The Green Gauntlet (57 page)

It passed like a carefully unrolled carpet, a great strip of patterned colour and, in what seemed to him, a stupendous silence, despite the measured tramp of so many boots, the thud of the music, and the faint rattle of the gun carriage where the wheels passed over the specks of grit in their path. It was a spectacle of a kind he had never seen before and never hoped to see, and he stood very straight, his seven medals trapping a ray of winter sunshine as the guardsmen formed up alongside the coffin and expertly transferred its terrible weight to their shoulders. The pallbearers went ahead in a loose group, Attlee, looking like an old but indomitable Chinese mandarin, relying upon the discreet elbow-touch of Eden, Macmillan walking on the outside, hunched against the cold, and somewhere there so many others who had been stirred or exasperated by the slurred exhortations of the man now resting on the shoulders of the straining guardsmen.

The very passage of the cortège up the steps towards the slowly-opening doors was the finale of an epoch that no film producer, however talented and inspired, could conjure out of celluloid and stage carpenters. It was as though, in that moment of time, a century of human experience peculiar to these islands and to the people standing about him, was being taken out of the stream of history and stored away with all the other experiences assembled in that place, the Great Fire, the Duke of Wellington, Trafalgar, the Jubilees, and the latest of them, the fire-blitz of 1941 when, on a rare visit to London, he had made his way here and seen the enormous bulk of St Paul’s standing almost alone amid acres of blackened rubble. His taxi-driver, equally impressed, had said, unconscious of bathos, ‘
Marvellous,
ain’t it? Bloody marvellous,’ and that, he thought, was as good an estimate as any. It
was
marvellous.
Bloody
marvellous! Every last aspect of it, all the way from a cavalry charge at Omdurman to St Paul’s.

He turned, giddy with cold or emotion, and let himself be carried along down Ludgate Hill to an Espresso bar where he drank two cups of scalding coffee and then crossed the road to the newspaper office to await Simon. He experienced no sense of anticlimax but instead a kind of emotional repletion that revealed itself in a slight unsteadiness of gait on the steep stairs and a breathlessness that had nothing to do with the cold or his age. He sat by a singing gas-fire thawing his toes and taking another sip or two from his flask. Overhead, like the rush of wild geese down the Valley in autumn, aircraft of the R.A.F. swept in salute, and down by the river he heard the defiant whoops of ships’ sirens.

He was engaged in piecing together impressions to form a whole and the process was familiar to him, the method smoothed by the sixty-three years he had spent in the Valley. What he sought, as he sat there musing, was a compendium of British virtues, some kind of justification for the intense national pride that brought a sparkle to his eyes, and he assembled it like a man building a utensil from odds and ends that had strayed within reach. There was dignity there, expressed in a pageantry that some might feel verged upon the ridiculous but it was not ridiculous because it was motivated by impulses worthier than pride—by respect and by an unconscious groping after traditions that had survived the passage of centuries. There was courage, too, of the kind he had witnessed so often in Flanders and in the Valley when hostile aircraft flew in from the sea. And underneath it all there was patience and kindness and wonder, expressed in the voice of the mother—‘soon, Ernie, soon,’ in her diffident offer of lukewarm tea to an aged stranger, and in that taxi driver’s involuntary tribute to the indestructibility of St Paul’s—‘
Marvellous
ain’t it? Bloody marvellous.’

The assessment brought to him a sense of belonging that he had never felt in these noisy crowded streets, a comfort that he had never found in religion or the promise of survival after death. He was at one with that strange, growling volcano of a man now on his way to Oxfordshire, and with all the people who had witnessed his passage, and there was immortality enough in this fellowship and in the loins of his sons, daughters and descendants.

Somewhere close at hand a typewriter clacked, perhaps recording what he felt about what he had seen or something like it. For what was going on to that page was quarried from English thought dressed in the English tongue.

III

T
hat, towards the end, was his self-analysis as a patriot. His final self-assessment as patriarch and man was more complicated and he delayed making it for a long time.

The rest of the winter passed quietly. He was still able to get out and about, and twice rode the grey to a meet, although he only stayed on an hour or two for he tired very easily now and sometimes his chest gave him a little trouble, so that the young doctor who came in from Coombe Bay, warned him to cut down on his cigarettes. He did not take the warning seriously, telling the doctor that a man within weeks of his eighty-sixth birthday was not obliged to cut down on anything.

‘I’m not one of those drooling old buffers who want to make a century just to get a telegram from some flunkey at the Palace and have a lot of relatives goo-gooing over a cake I can’t digest,’ he said, and the young man had looked flustered until Paul invited him to help himself to a whiskey from the decanter.

‘I wouldn’t have had to tell that to either of your predecessors,’ he said, with a dry chuckle. ‘Both Maureen, and before her old Doctor O’ Keefe, expected a tot of Irish every time they came to read my pulse. Matter of fact the old doctor died of it, running away from blue monkeys so his daughter told me.’

He was not ill but he was not himself, not even when the spring came round and he could make his way down to the lodge, or potter about the rose-garden that Grace had conjured out of the tail of the east paddock. Simon, seeking information from the doctor, was only moderately reassured.

‘Nothing specific,’ the man said, with the patronage inseparable from his profession, ‘just anno domini. There’s a whisper under his ribs. He had a couple smashed at one time, didn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ said Simon, ‘but that was ’way back in 1906, when he was injured fishing sailors out of the Cove.’

‘It’s the weak spot in his overall defences,’ the doctor said, ‘but allowing for that, a bullet through his knee, and a lump of shrapnel calling for the kind of surgery that shows under his hair, he’ll do very well if you can get him to take it easier and switch to a pipe.’

Simon, without actually disliking the man, could not find much confidence in him and talked to Evie about getting one of Maureen’s specialist friends in from Paxtonbury, but she gave it as her opinion that Paul wouldn’t thank him for it so he let it go until word came that the old man had taken to his bed with bronchitis.

He was obliged to give up his smoking then, for the cough resulting from a puff or two made his eyes water and his old bones rattle. Andy, visiting him at weekends, found him testy but far from helpless, and as the days lengthened and May sunshine came flooding into his room he became restive, pottering about in his old-fashioned dressing-gown, dismissing the nurse they found for him, and appearing downstairs the week of his birthday when he seemed almost himself apart from that cough.

A week or two after his birthday they brought him the news he had been awaiting. Vanessa had won the great-grandchild race, and produced a nine-pound boy on the anniversary of her wedding. She only just kept her promise. Two days later Whiz rang from Ross, to say that she was a grandmother. The close finish amused him but he was glad Vanessa had won because it would mean more to her and her jovial cross-country runner than to Whiz’s daughter and her poker-faced husband.

He lugged out the estate diary and leaved it through, losing himself in memories as he read of droughts and crop records and Valley gossip, some recorded in his own writing, some in Claire’s. Before he put it away again, however, he made the two entries and totted up his live descendants, making a tally of twenty, covering three generations.

‘Well, that’s not so bad, old girl,’ he said aloud, as though Claire was present and hanging upon the answer to the sum, ‘but it’s amazing there aren’t twice as many when you think of it.’

Then, the book still open before him, he took a nap, and John and his wife Anne, one-time dispenser of hangover cures, came in at teatime and woke him up, saying they were down for the week. On seeing what he had written in the diary that afternoon they told him the score was likely to be twenty-one by the end of November. For once they succeeded in surprising him and he said, defensively, ‘Must be my eyesight. Wouldn’t have missed a thing like that a year ago. Your mother was the one, however. Regular Sherlock Holmes when it came to babies. She sometimes spotted them in advance of the mothers,’ and Anne said, not for the first time, that she always regretted not having known Claire because she sounded so much fun.

‘She was,’ he said, ‘in more ways than I can tell a woman your age.’

John’s visit, and the fact that it brought Andy and Margaret and Simon and Evie into the house four times that week, had a far better effect upon him than any amount of cough mixture and tablets, so good in fact that John, after a private consultation with the others, cancelled a week’s holiday in Cornwall and decided to stay on, for the weather promised to be hot and he and Anne enjoyed water-skiing in the bay. Paul went down there with them once but the excursion tired him so that he spent the next day in bed and seemed listless or contemplative—they couldn’t decide which—the morning after that. Simon came about midday announcing a day’s holiday and they asked Rumble and Mary to look in for tea at four-thirty.

About two hours before that, however, he sent for Simon, who found him sitting on the edge of the bed in a pair of khaki drill slacks.

‘Damned stuffy in here, boy,’ he said, ‘open the windows a bit wider,’ but when they were open as far as they would go he said, ‘It’s still airless. Somewhere up in the eighties. Should be a bumper harvest. Must make a note to ring Young Eveleigh and Jerry on their prospects.’

‘Rumble will be over for tea,’ Simon said. ‘He’ll know all there is to know, won’t he?’ and Paul said, so quietly that he seemed to be talking to himself, ‘Rumble … Rumble could fix it. He’d understand too, I daresay.’

‘Understand what, Gov’nor?’ asked Simon, relishing neither the sound nor the look of him and Paul said, with a note of apology, ‘Sorry, boy, I was thinking …’ and then, more decisively, ‘Get Rumble over here now and tell him to bring the landrover. I’ve a fancy to go where I can breathe. It’s all right, nothing to get upset about. I only want him to take me up to my perch for an hour or so. I’ll be back for tea and I’m damned if I’ll have it up here on a tray. I don’t want to waste weather like this in bed. No damned sense in doing that at my time of life. Go on, Simon, there’s a good chap, phone Rumble and ask him to bring the Landy.’

Simon, without confiding in the women, did as he was asked but privately took John on one side and said, ‘This is a bit dicey, kid. He wants to go up to French Wood this afternoon, just as he wanted to trail down to the bay the day before last. I think he’s got a feeling that if he takes to his bed he won’t get up again and it’s beginning to frighten him a little. I can’t remember him looking that way before.’

John said, deferring to a brother thirty years his senior, ‘You’re the boss when he’s not around and it’s up to you. Knowing the Gov, however, he’ll do anything he wants to do, so maybe you’d better humour him. Is Rumble coming?’

‘On his way. I told him what I told you but he says he’s often taken him up there in the last year or so. Apparently you can drive to within fifty yards of the crest now.’

‘Then that settles it. It’s a Valley rite of theirs, and they must have decided to let us in on it. Tell the girls and I’ll get him ready.’

But when he entered the bedroom John found that Paul had got himself ready. He was wearing, apart from khaki slacks, an old grey sweater and a pair of heavy brogues. He was also in the act of lighting a cigarette and said, in answer to his youngest son’s mildly reproachful glance, ‘I know, I know, but I felt like one. It’s the first in forty-eight hours,’ and he inhaled with pleasure, looking, John thought, like a defiant fifth-former surprised by a master in the Smokery behind the lumber-room trunks.

Rumble and Mary drove up in their green landrover a few minutes later. He had been harvesting an early crop and his face was the colour of ripe barley. He looked, Paul thought, splendidly fit and he wished more of his family spent their time in the open. John was showing the benefit of a week’s water-skiing and skin-diving but Simon looked like a man who spent most of his life indoors and Andy, he recalled, had looked his fifty-six years last time he was over, although Mary did not look her fifty-four. She said, kissing him, ‘Rumble says you want to drive up to French Wood. Why don’t you wait until after tea, when it’s cooler?’

‘Because everything will have quietened down by then and I like to see it at full stretch,’ he said. ‘Apart from that trip down to that damned Lido, in Coombe Bay, I haven’t been beyond the lodge in weeks. I like sun. Always did. The stronger the better.’

Perhaps Mary had been forewarned by Rumble, or perhaps she caught the eye of John. However it was she made no further protest but watched him clamber unaided into the high seat beside Rumble and then went in to talk to Anne and Evie about his tiresomeness. ‘He simply refuses to adjust to old age,’ she said and Anne replied, ‘Good for him. Thank your stars he isn’t a hypochondriac, like my grandfather,’ and they went on to talk about children and forgot about him. But Simon did not, finding it difficult to rid himself of the memory of a spent old man, sitting on the edge of the bed with his weight resting on his hands and his gaze on something that only the very old could see.

Rumble drove slowly down the drive and turned right at the lodge, hugging the shade of the park wall as far as the junction of Hermitage Lane. The Sorrel was reduced to a trickle and almost silent but the birds about it were noisy enough and colour flamed both sides of the road, forget-me-nots, yellow iris, purple loosetrife and meadow-sweet on the left, and higher up, on the right-hand bank, Paul’s old friends the foxgloves, constellations of bright yellow dandelions and buttercups, cowparsley, purple orchis, cinquefoil, bedstraw, greater celandine, speedwell, trefoil and scarlet poppy. It was, thought Paul, a tremendous show, far more rewarding than any horticultural display in a flapping tent, and he said suddenly, ‘That bank—first thing that ever impressed me about here, the day old John Rudd brought me this way from Sorrel Halt all those years ago. I saw my first kingfisher that day, and there’s another.’