Long Summer Day (9 page)

They left the Dell by the broken gate, taking the path across parched fields to the headland, east of the river. A few pigs rooted on the edge of Coombe Brake, and half a dozen lean cows browsed in the meadow. Rudd shook his head over the Potters’ domain. ‘Lovell was always on the point of turning the rascals loose,’ he said, ‘but somehow he never did and I think I know why. People like the Potters have the power of survival and would endure under any system. They’re a dirty, dishonest and thoroughly worthless bunch, but somehow one goes on tolerating them as a kind of counterpoise to stolid, law-abiding tenants, like the Pitts and the Willoughbys. Take those girls now—a trio of handsome, tawny animals; how do they manage to keep strong and healthy? It’s probably on account of them that Old Tamer never got his marching orders, for young Ralph used to ride over this way rent-collecting and they probably took turns to pay him in a dry ditch every quarter-day! We’re crossing to the Willoughby boundary now—he’s a harmless enough chap, notwithstanding a touch of religious mania, and his sister Mary is a credit to the Valley. If it wasn’t for Mary Willoughby half the children round about wouldn’t be able to read or write!’

‘Aren’t they compelled to attend school nowadays?’ Paul asked but Rudd chuckled. ‘Common law doesn’t operate in places like this as it does in cities, Mr Craddock. We’re four miles from the nearest main road, and six from the railway. Whinmouth, on the estuary yonder, is a two-hour ride, and there is not even a village bobby between us and Paxtonbury, twelve miles inland. No, the folk about here are pretty well as self-contained as they were in the eighteenth century, and have their own way of doing things. Mary Willoughby started that little school of hers twenty years ago and dispensed all the schooling Valley children have ever had or wanted. Listen!’, and he reined in on the northern slope of the cliff field, pointing to a white cluster of buildings about half a mile below them. ‘That’s Deepdene, the farm that keeps the Potters at Low Coombe and the Derwents at High Coombe from tearing at one another’s throats! You can hear the children singing. I always like to listen when I ride out this way in the forenoon. It cheers me up after calling on the Potters.’

Paul listened but at first could hear nothing but the slow suck of the sea on the pebbles below. Then, very faintly, the sound of children’s voices reached him across Willoughby’s barley field, and after a moment or so he could identify the strains of ‘John Peel’. It had, as Rudd implied, a refreshing innocence and as they came to the road nearer the farm Willoughby’s daughter Elinor came out of the hen-roost to greet them. She was a shy, slim girl and on being introduced to Craddock, lowered her glance and said she would warn Auntie Mary of the visitors’ approach, using this as an excuse to escape. Paul saw her dart into the schoolroom, a long, half-timbered barn adjoining the house and was struck by the speed with which her bare feet covered the ground.

‘How old is that girl?’ he asked and Rudd said she was eighteen, and being courted by Will Codsall, the elder of the Codsall boys at Four Winds, just across the river.

‘The Codsalls are against the match,’ he added, ‘for Arabella is a snob and thinks her Will could do better. I daresay she’s right, but Elinor Willoughby will make a good farmer’s wife for somebody. I’ve never seen her idling or flirting, and she’s damned clever with her poultry strains. There’s nothing much wrong with this farm, although it’s too small to be profitable. Derwent, beyond the crest up there, has all the best acreage this side of the river.’

The singing stopped in the middle of a bar and they dismounted, giving their horses to Francis Willoughby and going into the barn. Paul felt far less at ease here then he had in the Potters’ Dell for the children, about a dozen of them, stared at him in curiosity, sitting on forms with their arms folded and expressions blank. When he was introduced to them as ‘a soldier gentleman friend of Mr Rudd’s’ they rose like so many clockwork figures and piped ‘Good morning, sir!’, after which they subsided, again in concert.

Rudd brought a flustered Mary Willoughby over to shake hands but instead of doing so she dropped a swift curtsy, so that Paul was struck by the tug of feudalism among the Lovell tenantry.

‘I heard the children singing,’ he said, for something to say and Mary Willoughby replied, eagerly, ‘Will you have them sing for you here, Sir? I’m sure they’d like to, wouldn’t you, my dears?’ and the children chanted ‘Yes, Miss Willoughby,’ opening and closing their mouths like two rows of puppets, then fixing their eyes on their teacher who picked up a tuning fork, tapped it on the desk and said, ‘Softly then! Watch the baton! One chorus of “The British Grenadiers”, because Mr Rudd tells me Mr Craddock is just home from the wars!’

The children, one and all, received this news with respect, their eyes leaving the tuning fork and returning to Paul. They sang in shrill, clear voices, the boys grinning, the girls repressing giggles, and when they had finished Paul said, hoarsely, ‘Thank you, that was splendid! Er—how many are there here, Miss Willoughby?’ and Mary said there were fourteen today because two of the older boys were out helping with the harvest and little Hazel Potter was playing truant again.

Paul, on impulse, pulled out a handful of loose change, saying that everyone present was to have a reward for singing so well but before the squeal of delight had died away a bullet-headed little boy in the rear row shot up his hand and demanded, ‘Sir, sir! Did you kill ole Kruger?’, a question that made even the demure Mary Willoughby laugh.

‘No,’ said Paul, ‘nobody killed Kruger, because he got away before anyone could catch him!’, but his questioner was not satisfied with this and saw Paul’s presence as a means of beguiling a tedious hour’s instruction. He followed up with, ‘Did
all
the Boers run away, please, sir?’, and Paul glanced at Rudd, hoping for some inspiration but getting none said, deliberately, ‘The Boers didn’t run away at all. They were very brave. After all, they were farmers fighting for their country, just as we would!’ This simple statement was received with a shocked ‘Cooo!’, and Paul again glanced at Rudd who was now studying a knothole on the schoolroom floor. Feeling miserably embarrassed he got up and tried to smile. ‘I’m sure Miss Willoughby won’t want me to stay and interrupt your lessons any longer,’ he said, ‘so Mr Rudd and I will have to say goodbye, because we have to ride over and see all the other farms.’

When they were clear of the farm, and riding along the ridge parallel with the woods Paul said, ‘Did I do wrong to tell them the truth?’

‘If you’re only a visitor passing through it doesn’t matter a damn what you say,’ Rudd told him, ‘whereas if you become “New Squire”, as the Potters rather hope, you can say anything you like! After all, they’ll be tenants, and if a Tory doesn’t mince his words with them why should a Radical?’

‘I’m not sure that I am a Radical,’ Paul told him. ‘I never gave a thought to politics until I began to convalesce, and had nothing better to do than read the Parliamentary debates in the newspapers.’

‘Well,’ pursued Rudd, with one of his quizzical sidelong glances, ‘and what conclusions did you arrive at?’

‘I don’t know, one can’t help admiring that chap Lloyd George’s nerve defying the whole weight of public opinion about the war, and there were fellows out there who came around to agreeing with him, after they took part in chivvying the Boers from Hell to Hackney. It seemed to me, however, that once we were in it we had to choose going through with it or becoming the laughing stock of the world. Apart from that it now looks as if they’ll get a better deal from us than they would have got from anyone else. What would have happened to them if the Germans or French had been in our situation?’

‘Ah,’ said Rudd evasively, ‘that would be telling!’ and Paul thought: ‘Damn him, he gave so much away yesterday that he’ll be a clam from now on! However, I’d lay six to four that he’s pro-Lloyd George, if only because the Lovell family were Tories!’ And then he forgot politics, surrendering himself to the beauty of a long, easterly slope stretching from Willoughby’s boundary, across the Derwent holding to the cloudless sky over the county border.

They met Willoughby on the ridge and introductions were exchanged. Rudd, glancing over the hedge, saw the evidence of Gregory’s excavations alongside the stream and at once remarked on it.

‘Derwent had no right to siphon off your water,’ he told the saintlike farmer. ‘You may need it badly later on, even if you don’t now.’

‘Why, God bless you; Mr Rudd,’ Willoughby said, ‘who am I to begrudge a neighbour water for his cattle in weather like this?’

Rudd said, ‘Well, it’s your concern I suppose, but I doubt if he’d do the same for you!’, and they rode on down the slope and through the fir copse that shaded the freshly whitewashed buildings of the Derwent farm, Rudd saying that Paul was not to expect forelock-pulling from Derwent, who was anxious to become a freeholder and probably had the means to purchase his land if a new owner was willing to sell it.

‘He’s a cagey fellow, with a poor wisp of a second wife,’ he told Craddock. ‘Frankly, I’ve never liked him much but both he and his son Hugh are first-class farmers, and the two daughters are the leading lights of the local hunt. One’s a very fetching girl but the other looks like a horse. They’ll all be civil to you when I tell him why you’re here, but don’t be fooled by the Derwents. They’re like the Codsalls; money and land are the only things they care about and after that, Independence Day!’

Paul’s reception at High Coombe was much as Rudd had predicted, both father and children making a show of hospitality and the faded Mrs Derwent bringing out glasses of sherry and some appetising little pikelets on a large silver tray.

The house was well furnished, the stock in good condition and the farm buildings in repair. Paul was particularly impressed by the spotlessly clean stables where Rose, the daughter with a face like a horse, showed him a magnificent four-year-old gelding she intended hunting next season. Rose cared for nothing but horses but her sister Claire showed great solicitude when Rudd told her that Paul had been wounded in action. She was extraordinarily pretty, Craddock decided, with gold hair piled high on a small head, dark blue eyes and an undeniably kissable mouth. She pretended to scold Rudd for encouraging a convalescent man with a leg wound to undertake such a long ride on a hot day, and when she took Paul’s glass to refill it her long fingers caressed his but in the nicest possible way. Craddock, somewhat to his surprise, found he was able to relax at High Coombe, notwithstanding Derwent’s dourness. The yard and enclosures were pleasant places in which to linger after the seediness of the Potter farm, and there were no children to embarrass him with leading questions about Kruger and the war. They resisted an invitation to stay for lunch, however, and pressed on under a blazing midday sun, breasting the northern spur of the ridge and entering the blessed coolness of Shallowford Woods.

Craddock at once decided that this was the most enchanting part of the estate, a great belt of old timber rising from a jungle of undergrowth that covered the entire south-eastern section of the estate, two miles across and about a mile deep, with a dip in the middle filled by a shallow mere. He had not noticed the lake on the map Rudd had shown him before they set out and thus came upon it by surprise, an oval of reed-fringed water enclosed by oaks and beeches, some of which must have been centuries old. Waterlilies floated here and a tiny islet, half-way across, was the haunt of wild duck and moorhen, who took to the reeds as soon as the horses emerged from the trees. Paul saw that there was a building of mock oriental design on the islet and Rudd told him it was known as ‘The Pagoda’ and had been built, half a century ago, by Amyas Lovell, father of the late baronet. Amyas, Rudd said, had been wounded in the head campaigning in Lower Burma and had been very eccentric towards the end of his life. The pagoda was supposed to be a miniature replica of a temple in Mandalay, and the old soldier had been in the habit of punting himself across the lake and painting atrocious water-colours from the pagoda steps.

They rode on through the murmurous woods, Rudd making estimates of the value of the timber, Paul telling himself that if ever he owned Shallowford he would prefer to sell Derwent his farm rather than fell any of the trees. Some of the beeches rose to a height of over a hundred feet and on the western edge of the wood, where they towered above younger trees, they had been planted according to plan for they were evenly spaced along the rides.

They emerged into glaring sunshine again east of the steeper and far less dense Hermitage Wood that rose behind the house. Paul could now see the back view of the manor lying in the little valley as they crossed rough ground heading for Hermitage Farm, which lay in open country between the curve of the Sorrel and the main road they had crossed the previous afternoon.

‘You’ll like Arthur and young Henry Pitts,’ Rudd told Paul, ‘they’re a genial, hardworking pair and I don’t ever recall having had a dispute with them all the twenty years I’ve been here. Although Arthur is no more than my age his father and grandfather farmed here before him and his father, Old Gaffer Pitts, is still living, although he’s got Parkinson’s disease, poor old chap, and now sits mumbling in the chimney corner. He can remember the harvest failures of the ’forties, and riots over the Corn Laws away in Whinmouth and Paxtonbury. He was in the militia at the time and broke heads on behalf of the Lovells, but his son and grandson are very easy-going and we’ll stop off there for a bite of lunch, it you’ve room for it after all those pikelets Claire Derwent pressed on you. That girl is about desperate for a husband, Mr Craddock! I daresay you noticed she made a dead set at you. What did you think of her? More fetching than the little dark ghost you disturbed in the nursery last night?’

Paul smiled but said nothing, determined to give the agent no opening in this particular field but as they urged their horses into a trot at the top of Hermitage he reflected that the Sorrel Valley seemed very well endowed with pretty girls, for he had encountered six in a single morning’s ride and any one of them would have stood out in a crowd among the overdressed young women he had noticed in London. Musing on them as they jogged down the track he made comparisons, measuring the aloof appeal of Grace Lovell with the pink and white prettiness of Claire Derwent and the shy charms of the Willoughby girl, now courted by young Will Codsall. He recalled also the frankly sensual appeal of the three Potter girls and it came into his mind that they had the generous proportions of the Hottentot prostitute from whom he had fled in Capetown but looked infinitely more wholesome. Then he was required to face yet another series of introductions, this time to Arthur Pitts and his wife Martha, their son Henry, and Pitts’ old father, The Gaffer. He took to this family at once, for there was a lack of ceremony about Hermitage that had been absent elsewhere, or perhaps it only appeared so, because Rudd was on more friendly terms with the Pitts than with the other tenants and he and Arthur began talking of the drought and the harvest, while Paul was faced with vast helpings of ham and tongue and mountains of green salad, served with a stone jug of potent, home-brewed cider.