The Green Gauntlet (4 page)

‘How much do you know about Simon and Rachel, Gov’nor?’

‘Practically nothing,’ Paul admitted, ‘except that they seemed to get along.’

‘Get along is about right. Like a couple of elderly workmen digging a trench. They haven’t been man and wife to one another for a long time. Rachel told me that herself, although I guessed it when Simon had his last leave.’

‘You mean they quarrelled?’

‘Not quarrelled, just parted company. Spiritually you might say. She was a pacifist.’

‘I knew she was once. She never really got over her first husband’s death in the First War but Simon was always very ‘anti’ himself.’

‘Not since he fought in Spain. He’d kill every bloody Fascist he met with a spanner, or anything handy! That was where they split. She believed in Gandhi’s theory of peaceful absorption of invaders, even Nazi invaders, and Simon thought that was damn silly. Most men and women could agree to differ on an abstract issue of that kind but they were political animals. It was in their veins—pamphlets, speeches, attitudes, ideals, the lot. They’ve spent their whole lives at it, poor devils. I can understand Simon—it’s inherited from his mother I imagine—but Rachel was a farmer’s daughter, Valley born and bred. It’s difficult to know why she was so intense.’

Paul, remembering other times, thought he did know but he was too tired to argue the point. Instead he said, ‘You can get a licence to rebuild Periwinkle. It’ll come under essential works.’

‘Let it wait,’ Rumble said, offhandedly and then, more thoughtfully, ‘Mary and the kid can stay here for the time being, can’t they?’

‘As long as you like,’ said Paul and then, a new worry suggesting itself, ‘You aren’t thinking of leaving and …’ but Rumble grinned and said, ‘Well, certainly not tonight, Gov’nor!’ and was gone, and Paul, finishing his drink, heard him run up the stairs, along the passage and open the door of the room Mary had occupied all her life until she married. He found himself thinking about the mutual attraction of these two, his hot favourites among all his sons, daughters, and in-laws. It went right back to their earliest childhood and he had watched it grow from a tiny seed and flower into the wholly satisfactory thing it had become. They were the complement of one another, Rumble a boisterous, happy-go-lucky extrovert, Mary a gentle, affectionate introvert. Of the lives and marriages resulting from his own theirs alone had been safe and predictable. Neither one of them—and he would swear to this—had ever held another man or woman in their arms, and somehow, at this moment, he was able to see through ceilings and doors into that little room of hers and know, with a sense of relief, that Rumble was already comforting her and that soon their bodies would fuse, as though anxious to replace life obliterated by the bombs. It was strange and a little indecent, he thought, that a man should find such reassurance in the physical possession of one’s own daughter but he did, relating it directly to the extreme pleasure he had always found in the body of the girl’s mother.

He poured himself some more whisky and took it over to the fireplace, kicking a log there until a splutter of blue flame devoured the sullen spiral of smoke. Fancifully he saw the shooting flame as a symbol of Rumble Patrick’s virility, and deep inside him there stirred the vague promise of a great tribe of grandchildren. He felt himself starved of grandchildren. Mary had one son but so far neither Simon nor The Pair had produced any and the baby daughter of Whiz, born in India, had been trapped there by the war. He sat on musing about his children collectively and individually, wondering why none of them save Mary seemed to belong to this great sprawling house, or professed loyalty to the fields and woods outside. He supposed everybody threw down their own roots and that those roots need not necessarily be based in soil. They might—as he suspected in the case of Simon—be anchored to ideas or, in the case of The Pair, to money and machines. He wondered whether he would ever see them congregate under this roof again and doubted it, for they seemed to have lost touch with his way of life and Claire’s. Well, for the meantime, there was nothing to do but hold on and he was good at holding on. Anyone hereabouts would vouch for that.

Outside the light began to fade over the leafless chestnuts and overhead, invisible above low cloud, one of the Paxtonbury-based Polish aircraft buzzed in from the sea.

Chapter Two

Craddocks at War

I

S
ometimes the musings of Valley-based people like Paul had the power to travel telepathic paths, spreading like sound waves half-way across the world where they were picked up in billet and bivouac and contemplated, sentimentally or unsentimentally, depending upon the strength of the pre-war ties of those who received them. Distance had no bearing upon their interpretation. Those preoccupied with their own pursuits and surroundings could disregard them but there were others who, in peacetime, had thought of Shallowford as a dead-and-alive backwater, but were now having second thoughts about it. News from home used them as a sounding board, producing pangs of homesickness and impatience with new scenes and new faces.

Paul Craddock’s sons and his absent daughter Whiz were not of this latter group. To each of them the Valley had never been more than a jumping-off place where, years ago, they had eaten, slept, and exchanged sly jokes about their father’s dedication to the land, or their mother’s Victorian approach to their father.

Simon, the eldest, had disappeared into the murk of the Northcountry after a number of false starts in life. The Pair Stevie and Andy, had followed him although, unlike Simon they had made a success of their exodus. Whiz turned her back on the Valley the day she married and had rarely visited it since. Her home now was the Service and if she thought of the Valley at all it was as a rustic backwater where there had once been some good hunting. Now it was as dead to her as Atlantis. Like Stevie and Andrew she had always lived for the present.

With Simon it was different again. He did not see his father’s patriarchal pretensions as ridiculous, or his stepmother’s devotion as naïve, but he could see neither one of them as having, in this day and age, a meaningful place in the structure of Western civilisation. They were pleasant anachronisms, clinging to a way of life that had crumbled as long ago as the summer of 1914. They had been unable to adapt to the demands of his own generation, currently facing the most dire threat since the westward surge of Attila. Possibly this was why he was able to read the wire informing him of his wife’s death without much sense of shock. It did not surprise him overmuch that, here and there in the process of total war, a civilian living in a remote agricultural area could be blotted out. He had fought in Spain and he had fought in France and in each campaign he had seen dwellings reduced to rubble and women and children reduced to pulp. Such things no longer horrified him, they only fed his hatred of a system that had accepted a policy of drift through the ’thirties and braced itself when it was all but too late. He had been a professional hater of privilege since his youth and now he was a dedicated hater of Fascism who found himself temporarily allied to bankers, merchants, and other former enemies. He had compassion, too much of it perhaps, but he could no longer waste it on an individual, not even when that individual was the tight-lipped woman who had been his wife and comrade in the long prelude to this cacophony. Thus he was able to ride out the shock of the news they brought him when he came in dripping from the grenade range on that winter’s afternoon. Anyone watching him might have assumed him to be reading a posting signal. His reactions were limited to a blink or two and a swallow of saliva. Then, very abruptly, he left the mess and went out into the thin, pattering rain to the cookhouse where his chief crony, Sergeant Rawlinson, was serving tea to recruits.

He called through the hatch, ‘Rawley! You got a minute?’ and Rawlinson’s red face appeared at the opening.

Their friendship was stronger than most wartime friendships for both, having served in the International Brigade, had special entries against their names in the green, confidential files of the unit. They were not exactly suspect but were what a regular officer might describe as ‘
Men with strong Leftist sympathies
’
.
The rankers had a much simpler way of putting it: they called them ‘Bolshies’ but now that Russia had joined the Allies the term had lost some of its opprobrium.

It was strange that a man like Simon Craddock, whose mother had been killed driving an ambulance in 1917, whose father, veteran of two wars, owned thirteen hundred English acres, and who himself was a 1939 volunteer, should be regarded so warily but there it was. This was Britain and this was the British way of assessing loyalty to the crown.

Both Simon and Sergeant Rawlinson knew about the entry on their documents but neither resented it. In the six years that had passed between now and the day they had sailed for Spain so much had happened that political confusion could be forgiven. The war had made them tolerant towards every sect and party in Europe except the Nazi Party. They had even lost much of their resentment for Italian Fascists after the mass surrenders in North Africa.

Rawlinson emerged from the kitchen carrying two pint mugs of tea and set them down on an empty table near the pot-bellied stove. Simon’s battledress began to steam. Without comment he handed the telegram to Rawlinson who read it, handed it back, and looked down at the stained table top.

‘Bastards!’ he said, and waited for endorsement.

Simon lifted his shoulders. He had inherited his mother’s political fanaticism and his father’s obstinacy but few of their physical characteristics. At thirty-eight he was spare and loose-jointed. He had narrow, thoughtful features and what his father would have called ‘an authentic Cassius look’ produced by dark hair, deepset eyes and prominent cheek-bones. He did not share his friend’s blanket assessment of the German nation.

‘It probably happens regularly over there, Rawley. If it hasn’t already it will as soon as Bomber Command steps up its offensive.’

‘Fair enough,’ Rawlinson said, ‘but they began it. Bastards! Every bloody one of them! You’ll be putting in for compassionate?’

‘I don’t know, I shall want to think about it.’

Rawlinson, once a Lancashire shoeshop clerk, whistled through teeth, shocked because the rich panoply of death had been built into his personality from earliest childhood. In the back streets of Burnley, with a father and two brothers on the dole, a good funeral was about all one ever got in the way of ceremony or spectacle.

‘You’ll
have
to go! You can’t let your wife be buried by strangers!’

‘There won’t be a stranger present,’ Simon told him. ‘The entire bloody Valley will be there. She was born on one of the farms and it will be the best-attended funeral in local history. My entry passes out on Friday and some of them need watching. It would take me all of three days to get there and back and I daresay the adj. would insist on me taking a week to sort things out. That’s the usual drill. What sense is there to it when I’m up to my neck in work here? They got Rachel. OK.’

Rawlinson regarded him warily. He admired Simon Craddock but he had never understood him, and that despite sharing bivouacs in Spain with other volunteers from what he still regarded as The Upper Crust.

‘I don’t get it,’ he muttered. ‘You implied it was six of one and half-a-dozen of the other, didn’t you?’

‘No I didn’t, Rawley. It’s a question of time, don’t you see? If we don’t get this bloody war finished in a couple of years Europe will fall apart at the seams, win or lose. The dead can’t help one way or the other.’

Fanaticism of any kind impressed Rawlinson but he was still unconvinced. ‘If it was my missus I’d want to
be
there. OK, so it’s cant, all that cock they say over an open grave. But she’s your missus and she was one of us! You owe her that much! Just to
be
there!’ When Simon did not reply but quietly sipped his tea, he added, ‘How long you been married?’

‘More than ten years.’

‘You hit it off, didn’t you?’

‘At first, and even when we split over this business we still respected one another. I saw her point of view but I don’t think she ever saw mine, not after Spain anyhow. She thought we had all been marching up a wrong turning so she packed in. Just like that. She went right back to the Sermon on the Mount. Love conquers all! But she didn’t know the first damn thing about love as most women understand it. We haven’t even slept together since I got survivor’s leave after Dunkirk. No, Rawley, she wasn’t one of us. It was a different kind of love she meant. Leper-colonies, the Untouchables, prison and hospital visiting.’

Rawlinson pondered on whether or not this put a different complexion on things but decided that it didn’t. ‘She was your missus,’ he repeated, obstinately, ‘and they’ll all expect you to go.’ A note of irritation entered Rawlinson’s voice. ‘Dammit, you don’t
want
to go, do you? You just don’t want to go! Now why not?’

It wasn’t an easy question. He felt about Rachel the way he felt about Rawlinson. They were partners in an expanding business that had gone through some very bad times in the ’twenties and ’thirties but was now on the mend. They thought of that business as progress, social justice, self-determination for minorities and equality of opportunity but now all the old battle-cries had been amalgamated into one and was on the lips of many former enemies, including Big Business, the Conservative Party, and that old whipping boy the Bourgeoisie. Rachel had dropped out and he was surprised, even a little ashamed, at his lack of reaction to news of her death. Just that one stab under the ribs and then nothing but a kind of nostalgia for the early years of their marriage when they had shared platforms at so many ill-attended meetings in so many hopeless campaigns, when they went calling on indifferent electors with their leaflets and torrents of words, and then home to bed to furnished rooms where the beds were lumpy, wardrobe drawers stuck half-way out, and the linoleum was cold to bare feet. Had there ever been any ecstasy? He couldn’t be sure after all this time. All he remembered was the clip clop of her sensible brogues on cobbles, rain streaming down her unpowdered cheeks and stray tendrils of hair hanging limply over the collar of a cheap, off-the-peg coat. In a way he was glad she was out of it. Her spirit, mortally injured by the assaults of the First War, had been too sickly to challenge its successor. She was worn out and used up, not physically perhaps but mentally. Too many doors had been slammed in her face. Too many of her leaflets had found their way to the lavatory and on September 3rd, 1939, she had turned her face to the wall.

He made his decision as he swallowed the rest of his tea. ‘I’m going to put a call through,’ he said briefly and Rawley watched him hunch his shoulders against the rain and recross the parade ground to the sergeants’ mess. ‘Queer bugger, Crad!’ he murmured aloud. ‘Queer, but Christ Almighty, tough! Tougher than anyone in this bloody outfit!’

II

T
he telephone rang in the hall an hour or so after they had returned to the Big House from the funeral. Claire Craddock, answering it, told herself that it was Simon ringing to ask who had been there, how many wreaths had been sent and from whom. She had been as shocked as Rawlinson by his refusal to ask for compassionate leave to attend but when she received his letter on the morning of the funeral, and had had time to think about it, she understood better than any of them. The relationship between them had always been easy and comfortable, perhaps because, in the days after his mother had abandoned him and Claire had taken her place at Shallowford, she had always made very certain that he wasn’t left out in the cold. Simon, a sensitive child, had recognised and appreciated her good intentions, and as he grew from a lonely child into a lonely young man it was Claire who had more of his confidence than his father, or his noisy half-brothers. She had never taken his marriage to that Eveleigh girl very seriously, recognising it for what it was, an attempt on the part of a young war widow to find her way back into the mainstream of life, but she had always respected the woman they had just laid in the Eveleigh patch at Coombe Bay churchyard. If she had little capacity for love, as Claire had practised it all her life, she had plenty of loyalty and had helped Simon through some difficult times, particularly when he returned from Franco’s prison weighing six stones.