Long Summer Day (53 page)

Smut said, in an odd, jerky voice, ‘It was rare gude of ’ee to coom, Squire! Mother zed you would, tho’ I didn’t taake it as zo ’till I zeed ’ee zittin’ there!’

‘Well, at least you’re back in the county and only a few miles from the Valley,’ Paul said, feeling uncertain of his own voice. ‘What kind of work do they give you, Smut?’

Potter winked and his mouth pretended to grin. ‘Well, tiz better’n downalong in Bodmin, Squire,’ he said, ‘where us is sewing they old bags most o’ the time. I’m a trusty now, you zee, an’ I work in the gardin, zo tiz altogether diff’rent. A man can turn his faace to the sky every so often an’ smell the sea when wind’s in the west! Oh, tiz well enough now, Squire, and they zay if I minds me P’s and Q’s I’ll be gettin’ more’n twelmonth off an’ be backalong in just over the year. How be things in the Vale, Squire? Mother, ’er can’t write, an’ tiz six months zince I zeed her, that time she come over the moor to Bodmin.’

‘Things are going along very well,’ Paul told him, ‘especially in the Dell. Tamer and the two older girls have been raising sugar-beet and I’m going to have Eph Morgan mend the roof before you come home!’

‘Arr,’ said Smut, absently, ‘you’m gude to us varmints, Squire! Mebbe, if someone like you had been backalong when I was a tacker I wouldn’t have taaken the wrong turn I did! Do’ee ever zee that Gilroy keeper I drubbed?’

‘Yes, I’ve seen him,’ Paul said, ‘and he’s not even showing a scar. Gilroy’s made him head keeper so you’d best stay our side of the Teazel when you do come out!’

‘I’ll do that right enough,’ Smut said earnestly, ‘for I woulden chance more time in a plaace like this, Squire! Tiz never worth it, an’ they’ll all tell ’ee the zame but mind you, most o’ the old rascals will be back again zoon enough for they’ve no other means of earnin’ a livin’!’

It was curious, Paul thought, how carefully Smut disassociated himself from the ordinary convict and he wondered if he thought of himself as a felon, or rather as an honest poacher who had fallen on hard times.

‘You really do intend to finish with poaching, Smut?’ he asked and Smut made a throat-cutting gesture and swore that he did indeed, and that if the Squire had meant what he said about having him back in the Valley, he would prove that the Potters could be as industrious and law-abiding as anyone in the county. ‘Us’ll maake the Dell show a profit, even if us has to harness ole Tamer to the plough!’ he added.

‘Very well,’ Paul said, smiling, ‘I’ll remember that! As soon as you come home we’ll go to work on the Dell. I’ll talk to your brother Sam and maybe we can clear part of the thicket north of the Bluff and add twenty acres to the holding. By the way, I suppose you know Sam now has a girl and a boy, and that your sister Pansy has one girl and a baby boy?’

‘No, I never heard tell o’ that,’ Smut said, with awe in his voice. ‘Lor bless us, to think on that! Four little tackers, in just over the two years! But then, we Potters is a rare tribe for breedin’. I dessay I’ve got a few around somewhere, tho’ none o’ the maids ever took me to court for ’em!’

It was this remark, uttered as the warder rose and brought the session to an end, that made the visit worthwhile, for in the final moment it seemed to Paul that the original Smut triumphed over the ingratiating penitent. He was hustled away and Paul went down the steps and through the wicket gate to the embankment, where Ikey trotted up and asked, in his ironed-on Paxtonbury accent, if Smut had had chains on his feet. ‘Good God, of course not!’ Paul replied, but as he said this he thought, ‘But they still treat convicts like half-tamed beasts and dress them as buffoons. It’s a pity they can’t be spared a few shreds of human dignity,’ and was silent half the way home.

When the trap began to descend to the river, however, he cheered up, reflecting that he had left Smut something to think about and to hope for and then he glanced curiously at the boy sitting on the box beside him, thinking, ‘Well, Grace and the
avant-garde
can sneer as much as they like but there is some point in my being here! Would the Lovells have given Smut Potter a second thought? And would this boy Ikey be getting a sporting chance? She might have originated the idea but she didn’t stay and see it through!’ and he went on to ponder the Eveleighs at Four Winds and Will and Elinor’s success at Periwinkle and then smiled at himself for seeking personal reassurance in a balance-sheet of good works. ‘Are you scared of going to a real school?’ he asked, suddenly, and to his surprise and slight embarrassment the boy gathered up the reins and brought the colt to a sudden halt. He turned and met Paul’s enquiring gaze steadily and Paul realised, for the first time, how greatly he had matured in the last two or three years. His skin, once fish-belly pale, was brown and healthy, his eyes were clear and his hair neatly cut, so that there was about him an air of confidence altogether different from the perkiness of the scrapyard urchin.

‘Yes, Mr Craddock, sir,’ he said, ‘I’m scared all right but you don’t have to worry, I won’t let you down, sir! The tutor told me all the new boys got ragged and that I’m not to mind because it’s an old English custom!’

He had lost, Paul noted, all traces of his thin Cockney accent and it came as rather a shock to realise that he had almost forgotten the poor little devil during his own troubles. The boy, he thought, could hold his own anywhere, for the toughness and resilience of the street Arab was still there under the looks and manners of a conventional lad on the point of exchanging prep school for public school. He said, as though to excuse his recent neglect, ‘Well, I’ve had troubles of my own lately as you’ve probably heard and that’s the reason why I appeared to lose interest in what you were doing over at the crammer’s. You remember it was Mrs Craddock’s idea that you went in the first place?’

‘Yes,’ the boy said, ‘I’m not likely to forget that, sir,’ and then more hesitantly, ‘Will she ever be coming back, sir?’

‘I don’t know, Ikey, probably not,’ he said gruffly, and Ikey taking the hint, shook out the reins and they moved down from the moor to the swollen Sorrel in a rather embarrassed silence.

Wild daffodils and yellow iris showed on the margins of the half-flooded meadows and the blackbirds were noisy in the Hermitage thickets. The sun, which seemed to have been away visiting another solar system since autumn, had returned to play a spring game with the darting current, and a bay hunter, out to grass on the Four Winds side of the stream, whinnied a casual greeting to the cob, before throwing up her heels and galloping madly across the levels. Paul said, ‘Tell me, Ikey, are you ever homesick for London now?’ and the boy replied, ‘No, sir, never! I don’t think I should ever want to go there again. This is my home now, sir.’

‘Me too,’ Paul said and the kinship that had been born during their first ride down this road during the coronation summer, suddenly reasserted itself as he thought, ‘I must write to Uncle Franz and find out more about the boy. If there’s a likelihood of Grace coming back, I’m damned if I won’t think about adopting him officially for he is the only soul about here who shares my feeling for the Valley and that makes him a kind of heir!’ They said no more until they were passing under the long park wall for each was absorbed in the familiarity of the scene, the swift river and stretch of meadows to the right, the sweep of Priory Wood to the left. Then Paul said, ‘There’s something else, Ikey, I don’t know whether your tutor mentioned it but at a school like High Wood they will expect you to have some kind of domestic background. Did he ever talk to you about that?’

‘He did mention it, sir, but said it was a matter for you and Mrs Craddock.’

Paul considered. He was confident that Ikey would pass muster in all outward respects but he recalled his own limitations as an officer in the Yeomanry, reflecting that there was no accounting for the graduations of the English caste system and the snobberies it spawned but there it was and one either accepted it or withdrew from the game altogether.

‘Do you ever write to your own parents, Ikey? Do you keep in touch with them?’

‘No, sir, I don’t,’ said the boy, unsentimentally.

‘All right,’ said Paul, ‘then we shall have to do a bit of bluffing. Sooner or later the subject of your family is bound to crop up. Did you have any story in mind?’

The boy grinned, suddenly an urchin again, and said, ‘Well, yes, sir! I was going to say my guv’nor was dead, and my mother was still living abroad. Could I say that you were … well … a kind of cousin, looking after me over here?’

‘You can do better than that,’ Paul said, laughing, ‘you can tell them I’m your stepbrother and official British guardian. The word “guardian” always seems to impress the snobs somehow. Would you like to do that?’

‘I would, and thank you, sir.’

‘Well, then that’s settled. When you leave on Tuesday do you want me to take you to school, and see you settled in?’

‘If it’s all the same to you, no, sir,’ Ikey said unexpectedly. ‘I’d sooner take the plunge on my own, sir.’

Paul glanced at him, noting the set of the jaw and his mind returned to the child’s gallantry and initiative on the night Codsall had hanged himself. ‘By God,’ he thought, ‘that snob school is lucky to get him, even though he might be the product of a drunken docker and a Hungarian emigrant!’

‘Very well,’ he said, ‘that’s something for you to decide but I’ll drive you as far as Paxtonbury in the brougham. We must have the brougham for an occasion like that!’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Ikey said, ‘I should like that, in case any of the High Wood chaps are going by the same train.’

‘Any of the High Wood chaps,’ thought Paul, grinning. ‘Damn it, he’s half-way home already!’ and they turned in at the gates and set the cob at the steep drive.

IV

A
s it turned out it was Chivers, the groom, who drove Ikey to Paxtonbury in the brougham that warm spring day for Paul was already on his way to London. Celia’s telegram arrived the night before, delivered by a perspiring telegraph boy who had cycled all the way from Whinmouth, but it told Paul very little. ‘Essential you are in London early morning of the third,’ it said. ‘Will meet 10.40 a.m. from Paxtonbury, Love Celia.’ That was all and Paul had to make what he could of it, reshuffling his programme, saying good-bye to Ikey and catching the main-line train at Sorrel Halt. Celia had a carriage waiting for him at Waterloo and he was in her town house in Devonshire Square by late afternoon finding that he was expected to stay the night, for Celia had arranged his meeting with Grace at seven-fifteen the following morning.

‘Where and why so early?’ he demanded but the Frenchman Daladier was present and he did not press the enquiry after Celia’s warning glance. They ate dinner together, making polite conversation and afterwards the Frenchman, who seemed to live on the premises, wandered off into the billiard-room. As soon as they were alone she said, urgently, ‘Pierre knows nothing about the real reason for you coming and I don’t want him involved, you understand? He’s practising here now, and any kind of scandal would injure him. I won’t have that happen, Paul!’

It was not, he reflected, the Celia who had received him at Coombe Bay in January, but a taut, nervous woman, manifestly irritated by the situation. He said, seeking to reassure her, ‘There’s no reason why either of you should be involved. Just tell me what kind of arrangement you’ve made with Grace.’

‘I haven’t made any arrangement with her,’ she said, sharply. ‘I haven’t set eyes on the little fool since I paid her fine at the police court, a day or so before I saw you in Devon! The fact is … she’s in Holloway Prison at this moment!’

‘Holloway Prison? For suffragist offences? Good God, Celia, what the devil has she been up to now?’

Celia looked as if she was about to cry. ‘I’ve had the greatest trouble keeping it from him,’ she wailed, ‘he’s a very perceptive man and I daresay he’s guessed the truth but he’s very tactful and hasn’t brought it into the open.’ She looked at Paul defiantly and he noticed that she was vulnerable and beginning to look her age. There were wrinkles under her eyes that he had never noticed before and the skin of her neck was slack. Suddenly he felt sorry for her, sorry but at the same time grateful, for it was obvious that a decision to get him to London had involved her in risks she did not care to take and that her fear of involving her lover by public scandal was real. He said, ‘Look here, Mrs Lovell, don’t think I’m unappreciative of what you’ve done. Just give me the facts and then let me go to a hotel. I’ll see you aren’t involved in any way. After all, this is my responsibility, not yours. How long has Grace been in gaol? And what did she go there for this time?’

She said, only slightly reassured, ‘There is a very militant section of this suffragist movement led by that dreadful woman Pankhurst and her daughters. It seems that Grace is one of the most irresponsible of them, she and a woman from the North, called Kenny. You must have read about them in the papers?’

Paul said, shortly, ‘The last I read about them they were organising a petition to the Opposition leaders, to Campbell-Bannerman, I believe, but Grenfell tells me they’ll get even less change from him than from Balfour!’

‘That’s so,’ she said, ‘but they have begun to picket the big Liberal meetings in the provinces. Up in Manchester, a month or so ago, Grace and some others climbed into a loft over the platform of a hall when Churchill was speaking. They had banners that they let down when the meeting started and were thrown out neck and crop, as you would expect them to be.’

‘Well?’

‘Most of them went meekly enough but Grace didn’t. She hit a policeman with an umbrella and was later charged with resisting arrest. She was put on probation but would you believe it she did the same thing two days later down here and this time they sentenced her to a month without the option! She comes out early tomorrow. That’s why I sent for you.’

‘Why didn’t you send for me straightaway?’

‘What good would that have done? She had legal representation in court and he couldn’t stop her going to prison!’

‘I can’t understand how I didn’t hear about it,’ he said, ‘it must have been in all the papers.’