Post of Honour (22 page)

By this time Sydney had come to terms with the war. The establishment of Nun’s Bay camp enabled him to exploit his somewhat panicky marriage to the only daughter of a Paxtonbury provision merchant and he persuaded his father-in-law to adventure into the field of confectionery and toys on premises adjoining the camp, where five thousand potential customers were wired in and ten miles from the nearest competitor. The village shop prospered under the personal supervision of Sydney’s wife Dora, who was not as winsome as some girls Sydney had contemplated marrying during his apprenticeship days but had the advantage of a good head for business and a father with a cellar full of sugar bought at pre-war rates.

So much progress in such a short time would have turned the heads of some young men and would have mellowed others. Sydney not only kept his head but remained loyal to his original dream, a resolve to establish a new balance of power in the area surrounding the twin valleys of Teazel and Sorrel. He could have told you most things about his ambitions as a whole but would have found it difficult to describe this secret driving force, which was really no more than a resolve to arrive at level pegs with Paul Craddock, of Shallowford House. He could not have said why he resented the man, or why everything he did in the way of increasing his substance was an attempt to wriggle beyond the reach of Squire Craddock’s patronage. It might have had something to do with Paul’s championship of his brother Will’s marriage to an ignorant farm girl, or the fact that Paul had been the first to look upon his butchered mother the night of the double tragedy, or something much more complex, a deeply buried resentment linking Paul in some way with all that had occurred at Four Winds that night, or a combination of all these factors that had made him a pensioner in the home of his father’s foreman, Eveleigh, to suffer years of drenching pity from the uncouth children of Eveleigh and his wife. He had never explored his motives in depth, preferring to lump them together under the general title of
Getting On
or
Getting Ahead
,
or
Being Someone
!
And now, as the war entered it second year, he was someone, as was evident when he paid a call on the Squire in his capacity as a Government forestry official and was sufficiently sure of himself to attempt reversing their roles.

Paul had already had one brush with the Commission when they had tried to make him include hard timber in the existing contract to supply pine-lengths for pitprops, so that it came as a wild surprise to him when he opened a letter bearing the official note-heading, informing him that a Mr Sydney Codsall would be calling on him by appointment on behalf of the department. Paul had always felt rather sorry for Sydney, whose spirit, he felt, must have been scarred his terrible experience in 1904, when he had so narrowly escaped sharing his mother’s fate. He had seen him often enough while he was growing up in the Eveleigh household but had lost track of him until their encounter on the land adjoining the Coombe Bay brickfield but Paul had almost forgotten that by now and decided that it was rather fortunate that the new local agent was under some kind of obligation to him, and not a foreigner eager to despoil the countryside of trees that had been growing before the German Kaiser’s grandfather had pulled on his first jackboot. He was slightly amused by Sydney’s pomposity when the young man was shown into the office but remembered that young Codsall had always been a pompous boy, utterly unlike his amiable brother, Will. He shook hands, offered Sydney a whisky and remarked jocularly that he had put on weight and seemed to be having a tolerable war. Sydney was disconcerted by this breezy reception and a little irritated by Paul’s inclination to treat him as though he was wearing his first pair of long trousers. He said, in the slightly lisping accent he had cultivated since taking his articles, ‘Time rattles on, Mr Craddock! Perhaps you have forgotten that I’m older than you were when you bought Shallowford from the Lovells!’

He hoped that this would put Squire in his place but all it did was to make Paul chuckle. ‘By God, you’re right, Sydney!’ he exclaimed and then, looking at him carefully, ‘You seem to have made good use of the time. Is this Government job full-time or a voluntary effort?’

Sydney considered this question so naive that he disdained to answer. He said, removing his rimless glasses with a deliberate air, ‘I think I can put you in the way of doing yourself a bit of good, Craddock.’

Paul did not miss Sydney’s self-conscious dropping of the word ‘Mr’. He said, sharply, ‘How do you mean, “good”? In respect of what?’

‘Timbah,’ Sydney said, smirking openly now, ‘Timbah and Pocket!’

Paul suddenly decided that he not only disliked but distrusted Sydney Codsall, that he had always disliked and distrusted him, from the day he had paid his first call at Four Winds and seen the boy standing beside his insufferable mother. His first instinct was to pull him up short, re-establishing the relationship that had existed between them since Ikey brought him back to the big house but his curiosity was aroused by the young man’s fatuity. He said, ‘Why don’t you say exactly what you have in mind?’

Sydney must have been completely deceived for he at once became conspiratorial, ‘You’re selling you pitprops well below par,’ he said, ‘I could get you another fifty shillings a load! Providing, of course, we came to an arrangement.’

‘You mean other local suppliers are getting more?’

‘There’s no standard price, the Government have to have pitprops by the million so long as trench fighting lasts and a smart supplier can get what he asks, providing he stands firm and . . . er . . . providing he has contacts our side of the fence! It’s the same with everything isn’t it and after all, the Government don’t have to make another profit do they?’

‘No,’ Paul said slowly, ‘I suppose not but this . . . er . . . “arrangement” you mention; do I assume it would be between you and I?’

‘Naturally,’ Sydney said, not surprised by the Squire’s ingenuousness. ‘I should be satisfied with twenty-five per cent of the increase. It would be worth that much to you, wouldn’t it?’

Something in Paul’s expression must have warned him, for suddenly he faltered and made a play of replacing his glasses. Paul stood up, looking directly down at him, and finding it very difficult indeed to check an impulse to knock him backwards over the chair. The desire to do just this sprang not so much from the amateurishness of Sydney’s technique as from the recollection of Will Codsall’s tormented eyes shortly before he returned to the Front to be killed and with this recollection came others, equally unpleasant, as though, instead of looking down on Sydney Codsall’s neatly-parted hair he was staring into a pool where scum gathered in poisonous-looking bubbles which were bursting softly in his face. All kinds of bubbles—the brutishness of the Coombe Bay mob howling under the Professor’s window, the stricken look on Marian Eveleigh’s face when he had called to console her on the death of her boy Gilbert and the satisfied smirk, not unlike Sydney’s, on the face of Lieutenant Lane-Phelps who had done his best to seduce Claire. He said, breathing heavily, ‘There’s only one thing that stops me telephoning Paxtonbury Town Hall and reporting every word of this conversation, Sydney! Do you know what this is?’ but Sydney, flushing now, jumped up so quickly that he smashed his glass, making a gobbling sound as Paul went on, ‘The thing that holds me back is that everybody associates you with poor old Will and Elinor, so for Christ’s sake get out of here before I kick you out and don’t ever come back on any pretext whatever!’ and he passed behind Sydney, flinging open the terrace door and glancing towards the porch where a sallow man sat waiting in a trap outside the main door. His movement gave Sydney a moment to recover a little of his bluster. He said, shrilly, ‘Look here, you can’t play the God Almighty Squire with me any longer! Things have changed and they’ll change a lot more before it’s over! I could have been a good friend . . . ’ but Paul made a vicious sweep with his hand and Sydney dodged round him and leaped on to the terrace as Paul shouted, ‘If that’s your trap get into it! I can’t think why you didn’t arrive on a snake!’ and then, as the last of his self-control left him, ‘Get out, blast you! Get out before I kick your arse all the way back to Paxtonbury!’ and at this Sydney ran along the terrace, shouted something to the driver and scrambled on to the box. A moment later the vehicle had passed behind the screen of chestnuts, leaving Paul standing with fists clenched and head thrust forward and that was how Claire found him when she came on to the terrace saying, ‘I heard shouting! Who was it, Paul?’

He swung round aggressively, almost as though he expected to find Sydney had eluded him and returned to the attack and she saw at once that he was in one of his rare, white-hot tempers. ‘Who
was
it, Paul? Who were those men?’

‘I don’t know who one of them was,’ he growled, ‘but the one I was talking to was a bloody sewer rat, the kind that seem to be proliferating about here!’ and he stalked past her into the bedroom, pouring himself a whisky and tossing it back in a gulp.

She followed him not asking other questions but not leaving the room for she sensed that he would need her in a moment or two. When the spirit had steadied him somewhat he told her what had happened, cursing the social infection that was poisoning the Valley and declaring that the only place for an honest man now was alongside chaps like Henry Pitts and Smut Potter. She heard him out. She was growing accustomed to these outbursts, although they were seldom so violent and usually tailed off into a rumbling monologue that had as its theme the avalanche of change that had swept over the Valley in a little over a year.

‘There are more Henrys and Smuts than there are Sydneys,’ she reminded him. ‘It’s important not to lose one’s perspective.’

‘You’re about the only one who hasn’t, Claire,’ he said but smiled grudgingly, adding. ‘I was a damned fool to myself anyway! I don’t want his filthy bribe but if I’d handled him more tactfully he might have saved our timber! Now he’ll go out of his way to hit back any way he can.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Claire, ‘he’ll be far too scared you’ll inform on him.’

‘Not him! There weren’t any witnesses. He’d deny it and say I was slandering him out of pique!’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ she said lightly. ‘I was a witness, wasn’t I? And in a cause like that I’d swear to it in Court if necessary! So would Horace Handcock because his patriotic principles would be outraged. One way and another we could sew Sydney into a sack and drop him in the river!’

Suddenly and irrationally he felt immensely grateful for her, for her balance and strength and her great granary of commonsense that made his own impulsive protests sound like the bleat of a child. He crossed to where she stood by the terrace door, pulled her towards him and kissed her on the mouth.

‘Damn it, I don’t believe you’d have the slightest compunction in perjuring yourself if the Valley was involved! I believe you would do it without a blush if you had to!’

‘Certainly I would,’ she told him cheerfully, ‘and I should do it a great deal more convincingly than you! That’s why I’m glad the children favour you more than me for there isn’t an unblushing liar among them! Well, have you got Sydney’s taste out of your mouth or shall I pour you another small one before lunch?’

‘Go away,’ he told her, good-humouredly, ‘and attend to your business so that I can attend to mine! Whenever that perfume wafts about the room in the morning I get a dozen different answers to the same column of figures!’ and he speeded her on her way with a slap on the bottom.

Her perfume remained, however, and it was not Sydney who hindered his concentration, so that presently he threw aside his work and began to browse through the pages of the estate diary, noting recent entries written in her neat, rounded hand. It was only then that he realised that he had not made an entry since the note recording the declaration of war but she had, more than four pages of them and he marvelled at her detachment for nobody could have guessed from the factual statements on subjects as commonplace as repairs to the tithe barn after a gale, that their lives had been mercilessly disrupted. Then he noticed, starred with an asterisk, an entry reading
‘For enlistments, casualties, etc. see last page’
,
and turned to the end of the book where, in fact, there were two pages devoted to war-time entries, one headed
‘Shallowford Estate Enlistments’
,
the other
‘Casualties, Decorations, etc.’
.
It surprised him very much that she had kept such a meticulous record, one that included the antecedents, regiment and even dates of departure of recruits. He read the long list of names under the Enlistment column, then turned to the shorter list on the page opposite. Roddy Rudd’s name led it with the information
Falkland Islands, November 1914
alongside and below were the names of Walt Pascoe, Jem Pollock, Will Codsall and Gilbert Eveleigh and he thought grimly, ‘and I wonder how any more names will be there before it’s over?’, resisting a strong impulse to score the page through and reflecting that, despite an occasional flippant note in some of the day-to-day entries, Claire took the job of local Recording Angel very seriously.

Contemplation of the book led him to ponder the future of the Valley as a whole and the ultimate effect the war would have upon it. Right up to the last minute on August 4th, 1914, everything had been reasonably predictable but what could anyone be certain of now, save shrinking manpower, shortages of things one once took for granted, and the brooding fear of news that another familiar face had been blotted out? His own detachment, maintained into the New Year, now failed him altogether and he was fully committed, if only because the Valley itself was committed, but involvement had not yet convinced him of the justness of the war or enlisted him among the patriots who seemed able to regard it as a latter day crusade. And he was beginning to sense that he was not alone in his reservations, that the Horace Handcocks and the Gloria Pitts of the Valley were already outnumbered by the doubters. Will Codsall’s terrible apathy had sobered some of the men in the bar of The Raven and the news that, notwithstanding his shattered nervous system, he had been thrown back into the whirlpool to vanish for good had shocked women whose sons and husbands were in training camps up and down the country. Only a few months ago people still hoped it would end any day with a glorious victory in the style of Waterloo or Agincourt, orchestrated by high-sounding sentiments of the kind written by the poet Brooke that had found their way into the
County Press
in 1914. Now the temperature had dropped, not alarmingly but noticeably, so that the odd cynic raised his voice, questioning the infallibility of news bulletins and even the qualifications of generals like the pot-bellied Joffre, who had once been everybody’s favourite uncle. Perhaps, after all, the smell of Sydney Codsall’s hair-oil had not been entirely vanquished by Claire’s whiff of Parma violets, for suddenly Paul felt restless and uprooted and, despite access to Claire’s granary of commonsense, lonely and desolate.