Post of Honour (74 page)

‘You weren’t,’ Paul said, remembering Claire’s tale of the sermon he had preached to wounded soldiers, ‘but probably I was and still am! I’ve always known my limitations and they don’t extend beyond the Teazel and the Bluff, yonder!’

He said good-bye and walked the skewbald down to the harbour where he saw the blind Alf Willis, supple and well-muscled for a handicapped man of over forty, emerge from the water and watched Pansy hand him his towel and help him on with his sweater. It was just another facet of the morning’s ride that pleased him and he turned the horse into the sandhills, meaning to follow the coastline as far as Crabpot Willie’s goyle before riding the last mile home in time for lunch.

It was much cooler here by the sea and the flies, which had bothered the skewbald in the woods, dropped away so that he put her into a steady trot. In five minutes he had reached the gully and turned inland, heading through the scattered pines above the shanty but halfway up the incline he reined in, his eye catching a sparkle of metal on the summit of the opposite hillock. There was a trap over there, stationary in a cleared patch about a hundred yards west of the goyle, and when he looked more closely he could see someone sitting motionless on the box, slumped against the iron backrest. He rose in his stirrups and called ‘Hi, there!’ but the figure did not move and the pony, after raising its head, went on cropping the sparse grass. He thought, ‘That’s odd, it looks like Old Meg’s trap,’ and he crossed the goyle at its shallow head, circling round to the clearing and coming alongside the shabby little equipage. It was Meg’s trap and Meg was in it. The reins had slipped from her hands and she sat with her eyes wide open, looking out over the tops of the lower pines to the bay. He did not need to dismount to discover that she was dead.

The sight of her sitting here, staring out across the Channel, was impressive and a little awesome. She looked rooted and statuesque, her knees spread and her hands resting lightly in her lap. She might have been part of the background, something that belonged there, like one of the fully-grown pines or the outcrop of sandstone against which the trap-wheel had come to rest in the pony’s search for grass. He dismounted, hitched the mare’s reins to the rear step and, after feeling her pulse, knelt on the footboard and eased her into the trap-well, which was half-f of rush mats and besom brooms. She was very heavy and the effort required all his strength but he managed it and gently, for he had a great affection for this hulk of a woman, who had always gone her own way with dignity, earning her own bread and keeping herself, and often her indolent family, with coppers coaxed from the twin trades of hawking and fortune-telling. It was strange, he thought, that she should die the morning he had news for her of another grandchild, one among so many, yet he did not find her death shocking or startling. It must have come upon her very stealthily, while she was returning home across the dunes and perhaps, hearing its rustle, she had reined in to take a last look at the sun baking the sandbanks a mile or so out to sea. It was, after all, a pleasant way to die and one might envy her some day, death in the open and the fresh air, after a long lifetime of breathing fresh air; a good deal better than John Rudd’s death in a stuffy little room and a far more natural one than poor Claire’s. He thought of Old Tamer’s death in the breakers off the Cove, hardly a mile east of this spot, and wondered if man and wife would now meet again after all this time and if so what would they have to say to one another. It seemed unlikely. If Heaven and Hell were Old Testament realities, then Tamer would still be working out his time in Purgatory, whereas Old Meg, who had never stolen so much as a clothes-peg, would surely get her reward if rewards were going.

He lifted the reins and clicked his tongue at the pony, turning the trap in a half-circle and setting off across the fields in the direction of the ford.

V

U
ncle Franz Zorndorff paid his last visit to Shallowford that September, his last visit anywhere as it happened, for a few months later he died at the age of ninety-three. His final meeting with Paul was almost accidental.

He had written in May saying that he was going to Austria for a holiday and Paul was very surprised, not so much that a man of his advanced years should feel a sudden urge to travel, but because Franz’s wish to see his homeland again after so many years indicated an unsuspected streak of sentiment in the old man. By Paul’s calculations Franz had fled the Continent seventy years ago, when the Emperor Franz Joseph had ruled over his hotch-potch of a dozen quarrelsome races of which Franz’s people, the Croats, were then a persecuted minority. Paul had never heard the Croat speak of Austria-Hungary with affection. It was the home, he would say of
Schlamperei—
which he translated as a policy of deliberate drift, a tolerance for romantic nonsense, and to a man with a lifelong dedication to money-making
Schlamperei
was an unforgiveable sin. It was therefore with some astonishment that Paul had read into the old man’s letter a kind of confession, for Franz had written, ‘ . . . I’ve had a very long run, my boy, and can’t expect more than another year or so. Before I go I should dearly love to see what they have made of it over there, since the old Empire broke up and everybody chose their own road to perdition. You might find it difficult to believe but I have always had a filial affection for the Old Man’ (he meant, presumably, Franz Joseph, who had ruled from 1848 until 1916) ‘and before I die I have a ridiculous desire to ride in a carriage along the Prater, and take a final sniff of the air of Transylvania. I daresay the journey will kill me but if it does then I shall have no complaints. Whilst the City of London is undeniably the only place where a man can put on weight whilst making a fortune, it is not, I think, a place where one would wish to leave one’s bones! Last week I made a shorter sentimental journey to your father’s grave, in Nunhead Cemetery. It was, perhaps, the sight of those grey acres that suggested this grandiose display of sentiment!’

Franz did not leave his old bones in Transylvania. Judging by the series of luridly-coloured picture postcards received by the twins, by Claire and others, his return to Vienna, after a lapse of almost three-quarters of a century, invigorated him and in mid-September that year Paul was again surprised to hear Franz’s precise voice on the telephone and to learn that he had that day landed in Plymouth.

‘What the devil are you doing in Plymouth, you restless old rascal?’ Paul demanded, and Franz said that he had made the outward journey by trans-Continental express but had returned home by sea from Trieste and would be passing through Paxtonbury in an hour or so. If Paul cared to meet him there he was welcome; there was a later train on to town and they could spend an afternoon together.

‘I’ll meet you, of course I’ll meet you,’ he said, beginning to wonder if the old chap was senile, ‘but why on earth don’t you stop off and stay with us for a week or two? There isn’t all that hurry to get back to London at your age, is there?’

‘As a matter of fact there is,’ Franz replied, unexpectedly. ‘To my way of thinking even minutes count but don’t expect me to explain that from a public telephone-box! My train gets in at one-fifteen and if you intend to meet me be there, because I shan’t get out unless you are, do you understand?’

‘I’ll be there,’ Paul said, resignedly, and replaced the receiver with a suspicion that Uncle Franz’s apparent hurry might have something to do with the twins who had been left in charge of the patron’s various enterprises during his absence. He mentioned as much to Claire but all Claire said was, ‘You’re a born worrier, Paul! Why on earth should you suppose anything like that? Those boys are perfectly capable of looking after his interests. They’ve been more or less running his business for years!’

‘Nobody runs Uncle Franz’s business!’ Paul said, ‘and I shall get to the bottom of this! It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if those two hadn’t been monkeying on the Stock Exchange while he was away!’ and he drove off across the moor, his disquiet causing him to arrive far too early and spend an impatient three-quarters of an hour stamping up and down the platform, awaiting the boat train.

He saw Franz leaning from the window before the train came to a halt and was relieved by his obvious chirpiness. The old fellow was as spruce as ever, his face sunburned the colour of an old walnut and his Van Dyck beard curled Continental fashion, so that he looked like the most elderly character in Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’, one of Paul’s favourite pictures.

He went along to the compartment and supervised the unloading of Franz’s cases, more than enough to load a barrow, and with the note of tolerant impatience he reserved for the Croat, said, ‘You don’t have to bother with all this clutter. I’m taking you along home whether you like it or not. Put all this stuff in the left-luggage office and we’ll have lunch at The Mitre and get back to Shallowford for tea. Claire’s expecting you.’

‘Then I shall have to disappoint her,’ Franz said, flatly. ‘I’m catching the late-afternoon train and only my duty to you disposed me to break my journey to this desert staging-post. If I survive I may well join you for Christmas but in the meantime there’s salvaging to be done, I assure you.’

‘So those boys of mine let you down after all?’ Paul said and the old Croat’s Father Christmas eyebrows shot up an inch as he looked at Paul with humorous concern.

‘Good heavens, no!’ he said. ‘Whatever gave you that idea? I’ve been in constant touch with them and they’ve been splendid, quite splendid! I can’t imagine how you produced a pair of smart operators like Steve and Andy. Are you quite sure Claire didn’t cuckold you one day while you were out ploughing?’

‘Then what the devil is your hurry?’ Paul demanded. ‘At ninety-three you can’t be all that essential to the business!’ and Franz said, with a twinkle, ‘I don’t suppose I am but I like to pretend to myself that it is so! After all, it’s all I’ve got to hold me to life and I daresay, at my age, you’ll feel precisely the same about your damned fields and dripping woods! The fact is, I’ve learned a good deal in the last few months, and perhaps it’s lucky for all of us that I made that trip. I had my suspicions, mind you, but I have to admit that I was scared once I saw it at close quarters.’

‘Suspicions about what? You’ve only been on holiday in Vienna, haven’t you?’

‘To get there I crossed Germany,’ Franz said, ‘and I was sufficiently misguided to stop overnight in Munich. A month or so later I stayed a few days in Nuremberg, and even in Austria I was able to confer with certain associates. The truth is, my dear fellow, the balloon is almost ready to ascend!’

‘Damn it,
what
balloon?’ said Paul, impatiently, and Franz replied, settling himself in the car and adjusting the impeccable creases in his trousers, ‘Ah, I thought that would confound you! It’s what follows from having your nose in the dirt all your life! I suppose you have heard of Hitler, have you not?’

‘Well, of course I have,’ Paul said, ‘who hasn’t? He makes more noise than the Kaiser used to but what of it?’

‘What of it?’ said Franz crisply. ‘The Kaiser turned everything upside down, didn’t he? And made you a small fortune into the bargain.’

‘Are you trying to tell me you think there’s danger of war?’

‘Indeed I am,’ Franz said, ‘but a very different kind of war from anything in the past. There won’t be anything gentlemanly about this one!’

‘There wasn’t anything gentlemanly about the last!’ Paul retorted, ‘ask anyone who was at Ypres or on the Somme!’

‘Oh, I’m not talking about the actual waging of it, the mere fisticuffs part!’ Franz said, with a blandness that Paul found irritating. ‘I’m talking about the political aspects, the impact on Western civilisation as a whole! That maniac means business and unless we people wake up in time that disgusting swastika of his will fly in all manner of unlikely places; Buckingham Palace maybe! Oh, you can chortle, but I don’t think you would if you’ve seen what I’ve seen this summer, or talked to people whose near relatives are actually populating his extermination centres!’

As usual Paul found himself impressed, in spite of private reservations that the old man was exaggerating. Franz was a Jew, of course, and he supposed that made a difference, for even Henry Pitts had expressed indignation of
pogroms
in Germany since the Nazi party had taken control, and yet, the prospect of actually being called upon to fight Germany again, had never cost Paul, or anyone else in the Valley, a moment’s loss of sleep. He said, more soberly, ‘Very well, Uncle Franz, what did you actually see? One of those idiotic rallies, with everyone goosestepping, wearing fancy shirts and shouting “Heil Hitler”?’

‘Yes,’ said Franz, without the customary spice of his professional cynicism, ‘I saw that but I also saw elderly women and seven-year-olds scrubbing the streets and being kept at it by arrogant young thugs with dog whips! I saw whole Jewish shopping centres wrecked and looted and, in Vienna, I was infected by the panic of men I have known gamble twenty thousand pounds on a hunch and then spend the evening drinking schnapps and listening to folk music without so much as telephoning their broker! I have lived a very long time, my boy, and seen a very great deal. I have not lost my touch or my sense of smell and can still sniff powder a long way off. And even though I find it difficult to read small print without spectacles I can still recognise a vulture when I see one.’

He seemed abstracted during the meal they had at The Mitre in the Cathedral Close and reluctant to return to the subject but over their coffee, after Paul had given him the family news, he said, suddenly, ‘There was a reason for my returning by sea! I couldn’t bring myself to cross Germany again, not even to fly over it, you understand?’

‘I can’t help feeling you’re exaggerating a little,’ Paul said, ‘for I can’t imagine anyone, even the Germans, starting another war. Incidents and an occasional bickering, no doubt, with plenty of sabre-rattling and a financial crisis or two, but when it comes to the actual point anyone would think twice; three times! Anyone, that is, who was actually there and Hitler served on the Western Front.’