The Green Gauntlet (51 page)

Paul said, so quietly that Simon had to incline his head to hear him, ‘Is she alive? Can you tell?’ and when Simon said he could feel her pulse and began chafing her, he heard Paul scrambling back over the ruins of the scullery shouting to John to bring the ladder. Then he was back in the room again and when he saw her stir he suddenly became excited and leaped up shouting, ‘John! The ladder! Hurry! Come over the roof!’ Subsiding again, as though ashamed of his outburst, he said, ‘You say she was
tied
there? Out on that tree?’ and Simon, still chafing the child’s hands, mumbled, ‘There’s no-one else out there, Gov. I’m sorry … sorry …’ but could add nothing more.

John came scrambling over the roof and they heard the thump of the ladder, neither of them pausing to wonder how the devil he had managed to drag the cumbersome thing this far but then, as Simon rose, cradling Vanessa in his arms, he saw Paul crawl into the aperture and cast the beam of his torch in a wide arc over the water. They had already eased Vanessa through the hole at the back and were beginning to ascend the first rungs of the ladder before he rejoined them, reaching forward to steady Simon’s shoulders. He said, ‘Tied there … Must have dragged her there … God knows, it’s a bloody miracle … I couldn’t have done it! Neither could you or anyone else, not with the place falling about her …’

They said nothing, concentrating on the tricky task of inching the child across the ladder that John had placed as a bridge between the remains of the thatch and a perilously insecure mound of cob a few yards beyond. They managed it somehow and dragged themselves back along the rope as far as the elm, with Vanessa balanced on their shoulders and Paul abreast of them, lending his shoulder as a staff whenever either of them needed it. When they reached the landrover he gave another series of despairing shouts but the answer came from some way above them, where there was a confused flicker of lights at the top of the lane.

Simon said, sharply, ‘Take Vanessa home, Gov’nor. There’s no sense in staying now help has arrived. I’ll pilot them down there and we’ve got the rope and ladder. Drive him back, John. And see what you can do to rouse Whinmouth. Drive there by the moor if necessary, or try and phone from somewhere en route. God knows, there might be dozens of casualties in that caravan park on the other side of the Coombe.’

He stood beside the bonnet gesturing and watched his father’s authority ebb so that John was able to coax him into the landrover where he sat hunched and silent, the child across his knees. Then, as Rumble Patrick and one of Eveleigh’s men appeared out of the darkness, John revved and began to back up the lane, the tyres fighting for a grip on a wash of loose stones in the gateway. Rumble Patrick asked no questions. With Simon and Eveleigh’s man he dragged at the floundering tail-board until the vehicle was wrenched round and moved off up the lane to where two other cars were parked at the junction. Henry Pitts waddled out of one of them, swathed in an enormous greatcoat that John recognised as superannuated Home Guard issue. He said briefly, ‘Stay here and keep contact, Henry. We’ve got Vanessa but mother’s still missing,’ and then swung left and lurched off into the darkness.

Henry Pitts stood there with his mouth agape, watching the tail-lights until they disappeared and then turning to look at the bobbing lights lower down where Simon, Rumble Patrick and Eveleigh’s man were scrambling over a wilderness of liquid mud.

‘Christ A’mighty,’ he said aloud, ‘to think it should ha’ come to this. Claire Craddock gone. Carried away by a tide o’ mud in her own bliddy vields.’

Suddenly he felt very old and helpless so that he blundered back to the car, groped in the glove box for a flask and sucked down two great mouthfuls of whisky and water. He recorked the flask, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and sat glumly to await reinforcements. Sitting alone in the darkness he remembered another such night down in Tamer’s Cove, when the whole lot of them were engrossed in work of this kind. But that was in the splendour of their youth and nothing had seemed too difficult or depressing. It was, he reflected, almost exactly half-a-century ago. The wonder of it was that of all that team he and Squire Craddock were present for the encore.

Chapter Five

Counter Attack

I

T
hey recovered her body the following afternoon. It was caught in a tangle of briars nearly a mile below the landslide, just short of the choked bridge where flotsam was piled twenty feet high and the Sorrel, in its furious search for the sea, had turned aside to flood half the houses and shops of Coombe Bay High Street, some of them to a depth of ten feet.

She did not die alone that night. The Coombe Bay constable, shouting a warning to sleeping householders, was caught by a wall of water between two of the shops and washed as far as the quay where the torrent tore through Smut Potter’s café leaving a hole ten yards wide. Down here, in one of the few original quayside cottages, an elderly couple were drowned in their beds and in the new red, brick houses, where the block stood in the path of the diverted mainstream, five other people died, two of them children.

It was astonishing, people said when they surveyed the two-mile path of the torrent that the death toll was not higher. Thirty houses had subsided when the tide rolled back the floodwater in the small hours and several caravans, mercifully empty, were swept from the eastern side of the Dell and carried in the path of the slide as far as the river bed.

Nine dead, damage estimated at a hundred and seventy thousand pounds. It was enough to put the Valley on the front page of the nationals for the fourth time in fifty-one years and bring newspapermen and television teams flocking in from London, Bristol and Plymouth to record the devastation and interview survivors. A short-lived, out-of-season boom followed the night of terror. Hotels and boarding houses reopened to accommodate the Press and a Paxtonbury disaster fund was opened for the families of victims and the hundred-odd homeless. People living as far away as Rome looked curiously at the ruin of an English village half-inundated in slime and temporarily isolated by the two arms of the Sorrel, the one following its original course when the bridge arches were cleared, the other, the wayward one, cutting through the new housing block, a huddle of cottages behind the High Street, and on into the bay via Smut Potter’s café and the old quayside.

Simon, plodding about among the muck and debris after his school was closed, likened the desolate scene to some of the towns he had passed in pursuit of the Wehrmacht to the Seine, places like Caen and Le Havre, but the defilement of this end of the Valley worried him less than his father’s silence.

When they told him she had been found he seemed neither surprised nor relieved but looked at them under his grey, shaggy brows and listened politely, as though to a report of a relatively trivial occurrence at one of the farms, a burned rick perhaps, or a Dutch barn unroofed by a gale. The Whinmouth doctor said it was the effect of shock, but Maureen, who knew him far better than his sons, understood that it was a more complex and deepseated reaction, involving not only Claire but the Valley as a whole, and that, in any case, he would be likely to see his human and material loss as one for all the time she had known him he had identified the Valley with his wife. His withdrawal, she thought, was caused by his attempt to come to terms with this quirk in his character and that whilst others would see it as a coincidence to him it was nothing of the sort. There was a kind of inevitability about it that, to an extent, buttressed him against grief, at least for the time being. She did not try to explain this to anyone because it was far too complicated. The only person capable of understanding it would be his daughter Mary, and she had her own grieving to do and her own pride to sustain her.

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.’