Post of Honour (44 page)

They made no great fuss of him at the house, having been warned against a demonstration in advance so that soon enough everyone had gone to bed or returned to their own pursuits and he and Claire were alone again in front of the study fire.

It seemed to him a smaller, cosier room than he remembered, with firelight reflecting on the coloured bindings of the books and the comforting smell of leather and odd, ineradicable dust that lay between the dark oak shelves. She sat with the hem of her skirt on her knees and her long, elegant legs stretched to the blaze. Seeing her like that, after so long a deprivation, he would have thought that she would have hurried him into beginning one of their study-fireside tumbles but for the moment he could only contemplate her, letting relief and gratitude warm him like the logs in the grate. She had lost a good deal of weight he would have said, was thinner about the face, and in her eyes was a maturity that was new to him. And yet, if anything, it heightened her allure and he said, involuntarily, ‘I’d almost forgotten how beautiful you were, Claire, how much of a woman!’ and when she smiled absently but made no reply, ‘I suppose it will take me time to get adjusted. So far it’s a little disturbing, no more than returning to a place one hasn’t visited since childhood but remembers as a source of joy and laughter.’

She said, ‘It won’t take you long, Paul! It won’t take you forty-eight hours if you can relax and let the Valley seep into your bones!’ She looked at him speculatively then, wondering whether she should take the initiative to search out the boisterous male in him that had so often responded to isolation here late at night but he was looking into the fire with a quizzical expression and she knew that she must be patient and walk carefully. His silence disconcerted her somewhat, for such silences were uncommon between them and one would have thought they had so much to discuss.

‘What did you think of the baby? You were up there a long time but when you came down you didn’t say?’

He recollected himself but she saw that he did so with an effort. ‘Jill? She’s quite beautiful!’ and then, with a welcome flicker of his old-time raillery, ‘She’ll have the edge on Claire Derwent at seventeen plus! She’s got perfect features.’

‘Do you like “Jill”? Do you want to change it for any other name?’

‘Since you ask me, yes. I’d like to call her Claire.’

She felt tremendously encouraged without knowing why. ‘For any special reason?’

‘She’s the most like you for one thing and for another . . . ’

‘Well?’

She knew precisely what he had in mind but she wanted very much to hear him say it. He looked across at her and grinned and her heart gave a leap. It was going to be all right. It was going to be the same, in spite of her intermittent misgivings ever since she had looked down on a stranger when they showed her into the ward at the hospital. He said, ‘You know damned well why. Do I really have to tell you?’

‘Yes, you do!’

‘All right. She’s far more of a love-child than any of them. She had to be when you look back on how you came by her. That’s a fact, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, that’s a fact,’ she said. ‘They say a woman always knows precisely when she comes by a child but I’m hanged if I could give you chapter and verse regarding the other two girls. Who could with a man like you about the place?’

‘Right then,’ he said, settling back and feeling the room and her presence grow on him like a skin, ‘it’s “Claire” from now on! What made you think of “Jill” anyway?’

‘I daresay because she came tumbling after,’ she said and he laughed. It was the first time she had heard him laugh for longer than she cared to remember.

They were finding their way again and the certainty of this excited her so much that she had to make an effort to sit still and appear to share his mood.

‘She’s going to be a handful, I can tell you that already. I daresay it’s because I worried so much all the time I was carrying her but you can’t expect everything. She’ll probably grow up into a thoroughly spoiled little brat, with everyone billing and cooing round her and all the young men within miles making silly excuses to call on us.’

‘Well, damned good luck to her,’ said Paul, emphatically. ‘After what we’ve had to put up with I’m all for the next generation grabbing all they can get!’ And then, suddenly, he thought of poor old Ikey and Hazel and of their child now asleep upstairs in the room he shared with the twins. He said, bitterly, ‘It’s a bloody shame Ikey couldn’t have made it! To cop it like that, three months before the end!’ and he scrambled up and looked down on her anxiously. ‘Look here, Claire, if I have occasional fits of depression don’t run away with the idea that you or the children are involved. I shall be remembering chaps like Ikey and Tom Williams and Will Codsall and all the other poor devils who went west!’

She looked at him doubtfully for a moment, as though debating with herself whether or not to pursue the subject. Finally she said, ‘Was it
worth
it, Paul? Was it really worth it, do you think? I mean, couldn’t it have been avoided with a little commonsense and more tolerance all round?’

He did not have to reflect long on an answer. He had already give the question a great deal of thought. ‘It will have been well worth it if everybody has grown up sufficiently to throw bombast and national prejudice on the ash heap! Anyway, for what it’s worth, that’s the general opinion among the troops and they ought to know! As to whether it could have been avoided that’s a different question. I suppose not, really. It could have been put off for a few years but no more, I think, not when you had gilded idiots like the Kaiser and the Tsar, and so many of our own windbags directing things! Sooner or later somebody would have pooped off the first shot so I suppose one has to regard it as inevitable in terms of the pre-war way of running things. It’ll be different now, though, if only because it has to be! Nobody would ever stand for it again in any case and that goes for Fritz as well as us, and certainly the poor devils of French, who bore the brunt of it, for all our share in winning.’

The fire rustled and a half-burned log slipped, ejecting a spark with a sharp crack that made him wince. She saw the instinctive movement and suddenly she was beside him, holding him tightly and covering his face with kisses.

‘Let’s put a ban on mentioning it,’ she said, ‘let’s rake the fire out and go to bed. You must be tired out and I ought to have sent you to bed hours ago!’ and she seized his hands but perhaps, in doing so, defeated her intentions for the movement brought them face to face on the hearthrug and he kissed her on the mouth, not hungrily but with a flourish that was at least a positive reassertion. ‘I’m not as tired as all that,’ he said and then it was she who laughed.

V

O
n June 1st, 1919, the day of his fortieth birthday, he went out into the yard and asked old Chivers if Snowdrop, twenty-one by his calculation, was still capable of an hour or two of walking exercise and Chivers asserted that he certainly was and was even good for a trot on level ground, so Paul watched the old man saddle the mild-eyed grey and then hoisted himself up and climbed the orchard path through a forest of bluebells to the gap near the stile that gave on to the high-banked lane connecting Hermitage with the western edge of the woods.

There seemed to him promise of a long, baking summer, with everything far forward after a warm and windless spring. He skirted the fringe of Hermitage Wood and picked up the narrow, circular bridle path that led to the little plateau that was his favourite vantage point. As he jogged along he looked up into a cloudless sky, enjoying the sun on his face and thinking that the weather was doing its best to make up for early autumns and long winters that had depressed the troops more than the shelling in France but then, he reflected, Flanders always had had a reputation for all-the-year-round drizzle and no matter where you dug out there you were bound to strike water a couple of feet below the surface. Then, as he had learned to do in the last six months, he was able to put France and the war out of his mind. Profit, he reminded himself, lay in the future and it was no use regretting an era when every child returning home from Mary Willoughby’s little school would automatically tug his cap, or drop a dutiful little curtsy whenever he or John Rudd rode by. Not all that had disappeared was bad and surely patronage of that kind was something country life could do without in the years ahead. There were, of course, uglier trends, like the steady infiltration of men of Sydney Codsall’s type into the coastal area east of Nun’s Bay, war profiteers who seemed determined to disfigure the entire countryside with gimcrack bungalows, most of them in cahoots with faceless allies on local and county councils. ‘Development’ they called it, pretending their object was that of providing homes for old people and ex-service men but having watched Sydney Codsall grow from a toothy child into a scheming young shyster Paul had no confidence in this theory. Sydney now owned almost a third of Coombe Bay, including the old inn, The Raven, which he had already ‘developed’ into a Tudor sham but Paul made up his mind that he would see murder done before Sydney’s tide pushed inland beyond the old brickyard, reflecting that he was nicely placed to hold it at bay for he was a war profiteer himself and a far more successful one than Sydney Codsall or any of his partners, not excluding Codsall’s father-in-law, reported to have made a fortune in sugar.

The comforting reflection slammed a door in his resentment so that he found he could indulge himself in the luxury of a chuckle. All the time he had been wrestling with estate problems, all the months he had spent in France and in hospital, money had been piling up in his bank, the harvest of other acres he owned within a penny tram-ride of Tower Bridge. Its total had staggered him when Franz had come down with his ledgers and balance sheets in the spring and for a week or more Paul had gone about with a Bunyan’s pack of guilt on his shoulders. It was not a very pleasant thought to realise one might have enriched oneself at the expense of the blood and bones of men like Ikey Palfrey and Big Jem of the Dell and his first impulse had been to get rid of it in a single dramatic gesture, as the politician Stanley Baldwin had done when he returned a third of his war profits to its source. Then he had a better idea and nothing Franz could say could make him drop it. He made over his holdings in the firm of Zorndorff and Craddock to the National Fund for War Disabled and afterwards transferred two-thirds of his accumulated capital, something like a hundred and twenty-thousand pounds, to a special Trust Fund earmarked exclusively for estate development. Not Sydney Codsall’s development but real development, the restocking and re-equipping of every farm in the Valley, the rebuilding of every cottage over fifty years old and the purchase of stocks of fertiliser and tractors for all who would use them and plough teams for diehards like Henry Pitts who would not. Not one penny of this money, Paul told Claire and a sceptical John Rudd, would ever be rechannelled to his personal account, or be included in legacies to his children or grandchildren. Capital and incidental interest would be used to rehearten and reclaim land and modernise each of the seven farms. In the meantime (and this was what sent Uncle Franz away tapping his forehead) the Craddocks, one and all, would live on rents frozen at pre-war level plus the yield of pre-war investments and whatever the Home Farm produced under the management of Honeyman’s nephew.

He had expected opposition from Claire, if only in defence of her children but she made no protest. She understood, far better than he realised, the compulsions under which he acted and being Edward Derwent’s daughter she had always accepted land as the only true wealth, notwithstanding all the fortunes made by speculators and Paxtonbury tradesmen in the last four years.

It was signed and settled now, less than six months after his discharge and today was the first morning in over a month that he had deserted the office. The doctors at Rhyl had not lied to him. His headaches were now spaced by weeks instead of days and the worst discomfort he suffered from wounds in two wars was the occasional nag of rheumatism in the small crater left by a Boer bullet at the turn of the century.

The magic of the morning began to work on him as his shoulder brushed the lower branches of the elms overlooking Hermitage and at last he reined in on the spur of turf at the extreme edge of the escarpment. It was all under his eyes, more than ten miles of it, with the silver sliver of the river curving south-east like a bent rapier aimed at the heart of the Bluff. To the left and behind stood the big timber of Shallowford Woods, trees he had nearly lost in 1916 but which had miraculously survived while every wood in north-eastern France had been shredded to bare poles. To the south he could just see a grey-blue strip of water where the Channel lapped the edge of the dunes; to the west was Four Winds, squatting snugly among green wheat and well-trimmed hedges, and beyond, three miles or more, the gentle slope to the Teazel watershed rising more steeply as it curved north to melt into the moor. This was the outlook, south-east, south and south-west but there was as much to savour within yards of where old Snowdrop stood like a pipe-clayed veteran, comfortably at ease. A towering elm marked the precise corner of the wood, its green buds clothing the hole as far as the lowest branches. Ferns had come creeping out of the wood to seed themselves on the extreme limit of the shade and among them was a riot of colour, jostling for space. Foxgloves stood there, some of them six feet high and already shaking out pink mittens a month earlier than usual; campion ran along the southern margin of the wood like a belt of crimson fire and lower down the bank grew clusters of dandelion, daisy, periwinkle, stitchwort, bugloss and buttercup. There was only a pretence of silence up here. If you listened and thought about listening, there was subdued uproar, an orchestra of buzzing and whizzing and whispering and a rich, heady scent, the overall smell of everything that grows in England in the months of May and June.

He sat there with slack reins until Snowdrop began to shuffle and arch his neck and then he went on slowly down the escarpment to the point where the footpath joined the approach lane of Hermitage Farms. Clouds of flies followed him, seeking Snowdrop’s eyes and the heat haze lay on the Valley like a blue, trembling veil. Prudence Pitts, Henry’s girl, saw him approach and shouted, ‘Me Dad be upalong wi’ the pigs, Mr Craddock!’ but he only smiled and lifted his hand. Of all the people in the Valley, save only Claire and possibly John Rudd and his wife, he preferred Henry’s company but today he wanted to make the circuit alone, without having to wrench his mind from contemplation of the Valley as a domain rather than a community.