Post of Honour (53 page)

He approached it from the south, climbing the escarpment above the big bend in the Sorrel and pushing his way through the tall thistles and docks that crowned the little plateau in front of the plantation but here, on the very edge of trees, he stopped short seeing the hunched form of a girl sitting with her back to him on a log near Grace’s flowering cherry. It was his daughter Mary and he did not have to see her face to realise that she was in tears.

She had not heard his approach so he stopped and drew back below the crest, his mind assembling the pieces of the puzzle with a speed and certainty that surprised him. Less than an hour ago he had heard her greet Rumble from the stairs and the note of pleasurable excitement in her voice told him that she must have been unaware until that moment of Rumble’s return; now she was here alone, more than a mile from the house, and even a man to whom feminine changes of mood remained a mystery after two marriages did not need to be told why. Rumble must have blurted out his harebrained plan and, equally obviously, the prospect of Rumble removing himself half-way across the world had devastated her. Here then, was something new, Mary and Rumble Patrick linked in a way that he had never suspected and he wondered if Claire had an inkling and if she had whether she was amused, displeased or indifferent. The revelation, complicating an already teasing problem, irritated him and he thought, impatiently, ‘Damn it, surely I must be imagining things! He’s not eighteen yet and she’s less than two years older!’ and he stole back to take another look but found to his relief, that she had disappeared and the distant crackle of dry bracken below the crest told him that she must have ridden up here on one of the ponies. He made up his mind then to watch her closely at supper and if she gave herself away to consult Claire at once but then, as though it had dropped through the trees and struck his head like a pebble, he had another and even more extravagant idea. What if it turned out that his eldest daughter and the son of Ikey Palfrey and Hazel Potter were to succeed him, the Valley passing not to his sons, as he had always assumed, but to his grandsons? He sat down on the stump to think and it astonished him that he could contemplate the irony of such a twist without resentment, could even find in it a kind of inevitability as he followed a loose end of the skein all the way back to the scrapyard beside the Thames. ‘I daresay it’s no more than wishful thinking on my part!’ he grumbled to himself. ‘But then, do I really wish it? Would I prefer events to have taken a more natural course and the valley pass to Simon, or one of the twins?’ He found himself unable to answer the question but he could not put it out of mind; the memory of his daughter’s hunched figure was too poignant to support the theory that he was deducing too much from too little. He sat musing a long time and then, crossing the grove, he picked up the pony’s tracks in the dust that lay thickly on the path around the northern bulge of Hermitage Wood. As he left the frees and walked into bright sunlight a hen pheasant whirred up less than a yard ahead and flew squawking across the dip. ‘I daresay you’re wiser than I am, old girl!’ he said aloud. ‘Kark-kark—Kark-kark! That’s about all any of us can say when it comes to explaining other people’s motives, especially when they are your own flesh and blood!’

II

I
t would have astonished him even more to have learned that he made his discovery, or half-discovery, only an hour or so before Mary herself gauged the strength of the bond that linked her to Rumble Patrick. Alone among the Craddock children she remembered his actual arrival at Shallowford, a small, plump, easily-delighted child of four, speaking an even broader Devon brogue than Mrs Handcock and Martha Pitts, and because she was the eldest girl, and no one in their senses vested responsibility in The Pair, her mother had taken her aside that same evening and told her frankly that Rumble’s mother had been killed and that his father, Ikey, was away at the war and that she was to do all in her power to make Rumble feel at home in the Big House. It was not, she soon discovered, a particularly onerous charge. Rumble Patrick made himself at home anywhere and in a week or two seemed to have forgotten everything about his mother and the enclosed life he shared with her at Mill Cottage, becoming almost at once one of the Craddocks, sleeping in Mary’s room until he was six, riding her ponies, sharing her toys and Claire’s good-night kisses. Mary soon noticed that her mother showed him special tenderness and would have found it difficult to believe that Rumble’s appearance in the world, and the war-time marriage that followed it, had sparked off the only important quarrel between her father and mother in the history of their marriage. When the child had been thoroughly absorbed, however, Mary did not relinquish her post as playmate extraordinary. Her maternal instinct, naturally strong (she was the only one of the Craddock girls who played with dolls), had been matured by Rumble’s presence and as her sisters grew up to develop their own interests and needed her less and less, she became Rumble’s sole companion in his eternal wanderings in the woods and valleys, where he constantly surprised her with his knowledge of fieldcraft, wild flowers and the habits of the thousand and one creatures who lived out their lives within a mile of the Sorrel springs on the moor. He never treated her as a girl, as did Simon and The Pair, but expected her to climb the same trees, wade the same streams, and disdain tears when brambles clawed at her bare legs and nettles left their smart on her wrists. Because he never seemed to want to ride but preferred to penetrate into places inaccessible to ponies, Mary soon ceased frying to compete with Whiz, the equestrienne of the family and thus lost favour with her Aunt Rose, who sometimes invited them all to stay at her sprawling Gloucestershire home that was a kind of horse-barracks. But there were compensations. By the time she was ten, and Rumble was eight-and-a-half, each of them knew the Valley better than Paul, or John Rudd, and among the tenants only Smut Potter, who drove the bakery van for his French wife’s business in Coombe Bay, could challenge them on the termini of the rabbit-runs in Shallowford Woods or the exact location of the principal otter holts along the weaving courses of the Sorrel and Teazel. They liked Smut, who would often stop his van and pass a pleasant half-hour with them during his rounds, telling them where to find nests and sometimes recounting his poaching exploits of pre-war days, and they had their favourites among the tenants, farmworkers and Valley craftsmen. They liked old Martha Pitts up at Hermitage, who would sometimes bake them savoury pasties, telling them she had done as much for Rumble Patrick’s mother when she had lived wild in the woods before her marriage. They liked and respected Grandmother Meg, whom they encountered in out-of-the-way places where she was gathering herbs or selling her rush mats and baskets and Meg, unsmilingly and with a deliberation that fascinated Mary, would sometimes tell their fortunes and prophesy that Mary would marry a gypsy and have blue-eyed children, a pledge that Mary secretly doubted for she could not imagine marrying anyone but Rumble, whose eyes were the colour of his mother’s name. They were fond of Henry Pitts, with his great, rubbery smile and were well-received by the Timberlakes at the sawmill, and also by the cork-footed Frenchman, Brissot, who did most of the work in the Dell while his partner, Jumbo, stood around cracking jokes in his thin, Cockney voice. Mary found it difficult to believe that both Mrs Brissot and Jumbo’s wife were Rumble’s aunts. Each of them seemed so old and each treated him with the respect they showed the Squire’s children but it was so, for Paul made no mystery of Rumble’s background and once took them up to French wood, pointing out the two trees he had planted in memory of Rumble’s parents, saying that Ikey, his father, had been a very brave soldier and his mother, Hazel, had known even more of what went on in the coverts and goyles of the estate than Smut Potter, a statement that helped Mary to understand Rumble’s instinctive knowledge of woodcraft and fieldcraft. They had their dislikes too, usually avoiding High Coombe and thinking of Mary’s uncle, Hugh Derwent, as an aloof, tetchy man plodding about his business without a smile, and although they got along well enough with Marian Eveleigh, at Four Winds, it was never a farm they frequented much for they were half-convinced that old Norman Eveleigh was a little soft in the head, partly because he looked at them as though they were not there but also because one side of his mouth dribbled a little, as though he had left his handkerchief at the farm. Rumble told Mary this was nothing to wonder at; Norman Eveleigh had evidently been touched by the Four Winds’ curse and sooner or later every master of this particular farm went mad.

So they wandered about, looking for and finding small, everyday adventures, but the idyll came to a sudden end in 1922, when Rumble Patrick was sent away to prep school and Mary put up her hair and had to pay some heed to her clothes. Then Mary went as a weekly boarder to the Convent of the Holy Family, in Paxtonbury, and there were only the holidays when they tried but failed to pick up where they had left off. Something went missing and neither of them could discover what it was; then Whiz grew old enough to invite her pony-mad friends back to the house, and some of the twins’ friends from Paxtonbury and Whinmouth began to notice Mary’s dark, shy charm and employ all, kinds of stratagems to get her alone and kiss her behind the barns or in dark corners of the house. At first she was indignant at such tomfoolery, thinking them very soppy but later both her mother and Whiz urged her to be ‘more sociable’ and she did try very hard, and even fancied for a week or two that she was in love with a red-headed boy called Gussie whom Stephen brought home to stay for a fortnight one summer. Yet the secret bond between them was never completely severed; it only stretched as the years went by, and the house was full of strangers who kept passing between them with their crazy horse dance steps and ukuleles and horseplay, so it was not until the week Rumble disgraced himself at school and came home with wild, frightening talk of going to Australia to learn sheep-farming, that the memory of their childhood alliance became vivid to her. Before that,
just
before that, something happened that made her particularly sensitive to Rumble’s callous declaration of independence.

A night or two before Rumble’s return there had been a Junior Hunt Ball at Whinmouth and, as usual on these occasions Mary was told off to chaperon her younger sisters, Whiz and Claire, respectively seventeen and fourteen, after they had been driven to the dance in the family Austin by Mark Codsall. The role of chaperone was largely fictitious these days, especially in the Craddock household, but Mary got her routine instructions—‘Keep an eye on them and make sure you’re all ready to leave by midnight.’ Claire Craddock was very broadminded in the matter of her daughters’ upbringing, not only because she trusted Mary implicitly and remembered her own youth had been singularly free of restrictions but also because, far more than Paul, she had come to terms with the new freedoms. It seemed to her both natural and healthy that young people should want to grow up fast and enjoy themselves out of range of adults, and whenever Paul challenged the wisdom of her tolerance she could be relied upon to dismiss his growls as evidence of a hang-over from an era dead and buried in the 1914–18 earthquake.

‘No one quarrels with your preference for horse-transport and horn-lanterns, dear,’ she told him on this occasion, ‘but you really must try to see the world through their eyes! All I’m concerned with is getting them there safely and getting them back at a reasonable hour. I’ve enough faith in my daughters to know that they’ll conduct themselves sensibly in company and this is a perfectly respectable company, composed of people we know. It might interest you to learn that it actually goes on until two a.m. but I’ve told Mary to have them back here by one!’

‘I should damn well think so!’ he replied but he did not make an issue of it. He would never have admitted as much but he had respect for her judgment in these matters and was obliged to admit that she had made a more successful job of raising the girls than he had of tailoring the boys.

Whiz was particularly excited, being currently involved in a double flirtation with two young thrusters from the Paxtonbury Farmers’ Hunt and looked forward to the certainty of being sure of partners for every dance and perhaps the cause of a quarrel. Fourteen-year-old Claire (whom everybody mistook for sixteen) was eager to show off her new apple-green organdie, her first real dance frock bought on the occasion of her fourteenth birthday, in June. Mark got them there too early and the first hour or so was dull but the dance warmed up when all the young men came in from The Mitre and Mary soon lost track of Whiz, suspecting that she was spending more time in the parked cars than on the dance floor, whereas it intrigued her to see young Claire blush for the first time in her serene existence, when the Master’s son, a willowy young man with a reputation for being Paxtonbury’s most expert ballroom dancer, partnered her to win the fox-trot competition. She was watching her sister come down from the platform and marvelling, as she often did on these occasions, at Claire’s breathtaking poise and composure, when Bob Halberton lounged across and asked her for the next dance. She was glad to see him, even though he did seem to have consumed rather more than a safe quota of beer, for up to then her dancing had been limited to potluck stumbles in the Paul Jones. She had known Bob all her life. His father was a doctor, practising in Whinmouth and he was a genial, heavy-featured boy, who was often out with the Sorrel Vale Hunt on Saturdays. He was engaged, he told her, in studying law and was finding it a terrible bore, so much so that he was thinking of throwing it up and trying for a short-service commission in the Air Force.

‘That’s the life!’ he told her, clutching her tightly as they shuffled round the crowded floor. ‘I’ve already joined a Flying Club at Reading, where I’m bogged down in an office so I get a flip most weekends. Who the devil wants to be chained to a stool grubbing among conveyances and affiliation orders? If it wasn’t for the fact that the old man has sworn to cut me off I’d sign on without even asking him and to hell with the consequences!’