Long Summer Day (83 page)

‘Go out? Why, of course I do!’ she called, still invisible, ‘why else do you suppose I’ve dressed myself up?’

‘I didn’t know you had,’ he said. ‘Come out and let’s have a look at you.’

‘Close your eyes then,’ she said and he closed them hearing the pleasant swish of her skirts as she moved into the bedroom and giving a gasp of astonishment that ended in a shout of laughter which he hastily choked back when he saw her frown.

‘What’s so funny about me?’ she demanded, tartly for her, but he moved round her once or twice and was no longer disposed to laugh but rather to wonder how a woman who so seldom got an opportunity of dressing for town, should succeed so spectacularly when the chance offered itself.

‘By George, you’re absolutely sensational, Claire!’ he told her, sincerely, ‘I only laughed out of shock! I’ve never seen you looking like that, not even on your wedding day!’

She was a summer’s evening study of white and apple green, a high-waisted skirt flowing away into a whipped-up torrent of sprigged lace that foamed out behind like a small, neat wake. Over a tight bodice she wore a green velvet hussar jacket, with frogged lapels and a stiff, turned-up collar. She had on a huge Gainsborough hat, one of the largest hats he had ever seen, worn at a tilt and crowned with green organdie gathered in half-a-dozen loosely tied bows and she was wearing the pearl necklace he had given her after the birth of the twins. In her right hand, clothed in an elbow-length suède glove, she carried a long-handled parasol with a white sword-knot swinging from it. He had noticed, of late, that she had been putting on weight but she was obviously well corseted under her coronation regalia for her figure seemed to him quite perfect, the waist as neat as the day he had first seen her in the yard of High Coombe farm, although even the merciless corset could not conceal the roundness of the hips and the generous contours of the bust. She blushed a little under his scrutiny and said, regretfully, ‘I didn’t realise how much I’d put on since Mary’s arrival! I ordered this dress in advance and I suppose it ought to be let out a little.’

‘Rubbish,’ he confronted her, ‘you’ve only put a little on in the right places and you don’t have to apologise to me. I like a woman to look like one, especially when she’s my wife. My only complaint is that the hat hides your lovely hair!’

‘I could hardly watch the Coronation bareheaded,’ she said. ‘After all, it’s only once in a lifetime and I don’t suppose we shall ever see another king crowned.’ Then she laughed, adding, ‘Do stop staring, darling, it can’t be that sensational! I bought every stitch of it in Paxtonbury,’ but he told her that he enjoyed staring and so would everyone else when they went out but that he wished they hadn’t got to go out, because she not only looked vice-regal but very provocative indeed.

‘I daresay,’ she told him, ‘but I’m not available for more than a chaste kiss right now and anyway my breathing is restricted, so do please behave yourself!’

‘Well, temporarily,’ he promised but drew her gently to him, complaining that the corset she was wearing converted her lovely rump into a rampart. She laughed at that and kissed him warmly saying, ‘Oh, we
are
lucky, Paul! I do love you so much! And this is for bringing me up, because I know you’d far sooner have stayed home!’, and she kissed him again, this time on the mouth but skipped away at once sensing that another kiss or two would make him unmanageable.

They went out, walking sedately along the edge of the lake and thence into the Mall, now crammed with sightseers, and from there to the Palace, to stare at the railings and royal standard, and then back again along Constitution Hill to Piccadilly, unrecognisable under a thousand flags and pennants and huge cardboard portraits of the King and Queen, printed in garish colours and wired against the tug of the breeze. She was so gay, and looked so desirable, that he felt they were well launched on a second honeymoon and Claire, when he told her this, admitted that she was, in fact, far more ready to enjoy herself than she had been on her real honeymoon in Anglesey, four years before.

‘Now why should that be for you weren’t a particularly nervous bride,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact I was agreeably surprised now I come to think of it.’

‘Well, I started out terrified I can assure you,’ she admitted, ‘because I couldn’t hide the fact from myself that I was a country daisy succeeding an orchid! I suppose it didn’t show because … well … you didn’t rush me! You probably don’t remember, Paul, but you were very patient with me.’

‘Was I?’ he said as they passed into the foyer of their hotel and the commissionaire saluted. ‘Well, I’m not likely to be so patient on my second honeymoon, my dear,’ and because it was obvious from the doorman’s smirk that he had overheard, Claire whispered urgently, ‘Shhh, for heaven’s sake! I shall blush scarlet when I see that man in the morning.’

‘It’s my belief that you’ll have good cause to!’ he said laughing, and in this mood they went in to dinner.

As usual, he was soon heavily asleep. She knew no one who could drop off to sleep so quickly and sleep so soundly, notwithstanding the unfamiliar symphony of rattling carriage wheels and honking motors that was such a contrast to the midnight stillness of Shallowford. She did not feel sleepy, in spite of all the wine they had drunk and the boisterous interlude that had followed. Always, at times like this, she liked to lie still in his arms, and smile at herself and at him and as the increasing flow of traffic rolled under the window she thought, ‘He really does behave as though he married me this morning! It can’t be my new clothes, in spite of the impact they made on him, for he could hardly wait for me to take them off!’, and she chuckled, wriggling from under his arms and sitting up, hugging her knees and feeling happier than she ever remembered. It was a very wonderful thing, she thought, to have attained the degree of balance and intimacy that was theirs and had been theirs since the very beginning, and her mind went back to the day soon after his arrival in the Valley, when she had set out to capture him without knowing or even caring what kind of man he really was, or what qualifications she had for marriage to someone with his unusual sense of purpose and singlemindedness. She was glad, looking back, that there had been that near-fatal rift in their association and for the first time in her married life she could contemplate his first wife without jealousy, reflecting that she probably owed her a good deal for seasoning him as man and lover. She must, Claire thought, have been a sensual little minx, for the man now asleep beside her had very little in common with the shy, rather gawky youth she had enticed down by the mere. All his boyishness and uncertainty had been ironed out of him during his first marriage and the unhappy period that followed it yet it had left him with no kind of a grudge against women, as might have been expected. He was masterful but, to her mind, accomplished as a lover and what was more unusual unselfishly so. That, in itself, was a contradiction to all that young women of her generation had been taught to expect of a man once he had got a woman to bed, for how many husbands in the Valley regarded lovemaking as a mutual experience or took pains to ensure that it was so? Precious few, she would say, for the dice was heavily loaded against her sex in this respect, yet it was not so in their marriage and for this she would never cease to be grateful. She leaned over and kissed him lightly and wriggled back into his embrace and as she drifted over the edge of sleep she thought, ‘If we go on like this I shall have a baby every year and lose my figure altogether but I don’t care a row of beans! Not even if they arrive in pairs, like Andy and Steve!’

The next morning they toured the city from Aldgate Pump to Marble Arch and when they had had their fill of sightseeing he asked her if she would care to renew her acquaintance with Uncle Franz and see the scrapyard in all its squalid glory.

‘It hardly qualifies as a Coronation attraction,’ he said, ‘but the Valley owes it a good deal. If I’d had my way I should have cut myself off from it altogether and it would have taken all of twenty years to put the estate in good heart.’

She said she would enjoy meeting Franz and spending an hour among his old iron, so they crossed the river and drove through the sweltering streets to the yard, where Paul noticed that there had been some extensive changes.

The place was as forbidding as ever but there was a certain grandeur about its disorder and multiplicity of its pyramids of junk. Several more acres had been enclosed on the far side and the fires now burned in braziers, mounted on brick hearths. Uncle Franz’s shack had given place to a red-brick building with waggon-sheds alongside and among the carts Paul noticed two or three cumbersome motor vehicles, shaped like barges on wheels and called, he was told, ‘lorries’. There was an air of efficiency about the place that had not been there in the earlier, more casual era. Doors in the office building had wooden plaques with
‘Foreman’, ‘Weigh In’, ‘Chief Sorter’
and
‘Cash’
painted on them. He said to Franz:

‘My word, things must be looking up! It used to be just a frowsy dump and now it’s a slum empire!’

Franz was his usual chirrupy self, extending to Claire the same Continental courtliness as he had shown Grace and he amused her very much by gravely kissing her hand and telling her that, whilst he was grubbing among scrap in a brick jungle the luckier and more discerning Paul had found ‘A pearl beyond price in the provinces’. Paul said, ‘Don’t take the slightest notice of him, Claire! He talks like that to every woman he meets under sixty! It comes from a lifetime of coaxing housewives to empty their attics!’ but to Franz he said, seriously, ‘You seem to have made a lot of changes round here and I must say the place looks a lot less sleazy than before. Have you taken in more land over there by the viaduct?’

‘Another four acres,’ Franz said casually, ‘and business was never better, my boy! Thank God for Kaiser Wilhelm and his shining armour! He’s the man who put new life into the scrap industry! I don’t suppose you ever look at the balance sheets I send you?’

‘No,’ Claire told him, ‘he doesn’t, only the dividend slips and even those have to be brought to his attention by the bank manager.’

‘Well, you might be interested to know that our turnover last year was treble that of our best South African War year,’ said Franz. ‘If this naval race continues until either of us or Germany goes bankrupt you’ll die a rich man, Paul, providing, of course, you don’t pour the whole of it into those Devon quicksands of yours!’

‘At least I do something practical with it,’ retorted Paul, slightly nettled by the old man’s irony, but Claire said, quickly, ‘Don’t tease him about the Valley, Uncle Franz! Ordinarily his sense of humour is good but that’s his sensitive spot!’ and Paul, suddenly ashamed of his huffiness, was grateful to her for her intervention.

They took Franz back to the hotel for tea and afterwards to a theatre, a musical extravaganza that Paul privately thought ridiculous but which Claire obviously enjoyed. During the interval, as he and Franz smoked a cigar in the foyer, the old man said, affably, ‘Well, Paul, I must say you should be congratulated on your taste in wives! She’s just as pretty as Grace and more tolerant of your eccentricities! You’re obviously a happy man.’

‘Yes, I am,’ Paul admitted readily, ‘and, in a way, I have to thank you for it, Franz, for I don’t suppose I should have bestirred myself to try again if you hadn’t jogged my elbow! Claire is a wonderful wife and mother and there’s no fear of her disappearing into the blue to join the Militants! Have you seen anything of Grace?’

‘Oh, once or twice, for an hour or so,’ Franz replied, rather too airily Paul thought, ‘she pops across the river to collect her subscription.’

‘What subscription? She gets her allowance regularly, doesn’t she?’

‘Oh, I’m not referring to the hundred a year you allow her,’ Franz said, laughing, ‘I mean the subscription I make to the Sacred Cause.’

‘You subscribe to suffragette funds?’

‘Certainly I do, twenty guineas annually!’

‘Good God!’ exclaimed Paul, genuinely astonished, ‘I didn’t think you cared two straws about votes for women.’

‘I don’t,’ Franz said, ‘but I like to see politicians harried and anyway, I admire their spirit.’

The thought crossed Paul’s mind that the real reason for the wily old Croat’s support of a movement that was embarrassing a Liberal Government lay much deeper than this, and had far more to do with his preference for a government inclined to spend even more upon armaments and thus, by inference, upon scrap, but he only said, ‘How is she, Franz? Still as fanatical?’

‘More so I’d say,’ Franz replied but no longer joking, ‘their front-line fighters have been getting a very rough handling up here. They don’t put everything in the papers.’

Paul was going to tell him about Grenfell’s championship of the movement and of the photographic evidence he had seen but at that moment the intermission bell sounded and they rejoined Claire in the stalls. The old man refused an invitation to accompany them on the morrow and see the procession from the M.P.s’ stand, so they watched him drive off across Leicester Square to his Portman Street home, after he had promised to make another appointment by telephone before they returned home at the end of the week.

That night, when they were alone, Claire said, suddenly, ‘You can’t help liking Uncle Franz, Paul, but …’ and she hesitated, as though fearing to offend him.

‘Under his charm he’s rather frightening; is that what you were going to say?’

‘Yes, it was, but maybe all people who make money are frightening.’

‘Well,’ Paul said, ‘I don’t suppose we should be sanctimonious about it. We put the money he makes to good use in the Valley and have been damned glad of it. I daresay we could struggle along without it now but it seems to me that to reject it would be a rather pompous gesture; all the same, I would do it, if you had strong feelings about it.’

She made no immediately reply, sitting on the dressing stool brushing her long hair, so he added, ‘Well?
Have
you?’

‘No,’ she said, as though she wasn’t altogether sure, ‘but the time could come when I might have. Do you suppose all this battleship building could lead to anything serious; to people actually killing one another, as they did in that war between Russia and Japan?’