‘You haven’t told me what happened to you.’
She said with what seemed to him something of an effort, ‘The real waste of the war wasn’t the blood, you know, it was the brains! That’s the currency your generation will have to pay in. Keith had brains, not just exam-passing brains but the ability to select and interpret what he learned. After he was killed it seemed to me I should at least make some effort to compensate for the waste. I took a degree in Economics at Leeds University.’
It did not surprise him overmuch. There was something about her that suggested not only stamina but initiative.
‘You went back to school?’
‘Night school up to Matric standard; then I got a county grant. They go out of their way to cater for the morally earnest in the North, you know.’
‘And then?’
‘I ran headlong into the sex-barriers your mother spent her life storming. They are still there, you know, bristling with patronage, complacency and fly-buttons! I tried accountancy, then teaching, then actuarial work and flopped in all three! They say the professions are open to women now but it isn’t true of course, not unless a woman is prepared to wear a tight skirt and leave all the decisions to the men, even the one about what time she likes to go to bed.’
He ignored all her jibes. ‘What do you do now?’
‘I supervise a chain of working men’s clubs and do part-time secretarial work for a Member of Parliament. The clubs interest me. The MP doesn’t, I’m afraid.’
‘A Socialist MP?’
‘A very temporary one; he’ll be looking for a job himself before he’s acquired a taste for House of Commons sherry.’
There were so many things he wanted to ask her—how secure was the recent Labour victory at the polls, how sincere was her avowed contempt for men of whatever political persuasion, and above all what remedies, if any, she prescribed for the anaemia of Western civilisation but at that moment the music stopped and he heard Stephen bawling for him from the terrace.
‘I’ll have to go,’ he said. ‘Won’t you at least come up and have a drink of some sorts?’
‘No thanks,’ she said, ‘I’ll bring our trap round to the front if you tell my sister I’m waiting. I promised Mother I’d get her back at a reasonable hour and I suppose three o’clock is reasonable by Esther’s standards.’
He offered his hand and she took it absentmindedly.
‘Couldn’t we meet again before I go back to town?’ he suggested. ‘I’m thinking of going on the staff of a new magazine but nothing’s settled yet.’
‘What kind of magazine?’
‘A long-hair; it’s to be called The Forum. Have you heard about it?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve heard about it,’ and then, with another crackle of candour, ‘You could do a lot better than that, Simon!’
‘Then let’s meet and discuss it. Tomorrow evening? I can pick you up and we could have a bite to eat at The Mitre, in Paxtonbury.’
‘Very well.’ She sounded unenthusiastic but he was still young enough and vain enough not to care. He went off along the flagged wall calling to Stephen but as he went he wished he could have seen her in the light, especially when she was talking about Beanpole Horsey.
IV
The twins ‘did their talking’ that same week, before all traces of the celebrations had been removed and it was as well for them perhaps that Simon was still at home to act as a buffer, and also that they had had the foresight to summon reserve artillery in the person of Uncle Franz Zorndorff who had been talked into paying one of his rare visits to the Westcountry.
The old man, whom Paul declared was going to live for ever, appeared the Monday after the party, spruce and chipper as ever, although, by Paul’s reckoning, he was now only a year short of ninety. He bowled up the drive soon after lunch in his huge, black Daimler, driven by a chauffeur wearing chocolate livery and Paul thought, as he watched the flunkey double round and give Franz an unnecessary arm as far as the porch, ‘The old rascal loves ostentation everywhere but in his counting-house. In there he’d too damned careful to spend sixpence on a new blotter!’ But he was pleased to see his father’s old partner nonetheless and made a mental note to seek his advice about farm prices and land values. The wily old Croat might spend his entire life between his luxury flat in the West End and his disputable Thames-side scrapyard, but his advice on any subject remotely connected with money was worth having and usually worth following. He called from the garden door as Claire ran out on to the porch, ‘Now what the devil brings you down here? Is the plague raging in town?’
The aged dandy waved his silver-topped cane and submitted gracefully to Claire’s embrace, and then Simon and Mary ran out, and after them the twins whooping with glee, so that Paul began to suspect there was more in this than met the eye and went back into the study to rake among memories of recent hints on Claire’s part connected in some way with the twins’ harebrained schemes for making money—for ‘getting aboard the jolly old bandwaggon’ as they would have put it. Their bandwaggons, Paul reflected, were gaudier than Simon’s but just as flimsily constructed and somehow far more calculated to irritate him. Simon’s false starts had about them a few rags of dignity whereas the twins’ were balloons full of blather that soared and were forgotten in a matter of days. The presence of Franz, however, made him more than usually curious to know what was brewing and he would have gone through into the hall had not Stephen appeared suddenly in the doorway and said, ‘Uncle Franz is swilling tea, Gov! He says to leave him with Mother for a jiffy. Andy and I want to jaw first, is that okay with you?’
‘You don’t have to tell me something’s afoot,’ Paul said and grinned in spite of himself for it was impossible to resist the impact of The Pair. ‘Come on in, both of you, and out with it! Your brother told me you had another rod in pickle for me.’
‘Won’t cost you a sou, Gov, and that’s a fact,’ said Stephen, sidling in and shutting the door after his twin. ‘Isn’t it a fact, Andy?’
‘Fact,’ said Andy, who habitually used fewer words than his brother.
‘Well, what is it? Not another madcap scheme like that marine engineering lark, I hope.’
‘Nothing like it,’ said Stephen, sitting and throwing his long legs over the arm of the chair, ‘this is a corker and Uncle Franz is right behind us, isn’t that so, Andy?’
‘Money in it,’ Andy said, ‘real money! No outlay either.’
‘At least not from your standpoint, Gov,’ Stevie added promptly.
‘Well that’s a change anyway,’ Paul said watching their exchange of glances with sardonic amusement. ‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that you’ve decided to take my advice and pick up where you both left off at Agricultural College?’
‘Look, Gov, farming’s a dead duck. Honestly it is!’
‘Dead and buried,’ confirmed Andy. ‘Ask any of your tenants, they’ll soon get you up-to-date!’
He knew it was useless to argue with them. They had been over the ground so often since both had left school without matriculating; they had been over it, through it and round it, with and without benefit of supplementary arguments and suggestions contributed by Claire, John Rudd and the Principal of the County Agricultural College they had attended for a couple of terms. ‘Well,’ he said, resignedly, ‘get to the point, I’m listening.’
‘Uncle Franz has asked us to take over his Birmingham Branch,’ said Andy, rather too bluntly it would seem for his brother’s liking for Stevie swung round in protest but was checked by a gesture on the part of Andy, confirming Paul’s theory that although Stephen was the more dominant of the two Andy was the brains of the alliance. He said, trying to keep his voice level, ‘What the devil do you mean? What Birmingham branch? And branch of what, for God’s sake?’
Stevie, already out of his depth, was content to leave the matter with his twin but Andy went on, deliberately, �
�Uncle Franz has a yard up there. It’s been open a year but it’s being run by a crook and isn’t paying off! It could tho’, particularly with another slump around the corner. Uncle Franz thinks we’d make a go of it.’
‘A “yard”?’ Paul queried, repressing an impulse to shout. ‘You mean—a scrapyard?’
‘What else? Franz is the king of scrap, isn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ Paul said, ‘he is, and when I was a year or two older than you he did his best to make me the Crown Prince! I declined the honour and looking back on my life I count myself very fortunate!’
‘But that’s just it,’ Andy said, leaning forward and speaking with great emphasis, ‘looking back on your life, Gov! We’re concerned with our lives and neither of us have the slightest inclination to vegetate down here!’
Out of the corner of his eye Paul saw Stephen wince but Andy, unrepentant, went on before either of them could comment. ‘I don’t mean that you’ve vegetated, Gov! Nobody around here could accuse you of that, but what you’ve done you wanted to do and were good at whereas Stevie and I, we’re neither of us particularly bright and have to grab at what chances present themselves! I reckon we could tackle this lark and might even make a go of it! Anyway, we’ve talked it over and we’d like to try.’
It was a longish speech for Andy and left him a little breathless and red in the face. Paul said, as his mind still boggled at the project, ‘You say you’ve talked it over? Do you mean with your mother, as well as with Uncle Franz and Simon?’
‘No,’ admitted Stephen, ‘we thought of doing so but didn’t. It didn’t seem fair to involve her in case you blew your top!’
Strange that, Paul reflected, calming somewhat. Strange and a little touching that they should have reservations in that respect. It did them credit he supposed, but it also showed how accurately they had measured Claire’s loyalty. Then, as he got his second wind, he had leisure to ponder the irony of the situation. From scrap to scrap in one generation! How Franz must relish the proposal after all he had heard from Paul on the subject of scrapyards over the last twenty-seven year! He said, very curtly, ‘Very well, you’ve had your say. Run along and let me talk this over with that old rascal.’
‘Don’t you want to hear details?’ Stevie asked and Paul said no but if he had to listen to them he preferred hearing them from Franz.
They got up gratefully enough but as they reached the door he relented slightly and said, ‘Well, at least you didn’t taunt me for using scrap money to keep the Valley alive since the war!’
‘We thought of it, Gov, but decided it was below the belt!’ Stevie said and they both vanished under cover of his grunt of laughter.
Paul went over to the window and looked down the curving line of the avenue of chestnuts. He still felt winded and was glad of a moment to compose himself before Franz appeared. From the angle of the window he could see the glint of afternoon sun on the ford and the shadow-play on the long swell of the Codsall stubble fields where they climbed to the watershed on the edge of the moor. He remembered the first time he had stood here and looked westward to the boundary, the day before the Lovell sale, in the long, dry summer of 1902, just before he had made up his mind to buy the place and years before those two young idiots had been thought of; well, it was pretty well full circle now, with all three of his sons opting out of the estate and the demands it made on a man. They would find their way, he supposed, but it would be their way not his or Claire’s and there was, after all, some justice in their argument. He had a right to want at least one of them to follow on here but he had no right to insist on it and he knew before he heard Franz’s step what the outcome would be. If he had a successor here it would have to be a grandson and even that, he felt, was unlikely.
The old man advertised himself with a cough, then shuffled in and stood with his back to the door. Paul thought he had seldom seen Franz so unsure of himself and it cheered him. It was not often he had the old man at a disadvantage.
‘Well, Franz,’ he said. ‘I suppose they told you I took it on the chin, although I must say it makes nonsense of everything I had in mind for them. Was it their idea or yours?’
‘Mine, Paul,’ Franz said, ‘and common decency demands I make some effort to hammer the motive into your thick skull.’ He lowered himself gently into Claire’s armchair and lit one of his long Dutch cheroots. He looked, Paul thought, like a centenarian gnome got up for a wedding—trim Van Dyke beard and sidewhiskers, razor-sharp creases in his striped trousers, puffed grey stock fixed with a diamond pin, gnarled fingers crowded with gold rings. He said, puffing a thin stream of bluish smoke, ‘I have a motive and it’s a disinterested one, I assure you.’
‘You imply you agree with Andy when he says British agriculture is dead and buried?’
‘No,’ Franz said, ‘but it soon would be if their sort had a hand in it! The fact is, Paul, my boy, you haven’t made allowances for the gap between their generation and yours. It’s a great deal wider than the usual gulf between father and son.’
‘The thing that defeats me,’ Paul said suddenly, ‘is that those boys are good farming stock on their mother’s side. Simon I could understand—any child of Grace would have to behave eccentrically but Claire’s boys—old Derwent’s grandchildren . . . !’
‘It isn’t eccentric to want to clear a fresh circle for yourself at twenty-one, Paul! After all, you did and were damned obstinate about it if I remember rightly! In any case, those boys are as far away from us as we were from men born during the French Revolution. You can blame the war for that but don’t blame them.’
‘But what the hell could they do in a Birmingham scrapyard? They’ll only lose money and you’ll ship them back to me the moment they do. I know you that well, Franz!’
‘My boy,’ said Franz, with the air of taut patience that always irritated Paul when they disagreed, as they did over almost everything they discussed. ‘Why will you persist in looking on the scrap-metal industry as the prerogative of a man in a leather apron, driving a donkey-cart? Did you ever see me touch a piece of salvage? What will they do up there? They’ll do what I tell them to do, make friends and contacts, hob-nob with steel-masters, used-car dealers, machinists, boiler-makers, wholesale meat-purveyors and wiremen! They’ll join clubs, buy drinks, dress well, drive fast cars, back steeplechasers and flirt with women, I hope; anything calculated to broaden their outlook and nail down new sources. I’ve done precisely that for the past fifty years and you can’t tell me that it hasn’t paid dividends!’
‘It sounds the kind of occupation well suited to them,’ Paul said, ‘but I hope you realise they can’t add a column of figures three times without getting three different totals, and that their scrawl is usually illegible.’
‘We maintain clerks and book-keepers,’ said Franz, acidly. ‘It wasn’t to learn how to run my business that I made the effort to come here, Paul.’
‘Neither was it to win my approval for my sons leaving me in the lurch,’ said Paul cheerfully, ‘for you’ve always been too damned arrogant to seek a blessing from anyone!’
Franz smiled, accepting the thrust as a compliment. ‘I won’t quarrel with you there, my boy, but the fact is I was wrong about you and admit it! The only real success is living one’s life the way one wants to live it and, taken all around, you’ve been successful. Damn it, how many men have survived two wars and two marriages and stayed sane and solvent?’
‘It wasn’t just luck, Franz, it was often more a matter of holding on.’
‘Whatever it was timing had something to do with it, which brings me to the only real point I want to make.’
‘Well?’
‘You had a twelve-year apprenticeship before the rot set in. You settled in here smug and cosy when the pound stood for something abroad, when everybody knew their place and you and all your bucolic friends could take tea on the lawn without the tablecloth blowing away and wasps crawling up yo
ur corduroys! You ought to remember that when you expect those boys to use your set of values! I’m nearly twice your age and I don’t expect them to use mine! They have to make a new mould and they can’t do it here growing prize artichokes and playing cricket on the green! Make ’em and they’ll go sour on you, sour and rotten, I promise you! I’ve seen too many rich men’s sons warped by Papa’s conceits not to know what I’m talking about. I’ve given you good advice in the past—it was me who put you on to this place at the start of it all—and I’m giving you more now! Let ’em go, and Simon as well if he wants to, and do it with good grace! Let ’em find out for themselves what it’s really like out there in among the grime and brickstacks. Either they’ll adjust and do you credit or they’ll come home with their tails between their legs, in which case you might found your neo-yeoman family after all!’
By the time Franz had finished and thrown his cheroot butt into the grate as a kind of full-stop Paul was chuckling, not so much because, in his heart, he agreed with the old man, but because his explosive vitality had the effect of cutting everything down to size and making Paul’s initial distaste for the project seem as prejudiced as Henry Pitts’ stonewall opposition to selling his plough horses and accepting the gift of a tractor. He said, pacifically, ‘All right, Franz, you don’t have to break a blood-vessel on their behalf! They’re all three of age, anyway, and I couldn’t stop them doing what they wanted. Good luck to them and to you and you’re the one who is going to need it most! However, since you seem to be in such a pontifical mood, and since I rarely see you where we’re not interrupted by the telephone, will you give me some advice? There are pretty clear signs of another slump setting in. Is it likely to be easier or more difficult to ride out than the last one, from my viewpoint I mean?’
‘Now why the devil should you ask me that?’ Franz said, playing at being ruffled. ‘What do I know of livestock and land values this far from civilisation?’
Post of Honour Page 41