Post of Honour

by R. F Delderfield

  So they wandered about, looking for and finding small, everyday adventures, but the idyll came to a sudden end in 1922, when Rumble Patrick was sent away to prep school and Mary put up her hair and had to pay some heed to her clothes. Then Mary went as a weekly boarder to the Convent of the Holy Family, in Paxtonbury, and there were only the holidays when they tried but failed to pick up where they had left off. Something went missing and neither of them could discover what it was; then Whiz grew old enough to invite her pony-mad friends back to the house, and some of the twins’ friends from Paxtonbury and Whinmouth began to notice Mary’s dark, shy charm and employ all, kinds of stratagems to get her alone and kiss her behind the barns or in dark corners of the house. At first she was indignant at such tomfoolery, thinking them very soppy but later both her mother and Whiz urged her to be ‘more sociable’ and she did try very hard, and even fancied for a week or two that she was in love with a red-headed boy called Gussie whom Stephen brought home to stay for a fortnight one summer. Yet the secret bond between them was never completely severed; it only stretched as the years went by, and the house was full of strangers who kept passing between them with their crazy horse dance steps and ukuleles and horseplay, so it was not until the week Rumble disgraced himself at school and came home with wild, frightening talk of going to Australia to learn sheep-farming, that the memory of their childhood alliance became vivid to her. Before that, just before that, something happened that made her particularly sensitive to Rumble’s callous declaration of independence.

  A night or two before Rumble’s return there had been a Junior Hunt Ball at Whinmouth and, as usual on these occasions Mary was told off to chaperon her younger sisters, Whiz and Claire, respectively seventeen and fourteen, after they had been driven to the dance in the family Austin by Mark Codsall. The role of chaperone was largely fictitious these days, especially in the Craddock household, but Mary got her routine instructions—‘Keep an eye on them and make sure you’re all ready to leave by midnight.’ Claire Craddock was very broadminded in the matter of her daughters’ upbringing, not only because she trusted Mary implicitly and remembered her own youth had been singularly free of restrictions but also because, far more than Paul, she had come to terms with the new freedoms. It seemed to her both natural and healthy that young people should want to grow up fast and enjoy themselves out of range of adults, and whenever Paul challenged the wisdom of her tolerance she could be relied upon to dismiss his growls as evidence of a hang-over from an era dead and buried in the 1914–18 earthquake.

  ‘No one quarrels with your preference for horse-transport and horn-lanterns, dear,’ she told him on this occasion, ‘but you really must try to see the world through their eyes! All I’m concerned with is getting them there safely and getting them back at a reasonable hour. I’ve enough faith in my daughters to know that they’ll conduct themselves sensibly in company and this is a perfectly respectable company, composed of people we know. It might interest you to learn that it actually goes on until two a.m. but I’ve told Mary to have them back here by one!’

  ‘I should damn well think so!’ he replied but he did not make an issue of it. He would never have admitted as much but he had respect for her judgment in these matters and was obliged to admit that she had made a more successful job of raising the girls than he had of tailoring the boys.

  Whiz was particularly excited, being currently involved in a double flirtation with two young thrusters from the Paxtonbury Farmers’ Hunt and looked forward to the certainty of being sure of partners for every dance and perhaps the cause of a quarrel. Fourteen-year-old Claire (whom everybody mistook for sixteen) was eager to show off her new apple-green organdie, her first real dance frock bought on the occasion of her fourteenth birthday, in June. Mark got them there too early and the first hour or so was dull but the dance warmed up when all the young men came in from The Mitre and Mary soon lost track of Whiz, suspecting that she was spending more time in the parked cars than on the dance floor, whereas it intrigued her to see young Claire blush for the first time in her serene existence, when the Master’s son, a willowy young man with a reputation for being Paxtonbury’s most expert ballroom dancer, partnered her to win the fox-trot competition. She was watching her sister come down from the platform and marvelling, as she often did on these occasions, at Claire’s breathtaking poise and composure, when Bob Halberton lounged across and asked her for the next dance. She was glad to see him, even though he did seem to have consumed rather more than a safe quota of beer, for up to then her dancing had been limited to potluck stumbles in the Paul Jones. She had known Bob all her life. His father was a doctor, practising in Whinmouth and he was a genial, heavy-featured boy, who was often out with the Sorrel Vale Hunt on Saturdays. He was engaged, he told her, in studying law and was finding it a terrible bore, so much so that he was thinking of throwing it up and trying for a short-service commission in the Air Force.

  ‘That’s the life!’ he told her, clutching her tightly as they shuffled round the crowded floor. ‘I’ve already joined a Flying Club at Reading, where I’m bogged down in an office so I get a flip most weekends. Who the devil wants to be chained to a stool grubbing among conveyances and affiliation orders? If it wasn’t for the fact that the old man has sworn to cut me off I’d sign on without even asking him and to hell with the consequences!’

  She had always rather liked Bob Halberton, who had the gaiety of the twins plus, she suspected, a good deal more intelligence and she thought of him as kind-hearted and masculine. She also liked him for not being sure of himself, or as good-looking as most of Whiz’s friends and the amateur sheikhs the twins brought home but she had never suspected that he was interested in her so that when he said, on the long drum roll, ‘Look here, Mary, it’s stuffy in here. Let’s go out for some air!’ she was flattered but reminded him of her responsibilities as chaperone. He said, laughing, ‘Oh, to the devil with that! They ought to be looking after you!’ and then, as though she was feinting, ‘Is there someone else? I always took you for the unsophisticated one!’

  The gibe (for she accepted it as one) hurt a little and she replied, with a crackle of defiance, ‘I’ll get my wrap.’ and on the way to the cloakroom told Whiz that ‘she was going out with Bob Halberton for a cooler’. Whiz laughed and looked surprised. ‘You. And Bob Halberton? My word, Mar, you’re coming on but watch out, they say he’s hot stuff!’

  ‘He won’t be “hot stuff” with me,’ Mary retorted, suddenly feeling annoyed with herself and everyone in the room, excluding Bob Halberton, to whom she felt she owed her escape from the company of wallflowers but as they made for his car, an Austin Seven painted to look like a racing car, she decided that he was not safe to drive and told him so and to her relief he said, ‘I daresay you’re right!’ and motioned her into the back, climbing in after her and losing no time in clasping her in a bearlike embrace.

  She did not mind being kissed by him, accepting the sad fact that almost every man who kissed you at a dance, or a celebration of any sort, was certain to smell of liquor but she had never been kissed so enthusiastically as Bob kissed her and wondered if it had anything to do with being in need of solace. People usually were when they sought her out and his grumblings about office life were still fresh in her mind. She drew back at last and said, ‘Could I have a cigarette, Bob?’

  He laughed rather unpleasantly at this, recognising it as a time-honoured manoeuvre in the art of self-defence but he gave her one, saying, ‘I didn’t know you smoked?’

  ‘Well, I’ve started!’ she said, so sharply that he laughed again, saying, ‘Don’t think I don’t understand! All your life you’ve been stuck with the job of Little Mother. Well, it’s time you started having fun, so why not let rip!’ and he kissed her again, this time letting his hand slip over her shoulder and rest on her breast. She remembered then what Whiz had said about him being ‘hot stuff’ but in her new role as a rebel she did not see how she could protest without see
ming a prude, so she puffed stolidly at the cigarette as he stealthily extended his hold but realised, rather forlornly, that she was deriving no pleasure at all from his mauling and wondered how all her contemporaries could welcome this kind of thing as they apparently did whenever they were alone in the dark with boys. He said, as though to relax her, ‘You’re very sweet, Mary! I’ve always thought of you as the flower of the flock!’ but instead of pleasing her the comment touched her pride and she replied, ‘If you’re referring to my brothers and sisters I should like to know what’s wrong with them!’

  He took up her challenge more ruthlessly than she expected. ‘Well, let’s face it, Mary; your brother Simon is a bolshie, the twins are a pair of nitwits, and although both your sisters are damned pretty they know it, even that kid Claire! I’m not a fool, it must be sheer hell living with younger sisters who do everything so well that everyone looks over your head at them!’

  His appalling honesty made her shudder but because she recognised a strong element of truth in what he said she kept her temper in check, thinking, ‘At least he has the guts to say what everyone else thinks! That’s more than anyone will, even Mother!’ and she said miserably, ‘I suppose that implies I’m the flop of the family? Well, I am! I’m not at ease with people like young Claire and I can’t win prizes at every field event like Whiz. I’m not gay and dressy and gregarious like the twins, or even bolshie and clever like Simon! Would you mind telling me exactly why you asked me to come out here? Was it out of pity?’

  It was his turn to recoil. He sat back, taking her by the shoulders and turning her face to him under the unflattering glow of the parking-ground lamp and for a moment seemed at a loss what to say. Then her instinctive sympathy for him gave him the wrong clue, as she said, hastily, ‘I’m sorry, Bob! That was a beastly thing to say! Let’s go back inside,’ and she reached to open the door.

  ‘Don’t be such a damned fool, Mary!’ he growled, throwing his arm around her. ‘Have fun yourself for once!’ and he began to kiss her with such determination that she was crushed against the hard leather cushions of the tiny car. Then he was almost on top of her, his hand slipping the shoulder strap of her dress over her arm in a clumsy attempt to fondle her small bosom. There was hardly enough space to resist but she did her best, pressing herself against the door and drawing up her knees so that her short dress wrinkled high on her thighs but even this he took as a gesture of encouragement, extricating his other hand and groping between her knees. Then fear and distaste gave way to fury and she dragged her nails down the side of his face and taking advantage of his wincing recoil rolled to the floor, grabbed the handle and fell out on to the tarmac. She heard him shout, ‘Mary, I’m sorry . . . wait!’ but she picked herself up and ran, not back to the hall but round the building into the shadow and across the little square to the quay where she stopped, steadying herself against the harbour guard-rail. She felt sick with misery and shame but still consumed with a terrible anger, not for Bob, whom she reasoned would be very sorry for himself when he sobered up, but with the world as a whole and her allotted place in it, the plainest, gawkiest and shyest of a family of six, a girl who had no more finesse when faced with a routine dance-hall hazard than to scratch a man’s face raw and then rush off into the dark like an outraged virgin pursued by a satyr. Whiz was two years her junior but Whiz would have extricated herself from such a situation with dignity and hauteur and surely even Claire, at fourteen, would have had enough sense not to climb into the back of a car with a half-tipsy boy, imagining that all he wanted from her was a dry peck or two and a sympathetic audience. Bob Halberton was clearly right when he implied that she was the family flop, the predestined maiden aunt, who would sit at home knitting woollies for a chain of nieces and nephews until her life grew dim and purposeless. Why was she so different from all the others? Why did she find a tussle in the back of a car degrading and humiliating, when most girls her age would have shrugged it off as no more than tiresome and others, a majority, perhaps, would have found it flattering, especially if they had spent two hours watching others enjoy themselves. She could find no answer to these questions that did not point to personal inadequacy and suddenly, to her renewed shame, tears began to flow and her whole world clouded over as she went back over Bob Halberton’s summary of the Craddocks of Shallowford—a bolshie, a couple of empty-headed idiots, two vain extroverts and a reject! Did everyone outside the Valley—and perhaps those inside it—view the family in this light? It was a chilling thought for, until that moment, she had always tended to think of the Craddocks as the acknowledged leaders of the community. Perhaps this was a fallacy? Perhaps people in places like Whinmouth and Paxtonbury had always regarded her father as a man who was playing Squire with money earned in a scrapyard, and her mother as a lucky farmer’s daughter, shrewd enough to have grabbed him on the rebound after a disastrous marriage to real gentry?

  Bob found her there dabbing her eyes and trying, in the wan light of the harbour lamps, to repair her make-up. He seemed contrite and deflated, showing three curving lines of nail-furrows on each cheek and said, as soon as he saw her, ‘I’m sorry, Mary! I didn’t realise what an ass I was making of myself . . . I’ve always liked you a lot, honestly, and after all you did give a chap the impression . . . ’ and he tailed off, shuffling from one foot to the other and dabbing his scratches with a handkerchief. There was, she decided, small comfort to be derived from his abjectness, for even now he was careful to use the verb ‘like’ rather than risk a second misunderstanding. Then her fatal pity took a hand again and she said, quietly, ‘You can’t go back in the hall with your face in that state, you’d better go home and forget what happened. It was my fault really, I shouldn’t have come out. At eighteen, it’s time I learned what’s expected of a girl who does,’ and she walked back across the square with Bob trotting alongside like a terrier who has been whipped and is hoping to find a way of wriggling back into grace. He found none; she said, decisively, ‘Good night, Bob,’ and went straight into the hall, where everyone was bobbing round the floor to the rhythm of the latest bit of nonsense:

  ‘There ain’t no sense,

  Sitting on the fence,

  All by yourself in the moonlight . . . ’

  and although Mary found the theme appropriate to her mood its irony had no power to cheer her as she sat waiting for Mark Codsall to call and take them home. When he did appear, on the stroke of midnight, she summoned her sisters with such impatience that Whiz complained, ‘You needn’t be in such a panic just because your Bob has taken himself off!’ and Mary felt she could have boxed her ears on the spot. To Whiz’s subsequent demand for an account of what happened, she snapped, ‘Nothing! Nothing but silliness!’ and that was her sole contribution to the lively recapitulation of the evening’s triumphs that beguiled her sisters all the way home.

  And then, after a day and a night of brooding, Rumble was restored to her and she tore downstairs in response to his shout only to learn, to her bewilderment, that he had been politely expelled and had made up his mind, presumably with her father’s blessing, to remove himself to Australia! What was more galling than this monstrous decision was the eagerness with which Rumble embraced it. All through the autumn, while letters and cables were passing to and fro between him and his future hosts, and his great black cabin trunk was being filled, he ranged about the house practising a ridiculous Australian accent and spicing his conversation with outlandish words like ‘pommie’, ‘outback’ and ‘fair dinkum’. It was as though, like Simon and the twins before him, he could hardly wait to scrape Valley mud from his shoes and whilst she had understood the restlessness of her brothers, Rumble’s rejection of the old life—a time that had once seemed eternal—mystified and depressed her.

  It was not until his last afternoon that she had an inkling of what lay behind this renunciation of their past. It was almost Christmas then and a cheerless Christmas it promised to be, for there was little point in decorating the house
for a family reunion that might last two or three days and would not, in any case, include the twins, who were in the Tyrol, and Rumble, who was due to sail on December 22nd. The weather, however, did its best to help the Valley show off its autumn clothes and when she accepted his invitation for a final ramble she found that October still lingered among the oaks and chestnuts of the southern rim of the woods, and that when they went down the long, tangled slope to the mere the water was slate-blue in pale sunshine and the evergreens on the islet were fortified against winter by a gloss that still held the ripeness of June. She noticed, a little maliciously, that he had lost some of his bounce and that his fresh, squarish face now had an almost stoical expression. He said nothing, however, until they moved along level with the ruinous old pagoda where he stopped, took her arm and said with rare earnestness, ‘Will you promise something, Mar? Will you come here sometimes, to this spot, and—well, remember me once in a while?’