The Green Gauntlet (5 page)

The call, however, was not a conventional enquiry from Simon but a terse request from Stephen, technically the senior of the twins (‘by ninety seconds’, as Claire always put it) and Stevie was ringing from Yorkshire asking for his sister-in-law’s last address. She knew at once he meant the address of his twin-brother’s wife, Margaret, and that his call had nothing to do with the funeral of his other sister-in-law, Rachel, or the wreath that had somehow gone astray. Her twin sons and their wives had always operated as a foursome, ever since their marriages in the early ’thirties and long before that Stevie and Andy had seldom been seen apart, having gone to school together, skylarked through the ’twenties together, and finally, to their father’s unspeakable disgust, gone back into the scrap business together. They had also prospered together and had made, she suspected, quite a pile of money before rushing into the R.A.F. at the outbreak of war. She had admired them for this, despite Paul’s rumblings to the contrary. They were both young men obsessed with flashy sports cars, golf, old-boy talk, jars of wallop and polkadot scarves, so that they seemed to her tailor-made for the R.A.F. and would have moped behind desks for the duration, despite their mastery of modern business techniques and their innumerable shady contacts in the world of scrap metal. Now, at last, they were separated. Stevie was on a conversion course to heavy aircraft in Yorkshire, and Andy, if anything the more dashing of the two, was in Egypt with his fighter squadron, whence he wrote illegible letters reminding her of the letters she had once had from him at school.

There was, she thought, a curious urgency in Stevie’s voice and also an unusual reluctance to enter into a chatty conversation. He was fit, he said, and unlikely to go on ops for months. He was also missing Andy whom he referred to as ‘the old clot’, but what he wanted right now was his sister-in-law Margaret’s London address. He didn’t say why and she didn’t ask him because it would have seemed an unnecessary question. She gave the telephone number and then Stevie asked how everybody was and whether they were going to rebuild Rumble Patrick’s farm ‘after old Jerry’s flying visit’. She had begun to tell him about the current family dispute concerning Rumble’s proposed enlistment but she didn’t get the chance to finish. The pips went and Stevie snapped, ‘No more change. Carry on regardless …’ and the line went dead.

She came away slightly puzzled. He hadn’t mentioned Rachel being killed but only the farm and although, taken all round, he had sounded his brash, breezy self, she had sensed a certain tension that disturbed her a little. She decided then that he had been lying about his prospects of going on operations and this comforted her, for somehow she never worried about the twins’ chances of survival. They had already survived half-a-dozen car crashes, two light aeroplane crashes and one drowning when their home-made boat overturned in the bay. It would, she reminded herself, take more than Hitler to bring stillness to The Pair.

In one respect Claire was right. In another she was as wrong as she could be. Stevie had told her the truth regarding his prospects of going on operations. His conversion course would confine him to base area flights for some weeks but Claire’s instinct had not been at fault. The tension, conveyed over the wire, had nothing to do with flying, or his enforced separation from Andy. It was the result of a profound shock administered by his wife who had just left him, threatening never to return.

The rift between them had been widening over a period of eighteen months. The first crack showed shortly after the twins had turned their backs on money-making and enlisted in a barrage balloon unit whence, by pulling a fistful of strings, they had transferred to a fighter-pilot course completed in time to enable them to harry the Luftwaffe through the final fortnight of the Battle of Britain. Their surrender of civilian status and the break-up of their small scrap-metal empire, had been no real sacrifice on their part. Money, as such, did not interest them and never had, not since their coming-of-age when old Franz Zorndorff, their cicerone, had lured them out of the Valley and trained them as his acolytes. What they found rewarding about life was its constant movement and the element of gambling inherent in the scrap market but when something even more boisterous presented itself they were happy to abandon scrap for the duration and whoop it up in the skies over south-eastern England.

Margaret, Andy’s Welsh wife, accepted the situation, making the best of what could not be altered, but Monica, Stevie’s partner, had never ceased to regard the war as an attempt on the part of all engaged in it to thwart her personal plans for the future. She had, in fact, argued strenuously against their enlistment and when she failed to carry her point she had sulked through the phoney war period and on into the Dunkirk summer and beyond. Now, after nearly two years of camp-following, she could contain her frustration no longer and the resistant flare-up promised to drive a wedge between man and wife that could never be withdrawn. It was the near-certainty of this that had put the note of urgency into Stevie’s voice when, in a frantic attempt to find a mediator, he had remembered his brother’s wife and asked for Margaret’s address.

He did not have much hope that Margaret’s intervention would cause his wife to change her mind. The two had never been close friends although, in the whirl of foreign business trips, shopping sprees, the buying and selling of homes, and the cut-and-thrust of business life, they had half-convinced both men that their relationship was cordial. The truth was, of course, neither Stephen, nor Andrew, nor even Margaret had ever been privy to Monica’s long-term plans for herself, her husband and, if they had to come along, for the other pair.

The spoiled daughter of the most pontifical-looking cleric in Devon Monica Dearden had never, or not until now, repented her pursuit and capture of the harebrained son of a small country squire. She told herself, the first night they met at an Assembly Room dance, that, given the chance, she could make something of Stephen Craddock, and in a way she had, dragging Andy and his Welsh wife along in her wake. Under her tutelage they had ceased to roar about the countryside in sports cars that looked like angry red beetles and had bought more dignified forms of transport. She had also redressed all three of them, persuading the boys to discard their loud sports clothes and the yard of knitted scarf that trailed behind them wherever they went. As to their social life, she had made shift to sort that out to a degree, encouraging them to devote only business hours to men who could hardly read or write, who kept no banking accounts, but who, at a moment’s notice, could produce half a battleship or ten miles of disused railway line. Together as a quartette they assembled round them a group of pseudo-sophisticated people and had begun to cultivate an acquaintance with what, in the middle ’thirties, passed for art. They attended a play or two by unarrived dramatists, discussed the work of a few fashionable novelists and patronised a succession of artists whose canvases, usually covered with clocks, fishbones, detached limbs, assorted triangles and solitary eyes puzzled Stevie very much but were loudly acclaimed by Monica’s friends.

It was not Stevie’s philistinism, however, that enlarged his wife’s exasperation with him into frantic resentment and neither was their quarrel connected with her refusal to encumber herself with children. Stevie conceded that she might well be right when she declared him unfitted to be anybody’s father. The flaw in their marriage was exposed by the same pressures as those brought to bear on Simon and Rachel. Neither could view the present war from a common standpoint. Stevie saw it as a kind of nonstop rugby football match between a sporting team and opponents inclined to foul. Monica saw it as the most unmitigated bore ever contrived to try the patience of the human family. It was bad enough, she thought, to have to break off her social contacts, pretend to be rationed as regards food, clothes and petrol, and stumble about small market towns where the street lighting had never been adequate and was now non-existent. What was worse, in her eyes, was an obligation to support the role of a twentieth-century vivandière in one dreary camp after another, in order to be on hand to embrace one of the beefiest threequarters in the British team. For Monica Craddock did not see her husband and his messmates as heroes but as a mob of hairy school-prefects. To her they were not the defenders of democracy but extroverts who had opted out of the serious business of life to enjoy an unlooked-for holiday. When introduced to the twins’ group-captain on one of the Battle of Britain airfields she thought of him as a bemedalled Doctor Arnold of Rugby, impossibly stupid, impossibly priggish and self-deprecating into the bargain and as time passed she grew to hate everything about the R.A.F. She hated its silly slang and its obsession with gadgets. She hated its juvenile enthusiasms and its affected insouciance in matters of dress and deportment. Born and bred in the precincts of a Cathedral Close, her life regulated by the clamour of bells and the proprieties expected of an Archdeacon’s daughter, she had once yearned for adventure, for the bizarre and the unpredictable. In the years between marriage and the outbreak of war she had found all three in the company of Stephen and his brother. Then, against all probability, they entered the Fellowship of the Dedicated and overnight had become more catholic than the Pope, reverting to schoolboys, crumpling their caps, leaving their top tunic button undone to prove that they were numbered among the élite, growing fair, droopy moustaches and, above all, prattling endlessly of ‘prangs’ and ‘popsies’ and ‘wizard shows’. This was not the kind of adventure Monica had envisaged and the façade of these people did not deceive her for a moment. They claimed to despise those who, in their own idiom, ‘shot a line’, but to Monica the lines shot by the men (and their women) of Bomber and Fighter Commands criss-crossed the entire country so that there was no way of escaping the tangle.

She stuck it out, month after month, hoping that something would happen to make life worth living again and then, in a chintzy hotel room in the small market town near Stevie’s Yorkshire station, she suddenly ran out of patience. Either Stephen accepted the opportunity she had made for him of escaping from this life and re-entering a world where one had access to civilised diversions, or she would call a truce to the marriage at least for the duration and possibly for ever.

It was not a lighthearted decision. In her own deliberate way she had loved him ever since he had whisked her away from that dreary Cathedral Close and through the years of their rackety marriage she had been faithful to him, although she had her suspicions that the same could not be said of him. She thought of herself as modern and broad-minded, however, and was not disposed to worry about an occasional peccadillo on the part of a lusty young man if, as she had rightly assumed, he was anchored by more important ties. He had always looked to her for stability and she did not fail him after arriving at the conclusion that he was under the spell of those glittering little machines and the mystique of the comradeship he found in the mess. He needed, she felt, to be hauled outside of the magic circle and she knew, or thought she knew, exactly how this could be achieved. On the excuse of visiting her parents she made a tour of pre-war contacts, visiting two knights (both former scrap merchants), a Cabinet Minister, and a nameless millionaire allegedly responsible for the flow of aluminium into every aircraft factory in the country. The result was more encouraging than she had hoped. At the stroke of a pen and the rustle of a few papers Stephen could walk out of the R.A.F. camp in the time it took him to get his clearance chit, and become a civilian with prospects of not only making money but scooping up post-war honours. When she had things nicely arranged she went to him with her plan.

To her amazement and disgust he turned it down flat, and even laughed at her for making such a grotesque proposal.

He had never realised that the quietly-spoken Archdeacon’s daughter he had married back in 1934 could bring herself to utter the words and phrases she used with such fluency when she had recovered from the shock of being brushed aside like a child offering a bankrupt father the contents of her piggy-bank.

He had just returned from what, in his ridiculous language, he described as ‘circuits-and-bumps’, and had apparently acquitted himself well for he bawled naughty R.A.F. ditties as he soaped himself in the bath. She went in and sat on a cork-topped stool looking down at what, once again, struck her as a captain of football tubbing himself after a successful match. He did not look his age, or anywhere near his age, which she knew to be old for flying duties. He said, in the irritating fashion of his clodhopping father, ‘Hullo, old girl? Spruce yourself up. Big do tonight! Chaps from Four-One-Eleven coming over for a binge. Foregathering at The Mitre. The popsie behind the bar has laid on off-the-ration wallop!’

‘You’ll be far too busy for that,’ she said, and handed him a towel and two letters. One letter bore the House of Commons imprint. He glanced at them casually and then, half-leaping out of the water, with a squint of dismay.

It was clear from his expression that he only half understood the portent of the documents. He said at length, ‘What the blazes
is
this, old girl? Put me in the picture, will you?’ and she said the letters, presented in the right quarters, would result in his immediate discharge to industry.

He looked at her as if she had said something obscene, saying ‘Come again?’ and when she shrugged, ‘But where did you
get
them? How did they arrive?’

She said, still patiently, ‘They didn’t arrive, Stevie. I did the rounds, saw the right people, and there they are!’

He was being, she thought, extraordinarily obtuse. He looked at the papers again, then at her and finally said, ‘But this is crazy! I couldn’t go along with this! What gave you the idea that I might?’

He looked very foolish squatting there naked, half in and half out of the bath, his extravagant moustache bisecting his sunburned face, his mouth slightly open. She felt like a mother who had just informed a thirteen-year-old son of the consequence of some juvenile folly, raiding a neighbour’s orchard perhaps, or breaking somebody’s greenhouse with a cricket ball. She said, quietly, ‘Well, it’s done now, so you’ll just have to make the best of it. In the end you’ll thank me for it, for at least you’ll stay alive. It’s a pity some the others haven’t got wives to take the necessary steps!’