Give Us This Day by R.F. Delderfield Page B

Taunton was his liability.”
    “How the devil did you know I was here?” Adam asked, and Giles said, smiling, that he was always here when he was in town, and Hugo had word from Henrietta yesterday that he was off on one of his junk-buying jaunts. “My words, not his,” he added. “I think you’ve got a collector’s eye.” They talked as equals, something he was unable to do with his other children, but Giles, unlike him in so many ways, had a maturity that the more extrovert of his family lacked. “As a matter of fact, I’m here to ask a favour, Father. A small one.”
    “It wouldn’t have to do with George, would it?”
    “No. Why should it?”
    “I don’t know. Just a hunch. Is George at the yard?”
    “No, he isn’t. He hasn’t been for a day or so.”
    “Where is he? I can never find him these days. He’s here, there, and everywhere, and I particularly want a word with him while I’m up here.”
    “He’s in the regions,” Giles said. “They expect him back sometime tomorrow.”
    “Do you know where in the regions?”
    “No, but Wesley Tybalt would tell you.”
    “I don’t think he would.” He looked at Giles narrowly. “How do you hit it off with that chap, Giles?”
    “Not all that well,” Giles said, looking a little puzzled, “He’s a first-class yard manager, according to George, but I don’t find him as likeable as his father. He’s a bit of a know-all, and talks down to the men and up to us.”
    “My sentiments exactly,” Adam said, “and he resents my poking my nose in when I feel like it. He probably takes his cue from George in that respect.”
    He toyed with the notion of taking Giles into his confidence, but quickly decided against it. All his life he had been jumping on people for coming to him with untidy briefs and his own was far from complete. “What was the favour, boy?”
    “It’s about a chap called Soper. I promised him we’d take him on. He’s out of a billet, and I’m obligated to him. He’s a member of the Shop Assistants’ Action Group and has had about as much as he can take from the drapery trade.”
    “There’s more to it than that, isn’t there?”
    Giles hesitated. “Yes, there is. If I want your help I owe you the truth. Did you read about that leaflet raid on the Jubilee procession in the papers? Fleet Street end of the Strand?”
    “Yes, I did. A very juvenile business, to my mind. That sort of gesture is spitting into the wind. Did Soper get the sack over it?”
    “He can’t go back. And he’s nothing put by to keep him while he looks for another billet.”
    “He won’t get one without a character.”
    “That’s why I’d like to help him.” He looked Adam in the eye. “How do you feel about the shop assistants’ cause, Father?”
    “Sympathetic. If I was in drapery it would have been a bomb not a leaflet. Time they organised themselves like other trades. But that’s their business. It certainly isn’t mine at my time of life.”
    Giles said, slowly, “I’ll not keep anything back. I organised that ‘spit in the wind’. I was there at the time. Me and Romayne.”
    Adam wasn’t much surprised. He knew Giles was mixed up in various campaigns, all of which were probably as abortive as this one. He said, “It’s the wrong way to go about things, boy. Old Catesby, up in the Polygon, could have told you that. He was your kind, always chasing the millennium, and even went to gaol for it in his time. But he learned and started from the bottom up. Got a proper trades union organised, and then went right after parliamentary representation. You don’t get far over here, marching around with banners and distributing leaflets at public assemblies. People are too lazy and too indifferent. Legislation is the only lever the British will accept. Germany excepted, we’re ahead of others in capital and labour relations. This chap you’re telling me about, is he the wild man type?”
    “He wouldn’t be if he worked for a firm like