The Green Gauntlet (42 page)

‘Don’t be so damned greedy,’ said Claire, ‘and don’t preen yourself that you could have satisfied two of me, even in your lustiest years.’

‘Ah,’ he replied, the small cloud lifting in her comfortable presence, ‘that’s true enough but who, apart from Brigham Young, could hope to achieve that? My observation was academic, I’m not complaining.’

‘I should think not,’ she said. ‘Here, get on with this and fill me in with the local chit-chat,’ and she handed him a vast plate of ham, cold chicken and salad prepared by Mary and warned him that there was a trifle and clotted cream to follow.

Chapter Three

Bastions for Sale

I

P
aul never outgrew his initial embarrassment at having to preside over the meetings of the Shallowford Estates Company.

Sitting at the head of the library table, flanked by sons, a son-in-law and daughter, he felt himself to be playing a part in a charade at a Christmas party, and when he told Claire that he felt amateur in the role, she said, cheerfully, ‘Well, it always makes me a little edgy but if there’s an imbalance at those meetings it’s in your favour. Simon always votes with you, and you and that Rumble Patrick rehearse your approach to every item on the agenda before Andy gets here.’

‘Yes, and he always arrives with Whiz’s proxy vote in his pocket, don’t forget that.’

‘What of it? He keeps her in the picture and you don’t. As a matter of fact, I’m surprised that he takes the business as seriously as he does. It must seem very small beer to him these days. If you want my opinion he does it out of loyalty to you and the others.’

‘I’d like to believe that, old girl, but knowing our post-war Andy I rather doubt it. Sometimes he reminds me of my father in his early scrapyard days, and then again, of your father when I was married to Grace. How does he get on with Margaret these days? Does he ever tell you?’

‘I don’t ask,’ Claire said. ‘At sixty-four I’ve learned to let well alone.’

She did not add that she often regretted her part in the wartime reconciliation but he was not really interested in Andy’s matrimonial affairs, as she realised when he replied, ‘That’s it! That’s what I ought to have done—let well alone.’

‘You mean you’re sorry you formed the Company? But you told me only a month ago it was saving you two thousand a year in tax!’

‘There are worse things than paying out half your income in tax.’

‘Tell me one.’

‘All right, I will. Seeing this entire Valley raped the way they’ve raped that village on the coast! It isn’t parting with acres I resent—I’m advocating we sell Hermitage to David Pitts at today’s meeting, but David is a farmer not a speculator. Suppose they got a real foothold and started a rampage on our side of the river?’

‘How could they do that when we own all the freehold?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said doubtfully, ‘but I do know that everyone associated with this Company except Mary considers me fossilised. Maybe if the money offered for sites was tempting enough …’

She interrupted with a snort of indignation. ‘Nonsense! If any one of them tried to cross you in that way they’d have me to reckon with.’

‘But you haven’t got a vote.’

‘No, but I’ve got a vitriolic tongue when I care to use it. If I thought Andy, Rumble, Simon or even Mary was using your generosity to spoil your old age, you’d hear my protest from one end of the Valley to the other.’

At the time the promise was lighthearted. She thought of his anxieties as symptomatic of the worries he had always harboured for a place that had taken and used his life as ruthlessly and as exclusively as it had. And yet, within less than a month, she was called upon to make good her promise.

The initial meeting, held within a month of their return, provided some lively exchanges but was not, on the whole, an acrimonious one for it was soon clear that Andy’s eagerness to run the squatters off the moor would be effectively checked by Paul’s tolerance and the half-extinct embers of Simon’s Socialist fires. Paul told them about his encounter with the ex-Eighth-Army man, and of the trouble strangers faced in getting a local council to take their housing applications seriously. Andy said, flatly,

‘Look, don’t give me that ex-service line. You never heard me bleat about this, did you?’ and he held up his gloved hand, the first gesture he had ever made to draw attention to it.

Simon said, quietly, ‘You started with advantages those squatters don’t have. You ended the war with money in the bank and the land you’re talking about was handed to you on a plate. Don’t be so bloody vindictive about those poor devils out there. Do you imagine they would be pigging it in a Nissen hut if they could find a real home?’

Paul sat back smiling, content to leave it all to Simon, who was better qualified to conduct this kind of argument. But Andy did not make an issue of it. He said briefly, ‘Well, if it was left to me and to Whiz we’d have them off in a brace of shakes. As it is, let the Gov’nor take it up with the local housing committees. We pay enough in rates, God knows.’

Paul promised to do this and they went on to agree upon renovations to Mill Cottage, installations at High Coombe, and the new rent to be fixed for the Honeymans at Deepdene. Then Paul resurrected the matter of David Pitts’ application to buy Hermitage and saw Andy glower.

‘I told him while you were away that you were absolutely opposed to selling off freeholds,’ he protested when Paul, to everyone’s surprise, admitted having told David and his father that the latter could buy Hermitage if he could find the money. ‘I consulted Rumble here and he agreed.’ Andy turned to Rumble for confirmation. ‘That’s true, is it?’

‘Yes it is,’ Rumble admitted, somewhat uncomfortably as Mary turned to him, ‘but I’ve been a freeholder since 1935 and thinking it over mine was a hypocritical stand to take. I see David’s point of view very clearly but I always got the impression the Gov’nor was dead against parcelling up the estate. That was the reason I agreed to say no.’

‘I was and I still am,’ Paul admitted, ‘but you’re a member of the family and David, besides being a first-rate farmer, is the son of my oldest friend in the Valley. It makes a difference.’

‘Nothing makes a difference when you’re in business,’ said Andy and Claire saw the live side of his face twitch.

‘It makes a difference to me,’ Paul said shortly, ‘and it’s time you understood that.’

‘What’s he prepared to pay? That’s the real issue,’ said Andy, and Paul reported that Henry had agreed to help and that the bank would come across with a substantial loan.

‘I’d be prepared to sell for £8,000,’ he said. ‘That’s allowing about two–five for the farmhouse. The stock, of course, is his own.’

‘It’s not enough,’ Andy said, brutally. ‘Up it to £9,500.’

Paul flushed and Claire thought he was going to lose his temper but he restrained himself, saying, ‘What do the others think? I presume you’re acting for Whiz as well as yourself?’

‘Whiz is like me,’ Andy said, ‘she’ll want as much as she can get.’

Rumble Patrick did a little sum involving the average of Hermitage and the price per acre that agricultural land was fetching. ‘Nine–five is top price for land about here,’ he said, ‘and I daresay one of the stockbrokers looking for a tax-fiddle would pay more if we advertised, but part of Hermitage is rough land, especially those fields behind French Wood. I’d say a fair price was £8,750 and I know David would pay that. He did damned well there during the war—at least Henry did, with all the black market traffic that went on. I daresay they’ve got more salted away than any of us.’

They put it to the vote and the compromise price was carried. After that tension ebbed and the men spent an hour or so passing the bottle and discussing general matters while Paul ’phoned Henry and got his acceptance of the price and agreement to complete by January 1st.

One of the more rewarding aspects of the post-war Andy was that he could peel off his board-room toughness as soon as the agenda sheets had been collected up and the ash trays emptied, a job, Claire reminded them, that always seemed to fall to the unpaid secretary of the Company. He told them something of the property world in London and elsewhere, of the sudden popularity of farm land among business men seeking escape hatches for heavily-taxed profits, and of the world in which he moved now that he was engaged in property deals all over the country. Paul, although not approving, was impressed by his expertise and wondered if he had inherited his techniques from his grandfather, who had made his pile out of scrap metals, or whether he had acquired them as part of the tactical training given him by old Franz Zorndorff in the years after he and Stevie had broken away to make their own way in life. He remembered the initial interview he had had with them in this very room and his disgusted comment at the time—‘From scrap to scrap in three generations …!’ Zorndorff, he knew, had always admired The Pair, and in a way he could still admire Andy, who found no difficulty at all in adapting to the cut-and-thrust of post-war commerce, so different in pace, method and even equipment to that of his grandfather’s era. The boy’s war injuries never seemed to bother him and it was possible to forget, watching him, that his left arm ended above the wrist and that the skin down one side of his face had been grafted from his buttock.

Musing, he dropped out of the conversation and watched them, collectively and individually. Andy stood apart, the only one among them who had really kept pace with the gathering momentum of the century. Rumble Patrick was closest to Andy, for at least he had mastered the technical advances of the last two decades and was applying them to his profession, whereas Mary was happy in the role of a dutiful wife of a type that Claire had never been, not even in her most complaisant moments. Then there was Whiz, who sometimes showed up to side with Andy and somehow managed to give the impression that money was vulgar and yet, when it came to making some, could be tougher than Andy who was always as interested in the game as the profits. Old Simon, as usual, was still the odd man out, but a far more integrated odd man than in his barn-storming days, when he had campaigned alongside that first wife of his. He was obviously in the right profession now and happily immersed in the short-lived enthusiasms of youth and passing on, in his own amiable way, all the lessons he had learned from two wars and a ten-year slump. More and more Paul found himself subscribing to Simon’s creed of watered-down Socialism, an attitude of mind rather than a political faith, and one, he felt, that the old Liberals of pre-First World War days would have understood and tried to practise today. Thank God the boy had found a wife like Evie Horsey, who cheerfully mothered his boys in that asphalt playground at Whinmouth and was content to stitch costumes for the pageants and plays Simon was always writing and producing to supplement his text-books. He was very popular there, Paul understood, not only with the boys but also—surprisingly—with the School Managers and parents. He had, at forty plus, at last found his niche and was even beginning to look like a schoolmaster with his long, narrow face, thinning hair and hunched gait.

The meeting broke up with boisterous goodbyes and Andy roared off down the drive in his absurdly luxurious car, while Rumble Patrick and Mary stumped off across the fields to the Home Farm. Simon, watching them go, said:

‘They don’t change much, do they? I remember seeing them wander off like that when they were about nine! Mary’s pregnant again, I see. How many grandchildren will that make?’

‘Eight,’ Claire said, ‘unless you’ve got any news for us,’ and Simon said that he had and that their second child could be expected round about January.

‘Well, you’re all coming up the straight,’ said Claire, ‘and not before time. Whiz has her three, Mary two and one in the oven, there’s your Mark and another to come, and finally that lovely child Vanessa, whom you could describe as a kind of combined effort, for Margaret tells me Andy spoils her terribly.’

She would never have said this to Paul, but the relationship between her and Simon had always been relaxed. He said, ‘I’m glad. That’s how it should be, but collectively we haven’t made much of a showing against your six and the Gov’nor’s seven, have we?’

‘There’s time enough,’ she said, ‘providing you don’t reduce sex to a kind of algebra, as people seem to be doing if you read the newspapers nowadays.’

He laughed, kissed her and drove off in his third-hand Humber. He never seemed to care what kind of car he owned or what kind of clothes he wore. Even now, after all these years, his preoccupation with abstracts reminded her vividly of Grace Lovell, his mother, whom she had once hated but had eventually come to understand and respect.

II

T
he crisis came a few weeks later when Andy rang and asked if they could convene a special meeting to consider a proposal he wanted to put to them. He would not say what the proposal was, only that it had reached him in a roundabout way and was sufficiently important to merit general discussion. Paul said he would arrange it and the date was fixed for the first day of October, Whiz writing to say that she couldn’t attend as she and Ian were due to preside over a passing-out ceremony but that Andy had agreed to act on her behalf.