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

the present war from a common standpoint. Stevie saw it as a kind of nonstop rugby football match between a sporting team and opponents inclined to foul. Monica saw it as the most unmitigated bore ever contrived to try the patience of the human family. It was bad enough, she thought, to have to break off her social contacts, pretend to be rationed as regards food, clothes and petrol, and stumble about small market towns where the street lighting had never been adequate and was now non-existent. What was worse, in her eyes, was an obligation to support the role of a twentieth-century vivandière in one dreary camp after another, in order to be on hand to embrace one of the beefiest threequarters in the British team. For Monica Craddock did not see her husband and his messmates as heroes but as a mob of hairy school-prefects. To her they were not the defenders of democracy but extroverts who had opted out of the serious business of life to enjoy an unlooked-for holiday. When introduced to the twins’ group-captain on one of the Battle of Britain airfields she thought of him as a bemedalled Doctor Arnold of Rugby, impossibly stupid, impossibly priggish and self-deprecating into the bargain and as time passed she grew to hate everything about the R.A.F. She hated its silly slang and its obsession with gadgets. She hated its juvenile enthusiasms and its affected insouciance in matters of dress and deportment. Born and bred in the precincts of a Cathedral Close, her life regulated by the clamour of bells and the proprieties expected of an Archdeacon’s daughter, she had once yearned for adventure, for the bizarre and the unpredictable. In the years between marriage and the outbreak of war she had found all three in the company of Stephen and his brother. Then, against all probability, they entered the Fellowship of the Dedicated and overnight had become more catholic than the Pope, reverting to schoolboys, crumpling their caps, leaving their top tunic button undone to prove that they were numbered among the élite, growing fair, droopy moustaches and, above all, prattling endlessly of ‘prangs’ and ‘popsies’ and ‘wizard shows’. This was not the kind of adventure Monica had envisaged and the façade of these people did not deceive her for a moment. They claimed to despise those who, in their own idiom, ‘shot a line’, but to Monica the lines shot by the men (and their women) of Bomber and Fighter Commands criss-crossed the entire country so that there was no way of escaping the tangle.
    She stuck it out, month after month, hoping that something would happen to make life worth living again and then, in a chintzy hotel room in the small market town near Stevie’s Yorkshire station, she suddenly ran out of patience. Either Stephen accepted the opportunity she had made for him of escaping from this life and re-entering a world where one had access to civilised diversions, or she would call a truce to the marriage at least for the duration and possibly for ever.
    It was not a lighthearted decision. In her own deliberate way she had loved him ever since he had whisked her away from that dreary Cathedral Close and through the years of their rackety marriage she had been faithful to him, although she had her suspicions that the same could not be said of him. She thought of herself as modern and broad-minded, however, and was not disposed to worry about an occasional peccadillo on the part of a lusty young man if, as she had rightly assumed, he was anchored by more important ties. He had always looked to her for stability and she did not fail him after arriving at the conclusion that he was under the spell of those glittering little machines and the mystique of the comradeship he found in the mess. He needed, she felt, to be hauled outside of the magic circle and she knew, or thought she knew, exactly how this could be achieved. On the excuse of visiting her parents she made a tour of pre-war contacts, visiting two knights