Post of Honour (19 page)

It was only then, as she made a step towards the bed, that he realised she was in earnest, that she was in desperate need of some kind of penance and would have been grateful for a blow across the face the moment she had confessed to Lane-Phelps’ fumblings and her suspicions regarding Hazel. He understood too that her emotions were essentially primitive, far more so than his, a newcomer to an area where the emotional relationship between man and wife had nothing to do with statutes and codes of behaviour written into books. He felt pity for her and compassion made him wiser yet without altogether banishing humour from such a grotesque situation. He said, thoughtfully, ‘Has anyone ever beaten you?’

‘My mother, when I deserved it.’

‘Never your father?’

‘He left that kind of thing to her. Perhaps it’s a pity.’

‘It’s not too late. Bend over that chair and stay there until I tell you to get up!’

Even then she had power to shock him. Without a word or a change of expression she did as he bid, hoisting her nightgown and bending low so that her hair brushed the carpet. She was trembling but not from fear and no longer for shame. The very humiliation of her posture brought a sense of release as though, by calling his bluff, she was already atoning in some degree for the self-abasement of the day. She might have felt differently about this had she seen his expression as he stood contemplating her defenceless buttocks. It held no trace of irritation or astonishment now. He was grinning, broadly, and as the cane dropped to the floor, she felt in place of its bite, a tremendous slap that would have precipitated her over the back of the chair had he not saved her by grabbing the folds of her nightgown and robe. Then, before she had half-recovered her balance, he had spun her round and was holding her in a grip that drove the breath from her body.

‘Don’t be such a damned fool!’ he shouted through his laughter. ‘I’m no wife-beater and you’re no Potter girl! Take those damned things off before I tear them off and get into bed and turn out the light! I know a way to teach you who is boss around here!’ and he kissed her, swung her off her feet and tossed her bodily on the bed.

It was his tone more than the gesture that sobered her, that and his abrupt stalk round the end of the bed and into the dressing-room where he kept his riding clothes.

She got up and stood in the centre of the room massaging her tingling behind and then, catching sight of her reflection in the tall mirror, was amazed to discover herself smiling. They were over it, through it, and had the rhythm of their lives by the tail again and she could have shouted her relief and thankfulness at the top of her voice. She heard him grunting as he tugged at his long boots and called, after a moment, ‘Do you want a hand with those?’ and he shouted back, ‘No! Get into bed for God’s sake woman!’ and a few moments later he was beside her handling her as impatiently as she ever recalled.

Yet it was she, exhausted by the emotional demands of the day, who slept first while he lay awake awhile, going about his familiar business of sorting out and docketing his impressions, his thoughts returning to her accurate diagnosis of his ill-humour over the last few months—his personal identification with the turmoil that had reigned in the Valley since Franz had ’phoned that August night telling him that war was inevitable and would be anything but the field-day-jubilee that everyone expected. She was right of course; she knew him better than anyone, better even than John Rudd who had shared the adventure from the very beginning. He saw the Valley people as a family, as dear to him as Grace’s boy Simon and the twins, and his daughters Mary and Whiz, all sound asleep in their quarters along the corridor. He shared the mounting desperation of wives like Elinor Codsall and the misery of mothers like Marian Eveleigh, at war not only with the Germans but with her own husband. He worried, with Old Honeyman, over the shrinking manpower of the farms and dreaded the impossible tasks that would face them all at harvest time. He brooded, with Rose Derwent, on the probable fate of her horses, bought up and driven away by Government scavengers to drag great hunks of metal along foreign roads. He had saved the old timber of the estate for the time being but how long would it be before they presented him with fresh ultimatums? And if the deadlock in France showed no signs of breaking how would it be possible, in two years or three, to reharness the Valley to his dreams? It was a depressing role, this witnessing of twelve years’ thought and toil being swept away like bubbles of silt on a Sorrel freshet but tonight, for the first time in months, he felt comparatively optimistic and this was not on account of his victory over the timber pirates. His cheerful mood stemmed directly from the woman asleep in his arms, a wife of eight years’ standing and the mother of four of his children but also, at this moment, a living symbol of the Valley, of its fruitfulness and beauty season by season. Her breasts were its contours and in her thighs lived its abundancy. ‘And not so damned fanciful either!’ he thought, ‘for there were Derwents hereabouts when the first Tudor arrived and probably before that if they could be traced! I didn’t get my hands on this land simply by paying the Lovell family a cheque but by taking her into partnership and giving her children in this house. All I’ve done since I got here is to play stud-horse and caretaker, and I daresay I’ll go on doing just that as long as I live for it won’t become Craddock land in the real sense until her children, and her children’s children, take on where I leave off!’ The conclusion and the glow of possession engendered by it, was a balm and warmed his belly like a glass of Burgundy. He pulled her closer, his lips brushing her hair and as he drifted off to sleep the knowledge that whole armies were locked in conflict across the Channel seemed a trivial thing compared to the eternity of red soil and the race who cared for it.

Chapter Five

I

J
ohn Rudd, Eveleigh, Sam Potter, indeed anyone who claimed to know Paul Craddock at all well would have argued that he was anything but an impulsive man. He had a reputation for slow, cud-chewing thought, and carefully weighed decisions, for assembling every scrap of available evidence and carrying it away to study in privacy before taking action on any matter involving the administration or development of the estate. And yet, viewed in retrospect, all of the important decisions of his life had been arrived at impulsively, almost recklessly—the purchase of thirteen hundred acres after a twenty-four hour survey; his marriage to Grace Lovell and later to Claire Derwent; his adoption of Ikey Palfrey and, finally, in the summer of 1915, his final conclusions on the war which led, more or less directly, to his personal participation in it.

Until then he had qualified as a guarded neutral, an object of distrust by the Kaiser-hating fire-eaters, men like Horace Handcock who saw in the conflict vindication of the prophecies of a decade. Almost alone among the menfolk of the Valley Paul was not visited by the virus of war-fever, devoting his energies exclusively to buttressing the Valley against the pressures exerted upon it from the hour Paxtonbury’s newsagents’ boys had run shrieking along the down platform proclaiming Armageddon and summoning the more impressionable to the Bosporus and the Sweetwater Canal. On that momentous occasion Paul did not even get his feet wet. He looked upon the involvement of Britain in the Franco-German quarrel as a grave misjudgement on the part of the Government, whom he had always regarded as pacific and conciliatory. When it was clear that there could be no withdrawal and that, for good or evil, there would be a few months’ carnage, he moderated his attitude, saying that he supposed they would all come to their senses sooner or later and he made no secret of the fact that he intended to continue minding his own business, taking full advantage of the Government’s reawakening interest in the land. Fortunately for him (for patriotism could be menacing) he was qualified to stand aside. He was thirty-five when the war began and still suffered from the leg wound gained in the last epidemic of patriotic hysteria. He also had considerable responsibilities, including a wife, a young family, a seat on the local Bench and suzerainty over six prosperous farms each expected to do its share in stocking the national larder. At that stage, indeed, at any foreseeable stage in the war, he could have been said to be serving national interests more usefully at home than overseas and he continued to tell himself this until the war was about a year old. Then, brick by brick, the protective barricade he had raised against the outside world began to crumble so that he was obliged to take stock of it and ponder how long it could sustain mounting pressures from all sides and how much longer he could justify his neutrality. For thirteen years now his life had been the Valley, the people who lived there, the crops they raised and the cattle they reared, and for him no other obligations existed. Under the tremendous stresses of a war however, with half the world already involved and every participant bent on total victory, the entire social structure of the Valley began to change at a velocity that made his head spin. The slatternly camp arose on the moor and raucous north-countrymen flocked in like so many Viking invaders. Machines proliferated and their stench poisoned the air of the countryside but, what was worse, his own men drifted away in twos and threes leaving every farm short of labour and at a time when official demands on the yield of the land were assuming fantastic proportions. In one way he welcomed those demands. They gave him plenty to do and justified his faith in the land and in the improvements he had made over the years. With the expert knowledge of John Rudd, and his own not inconsiderable experience to help him, he grappled with manpower and equipment problems, solving them all one way or another but hard work and improvisation could not rescue him from personal involvement in domestic problems, or as time passed, from involvement in the tragedies of the Valley. It was here that his detachment foundered.

In the last ten years Paul Craddock had developed a knack found in the best type of regimental officer. He had a remarkable memory for the kind of personal trivia that convinced tenants and estate workers that their interests were his and this was neither a pose nor an oblique way of keeping the estate machinery oiled. He really did think of the Eveleighs and the Codsalls as his friends and the Derwents and Rudds not as relatives or deputies but as allies and he went far beyond that, reaching right down to the level of the two or three-score hired men and maids employed on the farms and in the workshops of the Valley, craftsmen who were all, in some degree, dependent upon the estate. He knew everybody in the vale by Christian name. He knew whether they were married or single, how much they earned and how many children they supported. He knew the age of most of them and, in some cases, how long they had occupied their cottages and what kind of home-makers they were. Thus, when the men began to drift away to face death or disablement he was concerned for every one of them and for their families. Each brick knocked from his wall had a name upon it and when a sufficient number had been removed, or knocked askew, he was as deeply committed to the war as the least of them and they all knew it and looked to him to solve some of their immediate problems.

The first of these to confront him was the loss of Will Codsall’s labour at Periwinkle, smallest of the Valley farms and as time went on, he and John Rudd formed a pool of part-time, migratory labour to fill this and other vacancies so that soon Valley farming became almost a communal venture. This system broke down, however, after a mere eight months and with far more land under the plough than in peacetime, adjustments had to be made in the way of concentrating stock and merging machinery and even borders. Some local trades withered altogether. Thatching was the first of them and Nick Salter and his boys went to work at High Coombe and Four Winds. The fishing industry at Coombe Bay died after the recall to the Navy of Tom Williams and two of his crewmen and the local building industry was soon at a standstill, for Ephraim Morgan lost Walt Pascoe and three other specialists and although, in a sense, the failure of subsidiary trades was no immediate concern of the estate, Paul felt it incumbent upon him to do all he could to keep them alive against the return of the volunteers. Apart from using all available manpower on the denuded farms he also reduced nearly a score of his cottage rents and provided cart-horse transport for the pupils of Mary Willoughby’s little school. He maintained good relations with the camp and indulgent officers sometimes turned a blind eye to his temporary enlistment of a craftsman or agriculturist from among the swarm of recruits.

Then the casualties began to occur, the first of them, Roddy, John Rudd’s boy, who had written home in September,
‘We are looking for Von Spee: when we find him we shall go to the bottom!’
thus fulfilling John’s prophecy regarding the emptiness of boasts regarding the Navy’s invincibility. After that came news of Walt Pascoe’s death in Gallipoli but although Paul regretted Walt, whom he had liked, he did not waste much time on his widow, one of the few local women who seemed to be enjoying the war. After that, in May, 1915, came news that Tom Williams and his nephew had been torpedoed and of the near-riot that occurred in the churchyard when Tom was seen to put flowers on the grave of the German seamen buried there. Then a letter came from the old German Professor, who wrote from America to say that his only son, whisked into the Kaiser’s Army whilst on holiday, had been killed in Champagne. It was foolish, perhaps, to mourn the death of an enemy yet Paul did regret a boy whom he had always regarded as a charming, friendly lad with a splendid physique and courtly manners. He did not and could not see Gottfried Scholtzer as a ravisher of Belgian women and bayoneter of infants notwithstanding the report that the Germans had just used poison gas at Ypres. For all that reports of the use of poison gas as a weapon of war between civilised nations helped to set Paul thinking along new lines, for it began to seem to him that unless the war was won, and that within a reasonable period, civilisation would go to the devil and, what was more to the point, all prospects of the Valley resuming its pre-war rhythm would disappear for his lifetime. In this context he said to Rudd, ‘You can count me in from now, John! It might be the craziest thing that’s ever been allowed to happen but it has happened and as I see it we’ve no choice but to win,’ and old John, sucking his pipe, had replied, ‘The longer it goes on the less chance there is of a negotiated peace. For my part I don’t think it’s possible; everybody’s blood is up and it won’t cool until all European males between eighteen and forty are dead, or home with a limb missing! There’s another thing, too. Win or lose don’t deceive yourself into thinking it can ever be the same again, here or anywhere else! All the wrong people are getting killed and all the flag-flappers are making money. Thank God I’ve had most of my life. Chaps your age will have to adjust themselves to something very different when the bloody thing does run itself into the ground!’ In a year or so there were many who subscribed to this theory but in the early summer of 1915 John Rudd’s views were regarded as eccentric and even his wife Maureen derided them.

And so the barricade began to tumble but there was no major collapse of Paul’s defences until the Will Codsall episode. Once again it was a Codsall who supplied an unpleasant jolt to the Valley.

Will came home on leave in April and everyone was shocked at his appearance. He had left the previous August a thick-set, bumbling, broad-shouldered man, with a mild, friendly and slightly bucolic approach to all. He returned a shambling scarecrow, with a vague, shifty expression behind his eyes and a jumpiness that made his callers nervous when he handled his rifle and shot rats in the yard. Few could forget that Will’s father had died raving mad and to those who remembered Martin there seemed a disturbing resemblance between Will and the man who had taken to staring out to sea and had one day gone home to murder his wife. Will mooched about, answering questions of ‘What was it like?’ vaguely and unsatisfactorily, beginning sentences and leaving them unfinished but everybody made allowances for the fact that he had gone through a bad time after being rushed into the line in October and seeing most of his Paxtonbury cronies blown to pieces. They cheered up when Will, fortified by a few pints of ale, worked himself up into a ferocious mood at The Raven and described in detail, and with seeming relish, how he had brained Germans with spades and shot them down at close range when they advanced in close formation outside Ypres. Then, on the night before he was due to return, Paul was summoned from his office to find a tense Elinor Codsall awaiting him in the hall and Elinor, who seldom wasted words, went straight to the point regarding her fears for Will’s sanity.

‘ ’Er’s goin’ just like ’is old man!’ she declared, ‘and I’ve ’ad a rare old do with him, I c’n tell ’ee, Squire! Tiz no good carrying on about ’ow ’ee got ’isself into this ole pickle be joinin’ they Territorials backalong. The fact is he’ll do someone a mischief if us don’t tell they Army people there’s alwus bin daftness in the Codsall family! He’s talking about staying on yer and hiding hisself, same as Smut Potter did time he crowned Gilroy’s keeper! Says he’s done his bit ’an won’t taake no more part in it and if I hadn’t got un half-slewed with cider he’d ha’ been gone by now an’ us would have had the police over yer to march un off to prison!’

Paul accompanied her back to Periwinkle where he found a half-stupefied Will in the kitchen. Will had drained a gallon jar of home-brewed cider but he was not uplifted by it. Although he could hardly stand he was sour and intractable, declaring with idiotic persistence that he had no intention of returning to the colours but would ‘lie up somewheres ’till tiz all over!’ Paul tried to reason with him but in the end he had to fetch Doctor Maureen, who suggested getting Will’s leave extended. She made out a certificate to the effect that he was suffering from chest trouble and got it countersigned by the camp doctor, who was under an obligation to her for helping him free of charge during an epidemic during the winter. The Army doctor then examined Will and contacted his base at Paxtonbury with the result that Will was put to bed and remained there for a fortnight, after which he was, so the camp doctor assured them, regraded for duty at the base and was unlikely to be sent back to France for some months. The night before Will left home for the second time he called on Paul and at first seemed almost himself again but Paul was disturbed by his declaration, made on leaving, that he had seen his father on the battlefield. Under careful questioning he admitted that it was only Martin’s ghost he had seen and Paul put this down to some form of hallucination brought on by shock and exhaustion and was relieved to learn that Will could now anticipate a few weeks’ rest at base. Neither he, nor Will, nor the camp doctor were aware at that time of the tenuousness of the Ypres defences, after the counter-attack that had followed the German use of gas. Will reported to base on Saturday night; thirty-six hours later he was back at Le Havre and a month later the second of the dreaded buff telegrams arrived in the Valley. Will Codsall, the first man in the Valley to go to war, had been killed in action.