‘What was that?’ Paul asked sharply, not sure that he cared for their flippancy.
‘He asked us to scatter his ashes in the boneyard,’ Andy said. ‘Can you beat that? Down among the scrap! Ashes to ashes you might say.’
‘That’s a revolting idea!’ Paul protested, ‘and if it was left to me I should ignore it.’
‘Well, it was a special request,’ Andy said, ‘we’ve got it in black and white.’
‘Have you told the solicitors?’
‘No,’ they said together, obviously awaiting a lead.
‘Well don’t!’ Paul said. ‘He was a wonderful friend to me, and although we seldom saw eye to eye, I had more respect for him that you seem to have! I’ll take care of his ashes and I’ll do what he advised about stocking up.’
‘You mean you really fell for that stuff about war?’ Steve asked and Paul said, no, he didn’t, but he wasn’t going to be caught off balance by another slump and it amounted to the same thing! Then they all took a drink, and felt better for it and the twins drove him to Waterloo in time for the five o’clock train. It was not until he had shaken them off that he could laugh at them, and as the train gathered speed, and the yellow-brick labyrinth was left behind, he re-read Franz’s letter, finding that the old man’s quixotic search for his mother’s antecedents touched him more than the legacy. He thought, ‘I’ll drive over to Curry Rivel and Chard in the spring and take a look at those parish records. It’s odd that I never thought of contacting Somerset House myself but had to leave it to him!’ Then his mind conjured with expansion on the basis of the money. One could do a very great deal with ten thousand and it seemed disloyal to spend it in any other way, or simply invest it against a repetition of 1929-31. Two thousand would cover all the stock and machinery he could house at Home Farm and perhaps another thousand would provide a fuel-storage tank and pumping equipment, housed in the hollow on the western edge of Big Paddock. What could he do with the remaining seven? Some of it, he supposed, could be used to foster the co-operative that he had been nibbling at for years, a couple of heavy lorries, a combined harvester for the use of every farm on the estate, perhaps improved outbuildings, Dutch barns and modern byres at places like Deepdene, Low Coombe and Four Winds. That French Canadian, Brissot, and young Eveleigh could do with some help—he didn’t know about Francis Willoughby and Henry Pitts, who had always preferred to solve their own problems but they were tenants and he was entitled to improve his own property if he wished. Periwinkle was the exception. It was being bought by Rumble Patrick over a period and already a third of the money had been paid over. Then, as the train glided into Salisbury, he had an idea, and as it took shape it appealed to his sense of humour. He explored it for flaws and could find none and by the time he had finished dinner, and the train was rattling into Paxtonbury, he was resolved on it and made up his mind that he would confide in no one but Claire.
He left the train and made his way in driving sleet to his car, setting the windscreen wipers threshing and settling himself for the sixteen-mile trip over the moor. It was fortunate, he reflected, that he knew every bend in the road for there were patches of fog wherever the trees fell away and his eyes were not as keen as they had been when he drove up to the artillery positions behind Vimy nearly twenty years ago. He was relieved when the gradient told him he was over the crest and dropping down to the river where the elms behind the park wall kept the mist high and comparatively thin. ‘Tomorrow,’ he told himself, shivering, ‘providing Claire doesn’t head me off, I’ll ride to Hermitage with the news. Rain or no rain it’s always a damned sight warmer with a horse between one’s thighs!’
Claire did not head him off. All she did was laugh and say that she supposed he was interpreting the spirit of Uncle Franz’s implied conditions. She did suggest, however, that Simon and Whiz should benefit to some extent, pooh-poohing his argument that he was pledged to Rachel never to give Simon money, even supposing he was willing to accept any.
‘Nonsense,’ she scoffed, ‘Rachel has had time to outlive those high-minded notions! You offer her a little and see! As for Whiz and Ian, they don’t really need any, but I won’t have any of them saying we’re showing favouritism. I know you always have done as regards Mary and that I did towards little Claire, but never as regards money. That’s the one sure way to split a family.’
‘You’re right about that,’ he said. ‘Suppose we send them £500 apiece?’
‘You’ll have to do better than that,’ she said. ‘Rumble won’t accept a penny if he thinks it’s a gift. You’ll have to make it appear a direct legacy from Uncle Franz to Mary. Get one of the twins to forge a letter of confirmation and produce it in a day or so.’
‘I had something like that in mind myself,’ he said, ‘but not enough guile to put it into words!’ and he kissed her, absurdly grateful to be home again and reflected that, when they were alone here, with all the older children grown and dispersed, and two-year-old John and the staff asleep upstairs, there was a tranquillity and timelessness about the old house that made him feel half his age.
He rode over to Periwinkle the next day, a mild, damp morning, with the mist lying in the bottoms and everything drooping and glistening in the hedges. Mary, busily baking her bread, looked ponderous but very fit and when he asked her if any precise date had been quoted she told him Maureen had ‘pencilled in’ St Valentine’s Day.
‘Don’t let her take you in,’ he said, ‘she generally contrives to get things wrong. I was away from home when four out of my seven were born!’ and he called through the covered-way to Rumble who could be heard swinging an axe in the strawyard.
‘Come in for a minute, I’ve got news for you!’
Mary said, laughing, ‘He won’t like it, whatever it is. The one thing he really enjoys is chopping. Someone in Canada taught him to split sixpences edgeways and whenever he’s out of sorts all I have to do is hand him the axe and lead him to the chopping block! In ten minutes we’ve not only got more than enough for the evening’s burning but he’s worked off all his bad temper on stumps.’
‘I don’t believe that boy ever shows bad temper,’ Paul said, as they went back into the pleasant kitchen, where a great log fire burned and everything twinkled, and Mary told him he was happy enough most of the time but had been worrying over the struggle to maintain monthly payments on the farm, and also the fact that he couldn’t expand as fast as he had planned without hiring another hand. ‘He says farmers will never get a square deal in this country until they find a way to cut out the middleman,’ she added.
‘He sounds just like his grandfather,’ said Paul. ‘Every time I called on the Dell in the old days Tamer blathered about bankruptcy. When you’re as old as me you’ll realise this is no more than a built-in pessimism that the British farmer claims as a birthright! It comes from thousands of years’ sparring with our weather!’
Rumble came in, his face streaked with sweat and said, nodding at Mary, ‘She looks like a penguin, doesn’t she?’ and Mary countered with, ‘Kick off those filthy boots! I don’t want half the yard in here!’ so that again Paul thought how easy was their relationship and how greatly it differed from the more guarded exchanges between Simon and Rachel, or between the twins and their sophisticated wives. He said,
‘I’ve got a windfall for you; Uncle Franz Zorndorff left money to split between the family and Mary will get her share in a week or two.’
He saw them exchange glances and it seemed to him that Rumble’s eyes sparkled.
‘That’s encouraging! How much?’
‘Round about fifteen hundred,’ Paul lied happily and Rumble’s cheeks turned a deeper shade of pink as his arm slipped over Mary’s shoulders and they stood with their backs to the fire looking, Paul thought, like a couple of children on Christmas morning.
‘That was damned decent of the old boy!’ Rumble said. ‘I don’t recall seeing him more than twice. Why didn’t the tw
ins get the lot? After all, they worked for him.’
‘The twins have done very well,’ Paul told him. ‘They get the Empire and we get the leavings! He left us ten thousand on condition I spend half on the estate. I’ve earmarked five and the rest, less lawyer’s fees, passes to Mary, Whiz and Simon. That was what he had in mind when I last talked to him and that’s how it will be split!’
He wondered if Rumble suspected that this was largely a fiction and also how he would maintain it if Simon and Rachel declined to accept their share of the money. Rumble said, deliberately, ‘That’s terrific, Gov, but don’t give us Mary’s share, keep it towards the balance of the freehold and I’ll make it up to her later. It will mean this place is really ours that much sooner!’ He glanced at Mary; ‘Do you go along with that, Mar?’
‘Of course!’ she said, ‘it’s by far the best way of using it. We don’t want for anything right now and in a couple of years we shall be in the clear. Do what Rumble says, Daddy!’
They had, he reflected, outwitted him after all, and he thought how Claire would laugh when he got home and reported as much. ‘There’s at least one thing you can say about my brood,’ he told himself, ‘not one of them is greedy for money and that’s something to crow about these days!’
‘You’re sure you wouldn’t rather have it as a float?’ he persisted. ‘I’m in no hurry to be paid off and I never cared for the arrangement in the first place. I realise you want to be independent and I admire you for it, but you might just as well have stayed tenants until you got some capital together!’
‘That’s the way I want it,’ Rumble said, looking very obstinate, ‘for I don’t care to be a tenant, not even with you as my landlord! If I farm land I’ve got to own it! Maybe it’s something they dinned into me in the Dominions.’
‘Very well,’ Paul said, ‘that’s the way it will be. It will mean Periwinkle is two-thirds yours already and that’s not bad going for twelve months.’ He looked at Mary again. ‘Are you determined to have the baby here? You wouldn’t rather your mother made arrangements to go in St Theresa’s, at Paxtonbury?’
‘He’ll be born right here!’ she confirmed. ‘Mother had all her children at home and Rumble was born in the Valley. It wouldn’t be the same if he was born elsewhere, even tho’ Paxtonbury is just over the hill, and now I must see to my bread!’ and she went out leaving Rumble to walk him to the gate.
‘I’ve had the telephone installed,’ Rumble said, expressing an anxiety Paul had never felt for Claire, ‘and Doctor Maureen looks in every day.’ Then, with a diffidence that struck Paul as uncharacteristic, ‘Do you happen to know Grandfather Potter’s real name? I always meant to ask Mother Meg and never did!’ and Paul, racking his brains, said this was a teaser, for he had never heard anyone in the Valley call the old man anything but ‘Tamer’.
‘Do you want to name your boy after him?’ he asked and Rumble said, almost apologetically, ‘Yes, I should like to but don’t ask me why, something to do with your famous “continuity” I imagine. Do you think Uncle Sam or Uncle Smut would know?’
‘If they don’t we can easily look in the parish records,’ Paul told him. ‘I’ll ride down there right away and ring through. What’s your number?’ and he jotted it down in the memoranda block he was never without when he rode about the Valley.
An hour later he was chuckling and when Parson Horsey asked him the joke he said, returning the register, ‘I look like being saddled with a grandson called Jeremiah and I must say it’s an apt name for anyone destined to farm hereabouts! Do you christen many babies with Biblical names these days?’
‘Not one in fifty,’ Horsey said, ‘all the boys are named something fancy, like “Trevor” or “Bevis”, and all the girls are named after film stars!’
Well, thank God we can shorten it to something manageable,’ said Paul and rang through from Coombe Bay public ’phone booth to pass the information to Rumble.
He was there again in under a fortnight and for once Maureen had calculated the date accurately. The baby, christened Jerry (‘Jeremiah is asking too much of family loyalty’ Rumble declared) was born on February 14th. Mary was exhausted but delighted, and Claire said the baby had ‘an Italianate look’, having inherited Paul’s narrow features and his parents’ dark complexion. ‘There’s certainly not much Derwent about him,’ she said ruefully, when she came downstairs, and Rumble had promised to add the name ‘Edward’ to keep the record straight. Then, Valley-fashion, they all wet the baby’s head and Thirza was loaned as nurse for a fortnight, less because Mary needed her than for fear of giving offence, for Thirza regarded this function as an hereditary right and would have sulked for a week if she had been denied it.
‘Well,’ said Claire, as they drove down the track to the river road, ‘I suppose you’re satisfied now! You look almost as smug as Rumble I must say!’
‘It’s a matter of satisfaction to both of us,’ he said, ‘for it means that at least one of our children is anchored here. If young John stays put, and doesn’t take it into his head to go rooting in scrapyards, or taking the world’s troubles on his shoulders like Simon, then we’re in business for another two generations!’
She glanced at him affectionately, wondering at the astounding durability of the roots he had thrown down since the day he had first ridden into High Coombe yard in his stained Yeomanry uniform, and she had handed him sherry and pikelets and held his hand a little longer than necessary. In some ways it seemed a thousand years ago and in others only a month, and as she thought this she experienced the familiar, comforting desire to be possessed by him as though it was twenty years ago. ‘Maybe it’s an instinctive awareness of the cycle caused by another birth,’ she thought and wondered, even whilst laughing at herself, how she could get him to go to bed earlier than usual that night without making it obvious and pandering to his vanity, for even at fifty-six he was still inclined to parade his virility.
II
In the old days the ripples of the world beyond Paxtonbury seldom reached the lower reaches of the Sorrel. A few did, much trumpeted events, like the death of a monarch and the coronation of another but it was not often that Valley folk involved themselves, even objectively, in international topics. Before 1914 the latest titbit of scandal from the Dell could always be sure of winning more word-coverage in The Raven than, say, an Agadir crisis, or the latest Armenian massacre. The first international event that really captured the imagination in the Valley had been the war but even then not because Valley men were claimed and killed but on account of the invasion of the Valley by so many foreigners passing through the moor training camp and the convalescent home. After the war the Valley did its best to revive the policy of deliberate isolation, counting London, and the affairs of the Continent, well lost after so much cackling, scurrying and heartbreak. They were aware, of course, that all kinds of things did happen east of Sorrel Halt and west of the Whin, but no one, not even Horace Handcock (whose patriotism had managed to survive the General Strike and the Invergordon Mutiny) made more than a passing reference to events such as Lindbergh’s flight of the Atlantic, the Saar dispute, or the airship disaster at Beauvais. Farm prices interested them, and so did sporadic outbreaks of foot and mouth disease, but events like the trials of Metro-Vickers men in Moscow, and the perennial squabbles of French politicians went unread. The Valley was like a tiny community in the hinterland of a remote island; everyone living in it was intelligently aware of what went on in the local capital but only vaguely conscious of events further afield, especially those enacted in places separated from them by stretches of salt water. Few people in the Valley took a newspaper other than the Country Weekly and not all that number listened, with much attention, to the news bulletins although there was a radio of sorts in most of the farms and cottages.
All this began to change rather abruptly between the autumn of 1935 and the summer of 1936 and Paul, whose finger and thumb never really left the Valley p
ulse, was the first to notice this and become aware of the end of a deliberate dissociation with the world outside. The realisation came to him quite suddenly one frosty morning in October, 1935, when he was hailed by Henry Pitts from the lower stretch of Undercliff.
Henry, riding his tractor like a Roman charioteer, saw him testing the ice in one of the oxbows of the river and called, cheerily, ‘I zee that ole varmint be zettin’ about ’em niggermen, Maister!’ and somehow Paul at once knew that he was referring to Mussolini’s attack upon Abyssinia.
He went across to him and they talked for a spell on world events and it was soon after that, in the public bar of The Raven, that he heard people like Smut Potter and the blind veteran, Willis, engaged in argument over the probable fate of the sad-eyed Negus, currently a fugitive on his way to Britain.
Paul’s personal interest in world affairs had waned since Jimmy Grenfell’s death. Jimmy had always kept him in touch with the broad outlines of what was happening outside but now that both Jimmy and Uncle Franz were dead he found himself less and less addicted to reading leading articles in The Times and the Mail, preferring late-night symphony concerts to the nine o’clock or midnight news-bulletins on the air. It was the voice of Adolf Hitler, that he heard by accident one night, that first made him conscious of his withdrawal and he said to Claire, absorbed in her favourite Priestley, ‘Good God! Can you imagine a man who sounds like that running a country populated by chaps with as much sense as Old Scholtzer? It’s fantastic! He sounds like a maniac in a fit!’
‘What was that, dear?’ Claire asked, mildly, dragged from the interminable Odyssey of The Good Companions, and he said, smiling, ‘I’m sorry, I was only thinking aloud!’ but all the next day his mind returned to the phenomenon and although he spoke no word of German the speech had seemed to him to contain elements that a man could associate with the howl of the long-dead sheepdog of Preacher Willoughby, a dog that had caught rabies and had been shot by Smut Potter.
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