God is an Englishman

by R. F Delderfield

  Only one or two bystanders saw him die. Most of them, including those scrabbling frantically among the wreckage of the carriages lying in the stream, ran for their lives when coach and vans crashed down between the piers, remaining upright for a moment before slipping sideways and rolling over on their backs like three grotesque insects with wheels instead of legs.

  Three

  1

  HER RESPONSES DURING WHAT SHE LATER CAME TO REGARD AS THE DEEP TRANCE period, a matter of ten days or so, must have been as involuntary as they were polite and practical; orders issued; information supplied; decisions taken, all with that frozen area of her brain that had governed speech and actions at the scene of the crash, and continued to serve her up to the moment they came to her with the straight alternative. To amputate, or to let him take his chance. If it was a chance.

  The decision had a curious effect. It cracked the ice that had insulated her to a great extent but, once it was made, a second, shallower trance succeeded it, so that full awareness of what the disaster meant to them all in terms of personal adjustments continued to elude her. This second state of mind prevailed through the remainder of the summer and, to a degree, until autumn had spotted the wooded spur behind the house with old blood and guinea gold, reminding her that the rhythm of the universe was entirely unchanged, that it had not faltered, as everything else had faltered, because a foreman platelayer had looked at the wrong page of a railway timetable on the afternoon of the ninth of June.

  That same night she paused to do something it had not occurred to her to do throughout the entire interval. She stopped in the act of undressing to hold a candle up to the dressing table mirror, studying the reflection calmly and objectively in a manner uncharacteristic of a time when she had acknowledged vanity as a vice that a woman deeply in love was entitled to practise.

  What she saw in the oval frame astonished her. A tense, hollow-eyed woman she would have judged about thirty-four or five. A woman who had slept very little in weeks and who was convalescing perhaps but had, in the process, struck some kind of bargain with the future, exchanging dimples and a ripe mouth for a tautly-stretched skin and a prim little gash. Someone who had ceased to be concerned with the clothes she wore, how she dressed her hair, what effect sun, wind, and insomnia had upon her looks.

  She sat studying this stranger for a long time, moving slowly towards the point of recognition. Outside the night sounds in paddock and copse resolved themselves into a familiar pattern and with that small part of her mind not engaged with the process of adjusting to the transition from polite, disembodied ghost to someone of flesh and blood and complete awareness, she juggled with dates, measuring the most distant of them against the time available for a counterattack upon the terrible demands of the last few weeks and finding a measure of reassurance in the answer to the sum she set herself.

  Spring was the earliest estimate Sir John Levy had given as the time of his return. It would take a man that long, Sir John had said, to learn to walk again, and it was two seasons and a child away. Pregnancy exacted toll from the figure but was, on the whole, an honest trader in that it often bestowed something in return. Bloom to the cheeks, and a definite sense of renewal in terms of youth and vitality, a very comforting thought, to be used as a reserve against months of loneliness and the stresses resulting from the biggest challenge of her life.

  Then, as the candle guttered in the draught, another thought occurred to her. Like a whiff of fresh air invading a stale sickroom, like the swift passage of the court jester through a council chamber of sour-faced ministers of State, the enormity of her double deception proclaimed itself, so that the tight little mouth she was studying quivered, experimenting with the forgotten habit of laughter. And it deserved a laugh, she told herself, as he, of all people, would be the first to admit, for how many husbands returned home after a nine-month's absence to learn that they had not only been superseded as helmsman of a business but were obliged, into the bargain, to acknowledge an addition to the family?

  The secret smile was like a spring opening a door sealed against the past and, she found, as the door opened, that she had the courage to look and to contemplate, to look back and see herself slumped over that farmhouse table sipping tea from a mug thirty minutes after they had dragged her semi-conscious and half-naked down on to the line. It was good to see herself in that abject posture, drained and vulnerable, for the woman in the mirror was far from beaten. She looked very tired, and desperately overwrought, but she was both armed and armoured against the future and compared very favourably with the complacent little baggage who had used that same mirror the morning they all set out for the picnic on Folkestone beach.

  The interval between emerging from the wrecked coach and finding herself in the crowded farmhouse kitchen, with her children around her, and so many strangers coming and going, was a very blurred memory. She did not recall how she got there, dazed from the impact and that prolonged escape through the window into the arms of the men who caught her and set her down as tenderly as though she was a bubble that would burst. She had a vague recollection of stumbling across a field, a battlefield it seemed, but unlike any she had seen in the illustrated papers at the time of the Crimea and Mutiny. There was no shape to it, and no dignity. Dead and wounded lay about in abundance but they were not arranged in graceful attitudes as in the pictures, and seemed, one and all, to be in strident revolt against the fate that had spewed them into a water-meadow. Some kind of directing force was present, however, for a stream of walking wounded were all moving in a single direction, through gaps in a hedge, and across a grainfield already trampled flat, to a red-roofed building that formed three sides of a steaming midden. The children, her children that is, seemed to come and go, so that she seemed to be watching them through a thick lens held by an unsteady hand and it needed a tremendous effort on her part to assure herself that they were whole, and present as a unit, but for the time being Adam remained outside the range of contemplation. It was much later that she understood why.

  It had to do with the kind of man he was and also, to some extent, with the strength and dexterity he had exerted to drag her free of the wreckage and propel her within reach of the hands that plucked her through the hole and down on to the line. A man who could lift her clear of the floor, whilst lying flat on his back and half-blinded with blood, must surely have been capable of following her down on to the line, but what had become of him since was more than she could say. A man like that, she assumed, must be in urgent demand nearer the river where the main part of the train had piled up along the banks of the Beult. Then somebody was confronting her, a haggard, middle-aged man, with a pointed imperial, and was saying something about a coach that hung over the gap. And then someone else joined him and suddenly, or so it seemed, she was the centre of attention, and knew somehow that this had to do with Adam. The man with the imperial took hold of her arm and she caught a word or two he uttered…”went down”…”no time”…”still there,” and suddenly, without much sense of shock, she understood the drift of what they were trying to say, relating it to the reverberating clatter that accompanied her slither down the embankment to the field. He was not out there helping after all. He was still in that carriage and almost certainly dead, and her first, overriding thought was that she must go to him.

  They tried hard to dissuade her, not just the persistent man with the beard, but others, including two or three whitefaced men and one young woman, with her dress hanging in tatters, but she pushed through them, saying, “He's my husband! I’m not afraid to look at him.”

  They went out then, resignedly, a sorry little procession consisting of herself, the man with the imperial, another man in bloodsoaked overalls, and the young woman clutching her rags about her. She heard Deborah call but ignored her, crossing the yard, negotiating the gap in the hedge and moving over the field now dotted with couples hurrying past carrying bundles on improvised stretchers, to that part of the meadow where a single coach and two vans lay uptu
rned, the wheels glinting in the strong sunshine.

  There was a group of men at the free end of the carriage using a crowbar laid across a great, squarecut baulkhead and as they sweated and strained the end of the coach rose slightly and tilted, making a sucking noise as it parted from the deep, muddy scar on the grass. Stooping low she caught a glimpse of him, or rather of his sand-coloured coat, together with the picnic-basket they had carried down to Folkestone. The basket was squashed almost flat. She cried out then, dropping on her hands and knees and crawling forward under the leading edge of the roof. Someone tried to hold her, but she took a firm grip on a projecting plank and all that happened was that her ripped bodice, already split across the front, parted down the back as far as her belt. She went on, nevertheless, burrowing steadily through an accumulation of loose debris and calling his name and at last she managed to insert her head through the narrow gap between a bulge of leather and the top of the flattened picnic basket.

  He was lying on his back in a little hollow formed by the concave slant of the shattered timbers. One leg was clear but the other, splayed out at an angle, was pinned by Deborah's trunk and the trunk in its turn was held by a loose axle, as thick as a man's wrist. His face, turned away from her, was streaked with half-dried blood, his hair was white with dust, and one hand, flung across his chest, still held her boot.

  It was the boot, that she had not even missed, that enabled her to piece together those blurred intermittent memories of the last few moments they had spent in the coach as it hung suspended over the gap. She understood then that he had been instrumental in getting the children clear of that shambles as well as herself, but just how this had been achieved she could not imagine. It must have been so however, for all four of them were alive and safe, and only he was lying here in the wreck, crushed, battered, and almost surely dead.

  They were calling piteously to her now and someone grabbed her by the booted foot, but she kicked herself free and thrust her body still deeper into the wreck. She had to know. She had to learn for herself that it was over and done with. She could not compose herself to wait until somebody like that man with the beard, or that man in bloodied overalls, broke the news to her in halting, evasive phrases. She pushed her hand through the gap and tore at the lapel of his jacket, still buttoned to the waist. The cloth came away easily, indicating that it was split down the back and her palm moved under his shirt to the heart. Aware of nothing else around her she tensed herself to distinguish a beat and when it came, faint but definite, she let out a great shout of triumph. Then a firmer pressure closed over both feet and she was hauled backwards, still holding the tatters of his sand-coloured coat.

  2

  They learned of it on their respective patches within a few hours of the issue of provisional casualty lists, reacting to the dolorous news according to their several temperaments.

  Catesby, seeing his name in the critically injured column, told his stableman that Swann would die, was probably dead already, and when the man asked how he could know this he said, savagely, “His sort always do. It's the scabs who survive!” Then he telegraphed Tybalt, demanding to know if there was any point in his catching the night express south.

  Fraser read of it an hour or so later, returning from a long haul to Leith and wondered, wretchedly, what would happen to him, and how this tragedy would affect his daughter Phoebe, who had been so happy down there at that great place they maintained in Kent. He wrote at once to her, saying more or less the same as Catesby, but he did not telegraph. Even at a time like this Fraser was not a man to waste money.

  Bryn Lovell, in the Mountain Square, was shown a newspaper containing an account of the disaster by his mulatto wife and went out to his office, locking the door and pulling down the blind. He did this not as a gesture of mourning or even grief but because he wanted to study the newspaper undisturbed and evaluate Swann's chances as he would assess the vital aspects of a difficult haul.

  Young Rookwood, acknowledging that he owed everything to the man who had come marching into his bedroom when he was nursing a black eye, wept and would not touch his supper, despite Mrs. Gilroy's restrained coaxing. Vicary, of The Bonus, caught the midday train to London Bridge, arriving to find the yard in a terrible state of confusion, with Saul Keate incommunicado in the tack room, and Tybalt almost hysterical with anxiety, running up and down the belfry steps carrying a meaningless assortment of papers, or on his knees in his counting-house cubicle imploring the Almighty to intervene.

  Down in the Western Wedge, where even bad news travelled at a countryman's gait, Hamlet Ratcliffe, and Augusta learned of it by means of the Headquarters telegram and Hamlet, like his neighbour Rookwood, left his shepherd's pie un-tasted, declaring that this would spell certain ruin for them all. When Augusta asked why, hinting that a business of this size could surely run itself while Adam Swann was nursed back to health, he reproached her for being so stupid as to assume anyone could survive such a buffeting and adding, with gloomy relish, that the business would go under the hammer in a matter of weeks and old stagers like himself would be shown the door by the new management. For once, however, Augusta took issue with him, saying, sharply for her, “Dornee go to fretting about us, Hamlet. Think on they tackers, fatherless at their age, poor mites! Do ’ee reckon his missis would like to zend ’em down yer out of the way for a spell?” and later, when he was out of the way, she took the unheard-of step of writing a letter to Mrs. Swann expressing her sympathy and containing this proposal.

  Morris, of the Southern Pickings, was the first to take positive action, locking his premises well before time in order to catch a train for Abergavenny and consult Lovell, whose judgements he trusted. For Morris, alone among the provincials, knew that two sizeable haulage firms would be happy to acquire the Swann network, and it occurred to him at once that neither would miss this opportunity of snapping up a competitor. He had no ulterior motive. If Swann died, or came out of hospital too maimed for work, then he felt he owed it to Swann's dependants to cast around in advance for the best possible price.

  Of the provincial managers only young Godsall, of North Pickings, noticed the name “Blubb” in the list of dead. There was no reason why they should as yet, for Blubb's part in the rescue operations was not yet known. Nor was it until Charles Dickens, pursuing private lines of inquiry, identified the gallant, purple-faced, blubbery old man who had clung to the swaying wreck until Henrietta had been lifted clear and had then been abandoned to jump to his death. The body was identified that same night by means of a consignment note found in the coachee's breeches’ pocket, but Blubb's clumsy act of heroism went unnoticed. Dickens, helping the dazed Henrietta down the embankment had not seen him fall, and Henrietta had not recognised him as he dragged her through the window and down to the men balanced on the baulkhead. His waggon was found and commandeered by the rescue service, and it was assumed that he had been standing close-by, awaiting a goods delivery, when wreckage from one of the coaches fell on him and killed him. All that night he lay in the improvised mortuary with the other victims, under a blanket loaned by a Staplehurst villager. Later on formal identification was made by Michelmore, who explained to a bemused Headquarters why Blubb had happened to be on the scene. It was a grim coincidence, Tybalt thought, that two leading men in the network should be struck down within yards of one another, when neither could have known the other was present. Godsall, reading Blubb's name, jumped to the conclusion that they had been travelling in consort and his grief for Swann and Swann's family was mitigated, to some extent, by the certainty of immediate promotion to the Triangle. He thought it in bad taste, however, to mention this in a letter to Headquarters, and wrote instead to Henrietta, offering his services in any capacity. The letter, with Augusta's and many others, lay unopened on Adam's study desk. Henrietta had more important matters on hand than to read condolences.

  Edith Wadsworth read of it in an evening paper she chanced to buy when she was returning from an evening visit to the market. She di
d not usually buy anything but the morning papers, and rarely bothered to scan sensational national news but a railway disaster lay within her new field of operations and the contents bill, propped against the stand, read, “South Eastern Boat Train Tragedy; Many Dead.”

  She took the paper into her office, perched herself on her stool, and glanced through the pages, catching her breath a little at the magnitude of the crash. Then, but still idly, she glanced down the list of casualties, and when she saw the name “A. Swann” her heart seemed to stop and she said aloud, “It can’t be! It can’t. ” But it was. Less than an hour later Tybalt's telegram arrived, and she sent for the waggonmaster and asked him to circulate it among the staff. He thought she looked shocked but he was a taciturn man and after a few expressions of dismay, he left. She sat on, watching the sun sink behind the high brick wall of the adjacent brewery. The tragedy, to her at least, was a very personal one and unlike all the other managers, even young Rookwood, she did not relate it to her bread and butter or even the future of the firm. Its likely repercussions in this respect did not cross her mind. Instead, she found herself thinking of him as the inheritor of the strange fatality that seemed to account for all the men who had touched her emotions. Matt Hornby, drowned at sea. Wickstead, a professional thief on the run. And now Adam Swann, to whom, at any time in the last few years, she would gladly have given herself. What did that make her, she wondered? A Jonah trailing bad luck wherever she went? His wife and children were safe, it seemed, and she tried to picture their desolation, finding it very difficult for her own wretchedness absorbed her, and she wished now that she had held him in her arms at least once. She recalled then his dedication to eccentric ideals, his tremendous vitality, and his masculinity, understanding that she could not sit waiting for driblets of news from Fleet Street or from Headquarters, and that her presence in the yard, at a time like this, was superfluous, for she could not concentrate on any routine matter for a second. She locked up, crossed the yard to the stable and gave Dymond, the horsemaster, her keys. “I’m going up to town,” she said. “They’ll probably need help and you can manage here, can’t you?” Dymond said he could, making no further comment. It was common knowledge in the network that Edith Wadsworth and the Gaffer enjoyed a special relationship. The older men, like Dymond, thought of it as a business association. Most of the younger ones took it for granted that Edith Wadsworth had earned her stewardship on her back.