Post of Honour (61 page)

That was the period Claire called ‘The Marriage Year’, the twelve months between the spring of 1932 and the early summer of 1933, and Pansy’s marriage to Alfie Willis was only the final peal of wedding bells in the Valley. Mark Codsall led off by marrying Liz Pascoe, Pansy’s eldest daughter and taking the cottage her mother had vacated on moving into the pub. Then, to the vast relief of Gloria Pitts, Prudence accepted Young Honeyman, manager of the Home Farm, and the least hopeful of her many suitors. Gloria Pitts suspected that it was panic rather than Honeyman’s relatively good prospects that inclined her daughter to choose Honeyman instead of one of her flashier beaux, young men with oiled hair who had raced her about in the countryside in their second-hand cars and lingered so long in the passing bay of the lane. She was, in fact, on the point of demanding of her daughter specific information regarding matters that had come to her notice when Prudence announced the engagement. She went on to say—as if it was the most natural thing in the world—that they had ‘decided not to wait and would be married almost at once’ and that ‘this was Nelson’s idea because he was scared I might change my mind!’ Young Honeyman’s name ‘Nelson’, derived from his father’s obsession with the Navy League in pre-war days and only a threat on his wife’s part to shame him at the christening, had prevented the boy being named Horatio-Grenville-Hood, Nelson being a compromise. Gloria kept her suspicions to herself and Henry, who liked Honeyman, swore that he would give his daughter a ‘rare ole zend-off, like us had in the old days yerabouts’. He kept his promise. Over a hundred guests attended the wedding and Squire himself proposed the principal toast, for Prudence was one of his tribe of godchildren. Everyone declared that Prudence was the most radiant Valley bride of recent years and the junketings at the Hermitage that day were reminiscent of a less sophisticated era. There was an open-air breakfast and a procession down the track to the festooned honeymoon car, the couple riding the first stage on a farm-waggon drawn by drag-ropes. After that there was rice, old shoes, nosegays and silver horse-shoes all the way to Sorrel Halt, where Nelson and Prudence entrained for ‘an unknown destination’ that proved, disappointingly, to be Ilfracombe. Young Honeyman could hardly believe his luck when he found himself alone in the compartment with the most popular girl in the Valley but Prudence, carefully combing confetti from her red-gold hair, looked more relieved than ecstatic when he shyly showed her the marriage licence. It had been, she reflected, a very close call. Notwithstanding the falseness of the alarm that had precipitated the engagement, Henry would have had her marry Ronnie Stokes if she had not had the sense to keep her suspicions to herself and the odd thing was, now that she had Nelson, she actually preferred him to Ronnie. He was rather stolid she supposed, and his courting tactics were years behind the times, but he was healthy, high in the Squire’s good graces, and had no eyes for anyone but her; as to the techniques, she could supply those as part of her dowry.

Within two months of Prudence Pitts’ marriage Whiz, Paul’s second daughter, announced that she was engaged to a Flight-Lieutenant Ian McClean, recently attached to the new RAF base, a mile or so east of Paxtonbury. She told her parents that they would probably be manned before Ian left to complete a tour of duty in the Near East. Whiz had had almost as many local admirers as Prudence but the name of ‘Ian’ was new to Paul, although not to Claire who, although appearing to pursue a policy of extreme tolerance, nonetheless maintained a watchful eye on the least tractable of her three daughters. Up to the moment Whiz announced her news Paul had always pretended to be piqued by his daughters’ disinclination to ‘look about with an idea of settling down’ and had seemed, indeed, to take it as an affront that nobody had asked either one of them for her hand. Now, to Claire’s amusement, he began to bluster, demanding to know if ‘this Ian McShane was present to make a formal request’. Whiz laughed outright at this. ‘Good heavens, of course he isn’t!’ she said, ‘what year do you think this is? 1066? And anyway, you might as well get his name right. It’s
“McClean!”—
a small “c” and then a big one!’

‘I’m obliged to you for pointing that out,’ Paul grumbled, disconcerted when he sensed that Claire shared her daughter’s view in that he was behaving like a Victorian papa, ‘but how the devil am I expected to approve of a prospective son-in-law I’ve never even met?’

‘You have met him,’ Whiz said coolly, ‘he was one of a tennis party here at Whitsun but even if you hadn’t it wouldn’t make much difference, would it? After all, I’ll be twenty in April.’

Claire stepped in quickly now. She had no illusions regarding the lack of communications between Paul and all his children, with the exception of Simon, whom he had come to understand of late, and Mary, whom he adored. Between him and Whiz there had always existed a zone of neutrality that extended, to some extent, to their youngest child, whom he accused her of spoiling on account of her striking good looks.

‘Listen you two,’ she said, briskly, ‘what’s the point of quarrelling over the poor boy? Ask him to lunch tomorrow and let him speak up for himself! I’m sure your father will like him, Whiz, he seemed a polite, level-headed sort of chap to me,’ and with that Whiz drifted off to bed, reappearing at noon the following day with a uniformed Scot in tow, a cautious, thick-set young man, with sandy hair, good if rather distant manners, and a profound disinclination to engage in small talk. Paul spent an uncomfortable half-hour with him alone but neither of them mentioned Whiz and as the day wore on Paul realised that his daughter had been quite right—there was little expected from him one way or the other. Everyone of her generation was obviously equipped to make their own decisions, even at the age of nineteen. He noted with approval, however, that Ian McClean was neither fool nor weakling but a man who kept his emotions, if he had any, double-locked and chained and instinct told him that this kind of man might get the best out of a girl who had been inclined to put on side after so many successes in the show ring. Ian, it seemed, had a little money of his own, an income of about three hundred a year plus his pay and was due to fly off to the Suez Canal zone in September, returning the following spring. After that, he said, he would move about here, there and everywhere, sometimes in this country but more often in far off places like Hong Kong, Singapore, the Arabian Gulf and India. Whiz, once married, could accompany him to most of these places but not all, for there were certain areas closed to the wives of junior officers. When, at last, the subject of the actual wedding nosed itself into the conversation and Ian bucked at delay, Paul had a gleam of insight, reading into the young Scot’s insistence on a short engagement determination to stake his claim before Whiz went out of circulation, and he felt a certain sympathy for the man. Although by no means as beautiful as young Claire, Whiz (Ian gravely referred to her by her given name, Karen) was pretty enough to prove a bad risk and, like her twin brothers, she had the knack of attracting about her a small court of admirers, some of whom Paul reminded himself, were far less eligible than this taciturn Celt. In the end he found himself wholeheartedly approving the match and it made him chuckle to see the subtle change that the prospect of marriage wrought in Whiz, for she became almost affectionate towards him as her moods ranged from one of brittle excitement to a kind of dithering uncertainty, not as regards Ian but the trivia inseparable from weddings. Claire, however, seemed to have an instinctive knowledge of how to cope, both with her daughter and with the mounting tensions in the house as the day approached. She was quite prepared, he noted, to organise the most spectacular wedding ever witnessed in the Valley but by mid-August Whiz had backed down, settling for a comparatively quiet affair, with a mere sixty guests, most of them family or local equestriennes. Mary and young Claire were bridesmaids (Paul thought he had never seen anyone look quiet so enchanting as Mary in her sprigged organdie and long, Victorian mittens) and in the absence of any close friend at Ian’s temporary base, Stephen, the more talkative of the twins, stood as best man. To Paul’s relief he was not called upon to entertain the groom’s family. McClean’s father had died with most of the Cameronians at Loos, and his mother a year or so later, in India. Aside from a few RAF acquaintances from the camp the groom was represented by a formidable aunt from Perth, whose speech was as broad in its way as old Mrs Handcock’s, and who seemed to regard everyone living south of the Cheviots as something midway between a tyrant oppressor and a confidence trickster. Paul made the mistake of trying to draw her out on Scottish history but was soon sent packing with a flea in his ear, Aunt Elspeth being unaware that the last blood-letting between English and Scots had occurred at Culloden Moor, nearly two centuries ago. Picking up his dignity he wandered among the guests, feeling rather like a lucky amateur exhibitor at a professional flower show whose entry, the bride, had unexpectedly won first prize. He was consoled, however, by the presence of the wanderers among his brood, finding a sympathiser in Simon who dismissed all religious ceremonies as ‘social opiates’, a view that did not seem to be shared by his wife Rachel, who was clearly enjoying the occasion and looked, Paul thought, attractive in her simple blue dress, wide straw hat and elbow-length gloves. Simon told him a little of their life in the mining valleys and shipyard towns and it all sounded desperately dull and unrewarding but he noticed that the boy seemed to be maturing under the stresses of his nonstop guerrilla war against what he called The Establishment. He was, for instance, more restrained in his judgments and more disposed to make allowances for the terrible complexities of building a social system that guaranteed fair shares for all; he was also prepared to find room in his brave new world for a revitalised agriculture and for this small blob of jam Paul was duly grateful.

The Pair were as irrepressible as ever. They came skidding up the drive in a huge car of American make, scrambled out and at once proceeded to fill the house with noise and strangers, of the kind that attached themselves to the twins wherever they went. They must have introduced him to a baker’s dozen of their friends but he forgot their names instantly and could only think of them as carbon copies of his own boys and of each other. The young men, he noticed, used a laconic argot of their own that was almost a foreign language and drank a great deal without becoming the worse for it; their womenfolk—who reminded him of a bevy of medieval pages in a Flemish picture—had nicely waved peroxided hair, doll-like faces and were not above letting themselves be pawed in public, although they received these attentions absentmindedly, as though they were thinking of more important matters like their next hairdressing appointment. He found himself wondering how many of them were virgins, or whether their silly talk was no more than the backlash of Victorian and Edwardian cant. It was Henry Pitts, another wanderer in this post-war wilderness, who put these thoughts into words when he said, watching the young people milling about at the reception, ‘Us is vallin’ behind, Maister, and there baint two ways o’ lookin’ at it! There’s a bliddy great hairy fence betwext them an’ us, an’ whereas the wimmin zeem to be able to jump it when they’ve a mind to, I’m jiggered if I c’n nerve myself to take off! I can’t never be zertain zure what’s on t’other zide!’ There really was such a fence, Paul thought, and the only gap in it accessible to him was Mary, who seemed to have a password enabling her to move to and fro between the generations but preferred, on the whole, to stay in the safe old world that she could not have recalled, having been no more than three when the gates slammed on it in 1914.

One big surprise did emerge from the wedding, the totally unpredictable recapture of Stephen by his old flame, Monica Dearden, the Archdeacon’s daughter from Paxtonbury, whom Paul had almost forgotten. Claire met her in the Cathedral Close a week or two before the wedding and sent her an invitation, saying that it was at Stephen’s request, which was not true although he had asked her in one of his infrequent letters. Paul could never imagine either of the twins married. They seemed so self-sufficient, so satisfied with their hectic round of golf, jaunts to the Continent and business luncheons with potential suppliers of scrap iron in the North and Midlands. He was wrong, however. Before the end of Claire’s ‘wedding year’ both were brought into the fold, Stephen by the elegant Monica, who seemed to combine the unlikely roles of blue-stocking and playgirl, Andy by a little Welsh nurse whom he met during a spell in hospital after a road crash in one of his dashes down to South Wales in search of scrap. Paul like both his new daughters-in-law, although he was slightly intimidated by Monica Dearden and bored by the Archdeacon’s wife. Stevie and Monica were married and off on their honeymoon to Venice before he had the slightest inkling that Claire had, in fact, manipulated the match and regarded it as a personal triumph. He learned of this the day of the wedding in Paxtonbury Cathedral, when Stevie and his bride had gone, and he and Claire were driving back over the moor after seeing the couple off.

‘Well, I think I managed that very neatly indeed!’ she crowed, ‘and moreover my part in it will establish just the right relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law!’

‘I suppose you’re boasting of your share in helping that dull, well-meaning old duck to cope with all those beaming clergymen?’ he asked and she laughed and said, ‘Oh dear, Paul, you really are dim about some things! Haven’t you realised I arranged that wedding singlehanded?’

He stopped the car on the first stage of the descent, pulling off the road not fifty yards from the point where, more than twenty years before, she had helped him to adjust himself to all that had happened as a result of the suffragette riot in Westminster Yard.

‘What the devil are you talking about, Claire?
How
did you arrange it? Stevie has been blowing hot and cold about that girl for years and it seems to me all that happened is that he got a fresh look at her when she turned up at Whiz’s wedding, looking extremely fetching!’