Post of Honour (71 page)

It occurred to Paul, looking down at the broad, red face, spiked with grey bristles, that Edward Derwent had always been a man who concerned himself exclusively with fundamentals. Land, stock, and children to follow him, were the only things that he had ever considered worthy of serious contemplation. Everything else could go hang. He wondered if this was one of the reasons why he had always got along with his gruff old father-in-law and said, hoping to comfort him a little. ‘Well, Edward, you did me a damned good turn producing Claire. It’s been a good marriage, right from the start.’

‘Aye, you don’t have to tell me that, son,’ the old man replied, ‘although I daresay she’s been a bit of a handful now and again. You can lay that to my door for I spoiled her after her mother went and sometimes it looked to me as if you did the same. The times were against us, mind you! A man’s position in the house baint what it was, I can tell you! Why, even Liz’ll answer back when she’s a mind to!’ and as though making a final effort to assert the doctrine of male superiority he raised his voice and bellowed for his wife, who at once made nonsense of his complaints by popping into the room like a cuckoo on the hour, saying, ‘What is it, dear? Do ’ee want for anything?’ and Paul had to turn to the window to hide a smile.

Rose came down when the old man’s condition grew worse and she and Claire were with him when he died. He was buried in the churchyard extension, within swearing distance—as Smut Potter irreverently observed, of his one-time neighbour Tamer, with whom he had once maintained a long-standing feud about water-rights and the depredations of the Potter clan on his well-kept acres. ‘I sometimes wonder,’ Smut told Paul at the funeral, ‘what might have happened downalong if the Almighty, in his infinite wisdom, hadn’t planted Preacher Willoughby between the two of ’em. I reckon you would have come looking for an estate and found a bliddy battlefield!’

Paul offered Liz a home at Shallowford but she declined. Edward she said, had left her sufficient to buttress her old age and she had made many friends in Whinmouth and preferred to live out her years in the quayside cottage. ‘Us likes to watch the people go by,’ she said unexpectedly, ‘and I would miss my whist so! Tiz kind o’ Claire to want me, tell her, but I’ll stop where I be, thanking you!’

A more cheerful entry found its way into the estate record a week or so later, when preparations for celebrating the Silver Jubilee of George V and Queen Mary were in progress. Paul was leaving the rectory one morning in early May, having been discussing with Horsey the street-luncheon and the distribution of commemorative mugs to the schoolchildren, when he saw a blue Morris Cowley zig-zag down the village street, its horn blaring and its course so erratic that pedestrians instinctively withdrew into shop doorways until it came to an uncertain halt a few yards short of the church. Paul saw the driver waving but the sun was in his eyes and it was not until he crossed the street that he realised, to his amazement, the driver was Henry Pitts. Beside him, snuggled down like a sleek little dormouse, sat a pretty, very diminutive woman of about thirty-five, whom he recognised as one of the newcomers to the area who had recently bought one of Sydney Codsall’s bungalows at the top of the village. Henry, who was in an ebullient mood, insisted they all adjourn to The Raven close by. Like everyone else in the Valley he deliberately avoided calling the pub by its new name, ‘The Lovell Arms’. Paul was so astounded to see Henry driving a car that he followed them without a word and it was not until they were sipping their drinks that he found his tongue and asked Henry to introduce him to the lady and incidentally explain his inexplicable surrender to the twentieth century.

‘Well, Maister,’ Henry said, breezily, ‘I had to come to it, zame as everybody else yerabouts, but ’twas a pistol held to me head and Ellie’s finger on the trigger, baint that zo, midear?’ and he slid his arm round the little woman’s waist and drew her towards him with a familiarity that left Paul in no doubt at all but that Henry was planning to fill the gap left in his life by the death of his wife, Gloria. ‘Do ’ee know Ellie? Do ’ee know the Squire, midear?’ and when Paul said he had not had the pleasure, and Ellie giggled her denial, he continued expansively, ‘ ’Er’s new yerabouts, you zee, and a widder, baint ’ee midear? Us on’y made up our minds this morning, zo fitting you should be the first to know. Truth is, I told Ellie you’d stand for me when us gets to bizness. Will ’ee, now?’

‘Certainly I will and I’m delighted to hear it,’ said Paul, reaching down to shake hands with Ellie, who seemed to stand no higher than Henry’s massive chest, ‘but I don’t see the connection between finding a wife and buying a motor-car, Henry. Damn it, you’ve always set your silly face against everything that’s appeared on the market since Edward the Seventh was crowned!’

Ellie seemed to regard this remark as a brilliant witticism on Paul’s part, laughing so heartily that she spilled half her gin-and-orange down her chest and Henry brought her another and made a great show of removing the droplets from the front of her frock. When his ministrations were complete he said gravely that the car was not his but had belonged to Ellie’s late husband, a commercial traveller for a well-known brand of pickles, who had died of thrombosis whilst opening up new territory in Hampshire, six months ago. ‘ ’Twas very suddenlike, wasn’t it, midear?’ he said gaily. ‘Dropped stone dade, he did, in the act o’ taking his boots off! And him all alone, poor toad, in one o’ they dismal little places commercials stay in when they’m peddling!’

If it had not been for the fact that Henry was acknowledged to have the largest and softest heart in the Valley Paul might have found elements of near-relish in this recital, particularly as, all the time Henry talked of her husband’s fatal collapse, little Ellie beamed at him and then added, by way of extenuation, ‘Oswald was twenty years older than me, Mr Craddock, so it weren’t that much of a shock, if you follow me!’

‘I see,’ said Paul, reflecting that, although only half her size, Henry’s intended had the same philosophic approach to life and death as her predecessor, and at once bought another round, asking, ‘What finally overcame that daft prejudice of yours towards all things mechanical, Henry?’ and Henry explained that Ellie had the car but could not drive and that he, at fifty-eight, declined to walk the four miles between Hermitage and Coombe Bay every night to do a bit of courting, so he had hired a man from the Whinmouth Motor Company, taken a course of driving lessons and could now ‘push her along middling-like!’

‘Middling-like is about right,’ Paul commented but comforted himself with the reflection that a man who had survived three years on the Western Front without a wound would almost certainly die in his bed, especially as his grandfather had come close to breaking the Valley record for longevity.

‘Perhaps Ellie can talk you into getting a tractor after you’re married,’ he suggested, ‘for it’s something I’ve never been able to do! Here’s to both of you, and jolly good luck! Will it be a church wedding or a quiet affair at the Registry Office?’

‘Oh, not church, Mr Craddock,’ said Ellie, in a shocked tone, very much at odds with the congeniality she had shown over the eclipse of the traveller in pickles, ‘I mean, it wouldn’t
look
right, would it? Not with the pair of us hardly out of mourning!’

‘No, perhaps not,’ conceded Paul and suddenly decided he liked her for her honesty and remarkable inconsistency, both of which promised to contribute something towards the happiness of his oldest friend in the Valley.

‘Well, tiz a rare bit o’ luck us running into you today,’ Henry said, ‘for us was racking our brains about how to break it to young David and Mother! Seeing you reminded me o’ the part you played getting Elinor Codsall clear away, with that bliddy Squarehead she married! Do ’ee think you could bring yourself to sound the boy on how he’d feel about me bringing Ellie back to Hermitage? I dorn mind tellin’ ’ee, Squire, tiz something I don’t relish doin’.’

‘Damn it, that’s surely a job for you, isn’t it?’ Paul protested but Ellie said, earnestly, ‘Oh, we’ve already given ’em the
hint
,
Mr Craddock! What Henry means is—well—could you bring yourself to pop over today and sort of walk in on us, after we’d put it to ’em? Henry told me his Ma thinks a rare lot of you, and if we can bring her round to it I don’t reckon we shall have trouble with Henry’s boy. You see, I always get along with men!’ and she winked so impudently that it was Henry’s turn to soil his waistcoat with liquor.

It began to look like a conspiracy and must have been hatched, Paul decided, the moment they saw him in the street. He said, with a sigh, ‘Your father warned me thirty years ago what I was taking on with this place, Henry! I’ll come but only providing you take the plunge now. For all that I don’t see how my presence will help much.’

‘Giddon, doan you believe it,’ said Henry, finishing his pint at a gulp. ‘Mother alwus did think the sun shined from your backside, Squire! Hop in, Ellie, and us’ll get it over an’ done with, midear!’ and he led the way out to the little car and after killing the engine five times managed to start and drive down to the river road, where he soon built up to thirty-five miles per hour. It was a breathless but triumphant journey. Along every yard of the route Henry kept his finger on the horn and when he had occasion to change gear the car proceeded in violent leaps and bounds, so that Paul was relieved to be put at the top of Hermitage Lane and watch them drive on to the farm, ‘to warm things up a bit’ as Henry put it.

He gave them fifteen minutes’ grace and then ambled into the yard advertising his approach by calling to the dogs, so that Henry emerged on the porch and exclaimed, for the benefit of his aged mother and son, David, ‘Why damme if it baint Squire himself! Come along in! Youm just in time for the shock of a lifetime, Squire! I was just tellin’ Mother I was thinkin’ o’ bringing Ellie to care for her in her old age, wadden I, Davey boy?’ whereupon he solemnly reintroduced Paul to Ellie and then treacherously withdrew, on the feeble excuse of showing Ellie his saddlebacks.

It was obvious that the news had not come as a thunderbolt to the old lady and her grandson and equally clear that they were not wholly in favour of the arrangement, for Martha Pitts, invariably cheerful and welcoming, now had her nutcracker jaws well clamped and Young David was glowering at the stone flags, his enormous red hands hanging loose, like a pair of hams in a butcher’s window. Paul realised that the initiative was his and took it, as much out of his sympathy for them as Henry.

‘You might have done a good deal worse, Martha!’ he said, bluntly. ‘She’s a cheerful little body and I think she’ll make Henry a good wife. These things are never easy for the people concerned but when a man has been married as long as Henry he’s far easier to live with if he cuts his losses and starts all over again.’

‘She baint varmin’ stock!’ Martha grumbled, ‘and you c’n zee that be lookin’ at her!’

‘And suppose I had it in mind to marry an’ zettle in yer?’ demanded David, and they both awaited his verdict, not exactly resentful but with a certain shared glumness.

‘She may not be farming stock but she’s obviously used to a hard day’s work,’ Paul said. ‘Moreover, she’s genuinely fond of Henry and certainly isn’t after what money he’s got. In fact, it seems to me she’s doing precisely what he’s doing—finding a means to insure against a lonely old age!’

‘He’s got us!’ said Martha, defensively.

‘Both of you are different generations and that’s important to a man his age. And talking of ages, he’s not old enough to retire and hand over to you, David. If he did he’d soon run to seed if I know Henry.
Were
you thinking of getting married yourself?’

‘Well, no, I got no one particular in mind,’ the young man admitted, ‘but I got a right to if I do want!’

It occurred to Paul now that here was a situation that often cropped up in local farming families, where life revolved around a single, indivisible unit of land but it was a problem he had never been called to solve. Sometimes the older generation lived on and the sons soldiered as junior partners until they wanted to marry, but so far none of the Shallowford farms had supported three working generations under a single roof. He said, on impulse, ‘Suppose I agreed to build a house nearer the river if and when you think of marrying, Davey? Hermitage is large enough to support two families and I daresay Martha would get along with Ellie well enough, once she set her mind to it. If she didn’t could she move in with you?’ and he was relieved to see the old lady’s face relax, for it was known that she had always worshipped Henry’s son and that the boy’s presence here had made it easy for her to get along with the sharp-tempered Gloria in the past.

‘What do ’ee say to that, midear?’ she asked, glancing at her grandson with the furtiveness of the very old and insecure, and Davey, wrinkling his brow, said, ‘Well, I daresay ’twould be the best way out, Gran! I’d always be glad to ’ave ’ee, you knows that well enough!’

‘Very well, you’ve got my word for it,’ Paul said. ‘There’s an ideal site on that flat piece below Undercliff where the brook runs under the road. I’ll get my son-in-law Rumble to survey it tomorrow, for he seems to have made a first-class job of tidying up Periwinkle. You’re good neighbours, I hope?’

‘Arr,’ said David, with a flicker of enthusiasm, ‘he’s a dabster an’ no mistake! Can do well-nigh anything with his own two hands an’ most of it a bliddy sight better’n a tradesman! Coulden wish for a better chap upalong, I couldn’t.’

‘Then it’s settled,’ Paul said, ‘and the pair of you do what you can to make Ellie feel she’s wanted in the meantime!’ and he withdrew to find Henry and Ellie hanging about the yard, having eavesdropped on most of the conversation at the scullery window. They were obviously relieved and Henry said, ‘ ’Ow much will it cost to build that bungalow downalong, Squire?’ and Paul said, shortly, ‘A good deal less than it would to have a bad atmosphere up here, Henry! This has always been a happy farm and I want to keep it that way!’

‘Arr,’ Henry replied, thoughtfully, ‘youm right about that, Maister! Gloria had her moods, mind you, but Martha could always manage her, ’cept that one time, when she left it to me and a pair o’ scissors!’