Give Us This Day (3 page)

Four hundred yards nearer St. Paul’s, where the procession was channelled into the Strand and marched blaring, thrumming, and jingling between phalanxes of hysterical Imperialists (few among them could have said in which continent British Honduras or Tobago were located) was George Swann, managing director and New Broom Extraordinary. He was perched, together with his wife, his family, and his host, Sir James Lockerbie, in a window that would have fetched a hundred guineas had Sir James been in need of ready money. And George would have defined the brassy sunshine as ideal hauling weather.

On a day like this, given a fit team, a waggon carrying a full load could make fifteen miles from depot to off-loading point providing the teamster knew his business and gave the horses a regular breather. For years now George had taken weather into his calculations, but his mind was not on business today. With the yard closed down, and every employee enjoying a bonus holiday, he was wondering what new and plausible excuse he could offer Gisela for not making holiday himself. The problem not only took his mind off his work; it also drew a curtain on the procession below so that he saw not an ageing dumpy woman in a gilded carriage drawn by eight greys, not the clattering tide of blue, gold, crimson, and silver of her cavalry escort, and not even the Hong Kong police in their incongruous coolie hats, but a diversion that had interposed between him and his concerns since his chance meeting with Barbara Lockerbie a few weeks ago. For the New Broom had lost some of its inflexibility of late and those within close range of it noticed, or thought they noticed, a wholly uncharacteristic irresolution in the way the broom was wielded. A strange, unwonted peace had settled on the network. Dust had been allowed to settle in out-of-the-way corners at Headquarters and in the regions beyond, so that regional managers who had been at the receiving end of George Swann’s barrage of watch-it-and-wait-for-it telegrams ever since Old Gaffer put his feet up told one another the gale was easing off a point or two, and that the Young Gaffer, praise God, was “running out of steam,” as the Old Gaffer would have put it. They were men of the world, mostly, who had been around Swann yards long enough to remember George as a pink-cheeked lad with an unpleasant tendency to pop up in unexpected places when least expected. They fancied, therefore, that by now they knew him as well as they had known his father, but they would have been wrong. For George Swann had not run out of steam. On the contrary, he could have been said to have built up such a head of steam over the years that it became imperative that somebody come forward to open a safety-valve on his explosive energy. And this, in fact, was what had happened the moment Barbara Lockerbie crossed his path. Any steam that remained in George’s boilers was now at her disposal, not Swann’s.

It was nine weeks since they had met, seven since he had become her lover, and a long, fretful week since he had held her in his arms, shedding his packload of responsibilities much as Christian shed his sins and watched them roll away downhill on his journey to the Celestial City. Unlike Christian, however, George had reached the Celestial City at a bound, for Barbara Lockerbie, saddled with an ageing husband and currently between lovers, had an eye for men like George Swann, recognising him instantly as someone in such desperate need of dalliance that he was likely to prove virile, generous, and unencumbered with jealousy concerning competitors past and present.

She was right. He took what she offered gratefully, without seeking to lay down conditions and without a thought as to how deep a dent she was likely to make in his bank balance. He did not enquire why her elegant boudoir was slightly tainted with cigar-smoke, or who had paid for that cameo set in emeralds that had not been on the dressing table the night before last. He was as eager as a boy, as trusting as a spoiled mastiff, and as uncompromising in his approach as a shipwrecked mariner beached by sirens after years of toil and celibacy. That was why, when she declared these Imperial rites vulgar and took herself off to her country house in Hertfordshire before they were due to begin, she knew with complete certainty he would find a way of accepting her invitation to join her while Sir James Lockerbie, rival gallants, and his little Austrian wife, Gisela, were city-bound by the national junketings. She was not often wrong about men and she was never wrong about George Swann. Before the tail-end of the procession had passed under the Lockerbie window, George had composed and rehearsed an urgent summons from his Midlands viceroy. With luck, he could make Harpenden by suppertime and a Lockerbie carriage would convey his wife and family home to Beckenham. He rejoiced then that he had granted the network an extra day’s holiday in honour of the Jubilee. It meant that no one would look for him until the following Thursday.

3

For Adam Swann, seventy, it was appropriate weather, and for Alex, thirty-six, campaigning weather. For Hugo, twenty-eight, it was athletes’ weather, and for George, thirty-three, hauling and whoring weather. There remained the Swann Conscience, not quite silenced by the jangle of bells and the boom of royal salutes, and for Giles, its keeper, it was something else again. Protest weather, possibly, for Giles, almost alone among that vast crowd, was not present as a sightseer but as an actor. Evidence, as far as the Swanns were concerned, that all that glittered down there was fool’s gold.

His observation post was a first-floor window above the display windows of Beckwith and Lowenstein’s, the once-fashionable Strand branch, now set on its slow decline since the carriage trade had drifted east to Regent’s Street and Oxford Street. It was almost the last shop in the north facade of the Strand, and he was there as lookout on behalf of the forlorn band of leaflet-throwers stationed two storeys above. Among them, at her urgent insistence, was his wife, Romayne, disinherited daughter of one of the wealthiest merchants in the land.

It was not the first foray in which they had been involved, but because of the occasion it promised to be the most sensational, certain of earning press coverage, which was more than could be said of earlier protests, even the abortive one they staged at the Lord Mayor’s show last November.

Soper, the fanatical secretary of the newly formed Shop Assistants’ Action Group, had conceived it; Soper was a pallid, tireless, and, in Giles’s view, a very reckless campaigner who had won a majority vote in committee on the grounds that a gesture of this kind—a challenge thrown at the feet of the most powerful and influential people in Britain—was irresistible, and perhaps he was right. Few among those who were offered the Group’s standard leaflets in the street, or at Hyde Park Corner, accepted them, and even those who did discarded them ten steps beyond. “We have to move on,” Soper had argued passionately, “we have to force the campaign on the national press, and what more certain way of doing that than putting our case to the Queen on her way to St. Paul’s?”

Put like that it was unanswerable, and Romayne, her imagination fired, shouted “Hear, hear! Bravo!” as if the proposal of such a bold gesture represented its accomplishment. But Giles, to her private dismay, had argued against it, first publicly in committee, where he had been outvoted, then privately on their way home. She did not often run counter to him, but she did now, saying, “But don’t you see, Giles? It’s dramatic, something they can’t laugh off in the way they did when we paraded with placards!”

“It’s certainly that,” he said, trying to locate the springs of his instinctive misgivings, “but there’s something about it I don’t like. It’s not just the risk of arrest on some trumped-up charge—obstruction, creating a public nuisance—they’d find something if they laid hands on any of us. And it’s not the pleasure of reminding all those popinjays that there are more important issues than waving flags. Maybe it’s the timing.”

“The timing? I don’t follow, Giles, dear.”

He said, grumpily, “Well, there’s no point in us falling out about it. It was a majority decision and we’ll go ahead. I only lay down one condition. They leave the wording of the leaflet and the tactics to me.”

“Oh, but they’ll do that,” she said, and he thought she was probably right. The Shop Assistants’ Action Group did not lack ideas and enthusiasm, but it was woefully short on funds and prestige, both of which Giles Swann, a director of a nationwide haulage network, could provide.

The Jubilee ambush continued to bother him. They lived in a pretty little Georgian house at Shirley, within easy reach of East Croydon Station, and the back looked over woods and pastures to the Kent-Surrey border. That same night, unable to sleep, he got out of bed and went on to the terrace looking across the fields to the blur of Addington Woods and here, in uncompromising moonlight, his misgivings crystallised. He saw the leaflet raid as a single jarring note in a national overture. It was easy to imagine the wrapt expressions of the Jubilee holiday-makers, each of them revelling in a day’s release from monotonous toil to witness an unprecedented display of pomp and martial display in which they would feel themselves personally involved, and a majority, regarding the Queen’s personage as sacrosanct, would surely regard the descent of a shower of leaflets on her entourage an act of impiety. It would be irrelevant too, on a day when London was out to enjoy itself, and when every man, woman and child assembled there personally subscribed to the mystique of Empire and took pride in the spread of red on maps hung on the blackboards of the redbrick Board Schools.

Of all the Swanns, Giles saw himself as the only one involved in the present. Alex, George, and Hugo were forsworn to the future, to an increasingly modernised army, to the spread of commerce, and to the triumphs of the sports arena as the might of the tribes increased year by year. His father, who had once had a social conscience, had slipped back into the past, to the battles for franchise and human rights of the ‘sixties and ‘seventies. But it sometimes seemed to him that he alone was equipped to lift the lid on this treasure chest they called the Empire and examine, piecemeal, the terrible injustices concealed under the plumes and moneybags stowed there. As a child he had witnessed an aged couple evicted and despatched to separate workhouses, and as a youth he had penetrated the galleries of a Rhondda coal-mine and seen, closehand, the filth and degradation of the industrial cities in the north. Everywhere, it appeared to him, was gross imbalance; wealth and power on the one hand, grinding poverty and naked cruelty on the other, but so few acknowledged this boil on the body politic. They chanted patriotic music-hall ditties, put their money on the Grand Fleet, and thought of themselves as actually taking part in an eruption of power and plenty, unique in the history of mankind. Then they went blithely about their concerns, the privileged making money, gallivanting on river and race-course, snug under a mantle of rectitude woven for them by Providence. For the others, who made all this possible, it was very different. The conditions worked by shop assistants in the big emporiums were only one of the blatant contradictions in an age of tremendous technological progress, and the flagrant contrasts within the system tormented him, for it seemed to him that, once they were publicly recognised and acknowledged, they could be so easily adjusted. Romayne’s revelation was a case in point.

He remembered her as she had been in their courtship days, a pampered, highlystrung child of an industrialist, who had seemed never to comprehend his smouldering quarrel with the status quo, who had taken all her privileges for granted and had indulged in a fit of temper whenever anything was withheld from her. But all that had changed and under pressure of what he looked back on as absurdly melodramatic circumstances. Unable to adjust to her selfishness, he had jilted her, abruptly and finally after a scene in an Oxford Street milliner’s a minute to closing time one Saturday night, and had glumly assumed that the incident marked the end of their bittersweet relationship. Yet it was not so. Something had rubbed off on her, enough to project her out of her cushioned surroundings and into the workaday world, there to test his theories in the light of personal experience. Eighteen months later, against all probability, he had found and reclaimed her, earning her living in the cash desk of a North Country haberdasher’s, and sharing the submerged life of living-in shop assistants working a sixty-hour week under what was really no advance on the lot of slaves. The experience had transformed her utterly, and if that could happen to her it could happen to others, providing the point could be brought home to them with equal emphasis. Yet how to achieve it, without revolution and blood on the streets? Not by protest meetings at Hyde Park Corner. Not by leaflets, placards, parades, and letters to the press. Surely by legislation, and the slow reshaping of public opinion, it would be possible. There was a lesson here somewhere, for him and for everybody else. Possibly, just possibly, Soper was right. The public needed a shock, a whole series of shocks, and perhaps his underlying misgivings concerning Soper’s tactics stemmed from an excessive respect for law and order and an instinctive distaste for involving himself and his family in scandal. Romayne, out of regard for him, had not succumbed to those pressures, and remembering this he discerned the real source of her enthusiasm for Soper’s paper bombardment. Standing there in the moonlight he thought, forlornly,
She did that. She endured that purgatory for eighteen months, and for no other reason than to prove that we belonged to each other, paying in wretchedness for her tantrums, her ridiculous involvements with grooms and music-teachers, her gross extravagance and the capacity, hardening like a crust, to see the dispossessed as serfs. Well, then, to hell with what I think about the proposal. I’ll do it. Not for Soper and not even for the poor devils he claims to represent, but for her.

He went in to find her sleeping soundly and studied her in the shaft of moonlight that fell across the pillow. A beautiful child, robbed by sleep of the strange contradictions imposed upon her by the past, that included her failure to present him with a child, something she would probably see as a fresh source of inadequacy, although he did not. There were already too many children in the world. Many of them would never have enough to eat. Many of them would grow into spindle-legged, weak-chested adults with no alternative but to work out their lives at the dictates of some stonefaced overlord like her father or his grandfather. Like his own father, even, despite Adam Swann’s national reputation as an enlightened gaffer. He slipped in beside her, still troubled certainly, but comforted, to some degree, by the completeness of her transformation.