Post of Honour (47 page)

III

I
t was not often that John Rudd came to the big house these days. At seventy-seven, and with a heart condition that had given him one or two frights over the last few days, he found the long drive too steep and the effort of climbing in and out of his wife’s fussy little cars more exhausting than the ascent on foot. He was here tonight, however, and enjoying himself in an unexpected way, for this was the first big event at Shallowford in the past forty years when nothing was expected of him but to sit still, sip well-watered toddy and look amiable.

Maureen was off helping Claire and the staff with the buffet and Paul was consorting with some of his more active cronies—Henry Pitts, Smut Potter and the like, so that John, comfortably seated in what Claire was pleased to call the Minstrel Gallery (actually a kind of landing built on when the room was enlarged after the war) could look down on the swirling mob and make cynically good-humoured comparisons with other special occasions that had occurred here since the days of ‘that old goat George Lovell and his rackety sons, Hubert and Ralph’. The new dances puzzled him somewhat, prancing embraces of the kind that were always popular among young people but were confined, as far as he could recall, to the bushes and would never have been allowed on a dance floor, not even George Lovell’s dance floor. The tunes puzzled him even more, the old stamping music having been replaced by a variety of near-dirges, almost all concerned with moons waxing and waning over definite portions of the United States, with here and there a snatch or two reminiscent of the songs coons used to sing at concerts. Even the band instruments in use were nothing like he recalled, not even in the early days of the Craddock regime. The basic melody, it seemed, no longer emanated from the piano or the violins but from a kind of trombone called, he understood, ‘a sax’, the notes of which were augmented and often drowned by the rattle of kettledrum and clash of cymbals. The youngsters seemed to enjoy it all and take the cacophony for granted but then, in the decade that was just about to end, youngsters took everything for granted—noise, speed, half-nakedness and what was perhaps the most surprising, the virtual elimination of class-distinctions. If he needed proof of this he had only to lean forward an inch or so and look over the balustrade to see Stephen Craddock, the stockier of the twins, whirling round with Prudence Pitts, the red-headed daughter of Henry and Gloria of Hermitage, a girl who was almost exactly Stephen’s age. Now that, he thought, would have been enough to bring the ceiling down thirty years ago whereas, in the more free and easy Edwardian decade, the glimpse of the girl’s underclothes as she was swung round in a final flourish would have almost certainly led to her being ordered home by her blushing mama and clouted on the way out by her father.

They were at it again, with hardly a pause for breath, one of the swoonier tunes now—pretty enough in an unremarkable way but tinged, as were nearly all their songs, with melancholy and defeatism. He tried to catch the words of the lyric bawled into a mechanical amplifier by the hired girl vocalist (another undreamed-of innovation) but could make no sense of it, for she seemed to be pleading for kisses from somebody called ‘Babette’ and Babette, unless he was far in his dotage, had always been a woman’s name and a rather tarty one at that. His observations and the reflections they provoked switched from the general to the particular. He spotted and contemplated each of Paul’s brood in order of precedence, beginning with Simon, the Lovell girl’s boy, and ending with the Craddock postscript, the beautiful eleven-year-old, who had been given special permission to stay up until 1 a.m. for the occasion. They were a handsome bunch but also, as he knew from their parents and from Maureen’s fireside gossip, a highly unpredictable spread of children. Simon, already twenty-five, was said to be as mulish as his mother and likely to go her way if Paul failed to pull him up short whereas the twins, Stephen and Andrew, were as happy-go-lucky a pair as one would be likely to encounter anywhere but had not, so far as he was aware, done a day’s work in their lives, if one excepted the repeated stripping and reassembling of motor-bikes and their redesigning of old Hocking’s motor-launch into a speed boat that had capsized at high speed in the bay a month ago and came close to drowning them. There was Simon, serious but tricky, and The Pair, feather-witted but likeable, and then came the three girls, with more permutations—Mary, the eldest and her father’s favourite, Whiz, the long-faced sixteen-year-old who rode superbly, won bushels of awards and reminded everybody of her Aunt Rose away in Gloucestershire, and finally the family Aphrodite, Claire, whose classic profile, natural poise and astounding precocity marked her down as a future Emma Hamilton or Du Barry. Well, thank God, he only had one child to worry about since poor old Roddy had drowned under the guns of
Von Spee
and his Paul seemed normal enough, with plenty of his mother’s sense of humour but none of her pseudo-Irish feyness, praise be to God! He sipped his whisky, pondering the not inconsiderable compensations of old age as he saw Paul come through from the hall, mount the rostrum and motion the perspiring drummer to give a long roll on the drums as a preface to the midnight toasts.

They swarmed into the already overcrowded room from all parts of the house and garden, some of the latecomers looking a little dishevelled and removing wisps of grass from their dinner jackets and dresses. In the old days, John thought, only the Potter girls slipped out into the shrubbery between dances but now almost everybody made these stealthy exits and re-entrances. There was a general laugh when Stephen made a breathless reappearance with the daughter of the Paxtonbury Archdeacon in tow, and then Paul gestured for silence and made a pleasant little speech, not too long and not too flippant but spiced with a little salty humour about his sons’ shortcomings which was offset by the geniality Paul Craddock could always summon for a gathering such as this. There was not a man or a woman over forty present, John thought, who would not bear witness to the staying-power of the young greenhorn whom he had met off the London train more than twenty-seven years ago, and who had since rooted himself in the Valley as no Lovell had ever done.

John stood up to drink the twins’ health but it was not of them he thought as he downed his final whisky that night. His congratulations—if he offered any—were reserved for the tall, slightly stooping man of fifty, raising his glass and looking down on the slightly tipsy company, and on the blonde woman who stood smiling at his side and whose attention, he suspected, was also directed at Paul rather than her sons, for no one who knew Claire Derwent (as he still thought of her) doubted that any one of her children came better than a poor second to the man she had come home to nurse and marry at the time of the German wreck in Tamer Potter’s Cove. ‘Dear God it seems a dozen lifetimes away!’ muttered John aloud, as the music began to bray again and the couples swung off into the one recognisable dance of the evening, the Gay Gordons, and Maureen Rudd, appearing suddenly at his side, said, ‘What’s that you’re saying?’ But John was not prepared to admit to sentimentality, not even with only his wife as an audience, and replied, ‘Nothing, old girl, only that it’s time I toddled off. Stay on if you like, I’m for bed!’

‘I’ll tell Paul and Claire and get our coats,’ Maureen said and disappeared again while John took a final glance at the kaleidoscopic scene below, thinking, ‘Who’ll be next? Mary, the quiet one? She’s eighteen and has three years to go but maybe she’ll marry and won’t have a big house celebration. I doubt if I’ll be around to see it anyway but good luck to them all, damned good luck, if only for his sake!’

Soon after two a.m., when most of the older guests had left, the blaring of a hunting horn expertly blown by Robbie Eveleigh, youngest of the Eveleigh boys (he had taken Tremlett’s place as huntsman when the Sorrel Vale Farmers’ Hunt was revived in the early ‘twenties) summoned the younger generation of the Valley to join the traditional Tally-Ho crocodile, without which no Westcountry celebration could be said to be complete. Simon, as MC, thanked God that Paul and Claire had departed for the shanty, for already several of The Pair’s inner circle were a little the worse for wear and the passage of the Tally-Ho crocodile through the house seemed to him a direct threat to furniture and fabric. There was no help for it, however, and the best he could do was to insist on a single crocodile weaving in one direction instead of two working towards one another with the object of head-on collisions. They set off to the scream of three horns, Robbie’s and two others blown by Stevie and Andrew, and the uproar of their ascent of the stairs and progress along the main corridor from the old nursery to the west wing, shook the house in its foundations. The orchestra did not take part but added to the general din by playing hunting music at full blast so that elderly folk abed as far away as Coombe Bay stirred in their sleep as the waves of sound that launched Squire’s twins into their twenty-second year crossed the stubble fields and lapped the inshore sandbanks of the bay. Paul and Claire, climbing into bed in the shanty heard the distant uproar and exchanged wry smiles; Marian Eveleigh heard in in the big bedroom at Four Winds, rut-tutting lest it should wake Norman who had been sleeping badly since his heart attack in the spring and had been persuaded to take a sleeping-draught against the noisy homecoming of his children; old Martha Pitts heard it over at Hermitage and wondered if Henry was home and whether Gloria, her daughter-in-law, had managed to keep him sober. Francis Willoughby at Deepdene, who had politely declined an invitation heard it, for it set his Welsh collie barking and the yaps were answered by the deep-throated bay of Jumbo Bellchamber’s mastiff lower down the Bluff slopes at the Potters’ old farm. Nobody minded much, however, least of all Simon who was bored by his six-hour stint as Master of Ceremonies. Alone among the family (young Claire had flagrantly disobeyed her mother’s instructions and stayed up for the fun) he did not hitch himself on to the braying procession but wandered out on the terrace and down the broad, flagstoned path to the sunken rose garden, inhaling the night air with pleasure after the fug of the ballroom and watching the harvest moon ride over the avenue chestnuts down by the ford.

He had descended the steps that led to the lily pond before he saw a shadow and the glow of a cigarette over by the sundial. The lights from the terrace did not reach this far and the area round the column was cut off from moonlight by a tall copperbeech marking the southern limit of Grace Lovell’s single contribution to Shallowford. He saw, however, that a woman stood there and that she was not a guest, for she had a coat thrown loosely over her shoulders and beneath it wore a high-necked sweater and tweed skirt. There was also something about her posture that suggested here was someone else impatient with noise and buffoonery, so he called:

‘Hello there? It’s only me, Simon Craddock. Can I find someone for you?’

The figure straightened itself and tossed the cigarette in a wide arc across the pond.

‘No, thank you. I’m only waiting for my sister, Esther. Robbie, my brother, is staying on to help clear up so I brought the trap over for her; I’ll give her another ten minutes.’

He realised then that he was talking to Rachel Eveleigh, one of the two elder of the Four Winds’ girls and remembered in time that she wasn’t Rachel Eveleigh now but Rachel Horsey, having married Keith Horsey, the parson’s son, whose memorial plaque he had read that same afternoon. He remembered her clearly as a pretty, fresh-faced girl, with light brown hair, who used to help her mother make cream in the Four Winds’ buttery but had forgotten until now that Keith Horsey, the CO, had had a wife, much less a local one. Her presence here as an outsider puzzled him, especially as her brother Robbie, the huntsman, and at least one of her sisters, were among the more boisterous of the younger set in the house. He said, diffidently, ‘How is it you weren’t invited? I helped make out the list. You must have been overlooked. I’m most terribly sorry,’ and suddenly she laughed so that he felt embarrassed for there was nothing diffident about her laughter. Then she must have realised she had disconcerted him for she said, earnestly, ‘I’m sorry! I wasn’t laughing at you, Mr Craddock, just at the idea that anyone should be expected to remember me when making out invitation lists for a Shallowford beano! I’ve been away from here since before my husband was killed. You may remember him better than me, he went to your school, I believe.’

‘I remember you both,’ Simon said, still a little ruffled. ‘As a matter of fact I was thinking of Keith only this afternoon.’

‘You were?’ She sounded not merely surprised but defensive. ‘Why should anyone around here ever think of Keith?’

‘For the same reason as they think occasionally of all the other poor chaps who went west. Oh, I’m not referring to that mob’—he jerked his head towards the house—‘they’re incapable of thinking about anything of the smallest importance but local ex-service chaps must think of people like Keith Horsey a good deal. My father does for one!’

She moved aside so that the moonlight fell on his face and he had a curious certainty that she was weighing him up and trying to make up her mind whether to continue the conversation or break it off abruptly by walking away.

‘You’re different, aren’t you?’ she said, finally. ‘They never told me about you but—wait a minute, something gells—I remember! You were madly anti-blood sports, weren’t you?’

This time he could laugh for her directness, once you got used to it, was refreshing.

‘I still am,’ he said, ‘it’s a kink they never managed to straighten out but now they just pull my leg about it.’

‘Ikey told us,’ she said. ‘I remember there was a family row over it at the time.’ As she said this she recalled also that the Squire’s eldest son, his child by the suffragette, had always worshipped Ikey Palfrey, and the memory of this bridged the gap between them so that her prickliness changed to a kind of relief. She said, before he could reply, ‘Would you have a cigarette about you? That was my last and I’m an addict.’