‘I’m not apologising for that,’ Claire said, ‘for maybe Arabella Codsall had a point of view after all! You have always given everyone here far too much rope and let them impose upon you. Now it’s time I stepped in and cracked the whip a little for if I don’t I wouldn’t like to think what might happen when our own children grow old enough to get themselves into this kind of situation, providing they are stupid enough that is! And that isn’t all, either! The tenants are taking shameless advantage of you in all kinds of ways. They come down on us for everything nowadays and some of them are coining money out of that camp! As to this Ikey nonsense, I’ll settle that in two minutes, if you’ll back me up!’
‘I certainly won’t back you up to the extent of turning the Potters adrift!’ he retorted. ‘You can talk to Ikey if you like but you might as well understand he’s genuinely attached to the girl!’
She looked at him steadily, no longer pale and tight-lipped but with a bright pink flush on her smooth, oval face. ‘You actually believe that rubbish? Attached to a girl who won him in a ditch, a technique she probably learned from her sisters in the Dell?’
It occurred to him then that there had been a time, long years ago, when she herself had come very close to winning a man in a ditch but he knew that to remind her of the encounter beside the mere would only make a bad matter worse, so he shrugged and said:
‘You argue with Ikey. I’ve had my say and as far as I’m concerned Hazel stays in Mill Cottage, married or single! I’m damned if I’ll put her out to flatter your snobbery!’ and he stalked off, leaving her trembling with rage.
He never discovered whether or not she made a direct appeal to Ikey for no one from the Big House attended the ceremony in the parish church three days later. It was held at 8 a.m. and Ikey was gone from the Valley by afternoon. Paul heard that a number of the curious had gathered at the church, among them Henry Pitts’ big, rawboned wife and the kindhearted Mary Willoughby, who had once tried so hard to teach the bride the alphabet. Others watched the couple leave by the lych gate and drive off somewhere in Ikey’s hired motor and one of them, Rachel Eveleigh, herself due to marry in the same church that following day, told Mrs Handcock that she had never realised how beautiful Hazel Potter was and how serene she had looked as she sat smiling down at them while the bridegroom cranked the car. Ikey came in to say good-bye to Paul before driving off across the moor to catch his train but neither made a direct reference to the wedding. Ikey said, shaking hands, ‘I don’t suppose I’ll be back for at least six months, Gov’nor; if at all, that is,’ and Paul growled, ‘I wish to God the women of this Valley would be less bloody-minded and the men a bit more optimistic!’ but he wrung the boy’s hand and wished him luck.
Outside, as Ikey humped his kit into the little motor, he added, ‘I’ll keep an eye on her, Ikey!’ and Ikey replied, ‘I didn’t have to ask, Gov!’ That was all and Paul watched him swing round the bend of the drive to reappear again for a moment between the leafless chestnuts as he shot the gate. He thought, ‘What the devil does it matter anyway seeing that he’s heading for all that slush and slaughter. Somebody ought to remind Claire that she was young herself once, and a neighbour of the Potters but I’m damned if it’s going to be me! In her present mood she’d probably sulk for an extra month!’ and he went into the library and poured himself a stiff whisky.
He was standing there, his back to the fire, when Maureen came in from the terrace. She seemed very breathless, as though she had climbed the drive too quickly and she had a worried expression that looked odd on her broad, humorous face.
‘Could you go down to John?’ she said, quickly, ‘he’ll need you for an hour or so. It’s Roddy, his boy. He had a telegram about an hour ago,’ and as Paul exclaimed she said, ‘Oh, you don’t need to worry to that extent, Paul, he’s taken it on the chin, but Roddy was all he had left of his youth and a wife who died young. I think you could give him more than me. I was a latecomer in his life.’
‘Tell Claire,’ Paul said, savagely, ‘but don’t have her come fussing! She’s been damned difficult over this Ikey business,’ and slipping a bottle of his best Scotch in his pocket he hurried across the paddock to the lodge.
John was sitting in his old leather armchair beside an untended fire, the last light of the short winter’s day excluded by the closely latticed panes of the little window. He did not look grief-stricken, only small and a little shrivelled, an unlit pipe in one hand and the buff telegram form in the other.
He said, as Paul came in, ‘It was that affair off the Falklands. Our squadron was outgunned, just as I said they would be. There’ll be more naval shocks before it’s all over, mark my words. You can’t win a war by singing “Rule Britannia”, Paul!’ and he handed over the telegram containing the flat, impersonal expression of royal regret on the snuffing out of a life in its prime. Paul was to see and handle many of these telegrams in the next two years but because this was the first he read it carefully twice before laying it down.
‘I do wish you hadn’t taken Roddy’s bit of nonsense with Grace so much to heart, John,’ he said. ‘There was never anything in it, and I knew that, even at the time. We ought to have laughed him out of it and encouraged him to spend another leave here. Was he married?’
‘No, and I’ve got my own theory on that. It doesn’t matter a damn now, so I suppose I can tell you. The truth is he never really got Grace out of his mind. Does that surprise you?’
‘Yes, it does,’ Paul said, ‘for Grace never regarded him as anything more than an engaging boy. Did they meet after he left here that time?’
‘Oh yes,’ John said, ‘after the divorce they met often but you’re right, she never took him seriously. They used to dine and visit a theatre whenever he was in town or whenever he could catch her between spells in Holloway. Would you mind if I let her know about this?’
‘Not in the least,’ Paul said, ‘why should I?’ and he took glasses from the cupboard and half-filled them with his special brand of ‘Loch Leven’. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘I need one badly myself,’ and with the object of giving John something else to think about he told him of his quarrel with Claire over Ikey’s marriage.
‘She’s wrong and the boy’s right,’ John said, when he had finished, ‘for here’s another who never thought of Hazel Potter as dotty. Fey but not dotty. Anyway, who are any of us to talk about half-wittedness, when we’ve all got ourselves into this kind of mess? As for Claire, wanting to take it out on the Potter clan, I suppose I can understand that in a way.’
‘I’m damned if I can,’ said Paul, ‘it came as a shock to me that she even suggested it.’
‘It’s odd,’ John mused, sipping slowly, ‘the Valley always clung to its class distinction, even in the Lovell days. There were the Derwents and the Codsalls on either border, the workaday Pitts and Willoughbys in the middle and finally the Potters. Claire was brought up to regard the Potters as scum and I suppose they are in a way, all except Meg, who comes closer to ancient royalty than any of us. Marrying into the Big House was a triumph for High Coombe and I don’t think old Edward Derwent has ever stopped congratulating himself. The prospect of his grandsons inheriting High Coombe and every other farm in the Valley is a very unlooked for bonus and I daresay he’ll side with his daughter on this issue. Still, I ought to have a fellow feeling for him today I suppose,’ and when Paul asked why John said Roddy’s death had stirred in him memories of the boy’s mother that he thought he had forgotten and that Derwent too had lost a wife when she was about Myra’s age. ‘They were a bit alike,’ he added, ‘both pretty, dashing and maybe a little showy like poor old Roddy. It’s funny, but that kind usually burn themselves out before their time. It’s the plodders like you and me who die a little every day.’
Paul said, suddenly, ‘How do you see this war, John? As a crusade, the way most people seem to? Or more as I see it, an appalling, stupid waste, without a shred of glory about it? It hasn’t anything in common with
the wars you and I fought in, you against those poor devils of savages, me against a few thousand Boers. They were incidents but this is genocide or will be if fought to a finish. Dammit, the way things are going, we shan’t have an able-bodied man left in the Valley by this time next year!’
John Rudd lit his pipe and puffed it stolidly and Paul thought he looked much as he had that summer evening he first sat there after their ride from Sorrel Halt. He took his time answering, it was not often that anyone extracted a snap judgement from John Rudd.
He said at length, ‘I happened to have professional tips from Roddy and some of his shipmates on which I based my opinion of the Navy’s unpreparedness. That doesn’t make me a wise-acre.’
‘But you were the only one who was sure they wouldn’t capture Paris,’ Paul reminded him and John said: ‘I’ll be sixty next year; apart from the Zulu campaign I’ve lived all those sixty years in Britain. A man ought to learn something about his own people in more than half a century. He’d be a damned dull dog if he didn’t!’
‘What did you learn that makes you so cocksure, John? For you are cocksure, aren’t you?’
‘About the outcome? Yes, I am. We’ll win all right though I don’t know that it will do us much good in the end. I suppose I’ve seemed to you to take the war in my stride because I’ve been anticipating it so long and there isn’t much point in arguing the rights and wrongs of an inevitability. The line-up started round about the time you settled here and if it hadn’t been poor little Belgium this year, it would have been poor old Turkey next year, or hands off India the year after that! Now it’s here the only thing left is to hold on and the British do that much better than most of them!’
‘It looks to me as if it’s all that’s left to us,’ Paul said, ‘so what makes you confident about us getting anything better than a stalemate or a compromise peace?’
‘Ah no,’ John said quickly, ‘you can rule that out! A nation that achieves all this one has in a century has to have special qualities and I don’t say that in the spirit of somebody paid to write for the popular press, it’s just a feeling, down here,’ and he tapped his paunch with his pipe-stem.
‘Then all I can say is I wish to God I had it,’ Paul said emphatically. ‘It seems to me we rushed into the business without a thought as to what was at stake and these people here, the Walt Pascoes and the Smut Potters, are amateurs. We all know what happens when an amateur takes on a professional!’
‘They’ll stay amateurs for a bit,’ John said, ‘but that’s what I’m driving at. When they get desperate enough they’ll knock hell out of everybody. Go up to that camp and watch those cotton-spinners at bayonet practice.’
‘Not me,’ Paul told him, ‘I’ve no stomach for the business and I still think we were damned stupid to get drawn into it.’
‘Well,’ John said, ‘I can understand that, knowing you. For too long now you’ve been giving your attention to what happens in your own backyard but when you realise that backyard is at stake you’ll outdo the rest of them! That’ll be when your Puritan streak shows. Puritans only show fight when they’ve convinced themselves their way of life is threatened. After that there isn’t many who can stand up to them for long.’ He got up and knocked out his pipe. ‘Will you tell Maureen not to wait supper? I think I’ll take a turn along the river road.’
‘Do you want company?’
‘No,’ John said, smiling, ‘but if I did I should prefers yours to anyone’s. Thanks for coming down and thanks for getting my brain working on an abstract issue. I don’t know whether it was intentional but it worked!’ and he took his hat and stick and went out abruptly leaving Paul to contemplate two framed portraits on the mantelshelf, one of Roddy in his rakishly tilted naval cap, the other of the fat surprise packet Maureen had produced not so long ago, now asleep in the little room over the porch where Paul had spent his first night in the Valley. He thought, as he lit the lamp, ‘I wish those bloody fools who had poor old John Rudd drummed out of the Army on account of that Prince Imperial incident could have shared the half-hour I’ve just spent with him! Could I show that much dignity if I’d just had a telegram telling me Simon or one of the twins had been blown to bits in somebody else’s quarrel thousands of miles away?’ He sat finishing his whisky, having heard the girl whom Maureen employed as a maid clank off into the dusk on her bicycle. Presently Maureen came back and he gave her the message. ‘Well, that’s John’s way,’ she said, ‘he always is greedy with his troubles. Can’t bear to share ’em with any of us, but maybe you’ve noticed?’
‘Yes,’ Paul told her, ‘it was something I learned about him very early on. Did you see Claire?’
‘Yes and made a point of not telling her about Roddy, tho’ I rather wish I had. She almost bit my head off and the twins came in for a slap apiece. Is she that much upset about Ikey marrying the Potter girl?’
‘About as upset as I’ve seen her.’
Maureen said, as though to herself, ‘I find that very odd!’ and then, turning to face him, ‘Top up your drink, Paul, for you’re going to need it!’ and when he protested that he had already had too much whisky she took the decanter and half-filled his glass. ‘I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone, not even John, and you can please yourself whether you make use of it or not! If it wasn’t for Ikey, Claire Craddock would almost certainly still be Claire Derwent. At all events, she wouldn’t be mistress of Shallowford tucking your children into bed!’
Paul said, ‘What the devil did Ikey have to do with me marrying Claire?’ and Maureen, trying but not altogether succeeding to keep the chuckle out of her voice, replied, ‘It was a letter written by him saying you were calling for her, that got her down here that time you were laid up after the wreck. And that’s not all either, not by a long chalk! He wrote to Claire at the instance of Grace. The letter was written in her rooms that time he ran off to London.’
Said like that, bluntly and factually, it did not make an immediate impact on him. After a pause, while she waited for it to sink in, he said, ‘How do you know that? How long Have you known it?’
‘I’ve known it ever since I came here.’
‘He told you? Ikey told you?’
‘He did that, down by Codsall bridge a week or two after it happened.’
‘You believed him?’
‘Of course I believed him. Would a boy of his age manufacture a story like that? Besides, Ikey was never a liar.’
The implications of her story began to register. He said, wonderingly, ‘But he was only a kid! Claire came home on chance and finding me laid up volunteered as a nurse. If I remember rightly you engaged her.’
‘Claire never mentioned that letter to you? The one telling her you had been calling for her when you were running a high temperature?’
‘Never! I didn’t know there was a letter!’
‘Well boyo, there was! You can depend upon it and there isn’t much doubt that the girl took it at face value, believing what she wanted to believe. Knowing that, I’m sorry I blabbed. She probably had good reasons for forgetting. Still, I’ve told you now so it’s up to you if you jog her memory or not. The fact is she owes Ikey Palfrey her happiness, but come to think of it, so do you, for this silly business will blow over soon enough and taken all round you and Claire are as well-matched a pair as I’ve ever doctored!’
He said nothing for a moment so that presently she picked up his glass and pushed it into his hand. ‘Get it down, lad,’ she said, ‘it’s not Irish whiskey but it’ll serve!’ and after he had swallowed the measure and still remained silent, she cocked her head on one side and said, humouring him, ‘There now, it’s not worth brooding on. What began as a hoax turned out well enough for all of us, didn’t it?’
‘In the light of what you’ve told me,’ he said, slowly, ‘her present attitude to Ikey is impossibly arrogant! Ought she to be reminded of what she owes him?’ and it was Maureen’s
turn to consider.
‘No,’ she said at length, ‘I don’t suppose it would help in the least, it would probably harden her against him. How many of us enjoy coming face to face with a generous creditor after a lapse of ten years?’
For the first time since he had heard of Ikey’s intention to marry Hazel Potter Paul was able to smile. ‘You were in attendance as doctor at the time so will you tell me one thing more? Did I cry out for Claire?’
‘If you did I didn’t hear you,’ she said, ‘but you have to give that boy full marks for originality!’
He went out and up the drive feeling a good deal less despondent than when he had descended it. He found that his memories, jogged by Maureen’s story, were sharp enough when he summoned them. He could recall waking up after they had set his bones on the kitchen table and seeing Claire over by the window, looking as if she had always been there and would always remain there, and he could also recall his sense of relief at her presence, as though the excitement and terrors of the wreck had, in half-battering the life out of him, filled a vacuum left by Grace and given a new twist to his life. He thought, a little smugly, ‘Let her sulk! Let her indulge her damned Derwent pride, for that’s all it is now I can get a close look at it! I could puncture it by telling her what I know but Maureen’s right—it would only drive a permanent wedge between her and the boy, for what woman likes to be reminded of the tricks she played to get what she wanted? And she must have wanted me pretty desperately and Shallowford too I daresay, although I don’t blame her for that. She’s been a good wife and mother and she cares for this place as much as I do, so what have I got to complain about?’
He took a long sniff at the damp evening air and went in to begin his penance. He might have dragged his step a little if he had suspected that it would see him through Christmas and well into the New Year.
Buy Post of Honour Now!
About the Author
Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By) Page 87
