That same afternoon he threw his favourite Souter saddle across the fretful grey and rode across the sloping field to the woods, feeling his way cautiously, as though it was his first excursion here. He got as far as the rusting remnant of the German bomber on the downslope to the Mere but had his work cut out to hold his horse on a tight rein because the gelding had been brooding in loose-box and yard ever since Christmas. It wasn’t time yet, Paul decided, to have a thorough look around, so he trotted back along the lane to drink a cup of tea with Ellie Pitts at Hermitage, and discuss the last few weeks as two old soldiers might talk of a campaign that had just ended in triumph.
The right moment came about a month later, when the last of the mottled drifts had blown away and green shoots of new grass were revealed beneath them.
This time he made ready for a longer foray, filling his hunting flask with whisky and water and descending the drive between the two rows of candlesticks (for that was how he had always thought of the prim chestnuts in either paddock) turning left instead of his customary right, and making his first call on Jerry at the Dell.
Before he reached there, however, he had to ride along the path of the landslide and pass the naked foundations of Mill Cottage and was pleased that he could regard them without a pang. In bright sunshine, with the hedges full of dandelion, campion and stitchwort, he did not feel isolated from Claire. She was still somewhere close at hand, in the salty tang of the breeze blowing in from the Dunes, or in the green-gold fastness of the beech hedge to his left. The Sorrel was down to its normal width, despite the enormous amount of melted snow it must have carried down to to the sea in the last few weeks, and its current was singing again as a variety of river birds flitted among the iris stems of the ox-bows. Low down on one of the very few original elms about here a blackbird sang and high above him, centred on Codsall stubble fields, a lark entered into competition but soon withdrew from the contest.
That day he paid a visit to all the Coombe farms, complimenting Jerry on his progress here and telling him that it was a relief to be able to ride into the Dell without having to fortify oneself against a stream of piteous supplications, such as his grandfather Tamer would utter every time he saw Squire approaching. Jerry introduced him to his new resident couple, man and wife, who shared his quarters in the rebuilt farmhouse and Paul, reckoning the boy’s age as he invariably did on these occasions, thought it high time he got himself a wife like Young Eveleigh, over at Four Winds.
At Deepdene the Honeymans made him very welcome and Prudence, as saucy as ever he thought, thanked him with a kiss for his help during the Big Freeze. He stopped long enough to tell her the joke he had made about her father’s probable reaction to the arrival of helicopters over the Valley; then he went on up the winding, perfumed track to High Coombe, remembering it was here, in this yard, that he had first glimpsed Claire when she came tripping out to offer him and old John Rudd, the agent, sherry and pikelets on his first tour of the estate. The memory of her, a laughing, blushing beauty of nineteen, was so vivid to him that he hardly heard what Dick Potter and his wife had to say but in any case it would have been difficult to hold a conversation from the saddle while all those Potter children were making such a racket behind the barns.
He came then to his favourite stretch, the drop down through the north-eastern corner of the woods, past the rhododendron forest under Hazel’s cave, past the empty cottage of old Sam and Joannie Potter, to the edge of the Mere, still and silent in the sunshine with the trees lining the far bank beginning to show green and the bracken on the islet a cluster of sere, brittle fronds shot through with the white undersides of new growth.
It was here, just opposite the islet and its ridiculous Folly, that his memories of both Claire and Grace were most poignant, so that he stopped for a moment shading his eyes against the strong sunlight and luxuriating in the past as a man might relax in a soda-bath after a day’s hunting. For all that he was still able to laugh at himself, murmuring, ‘I’m always remembering now … almost minute by minute,’ and then, ‘Why not? It’s about all a man can do at my time of life and in a way it’s a compliment to the pair of them, the brazen hussies,’ and he smiled a slow, vain smile at the memory of tumbling Grace about on that islet one hot summer day, and doing the same for Claire on the very spot where the grey was standing. His eye caught a pair of wrens flirting in the hazel bush a short way up the track and he thought, ‘And that’s about the size of it. Survival, like the time we’ve just come through, then renewal under the sun. By God, I’d give an arm and a leg to start all over again.’
He touched the grey with his heels and rode on over the shoulder of the woods to Hermitage Lane, and thence to Four Winds where Eveleigh’s smart, city wife made a great fuss of him, although her cheek-to-cheek kiss lacked the warmth of Prudence Honeyman’s lips. He noted, however, with a degree of interest that he had no business to express, that she was pregnant and thought, as he rode back across Codsall Bridge to make a final call on Rumble and Mary, that old Maureen had known a thing or two when she made that time-honoured crack about the fertility of the Sorrel Valley.
III
There were two family weddings that year, each bringing him the promise of great-grandchildren—‘a rare privilege’ as he told Margaret, on their way to see Whiz’s eldest married to an almost exact replica of her father Ian when he had stood beside Whiz in Coombe Bay church back in the ’thirties.
It was, he thought, a rather stuffy wedding, despite the money Ian and Whiz had lavished on it, but then this branch of the family had always been a little bit stuffy and he supposed it made for variety when one remembered the kind of antics The Pair and Simon had practised in days gone by.
The guests in and about the huge marquee were garnished with gold lace that Andy, cynically enjoying himself, called ‘scrambled eggs’, apparently a sardonic R.A.F. term for high-ranking personnel. The act of cutting the wedding cake with the bridegroom’s sword fascinated Paul. What, he asked himself, would an R.A.F. officer do with a damned great sword throughout his professional career? He felt obliged to comment on it.
‘Damn it,’ he said to Margaret, who was sitting next to him, ‘they didn’t even use ironmongery of that kind in the cavalry after that first brush with the Uhlans, in August, 1914,’ but Margaret, giggling, shushed him and told him to behave, and so he did until they got him into the car and set off for home. Then he made Andy swerve by reciting a bawdy wedding toast that had shocked Big House guests as long ago as 1907, when Doctor Maureen was marrying old John Rudd.
He was, they told each other, becoming a bit of a handful on social occasions, having reached an age and seen enough to claim the privilege of saying precisely what he liked, but somehow, the older he grew the more lovable and amusing he became, so that people like Simon and Mary and Andy and Rumble Patrick, who could recall his cross-carrying moods and his harassed ‘Elizabethan look,’ were often shocked into laughter by his candour.
‘You wouldn’t think a man could change in his mid-eighties without becoming senile,’ Simon told his wife, ‘but the old Gov has and somehow it suits him. I wish Claire had lived to see it. She always thought he took himself and his precious Valley too seriously. It would have given her no end of a kick to see him sitting in that marquee knocking back his champagne and treating that Air Vice-Marshal as if he was a tenant behind with his rent.’
An even happier occasion was the wedding that followed in the first week of June, the week of his eighty-fourth birthday. This was his second entry in the race for the first great-grandchild for Vanessa, who had been working as a freelance journalist in London, suddenly appeared with a minor celebrity in tow, a jolly, broadshouldered young man, who had not only published two historical biographies—‘popular history’ he called it to isolate it from academic work—but had also represented Britain at the Olympic Games as a long-distance runner.
He was called by the somewhat off-putting name of Hugo Pych
ley-Cook, but there was nothing stuffy about him, Paul decided, as soon as Vanessa left them alone and they got into a lively discussion on Lord Cardigan, the leader of the Charge of the Light Brigade. Paul found Mr Pychley-Cook very much to his taste, a great, jovial extrovert, who was clearly head-over-heels in love with Vanessa. And who wouldn’t be, he thought, when he saw her sail up the aisle on the arm of Andy.
Margaret began to sniff as the service began and Paul, who had never had the slightest patience with women’s tears at weddings, turned a frown on her but remembered just in time that she was probably thinking of poor old Stevie and patted her instead, and for a moment their eyes met and he felt he could have used a sniff or two himself.
They had the reception at the Big House, the scene of so many notable occasions and Paul played host in a way that made Mary smile so that she said, in an aside to Rumble Patrick, ‘He’s absolutely terrific on days like this. I remember how warm and gay he was when I was waiting for the car to take me to church, and how relieved he was too when he realised I wasn’t in the least jittery.’
Rumble, knowing how this comment would please the old man, passed it on when they were waiting for Vanessa to change, and Paul said, with the merest hint of a quaver, ‘By George, Rumble, I remember as though it was yesterday. She was the prettiest bride I ever saw, including today’s. Funny thing though, she had me puzzled, because she was the most retiring of the lot but when she went out of that door she might have been on her way to a hair appointment. Wouldn’t even accept a small brandy and didn’t need one either.’ And then, with that candour for which he was now famous, ‘Been a good marriage—you and Mary. Best of the lot in some ways. But why the hell am I telling you that?’
‘I’m damned if I know!’ said Rumble, chuckling, ‘it’s a bit late in the day to start selling Mary to me. I took an option on her when I was nine.’
They all crowded out into the forecourt to speed the young couple on their way and reserved for him the honour of being the last to embrace the bride before she sidled into the car. ‘Stick it, Gramp,’ she whispered in his ear, ‘and put all your money on me for the first male in the fourth line of succession!’
He remembered that and thought about it when he was having his nightcap in the library late that night. Claire had been very shrewd in assessing Vanessa when she was still a toddler, he thought. The girl had all the exuberance of The Pair when they had surged out of this room to seek their fortunes, but something extra that stirred him deeply. It was a leavening of Claire’s warmth and sensuality, plus any amount of ‘Derwent commonsense’. He raised his glass to her and to that jovial young giant of hers, and in acknowledging them he acknowledged the promise he saw (and so many failed to see) in their down-to earth generation.
‘I daresay they’ve as many faults as we and the parents had,’ he told himself, ‘but there’s at least one they lost on the way down the years and that’s humbug. No bloody humbug about that bunch and I must say I find that refreshing.’
Tired, but pleasantly so, he finished his whisky and went slowly up the shallow stairs to bed.
Chapter Eight
Terms of Capitulation
I
They could not interest him in the 1964 general election. His time for partisan politics, he said, was long past and thank God for it, for it ought to be obvious to any man of sense that the rhetoric of ‘that jaw-factory on the Thames’ had spent itself in issues like Women’s Suffrage, the General Strike, and the débâcle of Munich. There was no point in taking it seriously in this day and age, when members trotted in and out the division lobbies like strings of circus ponies. If ‘those Labour chaps’ thought they could make a better go of things they were welcome to try and at least the tiny majority would keep the professionals on their toes. The only politician he had ever respected was Jimmy Grenfell, Liberal M.P. for the Valley for so many years, but in the end even Jimmy had retired from Westminster disillusioned, telling him that, notwithstanding the fuss and blather up there, the country really ran itself and always had, ever since provincial communities had wrung charters from bankrupt Plantagenets.
What interested him much more, they noticed, was Churchill’s final illness and this surprised them, for they had taken for granted until then that he had never subscribed to the Churchill cult, not even in the war, but had continued to regard him as a firebrand of Lloyd George’s stamp, with the trick of focusing public attention upon himself at times of crisis and then retreating into a corner to growl at nonentities who trod on his corns.
They were, it seemed, quite wrong about this, for in the last few years he had succeeded in identifying Churchill as the embodiment of a number of essentially British characteristics, so that he lifted him high above the clamour and set him up as a tribal symbol, like the Union Jack, pre-First World War dreadnoughts, roast beef, Gilbert and Sullivan, and village cricket.
They were not quite sure how this had been achieved for, in his time, Paul had been a vehement champion of the Left, Right and Centre, depending upon his private reading of the national pulse. Simon could recall him sympathising with Churchill over being a scapegoat for the Gallipoli failure, then rejecting him during the ’twenties and early ’thirties, and later still applauding him for his pre-war truculence and his wresting of the Premiership from ‘that umbrella chump’ Chamberlain, but his enthusiasm did not survive the famous ‘Gestapo’ speech of the immediate post-war period. Simon supposed that, as time went on, Paul came to revere Winston as one of his few surviving contemporaries, for they had been born within five years of one another and this fact alone must have elevated him in the eyes of a man extremely reluctant to discard anything from the past that might prove useful in shoring up present and future.
However it was he listened eagerly to all the bulletins when Churchill lay dying and was moved by the spectacle of long queues waiting in the cold to pass through Westminster Hall at the Lying-in-State.
When the day of the funeral was announced he said to Simon, ‘God knows, I haven’t often felt the urge to go to London, haven’t been near the damn place in years, but I’d give a good deal to see that funeral. It’s the end of an era, my era, but there it is … I suppose I must watch it on T.V.’
‘You’ll see more of it there than standing in the cold,’ Evie told him but he said, a little querulously, ‘It’s not the same. It’s never the same. That’s the trouble nowadays, everything has to be “instant”. Instant soup, instant sex, instant politics. Watered down, the whole dam’ lot of ’em. Well, you can’t produce instant emotion in a man of my age. Actually being there and seeing that piece of pageantry would be an experience worth having, I can tell you.’
It was the day after that that Simon received a surprise call from the managing editor of a group of Westcountry newspapers to which he had contributed ever since his return to Civvy Street. The group had been allocated a seat in St Paul’s, one of a hundred issued to the world’s Press, and the journalist selected to represent the West had been involved in a car accident so that Simon, as a proven feature writer, was offered his place.
‘I’m not looking for straight reporting,’ the editor told Simon over the phone. ‘Everything that can be said about Churchill has been said in the last fortnight. What I want is a feature written by someone with a sense of history. I can fix it in a couple of hours if you’ll cover it for us. You can collect all the bumff from our Fleet Street rep. and he’ll arrange a car. We shall have people covering the route of course. All we want of you is two to three columns on the atmosphere at St Paul’s.’
Simon, secretly flattered, accepted and it was only when he was in the act of telling Paul the news over the phone that he remembered his father’s comment the night before. ‘Look here, Gov,’ he said impulsively, ‘how would you like to come up with me? I wouldn’t suggest it but I can run you to the City, pick you up again as soon as the service is over, and I’ll have a car to drive you back to the hotel. At lea
st you’ll get a grandstand view, I’ll make sure of that.’
Paul said, with an enthusiasm he took no pains to conceal, ‘You’re a trump, Simon. If I won’t be in the way I’d be delighted to come with you. We’ll stay at that hotel Zorndorff lived in for nearly fifty years. There’s a man there who had reason to be very grateful to Franz and I’ve kept in touch whenever I’ve had to stay in town. I’ll book for two nights and you pick me up when you’re ready.’
He went upstairs and rummaged in the drawer of his tallboy, looking for something he handled once a year, his clamp of medals, that his sons referred to as ‘gongs’. Having found them he contemplated them thoughtfully in the waning light.
There were seven of them, two South African decorations, his M.C. and Croix de Guerre, gained during the St Quentin and the Chemin des Dames fighting in 1918, his general service and victory medals and the Second World War medal awarded for Home Guard service. For the first time in all these years he took pride in them but whether to wear them or not, that was something he would have to think about. Carefully and slowly, the way he did everything nowadays, he packed a night case and filled his hunting flask with brandy and water.
II
Simon’s hired car dropped him off at the bottom of Fleet Street and Simon pointed out the offices where he would collect him after the service.
‘Go in and wait if you feel cold, Gov’nor,’ he said. ‘I daresay you can get a first-class view from the window and I’ve told the London rep. to expect you. It’s still only eight-forty-five and you’ve got at least three hours to kill. I’d feel happier if you stayed with the car but it has to go in the official park and if you go with it you won’t see a thing. Now you’re okay? You’re sure?’
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 50
