Long Summer Day (22 page)

III

H
e never discovered how close Grace and Celia came to not making an appearance at all. Two of his tenants could have told him as much but neither of these was actually present when the Lovell gig stopped in the forecourt and Paul, warned by Mrs Codsall, came running to help them down, direct the driver round to the yard and ask Mrs Handcock for hot drinks for the late arrivals.

The first person to see the Lovell gig
en route
was Edward Willoughby, who was walking along the river road on his way from Deepdene. Willoughby had politely declined his invitation, for he disapproved of strong drink and also, although to a somewhat lesser degree, of dancing and non-sacred music. But there was nothing in the Bible against fireworks so he let his daughter Elinor persuade him to walk over in time to see the display. It was a fine clear night and he enjoyed his walk, seeing no one until he emerged from the Coombe track and joined the river road, where it ran towards the ford. It was here, under a mile from Shallowford, that the Lovells overtook him and then, to his surprise the gig pulled up a hundred yards further on and made as if to turn.

Will Codsall saw it about the same time from the far side of the ford, where he was enjoying his sulk while awaiting the fireworks and the seeming indecision of the driver puzzled him. He stood in the shadow of the gate, watching, and the murmur of women’s voices raised in argument reached him.

The gig had stopped because Grace Lovell had called over the rail to the hired driver and then Celia had countermanded the order, and Grace had repeated hers, so that the man swore softly under his breath and halted while they made up their minds which way they wanted to go. Both women found it embarrassing to state their case in the presence of a part-time coachman but there was no alternative, short of getting out and continuing the dispute on foot.

‘Grace, please don’t be so tiresome!’ Celia hissed, ‘we’re almost there, and we’ve simply got to go! We told Mr Craddock we should attend and it would be extremely rude of us not to at this stage, do you hear?’

Grace said nothing, being more inhibited by the coachman’s presence than was Celia, so that after a moment, with a cautionary nudge of the kind administered to a wilful child, Celia told the driver to get started again, and the gig rattled over the ford and began to breast the slope of the drive. Neither passenger spoke another word until Paul greeted them at the forecourt and then Celia, an expert social liar, said sweetly, ‘We do apologise for arriving so late, Mr Craddock! We had the
greatest
difficulty hiring transport,’ and Paul said, handing her down, ‘I’m delighted you got here in time for the fireworks but you must be cold! Let Mrs Handcock get you hot drinks!’

They went into the hall, where their appearance caused a little stir among the supper guests, for apart from Parson Bull quality had been noticeably absent from the ball. Mrs Codsall bridled, and dropped half a curtsy, while all the younger women stared enviously at Grace Lovell’s gown, a many flounced affair of scarlet silk that whispered as she walked across to the fire and spread her hands to the blaze.

‘Oh, but she’s beautiful!’ Elinor Willoughby said to Pansy Potter, who was gaping at the late arrivals and Pansy, her big red hands smoothing the serge of her stained, grey frock, murmured, ‘Ah, ’er is an’ all! Like a princess, an’ Mrs Lovell along of ’er,’ which expressed, fairly adequately, the opinion of every other woman present who watched their entry.

The Shallowford House firework display began with a single rocket that soared over the chestnuts and fell, a far-off ember, on the Home Farm stubble three parts of a mile away. It ended with a large and rather smudgy set-piece of Queen Alexandra, Claire having been told by the dealer in Paxtonbury that all the set-pieces of the royal pair had been sold out long ago.

Between the rocket and the set-piece some thirty-five minutes elapsed, a split second in eternity and only about a sixteenth of the time spent by most guests at Shallowford that night, yet this was enough to mould the destinies of fourteen men and women who stood among the hundred and twenty spectators.

Out here in the open, with the undersides of the chestnut leaves exposed in the lurid glow of Roman candles and the dark mass of Shallowford Woods rising behind the rose garden, the company seemed small and subdued. In the house there had been barely room enough to hold them and they had drawn courage from one another, performing prodigies of chaff and buffoonery, but out here they were awed and hushed, because the harsh glare of an exploded firework is not natural light, like that of sun, moon, or even lamp oil but has a talismanic quality that can betray the future to those who follow its path across the sky and watch it die. There were some who neglected to do this on the night of the Shallowford soirée, in late September, 1902, and each of them paid forfeit. It was not, after all, a very spectacular firework display, so perhaps its yield in heart’s ease or heartbreak was out of proportion to the ten pounds Claire had paid for the rockets, Roman candles and rip-raps, but fireworks are unpredictable. They did their work and burned themselves out; what happened as a direct result to those on the ground was no concern of the men who made and sold them.

Perhaps the golden rain had the most to answer for in emotional by-products. Horace Handcock, cannoneer extraordinary, had planted a row of six to follow the initial discharge of his battery of sixpenny rockets, and cries of delight greeted the first shower of green and crimson balls, erupting over the chestnuts and hanging suspended for a moment before drifting down and out of sight behind the trees. In the light of the shower of green balls Smut Potter made up his mind to remain a bachelor, while Walt Pascoe, a Coombe Bay bricklayer whose body and brain had been thrown in a ferment by the Potter sisters, made his choice, but these were only the results of the first discharge. As the second shower burst Edward Derwent came close to breaking his wife’s heart, whereas Paul Craddock had a clear thirty seconds to study Grace Lovell’s profile, not long but enough to fall so madly in love with it that there was no hope of disguising the fact from anyone, certainly not Derwent or his daughter Claire, both of whom were watching Paul intently. At the third discharge, when both crimson balls shot up and floated down, Mrs Codsall saw the spare figure of Preacher Willoughby on the far side of the little square, and beside him, arms linked, her son Will and Willoughby’s daughter, Elinor. She waited until the fourth discharge to make quite sure and then, with a squeal of rage, thumped Martin Codsall between the shoulders and roared, ‘So he’s here after all! Look over
there
!’
and Martin, following in the direction of her stabbing finger, caught a glimpse of Will and Elinor as the last laggard ball drifted behind the trees.

Of these few only Smut acknowledged his debt to the fireworks at the time. He had emerged from the steamy ballroom half-disposed to invest in the future and supply himself at one stroke with a dullish wife and a helpful father-in-law. For some time now he had been improving his relationship with Tom Voysey, Margy’s father, possibly the one father in the Valley who would welcome such a wastrel into his family. The Potters, notwithstanding hearty appetites, had rarely been able to eat all Smut brought home from the Gilroy and Shallowford coverts. Sometimes there was a glut in the Dell, so that Smut had sought an outlet for his spoils in Coombe Bay and Tom, of late, had been buying his poached game at about half its market value. Smut, however, did not really poach for money but mainly to keep the family fed, and also for the hell of it, so he was happy to dump hare, pheasant, trout, conies and even venison in Tom Voysey’s scullery behind the shop and go home with a half-sovereign in his pocket, knowing full well that Voysey’s profit at Whinmouth weekly market would approach four hundred per cent. It had occurred to him lately, however, that if he became Voysey’s son-in-law, as well as Voysey’s main source of supply, he might in time become rich enough to buy his mother the painted caravan she had always coveted and give his sisters shop dresses, and himself green velveteens, a moleskin waistcoat and perhaps a good gun into the bargain. He was not ambitious but he had a strong sense of family loyalty, and to demonstrate it was almost prepared to marry a girl with two heads. Margy Voysey had one head but it was large, seemingly almost round and crowned by a topknot of mouse-coloured hair. More hair sprouted from a large mole on her receding chin but, as if to compensate for this, she had no eyebrows and lack of them gave her a permanently surprised look, so that sometimes Smut thought that her decapitated head, set alongside those displayed in her father’s window, would have fooled all but the keen-sighted. He had remarked on this several times but it had not impressed him, one way or the other. Margy was Tom Voysey’s only child and what she looked like had not seemed to matter at all until those revealing green balls in the sky exposed her face at close quarters. He made up his mind on the spot; Meg must continue to inhabit the leaking farmhouse, and the girls continue to wear rags, until he could hit on an alternative solution to comfort them. The gun he possessed was good enough for another season, and he would remain content with Voysey’s half-sovereigns. There were premiums that were too stiff for an insured future and marriage to a greenish-tinted pig’s head was one of them. Mumbling ‘Just thought o’ something I got to do, Margy,’ he relinquished her hand, dodged out of the crowd and vanished into the starry night.

Edward Derwent had been his crusty, pessimistic self when he arrived at Shallowford that evening. Rose, his daughter, and Liz his twittering second wife, had done their best to persuade him that something momentous was happening—that Claire’s capture of a real live Squire was imminent but he refused to believe that anything so fortuitous could happen to him, a man who had seen the wife he worshipped lifted from a ditch with a broken neck. Even as a young man he had never been sanguine about life and it had taken him years to accept the fact that Molly Rodgers had married him, a penniless smallholder, and borne him children. When Molly was killed, early in the first run of the 1890 season, he had been overwhelmed but not surprised. Something of this nature had surely been lying in wait for him for years, and the only aspect of the tragedy that did surprise him was that it had taken some ten years to catch up with him.

He got over it in time and his doubting nature had helped, as had his capacity for long days of monotonous toil in the fields but when the shadow of his wife’s death had passed another took its place. Buried down here, with no more than two hundred acres, he decided it was hopeless to try and build a really prosperous farm to dower his two daughters and it worried him to contemplate what would become of them when he died. Rose, he imagined, could make some sort of a living out of her liveries, but Claire, although a fair horsewoman, had no real flare for farming or the rearing of livestock an unless she married well who would provide for her? It was useless to tell him, as Rose often did, that Claire was even prettier than her mother, and that the odds against her becoming an old maid were about ten thousand to one. Derwent only countered by saying that, in this depopulated little backwater, there was no man Claire was likely to want to marry and who, so far, had come courting either one of them? So, in the main, he ignored their silly tittle-tattle, claiming that Claire’s constant attendance at the manor was a sure sign the new Squire was taken up with her; he did not believe it, it was far too good to be true.

Then, with his own eyes and ears, he had seen and heard acknowledgements of his daughter’s influence at the big house, for as tenants arrived to pay their respects to the young man, Derwent noticed that he redirected their compliments to Claire and even received guests with his arm resting on her shoulder, and this evidence was reinforced by Craddock’s cheerful, ‘Well, Mr Derwent, my thanks for the loan of your daughter. Everything you see is her work, all I’ve done is carry out her orders, isn’t that a fact, Rose?’ And Rose had loyally agreed that the whole idea had been Claire’s, after which Claire bustled away to introduce Squire to latecomers, for all the world as though she was already mistress of Shallowford.

Derwent was a slow-thinking man and continued thinking to some purpose, until past midnight, when everyone trooped into the paddock to watch the fireworks, and his thoughts, for once, were heart-warming, so that he sensed the spread of a satisfied glow deep in his belly that was not wholly due to rum punch and at length his rare feeling of well-being demanded physical expression. Hesitantly, as a man unpractised in familiarities, his arm stole round the waist of his wife Liz and he pressed her to him so that she almost cried out with astonishment and delight for it was the first public acknowledgement he had made of her in five years of marriage, the first acknowledgement at all discounting his lusty embraces in bed. She thought, for a moment, that he must be far gone in drink, and then she was ashamed of the thought, reasoning that perhaps she had misjudged him after all and perhaps the glorious conviviality of the occasion had wrought a miracle on him. She revelled in this illusion for two minutes and then Handcock discharged another shower of green and crimson balls, and the glare lit up the paddock like a searchlight, so that everyone there might have been standing under strong lamplight, and this was the biggest betrayal of all, for it showed both Claire and her father the face of Paul Craddock, who was looking down at Grace Lovell, standing close beside him. In that moment father and daughter conceded complete and utter defeat.

IV

C
laire had been coaxed from the cloakroom by Rose and they had gone out into the paddock as the first rocket soared; she saw Paul standing in the angle of the box hedge, talking to Mrs Lovell, and at once made up her mind to edge round towards them during an interval of darkness, but unluckily, before the rocket dipped, her father saw her and called, ‘Well, Claire, this is a rare night for Shallowford! The Lovells never came up with anything of this kind at either of the Jubilees!’ and his voice was so jovial that she hesitated in spite of herself, puzzled by his rare amiability and pondering its source. Then, as the golden rain went up, she noticed that he had his arm round Liz’s waist, and in the light of the rockets they both looked so spoony that Claire’s spirits lifted and she wanted to laugh but did not for it pleased her to see them standing like lovers, with faces turned to the sky. She kept her mind on Paul, however, and when the volley of golden rain erupted she looked quickly in his direction and then wished very much that she hadn’t, for he was still there, no more than ten yards away but was no longer talking to Mrs Lovell. He was looking directly down at Grace Lovell and his expression was even more fatuously captive than that of poor Liz, and as Claire stared, almost choking with humiliation and dismay, Grace Lovell’s chin tilted so that she seemed to be returning his rapturous gaze and for several seconds, as the glare in the sky faded, they continued to look into one another’s eyes at a range of no more than twenty inches. As soon as it was dark again she fled, pulling back from the enclosure so quickly that Rose called, ‘What is it, Claire?’ but she could not talk, even to Rose, hurrying back to her seat on the backstairs with tears of disappointment streaming down her cheeks and a throat so dry and constricted that she could hardly get her breath. She sat here alone for the remainder of the display, oblivious of the winking flashes of reflected light, and the thunder and crackle of explosions over the paddock.