Give Us This Day Read Free Page A

“The Old Vic isn’t likely to last another ten years even if we do.”
    He picked up the wire again and took it over to the window, musing. Her frown disappeared then, for she knew very well what he was about. Calculating times and distances, as though the dying Sam was an impatient shipper and he had been asked to deliver a haul of goods within a specified time. He said, “I don’t know… family obligations… how would it look, Hetty? An only child, exchanging final farewells in favour of the Lord Mayor’s show?” and hoisted himself round, sitting on her plush dressing-table stool, sound leg bent and tin leg, as he always called it, thrust out.
    She knew then he was teasing her as he so often had over the years in this room where few serious words ever passed between them. She said, protestingly, “Really, Adam, it’s not a thing to joke…!” but he reached out, grabbed her by the hips, and pulled her close to him.
    There had been a time when his big hands comfortably encircled her waist. They didn’t now and recalling this he thought, Even so, she’s trim for a woman who has produced a tribe of nine . His hands passed over the rampart of her corset to her plump behind, straining below the rim of a garment that he sometimes referred to as her cuirass. It was an aspect of her that had always captivated him and he pinched so hard that she exclaimed, “Adam! Be serious! We’ve simply got to make up our minds, haven’t we?”
    “You’ve already made up your mind,” he said, genially. “All you want now is to shift the guilt on to me. Well, here’s how I see it. Sam’s eighty-eight and Hilda’s a born worrier. But the fact is anybody would find it damned difficult to travel north until the exodus begins tomorrow night. Nine trains in ten will be heading southeast and most of the upcountry traffic will be shunted to make room for them. We’d best make arrangements to travel on overnight from London. I’ll wire Hilda. Finish dressing. The carriages will be round at noon. If we get up to town by four we’ll take a stroll and have a preview of the decorations.”
    She kissed him then, impulsively and affectionately, and he stumped across to the door to tell one of the girls to bicycle into the village with a reply. But then, on the threshold, he paused. “He’s had a damned good innings, Hetty. And any last words he wants to say will be to me, not you. He was proud of you, mind, in his own queer way, but he saw me as the son he never had. Don’t let it spoil your day.”

    2

    In the old days, the Swanns, in the way of the middle-class, celebrated national occasions enfamille. As recently as the Golden Jubilee, ten years ago, a small balcony near St. Clement’s Dane had accommodated man, wife, and such of their family who were still home-based. But in a single decade the tribe had proliferated to an extent that astounded Adam whenever he thought about it. Unlike Henrietta, he had never had it in mind to found a dynasty.
    Today the royal balcony at Buckingham Palace would have been taxed to accommodate the entire Swann tribe even though two offshoots were out of the country, one in faraway China and another across the Irish Sea. But proliferation was not the only reason for dispersal. In spreading their wings each Swann had swung into an individual orbit, so that their occupations, their associates, and indeed their whole way of life and cast of thought presented a kind of spectrum of Imperial enterprise.
    Thus it was that an occasion like this found them, as it were, picketing the royal route, dotted here and there at intervals along its four-mile route. Each of them prepared to cheer certainly, and wave hat, handkerchief, or miniature Union Jack, but for different reasons, dictated by private conceptions of what excused this display of self-aggrandisement. Their individual and often contradictory standpoint was highlighted by their acceptance of what the newspapers were already calling “Queen’s