He surprised her by saying that before long a great many people would be preaching against the war, for it now seemed certain that it would not be over by Christmas or the Christmas after that and that he expected to be in France himself within days which was a pity for he would have liked to have attended Keith’s wedding on Saturday. Mrs Handcock was dismayed that he would only be home for days after an absence of more than two years and at once recalled her duty to notify Squire and Mrs Craddock of his arrival. Ikey made the brazen suggestion that he should carry in their early morning tea but Mrs Handcock would have none of this for it would mean him seeing man and wife in bed together and this outraged her notion of propriety. She entered into a conspiracy, however, to tell Squire that someone had called on urgent business, bidding Ikey to wait at the top of the stairs so that she could watch the fun. Soon Paul came hurrying out, struggling into his dressing gown and his shout brought Claire on to the landing without a dressing gown for she interpreted Paul’s bellow as an accident involving somebody’s tumble downstairs.
They were delighted to see him and touched by the presents he had for them in his valise, a cashmere shawl for Claire, a pair of silver-mounted Mahratta pistols for the library wall and a cunningly-made Indian toy for each of the children. Mary, three and a half now, blushed with pleasure when he gave her a doll dressed in exquisitely worked embroidery closely sewn with amber and ruby-coloured beads.
News of his return ran down the Valley like a heath fire and all that morning tenants and Valley craftsmen made excuses to call and shake his hand, for he was the only professional soldier among them and Mons had raised the standing of a professional soldier in public esteem.
Among the last to arrive was Keith Horsey, who came into the yard as Ikey was saddling Paul’s ageing Snowdrop for an amble round the estate before dusk. His greeting seemed so restrained that Ikey put it down to the nervousness regarding his imminent marriage. It was when Keith curtly declined the loan of the stable’s sole remaining hack and an invitation to accompany him that Ikey noticed there was a reticence about him reminiscent of the nervous, shambling youth who had been the butt of High Wood during his first school year. He told Chivers to exercise Snowdrop and walked Keith up the orchard as far as the sunken lane and here, exercising the privilege of an old friend, he said, ‘Are you scared about getting married, Keith?’ but Keith looked at him defiantly and replied, quietly, ‘No, Ikey. I’m not a bit scared about Saturday. Rachel and I will be very happy once we get away from here.’
‘I heard that your prospective father-in-law was flag-flapping,’ said Ikey, ‘but I’m damned if I’d let that bother me.’
‘It isn’t that either,’ Keith said, stubbornly, ‘in fact, it isn’t anything much to do with me really. I suppose I should have written but it wasn’t the kind of thing one could put to paper, at least, I couldn’t!’ and when Ikey raised his eyebrows, very puzzled by the other’s embarrassment, he went on, ‘It’s . . . about you, Ikey, but before I make an idiot of myself will you tell me something?’
‘Anything?’
‘Well, before you left here, how . . . how well did you know Hazel Potter?’
Ikey, still bewildered, said, ‘What the devil are you driving at? If you’ve anything on your mind, Keith, for God’s sake stop drivelling and come out with it.’
‘Very well, I will,’ said Keith primly. ‘I don’t suppose anyone here wrote to tell you for there was no reason why they should but Hazel Potter—she had a child about eighteen months ago and I’ve always believed it was yours!’
It took Ikey thirty seconds to get a grip on himself while Keith, his eyes directed to the ground, stood with shoulders hunched and hands clenched like a man expecting a blow. At last Ikey said, quietly, ‘If Hazel had a child it would be mine, Keith. Whose child do they think it is?’
‘They don’t think anything about it now,’ Keith said, ‘she wouldn’t say and nobody cared much so after a bit they gave up guessing.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘She’s living in the cottage beside the old mill on the river road. Doctor Rudd got her fixed up there and I found her a job, cleaning the church,’ and when Ikey made no reply he described how he and Rachel had found the girl in labour and how, when he had burst into the cave, she had shouted Ikey’s name. ‘No one knows that,’ Keith added, ‘not even Rachel, for naturally I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t be sure anyway, not until the child began to grow but then, somehow, I knew! Well, it’s off my conscience and I’m glad. I did what I could for her, Ikey, and she seems happy enough down there, happier than any of us I imagine.’
Ikey lowered himself slowly to the step of the stile while Keith continued to hover, seemingly more embarrassed than ever. They remained like that for a moment, neither speaking nor moving, until finally Ikey said, ‘It was damned decent of you, Keith, decent to say nothing but even more so to take care of her. However, I’d sooner have known! Do you believe that?’
‘Yes,’ Keith said, ‘I believe it now.’
‘You could have told Doctor Maureen. She would have written and maybe she would have understood too.’
Keith said, wretchedly, ‘I almost did but I couldn’t be sure, not absolutely sure and it seemed . . . well, so disloyal I suppose. How could I forget all I owed you? Oh, it wasn’t just watching out for me at school but everything, including Rachel. I suppose you’ve forgotten it was you who brought us together?’
‘Yes, I had forgotten,’ Ikey said but he remembered now, and a picture returned to him of a gawky, stammering youth shaking hands with the pert farmer’s daughter against a background of swirling couples and the blare of a brass band.
He said, ‘You’re sure nobody knows?’ and when Keith reassured him, ‘It seems incredible that nobody saw us, not once. Maybe her mother Meg does know but she’d never say anything, she doesn’t waste many words.’ He got up, passing a hand over his hair. ‘That old ruin beside the water-mill you say?’
‘It isn’t a ruin now, Squire had it done up for her.’
‘She stays in it all the year round?’
‘Why yes,’ Keith said, ‘why shouldn’t she?’
‘Ah,’ said Ikey, ‘that’s something you wouldn’t know, Keith. Well, I’ll go there right away.’
‘Would you like me to come?’
Ikey smiled. ‘No, we had no witnesses in the old days so there’s no point in enlisting one now. You could do something, though; tell Mrs Handcock to tell Squire I’ll be in to dinner but that I would prefer it wasn’t a celebration, I believe the Gov was planning one. There’s something else you can do too, if you will. I’ve only got three clear days, and God knows if I’ll ever be back. Would your father marry us if I got a special licence?’
Keith opened his mouth and closed it again, perhaps knowing his man better than anyone in the Valley. He said, ‘I expect Father will help, if he can,’ and hoisting himself over the stile walked down the orchard path towards the house.
The cottage stood on a low bank on the left of the road, a squat, three-roomed dwelling, built of cob with a pantile roof and around it a quarter-acre of vegetable garden hedged about with a criss-cross of angled beanpoles.
The setting sun over Nun’s Head was a narrow sliver of orange, turning the small, deep-set windows to flame and when he climbed the winding path and looked inside he could see them both in the light of a log fire, Hazel squatting on the floor, with her back to him and the child, facing the window, on the point of tottering across the floor into her outstretched arms. It was a set-piece, like a woodcut illustration of a sentimental magazine serial, yet curiously moving in its banality. He stood watching as the child staggered the distance on chubby, bowed legs and the mother caught him round the waist and tossed him the length of her arms. What awed him was not the child’s likeness to himself, which seemed to him so striking that he was astonished she had kept her secret so well but the domesticity e
tched on her and the room, as though the single act of giving birth to a child had changed her as no other pressures had been able to change her, drawing out her wild blood like wine from a cask and replacing it with the blood of a cottager’s wife, who slept in a bed under a roof, cooked regular meals and worked to a domestic timetable from sunrise to sunset. The evidence was all there before his eyes, not only in the playfulness between them but in the clean hearth, the shining pans suspended from the whitewashed walls, the patchwork rug neatly spread beside the scoured table where lay a pile of ironed linen and two bowls and spoons set before a high and a low chair. He thought, ‘It’s like looking into the cottage of the Three Bears and I wouldn’t wonder if she wasn’t pretending to be a bear,’ and suddenly a rush of tenderness choked him and he felt his eyes pricking and for a moment was a child again himself but one shut out of the simple delights of childhood looking in upon security and certainty he had never enjoyed. He stood back from the window making a great effort to collect himself and in a little he succeeded, so that he was able to pass the window and reach for the gargoyle knocker; yet he was unable to rattle it, thinking desperately, ‘God help me, she has to know and there isn’t much time! Maybe Dr Maureen or the parson can sort it out somehow but it’s for me to make the first move,’ and he thumped the knocker hard, hearing her steps scrape on the slate slabs and the slow creak of the heavy door being dragged open.
He had expected her to whoop, or scream, or make some kind of outcry but the only sound she uttered was a kind of prolonged hiss, expressing no more than a mild and pleasurable surprise and then she smiled, almost absently and stood back, waving him into the cosy room as though he had been a casual visitor calling with the parish magazine or a parcel of groceries. Then he remembered that she was endowed with the priceless gift of reckoning time by her own clock and calendar, and that her months had always been days and her days minutes or seconds. Yet erosion of this bastion must have started for she said, carelessly, ‘You been gone longer’n I recall; zeems longer any ways! Will ’ee mind the tacker while I maake broth?’
He could think of nothing adequate to reply to this and so compelling was her bland acceptance of his presence that there was no necessity to say anything, or to begin the grotesque task of convincing her that more than two years had passed since he had climbed the long slope to her little house and that within that period her womb had yielded up his child, the fat youngster now perched on his knee and gurgling with delight at this unlooked for variation in its routine. He said, as she bustled between hob and table, ‘He’s a proper li’l tacker. What do ’ee call un, midear?’
‘Well, ’er’s christened Patrick along o’ the lady doctor,’ she said, ‘but I dorn call un that, ’cept to plaise ’er when ’er’s about! I calls un anything as comes to mind and ’ee answers to most. When us is yer alone tiz ‘Rumble’ on account o’ the noise that comes out of un! He’s lively enough, mind, and us never has to worry over ’un but he do zeem to have a man’s share o’ the wind! Give un a pat and judge for yourself!’ and as if to support her claim the baby belched, a long, rumbling, almost dutiful belch so that Ikey shouted with laughter and Hazel smiled too as she poured soup into the two bowls and then, using a piece of muslin as a strainer, a third portion into another bowl she had taken from the dresser.
They sat and ate supper, slowly and ceremoniously, Hazel lifting the spoon to the baby’s mouth and turning aside every now and again to help herself. It was as though they had sat there through eternity, a man, a woman, and a child, snug and smug between four thick walls, warmed by the fire and their own complacency and it was only when he had watched her put the baby to bed in a cot made from a lidless coffer of ecclesiastical design that he was able to escape from the cocoon of fantasy that she and the child had spun around him from the moment of entering the cottage. Then, as she coiled herself like a housecat on the rag mat and leaned her thin shoulders against his knee, he realised that, whether he willed it or not, he would have to coax her a few steps towards reality and said, still using her brogue, ‘I’m a real sojjer now, midear, and theym sending me to the war in a day or zo. Suppose us goes down to the church an’ marries, same as Rachel Eveleigh an’ Passons’s son be doing this week? Would ’ee marry me, an’ zet up house here for me so as to have a cosy plaace to come back tu?’
She turned and stared up at him and at first he thought the movement was one of protest but she looked no more than mildly surprised and said, chuckling, ‘Now why ever should ’ee live yer along o’ me? Us all knows you bides wi’ the Squire, at the Big House.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s zo but tiz a draughty ole barn of a plaace an’ I’ve a mind to zet up with a plaace o’ me own. Seein’ as that tacker o’ yours be mine tu I dorn need to look no further, do I?’
His logic appealed to her but she had reservations. ‘Well, ’twould suit me well enough,’ she said, ‘seein’ youm comin’ an’ goin’ most o’ the time but will the Squire let ’ee? Worn ’er fly in a tizzy at you leavin’ ’un?’
‘Lookit yer,’ he said, ‘I’m a grown man, baint I? And I can live where I plaise, so hold your chatter woman and give us a kiss!’ and after kissing her he went on, ‘I like the notion so well, I’ll zet about it right away! I’ll see Squire, then I’ll have a word with Mother Meg for she’ll have to give ’ee away, seein’ Tamer’s dead an’ buried. You bide on yer an’ I’ll come to ’ee in the mornin’, and us’ll be married same as your sister Pansy, for that way us’ll get money from the Army for ’ee so long as I’m away.’
It was as simple as that and after a peep at the sleeping child he went down the bank and along the river road into the dusk and it was here, by pure chance, that he met Meg returning from one of her autumn hedge sallies, with pannier baskets full of roots slung across her shoulders.
She stopped in her stately swaying walk and greeted him with customary civility and although she made no direct reference to Hazel he was aware that she knew where he had been. Meg knew everything that happened in the Valley and therefore showed no surprise at all when he told her that the child was his and he had only known of its existence that same afternoon. When he said he was determined to marry Hazel by special licence, however, a shade of doubt crossed her face and she said, clicking her teeth, ‘Ah, you’ve no call to do that! ’Er’s well enough as she be, an’ Squire won’t favour it. You baint our sort and never could be, not now!’
‘I’m not gentry either,’ Ikey told her, ‘and everyone about here knows that well enough. Hazel, she knows how to care for the child as well as any woman in the Valley and at least the baby has stopped her wandering.’
‘Aye,’ said Meg, thoughtfully, ‘it has that and I’m glad on that account, for the Valley baint safe for a maid to wander the way it once was,’ and she jerked her head to the north where lay the camp beyond the hump of the moor. ‘Still,’ she went on reflectively, ‘they won’t take kindly to a man from the Big House marrying a Potter and come to think on it that makes no sense either, for youm better blood stock than the Quality! One can look into the baby’s hand for that!’ and casually she reached out and peered attentively at his hand, drawing her dark brows together as though resigned to what she read there. She said, suddenly, ‘Will you be doing this to give the boy a name?’ and he told her no; but he was doing it because he should have done it long since, before he went away, before he finally crossed over into the gentry’s world by taking the King’s commission. It had been a bad mistake and he admitted it for now he belonged to neither world. Only with Hazel did he feel rooted and at peace. If he survived the war, he went on, he would resign his commission and live out his life in the Dell or on some other holding. By then people all over the world would have seen the folly of money-grubbing, flag-waving and airs and graces and many would go back to agriculture, the family unit and simple basic things.
She nodded, as though disposed to agree with him and promised that if he sent a message to the Dell she
would attend the ceremony and afterwards she watched him wade the ford and pass between the great stone pillars of the gate; they had never exchanged more than a few moments’ conversation, yet she felt closer to him than to any of her own kin for somehow she recognised him as a spirit attuned to the rhythm of the seasons and privy to some of the earth’s secrets that were no longer secrets to her. Now, having read his palm, she knew something of his future too and was glad that he had spawned a son in whose veins ran the oldest blood in the Valley. What the Squire said or thought about legalising the union was not important. Marriages performed in the church down on the shore were no more than a ritual not much older than some of the oaks in the Shallowford woods. She supposed that the mumbling of a priest and the signing of papers had significance for some but not for such as her, whose ancestors had hunted about here before the first church was built. She hitched her baskets on to her shoulders and set off again down the river road, walking like a queen bringing gifts to gods older than the sad-faced Jew they called Jesus.
Post of Honour Page 10
