Give Us This Day (45 page)

Henrietta reasoned, no doubt, that Giles, centrepiece of a political arena, would be acquainted with any number of bachelors and perhaps, who knew, a comfortably-off young widower or two. He was, moreover, a kindhearted boy who would surely do his best to promote any promising friendship, so that she was all agog when Giles wrote in the autumn of 1905 that he was visiting Tryst during a dash to London, “and would pass on some intriguing news concerning Margaret’s debut in the valleys.”

Henrietta could place but one interpretation on this, and when he appeared she whisked him into her sewing-room before Adam could bombard the boy with political queries. She said, closing the door and leaning against it, “Tell, then. Tell! That bit about Margaret? Does it mean what I hope it means?”

Giles smiled as he peeled off his overcoat. The relationship between him and his mother was unique in the family. She had always stood in awe of him, even as a child. He was so scholarly, so dangerously knowledgeable about life and people, holding a kind of balance between the clamourings of eight sisters and brothers, a tolerant referee no one cared to dispute. In some ways he seemed even older and wiser than Adam, who often, Henrietta had noticed, deferred to him. Giles, for his part, saw his mother in the light of an amiable and impulsive elder sister, but there were aspects of her that he admired, notably her courage and resilience. He said, kissing her, “Oh, it’s nothing sensational. Only that she seems to have taken a fancy to one of my party workers. A splendid young chap called Huw Griffiths. They go everywhere together and a day or so ago the poor chap came to me quite lost for words, very unusual for Huw. It seems he thought he should ask my permission to propose.”

“Good gracious! And you don’t regard that as sensational! With Margaret twenty-six next December? What did you say to him?”

“What could I say? I told him it was up to her, to both of them. As you say, she’s surely old enough to know her own mind. If she had been younger I should have shuttled him to father. As it was, I advised him to throw his hat in the ring.”

“But what kind of man is he, for heaven’s sake? I mean, how old and how eligible? And what does he
do
? Surely even you realise these things are important to us?”

“To you, I daresay. Not to Margaret. She’s in love, I think, not only with Huw but also with his valleys and the people who live in them. She’s even taken to painting pithead scenes, and they’re very good to my mind, full of truth and humour…”

“Oh,
fiddlesticks
to what she’s painting!” Henrietta exclaimed, impatiently. “Tell me about this man Griffiths. You said ‘a splendid young chap’. Splendid in what way?”

“Well, as a party worker for one thing. He’s an excellent off-the-cuff speaker and a good organiser…”

“Do you mean he’s a member of Parliament?”

“Member of P…? Old Huw? Lord, no, nothing like that. He’s a miner. About Margaret’s age.”

“A… a… miner? A coal-miner?”

“Yes. A big, strapping chap, with hair as black as the coal he digs and a tribe of younger brothers who worship him. They all live in a cottage and look after their mother and one little sister. His father is dead, you see—silicosis, poor devil.”

“What would he earn?”

“Oh, about thirty shillings a week, but he isn’t likely to stay down the pit. He attends evening classes when he’s on day shift and sooner or later he’ll get a job on top. I might even persuade him to leave the pits altogether and become my agent. Old Bryn Lovell is getting past it and we’re looking for a younger man. If he and Margaret did marry I daresay he’d be tempted. We’ve got a good organisation and could pay a full-time agent three pounds a week.”

The shattering unworldliness of the boy checked her outcry. His values were so alien to her, and no more welcome for being so innocently stated. Looking back over the past, she realised that this had always been so with Giles, strangest and most complex of the brood, a boy who, she recalled, always seemed to her to inhabit a different planet from her and the rest of them and even, to an extent, from Adam, the wisest man on earth. And yet, in this kind of situation, there was no place for other-worldliness. She said, gulping down her disappointment, “Margaret can’t be serious. You just don’t understand these things, Giles. She’s probably bored down there and just… well, flirting a little. I suppose even that is encouraging in a way, for it’s never happened before. But I do think it’s time she came back, before she gives that young man silly ideas. You tell her from me I want her home, do you hear? And now here’s your father, and you’ll be talking politics nineteen to the dozen until luncheon. I’ll go and see to it now.” She withdrew into the hall before he could reply, calling to Adam, who was pulling off his gardening boots in the porch, “Giles is here. He hasn’t long, he says.”

That was the way of Henrietta, faced with unpalatable facts or even trends. She had a trick of reversing them, of picking the meat from the bone of some grisly-looking morsel and persuading herself that it must be good for something, although she wasn’t sure what and would have to think about it. If Margaret had taken up with a miner of her own age, it must mean that she was becoming aware of herself as a woman and that was hopeful, for it meant that with her daughter safely restored to her own circle, she could begin looking about for a real husband before the girl became restless and out of sorts, as was the way of unwed and uncourted females once they reached their mid-twenties. After lunch she would give her mind to the matter.

* * *

Margaret Swann’s renunciation of her former lover, the soft, unchanging Kentish countryside, had occurred within a week of setting foot in the mining valleys. She did not understand what agency brought about such a betrayal, only that some gaunt, looming stranger, brooding but infinitely persuasive, rose out of the mountain under her feet and tugged at her sleeve buttons, bidding her look, ponder, and absorb. For here was something unique in her experience and far more soul-stirring than any pastoral scene, with its eternal half-tones of green, brown, and gold, its regulated light and the plodding figures seen about its fields and coppices.

Here, her accoster insisted, was vitality, adventure, challenge, and an ugliness capable of crippling the spirit if you let it. But you didn’t, seeing it for what it was—a stark setting for comradeship, laughter, and compassion among all the teeming families inhabiting the terraces that seamed the steep slopes of Pontnewydd bowl. Here was greed, certainly, and probably all the other deadly sins, but they were on the defensive, despite occupation of the landscape reaching up to the rain-heavy sky behind the town. Within this arena, a cheerful, beleaguered garrison manning a battered citadel, were people, a multitude of Joneses, Evanses, Pritchards, Powells, Howells, Morgans, Reeces, and Owens. And, of course, Griffiths, like the Griffiths of 107 Bethel Street, where the branch of the tribe lived.

It all began, in fact, within a stone’s throw of the open end of Bethel Street, where it joined the track leading out of the town to the fold in the hill where Giles and Romayne had their stone-built house. Not half-a-mile from the pit that provided some kind of justification for all this clutter, clinging to the side of the hill. Climbing up from the cluster of little shops on the floor of the valley, she could just see the winding gear crowning the summit, with its huddle of sheds and sidings and its single rail track that reflected the last rays of the afternoon sun, playing catch-as-catch-can with the clouds.

Huw Griffiths was coming off shift with about a dozen other miners who lived in Bethel Street, and she recognised him at once as the impressive young man who had attended last Tuesday’s committee meeting in Giles’s parlour. He was, she would judge, an inch over six foot and his shoulder span, for a man with such a slender waist, was impressive. It was not his undoubted masculinity that had imprinted him on her mind, but his smile, that was ready and very winning but, at the same time, slightly tremulous, the smile of a child who wasn’t sure if he would win some permission he sought or be excused some fault for which he was about to be blamed. For Huw Griffiths, a man in his mid-twenties she would say, looked no more than thirteen when he smiled, and he was smiling now, having seen recognition in her glance across the width of the narrow road. He crossed over to her, his great, clodhopping boots striking harshly on the rocky surface of the track, and, lifting a filthy hand to an almost equally grimed forehead, said: “It is Miss Swann, isn’t it, now? I’m Huw Griffiths, the candidate’s senior steward. You opened the door to me Tuesday’s meeting, Miss.”

“I remember you very well, Mr. Griffiths.”

Although reckoned shy by Henrietta and others who did not know her well, Margaret Swann was never embarrassed by strangers. Men, young and old, had been coming and going all her life at Tryst, and she noted them all, for her eyes were trained to record tiny details and idiosyncrasies about people as well as those of petals, leaf patterns, and sun-shadows on gorse and bracken. Besides, there could be nothing to fear from a man with such a childlike smile and she smiled back as he went on, seemingly encouraged, “Might I ask a favour, Miss? I’ve some draft leaflets, you see—for the candidate, they are. Promised for tonight but there’s an evening class, see, and I’ve scrub-up and tea ahead of me. Our place is only a step and if you’d be so kind…”

“I’ll take them, certainly, Mr. Griffiths.” She fell into step with him, lengthening her stride over the uneven surface of the road and saying, for something to say, “What exactly is senior steward, Mr. Griffiths?” and his smile widened. At the corners of his mouth tiny furrows overlaid with coal-dust seemed to wink large black stars on a white ground. The smile fascinated her so much that she hardly heard his small joke in reply.

“Just a handle. To make a man feel someone, you’d say, Miss Swann. The candidate’s like that, you see…” He referred to Giles as though he was a stranger to her, “He likes to haf everybody in there with a part to play. Not just himself, like all the others.”

“What others?”

“Oh, the party bigwigs, those who come yer to speak, you know.”

“But what do you do, Mr. Griffiths? Write leaflets to put through doors?”

“Ah, no, I only copy them. It’s practice, you see, for I’m not much at writing yet. But I can talk when I’ve a mind to.” He expanded then deflated himself with another smile. “All I do is go on ahead to meetings and put out the chairs. Stand by for hecklers, too, but the candidate isn’t one for clearing the hall, not unless things get too rough, mind. Any old job handy, I reckon, that would cover it. Here’s our place, Miss,” and he stopped in front of one of the redbrick dolls’ houses, identical in almost every detail with all its neighbours, save that its knocker gleamed as though it had just had its daily polish.

“I’ll get the leaflets…” But then, hesitating, “Won’t you step inside, Miss? It wouldn’t do to leave the candidate’s sister on the doorstep.”

She moved in ahead of him, into a narrow strip of passage formed by planks partitioning off the parlour, then, one step beyond, into a kitchen filled with people half-seen through a cloud of steam and drying washing. He squeezed past her, blocking the way. “No, no, Miss, not in there. Mam and the kids are home, and my bath is laid out. Into the parlour, please.”

She turned and he reached over her shoulder to open the parlour door, revealing a room about eight feet by ten, stuffed with furniture. Inside the tiny house he became a giant, but a giant moving over familiar ground, so that every movement was pre-judged. “Take a seat, Miss,” and she sat on the one red plush chair, its back protected by a lace antimacassar, while he sidled out again and she heard him subdue a sudden babel from the kitchen, hissing them down as though her presence had converted the kitchen into a chapel. “
Ssh
, Mam! Shssh, Miriam… It’s the candidate’s sister. Mustn’t keep her waiting…” and after that a long hush, broken only by whisperings and stealthy movements on the other side of the wall.

She looked about her with the keenest interest. The room, vastly overcrowded as it was with table, chairs, a large green plant pot containing a huge aspidistra, knick-knacks of the kind she had seen won as prizes at Ton-bridge Fair, and an assortment of wool mats worked in all colours of the rainbow, was none the less cleaner than any room she remembered. It was, she supposed, the holy place of the house and very seldom used, for it felt cold and damp in contrast to the street and steaming kitchen. Family photographs decorated the walls, dominated by an oak-framed portrait of a thickset man of about forty, wearing his Sunday best and gazing down at her as though hypnotised by her presence. The eyes and the heavy square jaw betrayed him as Huw Griffiths’s father, and she wondered where he was, concluding he was probably down the mine on the night shift.

And then, as she sat taking in the contents of the room, and relating it to all she had seen in the few days since arriving here, there came to her a revelation of the kind she had read about in social and religious tracts, where people renounced one form of life for another, turning themselves inside out and seeing everything about them from a strange new angle. It had to do, in some mysterious way, with her painting, so far wholly concerned with nature, with rich, colourful, unsullied things that flowered and gave off a wide variety of scents, with solitude and stillness. But now, in the presence of these drab, mundane things, most of them lacking colour and form, and with the memory of the scenes outside dominated by the skeletal winding gear crowning the hill, she had an awareness of stirring from a long, drugged sleep into full and vibrant wakefulness and the desire to capture the experience in pencil lines was so strong that her hands itched for crayons and paper. For here was a new world, with a million subjects awaiting her brushes, subjects of the kind generations of genre painters had found compelling in the past but that had never, so far, seemed to her worth reproducing. She could hardly wait to get to her portmanteau containing the materials she had brought from Tryst and stood up, fidgeting with her gloves as he edged himself into the room and handed her a bundle of leaflets tied with string.