The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  He said, taking his drink, ‘Let’s get to the point. I haven’t very long. That proposition I mentioned, I don’t think you’ll need to chew on it. All I want is a plain “yes” or “no”,’ and he opened his brief case and took out a folder he had collected from the Whinmouth solicitors an hour or so ago.

  Shawcrosse looked down at it and blinked once or twice. ‘I’ll say that for him,’ Andy thought, watching closely, ‘it doesn’t take him long to get the message,’ and Shawcrosse said, meeting his eye, ‘So you want to buy your way in again? No hard feelings, old boy, but it’s too late for that. You held good cards and I didn’t ask you to throw your hand in.’

  ‘No, you didn’t, Ken. All the same, you’ll take me up on that offer. It’s for the Coombe Farm holding, every acre you bought north of the river, the farm I steered your way, remember?’

  ‘Good God, of course I remember. I’m not likely to forget a thing like that but you aren’t such a clot as to imagine a bit of flooding and that cliff cave-in has turned the place into a hot potato are you?’

  He turned the document over, running an eye down the last page of single-spaced typing and as he did this Andy saw the blood surge into his neck where it bulged over the collar of his shirt. ‘Twelve-five? The price we paid for it? Oh, come on, you must be kidding! I’ll get planning permission there eventually. As a matter of fact I’ve already got it, over on the village side. They don’t do business that way in the States, do they?’

  Andy said, snapping the catch of his brief case, ‘Don’t look at it as a straight sale, Ken. Try and see it as hush-money. I could get it for a lot less if I was greedy or vindictive, but I’m not. All I want is the Coombe, and I’m not even knocking off the odd thousand for the slice that fell into the river and drowned my mother, a copper, an old couple, and a bunch of kids.’

  He had not expected violent reaction to the threat and there was none. For a moment there was no reaction at all, except a deepening of that brick-red flush, so that he thought, ‘Why the hell does he wear his collar so tight? Do his self-delusions run to kidding himself he’s still twelve stone instead of fifteen?’

  Shawcrosse said, taking a careful sip of his whisky, ‘You know a lot better than that, Andy. Where the hell have you been? Running a crap game in the Chicago stockyards? Or watching revivals of bootleg films on the telly? I’m sorry because I got along with you better than most people. I can only imagine you’ve been hitting the bottle too hard,’ and he got up, crossed the room and opened the door. ‘No hard feelings,’ he said.

  ‘None at all,’ said Andy but without moving, ‘and no Public Prosecutor either, providing you sign that bill of sale. I’ve already written the cheque,’ and he took an envelope from his pocket and laid it on the desk.

  Shawcrosse closed the door again but remained with his back to it. ‘What the hell are you talking about? You’re in every fiddle we operated right up to here. If they gave me a five-stretch they’d give you a sixer.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Andy, ‘I wasn’t in that bloody great fire you had in the Enfield warehouse and that’s the fiddle I think of when I think about you. And in any case, do you think I give a damn what happens to me? I’ve no kids, and my wife thinks I stink. I’ve got brothers and sisters but if I walked into a room where they were assembled conversation would be reduced to the weather. I’ve no friends either. You were the nearest I ever came to having one, after my brother Stevie got the chop. You’d be surprised how little a man in my situation cares where he ends up, or what happens to him. It might even be interesting to mix with the big-time crooks instead of our kind.’

  The flush above the collar had spread a little, flooding the smooth pink skin on Shawcrosse’s pendulous cheeks. From across the room Andy could hear the whistle of his breath in his nostrils. Suddenly the interview shamed him, as though he had been caught helping Shawcrosse scrawl obscenities on the wall of a public lavatory. He said, ‘For Christ’s sake. I’m not bluffing! I’ve just come from that churchyard and that bloody awful village of yours. I’ll give you two minutes to sign and cut your losses, or I make a précis of everything I can prove about what went on between the time we were demobbed and the time we split up. I’m not putting the bite on you, not really. All I want is the Coombe farm. The rest of it, those places nearer the sea, aren’t worth having anymore.’

  Shawcrosse came back slowly to behind his desk and took another look at the folded document. ‘You’re mad,’ he said. ‘You’re just bloody mad enough to do it, aren’t you? And it’s not liquor either. They’ve hooked you on something more lethal in the last year or so.’

  ‘Let’s say I hooked myself. You’ve got a pen there, haven’t you? The one you use for signing all the planning permissions on the councils?’

  Shawcrosse made no reply. He signed the document in two places, pushed it back across the desk, picked up the envelope containing the cheque and stuck it in his pocket without looking at it.

  ‘Get to hell out of here,’ he said, ‘and I hope you die of cancer in the bowel.’

  ‘Far more likely the liver,’ Andy said, and putting the bill of sale in his brief case he turned and let himself out. Rhoda, Shawcrosse’s wife, came gushing across the hall as he fumbled with the catch of the front door. ‘Andy … wait … It’s been so long …’

  He did not look at her but swung the door open and went out on to the lamplit porch. Before she could follow he was half-way down the drive.

  His watch showed him it was still only a few minutes to nine so instead of swinging left to Paxtonbury he turned right, skirted the old town and found the ‘B’ road that led to the moor. It was dusk now and a warm night for April. Up here he could smell the sea and the whiff of wild onion that drifted off the dunes when the wind was right. His need for a drink, overpowering when he left the Shawcrosse place, had left him and he kept so light a touch on the accelerator that the speedometer hovered around twenty. Slowly, like the effect of vodka, warmth spread to his belly and on the crest of the moor, just before he began to dip down to the junction of the old dust road he stopped and lit a cigarette, watching the smoke lose itself in the light air.

  From here he could just see the lights of Coombe Bay at the very end of the Valley, and between there and the moor some of the familiar landmarks loomed in the dusk. Four Winds farmhouse to his right, Hermitage to his left, and beyond Hermitage the blue-black blur of the woods. French Wood reared up on his immediate left, and below him the narrow blade of the Sorrel swept in a broad arc from the lower slopes of the Moor to the nearest meadows of Home Farm, re-emerging half-a-mile on where it ran between the Coombe and Codsall’s stubble fields. He was well over forty now and yet he could not remember an occasion when he had stopped to contemplate the Valley in quite the same way. Either it had never occurred to him or he had never had the time. He thought of Stevie riding knee to knee with him across this part of the moor during a Boxing Day hunt when they were about seventeen, and then again of the time when they had equipped a third-hand motor-boat for a trip to France but had got no further than the sandbar to be rescued by Coombe Bay fishermen. He thought of Margaret too, and how he had first brought her here one icy, February morning, the night after he had abducted her from that stinking little hospital in Wales. And he thought of Vanessa, Stevie’s kid, and her brown curls and big grey eyes—‘mild as a heifer’s’ as Claire had once said. Well, here it all was, or what was left of it, and at least he had something to offer in the way of a coming-home present that the old Gov would value far above any of the junk he had thought of buying in New York or Chicago. He carefully extinguished the cigarette butt, remembering as he did how fussy Paul was about carelessly strewn cigarette ends up here. Then he let in the stiff clutch and coasted down the hill to the junction.

  Lights were burning on the terrace when he changed down to tackle the last gradient of the drive but nobody heard the car and nobody came out. He closed the car door silently and wal
ked along the flagstones as far as the library but although the fireplace lights were on, and a small fire was burning in the grate, the room was empty so he moved along to peep through the window of the adjoining room that had always been the estate office.

  Paul was there and it made him wince to see how old he looked, even though he still held himself straight and worked without glasses. He was writing in some kind of ledger as fat as a family Bible and his hearing must have been unimpaired for suddenly he stopped writing and stood erect, cocking an ear as though he had detected the scrape of feet outside. Beyond him, clamped squarely to the wall, was an oil-portrait of Claire that Andy remembered had once hung in the main bedroom. It showed her sitting on a sandstone rock down at the goyle, with her head thrown back as she reached across her breast to loosen the shoulder-strap of her blue costume. Andy remembered that it had been a present to his father on his sixtieth birthday and yet she looked no more than about forty-two or three, and although, when the story got around, the family had laughed at her vanity, they had all admitted that it was a wonderful likeness and the Gov had been so proud of the painting that he treated it like a Rubens. Affection for the lonely old man made him choke so that he remembered his longing for a drink, one of Paul’s really stiff drinks of Irish whiskey that he kept for special visitors in the library cupboard.

  He called softly, ‘Gov! It’s me. Andy,’ and Paul swung round so quickly that Andy regretted he had not made a conventional entry. Then he saw that the old man was jerky with excitement and crossed the little office so quickly that his elbow caught the ledger and spun it round on the hook-and-eye drawing-board. He flung open the garden door and pulled Andy into the room, holding him by the shoulders in a grip that proved he was not so old and tired as he had looked through glass.

  ‘God bless you, it’s wonderful to see you, boy,’ he said. ‘Why the devil didn’t you tell us … me … Margaret … Rumble … they’ll all be delighted …’ and he looked as if he was going to run across the library, fling open the door and summon the entire family. Andy said quickly, ‘Hold on, Gov … wait until I’ve had time to look at you. Christ, you’re spry for—what is it—seventy-five?’

  ‘Seventy-six on June first. And you don’t look so bad yourself, although you’ve put on a stone or so, haven’t you?’

  ‘It’s not from the grub in the States,’ Andy said. ‘Tasteless, every damned mouthful.’

  ‘What will you drink?’ Paul asked. ‘Drop of old Irish?’

  ‘I was standing there thinking about it with my tongue hanging out,’ Andy said, and when his father turned his back he slipped the bill of sale from his brief case and said, casually, ‘Prodigal’s peace offering. I didn’t squander all my patrimony on the husks that the swine eat.’

  He watched the old man raise his glass and then lower it again, curiosity showing in the lift of the heavy, tufted eyebrows. He said, with a hard swallow, ‘The Dell? In my name?’ and Andy said it was all buttoned up and said that he had bought it back for the price Paul had received from Jumbo Bellchamber seven years ago.

  He had never seen the old man so bemused or embarrassed. He kept looking at the typescript, then at Andy, then back at the typescript, fumbling for words and finding none, so that Andy said, for something to say, ‘I figured you could plant there again … half-grown soft woods, so that you’ll live to see them. Neither you nor I can wait around for oaks and beeches to grow but you could put in a few for the kids. I was up there this afternoon and it looked so bald. Then I had this idea.’

  Paul found his tongue at last. ‘It was a wonderful idea,’ he said, fighting to keep his voice steady, ‘the best idea you ever had,’ and then he dropped the paper on the floor and threw his arms round him, holding him close for a full half-minute. He had never embraced any of his children like that before, not even Mary.

  They had to plan the initial approach to Margaret. She was over at Home Farm, Paul told him, but was due back any minute. ‘You stay here and I’ll go and meet her when the car lights show in the drive,’ and then he seemed to want to talk about Vanessa, and her prospects at Dartington, but Andy steered him back to Margaret, saying ‘You’d better brief me, Gov. Is there any chance at all of Margy and I having a third go at it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said unhappily, ‘I honestly don’t know. We’re friendly, and since the flood she likes to fuss me, but she never did talk that kind of shop with me, only with Claire. She took a terrific knock over Claire. They were very fond of one another.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I managed to ride it out. I don’t think I should if it had happened any other way but pride—at a time like that—well, it helps more than you’d think. It was a terrific show she put up down there, just the kind of show Stevie put up when he brought that R.G. home in one piece. Whenever I get low I remind myself of that, and also of the fact that, according to Maureen, she wouldn’t have had more than a year or so with that heart of hers.’

  They finished their whiskey and Paul asked if he would like another but he refused. Then, as the white glow of headlights showed on the rhododendrons, he said, ‘Wait here,’ and went out. There was no shuffle in his step. He still walked like a middle-aged countryman crossing frozen furrows in heavy boots.

  She slipped into the room alone when he was in the act of pouring himself another whiskey. He was astonished by the absence of change in her. Her brown hair still trapped the gleam of the centre light and her skin was as smooth and unblemished as the day he had grabbed her by the shoulders as she straightened his pillow in the hospital and kissed her wide mouth, with the sour-faced sister three beds down the ward. He would have expected her to put on weight, for, although small-boned, she had always inclined to chubbiness, but her figure was as neat as when she was twenty. Only her large brown eyes indicated maturity.

  She showed none of Paul’s initial embarrassment but said, quietly, if a little huskily, ‘Hullo, Andy. Good to see you. We’d practically given you up,’ and he did not know whether to take this as a rebuff until she added, ‘Paul told me you had got him the Coombe back. That was a nice thought and I’m just as glad as he is about it. Not just the fact that he can pass it on, as he always wanted to every yard of the Valley, but because you remembered that. Has he told you about Vanessa?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but it’s about us I came, Margy. I owed him the Coombe anyway but if you and I could pick up the threads again it would be important to him and Vanessa.’

  ‘Is that why you’d like to try?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I only said that as some kind of inducement to you, I imagine.’

  ‘Well?’

  She wasn’t giving him much help but he had not come here expecting any. He said, ‘I’ve been around, and I’m not saying I haven’t had the odd tumble or two but none of them meant a damned thing. I couldn’t get you out of my system any more than I could Stevie. In the old days there was you and Stevie and Monica and business, and business was a lot of fun at that time but isn’t anymore, just a habit. The women I took to bed over there, and even those I played around with, before we broke up, were less than a habit, just a means of filling time when all the offices were closed and phones rang unanswered. Do you believe that?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I believe it. As a matter of fact I’ve always believed it.’

  ‘Does that mean you don’t give a damn anymore?’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything of the sort,’ she said, ‘but who was I to bellyache? I moved over to Stevie, didn’t I? And you didn’t seem to hold that against me.’

  ‘I never did,’ he said, ‘but I always had the impression there was something left over for me, particularly after I got used to being back, and showed you that I liked having Vanessa around. Was I wrong about that? Did old Stevie make a grand slam?’

  She said slowly—‘There’s never been anyone else—just the two of you, and, as I told Claire, sometimes you didn�
��t seem two people, even after Stevie changed and you stayed the same. I could have made a go of it after the war if you hadn’t been so obsessed with what you were doing and creeps like Shawcrosse. I kept waiting for a chance to make that clear to you, Andy. I daresay I could now if I made up my mind to it.’

  Suddenly she straightened up and the drag left her voice so that he saw her for a second or so as the girl of long ago. She said, ‘Let’s face it, Andy. There was never much between you and me but strong physical attraction but it was enough then and could be again. God knows, in the last few years I’ve thought about you often enough, wondered how you were doing, what you were up to, and what kind of women you went around with.’

  He said, without looking at her, ‘You don’t make anything more than casual contacts with people after the age of thirty or so. You lose the knack of making yourself matter, or finding something in them worth cultivating. It’s been that way with me a long time now. I’m damned lonely and I’m going to get lonelier. I never found anyone or anything that came near replacing the old set-up. I suppose I took it for granted that you had by now.’

  He paused, hoping she might volunteer information on the use she had made of her isolation, but when she said nothing but only looked glumly at the floor, he crossed to her and put his sound arm on her shoulder. ‘I’d like a chance to try again. I’d make it up to you somehow, but God knows, I don’t want to put pressure on you.’

  ‘Pressure?’ Her head came up. ‘There now. There’s a silly thing to say …’

  As always under the stress of emotion, the Welsh lilt returned to her voice so that she seemed to him as young and irrepressible as the day they had met. Her eyes still brooded but he noticed a familiar twitch at the corners of her mouth and it encouraged him to go on. ‘I’ll tell you something else, Margy. I’d get a hell of a kick putting physical pressure on you right now.’