Give Us This Day (14 page)

“Do you really think he started the fire, Gov’nor?”

“He started the warehouse fire. Probably didn’t intend to do more than destroy what was in there, so that we should have trouble proving anything. Unsupported evidence of men like Robsart wouldn’t have convicted him.”

“Then why didn’t he stay and brazen it out?”

“He slipped up admitting as much as he did to his father. Or maybe the size of the blaze scared him, or someone saw him entering or coming out of the place. Who can tell? Forget Wesley and take a look at your own affairs, George. Care to tell me how it started? I’m not poking about in a midden heap. It might help to talk to someone other than your wife.”

“Gisela won’t even refer to it. Most English women would, but a Continental goes to the heart of the matter.”

“Isn’t that woman Lockerbie the heart of the matter?”

“No, Gov’nor, not really. There was nothing permanent about that relationship. What happened here in the meantime is what counts.”

“You’re saying you were never in love with that woman?”

“I’ve never really understood that phrase… ‘in love’. Have you?”

“Not in the way poets peddle it. Love? I suppose I’ve always seen it as a crop raised by an association between a man and a woman after they’ve been trapped by their senses. Your mother and I were like that. I didn’t ‘love’ her in that sense when we married. And she was far too green and too flighty to know what she was about, apart from choosing a wedding gown and having some kind of status conferred upon her. But she fancied me and I fancied her, and we grew important to one another, the way people do when they find ‘emselves saddled with shared responsibilities.” He beetled his brows and stared at the floor. “If you had to cut loose for a spell, why didn’t you go to the places men frequent when things get on top of them?”

“It wasn’t that kind of need.”

“What kind was it?”

George said, slowly, “I was twenty when I met Gisela. I’ll tell you something I never told anyone else. You’ve met her tribe of sisters. They were all as pretty as pictures, and very saucy with it in those days. I might have settled on either one of them, or all three of them maybe, if it hadn’t been for old Grandfather Maximilien and his engine. He steered Gisela my way. Quite deliberately. You probably never did believe our eldest boy was a seven-month child.”

“You married her on that account?”

“I didn’t even know she was pregnant.”

“Then what’s all this got to do with you staking everything you worked for on a frolic with a high-class whore, like that Lockerbie woman?”

“As I say, it goes all the way back to Max and his engine. Until I found myself hooked to that, life was all cherry pie. Afterwards? Well, it was never quite the same again. I put everything I had and hoped for into that brute Maximus and I still think I was on the right track. About transport, I mean, about petrol-driven vehicles being much more than fussy little toys, replacing the carriage and pair. Then, when I thought I’d made a breakthrough, you handed the business to me on a plate and the fact is I wasn’t ready for it. I had no idea how much it involved, and how many demands it made on a man.”

“You seemed content enough. You appeared to be making a rare go of it.”

“I was content, and I was making a go of it. But then, one day last spring, I suddenly realised it was taking over. To the exclusion of everything else, including Gisela and the children. It was my bad luck that this should hit me in Barbara Lockerbie’s company. Do you want to hear the rest?”

“Only if you want to tell me.”

“We met at that launching of mine. The Lockerbies invited me to spend a weekend with them at their lodge in Skye. Have you ever been to Skye?”

“No, though I’ve looked across at it.”

“It’s a magic place. Or it seemed so to me at that time and in her company. Sir James didn’t turn up and I see now she planned it that way. We were out on the lower slopes of a mountain and the weather was fine and warm for the time of year. I suddenly realised what I’d been missing all these years and that soon I’d be forty. It all stemmed from that realisation, a matter of letting off steam, I imagine. The trouble was I didn’t realise, until I heard your voice over the telephone last night, how much steam was there. That, and the fact that women have always been more important to me than they seem to be to you and Alex and Giles and the others. I don’t mean all women. I mean lively, high-spirited women like Barbara Lockerbie, and that landlady of mine I once told you about in Munich.”

He understood. Far better, perhaps, than George knew, for in her own way Henrietta was such a woman. Had it been otherwise it seemed probable that he too might have needed a change when he was George’s age. The trouble lay, he supposed, in the fact that Gisela was a serious-minded little body and wouldn’t know how to coax him out of such a mood, whereas Henrietta would, and had done so time and again without him being fully aware of it until now. He said, “Well, some of us drive ourselves hard and when we do there’s generally a price to pay. You’ve paid yours, lad, and been overcharged to my way of thinking. I’m glad you told me as much as you did, but where do you go from here?”

“I know the answer to that,” George said, “but I haven’t the gall to tell you. Maybe I’ll tell you when this place is ticking over again.”

“No, tell me now. You’ve laid all your other cards on the table. Play out the hand.”

George said, with a ghost of a grin, “You’ll kick me downstairs I daresay, but I’ll chance it. I need a longish spell clear away from this place. Not to blow off more steam, at least not that kind of steam, but to follow a dream. Your kind of dream.”

“Something new?”

“Not entirely. We went over the same ground when we parted company that last time. As I say, I’ve never ceased to believe the real future of road transport is in the mechanically propelled vehicle, but everything I’ve attempted so far has gone off at half-cock and I know why. You can’t approach a job as demanding as that with half your mind on a business this size. You need isolation, and time to concentrate on every last detail, every modification, every scrap of information that comes in from the States and the Continent. Steam waggons aren’t the answer, not for our kind of work. But there is an answer and I’d find it if I had the time and money.”

“You’ve got the money, haven’t you?”

“Not really. All I’ve put by is earmarked to pay shareholders what Wesley Tybalt filched, but I could scrape by on next-to-nothing until I had a blueprint that satisfied me. Do you remember Jock Quirt, that Scots mechanic I had by me, when I was working on Maximus up at Sam’s place in Manchester? He was an ugly little chap, with very little to say for himself, but he was a bit of a genius to my way of thinking. He’s still working on that prototype up in the north.”

“You’re suggesting you set him to work right here?”

“No, I’m suggesting I go to him and we work on it together, but it would mean someone who really knew the ropes taking over here until next spring. I think I could guarantee results by then, and we’d have motor transport that would give us a two-year start over every haulier in the country. I’ve absolutely no right to ask this…”

“But you are asking it?”

“Yes.”

His head came up and the quick gesture reminded Adam again that, of all his children, George came closest to the Adam Swann who had made his grab on the strength of three guarantees: the yield of a looted necklace, sold to shady rascals in the city; a dream, not unlike George’s; and an invincible belief in his own star. He said, doubtfully, “I’m turned seventy, George, and past it. Go ahead with your dream if you have to and you’ll be no use to me or anybody else if you don’t. But find someone else to sort this lot out and get things moving again.”

“There isn’t anybody else. And you aren’t past it. It’s my belief you don’t really think you are either.”

“I wonder.”

He turned and crossed to the narrow window, and this time he did not see the desolation below but the broad curve of the river and the many-turreted tower he had explored only yesterday. He stood there a long time, thinking back and assessing himself in terms of profit and loss, failure and achievement, hopes fulfilled and unfulfilled. He thought of Tryst, too, and the showplace he had made of it in the years that had passed since he turned his back on this slum. He would miss that and he hadn’t much time to squander. How would Henrietta think of it? What would his doctor have to say about him shouldering a packload like this at his age? But did it matter what Henrietta, or the doctor, or anybody else thought? He did a kind of equation with the various factors of the case. A headquarters burned to a cinder. A criminal prosecution in the offing that would expose him and his as fools, milked by their own employees. George himself, at a crisis in his life, wanting desperately to atone but in his own way and on his own terms. He thought, distractedly:
I wonder if he’s right and whether I’m right to sympathise with him? I was wrong about mechanical transport. It’s plain enough it’s almost here now. I might even live to see the day they put the last of the horses out to grass and clutter the roads with clumsy galleons, like his precious Maximus. Everyone said I was mad to carve up the area the new railways had neglected, but I saw further than most of ‘em. Maybe George does now, for he’s my flesh and blood, and there’s a lot of old Sam Rawlinson in him. But none of these things count in the long run. The heart of the matter is, would I care to come back here and spend a St. Martin’s summer in this room, gathering all the loose ends together and adapting, if I could accept them, to all the changes he’s made already?
And suddenly his heart gave him the answer and he understood that, in an odd, clownish way, he would enjoy the exercise enormously, would relish being fully extended again and needed, not only by George, but by all those JohnnyCome-Latelys George had planted out along the network, cocky youngsters mostly who had long since written him off as an old codger, well past his prime. He said, “I’ll do it, George. For one year from today. And God help the whole boiling of you if I prove unequal to it, for then you’ll all be in a worse mess than ever. As to money, well, you don’t have to worry on that score. Your grandfather didn’t trust any one of you come to the end. He left his pile to me, with orders to dole it out as I saw fit, and you’ll get your slice of it. If you want to pour it down the drain in some murky workshop that’s your business. I only want two pledges from you and here they are. You’ll be back here to take over twelve months from now, hit or miss. And you take that wife of yours north with you.”

“Gisela won’t leave the family.”

“You can dump the family with Henrietta. It’ll keep her out of mischief while I’m slumming it right here.”

George said, eagerly, “You won’t regret it, Gov’nor. Not when the final score is totted up.”

“I’m not so sure about that but I’ve followed my nose in situations like this all my life and I’m too long in the tooth to change. I see too much of myself in you, George, and that’s a fact. Though I do flatter myself I had better brakes at your age.”

“Giles will back you.”

“Oh no, he won’t. In case you haven’t looked hard enough, Giles has a dream of his own and it doesn’t run on four wheels. As for Hugo, well, I’ve never seen him as anything more than Swann’s barker in the marketplace. Young Edward is more promising. He showed his mettle yesterday. I’ll take him under my wing, for he’s merchant through and through, I wouldn’t wonder.”

He got up stiffly. “Go down and get a wash under the pump and we’ll drink to it before I catch my train. I’ve still got to break this news to your mother. She won’t have heard of it, tucked away down there.”

George went out without another word and a moment later, watching from the window, Adam saw him splashing head and shoulders in the pump trough. He thought, I don’t know… I could have wrung his neck twelve hours since, an
d here I am, giving him his head again just as if he was all I had to show for my years here. And suddenly, as clear as a picture on the wall, he had a memory of comin
g home to Tryst one frosty February night, in 1864, and being greeted by the news that Hetty had been delivered of her third child and second boy, and going upstairs to look down on a merry little bundle in the cot, wide awake, knuckling his mouth, and staring back at him with an expression he could only describe as conspiratorial. And then, he recalled, a droll thing had happened, reminding him of the pact he and Hetty had made nine months before, after he learned from his father she had gone off the rails in his absence and come near getting herself seduced by a gunner who had fancied her. As if the baby in the cot was aware of the circumstances accounting for his presence, he had winked in a way that made Adam laugh aloud. He understood then why George was so easy to forgive.

Seven

A Titan, Fishing

T
he narrow coastal road, reaching the tiny village of Llanystumdwy, crossed the boulder-strewn river Dwyfor by a humped-back bridge, just beyond a cottage on the right. Where the bridge wall was broken, giving foot access to the river below, she stopped the dogcart, saying, “Down there, Giles. That cottage is his old home but I learned from that man back there he’d gone fishing. He spends a lot of time fishing when Parliament’s not sitting and he can slip away up here.”

He looked at her with amused incredulity. “I can’t just buttonhole him in that way, Romayne. Not him, not a man with his reputation. He’d snub me and I’d deserve it.”

“L.G. has never snubbed anyone in his life. Sat on them, talked them down, and carried them along in his wake, but not snubbed. It’s not his nature and I should know, for I’m one of his constituents, seeing that Beddgelert house is still in my name. You do as I say. March right up to him and tell him what you have in mind, and he’ll admire you for it. Nobody in the world is cheekier than Lloyd George.”

“Let me see that letter again.”

Romayne opened her reticule and took out a single folded sheet, straightening it and passing it to him. The secretary’s reply was couched in a single paragraph on House of Commons paper. It said:

Dear Madam,

Further to your enquiry concerning your husband, Mr. Giles Swann, Mr. Lloyd George has asked me to say that he will be in your area for one week when the House rises and would be happy to see Mr. Swann if he could come to Llanystumdwy before midday between Monday, 15th, and Thursday, 18th.

Nothing else but the signature was written on the paper.

He said doubtfully, “It’s a bit chilly, isn’t it? A chap like that must get hundreds of similar requests and if he’s on holiday…”

“Trust me, Giles. I know exactly what I’m about!” and he thought, Well, I ca
n stand a snub from a stranger, and afterwards, maybe, she’ll let me go about things in my own way. And he got down and went through the gap to the steep, fern-cla
d bank where there was a tiny path, hardly more than a rabbit run, leading inland through close-set trees growing above the stream. He had only gone about fifty yards when he saw him, sitting on a rounded boulder holding what looked like a boy’s fishing rod made from a bamboo cane and a ball of twine.

He recognised him instantly, not only as the rumbustious politician who was always getting into the news and its backspread of photographs, but at a much longer remove—a jaunty, rather cocky young man he had encountered all those years ago at the door of the empty Chamber of Commons, on his very first visit to Westminster, the incident that had inspired Romayne’s impulsive letter to the member for Caernarvon Boroughs.

He recalled the circumstances vividly. Himself a shy, thirteen-year-old, awed by the place where he stood; the young Welshman, brash and confident, despite his sing-song accent and country clothes. Slightly patronising yet friendly and informative, with his talk of the miserly wages Llanberis quarry-workers were paid and his intention, implied rather than uttered, of doing something about it if the opportunity offered. And since then he had, proving that his talk on that occasion was no adolescent boast but the pledge of a man already aware of his potential.

All that, however, had happened eighteen years ago and since then “Mr. George” (who had dismissed the hallowed Chamber as “crabbed and poky”) had moved on to capture headlines as the noisiest, wittiest, most trenchant member of the Liberal Party whereas Giles, by his own reckoning, had stood still looking on.

He went down the narrow path until the fisherman, hearing the crackle of dry twigs, looked up and smiled, calling, in a slightly moderated brogue, “Lovely morning, Johnny Peep! Come and join me in the sun. The fish aren’t rising. I did much better here as a boy poacher!”

He still wasn’t sure of his welcome, despite Lloyd George’s jocular greeting. “Johnny Peep” implied an intrusion, and he could pinpoint the source of the gibe:

Here I am, Johnny Peep,
And I saw three sheep,

And those three sheep saw me.
Half-a-crown apiece pays for their fleece,
And so Johnny Peep goes free…

It was a verse quip of Robbie Burns, who had used it to win an evening’s entertainment from three North Country drovers.

He said, “I’m Giles Swann, Mr. George. My wife wrote for an appointment and later persuaded me to follow you here. I realise that’s a liberty, but she seems to think you don’t mind seeing constituents.”

“I never mind meeting an old acquaintance, Mr. Swann.”

“You remember me?”

“Perfectly. A small, over-awed boy with knobbly knees and a reverence for politicians they don’t deserve.”

It was astounding, he thought, that he should recall their first meeting, but the politician had another surprise for him. “Why do you suppose I addressed you as Johnny Peep?”

“That was understandable, me dropping in on you in this way. You must value the few hours you get to yourself.”

“Not all that much. I never did care for my own company. The truth is I like an audience. Anyone about here will tell you that. As to recalling you, it came back to me the moment I saw the name ‘Swann’ on your wife’s letter, and why not? It’s a very famous name and you mentioned your father’s profession on that occasion.” He laid his improvised rod aside. “So you know the identity of Johnny Peep?”

“It was Burns, wasn’t it?”

“One of my best stories. Robbie was a rare spirit. Do you read him still?”

“Not in dialect,” Giles said. “He’s too broad for me.” Then, “I… er… didn’t see my wife’s letter. To be frank, she wrote it without my knowledge and sprang it on me when she got a reply.”

“Sounds an enterprising lass, Mr. Swann.”

“She’s Welsh.”

“That accounts for it. Join me,” and he made room on the boulder. “I take it you know what she wrote about?”

“She knew that I was anxious to be considered by the Liberal Party as a prospective candidate and thought a direct approach to you was the best hope. I must be frank again, however. I live and work in London. We have a holiday house up here, and come as often as we can. We met about here when we were eighteen.”

“Where exactly?”

“I fished her out of the river at Aberglaslyn. I thought she was drowning but she wasn’t, just fooling. She’s the daughter of Sir Clive Rycroft-Mostyn, the industrialist.”

The politician whistled softly. “Dynastic alliance?”

“Far from it. My father-in-law and I are not on speaking terms, and haven’t been since before Romayne and I married, eight years ago.”

“Political differences?”

“Not really, although I never did care for his way with people. He’s a big Tory subscriber.”

“Yes, he is,” Lloyd George said, thoughtfully, “and a bad man to work for, they say. But your father is a radical, I’m told. Did he bring you up the way you should go?”

It was difficult to withstand the man’s charm, even though, behind his amiability, there was irony, and that hint of patronage, as though Giles had been a small public meeting of the faithful. He had the most winning smile Giles had ever seen on the face of man or woman and he could understand why he had a reputation with the ladies. His personality played over you like a warm draught, but a searching one at that, Giles thought, telling himself that it would be dangerous to be less than frank with a man whose shrewdness showed in his eyes—merry, teasing eyes, but feeding every impression back to the calculating brain in that big, proud head. He said, “You’ve probably heard about my father’s methods. His above-average pay-scale and his provident scheme. He was a pioneer in that field and many City men dislike him on that account.”

“But he never tried to enter politics?”

“No. He’s a merchant first and foremost.”

“Probably more useful to us in that capacity,” Lloyd George said, chuckling. “At least he’s demonstrated that it isn’t necessary to chain his workers to the oar in order to balance his books.” He broke off, looking down at the tumbling water with a relaxed but watchful expression. “And how about you, Johnny Peep? Are you a convert, or have you always had a conscience? No, that’s not what I’d like to know. Put it this way. Suppose we found you a constituency to nurse, and after times out of mind addressing lukewarm audiences in draughty church institutes, the walls of Jericho fell and you clawed us another seat from the privileged? What qualifications would you claim to enter that pint-sized chamber where we meet and make your maiden speech to gentlemen who weren’t listening?”

It was not at all the kind of interrogation he had been expecting. The man’s complete lack of formality and touch of irony ran contrary to one another, so that it was difficult to decide whether he was posturing or deliberately seeking to discourage. Giles said, finally, “I’ve had far more administrative experience than most applicants. I’m in charge of a provident and pension scheme for two thousand hands, and I’ve read most of the social prophets in my time, deeply enough to quarrel with most of them.”

“That’s a point in your favour. Nearly all were theorists. Anything more?”

It was a time, Giles thought, to gamble, and he had the advantage of having Celtic ancestry on his mother’s side. Irony was a weapon in this man’s armoury but it wasn’t the one he employed very much in his attacks on every aspect in the system where he saw, and bitterly resented, injustice and inherited privilege. Colourful detail and dramatic licence spiced every public address he had ever made, either as courtroom solicitor or a member of Parliament, and it followed that he would be likely to respond to his own stock-in-trade. Giles said, “When I was a boy I watched an elderly farm labourer and his wife expelled from a tied cottage and sent off to separate workhouses. I never forgot that. It had a direct bearing on what I read and what I thought about when I was still at school. The month I left, thirteen years ago now, I walked from North Devon to Edinburgh to see things for myself. One incident made a deeper impression on me than anything else. It was on the deepest level of a Rhondda coal-mine. A young miner had his foot crushed by a runaway tub and I visited his parents that same night.”

“Well?”

“They saw the accident to their son as a piece of rare good fortune. It meant he could still earn money but in safety, on top, a cripple with a sporting chance of survival. If we can’t do better than that, as the richest and most powerful nation on earth, something’s wrong with our thinking as Christians.”

He saw at once that the gamble had paid off. The politician was looking at him with interest, and the gleam of mockery behind the eyes had gone. “That’s what we’re looking for, Johnny Peep. But I wouldn’t have expected it from a man with your background. Where is your holiday home in Beddgelert?”

“On the Caernarvon Road, about two hundred yards this side of the village. It’s called ‘Craig Wen’.”

“The white rock. I know it. Might I invite myself to call and have tea with you and your wife tomorrow?”

“My wife would be delighted, Mr. George. But you could meet Romayne now if you wish. She’s waiting for me in the dog-cart up on the bridge.”

“Ah no,” he said, “that would be taking advantage of the lady. Anyone sharp enough to write that letter and steer you here would want to do the honours. Tomorrow. Around four.”

It was a polite dismissal and he got up, extending his hand. “You’ve already been more patient than I had any right to expect.”

“And you’ve been more entertaining, Mr. Swann. Constituents who buttonhole me as you did usually want to talk about the disestablishment of the Welsh church, or get a shilling off their rent. Good day to you.”

He shook hands, casually, and picked up his amateurish rod and line. When Giles looked over his shoulder halfway back to the bridge he was still hunched there. He looked very boyish for someone they said would end his career in the Cabinet or in prison.

2

Neither of them ever forgot one detail of that first visit of the Welsh Cyclone, as some of his admirers were calling him, to the pleasant house under the chain of mountains that enclosed the Nant Gwynant Pass all the way to Capel Curig, and on through the softer Vale of Conway to the sea. It was a house that had happy memories for him, for it was here, when he was no more than a schoolboy, he had lost his heart to the lovely restless girl Romayne Rycroft-Mostyn had been in those days.

The memory of the visit remained a red-letter day for him because it was here, rather than beside the tumbling Dwyfor, that he fell under the hypnotic spell of this strange, magnetic being, a force rather than a man, embodying, as Giles saw it, the romantic fervour of the Gelt and a shrewdness that was Norman rather than Celtic and served the purpose of brake, spur, and generator of a man whose life, up to this point, had been a calculated advance towards the limelight and the source of power. For Romayne it had deeper, more personal significance. She saw Lloyd George’s patronage as the first practical attempt she had ever made to channel the potential of Giles Swann into a course where others, as well as herself, would accept him as a teacher and interpreter of his own uniquely compassionate philosophy. That, and the first real opportunity he had ever had of justifying himself in his own eyes.

For two hours by the grandfather clock, the Welshman talked about himself. Not vaingloriously, and certainly not tediously, for it was like listening to a saga out of the remote past where a king without a kingdom set about searching for his destiny. He told them of his obscure but happy childhood in these hills, fathered by a shoemaker uncle who emerged from the tale as a kind of Chiron preparing Jason for the Argosy. He told how, having decided to make his protégé a solicitor as a first step, his Uncle Lloyd had coached him in Latin by first learning Latin himself from a sixpenny grammar, bought on a bookstall. He laughed over his adolescent exercises in oratory, in the pulpit of a Welsh chapel, his early forays into journalism and the dramatic incident that made him famous throughout Wales when he successfully defended quarrymen flouting the law by forcing churchyard gates and burying a Nonconformist father beside his child in ground forbidden to Dissenters.