Post of Honour (29 page)

He and Paul sat late over the study fire and Grenfell told him something of the overall strategic position of the Allies and spoke of hidden factors that influenced decisions and could not be made public in the newspapers. The Dardanelles campaign, James said, had almost succeeded, and might have done had it not been bedevilled by inter-Service rivalry. Now, in his opinion there was no real chance of either side achieving a breakthrough in the West. James admitted to being an ‘Easterner’, believing that a final decision could only be reached on some other front but the High Command, of whom he had an even poorer opinion than Ikey, were now committed to a war of attrition in which the victory was based on the Allies’ superior manpower. ‘Almost as if they were playing with counters rather than people of flesh and blood!’ he declared bitterly. He deprecated Paul’s decision to join up, saying that he would contribute more doing his part in making good the terrible losses caused by the U-boat campaign. ‘Damn it man,’ he protested, when Paul told him he was due to leave in a few days, ‘hasn’t the Valley contributed its quota already! What sense is there in you rushing out in search of a medal and a lump of shrapnel to balance the Boer bullet that’s still travelling round inside you? I should have thought Claire would have had the sense to talk you out of it!’

Paul realised that it was useless to try and explain how he felt about staying home while men like Smut Pötter and Henry Pitts wallowed in the mud. By now Grenfell was incapable of regarding the war in a personal light but was compelled, by reason of his familiarity with the overall picture, to look at it as a complicated exercise in checks and counter-balances involving not merely men but entire races and imponderable economic factors. One other thing he said did impress Paul and made him increasingly anxious for the future and that was his contemptuous dismissal of the Russian ‘steamroller’ myth. He gave it as his opinion that Russia would be out of the war in a matter of months. ‘And can you wonder,’ he grumbled, ‘when the Tsarist system if rotten right through! Peasants are going into action unarmed while scoundrels in Petrograd are making fortunes, and all the time that ass of a Tsar and his neurotic wife behave as though they are playing chess instead of a game that will sweep them all under the carpet, along with all that’s left of human values!’ He went off to bed in a despondent mood and presumably found it difficult to rest for in the small hours Paul awoke to find Claire getting him a bismuth mixture. She told him she had heard James pacing his room, assailed by one of his stomach cramps and said, on climbing back into bed, ‘He’s going to pieces, Paul! I don’t think it’s indigestion but something more serious, probably ulcers. I’ve insisted the Maureen gives him a good going-over in the morning and if necessary you’ll have to persuade him to stay here and rest for a month or so.’

‘I’ll try but I don’t think I’ll succeed,’ Paul said and he was right, for when, in the morning, Maureen diagnosed irritation of the duodenal cap he shrugged, pocketed her prescription, and said that while men who had voted for him were having their heads blown off in France, and dying of dysentery in the Balkans, he could hardly take a month’s holiday on account of a bellyache. ‘And in the circumstances,’ he said to Paul, ‘who are you to argue with me? They’ll probably invalid you out halfway through your initial training, and I hope to God they do! At least there will be one person hereabouts to preserve a small corner of England that I like to regard as a counterweight to all their damned factory chimneys and red-brick jungles!’ Paul saw him as far as Sorrel Halt and as the train pulled out James leaned from the window and waved his billycock hat, revealing, for a brief instant, a flash of the jaunty campaigner who had once shocked the Valley by barnstorming his way into the heart of a Tory citadel. Paul was to remember his swift smile, and the wave of the billycock hat. It was a long time before he saw him again.

Two days later he stood on the same platform but this time it was he who was quitting the Valley and Claire, dressed in her fashionable best, who was putting a tolerable brave face on their first separation since she had come home in the spring of 1906. He said, jokingly, ‘Well, cheer up, I’m not off to France yet, just to camp over the county border!’ but there was finality in the occasion and they both sensed it, possibly because, further along the train, khaki-clad figures leaned from the windows watching them. Paul said, as they awaited the guard’s whistle, ‘Listen, Claire, get moving with that convalescent home the minute you get back, it’ll give you something to think about! As for me, I daresay I’ll put things in my letters aimed at taking some of the starch out of the matron’s linen!’ She smiled at that and said, ‘It’ll be odd getting a letter from you. You haven’t written me one for more than ten years. I daresay, when you get down to it, you’ll find it downright embarrassing!’

‘Not a chance,’ he said, ‘I could compose one between here and the junction and maybe I will!’ and with that the train started and her hand flew to her mouth, and looking back he saw her standing against the open skyline of the grey landscape. It was confirmation, he thought, of the belief that had been gaining strength in him through all the years of their marriage. She and the Valley were one and could never be separated in his consciousness. There was comfort and a certain reassurance in the knowledge.

Chapter Seven

I

T
he first of them began to arrive early in the New Year, men wounded in the later stages of the Somme offensive, some having already spent up to four months in hospital and were now on the road to recovery, although about a third were permanently maimed in one way or another. These were the most cheerful. They had survived and could never be sent out again, whereas the more able-bodied lived in permanent fear of being reboarded fit for active service and were inclined to retard their own recovery, sometimes with Maureen’s connivance.

At first there were only about a score of them but within weeks the Government sanctioned the erection of three Nissen wards in the small paddock on the right of the drive and thereafter the odd chronic case began to appear, including gas casualties, one or two who had lost limbs, and a few cases of shell-shock, men who sweated and trembled and dribbled and were sometimes sent off again to mental hospitals. By then a permanent Medical Officer had been allocated to Shallowford, together with three downgraded medical orderlies, themselves former casualties of 1914 fighting.

The weather that winter was cruel, with months of severe frost and several heavy falls of snow, so that, for the most part, the men remained indoors, some of them permanently in bed and it was this that compelled Claire to reorganise the staff almost as soon as it had been enrolled. She had not bargained for so many immobile casualties and the MO and his orderlies were fully occupied in the wards and could give no help in cooking, cleaning and organising recreational facilities. Doctor Maureen was equally busy, sometimes working an eighteen-hour day but she seemed to thrive on it and soon gained ascendancy over Captain Gleeson, the MO, who had served with the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry from Mons to the battle of Loos, and been invalided home with bronchitis in the autumn of 1915. Gleeson was a cheerful but irascible man who looked a little like a grizzled Father Christmas and could swear fluently in Hindustani. He was inclined, however, to take things easily, reckoning that at fifty-eight he had done his bit. He told Claire that only compassion kept him at his post he had been on reserve when recalled in 1914. His three orderlies worked extremely hard for they were anxious to remain on home service but when, in early March, the number of patients rose to eight-five the demands upon Claire, Mrs Handcock, Thirza and the scratch team of dailies she had enlisted in the village became intolerable and she began a local recruiting drive that was met with immediate success.

Her first triumph was the enrolment of Marian Eveleigh, whom she managed to coax from communion with the spirits when everyone else, including Marian’s exasperated husband, had given her up for lost.

The death of her eldest son and the fear of losing Harold, his brother, now commissioned and serving in the Near East, had brought Marian to the edge of a nervous breakdown and Eveleigh’s uncharacteristic involvement with the land-girl Jill had coincided with her change in life so that the wretched woman’s world had crumbled to pieces. She shut herself up for days on end in the boy’s old bedroom where she was alleged to have established contact with a Red Indian spirit, who acted as intermediary between mother and son. Her daughters and the hired hands at Four Winds took it for granted that she was going the way of old Marian Codsall but Claire had known Marian all her life and remembered that she came from good, yeoman stock and was therefore not prepared to accept this verdict. In her initial approach she worked on the lines that, by taking service at the hospital, Marian could do something practical on behalf of her surviving son. She won her victory on the afternoon she persuaded Marian to call at Shallowford and meet some of the patients. One of them had served in Harold’s battalion in France and from that day on the cloud that had been settling on Marian Eveleigh’s mind began to disperse and she agreed to go to work in the kitchen. Doctor Maureen described her as a classic example of the value of occupational therapy, declaring that Claire had a natural gift for healing. She then urged her to try her luck on Elinor Codsall who, since the night of Gloria Pitts’ assault, had stayed within the confines of Periwinkle and was said to be developing into a recluse. Elinor proved more stubborn. To Claire’s first appeal to hand over the outdoor work to Old Matt, one of the biblical shepherds (who was the Valley stopgap these days) she advanced a flat refusal.

‘They took my man Will an’ then spread bliddy lies about me so they can vinish their war without my help!’ she said. Claire was puzzled by her truculence, remembering her not so much as the wife of Will Codsall but as the shy daughter of old preacher Willoughby tending chickens at Deepdene and Elinor’s casual use of the favourite male adjective in the Valley was an indication of the changes that had engulfed the Valley in the last two years. She persisted, however, pointing out that the wounded men at Shallowford were ex-comrades of Will and therefore entitled to her concern and when Elinor protested that she had young children to care for in addition to thirteen-year-old Mark, Claire said that she might bring the toddlers to work with her each day and leave them in charge of Thirza, who had charge of the nursery for encumbered helpers. Elinor said she would think about it but when Claire artfully remarked that she looked years younger with her short hair, and reminded her of when they were girls on neighbouring farms, the widow’s surliness disappeared and she even shed a few reminiscent tears, brushing them away with the query, ‘What’s to become of us all, Mrs Craddock? That’s what I’d like to know, what with the Squire gone too at his time o’ life!’ and Claire hiding a smile, made a mental note to write and tell Paul that at least one of his tenants had ceased to think of him as ‘Young Squire’ and had already advanced him to his dotage.

Claire then enlisted the two Potter girls who grasped the opportunity to move within the orbit of eighty convalescent males, despite the fact that most of them were free with snapshots of wives and children. Time was pressing on the unmarried Potter sisters these days, for Cissie was thirty-three and Violet not much younger and although each could boast of a small spread of handsome, healthy children, neither could lay claim to a separation allowance or even a shared pension in respect of Jem, who had gone to his death unable to make up his mind which of them he would wed. As Violet put it to her sister, the night after Claire had offered them a pound a week each for a daily five-hour spell at the Big House, ‘Us’d better taake ’er up on it, Cis! Tiz reg’lar money and us dorn zeem to be gettin’ far with the boys zince they shifted that dratted camp the t’other side o’ the Valley!’ to which Cissie replied, thoughtfully, ‘Aye, and us baint gettin’ no younger neither, be us? They zay half the men downalong are short of a limb but they can’t all be married, can ’em? Maybe tiz time us thought o’ zettling down like Panse; after all, if theym took us’ll get the pension, providin’ us can get a pair of ’em to church, that is!’

And so they went and were soon in their element among the more cheerful and active of the patients and as more and more men arrived, and nearly half the women of the Valley were absorbed in shift work about the wards, kitchens and washhouse, they suggested to Claire that she signed on their sister Hazel, whose second child had been stillborn early in the New Year and whom they now described as ‘Uncommon low in spirit on that account’. It was a sharp reminder to Claire that she had not called on Hazel since she had lost her baby but before going along to Mill Cottage she consulted Maureen on the possible usefulness of Hazel on the staff. Maureen’s response surprised her. She said, shortly, ‘Leave her be, she’s not fit for any kind of work, although I daresay pottering about helping the sexton doesn’t overtax her.’

‘Do you mean she’s ill, that she hasn’t recovered from losing her baby?’ Claire asked but Maureen only sucked her lips, looked irritated and said grumpily, ‘Oh, she’s well enough physically, and if I was asked for a professional opinion I should say her wits were sharper than they had ever been but having Ikey home for a long spell and then losing him again had a bad effect on the poor little wretch.’

‘Well, since you’ve told me that much you might as well tell me the rest,’ Claire said. ‘I should have thought working here might cheer her up. She’ll be with other people all day.’

‘Not the kind of people we have here,’ Maureen said, ‘men lacking an arm or a leg and shell-shock cases! Hazel isn’t a child any more. She was never really half-witted you know, just retarded and always, I thought, in a rather privileged way. For one thing time meant nothing to her. The months separating That Boy’s visits were only days, perhaps even hours. She was never a prey to doubt, jealousy, or even fear of death in the way ordinary folk are bothered about these things. The fact is she’s now beginning to grow up and could prove as much a shell-shock case as some of the lads yonder! Leave her be, Claire, I’ll be responsible for her!’ and with that Maureen rushed off on her rounds leaving Claire regretting that she had not found time to call at Mill Cottage the day Meg brought news that Ikey’s daughter had been born dead shortly after his return to France. She resolved to go at the first opportunity but that night one batch of men left and another came in so that she was occupied every waking minute of the next two days. On the third day, as she was setting out, she met John Rudd trudging up the drive with news that put Hazel Palfrey out of mind. He reported, gloomily, that there had been a second rick fire during the night, this time at Deepdene, and that, following upon the first fire at High Coombe earlier in the week, it seemed probable that a pyromaniac was at large in the Valley.

II

J
ohn had had his suspicions after seeing the burned out ricks at High Coombe. He had a long experience of rick fires and this one, breaking out in the middle of the night after a week of drizzle, baffled him. Spontaneous combustion would have been preceded by smouldering and Hugh Derwent told him that he had passed the ricks only an hour before and would have certainly smelled smoke on such a windless evening. There were so many ways a stack could catch fire that John assumed that the outbreak was due to carelessness with cigarettes on the part of the soldiers taking shelter there earlier in the day. When news came of a second fire, however, this time at Deepdene, he realised that it must be deliberate and made a report to the police, circulating all the farms in the Valley to keep a sharp lookout and report the presence of any stranger in the lanes and tracks after dark. No information came in but within forty-eight hours there had been two more outbreaks, one on the extreme boundary of Four Winds and another on the eastern edge of Hermitage. John recruited a patrol from the officer at the Nun’s Bay camp and for a week or more no new outbreaks occurred. Then, in the first week of April, smoke was seen coming from a large stack of pit-props in the plantation beyond the badger slope north of the woods and this time evidence of kindling was discovered and there was a whiff of lamp oil about some of the half-burned billets. John was in the act of telephoning the police when Claire told him that Meg Potter was asking for him and had expressed a wish to say something of importance to ‘Squire’s agent and the Lady Doctor’.

‘What the devil does she want with Maureen?’ John demanded and then, a thought striking him, added, ‘I’ll get her in any case, she’s down at the lodge now.’

They assembled, all four of them in the library, the old gypsy standing with her back to the door, arms folded, face impassive, like a queen receiving an embassy. She said, without preamble, ‘I can tell ’ee where to look for the rick-burner!’ and when they exclaimed, went on, ‘I dorn say I
will
but I could! Providing us keep it clear o’ police an’ foreigners!’

John said, sharply, ‘Look here, we can’t promise anything of that kind! The matter has already been reported to police and the military. The whole damned place is in uproar!’ Then, when her expression did not change, ‘Is it one of the patients here? A shell-shock case?’

‘No it baint!’ Meg replied stubbornly, planting her sandalled feet widely apart as though to resist a combined onrush. ‘It’s along o’ my girl, Hazel!’