The Green Gauntlet Read Online Free PDF

thought he did know but he was too tired to argue the point. Instead he said, ‘You can get a licence to rebuild Periwinkle. It’ll come under essential works.’
    ‘Let it wait,’ Rumble said, offhandedly and then, more thoughtfully, ‘Mary and the kid can stay here for the time being, can’t they?’
    ‘As long as you like,’ said Paul and then, a new worry suggesting itself, ‘You aren’t thinking of leaving and …’ but Rumble grinned and said, ‘Well, certainly not tonight, Gov’nor!’ and was gone, and Paul, finishing his drink, heard him run up the stairs, along the passage and open the door of the room Mary had occupied all her life until she married. He found himself thinking about the mutual attraction of these two, his hot favourites among all his sons, daughters, and in-laws. It went right back to their earliest childhood and he had watched it grow from a tiny seed and flower into the wholly satisfactory thing it had become. They were the complement of one another, Rumble a boisterous, happy-go-lucky extrovert, Mary a gentle, affectionate introvert. Of the lives and marriages resulting from his own theirs alone had been safe and predictable. Neither one of them—and he would swear to this—had ever held another man or woman in their arms, and somehow, at this moment, he was able to see through ceilings and doors into that little room of hers and know, with a sense of relief, that Rumble was already comforting her and that soon their bodies would fuse, as though anxious to replace life obliterated by the bombs. It was strange and a little indecent, he thought, that a man should find such reassurance in the physical possession of one’s own daughter but he did, relating it directly to the extreme pleasure he had always found in the body of the girl’s mother.
    He poured himself some more whisky and took it over to the fireplace, kicking a log there until a splutter of blue flame devoured the sullen spiral of smoke. Fancifully he saw the shooting flame as a symbol of Rumble Patrick’s virility, and deep inside him there stirred the vague promise of a great tribe of grandchildren. He felt himself starved of grandchildren. Mary had one son but so far neither Simon nor The Pair had produced any and the baby daughter of Whiz, born in India, had been trapped there by the war. He sat on musing about his children collectively and individually, wondering why none of them save Mary seemed to belong to this great sprawling house, or professed loyalty to the fields and woods outside. He supposed everybody threw down their own roots and that those roots need not necessarily be based in soil. They might—as he suspected in the case of Simon—be anchored to ideas or, in the case of The Pair, to money and machines. He wondered whether he would ever see them congregate under this roof again and doubted it, for they seemed to have lost touch with his way of life and Claire’s. Well, for the meantime, there was nothing to do but hold on and he was good at holding on. Anyone hereabouts would vouch for that.
    Outside the light began to fade over the leafless chestnuts and overhead, invisible above low cloud, one of the Paxtonbury-based Polish aircraft buzzed in from the sea.

Chapter Two
    Craddocks at War
    I
    S ometimes the musings of Valley-based people like Paul had the power to travel telepathic paths, spreading like sound waves half-way across the world where they were picked up in billet and bivouac and contemplated, sentimentally or unsentimentally, depending upon the strength of the pre-war ties of those who received them. Distance had no bearing upon their interpretation. Those preoccupied with their own pursuits and surroundings could disregard them but there were others who, in peacetime, had thought of Shallowford as a dead-and-alive backwater, but were now having second thoughts about it. News from home used them as a sounding board, producing pangs of homesickness and impatience with new scenes and new