The Green Gauntlet

by Delderfield, R. F.

  As more and more reporters arrived and people began to talk freely, the story of the manner of Claire’s death half-leaked and they began to plague him for details. A village destroyed by a landslide and a torrent was first class copy, but a bonus human story—a seventy-two-year-old grandmother sacrificing her life for an injured grandchild was a golden peg on which such a story could be hung. They picqueted the Big House hour after hour and the restored telephone hardly ever stopped ringing, and had it not been for the presence of Simon and John, both with first-hand experience of newspapers and T.V. coverage, they might have overwhelmed him. As it was they preserved his isolation, dribbling a fact here, a recollection there, so that their reticence did not result in acrimony.

  Then, down in the village, they began to talk of his involvement with the developers and also plans for a mass funeral, so that pressure, instead of dwindling as the days passed, continued to mount, and Simon had to make a clear-cut decision about the funeral as well as bear the brunt at the inquest. His evidence, and that of John’s, was concise. They said as little as possible about the night sortie that they and Paul had made from the edge of the woods, and this was easier than they would have supposed for by now the issues were getting blurred and attention was redirected to the Coombe Bay area, to Shawcrosse’s stripping of the Dell and the supreme folly of cutting two new roads either side of an unpredictable watercourse.

  He took no part in all this, keeping very much to himself and seeming to agree when Simon told him he had arranged for Claire to be buried privately the day after the eight other victims were laid in the churchyard. Simon, handling him gently, was worried by his passiveness. His grief did not rise to the surface and he told Maureen, who had pronounced Paul little worse for his terrible exertions on the night, that he was worried about the weeks ahead, when the impact of all that had happened would fall on his father like another landslide. It was then that Maureen made her decision and went to him with the truth. The effect astonished her, who knew most of his secret thoughts, as much as it astonished the others.

  On the fourth day after the disaster, the day before the big funeral, winter borrowed a day from spring, as it sometimes did in the Valley, and those few gleams of sunshine came to Maureen’s rescue and to his.

  They told her that he had gone out soon after breakfast and climbed the upsloping orchard behind the stableyard to the stile that looked down on the lane and it was here that she found him, knowing full well why he was here, for it had been one of Claire’s favourite spots.

  She eased herself into his thoughts by this route, reminding him of how he had come to her during Claire’s second pregnancy, complaining that she had taken to getting up early in the morning and walking here barefoot among the bluebells and late primroses. He smiled, slowly, saying, ‘I remember very well, because you told me morning dew had never been known to cause an abortion,’ and then she smiled too and said, directly, ‘Simon and the others are wondering if you would like to see Claire. I told them I’d ask you.’

  He took his time answering but finally said, ‘No, I won’t see her. I daresay some of the older people in the Valley will raise their eyebrows at that but I’ve never subscribed to that tribal rite of tiptoeing into the presence of the dead and speaking in whispers, as though they might be embarrassed by what was said. I can’t imagine Claire wanting me to look at her any other way than through my memories. They’re pleasant enough, God knows, and I daresay they’ll last me out.’ Then, looking almost fierce as he stared at her under heavy, arched brows, ‘She wasn’t disfigured in any way, was she?’

  ‘Not in any way at all,’ Maureen said. ‘Once the mud was washed away she looked her usual “safe side of sixty”,’ and he said, with relief, ‘That’s good. She was as vain as a peacock about her looks.’

  ‘It wasn’t so much vanity as insurance against losing your interest.’ she hesitated a moment longer. ‘She wasn’t drowned, Paul. I can’t prove it of course, but let me say that in my opinion it was extremely unlikely. She was almost certainly dead when the water closed over her and took her half-way to the coast.’

  He looked so startled that she went on very hurriedly, telling him the full truth about Claire’s visit to her the morning before the flood, and when she had finished she was so flustered by the blankness of his expression that she said, uncertainly, ‘Well, Paul … it seemed to me you should know. What I mean is … she must have realised exactly what she was doing clambering up and down that tree trunk, getting those fastenings, and hanging on there in all that storm and wind. Perhaps a person in that situation with a helpless child would do what she did instinctively, or at least try to do it, but to me, knowing her heart condition, it was nothing short of a miracle. It was also a deliberate sacrifice.’ She paused. ‘Is that how you see it?’

  He said, at length, ‘Yes, that’s how I see it and that’s how it was. I’ll tell you something else, Maureen. I always loved the girl—once I got adjusted to losing Grace that is—and I was always damned proud of her looks and fine figure, but this is something different. What I mean is, it makes Claire a different person, someone whom even I didn’t know, and that after living with her for half-a-century. I wonder how many V.C.s were dished out for that kind of act in the two wars? It makes me proud of her in a new way.’

  She knew that he had not finished, that he had something else to tell her and she was right. After a moment he went on, without looking at her. ‘There’s another way of looking at this business and it keeps returning to me. It’s the curious completeness, almost rightness of that kind of death in that particular place. She was Valley-born and all her life she stood by me in a fight for and against the Valley but I don’t mean by that a fight against outsiders. The Sorrel and all the soil that came down on her weren’t outsiders. Neither was the heavy rainfall at the back of that landslide. These things have always been part and parcel of our life here. In a way we’ve always been fighting them, trying to tame them, trying to make them work for us. Somehow it doesn’t seem so bad to go down fighting in an old cause. Hazel, Rumble Patrick’s mother, was killed by a honking staff car near that cottage, and poor old Grace was killed in a foreign land by a foreign bomb. But Claire was luckier than either of them. If she had to go soon, then it was a wonderful thing to have a chance of doing something as useful as that at the final moment. I’m glad you told me. In fact, I’ll never cease to appreciate it,’ and he pressed her hand.

  ‘You mean it helps that much?’

  ‘More than you can know,’ he said and suddenly he turned on his heel and went down the orchard with his old, measured-yard stride, and across the stableyard into the house. She thought, following him, ‘He’s a queer one and no mistake. When do you ever stop learning about someone? God knows, I thought I knew them both but it seems I didn’t. In all these years I’ve only managed to lift a corner of the curtain.’

  But even Maureen was not prepared for the end-product of the talk they had leaning on the orchard stile.

  He called Simon and John into the library as soon as he entered and sent for the others as well. They realised at once that he was himself again as soon as he said, pouring them and himself whiskies, ‘Right. None of you have to creep about the damned house anymore. What time is that funeral fixed for tomorrow?’ and when Simon said it was scheduled for 3 p.m., and likely to be televised, he added, ‘I’ve had second thoughts. Claire ought to be part of it. This is a Valley occasion and she was very much a part of the Valley. She wouldn’t care to be buried quietly and discreetly, or not in the circumstances. Somehow I’m suddenly sure of that. Could you make the necessary alterations at this stage?’

  ‘Why yes, I suppose so,’ said Simon, doubtfully, ‘providing you’re sure that’s what you want.’

  ‘It is,’ he said, ‘and I’ll get around to telling you why, but not now because there’s something else I want to do. I’d like to make some kind of statement to those Press chaps. I’d like to do
Claire justice. Yes, I know, it cuts across what you thought I’d want but there it is, and unless it’s going to upset the rest of you I’d like to get the record straight. How much have they printed about things like Claire tying that webbing round Vanessa?’

  ‘Bits and pieces,’ John said. ‘We played it right down. Even the coroner thinks you waited by the landrover when Si and I went down to look. That’s why you weren’t called at the inquest.’

  ‘Well, it can’t make much difference now,’ Paul said, ‘and what the hell have any of us got to hide? She didn’t just die of exhaustion out there, and she wasn’t really caught by the flood. She had angina, pretty badly Maureen says, and she must have realised precisely what she was doing all the time. I’d like that generally known unless, that is, it’s going to embarrass either of you, or Mary, or any of the others.’

  They were silent as Rumble Patrick slipped into the room, and behind him Mary, Margaret and last of all Maureen. ‘It’s all right,’ Maureen said, ‘I told them the same as I told you,’ and John said, slowly, ‘You don’t mind this sort of thing being broadcast, Gov?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he said emphatically. ‘Why should I? Why should any of us? She did something astounding and why should it be passed over? I’ve told Maureen that I’m damned proud of her, and I imagine you are too. It helps me a lot and if you’ll let it, it’ll help you. I’d like Vanessa to know the truth about it when she’s up and about. God knows, she wouldn’t have had any chance at all if Claire had thought of herself.’

  And so it was done, and the full story appeared in the morning papers, and nine coffins instead of eight were carried along the improvised duckboard track from the mortuary to the plot behind the church that Shallowfordians still called ‘Overspill’.

  Never before had so many strangers witnessed a Valley funeral, and never had so many flowers been passed hand to hand from van to grave-side. Only the male Craddocks were present for it was a tradition that no female Craddock attended a funeral, and Paul, noticing John’s troubled glance when he gazed round at the phalanx of spectators, touched his elbow and said, ‘It’s all as it should be, John. Nothing that has ever happened here has been private. It wouldn’t have caused your mother the least concern. We’re still a community here in spite of everything, and four of those other people were born and raised in the Valley.’

  When the simple service was over and the crowds began to disperse, Henry Pitts sidled up and said, nodding towards the obelisk, raised by the German Merchant Marine over Tamer Potter’s grave, ‘Do ’ee remember the last time us had this kind o’ caper up yer, Maister?’ and Paul said he remembered very clearly, and had been thinking of it all day for it seemed to him very strange that two tragedies, separated by fifty years, should have had so many similarities.

  After that he stayed close to Henry, drawing comfort from the comradeship that had helped them both through the years and together they looked out over the devastation of the Village and the new course of the Sorrel.

  ‘They’ll soon get around to clearing it up and rebuilding, I imagine,’ Paul said. And then, making his first and last reference to the cause of the landslide, ‘Maybe it’ll teach them something, Henry. Maybe if we raise the matter of replanting, someone might listen to us next time.’ But Henry, made cynical by the years, said. ‘Maybe, but I woulden bet on it, Maister.’

  II

  Andy did not fly home for the funeral but wrote saying he intended leaving the States and returning to the U.K in the spring and that he would contact them on arrival. A week or so later a second letter arrived from him, addressed to Paul, and marked ‘Personal’, so that Paul did not open it in front of Margaret, now living at the Big House, but carried it away to his study as soon as breakfast was over.

  It was, he supposed, something in the nature of an amende honorable, for the boy was clearly distracted by the circumstances of Claire’s death and his indirect contribution to the changes at that end of the Valley. In spite of his isolation he was, Paul noted, still very well-informed about everything that was going on and Paul wondered how much the others had told him or, indeed, whether Margaret herself had let slip that the disaster had been caused by stripping vegetation from that part of the Coombe. He hoped not, for he felt no rancour now, wishing heartily that Andy had sense enough to realise as much, ‘I’ll sit down and write him a cheery letter when I feel more up to it,’ he told himself, but the weeks went by, and the effort of adjusting to the emptiness of the bedroom and the library chair accounted for most of his waning energy. He mentioned Andy to Margaret once or twice, and even to Vanessa when she told him all she could recall of that last evening at Mill Cottage. The child seemed more interested than her mother, who merely said, ‘We still keep in touch …’ but so offhandedly that he let the subject drop and turned the conversation to Vanessa’s future.

  Until then Margaret had taken it for granted that she would have a more or less formal education, but after reading some of her essays and verses Paul ventured an opinion that the customary five-year spell at Paxtonbury Convent School might be improved upon and in the end they managed to get her into Dartington Hall where, Paul was informed by Mary (the family authority on such matters), Vanessa’s creative impulse would be encouraged. That same spring she went off happily enough, and within a day or so of her departure Andy returned to the Valley after an absence of more than five years.

  He did not make his presence known and did not even inform them he had landed. He had urgent business to attend to and wanted it settled to his satisfaction before he made peace with the family. It was with this in mind that he hired a small and, for him, very unostentatious car and drove by a roundabout route to Coombe Bay churchyard to visit Claire’s grave. He was far from being a sentimentalist but he went there for all that. It was as though he wished to include her in the reconciliation.

  The sight of the nine fresh mounds and the debris of so many wreaths among clusters of fresh flowers, stirred him more than he had been stirred in a very long time. He stood there reading the inscription on the temporary headstone and then, hands in pockets, lounged across to the wall overlooking that section of Coombe Bay where the Sorrel had carved a new channel to the sea.

  Desolation persisted down here despite the nonstop work of earth-moving machines and the dumping of hundreds of tons of soil and rocks along the old course of the river. Like his brother Simon he found himself equating the rubble-strewn acres with the wrecked towns he had seen during the war and then his gaze crossed the river and the new dykes, finally resting on the bald, eastern half of the Coombe where the sun glittered on zinc or glass at what was left of the caravan park. He went down into the town and talked to one or two of the workmen, posing as a stranger and learning things about the flood and its repercussions that he had suspected but had been unable to confirm until now. Then he got in his hired car and drove back along the coastal road to keep an appointment with his father’s solicitors. That same evening, about eight o’clock, he phoned his former partner, Shawcrosse, from a hotel booth.

  Shawcrosse sounded glad to hear from him and could hardly wait to give him an up-to-date progress report on Shawcrosse Developments Ltd.

  ‘We’ve had our teething troubles,’ he assured Andy, ‘but we’re over them now. You were a B.F., old boy, to let the family scare you off in that way. What started as an outsider looks like coming up the straight ahead of anything I’ve ever done in this bracket. Why not come over for the odd noggin? Rhoda will be tickled to death. She always had a yen for the strong silent types, old boy.’

  He seemed not to realise that he was talking to the son of Claire Craddock, washed down the Sorrel a few months ago among the debris of his holiday camp, and Andy did not remind him but said he would come over right away and had a proposition that might interest Shawcrosse. Then, having collected his brief case and downed a stiff brandy, he drove out along the Whinmouth road to the big double gates of the Shawcrosse home, a l
arge, detached house built between the wars and garnished at a later date with Carolean-cum-Tudor embellishments.

  Shawcrosse, shaking hands with his customary man-to-man emphasis, greeted him enthusiastically, calling to Rhoda that he and Andy wanted a business chat ‘before the social yakkity-yak began’. He showed Andy into a large study that reminded his visitor of a room one of the pre-war scrap kings might have window-dressed in the hope of impressing a customer with a public-school background. The desk was as massive as Mussolini’s, the fitted carpet tickled the ankle, the pictures, all very modern, suggested framed wallpaper designs executed by a heroin addict. Andy said, by way of acknowledging the furnishings, ‘You’ve come a long way, Ken. Is it as far as you hoped when we first met, back in Tunis?’

  ‘Can’t grumble,’ Shawcrosse said genially, ‘but it hasn’t been all beer and skittles, especially since that bloody shambles over at Coombe Bay. Take a pew, old boy, that’s what they’re for,’ and he flung open a military chest saucily converted into a cocktail bar, saying, ‘Don’t tell me. I know your tipple. Make a point of remembering things like that.’

  ‘Great God,’ thought Andy, ‘he talks as though it was still 1942 and he was three weeks out of an Officers’ Training Unit. Are there many like him still around?’ and it sobered him to reflect that he had spent so many hours in this man’s company or that he had associated with him in any way at all, even over the telephone. Everything he said and did was phoney. The way he lifted his glass and leered as he gulped. The clothes he wore and the pub-talk gambits he used. The desk he sat at and the curtains he had chosen. Every last thing about him was as counterfeit as a deep-freeze dinner sealed in cellophane.