He glanced at her then as though expecting her to reject this line of reasoning outright but when she said, ‘Go on, Paul,’ he said, ‘I talked to the C.O. up there and he had a pretty high opinion of Stevie. Those chaps don’t talk slosh and he wasn’t just being kind. Afterwards I went up to French Wood and thought about it all, about Stevie and Andy, about Simon swimming for it at the time of Dunkirk, and Rumble Patrick sailing off because he felt he had to, and it seemed to me they weren’t any different from the chaps who went west in that bloody slime at Passchendaele. They hung on long enough to give everyone else a breather and put those bastards where they belong at the end of a rope. You don’t have to see it this way but you have to know what got me over the hump.’
It was the kind of reaction she might have expected from him, if only because he had always seen his own family as no more than a segment of the Valley and everyone else about here as part of a tribe he honestly believed to be superior to any other. It was an old-fashioned notion she supposed, at least thirty years out of date, but he was not a patriot in the sense that almost everybody had been when Kaiser Bill went berserk and all the men were hypnotised by Kitchener’s manic stare on the hoardings. His patriotism, as she saw it, was at once more localised and more broadly based, drawing its strength from the books he read and the thoughts he thought. It had to do with Valley crafts and Valley loyalties, with the food they grew and the dialects they used. It reached back into the history of history books that, for most people, herself included, had no more reality than the stories of the Old Testament but for him had a message that had regulated the whole of his life since she had known him. If it brought him comfort now who was she to question it? It could no nothing at all for her but that was another matter.
As the days passed she saw that he had been able to absorb the beating he had taken and when, three weeks after her return they were told about the bar to Stevie’s D.F.C., it meant a lot to him, even if she thought of it as one more manifestation of the male animal’s curious ability to make a mystique of organised slaughter. The Craddocks, she reflected, were collectors of medals. Paul had won the M.C. and Croix de Guerre in 1918, Simon a D.C.M. at Calais, and both Stevie and Andy already had the D.F.C., but only Paul seemed to set much store on decorations and had always worn his at the annual Armistice Service, like his cronies Henry Pitts and Smut Potter.
It was about a week after this that she judged him ready to withstand another kind of shock, indeed, the decision was forced upon her by a ’phone call from Margaret saying she would arrive on the Saturday train. It was only a week or so before Andy was expected home for a final course of treatment at Roehampton Hospital.
She waited until the conventional hour for family topics, when she was already in bed and he was fiddling about over by the window, laying out his keys and small change on the dressing-table.
All their married life they had used this moment for clearing-house gossip, a time when they were alone and he had turned his back on the Valley, stealing quietly back to her or his books, or both. In the old days the timing was deliberate for they had formed the habit of resolving the occasional difficulty or tiff on the spot. She had always had the power to distract him from all manner of worries, big and small, by the simple process of availing him of her impulsively generous body, after which his abstractions were somehow removed to a contemplative distance. Now, at sixty-four, his demands were no more than occasional and her own needs had become integrated into the quiet rhythm of their lives.
She said, watching him peel off his shirt and reach for his pyjama jacket, ‘You’re not in bad condition for an over sixty. Have I told you that before?’
‘Not lately,’ he said, ‘unless there was an ulterior motive.’
‘There’s one now.’
He had never really learned about her. He was surely, she thought, the most guileless man created since Adam. He had not noticed, for instance, as he so rarely did, that she had fortified herself against crisis-point by going into Whinmouth for a shampoo and set, or that she had used a dab or two of a small bottle of perfume Rumble had brought her from abroad that she had been hoarding over the months. All he had learned, it seemed, was to read some kind of invitation in her bedroom chatter when it fitted his own mood and this originated more from male vanity than from an instinctive awareness that she had something important to discuss. It was no good rehearsing this kind of thing. One had to seize a timely moment like this, when he was relaxed and more his younger self. She said, bluntly, ‘Come over here and sit down a minute. I’ve got something important to tell you. It’ll give you a jolt but you’ll get over it, providing you let yourself.’
He looked startled but suddenly he grinned. ‘Don’t tell me you’re pregnant again,’ he said. ‘You usually are when you talk that way.’
Suddenly she changed her mind about tactics, taking this unexpected chance of administering the medicine in a gulp instead of feeding it to him in small, bitter sips. She said, calmly, ‘Not me. Your daughter-in-law Margaret.’
‘Margaret!’
He had been on the point of sitting on the edge of the bed but he jerked upright so quickly that his head almost struck the beam in the ceiling. ‘But that’s nonsense! Andy’s been gone …’ and then he stopped, staring down at her, so that she had to clutch at her courage and take a deep breath to keep the tremor out of her voice.
‘She’s had the baby,’ she said, and seeing a way to sidetrack his sense of outrage for a moment, ‘that’s where I was when you couldn’t get me in London. I was in North Wales and before that I was at Stevie’s camp. I went there with the idea of talking it over with him but when I got there … well … you know what I found.’
He seemed stupefied but his expression did not daunt her as it might have done, for somehow she understood that concern for her was involved in his astonishment and she could only suppose that the vision of her arrival at the camp, to be told the substance of the wire he had received, had temporarily effaced any thoughts about Margaret.
He said slowly, ‘You did that! You trailed up there, just to talk about Margaret’s baby to Stevie? All that rubbish Maureen fed me over the phone … you didn’t hear about Stevie from her? … You got the news from the camp?’
‘Yes, but that was something I didn’t bargain for. I walked right into it and learned about it from one of his friends.’
‘Great God,’ he said, running his hand over the day’s bristles on his long jaw. Then, ‘But why! Why talk to Stevie? Why not me?’
She reached out and took his hand, holding it tightly so that the pressure of her thumb momentarily erased the brown spots on his knuckles. ‘There was a particular reason,’ she said, ‘they have been seeing a great deal of one another all this time. It isn’t just anyone’s baby, Paul. It’s Stevie’s.’
She gave him time to absorb this but not time enough to say the words that were on the point of tumbling from his mouth. ‘Wait, Paul. You’ve got to hear it all. You’ve got to trust me to know what I’m doing, what in fact I already have done. You’ve got to listen and think. Temper and disgust isn’t going to help any of us. It’s very important to let me explain.’
Their relationship was strong enough to take the strain and when she was convinced of this confidence returned to her. She said, ‘Will you listen? Will you trust me to tell you what I’ve already done before you jump to all kinds of wrong conclusions?’ and he said, bitterly, ‘Go ahead, say all you’ve got to say, but don’t forget Stevie’s dead and Andy’s due back in just over a week.’
‘You think I’m likely to forget either of those things?’
‘No.’ His head came up. ‘I’m sorry I said that but I’m entitled to know all there is to know before Andy arrives and finds her staying with us, and also that Stevie and she confided in you at the time!’
‘Stevie didn’t,’ she said, ‘but if Stevie hadn’t been killed Margaret was going to ask Andy to divor
ce her. Then she and Stevie would have married, providing his own divorce came through.’
It was too much for him. ‘They’re like a lot of barnyard animals!’ he burst out but she got hold of his hand again and said, ‘You promised to listen, Paul. I did what I did because somebody had to try and it was way beyond your capacity. That’s why I acted on my own and I’m not sorry I did. There’s still a chance my way.’
‘What way is that for God’s sake?’
‘Margaret’s going to tell Andy it’s Stevie’s child. It wasn’t difficult to persuade her to do that. It was far harder to prevent her backing out of the situation altogether. Now it all depends on Andy but my point in going there was to ensure she gave him the chance, if he wanted it. She owes him that. We all owe it him. I was going to make very sure Stevie stayed out of the way until he could make up his mind and that was the whole point of my going there. When things were taken out of my hands I did what seemed the next best thing.’
‘What was that?’
‘I hired a car that same night and travelled half-way across England to find Margaret and say to her what I had intended saying to him.’
He was beginning to understand and with understanding came the ability to assess her courage and coolheadedness. It had the effect of obscuring the harsh outlines of the dilemma, a heroic caper within a desperately squalid farce. He knew that this was how it must have appeared to her at the outset, that it had probably disgusted her as it disgusted him now, and yet she had managed to live with it for a long time and then, with nothing but instinct to guide her, had made some kind of attempt to sort things out. But even that was not all, not by a long chalk. Somehow she had found the nerve and resolution to hold on to her purpose in circumstances that would have sent most women reeling to the nearest source of comfort, and this seemed to him something one might witness once in a lifetime but not twice. Realisation of what the ordeal must have cost her humbled him, making him ashamed of his own recoil. He said, exchanging her grip on his hand for one of his own, ‘I’ll listen. And I won’t do Andy’s work for him by bullying you. I’ve always said you had a damned sight more sense than most people but I didn’t realise you had ten times as much guts. Go ahead, tell me how it looks from your viewpoint and I hope to God I can find the same focus.’
She told him, then, everything she knew and much of what she had guessed. She didn’t spare either one of them, for although it seemed to her fatally easy to use the handbook of words applicable to this kind of situation there were none of them, including Monica, who had not contributed in some way to what had happened. Andy, it seemed, had found fulfilment in aerobatics and Monica had shrugged off her obligations as carelessly as all of them had done in the past. It did not seem improbable that Stevie and Margaret should seek and find solace in one another and she supposed, times being what they were, one thing would very easily lead to another. She did not expect him to follow her this far and he did not, but at least he was able to contemplate it in a way that would have been impossible half an hour ago.
He said, when she told him that Stevie and Margaret had found a precarious happiness over the last few months, ‘I daresay they did once they were committed. What I can’t begin to understand is how either of them got to the point of going to bed with one another. With a couple of strangers yes, but not with each other.’
She owed him the whole truth. ‘Margaret tried strangers. I don’t know about Stevie. She told me that it only made things worse because there was no love in it.’
‘What the hell do they know about love?’
‘As much as us,’ she said, and his head came up sharply again. ‘Look, I was in France twenty months and you didn’t go screaming round the Valley for someone to take my place of a night.’
‘There were two good reasons why I didn’t. One, I had this entire place on my hands and plenty of old friends around me. Two, you took the trouble to write me a lot of affectionate letters, letters I still keep, and even re-read when I need a pick-me-up! Margaret showed me Andy’s last letter. It was like a note left at the back door for the baker or milkman.’
He thought about this and it moderated his contempt to some extent. It also made him even more wary of doing battle with her, for it was clear that she had studied her brief.
‘What is it?’ he asked suddenly, ‘a boy or a girl?’
‘A girl. Very dark. She looks like you must have looked at that age.’
It struck no chord in him. He heaved himself up and mooched over to the window. The wind was rising and soughing across the Valley from the direction of the Bluff, an easterly wind, with plenty of sleet in it.
‘What have you got in mind now?’
‘Nothing beyond giving her a base for the time being. Andy won’t be independent of the hospital for weeks. I told her she could bring the baby here and go and see Andy as soon as possible. The rest is up to her.’
‘What will he do? Have you any notion of that?’
‘I’ve got my private thoughts.’
‘Well?’
‘I think he’ll take more kindly to Stevie’s baby than to anyone else’s. It’s just a feeling I’ve had, since I heard about Stevie’s death in those circumstances. Anyway, rightly or wrongly, it seemed to me the best we could hope for.’
He finished undressing and came back to the bed. He was thinking hard but not getting very far. To an extent her own independent actions continued to obscure the main issue. He said, unexpectedly, ‘I’ve always accepted the convention that men were endowed with far more sexual energy than women.’
‘I’ve given you that impression?’
He considered her this time with a curious objectivity. ‘No,’ he said, with the faintest trace of a smile, ‘I can’t honestly say that, but then I’ve always regarded you as eccentric in that respect. I meant women generally. Is that notion a Victorian hangover on my part?’
‘Not entirely,’ she said, ‘it’s just that women on the whole put a little more into it than men. Just a man, any man, isn’t much good to the average woman. It has to be a particular man. In that sense there is a sound basis for the convention, no matter how ‘liberated’ the women of this generation fancy themselves. That was something Margaret discovered.’
‘She didn’t act by it.’
‘In a way she did.’
He put out his hand and ran it lightly across her hair.
‘By God!’ he said, suddenly, ‘we’ve been lucky with each other, Claire! I don’t think of it often but when I do it hits me like a falling tree.’ He slipped his hand over her breast, stroking it absently and presently he leaned on his elbows, took her face between his hands and kissed her on the mouth. ‘It’s odd. For a long, long time I thought of you as someone who was always a lot of fun horizontally but only adequate when you were vertical. Did you know that?’
‘I knew it,’ she said equably, ‘and I didn’t give a hoot. At my age, however, one has to start scratching around for fresh capital. That, I imagine, is what I’ve been doing lately.’
‘You needn’t have bothered on my account,’ he said. ‘Right now, for instance, I’m as erotic as Old Honeyman’s prize ram!’
It was an old joke between them. She could not remember how many years had passed since she had first made the comparison but it must have been more than thirty, when the children they had been discussing were toddlers, and their own world was still young. Tonight it told her that he had made up his mind to accept a situation that could not be altered except, perhaps, for the better, and also that, deep down, nothing counted for much in his heart and mind except their relationship rooted in this house and the Valley beyond it.
‘What am I doing out here in the cold?’ he asked and turned out the bedside light, heaving himself over her to his own side of the bed. His arms went round her with the vigour of a much younger man and in the same moment she told herself, laughing silently, that his referenc
e to Old Honeyman’s ram had not been an ageing man’s boast.
Chapter Eleven
Sallies By All Concerned
I
June, 1944.
The listing gull was still based on the landslip, still made its long, lazy circuits of the Valley. It was surprising that it was able to get airborne for its port wing had contracted to less than half a normal spread and the foot that had to take most of the strain of uncertain landings was like a shredded twig. For all that it fed well enough, its limitations teaching it things about the Valley based on certainties and not on casual observation. It took off that morning in a long, drooping curve, fighting to get enough height to clear the line of the dunes, then turning west along the coast until it reached the first of the camp huts where it noted the unusual stillness of the place. Smoke rose from the cookhouse and here and there an odd figure pottered among the huts but there was no stamping and shouting on the parade ground, no vehicles scuttling up and down the broad avenue from the guardhouse. It dipped, found some bacon rinds on the edge of a waste barrel and took off again, the rinds trailing from its beak.
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 26
