by John Masters
Guy stood, the knife in hand, looking down. He had done it well, and had enjoyed it.
There had been no need to kill the wretched madman. He could have followed him, calling for the police … or stopped him, and held him at knife point … but he hadn’t. He had not made pretty patterns in the sand: he had killed, with fervour and compulsion. In the end, cricket and rugby were only games to him: but this was not, and here he was a matador, after all. And that, he would have to live with, the rest of his life.
He began to tremble, shaking and shivering uncontrollably, and knelt to vomit at the side of the road as the lights of a car came up the hill.
They sat round the table in Stephen Merritt’s suite, five men – Stephen, Johnny, Richard Rowland, Overfeld, and Morgan. Betty was out, doing some last-minute Christmas shopping with Richard’s wife, Susan. Richard finished explaining his plan, which was, in brief, to run both Rowland’s and the JMC as linked enterprises, with himself as managing director of both, Overfeld his deputy, more particularly responsible for day-to-day supervision of the JMC. The JMC would continue to make trucks, but Rowland’s would convert to something else, preferably the mobile machine-gun vehicle, which Richard intended to explain to the War Office, and solicit orders for, immediately after Christmas; and his father Harry, as MP, would see that he got a hearing from the military. Finances had already been discussed, and Fairfax, Gottlieb and Toledano’s had both agreed in principle to put up the necessary capital. As time passed it was his intention to weld the two companies much closer, so that all used the same parts, even engines, perhaps.
When Richard finished talking, Stephen said, ‘I’ve been burning up the cables to New York the past two days, and the board have given me a great deal of discretion to act on their behalf. As Mr Rowland has said, we have in principle agreed to provide the money asked for. Now we have to work out the details, including making and selling the protection vehicle. As to practical engineering, do you have anything to say, Overfeld?’
Overfeld shook his head, ‘Nothing, boss. Except, I’d like to have a look at the plans for the machine-gun vehicle … Why don’t we call it the Rowland Mobile Protection Vehicle … MPV … to see what’s the best way to put it together.’
‘Me, too, boss,’ Morgan said.
‘You’d better call in Bob Stratton, when you’re doing that,’ Johnny said, speaking for almost the first time, ‘if he stays on.’
‘Might he not?’
‘He was supposed to retire when Mr Harry was, in September, 1914 … and now Mr Harry’s gone, he might want to go, too.’
‘I wish we could get Frank,’ Richard said, ‘but that’s out of the question.’
Stephen waited a few moments, then said, ‘Johnny, you wanted to say something, I know.’
Johnny drew a deep breath, waited a second or two to steady his voice, then said, ‘I think we’re aiming too low … thinking too small. The number of MPVs we can make and sell will never be large. At the end of the war Rowland’s will be back where it was in 1914 – selling a few good cars to a few rich people – only it’ll be outsold and outshone by Crossley, for instance, who’ve had such large war orders … We should abandon Rowland’s as it now stands – sell it to the government or anyone else who can use it to make shells, or guns, or war material.
‘The future’s up in the air … now, and after the war. We should start a new company to make aeroplanes. The demand will be insatiable until the war’s over and then, well, if we always think ahead and use the best brains, we’ll stay ahead, and afloat, in the sky.’
There was a long silence. At length his father said slowly, ‘Have you any suggestion as to what sort of aeroplanes we should build?’
‘Yes,’ Johnny said eagerly. ‘Guy tells me the RFC and the RNAS are both turning towards pure bombing aeroplanes. He put me in touch with a man who designs them … George Keble Palmer, who’s been designing for Handley Page for the past four years. I’ve spent a lot of time on the telephone with him. He has a design ready – his own, nothing to do with Handley Page – for a twin-engined heavy bomber.’
‘Where would we build these bombers?’ Stephen asked, his eyes fixed on his son.
‘We would have to build them at an airfield, so that they can be flown away when completed. I have confirmed that there is land available, cheap, abutting on Hedlington Airfield, four miles out of town. I calculate that we’ll need roughly a million pounds to get started. We could share the capitalization with Toledano’s.’
Mr Morgan whistled long and low. Richard stared at Johnny, his brain running fast. The young man had astonished him. This was a different person from the fellow who mooned over Stella like a love-sick calf.
Stephen turned to him, ‘What do you think?’
Richard said, ‘We can’t make a final decision here and now, obviously. We must talk to Keble Palmer, face to face, look at his designs … but Johnny’s right. I was thinking too small, and my vision was restricted to the ground. I say that we should work out what it will cost in money and time to start the sort of firm that Johnny has in mind … Can we keep Rowland’s going, too? I don’t know much about aircraft manufacture, but I do know there’s a great deal of wood and fabric working, chemical doping, and so on. We’ll have no jobs for many of Rowland’s men at the aircraft factory.’
Stephen said, ‘I think Johnny’s right there, too. We should convert Rowland’s to making shells. It’ll be profitable, so we don’t want to sell it. Who’d run it?’
‘I could keep an eye on it,’ Richard said, ‘but the day-to-day supervision would have to be done by Bob Stratton. He’s capable of it … if he’s willing to stay.’
‘Then we have to find a plant foreman for the aircraft factory. We should look in the body shops, I suppose.’
‘I wish more than ever that we could get Frank Stratton out of the army,’ Richard said. ‘If there’s conscription, I suppose he could be ordered out of uniform, just as legally as other people would be ordered in.’
‘We’ll try again, once we agree on the whole idea, in principle,’ Stephen said. ‘But there’s one small matter that we have not settled. Who’s going to supervise the aircraft factory – let’s call it the Hedlington Aircraft Company?’
‘Well, I suppose I’d be the overall director,’ Richard said.
‘Yes, but who’s going to be the man on the spot?’
Morgan looked at Overfeld; Overfeld looked at Richard; Stephen looked at his son. Slowly the others did, too. Stephen said, ‘You’ve talked yourself out of the RFC, Johnny.’
Johnny said, ‘But Dad … I’ve promised … I’ve said …’
‘Yes, and then you have come up with an idea that we ought to have thought of for ourselves. This is your baby … and you must raise it. You’ll have Mr Rowland here to turn to. We’ll find you a good works foreman, somehow.’ He stood up, and held out his hand, ‘And, Johnny, don’t tell me you really want to go to war. Mr Overfeld’s been telling me how keen you have become and how good. You’re a business executive, now, Johnny, and you’re going to carry a heavy load of responsibility, for a great deal of money, and men’s jobs and, soon, men’s lives … Deputy Managing Director of the new firm … Congratulations!’
‘Home, please, Kathleen,’ Richard said, settling back in the seat beside his wife. It was funny how one called most of the female staff by their Christian names, and the men by their surnames. He had never dreamed of calling Stafford anything but that … hadn’t known what his Christian name was, to be truthful. In this particular case it might be something to do with class. Females qualified to be chauffeurs were all ladies, as yet, and rather adventurous ones at that.
‘So,’ Susan said, ‘you’re going to get another factory.’
‘I think so,’ he said, ‘though it can’t be decided for a few weeks yet. We have a great deal of work to do on facts and figures.’
‘That’ll make three,’ she said, ‘Rowland’s, the JMC, and the one for aircraft … shells, lorries, and aeropla
nes. Your babies.’
He glanced at her, for there had been an odd intonation in her voice. She said, ‘They are your children, you know, and always have been. To you they mean what they would to anyone else, and also what the children we haven’t had would have meant.’
‘Well, I don’t think…’ he began. She went on, as though he had not spoken, ‘I need children, Richard. I’m going to adopt two.’
He stared at her, dumbfounded. ‘Adopt … two children … babies?’
‘Not babies, children … about six or seven, I should think. War orphans. We can afford it.’
‘Of course, but…’
She put her hand over his on the seat. ‘I need them, Richard. Believe me.’
He was silent then; there was nothing to say. He had neglected her for his work, he could not deny it. And she was right, that the plants he had supervised and the cars or trucks that they had turned out had been his beloved children, fruit of his brain rather than his loins.
‘Very well,’ he said; and, a long while later, ‘Good.’
The earl said, ‘So Hoggin’s going to get the roof done for us. He knows a contractor who’ll do it for half of what anyone else has quoted. And he’ll lend me most of that, at low interest. Smart fellow, Hoggin.’
‘And unscrupulous,’ the countess said. ‘You should be very careful in any dealings with him, Roger.’
‘Of course I will be … am,’ the earl said. ‘Have to have him down for tea one day … or a drink. That would be more his line.’
‘A drink with you in the study,’ she said firmly, ‘and you will have an appointment half an hour later.’
‘All right, all right,’ the earl said. He rubbed his hands in front of the fire. His wife was sitting to one side, knitting. He said, ‘We’re going to get that swine Gorse tonight. Skagg has information as to just where and when he’s coming. We’ll give him something to remember us by. We’ll teach him to poach my birds … and have the infernal impudence to announce ahead of time when he’s going to do it.’
His wife said, ‘Roger, you are obsessed with Probyn Gorse. He has you bewitched. You would do better to be thinking about Cantley.’
‘He won’t be sent to France for weeks or months yet,’ Swanwick said, ‘he has to be trained. The Coldstream don’t want any raw ensigns in the trenches.’
‘But he will be sent, sooner or later.’
The door opened and two young women came in, their elder daughter Lady Barbara Durand-Beaulieu and their widowed daughter-in-law, Mrs Arthur, wearing the evening dress uniform of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Nursing Service, which she had joined, from St Mary’s Hospital, the day after Arthur’s death had been confirmed. She was at present a ward sister in the big military hospital at Netley, on the Solent, but spending forty-eight hours’ Christmas leave with the Swanwicks.
‘Some waits are coming up the drive,’ Lady Barbara said cheerfully, ‘led by old Commander Quigley, I think.’ She spent so much time in the stables now that, however much she washed and bathed and perfumed, a slight, pleasant aura of horse manure always hung around her.
‘Oh God,’ the earl cried, ‘I heard enough carols from those blighters from Brighton the other day – if that’s where they really came from … Came here just to poach a deer or two for Christmas venison, if you ask me – gave Skagg a devil of a time. You go and listen to them. Tell ’em I’ve got a cold, anything. I suppose you’ll have to invite them in for a drink afterwards.’
‘We always have, and always will,’ the countess said placidly. ‘Run along, girls.’
As soon as they were alone again, she said, ‘When the waits leave, we must talk about that … girl. Florinda Gorse. Cantley must be made to give her up before she’s in a position to sue him for something.’
‘What use can she be to him when he’s at Windsor? He may already have given her her marching orders.’
‘Or she’s left him, because he’s not rich enough. We’re going to face hard times, Roger, unless the war ends soon and Cantley can go back to Toledano’s and start making some real money, a great deal of money.’
‘We’ve faced ’em before,’ the earl said. ‘Come on, I suppose we ought to go out and listen to those bloody waits.’
Archie Campbell reached behind him, without looking, found the bottle, lifted it round, and drank. His eyes never left the painting on the easel before him. It was a landscape, half impressionist, half abstract. It had started out as an early winter scene in Hampshire. He’d done the preliminary sketches and applied the first broad brush strokes near Winchester. There’d been the steeple of a village church in the background, meadows, cows, hedges, a stream, trees along the line of it, a farmhouse; and one figure, a man carrying two heavy pails of milk, in the foreground, coming towards you.
He leaned forward to look more closely at the man, and stumbled into the easel, just grabbing it in time before it fell, then lurching back, to rest his buttocks against the table behind him. Must be losing his balance …
He was losing his balance, that’s why the malt whisky was low in the bottle – not the other way round. Because the painting had changed, not overnight, but in the days he’d been working on it. The steeple had gone, painted out, flattened, you might say. The farmhouse was there, but it was only a ruin now, as he stared at it – and how had that happened? The rich green grass had turned dirty brown-green, and uneven. By daylight you’d swear there were holes, big holes, full of water or snow … The cows were lumps. That was the trouble with abstractions – you knew they were cows, but if you painted them in the abstract, how did anyone else know they were cows? Another viewer might see them as sheep, or bushes, or dead bodies.
And the man struggling along, with shoulders bowed under the milk pails, was … Christ, he had become a soldier, ammunition boxes slung from his shoulders, the square-edged shapes of full ammunition pouches across his chest, bayonet and entrenching tool at his side, the steel helmet an inverted bowl on his head, his eyes gleaming a terrible white.
It was no use trying to deny it. Perhaps he was avoiding the war, perhaps not, but it had come to him … come for him! He reached for the bottle again, and again drank, staring at the painting on the easel. It wavered, moved before his eyes, surging in and out of focus, everything in it becoming more clear to his eyes – a soldier, heavy laden, on the blasted battlefield, corpses, the soldier at the limit of his strength and endurance.
The telephone rang. Archie turned slowly, listening, staring. It rang and rang and rang. Archie carefully replaced the bottle on the table, and went out.
Ten minutes later he barged in through the doors of the Chelsea recruiting centre, fell to his knees, pulled himself up by holding on to the table in front of him, and said, ‘I wanna join up … Argylls.’
Two sergeants behind the desk looked him up and down, grinning. One said, ‘You’re right to choose a Scotch regiment, laddie, we can see that.’
‘I’m a Campbell,’ Archie cried, ‘a bluidy Campbell. So I mun go to the Argylls. If they’ll take me!’
The sergeant said, ‘It’s Christmas Eve, laddie. An’ ye’ve had a drop or two too much. We can’t pin the ribbon on you in this state. Come back in the morning … not tomorrow, Boxing Day, eh?’
‘I wanna join the Argylls, now!’ Archie said, weaving and half falling. ‘Take me away now!’
The other sergeant muttered to his comrade, ‘That’s a good suit of clothes, Bill. He’ll like as not fall down and freeze to death if he tries to walk home … We’d best send him home in a taxi. He’ll be back on Boxing Day, if he means it.’
No waits ever came to Probyn Gorse’s cottage and none came this evening; but about eight o’clock Skagg the head keeper came, with a brace of rabbits, and banged on the closed door.
‘Your granddad in?’ Skagg asked innocently.
‘I don’t see him,’ Fletcher said.
Over the young man’s shoulder Skagg saw Florinda and the Woman, at the stove. Probyn might be in the bedroom … but the dog
hadn’t barked. He was out with Probyn, on the job, that’s why. But in case he was wrong, one of the new men had been watching the cottage since afternoon – just as an extra precaution: though now that he knew when and where Probyn was going to take the pheasants, it didn’t really matter how he got there.
He lifted up the rabbits, ‘Compliments of his Lordship, for all of you. Merry Christmas.’
Fletcher took the rabbits with a nod, but no word. Skagg walked off and Fletcher closed the door behind him. He threw the rabbits to the Woman, then sat down at the table and picked up the book he had been reading.
Florinda said, ‘I’m going back to London tomorrow, soon’s Granddad gets home.’
Fletcher put down the book. He knew that his sister wanted to talk to him, or she would not have interrupted his reading. He said, ‘Back to the same place? Cantley’s leaving you there?’
‘He told me he’d have to give it up by the end of January.’
‘So you’re coming home? Don’t reckon Lady S will want you back in the Big House, though.’
‘I’m going to get married.’
The Woman stopped her stirring but said nothing, listening. Fletcher said, ‘To Cantley?’
‘He didn’t ask me. Another man did.’
‘Who?’
‘The Marquis of Jarrow.’
‘We are high and mighty, aren’t we?’ Fletcher said, grinning and slapping Florinda’s hand as it lay on the table beside his book. ‘Who the hell is he when he’s at home?’
‘He owns a dozen coal mines and most of Newcastle-on-Tyne.’
‘So he says.’
‘So Cantley says. He found out for me, after I told him. Cantley’s a good man … I wish he’d asked me, but he didn’t.’
‘And the Marquis of Jarrow is tall and handsome and strong, with wavy fair hair, an’ he’s the best horseman in England, and …’