Theirs Was The Kingdom (98 page)

She blushed to the roots of her hair. This was far worse than being caught full-length on the ground with one’s bodice half-unbuttoned, and it stunned her to think he could suppose she was so much in love with Clinton that she was prepared to snare him like a desperate scullery-maid. She said, indignantly, “Do you suppose I’d throw my cap at anybody as stupid as Clinton? Do you suppose I’d marry him, if he compromised me fifty times over? You really don’t know much about girls. That’s very obvious.”

“But there was a reason, wasn’t there?”

“No.”

“And if there was you wouldn’t tell me?”

“No.”

“I think you’d better. We’ve left our lunch behind and you’ll be very peckish by tea-time.”

His coolness maddened her, but then so did his blindness. He could reason this far but the main point appeared to have escaped him completely. She said, suddenly, “You insist on knowing?”

“You owe me that, Helen.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” she snapped. “You’ve neither looked at me nor spoken two consecutive words to me since you patched me up after that spill I had at Addington last September. You’ve been mooning after Joanna ever since that first day and you still are, although she’s told you she isn’t in love with you. Just how does that leave me in your debt? You’re so anxious to ferret everything out so go to work on that, Rowland Coles!”

She had not meant to be so explicit but now she was glad he had goaded her into losing her temper. The blank expression on his face—until then anything but blank—was worth what amounted to an admission that she was in love with him and had been since the moment he bandaged her after that brother of his had picked her out of the ditch outside their home. He looked so startled that she could have laughed. “Well?” she taunted him. “Are you satisfied now you know? Shall we turn around and go back to Tonbridge?”

“Good Lord,” he said, at last, “I really am an idiot! When it comes to people, that is. And I’m supposed to be the brainy one, the chap who walks through exams and takes all the prizes. Now Clint never won a prize or sat an exam in his life, but in a situation of this kind he wouldn’t even have to think on it, not for a second! I mean, he’d
know
, wouldn’t he?” And he turned to her desperately, as though her corroboration was vital to his peace of mind.

“Yes,” she said, “he’d know all right. He probably has known, from that first day we had luncheon with your family. Joanna knows too, for that matter, because I told her the minute she told me you had proposed to her, and I daresay your parents, and certainly your sisters, guessed long ago. But all these people knowing that I would give everything in the world to
be
Joanna doesn’t help, does it? I see that now very clearly. If I had the sense I was born with I’d never have let her talk me into taking part in such a silly, stupid novelettish situation.”

She leaned over to lift the reins from the rest but he caught her hand, checking her. The pony went on cropping. The hedge-sparrow, after a cautious circuit or two, decided there was nothing to fear and flitted back to her nest in the hollow. He still looked as if he had been struck on the head with a croquet mallet, but there was a hint of laughter at the corners of his mouth. He said, wryly, “There would be no point in wishing you were Joanna now, Helen.”

“Why? Because she refused you? Don’t believe it! I know men better than you know women. Rejection only puts them on their mettle. You’ll ask her again. And again after that, and in the end she’ll be so flattered she’ll accept.”

“I won’t ask her again,” he said. “Both of you can be sure of that.”

“Why not? Just because she played a silly trick on you?”

“No, not really. Because the trick worked. In a queer sort of way.”

He said it quietly and without much conviction, so that it made no immediate impact on her. Yet some kind of reply was obligatory, so she said, with the same offhandedness, “Oh, there’s no call for you to act the gallant any longer. I made a frightful fool of myself and I’m quite prepared to admit it, even if Jo isn’t.”

He smiled at that, a slow and very engaging smile, the first she had ever seen on his long, solemn face.

“Gallant? Who the devil said anything about being gallant? You and Joanna aren’t the only two who can play charades.”

“What can you mean by that?”

“I’ll tell you something. I came back to you and Clint
before
I was supposed to. I came because I was curious and for no other reason at all. I knew Joanna was up to something but I couldn’t fathom what, except that it had to do with you and with Clint. Well, I’ve found out now and, as I say, the trick worked to some extent. At least it showed me that you and I have something in common.”

“And what’s that, pray?”

He dropped his reasonable tone and flashed out, “Oh, don’t sound so damned priggish! It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You and I, we both make up our minds what we want and go straight at it. We aren’t easily turned aside by what stands in the way.” He looked at her speculatively. “What did Joanna tell you of what I have in mind now that I’ve qualified?”

“That you intended to become a medical missionary overseas.”

“And what did you deduce from that?”

“That you were convinced you ‘had a call,’ I suppose. That’s how they refer to it, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s what it’s usually called. But it wasn’t what I had.”

“I don’t understand.”

“How could you? You would have had to have known me a long time ago. You would have had to have known my father and grandfather when they were my age. It’s in the blood, like your brother Alex following the drum, and your father starting that business of his. To make something out of nothing. My grandfather rolled pills for a druggist in a country town until he was nearly forty, but he always had two rooted ambitions. To own a shop of his own, and to come to London. He achieved both. My father had a different ambition. He had it in mind to make a fortune and set up as a country gentleman, and that’s just what he’s done.”

“And you set your mind on becoming a missionary?”

She was listening to a very different Rowland Coles. She had never suspected that he would reveal himself as a tradesman, a man with something to sell, of the kind her father took pride in being. Yet she could discern similarities between them now. They had the same arrogance, the same prickly self-sufficiency, the identical “I’ll show you” and “Take-me-as-you-find-me” approach to the world. But he had a surprise in reserve for her. Before she could adjust to the new Rowley he said, “I daresay Joanna implied I was stuffy, didn’t she? No, that’s not fair, you don’t have to tell me what she said. But the fact is, looking back, I see now she made it pretty clear I didn’t appeal to her. As a man, I mean, as well as a future medical missionary in Patagonia, or Sierra Leone. Well, that’s her privilege. Clint is more her type but it took me time to admit that. All the same, I’m not
that
stuffy, and I’ll prove as much after we’ve had tea at a place I know in Hildenborough, just up the road. They serve rum butter, with home-baked scones and apricot jam. We’ll go there in a minute, but first I should like to prove I’m as much flesh and blood as Clint—” And he put his arm round her, holding her in a grip that made her wince and lifting his other hand tilted her chin, and kissed her on the mouth. It was not what you would call a lover’s kiss, but it had about it a very definite air of proprietorship.

Seven

1

I
T WAS THE TIME SHE CAME TO LOOK BACK ON AS THE FAMILY EXODUS. A TIME when the tempo and rhythm of Tryst faltered, changed, and reasserted itself in a way she could never have foreseen.

She had always known, of course, that such a time would come and had, in a sense, looked forward to it, seeing it as part of the pattern of fulfilment. The children, even the youngest of them, would grow up and scatter, but this was of no consequence. Progressively, marriages would take place and by the time little Margaret was tormenting her first beau Tryst would be half full of grandchildren. This was one of the hidden bonuses of producing a long, carefully spaced family. But it didn’t happen in quite that way. Instead, there was a trickle and then a rush of weddings and abdications that succeeded one another at such a speed that it sometimes seemed to Henrietta she was moving from early middle age to the evening of her life in a matter of weeks. It was enough to make any woman look over her shoulder for creeping shadows.

Alex, and his stocky little bride Lydia, had sailed for India in September but she was well-accustomed to Alex’s migrations by now. This time she resigned herself to a separation of anything up to five years and looked for his reappearance with two or more toddlers in tow. A glance at Lydia’s hips suggested she would have little or no difficulty in this respect.

Then overnight George, Gisela, and his two babies decamped, leaving the mill-house empty and uncared for and she could not bring herself to advise Adam to let it. This would be to set the seal of George’s abdication, making it more final than she was prepared to admit, even to herself.

A few months later, Helen came romping into the house, shrieking that she had become engaged to the elder of the two Coles boys, the serious-looking one who was already a doctor, and was going to be a medical missionary and whisk her off to some Godforsaken spot halfway across the world. This had given Henrietta a jolt, for it made nonsense of her private predictions. Until then she had been convinced that Rowland Coles had no eyes for anyone but Joanna, yet here he was, fidgeting about in front of an embarrassed Adam, asking for Helen in the most formal manner imaginable! Adam, the poltroon, hastily shuttled the stammering young man on to her, which was most inconsiderate of him. He must have known that she was disinclined to encourage Helen, younger than Joanna by three years, to jump the queue in this slapdash manner.

There was absolutely nothing she could do about it, however. The couple had clearly made up their minds about one another and were not disposed to wait the three years or more that Rowland would be away on his first assignment. And in support of haste (almost indecent haste, to Henrietta’s way of thinking) Helen was saucy enough to quote her own words at her, reminding her that she had often expressed strong disapproval of Giles’s long engagement to that Rycroft girl, and events had proved her right. The silly girl had tired of waiting, run off in a tizzy, and had never been heard of since.

Helen and Rowland (somehow Henrietta could never learn to call such an earnest young man “Rowley”) were married in July. Ten weeks after that they followed Alex and Lydia overseas and were lost to her almost as surely as if they had gone to the moon. How long did it take a letter to come from Papua, granted that a place as outlandish as Papua had a postal service?

They had been gone less than a fortnight before the kaleidoscope was given another violent shake, this time by someone whom Henrietta had thought incapable of surprising her. Deborah, thirty-one if you please, suddenly announced her intention of quitting the London scene and marrying a penniless young man no one at Tryst had heard of until his moment of presentation.

Luckily for all parties, Adam was on hand to act as buffer on this occasion. Indeed, it was Adam, shamelessly enjoying the joke, who broke the news to Henrietta. Unlike all the other children (not excluding George) Deborah had always maintained direct access to the titular head of the family. On this occasion the hussy made full use of it.

2

It happened towards dusk one blustery October afternoon, when Adam, watching the slate-coloured storm clouds over Wren’s dome, decided to make an early start for home and blew down the speaking tube to ask Tybalt to send a lad for a cab. Tybalt said, apologetically, “Er… excuse me, sir—if you’ve time, that is—you have a visitor. Miss Avery, sir…” When Adam said he was to tell Miss Avery to wait, pending his descent, and that she might as well accompany him to the station, Deborah spoke into the tube, saying, with laughter in her voice, “What I’ve to say to you can’t be said in a five-minute cab-ride, Uncle Adam! I’ll come up, if you don’t mind!”

He had, it seemed, no choice in the matter for the click told him the speaking tube stopper had been replaced and it was this that put him on his guard, implying that Deborah was taking no chances with countinghouse eavesdroppers.

A moment later she appeared and he saw at once that she was very elated about something. Her eyes sparkled and she was very breathless, as though she had run the length of the spiral staircase.

He said, with the counterfeit crustiness he reserved for enthusiasts of all kinds, “Well, what is it now? An assignment to look into the sanitary conditions of the gaols? Or my blessing on a trip to the leper colonies in the South Seas?”

But she kissed him on both cheeks, perched herself on the corner of his desk nearest the window and said, gaily, “Don’t be such a bear. It doesn’t become you, but I’ll put your mind at rest right away. What would you say if I told you I was to be married this day week?”

She had her revenge if she had looked for one. His jaw sagged and he half-rose, bringing both hands down on the letter trays and upending one of them so that a Bradshaw lying there spun and fell with a thump on his sound leg.

“Oh, come now, not you!
You’re
catching it from Alex and Helen…?” but then, more seriously, “It’s a proposition, I take it, not a fact.”

“A fact, I’m afraid,” she said, laughing at his confusion, “but it’s been a near certainty for several months now. For Heaven’s sake, Uncle, don’t look so astounded! It really is most unflattering. Oh, I’m well aware that both you and Aunt Hetty have resigned yourself to having an unclaimed blessing on your hands, but claimants do show up from time to time, even for leftovers.”

“Who is he?” he managed to say. “Do I know him?”

“Not personally. Though you must be acquainted with him by remove.”

“Now what the devil is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you have read his articles. You must have done, since you’re a regular subscriber to the
Gazette.
His name is Jeffs, Milton Jeffs, and he asked me to marry him when we were working on the dock strike in the summer. I refused then but we’ve both had a change of heart.”

“You’ve both had?”

“He’s going to buy and run a local paper in the West, where I can be more than a pencil-sharpener to him, all I’ve been so far. So I said yes.
Please.
And soon!”

He had to laugh at her. She was a feminist of the deepest conviction, but there was little about her that characterised all the other feminists he had met and read about—aggressive young hoydens or sour old biddies for the most part, making a lot of noise about what they called their back seats and second-class citizenship. He knew Jeffs too, now that he came to think about it, a cool and very precise journalist, who dealt in facts rather than sermons, itself an unlikely qualification for a post on Stead’s journal.

“How old is he? Around Stead’s age?”

She swung her legs to the floor and crossed to the window. “See for yourself, Uncle.”

“He’s here?”

“I very much wanted you to meet him. I want your approval, too. It’s very important to me.”

He was glad she had said that. Their relationship had always been close and suddenly he realised that her happiness was something he cared about very much. More than the future of any one of them, if he was completely honest.

He glanced down into the yard and saw a tall, hatless young man standing beside a half-laden frigate outside the warehouse. He had curly hair and was not, he would have said, as old as Deborah. His loose-jointed stance, together with the expression of profound concentration on his face as he watched the warehousemen, made him look boyish.

Deborah said, “I won’t be coy with you, Uncle Adam. Milton is five years younger than I. But he’s the kindest, the most discerning, and the most intelligent man I’ve ever met. I love him very much.”

“I suppose I should say ‘That’s all that matters,’” he said, “but it’s a phrase that always sticks in my gullet. The one thing Continentals arrange much better than us is their marriages. Has he got any money?”

“Two thousand pounds. And every penny of it has gone into his newspaper. ”

“Does he know about your father and how we stand in relation to one another?”

“He knows as much as I know.”

It was not a rebuke but perhaps it could be interpreted as a query, so that he thought, “And that isn’t so much either! But now isn’t the time to rake over Josh Avery’s middens!” He threw the casement open and called, “Mr. Jeffs! Come up and take the chill off the evening!”

The boyish face looked up and smiled. “At your service, sir!” Adam, turning back into the room said, “I’m going to like him, Debbie. Don’t ask me why. Just a feeling here,” and he patted his stomach.

The conviction stayed with him even when he learned that Milton Jeffs came from a Quaker family and subscribed to many of their beliefs. There was something about him that reminded Adam of the gay young men with whom he had shared hard tack in the trenches before Sebastopol, and on long, dusty marches across a sub-continent at war. The type, he told himself, was common enough in the field, and even here in the city. Youngsters who made no bones about their worth in the open market, who were prepared to grab joyously at any opportunity for advancement that came their way.

Jeffs’s ethos was a blend of idealism and realism, with a generous dash of humour thrown in, so that it was easy to see what attracted him to a woman like Deborah Avery. He approved the way the man looked at her, with laughter behind eyes that were shrewd as well as kind, and found himself thinking “I’m glad she took her time… In a way she reminds me of Edith in the presence of her Tom. But in another way he reminds me of myself, when I was around his age, although I never harboured his expectations of human decency.”

The age gap between them did not worry him as it seemed to worry Henrietta. What was five years at their age, particularly as they had both knocked about a bit? It was not, of course, Hetty’s type of marriage, with the emphasis on mutual physical appeal, but a match between two young people who had their instincts under control, who were looking for something more than physical accord, of the kind that had proved so important to her all these years. Privately, he suspected, Henrietta would have reservations about it, particularly after that embarrassing, Quaker-type wedding, where a prayer-meeting free-for-all replaced the traditional marriage service. For himself, he was equipped to probe a little deeper, assuming that Milton Jeffs’s participation in the ceremony—if it could be called a ceremony—was no more than a warmhearted gesture towards his elderly father and mother, two very gentle creatures, overawed by what they would think of as Henrietta’s grand manner and his own wealth and social position. But Milton wasn’t, thank God, and set to work to charm Hetty from the moment he met her. Soon there was no more talk of his marrying the girl for what she was likely to inherit, either from her foster parents or that seedy rascal Josh.

There was no point in inviting Josh Avery to attend. Apart from all other considerations, he was hardly a man to grace a Quaker wedding. But he heard about it, as Adam knew he would, and wrote care of the bank, enclosing a draft for five thousand pounds made out to Adam, together with a request for a personal report on young Jeffs.

Adam invested the money, without telling Debbie too much about it. He was determined to keep Avery’s secret as long as he could. For ever if possible. He wrote back briefly, giving it as his opinion that Debbie had made an excellent choice and that he thoroughly approved the match, leaving Avery to make what he could of this. He had a feeling that Josh would be relieved after that unpleasant business in Brussels. Transition from Stead’s controversial journal to a tin-pot newspaper in the West meant that there could be no repetition of what had happened when the girl was out scavenging for the Lord’s Anointed.