Post of Honour (72 page)

‘What was that?’ piped Ellie but he replied, with one of his slow, rubbery smiles, ‘Mind your own bliddy bizness, Ellie! Tiz between me an’ Squire and I won’t tell ’ee till I ’ave a mind to!’ and he emphasised Valley dominance of male over female by the proprietary slap on the behind that made them seem man and wife already.

Paul declined an offer of Henry’s to run him back to the house, walking over the shoulder of Undercliff pasture to the slope below French Wood and congratulating himself on a good morning’s work, albeit one that would set him back by several hundred pounds. High Coombe was gone but Four Winds had been saved and Periwinkle was burgeoning under the hands of Rumble and Mary. Now Hermitage, always one of his favourites, had been insured against dissolution, so that, taken as a whole, the future was more promising than it had been for a long time. He stopped at the crest and looked down across the Valley. Next week, he remembered, there would be Silver Jubilee celebrations, and although it seemed probable they would lack the spontaneity (and certainly the imperial aggressiveness) of 1902 and 1911, official jollifications were at least evidence of continuity and that alone, in a rapidly changing world, brought him a measure of satisfaction. He felt the urge to hurry on home and write in the estate diary about proposed changes this side of the Valley and relief must have shown in his face when he appeared at lunch, for Claire greeted him with a cheerful, ‘What’s cooking? You look smug?’ and he replied, ‘I feel smug, and I’ve every right to! No one in this house ever has fully appreciated my stupendous talents as an arbitrator!’

IV

I
t was, one might have said, his Indian summer of smugness. With the Slump behind him and the family, apart from the baby, off his hands, even his feud with Sydney Codsall became almost extinct after the bricks of the bungalows on the eastern border had mellowed and the County Council (with whom Sydney seemed to have lost his grip) compelled him to shift the caravan park nearer the main road where it was screened, to some degree, by the tongue of the woods.

The Silver Jubilee celebrations were tepid judged by earlier and more robust jamborees, as though the British were honouring the royal family from habit. Public luncheons were eaten, races run, mugs distributed, loyal addresses delivered but purely local festivities had lost their appeal in an age when radios were switched on all day and there was a two-hourly ’bus service between Coombe Bay and Paxtonbury, and all the youngsters roared about the countryside on motor-cycles. People went further afield these days and looked for more sophistication in their leisure. There were two cinemas in Paxtonbury and one in Whinmouth, and their bills were displayed regularly in the window of Smut Potter’s baker’s shop, giving him and his French wife free access to Hollywood entertainment every day of the week had they cared to avail themselves of this tremendous privilege.

And yet the Valley remained a unit, buttressed in the east by dedicated, middle-aged men, like the cork-footed Brissot of Lower Coombe and Francis Willoughby of Deepdene, and in the west by the bastions of Four Winds, Hermitage and the resurrected Periwinkle. There was still no more than a wandering path along the dunes and over the goyles and liaison between the estate and the National Trust kept the great woods in being and the slopes of Blackberry Moor free of bricks and mortar.

On Midsummer’s Day, 1935, when all the Jubilee litter had been gathered up and burned, a casual perusal of the estate diary sent Paul off on one of his great circular sweeps, his first in a long time. He had been entering up after breakfast when something prompted him to turn back the pages, a whole fistful of pages, to the same season of the year a quarter-century ago, when he had made the rounds to acquaint tenants of King Teddy’s death, in 1910. The recollection of this set him musing on the great patterns of change that had overlapped one another in the last two-and-a-half decades. It struck him that the very act of conveying such news across county on horseback was something linking him to Tudor and Stuart eras, for today, supposing the ailing George V died, everyone in the Valley would be aware of the fact within minutes. There was hardly a cottage that did not possess its radio and London papers arrived in Coombe Bay at breakfast-time on the morning ’bus. The bright sun threw golden darts across the little room so that the prospect of paperwork depressed him and he pushed his tray aside, letting his mind rove back to the day, clearly recalled, when he had ridden old Snowdrop over the Sorrel and back across the edge of the moor to the mere and the farms in the east. It seemed more than twenty-five years ago. Four of his seven children had been unborn and young Ikey Palfrey had only just left school. Old Tamer and Willoughby were already dead but Arthur Pitts, John Rudd, Norman Eveleigh and most of the old brigade were thriving and so were the second generation, Will Codsall, Big Jem, and a score of others commemorated in French Wood. The sight of a motor-car in those days had set everyone running and no one in the Valley had ever seen an aeroplane, or heard of Hollywood. There had been but one telephone in the district, a thing that looked like an ear-trumpet in Coombe Bay Post Office and the main road running behind the woods had been white with dust all summertime. He said aloud, as he re-read his 1910 entry, ‘God, it’s another world!’ and then, hearing Claire clearing the breakfast things, shouted, ‘I’m going out for a spell! I’ll be home to lunch!’ and went along the terrace to the yard calling Mark Codsall to saddle the skewbald.

He took the same route, across Big Paddock to Home Farm, where he stopped for a brief chat with his goddaughter, formerly Prudence Pitts, now mistress of the place, and as he sat his horse talking to her he reflected how quickly these flighty girls let themselves go once they had settled for a man. Prudence had once been the belle of the Valley and the giddiest flirt for miles around; today she looked as though she had been married almost as long as her landlord. He gave her good-day and rode on, his mind occupied working out her age which he judged to be twenty-seven. She was not, he thought, wearing so well, despite her lavish use of cosmetics and fortnightly visits to the Paxtonbury hairdresser. Her figure had already begun to sag and rumour had reached him that she nagged her husband but the farm itself seemed in good order, with its outbuildings freshly whitewashed and its yard free of nettles. He emerged on to the river road and crossed the bridge, once a plank affair but now of metal plates bedded in concrete piers and rode on down the Four Winds’ approach lane to the biggest but no longer the most prosperous farm on the estate. Harold Eveleigh and his eldest boy were there, tinkering with a tractor parked alongside the barn where Martin Codsall had hanged himself more than thirty years ago. He called, ‘Lovely morning, Harold! Anything you can’t fix yourself?’ and Eveleigh straightened himself and grinned.

‘If I can’t, Bob can,’ he said and the boy beside him grunted, ‘Carburettor trouble! This fuel is second-rate and she clogs. Dad will start her on it, no matter how many times I tell him to switch over and start on pure gas!’ He tinkered awhile and then, with a stuttering roar, the engine suddenly burst into life and the boy leaped up and tuned it to a smooth
bub-bub-bub
.

‘Got to keep him handy all the time,’ Harold said. ‘I wish to God he didn’t have to go to school! I could do with Bob around me all the week. I was going in for a mug of tea. Will you join me, Mr Craddock?’

‘Thanks, no,’ Paul told him, ‘but give my regards to your wife. I’m just doing the rounds and I’ve promised to be home for lunch. Everything okay over here?’

‘Ticking over,’ Harold said. ‘Milk yield is up but we’re down on pigs. Poor old Ben is past it, I’m afraid. Time we pensioned him off!’ and he nodded in the direction of an incredibly old man doddering across the yard carrying two buckets of swill, completely absorbed in the task of keeping his balance on the sun-slippery flags.

‘He must be nearly ninety!’ Paul said, recognising the labourer to whom he had once delivered the drunken Martin Codsall after taking him home from the bay one winter’s afternoon, shortly before the Four Winds’ tragedy, and he called, ‘Hi there, Ben!’ but the old man disappeared round the corner of the barn without looking up.

‘Stone deaf!’ Harold said, ‘but a better worker than most of them for all that! I’ve tried to persuade him to pack it in but either he can’t hear or deliberately misunderstands. He was here in Codsall’s time, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ Paul said, ‘and I daresay he’s another who would prefer to die in his boots. If you retired him he’d fade out in a fortnight. It’s routine that keeps that kind going.’

‘My God, it won’t keep me going at his age!’ Harold said, ‘I shall be damned glad to put my feet up and let the boys carry on.’

‘Do they want to?’

‘Bob does, he’s got a mechanical flair. Must be from his mother’s side, it certainly isn’t from mine.’

‘Well, there’s hope for you yet,’ Paul said. ‘You heard Henry Pitts has acquired a tractor since he remarried?’

‘I never believed it until I saw him cruising across Undercliffe the other day but if he drives it the way he drives his Morris we shan’t have him around for long!’

‘Don’t bank on it,’ Paul said, moving on. ‘Henry came through Third Ypres. It’ll take a damned sight more than a tractor spill to kill him!’

He rode down to the river, feeling, as he would have said, ‘comfortable’ about Four Winds. Harold Eveleigh would never be the kind of farmer his father was, or his brother Gilbert would have been, but he had more than enough staying power to see him through, and domestic peace anchored him to the place in a way that was rarer today than it had been a generation ago. He forded the river where it was no more than a fetlock deep and punched up the swell of Undercliffe and under the lee of French Wood to Hermitage, passing on his way the cleared site of Davey Pitts’ new bungalow. Davey, it seemed, had been evasive when he had told him a month ago he had no plans to marry, or perhaps his father’s second marriage had jogged his elbow. He had appeared at Shallowford within three days of the confrontation and taken Paul up on his offer to provide alternative accommodation for himself and the old lady. Later it had leaked out that he had become engaged to one of the Timberlake girls living in Whinmouth, so that the danger of relationships going sour at Hermitage had been sidestepped.

The old lady was sunning herself in the porch when Paul rode up and he was just in time to see Ellie emerge with her tea and biscuits. Old Martha, he noticed, received her ministrations as a right and he thought, ‘The sooner the old girl goes and leaves Henry and his new wife to themselves the better!’ and apparently Ellie thought so too, for she made a grimace of resignation with her mouth as if to say, ‘It isn’t for long, thank God! But I’m not giving her a stick to beat me with!’

He passed the time of day with them both and learned that Henry had taken his new tractor down in the hollow near the moor road fork. On the rim of the western boundary he saw him, trailing blue exhaust along the bowl of a field they called Barley Mow and it was obvious, even from this distance, that he was using his tractor as a plaything and not as an implement, for the trailer he was towing was empty and Paul watched as Henry, hunched like a chariot driver, charged a narrow gateway and roared up the incline towards the north-westerly tip of the wood. It was, he felt, a cheering sight, and evidence that none were proof against the lure of gadgets. Not a hundred yards from where Henry joyously tackled the gradient was the road junction where, in the early years of the century, he had stood on the bank and gaped at his first horseless carriage, the fidgety little contrivance driven into the Valley by Roddy Rudd. From that moment, it seemed, his mind had hardened against machines and his prejudices had been increased rather than diminished by his experiences in the glutinous mud of Passchendaele, yet here he was, wedded to the machine age by a widow and eight-horse power car. In a way, Paul thought, it was a comic miracle.

He left Henry to his play and rode across the shallow valley to the Periwinkle boundary where the skewbald, full of spring grass, and with the hunting season well behind her, threw up her heels and took the ascent at a gallop, Paul entering into the spirit of the frolic and hallooing Mary as she emerged from the wash-house with her mouth full of pegs—rubber pegs, he noticed. Rumble Patrick must have talked her into throwing her wooden pegs on to the ash-heap.

Every time he had come this way in the last few months there had been changes and all of them good. The new shingled roof of the farmhouse, the creosoted split-rail fences and the general air of sleekness that the ugly duckling of the Valley had acquired under Rumble Patrick’s dynamic direction, made his heart swell with pride, not only because the marriage was so clearly a happy one but because he felt he could take credit himself for having produced a daughter with enough sense to sit waiting for the right husband when other girls would have compromised. And yet, although the wedding was only three months distant in time, he found it difficult to regard the new occupants of Periwinkle as newlyweds. To him they seemed always to have been man and wife elect and what had happened last April was no more than ratification of contract. As he reined in at the gate Rumble appeared from the kitchen wearing nothing but a pair of khaki shorts and, improbably, an apron. The boy’s back and shoulders were burned a golden brown and Paul thought, ‘Now dammit, why can’t I tan like that? If I take my shirt off I go brick-red, endure two days’ agony, peel and then go fish-belly white again!’

‘What’s the idea of the badge of servitude?’ he asked. ‘No other man in the Valley would be seen dead in an apron!’ and Mary, spitting her pegs into a basket, called, ‘Don’t come between man and wife! Rumble does the cooking on washdays and he’s a better hand at it than most of the women around here! Are you going to stay and sample one of his hashes?’

‘Not likely,’ he said, dismounting and leading the skewbald into the lean-to stable, ‘but I’d like to see what kind of job you’ve made of it inside? You’re about finished now, aren’t you?’