Post of Honour (45 page)

He reached the river road and let the grey nose the shallows, waiting while he drank his fill. A kingfisher flashed by and he remembered seeing one on this same reach the very first evening he passed here in the company of old John Rudd. Deliberately he counted both years and phases; that first hectic season when everything was new and strange and the whole Valley burning a sackcloth-brown under what Mrs Handcock called ‘a praper ol’ scorcher’; the false dawn of his first marriage and all the grief and confusion that came of it; the long, rewarding period with Claire that endured until another and more catastrophic ‘scorcher’ was over, and finally the interminable war years, with everything falling to pieces and hardly any of his former allies surviving to pull them together again. Well, it had been a long haul, getting on for a fifth of a century of ups and downs, but he was still here, sitting the same horse in the same river bottom; there was time enough, at forty, for the fulfilment of lingering dreams.

Chapter Eleven

I

O
n the afternoon of September 1st, 1929, the eve of the twins’ 21st birthday, Paul saddled the sedate skewbald (who had replaced Snowdrop as his estate transport) and rode up to French Wood, the young plantation now growing up on the extreme south-western corner of the Hermitage plateau. He told himself he was going there with the object of calling on Henry Pitts and making one more attempt to convert him to tractor ploughing, but this was no more than an excuse to escape from the frenzied upheaval accompanying preparations for the all-night dance The Pair had organised, with the active connivance of their mother and sisters.

The house was already full of young people, most of them strangers to Paul, who bustled round and about him carrying armfuls of decorations, chairs, trestle tables and weird-looking band instruments and maintained a ceaseless hammering that made work in the office an impossibility. He said to Claire, standing on a stepladder with her mouth full of tacks, ‘I’m going over to Hermitage, I won’t be long!’ but she only nodded absentmindedly. Clearly she had no thoughts for him today and neither, it seemed, had anyone else, for even Mary, the quiet one, had been sucked into the whirlpool of the first big-scale social event at Shallowford since Simon’s twenty-first, more than four years before.

Paul rode up the orchard to the sunken lane, noting that the apple crop promised well and that Young Honeyman and Henry Pitts had almost done with harvesting. He never rode to the new wood without a feeling that he was going to church, for French Wood, which had been his own way of commemorating the Valley dead, was a kind of church, much more of one than the precincts of all the other war memorials in the district—plain granite crosses and pseudo-heroic statues of glaring infantrymen, without the vitality or validity of his private memorial to the eighteen local men who had died between August 1914 and November 1918.

He remembered as he rode across the plateau how the eccentric notion had come to him the week of his fortieth birthday in June, 1919, when he had sat Snowdrop on the crest overlooking the Valley and thought of all the cheery souls who had turned their faces to the sun at this spot and now lay in tidy graves in Picardy and Gallipoli. He thought too of the maimed, of poor devils like Reg Willis the wheelwright’s son, who had lost the sight of both eyes and Davy Tozer, the smith’s son, who had come home minus a leg. There had been talk of memorial stones and statues in all the papers just then, for the Armistice was only seven months behind them but now, as he entered the little wood growing up around him, he was very glad he had planted a free for each man instead of carving their names on a lump of granite in the churchyard. A living tree was surely more pleasant to behold than most of the conventional war memorials up and down the country and here, in ‘French Wood’ as the Valley folk insisted on calling it, every man had individual representation, so long as a comrade lived to come here and remember them once in a while.

The plantation was fenced with a stout wooden paling to keep out the wild deer and against all the predictions of the local wiseacres it was prospering, as though the wood spirits favoured the idea. Paul had chosen each young tree with care—a mountain ash for Ikey; oaks for the older men like Tremlett, the huntsman and Tom Williams, the fishermen; an elm for Jem Pollock already as thick as the Dell giant’s thigh and a small cluster of silver birches for the younger set, men like Tod Glover who had once flown low over this spot showing off his wind-riding skill like a buzzard. In the centre of the wood was a flowering cherry for Grace, killed hauling wounded back from Vimy and as he crossed the turf Paul was not much surprised to find his eldest son Simon sitting there, with a cherrywood pipe in his mouth contemplating the metal plaque which read:
‘Grace Craddock, ambulance driver, killed April 1917,’
and underneath the only Scriptural quotation inscribed on a plaque—
‘Greater love hath no man . . . ’
Simon said, without looking round, ‘You should have done your bit of Bible thumping under Tom Williams’ tree, Gov’nor! He was a Methodist and would have thought it fitting.’ Then, with laughter in his eyes, ‘She never had much truck with organised religion, did she?’

‘No,’ Paul said, aware that the boy was teasing him but not resenting it in any way, ‘she didn’t! As a matter of fact she didn’t have much truck with anything except Women’s Rights and Compassion.’

The boy looked at him in a way that Paul had learned to associate with his questing, mildly cynical nature, akin to his mother’s but more tolerant and far less likely to give offence.

‘It was a sentimental idea, this wood of the dead,’ he said, ‘but taken all round it does you credit, Gov’nor.’

‘Thank you,’ said Paul with a grin, for he suddenly remembered after all these years when and where he had invited Simon to call him ‘Gov’nor’—sitting on a fence near his school, during a hurried visit on Paul’s leave from the Front in the autumn of 1917. He thought of reminding the boy and then decided not. Simon affected to despise the past and to regard everything that had happened up to the Labour Government’s first term of office, in 1924, as a pitiable failure of all human achievement. He said, instead, ‘What made you come here, today of all days?’

‘For the same reason as you; to get away from the racket! Anyway, I had some thinking to do. I’ve had a letter from Ned Stokes. He wants to know if I’d care to take over the literary editorship of
The Forum
.
It’s a new magazine his uncle is backing. Might have a future now that Labour is back again.’

Paul was resigned to Simon’s false starts and news that he was contemplating a journalistic career, after turning his back on teaching and forestry, had no power to irritate him. He said, tolerantly, ‘You’re old enough to dispense with my advice, Si. I daresay you’d find it amusing for a time but those magazines don’t last long as a rule, do they?’

‘No,’ Si said seriously, ‘but what does?’

‘Land,’ said Paul, not unexpectedly, and Simon smiled and shook his head as though he had long ago accepted the fact that, when it came to the estate, his father was slightly off his head and everybody in the Valley acknowledged as much.

‘I suppose your mob will want to nationalise us,’ Paul said and without waiting for an answer, ‘Well, I daresay it’ll come to that in the end but until it does I’m staying put! It will take more than your precious Ramsay Mac’ to shift me.’

Simon took his pipe from his mouth and ran his hand through his dark hair. It was a gesture that always reminded Paul vividly of his first wife, one of the many quirks she had passed on to the child she had abandoned for the Women’s Suffrage Campaign, when he was no more than a few months old. He said, resignedly, ‘You might just as well go over to the Tories, Gov’nor. You’re a Tory in everything but name you know.’

‘Don’t be so damned patronising!’ Paul told him. ‘Jimmy Grenfell and I were the two people who showed the Tories the door round here before you were born!’

‘Oh, I know about the 1906 landslide and all that,’ Simon said, ‘but for all your sound and fury you Radicals are as deeply rooted in the past as eighteenth-century landlords. Even the Tories subscribe to something new if there’s a quick profit in it but you and Jimmy Grenfell don’t. Surely you can see we’ve taken your places as Progressives?’

‘I can’t see anything of the kind,’ Paul said, but genially, for secretly he never cared to quarrel with Simon’s championship of the underdog, not even when it was larded with left-wing jargon borrowed from dull-looking books translated from the Russian. ‘The fact is we were content to nibble whereas you lot will overeat yourself and give the electorate chronic indigestion. As soon as you begin to burp all your reforms will emerge as hot air and the Tories will be more firmly entrenched than ever! You see if I’m not right! However, I don’t propose to spend a pleasant afternoon discussing politics with you, I’m going over to Hermitage to see Henry Pitts. Do you want to come along?’

‘No thanks,’ Simon said. ‘I’d better go back and give The Pair a hand. Do you know how many those idiots have invited to stay with us overnight? Seventy-four! Where the devil are they going to sleep?’

‘I don’t suppose they will until the sun gets up and then they can doss down in the barns for all I care,’ Paul said. ‘Your mother and I are going to the shanty after the midnight toasts. You’ll be in charge from then on!’

‘An honour,’ said Si, grinning, ‘but one I could easily duck! The twins’ set are morons but come to that so are the twins themselves. Have you talked to them since they came back from town yesterday?’

‘Good God, no!’ Paul said, ‘they never talk to me! Mary is the only one of you who regards me as anything more than an amiable old-stick-in-the-mud with a fortune in loose change!’ and he sauntered out of the enclosure and swung himself in the saddle, setting the skewbald at the steep path down to the river road and turning right towards the Hermitage farm track. Simon moved clear of the trees and watched him until he passed out of sight behind the Hermitage elms. ‘Well, Gov,’ he said to himself, ‘Steve and Andy will be “talking” tomorrow or the day after and I daresay they’ll succeed in knocking you more than I ever have! I’ve always been odd-man-out here and had time to get used to it!’ He lit his pipe again and stood puffing thoughtfully and then, as he turned away, he passed the young beech planted for Keith Horsey, the parson’s son, whom he remembered as an old boy of High Wood and sometime school friend of his boyhood hero, Ikey. He stopped to read the words on the plaque:
‘To Keith Horsey, R.A.M.C. Killed February 1917.’ He
recalled that Horsey had once been the Valley’s conscientious objector and also that Number Ten Downing Street was now occupied by another. He thought, ‘You should have held on a bit. Who knows? A chap with a good degree might have had a place in the Cabinet and then every damned flag-flapper in the Valley would have licked your boots!’

He lunged off, hands in pockets, pipe in mouth. He knew his duty as the heir of Shallowford at the forthcoming celebrations but he did not look forward to hours of junketing in the company of hearty young men who drove high-powered sports cars with overlong bonnets and leggy girls who pretended they were hot stuff and shouted ‘Stop!’ as soon as they felt a hand above their knee. At twenty-five, and with his future still undecided, he considered himself too adult for this sort of nonsense; too old and too disillusioned with the entire bloody decade.

II

C
laire had been so busy preparing for the dance that she had neglected to enter the momentous date in the estate diary. Keeping the diary up-to-date was still largely her prerogative, although Paul sometimes wrote brief entitles in it and she knew that he always read every word she wrote between the heavy leather Bible covers of what had once been old Sir George Lovell’s pornographic photograph album. It was a task she always found congenial inasmuch as it made her aware of continuity and now that her youngest child was eleven, and she herself forty-five, continuity was important to her. About four-thirty, when the decorations were complete and the buffet tables laid and. covered with tablecloths, she made a last-minute check of the guest rooms, and the Nissen hut fortuitously left behind by the R.A.M.C. ten years before and then went into the library and shut the door against intruders.

She had always liked this room and liked being alone in it. Its smell of stale dust and old leather reminded her of the early days of her marriage and it always seemed to her that when she was here at night, with Paul reading or dozing in the big armchair on the other side of the hearth they recaptured the intimacy that eluded them in a house full of strident young things and servants who lacked the permanence of dear old bodies like Mrs Handcock, long since retired to a cottage, or Thirza Tremlett, who had been nursemaid until John Rudd’s boy had been born and she had moved down to the Lodge.

She fetched the diary and carried it back to the library table but as she set it down she caught a swift and not altogether pleasing glimpse of her reflection in the mirror over the sideboard. In the old days she had worried about putting on weight despite Paul’s constant assurance that he liked rounded women but now she wondered if current fashions had not encouraged her to proceed too boldly in the reverse direction for her breasts seemed to have disappeared altogether and her behind, viewed sideways, looked nearly as flat as a board. Her hair had been bobbed as long ago as 1926 and the shearing of her long, golden tresses, for thirty years her pet vanity, had been an occasion almost as catastrophic as the declaration of war. Paul had stormed and she had wept, and the fact that the entire family had taken up her cause had not helped to convince either of them that her smooth, oval face was suited to the fashion. Since then she had compromised, unknowingly anticipating the long-bob of the immediate future, and now her hair reached her shoulders and curled under, masking what she called her ‘rats-tails’ on the nape of her neck. Her skin was still very clear and her eyes retained their blue depths but as she turned her back on the mirror she could not help regretting that the craze for boyish figures was taking such a long time to die, or consoling herself that the one aspect of current fashions to her advantage was that of short skirts, for her legs were still shapely and her ankles slim, whereas some poor wretches were condemned to expose calves as thick as banister rails and knees as knobbly as applewood faggots.