‘Arr, I did that,’ Gloria said briefly. ‘Come on then and us’ll make a quick job of it!’ and they went down the slope and up the opposite hillside to the farm where a peep through the uncurtained window showed them that Elinor was inside alone, bottling plums at the long table. They lifted the latch and rushed in, startling Elinor so much that she jumped back, smashing a large glass jar of fruit on the slate hearth. It must have seemed to Elinor that her neighbour, together with the hired woman who accompanied her, were victims of the same homicidal urge that had destroyed Martin and Arabella, for they rushed at her shouting curses and before she knew what was happening they had her pinioned in the high-backed chair, her feet in a mush of spilled plums and broken glass that littered the hearth. Then she saw the big scissors and let out a wild shriek and young Mark upstairs tumbled out of bed and came pattering down the wooden stair but by then Vicky, who was a powerful woman, had the prisoner fast with her arms twisted behind the chair and Gloria, hearing Mark approach, wedged an oak form under the knob of the stairway door. After that the kitchen was in an uproar with all three women shouting and screaming and Elinor’s wild struggles upsetting the table lined with bottling jars that crashed and rolled in every direction. It was not until Gloria had torn Elinor’s hair loose and sliced more than half of it away that the victim had an inkling of what lay behind this assault, for Gloria screamed, ‘There now! No one’ll look at ’ee twice now, not even that bloody Hun!’ and went on snipping away until all Elinor’s honey-coloured hair lay in the great pools of plum juice on the floor. It was the presence of so much sticky liquid underfoot that gave Vicky Tarnshaw another idea. She shouted, gibbering with glee, ‘Now us’ll strip her naked an’ roll her in it, Mrs Pitts!’ and without waiting for affirmation she ripped Elinor’s cotton dress down the back and did the same with her petticoat, while Gloria wrestled with her drawers and stockings. It was this final indignity that gave Elinor a brief access of strength. She kicked Gloria in the stomach and lurched sideways so that the chair, entangling itself in Vicky’s legs, brought the pair of them crashing to the floor within a foot or two of the fire. The struggle then became general, with the winded Gloria joining in and getting half her own clothes ripped off and they were all threshing about in a whirl of garments and plum-syrup when the outer door crashed open and Henry Pitts rushed in to stand with mouth agape looking down at the extraordinary scene.
It had been his footfall, home on unexpected leave, that Gloria had heard in the lane and when Martha Pitts seemed evasive about his wife’s whereabouts he lost no time in getting her to voice her suspicions and had at once hurried in pursuit. Now he stood stock still on the threshold hardly able to believe his eyes. He was still wearing his uniform and patches of dried Flanders mud still adhered to his breeches and puttees. For a terrible moment he mistook the pools of plum juice for blood and assumed that the women were in the process of attacking one another with knives. Then he saw the shorn tresses lying behind the chair and it must have given him a clue for he started forward, seized his wife by the hair and hauled her clear, after which he planted a hefty kick on Vicky’s behind that caused her to roll sideways and expose the crushed, hysterical Elinor whose cropped head was only an inch or so from a smouldering log that had fallen on to the hearth. He lifted her to her feet and saw that she was almost naked and plastered from head to foot in bottling syrup, as indeed, were all three of them. He said, with a trench oath, ‘What in God’s name be thinking of, all of ’ee?’ and when Elinor, feeling her head, burst into hysterical weeping he turned to his wife whose dress hung down as far as the waist exposing her bare breasts and whose head and shoulders were dripping with plum juice so that she stared at him through a great mat of clotted red hair.
Vicky Tarnshaw was the first to recover. She scrambled to her feet and said, backing away, ‘Us was marking her, Mr Pitts! ’Er’s been lying wi’ one o’ they Hun prisoners up at the camp!’ whereupon Elinor suddenly ceased her outcry, snatched up the scissors and would have plunged them into Vicky’s face if Henry had not caught her by the shoulders and held her. Then Henry became conscious of a heavy thumping and wild cries from behind the stair door and asked Gloria who was there. She told him sulkily that it was the children trying to get in and the information seemed to steady him for he released Elinor, pocketed the scissors and went across to the door, opening it but blocking the boy’s entry and saying, ‘Tiz all right, Markboy. Us ’ave had a bit of an accident wi’ the bottling and us was quarrelling who was to blame! Go back upstairs and quiet your sisters!’ and then, very deliberately, he closed the door and addressing Elinor said, ‘Now give over snivelling, Elinor, an’ tell us the facts. Is it true you been larkin’ wi’ one o’ they Fritzes? Not that I give a damn if you ’ave but to satisfy these varmints, be it true?’
‘No, it baint,’ screamed Elinor, ‘it baint true! Willi Meyer saved my boy’s life when he was bit by an adder an’ ever zince I give ’un a bite to eat mealtimes! You c’n ask the children, any of ’em! Theym always yer when he comes inside the ’ouse!’
‘Right,’ said Henry, ‘then go along upstairs and don’t upset the tackers telling ’em what really happened!’ and as she moved across the littered floor he picked up a besom from the corner so that Vicky, mistaking his intention, made a sudden rush to the door. He caught her a buffet on the ear that sent her sprawling, shut the door and threw the broom at his wife. ‘Clean this bliddy mess up,’ he said briefly, ‘every particle of it, do ’ee hear?’ and when Vicky, dazed from the blow, struggled, up on her hands and knees, he added, ‘You too! Get to work the pair of ’ee! Or I’ll beat the daylights out of ’ee!’
He was very calm now, more deliberate and serious-looking than Gloria had ever seen him. He took a seat astride a chair near the door and watched their every movement and when the litter of squashed plums and broken glass was shovelled up he said, ‘There’s a bucket yonder, under the sink. Fill it from the kettle and give the floor a swab over!’
‘I’m not gonner scrub for the likes o’ . . . ’ shouted Vicky but she changed her mind when he got up and moved towards her and scuttled into the scullery for bucket and floorcloths. He reseated himself, placidly smoking his pipe as they moved about straightening furniture and washing the stone floor. When it was done, and the litter had been thrown out, he said, ‘Right! Get on home now, Vic Tarnshaw, an’ if you so much as shows your face at Hermitage again I’ll drown ’ee in the bliddy duckpond, you zee if I dorn’t! As for you,’ he continued, addressing his wife, ‘I reckon I’ll serve you zame as you served Elinor!’
‘Don’t you lay a hand on me!’ shouted Gloria, jumping back towards the fireplace but he turned his back on her and flung open the door just as Vicky made a rush to pass him and escape into the yard. She arrived there even quicker than she had intended for, as she flitted by, he kicked her so accurately that she flew across the cobbles and landed face-down in the midden heap. He did not even wait to watch her scramble up and run shrieking into the darkness but shut the door, bolted it and crossed to the hearth, extracting Gloria’s scissors from his pocket on his way. When she realised that he meant to put his threat into execution she let out a wild squark and tried to run round him and escape by the window, but he caught her easily enough, throwing his arm under her chin, dragging her across the window seat and making five quick snips with the blades. In a matter of seconds one side of her head was shorn even closer than Elinor’s. Then she began to beg and plead—‘Dornee boy! Dornee do it, Henry!’ and half-escaping his grip clasped him round the knees but he snipped and snipped until all her sticky auburn locks lay in a heap on the floor and the despairing face that looked up at him was the face of a stranger and not Gloria’s at all.
He released her then, kicking the shorn tresses into the hearth, after which, still quite impassive, he took a ten-shilling note from his breeches pocket and laid it on the table, calling, ‘Us iz goin’ now Elinor! I’ve left ’ee zummat to pay for the damage and I’ll be
over to zee ’ee in the mornin’!’
There was no answer, no sound in the big kitchen but the loud ticking of the clock and the whimpering of the woman huddled under the window. He said, briefly, ‘Be these our scissors?’ and when she nodded he flung them in the fire saying, ‘I woulden care to own ’em after this! Come on ’ome you gurt stoopid bitch, an’ thank your stars I don’t take a harness strap to your fat backside zoon as us gets there!’
She got up, still gulping and sniffing and went out into the yard. After a last look round he followed her, walking close behind as they crossed the shoulder of the hill, skirted the wood and went on down the far slope to the Hermitage track. It was a strange home-coming for a man who had been in and out of the trenches for the best part of a year.
The story of the assault on Elinor Codsall was common knowledge in a day or so. The Pitts did not broadcast it, and Vicky Tarnshaw left the Valley to work in a munitions factory in the North, but two closely-cropped heads on adjoining farms could not be concealed and Paul heard about it from the postman and made direct enquiries from Henry. Henry said, grimly, ‘Ar, tiz true enough, Squire, I come ’ome after nigh on a year overseas lookin’ for peace an’ quiet an’ what do I find? A bliddy war on me own doorstep, started be me own missis! Still, ’er won’t start another I reckon, and I’ve squared the damage they did upalong. What the hell have got into the folk back here? Be they all clean off their bliddy heads?’
Paul said he thought most civilians were and after paying a call on Elinor arranged, through Sam Potter, to get the Württemberger sent away from the camp in case he was victimised. The sight of Elinor’s unevenly shorn head distressed him more than anything he had witnessed in the Valley lately and leaving her he rode on up to the highest point of the estate, on the edge of Hermitage Wood, looking down across the autumn landscape and trying to understand the hysteria and savage intolerance that changed simple, workaday folk like Gloria Pitts and Norman Eveleigh into the kind of bigots one might expect to find in the fifteenth-century lynch mob whipped up by fanatical priests. Was it fear, he wondered, sponsored by the shattering of their settled way of life, or had a vein of tribal brutality always existed below the surface to be laid bare by the shock of war? It was hard to determine, particularly as the fighting men, like Henry, Ikey and Dandy Timberlake, seemed to have become almost gentle and were certainly more tolerant for their terrible experiences whereas cruelty only showed in the people at home. He sat his horse up there a long time deciding that he no longer belonged to any of them in the way he had belonged before the war. There were the fanatics, like Gloria Eveleigh and Horace Handcock, the Smart Allicks, like Sydney Codsall, and the passives, like Elinor Codsall and Claire; there were those in the thick of it all, like Ikey and Henry and the odd ones who saw the war as the negation of human dignity, people like Keith Horsey and poor, half-crazed Marian Eveleigh. He himself was a category of his own. By now he had learned to accept it as a kind of visitation, a plague that would one day die out and perhaps leave the land purified but today he felt utterly isolated, belonging neither to those under fire, to the patriots, or even to the honest doubters. He thought, grimly, ‘Damn it, I’ll have to find my way back again somehow and surely the only way to do that is to come down on one side or the other. I couldn’t honestly proclaim myself a CO but I’m damned if I’ll let my judgement be warped about the Keith Horseys and the Elinor Codsalls! I suppose the only thing left is to jump in head-first, alongside Ikey, Henry and all the others around here who have been sucked in!’ and at once he felt more clear-headed but because he was doubtful whether they could use a man of thirty-six with the scars of the last war on his body he said nothing of his decision to anybody, not even Claire, until he had written to his old Yeomanry Colonel who had a staff job in Whitehall and asked for advice on the quickest way of getting to France.
He had made insufficient allowance for the terrible attrition of the Somme battles. A reply came by return of post and he was offered, subject to a routine medical check, a temporary commission in the Royal Army Service Corps, Transport Section. He sat staring at the letter hardly knowing whether to be astonished, elated or dismayed and then, remembering Will and Smut and Jem and all the others, and weighing their worth against that of Sydney Codsall and Gloria Pitts, he made his decision. Fearing that Claire would try and talk him out of it he filled in the application and posted it, asking for an interview at the earliest possible date.
IV
He confessed that same night, when he and Claire were sitting late in front of the library fire. Her temperate reception of the news confounded him, so obviously so that she laughed, telling him, in Mrs Handcock’s phrase, that ‘she could read ’un like an ha’penny book!’ She could have said a great deal more on this subject, how she had watched him, anxiously and sympathetically, for months past as news reached the Valley in dribs and drabs of casualties, as fissures opened between combatant families and those who, by luck or design, had made money and managed to remain uncommitted. It was this, she felt, that was wearing him down for she had long ago accepted the fact that the social health of the estate concerned him very deeply, perhaps even more deeply than their domestic accord. This was the yardstick he used to measure his worth as a human being. She had watched him wince at the emergence of the Sydney Codsalls and their ilk, at rifts between men like Eph Morgan, whose only son had been killed, and men like Abe Tozer, the smith, whose son-in-law was said to be coining money in a Birmingham foundry. She too had been dismayed by the attack upon Elinor Codsall and by the traces of slime that survived Henry’s earnest attempts to make amends and yet, in the main, she had been unable to help him much for although she was Valley born she still looked at the Valley through clear glass and not, as he so obstinately did, through a stained-glass window. It was because she knew him so well that she had known it would end like this, in him going off in the wake of the others and she said, in reply to his question as to how she could know something he had not finally decided himself, ‘Oh, I knew you would go, sooner or later, and if I were in your shoes I suppose I should do the same. I don’t say I’d do it in the spirit of the slop one reads in the papers but, from a man’s viewpoint, it must seem that all the best are being sucked in and the discards spewed out! If you were ten years older you’d have to grin and bear it; as it is, thank God, you aren’t likely to be sent into the line; if they accept you at all, that is!’
‘They’ll accept me,’ he said, so huffily that she laughed again.
‘Yes, I suppose they will, for you’re a good deal lustier than some of the men they’ve taken. However, don’t run away with the idea that leg of yours will stand up to unlimited demands. What kind of jobs do they do in the Service Corps?’
He was so relieved that she accepted his enlistment as inevitable and was not disposed to make a song and dance over it that he became expansive. ‘The RASC take all the ammunition, stores and rations up the line. I shall try and wangle my way into a horse or mule section!’ but she reminded him that Ikey had told them mechanical transport had now all but superseded the horse in France, and that if he was judged on his handling of the old Belsize he would prove an expensive addition to the forces of the Crown. He was not entirely fooled by her gaiety but caught himself admiring her performance.
‘I don’t know why you should be so ready to consign me to the awkward squad,’ he grumbled, ‘I was in uniform the first day you saw me and you fell over yourself to catch my eye if I remember rightly!’
‘Yes I did,’ she agreed, ‘but you were young bones then! Besides you were the best catch in the county!’
‘I’ve still got a shot or two in my locker,’ he told her. ‘Come over here and I’ll prove it,’ but she declined the invitation and instead sat on the hearthrug looking into the coals as Paul watched the effect of firelight on her hair. As he mused he thought of something he had always been meaning to tell her but had somehow forgotten, not once but a dozen times, since their encou
nter with Grace at the time of the Coronation visit to London.
He reached out, heaved one of the heavy books from the shelf at his elbow and thumbed through the pages until he found the colour reproduction of Rubens’ young wife, Helene Fourment, as Bathsheba, receiving King David’s letter.
‘I don’t know whether you’ll be flattered or otherwise,’ he said, ‘but this was something I always meant to show you. The first time you and Grace met, that afternoon you came here with Rose soon after we were married, she produced this as soon as you had gone, and said you were Helene Fourment reincarnated. It wasn’t wholly a joke either, I think she half believed it.’
She showed interest at once, taking the book and studying it carefully. ‘Grace said that? All those years ago? But I was slim then and this girl would turn the scale to eleven stone! It was probably an attempt to put you off, I expect she saw you looking me over too attentively!’
He laughed, saying that even then he was inclined to think that Grace had been considering abdication. He could say that now and half-believe it for somehow, in the last year or so, he had begun to share a little of Grace’s impatience with parochialism. ‘You were never slim,’ he said, prodding her. ‘You had a neat waist and still have but you were always what the Edwardians called “a fine woman”, meaning that you had plenty to catch hold of! However, Helene was reckoned a great beauty, so I always regarded the comparison as a compliment, tho’, if I remember rightly, she did use the adjective “ripe”.’
‘It’s one that certainly suits me now,’ Claire said. ‘Are there any more of Hélène? Did he paint her often?’
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