‘I didn’t have to discuss it,’ Rumble said. ‘I daresay she guessed what would happen the minute she saw the farm reduced to rubble and, in any case, it’s the man who wears the pants in our family. That was another thing I learned from you, Gov’nor!’
He looked at the boy carefully, wondering how many facts he had guessed about his origins and how much nonsense had been fed to him by Valley gossip.
‘I never told you much about how you arrived on the scene, Rumble,’ he said, ‘and maybe I should have. Claire and I always felt it might set you apart from the others.’
‘I asked around and filled in all the blank spaces. Rachel Eveleigh delivered me and she made no secret of it. Then there was Doctor Maureen, who seemed to know everything relevant to my mother. You never held back anything important about my father and finally there was my aunt, Joannie Potter.’
‘What did Joannie Potter tell you that we didn’t?’
‘She took me up to the badger slope in the woods and showed me the cave where I was born.’
He grinned and somehow Paul was relieved by his gaiety. It all seemed so improbable and yet, here was the metal from which the link between had been forged all those years ago, the daughter of his most raggletailed tenant lying in a hillside and giving birth to a child sired by a raggamuffin he had rescued from a Bermondsey scrapyard. He said, ‘Did you ever hear that your father didn’t know of your existence until you were two? Or that I had the one big row of my life with Claire when she opposed your father’s marriage to Hazel Potter?’
‘No,’ said Rumble, ‘I never actually heard it, but you’d be surprised at the hints some of your chapel-going tenants dropped.’
‘You mean that I was your real father?’
‘Well—in a way you were’ Rumble said. ‘You not only hooked my father out of the slums and gave him everything you gave your own sons, you did precisely the same for me when my father and mother snuffed it.’
‘Snuffed it.’ It seemed an odd way to refer to the violent deaths of man and wife that had followed one another so swiftly in that pitiless period between 1917 and 1918, but then Rumble would have no clear recollection of his mother and none at all of his father, blown to pieces in a German dugout when the war was all but over.
‘When are you going and what kind of job will you do?’
‘I signed for a Canadian ship as gunner’s mate. She sails from Plymouth next Friday in convoy. I always fancied myself popping off at Jerry aircraft. I might even get the silly sod who dropped an egg on Periwinkle!’
‘Do you know where you’ll be going?’
‘Good God no. They wouldn’t even give me a hint. But I’ve got my own ideas, based on the cargo they were taking aboard.’
‘Wherever it is it won’t be a picnic, but I daresay you thought of that.’ For a moment he was preoccupied with the business of screening an unpleasant vision of Rumble struggling in Arctic waters, or cowering under a rain of cannon shells on the Malta run, and Rumble, with his usual prescience, must have known as much for he said, ‘I’ll promise you something, Gov’nor. I’ll come back in one piece.’
Paul was tempted to say that he had heard this kind of talk from men now mouldering out on the veldt, or lying in one of those tidy cemeteries behind Ypres but he held his peace, reflecting that Mary would need all the reassurance either of them could give in the months ahead. Instead he said, ‘Will you want me to run you to Plymouth?’
‘No, Gov’nor,’ Rumble replied, thoughtfully, ‘but there’s something I’d like you to do instead. You can run Mary and me to Paxtonbury and I can catch the train there. Then, on the way home, I should like you to cut through the woods and show Mary the place.’
‘What place?’
‘The cave. It sounds sentimental but I guarantee it would help. Gypsy medicine, maybe.’
The odd request, and all that it implied, moved Paul so deeply that he turned away, looking out into the darkness that now enclosed the paddocks on each side of the drive.
‘I’ll do that,’ he said shortly, and then, ‘She’s never been there?’
‘No, but somehow it ties in with a pact we made a long time ago, when we were kids.’
He was able to smile, recalling with sudden clarity this boy and his daughter climbing the long green slope behind the house bent on one of their childish forays about the countryside. He said, ‘You and Mary; you made up your minds about one another from the beginning, didn’t you?’
‘You could say that,’ Rumble said, and suddenly he was gone and Paul heard him calling as he went up the stairs two at a time.
Two or three stars showed through the branches of the avenue chestnuts, odd points of light exempted from the blackout. Something comforting was offered by their presence up there, something that had to do with the cycle of birth and death and rebirth that was the one unchanging feature of his forty years in this place. He pulled the curtain, switched on the light and went into the estate office. The map stirred in the draught from the library door Rumble had neglected to shut and somehow—he could not have explained why—the continuity of the Valley re-established itself as a pattern on the contours of the over-scored canvas.
II
They talked generalities all the way home from Paxtonbury and Mary seemed to him very composed, so much so that it struck him she had matured a great deal since marriage. The last time Rumble Patrick had sailed away she had moped for weeks and had lived for his letters, and Paul found himself wondering if she had found fulfilment in motherhood and was now less dependent on the presence of the man they had just seen on to the Plymouth train. It was possible, he told himself, for she had always been the most maternal of his family and the least dependent on the diversions of noise and company. He had invited Claire to accompany them on this solemn, leave-taking trip but Claire had declined.
‘The only props Mary ever needed were you and that scamp Rumble,’ she said. ‘I daresay she’ll weep a bit but you’ll have to put up with that. It’s a long time since I sprinkled your shoulder.’
‘I can’t remember an occasion since you discovered you were pregnant at fifty!’ she had laughed at this, recollecting the unreasoning panic of the time she was carrying John, their youngest, and what a strain she had put upon his patience. Then she went cheerfully about her chores and he was reminded again of her heedless attitude towards the sprawling family they had raised, and how effortlessly she took each new crisis in her stride, as though a war was no worse than an occasional wet harvest and just about as inevitable.
When they reached the spot where Hermitage Lane joined the road down from the moor he stopped, saying, ‘Rumble asked me to show you something on the way home. Shall we leave it until after lunch and ride over there?’ but Mary said no, she would like to be taken there now, and that Rumble, who could never keep a secret, had hinted so broadly at the diversion that she guessed it had to do with Hazel’s cave in the woods.
‘Then you know about it?’ he asked, a little disconcerted. ‘I got the impression that it was something he had always kept to himself.’
‘We went looking for it several times,’ she admitted, ‘but he always pretended he couldn’t find it. He was obviously saving it for a special occasion, like this.’
‘He got Joannie Potter to show him where it was and I must say I don’t get the message. Do you think it’s just another of his practical jokes?’
She looked shocked. ‘It’s not a joke, Daddy,’ and for a moment he thought she was going to elaborate but she said no more until they had climbed the steep lane to the point where it narrowed between the orchard of the Big House and the edge of the escarpment and the southern stretch of Shallowford Woods marched down to the Mere. They left the car at the last point where it was possible to reverse and made their way down through the ranks of oaks and beeches to the oval sheet of water at the bottom of the dip. When they came to a moss-covered log lying opposi
te the ruin of the pagoda on the tiny island, a folly built by one of the Lovells who had owned the estate in the last century, she stopped and pointed. ‘I’ll tell you something else you didn’t know. Rumble proposed to me right there, a few hours before he went off to Australia,’ and she laughed at his astonishment.
‘Good God. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. You mean, seriously?’
‘Well, as seriously as he ever does anything,’ Mary said, ‘and he must have known what he was doing because as soon as he came back four years later, he took up the option. As a matter of fact he was seventeen and from that moment I stopped feeling three years older. There was never anyone else, but I imagine you always knew that.’
‘Yes,’ he said thankfully, ‘I always knew it. It bothered your mother a little but it never bothered me.’
He had his own memories of the spot and they were more poignant than hers. In the early days of his first marriage, several centuries ago it now seemed, he had crossed over to the islet in a punt with Grace one blazing summer noontime and they had mended a long and bitter quarrel by making love in the bracken like a couple of precocious adolescents. He said nothing to her, however, remembering that she had never set eyes on Grace, and that no-one, not even Grace’s son Simon, mentioned her in the Valley nowadays. She and her suffragettes were as outmoded as the Lollards and Anabaptists, belonging to an age of voluminous, dust-raising skirts, picture hats and croquet parties on the lawn. Twice since then the world had torn itself to pieces and in between there had been the long dismal haul from slump to agricultural convalescence.
They turned north-west along the path that ran beside the Mere, passed Sam Potter’s cottage on the right, crossed a shallow stream and picked their way through tree stumps to a rabbit run that wound across the shoulder of the highest point of the woods to an open space crowned by a great slab of sandstone. It was not a good place to bring a horse and he seldom rode this way, but he had always known it was here that Hazel Potter had lived wild from April until late autumn.
He had forgotten how lonely it was, and how attractive too in a desolate way, the long slope studded with dwarf jack-pines and a sea of rhododendrons screening the margin of the Mere. Spring, it seemed to him, was late this year. The primroses were out and lower down there had been marsh marigolds and a few wild daffodils but no bluebells showed in the open patches below and if he remembered rightly there was always an April haze of bluebells on this south-facing slope. It was a grey, sunless day, with tattered clouds drifting slowly east and the breeze lacking its usual tang of the sea. He said, as though addressing himself, ‘Funny thing, wars always seem to shuffle the seasons. The rhythm changes when there’s a war on but I’ll promise you something more cheerful. The summer it finishes will be a scorcher. They had wet summers right through the Boer War and the Great War but in 1902, the year I came here and again in 1919, the heath caught fire and every stream went dry.’
‘How about the summer of Dunkirk?’ she asked, smiling at his tendency to hark back over the years whenever they were alone, but he said this too conformed to pattern because it demonstrated Jerry’s weather-luck. ‘They always have fine weather for their offensives,’ he said, ‘whereas whenever we launch one, everything is bogged down in the mud.’
They had reached the bend in the path opposite the jutting slab of sandstone and he suddenly recollected that the cave was somewhere close by and poked around in the stiff screen of gorse that ran along under the rock. Then, congratulating himself on his memory, he found a tiny tunnel that ran north straight into a short slide of stones and flints and called over his shoulder, ‘Here, Mary! I thought I hadn’t forgotten. I haven’t been up here in ten years but there it is,’ and he made room for her to brush past and then followed her into a shallow excavation under the spur, reflecting that he was now standing on the exact spot where Rachel Eveleigh delivered Hazel Potter of the child who was to sire his first grandson. It brought the past very close and for a moment he fancied he could see Ikey Palfrey’s swift grin and the bloom on Hazel Potter’s cheek, could even hear Ikey’s laugh and soft, muffled burr of Hazel’s brogue. ‘Now what the hell induced Rumble to send us on this goose chase?’ he demanded, looking round the empty cave and sniffing the dank air of the place. Then he noticed that she was smiling and that her eyes, ‘spaniel’s eyes’ he always thought of them, were shining with excitement as she touched the dry earth walls where a root broke through the crust and curled into a question mark.
‘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.
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 9