Post of Honour (12 page)

The cottage stood on a low bank on the left of the road, a squat, three-roomed dwelling, built of cob with a pantile roof and around it a quarter-acre of vegetable garden hedged about with a criss-cross of angled beanpoles.

The setting sun over Nun’s Head was a narrow sliver of orange, turning the small, deep-set windows to flame and when he climbed the winding path and looked inside he could see them both in the light of a log fire, Hazel squatting on the floor, with her back to him and the child, facing the window, on the point of tottering across the floor into her outstretched arms. It was a set-piece, like a woodcut illustration of a sentimental magazine serial, yet curiously moving in its banality. He stood watching as the child staggered the distance on chubby, bowed legs and the mother caught him round the waist and tossed him the length of her arms. What awed him was not the child’s likeness to himself, which seemed to him so striking that he was astonished she had kept her secret so well but the domesticity etched on her and the room, as though the single act of giving birth to a child had changed her as no other pressures had been able to change her, drawing out her wild blood like wine from a cask and replacing it with the blood of a cottager’s wife, who slept in a bed under a roof, cooked regular meals and worked to a domestic timetable from sunrise to sunset. The evidence was all there before his eyes, not only in the playfulness between them but in the clean hearth, the shining pans suspended from the whitewashed walls, the patchwork rug neatly spread beside the scoured table where lay a pile of ironed linen and two bowls and spoons set before a high and a low chair. He thought, ‘It’s like looking into the cottage of the Three Bears and I wouldn’t wonder if she wasn’t pretending to be a bear,’ and suddenly a rush of tenderness choked him and he felt his eyes pricking and for a moment was a child again himself but one shut out of the simple delights of childhood looking in upon security and certainty he had never enjoyed. He stood back from the window making a great effort to collect himself and in a little he succeeded, so that he was able to pass the window and reach for the gargoyle knocker; yet he was unable to rattle it, thinking desperately, ‘God help me, she has to know and there isn’t much time! Maybe Dr Maureen or the parson can sort it out somehow but it’s for me to make the first move,’ and he thumped the knocker hard, hearing her steps scrape on the slate slabs and the slow creak of the heavy door being dragged open.

He had expected her to whoop, or scream, or make some kind of outcry but the only sound she uttered was a kind of prolonged hiss, expressing no more than a mild and pleasurable surprise and then she smiled, almost absently and stood back, waving him into the cosy room as though he had been a casual visitor calling with the parish magazine or a parcel of groceries. Then he remembered that she was endowed with the priceless gift of reckoning time by her own clock and calendar, and that her months had always been days and her days minutes or seconds. Yet erosion of this bastion must have started for she said, carelessly, ‘You been gone longer’n I recall;
zeems
longer any ways! Will ’ee mind the tacker while I maake broth?’

He could think of nothing adequate to reply to this and so compelling was her bland acceptance of his presence that there was no necessity to say anything, or to begin the grotesque task of convincing her that more than two years had passed since he had climbed the long slope to her little house and that within that period her womb had yielded up his child, the fat youngster now perched on his knee and gurgling with delight at this unlooked for variation in its routine. He said, as she bustled between hob and table, ‘He’s a proper li’l tacker. What do ’ee call un, midear?’

‘Well, ’er’s christened Patrick along o’ the lady doctor,’ she said, ‘but I dorn call un that, ’cept to plaise ’er when ’er’s about! I calls un anything as comes to mind and ’ee answers to most. When us is yer alone tiz ‘Rumble’ on account o’ the noise that comes out of un! He’s lively enough, mind, and us never has to worry over ’un but he do zeem to have a man’s share o’ the wind! Give un a pat and judge for yourself!’ and as if to support her claim the baby belched, a long, rumbling, almost dutiful belch so that Ikey shouted with laughter and Hazel smiled too as she poured soup into the two bowls and then, using a piece of muslin as a strainer, a third portion into another bowl she had taken from the dresser.

They sat and ate supper, slowly and ceremoniously, Hazel lifting the spoon to the baby’s mouth and turning aside every now and again to help herself. It was as though they had sat there through eternity, a man, a woman, and a child, snug and smug between four thick walls, warmed by the fire and their own complacency and it was only when he had watched her put the baby to bed in a cot made from a lidless coffer of ecclesiastical design that he was able to escape from the cocoon of fantasy that she and the child had spun around him from the moment of entering the cottage. Then, as she coiled herself like a housecat on the rag mat and leaned her thin shoulders against his knee, he realised that, whether he willed it or not, he would have to coax her a few steps towards reality and said, still using her brogue, ‘I’m a real sojjer now, midear, and theym sending me to the war in a day or zo. Suppose us goes down to the church an’ marries, same as Rachel Eveleigh an’ Passons’s son be doing this week? Would ’ee marry me, an’ zet up house here for me so as to have a cosy plaace to come back tu?’

She turned and stared up at him and at first he thought the movement was one of protest but she looked no more than mildly surprised and said, chuckling, ‘Now why ever should ’ee live yer along o’ me? Us all knows you bides wi’ the Squire, at the Big House.’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s zo but tiz a draughty ole barn of a plaace an’ I’ve a mind to zet up with a plaace o’ me own. Seein’ as that tacker o’ yours be mine tu I dorn need to look no further, do I?’

His logic appealed to her but she had reservations. ‘Well, ’twould suit me well enough,’ she said, ‘seein’ youm comin’ an’ goin’ most o’ the time but will the Squire let ’ee? Worn ’er fly in a tizzy at you leavin’ ’un?’

‘Lookit yer,’ he said, ‘I’m a grown man, baint I? And I can live where I plaise, so hold your chatter woman and give us a kiss!’ and after kissing her he went on, ‘I like the notion so well, I’ll zet about it right away! I’ll see Squire, then I’ll have a word with Mother Meg for she’ll have to give ’ee away, seein’ Tamer’s dead an’ buried. You bide on yer an’ I’ll come to ’ee in the mornin’, and us’ll be married same as your sister Pansy, for that way us’ll get money from the Army for ’ee so long as I’m away.’

It was as simple as that and after a peep at the sleeping child he went down the bank and along the river road into the dusk and it was here, by pure chance, that he met Meg returning from one of her autumn hedge sallies, with pannier baskets full of roots slung across her shoulders.

She stopped in her stately swaying walk and greeted him with customary civility and although she made no direct reference to Hazel he was aware that she knew where he had been. Meg knew everything that happened in the Valley and therefore showed no surprise at all when he told her that the child was his and he had only known of its existence that same afternoon. When he said he was determined to marry Hazel by special licence, however, a shade of doubt crossed her face and she said, clicking her teeth, ‘Ah, you’ve no call to do that! ’Er’s well enough as she be, an’ Squire won’t favour it. You baint our sort and never could be, not now!’

‘I’m not gentry either,’ Ikey told her, ‘and everyone about here knows that well enough. Hazel, she knows how to care for the child as well as any woman in the Valley and at least the baby has stopped her wandering.’

‘Aye,’ said Meg, thoughtfully, ‘it has that and I’m glad on that account, for the Valley baint safe for a maid to wander the way it once was,’ and she jerked her head to the north where lay the camp beyond the hump of the moor. ‘Still,’ she went on reflectively, ‘they won’t take kindly to a man from the Big House marrying a Potter and come to think on it that makes no sense either, for youm better blood stock than the Quality! One can look into the baby’s hand for that!’ and casually she reached out and peered attentively at his hand, drawing her dark brows together as though resigned to what she read there. She said, suddenly, ‘Will you be doing this to give the boy a name?’ and he told her no; but he was doing it because he should have done it long since, before he went away, before he finally crossed over into the gentry’s world by taking the King’s commission. It had been a bad mistake and he admitted it for now he belonged to neither world. Only with Hazel did he feel rooted and at peace. If he survived the war, he went on, he would resign his commission and live out his life in the Dell or on some other holding. By then people all over the world would have seen the folly of money-grubbing, flag-waving and airs and graces and many would go back to agriculture, the family unit and simple basic things.

She nodded, as though disposed to agree with him and promised that if he sent a message to the Dell she would attend the ceremony and afterwards she watched him wade the ford and pass between the great stone pillars of the gate; they had never exchanged more than a few moments’ conversation, yet she felt closer to him than to any of her own kin for somehow she recognised him as a spirit attuned to the rhythm of the seasons and privy to some of the earth’s secrets that were no longer secrets to her. Now, having read his palm, she knew something of his future too and was glad that he had spawned a son in whose veins ran the oldest blood in the Valley. What the Squire said or thought about legalising the union was not important. Marriages performed in the church down on the shore were no more than a ritual not much older than some of the oaks in the Shallowford woods. She supposed that the mumbling of a priest and the signing of papers had significance for some but not for such as her, whose ancestors had hunted about here before the first church was built. She hitched her baskets on to her shoulders and set off again down the river road, walking like a queen bringing gifts to gods older than the sad-faced Jew they called Jesus.

VI

N
ews that the Squire’s protégé was to marry the half-witted postscript of old Tamer Potter and Gipsy Meg created a sensation in the Valley comparable to that of the Codsall murder or the wreck of the German merchantman in the cove. For a week or so, as talking-point, it ousted the war but then news of the Valley’s first casualty was broadcast and it was half-forgotten by the Eveleighs, the Pitts, the Derwents and the Willoughbys. The topic lingered, however, in the kitchen and sculleries of the Big House, for here it was recognised as a flash-point of a tremendous family row, a long, rumbling affair leading to weeks of the monosyllabic conversation at table, to sudden outbursts of temper by the complacent Squire’s wife and—this was the thing the servants noticed—a stricken look on the face of the Squire that reminded some of them of the dismal interval that had followed the flight of his first wife.

They were not far off the mark; in the days after Ikey had gone to France and Hazel Potter had become Hazel Palfrey, Paul was almost as miserable as in the months leading up to the wreck and his second marriage. He had enough to depress him in all conscience and without the added irritation of a semi-permanent quarrel with Claire. In four months he had watched the patient work of twelve years crash under the demands of war, with men leaving the Valley in ones and twos, impossible demands being made upon the Valley livestock and all the dislocations attendant upon the presence of the huge tented camp over the hill. Added to this were the constant appeals made to him for help from the bereft womenfolk, as well as personal embroilment in other people’s brawls, like the sour quarrel at Four Winds. He could have managed and perhaps, at a pinch, extracted a measure of satisfaction from tackling these problems, had he been able to share in the general enthusiasm for the war and view the slaughter across the Channel in the unequivocal terms of newspaper leader articles but to a man of his essential tolerance and slow habits of thought this was not easy. He had always regarded Germans (the professor and his son excepted) as noisy ridiculous people, with their posturing Kaiser and childish preoccupation with military display but he could not, at a bound, subscribe to the popular view that they were a race of sadistic monsters, hell-bent on rape and plunder with homicidal tendencies reaching down from the All-Highest to the humblest private soldier in the field. Nor could he, as an unrepentant provincial recognising his own limitations, convince himself that Britain’s involvement had been inevitable. For these reasons, and for others he sensed but could not put into words, he was depressed, frustrated and dismayed, without the compensating intoxication that the wine of patriotism seemed to produce in his neighbours.

Then Ikey arrived and Paul looked to him for reassurance and perhaps professional enlightenment but within hours of his return he calmly announced that he had fathered the Valley half-wit’s bastard and was determined to advertise the fact by marrying her! This was depressing enough; what was far worse, from Paul’s standpoint, was Claire’s hysterical efforts to stop the marriage and, when she failed, her inclination to saddle him with the blame as a man who had side-stepped his responsibilities. Her attitude, he felt, was as illogical as Grace’s had been all those years ago, for both instances proclaimed the maddening unpredictability of women and their brutish obstinacy in defending indefensible positions. He recognised at once that Ikey would have to make his own decision, no matter what any of them said or did and although he was hurt and baffled by the boy’s gesture he understood, or thought he understood, the chivalrous impulse that prompted it. Moreover, as temporal leader of the Valley (a position he had always taken very seriously) he felt he had a duty to the child and questioned whether he had the right to dictate to a man of twenty-three, for although still in receipt of a modest allowance Ikey was no longer dependent on Paul’s money and would not benefit by Paul’s will. At his own instance, shortly before leaving for India, Ikey had insisted that his name was removed from the list of beneficiaries, declaring that Paul had already done more than enough for him and that any money or property he left should go to the children. Only thus, he told him with a grin, could he hope to remain in Claire’s good graces for the rest of his life.