Long Summer Day (35 page)

Meg Potter had her cards and everyone else in the Valley had self-interest to guide them but John Rudd, the only one among them to hear the news direct from Paul, had no guide beyond a persistent niggle under his strapped-up ribs and the niggle told him approximately the same story as the cards told Meg. He could not have said why this should be so. He was a man who usually rationalised his prejudices and he reminded himself that, whereas everybody knew Bruce Lovell was a bad hat, nobody knew much about his daughter, except that her mother had drowned herself in a reservoir in India, years ago. He listened, sucking on his pipe, to Paul’s account of all that had taken place in the Valley during this absence, and could find it in him to admire the boy for his stand against Arabella Codsall and Lord Gilroy, but when Paul asked him outright what, if anything, he had against Grace Lovell he had had to choose between his niggle and his affection. He could not admit to a young man in love that he suspected a streak of madness in his darling’s veins or that for a woman to drown herself on account of a Lovell implied a fatal lack of balance on the female side. He had nothing but rumour and conjecture to reinforce his arguments, nothing more than a vague impression that Grace Lovell was bad luck. And now, as he stood leaning on the fence rails of the paddock watching the moon rise over the Bluff, he knew that he had deceived himself when he had assumed that Craddock’s arrival here, and the enthusiasm he brought with him, meant a permanent anchorage for himself. There could never be a safe anchorage with a Lovell in the Big House. As the soft, white light touched the shallows at the ford, John Rudd said to himself, impatiently, ‘Now who the hell am I to pour cold water on the boy? What gives me the right to advise him on a matter like this? He’s in love with a pretty face and a pretty figure and if he brings the same enthusiasm to his marriage as he’s brought to the Valley I daresay he’ll prove me a superstitious old fool!’ And hoisting himself from the rail he knocked out his pipe and went across to the lodge to bed.

Chapter Nine

I

A
marriage between strangers is an uncharted journey; Will Codsall knew his Elinor and Walt Pascoe his Pansy, before marrying them. Within certain limits, they knew what they could expect of them as cooks, housekeepers and bedfellows, and their brides were equally well primed, so that such surprises as they encountered had no power to astound them as Paul Craddock was astounded and delighted by Grace Lovell.

The 8 a.m. ceremony at Paxtonbury Parish Church was so short and simple that Paul had some difficulty in realising that he was indeed married when they said goodbye to Celia and John Rudd after breakfast at The Mitre. There was no one else present to shake by the hand or kiss; no rice, no confetti, no jokes, no old shoes tied under the carriage that took them to the junction and thence, by the Cornish express, to London, where they stayed one night before travelling to Dover and catching the cross-Channel packet for Boulogne.

Paul had asked her where she would like to spend the honeymoon and she had told him Paris, a city she had never visited although she was a seasoned Continental traveller and had stayed in several Belgian spas, sailed down the Rhine on a paddle steamer and spent several weeks beside the Swiss lakes. That was the first of his surprises but there were many more and they continued to explode at regular intervals, like the green and crimson rockets on the night of the soirée.

He discovered, for instance, that she could speak fluent French, whereas he was obliged to grope for half-forgotten phrases from school text-books, and perhaps, if he had not been so much in love, her accomplishment would have dismayed him a little. As it was he listened with awe as she exchanged banter with porters, ticket collectors and the concierge at the sedate hotel which she had found for him off the Avenue des Capucines. Another source of amazement was her apparent familiarity with Parisian history. She took him to all kinds of out-of-the-way places connected with characters he had met in fiction or in encyclopaedias, and talked freely of people like Madame Roland, Catherine de Medici and Marguerite of Navarre. She hustled him off to an obscure little museum to show him the proclamation Robespierre had been signing when the Thermidorians burst in and put a term to the Terror. She told him whimsical ghost stories as they walked the gravelled paths of the Petit Trianon and was even able to identify many of Napoleon’s marshals from busts that seemed to him identical as they looked down from niches in the old Palais Royale. She seemed to enjoy guiding him as though he had been an adolescent son instead of her husband, so that, during their sightseeing tours he trailed dutifully behind her feeling no shame on this account but rather a surge of pride that sometimes made him almost drunk with exhilaration. To give expression to his pride he spent freely, buying her a present every day. Sometimes it was a confection that caught his eye in a milliner’s window, sometimes a dress that she declared, laughing, she could never wear within fifty miles of the Sorrel Valley, and sometimes a mere trifle like a book, trinket or even a posy of spring flowers. So it happened that by day the initiative was hers but when they were alone in their first-storey room above the rattle of the traffic she deliberately abdicated and became a bride again who, while not in any way shy or withdrawn, allowed the initiative to pass back to him. Yet here again she had the power to surprise him, for he had not yet forgotten her kiss and the promise that accompanied it on the day she had helped to rout Cribb and although he meant to implement his pledge never to hustle her this soon proved beyond his power. He had, on embarking on this adventure, been only too aware of his inexperience but in some indefinable way she gave him a measure of confidence so that, to some extent, neither one of them suffered the disenchantment that might have attended the essays of two people who had grown to maturity in an age when discussion of sex was taboo. It did cross his mind during that first week, however, that her intellectual curiosity might have led her to seek and find some printed source of enlightenment, for she seemed to know very well how best to accommodate him and it was only in retrospect that he wondered whether she had acquired this awareness in the arms of the roystering Ralph Lovell, reputedly an expert wencher. When he falteringly touched on the subject, however, she answered him with her usual frankness, saying that Ralph had certainly done his best to anticipate marriage but that she had had no difficulty in thwarting him for, like all the Lovells, he was an arch snob and drew a nice distinction between women of her class and village girls like the Potters. On this he let the matter drop, not liking to contemplate just how many liberties had been extended to Ralph or to any other man. He was far too grateful for the patience and generosity she was prepared to extend to him and came to accept her accessibility as a physical manifestation of her exceptional candour. This was impressed upon him one afternoon about a week after their marriage when he had occasion to go into the bathroom of the little suite for his razor. The door was ajar and he called, ‘Can I come in?’ and she said, laughing, ‘Why not? You’re my husband, aren’t you?’ and he went in to find her naked, with her tumble of blue-black hair reaching to her shapely buttocks as she stood before a mirror using her brush with long, sweeping strokes. She did not seem in any way embarrassed and went on brushing while he stared at her in wonder. He had never seen her more than half undressed and had thought of her as a rather sturdy little person, with muscles moulded by plenty of exercise but now he could marvel at the classic proportion of her limbs which, against all probability, contrived to give an impression of strength as well as infinite grace and softness. Nor, until this moment, had he appreciated the luxuriance of her hair that trapped the afternoon light in its bluish depths, or of the slenderness of her waist and the neatness of her feet. He said, gently, ‘But you’re quite perfect, Grace! As perfect as a woman could be!’ and she replied, in the assured tone of a wife of years rather than days, ‘It’s nice to be told so!’ and went on with her brushing.

Her manner of answering reminded him poignantly that, for all her recent submissiveness, she had never admitted to loving him but had only contracted to try and it seemed to him very strange that a beautiful young woman could stand before him stark naked and yet continue to hold on to her spiritual independence. He said, ‘I’ll make you happy, Grace. That means more to me than anything.’

She was rather too quick, he thought, with her reply, for suddenly she stopped her brushing and said, ‘More than the estate? More than that Valley of yours?’

‘Whatever we do in the Valley we’ll do together,’ he said, without finding her question irrelevant and forgetting his razor he swept her off her feet and carried her back to the bedroom.

So the days and nights passed, with the leadership shared equally but one day she gave him a brief inkling of what seemed to him her contempt for the dominion of men.

She had taken him, guide-book in hand, to a little lodging house on the Left Bank, telling him that it was here that the girl assassin, Charlotte Corday, had stayed on the night she came to Paris to kill Marat. She seemed to have a very high regard for Charlotte Corday and to know facts concerning her that were not printed in the guide-book. She told him of the girl’s indignation at the way the revolution had degenerated into an orgy of cruelty and bloodshed, and of Charlotte’s determination to kill the man whom she identified as the chief author of the Terror, describing, with a certain relish, how she had bought the butcher’s knife that she used on her victim. Paul said, jokingly, ‘She must have been a cold-blooded little devil!’ but Grace snapped, ‘Cold-blooded? No, she wasn’t that! Fearless and resolute, if you like, but not cold-blooded! The cold-blooded stayed home and talked of achieving something. She went out and did it, while all the men of her party were content to posture on the rostrum!’, and as she said this he thought for a moment of Celia’s warning concerning Grace’s flirtation with the suffragists and wondered if she identified Charlotte Corday with the Pankhursts. She had never discussed modern politics with him and once or twice when he had mentioned Grenfell and his Liberals, she steered the conversation back to less controversial subjects but that same evening she opened the door on another unfamiliar world, conjuring two tickets for the ballet from a fellow guest at the hotel, and taking him, protesting complete ignorance, to the Opera, where
Giselle
was being presented by the Imperial Russian Ballet.

Until then he had always thought of ballet as no more than an eccentric form of dancing, but he tried to look as though he was prepared to enjoy it for her sake. It was not until he had stolen several glances at her during the performance that the magic began to work upon his prejudice and make his ignorance seem boorish. When the interval arrived he readily admitted this and was rewarded by a flash of enthusiasm in her eyes and an impulsive grasp of her hand as she said, ‘I was afraid you’d be bored and make nothing of it! This is an essential part of life, Paul! It makes up for so much ugliness, cruelty and stupidity! Will you promise me something? If the Ballet comes to London in the autumn may we travel up and stay for it? Will we get a chance to see something outside the Sorrel Valley every so often? Often enough to stop us growing cabbages for heads?’

He would have promised her the moon at that moment and replied, ‘Why, certainly, darling, you can go to London any time you wish!’ and then, recalling her enigmatic remark in the bathroom, ‘Is
that
what frightens you about Shallowford? The thought of being buried alive, and growing dull, like one of the farmer’s daughters?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘not really, but you must have hated the city very much to have gone there in the first place. They say you only visited Paxtonbury once, until we were married there!’

‘Well, I suppose I do hate cities,’ he admitted, ‘particularly London, but my real reason for buying Shallowford wasn’t as simple as that. I couldn’t stand the thought of an office career and with my knee the field was very limited. Then, after I was committed, I soon grew to love every blade of grass in the place but I suppose it really began with the dream.’

She showed interest at once. ‘What dream?’

‘Oh, I can’t tell you here and anyway it’s time to go back.’

‘Will you tell me tonight?’

‘Yes, but it will probably bore you. Other people’s dreams always bore me.’

She held him to his promise and when they were in bed he told her as much as he could recall of the conflict between the static hosts on the hospital ceiling and the compensating view of the country beyond the ward window that had seemed, at the time, to play such a vital part in his recovery. He could not tell whether she was impressed or dismissed the story as an unremarkable symptom of fever and drugs and would have been very surprised to know that she lay awake long after he slept, or that his story helped to convince her that he was by no means the amiable simpleton she had first supposed him to be. She lay there wondering if, even now, he understood that she had married him as cold-bloodedly as any fortune hunter and in retracing her steps over their various encounters she realised that already her conscience troubled her somewhat, for surely his apparent need for her could no longer be dismissed as the self-delusion all men used to disguise their clamour for access to a woman’s body and the incidental acquisition of a woman servitor. His approach, she thought, already indicted something more substantial than that and it would be folly not to admit it, for although his physical enjoyment of her was uncomplicated he already respected her as a person and not as a bedmate or a brood mare for children to perpetuate his name. For this, in the main, was how she had thought of him in the brief interval between her unconditional surrender and marriage but it was not, unfortunately for her peace of mind, how she thought of him now. He was, she admitted, far more imaginative than she had supposed, possessing also a certain originality and infinitely more patience than most young men, and even if his eyes were still fixed on contemptibly small horizons his vision might, she thought, expand if she could teach him to look beyond Coombe Bluff. She made a half-playful attempt to separate the Paul Craddock of Shallowford from the Paul Craddock now sleeping beside her. The one she had thought of as little more than a gawky, earnest, ignorant boy who had served and suffered in a war but learned little or nothing about people and their overriding greed and self-interest. He could still suffer fools gladly, so much so that he accepted rascals like Tamer Potter and cranks like Edwin Willoughby as personal responsibilities. He liked to think of himself as a benevolent patron, administering a tiny kingdom of rustics when, in fact, he was no more than a lucky young ass, aping the country gentleman and lagging a century behind the times. He had probably never heard of people like Keir Hardie and his forlorn little working-man’s party, or the vanguard of women prepared to sacrifice everything in an attempt to have a voice in their own destinies. Yet, and she was obliged to admit it, there existed, deep in this long lump of a man, a spark of idealism that was never completely submerged by douches of sentimental claptrap or obscured by muddled thinking, and now and then she had glimpsed it. There was something even more rare—a male gentleness that she had never experienced in any other man. Intrigued by now, she lit the night light, turning carefully on her elbow and looking down on him as he slept. He was not, she decided, particularly good looking, with his long, craggy face, strong features and stiff, unruly hair almost as dark as her own. If they did have children they would probably have faces as long as a horse and complexions as swarthy as Spaniards. She rested on her elbow a long time, studying him calmly and objectively, noting his look of innocence that was offset by the unexpected firmness of the jaw and the fastidiousness of the long, thin nose. It was a face, she thought, that could have belonged to a ruthless or even a cruel person who would want his way with men and women, yet she knew by now that there was no spark of cruelty in him and very little ruthlessness as far as she was concerned. She was aware too that she could, if she wished, manipulate him easily enough, either by appealing to his old-fashioned sense of chivalry or by the more direct method of throwing her arms and legs about him, and yet, was she capable of making him turn his back on his dream, so that they could advance as man and wife into the twentieth century? She looked at his jawline again. Perhaps, in time, when he grew a little but not yet, possibly not until she had borne him a child or two. A month ago this conclusion would have depressed her but tonight it only made her smile. She said, half aloud, as she playfully drew a lock of her hair across his cheek, ‘Well, Squire, we shall see! And anyway, I’ve been luckier than I deserve!’ and she kissed his forehead, blew out the light, turned over and chuckled. It was a long time since Grace Lovell had indulged in a chuckle.