Post of Honour (46 page)

She opened the book and wrote:
‘Today the Twins celebrated their 21st birthday with an all-night bau . . . ’
and then stopped, thinking how Stephen and Andy would hoot with laughter if they ever saw tonight’s event described as a ‘ball’, as though there would be sets of lancers and the mazurka, and all the gentlemen would wear gloves and the girls wait hopefully for their programmes to be filled. The thought took her back, however, to the first celebration she had ever attended in this house—the Coronation soirée in October, 1902, when she had driven here with her father, stepmother, brother Hugh and sister Rose, one and all convinced that new Squire would round off the occasion by announcing that he intended marrying Claire Derwent of High Coombe in the New Year. They had all taken a terrible tumble that night and she could smile at it now but it had taken her close on five years to ride out and perhaps she would be nursing a grievance yet if Paul’s first wife had not been such a goose as to run off to London to smash windows and get herself locked up in Holloway prison.

It was a day for musing. She wrote:
‘ . . . about two hundred guests attended and toasts were proposed by the Squire at midnight,’
but then she did what she usually did when making a special entry of this kind and began browsing her way back through the pages, noting entries relating to early triumphs of her second daughter Karen (universally known as ‘Whiz’) in the County show-ring, Simon’s decorous 21st birthday celebrations, in January, 1925, John Rudd’s retirement in the following year, and so on to the outbreak of foot and mouth disease at Four Winds in the summer of the General Strike, the crash of a Handley Page aircraft on the dunes, Jimmy Grenfell’s narrow electoral victories in 1924 and again last May and all kinds of relevant and irrelevant happenings since Paul’s miraculous return from the dead in the last weeks of the war. It was all here in her own or his handwriting and browsing over his entries she found a theme that was absent from her own recordings, a pattern of subdued anxiety running from page to page, an undertone to the orchestra of Valley events. There were terse entries like one in May, 1924, that read,
‘Codsall is developing east of Nun’s Bay, blast him . . . ’
and enigmatic ones such as
‘Quarry project through County Council; will block it one way or another.’
It was the first time she had noticed that he was using the diary as a safety valve or, indeed, that Sydney Codsall’s activities around the periphery of the estate were so important to him and it worried her a little, the more so because she could not remember him having confided in her beyond making a glum comment or two on local jerry building and the sins of war profiteers. She went into the office and rummaged among the estate maps. John Rudd had always praised Paul’s administrative capacity and although he was proverbially untidy everywhere else he was never slipshod in here, the plainly furnished room that was the hub of the estate and had been since he had converted old Sir George’s dark-room into an office. Everything was docketed and filed; every map, every lease and catalogue indexed with neatly printed cards. It was, she reflected, a side of him she hardly knew, even after twenty-two years of marriage, and today it intrigued her. She found a map dated 1929 and unrolled it, holding the ends down with ledgers and a glance at it confirmed her suspicion regarding his fear of encirclement, for whilst Shallowford land was shaded light pink and the sea pale blue, there were three areas shaded black and when she looked at the key she was not surprised to see them identified as
‘Threatened Development’
.
The extent of the areas surprised her. She knew that ever since the war had ended Sydney Codsall’s Whinmouth Development Company (Bricks and Tiles), Ltd had been building bungalows on what had once been Blair’s Farm, in Nun’s Bay, a coastal island of freehold dividing the southern boundaries of the Shallowford and Heronslea Estates but she was largely unaware of Sydney’s steady infiltration into Coombe Bay, two miles or more to the east, where, from time immemorial, most of the property had been owned by the Squire of Shallowford. There was a tracing pinned to the map which showed details of this infiltration. The old Manson brickyard was shaded in and so was The Raven, once owned by a local brewery and run by Minnie Flowers and her husband but now a Tudor sham renamed ‘The Lovell Arms’. Now that she thought about it the deliberate reintroduction of the word ‘Lovell’ into the district smacked of an insult aimed at Paul and she wondered if there existed some quarrel between Paul and the toothy child he had tried to befriend when Sydney’s father went raving mad all those years ago and killed Arabella Codsall with a hay-knife. There was a patch of black away up in the north-easterly corner of the map in the area where, during the war, there had been a prisoner-of-war camp. She had always thought of this parcel as land owned and administered by the Forestry Commission but it was clear that this too had now passed into the hands of the Whinmouth Development Company, for it was ringed in pencil and across it Paul had written ‘Quarry Site?’

She was still bent over the map, the twins’ celebration forgotten, when she heard his step beyond the office door and at once felt guilty, as though she had been prying like Bluebeard’s wife. He came in with a tired smile, however, that at once reassured her so that her protective instinct drove her anxieties into the open and she said, ‘I’ve been reading the diary and I came in here to check up. Why didn’t you tell me you’ve been brooding about Sydney Codsall’s antics?’ He looked hard at her then, trying to make up his mind whether she was genuinely interested and that she understood his caution. He had never quite forgotten his first wife’s contempt for his obsession with Shallowford and it had always seemed to her that this was the one wound of the many he had received at the hands of Grace Lovell that had been beyond her power to heal.

‘It’s a fair question,’ he said at length, ‘but right now we have to change for the big do tonight. I’ll explain when the tumult has died down.’

‘No, Paul,’ she said obstinately, ‘there’s no hurry to change. Tell me now or I shall worry about it when I should have my mind on my job tonight.’

‘Very well,’ he said, ‘although there can’t be much you haven’t heard. That little bastard won’t be happy until he’s boxed us in. His shantytown already extends as far as the dunes. He has about a third of the property in Coombe Bay under his hand and he’s just bought the quarry behind the woods.’

‘It looks frightening on paper,’ Claire said, ‘but hasn’t he gone as far as he can? With farm prices as their present level you don’t want any more land, do you?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t want more land. As a matter of fact I wouldn’t mind unloading some, providing it went to a farmer and not to rascals who haven’t the slightest interest in it beyond the quick profits they make exploiting it and fouling the countryside into the bargain!’

It was common knowledge that the shantytown on the old Blair farmland was the Squire’s
bête noire
and privately she considered his attitude unreasonable. The bungalows there were almost all occupied by elderly retired couples from Whinmouth and Paxtonbury and, much as she shared his love of the Valley, she was not prepared to claim a monopoly of the coastline. She said, carefully, ‘He’s already built on every square inch of the Blair holding. There isn’t room over there to put a shed up and all the land east is included in the country coastal preservation strip. Rudd told me that years ago, no one can build on it.’

‘No one can build houses!’

‘What else could be built?’

‘A road,’ he said, ‘a glorified promenade right across the dunes as far as Coombe Bay and once that was approved we should soon have a little Blackpool on our doorstep!’

‘This is possible? A motor road, between Nun’s Bay and Coombe Bay?’

‘Sydney and his Council stooges have been agitating for it for years. Why do you suppose he’s bought up so many Coombe Bay freeholds?’

She understood and shared his concern because her resentment had deeper roots than his. A road along the coast would cut and probably choke the series of goyles that led down to the beach and one of the first to go would surely be Crabpot Willie’s goyle, where lay the shanty that had a significance for her that she could never have explained to anyone, not even him.

‘They’ve been trying, you say. What stopped them succeeding?’

He grinned and rolled up the plan. ‘I’ve got my stooges as well,’ he said. ‘Fortunately it’s a pretty expensive project and nobody likes to pay more county rates than they can help.’

‘What about the land he’s got behind the woods? Can he build another shantytown there?’

‘It wouldn’t pay him to,’ Paul said, suddenly quite cheerful again, ‘even if the coastal development matures, as I daresay it will in the end. His holdings in Coombe Bay and north of the wood will always be blocked by High Coombe, so he’ll have to confine his activities in that area to quarrying. I daresay he’d give his eye-teeth to get hold of some of your brother’s pasture and have direct access to the sea from that side.’

‘What is he
really
after?’ she asked. ‘I mean, apart from money.’

‘Me!’

‘But why? You were almost a father to him when he was a boy. Ikey saved him from his crazy father, didn’t he?’

‘Yes he did,’ Paul said. ‘He fetched him down from the bedroom by ladder but Ikey would have saved everybody a lot of trouble if he’d left him there! Sydney hates me—I can’t tell why exactly—it’s probably because he knew I disliked his mother and because I showed him the door that time he came here during the war with his plan to cut me in on a side profit he was making out of pitprops. However, don’t run away with the idea that I hate him back. I don’t, you know, just what he stands for, what all Sydney Codsalls stand for. There are one or two operating in every area of the country. They stand up in public spouting about development and progress but what they really mean is exploitation and rural rape! They are the new
condottiere
, marching through England as the medieval mercenaries marched across France, taking everything out and putting nothing back! Some of them are old men who helped to push us into the war and drank blood for four years but there are plenty of others younger than me, men who made damned sure they stayed home and staked their claim while the going was good! Somebody has to stand up to the bastards or the country won’t be worth living in in a generation from now.’

She had heard it all before, when some of the ex-servicemen called on him for advice or a loan, but never so exactly stated. She said, ‘If you feel as strongly as that about Sydney Codsall why don’t you run for the County Council yourself, Paul?’

‘Not me!’ he said fervently. ‘I’ll fight them where I find them, in my own fields and woods, thank you! Councils? They’re for two varieties, well-meaning windbags and backscratchers, like Sydney’s mob! I know better than to fight them in the open. How long would it take them to tack a war-profiteer’s label on me?’

‘That’s nonsense! There isn’t a soul about here that doesn’t know you’ve ploughed everything back into the estate. Suppose you had behaved like half the other landlords and unloaded the farms on the tenants as soon as taxes went up and prices kept going down? You’ve nothing to be ashamed of and a good deal to be proud of, Paul.’

He said nothing to this but dropped his glance to the diary, thumbing idly through the stiff, scrawl-covered pages. She did not have to be told where he had been all afternoon. Whenever he was in this mood she knew he had been to French Wood, as though a visit there established contact with men who had shared his love of the Valley and were able to renew his faith in the future. She was aware also that his return to the wood had some link with the day itself, the coming-of-age of the two handsome young extroverts she had borne him, and as she thought this she remembered something else that would have made her chuckle had she thought of it earlier. They had been conceived here, in this very room and not in a bed either, bless you, but on that old bearskin rug in front of the fire, one gusty night after they had come home cider-merry from one of old Arthur Pitts’ Hallowe’en parties! She knew, after twenty-two years, how to coax him out of this things-aren’t-what-they-were mood and surely tonight was an occasion he should enjoy as much if not more than the twins and a lot of boisterous strangers. She said: ‘Right! We’ll all battle along with you, Paul, but was there a special reason why you kept this to yourself so long? Kept it from me, I mean?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose there was. You’ve always been so damned expert at keeping pace with change, Claire. Look at yourself! You don’t appear more than a year or two older than some of those cropped-eared, flat-chested girls the twins bring into the place but my clock stopped after the war and I sometimes think of myself as constitutionally incapable of keeping abreast of the times. It worries me sometimes and that’s the truth! I hate change but one day I’ll catch myself resisting changes for the better. Simon as good as told me that today.’

‘Well,’ she said, smiling at his earnestness, ‘you weren’t always so desperately traditionist. Can you seen any direct link between that moth-eaten old rug we ought to have thrown out long ago and those lumping great boys, whose health you’ll be proposing tonight?’

‘No,’ he said, looking very puzzled. ‘I’m jiggered if I can! Is there one?’

‘Certainly there is!’ she said and reminded him, laughing at his slightly startled expression and the way he stared down at the rug as though he half expected it to turn back into a bear. He said, his features relaxing slowly, ‘I might have known you would remember a thing like that! Will they be serving cider tonight, do you think?’

‘We’re not staying here tonight.’

‘That’s so,’ he said. ‘We’re off to the shanty, aren’t we? Well, you don’t have to remind me of what happened there a long time ago. Come to think of it, it’s a wonder we haven’t a baker’s dozen coming-of-age parties ahead of us!’ and he kissed her on the mouth in a manner that implied Sydney Codsall and all his works would be out of mind for at least twenty-four hours.