Give Us This Day (58 page)

Just as Henrietta would have liked to have shaken a decision out of Gilda, Edith was sometimes tempted to apply a spur to Edward. Ordinarily, and she had got to know him very well during his managership of her old territory, he was a very practical young man, but her daughter’s presence seemed to reduce him to the status of a minor flunkey privileged to serve royalty. And this, she had long since decided, was quite the wrong approach to make to a girl of Gilda’s temperament. She would have liked to have said to him, “Look, Edward, for everybody’s sake, but mostly your own and hers, tell the girl to make up her mind on the spot. You’ve a great deal to offer, and all she is bringing to you are looks that won’t last her a lifetime! If she turns you down then go out and find somebody who will make you a better wife, lad. If she accepts then in heaven’s name assert yourself. A man who doesn’t won’t get far with our Gilda!”

In the event, it was Gilda who herself raised the matter, admitting that she was fond of Edward but that was as far as it went.

“Then it’s not far enough,” Edith said tartly. “Your common sense should tell you that, girl!”

And Gilda replied, with one of her superior smiles that made Edith regret yet again Tom’s insistence that she should receive the best education they could afford, “On the contrary, Mamma, it’s my common sense that urges me to marry Edward as soon as may be. Before he goes off the boil, that is, for I’m not likely to get a better offer here or abroad. I surely don’t have to tell you the Swanns are better off than anyone else we know.”

The cynicism implicit in the girl’s reasoning was so much at odds with Edith’s character that she came close to boxing her ears but restrained herself, saying, “That’s no way at all for a girl your age to talk, Gilda! Either you care for the boy or you don’t, and money, given enough to be housed, fed, and clothed, should have little to do with it!” She saw her daughter’s eyes widen.

She said, wonderingly, “You really
believe
that, don’t you? But then, you’re a romantic, and I’m not, so we aren’t likely to agree about it, are we? Was Papa penniless when you married him?”

Not simply poor, Edith reflected, remembering how, in effect, she had had to do the proposing, but a man with a police record, who had served time in broad arrows and had been planning an act of theft when serving as one of her waggoners. Suddenly it occurred to her that here was an occasion when part of the truth about Tom Wickstead, so carefully hidden from the children over the years, might have a beneficial effect upon his daughter. She said, quietly, “He was not merely poor. He had seen the inside of a gaol and was busy hauling himself up by his bootstraps!”

She had expected that the information, regretted as soon as it was out, would have shocked the girl half out of her wits. All it produced was a shrug of Gilda’s pretty shoulders. She said, “Oh, that isn’t new to me, Mamma. Papa told me how you met and what he had been only a month or so before he died.”

“He told
you
!
All three
of you?”

“No, just me. I was named for his sister Gilda, wasn’t I? The one who went on the streets while he was in prison.”

“He told you that… everything? About his father being transported, about his mother dying in the workhouse?”

“Yes.”

“But why? I mean, what possible motive did he have? And for not telling me that you knew? Did you pass it on to the boys?”

“I didn’t pass it on to anyone. He made me swear I wouldn’t, but in any case it isn’t the kind of thing one would boast about, is it? I thought about it, however. I thought about it for years, all the time I was away from home, and you needn’t worry, I’m not ashamed of it. It taught me more about life than I ever learned from books.”

“What did it teach you? What specific thing, Gilda?”

The girl looked at her levelly. “It taught me that the very worst thing that can happen to anyone is to be poor. That’s why I’ve finally decided to marry Edward Swann.”

So there it was, and sitting, because suddenly she felt a little dizzy, Edith groped for the key that opened a door on so much about Gilda she had never understood. Her ability to detach herself from her surroundings. The tight control she had over her emotions. Her unusual reliance on her own judgments, so unlike the boys who had always, to some extent, leaned on her when they were growing up and going out into the world. In her presence now she felt deflated and oddly helpless, and yet, behind her confusion, there was a glimmer of hope that out of this they might find a bridge to a better understanding. She said, finally, “You do what you think best, Gilda. In a way I suppose I’ve misjudged you. I loved your father to distraction, but I can’t help thinking it wasn’t very wise of him to confide in you without consulting me first. He probably had a good reason, or what he thought was a good reason. You were always more important to him than the boys. Maybe he saw you as that sister of his, born all over again with a better chance. If you’ll take my advice you won’t tell Edward. His mother and father know, but they can be trusted. All there is left to say is if you do marry Edward, do your very best to make him happy and to have the kind of marriage I had, and Edward’s father and mother have had all these years. It’s the only thing worth having in the end.”

She got up and walked upstairs to her room. Unaccountably, and for the first time in thirty years, she wanted to weep. To weep for Tom and his sister Gilda. For all the wretchedness and deprivation they had suffered under a social system that valued goods and money high above human beings. Perhaps Gilda had it right after all. Perhaps the only ultimate sin was poverty.

3

The Swann firework display continued, at intervals, all through spring and summer to a time when the first shades of gold were beginning to show on the curling edges of the Tryst chestnuts and the early southwesterlies—“Sussex skies,” Adam called them—came probing over the county border, reminding him that it was time to get his apples in and give his ornamental lake its annual dredging.

Edward’s wedding, staged, to Henrietta’s delight in Twyforde Church rather than in faraway Northamptonshire, was behind them now. Everybody had stopped teasing Hugo by prefixing his name with “Sir,” a family joke that bewildered Hugo’s punctilious soldier-servant, whose chest expanded an extra inch every time he looked at his master nowadays, giving substance to Adam’s remark that the sergeant was the most outrageous snob in the country.

One golden September morning Henrietta put on her shawl and carried the post down to the terrace of the lake, where Adam was superintending the drainage, a task that needed considerable care if the sluices were not to jam and his paddocks flood. He looked like a ruffled old heron standing there in his rubber thigh boots, issuing gruff directions to the gardeners, and when she called to him he waded out and joined her on his stone seat fronting the water, a seat that had once formed part of the original embellishment of Tryst in the sixteenth century and had been rescued from a potting shed behind the stables.

“The mail looked important,” she said. “Here is your quarterly report, one from Alex, who has gone over to Ireland, and one from Margaret, addressed to you for some reason.”

He opened Margaret’s letter first because he could see she was curious about it and drew out a cheque bearing his own signature, together with a letter and a photograph of the latest addition to the Griffiths family, a fat and very jollylooking baby sitting on the obligatory bearskin rug.

He said, passing her the photograph and pocketing the cheque, “I won’t get any peace until I explain. They can’t be well off, so I sent her twenty pounds for her birthday. She’s returned it, as she has returned other cheques I’ve sent her. I suppose it’s time I took the hint and stopped playing fairy godfather. That husband of hers seems to have a surfeit of Celtic pride. She says they are several pounds a week better off now, for Giles made over his M.P.‘s salary to Huw as his agent down there.”

“I didn’t know they paid Members of Parliament!”

“They’ve just started to, and I don’t care to think what might come of it. They’re a shifty enough lot as they are. Pay ‘em for going there, and we’ll have some real blackguards scrambling for the cash. However, it doesn’t surprise me. About Giles, I mean. He’ll see it as a way of helping them and pretending it’s a rise. I daresay that prickly young Welshman will swallow that.”

His attitude to his in-laws often amused her. Ever since Joanna had run off with Clinton Coles in the middle of the night, Adam had referred to him as Jack-o’Lantern. Helen’s first husband had been “that pill-rolling Bible spouter.” Now the handsome Huw Griffiths was “that prickly Welshman.” He was a little gentler with his daughters-in-law; George’s wife, Gisela, was generally “that nice gel,” and Romayne “the flighty one.” Alex’s wife, Lydia, was still “the Colonel’s daughter,” and Hugo’s wife, “the Prima Donna.”

So far he had made but one jocular reference to Edward’s wife, commenting on the astonishing self-possession she exhibited at the wedding in April. He named her “the Ice Maiden.”

Alex had interesting news. He had been sent to Ireland, he told them, by Lord Haldane, Secretary for War, to make a survey of territorial recruiting prospects over there if and when the Irish Home Rule Bill was approved by Lords and Commons. When Henrietta, like so many others baffled by what successive generations of politicians referred to as “the Irish Question,” demanded to know whether Ireland would become an entirely separate country if the Irish at last had their way, he said, “Not for defence. Haldane is far too sharp for that. There will always be some of our chaps over there, if only to keep an eye on Paddy.”

She left him then to mull over the latest news from the network, and he unwrapped the latest copy of The Migrant, for Deborah’s husband, Milton, had used the name he jokingly suggested when the quarterly journal had been launched.

It was, he decided, a thoroughly workmanlike broadsheet, well-edited, wellprinted, and full of interest to anyone like himself. He read, among other things, that George had just commissioned his four-hundredth motor-van and sent it out to earn its bread in The Polygon. There was also a quarterly report by the Managing Director and he went through it word by word, telling himself that affable old George sounded oddly pompous when he committed himself to paper. He mused, tucking
The Migrant
into his boot,
He’s got a right to feel smug, I suppose… He was a big jump ahead of all of ‘em twenty years ago, when nobody, least of all me, believed in that snorting great engine he brought home from the Danube. But it won’t do for him to go on thinking nobody can ever catch him up. There’s always an outsider with a new trick up his sleeve, and there always will be. If there wasn’t, commerce would be desperately dull and he’d be the first to realise it with all that energy… Besides, it’s clear enough now that everyone is latching on to the potential of commercial motoring and his presence out there in front is a challenge to ‘em…

He gave some final instructions to the head gardener and turned to make his way up to the house for lunch, looking round him with pride of a kind he had never experienced beside the Thames. Up there someone was always around to disturb his sense of order whereas here, now that his estate had matured with its imported trees and shrubs, he could keep strict control on the landscape and intended to do so, as long as he lived. What would happen to it then he could only guess. The only one of his sons who had inherited his taste was Giles, and he doubted whether Giles would ever be tempted to turn his back on his lame ducks and become a country gentleman.

He was wondering, idly, what kind of instruction he could insert into a codicil to his will concerning the future care of Tryst and its treasures when he saw Henrietta emerge from the house and make her way, very swiftly for her these days, across the forecourt, turning her head this way and that as though she was looking for him. The moment she saw him she broke into a little trot and he called, “What’s the hurry, woman? I’m coming…” Then his sharp eye caught the glint of tears in her eyes and he hastened his step, saying, “What is it, Hetty? What’s upset you so suddenly?”

She said, breathlessly, “Wanted to catch you… tell you before you saw her… Edith’s here… She’s got news… dreadful news…” and she broke off with a sob, tears running parallel courses down her cheeks.

“One of her boys…?”

“No, no… it’s Gilda. Gilda and Edward. Edward came to her yesterday… Gilda’s gone.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“He doesn’t know. She just… well, left, in the middle of the night. They had a tiff, nothing at all so he said, and when she didn’t appear at breakfast he went to her room and found that her bed hadn’t been slept in.”

His immediate reaction was one of profound irritation that something as trivial as this—a tiff between newlyweds—should provoke such an emotional response in her, but then his impatience transferred itself to his son and daughter-in-law. Surely they were old enough to know that young marrieds who occupied separate beds in separate rooms could expect to quarrel and say things to one another that they would afterwards regret.

“I don’t know what Edith can be thinking of to come posting down from Northamptonshire on this kind of excuse,” he growled. “As for you, Hetty, there’s no sense at all in you upsetting yourself over something of this nature. How long have they had to get used to one another? Three months? Four? They have a quarrel and she decides to teach him a lesson by going home to mother. How many times would you have gone at her time of life if you had a mother to run to. Or if you hadn’t been reasonably certain I’d tan your backside when I came for you.”

“I don’t think you understand,” she said, “for it isn’t like that at all. Gilda didn’t go to Edith’s and Edward traced her as far as Dover. She’s gone abroad and from the note she left it’s quite clear she intends to stay there! Let Edith explain… I… I just wanted to warn you that she seems to regard it as her fault, and that’s nonsense…”

He thought, savagely, What the devil is the matter with everybody? Am I the onl
y one about who isn’t going senile? Hetty getting hysterical over a farce like this and Edith, as sane as any woman I know, blaming herself for having a feather-brained daughter…
And suddenly that vague sense of unease that had been prowling about under his ribs for a long time now found an outlet, driving the sparkle from the morning. He said, gruffly, “I’ll have a word with her, but this won’t amount to anything, take it from me,” and he stumped on ahead, mounting the portico steps two at a time.