God Is an Englishman by R. F. Delderfield Read Free Book Online

God’s name, had he decided to marry the girl? Had it been an impulse, related to the acquisition of Seddon Moss about that time and the need to establish himself among the GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 22
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    Fugitive in a Crinoline 2 3
    conventional businessmen of a settled community? Had that snivelling priest who called on him to discuss the girl’s future dented his self-sufficiency? Had he grown impatient with the need to go out and find a woman whenever he wanted one? Had he married out of fear of catching a venereal dis ease, or was it a subconscious groping after some form of permanence in the pattern of his life?
    He had never had time to find out. When, after a month or so she told him that she was pregnant, he was jubilant, and when they told him that she was dead he was furious, feeling himself to have been the victim of a complicated practical joke of the kind the wild Irish were always playing on their betters. To an extent the experience had sobered him and he had gone his own way, using people and discarding them but following a policy of keeping his private frolics to a minimum. There remained, however, Hen rietta, and suddenly, a little surprisingly, she was a capital asset.
    He got up, stretched his clumsy limbs, slapped a midge or two, and stumped off towards the house, a tall, thickset, bull-necked man with thinning hair grey at the temples and the heavy florid features that go with sensuality and a refusal to suffer fools gladly.
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    Mrs. Worrell, as round as a bolster and crimson in the face after her exertions over the range in the airless kitchen, told him that Hen rietta was somewhere about and he was to get out of her way if she was expected to prepare dinner for four at short notice. Alone among his seven hundred employees she could bully him, aware that a woman who could control staff, run a large, rambling house, and cook three wholesome meals a day was all but indispensable to a widower. Apart from that she was the only one among them that had known him when he was another man’s servant, and over the years they had adjusted to one another. He went out, across the hall and up the broad staircase, calling his daughter by name.
    She answered from her quarters at the end of the corridor, an octa gonal room representing one of the turrets in reverse and he went in without knocking.
    She was standing in front of a full-length mirror trying on a new green dress, and the sight of her, as she stood with her back to him absorbed in her task, gave him a moment to study her reflection and come to terms with her as a young woman, rather than a dumpy, imperious child. She was wrestling petulantly with the tough wire cage of a crinoline designed for a smaller waist and narrower but tocks. Her dilemma amused him, but it also offered him a sliver GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 23
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    of satisfaction, for he had no patience with this eternal preoccupation among both men and women for seventeen-inch waists that demanded the torture of whalebone corsets. When he put his arm around a woman he liked to feel flesh, not armour-plating, and he had always thought of the crinoline as a monstrous contrivance designed, he wouldn’t wonder, to keep men at a safe distance. He said, tolerantly, “Where’d tha’ buy that dam’ silly thing, lass?” and she said, over her shoulder, “At Arrowsmith’s, and it fitted when I tried it on. It’s the first dress I’ve ever bought from a shop. Mrs. Worrell’s niece sews for me and comes up time and again for fittings.”
    “Keep it that way,” he said, “for tha’ll get diddled every time tha’ set foot in Ned Arrowsmith’s premises.”
    She made no comment on this, and when he crossed to the window she continued to ignore him. She was not, he reflected, in the least like other men’s daughters, who fussed and fumed and fretted in a man’s presence, even that of their fathers and brothers. She always