Post of Honour (6 page)

In September of that year, 1913, Squire Craddock, that resolute hater of motors, confounded his friends by buying one. He made the gesture on the occasion of his wife presenting him with another daughter and the Valley was never to forget the unlikely association of baby girl and horseless carriage, for it was perpetuated by a quip of that inveterate Valley joker Henry Pitts. On hearing of the simultaneous arrivals at the Big House, he exclaimed, ‘He give ’is missis a bliddy motor? For coming up with another maid? Well damme, I suppose he knows what he’s at, but it sounds to me as daft as namin’ the baby Whiz-bang!’ This comment soon reached the Big House where Paul, having been told by Maureen that the child’s arrival was the quickest on local record, said, ‘Well, maybe Henry’s hit on something! Let’s call her “Whiz”, since she obliged her mother and me to that extent!’ and from then on his second daughter (officially named ‘Karen’) embarked on life as ‘Whiz’, or ‘Whizzo’, just as the twins were known as ‘The Pair’, and Simon as ‘Si’; only Mary, now almost three and as pretty as a Devon violet, enjoyed the dignity of having her Christian name put into general use.

Claire had been very relieved by the child’s safe arrival, for the previous year she had had another miscarriage, her second in five years. Her tendency to miscarry worried her much more than it need have done. There were plenty of wives in the Valley (Maria Eveleigh for one) who welcomed an accident of this kind but Claire derived the deepest satisfaction from her ability to produce healthy, good-looking children and her joy in doing so was closely linked to her consciousness of intellectual inferiority to Grace. She always thought of herself as rather a ‘goose’, with no pretentions towards intellectual tastes and pursuits. She could play the piano by ear but that was the nearest she ever came to the arts. She seldom read anything but the country newspaper or the lightest of romances and thought Holman Hunt’s
Light of the World
as the last word in masterpieces. She could strum any number of ballads on the old upright piano but the thunder of Wagner, the phrasing of Mozart and Mendelssohn, meant far less to her than, say, a waltz by Johann Strauss, and although Paul was by no means artistic he had a very lively appreciation of current political issues and was a wide if undisciplined reader, particularly of eighteenth-century classics and modern history. He had also cultivated a taste for period furniture, English porcelain and pictures and over the years had gradually transformed the reception rooms, getting rid of most of the pieces he bought when he first came to Shallowford and replacing them with furniture in the Chippendale and Sheraton periods and beginning a modest collection of Rockingham, Worcester and Swansea china. What he did not know about these things he was prepared to find out so that Claire now thought of him as an intellectual which he was not and never would be but because it was important to him to stand well in her eyes he encouraged the fiction, pretending to an erudition that he did not in fact possess. Grace would have rumbled him in an hour but Claire was not Grace and thanked her stars that she was not. She was a woman who knew her limitations and cherished them, her vanity resting in her children and her face and figure, which she regarded as her dowry as far as Paul was concerned.

She had ample excuse for this. Her placidity, that concealed a strong vein of obstinacy, occasionally irritated him but physically he was more in love with her than he had ever been. He still thought of her as an exceptionally beautiful woman and told her so, several times a week, which possibly helped to explain why, at the age of thirty, she still looked twenty. A pedant would have described her as fresh, and perhaps pretty rather than beautiful; she still had her pink and white complexion, unremarkable blue eyes, a very ripe mouth with its rather sensual underlip, and her small, determined chin. She worried about putting on weight but her fears were largely imaginary. Despite four children in six years she retained a surprisingly neat waist and a high, shapely bust but by far her most remarkable feature was her high piled corn-coloured hair, of which she was as vain as the late Empress of Austria. When it was unpinned it reached as far as her buttocks and under lamplight it glowed like a river of gold. He was always encouraging her to display it and no miser derived more satisfaction from a hoard of guineas than Paul Craddock on one of these semi-ceremonial occasions. He would gaze at it and stroke it with boyish wonder and she would sit smiling a little self-consciously but basking in his admiration, telling him that they were really too old for this kind of nonsense, yet he was always immensely gratified by her complaisance, telling her at the time, or in retrospect, that she made herself available to him so often in order to flatter his masculinity and although this was said as a joke between them it was really no more than the truth, for at moments like this neither of them forgot the scars left on his pride by his first marriage. She had, however, developed a sure instinct about him. If things were going well an act of love between them was a celebration; but if things went awry her generous body was an instrument of solace. She may not have been as clever as Grace but she was much wiser and far better versed in the art of giving; her mind was uncluttered with theories and the sores of humanity and concentrated, in the main, upon enlarging him as a person.

There was little or no rhythm about their love making. He would be stirred by any number of tiny, inconsequential things, a cluster of stray tendrils on her neck that caught a gleam of winter sunshine, the slow ripple of her breasts as she reached up to put something in place and what was singular about her in this respect was that she never used the excuse of a task or appointment to bridle or postpone his demands but would say, with a frankness that amused him, ‘Now? Well really . . . !’ and would cease whatever she was doing and accommodate him, initially with an almost complaisant air but soon with a cordiality that began to manifest itself the moment he laid hands on her. In this respect, as in others, they remained lovers and were seldom conventional as regards time and place. If the impulse touched him after the children and servants had gone to bed and they were together in the library of a winter evening, they would sometimes repeat their impromptu encounter of Hermitage Hallowe’en night before the fire and whenever this happened the process assumed a kind of lighthearted, unselfconscious ritual, beginning with his leisurely undressing of her and praising of each part of her, as though to prolong the occasion as long as possible. There was a stage, however, beyond which she would show impatience and then, when they were still, she would pretend to a modesty and delicacy that she did not possess and never had possessed, and he would tease her unmercifully but secretly he was immensely vain of his ability to awake such unthinking response in her. Intimate moments such as these brought her a disproportionate satisfaction, for she too had her vanities and they concerned, as well as his delight in her body, his virility, a virility that seemed somehow to spring from the valley around him, as though he were able, by some acquired magic practised over the years to catch and distil the fecundity of the countryside, storing it in his loins to bestow upon her as proof of his achievement. This enormous gusto in him, this bonus bounty of the fields and woods he loved, was something she prized even above her children, for she was persuaded that it was something rare that neither Grace Lovell nor any woman in the Valley could have conjured from him. It was partly this naive pride in his masculinity that invested her with the power to match and surpass his easily aroused passion. She sensed that he possessed her not only as a woman but as the consuming instrument of his lust for life in the place he had made for himself in this gentle wilderness. She was a woman not much given to extravagant fancies but in this realm the wildness of her imagination had few limits. She saw herself then not as Claire Derwent, a farmer’s daughter married to a man who had purchased his place among them with pounds, shillings and pence, but as consort to an almost godlike being who used her flesh as an altar to express his strange obsession with the fruitfulness and timelessness of the Valley, with every flower and cornstalk that grew in it, and every human or animal who lived and multiplied hereabouts, and it was acute awareness of this that made her reckless of giving, so that she felt at times that she could never absorb enough of him or demonstrate how dedicated she was to the gratification of his senses. Eagerness to convey this, communicating itself as it did to every nerve in her body as she enfolded and enclosed him sometimes half-stupefied him with delight.

And yet, in more mundane spheres, there were times when she called the tune, when an issue arose that encouraged her to make a stand and whenever this happened, when she once made it clear that she was determined to have her way, she could usually influence him without much trouble. This had been so in the case of Simon’s renunciation of hunting and like matters but perhaps her most signal victory was in respect of the car he brought home on the occasion of the birth of ‘Whiz’.

It was a 1911 Belsize, a great, square, brass-snouted monster, purchased second-hand from a Paxtonbury draper who had lost his nerve on the second outing and left it unused in his coach-house for almost two years. Paul decided to buy it after hearing Claire say it was a pity the family could never travel far afield as a group and after getting Frisby, the Paxtonbury coach builder, to service it and give him a few lessons in driving he piloted it home across the moor in dashing if somewhat erratic style, deriving unexpected pleasure out of his mastery of the brute and causing Eveleigh’s foreman, who saw him come bouncing down from the water-shed, to run up the hedge in alarm, scarcely able to believe his eyes when he recognised the driver.

About a fortnight after Claire had come downstairs he suggested a family expedition into Paxtonbury and after some hesitation Claire got the elder children ready, veiled herself in a beekeeper’s bonnet and they set off, little Mary sitting between Paul and Simon in the front, Claire and the exuberant twins in the back. Simon, holding Mary’s hand to give her confidence, looked very solemn but the Pair squealed in unison when Paul clashed the gears at the foot of the drive and wedged the lever into its tortuous gate, so that the Belsize (christened The Juggernaut by Claire) leaped forward like a steeplechaser and came to a shuddering halt between the stone pillars.

‘Are you sure you can manage it, Paul?’ Claire asked anxiously and he said huffily that he certainly could for how else could he have driven the fifteen miles from Paxtonbury? He got out and swung the heavy starting-handle and soon they were moving at a steady twenty miles an hour along the river road, past the Home Farm, where one of the biblical shepherds swung his hat and cheered, past Codsall Bridge, where Eveleigh’s cows turned tail and stampeded across the water meadow, then hard right up the unsurfaced incline to the moor where, long ago, Martin Codsall had taken his wife Arabella on a John Gilpin’s ride to prevent her intervening at her son’s wedding. And here, almost at the top of the hill, the engine coughed and fell silent, so that they were poised on a gradient of one-in-six, with no room to turn and no hope of breasting the hill.

He climbed out again, assured them of his confidence in himself as an engineer and swung the startling-handle until the sweat ran down his face but nothing happened and Mary’s faith in her father’s infallibility faltered so that she began to cry. Simon did his best to comfort her, declaring that Father would soon have them on the move again, while the twins shrieked offers of help from the back but Claire held them back, privately regretting her share in sponsoring the expedition and reflecting that, apart from the baby safe in her cot, all her eggs were now wedged in a single, unpredictable basket. Paul said there was nothing for it but a careful reverse back to the river road, where, if necessary, Simon could run and borrow ropes and a pair of Eveleigh’s cart-horses.

He pretended to treat the matter as a great joke and had she been alone with him she might have humoured him but the safety of her brood was no laughing matter to Claire and she said, very sharply, ‘Wait then, while we all get out!’ and when the twins clamoured to remain she gave each a smart box on the ear that sent them scrambling on to the road, after which she opened the nearside front door and ordered Simon to bring Mary out and wait with the twins on the safe side of the hill.

‘Look here,’ Paul protested, ‘if I get her started I shan’t be able to stop again without the engine dying. Why can’t you stay put and wait for her to spark when I slam her in reverse?’ but Claire said firmly that her duty was to look after the children, and what he did with The Juggernaut was his business, so after telling her she was making an unnecessary fuss he released the brake, missed his gear again and zigzagged all the way down the hill backwards, his steering made wildly erratic by the pressure he was obliged to apply to the handbrake.

He got safely down and they followed him in a cautious group, finding his temper had not improved for he was using language that made the twins and Simon giggle and Mary glance fearfully at her mother. Claire said then that she would walk the children home and send Honeyman out with two cart-horses and ropes but Paul, declaring that such mass desertion would make him the laughing stock of the Valley, ordered them to remain, saying that all he needed was a shove along the flat. An open quarrel was narrowly averted by the timely arrival of Tod Glover, an engaging nineteen-year-old who was Old Honeyman’s nephew and had recently forsaken the land to work for a Whinmouth hackney-carriage proprietor owning an eighteen-seater charabanc. Tod, cycling back from the Whinmouth direction, at once offered his services, inspecting the Belsize with the respect his ancestors would have reserved for its owner. As the only man within artillery range with the rudiments of a mechanical training Tod was regarded as the Valley witchdoctor and Paul welcomed him as the one person capable of rescuing his dignity. The lad had the bonnet cover off in a trice and after tinkering for some moments, and giving the handle a swing or two, he said, with a grin, ‘All she needs is a drink, Squire! When did you last fill her up?’