak? Well, partly by exercising nerve and common sense at the time of his injury, and partly by having the courage to reject a safe background and trust to luck when she was a chit of a girl. But more, she would say, by learning how to please a lusty, independent male animal and keep him interested over the years. And that was a trick nobody could teach anybody. You either learned how, or you didn’t and lost out.

The weeks that followed Christmas were always something of an anticlimax, but they too had their compensations. When snow was falling, the children took to toboganning, or, if snow held off, and New Year downpours converted all the country roads between here and Croydon into a chain of little morasses, Adam would ease off a little, sometimes spending days together at home, where he would seek a cure for restlessness by shifting the furniture around, “to make a change” he would say, although that wasn’t the real reason. She never stopped him, however. Aside from giving him something to do, it afforded him an opportunity to congratulate himself on the astonishing changes he had wrought in the original spartan country seat of the Conyers, and Henrietta secretly marvelled at all he had achieved, for many of the items of furniture he had bought during his jaunts up and down the country were regarded by local connoisseurs as master- pieces of English craftsmanship. There were pictures and porcelain too, and pieces of old silver worn smooth by use, so that gradually the house acquired a splendour that it had lacked in their pinchpenny days; it was not necessary to know about these things in order to appreciate them.

All in all she was more than content, but sometimes she did have a nagging doubt or two that a pleasant rhythm such as this could not be expected to last indefinitely and her misgivings were strong enough to prompt her to voice them from time to time, especially after they had shared a particularly satisfying day.

She did this a month or two after that rascal George had bounced back with his pretty Austrian wife, whom Henrietta had been prepared to dislike on sight but had discovered, within minutes, that she had little to fear from Gisela. The silly girl was so besotted with the boy that she hardly took note of anybody else and was proving not only manageable but also dutiful, something Henrietta had not expected of a foreign-born daughter-in-law. All the same, Gisela’s presence about the house reminded Henrietta that all manner of changes and upheavals might lie ahead, and she said, as they were going to bed that night, “Do you ever get scared deep down inside, when there’s no reason at all to feel anything of the kind?” Adam said, without looking up from the task of removing a top-boot from his sound leg, “ To be sure I do. Everyone does, if they’ve a ha’porth of sense. That’s the time one should look out for squalls.” And then, but incuriously, “Is it George turning up with a wife that’s put you on that tack?”

“In a way,” she said, marvelling at his intuitive powers so far as she was concerned, “for the truth is I expected to have to choose between a fortune-hunter and a frump, and Gisela is neither. She’s just a pretty girl hopelessly in love with the boy, and still would be if he hadn’t a penny to his name.”

“That’s so,” he said, finally removing the boot and standing it beside the other, but then added, “I’ll tell you something else about her if you’re interested. She pays George a deal more deference than you ever paid me. Certainly in public, and in private too, I shouldn’t wonder. Keep your eye on her, you might learn a thing or two about handling men!”

But she answered, with a shrug, “Pooh! There’s not a woman alive who could teach me one thing about handling
you
, Adam Swann! You know it, and I know it, so don’t you dare to compare us as wives, not even mentally, d’you hear?”

“I’m not such a damned fool as to do that,” he said, and she was glad to note seriousness in his voice. “Gisela? Well, she’s pretty, she’s graceful and submissive and most men look for that in a woman, I imagine.”

“But you don’t?”

“If I had I wouldn’t have stayed a bachelor until I was thirty-one. John Company’s India was chock-full of Giselas, and I daresay, penniless as I was at that time, I could have had my pick of ’em. However, I didn’t, so turn down the lamp and let’s get to bed. I intend to make an early start in the morning, rain or shine.”

She did as he asked and neither of them spoke for a few minutes but then, as always when she found herself the subject of a discussion, vanity and curiosity joined forces to nag at her and she said, “
Why
didn’t you? Having said so much, tell me the rest. So long as it flatters me, that is.”

She heard him chuckle and his arm went round her. The vague uncertainties released by the turn of conversation left her at his touch and he went on, “I’ll tell you, my love, but briefly.”

She heard him yawn and hoisted his hand to a breast, a trick she had often employed when he was sleepy and she was not. “Go on, tell me.”

“I suppose I was looking for promise. Your kind of promise. Goodnight, my love.”

The trick wasn’t working tonight but no matter. He had said enough, or all that she wanted to hear. A moment later he was snoring gently and she thought about the word, one he had often used regarding women in the abstract but had never, so far as she recollected, applied to her.
Promise.
Promise of what, exactly? Free access to her body, whenever he expressed the merest flicker of desire? That was a part of it certainly. He was a sensual man and they had both been lucky in that respect, for she had decided long ago that she was a particularly sensual woman and could match him any night of the week. But there was some other connotation and it continued to elude her until, as though someone had withdrawn a veil on his youth, she saw precisely what he meant; for there in her mind’s eye was a hill-station or garrison town, of the kind he had so often described, and it was crowded with simpering husband-hunters, newly disembarked from the bride-boat, and she was able to stand off and study them all, as through a peephole.