Long Summer Day (85 page)

‘No, not entirely,’ James said, sipping his drink, ‘but even if they do I don’t see why they should apologise for it. There’s self-satisfaction in fighting that hard for something you believe in deeply and sincerely and they’ll win, quite soon, I believe.’

‘It can’t be soon enough for me,’ Paul grumbled, ‘for right now I feel like a bath and not simply to wash the dirt from my body!’

While Grace was in the dressing-room Claire sat in the bedroom sewing up the rent in her blouse and when this was done she set about beating the dust from the heavy folds of the skirt and sponging away the great yellow stain. She worked methodically, her mind contemplating the unlikely situation, that seemed to her as improbable as a story in a chain-library novel but it did not embarrass her, for instinct told her that Grace had long since renounced any claim on Paul. When she came out drying her hair with a bath robe, she studied her dispassionately, noting her boyish figure, and the prominence of her collar-bone as she slipped on her blouse and stood before the long mirror tidying her hair. There was hardly a trace, Claire thought, of the trim, self-assured young woman who had entertained her to tea at Shallowford in the first year of her marriage. All her curves had disappeared and with them her indifferent, half-vacant air that had seemed at that time close to boredom. Now the lines of the face were taut, the cheek-bones prominent and every movement she made whilst brushing and underpinning her hair was crisp and decisive, as though physical energy was something to be carefully husbanded. Only yesterday, Claire recalled, she had thought of this woman as sensual but she changed her mind now and wondered if dedication to a political cause, to the extent that this woman had dedicated herself, demanded the discipline of a nun entering an order. She thought, ‘There must be enormous strength of will there for I know myself well enough to realise that I couldn’t exchange life with Paul, or the security of the Valley, for an abstract idea. I might have done once but not now, not having enjoyed a man’s vigour and protection, not having borne him children as she bore him a child. She has resilience too, she isn’t in the least put out by this turn of events and seems almost to take it for granted,’ and she began to comprehend some of the sources of the failure of the marriage, reasoning that, beside Grace, Paul was an adolescent, with an adolescent’s dependence upon flattery. She said, as she handed Grace her skirt, ‘Would you think it impertinent of me if I asked you if you were happier now, Grace?’ and Grace stopped in the act of stepping into her skirt, smiled and said, with utmost candour, ‘Certainly not, providing you’ll be equally frank with me!’

‘I’ve always been grateful to you,’ Claire said slowly, ‘and I don’t mind admitting that. There was a time when I was very jealous but that’s done with, I’m not jealous now, any more than you are of me! I’m happy and I think Paul is; in fact, I know he is. Yet I know too that he wonders about you sometimes and that he’ll be very upset by what happened today.’

Grace hitched her skirt and tucked in her blouse so that Claire thought she put on clothes more like a soldier hurrying to parade than a young woman dressing in the presence of another. She had a trick of conducting an intimate conversation like this on a flat, impersonal level, as though Claire was a recruit to the Cause and she was instructing her in tactics.

‘I’m quite sure Paul is happy, Claire, far happier than I could have made him, and believe me, I’m grateful to you too! You were the means of soothing my conscience about him. All the same, I still think you should have fought for him in the first place.’

‘But it wouldn’t have worked that way,’ Claire retorted, although it secretly pleased her to have proof of the fact that she knew Paul so much better than this strange, eclectic creature, ‘and you haven’t answered my question! I’ve got a reason for asking it.’

‘I don’t want to know reasons,’ Grace told her, ‘I made a bad mistake and so did he but I made mine deliberately, so it wasn’t fair that he should help pay for it! Am I happier? I don’t know, I had never much expectation of happiness so it’s difficult to judge. I’m doing what I want to do, I’ve found a purpose to justify myself so I suppose that’s something. The only way I did that when I was a wife was over there,’ and she inclined her head towards the bed. Claire said nothing, so she went on, as though answering her own questions, ‘That’s half a marriage but Paul isn’t a man satisfied with half, is he? I soon found that out and that’s what decided me to stop pretending. I imagine it’s very different with you for you always belonged in his precious Valley. It’s still the whole of his life, I imagine?’

‘Yes,’ Claire told her, it was, that and the children.

‘You have children? Yes, of course you have, Uncle Franz told me—two girls, wasn’t it?’

‘Two boys, and now a girl.’

‘You haven’t wasted much time!’

‘The first two arrived together—twins— the girl last December.’

Grace looked then as if she was trying to make up her mind to say something important but was not sure how it would be received and for a moment Claire suspected that she was going to flaunt her ‘liberation’ by inquiring into the sex relationship of man and wife. Then, suddenly, Claire understood the reason for her hesitation; she was thinking, no doubt, of her own child Simon and said quickly, ‘You were wondering about your boy?’ but Grace shook her head vigorously and replied, ‘No, that wasn’t it! It just occurred to me that a woman like yourself must regard a person like me as a masochist.’

Claire had. never heard the word ‘masochist’ and frankly admitted as much whereupon Grace laughed and said, ‘By God, Claire! I was right about you! You were the only person in the world for Paul and I admire your honesty! Not one woman in a hundred would have admitted that in your situation!’ and when Claire’s expression showed she was unable to follow her reasoning, she went on, ‘It’s just a fashionable word meaning someone who derives pleasure from pain. Some of our people fall over themselves to use all the new words, you know, and I suppose some of them really are masochists. Well, at least my affiliation is not that much of a fad! I’m the person I am simply because I watched my mother driven to suicide by the cruelty of a man and I suppose this is my way of hitting back but perhaps Paul never told you about that?’

‘No,’ Claire said, ‘he never did.’

‘Well, if you’re interested ask old John Rudd when you get home but I shall have to go now, I’m probably the only one who survived the raid and Headquarters will want a report,’ and she picked up a yellow straw hat of Claire’s from the window seat and said, ‘Could I borrow this until tomorrow? I lost mine in the scrimmage.’

‘You can have it, a donation to the Cause,’ Claire said, ‘but before you go I would like you to know that both Paul and I campaigned for Women’s Suffrage at the last two elections in the West.’

‘I do know it,’ Grace said, ‘for that comes within my terms of reference. However, this isn’t the kind of war won on platforms, as you probably noticed outside Parliament this afternoon.’

Claire said, ‘If you’d been arrested and taken to gaol would you have gone on another hunger strike and been forcibly fed?’

‘Not necessarily,’ Grace replied carelessly, ‘they’re so frightened of the prospect of one of us dying in gaol that they’ve introduced a new method now. They watch us starve for a few days, turn us loose, then arrest us again as soon as we’re strong enough to totter along between two fat policemen!’

‘It’s outrageous,’ Claire burst out, ‘how many times have you been in Holloway?’

‘I’ve lost count,’ Grace said, ‘but I can tell you how many times I’ve had the steel gag and been fed through the nostrils. That’s something you do remember.’

Suddenly Claire felt sick and miserable. The thin, erect figure standing by the window was a rebuke, not only to her but to all of them and contemplation of her, and all that had happened to her over the last few years, made a mockery of the brilliant procession they had watched the previous day. She said, falteringly, ‘How … how long will it go on, Grace?’ and Grace, shrugging, said perhaps another two or three years, depending upon all kinds of factors, the staying power of the Militants, the supply of funds, the state of public opinion and the obstinacy of male legislators of both parties. Then, as though bored with the subject, she crammed on the hat and said, ‘We’ll go down now. Paul will be tormenting himself guessing what we’re talking about up here!’ and she moved for the door but Claire caught her arm and said, ‘Wait, there is one thing more! We haven’t told Simon about you. It isn’t easy to explain divorce to a seven-year-old. We shall, of course, but sometimes I wonder … well, wouldn’t you like to see him? You could, at any time you wished.’

Grace gave her another of her long, thoughtful stares before saying, ‘No, I don’t think that would be very wise of me, would it? He’s happy and fit, I imagine?’

‘Yes, he is,’ Claire told her, ‘he gets on well with the twins but Ikey, the boy Paul more or less adopted, is his great favourite.’

‘Ah yes, Ikey,’ Grace said, as it struck her that Claire must be quite unaware of Ikey’s role as the link between them. ‘How is Ikey shaping? I always had great hopes of that boy.’

‘He’s doing very well,’ Claire told her, ‘he’s in his first year at Woolwich. He was going to be an Engineer but he’s changed to the Gunners. Having his own children hasn’t made any difference to how Paul feels about him.’

‘No,’ Grace said, slowly, ‘it wouldn’t, not with people like you and Paul, but …’ and she stopped, biting her lips so that Claire said, ‘Well?’

‘In a place like the Valley,’ she said, with less than her former assurance, ‘Simon won’t be in ignorance about me long. If I was in your place I should get Ikey to explain to him and not lose any time about it. It wouldn’t help if he heard it from one of the farm hands. Will you do that for me, Claire?’

‘Certainly, if Paul agrees,’ said Claire, although privately she thought the assignment eccentric.

‘Paul will agree to anything you suggest,’ Grace said and suddenly, inexplicably, she bent forward and kissed Claire on the cheek, after which she pulled open the door and marched out into the corridor. ‘No wonder Paul could make very little of her,’ Claire thought, as she watched the yellow straw hat bob down the staircase, ‘for who on earth could? Certainly not me!’ and she hurried to catch her up before Grace found the table where Paul and James sat smoking, each looking as sombre and ill-at-ease as an expectant father.

Chapter Nineteen

I

T
here was no persuading him to remain in London another night and catch the 11 a.m. train from Waterloo, that all Valley travellers used, for it was the only main line train that stopped at Sorrel Halt. He fled the city like a fugitive, telling her that this was not the first time but would be the last. At first she was depressed that their holiday, which had begun so well, should have ended so abruptly and on such a dismal note but as the lights of the tenement houses fell away, and the train ran on into dark, open country she began to share his relief at going and was soon lulled to sleep by the clack of the wheels. When she opened her eyes again it was light and she could smell parched summer woods, a few miles short of the Devon border.

He had not asked her about her conversation with Grace and she had not told him, thinking that it would keep for when he felt less jaded but he remained moody and silent over breakfast at The Mitre, in Paxtonbury. It was not until they had hired a horse and trap at the livery stables, and were breasting the incline on the first stage of the fifteen-mile journey to the Valley that he began to perk up a little, for she saw him lift his head and sniff the air like a pointer, as though he was searching the rendezvous of the west wind and the whiff of Channel spindrift. He said, as though she had been privy to his thoughts all the way home, ‘That glitter and all those blaring bands! Pomp measured out by the chain mile and what is the point of it if the vast majority are just lookers-on? Can you answer me that now?’

She said mildly that she supposed the spectacle itself was there to be enjoyed by taxpayers, and this, in essence, was the object the authorities had in mind but he growled, ‘Yes, I daresay! Bread and circuses, to keep the mob yammering for more red on the map! But they’ll bellow for local blood if given the chance, as you saw outside the House yesterday! Damn it, if we put on a show down here to mark a national occasion every man, woman and child in the Valley would be personally involved in it! But not in London, for London isn’t England any more! Monarchs used to make progresses to places like the Valley. Now they use London as a reflecting mirror and a bloody flyblown one at that!’

He seldom swore in her presence but she said nothing, knowing his mood would blow itself out in a few growls and gusts and that every turn of the trap’s wheels would improve his humour and she was right. After a rumble or two he subsided, his features relaxed, and he began to look about him as they tackled the last lap of the interminable hill to the saddleback where the real moor began. A hundred yards or so below the crest he pulled on to the heather and let the reins drop between his knees. It was then about 8 a.m., and the morning river mist had long since been sucked up by the sun so that the open stretches of Sorrel winked at the sky and the salt taste of the wind was unmistakable. She saw him grin and stretch himself, and in his sudden enthusiasm he thumped her knee so vigorously that she shouted, ‘Hi! That’ll leave a bruise, you great bully!’ but she smiled because she was so relieved the magic had worked again.

‘Look at it!’ he said. ‘Six miles wide and twelve deep!’

‘And we don’t own the half of it,’ she said, ‘so stop crowing!’

‘It doesn’t matter a damn who owns it,’ he said, ‘for even old Gilroy’s patch is more England than Trafalgar Square! I’ll tell you what I have in mind and you’re the first to hear of it! We’ll put on a coronation show of our own that will be talked about when George and Mary are nudging their jubilee! And I don’t mean simply a Valley affair but a
real
show, with brass bands, a sports programme, fatstock competitions, rifle butts, a gymkhana, a cart-horse parade, the lot! We’ll get entries from the Paxtonbury territorials, who start their annual camp in a fortnight, and from the Yeomanry over in Heronslea Park and we’ll get Gilroy to bring his hirelings across the Teazel to get a drubbing from our chaps in everything from pig-skittling to Cornish wrestling! How does that sound for a start?’

‘Absurdly ambitious,’ she said, her lip trembling, ‘but I’m all in favour if it improves your temper!’

He kissed her then, a great, hearty kiss full on the mouth, like a farmer returning home after a successful day at the market. Back here he was so like a great, hulking boy that she could never think of him as a person born and raised in a city. He said, ‘By God, we’ll show them how to go about things! Get up, Ned!’ and he slapped the reins on the cob’s back and began the steep descent to the river road.

His enthusiasm infected the entire Valley within a couple of days, as he lunged up and down the estate, dashing off letters to Honorary Secretaries as far afield as Whinmouth and—this astounded everyone who knew him—getting the house connected to the Paxtonbury Telephone Company, so that he could make direct contact with the Gilroy estate and the people and organisations to whom he looked for active co-operation. There had been all manner of free luncheons and sports meetings arranged in the district as part of the national coronation fiesta but most of these had been organised on a local basis. The promise of valuable prizes and free beer worked wonders upon the isolationist spirit of communities half-a-day’s journey north, west and east of the Valley so that the event, given good weather, looked like proving the most spectacular since the Heronslea three-day fair at the time of Victoria’s first jubilee, a celebration still spoken of by the middle-aged and elderly of the Valley as ‘the day us all got dead drunk at Gilroy’s expense’.

The local military organisations proved co-operative, Territorials and Yeomanry entering sports teams in most of the contests, and when it was clear that the number of contestants and spectators was likely to exceed two thousand Paul shifted the venue from Big Paddock to the Codsall stubble fields now lying fallow. Tents and enclosures began to mushroom there within days of his return home and the ringing of the new telephone bell in the hall drove Mrs Handcock frantic, for she swore that she could never disassociate it in her mind from a fire-alarm. Only the sudden return of Ikey, on a month’s furlough, saved her from resignation as Chef Extraordinary, and her husband Horace had to be taken on one side and told to persuade her that the Coronation Jamboree would make Shallowford history, so that her loyalty to the Squire was at stake. Apart from this Horace was a great help to Paul during these feverish days for he was a great authority on the many slumbering feuds that existed between Heronslea and the county border and showed the Squire how to exploit them in the interest of competitive events. Three silver and four brass bands entered in the band contests and there were over a hundred and forty gymkhana entries for a dozen major events. Two hunting packs promised support and rural athletes came in from as far away as Barnstaple, whereas the rifle and clay-pigeon events were so popular that they had to be shot off in heats days in advance. A fifty-yard stretch of the river was dredged for tub-racing and a wrestling ring was built west of the ford. There were all manner of agricultural contests, from fence-splitting to hedging-and-ditching and the inevitable firework display advertised a magnificent set-piece of the Spithead Naval Review, with guns firing rocket salvoes over the avenue chestnuts.

John Rudd, although approving of the venture as a whole, shook his head over the probable cost, declaring that it would set the estate back five hundred pounds, but Paul said they could regard it as money spent on advertising and that the Valley as a whole would benefit from new contacts and the opening up of fresh markets in the area. Rudd thought this was eyewash but he did not say so for by then he had had a word with Claire, who described what had happened on their last day in London. Thinking it over he agreed with her that a diversion on this scale was what Paul needed. As for the others, the hard core of the Valley tenantry, they formed a kind of staff about Paul, and, notwithstanding the fine weather, work on the farms was shamefully scamped throughout the first week of July. The stolid, conscientious Eveleigh took charge of the sports meeting, Sam Potter the agricultural competitions, and Henry Pitts, glad of such a good excuse to take a holiday, appointed himself Squire’s adjutant, with Ikey Palfrey as an aide-de-camp tearing up and down the Valley on his chestnut hunter. And each of these officers had auxiliaries outside the Shallowford area, men like Eph Morgan, the builder, who, as a Welshman, declared himself the only man qualified to supervise the musical programmes, and Tom Williams, the fisherman, who provided the tubs for the river-race and cartloads of hazards for the obstacle races. The women of the Valley rallied to Claire’s sub-committee so that the smell of baking rose over the Sorrel like a benediction and so much food was prepared that Martha Pitts, carrying her quota into the refreshment marquee, declared that the twelve apostles would be needed to carry away the surplus by the basketful as they had when the five thousand were fed beside Galilee.

The sky began to cloud over on the last day of preparation and it looked as though the spell of fine weather was about to end so that the men worked on frantically after dusk and when it was too dark to swing a mallet assembled to broach the first of the fifteen-gallon casks that had been hauled into the Valley by Whinmouth drays and were now ranged in an imposing row in the refreshment tent. Said Henry Pitts, his cheerful face clouded with anxiety, ‘All us wants now is a bliddy downpour, an’ us looks as if us’ll get it!’ but to Claire’s relief Horace Handcock (whose oracular powers extended to the weather field) licked his thumb, looked wise, and announced majestically that there would be a change of wind during the night and that the sun would shine all the following day. Then Sam Potter, raising his pewter tankard, declared that as the place would be full of foreigners tomorrow he proposed they all took this opportunity to drink the health of the Squire and everybody murmured agreement and downed their pints in one while Claire, glancing across the table at Paul, saw that he was touched by their loyalty and added her silent prayer for a cloudless day.

She was awake and at the window soon after five, watching the grey light creep over the Bluff and cross the river to the little town of tents, booths and enclosures west of the ford. It was childish, she thought, to be so concerned over a country fête of which there were probably a thousand arranged for that day in various parts of the British Isles but it seemed to her an issue of tremendous importance for so much work had gone into the event and not an inconsiderable amount of money. She continued to stand watching the sky while his snores reached her from the bed, and presently the shadows across the river retreated to the Teazel Valley and she saw cotton-wool mist steal in from the sea, which told her that calm weather could be expected for the surest sign of rain in the Valley was a clear view to the south-west. She went back to the bed and shook him and when he only muttered and rolled over on his back, she slid her hand along the dark stubble of his chin so that the short bristles crackled and he sat up suddenly wide awake and exclaimed, ‘What’s it like?’

‘Set fair,’ she said, ‘so get up and shave! You forgot to yesterday and your chin is like a quickset hedge!’

He passed his hand across his cheek and grinned, ‘So I did,’ he said, swinging his feet to the floor, ‘I was so damned busy! Have you been lying awake worrying about rain?’

‘Yes, I have,’ she said. ‘I invariably do your worrying for you! Now hurry up, Paul, there’s a lot to do before breakfast!’

‘Aye, there is that,’ he admitted, but despite her impatient protest he caught her round the waist as she crossed to the dressing-room and holding her for a moment said, ‘It wouldn’t by any fun without you, Claire! I don’t suppose I should lead a different life married or single but it wouldn’t be any
fun,
you understand?’ and he gave her a bristly kiss on the neck and went whistling along the passage to his tub.

She looked at herself in the mirror, wasting more precious time she told herself but there was time enough to smile at her reflection and say, ‘Claire Craddock, you’re odiously smug and he’s smug too! Maybe we’re all rather smug down here far away from it all and we’ll stay so as long as we can!’