The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  ‘In one way I do. I should have gone mad if I had kept it bottled up any longer but just seeing you, and hearing your voice is hell. I couldn’t have got through last evening without all that drink.’

  His instinct was to shy away from involvement. He said, breathlessly, ‘This is crazy, Margy! God knows, I like you a lot, and always have, but you and me—how would it help? You’d feel even worse when I’d gone, and me … I’d see myself as the all-time bastard every time I thought of either you or Andy.’

  She said nothing but under the blanket he felt her body contract slightly and her withdrawal seemed to reaffirm that the decision was his and that she had emptied herself of blame simply by telling him about the medical student and the man from the Embassy. He understood this and resented it but there seemed nothing to be done about it. He said, bitterly, ‘You would feel that way, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No,’ she said, and he was shocked by the steadiness of her voice, ‘I wouldn’t feel any way, except glad. Glad because it was you and not someone who was out looking for a randy woman!’

  He wanted then to escape from the folds of the blanket and reject her with a laugh or a conventional gesture of sympathy. A sound like a groan escaped him and, without in the least moderating his yearning for her, anger rose level with pity. She knew what he was going through but she didn’t help him, and he knew that it was not from lack of sympathy on her part but because these last few months had robbed her of the power to make an emotional decision.

  He had no idea how long they sat there, her head on his shoulder, her body inclined to him by the angle of the couch and the folds of the shared blanket, but presently she said, in the same emptied voice, ‘Anyway, Andy won’t come back. I knew that the day we said good-bye at Chester Station, and he went off to that Personnel Despatch Centre. Maybe it was knowing it that made me act the way I did. I don’t know, I don’t know a damn thing anymore, except that everything is going to pieces and only you being around keeps me from wanting to pack it in.’

  Her fatalistic acceptance of Andy’s death, and the despair inherent in her voice frightened him as he had never been frightened by physical risks he faced almost every day of his life. He said, helplessly, ‘For Christ’s sake, Margy—don’t talk like that …’ but suddenly she threw aside the blanket and moved away from the couch so that he thought she was crossing the room for the drink he so badly needed. He soon realised otherwise. She had returned to the bedroom leaving the door wide open and switched on her bedside light. He called, furiously, ‘Get something on and for God’s sake let’s both have a drink!’

  ‘I don’t want any more to drink,’ she said, quietly. ‘If you do, help yourself.’

  There was silence for a moment as he made a great effort of will to get up, pour himself a stiff brandy, drink it and get to hell out of the place before she could move within reach again but suddenly she reappeared in the doorway, the light behind her, so that she might as well have been naked. That way, he thought, she looked exactly as he had just imagined her without clothes, her limbs plump, rounded and nicely proportioned, so that he suddenly thought of his wife’s figure as angular and without promise. She stood there perfectly still, looking across at him without a flicker of embarrassment or apology. Then she said, very levelly, ‘In for a penny in for a pound! That was another of Andy’s dictums, remember? Come in, man, and lock the damned door behind you!’ and she shrugged herself out of her nightdress and climbed slowly into bed.

  She had to shake him when she brought in the tea and he opened his eyes astonished to see her wearing that identical scarlet-lined cloak he had expected to see at the station. There was no hint in her manner or expression of the hysteria of less than three hours ago and when she addressed him by name she might have been hailing him on the beach at Deauville where he and Andy and Monica were sunbathing while she wandered off to fiddle with one of those idiotic little machines that accounted for her loose change wherever they went.

  ‘I’m going now, Stevie. You take your time. You’ve nothing to get up for, have you now?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘nothing’ and then, as he took the cup a little of her tranquillity passed to him and he looked at her with a kind of awe that acknowledged her ability to solve her problems so swiftly and resolutely. He opened his mouth to say something but she lifted her hand and pushed a playful finger against his lips. ‘No inquest,’ she said. ‘When do you have to go back?’

  ‘I’m due in camp at 0800 hours tomorrow and it’ll mean catching the 1.30 a.m. from King’s Cross. Will you be back in time?’

  ‘I’ll see that I am,’ she said, ‘and don’t bother about Henrietta. She’s off on a dirty weekend of her own. King’s Lynn I think she said. She won’t be here until tomorrow night. Good-bye now. There’s cornflakes and a few rashers in the ’fridge. Milk too if you want to make yourself coffee.’ She bent and kissed him on the mouth and as she drew away she gave a little giggle. ‘You’re plastered with lipstick,’ she said, ‘and you look like the broken-hearted clown! Don’t worry! It’s done and it’ll stay done, so make the best of it before everything goes bang!’

  IV

  It is just possible that Monica, married to Andrew instead of Stevie, might have become reconciled to the life of an R.A.F. camp-follower.

  Most people, both in the Valley and out of it, thought of The Pair as interchangeable but Claire for one had always known they were not. There was a fanatical streak in Andy that reminded her of Paul and was entirely lacking in his twin. Both had been unspectacular scholars at school but once they were launched into the scrap world old Franz Zorndorff had soon recognised the complementary contributions each could make to his business concerns. Stevie had charm and an amiability capable of conjuring a profit from the crustiest dealer and the fields in which he operated, cozening, bribing, softening up prospects, were bars or clubs. Andy showed himself more adept at mastering the economics of the trade and later, when they became fliers, he was able to pay the same address to the scientific aspects of aerial warfare. With Stevie, at least up to the moment he flew a bomber on operations, the war in the air had been little more than a lark. Technicalities bored him, even though he never had much difficulty in absorbing enough of them to make him an average pilot, but Andy soon outgrew their initial approach to flying and became deeply interested in the slow build-up of tactical skills as opposed to the hit-and-miss approach of the dashing amateurs who filled the gaps made in professional cadres by the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain. With the development of this more objective attitude some of the natural exuberance left over from his youth departed, enabling him, to an extent, to regard the extravagances of the R.A.F. façade in much the same light as his down-to-earth sister-in-law. He did not crumple his cap. He did not use much slang. And he had no personal animosity against the enemy, thinking of him as he had once thought of schoolmasters and rival scrap dealers, people there to be outwitted, targets for his ingenuity and daring.

  When fighter aircraft became more sophisticated his appetite for concerted and preconceived action grew with every sortie. He operated less and less as a well-mounted buck in the hunting field and more and more like a seasoned boxer, fighting his way towards a world title. He was in line for promotion now and, as he himself would have put it, intended to keep his nose clean. As a squadron-leader he would have some sort of say in tactics and could progress from the dogsbody stage to ranks where he might be given a chance to put some of his theories to work.

  Out here, in the Western Desert, the tempo of the aerial war was very different from the comparative slapdash days of British-­based operations in 1940 and early ’41. Squadron scores and squadron casualties were more moderate and combats were by no means as frequent as over the Kentish Weald and the Channel. To an extent, despite the ceaseless sway of armies between the Qattara Depression and Benghazi, the contest had settled down. Andy, based in the region of the Ruweisat Ridge, east of Alexandria, was
now flying every day, escorting coastal convoys or, once Rommel had launched his May offensive, the Blenheim bombers raiding enemy supply dumps and occasionally he tangled with a Stuka. In June of that year he got his first confirmed kill, a JU 88 lumbering into Tobruk after its surrender. Two days after that he shot out of the sun and killed a Stuka. He watched, impersonally, as the maimed aircraft hurtled down in wide circles to explode on the brown emptied landscape below and then made for base, unable to try his luck at strafing lorries crawling along the coastal road because his ammunition supply was exhausted.

  All through the final eastward heave of the Afrika Korps towards Egypt he was happily engaged in this kind of ploy, peeling off and following his leader down to shoot up transport, tanks and self-propelled 80 mm guns. The overall progress of the war, or even the campaign, did not concern him. He concentrated on the immediate task and gave hardly a thought to his wife, to his brother Stevie, or to the future once this fascinating period of his life should end. He did not contemplate death either, despite the occasional failure of a messmate to return from a sweep across the great blue and white bowl of the sky enclosing this featureless desert. Sometimes, when he was alone up there he would give expression to the sheer exhilaration of flying by mouthing some dance tune of the past, when he, Stevie and their wives had zoomed about Britain and the Continent in one or other of their many fast cars and although he could not hear himself sing, the rhythm of a ’thirties tune would conjure up a fleeting picture of Margaret’s chubby face puckered with laughter. The thing that sometimes puzzled him was that he no longer felt a physical need for women and he had once raised this subject with the unit M.O., who set about reassuring him with the paternal earnestness of the family G.P. In Andy’s view the man talked nonsense. The fact was the highly complex business of handling aircraft, and evolving new techniques satisfied his creative urge if there was such a thing outside of a book. When Margaret was available he had enjoyed her undemanding company and taken a great deal of pleasure in possessing her but the current demands made upon his energy far transcended the demands of these pleasant trivialities and he had never been much of a letter writer. It would, in fact, have surprised him a good deal to be reminded that there had once been a time when the sight of her, dressed for a night out, had enlivened him sufficiently to spoil her make-up and send her back to the dressing-table uttering counterfeit protests in her lilting Welsh accent. Because of this he did not think it strange that little or no word of her reached him when the squadron post-corporal shouted, ‘Mail up!’ Home now belonged in the past, before this demanding and wholly satisfying occupation translated him into a sensitive machine. Home had to do with contracts and bargaining, with bluff and a kind of second-rate espionage waged from behind desks and over the telephone. Somehow he could not see himself returning to it, any more than he could picture himself a farmer like his father. He flew into the sun, automatically noting the few landmarks and searching the vast brown wasteland for targets. To Andy Craddock, who all his life had been seeking outlets for his explosive energy and technical know-how, the war in the Western Desert was a legacy that had come his way when he was still young enough to profit by it.

  One morning he did get a letter from Margaret but it told him very little, for something she had written about Stevie’s whereabouts had been blocked out by the censor. She was thinking of giving up nursing, she said (he had forgotten she had returned to it), and hoped he was well. She had seen something of Stevie but nothing of Monica. She sent her love and missed him. That was about all and a less preoccupied man might have read an effort of composition into the note—for it was little more. He stuffed the letter in his pocket and ambled across the hard sand to watch his ground crew warm up his Hurricane. Today they were all taking a closer look at Rommel’s build-up in the Mersa Matruh area.

  V

  Far away to the east, where the brassy Indian sun beat down on the trim white buildings of a Sports Club some two hundred miles west of the Burma battlefront, another member of the Craddock family basked in the warmth of her own content.

  Karen McClean who, as ‘Whiz’ Craddock, had once carried off all the gymkhana prizes within a twenty-mile radius of the Valley, sunbathed her honey-coloured body beside the staff pool, contemplating the present with a smugness that discouraged close attention to the letter from her mother that had come in with the last mail. Claire Craddock was a gossipy letter writer once launched upon Valley topics, but it had never occurred to her, poor dear, that her daughter Whiz did not place the same importance on good harvests, or the enlistment in the Armoured Corps of a Valley craftsman’s son. Whiz had been interested but unmoved by news that the Luftwaffe had demolished Periwinkle, killing Rachel, her sister-in-law, and Rachel’s brother Harold, but she was not deeply concerned about the prospect of her sister Mary’s eccentric husband’s intention to forsake the land for the sea. Rumble Patrick, like most of the other Valley characters, had always struck her as a hobbledehoy and she had never regretted rejecting offers of marriage pressed upon her by farmers’ sons and marrying Ian who had now secured a staff appointment and seemed destined to move into the upper echelons of the Service. Some people, Mary for instance, would consider Ian very dull, with his Scots caution and infinite attention to detail but he suited Whiz because, alone among the Craddock tribe, her personality was undiluted by sentiment. All her life, and she was approaching thirty now, she had observed the conventions and, within those conventions, excelled. Singlemindedness, plus an uncompromising rejection of anything loosely described as romantic, had brought her precisely the kind of success she sought at any one time. She had been acknowledged the most expert equestrienne in the Valley and, later, its most expert dancer if one discounted fancy steps. At twenty she had married and had spent her life on foreign stations, getting to know people likely to contribute to Ian’s advance and shamelessly flattering the leathery wives of station commanders. She could manage house-servants with the easy competence of someone who had never had to grapple with the perverse independence of the Anglo-Saxon working-class and, as far as anyone could remember, she had never been seen to laugh, not even at an air commodore’s joke. Ian McClean had a very great respect for her and secretly acknowledged the part she had played in his promotion to the undreamed of status of group captain but, being a Scot, he would have found it too embarrassing to have told her as much, any more than he could have found words to express satisfaction or otherwise with her recent announcement (made under cover of darkness) that she was pregnant. He must, on the whole, have been pleased however, for his approach to her became even more ambassadorial as time passed. When she reached her fourth month of pregnancy they were treating one another like a couple of professional diplomats moving towards a common goal. The only moment of the day either of them unbent was when they discussed the forthcoming addition to the McClean family over the six o’clock drink that was now a ritual, for Ian saw comparatively little of his wife and child these days. He said, in a Perthshire accent magically released by a dram of Scots whisky, ‘It’s a pity the bairn canna be born in Scotland but I see no prospect o’ that.’ To which she replied, dutifully, that it was indeed a pity, for it would inflict upon his Aunt Jean, known to be very rich, a second disappointment, particularly if it was another girl. Ian said, after a thoughtful pause, ‘It’ll no’ be a girl,’ and she accepted this, supposing him to be on fairly intimate terms with God.

  Their rectitude was like a wall of smooth Scots granite, isolating them from a war that had by now involved so many amateurs that professionals wondered whether it was worth winning at such a cost to tradition. Seen like this man and wife were extraordinarily alike. Simon, noticing this as long ago as their wedding day, had said, ‘They’re not only made for one another, they were designed for mutual inflation!’ a remark that still encouraged Claire, in her lighter moments, to make bawdy guesses at their bedroom conversation. Always inclined to tease her children Claire continued to begin her letters with ‘Dear Old
Whiz …’ and when Whiz’s replies began ‘My Dearest Mother and Father …’ she knew she had made her point.

  Sitting beside the Club pool in the glaring sunlight Whiz turned the pages of her mother’s latest letter, noting that Periwinkle Farm would remain a ruin until the war was over, that the local black market was enriching certain Valley patriots, and that Stevie and his wife Monica had quarrelled over his refusal to accept a discharge to industry, but it was like listening to the prattle of Elspeth at present teaching a celluloid duck to swim in the shallow end. The only impact the letter made was to cause Whiz to wonder why her mother should bother to commit such trivia to paper and post it half-way across the world and soon she folded the sheets, returned them to her crocodile handbag and called for Club stationery to write a reply. She made no reference to her mother’s gossip but demolished it for what it was worth in her opening paragraph that ran, ‘Dearest Mother and Father, I received your letter by today’s post and am happy to inform you that I expect our second child in the first week of December, almost certainly after the 4th but before the 7th …’ a perfectly logical prophecy that reduced Claire Craddock, reading it at the breakfast table six weeks later, to helpless laughter. Paul dried the tea-splattered sheet of paper with a napkin and then joined in, so that the study rang with merriment. He said, when they had recovered somewhat, ‘Where on earth did she get it from? Do you suppose it was from me? Was I ever that pompous?’

  ‘Oh yes, and sometimes still are, but God, in His infinite mercy, threw in a handful of self-doubt so that you deflate every now and again. Read the rest of it for I can’t, it’ll set me off again,’ and he relayed the news that Ian’s staff appointment had been confirmed, that they had lunched with the Viceroy’s aide-de-camp, that all three of them were in excellent health, and that Ian’s batman had made little Elspeth a large rocking horse fitted with a howdah.