Post of Honour (57 page)

She found him in the Home Farm strawyard talking to young Honeyman and drew him aside, pouring out her tale and waiting for him to erupt. He did not; instead he heard her out, interposing one or two terse, factual questions about the farm’s conveyance, the proposed route of the new road and other aspects of the sale, questions that she was unable to answer. His voice was steady but she noticed that his cheek twitched when she repeated what Hugh had said about herself and Rose. Then, quite suddenly, she realised that he was not angry at all but was regarding her with sympathy, and his arm went round her as he led her to the far side of the rick, out of earshot of Honeyman and his men. He said, briefly, ‘You’re taking this on yourself, aren’t you? Well don’t! It was my decision to sell to your father and how the hell were you to know he’d pass it to Hugh almost at once? For that matter, how could you or anyone else anticipate a thing like this? The real wrong Hugh has done is not giving me a chance to buy it back again; I don’t care what that young bastard Codsall gave him, I would have covered it, even if I had had to mortgage the entire bloody Valley! However, it’s done and I don’t suppose it can be reversed at this stage—that depends on the conditions your father handed over to Hugh. I’ll drive over and see him right away and I’d prefer you not to come. Will you walk across the fields, or shall I ask Honeyman to run you home in the trap?’

‘I’ll walk,’ she said gratefully, ‘and . . . thank you, Paul!’ and she brushed his cheek. She wanted to say much more. She wanted to tell him he had never seemed so big or so dignified as at that moment, when it must have seemed that everything he had striven for over the years had been mocked and belittled but he turned and left her and a moment later was driving down the river road towards Whinmouth.

Edward Derwent was not at home when Paul knocked at the door of his quayside cottage but Liz told him that he had had a letter from the local solicitor that morning and it had seemed to upset him. He had gone out with his breakfast half eaten and that was unusual for he ‘did zo take to his bacon an’ eggs’. Paul said, ‘Where’s the nearest ’phone-box, Liz?’ and she pointed to one outside the harbour-master’s office no more than a step away, so he said good-bye and crossed the quay to telephone Snow and Pritchard, the firm the Derwents used on the few occasions they needed a lawyer. They told him that Mr Derwent had indeed called that morning but had gone again, they understood to visit his son. The information troubled Paul. He knew Edward Derwent for an impulsive man if his dander was up, so he jumped in the car and put his foot down all the way to the moor highway that linked up with the dust road running across the headwaters of the two rivers. It was the longest way round but the way the old man would have taken if he made the journey by trap, and he remembered that Edward Derwent neither hired cars nor drove them. He reached the junction of roads in half-an-hour and it was not until he was descending the hill that the sourness of Claire’s news rose in his throat, tainting his palate like bile. He had a swift and agonising vision of what the estate map would look like when Codsall had finished with High Coombe, had cut his road and blocked the whole eastern boundary of the estate with bungalows, quarry shacks and God knew what else. Shallowford would be punched into an ungainly figure eight, with ‘development’ reaching as far as the edge of the Dell and then all the way to the coast. Coombe Bay would change overnight, becoming, no doubt, a snappy little resort, with a prim promenade, shelters and ‘attractions’ of one sort and another, and whom would they attract? Not men with a craft at their fingertips, like old Tom Williams and Abe Tozer the smith but carloads of week-enders, strewing paper bags and cigarette packets all over the gutters and townees to man shops displaying mass-produced goods behind chromium-plated windows! Well, no one alive could stop it altogether, he supposed, but where was the sense in accelerating the process and this, it would seem, was what Sydney and his kind had in mind, and for no better purpose than to line their own pockets. God damn the lot of them, he thought, and especially that bloody traitor Hugh Derwent, and he swung the car off the road into a passing bay to allow the passage of a two-horse farm wagon approaching at a walk.

It was not until the vehicle had drawn almost level that he noticed the waggoner was Hugh Derwent himself, hunched on the box with the reins slack in his hand. He shot out his hand to open the offside door and leap out and then he stopped halfway out, checked partly by his brother-in-law’s dejected air but more so by a livid cut spotted with congealed blood on his cheekbone. He opened his mouth to say something but Hugh did not even glance at the car. In a moment the waggon had gone creaking on its way leaving a debris of twigs and leaves where it had brushed the nearside hedge. In another moment it had passed out of sight round the bend in the narrow track.

Edward Derwent was standing in the centre of the yard when he drove up, waiting beside the pump almost as though he expected him and Paul noticed that he looked very trim in his serviceable tweeds and the deerstalker he had affected since his retirement. ‘More like a retired colonel than a farmer,’ Paul thought, with a grin, and without knowing why suddenly felt a great deal more cheerful, although, from where they stood, he could hear the chink of spades on flint as Codsall’s workmen dug their way across Eight Acre. Paul said, ‘I saw Hugh near the crossroads and he looked pretty sorry for himself! You’re not going to tell me you thrashed him?’

‘I caught him one or two before he ran for it,’ the old man said but with no answering smile. ‘It’s damned lucky for him I brought this instead of a double-barrel!’ and he lifted a heavy walking-stick tipped with a brass ferrule. ‘I was coming over if you hadn’t shown up. Not that there’s much to say, you can’t do a thing to stop it, lad.’

‘I didn’t imagine I could,’ Paul told him. ‘I just hoped, I suppose. Claire was very upset. What happened exactly?’

‘I threw him off,’ the old man said, ‘the same as I would a poacher. Oh, he owns the place legally, at least until Codsall moves in on Quarter Day, but I told him if I found him about the place between then and now I’d shoot him, even if I had to hang for it! Aye, and I would too, that’s no boast!’ Paul said, quietly, ‘Is there a drink in the house? We could both do with one, Edward!’ and led the way inside, noting that the kitchen showed signs of a hasty evacuation, with dresser drawers open and furniture pushed to one side. Old Derwent went into the scullery and came back with a bottle of gin in one hand and an orange in the other and Paul watched as he poured two measures, sliced the orange with his penknife and squeezed a half into each glass. ‘That’s so like him,’ he thought. ‘The old boy has probably never heard of bottled fruit-juice of the kind they’ll soon be selling from kiosks in Coombe-Bay-on-Sea!’ and they sipped in silence. Paul said, at length, ‘Someone will have to tend the stock, Edward. Shall I tell your man Gregory to carry on?’

‘No,’ Edward said, ‘I’ll have a word with Gregory before I go to bed. I shall stay unto the last minute. I ought never to have left here; never!’ and his eyes ranged the room, stopping at the patch of discoloured wallpaper between window and fireplace.

‘Claire took it,’ Paul told him, ‘it was a gesture, I suppose, but I’ll ask her to bring it back when she comes over.

‘You never knew Claire’s mother, did you?’

‘No, she was killed a few years before I got here. She was very popular and very beautiful, I believe.’

The old man walked across to the slate hearth and stood with one arm on the mantel looking into the empty grate. Paul had always thought of him as a prematurely aged man; this afternoon he looked ninety, although Paul knew he was no more than seventy odd.

‘She was the pride of the Valley,’ Edward said. ‘To see her in full-cry was to see wind crossing standing corn, boy! Claire favours her in looks, and Rose in style, but neither one could hold a candle to Molly in her prime! Damned if I ever could understand what she saw in me. Thought about that many a time and never found an answer.’

‘I could give him one,’ Paul thought, ‘but it would only embarrass him. The readiness of a man ready to kill his only son for selling off land to a jobbing builder probably had something to do with it; that, plus his guts and integrity. With five men like him I could hold the Valley against all comers but there aren’t five, only three now—him, me and Henry Pitts. The reinforcements haven’t shown up so, from here on, it’s digging in and that’s an end to it!’ Something still puzzled him, however, and he said, ‘Didn’t Hugh fight back? He could have held you off with one hand and laughed in your face, Edward!’

‘He hasn’t a ha’porth of real guts,’ the old man said. ‘I don’t know how Molly and me came to spawn a boy like Hugh. Seems all our spunk went into the girls!’ And then, cocking an eye, ‘He’ll not show his face in the Valley again until I’m six foot under! You’d better warn Claire of that.’

‘She’ll lose no sleep over it,’ Paul said but the old man shook his head. ‘A family ought to stick together to the end. I always tried to teach ’em that after their mother went but I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.’

‘You didn’t,’ Paul said, ‘but I daresay Hugh did when that girl of his showed him her backside. There’s a lot of us who would like a chance to catch time by the tail and I suppose he sees the chance of doing it, or thinking he can,’ and as he said this he felt an alien current of sympathy for Hugh Derwent, remembering his own desperate loneliness after Grace had gone and before Claire took her place. He said, in an effort to cheer Edward, ‘I suppose we’ve got a lot to be thankful for. I could never bear a brother of Claire permanent ill-will and I’ll tell you something else too. Whatever I’ve managed to do here in the last quarter century I couldn’t have done without Claire, so you still have a generous share in it, Edward.’

The old man pushed himself off the mantel, turned and retraced his steps to the table and as he reached for his glass his moustache twitched. In a man of Edward Derwent’s temperament this was the equivalent of Henry Pitts’ braying laugh. He said, ‘I’ll tell you one thing young-feller-me-lad! When you first settled here I wouldn’t have wagered a flagon of cider on your chances! I was wrong about Hugh and wrong about you, so you can write me off as a dam’ bad judge o’ character! Nobody could have done more for this place and the way you’ve gone about it has been right—right all the way down the line, so don’t let that Martin Codsall’s boy or my boy, or any other Clever Dick tell you that isn’t so, now or ever! I’ll drink to you, lad, to get the taste of my own kin out of my mouth!’ and he drained the glass and began moving round methodically shutting drawers and straightening furniture.

‘Will you want your things sent over tonight?’ Paul asked and Edward said he would. Claire could telephone the harbourmaster and ask him to tell Liz to pack them up and get ready to move back.

‘Will she want to do that just for a few weeks?’

‘She’ll do as I bliddy well tell her!’ the old man retorted. ‘I’ve yet to get a back-answer from my second wife, although I got plenty from the first!’ He stopped what he was doing and looked at Paul. ‘Tell me, lad,’ he said, ‘have you ever had any tussles with my girl? I always reckoned she’d take some managing. Did you ever have call to belt her?’

‘Only once,’ Paul said, smiling, ‘and it was a long time ago. Maybe that once was enough.’

The old man looked at him with admiration. ‘I always did tell Willoughby and old Arthur Pitts that there was a deal more to you than you could tell by looking,’ he said, ‘so at least I was right about one thing!’

Paul left him on that and went out into the yard. The hot sun sucked humid steam from a neatly-piled stack of manure and already the farm seemed half-deserted. A dog was sound asleep over by the pump and a blue-check pigeon was the only moving thing between byre and house. From over the hedge came the persistent chink of spade and the rumble of a wheelbarrow rolling along a plant track. He looked over the wall beside the building where Rose had had her stables and saw a seam of earth glowing red, like the wound on Hugh Derwent’s cheek. A few workmen pottered to and fro and beyond was a man in town clothes setting up a surveyor’s tripod. He went back to the car and eased it along the lane until he could turn and then drove home, thinking not of the eastern defences, which had crumbled, but those in the west, of the deserted Periwinkle and the masterless Four Winds. ‘It’s time,’ he told himself, ‘we had a little luck but I daresay it will all run Sydney’s way until the election. After that who knows? Who knows anything at all?

II

B
y the time Quarter Day came round he had other things to think about and so, for that matter, had most people. The alarm bells of national bankruptcy were ringing in Fleet Street and urgency ruffled the bland voices of radio announcers so that even in the Valley, where people were very slow to panic, folk became aware of the crisis and the possibility of a general election, ‘To Give the Government a Mandate For Economy’. That, thought Paul, was how it was always projected, in stunning capitals, with the emphasis on what was expected from the governed rather than what could be expected from the governors. Henry Pitts must have noticed as much for one morning, meeting Paul on the river road, he shouted,’ ’Ave ’ee ’eard the latest, Maister? We’m goin’ broke, on account of all that bliddy cash you an’ me ’ave been sploshing about zince us was demobbed, backalong!’

That was about it, thought Paul. The men in charge muddled along, bickering one with the other and trying this and that expedient until the machine slithered to a halt. Then, like the feckless head of an improvident household, they announced that there would have to be a cut in housekeeping, sacrifices all round and no more pocket money for anyone. His cynical attitude towards politics, fostered by a decade of agricultural depression, had been deepened by the arrival of Jimmy Grenfell, with the benefit of thirty years’ close-range experience of professional politicians. Sentence of death had put a cutting edge on Grenfell’s sense of humour and he beguiled some of his sleepless hours in front of the library fire after Claire had gone to bed sketching for Paul a gallery of lively portraits of the shady, the earnest and the pompous with whom he had hobnobbed since he first entered ‘The Club’, as he called it, about the time the Tsar’s fleet fired on British fishing smacks in the belief that they were Japanese warships. Listening to him Paul began to doubt the practicability of democracy but when he admitted his doubts Jimmy only said, with a shrug, ‘There are really only two choices, Democracy and Muddle, or Dictatorship and Tyranny. I admit I’ve sometimes wondered which is preferable but I’ve always come down in favour of muddle, if only because it can always be temporarily tidied without a blood bath. I daresay we shall stagger on for another decade or so, but as for finding the right answers, as we believed ourselves capable of doing in 1906, that’s just a pipe-dream! The Holy Grail was lost long ago and it’s not likely to turn up in Westminster.’