Give Us This Day (60 page)

It was while he was standing in front of the departures board trying, with all his might, to focus his mind on the train schedules displayed there, that Garside accosted him, touching his cap and saying, “It’s gone down, sir. I managed to get it on the workmen’s train just after six,” and Edward turned, wrinkling his brow and staring at the deputy stationmaster as if he had been a stranger and not a man with whom he had had scores of consultations concerning the despatch of freight since he came to the district as manager.

“What’s that you say?”

“Madam’s trunk, sir. The three-fifteen was on the point of leaving… matter of fact, I shouldn’t have let her pass the barrier, but she was clearly in a great hurry to catch it. I got her on and put her trunk on the next train, as promised. It’ll catch her up with that express label on it. Her cross-Channel doesn’t leave until just after nine, sir.”

His brain, completely fogged at Garside’s initial approach, began to clear a little so that he was able to make some kind of sense out of the man’s remarks. Gilda had come down here in the small hours with a trunk but had been unable to catch the three-fifteen save by jumping aboard when it was moving off on the whistle. To do this, she had been obliged to abandon the trunk and shout instructions for its forwarding to the obliging Garside, who had obviously recognised her and gone out of his way to help, probably because he regarded Swann-on-Wheels as one of the city’s most important patrons of his railway. It was Garside’s reference to the cross-Channel packet that baffled him. He said, carefully, “Is that three-fifteen a through train to the coast?”

“Yes, sir, though there’s a longish wait at Victoria. Long enough for Mrs. Swann to get breakfast, I daresay.”

“Thank you, Garside.” He reached into his trouser pocket and drew out a half-crown.

“That isn’t necessary, sir.”

“Take it, man.”

Garside took it with another salute. “Glad to help, Mr. Swann. The ladies will cut it fine, sir.”

He went off and Edward, passing a hand over his unshaven chin, sat on a platform seat and made a tremendous effort to think clearly and purposefully. It was no use going after her. By the time he got to Dover (he remembered now that the early morning train from Manchester connected to Dover) she would be in France. It was no use trailing over to her mother’s either, or not yet, not until he had had time to think up some plausible story for Gilda’s absence. As to the future, he had no wish whatever to explore that. The best course he could take now was to get himself shaved, make some kind of pretence to eat breakfast, and stop the news of her flight being broadcast to tradesmen who might well be numbered among Swann’s regular customers. If that happened, the depot would get to hear about it within hours and the thought of moving among the clerks and waggoners as a newly-married husband whose wife had fled from him in the middle of the night was not to be contemplated.

He went out of the station, called a cab, and drove home, telling the housekeeper that Mrs. Swann had been summoned away on urgent family business and that he had been to the station to send on her luggage. He had no means of knowing whether or not she believed him, but she was a discreet woman and he could rely on her to relay the information, for what it was worth, to the other servants. She said, “The breakfast is cold, sir. Shall I get cook to send up some more?” He said no, for he planned to follow Mrs. Swann after a visit to the depot, and would make do with coffee and eat on the train. He then dismissed her and went upstairs to shave, finding that he had to use extra care with his cut-throat for his hand was unsteady. He packed an overnight bag and came down again in ten minutes to drink a single cup of coffee. Then saying no more to anyone, he went out and walked the distance to the station. The depot could await a wire explaining his absence. In the meantime, the need to confide in someone was imperative, and he could think of no one but his mother-in-law, Edith Wickstead.

Two

Incident in Whitehall

H
e was not ill, or not of a sickness that could be diagnosed and cured, yet those who remembered Edward Swann in the days of his apprenticeship, and his surge into the West Country with his brother George when the two of them had raised the eyebrows of every transporter in the country, began to think of him as a sick man, for both his appearance and character had undergone dramatic changes in the last few weeks.

He had always been a ruddy-faced, well-set-up young man, quiet and deliberate in manner. Not too talkative, perhaps, but friendly enough, and a very good man to have beside you, behind you, or even over you in a crisis. He was more equable than George and more approachable than his father, someone who would always listen, who had time to spare for the lowliest employee in the sector, a gaffer, moreover, who was reckoned a first-class mediator in a local dispute and almost as good as his brother Giles at pacifying irate customers. Now there was hardly a trace of those characteristics that had played such a part in enabling this sector of the network to adjust to the 1905 realignment of frontiers and reshuffle of executives after the switch to powered transport. Moody and unpredictable, he slouched through his daily schedule like a sullen schoolboy harassed by an imposition, ranging off to the nearest public-house as soon as the yard shut down, not to royster, it was rumoured, but to sit in a corner drinking and snarling at anyone who offered to share his company.

The direct cause of the vast change in him soon got about, despite his mumbled stories of his young wife being on an extended trip abroad. “Completing her studies,” as one senior clerk said to another when the subject was raised in The Funnel’s counting-house, and his companion had winked solemnly as he said, “Studies in what, I wonder?”

It could not have been housewifery, for the Swann house at Edgbaston was closed and coming up for auction, its staff dismissed and its new furniture in store at the Bull Ring warehouse. When this proved to be more than a loading-yard rumour, and the young gaffer had taken to biting heads off in every direction, clerks, drivers, mechanics, waggoners, and even customers shared the view that someone should take Edward in hand before the sector slipped to the bottom rung of the Swann ladder, to rub along with regions where the horse and cart predominated. Opinion was divided as to who that someone should be. One Barnes, a summarily dismissed loader at the yard, was heard to exclaim that it should be that flighty young wife of his, after she had been dragged home by the hair, given a hiding, and put to work at milking the bile out of the gaffer. The senior clerk was more restrained. He let it be known that brother George should be informed of how things stood and summoned to give the region an old-fashioned going over. Older men said the Old Gaffer would have sorted it out in a trice, for he had always been partial to sacking from the top whenever things went awry in a particular region. None of these speculators were aware that George had already been called in and told to mind his own damned business, that no one this side of the Channel knew where the flighty young wife could be located, that old Adam himself had made little or no headway with the boy, and that Edith Wickstead (still “Gaffer Wadsworth” to the oldest hands about the place) had twice waylaid her son-in-law and urged him to put her daughter out of heart and mind before his life went sour on him.

Edith came as near as anyone to making a breach in Edward Swann’s glowering defences when she said, with her Yorkshire forthrightness, “The girl’s not worth a glass of cold gin, lad, and I would have told you that before you married if there had been the slightest prospect of you heeding me. She was hopelessly spoiled from babyhood and had her own way in everything until her father died. By then it was far too late to get it into her head that she wasn’t somebody very special, destined to become a great actress or a king’s trollop.”

It was the word “actress” that made Edward look up and he at once demanded to know if Gilda had always had an ambition to go on the stage.

“It was one of her grander fancies and the most persistent of them. She appeared in school plays, and had a good deal of amateur experience abroad, I believe. But everyone knows that kind of life needs real talent and far more stamina than she possesses, drat her. I thought she had put aside all thoughts of it when she married. For security,” Edith added, “she even had the gall to tell me that!”

Edward said, in a low voice, “She never pretended she was in love with me. She was honest in that respect. But I got the impression she preferred me to any other man she had met. I didn’t know about that chap Bernard until later.”

Edith had been on the point of interrupting and telling him, with some notion of shock therapy in mind, that what Gilda had preferred was not Edward Swann but Edward Swann’s prospects, including his share in his grandfather’s fortune, but his mention of Bernard checked her.

“I never heard of anyone of that name. Who is he? And how do you come to know about him?”

He told her the story of the flow of letters from Bernard’s sister, and the little he had learned from Gilda of the man who sent the inscribed photograph. “It was brooding about him that sparked off that silly row,” he said. “I got it into my head that he had been her lover in France, but I don’t think so now. Since you mention her being obsessed with the stage, other things seem to fit.”

“What kind of things?”

“The kind of books she read, for one thing. Plays they were, mostly, by Shakespeare and so forth. And French writers, too… especially a chap called Molly something.”

“Molière?”

“Yes, that was it. She used to read him aloud when I wasn’t around, or so the housekeeper told me. She was always dressing up, too. She’d spend hours up in her room, messing about with costumes of one sort or another. Not real clothes, you understand, but, well—fancy dresses. As a matter of fact, I thought it odd that she left most of her own clothes behind and took all those costumes away with her in that trunk. Could it be that she was still set on being an actress?”

“I would have thought so once, but not lately. There’s no security on the stage and she’s sharp enough to know that.”

“But if she thought she was good enough—I mean, to become someone like Ellen Terry—wouldn’t she have decided that money would come with success?”

“It’s possible, but listen here, lad. I didn’t hunt you down for the purpose of discussing my daughter’s castles in the air, but to persuade you to get a hold of yourself. You tell me you’ve had no success with your enquiries in France and I certainly haven’t a notion where she is or what she’s about. Neither do I care as things are, but your father and mother are my oldest friends and I feel badly enough about this to go to work on you. Sooner or later, if she doesn’t turn up, you’ll be well advised to get shot of her on grounds of desertion. It might take a long time, but you’re young enough to live through it. And for another thing, why don’t you buckle to, and drown your misery in work instead of drink? That road is no way out, not your way at all events. I’d offer you a home with me, but it’s too far from your depot. Suppose you rent a house locally and I come over and run it for you?”

He shook his head. “It’s kind of you, Edith, but I need time… time to ride it out, and either find her or forget her. It’s not just… well… losing Gilda. God knows that’s bad enough, and there isn’t an hour when I don’t think of her and want her. It’s looking such a damned fool, knowing everyone at the yard and out on the network and in the business men’s clubs about here sees me as someone who married a girl as pretty as Gilda, showed her off everywhere I went, then woke up one morning to find she’d ditched me like an old pair of boots.”

He paused, frowning. She said nothing so he went on, “I don’t have to tell you the name of Swann stands for something up here. The Gov’nor and George saw to that. How will people think of us now, I wonder? Or me particularly? A man who couldn’t even stop his own wife walking out on him after five months of marriage?”

“Most people won’t think of it at all, lad. Most people have forgotten it already. Or would do, if you’d let them.”

“But how am
I
supposed to think and feel in these kind of circumstances? I mean, what does everyone expect me to do? Dance a jig in the Bull Ring?”

“I imagine people who count expect you to write her off like a bad debt. One that costs far more to collect than it’s worth, and it’s her mother who is telling you this. Those letters you mentioned. Did you try the address on them?”

“I’m not that much steeped in liquor,” he said, with a touch of his newly acquired asperity. “I wired and wrote five times, and when the letters came back I hired a man to go over there and check on the place. The woman who wrote to her had gone, leaving no forwarding address.”

“And the universities? At Tours and in Paris?”

“He went there, too. They couldn’t help, or maybe they didn’t choose to.”

“Well, at least promise me one thing. Keep in touch, and come over for the weekend whenever you feel like it. Maybe you won’t but it’s better than going home to Tryst, and a lot better than drooping about by yourself with your head in a tankard.”

* * *

A few days after his conversation with Edith, he turned a corner and came headlong into collision with the realities his mother-in-law had urged him to face.

It came about in a curious way, when he found himself in the New Street area one Saturday afternoon, with more than two hours to wait before George’s train arrived. He had been surprised when George had wired saying that he was coming up for the weekend. He knew that his brother was heavily engaged with what promised to be an important development in powered transport, although it was one that, so far as Edward could determine, was unlikely to profit private enterprise. George, it was whispered, had at last talked his brother Alex into arranging a test-haul, made under the auspices of the Automobile Association, of a battalion of Guards from Aldershot to Hastings in a variety of motors, and Edward could only suppose that George saw advantages in the publicity. He did not know that Edith had written to his brother the day she had left Birmingham, urging the Managing Director to look to his crumbling defences in The Funnel.

Time, now that Edward had lost all interest in work, hung tediously on his hands. He spent most of Saturday morning in a public-house, had lunched there on bread and cheese and finally drifted down to the station where, checking George’s wire, he noted that he could not arrive until around four in the afternoon. It was now two o’clock, and his fuddled head and the sour taste on his tongue disinclined him to return to the bar. It was then, only a few steps from the station entrance, that he saw the bill-boards outside the Biograph Theatre.

He had heard, in a general way, about these biograph entertainments, moving pictures depicting news and fictional tales flashed on a screen in a darkened auditorium, but he had never had the time or inclination to visit one. Grudgingly he examined the advertisements outside the narrow little hall, wedged between a warehouse and a shop, a display of garish posters proclaiming the new wonder of the age and, hung in a frame, under the canopy, photographs of the kind of entertainment promised within. It was some sort of desert epic, featuring Arab sheiks and camels, and away in the back of his mind he connected them with those pictures Gilda had been sent from France. The similarity caused him to take a closer look and he isolated a picture about six inches square, showing a fierce-looking Bedouin photographed in the act of thrashing a prostrate woman with his whip.

Like the pictures in Gilda’s letters, it had about it the trappings of improbable melodrama. The gestures of the victim, hands raised, eyes wide with appeal, dress disordered, revived memories of the entertainment he and his brothers had once derived from a magic lantern, and he was on the point of moving on when something in the woman’s face checked him so that he looked again, peering very closely at the blurred image, then wrinkling his forehead with disbelief.

The woman on the ground reminded him vividly of Gilda. She had Gilda’s wealth of hair and Gilda’s smooth, oval face. She had Gilda’s petite figure, too, and he thought,
It’s almost surely a fancy… I’m beginning to have hallucinations…
But he paid his money and went in none the less, groping his way to a seat facing a blank screen centred by a small, circular light. Then the hall went even darker and somewhere towards the front a piano began to tinkle as a series of flickering images trooped on to the screen. Isolated here in the dark he forgot his miseries, his lifelong interest in technology absorbing him as he witnessed a moving photographic record of a steeplechase in which the horses seemed to cross the screen powered by clockwork mechanism and all the stewards and sightseers had the same jerky gait and gestures, even when they raised and lowered their straw hats. A mild sense of wonder invaded him, that it was possible to make pictures move in this way, and he began to enjoy the intimacy of the place as he watched first some French Army manoeuvres, then a seaside scene, and finally a swift tour of the Earl’s Court and Anglo-French Exhibition.

The round-up of news pictures was followed by a display of conjuring and then some mimed comedy in which an actor fell into a pond, and, having emerged, pranced about on the bank shaking his fist and mouthing oaths at mocking witnesses. Then the screen went blank for a moment and after an appreciable pause projected a frame announcing the main attraction, subtitled in English,
The Terror of the Desert.

It was, Edward soon decided, a very silly story, concerning what seemed to be an expedition into the Sahara, attended by a caravan of camels and horsemen, and led by a wildly gesticulating young man who spent most of his time spurring up and down the line of march mouthing directions at his underlings. Once, when the face of the leader was grossly enlarged, it had about it the same hint of familiarity, but again he dismissed this as fancy or coincidence. It was only when, after the travellers had encamped at an oasis and the horseman entered his tent, that he sat up with a jolt that almost projected him from his seat. The woman rising from a silken couch was either Gilda or Gilda’s double. He identified her not only by face and figure but even more surely by her mannerisms and that gliding walk of hers.