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

late, ever since her fourth and last miscarriage. Perhaps she saw him as the only child she was likely to have and was determined, in that queer private way of hers, to make the best of it. His arm went round her but she did not respond, although he could tell she was wide awake. He had a sense then of complete dependence on her and with it a sudden and inexplicable onrush of confidence in the future. Perhaps the day had not been such a failure after all.

Three

    Bedside Whisper

    M ost men, Adam reflected, were diminished by deathbeds, but Sam Rawlinson, his eighty-eight-year-old father-in-law, was clearly an exception. Sam, half-recumbent in a bed that had never been adequate for him, looked so excessively bloated that he made the ugly, over-furnished bedroom seem very cramped for visitors, who were obliged to squeeze themselves between bed and wardrobe and then sit very still for fear of overturning the bedside table littered with Sam’s pills and potions.
    Adam was surprised to find him not only rational but loquacious, as though, in the final days of his long, bustling life, he was in a rare ferment to get things tidied up and sorted out, and he received Adam almost genially, croaking, “Now, lad!” in that broad Lancashire accent of his he had never attempted to convert into the city squeak that many men of his stamp affected once they had made their pile. Henrietta had already been in with Hilda, Sam’s statuesque second wife, who seemed, improbably, to be giving way to the strain of the old man’s final battle against odds, the only one, thought Adam, he was certain to lose. She warned Adam, “You’ll find him low but he’s tetchy with it. He’s had me on the jump for more than a month now. Try and keep him off his dratted affairs, will you?”
    He climbed the gloomy, paint-scarred staircase, reflecting as he went that no one had ever succeeded in keeping Sam off his affairs, for they had been meat and drink to the old reprobate ever since, as a slum-bred lad in Ancoats in the first years of the cotton boom, he had kicked and throttled his way from coal-sorter, to bale-breaker, to the looms, and, at thirty-odd, to part-ownership of his first mill where he worked his hands like galley-slaves. He was already a man of substance when Adam met him, forty years ago, and the fact that Sam still addressed him, at seventy, as “lad,” made him smile. Long, long ago they had come to terms with one another, rarely referring to their first confrontation, when Sam had stormed into the Swann homestead threatening to prefer charges against him of abducting his eighteen-year-old daughter. In view of this understanding, they were spared soothing bedside prattle, customary in the circumstances. Adam said, bluntly, “Is there anything special you want doing, Sam?”—a clear enough indication to a man as forthright as Rawlinson that time was running out.
    “Nay,” Sam said, “nowt special, lad, tho’ I’m reet glad you’ve come an’ no mistake. Couldn’t have said what I’d a mind to say to t’lass. Women don’t set a proper value on these things.”
    “What things, Sam?”
    “Brass,” Sam said, uncompromisingly, “and what to make of it. Eee, they can spend it fast enough, the least of ‘em, but I never met one who could put it to work. Now that lass o’ mine, she’ll have made sizeable holes in your pockets over the years.”
    “I’m not complaining,” Adam said, “and neither should you with an army of grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to spare. There’ll be plenty to share whatever you’re inclined to leave.”
    “That’s the rub,” Sam said, heaving himself up in an effort to make himself more comfortable in the rumpled bed. “Ah’ve had second thowts about that. One time I had it in mind to see after our Hilda and split t’rest so many ways. Then Ah got to thinkin’. Most o’ the beneficiaries wouldn’t have a notion what to do with a windfall that came their way, so I went to old