The Green Gauntlet (40 page)

Away in the distance he saw Rumble Patrick at work with a baler but checked an impulse to ride the fly-pestered grey across open country and turned inland, noting that the rubble of Periwinkle farmhouse had now been carted away and that the site showed on the hillside like a filled-in shell-crater. It was shadier under the spur of Hermitage plateau, so he skirted it and headed up Hermitage Lane towards the beckoning shadow of the woods. At the last swing gate north of the farm he saw Henry Pitts and his greeting widened his old friend’s rubbery smile by at least two inches.

‘Giddon, youm back!’ Henry shouted, gleefully. ‘Us’d begun to reckon you an’ the Missus would stay outalong,’ and suddenly his smile shrank beyond its normal width and he said, ‘You won’t have heard the latest about my David’s caper, will ’ee? Now youm back ’ee won’t waste no time plaguing ’ee again.’

Paul remembered then that David had made an offer for the freehold of Hermitage and had been referred to Andy, who had told him brusquely that the Company had no intention of selling off more land. It was something Paul had forgotten, thinking it could wait for the Company’s next quarterly meeting, but now it occurred to him that there must have been a meeting during his absence so he said, ‘There’s not all that hurry, is there? I’m willing to consider it if he’s really made up his mind and can pay us a fair market price. I wouldn’t sell to a stranger but David is different. He was born on the place! Didn’t Andy tell him to hold his horses until I got back?’

‘No, ’er didden,’ Henry said, sourly for him, ‘’er showed him the door and zed there was no chance of David nor anyone else buying freeholds,’ and it seemed to Paul that he would have liked to express himself even more forcibly but did not do so out of regard for their long-standing friendship. He said:

‘You mean they had a row over it?’ and Henry said this was so, and that David came back saying he was going to emigrate to Australia where a man could hope to die owning the land he had worked in his lifetime.

For the second time that morning the sparkle left the air. First the squatters and now David Pitts and his son Andy snarling at one another in his absence.

‘David isn’t serious about emigrating, is he?’ he asked but Henry said he had already sent for brochures from Australia House.

‘I told him not to act like a bliddy vool until you was back,’ he said, ‘but now his ole gran is dade he’ll go if he’s got to bide yer as a tenant. He’s always had it in mind to own Hermitage, mind you. I never did, nor my ole feyther either, but they young ones is diff’rent.
Your
boy’s diff’rent. They doan zeem to be able to give an’ taake zame as us did, backalong.’

‘Well, tell him to throw those damned brochures in the fire,’ Paul said. ‘We’ll have a Company meeting in a week or two and he can rely on me to back him if he’s keen to buy. I don’t know why Andy should be so bloody-minded about it. This Valley is only a fringe interest of his. He’s got far bigger fish to fry and some of them stink to my mind.’

Suddenly Henry looked cheerful again. ‘Would ’ee tell un that now?’ he said, and without waiting for assent he put his fingers in his mouth and produced a piercing whistle, so that the chunky figure of David emerged from Hermitage copse some fifty yards away.

‘You damned old rascal, you must have seen me coming,’ Paul said, laughing, and Henry admitted as much so that Paul, reflecting that the ambush was reminiscent of earlier days, felt that the situation was now resolved and told the red-faced David that he could come over and talk figures as soon as he had had an opportunity to discuss the matter with Rumble Patrick and Andy.

‘There now, what did I tell ’ee?’ demanded Henry, rounding on his stolid son as though he had been a surly child of five. ‘Tiz the Squire who gives the orders round here, so hang they ole papers you got in the bliddy privvy, where they belong.’

David said nothing at all but Paul could see that he was relieved. He went off up the slope slashing at thistles with his stick and Paul, struck by the dissimilarity of father and son, said, ‘Do you know what it is about them, Henry? They don’t laugh anymore, that’s their trouble. The only one of mine who can really see a joke is Simon and he couldn’t until those boys of his began rubbing his corners off down at the school,’ and he touched Snowdrop with his heels and passed gratefully into the deep shadow of the lane that ran under the southern edge of the woods.

II

U
p among the big timber the summer scents were far stronger than on the plain and the muted orchestra that he always listened for here at this time of year reached him as a subdued clamour as he picked his way down to the Mere. The surface was glacial and over on the far side he could see some of the older beeches reflected in elaborate detail. The air was full of rustlings and hummings, punctuated every now and again by the flutes of the blackbirds, or the squawks of moorhens concealed on the islet. By the time he had ridden the length of the sheet of water his humour was quite restored and he was further gladdened by the sight of old Sam Potter, now the oldest of the Shallowford originals, who had lived on here alone after the death of his wife Joannie in the autumn.

Sam, the oldest of the Dell Potters, had been his woodsman for forty-five years and Paul supposed that he would now be making plans to live with one of his children, Dick perhaps, who had replaced that arty family at High Coombe, or Pauline, whose birth Paul had almost witnessed in this cottage the year he bought the estate. Sam, however, had other ideas, as he soon advertised saying, with a humility everyone else on the estate had discarded, ‘Was ’ee thinkin’ o’ givin’ me marchin’ orders, Squire, now Joannie’s dade and I draws the pension?’

‘Well now that you mention it I’m surprised to see you here. It must be very lonely for you, living in this place all alone.’

‘
Lonely?
’
Sam’s expression came as near to flat contradiction as Paul could remember. ‘God love you, I baint lonely. Not that I doan miss the ole woman. I do, ’specially in the evenings, but a man can’t be lonely out yer so long as he can get about and I’d far zooner bide than move in as lodger wi’ any one of ’em. They’d ’ave me, mind. Pauline would do for me, and I daresay I could earn board and lodge up at High Coombe wi’ Dick, but I’d zooner bide if it’s all the zame to you. Will ’ee be wantin’ the cottage for someone younger?’

‘No, of course I won’t,’ Paul assured him, glad to have at least one local landmark confirmed. ‘You can live here as long as you like and I’m not thinking of getting another woodsman in any case. There’s precious little game to keep and the woods can look after themselves, the same as they were doing long before you and I arrived on the scene.’ And then it occurred to him that this was tantamount to saying that Sam had never justified himself all these years, so he added, ‘You’ve more than pulled your weight ever since I gave you the job, Sam. If you slack off a bit now don’t imagine I’ll complain. It might seem odd to you but these woods have always meant more to me than any acres that pay rent. As long as you keep the rides open and there’s a refuge handy for everything in the Valley that needs one, I’m satisfied. That’s about all I ever wanted out of this part of the estate, so let’s leave it that way and you can go on paying peppercorn rent for that cottage of yours.’

It was a pleasure to watch Sam’s embarrassment as he stood by Snowdrop’s head, scratching a large brown mole that divided the furrows of his cheek. Sam, he reflected, had never had much in common with his father, mother, his poacher-brother Smut, or his numerous sisters, for he lacked their independence and cheerful impudence. He had always reminded Paul of a rural character out of another century and his presence here was a small buttress against change. He said, suddenly, ‘How do you put in the day, Sam? I mean, apart from clearing fallen timber and cutting the brambles back?’ and Sam said, ‘I got the chicken to zee to, and a bit o’ cookin’ and cleanin’, for Joannie liked the place scoured and ’er woulden ’ave it otherwise. But the best times is early on, when I watch the varmints.’

Paul remembered then that a ‘varmint’ to Sam was anything on four legs that came down to the Mere and he remembered that, unlike most keepers, Sam had never erected a vermin pole and seldom carried a gun. Somehow he must have sensed that Paul, never much of a sportsman, subscribed to his live-and-let-live theory hereabouts. Apart from hunting foxes (and refusing to dig them out) Paul had rarely killed for sport or the pot. He always thought of the wild life on this side of the woods as tenantry.

He said goodbye to Sam and took the winding path to the head of the Dell where the sun blazed out again and he saw that Dick Potter was due to start reaping in High Coombe’s west-sloping fields beyond the last of the trees.’

He was relieved to see a real Shallowfordian back in the farm where Claire had been born and where, on an airless summer morning such as this, she had first appeared to him as a laughing girl offering him a plate of pikelets, and holding his hand longer than necessary when their fingers touched. ‘She had made up her mind to get me from the very start,’ he reflected, grinning, ‘and that madcap first marriage of mine must have set the whole Derwent family by the ears. Old Edward, her father, was a crusty old chap but one of the best farmers in the Valley, and I still can’t be sure Dick Potter will stick at it after all that traipsing about the world in the Forces. However, he can’t do worse than that bunch we had here during the war,’ and as he thought this Dick Potter, and his lifelong chum and cousin, Bon-Bon, Smut’s boy, left their tractor stuttering in the yard and came across to him, asking with a frankness that old Sam would have considered impertinent, ‘if he and Mrs Craddock had been gypped by the Wogs in Port Said’. Two generations ago, Paul thought, nobody working up here would have heard of Port Said, but two world wars had improved their geography and simultaneously widened and narrowed their outlook. They were more sophisticated than their grandfathers but their travels seemed to have left them even more contemptuous of foreigners.

He told them a little of his travels and asked if either of them had heard or seen anything of the former tenant, who had gone off owing a quarter’s rent. ‘Not a butcher’s,’ Bon-Bon said, ‘the poor bastard was stuck with the kids. You heard his Missis—the one who was always painting when she wasn’t giving birth—ran off with a Yank? Imagine that! And her turned forty and as broad in the beam as that grey of yours.’

‘I’d heard she had left him,’ Paul said, feeling a little sorry for that idiot Archer-Forbes, ‘but I didn’t know it was for a Yank. It wasn’t the same one who caused that trouble over at the Home Farm, was it?’

‘Giddon no,’ said Dick Potter, chuckling, ‘this one was a darkie. He must have had something her old man didn’t have, in spite of all those kids. Come on Bon-Bon, time we got weaving. This summer has been a real scorcher, Squire, and it looks like staying that way.’

He left them roaring away on their tractor, trailing blue exhaust and reflecting that he might have been wrong about the seriousness of the younger generation, for obviously here were a pair who were not weighed down by their responsibilities. ‘Funny thing,’ he said to himself, as he crossed the border to Deepdene, the middle Coombe farm, ‘you think you know it all and then you suddenly realise you know very little about anyone. Noah Williams and that mine, Andy’s attitude to those squatters, David Pitts getting it into his head to sail off to Australia, Sam Potter content to live out his days watching otters and badgers, and now a middle-aged woman with a large family running off with a buck Negro. Sometimes life is as good as a pantomime about here but the townsman still thinks of us as a bunch of rustics bogged down in mud and tradition.’

He was in for a bigger shock when he clattered into the yard of Deepdene, expecting to be greeted by old Francis Willoughby. Who should be sunning herself in the porch but Prudence Honeyman—‘Prudence-Pitts-that-was’—and she seemed surprised that he was surprised, for apparently Rumble Patrick had promised to write informing him that Francis, defeated by his asthma, had retired in April and that Nelson Honeyman, homesick for the Valley after only three years ‘abroad’ in Dorset, had sold up, applied for the Deepdene lease and been granted it, Simon and Rumble having obtained Andy’s agreement over the telephone.

‘Well, I’m delighted to see you back,’ he admitted, thinking how handsome she looked and how much more sure of herself than when he had last seen her after that ludicrous incident in the Home Farm hayloft, ‘but surely Deepdene isn’t large enough for Nelson? I thought he was ambitious to make money.’

‘He was,’ Prudence said, ‘and he did. We sold that Dorset farm and stock for more than twice the price we paid for it. One of those expense-account farmers from London turned up, Nelson asked a silly price and he paid it, without batting an eyelid. It’s something to do with their tax but don’t ask me to explain it. We heard old Francis Willoughby was packing it in so Nelson decided he’d like to come back and see what he could make of this place. After all, Francis made money here, mostly with beef cattle of course, but Nelson’s sticking to sheep. He did very well out of them over there,’ and she pointed in the general direction of Dorset.

He said, a little diffidently, ‘Er … how
are
things between Nelson and you, Prudence? You were very frank the last time we talked,’ and she said, with a laugh, ‘Yes I was, wasn’t I? Well, I’ll be frank again, Mr Craddock. That business with Eddy Morrisey showed a profit. Nelson has never been quite the same since and I don’t mean by that he throws it up at me. He never has, not once.’

She paused a moment and Paul noticed that she wasn’t quite as brazen as her local reputation implied for she was blushing. She went on, however, ‘I more or less told you what our trouble was—that time you tried to sort us out? Well—how can I put it? There isn’t that kind of trouble anymore. I suppose the shock of that silly business helped. Not only Nelson but me, too. I’m not tarty-minded, you know, or not so long as I’m not taken for granted, the way I was up to that time. He spends more now, takes me out and about a bit, buys me things without me having to hint. What I really mean is—I’ll always settle for a quiet life, so long as it’s not too quiet if you follow me!’