God is an Englishman

by R. F Delderfield

  He said, pushing back his chair and clearing his throat, “Your father and I have some business to settle, lad. Take Henrietta a turn in the garden,” and deliberately avoiding his daughter's eye he stood up and rang for the maid, at the same time offering his cigar case to Goldthorpe.

  To his relief Henrietta also rose and grimaced in the old man's direction before gliding round the end of the table and floating decorously towards the French window that opened on to the terrace. He caught Goldthorpe watching her movements, and the wintry smile on the old man's face helped to absorb the choler he felt that a chit of a girl could come so near holding him up to ransom. Impatient of the restraint he had had to exercise throughout the meal he discarded any attempt at a preamble and said, bluntly, “Well, Matt, now that you’ve met her…?”

  “She's a bonnie lass,” the old man said, carefully, “and a very civil one. She's not much to say for herself, but I’m not holding that against her. That's rare in a young woman these days. Does she ken why I’m over here?”

  “Leave your lad to do his own talking,” Sam said. “At his age I wouldn’t have wanted a spokesman for a lass like Henrietta.”

  It amused him that Goldthorpe had been so thoroughly deceived by his daughter's unrelenting glumness. No doubt Henrietta had hoped it would discourage them and here was the old man applauding it. Unexpectedly Sam felt the tensions easing and poured Goldthorpe a generous glass of port as they faced one another over the ruins of the meal. When the maid had reached the door with a tray of dishes he called, “Leave the rest, I’ll ring when I’m ready,” and turned back to Goldthorpe with a flourish. “We’ll cut the cackle and get down to details,” he said, biting on his cigar. “I intend to settle five hundred a year on her, and I’ll add another hundred when the first child shows up. More if it's a boy.”

  The old man's head came up sharply, disconcerted by his directness. Sam went on, without giving his opponent time to hedge, “But you can do me a favour in exchange. That strip of waste between my offloading bays and the railway siding—it could save me two hours’ teamwork a day if I could run a brace of rails across it. I’m not expecting it for nowt. I’ll pay a fair price for it.”

  The old man's head wobbled as though he had received a box on the ear. He shut his eyes, as if absorbing the smart, and his mouth, Sam thought, looked like a rockseam depressed at each extremity. He recognised the expression at once as Matt Goldthorpe's “money-look,” as much a feature of the local scenery as Scab's Castle. It pleased him to be able to summon it so effortlessly. Matt said, with a kind of groan, “Nay, I had plans to build two rows of cottages on that strip, Rawlinson.”

  “Aye,” said Sam, indulgently, “happen you did, but then I had plans to go looking for a son-in-law among the shipwrights in Liverpool. Some of them are on the way to becoming gentry and there's not one who couldn’t call up as much as you.”

  Goldthorpe blinked twice, and Sam settled himself to wait, as for the next move of a doughty chess opponent. “Makepeace is shaping well,” Goldthorpe said, noncommittally. “He thinks of little but work, or didn’t until he took a fancy to your lass.” Then, “Five hundred, you said?”

  “Aye,” said Sam, “subject to you selling that strip.”

  There was a longish pause. Through a blue haze of tobacco smoke they measured one another's advantages, a matched pair, settling comfortably to the collar of avarice.

  5

  Twilight lingered in the open patches of lawn between summerhouse and copse, and the air was heavy with the scent of roses and cloves. Makepeace and Henrietta walked decorously, two children given permission to absent themselves for a brief interval but without getting into mischief or soiling their Sunday clothes. It was very still out here. The only sounds that reached Henrietta were the whisper of her dress (a dress she was already beginning to hate) and the plaintive squeak of Makepeace's new boots. Back in the house, in the presence of the older men, she had been protected against the sense of outrage that this pallid young man's suit represented, perhaps by easy accessibility to her own room, or by the nearness of Mrs. Worrell, her sole confidante, but out here she was vulnerable. She could not run far in this balloon of a gown, and there was nowhere to run to in any case. Until this moment she had been conscious of any number of sensations concerning him, but now he produced in her nothing but loathing, held in check by contempt for his timidity. As they moved down the slope, however, she sensed that he was not as timid as she had supposed. In the presence of his repulsive old father he was a quaking schoolboy, cringing under the rod. Released from that presence he acquired a kind of swagger that began to show in a strutting walk and the smug, proprietary glances he directed at her. He said, presently, “This is far enough, Henrietta,” and caught her by the arm.

  His touch, even through the elbow-length glove she wore, felt clammy, and the prospect of being embraced by him threatened her like the onrush of a dragon with moist paws and foetid breath. She fell back on the only defence at her disposal, a counterfeit and conventional modesty, instilled into her by a succession of amateur governesses, withdrawing her hand and saying, “Please, Makepeace! Behave!”

  It sounded very silly, a formal protest directed at a professional thief caught ransacking the family silver, and, in a way, she felt herself beset by thieves, a trio of them, including among their number her own father. Their quarry, she realised, was not merely her freedom and future but the most private areas of her body. She was like someone trying to scramble to the summit of an icebound slope without much hope of avoiding a fatal tumble, arms and legs flailing, clothes ripped, and flesh bruised in a descent into—what? A lifetime in the company of this parody of a man, superintending his household, being pinched and patronised by that old miser back in the house, undressing and lying down in bed with Makepeace, and the sheer blankness rather than the unsavouriness of that prospect made her stomach contract within the confines of her tightly laced corset.

  He said, with a hint of bluster, “Behave? But I don’t have to ‘behave’ any more, Henrietta. You know very well what they’re discussing back there. You know why father and I are here tonight. You aren’t saying your father hasn’t mentioned it, are you?” He paused a moment and when she said nothing he drew a long, whistling breath. “I’m expected to propose marriage to you before we go in. Then there's to be a settlement and I’m to get The Clough, as a wedding present. We went and looked at it yesterday and found it very suitable. The tenant is getting his notice tomorrow.”

  What was there to say to that? He mentioned The Clough, a small, manor-type house they owned two miles north of the town, as though the prospect of sharing it with him would make any girl of her age swoon with ecstasy, and his very certitude had the power to divert her thoughts and check the panic advancing on her like a wall of sludge.

  “When was all this decided? When and how?” she demanded and had the small satisfaction of seeing him look as disconcerted as had her father when she had challenged him that same afternoon.

  “Why, soon after the Victory Ball,” he said, with a hint of a stutter, “I made up my mind then, Henrietta.”

  “You made up your mind? Didn’t it even occur to you to mention it to me?”

  He seemed genuinely astonished. “Mention it? But how could I mention it? I had first to discuss it with father. How could I run contrary to him? I have no money. I get a weekly wage, like everyone else in his employ, but he’ll make me a generous allowance as soon as we’re married, and you’ll have money too. That's what they’re talking about now.”

  It was astonishing how people like the Goldthorpes and her father were able to canalise everything that happened to them, or was likely to happen to them, into streams leading to that single reservoir. Birth, death, marriage, all manner of personal relationships, all human endeavours and aspirations, led back to that one word. Money. Nothing else counted. Nothing else was of the smallest importance. She said, desperately now, “But I don’t love you, Makepeace. How could I? I hardly know you.
We’ve met a few times, we’ve danced together twice. How could I make up my mind about anything as important as that at a moment's notice? Marriage…you and me, moving into a big house like The Clough… living together, always…? It's something that any girl would have to…to…think about a long time, even a millhand!”

  He laughed outright at this, but there was relief in his laughter. He said, taking her hand again, “It isn’t anything you have to decide, Henrietta. It's important, of course, far too important for someone like you to decide. You wouldn’t know how, for that's a man's job and anyway, it hasn’t been decided in a moment. I’ve been considering it ever since the Victory Ball, and so has my father and your father. And now it's arranged!” and his arm went round her waist with a firmness that surprised her.

  The wave of panic touched her and broke over her so that she was too frightened and too breathless to find the strength to pull away from him a second time. She found herself groping for words as if they had been pieces of wreckage to keep her head above surface, but even in the tumult of the moment she had a horrid certainty that he assumed her to be overwhelmed by nothing more momentous than the majesty of the occasion, that and the vapourings that were reckoned obligatory on the part of an inexperienced girl receiving her first proposal of marriage. She said, despairingly, “When…?” but he seemed to take this as an invitation for both arms went round her and his face loomed over her, blotting out the light from the terrace. The scent of flowers in the half-moon beds were vanquished by the whiff of his breath, heavy with claret and a sourness that made her want to retch. She would have fought back with her knees if the arc of the crinoline had not made this impossible, and her right arm had not been pinioned by his left. There were only two avenues of resistance available, a left-handed downsweep of her fingernails across his cheek, or a simulated faint. She chose the latter as the easier to accomplish, buckling her knees so that she slipped below the level of his waistcoat. Then, before he could reach out and support her, she heard the steady drumming of hooves and the spatter of loose gravel, and suddenly he was gone and she was on her knees on the grass, cocooned in yards of silk and muslin. Voices called distractedly from the drive and the terrace, and she smelled the sharp whiff of a sweating horse. Behind her, as she rose, was a glow in the sky, yellowish white and extraordinarily vivid, so that she thought for a moment she had indeed fainted. But then she saw that the horseman was Joe Wilson, her father's overseer, and that people, including Makepeace and old Matthew, were jostling round him where he had reined in opposite the dining-room windows.

  Across the fifty-yard gap her father's voice reached her. “Afire? Our mill?” and then everyone began running back and forth, and she saw Makepeace glance towards the summerhouse, and instinct prompted her to move out of the ribbon of light cast by the dining-room lamps and into the fringe of the copse where the ferns grew waist high. She heard him call twice, but nobody came in pursuit and within minutes Goldthorpe's carriage came pounding through the stable arch and she watched the three men scramble in, and Joe Wilson wheel his sweating horse. Then, in a long, rambling clatter, they were gone.

  She thought gratefully, “It's a sign from heaven, it's God helping me to escape!” and without conscious thought her resolution was formed and she dodged round the summerhouse, avoiding the group of yammering servants gathering on the terrace as they stared up at the glow in the sky, and along the north side of the house to the conservatory door.

  She went through it to the hall, up the stairs and along the passage to her room, still littered with her preparations for the dinner party. From the cupboard, where her dresses hung, she dragged out a small basket-trunk full of odds and ends and emptied them on the floor and after that the carpetbag holdall Mrs. Worrell had loaned her to carry discarded clothes to the needy. Recalling its purpose, and the patronage with which she had filled it, she thought of herself as far needier at this moment than the most impoverished family she had visited in the company of the curate, Mr. Burbage. She was deficient in many things, including advice, money, and, above all, a plan, but there was no time to isolate any need beyond one to put distance between herself and Makepeace Goldthorpe. It did not occur to her to consider the prospect of staying on and defying her father, for no one had ever successfully defied Sam Rawlinson. A man who could hold a town to ransom through a long summer drought would make light of a locked bedroom door, or tears, or threats of suicide, or anything that she could do to divert him from the course he had decided. Men like Cromaty and McShane, the strike leaders back in the town, understood that and that was why they had put a torch to the mill, and now, she supposed, they would all end their lives in gaol on that account. But Cromaty and McShane had offered her a loophole for in these circumstances he was unlikely to return to the house before morning, and this gave her a minimum of eight hours to circle the town to the west, reach Lea Green, and catch a train to Liverpool where regular packet boats were said to leave for Ireland. She would be miles away, and perhaps even at sea, before a search could be mounted, and it would be some time before anyone thought of asking Mrs. Worrell where she might have gone.

  She wondered, as she began to stuff underclothes and toilet bag into the trunk, whether even Mrs. Worrell, the only person in her life who qualified as a confidante, would recall telling her those stories about her mother's family in Kerry. Her father, if he had ever heard of them, had surely forgotten them long ago. Months might elapse before inquiries could be pursued across the Irish Channel and at the moment she could only think in terms of hours. It struck her then that perhaps this flight was not a spontaneous idea after all and might have been dormant in her mind for a long time, or why else was the name and address of relatives she had never seen rooted in her memory? Uncle and Auntie O’Bannion. Shaun and Dympna O’Bannion. Briar Cottage, Ballynagall, County Kerry, Ireland. The words jingled like bells promising laughter and protection, so that she saw her unknown uncle as the traditional stage Irishman, with gap-toothed smile, and her aunt as a woman with a shawl over her head and kind, deepset eyes that would light up with pleasure when a fugitive niece came knocking on the door of Briar Cottage, Ballynagall.

  When the basket-trunk was full, and fastened with a girdle, she began putting things into the holdall: shoes, a needlework bag, an extra pair of drawers, one or two pieces of trumpery jewellery, a nightgown, and a half-emptied box of toffees bought when she went into the town to collect the dress. On second thoughts, recalling that she liked toffees, she stuffed the tin under the girdle where it would be handy. Then she turned out her purse on the bed. There was a shilling and a few coppers, enough to buy a railway ticket from Lea Green to Liverpool but certainly insufficient for even a deck passage to Dublin. She put the small change back in her purse and the purse in her reticule, and then, gathering up basket-trunk and holdall, she opened the door and listened.

  The prattle of the maids rose from the hall via the stairwell. The staff would continue to relish the drama until Mrs. Worrell descended on them from somewhere, and Mrs. Worrell was surely to be avoided as the one person in the house with authority to detain her. For a few moments Henrietta hovered on the threshold, uncertain of her next move, but then something stirred around her calves and she heard the panting of Twitch, her liver and white spaniel, who must have been roused from his kitchen basket by the outcry and slipped up the backstairs to seek reassurance. The presence of Twitch was an added embarrassment. He was very attached to her and would certainly follow wherever she went. Standing there, shushing the dog, clutching the basket-trunk under one arm and the holdall in the other hand, her thoughts began to sort themselves out. She had to have more money. She had to reach the schoolroom and get her atlas (for who could find their way to Ballynagall without an atlas), and she had to reach the shrubbery bordering the drive without being seen. Money was the first priority, and she thought she knew where she could find some. Taking brief advantage of a surge of the maids out on to the terrace, when someone shouted news of the crimson glow in
the sky, she slipped downstairs and along the passage leading to her father's den.