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

Fossdyke and drew up t’new will. Hilda’ll pass you a copy of it if you ask her.”
    He was breathing noisily and his broad, battered face had a deep purple flush, so that Adam said, “We don’t have to go over it, Sam. You can trust me to follow your wishes.”
    “Aye,” said Sam, emphatically, “I can that. Come to think of it, you’re one of the few Ah’ve always trusted, and there’s none so many o’ them.” He paused, as though reflecting deeply. “I were luckier’n I deserved about you, but I’ve owned to that times enough, haven’t I?”
    “I’ve been lucky myself, Sam. What do you want to tell me about your money? That Henrietta is getting the whole of the residue?”
    “Nay,” Sam said, clamping his strong jaws, “she’s getting nowt, or not directly. Nor young George either, tho’ I still reckon him the flower o’ the flock.”
    It astonished him to hear Sam say this, and with such emphasis. He could understand a man of Sam’s temperament fighting shy of splitting his money into so many insignificant packages, thereby making it seem a less impressive total, but he had always believed Henrietta, as Sam’s only child, would inherit the bulk of his fortune, and that George, who had been championed by his grandfather when the boy threw everything aside to redesign that petrol waggon he had brought home from Vienna, would come off best among the children.
    “What are you going to do with it, Sam? Leave it to charity?”
    To judge by his father-in-law’s expression, the question came close to killing him on the spot. He said, gesturing wildly with his fat, freckled hands, “ Charity ? Sweat bloody guts out for close on eighty years to cosset layabouts who never took jacket off for nobody, ‘emselves included? Nay, lad, you can’t be that daft! You know me a dam’ sight better than that! Charity ! There’s too much bloody charity nowadays! No wonder country’s not what it were in my young days, when it were sink or swim. Ah’m leavin’ the lot to you, to do as you please with. And it’ll amount to something when all’s settled up, Ah’m tellin’ you!”
    “Good God, I don’t want it, Sam. I’m already the wrong side of seventy, and I’ve got all the money I’m likely to spend!”
    “Aye, I daresay, though a man can always do with a bit more. Besides, it’s not as cut an’ dried as that, as you’ll see if you’ll hold your tongue, lad. I’ve had Skina-rabbit Fossdyke make a trust fund in your name. That way you can spread it around whichever way you’ve a mind, so long as it stays in t’family.”
    “How do you mean, exactly?”
    Sam was silent for a moment or two, seemingly occupied in getting his breath and marshalling his thoughts. Finally, he said, “Put it this way. You and me, we had nowt to begin with, but we each of us finished up with a pile big enow to make men tip their hats to us, didn’t we?”
    “You could put it that way.”
    “It’s the on’y way to put it. Use that brass o’ mine to feed any one o’ them lads or lasses who shows my kind o’ gumption. And your kind of gumption. Any one of ‘em, mind, man or maid, who’ll stand on their own feet an’ look all bloody creation in t’face, same as we have. Do you follow me now?”
    It made sense, Sam’s kind of sense. Bloated and dying, in an ugly house in a Manchester suburb, Sam Rawlinson obviously looked back over his life with immense satisfaction, hugging his commercial success (the only success worth having in his view) as a just reward for his prodigious and profitable endeavours over the years, thereby earning the respect of all men dedicated to the same object, and a man with any other objective was a fool, counting for nothing. He would want to see that money well spent and in a way he would spend it if, by some miracle, his youth and vigour were restored to him at this moment. There was a kind of merciless logic in the gesture, for Sam would restrict the deserving to those who, like