Long Summer Day (15 page)

When the morning temperatures cooled, and the period of drought was followed by a spell of soft rain and south-westerly-winds, Paul rode far afield every day, sometimes alone but more often in the company of Claire Derwent, who showed him the maze of leafy rides between Coombe Bluff and the northern edge of Shallowford Woods and all the short cuts to the Dell, Hermitage, Four Winds and bracken slopes of Blackberry Moor. Together they rode over to visit Lord Gilroy, in his elegant home, Heronslea, beyond the smaller, parallel River Teazel. Gilroy, stiffly polite, gave them tea in thin Rockingham china and threatened to send the local agent over to Shallowford in order to gather Paul into the local Conservative fold. He did not deign to ask Paul his politics, assuming, no doubt, that he was eager to ‘ …  stop the damned tide of Radicalism set in motion by that unspeakable bounder, Lloyd George’, a politician, his Lordship declared, who should have been strung up on the occasion of his pro-Boer rally, in Birmingham during the war! Paul judged it tactful to make no comment upon this and after an hour or so they left, riding south to the sea, then east along the curving beach to Coombe Bay.

Paul had made one or two expeditions in this direction already but always unaccompanied, for although his thoughts constantly returned to Grace Lovell, and to their three improbable meetings, there was no one in whom he could confide regarding his infatuation. Rudd, he knew, would go out of his way to dissuade him from anything but a formal association with the family and on the one or two occasions he had mentioned her name the agent had abruptly changed the subject. It was clear that he carried his dislike of the family as far as the cadet branch still living on Shallowford property, for he once referred to Bruce Lovell as ‘a man who could borrow from a Hebrew pawnbroker and later have the man charged as a receiver of stolen goods!’ Neither did Paul care to raise the subject of Grace Lovell to Claire Derwent, although their association had been completely circumspect. He decided that he would like to keep it that way, for she was a merry and informative companion, who seemed to enjoy showing him off to scattered local families, and although she looked undeniably attractive with her corn-coloured curls peeping beneath a hard hat and her pink cheeks glowing with health, she did not stir him in the way that Grace Lovell had when they had met on that first occasion in the nursery, or when she had accepted his gift of the screen at the sale. The screen had been collected the following day and since then he had not even glimpsed her although, on two occasions, he rode slowly past her house in the early morning, and at various times had ridden the grey, now named Snowdrop, along the tideline of the Bay.

The grey’s name derived from a remark of Mrs Handcock’s, greeting him as he rode down from Priory Wood with, ‘I zeed ’ee cummin’, you an’ that gurt beast o’ yours! Just like a man zitting atop a gurt bunch o’ snowdrops!’ and thereafter Paul discarded the grey’s Irish name which was unpronouncable, and settled for ‘Snowdrop’.

So the summer days slipped by, until Eph Morgan announced that renovations were finished, and Mr Craddock might write to the upholsterers in Paxtonbury for soft furnishings he and Rudd had ordered on their one expedition to the city. The day before they were due to arrive Claire turned up at the house on foot dressed, for once, in blouse, skirt and white straw hat, announcing that her horse had gone lame and asking if she could help arrange the furniture that was coming.

Paul told her the vans were not due until late that afternoon. It did not occur to him at the time to wonder how she had managed to walk the four miles from High Coombe to Shallowford, on a sultry day and arrive looking as fresh as a spring daffodil. She seemed so disappointed that Paul, telling her that she was welcome to ride Snowdrop home and return him the following day, suggested they took a picnic lunch to Shallowford Woods, returning before tea to receive the vans. Claire brightened up at this and said it was a wonderful idea, providing Paul’s leg was strong enough to carry him that far over rough ground.

‘Hang it, Claire, I’m not a cripple,’ he said indignantly. ‘The hospital surgeon told me to walk as much as I could and since I’ve been down here I’ve never been further than the lodge on foot. I’ll get Mrs Handcock to pack up some pasties and tea and sugar. We can make a fire and boil tea if we take my army canteen with us.’

They set out in high spirits, following the narrow path along the left bank of the river and skirting the shoulder of the Coombe to the edge of the woods, seeing no one except Hazel, youngest of the Potter children, said to be queer in the head and much given to talking to herself. She was doing it now, staring up at an isolated oak in the meadow and watching something half-way up the trunk. She did not notice their approach and they were thus privileged to overhear one of her impromptu poems.

‘I-zee-you-bobtail, a-patterin’-along thicky-bark,’ she sang. ‘Youm grey, and varmint they zay! But I loves ’ee! I loves ’ee bettern’n the red, ’cause youm like me, chaased be everyone, baint ’ee?’ but at this point Hazel must have heard their approach over the turf, for she swung round and took to her heels, speeding across the field towards the Coombe and covering the ground as fast as Matabele children Paul had watched in the kraals.

‘She’s an odd little thing,’ Paul said. ‘I don’t remember seeing her before. Does she live about here?’

Claire told him that she was Hazel Potter, an afterthought on the part of Tamer and Meg, and was reckoned half-witted on account of her tendency to spend her days roaming the fields and woods, sometimes holding conversations with trees, birds and animals.

‘Well, I don’t consider that convincing evidence of lunacy,’ he said. ‘She’s a rather beautiful child and moves as fast as a greyhound. Doesn’t she go to school?’

Claire said that she was enrolled at Mary Willoughby’s little school but was absent more often than not, for the Potters could not be induced to make her attend regularly, but she was clearly not interested in the subject and seemed preoccupied with thoughts of her own, so after watching the grey squirrel dart along the branch of the big oak and disappear into shadows cast by the leaves, he followed into the woods, wading through waist-high bracken to a ride that led down to the shore of the mere opposite the pagoda.

Despite his boast he found his leg tiring and was glad to sit and let Claire gather sticks for the fire. She had thrown aside her wide straw hat while he sat under a willow by the shore, admiring the grace with which she moved to and fro in the scrub, every now and again bending swiftly to add to her armful of sticks. She was, he thought, a very supple creature, with a figure shaped by healthy ancestors, years of hard exercise, and, he suspected, very little farm drudgery. Everything about her was neat, cool and somehow deliberate. She walked with a slight sway, like a tall flower in the wind, so that again he thought of a daffodil growing by a lake and he was glad now that chance had given him an opportunity of seeing her in feminine clothes. On all their previous expeditions she had appeared at the house in a brown riding habit, and dull colours, he decided, did not flatter her as much as the cotton blouse and well-cut grey skirt she was wearing today. The water of the mere was very still and he could see the white ruin of the Burmese pagoda hiding in pines on the islet. The air was full of the hum of insects and far across the little lake the reeds stirred, affording him a fleeting glimpse of waterfowl—wild duck, teal or widgeon he supposed, making a mental note to ask Rudd if they ever shot down here.

She came back to him still looking pensive and not much inclined to gossip, so they lit a fire and made tea in his battered canteen, afterwards disposing of Mrs Handcock’s pasties and talking lazily of one thing and another. He admitted then that his leg ached badly and she asked him about his wound. To satisfy her morbid curiosity he rolled up his trouser leg and showed her the bluish depression, where the Mauser bullet had entered, and the hollow where, after chipping the bone, it had emerged in the bulge of the calf. She studied it with concern, saying that until now she had been unable to relate all the papers had written of the war with actual physical suffering. Down here, she said, it had all seemed like something out of a history book happening to people in another age. Then she became embarrassingly silent again, sitting back, her weight resting on her hands and looking out over the water, so that after watching her slyly for a few moments he surrendered to an impulse that had returned to him since he had watched her gathering sticks. Leaning forward he kissed her on the mouth, not as any young man might claim a kiss from a pretty girl but more as a jocular attempt to re-establish contact between them. To his embarrassment she offered neither protest nor encouragement but continued to smile, saying, with the utmost self-possession, ‘Well, what now, Wicked Squire?’ and incongruously he thought of George Lovell’s album and the question he had asked himself on the day of the sale when she had surprised him with the mock Bible under his arm.

‘You wouldn’t know a wicked squire if you met one,’ he said but at this she laughed and said, lightly, ‘Don’t believe it, Paul! We had one here for years!’

He looked at her curiously then for her remark implied that Sir George’s weaknesses were general knowledge in the Valley. ‘How much do you really know of him, Claire?’

‘Oh, that he couldn’t be trusted a yard with a girl over fourteen and his son Ralph wasn’t much better! Everybody round here accepted that—after all, they had to, for people with that kind of money can behave pretty much as they like, can’t they?’

It struck him then, and for the first time, that there must be a great difference between country-bred girls like Claire Derwent and their social counterparts in the suburbs, for she, it appeared, could discuss this kind of thing with a man without embarrassment or coyness. More than that; Lovell’s eccentricities seemed hardly to interest her.

‘You mean you know about his … well … his photography, a rather unusual kind of photography?’

She looked at him frankly. ‘Why, of course! Everybody did. But who told you about it? Was it John Rudd?’

He told her how he had found the album by chance, admitting shamefacedly that he had been looking through it on the day of the sale, when she had come into the library with her invitation to lunch and at this she gave a little yelp of laughter.

‘Oh dear! How awful for you! What did you do with his famous collection?’

‘I burned it,’ he growled, ‘what the devil else could I do with it?’ but she still determined to treat the thing as a great joke.

‘I imagine most young men would have kept it for their own amusement, and do stop looking so shocked, Paul! Do you think a girl can grow up in a place like this without knowing about things like that?’

‘Did he ever ask you to pose for him?’

‘No, he didn’t but he certainly would have if I’d given him half a chance! He did start pawing me in our barn one day and I dodged into the open and fled. But I didn’t see anything very unusual in it at the time. Rose was a bit shocked, and thought I ought to tell father; I didn’t though, because I thought it was—well—just silly. What I mean is, the Valley girls who did go into that messy little room of his and let him take pictures of them with their clothes off weren’t enticed there. They did it with their eyes wide open and for what they could get out of it! I daresay the elder Potter girls’ pictures were in that album, weren’t they?’

Then, half-consciously, he noticed something else about her, that she was no longer smiling her slightly superior smile but was looking at him boldly as though assessing his mental confusion and perhaps weighing her advantage and his vulnerability; her eyes, watchful as a cat’s, never wavered, so that he felt more than ever confused and began to bluster.

‘Oh, I daresay you think me a greenhorn!’ he began, but that was all he said for suddenly she was lying full-length beside him with his face held between her hands and was kissing him not as he had kissed her a moment since, but in a fashion no one had kissed him before. He was not, however, really aware that the initiative had been hers alone for it had all happened in a matter of seconds. One moment they had been sparring with words, the next embracing with a recklessness that swept away all traces of the restraint that had governed every moment of their relationship up to that time. He thought, fleetingly, of all that possession of her here in the summer woods might entail, a complete surrender of dignity for her and for him God alone knew how many obligations, but the check was momentary. The softness of her mouth and the scent of her hair banished the last of his scruples and almost at once he began to assert his mastery, bearing down on her with his full weight, and fumbling at the fastenings of her blouse in his eagerness to use her as she so clearly intended to be used. There was no flicker of tenderness in his handling of her. She might have been the half-caste girl he had purchased for a few sweaty moment in the Cape Town brothel, for when the blouse buttons resisted he dragged at her skirt and continued to press brutally on her mouth. It was as he sought to extend his grip on her clothes that she somehow extricated herself, taking advantage of the bank and throwing herself sideways so that suddenly she was clear of him altogether and standing between the willow and the water’s edge, with her face turned away and her hands busy with her blouse that had broken free of the waistband of the skirt. Watching her from the crest of the bank he suddenly felt very foolish and very deflated, and his shame was not less intense because it was fused with exasperation. He rose slowly to his feet and when she had finished tucking in her blouse, and was lifting her hands to her disordered hair, he began to mumble excuses. They emerged as half-finished sentences, without conviction and without much sense, but almost as swiftly as she had left him she was beside him again, and her voice had an almost pitiful earnestness as she said, shaking her head so that pins fell in a shower, ‘
Don’t,
Paul! Don’t apologise! Just listen to me, so that we have a chance of starting again, of starting differently!’ and when he stared at her uncomprehendingly, ‘Don’t you see? I meant it to happen! Don’t you
see,
you idiot?’