God is an Englishman

by R. F Delderfield

  3

  The succession of hot summer days passed like units of an endless caravan crossing a desert. For Henrietta, for the old Colonel, and even for five-year-old Stella, there seemed never to have been a time when the sun did not hang motionless over the spur of the woods, when people did not walk on tiptoe and converse in hushed voices, as though in the presence of a corpse, and yet, below the pall, there was a persistent undercurrent of stealthy activity, a coming and going of strangers, of telegraph boys, of half-known associates from the yard like Keate and Tybalt, and a well-mannered young lawyer who introduced himself as Mr. Stock and claimed to be Adam's legal adviser as well as a business associate of two years’ standing.

  Henrietta saw them all, was polite to them all, but she did not take much heed of what they said, or recognise them when they called a second time. She was isolated even from the Colonel, who kept assuring her that there was every reason to hope, especially now that Adam had been moved from the emergency ward in the hospital to the home of Sir Nevil Cook, of Cook's Digestive Breakfast Biscuits, whose factory was hard by the Bermondsey yard and whose patronage, in the early days of the enterprise, had played an important part in getting the business launched in the London area. Tybalt tried to explain the relationship to her. Sir Nevil and Mr. Swann were not friends exactly, he said, but the magnate had always thought highly of the service, and had visited the yard on occasion to confer with Mr. Swann on provincial distribution. He was a generous man and it was characteristic that he should propose moving the injured haulier to his country house near Cranbrook, where the services of his own specialist, Sir John Levy, were available, together with trained nurses he proposed to hire. Tybalt knew Sir Nevil as a noted evangelist, of course, and a Member of Parliament. What he did not know was that the discussions he referred to were not confined to business matters, or that Adam had given the M.P. detailed information to help the passage of Shaftesbury's Chimney-Sweep Bill, assistance Sir John recalled with gratitude as soon as he heard of the disaster.

  She had no opinion to offer concerning the move. The whole thing was out of her hands so long as Adam remained in a coma and her two visits to his bedside had brought her close to the point of physical collapse. He was getting first-class medical attention and was still, in their quaint phrase, “holding his own,” but that was all and her helplessness to influence the situation built up inside her like steam in a valveless boiler, so that sometimes she felt that her brain would burst and render her as helpless and immobile as he. She could get nothing and nobody into correct focus and this had nothing to do with delayed shock but everything to do with the split-second transition from serene happiness to black and bitter misery. It was no help to remind herself, as she did from time to time, that she had responsibilities to the Colonel, to her children, to Avery's child, and to the future generally. For as long as he lay there, swathed in bandages, with that strange dead look about him, and his crushed leg resting on a kind of gallows, there could be no future, for her or for any of them, and this belief was underlined by the agitation of his associates who kept appearing and disappearing, with soothing words and distraught looks that belied them, as though they already thought of Adam Swann as dead and buried.

  The strange thing was she was incapable of finding temporary release in tears. In the fortnight or so that elapsed between her crawl under the wrecked waggon and the appearance at Tryst of two elderly strangers who drove up in a smart, two-horse equipage and demanded an audience with Mrs. Swann, she had not shed a tear and neither, if one discounted an occasional doze tormented with dreams, had she slept. The only relief she could find from the weight of dread that pressed down on her was in the silent presence of Avery's child, whose thigh injury kept her within call when she was not helping Phoebe Fraser to distract the children. For some reason, possibly because Deborah was old enough to appreciate the situation, she felt much closer to her than to her own children and could communicate with her, albeit wordlessly, in a way that was not possible with the Colonel, who she supposed had been insulated against the horror of death and wounds. Deborah would come upon her as she sat pretending to read letters in the sewing-room and take a seat beside her, saying nothing but taking her hand and holding it, sometimes for half-an-hour at a stretch. Then a current of communication would pass between them, as though the physical contact synchronised their grief and then, still without a word, Deborah would lift her hand, kiss it, and steal away, and she would feel tenderness for the funny little creature stir under her breast but it was never sufficiently clamant to release a flow of tears.

  She received the two elderly visitors in the drawing-room where the curtains were half-drawn and it was cool. They introduced themselves as Sir Nevil Cook, Adam's host, and the specialist Sir John Levy, a surgeon who had, so Sir Nevil informed her, attended the royal family before his retirement to the country.

  “Sir John is my neighbour and was good enough to drive over and take a look at your husband,” Sir Nevil said, in his curiously squeaky voice. “We thought you should know that hope definitely exists, Mrs. Swann. If only on certain conditions.”

  She had been obliged to make an effort to concentrate on what they said but the words “on certain conditions” made an impact. She said, in a whisper, “Conditions? What could anyone do that would be likely to help him?” and Sir John replied bluntly, “Amputation of the left leg, Mrs. Swann. That, in my view, is essential. It should be done at once. Tonight.”

  “Take his leg off ?”

  “Unless we do he isn’t likely to survive, or not in my view. Even discounting mortification he could never use it again. It is broken in four places and the foot is crushed. We must have your assent, Mrs. Swann, but I urge you to give it. It represents his only chance of recovery, you understand?”

  “Yes, I understand,” and then, rising, “May I have a little time to think about it?”

  “Not much time, Mrs. Swann.” He took out a ponderous watch, holding it in the hollow of his hand. “It is coming up to midday and it will likely take us two hours to get back to Sir Nevil's place and possibly another hour to prepare him for the operation. I could operate by four this afternoon and in my opinion every minute counts.”

  “You’re saying I have to decide now? At once?”

  “I’m afraid I am, Mrs. Swann.”

  She moved nearer the window, standing there steadying herself by the heavy, half-drawn curtains. Through the space she could see sunlight bathing the forecourt, flowerbeds, and paddock, down as far as the copse at the foot of the drive. There was no heat haze and the row of Scots firs reminded her of toy trees like half-opened umbrellas in the garden of a doll's-house Sam had bought her for her birthday twenty years ago. It was very strange, she thought, that she should remember that now, that and what had occurred behind that belt of firs only a fortnight ago judged by a calendar but as distant, in her present reckoning, as the day Sam burst through the front door of Scab's Castle trumpeting the fact that he had knocked four shillings off the price of the doll's-house and its garden ornaments. To cut off his leg. To take a sharp knife and separate it from his body, leaving him deprived for the rest of his life, whether that life was measured in years or weeks or days. She was able to picture the leg, that particular leg, the one that was nearest the window when they were lying side by side in that great double bed upstairs. A long, hard, well-muscled leg, almost as brown as his face, for he never seemed to lose the tan he brought home from the East, and the contrast between the whiteness of her own body and the brownness of his had always intrigued her. To remove that leg and lay it aside. To burn it or bury it, leaving him to grovel along with what was left of anything that survived the butchery. She heard an apologetic cough on the part of Sir Nevil Cook, and then the steady tick-tock of the grandmother clock the Colonel had brought down from the house beside Derwentwater. She said, without turning, “Do it. Do it this afternoon. What choice is there…?” and then nausea seized her and she blundered past them and out into the hall, d
arting across it to a recess housing the sink where she cut her flowers. She hung over the sink racked with dry retching, eyes misting and the taste of bile souring her tongue until, sensing a movement behind her, she slowly straightened herself, expecting to see the portly figures of her distinguished visitors but it was not them. Deborah was there, her narrow little face as pinched as a starveling's. Responding to a terrible need for strength and succour she reached out, clasping the child to her breast and for a moment they stood there, braced against the sink, Deborah half-supporting her, as though she was the crutch Adam would need from round about four o’clock this afternoon. This time contact with the child broke through the crust of ice enclosing her brain. Silently and steadily she wept.

  Four

  1

  IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN ANY TIME BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND DAWN WHEN THE bedroom door opened very softly and she sensed Deborah climbing into Adam's side of the bed. She was at war with time now and had banished the clock to the lumber room after a third sleepless night. She said, “You, Deborah?” and the child answered, “Yes, Auntie. Shall I stay awhile?” and Henrietta reached out, her arm encircling the child's thin shoulders as she thought, “God knows, I need someone. Whatever time it is it's done now and if he lives how will he regard the person who authorised it?” She knew she had not spoken aloud but she well might have done, for the child said, in a level voice, “I know about it, Aunt Henrietta. I listened at the door, I had to, you see, for it surely isn’t right you should take it all on yourself.” Then, more diffidently, “I asked the Virgin what I should do and she told me. Not at once, you understand, but afterwards, when I was asleep.”

  “What did she tell you, Deborah?”

  “To share it if I could.”

  She had no kind of answer to this. It was as though, by a stroke as sudden and salutory as that which had broken the pleasant rhythm of their lives, their ages had been reversed, and Deborah had attained the status of adult while she had become a child again, younger than Deborah when Adam first brought her here that Christmas Eve. She asked presently, “I did right then?”

  “Of course. How could you have refused? How could anyone, who wanted him to get well?”

  She lay very still. Outside, far across the downs, an insignificant flicker of lightning shafted the sky producing a candleblink in the room. The following peal was so faint that it was like a child's sleep mutter. She said, “He liked to ride and walk and swim. He was such an active man. I think he would rather have died.”

  “That isn’t true. You know that isn’t in the least true if you think about it. He's a fighter and I don’t mean ordinary fighting, the kind he gave up, but…well… fighting for other people. I talked to some of his men who were here and they all said the same thing.”

  “What men, Deborah?”

  “The men who work for him. That big man, Mr. Keate, and that little bald one, Mr. Tybalt. But most of all the young one, the lawyer.”

  “Mr. Stock?”

  “He didn’t tell me his name but we talked in the stable. He said Uncle Adam had more chance of getting well than anyone he knew and that when he did he would start all over again because—well—that's the way he's made. I thought about that after Mr. Stock left and it's true.”

  Was it? She moved closer to the child, marshalling aspects of Adam Swann in support of the theory and was obliged to admit that Deborah's was valid. He was a fighter. Everything about him proclaimed as much, and she, of all people, could vouch for it, for she had watched him convert an extravagant dream into reality in seven years, and do it, moreover, without the bluster men like her father regarded as essential to success. She had overlooked this and it was too important to be overlooked. Being Adam Swann it was entirely possible that he might regard a grave physical handicap as yet another challenge to his wits, his patience, and to that aggressive ingenuity he had used as a kind of blasting powder to overthrow every obstacle he had encountered since the day they sat over a camp fire in the fells and he told her how he proposed putting that necklace to work. A very great deal had happened since then, but it could all be traced back to the obstinacy and self-reliance he possessed in such abundance, a characteristic she had noticed the first day they travelled together.

  She saw then how hasty she had been in her estimate of the effects such a deprivation was likely to have on him. She had assumed, and might have gone on assuming, that Adam Swann, short of a leg, would be reduced to a parody of the man she had known, and this was a monstrous assumption to make about someone who had taken such pains to carve a place for himself in competition with ruthless rascals like her father, and old Matthew Goldthorpe, men who only pretended to independence while fattening on the sweat of others.

  Drowsiness stole over her and the prospect of sleep, real sleep hovered just out of reach. She said, “Don’t go, Deborah. Stay with me until they send word. Phoebe told me Sir John promised to let us know by mid-morning.”

  She wished then with all her heart that she had the child's faith. She had never extracted the smallest comfort from religion, thinking of it as she thought of institutions like royalty, or a piece of apparatus like the alphabet or the multiplication tables. Something that deserved occasional lip-service, and possibly a passing thought or two, before being set aside in favour of something more amusing and tangible. She supposed she had been taught to look upon Roman Catholics in the way she regarded foreigners, misguided, unfortunate people, much given to rituals of a kind not far removed from those practised by savages and heathens. She realised now how utterly stupid and bigoted this was on her part, for Deborah's God was clearly of far more practical use to her now than the austere Jehovah she had half-accepted as the arbiter of the universe, or the more patrician deity who presided over the parish church at Twyforde Green. She would have liked to have asked Deborah to give her more explicit information about her communion with the Virgin, but it seemed an invasion of the child's privacy so she said, “You’ll say more prayers for him? Special prayers, until he's well again?”

  “Why, yes, of course, and I’ve written to Sister Sophie to help. I did that the first day. I gave Stillman the letter to post and I wrote again today, as soon as I heard about his leg. It's important as many as possible should help.”

  Her simplicity was one of the most devastating forces Henrietta had ever encountered for, in a way, it seemed to embrace all the religions in the world, reducing their differences to insignificant proportions, and making nonsense of sect and schism. It was rooted and basic, part of the very structure of society once society was stripped of all its fads and fashions and prejudices. There were human beings, pulled this way and that by temperament and by circumstance, and there was a majestic source of power that left them to flounder or to make the best of things. As long as things went smoothly, as they had for so long now, she had had no quarrel with the divine plan, but when something like this occurred one needed more than conventional belief in her kind of creator, who was altogether too remote and impersonal to be used as a buffer. One needed access to somebody near, warm, and sympathetic, of the kind Deborah enjoyed, and she supposed right of access to such a source could only be acquired by training, of the kind the child had received in that community of nuns, or possibly, by self-discipline, of a kind she was never likely to possess. She remembered, however, that there was a word religious people sometimes used in these circumstances—“Intervention” it was, by which, she supposed, the untrained and the undisciplined were enabled to make their supplications. There was also something in the Bible about the special regard in which children were held by God so that it might follow that Deborah's presence among them was not an accident at all but part of a plan, arranged long in advance, and readily available to him in this desperate pass.

  She said, at length, “I’ve forgotten all the prayers I knew. I could make one up I suppose but that isn’t the same somehow, and there's no need so long as you’re here. Will you pray for me as well? Will you keep praying, until we hear something one way o
r the other?”

  “All the time,” the child said, and then, “You’re so tired. Try and sleep, Aunt Henrietta, just try, and if you can’t then I’ll go and make tea. I could use the small kettle for the iron one is too heavy. Suppose I made tea first and then you tried?”

  “I can sleep,” she said, “providing you stay,” and again the curious reversion in their roles occurred to her as Deborah drew herself half-upright and made a pillow of her shoulder, so that a sense of weightlessness stole over her and she surrendered to it with a gratitude that she could not have expressed in words.