Post of Honour (52 page)

It took his breath away for a moment and then the chuckle that had been trying to escape for the last ten minutes emerged as a bellow and he stood by the window with the letter still in his hand and enjoyed the joke as he had not enjoyed one in a long time.

Slowly the more sober aspects of the situation filtered through to him and he thought, with some satisfaction, ‘Dammit, it might be the best day’s work he ever did in his life marrying that girl! She’s got all his mother’s idealism pickled in several generations of Eveleigh commonsense. Shall I show this letter to Claire or shall I let well alone? It’s something I shall have to think about damned carefully!’ and he folded the pages, put them back in the envelope and locked it in a drawer of his desk, along with his Will and insurance policies.

He was preoccupied for several days, so much so that Claire mistook his withdrawal for worry about the failure of the new Government to halt the decline in agriculture. As was her custom she challenged him when they were going to bed one night.

‘There’s no sense in worrying yourself silly, Paul,’ she said, for perhaps the hundredth time in the last decade. ‘Farming will bob up just as it always does. That’s the one sure thing about the land. It’s indestructible and indispensable.’

‘Who the devil is worrying?’ he demanded, off guard. ‘Did I say I was particularly worried?’

‘I can always tell, it’s the Tudor look again!’

The ‘Tudor look’ was a family joke. Ikey, the family jester, had once produced a miniature, supposedly by Hillyard, of a long-faced Elizabethan worrier, and pointed out the close resemblance of the portrait to Paul in one of his baffled moods.

‘Ah,’ he said, beginning to brash his teeth vigorously, ‘you’re ’way off course this time, old girl! I wasn’t worrying, just pondering. About the newly-weds!’ He put down his toothbrush and glanced at her humorously. ‘Come to think of it you haven’t had much to say on the subject. The last time one of the family married a tenant’s daughter you sulked for weeks!’

She was long since proof against this kind of gibe and laughed over her shoulder as she climbed into bed. ‘That’s libel,’ she said, ‘and you know it! I began sulking about Ikey marrying Hazel Potter but there were other reasons for maintaining it and I don’t have to remind you of those, do I?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘you don’t! It was a guilty conscience about that young squirt up at the camp . . . what was his name again?’

‘You haven’t forgotten his name, you fraud but why worry about newly-weds of their age? Were you thinking of mailing them one of those Marie Stopes books there’s so much talk about?’

He said, slowly, ‘I had a letter from her, Claire, and I’ve been wondering whether or not to pass it on to you. I’ve decided I will. I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I did!’

She had been drowsy for the last hour but she was wide awake now. ‘Give it to me at once! Go on, give it to me!’ and when he protested that it was locked in his office she said, ‘I don’t give a damn where it is! Go and get it this instant, you traitor!’

He fetched it and sat on the edge of the bed watching her read it and any misgivings he might have had disappeared when he saw her stifle a giggle, then a series of giggles. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, laying it down, ‘poor Simon! All those capitals and underlinings! The Movement! Opposition! The WEA! There wouldn’t be any point in sending him Marie Stopes would there? He’s gone and married one, the silly boy!’

‘Now how can you justify that?’ he demanded. ‘I’m all for Simon having a sober wife as a sheet-anchor but don’t tell me any fun and games will go along with it!’

‘Rubbish!’ she said, ‘she gives herself away in the tailpiece. Don’t take that crusading preamble of hers at face value, it’s no more than a smokescreen!’

‘Are you trying to tell me she isn’t in earnest about her determination to make something of the boy?’

‘Oh, I daresay she thinks she is,’ Claire said, ‘but she’s covering up nevertheless and any woman could tell you as much. See here—she’s healthy, Valley-bred and thirty-four. She’s been without a man twelve years and if she’s an Eveleigh she’s no prude! Along comes Simon, young, good-looking but, what’s more important, pliable! Why bless you, she needs him more than he needs her but because of the age gap she has to justify herself! So what does she do? Sets about convincing herself the marriage is near-platonic but you can take it from me that now she’s got him she won’t address herself exclusively to the task of healing sick society!’

She always amused him when she came out with one of these down-to-earth pronouncements and he chuckled as he switched off the light and climbed into bed, saying, ‘The trouble with you is you’ve got a one-track mind and always have had!’ whereupon, not altogether to his surprise she said, ‘Thank God we’re old enough to let the world get on with it and concentrate on essentials,’ and enfolded him in a way that left him in no doubt at all about what she regarded as essential.

Chapter Thirteen

I

T
hat was the season of Rumble Patrick’s disgrace, the time when the long-suffering Headmaster of High Wood decided that a less conventional establishment was required to battle with the young man’s restless sense of humour. Whilst it could not be said that Rumble Patrick made family history by being expelled from school it is certain that his career there ended prematurely, following a letter from the Headmaster suggesting that withdrawal would save everyone concerned a great deal of unpleasantness.

So Rumble came home at seventeen, puzzled but not deflated by the world’s rejection of his efforts to cheer it up and Paul was not surprised by the turn of events. Indeed, the surprising factor was that High Wood had tolerated Rumble so long.

And yet was it all that surprising? From earliest childhood Rumble Patrick Palfrey had been able (and that simultaneously) to bewitch and exasperate his peers and nobody knew this better than Claire, who had been slightly awed by the child ever since the day she had brought him to Shallowford after Hazel Palfrey had been run down and killed by the Army staff car. There was something demoniac about Rumble who was, as Mary once declared, half-cherub, half-poltergeist. It was as though, shortly before his birth, he had been given the rare privilege of assembling his own psychological make-up from material available from both sides of his family and had rejected all but the risible and the bizarre. He had, for example, a broad streak of urchin impudence, the legacy of Ikey’s Thames-side forebears and fused with this was the cheerful contempt for authority that had been a characteristic of the Potter clan for generations. This was by no means all. Woven into his character were the strands of Ikey’s objectiveness, Mother Meg’s pride, Old Tamer’s cussedness and Uncle Smut’s initiative, all subject, it would seem, to a belief that every day was April Fool’s Day. It added up to a most engaging personality but one that offered certain problems to those charged with fitting him for a career in a competitive world.

Paul had sent him to High Wood out of habit. Neither Ikey nor Simon had taken kindly to the credo of the late Doctor Arnold of Rugby, and whereas The Pair had distinguished themselves at games, both had failed the Junior Cambridge examination three times in a row, having taken six years to grind from Second Form to Lower Fifth. With the arrival of Rumble Patrick in 1926, however, High Wood faced an altogether sterner challenge. By the time Rumble was fourteen his explosive energy had settled into a deadly rhythm that expressed itself in volleys of elaborate practical jokes, many of which would, no doubt, become hallowed by tradition but at the time of launching did nothing for the peace of mind of the staff.

It would be unprofitable to list the efforts of Rumble Patrick Palfrey to enliven the school’s day-to-day life. They began, conventionally enough, with run-of-the-mill pranks—the sudden elevation of the chalk on a length of thread suspended across the blackboard, the insertion of a dead rat under the teacher’s rostrum, the ghostly creakings of an isolated upright piano moved on to the edge of a warped floorboard shortly before Speech Day ritual began, the organic rumblings in blocked hot water pipes to illustrate a geography lesson about earthquakes and so on, but it was soon evident that Rumble was warming up for the big league, in Middle School. At fifteen he abandoned this kind of nonsense to the professional time-wasters, devoting himself to the planning and execution of more ambitious diversions and the inspiration of some of them must have derived from long-dead ancestors, jesters and tumblers in medieval Hungary perhaps, passed onto him by his emigrant grandmother. He was not only as good a mimic as his father had been but a better actor and was able, by the exercise of some strange Jekyll and Hyde alchemy, to assume all manner of personalities with the minimum of disguise. His voice had a wide range, his soft, cherubic features astonishing mobility and he was, above all, a persuasive salesman of comic ideas. There was never any malice in his jokes but his intense curiosity to witness what would occur if a certain number of actions were put into effect sometimes produced alarming results, as when he opened the sluice-gates of High Wood’s millpond and flooded a road to the depth of two feet or when, in less desperate mood, he persuaded the village signwriter to paint and erect a large board advertising an isolated section of school property for sale by public auction. Sometimes he would operate as leader of a band of jokers but more often he would work alone, as when he disguised himself as a grizzled labourer and rode about the country all one Sunday on a Douglas motor-cycle owned by the school cricket coach. He took his inevitable punishments cheerfully enough, counting them mild in exchange for the entertainment they represented, and for all his crazy unpredictability and nuisance value he somehow contrived to remain popular with the staff, even the Headmaster, who sat down to write his ultimatum to Paul with reluctance, reasoning perhaps, that life at High Wood after Rumble Patrick’s departure would be restful but dull. The letter was sent the day after Rumble, disguised as a deputy Stationmaster, sent the school eleven on a cross-country trip to Cornwall when they should have been playing away to Somerset Stragglers. In writing to Paul the Head admitted that ‘the boy could, if trained and tamed, prove a credit to himself and family’ but honesty compelled him to qualify this by adding ‘he might find it difficult to adjust in a society where the patterns of general behaviour were already established’, which Paul took as a hint to despatch Rumble Patrick to an outpost of the Empire where his originality would have free play among the primitives.

The day Rumble and his school trunk returned to Shallow-ford Paul left word that the boy was to report at once to the library. He did not consult Claire on the matter, knowing that she had long since succumbed to Rumble’s spell. In any case he always hated these occasions which embarrassed him and left him with a feeling of inadequacy as a father. When Rumble arrived, however, he saw at once that the boy was determined to make things as easy as possible, for he entered with Ikey’s engaging grin and said, without preamble and without hypocrisy, ‘I’m sorry I let you down, Gov’nor, but you don’t have to involve yourself any more you know. After all, I’m not a kid any more.’

Paul looked at him as he stood by the tall window and found himself comparing the boy to Ikey in his scrapyard days. He had Ikey’s sense of detachment and Ikey’s small, neat head but his frame was all Potter, sturdy, thick-set, suggestive of speed as well as power. He thought, sadly, ‘I wonder what the devil poor old Ikey would have made of him? Or Old Tamer, his grandfather?’ and his spirits lifted somewhat when he recalled that on both sides of his family Rumble had heroes of a kind and stamina that ought to be good survival currency in a world drained of security by the demands of the last sixteen years. He said, with more curiosity than reproach:

‘Why is it you prefer to live in hot water, Rumble, when most chaps your age are content to take a dip in it now and again?’ and the boy answered, with unexpected promptness, ‘The world is so lopsided, Gov’nor. Everyone is tearing themselves to pieces looking for answers and all they come up with are more and more questions!’ and he looked across at Paul shrewdly, as though it occurred to him he would have to elaborate a little if he was to make his point but Paul understood, having not only known and reared Ikey, but also observed Hazel when she was running wild in the woods. He meant, of course, that most people were so reluctant to laugh at themselves and that Rumble’s pranks were no more than an attempt to redress the balance.

‘Everybody’s finding life pretty tough these days, Rumble, and they aren’t all endowed with your kind of bounce. The point is, what the devil am I to do with you now? You can’t earn a living pulling people’s legs! Your father was a rare handful but at least he compromised and made a success of the Army. Suppose I passed you on to a crammer’s? Would you promise to stop acting the goat for once? It’s high time you did, you know!’

The boy, serious for once, said, ‘Simon and The Pair have gone off and only the girls are left. It must be a bit frustrating for you, Gov’nor—to have no one to carry on, I mean.’

‘You think you could make a career of farming?’

‘I wouldn’t want to step in ahead of them, it wouldn’t be fair, would it?’

‘Then what?’

‘I’d like to get out and about for a couple of years. Not like Simon—politics are a fearful bore—and not like Steve and Andy either, for I’d make a fearful hash of a commercial career. I mean
really
out and about; overseas.’

So here it was again; none of them had a particle of affection for the Valley. All they wanted was to escape as from a noose that threatened to throttle their initiative. They saw him, one and all, as an anachronism, clinging to a way of life that had begun to wither as long ago as the summer of 1914. The conviction that this was so made him feel defeated and old beyond his years.

‘Have you anywhere particular in mind?’

‘Yes,’ said Rumble, unexpectedly, ‘I’d go to Australia first. There was a chap I was friendly with at school, a fellow called McPherson, whose pater had a sheep farm inland from Brisbane. He was always keen for me to visit and I’ve heard from him lately and the offer is still open. It’s a big place, Queensland.’

Paul glanced down at the Headmaster’s letter and remembered the hint,’ . . . a place where the patterns of behaviour were not fully established . . . ’ Claire wouldn’t like it, or Mary, who, of all his children, had been the closest to Rumble. Yet the idea had obvious advantages. Australia was probably populated with unconventional people and any one of the numerous Diggers he had met in France during the war would be more than capable of knocking commonsense into the boy with the flat of his hand. Maybe a year or two roughing it among strangers was what he needed and yet, with Simon and The Pair already gone, he was reluctant to help empty the Valley of young men. He said, resignedly, ‘Check on that invitation, it might have gone cold; in the meantime I’ll think things over but while I’m doing it for God’s sake try and keep out of trouble, Rumble!’

Suddenly the boy was himself again, mischief sparkling in his eyes, so that Paul, recalling Ikey’s impudence, hardly knew whether to laugh or clout him across the head as he rushed into the hall calling to Mary. Paul heard his daughter’s joyous shout from the top of the stairs and then, as she relayed the news of Rumble’s home-coming to her sisters, a rush of feet across the landing. He went out of the garden door and down the drive to see Maureen, who had always shown a great interest in Rumble Patrick, but she only gave the advice he expected.

‘Damned good idea!’ she said. ‘Head him that way and don’t let Claire or the girls talk you out of it!’ and when he protested that all the young to whom one might look for succession were leaving the Valley, she added, ‘
He’ll
come back! That one will always come back! Too much of his mother in him to stay away long!’ and went briskly about her business, leaving him to reflect glumly that she herself had not been much help since John had died and her own boy had gone off to study medicine in Dublin.

These days he was beginning to feel more and more isolated, more and more turned in upon himself. The decade that had closed with the death of old John, his chief confidant, had not only deprived him of all three of his sons but several of his intimates, men like Arthur Pitts, of Hermitage, and his dour father-in-law Edward Derwent, who, on his son buying the freehold of High Coombe, had deliberately placed himself beyond the sphere of interference by moving into a quayside cottage overlooking Whinmouth harbour. Mary, the dreamer of the family, kept to herself when she wasn’t mooning after Rumble Patrick and even Claire seemed to have withdrawn from him a little as her two younger daughters claimed more of her attention, Whiz with her eternal round of gymkhanas and hunter trials, the youngest with the business of growing into the most sought-after adolescent within riding distance. Sometimes, as today, he was very sorry for himself, wishing the whole boiling of them would give him leisure to concentrate on his own concerns while making themselves available to help form a decision once in a while. He went down the river road a mile or so and for once found a little comfort in the distant prospect of Henry Pitts hup-hupping his three-horse plough team across the red down-slope of Undercliff, the farm’s southernmost field. He stood leaning on a rail watching Henry’s broad back from a safe distance, reflecting how often and how. fruitlessly he had tried to talk him into selling his horses and buying a tractor like Francis Willoughby, Eveleigh’s foreman, and Brissot, the cork-footed co-tenant of the once sterile Potter holding. ‘Well,’ he told himself, as Henry dragged his team round and came back towards him, ‘there’s one thing that won’t change—Henry’s methods of husbandry and his hatred of “buddy contrivances”!’ and although he had no wish to talk to Henry today the sight encouraged him to make his way to French Wood, a direction he often took when he was in the dumps.