People began to arrive in twos and threes, all breathless, all eager to talk about their own miraculous escapes until they saw the havoc in Periwinkle Yard. Then they stopped and poked about in an aimless way, not caring to look Mary Palfrey in the face. They did not start digging for Rachel until Squire Craddock himself arrived with old Henry Pitts, some of the elderly labourers and two Land Army girls from the Home Farm. By then Mary had collapsed and she and the child were driven away in the landrover, to be put to bed at the Big House.
Squire Craddock, at sixty-two, was still an active man and so was Henry Pitts, a year or two older. Together, with the minimum of talk, they set about clearing a way through to the kitchen. They were both trench veterans and houses demolished by high explosives were not as novel to them as to their helpers. Henry said: ‘Us’ll have to come at it from the back, Maister. It’ll take us all day to get through from this side. Is ’er dead would ’ee say?’
‘She’s dead all right,’ Paul Craddock said. ‘Some of these beams are nearly two feet across. We’ll go in from the scullery yard as you suggest.’
They had cleared as far as the scullery window when reinforcements arrived from the camp on the moor and half-an-hour later Rachel Eveleigh was lifted out and laid in the hen-house, the only outbuilding that remained standing. Squire Craddock and Henry Pitts looked down at her. She was not much marked and must have died instantly. She looked, Paul Craddock thought, her severe, humourless self, a woman who had been in arms against the ordered life of industrial and rural communities ever since she took up with that studious son of Parson Horsey. That was half-a-lifetime ago—back about the time of the old King’s coronation when she was a chit of about seventeen. And then Young Horsey had been killed stretcher-bearing in Flanders and she had gone on crusading for what she called social justice, and had ultimately married another Valley misfit, his own son, Simon. Well, here was an end to all her traipsings, and she didn’t look as if she minded all that much. Her hair was as grey as his own and the eyes were old and tired. A corporal of the Marines touched his arm.
‘There’s been another incident at that big farm, sir, the one nearer the sea.’
‘Four Winds?’
‘Yes, sir. They missed the farm but killed the Gaffer. Name of Eveleigh. They were after our lot I imagine. Pretty poor shooting. The nearest was nearly a mile off target.’
Paul only heard the first part of his comment. He was thinking how persistent was the ill luck of Four Winds, the largest of the Shallowford Farms and, over three generations, the most prosperous.
When he had come here, a raw, city-bred lad seeking a purpose in life, Four Winds had been occupied by the Codsalls and within two years crazy old Martin Codsall had killed his wife Arabella with a hay knife and hanged himself. Then Codsall’s foreman, Norman Eveleigh, moved in and for a spell everything prospered, but Eveleigh’s eldest son had been killed in the war, and young Harold had run off and enlisted, and Rachel had married a conscientious objector against her father’s wishes, so that the unity of the large family was lost in a swirl of discord and anxiety, and Norman Eveleigh solaced himself with a land girl who created more scandal. Then, when that was smoothed out, Eveleigh had had a stroke and his second son Harold had come limping out of the unemployment queues and returned to the land but the curse of Four Winds could not, it seemed, be exorcised, for here was the new master dead in one of his own ditches while Fate, sparing the Four Winds’ tenants nothing, had also struck at Rachel a mile to the north.
Suddenly he felt tired and angry, his spirit at one with the lowering skies and the bleak, wintry look of the countryside. It was all so pointless this deadly game that everybody was playing all over the world, and the pattern of order and progressive change that he had been at such pains to establish twice in his lifetime was again broken up by the drift of events over which nobody, least of all himself, had the slightest control. He wanted to go back over Codsall Bridge and up to French Wood, where he had often found courage in the past among trees planted in remembrance of men killed in the 1914–18 war, but a luxury like that would have to wait. There was his son Simon to be told and brought home for the funeral, and there were Connie Eveleigh and her children to be comforted. Neither duty could be put upon anyone else for both, son and tenant, had watched him at work over the years and would look to him for reassurance. For possibly the ten-thousandth time since he had ridden into the Valley as a young man he cursed himself for having taken up such a packload of obligations.
He took a final gloomy look at the rubble, wondering how his daughter Mary would take the loss of her home, even though her life and her son’s life had been spared. Henry Pitts, still at his elbow, said, ‘Where’s The Boy, then?’ He meant Rumble Patrick, Mary’s husband, whom many of the Valley folk still called The Boy, although he was now twenty-eight and had been master here for seven years. Paul said he had gone into Whinmouth for seed and left word that he was to be contacted at once through Whinmouth police, and as he said this he remembered how Rumble Patrick’s hands, and perhaps his love for Mary, had transformed this gimcrack little farm into a pretty little home. The thought comforted him a little. ‘Good old Rumble,’ he muttered, ‘I can leave Mary to him. He’s got Potter blood in him and those Potters can survive anything.’ He turned and climbed into the station waggon, driving it back on to the old dust road and down as far as Codsall Bridge where he turned into the muddy lane leading to Four Winds.
He had expected outcry but there was none. The pitiful remains of Harold had been gathered up by some unlucky wight and covered with sacking to await the ambulance. Connie Eveleigh was alone in the parlour, sipping tea made by one of the land girls. Everybody had a frozen face and spoke in undertones but Connie wasn’t weeping, or railing against the Luftwaffe. He remembered then that she had come from the North and would know how to conduct herself, a pretty, chubby woman, not easily daunted. It was to her, rather than to her husband, that he had given the farm when they came to him penniless, for she had spoken up honestly and fearlessly, asking a favour but holding on to her pride. Harold had been a bit of a show-off but she had kept him at work and contented and would have courage to spare for the weeks ahead. She looked up hard-eyed when he came stumping in, his boots leaving a trail of cob-dust across her patterned carpet.
‘The other one got Rachel, didn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but at least the blast killed her before the roof fell in.’
‘Two bombs, two Eveleighs,’ Connie said. ‘They don’t have much luck, do they? Thank God Mary and Jerry escaped.’
It was strange. He wasn’t thinking of the Eveleighs, or even of his own daughter and grandson, but of the original tenants, the Codsalls. Arabella Codsall had clacked at him endlessly in this very room and he had ridden over here with Martin, drunk as a fiddler, shortly before the man went off his head and committed murder. He it had been who had come here on the wings of a south-westerly gale the night his own boy Simon was born, to find Martin hanged in the barn and his wife an even worse mess than Harold Eveleigh outside. A damned unlucky farm but one that continued to fight back, as Connie was fighting now. He said, ‘How did the children take it?’
‘They don’t know yet. Bob went off with Rumble. Hughie and the girl won’t be home from school until—the camp ’bus gets in at teatime. Shall I meet it and break the news on the way over?’
‘Yes,’ he said, after a moment’s thought, ‘and I’ll send Claire over to go along with you. The Marines are getting in touch with Whinmouth police, so the elder lad will be back in an hour or so. You can rely on him, can’t you?’
‘He’s a good boy and a first-class farmer. He takes after his grandfather more than Harold. The younger one is more like Harold, full of enthusiasms that don’t last long.’
Her calmness astonished him, neither did he miss the hint of defensiveness in her praise of the elder boy. She was wondering, no doubt, if the tenancy would now
pass to him. The disposal of Four Winds’ tenancy had been discussed here twice before.
‘Keep him at it, Connie,’ Paul said, ‘and don’t let him do anything damned silly, like enlist. We can’t afford to have anyone else go.’
‘The Government wouldn’t let him enlist.’
‘They should have had that much sense in the last war. Then we shouldn’t have had so many trees in French Wood, or such a hell of a struggle to get going again through the ’twenties when you were so-high.’
‘I was a bit higher than that,’ she said, with a twitch of a smile. ‘Harold and I danced the Charleston the first night we met. He was a wonderful dancer, did you know that?’
He saw now that a tear glittered under the eyelash and crossing over he laid his hand on her shoulder.
‘It was all over in a flash. He couldn’t have known a thing. He died worse deaths in France after any number of near-misses. There’s some comfort in that I suppose. He wasn’t the kind of chap who could have faced a half-life if he had been maimed.’
‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ Connie said. ‘I knew our Harold.’ And then, almost as a challenge, ‘It was a good marriage. We had a lot of fun, Squire!’ The word ‘Squire’ did not come naturally to her as it still did to the old stagers, like Henry Pitts. ‘Our Harold’, of course, was pure Lancashire. No-one in the Valley would use a possessive pronoun in that way. Musing on this, and a little fortified by her dignity and courage, he was able to get the dire results of this lunatic hit-and-run raid into perspective. It might, he supposed, have been worse. Six bombs and two deaths. If one bomb had veered a little to the west fifty Marines might have been blown to pieces in the N.A.A.F.I. on the crown of the moor.
‘There’s one thing about this picnic,’ he said, ‘we’re all in it, every last one of us, no matter where you hide!’
He did not think she needed his presence any longer and drove back along the lane, thinking better of going home to ’phone Simon. Leaving the station waggon at the foot of the approach road to Hermitage Farm he climbed the gorse track to his favourite spot on the estate, the sharp ridge crowned by the memorial copse they called French Wood, coming at it from behind, threading his way through the little glade without glancing at the plaques and sitting on a fallen birch that gave him a view of the whole Valley.
It was a long time since he had been up here and the view, so familiar in every detail, had changed during the last eighteen months. Over Periwinkle a mushroom of dust lingered like the smoke of a huge autumn bonfire and he could see the buildings of Four Winds and the straw-coloured circle that marked the place where Harold Eveleigh had died under his stack.
To the west, however, there were more noticeable changes. Blackberry Moor had once been a vast rectangle of yellow gorse, heath, heather and green or gold bracken according to the season of the year but now it was a town, row after row of huts looking like an enormous chicken farm made up of uniform hovers and here and there, alongside smaller rectangles, large buildings camouflaged green and brown, the N.A.A.F.I., S.H.Q., the gymnasium, the guardhouse. Specks moved across the parade ground and a sliver of sunlight, travelling across the landscape like a fugitive, lit upon somebody’s bayonet, or a drop of moisture on the wire mesh that ran the length of the road. There had been a camp of sorts here in the First War but it was nothing like this, just an untidy huddle of bell-tents and a sagging marquee or two, where Kitchener’s volunteers drilled and shivered and swore. This camp looked permanent and he wondered, when it was all over, how the devil anyone would restore the heath to its natural state. It wouldn’t do to hunt over it for a decade or so. The place must be a labyrinth of hidden drains, slit trenches and coils of barbed wire.
He was surprised to find himself thinking of the future. For so long now there hadn’t been one, just a chequered past and a cheerless present, involving blackouts, rationing, black-market wrangles, Government forms sown with verbal man-traps, battledress, Home Guard manoeuvres, air-raid warnings and miles of dragons’ teeth along the once deserted shore as far as the Bluff. The vast camp signified all these things, a permanent reminder that freewill had blown away with the piece of paper that well-meaning ass Chamberlain had flourished after the Munich debacle. That was how it had seemed for a long time now and even the reckless mood of 1940 had departed, leaving a vacuum filled with glumness, boredom and worry.
His family were scattered. Of his four sons and two daughters only young John, the postscript, and Mary, now homeless, remained in the Valley. Stevie and Andy, the boneyard twins who had always patronised him and had gone off to make their money in scrap iron more than a decade ago, were both in the R.A.F., one at a Bomber Command airfield in Yorkshire, the other somewhere in North Africa with a fighter squadron. Simon, his eldest boy, was in Scotland, learning how to kill men with his bare hands and him getting on for forty! His daughter Karen, whom everybody called ‘Whiz’, was in India, thank God, and so was her husband, Ian. Ian had some kind of staff job and it would probably keep him alive. So much for the children, two home and four away. Some of his pre-war cronies were still around but the young ones had mostly gone. Only here and there was a son carrying on, like David, Henry’s son, at Hermitage. The rest were as far away as Alberta and Queensland, or caught up in some confused battle in Burmese jungle or North African desert. There was no continuity anymore and as he sat here, looking out over the grey landscape, he realized it was continuity he had striven for for forty years, often with little success. In a way it was a kind of suspension of all natural processes, like waiting for a spring that would never come. The land looked as lifeless as Rachel Eveleigh down there in that hen-house, and in the pattern of fields and copses under his eye, nothing moved except the odd speck or two on the camp parade ground.
A Hurricane came zooming out of the blur of the woods, one of the Paxtonbury-based Polish fighters in tardy pursuit of the raiders and he realised how deeply he resented all aircraft as representing a hateful challenge to all that was predictable, slow and safe. His first wife, Grace, had been killed by a Gotha on the pavé road behind Ypres; his youngest daughter, Claire, Dairy Queen of the West, had died in one off the Dutch coast, as long ago as 1934; and now they menaced the slopes and river-bottoms of remote streams like the Sorrel. God curse the fool who had first invented them, and as he thought this he remembered how he had set his face against all mechanical gadgets right through the early morning of the machine-age, when old King Teddy had been ruling an England of three-horse ploughs and leg-o’-mutton sleeves.
Then, as always, his obstinacy reasserted itself and he stood up, dusting his breeches. It didn’t pay to brood about it. There was plenty to be done, here and elsewhere, and he had looked down on this Valley too many times and in too many contrasting moods to be fooled by the desolation of winter, even a wartime winter. The Valley had looked deceivingly cheerful from here in the summer of Dunkirk but things were far more hopeless then, with everyone waiting for the first German parachutists and only a few shotguns and rook-rifles to oppose a landing of Panzers. There had been many setbacks and more to come he wouldn’t wonder, but at least that madman who raved and frothed and bit carpets had been held, and the chances of invasion now were remote, notwithstanding this morning’s escape of the battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst that had probably touched off this piddling little air-raid. He descended to the road, driving along it until he came to the two stone pillars that marked the drive and accelerating over the loose gravel between leafless chestnuts.
His wife Claire was awaiting him on the step and he felt better for seeing her there. At least she hadn’t changed, or not that much in all these years. She was fifty-nine but looked about forty-three and it cheered him to reflect that Claire had always had magic at her command to adapt to any fashion that found its way this far west. In what people now called the Edwardian Afternoon she had been a buxom, laughing girl, with a wasp waist and flowing hips and bosom and in the period now called
The Gay ’Twenties she had changed herself into a flapper showing shapely legs half-way up the thigh and cropping her lovely, corn-coloured hair in order to be at one with her daughters. Then, during the ’thirties, she had compromised between these two extremes and it was only when she was undressing to go to bed that he realised she was steadily losing the battle against excess flesh. But now a fourth compromise had been achieved for the kind of things that put weight on her belly and buttocks were difficult to get, so that recently she had been able to make a virtue out of necessity and had begun to slim in all the right places. Through all these changes her features and characteristics had remained the same, her fresh, pink and white complexion as unblemished as a girl’s, her slightly prominent eyes reminding him of inshore water off the Coombe Bay sandbanks on a summer’s day—those two things, plus her optimism, steadfastness and strong sexual attraction for him, that persisted even now, so that there never was a time when he was not in some way stirred by her presence. She said anxiously, ‘Where on earth have you been? I phoned poor Connie and she said you left an hour ago!’
He was tempted to lie but thought better of it. ‘I had to pull myself together, old girl. I went up to French Wood,’ and was a little touched to see her smile.
‘I might have known it. Did it work?’
‘More or less. How is Mary and the kid?’
‘Both scrubbed and sound asleep. Doctor Maureen came over and gave them something to counteract the shock. The police phoned from Whinmouth. They’re looking all over for Rumble and Connie’s boy. I didn’t know what to say to Connie, poor kid.’
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 2
