Give Us This Day (77 page)

  "Sir!"

  He did not wait to see it done, but went out without a backward glance, his step appreciably lighter. The weight had lifted from his brow and he thought, making his way over the scrupulously-swept asphalt towards the guardhouse,
What the devil does it matter if the Willoughby-Nairns of this world go to their graves without learning the difference between a lance and a Vickers machine-gun? Providing, in places like there, here and on home stations, there are waiting-lists of Lance-Corporal Hunters?

* * *

  On Saturday, June 27, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife, Sophie, presided over a formal banquet served in the dining-room of the hotel at Ilidze.

  The night was warm. Windows were thrown open. Outside on the lawn the band of the Sarajevo garrison played Schumann's "Träumerei," a phantasy on "La Bohème," a Lehár medley and the obligatory "Blue Danube." The guests ate souffle, lamb, fillet of beef, roast goose, and fruit. They drank French wines, the local Mostar and Hungarian Tokay. Towards midnight, Franz Ferdinand remarked he was glad his Bosnian visit was almost over, and someone suggested that the brief visit to the capital scheduled for the following day should be cancelled and the archducal couple should make an immediate return home. Then, being persuaded that Sarajevo dignitaries would be hurt and disappointed by the cancellation, a decision was reached to adhere to the original schedule. The hands of the dining-room clock moved up to midnight. The day of St. Vitus had begun.

2

That same night, at round about the same hour as the Archduke's dinner guests were doing justice to their roast goose, Edward Swann was eating a less exotic but appetising home-cooked meal in the dining-room of his mother-in-law, Edith Wickstead, near Peterborough, Northamptonshire. He had company but it was not Edith's, and although unaware of it at the time, Edward, too, had a surprise immediately ahead of him. For he, too, in a very small way, was the target of a conspiracy.

  Although outwardly himself again, encouraging his brother George's colourful comment that "He's blown his nose, dusted himself off, and emerged the same good old go-steady-think-twice Edward again," he had been changed inwardly by his wife's desertion and in a way that even George, his mentor over many years, was unqualified to judge. The real trouble with Edward was that he had absorbed, one could say, a quadruple dose of ancestral practicality. From his French grandmother, Monique d'Auberon, daughter of a Gascon pastrycook, he had inherited the same strain of hard common sense that ran so richly in the veins of his father and mother and had been present, in full measure, in the blood of his maternal grandparents, one a Lancastrian millhand who had made two fortunes, the other an Irish peasant, whose common sense told her she should seek her pot of gold in Liverpool rather than County Kerry.

  The same strain, to a degree, ran in all the Swanns but with nothing like the same urgency, and whereas it stood him in very good stead as an engineer, and a man of business, it made it almost impossible for the same man to rationalise his wife's dream of becoming a celluloid goddess.

  For a brief spell, after watching, openmouthed, Gilda's eye-rolling and cavorting on the flickering screen of that little picture-house in Birmingham, he had been comforted by the acknowledgment that he had made the biggest mistake of his life by falling in love with her. He was not in love with her any longer.

  This was how things stood with him when Betsy Battersby was unleashed upon him, for Betsy, it could be said, was the price Edith Wickstead paid to get her conscience out of pawn, a brawny, cheerful, uncomplicated Yorkshire lass, her favourite among a tribe of nieces and great-nieces left behind in the North Riding when she moved south to take over the old Crescent territory in the 'sixties. Edith, missing her own family when the boys grew up and Gilda went abroad, grew to like Betsy's undemanding company, particularly when Tom was out about his business. After Tom's death, she became a frequent visitor, giving her great-aunt a hand with the house chores so that Edward, also a frequent visitor, came to think of her as a family hanger-on, midway between a domestic help and a house guest. While under the spell of Gilda, however, he never saw her for what she was, a well set-up girl in her mid-twenties, that is to say, some ten years his junior. She had flaming red hair, light blue eyes that always looked pleasurably surprised, regular if slightly heavy features, a generous mouth, much given to laughter, and an excellent figure that Edith always thought of in Adam's terms as "promising," recalling that neither he nor Tom had cared for wraiths, much in vogue during their courting years. Tom, she remembered, had always admitted that he liked plenty to catch hold of, and Betsy Battersby certainly came into this category of women.

  The idea of deploying her against Edward, however, as a kind of consolation prize for the manner in which a real slut, her own daughter, had served the poor boy, did not occur to Edith until she had had an opportunity to make a full assessment of the harm Gilda had inflicted on him, and this she was only able to assess by instinct, after Edward's response to the first letter from America.

  It arrived out of the blue, about two years after Gilda's flight to France, telling a tale that the truant might have borrowed from the Arabian Nights. Her films, it seems, had been seen in America and an agent had negotiated a contract enabling her to travel all the way to California to make a costume film about the French Revolution. This, so Gilda reported, had led to other films and a better contract, so that she was now in receipt of the equivalent of a hundred English pounds a month, with the promise of much more to come. She had changed her name again and was now known as Gilda de la Rey.

  Reflecting that there was surely substance in the adage that the wicked prospered like the green bay tree, and remembering also that she had always been inclined to doubt the validity of that contradictory saw about virtue being its own reward, Edith read the final page. It scouted a proposition that, as they were unlikely to meet again, Edward should supply grounds for a divorce, and was set down, Edith thought, as though this was the bestowal of a royal and gracious favour upon an unworthy subject.

  She took the only course open to her, telegraphing Edward to visit her and discuss the matter and was not surprised when he growled, after scanning the relevant page, "Let her whistle for her divorce. I'm over it now and I'm damned if I'll make it public. Just don't answer the letter, Edith."

  She said, gently, "That's precisely how I felt about it at first, but then it occurred to me you might be cutting off your nose to spite your face. Divorces, nowadays, aren't the end of the world, as they were in my day, and this would be undefended and wouldn't create much stir. Anyway, look at it from another standpoint. You might want to get married again some time."

  "When that happens you can certify me," he said. "Don't answer it, Edith. Hasn't she caused both of us enough grief?"

  She said, carefully, "I know you're over it, Edward. I know also that you must ask yourself sometimes why and how you came to fall in love with a girl as heartless and self-centred as that. I'm glad Tom didn't live to see the way she turned out. However, be honest with yourself. You've got red blood in your veins and you're only in your mid-thirties. What do you propose to do about women for the rest of your life?"

  He said, without meeting her glance, "I don't need women in that sense. If I did I could buy one."

  "But that's not you, is it?"

  "How do you mean 'not me'? Look here, Edith, you were gaffer of a region here and must have seen most things. You know that men who want a frolic can get one, providing they've got money in their pockets."

  "I know that, yes. But it wouldn't be your way and you've probably found that out for yourself."

  He was silent, so she said, with a sigh, "Very well. I won't answer it. But if she writes again I'll re-address the letter to you and you can decide for yourself whether or not you read it."

  He left her in an ill-humour, and she suspected he was going to drown his sorrows. In spite of what the family was saying about him, it was clear to her that he still had some to drown. But then, within minutes of his departure, her spirits lifted, for Betsy arrived with luggage and asked if she could stay a week or so.

  "It makes a rare change," she announced, "for down here it's free and easy, and back home I'm faced with a choice of playing nursemaid to other folks' babies or filling my time with chapel activities. That's the two alternatives open to old maids in my part of the world."

  "I'll never think of you as an old maid, Betsy," said Edith. Betsy replied, cheerfully, "No more will I until I'm the wrong side of forty. It was hot and dusty in the train. Can I pop up and have a bath before supper?"

  She was calling from the top of the stairs in five minutes. "Auntie Edith! There's no more than a sliver of soap in the dish. Can you throw me a cake?" and Edith, getting a new tablet, took it to the stairhead where Betsy was standing naked on the landing.

  It was her nakedness that fired Edith's imagination. Somehow it had never previously occurred to her how comely Betsy might look without clothes that were usually home-sewn and out of fashion. With her flaming red hair reaching as far as her broad buttocks, her high bust set off by a waist that looked two inches narrower than it did when she was dressed, she looked like a Viking's bride and she thought, with a mild rush of excitement,
By God, if young Edward could see Betsy now it would do more to put that stupid wench of mine out of mind than any amount of soothing talk on my part. Or tumbling with whores, for that matter… But
all she said was, "Here's your soap, Betsy. And over supper remind me that I've a proposition to put to you."

  "What kind of proposition?"

  "We'll see, shall we?"
* * *

  On Saturday, the 27 of June, about the time the archducal guests assembled in the Ilidze Hotel, Edward Swann appeared at his mother-in-law's door in response to an invitation for a weekend stay.

  He was met by Betsy, who said that Auntie Edith was visiting a sick friend a mile or two nearer Peterborough, and wouldn't be back until after dinner.

  "She asked me to cook for you and it's almost ready. Give me your grip and I'll take it up while you treat yourself to some sherry." And without waiting for his response, she grabbed his bag and tripped upstairs where he heard her humming a snatch from the music-hall song, "Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey?"

  In the dining-room a meal was laid for three. There was, he noticed, a bottle of champagne in the ice-bucket and he thought,
What's Edith celebrating, I wonder? She doesn't generally run to champagne. Maybe it's her birthday.
He said to Betsy as she reappeared, "Is it Edith's birthday, Betsy?" and Betsy said it was not but it happened to be hers.

  "I'm twenty-eight," she said gaily. "Isn't it awful? But I'd sooner have a birthday here than home, for our house is strict T.T. If my father thought I was guzzling champagne he'd come down here and fetch me home with a flea in my ear."

  "He could hardly do that to a daughter of twenty-eight, could he?"

  "Oh, yes he could. I don't know whether you know the north well, but they keep a rare tight rein on the women up there, much tighter than down here. It's still a patriarchal society, and pi-faced with it."

  There was something about Betsy that amused him. It was difficult to believe that she was twenty-eight.

  "How do you mean, pi-faced?"

  "Well, everything revolves round the chapel. No one goes to the theatre, no one is supposed to drink, and cards are the Devil's prayerbook. That's why I spend as much time as possible with Auntie Edith. She's fun, but my people don't really know her. They think she's a semi-invalid, and she plays along with it just to get me here. That's jolly sporting of her, don't you think?"

  He hardly knew what to think. For the first time despite her ingenuousness, she was registering upon him as a woman, not all that much younger than himself, a woman with an air of a lively, mischievous child about fourteen radiating a boisterous cheerfulness that was difficult to resist. He said, "Well, make the most of it, Betsy. Join me in some sherry before you serve, and we'll follow up with the champagne. How long is Edith likely to be?"

  "Oh, not more than an hour or so, but she insisted we weren't to wait dinner. I've roasted a duck and it will be spoiled. I'll have the sherry, tho', and then dish up. Shall I put on the gramophone?"

  "If you like." He looked across at the big horned phonograph on a side table, noting that it was an American model, an improvement on George's latest and George was an Edison Bell enthusiast. "That's new, isn't it?"

  "Auntie Edith gave it to me for my birthday, but I'll have to leave it here. A phonograph is only one up from a pack of cards in our house."

  "You could get round that. Why not buy a sacred recording and try breaking 'em in with the 'Hallelujah Chorus'?"

  It was the closest he had come to making a joke in a long time, and she made it seem a better one than it was, exclaiming, "Why, that's a wonderful idea! They might even progress, eventually, to Gilbert and Sullivan. But I've only got the one cylinder and that's ragtime."

  "
What
time?"

  The word meant nothing to him and she looked surprised. "Ragtime. Bouncy stuff played fast. It's called 'Alexander's Ragtime Band'," and she hummed the first line or two of a jerky little tune that he immediately recognised as a recent vanboys' favourite at the yard. "I'll put it on. If it winds down while I'm dishing up turn the handle quickly, for they sound frightful when they run down, like a rhinoceros with the belly-ache."

  She switched on, downed her sherry at a gulp, and bounced off into the kitchen, where he heard her singing an accompaniment to the whining, oddly fascinating rhythm of the scratchy recording. He thought, pouring himself another sherry,
She's a rum sort of girl. Her cheerfulness rubs off on a chap somehow, yet it doesn't sound as if she has much of a life, poor beggar… No idea Edith's folk up north were straitlaced…
As he thought this, he felt relaxed and grateful to her for the lift she had given him, for nowadays there seemed to be nothing much in life but work and sleep.