The Green Gauntlet (3 page)

‘There’s one thing about this picnic,’ he said, ‘we’re all in it, every last one of us, no matter where you hide!’

He did not think she needed his presence any longer and drove back along the lane, thinking better of going home to ’phone Simon. Leaving the station waggon at the foot of the approach road to Hermitage Farm he climbed the gorse track to his favourite spot on the estate, the sharp ridge crowned by the memorial copse they called French Wood, coming at it from behind, threading his way through the little glade without glancing at the plaques and sitting on a fallen birch that gave him a view of the whole Valley.

It was a long time since he had been up here and the view, so familiar in every detail, had changed during the last eighteen months. Over Periwinkle a mushroom of dust lingered like the smoke of a huge autumn bonfire and he could see the buildings of Four Winds and the straw-coloured circle that marked the place where Harold Eveleigh had died under his stack.

To the west, however, there were more noticeable changes. Blackberry Moor had once been a vast rectangle of yellow gorse, heath, heather and green or gold bracken according to the season of the year but now it was a town, row after row of huts looking like an enormous chicken farm made up of uniform hovers and here and there, alongside smaller rectangles, large buildings camouflaged green and brown, the N.A.A.F.I., S.H.Q., the gymnasium, the guardhouse. Specks moved across the parade ground and a sliver of sunlight, travelling across the landscape like a fugitive, lit upon somebody’s bayonet, or a drop of moisture on the wire mesh that ran the length of the road. There had been a camp of sorts here in the First War but it was nothing like this, just an untidy huddle of bell-tents and a sagging marquee or two, where Kitchener’s volunteers drilled and shivered and swore. This camp looked permanent and he wondered, when it was all over, how the devil anyone would restore the heath to its natural state. It wouldn’t do to hunt over it for a decade or so. The place must be a labyrinth of hidden drains, slit trenches and coils of barbed wire.

He was surprised to find himself thinking of the future. For so long now there hadn’t been one, just a chequered past and a cheerless present, involving blackouts, rationing, black-market wrangles, Government forms sown with verbal man-traps, battledress, Home Guard manoeuvres, air-raid warnings and miles of dragons’ teeth along the once deserted shore as far as the Bluff. The vast camp signified all these things, a permanent reminder that freewill had blown away with the piece of paper that well-meaning ass Chamberlain had flourished after the Munich debacle. That was how it had seemed for a long time now and even the reckless mood of 1940 had departed, leaving a vacuum filled with glumness, boredom and worry.

His family were scattered. Of his four sons and two daughters only young John, the postscript, and Mary, now homeless, remained in the Valley. Stevie and Andy, the boneyard twins who had always patronised him and had gone off to make their money in scrap iron more than a decade ago, were both in the R.A.F., one at a Bomber Command airfield in Yorkshire, the other somewhere in North Africa with a fighter squadron. Simon, his eldest boy, was in Scotland, learning how to kill men with his bare hands and him getting on for forty! His daughter Karen, whom everybody called ‘Whiz’, was in India, thank God, and so was her husband, Ian. Ian had some kind of staff job and it would probably keep him alive. So much for the children, two home and four away. Some of his pre-war cronies were still around but the young ones had mostly gone. Only here and there was a son carrying on, like David, Henry’s son, at Hermitage. The rest were as far away as Alberta and Queensland, or caught up in some confused battle in Burmese jungle or North African desert. There was no continuity anymore and as he sat here, looking out over the grey landscape, he realized it was continuity he had striven for for forty years, often with little success. In a way it was a kind of suspension of all natural processes, like waiting for a spring that would never come. The land looked as lifeless as Rachel Eveleigh down there in that hen-house, and in the pattern of fields and copses under his eye, nothing moved except the odd speck or two on the camp parade ground.

A Hurricane came zooming out of the blur of the woods, one of the Paxtonbury-based Polish fighters in tardy pursuit of the raiders and he realised how deeply he resented all aircraft as representing a hateful challenge to all that was predictable, slow and safe. His first wife, Grace, had been killed by a Gotha on the pavé road behind Ypres; his youngest daughter, Claire, Dairy Queen of the West, had died in one off the Dutch coast, as long ago as 1934; and now they menaced the slopes and river-bottoms of remote streams like the Sorrel. God curse the fool who had first invented them, and as he thought this he remembered how he had set his face against all mechanical gadgets right through the early morning of the machine-age, when old King Teddy had been ruling an England of three-horse ploughs and leg-o’-mutton sleeves.

Then, as always, his obstinacy reasserted itself and he stood up, dusting his breeches. It didn’t pay to brood about it. There was plenty to be done, here and elsewhere, and he had looked down on this Valley too many times and in too many contrasting moods to be fooled by the desolation of winter, even a wartime winter. The Valley had looked deceivingly cheerful from here in the summer of Dunkirk but things were far more hopeless then, with everyone waiting for the first German parachutists and only a few shotguns and rook-rifles to oppose a landing of Panzers. There had been many setbacks and more to come he wouldn’t wonder, but at least that madman who raved and frothed and bit carpets had been held, and the chances of invasion now were remote, notwithstanding this morning’s escape of the battleships
Gneisenau
and
Scharnhorst
that had probably touched off this piddling little air-raid. He descended to the road, driving along it until he came to the two stone pillars that marked the drive and accelerating over the loose gravel between leafless chestnuts.

His wife Claire was awaiting him on the step and he felt better for seeing her there. At least she hadn’t changed, or not that much in all these years. She was fifty-nine but looked about forty-three and it cheered him to reflect that Claire had always had magic at her command to adapt to any fashion that found its way this far west. In what people now called the Edwardian Afternoon she had been a buxom, laughing girl, with a wasp waist and flowing hips and bosom and in the period now called The Gay ’Twenties she had changed herself into a flapper showing shapely legs half-way up the thigh and cropping her lovely, corn-coloured hair in order to be at one with her daughters. Then, during the ’thirties, she had compromised between these two extremes and it was only when she was undressing to go to bed that he realised she was steadily losing the battle against excess flesh. But now a fourth compromise had been achieved for the kind of things that put weight on her belly and buttocks were difficult to get, so that recently she had been able to make a virtue out of necessity and had begun to slim in all the right places. Through all these changes her features and characteristics had remained the same, her fresh, pink and white complexion as unblemished as a girl’s, her slightly prominent eyes reminding him of inshore water off the Coombe Bay sandbanks on a summer’s day—those two things, plus her optimism, steadfastness and strong sexual attraction for him, that persisted even now, so that there never was a time when he was not in some way stirred by her presence. She said anxiously, ‘Where on earth have you been? I phoned poor Connie and she said you left an hour ago!’

He was tempted to lie but thought better of it. ‘I had to pull myself together, old girl. I went up to French Wood,’ and was a little touched to see her smile.

‘I might have known it. Did it work?’

‘More or less. How is Mary and the kid?’

‘Both scrubbed and sound asleep. Doctor Maureen came over and gave them something to counteract the shock. The police phoned from Whinmouth. They’re looking all over for Rumble and Connie’s boy. I didn’t know what to say to Connie, poor kid.’

‘You don’t have to worry about her,’ Paul said, ‘she’s got more guts than any woman about here! And don’t run away with the idea that it’s because she and poor old Harold weren’t close. They were, in their own kind of way.’

Her teeth came over her heavy lower lip in a way it usually did when she was about to admit a shortcoming.

‘If it had been you or Mary someone would have had a hell of a job comforting me!’

She went into the hall and he noticed she had avoided mentioning Rachel’s death, or the need to contact Simon. It wasn’t fear of making a fool of herself in front of him, and it wasn’t lack of affection for the woman who had married her stepson. It was something more fundamental and he acknowledged it to himself as they passed into the library and she poured him a tot of whisky. ‘She doesn’t give a damn about anyone except me,’ he thought, ‘and she never has.’ He said, feeling better for the whisky, ‘I shall have to wire Simon. They’ll almost certainly give him compassionate leave, no matter what he’s doing,’ and he began to move into the hall where the old-fashioned telephone was still bracketed to the wall, occupying the same place as when it was first installed in the days before Shallowford House had been a wartime convalescent home.

‘Leave it!’ she said suddenly and when he looked shocked, ‘Rumble will attend to it, it’ll give him something to occupy his mind. After all, he was closer to Rachel than any of us.’

He had forgotten. The shock of the morning’s events had made him overlook yet another coincidence about the two-minute swoop of those damned Fokker-Wulfes. Rachel Eveleigh had actually delivered the boy in the year before the First War, stumbling upon his half-witted mother in labour in the cave she sometimes occupied over the badger slope in Shallowford Woods and ever since, not unnaturally he supposed, there had been a strong bond between Rumble Patrick and the childless Rachel Eveleigh.

‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘I’ll let Rumble handle it,’ and sat down again, stretching his legs and suddenly feeling his age.

‘What was the point of it anyway?’ she asked, irritably. ‘It doesn’t make any kind of sense, does it? A woman washing eggs at a sink. A man digging a drain in his fields. Is that going to get anyone anywhere? It’s not even as if there was a terror element about it, like blitzing London or one of the ports. Do
we
do this kind of thing to their farms and villages?’

He explained that the Luftwaffe was aiming at the camp and that, in all probability, the German airmen had been trainees on a practice run to gain experience. She seized on the last word as though it had been a blasphemy.

‘
Experience!
’
she mocked. ‘You men are all the same! There isn’t one of you, English, French, German or Jap, who can think straight! Experience of what for God’s sake? Reducing human beings to pulp, in order to see how your silly machines work? Rumble rebuilt that home with his two hands and Mary made it pretty and cosy and exciting. It was like … like a doll’s house! What kind of sense is there in blowing it to smithereens like that?’

Her indignation was so typical of her, and so true to the form of her grumpy old father, Edward Derwent, once master of High Coombe, who had never had a moment’s patience with anything he could not touch, sniff, eat, or sell. ‘Derwent-commonsense’ Paul had always called it and there were times when it had stood him in good stead. She had never seen any point in the First War and for a long time he had agreed with her, but they had had many arguments about this one, for whilst he was convinced that it was just, she blamed it on the vanities and inefficiencies of male animals from Plymouth to Pekin. It need never have happened, she said, and whilst granting that it had to be won at all costs, she had no confidence that the world would be any the better for it when the rubble was cleared away. To her it was the ultimate negation of commonsense and demonstrative proof of the obsession of men with inessentials. All that mattered to a Derwent was good food, warm clothes, a roof that didn’t leak, regular harvests, and the pleasure of sharing a double bed with your partner in all these things. She had never once bothered herself about politics, having seen what they had done to her predecessor, who left a good husband and a good home to march about London breaking windows and waving banners. Her detachment sometimes irritated Paul but today it brought a gleam of humour to the sombreness of the day.

He said with a grin, ‘I might have known the violation of Mary’s chintzy little bedroom would have outraged you far more than the fact that two German battleships have got clear.’

‘Damn the battleships and damn the war! I’m terribly upset for that nice girl Connie, and for Simon as well, but for me the entire stupidity of everything that’s happening is pinpointed by some fool hundreds of miles away making a bomb to drop on a home two people built for themselves out of nothing. I daresay it’s illogical but there it is. I remember Periwinkle in the days before even you came here. It was nothing but a ratty old shack, and Rumble and Mary created it, but now it’ll never be the same for them. It’ll always be the place where somebody they liked was killed.’

‘Have some whisky yourself, old girl,’ he said tolerantly, and was crossing to the decanter when Rumble Patrick came in, having dropped Young Eveleigh at Codsall Bridge. He had been given the gist of what had happened at Periwinkle and Paul was puzzled by his phlegmatic approach to the destruction of the farm and the narrow escape of his wife and child. When Paul told him how they had found Rachel in the ruins of the scullery he shrugged. ‘I’m more upset about Harold Eveleigh,’ he said. ‘At least he still thought life was worth living.’

‘Didn’t Rachel?’

‘No. She was fed up and has been ever since Simon brought her here.’

‘She missed him that much?’

Rumble looked at him shrewdly, drawing his brows together in a way Paul remembered his father Ikey Palfrey had done, on the few occasions Ikey had wanted to say anything serious.