Post of Honour (56 page)

‘You can’t blame him for that,’ Paul grunted but he could see they were worried about their future and said, hoping to reassure them, ‘Don’t think I’ll ever send you packing, we’ll think of something. In the meantime you had better let Rachel know and see if you can get her home to take her turn at nursing. Someone will have to sit with him night and day and there are only two of you.’

He went out and rode slowly down the track to the river road, unable to shake off his gloom. Eveleigh’s death had not been entirely unexpected but it was a pity that it had to happen now with skilled labour so scarce, all the younger men drifting into the cities, and the Valley feeling the pinch of war-time losses more sharply than at any time since the Armistice. What a splendid thing it would have been if young Gilbert had been there to step into his father’s place or, failing that, his own son Simon bring Eveleigh’s daughter home and work out an apprenticeship at Four Winds under Marian’s experienced eye? He thought, savagely, ‘Damn the younger ones! Where’s the sense in them turning their backs on the land and joining the bloody dole queues in the city?’ and then it occurred to him that this was unfair because the natural successors were not children who had grown up in the last decade but those who lay in graveyards all over France and the Near East. Who could blame their younger brothers and sisters for seeking a more rewarding life than that of the hulk sprawled in the kitchen at Four Winds, used up at the age of sixty-seven? One needed to have had a glimpse of what the Valley could offer in pre-war days before one could be reconciled to the sweat and grind of the job. Maybe, after all, he had it wrong and his sons, and young sparks like Rumble Patrick, had it right; maybe The Pair had talked sense when they described farming in England as a dead duck.

In the event Eveleigh lasted no more than a month and they buried him a pebble-toss from old Willoughby, Tamer Potter and Arthur Pitts. All the family were briefly united for the funeral and Paul had a word or two with Harold, the second boy, now in his early thirties and serving as Welfare Officer (whatever that was) at a jam-making factory in Manchester. He looked, Paul thought, an odd man out among Valley mourners, in his neat black overcoat, trilby hat and striped pants. Paul asked him how he was doing and he said, wryly, ‘Oh, so-so, Mr Craddock! There’s a hell of a lot of unemployment up there but I’m on the permanent staff, thank God! I cashed in on the welcome-home-the-heroes boom in 1919 and flashed my ‘accustomed-to-handling-men’ qualifications under their noses! I had damn all else to offer, except a good line in killing Turks!’ Paul also had a chance to meet and reappraise Rachel, his daughter-in-law, but found to his dismay that both Simon and his wife bored him with their clichés and endless chatter about the dictatorship of the proletariat and the various manifestations of the class-struggle. ‘Don’t they ever come down off the bloody platform and become human beings?’ he complained to Claire, after Simon and Rachel had rushed north again to take part in yet another bye-election but Claire only chuckled and said, ‘They’ll get over it, poor dears. They are talking about adopting a child so all we have to do is to wait until the proletariat has to be fed at four in the morning!’ and privately he thanked God for her commonsense and was ashamed of his own intolerance. Then, as March came round, he was sucked into the political maelstrom himself, for Jimmy Grenfell, Liberal Member for the Paxtonbury Division since half-way through King Edward’s reign, announced that he would not stand again when the present Parliament dissolved and intended to devote what remained of his life to writing a history of the Chartist Movement, a task that seemed to him more rewarding than shoring up a Labour Minority led by the Duchess-kissing Ramsay MacDonald, now a prisoner of the Tory Opposition. Paul, who hated abrupt changes of any kind, was shocked by his decision.

‘Who the devil can we find to take your place, Jimmy?’ he grumbled. ‘I’ve looked to you as our spokesman up there ever since I came here.’

‘Why don’t you stand yourself, Paul?’ Jimmy said but only in jest, for he knew that his backer would as soon go and live in Hong Kong as spend most of his time in London.

‘We’ll lose that seat if a Socialist makes a three-cornered fight of it,’ Paul warned him but Grenfell said, dryly, ‘We’ll lose it anyway. The Tories are putting up a local man, a real local, not a phoney like they have in the past.’

‘Who?’

‘You know him; a young speculator called Codsall, the son of one of your former tenants, I believe.’

‘
Sydney
Codsall? That young bastard? You must be joking!’

‘I’m not joking, they’ve had their eye on him ever since he got on the County Council a year or so back.’

‘Then we have to find someone with an even chance of beating that young scoundrel,’ Paul declared and his emphasis puzzled Grenfell for it had seemed to him that Paul had been losing interest in politics of late. ‘He’s the man behind everything shoddy round here and he doesn’t know a damned thing about representing an agricultural constituency! He’s a small-town shyster on the make and I’ve known him since he was a child. Even then he was a slippery little swine!’

‘They say he’s made a pile,’ Grenfell said. ‘Is that true?’

‘I daresay, he’s dabbled in jerry-built property and runs a quarry over beyond High Coombe. He had hopes of ‘developing’ Coombe Bay, God help us, but I’ve scotched that by blocking his direct access to the sea.’

‘Maybe that’s what set him on his way to Westminster,’ said Grenfell, grinning. ‘You’d be surprised what they get up to there nowadays, It’s one of my reasons for getting out.’

‘You’re absolutely resolved on it, Jimmy?’

‘Yes I am,’ said Grenfell and gave Paul a narrow glance. ‘You’ve taken a beating since the slump set in and your boys went off. Could you take another wallop?’

‘You’ve decided there’s no alternative to Tories and Socialism?’

‘No,’ said Grenfell, ‘nothing so drastic. That last time I was in dock—just before the last General Election—I asked them to give it to me straight. They did! Cancer! I’d like to have a crack at something creative before I go.’

It should not have been much more of a shock than Eveleigh’s stroke. For a long time now Claire had been worried about Jimmy Grenfell’s health and his spells in hospital, but Paul, regarding him as a frail man but knowing him for a fighter had never shared her concern, certainly not to the degree it merited. Grenfell gave him a moment to ride out the punch and said, placidly, ‘I told Claire months ago and advised her to keep it from you. I didn’t really believe she would but I see I misjudged her. Come now, it’s not all that much of a shock. You knew I’d never make old bones and I’m pretty well satisfied with the run I’ve had for my money.’

‘How long did they give you?’ Paul asked, feeling like a child in the presence of Jimmy’s size and toughness.

‘Oh, they blathered about another operation,’ Grenfell said, ‘but who the devil wants to die the death of a thousand cuts in a clinic noisy with lamentation? I’m like your old friend Eveleigh, I prefer to die on my feet. However, I might as well choose the locality and I’m damned if I want to spend my last few months listening to professional liars like Stan Baldwin and Ramsay. They’re all pitiful when you measure ’em against real men, chaps like Asquith, Grey, Haldane and even poor old Bonar Law. Post-war change isn’t limited to the Valley, Paul. You’d have to face it no matter where you went.’

‘What are your plans, Jimmy? Will you wait for another election?’

‘Oh yes, it’ll be this autumn in my view and I need daily access to the Public Record Office and the library of the House while I finish my research. This book means a lot to me, Paul. I’ve been at it, off and on, for ten years. After that, I’ll find somewhere down here and watch the sunset.’

‘You’ll watch it from Shallowford,’ Paul said, ‘and don’t let’s have any polite excuses! Claire would wish it, Maureen will be on tap, and the place has been half-empty since the boys left.’

Grenfell’s face lit up with pleasure. ‘You mean that? It isn’t a sympathetic reflex?’ and when Paul grunted impatiently, ‘Then I’d like that, Paul. It has shape, for in a way it all began in your library—that time I called uninvited, remember? And I’m not such a fool as to imagine I should ever have won the seat if I hadn’t had you behind me. I’ve never had more than a slim majority and it was made up of people who trusted me because they liked and trusted you. Will you write to me after you’ve talked to Claire? It’s her decision, you know.’

He talked to Claire that same night, anticipating her approval and getting it. She had always understood the strength of the bond between the two men and, like most of the women in the Valley, had long since succumbed to Jimmy Grenfell’s shy charm and integrity. She said, ‘He can have Simon’s old room. It faces south and is big enough to use as a study. He can do his writing there and come and go as he pleases by the garden stair. When will he move in?’

Paul said he thought after Parliament had dissolved for the summer recess but that between then and now they had to get busy looking for a challenger to Sydney Codsall’s pretensions. She said, with a yawn, ‘I wouldn’t try too hard, Paul. If Jimmy says he’ll get in he will. We only scraped home last time because of Jimmy’s personal following.’

‘But we can’t just hand that little bastard the seat on a plate! I’d sooner stand myself than let that happen!’

‘You won’t do anything so silly!’ she said emphatically and when, like a thwarted boy he challenged her, she got up and crossed to the rug, looking down at him with a mixture of sympathy and impatience.

‘You ask why? For any number of reasons! In the first place an MP has to spend at least half his time in London; in the second you don’t really give a damn about what happens outside this Valley and never have, but most of all because, as an MP, you’d lose the thing about you that’s more important to me and everyone else about here, that makes you different and easy to love!’

‘Now what the hell would that be?’ he demanded, laughing at her but she did not smile.

‘Your faith in people and your instinctive trust in them! You wouldn’t keep that once you started bandying words with that glib bunch! No, Paul, you can put that out of your mind, and Jimmy, Henry Pitts or anyone else with your true interests at heart will tell you the same if they’re honest!’ and she went off to bed, leaving him to ponder her advice by the fire. She was right, of course, and in any case, when it came to the touch, he doubted if his pride was equal to a defeat at the hands of a man like Sydney Codsall. It occurred to him, however, that she might be out-of-date in her estimate of human beings and Valley folk in particular. He still liked and trusted the hard core, men like Henry, Francis Willoughby, Sam and Smut Potter, and women like Marian Eveleigh and Martha Pitts, and even some of the latecomers like the French Canadian, Brissot, and his sky-larking partner, Jumbo Bellchamber, but he was not nearly so sure of the youngsters, of his own sons, of second-generation Potters and the Valley flappers who plastered their faces with make-up and seemed to spend most of their time waiting for the ’bus to Paxtonbury and Whinmouth. Sydney himself was of this generation, too young to have suffered in the war but old enough to join in the scramble for the wreckage of a civilisation that had once offered security and serenity to anyone who did not complain of an aching back or expect too much in the way of bonuses.

‘Well, I daresay she knows what she’s talking about,’ he thought, heaving himself up and shelving a final decision until he could assess the prospects of drumming up a candidate with a sporting chance. ‘Maybe most people see Sydney as I’ve always seen him and won’t take him too seriously.’

Some did, however, as he was obliged to admit before this year of setbacks had lurched into a crisis that rang alarm bells as far west as the Sorrel Valley.

Chapter Fourteen

I

P
erhaps the first of the Valley uncommitted to take a markedly serious view of Sydney Codsall was Hugh Derwent, freeholder of High Coombe.

No one had ever seemed to get the true measure of Hugh. At the age of fifty he was unmarried, seldom moved more than twenty miles east or west of the Bluff and was, in a sense, the Valley sphinx, a man who kept very much to himself and had no real friends, apart from Francis Willoughby, his next-door neighbour at Deepdene. Often enough his dogged neutrality puzzled Francis, who nevertheless ambled to Hugh’s defence when his name came up for periodical speculation in the bar of The Raven or the Paxtonbury cattle-market, those two changing-houses of Valley gossip.

Paul had confessed to Claire often enough that he had never been able to guess what her brother Hugh was thinking and Claire said this was not really surprising for Hugh had never had a thought at all but got by very well on instinct. He was a prudent if unenterprising farmer, without his father’s prickly pride, his sister Rose’s amiability, or his sister Claire’s natural sparkle and quick temper. In a sense, but without setting out to deceive or conciliate, Hugh Derwent was all things to all men. Some said he was ‘near’, which, in the Valley idiom, meant careful with loose change. Others said he was not mean, silent and withdrawn by nature but was exceptionally shy and shyness made him difficult to know. The children thought of him as even crustier than old Edward Derwent and kept clear of his neat fields but Francis Willoughby held Hugh was not so much crusty as lonely, and missed the bustle that had prevailed at High Coombe when Rose’s riding school had been based there and the place was always full of laughing girls and young men mooning after Claire before her elevation to Squiress. His purchase of the freehold from his brother-in-law, towards the end of 1929 surprised nobody, for it had long been known that all the Derwents were land-hungry. On becoming a freeholder, however, and taking over from his father, Hugh had withdrawn even more from his neighbours and although he gave them all the traditional Valley salute—a circular flourish of the right hand and a sound midway between a grunt and a cough—he rarely gave them anything else but went about his business with ponderous tread and level gaze. Paul, who had always been curious about him, occasionally plied Claire for information about his youth. Had he ever been any different? Had he ever shown an inclination to specialise, as had Francis Willoughby with his beef cattle? Had he ever fallen in love? To the last question Claire, taxing her memory, said there had been a phase in Hugh’s life when he was about nineteen when he had begun to brush his clothes, wear a necktie instead of a choker, and plaster his hair with grease and that these actions were outward manifestations of his obsession with Queenie Pitts, a cousin of Henry’s, who had spent summer holidays at Hermitage. But Queenie had married a sergeant of the Royal Marines, after which Hugh had reverted to his old morose habits and had seemed, she recalled, more relieved than heart-sore. What was Queenie Pitts like, he asked, and she said she was a plump, jolly girl, with Henry’s smile, lots of freckles and a propensity to say ‘Ooo-ahhh!’ in her earnestness to agree with everybody and keep the atmosphere congenial.

‘She sounds as if she might have done him a lot of good,’ Paul said and Claire agreed, adding that the Derwents were a warm-blooded lot and that Hugh’s moroseness was probably caused by his never having enjoyed a woman, for she was ready to swear he was still a virgin.

Virgin or not Hugh Derwent set Valley tongues wagging in the summer of 1931.

Francis Willoughby was the first to get an inkling of what was happening. He was crossing his top field adjoining Derwent’s land one day when he noticed a smart new car parked in High Coombe’s approach lane but did not remark on it until, on the third occasion it was there, he saw Hugh and Sydney Codsall emerge from the yard, stand talking for a moment and shake hands before parting. After Sydney had backed out he went along the hedge and called, genially, ‘What’s young Bighead after, Hugh?’ using the name Sydney’s detractors had coined for a son of old Martin, who had taken to wearing town clothes. To his surprise Hugh Derwent flushed, mumbled something noncommittal and at once withdrew, obviously disinclined to discuss the visit, but a surprise of a more dramatic nature was in store for Francis that week. A day or so later an earth-moving machine arrived in charge of a squad of Whinmouth navvies and began to bite into Derwent’s northern boundary hedge, clawing its way across two clover fields and swallowing soil and hedgerows like a starving mastodon let loose on the countryside. This was too much, even for an incurious man like Francis. He crossed over to High Coombe, sought out its master and said, with the resentment of a traditionist witnessing a landscape change, ‘What the hell be ’em about, Hugh? Be ’em laying a culvert or zummat?’

Hugh looked, he recounted later, very shifty but said, ‘They’m coming through, Francis! Tiz all zigned and zettled!’ and when pressed for more detailed information, admitted that he had sold a freeway connecting Codsall’s quarry and the main road north of Shallowford, to the cliff-top fields east of the Bluff. Francis was amazed and said so but Hugh, with a flash of Derwent temper, replied, ‘What business is it of anyone else? Tiz my land now and I paid for it!’ after which he stumped off and Francis, greatly troubled, pondered developments a day or two before seeking out Claire and telling her what was happening on the eastern edge of the Valley. He was prepared for indignation but not the dismay she displayed the moment he explained what was occurring.

‘You’re sure of this? Codsall’s men are actually working there now?’ and when he confirmed that this was the case and it looked as though the new road would pass within fifty yards of the farmhouse, she said, quietly, ‘Thank you, Francis! Don’t tell anyone else and be sure you keep it from Squire! I’m going over there right away.’

She was bumping down High Coombe approach track within the hour and found her brother drinking his morning cocoa at the kitchen table. He seemed displeased but not surprised when she burst into the room and sent his daily woman Flossie Waring packing, with a curt ‘Leave us, Floss!’

‘What the devil is going on here, Hugh?’ she demanded. ‘Have you leased Codsall a right-of-way, or have you been such a fool as to let him talk you into selling a strip?’

He said, with defiance that did not fool her, ‘He’s bought it! Paid a crazy price for it! It’s like I told Francis, tiz all zigned and zettled, and nobody’s business but mine!’

‘
What
is signed and settled?’

‘The sale! What else? I’ve done wi’ farming, drat it! I got more sense than any of ’em, I reckon.’

Claire was so appalled that she could only echo his words, the full meaning of which took some time to register. ‘
Done
with farming? What on earth do you mean “done with farming”? How can you be done with farming? You’re still here, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I won’t be, come Quarter Day! I’ll be long ways off and married too, mostlike.’

At any other time the mere possibility of her brother Hugh marrying, or even contemplating marriage, would have put every other thought out of her head but under the shock of his admission she let the incidental news pass as irrelevant and said, breathlessly, ‘Look here, Hugh, who do you think you’re fooling? Paul sold you the freehold because he knew you and Father always hankered after it! It was me who persuaded him and you can’t sell it, not even if you wanted to!’

He put down his mug and stood up. She had never realised how much weight had been added to his lumbering frame since the war. Today he looked gross and out of condition, and his eyes, which had always held a puzzled, slightly worried expression, were as cold and blue as a March sky. She said, with sudden concern, ‘What
is
it, Hugh? You aren’t sick, are you? If you are . . . ’

‘Never felt better!’ he said shortly, ‘nor more pleased wi’ meself! And tidden a particle o’ use asking me to change my mind because it’s like I said, all zigned and zettled!’

‘I keep asking you
what
is signed and settled!’ she almost screamed, and his rather pursey mouth twitched, almost as though he found her extreme exasperation amusing.

‘You’d better get it straight and go back so as your man can swallow it in one piece,’ he said. ‘It’ll be less sour than nibbling, piece at a time! Codsall been badgering me for more than a year to sell him Eight Acre and Top Warren. Offered me near as much for two meadows as I paid for the whole parcel. Well, I held him off until I run across Queenie—Queenie Pitts that was. She’s been a widow twelve years or more, did you know that?’

‘Never mind Queenie Pitts! Did you sell Sydney Eight Acre and Top Warren? Did you?’

‘Aye, I did,’ he said, watching her carefully, ‘and more!’

‘How much more?’

‘The whole of it.’

‘High Coombe? The
house
?
This
house?’

‘He woulden have it no other way, so we settled on Saturday.’

Suddenly her knees began to buckle and she half turned from him to sit on the end of the long oak bench running the length of the big refectory table. There wasn’t a thing about this kitchen that lacked association with her childhood, especially those years before the day they brought her mother into the yard and she saw her through the inglenook window, a bundle under a covering of coats. Sitting here, her head in a whirl and her body shaking, it was as though the most terrible moment of her life had returned to gloat and reduce her once again to a little ghost with two swinging plaits and pointed dancing shoes, worn for the first time that day in anticipation of Mary Willoughby’s Christmas party. She said, in a whisper, ‘Is it final, Hugh? There’s no crying off?’ and he answered gruffly that there was not, for he had made up his mind to change the entire pattern of his life and Codsall’s price was ‘the daftest ever paid for a Valley farm and likely to be ’till the crack of doom!’ The mention of money seemed to relax him and iron away some of his truculence, for he stood over her grinning and said, ‘Here, lass, what’s there to fuss about? I only sold what was mine since Father took himself off. Dammit, your husband would have sold at that price if he’d known about it!’

His reference to Paul restored to her the power of protest. She shouted, ‘That’s a damned lie, Hugh! Paul wouldn’t have, no matter what Sydney was offering!’ but his grin broadened so that suddenly he was no longer a paunched, balding man of fifty but a teasing brother, enjoying the time-honoured High Coombe game of ‘making Claire’s eyes spark’. He said, genially, ‘Now see here, Claire, what’s wrong with me sitting in a dish o’ cream for a change? You been squatting in one ever since you nabbed young Squire and Rose weren’t long following suit! Why damme girl, you’ve got pretty nigh the whole Valley under your hand, an’ Rose spends more on her hunters in one year that I earn in two! I’m gone fifty; I don’t want to stay an’ wear out, like old Norman Eveleigh yonder. Besides, like I said, I ran into Queenie, and she’s that bonny you’d never believe and her not a year younger’n you!’

It was his seeming inability to understand the nature of his betrayal that baffled her for when she turned away he grabbed her arm and she saw that he was holding up a snapshot for her inspection, almost as though he felt confident that she had only to glance at it to approve his act. She saw that it was a picture of a blowzy, smirking woman in a bathing costume, and although just recognisable as Queenie Pitts, it had little relation to the bucolic girl she remembered in her teens. It was inconceivable, she thought, that a cautious, unimaginative man like Hugh should be eager to exchange land he had farmed all his life for a late-flowering courtship with a fat, rather coarse-looking woman, but perhaps he did not see her as she was but as she had seemed to him the better part of thirty years ago. It was this that prompted her to make a final attempt to shame him if he was capable of being shamed. Behind him, hanging where it had hung throughout much of her childhood, was a large, oval-framed portrait of their mother, a picture sadly dated and taken God knows how many years ago in a Whinmouth studio, of a handsome, smiling woman, under a broad picture hat and wearing a blouse with leg-o’-mutton sleeves that looked like a pair of waterwings. She pushed past him and unhooked the picture, tucking it under her arm and making for the door but the action increased his truculence and he moved to stop her, shouting, ‘Now lissen here, Claire, tidden a particle o’ use your man storming over here, and making a scene . . . ’ but when she evaded him he followed her out into the yard, trotting alongside as she climbed into the car, started the engine and began to reverse rapidly up the lane. Tears blurred her vision so that she struck the bank more than once but she outdistanced him easily enough and swung into the Dell road, leaving him behind in a cloud of exhaust. She thought, ‘I’ve got to be the one to tell Paul! I won’t be answerable for what he might do if it passed to him as Valley gossip!’ and she calmed a little, pushing the car up the one-in-four gradient on the shoulder of the Bluff.