Post of Honour (49 page)

‘Don’t you want to hear details?’ Stevie asked and Paul said no but if he had to listen to them he preferred hearing them from Franz.

They got up gratefully enough but as they reached the door he relented slightly and said, ‘Well, at least you didn’t taunt me for using scrap money to keep the Valley alive since the war!’

‘We thought of it, Gov, but decided it was below the belt!’ Stevie said and they both vanished under cover of his grunt of laughter.

Paul went over to the window and looked down the curving line of the avenue of chestnuts. He still felt winded and was glad of a moment to compose himself before Franz appeared. From the angle of the window he could see the glint of afternoon sun on the ford and the shadow-play on the long swell of the Codsall stubble fields where they climbed to the watershed on the edge of the moor. He remembered the first time he had stood here and looked westward to the boundary, the day before the Lovell sale, in the long, dry summer of 1902, just before he had made up his mind to buy the place and years before those two young idiots had been thought of; well, it was pretty well full circle now, with all three of his sons opting out of the estate and the demands it made on a man. They would find their way, he supposed, but it would be their way not his or Claire’s and there was, after all, some justice in their argument. He had a right to want at least one of them to follow on here but he had no right to insist on it and he knew before he heard Franz’s step what the outcome would be. If he had a successor here it would have to be a grandson and even that, he felt, was unlikely.

The old man advertised himself with a cough, then shuffled in and stood with his back to the door. Paul thought he had seldom seen Franz so unsure of himself and it cheered him. It was not often he had the old man at a disadvantage.

‘Well, Franz,’ he said. ‘I suppose they told you I took it on the chin, although I must say it makes nonsense of everything I had in mind for them. Was it their idea or yours?’

‘Mine, Paul,’ Franz said, ‘and common decency demands I make some effort to hammer the motive into your thick skull.’ He lowered himself gently into Claire’s armchair and lit one of his long Dutch cheroots. He looked, Paul thought, like a centenarian gnome got up for a wedding—trim Van Dyke beard and sidewhiskers, razor-sharp creases in his striped trousers, puffed grey stock fixed with a diamond pin, gnarled fingers crowded with gold rings. He said, puffing a thin stream of bluish smoke, ‘I
have
a motive and it’s a disinterested one, I assure you.’

‘You imply you agree with Andy when he says British agriculture is dead and buried?’

‘No,’ Franz said, ‘but it soon would be if their sort had a hand in it! The fact is, Paul, my boy, you haven’t made allowances for the gap between their generation and yours. It’s a great deal wider than the usual gulf between father and son.’

‘The thing that defeats me,’ Paul said suddenly, ‘is that those boys are good farming stock on their mother’s side. Simon I could understand—any child of Grace would have to behave eccentrically but Claire’s boys—old Derwent’s grandchildren . . . !’

‘It isn’t eccentric to want to clear a fresh circle for yourself at twenty-one, Paul! After all, you did and were damned obstinate about it if I remember rightly! In any case, those boys are as far away from us as we were from men born during the French Revolution. You can blame the war for that but don’t blame them.’

‘But what the hell could they do in a Birmingham scrapyard? They’ll only lose money and you’ll ship them back to me the moment they do. I know you that well, Franz!’

‘My boy,’ said Franz, with the air of taut patience that always irritated Paul when they disagreed, as they did over almost everything they discussed. ‘Why will you persist in looking on the scrap-metal industry as the prerogative of a man in a leather apron, driving a donkey-cart? Did you ever see me touch a piece of salvage? What will they do up there? They’ll do what I tell them to do, make friends and contacts, hob-nob with steel-masters, used-car dealers, machinists, boiler-makers, wholesale meat-purveyors and wiremen! They’ll join clubs, buy drinks, dress well, drive fast cars, back steeplechasers and flirt with women, I hope; anything calculated to broaden their outlook and nail down new sources. I’ve done precisely that for the past fifty years and you can’t tell me that it hasn’t paid dividends!’

‘It sounds the kind of occupation well suited to them,’ Paul said, ‘but I hope you realise they can’t add a column of figures three times without getting three different totals, and that their scrawl is usually illegible.’

‘We maintain clerks and book-keepers,’ said Franz, acidly. ‘It wasn’t to learn how to run my business that I made the effort to come here, Paul.’

‘Neither was it to win my approval for my sons leaving me in the lurch,’ said Paul cheerfully, ‘for you’ve always been too damned arrogant to seek a blessing from anyone!’

Franz smiled, accepting the thrust as a compliment. ‘I won’t quarrel with you there, my boy, but the fact is I was wrong about you and admit it! The only real success is living one’s life the way one wants to live it and, taken all around, you’ve been successful. Damn it, how many men have survived two wars and two marriages and stayed sane and solvent?’

‘It wasn’t just luck, Franz, it was often more a matter of holding on.’

‘Whatever it was timing had something to do with it, which brings me to the only real point I want to make.’

‘Well?’

‘You had a twelve-year apprenticeship before the rot set in. You settled in here smug and cosy when the pound stood for something abroad, when everybody knew their place and you and all your bucolic friends could take tea on the lawn without the tablecloth blowing away and wasps crawling up your corduroys! You ought to remember that when you expect those boys to use your set of values! I’m nearly twice your age and I don’t expect them to use mine! They have to make a new mould and they can’t do it here growing prize artichokes and playing cricket on the green! Make ’em and they’ll go sour on you, sour and rotten, I promise you! I’ve seen too many rich men’s sons warped by Papa’s conceits not to know what I’m talking about. I’ve given you good advice in the past—it was me who put you on to this place at the start of it all—and I’m giving you more now! Let ’em go, and Simon as well if he wants to, and do it with good grace! Let ’em find out for themselves what it’s really like out there in among the grime and brickstacks. Either they’ll adjust and do you credit or they’ll come home with their tails between their legs, in which case you might found your neo-yeoman family after all!’

By the time Franz had finished and thrown his cheroot butt into the grate as a kind of full-stop Paul was chuckling, not so much because, in his heart, he agreed with the old man, but because his explosive vitality had the effect of cutting everything down to size and making Paul’s initial distaste for the project seem as prejudiced as Henry Pitts’ stonewall opposition to selling his plough horses and accepting the gift of a tractor. He said, pacifically, ‘All right, Franz, you don’t have to break a blood-vessel on their behalf! They’re all three of age, anyway, and I couldn’t stop them doing what they wanted. Good luck to them and to you and you’re the one who is going to need it most! However, since you seem to be in such a pontifical mood, and since I rarely see you where we’re not interrupted by the telephone, will you give
me
some advice? There are pretty clear signs of another slump setting in. Is it likely to be easier or more difficult to ride out than the last one, from my viewpoint I mean?’

‘Now why the devil should you ask me that?’ Franz said, playing at being ruffled. ‘What do I know of livestock and land values this far from civilisation?’

‘About a hundred times more than the best-informed local Agricultural Adviser who ever quoted an out-of-date white paper to me,’ Paul told him, remembering that all the success the old man had achieved since landing in England as a political refugee had not made him immune to flattery.

‘You’re genuinely asking my advice? About selling or buying land?’

‘About selling it; I’ve come out of things better than most farmers since the war but it’s time I retrenched if I want to keep money in hand against emergencies. One of my tenants has been pestering me to sell for some time.’

‘You trust him?’

‘Good God, yes, he’s my brother-in-law. It’s Claire’s brother, Hugh.’

‘Then sell! Sell tomorrow! And retrench too if you have time!’

‘It’s as bad as that?’

‘We’re heading directly into the worst economic blizzard of our lifetime.’

‘Oh come, Franz, you aren’t that scared of another Socialist Government?’

‘The Socialists have nothing to do with it this time. The Tories ought to be damned glad they’re not holding the baby. As a matter of fact some that I know are!’

Paul was more interested than alarmed. He knew that the sensitive fingers of this dry old stick never left the economic pulse and recalled how, on the night of August 1st, 1914, he had been hauled out of bed to answer Franz’s laconic telephone call urging him to insure against a long war; only Kitchener and Uncle Franz had been right about that! He said, ‘If it isn’t all this talk about the investors going abroad and taking their money out of reach of our tame Bolshies what’s causing the anxiety?’

‘The American Stock-market. You don’t still cherish the fiction we’re still the financial hub of the world, do you? We’re in for a bad time, the whole lot of us!’

‘Well,’ said Paul resignedly, ‘the first to feel it will be the farmers.’

‘Oh don’t try that one on me,’ Franz said testily. ‘I’ve never seen a poor one yet and at least they can always eat! By this time next year that’ll be a privilege among the unemployed.’

‘Then why are you branching out in Birmingham? Wouldn’t you do well to retrench?’

The old man smiled and stood up, brushing the ash from his faultlessly cut jacket.

‘I always maintained, Paul, that you were not a man of business and certainly not of the scrap business! In a month those boys of yours will make rings round you. The scrap market is the vulture in the flock. That’s why I can smell carrion long before anyone else’s nostrils twitch. Sell to your brother-in-law and count yourself fortunate. I would advise you to pretend to sell reluctantly and keep the price up but I know your Nonconformist conscience would torment you if you didn’t tell the buyer everything I’ve said to you today! Besides, you have a duty to your wife’s family, I suppose, you owe her something for putting up with you all these years! What time do you dine in this wilderness?’

‘We don’t,’ Paul told him, ‘we have high tea at six-thirty and don’t expect any frills.’

The Croat took out a large gold watch and studied it. ‘Time for a nap,’ he said, affably. ‘Half-an-hour with you, my friend, is as good as a day’s grind.’

He went out with his curious shuffling step and Paul, still grinning, escorted him as far as the landing, pointing the way to the guest room. As he descended the stairs his grin broadened. Simon, Andrew, Stephen, and behind them, Claire, were all gazing up at him from the threshold of the hall. They looked like a group of anxious children whose ball has just sailed over an alien fence and were calculating the risks of retrieving it.

Chapter Twelve

I

P
aul remembered, looking back on that time, that Franz had used the word ‘blizzard’ and had seemed to mean it but the depression that resulted in three million unemployed in Britain, and had most of its cities and great areas of the countryside sick and gasping by 1931, did not visit the Valley as a blizzard, or anything like a blizzard. Instead it crept in from the north and east like a malign, leisurely blight, touching first one family then another, plucking at a farm here, a man there, leaving any number of small, scabrous wounds that were slow to heal and seemed at first unrelated to one another or to hurts such as those caused, say, by the war. Yet, in some instances, the wounds were just as lethal. At Periwinkle, for example, which decayed structurally, and in the relationship between the Big House and High Coombe, where the period of stress left a scar that never did heal while there was a breath in the body of Paul Craddock and his wife, formerly Claire Derwent.

Echoes of the Wall Street crash reached the Valley by courtesy of Fleet Street. During the autumn Stevie and Andrew left for what Paul thought of as its storm-centre, the industrial Midlands, but when they reappeared on Christmas Eve that same year they did not look like the survivors of the economic disaster. They roared up in a red MG sports car, with long silk scarves round their necks and golf clubs protruding from an overloaded boot. They rampaged about the Valley for a spell shouting at everyone they encountered, coming home at four in the morning and spending freely in the Paxtonbury pubs. Then they disappeared again without anyone having the least idea what they did in Birmingham or how they acquired sports car, golf clubs or the skill to use them.

It was a hard winter. Snow fell early and Valley noises were muted for a period of weeks; then, with the arrival of a cheerless, seeping spring, came news that foxes were active west of Hermitage Wood and that luckless Elinor Codsall had lost thirty-seven point-of-lay birds in a single night.

Paul went over to pay her hunt compensation, knowing that she was having a struggle with the price of eggs at an all-time low and her son Mark laid up with a broken leg caused by a motor-cycle skid during the cold snap. He was accustomed, by now, to Elinor’s pessimism but was puzzled by the way she took her loss of hens to heart, as though the dog-fox who got into the run had singled her out for special persecution.

‘ ’Er made straight for me, zame as all bad luck do!’ she said and when Paul tried to laugh her out of her grievance she said, challengingly, ‘Well, baint it zo? Baint I alwus zo? My man was the first to get called up an’ be blown to tatters! Then us struggles on ’till that red-headed bitch Gloria Pitts comes yer raisin’ creation about me an’ that German! Then us loses the pigs in the first voot an’ mouth outbrek an’ when us is making headway again Mark has to break his bliddy leg. Now, to top all, nigh on forty point-o’-lay crossbreds, the best I ever reared, makes one meal for bliddy Reynard!’

There was no comforting her and she continued to grumble through the summer when Mark was back at work but likely to be slightly lame for the rest of his life for the accident left him with one leg an inch shorter than the other.

The Codsalls perked up for a time after Paul found them a hired hand called Rutter but after a few months at Periwinkle the new man had an invitation from his brother-in-law in Tasmania and announced that fanning here was a mug’s game and he was getting out while the going was good. After that Paul noticed that land Will Codsall had patiently reclaimed from the moor began to go back, so that before the year was out Periwinkle was reduced to its original holding, a mere sixty acres and although Elinor was only paying a pre-war rent she fell behind in that and Paul, only too aware of the narrow profit margin of more prosperous farms, could not be persuaded by John Rudd to find a billet for Mark Codsall somewhere else and cut his losses by letting Elinor live on in the old Hardcastle farmhouse while her land was divided between Four Winds and Hermitage.

It was the final piece of advice John was to give him. In the event the Periwinkle problem was solved by a near miracle but before Paul could justify his extreme reluctance to do as the agent suggested John was dead.

If a man can be said to have died thoroughly at peace with his world this was achieved by John Rudd. He died in the cramped bedroom of the lodge that he had occupied ever since the Lovells had left and in the presence of the only three people in his life who mattered to him, his wife Maureen, the slim, fair-haired boy, whom she had astonished everyone by producing soon after her late marriage, and Paul Craddock, whom John always claimed to have restored to him a purpose in life.

He caught a severe chill in early autumn and coughing aggravated his heart condition. On the third day after he had taken to his bed it was arranged that he should be admitted to Whinmouth Hospital and Maureen sent for Paul asking him to come before the ambulance was due. Paul was shocked at John’s appearance. He lay propped up by pillows looking more than his age and his gruff voice was reduced to a dry whisper. Yet he seemed philosophic about his chances of survival. ‘Tried to tell Maureen to leave me be,’ he said, ‘but she fussed, so I couldn’t be bothered arguing. Prefer to die here if I’ve got to go. Been my life best part of fifty years.’

Paul reminded him that Maureen’s purpose in transferring him to hospital was his need of an oxygen tent but he made no attempt to indulge in conventional sick-bed denials. He knew Rudd better than that and recognised an old, tired and moderately satisfied man when he saw one. John went on, after some coughing, ‘Should like to have left you on a crest instead of deep in a damned trough. Think you’ll struggle out of it?’

‘We’ve always bobbed up before, John,’ Paul told him, ‘and there’s no sense in you worrying about it at your time of life.’

The agent’s old-fashioned moustache twitched. ‘You’re a damned sight tougher than you look, Paul,’ he said grudgingly. ‘A Boer bullet in your knee, lump of shrapnel in your head, your ribs bashed in that time of the wreck, and this white elephant on your back! But you wouldn’t have it otherwise, would you?’

‘I could have done without the bullet and the shrapnel,’ Paul said, ‘but I’m not nearly as bothered as you seem to be by current land values and farm prices. These things come and go like women’s fashions.’

‘Talking of fashions . . . ’ whispered John and stopped as his son came in with a draught of medicine, put it down on the bedside table and said, in a sickroom voice, ‘Mother has just heard on the ’phone that the ambulance will be a bit late, Father. It seems they’re clearing up after a road smash on the main road, a bad one.’

‘Good,’ John croaked, ‘hope it keeps ’em busy all night!’ and as the boy tiptoed out and he reached out to pick up his medicine, ‘I wish to God he and his mother would be as realistic as you, Paul. She’s tough enough with her patients but she clucks all day long over me! Like a schoolmaster spoiling his own children!’ and he chuckled at his own modest joke.

Paul said, for something to say, ‘You were making some comment on fashions.’

‘Ah yes,’ John muttered, his medicine glass clutched in a hand that shook so much that Paul reached across to steady it, ‘it made me think of bosoms!’

‘Whose bosom in particular?’

‘Everybody’s! Time was when every woman about the Valley tortured herself to look like an hour-glass. Now every damned one of them, your wife included, delights in making herself look like a tube!’

It struck Paul as so grotesque that bluff old John Rudd should beguile the time awaiting his ambulance by jesting about bosoms that he laughed outright and the patient, catching the infection of laughter, joined in so that for a moment they were both comparatively young again, riding together through Shallowford on their way home from a day’s hunting before the war. Then, with tragic suddenness, John’s laugh changed to a rasping cough and the draught of medicine shot over the coverlet as he bent forward spluttering and groping with outflung arms. Maureen rushed into the room and after her the boy but it was over before they could hoist him back into his former position.

It was sobering, Paul thought, to witness the extremity of their distress, for although death was a new experience to the boy his mother must have seen a thousand die in almost identical circumstances. She looked across at Paul with her face ravaged and Paul, taking control, motioned to the boy to leave which he did at once, trying in vain to stem an unmanly flow of tears. Paul said, ‘He loathed the prospect of dying outside the Valley, Maureen! He told me so the minute I came in here. Surely you must have known what his chances were!’

She made a gesture of hopelessness and turned her back on the disordered bed, crossing to the window and opening it a notch so that a swishing wind threading the chestnuts banished the stuffiness of the little room. Paul took advantage of the moment to lay the body straight and arrange the sheet, after which, thinking to give her son something to occupy his mind, he called down and gave instructions to cancel the ambulance and notify the hospital. He turned back to Maureen, still standing by the window. ‘Can I get you a drink, Maureen?’ and when she shook her head, ‘He had a good life once the Lovells went out of it and especially good after you came to share it.’

‘He told you that?’

‘He implied it often enough. It was a tremendous piece of luck for him to find you about half-way through.’

‘For me too, Paul,’ she said, and he saw that she had herself in hand again.

There seemed nothing more to say, or not at this stage, and when Maureen indicated she would like to stay a while and compose herself before she went back to the boy, he left without saying anything to his godson who was talking hoarsely into the telephone. He went out into the drive and found the night warmish but gusty, with only a sliver of moon over the Bluff and a hurrying breathlessness in the south-westerly wind that promised more rain, possibly an autumn gale. He went through the open iron gates to the ford which was high and noisy and stood there a moment gulping down mouthfuls of the moist air, quickly coming to terms with the sharp break in a line of continuity that led right back to the blazing afternoon thirty years ago, when he had first trotted along this road with John. That was all that John had cared about—continuity, pattern, ordered progress and it was that, he supposed, that had linked them from the beginning, building a relationship that had resulted in each of them having complete confidence in the other and in Shallowford as an institution. Yet he remembered John telling him before the war that he no longer needed an agent, that he was perfectly capable of running this place alone. It wasn’t true of course, no single man’s care and capital could nourish the Valley, no matter how single-minded and dedicated that man might be. It needed a dozen or more and they were getting fewer as time went on. Some were not being replaced as surely as Arthur Pitts at Hermitage had been and Edward Derwent, his father-in-law at High Coombe but he had been lucky so far. Of the seven farms only Periwinkle and Four Winds were in rough water, the one because it had always been too small and inadequately staffed, and the other because Eveleigh’s eldest son had been killed in the war and none of the others seemed interested in carrying on. He stood there in the wet wind making a sort of accounting to the dead man in the lodge. Prices were atrocious, more and more skilled men were drifting into the towns, hedging and ditching was in arrears because of labour shortage, reliefs and government subsidies were unrealistic, and old men like Henry Pitts and the failing Eveleigh were slow to take to new methods and develop new markets like those of sugar-beet, cereal wheat and peas for local canning. If it were not for Paul’s policy of keeping rents at a minimum figure, and feeding fresh capital into the estate by way of pedigree livestock, farm machines hired out at nominal rates and free gifts of chemical manure to those who would use it, the estate would have contracted long ago and land would have been sold off to keep what remained in good heart. As it was only Hugh Derwent’s High Coombe had broken away and even that was still in the family and might return some time seeing that Hugh was a bachelor and likely to remain one. John had seemed worried in his last moments regarding his ability to hold on to the place and now Paul wondered if he had convinced him of his determination and wished that he had emphasised it more. ‘Well,’ he muttered to himself, as he turned for home, ‘he ought to know me after all this time! I’ll see it through one way or another until one of the boys comes to his senses, or one of the girls marries a sensible chap and has children to pass it to!’ and feeling renewed rather than depressed he repassed the lodge and lifted his hand in salute to the man who lay behind the little latticed window. It was very difficult to think of old John as dead.