Give Us This Day (5 page)

“That’s all right, Mr. Swann.” He put his arm round his girl and she winced. “It hurts horribly,” she said. “Do you suppose we could find a chemist open and get some arnica?”

“You stay here,” Giles said. “I’ll find a chemist’s, and a pie-shop, too. You’ll be safe enough here until the crowds start dispersing. Then we can all go home. Will you wait with them, Soper?”

“Anything you say, Mr. Swann.”

He went out into the blinding sunshine, working his way west towards Trafalgar Square and King William IV Street where, on his way to the rendezvous, he had seen shops open. “Anything you say, Mr. Swan…” They all looked to him for a lead, not because he was more qualified to give one than the least of them, but because he was a renegade from the far side of the barricades, a man who owned his own house, wore tailored clothes, and had a famous father. It wasn’t good enough, not by a very long chalk, and somehow he would have to improve on it or leave them to get on with it alone. He found a chemist’s and bought a bottle of arnica, then a market coffeestand where he bought four meat pies and four bottles of ginger beer, carrying his purchases back to their refuge in the labyrinthine corridors of the market. Romayne took charge of the girl, coaxing her to unbutton her blouse and expose a great purple bruise above the prominent collarbone. He noticed that she flushed when her neck and shoulders were bared and he turned aside, taking Soper over to the grille. He said, quietly, “You’ll never get a billet after this and you know it. Have you any experience of clerical work?”

“I was a ledger clerk at Patterson’s, the wholesalers, soon after I left school.”

“Why didn’t you stick to book-keeping?”

“I got sacked after asking for a rise. No shindig at Patterson’s, just a straight case of Oliver Twist on that occasion. Don’t bother about me, Mr. Swann. I’ll look out for myself.”

He liked Soper’s spirit and wry sense of humour. Headstrong he might be, but if there were three Sopers in every city emporium the rough-and-ready tactics they had used today would be unnecessary. Real solidarity among the helots was what was needed, and it wasn’t impossible. It had already been successful in the heavy industries up north. Bargains could be struck between the vast numbers of havenots and the Gradgrinds in their plush suburban houses. But there were not three Sopers anywhere, much less in a drapery store. More often than not there wasn’t one prepared to risk his livelihood for a cause of this kind. He said, “I’ll get you a billet with my father’s firm. I can tell the truth about you to him. It’ll be a fresh start.”

“And the Action Group, Mr. Swann?”

“We shall have to work for parliamentary backing. It’s not impossible. Other trades have achieved it. What we need is some kind of charter to cover all the retail trades.”

“That’s looking way ahead, isn’t it?”

“It’s better than this hit-and-miss campaign, and I’m going to put my mind to it. Have you got enough money to stay on in your digs for a week or so?”

Soper grinned. “For a month. On credit if need be. The landlady’s daughter fancies me, and she doesn’t know about Miriam.”

“Where does Miriam live? She isn’t living-in, is she?”

“No. She lives with an aunt in Maida Vale.”

“Get her home and let her rest. She’d better show up tomorrow, and if she should be questioned tell her to give my wife’s name as a reference. We’ll say she spent the entire day with us and the janitor is mistaken.”

He looked relieved at that, Giles thought, and his estimation of Soper soared another point. “You could get married on the wage my brother George pays his warehouse clerks,” he said. “It’s above average.”

* * *

They said little to one another on the way home. The heat in the suburban train was insufferable and everybody in the world seemed to be making his way out of the city. It was only later, when they were standing at the window watching the Jubilee bonfires wink across the Shirley meadows, that he said, suddenly, “How much does all this mean to you, Romayne? This house, servants, security, comfort?”

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s important I should know. Apart from that brief spell, when you ran away and worked in that sweat-shop, you’ve always been cushioned against poverty. Like me. Like almost everyone we know. We’re really no more than salon revolutionaries and I’m tired of facing two ways. But it wouldn’t be fair for me to make the decision alone.”

“What decision?”

“To throw up the firm and get myself adopted as a Liberal candidate, if anyone will have me. Then work full-time at what I believe in, what I’ve always believed in from the beginning.”

She turned and looked at him speculatively. “You’d do that? You’d walk out on your father’s firm for good?”

“I would. Would you?”

“You know I would.”

“It’s that important to you?”

“Seeing you spend your life working at something you believe in is important. It doesn’t matter what. It never has really.”

He bent his head and kissed her. “I haven’t the least idea how to go about it, but…”

“I have.”

”
You
have?”

“I’ve thought about it a long time now but I didn’t say anything. It had to come from you. I think I know how I could get you taken up, with a real chance of getting to Westminster.”

“If you’re relying on your father he wouldn’t lift a finger…”

“It’s nothing to do with my father. It’s an idea I had a long time ago, when we were on holiday in Wales, but don’t ask me about it now.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have to think about it, about the best way of going about it. Just let me work it out and put it to you when I’m ready.”

He thought, distractedly,
I’ll never know her. Not really, not like old George and Alex know their wives, and certainly not like my father knows Mother. I know no more about her now than that day I fished her out of that river below Beddgelert, when we were kids. But the devil of it is she knows me. Every last thing about me!

The long day was almost done. From across the meadows came the faint, meaningless sounds of revelry, persistent celebrants sporting round their bonfires, reluctant to write “finis” to a day they would talk about all their lives. He said, as they settled under the flimsy bed-coverings, “Our joint resources won’t run to more than three hundred a year, if that. We should have to sell up and move to wherever I was chosen. A terrace house or a cottage maybe.”

“Three hundred a year is six pounds a week,” she said. “People bring up big families on that and there’s only two of us. Go to sleep, Giles.”

It was a clue, he thought, linking her sponsorship with her apparent inability to bring him a child. In a curious way their relationship had shifted of late, ever since her fourth and last miscarriage. Perhaps she saw him as the only child she was likely to have and was determined, in that queer private way of hers, to make the best of it. His arm went round her but she did not respond, although he could tell she was wide awake. He had a sense then of complete dependence on her and with it a sudden and inexplicable onrush of confidence in the future. Perhaps the day had not been such a failure after all.

Three

Bedside Whisper

M
ost men, Adam reflected, were diminished by deathbeds, but Sam Rawlinson, his eighty-eight-year-old father-in-law, was clearly an exception. Sam, half-recumbent in a bed that had never been adequate for him, looked so excessively bloated that he made the ugly, over-furnished bedroom seem very cramped for visitors, who were obliged to squeeze themselves between bed and wardrobe and then sit very still for fear of overturning the bedside table littered with Sam’s pills and potions.

Adam was surprised to find him not only rational but loquacious, as though, in the final days of his long, bustling life, he was in a rare ferment to get things tidied up and sorted out, and he received Adam almost genially, croaking, “Now, lad!” in that broad Lancashire accent of his he had never attempted to convert into the city squeak that many men of his stamp affected once they had made their pile. Henrietta had already been in with Hilda, Sam’s statuesque second wife, who seemed, improbably, to be giving way to the strain of the old man’s final battle against odds, the only one, thought Adam, he was certain to lose. She warned Adam, “You’ll find him low but he’s tetchy with it. He’s had me on the jump for more than a month now. Try and keep him off his dratted affairs, will you?”

He climbed the gloomy, paint-scarred staircase, reflecting as he went that no one had ever succeeded in keeping Sam off his affairs, for they had been meat and drink to the old reprobate ever since, as a slum-bred lad in Ancoats in the first years of the cotton boom, he had kicked and throttled his way from coal-sorter, to bale-breaker, to the looms, and, at thirty-odd, to part-ownership of his first mill where he worked his hands like galley-slaves. He was already a man of substance when Adam met him, forty years ago, and the fact that Sam still addressed him, at seventy, as “lad,” made him smile. Long, long ago they had come to terms with one another, rarely referring to their first confrontation, when Sam had stormed into the Swann homestead threatening to prefer charges against him of abducting his eighteen-year-old daughter. In view of this understanding, they were spared soothing bedside prattle, customary in the circumstances. Adam said, bluntly, “Is there anything special you want doing, Sam?”—a clear enough indication to a man as forthright as Rawlinson that time was running out.

“Nay,” Sam said, “nowt special, lad, tho’ I’m reet glad you’ve come an’ no mistake. Couldn’t have said what I’d a mind to say to t’lass. Women don’t set a proper value on these things.”

“What things, Sam?”

“Brass,” Sam said, uncompromisingly, “and what to make of it. Eee, they can spend it fast enough, the least of ‘em, but I never met one who could put it to work. Now that lass o’ mine, she’ll have made sizeable holes in your pockets over the years.”

“I’m not complaining,” Adam said, “and neither should you with an army of grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to spare. There’ll be plenty to share whatever you’re inclined to leave.”

“That’s the rub,” Sam said, heaving himself up in an effort to make himself more comfortable in the rumpled bed. “Ah’ve had second thowts about that. One time I had it in mind to see after our Hilda and split t’rest so many ways. Then Ah got to thinkin’. Most o’ the beneficiaries wouldn’t have a notion what to do with a windfall that came their way, so I went to old Fossdyke and drew up t’new will. Hilda’ll pass you a copy of it if you ask her.”

He was breathing noisily and his broad, battered face had a deep purple flush, so that Adam said, “We don’t have to go over it, Sam. You can trust me to follow your wishes.”

“Aye,” said Sam, emphatically, “I can that. Come to think of it, you’re one of the few Ah’ve always trusted, and there’s none so many o’ them.” He paused, as though reflecting deeply. “I were luckier’n I deserved about you, but I’ve owned to that times enough, haven’t I?”

“I’ve been lucky myself, Sam. What do you want to tell me about your money? That Henrietta is getting the whole of the residue?”

“Nay,”
Sam said, clamping his strong jaws, “she’s getting nowt, or not directly. Nor young George either, tho’ I still reckon him the flower o’ the flock.”

It astonished him to hear Sam say this, and with such emphasis. He could understand a man of Sam’s temperament fighting shy of splitting his money into so many insignificant packages, thereby making it seem a less impressive total, but he had always believed Henrietta, as Sam’s only child, would inherit the bulk of his fortune, and that George, who had been championed by his grandfather when the boy threw everything aside to redesign that petrol waggon he had brought home from Vienna, would come off best among the children.

“What are you going to do with it, Sam? Leave it to charity?”

To judge by his father-in-law’s expression, the question came close to killing him on the spot. He said, gesturing wildly with his fat, freckled hands, “
Charity
? Sweat bloody guts out for close on eighty years to cosset layabouts who never took jacket off for nobody, ‘emselves included? Nay, lad, you can’t be that daft! You know me a dam’ sight better than that!
Charity
! There’s too much bloody charity nowadays! No wonder country’s not what it were in my young days, when it were sink or swim. Ah’m leavin’ the lot to you, to do as you please with. And it’ll amount to something when all’s settled up, Ah’m tellin’ you!”

“Good God, I don’t want it, Sam. I’m already the wrong side of seventy, and I’ve got all the money I’m likely to spend!”

“Aye, I daresay, though a man can always do with a bit more. Besides, it’s not as cut an’ dried as that, as you’ll see if you’ll hold your tongue, lad. I’ve had Skina-rabbit Fossdyke make a trust fund in your name. That way you can spread it around whichever way you’ve a mind, so long as it stays in t’family.”

“How do you mean, exactly?”

Sam was silent for a moment or two, seemingly occupied in getting his breath and marshalling his thoughts. Finally, he said, “Put it this way. You and me, we had nowt to begin with, but we each of us finished up with a pile big enow to make men tip their hats to us, didn’t we?”

“You could put it that way.”

“It’s the on’y way to put it. Use that brass o’ mine to feed any one o’ them lads or lasses who shows my kind o’ gumption. And your kind of gumption. Any one of ‘em, mind, man or maid, who’ll stand on their own feet an’ look all bloody creation in t’face, same as we have. Do you follow me now?”

It made sense, Sam’s kind of sense. Bloated and dying, in an ugly house in a Manchester suburb, Sam Rawlinson obviously looked back over his life with immense satisfaction, hugging his commercial success (the only success worth having in his view) as a just reward for his prodigious and profitable endeavours over the years, thereby earning the respect of all men dedicated to the same object, and a man with any other objective was a fool, counting for nothing. He would want to see that money well spent and in a way he would spend it if, by some miracle, his youth and vigour were restored to him at this moment. There was a kind of merciless logic in the gesture, for Sam would restrict the deserving to those who, like himself and his son-in-law, backed themselves against all comers. He said, with a shrug, “Well, you might do worse, Sam. I get the drift of it, and you can rely on me to do it your way. Is that all?”

“Nay,” said Sam, “it’s not all. Ah’ve been wanting a word in your ear for long enough. Mebbe I won’t get another chance.”

Adam waited, but for some moments Sam’s gaze remained blank. Then, unexpectedly, he rallied and said, very carefully, “It were about young George. Him and that kiss-your-arse manager he sets such store on. What’s the name? Same name as that old maid of a clerk you had down there, before you took it into your head to back out and leave t’lads to run your business.”

“You mean Tybalt? Wesley Tybalt, the son of my head clerk?”

“Aye, that’s him. I got word he wants watching.”

It crossed Adam’s mind then, and for the first time since entering the room, that Sam was wandering. Wesley Tybalt, the only child of his old friend in the rough and tumble days, had lately established himself as the most dynamic administrator they had ever had. George himself said so, others echoed his judgment, and even his excessively modest father, now retired and devoting himself full-time to his East End mission work, agreed with them. Sam had always been keenly interested in the expansion of Swann-on-Wheels, but he had never had anything to do with its dayto-day administration. It seemed extremely improbable that now, at nearly ninety, and a housebound invalid into the bargain, he could have discovered anything of importance about the firm’s affairs. Wesley Tybalt had served his time up here, but so had everybody else who held a position of responsibility at Headquarters. It was a Swann rule that promising executives should spend six months in every region before joining the London staff, so Sam might well have met and evaluated Tybalt when he was based in the north. That could hardly account, however, for so direct a warning. He said, sharply, “You’ll have to be a damned sight more explicit than that, Sam. I’m out of things now, as you well know. George is gaffer, and Giles is next in line. My other two younger sons, Hugo and Edward, are in the network, but I’ve never once had reason to suppose George wasn’t making a thorough go of it. If there was a flaw in young Tybalt, I would have heard about it. One or other of the boys would have told me, and asked my advice, no doubt.”

“Not George,” Sam said, once again clamping his aggressive jaws like a rat-trap. “George is a loner, as you’ve good cause to know. Your memory’s not that short, lad.”

That much at least was true. Ever since taking over, George had gone his own way without seeking anyone’s advice but the business had prospered under him, despite an occasional misjudgment, like the premature introduction of those mechanical vans some years back. As for young Tybalt, Adam had been prejudiced in his favour a long time now, partly, no doubt, because he had received such unswerving loyalty from his father over a period of thirty years. He had met him often during his visits to the yard, a tall, loose-limbed, toothy young man, with thin sandy hair and an ingratiating manner. Not a boy you could like, perhaps, but one who knew precisely what he was about when he came to having charge of the network’s clerical concerns. Every single question Adam had ever put to him concerning stock and trends and routes had prompted a concise and realistic answer. He said, doubtfully, “What put this into your head, Sam? Where did it come from? Has George been up here lately?”

“He came once. A few weeks since, when I was still up and about, but he weren’t the same lad as back along. There were no flies on him then but there are now. One in particular, I’d say.”

“Who would that be?”

“Nay, I can’t swear to that. I could’ve one time, when I was around to put the ferrets in if I wanted to know anything partic’lar. But I’ll lay long odds it’s a woman. He were dressed to the nines and had his hair smarmed down and smelling like a garding.”

“Did he talk to you about business?”

“Nay, he didn’t. And that was what made me sit up an’ take notice, for he alwus had before, whenever he looked in on me. Like I say, he weren’t t’same lad at all, so I got to talking with one or two of the old uns who dropped in to pass the time o’ day wi’ me and I got a hint or two.”

“What kind of hint?”

“That Swann’s New Broom was cutting a dash wi’ the quality an’ leavin’ too much to his clerks. I seen many a good man go bust that way. So have you, I daresay.”

“And young Tybalt. Have you ever met him?”

“Can’t say as I have but old Levison has. Come to think on it, Levison was the one who tipped me the wink.”

“Who the devil is Levison?”

“Levison and Skilly, big warehousemen, Liverpool way. Done a deal o’ business with ‘em in my time, but they don’t haul by your line. Their stuff goes south on the cheap with Linklater’s outfit. These things get around. They always have an’ they always will among folk who count.”

“What got around, exactly?”

“Nowt to speak of…” He was tiring rapidly and his breathing became laboured so that Adam thought,
I can’t press him now, although I’d give something to know what put that bee in his bonnet
. He rose, massaging the straps of his artificial leg. “I’ll think on it.”

Sam said, watching him narrowly. “Bloody memory’s not what it were, dam’ it!” He fumbled for his hunter watch, hanging by its heavy gold chain from the bedrail. “Time for me green pills,” he said, vaguely. “Better fetch our Hilda up, lad. You’ll be staying over a day or so?”

“We’re staying at the Midland. Hilda has enough on her hands, Sam.”

“Aye,” Sam said, listlessly, “she’s a good lass, but she never did the one thing I expected of her.” He rallied momentarily, glaring the full length of the bed at an atrocious seascape hanging on the far wall. “Ah’d have liked a son to follow on. Hetty’s litter is well enough but a lass isn’t the same, somehow.”

His chin dropped and his thick red lips parted. Adam went out, closing the door softly and calling to Hilda that it was time for Sam’s green pills. Hetty asked, handing him a cup, “How did you find him, Adam?”

“Very talkative,” Adam said, thoughtfully. “He’ll soldier on a bit yet if I’m any judge.” And then, as if she had expressed a contrary view, “He’s a man of parts, your father. There aren’t many of his sort about nowadays.”

“There never were,” Henrietta said, “even when I first remember him. That was twelve years before you saw him ride a boy into the ground the night they were burning his mill.” Then, in a more conciliatory tone, “Do you suppose he remembers things like that now, Adam? Now that he’s dying, I mean?”

“If he does he doesn’t regret ‘em.”

“But… shouldn’t he? I mean, now that he’s going? I’m sure I would. You too.”

“That’s the difference between us and between the times, too. In Sam’s day, in my early days come to that, it was kill or be killed. You can’t expect a man reared in a jungle to fall to his prayers in his dotage. Not without his tongue in his cheek that is. He asked me to ask Hilda to show us a copy of his will.”