Post of Honour (21 page)

III

P
ansy Pascoe, widowed nine months ago, expected Dandy Timberlake to pay a courtesy call when he was invalided home from Egypt that Christmas, but was surprised to see him climbing up the steep, stony track to the Dell within an hour of his return to the Valley.

Pansy was as good-natured and affectionate as any other Potter but, like her sisters Cissie and Violet, she had always found difficulty in throwing down roots strong enough to bind her to any one male and although she was saddened by Walt’s death she did not mourn him long. As the months passed she was able to bracket him in her mind with all the other men of the Valley, including Dandy and his brothers, and was therefore delighted to see the tall, stooping figure amble into the yard pause, regarding the scene with distaste, for it was washing-day and the Potter farmyard looked more like a nomadic encampment than ever, an untidy crisscross of lines supporting innumerable flapping garments and an air of jerky, unplanned industry pervading the outbuildings and washtubs.

Pansy abandoned her tub and ran to greet him, a big, beaming, blowzy woman, radiating a vitality that, for a moment, affronted a man who had spent six months in a hospital cot. She said: ‘Why, Dandy, youm fair blown be the climb! Come inside an’ us’ll brew some tay!’ but Dandy refused the invitation with a gesture, saying he preferred to sit in the open where they could talk privately, and then, glancing round the Dell once again, realised that he had forgotten the fecundity of the Potters and exclaimed, Tiz like a buddy fairground yer! How many tackers be there for God’s sake?’

‘Oh, I dunno,’ she said carelessly, ‘getting on fer a dozen I suppose but domee mind ’em boy, nor the soldiers neither! I’ll get my li’l Liz to carry on with the wash,’ and raising her voice she bellowed to her eldest daughter, a dark girl of about eleven, telling her to attend to the tub while her mother took a breather.

The girl detached herself from a swarm of children round the waist high nettles and Dandy, watching them, said tolerantly, ‘How many o’ that lot be your, midear?’

She told him four and pointed them out, a boy favouring his father, two girls favouring her, and a toddler with straw-coloured hair who was staggering up and down with a huge marmalade cat that seemed not to mind being hooked under its belly and dragged about with its paws clear of the ground. It was the toddler who interested Dandy and he scrutinised the child carefully, noting his slightly buck teeth and narrow head topping a thick neck and solid little body. ‘That little ’un,’ he said, thoughtfully, ‘what’s un called, Panse?’

She knew, or thought she knew, why he asked and her generous mouth split in a grin, ‘Albert,’ she said, ‘but I alwus thinks of ’un as “Dandy”! What’s eatin’ ’ee? Be ’ee thinking I was comin’ down on ’ee for a maintenance order?’ and when he was silent she pressed him, adding, ‘Well? Do ’ee own to the boy? Do ’ee mind the night I come by him, you ole rascal?’

Her sophistry shocked him and he blushed under his tan. ‘Did Walt ever guess?’

‘Giddon no!’ she said impatiently, ‘for Albert were only a tot when you went off and bevore that, down at that cottage, us was treading on one another, so I don’t reckon he ever got a close look at him! You baint
worryin’
about it, be you? Not after all this time?’

Dandy cleared his throat. It was embarrassing to confess to worrying over such a triviality to a Potter girl but he went on, desperately, ‘Yes I be! I got to thinkin’ on it many a time when Walt and me was out there together and that’s why I made up my mind to speak, zoon as I set foot in the Valley! Fact is, me and the Army have parted company, Panse, and I’ll be back at me old trade soon as I’m fit to do a day’s work. There’s no help for that anyways, for Pa and Ma are moving out come New Year, on account o’ Pa’s arthritis and theym goin’ to live in one o’ they new jerry-builts, at Nun’s Bay. With them gone, and the other boys away, Sawmill Cottage’ll be empty and if I quit Squire will have to move a new sawyer in seein’ house-room’s mighty short about here.’ He paused and cleared his throat again, irritated by the bewilderment on her broad, freckled face. ‘Fact is,’ he went on, with a rush, ‘I got to thinkin’ maybe you’d turn your back o’ this knacker’s yard and live decent again! There’s room enough for all of us at Sawpits. The boys and the maids can share the two back bedrooms and we’ll have the front! What do ’ee say, Panse? Dornee reckon Walt would sonner you took up with me than one o’ those bliddy forriners? And baint there a good enough reason for it, seein’ us’ve already made a start with a family of our own?’

She had been amazed and then amused by his stumbling earnestness when he began, astounded by his apparent willingness to accept responsibility for four children when only one of them was his but then, as he ploughed on, she was touched very deeply, not so much by his troubled conscience but by his eagerness to salvage something out of their past. It was as though he was offering her not marriage exactly, and certainly not what passed for respectability in the Valley, but something much more than that and of infinitely greater value, for here was a fruity slice of her half-forgotten youth being restored to her by someone who had once contributed to its gaiety. Then she reminded herself of the more practical issues, a father for her children and regular money coming in from his work and part disability pension but these things did not seem important. What impressed her was the tremendous compliment he was paying her and for the first time since she was a twelve-year-old, smarting under one of Ole Tamer’s casual clouts, her eyes filled with tears and she was so disconcerted by them that for several moments she was incapable of speech.

He waited, having the kindness to avoid looking at her and presently, collecting herself, she gave expression to the warmth she felt for him by reaching out and letting her plump hand slide from his shoulder to his knee. It was the gesture that had won her Walt Pascoe all those years ago, when they stood together watching Coronation fireworks, and it must have communicated itself just as surely to Dandy for he suddenly grabbed her and kissed her so enthusiastically that she was transported back to the time when she was a neat-waisted girl of seventeen skylarking in the hayfields. She said, with a slight quaver, ‘You . . . you baint makin’ game o’ me, Dandy? You baint, be you?’ and he denied hotly that he was, declaring that he would prove as much by making arrangements with the rector this very day but that in the meantime she was to restore Walt’s wedding ring to her finger—‘So as none o’ they buddy forriners get to trespassing zoon as me back’s turned!’

He left her then and she watched, with compassion, his halting progress down the track before running to give Cissie and Violet the news. She was not much given to vanity but she could not help feeling elated by the thought that, whereas the three of them had shared many men, she alone had received not one proposal but two. It seemed to her, thirty-three and with four children, confirmation that she was the flower of the flock.

The big hearth at Sawpits Cottage had no time to cool. The older Timberlakes moved out on New Year’s Day and Dandy and his bride, trailing their ready-made family, moved in that same afternoon so that for the first time in close on twenty years the whine of the Home Farm saw was challenged by the tumult of children. Pansy, reconciled by the solid comfort of the place to the loss of her regained independence, was in high spirits, having drunk a pint of her mother’s hedgerow wine at the impromptu wedding breakfast in the Dell but Dandy, exhausted by the excitements of the day, admitted frankly that he felt unequal to the statutory exertions of a bridegroom. ‘Well,’ she said, genially, ‘we’m neither of us chickens be us and there baint no particular hurry, seein’ youm back for good midear! Why dornee go up along an’ rest while I put the tackers to baid and make supper? I’ll call ’ee when I’m ready and tidden as if you dorn know what youm be gettin’ be it?’ He took her advice and climbed the stairs, thinking wryly on the days when he had bounded up them three at a time and was soon so heavily asleep that when she called there was no response so she went up to find him, sprawled fully-clothed on the bed in his new blue serge suit, its crumpled flower still pinned in the buttonhole. She thought, smiling, ‘He’s aged, the poor toad! They must serve ’em cruel in that bliddy war! I’ll let un bide and take supper alone!’ and then she giggled, reflecting on the unlikeliness of her wedding night, with four of her children under the same roof and the groom sound asleep and still dressed in his Sunday suit. She went out quietly and ate her supper in front of the fire, thinking not only of Dandy, whose snores she could hear through the oak floor, but also of Walt and Smut, and Henry Pitts and poor old Will Codsall and young Gilbert Eveleigh, and all the other Valley boys dead or scattered or just tired out like Dandy upstairs and for the first time, not excluding the moment when the buff telegram had been delivered to her, she thought of the disruption of their lives as something sad and disturbing.

IV

N
un’s Bay village was a small island of freehold land sandwiched between the coastal borders of the Heronslea and Shallowford estates, a tiny community that had been no more than a hamlet up to the time old Farmer Blair had died childless, a year or so before the war. The Blairs had freedholded here for generations but when the last of them died the farm went up for sale. Local landowners had made a bid for it but it eluded both Gilroy and Paul, passing into the hands of a local firm that practised under the enigmatic title of
The Whinmouth Development Company (Bricks and Tiles) Ltd
whose boards had been mushrooming in the district ever since Coronation year. The chairman of this shadowy company was supposed to be old Widgery of Whinmouth, but nobody believed this for Widgery was in his eighties and his neighbours thought it unlikely that he would launch out into land development after a lifetime as a dairyman. Whinmouth folk said that Widgery, who owned a few houses in the Whinmouth harbour area, was the front for a group of men that included two or three Urban District Councillors who did not want their association with local building publicised but although these pundits were groping in the right direction they were wide of the mark. The secretary, and major shareholder in the Whinmouth Development Company, was a young man who was too knowing to waste time and money fighting local elections or concerning himself with other people’s drains and water supply.

Sydney Codsall, as a qualified solicitor, had left Whinmouth two years before the war and was now junior partner in an older firm of country solicitors, with offices in Cathedral Yard, Paxtonbury. Sydney had enlarged himself a great deal since the days when he had courted Rachel Eveleigh in the hope of getting a slice of freehold land for a wedding present. At twenty-one he had come into the money left by his father and mother. Ordinarily he would have only inherited half but in the event every penny of it came his way, partly because of Will’s careless nature but more on account of Elinor’s independent spirit. Having abominated Arabella when she was living she had no wish to profit by her death. Sydney had an eye for a bargain and used the money wisely, chiefly in the purchase of odd parcels of land. His years at a solicitor’s desk had taught him, among other things, that the only really permanent form of wealth was land, and after land, bricks and mortar, preferably unmellowed bricks and mortar. Having ready access to advance information, and also the cash to tempt impatient beneficiaries, he soon acquired an oddly assorted patchwork of strips and corners in and around Whinmouth and formed a loose kind of partnership with a local builder called Tapscott, whom he tamed by taking out mortgages when the builder’s going was rough during spells of bad weather. By the spring of 1914 he was in a fair way of business and having temporarily exhausted the Whinmouth vein, where Tapscott had a bad reputation, the partners ranged further along the coast in search of promising sites. At Coombe Bay they were blocked by the Shallowford estate, whereas inland most of the property was in Gilroy’s hands but the death of old Blair, who owned over a hundred acres at the mouth of Nun’s Bay goyle, proved a godsend, for Blair’s heir was farming in South Africa and wanted a quick sale. The farm was purchased and building began almost at once.

The war, however, caught Sydney off balance and after the completion of a mere half-dozen of the twenty-four bungalows planned, the scheme looked like petering out and might have done if Sydney had not taken out insurance by cultivating the Paxtonbury Borough Surveyor who put him in touch with the Government department responsible for siting training camps in the west. The temporary camp on the moor had never been very satisfactory. It was badly exposed, south-westerly gales made havoc of tents and its water supply was poor, so that Sydney was able to lease his Nun’s Bay site for the duration and secure Tapscott a meaty contract for erecting a permanent hutted camp on farmland overlooking the sea. There were several rewarding by-products to this development, the most important being the securing of Sydney’s enrolment as a permanent member of the Camp Siting Commission, and its off-shoot, a committee concerned with the acquisition of local timber for Government needs. Sydney could scent an Act of Parliament as a fox scents the taint of man. He reasoned that, if the Army was so short of manpower as to rush a clodhopper like his brother Will into the front line, it would not be long before the supply of patriots was exhausted and Lord Kitchener began prodding the hesitant. Friends told him that England would never stand for conscription but he did not believe them and was soon proved right. Within weeks of his attachment to the camp-siting and timber commissions the newspaper announced the Derby Act, under which all single men below the age limit were ordered to attest pending enrolment in the forces and Sydney hastened to take out further insurance by getting himself a wife. He also bought the services of a co-operative doctor, who addressed himself to the task of discovering minor ailments afflicting Sydney’s person, ailments that had been quiescent since childhood.