Post of Honour (81 page)

Cyrus and Myra Lee Gibson were of the select company of expatriates who, from time to time, strayed into the Valley and never found their way out again. The first of them, in Paul’s experience, had been the old German professor, and since then Brissot, the French Canadian, and Marie Potter, Smut’s wife, had been added to their number. Mrs Lee Gibson had allegedly come to the West to trace ancestors but her husband, a successful portrait artist (who, as a young man had hob-nobbed with the Paris Impressionists) had stayed on to paint landscapes, confessing himself fascinated by the quality of light in and around the Valley which, in high summer, was the nearest British equivalent to his native Arizona and in early autumn reminiscent of the filtered sunlight of Provence. Paul did not take these compliments seriously, recognising’ Cyrus as a dabbler in everything but portraiture but both he and Claire had become attached to the old couple. They had no family of their own and made favourites of young John and Mary’s son, Jerry, who was often dumped on his grandmother for the afternoon.

During a spell of hot May weather Claire was down here every day and one blazing afternoon, when she had ordered the children out of the pool and was standing with her back to the goyle drying her hair, Lee Gibson hailed from beside the shanty, calling ‘Hold it! Don’t move, gal!’ and she thought he was taking a snapshot but when she went up the beach saw he was touching up a series of charcoal sketches, all of herself in various postures in and about that rock-ledge.

‘Can’t you find a better model than a grandmother playing Nannie to a couple of toddlers?’ she joked but he said, adding a touch here and there, ‘I think we’ve hit on something! Myra thinks so, too. If you’re interested we could build on it. Come up to the cabin and see for yourself. Myra will watch over the children,’ and he led her into the shanty which Paul let him use as a studio whenever he worked west of the Bluff.

She was astonished at what she saw propped against the empty grate—a full-length portrait, two-thirds completed, of herself, seated on a spur of rock casually engaged in drying herself with a blue towel. He had caught her in a moment of abstraction, half-facing the Channel seen in the right background, with her shoulder-length hair tousled and bunched by the upward thrust of her right hand, and the sun playing strongly on her half-exposed breast and loosely braced thigh. The picture had a quality that was rare, a kind of breadth and freedom so often absent from a posed portrait, and it pleased her enormously not only because it was an excellent likeness but because some good fairy had enabled him to bring out her vitality and with it a strong echo of her youth. She said, throwing modesty aside, ‘Cyrus, it’s wonderful! It makes me look—well—not more than forty! And nobody could say it wasn’t me; you’ve been gallant enough to slant it so that I look ten stone instead of getting on for twelve!’ and she was so flattered and excited that she kissed him, saying, ‘Does Paul know? Have you shown it to him yet?’

‘Certainly not! For one thing it isn’t finished and you’ll have to pose in here for the final touches; for another I’m not at all sure he’d approve of an uncommissioned semi-nude of his wife. He’s old-fashioned enough to hound me out of the Valley for taking such a liberty!’

‘He’ll love it!’ she declared, and then, ‘Look here, his birthday is next week. Could you finish it by then?’

‘With your co-operation I could,’ he said and she could see that he was pleased with her enthusiasm. ‘I’ll cover it now. If the children see it they’ll go running to him and I take it you want to surprise him?’

‘Yes, I do and I will!’ she said, helping him to drape it with a sheet and told him of a day long ago, when they were lean and young and vain, and Paul had proposed having her painted in oils by a London artist but somehow the project had been shelved and forgotten. ‘We’ve left it rather late,’ she said ruefully, ‘for I think I was worth painting in those days!’

‘You’re worth it now in my eyes and his,’ he reassured her, ‘in mine because your figure is more interesting that it was then—and if you doubt it take a look at Renoir’s “Anna”—and in his because you haven’t changed at all, my dear! I happened to see him looking down at you when you were streaking across that pool a day or so ago and, quite frankly, it struck me that his mouth was watering! So there you have it!’

It was a thought to cheer her all the way home and prompt her to do something she did infrequently these days which was to change for high tea, wondering if he would notice. To her relief he did, for although he made no comment she heard him telling Mary on the ’phone that ‘Mother had got herself up’ as a dress-rehearsal, no doubt, for the family reunion on the occasion of his birthday next week when, for the first time in years, they would reassemble at Shallowford and drink champagne sent on in advance by the twins.

On the last day of May, the day prior to his sixtieth birthday, they began to drift in from the North, the Midlands and Camberley, where Whiz and her husband were currently based, and it was after the last of them had arrived, and they had retired bemused by talk and bustle, than she warned him not to expect his birthday present from her until the children had gone. When, unsuspecting, he enquired if it was coming by post she blushed and her moment of confusion intrigued him, so that he said:

‘What are you driving at? Do you mean you would prefer the children not to see it?’

‘Not exactly,’ she stammered, ‘I don’t mind them seeing it once it’s—well—once it’s
established
but it would embarrass me very much if they realised it was a birthday gift. You’ll understand when you see it.’ He sat on the edge of the bed scratching his head and looking so completely baffled that she laughed, saying, ‘I’ll tell you what! It’s past midnight so have it now! But you must give me your word of honour you won’t go whooping downstairs with it, won’t even refer to it in front of them!’

His curiosity was now so engaged that he would have promised anything, so she went along the passage to the room that had been Jimmy Grenfell’s and came back carrying a package measuring about four feet by three carefully tied in brown paper and sacking. He cut the string with her nails scissors and his expression when the canvas was revealed, was worth all the self-doubts she had suffered since entering into the conspiracy with Cyrus. He propped it against the dressing-table and stood back studying it from every angle. Then he moved it so as to catch the beside light and walked cautiously round it, as though he was playing Peeping Tom on a bathing beach. Finally he said, sombrely, ‘It’s a bloody miracle! He’s seen you not only as you
are
but as you always
were
!
I’ve never looked at a picture so alive and exciting! It’s got everything I ever saw in you, from the day you took me swimming there over thirty years ago! It’s the most wonderful birthday present you’ve ever given me, that anyone’s ever given me!’ and he threw his arms round her and kissed her in a way that convinced her that the instinct that had prompted the gift had been as accurate as were most of her instincts concerning him.

‘Where are we going to hang it?’ he demanded.

‘Not downstairs certainly,’ she said. ‘Everyone who comes into the house will make that awful music-hall joke about dressing mutton to look like lamb. It’s—well Paul—it’s a very
private
present, and I certainly don’t want it on exhibition! It was just an idea I had the moment I saw it half-done and it seems to have worked, so that’s all I care. Hang it in your dressing-room.’

He studied it again, so carefully that she said, laughing, ‘For heaven’s sake, Paul, you’ve got the original right here! If you look at it much longer with that leery expression I shall begin to think it’s idealised and you’re reminiscing!’

‘It isn’t in the least idealised,’ he said, seriously, ‘it’s a melting-pot of everything about you that has made me look at other women objectively rather than subjectively all the years we’ve been married! And I’ll tell you something else too, if it flatters you!’

‘It’ll flatter me,’ she promised.

‘I’ve led a pretty active life and therefore I’ve always had plenty to do and mostly have enjoyed doing it but every time you walk into a room I find myself wishing everybody else would walk out of it! Every time I touch you I get the impression of physical renewal and that must be a very rare tonic for a man my age! I can’t expect it to last into my seventies, so I’m damned if I don’t hang this picture over the bed where I hope it’ll keep me from flagging as time runs on!’

‘When you flag in that respect I’ll ’phone Jonas Whiddon, the undertaker,’ she said, chuckling, ‘for you’ll be ready for him! Now get me out of this party dress so that I can breathe freely again!’ and she stood while he unhooked her, reflecting that the strictures she had endured to look as slim and young as possible that evening had been largely unnecessary, for she did not really care a curse what the assembled children thought of her figure and, as far as he was concerned, the picture seemed to have provided him with ample excuse to turn the calendar to the wall.

They were awakened early next morning by a stir below the window and Claire, who could slough off morning drowsiness in a matter of seconds, jumped out of bed and took a peep through the curtains, retiring promptly when confronted with Henry Pitts’ melon-slice smile. She said, scrambling into her dressing gown, ‘Wake up, Paul! Henry and some of his cronies are outside!’ and she shook him so that he sat up, rubbing his eyes and grumbling that it was still too early to get up.

‘It’s twenty minutes to seven,’ she told him, seizing a comb and struggling with her hair, ‘and maybe you can tell me why half the Valley is milling about outside our front door! I came within an inch of making a Lady Godiva bow to them!’

‘They couldn’t have noticed or they would have cheered,’ he said and went yawning to the window where, seeing Henry’s upturned face, he called down, ‘What’s up, Henry? Trouble somewhere?’

‘No trouble, Maister,’ Henry called back, ‘but the top o’ the marning to ’ee, an’ the missis too!’ Then, turning to Smut Potter close by he called, ‘Tell Mark to bring ’un out, Smut! Let the gentleman zee the rabbit!’ and there was a prolonged stir behind the rhododendron clump and Claire, joining Paul at the window, recognised Harold Eveleigh, Rumble Patrick, Farmer Brissot, Jumbo Bellchamber, and, standing a little apart, Francis Willoughby and Dick Potter. As they stared down Mark Codsall emerged from behind the shrubbery leading an unsaddled grey some seventeen hands high and of a build that reminded Claire instantly of old Snowdrop, the well-mannered gelding Paul had ridden about the Valley from the day of his arrival until the early ‘twenties. Paul must have noticed the resemblance too for he exclaimed, ‘My God! It’s Snowdrop’s ghost! Where do you suppose they got him and why . . . ?’ and then the significance of the assembly dawned on him as he saw her laughing and Henry shouted, ‘Come on down, just as you be, Squire! Us baint leavin’ without drinking your health an’ me, Smut an’ Mark have been up an’ about zince daylight!’

Paul withdrew, lost for words, blundering round the wrong side of the bed in search of his slippers. She found them, pushed him down on the bed and slipped them on his feet as though he had been a boy late for school, saying, ‘I’ll stay and get dressed but you go right on down! I can’t feed that lot at short notice!’ and she hustled him out and slammed the door so that he stood bewildered for a moment before going down through the kitchen and into the stable-yard, where the big grey now stood, surrounded by more than a dozen of them with its rope halter held by Mark Codsall, Shallowford’s groom-handyman.

Some of them, he thought, looked vaguely embarrassed but this number included neither Henry Pitts nor Smut, who stood close together, clearly enjoying the occasion. Henry said, ‘Tiz the nearest us could come to old Snowdrop, Maister! Didden seem right somehow, you ridin’ about the Valley on that bottle-nosed skewbald o’ yours, so when Smut zeed this one at Bampton Fair us clubbed together and sent Smut to buy ’un! He got ten pound off what they were asking but us knowed he would, the bliddy old thief!’

‘He’s rising eight,’ Smut said, ‘but well-mannered. I knows that because I rode ’un all the way home, just to make sure that nagsman at Bampton weren’t lying when he said ’er was traffic-broken! On’y think he shied at was a bliddy motor-bike doing nigh on seventy mile an hour! He’s been out two seasons with the Eggesford Hunt, so I reckon us have catched a bargain one way and another! He’ll go, mind you, and I daresay he can jump too, but seein’ you baint so young as you were us zettled for a soft-mouth and easy temperament!’

‘You
all
had a hand in it?’ Paul said at length. ‘Everyone here?’

‘Giddon no,’ Henry said, ‘us baint all here! There was nigh on fifty subscribed and I got a list here if you can read my writing!’ and he presented a soiled sheet of foolscap, containing a long list of names, each of them familiar and representing not only the tenants but all the local craftsmen, men like old Aaron Stokes and Abe Tozer’s son. Goss, the new sexton, had contributed and so had Willis, the blind wheelwright, and there were a couple of names from outside the Valley, Ben Godbeer, the Paxtonbury seedsman, and ex-Police Sergeant Price, long since retired, from Whinmouth.

He was too moved to make adequate response but they seemed to understand his confusion and silently made way for him as he walked round the gelding, noting a broad back and heavy quarters proclaiming it a stayer who would carry him over rough ground all day and still be good for a turn of speed towards dusk. It was, he thought, one of the best all-rounders he had ever seen and he did not need to be told it had good manners. Even Snowdrop would have stood chafed at standing unsaddled in the midst of such a crowd, all of them strangers.

He said, quietly, ‘He’s magnificent, and I can’t thank you all enough. It’s . . . it’s quite the kindest thing anyone ever did for me . . . ’ and he trailed off, feeling that anything he said in the way of acknowledging their loyalty and generosity would sound trite. Henry came to his rescue with—‘Put ’un away in the loose-box, Mark boy! Let’s drink Squire’s health and get about our buziness!’ and they all trooped into the kitchen where Claire was drawing tankards of ale and The Pair and Simon were on hand to serve them, each of his sons displaying a jocularity suitable to the occasion. Then they drank his health, mercifully without speeches and presently, after wishing him Many Happy Returns, they drifted away so that he was left alone with Simon who said, with a smile, ‘I wouldn’t have missed that, Gov! It was quite something in this day and age!’ and Paul, automatically collecting tankards and piling them into the sink, agreed that it was but he could find no words to convey to the most perceptive of his children the warmth of the glow in his heart but went quietly upstairs to shave, glad of an excuse to take his time over dressing. ‘Some of the older ones used to say there were compensations in passing the sixty-mark,’ he reflected, ‘but I never believed them until this moment,’ and he paused in the act of scraping his chin with the open razor he had bought in Cape Town on his twenty-first birthday and glanced out of the little window across the fields, already shimmering in the morning heat-haze. ‘I’ve got this place by the tail at last,’ he thought, ‘and it’s taken me close on forty years to do it! They would never have done a thing like that for the Lovells and I’m damned glad all the children were here to see it!’ He wiped the lather from his face and looked hard at himself in the glass, noting the mop of iron-grey hair and brown, lined face that now had a permanent ‘Tudor look’. He wondered if the marks of the struggle were as obvious to others as they were to him and then, lowering his glance, noted with satisfaction that he had no paunch, that his body looked more youthful than his face. He pulled on boots and breeches and drifted into the bedroom, hearing the babel from below as his family assembled for breakfast but feeling no immediate inclination to join them. He threw wide the window sniffing the air like a pointer, playing his old game of identifying its components—dew-soaked grass, clover, the scent of roses from Grace’s sunken garden and the overall tang of the sea. Well, there it was, looking precisely as it had looked when he first came here limping from the effects of a Boer bullet and as it had looked on all his other birthdays. Many of them he had forgotten but he could remember the notches of successive decades—the day he was thirty for instance, when he and Claire had taken the eight-months-old twins to Coombe Bay in the waggonette and the day he was forty, when he had ridden alone up to the spur of Hermitage Wood and picked the spot for the memorial plantation. On his fiftieth birthday, just before the twins’ coming-of-age, he had gone the rounds with old John Rudd, bless his heart, and now that he was sixty they roused him from bed to present him with a hunter that reminded them of Snowdrop, thus underlining the fact that they too, in their way, clamoured for continuity. He looked from the rumpled bed to Claire’s portrait, still leaning against the dressing-table, and the memory of last night’s frolic made him smile. He didn’t feel sixty and he didn’t act sixty but then, why should he, with a fine woman like her in his arms and the Valley calling to him outside? And as he thought of Claire and the Valley in relation to one another he reminded himself that they were indivisible, that the vitality they fed him sprang from the same source. The knowledge that it was there, would always be there, put a spring in his step as he went along to the head of the stairs listening to the clatter-clatter from the dining-room. A verse occurred to him and he fumbled for it as he went down to the hall—something of Hardy’s that he had read recently and had memorised because it seemed to him to epitomise the life he and Claire had shared in this house and would, he supposed, continue to share throughout their remaining years: