Give Us This Day

by R. F Delderfield

  "I never heard that," Lovell said, wonderingly. "What made her do a daft thing like that?"

  "All manner of motives, adding up to a need to break free of her background. In fact, I might as well admit that, but for her insistence, I wouldn't be here now, throwing my hat in the ring. She seems persuaded I'm tailor-made for the role."

  "Ah," Lovell said, nodding, "that tells me more about her. I've had the same notion ever since you looked in on me on that tramp of yours." He mused a moment, toying with the heavy key of the front door. "Tell you something else. You'll win this seat, in spite of Carey's grip on the farming and docking interests further west. In a year or so the Tories will have shot their bolt about here. Maybe you're right to camp on the battlefield. It might help overcome the prejudice against the English. That'll be my line of attack, anyway."

  "You'll come out of retirement to be my full-time agent?"

  "I will and gladly," Lovell said, "and I'll tell you something I never dared tell your father. I did my best about here, and made a success of the branch, but trade was always second best with me. I always did have a hankering to get at their throats. Any true Welshman has and I'm free to please myself now that I'm a widower and the boys are grown and off my hands. I'll see Hughes Brothers about the house. They'll need a deposit, for a place like this wouldn't stay on their books long."

  He led the way into the open and paused at the rusted iron gate between the two stone pillars of the front patch. "Christ Almighty!" he said. "But they've made a rare midden of it, haven't they? I used to fish down there as a boy. All you could catch now would be an old boot and a tin can. I wonder if they'll ever go away again?"

  "They'll go, when the seams run out. Meantime we'll give as good as we get, I promise you."

  * * *

  The weather had broken when he drove her up here for the first time. The valley was screened in a curtain of slanting rain, and the mountains were unseen under great grey banks of low cloud. It was a pity, he thought, that she couldn't see the one redeeming feature of the landscape, but she made no complaint, following him round the squarish house that was littered with crates, a few of which he had already unpacked, for they had planned to move in at once and be on hand for the adoption meeting on Saturday. He had chosen the back room as their bedroom on account of the view it offered, but now that he entered it the drabness of the vista depressed him a little. He said, "You're sure about this, Romayne? After all, as Lovell pointed out, we could look about for a more cheerful aspect beyond the main line. There's a belt of agricultural land there and one or two stone-built villages."

  "With populations of a hundred or so?"

  "No more. Almost everyone about here works in the pits. The electoral roll shows a population of around twenty thousand in Pontnewydd alone."

  "Then here is the place we start. Anything less would be a compromise, wouldn't it?"

  "Well, yes, I suppose it would, but you'll spend a good deal of your time up here and you ought to have the final say in it."

  "It was all my idea, remember? So now that it's shaping up don't apologise for it, not ever. To do that is cheating, Giles."

  "Cheating who?"

  "Me. This is the first worthwhile thing I've ever done for you, to bring you up to the point of making a clean break, and I want to remember that, always. It's a fresh start for me, too. Those years in London were no more than an interlude."

  She walked slowly round the little room, with its peeling wallpaper and brass bedstead set against the inner wall between sash window and door. Most of his unpacking had been done up here. The folded bedclothes were piled on the mattress. A bedside table had been set up with its oil-lamp, and there was a new dressing-table in the opposite corner, looking like a piece of furniture that had come in here out of the rain and been unable to find its way out again. "I'll tell you something, Giles, that might convince you that this isn't a fad of mine… settling here, I mean. This place, this house, is going to mean a great deal to me. A new beginning for me as well as you, for we've never been man and wife in the full sense of the word, or not until this moment. No, don't quarrel with that, for you know very well what I mean. We've loved each other, yes, but neither one of us has ever been… well… fulfilled, in the way those miners and their wives are fulfilled in those brick boxes down the hill."

  "You're talking about children?"

  "Partly. I'll give you children here. I feel it, inside here," and she touched her breast. "But I'll give you more besides, and the feeling that I can makes me happier than I've ever been. Safer, too."

  He kissed her mouth, surprised by the eagerness of her response. She said, "Let's not unpack anything more up here. Uncrate some of the kitchen stuff and light the fire. I'll make the bed up and cook supper. It will only be bacon and eggs and cheese but I'll improve on that without a cook. It won't do for you to have people waiting on us up here. Just a woman to pop in and help clean up in the mornings, that's all I want from now on," and she addressed herself to the blankets and pillows, going about it so briskly that he had to remind himself he had never seen her make a bed before. He went down the narrow stairs and soon had a crackling fire going with sticks and a bucket of coal he had brought up in the trap. By the time supper was cooked and eaten, and the crocks scoured in a sink half-fell of water boiled on the hob, darkness had closed in, pressing against the uncurtained windows. She said, "Do you want to tackle those voters' registers now, or shall we make an early night of it?"

  "I'm doing no paperwork tonight. I was travelling from first light this morning, putting in the time getting to know the beat until your train arrived."

  "Give me fifteen minutes," she said. "There's something I've a mind to do," and she slipped away upstairs, leaving him with the impression that they were alone for the first time in their lives. When she called down he damped the fire with dust, extinguished the lamp, and went upstairs, pausing on the threshold of the bedroom and blinking into the lamplit room. It was a room magically transformed. Rosepink curtains screened the window. Rugs covered the shredded linoleum. The bed had been made up and turned back and she was sitting at the dressing-table mirror brushing her hair.

  "Well, bach?"

  "It's marvellous! I've never seen those curtains before."

  "I made them, and the rugs were set aside before the inventory was made out at Shirley. It's cosy, isn't it? Much cosier than I expected. The heat comes from that chimneybreast and it'll stay warm all night, so long as the fire stops in. Feel here."

  He put his hand on the chimneybreast and found the bricks warm. "I think you got a bargain," she added. "This place is far better built than Craig Wen, but that's because it was built by Welshmen for a Welshman. In Beddgelert they were just fleecing the English."

  It amazed him how quickly she was adapting, but then he remembered that she was pure Welsh on her mother's side. "I daresay you'll end up speaking Welsh fluently," he said. "You've got the hang of it from old Maggie, up in Beddgelert." And as he said this there came to him, fresh as a rose, the memory of that first morning she had led him into her father's house in his dripping clothes, and Maggie had scolded her in Welsh and dried him off while Romayne, full of mischief, had changed into a gown of crimson velvet, with gold facings and rows of gold buttons on the bodice and sleeves. She said, "What are you remembering now?"

  "Your 'Camelot' gown," he said, "and how you looked when your hair was cut short and combed close to the head, so that it matched the gold buttons on the sleeves."

  "You've forgotten something not so far back."

  "What's that?"

  "Today's our wedding anniversary."

  "My God, so it is! And I had forgotten, although how…"

  "I didn't," she said, triumphantly, and reached beyond the bed and pulled out first a stone hot-water bottle, wrapped in her nightgown, then a bottle of champagne and two glasses. "There," she said, "but it's not fair to crow over you because I made up my mind our first night here would have to be a special occasion. That's why
I persuaded you to leave me behind to finish the packing. Open it, but don't let it shoot over the bedclothes. They're all we have until the van gets here."

  It was years, he thought, since he had seen her in this mood, as sparkling as the child she had been the day they met. She was wearing a blue silk dressing gown he had bought her on their first visit to the Continent, a dashing affair, trimmed with Lille lace and sashed with blue velvet. He drew the cork and filled the glasses, saying, "What do we drink to?"

  "To winning Pontnewydd from the enemy!"

  "No," he said, "to us, and to you especially, for I've never seen you like this since…"

  "Since before I ran off?"

  "Since before that really, for we seemed to squabble our way through that interminable engagement. Since that day on the mountain just before you went back to London to be presented. You flew into a temper because I argued against us getting married right away."

  "I remember and I was right. You should have taken me at my word. My father would have agreed, he was so relieved to find anyone who would take me off his hands. At least we should have been spared all those silly squabbles."

  "But you wouldn't have seen how the other half lived, and then we shouldn't have been here at all."

  "That's so. I'd forgotten how it began."

  She drained her glass and set it down on the dressing-table, crossing to him where he sat on the edge of the bed. "It's permanent," she said. "You believe that, don't you?"

  He unhitched the bow of her dressing gown, slipped his hands behind her, and ran them lovingly down her back and over her thighs. "I not only believe it. I feel as if we were beginning our honeymoon, with all the benefit of experience. There's Welsh magic left in this valley after all. Those tips haven't been able to banish it."

  She slipped out of her gown and threw it across the only chair in the room. "Stop making speeches," she said. "They'll be needed later. If we're on our honeymoon let's get on with it, bach," and she kissed him, lifted the hot water bottle from the bed and slipped between the sheets.

  The pleasant languor of her body encouraged a state of mind enabling her to isolate the uniqueness of the occasion in a way that had never been possible in the past. For then, like a heavy shadow, the shame of her encounters with other men, prompted by curiosity on her part and uncomplicated lust on theirs, had stood between her and physical fulfilment in the arms of a different kind of man, one whose chivalry and essential tolerance had been recognised by her from the first day she met him.

  He knew of those earlier follies, of her seduction, before she was seventeen, by a groom and later a Belgian musician. She had allowed them to fumble her with clumsy fingers, then possess her for a few sweaty moments in isolated corners of the house. Her father had made sure that he did know when, washing his hands of her, he was still resolved to use Giles Swann as a go-between in his relations with his work force. He had laid the unsavoury facts before him like items in a police report, but it had not freed him from the need of her, nor scared him off, as it would have scared most men. Rather it had enlarged his area of compassion so that their subsequent relationship had never been soiled by the knowledge. As for herself, her lovers, if you could call them that, had never come close to teaching her anything of the least significance about the way to search out a relationship that promised to assuage the loneliness of spirit that had clouded her childhood and adolescence. Indeed, it was not until this moment, the culmination of the long haul that had led them to this unremarkable little house overlooking a ruined valley, that she recognised the act of physical fusion, even with a man she could respect, as little more than a starting point in the journey of the soul towards personal fulfilment. It was imperative that she should acknowledge this and acknowledgment was made with a gesture. She reached out and found his hand in the darkness, lifting it gently and mooring it under her breasts. Its presence somehow confirmed her full acceptance of the active role in their partnership.

  Two

  George versus the Clock

  For George, the work was reminiscent of housebound hours spent over jigsaw puzzles in the nursery at Tryst, a methodical sorting and shifting of segments of a battle scene, or a farmyard, until the four cornerpieces were in place and the straight edges in approximate alignment, so that a start could be made towards completing the picture, but the analogy went far beyond that. Just as, bent over the tray holding the puzzle, the selection of a fragment was suddenly seen to be the correct one and a segment slotted into place, so it was with the third prototype of Maximus, whose assembly presented so many experiments, frustrations, and disappointments. There was a penalty of error, too. On the workshop floor a misconjecture could represent a wasted day, perhaps a wasted week, and he was working against the clock.

  He had been through it all before. Once beside the Danube, sorcerer's apprentice to old Maximilien Körner assembling his giant carriage that had ultimately crawled through the morning river mists like Jupiter's war-chariot, and later during his earlier severance from the firm, when he had improved on Max's model to a degree that had half-persuaded his father that the days of the dray horse were numbered.

  But now the challenge was more immediate. All over Europe and the Americas men were bending brain and will to the solution of these selfsame problems, although a majority of them still regarded the mechanically propelled vehicle as a substitute for the brougham rather than the waggon and dray. He made the fullest possible use of their discoveries, however, adapting and often blending gleanings from word-of-mouth information, sketches, and sometimes spare parts, run down by the indefatigable Scottie Quirt, who had spent ten years drifting about the north and Midlands, hiring his skills to whoever would pay for them.

  Like a jigsaw, yet he sometimes saw his task in a more majestic light. A range of mountains, with a few major peaks and innumerable smaller ones, each presenting a peculiar challenge of its own. Nothing was predictable in this wilderness. Sometimes the loftier peaks were easier to scale.

  One such peak represented the ratio between thrust and laden weight, another the variation of gears to adapt to gradients, including a reverse gear; for without the ability to reverse, a vehicle was as cumbersome as a barge fighting a strong current. He estimated that he should be able to generate sufficient power to haul a five-ton load, more than any load Swann's four-horse or two-horse waggons could haul, over indifferent roads, and this had been achieved by constant modification of the carriage until the overall weight of the vehicle was reduced to a point where its chassis did not fracture under the strain. The main structure of a Swann mano'-war, the heaviest category in use with the exception of purpose-built Goliaths, was of oak, four inches thick in places. A petrol-driven Maximus of corresponding strength would be impossibly heavy, so he switched to nickel-steel that was found equal to anything Swann was likely to haul, excluding heavy machinery. The gear changes operated through a gate, with a retaining bar to prevent reverse gear being engaged in error.

  The third and fourth mountains to be scaled, however, presented greater challenges. They represented overheating, and a tendency for vital parts to be shaken loose by vibration and passage over uneven sections of carriageway, and he was assaulting these most of the winter. Overheating was eventually cured by the introduction of a perforated jacket made of copper, and the summit of the fourth major peak was reached on the unforgettable day that he and Scottie fitted their double semi-elliptic front and rear springs, affording the first real flexibility Maximus had ever achieved.

  There remained the minor peaks, each with a range of problems of their own, so that it was sometimes like inching his way up a shingled incline sown with brambles and quickset thorn. They represented braking, solved at last by internal expanding shoes operating in drums; uneven transmission, overcome by a new type of carburetter intake copied from a French model; lubrication, and a hundred and one other problems, each of which proved desperately time-consuming. Even so, by late April, ten months from the day he had stripped son of Maximus do
wn to its last rivet in the Salford yard, he had done what he had set out to do. He had, he told himself, a vehicle capable of hauling a sizeable load south to H.Q. in two days, averaging seventy-five miles a day from the final testing ground, a mile east of Macclesfield, to London Bridge.

  "Will you take me with you, George?" Gisela asked, when he was ready for the gamble, and he said, regretfully, that he could not. A passenger meant extra weight and, aside from that, the driver would have to face a formidable buffetting. It was a silly risk to take in view of the fact that she was now five months pregnant.

  "Then I shall go by train," she said, "and it's a great pity. I should enjoy your father's expression when he comes down from that tower and finds a Maximus in his yard."

  "Oh, you could still do that," he said, anxious to acknowledge her loyalty and invaluable help over the past ten months. "Set out by train the day after I leave and when you get there wait for me in the yard of the old George, somewhere between five and six. If I break down I'll telephone Bendall's factory in the Borough and he'll send someone over with a message. In that case catch the train on to Tryst, but say nothing about the trial run. I'll catch them bending or not at all."