‘He was always painting her. Damn it, the man was over fifty and she was sixteen when they married so can you blame him? If I could paint I’d have you sitting for me nude, half-dressed or over-dressed, eight hours a day!’ He took the book from her and looked closely at it again. ‘That’s an idea, Claire,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Would you like to sit for someone really good? After all, we look like being here permanently, so it’s time we laid down an ancestor or two!’
She was secretly delighted at the suggestion but made a protest nevertheless, saying that it would have been a pleasant notion ten years ago but today, at thirty-three, it was too late for that kind of nonsense.
‘Rubbish,’ he said, ‘look at some of these old hags of the Lovell family! I’d a damned sight sooner sit looking at you and pack this lot off to a sale. If we could get a London artist down he could do the children as well. I’ll write off to Uncle Franz, for I wager the old codger would know someone and keep his price down.’
She said slowly, ‘All right then but don’t be so eager to throw your money away. As a matter of fact I’ve a confession myself. I didn’t mean to tell until the plan was a lot further advanced but if you really are likely to go soon you ought to know at once. Had it ever occurred to you that I might want to play a more positive part in the war?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘frankly it hadn’t! You always seemed far better at carrying-on-as-usual than me.’ And then he remembered that long ago she had an ambition to nurse and had taken a course at St Thomas’s Hospital during her exile in London. He said bluntly, ‘Look here, I’m damned if I’ll stand for you working yourself to death as a VAD! I want you here when I come home and you have the children to think of.’
‘Oh, it wouldn’t involve leaving here,’ she said, airily, ‘but if you do go I don’t think I could hang around here passing the time, living for leave periods or the end of the war. I should have to have something to keep me occupied and as long as John Rudd is active he can care for the estate far better than I. I had . . . well, it occurred to me that we could turn this barn of a place into a hospital!’
‘A hospital! For stretcher-cases?’
‘No, that isn’t practical, something more modest like a convalescent home for about fifty to sixty wounded men who wouldn’t arrive until they were on the road to recovery. As a matter of fact I’ve already discussed it with Doctor Maureen.’
‘The devil you have!’
‘She thinks it’s a first-class idea. We’ve got at least ten rooms we now use for lumber. I could shift the children out of the east wing and clear the furniture from the big drawing-room that we hardly ever use. Then we could have a main ward on ground level and patients that could move about could sleep three to a room upstairs. If we needed more space we could get a couple of Nissen huts put up in the paddock. I got the idea watching Dandy Timberlake after he came home from Gallipoli. Men get patched up in big hospitals and then they go home on leave, most of them to industrial cities and some, I suppose, to near-slums. Then, as soon as their scars heal, they get reboarded but they aren’t really well at all, they’re still suffering from shock and nervous exhaustion like Dandy and some of the others about here who have been out a long time. A month or so in a place like this, with organised exercises, fresh air and sea-bathing from May to October would work wonders. I should like to do it, providing you agree.’
‘Well,’ he said, greatly impressed in spite of himself, ‘I suppose it’s possible but who would you get to run it?’
‘I’d run it,’ she said. ‘I’ve kept up-to-date reading Maureen’s journals and if we gave the house the Government couldn’t very well turn us down, could they? As to staff, there are more than a dozen wives in the Valley who would be glad to do something useful. We could even organise a local crêche, with a roster of nannies and older children taking their meals at Mary Willoughby’s so that their mothers could work part-time over here. They only drawback I can see is whether you really want the place knocked about by strangers and turned into a kind of barracks. After all, this is what you’ll be fighting for, and in spite of anything you might think at the moment your dream isn’t dead, Paul, only hibernating. Do you think I don’t know why you divert every penny you receive from the scrapyard into a special account, earmarked for post-war development!’
‘This is ridiculous!’ he exclaimed, laughing. ‘I don’t have a shred of privacy! How the devil did you know I had made up my mind not to make a personal profit out of munitions or other fiddles?’
‘Oh, I keep an eye on your papers when you’re on your rounds,’ she said carelessly, ‘and for all you know I go through your pockets from time to time. You ought to know that, seeing you’re likely to be turned loose in France among the mesdemoiselles and the WAACs! But don’t sidetrack me, I’ve got to know exactly how you feel about this plan. It’s got to have your blessing before I go ahead with it.’
He said, pulling her down on his knees, ‘I think it’s a damned good idea and with Maureen to keep an eye on the venture you’ll make a sensational success of it! Yes, it has my blessing, Claire. You’re nearer the truth than you know about the home background of those poor devils. There isn’t one in fifty who owns a square inch of the land he’s fighting for and Grenfell says their physique compares very poorly with the men they’re up against! Take a look at some of those strapping Fritzes in the camp and see for yourself, it’s a point worth taking!’ Then, teasing her, ‘I suppose when I do get leave and come back here pawing the ground I’ll be met by a starchy matron who regards me as a patient rather than a warrior in search of solace?’ and he ran his hands over her thinking what a fool he must be to sacrifice her society for the desolation Ikey had described to him in Flanders or even the cheerlessness of a base camp populated exclusively by men. She said, after a moment of this, ‘I’m always telling you we’re too old to do our courting in an armchair! Let’s go to bed,’ but the prospect of forsaking the warm fire and putting a term to one of the rare moments of intimacy was uninviting, so she remained where she was holding the future at bay and presently she provoked him into enacting one of those boisterous scenes that always made her chuckle in retrospect, as though they were not man and wife, with a growing family and a longish partnership behind them but a couple of youngsters making the most of a lucky opportunity in the front parlour, when everybody was out of the way.
V
Paul’s summons to report for initial training at a nearby Officers’ Training Camp came in late November, 1916, but before he left Grenfell travelled down from London and spent a night or two at Shallowford. He was a very different James, Claire decided, from the buoyant, quietly confident professional they had often entertained in the days following his return to Parliament. The strain of long-night sittings and a share in decisions involving the slaughter of thousands of men showed in the lined face and patches of white hair above his ears. He had lost most of his jauntiness and now walked with a slight stoop. He was not, he told her, in the best of health, being sadly troubled with chronic indigestion and periods of sleeplessness, aggravated by his growing disgust for the jealousies and scramble for power among some of his senior colleagues and opposition members of the wartime Coalition. It was like, he told them, being aboard a crippled vessel among a lot of elderly passengers who had dismissed the crew and taken upon themselves the job of charting the ship’s course. Paul soon realised that he was not only losing faith in his revered leader, Asquith, whom Grenfell said was too much of a gentlemen to survive in such a scrimmage but had also come to dislike and distrust the firebrand, Lloyd George, who was openly flirting with Unionists, men like Bonar Law and the newspaper magnate, Alfred Harmsworth, in the hope of replacing Asquith as Premier. ‘I’m not so prejudiced as to think The Welsh Wizard wouldn’t make a good pilot,’ Grenfell admitted, ‘but the way he’s going about it could split the party down the middle and we are going to need men of Asquith’s integrity when this business is over. Sometimes I
find myself more in sympathy with the men who had the guts to stand up in August, 1914, and condemn the whole business as an international crime! I wasn’t one of them but I supported the idea of a negotiated peace months ago and I’ve suffered for it since! Maybe Old Keir Hardie was right when he said, “If I had my time over again I should steer clear of politics and preach the gospel”.’
He and Paul sat late over the study fire and Grenfell told him something of the overall strategic position of the Allies and spoke of hidden factors that influenced decisions and could not be made public in the newspapers. The Dardanelles campaign, James said, had almost succeeded, and might have done had it not been bedevilled by inter-Service rivalry. Now, in his opinion there was no real chance of either side achieving a breakthrough in the West. James admitted to being an ‘Easterner’, believing that a final decision could only be reached on some other front but the High Command, of whom he had an even poorer opinion than Ikey, were now committed to a war of attrition in which the victory was based on the Allies’ superior manpower. ‘Almost as if they were playing with counters rather than people of flesh and blood!’ he declared bitterly. He deprecated Paul’s decision to join up, saying that he would contribute more doing his part in making good the terrible losses caused by the U-boat campaign. ‘Damn it man,’ he protested, when Paul told him he was due to leave in a few days, ‘hasn’t the Valley contributed its quota already! What sense is there in you rushing out in search of a medal and a lump of shrapnel to balance the Boer bullet that’s still travelling round inside you? I should have thought Claire would have had the sense to talk you out of it!’
Paul realised that it was useless to try and explain how he felt about staying home while men like Smut Pötter and Henry Pitts wallowed in the mud. By now Grenfell was incapable of regarding the war in a personal light but was compelled, by reason of his familiarity with the overall picture, to look at it as a complicated exercise in checks and counter-balances involving not merely men but entire races and imponderable economic factors. One other thing he said did impress Paul and made him increasingly anxious for the future and that was his contemptuous dismissal of the Russian ‘steamroller’ myth. He gave it as his opinion that Russia would be out of the war in a matter of months. ‘And can you wonder,’ he grumbled, ‘when the Tsarist system if rotten right through! Peasants are going into action unarmed while scoundrels in Petrograd are making fortunes, and all the time that ass of a Tsar and his neurotic wife behave as though they are playing chess instead of a game that will sweep them all under the carpet, along with all that’s left of human values!’ He went off to bed in a despondent mood and presumably found it difficult to rest for in the small hours Paul awoke to find Claire getting him a bismuth mixture. She told him she had heard James pacing his room, assailed by one of his stomach cramps and said, on climbing back into bed, ‘He’s going to pieces, Paul! I don’t think it’s indigestion but something more serious, probably ulcers. I’ve insisted the Maureen gives him a good going-over in the morning and if necessary you’ll have to persuade him to stay here and rest for a month or so.’
‘I’ll try but I don’t think I’ll succeed,’ Paul said and he was right, for when, in the morning, Maureen diagnosed irritation of the duodenal cap he shrugged, pocketed her prescription, and said that while men who had voted for him were having their heads blown off in France, and dying of dysentery in the Balkans, he could hardly take a month’s holiday on account of a bellyache. ‘And in the circumstances,’ he said to Paul, ‘who are you to argue with me? They’ll probably invalid you out halfway through your initial training, and I hope to God they do! At least there will be one person hereabouts to preserve a small corner of England that I like to regard as a counterweight to all their damned factory chimneys and red-brick jungles!’ Paul saw him as far as Sorrel Halt and as the train pulled out James leaned from the window and waved his billycock hat, revealing, for a brief instant, a flash of the jaunty campaigner who had once shocked the Valley by barnstorming his way into the heart of a Tory citadel. Paul was to remember his swift smile, and the wave of the billycock hat. It was a long time before he saw him again.
Two days later he stood on the same platform but this time it was he who was quitting the Valley and Claire, dressed in her fashionable best, who was putting a tolerable brave face on their first separation since she had come home in the spring of 1906. He said, jokingly, ‘Well, cheer up, I’m not off to France yet, just to camp over the county border!’ but there was finality in the occasion and they both sensed it, possibly because, further along the train, khaki-clad figures leaned from the windows watching them. Paul said, as they awaited the guard’s whistle, ‘Listen, Claire, get moving with that convalescent home the minute you get back, it’ll give you something to think about! As for me, I daresay I’ll put things in my letters aimed at taking some of the starch out of the matron’s linen!’ She smiled at that and said, ‘It’ll be odd getting a letter from you. You haven’t written me one for more than ten years. I daresay, when you get down to it, you’ll find it downright embarrassing!’
‘Not a chance,’ he said, ‘I could compose one between here and the junction and maybe I will!’ and with that the train started and her hand flew to her mouth, and looking back he saw her standing against the open skyline of the grey landscape. It was confirmation, he thought, of the belief that had been gaining strength in him through all the years of their marriage. She and the Valley were one and could never be separated in his consciousness. There was comfort and a certain reassurance in the knowledge.
Chapter Seven
I
The first of them began to arrive early in the New Year, men wounded in the later stages of the Somme offensive, some having already spent up to four months in hospital and were now on the road to recovery, although about a third were permanently maimed in one way or another. These were the most cheerful. They had survived and could never be sent out again, whereas the more able-bodied lived in permanent fear of being reboarded fit for active service and were inclined to retard their own recovery, sometimes with Maureen’s connivance.
At first there were only about a score of them but within weeks the Government sanctioned the erection of three Nissen wards in the small paddock on the right of the drive and thereafter the odd chronic case began to appear, including gas casualties, one or two who had lost limbs, and a few cases of shell-shock, men who sweated and trembled and dribbled and were sometimes sent off again to mental hospitals. By then a permanent Medical Officer had been allocated to Shallowford, together with three downgraded medical orderlies, themselves former casualties of 1914 fighting.
The weather that winter was cruel, with months of severe frost and several heavy falls of snow, so that, for the most part, the men remained indoors, some of them permanently in bed and it was this that compelled Claire to reorganise the staff almost as soon as it had been enrolled. She had not bargained for so many immobile casualties and the MO and his orderlies were fully occupied in the wards and could give no help in cooking, cleaning and organising recreational facilities. Doctor Maureen was equally busy, sometimes working an eighteen-hour day but she seemed to thrive on it and soon gained ascendancy over Captain Gleeson, the MO, who had served with the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry from Mons to the battle of Loos, and been invalided home with bronchitis in the autumn of 1915. Gleeson was a cheerful but irascible man who looked a little like a grizzled Father Christmas and could swear fluently in Hindustani. He was inclined, however, to take things easily, reckoning that at fifty-eight he had done his bit. He told Claire that only compassion kept him at his post he had been on reserve when recalled in 1914. His three orderlies worked extremely hard for they were anxious to remain on home service but when, in early March, the number of patients rose to eight-five the demands upon Claire, Mrs Handcock, Thirza and the scratch team of dailies she had enlisted in the village became intolerable and she began a local recruiting drive that was met with immediate s
uccess.
Her first triumph was the enrolment of Marian Eveleigh, whom she managed to coax from communion with the spirits when everyone else, including Marian’s exasperated husband, had given her up for lost.
The death of her eldest son and the fear of losing Harold, his brother, now commissioned and serving in the Near East, had brought Marian to the edge of a nervous breakdown and Eveleigh’s uncharacteristic involvement with the land-girl Jill had coincided with her change in life so that the wretched woman’s world had crumbled to pieces. She shut herself up for days on end in the boy’s old bedroom where she was alleged to have established contact with a Red Indian spirit, who acted as intermediary between mother and son. Her daughters and the hired hands at Four Winds took it for granted that she was going the way of old Marian Codsall but Claire had known Marian all her life and remembered that she came from good, yeoman stock and was therefore not prepared to accept this verdict. In her initial approach she worked on the lines that, by taking service at the hospital, Marian could do something practical on behalf of her surviving son. She won her victory on the afternoon she persuaded Marian to call at Shallowford and meet some of the patients. One of them had served in Harold’s battalion in France and from that day on the cloud that had been settling on Marian Eveleigh’s mind began to disperse and she agreed to go to work in the kitchen. Doctor Maureen described her as a classic example of the value of occupational therapy, declaring that Claire had a natural gift for healing. She then urged her to try her luck on Elinor Codsall who, since the night of Gloria Pitts’ assault, had stayed within the confines of Periwinkle and was said to be developing into a recluse. Elinor proved more stubborn. To Claire’s first appeal to hand over the outdoor work to Old Matt, one of the biblical shepherds (who was the Valley stopgap these days) she advanced a flat refusal.
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