Long Summer Day (20 page)

‘I’ve never caught a cold in my life, Mr Craddock,’ she said, but she stepped into the hall and he saw to his astonishment that she was wearing one of the new bicycling outfits, a costume that was a shapeless mass of pleats and pockets. He left her spreading her hands before the library fire and told a maid to bring tea and muffins at once. Then he put bellows to the coals and lit the table lamp, aware that she was watching him with the disconcerting concentration he now expected of her. Today, however, there was a difference for her scrutiny did not make him feel inadequate but rather the opposite, as though she was a child who had come in out of the rain expecting a scolding. She looked rather childish, he thought, in that absurd costume, and he decided that he heartily agreed with the people who were currently writing letters to
The Times
complaining that the bicycling craze had robbed young women of feminine appeal.

‘I didn’t know you were a bicyclist,’ he said, as the girl came in with the tray and left again, averting her glance from the steaming figure by the fire.

‘Oh, it makes a change,’ she said, listlessly, and then, chafing her hands and looking at the pyramid of sealed envelopes on the table, ‘Are all those letters invitations for the supper-dance?’

He was surprised by her directness and stopped in the act of pouring. ‘Why, yes,’ he said, ‘as a matter of fact they are and there’s one there for you, and for Mr and Mrs Lovell. You can take it now if you like.’

‘Who will be coming?’

‘Just about everybody,’ he said, laughing, ‘at least I hope so. Do you think your father and Mrs Lovell will accept?’

‘Yes, they will,’ she said.

‘You’ve been discussing it then?’

‘Everybody’s been discussing it.’

He was pleased without knowing why and she went on. ‘My father can’t actually attend. He’s going to London tomorrow, but Celia, my stepmother, will, you can be sure of that!’

She said this almost as a threat and it occurred to him again what an odd young woman she was, for she seemed always to carry on a discussion from out of range, to be standing just inside the boundary of good manners so that it was like talking to a precocious child, in the presence of strangers.

He said, handing her tea and muffins, ‘I trust you’ll be coming too, Miss Lovell.’

She looked round the room carefully, inspecting the evergreen decorations before saying, this time with a tired smile, ‘Yes, I will, Mr Craddock, for Celia, my stepmother, would be annoyed if I didn’t. Anyway, I’d like to come now that I’ve seen all the trouble you’ve taken. Everybody ought to back you up, for nobody did anything like this for the Valley people in the old days.’

‘Don’t give me the credit,’ he said. ‘All the organising has been the work of Miss Derwent, of High Coombe. She’s been working on it a fortnight.’

‘Rose Derwent?’

‘No, Claire Derwent, her sister. She’ll be here in a moment, I hope. The poor girl has driven into Paxtonbury for fireworks.’

She nodded, sipping her tea and nibbling her muffin. She ate and drank, he thought, like a fastidious kitten and as he watched her, trying to think of something affable to say, the mystery that had surrounded her from the occasion of their first meeting returned to him, so that suddenly a breakthrough of some kind became a matter of importance to him.

‘You keep coming back here, Miss Lovell,’ he said, ‘and always under improbable circumstances. Yet it seems to me as if being here makes you unhappy, and talking to me makes you angry—not with me exactly but—well, with yourself! Isn’t there anything I can do to make you take me for granted? Almost everyone else is beginning to.’

She listened with little change of expression but her pallor intensified a little, and her jawline moved as the small chin hardened. Her inflexibility made him uncomfortable so that he reached for her tea-cup, saying, ‘I’m sorry, it’s bad manners on my part to say that when we hardly know one another. It’s just that—well—we don’t seem to make much progress, do we? Let me give you another cup of tea.’

When he had refilled the cup and handed it to her he was surprised to see that she looked far more at ease than he felt.

‘I don’t blame you a bit, Mr Craddock. The fact is, all the Lovells are odd, and I’m odder than most! Don’t apologise for your breach of manners, I should do that, not you. You’re wrong about something, however, I don’t resent you being here. I did before I met you but I don’t now. You’ll make a better job of Shallowford than they did, anyone can see that with half an eye, if only because you’re an optimist. Coming here doesn’t make me unhappy either. I expected it to but it didn’t, or not after that second time, when you bought the screen. I suppose I’m curious and that’s understandable. I once thought I should be running the house.’

‘Were you in love with Ralph Lovell?’

‘No, never.’

‘But he was with you?’

‘I’m afraid not, and he didn’t ever pretend to be, but don’t ask me to explain the mystique of dynastic marriages, or “arrangements”. It has to do with money, I suppose, but there’s more to it than that. Ralph and I grew up with the thing more or less settled.’

‘But didn’t you even like the man?’ he persisted, but before she could reply they both heard the rattle of wheels on the gravel outside and then the heavy creak of the door and a ring of laughter followed by Ikey’s explosive ‘Cor! What a carry-on!’

Her expression changed at once and she said, pulling on her gloves, ‘I must go now, the rain’s stopped,’ and when he protested, saying it was only Claire Derwent and the stable lad returning with the fireworks, she brushed aside his courtesies and hurried into the hall.

‘I can get Chivers to drive you back, and take the bicycle in the trap,’ he argued, but she shook her head and opened the door.

‘No, I’ve got a lamp and it’s all downhill. Thank you for everything, Mr Craddock, and I’ll see you on the night. Post the invitation and I’ll warn Celia it’s coming. Good-bye, and thank you!’ and in a swirl of skirts she was gone, yanking the machine round, hoisting herself on to the pedal and thence into the saddle without even stopping to light the lamp on the handlebars.

He called good-bye when she was half-way across the forecourt, noting that she seemed equally at home on a bicycle as riding side-saddle on a horse, and then Claire, her skirt splashed with red mud, came through the kitchen arch and he saw that despite her wetting she was in high spirits and grabbing his hands said, ‘We got soaked, both of us! Just look! But we got the most wonderful fireworks you’ve ever seen and I wrapped them in an oilskin as soon as the rain came down. Ikey’s unpacking them now and putting them in the still-room. Is there any of your tea left, while Mrs Handcock makes fresh?’

He felt a little bewildered; the contrast between them was so great. ‘I’ve had a visitor,’ he said, taking her into the study and removing the fireguard so that she could enjoy the full benefit of the heat. ‘Someone else came in out of the storm, and had to be warmed inside and dried off outside.’

‘Oh, who was that?’

‘Grace Lovell, the girl who was to have married Ralph.’

‘Her? What on earth did she want?’

He was too preoccupied to notice that the laughter left her eyes, or that her voice now had an edge.

‘I told you, she came in out of the storm, she was riding a bicycle and wearing one of those awful cycling costumes. I gave her tea and muffins, it was the least I could do, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, I suppose it was,’ she admitted doubtfully, and then, ‘Didn’t you bid for something for her at the sale?’

‘A nursery screen she seemed to want. She was mooning over it the night I first arrived. Do you know her? She seems to know you and Rose.’

‘I know her father is a bad hat, and she gets on better with her stepmother than with her father. What did you talk about besides me?’

He did not miss the reproof this time but met it good-humouredly.

‘She implied that you were the Belle of Sorrel Valley, and I said I had heard as much but thought it rather undignified for the Squire to compete with all the other chawbacons in the Valley! I said you were employed here as an apprentice parlourmaid, but had agreed to help out as an interior decorator for the party. She said—’ but by now she was mollified and flaring her skirts to the blaze, said, laughing, ‘I don’t believe either of you mentioned me! She was probably too busy telling you you’d never make a go of this place. That was what everyone of them except me believed when you came.’ Then, changing the subject very pointedly, ‘That cob Rose sold you is a corker! He didn’t drop below a trot all the way from Teazel Bridge, and I didn’t have to flick the whip once!’

Over her shoulder he saw her reflection in the fireplace mirror. In the bright lamplight her cheeks glowed and her eyes shone with health. He put his hands on her shoulders and pulled so that her weight rested on him lightly and he could kiss the damp coil of hair above her ear.

‘You look prettier than ever when you’re soaked through,’ he said. ‘I was an ass to send Ikey. If I’d have driven we could have stopped somewhere, until the rain eased off,’ and he would have turned her and kissed her lips if, at that moment, they had not heard the rattle of crockery outside as Mrs Handcock bustled in, barging the door open with her enormous hips and exclaiming, ‘Mazed you be! Sixteen mile there, sixteen mile back, an’ all ter vetch a bundle o’ Roman candles! You too, Mr Craddock, surely youm old enough to know better! That Palfrey varmint coming into my kitchen drippin’ wet, an’ Miss Claire here like to catch her death!’ She swept the corner of the table clear and set down the tray with a crash. ‘There, get a hot drink inside ’ee and then strip they wet things off an’ give ’em to me to dry!’ And so the moment passed, and Claire began to chatter gaily about the fireworks, the storm and the wonderful paces of the new cob but he was not really listening, finding that his mind, unaccountably, was elsewhere, following a small figure in a bicycling costume down the long hill into Coombe Bay, up the harbour slope to an ugly Victorian villa and into a room where the screen might remind her of him. And Claire, although she continued to chatter of fireworks, was half aware of the fact.

II

A
t ten minutes to midnight, on a clear September night, the Shallowford House Coronation Supper-Dance and Soirée had run about half its course. Dancing had been promised until dawn to those who intended to stay, but already, four hours after the opening Paul Jones, the party had lost the brittle civilities that had bedevilled its first hour or so.

The sluggish start had been no fault of the musicians. Mary Willoughby at the piano, and the two biblical shepherds, Matt and Luke, as fiddlers, had played with gusto from the moment Paul made a formal round of the ballroom, hall and terrace and coaxed self-conscious couples on to the floor. Now, after a noisy set of Lancers, the Boston Two-Step, two waltzes and a break for ices, the atmosphere had thawed a great deal and Claire had made up her mind that the event was building into a spectacular success. A second Paul Jones was a riot, even Mrs Codsall joining the ring to be caught by a grinning and half-tipsy Tamer Potter, who swung her round the floor at such a speed that she had no chance to escape nor breath to protest.

From the forecourt the din rose like a waterspout, soaring into the night sky and making every roosting bird in the Home Farm coverts fidget. Standing half-way down the drive the tinkle of piano and the scrape of violins were puny, intermittent sounds all but submerged in the roar of voices and crash of feet, in sudden shrieks of laughter and the long rolling clatter of crockery, as Mrs Handcock and her sweating team plunged mugs and ice-cream plates into vats of near-boiling water.

Almost everybody in the Valley was now inside the house or, in extreme cases (like that of seventeen-year-old Violet Potter), in the shrubberies surrounding the house, but Claire had badly underestimated the final tally of guests, for labourers’ wives from the Gilroy Estate had been recruited as Sorrel Valley babyminders. The only family so far unrepresented was the Bruce Lovells, of Coombe Bay, who had sent a message to say they would be late. Paul was too busy and far too elated to miss them, and Claire privately hoped they would not appear after all, for she had not quite forgotten Paul’s vacant look after Grace Lovell had cycled home the night she had returned with the fireworks. It was not a serious worry, however. She too had her hands full, supervising the staff, the refreshments and even the run on the cloakrooms, and re-introducing Paul to late arrivals, whispering their names to him when they were still out of earshot.

The Potters had arrived
en masse
in a farm cart, every single one of them, including the pregnant Joannie (who spared the company’s blushes by staying to help in the kitchen) and Hazel, the youngest Potter girl, who found herself a seat high up on a pedestal shorn of its bust and moved well back against the billiard racks. From here she could look down on the throng with her large, wonder-struck eyes, unnoticed by anyone except Ikey Palfrey, who, in his uncomfortably stiff collar prescribed by Chivers, the groom, had spotted her perch and staring up at her, shouted, ‘You look like a statcher up there, kid!’ a remark, which, although made with friendly intent, caused Hazel to shoot out her tongue and put her thumb to her nose, a gesture that made Ikey slightly homesick for Bermondsey.

All the Derwents, together with their staff, were present, as were the four Willoughbys and the four Codsalls, with their hired hands. Three waggonettes had driven over from Coombe Bay, bringing many of the tradesmen and all the artisans, including Eph Morgan, who was already engaged in disputation with Derwent’s foreman, Gregory, concerning the advantages of free trade over tariff reform. They could hardly hear one another but were enjoying themselves, for Gregory was the honorary treasurer of the Whinmouth Conservative and Unionist Association and considered it his duty to engage the Radical, even at a coronation ball.

Parson Bull looked in for an hour or so but left early, despite generous brandies. The vicar was a little confused by an event that, so far as he could recall, had no precedent in Valley history. He supposed there was nothing basically wrong with farmers and their hired hands making brief holiday once in a while, and there was, of course, a loyal excuse to be found in the coronation but at the back of his mind he found new Squire’s common touch disconcerting and he was not easily disconcerted. Anyone else, he thought, as he drove off, could have been scolded in public for encouraging so much dangerous familiarity inside the walls of the manor but it was difficult to challenge a man who held the gift of part of his own living in his hand, and that in coronation year, so all he said to Paul on leaving was, ‘Well, don’t let ’em drink too much, Craddock! If you do you’ll regret it for there’s no holding one of ’em once they’re well liquored!’ The admonition annoyed Claire who said, tartly, ‘That’s rich, coming from him, a sponge in a dog-collar!’, and she flounced off to confer with Mrs Handcock on the supper relays.