Post of Honour (77 page)

‘Why the devil didn’t she ring and ask one of us to fetch her?’ he demanded and then, because Claire looked worried, ‘Is she all right? Is Simon all right?’ and he got up to go into the hall but she stopped him, saying, ‘I think she wants to talk to you alone. I’ll take John down to Maureen for his inoculation and join you at lunch. She’s agreed to stay on a day or so.’ Rachel appeared, looking, he thought, not merely bedraggled after a two-mile walk in pelting rain but extremely unsure of herself.

Claire took her hat, coat and gloves, told her to stand against the fire and went out, carrying the protesting two-year-old with her. Paul said, ‘I’ve forgotten, Rachel. Do you drink or don’t you?’ and Rachel said she would be glad of a whisky if there was one going and her clothes began to steam in the heat of the library fire.

‘I ought to have had more sense, I suppose,’ she said, ‘but the fact is I just didn’t think of telephoning. I’ve got too much on my mind and that’s why I’m here!’

‘Is Simon ill?’

‘No, he’s very well, or was the last time I saw him.’

‘You . . . you’ve not parted?’

‘No, at least, not in the conventional way. We’ve had a big row tho’, the first in six years, and it doesn’t make it any easier to reflect that basically he was right and I was wrong! But even if I climbed down it wouldn’t stop him now. You might but I couldn’t and that isn’t surprising when you think of it. It was me who headed him that way in the beginning.’

He said, handing her a large whisky and soda, ‘Sit down and take it easy. Where is Simon right now?’

‘In Falmouth, unless he’s already sailed.’

‘Sailed where?’

‘For Spain, as a volunteer.’

‘Good God!’ Paul exclaimed, deeply shocked. ‘What the devil made him do a damned silly thing like that?’

She said, regarding him carefully over the rim of the glass, ‘How much are you interested down here? I mean, it’s common currency with us but I realise it mightn’t be for you. He got it into his head that every able-bodied man who gives a damn about the future ought to stop talking and do something and, as I said, he’s probably right! But after all, he’s well over thirty and was almost certain to win a seat in Glasgow next election. I think he could do more good right here, fighting this non-intervention farce but maybe that’s only my way of kidding myself. What really frightens me is the idea of him being killed or captured. It’s a no-holds-barred war you know!’

‘He must be off his head!’ Paul said. ‘What can he hope to do out there? One man, caught up in a war between two bunches of foreigners? What possible purpose does he think he’ll achieve?’

‘Solidarity of the Left I imagine,’ Rachel said. ‘That’s what got him as far as Falmouth. There’s an International Brigade forming, people like us, who think this is a dress-rehearsal for the Fascist take-over in Europe.’

‘
You
think that, or only Simon does?’

‘Oh, I think it, and surely it’s evident, even to our homegrown Fascists, but that doesn’t reconcile me to losing him. You remember what I wrote to you at the time we married? I said I’d do everything I could to make him a good wife and I seem to have succeeded too well. He’s quite dedicated now, far more than I am or ever could be! I found that out when we argued about his going. I suppose you’d call me Frankenstein, of the rose-pink variety. In the last year or so I’ve paled but he’s gone several shades deeper red!’

‘How on earth do you think I can help?’

‘I don’t know really, I came here because I was . . . well . . . desperate I suppose. I thought you might hurry down to Falmouth before the boat sails for Bordeaux—that’s where they’re said to be congregating—and try and talk him out of it one way or another.’

‘If you can’t how can I? He thinks of me as an anachronism and always has!’

‘He’s got a very great affection for you nonetheless.’

Paul was surprised to hear it; mild respect, perhaps, in a slightly contemptuous way, but hardly affection. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘We were talking about it a night or two ago. What he admires about you is your consistency. That, and your genuine concern for the few people you think you can influence along broadly progressive lines.’

‘The trouble with you and Simon and everyone else of your persuasion,’ he complained, ‘is that you slot every idea and abstract into a labelled bin and forget that politics consist of people with toothache, mother-in-law troubles and rate-summonses! I daresay I seem very old-fashioned to you but at least I’ve never overlooked that! And touching his mother I might as well tell you she’s still very much alive in Simon and always has been. She seems to have passed on this . . . this mania for bannerwaving, like a congenital defect, like cross-eyes or a weak chest.’

He sounded so exasperated that she laughed and then he laughed too, adding, ‘Listen to me! Preaching at you! I’ll go to Falmouth right away if you can tell me where to locate him but only on condition you stop here and let Claire mother you for a week or two. Will you do that?’

‘Yes,’ she said earnestly, ‘and I’ll never cease to be grateful if you can talk sense into him.’

‘I can’t promise to do that,’ he said, ‘but I’ll try. Of my seven children only Mary ever regarded me as anything more than an amiable fuddy-duddy. Maybe I should have been a bit more Victorian in my methods of bringing them up.’

‘You did all right, Squire,’ she said, ‘ask my mother or anyone else about here!’ and she walked across to the tall window and looked out across the dripping paddock at the distant outbuildings of Home Farm. ‘It’s odd,’ she said, with an air of apology, ‘a bit of me is beginning to think you might have been far closer to the truth than any of us—accidentally one might say, like a man who made up his mind to pursue a path even if it did appear to lead in the opposite direction! After all, the world’s round isn’t it? You might be the odd one who goes the whole way while all we short-cutters get lost in the woods!’

It seemed to him the most oblique endorsement of his policy that anyone ever stated to his face.

The directions she gave him were vague. Simon was supposed to be boarding a coaster in Falmouth and crossing to Brest where, if everything went according to plan, he would meet volunteers from countries as widely separated as Mexico and Bulgaria and travel overland to Bordeaux. Here a Republican coaster was scheduled to pick them up and take them on to San Sebastian. It was typical, Paul thought, of the sheer muddle-headedness of the Left, an itinerary based on hope, faith and slogans, rather than steamship tickets and a thick-soled pair of walking shoes. He found the coaster easily enough, a grubby little cockleshell called
Hans Voos
,
out of Amsterdam, but the only man aboard her appeared to speak no English save the single word ‘Okay’, which he repeated, with varying degrees of emphasis, whenever Paul asked a question. He booked bed and breakfast at an hotel near the harbour, fortified himself with a couple of stiff whiskies and went looking for Simon but it was not until the following day that he located him through a wharf-loafer, who said the Dutch vessel was due to sail the following morning and that some young Englishmen had been recruited as crew. Paul never learned how the vessel had arrived there from Amsterdam with a crew of one, or what the ship was supposed to be transporting apart from British idealism.

Simon was in high spirits, looking and talking like a young missionary who, after innumerable setbacks, had just been given sailing instructions to New Guinea and promised the likelihood of being eaten by cannibals. He did not seem surprised to see his father, admitting that he had thought it probable Rachel would approach him in the hope of bringing about a last-minute cancellation of plans.

‘I can tell you now, Gov’nor,’ he said, ‘that there won’t be any change, although I appreciate your coming all this way for her sake. She ought to have known better than to involve you for, damn it, I’m thirty-two not seventeen! I know precisely what I’m doing and what’s at stake.’

‘It’s my belief that you don’t!’ growled Paul, ‘and frankly I think you’re in for some nasty shocks once you embroil yourself in that free-for-all! Don’t think I’m not on your side—in the general sense that is. I hope to God these chaps give Franco and his mercenaries a damned good thrashing and bundle them back to Africa but I think it’s their concern, not ours, nor Russia’s, Italy’s or anyone else’s! I’ve seen two wars and unless Britain was directly involved they could fight another in my stableyard before I’d join in!’

‘But hang it, Gov’nor, this is a dress-rehearsal and how it goes will resolve the future for every one of us!’ Simon argued although good-humouredly. ‘We don’t expect chaps your age to join in but how the devil can I preach solidarity against Fascism if I’m not prepared to peel off my own coat and take a crack at them? I tried to make Rachel see that, and she ought to see it, but all she could say was that I would do more good staying home and helping to organise public opinion against Non-intervention.’

‘And I’m by no means persuaded she isn’t right at that,’ Paul said, wishing Jimmy Grenfell was alive to back him up. ‘I’ll grant you we’ve been drifting pretty hopelessly since the war, and that things are getting in a hopeless muddle one way and another, but if that’s so isn’t it the duty of chaps your age to become legislators rather than Robin Hoods? She says you would win your next fight at the hustings.’

‘Suppose I did?’ Simon said, bitterly, ‘where would I go from there? I’m been stumping the country for six years and Capital is more firmly entrenched in Westminster than it was when you and old Jimmy Grenfell held the platform, in pre-world war days! We were getting somewhere then, if history books are to be believed, but we’ve been backsliding ever since and if you don’t believe me look what’s happening in Germany and Italy right now! Anyone with enough guts to oppose racialism and rule-by-rubber-truncheon is shot out of hand or sent to rot behind barbed wire! Have you really thought about the logical outcome of Fascism, as practised by bastards like Hitler and Mussolini?’

‘I’ve thought about it a great deal,’ Paul said, ‘and all I’m saying is that insurance against that kind of thing happening here won’t be bought by your death in a Spanish ditch!’

‘Well, we must agree to differ I suppose,’ Simon said, cheerfully. ‘You’ll wake up sooner or later and I hope to God it isn’t too late!’ Then, with a boyish grin, ‘Would you like to meet the troops? Deckhands all, tho’ I doubt if any one of them has ever sailed further than the Isle of Wight on Bank Holiday,’ and without waiting for his father to accept this dubious honour he led the way to a ramshackle pub where Paul was introduced as ‘the Gov’nor’ to a group of piratical-looking young men drinking beer out of tankards and seemingly as full of missionary zeal as his son. There was a slim, pallid youth, whose clothes looked as if they had been borrowed from a younger brother’s wardrobe, a squat, broad-shouldered Scot, who spoke with a thick Glasgow accent and was addressed as ‘Tarn’ by the others, but the recruit who impressed Paul the most was a handsome young chap with a public-school accent, who said his name was Barnaby and had, Paul learned, interrupted his studies at Cambridge to sign on as a deckhand on the
Hans Voos
,
which was the only legal way of leaving the country for the rendezvous in Bordeaux. The obvious sincerity of the group touched him in spite of himself and deep in his heart he envied their faith in their own convictions, their high spirits and derring-do. He thought, ‘They’re only a later edition of the young idiots who thronged into the Yeomanry after Black Week, 1899, and went off to fight Kruger, and I daresay they’ll soon be as disenchanted with International Socialism as we were with Imperialism.’ Then, glancing at Simon (deep in a dialectical discussion with the Glasgwegian and talking, as far as Paul could hear, straight from the textbook) ‘I wish Grace could see him now! He’s so very like her in her suffragette days, with the same passionate belief in theory and the same compulsion to put theory to the touch! Well, I only hope he’s luckier than she was and neither rots in gaol or finishes six feet down on a Continental plain!’

Simon said, ‘Will you stay and see us off, Gov?’ and Paul said no, he wouldn’t, because he had a strong suspicion that they wouldn’t get further than the harbour entrance before a Government official came aboard with a court order and returned them to the shore. ‘I’ll bail the lot of you out if I have to,’ he promised, ‘but only on condition that you all go home and tackle whatever you’re trying to do in a country where you can be understood from a platform.’

They seemed to think this was meant as a joke and certainly accepted it as one, thumping his shoulders and forcing him to drink another tankard of beer, as though he had been a parent conferring with daredevil prefects on Speech Day. Then he and Simon went outside and back along the quay to his hotel. ‘It’s coming in thick again,’ Paul said, ‘and it’s a four hours’ drive, so I’ll say good-bye and good luck and try and think of something cheerful to tell Rachel when I get home.’

‘Tell her to keep my candidature warm,’ Simon said. ‘I’ll be back inside six months and you’ll find out what it’s like to have an MP in the family. You haven’t said anything about Mother and the kids. Are they all well and happy?’

‘Mary is,’ he said, dolefully, ‘but I wouldn’t know about the others. Whiz seems settled enough with that airman of hers but they spend most of their time abroad. As for The Pair, they’re still making money I suppose, spending most of it on their wives and the rest on the sort of rubbish everyone prefers to something worth having these days!’

‘Well, cheer up, Gov!’ he said. ‘You look good for another thirty years as an eighteenth-century squire and by that time things will almost certainly have sorted themselves out a bit, even if all the surviving squires are in museums!’ but suddenly his smile faded and he looked serious as he said, ‘Listen Gov, I’ll write . . . I’ll write anything important direct to you, understand? I’m more glad than I can say I had this chance of seeing you and all I want you to understand is that I’m doing what I think to be right—what I think
has
to be done by some of us, some time, so why not now? Put like that I suppose it sounds like an attitude but even if it is it’s my attitude and deeply felt! The minute I get an address I’ll write and . . . ’ he stopped suddenly and came as near to blushing as anyone with his sallow complexion could.