“Because I got the impression you don’t steal for gain.”
“Why else would a man steal? ”
“For all kinds of reasons. From habit. From necessity. From motives of pride and revenge. Even from a love of walking a tightrope.”
He looked across at her steadily and there was mischief in his eyes. “You’ve thought about it a great deal, haven’t you?”
“I’ve thought about you, yes. Wondered about you, too. What you were doing, whether you were back in prison or still on the run. But mostly, as I said at the time, what a waste you represented.”
He pondered this while she finished her pie and started on the apple tart.
“Don’t you want your wine?”
“Does that mean you want it?”
“Yes, it does. It wasn’t easy to bring myself to this point. It was the most difficult decision I’ve ever had to make.”
She tasted the wine, set down her glass, and refilled his. “Drink if it helps,” she said, but he left the glass on the table and said, slowly, “I’m not on the run. I didn’t tell you the full truth about that. About everything else but not that. I’m out on licence, with two years unexpired sentence hanging over me but if I’m caught on a fresh crib it would mean seven to ten years, plus the outstanding two. That's slow death. There’d be no going back after that.”
“Why did you lie about that?”
“It seemed the best way to head off a lecture on the rewards of industry.”
“And the real reason?”
“I doubt if you would have believed it. It would have sounded too unlikely in the circumstances—me having been on hand to save you from those drainage pipes.”
“What's the connection?”
“It was something similar that earned me a big cut in sentence. I’m a good swimmer and in Gibraltar harbour I saved two marines from drowning when their gig capsized. Their Commandant wrote to London, and because he was highly placed, and could pull strings, they gave me a conditional pardon; with instructions to report weekly, of course.”
She stopped eating. “You mean you deliberately threw away a chance like that?”
“It wasn’t much of a chance. I had a record, and no trade. I knew I could do better than beg and I have.” He began to brag. “These aren’t the usual swagman's duds. This suit of clothes was made to measure.”
Suddenly she wanted to laugh. His mixture of vanity and jaunty self-justification were so much at odds with what she took to be the real Wickstead, a man who had come near to admitting that he was lost in the dark. She said, “You’ve come so far, Wickstead…What's your other name?”
“Tom.”
“You’ve come this far, Tom, so why sit there fidgeting, like a young man trying to nerve himself to ask a girl for a dance? I mightn’t say no and if I do I’ll spare your pride. You’ve been thinking, too, since we last met. You’ve been assessing your chances of starting out all over again. Well, that's the most sensible thing you’ve ever done, so you don’t have to apologise for it. I’ve been thinking along the same lines concerning myself.”
“You have?”
“We’ll come to that. For the time being let's confine ourselves to you. If you’ll give me your word that you genuinely want a job, that you would give it a fair trial and promise to come to me if you decide you made a wrong decision, then I’d find a place for you. Old Duckworth has come into a little money and only stayed on to oblige me. You can take over tomorrow as yard foreman, at fifty shillings a week and the standard rates of commission on new business. It isn’t much but it could be. More than half of Swann's foremen have moved on to a deputy manager's post, and that carries a bonus rate of two per cent on local turnover. I know a man much younger than you who is making three hundred a year. Will you want time to consider that?”
No, he said joyfully, he wouldn’t and she remembered Henrietta had made an identical reply when she had put her proposition to her back in July. It reminded her that she was so concerned with solving other people's problems that she never had time to solve her own. She said, as he began to stammer his thanks, “That's you accounted for, and I don’t want any earnest protestations until the trial period has expired. In the meantime there's one small thing you could do for me, Tom.”
“What is it?”
She measured him with her eye and stood up, having emptied her glass and set it down with a flourish.
“You can do what I asked Swann to do the last time he was here. You can come round here and kiss me.”
He looked so taken aback that she felt sorry for him, but then, as he hesitated, she felt less sorry than indignant. “It's not a condition, damn it! You won’t be expected to do it every morning you report to the yard. It's a…a gesture, and I’m terribly much in need of a friendly gesture. More than you are if the truth's known!”
He moved in smartly then and his gaiety reassured her, so that when she felt his arms encircle her she changed her mind about the kind of kiss she had in mind. She was in no doubt as to the reason behind the invitation. It was just the same as when Adam had stood there. All she wanted, but that most desperately, was to feel a woman again, and he seemed to understand this very well, perhaps too well. He kissed her fondly but expertly, more expertly than she had ever been kissed, and the sensation under her breasts returned so that she was unable to conceal the pleasure his embrace brought her. She could have stood there being kissed for as long as he was disposed to remain, but when his pleasure revealed itself in a slight increase of pressure at her waist and shoulder she quietly disengaged, remembering that Mrs. Sprockett might come bustling in at any moment, and that her personal dignity would be involved. She wanted him, as much as she had wanted his predecessors, but not furtively, the way he had always lived until now, but she was exhilarated to note that he was the more breathless of the two when he said, in a rather hushed voice she had never heard him use, “Is it because things have gone wrong with you since we parted?”
She replied, equably, “No, Tom, or not in the general way. Certainly not any way I could explain. Let's just say I suddenly felt very lonely; as lonely as you appear to be.”
“You mean, we might give one another a hand?”
“Why not? Without obligations on either side. And I mean what I said about a trial period. You can walk out on the job at any time and all I ask is that you will tell me, and not just disappear, with anything that belongs to us, or our customers.”
He said, thoughtfully, “That quip of yours—about walking a tightrope—it probably seems an exciting life to safe people looking in but it isn’t, you know. It's hell all through unless you’re drunk, and if you’re drunk you botch it sooner or later. That brush with you in Harwich did more to destroy my nerve than anything behind me, and you can’t play my game if your nerve isn’t up to it. I walked about all that night, seeing how it would end. Early one morning in a prison yard, with the chaplain snuffling his prayers, and a drop straight out ahead of me.”
“Don’t, Tom. Don’t talk that way!”
“I have to. If you’re prepared to take me on trust you should know how it is. The truth is you can’t really worst them. Nobody has that much luck and this kept recurring to me. Before it was light I dropped the revolver into the dock and I haven’t done a job since. Unless you count fencing those watches you found in the trunk.”
“Where have you been?”
“Tramping. Thinking things over flat on my back and looking up at the sky.” He was silent for a moment. “Are you religious? I don’t mean in the going-to-church sense. Do you believe in a plan of some kind?”
“If I do it isn’t the one they preach about in pulpits.”
“That's what I decided. That's based on property and education and the handicapping is badly arranged. Brains, background, the kind of upbringing a person has…”
“People like you put too much emphasis on those things.”
She was thinking, curiously enough, of Henrietta, and the neatness with which she had eased
herself into the management of the network with no other qualification beyond a need to hold fast to a man's affection. She thought of Adam, too, in his earlier days, with nothing to guide him but instinct and a muddleheaded obstinacy, who had yet succeeded in translating extravagant dreams into realities. “The important thing is to be ready to back yourself and then find people willing to cover the bet. That, and to guard against self-pity. I should know.”
She felt immensely comforted in his presence and in his need of her, and the emotion demanded assurance of a kind she had never sought from anyone, not even Adam.
“You’re not married, are you, Tom?” He did not seem to put the obvious construction on the question but replied, simply, “No. I never cared to involve anyone fond of me in the life I led and the risks I ran.”
“There was somebody?”
“No one in particular. I suppose I took my fun where I found it.”
So had she, she reflected, except that there seemed to have been precious little fun all told. She was glad then that Mrs. Sprockett would soon be back, for she understood quite clearly what she would be inclined to propose if they were alone and it seemed very unfair to rush him to that extent. So she compromised, saying, “We might have fun working together, if you were so disposed. And that isn’t a roundabout leap-year proposal. At least we could get to know one another,” and he replied, soberly, “I don’t need time to get to know you. I’ve not thought about anyone else in all this time and what you might find harder to believe is that it didn’t begin with that ambush on the train.”
“When you were working in the yard? Nonsense, Tom.”
“It isn’t nonsense. You fascinated me from the first day. I used to watch you when you didn’t know it through that office window. When I heard you giving the orders, and men twice your age taking them, it sometimes seemed as if you were married to everyone in the yard and had brought everyone a dowry.”
She laughed and it struck her that he could make her laugh without any trouble at all.
“Is that all? A loud-voiced gaffer in skirts?”
“No. As I say you always intrigued me but the real impact was when I saw those pipes slipping and had what you could call a cast-iron excuse to put my arms about you and satisfy myself that you handled like a woman.”
It was an odd sort of compliment, she thought, but it pleased her. She said, “Kiss me again then and go before we scandalise Mrs. Sprockett,” and he kissed her but with a mildly abstracted air. He had, she decided, a very rare technique, half drollery and half male gentleness that was new in her experience.
“Where are you staying, Tom?”
“The Wheatsheaf. I’m paid up until Saturday.”
“You want an advance on your wages?”
“No, I’d much prefer to earn it.”
He made ready to go then and she saw him as far as the door, smiling when he tipped his hat as he turned into the street and wondering if his elation matched hers, and whether a man like him would settle to any collar for more than a month. It was unimportant. A month would be long enough to enable her to readjust to the rhythm of things and stop feeling so damned sorry for herself. She closed the door, went through to her little bedroom, and began to unpack. As she did she caught herself humming.
Six
1
THAT WAS THE AUTUMN AND WINTER OF SEEPING, PITILESS RAINS, OF SWIFTLY alternating gales, frosts, and thaws, that made the life of every man and beast in the network a torment. A time when thoughts turned yearningly to the summer that was gone, and forward to a spring that sometimes seemed reserved for the next generation.
Henrietta, clinging to her five-day stint at the yard until the Christmas break, was there to hear the dolorous pleas of Ratcliffe in the west, the first domino to fall, setting off a chain reaction among the southerly regions. His initial bleat reached them as early as late October, after a fortnight's torrential downpour had smashed the banks of the Exe, the Taw, the Torridge, the Bray, the Dart, and many lesser streams, inundating all the valleys along which his bread-and-butter runs travelled, and spilling millions of gallons of ruby floodwater across the grazing grounds of his regular customers between the Channel and Barnstaple Bay.
Then the Tamar and the placid Camel followed suit, and in a single disastrous twenty-four hours he lost eight loaded waggons and three teams, two of his waggoners barely escaping with their lives when a wall of water engulfed them north of Tiverton. That same week, with half his routes under water he had to turn to the railways for succour, not only in Devon but in Somerset too, in order to fulfil his commitments, but as every other carrier in the west was in similar straits, deliveries piled up on sidings right across the region and railway embankments were beginning to shred at a dozen places between the Vale of Taunton and Bodmin Moor. After his St. Thomas’ sub-depot had been flooded to a depth of four feet he sent a despairing wire for reserve teams, declaring that unless Rookwood in the Southern Square could help him, he could not undertake to keep his traffic moving for another week.
They sent him a convoy and at once had cause to regret it, for large-scale subsidence along a stretch of the Wilts, Somerset, and Weymouth Railway northwest of Salisbury swamped Rookwood with a flood of a different kind. Every farmer for miles around began to clamour for road transport to haul London-bound produce to departure points further east, so that Rookwood, in his turn, had to call on the Kentish Triangle for help.
Then the implacable downpour moved east and Vicary, his low-lying territory laced with estuaries, was soon in difficulty, flooded roads necessitating complicated detours where the usual routes were blocked by a dozen or more collapsed bridges. The strain on the draught-horses was killing as they churned their way through seas of liquid mud and slewed into open country where landslides had obliterated the highways. Horses foundered, loads shifted, axles broke, canopies were stripped by high winds, and journeys that had been made in a few hours stretched into a day and a night throwing every timetable in the south into disarray.
Early December brought a brief respite when temperatures fell and the ground hardened, but a quick thaw followed and stream beds brimming with snow water washed down a wilderness of uprooted trees and tangled underbrush, so that conditions were soon chaotic in all four regions and reserve teams were just not to be had. It was then that the game of general post they had been playing with one another had to cease.
About a fortnight before Christmas, when things were at their worst but the most dreaded months of a haulier's calendar were still to come, Henrietta made her decision but in obedience to her policy of giving the professionals first call, she summoned Keate, Tybalt, Godsall of the Kentish Triangle, and the lawyer Stock to the belfry, asking them what they had in mind to guard against a complete standstill when the regions advanced into the new year with depleted teams, broken-down vehicles, and a sullen, exhausted work-force.
They had ideas of a sort. Tybalt proposed a head office edict, forbidding the acceptance by any district manager of a single new commission, all efforts being bent to meet the requirements of customers whose loyalty had been tested over the years.
Keate, whose cautious nature had been eroded to some extent by Adam's expansionist creed, had an alternative solution. Setting his face against the rejection of new business (especially when it was there for the taking), he suggested an overall abandonment of time-schedules right across the affected regions, a concession, he said, that would ease the tremendous burdens laid upon men, waggons and horses operating over half-ruined roads, particularly in the soggy Western Wedge and The Bonus that was now like a gigantic sponge.
Godsall, declaring that his loans to Vicary and Rookwood had left him dangerously under-strength, was more revolutionary. He recommended a cancellation of all long-distance hauls and a new understanding with the railways on the basis of bulk shipments over a limited period, to carry them over into the spring.
Stock, the lawyer, offered no solution, having decided that Henrietta's recent probing into the financia
l aspects of her husband's concerns indicated that she had a sweeping decision of her own and was merely indulging in a cat-and-mouse exercise with her lieutenants. He was, as it happened, quite right as regards this although, as soon as she spoke, he thought himself a fool for not having seen through her request for a summary of the reserve accounts when she called on him the previous afternoon.
By now, of course, they had all adjusted to her presence behind that great desk of his, with her little feet on a footstool, and her artless way of playing them against one another. They were a generation of men who had grown to maturity under a small, plump woman ruling large slices of five continents. Perhaps this helped them to accept her invasion of their spheres of influence.
She said, rather pertly, Stock thought, “All very practical, I’m sure. But there must be a better way, a more daring way of going about it. What I mean is… well, why couldn’t we turn this run of bad luck to our advantage, seeing that it must have thrown all our competitors into a regular whirl? Wouldn’t you say it has, Mr. Keate? Knowing as much as you do about what one can expect of the strongest teams?”
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