Long Summer Day (81 page)

‘You mean you want a week or two to think it over?’ Paul said, laughing, and Ikey said maybe only a day or two, so by common consent they dropped the subject and rode on into the city talking of horses.

V

E
very day, wearing his old training sweater and a pair of soiled slacks, Ikey climbed the orchard to the high-banked lane, circled the mere and threaded the rhododendron maze that he now knew as expertly as Hazel. She was always waiting for him, high up on her rock, and would lift her hand when she saw him tackle the steep, pine-studded slope leading to the cave. And when he saw her a sense of urgency would rush down on him and he would set himself at the sandy slope as though he was on the home run of the most important cross-country event of the season for all summer there had been a clock ticking in his heart, setting a term to boyhood.

One day, soon after the conversation on careers, he did not come until evening, after the sun had passed Nun’s Head in the west and the bowl below the escarpment was drowsy with summer, as though everything living there had been used up by the heat of the day. She shouted, from her platform, ‘Where’ve ’ee been? I’ve been lookin’ out for ’ee zince noon!’ and he told her he had been to a tea-party with some of Mrs Craddock’s friends in Coombe Bay and had only now managed to change and steal away. He went through the wicker screen to the little house and because everything there was familiar to him he noticed a stone jar, standing in one of the cavities she had scooped in the soft sandstone.

‘What have you got there?’ he asked and she told him it was a gallon jar of Meg Potter’s hedgerow wine she had stolen from the washroom behind the Potter farmhouse. ‘Tidden
really
stealing,’ she added, ‘for backalong, when ’er was out after blossoms, I went along of her an’ helped. Besides, there’s nigh on a dozen jars stored there to cool off. ’Er sells it, you zee, over in Whinmouth, so when ’er wasn’t lookin’ I skipped off with some, thinkin’ us’d taake a mug when us was dry!’

He sniffed it, finding that it smelled a little like damp corn. ‘What does she put in it, Hazel?’

‘Oh, all sorts,’ the girl said carelessly, ‘zertain nettles ’er knows, cowslips, elderberries, turnips, dandelion, sloes, quinces and I don’t know what, fer ’er’s proper stingy with ’er book o’ charms an’ never lets none of us peep, not even me, who couldn’t read what’s writ there! Would ’ee like to sample it? Tiz rare stuff and good for rheumatics they say.’

‘I don’t have rheumatism yet,’ he said laughing, ‘but I’ll down a mug if you will,’ and she produced two earthenware cups, shook the jar and tipped a generous measure into each.

It was like drinking the Valley at harvest time. Clover was there, as a kind of base, but so was every other ingredient Hazel had mentioned and many others besides, including honey. It slipped over the palate like nectar.

‘By George!’ he exclaimed, ‘it’s marvellous! Better than any drink I ever tasted! Pour me another.

‘Tiz heady stuff,’ she warned him, ‘us dorn want to zend ’ee ’ome tipsy,’ but he boasted that he had a good head for liquor and could walk a straight line after half-a-bottle of the Squire’s burgundy with brandy to follow so she poured another measure and sat sipping her own, her great brown eyes watching him over the rim of the cup.

When he had finished his second drink and smacked his lips with appreciation she put the stopper on the jar and returned it to the cavity.

‘I dorn reckon you’d better have no more, Ikey,’ she said, ‘for even our Smut can’t taake a pint of it and you’ve had two gills. ’Ow do it feel? Do it warm your belly and make your ears sing?’

It would have baffled him to tell her exactly how he felt. There was, it was true, a great glow spreading under his navel and his ears were singing but not unpleasantly so, the murmur of the woods coming to him as a chorus chanted by angels and the evening light, filtering into the cave through the gorse, appearing as the radiance of a celestial sunset. He said, giggling, ‘Let’s have another half cup, Hazel—go on, be a sport!’, but she refused him and stood with her back to the cavity. He got up then crouching because the roof was low and made a playful grab at her but she pushed him and he staggered, grazing his head on a rock buttress, not heavily, but enough to make him yelp and sink to his knees. She was beside him at once, with her arms round his shoulders, pressing his head to her breast and uttering soothing noises, as she might over a puppy struck by a blundering foot.

‘’Ave I ’urt ’ee? Did ’ee knock yer poor ade on the rock? Tiz gone to your legs, like rough cider! Bide awhile an’ I mak ’er some tay!’, and she held him like a child, rocking him to and fro while a wave of sweetness passed over him and he forgot the smart of his head in the softness of her breasts and the scent of her hair tumbling about his face. Then the glow in his belly seemed to explode so that its warmth invaded every vein in his body and he broke from her embrace, bearing her backwards and crushing her into the bracken with his weight and covering her face with kisses. She seemed inclined to resist him for a moment for when, breathlessly, he turned his head aside and caught up a handful of her hair, which he pressed against his mouth she twisted from beneath him and said, ‘Dornee, Ikey boy, tiz the drink in ’ee!’, but he saw to his relief that she was only laughing at him and that her remark was more of a statement than a protest. He released her, however, rolling on his elbow and laughing at himself but also at her for she looked comical squatting back on her hams and looking down at him like an affectionate wife contemplating a husband far gone in drink who had returned home and fallen on the doorstep. She seemed to contemplate him a long time, as though not sure what to do with him and as she sat there, head on one side, hands on her knees, he thought her the most beautiful creature he had ever seen and blurted out, ‘I love you so much! I love you, Hazel’, and because, despite the choir and the golden haze, his inner consciousness was still sharp and clear his voice sounded false and stilted so that he slipped back into her vernacular, saying, ‘Youm mine, Hazel Potter, and I’ll kill any man who touches ’ee, do ’ee hear, now?’, and this must have sobered her for she stood up with a slow, graceful movement, and without taking her eyes off him, said, ‘O’ course ’ee would! But I woulden let un, Ikey!
Never,
do ’ee hear? No man but you!’

The effect of the wine on his brain was two-fold, for while his body presented him as an amorous, half-helpless clodhopper his thoughts about her were diamond sharp and he saw her as he had always thought of her, the concentration in a woman’s body, of all the colours and scents and fruitfulness of the Valley under the mantle of summer and desired her not as a woman but as a kind of key to her world and everything it offered. Yet the prospect of possessing her seemed to have nothing to do with his body but was an emphatic gesture of the mind. He stood up, unsteadily, and because he staggered a little she took his hands, saying, ‘You’d best bide a spell, Ikey, youm drunk as David’s sow!’ and she giggled and she propped him against the canting wall and spread her flour sacks on the bracken at the back of the cave.

‘You’ll bide tu?’ he said and she told him she would but he was not to worry for he would soon be asleep and when he awoke he would be none the worse for the drink; ‘’Er dorn carry no ade with ’er,’ she added. By now, however, the glow had spread to every part of his body, so that the atmosphere of the cave became insufferably hot and he began to struggle with his sweater in an effort to pull it over his head. She said, as though it was the most natural question in the world, ‘Be ’ee
that
hot then? Do ’ee want to strip to lie down?’, and pulled his sweater free after which she removed his trousers by the simple process of unbuckling his belt and hoisting his legs clear. He suffered this indignity without protest, without even thinking of it as an indignity, and watched her make a pillow of his clothes. When the makeshift couch was ready he collapsed on to it and lay flat on his back as she knelt beside him, inspecting his body with a kind of amused tolerance and saying, with the utmost mildness, ‘Ah, youm a praper-looking man now, Ikey, a praper man to be sure!’ He lay staring up at her with slightly glazed eyes and might have succumbed at once to the drowsiness that was already playing tricks with his consciousness, distorting his judgments of sound and distance but then, almost with resignation, she stood upright again and without taking her eyes off him for a moment slipped out of her odds and ends of garments, folded her ragged dress with great care and put it to one side, standing erect between where he lay and the fading light filtering through the gorse screen of the entrance. His drowsiness left him then but he did not move a muscle, remaining on his back looking up at her, marvelling at the tawny smoothness of her long, straight legs and the rim of browned skin where the tide of sunburn had been checked by the dress just above the shallow downsweep of her breasts and above her knees. Then, with a curiously remote expression, half abstracted and half deliberate, she knelt again and began passing her hands over his body, lightly yet with an air of purpose so that the touch of her fingers induced in him a state that was a kind of suspension between elation and the richest daydream of his experience. He was aware that they were naked and that she was caressing him with deliberation but he felt no shame or, at that moment, desire. Her manipulation of his senses was without significance and thus made no direct impact on him and he did not move, neither did he reach out to return her caresses. It was only when she placed both hands on his shoulders, leaning over him to kiss his mouth that her presence beyond his reach became intolerable and he pulled her down beside him, kissing her face and breasts and shoulders and slipping his hands down the full length of her back. She said, with a tinge of sadness in her voice but without urgency, ‘You gonner tak’ me now, Ikey? Be ’ee clear-aded enough to know what youm at!’ and he said, sharply, ‘Youm mine, Hazel Potter, I’ll tak’ ’ee whenever I wants!’ and she sighed as he enfolded her and was done with her in a few painful seconds.

He slept then, almost on the instant and she slipped gently from him, aware of the evening chill rising out of the Valley and striking cold on her back. She paused a moment to look down on him, noting the tiny fronds of dead bracken adhering to his chest and hair so that suddenly he looked a boy again, younger by far than her and she hastened to cover him with another of her sacks. She did not regard what had happened as momentous and could contemplate it without fear or regret. She did not invest it with any special significance. He had always been her man and she was aware that men’s desires and demands changed as they grew older. It was just that today, unexpectedly, a few draughts of hedgerow wine had hastened his growth and he had moved on, taking her with him as was the order of things. She did not look for a solution to their committal for she had never troubled herself about solutions and explanations of human or animal conduct, taking each new experience as it came and extracting from it what she needed and what life was disposed to give her. It had granted her him and for a long time now she had accepted the inevitability of this bounty and the limitations that accompanied it, for she supposed now that he would demand access to her every time they met and that she would grow accustomed to being seized by him and crushed under him, with dry bracken stalks scratching her back and her body a soft target for his explosive energy. She did not resent this in any way. All she knew of life in the woods and on the moors taught her that violent possession of the female was the unquestionable right of the male and if, beyond this acceptance, there was a single spark of sadness it was struck by his impatience that had involved pain, certainly to her but perhaps also to him. Yet she knew instinctively that this need not always be so, that it would not necessarily be a clumsily contrived act and that perhaps, when the wine was out of him, they could find ways to prolong preliminaries that had brought her infinitely more joy and satisfaction than the climax. She shook out her hair and pulled on the ruin of her dress thinking with yearning of his smooth, white body under her hands and of the way she had gentled every part of him while he lay still staring up at her as though she was an angel appearing out of a cloud. And as she thought this she lifted and studied the hands that had touched him, extending her fingers and bringing them to her lips, smiling secretly as she performed this act of homage. Then with a final glance at him, she made her way out into the open and through the gorse to the slope. She knew somehow that he would not want to find her there when he awoke.

He got back to his room without disturbing anyone, remembering little of his scramble through the rhododendrons, and round the edge of the mere in almost total darkness. Once or twice he fell and bruised himself and on the climb up the escarpment to the edge of the woods he was clawed by innumerable briars but he struggled on, careless of hurts so long as he could reach the privacy of his room and lock the door against intruders and thought.

She had been right about the comparative harmlessness of the devil’s brew that had drawn him into this terrifying situation. There was no hangover; his head did not ache and although his mouth felt parched there was no sour taste on his palate as there had been when he, and Manners, and Hicks Minor, had drunk three pints of stout in the fourth form and gone reeling to bed. But the lack of a hangover was a trifling compensation when he was weighed down by so much guilt and shame and by so many desperate fears that rushed at him like gusts of wind from behind every tree. He did not know whether her absence, when he awoke to find himself naked under her sacks, had been a relief or not. He would have found the greatest difficulty, he thought, in meeting her reproachful eyes, but it was pitch dark by then and they could have talked, and she might, somehow, have been able to reassure him, although he doubted very much if she would have forgiven him his handling of her. He thought savagely of his worldly-wise cronies in the Sixth, who boasted so lightly of their conquests of shop-girls and street-walkers. Either they were liars, which he was disposed to believe, or they were made very differently from him, without consciences, and without any sense of moral responsibility towards other people. For a few minutes only after finding himself alone in the cave and the Valley below dark and silent, he had attempted to dismiss the incident as an initiation into the world of men. He had got drunk on Meg Potter’s nectar. He had kissed and fondled a girl. And finally he had pushed the encounter to its logical conclusion. After all, she was only a Potter and everyone in the valley knew that the Potter girls were to be had for a shilling. But soon he recognised this as a deliberate distortion of the truth, knowing that what had happened after the wine had started a fire in his loins had not been a casual encounter with an accommodating girl but something approaching a rape, with her a virgin crying out as she was ravished, and, what was worse, ravished by someone whom she trusted. If his memory of all that had taken place had been at all clear he might have found ample self-justification in the fact that it had been she who had undressed him, she who had pushed him down on the floor and then virtually offered herself but the devil of it was he was by no means clear on the details, only upon the fact. That brew of Meg’s seemed to have scoured his memory of all that had occurred between his swallowing of the second mugful, and her sharp, single cry as he took possession of her. He could hear that cry now and it tormented him all the way down the sunken lane and across the orchard to the stable-yard. Then, as he reached his room, guilt was driven out by fear and the most urgent of his fears was that she should find herself with a child, his child, whom he would have to acknowledge before Squire, the elegant Mrs Craddock, Doctor Maureen, Hazel’s family and, indeed, the Valley at large! What would follow if this dread possibility materialised he did not know. He would, he supposed, be thrown out of the house, for surely Squire Craddock would be outraged to discover that the protégé upon whom he had lavished so much affection and money had behaved in such a base fashion. Ignorance buttressed his fears for in spite of the long talks over the study fires in his last year at school he still did not know whether a baby was the inevitable sequel to what he had done. He hoped and prayed not, telling himself that if this was the case then the world would be overpopulated in a matter of years, and he clung to this straw of comfort while he pulled off his clothes and stealthily washed himself in cold water. Then, as he climbed into bed, it occurred to him that if the worst happened perhaps he might not be turned out of the house, but reviled and herded to the altar to be married to Hazel Potter out of hand. Possibly her mother and brothers (and almost certainly the Squire and Mrs Craddock) would insist upon marriage and for a moment the pricks and stabs of guilt and fear ceased to assault him as he tried to picture their life together as man and wife. He supposed he loved her for how else could he have behaved with such criminal recklessness? And he was convinced that she still loved him, in spite of his brutality but he also knew that there was a good deal more to marriage than rolling about on a couple of sacks spread on dried bracken. How and where would they lie? How did one earn enough money to maintain a wife and the children resulting from every encounter such as the last?