Post of Honour (36 page)

When the job was finished, and the shanty looked snug and inviting, she locked the door and kept the key on her personal ring, against the time that she should have news of Paul’s homecoming, for the shanty was to be a place where they could enjoy a few hours’ blessed privacy away from the racket of wards and nursery and safe from those who might use his precious leave to importune for one thing or another. There was also, she admitted to herself, a selfish element in the scheme. She had long since made up her mind that she needed him far more desperately than did anyone else in the Valley and was prepared to maintain her claim at the expense of tenants, employees and even the children.

In early October he wired asking if she would care to meet the leave train at Charing Cross and spend a day or two in town doing the popular shows but she wrote at once declining the offer, saying that she would meet him at Sorrel Halt in the trap. She knew that he would prefer this and her plans were now well advanced.

On the morning of the day he was due to arrive she drove the trap over the dunes for a last-minute inspection and unloaded enough stores at the shanty to withstand a short siege. The cabin looked spic and span under its new coat of tar and creosote, crouching under the cluster of firs like a weatherbeaten toadstool. Inside it smelled fresh and clean and Claire spent an hour there, lighting a fire and banking it high with green wood, airing the bed with stone hot-water bottles, off-loading eggs, bacon, flour, and some bottles of wine laid down for Simon’s twenty-first birthday and adding a touch of colour with some bronze and yellow chrysanthemums.

She sat for a moment watching the fire burn up feeling more like a young bride than a woman approaching middle age with a growing family and over a hundred convalescent soldiers on her conscience, but the latter could not have troubled her much for, as she laid her best silk nightdress across the pillow, she thought, gaily, ‘I daresay he’ll remind me it’s autumn and hustle me back to the house in search of comfort after nine months at the Front but I’m damned if I don’t do my best to maroon him here for twenty-four hours!’ Then she locked the door and led the pony up the incline to the dunes, noting with satisfaction that the weather, although crisp, looked settled over Nun’s Bay, the source of all the gales at this time of year.

She was astonished to note how fit and young he looked when he swung his valise from the train and came striding down the platform towards her. For so long, it seemed, she had been shut up with sick, shambling men, short of a limb, jumpy and indecisive in their movements. She knew, of course, that he had been spared the worst of it and had at least slept under a roof since the spring offensive but she had not expected him to come to her looking braced, healthier and obviously more tranquil in mind than when he had been grappling with multiple problems during the first half of the war. She experienced a moment of embarrassment when he embraced her, recalling all those things she had poured into her letters during the last few months but the moment passed after they climbed into the trap and he took the reins with an air of having been met after one of his rare trips to London.

He told her a little of what had been happening over there, of the failure of the latest Ypres battle on account of the mud and how lucky he had been then to be in the relatively quiet sector far to the south and she began to feel slightly deflated, as though her role now was no more than that of dutiful audience to the returning warrior. Then, just as they were dipping down from the crest near the place where he had stopped to reassure himself after the suffragette scrimmage, he surprised her by pulling off the road, dropping the reins and kissing her with such zest that she exclaimed, laughing, ‘I expected something like that on the platform but all I got was a peck and a war bulletin!’

‘You can forget the damned war from now on,’ he said, seriously, ‘I only used it as a smokescreen while I got my bearings! If it was dark I’d let the pony nibble on that gorse for a spell and whisk you off into the heather before we got buried alive by well-meaning old busybodies like Mrs Handcock and the local Home Fronters! I was glad when you said you preferred not to meet me in London but we ought to have had the sense to find a place temporarily removed from everyone!’

He could hardly have given her a more welcome opening. She said, eagerly, ‘Listen, Paul, do you remember that tumbledown old shack in the gully near the rock-pool where you proposed? I had an idea a month or so ago and I talked Eph Morgan into restoring it and when it was done I fixed it up. We can go there now. I took food over this morning and lit a fire. We can stay there for a day or so if we like because I took Maureen into my confidence and she said she’ll think of something to spare our blushes! You don’t
have
to go, of course, we could ride over tomorrow but . . . well, it’s the only way I could think of to make sure the tenants don’t descend on us in a body!’

She broke off, embarrassed to discover that she was blushing furiously under his amused stare and said, lifting up the reins, ‘Well, there it is! Suit yourself! I don’t mind either way!’

‘By God I will!’ he said, snatching the reins and flicking them across the pony’s back. ‘How the devil do you get there from here? There’s no road, is there?’ and as she directed him to cross Codsall Bridge and cut across the stubble fields to the dunes, ‘And you don’t have to apologise, either! I half thought that you . . . all right, let it pass!’

‘What were you going to say?’

He looked at her with a grin. ‘Only that I had a rather depressing thought at the back of my head—that those letters you wrote were prompted by loneliness more than anything else and that when we came face to face you’d feel shamefaced about putting your name to them!’

‘And what makes you think I’m not?’

‘Like hell you are, you little liar!’ he said, chuckling, ‘you’ve been plotting for months and why not? By God, Claire, I don’t regret getting into the war when I might have stayed here but I don’t think I realised how vital you were to my peace of mind, or how desperately I would miss you! I used to think it had to do with your identification with this place and so it had, in the beginning, but not any longer! It’s you Claire Derwent and not the Valley! I could live anywhere if I had to, so long as I could be sure of waking up nights and finding you within reach!’, and he threw his arm round her as they bumped off the Four Winds track and headed across the stubble for the coast. She said, choosing her words carefully: ‘I’ve always pretended to be the Spirit-of-the-Valley, Paul, for I knew that was the kind of wife you wanted and played up to it! Even in the very beginning I admired your nerve taking on a job this size, and being a rather sensual little beast there never was a time when I didn’t enjoy you as a man. Deep, spiritual need, however—real love, that’s something one has to learn and I didn’t begin learning until we had that stupid quarrel over poor Hazel and its sequel. Since then, and since your being away put responsibility on me, I understand your purpose better than anyone—except maybe John Rudd. I know somehow you’ll come back for good, if only because you were meant to make this out-of-the-way corner live and flower. That’s why, although I’m desolate without you, I don’t worry myself sick like all the other women.’

He nodded, understanding and valuing every word she uttered. Then, as they reached the grove of dwarf oaks, he climbed down and led the pony along the ruts made by her hauls earlier in the year. When they reached the bottom it was dusk and the orange sun was playing a losing game with the silhouettes of the firs behind the cabin. He said, with the deepest satisfaction, ‘This was an inspiration, Claire, and we’ll keep this place for ourselves! We won’t even have the children here,’ and turned aside to unharness the pony and bed her down in the lean-to stable while she went inside to stir up the fire and prepare a meal. She had, he noticed, overlooked nothing. There was even a truss of hay and bucket of oats for the animal.

IV

O
f the eight days he remained in the Valley they spent four in seclusion and the rest up at the house. The ninth he devoted to Simon who had gone to High Wood the previous month.

For Claire the time they spent alone was the highwater mark of her marriage, a lamp that was to shine down the years to the end of her life, lighting up periods of doubt and frustration, a fixed point to which she could always look for reassurance when her hair ceased to crackle under the comb and she began to thicken and lose some of her suppleness. Their hunger for one another denied them the leisurely love-making of pre-war days but instead followed a kind of graph, with a dozen rapturously high peaks and any number of swift dips into laughter. But midway between these two extremes were long, placid intervals when she would bring him up-to-date on Valley affairs and gossip so that when it was time for him to go a clear, balanced picture of Valley trends and Valley economics was etched upon his memory. The picture was to console him in the calamitous period ahead but he remembered more vividly the gaiety of their conversations and the blessed silence of the gully, disturbed only by the whisper of the firs and the measured suck of the tide, advancing and retreating up and down the deserted beach. The children brought him joy too, each in their several ways. Simon’s adolescent earnestness, the twins’ boisterous enthusiasm for all things military, the independence of little Whiz and six-year-old Mary’s solemnity when she sat on his knee, begging him to make the other available to her protégé, Rumble Patrick, whom he noticed she mothered like a little spaniel bitch foster-rearing a fox-cub.

But for Claire there was no such overall domestic pattern as this; for her the interval was at once more intense and far more personal, a time when she had reason to bless her forethought in providing a retreat where she was under no obligation to share him and where no exchanges between them were too unlikely and extravagant for a man and woman denied one another for so long.

After the initial transport, when they let the meal she had prepared go cold upon the table, she made up her mind to prolong the ecstasy of reunion by the exercise of some restraint but her resolutions came to nothing. As soon as he touched her her yearning became a frenzy so that she would not wait for him to take the initiative, as in the past, but would translate her written promises into action demanding of him as much as he could give and exalting in his greed for her. Yet always, as in the earliest days of their marriage, there was a residual of humour, for when they were still again she would say, teasing him, ‘You don’t act like a man home from a place where they work you hard! I believe you must have landed the cushiest job in France with nothing better to do but loiter about storing up energy on a honeymoon diet of oysters and champagne!’ And he would respond with some rejoinder as, ‘It was generated by your shameless letters—refined cruelty to a much-married man away from home and living in the open on a diet of bully beef!’ Or, if she teased him about his techniques, saying he must have acquired them from the mademoiselles, he would heave her across his knee and spank her broad bottom for disobeying his orders to keep the war out of their conversation. As a honeymoon it was far more enriching than its predecessor ten years before and it was this she had in mind when she denigrated honeymoon couples as a whole, declaring that it was too much to expect young couples to adjust themselves so soon after the fuss of a tribal ceremony with the din of wedding bells in their ears. ‘Why can’t honeymoons be postponed for as long as this?’ she demanded, and he had laughed, saying, ‘Because, you idiot, they are designed for the prompt procreation of children! Suppose we’d waited ten years? We should have been a tetchy old couple of nearly sixty while the twins and Mary were still at school!’

‘Well,’ she said, with a conceit that made him chuckle, ‘if you haven’t procreated a-second clutch in the last forty-eight hours I must be past bearing! If the estate falls into disarray because I’m busy nursing all next summer you’ll have no one but yourself to blame, Squire!’

This was the way they talked and this was the rhythm of the days and nights they spent together, wild, ungovernable moments, spaced with intervals of laughter, speculation and reminiscence, but there were some inexpressibly tender moments too, as when they were undressing before the fire late one night after stealing back to the cabin like a pair of clandestine lovers.

She was in the act of slipping on her nightgown when he took it from her, bidding her to stand before the green and violet sputter of blazing apple logs, and when she did as he asked he sat absorbing the strength and symmetry of her body, as a painter might ponder the complexities of transferring physical perfection to canvas. She had already loosed her hair, and its lights danced the measure of the flames. She stood quite still, receiving and relishing his homage as he appraised every part of her, her long, slender feet and dimpled knees, the glowing health of her skin, the smooth sweep of her hips where they ended in a still-neat waist—every aspect of her that he had worshipped over the years. There was not a part of her, he thought, that was less than perfect in his eyes; the sturdy columns of her thighs balanced by wide buttocks and a long, straight back, her full, firm breasts, her strong neck and powerful shoulders offsetting the curious smallness and neatness of her head and, above all, those features of her that were so eager to demonstrate subjection to him, her generous pouting mouth, her lips, and eyes that seemed to him at this moment never to have held in their depths anything but promise. He said, soberly, ‘You’re not just Rubens’ model, Claire, you’re Velasquez’s and every other perfectionist who ever tried to express a feminine ideal! You’re quite beautiful and far nearer physical perfection than you were in your early twenties! I swear to you that isn’t flattery and it isn’t because I’ve been starved of you either! A man could go on looking at you for ever and find something new and exciting every second! How could any man in his senses help desiring you, even if he did no more than keep you to look at at moments like this?’