Post of Honour (54 page)

She had always rather liked Bob Halberton, who had the gaiety of the twins plus, she suspected, a good deal more intelligence and she thought of him as kind-hearted and masculine. She also liked him for not being sure of himself, or as good-looking as most of Whiz’s friends and the amateur sheikhs the twins brought home but she had never suspected that he was interested in her so that when he said, on the long drum roll, ‘Look here, Mary, it’s stuffy in here. Let’s go out for some air!’ she was flattered but reminded him of her responsibilities as chaperone. He said, laughing, ‘Oh, to the devil with that! They ought to be looking after you!’ and then, as though she was feinting, ‘Is there someone else? I always took you for the unsophisticated one!’

The gibe (for she accepted it as one) hurt a little and she replied, with a crackle of defiance, ‘I’ll get my wrap.’ and on the way to the cloakroom told Whiz that ‘she was going out with Bob Halberton for a cooler’. Whiz laughed and looked surprised. ‘
You
.
And Bob Halberton? My word, Mar, you’re coming on but watch out, they say he’s hot stuff!’

‘He won’t be “hot stuff” with me,’ Mary retorted, suddenly feeling annoyed with herself and everyone in the room, excluding Bob Halberton, to whom she felt she owed her escape from the company of wallflowers but as they made for his car, an Austin Seven painted to look like a racing car, she decided that he was not safe to drive and told him so and to her relief he said, ‘I daresay you’re right!’ and motioned her into the back, climbing in after her and losing no time in clasping her in a bearlike embrace.

She did not mind being kissed by him, accepting the sad fact that almost every man who kissed you at a dance, or a celebration of any sort, was certain to smell of liquor but she had never been kissed so enthusiastically as Bob kissed her and wondered if it had anything to do with being in need of solace. People usually were when they sought her out and his grumblings about office life were still fresh in her mind. She drew back at last and said, ‘Could I have a cigarette, Bob?’

He laughed rather unpleasantly at this, recognising it as a time-honoured manoeuvre in the art of self-defence but he gave her one, saying, ‘I didn’t know you smoked?’

‘Well, I’ve started!’ she said, so sharply that he laughed again, saying, ‘Don’t think I don’t understand! All your life you’ve been stuck with the job of Little Mother. Well, it’s time you started having fun, so why not let rip!’ and he kissed her again, this time letting his hand slip over her shoulder and rest on her breast. She remembered then what Whiz had said about him being ‘hot stuff’ but in her new role as a rebel she did not see how she could protest without seeming a prude, so she puffed stolidly at the cigarette as he stealthily extended his hold but realised, rather forlornly, that she was deriving no pleasure at all from his mauling and wondered how all her contemporaries could welcome this kind of thing as they apparently did whenever they were alone in the dark with boys. He said, as though to relax her, ‘You’re very sweet, Mary! I’ve always thought of you as the flower of the flock!’ but instead of pleasing her the comment touched her pride and she replied, ‘If you’re referring to my brothers and sisters I should like to know what’s wrong with them!’

He took up her challenge more ruthlessly than she expected. ‘Well, let’s face it, Mary; your brother Simon is a bolshie, the twins are a pair of nitwits, and although both your sisters are damned pretty they know it, even that kid Claire! I’m not a fool, it must be sheer hell living with younger sisters who do everything so well that everyone looks over your head at them!’

His appalling honesty made her shudder but because she recognised a strong element of truth in what he said she kept her temper in check, thinking, ‘At least he has the guts to say what everyone else thinks! That’s more than anyone will, even Mother!’ and she said miserably, ‘I suppose that implies I’m the flop of the family? Well, I am! I’m not at ease with people like young Claire and I can’t win prizes at every field event like Whiz. I’m not gay and dressy and gregarious like the twins, or even bolshie and clever like Simon! Would you mind telling me exactly why you asked me to come out here? Was it out of pity?’

It was his turn to recoil. He sat back, taking her by the shoulders and turning her face to him under the unflattering glow of the parking-ground lamp and for a moment seemed at a loss what to say. Then her instinctive sympathy for him gave him the wrong clue, as she said, hastily, ‘I’m sorry, Bob! That was a beastly thing to say! Let’s go back inside,’ and she reached to open the door.

‘Don’t be such a damned fool, Mary!’ he growled, throwing his arm around her. ‘Have fun yourself for once!’ and he began to kiss her with such determination that she was crushed against the hard leather cushions of the tiny car. Then he was almost on top of her, his hand slipping the shoulder strap of her dress over her arm in a clumsy attempt to fondle her small bosom. There was hardly enough space to resist but she did her best, pressing herself against the door and drawing up her knees so that her short dress wrinkled high on her thighs but even this he took as a gesture of encouragement, extricating his other hand and groping between her knees. Then fear and distaste gave way to fury and she dragged her nails down the side of his face and taking advantage of his wincing recoil rolled to the floor, grabbed the handle and fell out on to the tarmac. She heard him shout, ‘Mary, I’m sorry . . . wait!’ but she picked herself up and ran, not back to the hall but round the building into the shadow and across the little square to the quay where she stopped, steadying herself against the harbour guard-rail. She felt sick with misery and shame but still consumed with a terrible anger, not for Bob, whom she reasoned would be very sorry for himself when he sobered up, but with the world as a whole and her allotted place in it, the plainest, gawkiest and shyest of a family of six, a girl who had no more finesse when faced with a routine dance-hall hazard than to scratch a man’s face raw and then rush off into the dark like an outraged virgin pursued by a satyr. Whiz was two years her junior but Whiz would have extricated herself from such a situation with dignity and hauteur and surely even Claire, at fourteen, would have had enough sense not to climb into the back of a car with a half-tipsy boy, imagining that all he wanted from her was a dry peck or two and a sympathetic audience. Bob Halberton was clearly right when he implied that she was the family flop, the predestined maiden aunt, who would sit at home knitting woollies for a chain of nieces and nephews until her life grew dim and purposeless. Why was she so different from all the others? Why did she find a tussle in the back of a car degrading and humiliating, when most girls her age would have shrugged it off as no more than tiresome and others, a majority, perhaps, would have found it flattering, especially if they had spent two hours watching others enjoy themselves. She could find no answer to these questions that did not point to personal inadequacy and suddenly, to her renewed shame, tears began to flow and her whole world clouded over as she went back over Bob Halberton’s summary of the Craddocks of Shallowford—a bolshie, a couple of empty-headed idiots, two vain extroverts and a reject! Did everyone outside the Valley—and perhaps those inside it—view the family in this light? It was a chilling thought for, until that moment, she had always tended to think of the Craddocks as the acknowledged leaders of the community. Perhaps this was a fallacy? Perhaps people in places like Whinmouth and Paxtonbury had always regarded her father as a man who was playing Squire with money earned in a scrapyard, and her mother as a lucky farmer’s daughter, shrewd enough to have grabbed him on the rebound after a disastrous marriage to real gentry?

Bob found her there dabbing her eyes and trying, in the wan light of the harbour lamps, to repair her make-up. He seemed contrite and deflated, showing three curving lines of nail-furrows on each cheek and said, as soon as he saw her, ‘I’m sorry, Mary! I didn’t realise what an ass I was making of myself . . . I’ve always liked you a lot, honestly, and after all you did give a chap the impression . . . ’ and he tailed off, shuffling from one foot to the other and dabbing his scratches with a handkerchief. There was, she decided, small comfort to be derived from his abjectness, for even now he was careful to use the verb ‘like’ rather than risk a second misunderstanding. Then her fatal pity took a hand again and she said, quietly, ‘You can’t go back in the hall with your face in that state, you’d better go home and forget what happened. It was my fault really, I shouldn’t have come out. At eighteen, it’s time I learned what’s expected of a girl who does,’ and she walked back across the square with Bob trotting alongside like a terrier who has been whipped and is hoping to find a way of wriggling back into grace. He found none; she said, decisively, ‘Good night, Bob,’ and went straight into the hall, where everyone was bobbing round the floor to the rhythm of the latest bit of nonsense:

‘There ain’t no sense,

Sitting on the fence,

All by yourself in the moonlight . . . ’

and although Mary found the theme appropriate to her mood its irony had no power to cheer her as she sat waiting for Mark Codsall to call and take them home. When he did appear, on the stroke of midnight, she summoned her sisters with such impatience that Whiz complained, ‘You needn’t be in such a panic just because your Bob has taken himself off!’ and Mary felt she could have boxed her ears on the spot. To Whiz’s subsequent demand for an account of what happened, she snapped, ‘Nothing! Nothing but silliness!’ and that was her sole contribution to the lively recapitulation of the evening’s triumphs that beguiled her sisters all the way home.

And then, after a day and a night of brooding, Rumble was restored to her and she tore downstairs in response to his shout only to learn, to her bewilderment, that he had been politely expelled and had made up his mind, presumably with her father’s blessing, to remove himself to Australia! What was more galling than this monstrous decision was the eagerness with which Rumble embraced it. All through the autumn, while letters and cables were passing to and fro between him and his future hosts, and his great black cabin trunk was being filled, he ranged about the house practising a ridiculous Australian accent and spicing his conversation with outlandish words like ‘pommie’, ‘outback’ and ‘fair dinkum’. It was as though, like Simon and the twins before him, he could hardly wait to scrape Valley mud from his shoes and whilst she had understood the restlessness of her brothers, Rumble’s rejection of the old life—a time that had once seemed eternal—mystified and depressed her.

It was not until his last afternoon that she had an inkling of what lay behind this renunciation of their past. It was almost Christmas then and a cheerless Christmas it promised to be, for there was little point in decorating the house for a family reunion that might last two or three days and would not, in any case, include the twins, who were in the Tyrol, and Rumble, who was due to sail on December 22nd. The weather, however, did its best to help the Valley show off its autumn clothes and when she accepted his invitation for a final ramble she found that October still lingered among the oaks and chestnuts of the southern rim of the woods, and that when they went down the long, tangled slope to the mere the water was slate-blue in pale sunshine and the evergreens on the islet were fortified against winter by a gloss that still held the ripeness of June. She noticed, a little maliciously, that he had lost some of his bounce and that his fresh, squarish face now had an almost stoical expression. He said nothing, however, until they moved along level with the ruinous old pagoda where he stopped, took her arm and said with rare earnestness, ‘Will you promise something, Mar? Will you come here sometimes, to this spot, and—well, remember me once in a while?’

The finality as well as the strangeness of the request dried her mouth and her voice was as strange to him as his sudden seriousness was to her.

‘Yes, of course—of course I will, Rumble, but, oh God, you make it sound as if I won’t ever see you again! You make it so horribly final! Why do you
have
to go? You needn’t! Even now you could cry off and we’d all understand! I think Daddy would be relieved really and I’m sure Mummy would!’

He seemed to consider a moment so that hope fluttered in her but then he said, slowly, ‘I couldn’t you know—cry off, I mean. I’ve let him down just like the others but at least I know it and can do something about it and I think he understands that or will do, some day!’

‘But I don’t understand! What has Daddy got to do with you going all that way off? He hasn’t thrown you out, he wasn’t even upset about you getting sacked from High Wood. Where does he enter into it?’

He looked at her solemnly for a moment and then, relaxing, gently pushed her down on a stump where the path crossed one of old Aaron Stokes’ tracks to the reed beds.

‘It’s because of him I got into this, Mar,’ he said, ‘but I’ll never forgive you if you pass that on, even to your mother or to Simon! Don’t you realise what a sickener it was for him? The twins going off like that, and Simon never having the remotest wish to carry on? It was part of his dream that at least one of them would finish what he started. I imagine that’s why he had a family in the first place!’

‘Well, even if that were true,’ she said, and privately thought he was taking far too much for granted, ‘You could go to Agricultural College and take on the Home Farm in time.’

‘It wouldn’t be the same,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’m not his son you see, just the by blow of a kid he fished out of the slums and the scattiest of the Potters. We respect one another and he’s been more than a father to me. It would be a poor sort of return if I paid him back by horning in ahead of his children! Surely you can understand that, Mar?’

‘No I can’t!’ she said, stubbornly. ‘For you’ve just said neither Simon, Steve nor Andy want to stay here and farm. The Valley has never meant a thing to any one of them!’

‘They may come round to it, one or other of them, sooner or later,’ he said, ‘but they certainly wouldn’t if I got my oar in first and staked a claim! Simon is too unselfish and the twins would just use me as an excuse. You must see that, Mar.’