Give Us This Day Read Online Free Page B

as a sightseer but as an actor. Evidence, as far as the Swanns were concerned, that all that glittered down there was fool's gold.
      His observation post was a first-floor window above the display windows of Beckwith and Lowenstein's, the once-fashionable Strand branch, now set on its slow decline since the carriage trade had drifted east to Regent's Street and Oxford Street. It was almost the last shop in the north facade of the Strand, and he was there as lookout on behalf of the forlorn band of leaflet-throwers stationed two storeys above. Among them, at her urgent insistence, was his wife, Romayne, disinherited daughter of one of the wealthiest merchants in the land.
      It was not the first foray in which they had been involved, but because of the occasion it promised to be the most sensational, certain of earning press coverage, which was more than could be said of earlier protests, even the abortive one they staged at the Lord Mayor's show last November.
      Soper, the fanatical secretary of the newly formed Shop Assistants' Action Group, had conceived it; Soper was a pallid, tireless, and, in Giles's view, a very reckless campaigner who had won a majority vote in committee on the grounds that a gesture of this kind—a challenge thrown at the feet of the most powerful and influential people in Britain—was irresistible, and perhaps he was right. Few among those who were offered the Group's standard leaflets in the street, or at Hyde Park Corner, accepted them, and even those who did discarded them ten steps beyond. "We have to move on," Soper had argued passionately, "we have to force the campaign on the national press, and what more certain way of doing that than putting our case to the Queen on her way to St. Paul's?"
      Put like that it was unanswerable, and Romayne, her imagination fired, shouted "Hear, hear! Bravo!" as if the proposal of such a bold gesture represented its accomplishment. But Giles, to her private dismay, had argued against it, first publicly in committee, where he had been outvoted, then privately on their way home. She did not often run counter to him, but she did now, saying, "But don't you see, Giles? It's dramatic, something they can't laugh off in the way they did when we paraded with placards!"
      "It's certainly that," he said, trying to locate the springs of his instinctive misgivings, "but there's something about it I don't like. It's not just the risk of arrest on some trumped-up charge—obstruction, creating a public nuisance—they'd find something if they laid hands on any of us. And it's not the pleasure of reminding all those popinjays that there are more important issues than waving flags. Maybe it's the timing."
      "The timing? I don't follow, Giles, dear."
      He said, grumpily, "Well, there's no point in us falling out about it. It was a majority decision and we'll go ahead. I only lay down one condition. They leave the wording of the leaflet and the tactics to me."
      "Oh, but they'll do that," she said, and he thought she was probably right. The Shop Assistants' Action Group did not lack ideas and enthusiasm, but it was woefully short on funds and prestige, both of which Giles Swann, a director of a nationwide haulage network, could provide.
      The Jubilee ambush continued to bother him. They lived in a pretty little Georgian house at Shirley, within easy reach of East Croydon Station, and the back looked over woods and pastures to the Kent-Surrey border. That same night, unable to sleep, he got out of bed and went on to the terrace looking across the fields to the blur of Addington Woods and here, in uncompromising moonlight, his misgivings crystallised. He saw the leaflet raid as a single jarring note in a national overture. It was easy to imagine the wrapt expressions of the Jubilee holiday-makers, each of them revelling in a day's release from monotonous toil to witness an unprecedented display of pomp and martial display in which they would feel