The Green Gauntlet by R. F. Delderfield Read Free Book Online

Their surrender of civilian status and the break-up of their small scrap-metal empire, had been no real sacrifice on their part. Money, as such, did not interest them and never had, not since their coming-of-age when old Franz Zorndorff, their cicerone, had lured them out of the Valley and trained them as his acolytes. What they found rewarding about life was its constant movement and the element of gambling inherent in the scrap market but when something even more boisterous presented itself they were happy to abandon scrap for the duration and whoop it up in the skies over south-eastern England.
    Margaret, Andy’s Welsh wife, accepted the situation, making the best of what could not be altered, but Monica, Stevie’s partner, had never ceased to regard the war as an attempt on the part of all engaged in it to thwart her personal plans for the future. She had, in fact, argued strenuously against their enlistment and when she failed to carry her point she had sulked through the phoney war period and on into the Dunkirk summer and beyond. Now, after nearly two years of camp-following, she could contain her frustration no longer and the resistant flare-up promised to drive a wedge between man and wife that could never be withdrawn. It was the near-certainty of this that had put the note of urgency into Stevie’s voice when, in a frantic attempt to find a mediator, he had remembered his brother’s wife and asked for Margaret’s address.
    He did not have much hope that Margaret’s intervention would cause his wife to change her mind. The two had never been close friends although, in the whirl of foreign business trips, shopping sprees, the buying and selling of homes, and the cut-and-thrust of business life, they had half-convinced both men that their relationship was cordial. The truth was, of course, neither Stephen, nor Andrew, nor even Margaret had ever been privy to Monica’s long-term plans for herself, her husband and, if they had to come along, for the other pair.
    The spoiled daughter of the most pontifical-looking cleric in Devon Monica Dearden had never, or not until now, repented her pursuit and capture of the harebrained son of a small country squire. She told herself, the first night they met at an Assembly Room dance, that, given the chance, she could make something of Stephen Craddock, and in a way she had, dragging Andy and his Welsh wife along in her wake. Under her tutelage they had ceased to roar about the countryside in sports cars that looked like angry red beetles and had bought more dignified forms of transport. She had also redressed all three of them, persuading the boys to discard their loud sports clothes and the yard of knitted scarf that trailed behind them wherever they went. As to their social life, she had made shift to sort that out to a degree, encouraging them to devote only business hours to men who could hardly read or write, who kept no banking accounts, but who, at a moment’s notice, could produce half a battleship or ten miles of disused railway line. Together as a quartette they assembled round them a group of pseudo-sophisticated people and had begun to cultivate an acquaintance with what, in the middle ’thirties, passed for art. They attended a play or two by unarrived dramatists, discussed the work of a few fashionable novelists and patronised a succession of artists whose canvases, usually covered with clocks, fishbones, detached limbs, assorted triangles and solitary eyes puzzled Stevie very much but were loudly acclaimed by Monica’s friends.
    It was not Stevie’s philistinism, however, that enlarged his wife’s exasperation with him into frantic resentment and neither was their quarrel connected with her refusal to encumber herself with children. Stevie conceded that she might well be right when she declared him unfitted to be anybody’s father. The flaw in their marriage was exposed by the same pressures as those brought to bear on Simon and Rachel. Neither could view