The Green Gauntlet (48 page)

Claire could smile at this. ‘Run along with you. What games do you think we could play at our age?’

‘Knowing you nothing would surprise me,’ Maureen said, and then, with a show of her occasional warmth, ‘we’ve all got to die of something. I haven’t found my label yet but it won’t be long now. I’m an old fool to think I can go on diagnosing at my age. Not that I blame myself about you, for I haven’t examined you since before the war. I’ll make an appointment for you to see Hilary Wescott, in Paxtonbury, the day after the party, but you must tell Paul the truth before then. You’ll get that pain now and again but not too often to bear, and I do mean that.’ She looked at her speculatively. ‘You don’t want to hear all the technical details I hope?’

‘No. I’ll tell you something though. I’d far sooner this than cancer of the womb or breast. That’s always been my secret horror.’

‘I know,’ Maureen said, ‘it is with most women, particularly those who have enjoyed themselves the way you have.’

She went over to the latticed window and looked out on the winter landscape, still soaking up a thin, never-ending rain.

‘We neither of us can grumble, I suppose. It’s been a long time, and most of it fun. You feel that, don’t you?’

‘Yes. It’s only that I can’t imagine how he could cope without me. He’s been very close to violent death twice since I’ve known him and I suppose that’s the reason I’ve always taken it for granted that I should be the one who would have to cope. The thing is, nobody ever knows for sure, do they?’

Maureen turned slowly and regarded her steadily. ‘You’ve taken it far better than most,’ she said, ‘but then again, why not? You’ve had a much better run for your money than anyone else I know. Will you tell the family, eventually?’

‘Not likely!’ Claire said, ‘I wouldn’t even tell Paul if I could trust you not to.’

‘It would be unfair not to,’ Maureen said, ‘and you’ll realise that if you think about it. I’ll get hold of these tablets by tonight and deliver them personally. You’ll be up at the house for supper I suppose?’

‘No, I won’t,’ Claire told her, ‘I’ve promised to baby-sit for Margaret who is coming over from the cottage to plan the ceremonial with Mary and Evie. Put them in an innocent-looking package and leave them in my desk.’

‘I’ll do that,’ Maureen said, heavily. And then, ‘What do you mean, baby-sit? That child Vanessa is turned twelve, isn’t she?’

‘She has her leg in plaster after a fall out hunting last Saturday. I don’t think it’s all that serious but she’ll have to miss the party and anyway she hates being left alone.’ She paused a moment, then went on. ‘Vanessa and me, we’ve got a rather special relationship. Very different from all the other grandchildren. I suppose it’s the circumstances, although I’ve never asked Margaret how much she told the child about Stevie.’

‘I knew about that special relationship. I keep my eyes open. She isn’t very robust, is she? In spite of all this gallivanting about on horses.’

‘She’s my favourite,’ Claire said, and left it at that.

Maureen said, ‘I’ll pop in to look at the decorations and slip the tablets in your notepaper drawer. I’ll do something else for you too, I’ll be there when you tell Paul if you’d like me to. It might help him to accept it without a lot of fuss.’ Suddenly she crossed the room and kissed her on the forehead, a gesture so uncharacteristic that Claire was taken by surprise.

‘That was the whole truth, wasn’t it?’ she asked, and Maureen replied ‘Yes, it was. There was a time when I would have bluffed but that was long ago, my dear. The rest depends very much on you.’

II

I
t was still drizzling when she climbed carefully into Margaret’s two-seater at dusk and slowly negotiated the sharp bend in the drive. Margaret said Evie would drop her off at the cottage about eleven and Claire could then use the little car to return home. The slush in the lane, she warned her, was ankle deep and if she drove the station waggon it would get stuck turning.

At the bottom of the drive, for no particular reason, she stopped and looked back. Here, at the half-flooded ford, darkness pressed in on all sides but higher up the rise, beyond the last of the chestnuts, she could see an orange glow spreading from the terrace where all the lights were burning as though John’s party had already begun. For a moment she sat looking at them, wondering if this was the last party she would ever attend at the Big House.

Her fortitude had increased during the afternoon with so much bustle going on around her and everybody simmering with subdued excitement. It was interesting, she thought, how a family occasion like this exposed the sameness of successive generations. Her own children, and more still their children, pretended to indifference towards family junketings, as though they had no strong family ties but the atmosphere up there now was really no different from that of the old harvest suppers and coronation soirées. Only the externals changed. The tunes the band would play tomorrow night would have a different rhythm and their lyrics would have some of the sentimentality ironed out of them.

The style of dancing would be different, with less proximity between partners, and the horseplay would be less inhibited, but all the essentials were there, the sense of anticipation associated with fun and frolic, laughter and swift embraces in the dark corners of the house. It had all happened before and it would go on happening for ever, because that was what life was about, although one had to keep reminding oneself of this when reading newspapers of watching television.

Maureen had been right. She had had her innings and enjoyed it far more than most people she knew. Paul had had his too, but she doubted if he would admit it as cheerfully as she did for he made the worst kind of invalid and sometimes took himself as seriously as a hanging judge. Not with her, thank God! Never with her, and that, she supposed, was what she had had to offer all these years, a sanctuary and distraction from all the stresses of his life. Beyond that nothing very much, except to present him with a rather fractious brood and nourish his pride in his virility.

The party was over Maureen had said and from now on she was a spectator. Well, she wasn’t so sure about that, or not as long as that agonising pain stayed away. She had, she supposed, been sentenced to death in that little lodge just inside the gates a few hours ago but it hadn’t even sobered her, much less depressed her. Perhaps she had known, subconsciously, since last September, when it sent her reeling for the first time and she would have screamed for help if she hadn’t remembered just in time that Paul was so tragically obsessed by the certainty that they would reduce his Valley to an islet, hemmed in by speeding cars and zooming aircraft. As it was she didn’t know how much to believe of Maureen’s qualified assurances but it didn’t seem to matter all that much anyway. At seventy-two only the luckiest had more than a small handful of summers ahead of them and she had never wanted to live on for the sake of living, like old Mrs Timberlake, who had been born the year of Trafalgar and had died more than a century later a mumbling, toothless, shrivelled old nut. That wasn’t living. Living was all that had happened to her since she came storming back into the Valley on hearing the news that Paul Craddock had been calling for her whilst Maureen O’Keefe (as she then was) had been setting his bones after that shipwreck in Tamer’s Cove.

Before that life had been pleasant enough but humdrum up at High Coombe with her gruff old father and her horse-faced sister, Rose. It hadn’t really begun to crackle until he had opened his eyes and seen her sitting in the window alcove in that ridiculous V.A.D. uniform, posing as a nurse on the strength of a few evening lectures at Guy’s Hospital. Then, only a week or two after, the fuse had begun to splutter and the rocket had soared. Within a month he had proposed, while they were swimming in the landslip rockpool and it was high time too for, at his instance, she had shed a monstrously ugly bathing costume and bathed in the nude, although he had kept his promise about minding the horses and looking out to sea.

She was remembering so much today and enjoying remembering. ‘A good run for her money,’ Maureen had said and it had been a fantastic run, and it wasn’t over yet! The years slipped through her memory like a film, most of the images blurred but a few of them startlingly clear and distinct. Their two honeymoons in Anglesey, separated by twenty-six years. The Coronation visit to London in her prime, spoiled by that terrible suffragette riot outside the Houses of Parliament. Her one clumsy flirtation with that Kitchener-Army staff officer—she had even forgotten his name—that came close to getting her hide tanned when she blurted out the truth. And the rest? Long hot summers and long dark winters, enlivened by Heaven knows how many Christmasses and Hallowe’en Parties and Guy Fawkes bonfires. The election campaign that he almost won but mercifully lost. A house full of noise and children. The stableyard full of sleek, restless hunters when the Sorrel Vale met there every first Saturday in November and every Boxing Day. Rooms full of flowers from the garden and the soft flutter of apple logs in the library grate. The smell of baking in the big old-fashioned kitchen that she was always intending to modernise but somehow never did. The smell of lavender on sheets and the smell of a man when she opened her eyes at first light on a spring morning and slipped from his embrace. The terrible, though never wholly despairing months he had been missing in France, and the joy of having him home again, only slightly the worse for wear. Marvellous, all of it. Who was she to complain about a few sharp spasms and the certainty of a speedy exit at the end of it all?

She eased herself round and let in the clutch, inching the car forward very slowly when the lamps reflected floodwater half-way across the road. She took it quietly and easily, in case there was more flooding on the stretch to the cottage but there was only an inch or two, although the noise of water roaring through the road culverts was deafening. She reached the cottage and backed carefully into the lane, grateful for the porch light Margaret had left burning, then climbed the five steps to the latched door. At the sound of its click Vanessa called from the living-room. ‘Is that you, Nan?’ and Claire said it was and went in to find her propped up on a settee, her injured leg resting on a humpty. The lamplit room looked very cosy and suddenly she was glad she had escaped from the Big House. Vanessa had repose and tonight she needed repose more than Maureen’s tablets.

‘Is it still flooding out there?’ Vanessa asked. ‘The river was right over the road at high tide this afternoon,’ and before Claire could reply, ‘Do you want to watch telly? Or shall we just drink tea and talk?’

‘We’ll drink tea and talk,’ Claire said, laughing, and thought how cuddly Vanessa looked with her shining nutbrown hair in its fashionable pony-tail and her freckles looking more definite than they really were in the glow of the lamp behind her.

‘It’s an awful bore this happening just before the party,’ Vanessa said. ‘I was jolly well looking forward to it I can tell you. John said I could invite as many as I liked, so I sent invitations to everyone in the Pony Club. Now they’ll all turn up and I won’t.’

‘Oh, I daresay we’ll get you there somehow,’ said Claire, ‘and after all, it isn’t everyone who breaks a bone over a hairy fence. You’ll be one of the principal attractions.’

‘I’d sooner have shown what I could do at rock ’n’ roll!’ said Vanessa. ‘Put the kettle on, Nan, and then I’ll introduce you to someone special. A real
discovery.
’

Vanessa was always making ‘real discoveries’. Once it had been Schubert, another time Renoir, and then again Grace Darling, the lighthouse heroine or a stray book of reminiscences by R.L. Stevenson. Today it was a modern poet, John Betjeman, whose love-affair with the suburbs had caught her fancy. Claire was not entirely unfamiliar with Betjeman for Paul had been impressed by his outspoken criticism of the modern compulsion to tear down old buildings and replace them with functional monstrosities. She mentioned this as she was putting the kettle on but Vanessa exclaimed, ‘Oh, he’s much more than a
preserver,
Nan! He takes tiny, trivial things, and tiny, trivial people who seem dull but aren’t because he shows you the pathos about everything. Just listen to this,’ and she read a sad little poem about a clergyman’s widow in a furnished room, and then an even sadder one called ‘The Cottage Hospital’, all about dying.

They were not, perhaps, morale-boosters but in her present mood Claire was more impressed than she would have been.

‘Read me some more,’ she said, pouring their ritual tea. ‘Doesn’t he write any cheerful poems?’

‘Oh, yes.’ said Vanessa, ‘sometimes he can be ever so funny—you know—in a
nudgy
kind of way. Listen to this one, beginning ‘Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough,’ and she read a poem that Claire thought would have pleased Paul, for it expressed much that he felt about current values.

‘I think your latest discovery is wonderful,’ she said, ‘and I’ll tell you what—give Grandpa a collected edition of Mr Betjeman’s work for his next present. He’d be thrilled to think someone of your generation understood his point of view so well. Have you ever written any poetry yourself, Vanessa? Somehow you always give me the impression that you might one day.’ Vanessa looked a little embarrassed and said, ‘I’ve never told anyone else, not even Mummy.’

‘You mean you
do
write poems?’

‘Well—bits, when I get an idea. But I’m never satisfied with them. As soon as I try and make thoughts rhyme they seem forced and not
private
anymore, as though somebody had said, “Bet you couldn’t make it scan and
sound
like poetry!” They’re in that attaché case on the dresser, a little blue notebook.’

Claire got the book and handed it to her, smiling at Vanessa’s concentrated frown as she thumbed through the pages and said, ‘There. That one isn’t bad but don’t dare read it aloud.’

‘You read it,’ Claire urged. ‘Poets should always read their own poetry.’

Vanessa hesitated but finally reached out, cleared her throat, and said, ‘Do you remember that funny little kindergarten I went to in Whinmouth years and years ago?’