Give Us This Day (15 page)

The rest was familiar, at least to Giles. His challenge, at the age of twenty-six, of the local squire at the hustings, his early days at Westminster and his rise to prominence as a politician who paid scant tribute to parliamentary procedure in his onslaught on the social sicknesses of his age.

But then, as the sun passed beyond the mountain summits in its swing down towards the Irish sea, he returned briskly to the purpose of his visit, the possibility of settling Giles in a constituency where hard work and, as he put it, the gathering might of the people would elect him to Parliament and enable him to help convert Britain into a real democracy instead of a sham one.

“For mark you, it’s almost here,” he prophesied, with one of his extravagant gestures, “this landslide that will sweep us into power and enable us to implement reforms centuries overdue. Five years, ten at the most, but not more I promise you, and maybe you’ll be there, Johnny Peep, to hammer out a constitution based on principles of justice, merit, and equality of opportunity.”

But it was not all rhetoric. He had a shrewd eye, for instance, for advantages to be wrung from the fact that Giles Swann bore a nationally known name in commerce, and it was while questioning Giles on his father’s secure foothold on the southern perimeter of the region that he pounced on one specific area as an ideal jumping-off place.

“Pontnewydd?” he exclaimed, after Giles had told him the name of the valley where he had descended a coalmine in the company of Bryn Lovell, for so long his father’s viceroy based on Abergavenny. “I know it well and I’ve heard tell of Lovell, too. Isn’t he the man who hauled a Shannon pump to the flooded shaft, and saved the lives of nearly sixty entombed miners? Why, man, it’s a legend down there and legends are stock-in-trade. Pontnewydd is in Usk Vale country, that will likely fall to us after a couple of campaigns. Evan Thomas, the candidate down there, is over sixty and I doubt if he’ll weather it.”

He was silent and contemplative for a moment. Then he said, “It would mean full-time campaigning, lad. Over a period of years unless you were exceptionally lucky. How dependent are you on your father?”

“I’ve money saved and my holding in the Swann Company would bring me a small income. But wouldn’t it be possible to campaign up to the next election on a part-time basis?”

“No,” Lloyd George said, uncompromisingly, “it would not. Winning a seat in Parliament was once a rich man’s hobby but it isn’t any longer, praise God. People stopped playing at politics when Gladstone broadened the suffrage. In a place like Pontnewydd it would be a fight with the gloves off, much like my first fight against Squire Nanney up here.”

“Couldn’t he be chosen as a North Wales candidate, Mr. George?” Romayne asked. He said, smiling, “No again, my dear! He’s an Englishman, who doesn’t speak a word of Welsh. In the south that isn’t important. They’ve had the English on their backs for so long they’re half Anglicised themselves I’m told, although they wouldn’t admit it. We might try for an industrial seat in England, but I wouldn’t have much influence there. Many English Liberals regard me as a potentially destructive element. The more respectable among them have already joined the club.”

“What club is that?”

His eyes danced. “One that I hope you’ll avoid if you ever get to Westminster. The Pro-Consul’s Club as I think of it, where the lions lay down with the lambs. Or the wolves. Dramatic personality changes occur in revolutionaries, once they’ve put on the Westminster straitjacket. You might even have difficulty distinguishing them from their opponents after a year or so in that hot house. It’s a rare place for raising hybrids.” He looked at his watch. “I’m due in Caernarvon for a constituency meeting at eight and must leave you now. May I take it you’re prepared to put yourself in my hands? Well, you might do worse in your situation, for I’ve taken a rare fancy to you, Johnny Peep. A little more fire in your belly and you’ll emerge as a very promising recruit to my way of thinking. A Tory-orientated young man, with everything to gain by accepting the advantages conferred on you by a rich background and good education, who accepts the radical as the arbiter of the twentieth century.” He turned to Romayne. “You can play your part, my dear. The role of a politician’s wife isn’t easy. You’ll soon learn that, I daresay. In any other profession a man can use what cover is available. Out there in the arena he’s a sitting target and it isn’t only his hide that takes a walloping from time to time.”

They were both well aware of what was explicit in the warning. As recently as last July Lloyd George had been cited in a divorce suit that threatened to topple him, but he did not act like a man under a cloud. His denigrators, Giles decided, would have to get up long before sunrise to catch David Lloyd George napping.

* * *

Adam was in his tower working by lamplight when Giles came to him with the letter. An invitation to present himself at an Usk Vale constituency meeting, where preliminary steps would be taken to replace the retiring Liberal candidate at a rally of the Executive in the new year. Evan Thomas, a local councillor who had fought three unsuccessful elections, had stepped down earlier than anyone expected, on grounds of failing health. Almost certainly, Giles decided, he had been nudged by younger elements of the party in the area, men working in close liaison with Lloyd George, who was already accepted by the thrusters as the real leader of the Welsh Liberals.

Giles had kept Adam informed to date but there hadn’t been much to pass on and, in any case, his father’s energies were fully absorbed in the gigantic task of reorganising and rebuilding headquarters while still exercising control of the provincial network. Giles had not been able to help him much. His own experience was confined almost wholly to welfare on the one hand, and the investigation of claims on the other, and he rarely spent more than two days a week in the capital. But Adam had not complained. Indeed it had seemed to Giles, through those busy autumn months after the New Broom had vanished from the scene, that his father relished the task thrust upon him by George’s leave of absence, and the havoc wrought by the fire.

“You’ll be going down to look them over, I take it?” he said, and Giles reminded him that it was more a case of being looked over.

“Swanns do the looking,” the old man said, half in jest.

But Giles replied, “Oh, I don’t give myself much of a chance. They’ll be sure to choose a local man in favour of a candidate who can only pay flying visits to the valleys,” and failed to notice his father’s abstracted look as he took the letter and held it closer to the circle of lamplight. “I thought I should let you know I’ll be out of touch Monday and Tuesday of next week. I’ll get those Swansea claim forms from the clerks and deal with them over the weekend.”

Adam said, sharply, “Wait on, son. Don’t be in such a confounded hurry. I need time to mull this over. Pour me a noggin and help yourself to one while you’re about it.”

“But you’re swamped with work. Look at that desk.”

“I’m getting on top of it.”

Giles went to the wall cupboard his father had reconverted into a cellarette. Ever since he could remember his father seemed far more relaxed in this queer octagonal chamber than in his more comfortable surroundings at Tryst. The place still had the air of a bivouac, tenanted by a campaigning general with spartan tastes and a passion for work.

“How do you feel about going the whole hog, boy?”

Giles looked at him, encouraged by the smile plucking the corners of his mouth.

“You mean shifting down there permanently? Leaving you to cope with this mess alone?”

“I’m not alone. Keate has come back four days a week. And that young brother of yours is a damned quick learner.”

Giles noticed he said nothing of old Hugo. He had always been disposed to dismiss old Hugo as an amiable oaf. Anywhere outside a sports stadium, that is.

“One of us ought to stand with you, apart from a kid Edward’s age.”

“Not you, boy. For one thing your heart’s never been in it and for another this letter tells me you’ve got bigger fish to fry. Well?”

“I don’t know. I as good as told Lloyd George I couldn’t accept a full-time candidacy.”

“Question of money?”

“No. We could get by on a modest income down there.”

“That won’t get you far, son.”

“How do you mean?”

“The Liberals are not only short of young talent at the moment. I happen to know they’re desperately short of ready money.”

“I didn’t promise them any money.”

“You didn’t have to. I’m not saying that chap Lloyd George doesn’t recognise good political potential when it comes knocking at his door, but it wasn’t that that got your foot in the door. If you could bring the local party a sizeable annual subscription they wouldn’t give a local man a second look. I know that much about party politics. You’ve got your share of Sam’s residue. It’s more than enough to win that seat, backed by hard graft.”

“Isn’t it a bit like buying your way in?”

“You have to buy your way into everything, son. You always did, even in my day. Only now it’s twice as expensive. Only those Keir Hardie crusaders see politics in any other light and they’ll come around to it as soon as the Labour Party settles down.”

“Lloyd George got himself elected without financial backing.”

“So he did. But who keeps him there, pitching away at the coconut shies? His family practice mostly. I’ve had that on good authority.”

“It still doesn’t entitle me to leave you in the lurch.”

Adam sipped his brandy. “Tell you something I’ve not told anyone else, Giles. Something I wouldn’t admit to your mother, if only for fear of hurting her feelings. I’m happier here, back in this slum, than I’ve ever been since the day I walked out on it, and turned my hand to making something of Tryst. That was a challenge while I was doing it, but now all that’s left for me to do is to watch the trees and shrubs grow and I’ll be gone before they mature. Oh, I daresay George regards what I’m doing here as a sacrifice, and I mean to let him go on thinking it. It might help to keep him in line, after that silly business with that Lockerbie woman. The truth is I put myself out to grass before I was used up, and it does a man a power of good to realise that when he’s seventy and get a chance to prove it. Lift your glass, boy, and drink to the first Swann to make laws. They’ve been busy bending ‘em ever since Agincourt. It makes a change.”

Giles finished his brandy, reflecting that nobody ever stopped learning about the Gov’nor. His queer passion for this squalid place. His unquenchable faith in himself and his potential. His gruffness, forthrightness and swift, unexpected touches of kindness, gentle as a woman’s. He said; “If I won a seat, would that make you glad? Proud, perhaps?”

The old man crossed to the cupboard and poured himself another measure. “It’s important I should know, sir.”

The “sir” arrested him. Like his brothers, even young Edward had stopped calling him “sir.” It was Gov’nor or Father, according to their estimate of his mood.

“Glad? Yes, I’d be glad for your sake. Proud? I’m not so sure. You’ve got respect for that place and I once had. But most of it has leaked out my boots over the years.”

“It’s still the best governing instrument in the world, isn’t it?”

“Yes, you could claim that I suppose. But looking round the world nowadays I sometimes wonder if we couldn’t have set a better example.”

“Because other democracies are younger and greener?”

“Not necessarily. Put it another way. Ours should be better than it is by this time. We had a long start over everybody else, and I’m not sure I like the use we’re making of it nowadays. ‘Strutting’ doesn’t become us.”

He knew what was in his father’s mind, and it was not merely the recent exercise in what he had dismissed as “tribal breastbeating.” It was an attitude taken for granted by almost every living soul in the islands, from tiara-wearers, walking the red carpet between ranks of cooing shopgirls outside Devonshire House, down to the hardest-driven slavey in the basements of their town houses. It was in their ditties and their folk lore, and taught alike in their redbrick elementary schools and ancient seats of learning. It could be heard in the clamour of their halfpenny press and seen in the swagger of their sailors on shore leave. You could see it reflected in stock-market quotations and hear its voice in the rattle of money pouring into a million tills. It decked itself in feathers and pearl on Hampstead Heath on Bank Holidays and in scarlet and gold in garrison towns all over the world, and perhaps Adam was speaking for his son as well as himself when he added, “It’s not all bad, mind you. The devil of it is most radicals would throw out the baby with the bathwater. There’s a lot here worth saving but it needs pruning and we’d best set about it ourselves before somebody does it for us. If you get into that place, give ‘em a prod from me, will you?”

“If I ever did get there,” Giles said, “I’d look to you for a briefing before I threw my hat in the ring.”

Adam watched him cross the yard as he had watched his brother George go, thinking,
Well, that’s another of ‘em. It’s lucky Hetty wouldn’t call “whoa” when I wanted to, for we’re going to need reserves before we’re through
, but this didn’t depress him unduly. Swann-on-Wheels had been his life’s work and the patrimony was there for the taking, providing any one among his five sons was equal to it. But he wasn’t a man enslaved by the notion of seeing his own flesh and blood dedicate themselves to it, in the way he had done when he had turned his back on soldiering and taken the plunge in the ‘fifties. He would see that as vanity, and although reckoned as proud as Lucifer by friends and enemies alike, nobody had ever called him vain. He drained his tot, stumped round the end of the desk, and settled himself in his wide-bottomed chair. Outside the evening sounds of the yard reached him, muffled in river fog. A Goliath, or fully-loaded man-o’-war creaking in from the Midland sector; a vanboy’s quip as he leaped down from a tailboard; the dolorous hoot of a tug heading down river towards the docks. Sounds that were the symphony of his life and enterprise about here, able to comfort him as he settled back to his work.