R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  They met as arranged at the foot of the knoll, marked on the maps as the Clump, but none of them had anything to report. Winterbourne had vanished and Herries thought it likely that he might be home by now but he was not. There was no message from Winterbourne Senior and when Herries rang the City number he was told the boy had not yet appeared. Herries said, quietly, ‘We’ve searched a five-mile radius here and we’ll extend it to ten or twelve before dark. If he’s still in the district we’ll find him, Mr Winterbourne. Are you prepared to leave it at that, or would you prefer me to notify the police.’

  David, standing near the door, heard the calm voice rise to a crackle and saw Herries scowl. ‘Very well, that’s your prerogative, Mr Winterbourne,’ and he replaced the receiver.

  ‘Damned codfish,’ he said. ‘That’s what comes of making too much money, P.J. The word “police” sent his blood pressure soaring, just as I knew it would. Still, he has a point. The police mean publicity and he’s had a surfeit of that. Wouldn’t do us much good, either. We’ll keep it in the family for the time being.’

  After lunch they assembled all the prefects and sent them off in couples, nine pairs in all, covering all points of the compass ten miles afield. Those with farthest to go were given bicycles and instructions to phone in.

  David pushed his own enquiries as far as Challacombe but when they all met again at dusk no one had seen or heard anything of Spats. Exmoor had swallowed him up.

  Herries said, as they picked over a cold supper, ‘There’s no help for it. Publicity or no publicity we’ll have to report him missing and I daresay we’ll get a wigging for not doing it earlier.’

  Beth said, unexpectedly, ‘But you’re still not really worried, are you?’ and Herries replied, ‘No, my dear, not to that extent. I’m irritated, and concerned as to his state of mind and my responsibilities. But when you’ve been at this as long as I have you learn to rely on the barometer in here,’ and he tapped his hard, round stomach. ‘Get a good sleep, both of you. We’ll turn to again after breakfast tomorrow but I’ll discuss it with Inspector Chawleigh at Challacombe before I go to bed.’

  ‘But you’re worried sick, aren’t you, Davy?’ Beth said, as soon as Algy’s steps had died away on the stairs, and he replied, ‘By God, I am! Who wouldn’t be?’

  ‘Why not trust Algy’s instinct?’

  ‘It’s not only Winterbourne I’m concerned about,’ he admitted, with something of an effort. ‘It’s us, you and me. A thing like this, to happen my first term here as housemaster. Damn that silly woman and her peccadilloes! Right now I could strangle her with one of her own silk stockings.’

  She said, ‘Come to bed, Davy,’ and he followed her, without much confidence that he would sleep.

  And yet he did, a few minutes after she had taken him in her arms, and as he drifted off he thought, drowsily, ‘She’s right… I can cope with anything so long as she’s around… I’ve been feeling damned sorry for myself all day but I’m luckier than that chap Winterbourne, for all his investments and fancy trappings… If he’d had the sense to marry someone like Beth his boy wouldn’t be out on the moor feeling the sky had fallen on him.’ His hold on her tightened, as though he was suddenly aware of the fragility of happiness, how chancy it was and how easily lost.

  Two

  * * *

  1

  IT HAD LEAKED BY RISING BELL THE FOLLOWING MORNING, A heavy, sultry day, with a promise of sticky heat and thunderstorms before evening.

  The wildest stories concerning Spats Winterbourne were circulating and there was no stopping them, as Boyer told him after the school had gone into breakfast. Even Algy had lost some of his ebullience and drifted in to tell them Inspector Chawleigh would be making his own enquiries from Challacombe, and was sending a man over to get statements.

  ‘None of these people seem to be able to do a thing without first putting it on paper,’ he grumbled. ‘One of these days the entire Western world will grind to a halt, its apparatus clogged with forms, files and memoranda. I had it in mind to comb the south-eastern area today, starting from farther out with Boyer, and one or two others. Will you stay here meantime and cope with that scrivener?’

  ‘Anything you say,’ David said, feeling that he had lost control of the situation. ‘Beth planned to take the twins into Challacombe for their inoculations, so I won’t have the car until she gets back. I could cancel it, of course.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Herries said, ‘that diphtheria scare is still on, I’m told. We had everyone jabbed the first week of term. I was an idiot not to tell Willoughby to do the infants then. I’ll phone in around midday and we can exchange news. I daresay Mr Moneybags will call again. Tell him the state of the poll.’

  David watched him drive off, his Austin Seven grossly overloaded with the Sixth Form posse. Ten minutes later Beth drove the Morgan round from the coach-house with the twins aboard, Joan in front with her, Grace perched in the dickey seat behind. He did not go down and reassure the children about the inoculation. In his present mood she was more qualified to do that, but he waved as they bumbled off down the west drive and Grace waved back. There was no point in going into class. For one thing he couldn’t concentrate. For another he was likely to be fetched at any moment to deal with Inspector Chawleigh’s man, so he asked matron to show him Winterbourne’s locker, sorting through his belongings in the linen room, looking for some kind of clue as to the boy’s whereabouts.

  There was nothing of any consequence in the pockets and turning them out lowered his spirits a degree or two farther, for he remembered performing this same office for casualties behind Béthune, in the autumn of 1915. A cardboard folder caught his eye and he took it over to the window, surprised to find it contained about a dozen very creditable watercolours, all of Exmoor scenes and signed ‘E. W. Winterbourne’, with dates reaching back a couple of years.

  The quality of the work astonished him. Spats could not have been more than thirteen when the first of them was painted and, so far as he knew, the boy had had no training. There was one that impressed him particularly, a limpid sketch in bronze, russet and green, of Chetsford Water, where it flows out of the middle moor and passes under an old stone bridge through a desolate area of upland. The autumnal tints of the moor had been trapped by the boy’s brush. It had a soft, brooding quality, unrelieved by the width of a sky dappled with those long streamers of cloud that passed in endless procession over the scene at all seasons of the year.

  He was still looking at it when Mrs Gorman, the matron, presented herself. ‘The policeman is here now, Mr Powlett-Jones. Mrs Herries is showing him into the head’s study. Will you be wanting any further help from me?’ He told her no, tucking the folder under his arm and going down the slate steps to the quad. The light seemed very queer out here, overcast with a yellowish tinge as if, at any minute, the low clouds pressing on the school buildings would split and empty themselves. From the direction of Big School, where Bouncer was in session, he heard a burst of laughter, and turned in through the arched door leading to the head’s kitchen quarters and thence to the study, where a young policeman, looking just as green and uncertain of himself as he had when he reported for his first interview there more than seven years ago, was thumbing his notebook.

  2

  Venn’s lorry-driver, emerging from the quarry two-thirds of the way up Quarry Hill, was aware that something was amiss the moment he levelled out on the gradient, about one in six here but steeper beyond the ash coppices that grew on each side lower down the road. He braked as hard as he dared but the speed of the heavily-laden lorry increased so that he made a wild grab at the handbrake, throwing all his weight on it as the vehicle weaved the full width of the road, its speed increasing with every yard it covered. As he approached the bend he realised he could never make it and acted on impulse, swinging the wheel hard right, mounting the low bank and crashing into the little forest of saplings to cut the corner or, if he was lucky, snarl up on the tangled undergrowth there. His left hand st
ill gripped the brake lever but his right was pressed on the horn, so that his blaring progress could have been heard a mile away.

  Old Chuff Greenaway, Farmer Grover’s part-time man, was the only witness to the lorry’s crashing entry into the wood. He was hedging fifty yards lower down the hill, heard the horn and glanced up just in time to see the vehicle tear into the copse and plough on down the slope, its progress marked by the travelling tumult among the trees that tossed and whirled as though struck by a cyclone. The undergrowth slowed the lorry’s progress somewhat but the weight of stone behind it was too much for the ten-year-old growth in the coppice. It shot out on to the road again at about thirty miles an hour, the driver still wrestling with the gears, the horn still trumpeting his terror.

  Beth, changing gear to tackle the second stage of the hill, saw it as a looming shadow, bursting out of the woods like a mastodon on the rampage, but she had no real awareness of the impact when the lorry tore into the nearside of the Morgan, crushed it, caught it up upon its front fender, carried it fifty yards or more down the hill and then discarded it before striking the far hedge and overturning on its side. Nothing could have been more sudden, more unexpected or more final. One moment she was addressing a remark to the children about the blaring horn, the next this great thing was looming over her, blotting everything out. She felt no fear or even dismay, only an intense curiosity concerning its sudden eruption from the little green wood on her left.

  Chuff Greenaway, panting hard, was on the scene in less than a minute, and what he saw caused him to stand wheezing yards short of the two piles of debris, one big, one small, his mouth agape, his eyes starting from their sockets. Then, with a groan, he turned and tottered back to the farm lane beyond the bend, sobbing out his story to Martha Grover, who was hanging out washing in the cobbled yard.

  With a small part of his mind David heard the young policeman’s intermittent rumble, something about a terrible accident on Quarry Hill involving Venn’s lorry, Beth and the children, but the full portent of what he was saying was too obscene, too monstrous to be absorbed. The man went on mumbling, his big hands fidgeting with his helmet on his knees, but soon David could make no kind of sense at all out of what he was saying and gestured so that he stopped, sitting immobile on the chair David had occupied that first spring day he came here and took tea with the Herries. Then, but dimly, he was aware of several other things, the presence of Ellie Herries who, for some inexplicable reason, was pressing his head to her chest, and a sustained roaring sound in his ears like the sound of the pre-zero-hour Somme bombardment, and behind it a complex of inconsequential sounds, a distant roll of thunder, the five-minute bell signifying the end of a period, the familiar clatter of boots on the quad flagstones outside, and the shrill voice of Rawlins – it was odd how easily he identified the voice-shouting, ‘No! Find your own ruddy atlas! You’re always scrounging…!’ as he scuttled past under the window.

  He got up, very stiffly, and moved out into the passage, through the arched door to Big School and into the forecourt, instinctively turning half-left and moving up towards the stump of the riven beech, Algy’s thinking post. The roller was here again, parked where it should not have been by one of the chain-gangs, very active at this time of year, and he sat on it, grappling with the enormity of the news that the pink-cheeked young policeman had brought. Beth and one of the kids dead. The lorry driver dead. The other twin, he did not know whether it was Joan or Grace, badly injured and rushed by ambulance to Challacombe hospital.

  The roaring in his ears increased in volume, blotting out other sounds although he could see, as through the wrong end of a telescope, some of the First Eleven at the nets below the pavilion, and even wondered why they played so soundlessly. One of the groundsmen was poking about the cricket pitch, searching for evidence of his implacable enemy, the mole. It astounded him that life, distorted into an unimaginable nightmare for him, continued to flow so smoothly and unremarkably elsewhere.

  His brain was still three-parts numb. It was impossible to absorb a shock of this magnitude. And yet, below the area of numbness, was a terrible rawness that quivered and winced when partial consciousness invaded it. He sat there like a stone carving, hands on thighs, chin thrust forward, seeing without actually seeing, hearing nothing but that dull roaring and then, as unaccountably as Ellie had appeared, Howarth was there, feet planted astride, hands locked behind his back as he sometimes stood in class. He said, ‘Come up to my rooms, P.J. Come and have a stiff drink, man,’ and when David did not answer, ‘The police say someone will have to go to Challacombe. I’ll come with you, as soon as the head gets back with transport.’ And then he did a strange thing, strange that is for Howarth, who had never, in the seven years he had known him, betrayed any emotion other than irritation. His tight little mouth twisted, the eyes behind the prim, pince-nez glasses glittered, and he reached out and placed his arm about David’s shoulders, letting it rest there, lightly but firmly.

  Away across the field the bell jangled for lunch and a muted clamour reached them. The sounds roused him somewhat. He said, hoarsely, ‘Do you suppose it’s true, Howarth? I mean… couldn’t it be some… some frightful mix-up?’ and Howarth said, hoarsely, ‘We’ll call in on Doc Willoughby’s on the way to Challacombe, David. He’ll give you something to help ride out the shock.’

  It was strange. His brain recorded the fact that Howarth had never before addressed him by his Christian name and this, improbably, touched some hidden spring behind his eyes, so that he began to weep, tears brimming over and coursing the length of his jawline. He even noted that one of them splashed down on the smooth shining surface of the roller, bursting like a starshell over the lines at night, so that it recalled violent deaths in the past, the very distant past, it seemed, although the wounds those deaths inflicted on him were not healed, as he had always assumed them to be. He said, brokenly, ‘Out there it was different. Everybody was going to die. It was only a matter of how and when.’

  ‘You got through that,’ Howarth said.

  ‘Not this. Not this!’

  ‘Yes! Here you’ve got something to hold on to, make something of. Out there it was just… just bloody waste!’ Suddenly he became extraordinarily animated, putting both hands to David’s shoulders swinging him round and shaking him. ‘The people round you aren’t numbered for death, the way everyone was out there. You’ve got thirty to forty years of hard grind ahead of you, doing a job you’re uniquely equipped to do and in a way no one else could do it! It won’t make much difference for a month, a year maybe, but it will in the end, I promise. A clear purpose always does, and I’m qualified to tell you that.’

  Something of Howarth’s urgency got through to him. Not much, but enough to bring him partially out of his stupor of grief and despair. He said, carefully, ‘I couldn’t go to Challacombe, Howarth. I couldn’t identify her. Someone else will have to do that. Killed outright, that policeman said. Crushed by a bloody great lorry, running wild…’ He stood up. ‘I’m going across the moor. Alone. I can’t fight it… can’t accept it… here. Not where she was, not where that kid waved goodbye three hours ago. Tell Ellie. Tell Herries when he gets back.’

  ‘Let me come with you.’

  ‘No! I can only cope with it alone, but it must be away from here.’ He glanced down at the great sprawl of buildings, silent again for the lunch break. ‘This place was a part of her. She’s too close here. So are the twins. Can you understand that?’

  ‘Yes,’ Howarth said, ‘but for God’s sake remember what I said, about using it to hold on to. The place itself, all of us here. For there isn’t one soul down there who isn’t grieving with you, or won’t be the moment he knows. That’s worth thinking on, David. It’s the only thing worth a thought just now.’

  He stood and watched him go, up past the pavilion, along the fringe of the plantation, then left into the undergrowth. Sullenly he groped for his cigarettes and after three fumbled attempts lit a Gold Flake, inhaling the smoke deep into his
lungs. He stood there watching until he saw the tall, spare figure emerge from the far side of the plantation and head for the Coombe. Then, with a grunt, he turned back towards the school buildings, walking swiftly and purposefully, but wondering just how he could explain his sanction of P.J.’s lunge off into the open country, with a more than even chance that he would never find his way back again.

  3

  David had no awareness of familiar landmarks, or not after crossing the plank bridge over the Coombe, where he had seen Blades and that woman Darbyshire last summer. He walked swiftly but blindly, vaulting stiles, scrambling up and down briar-sown banks, so that often he stumbled and sometimes fell. But he picked himself up with a kind of ferocity and pushed on over miles and miles of upland and across a dozen or more timbered gullies. As long as he could keep walking at this speed he was able to keep at bay the full impact of the blow, to stop it flattening him and leaving him as crushed and broken as Beth and the twins, wherever they were at this moment. His sole awareness of the landscape was the curious yellowish light he had noticed earlier that day and persisted even here, fifteen hundred feet above sea level. Every now and again thunder rolled but it was not until he paused gasping, on the crest of the long, heathery slope leading down to Chetsford Water, that the storm began to gather overhead and one or two heavy spots of rain fell on his sweating face. The soft, yellow glow in the sky dispersed then, replaced by a grey curtain of rain moving swiftly in from the east, a swaying, gently undulating curtain, immensely tall and hissing, coming to meet him like a vast, all-enveloping sheet of old canvas, the sail of some giant galleon torn loose by a cyclone and running free across the middle moor. He had never seen its like before. Perhaps nobody had. Perhaps it was the forerunner of the Apocalypse.