The Green Gauntlet (41 page)

‘Indeed I do,’ he said, smiling and reflecting that, in some ways, she was not unlike Claire. She had plenty to offer, and provided it was accepted with enthusiasm she could jog along contentedly enough, even with an unimaginative creature like Nelson. All she really looked for was security and to be admired and needed. For the rest, things could be left to take care of themselves.

‘Where is Nelson now?’

‘Gone to Paxtonbury to buy a smashing new car. Can I make you some coffee?’

He was tempted but pleaded appointments in Coombe Bay and moved on, comforted by the thought that stability had returned to this side of the estate now that Dick Potter and Bon-Bon were at High Coombe, and a Honeyman was installed at Deepdene. This area had always been the weak spot in his defences and still was to a degree, for he was worried about Low Coombe, a perennial source of anxiety ever since old Tamer’s days. Brissot, the French Canadian who partnered Jumbo Bellchamber, had been a good farmer but the Cockney had never regarded the farm as much more than a bolt hole after the First War. Now that Brissot had retired and gone back to the home he left in 1914, Paul couldn’t see Jumbo managing on his own, especially with a woman like Violet Potter for a wife. He knew that they had all been coining money during the war and were still in cahoots with Smut Potter and his avaricious French wife, Marie. Both Jumbo and Smut ran big cars and spent whole days at National Hunt meetings. They also went up to London for a binge every now and again, and the farm was beginning to look down-at-heel.

He descended the winding path through thinning trees, his thoughts returning to characters who had used it over the last half century—savage old Tamer, Gypsy Meg, the Timberlake boys who had come courting the Potter girls, and Jem, the Bideford Goliath, who had once held sway here with the two eldest Potter girls as his wives, and children of doubtful parentage swarming all over the Dell. Then, as he approached the clearing where the farmhouse squatted, he heard the roar of a powerful engine and was just in time to see a long, blue car shoot off down the track. Jumbo, standing at the porch, looked a little disconcerted, as though he might be asked questions concerning his visitor but Paul made no comment. Rationing was still in force, but if Jumbo was still active in the black market there was not much point in lecturing him years after the collapse of the Third Reich.

Jumbo said, guardedly, ‘Heard you was back, Mr Craddock,’ and Paul wondered at the infallibility of the Valley jungle-drums and asked how Jumbo was faring now that his partner had left, and what kind of crops he intended raising in the cliff fields further east. The Cockney was more than usually evasive. His wary eyes—a rifleman’s eyes thought Paul, recalling how Jumbo had once shot four Uhlans out of the saddle like ducks at a fair—roved the Dell, and when Paul enquired after Violet he said, carelessly, ‘Lazy old slut’s gorne ter Whinmouth to ’ave a nairdo! She’s there twice a week.’

Paul said, on impulse, ‘Do you ever regret settling here, Jumbo? Don’t you ever hanker after London?’ and the man replied, as though suspecting a trap, ‘No. Woulden want ter live there no more. Like a bit o’ country, alwus did,’ so that Paul had a glimpse of the original Jumbo playing cricket with a piece of wood and a rag ball in some smutty park near Southwark. Bellchamber, his instinct told him, was certainly uncomfortable about something. But he was not curious and rode down the track to the river road where he passed Mill Cottage, once the home of Hazel and her baby son Rumble, now much in need of renovation but capable, he would say, of housing a squatter if one of them could be persuaded to buckle down and earn a living from the soil. He made a note of this and pushed on across fields shimmering with heat to the head of Coombe Bay village where he had once owned property but, on looking about him, was glad it had passed to other hands.

There were changes here every month now as the place continued to inflate itself into a community somewhere between Bognor Regis and one of those Westcountry coastal villages trying to qualify as a terminus for day-trippers. Old cottages had been ripped down and replaced with flat, greyish shops that looked like the blockhouses they had once built along the Transvaal railway, except that they had chromium-framed windows and were hung about with rubbishy merchandise and jazzy signs painted in hard, gilt lettering. There were several small cafés flanked by tinplate advertisements for soft drinks and brands of cigarettes, a window full of ‘handicrafts’ that included ashtrays contrived out of tortured knots of wood and pixies made from twigs and acorns. There were painted seashells and one or two wishy-washy water-colours trying to get themselves adopted as calendars, and lower down the hill was a shop called ‘The Olde Spinning Wheele’ that set Paul wondering why everyone who tried to give the impression he was practising an ancient craft should find it necessary to add a couple of ‘e’s’ to his signboard. The Raven, always a nondescript pub, now looked like a child’s attempt to build a Tudor barn out of black sticks and cardboard and the whole place smelled of fish, varnish and hot rubber.

The season was in full swing and Paul marvelled at the number of people attracted by all this clutter. Families trudged up and down the hill, large pink mums in navy slacks and dads in shirtsleeves and cheap Panama hats. The children, some of them blistered but all of them well-fed and chubby, seemed never to have seen a man mounted on a horse before, for they shouted and pointed with every indication of excitement. Then Paul saw the new Rector, Mark Portal, chatting to an elderly hiker who looked as if he had stepped out of a pre-war
Punch
with his khaki shorts, deerstalker, and enormous rucksack. He reined in to pass the time of day with the parson whom he hardly knew, for Old Horsey had died a year ago and had not been replaced until the week before Paul’s winter illness. The professor-type hiker moved on and the young Rector called, ‘Top of the morning, Squire,’ with professional heartiness, but noting Paul’s bleak look, added, with a grin, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Craddock, but it gives me a lift to call somebody “Squire”. It puts me back in a world of free blankets, private pews and long, thundering sermons aimed at maintaining the status quo.’ Paul wondered if the fellow was getting at him but decided not, for he had an open face and humorous eyes. He said, ‘How are you liking it here? Is there anything I can do? My responsibility in the village has been whittled down to your rectory and the Boer War memorial tablet in the church. Wait a minute, I’ll get off, I can’t talk down to the cloth in this high-handed manner,’ and he dismounted, looping the grey’s bridle over his arm and edging into the kerb to make way for a motor-coach crammed with the day’s quota of sightseers from Paxtonbury’s hotels. The smell of seaweed, always so strong about here, was banished by the whiff of exhaust and he could not prevent himself saying, ‘If this is progress then number me among the primitives.’

The Rector chuckled. ‘Yes, I heard they were your sentiments,’ he said, ‘and actually they’re mine too, but I dare not advertise it. My father had a latter-day Oliver Goldsmith living in Northamptonshire when I was a boy and the local Squire managed to keep even the railway at bay until 1899. He was a dedicated hunting man.’

‘So was your predecessor-before-last, Parson Bull,’ Paul said. ‘He drove himself into the ground foxhunting and between you and me he was one of the biggest old rascals around here.’

‘I heard that too,’ Portal said. ‘There’s a photograph of him in my study and he looks like a warrior bishop about the time of the Peasants’ Revolt. I wonder how he’d cope with my kind of parishioner?’ and Paul said that it would be interesting to watch him herding them to evensong with his long, leather whip that produced cracks capable of carrying across two fields and a covert. Portal said, thoughtfully, ‘It’s a matter of adjusting, I suppose, but frankly the speed of it all has left me breathless. I’m only thirty-nine and I’ve seen an incredible amount of change in that time. You must have seen a great deal more. Is all of it vulgar?’

‘Not by any means,’ Paul replied, taking a sudden liking to the man. ‘When I came here first there were some fearful injustices, a great deal of filthy housing, too much cruelty to children and animals, and old people living on about a shilling a day. There was an old woman called Coombes who lived in that cottage—or where a cottage once stood—she used to dry her tea-leaves on a piece of board to make them last a week. There was a family of nine who were all swept away by typhoid in a single summer due to polluted drinking water. We’ve got rid of that kind of thing, but somehow I can’t help wishing we’d managed it more gracefully. Will you and your wife come to dinner one day next week? That was obligatory in the old days but you won’t upset me a bit by declining.’

Portal said he would be delighted and they fixed on Wednesday after which Paul swung himself into the saddle and went on down to the quay where he turned right, hoping to escape his involuntary role as one of the Coombe Bay holiday attractions. Half-way along the quay, however, he pulled up short outside Smut Potter’s bakery, astonished to discover that it was no longer a bakery but a half-gutted shop in the process of conversion into a Continental-type café. Iron tables were already stacked in one corner and the store had been demolished to make room for a drive-in car park. It was not his concern any longer, for he had sold the property when the Company was formed, but all the same it surprised him. He had always thought of Smut and Marie as permanent Shallowfordians and found it difficult to believe that they had made enough during the war to retire. Then Smut came out of the yard pushing a handcart loaded with part of his oven and gave Paul a cheery greeting. He too must have been listening to Valley drums for he said, ‘Us yerd you was backalong. Did ’ee see the boy on the way down?’

‘You mean
your
boy, Bon-Bon?’

‘Giddon no, your boy. The townee one, Andy.’

‘Andy has been here today?’

‘Just left,’ Smut said, ‘come to zee how us was gettin’ on with the new place.’

A thought occurred to Paul. He said, ‘Was he driving a big flashy car? A blue one?’

‘Yes he was,’ said Smut, ‘a real corker. Cost him nigh on dree thousand, or so he said. Do ’em pay that much for cars in London?’

‘You’d be surprised what they do up there,’ Paul said, vaguely, for his mind was occupied with the reason, if there was a reason, for Andy’s abrupt departure from Lower Coombe half an hour before. Thinking back it seemed to connect with Jumbo Bellchamber’s hangdog look and his reluctance to chat, as though he was anxious to prevent Paul from knowing Andy had been there. He said, briefly, ‘Look, Smut, what the hell is going on around here? This place is changing overnight and there’s a smell about it I don’t like. Do you own those premises of yours now?’

‘Not me,’ said Smut, readily, ‘I rent ’em, zame as I did from you. This café lark is Marie’s idea, but the new landlord is backing her. Not that I’m against it, mind. There’s a packet o’ money to be made in season the way things is going yerabouts.’

‘Then who is the new landlord?’

‘It’s a Company. Your boy could tell you more about it than me. Chum of his is the Chairman, one-legged chap called Shawcrosse. He was the one who bought it, and all them other lots you sold off a year or two back.’

The name had an elusive familiarity but Paul, after chasing it a moment or two postponed pursuit until he could talk to Andy whom he supposed had gone to the house to await his return. ‘What the devil is this chap Shawcrosse trying to do? He’ll never make a Blackpool out of this place. It’s too far from the main road and any expansion east is blocked by the Bluff. Come to that, he can’t even expand inland, for there he runs smack up against our border. Have you ever actually met him?’

‘Not me,’ said Smut again, ‘he’s too bliddy toffee-nosed to pass the time o’ day with my sort but your boy can tell you about him. He lived next door to him for a time, back end o’ the war, when they was both upalong.’

Paul remembered then and his disquiet increased. Shawcrosse—a chap about Andy’s age or a little older, who had lost a leg in the Western Desert and had rented one of the tall Victorian houses in Cliff Terrace for his convalescence. He remembered him now, a smooth, outwardly affable type, with ginger hair brushed straight back and a mincing little wife who wore shoes with heels like poniards.

‘So that’s him? A speculator I wouldn’t wonder. Well, there’s nothing I can do to stop his gallop even if I wanted to, so good luck with the café, Smut, and give my regards to Marie.’

He rode on down the quay and up on to the dunes, leaving Smut to dispose of his oven that he supposed would now go for scrap if people still wanted scrap. The sun sparkled on the great sheet of blue water between the beach and the sandbanks but Paul did not notice it. Deep down he knew himself to be disturbed but would have found it difficult to say why, for on the whole his ride had been reassuring. There had been changes, some of them startling changes, but then there always had been, even in his earliest days, and one soon got used to new patterns and new faces. Deliberately, as he walked the sweating grey over the soft ground towards the ford, he marshalled his thoughts, beginning with the squatters and moving on to David Pitts’ determination to become a freeholder. Old Sam Potter was a fixture and so, it seemed, was his son Dick at High Coombe. Then there was the pleasant discovery of finding the Honeymans established at Deepdene but the pattern began to change as he descended the Coombe and approached that noisy little sham resort at the mouth of the Sorrel. Jumbo Bellchamber was up to something, and so was this fellow Shawcrosse, and he suspected that Andy had a finger in the pie somewhere along the line. They had better, he thought, bring it out into the open right away and he rode up the drive and into the stableyard expecting to see his son’s three-thousand-pound car parked behind the house. It was not and when Claire came out to tell him that lunch was on the table she added that Andy had phoned from Whinmouth and she had invited him over but he said he had another engagement.

‘Is anything the matter?’ she asked, noting his frown, and he told her no, or not that he knew of, but he had just made a resolution to keep clear of Coombe Bay during the summer months. Then he remembered the Rector and warned her that he was coming to dinner, and after that he told her rather more of his conversation with Prudence Honeyman than he had intended, for somehow he needed to switch his mind to lighter subjects. She said, as he knew she would, ‘Well, I’m glad. And I’m surprised too, for that girl deserved someone more positive than Nelson. She ought to have had half-a-dozen children by now,’ to which Paul replied, ‘She would if I’d had anything to do with it.’