The Green Gauntlet (45 page)

IV

W
hen lunch was cleared away and still Andy had not returned or telephoned, Margaret said she would drive down into the town and collect Vanessa who had been having a dancing lesson at a little Academy in the Y.W.C.A. Hall. Claire was glad to get her out of the house. It gave her a better opportunity of putting her apology for a plan to work, and it seemed to her that confrontation without Margaret in the offing would be less complicated.

She was luckier than she had hoped. Within fifteen minutes she heard Andy’s car send the gravel flying as he drove up with his inevitable flourish, slammed the door and ran up the porch steps carrying his worn briefcase. Watching him through the study window she could see him objectively, as a teenager storming into the Big House with Stevie at his heels, a couple of freebooters returning to base for a meal and a chance to plan the next foray. He was heavier, of course, and all that scar tissue hadn’t improved his looks, but he still dressed with the same assertive flashiness, expensive camel-hair coat, carelessly knotted silk scarf, yellow gloves and handmade shoes, as though he used his clothes to proclaim the shallow prosperity of his enterprises. She thought, distractedly, ‘How the devil did an uncomplicated man like Paul Craddock sire a pair of prancing stallions like Andy and Stevie? Where does it come from, this obsession to be top-dog and prove it every minute of the day? It couldn’t have come from Paul’s scrapyard father—he was always bullied by that old rascal Zorndorff, and my father wasn’t greedy for anything except the acres he ploughed!’ He came into the hall in what seemed to Claire to be a very good humour, calling, ‘Margy? You there Margy?’ and when Claire moved into the study doorway he looked first baffled and then alerted, perhaps by her presence within reach of his desk. Then, already bluffing, he threw down his coat and brief case and said, ‘Had lunch? Vanessa around?’ and she told him that Vanessa was at dancing class and that Margaret had just gone for her.

‘I’ll fix myself something,’ he said, ‘come into the kitchen and yarn while I eat. I’ve just driven two-fifty without stopping. She’s a honey, that car. Why don’t you talk the Gov into getting one? Is he going to potter round the Valley in an Austin for the rest of his life?’

‘I don’t know,’ Claire said, carefully, ‘maybe he’ll push the boat out when he capitalises on what’s left of the estate,’ and he gave her a shrewd look and said, ‘What’s cooking? Why are you up here?’ and then brushed past her into the study and saw the tracing and the letters on the desk and the centre drawer of his desk open.

It did not take him more than a few seconds to recover and she marvelled at his sang-froid, wholly assumed but more than adequate to absorb any amount of recoil. It was, she supposed, a trick of the trade acquired over the years. He said, with a shrug, ‘You’ve rumbled it, then?’

‘Yes, I’ve rumbled it. I always brought you and the others up to regard the act of reading one another’s mail as one of the shabbiest things one person could do to another but there are exceptions. I’m glad I got the chance to read yours.’

He went over to the desk and studied the plan for a moment. He did not so much as glance at the letters.

‘Well,’ he said, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke through his nose, ‘that’s that! I knew there would have to be a showdown sooner or later and I daresay it’ll be a more civilised one with you than it would be with the Old Man.’

The word ‘civilised’ irritated her but only momentarily. She said, ‘Is it part of the new creed of the civilised to sell their own kith and kin to strangers? Providing the price is right? Does
anything
go nowadays?’

‘Pretty well anything,’ he said, ‘but if that’s your approach I might just as well try and have a final go at converting the Gov’nor. No sense in the two of us rehearsing is there? I have got a point of view, you know.’

She gave herself a moment or two to bite back the obvious retort, one of several that occurred to her and he watched her, smiling with the live side of his face, so that anyone not aware of his facial burns might have mistaken his blandness for mockery. She was familiar with the distortion and today it set limits to her anger. She said, ‘Very well. If there is an explanation, any kind of explanation, I’d be interested to hear it,’ and sat down in his swivel chair.

‘I dropped a broad hint at the last meeting,’ he said, ‘but nobody noticed.’

‘I noticed. That’s why I’m here. All that talk about young people drifting out of the Valley in search of jobs and kicks. That was the hint, wasn’t it?’

‘It’s happening,’ he said, ‘and in places like Coombe Bay it’s already happened. Everybody still there depends entirely on the holiday trade. Without it there wouldn’t be a hundred people left in the village. Are you going to deny that?’

‘It isn’t what we’re talking about,’ she said.

‘You mean the devious way I went about it? Well, what alternative was there? You ought to know, you’ve been married to the Old Boy for forty years.’

He had been well in control of himself up to now but suddenly he became very emphatic. ‘An industrialised country doesn’t stand still. It can’t or it would go bust in a single generation. That was true when we stopped feeding Europe a century ago and it’s even more true today. We live by importing food and exporting manufactured goods and we’ve been doing that for the last eighty years but there are still people like the Gov’nor who can’t or won’t admit it, and naturally they get hurt when it hits them between the eyes. I’m sorry about that—in a way I admire him, always have admired him, but for far different reasons than the middle-of-the-roaders like Rumble Patrick and Simon admire him. He can’t help being the kind of person he is any more than I can, or you can, but he has to pay the standard price for the privilege of trying to turn back the tide. He has to get his feet wet every now and again!’

‘Can you honestly say he hasn’t done a wonderful job of work since he came here half a century ago? Are you even qualified to say whether he has or hasn’t? You didn’t know this place until he’d put years of his life into it but I did. I knew it in an absentee landlord’s time when most of the people about here hadn’t got a good roof over their heads and shared outside privvies and pump water. Don’t talk about him as if he was antediluvian. He doesn’t deserve it. And he certainly doesn’t deserve what you’ve done to him.’

‘He’ll never understand what I’ve done or tried to do,’ Andy said, ‘and for that matter I don’t suppose any of you will but I don’t give a damn about that. All I’m interested in is making sure that when he is taken for a ride he gets paid for it. That’s been the general object of the exercise as far as I’m concerned. Do you think Shawcrosse would have paid twelve thousand for that tip of Bellchamber’s if I hadn’t twisted his arm?’

‘But can’t you see that he isn’t the least bit interested in money? If he had been do you suppose he would have ploughed a fortune into the Valley and then given what was left to people like you? This Company, this Deed-of-Gift nonsense the lawyers talked him into, do you really believe he did it to save tax and dodge death-duties? It wasn’t that way at all. It was a gesture—
his
kind of gesture, to people like Stevie who lost his life, and people like you who were bruised and knocked about. He didn’t have to do it. He could have sat back and let the whole lot of you get on with it and be damned to the speculators, and the Exchequer and everyone else who is frying to turn his dream into a nightmare. Oh, I daresay that sounds fanciful to you but he does have a dream, he’s always had it, and it isn’t a selfish dream either. He fought for it and worked for it and if the times have overtaken him it isn’t your place to lead the stampede.’

‘I never did lead it,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact, most of the time, I’ve been trying to head it off.’

‘By ranging yourself with people like this man Shawcrosse, whoever he is.’

‘Shawcrosse isn’t anyone in particular,’ he said stubbornly. ‘Shawcrosse is just a symbol. There are hundreds of Shawcrosses, thousands of Shawcrosses, and most of them have eased themselves into places where they can call the tune! The departmental offices concerned with the future of places like the Valley are stuffed with Shawcrosses and there’s a baker’s dozen of them—half of them builders—on every sizeable town council. They’ve got dreams that he doesn’t even know about and wouldn’t understand even if he did know. But in ten years’ time he’ll find that out, and then it’ll be too late, because the only power the Shawcrosses respect is the power of money. By then, unless he capitalises and reinvests the way I’ve been urging him to do, he won’t have any money and not much land either. He’ll have been bled white by tax and sewn up with legislative tape. They’ll serve him with forms and requisitions and anything else they’ve got in their bloody pigeonholes. And even if he doesn’t change the rest of the Valley will the moment they spot a chance of making big capital gains. You’ll see a stampede then all right and who will be heading it? The Pittses, the Honeymans, the Eveleighs and the Bellchambers. The whole damned lot of them, one after the other, and they won’t wait around to say goodbye either, because their kind of loyalty was spent long before I came on the scene. It didn’t survive the First War and if you don’t believe me ask any one of them how much they made out of the black market when I was in the Desert.’

He obviously believed every word he said. He was not, she decided, excusing himself, or softening her up in the hope that some of his arguments would be passed on to Paul when she got home. She said, distractedly, ‘You don’t believe in anything, do you?
Nothing.
Nothing at all. When did you stop believing, Andy?’

She never learned how he would have answered that question and she would have liked very much to have heard it from his lips. Just then a door banged somewhere outside and then, surprising them both, Margaret was there in her hat and coat and with a red suitcase in her hand. She said, addressing Claire, ‘Will you be long? Vanessa’s out there and I don’t want her dragged into it.’

For the first time since he had come into the house he looked nonplussed. It was not her words or her suitcase that disconcerted him but her act of addressing Claire as though there was no-one else in the room. Claire saw him flush and the colour, restricted to the live side of his face, reminded her of a reflection in a warped mirror. Then the colour died away and he said, without moving, ‘Where the hell are you going? How do you come into this?’ and looked back in Claire’s direction as though she could supply the answer.

‘I don’t know what Claire’s been telling you,’ Margaret said, ‘but she probably didn’t explain that I came across that tracing and those letters when I was looking for some blotting paper. I took them to her at once. It seemed to me I owed her and your father that much.’

‘If you have prejudged the issue go where the hell you like,’ he shouted, ‘but don’t take Vanessa out of here on account of a damn silly family squabble.’ Margaret did not move as he took a step towards her, however, but said, in the same level tone, ‘I’ll take Vanessa where I like. You’re not her father and have no say in what happens to her, Andy. Stop shouting at me and get yourself a drink.’ Then she went out and Claire, after hesitating a moment, followed. He walked behind as far as the front door and then stopped and when she reached Margaret’s car and saw Vanessa perched on the back seat among other suitcases, Claire turned her head and saw him standing at the library window watching.

She said, in a low voice, ‘Are you sure about this, Margaret? It’s not your quarrel you know,’ and Margaret said, easing herself into the driving seat, ‘I’m sure. I only needed something like this as a pushover,’ and let in the clutch.

Vanessa said, equably, ‘Are we going to Nan’s?’ and when Claire confirmed that they were she said, ‘Good! Gramp will let me ride Spotty to Saturday’s meet. If I stay on he’ll probably let me poke about the coverts a bit, unless they find straight off.’

‘I’m sure he will,’ Claire said, ‘but don’t argue if he keeps you on the leading rein like last time you went hunting with him.’

V

I
t was more or less as he had prophesied, except that his time schedule was over-optimistic. The face of the Valley was changed not in ten years but in seven.

Andy had spoken of an army of Shawcrosses and of their plans, of private men with private swathes to cut, and public men with reputations to make or to guard, one eye on the local editorials, the other on the ballot-box, and also of faceless men at the disposal of both groups for the price of a little deference.

Andy had warned her that Paul would not even understand their motives if they were spelled out to him and here again he was right. These cohorts did not use Paul Craddock’s dictionary. They called things by strange names. A row of red-brick houses, with slated roofs and bearded gnomes surrounding small concrete rock-pools, replaced a row of thatched, cob cottages burned down as fire brigade exercises, and this was called ‘Modernisation’. A concrete swimming-bath, built within a hundred yards of the sea was called ‘An Amenity’. A road, flanked by hoardings advertising tyres and Coca-Cola was ‘Marine Access’, although only a potential suicide would use such a road without a girdle of chromium and pressed steel about him.

The transformation was not dramatically achieved and always the eruptions were strictly localised. It was as though the miles separating Whinmouth and Coombe Bay ran across a corrupted body and no-one could be sure where a boil would gather or where the skin would pucker and change colour. The initial eruption was along the eastern edge of the Coombe where all the trees were felled and all the hazel-bushes and gorse ripped out and carted away, and in their place multi-coloured caravans were parked in neat rows, with here a corrugated-iron privy, there a squat, cast iron incinerator. Beyond them, mushrooming between Whitsun and September, stretched the tents and between tents and caravans they built a wainy elm bungalow, selling camping gear and presided over by Bellchamber himself.

That was in the late spring of 1948. Other amenities followed in quick succession.