Long Summer Day (52 page)

II

C
elia’s second letter arrived towards the end of January, more than six months after Grace had left. Her first, replying to his angry demands for news of his wife’s whereabouts had merely annoyed him for he concluded from it that Celia was not much surprised by what had occurred and that it was not, in her view, an astonishing thing for her stepdaughter to have abandoned home, husband and a six-month-old child after an apparently trivial disagreement. The letter, moreover, expressed a neutrality that he would not have expected from her in view of her eagerness to arrange the marriage and he thought, bitterly, ‘Damn the woman! She might at least have said something sympathetic, even if she does make it very plain she won’t accept the job of umpire!’ He had not written again and was therefore surprised by a message from Coombe Bay one grey morning, informing him that she had returned to the Valley and would be glad if he would call as soon as convenient. He rode over that same afternoon but as he stood outside the door awaiting an answer to the bell his mind returned to the first occasion he had stood here, also in response to Celia’s urgent invitation; it seemed to him more like fifty than two years ago. She received him graciously when the trim maid showed him up the narrow stair to her little boudoir, looking out across the restless winter sea but he was in no mood for polite preliminaries and said, bluntly, ‘I could make no sense at all of your first letter and can only suppose that you now regard the marriage as a mistake on everybody’s part!’

She looked at him with her head on one side and then, laughing heartily, took his hand on both of hers and kissed him on the cheek.

‘Paul,’ she said, ‘you might have frightened Grace with that baronial approach but it doesn’t impress me in the least! Sit down, unbutton your coat and tell me exactly what led up to it. More important still, tell me how you got along
before
it happened.’

He was nonplussed by her heartiness but her charm began to reassert itself after a few moments so that he found himself thinking not so much of Grace or his own situation, but how she managed to look so young and attractive. He discovered too that he envied her assurance, reflecting that it was no wonder she had taken his news so lightly for there was so much experience behind her friendly brown eyes. He told her, without embroidery, of the passive period of their marriage and the sense of security it had given him, and then of their two quarrels, one over Smut Potter and the other over Roddy Rudd, and their exchange of ultimatums in respect of the rally and the visit to the ballet. She was a good listener and he saw that she did not miss a point but when he had finished, describing how Grace had packed her trunks and disappeared, she said, with a smile, ‘I daresay that’s all very relevant, Paul, but if I’m to bring you together again I shall have to know a great deal more than that! How did Grace behave as a bride, before and after Simon was born?’

It crossed his mind then that she was using the occasion to satisfy a prurient curiosity and he recalled her more than maternal approaches to him when he had called upon her the first time, and again when they had parted after the wedding and she had drawn him aside and whispered, ‘Don’t stand any nonsense from her, Paul! Remember the old proverb— “Thou goest to a woman? Do not forget the whip!”’ Then, without understanding why, he knew that she was drawing him out for a purpose of her own, that she could tell him a great deal more if she chose but had not yet made up her mind to tell what she knew. The thought put him on his guard and he said off-handedly, ‘Grace was a perfect wife in the way most young men look for one, although maybe “wife” isn’t the word you had in mind!’

She nodded, eagerly. ‘Now that’s odd, but very interesting! It knocks the bottom out of a theory I had about her before you were married.’

He said, impatiently, ‘Look here, Mrs Lovell, I’m only interesting in getting her to behave like a reasonable human being. I know she’s bored down here and I’m willing to make advances. The estate is running itself now and we could go to London occasionally and maybe visit the Continent. Damn it, I’d even buy one of those blasted motors she seems so keen on and have a telephone and electric dynamo installed, if those things are that important to her! The one thing I won’t do is change my way of life and I don’t think she has the right to demand that. If you know where she is—and I believe you do—you can tell her that! She made a bargain and I intend to hold her to that part of it!’

‘I should have no patience with you if you didn’t,’ Celia said, eyeing him carefully, ‘and the fact is you happen to be right—I do know where she is, I saw her less than a week ago.’

‘She’s abroad?’

‘No, in London.’

He got up with an air of exasperation but she motioned him to sit again, adding, ‘Don’t rush me, Paul! I have to consider very carefully what to do, for I’m genuinely fond of you and would like nothing better than to restore her to you on your own terms. Her kind of nonsense would have been thrashed out of a young wife when I was a girl but times change and she happens to have a little money of her own, for which you can blame me. Then again, I suppose there is some kind of excuse for this silly revolt against men. She did watch her father drive her mother to suicide but perhaps you never heard about that?’

‘I knew her mother drowned herself in India,’ Paul admitted, ‘but naturally I never discussed it with her.’

‘Perhaps you should have done, for it goes some way towards explaining her oddity. Bruce Lovell drove that poor woman to her death with his debts and women and rather special brand of cruelty. I ought to know, although I didn’t hear of it until it was too late.’

‘You mean that Grace, seeing that happen, conceived a contempt for men? That this suffrage nonsense is a kind of revenge?’

‘What other reason could there be for an intelligent girl like her trading security and comfort for a fad?’

He knew that he could never convince a woman of Celia’s background that some people might consider themselves more deeply committed to a political principle than a trend in fashion, so all he said was, ‘I made a point never to quarrel with her political views. After all, she has as much right to hers as I have to mine.’

‘Quite,’ said Celia, ‘but yours haven’t led to the police court!’

He sat up, alarmed and astounded. ‘Police court? When?’

‘She would be in gaol right now if I hadn’t read of her case in the papers and paid her fine, very much against her will. These women hate to be deprived of their martyrdom.’

‘Grace was actually charged in court? What the devil for?’

‘Throwing a bag of flour at a Cabinet Minister or so I understand. It’s all so futile! What would they do with the vote if they got it? March around in hideous clothes campaigning for one nincompoop or the other, I imagine. But perhaps you, as a Radical, sympathise with them?’

‘I’ve never been convinced,’ he said, ‘but I’m damned if I think that issue is worth my marriage! Besides, Grace’s desertion hasn’t all that much to do with votes for women. I realise now that it’s more of a repudiation of our way of life down here, a kind of compulsion to see everything new as miraculous and everything old as fuel for a bonfire. In that respect we should never see eye to eye but it need not prevent us from leading a normal married life. Do you see any prospect of convincing her of that?’

‘Well, I suppose we could try,’ she said, sighing. ‘Would you be prepared to travel up to town and talk to her if I could arrange it?’

‘Yes, I would,’ he said eagerly, ‘I should be glad of the opportunity. I don’t think I would have been but now—well, I’ve always regarded dignity as a rather negative virtue, Mrs Lovell, and I threw mine away when I bought myself a leading position among people who have been farming land since the Conquest!’

She gave him a long, affectionate glance and once again he was conscious of something frankly sensual in her contemplation. ‘You know, Paul,’ she said at length, ‘the thing I admire most about you is your lack of complacency! I think Grace is an absolute fool. You’re a real man, and you’ll be a big one hereabouts one of these days! Will you stay to supper?’ and when he declined she looked very disappointed and said, with a lift of her elegant shoulders, ‘Oh, very well, hurry home and stick your nose in your beloved dirt! I’ll write the moment I can arrange something!’

She kissed him then, warmly on both cheeks, inclining her body towards him with rather more pressure than necessary and he recognised the perfume that Grace used. For a moment he was half-inclined to accept her invitation, and perhaps demonstrate his contempt for personal pride and she would have welcomed him, he was sure of that. The vague prospect of reconciliation, however, caused him to recollect himself and he thanked her, turning for the door. Little, he reflected, had been achieved, but enough to make him feel more cheerful than he had felt for months.

III

J
anuary passed with a spell of mild, muggy weather and white, drenching mists came in from the sea, shrouding those parts of the estate free of timber. All along the Valley, except for brief periods about noon, the clouds remained dense and almost motionless. The mist muffled the continuous whine of the Home Farm saw and moon-faced cattle loomed out of the fog along the river road, their hooves making sounds like soggy corks being withdrawn from bottles as they squelched across the half-seen landscape. Paul had resumed the rhythm of his work by then and was drawing up plans for a communal marketing scheme that he had been pondering a year or more but with the arrival of hard frosts in late February, and flurries of snow and sleet beating in from the north-east, it was difficult for busy men like Arthur Pitts, Eveleigh and the Derwents to assemble and exchange views on prospects of pooling resources instead of competing for the Whinmouth and Paxtonbury markets. Travel along icebound roads was irksome, and hunting, where they might have conferred in the field, was at a standstill. Celia kept in touch, writing once from the village and twice from London but apparently it was not proving easy to locate Grace, and although Paul thought of her frequently some of the ache had gone from his heart and he was able, for long periods during the day, to put her out of mind altogether. John Rudd took to spending his evenings in the library again and once James Grenfell, down from London, dined with them, talking of events that might have been happening on the moon for all they affected life in the Valley. He said that the Tsar’s regime in Russia was tottering under the stresses of revolution at home and a disastrous dispute with the Japanese in the Far East. Grenfell, to Paul’s amazement, backed the Japs to win the war that was on the point of breaking out but said he had scant sympathy with Russia, a nation that was the social equivalent of England about the time of the War of the Roses. The M.P. also discussed home affairs and prophesied an early general election, with a landslide victory for the Liberals but when Paul asked him if the cause of women’s suffrage was likely to make progress under a radical government Grenfell said it would not, for no government could allow itself to be blackmailed, and blackmail was the strategy of the militant group dominating the movement.

They sat talking until the small hours and Paul was grimly amused to note the subtle changes wrought by a few months in what Grenfell now called (rather self-consciously) ‘My Workshop’. He was already a little thinner and a little greyer, Paul thought, but some of his tolerance had departed and Paul now thought it unlikely that he would suffer fools gladly. There was also a slight formalism in his manner and in his ways of pronouncing judgements, as though his opinions were unchallengeable statements of fact that no one in his senses could dispute. It was all barely noticeable but it went some way towards confirming Paul’s distrust of professional politicians, who, once translated from candidate to Member, seemed to take on the pedagoguery of schoolmasters unable to distinguish between children and adults. Perhaps Grenfell himself was conscious of this for, on saying good-bye, he suddenly seemed less sure of himself as he said, hesitantly, ‘You’ve heard no more of Grace, I suppose?’ and when Paul told him there was still a possibility of a reconciliation he perked up at once, exclaiming, ‘That’s splendid! As for me, to be honest I’m sometimes very homesick for the Valley and I wonder she isn’t! It can be disappointing up there at times. One begins hopefully enough but inside the House one sometimes has a curious sensation of having joined an all-party conspiracy against the people we’re supposed to represent! However, I hope I’ll outgrow this when we are a government and not an opposition,’ and climbed into his trap and rattled away down the drive, leaving Paul with a conviction that Grenfell had found travelling more rewarding than arrival.

A day or so later, when the weather had mended somewhat, Meg Potter arrived sitting sidesaddle on the cart-horse they had loaned Tamer, fording the swollen stream as unconcernedly as if it had been a brook. She told him that Tamer was laid up with sciatica, that she and the girls were busy with spring-sowing, and that she had heard Smut had been transferred to Paxtonbury gaol. ‘He’s mentioned you in every scribble us’ve had,’ she said, ‘so he’d take it kindly if you could bring yourself to go up to that bad place, Squire.’ Paul said he would be glad to, for such visits as Smut had been allowed during the first two years of his sentence had been made by Meg herself. Twice Paul had loaned her the trap and she had driven right across Dartmoor and over the Tamar to Bodmin gaol, to spend a bare thirty minutes with her son, and Paul realised that she was relieved he was now back in Devon, for at least this was an earnest of his ultimate return to the Valley.

In a day or so Ikey Palfrey was due to start his first term at High Wood, a small public school in the north of the county, so Paul let him accompany him to Paxtonbury and wait with the trap whilst he approached the red-brick prison and presented his visitor’s ticket. The vast bulk and silence of the ugly building oppressed him, and he wondered what on earth he could say to a man who had been locked up in such a place for more than a hundred weeks but when the wicket gate was opened and he was escorted to the waiting-room, curiosity conquered his distaste and he looked around with interest, watching a group of convicts at work in the courtyard with besoms and drain rods, and noting the blank faces of the other visitors who lined the bench like patients in a dentist’s surgery. Eventually he was conducted to a low-ceilinged room furnished with a long table and divided down the middle by a wire mesh and after another delay a warder jangling keys at his belt entered, escorting a small, shrunken man in a mountebank’s jacket and breeches of coarse canvas. For a moment Paul failed to recognise this clownish creature as the spry, suntanned poacher, with the insolent glance and soft, springy step, for Smut looked as if he had been confined in a small, sunless cupboard for weeks and hardly a trace of his natural ebullience survived. There were still irregular traces of brown on his cheeks but they were mere blotches, emphasising the moist pallor of his skin, and only the light blue eyes that lit up on seeing Paul recalled the Smut Potter he had met his first day in the Valley.