‘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
A
ndy 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 large, 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.
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?’