Post of Honour (76 page)

‘I had something like that in mind myself,’ he said, ‘but not enough guile to put it into words!’ and he kissed her, absurdly grateful to be home again and reflected that, when they were alone here, with all the older children grown and dispersed, and two-year-old John and the staff asleep upstairs, there was a tranquillity and timelessness about the old house that made him feel half his age.

He rode over to Periwinkle the next day, a mild, damp morning, with the mist lying in the bottoms and everything drooping and glistening in the hedges. Mary, busily baking her bread, looked ponderous but very fit and when he asked her if any precise date had been quoted she told him Maureen had ‘pencilled in’ St Valentine’s Day.

‘Don’t let her take you in,’ he said, ‘she generally contrives to get things wrong. I was away from home when four out of my seven were born!’ and he called through the covered-way to Rumble who could be heard swinging an axe in the strawyard.

‘Come in for a minute, I’ve got news for you!’

Mary said, laughing, ‘He won’t like it, whatever it is. The one thing he really enjoys is chopping. Someone in Canada taught him to split sixpences edgeways and whenever he’s out of sorts all I have to do is hand him the axe and lead him to the chopping block! In ten minutes we’ve not only got more than enough for the evening’s burning but he’s worked off all his bad temper on stumps.’

‘I don’t believe that boy ever shows bad temper,’ Paul said, as they went back into the pleasant kitchen, where a great log fire burned and everything twinkled, and Mary told him he was happy enough most of the time but had been worrying over the struggle to maintain monthly payments on the farm, and also the fact that he couldn’t expand as fast as he had planned without hiring another hand. ‘He says farmers will never get a square deal in this country until they find a way to cut out the middleman,’ she added.

‘He sounds just like his grandfather,’ said Paul. ‘Every time I called on the Dell in the old days Tamer blathered about bankruptcy. When you’re as old as me you’ll realise this is no more than a built-in pessimism that the British farmer claims as a birthright! It comes from thousands of years’ sparring with our weather!’

Rumble came in, his face streaked with sweat and said, nodding at Mary, ‘She looks like a penguin, doesn’t she?’ and Mary countered with, ‘Kick off those filthy boots! I don’t want half the yard in here!’ so that again Paul thought how easy was their relationship and how greatly it differed from the more guarded exchanges between Simon and Rachel, or between the twins and their sophisticated wives. He said,

‘I’ve got a windfall for you; Uncle Franz Zorndorff left money to split between the family and Mary will get her share in a week or two.’

He saw them exchange glances and it seemed to him that Rumble’s eyes sparkled.

‘That’s encouraging! How much?’

‘Round about fifteen hundred,’ Paul lied happily and Rumble’s cheeks turned a deeper shade of pink as his arm slipped over Mary’s shoulders and they stood with their backs to the fire looking, Paul thought, like a couple of children on Christmas morning.

‘That was damned decent of the old boy!’ Rumble said. ‘I don’t recall seeing him more than twice. Why didn’t the twins get the lot? After all, they worked for him.’

‘The twins have done very well,’ Paul told him. ‘They get the Empire and we get the leavings! He left us ten thousand on condition I spend half on the estate. I’ve earmarked five and the rest, less lawyer’s fees, passes to Mary, Whiz and Simon. That was what he had in mind when I last talked to him and that’s how it will be split!’

He wondered if Rumble suspected that this was largely a fiction and also how he would maintain it if Simon and Rachel declined to accept their share of the money. Rumble said, deliberately, ‘That’s terrific, Gov, but don’t give us Mary’s share, keep it towards the balance of the freehold and I’ll make it up to her later. It will mean this place is really ours that much sooner!’ He glanced at Mary; ‘Do you go along with that, Mar?’

‘Of course!’ she said, ‘it’s by far the best way of using it. We don’t want for anything right now and in a couple of years we shall be in the clear. Do what Rumble says, Daddy!’

They had, he reflected, outwitted him after all, and he thought how Claire would laugh when he got home and reported as much. ‘There’s at least one thing you can say about my brood,’ he told himself, ‘not one of them is greedy for money and that’s something to crow about these days!’

‘You’re sure you wouldn’t rather have it as a float?’ he persisted. ‘I’m in no hurry to be paid off and I never cared for the arrangement in the first place. I realise you want to be independent and I admire you for it, but you might just as well have stayed tenants until you got some capital together!’

‘That’s the way I want it,’ Rumble said, looking very obstinate, ‘for I don’t care to be a tenant, not even with you as my landlord! If I farm land I’ve got to own it! Maybe it’s something they dinned into me in the Dominions.’

‘Very well,’ Paul said, ‘that’s the way it will be. It will mean Periwinkle is two-thirds yours already and that’s not bad going for twelve months.’ He looked at Mary again. ‘Are you determined to have the baby here? You wouldn’t rather your mother made arrangements to go in St Theresa’s, at Paxtonbury?’

‘He’ll be born right here!’ she confirmed. ‘Mother had all her children at home and Rumble was born in the Valley. It wouldn’t be the same if he was born elsewhere, even tho’ Paxtonbury is just over the hill, and now I must see to my bread!’ and she went out leaving Rumble to walk him to the gate.

‘I’ve had the telephone installed,’ Rumble said, expressing an anxiety Paul had never felt for Claire, ‘and Doctor Maureen looks in every day.’ Then, with a diffidence that struck Paul as uncharacteristic, ‘Do you happen to know Grandfather Potter’s real name? I always meant to ask Mother Meg and never did!’ and Paul, racking his brains, said this was a teaser, for he had never heard anyone in the Valley call the old man anything but ‘Tamer’.

‘Do you want to name your boy after him?’ he asked and Rumble said, almost apologetically, ‘Yes, I should like to but don’t ask me why, something to do with your famous “continuity” I imagine. Do you think Uncle Sam or Uncle Smut would know?’

‘If they don’t we can easily look in the parish records,’ Paul told him. ‘I’ll ride down there right away and ring through. What’s your number?’ and he jotted it down in the memoranda block he was never without when he rode about the Valley.

An hour later he was chuckling and when Parson Horsey asked him the joke he said, returning the register, ‘I look like being saddled with a grandson called Jeremiah and I must say it’s an apt name for anyone destined to farm hereabouts! Do you christen many babies with Biblical names these days?’

‘Not one in fifty,’ Horsey said, ‘all the boys are named something fancy, like “Trevor” or “Bevis”, and all the girls are named after film stars!’

Well, thank God we can shorten it to something manageable,’ said Paul and rang through from Coombe Bay public ’phone booth to pass the information to Rumble.

He was there again in under a fortnight and for once Maureen had calculated the date accurately. The baby, christened Jerry (‘Jeremiah is asking too much of family loyalty’ Rumble declared) was born on February 14th. Mary was exhausted but delighted, and Claire said the baby had ‘an Italianate look’, having inherited Paul’s narrow features and his parents’ dark complexion. ‘There’s certainly not much Derwent about him,’ she said ruefully, when she came downstairs, and Rumble had promised to add the name ‘Edward’ to keep the record straight. Then, Valley-fashion, they all wet the baby’s head and Thirza was loaned as nurse for a fortnight, less because Mary needed her than for fear of giving offence, for Thirza regarded this function as an hereditary right and would have sulked for a week if she had been denied it.

‘Well,’ said Claire, as they drove down the track to the river road, ‘I suppose you’re satisfied now! You look almost as smug as Rumble I must say!’

‘It’s a matter of satisfaction to both of us,’ he said, ‘for it means that at least one of our children is anchored here. If young John stays put, and doesn’t take it into his head to go rooting in scrapyards, or taking the world’s troubles on his shoulders like Simon, then we’re in business for another two generations!’

She glanced at him affectionately, wondering at the astounding durability of the roots he had thrown down since the day he had first ridden into High Coombe yard in his stained Yeomanry uniform, and she had handed him sherry and pikelets and held his hand a little longer than necessary. In some ways it seemed a thousand years ago and in others only a month, and as she thought this she experienced the familiar, comforting desire to be possessed by him as though it was twenty years ago. ‘Maybe it’s an instinctive awareness of the cycle caused by another birth,’ she thought and wondered, even whilst laughing at herself, how she could get him to go to bed earlier than usual that night without making it obvious and pandering to his vanity, for even at fifty-six he was still inclined to parade his virility.

II

I
n the old days the ripples of the world beyond Paxtonbury seldom reached the lower reaches of the Sorrel. A few did, much trumpeted events, like the death of a monarch and the coronation of another but it was not often that Valley folk involved themselves, even objectively, in international topics. Before 1914 the latest titbit of scandal from the Dell could always be sure of winning more word-coverage in The Raven than, say, an Agadir crisis, or the latest Armenian massacre. The first international event that really captured the imagination in the Valley had been the war but even then not because Valley men were claimed and killed but on account of the invasion of the Valley by so many foreigners passing through the moor training camp and the convalescent home. After the war the Valley did its best to revive the policy of deliberate isolation, counting London, and the affairs of the Continent, well lost after so much cackling, scurrying and heartbreak. They were aware, of course, that all kinds of things did happen east of Sorrel Halt and west of the Whin, but no one, not even Horace Handcock (whose patriotism had managed to survive the General Strike and the Invergordon Mutiny) made more than a passing reference to events such as Lindbergh’s flight of the Atlantic, the Saar dispute, or the airship disaster at Beauvais. Farm prices interested them, and so did sporadic outbreaks of foot and mouth disease, but events like the trials of Metro-Vickers men in Moscow, and the perennial squabbles of French politicians went unread. The Valley was like a tiny community in the hinterland of a remote island; everyone living in it was intelligently aware of what went on in the local capital but only vaguely conscious of events further afield, especially those enacted in places separated from them by stretches of salt water. Few people in the Valley took a newspaper other than the
Country Weekly
and not all that number listened, with much attention, to the news bulletins although there was a radio of sorts in most of the farms and cottages.

All this began to change rather abruptly between the autumn of 1935 and the summer of 1936 and Paul, whose finger and thumb never really left the Valley pulse, was the first to notice this and become aware of the end of a deliberate dissociation with the world outside. The realisation came to him quite suddenly one frosty morning in October, 1935, when he was hailed by Henry Pitts from the lower stretch of Undercliff.

Henry, riding his tractor like a Roman charioteer, saw him testing the ice in one of the oxbows of the river and called, cheerily, ‘I zee that ole varmint be zettin’ about ’em niggermen, Maister!’ and somehow Paul at once knew that he was referring to Mussolini’s attack upon Abyssinia.

He went across to him and they talked for a spell on world events and it was soon after that, in the public bar of The Raven, that he heard people like Smut Potter and the blind veteran, Willis, engaged in argument over the probable fate of the sad-eyed Negus, currently a fugitive on his way to Britain.

Paul’s personal interest in world affairs had waned since Jimmy Grenfell’s death. Jimmy had always kept him in touch with the broad outlines of what was happening outside but now that both Jimmy and Uncle Franz were dead he found himself less and less addicted to reading leading articles in
The Times
and the
Mail
,
preferring late-night symphony concerts to the nine o’clock or midnight news-bulletins on the air. It was the voice of Adolf Hitler, that he heard by accident one night, that first made him conscious of his withdrawal and he said to Claire, absorbed in her favourite Priestley, ‘Good God! Can you imagine a man who sounds like that running a country populated by chaps with as much sense as Old Scholtzer? It’s fantastic! He sounds like a maniac in a fit!’

‘What was that, dear?’ Claire asked, mildly, dragged from the interminable Odyssey of
The Good Companions
,
and he said, smiling, ‘I’m sorry, I was only thinking aloud!’ but all the next day his mind returned to the phenomenon and although he spoke no word of German the speech had seemed to him to contain elements that a man could associate with the howl of the long-dead sheepdog of Preacher Willoughby, a dog that had caught rabies and had been shot by Smut Potter.

Then he noticed that others were equally concerned or, if not concerned, at least interested in the antics of the German Fuehrer and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in those of the Italian Duce and his eternal postures and extravagant claims to the Mediterranean, Corsica and Nice. Both of them became, in a sense, comedians, always good for a wry joke or a gibe, in a way that men like Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald were not, for these men were at least recognisable whereas Hitler and Mussolini were not and seemed different even from such flamboyant characters as the ageing Kaiser, now reported to be chopping trees in Holland.

Then the Spanish Civil War began and circumstances combined to compel Paul to take a more than casual interest in world affairs, for one morning, when he was at work in his office, Claire came in carrying baby John and said, ‘We’ve got a visitor, Paul. It’s Rachel!’ and when he said, with pleased surprise, ‘Simon too?’ Claire said Rachel was alone and wanted to see him at once. ‘She’s in the kitchen,’ she told him, ‘she was wet through, the silly girl! She walked up from the ’bus stop in Coombe Bay!’