The Green Gauntlet (16 page)

She stared at him with her mouth slightly open as though he had said something bad like the word ‘bugger’ that had earned him a clout on the ear at Easter. Then, while he waited, she did her best to look ordinary again and he reminded himself that she was the quickest person he knew to turn pink and lose control of a situation. She said, with a laughable attempt at severity ‘Of course he isn’t dead! This letter’s from him. What on earth makes you say a terrible thing like that?’

‘You were blubbing,’ he said, calmly, ‘but I’m jolly glad Rumble is okay. It’s funny him not being here this hols. It’s not the same, somehow. I passed Periwinkle on the way down from the moor. It looks like a big bonfire. After it’s out I mean.’

He waited, hoping she would tell him about the letter but instead she did something that would have irritated him very much had she been anyone but Mary, who was born that way and couldn’t help herself he supposed. She shot out her arms and embraced him, pressing him hard against her fat stomach, so that he suddenly remembered what had made him interrupt his rounds and approach her. He said as she released him, ‘What’s up, then? Is it because you’re getting fat?’

He was accustomed to adults reacting to perfectly reasonable questions with gusts of laughter or superior smiles but in her present mood her laughter surprised him. She said, struggling to contain it, ‘No, no, John I wasn’t crying about getting fat. I’m glad I’m getting fat. The fatter, the better,’ and then she stopped, wondering if she had gone too far. Their relationship, eased by Rumble, had always been an undemanding one but she shared her mother’s uncertainty about him. Sometimes it seemed to her he had never been a baby at all but had come into the world as a precocious eight-year-old whom it was impossible to treat as a child. At first she was inclined to change the subject but suddenly, deciding that she badly needed a confidant, she said:

‘I was crying because I miss Rumble even more than you do and this is to say he won’t be home for longer than we thought. He’s going through the Panama Canal and then right across the Pacific.’

Digesting this news, and promising himself that he would look at a map as soon as he got home, John returned to the more pressing topic, ‘Why are you glad you’re getting fat?’

She said, ‘Because I’m going to have a baby. That’s what’s making me fat and I like babies. It’ll be someone for Jerry to play with and anyway, as soon as he arrives I’ll be thin again.’ He said nothing so she went on. ‘You knew babies came from their mothers, didn’t you? The same as cows and horses?’

One of the endearing things about John Craddock was his meticulous regard for the truth. He said, ‘No, not really. I knew of animals, of course. I saw one of Francis Willoughby’s Red Demons calve—that time they had to kill the cow with the humane killer.’ His tone told her that he was concerned for her survival so she said gaily, ‘Well, they’re not likely to use the humane killer on me so don’t give it another thought.’

‘Why didn’t you read the letter at breakfast?’

‘Because I didn’t want to cry in front of everybody.’

‘But how did you know you would if you hadn’t read it?

‘Because I always do, I can’t help it, it’s just that I was born beside a waterworks—no, that’s a joke—what I mean is, some people can control themselves and some can’t. Just seeing Rumble’s handwriting makes me start to snivel and I can’t do a thing about it but you don’t have to tell anyone up at the house you caught me at it.’

‘All right, I won’t,’ he said, ‘but will you tell me something else about babies?’

She looked at him apprehensively and then smiled. More than ever he looked like a gnome, one of those wise, amiable gnomes who entertained Snow White in their house in the woods. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Can people who aren’t married have them?’

She considered, reflecting that she might have anticipated this and said, at length, ‘Yes, they can, but it’s silly of them because a baby has to have a father as well as a mother. Usually it’s the father who earns the money that keeps all three and if a woman isn’t married she’s often in a fix.’ She wondered whether to leave it at that. He seemed satisfied but his honesty was infectious, so she went on, after a pause, ‘People fall in love and usually a baby arrives soon after that. Not always, of course, but as a rule. A baby isn’t just something the mother produces. It’s part of the father too and even with people who aren’t married there has to be a father. It’s like …’

‘Like the bull?’

‘Yes,’ she said gratefully, ‘like the bull.’

‘And Rumble Patrick is your bull?’

He paused, as always resenting adult laughter, although Mary’s was moderate. ‘What’s funny about that?’

‘Nothing,’ she assured him, straightening her face, and for some reason feeling relieved at his innocence, ‘nothing at all. It was just an odd way of saying it. People are a bit different from animals and bulls don’t love the cows, or not a particular cow. But men and women, Rumble and me for instance, happen to love one another, so it isn’t in the least surprising that I’m having a baby and getting fat.’

He intended asking her how this had been achieved in Rumble’s absence but suddenly he understood that she had been making a considerable effort and decided that it would be unsporting to press her unduly, especially as she had been more patient with his line of questioning than his mother, the day he came home and sought further information concerning Francis Willoughby’s cow. He said, rising from the log, ‘Do you want me to go now?’

He was, she told herself, a very penetrating person and suddenly she felt closer to him than to anyone since Rumble had left the Valley.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s nearly lunchtime. Let’s go home together and you can show me where you found that spotted orchis you were talking about the other day.’

Wild flowers was an interest they shared and in the climb through the open part of the wood he seemed to dismiss the subject of babies and their relation to her swelling figure, but when they had found the patch of orchis, and reached the gate that led through the long orchard to the stableyard, he said suddenly, ‘Will it be another boy?’

‘I think so,’ she said, ‘but I can’t be sure. It might be twins. Twins run in the family.’ And then, seizing him by the hand with an impulsive tug prompted by conspiratorial affection and genuine excitement, ‘Suppose it is? What shall we call them if they are a boy and a girl? Can you suggest something different?’

He said at once, ‘Yes. The boy could be Winston and the girl could be Sorrel.’

‘Why that’s perfectly splendid,’ she said, meaning it. ‘We’ll certainly bear that in mind at the christening,’ and as they clattered down the broad stone steps into the yard she told herself that meeting him out there had been very good for her morale, as good or better than the intended drag along the Mere to Rumble’s cave, the sanctuary she usually sought on these occasions.

Chapter Six

Ration Party

I

T
o some extent almost every living soul in the Valley was involved in the black market but the profits and privileges resulting for the majority were so insignificant that even a dedicated sleuth like Constable Voysey, resident officer at Coombe Bay, rarely bothered to investigate and check the steady traffic in pork, beef, poultry, illicitly produced clotted cream, butter and eggs. To do so would have involved a complex machinery of personnel and vehicles, a network of informers, the tapping of telephones, the establishment of lookout points and, probably, a huge gaol to accommodate the convicted. Up at the camp he suspected that there might be traffic in various commodities in short supply but this was the concern of the military police. All that the black-browed Voysey could do to control the flow of rationed food out of the Valley to Paxtonbury middlemen was to keep eyes and ears open and make an occasional pounce on careless minnows and this, being an extremely conscientious and patriotic officer, he did. Voysey did not have to be told, of course, that several much bigger fish swam freely round the pool without even approaching the net, or that, by this time, they had organised themselves into a syndicate capable, had they wished, of making nonsense of his endeavours as bailiff. Moreover, without any help from Squire Craddock (possibly Voysey’s sole reliable ally in the entire Valley) he could identify those big fish and even classify them into weight categories.

The three Sorrel pike were Smut Potter, his French wife, Marie, and Jumbo Bellchamber, farming at The Dell half-way up the Coombe. They were at the hub of an organisation that reached out across the Valley, through farms and cottages, to the cold storage rooms of innumerable retailers extracting a steady profit from their regular peace-time customers, and Voysey, no matter how earnestly he tried, could only snatch the occasional customer and a local customer at that, for his superiors in Paxtonbury were clumsy at following up the leads he gave them after ducks and pigs and consignments of eggs had started on the first stage of their journey from his coastal patch.

It would be easy to see this widespread practice of selling rationed food as a war within a war, a vast and unsavoury conspiracy on the one hand and a determined preventive campaign on the other hand but it was not like that at all. There were no pitched battles, or even the odd skirmish of the kind Smut Potter had engaged in when he was king of the Valley poachers. There was no malice either, certainly not on the part of operators like Smut and Jumbo who, as survivors of one war, saw nothing unpatriotic in making a modest profit out of another. Smut, in fact, was prepared to defend himself when challenged by Squire Craddock, and his wife Marie, whose countrymen lay prostrate under the hated Boche, supported her husband’s viewpoint. There was patriotism and there was profit, and far from seeing these virtues in conflict Marie had, with Gallic logicality, succeeded in marrying one to the other. As she pointed out to Squire when he argued that every fowl sold on the black market was a virtual betrayal of the Resistance, well-fed Englishmen were more likely to hound the Boche from her country than pallid, half-starved Englishmen, nourished on dried egg and spam. The occasional sustenance she put into the bellies of English families surely stiffened their determination and might even encourage them to launch a Second Front at the earliest opportunity. There was no answer to this kind of reasoning and when Paul, in desperation, appealed to Smut, he ran his head against another wall of unanswerable logic. Smut rolled up his trouser leg and displayed blue seams of flesh marking the leg wound he had received near Valenciennes, in 1918, and, to drive the lesson home, he pointed to the large portrait of his only son, locally known as ‘Bon-Bon’, now serving in the Middle East.

‘There’s proof of what I got for a shillin’ a day backalong,’ he said placidly, ‘and my boy tells me he’s pickin’ up vower and zix a day in that bliddy ole desert where he’s tu. If us can’t make a bit extra when tiz there for the taakin’ tiz a bliddy poor do, Maister. So dornee preach king-and-country to me. Us all does it one way or the other, an’ you baint gonner tell me they Government chaps in London goes short of a fried egg or a leg o’ chicken. Giddon, t’woulden surprise me if they didden zit down to oysters and champagne dree times a week!’

It was more or less the same when Paul pursued his investigations in the Coombe. Jumbo Bellchamber, and his wife Violet, stood shoulder to shoulder in defence of a black market that neither of them would admit existed to any great extent.

‘You c’n tell that bloody nark Voysey he’s welcome to look in here any day,’ Jumbo declared. ‘He won’t see our larder overstocked, will he, Vi?’

‘Damn it, I’m not talking about the occasional fowl or the odd loin of pork you eat yourselves,’ protested Paul. ‘Everybody round here puts rationed food on their own table, and makes the occasional pound of butter on the side—you’d expect them to, seeing the opportunities they get. What Voysey suspects is that there’s a regular run between here and Paxtonbury tradesmen and that the prime movers behind it are you and Smut. He isn’t so sure about people like Francis Willoughby, the new people at High Coombe, and Henry Pitts, but he’s got his eye on you two, so all I’m saying is watch out. If you’re caught one of these days and end up in court don’t expect bail or sympathy from me. I’m not at all sure that a conviction wouldn’t amount to a breach of tenancy and give me the right to send you packing!’

The threat, if it was a threat, sobered Violet Bellchamber, in spite of the defensive grin it coaxed from her husband.

‘Aw, giddon, Squire,’ she said, ‘you woulden do a thing like that to a Potter. We been here zince I don’t know how long, and my Dad and Mother Meg thought a rare lot o’ you from the very beginning. I’m not sayin’ Jumbo and everyone else in the Valley is above makin’ a shillin’ or two zellin’ butter an’ crame to them as comes beggin’ for it, but us baint losin’ the war on that account, be us?’

Paul recognised the futility of arguing with them, of persuading them to involve themselves in the wider issues of the struggle. Nobody could call trench veterans like Smut Potter and Jumbo Bellchamber traitors, or even profiteers in the real sense of the word. Almost certainly, as in the last war, fortunes were being amassed by more sophisticated men who continued to think of themselves as patriots and by these standards the trickle of food that left the Valley by unauthorised routes was hardly worth a thought. All the same it would be degrading to see men and women he had always thought of as the real sinews of the country exposed in Paxtonbury police court as seedy rascals, cashing in on the U-boat campaign.

He reported the substance of his conversation to Voysey and left it at that, but the confrontations left a slightly sour taste in his mouth when he reflected that Valley men like Rumble Patrick were risking their lives to bring food and petrol across the Atlantic while this kind of hole-in-corner trading was common practice at home. He did not discuss the matter with Claire, suspecting, quite rightly, that she would laugh at his scruples. More than ever these days he was beginning to see himself as an ageing prig, deriving a glum satisfaction from the value he placed upon the old, cohesive loyalties of the Valley. ‘After all, who am I to preach?’ he asked himself, hoisting his big frame into the saddle and riding through the open timber of Dell Wood to the sloping field that led down to the stableyard. ‘My own father made a packet out of the Boer War, and his partner, old Franz Zorndorff, made another out of the war after that, and both fortunes were used by me to keep this place in good heart over the last forty years. If I’m honest I suppose I don’t give a damn what they do so long as they aren’t caught red-handed and front-paged. That’s something I wouldn’t care to see at my time of life.’

II

I
n point of fact he came within an inch of seeing it. Perhaps the fact that he did not was due less to Smut’s dormant skill as a professional poacher than to the allegiance Paul had won during forty years of benevolent despotism in the area.

It was never established how the conscientious Constable Voysey got wind of Operation Christmas Stocking. He may have learned of Smut’s plans to mount a seasonal delivery on an exceptionally big scale through an unguarded remark overheard at The Raven. Or he may have worked on assumption, keeping a close check on the goings and comings at Smut’s bakery in Coombe Bay. At all events he went into action at dusk on December 23rd after peeping through the yard palings and watching Smut and Jumbo Bellchamber make a series of journeys to and from the bakery storehouse to a parked van. He knew Smut went to Paxtonbury for supplies once a week, and also that this was his usual day for going, and it must have seemed odd to him that his trip had been delayed until after blackout hours, when anyone driving about the Valley would have to do so on quarter-power headlights. In the event he kept the yard under close observation until he saw the van emerge with Smut at the wheel and Jumbo beside him. Having watched it climb the steep street and turn towards Codsall Bridge, he decided to stake everything on a hunch. Hurrying back to his quarters he phoned his inspector at Paxtonbury and suggested the setting up of a checkpoint at the site of the 1940 tank trap, where the Valley road, breasting the last swell of the moor, joined the main highway eight miles short of Paxtonbury. There were two alternative approaches to the city but Voysey, certain that he had not been spotted during his vigil, saw no reason why Smut should use them. Petrol was strictly rationed and each road meant a four-mile detour.

For once the inspector was alert and co-operative, promising to drive straight to the checkpoint and stop and search the van. Whatever it contained would have to be explained in detail and Voysey was confident that no explanations could account for a load that had necessitated at least a dozen encumbered journeys to and from the store. There was the time element, of course. The inspector would have to hurry to reach the road junction before the van turned into the main highway but Voysey calculated that Smut would make at least one stop en route, probably at Hermitage Farm, to pick up Henry Pitts’ contribution to Cathedral Close Christmas dinners and in this surmise he was correct. The inspector reached the concrete buttresses at the junction without having seen the van pass in the opposite direction and here he waited, parking his Morris car across the single line approach of the moor road. It was just six o’clock, with little wind and a swirl of white mist shrouding the lower ground where the Sorrel wound its way past the Home Farm and Shallowford House to the sea.

In the meantime Voysey, leaving nothing to chance, got out his own little car, an elderly Austin Seven, and drove after the van. Smut had had about fifteen minutes start but Voysey did not hurry. If, as would seem likely in the circumstances, Smut tried to double back into the Valley, he would find himself boxed between two police cars and panic was proof of guilt. Voysey, cruising along beside the swollen Sorrel, thought he had managed it all very nicely. Not only would he have struck a fatal blow at the Valley black market, there was also some likelihood of magisterial commendation when the case came to court.

It would surely have happened this way had it not been for Smut’s poacher’s instinct, a sixth sense inherent in all the Potters, whose ancestors had taken deer from Norman overlords hereabouts as far back as the twelfth century. In Smut it was something stronger than an ancestral memory for its pulse had been adjusted by years of poaching over this very ground, and later by three years’ practice as sniper and battalion scrounger on the Western Front. The moment he rose out of the Valley fog-blanket and tackled the last ascent of the moor, his eye registered an unnatural contour on the crest and when he ran his hand over the slightly misted windshield he saw a distant gleam about three feet long and two feet deep midway between the invisible concrete buttresses of the tank trap. He said, shortly, ‘Someone’s parked there, clean across the junction,’ and at once extinguished his lights and stopped the van. Jumbo Bellchamber, who was no poacher, showed impatience. ‘So what? It’s only someone from the camp screwing a bint. Give ’em a toot to move over and let’s get on. It’s bloody parky up here in this perishing mist.’