The Green Gauntlet (29 page)

‘What way is that for God’s sake?’

‘Margaret’s going to tell Andy it’s Stevie’s child. It wasn’t difficult to persuade her to do that. It was far harder to prevent her backing out of the situation altogether. Now it all depends on Andy but my point in going there was to ensure she gave him the chance, if he wanted it. She owes him that. We all owe it him. I was going to make very sure Stevie stayed out of the way until he could make up his mind and that was the whole point of my going there. When things were taken out of my hands I did what seemed the next best thing.’

‘What was that?’

‘I hired a car that same night and travelled half-way across England to find Margaret and say to her what I had intended saying to him.’

He was beginning to understand and with understanding came the ability to assess her courage and coolheadedness. It had the effect of obscuring the harsh outlines of the dilemma, a heroic caper within a desperately squalid farce. He knew that this was how it must have appeared to her at the outset, that it had probably disgusted her as it disgusted him now, and yet she had managed to live with it for a long time and then, with nothing but instinct to guide her, had made some kind of attempt to sort things out. But even that was not all, not by a long chalk. Somehow she had found the nerve and resolution to hold on to her purpose in circumstances that would have sent most women reeling to the nearest source of comfort, and this seemed to him something one might witness once in a lifetime but not twice. Realisation of what the ordeal must have cost her humbled him, making him ashamed of his own recoil. He said, exchanging her grip on his hand for one of his own, ‘I’ll listen. And I won’t do Andy’s work for him by bullying you. I’ve always said you had a damned sight more sense than most people but I didn’t realise you had ten times as much guts. Go ahead, tell me how it looks from your viewpoint and I hope to God I can find the same focus.’

She told him, then, everything she knew and much of what she had guessed. She didn’t spare either one of them, for although it seemed to her fatally easy to use the handbook of words applicable to this kind of situation there were none of them, including Monica, who had not contributed in some way to what had happened. Andy, it seemed, had found fulfilment in aerobatics and Monica had shrugged off her obligations as carelessly as all of them had done in the past. It did not seem improbable that Stevie and Margaret should seek and find solace in one another and she supposed, times being what they were, one thing would very easily lead to another. She did not expect him to follow her this far and he did not, but at least he was able to contemplate it in a way that would have been impossible half an hour ago.

He said, when she told him that Stevie and Margaret had found a precarious happiness over the last few months, ‘I daresay they did once they were committed. What I can’t begin to understand is how either of them got to the point of going to bed with one another. With a couple of strangers yes, but not with each other.’

She owed him the whole truth. ‘Margaret tried strangers. I don’t know about Stevie. She told me that it only made things worse because there was no love in it.’

‘What the hell do they know about love?’

‘As much as us,’ she said, and his head came up sharply again. ‘Look, I was in France twenty months and you didn’t go screaming round the Valley for someone to take my place of a night.’

‘There were two good reasons why I didn’t. One, I had this entire place on my hands and plenty of old friends around me. Two, you took the trouble to write me a lot of affectionate letters, letters I still keep, and even re-read when I need a pick-me-up! Margaret showed me Andy’s last letter. It was like a note left at the back door for the baker or milkman.’

He thought about this and it moderated his contempt to some extent. It also made him even more wary of doing battle with her, for it was clear that she had studied her brief.

‘What is it?’ he asked suddenly, ‘a boy or a girl?’

‘A girl. Very dark. She looks like you must have looked at that age.’

It struck no chord in him. He heaved himself up and mooched over to the window. The wind was rising and soughing across the Valley from the direction of the Bluff, an easterly wind, with plenty of sleet in it.

‘What have you got in mind now?’

‘Nothing beyond giving her a base for the time being. Andy won’t be independent of the hospital for weeks. I told her she could bring the baby here and go and see Andy as soon as possible. The rest is up to her.’

‘What will he do? Have you any notion of that?’

‘I’ve got my private thoughts.’

‘Well?’

‘I think he’ll take more kindly to Stevie’s baby than to anyone else’s. It’s just a feeling I’ve had, since I heard about Stevie’s death in those circumstances. Anyway, rightly or wrongly, it seemed to me the best we could hope for.’

He finished undressing and came back to the bed. He was thinking hard but not getting very far. To an extent her own independent actions continued to obscure the main issue. He said, unexpectedly, ‘I’ve always accepted the convention that men were endowed with far more sexual energy than women.’

‘I’ve given you that impression?’

He considered her this time with a curious objectivity. ‘No,’ he said, with the faintest trace of a smile, ‘I can’t honestly say that, but then I’ve always regarded you as eccentric in that respect. I meant women generally. Is that notion a Victorian hangover on my part?’

‘Not entirely,’ she said, ‘it’s just that women on the whole put a little more into it than men. Just a man, any man, isn’t much good to the average woman. It has to be a particular man. In that sense there is a sound basis for the convention, no matter how ‘liberated’ the women of this generation fancy themselves. That was something Margaret discovered.’

‘She didn’t act by it.’

‘In a way she did.’

He put out his hand and ran it lightly across her hair.

‘By God!’ he said, suddenly, ‘we’ve been lucky with each other, Claire! I don’t think of it often but when I do it hits me like a falling tree.’ He slipped his hand over her breast, stroking it absently and presently he leaned on his elbows, took her face between his hands and kissed her on the mouth. ‘It’s odd. For a long, long time I thought of you as someone who was always a lot of fun horizontally but only adequate when you were vertical. Did you know that?’

‘I knew it,’ she said equably, ‘and I didn’t give a hoot. At my age, however, one has to start scratching around for fresh capital. That, I imagine, is what I’ve been doing lately.’

‘You needn’t have bothered on my account,’ he said. ‘Right now, for instance, I’m as erotic as Old Honeyman’s prize ram!’

It was an old joke between them. She could not remember how many years had passed since she had first made the comparison but it must have been more than thirty, when the children they had been discussing were toddlers, and their own world was still young. Tonight it told her that he had made up his mind to accept a situation that could not be altered except, perhaps, for the better, and also that, deep down, nothing counted for much in his heart and mind except their relationship rooted in this house and the Valley beyond it.

‘What am I doing out here in the cold?’ he asked and turned out the bedside light, heaving himself over her to his own side of the bed. His arms went round her with the vigour of a much younger man and in the same moment she told herself, laughing silently, that his reference to Old Honeyman’s ram had not been an ageing man’s boast.

Chapter Eleven

Sallies By All Concerned

I

J
une, 1944.

The listing gull was still based on the landslip, still made its long, lazy circuits of the Valley. It was surprising that it was able to get airborne for its port wing had contracted to less than half a normal spread and the foot that had to take most of the strain of uncertain landings was like a shredded twig. For all that it fed well enough, its limitations teaching it things about the Valley based on certainties and not on casual observation. It took off that morning in a long, drooping curve, fighting to get enough height to clear the line of the dunes, then turning west along the coast until it reached the first of the camp huts where it noted the unusual stillness of the place. Smoke rose from the cookhouse and here and there an odd figure pottered among the huts but there was no stamping and shouting on the parade ground, no vehicles scuttling up and down the broad avenue from the guardhouse. It dipped, found some bacon rinds on the edge of a waste barrel and took off again, the rinds trailing from its beak.

Over Four Winds it saw acres of green wheat and a herd of drowsing cattle but Farmer Eveleigh and two of his Land Army girls were at work down there and nothing presented itself as worth a stop. It flew on over the silent ruin of Periwinkle and across the high plateau of French Wood to Hermitage, where David Pitts was feeding pigs in the large sty behind the farmhouse. David was tolerant of gulls and the bird hovered, hoping he would slop swill from the pail. Occasionally he did, particularly when the wind made him stagger but today he held his course, setting both buckets down very carefully outside the sty door. Unlike his father Davie was a frugal man, who thought of every pint of swill as money in the bank.

Henry, discussing David with his jolly wife Ellie, sometimes dismissed his son as ‘a bliddy ole skinflint’, but secretly he admired him for making such a success of the three hundred acres casually farmed by Henry, and before that, by Henry’s father, Arthur. A curious relationship had grown up between father and son since David had moved lower down the slope into a cottage built for him and his grandmother after Henry had remarried late in life. Henry, semi-retired, was content to take his orders from the boy and was very wary of his mother, old Martha, now entering her nineties. The farm was still in Henry’s name but all the decisions were David’s. Watching him sometimes Henry would shake his head, declaring that youngsters took themselves too seriously nowadays and had forgotten how to enjoy themselves. There had been no hunting in the Valley since the war but even had there been David would never have taken the field in the way that Henry and his father would turn their backs on toil and pound gaily across country with the Sorrel Vale pack.

The gull left Hermitage and beat eastward to circle the Home Farm, concentrating on the strawyard behind the house where David’s sister Prudence, long married to Nelson Honeyman, the young master, dallied with one of the last of the American Rangers left in the area. The gull had profited by the brief American occupation of the coastal strip between Whinmouth and the Bluff, for the Rangers were not only well fed but wasteful. Sometimes they would discard a half-emptied tin of food during a break in their training out on the sandbars, but this morning there was only one of them to be seen and he stood behind the angle of the farm, enjoying a joke with Prudence. The gull knew Prudence as one of the few women in the Valley prodigal with titbits, and its curiosity was aroused now by a small, opened crate of brightly coloured packages and tins resting on a trestle close-by. It wondered if they would leave it unguarded so that it could flop down and investigate but they did not, standing there a long time talking and laughing, so that Prudence’s brassy head, shining in the sun, periodically jerked back and her laughter reached the gull as it continued to circle hopefully. Then, lifting the carton, she took it into the barn and the Ranger followed, so the gull flew on over the Home Farm paddocks and the big stone house that was silent, offering nothing until the ground rose steeply behind it and there was promise in the jam-buttie a little boy was nibbling at the top of the orchard.

The gull recognised the child as it had recognised Prudence, the source of an occasional meal, but today Mary Palfrey was there with her new baby who was tottering between mother and brother. Fearing nothing in this quarter the gull dropped down on a gatepost at the end of the orchard, not because it was interested in watching Sorrel Palfrey learn to walk but because, intent upon his sister’s attempts, Jerry Palfrey had turned his back on his jam-smeared crust and was calling, in his high, piping voice, ‘Come on, Sorrel, I’ll catch you.’ It was an opportunity the listing gull had learned to watch for over the seasons. With a flurry of wings it was down, up and away, the crust in its beak. The boy Jerry did not resent the naked theft but shouted with laughter. The staggering child fell flat on her face with surprise.

The gull skirted the woods and looked down on the family at High Coombe where the farmer’s wife, as usual, was sitting at her easel in an untidy front garden. It ignored the bright colours in the box beside the woman, knowing from past experience that they were inedible. Turning south it drifted down the wind funnel between the timber of Coombe Brake and the Bluff. There was nothing to be found here except an odd pig-nut outside Willoughby’s farm, Deepdene, and soon it was coasting over the three detached houses that crowned the northern edge of Coombe Bay village.

Its ancestors had often found easy pickings here for one of those tall, greystone houses had once sheltered an old German who encouraged gulls to feed from his hand but that was long ago. The people living here now usually ignored visitors flying in from the Coombe. The gull knew two or three of them, however, the man who lived in the end house and walked with a bobbing roll as if his leg was injured like the gull’s own, and the three people who lived next door, a man with a rigid hand, a woman and baby, who seemed to live in a pram on the lawn. The man was there now, leaning on the fence and looking directly up at the gull, as though comparing its clumsy aerobatics with the flight of the bright little machines that sometimes skimmed south over the woods, or inland from the sea.

The gull hovered long enough to study the upturned face that was unlike the face of any other man in the Valley. One side of it was dead like his hand, while the other could register expressions that the gull had learned, over the years, to recognise as like, dislike, interest, indifference or impatience. Today this side of the man’s face was animated and he called softly to his wife who was bending over the baby’s pram. The woman glanced up and presently went to the kitchen window, got something and gave it to the man, who placed it on his rigid hand and slowly extended his arm, a gesture the gull recognised as an invitation. It hovered a moment in order to make quite sure, then dipped to the fence where it alighted, staggered a full two feet, and steadied itself by half-opening its sound wing. The man stood quite still, the piece of bread resting on his gloved hand, and the woman watched too, so that for a moment there was absolute stillness in the garden.

The man said, ‘It’s him all right, Margy. It must be oil. That port wing is U.S. and he’s got a gammy leg as well, poor bastard!’ Then, to the gull, ‘Here, boy! Take it! We bloody cripples ought to stick together,’ and the gull, reassured by the tone, heaved itself from the fence and took the crust, wheeling in an uncertain half circle and heading for the quay.

The man watched it go and the woman watched the man.

‘Well, at least the poor old bugger is still airborne,’ he said, and lounged off into the house to turn on the radio. Sounds of a news-bulletin reached Margaret as she stood by the pram, rocking it gently, but the words carried on the breeze were only intermittently heard and therefore made little sense. ‘ … making good their landing … considerable opposition at scattered points … advancing on two sectors …’ And then, one complete sentence: ‘So far only one vessel reported lost.’ she called, ‘How is it going, Andy? Is there anything fresh?’ and Andy, appearing at the french window with a cigarette in his mouth, said, ‘They’ve all got ashore and seem to be in business.’

He stood there a minute and Margaret wondered uncertainly, if she should try and console him again. She knew the source and depth of his bitterness—an armada of aircraft, ships and men committed to the biggest enterprise of the war, and himself pottering about a garden with a woman, a child and an artificial hand. His depression had increased, she noticed, when the papers had begun to talk of the Second Front and all the American Rangers down on the shore had packed up and gone, taking their landing craft with them. Then Andy came lounging out of the house, calling, ‘I’m going to have a yarn with Ken Shawcrosse. Give me a shout when lunch is up.’ she thought, unhappily, ‘I’ll probably have to give three shouts, and then Ken Shawcrosse will come lumbering back with you and expect me to feed him on our rations. And after that you’ll both swill gin and French, and tonight you’ll be sour-tempered until it’s time for bed and might want to use me, as if I was something from the far end of a Sultan’s harem.’ Then, as the baby gurgled, she drew her finger along the child’s cheek. ‘We’ll stick it out, Vanessa,’ she said, ‘we’ll stick it out until it improves. And everyone except me seems to think it will.’

II

T
he gull, being no fisherman, did not venture across the tidal lagoon to the sandbars where the one landing craft the Americans had left behind lay wrecked and rusting, holed by a 1940 obstruction and now the haunt of gulls who lined its weed-covered sides to watch for fish trapped in the hull. Evie Craddock saw them standing there as she tied up to the barnacled poles, slipped out of her skirt and singlet, and lowered herself into eight feet of slack water. There were no prohibitions about bathing now and in fine weather she came here every day. It brought Simon much closer and today she was in need of some kind of reassurance.

He had said nothing about the part he expected to play in the invasion but his extreme reticence had only increased her uneasiness. Before releasing her hold on the gunwale she looked across the ruffled water towards France, picturing what might be happening there, her guesses based on the scrappy content of the radio bulletins. They did not tell her much. To listen to the genteel voice of the announcer one would imagine the invasion was a kind of cross-Channel excursion, the picnic to end all picnics, with men wading ashore in shallows shouting like boys sent to play on a beach. She was aware, of course, that it was not like that at all, that over there, almost within sight it seemed, men were bleeding to death in the shallows and all was the wildest confusion. Simon, if he was there at all, would have been ashore since first light, and she wondered, distractedly, whether there had been a second mention of glider troops in later bulletins. The thought made her push off and swim rapidly round the dinghy, as though ashamed of enjoying herself when Simon and hundreds of thousands of others were drenched in sweat and numbed by explosions. Then her commonsense caught up with her and she thought, ‘If he could see me he’d laugh—out here making a pilgrimage round the mermaid beat in his honour. I’ll write and tell him what I did on D-Day.’ She lay flat on her back and let herself wash to and fro in the tidal wavelets. ‘He’ll make it somehow,’ she told herself. ‘It’s like Paul told me on the phone—Simon will make it in the long run or he wouldn’t have got this far.’

Simon had, in a manner of speaking, already made it. The Orne bridge was now as secure as the most optimistic of them could have hoped for ten hours previously when they cast off and came gliding in from the north-west to crash within fifty yards of the bridges over the little river and the Caen Canal.

The first twenty minutes had been the liveliest and, in some ways the most rewarding of Simon’s military career and that career went back a long time now—to the day when he emerged from the hold of the Dutch collier to join the raggle-tailed Basques in a war that was already history. It was of this other war that he thought as he sat in the whistling glider awaiting the impact. You were not supposed to think of anything on these occasions but empty your mind so that the body was free to respond to reflexes rehearsed over the months of training for a single leap into the dark towards a specific objective. The leap was from the wreck of a Horsa glider. The objective a couple of bridges over two insignificant waterways near the village of Ranville, in Normandy.