Long Summer Day (29 page)

He recognised her at once as the child who had sat crosslegged on the pedestal at the coronation supper-ball and the horrid embarrassment of being caught by a girl in the act of blubbering made him glare as though she had been a predatory animal on the prowl.

‘What are you doing here?’ he blustered, but she did not seem to resent his aggressive manner and continued to pluck her lip and swing her tin, which Ikey now identified as a home-made handwarmer of the kind he had often used in winter in the scrapyard.

‘Youm lost, baint ’ee?’ Hazel said at last, and the corners of her mouth puckered as though she could easily have laughed at his dilemma.

It was useless to deny the fact so he said, loftily, ‘Yerse, I am, I never bin this side o’ the woods and was caught in the storm. Tracking deer!’ he added, impressively.

This interested her. ‘You was gonner kill ’em?’

‘No,’ he said modestly, ‘I ain’t got a gun an’ Squire won’t have ’em killed. I was tracking ’em, to where they went.’

‘Ah, they went downalong,’ she said authoritatively, ‘they always do in the snow. Henry Pitts puts feed out for ’em but they don’t stay, they come back, soon as they’ve eaten an’ move over to the spruce where there’s plenty o’ bark to bite on! Most everything lives this side o’ the mere—foxes, hares, an’ badgers too, tho’ there’s a set ’longside my squirrel tree, upalong.’

She talked as an expert, as someone privy to all the secrets of the wood and he had a strong impression that she thought of foxes and badgers not as creatures but as family units, inhabiting farms and living within prescribed borders, just like the Potters, the Codsalls and the Willoughbys. He had never heard the word ‘set’ before in this sense and would have liked to ask about it but not wishing to display his ignorance he said, ‘Can you show me the way aht? I’m late ’ome and I got work waiting in the tack-room.’

She smiled then, and he noticed that her rather vacant face underwent a remarkable change when her mouth widened, exposing strong, white teeth. It was as though the smile was something she used for switching identities—from a dull-witted waif to a woodsprite in a homespun skirt of undyed sheep’s wool and long gaiters of rabbit skin, tucked into patched, lace-up boots. One of the boots gaped like the mouth of a fish and exposed pink toes. He was enormously impressed by her yet was careful not to show it for although she clearly knew her way, which he did not, she was still only a girl and also a Potter and therefore of no account. She looked, he thought, only half human in her outlandish clothes, with a mop of matted red-gold hair and green eyes but as she continued to smile at him and her pink tongue emerged to moisten her lips, he had the impression that here in the woods she was a kind of queen and that all the creatures would come running to her whistle, that she could have told you everything in the wood that was good to eat and every berry that was poisonous, that there would be nothing that went on here that she did not know about and this gave her a purely local omnipotence exceeding even the Squire’s. She said, carelessly, ‘You’d ha’ died o’ the cauld, Boy, if I hadn’t ’eard ’ee squawk! You shoulder kept walking ’til you dropped an’ even then you should ha’ crawled! Youm praaper mazed to zit yourself down in the snow. Coom, I’ll tak’ ’ee backalong!’, and without giving him an opportunity to justify himself in any way she took him by the hand and led him into what looked like a low tunnel cut through the thickest part of the laurels.

What astonished him more than her anticipation of every twist and turn in this maze of undergrowth was her body temperature. The hand that clutched his was as warm as if it had just been withdrawn from a fur glove, and he reasoned that her feet must be just as warm for how else could she endure to walk through thick snow with a gaping hole in her boot? She not only knew exactly which rabbit run to follow and which to reject but also the strength and thickness of every obstruction. Without leaving hold of his hand for a moment she twisted this way and that, pushing through a tangle of branches without a second’s hesitation, so that presently they came out on the side of the lake that ran directly past the island with the pagoda. He said gruffly, when he had recovered from his astonishment, ‘Orlright, I know me way from here,’ but she did not relinquish his hand but began hauling him up the slope to the crest of the escarpment where, in the gathering dusk, he saw the welcome yellow glow of the Big House lights.

‘I’ll leave ’ee here, Boy,’ she said, ‘but dornee stray that zide again ’til the snow’s gone.’ She looked up at the sky and sniffed.

‘’Er won’t be long now; us’ve zeen the worst of it.’

His respect for her grew and grew, whittling away at his male arrogance and making it seem mean and ungracious, so that he admitted, hesitantly, ‘I was lost orlright, an’ I dunno what I’d have done if you hadn’t bobbed up. What’s your name? Mine’s Ikey, I’m stable boy down there.’

‘Yes, I know. I’ve overlooked ’ee often enough,’ she said lightly. ‘I’m Hazel, and they zay I’m mazed. I’m not tho’, but I let ’em think it’s so, for that way I go where I plaises,’ and with this astonishing confession she turned away and seemed on the point of vanishing into the dusk but he called urgently, ‘Where can I find yer if I want to go that side of the mere again?’, and she replied, pausing in her stride, ‘Come down by the Niggerman’s Church and whistle. Whistle loud and I’ll come to ’ee,’ and she put her fingers in her mouth and blew, producing a long, low and very piercing sound like the summons of a London cabby. Then, before he could ask her to teach him this engaging trick, or identify the ‘Niggerman’s Church’ as the old pagoda, she had disappeared, moving so silently that he could not have sworn whether she went back down the slope or east along the path towards the Coombe.

He stood there looking into the darkness where she had vanished and he thought how far from mazed she was but how completely she fooled everyone in the Valley. Then he wondered if he should tell Chivers or Mrs Handcock of his adventure, of how, without Hazel Potter, he might have died down there in the wood but he decided not for this would be an admission of personal inadequacy and might also mean future prohibitions. At least, this was what he told himself but the truth was he was reluctant to share with others the knowledge that Hazel Potter was really a princess, masquerading as a half-witted waif, or that God who had once before come to his aid in a moment of despair obviously had a special interest in his welfare. Why else should He have directed her to him, barely fifteen minutes before daylight faded?

He brushed the dead leaves from his coat and went on down the slope towards the pool of orange light.

Chapter Eight

I

H
azel Potter knew her weather signs. The wind veered round to the south-west before Christmas and the snow was washed from the banked lanes by driving rain, so that after a spell there was hardly a trace of it save for pockets of slush under the trees.

Paul went about his business cheerfully enough, making his rounds two or three times a week, discussing spring sowing with unhurried men like Arthur Pitts and Honeyman, and pigs with Will Codsall, whose ramshackle holding was now gradually assuming a patterned neatness like Four Winds and High Coombe. Paul did not think of Grace Lovell much during the day but at night, when he was sitting before the library fire, loneliness sometimes stole upon him and the technical books on soil, shorthorns and land drainage, prescribed as evening reading by John Rudd, lay undigested on his knees as he pictured the dark, compact figure of Grace in the leather armchair opposite, her eyes bent over some sewing or gazing abstractedly into the red glow of the Home Farm apple logs blazing in the hearth.

It was, he admitted to himself, a very improbable picture but his thoughts of her were always in this pleasant frame for after an interval of seven weeks, with no word from her except the scribbled message on the label of the puppy’s collar, his memories of her arranged themselves in thicknesses, laid one upon the other like dockets in his office tray.

First there was the overall impression of mystery that her presence brought to him, with the certainty that somehow she belonged here in this house and by this fireside and this conviction was as strong and unreasoning as that which had possessed him concerning the estate as a whole on the day he had first ridden down from the moor alongside John Rudd. He could not say why this should be so; she had done little or nothing to confirm it but it persisted just the same, matching his possessive pleasure in the meadows, woods and leafy lanes between the Sorrel and the Bluff, the railway line and the silver sands of Coombe Bay. Then, adding a pinch of spice to her sense of belonging here, was the physical impact she made upon him—her neatness, her containment, her cool, ivory skin seen against blue-black side curls and straight fringe, her dark, contracting brows arching over eyes the colour of dog violets in Priory Wood, her long cheekbones and firm little chin with the large dimple, but above all, her presence as a whole, that seemed to him to promise so much to a man who could break through the defences she had erected against an invasion of her intense privacy and self-isolation. Was he such a man? He doubted it but doubts did not deny him reveries and flights of fancy, so that sometimes the sudden fall of the heavy book from his knees would drag him from an exotic dream in which he was mastering her in silent places about the house, while she, for her part, was submitting to his domination. The absurdity of these imaginings was sometimes brought home to him when he recollected that a proposal of marriage on his part had yielded no more than a vague promise to ‘think about it’, but then, for comfort, he would look down at her dog and reflect that she must have thought of him as a man of compassion, gauche and unsophisticated perhaps, yet more eligible than the roystering Ralph Lovell, or any of the men she met in her father’s rootless set, and this would launch him into fresh fields of speculation regarding the life she led in London, and what kept her there all this time, and if there was a lover in the background. He wondered too how much she knew about the source of his money and whether, indeed, such knowledge would disqualify him in her eyes, or those of her stepmother. It was then that the absurdity of his spontaneous proposal came down upon him with a rush, so that he told himself that he really had no wish to be taken seriously and that, for both their sakes, it would be better if they could look upon his impulsive advances as a flirtation, approximately in the same category as that he and Claire Derwent had shared before it went sour and she ran away to hide in Kent.

As the days passed it was this aspect of their relationship that began to gain ground at the expense of all the other daydreams. After all, he told himself, what did he know of the girl, and how much could one listen to instinct in matters as final as this? He had met her five times during a period of six months and on two of those occasions their conversation was such as might have passed between people in the street. He was sure, for instance, that a man like Franz Zorndorff would regard his infatuation as hopelessly immature, a park bandstand romance between adolescents, whereas John Rudd would have even stronger feelings about it, for he made no bones about including her family in his blanket of detestation of all the Lovells. And yet, behind all these misgivings was a curious inevitability of Grace Lovell as Mistress of Shallowford that could not be separated from his own identification with the estate and assumption of personal responsibility for all the people of the Valley. He had no clear idea of what he would tell either Rudd or Zorndorff about her, or what indeed he would say to Grace or Celia Lovell if either one of them took him at his word. He only knew that somewhere and somehow their paths would converge and that until they did real ownership of the Valley would elude him.

His thoughts were in this confused state when, a day or so before Christmas, a batch of letters arrived by a single post. He extracted all the seed catalogues, trade agricultural leaflets, bills and conveyances and carried the rest into his office, locking the door against interruptions.

The first was his fortnightly letter from Uncle Franz, to whom he had written in detail regarding his efforts to enlarge the estate to the north and east by the acquisition of the Priory freehold, now renamed Periwinkle Farm by Elinor and Codsall, and the cliff fields incorporated in High Coombe. Zorndorff had taken to addressing him as ‘My Dear Squire’, using the form of address with restrained irony but he approved Paul’s ready acceptance of a money draft from scrapyard profits, despite Paul’s disclaimer which Zorndorff, it seemed, refused to take seriously. The Croat’s letter was concise, businesslike and affectionate but there remained the hint of mockery in outwardly innocent phrases, as though, now that he had launched his ‘nephew’, he could pretend that he was indulging the whim of an enthusiastic boy who would soon realise that the estate was all a bit of a joke between them, and could be wound up in the course of time. There was a footnote to the letter which seemed to Paul to underline this, for Zorndorff wrote: ‘If, by spring, you are persuaded that you have bitten off more than you can chew, don’t despair, my dear boy! By pure chance you are batting on a safe wicket! Land values have jumped twenty per cent since the peace and we might even net a profit on your improvements!’

Paul smiled at this, made some notes in the margin and put the letter aside, opening a breezier one from John Rudd, who said he was up and about again and had been advised by his doctor to get as much exercise as possible in order that the cracked ribs could mend themselves. He added that he would be home again on New Year’s Day, after seeing his boy Roderick off at Chatham.

The two letters in feminine handwriting Paul left until last and now opened a stiff envelope containing a very large Christmas card, with slapdash scrawl on the back. It was, he was relieved to discover, from Claire Derwent who had obviously emerged from her interminable sulk, for she wrote:

My dear Paul,

You must think me a presumptuous little fool! Perhaps Rose has told you why I went off without even saying good-bye, but the truth is, on the day after our party, I was so bored, restless and miserable, and everything seemed such a dreadful anticlimax that I just had to do something desperately different! The chance of a visit to cousins here (which I had previously declined) seemed one way out but I didn’t know then, of course, that it would become permanent. Well, it has! I’m opening a tea shop in partnership with my Cousin Marion at a place called Penshurst that you may or may not have heard of because it’s a famous Elizabethan house owned by the De Lisle family (Sir Philip Sydney and all that!) and lots of London visitors come here in the summer so it ought to be fun as well as profitable! I shall miss the Valley, of course, but not so much as you’d imagine, for the countryside here is just as pretty and Kent, remember, is the Garden of England! I do know (and how could I fail to know) what a little fool I made of myself as regards you. I was to blame from the beginning and hope you won’t hold it against me for the rest of my life. I can only put it down to the dullness of life at High Coombe until you arrived to brighten things up a bit but now I’ve had lots of time to think it over and, like I say, it makes me blush to think of the way I behaved to someone who was such a good friend and had plenty of worries of his own! I do most sincerely wish you all the luck in the world, Paul, and I know you’ll do well down there, ‘bringing all they ole “puddenades” bang up-to-date, midear!’ and heaven knows they need it! Keep at it, and bless you,

Yours affectionately,

Claire Derwent
.

The friendliness of her letter touched him deeply for he began to see how he had encouraged her more than she cared to admit and also that she had almost certainly been taken to task by her father and packed off home from the party with a flea in her ear. Her letter mellowed him so that he could think of her now with warmth and laughter and he reflected that a letter as frank and cheerful as this might do something to sweeten his relationship with Rose, whom he admired, and Edward Derwent, whom he respected. Ever since Claire had taken the huff, relations between Shallowford House and High Coombe had been very cool and Paul realised that he could not afford to incur the enmity of both the Codsalls and the Derwents within six months of moving in. So, before answering Claire’s letter, he wrote a note to Rose telling her that he had heard from Claire and was writing to wish her luck with her tea-shop venture.

He then opened his fourth letter, to find that it was a brief note from Celia Lovell, stating that they would be returning to Coombe Bay shortly and inviting him to call for tea, at 4 p.m. on December 31st. That was all. No hint that Grace had confided in her, no enquiries concerning their conversation regarding the estate, just that they were coming home and he was invited for tea on the last day of the old year. Re-reading the letter in an effort to learn something of Celia Lovell’s character he thought of her as someone who never put pen to paper without recognising the possibility that she might be called upon to justify it in a court of common pleas.

After lunch the rain stopped and a watery sun came out, so he told Ikey to prepare the dog-cart and put a loose halter on Snowdrop, so that he might drive into Coombe Bay for shoeing the grey and the cob. As an afterthought he took Grace’s retriever pup, perched on the box beside him. She was a gawky, lovable little bitch, with a pathetic eagerness to make friends with everybody and Paul lavished upon her a special affection of which she took shameless advantage, calling her ‘Goneaway’ because of her ever-hopeful but always unsuccessful pursuit of game flushed from the thickets during her walks. She lolloped at his heels as he rode about the estate, sometimes following him so closely that her face was masked by a film of liquid mud thrown up by Snowdrop’s hooves. Paul had come to agree with Chivers, the groom, that she was untrainable as a gun dog but he went on trying, calling her to heel when she was half-way down a rabbit hole, or scrabbling at a molehill, and thus a curious rhythm was established between man and dog that varied according to the time of day. Whenever Paul thought anyone else was present he used a stern voice but when he and Goneaway were alone in the study, all pretence of trainer and trainee was abandoned and the bitch leapt on to chairs, dragged bones under rugs and invariably positioned herself where she could monopolise the heat of the fire.

The Coombe Bay smith, a squat, mild-mannered man called Abe Tozer, promised to shoe the horses within the hour, so Paul, taking Goneaway, walked up the east side of the slope overlooking the harbour, where stood Lovell’s rented house, shuttered and silent. He was a little disappointed at this, and almost decided to call at the lodge and ask if the family was expected before Christmas, but thought better of it and walked on to the sandhills above the beach.