He turned off the river road beyond Codsall Bridge and tackled the long slope of the moor, glancing, as always when he rode this way, at the feathered crown of French Wood. Those trees were coming on. Every one of them was in its twenty-fourth year and the spur over Hermitage would have looked odd without them, as odd, no doubt, as the meadowland between the river and the sea on his left if he had planted it with soft timber as Eveleigh Senior had once proposed. There were no other significant changes in the landscape since the day he had first ridden along this road in the company of old John Rudd and the memory of that sunny afternoon, getting on for half-a-century ago, made him smile, for he remembered they had talked about the Zulu war, now as remote as Waterloo. And here he was doing John Rudd’s job for him, taking a led horse to the station to meet a passenger on the London train. It was, he reflected, untypical of Simon to propose such transport, and thinking of Simon’s decision to take a commission after all he wondered if the boy’s outlook had changed and whether he still thought of anyone who owned more than his own house in a suburb as a legitimate target for a cannonade of leaflets, fiery speeches and comparative statistics.
When he had crested the moor and could look over his shoulder at the great camp marching up the western slope to the Heronslea border, his thoughts turned to the war in general and here again he found cause for moderate satisfaction. It had been touch-and-go in the summer of 1940, and depressing enough in 1941 with new disasters coming one on top of the other but they had begun to see daylight in 1942, despite the local swoop of the Fokker-Wulfes, the surge of the Nazis into Southern Russia and the fall of Singapore. The tide had really begun to turn, he imagined, at El Alamein, and now the fighting was over in North Africa, for everyone as well as poor old Andy. Soon, he supposed, they would invade what that fire-eater Churchill was already calling ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’, and with more and more Americans arriving eventual victory was certain, particularly as the Russians were now moving over to the offensive. He wondered, vaguely, what madness could have got into the Germans after their terrible lesson of 1918. He had never been a German-hater until they started slamming poor devils into concentration camps and shooting God knows how many wretched civilians in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Germans of the trenches hadn’t seemed such bad chaps when you got to know them, and he had always prided himself on being one of the very few hereabouts who had never subscribed to the hysteria that resulted from all those 1914 stories of bayoneted babies. But it seemed that the Valley patriots had been nearer the truth after all, for how else could one explain unspeakable crimes like Lidice? Well, it would all sort itself out he imagined, like the other war and like the slump period when he had had to subsidise every farm in the Valley. Mostly it was a matter of holding on and minding one’s own business and he deliberately turned his back on global problems as he crossed the main road, trotted across the short stretch of moor to the railway cutting and rode into the station yard just as a distant puff of smoke over his right shoulder advertised the approach of the London train.
Simon looked fitter than Paul remembered him looking in years. With his combat experience, Paul thought, they ought to have given him a commission long ago, but his involvement with the militant left had probably held him back. Now that Russia was putting up such a fight everyone was inclining left and the irony of this had obviously not escaped Simon, for when Paul commented on the horses he said, with a grin, ‘Got to climb back in the saddle now, Gov’nor. I’m an officer and gentleman again!’
‘How was the O.C.T.U. course?’ Paul asked, ‘didn’t you find it tough going at your age?’
‘Piece of cake,’ Simon said, ‘probably because I’m in training after playing soldiers up in the Highlands so long! I had to watch the finer points, however. It still doesn’t do to be caught whistling “The Red Flag” or eating peas with your knife.’
Paul liked the boy’s sense of humour, seeing behind it a growth of tolerance, and he thought again of Simon’s mother, and how unerringly her championship of the underdog had reproduced itself in the boy. He noticed too that Simon looked about him eagerly and asked intelligent questions about the Valley’s contribution to the war. How cynical were the farmers in their approach to Government appeals to grow more and offset the U-boat campaign? What kind of prices were they getting for produce? How much of it was subsidy? How was High Coombe shaping under the new arty-crafty people Paul had written about. What had happened to Rumble Patrick’s acres after the young idiot had gone to sea? Paul answered his questions in detail, reflecting that this was the first time any of his sons had shown even a passing interest in his life’s work and presently Simon, reining in above the Sorrel, further enlarged himself by saying with a chuckle, ‘Well Gov’nor, we all used to snigger at you and your mediaeval villeins down here, but the laugh was on us after all. I’m taking you more seriously from now on.’
‘Ah yes,’ Paul said, unable to resist a sly backhander. ‘I daresay you are, but you’ll want all land nationalised after the war and chaps like me booted off to make room for civil servants!’
‘No I won’t,’ Simon said, unexpectedly, ‘I’m mellowing. We all wasted time and energy slanging one another through the ’twenties and ’thirties. In the end what happened? We had to form a Coalition and it worked a lot better than I hoped. The fact is, I suppose we ought to be grateful to that little bastard and his gang of psychopaths. At least he succeeded in uniting Left, Right and Centre.’
‘Down here it’s easy to lose one’s way among all the directives we get fired at us. What’ll happen afterwards?’
‘Well, we can’t do a damned thing until we’ve got that bunch behind bars. After that some kind of world federation, with more teeth than the poor old League of Nations. Everyone will have to surrender some sovereignty. The Empire will be the first casualty, I imagine.’
‘I won’t lose much sleep over that,’ Paul said grimly. ‘I daresay you and your brothers sometimes think of me as a flag-flapper but it’s never been much more than a local flag.’ He had always envied his eldest son’s comfortable grasp of the wider issues, however, so he went on, knitting his brows; ‘I was thinking of the Kaiser’s Germans on the way over here. They were idiots, of course, with their brass bands and worship of uniforms but they weren’t murderers, or not the ones I ran into. What do you suppose happened to them all of a sudden?’
‘They were in a mess and took a short cut that landed them in an abattoir. It’s happened before, and not only to them.’
‘Could it happen to us?’
‘No. It might begin to but then a jack-in-office would have an old lady’s pet poodle put down for imaginary rabies in Melton Mowbray and the entire bloody electorate would shout “shame!” and throw the Government in the Thames!’
Paul laughed, the first really hearty laugh he had enjoyed in a long time. ‘You used to be partial to short cuts yourself,’ he said and Simon replied, ‘That’s so, but a man likes familiar ground as he gets older. Don’t forget I’m nudging forty!’
‘It’s not just a matter of age,’ Paul said, ‘it’s a dampening down process, of the kind that I noticed in your mother when I met her in France after the Somme. The last time you were home, just before Rachel was killed, your hatred of what was going on was oozing out of your pores. I didn’t quarrel with that, mind you. You’d seen what Fascists were capable of in France and Spain, but now—well, you seem to me to be off the boil. More professional, perhaps? Is that it?’
Simon took his time answering and Paul gathered from his reaction to the question that he had lost a good deal of the intense privacy he had cultivated as a boy. He said, ‘Have you read a chap called Orwell?’
‘The Road to Wigan Pier? Yes, I have and I liked him. He seemed to me to have more compassion than most of the authors you introduced into the house.’
‘I’ve met him and talked to him. He’s not too optimistic about what could emerge from this sho
wdown. It could be a Robot State, with science taking over from the sociologists. Wells had the same notion, remember?’
‘And what banner would you enlist under then?’ Paul asked, with a smile, for he had a countryman’s contempt for theorists of all kinds.
‘Well, right alongside well-meaning reactionaries like you, Gov’nor! After all, looking around me I have to admit you’ve done a better job than any of those bloody politicians in Westminster. And I mean politicians with red ties as well as blue.’
Paul was so unused to compliments of this kind from a member of his family that he felt vaguely embarrassed and said, clapping his heels into the grey and leading the way down the path. ‘I’ve done what I wanted to do, lived and worked in the open and raised a family on fresh air and good food! As to any wider complication, I’ve played it by instinct and I’ve never been that far out. I don’t really give a damn what happens over there when they’ve cooked Hitler’s goose but I think I know my own people and they won’t let anyone push them around indefinitely. They never have and they never will, and if that sounds like something out of a Boer War music-hall ditty I can’t help it. It’s the way I’m made and what life has taught me over the last forty years.’
He had not meant to amuse Simon but he did and Paul laughed too, for in the ring of Simon’s laugh he heard another echo of his mother and it made him feel absurdly young for the moment.
After that they talked easily of one thing and another and it pleased Paul to see the eager way Simon looked about him as they dropped down to the river road and walked the fly-pestered horses along the bank to the lodge gates. Simon said suddenly, ‘Its got magic, I’ll grant you that,’ and when Paul said it was losing it, like everywhere else, he said seriously, ‘It’ll keep so long as you’re around, Dad, and that’s what’s important to me.’ It was not the sentiment so much as the form of address that interested Paul. It must, he thought, be getting on for thirty years since Simon had addressed him as anything, but ‘Gov’nor’, a semi-ironic term every one of them but Mary used. ‘Something has happened to him,’ he mused as they clattered into the yard and Claire and Mary ran out shouting their greetings, ‘but it’ll take a woman to ferret out what!’
II
On the fourth day of his leave Simon saddled Paul’s grey and rode across the ford and down to Coombe Bay, hoping to take a swim in the calm water between the sandbar and the landslide west of the village. It was a hot, shimmering day, and later he intended visiting Rachel’s grave in the new acre beyond the churchyard wall, where lay most Shallowfordians who had died since the early ’thirties. First, however, he took advantage of his battledress to enter the prohibited beach, noting that the sea was doing its best to make the ugly crisscross of defences look part of the landscape. It was from this beach, he remembered, that Claire had taught him to swim and but for that he would have spent the last three years as a prisoner-of-war after the unit’s surrender near Calais. The reflection increased his enjoyment of the occasion as he swam across the two hundred yards separating the beach from the nearest obstructions inside the bar. It was here, in a rectangle of rusting iron and trailing weed that he saw, or thought he saw, a mermaid.
She bobbed up from behind a thick, rusty crosspiece, her dark hair floating in a wide swirl, her expression as startled as one might expect of a mermaid surprised an eighth of a mile offshore. He was so astonished that he opened his mouth, swallowed half a gill of seawater and fell to coughing. When he was recovered and looked again she was gone.
He called, ‘Hi, there! Am I seeing things?’ and she bobbed out again, smiling, a good-looking girl in her early twenties, with a smooth oval face and eyes that seemed, in the strong sunlight, only a shade less green than the weed clinging to the crossbar. Then he looked closer and saw that they were not green but hazel and that she had a laughing mouth with traces of lipstick on the underlip. He said, with moderate enthusiasm, ‘Oughtn’t we to introduce ourselves? At first glance I could have sworn you had a tail!’
‘I knew you hadn’t,’ she said, ‘I saw you kicking on the way out but I thought you might have a warrant and a pair of handcuffs! It’s verboten to swim here but I suppose you’re privileged.’
‘More or less,’ he said, ‘because I arrived in uniform. All the same, I was stopped and asked for my identity card at the old gun emplacement. Why weren’t you?’
‘Because I came by boat,’ she said and waved her arm towards the seaward side of the sandbank where a dinghy was moored under the overhang of the iron scaffolding. ‘That’s even more verboten, of course, but they don’t keep much of a lookout, do they? I might be a Hitler maiden, cruising inshore for a spot of sabotage!’
‘You don’t talk like one, or you’ve managed to acquire a first-rate East Anglian accent.’
‘That’s clever of you,’ she said. ‘I come from Norwich but I’ve always thought it wasn’t noticeable, except on a tape recorder.’
‘I’m very interested in regional accents,’ he said, ‘an amateur Professor Higgins. Are you on holiday?’
‘No, I’m here for the duration. We were blitzed and I manage for Mr Horsey, the Rector. Before we go any further, however, I ought to admit I know who you are. You’re one of Squire Craddock’s sons, aren’t you? The one who is in the Army?’
‘The oldest one,’ he said, ‘and getting on for superannuation. I’m on leave and this is the first time I’ve been back for more than two years.’
She looked serious for a moment. ‘I remember—“Simon” isn’t it?’ and when he nodded, ‘My uncle talks about you as a tribe! He’s a Craddock fan, did you know that? He has a terrific respect for your father and mother. He’s really quite a dear.’
He liked her voice and friendliness. He liked too the way water glistened on her smooth, pale face, like raindrops on the unblemished skin of an apple hanging in sunlight. ‘Let’s take a look at your boat,’ he said. ‘We can keep the obstructions between us and the gun-post, otherwise the entire crew will come out to investigate.’
They waded ashore and ran crouching across the narrow strip of sand to the boat. She was taller than he would have guessed and slimly built but out of the water she looked younger than he had judged. She had small, high breasts, long, sloping shoulders, a narrow waist and long legs that would carry her over the ground quickly. Poised on the edge of the boat she reminded him vaguely of a figure in a fifteenth century painting by someone like Baldung or Memling. There was something slightly mediaeval about her breasts and shoulders, suggesting a Virgin in a stained glass-window. Her best feature, he decided, was her hair, black and very plentiful, darker and much curlier than his sister Mary’s. It was not her face or figure that attracted him, however, so much as her complete lack of artifice. She made no kind of effort to impress so that he had an odd impression they had already known one another a long time and had met again casually after a brief interval. He said, joining her on the gunwale, ‘Old Horsey must be over eighty. He can’t be your real uncle, can he?’
‘He could at that,’ she said, smiling, ‘for I’m twenty-eight, but he’s not really an uncle at all, he’s a cousin twice removed. My father is a parson like him. Parsons run in our family. The Horseys have had about a dozen in three generations. Did you know Uncle Horace’s son, the one who was killed in the First War?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘as a matter of fact I married his widow,’ and he smiled as her hand shot to her mouth like someone trying to mask a gaffe.
‘Of course! What a stupid remark. She was killed in that hit-and-run raid, wasn’t she? Uncle wrote about it at the time. I say—I’m sorry, I’m not very bright about that kind of thing.’
‘There’s nothing to be sorry about,’ he said, making a circle in the sand with his great toe. ‘It happened, and that’s that. If you were blitzed in Norwich I daresay you lost people the same way.’
‘Friends,’ she said, ‘about half a dozen of them. We were lucky but the Vi
carage was burned down when a couple of incendiaries went through the roof. You’re a Commando, aren’t you?’
‘I was, a sergeant instructor, but I was commissioned a week ago and now I don’t know how they’ll use me. Gliding, maybe, that’s the latest fashion.’
‘I wanted to go in the A.T.S.’ she said, ‘but Mummy talked me out of it. I think she had an idea they share huts and blankets with the men. I wish I had joined. In Norwich I ran a canteen for a school and now I’m going to serve in the N.A.A.F.I. up at the camp.’
‘You’ll be in great demand over there,’ he said, ‘the intake is about a thousand men every six weeks and there are only about a dozen women allowed inside the wire!’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s what I hoped!’ and laughed, shaking out her dark curls and rubbing them gently with a towel she took from the thwarts.
‘Still fancy free?’
‘Still fancy free. I was engaged once but he fell for a W.A.A.F. and after a decent interval he brought her to the Vicarage for my approval. She was much more his type than me, very fair and fluffy, and well up with all the latest hot numbers. She played boogie-woogie on the church organ. Father never quite got over it but I did.’
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 19