Give Us This Day (19 page)

She re-addressed herself to the monthly task of writing to Joanna in Dublin, the only member of the family with whom she maintained a regular correspondence. “My Dear Jo… Nothing much to report… kept busy from dawn to dusk… thank you very much for the dress patterns but I don’t know whether I shall ever find time to make anything… Rowley very well, although I must confess I feel drained of energy in the summer… my love to Clint and the family… I do envy you two boys and a girl but perhaps I shall be lucky soon…” Random, inconsequential thoughts that were hardly worth committing to paper, yet her sole link with a world that sometimes seemed as remote as the stars.

* * *

George tinkering with machines; Alex peddling lethal hardware. Stella dominating a dutiful array of sons, daughters, and farmhands; Margaret filling her canvases; Joanna as a Swann emissary in Ireland; Helen eating her heart out in Peking; Hugo touring the country from one sports meeting to another; Edward following in George’s footsteps, it seemed. Henrietta saw them all as a queer, rootless, self-centred lot, not in the least like the orderly spread of soldier sons she had envisaged when, as a girl living in a rackety industrial town, she had dreamed the hours away, waiting for a prince to ride over the hill.

She granted them a rather breathless individuality, and a trick of fixing the attention of whoever looked in the direction of any one of them, but they lacked, to her mind, a common theme, a resolute and clearly defined purpose that had been hers all the years they had been growing up in this old house on the spur. Their various aspirations confused her, for they were not, she would have thought, the ambitions that should activate conventionally reared sons and daughters. Their fulfillments to date eluded her. The best she could do was to number off their progeny and hope that a coherent pattern would emerge from the following generation. But having settled her mind as to that, she went about her chores contentedly enough, cocking an eye at the clock now and again to remind herself that a predictable husband and youngest son would be home soon, wanting their supper.

But Adam, in his stone eyrie above the sliding Thames, did not view them in these slightly censorious terms and did, indeed, perceive a pattern in their collective pursuits, seeing them as children of their tribe and times, widening an ever-larger circle in a way that soldier sons would never have done and on the whole he was not displeased. At all events they’re positive, he thought, every last on
e of ‘em, and that’s as much as a man has a right to expect at my time of life.

The verdict mellowed him, leaving his mind free to pursue his self-imposed task of restructuring the network and going about it in a way that would probably astonish George when he scrubbed his hands and re-addressed himself to paperwork. For this restored to him his pride, and pride, to Adam Swann, was a power-house that set all his other generators to work and helped to balance the nation’s books. He seldom gave a thought to his grandchildren. The past he had renounced at the age of thirty, and the future was not his business. All his nervous energy was engaged with the present on a purely day-today basis, and on that basis Swann’s waggons would continue to roll.

PART TWO

Tailtwist

One

Breakthrough

T
he valley was not as Giles remembered it.

When, as a scholar-gipsy, he had first passed this way on his marathon walk from Devon to Edinburgh in 1884, he had seen it as a monument to squalor that yet retained a few subtle undertones of an older Wales, when unsullied streams ran between folds in the hills and islands of green showed on the ragged escarpment behind the town. Dirty and depressing, especially under lowering skies, but raising a few of its tattered banners of the time before the English first came here with their mail-clad men-at-arms, later with their prospectors and surveyors, finally with their armies of scavengers to claw the wealth from the ridges and darken the mountain with spoil.

Today, a mere thirteen years later, the whole area was given over to the moneygrubbers, with no vestige of green remaining and tips everywhere, dark against the sky on the northern edge of the town. Housing had proliferated as the mines expanded and more and more Welshmen yielded hard-won acres to the thistles and came out of the interior to earn their bread. The winding gear was silhouetted against the winter sky, a stark symbol of Anglo-Saxon dominance, like a gallows in the marketplace of a conquered town. The steep terraces of the tiny dwellings began higher up and stretched all the way down to the grey-black blob that was Pontnewydd, where there were a few grubby shops and a rash of chapels, each built like a fortress of local stone. The overall picture now was one of stupefying drabness, and yet, knowing these people, Giles was fortified by the certainty that this was not the whole picture, only its frame and outer edges. Down there in the heart of the place, and up here on the serried terraces, there was warmth and comradeship that one could seek in vain in more wholesome places. There was human dignity, too, a plinth for loyalty, courage, and the dreadful patience of men and women who, while admitting defeat, had never signed the articles of unconditional surrender.

Lovell, his father’s former viceroy about here, found them the house, one of the few about here with privacy, for it stood at the end of an unsurfaced road running at right-angles to Alma Terrace and ending in a cul-de-sac under the lowest ridge of the mountain; the house, Lovell said, was that of an official of the Blaentan Company, and it could be bought for a couple of hundred pounds. Stone-built and four-square to the winds that cut their way through the northern passes all winter and the southwesterlies that blew in from the Atlantic in spring and autumn. A three-bedroomed house, reckoned grand by Pontnewydd standards, for it had a small, walled garden front and back, and a rear view of the mountains of mid-Wales.

Lovell said, giving him a steady look: “Sure you want to buy it? Will your wife care to bide here, within washing-line view of cottages and tips? Pontnewydd is the central point, I’ll grant you, and will shorten your journeys about the constituency, but we could find something more salubrious if we looked nearer the coast, and you’ll have the horse and trap to get you around.”

“I’ll hang out my sign here,” Giles told him. “If I’m to represent these people, I’ve got to know them both in and out of the mine. Where else could I hope to do that?”

“It’s not you I’m thinking of,” Lovell said. “You were always something of a Romany, even when you looked in here as a schoolboy, and talked me into taking you down a pit. But Mrs. Swann deserves some consideration. With a man like Rycroft-Mostyn for a father, and eight years soft living in London, she’ll not take kindly to slumming, will she?”

“She might,” Giles said, smiling. “You can decide that when you meet her,” and on impulse he told Lovell the story of her flight on the eve of their wedding, and how he found and reclaimed her working for a few shillings a week in a North Country drapery store.

“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.