The Green Gauntlet (44 page)

‘Get some kind of proposition on paper,’ Claire said, ‘and make sure that you put in that clause about leaving the timber our side of the wood.’ She got up and followed Paul on to the terrace.

III

P
erhaps Margaret was alerted by his expression as he came in or by the way he listened apathetically when she told him Shawcrosse was awaiting him in the study. She had lost touch with him lately and the only real point of contact between them was Vanessa, to whom he was very devoted, almost as though he regarded the child as the one remaining link with the boisterous days before the war when business deals of the kind that obsessed him still had acted upon him like champagne rather than drugs. It was not like that anymore. The chasm between them could not be traced back to the small fissure caused by her association with Stevie or he could never have made a cult of Vanessa, buying her ponies, tossing her up and down, teasing her, laughing with her, and whisking her off to places like Fortnum & Mason’s to array her in expensive, and to Margaret’s mind, show-off clothes. She had no complaint to make regarding his attitude towards herself. He was always kind if abstracted, invariably generous, and very occasionally, when he was idle between deals, he would make love to her in a way that recalled, very fleetingly, the extrovert Andy of the ’thirties. It was, she supposed, as good a marriage as most people of their generation enjoyed. There wasn’t much sparkle about it but there was no acrimony either, and certainly no bitterness on his part that Stevie had given her the child who was capable of interesting him as she could never do again.

She wondered about this a great deal, toying with all kinds of theories that led ultimately to a single theory. The end of the tie torn loose by Stevie’s death had somehow reattached itself to Vanessa, by-passing her altogether, so that there was not much more than tolerance between them but it was tolerance that stemmed from gratitude for the presence of the child. She wondered sometimes if things would have been different if they had had children of their own but there was not much prospect of this now and he did not seem interested in the possibility. Whenever he did use her, and it was not very often for he was away from home most of the year, he did it as though reassociating with a discarded mistress, or an old, complaisant girl friend of his youth whom he had met after an interval of years and taken to bed in an effort to recall old times. She realised that she was as much to blame for this as he was. The few short months spent with Stevie in the little house under the wood had changed her expectation of a relationship between a man and a woman seeking fulfilment in one another’s company. Magically Stevie had become a different person after that first encounter in London but Andy, although undergoing many outward changes, had remained basically the same, a roving buccaneer who became bored and irritable after more than forty-eight hours ashore.

She had never made any secret of the fact that she disliked Shawcrosse and Shawcrosse’s mincing little wife, Rhoda, and now, for a moment at least, it looked as if he shared her impatience. He said, sharply, ‘He’s here? He doesn’t take much on trust, does he? How long has he been waiting?’

‘About an hour,’ she told him, ‘I gave him a drink and
The Times
,’
and then she left him to go about her business, wondering why he was jumpy, and what lay behind his peevish comment on Shawcrosse’s presence. Soon, however, she forgot the incident and drove off to the riding stables to fetch Vanessa. It was never any good wondering what went on in Andy’s mind. It never had been any good, not even in the days when she and Monica had been sucked into the whirlpool of their scrap-market activities. It was not until a month later, when she happened to go into the study in search of blotting paper, that she stumbled on a corner of the jigsaw puzzle his life had become since he had left the RAF.

They had rented a large, detached house on the outskirts of Whinmouth, one of the many rented houses she had shared with him in the last thirteen years. Like all the others it was not a home but a plushy perch, with a large, well-kept garden, a sun lounge, and between-the-wars furniture that made her homesick for the black oak of ‘
Ty-Bach
’
.
He had a large, pseudo-Regency desk with innumerable drawers, all but one of them locked, so she opened the central drawer hoping to find the blotter he sometimes used. Finding it there she lifted it out and thus uncovered the plan.

It was a large, mounted tracing that she recognised as a detailed plan of the coastal belt between Nun’s Head and Shallowford Bluff. Every farm, field and coppice was marked in and named.

There was no special reason why she should be interested but she picked it up nevertheless and carried it over to the french windows, forgetting the blotter as partial awareness of what she was holding edged into her mind. Paul, her father-in-law, had a map just like this in his estate office adjoining the library and had proudly displayed it to her the first time Andy brought her to Shallowford House just before they had married. He told her then that he had drawn it when he was a young man and had added to it as the years went by, and changes were recorded in and around the farms, the tracks, and green blobs of woodland.

But the plan she was holding was really two plans. One was the original, or rather a fair copy of the original, and the other a detailed record of recent changes within and without the estate boundaries. It struck her then that some of the features on the map must be speculative for there was a road hugging the coastline all the way from Whinmouth to Coombe Bay and she knew that there never had been anything more than a footpath over the dunes following the southern boundary of the estate.

There was another new feature shown, a great, shaded patch, rectangular in shape, reaching from the river road half-way up the Dell and this was overprinted with the words
‘Shawcrosse Holiday Camp’.
This surprised her, not only because a holiday camp was apparently scheduled to be built inside the estate, but because she could not imagine a man like Paul Craddock doing business with a spiv like Shawcrosse.

She took the plan back to the desk, laid it down and rummaged among other papers in the drawer. They were mostly copies of letters written on the notepaper of Shawcrosse & Craddock, Craddock Development Company, or Vista Homes Limited, only three of the names Andy used in his complicated network of ventures. It was not necessary to study the letters. She found a memoranda sheet with a paper-clip clinging to it and recognised it as the key that had been affixed to the plan. It told her as much as she wanted to know.

This was the Shallowford Valley, not as Paul saw it, or as anyone else had ever seen it, but how it would look when Shawcrosse and Andy had finished with it. The ruthlessness of the exercise, already well started it seemed, stirred an indignation within her that made her feel physically sick. She sat back in his swivel-chair for a moment, closing her eyes and making a great effort to concentrate. Then, with deliberation, she compared key and plan, relating the initial capital letters—‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, etc., to coloured twins on the map. ‘A’, shown in blue, was property already acquired by one or other of the companies in Coombe Bay and there seemed to be a great deal of it. ‘B’ was the holiday camp, absorbing one of the Shallowford farms and spreading, in the shape of a spur, to the cliffs east of the Bluff. ‘C’ was labelled ‘
Proposed New Road
’
and after it, written in pencil, were the words, ‘
Est. time compt’n., Sept. 1950
’
.
There were various other features, a hotel half-way along the road and a housing site on the Moor but she did not study these in detail. Suddenly the pattern became very clear indeed. Andy, as the dominant director of the family company, was the inside man operating on behalf of Shawcrosse, and perhaps some of the other vulpine characters who occasionally called at the house for a drink or left cryptic messages when Andy was out.

It was like finding oneself involuntarily caught up in a conspiracy to defraud or, even more frightening, witnessing a back-alley attack on an unsuspecting victim and being faced with the choice of intervening or looking the other way. Sitting there, glancing from map to key and key to map, she was stunned by his betrayal, remembering that his access to this property had been a free gift, a shy acknowledgment by his father of his war-service and perhaps also a form of recompense for his physical injuries. She did not try to persuade herself that it might not be a conspiracy at all, that everything on that map was known and approved by Paul, by Simon, Rumble Patrick and the others. It had the hall-marks of a secret treaty and somehow it carried not only Andy’s signature but the unmistakable stamp of Shawcrosse. But if she had wanted further proof it was there to hand, in the carbon copies of letters exchanged between Andy and Shawcrosse and between Andy and his sister Whiz. It was the tailpiece of one of the letters to Whiz that told her something else. Not only had Andy acquired his sister’s shares more than a year ago, but had apparently tried and failed to buy Simon’s, for Andy had written to his sister: ‘ …
Simon wouldn’t sell. He seems to think it would upset the Old Man and I daresay he’s right, so don’t make your sale to me public until I give you the okay. No sense in getting his back up to that extent, and Simon won’t say anything about my offer. He doesn’t know, of course, that you and Ian have already sold out.’

Margaret wondered vaguely if Whiz had any clear idea of what was really going on, and also how much Andy had paid her for her shares. She knew very little about Whiz, recalling her only as a rather formal little madam, who had wrinkled her pretty nose at Margaret’s Welsh accent when they first met. But it didn’t matter about Whiz. Andy was the central figure and behind Andy, like a puppeteer, was Shawcrosse, jerking strings to make the Craddocks dance. As she thought about it other pieces of the jigsaw came to hand; snippets of conversations, that hangdog look of Andy’s when he returned from the Big House, the visitors he had from time to time, among them the farmer Bellchamber who, she remembered, was the tenant of the holding now labelled ‘
Shawcrosse Holiday Camp
’.

She sat on sifting pieces and enlarging the pattern until the exercise disgusted her and she got up, stuffed plan and letters into her handbag and went out to the car. Five minutes later she was climbing Whinmouth Hill to the crest of the moor.

Claire heard her out in silence, scanning the plan for a long time and then asking odd and seemingly irrelevant questions. When was Andy expected back? Where was he at this moment? Where was Vanessa? Did Andy ever talk about Stevie? How much of his affluence was real, how much reposed in mortgaged property? Margaret answered as best she could but all the time she was wondering why Claire didn’t summon Paul, who was working in the estate office across the hall. At last she put this to Claire, admitting that her intention had been to pass the information to Paul straight away and let him take any action he thought fit without informing Andy but Claire said, quietly, ‘I’m very glad you didn’t. It was wise of you to tell me first,’ and then, ‘I’m not blameless you know. I’ve sensed that something very odd was going on for a long time and I ought to have challenged him outright. As it is you’ve got yourself involved and I don’t like that. How can things be the same between you when he knows you’ve been poking among his private papers and bringing them over here?’

‘It isn’t that important,’ Margaret said, ‘not to me at all events.’

‘To Vanessa it might be.’

Margaret was silent a moment. Then she said ‘No, not to Vanessa either. I wouldn’t want Vanessa to grow up in that atmosphere and Stevie wouldn’t have wanted it either. Or not the Stevie I knew at “
Ty-Bach
”.’

‘You see what comes of meddling,’ Claire said. ‘You knew from the beginning it wouldn’t work, didn’t you? That time in Criccieth, when I bullied you into making a clean breast of it and giving Andy a chance?’

‘I never saw it as anything but the best of a bad job,’ she said, ‘but what do any of us know about what goes on in other people’s heads?’

‘I know what goes on in Paul’s,’ Claire said, ‘and if this isn’t handled cleverly it’ll scar him for life. You say Andy is due back tomorrow? Do you know what time?’

‘I never know what time. He just shows up, sometimes alone, sometimes with one of his cronies.’

‘Then let’s hope he’s alone this time. I’ll come over after breakfast, just to make sure.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I don’t know, it depends on so many things. On his attitude and my instinct mostly, but I’ll be there. I’m not going to let you face this alone. And don’t ever imagine I’m not grateful, Margaret. Right now I wish you were my daughter as much as I wish Andy wasn’t my son.’

They went out to the stableyard where Margaret’s car was parked and as she got in Margaret said, ‘There’s just one thing more. That Mill Cottage down on the river road, I noticed they were doing it up and rethatching. Is it for rent, or is it earmarked for one of the estate workers?’

‘It was,’ Claire said, ‘but if you need it for a cooling-off spell you can have it, I’ll make sure of that,’ and as she said it her mind conjured up a picture of another forlorn young woman who had found refuge there years and years ago, at the time of the First War. The woman was Hazel Potter, the half-wild postscript of the Potter family, and Hazel’s child was now her son-in-law. She thought, as she watched Margaret drive away. ‘It’s odd the way people and buildings and situations resolve themselves in this place; Four Winds, the Codsalls, the Eveleighs and tragedy; Periwinkle, the bombs, and Simon’s wife; High Coombe, and me, and my brother Hugh when he tried to double-cross Paul in the way Andy had done; and now Mill Cottage, restored just in time to provide a sanctuary again.’ Then she went in and up to the room that had been Young Claire’s that she used as an inner tabernacle, keeping everyone else at bay. She took with her the tracing and the letters. Without fuss she sat down and studied them, line by line and word by word.