The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

But the plan she was holding was really two plans. One was the original, or rather a fair copy of the original, and the other a detailed record of recent changes within and without the estate boundaries. It struck her then that some of the features on the map must be speculative for there was a road hugging the coastline all the way from Whinmouth to Coombe Bay and she knew that there never had been anything more than a footpath over the dunes following the southern boundary of the estate.

  There was another new feature shown, a great, shaded patch, rectangular in shape, reaching from the river road half-way up the Dell and this was overprinted with the words ‘Shawcrosse Holiday Camp’. This surprised her, not only because a holiday camp was apparently scheduled to be built inside the estate, but because she could not imagine a man like Paul Craddock doing business with a spiv like Shawcrosse.

  She took the plan back to the desk, laid it down and rummaged among other papers in the drawer. They were mostly copies of letters written on the notepaper of Shawcrosse & Craddock, Craddock Development Company, or Vista Homes Limited, only three of the names Andy used in his complicated network of ventures. It was not necessary to study the letters. She found a memoranda sheet with a paper-clip clinging to it and recognised it as the key that had been affixed to the plan. It told her as much as she wanted to know.

  This was the Shallowford Valley, not as Paul saw it, or as anyone else had ever seen it, but how it would look when Shawcrosse and Andy had finished with it. The ruthlessness of the exercise, already well started it seemed, stirred an indignation within her that made her feel physically sick. She sat back in his swivel-chair for a moment, closing her eyes and making a great effort to concentrate. Then, with deliberation, she compared key and plan, relating the initial capital letters—‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, etc., to coloured twins on the map. ‘A’, shown in blue, was property already acquired by one or other of the companies in Coombe Bay and there seemed to be a great deal of it. ‘B’ was the holiday camp, absorbing one of the Shallowford farms and spreading, in the shape of a spur, to the cliffs east of the Bluff. ‘C’ was labelled ‘Proposed New Road’ and after it, written in pencil, were the words, ‘Est. time compt’n., Sept. 1950’. There were various other features, a hotel half-way along the road and a housing site on the Moor but she did not study these in detail. Suddenly the pattern became very clear indeed. Andy, as the dominant director of the family company, was the inside man operating on behalf of Shawcrosse, and perhaps some of the other vulpine characters who occasionally called at the house for a drink or left cryptic messages when Andy was out.

  It was like finding oneself involuntarily caught up in a conspiracy to defraud or, even more frightening, witnessing a back-alley attack on an unsuspecting victim and being faced with the choice of intervening or looking the other way. Sitting there, glancing from map to key and key to map, she was stunned by his betrayal, remembering that his access to this property had been a free gift, a shy acknowledgment by his father of his war-service and perhaps also a form of recompense for his physical injuries. She did not try to persuade herself that it might not be a conspiracy at all, that everything on that map was known and approved by Paul, by Simon, Rumble Patrick and the others. It had the hall-marks of a secret treaty and somehow it carried not only Andy’s signature but the unmistakable stamp of Shawcrosse. But if she had wanted further proof it was there to hand, in the carbon copies of letters exchanged between Andy and Shawcrosse and between Andy and his sister Whiz. It was the tailpiece of one of the letters to Whiz that told her something else. Not only had Andy acquired his sister’s shares more than a year ago, but had apparently tried and failed to buy Simon’s, for Andy had written to his sister: ‘ … Simon wouldn’t sell. He seems to think it would upset the Old Man and I daresay he’s right, so don’t make your sale to me public until I give you the okay. No sense in getting his back up to that extent, and Simon won’t say anything about my offer. He doesn’t know, of course, that you and Ian have already sold out.’

  Margaret wondered vaguely if Whiz had any clear idea of what was really going on, and also how much Andy had paid her for her shares. She knew very little about Whiz, recalling her only as a rather formal little madam, who had wrinkled her pretty nose at Margaret’s Welsh accent when they first met. But it didn’t matter about Whiz. Andy was the central figure and behind Andy, like a puppeteer, was Shawcrosse, jerking strings to make the Craddocks dance. As she thought about it other pieces of the jigsaw came to hand; snippets of conversations, that hangdog look of Andy’s when he returned from the Big House, the visitors he had from time to time, among them the farmer Bellchamber who, she remembered, was the tenant of the holding now labelled ‘Shawcrosse Holiday Camp’.

  She sat on sifting pieces and enlarging the pattern until the exercise disgusted her and she got up, stuffed plan and letters into her handbag and went out to the car. Five minutes later she was climbing Whinmouth Hill to the crest of the moor.

  Claire heard her out in silence, scanning the plan for a long time and then asking odd and seemingly irrelevant questions. When was Andy expected back? Where was he at this moment? Where was Vanessa? Did Andy ever talk about Stevie? How much of his affluence was real, how much reposed in mortgaged property? Margaret answered as best she could but all the time she was wondering why Claire didn’t summon Paul, who was working in the estate office across the hall. At last she put this to Claire, admitting that her intention had been to pass the information to Paul straight away and let him take any action he thought fit without informing Andy but Claire said, quietly, ‘I’m very glad you didn’t. It was wise of you to tell me first,’ and then, ‘I’m not blameless you know. I’ve sensed that something very odd was going on for a long time and I ought to have challenged him outright. As it is you’ve got yourself involved and I don’t like that. How can things be the same between you when he knows you’ve been poking among his private papers and bringing them over here?’

  ‘It isn’t that important,’ Margaret said, ‘not to me at all events.’

  ‘To Vanessa it might be.’

  Margaret was silent a moment. Then she said ‘No, not to Vanessa either. I wouldn’t want Vanessa to grow up in that atmosphere and Stevie wouldn’t have wanted it either. Or not the Stevie I knew at “Ty-Bach”.’

  ‘You see what comes of meddling,’ Claire said. ‘You knew from the beginning it wouldn’t work, didn’t you? That time in Cric­cieth, when I bullied you into making a clean breast of it and giving Andy a chance?’

  ‘I never saw it as anything but the best of a bad job,’ she said, ‘but what do any of us know about what goes on in other people’s heads?’

  ‘I know what goes on in Paul’s,’ Claire said, ‘and if this isn’t handled cleverly it’ll scar him for life. You say Andy is due back tomorrow? Do you know what time?’

  ‘I never know what time. He just shows up, sometimes alone, sometimes with one of his cronies.’

  ‘Then let’s hope he’s alone this time. I’ll come over after breakfast, just to make sure.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I don’t know, it depends on so many things. On his attitude and my instinct mostly, but I’ll be there. I’m not going to let you face this alone. And don’t ever imagine I’m not grateful, Margaret. Right now I wish you were my daughter as much as I wish Andy wasn’t my son.’

  They went out to the stableyard where Margaret’s car was parked and as she got in Margaret said, ‘There’s just one thing more. That Mill Cottage down on the river road, I noticed they were doing it up and rethatching. Is it for rent, or is it earmarked for one of the estate workers?’

  ‘It was,’ Claire said, ‘but if you need it for a cooling-off spell you can have it, I’ll make sure of that,’ and as she said it her mind conjured up a picture of another forlorn young woman who had found refuge there years and years ago, at the time of the First War. The woman was Hazel Potter, the half-wild postscript of the Potter famil
y, and Hazel’s child was now her son-in-law. She thought, as she watched Margaret drive away. ‘It’s odd the way people and buildings and situations resolve themselves in this place; Four Winds, the Codsalls, the Eveleighs and tragedy; Periwinkle, the bombs, and Simon’s wife; High Coombe, and me, and my brother Hugh when he tried to double-cross Paul in the way Andy had done; and now Mill Cottage, restored just in time to provide a sanctuary again.’ Then she went in and up to the room that had been Young Claire’s that she used as an inner tabernacle, keeping everyone else at bay. She took with her the tracing and the letters. Without fuss she sat down and studied them, line by line and word by word.

  IV

  When lunch was cleared away and still Andy had not returned or telephoned, Margaret said she would drive down into the town and collect Vanessa who had been having a dancing lesson at a little Academy in the Y.W.C.A. Hall. Claire was glad to get her out of the house. It gave her a better opportunity of putting her apology for a plan to work, and it seemed to her that confrontation without Margaret in the offing would be less complicated.

  She was luckier than she had hoped. Within fifteen minutes she heard Andy’s car send the gravel flying as he drove up with his inevitable flourish, slammed the door and ran up the porch steps carrying his worn briefcase. Watching him through the study window she could see him objectively, as a teenager storming into the Big House with Stevie at his heels, a couple of freebooters returning to base for a meal and a chance to plan the next foray. He was heavier, of course, and all that scar tissue hadn’t improved his looks, but he still dressed with the same assertive flashiness, expensive camel-hair coat, carelessly knotted silk scarf, yellow gloves and handmade shoes, as though he used his clothes to proclaim the shallow prosperity of his enterprises. She thought, distractedly, ‘How the devil did an uncomplicated man like Paul Craddock sire a pair of prancing stallions like Andy and Stevie? Where does it come from, this obsession to be top-dog and prove it every minute of the day? It couldn’t have come from Paul’s scrap­yard father—he was always bullied by that old rascal Zorndorff, and my father wasn’t greedy for anything except the acres he ploughed!’ He came into the hall in what seemed to Claire to be a very good humour, calling, ‘Margy? You there Margy?’ and when Claire moved into the study doorway he looked first baffled and then alerted, perhaps by her presence within reach of his desk. Then, already bluffing, he threw down his coat and brief case and said, ‘Had lunch? Vanessa around?’ and she told him that Vanessa was at dancing class and that Margaret had just gone for her.

  ‘I’ll fix myself something,’ he said, ‘come into the kitchen and yarn while I eat. I’ve just driven two-fifty without stopping. She’s a honey, that car. Why don’t you talk the Gov into getting one? Is he going to potter round the Valley in an Austin for the rest of his life?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Claire said, carefully, ‘maybe he’ll push the boat out when he capitalises on what’s left of the estate,’ and he gave her a shrewd look and said, ‘What’s cooking? Why are you up here?’ and then brushed past her into the study and saw the tracing and the letters on the desk and the centre drawer of his desk open.

  It did not take him more than a few seconds to recover and she marvelled at his sang-froid, wholly assumed but more than adequate to absorb any amount of recoil. It was, she supposed, a trick of the trade acquired over the years. He said, with a shrug, ‘You’ve rumbled it, then?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve rumbled it. I always brought you and the others up to regard the act of reading one another’s mail as one of the shabbiest things one person could do to another but there are exceptions. I’m glad I got the chance to read yours.’

  He went over to the desk and studied the plan for a moment. He did not so much as glance at the letters.

  ‘Well,’ he said, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke through his nose, ‘that’s that! I knew there would have to be a showdown sooner or later and I daresay it’ll be a more civilised one with you than it would be with the Old Man.’

  The word ‘civilised’ irritated her but only momentarily. She said, ‘Is it part of the new creed of the civilised to sell their own kith and kin to strangers? Providing the price is right? Does anything go nowadays?’

  ‘Pretty well anything,’ he said, ‘but if that’s your approach I might just as well try and have a final go at converting the Gov’nor. No sense in the two of us rehearsing is there? I have got a point of view, you know.’

  She gave herself a moment or two to bite back the obvious retort, one of several that occurred to her and he watched her, smiling with the live side of his face, so that anyone not aware of his facial burns might have mistaken his blandness for mockery. She was familiar with the distortion and today it set limits to her anger. She said, ‘Very well. If there is an explanation, any kind of explanation, I’d be interested to hear it,’ and sat down in his swivel chair.

  ‘I dropped a broad hint at the last meeting,’ he said, ‘but nobody noticed.’

  ‘I noticed. That’s why I’m here. All that talk about young people drifting out of the Valley in search of jobs and kicks. That was the hint, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It’s happening,’ he said, ‘and in places like Coombe Bay it’s already happened. Everybody still there depends entirely on the holiday trade. Without it there wouldn’t be a hundred people left in the village. Are you going to deny that?’

  ‘It isn’t what we’re talking about,’ she said.

  ‘You mean the devious way I went about it? Well, what alternative was there? You ought to know, you’ve been married to the Old Boy for forty years.’

  He had been well in control of himself up to now but suddenly he became very emphatic. ‘An industrialised country doesn’t stand still. It can’t or it would go bust in a single generation. That was true when we stopped feeding Europe a century ago and it’s even more true today. We live by importing food and exporting manufactured goods and we’ve been doing that for the last eighty years but there are still people like the Gov’nor who can’t or won’t admit it, and naturally they get hurt when it hits them between the eyes. I’m sorry about that—in a way I admire him, always have admired him, but for far different reasons than the middle-of-the-roaders like Rumble Patrick and Simon admire him. He can’t help being the kind of person he is any more than I can, or you can, but he has to pay the standard price for the privilege of trying to turn back the tide. He has to get his feet wet every now and again!’

  ‘Can you honestly say he hasn’t done a wonderful job of work since he came here half a century ago? Are you even qualified to say whether he has or hasn’t? You didn’t know this place until he’d put years of his life into it but I did. I knew it in an absentee landlord’s time when most of the people about here hadn’t got a good roof over their heads and shared outside privvies and pump water. Don’t talk about him as if he was antediluvian. He doesn’t deserve it. And he certainly doesn’t deserve what you’ve done to him.’

  ‘He’ll never understand what I’ve done or tried to do,’ Andy said, ‘and for that matter I don’t suppose any of you will but I don’t give a damn about that. All I’m interested in is making sure that when he is taken for a ride he gets paid for it. That’s been the general object of the exercise as far as I’m concerned. Do you think Shawcrosse would have paid twelve thousand for that tip of Bellchamber’s if I hadn’t twisted his arm?’

  ‘But can’t you see that he isn’t the least bit interested in money? If he had been do you suppose he would have ploughed a fortune into the Valley and then given what was left to people like you? This Company, this Deed-of-Gift nonsense the lawyers talked him into, do you really believe he did it to save tax and dodge death-duties? It wasn’t that way at all. It was a gesture—his kind of gesture, to people like Stevie who lost his life, and people like you who were bruised and knocked about. He didn’t have to do it. He could have sat back and let the whole lot of you get on with it and be damned to the spe
culators, and the Exchequer and everyone else who is frying to turn his dream into a nightmare. Oh, I daresay that sounds fanciful to you but he does have a dream, he’s always had it, and it isn’t a selfish dream either. He fought for it and worked for it and if the times have overtaken him it isn’t your place to lead the stampede.’

  ‘I never did lead it,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact, most of the time, I’ve been trying to head it off.’

  ‘By ranging yourself with people like this man Shawcrosse, whoever he is.’

  ‘Shawcrosse isn’t anyone in particular,’ he said stubbornly. ‘Shawcrosse is just a symbol. There are hundreds of Shawcrosses, thousands of Shawcrosses, and most of them have eased themselves into places where they can call the tune! The departmental offices concerned with the future of places like the Valley are stuffed with Shawcrosses and there’s a baker’s dozen of them—half of them builders—on every sizeable town council. They’ve got dreams that he doesn’t even know about and wouldn’t understand even if he did know. But in ten years’ time he’ll find that out, and then it’ll be too late, because the only power the Shawcrosses respect is the power of money. By then, unless he capitalises and reinvests the way I’ve been urging him to do, he won’t have any money and not much land either. He’ll have been bled white by tax and sewn up with legislative tape. They’ll serve him with forms and requisitions and anything else they’ve got in their bloody pigeonholes. And even if he doesn’t change the rest of the Valley will the moment they spot a chance of making big capital gains. You’ll see a stampede then all right and who will be heading it? The Pittses, the Honeymans, the Eveleighs and the Bellchambers. The whole damned lot of them, one after the other, and they won’t wait around to say goodbye either, because their kind of loyalty was spent long before I came on the scene. It didn’t survive the First War and if you don’t believe me ask any one of them how much they made out of the black market when I was in the Desert.’