Long Summer Day (62 page)

He remembered vaguely that she had taken new premises in Bayswater about a year ago and that news of this had reached him through Rose after the arrival of a Christmas card showing a sketch of her shop. It gratified him that he could remember such things and that his brain seemed to be working normally, and after being prompted to tell him more she explained that she had read of the wreck in the London newspapers and decided to come home and hear about it first-hand. She said nothing of Ikey’s letter, deciding that it was not for her to tell him that her presence here was in fact due to the boy’s statement that he had called out for her in a delirium. Then he asked her the date and seemed surprised when she told him that it was April 8th, nearly a month since the night of the wreck, yet with this reminder she witnessed a mild puff of pride when he said, being careful to speak collectively, ‘We did a good job down there, didn’t we? Seven out of the nine on that rock but it was more by luck than judgment! Poor Old Tamer was the real hero and I wish to God he’d lived to realise what he’d done, and have people respect him for once! Will you remind John Rudd to see that Meg and the girls don’t want for anything until I can get about again?’

‘You really can’t start fretting over things until you’re really well,’ she told him severely. ‘For heaven’s sake let the Valley look after itself, Paul! It’s been doing it for centuries, you know!’ and then she regretted having said this for it implied that his leadership was a non-essential, so she added, quickly, ‘That doesn’t mean that everybody round here doesn’t think a very great deal of you, Paul! I realised that the moment I talked with Father and you know how difficult he is to impress! He said the Valley people would never have achieved anything like that under a Lovell and that you’ve done a wonderful job here and this proves it.’

He pondered this for a moment and she took the opportunity to draw the curtains. When she returned to the bed he was asleep and as she stood looking down at him it crossed her mind that he had the face of an Elizabethan, with a jaw-line and high cheekbones that were uncommon today, especially about here, where almost everyone had the squarish Anglo-Saxon cast of features, or, where the Celtic strain predominated, a smoother, chubbier face. There were plenty of dark-skinned men in the Valley but their beards had a bluish gloss that his lacked. All in all, she reflected, he was a strange, alien man to want to make his life here where he had no roots yet his doggedness was making itself felt, even upon men as conservative as her father. He was like a wedge that had first attached itself to the soil of the Valley by its own weight and every blow strengthened its bite. There had been that awful Codsall business, then the dismal Smut Potter affair and the quarrel with Gilroy and finally the strange abdication of Grace Lovell but nothing seemed capable of dislodging him, not even the recurring scandals of his wife’s gaol sentences. He absorbed all these setbacks, still clutching at his rather old-fashioned conception of duty. His outlook would have amazed his predecessors and was said to have exasperated his wife but this ought not to have surprised him—anyone could have told him that a well-bred woman like Grace Lovell would be incapable of seconding his arch ideas.

She stood there a long time and the memory of their association returned to her like a windsong, pleasant but unsubstantial, without a clearly recollected beginning and with no promise of renewal. She had once thought of herself as madly in love with him but now she understood that her self-deception had grown out of the prospect of co-owning the acres on which she had been born and where she had spent such a happy childhood. She had forgiven herself all those clumsy schemes to capture him, supposing that any girl of her age and limited experience would have done her best to catch a husband who was rich, young and very amiable. Perhaps he was the real loser, for surely no one else in the Valley understood him as she did and had done from the moment when she had been able to evaluate his terrible earnestness. The thought interested her. Had Grace Lovell really been obsessed with the campaign to win votes for women or had she run off simply because she was bored to death by his obsession with chawbacons and their affairs? And wouldn’t any intelligent, educated woman be bored with them if she had access, through his money, to a richer and fuller life? It was, she decided, unfair to ask herself this question, for she had never regarded herself as an educated woman and had been brought up to accept the authority and the wilfulness of males as uncomplainingly as one faced up to a wet haymaking season, or a false spring half-way through January. A Valley wife did not necessarily have to embrace her man’s enthusiasms; she either absorbed them or shrugged them off and went about the business of making a home and rearing children. Yet would it be as simple as this with Paul Craddock? Whoever married him would marry the estate, and personal happiness with a man as obstinate as he could only be achieved by a fusion of interests that went beyond those of hearth and nursery. It was not simply a matter of acreage either, of cob, thatch and husbandry. Whoever shared his life would be required to know the Christian names of every soul dwelling inside the magic circle, together with their needs, hopes, fears and capacity for skilled and unskilled work. It was something to which she had not given a thought when she made such a goose of herself beside the mere and in the days immediately before the Coronation soirée.

There was a scrunch on the gravel outside and she looked down from the window to see the doctor’s gig cresting the drive. As she watched Doctor Maureen handed down by John Rudd, she thought, ‘Well, O’Keefe’s clever daughter may know what’s wrong with his body but I could do a better job on the real man, so I’m hanged it I give that tea-shop another thought until I’ve made him laugh again!’

III

N
o poet lived in the Valley so there was no one to idle along the banks of the Sorrel, or sit musing beside the mere that season and make some shift at capturing the magic of spring in the fields and bottoms, or the effect it had upon the men and women who lived there. Hazel Potter sensed what was happening because she communed with each successive season but Hazel had great difficulty in writing her name and her poetry either stayed in her head or was expressed through gibberish or the flash of her nut-brown arms and bare legs, as she ranged the woods, or crossed the moor as far as the railway line. Hazel saw the drifts of bluebells under the beeches west of the mere and the trailing clusters of primroses nestling in the steep banks of the back lanes between Hermitage plateau and the thickets of the Bluff. She heard the oratorios of the thrushes, blackbirds and finches and in the birch woods and laurel clumps, and saw the voles slipping along the Sorrel flats between the straight, green stems of wild iris. She knew some of the otters by name and the badgers too, where they had their holts in the broken hillside north of the mere, and she often stood for an hour talking to darting squirrels in the oak on the meadow above the big house.

Tamer’s death brought her no sorrow. She had never been afraid of him, as were the older girls, and her appraisal of death differed very materially from that of almost everyone else in the Valley. When the Valley folk heard Parson Bull intone at the graveside of the German sailors, using phrases like ‘man springeth up and is cut down like a flower’, or ‘in the midst of life we are in death’, they did not understand these warnings as Hazel understood them, regarding them as no more than extracts from the Prayer Book. Hazel, so accurately in tune with the rhythm of the Valley and with the cycle of life and death that involved every living thing in the Valley, accepted the phrases as plain statements of fact. Every creature, every leaf and every flower in the Valley lived its hour and died its death, sinking back into the earth again and reappearing in changed form next spring, or the spring after that. There was no profit in deploring this, or in wearing mourning and uprooting flowers to pile on pits at places where men and animals and even windfalls and the husks of horse chestnuts were recommitted to the earth. There they had been and there they went and that was that; there was no dividing line to be drawn between a pot-bellied drunkard like Tamer Potter and, say, a hedgehog struck by a hawk. It was the pattern of things and to question it or even think about it was futile. Yet this did not mean that Hazel Potter was deaf to the muted trumpet of spring, or that the throb of renewed life in the Valley aroused no response in her heart. Her step was lighter and her eye and ear sharper than when she trod these same paths in autumn or winter and her heart beat faster as she silently dogged the movement of Ikey Palfrey (whom she still thought of as ‘The Boy’) in his lonely tramps through the coppices and bramble brakes behind the big house.

She had been surprised to see him again for they said that Squire had sent him away to a big school, and it must have been so for he had stopped coming down to the mere opposite the Niggerman’s Church to wait for her. She did not resent this severance of their association, supposing him to have passed out of her orbit after being condemned to sit all day scratching among papers like a squirrel making a dray but sometimes she was curious to learn what had induced him to abandon the jolly life of a stable-boy for a wearisome life like the Squire’s and whether, in fact, the change had been imposed upon him as a punishment, perhaps for stealing away and meeting her in the woods. Her curiosity encouraged her to keep a close watch on him and one morning she followed him across the bluebell orchard behind the house and through Priory Wood to the high-banked lane linking Hermitage land to the northern boundary of the Home Farm. When he turned east, as though making for Shallowford Woods, she stepped from behind a big ash and called so that he stopped in his tracks and looked surprised and undecided. Then, when he saw her slide down the bank, he blushed and seemed on the point of running back the way he had come.

‘Where’ve ’ee been, Boy?’ she demanded, ‘an’ why didden ’ee come upalong, like ’ee used to?’

His embarrassment left him as soon as he heard her voice but was replaced by a kind of wariness. He said, ‘I thought maybe you wouldn’t be there, on account of your father being drowned,’ and at this she looked surprised, not so much by the remark but by the dramatic change in his voice, as though it had been dug out of him, put through a mangle and replaced, a lisping relic of the original.

‘You spake diff’rent,’ she proclaimed, gleefully. ‘How cum you do that, Boy?’

He said, with dignity, ‘My voice has broken. All men’s voices change when they are fourteen.’

This seemed to interest her, as though it was one of the few processes of nature that had somehow escaped her notice.

‘Is it zo?’ she said, ‘I never heard tell of it bevore,’ and then, forgetting his voice, ‘Do’ee want to zee the badgers, Boy?’ and he conceded gravely that he would like to see them and they went up the lane, across the wood and round the edge of the mere to the hill near where she had found him in the snow.

They did not see any badgers but they saw many other things that interested him, a bullfinch’s nest with three eggs, an otter diving near the island, a lame vixen at the entrance of an earth close to Smut’s hideout, and soon a little of their effortless relationship returned so that he found himself slipping back into her brogue and wondering about her again. He asked her if her father’s death had made her as miserable as the Squire’s illness was making him and was shocked by her seeming indifference.

‘Giddon, no,’ she said contemptuously. ‘Er’s dade idden her? And ’er diden know a dandelion from a daisy!’

Unable to follow this logic he said, ‘Well, he was a hero down in the cove, Hazel!’ and she replied, glumly, ‘Ar but ’er smashed our boat to tatters bringin’ they foreigners off the rock!’ The discovery that she valued the boat far above her father gave him another clue to her character. She had always intrigued him, with her astonishing knowledge of woodlore and her free communion with wild creatures, but now he saw her as the one person of his world who had achieved complete independence and it seemed to him a very wonderful thing, this ability to remove oneself at will from the ties of authority and wander over the Valley, impervious to social obligations and the weather. In a way he thought, she was a kind of queen with privileges denied men and women tied to chores and caught up in the rhythm of the seasons. She was beautiful too, with her great brown eyes, healthy, freckled skin and a wild mass of chestnut hair that fell, free of all pins and ribbons, to her shoulders. Contemplating her, as they sat side by side on an old log beside the mere, he said, enviously, ‘You have a marvellous time, Hazel, doing exactly what you please! Why can’t everyone do as they please, just the way you do?’

She gave him a shrewd, sidelong glance, her strong teeth flashing in a merry smile. ‘Mabbe tiz along o’ they old books, Boy,’ she told him, ‘they’m all mazed about books. I dunno why. What can ’ee vind in ’em that baint starin’ ’ee in the faace about here?’ and she reached out and plucked a celandine growing in the bank behind them, holding it between a grubby finger and thumb and twirling it, so that the moist gleam of its petals changed it from a flower to a golden ring. ‘Idden ’er pretty now? Dorn ’ee think on that when youm in skuel, along o’ they ole books?’ It was a salutary object lesson and impressed him tremendously for somehow it revealed to him his own duality, part waif like her, part gentleman-in-the-making, and for the moment the latter role seemed very sterile. He reached out, tentatively and touched her hair, finding it unexpectedly soft and glossy. She did not move or smile but sat quite still as the tangled tresses slipped through his fingers but when the impulse to touch her was spent, and he shyly withdrew his hand, she said, ‘Tiz soft, baint it?’ and shook her head so that hair tumbled about her shoulders and then, with her head on one side, ‘Do ’ee think I’m beautiful, Boy?’ He said, sadly, ‘Yes, you are beautiful, Hazel, and the best times I ever had have been out here with you but I’m going back to school tomorrow, so I shan’t see you again until the summer holidays. Suppose … suppose I write you a letter from school?’