The Green Gauntlet (53 page)

Shawcrosse made no reply. He signed the document in two places, pushed it back across the desk, picked up the envelope containing the cheque and stuck it in his pocket without looking at it.

‘Get to hell out of here,’ he said, ‘and I hope you die of cancer in the bowel.’

‘Far more likely the liver,’ Andy said, and putting the bill of sale in his brief case he turned and let himself out. Rhoda, Shawcrosse’s wife, came gushing across the hall as he fumbled with the catch of the front door. ‘Andy … wait … It’s been so long …’

He did not look at her but swung the door open and went out on to the lamplit porch. Before she could follow he was half-way down the drive.

His watch showed him it was still only a few minutes to nine so instead of swinging left to Paxtonbury he turned right, skirted the old town and found the ‘B’ road that led to the moor. It was dusk now and a warm night for April. Up here he could smell the sea and the whiff of wild onion that drifted off the dunes when the wind was right. His need for a drink, overpowering when he left the Shawcrosse place, had left him and he kept so light a touch on the accelerator that the speedometer hovered around twenty. Slowly, like the effect of vodka, warmth spread to his belly and on the crest of the moor, just before he began to dip down to the junction of the old dust road he stopped and lit a cigarette, watching the smoke lose itself in the light air.

From here he could just see the lights of Coombe Bay at the very end of the Valley, and between there and the moor some of the familiar landmarks loomed in the dusk. Four Winds farmhouse to his right, Hermitage to his left, and beyond Hermitage the blue-black blur of the woods. French Wood reared up on his immediate left, and below him the narrow blade of the Sorrel swept in a broad arc from the lower slopes of the Moor to the nearest meadows of Home Farm, re-emerging half-a-mile on where it ran between the Coombe and Codsall’s stubble fields. He was well over forty now and yet he could not remember an occasion when he had stopped to contemplate the Valley in quite the same way. Either it had never occurred to him or he had never had the time. He thought of Stevie riding knee to knee with him across this part of the moor during a Boxing Day hunt when they were about seventeen, and then again of the time when they had equipped a third-hand motor-boat for a trip to France but had got no further than the sandbar to be rescued by Coombe Bay fishermen. He thought of Margaret too, and how he had first brought her here one icy, February morning, the night after he had abducted her from that stinking little hospital in Wales. And he thought of Vanessa, Stevie’s kid, and her brown curls and big grey eyes—‘mild as a heifer’s’ as Claire had once said. Well, here it all was, or what was left of it, and at least he had something to offer in the way of a coming-home present that the old Gov would value far above any of the junk he had thought of buying in New York or Chicago. He carefully extinguished the cigarette butt, remembering as he did how fussy Paul was about carelessly strewn cigarette ends up here. Then he let in the stiff clutch and coasted down the hill to the junction.

Lights were burning on the terrace when he changed down to tackle the last gradient of the drive but nobody heard the car and nobody came out. He closed the car door silently and walked along the flagstones as far as the library but although the fireplace lights were on, and a small fire was burning in the grate, the room was empty so he moved along to peep through the window of the adjoining room that had always been the estate office.

Paul was there and it made him wince to see how old he looked, even though he still held himself straight and worked without glasses. He was writing in some kind of ledger as fat as a family Bible and his hearing must have been unimpaired for suddenly he stopped writing and stood erect, cocking an ear as though he had detected the scrape of feet outside. Beyond him, clamped squarely to the wall, was an oil-portrait of Claire that Andy remembered had once hung in the main bedroom. It showed her sitting on a sandstone rock down at the goyle, with her head thrown back as she reached across her breast to loosen the shoulder-strap of her blue costume. Andy remembered that it had been a present to his father on his sixtieth birthday and yet she looked no more than about forty-two or three, and although, when the story got around, the family had laughed at her vanity, they had all admitted that it was a wonderful likeness and the Gov had been so proud of the painting that he treated it like a Rubens. Affection for the lonely old man made him choke so that he remembered his longing for a drink, one of Paul’s really stiff drinks of Irish whiskey that he kept for special visitors in the library cupboard.

He called softly, ‘Gov! It’s me. Andy,’ and Paul swung round so quickly that Andy regretted he had not made a conventional entry. Then he saw that the old man was jerky with excitement and crossed the little office so quickly that his elbow caught the ledger and spun it round on the hook-and-eye drawing-board. He flung open the garden door and pulled Andy into the room, holding him by the shoulders in a grip that proved he was not so old and tired as he had looked through glass.

‘God bless you, it’s wonderful to see you, boy,’ he said. ‘Why the devil didn’t you tell us … me … Margaret … Rumble … they’ll all be delighted …’ and he looked as if he was going to run across the library, fling open the door and summon the entire family. Andy said quickly, ‘Hold on, Gov … wait until I’ve had time to look at you. Christ, you’re spry for—what is it—seventy-five?’

‘Seventy-six on June first. And you don’t look so bad yourself, although you’ve put on a stone or so, haven’t you?’

‘It’s not from the grub in the States,’ Andy said. ‘Tasteless, every damned mouthful.’

‘What will you drink?’ Paul asked. ‘Drop of old Irish?’

‘I was standing there thinking about it with my tongue hanging out,’ Andy said, and when his father turned his back he slipped the bill of sale from his brief case and said, casually, ‘Prodigal’s peace offering. I didn’t squander all my patrimony on the husks that the swine eat.’

He watched the old man raise his glass and then lower it again, curiosity showing in the lift of the heavy, tufted eyebrows. He said, with a hard swallow, ‘
The Dell?
In my name?’ and Andy said it was all buttoned up and said that he had bought it back for the price Paul had received from Jumbo Bellchamber seven years ago.

He had never seen the old man so bemused or embarrassed. He kept looking at the typescript, then at Andy, then back at the typescript, fumbling for words and finding none, so that Andy said, for something to say, ‘I figured you could plant there again … half-grown soft woods, so that you’ll live to see them. Neither you nor I can wait around for oaks and beeches to grow but you could put in a few for the kids. I was up there this afternoon and it looked so bald. Then I had this idea.’

Paul found his tongue at last. ‘It was a wonderful idea,’ he said, fighting to keep his voice steady, ‘the best idea you ever had,’ and then he dropped the paper on the floor and threw his arms round him, holding him close for a full half-minute. He had never embraced any of his children like that before, not even Mary.

They had to plan the initial approach to Margaret. She was over at Home Farm, Paul told him, but was due back any minute. ‘You stay here and I’ll go and meet her when the car lights show in the drive,’ and then he seemed to want to talk about Vanessa, and her prospects at Dartington, but Andy steered him back to Margaret, saying ‘You’d better brief me, Gov. Is there any chance at all of Margy and I having a third go at it?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said unhappily, ‘I honestly don’t know. We’re friendly, and since the flood she likes to fuss me, but she never did talk that kind of shop with me, only with Claire. She took a terrific knock over Claire. They were very fond of one another.’

‘And you?’

‘I managed to ride it out. I don’t think I should if it had happened any other way but pride—at a time like that—well, it helps more than you’d think. It was a terrific show she put up down there, just the kind of show Stevie put up when he brought that R.G. home in one piece. Whenever I get low I remind myself of that, and also of the fact that, according to Maureen, she wouldn’t have had more than a year or so with that heart of hers.’

They finished their whiskey and Paul asked if he would like another but he refused. Then, as the white glow of headlights showed on the rhododendrons, he said, ‘Wait here,’ and went out. There was no shuffle in his step. He still walked like a middle-aged countryman crossing frozen furrows in heavy boots.

She slipped into the room alone when he was in the act of pouring himself another whiskey. He was astonished by the absence of change in her. Her brown hair still trapped the gleam of the centre light and her skin was as smooth and unblemished as the day he had grabbed her by the shoulders as she straightened his pillow in the hospital and kissed her wide mouth, with the sour-faced sister three beds down the ward. He would have expected her to put on weight, for, although small-boned, she had always inclined to chubbiness, but her figure was as neat as when she was twenty. Only her large brown eyes indicated maturity.

She showed none of Paul’s initial embarrassment but said, quietly, if a little huskily, ‘Hullo, Andy. Good to see you. We’d practically given you up,’ and he did not know whether to take this as a rebuff until she added, ‘Paul told me you had got him the Coombe back. That was a nice thought and I’m just as glad as he is about it. Not just the fact that he can pass it on, as he always wanted to every yard of the Valley, but because you remembered that. Has he told you about Vanessa?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but it’s about us I came, Margy. I owed him the Coombe anyway but if you and I could pick up the threads again it would be important to him and Vanessa.’

‘Is that why you’d like to try?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I only said that as some kind of inducement to you, I imagine.’

‘Well?’

She wasn’t giving him much help but he had not come here expecting any. He said, ‘I’ve been around, and I’m not saying I haven’t had the odd tumble or two but none of them meant a damned thing. I couldn’t get you out of my system any more than I could Stevie. In the old days there was you and Stevie and Monica and business, and business was a lot of fun at that time but isn’t anymore, just a habit. The women I took to bed over there, and even those I played around with, before we broke up, were less than a habit, just a means of filling time when all the offices were closed and phones rang unanswered. Do you believe that?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I believe it. As a matter of fact I’ve always believed it.’

‘Does that mean you don’t give a damn anymore?’

‘It doesn’t mean anything of the sort,’ she said, ‘but who was I to bellyache? I moved over to Stevie, didn’t I? And you didn’t seem to hold that against me.’

‘I never did,’ he said, ‘but I always had the impression there was something left over for me, particularly after I got used to being back, and showed you that I liked having Vanessa around. Was I wrong about that? Did old Stevie make a grand slam?’

She said slowly—‘There’s never been anyone else—just the two of you, and, as I told Claire, sometimes you didn’t seem two people, even after Stevie changed and you stayed the same. I could have made a go of it after the war if you hadn’t been so obsessed with what you were doing and creeps like Shawcrosse. I kept waiting for a chance to make that clear to you, Andy. I daresay I could now if I made up my mind to it.’

Suddenly she straightened up and the drag left her voice so that he saw her for a second or so as the girl of long ago. She said, ‘Let’s face it, Andy. There was never much between you and me but strong physical attraction but it was enough then and could be again. God knows, in the last few years I’ve thought about you often enough, wondered how you were doing, what you were up to, and what kind of women you went around with.’

He said, without looking at her, ‘You don’t make anything more than casual contacts with people after the age of thirty or so. You lose the knack of making yourself matter, or finding something in them worth cultivating. It’s been that way with me a long time now. I’m damned lonely and I’m going to get lonelier. I never found anyone or anything that came near replacing the old set-up. I suppose I took it for granted that you had by now.’

He paused, hoping she might volunteer information on the use she had made of her isolation, but when she said nothing but only looked glumly at the floor, he crossed to her and put his sound arm on her shoulder. ‘I’d like a chance to try again. I’d make it up to you somehow, but God knows, I don’t want to put pressure on you.’

‘Pressure?’ Her head came up. ‘There now. There’s a silly thing to say …’

As always under the stress of emotion, the Welsh lilt returned to her voice so that she seemed to him as young and irrepressible as the day they had met. Her eyes still brooded but he noticed a familiar twitch at the corners of her mouth and it encouraged him to go on. ‘I’ll tell you something else, Margy. I’d get a hell of a kick putting physical pressure on you right now.’

‘Ah, would you?’ She was half-smiling now and it crossed his mind that she was probably egging him on in the hope of getting some of her own back. The doubt was sufficient to make him lift his hand from her shoulder but surprisingly, she reached out and seized it, pulling him round so that they stood with no more than an inch or so between them. The gesture, and the slight trembling that communicated itself to him through her fingers, elated him out of all proportion to its promise. For a moment they stood there, facing one another, and then, with a shrug that implied an eager readiness to jettison the past, she said. ‘Talk … all this old talk. What’s got into us all nowadays that we have to explain everything, take everything to pieces? You’re back, aren’t you? You’re sick of traipsing then, and I’m sick of making do, and living my life through Vanessa. I’m not that old yet, Andy bach,’ and she threw her arms round him and kissed him on the mouth in the way he had forgotten but now remembered.

More than anything she could have said or done the kiss renewed him, stripping away his drabness and taking him back so far and so swiftly that he remembered the first occasion she had failed to elude his awkward grab when he lay trussed in her dingy little hospital twenty years ago. He said, thankfully, ‘By God, Margy, I needed that. I really needed something like that by way of a welcome,’ and she replied gaily, ‘Me too. It’ll do for a starter,’ and she opened her bag and foraged for her lipstick. He looked past her at his father’s decanter. For the first time in months he could contemplate liquor without craving it.