Post of Honour (73 page)

Yes they were, she told him, and he smiled at the queenly way she marched ahead of him into the house leaving Rumble to off-saddle the mare and resume his weekly chore. He had seen the renovations in various stages but was unprepared for the pleasant impact of Elinor’s old kitchen, always a tumbledown old place, with its crumbling beams and bulging cob. Today the place seemed not only solid and commodious but one of the most cheerful rooms he had ever entered, its great stone fireplace softened by large earthenware jars filled with lupins, delphiniums and gladioli, the slate floor laid with brightly patterned rugs and primrose curtains over the windows. There was a new stove in the enlarged scullery, a covered-way for boots, coals and logs, and what had once been a deeply recessed bacon cupboard had been converted into a backstair leading to the landing where the beams had been treated with a preservative that gave off a pleasing resinous smell. She obviously took immense pride in showing him all they had done and pouted when he said the place looked more like a pocket Manor House than a run-down farm.

‘I don’t see why all farmers should have to share a sty with their pigs,’ she said, ‘and most of them around here do! Rumble can solve any problem once he puts his mind to it but it was me who took charge up here,’ and she led the way into the low-ceiling bedroom, where the walls were painted the colour of old parchment, every piece of cottage furniture gleamed and the double bed was covered with a lavender-blue bedspread. There were night tables either side of the bed and on them were gleaming silver candlesticks, complete with original snuffers. It all looked so trim, fresh and elegant that he thought, ‘They aren’t really farmers at all, they’re more like a couple of kids playing house!’ He said:

‘I was only teasing. You’ve got a better home-making instinct than any of us, Mary, and this would have made old Elinor Codsall’s eyes start from her head. As for poor old Will, he would have rolled himself in a blanket and slept on the floor!’ Then, looking at her pink nightie and Rumble’s striped pyjamas folded on the pillows like props in a magazine advertisement, ‘You’re obviously well-matched and I don’t have to ask if you’re happy.’

‘No,’ she said, without a trace of the shyness that had characterised her up to the very moment of Rumble Patrick’s reappearance in the Valley, ‘No, you don’t, Daddy! He’s wonderful but sometimes I find it very hard to believe he’s only twenty-two. He seems so much more mature than any of the younger set round here and yet—well—it doesn’t make him in the least stodgy, if you know what I mean.’

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ he said, ‘for his father Ikey had the same quality. It was something I always envied him!’ and he gave her a swift hug to express his extreme satisfaction and they went downstairs to the scullery where Rumble was stirring a savoury-smelling stew in a large, black saucepan which he lifted aside and said, as he slipped his arm round her waist, ‘Did he think it was a bit fussy up there? Above stairs it was her doing, not mine, Gov’nor!’

Paul said, seriously, ‘You’ve made a wonderful start here and it frightens me to think I thought of bulldozing the place after Elinor left, and letting it revert to rough pasture. What have you got in the way of stock?’

‘Nothing to boast about as yet,’ Rumble said, ‘but I’m buying some Friesians from Eveleigh. The new generator’s installed and the milking machine arrives on Friday. I shan’t bother with pigs while the price is so low but I’m going ahead with the cereal wheat as I planned. That way I can manage with one extra hand. After we’ve reclaimed fifteen acres of moor we’ll see about getting another on piecework basis. Would you and Claire like to come over to a meal on Saturday night? It’s rather special, the official switch-on!’ and he pointed to the empty light-socket over the stove.

‘We should be delighted,’ he said and Rumble told Mary to watch the stew while he showed Paul the electric plant housed in what had been Will Codsall’s cowshed and then, as Rumble led the way out of the house, his face assumed a slightly wary expression as he said, ‘Did she drop the dutiful hint about a little stranger, Gov?’ and went on, before Paul could exclaim, ‘Oh, I talked the usual guff about waiting until there was money in the bank but . . . well . . . you know these things have a way of making up their own minds! Maybe there’s some sense in her view—that kids are the better for having young parents!’

‘Well, you certainly haven’t wasted much time, Rumble,’ he said, smiling, ‘but taken all around I think she’s right and you’re wrong!’ He glanced down the slope to where the river gleamed between the willow clump on the wide river bend above Codsall bridge. ‘It’s a nice spot to be born in and grow up, so damned good luck to the three of you!’

He rode off along the crest towards the bulge of Hermitage Wood feeling more elated than ever. He already had three grandchildren, all girls, but Mary’s he felt sure, would be a boy and perhaps take his place here in the ’fifties and ’sixties. Somehow he had always known that his successor would derive from Mary and also that, somewhere along the line, Ikey would have a stake in it, and it was to Ikey that his thoughts returned as he cut across the northern boundary of Hermitage to enter the woods by a little-used bridle path running round the shoulder of the badgers’ slope. It was about here, so Maureen told him, that Hazel Potter had been delivered of Rumble Patrick in a cave, on a summer evening the year before hell broke loose and changes rushed down on them so rapidly that it seemed the pattern of life would be shattered for all time. It had not, thank God. Somehow they had been able to save the main fabric, sort out the pieces, and begin all over again and this, surely, was what Oliver Cromwell (himself a well-meaning vandal) would have called ‘a crowning mercy’.

The woods were at their midsummer best, the bracken shoots mushrooming as high as the skewbald’s ears, the flowering rhododendrons immediately below looking like a fleet of purple galleons anchored in an olive-green bay with their crews asleep or ashore. Beyond the stream, in the hollow east of the mere, Sam Potter’s cottage reminded him of the cottage Tom had seen from Hearthover Fell, in his favourite childhood book,
The Water Babies
,
and as he advanced down the steep slope he caught a glimpse of the ponderous figure of Joannie Potter, wearing red, just like the old lady who had befriended the fugitive sweep. The mere itself, on his right, was very still but as he reached its northernmost tip he could see the tiny V-ripples of voles swimming along the bank towards Smut Potter’s old hideout, and, over by the islet, a moorhen and her chicks making the circuit and again suggesting a fleet, only this time one of rowboats led by a small, brown ketch. The orchestra began as the path flattened out, a low muted hum of innumerable rustlings and warblings and dronings, pitched in the identical key that he heard when he first rode here in the drought of 1902, and he thought, ‘This will almost certainly be the last place to change! Even Sydney’s bulldozers would be defeated by this tangle, thank God!’ and he called to Joannie Potter, twice as heavy as when Sam first brought her here at his instance and she answered in her high-pitched, broad-vowelled voice, ‘Zam’s downalong! Word came Mother Meg wanted un. Do ’ee want un special, Squire?’ and Paul said no, he was just taking the air, and asked after Pauline, his first Valley godchild, now married to a railwayman in Paxtonbury.

‘ ’Er’s vine,’ Joannie said, ‘and expectin’ another. That’ll mak’ zix grandchildren, what wi’ Georgie’s last one! Who’d ha’ thought it now?’

‘Who indeed?’ said Paul, with a smile, for he had always had a warm corner in his heart for Sam and Joannie, the very first of the second generation round here to raise a family and name one of their children for him, although her sex called for a little cheating and one extra syllable.

‘What’s Sam doing downalong?’ he asked and Joannie told him that word had come from the Dell that Meg had had ‘one of her spells’ a week since and Smut had had to take the van and fetch her back from the moor, leaving her horse to find its own way home.

‘ ’Er’s over eighty now and ’er reely shoulden keep traapsing about, the way she does,’ Joannie complained.

‘You’ll not stop Meg moving around,’ said Paul, ‘not unless you tie her down!’ and he rode on beside the mere, passing the spot where, on the left, he had first romped in the grass with Claire, and on the right was the islet holding his happiest memory of Grace. At the sloping field he turned left, hugging the edge of the woods past the favourite haunt of the Shallowford butterflies for about here, years before he came to the Valley, someone had begun planting an ornamental shrubbery and a few of the imported shrubs had lingered on, notably a buddleia that seemed to hold a special delight for butterflies of all kinds. They were here now, wavering irresolutely over the flowers, a host of Red Admirals, Peacocks, Meadow Browns, Tortoiseshells and Cabbage Whites, two or three hundred of them going about their business whatever it was, and pausing to watch them Paul remembered the neighbours of the old German professor who had been driven from the Valley in 1914, for his hobby had been lepidoptery and he had had cases of butterflies in his study.

He gave Deepdene a miss and rode instead down the winding path to the Dell to inquire after Mother Meg but she was not there and neither was Sam, the French Canadian Brissot telling him that, against her daughter’s advice, Meg had set out on one of her basket-selling trips early that morning.

The Dell looked far tidier than it had ever looked under the hands of Old Tamer, his wife, or even Big Jem. There was not a nettle or dock to be seen and green wheat stood shoulder high in what had once been a tangle of briars on the southern slope of the wood.

‘You seem to be keeping hard at it about here,’ he said to Brissot, a man he respected, although he could never understand why he had carried the Cockney Bellchamber on his back all these years. ‘Do you ever feel homesick for Quebec?’ and the Frenchman said politely that he had never regretted settling in England because the winters were so mild, particularly down here, and even as a child he had hated snow. Violet, Jumbo Bellchamber’s wife, came out with her washing while they stood talking and smiled a welcome. Like Joannie Potter she had put on a great deal of weight and it was difficult to picture her as a slim, fleet-footed girl, who had once set Valley tongues clacking and driven the young sparks wild. ‘They all seem to have settled for a quiet life at last,’ he told himself, ‘although I would never have bet a shilling on it happening!’ and he took the track that led over the western shoulder of the Bluff and was soon clattering down Coombe Bay High Street.

Not much of the original village was left and what little there was seemed populated with strangers, loafing about the church green in holiday garb. Almost everyone about here, he reflected, catered for summer visitors and in a month or two, when the school holidays began, this street would teem with Cockneys and Midlanders in shorts and coloured shirts, with children scrambling about in the harbour with shrimping nets and toy boats. He was in such a relaxed mood, however, that the thought of Coombe Bay as a holiday resort did not bother him this morning. It was probably good for trade and who the devil was he to deny city families a fortnight by the sea, or begrudge people like Smut Potter and that French wife of his selling their confections? As he drew level with the Vicarage he saw Parson Horsey, a bent, shrunken old man now, with a halo of silvery hair circling his brown, polished skull. The old man was still very active, however, for here he was hoeing his flower-beds and stooping every now and again to pluck a weed and toss it in a seed-box close by.

‘I had to get out in the sun this morning,’ Horsey confessed, after Paul had hailed him and Paul said, ‘Me too!’ and reined in, asking after Abe Tozer, the smith, who had taken to his bed a week or so before.

‘He’ll not last the summer,’ Horsey said, ‘but he hasn’t any regrets. After all, he was swinging a hammer up to last week and his wife tells me he’s well over eighty. I suppose the forge will close when he dies. There’s more call here for a good garage than a smithy. Your good lady is well, I trust?’ and Paul said she was and told him the news from Periwinkle. Horsey said with a smile, ‘Well, it doesn’t surprise me, Squire. That girl of yours is a lovable lass and as for that lad of Hazel Potter’s, one should never be surprised at how a Potter turns out! I’ve just seen Pansy taking her third husband for an airing. He’s a powerful swimmer, you know, and she marches him down to the beach every morning of the week about this time between May and October. There’s some very good stuff in that woman somewhere. They say she’s made that poor chap a very happy man. It isn’t everyone who would take him on.’

It was a judgment, Paul thought, that old Parson Bull would never have passed and not for the first time he congratulated himself in installing this little gnome of a man as rector all those years ago when Parson Bull, last of the sporting parsons, had ridden himself into the ground chasing foxes.

‘Do you ever hear from Rachel these days?’ he asked and Horsey said he did, now and again, and that the last time she wrote she said she had just been adopted as Socialist candidate for a Glasgow constituency and seemed to have a chance of being elected if Baldwin went to the country in the autumn. He waited to see if Paul would respond with news of a letter from Simon but when he did not, added, ‘Your boy is her agent. I expect you’ll be hearing!’

‘I doubt it,’ said Paul. ‘They’re generally too absorbed in politics to waste propaganda time writing to an old Diehard like me! What do you really make of them? Honestly now?’

Horsey said, with a smile, ‘I think maybe they have the right idea—broadly speaking that is! Things are badly shared, no one can deny that, so perhaps it’s right that the younger generation should chivvy those in authority. Frankly I find their outlook a bit cold-blooded and I daresay you do as well, but if they can goad the Establishment into knocking down a few slums, raising the general standard of living, and stopping another war, then all power to their elbow! Our lot were a bit too complacent, don’t you think?’