The Green Gauntlet (38 page)

Zorndorff had told him then that he was behaving like an idiot, that his few thousands was the equivalent of feeding one oat to a donkey, but he had persisted and Claire had encouraged him to persist. It might not be businesslike, she told Zorndorff and her cynical sons, but it was Paul Craddock, and she would have no part in persuading him to act against his instincts.

He was to suffer for his principle or, as some would say, his obstinacy, for as soon as agriculture began to pick up again taxation kept pace with its progress. By the end of World War II it was galloping well ahead, so that Paul often found himself in the position of a man of affluence who could find no-one to change a five pound note. The Whinmouth bank manager, who knew him well, never pressed for a reduction of his periodical overdrafts and when what seemed to Paul staggering amounts were demanded by the Inland Revenue, cheerfully advanced him mortgages and other credits. When the war was virtually over, however, Paul realised that it was imperative to retrench and take some kind of action to stop the estate being bled white by the high rates of interest. It was with this in mind that he made an appointment with Edgar Wonnacott on what turned out to be the final day of the war.

Some time before that, however, he had been thinking in wider terms of a reshuffle of his affairs. He did not feel his age, or anything like his age and put this down to Devon air, plenty of exercise on foot and on horseback, and a life-long limitation of objectives well within his ability to attain. He was, Claire said, very smug about his health and strength and the fact that he never caught cold or took so much as an aspirin. He slept well, did not suffer from rheumatism, ate sparingly and drank whisky when he could get it. He was also a heavy smoker of cigarettes but he had no cough and his wind was remarkable for a man of his age. He could still climb the Hermitage plateau or the Bluff in long, raking strides without much more than a grunt when he reached the summit. And yet, taken all round, he had lived a rough life and had been knocked about more than most men of his generation. He still limped slightly from the effects of a Mauser bullet in his kneecap, and twice since the Boer marksman had shot him down he had been seriously injured, once during the rescue of German sailors in Tamer Potter’s Cove, in 1906, and again twelve years later during the final German offensive. Now, when the wind was in the east, his old wounds ached a little but it was not battles of long ago that reminded him it was time to get his affairs in order. It had much more to do with an acknowledgment of what he felt he owed the generation that had grown up between the wars. They had, he would say, given a damned good account of themselves. But for the energy and adaptability of people like Stevie and Andy (whom he had once thought of as near-decadent), and misfits like Simon, or scamps like Bon-Bon Potter and his cousin Dick, the Nazis would have got ashore and fought their way across his Valley. It was time, Paul thought, as he sat on the ridge of French Wood on V.E. night, that somebody faced up to this and it might as well be the landlord.

Below him, as the blue dusk stole in from the dunes, bonfires twinkled in a wide semi-circle, one big one at the R.M. Camp, smaller ones at Nun’s Head and Four Winds, another on Coombe beach and the one he had just left in the High Street. The night was mild but damp, and the scent, carried on the light breeze, was the smell of spring. From where he sat he could see the first drifts of bluebells in Hermitage larch coppice and the last of the primroses grew at his feet. On this plateau he could almost place the week of the year without reference to calendar or diary. Long ago he had memorised the sights, sounds and scents of successive seasons. In the spring the leaves were slippery underfoot, and in the autumn they whispered like children hushed by authority. The note of a snapping twig would tell him whether or not it held sap and he knew all the wild flowers and birds and small creatures who could be found here at different times of the year. He recognised too the sky signs over the Bluff where he could read the weather in cloud formation or degree of visibility. He thought, drawing on his cigarette, and welcoming the solitude of the wood, ‘I wonder who will take my place here in ten to fifteen years? The time will come when I can’t even ride up here, when I turn my back on it for the last time and go home to die.’ Claire might outlive me by a few years but she wouldn’t have to come this far to remember me. She could do that down by the Mere where she made her first clumsy attempt to catch me, or before the library fire, where we have spent so many pleasant, humdrum evenings. No, this place has always been more mine than anywhere else in the Valley and if I had any say in it I should like to die here as old Meg Potter died on the sandhills above Crabpot Willie’s shanty.’

The thought of the shanty redirected his thoughts to his wife and he remembered her very vividly as she had appeared to him one autumn evening there during a 1917 leave, a few days they had salvaged from that grim time and presented to one another as one might exchange simple, inexpensive gifts. He remembered how breathtakingly beautiful she had seemed to him standing naked in front of the fire, with the soft light of burning apple-logs reflected on her firm white flesh and unpinned hair, and shadows chasing one another the length of her rounded thighs and long, dimpled back.

The memory stirred nothing but silent laughter in him now, laughter and with it a flicker of complacency that their delight in one another had produced three sons and three daughters, to add to the one poor Grace had given him with so much pain as long ago as 1904. The date reminded him of Simon’s age and for a moment he thought of his children in two groups, five living and two dead. Then, detaching little Claire, Stevie, and the family postscript, John, he concentrated on the four who had weathered out this war and would now, he supposed, begin to think of settling down, as he had settled long before he was their age. Surely he owed it to them to offer some kind of inducement to do this, to put down roots and give those roots a chance to take hold of something, in the way every commemorative tree in this copse had rooted itself.

There was old Simon, the brainiest of them but still undecided what to do with his life. There was Andy, with his permanently gloved hand and that dead strip of face. There was Mary and her Rumble Patrick, who would welcome any land coming his way. And there was the indifferent Whiz and her husband Ian, neither of whom he had seen for nearly six years. Whatever settlement was made would have to be an equal division among them. He had seen too many family quarrels begin in the Valley over a father’s preference for one child or another, even when one member of the family deserved a larger slice of the cake. He could form some kind of company, he supposed, with four equal shares and himself as permanent Chairman but how could this be achieved without breaking up the estate into small, uneconomical units? Nothing would induce Simon or Andy or Ian to farm, although one or other of them might like to own a house and a plot of land in the Valley. Young John’s patrimony could stay in pickle until he was twenty-one and that was still a decade away. Rumble Patrick might be persuaded through Mary to accept the vacant Home Farm as a gift, abandon the shattered Periwinkle, and join the two holdings in a single unit. As to Simon, his wife Evie, Andy, his wife Margaret, and Whiz and Ian, he couldn’t be sure. They had earned something and one way or another they were going to get it without waiting for him to die. It was a problem to be put to Wonnacott as soon as possible. With this resolve he got up, carefully extinguished the butt of his cigarette, and stumped off down the winding track to the river road.

When he reached Codsall Bridge he noticed the stars, thrown across the arc of the sky like jewels scattered by a fugitive thief. He thought, as the damp of the river bottom probed his Boer wound, ‘I’d better ring Wonnacott and fix something up this week. That damned bullet nearly put paid to me before I set foot in this place, and Fritz’s lump of shrapnel came even closer in 1918. I’m a good deal fitter than most men over the hill but let’s face it—I’ve been luckier, and luck can run out, just as Stevie’s did.’ An owl who lived in the elms at the corner of the park wall hooted as though confirming this possibility and Paul smiled into the gathering darkness, cupping his hands, blowing into the cavity, and giving such an accurate imitation of the hoot that the owl was mute with astonishment. By the time he had found his voice again Paul had turned in at the lodge and was half-way up the drive.

V

F
or once Edgar Wonnacott paid him a grudging compliment, expressing surprise that Paul had at last turned his mind to a possibility that most business men begin to consider on reaching the age of forty. Paul, not to be bullied by the old badger, said, ‘Damn it, Edgar, I’ve made my will, haven’t I?’

‘Yes and it’s years out of date,’ said the lawyer, with one of his sour smiles. ‘I turned it out the day you phoned and your youngest child isn’t even mentioned in it. If you are set on this Deed of Gift—which I’m not against mind you, for it’s some kind of protection against penal death-duties—you’ll have to scrap that will and draw up another. Before we go any further, however, can you trust your family?’

‘Now what a damned stupid question,’ Paul said. ‘If I couldn’t I shouldn’t be here, should I?’

‘I can’t answer that,’ Wonnacott said, ‘it’s something I have to take for granted on occasions such as this, but I always make a point of raising it. You’d be surprised to hear how some sons and daughters react to a covenant of this kind. I’ve known of more than one case where an indulgent parent has voluntarily stripped himself of all he possesses and then been shown the door.’

‘I’m not that kind of a fool and I don’t have that kind of family,’ Paul told him. ‘I shall leave the house, grounds and Shallowford Woods in my own name. For the rest I had some idea of splitting it up as regards income yield, but stipulating that it wasn’t to be sold off in my lifetime.’

‘You can’t give something away and then lay down all kinds of conditions as to what the owner does with it,’ Wonnacott told him. ‘You could, however, make it over to a company, keep some of the shares yourself, and distribute the rest equally among your sons and daughters. It would have to have a secretary, of course, and would have to be registered in the proper way.’

‘All right, get cracking on it right away,’ Paul said.

‘Wait a minute, Mr Craddock. There would have to be a certain amount of preliminary reorganisation first. The fact is, you’re heavily mortgaged and if you’ll take my advice you’ll clear off those mortgages and consolidate before bringing in other shareholders, even if those shareholders are your sons and daughters. That way the company will start life without a weight round its neck.’

It seemed a rational point to make and Paul said so. ‘How much do the mortgages amount to?’ he asked and Wonnacott said that they totalled just over nine thousand.

‘Great God! As much as that.’

‘You’ve been paying a lot of tax lately and your rents have remained at Slump level. Sooner or later you’ll have to raise them and start investing. Ever since I’ve known you you’ve spent as much as you earn, although I’ll admit you’ve never spent much on yourself. It’s all gone back into the estate. If restrictions and taxation hadn’t prevented you from continuing to do that throughout the war, you would have had an even bigger overdraft by now.’

Paul, sobered by the figure, asked, ‘What do you suggest I should do?’

‘Contract,’ Wonnacott said, ‘providing you can find buyers. Why don’t you sell off that eastern section, those three farms running down to Coombe Bay? With the money raised you could clear the mortgages altogether, hoist your rents all round—and don’t tell me the farmers can’t afford to pay more after the money they’ve been making lately and then form your company, with a small income guaranteed you for your lifetime. Have you got any private money I haven’t heard about?’

‘Two or three thousand in Government stock,’ Paul said, ‘and my wife got about as much from her father when he died. We could manage well enough. Periwinkle is due for a compensation grant but I don’t really own that farm. My son-in-law was buying it when it was blown to blazes.’ He got up and went to the window, rubbing his chin. ‘I don’t take kindly to the idea of slicing off the entire Coombe,’ he said finally. ‘Couldn’t I dispose of isolated properties in Coombe Bay itself?’

‘Certainly you could. It’s as broad as it’s long. My point was you aren’t getting any younger and apart from raising capital it would reduce the area of your responsibility.’

‘I like responsibility,’ Paul said, ‘it’s what’s kept me going all these years. Go ahead with that company and the transfer of ownership aimed at dodging death-duties. I’ll last another five years I promise you! In the meantime I’ll send you a detailed list of all the Coombe Bay odds-and-sods and we can clear the mortgage with what they yield.’

And so, in a matter of days, it was done, to Paul’s mind entirely satisfactorily. He was astonished by the total figure produced by the sale of his Coombe Bay properties. Anticipating about twelve thousand pounds he actually received a net total of nineteen and even then Wonnacott told him he let some of them go too cheaply. Neither Paul nor his agent ever met the purchasers. They were, it seemed, intermediaries who bought properties, did them up, and resold them immediately. Wonnacott, accustomed to the measured pace of provincial business, expressed disgust at what was going on now that the war was over and ex-servicemen were demanding living space.

‘Some of the places around here have changed hands five times in as many months,’ he growled. ‘They start out at about fifteen hundred pounds and the last in the queue hands over something in the region of four thousand.’ He looked at Paul cautiously for a moment, before saying ‘If you were a business man, Mr Craddock, I could put you in the way of making a packet.’

‘Out of youngsters who put paid to Hitler and his gang? No thank you!’

‘Oh, not necessarily that way,’ Wonnnacott said but choosing his words carefully. ‘You could raise money on that timber of yours in Shallowford Woods and make another fortune out of building-sites where the woods touch the main road on your northern boundary.’