She said, quietly, ‘No, I think you know what you’re doing, Paul. I think you always know what you’re doing if it concerns the Valley.’
‘You’ve been in a minority of two then,’ he said, but with relief in his voice. ‘Only Smut’s wife, old Marie, encouraged me at the time. You didn’t! Why didn’t you?’
‘Why didn’t I what?’
‘Back me up, tell me I was right. I would have appreciated it.’
She said, levelly, ‘You show me any woman about here with sons who is ready to admit, even to herself, to the prospect of seeing them face what you faced last time, or the possibility of suffering what wives and mothers like me and Marian Eveleigh and Elinor Codsall suffered all the time you were out there. No Paul, you don’t bring it into the open, you go on pretending it’s a bad dream that will fade out as soon as it’s light! That’s what I’ve been doing ever since Simon went off to fight in Spain.’
He pondered her confession, finding it not only human but logical. One was so apt to think of war as a man’s business whereas, of course, it was not and involved everybody one way or another, not because the methods of waging war had changed with the introduction of bombers but because feather-distributing women of Gloria Pitts’ type were rare. The majority, the Claires, the Marians and the Elinors of this world, seldom came forward to claim their fair share of the misery when their menfolk were lying out in mud under a barrage, or were home again, flaunting their medals and heroism. Usually, as in Claire’s case, they kept their thoughts and misgivings to themselves, and tried to look interested when they had to listen to stories of blood and privation. This was the first time in twenty years he had ever given a thought to all she must have suffered during the period he had been in France. Was it any different in any other home in the Valley? He said, gently, ‘You should have told me that before, Claire, but I’m glad it popped out!’ and suddenly she was on the rug beside him with her arms round his knees, as though interposing herself between him and the pointing finger of Kitchener in 1914. ‘You won’t go again, Paul! You wouldn’t? I couldn’t face that time again, no matter what!’ and he said, stroking her hair, ‘Good heavens, no, I shan’t go! How could I, at my age? Besides, if it does come there will be more than enough to do right here, I can tell you.’ She nodded, eagerly, and he thought it strange that his reassurance, which did not include immunity for Simon, Stevie, Andy or her two sons-in-law, Ian and Rumble, should bring her such immediate comfort. Then he remembered what Maureen had said, what he himself had always suspected. She didn’t give a damn about her children now they were grown and dispersed. All her adult life her eggs had been in one basket.
II
There had always been a rhythm to their relationship, a swing and a drift that seemed not to be governed by external pressures, or by their own impulses but rather the chances that struck high and low notes in the harmony of the marriage. A trivial misunderstanding might promote a period of coolness, a casual mental adjustment, such as that resulting from this talk of war, bring them close together again so that for weeks together they would respond to one another far more like lovers than man and woman who had shared a bed for thirty years.
In that final summer of the old world, or rather to world that had tried so unavailingly to resolve itself into the older pattern, they were closer than they had ever been since the long interval between the children growing up and the birth of John, now a chubby, mischievous child of five. They would sometimes take him down to the shanty where Claire would teach him to swim in the rock-pool where she herself had learned and Paul would squat on a rock at the mouth of the goyle and watch them, marvelling a little at her patience and also at the curious sinuosity of her body in the water. The thrust of her American crawl never ceased to surprise him and these days she was unencumbered by the heavy, serge bathing dress she had worn the day he proposed to her within shouting distance of this favourite spot of theirs. Her figure, he thought, had withstood the years and successive pregnancies astonishingly well. It was thickening about the waist but not appreciably so for a woman over fifty. Her long legs were still, in his view at least, the shapeliest in the Valley, her breasts were full but high and her behind, always ample, had for him the pleasing flow of a ripe pear, so that when he saw her stand poised at the deepest end of the pool, flash down into the clear water and forge the entire length of the trough under water he would gloat over her as some sensual memory stirred in him and sometimes he would select a specially bright coin from his hoard of memories and, as it were, hold it momentarily between finger and thumb.
He did not always accompany her there. He had work to do, although it was now confined, in the main, to checking his defences, like a conscientious garrison-commander anticipating a siege but uncertain when the first enemy hull would show over the horizon. There were times, indeed, when he doubted if there would be a siege, and then he would chide himself for a man who had let fancy dominate him but always, via newspapers, radio or the telephone links he had established with Simon, Rachel and the twins, would come sinister hints and rumours that hardened his sense of purpose and then she would have to spend her afternoons at the pool alone with John, or in the company of the Lee Gibsons, an elderly American couple who had rented the tall Victorian villa once occupied by Celia Lovell and used as a penitentiary for the erring Bruce Lovell.
Cyrus and Myra Lee Gibson were of the select company of expatriates who, from time to time, strayed into the Valley and never found their way out again. The first of them, in Paul’s experience, had been the old German professor, and since then Brissot, the French Canadian, and Marie Potter, Smut’s wife, had been added to their number. Mrs Lee Gibson had allegedly come to the West to trace ancestors but her husband, a successful portrait artist (who, as a young man had hob-nobbed with the Paris Impressionists) had stayed on to paint landscapes, confessing himself fascinated by the quality of light in and around the Valley which, in high summer, was the nearest British equivalent to his native Arizona and in early autumn reminiscent of the filtered sunlight of Provence. Paul did not take these compliments seriously, recognising’ Cyrus as a dabbler in everything but portraiture but both he and Claire had become attached to the old couple. They had no family of their own and made favourites of young John and Mary’s son, Jerry, who was often dumped on his grandmother for the afternoon.
During a spell of hot May weather Claire was down here every day and one blazing afternoon, when she had ordered the children out of the pool and was standing with her back to the goyle drying her hair, Lee Gibson hailed from beside the shanty, calling ‘Hold it! Don’t move, gal!’ and she thought he was taking a snapshot but when she went up the beach saw he was touching up a series of charcoal sketches, all of herself in various postures in and about that rock-ledge.
‘Can’t you find a better model than a grandmother playing Nannie to a couple of toddlers?’ she joked but he said, adding a touch here and there, ‘I think we’ve hit on something! Myra thinks so, too. If you’re interested we could build on it. Come up to the cabin and see for yourself. Myra will watch over the children,’ and he led her into the shanty which Paul let him use as a studio whenever he worked west of the Bluff.
She was astonished at what she saw propped against the empty grate—a full-length portrait, two-thirds completed, of herself, seated on a spur of rock casually engaged in drying herself with a blue towel. He had caught her in a moment of abstraction, half-facing the Channel seen in the right background, with her shoulder-length hair tousled and bunched by the upward thrust of her right hand, and the sun playing strongly on her half-exposed breast and loosely braced thigh. The picture had a quality that was rare, a kind of breadth and freedom so often absent from a posed portrait, and it pleased her enormously not only because it was an excellent likeness but because some good fairy had enabled him to bring out her vitality and with it a strong echo of her youth. She said, throwing modesty aside, ‘Cyrus, it’s wonderful! It makes me look—we
ll—not more than forty! And nobody could say it wasn’t me; you’ve been gallant enough to slant it so that I look ten stone instead of getting on for twelve!’ and she was so flattered and excited that she kissed him, saying, ‘Does Paul know? Have you shown it to him yet?’
‘Certainly not! For one thing it isn’t finished and you’ll have to pose in here for the final touches; for another I’m not at all sure he’d approve of an uncommissioned semi-nude of his wife. He’s old-fashioned enough to hound me out of the Valley for taking such a liberty!’
‘He’ll love it!’ she declared, and then, ‘Look here, his birthday is next week. Could you finish it by then?’
‘With your co-operation I could,’ he said and she could see that he was pleased with her enthusiasm. ‘I’ll cover it now. If the children see it they’ll go running to him and I take it you want to surprise him?’
‘Yes, I do and I will!’ she said, helping him to drape it with a sheet and told him of a day long ago, when they were lean and young and vain, and Paul had proposed having her painted in oils by a London artist but somehow the project had been shelved and forgotten. ‘We’ve left it rather late,’ she said ruefully, ‘for I think I was worth painting in those days!’
‘You’re worth it now in my eyes and his,’ he reassured her, ‘in mine because your figure is more interesting that it was then—and if you doubt it take a look at Renoir’s “Anna”—and in his because you haven’t changed at all, my dear! I happened to see him looking down at you when you were streaking across that pool a day or so ago and, quite frankly, it struck me that his mouth was watering! So there you have it!’
It was a thought to cheer her all the way home and prompt her to do something she did infrequently these days which was to change for high tea, wondering if he would notice. To her relief he did, for although he made no comment she heard him telling Mary on the ’phone that ‘Mother had got herself up’ as a dress-rehearsal, no doubt, for the family reunion on the occasion of his birthday next week when, for the first time in years, they would reassemble at Shallowford and drink champagne sent on in advance by the twins.
On the last day of May, the day prior to his sixtieth birthday, they began to drift in from the North, the Midlands and Camberley, where Whiz and her husband were currently based, and it was after the last of them had arrived, and they had retired bemused by talk and bustle, than she warned him not to expect his birthday present from her until the children had gone. When, unsuspecting, he enquired if it was coming by post she blushed and her moment of confusion intrigued him, so that he said:
‘What are you driving at? Do you mean you would prefer the children not to see it?’
‘Not exactly,’ she stammered, ‘I don’t mind them seeing it once it’s—well—once it’s established but it would embarrass me very much if they realised it was a birthday gift. You’ll understand when you see it.’ He sat on the edge of the bed scratching his head and looking so completely baffled that she laughed, saying, ‘I’ll tell you what! It’s past midnight so have it now! But you must give me your word of honour you won’t go whooping downstairs with it, won’t even refer to it in front of them!’
His curiosity was now so engaged that he would have promised anything, so she went along the passage to the room that had been Jimmy Grenfell’s and came back carrying a package measuring about four feet by three carefully tied in brown paper and sacking. He cut the string with her nails scissors and his expression when the canvas was revealed, was worth all the self-doubts she had suffered since entering into the conspiracy with Cyrus. He propped it against the dressing-table and stood back studying it from every angle. Then he moved it so as to catch the beside light and walked cautiously round it, as though he was playing Peeping Tom on a bathing beach. Finally he said, sombrely, ‘It’s a bloody miracle! He’s seen you not only as you are but as you always were! I’ve never looked at a picture so alive and exciting! It’s got everything I ever saw in you, from the day you took me swimming there over thirty years ago! It’s the most wonderful birthday present you’ve ever given me, that anyone’s ever given me!’ and he threw his arms round her and kissed her in a way that convinced her that the instinct that had prompted the gift had been as accurate as were most of her instincts concerning him.
‘Where are we going to hang it?’ he demanded.
‘Not downstairs certainly,’ she said. ‘Everyone who comes into the house will make that awful music-hall joke about dressing mutton to look like lamb. It’s—well Paul—it’s a very private present, and I certainly don’t want it on exhibition! It was just an idea I had the moment I saw it half-done and it seems to have worked, so that’s all I care. Hang it in your dressing-room.’
He studied it again, so carefully that she said, laughing, ‘For heaven’s sake, Paul, you’ve got the original right here! If you look at it much longer with that leery expression I shall begin to think it’s idealised and you’re reminiscing!’
‘It isn’t in the least idealised,’ he said, seriously, ‘it’s a melting-pot of everything about you that has made me look at other women objectively rather than subjectively all the years we’ve been married! And I’ll tell you something else too, if it flatters you!’
‘It’ll flatter me,’ she promised.
‘I’ve led a pretty active life and therefore I’ve always had plenty to do and mostly have enjoyed doing it but every time you walk into a room I find myself wishing everybody else would walk out of it! Every time I touch you I get the impression of physical renewal and that must be a very rare tonic for a man my age! I can’t expect it to last into my seventies, so I’m damned if I don’t hang this picture over the bed where I hope it’ll keep me from flagging as time runs on!’
‘When you flag in that respect I’ll ’phone Jonas Whiddon, the undertaker,’ she said, chuckling, ‘for you’ll be ready for him! Now get me out of this party dress so that I can breathe freely again!’ and she stood while he unhooked her, reflecting that the strictures she had endured to look as slim and young as possible that evening had been largely unnecessary, for she did not really care a curse what the assembled children thought of her figure and, as far as he was concerned, the picture seemed to have provided him with ample excuse to turn the calendar to the wall.
They were awakened early next morning by a stir below the window and Claire, who could slough off morning drowsiness in a matter of seconds, jumped out of bed and took a peep through the curtains, retiring promptly when confronted with Henry Pitts’ melon-slice smile. She said, scrambling into her dressing gown, ‘Wake up, Paul! Henry and some of his cronies are outside!’ and she shook him so that he sat up, rubbing his eyes and grumbling that it was still too early to get up.
‘It’s twenty minutes to seven,’ she told him, seizing a comb and struggling with her hair, ‘and maybe you can tell me why half the Valley is milling about outside our front door! I came within an inch of making a Lady Godiva bow to them!’
‘They couldn’t have noticed or they would have cheered,’ he said and went yawning to the window where, seeing Henry’s upturned face, he called down, ‘What’s up, Henry? Trouble somewhere?’
‘No trouble, Maister,’ Henry called back, ‘but the top o’ the marning to ’ee, an’ the missis too!’ Then, turning to Smut Potter close by he called, ‘Tell Mark to bring ’un out, Smut! Let the gentleman zee the rabbit!’ and there was a prolonged stir behind the rhododendron clump and Claire, joining Paul at the window, recognised Harold Eveleigh, Rumble Patrick, Farmer Brissot, Jumbo Bellchamber, and, standing a little apart, Francis Willoughby and Dick Potter. As they stared down Mark Codsall emerged from behind the shrubbery leading an unsaddled grey some seventeen hands high and of a build that reminded Claire instantly of old Snowdrop, the well-mannered gelding Paul had ridden about the Valley from the day of his arrival until the early ‘twenties. Paul must have noticed the resemblance too for he exclaimed, ‘My God! It’s Snowdrop’s ghost! W
here do you suppose they got him and why . . . ?’ and then the significance of the assembly dawned on him as he saw her laughing and Henry shouted, ‘Come on down, just as you be, Squire! Us baint leavin’ without drinking your health an’ me, Smut an’ Mark have been up an’ about zince daylight!’
Paul withdrew, lost for words, blundering round the wrong side of the bed in search of his slippers. She found them, pushed him down on the bed and slipped them on his feet as though he had been a boy late for school, saying, ‘I’ll stay and get dressed but you go right on down! I can’t feed that lot at short notice!’ and she hustled him out and slammed the door so that he stood bewildered for a moment before going down through the kitchen and into the stable-yard, where the big grey now stood, surrounded by more than a dozen of them with its rope halter held by Mark Codsall, Shallowford’s groom-handyman.
Some of them, he thought, looked vaguely embarrassed but this number included neither Henry Pitts nor Smut, who stood close together, clearly enjoying the occasion. Henry said, ‘Tiz the nearest us could come to old Snowdrop, Maister! Didden seem right somehow, you ridin’ about the Valley on that bottle-nosed skewbald o’ yours, so when Smut zeed this one at Bampton Fair us clubbed together and sent Smut to buy ’un! He got ten pound off what they were asking but us knowed he would, the bliddy old thief!’
‘He’s rising eight,’ Smut said, ‘but well-mannered. I knows that because I rode ’un all the way home, just to make sure that nagsman at Bampton weren’t lying when he said ’er was traffic-broken! On’y think he shied at was a bliddy motor-bike doing nigh on seventy mile an hour! He’s been out two seasons with the Eggesford Hunt, so I reckon us have catched a bargain one way and another! He’ll go, mind you, and I daresay he can jump too, but seein’ you baint so young as you were us zettled for a soft-mouth and easy temperament!’
Post of Honour Page 70
