The Green Gauntlet (21 page)

Simon took his time answering and Paul gathered from his reaction to the question that he had lost a good deal of the intense privacy he had cultivated as a boy. He said, ‘Have you read a chap called Orwell?’

‘
The Road to Wigan Pier
?
Yes, I have and I liked him. He seemed to me to have more compassion than most of the authors you introduced into the house.’

‘I’ve met him and talked to him. He’s not too optimistic about what could emerge from this showdown. It could be a Robot State, with science taking over from the sociologists. Wells had the same notion, remember?’

‘And what banner would you enlist under then?’ Paul asked, with a smile, for he had a countryman’s contempt for theorists of all kinds.

‘Well, right alongside well-meaning reactionaries like you, Gov’nor! After all, looking around me I have to admit you’ve done a better job than any of those bloody politicians in Westminster. And I mean politicians with red ties as well as blue.’

Paul was so unused to compliments of this kind from a member of his family that he felt vaguely embarrassed and said, clapping his heels into the grey and leading the way down the path. ‘I’ve done what I wanted to do, lived and worked in the open and raised a family on fresh air and good food! As to any wider complication, I’ve played it by instinct and I’ve never been that far out. I don’t really give a damn what happens over there when they’ve cooked Hitler’s goose but I think I know my own people and they won’t let anyone push them around indefinitely. They never have and they never will, and if that sounds like something out of a Boer War music-hall ditty I can’t help it. It’s the way I’m made and what life has taught me over the last forty years.’

He had not meant to amuse Simon but he did and Paul laughed too, for in the ring of Simon’s laugh he heard another echo of his mother and it made him feel absurdly young for the moment.

After that they talked easily of one thing and another and it pleased Paul to see the eager way Simon looked about him as they dropped down to the river road and walked the fly-pestered horses along the bank to the lodge gates. Simon said suddenly, ‘Its got magic, I’ll grant you that,’ and when Paul said it was losing it, like everywhere else, he said seriously, ‘It’ll keep so long as you’re around, Dad, and that’s what’s important to me.’ It was not the sentiment so much as the form of address that interested Paul. It must, he thought, be getting on for thirty years since Simon had addressed him as anything, but ‘Gov’nor’, a semi-ironic term every one of them but Mary used. ‘Something
has
happened to him,’ he mused as they clattered into the yard and Claire and Mary ran out shouting their greetings, ‘but it’ll take a woman to ferret out what!’

II

O
n the fourth day of his leave Simon saddled Paul’s grey and rode across the ford and down to Coombe Bay, hoping to take a swim in the calm water between the sandbar and the landslide west of the village. It was a hot, shimmering day, and later he intended visiting Rachel’s grave in the new acre beyond the churchyard wall, where lay most Shallowfordians who had died since the early ’thirties. First, however, he took advantage of his battledress to enter the prohibited beach, noting that the sea was doing its best to make the ugly crisscross of defences look part of the landscape. It was from this beach, he remembered, that Claire had taught him to swim and but for that he would have spent the last three years as a prisoner-of-war after the unit’s surrender near Calais. The reflection increased his enjoyment of the occasion as he swam across the two hundred yards separating the beach from the nearest obstructions inside the bar. It was here, in a rectangle of rusting iron and trailing weed that he saw, or thought he saw, a mermaid.

She bobbed up from behind a thick, rusty crosspiece, her dark hair floating in a wide swirl, her expression as startled as one might expect of a mermaid surprised an eighth of a mile offshore. He was so astonished that he opened his mouth, swallowed half a gill of seawater and fell to coughing. When he was recovered and looked again she was gone.

He called, ‘Hi, there! Am I seeing things?’ and she bobbed out again, smiling, a good-looking girl in her early twenties, with a smooth oval face and eyes that seemed, in the strong sunlight, only a shade less green than the weed clinging to the crossbar. Then he looked closer and saw that they were not green but hazel and that she had a laughing mouth with traces of lipstick on the underlip. He said, with moderate enthusiasm, ‘Oughtn’t we to introduce ourselves? At first glance I could have sworn you had a tail!’

‘I knew you hadn’t,’ she said, ‘I saw you kicking on the way out but I thought you might have a warrant and a pair of handcuffs! It’s verboten to swim here but I suppose you’re privileged.’

‘More or less,’ he said, ‘because I arrived in uniform. All the same, I was stopped and asked for my identity card at the old gun emplacement. Why weren’t you?’

‘Because I came by boat,’ she said and waved her arm towards the seaward side of the sandbank where a dinghy was moored under the overhang of the iron scaffolding. ‘That’s even more verboten, of course, but they don’t keep much of a lookout, do they? I might be a Hitler maiden, cruising inshore for a spot of sabotage!’

‘You don’t talk like one, or you’ve managed to acquire a first-rate East Anglian accent.’

‘That’s clever of you,’ she said. ‘I come from Norwich but I’ve always thought it wasn’t noticeable, except on a tape recorder.’

‘I’m very interested in regional accents,’ he said, ‘an amateur Professor Higgins. Are you on holiday?’

‘No, I’m here for the duration. We were blitzed and I manage for Mr Horsey, the Rector. Before we go any further, however, I ought to admit I know who you are. You’re one of Squire Craddock’s sons, aren’t you? The one who is in the Army?’

‘The oldest one,’ he said, ‘and getting on for superannuation. I’m on leave and this is the first time I’ve been back for more than two years.’

She looked serious for a moment. ‘I remember—“Simon” isn’t it?’ and when he nodded, ‘My uncle talks about you as a tribe! He’s a Craddock fan, did you know that? He has a terrific respect for your father and mother. He’s really quite a dear.’

He liked her voice and friendliness. He liked too the way water glistened on her smooth, pale face, like raindrops on the unblemished skin of an apple hanging in sunlight. ‘Let’s take a look at your boat,’ he said. ‘We can keep the obstructions between us and the gun-post, otherwise the entire crew will come out to investigate.’

They waded ashore and ran crouching across the narrow strip of sand to the boat. She was taller than he would have guessed and slimly built but out of the water she looked younger than he had judged. She had small, high breasts, long, sloping shoulders, a narrow waist and long legs that would carry her over the ground quickly. Poised on the edge of the boat she reminded him vaguely of a figure in a fifteenth century painting by someone like Baldung or Memling. There was something slightly mediaeval about her breasts and shoulders, suggesting a Virgin in a stained glass-window. Her best feature, he decided, was her hair, black and very plentiful, darker and much curlier than his sister Mary’s. It was not her face or figure that attracted him, however, so much as her complete lack of artifice. She made no kind of effort to impress so that he had an odd impression they had already known one another a long time and had met again casually after a brief interval. He said, joining her on the gunwale, ‘Old Horsey must be over eighty. He can’t be your real uncle, can he?’

‘He could at that,’ she said, smiling, ‘for I’m twenty-eight, but he’s not really an uncle at all, he’s a cousin twice removed. My father is a parson like him. Parsons run in our family. The Horseys have had about a dozen in three generations. Did you know Uncle Horace’s son, the one who was killed in the First War?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘as a matter of fact I married his widow,’ and he smiled as her hand shot to her mouth like someone trying to mask a gaffe.

‘Of course! What a stupid remark. She was killed in that hit-and-run raid, wasn’t she? Uncle wrote about it at the time. I say—I’m sorry, I’m not very bright about that kind of thing.’

‘There’s nothing to be sorry about,’ he said, making a circle in the sand with his great toe. ‘It happened, and that’s that. If you were blitzed in Norwich I daresay you lost people the same way.’

‘Friends,’ she said, ‘about half a dozen of them. We were lucky but the Vicarage was burned down when a couple of incendiaries went through the roof. You’re a Commando, aren’t you?’

‘I was, a sergeant instructor, but I was commissioned a week ago and now I don’t know how they’ll use me. Gliding, maybe, that’s the latest fashion.’

‘I wanted to go in the A.T.S.’ she said, ‘but Mummy talked me out of it. I think she had an idea they share huts and blankets with the men. I wish I had joined. In Norwich I ran a canteen for a school and now I’m going to serve in the N.A.A.F.I. up at the camp.’

‘You’ll be in great demand over there,’ he said, ‘the intake is about a thousand men every six weeks and there are only about a dozen women allowed inside the wire!’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s what I hoped!’ and laughed, shaking out her dark curls and rubbing them gently with a towel she took from the thwarts.

‘Still fancy free?’

‘Still fancy free. I was engaged once but he fell for a W.A.A.F. and after a decent interval he brought her to the Vicarage for my approval. She was much more his type than me, very fair and fluffy, and well up with all the latest hot numbers. She played boogie-woogie on the church organ. Father never quite got over it but I did.’

He said, surprised at his own initiative, ‘Look, when you’ve dressed, and sneaked back round the breakwater, will you wait for me up at the lych-gate? I’ve got my father’s grey hobbled on the beach and I’ll ride back along the dunes in about half an hour. Unless you want to stay out here that is.’

‘I’ve got to cope with Uncle’s lunch,’ she said, ‘but he never knows what time it is. Yes, I’ll meet you there, but why the lych-gate?’

He hesitated but then, meeting her frank, interested gaze, ‘I wanted to see where Rachel was buried,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been there and I’d prefer to go in company. Your kind of company anyway.’

She said, calmly, ‘I can understand that. In about half an hour then, and if I’m caught landing back me up when I say I’m a refugee from Sark!’

He gave her a casual wave and went back across the sandspit, swimming to the landslip where he had left his clothes and the hobbled grey. He felt elated and even more relaxed than he had felt riding back over the moor with the Old Man. The girl’s gaiety was infectious. It took him back to the times he used to come here with Claire for his swimming lessons, and the weather itself was co-operating for, in those days, it seemed to him that the sun was always hanging over Nun’s Island like a pawnbroker’s ball and the sand above highwater line was hot to the feet. He realised then why he had put off his duty visit to Rachel’s grave, but in the company of a stranger like the girl it seemed no more than polite gesture calculated to satisfy the conventional side of Claire, who had asked him if he had been only that morning. He hurried into his battledress and rode up the slope of the dunes and from here he could see what the men on the jetty could not see, the little black dinghy, creeping along under cover of the breakwater. As he watched he saw it nose in among three or four other boats moored under the Bluff.

She was waiting when he got there and haltered the grey to the church railings, following her across the angled slope of the old churchyard crowded with headstones engraved with names that were a kind of alphabet to anyone who had grown up in the Valley; Willoughbys, Codsalls, Potters and Derwents, Stokeses, Morgans and Tozers. He had known most of them as a boy and could call to mind the faces of some of their children and grandchildren. He said suddenly, ‘Do you like it here? Does it seem dead-and-alive after a city like Norwich?’ and she said it did not and that she liked it very much because it was ‘George-Ellioty’.

‘That’s a rum adjective,’ he said, ‘but I know what you mean. I must tell the Gov’nor what you said. He’s always quoting Tom, Maggie, and Silas Marner at us. He thinks a great many things have altered here but it seems much the same to me. I left here as long ago as 1929 just before I married, and I only returned on rare family occasions, apart from a spell of convalescence after they winkled me out of Franco’s stinking gaol.’

She didn’t question him about Spain and he was grateful, but said, ‘You didn’t have any children, did you?’

‘No, we were too priggish. We used to tell each other it wasn’t the kind of world to dump children in but I see now we were fooling ourselves and each other.’

‘How?’

‘Who can pontificate on anything as basic as that? All these people—I knew most of them—had flocks of children, and God knows, they had their problems! Every generation has its problems and how the hell can you solve them by cutting down on population? We should look pretty sick right now if we hadn’t got plenty of keen types to open a Second Front and were obliged to stay on the defensive indefinitely.’

‘It’s a point,’ she said, and at that he laughed, saying, ‘Why am I talking to you like this? I don’t even know your name. Is it Horsey?’

‘It’s Horsey,’ she said, equably, ‘Evelyn Horsey, but everyone except my mother calls me Evie. Mother is just the tiniest bit prissy. It probably comes from presiding over thousands of sewing circles and Save-the-Belfry bazaars! Have you any idea where the grave is because I know. It’s over near the yew in the Intake. That’s where all the Eveleighs are. I cut the grass there only last week.’

She led the way across Church Lane into the new churchyard, already containing a score of graves. He remembered the Eveleigh patch then and stood beside the slate headstone, reading the weathered names of Norman and his son Gilbert, and the later inscriptions cut on behalf of Marian, his mother-in-law, Harold, his brother-in-law and, last of all, ‘
Rachel Craddock
’,
with the bald ‘
1896–1942 Killed by Enemy Action
’ underneath. There was no Craddock patch as yet for they had never found his sister Claire’s body after the Dutch air disaster in 1934 and that, he supposed, was the reason why his father had had Rachel laid there with the rest of her family. He said to the girl standing behind him, ‘I didn’t come home for the funeral.’