The Green Gauntlet (58 page)

Rumble, making a sharp turn up the lane did not see the bird, but said, grinning, ‘There’s not much you miss, is there Gov’nor?’ and Paul said no, or not so long as he was mobile, and then remembered to thank the boy for leaving his work at this busy time of year in order to drive an old bag of bones to his favourite roost.

They passed through an open gate about two hundred yards short of Hermitage, where Ellie Pitts’ foreman was tinkering with a tractor and then over the shoulder of the pasture known as Undercliff, making for the trees at the rear of French Wood where there was a track negotiable in dry weather.

The gorse between here and Hermitage Copse dip was ablaze and between the great yellow clumps grew acres of heath and heather. Rumble said, ‘Old Henry, and David after him, made several attempts to root out that stuff and enlarge this pasture but they never made much progress, did they?’ and Paul replied, ‘No, thank God. A man can clear too much on his holding and it begins to look like a suburban allotment, if he isn’t careful.’ Then, after a pause, ‘Don’t let them make too many changes when I’m gone, Rumble. You’ll have to go along with the times, of course, but leave all the big timber and don’t monkey with French Wood, or places like that wildflower bank down by the river.’

‘Well, I can vouch for Home Farm, and our Jerry will take care of the Dell,’ Rumble said, as they nosed into the central ride that divided the plantation, ‘as for the rest, that’s up to Simon. He’ll have the main say in what goes on, won’t he?’

‘If he wants to,’ said Paul, glad that Rumble did not make the usual deprecating noises about him lasting indefinitely, that some might have felt obliged to make. ‘This is far enough. I can make it on my own to the ridge, and don’t hang about like a chauffeur waiting for me. I’d like to sun myself up here for an hour. Go back to your work, boy, and send one of the others for me around four-thirty.’

Rumble was not surprised by this abrupt dismissal. It was the fifth or sixth time in the last few months that he had been summoned to take the old man within reach of the crest and he knew that at no time in his life had Paul needed company up here. All the same, he stayed and watched him go, walking slowly along the level ground to where the trees ended. Then, seeing him lower himself into the hollow of the sawn elm that the Hermitage foreman had converted into a makeshift seat at his request, he backed between a rowan and a silver birch and drove back the way he had come.

IV

T
he air up here was less humid than at river level but the murmur was continuous, an undulating chorus that he always listened for in woods at this season of the year, the long, gluttonous song of summer, of bees hard at work on curtseying stalks and the prolonged twitter and rustle of birds in the thickets. You could, he thought, almost hear things growing.

Up here, from April until August, blackbirds and thrushes sang all day but they were difficult to spot in the complicated sun-patterns of the leaves and he could see none now, although he did see a jay, betrayed by its bright plumage, and after that a green woodpecker rapping away at an old beech, one of the very few original trees on the plateau. He had always liked this industrious bird, whose search for insects exposed signs of decay to an observant woodsman like old Sam Potter, who had called them by the country name, ‘yaffle’, because of their derisive laugh. He watched the ‘yaffle’ pursue its fitful, circular search, passing out of sight on the far side of the trunk and then reappearing, prospecting the bark like a conscientious carpenter searching out a fault in the structure of a wall. Then a swift flashed out of the wood and he followed its flight down the steeply-angled slope to the curve of the river. The lightest kind of breeze touched the stiff-ranked grain of Four Winds’ meadows, turning them into a sea of molten gold, and then passed on and up the escarpment to lose itself in the wood at his back. Its passage reminded him of a snatch from a poem he had learned at school and he murmured it aloud,

‘“All along the brimming river

Little breezes dusk and shiver …”’

‘Good that,’ he thought, ‘that chap Tennyson knew what he was talking about.’

Away beyond the cluster of Four Winds’ outbuildings he could see the hyacinth-blue rim of the moor, with none of the camp scars showing now, and to the far right, just within range of his eye, the faint rectangle marking the site of Periwinkle that had never quite harmonised with the soil surrounding it, probably because of the noxious chemicals in that damned bomb they had dropped there. He thought about Periwinkle a moment and what had emerged from it after he had created it out of the old Hardcastle freeholding and leased it to poor old Will Codsall, killed in the Loos sector in 1915. It had earned its keep he supposed, first as a refuge for Will and his Elinor—Elinor-Willoughby-that-was—then as a starting point for Rumble Patrick and Mary in the days when Rumble’s head was full of undigested theories. His first grandson had been born down there, and almost killed there a few years later, but now it was no more than a scar on the boundary between Four Winds and Hermitage. It had served its purpose and been reclaimed by the Valley, as would every other man-made monument in time.

The sun warmed him through but the haze in the Valley set limits to his view. Ordinarily he should have been able to glimpse a strip of the bay between the landslip and the goyle, where Crabpot Willie’s shanty had once stood, but today it was invisible. Only the upper bastion of the Bluff showed on the left and between that and the spur on which he sat, the sun shining on the seaward curves of the Sorrel. His eager gaze dropped a point or two so that he could just make out the clump of new trees growing down the western side of the Coombe. Following their march to the level of the river road he picked out the narrow slash of the lane that ended in the site of Mill Cottage.

The memory of what had happened there returned to him, poignantly this time, for suddenly, inexplicably after all this time, he felt a great surge of loneliness that could not be assuaged by the thought of a houseful of sons and daughters-in-law awaiting tea for him back at the house. He enjoyed their company and their comradeship, and he liked to watch the high spirits of their children, but they were not his generation, the last of whom had dropped away in ones and twos, leaving him a Crusoe on an island of time. He was filled with a great longing to see Claire, to reach out and touch her, to hear her voice and catch the sparkle of her eye as she looked over her shoulder at him while tugging a comb through her hair, and the yearning was strong enough to revive a little of his resentment against the spoilers whose greed had been powerful enough to move a hillside that had stood still since the days when the Sorrel was five miles wide and the haunt of dinosaurs.

The small flame of anger burned itself out in a matter of seconds. When he looked that way again he could not even detect the place where the landslide had occurred. In the shimmer of heat the long slope of the Coombe looked as it had always looked in summer, a squat green lizard with its tail in the river.

He thought, idly, ‘What’s it all about? What difference would it have made if I’d spent my life elsewhere?’ and he fell to contemplating all he had put into the Valley and all he had taken out. It was a very long and complicated balance sheet but that did not bother him, old and muddled as he was, for it was an exercise in accountancy that he had practised daily for more than sixty years.

He thought first of the debit side, of his disappointments and frustrations, of the farms and the people he had seen go sour—old Martin Codsall killing Arabella with a hay knife and then hanging himself with baling cord, the fact that not one of his four sons had shared his active interest in the place but thought of it as a kind of summer retreat or, at best, a family base to bring their children at Christmas and holiday times. He remembered his first wife’s openly expressed contempt for the narrowness of a life lived between the Whin and the Bluff and her renunciation of himself and the Valley before he was twenty-six. He remembered the ravages of two wars, the wholesale slaughter of Valley men in France and, twenty odd years later, the wanton deaths of people like Rachel, Harold Eveleigh and his own son, Stevie. He remembered other, lesser plagues, foot and mouth epidemics, storms, droughts, crop failures of one kind or another, the long trek across the desert of the Slump when farms were two a penny, and the final blow that had robbed him of Claire in his old age.

But there was another side to it, thank God, and it was as well to dwell on this, the rehousing of people who had lived in squalor when he came here, the reclaiming of hundreds of acres of wilderness that had paid a high dividend when the country was reduced to siege rations, all the marrying and procreating that had gone on down there over half a century, and all the laughter and junketing attending the special occasions they had celebrated as far back as Edward VII’s coronation. You had to balance the good with the bad, the positive against the negative, and in the end, even when viewed objectively, the first far outweighed the second. If he had never set foot in the place how would it look at the moment? The whole strip of coast would be sown with red and white dolls’ houses and nothing would be growing there except a few front-garden roses and a few back-garden vegetables. Some of the farms, like High Coombe and Low Coombe, would have long since disappeared and in their place would be caravan parks and maybe a hoarding or two. The woods would have been thrown, the axe eating into standing timber year by year, until nothing remained except moss-covered stumps. The Mere, if it survived at all, would look like the Serpentine on a busy day. He had stopped this happening and had bent most of his energies towards conservation, but he had also developed and expanded within the limits of his pocket, so that people like the Potters and the Eveleighs and the Pittses and the Honeymans had been encouraged to live useful and, in the main, enjoyable lives, or more useful and more enjoyable than they would have lived under the patronage of someone like that scoundrel Shawcrosse, or Sydney Codsall, his predecessor, who had also tried to usher in an era of ugliness and urban sprawl. On the whole, and making full allowances for his stubbornness, he had succeeded. It was a pleasant verdict to arrive at on a hot summer’s afternoon when a man’s eighty-sixth birthday was behind him.

It was then that he spotted the hare, one of the largest he had ever seen in the Valley, and the sight of it sitting there, its long ears raised an inch or two above the young bracken fronds, gave him not exactly a fright but a feeling of unease, for he remembered that there were many legends about hares in the Valley and all of them were associated in one way or another with bad luck. The hare was not looking in his direction and he must have been well to the windward of it, for although its nose twitched it looked as placid as a cat dozing in the sun. What was that story Old Meg or her poacher son Smut had told him about a Valley witch who turned herself into a hare every night? Something about a silver bullet they made from a crooked sixpence, so that the hare could be stalked and shot, and in the morning they found the old woman dead with the crooked sixpence in her heart. How many such legends had they told him over the last sixty-odd years and how persistent they were, passed on from generation to generation as faithfully as ancestral traits like the Codsall streak of violence, the rolling Potter gait, the Pitts’ grin that had missed David and reappeared in Prudence Honeyman when she reached middle-age? How timeless everything was or everything except the body that one used to go about the business of life, working, planning, eating, mating and then disintegrating with a certainty no other human experience could match?

He stared fixedly at the hare, so fixedly that when it moved, bounding out of the bracken and shooting off at a tremendous pace across the escarpment, he gave a great start that jolted his bones and set him coughing so violently that he had to grip the bark of the elm with one hand, using the other to grope in his pocket for his handkerchief, his eyes misting so that the whole vista below slanted and blurred.

He got hold of the handkerchief but the paroxysm was so violent and so persistent that he had no power to raise it to his eyes. The cough jostled him like a giant wrestler, throwing its terrible weight left, then right, then full centre, so that he bowed his head, fighting back with every nerve and muscle in his body, and because of his streaming eyes he fought blind.

Slowly, very slowly, he began to win, and threw up his head in a final effort so that his eyes drew level with the horizon but then a strange thing happened. The blue haze of the moor, and that point on the Dunes where, in lower temperatures he could have seen the glint of the bay, began to advance like a long belt of cloud, and as it moved it absorbed all the colours of the Valley, the blue of Sorrel forget-me-nots, the yellow of the irises and buttercups, the bright crimson of a thousand and one foxglove bells and hedge poppies, the dozen shades of green from heather stalk to the near-white underside of cowparsley and beech leaf, a gloriously prolific cascade of colour a mile wide, crossing the width of the Valley and scaling the crest on which he was perched.

He watched it with the curiosity he had always had for every manifestation up here but as it rolled over the river and advanced up the slope his curiosity turned to wonder that such a kaleidoscopic miracle could be conjured out of a summer’s afternoon. Then it touched him and he recognised the scent, a compound that he could separate, naming the tang of gorse, the resin of the pines, the smell of turned soil that would bring gulls flocking and, behind all these, the sharp, healing whiff of the sea.

Each of them broke into a run when they saw the handkerchief trailing from his left hand and the backward tilt of his head where it rested on the arm of the truncated elm.

The handkerchief hung there like a drooping ensign on a windless day, its neatly creased folds as motionless as the fingers that gripped them. Simon, the first to reach him, did not need to make the routine tests. His face and hands were still warm so that he could not have been dead more than a few minutes, and at first the very narrowness of the margin filled him with a bitterness that brought tears to his eyes. And then he had second thoughts that helped to offset his feeling of guilt, for if Paul Craddock could have devised a death for himself it would have been death in these precise circumstances, high up, in the open, and looking across the Valley on a drowsy summer afternoon. They all had a private place in the Valley and this was his, had always been his, as far back as Simon could remember, and as he stood there, with John and Rumble bustling round him, it was this single memory that emerged from the turmoil of his emotions and gave him a measure of self-control.