Post of Honour (17 page)

It was after the signal failure of her most brazen attempt to stimulate him that she made up her mind to adventure one step further with Aubrey. In the early days of her marriage Paul had always taken pleasure in brushing her hair and when they retired about eleven o’clock one night she made sure there was a bright fire in the grate, undressed, put on a beribboned summer nightgown, loosened her hair and invited him to brush it. His response would have made her laugh at any other time. He took the brush, performed a dozen, absentminded strokes and said, vaguely, ‘Won’t you be cold in this? Shouldn’t you wear something thicker?’, so that she snatched the brush away and climbed sulkily into bed, thinking, ‘If Aubrey does call I’ll receive him whether Paul is here or not! At least he’ll pay me a few compliments instead of deluging me with estate problems and other people’s troubles!’

He did call and with regularity, seeming to have accurate information on Paul’s movements, for he never once appeared when she was not alone and able to be coaxed out of the orbit of the servants. They walked in the rose-garden and they sat in the little conservatory, talking gaily of this and that and sometimes skirmishing a little. By this time her feelings of guilt had almost disappeared and she flattered herself that she could handle him as surely as her sister Rose handled a young horse. There were half-a-dozen light kisses and one or two pats on the bottom, or make-believe accidental contacts between his hand and her breasts, but his progress was disappointingly slow until the afternoon when, in teeming rain, he came to tell her that he was expecting to join a draft in less than a week. They took tea in the conservatory where he kissed her rather more ardently than usual and she discovered, to her surprise and dismay, that his good looks, expertise and quietly aggressive masculinity roused her more than she wanted to be roused. It was only when his hand slipped from her shoulder, passing casually over her buttocks and then, swiftly and accurately, moved lightly between her thighs that she recollected herself and fended him off with genuine indignation. He said, sulkily, ‘You can’t blame me wanting all of you, Claire, not in the circumstances!’ a protest that fell short of his usual high standard in the give and take of mashing. She replied as she turned for the door, ‘It’s a good deal more than you’ll get, Aubrey, circumstances notwithstanding!’ which at least showed him that she was learning. He followed her abjectly, mumbling apologies and blaming her magnetism for his unforgivable lapse, and although she parted from him coldly she remembered all he had said when she sat musing before the library fire that evening, waiting for Paul to come home from an overlong session of the local agricultural war committee in Paxtonbury.

Paul telephoned about nine saying he would not be in until midnight so she went yawning to bed, still unable to make up her mind whether or not she should forgive Aubrey’s insolence sufficiently to say good-bye to him before he left for France. She decided, on drifting off to sleep, that she would; any man going out into that deserved the benefit of the doubt.

She was not much surprised when, soon after breakfast the next morning, a lance-corporal arrived with a message couched in impeccably polite terms. It told her that Lieutenant Lane-Phelps was due to leave camp within forty-eight hours and would appreciate an opportunity to thank her for her hospitality since he had been in the district. He added that he would telephone if she would tell the lance-corporal ‘when she was likely to be on hand’ and she did not miss this hint, telling the messenger Lieutenant Lane-Phelps might telephone mid-morning, a time when Paul was certain to be out. Sharp at eleven a.m. on the following day he ’phoned, first asking if she was alone. She said, hesitantly, that she was, astonished that the note of pleading in his voice brought colour to her cheeks.

‘I’m due out of camp late tonight,’ he told her, ‘but I’m free all this afternoon. Will you ride out and meet me at the battery on the Bluff?’

She hadn’t bargained for this; a sad, semi-platonic farewell in the security of her own drawing-room with delicately balanced cups of tea and Mrs Handcock within earshot was one thing. A meeting in the wooded country on the western slope of the Bluff involved risks she was reluctant to take but then she reminded herself that he was manageable and could hardly get out of hand if they were both on horseback—so she said she would do her best to meet him between three and four o’clock, providing he promised ‘not to be silly’.

She was beginning to suspect that she had no talent for the role of erring wife and blew hot and cold all the morning, changing her mind half-a-dozen times. When, at lunch, Paul said he intended taking the trap to Whinmouth that afternoon—‘to have another go at knocking sense into those damned timber pirates’—she had difficulty in not exclaiming with relief, for somehow his absence from the Valley converted an act of gross disloyalty into a kind of schoolgirl romp and she thought, as he gave her a casual kiss and marched off, ‘It isn’t as if I was the least bit in love with the boy! I’m damned sorry for him—sorry for anyone going to France but even that isn’t the real reason I’ll go and say good-bye! I’m really going because all the sparkle has gone out of my life since last summer and this is the only bit likely to come my way until it’s all over!’, and she went into the yard and saddled Snowdrop, telling Chivers that she was riding over to High Coombe to see her brother Hugh.

It was a dull, windless afternoon when she emerged on to open ground from the high-banked lane that ran down to the woods. There was rain about but it fell on the Valley as mist, filling the hollows and blurring the landscape on the far side of the river. She rode at a slow walk, as though, by dallying, she still had leisure to change her mind but when the belt of mist had crossed the stream to idle at the base of the Bluff she was conscious of mounting excitement and almost admitted to herself that it was the prospect of being grossly flattered by a good-looking young man that made her feel so reckless. When she reached the outskirts of the Dell Wood, that clothed the western shoulder of the Bluff, she had renewed qualms of being spotted by one or other of the Potter tribe whose farm lay less than two hundred yards beyond the first trees, so she made a wide circuit to within fifty yards of the river road intending to skirt the garden of Mill Cottage and use a track that ran across the steepest part of the Bluff before trailing off into a gorse-grown section of the cliff, overlooking the battery. From here, she thought, she could look down into the copse without being seen and perhaps, even then, change her mind and ride on to High Coombe, as advertised.

She had reached a point where the cottage came within twenty yards of the road when she pulled hard on the bridle, seeing a figure suddenly emerge from the river mist and turn in at the wicket gate of the cottage. He was on foot and because the stiff latch of the gate engaged his attention he did not look over his shoulder and see her reined in between the high banks. There was no mistaking the long stride and short-peaked cap. The man entering Mill Cottage was her husband, who should, by now, have been more than half-way to Whinmouth to confront his enemies the timber pirates.

Her first reaction was extreme astonishment at seeing him there and she only just checked herself calling out. Then, like the crackle of Chinese rip-raps, came other responses, all painful and most of them outrageous, for the sight of him turning casually into the gate of Mill Cottage, as though he visited there alone and on foot every day of the week, set off a chain reaction in Claire’s already over-stimulated imagination, exhuming factors that her memory had recorded subconsciously over the last three months. There was his recent habit of walking rather than riding about the estate; his extreme reluctance to mention Ikey, or the trollop Ikey had married; his obstinate championship of the girl at the time of the wedding and his evasiveness to engage in any kind of truce-talk after the initial flare-up between them on the subject. All this, she reasoned, as her brain skipped from signpost to signpost, might or might not have significance but there was something else that presented itself as a particularly glaring piece of circumstantial evidence. There never had been a time since their marriage when he had failed to enjoy her as his bedfellow, not, that is, until recent weeks. In other spheres she had, at one time or another, had self-doubts but never in this respect for here was the thread they used to spin the pattern of their marriage, a mutual and deeply-rooted satisfaction in access to one another of the kind that Grace, as he had once told her, had proclaimed the true basis of marriage but had, for so many other reasons, been unable to achieve with him. Time and again over the last eight years she had exulted in her power to engage him at the level of an accomplished mistress rather than that of a workaday wife and while she had no yardstick but him to assess the vigour of men it had always seemed to her that his was exceptional. What pleased her even more was his boyish frankness regarding her power to stimulate him. She could look back on a girlhood and early womanhood when the topic of sexual adjustment between man and wife was taboo, not even discussed between mother and daughter. To her his approach had seemed not only healthy but immensely flattering. He had never used her without complimenting her, often in such wildly extravagant terms that she blushed in the secrecy of his embrace and as a lover he contrived to combine enormous gusto with a gentle reverence of her body. Sometimes she had not hesitated to exploit this when eager to win him over to her point of view yet, even here, he had knowingly submitted to exploitation, so that they had achieved a harmony she believed to be rare between two people. She was so conscious of this, and of her power to rouse him at will, that she often smiled at her own smugness but she had never ceased to value his need of her, hugging it to herself as the most precious acquisition of her life. It was because of this that the mere suspicion that her ascendancy was threatened frightened her as never before. To see him walking through that cottage gate, across the little garden and in at the back door without even knocking made her almost sick with rage and the alarm bell that buzzed most persistently in her head was not that he was clearly a regular visitor here but that he was prepared to lie about his visits.

She sat the horse without moving for five minutes or more while Snowdrop munched over the long grass growing out of the bank. She went over the evidence piece by piece, balancing one fact against another without troubling herself to seek alternative explanations. There could not, she decided, be any other explanation, for everybody in the Valley knew what the Potter girls had for sale. Their availability to any man with a shilling or two in his pocket was a byword for miles around and had been, ever since she had been a girl growing up a mile or so above the Dell. It followed that this girl, the half-witted Hazel, who was by far the prettiest was also, on account of her lack of wits, the most accessible for she would be unlikely to blab of her conquests. It was all, Claire decided, very much of a piece—his moodiness, his deliberate attempts to turn the conversation whenever Ikey’s name was mentioned, his obstinate advocacy of the idiotic alliance, and, above all, his currently tepid approach to her own person, for surely only a man who spent himself frequently with a strumpet could fail to respond to her invitations during the last week or so when she had, as she now realised, been seeking reassurance from him.

It was the thought of Lane-Phelps, waiting for her at this very moment in the copse under the Bluff, that changed her dismay to humiliation. The base inequality of the sexes stuck in her throat like a plum-stone, for here she was, feeling guilty and troubled about a mere kiss or two, while her husband was paying regular visits to a harlot whom he had married off to his own ward! The reflection braced her to gather up Snowdrop’s reins and half-wheel in the lane with the object of riding openly to her rendezvous with Aubrey and avenging herself on the spot but she did not proceed with this intention. Deep down, under the welter of indignation that boiled in her, was a pinpoint of Derwent commonsense and it told her that there was a chance, just a chance, that she might be wrong, or half-wrong, or misled in some way, so that she knew she would have to make certain before committing herself finally and absolutely.

She judged that almost ten minutes must have passed since she saw him enter the back door and he was not, as she knew better than anyone, a man likely to make a ritual of the business. By this time, no doubt, they were already upstairs and in bed. The prospect of actually confronting them was dramatic, providing she could go through with it, which she doubted, but perhaps this would not be necessary. All she had to do was to creep into the house and listen and after that events could take their course. She swung herself out of the saddle, knotted the bridle round a young ash, and taking advantage of the overgrown bank moved down the lane to the gate which, most fortunately, he had left ajar.

The mist proved a valuable ally. It had been thickening minute by minute and now the hollow in which the cottage stood was half-filled with the seeping cloud drifting in from the south-west. Looking over her shoulder she could no longer see Snowdrop, so, moving with great caution, she approached the door and laid a hand on the latch. As she did this she glanced through the tiny rear window of the building, her eye attracted by the flicker of the fire within and here she stopped, hearing the murmur of Paul’s voice rising and falling in a continuous rumble, as though he was reciting. He sounded so unlike a man passing a casual half-hour with a harlot that she hesitated and then, hardly knowing what she did, edged back from the porch, flattening herself against the cob wall and inching forward until she could look directly into the big room, with its window facing the river and its hearth on her immediate right. What she saw made her gasp. All three of them were there, Paul, Hazel and the child, the latter on his mother’s lap with his fat legs dangling like great, pink sausages as Hazel listened attentively to Paul reading aloud from a letter. Claire watched in amazement. It was like looking in upon an animated scrapbook illustration, the tall, broad-shouldered man, still wearing his cap, his shoulder resting lightly on the mantelshelf and holding the letter in his hand, the young woman sitting in an old basket chair, an expression of rapt attention on her face, the child, disinterested but relaxed in the grip of his mother’s forearm, his legs clear of the floor. Claire could even hear a snatch or two of the letter . . . 
‘thought of you when I saw the wind catch the poplar leaves and throw
a
handful of silver into the air’ . . . ‘hoping to come on leave’ . . . ‘heard your brother Smut had been promoted to corporal!’
 . . . odd, inconsequential snippets that nonetheless made everything perfectly clear, so clear indeed that she could have smiled had she felt less ashamed at being here at all. She had been right about one thing, however. He obviously did come here regularly but for the purpose of reading Ikey’s letters that were obviously enclosed in his own and Claire suddenly remembered that Hazel Potter had never learned to read or write, despite all Mary Willoughby’s efforts to teach her the alphabet.