Theirs Was The Kingdom Page 20

  All traces of cynicism deserted him then, for there was absolutely no denying that he was confronted, not by a professional politician, but A Presence likely to regard a moment's inattention as blasphemy. Great, thunderous cadences emerged from the lips; the bright, unwinking eye held him rigid in its beam, a beam that had the power to isolate every one of those upturned faces and convey a curious impression of nakedness, as though Gladstone was addressing not one meeting but twelve hundred meetings held in as many sound-proofed cubicles.

  It was extraordinary, Adam thought, how defenceless one was against the compelling logic and booming oratory of the spellbinder. Somehow, despite an acute awareness of personal vulnerability, one knew it was a spell, but a spell capable of suspending reason and checking any attempt to weigh the content of successive declarations, words, and phrases, each of which hit the audience like a jet of scalding water, so that one might as well have challenged the tablets of Sinai as the edicts flung the length of Exeter Hall.

  His theme, Adam had noted, had been advertised as “the power and potentiality of a fully enfranchised electorate” and had promised, he thought, to be insufferably dull to a boy not yet fourteen. A swift glance at Giles, however, told him how wrong he had been to take this for granted and make no allowance for the impact of an orator buttressed by an unshakable conviction that every word he uttered was put into his mouth by Jehovah, whose vessel he was.

  If Adam and everyone else in the great hall were spellbound, then Giles was hypnotised as effectively as an African primitive at the feet of a paramount witchdoctor. He sat with his small body thrust forward, hands gripping chair-arms, elbows slightly out-thrust, and shoulders braced, as though crouched at the starting line of a race upon which his life depended. The deluge of words from the platform seemed to sweep over the boy like Atlantic rollers but it was manifestly clear that, far from being stunned by them, he welcomed the drenching as the most enriching experience of his life.

  “…We cannot reckon upon the clergy of the established Church either in England or Scotland… We cannot reckon upon the wealth of the shires, nor upon the wealth of the country…” The rhetoric belched from the man like a succession of crashing broadsides, overturning everything between cannon-mouth and target. “…In the main these powers are against us… we must set them down as our most determined foes! But, gentlemen… gentlemen… above all these things, behind all these things, THERE IS THE NATION ITSELF, and this great trial of strength with justice and true, unsullied pride as the inheritors of the great democratic tradition as its prize, is proceeding before the nation! The nation is a hard power to rouse but when roused harder still and more hopeless to resist!”

  It occurred to Adam then, a mere fleeting thought skimming over the surface of the flood, that this man was not really speaking of the nation at all. He spoke for no one but himself, but this was more than enough. No party, no coalition of parties, not Crown, nor Lords, nor consortium of privilege could hope to resist such a force for long. They must, inevitably, be engulfed and sent flying, so that at length all England, all Britain—and, ultimately, he supposed, all parts of the world where British interests prevailed—must be Gladstonised, even as Giles was Gladstonised where he sat straining forward in his seat resolved not to miss a syllable of the oration, or a single gesture that accompanied them.

  Even the tempest of applause that followed Gladstone's withdrawal to the semicircle of seats, where sat the stupefied officials and warm-up men, could not top the majesty of the speech itself. As they rose—and knots of fussy, resetted stewards began to dart up and down the aisles, ushering the bemused audience into the street—the rolling echoes of Gladstone's broadsides continued to reverberate, so that Adam, one arm on his son's elbow, had to make a conscious effort to manoeuvre his artificial leg round the angle of the bench-end, as though awakened from a trance and not sure where he was or which direction he should take.

  In the street it seemed banal to make a comment, so they walked briskly along the gas-lit pavements, each coming to terms with the tremendous experience, each preoccupied with striking a bargain between the reality and the fantasy of the splendid occasion. It was only when, somewhere around the Haymarket, Adam hailed a hansom, and they had hoisted themselves into the snug interior, that Adam was able to say, “Well, Giles…?”

  And Giles replied in the voice of someone who had been a witness to some astounding natural convulsion, “It's… like… like Moses… That bit where he comes down from Sinai with the tablets… What I mean is, you have to listen… You have to obey!”

  And Adam thought it strange and rather comforting that at least one of his sons should have inherited his own reflective powers, for it had been of Moses, descending from Sinai with the dictates of God Almighty tucked under his arm, that he had thought at the very beginning of the peroration.

  For himself already the numbing effects of the bombardment were beginning to wear off, the long rumbling echoes of those measured cadences merging into the steady roar and rattle of London traffic. But then, he thought, he was fifty-three, and had seen and experienced pretty well everything, whereas the boy at his side was open to everything new and strange and compelling. Giles's Gladstonisation, no doubt, would take like a smallpox injection, and stand him in good stead in a world that could do with any amount of moral uplift, even if some of it was misdirected and took no account of the frailty of men, Englishmen along with everyone else.

  Seven

  1

  GILES HE WAS GETTING TO KNOW. ALEXANDER, HAVING MADE HIS DECISION, presented few problems. His daughter, Stella, in her present situation, needed a mother's help, whereas the five younger children were primarily Phoebe Fraser's concern. There remained George, Crown Prince designate of the Swann empire.

  Most people, including his mother, brothers and sisters, and especially the staff at Tryst and families within calling distance, took George for what he seemed—a happy, hearty, excessively amiable extrovert, with a propensity for getting into scrapes but enough guile to talk himself out of most of them. George had always been the most popular of the Swann children. Schoolfellows found him amusing, inventive, and companionable, whereas even schoolmasters who wrote “Will not apply himself… could do better… a disappointing term,” or an uncompromising “Idle” on his school reports, referred to him jocularly as “that young rascal Swann” when his name came up, as it frequently did, in common rooms.

  Taken all round, the word most frequently applied to him, particularly by the ladies, was “engaging” and this he indubitably was, for, although irrepressible and resentful of all disciplines, his amiability rarely deserted him, not even when he was carpeted and flogged. He was one of those fortunate males whose grace, good looks, and sense of humour enabled him to escape the full consequences of irresponsibility at all levels, so that he was usually dismissed as “a real boy,” whatever that might mean in scholastic parlance. It was a generalisation that fooled everybody but his father, who had been assessing him ever since he could toddle as far as the cistern loft and find out what happened when the outfall pipe was blocked with one of his sister's dolls. Latterly Adam had come to certain conclusions regarding George's potentialities and failings.

  In their last confrontation, Henrietta had accused Adam of paying strict attention to the merits and demerits of the men he employed but maintaining a benevolent neutrality in respect of his family. On the occasion of Stella's present trouble she spelled this out, but long before that, and on many less serious occasions, she had charged him with parental neglect, even going so far as to declare that, in some respects, he resembled a dog fox who trotted across country overnight, sired a sizeable litter, and then trotted back again to his earth over the county border. This, a vulgar thought no doubt, was nonetheless an accurate summation if one excepted George, his second son. For George, alone among them, had not been sired absentmindedly but purposefully, almost deliberately one might have said, as part of an openly arrived at bargain between man and wife.


  Sometimes, when she was in one of her maternal moods, Henrietta would reflect upon the occasions when each of her nine children had been conceived. She could isolate three such occasions specifically, the remainder being guesses. Giles was easy to isolate. She had come by him less than twenty-four hours before the Staplehurst crash, whereas the last of them, the baby born but a few weeks ago, owed his existence to his parents’ endeavour to dispel the gloom that descended on Tryst after they had laid the old Colonel to rest. George was a similar case, except that here she recalled in detail the circumstances of his conception, as marking a reconciliation between man and wife after the one serious quarrel of their married life. George had resulted from an industrious night they shared at the old George inn, in Southwark, ending the sour period that succeeded the death of one Luke Dobbs, chimney sweep, in a Tryst chimney.

  It was a time she did not like to dwell upon, even at this distance, for it had seemed to her, after a month of domestic turmoil, that she had lost Adam to Edith Wadsworth, to whom he had gone seeking balm for a bad conscience. But Edith, God bless the woman, had not pressed her advantage. Instead she sent him south again with some good advice, and the upshot of it had been that almost ritualistic reconciliation, with herself installed as mistress of a house to which they could lay title and a new understanding between them, concerning their individual responsibilities. George—laughing even then, according to his father— had appeared on Valentine's Day in the following February, a day that marked a spectacular advance in the fortunes of Swann-on-Wheels, and perhaps it was on this account that Adam had always seen George, and no other, as his commercial heir, with a significance that had not attracted itself to any of his other children. He knew, for instance, that George used charm and good looks as an insulator, disguising a natural indolence that, in turn, concealed a lively intelligence. It was Adam's intention to peel away his son's protective layers of bluff and enable the brain beneath an opportunity to expand. Not only for George's sake but for the ultimate glory of Swann-on-Wheels.

  Adam Swann had not been selecting deputies for twenty years without learning how to sift wheat from chaff, and something told him unequivocally that here was his natural heir, whose high spirits and ingenuity might be turned to good account in the next two decades. George, of course, was still at the stage when he pretended to make light of money, but he would get over that once he had taken the fever of competitive commercial enterprise, once his curiosity had been aroused by the infinitely subtle manifestations of merchandising that was the national substitute for poetry in a race mainly composed of traders of one sort or another. The important thing, as he saw it, was to make an early start on the boy, to fire his imagination and foster in him the pride of personal achievement, of the kind his father enjoyed every time he totted up a sheaf of monthly returns. Plenty of people seemed to think that there was something ignoble in money-making, and even those who had dedicated their lives to it often went to extraordinary lengths to apologise for their obsession. Adam Swann had never subscribed to this social fiction and neither would his son George, if he could help it.

  These were among the reasons that prompted him to cut short his son's formal education and introduce him, at the earliest possible age, to the source of all the good things in life he had enjoyed so far. He was not looking for a gentleman to replace him when, if ever, he retired and took to fox-hunting three days a week. What he needed, what he was absolutely determined to salvage from his family, was at least one person, bearing his name, who was a combination of a realist and a romantic. For at the hub of a concern like Swann-on-Wheels there was need for both.

  George was not sorry to be released from the strictures of school, although he had a few misgivings when he learned that he was to sacrifice the prospect of an idle year or two at Varsity, where, so the seniors told him, life was tailor-made for someone lucky enough to possess a father who sneered at examinations and degrees and had a city niche awaiting him when (as must inevitably happen in George's case) he was sent down in disgrace. There were, George reflected, during his initial apprenticeship period at the yard, certain compensations in being regarded as a man after passing one's seventeenth birthday. One was having one's own rooms five days a week, and the privacy that went with them. Another was a sufficiency of pocket money. But best of all, of course, was the prospect of having London as his first oyster, with any number of replacements awaiting him as soon as he began his travelling scholarship in the provinces.

  His first independent act was to cultivate a moustache, very modest as yet but destined in time to become one of the most luxuriant in the network, where fierce moustaches had long been accepted as the badge of manhood. At seventeen he already looked like a man, being five feet eleven inches with shoulders to match, so that the progress of his moustache (after an anxious week or two) pleased him without surprising him. George, in fact, rarely was surprised. He was not precocious exactly, and few thought of him as cocky, but he had a way of winning the trust of almost everyone he encountered, not merely those who might have been expected to show respect for an amiable youngster with certain expectations in the City. Indeed, most of the people he met during that first six months began by patronising him on this account, but soon they succumbed to his charm and good humour, so that instead of referring to him behind his back as “Swann's cygnet,” they sometimes spoke of him among themselves as “that nice young chap with all his wits about him, the one the Gaffer's schooling for the succession.”

  He had, of course, certain basic advantages and could take for granted deference from the old hands like Tybalt, the chief clerk, and Keate, the waggonmaster. But this did not explain how he won over the semi-independent men of the network, shrewd characters like Stock, the lawyer, and Godsall, a former army lieutenant, who had exchanged a commission in a crack regiment for a regional post under Swann and was currently managing the Kentish Triangle.

  It was Godsall, under whom George worked that first summer, who initiated him into the mysteries of the Swann System, explaining the kind of decisions regional managers were expected to make twenty times a day, and the hundred and one processes, all insignificant in themselves, that contributed to the overall pattern of an enterprise that kept a thousand waggons moving along the roads of Britain and hauling everything from a flatbed printing machine to a barrel of herrings. By the time the introductory period was over, and George was ready to embark on his travelling scholarship, one of Adam's initial hopes concerning the boy's indoctrination had been fulfilled. He no longer took the network for granted, as something that had absorbed his father ever since he could first remember him. Instead, he came to regard it as a complicated, extremely efficient piece of apparatus that seemed to have evolved from nothing and was nurtured through the years by his father's highly charged imagination, plus the devotion of a handful of men he had selected to project a policy of nonstop expansion.

  It was the unctuous, bald-headed Tybalt, possibly, who was responsible for this indoctrination. For Tybalt, chaperoning him during his week in the estimates section, was inclined to talk nostalgically of the earliest days of the concern and how, at times, it had seemed they must go to the wall when his father (whom the clerk clearly worshipped) reinvested every penny that came in from the regions in order to follow the drumbeat of expansion. He spoke of many other things, of which George had been dimly aware—Adam's desperate situation when his partner, Avery, had become involved in a scandal and fled the country, after squandering the firm's reserve capital on a Spanish dancer. Of days and nights when Adam, with no guidelines apart from his intuition, and deep-rooted faith in himself, had remained closeted in that belfry overlooking the Thames, wrestling with the kind of problems that beset a besieged general. Of the invention, during one of these all-night sessions, of the firm's ready reckoner known as Frankenstein. And of Adam Swann's hardihood after he had lost a leg and returned to work a year later, having learned to walk again in Switzerland.

  Tybalt seemed shocked when Geo
rge cheerfully admitted that most of this was new to him, that he had always been inclined to regard the Governor as someone far too set in his ways to be interesting to one of the rising generation. After a week in Tybalt's company, however, another in the company of Keate, the waggonmaster, and the pursuit of one or two private lines of enquiry touched off by their confidences, George Swann was able to see his father in a new light. He was not, as most fellows’ fathers seemed, a conservative old buffer, self-harnessed to a juggernaut, and incapable of leading a gentleman's life with the money he had made. In his own way he was an artist, almost as much an artist as that chap Michelangelo, who had spent years (or so they said) lying on his back in a hammock painting a ceiling. Or perhaps someone like Christopher Wren, who had raised St. Paul's out of the ashes of the Great Fire of London. However one looked at it, it was undeniable that Adam Swann had done something useful with his life when he might so easily have frittered it away like the old Colonel, for whom George had had affection but certainly no awe, of the kind he was beginning to have for his father.