Give Us This Day (51 page)

He paused by the door, smiling at her over his shoulder. “To wire Harmsworth,” he said. “And just for the record, I’ve had the same itch for a year or more and lately I’ve been scratching it raw.”

5

The problem, similar in so many ways, yet with undertones more far-reaching concerning each of them, was not so easily resolved by Giles, mulling over his notes in the first-floor flat they had leased from a departing Tory member for a Welsh constituency.

It was conveniently central and they had been lucky to get it, but already both of them were missing the soft, southwest wind over the Rhondda uplands, and the singsong lilt of their constituents. In London, Giles felt, a man could lose his identity if he wasn’t careful, and his initial reactions to the fulfilment of a dream that had preoccupied him since his early twenties had been oddly deflating once L.G., and another Welsh Liberal, had introduced him to the House of Commons at that first jubilant assembly, following the February landslide.

He had always thought of it as a very solemn place governed, of course, by tradition, but generating a kind of magisterial impulse that conditioned the mood of the entire country outside. Everything that happened to ordinary people began right here beside the Thames, and one was almost tempted to speak in whispers once the portals had been crossed, and one found oneself rubbing shoulders with men whose names had been familiar to him since boyhood. But the sense of majesty was soon dissipated, perhaps by L.G.‘s gentle raillery, and he recalled now that David Lloyd George never had been the least impressed with the place. He had called it crabbed when they met here one afternoon as long ago as spring 1879, Giles an awed thirteen-year-old, tagging on to a bunch of sightseers, Lloyd George, seventeen and clad in rough country clothes, making his first-ever visit to a building that would dominate his life and destiny.

“It’s more of a club, Johnny Peep,” he said, “and no club is worthy of Stardust. Think of it as a workshop if you can, where policies are hammered out, as upon a bench. Fashioned, refashioned, recast, and more often than not rejected after infinite palaver among the journeymen. We get things done, of course, but never in the way we hoped or imagined. We have to compromise one with the other in order to make progress, and that’s in the nature of things, there being more than six hundred of us all trying to catch the spotlight.”

“I’ve never known you to compromise over anything you regarded as important, L.G.,” but Lloyd George had replied, “Well, never in front of an audience, lad. But here? You’d be surprised, shocked even, until you come to understand how essential it is.”

There was one issue, Giles had noticed, concerning which most of his closest associates were prepared to compromise upon, and that in the company of men whose policies they had attacked for years while in opposition. No one, excluding that saintly old Scotsman Keir Hardie, seemed disposed to make a party issue out of women’s franchise, and it distressed him that this should be so, for he had long since been convinced that it was a vital plank in the efforts of the Liberals to broaden the stage of democracy.

Down in the valleys, Romayne had already played a part in forming a local branch of the W.S.P.U., and he had encouraged her even though the response among the miners’ wives had been apathetic. It seemed quite monstrous to him that women as intelligent and socially aware as she or Debbie were denied a voice in the nation’s destiny, and his misgivings were not dispelled by L.G.‘s bland assurances on the subject.

“It’s all a question of priorities, Johnny Peep,” he reasoned. “It will come, you can depend on that, but in its own good time, when we’ve dynamited our way through centuries of rubble half-burying the body politic. There are so many issues that I see as vastly more urgent. National insurance, pensions for the old and disabled, reform of the House of Lords, higher education and opportunities for the poor, public ownership of certain national products, a basic minimum wage, the relegation of the very idea of tariffs on to the bonfire, and don’t deceive yourself that Free Trade won’t be in danger from time to time. Home Rule for Ireland, to shed that pack-load of trouble, all manner of things, many of them linked to the future of your miners and their families. We simply haven’t the Parliamentary time and that’s a fact, and the tactics of Emmeline Pankhurst aren’t doing much to persuade the electorate that women can be trusted with the vote.”

“But what else can they do?” Giles had argued. “They’ve tried lobbying and talking for a generation without gaining an inch. At least they’ve brought the matter into the open.”

“Kaiser Wilhelm is a star turn at doing that, but it doesn’t make him more credible in the Chancellories of Europe.”

He had gone away less than half satisfied to discuss it all again with Romayne, and discovered, as he had expected, that L.G.‘s arguments made no impression upon her. Sometimes it struck him that she did not trust the man and this pained him a little, for he still regarded L.G. as the greatest campaigner for reform in the land. She said, “It isn’t important what L.G. thinks, Giles. You’re a Member of Parliament now. What do you think? Honestly and deeply, down in your heart?”

“You know what I think. That all women over thirty ought to have the vote now. And that a Commission should be set up to consider extending it to women over twenty-one. You couldn’t get the public to swallow a mouthful that big in one gulp, but it could be done in two.”

“Would you be prepared to say that in public?”

“Of course I would. I only played it down at the election because L.G. warned me it wasn’t wise to raise it until Liberal policy had been decided on the issue.”

“And now?”

“There’s absolutely no hope that the W.S.P.U. will win enough support in the House to get a bill through the Commons. As for the Lords, why they’d throw it out in ten seconds.”

“Then if you believe in it, sincerely and utterly, why not introduce it into your maiden speech?”

He did not answer at once. The possibility had occurred to him but he had shelved it, half agreeing with L.G. that there were so many more important priorities. He said, finally, “I’ve roughed out my speech. It’s devoted almost entirely to the miners’ minimum wage. After all, the miners put me here and I owe them the honour of the first salvo.”

“Their wives helped, and I’m not talking about work in committee rooms and so forth. I mean by keeping their homes and families together, year after year, often under impossible conditions. You owe them a salvo, Giles. Wouldn’t it be possible to slip in some reference to a wife’s right to have a say in the family’s future?”

He looked down at his notes again. “I don’t know. I should have to think about it very carefully.”

She did not press him further, knowing he was already under some strain concerning the prospect of the speech. His platform confidence, she noticed, varied from shuffling nervousness to a buoyancy where he could dispense with notes altogether and hold an audience for an hour or more. It depended entirely on atmosphere. If he could sense sympathy in the upturned faces, he could race away in galloping style, garnishing a theme with all kinds of anecdotes, some from the mountain of books he had scaled, others from personal experiences. But there were times, as now, when the prospect of hostility or indifference could make him sound humdrum or even dull. All the best of his speeches were made in the valleys, where the great majority of his listeners were men whose cause he had espoused as a youth during his first visit to Wales, so that sometimes she thought his father was right when he told her, “Old Giles ought to have settled for the Church. They need people like him, with his kind of innocence and integrity. Politicians can do without it, for politics is a dirty business most of the time. A politician who won’t hit below the belt is at a disadvantage.”

He came to her briefly the day he was to make his parliamentary debut and said, “Well, I took your advice. I slipped in an oblique reference to the W.S.P.U. campaign.”

“Just how oblique, Giles?” she asked.

“I’ll read it to you tonight, when it’s all behind me. I’d prefer it that way if it’s all the same to you. I’m going over there early. I want a word with L.G. before the debate. He’s promised me ten minutes before lunch.”

“Good luck, Giles,” she said, kissing him, glad now that they had agreed she should not avail herself of an opportunity to hear him from the Ladies’ Gallery. She thought,
He’ll be more relaxed when he gets back late tonight, and I can convince him he wasn’t half as bad as he imagined.

But then, when she slipped out for a walk along the Embankment after their help—old Mrs. Robbins had come with the shopping and could keep an eye on the children—she had an unlooked-for opportunity to read at least part of his speech, the important part, hours before his return. A
Star
news-vendor was standing opposite Cleopatra’s Needle with a contents bill clipped to his board and the legend on the poster read, in handwritten script, “STIR IN COMMONS— LIBERAL PLEDGES SUPPORT FOR SUFFRAGETTES.” She fumbled in her purse for the halfpenny, taking the paper across the road to read under one of the globes glowing there beside the plinth.

It was not much of a stir. Whoever scrawled that contents bill must have been desperate for an eye-catching item, but it made her start to see the heavy print of the lead-in that began “Today, in the House of Commons, Mr. Giles Swann, newly elected Member for Pontnewydd, caused a brief uproar during his maiden speech in support of the second reading of the Minimum Wage Bill…” And underneath, a side-heading arrested her eye as it swept down the column, “Liberal Pledges Support for Labour Motion.”

She folded the paper, aware of a quickening of her pulse and a painful thumping of her heart, and almost ran back across the Embankment and under Charing Cross arch to the flat. She had a near certainty that he would be there, long before he was expected, and in need of her, but when she let herself in and called, “Giles! Are you there, Giles?” only Mrs. Robbins poked her head over the banister and hissed, “
Shsh
, M’m! I on’y just got the baby orf… It’s his teething, like I said.” She waited a moment to regain command of herself, then mounted the stair slowly, holding the newspaper close to her breast.

* * *

He managed to buttonhole Lloyd George in one of the corridors after enquiring for him with mounting desperation.

“You did promise me a few minutes, L.G. Run your eye over it, no… not the first page, that’s along the lines you advised… the piece I’ve written in,” and when the Welshman glanced at it, casually at first but then with keen attention, “One of us has to say it, L.G. You think it, but won’t make it public. I don’t necessarily want your approval, certainly not your official approval. But if you think it’s letting you down, I’ll wait for Keir Hardie’s motion.”

“You realise what it implies. For you, I mean, and that’s all it concerns really, for you’ll not win anyone over at this stage. Not even the odd waverer.”

“What
would
it imply. To me?”

“Any chance of patronage. Now and for a long time to come. No one cares to hear a change in policy so much as hinted at in a maiden speech. They’ll forgive dullness, confusion even. But not originality. It doesn’t become new boys!”

“You’re urging me to take it out?”

“Not necessarily. You know where I stand on the issue, and I was reckoned a firebrand when I first came here. I disappointed them, however. My instinct was to lie low and watch points until I learned my way around.”

“And that’s your advice to me?”

“If you like, Johnny. Most of them do, you know. What I’m saying is you have to make a deliberate choice between principle and discretion, and that’s a choice you must make yourself, without me pointing you one way or the other. What time will you be speaking?”

“Early on. About three-thirty, I was told.”

“Well, then, skip the preamble. Take a breath of fresh air in the park and think it over.”

He went out into the pale spring sunshine, cutting through Queen Anne’s Gate, then across St. James’s Gardens to the path circling the lake with its nesting island. The park was all but deserted at this time of day. At the nearer end of the wooden bridge a woman who looked about seventy, probably one of the many professional scrubbers from the Treasury or the Admiralty buildings judging by her cap and sacking apron, was feeding crusts to a small circle of ducks. He stopped to watch, taking in the woman’s coarse, reddened hands, swollen finger joints, and badly broken nails, and the abstracted look on the craggy features under the crooked peak of the cap. A square of greaseproofed paper that held her lunch or breakfast lay on the seat behind her, and close by a carpet bag that was almost surely her scrubbing brushes and mopping cloths. His eyes travelled slowly down to the dipping hem of the skirt, noting the broken boots that concealed a fine array of bunions judging by the bulges near the toes. He thought, S
he’s probably worked at scrubbing office floors for sixty-odd years, and she’ll stick it another five. After that it’ll be the infirmary at best…
Then, his glance moving up again as she chirped “Chick-a-dee, chick-adee!” to the swarming ducks, he noticed a ring all but buried in the mottled flesh of her left hand and a burning curiosity to know something of her possessed him. He said, touching his hat, “Good-day. Are these your regulars?”

She turned and looked at him levelly, a hint of mockery in her eyes.

“You could call ‘em that. They know me any road. I on’y got to call to ‘em. There’s a rare lot after it today. That’ll be the dripping. They like dripping and I don’t alwus ‘ave it.”

“Bread and dripping. Is that all you bring?”

She looked not so much surprised as mildly outraged. “Lumme, what else on their screw?” and she jerked her head towards the offices in the background. He felt in his pocket and took out a half-a-crown, offering it shyly. She looked hard at it and then up at him. “Nice of yer, gov’, and I know yer mean right. But we never begged.”

“We?”

“Not me, not Thompson. Nor none o’ the kids when I was around to fetch ‘em one. I’m working and I’ve got a room. There’s plenty who could use that ‘arf-crahn sleeping out on the Embankment.”