Post of Honour (48 page)

He took out his case, a twenty-first birthday gift from his sister Mary and they lit up, moving by common consent across to the low wall that surrounded the lily pond; they were reconciled by each other’s company to the uproar still issuing from the house. He said, rather glumly, ‘Ah now, Ikey was one up on both of us! He would have
thought
the same as we do of that kind of horse play but it wouldn’t have prevented him from joining in and outdoing the wildest of them! Then he would have gone to bed stone sober and laughed himself to sleep!’

‘How do you know so much about him? You were still a child when he was killed.’

‘I was fourteen-and-a-half and I should remember. The day they told me he was dead was the last time I shed tears. That was when Claire sent his last letter on.’

‘A letter to you?’

‘He wrote me many letters, fifty-three actually.’

‘Describing what it was like out there?’

‘About pretty well everything. I once thought of publishing them but then I thought better of it. It was the only legacy Ikey left to anyone, so why the hell should I share it with boneheads like The Pair, and the other idiots up there?’

‘You don’t share things at all, do you? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not implying that you’re mean but that you hate sharing yourself and anything important to you, anything you believe in or regard as fundamental?’

Her prodding among the private storehouse of his thoughts made him feel sufficiently resentful to stand up in protest but when she reached out quickly, and caught him by the hand, he suddenly felt more cheerful and expectant than for a very long time. He hardly knew why this should be so; he could not even see the girl’s face clearly where she sat with her face turned away from the moonlight and he reminded himself that she was not a girl but a woman in her early thirties, widowed more than ten years ago. And yet there was an assurance in her voice and touch and as her hand tugged at him he sat down again saying, ‘What the hell is wrong with us? What’s eating the bloody heart out of us? Why is it we can’t
be
young and
act
young, like all the others up there?’

‘Well, I’m not young any more,’ she said equably, ‘but in your case I imagine it’s part heredity and part on account of those letters Ikey Palfrey wrote you.’

‘Do you remember my mother?’

‘No, not really, but everybody in the Valley knew of her. I was about seven when she was headline news about here. She has significance for me because you might say that in a way she broke the ice for Keith.’

‘How did she do that?’

‘They were the only two rebels the Valley produced in a generation so it’s fitting they should both leave their bones on the same battlefield, particularly as most of those who threw the brickbats are home and dry!’

She had given him the clue he had been fumbling for ever since her harsh laugh at his apology about the invitations. She had been embittered not so much by Keith’s early death as by the patriotic persecution that had hounded him within range of the guns. His curiosity concerning her increased, perhaps nudged by the ‘Oxford’ accent she used, something utterly foreign to anyone growing up in the kitchen of Four Winds but something like the half-way voice of someone who had worked hard to shed the Valley burr.

‘Keith was killed twelve years ago,’ he said, ‘what have you done with yourself all that time?’

‘All kinds of things except marry again.’

‘You don’t sound like a Valley girl any more.’

She laughed, pleasantly this time. ‘Should I? I left here for the North in 1914.’

‘It always shows up in the vowels.’

She was silent for a moment. The racket in the house had died down and dancing had evidently been resumed for the sound of a waltz drifted across to them, a thin, warbling tune, pleasant to hear after the frenzied scream of the hunting-horns.

‘What’s that they’re playing?’ she asked suddenly.

‘It’s one of the talking-picture tunes called “I met her in Monterey”.’

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘one of their “if-only” tunes! You might think they were all in their ’fifties if you judged them on their dance music.’

‘You haven’t told me what happened to you.’

She said with what seemed to him something of an effort, ‘The real waste of the war wasn’t the blood, you know, it was the brains! That’s the currency your generation will have to pay in. Keith had brains, not just exam-passing brains but the ability to select and interpret what he learned. After he was killed it seemed to me I should at least make some effort to compensate for the waste. I took a degree in Economics at Leeds University.’

It did not surprise him overmuch. There was something about her that suggested not only stamina but initiative.

‘You went back to school?’

‘Night school up to Matric standard; then I got a county grant. They go out of their way to cater for the morally earnest in the North, you know.’

‘And then?’

‘I ran headlong into the sex-barriers your mother spent her life storming. They are still there, you know, bristling with patronage, complacency and fly-buttons! I tried accountancy, then teaching, then actuarial work and flopped in all three! They say the professions are open to women now but it isn’t true of course, not unless a woman is prepared to wear a tight skirt and leave all the decisions to the men, even the one about what time she likes to go to bed.’

He ignored all her jibes. ‘What do you do now?’

‘I supervise a chain of working men’s clubs and do part-time secretarial work for a Member of Parliament. The clubs interest me. The MP doesn’t, I’m afraid.’

‘A Socialist MP?’

‘A very temporary one; he’ll be looking for a job himself before he’s acquired a taste for House of Commons sherry.’

There were so many things he wanted to ask her—how secure was the recent Labour victory at the polls, how sincere was her avowed contempt for men of whatever political persuasion, and above all what remedies, if any, she prescribed for the anaemia of Western civilisation but at that moment the music stopped and he heard Stephen bawling for him from the terrace.

‘I’ll have to go,’ he said. ‘Won’t you at least come up and have a drink of some sorts?’

‘No thanks,’ she said, ‘I’ll bring our trap round to the front if you tell my sister I’m waiting. I promised Mother I’d get her back at a reasonable hour and I suppose three o’clock is reasonable by Esther’s standards.’

He offered his hand and she took it absentmindedly.

‘Couldn’t we meet again before I go back to town?’ he suggested. ‘I’m thinking of going on the staff of a new magazine but nothing’s settled yet.’

‘What kind of magazine?’

‘A long-hair; it’s to be called
The Forum
.
Have you heard about it?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve heard about it,’ and then, with another crackle of candour, ‘You could do a lot better than that, Simon!’

‘Then let’s meet and discuss it. Tomorrow evening? I can pick you up and we could have a bite to eat at The Mitre, in Paxtonbury.’

‘Very well.’ She sounded unenthusiastic but he was still young enough and vain enough not to care. He went off along the flagged wall calling to Stephen but as he went he wished he could have seen her in the light, especially when she was talking about Beanpole Horsey.

IV

T
he twins ‘did their talking’ that same week, before all traces of the celebrations had been removed and it was as well for them perhaps that Simon was still at home to act as a buffer, and also that they had had the foresight to summon reserve artillery in the person of Uncle Franz Zorndorff who had been talked into paying one of his rare visits to the Westcountry.

The old man, whom Paul declared was going to live for ever, appeared the Monday after the party, spruce and chipper as ever, although, by Paul’s reckoning, he was now only a year short of ninety. He bowled up the drive soon after lunch in his huge, black Daimler, driven by a chauffeur wearing chocolate livery and Paul thought, as he watched the flunkey double round and give Franz an unnecessary arm as far as the porch, ‘The old rascal loves ostentation everywhere but in his counting-house. In there he’d too damned careful to spend sixpence on a new blotter!’ But he was pleased to see his father’s old partner nonetheless and made a mental note to seek his advice about farm prices and land values. The wily old Croat might spend his entire life between his luxury flat in the West End and his disputable Thames-side scrapyard, but his advice on any subject remotely connected with money was worth having and usually worth following. He called from the garden door as Claire ran out on to the porch, ‘Now what the devil brings you down here? Is the plague raging in town?’

The aged dandy waved his silver-topped cane and submitted gracefully to Claire’s embrace, and then Simon and Mary ran out, and after them the twins whooping with glee, so that Paul began to suspect there was more in this than met the eye and went back into the study to rake among memories of recent hints on Claire’s part connected in some way with the twins’ harebrained schemes for making money—for ‘getting aboard the jolly old bandwaggon’ as they would have put it. Their bandwaggons, Paul reflected, were gaudier than Simon’s but just as flimsily constructed and somehow far more calculated to irritate him. Simon’s false starts had about them a few rags of dignity whereas the twins’ were balloons full of blather that soared and were forgotten in a matter of days. The presence of Franz, however, made him more than usually curious to know what was brewing and he would have gone through into the hall had not Stephen appeared suddenly in the doorway and said, ‘Uncle Franz is swilling tea, Gov! He says to leave him with Mother for a jiffy. Andy and I want to jaw first, is that okay with you?’

‘You don’t have to tell me something’s afoot,’ Paul said and grinned in spite of himself for it was impossible to resist the impact of The Pair. ‘Come on in, both of you, and out with it! Your brother told me you had another rod in pickle for me.’

‘Won’t cost you a sou, Gov, and that’s a fact,’ said Stephen, sidling in and shutting the door after his twin. ‘Isn’t it a fact, Andy?’

‘Fact,’ said Andy, who habitually used fewer words than his brother.

‘Well, what is it? Not another madcap scheme like that marine engineering lark, I hope.’

‘Nothing like it,’ said Stephen, sitting and throwing his long legs over the arm of the chair, ‘this is a corker and Uncle Franz is right behind us, isn’t that so, Andy?’

‘Money in it,’ Andy said, ‘real money! No outlay either.’

‘At least not from your standpoint, Gov,’ Stevie added promptly.

‘Well that’s a change anyway,’ Paul said watching their exchange of glances with sardonic amusement. ‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that you’ve decided to take my advice and pick up where you both left off at Agricultural College?’

‘Look, Gov, farming’s a dead duck. Honestly it is!’

‘Dead and buried,’ confirmed Andy. ‘Ask any of your tenants, they’ll soon get you up-to-date!’

He knew it was useless to argue with them. They had been over the ground so often since both had left school without matriculating; they had been over it, through it and round it, with and without benefit of supplementary arguments and suggestions contributed by Claire, John Rudd and the Principal of the County Agricultural College they had attended for a couple of terms. ‘Well,’ he said, resignedly, ‘get to the point, I’m listening.’

‘Uncle Franz has asked us to take over his Birmingham Branch,’ said Andy, rather too bluntly it would seem for his brother’s liking for Stevie swung round in protest but was checked by a gesture on the part of Andy, confirming Paul’s theory that although Stephen was the more dominant of the two Andy was the brains of the alliance. He said, trying to keep his voice level, ‘What the devil do you mean?
What
Birmingham branch? And branch of what, for God’s sake?’

Stevie, already out of his depth, was content to leave the matter with his twin but Andy went on, deliberately, ‘Uncle Franz has a yard up there. It’s been open a year but it’s being run by a crook and isn’t paying off! It could tho’, particularly with another slump around the corner. Uncle Franz thinks we’d make a go of it.’

‘A “yard”?’ Paul queried, repressing an impulse to shout. ‘You mean—a
scrapyard
?’

‘What else? Franz is the king of scrap, isn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ Paul said, ‘he is, and when I was a year or two older than you he did his best to make me the Crown Prince! I declined the honour and looking back on my life I count myself very fortunate!’

‘But that’s just it,’ Andy said, leaning forward and speaking with great emphasis, ‘looking back on
your
life, Gov! We’re concerned with
our
lives and neither of us have the slightest inclination to vegetate down here!’

Out of the corner of his eye Paul saw Stephen wince but Andy, unrepentant, went on before either of them could comment. ‘I don’t mean that you’ve vegetated, Gov! Nobody around here could accuse you of that, but what you’ve done you wanted to do and were good at whereas Stevie and I, we’re neither of us particularly bright and have to grab at what chances present themselves! I reckon we could tackle this lark and might even make a go of it! Anyway, we’ve talked it over and we’d like to try.’

It was a longish speech for Andy and left him a little breathless and red in the face. Paul said, as his mind still boggled at the project, ‘You say you’ve talked it over? Do you mean with your mother, as well as with Uncle Franz and Simon?’

‘No,’ admitted Stephen, ‘we thought of doing so but didn’t. It didn’t seem fair to involve her in case you blew your top!’

Strange that, Paul reflected, calming somewhat. Strange and a little touching that they should have reservations in that respect. It did them credit he supposed, but it also showed how accurately they had measured Claire’s loyalty. Then, as he got his second wind, he had leisure to ponder the irony of the situation. From scrap to scrap in one generation! How Franz must relish the proposal after all he had heard from Paul on the subject of scrapyards over the last twenty-seven year! He said, very curtly, ‘Very well, you’ve had your say. Run along and let me talk this over with that old rascal.’