Theirs Was The Kingdom (90 page)

He carried his coffee into the library and idled there until past midnight, drinking more than twice his brandy ration and smoking half a dozen Burmese cheroots. For all that he slept badly, remembering, when he woke up in the small hours, Henrietta’s complaints concerning the size of the Conyer bed when one had it to oneself. He dropped off again finally and sat up with a start about nine, two hours past his usual hour of rising. He had an aching head and a furred tongue, and to add to his troubles stubbed his toe on the way to his wash-basin in the dressing room that gave him a good excuse to use some of his favourite Hindustani oaths. A glimpse of his youngest child, seven-year-old Margaret, riding her pony across the paddock, failed to lift his spirits. It reminded him of his age and he thought, wryly, “I can remember Hetty telling me that child was on the way, a month or so after we buried the old Colonel. Seems the day before yesterday. At this rate I haven’t so long left to do everything I plan to do…” That made him think of George again, and regret that he hadn’t been more generous with the boy. Taken all round, and judged commercially, George was the flower of the flock.

He felt more cheerful with coffee and eggs and bacon inside him and had one of his rare impulses to play truant, telling himself it was a long time since he had taken time off to enjoy an early summer’s day about here. There was no word from Henrietta or Giles, so he told Phoebe he would not be going up to town as usual and went off down the drive, admiring the haze of bluebells that grew under the copper beeches and the riot of campion and dandelion about the margin of the paddocks.

At the gap opposite the old mill-wheel, he cut through the pine and larch wood to the road, leaning there with his back against a tree and feeling peace steal over him as his headache lifted and his thoughts crystallised on the straight stretch of carriageway that led to the main road a mile to the northeast.

It was down that strip, more than twenty-seven years ago, that he had driven Henrietta one soft April evening an hour or so before their first child, Stella, was born. Time was a curious thing when you thought about it. Sometimes, as when he was shaving only an hour since, it telescoped, the years running into one another. At other times, as now, it unrolled like an endless length of ribbon, and gaily coloured ribbon so long as you didn’t let your eye dwell too long on the dun patches. On the whole, they had been good and fruitful years, better than he deserved when you took his late start into account, and more rewarding, he would judge, than those of most of his contemporaries. For those who weren’t already dead were paunched and short-winded, and preoccupied with things like stocks and shares, and saddled, for the most part, with old hags and a straggle of dull, querulous children, whereas Henrietta was still fresh and comely at forty-seven, and each of the children was as much a character as the regional managers when you contemplated them individually and not, as he usually did, as a gaggle.

There were the two eldest, Stella and Alex, both rather solemn and set in their ways. There was Old George and Giles, both original but temperamentally as disparate as a Chinaman and a Zulu. There were the two younger girls, Joanna and Helen, the handsome extroverts of the family; Edward, who was beginning to look like a pocket version of old Sam Rawlinson; Hugo, a great handsome oaf who yet moved round a cinder track like a Greek god and still had trouble with spelling two syllable words; and finally Margaret, who reminded him somehow of the picture he had formed of his own mother, based on the one portrait that had come down to him.

He thought, lazily, “Now why the devil did I work myself up into such a lather over Old George, and that daft notion he had of pouring money into that engine of his? What the devil is money for but to fool around with, the way I have all these years? Most men of my standing would have a hundred thousand invested by now, but I should have a job to lay hands upon ten, unless I parted with the house and everything inside it. How much would George have wasted before he admitted it was going down the drain? A thousand? Two thousand?” But then, coming to him as a sustained rattle from beyond the tree-lined bend, he heard the approach of a light vehicle and thought, joyfully, “It’s Hetty!… I’d know that jingle anywhere,” and climbed down from the bank just in time to see the yellow gig swing round the bend into the straight, with Henrietta perched on the box, moving at a spanking trot as though she was in a great hurry to be home.

He called, waving his arms, “Hi, there! Where’s the fire?” She pulled up, looking quite startled for a moment, after which she at once set to work to compose her features, an exercise that always afforded him amusement, for in all his comings and goings over the years she had never liked to be caught at a disadvantage.

He had not been mistaken about her hurry, however. The pony was lathered and glad to pull up. She said, “And what are
you
doing here at this time of day? Is anything wrong?”

“Not my end,” he replied, cheerfully, “how about yours?”

She looked, he thought, very unsure of herself for a moment and took her time answering. But then, squaring her shoulders, “Climb up here. I’ll tell you before we go home, though I’m dying for some tea. I got into Euston very early, took a cab across to Charing Cross, and then on to Croydon. I’ve made good time.” She glanced at the little heart-shaped watch pinned to her corsage. “Fifty minutes from the livery stable. It was a lovely drive on a morning like this.”

He could not help chuckling. She was so like the girl he remembered. She never changed, or not in any important particular, and the remembrance of this caused him to throw his arm round her and kiss her.

“Come Hetty, out with it. Is it to do with Sam?”

“In a way. And George, too. Mostly George.”

“Well?”

“I’ll get it over and done with, and explain motives later. George has left here, Adam. For good, and his family with him.”

“
Left here?
You mean, left the mill-house?”

“Left the firm. He said there was no other way. He said he’d put a proposition up to you and you turned him down flat. You had it out, didn’t you, before you left for the West Country?”

“Well, yes, you could say that. But we didn’t quarrel and I got the impression he saw my viewpoint. More or less.”

“I’m sure he did. But it didn’t help. That engine is everything to him, just as the network was to you in your early days. The fact is he couldn’t pretend any longer.”

“Pretend to devote himself to Swann-on-Wheels?”

“ To Swann-on-Wheels as constituted. With you, and most of the others, determined to jog on in the same old way. He said he had to go about it his way or no way at all.”

“He’s taken a job with someone else?”

“No! He wouldn’t do that. He isn’t disloyal. It was a personal decision. He made up his mind somewhere between the yard and getting back here on Saturday to strike out on his own.”

He was amazed. “Great God! Does he realise what’s involved? To start up in our line of business needs fifty times as much capital as he has, even beginning in a small way, smaller than I did. He’s not such a fool as to imagine he can sell that idea of his to someone with capital, is he?”

“He isn’t going to sell it. He means to go on working on it until it is marketable.”

“But what about Gisela and the children? They have to eat, don’t they? And have somewhere to sleep nights?”

“Sam is attending to that.”

“Sam!”
The first hint of her treachery—and he saw it as that under the initial impact—was like a stab in the belly. “You’re saying
you
arranged it? That’s what took you to Manchester?”

“Yes. It was either that or see him pack up and leave with no prospects at all. He was absolutely determined and began to talk wild when I raised the same questions as you raised concerning his responsibilities to Gisela and the babies. I never saw him so determined about anything. He kept talking about a man called Pal something… a Frenchman I believe, a man who invented something and burned his wife’s furniture for some reason.”

“
Palissy?
Bernard Palissy?”

“That was it! Who was he? And why on earth did he burn his wife’s furniture?”

“He was just such a crank as George, only his obsession was enamel-processing. He burned the furniture to keep his ovens at a certain temperature.”

“Has he made an awful lot of money since? Is he well-established now?”

He was very grateful to her for having said that. It took a little of the strain out of the situation. “Palissy lived in the sixteenth century. Yes, he did succeed in making enamel-ware and none better. But he died in the Bastille for all that. George should have picked someone else to inspire him. He’s going to need more luck than Palissy.”

“No,” she said, “not luck exactly. I’ve been able to take that element out of it. Sam is backing him.”

“Sam Rawlinson backing a nonsense like that? You’re joking! Sam’s a gambler but he only backs odds-on chances, like Suez Canal stock.” And then, watching her, he understood that she had been rather more than an intermediary. He said, sharply, “Just how deeply are you involved in this? Apart from passing him on to Sam, I mean?”

“I never pretended to you I didn’t believe in George, did I?”

“No, you didn’t. But believing in him is one thing. Encouraging him to pack his traps and walk out of my life and my firm is something else. I’m damned if I understand how you could have brought yourself to do such a thing, Hetty.”

“Well, I did,” she said, “and I’m not sorry for it. I’ll tell you why if you have the patience to listen.”

“I’ll listen,” he said, grimly. “What choice do I have? He’s gone, hasn’t he?”

“Not necessarily for good.”

“Don’t deceive yourself about that, my dear.”

“But I’m not deceiving myself. It seemed to me the only possible compromise. Sam is still one of the family, isn’t he? In a sort of way, I mean. It was a determination to keep us in touch that made me nerve myself to, well… to go about it behind your back. I hated doing it. It seemed mean and shabby, for I know how much George meant to you. But it was better than losing him altogether, better than seeing him go off and work for strangers and maybe end up as a rival to you. Can you understand that, Adam?”

He was beginning to. In a way he could see her dilemma and also sense the strain it had put upon her loyalties. His family or hers? Swann-on-Wheels, or the Swanns of Tryst, sired by him but always taking second place in his list of priorities? A straight choice, he supposed, and one that he himself had been called upon to face three days ago. But he had chosen the other alternative, letting George go in favour of the network. He said, presently, “Very well, I see your problem. How did it resolve itself in the end?”

“I was going to give him a letter but then I thought, “Sam’s old, and getting woolly, and a letter won’t do. I’ll have to go to him and explain,” and that’s what I did, as soon as George had taken that engine to bits and packed it up. I took Gisela and the children. We caught the six o’clock north and stayed overnight in the Midland Hotel. Early on Sunday we went out to Sam’s, and I told him he could use any money he was intending to leave me for George’s family and George’s ideas.”

“And where was George himself while you were doing that?”

“He came up on a Sunday train with the crates. He wouldn’t let them out of his sight. He joined us late on Sunday and I hoped to get back before you showed up, but I couldn’t. There was signing to be done at Sam’s lawyers, so I stayed over and took the early morning train south. Even then I thought I’d be in time, for you said you wouldn’t be back until today. That was bad luck on my part, for how many days a year do you stay home anyway?”

He began to warm towards her, inexplicably it seemed to him, for, despite George’s vehemence, he found it difficult to believe the boy would have put his family and future at risk without her connivance. Yet there was logic about her actions, and a certain ruthlessness too, of a kind that he understood very well. She was fighting for what she regarded as her paramount interests, just as he would have fought for the network, and for the first time in all the years they had been married he saw them as having pursued different goals, often in different directions, but with the same steadiness of vision and the same obstinacy. The family unit was what mattered to her, taking precedence over everything else, even him.

He said, mildly, “Right. Let’s get you home and brew that tea. But between here and the teapot tell me how Sam Rawlinson reacted to the arrival of that damned contraption on his doorstep. To say nothing of its inventor, his wife, and two babies, still in long clothes.”

“He was absolutely splendid. Once I made him understand, that is, and so was Hilda, and that was even more surprising.”

“It isn’t all that surprising when you think about it,” he said, picking up the reins and chivvying the pony between the pillars into the drive. “It’s a late score for him. Two in one, when you look at it. He’s got you back after half a lifetime, and he’s coaxed my likeliest entry into his stable. I wouldn’t put it past the old devil to pour money into that bottomless pit of George’s, out of pure cussedness. It’s the kind of challenge that would likely appeal to a man who began as a bale-breaker in a ratty old mill, and went on to make three fortunes in a row. It makes me wonder why he underestimated his most promising investment all those years ago.”