Long Summer Day (63 page)

‘No dornee,’ she said, laughing, ‘I coulden read un,’ but then a thought struck her and she added, ‘I could get Pansy to spell un out mebbe. ’Er’s the best scollard of us.’

‘No,’ he said, hastily, ‘I wouldn’t like that!’ and suddenly feeling deflated he got up and began skimming pebbles into the mere, watching them break the surface all the way to the islet.

She sat on the log watching him, plagued by emotions that she did not understand and moved by impulses that were the first she had been unable to obey as soon as they were felt. The recollected touch of his hand as it passed over her hair made her shiver and this puzzled her greatly, for the sun was very warm on her bare neck and legs. She got up, puzzled and angry with herself, and went quietly up the slope through the close-set timber. When he tired of throwing stones and returned to the log she had disappeared behind the trees.

IV

T
he fingers of spring were probing everywhere in the Valley now and their licence was not restricted to the young and untrammelled. High on the long slope of Blackberry Moor, Elinor Codsall was aware of them that same morning, when the persistent twitter of birds awoke both her and Will at first light, and in yielding to him she casually conceived a third child, despite their plan to limit the family until they had enough capital to buy some portable hovers Will had coveted at the experimental poultry farm, north of Paxtonbury. He had thought at first that he could make hovers as good as these but the days were far too short and they could not afford hired help like the other farms in the Valley. As soon as he had done with her Will began to snore again, a gross indulgence on his part in view of the fact that it was time to rise and start work, so she prodded him, calling ‘Will! Will! Dornee drop off again! I’ll brew tea an’ us’ll make an early start today!’ He grunted and sat up, knuckling his eyes and then, in the soft light of dawn, grinned down at her fondly and possessively. ‘By God Elinor,’ he declared, ‘youm prettier’n ever, midear! I reckon I could taake ’ee again if us had time,’ and although she said, ‘Giddon with your old nonsense!’ and slipped hurriedly out of bed in case he was tempted to waste more time, she was pleased with the compliment, reflecting that most men of Will’s type, having been so recently indulged, would have grumbled at being dragged from sleep.

The sun almost shouted at Sam Potter, striding over the dyke-banks at the eastern end of the mere on his way to fell timber for a pheasant compound. He walked as though all his joints were fitted with small, steel springs, covered just over a yard at each stride, and as he loped along he sucked in great mouthfuls of sharp April air, sparing a thought for poor old Smut, now ending his third year behind bars and due, so they heard, for release on licence in the new year. He did not think of his father, Tamer, lying in Coombe Bay churchyard surrounded by such unlikely names as Ledermann, Schmitt and Kohlhoff, for it was not a morning to contemplate death and shipwreck. Instead he watched, with an admiring grin, a great dog-fox leap clear of the bracken and bound across the soft ground towards the badger sets. ‘Show a leg, you ole thief!’ he shouted, ‘us’ll be arter ’ee when the nights draw in!’ Then, having selected a sapling, he swung his axe in a wide, slashing arc and the sound of the stroke rang through the woods, flushing out three moorhens and sending them skimming across the lake for their sanctuary on the islet.

The Codsalls and Potters were habitual early risers but Arthur Pitts and his son Henry over at the Hermitage worked to a more leisurely schedule and ate enormous breakfasts before issuing out of doors. They were munching away now with their womenfolk moving to and fro from the stove, Martha and her great tawny daughter-in-law from over the Teazel, absorbed into the cheerful atmosphere of Hermitage kitchen and privately thanking her lucky stars that she had chosen the genial Henry for husband, instead of the buck-toothed kennelman at Heronslea. The Hermitage, she often reflected, was a home in the very best sense of the word and she now thought of herself as settled for life, although it sometimes puzzled her that Henry, with so much to offer in the way of good temper and security, had remained a bachelor for so long. She was not entirely convinced by Martha Pitts’ explanation that ‘Henry was waitin’ on Mrs Right an’ you be ’er m’dear!’

Four Winds usually erupted about the time Will Codsall, at Periwinkle, was making his first rounds of the hen-roosts, and filling the hoppers while Elinor followed in his wake collecting the eggs. It was strange that a cautious and sober man like Norman Eveleigh and his practical wife, Marian, should have produced between them such a noisy, rollicking brood, or that they should suffer them to make so much noise as they trooped down the uncarpeted stairs to breakfast, spilling over one another in their eagerness to get to the table and squealing with laughter when Sydney Codsall (now regarded as one of the family) used one of his long, unintelligible words when making a simple request, like ‘Pass the marmalade!’ Their father and mother had impressed upon them that they must show great kindness to Sydney, who had lost both father and mother and thus qualified as an orphan but they found it difficult to avoid teasing him, for he was so unlike any other boy in the Valley, so solemn, studious and unblinking behind his steel-rimmed spectacles that he sometimes seemed more like a little old man than a schoolboy.

Sydney ate sparingly, paying more attention to a book propped against the cruet than to the home-made bread and jam piled on the wooden platters. Marian had given him permission to read at meals for he was already recognised as an exceptionally clever boy, who would go far, although in what direction nobody had yet decided. The headmaster of the Whinmouth Secondary School was said to take a keen interest in him and had told Eveleigh that he was a boy to be encouraged. He was therefore absolved from any work on the farm and spent hours in a room upstairs that was not much bigger than a closet. Up here, although he worked methodically, he did not spend every moment of his isolation preparing lessons. Sometimes he gazed out of the little window at the sons and daughters of the new tenant of Four Winds as they moved to and fro about their regulated tasks in the yard and deep in his heart he despised them all as a gaggle of geese, boys and girls who would never amount to anything but hewers of wood and drawers of water. He had inherited his mother’s hunger for gentility but even at fourteen he could see quite clearly where his mother had made her first and fatal mistake. She should never have married a clodhopper like his father, for the road to gentility lay not through labour but through attentive study and the accurate memorisation of cohorts of declensions and tables. The headmaster had told him that knowledge was power and power, some time and in some undefined sphere, he was determined to possess. Then all those giggling, skylarking Eveleighs would work not for their father, a jumped-up farm foreman, but for him, Sydney Codsall, the real master of Four Winds and all the acres beyond. After breakfast he set out on his bicycle to pedal the nine miles to school. The sun was hot by then and the birds sang in chorus all the way to the bridge over the Teazel but spring had no message for Sydney. He did not even notice it, being fully occupied repeating to himself a list of irregular French verbs.

ŸŸŸ

The warm spring weather and the tumult it provoked in the thickets and hedgerows of the Valley did have a very dramatic effect upon someone old enough and experienced enough to know better. This was John Rudd, rising fifty-three, and a widower for more than twenty years but age and experience had not prevented him from falling hopelessly in love with Maureen O’Keefe, M.D., and that at first sight, when she drove her gig over to the lodge a day or two after the shipwreck and told him, in her pleasant Irish accent, that she was ‘after taking Father’s place for a spell’.

From the moment she consented to take tea with him in his little parlour, and they had discovered in the city of Cork a topic of mutual nostalgia, he found her the most engaging young woman he had ever met and he continued to think of her as young after she had admitted to thirty-four. It was her humour and frankness that engaged him during that first meeting, but later, after she had paid several visits to Paul, she rapidly enlarged her hold upon him so that he began to think of her small, puckish features as beautiful, and her sturdy, thick-set figure as statuesque. Yet he was not such an old fool as to imagine that she was in the least attracted to him and would have been more than satisfied with her friendship, for she was the only ‘liberated’ woman in his experience who did not make a tiresome fetish of emancipation. He was as astonished at the arrival of a qualified doctor in petticoats as everyone else in the Valley for it was a phenomenon that he had neither encountered nor imagined but after watching her at work on Paul and other equally embarrassed males in the Valley, he had conceived an enormous admiration for her skill and her easy approach to cottagers that overcame their prejudices and won their confidence in the course of a single visit. She was obliged to rely on him a good deal that first month, for she was a complete stranger to the Valley and her close relation with O’Keefe did not help, for the old man had been losing his grip lately and even patients who had suffered him half a lifetime were beginning to distrust his diagnoses and his rough and ready surgery. She was very frank, however, about her father’s shortcomings, admitting that the old man was no longer fit to attend a sick cat and this, she said, was the real reason she was here, to save him making a mistake that would ‘blot his copy-book and mine, on account of our names being one below the other in the Medical Register’!

She soon packed him off to take his cure and had the practice to herself. ‘Playing herself in,’ she called it, while she continued to search for a firm of practitioners who had not taken the pledge to stop the infiltration of women into the profession. One of the things that John Rudd most admired about her was her cheerful acceptance of male prejudice in the medical field, for in spite of it she preferred male doctors. ‘Women in authority,’ she told him once, ‘are usually hell-cats, like the matrons and nursing sisters I trained under before going on to take a degree in Dublin!’ She was like her father in one respect. She drove everywhere and did everything at high speed and with enormous gusto but she enjoyed her work enormously and was very proud of having wrested her M.D. from the English. Although born in Ireland she had spent part of her childhood and some of her training period in Scotland, so that her accent was of a Celtic hybrid, half County Kerry, half Lowland Scot. Her outlook and sense of humour, however, was all Irish and her long struggle to qualify had done nothing to moderate a natural ebullience. During her five years in Dublin she had lived, she told Rudd, on about fifteenpence a day, ‘doled out in threepenny bits’ by the Scots uncle who took her in when Himself (Doctor O’Keefe) had made his one-way crossing to England thirty years before. John Rudd would have liked to have satisfied his curiosity as to why O’Keefe had come here in the first place but reserved the question until he could be sure it would not give offence.

Like so many Irish patriots Maureen O’Keefe could laugh at her enthusiasm for Home Rule and even sympathise with the English for having to contend with such an indigestible morsel as Ireland. Perhaps John Rudd’s intimate knowledge of Ireland, and the fact that he had enjoyed many a day’s hunting in the West, did something to draw them closer together at a time when the agent was depressed regarding the Squire’s slow crawl back to health. She was a good talker but an even better listener and within a few days he had unburdened himself regarding his own situation and his relationship with Paul. This was touched off by a direct question she addressed to him after he had watched her encase Paul’s ribs in plaster. Before he could congratulate her on what seemed to him a very dexterous display she said, as they drove off down the drive, ‘You love the man, do you not, John? Now would you be after wantin’ to tell me why?’ and he had replied, impressed by her discernment, ‘Yes, I love him and I’d be glad to tell you why if you have the patience to listen!’

‘I have that,’ she said, whipping up the cob, ‘for it’s no more than a trotting road here,’ and as they bowled along to Four Winds on their way to dress the septic hand of a labourer, he told her of his years under the Lovells and of Paul Craddock’s sudden appearance in the Valley and how, over the last few years, they had made the estate their life. He told her too of the manner in which he had left the Army and settled in this remote corner, admitting that until Craddock had come his entire existence had seemed profitless. Then, in response to her frank questions, he described the recurring crises they had shared, culminating in Grace Craddock’s flight and the night, just before her arrival, when they had seen the spirit of the Valley at work in the cove and Paul had twice risked his life to save seven lives. It was this incident that he saw as the first fruits of their partnership and it seemed to him a bitter thing that Paul was too ill to evaluate it. ‘If I could only get that across to him I swear he’d begin to mend,’ he declared but at that she laughed, saying she knew a better tonic for the boy and that luckily it was at hand in unlimited supply. She said merrily that she had only drawn him out on the subject in order to confirm her diagnosis. ‘You’ll not be put out by what I say, John? You’ll not think me presumptuous for interfering?’

‘You’re the doctor,’ he said, ‘and any judgement you made would be based on good sense and a kind heart.’

She stopped the trap, sucked in her cheeks in a way she had and let her body slump back on her hands. ‘Paul Craddock is as strong as an ox!’ she said, ‘and there’s no reason in the world why he shouldn’t be up and about again in a fortnight, providing he looks ahead instead of brooding on what lies behind! Sure, he did a man’s job of work there in the cove, but his physical hurts aren’t important! There’s more to it than that, John, the boy’s pride is in ruins!’

‘How could you know that?’

‘I guessed it the moment I heard tell of the little baggage he married. It’s a special balm the boy needs and you can’t buy it by the pot at the pharmacy!’