Long Summer Day (61 page)

‘No,’ he said, stubbornly, ‘I don’t reckon I do, ma’am. Married people live together for always, don’t they?’

She tried another approach. ‘What do you believe in most, Ikey. I mean … what
idea
?
What’s terribly important to you, apart from Squire Craddock? Would it be your new school?’

He considered the question carefully, as though resolved to give as truthful an answer as his understanding of it permitted. ‘I suppose, England,’ he said finally, and then, doubtfully, ‘is that what you meant, Mrs Craddock?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s exactly what I mean and now see if you can follow me a little further. England is your country and it’s very important to you. So it is to me and to the Squire, only we don’t all have the same ideas of how to work for it, or make it a better place for everyone to live in.’

His eyes never left hers as he said, ‘I can’t see what that’s got to do with you and Squire, ma’am.’

‘Oh yes, you can, if you think, Ikey. You’re very sharp! If you weren’t you wouldn’t have got the idea of coming to find me in the first place and even if you had you could never have found your way here alone. What I’m trying to say is this—the Squire and I don’t live separate lives because we’ve quarrelled in the way that lots of married people quarrel. It’s just that he wants the
old
kind of England and I want a very different one. When married people think as opposite as that they cease to get any pleasure out of one another’s company.’

‘You mean you ran away just to join the suffragettes?’ he asked, incredulously.

‘Not exactly,’ she said, smiling, ‘but that was what decided me. I really left because there was no real place for me in the Valley and I believe Squire understands that now. If you give him time I don’t think he’ll continue to hold it against me!’

‘Then why is he so miserable?’ demanded Ikey and she said, quickly, ‘Because he’s very lonely! You’re away at school most of the time and Shallowford is a big empty house for a man to live in alone. Besides, I don’t believe he is miserable all the time or not when he’s out in the open. Maybe he’ll marry again!’

‘How could he do that when he’s married to you?’

‘People can get unmarried—divorced, and I’ve already gone into that, although he doesn’t know about it yet. I suppose it must sound terribly complicated to you, Ikey, so you’ll just have to take my word for it until you’re older! It wouldn’t be the slightest good my coming home simply because he was injured. You see, I believe in what I’m doing here, with all my heart and soul, just as much as Squire believes in what
he’s
doing, and besides, I wouldn’t want to live in the country again.’ She paused. ‘Have I made any kind of sense to you?’

‘Yes, I reckon you have,’ he said, slowly, ‘but it doesn’t help much, does it?’

‘I believe
you
might help straighten things out,’ she said, ‘but you would have to give me your word of honour never to tell a soul, not even the Squire, that I had a hand in it!’ and she paused, looking at him speculatively, scrutinising and ultimately sanctioning an idea that had occurred to her with disconcerting suddenness. ‘Do you remember Farmer Derwent’s daughter? Claire, the pretty one?’

‘Yes, of course,’ he said, ‘she used to ride a lot with Squire. She was always over the big house before …’ He was going to say ‘before you came’ but checked himself, feeling this might annoy her and said instead, ‘before I started taking lessons in Paxtonbury.’

‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘and since we seem to have so many secrets now, Ikey, I’ll let you into another. If the Squire hadn’t married me he would have almost certainly married Claire Derwent! It was me who stopped him marrying her but she’s still very much in love with him.’

‘How do you know that?’ he demanded, unequivocally.

‘Well, I do know,’ she said, ‘and what’s more I know where she is at the moment. She’s running a tea-shop quite near here. She owns it but she also trains as a nurse. I met her by accident some time ago and we … well, we talked! It was before the news got around that I had run away and she thought I was up here on a visit. She’s the one you ought to spirit back to Shallowford, not me.’

A small bubble of mischief popped through the crust of his bewilderment and he said, with an engaging grin, ‘You mean, he might fall in love with her again and marry her?’

‘Why did you say “again”?’ she said sharply and he said, half-apologetically, ‘Well, they were laying odds on it when I was a stable-boy!’

‘Who were?’

‘All of them, Handcock the gardener, Chivers the groom, and the rest! Mrs Handcock was sure Squire would marry Claire Derwent and I remember her and Thirza grumbling about it in the kitchen.’ He grinned again. ‘She clouted me for telling Chivers what they said!’

She noticed something new about him as he said this, that his loyalty was wholly Paul’s. Her patience and cosseting had made no impression upon him, for he did not see her as an individual, or even as Paul’s legal wife, but merely as a possible means of improving the humour of his hero, Squire Craddock. She realised something else—that she had grossly underestimated his intelligence and had been wrong to deal with him as one might deal with a child. He was not a child—in many ways he was far more mature than Paul and seemed almost to be mocking her as he said, ‘And how would I go about that, Mrs Craddock?’ His cold-bloodedness, his apparent readiness to regard her as something expendable was chastening.

‘You came to me out of the blue so you’d better do the same to her, Ikey,’ she said and got up, with the intention of checking on Claire Derwent’s address in the directory she used for canvassing. The initiative, however, had now passed to him. He seemed to be considering the matter with clinical detachment.

‘That wouldn’t do at all,’ he said finally, ‘not now you’ve told them where I am. If Miss Derwent got to know I’d been here first she wouldn’t believe a word I said! No, that wouldn’t work, or not with a lady!’

He seemed to imply that her sex was not so much tiresome as possibly devious, and while this might have enraged her had he been a grown man she found herself admiring his easy familiarity with human weaknesses, so much so that she felt she had done her part by reminding him of Claire Derwent’s existence and could safely leave the mechanics of intrigue to him. When she spoke again she was the pupil, he the instructor.

‘What new mischief are you planning now, Ikey?’

‘It would have to be done by a letter,’ he said slowly, ‘and the letter would have to be posted in Shallowford. I could write it here tho’, and you could read it. Then I could post it as soon as I get home and it would have a local postmark on it and she wouldn’t suspect.’ He had clearly made up his mind on the essentials. ‘Could you lend me a sheet of paper and pen and ink, ma’am?’

She gave him some plain writing paper, a pen and a bottle of ink, and left him to himself while she cleared the supper things. All the time she was washing up and drying he was bent over his task, his pen scratching away, his tongue peeping from between his teeth in the effort of concentration. When she had finished she lit the gas fire and sat beside it, pretending to read but actually giving him her whole attention. At last he straightened up and handed her the paper, now covered with his half-formed schoolboy scrawl and signed,
‘Ikey Palfrey’
and in brackets, below the signature,
‘the one you may remember as stable-boy!’
The naiveté of this afterthought made her smile but the letter itself was by no means naïve but a little masterpiece of special pleading. If she knew Claire Derwent as well as she thought she did the girl would find it irresistible. Ikey had written:

‘Dear Miss Derwent, I got your address from the Xmas Card you sent Squire. You may think it rood of me to write like this but I take the chance because I love Squire and can’t think of any other way to help. You will have hird all about how he and Tamer Potter rescued the German sailors, and how he got badly hurt and is still laid up, also how Mrs Craddock run off a year ago and hasn’t been seen since. Well Miss Derwent, now I come to the mane thing. I was in and out of his room before he began to come round from the whack on the head and he kept asking for you, not nowing it of course but calling out your name as if you was in the room. I asked Mrs Handcock about it and she said maybe he was remembering all the good times when I used to saddle up for him and you rode in the woods I thought you might like to know about this so you could call in and cheer him up a bit if you were down this way to see Miss Rose or Farmer Derwent soon. I know he would like that because he’s been very low lately, nothing like he was in the old days so again appollergising for writing and hoping you are well as I am since Squire sent me to school Respectfully, Ikey Palfrey.’

She read the letter through twice and handed it back to him, together with Claire Derwent’s address in Bayswater.

‘Ikey,’ she said, ‘either you’ll end up in gaol like Smut Potter, or you’ll be Prime Minister! I couldn’t improve on that in a thousand years. Now tell me about yourself, and how you’re getting on at that big school in North Devon.’

Chapter Fourteen

I

I
t was not until she was alone in the room that Claire Derwent knew with certainty she had come home for good, that never again would she willingly exchange this view and these scents, for the asphalt of Bayswater or the genteel atmosphere of Tunbridge Wells. It was mid-April now and in the afternoons the sunlight over the paddock was the colour of buttermilk, with wide belts of river sedge lying like strips of green velvet on either side of the stream, and flocks of starched clouds moving slowly down from the Bluff casting patches of creeping shadow over the stubble fields of Four Winds and the long slope dividing the two rivers.

She stood by the big window a long time, occasionally glancing at the man on the bed, unworried by his restlessness, for they had warned her that he would be feverish for a day or so and the doctor had promised to look in on the way back to the village to ‘make him a little more comfortable’. Claire had attended enough V.A.D. lectures at St Thomas’s to accept this phrase as a cliché that not even a lady doctor like O’Keefe’s down-to-earth daughter could avoid using.

He looked, she thought, supremely uncomfortable, with his left arm awkwardly angled in its shiny metal splint, his body slumped in a position half-way between sitting and lying and his head turbaned in bandages, like the heads of wounded soldiers in illustrated magazines. He needed a shave too, and perhaps tomorrow they would allow her to shave him. That was something she had learned in the first series of lectures—‘How to remove hair from the helpless’—and the memory of the sub-title made her smile, so that she had to chide herself for feeling so cheerful in a sick-room and turn again to look at the view, taking a brief mindseye ramble over the horizon where the Shallowford ford beeches formed the eastern frame for the landscape.

She had not realised how little thought she had given this place in the last few years. Once the first wave of homesickness had receded, and she had become absorbed in the tea-shop adventure, she had felt rather patronising about the Sorrel Valley and Sorrel Valley folk, thinking of them as a collection of raggle-tailed rustics without benefit of the urban delights of a fashionable spa and out of reach of the great city, where she had spent the final year of her exile. But now, only three weeks since she had been lured home by that fantastic letter (penned by what was surely the Squire’s most devoted tenant!) it was the people of the Spa and of the faceless houses along the Bayswater Road whom she thought of as underprivileged. What had any one of them to compare with this except a formal park or two, or a village already cluttered with honking, dust-trailing motors and enclosed by clusters of red-brick houses, where prosperous merchants were caricatures of men like Craddock? Yet, she had only made the journey on impulse, and with no intention of doing more than pay a hasty call on her father and Rose, and perhaps, in response to that devoted stable-boy’s plea, to congratulate the hero of the Valley on having put the Sorrel Valley on the front pages of the newspapers for the first and probably the last time in history.

She had made her call and had returned to High Coombe shocked by his appearance and afterwards, with no real object in mind, she had hung on, waiting for the crisis of his attack of pneumonia, a not unexpected result of his incredible exertions on the night of the wreck. She found the rhythm of the big house shattered. People came and went, and the placed seemed half full of foreigners, not foreigners who lived within half-a-day’s ride of the Valley but real foreigners, who spoke a foreign tongue. Poor old John Rudd went about with an undertaker’s face and Mrs Handcock wept freely into her pastry. The only lively person about the place was two-and-a-half-year-old Simon, who soon made friends with her and clamoured to be taken for rides of the pommel of her saddle.

Then, like the false dawn of a new era, Doctor Maureen O’Keefe, the Coombe Bay physician’s fully-qualified daughter, swept into the Valley, the first lady-doctor that any of them had heard of much less attended, with her mixture of sardonic humour, brisk efficiency and shrewd Irish charm that had succeeded in routing prejudice in less than a week. She had brought with her a sense of rapid change, fresh air and wide open windows, so that soon news began to spread that Squire Craddock was on the mend, and ‘thicky lady-doctor’ had miraculously repaired his damaged ribs and set one of his fractures, using the big kitchen as an operating theatre. Even John Rudd was seen to perk up a little and Mrs Handcock ceased her eternal snivelling. The boy Ikey lost his look of tragedy and optimism returned to the Valley in the wake of spring. Yet, although Doctor Maureen showed a certain interest in Claire’s claim regarding V.A.D. training at St Thomas’s it was not until after the second operation on Paul’s arm that she accepted her offer as sick-room nurse, whilst she drove her gig about the Valley, bullying blushing labourers into peeling off their shirts and answering her questions about diet and cottage hygiene.

At any other time the invasion of a woman doctor in the Valley would have provided a pub topic for a month but so many things had been happening here of late that Doctor O’Keefe’s daughter was able to play herself in in a matter of days. Rumours rushed up and down the Valley like flights of starlings. The Squire was dying. The Squire was recovering. Old Tamer Potter was being buried in a common grave with seven German sailors. Old Tamer Potter was having a granite memorial tombstone all to himself paid for by the Kaiser. And then rumours that grew out of these rumours; young Palfrey, the stable-boy Squire was trying to turn into a gentleman, had run away, been caught and sent back by the police; Claire Derwent, who was once said to be marrying Squire, had been rushed down from London to nurse him as soon as it was known that Squire’s wife, that mad Lovell girl, had been locked up yet again; Smut Potter, languishing in Paxtonbury gaol, was said to be due for early release, an official reward for his father’s heroism, and finally, perhaps the most disquieting rumour of all, old John Rudd, a widower with a son old enough to drive motors and seduce wives, was said to be madly in love with the lady doctor and courting her, while her father was taking a cure in an alcoholic ward of Paxtonbury asylum! It was too much, too quickly served and the Valley was unable to digest it, so that soon it gave up trying, the weather being warm, spring well advanced and work waiting upon idle hands in field and byre.

Slowly the great springtide of speculation receded but the Valley families were never to forget their moment of high drama. In farms and cottages newspapers containing stories of the wreck, and the funerals that followed it, were carefully folded and laid away in chests of drawers, so that future generations could appreciate the national importance of the Sorrel Valley in years to come.

II

H
e saw her sitting sideways to the bed, an open book on her lap and the afternoon sun, flooding through the tall, mullioned windows, playing games with tendrils that had escaped from her golden ‘bun’ and hung like tiny tongues of autumn bracken over her ears.

It took him a moment or two to realise who she was for when he saw her sitting there, with her knees pressed together and her head bent low over the page, he at once associated her with a picture he had seen somewhere and the effort of establishing the link tired him, so that he closed his eyes again and went about disentangling the fabric of dreams from reality. Then, when he opened his eyes again, he remembered. The woman sitting beside the bed, knees pressed together, smooth, rounded face half-turned to the window and a book on her lap, was Bathsheba, reading the message from King David, yet also—and this was puzzling—she was Claire Derwent, late of High Coombe farm. He studied her very carefully, or as carefully as his damnably awkward posture would permit, trying to remember whether she had been there during his few lucid intervals when he had exchanged a word or two with John Rudd before being pulled this way and that by a strange woman said to be a doctor and the daughter of that drunken old Irishman, O’Keefe. He could not recall seeing Claire in the room then and this disturbed him, for it suggested that he was still dreaming and that Claire Derwent, or Bathsheba, belonged to the world of fantasy. Then she looked up and saw that he was awake, and her eyes lit up as she smiled in a way that somehow reassured him. She said softly, ‘Hullo, Paul! More yourself?’ and reached out to take his pulse. This again struck him as odd, for it seemed extremely improbable that there should be two lady doctors in the Valley.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, ‘and why the devil am I still trussed up like this?’ but this time her smile was professional as she said calmly, ‘Which question would you like answered first, Paul?’ and because her voice and touch soothed him he smiled back, saying, carefully, ‘They were going to reset this damned arm. That’s the last thing I remember. Is it done now? Is this why I’m still in a straitjacket?’ and she told him that this was so, that ‘the lady doctor’ would be in to look at him again soon and that meantime she had volunteered her services as nurse. ‘Semi-professionally,’ she added, with a touch of pride, ‘for I did V.A.D. training in London but I don’t think you should talk much now. Suppose I get you a cup of tea?’

‘I don’t want a thing to eat,’ he said, ‘but I could do with some tea! I’ve got a mouth just like the bottom of old Honeyman’s sawpit! Chloroform I imagine. Get tea, Claire, but don’t go away, because I want to know what’s happened. I’m still very hazy.’

‘Of course you are,’ she said, ‘you’ve just come round from an anaesthetic but you’ll be all right in the morning. I’ll get tea now,’ and she rustled out of the room and hurried down the backstairs to the kitchen.

Without understanding why she felt elated, perhaps because his recognition of her, and his inclination to chat, gave substance to Maureen O’Keefe’s assurances of a swift recovery. Mrs Handcock read good news in her face and in the demand for a pot of strong tea. ‘Is ’er comin’ round, then? Is ’er really on the mend, do ee’ think?’ she asked and Claire told her that he was very definitely on the mend, and that she could pop in and have a word with him after the doctor had been. The bulletin transformed the housekeeper. She puffed out her cheeks with relief and waddled to and fro laying the tea-tray, saying, ‘Tiz been a turrible carry-on about yer, Miss Claire! A
turrible
carry-on! Right plaized to zee
you
back I be for mebbe you c’n maake ’un smile again! What with one thing and another us didden know ’ow ’twould end sometimes. My Horace has been in a rare ole tizzy about ’un, I can tell ’ee!’

‘I can believe it, Mrs Handcock,’ said Claire, and took the tray up the backstairs to the bedroom, cooling the first cup with plenty of milk in case he spilled it, then putting her arm round his shoulders to steady him as he lifted it to his mouth with his free hand.

He drank it gratefully and asked for another and hotter cup but while she was pouring he passed his hand over his chin and exclaimed, ‘Good God, I’ve got half-an-inch of stubble! Why the devil didn’t somebody shave me before they brought you here?’ and she laughed and said she would shave him herself if the doctor gave permission and then let him drink his second cup without help, remembering the stress laid upon such niceties in the lecture entitled, ‘Convalescence!’

‘All right,’ he said, when she had relieved him of the cup, ‘now you can tell me how you happen to be here and something of what’s going on. That woman doctor can’t because she’s a stranger here and as for John Rudd, he fusses like an old hen every time I ask him a straightforward question! All I get from him is “Don’t fret, Boy! Leave everything to me!” as if that helps a man to clear his head!’

‘Well, he’s right,’ she said, ‘for you have been rather ill, you know. Apart from being badly knocked about you had pneumonia and pneumonia plus broken ribs can be very dangerous.’

He grinned and she realised he was laughing at her readiness to dispense medical knowledge.

‘So you sold that wretched tea-shop and took up nursing?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘but I might. I was always interested in nursing and would have gone in for it years ago if Father hadn’t sat on the idea. I enrolled for a V.A.D. course at St Thomas’s when I left Penshurst and opened a shop in London.’