He moved back to the desk, puffing steadily at his cigar.
“If you want my opinion, free of bias, that is, you’re well rid of her.”
“You can say that?”
“Who has a better qualification to say it? I was obliged to suffer her tantrums until she was of age last January. Then she came into a small income from her mother's estate, enough to keep her off the streets. But she’ll gravitate there, given time, mark my words. Did you ever hear of homesickness for the gutter?”
“Yes, I did. But she never once struck me as suffering from that. The reverse, I’d say.”
“She generally made a good job of concealing her tracks and that must mean something, I suppose. Possibly that she has a deep affection for you. Saw you as a lifeline perhaps. As I did, and freely admit to it.”
The sensation of lightheadedness that had troubled him ever since the doorstep parting returned. It was as though he was looking across the desk at Sir Clive through a slightly distorted glass. He was conscious of a persistent buzz in his ears and his stomach rumbled, reminding him that he had eaten practically nothing in the last forty-eight hours. When his head cleared somewhat he saw that Sir Clive was offering him brandy, taken from a cabinet from behind the desk.
“Drink it,” he said. “You look as if you need a drink, boy,” and Giles took the goblet, swallowing half the contents in a gulp.
“I’m not renowned for making my motives public,” Sir Clive went on, “but as regards yourself I think I owe it to you. If only because I admire staying-power, particularly in the young, and you’ve shown it, God knows. There's a streak of madness somewhere in that branch of the family. Or maybe it's in mine, for I was never one for excavating ancestors. Anyway, it's there, and in her it takes the form of wantonness, coupled with extreme indiscipline, hatred of any kind of restraint. I daresay you’ve noticed that and I’m not going into details. What's the point now? There was this young manservant, Dodge. I surprised him fumbling her in a guest room when she was around fifteen. There was a far more serious affair with the music teacher. He was married, and I had to pay him off and ship him back to Belgium. And finally, a year or so before you showed up, there was Gilpin. Up to then she had a penchant for brutes. That's why I was surprised when she stuck to you for so long. Well, I paid Gilpin off, too, but there's a limit to this kind of recklessness. As I say, she's reached her majority now, and is well aware I’m not to be counted on any longer.” He flicked the ash from his cigar and looked at Giles shrewdly. “I imagine you acted the gentleman throughout and you never became lovers. Well, that wasn’t wise, but how could you be expected to know that? If you had we might at least have got her married. And divorces are easy enough to come by these days, provided you’d wanted one.”
What puzzled him far more than the account of Romayne's string of lovers was the detachment the man was able to bring to a discussion of his own daughter's follies and deficiencies, as though he had been making a brief, factual report on the shortcomings of a scullery maid concerning whom somebody had called seeking a reference. His cold-bloodedness was as chilling as standing neck-deep in a barrel of ice, and as repugnant, in another way, as handling something dredged from a drain. In yet another way, however, it had the effect of rallying him, for he thought, “He talks of her as if she was a consignment of spoiled goods that had been returned to one of his damned warehouses…” and with this rage mounted in him so that his resentment was switched clear away from Romayne and concentrated on this bland, bloodless merchant, who thought of everyone, including his own flesh and blood, in terms of marketability. He said, cutting into the man's smooth, rambling talk, “Suppose she isn’t in Wales? Will you mount some kind of search for her?”
“Not I! That's up to you, young feller-me-lad, if you feel so inclined. I tell you I’m done with her. I’ve got other and far more important things to think about.”
“You don’t regard yourself as being responsible for the way she ran wild? For the silly scrapes she got herself into?”
“No. And don’t give me that fool's talk. People are what they are, or so I’ve always found.”
“But, God damn it,” Giles burst out, “she needed help! She's always needed help.”
“Then find her and give her help, if you feel so disposed. But don’t look to me for backing. I hate weaklings. I always have, and your father would say ‘Amen’ to that, I daresay.”
“No,” Giles said, slowly, “my father wouldn’t. He's enjoyed making money, but he's never made a god of it the way you have. And with him flesh and blood have always had a certain value, apart from what they were worth to him in hard cash.”
He never discovered what Sir Clive Rycroft-Mostyn made of that, for he was not looking at him when he said it, and the moment it was said he turned away, tugged open the heavy door, and walked out into the corridor. The typewriter girls were still slamming away at their machines. The ambassadorial clerks were still padding about with files and memoranda. The silver-buttoned flunkey at the door had not forgotten how to convey the impression that it would be a pleasure to be stepped on by anyone with personal access to Sir Clive Rycroft-Mostyn. This, he reflected, was big business as most city men recognised it, and everyone involved in it was a cog or a screw. Dehumanised, sealed off from the mainstream of Christian civilisation. It was comforting to reflect that Swann-on-Wheels was not run on these lines. It never had been and it never would be. It was still, and would always remain, a family concern, no matter how many and how varied were those involved in its practice and policy-making. Goods and capital investment and profits counted, but neither one of them so much as people. He turned his steps towards the Thameside slum, a drunk instinctively making his way home.
Adam was in the tower, Tybalt said, and had been asking for him, so he went up the narrow staircase to find his father sitting at his littered desk, with his gammy leg stuck out at the familiar angle, and his long chin supported by his right hand, as if he was assessing the imponderables of some complicated cross-country haul of fish, fruit or hardware. His eyes lit up when Giles entered, but he still looked tired and curiously dispirited, for Giles had noted that up here, immersed in his own concerns, he was almost invariably brisk and cheerful. He said, gruffly, “Tybalt tell you?”
“No, sir,” Giles, momentarily forgetting his own wretchedness, “tell me what?”
“About George.”
“What's happened to George?”
“He's gone. Walked out. Thrown in with Sam Rawlinson, your grandfather, of all people. We haven’t seen eye to eye on a number of things lately, but there was nothing we couldn’t have ironed out, given time. It was that damned machine of his. Seems to have taken possession of his senses, to the exclusion of everything else, including his wife and children. Well, so be it, and to the devil with him and his thunderbird. But I don’t mind admitting I was badly upset by your mother's attitude.”
“What's mother got to do with George's Maximus?”
“What indeed?” He never recalled his father sounding so embittered. “I daresay that will emerge, but the short answer is she backed him to the hilt. It was at her insistence that he threw in with his grandfather for, believe it or not, the old fool sees yet another fortune in that contraption. You’d think he knew better at his age. You’d suppose he’d had enough of fortunes and what they cost a man to make. However, there it is.” He paused a moment, toying with a paper-knife made in the shape of a cavalry sabre. “It's hit me damned hard, son. Particularly with you going, too.”
“I won’t be going. For what I’m worth I’m your man, not Rycroft's, from here on.” And then, carefully, “Can you stand another buffet, sir?”
He was relieved to see Adam's grin, the grin he had always associated with an overgrown schoolboy planning a practical joke.
“Why not?” He cut the air with the paper knife. “I survived a good many when I earned my keep with one of these. A straightforward business, that. Sometimes I think I should have stuck to it. You’re t
he brandy man. Alex is port, George is beer. You are the brandy man, aren’t you?”
“I’m becoming one,” Giles said, as Adam rose and stumped over to his cellar-ette beside the ready-reckoner that the network knew as Frankenstein. “I’ve just had a double from my ex-father-in-law.”
He saw his father's face narrow as he paused in the act of pouring, “Well?”
“I walked out on Romayne, and she walked out on him. Then I made it a treble by throwing his job in his face. I’m glad about that part of it at least.”
“You want to tell me?”
“Eventually. Not now.”
Adam came forward with the drinks. “ To abdication, then.”
“We’ll survive, sir.”
“By God, we will.”
A shaft of late afternoon sunshine stole through the little Gothic window and picked out the dust that always gathered up here, no matter how often Tybalt sent the yard men up with their brooms. To Giles, to Adam also possibly, it brought a little warmth into the turret.
Four
1
THAT WAS THE SUMMER OF THE FIRST JUBILEE AND THE TRIBES AS A WHOLE— half-exiled Celts, ponderous Saxons, predatory, far-ranging Scandinavians, and methodical, hard-fisted Norman French who had travelled this far together—were aware of a sense of fusion and common purpose that had eluded them (save in widely spaced moments of peril) for more than eight centuries. There were still dissidents, of course, but their voices were muted, submerged in the thrum of national breast-beating, lost in the flutter of unfurled flags and the drift of bonfire smoke. For this was a time when the nation made ready to pay ritual homage to the dumpy, toothy little widow who had come to see herself, not merely as a queen and queen-empress, but also as the powerhouse of a new centre of gravity sited somewhere between the Pool of London and Windsor. Or perhaps carrying it about with her, like a celestial seal of office, on her annual migrations to country houses in Norfolk, the Isle of Wight, and the banks of the Dee.
But for Swann-on-Wheels and for Adam Swann particularly, who had always identified with the epoch, there was an anomaly here. For that same summer, the summer of 1887, was a period not of fusion and closing ranks but the reverse, with the network showing unmistakable signs of stress, and a feeling of unease and uncertainty at the very hub of the thirty-year-old venture that had seemed, less than a year since, as durable as the monarchy and far more adaptable to external pressures. Or so he would have claimed.
Yet it was not so. From his truncated turret above the curve of the brown river he could sense the tremors of dissolution and they frightened him, for he was turned sixty now, aware of the ache of old wounds, and that sense of doubt that accompanies shortness of wind, rotting teeth, and, above all, a hazing of that clarity of thought and diabolically accurate memory that had proved so invaluable in his triumphant years.
Somewhere—he took his time locating its source—there was grit in the axle and it did not stem from the regions, now enjoying a devolution of power that he himself had initiated but from much nearer home, from the very foundations of the tower in which he sat, and the knowledge of this, notwithstanding his enormous experience, made him less sure of himself than he had ever been since he first came here in his thirty-first year to play chuck-farthing with destiny. Around him, sometimes seen but more often heard as a rustle in the dark, was a spirit of near-mutiny and he came at last to identify its storm-centre as George, the heir-apparent. But identification enabled him neither to scotch it nor adapt to it, for it was too nebulous a thing to be defined and studied in the way he had tackled successive crises in the past. It centred on George certainly, drawing inspiration from the boy's tremendous thrust (so like his own in the very earliest days), from his easy affability with staff and customers that Adam had never really acquired, from the boy's outward-looking optimism or arrogance, however you were disposed to view it, from his ready command of three languages against Adam's one, but, above all, from his expressed certainty that the horse and cart era was nearly over, and along with it the patriarchal tone and regional autonomy of the enterprise. It was a view that Adam was too long in the tooth to share.
George Swann, at twenty-four, had not only succeeded in astonishing his father's acolytes, but he had also astonished himself. More than three years of free-ranging abroad, with no real necessity to work, and the emphasis, if he was honest with himself, on diversion rather than furthering his technical education, had made him wary of the disciplines inherent in a permanent position at the yard, where he had perforce to adjust to the rhythms of men like Tybalt, the clerk, and Keate, the waggonmaster. Yet he did adjust, and in a matter of weeks, making a unique place for himself as a powerfully placed referee, to whom the younger men began to defer and to look to for support of any change in regional policy that smacked of modernisation.
Nor was this all. As a young man, with first-hand experience of important Continental firms, he discovered that middle-aged customers were willing to give him a hearing and, having heard him, to follow his advice. In this way, aided by his natural enthusiasm and amiability, he soon emerged as the most successful prospector of new business Swann-on-Wheels had thrown up in its thirty years’ handling of the nation's goods. In the first six months, he landed thirty-eight new contracts, all in the Headquarters’ area, but when Adam, applauding his initiative, suggested he should go out into the regions and break fresh ground, he did not take kindly to the proposal. Instead, he fired his first warning shot across the provincial bows. He did not see Swann-on-Wheels as drawing its inspiration from the shires, he said, or even from territories as large as Jake Higson's beat in the North, that included several industrial centres. The future, he hinted (and it was scarcely more than a hint at that time) lay right here beside the Thames. In other words, with improved rail services and faster hauls, centralisation was imperative. He went even further down a road the old stagers would be likely to see as heresy. To his mind, the regions already enjoyed too much autonomy, were already too parochial in their thinking. What was needed now, what would have to come in the near future, was some form of centralisation and, more particularly, the appointment of managers each responsible for a particular branch of the system. Devolution, that is, based not on geography but on the nature of the goods hauled and on the vehicles used in performance of a specific job.
Adam challenged this at once, pointing out that a change of policy as revolutionary as this would embitter relations between Headquarters and the regions, particularly men like Lovell and Ratcliffe, who were very jealous of their frontiers and had never taken kindly to Headquarters’ writ, although they had always been ready to abide by policy decisions carried by majority vote. Semi-independence of the regions, Adam insisted, had always been a cornerstone of the firm's policy and when George had moved about a bit, and taken the measure of old hands scattered about the shires, he would tread warily as regards the imposition of London decisions on men who, whatever their other failings, knew their customers and territory far better than anyone beside the Thames.
“My line was always to pick a local man and give him a free hand,” he argued, but George, with one of his infectious chuckles, said that here and there, unless he was much mistaken, tree hands were twiddling thumbs, as in the case of that old peasant Ratcliffe in the Western Wedge, who was beginning to regard himself as wholly independent west of the Dorset-Somerset borders. “I’m not advocating any diminution of their powers,” he urged. “In some ways I’m giving them more. Centralisation would take some of the workload from their shoulders, give them an opportunity to get into the four corners of their beats, exploit their local knowledge, pull in more customers, and increase turnover and dividends, the way I’ve been able to do in the suburbs. They can’t do that when so much of their time is occupied in paperwork, in running repairs, in scratching around for the right type of vehicle at the right time. The fact is, Guv’nor, if you talked to some of the younger men out there you might find my views regarding a breakdown of hauls under Headquarte
rs-based specialists, might be welcomed. Why don’t you try it sometime, if only to prove to yourself that I’m talking through my hat? I’ll withdraw if I’m proved wrong!”
That was the way of George. He put forward his views and then invited the opposition to test them, and this was what Adam did, in the autumn of 1886, when they were still coasting along the level stretch. He learned to his secret chagrin that George was indubitably right, that the regional thrusters, men like Godsall of the Kentish Triangle, Rookwood of the Southern Square, and even the Scottish viceroy, Jake Higson, would indeed welcome the appointment of specialist managers based on London, who would accept responsibility for distinctive hauls such as house-removals and the holiday-brake traffic that threw a heavy strain on their teams throughout the summer months. He learned something else, too. That some of the older men, notably Hamlet Ratcliffe in the West, and Bryn Lovell in the Mountain Square, were ageing faster than he had been led to believe and that, here and there among their senior staffs, were some who were well past their prime and by no means up to their work.
Grudging admiration for his son's prescience did battle with his own obstinacy and also with his loyalty to old friends. But what really prevented him from a frank admission that there was something to be said for centralisation and the appointment of specialists to handle traffic outside the regional bread-and-butter categories, was a reluctance to tamper with a system that had proved so successful over such a long period. Something deep inside him mistrusted any rigid form of centralisation and stemmed, possibly, from the memories of all he had suffered in the field at the hands of high-ranking nincompoops operating ten miles outside the range of enemy's shot and shell. At all events, he did nothing beyond ponder his findings, promising himself that he would take another look at the situation in the spring.
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