‘Ah, would you?’ She was half-smiling now and it crossed his mind that she was probably egging him on in the hope of getting some of her own back. The doubt was sufficient to make him lift his hand from her shoulder but surprisingly, she reached out and seized it, pulling him round so that they stood with no more than an inch or so between them. The gesture, and the slight trembling that communicated itself to him through her fingers, elated him out of all proportion to its promise. For a moment they stood there, facing one another, and then, with a shrug that implied an eager readiness to jettison the past, she said. ‘Talk … all this old talk. What’s got into us all nowadays that we have to explain everything, take everything to pieces? You’re back, aren’t you? You’re sick of traipsing then, and I’m sick of making do, and living my life through Vanessa. I’m not that old yet, Andy bach,’ and she threw her arms round him and kissed him on the mouth in the way he had forgotten but now remembered.
More than anything she could have said or done the kiss renewed him, stripping away his drabness and taking him back so far and so swiftly that he remembered the first occasion she had failed to elude his awkward grab when he lay trussed in her dingy little hospital twenty years ago. He said, thankfully, ‘By God, Margy, I needed that. I really needed something like that by way of a welcome,’ and she replied gaily, ‘Me too. It’ll do for a starter,’ and she opened her bag and foraged for her lipstick. He looked past her at his father’s decanter. For the first time in months he could contemplate liquor without craving it.
Chapter Six
Absorbing the Enemy
I
In some ways these were the most rewarding years of his life and certainly the most tranquil.
Age, and enormous experience, enabled him to deal with people and problems more objectively than had been possible in his young and middle life, and although eighty on June 1st, 1959, he continued to enjoy splendid health. There was something else that mellowed him a great deal. He found that he could take the storms and triumphs and frustrations and controversies of the years and winnow them through a wry and retentive memory, setting the grain of commonsense and kindness on one side and discarding the chaff of prejudice and partisanship. It was his ability to do this that buttressed him against a prevailing mood of national pessimism and self-doubt, caused (so pundits assured him) by the effort and sacrifices of two world wars, and the loss of an empire.
Just as he had always seen the fruitfulness of the Valley reflected in the flesh of his wife, so he now saw the overall shift of pattern in national life adapt to the new pressures but without losing the more important of its basic values. Of course, he was very biased in this direction, and those who remained of his generation challenged the thesis, but he had the advantage of day to day contact with a horde of grandchildren and godchildren, and they nurtured his essential tolerance, so that he refused to join in the headshaking of the over-sixties when pop art cut a swathe into culture, when the sputnik bleeped its way around outer space, and the cult of permissiveness rained volleys of custard pies at the Establishment across the television studios. He told himself that he had seen it all before, or something very like it, and reminded himself that, for all his anxieties, the Valley was still more or less intact and the British still the secret envy of other nations. His argument was simple. One did not, he would say, go out of one’s way to mock an old lady who had been by-passed by the mainstream of life; one left her alone, or sniggered behind her back, but today, when almost everyone was busy abusing Britain, it was clear that they did so because they envied her her superb mastery of the art of compromise.
This proved, of course, that he was still an unrepentant chauvinist and he made no apology for being one but managed to hold his own against his exasperated descendants because his arguments were genially expressed and his memory diabolically accurate.
‘I can recall all that European cackling at the time of the Boer War,’ he would tell them, ‘but in the end what happened? We had the Boers fighting for us against the Germans.’
He was something of a prophet, too. Outraging Vanessa, and Simon’s son, Mark, by defending Eden’s Suez policy, he told them, ‘We shall soon have a peck of trouble with that fellow Nasser,’ and he was right. Later on, when the Profumo scandal blew up in the faces of the Tories, he warned his Tory friends that the Puritan streak in the British would do them more harm than any number of Opposition broadsides, and he was right again. They continued to chuckle over him, declaring that his mind had atrophied about the time Rupert Brooke wrote ‘The Soldier’, but they always enjoyed his company nevertheless.
They had called him Young Squire once and then Squire, but now it was Old Squire, and this he accepted as an ironical compliment in days of coastal traffic jams, sonic booms, the Beatles, four-letter words, and hi-fi recordings of compositions that had been scored, he would remind them, in days when the creative impulse could get along without the help of gadgets.
He had one or two violent prejudices that never were exorcised. One was official tolerance of things like the strip club and the fruit-machine; another was the ‘with-it’ parson, trying so fatuously to get into step with the times and making himself and the cloth ridiculous. A third was the tendency on the part of all Governments to subsidise vast armies of civil servants and rule the country from Whitehall without taking into account provincial prejudices. A fourth was the regular appearance of jockeys, cricketers, pop-singers and reformed rabble-rousers in the honours lists. But these were not more than eccentricities and a man could be forgiven a few eccentricities when he had passed his eightieth birthday.
Perhaps the occasions when he could best hold his own among the youngsters were those when he rode out on Saturdays between November and April with the Sorrel Vale Hunt, for he was still to be seen a field or two behind the thrusters and a coppice ahead of the laggards. He was the only one of the original Shallowfordians who still hunted and was now riding his fourth grey, not counting the skewbald he had hunted between the wars. He would pound along with Rumble’s son Jerry and sometimes Vanessa or Simon’s son Mark, showing them the best shortcuts, or gaps offering a dignified alternative to a ‘hairy fence’. He knew, it seemed, every puddle and every bunch of dock leaves between the Dunes, the Woods, the Bluff and the Whin, and visitors uncertain of the direction to take during a fast point, would shout, breathlessly, ‘Keep an eye on Old Squire. He’ll get us there.’ And he always did, with or without mud on their backs.
He had other absorbing interests now and the chief of these developed from his lifelong appreciation of good china, old silver and moderately priced oils. Under his hand the interior of the Big House took on a subdued splendour, for Claire had never bothered what she sat on, what she ate from, or what she hung on walls. Good quality pictures began to appear in the bedrooms and on the landings, a few of them sure to appreciate in value he told them, and in his hunt for a good piece of eighteenth-century walnut, or a George II soup ladle, he built a solid bridge between himself and his prodigal Andy who, to everyone’s astonishment, acquired large, rambling premises in the Cathedral close, Paxtonbury, and opened an antique shop to which he brought his aggressive initiative so that it soon became one of the regular calling places of tourists and, more particularly, The Trade.
Both he and Andy enjoyed their flirtation with The Trade. Andy was amused by the hamfisted tactics they used, prowling about in hard-faced couples and denigrating everything they wanted to buy. Paul liked their easy patter … ‘ … pity it’s got a chip,’ ‘ … pity there aren’t two’ and the inevitable ‘ … not all that “right”, Gov’nor, been married up with something.’ Often, in the late ’fifties and early ’sixties, he and Andy could have been seen at country-house sales, where they evolved a technique in opposition to the bidding of what Andy called ‘The Get-together Boys’. Margaret, seeing Paul draw closer to Andy, extracted a good deal of satisfaction from the reconciliation for her own relationship with Andy had mellowed.
Andy not only showed excessive devotion to Vanessa (now serving as a journalist on a small-town newspaper and secretly writing a novel about Byron), but seemed also to have found his way back to the boisterous days of their marriage so that she could always tell whether or not he had had a good day at the auctions by his approach as a lover.
One night, after they had been energetically pursuing their lost youth, he surprised her very much by telling her that the harmony she had achieved with his mother was understandable because they were temperamentally as alike as he and Stevie had been. When she asked him to elaborate he said, with a grin, ‘The only thing that ever mattered to either of you was to be needed and regularly man-handled. Claire never really gave a damn for any one of us, except that kid-sister of mine who was killed in that air-crash, and after her Vanessa. My guess is that all she was really interested in was the Gov, and the way he looked at her, especially when she took her clothes off. My God, ‘dutiful’ wasn’t the word for her. You could sense the difference in her every time he came stomping in from the fields or from hunting. She positively fluttered.’
‘I don’t flutter,’ Margaret said, indignantly, although secretly conceding there might be something in what he said, but he replied, ‘Not yet, but you’re coming on nicely, Margy. I see now why I went looking for a wife in Wild Wales.’ It was that kind of relationship these days—warm, lighthearted, relaxed. Approaching the age of fifty it was all she asked for.
Another compensation Paul found in his old age was music. One Christmas they bought him a radiogram and a stack of records, and he would play them over and over late at night as he sat before the library fire with a favourite book on his knee. He never read a new book now, preferring something he didn’t have to take on trust, but he bought a new record every time he went to Paxtonbury or Whinmouth. His taste was very catholic. If you went along the library passage at night you were likely to hear Mozart, Haydn, Dvorak, Strauss, or even Mario Lanza bellowing songs from The Student Prince, but whatever it was it had some kind of eighteenth to nineteenth century flavour, for this was one of his favourite ways of retracing his footsteps. The other was his irregular rounds, sometimes ridden in vile weather, so that Mary and Evie and Margaret would scold him for taking chances but not seriously, for they knew he had the toughest hide in the county.
He took Andy’s advice about replanting the Coombe. By the end of the decade the landslide scar had healed and could only be seen as a faint discolouration, west of the Dell, where a small forest of spruce, larch and Norwegian fir half covered the slopes. Here and there he had planted a few oaks and beeches, telling young Jerry, Rumble’s son, that when he was his age the trees would amount to something.
Jerry, to Paul’s delight, applied for the lease of Low Coombe and under Rumble’s direction rebuilt the old cob farmhouse and ploughed up the meadows where Shawcrosse’s caravans had once stood. It gave Paul tremendous satisfaction to reflect that Old Tamer’s grandson was back in the Coombe and making it yield more than any Potter had ever succeeded in doing in the past. Sometimes, when he rode out there, he could recognise the old rascal’s rolling gait in the young man’s walk and see yet another ancestral trait in the sharp, half-truculent look that greeted him when he clattered up the loose stones of the approach.
Over at Home Farm Rumble Patrick and Mary prospered although, to Paul’s mind, Rumble was still too experimental to develop into the kind of farmer old Honeyman had proved to be in pre-First World War days. They had three other children besides Jerry but Mary told him that Jerry was likely to prove the only dedicated sodbreaker in the brood.
Over at High Coombe Dick Potter, unpredictably, had modelled himself on his stolid father Sam, instead of his Uncle Smut, and seemed happy enough, ultimately marrying a long-legged agricultural student, ten years his junior, who presented him with an addition to the family every eighteen months. Hearing the clamour every time he passed this way, Paul remembered the bawdy dictum of Doctor Maureen who always declared that a young woman had only to set foot in the Valley to become pregnant. He did not know whether the size of Dick’s family proved her theory. The Potters, generation by generation, had always been prolific.
Lower down, at Deepdene, the old Willoughby Farm, Nelson and Prudence Honeyman stayed on, Nelson forsaking sheep and building up a first-class Guernsey herd, Prudence opening a riding stable with horses bought at the sale of Claire’s sister Rose, in Gloucestershire. Paul approved of this heartily, for he enjoyed watching her cavalcade of youngsters tit-tupping through the woods and daring one another to jump fallen logs on bored ponies. It took him back to the days of long ago when Rose had run a riding school at High Coombe, and nowadays he hoarded his satisfied memories like doubloons.
Over at Hermitage Henry Pitts, like himself, was long past active participation in any kind of husbandry but he had an efficient manager and a couple of brawny women who had learned their trade in the Land Army during the war. Henry pottered about but he was becoming increasingly fat and the only thing about him that called to mind the Henry of Passchendaele was the slow, rubbery smile that was never effaced, not even by his jeering contempt of ‘they ole contrapshuns’, by which he meant every piece of machinery, industrial or domestic, that had appeared on the market since 1913.
Early in 1961 Henry fell sick and took to his bed and when he seemed likely to die Ellie, his second wife, sent one of her women across to the Big House with an urgent message. Paul was at his bedside within the hour and commiserated with him concerning the absence of his son David, who was now farming in Alberta and had not been summoned. Henry, his great blubbery face still holding the wide, gap-toothed grin that was as familiar to Shallowfordians as the Bluff or the Sorrel, rejected his sympathy. ‘Giddon, Maister,’ he said, huskily, ‘tidden no odds. Davey’s got his own matters to ’tend tu and us never did relish the notion of zeein’ ’em all standing round the baid, trying not to think of ’ow much was coming their way, zoon as the poor ole toad snuffed it.’
Paul had heard Henry refer to hundreds of Shallowfordians as ‘poor ole toads’ but had never thought to hear him apply the phrase to himself and it made him sad to reflect that his oldest friend in the Valley must, indeed, be on his way out. Henry, for his part, was willing to concede this but without sacrificing his grin. ‘Truth is, Maister,’ he wheezed, ‘us ’ave diddled ’em pretty smartlike, you an’ me, when you think on that bliddy ole mudbath in Flanders, and all they bliddy aeroplanes that come near blowin’ us to tatters twenty-year after that. I made eighty-six, didden I? And I baint gone yet.’
He was gone, however, before the spring, and Paul, attending the popular funeral in the Overspill, reflected that he was now virtually the only survivor of the old brigade, for Smut Potter had died the previous year, after having opened a betting-shop in Paxtonbury with the proceeds of an insurance policy, and his brother Sam had died about the same time. The transition from old to new faces, however, had now become so gradual that Paul was beginning to think of comparative youngsters like Rumble Patrick and Nelson Honeyman as veterans.
Eveleigh—still ‘Young Eveleigh’ to Paul—made a great success of Four Winds, once the unluckiest farm on the estate, winning prizes at County Shows as far away as Bath and Hereford. Connie, his mother, lived on in one of the cottages and the only worry in this corner was Eveleigh’s bachelor status that must have bothered his mother for she confided to Paul that she was ‘on the lookout for a nice wife for the boy’, saying it as though she was thinking of taking the ’bus to Paxtonbury to buy him a pair of gumboots. He said, musing ‘I wouldn’t bother if I was you, Connie. Funny thing about the mating instinct in the Valley. It’s usually the girls who make the running and corral the men like bullocks. You only have to think back a bit to see my point. Old Arabella Codsall cornered Martin in this very kitchen. And you were always the brains behind your boy Harold, just as Joannie Potter ran Sam, and that Frenchwoman took over Smut when he was cut off behind Fritz’s lines and hid
out in her bakery. I could give you plenty of other examples. There was my Whiz and that Ian of hers—she picked him coldbloodedly from the entire male field of the Sorrel Vale Hunt, and there was my Claire, who didn’t give me up even when I married Grace Lovell. She was the best example of all, because the summer I came here, long before you were born, she took me on what I thought was an innocent ramble down by the Mere and came damned close to seducing me. And me only weeks out of hospital.’
Connie was very intrigued by this story and asked for more details but he called her a nosey old woman and wouldn’t elaborate, except to say, ‘Leave it to natural selection. Some smart young filly already has her eye on your boy, I wouldn’t wonder.’
He was right yet again. That summer, whilst showing a prize bull in the Vale of Evesham, Farmer Eveleigh was carefully singled out by the daughter of one of the judges, a very pretty brunette in her late ’twenties who had, so they said, been a model and had actually played small parts in films.
Connie, caught on the hop, was not at all sure that the girl would prove the right kind of wife for a dedicated farmer living in the remote provinces but Paul, after looking her over, said, ‘Damn it, Connie, you’re even more old-fashioned than I am. What kind of woman do you want? A slabsided, rosy-faced milkmaid, with a tie-on bonnet and hands the colour and size of hams? Farmers’ wives don’t come that way anymore. They go into Paxtonbury once a week for a hair-do, and if you saw them driving their Hillmans and Wolseleys to a Point-to-Point you’d think they were young duchesses. That girl might set local tongues wagging but she’ll also lead women’s fashions and I wouldn’t be surprised if she isn’t well dowered into the bargain.’
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 48