Post of Honour (80 page)

Simon said, with a tired smile, ‘Major Harries? I’ve already seen him. He met us and gave us lunch at Tilbury yesterday!’ and when Paul exclaimed Simon added, stifling a yawn, ‘Soon it won’t be a question of Tories, Socialists and Liberals, Gov’nor, just for and against—those who oppose the clock being put back a thousand years, and those with nothing else in mind! There won’t be any neutrals. Everyone here will have to step to one side of the line and that’s what I intend to stress when I lecture.’

‘Before you dive back into the mill-race you’ll damn well get some rest and put on a bit of weight!’ Paul said, gruffly. ‘Rachel means to see to that and I intend to back her up!’

‘Oh, sure, sure,’ Simon said, ‘I’ll get fit first. That’s obligatory if I’m to do any good, but I’m not “cured” as you might say, just confirmed! I daresay it sounds vainglorious but I wouldn’t have missed it and I don’t regret a bloody day of it! At least I’ve satisfied myself I was on the right tack. How about you?’

‘We’ll discuss that when you’ve had a good meal and ten hours’ sleep,’ Paul said, ‘Doctor Maureen is waiting to give you a good going-over. However, just for the record, I’m on your side of the line and so are a minority of thinking people, although not many hereabouts.’

Simon looked across the Sorrel to the watershed as they topped the rise and began the winding descent to the river road. It was a mild spring day and the Valley looked patiently expectant, not yet in its uniform of spring-green but half-dressed, one might have said, in hourly anticipation of its coming-out date.

‘I thought about this place a good deal while I was in Spain,’ he admitted. ‘You mightn’t believe me but it exerts its magic on me as powerfully as on you, although maybe I’m too inhibited to make a fetish of it. It must have been a wonderful place to live in the old, carefree days when you came rampaging down from London.’

‘They weren’t all that carefree. We had our problems, just as your generation has. The main difference was most people were content with three square meals a day, a good night’s rest and to leave it at that!’

‘Ah! “Bread alone”!’ Simon commented. ‘Well, it’s all the poor devils in Spain ask but there are plenty to deny them even that!’

‘No!’ Paul countered, almost savagely, ‘not “bread alone” Simon! A man who wants to be more than a cabbage needs a dream to spread on his bread! Otherwise one might as well take one’s place alongside the cows and wait to be milked night and morning!’ And then, seeing Simon looking at him quizzically, ‘I’m sorry, I made up my mind on my way over to meet you that I’d talk platitudes for at least a day or so,’ and Simon, grinning, said, ‘Well, that comes under the heading of a platitude Gov’nor but I’ll not quarrel with it and I don’t suppose my mother would have done,’ and as they turned on to the river road Paul saw him fumble in his inside pocket and pull out a cheap folder containing the two soiled photographs of Grace he had sent to Spain a month or two after their parting in Falmouth. Impulsively he stopped the car and said, ‘Let me look at those, Simon!’ and Simon handed him the folder and sat silently while he scrutinised the pictures, one a faded snapshot of Grace in the rose garden she had created, the other a formal studio-portrait, taken on their Paris honeymoon, in 1903. He said, handing them back, ‘Environment doesn’t count for a damned thing! You’re as alike as peas in a pod, physically and temperamentally! What’s in the blood stays there!’ and he let the clutch in and pulled back on to the road. They drove the rest of the way home in silence.

Chapter Nineteen

I

S
imon and Rachel remained in the Valley until early summer but Paul was relieved they were gone before the Munich crisis set everybody (including constitutional optimists like Claire, Henry Pitts and Smut Potter) by the ears. They came to him one by one, freely admitting their misjudgements but when it was all over, and Chamberlain had returned waving his piece of paper, they joined the tumultuous acclamation of the man who had ‘saved the peace’. Their complacency angered him, although he went out of his way not to show it. Instead he spent long hours in his office, planning, conserving, getting his stock records up-to-date and cautiously adding to his purchases of seed, chemical manures and machinery. His fear was now not so much that there would be a war but that there would not, that he was laying up stock against a day when the Valley lost its identity in an almost bloodless absorption of Western Europe. For that, it would seem, was the alternative that most people preferred, including those he would have classed as rebels in the old society.

He began thinking along these nightmarish lines after a discussion with Smut Potter round about Christmas-time. Smut, carelessly going his rounds, called to him one day as he was crossing Codsall bridge and said, ‘Well, Squire, three months ago I would have bet my favourite twelve-bore to a pound o’ tay us would have been keepin’ Christmas in they bliddy trenches but it’s blown over after all!’ and although it was no more than a casual greeting, of the kind that Smut offered to almost everyone he met between Coombe Bay and Periwinkle, Paul was sour enough to challenge him, saying sharply, ‘It’s a damned pity we aren’t while we’ve still got a few twelve-bores to put to our shoulders!’ and Smut at once lowered his van window, apparently to hear the news that had put so much grit into Paul’s voice.

‘You abben heard nothin’ new, ’ave ’ee?’ he asked. ‘That bliddy Hitler baint jumped the gun, has he?’ and Paul, mollified by the anxiety in his voice, replied, ‘No, I’ve heard nothing new, but I daresay we shall soon enough!’

Smut looked relieved then and also a little sheepish. ‘Gordamme, you put the fear o’ God into me, Squire!’ he admitted and then, in a puzzled voice, ‘Don’t you reckon us is over it? I had the bliddy jitters backalong but it zeems quiet enough now according to the papers and radio.’

Paul was tempted to stay and preach, to use Smut as a captive audience for his forebodings but he changed his mind, saying, ill-humouredly, ‘Well that’s very reassuring! I’ll sleep a lot better for hearing that, Smut!’ and went his way hands in pockets so that Smut looked after him with concern, wondering what factors were at work to make Squire so crusty these days, and whether his own wife, Marie, had infected him with her non-stop Jeremiads about
les sattes Boches
but he was not left wondering for long. Winter passed and spring followed and with spring came the pounce on Prague, and after that Mussolini’s grab at Albania, and in the confused weeks that followed they began to drift back to him, bringing with them what he most needed, a feeling of unity and purpose and comradeship, that made him feel less like a prophet of doom stalking the Valley and muttering of wrath to come.

Henry Pitts was the first of the prodigals, declaring that ‘ ’Twas time us stopped the rot’, and Harold Codsall was the next, sending his boy over with the trailer to buy chemical manure against the arrival of a stock he had ordered in Paxtonbury. Then Smut, holding forth in the bar of The Raven one night, declared that ‘only Squire and his boy’ had been right about what would follow Munich and word of this reached Paul the next day by Parson Horsey who confessed, sadly, that sooner or later someone would have to do something about Hitler and that whatever it was would be inconsistent with the charters of the Peace Pledge and the League of Nations. But none of these affirmations brought him as much comfort as Claire’s, who said one night, as they sat by the fire, ‘Did I tell you I had a word on the ’phone with two of your daughters-in-law while you were out?’

‘No,’ he said, without displaying much interest, ‘You didn’t; anything new?’

‘Yes there was,’ she said, knitting her brows, ‘and perhaps you can make sense of it for I can’t and neither, it seemed, could Monica or Margaret, both of whom appear convinced that their respective husbands—our sons that is—have gone raving mad! They’ve joined the Air Force!’

He dropped the book he was reading and stood up with such a jerk that his Boer scar gave him a twinge.

‘They’ve
what
?’

‘Well, not joined exactly but put themselves on some kind of Reserve. You remember one of their crazes was gliding or flying? Well, now they go up every Sunday and they’re both going on some kind of course for a fortnight. It’s all to do with the scare—you know, flying balloons or something.’

‘The Balloon Barrage?’

‘Yes, that was it, that’s what Margaret said.’

‘Well I’m damned,’ he said, subsiding, ‘they are about the last two I would have thought to join that kind of outfit at a time like this!’ and suddenly he laughed. ‘I’m not laughing at them but at what old Franz would have said. I hope he’s where he can’t see them wasting their time fiddling about with barrage balloons when the price of scrap is at an all-time high.’

‘What exactly
are
barrage balloons?’ she asked, mildly, and he told her, adding that the very fact amateurs like The Pair had been enrolled meant that somebody was taking a more serious view than he had supposed.

‘You sound very cheerful about it,’ she said, and he replied that he was, in spite of all it might mean, for even a war was better than watching Europe taken over piecemeal and half the world enslaved without so much as a whimper on the part of the victims.

‘You never used to think like that, Paul. You were always utterly opposed to war, even when everyone about here was war-crazy in 1914.’

‘It was quite different then,’ he said, ‘and it amazes me that everybody doesn’t
see
it’s different! I still think that last war was an act of madness on everybody’s part—certainly continuing it after 1916 was—but there’s simply no other way of containing that bunch of psychopaths. They haven’t a damn thing in common with the Kaiser’s bunch. Losing to Germany in ’14 or ’15 would have been bad but if we’d agreed to a patched-up peace after a year or so, it would have all been forgotten by now!’ He leaned forward, earnestly, and she was impressed by the note of pleading in his voice. ‘Tell me, Claire, tell me honestly, do
you
think I’m a nervous old maid laying in all these stocks and building that fuel-storage tank? If you do, then for God’s sake say so and give me a chance to convince you!’

She said, quietly, ‘No, I think you know what you’re doing, Paul. I think you always know what you’re doing if it concerns the Valley.’

‘You’ve been in a minority of two then,’ he said, but with relief in his voice. ‘Only Smut’s wife, old Marie, encouraged me at the time. You didn’t! Why didn’t you?’

‘Why didn’t I what?’

‘Back me up, tell me I was right. I would have appreciated it.’

She said, levelly, ‘You show me any woman about here with sons who is ready to admit, even to herself, to the prospect of seeing them face what you faced last time, or the possibility of suffering what wives and mothers like me and Marian Eveleigh and Elinor Codsall suffered all the time you were out there. No Paul, you don’t bring it into the open, you go on pretending it’s a bad dream that will fade out as soon as it’s light! That’s what I’ve been doing ever since Simon went off to fight in Spain.’

He pondered her confession, finding it not only human but logical. One was so apt to think of war as a man’s business whereas, of course, it was not and involved everybody one way or another, not because the methods of waging war had changed with the introduction of bombers but because feather-distributing women of Gloria Pitts’ type were rare. The majority, the Claires, the Marians and the Elinors of this world, seldom came forward to claim their fair share of the misery when their menfolk were lying out in mud under a barrage, or were home again, flaunting their medals and heroism. Usually, as in Claire’s case, they kept their thoughts and misgivings to themselves, and tried to look interested when they had to listen to stories of blood and privation. This was the first time in twenty years he had ever given a thought to all she must have suffered during the period he had been in France. Was it any different in any other home in the Valley? He said, gently, ‘You should have told me that before, Claire, but I’m glad it popped out!’ and suddenly she was on the rug beside him with her arms round his knees, as though interposing herself between him and the pointing finger of Kitchener in 1914. ‘You won’t go again, Paul! You wouldn’t? I couldn’t face that time again, no matter what!’ and he said, stroking her hair, ‘Good heavens, no, I shan’t go! How could I, at my age? Besides, if it does come there will be more than enough to do right here, I can tell you.’ She nodded, eagerly, and he thought it strange that his reassurance, which did not include immunity for Simon, Stevie, Andy or her two sons-in-law, Ian and Rumble, should bring her such immediate comfort. Then he remembered what Maureen had said, what he himself had always suspected. She didn’t give a damn about her children now they were grown and dispersed. All her adult life her eggs had been in one basket.

II

T
here had always been a rhythm to their relationship, a swing and a drift that seemed not to be governed by external pressures, or by their own impulses but rather the chances that struck high and low notes in the harmony of the marriage. A trivial misunderstanding might promote a period of coolness, a casual mental adjustment, such as that resulting from this talk of war, bring them close together again so that for weeks together they would respond to one another far more like lovers than man and woman who had shared a bed for thirty years.

In that final summer of the old world, or rather to world that had tried so unavailingly to resolve itself into the older pattern, they were closer than they had ever been since the long interval between the children growing up and the birth of John, now a chubby, mischievous child of five. They would sometimes take him down to the shanty where Claire would teach him to swim in the rock-pool where she herself had learned and Paul would squat on a rock at the mouth of the goyle and watch them, marvelling a little at her patience and also at the curious sinuosity of her body in the water. The thrust of her American crawl never ceased to surprise him and these days she was unencumbered by the heavy, serge bathing dress she had worn the day he proposed to her within shouting distance of this favourite spot of theirs. Her figure, he thought, had withstood the years and successive pregnancies astonishingly well. It was thickening about the waist but not appreciably so for a woman over fifty. Her long legs were still, in his view at least, the shapeliest in the Valley, her breasts were full but high and her behind, always ample, had for him the pleasing flow of a ripe pear, so that when he saw her stand poised at the deepest end of the pool, flash down into the clear water and forge the entire length of the trough under water he would gloat over her as some sensual memory stirred in him and sometimes he would select a specially bright coin from his hoard of memories and, as it were, hold it momentarily between finger and thumb.

He did not always accompany her there. He had work to do, although it was now confined, in the main, to checking his defences, like a conscientious garrison-commander anticipating a siege but uncertain when the first enemy hull would show over the horizon. There were times, indeed, when he doubted if there would be a siege, and then he would chide himself for a man who had let fancy dominate him but always, via newspapers, radio or the telephone links he had established with Simon, Rachel and the twins, would come sinister hints and rumours that hardened his sense of purpose and then she would have to spend her afternoons at the pool alone with John, or in the company of the Lee Gibsons, an elderly American couple who had rented the tall Victorian villa once occupied by Celia Lovell and used as a penitentiary for the erring Bruce Lovell.