Post of Honour
Page 83
‘It’s just as I imagined,’ she said, ‘it’s got a terrible privacy, as though it was the very heart of the Valley. Do you feel that?’
‘No, I don’t but I can imagine that was how Hazel Potter and Ikey thought of it. Nobody ever once saw them together until he married her early in the war, so they must have been intensely private people. But me, I like sun and a broad vista. My centrepiece is the edge of French Wood, looking south. What’s this pact Rumble talked about? Do you mind telling me?’
‘It’s to do with his survival,’ she said, ‘and I don’t care how ridiculous it sounds it makes sense to me. This is where he began and this is the hub of where he’ll finish. It’s the gypsy in him. He knows, don’t you see? And he wants to convince me, so that I won’t be jittery all the time he’s away. He began in the Valley and he’ll come back to the Valley in the end.’ She looked at him speculatively. ‘Sentimental tosh?’
‘To anyone but you, me or Rumble,’ he said, and it occurred to him that, over the years, he had done her an injustice, imagining that even she, the most fanciful of the brood, had never shared his sense of communion with the Valley.
‘You want to stay up here a bit?’
‘Yes, a few minutes but first there’s something I can tell you that I haven’t told Rumble. You’ll be having another grandchild before Christmas.’
‘You let him go? Without telling the boy? But that was crazy. He would have …’
‘Backed down? Yes, I imagine he would. That was why I didn’t tell him. Nobody hobbles Rumble, not even me. He’d made up his mind and I didn’t want to be the one to bring more pressure on him. You brought all you could and I wasn’t holding him to ransom. Do you imagine I don’t know him by now?’
He stood just inside the entrance of the cave looking and feeling foolish, so much so that she laughed at his chapfallen expression and said, ‘Run along, Dad, I’ll find my own way back. And don’t fuss! I’ve got seven months to go and I hope it’s another boy. That’ll give you that much more insurance, won’t it?’
He took her hand, pressed it, and blundered back along the gorse tunnel into the open. The heaviness that had dragged at him all through the scurry of Rumble’s departure was gone but it was not wholly as a result of the news she had passed to him so casually but rather her awareness of his desperate need for some kind of reassurance in the future. They must, he told himself, have often discussed his obsession with this tangle of woods, fields and streams that had been his being for so long, and it therefore followed that their estimate of him, and his involvement with the place, was not the rich joke it was to the rest of the family. It was comforting, he thought, to be tolerated to this extent, and his step as he descended to the clearing surrounding Sam Potter’s cottage was almost jaunty.
‘If I’m looking for continuity,’ he told himself smugly, ‘it’s there I’m most likely to find it! I only hope to God that some damned U-boat doesn’t make fools of us all.’
Old Sam Potter came out of his back door carrying a bowl of chicken mash and Paul hailed him gratefully. Despite years of axe-swinging and constant plodding in clumsy boots about the bogs and coverts at this end of the estate, Sam had put on weight and Paul judged he would turn the scale at seventeen stones. ‘Hi, there!’ he shouted, ‘Mary and I have just seen Rumble Patrick off. Any news of your boy?’
‘Giddon no,’ Sam said, ‘Dick doan put pen to paper any more than I ever did but ’er phoned his Uncle Smut a—month or two back, asking for fags. They’m short of ’em out yonder it zeems.’
‘Out yonder’ Paul reflected, might mean anywhere at all to Sam Potter, who still thought of Cornwall and Somerset as foreign countries. He declined Sam’s invitation for ‘a dish o’ tay’ and leaned his elbows on the fence that surrounded the cottage. ‘Ah, they’re a footloose lot, Sam,’ he commiserated, ‘but they’ll grow tired of it I wouldn’t wonder, and settle here like the rest of us,’ but Sam had no faith in the stability of Shallowfordians born after the death of Queen Victoria and said, scattering the mash among lean, long-legged hens, ‘Dornee believe it, Squire. They baint happy in one place more than an hour at a time, not none of ’em. And if they do come backalong they’ll turn the bliddy plaace upzide down, you zee if they don’t.’
At any other time Paul would have confirmed Sam’s prophecy but today, despite Rumble’s departure, he felt optimistic and turning away passed down the long side of the Mere to the point where he could find the shortest ascent to the spot where they had left the car. As though to encourage him the sun at last broke through the canopy of cloud and a beam struck the underside of a giant beech, sprouting a hundred thousand new leaves. The lesson of renewal could not have been lost upon him for he thought, ‘We’re a couple of old cart-horses, Sam and I, and it’s high time we were put out to grass. It’s just an accident that we’re both still at it but I’m damned if I do more than potter the moment the war’s over,’ and he tackled the last ten yards of the wooded slope and began, thankfully, to descend to the level of the road.
III
Mary emerged from the cave and climbed the lip of heather to the flat surface of the rock, asking herself whether her serenity had been assumed for the benefit of her father, admittedly the Valley’s most persistent worrier, but deciding that it had not and that she did indeed feel confidence in the future. To that extent Rumble Patrick’s notion of sending her here had succeeded more than he could have hoped. It was curious, she thought, but not more so than their association, their long partnership as children, his solemn proposal at seventeen, his sudden reappearance four years later and a marriage that had resulted in the safe, unexacting life she had always promised herself. He would almost certainly return as he had promised, and within hours they would pick up the threads of their life, exploiting his sense of purpose, rebuilding Periwinkle to his design, and steadily adding to their family and stock; another Paul and another Claire, caught up in the rhythm of the Valley.
She sat there a long time looking down on the spread of farms between the southern rim of the woods and the blue-grey line of the heath and dunes where Four Winds and Home Farm borders met the sea. Down there, she reflected, were innumerable Pittses and Craddocks and Stokes and Eveleighs, and some of them had been there a very long time but none as long as the Potters whose blood ran in her children, born and unborn. It increased her sense of kinship with him to reflect that when he had emerged, bawling and brick-red from under this very slab of sandstone, she had been toddling about the Big House yonder, almost as though she expected and awaited him. Now she could contemplate him as boy and man, as husband and lover, and think herself more fortunate than most. She wondered if seven years as Rumble Patrick’s wife had not left her a little smug and decided, with the minimum of self-reproach, that it had but why not? Their marriage had been modelled on that of her parents and this was her doing, not his. Her relationship with her mother was more that of a younger sister than a daughter and when all the others had gone their several ways, and she had stayed on awaiting Rumble’s return, she had had a better opportunity to assess the Big House partnership than any of the others who dismissed man, wife and way of life as hopelessly old-fashioned. Perhaps they were and perhaps it was, but the point was it had worked, and so had her own marriage, a carbon copy of the original, so who cared a damn about sex equality as proclaimed by poor old Rachel, or pursued by the sophisticated wives of The Pair?
It might have raised a blush on Claire’s cheek to know how closely her eldest daughter had checked the simple arithmetic of her relationship with Paul, and how faithfully the answers had been applied at Periwinkle. For the first time in years Mary recalled her mother’s blunt advice on the subject of marriage, offered only a week or two before Rumble had whisked her off to the little farm on the far side of the Valley. ‘The way to make it work is to be cheerfully available morning, noon and night, and go along with his major decisions, no matter how damn silly they seem at the time. If y
ou do quarrel don’t sulk but make it up in bed. In ten minutes you’ll both be back to normal.’ That was about it, for Claire with thirty-four years’ experience behind her, and for Mary with a mere seven. Looking back on those years she could remember no more than an occasional tiff, always resolved by mother’s prescription.
In her new-found serenity she could ponder the family as a whole, sparing a thought for the marriages of her brothers, and it seemed to her that all three of them would have benefited by closer observance of the old couple—a partnership, with the man a short head out in front, and any little differences resolved horizontally. Well, there it was and there was nothing very complicated about it. For mother and daughter it had meant fulfilment and that, she supposed, was an end in itself.
Down on the nearest grey stub of a sawn pine a dog fox looked up at her and showed his teeth. Peace and certainty warmed her breasts and belly and she called, in the brogue of old Sam Potter, ‘Hullo there, you ole varmint!’ The fox lifted a forepaw as though prepared to meet the challenge but suddenly changed his mind and padded unhurriedly down the long, sandy slope. In a moment, moving as jauntily as her father, she had slipped off the spur and followed him down to the Mere.
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About the Author
R. F. Delderfield (1912–1972) was born in South London. On leaving school he joined the Exmouth Chronicle newspaper as a junior reporter and went on to become editor. He began to write stage plays and then became a highly successful novelist, renowned for brilliantly portraying slices of English life. With the publication of his first saga, A Horseman Riding By, he became one of Britain’s most popular authors, and his novels have been bestsellers ever since. Many of his works, including A Horseman Riding By, To Serve Them All My Days, the Avenue novels, and Diana, were adapted for television.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1966 by R. F. Delderfield
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
978-1-4804-9050-5
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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