The Green Gauntlet (28 page)

Then she thought of Paul and his overriding need for shape, pattern and stability, and it occurred to her that she was not pleading her son’s cause at all but Paul’s. If something—anything—could be done to put the pieces together the passage of time might impose some kind of solidarity on the family and prevent his withdrawal into a wilderness of frustration and loneliness that she alone could not prevent. She said, ‘I’ve thought about this very deeply, Margaret. Lately I’ve not thought about much else. It seems to me the only hope any of us have is to tell the truth as you told it to me. Andy isn’t a puritan and I’ll wager he’s never lived like one. I remember a time when he was seeing a lot of that stupid little actress everyone was talking about, a couple of years after you were married. Can you be certain he was never unfaithful to you?’

‘It didn’t seem to matter in those days,’ Margaret said absently. ‘Stevie had an affair or two and so, for that matter, did Andy but they didn’t amount to much in our set and we managed to laugh them off. I didn’t fancy anyone but Andy but if I had I daresay I should have gone right ahead. There wasn’t the same depth if you follow me. Everything was on the surface and life was a kind of joke. None of us ever stayed in one place long enough to think about being married in the sense that you and Paul are, or my Dad and Mam are. In their case it was to do with having very little spare cash I suppose, and in yours it was being rooted in one place and belonging. Our Valleys in the Rhondda aren’t so very different. Only uglier, with the tip and the grime. It seemed a very wonderful thing then to be whisked out of it and given a cheque book, but there’s a bill just the same, isn’t there, now?’

‘There’s always a bill. The point is, are you prepared to meet it if I back you from start to finish?’

‘Go back to Andy? Provided he’s interested?’

‘I mean just that.’

She considered a long time. Sleet slashed against the darkening window-pane and a sense of impatience gripped Claire. The south-west usually shared the weather of Wales and for a moment she had a clear picture of Paul standing in the draught of the big front door, wondering at Maureen Rudd’s evasions concerning her whereabouts, and also how he was likely to receive news of Stevie’s death. She said, abruptly, ‘I can’t stay around. I’ll have to phone London, talk to Maureen, and see what she’s told Paul. Then I’ll have to go home. What I’ve got to know is will you follow on? You’ll be very welcome to stay, both of you, as long as you like and no matter what happens when Andy comes home.’

She said at last, ‘I’ll try, but more for your sake and Paul’s than mine. Like you say, we made a go of it one time, and if Andy accepts Vanessa it could work. There’s one thing though. I don’t want you writing my part for me. You’ve done your share coming all this way. I couldn’t have got through it on my own. I’m not so tough, in spite of all the training they put me through.’

Claire kissed her then and went out, leaving her staring at the ceiling, her small, plump hands clasped behind her mop of brown hair and when she went in to take another quick look at the baby on the way out, with the fussy Sister Pritchard at her elbow, she said, ‘You were right. She
is
pretty, prettier than any of mine at that stage!’ to which Sister Pritchard replied, with a heartiness that reminded Claire of women in the Valley who devoted themselves to Guides and V.A.D. work, ‘A real surprise packet for Mr Craddock when he shows up! And a little dividend for Grandpa, eh?’

Claire went out into the street thanking God for her sense of humour, a legacy of her mother’s, for her father, crusty old Edward Derwent, had never seen a joke in his life.

IV

I
t would have been very difficult, she assumed, to have bluffed many men as easily as she had bluffed him on her return home. He had accepted at face value Maureen’s absurd story about Claire’s sudden resolve to run down to Sevenoaks to see her cousins with whom, years before she was married, she had run a bunshop. Maureen told him, and he had believed her, that the relatives had been bombed and she had taken upon herself the duty of breaking the news about Stevie. Paul himself, Maureen had told her, seemed stoical about it, as though he had been expecting news of this kind every day now that Bomber Command’s non-stop offensive was mentioned in every six o’clock bulletin, but when she got home she found that it wasn’t fatalism or courage that sustained him but a kind of pride that had enabled him, by some tortuous path of reasoning, to see Stevie’s sacrifice as the epitome of all he felt about this struggle for survival. He said, as though apologising for this, ‘I don’t expect you to understand that. You’ve never been able to see this war as anything but a continuation of the last, but it helped me more than I can say. What I mean is, there’s no kind of connection in my mind between the two wars. That last one was murder, badly managed, and quite unnecessary. But this is something very different. It’s the only war I’ve ever heard about worth fighting. I’ve always seen it as a straight choice between civilisation and barbarism. I’ll tell you something you must have sensed over the years. I never had a great deal of time for The Pair. They had far better chances than most of their generation, growing up in a place like this, with a solid family background, a good education if they had cared to acquire one, and no shortage of money, but they didn’t value any one of those things. They seemed to me to live shallow, silly lives and carry those wives of theirs along with them. They never had any children or did anything constructive, except to make the kind of money my father and old Franz Zorndorff made when there was more excuse for a man looking after Number One! But I was wrong about them just the same. They came up to scratch in the end and if they hadn’t we wouldn’t be here right now, with the prospect of starting all over again.’

He glanced at her then as though expecting her to reject this line of reasoning outright but when she said, ‘Go on, Paul,’ he said, ‘I talked to the C.O. up there and he had a pretty high opinion of Stevie. Those chaps don’t talk slosh and he wasn’t just being kind. Afterwards I went up to French Wood and thought about it all, about Stevie and Andy, about Simon swimming for it at the time of Dunkirk, and Rumble Patrick sailing off because he felt he had to, and it seemed to me they weren’t any different from the chaps who went west in that bloody slime at Passchendaele. They hung on long enough to give everyone else a breather and put those bastards where they belong at the end of a rope. You don’t have to see it this way but you have to know what got me over the hump.’

It was the kind of reaction she might have expected from him, if only because he had always seen his own family as no more than a segment of the Valley and everyone else about here as part of a tribe he honestly believed to be superior to any other. It was an old-fashioned notion she supposed, at least thirty years out of date, but he was not a patriot in the sense that almost everybody had been when Kaiser Bill went berserk and all the men were hypnotised by Kitchener’s manic stare on the hoardings. His patriotism, as she saw it, was at once more localised and more broadly based, drawing its strength from the books he read and the thoughts he thought. It had to do with Valley crafts and Valley loyalties, with the food they grew and the dialects they used. It reached back into the history of history books that, for most people, herself included, had no more reality than the stories of the Old Testament but for him had a message that had regulated the whole of his life since she had known him. If it brought him comfort now who was she to question it? It could no nothing at all for her but that was another matter.

As the days passed she saw that he had been able to absorb the beating he had taken and when, three weeks after her return they were told about the bar to Stevie’s D.F.C., it meant a lot to him, even if she thought of it as one more manifestation of the male animal’s curious ability to make a mystique of organised slaughter. The Craddocks, she reflected, were collectors of medals. Paul had won the M.C. and Croix de Guerre in 1918, Simon a D.C.M. at Calais, and both Stevie and Andy already had the D.F.C., but only Paul seemed to set much store on decorations and had always worn his at the annual Armistice Service, like his cronies Henry Pitts and Smut Potter.

It was about a week after this that she judged him ready to withstand another kind of shock, indeed, the decision was forced upon her by a ’phone call from Margaret saying she would arrive on the Saturday train. It was only a week or so before Andy was expected home for a final course of treatment at Roehampton Hospital.

She waited until the conventional hour for family topics, when she was already in bed and he was fiddling about over by the window, laying out his keys and small change on the dressing-table.

All their married life they had used this moment for clearing-house gossip, a time when they were alone and he had turned his back on the Valley, stealing quietly back to her or his books, or both. In the old days the timing was deliberate for they had formed the habit of resolving the occasional difficulty or tiff on the spot. She had always had the power to distract him from all manner of worries, big and small, by the simple process of availing him of her impulsively generous body, after which his abstractions were somehow removed to a contemplative distance. Now, at sixty-four, his demands were no more than occasional and her own needs had become integrated into the quiet rhythm of their lives.

She said, watching him peel off his shirt and reach for his pyjama jacket, ‘You’re not in bad condition for an over sixty. Have I told you that before?’

‘Not lately,’ he said, ‘unless there was an ulterior motive.’

‘There’s one now.’

He had never really learned about her. He was surely, she thought, the most guileless man created since Adam. He had not noticed, for instance, as he so rarely did, that she had fortified herself against crisis-point by going into Whinmouth for a shampoo and set, or that she had used a dab or two of a small bottle of perfume Rumble had brought her from abroad that she had been hoarding over the months. All he had learned, it seemed, was to read some kind of invitation in her bedroom chatter when it fitted his own mood and this originated more from male vanity than from an instinctive awareness that she had something important to discuss. It was no good rehearsing this kind of thing. One had to seize a timely moment like this, when he was relaxed and more his younger self. She said, bluntly, ‘Come over here and sit down a minute. I’ve got something important to tell you. It’ll give you a jolt but you’ll get over it, providing you let yourself.’

He looked startled but suddenly he grinned. ‘Don’t tell me you’re pregnant again,’ he said. ‘You usually are when you talk that way.’

Suddenly she changed her mind about tactics, taking this unexpected chance of administering the medicine in a gulp instead of feeding it to him in small, bitter sips. She said, calmly, ‘Not me. Your daughter-in-law Margaret.’

‘
Margaret!
’

He had been on the point of sitting on the edge of the bed but he jerked upright so quickly that his head almost struck the beam in the ceiling. ‘But that’s nonsense! Andy’s been gone …’ and then he stopped, staring down at her, so that she had to clutch at her courage and take a deep breath to keep the tremor out of her voice.

‘She’s had the baby,’ she said, and seeing a way to sidetrack his sense of outrage for a moment, ‘that’s where I was when you couldn’t get me in London. I was in North Wales and before that I was at Stevie’s camp. I went there with the idea of talking it over with him but when I got there … well … you know what I found.’

He seemed stupefied but his expression did not daunt her as it might have done, for somehow she understood that concern for her was involved in his astonishment and she could only suppose that the vision of her arrival at the camp, to be told the substance of the wire he had received, had temporarily effaced any thoughts about Margaret.

He said slowly, ‘You did
that
!
You trailed up there, just to talk about Margaret’s baby to Stevie? All that rubbish Maureen fed me over the phone … you
didn’t
hear about Stevie from her? … You got the news from the camp?’

‘Yes, but that was something I didn’t bargain for. I walked right into it and learned about it from one of his friends.’

‘Great God,’ he said, running his hand over the day’s bristles on his long jaw. Then, ‘But
why!
Why talk to Stevie? Why not me?’

She reached out and took his hand, holding it tightly so that the pressure of her thumb momentarily erased the brown spots on his knuckles. ‘There was a particular reason,’ she said, ‘they have been seeing a great deal of one another all this time. It isn’t just anyone’s baby, Paul. It’s Stevie’s.’

She gave him time to absorb this but not time enough to say the words that were on the point of tumbling from his mouth. ‘
Wait,
Paul. You’ve got to hear it all. You’ve got to trust me to know what I’m doing, what in fact I already have done. You’ve got to listen and
think.
Temper and disgust isn’t going to help any of us. It’s very important to let me explain.’

Their relationship was strong enough to take the strain and when she was convinced of this confidence returned to her. She said, ‘
Will
you listen? Will you trust me to tell you what I’ve already done before you jump to all kinds of wrong conclusions?’ and he said, bitterly, ‘Go ahead, say all you’ve got to say, but don’t forget Stevie’s dead and Andy’s due back in just over a week.’

‘You think I’m likely to forget either of those things?’

‘No.’ His head came up. ‘I’m sorry I said that but I’m entitled to know all there is to know before Andy arrives and finds her staying with us, and also that Stevie and she confided in you at the time!’

‘Stevie didn’t,’ she said, ‘but if Stevie hadn’t been killed Margaret was going to ask Andy to divorce her. Then she and Stevie would have married, providing his own divorce came through.’

It was too much for him. ‘They’re like a lot of barnyard animals!’ he burst out but she got hold of his hand again and said, ‘You promised to listen, Paul. I did what I did because somebody had to try and it was way beyond your capacity. That’s why I acted on my own and I’m not sorry I did. There’s still a chance my way.’