Long Summer Day (60 page)

Just before the boats arrived a group of them, wet, shivering and little realising what they had achieved, gathered round the body of Tamer, muttering among themselves, shamed by the corpse of a man whom all had regarded with varying degrees of contempt. Presently Ephraim Morgan, the only man among them born outside the Valley, said, ‘There’s a name you give the poor chap—“Tamer”. Was he christened so?’ and Honeyman growled, ‘How would a man get a given name like “Tamer”, you old fool? When he was a boy living hereabouts a circus come to Whinmouth and he won a gold sovereign for staying five minutes in among they mangy old lions! Seed him do it I did and his father gave him a belting for it, but he was Tamer Potter from then on. Anyone in the Valley could have told you that, I reckon.’

They drifted away, moving among the survivors, who were sitting round the fire huddled in blankets. Pride was beginning to steal upon them and with it impatience for Williams and his boats to take them off this accursed stretch of beach. They stopped at the still figure of the Squire, watched over by a grim-faced Eveleigh and the silent Rudd. The bandages about his head showed white in the grey murk and once, as they watched, he groaned and moved his hands in a futile little gesture. Perhaps Edward Derwent voiced the general opinion when he said, ‘There’s more to him than I supposed and it’s a blessing, maybe, he came among us! Pray God he’s not mortally injured,’ and he moved on to warm himself at one of the fires, remembering the time when he thought to have this man as son-in-law. It seemed a lifetime ago.

V

G
race, from her seat on the platform, first noticed the boy during the chairman’s preamble and wondered at his presence. He was too far back for her to recognise him as the stable-boy whom Paul had rescued from a scrapyard but she could assess his age at about fourteen and supposed him to be the son of someone in the audience. Then she forgot him until spotting him again, marching along the kerb in pace with the procession. This time she recognised him at once and wondered what on earth he could be doing there and whether Paul was somewhere in the crowd and using the boy as his emissary.

As she had predicted in Committee the park rally was proving a dismal failure. She belonged to the elite of the movement, who understood that the time had passed when processions, banners and appeals to the public conscience produced any effect. With two prison sentences behind her she was stripped of democratic prejudices and contemptuous of rearward troops who still believed in persuasion by leaflet and argument. She was no longer a campaigner but a revolutionary, one of two or three hundred, whose bruises taught that a revolution demanded sacrifices of a kind that few spinsters, and even fewer wives, were prepared to make. She thought of the great majority of women marching behind her as emotional adolescents, ready enough to carry a banner, or perhaps bait a harassed bobby but untested by the ordeal of pain that the hard core of the movement now expected its initiates to seek out and suffer.

She had changed a great deal in the last year, changed physically, having lost close on two stone on Holloway’s diet, but also psychologically, for she believed that she had at last won the battle against herself and had renounced all men, from Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman down to that chubby-faced boy trotting along beside the vanguard and apparently searching for her in the ranks. It had been an uphill struggle this complete and utter renunciation and throughout it, every step of the way, she had envied the spinsters of the movement their virginity and their apparent physical repugnance of men as men, reflecting that it must be a very simple matter to renounce something one had never sought or enjoyed. She found the renunciation of the claims of motherhood (a subject some of the newcomers debated with the ecstasy of young nuns) a relatively simple matter for although she sometimes felt curious about her son she did not yearn for him, as she did for a man who could solace her and to whom she could bring solace. There were sleepless nights in Holloway when she read more into the occasional howls of women in the cell block than a desperate loneliness, or deprivation. They were keening perhaps, for their men, for some stupid, patronising, pompous overlord, who was probably sharing the bed of some other hapless slut but they keened nonetheless and their outcry set Grace Craddock’s teeth on edge. Yet it was her prison spells that had won her the battle in the end, for there were men on the staff of Holloway, as well as wardresses, a few of whom singled out suffragettes for special persecution. There were chaplains, doctors and visiting magistrates, men with bland, rubbery faces and well-nourished paunches; doctors who threatened forcible feeding, chaplains who talked about duty to God, which meant, of course, duty to men, and magistrates, who would cheerfully have reintroduced the horsewhip and the ducking stool had those methods of persuasion remained on the Statute Book. These occasional reminders of the sex had done more to stiffen her resolution than the bullying of the wardresses, with their harsh, morning cries of ‘Slops outside!’ and their habits of standing by whirling a bunch of keys on a short chain whilst prisoners crammed spoonfuls of revolting grey porridge into their mouths. She could sometimes sympathise with the wardresses, some of whom were disconcerted by having to deal with educated women, but the men were like all men outside, ready with a smile, a pat or a pinch but only if wives, daughters and serving wenches were prepared to jump through hoops like a string of performing bitches. They were just as ready with their fists and their heavy-booted policemen to prevent any enlargement of a woman’s role, or any claim by women to reshape society.

When the procession had been broken up, as she knew it would be the moment she saw the decoys march in with their Union Jack, she slipped away from the scrimmage and made across the park towards the Serpentine and it was here, away from the cheering, hysterical buffoons around the rostrum that she saw that the boy had followed her but was keeping his distance, like a cautious private detective. She sat down on the first available seat, watching him stop, edge forward uncertainly and finally touch his cap and grin in a rather rueful way, as though by no means sure of a welcome. She called, ‘All right, Ikey! What do you want?’

He came up quietly and sat down beside her. He was looking, she thought, travelworn and dishevelled, as though he had slept in his clothes. His wide Eton collar was a limp rag and his dark hair tousled. She noticed too that his boots were coated with dust and that under the dust was a stiff layer of red, Devon clay. He said, with a more cheerful grin, ‘I had a job keeping track of you, Mrs Craddock. I found the place easily enough but when you started marching there were so many ladies and they were all dressed the same.’

His accent struck her as unfamiliar. The nasal Cockney twang had been extracted from it and yet, somehow, it was not yet a normal speaking voice. She said, briefly, ‘Is Mr Craddock with you?’, and he looked very surprised and said, ‘Good Lord, no, Mrs Craddock! How could he be? Haven’t you heard?’

‘Heard what?’

‘Why about the wreck, about this!’, and he took a crumpled copy of the
Daily News
from his pocket and opened it. On the front page was a banner headline, the second feature of the edition. It said:
‘Westcountry Wreck Drama; Villagers Save Seven Lives,’
and underneath, in smaller type,
‘Gallant Rescues by Squire and Farmer; Five Believed Dead!
He let her read the story through without comment. It was a garbled, inaccurate version but its outline was factual. In the stop press, under the heading,
‘Wreck Drama’,
was a three-line paragraph reporting that Squire Craddock had been critically injured getting the last of the German sailors ashore under the cliffs. She said, sharply, ‘How bad is he? Is he likely to die?’ and Ikey admitted that he did not know for he had not come to her from Shallowford but from school, having run away early the previous morning. She looked at the newspaper again and saw that it was a day old. It did not surprise her that she should have missed the story. She seldom read anything but political news.

‘Ikey, when did this happen? And why did you run away?’

‘Three nights ago,’ he said. ‘My housemaster told me I was to stay on at school but I was coming to find you anyway—in the holidays, that is! I knew the address of your headquarters, so I rode a goods train to Paxtonbury and then caught the main line train.’

There were so many other questions she wanted to ask but she noticed now that his grin was forced and that behind it his features were drawn. She said, ‘Where did you sleep last night?’

‘I found somewhere,’ he said defensively and she remembered then that he had once been a wharfside boy. ‘Have you eaten anything?’

‘I had a meat pie, early on.’

She got up and took his hand. ‘Well, let’s get something inside you and then you can talk. After that you can sleep at my lodgings whilst I tell them where you are. They’ll be frantic and I expect the police are looking for you!’

They walked along to the Achilles statue and hailed a cab, and in a Kensington teashop she watched him eat ravenously yet with punctilious attention to his table manners. When they were going up Sloane Street to her bed-sitting room she said, ‘How do you feel now, Ikey?’ and he grinned again, this time without effort and said, ‘I feel fine, Mrs Craddock! Are we going back home now?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘that is, you are, but not until you’ve had a good sleep. I’ve got to let them know you’re safe and well, Ikey. If the Squire is as ill as they say they won’t want a thing like this worrying him, will they?’

‘No,’ said Ikey, mildly, ‘I hadn’t thought of that. How will you do it?’

‘I’ll telephone the Whinmouth police,’ she said, ‘and ask them to take a message to Mr Rudd. Then he can let the school know and after that you can take your time going back.’ He was about to protest at this but a yawn caught him unawares and while he was stifling it she said, ‘We can talk later, after I’ve done what I have to do.’ They climbed the stairs to her room overlooking the Square. It was simply but pleasantly furnished for her austerity did not extend to the deliberate sacrifice of comfort. Enough sacrifices of that kind were required in gaol. She made tea while he went behind the draw curtain to undress and when she took him a cup of tea he was sitting up in bed and blushed when she looked at his neatly folded clothes. She thought to herself, ‘Somebody is working hard on Ikey and I don’t believe it’s just Paul—he’s changed a great deal but the little ragamuffin is still there, under the straitjacket they’re knitting for him!’ She sat on the end of the bed watching him and liking what she saw, and presently said, ‘Did you really run away with the idea of finding me and taking me back with you?’

‘Yes, I did,’ he said, with another yawn, ‘it was the only way I could think of to help Squire,’ and he handed her the empty tea cup and snuggled down under the sheets. Before she had passed beyond the curtain he was asleep.

She chose a police station where she was not known and gave her real name. She took Ikey’s paper along and showed it to a serious-looking sergeant, explaining who Ikey was and saying that she would like to get a message sent through to Whinmouth police station. She would have preferred to pass the information by telegram but this would have taken longer. As it was the sergeant, gravely interested, allowed her to speak to the Whinmouth sergeant and she asked him to telephone the landlord of The Raven and tell someone to ride over to Shallowford and report to Mr Rudd that Ikey Palfrey was safe and would be coming home on the first train tomorrow. Then she asked for news of Paul and was told he was on the mend, although likely to be laid up for some weeks. The head wound, she learned, had caused severe concussion but more serious injuries included two broken ribs and a fractured arm. The serious-looking police sergeant at her elbow listened to every word, and when she had concluded the call he said, trying hard to sound nonchalant, ‘The er … gentleman concerned in the rescue is your husband, ma’am?’ and she said that was so and thanked him for his assistance but left without satisfying his curiosity. It was a long time since she had scored over a member of the Metropolitan police.

It was growing dusk when she climbed the stairs to her room again to find him still asleep. She made some vegetable soup and a ham salad, and set two places at her little table. Then she woke him, showing him where he could wash, and while he was splashing in the cubicle she told him what she had done and gave him the reassuring news from Shallowford. When they were sitting at the table she said, ‘Very well, Ikey, now I’ll listen,’ but suddenly he was tongue-tied. It had seemed so clear-cut when he had set out but now the purpose of his mission was getting blurred, and his presence here, drinking her soup and eating her ham salad after sleeping in her bed was farcical, like an elaborate practical joke that had misfired. She said, trying to reassure him, ‘Whatever you say, Ikey, will remain between the two of us! After all, you must have had very strong reasons for doing such a silly thing, particularly when you already knew the Squire had been injured and the whole Valley would be in an uproar without you adding to it!’

‘I don’t properly understand it any more, ma’am,’ he admitted. ‘I thought I did but I don’t. I suppose I just wanted to … well to
help
him! He’s been jolly decent to me, and it seemed right to pay back somehow. You see, he was so different when you were there and even before you came but now, well, it isn’t like it was, not for me and not for any of us! I reckoned that if you came back it would be all right again but I daresay it’s none of my business, ma’am.’

Suddenly she felt great compassion for him. If she could have been sure that it would not have embarrassed him horribly she would have flung her arms round him and kissed him for his confusion. The honesty that prompted it seemed to her one of the most genuinely touching things she had ever witnessed and for the first time in a very long period she could have wept without shame. She said, mastering herself, ‘I can’t ever come back, Ikey, and I don’t think the Squire wants me back, not unless I changed my whole life and I can’t do that. Far too much has happened but I don’t blame you for trying. I think it was a rather wonderful thing to do and you’re quite right to look up to the Squire the way you do because he is a very good man and not simply because of what he did for you or what happened in Coombe Bay the other night. It’s just that he and I have different work to do and neither of us could do it if we went on living together in Shallowford or anywhere like Shallowford.’ She paused, adding, ‘Do you understand anything of what I’m trying to tell you, Ikey?’