"You won't do this one thing for me?"
"Of course I won't! Not for your sake, for Rory's, or for the king of the Cannibal Islands!" She glanced up at the kitchen clock, noting it wanted a couple of minutes to two. "I'll give you fifteen minutes to leave. After that, if you haven't gone, I'll wake Alex and tell him what you've done and why. I'm not leaving you down here either, to open that door again and use my kitchen as… as a plotters' den. Get up and get dressed. I mean to see you upstairs and out of the house."
They went through the hall and up the main staircase, turning down the corridor to the old nursery. She stood wordlessly by the door and watched Helen dress and it was as if a terrible weight was pressing on her breast. In ten minutes they were back in the hall and she pulled the lobby curtains aside and looked out. The cab was still there. She said, "Draw the bolt and turn the key. You can let yourself out," and at that Helen turned and she was surprised, and a little startled, to see tears streaming down her face.
"We've been close a long time, Jo."
"All our lives. You think this is easy for me?"
"No, no, it can't be, but you still don't understand. Rory's committee, especially since he lost his seat and joined the staff… well… they didn't trust him before. They don't trust any of Redmond's men. But they trust him now. Him but not me. Because I'm English."
"Dear God, it can't be all that important, Helen! It just can't!"
"To stand well with Sinn Fein? No, that isn't important. Not on its own it isn't. But can't you understand, Jo? It's all I've got to offer Rory. I'm years older than him, and I've never had your looks. And I can't give him children. It's too late for that."
She had a glimpse then of the hidden pressures at work in the relationship of this ill-matched pair; one a man consumed by his own conceit, his mind lost in the fog of Celtic legend and the real and fancied injustices practised upon these people, the other a woman whose entire being was centred on a younger man's flattery and probably unable to think straight once he laid hands upon her.
She said, "I understand in a way, but it doesn't make any difference, Helen. You must see that, besotted as you are with that man. From here on we've no choice, have we? You go your way, I'll go mine," and she moved past her to withdraw the bolts of the front door. And then, as the night air struck chill on her, she remembered something else that might be important.
"I'm returning that case. You'll have to tell me where it was in Alex's room. It wouldn't do for him to find it had been moved in the night."
"You won't tell him then?"
"I don't know. It's something I'll have to think about."
"It was on his chair. He isn't very careful for a man with his responsibilities."
Was it the vaguest of threats? Or a last-minute warning? Did it mean that, from here on, Alex was a marked man as long as he moved unescorted about Ireland? Joanna didn't know. Suddenly she was too tired and too depressed to think about it. Instead she watched her sister descend the steps and stand hesitating under the street lamp. Opposite the cab door opened and somebody got out, but she did not wait to identify him.
2
Back at Tryst, Henrietta's first reaction was of intense relief that she had prevailed upon Joanna to tell her, without piling this additional load on Adam's shoulders. It was enough, as she had found to her cost of late, to put a bold face on one's own troubles without meddling in the affairs of factions, sects, and nations. Her spirits lifted for she recognised, in her interception of Joanna's tale of woe, an opportunity of service, a way leading back to the summit she had occupied in her youth when, by common consent, Adam had confined himself to his business and she to hers, that of steering the family through the crosscurrents of the years.
She said, unequivocally, "Don't mention a word of this to your father. You'll not so much as hint at it, is that clear?"
Joanna, looking pained and puzzled, said, "But surely I have to, don't I? I mean, suppose Helen or Rory come here on a visit? And suppose that visit coincides with one from Alex and Lydia?"
"I'll deal with that if it arises, but I'll not have your father worried, you understand? It was right of you to tell me, and right of you to act as you did. But this is as far as it goes, do you hear?"
"And Alex?"
"There's no point in saying anything to him either. You know that in your heart, Jo."
She paused, recalling an earlier family quarrel that had never really healed, one between Alex and Giles in connection with that awful war, and the misery that had emerged from it for Hugo. What would be served by widening the family breach to include Alex and his sister, who were unlikely to meet again for years? Ireland, confound it, could look to itself. For her part, having lost a grandson, a daughter-in-law, and a daughter in swift succession, she was concerned with what remained. Nothing else mattered. She said, "Listen Jo, Alex and Lydia are sailing for India in a week or two. I was sorry when I heard, but I'm right glad now. Let it pass. Leave it where it is." And then, dejectedly, "You and Helen—I suppose you'll keep yourselves to yourselves from now on?"
"How else could it be?"
"No other way. But it's sad just the same. And very stupid, too, if you think about it. Meddling in men's affairs is always dangerous. What did it bring Romayne but a messy death? What purpose does it serve any of us in the end?" She mused a moment, aware that Joanna was watching her intently. "A woman should have more than enough to absorb her, especially if she has children to rear."
"Helen has no children."
"No, and more's the pity, for if she had she wouldn't have made such a fool of herself. Think yourself fortunate, Jo. Go back to yours and forget this happened. That's my advice, and that's what I want for all of us."
"Is that all you have to say, Mamma?"
"Almost all." She got up and went over to the fireplace, lifting a photograph framed in silver from its pride of place above the hearth. Adam wasn't overfond of displaying family photographs—"sentimental clutter" he called them, much preferring to decorate his walls with oils and water-colours acquired in his forays up and down the country, some of them worth a penny or two, or so he claimed. She took his word for it, but this group photograph meant a lot to her. It was a silver wedding photograph, taken on the lawn in September 1883, and they were all there, every last one of them, together with the three senior in-laws, Denzil, Lydia, and Gisela, and the first brace of grandchildren, Robert and Martin Fawcett. Sixteen all told, less than half the Swann muster today. She studied the group, forgetting Joanna was still there. Jo and Helen were sitting crosslegged in the foreground, sixteen and thirteen respectively and very conscious, judging by the exceptional solemnity of their expression, of the great occasion. She said, passing the picture to her daughter, "It doesn't seem long ago, does it? But three of that group are dead, and now Helen is dead to you. That makes four. Providing you wish it so, that is."
"Are you really saying I should pretend to myself it never happened?"
"I don't know. It's for you to decide. You and Helen, as you get older, and fewer of you are left who remember how it was at Tryst when this picture was taken. I can't tell either of you what to do or what not to do at your age, with homes and husbands of your own. Apart from sparing your father more worry, that is, and I'm in no doubt about that. But I can tell you something I've learned here in all these years. The family is the only thing worth a row of beans in the end, and that's about the only thing in life I learned in advance of your father. I'll tell you something else. When I was a girl, I thought the only sons worth having were soldiers. I don't think so any more. No woman does once she's gone to the trouble of bearing children, and, what's a great deal more tiresome, raising them until they can stand on their own feet. You think hard about that. Helen and you were as good as twins once. Well, I'd value that high above a piece of foolishness hatched up by men, for men never grow up anyway, or not in the way women do." She took the photograph back and rehung it, glancing as she did at the mantelshelf clock. "Go and find your fathe
r. Tell him luncheon will be ready in about twenty minutes. He has to be coaxed to eat just now."
* * *
As soon as Joanna had left, she went over to her bureau beside the window, taking out her address book and leafing through it until she came to the C's. She could rarely remember these outlandish Irish addresses, and even when she did she couldn't spell them without a copy. When she came on Helen's address, she put a marker in the book and sat thinking, grateful for a brief interval of solitude. But presently, having watched Joanna pass beyond the lilac clump and cross the area of lawn where it sloped down to the lake, she took up her pen and began to write, continuing to do so until she had filled one sheet and half another.
The words came easily, for somehow the act of writing restored to her some measure of the authority she had once wielded but had lost since the brood had grown up and gone about their own affairs.
My dear Helen,
Thank you for your letter about Stella and for the lovely wreath that arrived in time. We did not expect you to travel over at such short notice and by now you will have received the newspaper I sent, explaining everything, or everything that matters.
You might like to know your father was wonderful throughout it all. Without him I can't imagine how Denzil and I would have managed, but he feels it as much as either of us, and so does George, who regards himself as responsible for what happened. But this letter isn't about Stella. What happened to her, all the sadness and waste of it, is behind us now and can't be altered, one way or the other. That doesn't apply to you and Jo, however, and I've told her so a moment since, together with advice—that I mean to see she takes—to never breathe a word of it to her father or Alex. That way, given time, you can both pretend it didn't happen. You can do that with most things if you've a mind to, for I have and still do where there's no other way out. And there isn't for you and Jo, or not as I see it. But even supposing either or both of you can't or won't, this is to say that I mean to, because that way, if you ever want to come back here, with or without Rory, there's nothing to stop you, and why should there be? This is still home for all of you, and as long as your father and I are alive I mean it to stay so.
She signed and sealed it and put it in her tray among a dozen others, each acknowledging wreaths and messages of sympathy. It was the only letter there, she reflected, that really said anything.
To Adam and Joanna, slowly climbing the drive in sunshine that was exceptionally strong for the time of the year, the luncheon summons seemed very sonorous, almost like a judgment.
Eight
As From a Pinnacle
In the two years left of the old world, and what some (half-forgetting that Teddy had been replaced by the blameless George) would call "The Edwardian Afternoon," Adam watched as from a pinnacle, armoured against the byblows of fate and able, to some extent, to disassociate himself from all but the process of growing old and that detached curiosity about men and their affairs that had made him the oracle others thought him.
He was like a veteran general, with countless battles behind him, who was yet peripherally caught up in the current war and in receipt, from time to time, of scribbled despatches brought him from afar. And having, as it were, studied their content, he would listen gravely, or sympathetically, or half-humorously, to what the messengers had to say and then prophesy, so that they went away stimulated, or sobered, or mildly fortified by his wisdom.
In the late spring, summer, and early autumn months, he could usually be found out of doors, pottering about his Hermitage museum, or seated on a log in one of the patches of wild wood that varied the pattern of his planted areas, or on one of the stone seats or balustrades that embellished his demesne. But when the rains came and the winds went whooping over the Weald, he retired to his study fireside, browsing among his books.
He was here, one day, when Deborah called for consolation as regards her old and trusted mentor, W. T. Stead, lost on the Titanic and last seen, so survivors said, absorbed in a book as the great liner, symbol of all the new technologies, poised for her final plunge, making nonsense of the claims that she was unsinkable.
"Her sinking seems to me symbolic of all I've observed over the last few years," he said, shaking his head. "Of my generation, too, I suppose, tho' to a lesser extent. For my lot were improvisers, whereas those who came after us—like George— relied on sums worked out in the office instead of in the market-place. Sad that Stead had to be sacrificed to their pride, however. The old warrior deserved better. Reading a book, you say? Well, that was in character, I suppose. He had a high opinion of you once. What did he think about you and the suffragettes?"
Deborah replied that he didn't really approve, for Stead's violence was always confined to words, and edited words at that. "But he was a bonnie fighter," she added, "and I'll always remember him as that."
"Me too." And there returned to him, over an interval of thirty years, the memory of a distraught man awaiting him in his turret at the time of the Pall Mall Gazette's strident campaign on behalf of child prostitutes, served up to satyrs for five pounds a hymen, a man he had been ultimately to champion.
"Well," he said, by way of valediction, "Stead won most of his battles, so maybe the pen does have the edge on the sword."
She knew then that he was debating with himself the old imponderable. Did the end ever justify the means? Or did the end get grotesquely distorted by the means, in their case assaults on the person of the Prime Minister, on the Lossiemouth golf links, the slashing of the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, a bomb in the house of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, another against the walls of Holloway Prison and the militants' Calvary. She had pondered this herself many times, waiting, pinched with hunger, to be released under the Cat and Mouse Act, but had never arrived at any irrevocable decision. Yet she knew that he had and tried to coax it from him.
"You're wavering, Uncle Adam. You've probably decided we're our own worst enemies."
"No, no, not that, for no one can say you didn't give the pen a fair trial," he replied, smiling. "Why, I was reading your pamphlets forty years ago. Aye, and averting my eyes from the first knickerbocker suit, too! It's just that sometimes I wonder if Britain is the best place for you. In France you would have been home and dry long ago, riot being the staple diet over there."
"But that isn't why they hate us, is it?"
"No, it isn't," and his eyes twinkled for a moment.
"Why then?"
"Because you deny what's meat and drink to the politician. Patronage. He can't get along without that. But tell your friends not to despair, my dear. The moment the Government of the day finds it convenient to pat your heads instead of kicking your backsides, you'll get your vote."
He had one of his rare visions then, of a time when every pair of hands, white and gloved, red and calloused, would be needed at the pumps, and out of it, no doubt (providing the ship of state did not follow the Titanic), might come universal suffrage, so effortlessly perhaps that even Mrs. Pankhurst would be caught on the hop. But he said nothing of this to her, for he knew that she, and that clever husband of hers, and George, and all the rest of them, did not believe in his Armageddon.
* * *
One of his most regular visitors these days was George. A George, he was glad to note, who had recovered most of his natural ebullience once he was satisfied he had stolen yet another march over his competitors by shunting his SwannMaxie fleet into regions where they could do the kind of work Swann's one-horse pinnaces had once done, leaving the heavy hauls to his latest nine-day wonder, the articulated trailer, an improvement on the prototype that had cost Martin his life on a Pennine slope.
There were far less Clydesdales and Cleveland Bays on the Swann roster nowadays, and horse-drawn transport was now confined to local runs or over routes where, even yet, motor-vehicles jibbed at the terrain.
A visit from George was usually an ego-booster to the prophet on the pinnacle. For a long time now he had been aware that his advice was no longer
sought out of deference but as insurance, in premiums George had been more than willing to pay since the night he rehearsed them in the parts they were to play at Stella's inquest. You could say that for George, he thought, and it was one reason why he backed him to stay out in front.
Just as Debbie kept him up to the minute on what was happening in the suffragette sector, and Giles briefed him on the national issues, so George kept him abreast on the latest trends in transport.
Their relationship had deepened and broadened appreciably since Stella's death. The partnership had steadied of late, not only because George had evaluated his shrewdness and steadfastness but because Adam had at last adjusted to the stupendous changes in the transport scene since the arrival of the self-propelled vehicle. George saw himself as a master of tactics but when it came to strategy he was always ready to defer to a man who carried in his head a large-scale map of Britain, and indices of all the products that kept the country in the forefront of the world's trading nations.
* * *
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