The Green Gauntlet (43 page)

‘What do you suppose that boy is up to now?’ Paul grumbled, at breakfast. ‘Does he want us to spend David’s purchase price on a whole lot of battery houses, or a new road to serve the Coombe Farms? I never see the point of making money the way he and his kind make it. The minute they have it they find something fresh to spend it on.’

‘That’s what it’s for,’ Claire said, ‘and you’re the right one to preach I must say. When I think of all the money you’ve poured into the stretch between the Bluff and the Moor. What did old Franz used to call it—Craddock’s “Slough of Despond”?’

‘At least something useful re-emerged from mine, enough to beat two U-boat campaigns and raise a lot of healthy people. All Andy raises are office blocks that look like bloody great greenhouses, housing estates beginning to sprout T.V. aerials, and a lot of layabouts who seem to live off the rates.’

She laughed, as she usually did when he took one of his bad-tempered swipes at post-war trends. ‘My God! Listen to the man who talked my Tory father into voting for Lloyd George. Come on, help me prepare the board-room, and whatever Andy proposes count ten before you jump. I daresay it’s something that’ll do the Inland Revenue out of a hundred or so and if it is I’m in there rooting for him.’

They had no agenda for there was nothing that couldn’t wait upon the December meeting. Andy, when he drove up, looked subdued and this impression was confirmed when he began, in response to Paul’s invitation, to say what he had in mind.

‘You’re probably going to blow your top at this, Gov’nor. But before you do remember I’m making the proposition with the idea of ensuring any money that flows into the Valley flows our way as well as other people’s.’

‘Every time I hear you use that word “money”,’ said Paul, misquoting Goering, ‘I want to reach for my gun. However, go on and I’ll try and judge the proposal impartially.’

‘It leads back to that chap Bellchamber in Low Coombe,’ Andy went on, for some reason preferring to look in Rumble Patrick’s direction. ‘The fact is he’s very eager to buy his freehold. Maybe it’s catching.’

Everyone was surprised but no-one more than Paul, who had never thought of Jumbo Bellchamber as anything more than a kind of First World War squatter. ‘
Bellchamber
wants Low Coombe? And he approached
you
?’

‘Indirectly, yes.’

‘Why did he do that? I was over there a month or two ago and he never so much as hinted at it.’

‘I’m not surprised. He probably thought you’d knock him down for daring to suggest it.’

A shutter flicked in Paul’s brain and showed him something he was not over-anxious to see. He remembered Jumbo’s evasiveness on the last occasion they had met, and then the glimpse of a big car shooting off down the Dell track. He remembered, too, Smut telling him that same morning that Andy was in the Valley and how he had expected to find him up at the house but had been told by Claire that he had ’phoned from Whinmouth saying he was otherwise engaged. He said, carefully, ‘You’ve seen Bellchamber yourself? You’ve already discussed it with him?’

‘That’s right.’

They were all watching now, sensing the tension between father and son.

‘
When,
exactly?’

‘Does it matter when?’

‘Yes it does. Was it the day after I came home from abroad?’

‘It might have been.’

‘It damn well was. I saw your car. And you shot off like a bolted fox the moment you saw me riding down the Coombe on Snowdrop.’

If Andy was rattled he did not show it. He said, evenly, ‘It was me all right. I went there to find out exactly what was going on and I did find out. As a matter of fact I’ve seen him since.’

‘And what was “going on”, as you put it?’

‘Look, for God’s sake, Gov’nor. I’m not fifteen and I haven’t been at your cigars. This is supposed to be a Company. All I’m trying to do is steer it towards the jackpot.’

‘Get to the point, Andy.’

This from Claire, looking flushed, as she usually did when obliged by her position as secretary to witness a family row as a neutral.

‘I’ll get to the point if he’ll let me. Jumbo Bellchamber is prepared to buy Low Coombe, the tattiest farm on the estate, for half as much again as David Pitts is paying for Hermitage freehold.’

Rumble was the first to speak. He looked stunned, and no wonder Paul thought, for he had worked hard since he was a boy without assembling half that amount of capital.

‘Over twelve thousand? For Low Coombe, half of it rough grazing, and a third of the other half blackberry bushes running wild? Where the hell would Jumbo Bellchamber get his hands on that kind of money? Has he won the Pools? Or ploughed up buried treasure?’

‘That was one of the things I checked on,’ said Andy, calmly. ‘He can pay. That and more if necessary.’

‘But why? That’s what I’d like to know.
Why!
’

Rumble was red in the face and Paul couldn’t be sure if his flush was caused by astonishment or by resentment that a slut farmer like Bellchamber had earned that kind of money in five years of a national food shortage. He had a right to be angry, Paul thought. All the time the Valley black marketeers had been shuttling to and from the premises of local butchers and dairymen Rumble had been one of the idiots keeping their petrol lines open at the risk of his life. He said, ‘That’s something we’d all like to know, Andy.
Why?
’

‘Certain people are backing an idea of his that will make money a good deal easier and faster than it’s made by farming. It’s tied in with that expansion in Coombe Bay, and if we block it in the north-west it will happen in the east beyond the Bluff, where there’s an alternative site just as good as Jumbo’s and even nearer the sea.’

‘A site for what? For housing?’

It was Simon who asked the question and Claire saw that he wasn’t angry but troubled, almost certainly more on Paul’s account than his own.

‘No,’ said Andy, ‘the County Council wouldn’t approve more housing sites in that area yet. Sooner or later, of course, they’ll have to, and accommodation land will be released in ten and twenty acre dollops. But right now we can actually stop proliferation by selling to Jumbo because he’s on to a good thing. A camping site, with a maximum of fifty caravans and probably twice as many tents. He’ll put in latrines, incinerators, and probably one temporary shop to sell gear, dairy products and tinned stuff. The choice is very simple. We sell and pick up more than three times what that tip is worth. Or we don’t sell, and a camping and caravan site opens up anyhow a mile or so further east, on Lakeworthy’s land. That’s the alternative. Kick it around among yourselves.’

‘It’s bloody scandalous!’ roared Paul. ‘I haven’t heard a whisper about a camping site over there. I always understood a thing like that had to be thrashed out very thoroughly in a local and a County Council before you could build shanty-towns on coastal land.’

‘It has been thrashed out, Gov’nor,’ Andy said, ‘but not much of it in public. Most of it is done in committee and the backers I’m talking about know their business. I daresay they’ve got their stoolies planted here and there.’

‘“Stoolies”? What kind of jargon is that?’ Paul demanded, glad to be able to direct his fury on something specific and Andy grinned as Rumble said, pacifically, ‘Take it easy, Gov’nor. Andy means stool-pigeons—tame Councillors on their side, either on Whinmouth U.D.C. or Paxtonbury R.D.C.’

‘Both if they know what they’re about,’ said Andy, ‘and don’t assume naked bribery comes into it. It’s usually an old-pals act. That’s the way it goes nowadays, but maybe it always did.’

‘It damned well didn’t,’ Paul said, warmly. ‘There was a time when local landowners were consulted before something like this was rammed under their noses.’

Claire said, sharply for her, ‘Calm down, Paul, and don’t cloud the issue. After all, you could have got yourself elected on a Council any time over the last forty years but you never bothered. Maybe it’s a pity you didn’t.’ She turned to Andy, mildly enough for him to mistake her for an ally. ‘You seem to know a great deal about this, Andy. I accept the fact that you’re familiar with backstage jiggery-pokery, and also that you went to some pains to get this information in advance, but do you actually know these backers of Jumbo’s?’

He looked at her squarely. ‘Not well enough to stop them,’ he said, ‘but well enough to appreciate that they’re people who don’t move in unless they’re sure of themselves. It seems that they picked on Jumbo. Jumbo certainly didn’t seek them out.’

‘Couldn’t we lodge objections?’ asked Simon, and Andy said they could, both as a Company and as individuals. Several residents in the district would object but it would serve very little purpose, except, possibly, to delay it a season. ‘Too many people are likely to benefit,’ he explained. ‘All the farmers round here and every tradesman within a radius of five miles. As long as the camp conforms to certain sanitary and siting regulations there are no grounds upon which any effective objection can be based. Coombe Bay is growing fast, and so is Whinmouth. There’s even talk of a coastal road connecting the two and that would lead to a compulsory purchase order involving us.’

‘Very well,’ said Claire, who seemed to have taken matters in her own hands, ‘tell us exactly how you feel about it and don’t hold anything back. I’m sure everyone wants to know precisely where they stand and don’t interrupt him, Paul, wait until he’s finished.’

‘It’s easy enough for a child to understand,’ Andy said, trying to keep a note of exasperation out of his voice. ‘Sooner or later we’re going to have either housing or a caravan site on our eastern boundary. You can fend it off for so long but with everyone screaming for homes, and all this emphasis on youth clubs and outdoor activities that produce new industries—caravan-building for instance—the pattern of places like this has to change and it will change, no matter how far people like the Gov’nor dig their heels in. It’s not change for the sake of change, either. It’s made inevitable by factors like the population explosion, rising wages, and holidays with pay—especially holidays with pay. Places like this can’t survive any longer on agriculture alone. They’ve got to develop as holiday centres whether they want or not and they’re lucky if they can keep light industry at arm’s length. Even as it is, with every coastal town expanding like mad, the younger generation are still moving out in search of jobs, in search of more sophistication if you like. I don’t have to tell you how many men agriculture is losing every year. The figures are there in
The Farmer’s Weekly,
for anyone to read. Well, that’s point one—more housing or something less permanent and purely seasonal, like a caravan site. Point two, who makes a profit out of it? Us, or someone standing on the touchline, like that smallholder Lakeworthy the far side of the Bluff? We could let the site ourselves, of course, but the Gov’nor wouldn’t stand for that in a million years and for once I’m with him, because Bellchamber doesn’t know what he’s in for with all the sanitary regulations and all the moonlight flits he’ll have to cope with! My advice, for what it’s worth, is to squeeze the last drop out of him while he’s in a position to pay.’

There was an uncomfortable silence. Perhaps everyone was waiting for Paul to speak but he said nothing because it seemed to him that others, younger than him, should have their say first. Rumble Patrick looked at Mary, paused, and finally said, ‘Well, that’s straight enough, Andy, and there wasn’t much hot air in what you said. It’s logical, or most of it is, and although none of us are keen to see even a third-rate farm like the Dell pack it in and earn its living out of campers, we could use that twelve thousand to stop the same thing happening to the rest of the farms. Twelve thousand, carefully spent, could make our holdings the most efficient and productive in the county.’

It was, Paul thought, qualified approval, and although he accepted Rumble’s logic he flinched from the prospect of being obliged to move over for men like Bellchamber, for Bellchamber’s backers and, behind them, jobbers who seemed to have infiltrated into every legislative body in the land, people who never would give a damn for the soil that fed them and who didn’t know a stoat from a weasel. He said, sourly, ‘Simon? You anything to add to that?’ and Simon said he hadn’t but would vote with Paul on grounds of sentiment.

It was Claire’s cue to step in again. She said, ‘For Heaven’s sake … don’t let’s split down the middle on a thing like this. Andy doesn’t want that, it doesn’t mean enough to him financially, and I’ll not sit here and watch you totting up your share values and measuring them against one another just to find out who pips who. This might be a business but it’s also a family. Do one thing or the other but do it unanimously. Throw it out of court, or agree to sell and let Bellchamber wheel his caravans in, so long as we write into his contract that he leaves our side of the Dell Wood untouched as a screen. After all, we’ve had bigger camps than his in the Valley twice in my lifetime and they didn’t give us claustrophobia. Andy was right to bring it up in this way. You’ll admit that, won’t you, Paul?’

Paul roused himself with difficulty. ‘Yes, I’ll admit that, and I’ll also admit that we could retrench with another twelve thousand in the kitty but I can’t pretend that I’m philosophical about it. It seems to me that even this is only the thin edge of the wedge and for the first time in my life I’m going to ring what’s left of my place with warnings against trespassing. I’ve never gone in for close-paling fences, broken glass on walls, or barbed wire. I didn’t have to, because people used to be born with a sense of fitness and an appreciation of a decent bit of landscape, but now it’s different, different in every way, and they’ll find I can prove as prickly as those others are smooth and slippery. You can sell to Bellchamber but don’t ask me to sit here hammering out the conditions of sale. I couldn’t stomach that. It might turn my mind in the direction of spring-guns and man-traps and I believe they’ve been taken off the statute-book!’

He pushed back his chair, got up and walked out through the garden door. Claire called ‘Paul!’ but he didn’t reply and Rumble said, ‘Leave him, I’ll talk to him later.’ Simon said nothing, sitting hunched with his hands in his pockets until Andy said, glumly, ‘And where does that leave us? God knows, I knew he’d take it pretty hard but it isn’t the end of the world—just a few tents and caravans, half a mile away and still out of sight …’