Give Us This Day by R.F. Delderfield Read Free Book Online

it?”
    “It’s better than this hit-and-miss campaign, and I’m going to put my mind to it. Have you got enough money to stay on in your digs for a week or so?”
    Soper grinned. “For a month. On credit if need be. The landlady’s daughter fancies me, and she doesn’t know about Miriam.”
    “Where does Miriam live? She isn’t living-in, is she?”
    “No. She lives with an aunt in Maida Vale.”
    “Get her home and let her rest. She’d better show up tomorrow, and if she should be questioned tell her to give my wife’s name as a reference. We’ll say she spent the entire day with us and the janitor is mistaken.”
    He looked relieved at that, Giles thought, and his estimation of Soper soared another point. “You could get married on the wage my brother George pays his warehouse clerks,” he said. “It’s above average.”
    * * *
    They said little to one another on the way home. The heat in the suburban train was insufferable and everybody in the world seemed to be making his way out of the city. It was only later, when they were standing at the window watching the Jubilee bonfires wink across the Shirley meadows, that he said, suddenly, “How much does all this mean to you, Romayne? This house, servants, security, comfort?”
    “Why do you ask?”
    “It’s important I should know. Apart from that brief spell, when you ran away and worked in that sweat-shop, you’ve always been cushioned against poverty. Like me. Like almost everyone we know. We’re really no more than salon revolutionaries and I’m tired of facing two ways. But it wouldn’t be fair for me to make the decision alone.”
    “What decision?”
    “To throw up the firm and get myself adopted as a Liberal candidate, if anyone will have me. Then work full-time at what I believe in, what I’ve always believed in from the beginning.”
    She turned and looked at him speculatively. “You’d do that? You’d walk out on your father’s firm for good?”
    “I would. Would you?”
    “You know I would.”
    “It’s that important to you?”
    “Seeing you spend your life working at something you believe in is important. It doesn’t matter what. It never has really.”
    He bent his head and kissed her. “I haven’t the least idea how to go about it, but…”
    “I have.”
    ” You have?”
    “I’ve thought about it a long time now but I didn’t say anything. It had to come from you. I think I know how I could get you taken up, with a real chance of getting to Westminster.”
    “If you’re relying on your father he wouldn’t lift a finger…”
    “It’s nothing to do with my father. It’s an idea I had a long time ago, when we were on holiday in Wales, but don’t ask me about it now.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because I have to think about it, about the best way of going about it. Just let me work it out and put it to you when I’m ready.”
    He thought, distractedly, I’ll never know her. Not really, not like old George and Alex know their wives, and certainly not like my father knows Mother. I know no more about her now than that day I fished her out of that river below Beddgelert, when we were kids. But the devil of it is she knows me. Every last thing about me!
    The long day was almost done. From across the meadows came the faint, meaningless sounds of revelry, persistent celebrants sporting round their bonfires, reluctant to write “finis” to a day they would talk about all their lives. He said, as they settled under the flimsy bed-coverings, “Our joint resources won’t run to more than three hundred a year, if that. We should have to sell up and move to wherever I was chosen. A terrace house or a cottage maybe.”
    “Three hundred a year is six pounds a week,” she said. “People bring up big families on that and there’s only two of us. Go to sleep, Giles.”
    It was a clue, he thought, linking her sponsorship with her apparent inability to bring him a child. In a curious way their relationship had shifted of