Give Us This Day

by R. F Delderfield

  "I didn't pass it on to anyone. He made me swear I wouldn't, but in any case it isn't the kind of thing one would boast about, is it? I thought about it, however. I thought about it for years, all the time I was away from home, and you needn't worry, I'm not ashamed of it. It taught me more about life than I ever learned from books."

  "What did it teach you? What specific thing, Gilda?"

  The girl looked at her levelly. "It taught me that the very worst thing that can happen to anyone is to be poor. That's why I've finally decided to marry Edward Swann."

  So there it was, and sitting, because suddenly she felt a little dizzy, Edith groped for the key that opened a door on so much about Gilda she had never understood. Her ability to detach herself from her surroundings. The tight control she had over her emotions. Her unusual reliance on her own judgments, so unlike the boys who had always, to some extent, leaned on her when they were growing up and going out into the world. In her presence now she felt deflated and oddly helpless, and yet, behind her confusion, there was a glimmer of hope that out of this they might find a bridge to a better understanding. She said, finally, "You do what you think best, Gilda. In a way I suppose I've misjudged you. I loved your father to distraction, but I can't help thinking it wasn't very wise of him to confide in you without consulting me first. He probably had a good reason, or what he thought was a good reason. You were always more important to him than the boys. Maybe he saw you as that sister of his, born all over again with a better chance. If you'll take my advice you won't tell Edward. His mother and father know, but they can be trusted. All there is left to say is if you do marry Edward, do your very best to make him happy and to have the kind of marriage I had, and Edward's father and mother have had all these years. It's the only thing worth having in the end."

  She got up and walked upstairs to her room. Unaccountably, and for the first time in thirty years, she wanted to weep. To weep for Tom and his sister Gilda. For all the wretchedness and deprivation they had suffered under a social system that valued goods and money high above human beings. Perhaps Gilda had it right after all. Perhaps the only ultimate sin was poverty.

  3

  The Swann firework display continued, at intervals, all through spring and summer to a time when the first shades of gold were beginning to show on the curling edges of the Tryst chestnuts and the early southwesterlies—"Sussex skies," Adam called them—came probing over the county border, reminding him that it was time to get his apples in and give his ornamental lake its annual dredging.

  Edward's wedding, staged, to Henrietta's delight in Twyforde Church rather than in faraway Northamptonshire, was behind them now. Everybody had stopped teasing Hugo by prefixing his name with "Sir," a family joke that bewildered Hugo's punctilious soldier-servant, whose chest expanded an extra inch every time he looked at his master nowadays, giving substance to Adam's remark that the sergeant was the most outrageous snob in the country.

  One golden September morning Henrietta put on her shawl and carried the post down to the terrace of the lake, where Adam was superintending the drainage, a task that needed considerable care if the sluices were not to jam and his paddocks flood. He looked like a ruffled old heron standing there in his rubber thigh boots, issuing gruff directions to the gardeners, and when she called to him he waded out and joined her on his stone seat fronting the water, a seat that had once formed part of the original embellishment of Tryst in the sixteenth century and had been rescued from a potting shed behind the stables.

  "The mail looked important," she said. "Here is your quarterly report, one from Alex, who has gone over to Ireland, and one from Margaret, addressed to you for some reason."

  He opened Margaret's letter first because he could see she was curious about it and drew out a cheque bearing his own signature, together with a letter and a photograph of the latest addition to the Griffiths family, a fat and very jollylooking baby sitting on the obligatory bearskin rug.

  He said, passing her the photograph and pocketing the cheque, "I won't get any peace until I explain. They can't be well off, so I sent her twenty pounds for her birthday. She's returned it, as she has returned other cheques I've sent her. I suppose it's time I took the hint and stopped playing fairy godfather. That husband of hers seems to have a surfeit of Celtic pride. She says they are several pounds a week better off now, for Giles made over his M.P.'s salary to Huw as his agent down there."

  "I didn't know they paid Members of Parliament!"

  "They've just started to, and I don't care to think what might come of it. They're a shifty enough lot as they are. Pay 'em for going there, and we'll have some real blackguards scrambling for the cash. However, it doesn't surprise me. About Giles, I mean. He'll see it as a way of helping them and pretending it's a rise. I daresay that prickly young Welshman will swallow that."

  His attitude to his in-laws often amused her. Ever since Joanna had run off with Clinton Coles in the middle of the night, Adam had referred to him as Jack-o'Lantern. Helen's first husband had been "that pill-rolling Bible spouter." Now the handsome Huw Griffiths was "that prickly Welshman." He was a little gentler with his daughters-in-law; George's wife, Gisela, was generally "that nice gel," and Romayne "the flighty one." Alex's wife, Lydia, was still "the Colonel's daughter," and Hugo's wife, "the Prima Donna."

  So far he had made but one jocular reference to Edward's wife, commenting on the astonishing self-possession she exhibited at the wedding in April. He named her "the Ice Maiden."

  Alex had interesting news. He had been sent to Ireland, he told them, by Lord Haldane, Secretary for War, to make a survey of territorial recruiting prospects over there if and when the Irish Home Rule Bill was approved by Lords and Commons. When Henrietta, like so many others baffled by what successive generations of politicians referred to as "the Irish Question," demanded to know whether Ireland would become an entirely separate country if the Irish at last had their way, he said, "Not for defence. Haldane is far too sharp for that. There will always be some of our chaps over there, if only to keep an eye on Paddy."

  She left him then to mull over the latest news from the network, and he unwrapped the latest copy of The Migrant, for Deborah's husband, Milton, had used the name he jokingly suggested when the quarterly journal had been launched.

  It was, he decided, a thoroughly workmanlike broadsheet, well-edited, wellprinted, and full of interest to anyone like himself. He read, among other things, that George had just commissioned his four-hundredth motor-van and sent it out to earn its bread in The Polygon. There was also a quarterly report by the Managing Director and he went through it word by word, telling himself that affable old George sounded oddly pompous when he committed himself to paper. He mused, tucking The Migrant into his boot, He's got a right to feel smug, I suppose… He was a big jump ahead of all of 'em twenty years ago, when nobody, least of all me, believed in that snorting great engine he brought home from the Danube. But it won't do for him to go on thinking nobody can ever catch him up. There's always an outsider with a new trick up his sleeve, and there always will be. If there wasn't, commerce would be desperately dull and he'd be the first to realise it with all that energy… Besides, it's clear enough now that everyone is latching on to the potential of commercial motoring and his presence out there in front is a challenge to 'em…

  He gave some final instructions to the head gardener and turned to make his way up to the house for lunch, looking round him with pride of a kind he had never experienced beside the Thames. Up there someone was always around to disturb his sense of order whereas here, now that his estate had matured with its imported trees and shrubs, he could keep strict control on the landscape and intended to do so, as long as he lived. What would happen to it then he could only guess. The only one of his sons who had inherited his taste was Giles, and he doubted whether Giles would ever be tempted to turn his back on his lame ducks and become a country gentleman.

  He was wondering, idly, what kind of instruction he could insert into a codicil t
o his will concerning the future care of Tryst and its treasures when he saw Henrietta emerge from the house and make her way, very swiftly for her these days, across the forecourt, turning her head this way and that as though she was looking for him. The moment she saw him she broke into a little trot and he called, "What's the hurry, woman? I'm coming…" Then his sharp eye caught the glint of tears in her eyes and he hastened his step, saying, "What is it, Hetty? What's upset you so suddenly?"

  She said, breathlessly, "Wanted to catch you… tell you before you saw her… Edith's here… She's got news… dreadful news…" and she broke off with a sob, tears running parallel courses down her cheeks.

  "One of her boys…?"

  "No, no… it's Gilda. Gilda and Edward. Edward came to her yesterday… Gilda's gone."

  "Gone? Gone where?"

  "He doesn't know. She just… well, left, in the middle of the night. They had a tiff, nothing at all so he said, and when she didn't appear at breakfast he went to her room and found that her bed hadn't been slept in."

  His immediate reaction was one of profound irritation that something as trivial as this—a tiff between newlyweds—should provoke such an emotional response in her, but then his impatience transferred itself to his son and daughter-in-law. Surely they were old enough to know that young marrieds who occupied separate beds in separate rooms could expect to quarrel and say things to one another that they would afterwards regret.

  "I don't know what Edith can be thinking of to come posting down from Northamptonshire on this kind of excuse," he growled. "As for you, Hetty, there's no sense at all in you upsetting yourself over something of this nature. How long have they had to get used to one another? Three months? Four? They have a quarrel and she decides to teach him a lesson by going home to mother. How many times would you have gone at her time of life if you had a mother to run to. Or if you hadn't been reasonably certain I'd tan your backside when I came for you."

  "I don't think you understand," she said, "for it isn't like that at all. Gilda didn't go to Edith's and Edward traced her as far as Dover. She's gone abroad and from the note she left it's quite clear she intends to stay there! Let Edith explain… I… I just wanted to warn you that she seems to regard it as her fault, and that's nonsense…"

  He thought, savagely, What the devil is the matter with everybody? Am I the only one about who isn't going senile? Hetty getting hysterical over a farce like this and Edith, as sane as any woman I know, blaming herself for having a feather-brained daughter… And suddenly that vague sense of unease that had been prowling about under his ribs for a long time now found an outlet, driving the sparkle from the morning. He said, gruffly, "I'll have a word with her, but this won't amount to anything, take it from me," and he stumped on ahead, mounting the portico steps two at a time.

  4

  A sense of deep, personal failure had attended Edward from the very beginning, from the first moment they were alone after the hurly-burly of the wedding reception, the plaudits, and the send-off of trailing the usual assortment of threadbare slippers and old boots. And it was the more oppressive because he had no previous experience of personal failure and would have found it very difficult to put into words, even to old George, in whose shadow he had stood ever since he could remember. For until then he had been concerned with tangible things, with nuts, bolts, gradients, time schedules, metal stress, trade potential, and profit margins, inanimates that responded to patience and logic, whereas Gilda, the prize that had fallen to him so unaccountably and after so long a siege, did not respond to approaches that had solved his problems as an engineer, a regional manager, and master of his trade.

  In the first few weeks of their life together he tried variants of all the methods that had served him so well in the past. Flattery, bribery, a careful study of the opposition's defences, aggression, compromise, the storming salesman approach favoured by George, and even craftiness, but all in vain. He had won her on paper and lost her in practice. Her very passivity was her strength and his weakness. His experience with women was no more and no less than that of most young husbands, but he had a conviction that an accomplished masher would have retired baffled from the single room she had insisted upon occupying as one of the articles of her surrender. Yet this is not to say she had denied him access to her on any occasion. She betrayed no sign of fear, shame, or even embarrassment that he had expected when she was obliged to share his bed during their touring honeymoon into the west.

  In the first weeks of married life in their new Birmingham home, surrounded by the highly-trained staff he had enrolled for her, she spent the time he was absent in reading, walking, and writing letters acknowledging their array of wedding gifts. When they were together on excursions about the city, dining, or merely sitting by the fireside, she performed all her domestic functions faultlessly, acceding to his every wish save the one that began to obsess him. All he was to be granted, it seemed, was her presence. A beautiful slave, obedient to his every caprice but enjoying, by some feat of legerdemain, far more freedom and personal privacy than was available to her owner.

  Turned back upon himself by her stillness and chilled by her impersonal acknowledgment of his affection, he began to change in a way that his intimates were not slow to observe. He had always been an amiable young man, unruffled by minor setbacks of the kind that came the way of every regional manager in the course of a working day. Now he became strangely intractable, given to gruff replies and short, explosive bursts of temper. And at the same time his methodical approach to problems involving consultation with senior subordinates and customers became casual and off-hand as he took to spending much of his time closeted in his office, leaving all but the major decisions to deputies.

  That was before the weekly letters from Paris began to arrive for her, the first of which merely excited his curiosity, so that when he asked who had written it she passed it to him and he ran his eye down the page, discovering that it was written in French and turned at once to the final page to look at the signature.

  "Who is this 'Clothilde'?"

  "A friend."

  The reply was typical of her replies to all his questions, polite but yielding nothing.

  "What kind of friend?"

  "We shared rooms."

  "Where?"

  "At Tours, when I was teaching English at the University. Her name is Clothilde Bernard."

  "How old is she?"

  "About my age."

  "What does she write about?"

  "Mutual acquaintances. Shall I translate?"

  "No, no, it doesn't matter, I didn't mean to pry."

  "You are not prying."

  He forgot the incident almost at once but recalled it when, almost as regular as a Swann hardware haul to Coventry, identical-looking letters arrived, always from Paris, always on a Wednesday, and always, presumably, from Clothilde Bernard, so that his curiosity concerning them became so intense that, taking advantage of her temporary absence one day, he opened her bureau and counted them.

  There were twelve, all looking alike save the most recent delivery, a bulkier package containing photographs. He took them out and found they were not the ordinary amateur photographs he had expected but professional pictures, depicting what looked like some kind of entertainment, a melodrama presumably, for they depicted dramatic confrontations between a young, spade-bearded man wearing evening dress, and a young woman in a ballet costume. The little ballerina, it would appear, was being victimised in some way, for the man in the pictured numbered "one" was threatening her, arm upraised. In the picture numbered "eight" she lay dead at his feet and he was being arrested by gendarmes, a revolver in his hand. He made nothing of these, but a ninth picture interested him. It was a still of a young actor in the costume of the eighteenth-century and he looked very elegant and selfassured. It was signed "Etienne" and below, in handwriting so full of flourishes that it defied analysis, was some kind of greeting.

  He returned the photographs thoughtfully, wondering at her preoccupat
ion with this kind of frivolity, for over here she had given no indication of an interest in theatricals. But curiosity nagged at him so persistently that, when a thirteenth letter arrived, he asked outright what subject it was that Clothilde found so much to write about. She answered, quietly, "As I explained, what goes on at the universities. She is now at the Sorbonne, teaching drama. Upstairs I have some photographs of her work. Would you care to see them?"

  "Yes, I would. Very much."

  She got up from the table and glided away, moving as noiselessly as she invariably did, and a moment later she was back with the photographs he had already seen. He made a pretence of looking at them and asked, "Who is Etienne?"

  "Clothilde's brother."

  "Another university tutor?"

  "No, a professional actor. There he is playing Monsieur Beaucaire."

  "What has he written under the picture?"

  "Souvent femme varie—Bien fol est qui s'y fie."

  "What does that mean?"

  "Woman often changes; he is a big fool who trusts her."