He put down his mug and stood up. She had never realised how much weight had been added to his lumbering frame since the war. Today he looked gross and out of condition, and his eyes, which had always held a puzzled, slightly worried expression, were as cold and blue as a March sky. She said, with sudden concern, ‘What is it, Hugh? You aren’t sick, are you? If you are . . . ’
‘Never felt better!’ he said shortly, ‘nor more pleased wi’ meself! And tidden a particle o’ use asking me to change my mind because it’s like I said, all zigned and zettled!’
‘I keep asking you what is signed and settled!’ she almost screamed, and his rather pursey mouth twitched, almost as though he found her extreme exasperation amusing.
‘You’d better get it straight and go back so as your man can swallow it in one piece,’ he said. ‘It’ll be less sour than nibbling, piece at a time! Codsall been badgering me for more than a year to sell him Eight Acre and Top Warren. Offered me near as much for two meadows as I paid for the whole parcel. Well, I held him off until I run across Queenie—Queenie Pitts that was. She’s been a widow twelve years or more, did you know that?’
‘Never mind Queenie Pitts! Did you sell Sydney Eight Acre and Top Warren? Did you?’
‘Aye, I did,’ he said, watching her carefully, ‘and more!’
‘How much more?’
‘The whole of it.’
‘High Coombe? The house? This house?’
‘He woulden have it no other way, so we settled on Saturday.’
Suddenly her knees began to buckle and she half turned from him to sit on the end of the long oak bench running the length of the big refectory table. There wasn’t a thing about this kitchen that lacked association with her childhood, especially those years before the day they brought her mother into the yard and she saw her through the inglenook window, a bundle under a covering of coats. Sitting here, her head in a whirl and her body shaking, it was as though the most terrible moment of her life had returned to gloat and reduce her once again to a little ghost with two swinging plaits and pointed dancing shoes, worn for the first time that day in anticipation of Mary Willoughby’s Christmas party. She said, in a whisper, ‘Is it final, Hugh? There’s no crying off?’ and he answered gruffly that there was not, for he had made up his mind to change the entire pattern of his life and Codsall’s price was ‘the daftest ever paid for a Valley farm and likely to be ’till the crack of doom!’ The mention of money seemed to relax him and iron away some of his truculence, for he stood over her grinning and said, ‘Here, lass, what’s there to fuss about? I only sold what was mine since Father took himself off. Dammit, your husband would have sold at that price if he’d known about it!’
His reference to Paul restored to her the power of protest. She shouted, ‘That’s a damned lie, Hugh! Paul wouldn’t have, no matter what Sydney was offering!’ but his grin broadened so that suddenly he was no longer a paunched, balding man of fifty but a teasing brother, enjoying the time-honoured High Coombe game of ‘making Claire’s eyes spark’. He said, genially, ‘Now see here, Claire, what’s wrong with me sitting in a dish o’ cream for a change? You been squatting in one ever since you nabbed young Squire and Rose weren’t long following suit! Why damme girl, you’ve got pretty nigh the whole Valley under your hand, an’ Rose spends more on her hunters in one year that I earn in two! I’m gone fifty; I don’t want to stay an’ wear out, like old Norman Eveleigh yonder. Besides, like I said, I ran into Queenie, and she’s that bonny you’d never believe and her not a year younger’n you!’
It was his seeming inability to understand the nature of his betrayal that baffled her for when she turned away he grabbed her arm and she saw that he was holding up a snapshot for her inspection, almost as though he felt confident that she had only to glance at it to approve his act. She saw that it was a picture of a blowzy, smirking woman in a bathing costume, and although just recognisable as Queenie Pitts, it had little relation to the bucolic girl she remembered in her teens. It was inconceivable, she thought, that a cautious, unimaginative man like Hugh should be eager to exchange land he had farmed all his life for a late-flowering courtship with a fat, rather coarse-looking woman, but perhaps he did not see her as she was but as she had seemed to him the better part of thirty years ago. It was this that prompted her to make a final attempt to shame him if he was capable of being shamed. Behind him, hanging where it had hung throughout much of her childhood, was a large, oval-framed portrait of their mother, a picture sadly dated and taken God knows how many years ago in a Whinmouth studio, of a handsome, smiling woman, under a broad picture hat and wearing a blouse with leg-o’-mutton sleeves that looked like a pair of waterwings. She pushed past him and unhooked the picture, tucking it under her arm and making for the door but the action increased his truculence and he moved to stop her, shouting, ‘Now lissen here, Claire, tidden a particle o’ use your man storming over here, and making a scene . . . ’ but when she evaded him he followed her out into the yard, trotting alongside as she climbed into the car, started the engine and began to reverse rapidly up the lane. Tears blurred her vision so that she struck the bank more than once but she outdistanced him easily enough and swung into the Dell road, leaving him behind in a cloud of exhaust. She thought, ‘I’ve got to be the one to tell Paul! I won’t be answerable for what he might do if it passed to him as Valley gossip!’ and she calmed a little, pushing the car up the one-in-four gradient on the shoulder of the Bluff.
She found him in the Home Farm strawyard talking to young Honeyman and drew him aside, pouring out her tale and waiting for him to erupt. He did not; instead he heard her out, interposing one or two terse, factual questions about the farm’s conveyance, the proposed route of the new road and other aspects of the sale, questions that she was unable to answer. His voice was steady but she noticed that his cheek twitched when she repeated what Hugh had said about herself and Rose. Then, quite suddenly, she realised that he was not angry at all but was regarding her with sympathy, and his arm went round her as he led her to the far side of the rick, out of earshot of Honeyman and his men. He said, briefly, ‘You’re taking this on yourself, aren’t you? Well don’t! It was my decision to sell to your father and how the hell were you to know he’d pass it to Hugh almost at once? For that matter, how could you or anyone else anticipate a thing like this? The real wrong Hugh has done is not giving me a chance to buy it back again; I don’t care what that young bastard Codsall gave him, I would have covered it, even if I had had to mortgage the entire bloody Valley! However, it’s done and I don’t suppose it can be reversed at this stage—that depends on the conditions your father handed over to Hugh. I’ll drive over and see him right away and I’d prefer you not to come. Will you walk across the fields, or shall I ask Honeyman to run you home in the trap?’
‘I’ll walk,’ she said gratefully, ‘and . . . thank you, Paul!’ and she brushed his cheek. She wanted to say much more. She wanted to tell him he had never seemed so big or so dignified as at that moment, when it must have seemed that everything he had striven for over the years had been mocked and belittled but he turned and left her and a moment later was driving down the river road towards Whinmouth.
Edward Derwent was not at home when Paul knocked at the door of his quayside cottage but Liz told him that he had had a letter from the local solicitor that morning and it had seemed to upset him. He had gone out with his breakfast half eaten and that was unusual for he ‘did zo take to his bacon an’ eggs’. Paul said, ‘Where’s the nearest ’phone-box, Liz?’ and she pointed to one outside the harbour-master’s office no more than a step away, so he said good-bye and crossed the quay to telephone Snow and Pritchard, the firm the Derwents used on the few occasions they needed a lawyer. They told him that Mr Derwent had indeed called that morning but had gone again, they understood to visit his son. The information troubled Paul. He knew Edward Derwent for an impulsive man if his dander was up, so he jumped in the car and put his
foot down all the way to the moor highway that linked up with the dust road running across the headwaters of the two rivers. It was the longest way round but the way the old man would have taken if he made the journey by trap, and he remembered that Edward Derwent neither hired cars nor drove them. He reached the junction of roads in half-an-hour and it was not until he was descending the hill that the sourness of Claire’s news rose in his throat, tainting his palate like bile. He had a swift and agonising vision of what the estate map would look like when Codsall had finished with High Coombe, had cut his road and blocked the whole eastern boundary of the estate with bungalows, quarry shacks and God knew what else. Shallowford would be punched into an ungainly figure eight, with ‘development’ reaching as far as the edge of the Dell and then all the way to the coast. Coombe Bay would change overnight, becoming, no doubt, a snappy little resort, with a prim promenade, shelters and ‘attractions’ of one sort and another, and whom would they attract? Not men with a craft at their fingertips, like old Tom Williams and Abe Tozer the smith but carloads of week-enders, strewing paper bags and cigarette packets all over the gutters and townees to man shops displaying mass-produced goods behind chromium-plated windows! Well, no one alive could stop it altogether, he supposed, but where was the sense in accelerating the process and this, it would seem, was what Sydney and his kind had in mind, and for no better purpose than to line their own pockets. God damn the lot of them, he thought, and especially that bloody traitor Hugh Derwent, and he swung the car off the road into a passing bay to allow the passage of a two-horse farm wagon approaching at a walk.
It was not until the vehicle had drawn almost level that he noticed the waggoner was Hugh Derwent himself, hunched on the box with the reins slack in his hand. He shot out his hand to open the offside door and leap out and then he stopped halfway out, checked partly by his brother-in-law’s dejected air but more so by a livid cut spotted with congealed blood on his cheekbone. He opened his mouth to say something but Hugh did not even glance at the car. In a moment the waggon had gone creaking on its way leaving a debris of twigs and leaves where it had brushed the nearside hedge. In another moment it had passed out of sight round the bend in the narrow track.
Edward Derwent was standing in the centre of the yard when he drove up, waiting beside the pump almost as though he expected him and Paul noticed that he looked very trim in his serviceable tweeds and the deerstalker he had affected since his retirement. ‘More like a retired colonel than a farmer,’ Paul thought, with a grin, and without knowing why suddenly felt a great deal more cheerful, although, from where they stood, he could hear the chink of spades on flint as Codsall’s workmen dug their way across Eight Acre. Paul said, ‘I saw Hugh near the crossroads and he looked pretty sorry for himself! You’re not going to tell me you thrashed him?’
‘I caught him one or two before he ran for it,’ the old man said but with no answering smile. ‘It’s damned lucky for him I brought this instead of a double-barrel!’ and he lifted a heavy walking-stick tipped with a brass ferrule. ‘I was coming over if you hadn’t shown up. Not that there’s much to say, you can’t do a thing to stop it, lad.’
‘I didn’t imagine I could,’ Paul told him. ‘I just hoped, I suppose. Claire was very upset. What happened exactly?’
‘I threw him off,’ the old man said, ‘the same as I would a poacher. Oh, he owns the place legally, at least until Codsall moves in on Quarter Day, but I told him if I found him about the place between then and now I’d shoot him, even if I had to hang for it! Aye, and I would too, that’s no boast!’ Paul said, quietly, ‘Is there a drink in the house? We could both do with one, Edward!’ and led the way inside, noting that the kitchen showed signs of a hasty evacuation, with dresser drawers open and furniture pushed to one side. Old Derwent went into the scullery and came back with a bottle of gin in one hand and an orange in the other and Paul watched as he poured two measures, sliced the orange with his penknife and squeezed a half into each glass. ‘That’s so like him,’ he thought. ‘The old boy has probably never heard of bottled fruit-juice of the kind they’ll soon be selling from kiosks in Coombe-Bay-on-Sea!’ and they sipped in silence. Paul said, at length, ‘Someone will have to tend the stock, Edward. Shall I tell your man Gregory to carry on?’
‘No,’ Edward said, ‘I’ll have a word with Gregory before I go to bed. I shall stay unto the last minute. I ought never to have left here; never!’ and his eyes ranged the room, stopping at the patch of discoloured wallpaper between window and fireplace.
‘Claire took it,’ Paul told him, ‘it was a gesture, I suppose, but I’ll ask her to bring it back when she comes over.
‘You never knew Claire’s mother, did you?’
‘No, she was killed a few years before I got here. She was very popular and very beautiful, I believe.’
The old man walked across to the slate hearth and stood with one arm on the mantel looking into the empty grate. Paul had always thought of him as a prematurely aged man; this afternoon he looked ninety, although Paul knew he was no more than seventy odd.
‘She was the pride of the Valley,’ Edward said. ‘To see her in full-cry was to see wind crossing standing corn, boy! Claire favours her in looks, and Rose in style, but neither one could hold a candle to Molly in her prime! Damned if I ever could understand what she saw in me. Thought about that many a time and never found an answer.’
‘I could give him one,’ Paul thought, ‘but it would only embarrass him. The readiness of a man ready to kill his only son for selling off land to a jobbing builder probably had something to do with it; that, plus his guts and integrity. With five men like him I could hold the Valley against all comers but there aren’t five, only three now—him, me and Henry Pitts. The reinforcements haven’t shown up so, from here on, it’s digging in and that’s an end to it!’ Something still puzzled him, however, and he said, ‘Didn’t Hugh fight back? He could have held you off with one hand and laughed in your face, Edward!’
‘He hasn’t a ha’porth of real guts,’ the old man said. ‘I don’t know how Molly and me came to spawn a boy like Hugh. Seems all our spunk went into the girls!’ And then, cocking an eye, ‘He’ll not show his face in the Valley again until I’m six foot under! You’d better warn Claire of that.’
‘She’ll lose no sleep over it,’ Paul said but the old man shook his head. ‘A family ought to stick together to the end. I always tried to teach ’em that after their mother went but I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.’
‘You didn’t,’ Paul said, ‘but I daresay Hugh did when that girl of his showed him her backside. There’s a lot of us who would like a chance to catch time by the tail and I suppose he sees the chance of doing it, or thinking he can,’ and as he said this he felt an alien current of sympathy for Hugh Derwent, remembering his own desperate loneliness after Grace had gone and before Claire took her place. He said, in an effort to cheer Edward, ‘I suppose we’ve got a lot to be thankful for. I could never bear a brother of Claire permanent ill-will and I’ll tell you something else too. Whatever I’ve managed to do here in the last quarter century I couldn’t have done without Claire, so you still have a generous share in it, Edward.’
The old man pushed himself off the mantel, turned and retraced his steps to the table and as he reached for his glass his moustache twitched. In a man of Edward Derwent’s temperament this was the equivalent of Henry Pitts’ braying laugh. He said, ‘I’ll tell you one thing young-feller-me-lad! When you first settled here I wouldn’t have wagered a flagon of cider on your chances! I was wrong about Hugh and wrong about you, so you can write me off as a dam’ bad judge o’ character! Nobody could have done more for this place and the way you’ve gone about it has been right—right all the way down the line, so don’t let that Martin Codsall’s boy or my boy, or any other Clever Dick tell you that isn’t so, now or ever! I’ll drink to you, lad, to get the taste of my own kin out of my mouth!’ and he drained the glass and
began moving round methodically shutting drawers and straightening furniture.
‘Will you want your things sent over tonight?’ Paul asked and Edward said he would. Claire could telephone the harbourmaster and ask him to tell Liz to pack them up and get ready to move back.
‘Will she want to do that just for a few weeks?’
‘She’ll do as I bliddy well tell her!’ the old man retorted. ‘I’ve yet to get a back-answer from my second wife, although I got plenty from the first!’ He stopped what he was doing and looked at Paul. ‘Tell me, lad,’ he said, ‘have you ever had any tussles with my girl? I always reckoned she’d take some managing. Did you ever have call to belt her?’
‘Only once,’ Paul said, smiling, ‘and it was a long time ago. Maybe that once was enough.’
The old man looked at him with admiration. ‘I always did tell Willoughby and old Arthur Pitts that there was a deal more to you than you could tell by looking,’ he said, ‘so at least I was right about one thing!’
Paul left him on that and went out into the yard. The hot sun sucked humid steam from a neatly-piled stack of manure and already the farm seemed half-deserted. A dog was sound asleep over by the pump and a blue-check pigeon was the only moving thing between byre and house. From over the hedge came the persistent chink of spade and the rumble of a wheelbarrow rolling along a plant track. He looked over the wall beside the building where Rose had had her stables and saw a seam of earth glowing red, like the wound on Hugh Derwent’s cheek. A few workmen pottered to and fro and beyond was a man in town clothes setting up a surveyor’s tripod. He went back to the car and eased it along the lane until he could turn and then drove home, thinking not of the eastern defences, which had crumbled, but those in the west, of the deserted Periwinkle and the masterless Four Winds. ‘It’s time,’ he told himself, ‘we had a little luck but I daresay it will all run Sydney’s way until the election. After that who knows? Who knows anything at all?
Post of Honour Page 49
