Long Summer Day (76 page)

Chapter Seventeen

I

I
t was with a sense of shock that Paul heard the name of Lord Gilroy announced as he sat working in the library one sunny July morning but before the man had been shown in he realised that his visitor must be the successor to the man who had once bearded him in this room and played an unconscious part in Grace’s decision to marry.

The old man, the ‘dry, bloodless old stick’ as John Rudd described him, had died a year since and Paul had only a vague recollection of his son, whom he had met once or twice in the hunting field. He found him a great contrast to his desiccated-looking father, a tall, broad-shouldered, chubby-cheeked individual, who looked and dressed more like a prosperous city business man than a landowner. He wore expensively cut country clothes, the kind of clothes city men always don when travelling ten miles outside London and his approach was well-bred, genial and confident, so that Paul got the impression that his visit was friendly and possibly directed at improving relations between the estates. Paul had no quarrel with him and had indeed written him a formal letter when he read of his father’s death on the Continent. He offered him whisky which Gilroy promptly accepted.

‘I do apologise for interrupting you at work, Craddock,’ he said glancing at the littered table, ‘but I’m away up north tomorrow and I gave Owen-Hixon my word I would call, although’—and he smiled, pleasantly—‘I must confess it was at his insistence rather than mine! You won’t have met Captain Owen-Hixon yet? He’ll be opposing your man at the next election, and the local party were lucky to get him! He’ll give Jimmy Grenfell a good run for his money, I’m told.’

As Paul waited for Gilroy to come to the point it struck him that father and son were about as unlike one another as was possible in an inbred family like the Gilroys. Whereas the original Lord Gilroy had stood on the same hearthrug, looking and behaving as if he was paying a call on a recalcitrant cottager, his son had the cheerful expansiveness of a company director trying to interest a prospective shareholder in a doubtful bill of goods.

Paul said, hoping to shed light on Gilroy’s presence, ‘The Unionist candidate asked you to call? Didn’t he know I was deeply committed to the Liberals?’ and Gilroy said, laughing, that he did indeed but the candidate had described Squire Craddock as ‘a lost sheep who might be happy to return to the fold in view of Lloyd George’s “People’s Budget”, a frontal attack on every landowner in the British Isles.’

‘Did you agree with him?’ Paul asked and Gilroy said that he did not, for he flattered himself that he knew his enemy better. ‘However,’ he said cheerfully, ‘since I’m here I might as well say what I came to say, providing you’ll pay me the compliment of listening! Frankly, some of the local committee feel that recent events might have caused you to have second thoughts about Liberal policy. They wanted to descend on you with a deputation, the fools, and I give you my word that it was me who stopped them! I remembered the drubbing you gave my father when he called soon after you took over the estate!’ and he chuckled, appreciatively. ‘You were the only person about here who ever sent my father packing with a flea in his ear!’

‘It wasn’t really me,’ Paul admitted ruefully, ‘it was my first wife and I daresay she could do better now. From what I read in the newspapers, however, she seems to expend all her ammunition on the Government.’

Gilroy looked uncomfortable for a moment, as though he had expected Paul to gloss over his oblique reference to Grace but he said, ‘You are still in touch with her?’, and Paul said he was not but that the antics of suffragettes was breakfast-talk all over the country. ‘Ah, yes,’ Gilroy said thoughtfully, ‘but I can’t help feeling that militancy won’t get them far, although our people ought not to complain. They have intervened in several important bye-elections already and very much to our advantage. Asquith, I hear, can’t speak in public for five minutes without being expertly heckled! However, it wasn’t suffragettes that I came to talk about, Craddock.’

‘Go ahead by all means,’ Paul said, deciding that the son was infinitely more likable than his crusty old father.

‘Well,’ said Gilroy, ‘there are people on our committee here who find it difficult to believe that a man owning your acreage can stay in step with firebrands like Lloyd George and that pirate Churchill! After all, social progress in an industrial state is one thing but highway robbery is quite another! I imagine you keep in touch with national issues or is your interest in politics purely local?’ He paused but when Paul said nothing, he went on, ‘You don’t have to answer my questions, of course, not even out of politeness. You send me packing as promptly as you sent my father and I’m damned if I’d hold it against you! After all, we may be at war but wars can be fought by gentlemen.’

‘I don’t mind answering your questions in the least,’ Paul said slowly, ‘but there’s no prospect of me crossing the floor if that’s what your committee hopes. I’m not deeply concerned with what happens in Westminster, it’s true, for I’ve always thought of an M.P. as a man who ought to concern himself with his own constituents. After all, that was the original intention, wasn’t it?’

‘A long time ago,’ Gilroy replied, ‘but I’m entirely with you. Have you studied these latest proposals, the way the Chancellor proposes to get the money for this insurance scheme of his? It’ll come largely from us, you know. Don’t you feel any resentment at all?’

Paul had asked himself this several times during the last few weeks, after the London papers had carried reports of Lloyd George’s sensational proposals to raise income tax to 1
s.
2
d.
in the pound, increase death duties by a third on estates of more than £5,000, and slap heavy taxes on land of enhanced value, even if it remained undeveloped, but the proposals had not weakened his loyalty to the party as a whole, or to James Grenfell in particular. It would sound, he thought, rather smug to admit this to a far wealthier landowner like Gilroy but the fact was he had never really thought of himself as a wealthy person, and had never been able to interest himself in money as money. He regarded it still as a means of feeding and improving the estate and he could not see how Lloyd George’s proposals, that had set most landowners about the ears, could make much difference to the future of the Valley. In any case some kind of insurance scheme was surely due to poor devils cooped up in shops, offices and factories all the year round. He did not say this, however, for it seemed to him a holier-than-thou attitude. Instead, he said, guardedly, ‘I imagine the Chancellor has to get money from somewhere. You people have been insisting for years that we play snap with the Kaiser as regards naval strength and dreadnoughts can’t be built for nothing, Lord Gilroy.’

‘Indeed they can’t,’ Gilroy replied affably, ‘“We want EIGHT. And We Won’t Wait!” but although I’m not surprised by your attitude—your personal attitude that is—I must admit that I am by its broader implications. After all, it’s plain to me looking across the Sorrel that you’re as deeply traditionalist as was my father and you’re far more attached to the old way of life than I am, who was born to it! How do you marry your cricket-on-the-green notions to the clamour for a New Order, led by men primarily concerned with industrialisation?’

‘I’ve never set my face against change,’ Paul said defensively, ‘and I should have thought that was known in this area. I admit I want to preserve, and even people like Grenfell regard me as a bit old-fashioned but if the old system isn’t prepared to bend it will break and I wouldn’t like that to happen. I suppose that’s why I’m a Liberal.’

‘Curious,’ Gilroy said thoughtfully, ‘for I believe the exact opposite and that’s why I vote Unionist. I don’t think our system was built to bend but if it’s tampered with too much it will break, and then we’ll all be in trouble! Still …’, and he stood up extending his hand, ‘I’m bound to say I respect your views, Craddock. I’ll fight you when the election comes up and I’ll fight damned hard but I hope you’ll never regard me as a personal enemy, or associate with me all the party mudslinging that is inevitable!’

‘I’m delighted you called,’ Paul said and meant it, for the feud had always seemed to him very childish. ‘I take it you will inform the new candidate and the committee that the lost sheep prefers to remain lost!’

‘I will indeed,’ Gilroy said, chuckling, ‘as a matter of fact I shall rather enjoy doing that, Craddock,’ and Paul walked him to the forecourt where his shiny French motor awaited him, a strait-faced chauffeur sitting erect behind the enormous brass steering wheel. The big car moved off smoothly, trailing a cloud of blue exhaust and Paul thought, ‘Damn it, one can’t help liking the chap, but if he’s so keen on preservation why the devil does he have to poison the Valley with that stinking contraption?’

Claire came to him, calling, ‘Who was it?’ as she crossed the paddock and he said, helping her over the rail and slipping his arm round her waist, ‘That was only young Gilroy kite-flying. He wanted to know whether I would jettison Grenfell on account of Lloyd George’s land piracy!’ and her laughter comforted him, for he could not help reflecting how differently Grace would have reacted. ‘It’s odd,’ he said, ‘the last time a Gilroy called here he succeeded in getting me married! Did you ever hear about that?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘but before I forget to tell you the twins are talking!’

‘That’s Simon’s idea of talking, to me they only gurgle.’

‘No,’ she protested, ‘Andy can say a word or two—he’s already about three months ahead of Steve and he’ll be walking in a matter of weeks. Simon has him in the nursery now. He’s very good for them, you know, and they worship him,’ and he forgot all about Gilroy as she talked of the relationship between the three children so that he thought, as soon as she had gone, ‘She’s so different from Grace and I suppose some husbands might be bored with her but I’m jiggered if I am!’ and went whistling into the yard calling to Chivers to harness the trap for a seed-buying trip to Paxtonbury.

As though Valley drums had relayed news of Gilroy’s visit to Westminster, Grenfell wired he was coming down that same week and Paul, meeting him at Sorrel Halt, drove him across Blackberry Moor and listened to lobby gossip that never found its way into the West-country editions of the London newspapers.

He found the Member depressed and glad of a few days’ rest in the country, as well as an opportunity to confide in Paul his fears of the outcome of the next election.

‘In spite of our majority we’re having to fight every inch of the way,’ he admitted. ‘We’ve had to compromise on the new Dreadnoughts to get the support we need for social legislation and Irish Home Rule but the P.M. has his hands full with that Cabinet and finds them a difficult team to drive! Some would call the Kaiser’s bluff and let him build as many blasted battleships as he likes but at the other end of the scale we have the well-britched, who think L.G. is biting off far more than he can chew! The Lords will throw the budget out, of course, but that only means we shall have to go to the country. I promise you, it’s been a devil of a sitting! I can’t tell you how glad I am to turn my back on it for a day or so.’

He talked, with his customary lucidity, on a wide variety of topics but Paul noticed that he avoided mentioning women’s suffrage and the havoc the militants were causing at the public meetings, doing this, he felt, out of motives of delicacy. In the meantime, however, Paul was content to listen, receiving an account of Grenfell’s stewardship up to the end of the third year of the Government’s span and asking for details of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s proposed new land taxes. Grenfell, he thought, hedged a little on this, as though he shared the local Unionist’s suspicions that a man owning fourteen hundred acres might jib at facing a stiff increase of taxes including a levy on increment value and the exploitation of mineral rights, so that when Paul told him of Gilroy’s visit he made no attempt to hide his relief. ‘By George,’ he said, ‘I’m delighted to hear that, Paul! I couldn’t help wondering if you’d be tempted to ditch us and I suppose one could hardly blame you if you did! Was it loyalty to me that made you spit in his face?’