Give Us This Day

by R. F Delderfield

  "Eight. My husband replaced Mr. O'Dowd as Irish manager, soon after we were married. Now be so good as to tell me, Mr. Clarke, why did we lose the contract? I have to know, for when Clinton finds I've been talking to you he'll quiz me all the way home. Was it simply because Mr. Brayley is an Irishman?"

  The attack, pressed home in this way, momentarily disconcerted the wine merchant, so that he welcomed the respite granted him by the arrival of the teatray. But then, before he could counter, Clinton arrived out of breath, and not seeing Clarke at once, scowled his displeasure and said, "Really, my dear, wasn't it rather silly to disappear like that? I wasn't gone but ten minutes…" but broke off when he became aware of Clarke's grin across the table.

  Tim said gently, "Come now, don't scold her, man. She's only here to argue your case, and how many wives would do that in public? Especially young and fetching ones like yours. Here, let me buy you a drink to take the sour taste of that contract out of your mouth," and again he summoned a waiter, this time ordering two whiskies and sodas. "I know that's your tipple, Coles. It's my business to know these things. Don't let your tea go cold, my dear."

  Then followed, for Clinton Coles, one of the most bewildering intervals of his sojourn in Ireland, for it soon became clear that a man whose patronage could mean as much as two thousand a year to the firm and who had resisted all his efforts (including costly backhanders to warehouse clerks) to point custom Swann's way, had taken a great fancy to his wife and was vulnerable on that account, if half they said about Tim Clarke's gallivanting was true. For ten minutes they talked horses, but they soon got around to business, and the upshot of the occasion was a promise from Clarke that he would review the contract when it came up for confirmation at his quarterly board meeting next month.

  By then the last race was run, and they had downed a couple of whiskies apiece while Joanna sipped her tea and concentrated on looking excessively demure. It was when they rose to leave, however, that Clinton Coles became fully aware of his wife's potential as a business asset. Clarke said, "If you're thinking of attending the garrison supper-ball on Thursday week, could I prevail on you and your charming wife to join my party as my guests? The fact is, I'm short of young people this year, and we ought to take advantage of a gel as decorative as Mrs. Coles."

  Clinton murmured that he would be delighted to accept, and Joanna, glowing with triumph, added that they would anticipate the occasion with the greatest pleasure. She reasoned that old man Clarke would have no means of knowing that year after year had passed without the Coleses having received a coveted invitation to the liveliest event of the Dublin season.

  They were bowling homewards before Clinton, slowly recovering from the shock of acknowledging his wife as an emissary extraordinary, squeezed her hand and said, feelingly, "My dear, you were sensational! We've as good as hooked that old rascal, and it's all your doing. How did it come about? You went into that buffet in a pet, didn't you?"

  "Oh, not really," Joanna said, generously, "I was aware you were one of the wasps buzzing round Deirdre Donnelly's jampot, but why should that bother me? I really did need some tea, and as soon as the old goat started sidling up to me I thought I'd take advantage of it. After all, where's the harm? He's over sixty and only playing games with himself, isn't he?"

  "Well, I wouldn't go as far as that," Clinton said, chuckling. "They tell me he can still give a very good account of himself with the barmaids, and seeing how dashing you look today no one can blame him trying his luck. I would have thought, however, he'd turn glum as soon as I appeared on the scene. Maybe he reasoned I'd turn a blind eye for two thousand a year."

  "Ah, and would you?"

  He looked outraged. "Good Lord, woman, you surely don't mean…" but she laughed and pinched his knee, underlining the tolerant and cheerfully sensual relationship that had developed between them since she and her sister Helen had switched beaux at a Penshurst picnic in their youth. She knew very well that he was not in love with her in the way she had been with him since she had surrendered to him on a Kentish hillside, but she flattered herself that she could still make him forget the Deirdre Donnellys of this world when she had him in her arms.

  "I'm only teasing," she said, "and you surely know it. Well, we didn't back a winner, but, taken all round, I'd call it the most profitable day we've had at the races, wouldn't you?"

  "I would indeed," he said, "and it isn't over yet, my dear."

  Neither was it, in the sense he implied. That night, in their pleasant bedroom overlooking the Kingstown busy harbour, he was a boy again and she reflected that he was never likely to be anything else, despite his cares of office and a propensity to spend rather more than they earned each year. And yet, in the event, she was wrong in assuming today had been a profitable day for the Dublin branch of Swann-on-Wheels. She had no means of knowing that her chance encounter with Tim Clarke, at a Curragh race-meeting, was the very first detonation in a chain of explosions down the years that would, by the spring of 1916, divide her loyalties and Clinton's, and that the wounds inflicted by the breach would not be healed until Dublin itself was a battlefield.

  * * *

  Two months' voyaging and a week's uncomfortable land trek from the Dublin Pale, where the London Mission had its pitch under the walls of Peitang Cathedral in the Imperial City of Peking, Helen Coles, once boon companion of Joanna, and sister-in-law to Clinton, was also recalling the famous picnic on the wooded hillside above Penshurst Place in April 1888, an event that had led to her marriage with Rowland Coles and her presence here in the enervating summer heat of the Chinese land mass. The heat, the smells, and the unceasing clamour of the great city were factors that disinclined her to continue the battle to persuade herself that she had the best of the bargain on that occasion.

  In the years of traipsing that had followed her acceptance of Rowley's proposal, she had made sustained efforts to convince herself that she was very privileged to be the wife of a man whose sole ambition in life was to relieve suffering, teach aliens the rudiments of Western hygiene, and bestow upon them the benefits of a Christian way of life. Having her full share of Swann tenacity, however, she stuck gamely to her endeavours, but here in Peking, a mild improvement on their billet in East Africa, she was conscious of losing ground rapidly. Her temper was not improving and neither was her health but, what was more depressing, she was coming to terms with the certainty that she was thoroughly unsuited to the life of a medical missionary dedicated to his calling, and was wishing heartily that something would stifle her yearning for a humdrum life in the company of Europeans, living out selfish lives in a comfortable background. And this made her feel shamefully disloyal to poor Rowley, whom she still cherished, but in the way one might cherish the chief of a tribe, or the austere and remote father of a large and indigent family.

  She had come to look upon Rowley in this way by slow and arduous stages, signposted over nine years of marriage by his expectations of her as a helpmate and deputy, rather than someone licensed to release him, from time to time, of his fearsome responsibilities, but she had proved miserably unequal to the task and awareness of this made her a failure in her own eyes.

  She knew, at the deepest level of consciousness, that it was not her fault, that no mere woman could wean him, even momentarily, from his resolve to work miracles among the heathens, first upon their bodies, and then (providing he had the time) upon their souls. She learned this very early in their marriage, possibly by the manner in which he made love to her on the rare occasions he could be coaxed from this quest in savage, fly-pestered backwaters for his personal Holy Grail. On all occasions, even when on leave and at a remove from his flock, it was she who had to initiate each encounter and remind him shyly that she was his wife as well as his dispenser; and when he acquiesced, in his quiet, grave way, he performed his marital functions absentmindedly, as though he was carrying out some repetitive task, with a particle of his mind. Then he would lie flat on his back, pondering some problem concerned with the spread o
f typhus, or the contamination of drinking water, or an antidote for the bite of some lethal reptile, and was quite lost to her in the physical sense until the next occasion.

  It had a very depressing effect on her, this withdrawal, as though, each time it occurred, he was saying that she was incapable of stimulating his senses; and fleetingly, with a kind of terrible nostalgia, she remembered the frolics of other, less exalted men, who had embraced her in dark corners of Tryst, sometimes letting their hands stray over her breasts and buttocks, proclaiming what she had always assumed a male compulsion to fondle and be fondled. Sometimes she found herself envying his convert nurses when he lost his temper on account of their clumsiness or dilatoriness and snapped at them in a way that sent them scuttling. It would be gratifying, she thought, to goad him to a point of fury where he would unhitch his belt and thrash her and make her smart and cry out, for this would at least establish that she stood for more than a mute, unpaid assistant in the wards where his patients queued for a few moments of his time.

  All the other missionaries' wives—and there were more than a dozen here in Peking—seemed to adapt to this passive role; but mostly they were middle-aged, with complexions dried and skins wrinkled by equatorial suns, whereas she was still only twenty-seven and could never banish from her mind the greenness of Kentish hopfields and the freshness of meadows and coppices in the Weald. The death of their child, after a few sickly weeks of life, had been a double tragedy for her. Its survival might have prevailed upon him to send her home to await his next leave. As it was, he seemed to take it for granted that she would remain as isolated from civilisation as a female Crusoe, and she had begun to doubt whether she had the hardihood to endure a three-year stint at the Peking Mission.

  The possibility of their being shifted, she gathered, was remote. Nothing dramatic ever happened out here, as China pursued its timeless journey down the centuries. The Chinese had developed a way of life that nothing could hope to alter, and the great powers—Britain, America, Germany, and Austria—enjoyed their limited concessions in this incredibly old city. She discounted rumours of a growing opposition to the foreigner building in northern and eastern provinces. The wily old Empress would never be so stupid as to challenge the might and technology of the West, and any move against isolated missions and trading outposts would be savagely repressed by Imperial troops.

  She re-addressed herself to the monthly task of writing to Joanna in Dublin, the only member of the family with whom she maintained a regular correspondence. "My Dear Jo… Nothing much to report… kept busy from dawn to dusk… thank you very much for the dress patterns but I don't know whether I shall ever find time to make anything… Rowley very well, although I must confess I feel drained of energy in the summer… my love to Clint and the family… I do envy you two boys and a girl but perhaps I shall be lucky soon…" Random, inconsequential thoughts that were hardly worth committing to paper, yet her sole link with a world that sometimes seemed as remote as the stars.

  * * *

  George tinkering with machines; Alex peddling lethal hardware. Stella dominating a dutiful array of sons, daughters, and farmhands; Margaret filling her canvases; Joanna as a Swann emissary in Ireland; Helen eating her heart out in Peking; Hugo touring the country from one sports meeting to another; Edward following in George's footsteps, it seemed. Henrietta saw them all as a queer, rootless, self-centred lot, not in the least like the orderly spread of soldier sons she had envisaged when, as a girl living in a rackety industrial town, she had dreamed the hours away, waiting for a prince to ride over the hill.

  She granted them a rather breathless individuality, and a trick of fixing the attention of whoever looked in the direction of any one of them, but they lacked, to her mind, a common theme, a resolute and clearly defined purpose that had been hers all the years they had been growing up in this old house on the spur. Their various aspirations confused her, for they were not, she would have thought, the ambitions that should activate conventionally reared sons and daughters. Their fulfillments to date eluded her. The best she could do was to number off their progeny and hope that a coherent pattern would emerge from the following generation. But having settled her mind as to that, she went about her chores contentedly enough, cocking an eye at the clock now and again to remind herself that a predictable husband and youngest son would be home soon, wanting their supper.

  But Adam, in his stone eyrie above the sliding Thames, did not view them in these slightly censorious terms and did, indeed, perceive a pattern in their collective pursuits, seeing them as children of their tribe and times, widening an ever-larger circle in a way that soldier sons would never have done and on the whole he was not displeased. At all events they're positive, he thought, every last one of 'em, and that's as much as a man has a right to expect at my time of life.

  The verdict mellowed him, leaving his mind free to pursue his self-imposed task of restructuring the network and going about it in a way that would probably astonish George when he scrubbed his hands and re-addressed himself to paperwork. For this restored to him his pride, and pride, to Adam Swann, was a power-house that set all his other generators to work and helped to balance the nation's books. He seldom gave a thought to his grandchildren. The past he had renounced at the age of thirty, and the future was not his business. All his nervous energy was engaged with the present on a purely day-today basis, and on that basis Swann's waggons would continue to roll.

  PART TWO

  Tailtwist

  One

  Breakthrough

  The valley was not as Giles remembered it.

  When, as a scholar-gipsy, he had first passed this way on his marathon walk from Devon to Edinburgh in 1884, he had seen it as a monument to squalor that yet retained a few subtle undertones of an older Wales, when unsullied streams ran between folds in the hills and islands of green showed on the ragged escarpment behind the town. Dirty and depressing, especially under lowering skies, but raising a few of its tattered banners of the time before the English first came here with their mail-clad men-at-arms, later with their prospectors and surveyors, finally with their armies of scavengers to claw the wealth from the ridges and darken the mountain with spoil.

  Today, a mere thirteen years later, the whole area was given over to the moneygrubbers, with no vestige of green remaining and tips everywhere, dark against the sky on the northern edge of the town. Housing had proliferated as the mines expanded and more and more Welshmen yielded hard-won acres to the thistles and came out of the interior to earn their bread. The winding gear was silhouetted against the winter sky, a stark symbol of Anglo-Saxon dominance, like a gallows in the marketplace of a conquered town. The steep terraces of the tiny dwellings began higher up and stretched all the way down to the grey-black blob that was Pontnewydd, where there were a few grubby shops and a rash of chapels, each built like a fortress of local stone. The overall picture now was one of stupefying drabness, and yet, knowing these people, Giles was fortified by the certainty that this was not the whole picture, only its frame and outer edges. Down there in the heart of the place, and up here on the serried terraces, there was warmth and comradeship that one could seek in vain in more wholesome places. There was human dignity, too, a plinth for loyalty, courage, and the dreadful patience of men and women who, while admitting defeat, had never signed the articles of unconditional surrender.

  Lovell, his father's former viceroy about here, found them the house, one of the few about here with privacy, for it stood at the end of an unsurfaced road running at right-angles to Alma Terrace and ending in a cul-de-sac under the lowest ridge of the mountain; the house, Lovell said, was that of an official of the Blaentan Company, and it could be bought for a couple of hundred pounds. Stone-built and four-square to the winds that cut their way through the northern passes all winter and the southwesterlies that blew in from the Atlantic in spring and autumn. A three-bedroomed house, reckoned grand by Pontnewydd standards, for it had a small, walled garden front and back, and a rear vie
w of the mountains of mid-Wales.

  Lovell said, giving him a steady look: "Sure you want to buy it? Will your wife care to bide here, within washing-line view of cottages and tips? Pontnewydd is the central point, I'll grant you, and will shorten your journeys about the constituency, but we could find something more salubrious if we looked nearer the coast, and you'll have the horse and trap to get you around."

  "I'll hang out my sign here," Giles told him. "If I'm to represent these people, I've got to know them both in and out of the mine. Where else could I hope to do that?"

  "It's not you I'm thinking of," Lovell said. "You were always something of a Romany, even when you looked in here as a schoolboy, and talked me into taking you down a pit. But Mrs. Swann deserves some consideration. With a man like Rycroft-Mostyn for a father, and eight years soft living in London, she'll not take kindly to slumming, will she?"

  "She might," Giles said, smiling. "You can decide that when you meet her," and on impulse he told Lovell the story of her flight on the eve of their wedding, and how he found and reclaimed her working for a few shillings a week in a North Country drapery store.