Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  It was easier to assess its age and character than had been possible by studying the picture in the Illustrated London News; Craddock saw at once that it was really two houses, of widely separated periods. The centre block, notwithstanding its portico and Doric columns, was a stone Tudor farmhouse, with two squarish windows set low in the wall. The massive front door was the kind of entrance suggested by the key and although at first sight the two styles represented in the frontage seemed incongruous yet they seemed to have learned to tolerate one another over the years, the marriage having been accomplished by a mantle of creeper running wild along the whole front of the building. The main windows, opening on to the terrace, looked as if they gave upon spacious rooms and the terrace itself was unpretentious, divided in half by the semi-circular approach fronting the pillars, and bounded by a low stone wall spaced with stone cranes or herons.

  Craddock stood looking up at it for several minutes, watching the west windows turn ruby in the sun and as he stared, eyes half closed against the sun, the silent building began to stir with life, so that he saw it as an ageing and once beautiful woman, awaiting the return of sons who had marched away centuries since and been swallowed up in a forgotten war. There was patience here, patience and a kind of desperate dignity, as though all hope of their return had never been abandoned, and that one day all the windows would glow with candles. Craddock tried to relate this dignity and repose with the little that Rudd had told him of the family who had lived here for a century or more but he found this very difficult, for somehow the house did not strike him as morose, merely forsaken and resigned. Yet about the middle section of it, the oldest, Elizabethan block, vitality lingered, the older tenants still seeming to exert more influence than the Lovells and this conviction was so real that Craddock would not have been surprised if, as he watched, lights had flickered in that part of the house leaving each wing dark and lifeless.

  He climbed the stone steps and wrestled with the giant key, the lock turning more easily than he had anticipated, and the great door swung back with a sound like an old man’s cough. He left the door open, for it was dim in the slate-slabbed hall and here he saw that the early-Victorian architect’s work on the interior had been more bold than outside, for beyond the great empty fireplace a stair ran up in a well-contrived curve and each step was so broad and shallow that it promised an easy ascent to those short of wind. There was not much furniture in the hall and what there was was shrouded in green dust-sheets. Some of the portraits had lot numbers attached to them and Craddock, recalling the hard faces of Sir George and younger son, guessed they were portraits of Lovells from 1806 onwards; they had the same bleakness of eye and stiff formality of dress that he had noted in the photographs in the magazine.

  He glanced in two reception-rooms, one on each side of the hall, finding them half-full of shrouded furniture, most of which was lotted, but here and there was a piece labelled with an ‘R’. The reserved pieces, he noticed, were mostly heavy oak or draperies, like the big refectory table and the faded curtains looped with silk ropes as thick as cables. He went back into the hall and down the stone passage leading to the kitchens but the light here was bad so he returned and ascended the stairs, hesitating at the top where there was a kind of minstrel gallery, trying to decide whether to take the left or the right-hand corridor.

  He was standing here when he heard the sound of a footfall on a wooden floor, and hearing it repeated identified the sound of someone walking in one of the rooms in the west wing. He was on the point of retracing his steps, and locking the door behind him, when he remembered that he was as authorised to be here as anyone else, so he walked quietly in the direction of the sounds until he came to the door at the very end of the corridor. It was slightly ajar but when he stopped and listened again the sounds had ceased, so after a preliminary cough he walked into what had obviously been a nursery, for there were toys strewn about, including a large dappled rocking-horse and over in the corner a vast three-fold children’s scrap screen of the kind that every upper-class nursery possessed. Then, over by the tall window, where the square panes had turned to stained glass in the setting sun, he saw the girl.

  Astonishment made him the trespasser. He stood just inside the door gaping, and she stared back, an instinctive defiance stemming from anger rather than alarm. She was, Craddock decided on the spot, the most exciting woman he had ever seen. Not in illustrated books, nor in the course of his visits to picture galleries or in his dreams, did he recall having seen anyone who made such an immediate impact upon his senses. She was wearing a light blue riding habit, hitched at one side, a white silk blouse frilled at the throat to give the impression of a stock and was bareheaded, her dark hair gathered in a broad grey ribbon. Her eyes matched her costume exactly, her nose was short and straight and her small but very resolute chin had a large dimple an inch below a small, red mouth. But what impressed him more than her good features or bearing, was the texture of her skin, which was pale and waxlike, very firm and entirely without blemish. Her hair, removed from the strong rays of ruby light that flooded the windows, would have seemed jet black, giving the taut skin of her cheeks and forehead an almost phosphorescent glow. She was not much above five feet in height but the cut of her habit, enclosing a small waist and emphasising the upward sweep of her breasts and downsweep of her sturdy thighs, added a fictitious inch or so to her figure.

  He stood staring at her and she stared back, one hand gripping the curtain, the other holding a riding switch, and perhaps thirty seconds passed before she said, sharply: ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ The voice betrayed no trace of fear, or even surprise, only a leashed and rather daunting anger.

  He said, uncertainly, ‘My name is Craddock, Paul Craddock. I’m looking over the house. Mr Rudd, the agent, gave me the key,’ and he held it up as though it had been his ticket of admission and she was the janitor. She considered him and the key for a moment but her expression did not relent. She still glowered at him, as though he had been a strange male who had blundered into her bedroom, so he tried again, this time a little hoarsely, for his throat was dry and his heart was pounding.

  ‘I arrived this afternoon, Rudd and I rode over from the station.’

  ‘Why?’

  She spat the word at him so sharply that it converted his uncertainty into indignation.

  ‘Why not? My father’s trustee has an option on the estate!’

  Her expression softened and there was curiosity in the eyes.

  ‘Does he intend buying the place? Buying the estate as a whole?’

  ‘He might,’ Paul said, ‘and on my behalf but it’s far from settled yet.’ Then, tentatively, ‘Do you live here? Rudd said the house had been empty for some time.’

  Her eyes left him for the first time since he had entered the room. She glanced first at the bare floor, then out of the window.

  ‘No,’ she said, less aggressively, ‘I don’t live here. I used to come here a great deal; some time ago, before … before the war!’

  Her reluctance to speak the word gave him a clue. He said, lightly, ‘Ah, you knew the Lovells then?’

  ‘Of course!’, and that seemed to be all the information she was prepared to give for suddenly she seemed to slump a little, as though bored with the conversation. After a pause, however, she went on, ‘I must go now, it’ll be dusk before I’m home. I’ve got a horse in the yard and four miles to ride. I’m sorry I startled you, I should have asked Rudd for the key. I only came here to look at some furniture.’ Then, in a few long strides, she was past him and before he could think of an excuse to detain her she was half-way along the passage, her high-heeled riding boots clacking on the bare boards. A door banged somewhere behind the kitchens and after that there was silence, a slightly eerie silence he thought, as though she had been a ghost and he had imagined the encounter.

  He crossed to the window asking himself impatiently why a chance meeting with a pretty girl
in an empty house should disturb him, both emotionally and physically. She was obviously here without authority and had probably decided to bluff. He wondered briefly how she had managed to unlock the back door and why she should have seemed so resentful of him. She had, he decided, been musing and had made her way to this particular room for that purpose. Her pose over there by the window had betrayed as much and his sudden appearance breaking into her reflections, had startled her, so that, in a sense, her anger had been counterfeit. He remained standing where she had stood, wondering if she would circle the west wing and appear at the crest of the drive, but when he heard or saw something of her he fell to thinking about women in general and his relations with them in the past.

  His experience with women had been limited but although technically still a virgin he was not altogether innocent. There had been a very forward fourteen-year-old called Cherry, who had lived in an adjoining house in Croydon, when he came home for school holidays and Cherry had succeeded in bewitching but ultimately terrifying him, for one day when they were larking about in the stable behind her house, she had hinted at the mysterious differences between the sexes and when, blushing, he had encouraged her to elaborate, she had promptly hoisted her skirt and pulled down her long cotton drawers, whereupon he had fled as though the Devil was after him and had never sought her company again, although he watched her closely in church on successive Sundays, expecting any moment to see forked lightning descend on her in the middle of ‘For all the Saints’. Then there had been a little clumsy cuddling at Christmas parties, and after that a flaxen-haired girl called Daphne whom he had mooned over as an adolescent and had thought of a good deal in the Transvaal but now he had almost forgotten what Daphne looked like and had not recalled her name until now. Finally there had been an abortive foray across the frontier in the company of a self-assured, toothy officer, called Prestcott-Smythe, the two having ventured into a brothel at Capetown, where Paul spent a few embarrassing moments with a Hottentot whore. The experience was something he would have preferred to forget and indeed, almost had forgotten save for the girl’s mousey smell and repellent gestures. After that the Veldt and the exclusive company of men until he was wounded, and in the hospital any attempts to establish extra-professional relationships with volunteer nurses had been nipped in the bud by the Countess who regarded every officer as her personal prerogative. So he stood thinking, glancing round the musty nursery and wondering what compulsive memories had directed the girl here when she had every reason to suppose that the house would be empty. The rocking horse, and the faded scarp screen offered no answer and apart from the few scraps of peeling wallpaper there was little else in the room. Then, unexpectedly, he saw her again, riding a neat bay round the south-western corner of the house below the window and as he watched she flicked the horse into a slow canter at the head of the drive and they passed out of sight under the avenue of chestnuts. He saw a swift flash of blue as she passed the gate pillars and then nothing more, so that excitement ebbed from the day and he made his way down the shallow stairs, letting himself out and carefully re-locking the door.

  Dusk was falling outside and a blue mist lay under the woods enclosing the house from the back. The front windows, were blank and there was no life in the house, not even the original block beyond the pillars. He noticed also that paint and plaster were peeling from parts of the façade and that the old building now looked more like a near-ruin than a dignified woman awaiting the return of dead men. Yet the vivid memory of the girl’s eyes and pale, waxlike skin remained as he made his way back to the lodge and as soon as he had settled over a toddy with Rudd he told the agent of his encounter, expecting surprise and possibly indignation at a trespass but Rudd only shrugged when he described the girl and her curiously aggressive reception.

  ‘That’ll be Grace Lovell,’ he said, carelessly, and when Paul asked if she was a granddaughter of the old Squire Rudd chuckled.

  ‘By no means,’ he said, ‘simply a family hanger-on of a kind, although perhaps that’s a bit unfair on the girl. Her father, Captain Bruce Lovell, is the family ne’er-do-well and even he is only a cousin. He took one of the Lovell houses at Coombe Bay after his retirement from the Gunners and was quite a charge on them all until he remarried. His wife was a Voysey, very wealthy family from Derbyshire I understand. But in marrying her Bruce bit off more than he could chew, or so I’m told. The girl’s been very troublesome too. She was to have married Ralph, the younger son of the old man, but Kruger put paid to that of course.’

  As always when he discussed the Lovells Rudd’s manner hardened but somewhere at the back of Paul’s mind a shutter opened and the girl’s display of anger at being discovered in the empty house began to make sense.

  ‘Was it a family match or were they fond of one another?’ he asked but at that the agent’s casualness left him and he looked at Paul with a kind of exasperation.

  ‘Look here, if you’ve been smitten by Grace Lovell my advice is forget her. She’s tarred with the same old brush, an indiscipline that can show itself in obstinacy, bloodymindedness, or a sort of madness. There’s congenital rottenness in that family somewhere along the line. Sometimes I used to dismiss it as arrogance coming from always having had too much money, but other times … well, I’m not going to bore you with more confessions. They’re all dead now, at least, the three I had to do with are, and I’m done with them, thank God, so take another glass before you go to bed and tell me what you thought of the house up yonder.’

  They talked for a spell of the fabric of the building and Rudd told him something of its growth from a manor farmhouse, older by far than any other farm on the estate, to its present unmanageable size. The main changes were made in the early eighteen-twenties, on the proceeds of prize-money won by the first Lovell’s brother, who had been lucky during the long war with France. Paul listened with assumed interest but his mind was not much exercised by Rudd’s estimates of how much it would cost to put Shallowford and surrounding property in order after two decades of neglect. It was engaged in following a flash of blue beyond the ford and across country to the sea. ‘Smitten’ was the word the agent had used, and Paul was regretting now that he had betrayed interest in the girl. Rudd, however, interpreted his polite affirmatives as a desire for bed and presently arose, knocking out his pipe.

  ‘We’ll do the round tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you the worst part first, over in the Coombe, and then we’ll look for something better at Hermitage and Four Winds in the west. Good night to you, Mr Craddock. There’s a candle on the hall tray.’

  He went up and Paul soon followed but it was a long time before he slept. His wound ached from the long ride and the owls in Hermitage Wood were hunting and making a great deal of noise about it. Soon the moon rose, flooding the tiny chamber with a silver light, and at last Craddock slept, most of his doubts unresolved.

  II

  Nobody could have said with certainty how the Potters of Low Coombe received warning of The Prospect’s visit. They were usually the first to get news, even of insignificant events and Smut Potter, the poacher, who saw Craddock’s arrival at the station probably passed the word around. The Potters lived with a communal ear to the ground and could hear and interpret every rustle of rumour between the sea and the far side of the moor beyond the railway line. The green basin they occupied under the wooded, sandstone bluff suggested a gypsy encampment but in place of caravans were ramshackle buildings centred on a ruinous cob farmhouse and life revolved around the pump which, at this time of year, was hidden by docks, chickweed and shoulder-high nettles. A long clothes-line stretched from the pump to the nearest oak and along it, on any fine day, hung an astonishing array of threadbare garments, all the way down from Old Tamer’s long woollen pants to the pinafore of Hazel, the youngest of the Potters, a half-witted nine-year-old, as wild as any animal in the woods.

  Nobody, not even Tamer himself or his brown-faced, handsome wife Meg, could give the full streng
th of the clan at any given time. Potter boys and Potter girls were always coming or going and as often as not some of Meg’s Romany kinsfolk were encamped in the Coombe, although, under Sir George, this had been forbidden upon penalty of eviction, for it gave every local poacher an alibi. Tamer and his wife had been living at Low Coombe for as long as most Valley folk could remember, sometimes farming the ninety-odd acres between the sea and Edwin Willoughby’s farm, higher up the Coombe, but subsisting in the main upon the driblets of money the children brought in, Sam, the eldest boy, from the sale of firewood, Smut, the second boy, from poaching and the three elder girls from what they earned as part-time domestics and the occasional sale of their lusty, unwashed bodies. But for all their improvidence the Potters were a happy-go-lucky brood, each with their father’s eye for a quick profit and their mother’s resilience, nurtured by the systematic persecution of Romanies. They were ragged, dirty, thieving and irrepressible but they seldom went short of food and not one of them had ever been laid aside by a day’s illness. Peasant cunning on the part of Tamer, allied to possession of the Evil Eye on the part of his wife, may have contributed to their survival, for although they were despised and avoided by respectable families like the Codsalls, the Pitts and the Derwents, and treated with tolerance by their immediate neighbours, the Willoughbys, few in the Sorrel Valley cared to incur the hostility of the men, or the witchcraft of Meg, who was credited with the power to distribute blessings or blights, according to her inclination.

  The scene in Low Coombe that morning was akin to the scurry in a Highland glen after word had arrived that redcoats were arriving to search for arms and Jacobites. At first there was a wave of panic, showing itself in wildly disordered attempts to clear away litter, strip the clothes-line and shore up tottering walls but the Potters could never engage in sustained activity and after half-an-hour’s running here and there Old Tamer called a conference round the pump, pointing out that perhaps, in the circumstances, it would be more profitable to advertise extreme poverty, rather than create an impression that the Potters were sober, industrious farmers. Rudd, the agent, would never be taken in by a last-minute­ spit-and-polish whereas the new squire (the Potters, one and all, already thought of Paul as such) should be given no excuse for thinking the family was self-sufficient and could survive without a reduction of rent and perhaps a loan of draught animals from the Home Farm.