Read Online Post of Honour by R. F. Delderfield - Free Book Online

him, as though he were able, by some acquired magic practised over the years to catch and distil the fecundity of the countryside, storing it in his loins to bestow upon her as proof of his achievement. This enormous gusto in him, this bonus bounty of the fields and woods he loved, was something she prized even above her children, for she was persuaded that it was something rare that neither Grace Lovell nor any woman in the Valley could have conjured from him. It was partly this naive pride in his masculinity that invested her with the power to match and surpass his easily aroused passion. She sensed that he possessed her not only as a woman but as the consuming instrument of his lust for life in the place he had made for himself in this gentle wilderness. She was a woman not much given to extravagant fancies but in this realm the wildness of her imagination had few limits. She saw herself then not as Claire Derwent, a farmer’s daughter married to a man who had purchased his place among them with pounds, shillings and pence, but as consort to an almost godlike being who used her flesh as an altar to express his strange obsession with the fruitfulness and timelessness of the Valley, with every flower and cornstalk that grew in it, and every human or animal who lived and multiplied hereabouts, and it was acute awareness of this that made her reckless of giving, so that she felt at times that she could never absorb enough of him or demonstrate how dedicated she was to the gratification of his senses. Eagerness to convey this, communicating itself as it did to every nerve in her body as she enfolded and enclosed him sometimes half-stupefied him with delight.
    And yet, in more mundane spheres, there were times when she called the tune, when an issue arose that encouraged her to make a stand and whenever this happened, when she once made it clear that she was determined to have her way, she could usually influence him without much trouble. This had been so in the case of Simon’s renunciation of hunting and like matters but perhaps her most signal victory was in respect of the car he brought home on the occasion of the birth of ‘Whiz’.
    It was a 1911 Belsize, a great, square, brass-snouted monster, purchased second-hand from a Paxtonbury draper who had lost his nerve on the second outing and left it unused in his coach-house for almost two years. Paul decided to buy it after hearing Claire say it was a pity the family could never travel far afield as a group and after getting Frisby, the Paxtonbury coach builder, to service it and give him a few lessons in driving he piloted it home across the moor in dashing if somewhat erratic style, deriving unexpected pleasure out of his mastery of the brute and causing Eveleigh’s foreman, who saw him come bouncing down from the water-shed, to run up the hedge in alarm, scarcely able to believe his eyes when he recognised the driver.
    About a fortnight after Claire had come downstairs he suggested a family expedition into Paxtonbury and after some hesitation Claire got the elder children ready, veiled herself in a beekeeper’s bonnet and they set off, little Mary sitting between Paul and Simon in the front, Claire and the exuberant twins in the back. Simon, holding Mary’s hand to give her confidence, looked very solemn but the Pair squealed in unison when Paul clashed the gears at the foot of the drive and wedged the lever into its tortuous gate, so that the Belsize (christened The Juggernaut by Claire) leaped forward like a steeplechaser and came to a shuddering halt between the stone pillars.
    ‘Are you sure you can manage it, Paul?’ Claire asked anxiously and he said huffily that he certainly could for how else could he have driven the fifteen miles from Paxtonbury? He got out and swung the heavy starting-handle and soon they were moving at a steady twenty miles an hour along the river road, past the Home Farm, where one of the biblical shepherds swung his hat and cheered,