Post of Honour

by R. F Delderfield

  ‘It’s not enough,’ Claire said, emphatically, ‘she’s got to win! She’s just got to win!’ and when Paul said, ‘Why, Claire? What’s so terribly important about it? And why is it so vital to you?’ the cold glance she turned on him reminded him uncomfortably of her recent moods. ‘It isn’t important to me but it’s terribly important to her! Why? Because it’s all she’s got, don’t you see?’ and to Paul’s astonishment Monica came out in full support of this astonishing verdict, saying, ‘I go along with that! I was a Claire, not as pretty maybe but with nothing to offer but a face and curves in the right places! I never had any real confidence in myself in a last year’s dress; no brains, no special skills, nothing but myself.’

  ‘And the pity of it is that it’s expendable,’ Claire added. ‘One loses a little of it every day after one’s twentieth birthday. Now a thing like this—public recognition I mean—is something one can look back on all one’s life without having to console oneself with a photograph album!’

  As she said this, almost as though addressing herself, the cancer of the last year was suddenly revealed to him for he remembered how vain she had always been of her body, and her ability to keep pace with changing fashions, all the way from leg-o’-mutton sleeves and picture hats to the bandeaux and short skirts of the ‘twenties’, and the more feminine styles of today. It occurred to him then that she must always have thought of their partnership as something that owed very little to the shared adventures of three decades but hung upon factors like the weight of flesh about her thighs, the size and sag of her breasts and the clarity of her skin. Comprehending this for the first time in nearly a year he had an inarticulate desire to comfort her but at that moment the curtains swung aside and the Master of Ceremonies emerged with a slip of paper in his hand and announced, ‘The final decision of the judges, ladies and gentlemen . . . Miss Cheshire, fourth place, Miss Shropshire third place . . . ’ He saw Claire, then Mary and the others, rise in their seats and heard the Twin yelp with triumph. ‘Miss Kent, runner up . . . Miss Devonshire, Dairy Queen of England and Wales for the year 1934–1935 . . . ’

  The orchestra crashed out and the applause stormed over their heads. He saw the other finalists file in, noting their glumness and pathetic attempts to smile as Claire was led to the central dais, moving with infinite grace, utterly composed as the silly little crown was placed on her head by last year’s winner, and beside him his wife looked so pale that he thought for a moment she was going to faint and caught her arm as trumpets blared and everyone rose to their feet, clapping. He said, with relief, ‘Well, there you are! She’ll have something to look back on after all!’ but the thought struck him that, at the age of sixteen, the salting away of memories was a macabre compulsion.

  By the following day they had dispersed, the twins and their wives roaring away up the Great North Road, Simon, about some mysterious business in the East End and then to Euston for Manchester, Paul and Mary by taxi to Waterloo, with Claire left behind to stay with her daughter until Tuesday. At the last minute Schroeder, the Organising Secretary, came to them with a sudden change of plan. Arrangements had been made, he said, for the winner to fulfil her first public engagement at an Agricultural Fair, due to open in The Hague later that week but prior to that she had to be ‘groomed’, whatever that meant. Paul was anxious to get home. The harvest was late and in any case he and Mary had arranged to take part in a County Gymkhana but he would have waived Valley commitments if he had been persuaded that wife or daughter needed him. As it was, in the upheaval that followed the triumph, he was almost overlooked and when Claire said that she would like to stay on a day or two to help choose dresses, and that he would be bored by a two-day shopping expedition in the West End, he took the broad hint and said, ‘You don’t mind if I go back with Mary? I’m a droop when it comes to this kind of thing!’ she regarded him with her head on one side and replied, ‘You’re dying to get out of here and I must say you’ve been far more patient than I expected! Go along home with Mary and meet me on the three o’clock from Waterloo, on Tuesday. I can’t really leave her alone until she flies off and I have a feeling she’d sooner have me around than Mary!’

  ‘I’m quite sure she would,’ Paul said, ‘and I believe you’re getting an even bigger kick out of it than she is!’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Claire admitted, ‘for it’s something I should have loved to have happened to me at her age, although I couldn’t have carried it off with her aplomb!’

  ‘I’m damned certain you could,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think your father would have stood for it for one moment!’

  ‘Neither would you! I can just see your face if I wiggled up and down in front of those latterday George Lovells in a tight bathing costume! Did you think of that old rascal when the judging was going on?’

  ‘Why yes, I did as a matter of fact,’ he admitted, surprised and pleased at this evidence of a return to their old-time jocular plane, ‘but I would have said it was the last thought to occupy your mind.’

  She said, frankly but without looking at him, ‘It’s been a difficult time for you, Paul, and don’t imagine I don’t realise as much! But we’re over the hump now, I can tell you that! This has been a real tonic to me! Would you be interested in learning how, exactly?’

  ‘Yes, I would. Very interested indeed!’

  ‘Well, I suppose, up to the moment of young Claire winning the preliminary I was just plain envious—envious and resentful of their youth and high spirits, of the freedom they enjoy that we never had and of their good looks and expectation of life! I was even jealous of Mary’s tranquillity but now, well—now I’ve got the whole thing into better focus, just a matter of counting blessings I imagine! After all, we’re still solvent and in good health and Claire owes this triumph to the legacy of our health. But the really important thing is I’m still important to you! I’m convinced of that at any rate!’

  ‘Did you ever doubt it?’

  ‘Yes, both before and after John was born. Don’t ask me why but I did!’

  ‘I wonder what happened to all that famous Derwent commonsense?’

  ‘It evaporated the minute I knew I was pregnant. Maureen tried to explain it but she didn’t really get through to me.’

  ‘Or to me either,’ he admitted.

  ‘It’s partly a physical change, I suppose. I told her before I left that I’d try and put it on paper some time so that she could write an article for one of her medical journals.’

  ‘Don’t you do anything so damned silly,’ he said, ‘it’s one thing having a daughter displaying all her equipment in public, but quite another having one’s wife strip herself naked for the British Medical Journal! I’ll say good-bye to Claire and wish her luck,’ and he turned to go with a sense of enormous relief but as he reached the door he said, as an afterthought, ‘From now on it’s going to be us, Claire! They can bloody well fend for themselves, one and all! One thing Maureen said did get through to me—that the time we’ve got left could be the happiest years of our life. Did she say that to you?’

  ‘Yes and I didn’t believe her but I do now. That’s all that counts, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s what counts with me,’ he replied emphatically and crossed the corridor to the room shared by the two girls.

  Mary was in the lobby arranging about luggage but his youngest daughter was there and he was at once struck by her remoteness of expression which was something new to him, although she had always been a very self-contained person, far more so than any of his other children. She was so still and rapt as she sat by the window that she did not turn her head as he entered and he felt the curious embarrassment that had always plagued their relationship. He said, with assumed heartiness, ‘Well, Kiddo, you saw them all off and your mother’s bursting with pride! She’s staying until you take off at Croydon and I’ve come to wish you luck, I’m going home with Mary.’

  The child looked at him as though he had said s
omething she only half understood and again he caught the half-puzzled, half-anxious expression in her eyes, eyes a shade bluer than her mother’s and half veiled by long, golden lashes. He thought, ‘Well, here’s an odd turn-up! She isn’t as confident as all that now that she’s launched!’ and somehow felt closer to her than ever before, the shift prompting a protectiveness she had never seemed to demand of him.

  ‘Are you scared after all, Claire? If you are it’s nothing to be ashamed of, and if you want to talk about it I’ll listen.’

  ‘No,’ she said, in hardly more than a whisper, ‘I’m not scared, Daddy. I’m terribly excited but—’ and suddenly, against all probability, she seemed on the verge of tears so that he went across and put his arm on her shoulder, saying, ‘You can still back out if you want to! Nobody can make you go through with it. After all, it’s only a kind of advertisement, and apart from expenses you aren’t being paid for the job.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t want that,’ she said, ‘I’d want to go through with, it, no matter what happens.’

  ‘But what could happen, Kiddo? Apart from pleasant things?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, uncertainly, ‘nothing, I suppose, but it’s queer—I had a feeling it was all—well—bound to happen, just the way it has! Just now, before you came in, it seemed—well rather creepy somehow. Does that sound stupid?’

  ‘No, not a bit stupid. The fact is you’ve had a devil of a lot of excitement and no matter how much you pretend to be adult you’re still only a kid. It’s perfectly understandable you should feel nervous. If it was me, I’d be scared stiff.’

  She made the only joke he ever recalled her making, saying, with a smile, ‘You’d look like hell under a crown, Daddy!’ and because it was the first time there had ever been real communication between them he threw his arm round her, saying, ‘Neither you, nor Whiz, nor your brothers, ever had the slightest respect for me! However, if you’d like me to stay and see you off I can easily ’phone through and get Henry Pitts to do my judging at the Gymkhana. Would you like me to do that, Claire?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘because I know you hate London and I think you’ve been pretty sporting over the whole business. You haven’t even warned me not to talk to strange men in foreign cities! Go on back to your precious Valley and let me find one of my own, like Whiz and The Pair! All I’d like you to be sure of is that—well—that I don’t really take everything for granted! It’s just that I’m not very good at saying “thank you”,’ and she took both his hands, stood on tiptoe and kissed him very deliberately on both cheeks. The unexpectedness of words and gesture overwhelmed him so much that all he could say was, ‘Do you need any money?’ She shook her head, held him for a moment and then resumed her seat by the window. He may have fancied it but it seemed to him that she turned her head away deliberately and he went out hurriedly, never having suspected her of doing anything so human as to shed a tear at the prospect of leaving home and family.

  IV

  It was a rather sombre journey back to the Valley. He found it difficult to rid himself of a feeling of guilt, of having abandoned her at a time when, for the first time in her life, she seemed to need him but when he tried to describe what had passed between them, first to Claire and then to Mary, it sounded trivial and insubstantial so that he was not surprised when they told him that maybe young Claire had bitten off just a tiny bit more than she could chew and that a little humility, the product of nervousness, would do her far more good than harm. When he urged that he should stay after all, or even accompany her to Holland, they laughed at him for reverting to one of his ‘duty-moods’, another hoary source of merriment among the family, yet the feeling of unease persisted, clouding his pleasure at the sight of the Valley under warm September sunshine, with its fields dotted with golden stocks and its streams unseasonably high after a wet August.

  All that day and all the next he had difficulty in picking up his routine, his mind constantly returning to the picture of young Claire sitting at the hotel window looking out on nothing or perhaps on something only she could see, and he thought too of her sudden spurt of affection, wondering what instinctive fears might have prompted it. The feeling was strong enough to drive him to the telephone on the second night, the last of her stay in London, only to learn from an impersonal receptionist that ‘Mrs and Miss Craddock had gone to a theatre and were not expected back until after midnight.’ He declined an invitation to leave a message and went to bed with his favourite copy of Jorrocks and when Jorrocks failed to entertain him he lay awake a long time listening to the screech of owls in the paddock, thinking it was the one night-sound of Shallowford he preferred not to hear on the rare occasions sleep evaded him.

  If Shallowford House could have been said to possess a radio fan the title would have gone to Mary, the only member of the family whose musical tastes extended beyond Strauss waltzes and jazz. Mary’s room, the first on the nursery corridor facing west, was the most feminine in the house. She had chosen her own carpet and curtains and converted two deep alcoves into arched bookshelves. Her furniture was small and neat, an assortment of birthday and Christmas presents over the years and she had accompanied Paul to local auction sales to buy little pieces of Coalport and Rockingham china, mostly vases and baskets which she kept filled with wild flowers from February until late autumn. These little posies, dotted about the room, were her calendars. In late winter there were usually snowdrops and celandines on the mantelshelf and the lower shelves of the alcoves. In March and April there were primroses and dog-violets, with arrangements of pigmy daffodils and narcissi as spring advanced and after that came the blue and yellow iris that everyone else in the Valley called ‘flags’. Later still the room was gay with foxgloves and bluebells (cut short to spare the bulbs), honeysuckle, meadowsweet, campion, bugloss and shyer flowers gathered in remote corners of the woods revealed to her by old Meg Potter, with whom Mary was on intimate terms. She spent a great deal of her free time in this room writing her diary, trying to compose rustic sonnets in the style of Wilfred Blunt (her favourite poet) and writing long, rambling letters to Rumble Patrick, with whom she had now maintained a regular correspondence for more than three years. Rumble’s photograph stood in a silver frame on a papier-mâché bedside table, not the roundfaced Rumble Patrick who had decamped to Australia as long ago as December, 1930, and had since wandered half-way round the world, but a lean, cheerful-looking young man, in what she took to be a Canadian trapper’s outfit of fur cap, fringed jacket and top boots. The photo was signed ‘As always, Rumble’ which satisfied her but did not seem to impress anyone else.

  On the afternoon Paul drove to Paxtonbury to meet the 3 p.m. out of Waterloo she declined his invitation to come along, saying that she had to write Rumble an account of the Dairy Queen final so that it was about half-past five, just after Paul had left, that she sat down at her little rosewood desk and began to marshal her facts, making no effort to restrain the pride she felt in the family triumph and pinning caption slips on each of the snipped-out photographs of Claire, on which she wrote such comments as ‘This doesn’t do our Claire justice, it was one of those awful flashlights and she looks startled!’ or ‘The girl next to Claire is Miss Cheshire who was a very pretty brunette but a cat!’ About ten minutes to six she reached out and turned her wireless set on, continuing writing against a background of Jack Payne’s light orchestral music, a Palm Court broadcast dribbling out tinkling tunes like ‘Little Man you’ve had a busy day’, or dreamier ones like ‘A Night in Napoli’ and ‘Little Old Church in the Valley’. Mary paid no heed to them but unconsciously cocked an ear when the announcer began to read the news. Then she stopped writing, in the middle of the word ‘gorgeous’, used to describe the white satin ball-dress the Dairymen’s Association had presented to Claire to wear at her maiden public appearance. Her hand clutched the pen so tightly that its nib spluttered and for a moment the little room, flooded with early evening sunshine, rocked and receded as t
he announcer said, in a voice nicely pitched for tragic announcements, ‘ . . . there are believed to be no survivors in this afternoon’s air disaster, involving the British Dairymen’s contingent on their way to exhibit British products at The Hague. Among those aboard the aircraft, which is believed to have crashed about twelve miles north-west of the Hook of Holland, was the recently-chosen British Dairy Queen, Miss Claire Craddock aged only sixteen. Rescue craft went out on receipt of the first distress signals and, together with other aircraft, are still searching the area. A report has come in that one body, believed to be that of a crew member, has been recovered but apart from a small amount of wreckage no traces of the fuselage have been found. The total complement of the aircraft was sixteen. Further bulletins will be issued at nine o’clock and midnight . . . ’

  Mary waited, her hand on the knob, until the announcer went on to talk about something else. Then she switched off and stood up, steadying herself by the little brass rail that surmounted the desk and it was necessary to grip hard for the walls continued to expand and contract and all the time the sun poured into the window like a blinding light, causing her to raise a hand still holding the pen and press the palm to her eyes. The movement left a smear of ink on her cheek.

  Claire dead! Drowned and probably mangled, somewhere off the coast of Holland! Claire, the spoiled beauty of the family, whose photographs lay strewn across the desk covering the pages of Rumble’s letter. Claire! Who had somehow stood for success and glitter and adventure in the world outside the Valley, the beautiful little child whom she had accompanied to so many dances, gymkhanas and fetes, noting how everyone turned their heads when they passed, the girl who had caused men of all ages to stand aside and pay silent homage to her radiance and grace, as though she was some classical statue transformed into flesh and blood and loaned for each occasion. It was incredible and yet, as Mary fought for her breath, she knew that it was true and that even at this stage to hope would be futile. There had been clinical finality in the announcement but away and beyond this there was also a terrible inevitability about it, as though young Claire had come to the end of the road the very moment the little crown had been settled on her head and that somehow, if only they had taken the trouble to find out, it could all have been found in Meg Potter’s pack of cards.