The Green Gauntlet (33 page)

They were brought out of this semi-trance by the Negro, hailing them against the wind from a projecting beam at the extreme right of the blockhouse. He was standing there silhouetted against the grey sky, holding Willis in his arms and his posture, Paul thought, was wildly improbable and grotesquely divorced from workaday life. It belonged in the coloured illustration of an adventure book he had read as a boy, something by Henty or Fenimore Cooper.

‘He’s alive and out cold,’ the Negro called, and forgetting Noah as readily as he had forgotten the American a moment before Paul followed Smut and Voysey down the ladder, leaving Fred Olver at the apex to steady it in readiness for the ascent. Just as he passed below the level of the debris Paul saw Noah’s left hand flutter as he laid hold of the shredded length of cable. The boat was then no more than a few yards from the mine and the mine less than three boat lengths away from the jetty.

III

T
hey did not relieve the Negro of his burden. He seemed to be a man of unusual strength endowed with an acrobat’s sense of balance. With Voysey and Smut alongside him he picked his way over the rubble like a cat, needing no more than a touch or two on the elbow when his feet found the lower rungs of the ladder. Because of this Paul had leisure to glance through the shattered framework on his left and watch Jaffsie brace himself against the oars, so that the skiff swung slowly round in an arc and began heading out to sea.

It moved, Paul thought, with a terrible dragging slowness, so that he roused himself and shouted to the recumbent Noah, ‘Let her go and get ashore, man!’ but Noah, if he heard, paid no attention to this advice but continued to sprawl with his face almost in the water and the splayed cable clutched in both hands. The mine, checked in its spiralling drift towards the end of the wrecked jetty, followed unwillingly, clearing the last beam by no more than a few yards. Then, ascending the ladder as one of a bunched group, Paul had no opportunity to follow its progress. Other people, Pansy among them, had joined Olver at the top of the ladder and Willis was lifted clear, Voysey venting his relief in a roar of disapproval as he realised the shore end of the jetty was now lined with figures, women and children among them. They all scuttled away with Voysey herding them like sheep, and the big Negro must have gone with them for suddenly Paul was alone with Smut watching the last scene in the drama as Noah, fifty yards seaward of the jetty, lowered the cable-end back into the water and rolled round facing his son who at once set a slanting course for the breakwater.

Smut, watching intently, voiced a thought that was in Paul’s mind.

‘He’s got zense as well as nerve,’ he said grudgingly. ‘He’s leaving her where the tide’ll carry her’ way along the beach. Er’ll blow off this zide o’ the landslip and do no harm to nobody, except the gulls mebbe.’ But then, sensing perhaps that this was a wholly inadequate acknowledgment of what the Williamses had just achieved, he added, ‘Youm so bliddy wrong about people, Squire. I knowed Noah zince he was a tacker, and I woulden ha’ bet a farden on him tackling a job like that, never mind doing it so quietlike. Buggered if I won’t stand him a pint tonight if he shows up.’

‘You won’t,’ Paul said, ‘I’ll do any standing that’s to be done, and it’ll be a quart if he can take it,’ but at this Smut’s grin returned to him for the first time that afternoon.

‘You don’t want to worry on that score,’ he said. ‘Noah baint a bible-puncher, like the rest of his kin. Noah Williams could drink the bliddy Raven dry if you give him the chance.’

Huddling into their damp clothes they crossed the quay, their feet scrunching on shattered glass.

Chapter Thirteen

Outpost Incident

I

R
umble’s fears that the Valley might suffer further air attacks on account of its nearness to Normandy proved unfounded. By now the Luftwaffe was a spent force and although V-bombs, and later rockets, continued to keep Londoners on the jump, the provinces seemed to be groping their way back to a peacetime routine in that final winter of the war.

The Royal Marine camp was still in being but its complement had shrunk to a mere hundred or so. Many of those who had stamped and shouted on the square were now in Holland or the Far East, and not a few lay in graves beside the Scheldt, or along the approaches to Caen. Hit-and-run raiders were never seen now, only Polish-manned aircraft skimming over the coast like little silver hornets. Simon wrote saying he had an admin. job at Eindhoven. Rumble, travelling by slow stages, was on his way home across the Indian Ocean. Andy and his friend Ken Shawcrosse were still based in the tall Victorian houses at Coombe Bay but more often than not were away, leaving Margaret and the baby Vanessa to their own devices.

Claire, supposing her to be lonely, invited her to come and join Mary and the other children at the Big House, but she declined. It would be a nuisance, she said, to keep returning whenever Andy came home after one of his mysterious forays up and down the country. His Development Company was already in business and a little of his pre-war zest had returned to him. Margaret and the family generally welcomed this, but none of them cared much for his crony, Shawcrosse. They employed a blonde secretary, a hearty girl with a warm, built-in smile and Margaret hinted to Claire that they probably shared her as mistress as well as stenographer. Anticipating Claire’s protest she said, ‘Now wait. Who the hell am I to complain of that? Besides, if it sweetens his temper I’ll tuck them up in bed if they ask me nicely.’

Claire said nothing. More than ever she was beginning to wonder if her brief essay in mending and making-do had not been a failure after all.

II

T
he valley did witness one further skirmish but it was between allies and took place one frosty morning in the Home Farm hayloft, whither Prudence Honeyman (née Pitts) had retired to settle for her PX goodies. It was a brisk, scandalous engagement, reminiscent of a much earlier era in the Valley when people made a rare fuss about this kind of thing, but although it did not involve a member of the Craddock family its repercussions were instrumental in breaking the long Honeyman tradition at Home Farm and causing Paul to redraw farm boundaries that had remained static for a generation.

One of the few Americans left in the Valley after the pre-D-Day exodus was Ed Morrisey, the barrel-chested sergeant in charge of the sub-depot in the goyle, about half-way between the landslip and Coombe Bay. He was on familiar terms with the Honeymans, for theirs was the nearest farm and when, one morning in February, he received instructions to pack up and rejoin his unit, he decided to make a final attempt to collect dues skilfully withheld by Prudence for over a year.

What he did not know, it seemed, was that Prudence’s husband Nelson had been keeping a close watch upon his regular and so far frustrated attempts to exact payment from the beneficiary, for Nelson had been married to Prudence for twelve humdrum years and knew her rather better than Eddy or anyone else in the Valley.

It had not been a successful marriage, although its failure was a secret from all but Paul, who knew most things of importance concerning his tenants, enough, in fact, to cause Claire to wonder why he was so unfamiliar with the domestic ebb and flow of his own family. The answer to this was that Paul had never taken his sons and daughters very seriously, whereas he automatically accepted responsibility for his tenants, and had done ever since buying the estate.

In the late nineteen-twenties, when she was growing up at Hermitage under the tolerant eye of Henry and her mother Gloria, Prudence Pitts had been the most sought-after girl in the Valley and at thirty-four she still had a good figure, bold, snapping eyes, and a mop of red-gold hair. Gloria had often despaired of getting her safely off her hands but then, to everyone’s surprise, she had suddenly decided to marry Nelson, only son of old Honeyman, and one of the most conscientious younger men in the Valley. Nelson, slight, earnest and unoriginal, had been no more than a servitor at the court of Prudence but he was shrewd and it did not take him long to discover that the source of his luck was a false alarm on her part. Like the Potter girls before her Prudence had sampled most of the young men between the Whin and the Bluff before she settled on one in particular.

She was not, however, possessed of the Potter temperament, regarding men as swains and providers and not the means of passing a pleasant hour under the stars. To that extent she learned her lesson early in life and never made the same mistake again. She remained a flirt and many a man who had business at Home Farm in the last ten years had been encouraged to try his luck but, as in the case of Ed Morrisey, the prize eluded them. A kiss, a hasty fumble, a subdued giggle, was all they got in exchange for time and capital invested, and Sergeant Morrisey had been a steady investor since the first occasion Prudence had snapped her eyes at him and told him how she yearned for what she called ‘sweets’ and he called ‘candy’.

He brought her candy. Boxes and boxes of candy, together with ‘K’ rations and towels and sheets representing scores of clothing coupons. He brought her tinned turkey at Christmas time and, when these yielded no more than a kiss or two in the barn, he produced several pairs of nylon stockings, now accepted in the Valley as a kind of down-payment on defloration. It remained, however, a strictly one-way trade. The missionary continued to distribute his beads but the native remained relatively hostile.

Morrisey was not desperate. He had access to several more liberal-minded girls in Whinmouth but by February 1945 he had come to believe that his manhood was at stake and decided to make one last attempt to vindicate it. He packed a large carton, choosing goods that were unobtainable, even in a community containing black market experts like Smut Potter and Jumbo Bellchamber, and drove his jeep over the sandhills to the Home Farm strawyard.

He did not make the mistake of telling Prudence that he was posted, or that this was his final visit. Indeed, he hinted at vast bounties awaiting her, underlining the hint by declaring that rationing would continue in Britain long after the cessation of hostilities. Prudence was impressed in spite of herself, both by the magnitude of his gifts and the threat of further shortages. In addition his visit had been nicely timed for Nelson, moments before Ed had appeared in the yard, had told her he was driving to Whinmouth to apply for extra feed coupons for his herd. She handled the packaged cartons as another woman might have handled pearls. ‘It’s swell of you, Eddy,’ she said, ‘real swell!’ Like all other women in the Valley she had imbibed American idioms along with American PX goods.

Eddy said, ‘It’s cold out here. Let’s go in the barn, honey.’

They always went into the barn when he arrived with a carton but so far this had proved Eddy’s terminus for Prudence was careful to leave the big door swinging open. She did so now but when he put his arm round her and kissed her in a way that Nelson had never kissed despite a good deal of encouragement on her part, she felt a bit of a niggard and wondered, a little apprehensively, how long this trade could be expected to continue at the present rate of exchange. She said, to his gratification, ‘I don’t know how I could have coped this last year without you around, Eddy!’ And then, ‘Did you pass Nelson on the way over here?’

‘Yeah!’ he said, hopefully, ‘heading towards the camp in his jalopy.’

He would have added his persuasions then but reasoned that if an invitation was coming it was far better it should come from her, so he drew back a little, saying, ‘You sure are cute, baby! And you smell nice, too!’

‘It’s that perfume you gave me, the bottle your buddy brought back from France.’ Then, very cautiously, ‘Did Nelson see
you
?’

‘I guess not. He was going in the other direction and all of a quarter mile up the road.’

‘Then let’s go up the ladder,’ Prudence said, and was surprised to find herself trembling. Eddy was getting on for forty and his poor condition had been a factor in him being left behind when the Rangers moved out, but he was up that vertical ladder in five seconds flat. There was plenty of hay up there and it was warm and dark, with no more than a shaft or two of winter sunshine penetrating cracks in the weatherboarding. She said, ‘You’re a naughty boy, you really are! And don’t think I believe a word about you being a bachelor!’ Then, with a directness that rather shocked him, ‘You’ll have to be quick before they wonder where we’ve gone.’

Nelson had seen the jeep breast the last of the dunes spotting it in his driving mirror as he approached the final bend in the farm track leading across the fields to the river road. It was no more than a glimpse but enough to decide his course of action. He rounded the bend, stopped, reversed and got out of the lorry, standing under the wall to plan his next move. It was not the first time he had kept watch on them. Once or twice he had seen them embrace, his eye glued to the hinge-crack of the barn door, but he had not disturbed them. A man could not be expected to stake his entire future on a kiss or two and a bit of scuffling behind an open barn door, but somehow, today, he felt very uneasy, having heard on the Valley grapevine that the U.S. depot on the beach was due to close. He left the vehicle where it was and went through the door in the park wall and across the western paddock, taking care to stay the far side of the hedge. Then, seeing no-one in the yard but noting the bonnet of the jeep projecting from behind the barn, he moved quietly behind the byre and thus reached his usual observation post.

Nothing came within his range of vision except a pile of tools, a few bales of straw, and a muck-spreader, and this puzzled him so that he wondered for a moment if Prudence was settling accounts in the kitchen. Then he heard a stifled laugh and it came from immediately above, telling him that on this occasion Sergeant Morrisey had enlarged his bridgehead. He crept inside the barn and listened at the foot of the ladder. What he heard resolved his next action.

Among the tools in the corner of the barn was a mattock with a loose shaft and when he laid hold of it the head and shaft parted without so much as a rattle. Nelson was slightly built and below medium height and although, by now, he was fully charged with indignation, he knew that he was no match for the stocky sergeant. God, they said, looked favourably upon a worthy cause but there was another saying that He also sided with the big battalions and Nelson was a realist. He tightened his hold on the mattock shaft and ascended the vertical ladder step by step, taking his time about it and testing each rung for creaks.

Neither of them heard him and neither was positioned to see his head rise slowly above the level of the floor. He was more or less prepared for what he saw under the sloping eaves but it gave him a nasty jolt to have his gloomiest suspicions so convincingly confirmed. Prudence, it appeared, was at last giving full value for money and from the glimpse he got of her in his rush across the floor she was not finding the discharge of the debt irksome. Fortunately for her Eddy was the more exposed of the two and the heavy end of the shaft descended before either was aware they had company. Eddy shouted a picturesque oath and achieved a quick double roll, so that the second blow, aimed at his head, glanced off his padded shoulder and struck the back of his hand. Like a dancing demon returning to the pit in a miracle play he hopped the length of the loft and then, to Nelson’s amazement, disappeared altogether having shot feet first through the hatch that was partially masked by hay.

He fell with a terrible crash and had not his exit been vertical he might have broken his neck. As it was he broke his right leg and lay bellowing like a calf, adding his yells to the piercing screams of Prudence who had somehow struggled to her knees and was embracing Nelson’s gumbooted calves in the attitude of a drunkard’s wife in a Victorian temperance print.