Post of Honour (95 page)

‘Good God. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. You mean, seriously?’

‘Well, as seriously as he ever does anything,’ Mary said, ‘and he must have known what he was doing because as soon as he came back four years later, he took up the option. As a matter of fact he was seventeen and from that moment I stopped feeling three years older. There was never anyone else, but I imagine you always knew that.’

‘Yes,’ he said thankfully, ‘I always knew it. It bothered your mother a little but it never bothered me.’

He had his own memories of the spot and they were more poignant than hers. In the early days of his first marriage, several centuries ago it now seemed, he had crossed over to the islet in a punt with Grace one blazing summer noontime and they had mended a long and bitter quarrel by making love in the bracken like a couple of precocious adolescents. He said nothing to her, however, remembering that she had never set eyes on Grace, and that no-one, not even Grace’s son Simon, mentioned her in the Valley nowadays. She and her suffragettes were as outmoded as the Lollards and Anabaptists, belonging to an age of voluminous, dust-raising skirts, picture hats and croquet parties on the lawn. Twice since then the world had torn itself to pieces and in between there had been the long dismal haul from slump to agricultural convalescence.

They turned north-west along the path that ran beside the Mere, passed Sam Potter’s cottage on the right, crossed a shallow stream and picked their way through tree stumps to a rabbit run that wound across the shoulder of the highest point of the woods to an open space crowned by a great slab of sandstone. It was not a good place to bring a horse and he seldom rode this way, but he had always known it was here that Hazel Potter had lived wild from April until late autumn.

He had forgotten how lonely it was, and how attractive too in a desolate way, the long slope studded with dwarf jack-pines and a sea of rhododendrons screening the margin of the Mere. Spring, it seemed to him, was late this year. The primroses were out and lower down there had been marsh marigolds and a few wild daffodils but no bluebells showed in the open patches below and if he remembered rightly there was always an April haze of bluebells on this south-facing slope. It was a grey, sunless day, with tattered clouds drifting slowly east and the breeze lacking its usual tang of the sea. He said, as though addressing himself, ‘Funny thing, wars always seem to shuffle the seasons. The rhythm changes when there’s a war on but I’ll promise you something more cheerful. The summer it finishes will be a scorcher. They had wet summers right through the Boer War and the Great War but in 1902, the year I came here and again in 1919, the heath caught fire and every stream went dry.’

‘How about the summer of Dunkirk?’ she asked, smiling at his tendency to hark back over the years whenever they were alone, but he said this too conformed to pattern because it demonstrated Jerry’s weather-luck. ‘They always have fine weather for their offensives,’ he said, ‘whereas whenever we launch one, everything is bogged down in the mud.’

They had reached the bend in the path opposite the jutting slab of sandstone and he suddenly recollected that the cave was somewhere close by and poked around in the stiff screen of gorse that ran along under the rock. Then, congratulating himself on his memory, he found a tiny tunnel that ran north straight into a short slide of stones and flints and called over his shoulder, ‘Here, Mary! I thought I hadn’t forgotten. I haven’t been up here in ten years but there it is,’ and he made room for her to brush past and then followed her into a shallow excavation under the spur, reflecting that he was now standing on the exact spot where Rachel Eveleigh delivered Hazel Potter of the child who was to sire his first grandson. It brought the past very close and for a moment he fancied he could see Ikey Palfrey’s swift grin and the bloom on Hazel Potter’s cheek, could even hear Ikey’s laugh and soft, muffled burr of Hazel’s brogue. ‘Now what the hell induced Rumble to send us on this goose chase?’ he demanded, looking round the empty cave and sniffing the dank air of the place. Then he noticed that she was smiling and that her eyes, ‘spaniel’s eyes’ he always thought of them, were shining with excitement as she touched the dry earth walls where a root broke through the crust and curled into a question mark.

‘It’s just as I imagined,’ she said, ‘it’s got a terrible privacy, as though it was the very heart of the Valley. Do
you
feel that?’

‘No, I don’t but I can imagine that was how Hazel Potter and Ikey thought of it. Nobody ever once saw them together until he married her early in the war, so they must have been intensely private people. But me, I like sun and a broad vista. My centrepiece is the edge of French Wood, looking south. What’s this pact Rumble talked about? Do you mind telling me?’

‘It’s to do with his survival,’ she said, ‘and I don’t care how ridiculous it sounds it makes sense to me. This is where he began and this is the hub of where he’ll finish. It’s the gypsy in him. He
knows,
don’t you see? And he wants to convince me, so that I won’t be jittery all the time he’s away. He began in the Valley and he’ll come back to the Valley in the end.’ She looked at him speculatively. ‘Sentimental tosh?’

‘To anyone but you, me or Rumble,’ he said, and it occurred to him that, over the years, he had done her an injustice, imagining that even she, the most fanciful of the brood, had never shared his sense of communion with the Valley.

‘You want to stay up here a bit?’

‘Yes, a few minutes but first there’s something I can tell you that I haven’t told Rumble. You’ll be having another grandchild before Christmas.’

‘You let him go? Without telling the boy? But that was crazy. He would have …’

‘Backed down? Yes, I imagine he would. That was why I didn’t tell him. Nobody hobbles Rumble, not even me. He’d made up his mind and I didn’t want to be the one to bring more pressure on him. You brought all you could and I wasn’t holding him to ransom. Do you imagine I don’t know him by now?’

He stood just inside the entrance of the cave looking and feeling foolish, so much so that she laughed at his chapfallen expression and said, ‘Run along, Dad, I’ll find my own way back. And don’t fuss! I’ve got seven months to go and I hope it’s another boy. That’ll give you that much more insurance, won’t it?’

He took her hand, pressed it, and blundered back along the gorse tunnel into the open. The heaviness that had dragged at him all through the scurry of Rumble’s departure was gone but it was not wholly as a result of the news she had passed to him so casually but rather her awareness of his desperate need for some kind of reassurance in the future. They must, he told himself, have often discussed his obsession with this tangle of woods, fields and streams that had been his being for so long, and it therefore followed that their estimate of him, and his involvement with the place, was not the rich joke it was to the rest of the family. It was comforting, he thought, to be tolerated to this extent, and his step as he descended to the clearing surrounding Sam Potter’s cottage was almost jaunty.

‘If I’m looking for continuity,’ he told himself smugly, ‘it’s there I’m most likely to find it! I only hope to God that some damned U-boat doesn’t make fools of us all.’

Old Sam Potter came out of his back door carrying a bowl of chicken mash and Paul hailed him gratefully. Despite years of axe-swinging and constant plodding in clumsy boots about the bogs and coverts at this end of the estate, Sam had put on weight and Paul judged he would turn the scale at seventeen stones. ‘Hi, there!’ he shouted, ‘Mary and I have just seen Rumble Patrick off. Any news of your boy?’

‘Giddon no,’ Sam said, ‘Dick doan put pen to paper any more than I ever did but ’er phoned his Uncle Smut a—month or two back, asking for fags. They’m short of ’em out yonder it zeems.’

‘Out yonder’ Paul reflected, might mean anywhere at all to Sam Potter, who still thought of Cornwall and Somerset as foreign countries. He declined Sam’s invitation for ‘a dish o’ tay’ and leaned his elbows on the fence that surrounded the cottage. ‘Ah, they’re a footloose lot, Sam,’ he commiserated, ‘but they’ll grow tired of it I wouldn’t wonder, and settle here like the rest of us,’ but Sam had no faith in the stability of Shallowfordians born after the death of Queen Victoria and said, scattering the mash among lean, long-legged hens, ‘Dornee believe it, Squire. They baint happy in one place more than an hour at a time, not none of ’em. And if they do come backalong they’ll turn the bliddy plaace upzide down, you zee if they don’t.’

At any other time Paul would have confirmed Sam’s prophecy but today, despite Rumble’s departure, he felt optimistic and turning away passed down the long side of the Mere to the point where he could find the shortest ascent to the spot where they had left the car. As though to encourage him the sun at last broke through the canopy of cloud and a beam struck the underside of a giant beech, sprouting a hundred thousand new leaves. The lesson of renewal could not have been lost upon him for he thought, ‘We’re a couple of old cart-horses, Sam and I, and it’s high time we were put out to grass. It’s just an accident that we’re both still at it but I’m damned if I do more than potter the moment the war’s over,’ and he tackled the last ten yards of the wooded slope and began, thankfully, to descend to the level of the road.

III

M
ary emerged from the cave and climbed the lip of heather to the flat surface of the rock, asking herself whether her serenity had been assumed for the benefit of her father, admittedly the Valley’s most persistent worrier, but deciding that it had not and that she did indeed feel confidence in the future. To that extent Rumble Patrick’s notion of sending her here had succeeded more than he could have hoped. It was curious, she thought, but not more so than their association, their long partnership as children, his solemn proposal at seventeen, his sudden reappearance four years later and a marriage that had resulted in the safe, unexacting life she had always promised herself. He would almost certainly return as he had promised, and within hours they would pick up the threads of their life, exploiting his sense of purpose, rebuilding Periwinkle to his design, and steadily adding to their family and stock; another Paul and another Claire, caught up in the rhythm of the Valley.

She sat there a long time looking down on the spread of farms between the southern rim of the woods and the blue-grey line of the heath and dunes where Four Winds and Home Farm borders met the sea. Down there, she reflected, were innumerable Pittses and Craddocks and Stokes and Eveleighs, and some of them had been there a very long time but none as long as the Potters whose blood ran in her children, born and unborn. It increased her sense of kinship with him to reflect that when he had emerged, bawling and brick-red from under this very slab of sandstone, she had been toddling about the Big House yonder, almost as though she expected and awaited him. Now she could contemplate him as boy and man, as husband and lover, and think herself more fortunate than most. She wondered if seven years as Rumble Patrick’s wife had not left her a little smug and decided, with the minimum of self-reproach, that it had but why not? Their marriage had been modelled on that of her parents and this was her doing, not his. Her relationship with her mother was more that of a younger sister than a daughter and when all the others had gone their several ways, and she had stayed on awaiting Rumble’s return, she had had a better opportunity to assess the Big House partnership than any of the others who dismissed man, wife and way of life as hopelessly old-fashioned. Perhaps they were and perhaps it was, but the point was it had worked, and so had her own marriage, a carbon copy of the original, so who cared a damn about sex equality as proclaimed by poor old Rachel, or pursued by the sophisticated wives of The Pair?

It might have raised a blush on Claire’s cheek to know how closely her eldest daughter had checked the simple arithmetic of her relationship with Paul, and how faithfully the answers had been applied at Periwinkle. For the first time in years Mary recalled her mother’s blunt advice on the subject of marriage, offered only a week or two before Rumble had whisked her off to the little farm on the far side of the Valley. ‘The way to make it work is to be cheerfully available morning, noon and night, and go along with his major decisions, no matter how damn silly they seem at the time. If you do quarrel don’t sulk but make it up in bed. In ten minutes you’ll both be back to normal.’ That was about it, for Claire with thirty-four years’ experience behind her, and for Mary with a mere seven. Looking back on those years she could remember no more than an occasional tiff, always resolved by mother’s prescription.

In her new-found serenity she could ponder the family as a whole, sparing a thought for the marriages of her brothers, and it seemed to her that all three of them would have benefited by closer observance of the old couple—a partnership, with the man a short head out in front, and any little differences resolved horizontally. Well, there it was and there was nothing very complicated about it. For mother and daughter it had meant fulfilment and that, she supposed, was an end in itself.

Down on the nearest grey stub of a sawn pine a dog fox looked up at her and showed his teeth. Peace and certainty warmed her breasts and belly and she called, in the brogue of old Sam Potter, ‘Hullo there, you ole varmint!’ The fox lifted a forepaw as though prepared to meet the challenge but suddenly changed his mind and padded unhurriedly down the long, sandy slope. In a moment, moving as jauntily as her father, she had slipped off the spur and followed him down to the Mere.

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About the Author

R. F. Delderfield (1912–1972) was born in South London. On leaving school he joined the
Exmouth Chronicle
newspaper as a junior reporter and went on to become editor. He began to write stage plays and then became a highly successful novelist, renowned for brilliantly portraying slices of English life. With the publication of his first saga, A Horseman Riding By, he became one of Britain’s most popular authors, and his novels have been bestsellers ever since. Many of his works, including A Horseman Riding By,
To Serve Them All My Days
, the Avenue novels, and
Diana
, were adapted for television.