She half turned away. He followed her.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘The very intensity of feeling I have for you breeds a contrary fever that no assurances – no ordinary assurances, that is – can bring to intermittence. Do not cry . . .’
‘How can I help it!’ she flared at him. ‘For months – and more months – your bitter, vile unkindness – your coldness towards me and towards your son—’
‘Will cease,’ he said, deep emotion still gripping him, swamping his natural caution. ‘From now. From tonight. It’s not too late. After this we can begin again.’
‘Tonight,’ she said scornfully, ‘perhaps you feel this tonight! But what of – of tomorrow and the next day? It will start over afresh. I cannot – I will not go on! . . .’
‘Nor I. It shall be. I promise, Elizabeth, listen to me. Do not cry—’
She waved away his handkerchief and wiped her streaming eyes on the sleeve of her nightgown. She went back to the dressing table, picked up the brush in her agitation, set it down.
‘I do not want to leave you,’ she said. ‘Truly I do not. Everything I said when we were married holds good today. More so. But I will leave you, George. I swear I will, if this ever—’
‘You shall not. Because I shall not be like this again.’ Again he had followed her and, taking a risk, he kissed her head; but she did not shrink away.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I have sworn on oath! One can go no further than that. So you swear on oath! Not ever to mention, to bring up, to harbour thoughts, evil wicked suspicions—’
‘I swear it,’ George said, taking the bible from her. The emotion was still carrying him along. He had never before in his life been so stirred. Tomorrow, in spite of the oath he was about to take, and true to her predictions, he would think again. But never perhaps quite in the same way. He must not, could not, for it had been a near thing. So Valentine, after all . . . He was convinced by her oath. With her quiet but steady religious beliefs, it was inconceivable that even to save her marriage she should imperil her soul by lying on the bible. So emotion caught him both ways. The nearness of the loss and the enormity of the gain. His own eyes were moist and he tried to speak but his throat closed up and he could not.
She leaned against him and he put his arms round her and kissed her.
Chapter Ten
I
As the shadows of doom lengthened round England, so the shadows of the early summer shortened and the sun climbed high. New fleet mutinies had broken out, far worse than the first, many ships imprisoned their officers and most flew the red flag; an English revolution similar to the French was beginning, while a Dutch fleet with 30,000 troops gathered in the Texel preparing to invade, even the Guards were thought to be on the brink of seizing the Tower and the Mint.
And the weather set fair – perfect invasion weather. And everyday life went on as usual: farmers tended their animals and their crops; miners dug their ore; people clattered over the cobbles to do their shopping, buying ever less for ever more; ladies complained of the unwonted heat; there was a shortage of water in country districts; the sea lapped at the iron coast, docile and scarcely raising a shiver of spray; fishermen barked their nets and prepared for the pilchard season. Sawle feast would soon be due, and in spite of war threats there was to be the usual procession, the races, the athletic contests; Tholly Tregirls was organizing some wrestling matches. Jeremy Poldark caught the measles at last and gave it to his sister, but they both suffered mild attacks and there were no complications. Dwight Enys was looking recovered in health, but, just to make a change, Caroline was not well. Demelza hoped it was not frustration.
Ross’s frustrations, though of a different kind, continued. It was no pleasure, he said to Demelza, to command a company of slackers. Yet if he left the Volunteers and joined the Fencibles he could be moved anywhere in England at a moment’s notice, leaving not only his mine and his business concerns but his wife and children unguarded. If the French or the Dutch or the Spanish arrived they would be as likely to choose this coast as any other, and he would prefer to be on hand to receive them.
If he had to leave Cornwall, then better return to the army proper. At the moment, with half the navy in revolt, the army was suddenly finding itself popular.
‘It would not be popular with me,’ was all Demelza said. ‘You have not yet been back two years safe from your last adventure.’
So summer. The Cornish sea settles into an egg-shell blue when the weather is warm and fair and likely to remain so. None of that brilliant cobalt which comes when the north-west wind is picking up, nor the transparent lacy green of the easterly breezes. Now there was no breeze, for several days no breeze at all, as if the peninsula were a three-decker, becalmed, the air become warm as well as the sun. The bent trees crouched in their accustomed postures, flinching from a task-master who had suddenly gone. Grasses were still, smells grew stronger, smoke rose in complacent spirals.
A day in June after Ross had left for Falmouth – he was seeing military leaders and spending the night with Verity – Demelza took the children to a pool on the edge of the sea near Damsel Point, and they all bathed in its cool bottle-green depths and then fished for shrimps and other exciting creatures that darted in and out among the seaweed and the sea anemones.
Depths, of course, was hardly the word. As a child Demelza had seen nothing of the sea except at a distance, and so had never learned to swim. Ross would have taught her long before this except that the constant surf on Hendrawna Beach made it almost impossible to try. So her pool was shallow, yet deep enough for Jeremy to swim in and shallow enough for Clowance to avoid total submersion. And she went briefly into a deeper pool herself nearby and managed to her satisfaction to make the other side without drowning.
It was still early, scarcely ten o’clock, when they returned to the house glowing and laughing. A few wanton clouds with vaporous edges had formed about the sky but one knew better than to take them seriously; they would soon be sucked up into the general heat. The two children had run shouting indoors; not content with a morning dip they were now going with two of the Martin children and two Scobles, in the charge of Ena Daniel, down to the beach to built a great sand wall against the incoming tide. Demelza had carried a basket chair into the shade of the old lilac tree beside the front door and was combing out the tangles in her damp hair when she saw two horsemen riding down the valley.
With instant recognition, which seemed to come as much from instinct as from eyesight, she got up, flew indoors and changed into a casual but seemly green linen frock from the loose twill dressing-gown she had been in, and she was down in the parlour rapidly straightening and tidying when Jane came in to say a gentleman had called.
Hugh Armitage with a groom. Hugh in a light grey long-tailed riding coat and black breeches and riding boots. His stock was loose-tied and he wore no waistcoat. He seemed older and less good-looking. But then he smiled and bent to kiss her hand, and she knew his attraction was unchanged.
‘Demelza! How fortunate to find you at home. And what joy to see you again! Ross is here?’
‘Not – just at the moment. Tis a surprise to have you call! I didn’t know . . .’
‘I’ve been at Tregothnan only since Monday. I came over at the first opportunity.’
‘You are on leave?’
‘Well – in a manner, yes . . . How are you? How have you been keeping?’
‘We’re all brave, thank you . . .’ They looked at each other uncertainly. ‘Please sit down. You’ll take something?’
‘Not at the moment, thank you. I am – at this moment I need no sort of refreshment.’
‘Then – then your man? Perhaps some beer or lemonade?’
‘I’m sure he’ll like that; but there’s no hurry.’ He waited until she had seated herself and then took a seat on the edge of a chair. Although he was bronzed, she thought he did not look well. Or perhaps it was just that his eyes were troubled when they looked at her.
‘How are your u
ncle and aunt?’
‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘I forget my manners. Indeed when I see you I forget everything. They send their warmest good thoughts. My aunt was coming with me today, with both children, intent on asking you to fulfil your undertaking; but John-Evelyn – that’s the younger – has a touch of summer fever and Mrs Gower did not feel she could safely bring him out. I should, I know, myself have delayed a day or two, but the weather at the moment is so fair and one fears to lose it.’
‘Ross has only been gone a couple of hours; he’ll be sorry to have missed you . . . Our undertaking? What is that?’
‘He invited us – you both invited us – to ride over one day this summer and see the seals.’
‘Oh?’ Demelza smiled. ‘Dear life, I thought you meant that. What a pity!’
‘When will he be back?’
‘He is – perhaps not until nightfall. I’m not sure.’ She did not want Ross to be thought of as too far away.
‘Perhaps another time then. But it’s such a refreshment to see you – all my most vivid memories revived and renewed. It’s like visiting a green oasis in a barren desert.’
‘In deserts do they not have things called – what is it – mirages?’
‘Do not poke fun at me,’ he said. ‘Not just at first. Not until I have got used to looking at you again.’
His reply affected her. She wrinkled an eyebrow and said ruefully: ‘Is not fun like a curtain one draws over other feelings? Of course I’m glad to see you too, Hugh. But it’s a summer day and more fitting to be gay than romantic. Shouldn’t we sit outside and talk in the cool for a while? Then you can send your poor groom round to the stables and he can unsaddle and rest and be fresher for the return.’
So they went out, he a trifle clumsily as if striving with a stiffness of the body; and they fetched another chair and she a fan and Jane brought them cool orangeade from the still-room; and pleasant conversation continued for a while.
His leave from the navy was indefinite, he said, and one did not know quite how long it would extend. He told her of his service, and the one brief but bloody fight he had been engaged in, lasting a solitary hour out of all his nine months at sea. Thank God, it looked as if the mutinies at the Nore and Plymouth and elsewhere were over. After days when the fate of the country hung in the balance, one ship after another had lowered the red flag and allowed its officers to take command again. The ringleaders were arrested and would be duly tried. Many of the grievances would be met.
‘I wholly agree with the complaints that were made,’ said Armitage; ‘the navy is grossly neglected and disgracefully treated at all times; many of its enactions are centuries out of date. But as for these Nore scoundrels, I’d gladly string them up from my own yard-arm.’
‘You sound very severe,’ Demelza said.
‘War is a severe thing, if I may so put it. We’re fighting for our very lives, and I do not know how we may prevail. The country seems to have lost faith in itself, to be no longer willing to fight for the principles in which it used to believe. As a nation we are slothful or altogether asleep.’ He paused and his face relaxed. ‘But why do I trouble you with such thoughts? Only because I believe you to be too intelligent to be content with idle chatter. Tell me more of your own doings since last we met.’
‘That would be idle chatter.’
‘Well, I am happy to listen to anything you have to say. Sitting here I am happy anyhow.’
She began to speak of one or two things, but not in her usual fluent style. Usually talk at any level came easy to her, but not now, and she was glad to break off at the sound of screams of laughter and childish voices behind the house.
‘It’s my children and some of their friends,’ she explained, ‘they’re going off to build a great wall of sand against the tide.’
‘You were going with them?’
‘No, no. They have someone to look for them. I took them down to a pool for a swim earlier.’
He had risen and was screwing up his eyes, peering towards the beach. ‘The tide is flowing then?’
‘Yes. It will be full soon after midday. But it’s not a high tide. The highest tides here are always about five in the afternoon.’
There was silence for a while. She watched a bee feeding itself on a lilac flower. It crawled on heavy drunken legs from one stamen to another like a fat soldier burdened with too much loot. The flowers were just past their best but the scent was heavy on the air.
He said: ‘Could we not go today?’
II
Looking back, she remembered quite well the somewhat disorganized defences she put up against his request. Because her brain was impeded by unexpected emotion it was not quick enough to know that no defence at all was needed to such a suggestion – a plain polite refusal would do. Instead she made a number of excuses, each of which sounded lamer than the last in her own ears, and in the end, confronted with his tentative solutions to her excuses, she found herself saying: ‘Well, I suppose we could.’
On their way down Nampara Cove, with the emaciated stream whispering a thin treble tune beside them, and the tall groom solemnly carrying oars and rowlocks, she wondered whether it was indeed unseemly of her to have agreed to his suggestion. The behaviour of the aristocracy was something she was still not wholly familiar with. Ross might not like it when he knew. Nobody else mattered. But what harm could there be? Even without the big servant, the seals would be chaperone enough.
‘Why is the water in the stream so red?’ Hugh asked.
‘It’s the tin washings from the mine.’
But when they got to the little shingly beach and pulled the dinghy out of the cave and dragged it down to the sea she saw that at least the groom was not to be a chaperone.
‘We shall be some time?’
‘Oh – perhaps an hour. One cannot always be sure. There may be none about.’
‘Well, stay here, Mason. I shall need your help to pull the boat up again.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Oh, I can do that,’ Demelza said. ‘I have pulled this up myself before now.’
Hugh said: ‘Mason might just as well stay here as at the house.’
‘Should he not come with us and row?’
‘No – if you’ll permit it, I’ll row myself.’
She hesitated.
He said: ‘It’s such a rare pleasure to talk to you that I should like the privilege of privacy.’
‘Oh, very well.’
Used to clambering into a boat with bare feet and wet to the knees, she found a mild amusement in being handed into the dinghy by the two men as if she were porcelain. She sat in the stern and tied a green silk scarf about her hair as they were pushed off.
The sea danced little measures around them in the sunshine. Hugh had taken off his long coat and rowed in his shirtsleeves, his forearms pale with a freckling of dark hair along the bone. She had thought when she saw him first at Tehidy that he was a hawk-faced man, but the sharpness of his features resembled something less predatory; the fine bones were too fine, the shape of the face aristocratic rather than aggressive. He wore no hat in the boat and his hair was tied with a ribbon at the back.
The dinghy had a mast and a small sail which could be hoisted, but the only air today was that created by their passage through the water. Hugh was soon sweating, and even Demelza, though so scantily clad, was hot.
She said: ‘Let me row a while.’
‘What?’ He smiled. ‘I couldn’t permit it.’
‘I can row very well.’
‘It would be unseemly to try.’
‘Then row easy. It is no more than a mile.’
He slowed and allowed his oars to keep way on the boat without putting much effort into it. They made progression westwards in the direction of Sawle, keeping not more than a hundred yards from the towering cliffs. Here and there little beaches showed sandy lips in coves unreachable except by sea. There were no boats about. Sawle fishermen, amateur and professional, always tended to find more prof
it in the waters beyond Trevaunance.
Hugh stopped and put an arm across his brow. ‘I am happy that you’ve come with me. Wasn’t it Dryden who said: “Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.”’
‘Well, the weather may not last.’
‘It’s not the weather, my dear Demelza. There are other things I have to say to you.’
‘I hope they are not things you should not say.’
‘They are things I do not wish to say. Believe me.’
She looked her surprise, and he smiled again, then twisted the oars in his hands, looking down at his palms. ‘Surprising what small practice one gets at rowing when one is an officer. I was a horny-handed boy, but it has worn off.’
‘What is it you are going to say to me?’
‘Sadly, I have to tell you that my leave from the navy is not indefinite. It is permanent. I have been discharged. Otherwise, of course, I should not be here. Shore leave in time of war is scanty indeed.’
‘Discharged?’
‘Well, not altogether as a mutineer. Ours was a happy ship. Captain Grant is of the mould of Collingwood and Nelson. But it’s mutiny of a sort . . . Or, at least, inefficiency.’
‘Inefficiency? You? How could that be?’
‘Your incredulity warms my heart. Well, no, but it’s, as I say, a form of insubordination. My eyes will not behave. Once they refused to recognize a flag at two hundred yards – now they’ll not do it at fifty. Like any rebellious matelot, they will not respond to discipline.’
She stared at him. ‘Hugh, I’m that sorry . . . But what are you trying to say?’
He began to row again. ‘I’m saying I can see the land from here – just. Tell me how we go.’
Demelza continued to stare at him in silence. Her hand had been over the side, and she drew it in and let the drops fall on the seat beside her.
‘But it was to be better! You said that when we first met.’
‘It was to be better but instead it is to be worse. I have seen two special doctors in London, one a naval surgeon, the other private. They agree that nothing can be done.’
The Four Swans Page 34
