Post of Honour (55 page)

She did see it and gave him credit for his sagacity. Until then her sense of deprivation had been so personal that it had never occurred to her that he might be making a deliberate or half-deliberate sacrifice, and the realisation enlarged him enormously. She said, with awe in her voice, ‘Then you aren’t really so . . . 
keen
to go, Rumble?’

‘Keen?’
He sounded outraged. ‘Leaving
here
?
Why, turning my back on this place is the hardest thing I’ve ever done or ever will do! And there’s more to it than that too! Leaving you makes it that much harder. The Valley is my home and you’re the one person that makes it so, and it’s never been any other way with me, although I don’t think I understood that until a week or two ago, until . . . well . . . until I’d burned my boats!’

There was sweetness as well as pain in his declaration, a sweetness that seemed to rend her and gush into her breast so that she reached out and took both his hands and held them tremulously. In the pincer grip of fear and relief she was unable to utter a word of protest or pleasure and they sat there on the many-ringed stump, linked less by physical contact than by the intensity of their emotions, by a tangle of ties reaching back to their earliest childhood compounding all the days they had spent together soaking up sunshine and drinking wind and rain. It was a magic moment, less transitory for her than for him, for now, out of understanding, came reassurance of a kind and a conviction that, if a person as splendidly resourceful and enterprising as Rumble could travel to the ends of the earth, he might well find his way back again, so that this might not be the end of everything but a beginning. She said, in a steady voice, ‘I love you, Rumble! I want you to know that I love you and could never love anyone else, could never want anyone else to touch me, you understand?’ and as she said this she thought fleetingly of Bob Halberton’s prying hands on the night of the dance and was conscious of a release from shame, as though Rumble’s touch had exorcised an unwholesome memory and restored tranquillity to her being.

He looked at her in a way that he had never done in the past. There was joy in his glance but apprehension also, as though he welcomed her pledge but doubted her strength to make it good against the demands of time and distance. Then he raised his hand and touched her lightly on the cheek and in the shy gesture was all she needed to know, at all events for the present, until she had leisure to contemplate this moment of time in privacy. He kissed her mouth so gently that she was half afraid to return the kiss but did so with hardly less restraint, and it was a bestowal that must have liberated him from the silence of wonder, for he said, stroking her hair, ‘I’ve thought of this, Mar. Many times! I’ve imagined it but that’s as far as it went. It’s late enough in the day for us but it has happened, and I suppose that’s the important thing!’ And then, nerving himself, ‘But it doesn’t bind you, Mar! You must understand that! It mustn’t spoil things for you after I’ve gone!’

‘But I want it to bind me, Rumble,’ she said, fervently. ‘I wouldn’t want to remember it any other way and I don’t care for how long, you understand? I don’t care any more!’

They sat through the last moments of the short winter’s afternoon, saying little of any consequence, too shy now to do more than utter short, broken sentences about letters, pledges, promises and a raggle taggle of trivialities, but for Mary all the stresses of the last few weeks had been eased, like the slackening of a cable hitching her to a drag-load of despondency and deprivation. She wondered, as they went hand in hand up the escarpment to the slope above the house, whether anyone would notice and comment on the change in her when they assembled for high tea but decided that she did not care a rap if they did.

Nobody exclaimed. They were all too concerned with the ritual of his departure and in any case it would be days before the great change in her advertised itself in an added brightness of the eye, a lightness of step or a tendency to hum a tune instead of taking up a challenge thrown down by Whiz or young Claire. By that time he was gone and they had received his first card posted at Lisbon. Claire read it aloud and Paul, catching Mary’s eye and seeking confirmation of his thoughts in French Wood back in the summer, was reassured by what he saw, or thought he saw, thinking, ‘Well, she seems to have reconciled herself to his going after all! I daresay I was imagining something that wasn’t there,’ and he dismissed the subject, forgetting it in a welter of new troubles. It was some time before he realised that he had been right after all.

III

T
he seasons had their cycles and the years their rhythms, a small graph within a larger one that was then caught up in the rhythm of the world outside. There were good years and bad, years recalled with laughter and others with memories that the people of the Valley stowed away like limber to take out only in times of prosperity and good cheer. The war years fell into this grouping but even these had faces that reflected an odd note of laughter or excitement, like the arrival of the first aeroplane in the Valley, or the ripple that ran down the Sorrel when news came that Smut Potter had returned from the dead. Some of the slump years had this same, mitigating sparkle. The year 1926, when prices were down and foot and mouth rampant and the general gloom was relieved to some extent by the astounding news that Francis Willoughby had won a national cattle award and was taking one of his bulls all the way to the Argentine. Paul watched these rhythms closely and sometimes wrote of them in the estate diary, jotting down forecasts between solid wedges of Claire’s trivia, and his extreme sensitivity regarding all things pertaining to the Valley regulated his alternating moods of optimism and pessimism, particularly round about January, the bleakest time of year. He would say, ‘This year will be good in most respects . . . ’ or, ‘This year’s damp is already in my bones . . . !’ pretending that his barometer was the wound in his knee, or the small crater in his temple where the last piece of shrapnel had been extracted in 1918, but this was only a family joke, like his ‘Tudor look’. His gift of local prophecy, if indeed he possessed one, was geared to a far more complicated machine assembled from the cogs and wheels plucked from the years, from signs and portents passed to him by gypsy Meg, or by weather sages like Arthur Pitts and old John Rudd, but even Paul himself never mastered the art of starting or stopping this machine at will. It seemed to generate itself and run on through a given number of revolutions and when at length it stopped of its own accord he knew they were all set for one of their unmemorable spells, when things were neither good nor bad and the seasons came and went unnoticed.

The machine began to roll in the first week of January, 1931, and its whining was so urgent that he was worrying hard before the year was forty-eight hours old, the nag setting him reading through the pages of the diary as far back as 1904 when the new year had opened with the Codsall tragedy and the tempo built to the whirlwind of Grenfell’s first victory and Grace’s flight. Perhaps it was the vivid memory of this time, and its link with the first event of 1931, that put him on his guard, for just as the bumpy run of 1904 began at Four Winds, so the 1931 run of bad luck began with an event that left Four Winds masterless and laid open the flank to the west. It was a vulnerable flank, particularly since Elinor Codsall had given up and Periwinkle had gone derelict, for although in the east High Coombe had been pinched out by the sale of freehold Paul never considered this as a sign of impending dissolution. Hugh Derwent was his own brother-in-law and also a first-class fanner. It did not matter if his land had been erased from the estate map for Hugh had told Claire more than once that he was unlikely to marry now and he had no kith or kin other than the Craddock children, and his childless sister, Rose. To the west, however, it was another matter. Not only was Four Winds the largest and most prosperous farm of the original six, it was also the closest to Nun’s Bay shantytown and the proposed route of the coastal road to Coombe Bay. Failure, or withdrawal in this direction might mean all manner of things and could not be shrugged off like the break-up of Periwinkle in the north-west. Four Winds was a bastion in the economy of the estate; it needed a strong man in possession.

It was with these thoughts that Paul, learning of Norman Eveleigh’s second stroke on January 3rd, threw a saddle over the skewbald and took the shortest route to the gate in the park wall. It was the route, he reminded himself, that he and Ikey had taken the night he answered a previous summons to Four Winds when Norman Eveleigh, tousled but cool-headed at three in the morning, had recommended himself as a likely successor to the man hanging in the barn. Now, according to Marian, Eveleigh was done for, lying in the kitchen where he had been carried by two of his men after collapsing in the yard an hour or so before whilst clearing a blocked drain. He did not recognise anyone, not even his wife, but lay on a makeshift bed staring up at them with uncomprehending eyes. The thick fingers of his left hand twitched and his left leg kicked but these were the only movements he made when Doctor Maureen peeled off his long, woollen pants and probed the flesh. Marian stood beside the log fire and old Ben, Eveleigh’s aged pigman, remained in the doorway, twisting the ends of his white moustaches in embarrassment at witnessing the sudden helplessness of a man he had feared and respected for more than thirty years.

‘Will us get un upstairs?’ Marian asked, after Maureen had finished her examination. ‘Us coulden manage it at first but I daresay us could now, tho’ he’s a tumble weight.’

‘He’ll do here for the time being,’ Maureen said and then, without lowering her voice, ‘I’m afraid this is it, Marian!’ and when Eveleigh’s wife shot her a look of reproach, added, ‘He can’t hear and he can’t see much either. Maybe the difference between light and dark with his left eye but no more.’

Marian’s face crumpled and she began to sniff so that Maureen at once summoned Debbie, Eveleigh’s unmarried daughter, telling her to look after her mother. Paul said nothing but remained after Debbie, Marian and Ben had left the room. The hulk on the makeshift couch was enough to depress anyone who had known Norman Eveleigh in his prime, a tireless machine that could harvest round the clock, and milk faster than anyone in the Valley, a man to whom hard and regular toil was the breath of life, so much so that he had somehow carried on after his first stroke years ago and still managed a better day’s work than some of the younger hands who had come to the Valley since the war.

‘I’d sooner see him dead!’ he said suddenly. ‘He’d have wished it, I can tell you that!’

‘Most people wish it,’ Maureen said, repacking her bag, ‘but we have to take what comes our way. We were right about keeping him hard at work as long as possible. Any other finish would have been cruel.’ Then, straightening herself, ‘He was a damned hard man, Paul. Hard on himself and hard on everyone around him.’

‘He was a good farmer,’ Paul said, ‘and taken all round a good family man. I never regretted putting him in here after Codsall. It was one of the few times I followed a hunch and wouldn’t let John turn me aside.’

‘How old would he be?’

‘Sixty-seven,’ Paul said and she smiled, recalling that Paul and her John had vied with one another on knowing the exact age of everyone in the Valley. It was one of the small vanities they shared.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose you might say he worked himself into the ground but the older ones do, don’t they? There aren’t many of the originals left now, are there?’

‘There are none,’ he told her gravely, ‘but the farms of four of the six I began with have passed from father to son. That’s not a bad average and I’ll warrant it can’t be said of any other estate round here.’ He lifted Eveleigh’s hand, holding it for a moment and setting it down on the blanket when Eveleigh’s stare did not waver. ‘How long is he likely to last?’

‘Hard to say,’ Maureen replied, ‘but not long. We could get him into Paxtonbury Hospital if Marian prefers that. It’ll save her trouble for he’ll have to be nursed day and night. What do you think?’

She had grown accustomed to deferring to him on matters like this. The Valley people trusted her by now but not in the way they trusted him.

‘He ought to die here,’ said Paul.

‘But he won’t be conscious of where he dies and he’ll certainly survive longer in hospital if we can get him there.’

‘There isn’t any point in him surviving, Maureen, and no matter how stricken he is he’ll know if you shift him!’

‘How? He can’t see or hear!’

‘He can smell!’ Paul said, ‘and I don’t want him to go with the stench of a hospital in his nostrils! He’s one of us. Maureen, and he’d prefer to die on his own land.’

She did not argue with him; John had taught her that he knew all these people better than anyone alive and she was confident that he could handle Marian Eveleigh, a woman who had always accepted him as God’s deputy.

‘Very well, Paul, tell them to fix him up down here. It’ll kill him to be dragged up that stairway. I’ll look back tonight.’ She went out and climbed into her ramshackle car, touched by his sadness and finding in it confirmation of an accelerated rate of change and the merciless shift of pattern in their lives lately. Who would he get in Eveleigh’s place, she wondered? There was no son or son-in-law to follow on, for Gilbert, the only real farmer of the brood, had been blown to pieces practising with a short-fuse hand-grenade in 1916, and the eldest daughter, Debbie, was one of those Valley girls who preferred to go to their graves mourning a man killed in the war—who was it now?—one of the Marlowe boys, or Dave Williams, the fisherman? Well, that was Paul’s problem, she had plenty of her own with a mild ’flu epidemic on her hands and she slammed the car in gear and drove off towards Codsall bridge, noting that the river was high and that another day’s rain would flood the lower road as it usually did at this time of year.

Paul remained at Four Winds most of the morning, helping Marian and Debbie convert the kitchen into a sickroom but he was more concerned with the problem of succession. He said, when Norman had been made as comfortable as possible, ‘Do you suppose your youngest boy, Robbie, would be interested?’ and Marian said Robbie wouldn’t, he was far happier as a hunt servant whereas Harold, the second boy, was doing too well in the North to change his factory job for farming.