Long Summer Day (45 page)
He went back to confer with the Coroner and the Police Inspector, while Paul mounted the trap Ikey had brought round and the two set off along the coastal cart road towards Coombe Bay. Ikey, to his delight, was allowed to drive and they were soon clear of the town and breasting the long hump of the red cliff that enclosed Whinmouth on the east. They were walking the horse down the next hill into Teazel Coombe when Paul said, ‘Mrs Craddock and I have been discussing your future, Ikey. She thinks you should go to school, a real school, you understand?’
The boy looked startled, ‘You mean, away to school, sir?’ And when Paul told him this was so he burst out, ‘But I like it fine where I am, an’ what I’m doing, sir! I don’t want no more upsets. This aint because o’ what ’appened at Four Winds, is it, sir? I did right the Coroner said, and so did you when we was doing of it!’
‘Of course you did right,’ Paul said, ‘but both Mrs Craddock and I feel that the way you’ve shaped since you’ve been here and the progress you’ve made at Miss Willoughby’s school, entitles you to a real education. You can’t get higher than Chivers if you stay a stable-lad, and you can never earn more than a pound or two a week. How old are you?’
‘I couldn’t say for sure,’ the boy said, ‘but I reckon I’m thirteen, or near enough. My mum told me I was eleven when I first come ’ere but what would it mean, sir, going away and being put to a big school? Would it mean … well … that I grew into a gent, like you, sir?’
Paul chuckled. ‘By no means,’ he said, ‘for I’m only half a gentleman, Ikey. I bought my place here with money made from the scrapyard, and I didn’t even make that myself, it was all earned by my father and Mr Zorndorff. No, that isn’t the point, at least Mrs Craddock wouldn’t think it was. She says that you’ve got a naturally quick brain and if you put your mind to it you could learn to speak properly and stand a far better chance of getting on in the world. Apart from that a good education is a fine thing in itself. I didn’t have one and I’ve missed it, I can tell you! You can never really catch up, you only think you can.’
The boy glanced at him curiously. ‘There’s nothing you can’t do, sir,’ he said, ‘so I don’t see what … well … I don’t see what the way a bloke talks has to do with it!’
‘It has, believe me,’ said Paul feelingly, ‘in England it’s the most important thing of all. I don’t know why it should be but it is. Your accent, and mine, for that matter, would hold us back all our lives so long as we stayed at home. It wouldn’t hinder us in America or the Colonies but here it’s a kind of password. But I’m not the person to give you the best advice about this, go and have a word with Mrs Craddock when you get home’; and when Ikey still hesitated, ‘You like Mrs Craddock, don’t you? You’d trust her, the same as you would me?’
Ikey said reverently, ‘I think she’s the most beautiful person I ever see, sir. She’s like … like a picksher in a book. I’d talk to her about it, sir, but I’d tell her same as I told you, that I’m ’appy enough as I am!’
They left it at that and Ikey saw Grace but the result was as Paul had expected. She converted him to her point of view in half-an-hour. He at once sought Paul in the stables and said, grinning shamefacedly, ‘Mrs Craddock reckons I could board out a bit with a schoolmaster she knows in Paxtonbury, sir, so I’m orf tomorrer! Then I got to try fer one o’ them nobs’ school, I dunno where exactly, but I ’ope it’s ’andy!’ That was all; the guardianship of Ikey Palfrey had passed from man to wife.
Paul learned the details later, when Grace was up and about again. The staff, he noticed, now treated her with increased respect, as though, by producing a male heir, she had accomplished a very singular feat indeed and although he was amused by this he was dismayed by her curious lack of interest in Simon, whom she cheerfully abandoned to Thirza, now promoted from parlourmaid to Nannie. Grace breast-fed the baby, O’Keefe telling Paul that she had made an excellent recovery, far more rapid than he had anticipated, for the difficulties of the breech birth had evidently rattled the old man. Daladier, the specialist, came over once or twice to re-examine her and Celia accompanied him. Grace was convinced that the French surgeon was Celia’s lover, for Bruce, her father, remained abroad. The notion of her forty-five-year-old stepmother enjoying a Continental lover amused Grace but in a strange way it seemed to bring them closer together so that Paul thought, ‘I suppose it’s because she finds this one more example of flying in the face of convention, or is it just another score off her father?’
Rudd, to Paul’s surprise, unequivocally endorsed the new tenancy of Four Winds, declaring that Eveleigh was far more likely to make a success of the farm than Will Codsall. After Eveleigh had settled in Paul rode over once or twice and was impressed with the transformation of the place. Its air of explosive gloom has gone and the ghosts of Martin and Arabella seemed to have been laid by the teeming, tumbling Eveleigh brood, four flaxen-haired little girls, all lively and pretty and two stolid boys. Marian Eveleigh more than fulfilled her husband’s promise in the buttery and the results of her industry were soon going up the line to London markets, where her butter and tinned yellow cream was reputed to appear on the tables of famous restaurants. The two elder girls were initiated into the art and might have increased the dairy output if Eveleigh had not been a stickler for their regular attendance at Mary Willoughby’s school. He had, Paul noticed, a great respect for the value of education and later on, when he would have been glad of his eldest boy’s help about the farm, he preferred to see him canter off on the Four Wind’s lively pony and ride the eight-mile round trip between Deepdene and Four Winds every weekday.
The weather that spring was mild and crops were forward. Up at Periwinkle, on the edge of the moor, Elinor Codsall was busy building up a strong strain of poultry that promised to improve on the hens she had left behind at her father’s farm. She favoured a sturdy crossbreed, Rhode Island Red and Light Sussex and she too availed herself of city markets made available by the railway. Paul sometimes met her at Sorrel Halt unloading crates of eggs in the siding and noticed that she was pregnant again. He thought, ‘That was one of the best things I ever did, promote that marriage! How Will would cope without her I can’t imagine,’ and he looked upon Periwinkle as one of his successes. Elinor made no secret of her relief that Four Winds, with its fine Friesian herd, had passed into other hands. ‘If Will had gone backalong,’ she told Paul, ‘I’d ha’ lost him! ’Tiz as well for us things happened as they did and young Sydney is better along of all they Eveleigh children. Mebbe it’ll taake him out of himself for he’s got too much of his mother about him, whereas my Will has no particle of ’er, Glory be!’
Henry Pitts, at Hermitage, was courting at last, to his mother’s satisfaction and his jolly father’s amusement. He had been taken in hand, with little impetus on his part, by a grenadier of a girl, full-bosomed and red-haired, who was employed as dairymaid at one of the Gilroy farms and occasionally, when Paul was riding along the lanes of an evening, he would pass them walking slowly and in step, with Henry’s arm tucked firmly under the girl’s, so that he looked like an amiable prisoner being exercised by an affectionate wardress. As he passed them and Henry gave him a good evening Paul reflected that the women of the Valley were more vital and purposeful than its men and seemed also to have a clearer conception of what was important and what was not and that in most cases it was they who made the decisions. There was Elinor Codsall and her Will, Henry and his tall red-head, Martha and the easy-going Arthur Pitts, Mary Willoughby and her preacher brother, and, to some extent, Eveleigh’s wife Marian, now keeping the pot boiling through the difficult period of the take-over. He wondered briefly if Valley folk thought the same of him and regarded Grace as the originator of policy at the big house but thought this unlikely, for Grace’s interest in the estate was purely personal, like her patronage of Ikey Palfrey. He wished sometimes that she would show a more active interest in the estate and not continue to regard it, as he was sure she did, as a tiresome hobby on the part of a boyish husband. Their relationship as a man and wife remained tranquil enough but he failed utterly to interest her in his political activities and so did James Grenfell, for all his persuasive charm. Paul had been a witness to their last skirmish, when Grenfell, arriving at Shallowford with news that a bye-election was a probability in the constituency in the summer, admitted that, whilst favouring the principle of the woman’s vote, he thought it should await the settlement of more important issues, such as tariff reform, the bridling of the House of Lords, the Irish question, and a mass of badly-needed social legislation on subjects as divergent as shop-assistants’ hours and pensions for the aged. He could not regard women’s suffrage as a major issue; for Grace it dwarfed every other.
‘You Liberals will never get your major reforms through without enlisting the support of every intelligent woman in the country,’ she declared. ‘You prattle about social reform until your platforms disappear behind a cloud of gas but you don’t really believe in it, not you, not Lloyd George, not that cold fish Asquith, or Oh-So-Courteous Mr Grey! The right of women to have a say in the kind of society in which they live ought to be self-evident! We produce the children you need to play “Snap” with the German Kaiser but you still relegate us to the kitchen and nursery! Well, it won’t do, James, I’m hanged if you’ll get my support until you stand up in Paxtonbury Drill Hall and admit that a woman is no longer a second-class citizen! If a male cretin can vote, why deny the same right to a qualified woman doctor?’ It seemed to Paul that she had a point, but James only laughed and replied, ‘When a modern political party aims at rebuilding the entire fabric of that nation, my dear, it has to select priorities and deal with reforms one at a time. It dare not risk hard-won gains on a highly controversial domestic issue. You’ll get your vote all right but you’ll have to wait until you’re thirty-odd instead of twenty-odd!’ and Grace had snapped, ‘It’s too long to wait, James!’ and had retired to her rose garden in one of her withdrawn moods, not mentioning the subject again until Paul was getting into bed when she said, astounding him with her guile, ‘Why don’t you work on the local committee to persuade Grenfell to stand down and put you up instead? I’d work hard for you, providing, of course, you stood for women’s suffrage. After a trial run or two we’d get to Westminster!’
‘But I haven’t the slightest desire to get to Westminster!’ he protested and she replied, with a sigh that troubled him, ‘No, Paul, I’d forgotten that!’ and dropped the subject.
After that they kept off the subject of politics and the spring days passed pleasantly enough. One day, to his genuine pleasure, Claire Derwent appeared at the last hunt of the season and contrary to expectations he found that he could talk and joke with her without embarrassment. They seemed, in fact, to slip into the easy, unexacting relationship of the earliest days of their friendship, when she had ridden beside him all over the Valley and introduced him to people he now addressed by nickname. She was a little less plump, he thought, but her figure, if anything, was the better for it and she looked very fit for a girl who, according to her own account, spent most of her time indoors and had not sat a horse since leaving the Valley. She made no reference to the abruptness with which she had decamped after the Coronation soirée, or to the fact, now clearly established in Paul’s mind, that she had felt certain he would propose to her but she still seemed interested in everything that was happening in the Valley and congratulated him warmly on the birth of his son, Simon.
‘Why don’t you come over and see the place again, Claire?’ he said. ‘You ought to meet Grace and I’m sure you’ll like one another. She’s a great gardener and has made all kinds of changes outside, although she won’t even give advice on the administrative side. Come over to tea and bring Rose,’ and Claire said that she would be happy to visit them the day before she went back to her teashop in Penshurst to prepare for the summer influx of visitors.
‘I can’t imagine you pottering about a teashop, Claire,’ he said, as they rode part-way home together, ‘you’re an open-air girl and that’s a city job,’ and she had glanced at him, a little sharply he thought, and said, ‘I’d sooner do that than spend my life as an unpaid servant for father!’
‘Well, I don’t suppose it will be for long,’ he said lightly, ‘you’ll be married very soon for sure.’
‘Maybe,’ she said, and left it at that, but she redeemed her promise and she and Rose arrived in Derwent’s yellow dog-cart the following Saturday, both dressed in their best and Claire looking very smart in a diagonally-striped blue and white silk dress, with a huge picture hat of matching straw, openwork mittens instead of gloves and a long-handled parasol of saxe-blue silk.
Handing her down from the box Paul thought it was going to be a rather trying occasion but it proved exactly the opposite. As he had predicted she and Grace seemed to find a good deal to talk about and abandoned him to Rose, who lured him into the yard on the pretext of talking shop with Chivers the groom and then set to work to sell him a cob and exchange the old Lovell trap for a smarter equipage. He was easy game for this, having already made up his mind to buy a more modern drag before Grace, with her modern notions, persuaded him to get a motor, still foreign to the Valley but sometimes seen in the steep streets of Paxtonbury. When they had more or less clinched the deal he asked Rose outright if she thought Claire was happy away from home and Rose said she was as happy as most girls who could never settle for anything short of a husband and babies. Paul half expected her to make some reference to the general belief that he had jilted her but she did not and he was grateful. She praised Grace, saying that she thought her ‘quite lovely’, and adding that she was popular among the tenants, and then they returned to find Grace and Claire in the drawing-room after her inspection of the baby. Claire paid him the usual compliments and they left, declaring that they had enjoyed the visit enormously, and that Paul and Grace must come to High Coombe and not wait until Claire came home again, for that might not be until Christmas-time.
