Post of Honour (65 page)

When at last it happened—on the 30th January, 1934—he was away from home, just as he had been in 1910 when Thirza Tremlett met him at the gate with news of Mary’s arrival. Henry Pitts’ wife, Gloria, had died whilst on a visit to her sister in Cornwall, the victim of her own obstinacy and a virulent influenza epidemic, for Henry said she had been severely troubled with her chest throughout the winter but had insisted, against his advice, on making the trip to the remote village where she had been born in order to attend her aged mother’s funeral early in the New Year. She caught a severe chill at the graveside, developed pneumonia and had been too ill to recognise him when he responded to an urgent summons to the bedside. To his surprise and indignation he learned that Gloria had expressed a death-bed wish to be buried in the family grave near her original home and it required the united pressure of all Gloria’s Cornish relatives to overcome his objections to such an act of disloyalty. Paul, who thought it his duty to attend Gloria’s funeral, found Henry’s grief somewhat mitigated by his wife’s eccentric preference to lie in foreign soil, and on their way back from the funeral tea (it was, Henry grudgingly admitted, a very sumptuous one) he voiced his complaints with what seemed to Paul an exaggerated bitterness.

‘Tidden right!’ he kept saying, ‘an’ tidden zeemin’ that ’er should lie down yer, half-way across the bliddy country! Never ’eard o’ such a thing, not in all me born days! A Pitts, buried all the way down yer, among a horde o’ flamin’ Cornishmen! Tiz ’er own wish I know but ’er won’t rest easy! There’s been a Pitts in the Valley for I don’t know how long and ’er’s the first to be buried out of it! ’Er was alwus obstinit mind but I never dreamed ’er was so mazed about Cornishmen!’

Henry’s rumbling complaints took some of the sting out of the occasion as they recrossed Bodmin Moor in driving January sleet and Paul, a tolerant listener, was tempted to confide some of his own troubles to his old friend, if only to distract him from his grievance but he thought better of it and held his peace until they drove into the frontier town of Launceston, where he left Henry to console himself with a tankard of beer and telephoned Shallowford to say he expected to be home in two or three hours.

Mary answered so quickly that she might have had the receiver to her ear. She said, quietly but incisively, ‘Come straight away, Daddy! The baby’s arrived! It’s a boy and everything’s fine but we need you!’

Paul said, with a gasp, ‘Your mother is all right? You aren’t keeping anything back?’

‘No, honestly. Maureen says it was a very straightforward affair but . . . ’

‘To hell with what Maureen says! Maureen told me there was no possibility of the baby arriving until partway through February! When was he born?’

‘It started soon after you left.’

‘Why the devil didn’t somebody get in touch?’

‘We couldn’t. I wasn’t sure of the address and there wouldn’t have been a ’phone, would there?’

‘No, you’re quite right. Give her my love and tell her I’ll be with her in about three hours. And Mary . . . ’

‘Well?’

‘How has she taken it?’

Mary said, carefully, ‘It’s a bit odd, Dad. You know how she’s been but I thought—well, when the baby actually arrived I thought she’d change.’

‘And she hasn’t?’

‘No, she doesn’t seem interested. Just hurry along, she’ll be all right when you show up!’

He replaced the receiver and stood looking across the hotel lobby at the sleet slashing down on the little square and leaping up from the cobbles. He felt tired and dispirited, finding no pleasure in the news although, secretly, he had been hoping for another boy. He thought, impatiently, ‘Claire’s right! We’re both too old for this kind of nonsense and it’s time we both had a little peace and quiet!’ and then homesickness came down on him, as it always did when he was more than an hour’s ride from the Valley, and he called to Henry to hurry along and went out into the rain to the car.

It was like playing an old, old scene over again, with words and actions clearly remembered but all the spring and gaiety gone from the step. She was in the same room and the same bed and the only difference, he was quick to notice, was that the baby’s cot was not by the window as it had been on every previous occasion. She looked, he thought, extraordinarily fresh and young but there was still hostility in the eyes, or perhaps it was not hostility but simply an unconscious expression of the same, baffling impatience with life he himself was experiencing. He said, with an effort, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here, Claire, I could kick myself for not trying to find a public ’phone in that God-forsaken country. I ought not to have gone, I suppose, but Henry is our oldest friend left around here and he wanted me at a time like this. Mary said it was quick, like the others. Is that true?’

‘Yes, it was very quick,’ she said. ‘I suppose you’re pleased it’s a boy?’

‘Yes, I am but all I really wanted was to get it over and done with.’

He wanted badly to use this opportunity to talk frankly to her, to make some attempt to climb the fence that had grown up between them during the drift of the last few months, but she would not give him the necessary encouragement so he remained standing by the window, feeling more shy and gawky than when he came here to visit her after the birth of the twins. What they had lost, he decided, was the sense of humour that had always been able to bridge these embarrassing moments. When she asked if he had any name in mind he said, groping wildly for laughter, ‘I don’t know . . . something to single him out from all the others ten laps ahead; how about “Tail-piece”?’ The small joke was a failure. After a wretched pause she said, settling herself, ‘Yes . . . well you had better go and look at him. After all, he’s all yours, Paul!’

He would have protested and perhaps, stung by injustice, hit back in some way but he remembered in time that she was at a disadvantage and that if this tension between them persisted it must be met and faced as soon as she came downstairs. He went along the corridor to the old nursery where, to his astonishment, he found Thirza Tremlett sitting beside the cot making the obligatory noises, she had made over the cots of all the children up to the time she left the Big House and became nanny to John Rudd’s boy. She was wearing her faded nanny’s ‘uniform’ and for some reason her presence cheered him a little.

‘Now what the devil prompted you to rejoin the column?’ he asked, remembering that Thirza had married after leaving Maureen’s service and had not been seen in the valley for some time past. Thirza told him that she had heard through old Mrs Handcock that Mrs Craddock was ‘expecting again’ and had applied for reinstatement after she and her husband had ‘gone their seprit ways’. He recalled then that Thirza had ultimately married a Whinmouth sailor who had, it was rumoured, been courting her since the bustle was in vogue. He said, looking down on the fat little bundle who was gesticulating with a small, business-like fist, ‘And what do you think of this surprise packet, Thirza?’ She replied that she supposed he would do but pointed out that, with a gap of fifteen years between him and his youngest sister, ‘he was zertain zure to be spoiled’ and he might depend upon her to do her best to see that he wasn’t.

‘ ’Ave ’er got a given naame yet, Squire?’ she asked and Paul said no, it was something he would have to think about, and because Thirza was more of an old friend than an employee, added, ‘Mrs Craddock doesn’t seem particularly pleased with him, Thirza? Have you any idea why?’ She did not seem in any way embarrassed by his mark of confidence, considering, no doubt, that it was her prerogative to pronounce upon such matters. ‘Well,’ she said, unsmilingly, ‘I baint surprised to learn that! Mebbe Mrs Craddock thinks tiz high time ’er was done wi’ such tiresomeness!’ and the look she gave him as he withdrew was loaded with reproach.

He drifted off to seek Mary, wondering whether ‘tiresomeness’ on the part of Thirza’s sailor-husband had played its part in the failure of the marriage but he was far too grateful to see a fragment of the old pattern restored to resent the implied rebuke. Mary was not to be found so he went up across the long orchard, conjuring with names and recalling the fun he and Claire had naming the other children, sometimes amusing themselves for nearly a week before settling on Andrew, Stephen and Mary. ‘Karen’, the name Whiz never used, had been Claire’s choice, he remembered, and she had hit on an equally fanciful name for young Claire which he had rejected on his return from France, in 1918. As he went down the lane towards the western tongue of the woods confidence began to return to him, a bonus, perhaps, of crossing a landscape where every tree and every contour was as familiar to him as his own features. ‘I daresay it’s something to do with the metabolism of the body’ he told himself, still pondering the baffling changes in Claire, ‘and as time goes on it will sort itself out, like everything always does in and about the Valley.’ After all, there had been times when he had despaired of finding his own way, and plenty of occasions when whole families, like the Eveleighs at Four Winds, had been written off but something always turned up to adjust the balance in the way spring converted this belt of trees from a witches’ back drop to a maze of green tunnels. He turned away from the woods and went down the long, sloping field to the house, just as a watery sun came out and the sky over the Sorrel cleared for a few moments. It looked quiet and workaday down there, with wavering columns of bluish smoke rising from the twisted chimneys and a line of limp washing on the cord that crossed the kitchen garden. Peace returned to him and with it the memory of the fat little bundle in the cot knuckling his fist and looking up at him through eyes slitted against the light. ‘John!’ he exclaimed suddenly. ‘It will be good to have a John around the place again and if there is a more English name for a farmer I’ve yet to hear it!’ He went on down the slope feeling almost cheerful again.

II

‘A
lmost’ was as far as he got that season. As spring came round Claire edged back into the family circle but far too guardedly for Paul’s liking, so that imperceptibly their roles were now reversed, with his own edginess causing his daughters and the men about Home Farm to tread warily, whereas it was Claire who held the watching brief that had been his throughout autumn and winter. He was aware of the sources from which his surliness stemmed, not merely his semi-estrangement from Claire but a long, rumbling quarrel with circumstances that held any number of new problems in reserve, depriving him of the mental ease he had enjoyed in the pre-war days when the world was sane and the wary peace he had enjoyed in the years leading up to the slump, when his children were growing up around him and he was still young enough to respond to a challenge. Yet, even now, there existed no open quarrel between him and Claire. She had abandoned her solitary expeditions in the trap and was, in fact, less inclined to fly off the handle when something displeased her, but what exasperated him most was her neutral attitude to the baby and her tendency, at least in his view, to give free rein to young Claire who was now, as Mrs Handcock would have said, ‘of an age’, which meant she was too old to be smacked and too young to respond to reason. It was no consolation to reflect that Claire had never been over zealous in her duties as a mother, that she had left all the fussing to people like Thirza, Mrs Handcock and old Olivers, the groom, for he remembered also that the children, one and all, had always been able to make her laugh and arouse her interest, so that her relationship with them had been that of an elder sister rather than a mother and he had never quarrelled with this. As to the new baby, she breast-fed him, as she had all her other children but that was all. She took no pains to conceal that he was little more than a tiresome addition to household chores and Paul sometimes wondered if the baby’s plainness had anything to do with her attitude. At this stage in their lives all her children had a pink and white prettiness whereas John, a sturdy child and one that gave little enough trouble, was surprisingly sallow and even Thirza had to admit that his wrinkles had something in common with those of old Aaron Stokes, the doyen of the Valley, still to be seen outside his cottage on fine mornings making bird-tables to supplement his pension.

When the baby was about six months old Paul stopped by the lodge one morning seeking further advice from Maureen but was not surprised by her impatience with his complaints.

‘Women are often withdrawn after childbirth,’ she reassured him, ‘so in the name of God don’t be cultivating another fancied grievance!’

‘Now why the hell should I go looking for trouble?’ he demanded but she said, with a laugh, ‘Oh, I’m not saying it’s deliberate on your part but she tried your patience pretty sorely all winter so this is your subconsious getting its own back!’

Neither he nor old John Rudd had ever had much patience with Maureen’s pseudo-Freudian explanations for human oddities of one sort or another, so he protested that she was now talking nonsense, ‘Damn it, you admitted yourself that she was jealous of the poor little beggar before he arrived. Now that I’ve come round to your point of view you back down on it and feed me a lot of psychological claptrap! It would have made John hoot with laughter and you know it!’

She said, regarding him with affectionate amusement, ‘Oh, you and my John were two of a kind. Everything you came up against had to be black, white or khaki and stated in two-syllable words! Well, thank God, we’ve learned something about human beings since those days and the plain fact is life isn’t that simple! A thing like this could have gone either way. A majority of women producing a healthy child at fifty would have whipped up their husbands’ temper for quite another reason!’

‘How?’

‘They would have screamed with triumph, turned their backs on their man for good and gone to goo-gooing over the new arrival and if it had taken Claire that way we should have had you in here with an even bigger chip on your shoulder! Very well, you’ve asked for it. I’m going to give it you straight whether you like it or not! How often have you made love to the girl since the package was delivered?’