Post of Honour (66 page)

‘Now you’re just a nosy old woman dredging for prurient details but if you don’t wheedle them out of me I daresay you’ll get them from her so I’ll tell you! We haven’t been man and wife since John arrived, and as things are right now we look like heading for honourable retirement!’

‘Then you’re both bigger fools than I took you for!’ Maureen replied. ‘There’s not the slightest chance of her conceiving again and setting up a new record in the Valley!’

‘I don’t think it’s that, Maureen.’

‘Then what is it? Are you both sulking, at your age?’

He said, trying to state his case as honestly as he could, ‘We never have been lovers from habit and what’s more I can’t remember a time when an occasion wasn’t mutually prompted and mutually enjoyed but the impetus has gone somehow. Maybe it’s burned itself out and the very lack of it is poisoning our relationship.’

‘But that just isn’t true,’ she said with an earnestness that half-convinced him in spite of himself. ‘This is no more than a phase and both of you are prolonging it artificially. Listen here, Paul, I know an old stick-in-the-mud like you finds it difficult to take psychological factors into consideration but they do exist and very much so in a woman as sensual as Claire and a man as vigorous as you! The years ahead of you could be your happiest yet for I never saw a better-matched or a healthier pair, but you are letting your prejudices react against one another and if you don’t do something about it you might have a real issue on your hands before you’ve realised it!’

‘What do you suggest? That I don’t wait for the propitious moment and demand my rights, as they say?’

‘No, I don’t,’ she said emphatically, ‘for that might easily result in your making an ass of yourself and coming back here waving your pride at me like a head on a pike! I know it’s asking a lot of you to be subtle—neither you nor my John ever really understood the damned word—but subtlety is your cue now. Stop bellyaching and start courting and I promise you the propitious moment will appear without any prompting on your part, you great numbskull!’

‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘you’re beginning to make sense but even if you’re right I don’t see how a thing like this can be resolved by a tumble or two on the bed,’ and she sighed, so deeply that he had to smile.

‘You can be so
thick
sometimes!’ she said. ‘Who am I, a woman who married an elderly man when I was over thirty, to be giving you and Claire lessons in this kind of thing? I’ll spell it out for you. Claire Derwent, as I’ve told you before is crazy about you, not as Squire of Shallowford but as a man—M.A.N—and the only man she has ever enjoyed or ever wanted to and when I say enjoy I mean it! I remember telling John more than once that she goes limp at the knees every time you enter a room and women like her don’t change, not even when they produce “proofs of affection” as they used to say, at the age of fifty! Well, here she is, back in the race again you might say, but how are you giving expression to the relief she must be feeling? By holding back out of mistaken consideration and by working off your bad temper looking for qualities in her that aren’t there and never were, not even when she was a day-old bride! You remember what I told you in the beginning of all this? That the children are no more than by-products to her, this last one especially, but if she ever suspects that baby is causing a permanent rift between you you’ll really have something to blow about! You haven’t put this in words to her, I hope?’

‘No, I haven’t said anything but Mary and Thirza must have noticed her attitude to the kid.’

‘Let them both mind their own damned business! One’s made a mess of her own marriage and the other is still waiting on Mr Right! This concerns no one but you and Claire, and my advice is to stop expecting her to sit opposite you with a shawl on her shoulders and rock the cradle! Dammit, when I think of most of the middle-aged couples you don’t deserve your luck, either of you! There won’t be an old age for you or her unless you open the door to it!’ She paused for breath and concluded, ‘Have I made any impression on you at all?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think maybe you have but I’m not one of your wide-eyed witch-doctor patients, who swallow everything you prescribe without question. I like to be told the ingredients and make up my own mind. Would you give me a hint how to start courting at fifty-four? You ought to know something about it, John was about that age when he married you. What was his line?’

‘He pretended to anticipate my every wish. It was only later I discovered that his technique was simplicity itself. He would pay out three yards of slack and pull in two-and-a-half when I wasn’t looking and I loved him for it! You start with an advantage no man deserves. Claire’s already broken and the jerks won’t even surprise her!’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you won’t find that in any of your Psychology-for-the-Million textbooks but I suppose it’s the kind of advice I was looking for and I’ll take it. There’s a big-supper-dance at the Paxtonbury Town Hall on Thursday, the annual “do” of the county Dairymen’s Association. The girls wanted to make it a family excursion but I turned them down. I’ve suddenly changed my mind.’

‘Quite proper!’ she said. ‘Why the hell should the kids have all the fun? Has she got a new frock to go in?’

‘No, but she’s got her eye on one!’ and he walked out almost jauntily so that she called after him, ‘Don’t waste my surgery time coming back here with a progress report! I live on your doorstep, remember?’ and slammed the door feeling justifiable pride in her achievement but regretting that old John wasn’t on hand to hear an account and share the joke. Time and again he had prevailed upon her to break confidence with the patients he liked as well as those he did not.

The dance was in full swing when they arrived about nine o’clock and the two girls at once disappeared to find their friends, leaving Paul and Claire to begin the evening with the Military Two-Step, this kind of item predominating an event organised by and for the middle-aged rather than youngsters. By Paxtonbury standards it was an impressive gathering and reckoned the event of the season, if Paxtonbury could be said to enjoy a season. Most of the local landowners were present, including the Somerset Gilroys, near relatives of the Heronslea family, who had recently let their property and gone to live in France. Humphrey Gilroy asked Claire to dance and Paul found himself partnering Gilroy’s wife, a statuesque woman who seemed to tolerate him solely on account of his relationship with Rose Barclay-Jones, organiser of the well-known two-day event in Gloucestershire and described by Mrs Gilroy as ‘a dashing gel’, which struck Paul as a curious description of his gaunt, fifty-nine-year-old sister-in-law. After they had shed the Gilroys, danced a waltz, and watched Mary win a spot-prize (young Claire seemed to have adjourned to the carpark but Paul, in tolerant mood, did not remark on it) they sat out eating cold turkey and Claire, who had seemed nervously elated ever since he had insisted on buying her a green velvet dance frock she had admired in a Cathedral Close window, said, ‘I suppose you know all about the Dairy Queen Contest? They have the preliminary canter tonight and we’ve never had a finalist all the years it’s been going.’

‘Yes,’ he told her, he knew all about the Dairy Queen Contest. Old John Rudd had always referred to it as ‘The Heifer Parade’, declaring that its popularity lay less in its avowed purpose of advertising Britain’s farm products than in the opportunity it offered farmer-judges from all over the provinces to enjoy a close-up of young women in bathing costumes. ‘I’d forgotten it was on the programme,’ he admitted and she said, doubtfully, ‘Honestly? You aren’t holding out on us?’ and then laughed so that he at once linked her expectant air with the mysterious flutter in the family when he had announced that they would be attending the dance after all.

‘Look here,’ he demanded, ‘what
is
all this? What gave you, young Claire and even Mary the jitters when I suddenly changed my mind about coming tonight?’

‘Oh, never mind,’ she said, smiling, ‘just sit back and wait! Frankly I thought you were double-bluffing us but it seems I was wrong!’ and before he could dig deeper the drums rolled, the floor cleared, and the Paxtonbury Town Clerk stepped on stage to proclaim in a town-crier’s voice that there would now be an interval while Mr Humphrey Gilroy CBE, and three other judges representing four Westcountry counties, would select Devon’s entry for the national final of the British Dairy Queen of 1934.

It was then, as the curtains swung aside to reveal a dozen contestants grouped in a half-circle on the dais, that Paul experienced one of the sharpest jolts of his life. Fourth from the right, looking like a young Aphrodite in her scarlet swimsuit and ermine-trimmed cloak, was his youngest daughter, and Claire, watching him nervously, saw his body go taut as he exclaimed, ‘Good God! It’s young Claire! Whose idea was this? And why they devil wasn’t I consulted?’

She said, rather desperately, ‘Shhh, Paul, not here—please! I’ll explain everything but don’t make a scene, she’d never forgive you!’ and she let him simmer as the audience cooed, the band struck up a Danubian waltz and the girls began to circle the dais, their high heels clattering as they passed to and fro in front of the judges in the orchestra pit.

She was, he had to admit, the most staggeringly attractive female he had ever seen but it was not the classic regularity of her features, or the singular maturity of figure in one so young that gave her such obvious advantages over the others. Her distinction was centred on her poise, a kind of relaxed sophistication that armoured her against the nervous embarrassment of the older girls. She was, he reflected grimly, a smooth professional among a crop of buxom amateurs; then his attention switched from the stage to his own predicament.

He knew that if he made no effort to hold himself in he would make a scene of their conspiracy of silence, if not here then the moment they returned home. Alternatively, if he once admitted to feeling slighted and belittled by their exclusion, such progress as he had made with Claire in the last day or so would be cancelled out. In the resultant flare up (for she would certainly side with her daughters) the chance to recapture the elusive rhythm of their lives would be lost, perhaps for good. He saw then, and clearly, that he must either capitulate or compromise but there was really no room to manoeuvre. He knew his youngest daughter sufficiently well to appreciate how much this occasion meant to her, particularly if—as was barely credible considering her age—she went forward to the national final. He was so absorbed in making private decisions that he paid little heed to the judges and it was the familiar ring of his own name issuing from the mouth of the Town Clerk that jolted him into awareness that the stage was now empty of bathing beauties, and a decision was on hand. He thought, as sweat struck cold under his armpits, ‘Damn it, why should I let a prejudice destroy the peace and quiet of my own home? This is a time to borrow old John Rudd’s trick of paying out slack and not haul in again until my feet are on surer ground than they have been during the last twelve months!’ and then the tension broke in the seats behind and he felt Claire’s hand grasp his wrist as a fanfare of uncertain trumpets summoned his youngest daughter back on stage and he watched her advance towards the Lady Mayoress who had materialised from the wings carrying a garish-looking crown on a red, velvet cushion. ‘Good God!’ he exclaimed, ‘she’s won!’ but because he saw in his wife’s face a radiance that had not been there for a very long time, he found it easy to counterfeit a nonchalance he did not feel and even to add, ‘There was never a doubt about it, was there?’

He got his reward on the spot. Her relief seemed to burst like a bubble and for the first time in almost a year she looked at him in a way that he recognised and remembered.

‘You rotten fraud!’ she whispered, enlarging her grip on his hand, ‘you had me scared for a moment!’ and then, to his acute embarrassment, she and Mary began to applaud as frenziedly as anyone in the hall.

III

‘I
n for a penny, in for a pound,’ Maureen told him when she heard the news and again he took her advice so that the Craddocks descended upon London in a body in September to swell the gathering of provincials from all over England and Wales who were involved in the Dairy Queen finals, held in a Park Lane hotel.

The competitors, viewed as a contingent, taxed the ingenuities of all but the most ingenious of the Press corps, who found most of the girls blushingly inarticulate when faced with the stock questions. All but Claire that is, of whom the journalists made a mascot, not only because she was the youngest finalist by almost two years but because she seemed to know exactly where she was going and why. This was something that Fleet Street not only understood but applauded.

Mary, who was present at most of her interviews, looked on with awe as Claire fenced, joked and flirted with hardbitten men more than twice her age and seemed, by exercising an inborn skill, to know precisely what they required in the way of copy, so that Claire’s profile, Claire’s expectations, and even Claire’s pronouncements on such diverse topics as clothes, love, cows and cheese were featured in all the journals and periodicals. She even made a fleeting appearance on Gaumont British News, assisting at the opening of a hospital wing.

One way and another it was a sensational week and the first occasion for Paul when London, as a city, touched him with her magic for the weather was fine and warm, their quarters comfortable and the general excitement contrived to keep at bay that depressing anonymity he had always felt when caught up in this whirl of traffic and stampede of grey-faced millions who somehow reminded him of prisoners-of-war milling about the compounds behind Compiegne.

Perhaps the sense of family unity had something to do with it, for on the second day the twins and their wives roared up in their big, shiny cars, Monica and the laughing Welsh girl, Margaret, both dripping with furs and inclined, he noticed, to convert their ‘
a
’s into ‘
e
’s
and discard the ‘
g
’
in words like ‘ripping’ and ‘topping’, which they used a great deal. Like Claire, and a few of the Pressmen, the twins were already assured of victory and Paul feared for them all when finalists intermingled for the first time at a tea dance and he realised that the competition here was far more formidable than at Paxtonbury. She could, he thought, outclass some of the chubbier girls from the remote counties, places like Cardigan and Cumberland (although, if he were in search of a living advertisement for cream and butter these were the very girls he would choose) but it was obvious that city sophistication had lapped over the farmlands within shouting distance of the big cities and Miss Suffolk, for instance, looked far more like a film star than a dairymaid. He enjoyed talking to Garstin Schroeder, the improbably-named Organising Secretary of the British Dairymen’s Association, finding him extremely well-informed on the subject of farming prospects generally, and he found common ground talking to some of the fathers of competitors, whose dolorous experiences on the land during the nineteen-twenties were identical with his own. As a rule, however, he stood aside and let the women enjoy themselves, grateful for Mary’s watchful chaperonage of Claire, even more grateful for his wife’s sparkle which dated from the very moment he gave his reluctant blessing of the enterprise in the Paxtonbury Town Hall. He did not have to follow Maureen’s advice literally; so far, he told himself, he had paid out a great deal of slack and gathered none in but it was a relief to hear her laugh again, to see her preen herself in her smart new clothes and watch her soar off on a series of shopping sprees with her elegant daughters-in-law, Monica and Margaret, neither of whom, he reflected, seemed eager to pause in their eternal gallivanting long enough to produce a grandchild for his delight. It was reflection on his lack of grandchildren, in fact, that had modified his pleasure in the reunion. The Pair had now been married more than two years and Simon, who showed up on the final day, for four years, but neither one had yielded a dividend, male or female. Whiz, they told him, was expecting a child but Whiz and her dour Scots husband were far away in Singapore and if things went on like this it might be years before he could hoist a toddler on to the crupper of his saddle and ride down across the Codsall stubble fields, as he had ridden with all his own children at one time or another. He mentioned this to Claire one night after they had returned from a noisy drinking session in the hotel lounge but she did not seem to share his regrets.