It was a dull, windless afternoon when she emerged on to open ground from the high-banked lane that ran down to the woods. There was rain about but it fell on the Valley as mist, filling the hollows and blurring the landscape on the far side of the river. She rode at a slow walk, as though, by dallying, she still had leisure to change her mind but when the belt of mist had crossed the stream to idle at the base of the Bluff she was conscious of mounting excitement and almost admitted to herself that it was the prospect of being grossly flattered by a good-looking young man that made her feel so reckless. When she reached the outskirts of the Dell Wood, that clothed the western shoulder of the Bluff, she had renewed qualms of being spotted by one or other of the Potter tribe whose farm lay less than two hundred yards beyond the first trees, so she made a wide circuit to within fifty yards of the river road intending to skirt the garden of Mill Cottage and use a track that ran across the steepest part of the Bluff before trailing off into a gorse-grown section of the cliff, overlooking the battery. From here, she thought, she could look down into the copse without being seen and perhaps, even then, change her mind and ride on to High Coombe, as advertised.
She had reached a point where the cottage came within twenty yards of the road when she pulled hard on the bridle, seeing a figure suddenly emerge from the river mist and turn in at the wicket gate of the cottage. He was on foot and because the stiff latch of the gate engaged his attention he did not look over his shoulder and see her reined in between the high banks. There was no mistaking the long stride and short-peaked cap. The man entering Mill Cottage was her husband, who should, by now, have been more than half-way to Whinmouth to confront his enemies the timber pirates.
Her first reaction was extreme astonishment at seeing him there and she only just checked herself calling out. Then, like the crackle of Chinese rip-raps, came other responses, all painful and most of them outrageous, for the sight of him turning casually into the gate of Mill Cottage, as though he visited there alone and on foot every day of the week, set off a chain reaction in Claire’s already over-stimulated imagination, exhuming factors that her memory had recorded subconsciously over the last three months. There was his recent habit of walking rather than riding about the estate; his extreme reluctance to mention Ikey, or the trollop Ikey had married; his obstinate championship of the girl at the time of the wedding and his evasiveness to engage in any kind of truce-talk after the initial flare-up between them on the subject. All this, she reasoned, as her brain skipped from signpost to signpost, might or might not have significance but there was something else that presented itself as a particularly glaring piece of circumstantial evidence. There never had been a time since their marriage when he had failed to enjoy her as his bedfellow, not, that is, until recent weeks. In other spheres she had, at one time or another, had self-doubts but never in this respect for here was the thread they used to spin the pattern of their marriage, a mutual and deeply-rooted satisfaction in access to one another of the kind that Grace, as he had once told her, had proclaimed the true basis of marriage but had, for so many other reasons, been unable to achieve with him. Time and again over the last eight years she had exulted in her power to engage him at the level of an accomplished mistress rather than that of a workaday wife and while she had no yardstick but him to assess the vigour of men it had always seemed to her that his was exceptional. What pleased her even more was his boyish frankness regarding her power to stimulate him. She could look back on a girlhood and early womanhood when the topic of sexual adjustment between man and wife was taboo, not even discussed between mother and daughter. To her his approach had seemed not only healthy but immensely flattering. He had never used her without complimenting her, often in such wildly extravagant terms that she blushed in the secrecy of his embrace and as a lover he contrived to combine enormous gusto with a gentle reverence of her body. Sometimes she had not hesitated to exploit this when eager to win him over to her point of view yet, even here, he had knowingly submitted to exploitation, so that they had achieved a harmony she believed to be rare between two people. She was so conscious of this, and of her power to rouse him at will, that she often smiled at her own smugness but she had never ceased to value his need of her, hugging it to herself as the most precious acquisition of her life. It was because of this that the mere suspicion that her ascendancy was threatened frightened her as never before. To see him walking through that cottage gate, across the little garden and in at the back door without even knocking made her almost sick with rage and the alarm bell that buzzed most persistently in her head was not that he was clearly a regular visitor here but that he was prepared to lie about his visits.
She sat the horse without moving for five minutes or more while Snowdrop munched over the long grass growing out of the bank. She went over the evidence piece by piece, balancing one fact against another without troubling herself to seek alternative explanations. There could not, she decided, be any other explanation, for everybody in the Valley knew what the Potter girls had for sale. Their availability to any man with a shilling or two in his pocket was a byword for miles around and had been, ever since she had been a girl growing up a mile or so above the Dell. It followed that this girl, the half-witted Hazel, who was by far the prettiest was also, on account of her lack of wits, the most accessible for she would be unlikely to blab of her conquests. It was all, Claire decided, very much of a piece—his moodiness, his deliberate attempts to turn the conversation whenever Ikey’s name was mentioned, his obstinate advocacy of the idiotic alliance, and, above all, his currently tepid approach to her own person, for surely only a man who spent himself frequently with a strumpet could fail to respond to her invitations during the last week or so when she had, as she now realised, been seeking reassurance from him.
It was the thought of Lane-Phelps, waiting for her at this very moment in the copse under the Bluff, that changed her dismay to humiliation. The base inequality of the sexes stuck in her throat like a plum-stone, for here she was, feeling guilty and troubled about a mere kiss or two, while her husband was paying regular visits to a harlot whom he had married off to his own ward! The reflection braced her to gather up Snowdrop’s reins and half-wheel in the lane with the object of riding openly to her rendezvous with Aubrey and avenging herself on the spot but she did not proceed with this intention. Deep down, under the welter of indignation that boiled in her, was a pinpoint of Derwent commonsense and it told her that there was a chance, just a chance, that she might be wrong, or half-wrong, or misled in some way, so that she knew she would have to make certain before committing herself finally and absolutely.
She judged that almost ten minutes must have passed since she saw him enter the back door and he was not, as she knew better than anyone, a man likely to make a ritual of the business. By this time, no doubt, they were already upstairs and in bed. The prospect of actually confronting them was dramatic, providing she could go through with it, which she doubted, but perhaps this would not be necessary. All she had to do was to creep into the house and listen and after that events could take their course. She swung herself out of the saddle, knotted the bridle round a young ash, and taking advantage of the overgrown bank moved down the lane to the gate which, most fortunately, he had left ajar.
The mist proved a valuable ally. It had been thickening minute by minute and now the hollow in which the cottage stood was half-filled with the seeping cloud drifting in from the south-west. Looking over her shoulder she could no longer see Snowdrop, so, moving with great caution, she approached the door and laid a hand on the latch. As she did this she glanced through the tiny rear window of the building, her eye attracted by the flicker of the fire within and here she stopped, hearing the murmur of Paul’s voice rising and falling in a continuous rumble, as though he was reciting. He sounded so unlike a man passing a casual half-hour with a harlot that she hesitated and then, hardly knowing what she did, edged back from the porch, flattening herself against the cob wall and inching forwar
d until she could look directly into the big room, with its window facing the river and its hearth on her immediate right. What she saw made her gasp. All three of them were there, Paul, Hazel and the child, the latter on his mother’s lap with his fat legs dangling like great, pink sausages as Hazel listened attentively to Paul reading aloud from a letter. Claire watched in amazement. It was like looking in upon an animated scrapbook illustration, the tall, broad-shouldered man, still wearing his cap, his shoulder resting lightly on the mantelshelf and holding the letter in his hand, the young woman sitting in an old basket chair, an expression of rapt attention on her face, the child, disinterested but relaxed in the grip of his mother’s forearm, his legs clear of the floor. Claire could even hear a snatch or two of the letter . . . ‘thought of you when I saw the wind catch the poplar leaves and throw a handful of silver into the air’ . . . ‘hoping to come on leave’ . . . ‘heard your brother Smut had been promoted to corporal!’ . . . odd, inconsequential snippets that nonetheless made everything perfectly clear, so clear indeed that she could have smiled had she felt less ashamed at being here at all. She had been right about one thing, however. He obviously did come here regularly but for the purpose of reading Ikey’s letters that were obviously enclosed in his own and Claire suddenly remembered that Hazel Potter had never learned to read or write, despite all Mary Willoughby’s efforts to teach her the alphabet.
The long trailers of mist seemed to bore their way into Claire’s bones and she shivered so convulsively that she could remain still no longer and began to retreat along the wall towards the door, and into the weed-filled garden, moving backward step by step, as though from something terrifying. On reaching the open gate, she turned and ran through the mist to the spot where the grey was tethered; seconds later she was in the saddle and using her heels vigorously so that the horse broke into a trot and then a slow canter, swinging left into the sloping field at the head of the path and finally, still at a canter, down the broad sweep of meadow to where the Shallowford track ran down to the orchard.
It was not until Snowdrop had been stabled and Claire was sitting hunched over a smouldering library fire that she spared a thought for Aubrey Lane-Phelps, still waiting for her in the mist below the battery but it was no more than a fleeting thought. ‘Damn Lane-Phelps!’ she said, aloud, ‘he can go to France, Egypt or Timbuctoo for all I care! I shall squirm every time I think of him and maybe weep as well but not for the reasons he thinks!’ and she snatched up the poker and attacked the fire as though the smouldering logs had been responsible for bringing her within a hairsbreadth of reducing her well-ordered life to chaos.
V
He did not come in to tea and when she nerved herself to make an inquiry from Chivers she learned that he had returned home about three-thirty, collected the trap and gone to Whinmouth as scheduled. She knew then that he would not be home again until supper and deciding that she could not face him across the table went up to the bedroom telling Mrs Handcock that she had a headache and was retiring early. She did not attempt to undress but sat in her favourite chair over the coal fire, curtains drawn against the world.
She tried to read and failed and tried to think and failed. In the end she just sat and looked at the shifting coals, awaiting his step in the library below.
About nine Mrs Handcock tapped on the door and said a Mr Lane-Phelps was asking for her on that there telephone. Claire said, shortly, ‘Tell him I’m not available! Tell him that if he wants he can ring later, after Squire returns!’ and her contemplation of Aubrey’s reaction to this message was the one cheerful spot in an interminable evening. Soon after Mrs Handcock had gone she heard Paul come in and after a brief pause the chink of china, as his cold supper was set before him; she thought, ‘Do I go down or do I wait for him to come to bed? If Mrs Handcock has told him I’ve got a headache he’ll creep about for fear of disturbing me. Well, I could hardly be less disturbed and am likely to remain so unless I tell him everything now, before I weaken! I daresay it’s inviting disaster but I’m sick to death of watching us drift the way we’ve been drifting since Ikey came home! He’ll surely fly into a fearful rage and assume I’m going the same way as Grace but I can’t help it if he does for anything’s better than this. We had a good marriage, a wonderful marriage, and if we can’t mend it and put it back on the rails it won’t be for want of trying on my part!’ She decided to wait for him to come up and undressed, putting on a winter nightgown, for this was no time for ribbons. It was whilst rummaging in the cupboard for her nightgown that she saw some of Simon’s discarded riding kit, jodhpurs and jacket that he had outgrown put aside for the next jumble sale. There was a riding switch, a short brown cane that she picked up, recalling the story she had heard of the Bideford Goliath’s use of a stick on the Potter girls every time they tried to make a fool of him. She thought: ‘I wouldn’t blame him if he treated me like Cis and Vi Potter for I’m really no better for all my airs and graces!’ and the reflection made her more depressed than ever, for all her life she had regarded the Potter girls with a contempt not far removed from disgust.
He did not keep her waiting long. Soon she heard him call good night to Mrs Handcock, who usually drowsed by the kitchen fire until nearly midnight and then he came in, looking mildly surprised to find her sitting there and the lamps still burning.
‘I haven’t got a headache, Paul,’ she said at once, ‘but I came up early. I’ve got something important to say.’
He did not seem particularly surprised by this unusual greeting but for a moment looked almost amused and then straightened his face, kissed her lightly on the forehead, and said, ‘Well, you do look a bit off colour. Anything unpleasant happened?’
She said, with a deliberation that surprised her, ‘Yes, Paul, a great deal has happened and it is unpleasant but not nearly so bad as it might have been, or would still be if I made light of it.’
He sat down on the hard chair across the fireplace and shot out his long legs. He was still wearing his tall boots and breeches and he looked, she thought, a good deal more cheerful and relaxed than he had looked for some time.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘if it’s that important my news can wait,’ and she experienced a wild flutter of alarm and cried out, ‘You haven’t enlisted!’ at which he laughed louder than she had heard him laugh since before the war.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t enlisted, I doubt if they’d have me! It’s just that I’ve saved out timber, at least for the time being.’
‘I’m glad,’ she said, slowly, ‘and I expect you are!’ and then, as though restarting a race after a false start, ‘I’ve let you down rather badly, Paul! In two ways, different ways! I’ve been very unhappy about what’s been happening to us lately and I suppose that’s my only excuse, although it’s a very poor one.’
He still did not seem much concerned although his expression hardened a little. He said, ‘What the devil are you driving at? Come right out with it, it’s easier that way and I’m damned sure it isn’t half as bad as you think it is! How have you let me down?’
She said, flushing, ‘I’ve been having a very heavy flirtation with Aubrey Lane-Phelps, up at the camp. Only a flirtation on my honour, but . . . well, it might easily have led to something more serious if I hadn’t suddenly come to my senses this afternoon!’
‘Why especially this afternoon?’ he asked, so mildly that she was thrown off balance again and began to stammer, her cheeks flushing as bright as the core of the fire.
‘I . . . well . . . I followed you to Hazel Potter’s—Hazel Palfrey’s cottage! I saw you go in. I was coming down the lane on the grey.’
‘Yes, I know,’ he said, grinning, ‘I saw you and I wondered what you had in mind. Why didn’t you call?’
For a moment she was speechless and then, her colour receding somewhat, ‘You . . . you saw me?? You knew I was there while you were reading Ikey’s letter to her?’
‘Well no,’ he admit
ted, looking surprised in his turn, ‘I didn’t know that. I had it in mind you rode off in a huff as soon as you saw me. As a matter of fact that’s why I’ve never told you I always call there and read his letters. She wouldn’t make much of them herself. What induced you to peep in and then creep away?’
She had to plunge now for what had seemed too certain this afternoon now seemed not only grotesquely ridiculous but downright insulting. She went on: ‘Sitting here this evening I made up my mind to admit everything and here it is! I was certain you were calling there for . . . well, for the reason most men call on the Potter girls!’
If she wanted to astonish him she had succeeded at last. His jaw dropped and his heavy brows shot up more than an inch. Then, mercifully for both of them, his unpredictable sense of humour came storming up and he let out a bellow that might have been heard in the stable-yard on the far side of the house. ‘Great God!’ he said, once he had composed himself, ‘you thought that! But you dear silly idiot, how often have I got to tell you that Hazel hasn’t a thing in common with her sisters? Ikey’s wife? And him in the trenches? Why, Great Scott, even if I was so inclined she’d kill anybody who tried to make a fool of Ikey!’ Then, quite suddenly, he became serious again and went on, ‘What the devil is the matter with you, Claire? It can’t be just this nonsense with a cocky young masher like Lane-Phelps. I knew all about that, knew you were very flattered by his attentions anyway, but it didn’t worry me or not seriously! I suppose I was irritated to watch him buzzing round like a wasp over a jam-jar but since everybody is a little crazy these days I didn’t grudge you a bit of fun, so long as it remained fun!’
Post of Honour Page 15
