The Green Gauntlet (24 page)

The German lit one from a curiously shaped brass lighter and then Paul lit one too and they stared down at the parachute.

‘Yours?’ he asked, and the young man nodded and smiled, at the same time making a curiously English gesture, closing the fingers of both hands and elevating his two thumbs.

‘I should say you’re lucky,’ Paul grunted, ‘you made it by a few feet. What’s your name?’

‘Weber,’ the man said, and then, politely, ‘You are a soldier?’

‘No, but that’s my house down there. I was a soldier, I probably fought your father in France.’

‘Ach so,’ the young man said, like a stock character in a Continental play, ‘but it was a different kind of war.’

‘Very different,’ Paul said, grumpily. ‘We didn’t kill women and kids, neither of us.’

The young man looked thoughtful. Then he said, unsentimentally, ‘My mother and my aunt were killed by bombs in Stuttgart. In this year.’

The last of Paul’s resentment ebbed and with it went the exhilaration of the capture. He felt an absurd impulse to unclip his holster and toss the contents into the wood beside which they stood. Close by was the tree where there were once grey squirrels beloved of Hazel Potter, the mother of Rumble Patrick and he thought fleetingly of Rumble, and of Stevie and Andy and Simon, comparing them with this tall, good-looking boy miraculously saved from that holocaust back there in the woods. He said aloud, but not addressing the man, ‘We’re sick, the whole damned lot of us. We must be,’ and the German said, ‘Please?’ to which Paul gave no answer.

They went down the long meadow into an erupting household. John, a child once again, pranced out screaming that a jeep had arrived with an officer and two men from the camp. They had orders to search the woods after a report from the Polish Squadron that a bomber had crashed before crossing the coast. ‘Paxtonbury is still burning,’ he said, as though it was something to exult over, ‘but nobody round here was hit.’

They went into the kitchen, the German making a great effort to look dignified and the Royal Marine sergeant there said, ‘Christ! The boy was right, sir. We didn’t really believe him.’

‘This is the only survivor,’ Paul said, ‘the others are back there this side of the Mere, done to a turn.’

‘How did Sonny Boy escape?’

‘Parachute. The ’chute is back there too. None of your people hit?’

‘No, sir, it was a Baedekker on Paxtonbury. There were casualties there I think but it was mostly incendiaries.’

‘They didn’t sound like incendiaries,’ Paul said, ‘you’d better fetch your officer. This chap won’t give any trouble,’ and he automatically put the kettle on the stove.

‘They’ll come for you soon,’ he told the prisoner. ‘Tea?’

The man nodded eagerly and Paul saw his eyes range round the big room. He said, as Paul busied himself with cups, ‘You are the Graf?’

‘The “Graf”?’ Paul searched his memory for an approximate and said, ‘Well, I don’t know, the people here think of me as “Squire”.’

‘Ah yes,’ the young man said, ‘that is the word—“
Squire.
”
I am very glad your property was not damaged last night.’

‘And so am I,’ thought Paul, ‘but it’s no thanks to you that my wife, two of my children, and two of my grandchildren aren’t smeared on the wall of the broom cupboard.’ And then he remembered the Stuttgart raid, and when Claire came in, tight-lipped, unsmiling and no more than curious, he said, ‘Go easy on him. He’s got troubles of his own.’

Chapter Nine

A Variety of Sallies

I

C
hristmas, 1943, the fifth Christmas of the war.

It had already lasted longer than the war that nobody in the Valley thought would ever end, and although there was no question of losing it now Paul felt that it had somehow bogged itself down in Italy, in Russia, and behind the much advertised defences of what even the Valley people now called, in the jargon of the times,
Festung-Europa.

It was surprising, he thought, that so many of the Valley youngsters were still alive, and also that they bobbed up so frequently. The blight he had anticipated back in 1939 had so far been averted. Bon-Bon, son of Smut and Marie Potter, came home sporting a medal, and so did Dick Potter, now a sergeant in a famous infantry regiment. So far, miraculously it seemed, none of his tenants had lost a son and fatal casualties were still numbered at two, Harold Eveleigh and Rachel Craddock, both civilians. His own family, apart from Andy, were still closely engaged: Stevie flying a Lancaster in the ever-mounting air attacks over Germany; Simon, training for some distant offensive, stationed in the Midlands; and Whiz’s husband, Ian, living, as far as he could judge from her letters, a sybaritic life in India. Rumble Patrick had come home in September, sunburned and as cheerful as ever, ranging into the Valley like a sailor in a Victorian print with a bulging kitbag full of bizarre gifts and a repertoire of travellers’ tales from the other side of the world. Paul was surprised that he had not appeared with a parrot and when he mentioned this Rumble said it had, in fact, occurred to him to buy one in Buenos Aires but all the parrots he interviewed talked Spanish so he hadn’t bothered. He told Paul he had had one or two near shaves, and that his ship had been holed by a torpedo off Halifax, Nova Scotia, but they had managed to float her into port. ‘Don’t mention that to Mary,’ he said, ‘let her go on thinking I’m immortal. Claire had the same idea about you last time, I believe.’

‘Yes, that’s so,’ Paul said, remembering how, alone in the Valley, Claire had persisted in thinking of him as alive when he had been lying in a coma in a German hospital at Soissons, and then he asked Rumble if the neutral countries he had visited considered the eventual collapse of the Third Reich inevitable.

‘Everywhere but in the Argentine,’ he said, ‘Jerry has a special line in propaganda over there. We seem to be getting on top of the U-boats lately and the only crack I had at Jerry was at a Condor, off San Sebastian. Looking round it strikes me that you people see a damned sight more action than us. Paxtonbury is a right mess, I saw that while I was waiting for the ’bus. Is it true that about a hundred people were killed?’

‘A hundred and eleven, and twice as many injured,’ Paul said, and because the subject depressed him he went on to give Rumble the family news, saying that Andy, who was to have returned home in August, had now been transferred to Cairo for further skin-grafting. He understood there were first-class facilities out there now that the Germans had been driven out of Africa.

‘How is Andy’s wife?’ Rumble asked. ‘Does she ever look back here?’ and Paul said no, and that Claire told him she was nursing in a hospital in Wales and sometimes met Stevie who had spent some time on a course at a Shropshire airfield and was within driving distance. Then he added, ‘I suppose Mary told you Stevie and Monica have split up? I can’t say I’m devastated, I never liked that girl. I always thought her damned patronising, not only to us but to that little Welsh wife of Andy’s. I believe there will be a divorce eventually and it’ll be the first in my family, but the way people are carrying on lately it doesn’t shock me as it might have twenty years ago. Claire seems to take it more seriously but she’s not herself these days.’

‘I’d noticed that,’ Rumble said, ‘Mary thinks that raid upset her badly.’

‘She was off her oats before that,’ Paul said, ‘I think maternal anxiety about all of you has finally caught up with her, or perhaps it’s just age. After all, she’ll be sixty in a month or two and at last she’s beginning to look it—fifty anyway. Will you be home for any length of time?’

‘I’ve got a ship sailing mid-October,’ he said, ‘and I made sure it wasn’t travelling a Northern route. In spite of what you think I don’t stick my neck out more than I can help.’

‘There was no damned point in you sticking it out at all,’ Paul grumbled, ‘but maybe it’s like you say, you’re nearly as safe in the Atlantic as within a half-mile of that camp on the moor! I’ll tell you something else. That last baby was a Godsend to Mary. It stopped her brooding and gave her something to think about. I’m glad it was a girl. Are you?’

Rumble said he was but was disappointed it was a blonde. ‘I was expecting it to be a brunette Craddock, like Mary,’ he said, ‘and it turns out to be a Derwent-Potter Anglo-Saxon!’

He lunged off in search of Mary and later Paul saw them both saddling his grey and the pony. They were going, Mary said, to take a look at the remains of the German bomber but privately, seeing that the September sunshine was warm and inviting, Paul thought this unlikely and that they were taking the opportunity offered to get away from the family and pretend they were ten years younger. ‘That’s one aspect of being married to a sailor,’ he told himself, ‘every time he comes ashore it’s another honeymoon,’ but went on to reflect that Rumble and Mary always had seemed newly-weds to him and probably always would, even if he survived their Silver Wedding. He wished heartily that some of his other children had mated by instinct, in the way he invariably thought of Mary’s marriage to Rumble, but he was more philosophical nowadays concerning the troubles of others, particularly those of the generation that had grown up between the wars. He drove off to attend a War Agricultural Committee meeting in Whinmouth.

About two months after Rumble had departed Simon came home on leave to marry what Paul called his ‘Coombe Bay mermaid’, niece of old Parson Horsey, who had been a regular visitor at the Big House since Simon and she had become engaged. He liked her immensely, finding her a sympathetic, uncomplicated person, more like one of the youngsters growing up hereabouts in Edward VII’s reign than the brittle young people of the ’forties. They had a quiet church wedding and this in itself, thought Paul, was unusual nowadays when youngsters dragged one another off to the nearest Register Office and signed on, like couples qualifying for pensions or free coal. He enjoyed the wedding that took place under a light fall of snow, the first snow of the winter, and afterwards they all gathered at Parson Horsey’s rectory for a frugal wedding breakfast. The old man himself had insisted on officiating, despite increasing feebleness. Looking at him during the ceremony Paul told himself that the old chap wouldn’t last much longer and his mind went back to Horsey’s predecessor, the rampaging Parson Bull, who had spent most of his time foxhunting and died as a result of an injury in the field. ‘It’s like remembering someone who fought at Naseby,’ he thought, and wondered whom he would get to replace Horsey when he died. He was one of the last of Paul’s intimates around here and they shared many memories, sad and joyful. He was glad Simon had lengthened the chain of association by marrying into the family but it was odd that both his eldest son’s wives should have the same surname.

Claire welcomed the wedding. It took her mind off the nagging problem of the Stevie-Andy-Margaret triangle. She was still at her wit’s end what to do about it, for Margaret’s child was due in a week or two but no word came from her or Stevie. She was not even certain that Stevie admitted paternity, although Margaret assured her that they intended to marry. That, however, was before Andy had returned from the dead and Margaret’s reaction to this had been baffling. She seemed to withdraw from the situation, as though the mere act of transferring her affections from one brother to another meant that Andy would bow himself out of her life and this seemed to Claire (and would, she assumed, seem to any sane person) an outrageous supposition. She was not as appalled by the switch as she might have been, however, for she was a woman who had always found it easy to adjust to the mood of successive generations. In her own youth infidelity within the family would have been unthinkable but now, she realised, it was more likely to be regarded as a tiresome muddle than a disaster. She tried, over and over again, to think it out logically and arrive at some kind of compromise with herself, but the ramifications of the problem were beyond her and in the end she always came back to what seemed to her the best of a very bad job, a frank admission on Margaret’s part that she had gone off the rails and been unlucky enough to conceive a child during Andy’s absence abroad. This, she reasoned, would at least keep the scandal impersonal and Andy would have a straight choice of overlooking her adultery or divorcing her.

Divorce, in the old days, had been a terrible thing for all concerned, parents and in-laws as well as the parties themselves, but this was no longer so. People seemed to get married and divorced like getting on and off omnibuses and no-one thought much less of them. Paul, of course, wouldn’t see it this way at all although he had taken the prospect of Stevie’s divorce quietly enough because he had never cared for Monica Dearden. She could imagine, however, how violently he would erupt if he discovered that Margaret’s child was Stevie’s and that only the unexpected delay in Andy’s homecoming had prevented a confrontation before the child was born. It was the kind of situation you read about in the Sunday papers but her mind boggled at the impact it would have upon him.

Having considered but rejected Simon as a confidant and also, for roughly the same reasons, Rumble Patrick when he came home in late summer, she continued to keep her own counsel, extracting what satisfaction she could from the rehabilitation of Simon who at last, thank God, had found a nice, sensible girl to look after him. She was very generous when Evie came to her for advice about fixing up part of the Old Rectory as a temporary home. Sheets, blankets and curtains were almost impossible to buy on the miserly issue of coupons they gave to couples intending to marry, so Smut Potter drove over in his baker’s van and returned to the Rectory with a load of furnishings that were no longer needed at the Big House.

‘Look on it as my wedding present,’ she told Evie, when she called to protest at the prodigality of her mother-in-law. ‘You didn’t know the boy in his gloomy days and therefore you can’t possibly appreciate what you’ve done for him. His first marriage was a so-called intellectual-alliance and just about as frosty as it sounds. I’m not saying that Rachel wasn’t a good wife. She was, or she tried to be, but he went through a terrible time in Spain and later in France and she wasn’t much help to a normal healthy male. He was obviously crying out for somebody like you and I’m sure you’ll make him very happy. I daresay he’s told you the situation he found himself in after his mother walked out all those years ago and I married Paul and raised a tribe of my own? Well, I did my best to spoil him on that account, so you’ll find he’ll spoil easily, but one word of warning—for Heaven’s sake don’t take his politics seriously.’

‘I don’t think he’s got many now,’ Evie said. ‘He’s very sold on the war against Hitler but then, so am I, and so is everyone else, aren’t they?’

‘You can count me out,’ Claire said. ‘I worked all the patriotism out of my system in 1918. What amazes me is that everybody else didn’t. Oh, I know we had to fight this one when it happened but what guarantee have we it will be the last? If men didn’t learn their lesson in those awful trenches they aren’t likely to learn it gaping at the ruins of Paxtonbury.’ She looked at Evie’s rather shocked expression and then laughed. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said, ‘I’ve had a basinful lately and the only thing I really care about is this Valley. I’m a local patriot you might say and to me, like Paul, foreigners begin on the far side of the railway line.’ She wondered, briefly, whether to ask the girl if she intended having any children but thought better of it. Simon was thirty-nine and Evie, she gathered, twenty-eight. If they needed encouragement in this direction they could look for it elsewhere.