Long Summer Day (18 page)

Martin Codsall considered this, wondering how far it was from the truth, for the Willoughbys, although poor, had never been regarded as anything other than harmless, respectable people and the bitterness of his wife’s prejudice against them puzzled him. It might, he reflected, be a pleasant change to hear another woman’s voice raised in the kitchen, and personally he had nothing whatever against his son marrying into a Coombe family, so long as it wasn’t to a Potter. He would have preferred it to be a pretty girl like Claire Derwent, who had made his mouth water when he watched her waltzing at the Victory Ball in the Whinmouth Assembly Rooms last May, but Will would be of age in a month and could marry whom he pleased, so where was the sense in making such an issue of it? He said, again in a low voice, ‘I don’t want to lose our Will, Mother, I couldn’t get along without him. It would mean taking on another man and another boy, and veeding ’em both, six days a week!’ He thought this appeal to her pocket might make her think twice but he was wrong, for Will’s revolt plucked at the taproots of her authority and in a way she was enjoying the dispute that must end in Will’s unconditional surrender. She glanced at the white-faced Sydney, listening to every word and snapped. ‘Eat up your pie, and sit up straight, Sydney!’ Then, like a boxer flexing his muscles before advancing to the centre of the ring, ‘If Will was so inconsiderate as to run contrary to my wishes I wouldn’t receive him into the house again, or his wife either! “Either” you’ll notice, not
“neither”
!’
and as though this was her final word on the subject she dabbed her lips with the napkin and cut into another portion of shepherd’s pie.

There was a silence, Martin and Sydney looking down at their plates, Arabella looking past them at a brass warming pan over the fireplace. Then two sharp sounds were heard simultaneously, the scrape of Will’s chair and the warning rattle of Arabella’s cuckoo clock, which always made this sound a second before its doors flew open and the bird bobbed out to cry the hour.

‘That’s all I wanted to be sure of, Mother,’ Will said, ‘I’ll be goin’ along now, and don’t
neither
of you come making a scene over at Deepdene when I’m zettled in! If you do I’ll come back and do mischief!’

Arabella dropped her knife and fork and half rose to her feet as Martin stretched out his hand, as though to detain Will by force. Sydney remained quite still, masticating his mouthful of pie the requisite thirty-two times before swallowing.

‘You go and I’ll harness the trap and come straight over to fetch you back!’ shouted Arabella. ‘I’ll make such a fool of you you’ll be the laughing stock of the Valley. You an’ that girl too!’

Will stood facing her and Martin, looking up, noticed that the muscles of his son’s jaw were twitching, and that his big hands, resting on the back of his chair, were trembling. Some instinct warned him that this was a real and final crisis and he jumped to his feet just as the cuckoo appeared at the double doors of the clock. Simultaneously Will’s hands left the chair and reached across the table, grasping the heavy crock in which stood the remains of the shepherd’s pie. It flew across the room and struck the doors of the clock in the act of closing, splintering them with a crash that sent the Codsall’s spaniel Nell scurrying for the back door. The crock itself, together with all that remained of the pie, ricochetted from the wall, fell on the table then disintegrated, spattering Sydney with china, mashed potato and gravy, and shattering half the dishes. Sydney screamed and Arabella, after a single outraged yell, burst into a noisy flood of tears. Martin said nothing. He had been Arabella’s husband for twenty-one years and therefore considered himself married to her cuckoo clock, a wedding present from the staff of her father’s shop. There were no words to express the dreadful finality of such an act. But Will said one more thing as he turned at the door to the hall on his way out. ‘That’s to show I baint bluffing, Mother!’ he said. ‘I’ll come back here, and do the same for every stick o’ furniture in this house if you show your face at Deepdene arter I’m gone!’

They heard him stump upstairs and drag open a chest of drawers but after that there was silence except for Arabella’s sobs and Sydney’s intermittent sniffs but the horror of being abandoned by even such a silent ally as his son gave Martin a last spurt of courage.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I hope you’re satisfied, Mother! I do ’ope you’re satisfied!’, and he left them to their mourning.

On their flight down to the beaches the gulls passed low over the two chalet-style houses standing in an acre apiece on the ridge above the harbour. The western one, ‘Channel View’, was the home of Captain Bruce Lovell, his wife Celia (née Winterbourne, of Winterbourne Chase, Derbyshire) and Bruce’s daughter, Grace, by his first wife. No vulgar quarrel was in progress here but there was enough tension under the roof to charge a searchlight battery.

Bruce Lovell’s second marriage had not been as disastrous as his first, which had ended in his wife’s suicide in a Madras reservoir. Celia was a well-bred, handsome woman, who seldom raised her voice, preferring to correct her husband’s many failings by more indirect means, such as sentencing him, every now and again, to terms of banishment in the country, or keeping him short of money at the height of the flat season. Bruce was undergoing punishment now and had been, ever since his disastrous losses at Ascot, and an involvement with a little milliner in Camden Town, but his sentence was almost up and he was now watching the calendar like a new boy approaching the end of his first term at a particularly dull boarding school.

Celia had promised him that they would return to town on the tenth of October and he knew her well enough to accept the fact that no social obligations or pleas on his part would induce her to forward the date by twenty-four hours. They had now been at ‘Channel View’ since the end of June, ‘a three-months’ stretch’ as he would tell his cronies at the Club, and it seemed to him a heavy penalty for backing an also-ran in the Royal Hunt Cup, and then seeking mild consolation in a rough and tumble with an amateur tart in Camden Town. He was, however, philosophical, so long as his philosophy could be practised in comfort, and life had taught him that a spree was usually followed by a flick of the whip by those controlling the purse strings. This was the pattern of life for a gentleman without private means of his own and he had followed it uncomplainingly as a cavalry subaltern, a tea-merchant, a stage-door Johnny, a remittance man, a tout, and finally as the husband of the elegant Celia Winterbourne. She paid up but she made him suffer and he was suffering now, by God, from the agonising pangs of country life by the sea. He hated the country. Ennui engulfed him as soon as he saw a ploughed field or a wood, and prolonged residence in the country reared inside him a kind of octopus whose tentacles explored his vitals, his greying temples and finally every cell of his brain, so that instead of screaming he yawned until his jaws ached and even the sporting page of
The Times
could arouse in him no more than a candle glimmer of professional interest. Celia knew he was nearing breaking-point and wished now that she had fixed the date for their return a week earlier but the Winterbournes had not made a fortune in pots of boot blacking without showing firmness at factory bench and fireside, so she set her face against a surrender that revision of the departure date would imply, hanging on and watching his long, yammering yawns with a certain satisfaction. It was some consolation for having been obliged to ask her father for an advance in order to pay his bookmaker and for having to listen to an unspeakably coarse private detective’s report on what had transpired in a basement flat in Camden Town.

Celia had not minded Bruce’s infidelity as much as the smell of the detective’s beery breath, or the fact that he wore heavy brown boots with a navy blue suit. She was that kind of woman; little things pleased or irritated her. Bruce’s sun-tan, when they first met in Madeira, had been a little thing and so had his discovery that freesia was her favourite flower. Little things both, but enough to encourage her to share life with a man whose sole qualification for a husband was that he looked a gentleman and could even behave like one in public.

What occupied Celia’s thoughts just now, however, was not Bruce’s breaking-strain, which she could assess out of the corner of her eye but the circumstances surrounding the new Squire’s interest in her unpredictable stepdaughter Grace, Bruce’s daughter by his unfortunate first wife. When Celia became the second Mrs Lovell Grace had been seventeen and had spent the greater part of the year at a convent in the Lake District. At that time Celia had nothing against the girl and had set out to do her best on Grace’s behalf, arranging a season for her and casting about for suitable escorts, one of whom might ultimately relieve her of the responsibility of a half-grown stepdaughter, but Grace had been unresponsive. There had been a succession of sulks and tantrums, leading, now that Grace was of age, to a wary truce between them. Bruce played no part in this, giving his daughter less thought than a promising colt for next year’s Derby.

In some ways Celia respected the girl, for at least she had a natural dress sense, caused her very little concern by cultivating unsuitable friendships and was an accomplished horsewoman who could have made herself a national reputation in this field. But Grace’s disposition as a whole was baffling, for she was very difficult to type and this made it impossible to plan her future. The Winterbournes had been a very sociable family and Celia, in her youth, had met every conceivable type of young socialite at Winterbourne Chase. She experienced gawky girls, sulky girls, listless girls, dutifully innocuous girls and girls whose homesickness for the gutter led them to consort with grooms and bootboys. Among her friends her women who could be classified as Spartans, blue-stockings, religious maniacs, women who dieted themselves into a decline, and those who over-ate and acquired a matron’s figure before they lost their virginity. She supposed that she understood the frustrations of every woman of her own class between the age of thirteen and forty but she had yet to make real contact with Grace, whose personality seemed to Celia a wild tangle of contradictions. That the girl had a good brain she had no doubt. She had heard her converse on equal terms with elderly men, and on subjects well outside the range of a convent-educated girl—Darwinism, the Oxford Movement and Universal Suffrage to name only three, but at Celia’s ‘At Homes’ she sat as mute as a mummy, and everyone left thinking her insufferably dull. Some days she looked pretty and on other days she was almost plain, her strange pallor without its lustre, her hair bundled any old how and always short of pins. Usually she had good manners but there were occasions when she behaved like an adolescent bore, anxious to attract attention to herself. She interested men, all kinds of men, but she never showed the least sign of wanting to exploit her conquests and often she seemed to Celia frigid and, what was far worse, aggressively so. In fact, regarding her stepdaughter, Celia was certain of only one thing. The girl hated her father and took no pains to hide it. Perhaps it was this, which, in a sense, was something shared between stepmother and stepdaughter, that encouraged Celia to persist in her efforts to help the child but so far her efforts had gone unrewarded. Grace Lovell continued to walk and ride in a strange world of her own; it seemed to Celia, a friendly, cheerful extrovert, to be a very arid, profitless world.

The incident with the screen intrigued her. She had heard a good deal of gossip about the young man who had appeared from nowhere and swallowed the Shallowford white elephant at a gulp. It was rumoured that his money derived from guns or scrap metal, and Celia, who, to do her justice, was still unconvinced that her own income stemmed entirely from boot polish, fervently hoped that it was the former, for whilst there was a certain dignity in shot and shell there was surely none in old iron. She had been very curious to see the young man for herself and that was why she had nagged Bruce into taking them to the sale but once there, gaped at by every hobbledehoy in the Valley, and inhaling their body odours at close quarters, Celia would have left at once had not Grace insisted on staying to bid for two items of furniture in the nursery. Celia had humoured her because she thought the girl might feel nostalgic regarding her past association with Ralph Lovell, the rackety son of that old rascal Sir George, and when Bruce wanted to go home and asked what purpose there could be in lumbering the house with Ralph Lovell’s playthings, Celia told him sharply to hold his tongue and squeezed Grace’s unresponsive hand, standing beside her whilst a vulgar farm wife had bid more than the things were worth. Then the curious thing had happened. The lean-faced young man who had bought the estate had topped the bidding and presented the nursery screen to Grace, when, as far as Celia was aware, he and Grace had not even met.

Discreet questioning on Celia’s part provided half the answer. Grace said, off-handedly, that she had encountered Craddock whilst riding on the sandhills one morning, but this was enough to set Celia’s thoughts in motion along strictly circumscribed lines. Ever since her own nursery days she had been accustomed to think and talk about suitable marriages for this relative or that playmate. She said nothing to Bruce at first, allowing the possibility of bringing these two young people together to mature, but day by day she held the possibility up to the light, searching for possible flaws and blemishes. She discovered none, or none that mattered nearly so much as getting Grace off her hands, in order that she could devote all her time to moulding Bruce into someone for whom it was not necessary to apologise to one’s friends.

Only when she was quite ready did she fire her first range-finding shot, aiming it at the neat crease of Bruce’s
Times,
behind which he was taking cover after dinner one evening. Grace was not in the house at the time, having gone on a short duty visit to Celia’s sister in Derbyshire, so they had an opportunity to explore the possibility at leisure.