Give Us This Day (61 page)

It was an extraordinary sensation sitting there watching a shadow play involving the woman he had loved to distraction since the moment he met her at Edith Wickstead’s home nearly two years ago. It was as though he was dreaming an exceptionally vivid dream, in which were incorporated elements of amazement, a deep yearning, and the wildest kind of farce, far more improbable than the scene in his room the night she left home. But then, before he could determine whether or not he was in the grip of some self-induced deception of the senses, the action of the epic changed and the oasis was attacked by a horde of Arab horsemen, who succeeded in scattering the expedition and abducting Gilda, who was carried away on the saddlebow of a bearded chieftain, whose eyes rolled like those of a man in the grip of an epileptic fit.

There followed a short series of scenes, more or less connected, showing the chieftain’s impetuous siege of his prize and her ultimate consignment to the harem where, in the presence of half-a-dozen fat, inscrutable-looking women, she alternately raised her hands to heaven and collapsed sobbing on a couch. This orgy of despair lasted perhaps five minutes before the Arab chieftain arrived with the obvious intention of thrashing his captive into submission, but hardly had he begun the work when the gesticulating horseman turned up again, firing endless volleys of shots from his revolver, and accounting, so far as Edward could judge, for rather more than half the population of the town. The chieftain went down as he tried to escape with the struggling Gilda, after which the cameras played on a fond reunion scene, with Gilda fluttering her eyelids as if they had been automatically-operated blinds, and the gallant pistoleer kneeling on one knee and running a scale of kisses up and down her arm.

Before he could emerge from his daze of incredulity, the screen went blank and the lights came on and everybody around him got up and went out into the daylight. He had no power in his legs to follow them, but sat there with his lips parted, gazing up at the blank screen, until a man in a rusty-looking frockcoat touched him on the shoulder and said, civilly, “Nex’ show five o’clock, sir. Rich, weren’t it?”

Edward hauled himself to his feet and said, “That… that actor and actress, do you know them?”

The man looked almost as astonished as he felt and replied, “Lor’ no, sir, I don’t
know
‘em. I mean, ‘ow would I? It’s a French reel, rented for publick exhibition…” But then, “Wait a minnit tho’, I got the contrac’, ‘aven’t I? I’ll ‘ave a squint if you can ‘old on a jiffy. Alwus ‘as the names o’ the leading actors on the contrac’.” He pottered off into his little office under the balcony where the projectionist was housed, emerging again with a document that resembled a conveyance. “Now let’s see.
Terror o’ the Desert
. Made in Paris, like I said, tho’ I dunno how they managed for sand and whatnot. They get up to all kinds o’ tricks over there, same as the Yanks. Made by a cove called Jules Lamont, wi’—here you are, sir—Monsewer Bernard Villon an’ Mamerselle Fantine Grenadier. I remember we’ve rented several wi’ the same team and the customers like ‘em, judging by the takings.”

“That picture you have in the foyer… the one of the two of them, could I buy it?”

”
Buy
it?” The man scratched his head. “Well, I dunno. I don’ see why not, seeing this is Sat’dy, and we got to send this lot on to Mr. Hamilton’s Picksherdrome at Wolver’ampton tomorrer. But they woulden miss one display picsher. What do you say to ‘alf a dollar, sir?”

Edward gave him half a crown and they went into the foyer together where the manager removed the picture from its frame and handed it over. Edward walked blinking into the daylight and down to the station hall, noting that it wanted but twenty minutes for George’s train to arrive.

He sat on the seat he had occupied the morning of her flight and studied the picture anew. It was like Gilda and yet it was not. The delicate moulding of her features were disguised under what might have been a thick coating of actor’s greasepaint and distorted, to some extent, by her simulated expression of terror or loathing. She looked a little like a doll conceived by some malevolent scarer of children and yet one knew, at a glance, that she was playacting and that the agonised look was a pretence, and a poor one at that. He thought, dully,
It’s her right enough, and she exchanged me for this… this mummery… She threw over the name Swann, and even the name given her by her parents, for one that goes along with this kind of nonsense…
Suddenly he was persuaded that it was not love for Bernard or anyone else that had urged her to decamp with that trunkful of theatrical clothes, but the allure of seeing herself in this kind of role, a shadow on a screen to be gaped at by strangers in places like that seedy little hall he had just quitted. It seemed incredible to him someone sane could make such a choice, but in a way, at some distance below incredulity, it fitted her personality, for it was really no more than a gross extension of the self-deception she had been practising ever since he had known her and almost certainly, if Edith was to be believed, since her childhood. The yearning to be “someone special” had milked her of all her natural feelings and responses, of the capacity to love and be loved, of obligations to anyone other than herself and this, in a roundabout way, accounted for her woodenness towards a man she had married.

Painfully and vaguely repugnant memories of their brief association returned to him like clumsy fingers probing a wound. Gilda accepting a gift. Gilda at meals. Gilda, with her lovely hair spread on a pillow and her body beneath his, but always with that blankness behind her eyes, as if, at the very moment of coition, she was transforming him into the person of that prancing horseman or eye-rolling sheik. Or perhaps not even that. Perhaps she was visualising herself drooping about a stage tent dressed as an Arab houri, wooed and whipped by other shadows. But always as a person uninvolved in life as it was lived by everybody but “special people,” always pretending to situations in which she was never required to be involved emotionally, and as he thought this a kind of shudder passed through him.

The sensation was like the quenching of an unbearable thirst—rich, satisfying, and uplifting—so that his memory revived for him a story old Phoebe Fraser, nanny to all the Swanns, had once read him and his sister Margaret, a story called
Pilgrim’s Progress
that had promised to be dull because it was holy but had proved surprisingly absorbing and adventurous as the hero, Christian, journeyed to the Celestial City. He remembered with surprising clarity how Christian had ascended the Hill of Difficulty with his burden and struggled upward to the cross where the burden fell away, tumbling down, down, and out of sight and leaving the pilgrim untrammelled for the road ahead. Sitting here, with the hissing din of the station in his ears, he could identify with Christian at that very moment, a man miraculously freed of a weight so intolerable that it clouded his mind to the business of the day.

Deliberately, and with a kind of dedicated joy, he tore the picture into small pieces and let them fall on to the platform. Then he glanced up to see George’s train sliding in and George’s face scanning the platform, and he grinned. It wasn’t often anyone saw old George looking bothered.

* * *

The brothers had always been close. Closer than any of the others save, possibly, Joanna and Helen, so that it did not surprise him much when George understood the intricacies of the story so readily. He said, as they sat over a pint in Edward’s favourite snuggery, “I don’t know… marriage is always a bran-tub to a man who is interested in his job. I was damned lucky, considering, remembering the gambles I took before I fetched up with Gisela. I’ve played the fool since, come to that, and might have again if I’d ever found time. Work, that’s the best tonic in the long run.” And then, giving his brother a shrewd look, “You’re pretty much behindhand from all I hear. Maybe I can suggest a short cut or two. Or would you prefer some other distraction? A music-hall, maybe?”

“I’d like to go down to the yard, providing you’d come along. God alone knows what’s got buried in those in-trays,” and for the third or fourth time since he had met George at the station he raised his left arm and scratched himself vigorously. “As if I hadn’t got enough on my plate,” he said, ruefully, “I caught a flea in that sleazy little theatre!” George, predictably, threw back his head and laughed and Edward joined him. It was his first laugh in a very long time.

It was coming up to midnight when they returned to the hotel after six hours spent unravelling the muddle that had accumulated since the day Gilda had left. He was very tired, but pleasantly so, a different kind of tiredness from that induced by liquor and by his long self-pitying walks through city and suburban streets. He felt very sleepy and far closer to George than he had ever felt, judging himself extraordinarily lucky that his brother’s visit had coincided with the moment of revelation. He said, thoughtfully, “Do you see any future in that moving-picture business, George? I mean, will it ever amount to more than a showman’s stunt?”

George replied, “Oh yes, there’s money in it now, and there’ll be a lot more as time goes on. Those biograph theatres are mushrooming in the London suburbs, but I wouldn’t invest in it, although I’ve been urged to by several claiming to be in the know.”

“Why not then?”

“I suppose because I never did derive pleasure from playacting of any kind. Our sort can’t, and I can tell you why. We’re too curious to go behind the scenes and find out what goes on. And then there’s the folk associated with theatricals. They’re crazy, nearly all of ‘em. I mean, who the devil can begin to understand what makes a fine-looking woman like your missus spend her life prancing around pretending to be somebody else?”

He stretched his legs, enlarging on his theme. “I remember once when the Gov’nor took us all to our first pantomime at the Lyceum. It was before you were born, I imagine. Old Alex, Stella, me, and young Giles. Must have been somewhere around Christmas ‘seventy-four or five.
Jack and the Beanstalk
, it was, and all the others were nearly sick with excitement. I wasn’t. The show itself left me cold, but I remember puzzling all the way home how the hell I could make a beanstalk grow in front of an audience and still keep ‘em guessing. I worked out that it must be by a system of ropes and pulleys, high up behind the proscenium arch. It’s odd how different people can be inside one family. You’re the only one I’ve ever really understood. I suppose that’s why I caught on about how you felt in that picturedrome, weighing that woman’s worth against the network.” He sat thinking a moment. “Shall I tell you something else? When he was your age the Gov’nor had trouble with mother, but he was luckier than you. Or more ruthless, maybe. He nursed her round to his way of thinking. Maybe, given time, you could do the same.”

“I’ll tell
you
something,” Edward said. “I wouldn’t bother to try. I’m over it, George, and through with it. She can go to the devil for all I care,” and he broke off, stifling a yawn.

“Go and sleep it off, lad. I’ll have a nightcap and follow on. We’ll have another crack at that backlog tomorrow. Our way of going to church!”

Edward left him in the lounge and George was still there, puffing on his cigar, when he heard himself being paged by a boy in a pillbox hat. He called, “Hi, my name’s Swann. Who’s asking for me at this time of night?”

The boy said, “I don’t know, sir. The night porter has the message if you’ll ask at the desk.”

He lounged over to the desk, thinking,
The Gov’nor once told me the network was a seven-day-a-week, twenty-four-hour-a-day job, and he was right.
Having identified himself at the reception desk, he was shunted on to the hall porter who said, “It’s a telephone message, sir. It came in about ten o’clock. The lady asked if you would ring this number, no matter how late it was.”

He took the slip with some disquiet, assuming it must be Gisela in some kind of fix, for she was chary of pursuing him on his frequent lunges up and down the country. But then he saw that it wasn’t his own number but one of the inner London exchanges, and tipped the porter to call while he went over and retrieved the second half of his whisky and soda.

He recognised the voice as that of Milton Jeffs, his brother-in-law, and was at once alerted by the strained undertones in Milton’s voice as he said, “George? Thank God! Debbie wants to speak to you. Something urgent… bad news, I’m afraid. She found out where you were from Gisela and badly wants advice. Wait, she’s here now.” Deborah came on the line saying, “Something bad has happened, George. It’s Romayne. She’s been seriously hurt in a suffragette demonstration outside Parliament this afternoon.”

“Is that all you know?”

“She was knocked down and ridden over by a van.”

“Is she with you?”

“No, no, she’s in Westminster Hospital. George… she isn’t expected to live.”

He could tell by the catch in her voice that she was fighting very hard to control herself. He said, bracing himself, “Take it easy, Debbie. Take your time. Tell me how I can help.”

“I don’t know… I’ve been at my wits’ end trying to trace Giles. He’s away in his constituency on account of that trouble they’re having in the mines and nobody seems to have heard of the telephone down there. I’ve wired his home, of course, and Huw Griffiths, but there would have been an answer by now if they had been anywhere in the Pontnewydd area. I felt so helpless and I have to get back to the hospital right away. I dare not tell the old folk so I rang Gisela and she told me where you were. We’ve got to find Giles and bring him home as soon as possible.”

“The Welsh police could help…” but she cut in, sharply, “No, not the police! Not even in these circumstances,” and he guessed that the police had been involved in what had occurred outside the Houses of Parliament that day. He said, quickly, “I’ll find him. I’ll hire a car and drive down. That’s by far the quickest, for it’s Sunday now and God knows how long we might be getting there by train. I’ll find him and bring him back. By tomorrow afternoon at the latest.”