‘Good heavens, no!’ he said. ‘Whatever gave you that idea? I’ve been in constant touch with them and they’ve been splendid, quite splendid! I can’t imagine how you produced a pair of smart operators like Steve and Andy. Are you quite sure Claire didn’t cuckold you one day while you were out ploughing?’
‘Then what the devil is your hurry?’ Paul demanded. ‘At ninety-three you can’t be all that essential to the business!’ and Franz said, with a twinkle, ‘I don’t suppose I am but I like to pretend to myself that it is so! After all, it’s all I’ve got to hold me to life and I daresay, at my age, you’ll feel precisely the same about your damned fields and dripping woods! The fact is, I’ve learned a good deal in the last few months, and perhaps it’s lucky for all of us that I made that trip. I had my suspicions, mind you, but I have to admit that I was scared once I saw it at close quarters.’
‘Suspicions about what? You’ve only been on holiday in Vienna, haven’t you?’
‘To get there I crossed Germany,’ Franz said, ‘and I was sufficiently misguided to stop overnight in Munich. A month or so later I stayed a few days in Nuremberg, and even in Austria I was able to confer with certain associates. The truth is, my dear fellow, the balloon is almost ready to ascend!’
‘Damn it, what balloon?’ said Paul, impatiently, and Franz replied, settling himself in the car and adjusting the impeccable creases in his trousers, ‘Ah, I thought that would confound you! It’s what follows from having your nose in the dirt all your life! I suppose you have heard of Hitler, have you not?’
‘Well, of course I have,’ Paul said, ‘who hasn’t? He makes more noise than the Kaiser used to but what of it?’
‘What of it?’ said Franz crisply. ‘The Kaiser turned everything upside down, didn’t he? And made you a small fortune into the bargain.’
‘Are you trying to tell me you think there’s danger of war?’
‘Indeed I am,’ Franz said, ‘but a very different kind of war from anything in the past. There won’t be anything gentlemanly about this one!’
‘There wasn’t anything gentlemanly about the last!’ Paul retorted, ‘ask anyone who was at Ypres or on the Somme!’
‘Oh, I’m not talking about the actual waging of it, the mere fisticuffs part!’ Franz said, with a blandness that Paul found irritating. ‘I’m talking about the political aspects, the impact on Western civilisation as a whole! That maniac means business and unless we people wake up in time that disgusting swastika of his will fly in all manner of unlikely places; Buckingham Palace maybe! Oh, you can chortle, but I don’t think you would if you’ve seen what I’ve seen this summer, or talked to people whose near relatives are actually populating his extermination centres!’
As usual Paul found himself impressed, in spite of private reservations that the old man was exaggerating. Franz was a Jew, of course, and he supposed that made a difference, for even Henry Pitts had expressed indignation of pogroms in Germany since the Nazi party had taken control, and yet, the prospect of actually being called upon to fight Germany again, had never cost Paul, or anyone else in the Valley, a moment’s loss of sleep. He said, more soberly, ‘Very well, Uncle Franz, what did you actually see? One of those idiotic rallies, with everyone goosestepping, wearing fancy shirts and shouting “Heil Hitler”?’
‘Yes,’ said Franz, without the customary spice of his professional cynicism, ‘I saw that but I also saw elderly women and seven-year-olds scrubbing the streets and being kept at it by arrogant young thugs with dog whips! I saw whole Jewish shopping centres wrecked and looted and, in Vienna, I was infected by the panic of men I have known gamble twenty thousand pounds on a hunch and then spend the evening drinking schnapps and listening to folk music without so much as telephoning their broker! I have lived a very long time, my boy, and seen a very great deal. I have not lost my touch or my sense of smell and can still sniff powder a long way off. And even though I find it difficult to read small print without spectacles I can still recognise a vulture when I see one.’
He seemed abstracted during the meal they had at The Mitre in the Cathedral Close and reluctant to return to the subject but over their coffee, after Paul had given him the family news, he said, suddenly, ‘There was a reason for my returning by sea! I couldn’t bring myself to cross Germany again, not even to fly over it, you understand?’
‘I can’t help feeling you’re exaggerating a little,’ Paul said, ‘for I can’t imagine anyone, even the Germans, starting another war. Incidents and an occasional bickering, no doubt, with plenty of sabre-rattling and a financial crisis or two, but when it comes to the actual point anyone would think twice; three times! Anyone, that is, who was actually there and Hitler served on the Western Front.’
‘Precisely the same might be said of 1914,’ Franz said. ‘I defer to you when it come to recalling actual conditions on the battlefield but someone like me, a man whose ear has been to the ground for nearly a century, doesn’t have to read history books to know that in August 1914, no one, not even the Junkers, actually willed the war! It simply happened. All but the lunatic fringe were terrified of the actuality by the time the guns started firing themselves.’
‘Aren’t there enough of us to contain him?’ Paul argued. ‘What about Russia and France?’
‘You can write off France! I’ve done business there lately and count myself fortunate I collected fifty per cent of my bad debts. As to Russia, there are plenty of wiseacres who think he’ll turn East and if he did they would encourage him, finance him I don’t doubt, but they would be doing themselves a very poor service. It’s no more than a question of who is first. That man is after world domination.’
It was difficult not to be convinced by the old man, particularly when one looked back on his accurate prophecies of 1906, 1914 and 1929. He had forecast, among lesser catastrophes, the German Naval race, the World War and the Wall Street crash, when those in a position to know, people like James Grenfell for instance, had been hopelessly wrong. Paul said, ‘Isn’t there a way to head it off?’
‘Yes,’ Franz said, ‘but I very much doubt if you English are realistic or ruthless enough to use the means at your disposal! You could blow Mussolini’s transports out of the water when he gobbles up Abyssinia in a week or two. That might convince German financiers and chauvinists that they were playing with fire. The Abyssinians are barbarians, of course, but we might as well confine barbarism to Africa if we can.’ His eyes, usually as bright as a ferret’s, seemed to cloud and he looked across at a portly Dickensian waiter and a couple of clergymen toying with their fish course. ‘You know, Paul,’ he said, ‘it’s your world that’s at stake, not mine! We people, the usurers of this world, learn to come to terms with these things but you never could. Win or lose you’ll sacrifice all you managed to salvage from the last dog-fight—provincial peace and social patterns, a code of decent behaviour and places like this, that are the focal points of your out-dated civilisation. You’ll be lucky if you don’t lose your precious Valley.’
‘How do you suggest I insure against it?’ Paul asked grimly, for it began to dawn on him that Zorndorff’s telephone call and his decision to break his journey, were no more than thinly-disguised manoeuvres to exercise the protectiveness shown towards the son of his old partner, a habit that had coloured their relationship for more than thirty years.
‘I can tell you that, my boy,’ Franz said, cheering up at once, ‘you can act independently of that idiot Baldwin and any windbag who succeeds him, and set course between the present and Doomsday.’
‘Well?’
‘Buy!’ Franz said, earnestly. ‘Lay up the treasure of the fat years against the dearth of the lean! Buy all the pedigree stock you can afford and all the latest machinery. Build a reservoir at a safe distance from the house for reserve fuel, for fuel will be one of the first things to run short. Make yourself as tight and self-contained as Noah, who received his warning from a somewhat more in
fallible source, but above all, ignore anything you read in the newspapers about pacts and arms agreements and Germany being too poor to wage a war of aggression! Even over there plenty of people old enough to know better are depending on that and more still are falling into the error that they are still in the driver’s seat. I daresay they were until a year or so ago but time doesn’t stand still for people like Adolf Hitler. It’s get on or get out, the same as it is in any competitive business, and nobody seems to have recognised him as that very rare phenomenon indeed!’
‘Come again!’
Franz said, with his familiar, sneering smile, ‘They do not recognise an Austrian who is uniquely free of the taint of schlamperei! I am such a one, and Hitler is another. Dangerous fellows both! Like an Englishman unhindered by tolerance, someone who would even cheat at cricket if there was a sizeable stake on the match! Well, it is time for my train, I think,’ and he stood up, taking out his wallet and putting a five-pound note on top of the two-pound bill.
‘I’ll pay for this, Uncle Franz,’ Paul said but the old man waved his hand.
‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘I doubt if I shall ever have the pleasure of lunching with you again,’ and, to the hovering waiter, ‘The meal was excellent! My compliments to the chef and share the change!’ He swept out, past the two clergymen and the gratified waiter, and Paul reflected that for all his shrewdness he was still as vain as a mongrel who has confounded the judges by winning a first at Cruft’s.
He drove home very slowly, pondering the old man’s Jeremiad and wondering if, in the next year or so, he should plough his reserve (only just replenished after the drain of the slump) into building the fuel-tank and investing in stock and machinery at the County Show. ‘Maybe I will,’ he told himself, ‘the old rascal was right about everything else but I’m not that much impressed, in spite of it all! At the age of fifty-six there’s really no reason why I should be.’ But then, as he looked up and saw the slender silhouette of French Wood on the skyline, he remembered that he had sons and sons-in-law, the eldest thirty-one, the youngest still a baby, and he hurried on, saying, ‘Christ! Not again! Not after what we endured for four years at the hands of boneheads like Haig!’ then, as the park wall began, and he caught the gleam of sun on the shallow river, he compromised, ‘I’ll buy, just as he advised,’ he told himself, ‘but as an investment in sanity not in suicide!’
He swung into the drive and blew his horn to give Claire warning of his approach.
Chapter Eighteen
I
Franz did not return to the West for Christmas. In mid-December Stephen wrote to say that the old man had gone into a nursing home and in late January, the week Valley radio sets broadcast news that King George lay dying, Zorndorff died in his sleep.
Paul thought it his duty to travel to London in thick, January murk to attend the cremation at Woking and when he returned to the old man’s home in Sloane Street one of a small army of the solicitors Zorndorff had employed drew him on one side and gave him a letter Franz had dictated, with orders that it be handed to Paul Craddock after his death.
‘He made a number of codicils to his will during the last few months,’ the man said, rather resentfully. ‘All in all it made matters very complicated! Up to that time his dealings with us had been very straightforward.’
‘I daresay you were well paid for it,’ Paul said, shortly, and the solicitor, regretting his unguarded remark, buttoned his lip and said, ‘Oh, I certainly wouldn’t like you to think we objected in any way, Mr Craddock. It was just that—well—we felt some of his last minute changes were rather impulsive!’
‘Since you’ve told me this much you can tell me what they were,’ Paul grunted, for he was always a little edgy in London, particularly when required to go there in winter.
‘I . . . er . . . I think perhaps your sons are better qualified to explain that, sir,’ the man said. ‘After all, we handled his latest will but we were not his exclusive advisers. The Five-Year dispersal of the estate was executed by another firm. He only came to us when the partner of his regular solicitors died.’
Paul relented somewhat, reflecting that Uncle Franz must have been a particularly troublesome client to men whose minds ran along prescribed grooves and when he was alone with Stevie and Andrew he reported his conversation with the lawyer, asking them how much they expected to benefit from the will. The boys were practically strangers to him now. It was getting on for seven years since they had launched themselves into this bizarre world of scrap metal, golf tournaments, mysterious trips up and down the country in bigger and better cars, and hole-in-corner conferences with shady characters who lived, Paul suspected, on their wits, and only just inside the law. Neither Stephen nor Andrew had maintained any real links with the Valley or, as far as he could judge, with any aspect of country life that was not synthetic. They wore Savile Row suits and smoked big cigars but there was still something vaguely flashy about both them and their equally well dressed wives, so that he thought with relief of Rumble Patrick and Mary, in their snug farmhouse, overlooking the Sorrel.
‘There’s not all that much duty to pay,’ Andy explained, with a grin. ‘Uncle Franz saw to that when he split everything up a year or so after we horned in on the racket! It was lucky for us he lived out the span. Stevie and I were made partners, you know, but most of his capital was ploughed back in the Birmingham and Liverpool branches and since then we’ve opened yards in half-a-dozen other places. You might say that what the Old Boy really left us was goodwill, bricks and mortar. Plenty of it but not much cash. About five thou apiece I’d say, wouldn’t you, Stevie?’
‘Plus legacies in trust for the kids,’ Stevie said. ‘They won’t have to bother, I can tell you that, Gov, so if you ever think of making a will you can cut us out and no hard feelings.’
It was impossible not to respond towards the sheer impudence of The Pair, Paul thought, and he could readily understand how the old buccaneer had taken them to his heart.
‘I’m not at the will-making stage yet,’ he told them, ‘but I should be interested to know how the old fellow disposed of his cash. He had hordes of Austrian relatives, most of whom sponged on him for years, but somehow I don’t think the hangers-on will benefit. The lawyer I spoke to seemed to imply he had had all manner of second thoughts after his trip abroad.’
‘Yes he did,’ Andy said, ‘and he was damned cagey about them but from what I can gather he left a hell of a dollop to the Zionist Movement. He was very needled about what was happening to the Jews over there but, aside from that, I hope he didn’t overlook you, Gov! You mightn’t believe it, but he had a lot of time for you, even though, privately, he thought you were a bit . . . well . . . a bit set in your ways, if you follow me.’
‘I follow you,’ Paul said, ‘and it’s about the politest way either of you have ever put it! He left me a letter to be read after his death and I’ve got it here. I purposely didn’t open it until I could share it with you,’ and he thumbed open the stiff, parchment envelope, extracting a single, folded sheet, with an antedated cheque attached to it by a paper-clip. The cheque was for ten thousand pounds.
‘Good God!’ Paul exclaimed, ‘this is absolute nonsense! I parted with what interests I retained in the firm during the slump!’
The letter was brief and very much to the point. ‘My dear Paul,’ it ran. ‘I enclose this because, knowing lawyers, I realise that it might be a year before you get your hands on it. You can draw on this almost at once and, as I warned you, there isn’t that much time! I don’t suppose you followed my advice and stocked up but this may prompt you to begin. You ought to be a rich man in your own right but I know very well that you are not. You still might be, in spite of yourself, if you ever approach my age! It’s my guess that in the years ahead land and property will skyrocket as never before and for all manner of reasons, among them over-population and slum-clearance by bombing squadrons. However, I found on getti
ng back here, that I was in a very small minority. Few people take that little rascal any more seriously than you did. That’s why I made some last-minute alterations in my will and left the bulk of my pile to those who are going to need a refuge few of them deserve! Despite your holier-than-thou judgment of me, my boy, I never really had much use for money as money. It was making it, beating them all at it, that was the breath of life to me, even in your father’s time! One small thing; I had someone do a little digging in Somerset House after our last meeting and uncovered a little that explains your life-long obsession with mud, red necks, thatch, well-water and hairy forearms! Your mother’s maiden name was ‘Endicott’ and she came from a Somerset village, either Curry Rivel or Chard, I was unable to determine which, although I daresay you could find out by checking parish records. She was born in 1848 but I couldn’t get a copy of the birth certificate as there were hordes of Endicotts thereabouts. All I wanted to prove to myself was that you did, after all, revert to type! Good luck always, dear ploughboy—affectionately, Franz Zorndorff.’
He read the letter aloud and the twins listened respectfully. Andy said, finally, ‘Well what do you know? He was an amazing old bird, wasn’t he? But I can’t help feeling that last trip of his threw him off balance a bit. After all, who cares about a bloody little whipper-snapper who used to hang wallpaper and bites carpets whenever he gets stoked up? Someone will bump him off sooner or later!’
‘As a matter of fact the cheque isn’t all that much of a surprise to me,’ Stevie admitted. ‘The last time I talked to the Old Boy he launched into a diatribe about the submarine fleet Hitler is building and how we should all be starved out in war. Damned funny the bats that start whizzing around in your belfry when you get to that age! There was that final instruction we found on his desk, the day the ambulance called for him.’
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