Post of Honour (69 page)

She said, biting her lip, ‘Something’s happened. Something . . . bad! Don’t let anyone in, I’ve got to tell you first!’ and then stopped, her tongue filling her mouth.

All her life she had admired him at times of crisis. He had always seemed to her a big, dependable man, whose inclination to fuss was reserved for the smaller, unimportant irritants, a broken harness strap, a sudden quarrel resulting in unnecessary noise but in the wider sphere she had never once seen him rattled and it came to her now, faced with this hideous task, that this might be the secret of his reputation in the Valley. He came over to her and took her by the hand, leading her to a chair near the tall window, saying, ‘Is it about Rumble, Mary?’ She shook her head and swallowed and they waited until her tongue became manageable.

‘Claire,
our
Claire!’

Her mother’s head came up sharply. ‘She’s ill? Someone’s telephoned from London?’

She wished now that she had tackled Paul alone. It would have been much easier to have told him and let him pass it on, for her mother’s favouritism of Claire had never been a secret in the house, just another family joke, and surely a shock like this would be too great for her to absorb without a collapse. The thought gave Mary a little strength. She said, choosing her words with the utmost care, ‘There’s been an accident. A bad accident!’

‘Where?’

It was Paul who spoke and he sounded tired rather than frightened.

‘Flying Holland—it was on the wireless—then the police rang. No one was saved!’ and she bowed her head and was silent.

There was no sudden outcry, no movement of any kind. The library clock ticked on. The mellow light filtered by the avenue chestnuts flooded the room as each of them fought with the whole of their strength to ward off horror from each other and then Claire, twisting her handkerchief into a hard knot, stood up and she said, quietly:

‘There’s no hope? None at all?’

Mary shook her head and there was silence again. Claire crossed to the sideboard, taking out a brandy glass and a decanter. She poured four fingers and carried it back across the room.

‘Take a drink, Paul!’

‘You—?’

‘It doesn’t help me but it will you.’ He took and swallowed it like a child taking medicine and it was in the act of putting the decanter away that Claire, out of the corner of her eye, saw Mary sitting with her head bowed, her hands on her lap. The abject pose communicated the girl’s misery to her as nothing else could have done. She moved to the window and touched her head lightly, the gesture releasing a spring of tenderness that had never flowed for a daughter who seemed to belong less to her than did Paul’s son by Grace Lovell. ‘I’ll never forget you made yourself tell us, Mary!
Never
,
you understand?’ Then she went out, leaving them alone, understanding that, at a juncture such as this, she was the odd one out.

She paused in the hall undecided which way to go and what to do first, yet astonished at her own steadiness. Then she made her decision and climbed the stairs to Claire’s room, one room along from Mary’s. It was still strewn with the debris of Claire’s departure and she wondered for a moment why nobody had tidied up after they had gone. Then she remembered that Claire had always been the litterbug of the family and that long ago instructions had been issued to Thirza and the others not to encourage her slatternly habits by following her round and picking up discarded garments.

Tears began to flow as she set about the job of clearing up and as the first of them fell she knew the source of her strange, numb calm. It was not, as she had thought on quitting the study, the almost instinctive lurch towards the routine obligations of telephoning and writing, or a summoning of willpower to withstand the flow of condolences or the clamour of the Press. This rally would occur in an hour or so but for the moment she found a reserve of strength in a deep conviction that what had occurred was not a terrible accident but a cycle of circumstances, all of which were inevitable and quite beyond anyone’s power to alter or mitigate. She had always known that something like this would deprive her of Claire, suddenly and completely, and it was because of this that she had spoiled the child so shamelessly. She was very far from being a superstitious woman in the accepted sense of the word and yet, as regards Claire, a child conceived against a background of death and deprivation in the deepest trough of the war, she had always been half-aware of a kind of bargain made with death that involved not only the child but her father whom everyone in the Valley, herself excepted, believed dead at the time. All the time the child had lain in her womb death had squatted over the Valley, and his favourite roosting-spot had been the chimney-pots of this house. Yet, in the end, he had been vanquished, or perhaps not vanquished but bought off, and now, after a respite of more than sixteen years, he had returned to claim the talisman. She did not know why or how such a train of reasoning could cushion her against the terrible shock of Claire’s death but it did, so that a kind of emotional petrification checked her tears and she braced herself against the demands that Paul and Mary and all the others would be certain to make on her in the weeks ahead, weeks of mourning that were denied even the focal point of a committal.

When the room was tidy she opened the window, took a last look round and went downstairs to the telephone, lifting the receiver and asking for the number of the Whinmouth police station. Her hand and her voice were steady as the bell tinkled, and when Thirza emerged from the kitchen to answer it, she turned aside and said, crisply, ‘Go and fetch the Lady Doctor, Thirza. Tell her Mr Craddock wants her urgently and hurry!’

She turned her back on the woman’s puzzled expression and re-addressed herself to the telephone but there was no more news, only confirmation of the disaster. She replaced the receiver and wondered whether to await Maureen in the hall but then she had another thought, retracing her steps upstairs, and going along to the nursery. The baby was awake, threshing away with his little fists, and as she stared down at him she found herself smiling. She thought, ‘I wonder why he always struck me as a plain child? He isn’t plain, just—comical!’ She picked him up, carried him downstairs and out on to the terrace, holding him tightly and occasionally brushing his head with her lips. They were still standing so when Maureen and Thirza came hurrying up the drive.

Chapter Seventeen

I

N
o other bodies were recovered so it was as Claire had suspected, a mourning without a corpse, with a memorial service in Coombe Bay Church that Paul authorised only after strong pressure from The Pair and their wives, who were, it seemed, very conventional in some respects and thought it essential Claire should have her public tribute.

The weather broke the day following and autumn rain seeped down on the stubble and a countryside that had rallied during the sunny spell following a wet summer; by the end of the week it might have been late November. The Sorrel was in flood and all its culverts choked with sodden leaves.

It was strange that the elimination of Claire, who had never been noisy and energetic like her brothers, or even gregarious like her sister Whiz, should invest the house with such gloom and emptiness, but this was so and it was Mary, without an absorbing occupation, who noticed it more than the others. Sometimes, when it pressed too heavily upon her, she put on macintosh and gumboots and slogged up across the orchard to the lane and round the rim of the woods to the mere, or, turning left instead of right, climbed to French Wood and dropped down past Hermitage Farm to the stream that fed the Sorrel here, then up the long slope to the ruin of Periwinkle. She had always liked Elinor Codsall and it increased her depression to see the rain dripping through the thatch and thistles marching down the slope that Will, whom she dimly recalled, had reclaimed from the moor before he went off and got himself ‘blowed to tatters’, as Martha Pitts used to say.

She was here one October afternoon, about a fortnight after Claire’s death, when she heard, or thought she heard, the sound of footsteps in what had been Elinor’s kitchen. She stood on the bank and listened, half-deciding that she must have been wrong but then she noticed a wisp of smoke rising from the chimney and guessed who must be inside, almost certainly old Meg Potter. Meg sometimes used the ruin for boiling herbs she had gathered this side of the Valley and thus saved herself the trouble of hauling them all the way to Low Coombe where she lived if she could be said to live anywhere. It would be comforting, Mary thought, to take a brew of tea with Meg and tell her her troubles. Maybe she would tell her fortune again, as she often did when they met by chance in isolated places. Meg did not tell anybody’s fortune but she was always ready to tell Mary’s and she would never accept silver for her services. ‘You’ll never maake money, tho’ you’ll live a long time in peace,’ she would tell her gravely, ‘and I donr’t need me palm crossed to tell that to man nor maid!’

She jumped down from the bank and crossed the muddy farmyard, meaning to stand beside the rain-tub and peep in the window, in case it wasn’t Meg but one or other of the wayfarers, who sometimes slept a night in there
en route
for Paxtonbury’s tramps’ lodging house. Then she stopped, convinced that she was the victim of a hallucination brought on by delayed shock, for inside, engaged in measuring the room with a long, notched yardstick, was Rumble Patrick!

At least, she thought it was Rumble Patrick, although the young man absorbed in the task of estimating the floor-space of the littered room was much taller, more broad-shouldered and somehow more rawboned than the Rumble who had kissed her beside the mere all those years ago, and to whom she must have written at least two hundred and fifty letters during the last three and a half years. He was much browner too and more weather-beaten about the face and his dark hair, that had been thick and unruly, was now close-cropped, so that his reddened ears, always inclined to protrude, seemed set at an angle of about forty-five degrees. His clothes were outlandish, serviceable breeches and a kind of lumber-jacket with a fur-lined hood, and strong, laced-up boots, like those her mother was seen to be wearing in photographs taken before the war, only these had metal-tipped high heels that looked oddly effeminate on the long legs of a broad-shouldered young man.

She remained by the window oblivious of the dripping thatch as warmth stole into her, animating every nerve in her body and bringing the blood rushing to her cheeks already whipped by the wind. She tried to call out but her tongue was as unresponsive as it had been when she had brought the news of Claire’s death to her father and mother and it was all she could do to lift her hand to the pane and drum with her fingers on the cracked glass. He turned then, as sharply as a hare surprised in long grass but when he saw her he did not seem surprised but grinned broadly and beckoned, so that she ran along the slippery cobbles and under the cascade of drips at the porch and the next moment she was in his arms, laughing and crying and still struggling with a sluggish tongue.

He said, holding her and running his big, rough hands over her damp hair, ‘I suppose that rascal Smut Potter gave me away? He was the only one who saw me jump the train, at Sorrel Halt. I meant to tip him to keep his mouth shut but I had to run along the line for my rucksack and forgot!’

She told him at last that she had not had the least idea he was home and that he was a pig to have given her such a shock, and that he couldn’t have come from Sorrel Halt that day because the first train that stopped there was the four-thirty and it was only three-forty-five now but he said, grinning, ‘Who said it stopped? It slowed down and I couldn’t see the sense of going on to Paxtonbury and hiring a taxi so I jumped for it! We’re going to need all I’ve saved to put this joint in order! What’s the matter with Gov’nor, to let one of his places run down to this extent? Another year and even I couldn’t have fixed it!’

He spoke, she noticed, with a slight but unmistakable Colonial drawl, using words like ‘fixed’ and ‘joint’ without self-consciousness so that for a moment the implication of what he said did not strike her; when it did she could have cried out with relief and joy. Being Mary, however, she admonished herself for leaping to the most exciting conclusions and said, instead, ‘You mean you intend to
farm
Periwinkle? To do it up yourself and . . . and
settle
in it?’

‘You bet,’ he said, casually, ‘unless there’s anything better going and I’m pretty sure from your letters there isn’t! The others are all occupied, aren’t they? Even if they are operating on a horse-and-buggy economy!’

Yes, she told him, almost gobbling with excitement, all the other farms in the Valley were tenanted and High Coombe had been sold off and was now a building estate and caravan camp. Her father had long since written-off Periwinkle and what remained free of weeds had been split between Hermitage and Four Winds, after Elinor Codsall had married her German prisoner-of-war. He looked thoughtful at this and she noticed that when he concentrated his expression reminded her sharply of his grandmother, Meg Potter; he had Meg’s deep-set eyes and bushy brows and the same obstinate chin.

‘That’s bad,’ he said, ‘for I don’t suppose either Pitts or Harold Codsall will take kindly to surrendering land. They could be compensated, I suppose. I’ve earmarked two thousand dollars for contingencies.’

‘Good heavens!’ she said. ‘Daddy wouldn’t let you pay money for that! He’d come to some kind of arrangement with Henry and Harold,’ but he said, sharply, ‘If they can be persuaded to let it revert I’ll pay for it! I’m aiming to be a freeholder, not a tenant farmer. Come to think of it, it’s probably a good idea the Gov let the place run to seed. He might even be glad to get it off his hands. Would he, do you think? After we’re married, of course?’

The sheer casualness of the afterthought made her gasp and she said, drawing back a little, ‘
Married?
Good Lord, Rumble, you haven’t even proposed to me yet! I was always hoping you would in your letters but for every paragraph in them that made me hope there were five hundred about sheep-dip!’

He said, with his slow grin, ‘Ah, you’d be surprised how many trial proposals I used to light my pipe winter evenings! Fact is, I’m too down-to-earth to put that kind of guff on paper but then, where’s the point, seeing I never looked twice at any other Sheila?’

‘Sheila?’ she said, with a sharp stab of jealousy, ‘who is Sheila?’ and he threw back his head and laughed, telling her that ‘Sheila’ was nobody in particular, just Australian slang for ‘girl-friend’.

‘Well,’ she said, much relieved, ‘you haven’t even told me how and why you’re here. I suppose you decided to come as soon as you got my letter telling you the awful news about poor little Claire?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t wait for a letter. I went East the day after I read about it in the papers. She was only about eleven when I left, poor kid, but she would have had my vote at a beauty contest even then. How has your mother taken it, Mary?’

‘Oddly enough a good deal better than Father,’ she told him. ‘He’s frightfully low but you being here will cheer him up. He was always asking about you and I had to read him all the farming bits from your letters. I think he approves of you very much, Rumble.’

‘Well, I hope so,’ he said, ‘seeing that he’s likely to be stuck with me for a son-in-law!’ and suddenly he reached out and grabbed her again with a kind of proprietary flourish that made her giggle but his embrace was no laughing matter; his grip promised to crack her ribs.

‘Oh, Rumble,’ she cried, as he swung her off her feet and carried her triumphantly into the yard, ‘you’ll never know what a difference it made, looking into that filthy window and just seeing you there! I can’t get Claire out of my mind and the others can’t either. It seems almost wrong to feel happy after what happened to her but I do, I do, terribly happy, and . . . safe somehow! Can you understand that? No, I don’t suppose you can, not having been here when it happened, and not having seen any of us in years!’

He said, cheerfully, ‘Whether I can understand it or not it sounds very flattering!’ and when he seemed disposed to march clear across the yard and into the lane with her, she said, ‘For heaven’s sake put me
down
,
Rumble! Suppose Henry Pitts or anyone came down moor road?’

‘Oh, they wouldn’t begrudge me a celebration,’ he said, ‘not even in England, where they still go for the gooseberry-bush guff!’ but he set her down, kissed her mouth with the air of a man sealing a bargain and set off down the eastern slope at such a pace that she had to trot to keep up with him. When they reached the wicket gate in the park wall, however, he suddenly became shy and said, ‘Hadn’t you better run on ahead and warm them up a little? After all, this isn’t the Outback or the Rockies, where anyone passing by is expected to stay a fortnight!’ but she seized him by the hand saying that Paul and Claire would be delighted to see him and that he was just what was needed up there, so they crossed the Big Paddock, skirted the Home Farm and came on the drive near the final curve, Mary running across the gravel forecourt shouting, ‘Mummy! Daddy! Look who’s here!’ and thinking that even decorous Claire would have whooped for joy to see Rumble back in the Valley at last and at a time when they could all do with a little good news.

II

H
e had his father’s flair for lighting up shadows, for coaxing laughter from such reluctant subjects as the poker-faced Thirza and the solemn Mark Codsall. From the moment he flung down his rucksack in the hall, and was dragged by Mary into the library, stillness left the house and voices were raised again. He was, Paul thought, like the sun and wind, radiating vitality just as Ikey had done whenever he chose and it was quite astonishing to see the effect he had upon Mary, who hardly ever took her eyes from him, although she had an irritating habit of interrupting and throwing him off on a fresh tack just when he was explaining something interesting, like the latest kind of reaper operating in the wheatlands of the North-West. The two men soon got down to business and, as Mary had predicted, Paul was very willing to have Periwinkle reoccupied, promising to see what he could do to recover the hundred-odd acres leased to Hermitage and Four Winds. Harold Eveleigh, he said, would probably be glad of shrinkage, for Four Winds was about as much as he could handle with only one man and one boy but Henry’s son, David, might protest at yielding up the Undercliffe pasture, for he had put a good deal of work into it since it was ceded. Supposing this could be achieved, however, Periwinkle would still be a farm of well under two hundred acres and not, he would have thought, an economical unit these days. Would not Rumble be better advised to cross the river and take one of Gilroy’s run-down properties? He understood that the Heronslea estate was in very bad shape, with some of the smaller farmers being welded into larger units, and two or three ruinous and tenantless at the moment.