The Green Gauntlet (59 page)

The face was rigid but composed, the face of a dead man certainly, but with an expression of mute acceptance one might see on the face of an effigy on a tomb in an old church. It was that kind of face, all the way from hairline to jaw, resolute, patient, incapable for ever of registering anything but resignation, and the same could be said of the not ungainly posture of the long body held in the crutch of the two stumps jutting from the trunk of the improvised seat.

It was a pity, he thought, they could not bury him here, without fuss and without lamentation, private or public. There was nothing to lament about as there might have been had he died in his bed, with the sun shut out and a houseful of whispering relations below him. And then he noticed the handkerchief again and this time it registered in his mind as a flag of truce, a token of surrender but the conditional surrender of a man who had never stopped fighting from the moment he rode into this Valley and had, moreover, fought more cleanly than most, with self-forged weapons and a text-book full of good sense and kindliness. You could take your choice how you regarded him, and what he had done or tried to do in this backwater. You could call him a clown, a reactionary, a chawbacon, a fool; but you could never call him a knave, or poltroon.

Rumble, by far the least affected, said, ‘Are you thinking the same as me, Si?’

‘That he almost willed it on himself? Yes, something like that, Rumble. I had a feeling this afternoon, when I went up to his bedroom. I didn’t like the idea of him going.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t stop him,’ Rumble said, and left it at that.

John, less shocked than Simon, took the handkerchief from the drooping fingers, folded it carefully and put it in his pocket. Rumble answered the question he was on the point of asking. ‘He didn’t have much pain, not this time. You’ve only got to look at him.’ Then, unable to make the decision to move him, ‘He was a complete man, complete in every way. He was also the best friend I ever had.’

They said nothing to this. Each was engaged in assessing the extent of their loss and their assessments were different from Rumble’s and different from that of any one of them back at the house, or from Andy or Whiz, who would have to be told within the hour. To John he had always seemed an old man, someone who dispensed wisdom, enormous experience, and a kind of gruff joviality. Simon could remember much further back to a time when Paul had walked him through another wood more than forty years ago, and told him of his mother’s death on the greasy French pavé, and then talked tolerantly of the men who had killed her. Tolerance, it seemed to him, had been this man’s cornerstone, although there were those within and without the Valley who would have granted him many virtues but not this one. It was so, however, and he should know. He had sat with him in the forecastle of a Dutch collier the afternoon he had sailed to fight in Spain, and he had been met and driven home by him two years later, after his spell in Franco’s gaol. He had always been ready with advice but if you rejected it, as Simon so often had, he didn’t hold it against you, and he didn’t show wisdom after the event. If that wasn’t tolerance then what was? He said suddenly:

‘Could you and John carry him back to the landrover, Rumble? I’d like to stay here a few minutes. You can wait or drive on home, whichever you please.’

‘We’ll wait,’ Rumble said.

Between them they lifted him easily. He was tall but he did not weigh all that much. Simon moved to the very edge of the plateau, turning his back on them, not wanting to see his father carried away like a casualty at Teruel, or at the bridge over the Orne. Neither Rumble nor John had ever seen men in that condition.

He heard the door of the landrover clang but he did not move. He was watching a single gull coast down the Valley from the Coombe and head across the narrow river in the direction of Four Winds. The gull, flapping lazily in the still air, lost height at the foot of the plateau and then, catching a cross-current, regained it and soared over at about three hundred feet. Simon, remembering Churchill’s fly-past, saw it as a salute and somehow a fitting one. Below him the countryside was magically still and silent as some of the heat went from the day. Then, as the gull turned to a speck, everything began to stir again, the grain in the fields, the birds in the thickets, the insects on the wing. He looked down at his inheritance and then moved woodenly through the bracken towards the waiting trio.

About the Author

R. F. Delderfield (1912–1972) was born in South London. On leaving school he joined the
Exmouth Chronicle
newspaper as a junior reporter and went on to become editor. He began to write stage plays and then became a highly successful novelist, renowned for brilliantly portraying slices of English life. With the publication of his first saga, A Horseman Riding By, he became one of Britain’s most popular authors, and his novels have been bestsellers ever since. Many of his works, including A Horseman Riding By,
To Serve Them All My Days
, the Avenue novels, and
Diana
, were adapted for television.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1968 by R. F. Delderfield

Cover design by Jason Gabbert

978-1-4804-9061-1

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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