Theirs Was The Kingdom

by R. F Delderfield

  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.
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  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.”

  “What investment was that?” she asked, innocently.

  “You,” he said. “Damn it, woman, if he’d played his hand better he could have married you to real money, and would have been in the House of Lords by now. Lord Rawlinson, of Seddon.”

  “I had my own ideas about that,” she said, “but maybe you’ve forgotten.”

  “I haven’t forgotten a thing about you,” he said, pinching her thigh as the pony toiled up the slope at a snail's pace. “Not a thing, d’you hear? I was telling myself just that down by that copse and if you hadn’t needed your breakfast I might have played you at your own game down there.”

  “I could have waited,” she said, calmly. “It would have been the quickest way of getting you off my conscience,” and he laughed.

  They ambled into the yard and he handed her down, calling to the lad to bring her bags inside and give the pony a rub down before turning him out to grass. She moved ahead of him up the steps to the kitchen and this was just as well, for he was chuckling and she would have found too much satisfaction in that.

  Five

  1

  IT WAS LIKE A DYNAMO SWITCHED ON TO WARM UP LONG BEFORE IT WAS REQUIRED to run at full power, that had then somehow got out of hand, generating current that pulsed far and wide across the length and breadth of the country, quickening everything within its orbit, so that mundane concerns were forgotten as everything and everybody was caught up in the swirl and thrust of the runaway engine.

  Or like a placid hay ride that had developed into a raucous free-for-all outside the alehouse, where dignity was forgotten in a wild, tribal orgy involving chants, dances, and merrymaking of a kind ordinarily discouraged in a nation dedicated to the till and family prayers.

  It was licence to get roaring drunk after a lifetime of sobriety, amorous after a life of celibacy, spendthrift after years of parsimony, and, within it all, an awareness amounting to certainty that, in the decades leading up to this magic moment, the human species had subdivided, a minority (that was British) hiving off to occupy the seats of the elect, a majority (foreigners, poor devils) standing off to admire, much as Sunday morning loiterers watched the parade of the privileged after church in Hyde Park. But with a qualification. The loiterers, given British citizenship, were now numbered with the carriage folk.

  Its effect upon the network was uneven, the regions responding according to the men who reigned there. In the past, the meeting of a crisis caused by bad weather, shortage of cash at Headquarters, or a trade recession, could be gauged to some extent by reflection on the several temperaments of the viceroys and their key men. But there was no gauging this, so that no specific directive went out advising the satellites how to celebrate, how much money to spend, how to go about using the occasion as an excuse to project themselves and their concerns. It was left to each of them to caper or to stay at home, taking advantage of the national holiday to put their feet up, so that the Jubilee meant different things to different men; a splendid occasion to some, an extra Bank Holiday to others.

  To a degree, reaction was governed by geography. The regions within excursion range of the capital, where the national celebrants operated, made no significant contribution of their own, executives and small fry alike preferring to travel up to town overnight and scramble for kerbstone vantage points along the royal route from Buckingham Palace to St. Paul's. Thus, Godsall of the Kentish Triangle, Vicary of The Bonus north of the Thames estuary, and Headquarters personnel, who lived in the very hub of the rituals, looked to officialdom and flunkeydom for a free spectacle, not even bothering to spend their regional allocation on rosettes for the teams and bunting for their premises. On the day itself their employees and customers were left to their own devices, to let off a few fire-crackers and sing a few music-hall ditties round bonfires.

  Adam himself was among this idle group, standing with Henrietta and his four youngest children at the office window of a customer within fifty yards of St. Clement Danes in the Strand. The three girls got very fidgety during the interminable wait, for they had to be in position long before breakfast-time.

  When, at last, the glittering cavalcade passed below, Henrietta and the children judged it had been worth the effort to get here, but Adam had his doubts. He had never cared very much for the plump little woman, whose longevity had touched off this hulla-balloo. His allegiance, and that was qualified, had been to her German husband, one of the few surrounding her who had foreseen the technical revolution and been able to isolate trade from trappings. But Albert had died long ago, when the network was in its infancy, and hardly anyone remembered him now, looking upon his sixty-eight-year-old widow as the catalyst of the new imperialism. He watched her pass, with her jingling escort of Household Cavalry, her horde of relatives, and her scarlet-clad janissaries, and it struck him that this whole affair was an anachronism, for both she and they represented an England that belonged more to his father's day than his. He said nothing of this to Henrietta. For her, somehow, the pageant was the enactment of a girlish dream that had been concerned with moustached warriors and the panoply of conquest. In this context it was a pity that her single contribution to the set-piece was far away in India, with his homely bride, the Colonel's daughter. It crossed Adam's mind then how her eyes would have sparkled if Alex had been numbered among the royal escort.

  After that there was nothing to do but go home and preside over the local celebrations at Twyforde Green, where there was an athletic meeting, a public tea, the distribution of mugs, and, as darkness fell, the discharge of sky-rockets to light a sky already reflecting the glow of hilltop beacons. Personally there was not much to celebrate just now. George was lost to him, and with George went the sense of continuity, whereas Giles, poor chap, was all dressed up with nowhere to go, save as coat-holder for Hugo at the Crystal Palace sports rally.

  It seemed very quiet when, around midnight, they saw the two youngest to bed, Joanna and Helen having already changed and left to dance the night away at one of their country-house balls, occasions that were always promising to lead to a double engagement and double wedding at Twyforde Green parish church but somehow never did. For the Inseparables, although by no means short of suitors, put an impossibly high price on youth and freedom.

  It was around one in the morning when he came stumping out of his dressing room to find Henrietta asleep, her Jubilee finery strewn about the room. He stood by the window a moment, counting the twinkling points of light on the Kentish hillsides, trying hard to identify with the national occasion. Alone among them, save for an elderly servant or two, he could remember a time when the adjective “Victorian” had no significance, and it seemed to him, standing there counting the beacons, almost as long ago as the day the first Conyer built under this wooded spur. He had a sense of hurrying time, and no compensating sense of achievement that he had so often experienced in this house, where so many of his plans had been laid and all his children had drawn their first breath. Somewhere along the line, he supposed, he had taken a wr
ong turn that was threatening to run him into a cul-de-sac in his old age, but maybe he was not alone in this. He had an intuitive sense that the nation had made a similar miscalculation and that backtracking, for man and tribe, might prove a long and tiresome business. Pride in one's achievements was well enough. But pride was no substitute for a compass.

  2

  Albert Rookwood, forty-three years of age, and Gaffer of the Southern Square since he was a lad of twenty and rubbing Howarth's Moustache Oil on his upper-lip, had no such misgivings.

  Alone among Swann's viceroys (with the possible exception of Jake Higson, his fellow ex-gamin in the network hierarchy), Rookwood had seen profit in using the national mood as a springboard for promoting an advertising campaign clear across his territory, from the Solent to the southern slopes of the Cotswolds. He was very careful, however, to ensure that dignity was not sacrificed to vulgar display, of the kind they seemed to be encouraging among hucksters and back-street shopkeepers. Whatever he did by way of telescoping the House of Windsor and the House of Swann would be characterised by the sobriety and restraint that had sat upon Rookwood like an undertaker's frock-coat ever since he had married his landlady's daughter, raised a family, taken his place among the city worthies, and erased from his mind any lingering doubts concerning his obscure origins.

  He lectured his sub-depot managers, marshalled and inspected his teams, doled out his Union Jacks and rosettes, and issued a stream of crisply worded bulletins concerned with shining brass-work, well-oiled saddlery, decoration of premises, and general deportment on The Day. Then, as a final concession to the national mood, he gave orders that every vehicle that left one of his yards bore on its tailboard a sedate cut-out of Windsor Castle, and that waggoners’ whips could be decorated by a neatly tied bow in red, white, and blue silk. The general effect of all this was a stunning uniformity.