The Green Gauntlet (22 page)

‘You couldn’t come?’

‘I wouldn’t. I was in the middle of a course up in the Highlands and it seemed to me more important to finish what I was doing than come five hundred miles to see Rachel buried. Some of my pals were shocked and so, I think, was my father and stepmother. What do you think?’

Extraordinary, he thought, asking her a question like that on the strength of an hour’s acquaintance but he waited eagerly for her answer, knowing it would be an honest one.

‘It’s something no-one has any right to comment on one way or the other,’ she said. ‘It was a matter for you. No-one else, not even your people.’

‘She was a very intense person,’ he said. ‘She never got over Keith Horsey being sacrificed to the armchair patriots in World War I. She felt she owed it to him to spend the rest of her life crusading against injustice of that sort. All kinds of injustice, from bad housing to victimisation by Trade Unions. She wasn’t really a Socialist at all, except in the nineteenth-century sense. It used her up by the time she was forty and damn near used me up too! It wasn’t until I came to grips with reality that I realised theory isn’t much good against Stukas and Panzers. You’ve got to strike some kind of bargain with the Top Hats, if only in order to stop the Steel Helmets taking over. You can always go back to pelting toppers when you’ve nothing better to do.’

‘Uncle Horace warned me you were the odd one out,’ she said, but when he looked up sharply and saw that she was smiling he smiled too, saying, ‘Yes I am, so thanks for coming. Let’s go in and say hello to the Rector. Then I must go home. It’s gone lunchtime now.’

‘Stay and lunch with us,’ she suggested. ‘You can put the horse in the loose-box and phone the Big House. Uncle Horace would like to meet someone actually taking part in the war. The only soldiers he ever sees are the local Home Guard and that elderly naval gun-crew down at the harbour. There isn’t much to tempt you, I’m afraid, but at least it isn’t one of those awful dishes the radio keeps telling you are much better for you than real food! As a matter of fact it’s one of Farmer Bellchamber’s ducks—cold. It’s rather like the relationship that used to exist between professional smugglers and the local parson. Instead of leaving a cask of brandy on the doorstep they now leave eggs and poultry. I don’t know what he’s expected to do in return, probably intercede for them in the Quiet Moment before the sermon!’

She took him by the hand and he found her grasp cool and firm, exactly the kind of grasp he would have expected from someone as self-assured and sane and yet, in another way, as irresponsible as one of The Pair when they were seventeen. They led the grey round the churchyard and into the Rectory yard where there was an unused loose-box and Simon unsaddled while Evie went clattering into the big old-fashioned kitchen, calling to her uncle that she had a guest. Simon stood for a moment with his hand on Snowdrop’s shoulder, warming himself in the mood that had been growing on him ever since he had looked out of the carriage window at Sorrel Halt and seen his father standing there with the reins of the two horses looped over his arm. ‘It’s curious,’ he thought, ‘how tranquil everything has become since then, almost as though one was beginning again with the benefit of hindsight. But that isn’t really anything to do with her, or the Gov’nor, it’s the sameness of this place.’

The frail old man greeted him with a cordiality he bestowed on all the children of Paul Craddock. Simon, alone among his brothers and sisters, could recall Horsey’s early years in the Valley, when he had appeared as a diffident man from a London dockside parish, a freakish replacement in Shallowford eyes of the bustling, bullying Parson Bull, last of a long line of local hunting parsons.

Listening to the old man’s knowledgeable observations on Valley flora and fauna (he did not, it appeared, have much interest in the war after all), Simon found himself assessing Horsey’s unlikely success since he had settled among them, recalling his faltering sermons and self-effacing manner in the years leading up to the First World War, and his sudden access of spiritual strength after his only son had been killed in France. Today the old fellow did not look strong enough to climb a pulpit stair but Simon knew that there was steadfastness there for he had often heard Paul describe how, against all probability, Horsey had united the religious sects of the Valley and reconciled the mutual suspicions of the Anglicans, the tight little Nonconformist groups among tradesmen and fishermen, and the few Roman Catholics in the Valley. Somehow his essential faith and love of nature had compounded a kind of local patriotism and his courage and integrity was unquestioned by all.

With half his mind Simon listened to the old fellow’s tale of tracking down a rare moth, identified by a long Latin name, and with the other half he contemplated the smiling, leggy girl who dispensed cold duck and green salad with the easy jocularity of a mother feeding her son and one of his friends who had strayed in for a meal after a day’s romp. The peace of the old rectory was like balm. He found himself thinking, ‘This is what it is all about—this is the essence of what we’re fighting for—peace, the well-stocked English countryside, predictability, and cold duck.’ He noticed too the casual grace of her long white hands and once, when their eyes met and she smiled, the cheerlessness of his own life up to this point presented itself as a long tramp across the empty streets of an industrial city in January sleet. He thought, a little apprehensively, ‘She’s late spring and there’s an element of renewal about her,’ and the insecurity of his present life pricked him like a spur so that he thought, fleetingly, ‘If I want to change direction there’s no time to be lost, not a day, not an hour …!’

III

L
ooking back on that period it seemed to Simon that the seed of their relationship sprouted overnight like Jack’s Beanstalk. He only had nine days, and three of them had passed before they met, but they made the very best of the remaining six. The day after lunchtime at the Rectory he took her home, and the day after that they walked across the cliffs to Whinmouth and had tea at a little café he knew on the Quay. On the fourth day he borrowed Bon-Bon Potter’s abandoned motor-cycle and drove her pillion to Paxtonbury, where they saw
One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing
and he amused her throughout tea relating the pre-war antics of The Pair. That evening they had dinner at the Big House where anything but high tea was a rarity. Claire, watching them, reflected on the seesaw element of family life and fervently wished him well. He deserved, she thought, a real break this time and it was strange that he should look like getting one at the moment The Pair’s nonstop hayride was on collision course.

Ever since Margaret had stayed a few days after Andy had been reported missing Claire had lived with their unsavoury problem, recoiling from it in a way she had never done when marginally involved in so many of their pranks. This, she realised, was not a prank at all but a desperately serious business, especially now that Andy had turned up again, and whenever she pondered his miraculous reappearance she felt bereft of common decency for she was unable to dismiss the uncomfortable thought that it might have been better for everybody if Andy had stayed missing.

And yet, knowing that Margaret must be thinking the same, she still felt desperately sorry for her and for that idiot Stevie as well. She did not know her sons very well. They had always lived at such a frightful pace, mostly away from home, and had seemed so well able to take care of themselves but now she was beginning to understand that this was a fiction and that both had been engaged in a game of bluff of which the end-product was a scandal that could age Paul twenty years.

Only one thing recommended itself, to keep it from him as long as possible, please God for ever, but how could this be achieved after Andy got home and found a wife six months gone with his brother’s child? It would be better, she imagined, if Andy was led to think of the child as a stranger’s. He was the kind of person who might in time overlook that, after an absence abroad of more than two years, but what would be his reaction when he learned that Margaret’s feelings towards him were indifferent and that Stevie, under the stress of war, had become as vulnerable as Simon, now chattering away to this likeable girl he had fished out of the bay? Margaret had been appallingly frank but her identification of Stevie with Andy did not seem a piece of special pleading to Claire, herself a sensual woman who had lived for a man’s embraces since she was a girl of nineteen. She had, in fact, seen a similarity between her own marriage and the marriage of Andy and Margaret, a partnership with a strong physical basis but not much else. Now, it seemed, the girl had found something else and found it where and when she least expected it.

Inability to confide in anyone, or even discuss the impasse with the parties concerned, made Claire distrait, so that even Paul, usually insensitive to her moods, was beginning to notice, attributing her moodiness to anxiety over Andy’s injuries and Stevie’s determination to fly again as soon as his rest period had ended. There was also Simon to worry about, and because he was a stepson she had always given him more attention than any of the others. She would have gladly confided in Simon if she had not been caught off balance by his newly acquired peace of mind. As it was it seemed to her a shabby trick to knock him over the head just as he was standing upright after so long, so she said nothing, drawing what comfort she could from his unexpectedly high spirits and the pleasure they obviously gave his father.

Paul Craddock, unencumbered by such dismal forebodings, could sit back and enjoy what he thought the lady Victorian novelists might have called ‘a whirlwind courtship’. For him one of the by-products of family life had been an opportunity to watch his children choosing mates and it was a pleasure that grew with the years, for he was now of an age when he didn’t give a damn whether they made fools of themselves or otherwise. It was not always so. He had been embarrassed by the dourness of the Scotsman Whiz had brought home and rebuffed by the coolness of the Archdeacon’s daughter and the Archdeacon’s wife. Margaret, who had the kind of promise he always looked for in women, he had liked from the start and he had always felt sympathetic towards Rachel Eveleigh who had gone through such a bad time in the First War. His ewe lamb among his in-laws, of course was Rumble Patrick, who had always seemed so right for Mary, but now he found himself warming to this dark, leggy girl Simon had brought home so unexpectedly and he wondered whether the boy was as taken with her as he appeared to be, or was only going through a kind of thawing out process after the drabness of his first marriage. He didn’t know and he wouldn’t bet on it but, like Claire, he wished Simon all the luck in the world and privately hoped the girl would forget she was a parson’s daughter and remember there was a war on.

On the last day of his leave, when he and Evie Horsey had set off to visit the headwaters of the Sorrel where its source welled into the deep sandstone cleft running diagonally across the moor, Simon Craddock made up his mind in the way he had impressed upon so many recruits when they were introduced to the death-slide, or the hop, skip and jump across a twenty-foot wall on the assault course. He said, looking down at her as she dabbled her hands in the first yard of the Sorrel, ‘I don’t ever recall enjoying a week like this, Evie, not in my entire life! It began even before you bobbed up from behind that bollard. What I do know is that it would have been temporary if I hadn’t run into you.’ He paused a moment, as though gathering himself for the leap. ‘I’m due out of here at first light tomorrow. I’ll write of course but why say the only important thing I have to say on paper? Will you marry me?’

It was, he thought, a rather casual, amateurish proposal but he saw that it was not entirely unexpected. Only the timing astonished her, for she thought of him as a man approaching middle age, who would pause to weigh factors that would not occur to a younger man. When she did not answer immediately but remained kneeling beside the stream letting the current run through her fingers, he said, quietly, ‘All right, think about it, and that isn’t a conventional qualification. I’m eleven years older than you and I still haven’t a clue what I’m going to do with my life when the war’s over. I’ve always made most of my decisions on impulse and that’s what I’m doing now.’

When she still did not answer his nerve faltered a little and he said, breathlessly, ‘Well say
something
.
Tell me I’ve got a nerve, or to stop making a damn fool of myself, or be my age, or something!’ Then she stood upright, took his face between her hands and said, with a now familiar compromise between gaiety and sincerity, ‘Of course I’ll marry you, providing you haven’t thought better of it by the time you’re home again and I do hope you haven’t! I’d back my instinct about you. Any girl who had a ha’porth of sense would do that,’ and she kissed him, very gently, on the mouth.

It was as simple as that, the simplest and most satisfactory thing that had ever happened to him and he wondered at its simplicity for a very long time, remembering not only the spontaneity of her acceptance but also the setting, with its great hartstongue ferns and tinkling stream, birds in the thickets above and sunbeams probing the bank on which they stood, and something of this must have communicated itself to him at the time for he said thankfully, ‘I’m damned glad I was able to say it instead of writing it. Somehow I didn’t think I would, and would have cursed myself for having to put it all on paper the minute I got back to camp. I’m out of practice, Evie, but you’ll have noticed that by now.’

‘I’ve noticed,’ she said, ‘and it’s a point in your favour.’ Then, unexpectedly, ‘Afterwards? Will you want to come back here? To settle I mean?’

‘God knows! I’m no farmer and what else would I do?’

She took his hand and spread it out, regarding it intently for a moment and saying, ‘You could do anything very well so long as you believed enough in it, but you won’t bother much with personal problems until there’s hope for everybody’s future. You’re that kind of person and if you weren’t you’d be just another widower looking for a fresh start. How long do you give it, Simon?’