Give Us This Day Read Free

greedy and certainly no less vainglorious, were jostling for what they called “a place in the sun” and he isolated them one by one. There was Germany, led by that loud-mouthed ass Wilhelm; there was France, obsessed by her sense of inferiority since the 1870 debacle; and across the Atlantic there was America with a commercial potential that could, given time, reduce the status of all his rivals to those of nonentities. And thinking this he did what he had always done when his mind ranged far beyond his concerns. He withdrew, thankfully, into the realm of the predictable, represented by his own brood and his own business.
    George, no doubt, would forge steadily ahead, pushing the network to its limits. And beside him, as a safety-valve operator, was Giles, placator of ruffled clients, temperature-taker of the Swann work force, adjudicator of every grouse and dispute that came humming down the threads of the network to the heart and brain of the enterprise beside the Thames. It was enough, he supposed, for a man of seventy that morning, with a tumultuous family dinner party in the offing and little hope of repose until his own and the nation’s affairs had steadied. He tucked his unread Times under his arm and descended to level ground, sniffing the fragrance all abou t him and cocking a countryman’s ear to the murmurous summer noon.
    * * *
    The wire came within an hour of the family exodus, when the last touches were being added to her Jubilee ensemble and the gardener had delivered the carnations and roses for the ladies’ corsage sprays and the buttonholes the men would wear in the lapels of their newly pressed frock coats.
    Henrietta, her mouth full of pins, could have wept with vexation as she glanced at the buff slip from Hilda, her step-mother: “Father worse. Advise coming immediately”— a mere five words capable, providing convention took precedence over inclination, of spoiling an occasion she had been anticipating for months.
    For a moment, without removing the pins from her mouth, Henrietta Swann weighed the substance of the message, calculating, on the minimum of evidence, Sam Rawlinson’s chances of hanging on to life for an extra twenty-four hours or so, long enough for her to sandwich the Imperial spectacle between the present moment and a long, hot journey to Manchester in order to put in a dutiful deathbed appearance.
    Almost forty years had elapsed since Sam had forfeited any affection she had for the old ruffian, for how could anyone love a father prepared to bargain a daughter for a scrap of wasteland adjoining his loading bays in the mill town where she had waited for Adam, or Adam’s equivalent, to rescue her from obscurity. A wily old rascal, ruthless and disreputable, who had kicked his way up from bale-breaker to mill-owner, who had reckoned everything, including his own daughter, in terms of brass and done his level best, God forgive him, to mate her with a simpering nobody. Adam, of course, had forgiven him long ago, and had even tried, over the years, to soften her approach, but he had made little or no headway. For her, Sam Rawlinson continued to stand for vulgarity, male arrogance, and the seediness that attached itself to his entire way of life; and remembering this like a line out of her catechism, she removed the row of pins from her mouth, hitched her petticoat, and called, “ Adam! It’s from Hilda! A wire, saying we should go at once… What are we to do, for heaven’s sake? Today, of all days!”
    He came out of his dressing-room, took the wire, read it, and laid it on her dressing-table among her vast array of bottles and lotions.
    “That’s for you to say, isn’t it, m’dear?”
    She said, bitterly, “No, it isn’t! Or not altogether. Everything’s so nicely arranged. We were very lucky indeed to get that balcony and a thing like this…well… it’s once in a lifetime, isn’t it?”
    “I fear so,” he said, making no effort to keep the chuckle from his voice.