Give Us This Day

by R. F Delderfield

  "In the kitchen. I've only come out to look before locking up." He nodded at the cow beyond the rail. "She's through it but we had a worrysome hour or two. Vet was here twice since she started, around noon. Twin heifers. Alwus look for trouble with a pair. Still, she'll do now, I think. Take a look at 'em," and George peered beyond the lantern ray to see the mild-eyed Guernsey munching at her rack, one calf at her udders, another curled at her feet in the straw. He said, with a rush, "Listen, Denzil, I'd sooner break it to you here… alone. Martin was… was killed today, up in the Pennines…"

  "Killed? Marty!" His head came up so sharply that George heard the cricking sound of his neck. "How?"

  "He was driving one of the new vans from Leeds and skidded on an icy road trying to avoid a hunt. He was dead before they got him out. Rudi telephoned from a place called Colne."

  He watched the farmer ride out the shock. His weather-beaten face first drained itself of colour, and then a heavy flush returned to his pendulous cheeks as he raised a hand and rasped the palm across a day's stubble.

  "My boy? Dead, you say?"

  George nodded and stood waiting. The only sounds that broke the stillness of the byre was the lisping suck of the calf and the champ of its mother at the rack. Presently Denzil said, "When did it happen, George?" George said he wasn't sure, but it was probably early afternoon. The van Martin was driving was brand new, one that he assembled himself and partially designed on his own drawing-board. He added, "He was keen, Denzil. The keenest lad we ever had in the machine shops. It's a frightful thing to have happened, the first man we ever lost on a motor run. I don't know much about the circumstances except that there was a fire…"

  "A fire? On the road you mean?"

  "The vehicle caught fire, but Martin was almost certainly dead when the flames reached him, or so Rudi says."

  Denzil was staring at him aghast, and he knew why. Within yards of where they were standing, Denzil's own father had died in a fire, trying to save his cattle when the farm was gutted. That was before he married Stella, something like thirty years ago. Stella had told him how, on that occasion, Denzil had carried his father's body to an outhouse down the approach lane, and afterwards she had watched over him all night while he slept on sacks in a shed behind the piggeries.

  "We'd best go in now and tell his mother, Denzil."

  "Nay, I coulden do that."

  "You don't have to, I will…"

  "No! " The farmer shot out his huge hand and caught George by the wrist. "Let me think on it a minute… Burned up, you say?... I can't tell her that. She's alwus been afraid o' fire, ever since we lost Dewponds that time. Every time she smells smoke she makes me go out an' do the rounds. No, I dassn't tell her that, not yet any road."

  George could hear his breath wheezing, but soon, rather sooner than he expected, his brother-in-law recovered some sort of grip upon himself. He said, finally, "You wait on. Wait in the yard. I'll go in and break it, best I can. It'll be better comin' from me, seein' she was always dead against them boys goin' up there in the first place. Wait on 'til I come."

  He plodded slowly out of the byre, closing the door and moving across the beam thrown by the Daimler's lights towards the kitchen. He went in and George saw his shadow move against the muslin curtains of the big, low-beamed room.

  It was a room, he recalled, that his sister had helped Denzil to rebuild when she was a girl of about twenty, slowly emerging from the shock of that disastrous first marriage to a vicious wastrel over the Sussex border. He understood then why she had opposed the exodus of her boys from this farm and this plodding way of life. Everything that was real and important to her was right here, in this flowering corner of Kent, and everything beyond it, even Tryst, where she had been born, was alien and charged with menace. She had renounced home and family the night of that fire, identifying herself body and soul with that lumping great chap, Fawcett. Why and how nobody had ever discovered. Not even his mother, who had done all she could to encourage the unlikely match.

  About five minutes passed. The sweat on his forehead and under his arms struck cold and he shivered, making the effort of his life to resist the temptation to leap into the motor, reverse madly up the lane to the river road, and drive off into the night. Presently Denzil came out and called, not to him but to someone working in a milking shed on the far side of the yard. Robert, Denzil's eldest son, emerged, shouting irritably, "What's to do now? I'm milking. Charley's gone and I said I'd finish!" But his father called again, sharply this time, and Robert stumped across the cobbles to join him and they stood talking for a moment in the doorway before Robert went in and Denzil came across to the byre. He said, "Woulden it be better if you left it? If you just drove off, and come back in the morning?"

  "No, it wouldn't, Denzil. The papers might be full of it in the morning, and even if you keep them from her, busybodies from the village are sure to come posting up here falling over themselves to tell her the gory details. No, no, I don't want that, and neither do you if you think about it."

  "Ah, come on in, then, but don't say more'n you have to, for she's taken it bad. She's taken it real bad, George."

  She was in her customary place at the head of the long oak table, as though about to preside over supper. She sat bolt upright and her plump round face was perfectly blank, almost as though she was asleep with her eyes open. She gave no sign when he moved around and took a seat close to her, furthest from the fire. He took her hand, coarsened by years of farm work, and held it tightly. It had always been difficult to equate her with the elegant sister he remembered in the days when they were all growing up together at Tryst and she was reckoned the belle of the county and the best horsewoman for miles around. The Stella of those days had died before she was twenty, and this heavy, practical, unsmiling woman had taken her place. He said, brokenly, "I'm sorry, Stella… sorry," but could say no more, lowering his head so that he was only half aware of her sudden, incredibly swift movement up and away from the table. He only realised that the hand he had been clasping had been whipped away, as from the fangs of a snake. He heard Denzil and Robert cry out together and a combined rush of boots on the slate floor. There was a sudden flash and a shattering report, blinding and deafening him and then, as his chin came up, he saw Stella struggling with her husband and son, the latter with one hand on the gun forcing the barrel towards the floor. Then, very suddenly, she went limp, her knees buckling as she pitched forward and would have fallen had not both men grabbed her, Robert throwing the twelve-bore to the floor. The kitchen was half full of smoke and the reek of gunpowder made him cough and splutter. Robert said, breathlessly, "Leave her, Dad. I'll see to her. I'll carry her up. Fetch Dolly fer Chrissake! For Chrissake run an' fetch Dolly!" George subsided on the bench, the noise of the shot still singing in his ears, and through a haze of smoke he saw Robert lift his mother as though she was a slip of a girl and move ponderously towards the stairs. He was unable to help him. There was no power in his legs. The big kitchen clock ticked on, and a Welsh collie that had scampered for cover when the shot was fired emerged cautiously from beneath the table and arranged himself carefully beside him, slowly wagging his bush of a tail.

  Dolly, Robert's brawny wife, hurried in and went straight upstairs. Then Denzil returned, wordlessly picking up the gun and breaking it open. "T'other barrel weren't loaded," he said. "That must be young Dick. On'y Dick's vool enough to leave a loaded gun about the place."

  "Did she mean to kill me? Or was it to scare me out of the house?"

  "God knows. She had the gun on you any road, and if Bob hadn't been mighty quick…" He ran his hand over his stubble again, making a sound like a hand-saw. "It's all on account of what the boys did, I reckon, leaving here to work on those motors of yours. She's never been the same. She never got used to it and alwus blamed you for it. She told me just now you killed him, same as you shot him, but she didn't mean it, not really."

  "How do you feel about it, Denzil?"

  "Not the way she does. It wa
s what they wanted, or young Marty wanted any road. We had letters from him saying so, and his brother woulden come back to a farm, not now."

  "That's how it was, Denzil. I'd like you to believe that. I'd like you to try and make Stella understand that. Martin was a born engineer and was first-class at his job, right from the start. He wouldn't have been happy doing anything else. Do you think you could convince her of that?"

  "No, I don't, but I'll try, once she gets over the shock."

  "There'll be an inquest. I'm going up for it. Would you or Robert like to come?"

  Denzil shook his head. "No, neither of us. We're busy here, dawn to dusk. You can't leave livestock same as you can motors. Besides, what purpose would it serve, seein' the boy's dead?"

  He sat down heavily as Robert came clumping down. "Dolly'll stay with her while I take the mare and ride for Doctor Fowler. Maybe he'll come, or maybe he'll give us something to quieten her. Meantime you'd best take a gill, Dad. You, too, Uncle George." He went over to a cupboard in the big dresser and took out a bottle and two cups, pouring into the cups and adding water from the iron kettle beside the hearth. "I'll be back in less than an hour, providing he don't keep me waitin'."

  His father raised his head. "Watch out for ice on that footbridge. Don't try and ride over, get off and lead. We've had trouble enough for one night."

  "I'll mind the ice. You drink up. You, too, Uncle George."

  He went out, a big, strong, very capable man, ideal to have around in a crisis. Something about his gait reminded George vividly of the Adam he remembered from childhood. He thought wretchedly, They've all got more Swann than Fawcett about 'em. That must be because Stella's the dominant partner… Slowly he reached out for the liquor and lifted it to his lips. It was sloe gin, judging by the taste, and well matured. The cloying stuff warmed his belly and soothed his throat, still irritated by the whiff of gunpowder. The big clock, inevitable as doom, ticked on. The collie's tail maintained its steady, friendly whisk. He said, finally, "We'd best keep this to ourselves—the gunshot, I mean. It could lead to her being put away somewhere. The old folks must never hear about it. I can't face them right now. Debbie is going to cope with telling them in the morning…" He heaved himself up. "I'll keep you informed, Denzil. And be sure the newspapers are kept from her. Come to that, I wouldn't read them myself if I were you. They'll play it up, if I know 'em."

  He felt drained and useless. All his striving since he had recoiled from that June balance sheet had amounted to this, a favourite nephew burned to a cinder. His own sister trying to blow his head off with a twelve-bore. He went out, reversed the Daimler down the lane, and straightened her out on the river road. He let in the clutch and drove off into the frosty night.

  2

  Down the years, good and bad, the Swanns had demonstrated that they could ride out the buffets. Hugo's blindness. Stella's disastrous first marriage. The death of Giles's wife in a street riot. These sombre events had been absorbed into the mainstream of life. Not forgotten, of course, but shelved, like bills that were inconvenient to pay on demand, and never featuring in the conversational traffic of a family as large and gregarious as the Swanns of Tryst.

  So it might have been with the death of Martin Fawcett, and that despite the furore in the press, had the boy's mother been seen to mourn the boy with dignity, to divorce the tragic incident from her long-standing grudge against George concerning the nature of his work and his involvement with George's concerns rather than his father's. But the shattering report of that gunshot seemed to have released tensions within her that no one suspected were there, least of all her easygoing husband, and her big, capable son, known about Dewponds as Young Master. Her physical prostration lasted no more than forty-eight hours, and in the days that followed, at least to the farmhands and villagers, she seemed to potter about her chores much as usual. But those close to her could not fail to note an abrupt change in her manner and a marked increase in her taciturnity that had passed for matter-of-factness since she had renounced the role of county belle for that of farm wife on a three-hundred-acre holding.

  She was not seen at the funeral in Twyforde Churchyard a few days after the tragedy, but then no women were present inside the family. There was no occasion for display when, at the very moment of interment, the leader writer of The Times, and his opposite number in Northcliffe's Mail, were at war with one another on the vexed question of heavy road traffic. The one declared that the appearance on the nation's highways of motorized giants represented a menace that almost justified reintroduction of the Red Flag Act; the other held that an occasional mishap of this kind was a small price to pay for the dramatic spurt Britain's motor engineers had achieved since that idiotic piece of legislation had been repealed, enabling the country to regain its lost lead over Continental competitors.

  George watched the controversy from the touchlines, resisting, on the advice of the editor of the Swann broadsheet, the temptation to contribute a letter pointing out that the accident could never have occurred had the master and hunt servants involved shown a little common sense, or made an allowance for Martin's difficulties in braking a heavy vehicle on an icy gradient.

  He growled, when he ran his eye over the spate of letters from the hunting shires. "Here's proof, if we wanted it, that the English value the life of an animal at twice that of a man earning his living. If Martin had run clear through that damned pack, and killed a dozen or more, you would have heard baying from Channel to Border. As it is, seeing the kid sacrificed his life for them, they vent their spleen on the vehicle! In the name of God, what do they imagine keeps the nation fed? Trade, or the entrails of foxes?"

  But Milton Jeffs said, quietly, "Let it ride, George. No one can stop the motor now. There was the same uproar when the railways carved up the fox-hunting country. Ask Adam if you want confirmation of that."

  He was sometimes tempted, indeed, to consult his father on the current turn of affairs, and more particularly on his own inclinations as regards further development of the Fawcett trailer, but he held back. The old people had taken a series of hard knocks lately, what with Romayne's death and the moonlight flit of young Edward's giddy wife, and at their age they would lack the resilience for which both had been noted in the past. So he kept clear of Tryst, waiting for the press controversy to die down and be replaced by another, the public hazard of lowflying aeroplanes over cities. But the unease at Dewponds persisted, as he learned from Debbie who was often over there, trying to coax Stella out of the doldrums. She said, early in the new year, "Poor Denzil's worried half out of his wits. He says she's so tetchy he hardly dares open his mouth, and they both seem to be sleeping badly. Did you know Stella was abnormally scared of fire?"

  "Not until the night I was there. Denzil told me then. He said she has him up going the rounds every time she smells a bonfire. It's understandable, I suppose, seeing that Dewponds once was burned to the ground, and old Fawcett lost his life in the outbreak."

  "Well, it's gone beyond that according to him. He tells me she has him out of bed as often as three times a night, and when he's hard to rouse she goes on the prowl herself. I got the doctor in again and he prescribed for her, but Denzil says no one can lead Stella to medicine. Most of it goes down the sink according to him." She paused, regarding him sympathetically. "There's another thing, too. She knows the full circumstances of Martin's death. One of the farmhands blurted it out and was sacked for his pains. How do you feel about calling in and asking Giles to talk to her?"

  It was an old Swann nostrum. When the medical profession had had its fling, they usually sent for Giles, the family wiseacre. He had a knack of coaxing secrets from closed minds and finding unsuspected paths out of an impasse, but he had no luck as regards Stella. After an unresponsive hour with her, he told Denzil, "I can't reach her. Not yet, anyway, for I daresay that doctor's right. The shock came at a bad time for her, when most women of her age are finding it difficult to cope. However, I'll prescribe for you if you'll heed me."

>   He looked shrewdly at his brother-in-law, not liking his haggard features and the sag in his belted belly. He had lost, at a guess, upwards of twenty pounds in the last few months, and it was obvious that interrupted sleep was taking its toll. "Get her into a nursing home for a month or so, and I'm not talking about an asylum. It's more of a retreat, a place I know at Broadstairs. They just sit about and are cosseted during convalescence. It's expensive but she can afford it. She's never touched that money of Grandfather Sam's, has she?"

  He admitted this was true. There had been times, Denzil said, when they could have used her private capital, but he had never asked her for it, not even during the severe agricultural depression of the 'nineties.

  "Why not, Denzil?"

  "I had my reasons. She come to me when she was in bad trouble. I never dreamed she would but she did, forsaking your lot for this, and a hard and toilsome life mostly. I wanted her. By God, I wanted her, ever since I was a boy, but I never wanted her father's money, or her grandfather's, come to that. We've made do and rubbed along happily enough until now, and we'll come through this I daresay, without packing her off anywhere."

  He looked around the yard. "She rebuilt this place with her own hands. You woulden know about that, being no more'n a boy at the time but she did, or the pair of us did. Laid every beam, every brick, and every tile. You take her from here, and she'll get worse instead of better."