Long Summer Day (67 page)

‘No,’ he said, deliberately, ‘that I wouldn’t! A man doesn’t have emotional impulses at my age and neither does a woman of your experience respond to them! I was deeply in love with my wife, but I don’t expect to recapture that kind of feeling at my age. This is something quite different and I’m not going to dress it up in fancy language. I was lonely and crotchety during my time here with the Lovells, and I owe my fresh start to Paul Craddock. But when he married I was lonely again, and after his wife left him I was lonely and miserable into the bargain. Your coming here was a kind of miracle, a third start in middle age, which is something no man has a right to expect. I’d make you a good husband and I think we should suit one another. I’m interested in your work and I envy your self-confidence and high spirits, two things I’ve always lacked. However, if you think the idea is ridiculous, say so. You won’t give offence to me and we can remain good friends and leave it at that!’

Her laugh seemed to fill the stuffy little room and momentarily he was disconcerted but then he saw that there was no derision in her merriment and that she looked younger and prettier than he would have thought possible.

‘John,’ she said, taking his hands, ‘I like it so much better when you speak off the cuff and forget to rationalise! Sure I’ll marry you, the moment you give the word but I’m not so long in the tooth as to seek nothing better in marriage than twilight companionship! You make it sound so damned dull, so you do, and this is to prove there’s a chance it might have its livelier moments!’ and she gave him a resounding kiss on each cheek, after which she skipped over to the corner cupboard where he kept his drinks and poured a couple of stiff whiskies, bringing them back to him and raising her glass with the toast, ‘Here’s to us, John, and bless you for everything but your modesty!’

II

T
he bay was as smooth and as flat as a silver platter and looked just like one from the top of the drowsy village street but when they had gone down the slipway and walked the horses along the tideline, the water lost its silvery gloss and turned forget-me-not-blue inshore, with great belts of emerald-green under the sandbanks of the bar. Everything on the beach was lazy in the hot, morning sun. Gulls idled about the pools pecking listlessly at their catches and two of Tom Williams’ boats, a mile out to sea, were stationary specks and seemingly unmanned, which told Paul that Tom and his crews had dropped anchor, set their lines and gone to sleep until the sun should pass beyond the headland that marked the outfall of the Teazel.

There was not a soul about on the beach and when the horses reached the shade of the giant boulders, scattered like giant’s marbles for more than a quarter-mile below the largest landslip, they were reluctant to leave it, so Paul found a tiny bay backed by steep rocks where there was a rock pool half-way up the beach. It was a pleasant place to linger so they unsaddled and let the horses potter about in the shallows, while Paul peeled off jacket and shirt and stretched beside the pool, luxuriating in the sun and saying this was something he had longed to do throughout his weeks of confinement.

She stood on the far side of the pool smiling at him and presently she called, ‘Are you a swimmer, Paul?’ and he told her he was not but could thresh about in a calm sea and enjoy it, providing the water was lukewarm. ‘This pool has a Table Bay temperature,’ he told her, ‘so I’m having my dip right here. Do you swim?’

‘Yes,’ she said, pensively, ‘Rose and I used to come here often when we were children. My mother could swim like a fish, and taught us when we were still toddlers. I often wonder where she learned to swim as well as she did, for she wasn’t a local girl. Father was always vain about her horsemanship but he thought sea-bathing unladylike and often told her so but she never let his old-fashioned notions worry her. She was an extraordinary woman in her way, Paul. All the older people in the Valley still remember her, some of them more vividly than Rose and I.’

He recalled then the little Rudd had told him about the dashing first Mrs Derwent and for the first time realised that Claire and her sister Rose must have been old enough to recall the day their mother had fallen to her death at a jump over the Heronslea border. He would have asked her more about it but it was neither a time nor place to probe disagreeable memories so he said, ‘Well, here goes! I’ll paddle about as Doctor Maureen advised and then sunbathe,’ and she took the hint and wandered further down the beach towards the horses while he slipped out of the rest of his clothes and lowered himself gently into the pool.

It was deliciously warm and the water soothed the sore belt of flesh where the plaster had been. Presently he struck out and crossed the pool, using a clumsy sidestroke and telling himself that he had been a fool to let four summers pass without once coming down here to swim. He had been splashing about for half-an-hour before she returned carrying a parcel wrapped in oilskin.

‘What’s that?’ he called, ‘you didn’t say we’d picnic. I was going to suggest lunch at The Raven on the way back.’

‘It isn’t food, greedy,’ she told him, ‘it’s only my bathing costume. It’s a hideous thing and one might as well try and swim in a crinoline! You men don’t know how lucky you are being able to bathe in a single costume. Just look at it!’ and she held it up, a voluminous garment in heavy serge, with sleeves and wide ornamental frills ending in bloomers tied with ribbon just above the knee.

‘Good God!’ he exclaimed, laughing. ‘I’ve seen pictures of them in the newspapers but I didn’t think people actually swam in them! Won’t it drag you down?’

‘I’ll chance it. Will you be a perfect gentleman and watch the horses for a few minutes?’

‘Not me,’ he said, ‘I’ll wait and watch you go in and I wish I had old Sir George’s camera! You’ll look ravishing in that outfit!’

She made a face at him and went off behind the shoulder of the rock, emerging after an interval in the costume, with her hair crammed under a mob cap of the kind that Lovell’s housemaids had worn but Paul had long since banished. It was odd, he thought, that she could enhance a costume as sexless as that, investing it with an element of comedy. The only parts of her exposed were face, shins, feet and hands, five pink and white patches relieving yards of navy-blue worsted. He said, regretfully, ‘They don’t leave much to chance, do they? Do all the girls dress like that when they bathe from the machines at Folkestone and Margate?’

‘More or less,’ she said, ‘but the men don’t see them because usually they’re shooed to the far end of the beach. Only the really go-ahead resorts allow mixed bathing and as for what I’m doing right now, I’d be drummed out of society altogether in any self-respecting Spa if it got about that I’d actually shared a rock pool with a man and him married into the bargain! Well, as you said, here goes!’ and she poised herself on a rock three feet above the water and plunged, very expertly he thought considering her handicap but the dive did not astonish him so much as the pace at which she raced the length of the pool, turned, disappeared under water and swam back to him with a powerful over-arm stroke.

‘By George, you make my efforts look silly!’ he said admiringly as she went up and down again with a back stroke, climbed out and plopped herself breathlessly beside him.

‘I was always a lot better than Rose,’ she said. ‘Mother made up her mind to produce the best horsewoman and the best swimmer in the county. She was only interested in bests and as far as Rose is concerned she succeeded but I don’t think I could have learned to swim in this outfit. She used to let us swim in the nude. Nobody ever comes here except an occasional beachcomber from Coombe Bay but of course we had to keep it from father.’

‘She sounds a great deal of fun,’ Paul said and then, throwing his towel over his shoulders, ‘Look here, if I promise not to play Peeping Tom would you like to take it off and have a real swim? I can see you’re longing to!’

‘All right,’ she said, doubtfully, ‘if I can trust you not to cheat. Go along the beach to where the landslip begins and stand guard. No one can come from the west because low tide doesn’t clear the point and Tom Williams is way out of range.’

‘Perhaps he has a telescope,’ Paul said and she replied, ‘If he has good luck to him!’

He picked his way over the boulders to an empty stretch of sand and was still standing there, presenting a chivalrous back, when she called and he rejoined her to find her dressed with her great mass of golden hair tousled and loose about her shoulders. She said, ‘It was wonderful! I felt a little girl again and I could almost hear mother laughing at us! Lend me your towel and I’ll try and do something with my hair. It’ll have to dry before I can show my face in Coombe Bay or the truth will have run as far as the railway line by sunset!’

He said, handing her the towel, ‘Do we have to bother that much about gossip, Claire?’ and she replied, without looking at him, ‘Yes, Paul, I’m afraid we do! If we stopped caring there’s an end to the fun we’re having and the prospect of more in the future.’

‘You mean your father?’ he said, remembering Edward Derwent’s coolness towards him that had been maintained until the night of the wreck but she said, calmly, ‘No, Paul, nothing whatever to do with Father! And nothing to do with anyone else in the Valley, except you and me, but me especially! I wouldn’t care to go through that experience again and if I thought I was likely to I should go back to London tomorrow.’

It was the first real indication he had had that she had suffered on his account, having always regarded her flight from the Valley as an exhibition of pique.

‘I didn’t mean to act shabbily, Claire,’ he said. ‘It honestly didn’t occur to me that you were hurt.’

‘If I was I had no one but myself to blame,’ she said, ‘and it didn’t take me long to realise that! In any case, I imagine you’ve since been hurt a great deal more, so let’s forget about it and get lunch at The Raven.’

She got up and went down the beach to collect the horses, leading them back to him where he stood beside the pool. The sun still shone but for him at least the sparkle had gone from the day. As she was saddling up, he said, ‘You only met Grace that once—the time you came over to tea. Didn’t Rose write to you and fill in the blanks?’

‘No,’ said Claire, sharply, ‘Rose did not! She isn’t given to tittle-tattle! All I heard was that …’ She stopped and addressed herself to tightening the girths so that he said, impatiently, ‘Well? What did you hear?’

‘That you weren’t getting along,’ she said, briefly, ‘but do let’s stop discussing it, Paul.’

‘No,’ he said, suddenly exasperated with the conspiracy of silence regarding Grace and irritated that it should run all his personal relationships into cul-de-sacs where the mere mention of her was regarded as unmannerly. ‘I’m over it now and I haven’t forgotten what you said about making a fresh start. How can I do that if everyone shies away from the subject the way John Rudd and Mrs Handcock always do, the way you are doing right now? Grace isn’t ever coming back so we can all stop pretending it didn’t happen!’

‘I’m not so sure we can,’ she said, regarding him steadily across her saddle. ‘Everyone here says you’re still very much in love with her and that you’ll never give her up!’

He was not so much astonished by this, reasoning that he must have given this impression by his churlishness over the last two years but it struck him now that it was no longer true, that in the last few weeks most of the resentment and humiliation had been purged from him, although just how this had happened he did not understand. It was something to do with a shift in the centre of gravity, removing Grace as the dominant factor in his life and filling the vacuum with the Valley, and the people of the Valley and he supposed that this shift had been brought about by the wreck but it was clear that Claire’s return had a share in it. ‘I was very much in love with her,’ he admitted, ‘but it seems to me that love can only stand up to a certain amount of battering, Claire. Grace walked out on her duties as wife and mother and I’m reconciled to the fact that I never will understand why. It’s one thing to lose out to another man but quite another to be made a fool of by a political fad! I suppose the heart of the trouble is that Grace didn’t simply turn her back on me and Simon but on our whole way of life down here. That being so there comes a time when a man has to accept what can’t be altered!’

She had finished adjusting the girths now and was holding both horses by the bridles. She looked, he thought, very young with her damp hair tumbling about her shoulders but for the first time since her return she also looked resentful.

‘I don’t see why you have to involve me in it,’ she argued. ‘I won’t have people thinking I’m waiting in the wings, waiting … well, for things to happen! I’ve already made a fool of myself twice over you, Paul Craddock, and there isn’t going to be a third time, I promise you!’ and with that she dropped Snowdrop’s bridle, swung herself up and set off at a smart trot down the beach. He did not follow her at once but remained standing by the pool, smiling to himself. Perversely her flash of temper had overthrown the barrier their mutual wariness had raised and unaccountably he felt more lighthearted than at any time since that ridiculous quarrel with Grace over young Rudd and his motor. And this was not because he was flattered by her demonstration but because he was able, for the first time in years, to get his dilemma into perspective and view it objectively without self-pity or indignation. It was this glimpse of himself that opened up an entirely new vista on his marriage. He could see it now for what it was, no more than a compromise from the very beginning, an arrangement entered into with reservations on the part of a woman with her back to the wall. Surely there could be no such thing as a marriage conditioned by such strictures and anyone but an infatuated fool would have realised as much from the beginning. He had been too obsessed with her to weigh the cost against the probability of failure. He had temporised and gone on temporising, buying time with intermittent flashes of hope, like her interest in the garden and her ability to hypnotise credulous peasants, like Horace Handcock. There had never been a real marriage between them, no real fusion of interests and responsibilities, only the mutual appeasement of physical appetites, together with resignation on her part and hope deferred on his. Standing there on the rock, with the sun warming his body, and Claire a solitary figure on the tideline, he saw this so clearly and unmistakably that he felt like proclaiming it at the top of his voice, for self-knowledge brought with it a sense of release that was immensely reassuring and uplifting. ‘Damn it,’ he said aloud, as he retrieved his clothes, flung them on, and swung himself on to Snowdrop, ‘a man ought to be guided by his head when he goes looking for a wife! If I’d had a ha’porth of sense I’d have finished what she started in Shallowford Woods years ago!’ and forgetting Maureen O’Keefe’s caution he clapped his heels into Snowdrop’s flanks and pushed him into a canter, so that Claire, looking over her shoulder, stopped and swung her cob round as her came up with her.