Theirs Was The Kingdom (77 page)

He turned his back on her then, partly to unstrap his leg but also to hide a grin. “Twenty-seven years married,” he thought, “and I still waste breath trying to teach her more than she cares to know,” and was confirmed in the view when, as he balanced himself beside the bed preparatory to lowering himself, he heard her pulling her nightgown over her head. She had always done that when she needed him, ever since an occasion in the early days of their marriage when he had compared its rucked-up folds to a bundling bag.

Yet he misjudged her for all that. She had understood, more or less, what he was trying to say and might, indeed, have expressed it more directly, although only to herself, with whom she had held so many interesting conversations on this absorbing subject since the first night he had held her in his arms. She cared about the Elsie Griddles of this world. Anyone with daughters of their own was obliged to care, she supposed, but she was neither tempted nor equipped to cross parochial frontiers into the territory of the Steads and the Deborahs who, unlike Adam, seemed incapable of striking a balance between the general and the particular. On reflection, and in the light of that pitiful story he had brought home as evidence of his own commitment, she was prepared to admit she had been a fool to quarrel with him on such an issue. He was right, too, to dismiss repercussions that sprang to mind concerning Alex’s promotion, and Giles’s engagement to that predatory little miss, Romayne. If those concerned hadn’t the good sense to see both as boys worth their salt then so much the worse for them.

He was beside her now and his arms were round her, but with half her mind she was still able to conjure with fancies prompted by that extraordinary admission of his concerning her role in his life. In so many ways men were unbelievably dense and he was no exception, or not when it came to evaluating the mechanics of a partnership such as theirs. Was he really such a fool as to imagine that she was primarily concerned with solacing him when he had her in an embrace, with the door slammed shut on the Steads, the Deborahs, the choked chimney sweeps, the ravaged Elsie Griddles, and even the long row of children that had resulted from their frolics in this bed? Did it never occur to him, for all his years of experience as her mate, that she had her own moments of exultation, that they were not merely physical but were nonetheless capable of transforming her into a person of tremendous consequence, who could patronise every other woman she had ever known or read about? He had his bonuses, she supposed, but they were paltry compared to hers. The act of possessing could surely never equal the act of being possessed, for how could it gorge the ego, as hers was gorged every single time she inflated him and emptied his mind of all those weighty concerns he lugged about with him all day and seemed unable to shed until the moment he could run his hand the length of her spine, fondle her buttocks, feed on her mouth and breasts, and ultimately, usually too soon for her liking, spend himself between her thighs and slip away into his own world again, until the moment came when physical awareness of her would reduce him to the same state of servitude. That was real power, power of a kind no man born of woman ever had or ever could exercise, whereas she had it in abundance, would always have it so far as he was concerned, and wanted for nothing more.

Lying there, still locked in his embrace, she thought she could tell him things about marriage, and love within marriage, that would amaze him, but there it was. Nothing would be gained by divulging her secrets, for one of the facts she had learned about men from him, and from his regular handling of her, was that they could never, ever, surrender the role of the aggressor, or regard themselves as anything other than the hunter and initiator. Why not let them live and die with this harmless fiction?

One

1

I
T SEEMED TO ADAM, POTTERING DOGGEDLY ABOUT HIS CONCERNS, THAT THE pattern of his life was a long, uneven haul across a varying landscape, with an ascent here and a descent there, interspersed by long, flattish stages that could dull the senses and impair his judgement, so that a jolt, or a series of jolts, would leave him baffled and self-abusive, telling himself he had been a fool to lower his guard. For in his world, a world of catch-as-catch-can, to lower one’s guard was to invite a bloody nose.

It had always been this way. He could look back on a dozen occasions when he had been caught napping on the box, and had had the devil’s own job to prevent him and his concerns being run down or tumbled into a ditch. The financial crisis of the early ‘sixties blew up out of a serene sky. So did the rail crash that cost him a leg, and after that, down the long, busy reaches of the sixties and seventies, there had been any number of rapids and collisions, cross currents and shoals. But always, being by nature a cautious optimist, he had backed himself to level out, adapting to new stresses in the way that had proved so successful when he shed most of his packload by making the managers custodians of their own pocket. As to the family, with the watchful Henrietta as his sergeant-major, he was still confident it could be chivvied along without much trouble and taught, in time, to look to itself, as he had had to do when he was younger and less wary.

The period between the late summer of 1885 and the early spring of 1887 was a passage over level ground. He was approaching his sixties then and inclined, more and more, to take the leisurely conciliatory course, prompted by his private philosophy that nothing mattered much, or not so long as a man retained his dignity and continued to trust his own judgement far beyond the judgement of others. Out along the network things prospered, and at home, after that one brush with Henrietta over Debbie’s involvement in Stead’s campaign, life went off the boil, nothing dire resulting from his enlistment in the social sanitary squad. Most people, he supposed, were getting a better social focus these days, were coming to understand that the countinghouse was not the powerhouse of tribal concerns but only the repository. Tub-thumpers like Stead, Booth, and that woman Butler were making a noticeable impact on the national conscience and this, in turn, was being reflected at Westminster, where some kind of compromise was emerging between the thunderers like Gladstone and the inheritors of Palmerston’s laissez-faire society, men like Salisbury, who had just sent his rival packing.

In the meantime, in contrast to politicians who were obliged to promise miracles, the men of affairs—men of his ilk—occasionally achieved them. They had just driven tunnels under the Mersey and the Severn. A spread of new docks had been built down river at Tilbury, to handle the ever-increasing volume of Far Eastern trade. Catesby’s dream of the fifties and sixties, the creation of a federalised workers’ force strong enough and united enough to strike bargains with the captains of industry, was all but fact. The final nails were being driven into the coffin of the eighteenth-century pastoral economy by the arrival from dominions overseas of the first cargoes of frozen mutton. In short, after a frightening wobble or two, the British had resumed course, the only course open to them now if truth were told. For under the flag of Free Trade they could continue to smelt, delve, and fashion for half the world, while the laggards of the era packed the holds of British vessels with the cheap food it would not pay home-based farmers to grow. Son-in-law Denzil Fawcett might rumble and grumble over this but, for himself, he faced up to it, had always faced up to it, ever since he had first read of Stephenson’s iron road between Manchester and Liverpool, completed when he was a toddler.

As for the rest of the world, with its incessant clamour and its sporadic attempts to challenge British enterprise and British expertise, that was well lost so far as he was concerned. Sitting high in his truncated tower, overlooking the busiest river in the world, he had time, these days, to scan the foreign as well as the home news in the armful of journals that appeared on his desk each morning. What he read in them confirmed him in his belief that foreigners, one and all, were a noisy, clownish, posturing bunch, too occupied in striking attitudes to make a success of big-scale commercial pursuits. Sometimes their antics irritated him, exacerbating his impatience with the human race, but more often they amused him, so that he came to see them as a raggle-taggle assortment of anarchists, organ-grinders, sabre-clankers, peasants, pot-bellied, purple-cheeked trombonists, and mountebanks of one kind or another who would rather spend themselves throwing double somersaults and quarrelling outside taverns than roll up their sleeves and settle to an honest day’s toil.

At times like this his arrogance and self-sufficiency would inflate him to proportions when he could laugh at himself as well as at Continentals. There was that great land Russia, good for something, he supposed, although he wasn’t sure what, for there it was, grinding along at the pace of a mediaeval cart, its progress punctuated every now and again with the crack of the assassin’s pistol or the blast of a homemade bomb. How would that end, he wondered? In a modern Jacquerie most likely, with smoke rising from country houses, and Cossacks carving a path through street demonstrators. And then, nearer home, were France and Germany, still glaring at one another over the twitching corpse of Alsace-Lorraine, both taking out insurance against a renewal of the 1870 debacle. Well, the country would keep clear of that, he hoped. He had never expected much of France, with its out-dated conception of glory, and its tendency, every year or so, to rip up the paving-stones and proclaim a new constitution, but Germany was beginning to disappoint him. After all, the Germans were Anglo-Saxons, and Bismarck, Prussian boor that he was, had the makings of a statesman. Adam had even been impressed by his social reforms and even more by the Reichstag’s recent refusal to give the military clique a blank cheque, but things had taken a turn for the worse since that ass Wilhelm had pushed his ailing father out of the limelight and taken to swaggering here, there, and everywhere with that absurd eagle-crested helmet and a gilded breastplate that wouldn’t stop a slug from a Sikh’s muzzle-loader. Further south, the Habsburgs were on the way out, so they said, playing a muted second fiddle to Hohenzollern brass, and that meant the Balkans were due to erupt any day and bring down the moribund Ottoman empire.

And then there was America, the up-and-coming country some said, but he wasn’t so sure. There was plenty of space out there, and God knows how many mineral sources to be tapped once they organised their transport system and stopped murdering one another. There was a sound Anglo-Saxon base too, with any number of thrustful immigrants, younger sons with their way to make flooding into the country, so they might do better than most; providing, of course, they standardised their language and banished the spittoon.

There was less stability to be looked for nearer home in Ireland, devil take the place, for who would have thought a bunch of ragged-arsed Paddies could split the British Liberal party down the middle and hold Parliament to ransom?

Well, thank God the country’s real health didn’t depend on what was said and done in that debating society a mile or so up the river. He knew and they knew that Britain’s position in the world depended on men like himself and his customers within the square mile, and in a dozen or so cities dotted about the network between Clyde and Thames. The rest (with the exception of the Navy) was mere window-dressing, as he had often told young Giles, still inclined to take politicians at face value. Commerce and cannon. That was all that counted when it came to dealing with Russians and Turks, with men who strutted about in eagle-crested helmets and breastplates, with idiots who pulled up paving-stones when something was not to their liking. There was the Navy, and behind the ironclads was the Bank of England. And behind the Bank a trained reserve, as it were, a hundred thousand adventurers like himself, who had long since decided what made the world go round. As long as they attended to their business the peace of Waterloo would continue and foreigners might do as they pleased with one another, and with such tracts of desert and jungle as were going begging when the British had posted their “keep out” notices.

There were some, Gladstone among them, who would have called a halt to overseas expansion; and there was a time, Adam reflected, when he would have agreed with them. But that was before he had made his pile, and poked his long nose into half the factories and foundries of the land. He was a dedicated Imperialist now, he supposed, although by no means as starry-eyed about Imperialism as some, seeing it as a bazaar rather than a mission, and assessing each new slice of red on the map in terms of money in the bank ten or twenty years from now. Providing, of course, that the spoilers were prepared to take the long view, and put something in before milking it dry and making new enemies in the process. It was for this reason, he supposed, that he had sided with the Holy Joes over that Maiden Tribute business. An empire was like a firm. To yield a steady return it needed more than a planted flag, a few hardbitten mercenaries, and a Bible-spouting general like Gordon. It demanded imaginative investment, well-guarded channels of communication and, above all, a trained work force that was aware, every hour of every day, which side its bread was buttered. That, to his way of thinking, was the prescription that had given Britain its place in the sun over the last fifty years. It had all begun as a sordid scramble, of course, with the weak going to the wall, but that hadn’t lasted long. There had always been a sufficient number of clearheaded idealists on hand to scrape the maggots from the fruit, and encourage the penny-an-hour vineyard workers to think of themselves as potential shareholders, so that an idiot like the Czar, who declared strikes illegal, deserved nothing better than a bomb splinter up his backside, if only to teach his successor that you couldn’t treat men like cattle and still expect the best from them. Even in Belgium, so Reuters told him, the military were shooting strikers in the street, whereas in Berlin those who “spoke ill of the Kaiser” were slapped into gaol, as if everyone was living in the days of the Star Chamber and Holy Office. Britain’s dominance of world markets wasn’t simply a matter of Free Trade (although that was important); it was equally dependent on Free Speech and a Free Press, on the right of anyone with a grievance to air it, at the top of his voice if necessary. If you gave him leave to do that he would get the bile off his stomach instead of spilling it in an anarchist’s cellar. This much had been learned over here a generation ago, and it was logical to assume that, given time, other tribes and federations of tribes would learn it. Until they did, however, they would continue to drag their feet, shaking impotent fists at the Channel, and shortchanging any Englishman who was fool enough to cross it in the belief that he could learn anything to his advantage over there.

Meantime, with the Jubilee looming up, there was no harm in a bit of advertising, of the kind the event promised to provide in good measure. The thought reminded him to make a draft of a memo concerning it that he intended to send out to the regions. There would be a smart run on bunting, and red, white and blue ribbons come the spring, and he was advising the managers to buy in advance. He was no blind worshipper of royalty. Sometimes he thought of Victoria as an insufferable bore. But that was no reason why his waggons and Clydesdales should not make as fine a show as anyone’s come the Day.

So he pondered, sitting tight in his eyrie looking down on the curve of the river. Obdurate, prejudiced, utterly self-sufficient, and thoroughly typical of all of his kind crowded into that vast, dung-smelling capital.

2

Sixteen or so miles to the southeast Henrietta was also stocktaking, but her thoughts, as always, moved in a narrower circle. She was not much concerned with Romanoffs and Hohenzollerns, with trends in trade, or the scramble for Africa; in this sense she was even more of an isolationist than Adam, her world being Tryst, and the brood that had been hatched there. For smugness, however, there was little to choose between them as the firm and family moved along the level stretch of ’85 and ’86, and into the first weeks of Jubilee year.

The period began uncertainly for Henrietta. No sooner had she made her peace with Adam over that Maiden Tribute nonsense than she came to believe she had arrived at the menopause. The certainty of this, as summer gave way to autumn, caused her more initial worry than it need have done, for she had been exchanging gossip concerning its manifestations for many years now, The Change being a popular topic among the middle-aged marrieds the moment the men and children were out of earshot.

She soon realised, of course, that she could discount nineteen-twentieths of the tittle-tattle relayed to her by women a few years her senior. As always, in matters of this kind, they were soon seen to be liars or ninnies, with their ridiculous jeremiads of fainting fits, loss of memory, ungovernable fits of rage, depression, sleeplessness, and even, God forgive them, mental breakdowns necessitating temporary removal from husband and family.