Post of Honour (70 page)

‘I wouldn’t care to go outside the Valley,’ Rumble said. ‘I’ve done all the travelling I intend to do. From now on, if you catch me north of the railway line, or east of the Coombe, you can take a shot at me with a twelve-bore!’ and he obviously meant it, for he at once plunged into a detailed description of what he intended doing with Will Codsall’s old place, and how he could make it as prosperous a farm as Four Winds in Norman Eveleigh’s heyday. ‘Two-thirds of it are southern slopes,’ he said, ‘and dear old Elinor, bless her, had her nose so deep in the hen-roosts that I don’t think she ever realised it, or Will Codsall before her! Once I’ve reclaimed the moor strip there’s not much I couldn’t raise there and I’ve learned what can and can’t be done in a climate like ours! Cereals can be produced here cheaper than in Canada, providing mechanisation is one hundred per cent and the biscuit factories prefer English wheat to any other kind.’

‘Then why has three million acres passed out of cultivation since the war?’ Paul asked, and Rumble said it was largely on account of the English farmer’s resistance to new methods and reluctance to combine for the purposes of buying and marketing. Paul, who had been trying to build a co-operative system ever since 1911, had to admit that Rumble was right and asked if Periwinkle would specialise or follow a policy of mixed farming, like that practised by most of the Valley farmers for generations.

‘That depends entirely on available markets and the growth of Government subsidies,’ Rumble said. ‘The canning industry is bound to go on expanding and when it does it might pay to try fruit on the western side. In the meantime I shan’t bother with beef or pigs, and if I follow Elinor in the matter of hens you won’t catch mine outside of a deep-litter! Free range is old-hat and damned wasteful on farms as small as they are in this country. What do you want for Periwinkle as it stands, Gov? I shall have to make a start right away if I’m to be ready for spring sowing, and there’s not so much as a fence in repair over there!’

Paul said, smiling, ‘What shall we say? Ninety acres at sixpence an acre . . . ?’ but Rumble’s jaw shot out and he said, briskly, ‘I’m not joking, Gov’nor! If I can’t buy it I won’t have it!’

‘Then have it as a wedding present,’ Paul said, ‘providing I got the message in Mary’s eyes!’ and he thought how times had changed, for here was everybody blandly assuming that Rumble and Mary would many almost at once and so far no one had mentioned the matter either to him or to Claire, save by implication.

‘No, I’ll not have that,’ Rumble said obstinately. ‘I wouldn’t feel I owned it and I always wanted to own a piece of the Valley, ever since I was a kid.’

‘Did you now?’ said Paul, much surprised, and reflecting how odd it was that such a thought had never entered the head of either one of his own sons. ‘Well, I see your point, and I daresay I’d have felt the same at your age, but the farmhouse itself is derelict and it’s my responsibility to get that right before I make the place over. I’ll ask Eph Morgan to look at it. He’ll give me good advice.’

‘I’ve already looked at it,’ Rumble said, ‘and I don’t want anyone else messing about over there! I can make that place shipshape in three months, providing I can hire one pair of unskilled hands. Where I’ve been we don’t waste money on builders, plumbers and electricians, we do things ourselves. All I want out of you is your price. And your daughter!’

‘Ah, I was wondering when you were coming round to that,’ Paul said, ‘but supposing you can make Periwinkle habitable, when do you intend getting married?’

‘The day the last shingle goes on the roof,’ Rumble told him, ‘for I’m damned if I’m going to re-thatch! It looks pretty enough but a man’s never done with it. Can you buy Canadian shingles around here?’

‘I’m sure
you
can,’ Paul said, responding to the boy’s tremendous zest, and remembering precisely how he felt himself when he first vowed to put new life into the Valley, ‘but if you won’t let me set you up there I’ll buy you a tractor for a wedding present and Claire will chip in with some furniture. By God, but it does me good to see somebody with a bit of real enthusiasm for land! I’d begun to think we’d seen the last of it in your generation and quite made up my mind that you would stay in the Dominions. Weren’t you tempted to? Honestly?’

‘No, never, although it was fun while it lasted and the best place to learn because class cuts no ice at all over there! A man’s judged on the skill in his hands and the ideas in his head.’

‘Then apart from Mary what made you return?’

Rumble said, wrinkling his brow and looking, for a moment, extraordinarily like his grandfather Tamer assessing the cash value of a piece of flotsam, ‘It’s home, I guess. I could have sent for Mary and I daresay she would have come but there wasn’t a day out there when I didn’t sniff the air and find something missing! Spring-time and Fall were the worst. You could never smell rain, or come to terms with the colours. All manner of things tug at a man but one can’t put a name to ’em until one’s back. In the train, on the way down, I got a clue—everything’s real green—that is, neither parched up, as it almost always was in Queensland, or green-sombre, like the pine forests back of the Rockies. And the sky is different too, maybe because it doesn’t stay the same two minutes together!’

‘Well,’ Paul said, laughing, ‘Mary often told us you weren’t any great shakes at writing a love-letter, Rumble, but you seem to me to have the instincts of a poet, of the old Walt Whitman variety! Did you ever read him?’

‘Never,’ Rumble admitted, ‘but Mary’s been threatening me with poetry ever since I got back! Maybe I should be grateful to all the guys she quotes. They seem to have kept her in cold storage while I was away.’

‘I don’t think it was the poets altogether,’ Paul told him, remembering the glimpse he had of his daughter in French Wood, the day Rumble had made up his mind to go overseas, I think it was Valley magic. After all, your roots here are a lot deeper than mine!’ and he got up as Mary came bouncing in, shouting that Henry Pitts and his son David had called, that she had shown them into the office, and that a message had come from Harold Eveleigh saying he would be over as soon as he could to see about the redivision of land and when Paul, astonished, said he had not even broached the matter to either of them, Mary said gaily, ‘No, but I did and I think you ought to see to it at once, Daddy!’

He went along the corridor hiding his smile. It was extraordinary, he thought, how the certainty that she was coveted put sparkle into the girl. Maybe there was more of Claire in her than either of them had suspected.

Mary’s was far more of a Valley wedding in the old-fashioned sense than that of any of his other children, all of whom had married what Mrs Handcock or old Tamer would have dismissed as ‘forriners’, notwithstanding the fact that Whiz’s groom, Ian, and both the twins’ wives, were a mixture of Saxon and Celt. Here, however, both bride and groom had been born within hailing distance of the Sorrel, and nobody (except possibly Claire) recalled that the latter had first seen the light of day in a cave over the badger slope in Shallowford Woods.

So many responded to the general invitation that Paul was reminded of the wedding of John Rudd and Maureen O’Keefe, getting on for thirty years ago, the last occasion he could recall when children presented horseshoes to the happy pair on their way down the drive.

He prayed for a fine day and his prayers were answered, April borrowing a few hours from June and the sun throwing down a cloth-of-gold cloak that spread from the summit of the Bluff to the crown of the Teazel watershed. It was the first family reunion since the day of the Dairy Queen final but, as though by common consent, nobody mentioned this and the occasion was further heightened for Claire by a sight of her first grandchild, the three months old daughter of Whiz, home on leave from Malaya. There were prospects of more to come, she noted, when the twins’ wives appeared, putting all the women to shame with their smart London clothes but unable to disguise the fact that both were pregnant. Simon and Rachel turned up, both, she thought, looking rather tired and old, and Smut Potter, by virtue of the fact that he was uncle of the groom, hired himself a topper and striped pants from Whitby’s, in Paxtonbury, and so astounded his brother Sam that he exclaimed to Henry Pitts, ‘Would ’ee think, to look at ’un, that he ever did time for poachin’? Damme, you could almost mistake him for old Gilroy himself!’ All the Valley originals attended the church and reception; Marian Eveleigh, Eph Morgan, now in his eighties, and Martha Pitts also in hers, Maureen and her son Paul, Abe Tozer, the smith (who now shoed no more than two horses a week), together with a score of second-generation couples, mostly Pascoes, Timberlakes or Codsalls. Old Edward Derwent was bedridden but he sent Liz and Rose came down from Gloucestershire. To Paul, looking out of the library window while the guests were assembling after the ceremony, it was proof that many of his fears regarding the Valley’s vitality were groundless but perhaps this was less because so many familiar faces were to be seen than the reassurance that had been his watching Rumble rebuild Periwinkle almost single-handed, and also the light in his daughter’s eyes, when she came downstairs to share a ten-minute vigil with him after Claire and all the others had left for the church.

‘There’s no hurry, sir,’ the car-hire man had told him on the telephone, when he was dressed, fidgety and waiting for Claire to come down, ‘it’s customary for the bride to be five minutes late at the church. There’s only the one car, I believe?’

‘Yes,’ Paul told him, ‘just the bridal car, my wife and the others are finding their own transport but you will be here sharp at eleven, won’t you?’ Then, having survived the last-minute panic surrounding the departure of the family in what looked like a motorcade, he retired to the library for a double brandy and was enjoying it when the door opened and Mary came in, looking as serene and composed as young Claire would have looked in similar circumstances but, to his mind, the most ravishing bride of the century. The brandy had steadied his nerves and he said, gratefully, ‘This is something very special for me, Mary. All the other weddings—well, perhaps I shouldn’t say it—but they were just occasions! You and Rumble represent the continuity I always wanted and worked for and my only regret is that Ikey didn’t live to see it! I think he would have derived as much satisfaction from it as I do. You don’t remember him, I suppose?’

‘No, and I’ve only the vaguest memory of Rumble’s mother, but you loved the pair of them, didn’t you?’

‘Yes I did,’ he admitted, ‘as much as my own children, although they were probably the most unlikely pair who ever produced a child, even in a community like ours which has been throwing up eccentrics for generations! You don’t look as if you need a drink but you can have a small one if you like.’

‘No,’ she said, arranging herself on the humpty as deftly as a swan on a nest, ‘I’ll wait, I think. I always thought I’d be sick with panic but I’m not and when you come to think of it why should I be? How old was Rumble when Mother brought him home that day?’

‘Four; you’re not telling me you remember his arrival here, are you?’

‘That’s the funny thing,’ she said, ‘I do, and quite distinctly! It was only an hour after his mother was killed, wasn’t it? Mother told us he’d just been orphaned and we had to make it up to him but I think I was the only one impressed!’

He thought he knew what she was thinking—of the seeming inevitability of this marriage, something that had seeded itself and emerged from a shared childhood but he could remember the original link in the chain that connected her with Rumble Patrick Palfrey to the Valley—an impulsive act of his street-urchin father in the scrapyard during the long, hot summer of 1902, a tiny, insignificant incident that had prompted him to adopt Ikey, first as a stable-boy, later as a kind of son; he did not remember ever having told her how casually it had all begun.

There was no time now; the car advertised its arrival by a screech of tyres on the gravel and she stood up, unhurriedly rearranging the folds of her gown.

‘Well,’ he said, offering his arm, ‘here goes the last of the Craddock girls!’ and she replied, rising to the occasion, ‘Well you needn’t sound so beastly relieved about it! I may have been the retiring one of the family but I had my chances!’

‘I’m damn glad you didn’t take ’em!’ he said, and they passed out on to the terrace and into the forecourt where the car stood flaunting its broad, white ribbons.

III

E
dward Derwent died that spring and neither Paul, Claire, nor anyone else who was on intimate terms with the old man could regret his death. He had been bedridden for the better part of a year and had confessed, often enough, that confinement to a bedroom was purgatory. Liz told Paul he was a tetchy invalid and Paul could believe it. He had always been a very active man, even in his declining years, and when Paul called on him for the last time he admitted that he had made the biggest mistake of his life retiring at seventy and ‘handing over to that damned son o’ mine!’

‘I should have carried on and died on my own acres, same as Norman Eveleigh!’ he said, ‘for that way High Coombe would ha’ stayed inside the boundaries and I shouldn’t have to lie here knowing there was a rash o’ red-brick spreading across Eight Acre and Cliff Warren! However, tiz too late to think o’ that now!’

‘I don’t ever think of it,’ Paul had comforted him, ‘and neither does Claire! At the time it happened it stuck in my gullet but at least it was a means of keeping the coastline open. If Sydney hadn’t got direct access to Coombe Bay through your land he would have hammered away at the County Council until he got a road over the dunes from the west. As it is we got off fairly cheaply. Young Harold Eveleigh’s return to Four Winds shored up the landslide to some extent.’

‘Ah!’ Derwent said, with real regret in his voice, ‘I should ha’ had more sons and I would have had if I hadn’t lost my first wife, backalong.’

‘You’ve done all right by your daughters, Edward,’ Paul reminded him, ‘and you can’t expect your bread buttered both sides. I daresay, if you had had a spread of sons, they would have been killed in the war!’ and the old man must have pondered this for presently he said, ‘Arrr, I daresay you’re right at that, boy! It never struck me that way before and the girls did me credit, just as you say, tho’ I should have liked our Rose to have married a bit earlier and had children!’