The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  He obviously believed every word he said. He was not, she decided, excusing himself, or softening her up in the hope that some of his arguments would be passed on to Paul when she got home. She said, distractedly, ‘You don’t believe in anything, do you? Nothing. Nothing at all. When did you stop believing, Andy?’

  She never learned how he would have answered that question and she would have liked very much to have heard it from his lips. Just then a door banged somewhere outside and then, surprising them both, Margaret was there in her hat and coat and with a red suitcase in her hand. She said, addressing Claire, ‘Will you be long? Vanessa’s out there and I don’t want her dragged into it.’

  For the first time since he had come into the house he looked nonplussed. It was not her words or her suitcase that disconcerted him but her act of addressing Claire as though there was no-one else in the room. Claire saw him flush and the colour, restricted to the live side of his face, reminded her of a reflection in a warped mirror. Then the colour died away and he said, without moving, ‘Where the hell are you going? How do you come into this?’ and looked back in Claire’s direction as though she could supply the answer.

  ‘I don’t know what Claire’s been telling you,’ Margaret said, ‘but she probably didn’t explain that I came across that tracing and those letters when I was looking for some blotting paper. I took them to her at once. It seemed to me I owed her and your father that much.’

  ‘If you have prejudged the issue go where the hell you like,’ he shouted, ‘but don’t take Vanessa out of here on account of a damn silly family squabble.’ Margaret did not move as he took a step towards her, however, but said, in the same level tone, ‘I’ll take Vanessa where I like. You’re not her father and have no say in what happens to her, Andy. Stop shouting at me and get yourself a drink.’ Then she went out and Claire, after hesitating a moment, followed. He walked behind as far as the front door and then stopped and when she reached Margaret’s car and saw Vanessa perched on the back seat among other suitcases, Claire turned her head and saw him standing at the library window watching.

  She said, in a low voice, ‘Are you sure about this, Margaret? It’s not your quarrel you know,’ and Margaret said, easing herself into the driving seat, ‘I’m sure. I only needed something like this as a pushover,’ and let in the clutch.

  Vanessa said, equably, ‘Are we going to Nan’s?’ and when Claire confirmed that they were she said, ‘Good! Gramp will let me ride Spotty to Saturday’s meet. If I stay on he’ll probably let me poke about the coverts a bit, unless they find straight off.’

  ‘I’m sure he will,’ Claire said, ‘but don’t argue if he keeps you on the leading rein like last time you went hunting with him.’

  V

  It was more or less as he had prophesied, except that his time schedule was over-optimistic. The face of the Valley was changed not in ten years but in seven.

  Andy had spoken of an army of Shawcrosses and of their plans, of private men with private swathes to cut, and public men with reputations to make or to guard, one eye on the local editorials, the other on the ballot-box, and also of faceless men at the disposal of both groups for the price of a little deference.

  Andy had warned her that Paul would not even understand their motives if they were spelled out to him and here again he was right. These cohorts did not use Paul Craddock’s dictionary. They called things by strange names. A row of red-brick houses, with slated roofs and bearded gnomes surrounding small concrete rock-pools, replaced a row of thatched, cob cottages burned down as fire brigade exercises, and this was called ‘Modernisation’. A concrete swimming-bath, built within a hundred yards of the sea was called ‘An Amenity’. A road, flanked by hoardings advertising tyres and Coca-Cola was ‘Marine Access’, although only a potential suicide would use such a road without a girdle of chromium and pressed steel about him.

  The transformation was not dramatically achieved and always the eruptions were strictly localised. It was as though the miles separating Whinmouth and Coombe Bay ran across a corrupted body and no-one could be sure where a boil would gather or where the skin would pucker and change colour. The initial eruption was along the eastern edge of the Coombe where all the trees were felled and all the hazel-bushes and gorse ripped out and carted away, and in their place multi-coloured caravans were parked in neat rows, with here a corrugated-iron privy, there a squat, cast iron incinerator. Beyond them, mushrooming between Whitsun and September, stretched the tents and between tents and caravans they built a wainy elm bungalow, selling camping gear and presided over by Bellchamber himself.

  That was in the late spring of 1948. Other amenities followed in quick succession.

  A housing estate grew up on the western slopes of the Bluff and the gulls who lived in Tamer Potter’s Cove soon had access to three hundred dustbins. The swimming-pool, pride of the Rural District Council based as far away as Paxtonbury, dominated the quay, and there was another just like it at Whinmouth. Hard tennis-courts were carved out of the Undercliff and the number of shops in the steep High Street increased to thirty-eight, nine of them seasonal cafés, four of them gift shops, one a supermarket.

  There would have been no sense in developing on this scale whilst confining the twin approach to the village (by footpath over the Dunes, by track following the course of the Sorrel) to the access of other days. This would have been to create a ghost town under the Bluff. In 1950, again as Andy had predicted, a compulsory purchase order prefaced the arrival of the bulldozers and their sun-tanned operators, humming snatches of Oklahoma hit tunes, made short work of the undulating stretch of sandy soil and couch grass between the southern tip of the Moor and Crabpot Willie’s goyle, then on over more level ground to the first houses of Coombe Bay. This road was for coastal traffic, and approaches to the sea were channelled below it through three short tunnels giving on to the beach. The plantation of Douglas firs that had crowned the head of the goyle fell to the scream of mechanical saws in less than a week.

  On route to Coombe Bay, but a mile or so nearer Whinmouth, the triangle of freehold separating the Shallowford and Heronslea estates was acquired by Shawcrosse himself who began building a hotel there before the road was finished. He called it ‘Hotel Majestic’, and in his advance publicity he advertised a private beach but there was a storm over this in Whinmouth Council and he had to retract. That part of the beach was already leased to refreshment hut proprietors and Whinmouth ratepayers saw no reason why they should sacrifice a source of revenue to a stranger.

  But the coastal road was not enough. Coombe Bay needed direct access to the main road to Paxtonbury and after a great deal of discussion it was decided to re-surface and widen the road that was already there, the river road that slipped down from the Moor, rounded Hermitage plateau, and ran past Codsall Bridge to the ford that had given the estate its name. Paul fought this ‘amenity’ tooth and claw and there was a Public Enquiry but he lost the day. A local poll, organised by Shawcrosse, resulted in a landslide victory for the progressives, two thousand and seven votes to four hundred and eight. The road went through. By 1953 it was necessary to challenge two streams of traffic if you wanted to walk or ride from the Big House to the beach, unless, of course, you used one of the coastal road tunnels, where the summer traffic, rumbling overhead, sounded like a south-westerly beating on the shore.

  Andy had been right in yet another respect. Most of the locals soon came to terms with the changes and among the first to do so was Henry Pitts, whose land ran right down to the inland road. It was about here, back in 1904, that he had left his plough and run across two fields to gape at the first motorcar he had ever seen and had bolted for safety when Young Roddy Rudd, son of the agent, had restarted his engine. He did not bolt now, for although there was a great deal of noise there was not much movement, especially at the height of the season. Cars and coaches approached Coombe Bay in procession, progressing in short, stuttering jerks. There was ple
nty of time for Ellie, Henry’s busy little wife, to sell plums, cut blooms, apples and even strawberries from a stall erected at the end of Hermitage Lane, although her stepson, David, disapproved so wholeheartedly of her clientele that he sold out in Coronation Year and carried out his threat to emigrate. His father, who had financed him as a freeholder, did not try to stop him this time for he appreciated his motives.

  ‘Let un go if he’s a mind to,’ he told Ellie, ‘for there’s no bliddy future in raising corn nor cattle in all this fume an’ racket. Tiz like a bliddy motor-rally yer from July ’till September but us shoulden complain should us, midear? Not when us can cut out they middlemen and zell direct to the public.’

  There was a rumour that Henry would eventually sell a string of roadside plots for ribbon development but he never did. Either he had too much sympathy for Paul or he lacked a sponsor on the nearest Town and Country Planning Committee.

  By the time the tepid Coronation festivities were over the estate had become a tight-waisted island, bounded by the new coastal road in the south and the new four-lane Paxtonbury road in the north. To the east, the Coombe having been punched out, the two holdings of Deepdene and High Coombe ballooned in the direction of the county border. To the west, with Hermitage gone, the rough rectangle comprising Home Farm pastures and Four Winds still formed a buffer that protected the Big House itself and the wilderness of Shallowford Woods.

  As long as the two paddocks and woods were left to him Paul found he could tolerate the changes and, to an extent, he slowly adapted to them, for whenever he rode now he turned inland, pushing into the heavy timber or crossing Henry’s fields to the moor. There had been talk of building bungalows up here but it came to nothing and Paul claimed no credit for parrying this left hook of the Whinmouth U.D.C. It was parried by the War Office, far away in Whitehall, who had already fattened two generations of cannonfodder on these slopes and decided to hold the pasture in reserve until they were convinced that the next war would be fought without benefit of spit-and-polish techniques perfected in the heather.

  Between 1953 and 1954 there was a lull. The builders, it seemed, had run out of options, or the departments had used up their ideas. But towards the end of the latter year the assault was commenced again and this time Paul and his rump of diehards realised it would be a fight to the finish, for the threat came from the north, where Paxtonbury’s civil airport had been constructed out of the ruins of the old Polish airfield.

  It seemed that longer runways were necessary and the airport authorities acquired a clutch of meadows that took them right up to the main road, beyond which the northernmost clumps of Shallowford Woods began, a mile-long plantation of oak, beech, ash and sycamore. It was not the best timber on the estate—that lay lower down, beyond the Mere—but a speech by a Paxtonbury Councillor, claiming that the nearness of the trees constituted a danger to aircraft, made it clear where the next blow would fall. When Paul flatly refused to fell a single tree the fight was on.

  For once the garrison had allies and Paul could call in The Men of the Trees, and other rural preservation societies. Several public meetings were held and there was a sharp exchange of letters in all the local newspapers, but it was not until his youngest son John, currently studying for a science degree at Bristol University, made a close study of Green Belt legislation aimed at protecting roadside timber, that victory seemed possible and the airport people drew off to ponder new strategy.

  The respite was doubly welcome to Paul. Not only did it save his trees, at least temporarily, it also restored his faith in the solidarity of the family, so badly shaken by Andy at the time of his abrupt withdrawal from the Company. Piecemeal presentation of Andy’s case by Claire, Rumble Patrick and even Simon, had not done much to mellow Paul’s view of his son’s enlistment with the enemy. At first an almost Victorian situation developed so that it was considered bad taste on anyone’s part to mention Andy’s name. Later, when it was learned that Andy had disposed of all his interests in Shawcrosse Enterprises and gone to live in the States, it was possible to persuade Paul that his son’s equivocal attitude to local development did not quite qualify as perfidy and he learned to accept it as a by-product of his son’s long apprenticeship among rascals living on their wits. Subconsciously, therefore, he began to think of Andy as someone who had contracted a skin disease whilst taking wholly unnecessary risks in a sewer.

  Claire and the others were more generous, accepting the fact that Andy had, however mistakenly, sincerely believed that he was acting in the family’s best interests. By the late nineteen-forties there was already a desultory exchange of letters between them and the exile, but Margaret never returned to him and Paul could always rely on a sympathetic audience when he referred to his son as ‘that bloody Quisling’.

  This did not mean that Margaret shared Paul’s committal to the status quo in the Valley. Her severance was a voluntary withdrawal from the mock-marriage imposed on her by family pressures at the time of Stevie’s death. She had rejected Andy’s way of life as profitless and found a healing stillness at Mill Cottage, three-parts of a mile along the road between Shallowford lodge-gate and Coombe Bay. The traffic did not worry her. She was a sociable person and the occasional motorist seeking water for a boiling radiator, or respite for a car-sick child, helped to counteract the isolation of the cottage. She adapted to grass-widowhood more easily than she had anticipated. At forty, she discovered, it was possible to get along without a man, so long as she had Vanessa, Vanessa’s pony-tailed friends and easy access to Claire, to Mary, and to Simon’s wife, Evie. It was easier still when Simon obtained the headship of a new school in Coombe Bay and he and Evie left Whinmouth to live a mile or so down the river.

  After settling into the cottage she began to take an interest in gardening and soon the two little patches, one at the front, the other climbing the steep slope to the edge of the half-naked Coombe, became an obsession. She spent whole days out here growing a variety of plants and doing her own potting in a greenhouse Paul built for her alongside the old shed at the top of the half-acre. She never bothered to get a divorce and Andy never sought one, although he sent her money regularly, asking and receiving news and the latest snapshots of Vanessa. Paul, visiting her occasionally, thought it strange that an attractive woman of forty should be content to lead such a withdrawn life at this forlorn outpost of his crumbling empire and once asked her point-blank if she ever contemplated putting the past behind her and perhaps marrying again. Her answer touched and amused him. ‘I’ve been “married” twice,’ she said, ‘both times to your sons. I wouldn’t want to marry outside the family and the only male Craddock left is Young John!’ Then, half-seriously, ‘He’s growing more like the Stevie I remember every day. Did you realise that?’

  ‘No,’ he said, very decidedly, ‘I didn’t. John is one on his own and in some ways the sharpest of the litter. Like Stevie indeed! How the devil can you say that? Poor old Stevie had his points, but all the time I knew him there was never a pin to choose between him and Andy.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said, with the Welsh lilt that always intrigued him, ‘but you never met the real Stevie, did you now?’ and then refused to qualify the comment but directed his attention to her lupins, declaring them to be the most spectacular ever grown in the Valley.

  He went off across the sloping field in one of his half-rueful, contemplative moods, thinking not so much of the past, as he did more and more now that he had passed his seventieth birthday, but of the present in relation to his sons and daughters, alive and dead. Every one of them had been born in that stone and timber house set on the ridge under the woods but if what Margaret said was true each of them might have had a different mother and a different father. Stevie and little Claire were dead, and Andy was lost to him; of the others only John, the tailpiece, came close to establishing the relationship he had looked for in a son. The forging of this friendship between a man of seventy and a boy in his teens had been one of t
he few rewarding aspects of these last, hard-fought years.

  VI

  It had all happened rather haphazardly, beginning during a chance visit he paid to John during his last year at school. The boy was almost eighteen then and his record at High Wood was the most impressive of any of the Craddocks who had gone there. Paul gathered that he not only found the assimilation of knowledge easy but had proved to be that very rare phenomenon at an English school—someone who could make an excellent showing at games but could also win scholarships.

  He was due to go up to University in October, and although Paul found it difficult to rejoice in the prospect of any young man reading for a scientific degree, he already knew enough about John to appreciate the many-sided aspect of his interests and enthusiasms and did not see him as someone likely to devote his life to evolving new methods of blowing the world to smithereens, or inventing a new killer epidemic in the national interest. For this was how he had come to look upon all scientists of late, a conspiracy of experts lacking moral responsibility and divorced from the humanities, idiots who not only helped to proliferate devilish weapons but, in their less dedicated moments, invented the mass-produced gadgets and plastic rubbish exhibited in the gift shops at Coombe Bay. He was willing to admit that he was extremely prejudiced in this respect but there was nothing he could do about it, even though, in private moments, he sometimes saw himself as a latterday Henry Pitts, who had fled from his first motor and inveighed against the introduction of tanks to the Western Front.

  He discovered, to his relief, that John intended to specialise in zoology but was already well advanced in physics, so that he was puzzled as to the precise direction in which the boy was heading and responded eagerly when John suggested they should take advantage of a cancelled rugger match and walk across the spur of Exmoor on which the school was set.

  He had always liked it about here, a wild, lonely spot where the constant changes in cloud formation suggested that the crust about the outcrops of granite was as molten as the day the plateau had heaved itself out of the sea. He said, after showing John the spot where he had told Simon of the death of his mother in France, in 1917, ‘I’ve always enjoyed a visit here. If I didn’t live in the Valley I’d buy myself a hill-farm on one of these slopes and watch the light fade over Lundy, instead of the English Channel.’