Long Summer Day (10 page)

Henry, Arthur’s son, a thick-set young man with a pallor at odds with a farmer who had been out in a heatwave for a month, was exceptionally welcoming and solemnly wished Paul well if he did in fact buy, reinforcing Rudd’s hints that ‘the place would require a praper ole shower o’ money’ if it was to be put on a profitable basis. Martha, Arthur’s busy little wife, had a brogue as broad or broader than Tamer Potter’s and Paul had some difficulty in catching the drift of her conversation, spiced as it was with so many strange words, like ‘thicky’ and ‘giddon’ which he interpreted as ‘that’ and ‘go along with you’, whereas all animals, male and female, were referred to as ‘’Er’. She expressed her deep thankfulness that ‘they ole Boers were now parcelled up an’ vinished with’, and that no more young men would be required to ‘get theirselves shot to tatters’, pointing out that if a man had a mind to die from gunshot wounds he might, with more profit, ‘stand the blind side of thicky hedge, when us iz rabbiting!’ Her husband, Arthur, who happened to overhear this remark, said, ‘Dornee talk so daft, mother! You get a blamed sight more pay chasin’ they Boers than us gets for the rabbits us knocks over hereabouts!’ One way and another Paul delighted in their cheerful company and was sorry when Rudd said they must press on to Four Winds to meet the Codsalls; his failure to do so that same day would surely stir up jealousy in the Valley.

‘Well youm right there,’ confirmed Martha, ‘but dornee let that Arabella Codsall give herself airs and you can depend on it she’ll try, seeing as she can’t never forget her father left her the best-dowered daughter in the Valley.’

Rudd, laughing, said he would mind her advice and off they went again, Paul making light of the growing stiffness in his knee, which pained him somewhat when he swung his leg over the grey.

‘I think they’re delightful people,’ he told Rudd, when they were trotting down to the river road and Rudd said he had planned the tour this way because it had a natural rhythm, all the way from sleazy rascality in the Potters’ Dell, to the farcical pretentiousness of Arabella Codsall, ‘the best-dowered woman in the Valley.’

‘Four Winds is the largest farm in the area,’ he told Paul as they went along, explaining that it had been stocked on Arabella’s money, nearly two thousand left by her father, a Paxtonbury draper. ‘Mind you,’ he added, ‘Martin paid dearly for his stake, for Arabella never lets him forget that she married beneath her and considers herself a cut above any other farmer’s wife in the Valley. Martin is a harmless sort of chap but of less account at Four Winds than Derwent’s wife is at High Coombe. At least Mrs Derwent can handle a knife and fork how she likes and that’s more than Martin can when there’s company. She’s a tiresome, garrulous, over-weening bitch is Arabella, for she not only nags her husband from morning to night but discriminates between the boys. Will, the elder, is an amiable blockhead, who would make a good enough farmer if he was left to himself, but he isn’t, and his mother makes a pet of Sydney, her younger son, who she is determined to make into a gentleman. How the hell she’ll do that with Codsall blood and bone I can’t imagine, for the Codsalls have been farming there for a century and Codsall’s father, old Jeremiah, died in the infirmary after falling in the Sorrel dead drunk on New Year’s night. However, we’d best call and round off the day by taking a quick look at the village itself. You can see the Home Farm any time, tomorrow if you like, if you don’t want to hang about the sale.’

Paul, elated at the prospect of riding down to the sea before the heat went out of the day, now addressed himself to the impossible task of sorting out the various families he had met so far but his memory boggled at so many Potters and Willoughbys and Derwents and Pitts, with here a husband who bullied his wife, and there a wife who nagged her husband, of the rivalries and jealousies and a bevy of pretty, chirrupy girls and their lumping great brothers, so that he gave it up as they clattered over the wooden bridge into Codsall territory and saw the sprawling cluster of buildings round the long, low farmhouse close to the western boundary.

It was obvious that word of his presence had reached the fifth farm, for the four Codsalls awaited them in the yard, dressed in their Sunday broadcloth and Rudd, spotting Martin Codsall’s silk waistcoat from afar, let out a guffaw and shouted, ‘Codsall! You never tog yourself up for me when I come for the rent!’, a jest that Arabella Codsall, towering half-a-head above her husband, and holding little Sydney by the hand, ignored but bobbed an abbreviated curtsy in Paul’s direction, exclaiming, ‘Look now, Sydney! The gentleman’s in uniform, and an officer’s uniform, I declare! Welcome to Four Winds, Mr Craddock!’ Then, in a higher key that carried as far as the river—‘Will! Don’t stand gawping! Take the gentleman’s horse! Martin! What are you about? Show the visitors into the parlour this minute!’, and the Codsalls moved into action like a sullen detail surprised by a visiting staff-officer and watched by a zealous sergeant-major.

III

A
rabella Codsall, notwithstanding her comparative affluence, was almost certainly the most unhappy woman in the Valley and her discontent stemmed from her disgust of the poor material with which she was obliged to work. Under no circumstances could she have proved a success as a farmer’s wife. She had been born over a linen-draper’s shop and brought up within the tight circle of a cathedral city’s tradesmen’s community, so that she thought of farmers as hobbledehoys in a social bracket equivalent to that of roadsweepers, lamplighters and Irish navvies. For all that she had been glad to marry Martin Codsall some twenty years before when she was then twenty-eight and towered nearly six inches above most of the eligible tradesmen’s sons, in her native Paxtonbury. She had the additional handicap of looking rather like an indignant goose, with a large, curving nose, small startled eyes, sharply receding chin and a mouth that was always half-open, as though honking with fury. She had arrived at Four Winds with a supply of linen and one hair trunk but any chance she had of making the most of her situation was shattered by her father’s death and surprise legacy of nearly two thousand pounds. She had not expected anything like this amount for Alderman Blackett had been notoriously secretive concerning his savings. Moreover, there had originally been two other children and the Alderman, having made his will early, had not altered it when these two died in a scarlet-fever epidemic in the early ’nineties, so that the words ‘or surviving progency thereof’ trebled Arabella’s patrimony. She at once set about the task of hoisting the cumbersome Codsalls into a niche above that occupied by their neighbours, and only a peg or two below that of the Lovells, but it had been a wearisome, thankless task, for neither Martin nor her elder son Will seemed able or willing to exploit their opportunities. Arabella mistook the symbols and rituals of her linen-draper’s background for reliable handholds along the haul towards gentility, instituting at Four Winds such incongruous items as four o’clock tea sipped from thin china, linen napkins, a maid with a cap, and even a tablecloth at breakfast, novelties that bewildered Martin Codsall and ultimately converted both him and his son Will into farmyard fugitives, who stayed out of doors whenever possible. Yet she persisted; year after year she prodded and planned, and words of advice and admonition gushed from her goosey little mouth like a cataract, so that in order to survive her menfolk were driven to raise all kinds of defences against her nagging. Martin took refuge in a weak man’s obstinacy and a warren of bolt holes. Will adopted the characteristics of a deaf mute, so that at last Arabella was driven to direct most of her energy upon Sydney, the younger boy. Sydney was more pliant—or so it seemed—and his pliancy soon won for him the adoration of his mother. The moment Arabella had word of Craddock’s visit, and the possibility of his succeeding as Squire, Four Winds erupted. She dressed Sydney in his best, set the hired hands to scour the yard, instituted a spring-clean inside the house (where most of the work was done by a befrilled half-witted child, called Minnie), flushed Martin and Will from their hiding-places and ordered them to don their Sunday serge. Martin, mumbling that he had work to do, took his revenge by somewhat overdoing the transformation and appeared downstairs in a starched dickey when it was too late to go back and change his shirt. Son Will, his mind still searching for a permanent escape route from this hell upon earth, said nothing at all but eyed Craddock with interest when he rode into the yard, perhaps seeing in him some glimmer of hope for the future; for Will Codsall, madly in love with Elinor Willoughby and reduced to the status of an automaton, any change at Shallowford would be for the better.

Within two minutes of being seated in the Codsall’s airless parlour, listening to Arabella’s uninterrupted flow of domestic clichés, Paul realised that Rudd had not exaggerated in his description of Arabella as an insufferable woman. Her approach to him was at once overweening and apologetic, overbearing yet grotesquely cringing, vain to the point of idiocy, yet voluble in her demands as a long-suffering tenant, so that Rudd, after listening to her gobbling for ten minutes, cut in with a terse, ‘It’s not the slightest use burdening Mr Craddock with all this, Mrs Codsall! He hasn’t even made up his mind to buy Shallowford and if you make everything sound run down, I don’t suppose he will!’

This remark had some effect upon her, inasmuch as she converted her flood of complaints into a detailed description of Sydney’s astonishing progress under a private tutor, at Whinmouth, whereupon Craddock, taking his cue from the agent, said, ‘I really came over to look at the farm, Mrs Codsall,’ and on that Martin bobbed up like a hare and led the way out into the sunshine with Will breathing down his neck and Mrs Codsall, still gobbling, bringing up the rear. Sydney did not follow his parents into the yard. He was a well-schooled little boy and his Sunday suit anchored him to the parlour.

They inspected Codsall’s excellent Friesian herd, then his pigs and finally his sheep down by the river. Here Martin disappeared, seemingly into a haystack, but Arabella and Will followed every step of the way, so that Paul had the impression he was being dogged by a goose and a soft-footed St Bernard dog. Soon both he and Rudd ceased to comment, for the most innocuous remark increased the clack of Arabella’s tongue, and finally they made their escape, the honking of Arabella following them as far as the swing gate that led to the bridge. It seemed then that they had spent a long afternoon at Four Winds but on glancing at his watch Paul saw that their visit had occupied no more than forty-five minutes.

Neither of them spoke for a while and the silence in the river meadows was like a balm but at length Rudd said, ‘One understands under what terrible provocation some murders are committed! I’ve often thought how willingly I would give evidence on Martin’s behalf, if he appeared at Paxtonbury Assizes one fine day charged with drowning that wife of his in a duckpond. Justifiable homicide! That’s what the verdict would be.’ Paul asked if he knew the cause of Arabella Codsall’s terrible volubility and he replied with a wry smile, ‘Well, I suppose I might quote our friend Donne about a woman’s mouth only being full of words when she is empty elsewhere, but it doesn’t apply in Arabella’s case. I think it has something to do with the dismal nineteenth-century cult of “self-improvement”, foisted upon us by all those crackpot writers and philosophers, like Ruskin, Bentham, and all the rest of them! Buried down here for the past two decades I’ve seen less changes than most men but what I have seen could have taught those city sociologists something! It’s a great mistake to teach everybody to read and write, Craddock, maybe the greatest mistake western civilisation has ever made, for it’ll do for us all in the end, mark my words!’

‘Now how can you possibly justify that?’ Paul demanded, recalling the squalor of the area beyond Tower Bridge, ‘surely some of a nation’s wealth ought to be ploughed back into its population. From what I’ve seen since I came home precious little of our industrial profits are being invested in the welfare or the fabric of the country. Isn’t a compulsory education the key to a nation’s progress?’

‘It’s a key all right,’ Rudd said sadly, ‘but does it unlock? When I was a boy the social scale here and in the cities was not adjustable. In the main you stayed what you were born, artisan, tradesman, professional man, gentleman. Hardly anyone in a district like this
could
read or write, or wanted to, but they were contented enough, they didn’t resent the patronage of people like the Lovells. They got all they needed by hard work and peasant cunning, by making themselves indispensable to their so-called betters, and they didn’t quarrel with the pattern either. People like Arabella Codsall wouldn’t have been tolerated for a moment, but that isn’t so any more. Arabella is laughed at by old-timers like Martha Pitt, but only behind her back! I’ve seen Arabella at village socials, queening it over all the other wives but impressing them, in spite of themselves. Nobody challenges her, not even you or I. And if her husband took an ashplant to her backside as he ought he’d be up before the magistrates. If Arabella hadn’t been taught to read and write would she have had the impudence to complain to us about her damned rights-of-way or her roof tiles?’

‘What do you think will happen in backwaters like this eventually then?’

‘I can tell you that, now that we have universal male suffrage. The whole edifice will come crumbling down in a single life’s span and the land, as we know it today, will go to pot, with nobody left to tend it. All the children you saw with their noses in books at Mary Willoughby’s school will drift away to the cities and become an army of frustrated little clerks and busybodies. They’ll all be Arabella Codsalls, wringing their hands over their neighbours’ possessions, living in little brick boxes with a few square feet of garden. You might regard the talkative Mrs Codsall as a local pioneer.’

‘Altogether too pessimistic,’ Paul argued. ‘Damn it all, we’re all subject to evolution. Things never stay the same for long, either nationally or locally.’