Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  Some goodwill had to be purchased, as when Paul took Rudd’s advice and gave Sam Potter the post of estate forester with a cottage at the far end of Shallowford Mere, Sam was grateful for both accommodation and post. He had lately married, and his wife Joannie was pregnant, and with winter coming on life promised to be bleak in the crowded family dell. Rudd reasoned that, with brother Sam drawing regular pay from the enemy’s purse, brother Smut’s poaching might be confined to robbing other people’s coverts, east and west of Shallowford. Paul also won over the dour Edward Derwent, by buying in a small cliff pasture on the extreme eastern border and incorporating it into the High Coombe domain without an increase of rent, but in any case his relations with the Derwent clan, as with the amiable Pitts family, at Hermitage, were fairly cordial from the very beginning. Rose Derwent found him a good groom and a sturdy cob for his trap and her pretty sister Claire gave him plenty of frank advice regarding his approaches to the women of the Valley. ‘You have to pay each and everyone of them the compliment of pretending they are equals of the men,’ she told him, when he came grumbling of Arabella Codsall’s importunities one day. ‘It’s a pure fiction, of course, except in Arabella’s case, but it’s Heads-I-win-Tails-You-Lose for you because the women are flattered and their menfolk regard your approach as proof that they have married wives with good sense!’ There and then Paul decided that Claire Derwent herself had more sense in her head than one could reasonably expect to find in a pretty girl of nineteen, but he was very careful not to discriminate between her and her sister Rose, for he soon discovered that Rose had a very warm heart, would go out of her way to help anyone and nursed no jealousy whatever in respect of her handsome sister.

  In the immediate area of the big house Mrs Handcock was his major-domo. Her immense weight did very little to reduce her mobility and she bustled breathlessly to and from her quarters in the domestic wing ministering to him and Rudd and engaging a troop of local girls to take service at Shallowford as soon as the renovations were finished. At first Paul had the greatest difficulty in understanding Mrs Handcock’s brogue, the broadest in the Valley not excluding Tamer Potter’s, and would shake his head when she pounded into the parlour to ask if he would be available ‘to-zee-thicky-Lowry-maid-us-was-thinking-o’-taakin’-on-till-us-zees’-ow-’er-shaapes!’

  In the meantime the house was nearing the step of habitability, for Eph Morgan, the Welsh expatriate from Coombe Bay, had moved in the day after the sale and had since recruited a horde of local craftsmen on a sub-contract basis, setting them re-roofing, re-plastering, and papering according to the demands of Rudd’s survey. The agent acted as architect but paid Paul the compliment of consulting him on important details. A bathroom was added, a passage cut through from kitchen to dining-room to ensure that meals were no longer served cold, joists in several floors were ripped out and replaced, every room upstairs was repapered with a cheerful floral pattern, new storage water tanks were installed in the loft, and Sir George Lovell’s dark-room was fitted up as an estate office. Paul spent a great deal of his time watching the builders at work and Ephraim Morgan, their sponsor, intrigued him. He was a very small man, hardly more than five feet in height, but with a huge, round head that gave him the appearance of an intelligent gnome. He had first come into the district as a railway engineer and had decided, when the line was built, that he could earn a better living in Devon than his native Wales. Yet, like all Welshmen, he cherished a fiery patriotism for the Principality and was a great admirer of Lloyd George, concerning whom he would deliver long, rhapsodic speeches in his sing-song voice while the men stood around grinning and sometimes throwing a sly comment as fuel to the Welshman’s fire. Eph Morgan had two principal hates, The Brummagers (represented by his arch-enemy Joe Chamberlain) and The Brewers, whom he declared the mainstay of the Tory Party and he saw his hero Lloyd George as a dauntless St George ambushing both from morning to night. Paul gathered, however, that Morgan was an exception as regards his interest in radical politics, for all the farmers, and most of their hired men, were tepid Conservatives, who had followed the Lovell lead at the polling booth for generations without devoting a thought to topical issues like Irish Home Rule, Welsh Disestablishment, or the legacies of the South African War like the concentration camp scandal and the importation of Chinese labour into the mines. They were content to plod peacefully along the well-beaten paths of rural forefathers, looking to the gentry to govern and to the owner of the big house to keep their premises in repair, promote country sports and occasional social activities like the annual harvest supper and Empire Day celebrations. Notwithstanding the activities of prominent local dissenters like Farmer Willoughby, of Deepdene, and Eph Morgan, the established church had the local community well in hand. Parson Bull was not only feared but genuinely respected in the district. Rudd introduced them after Matins one Sunday morning, and Bull struck Paul as a man at least a century behind the times. He treated all his parishioners, rich and poor, with impatience and showed little traditional deference to his patron, the Squire. Rudd said that Bull’s consuming interest was hunting and that he was an ecclesiastical parody of Surtees’ Jorrocks, inasmuch as he hibernated in the summer and came alive when cubbing began, in the last week of September. Then, Rudd promised, Paul would see the real Parson Bull astride an enormous seventeen-hand skewbald roaring his way across country and threatening whiplash and hellfire to anyone who blocked his approach to a jumpable fence. ‘He’s a frightful old tyrant and makes nonsense of the Sermon on the Mount,’ he said, ‘but he’s so Old English that one can’t help paying him grudging respect. You’ve got half the gift of his living but that won’t mellow his approach to you, as you probably noticed. They say that even the Bishop goes in fear of him and he’s scared so many curates into resigning that now he doesn’t have one but simply goes through the motions of taking a monthly service in outlying churches over the river.’

  Doctor O’Keefe, on whom Paul called for a routine check of his wound, was equally offhand, and the reek of whisky in his surgery went some way towards explaining the speed with which the doctor drove his gig around the district. He asked Paul one or two questions about the war, glared at his knee, then warned him that ‘he would have his hands full with a damned shambles like Shallowford’, but they struck no sparks, and Paul left feeling the doctor lacked the saving grace of Parson Bull, who was at any rate a rumbustious character. Rudd said that O’Keefe had not always been surly and uncommunicative but had become misanthropic after his wife’s death from tuberculosis some years ago. He had always been very fond of Irish whisky (‘the landlord of The Raven kept a special stock for him’) and had turned to the bottle for solace. His wife had been a beautiful woman and the story was that they had been very attached to one another. ‘They’ve got a daughter somewhere,’ Rudd added, ‘a bonny girl she was, who ran off soon after her mother’s death and is nursing or teaching up the country. If she stayed she might have pulled the doctor through but it isn’t a job I should have relished, and I daresay she’ll keep clear of him until he floats into the grave.’

  When the morning temperatures cooled, and the period of drought was followed by a spell of soft rain and south-westerly-winds, Paul rode far afield every day, sometimes alone but more often in the company of Claire Derwent, who showed him the maze of leafy rides between Coombe Bluff and the northern edge of Shallowford Woods and all the short cuts to the Dell, Hermitage, Four Winds and bracken slopes of Blackberry Moor. Together they rode over to visit Lord Gilroy, in his elegant home, Heronslea, beyond the smaller, parallel River Teazel. Gilroy, stiffly polite, gave them tea in thin Rockingham china and threatened to send the local agent over to Shallowford in order to gather Paul into the local Conservative fold. He did not deign to ask Paul his politics, assuming, no doubt, that he was eager to ‘ … stop the damned tide of Radicalism set in motion by that unspeakable bounder, Lloyd George’, a politician, his Lordship declared, who should have been strung up on the occasion of his pro-Boe
r rally, in Birmingham during the war! Paul judged it tactful to make no comment upon this and after an hour or so they left, riding south to the sea, then east along the curving beach to Coombe Bay.

  Paul had made one or two expeditions in this direction already but always unaccompanied, for although his thoughts constantly returned to Grace Lovell, and to their three improbable meetings, there was no one in whom he could confide regarding his infatuation. Rudd, he knew, would go out of his way to dissuade him from anything but a formal association with the family and on the one or two occasions he had mentioned her name the agent had abruptly changed the subject. It was clear that he carried his dislike of the family as far as the cadet branch still living on Shallowford property, for he once referred to Bruce Lovell as ‘a man who could borrow from a Hebrew pawnbroker and later have the man charged as a receiver of stolen goods!’ Neither did Paul care to raise the subject of Grace Lovell to Claire Derwent, although their association had been completely circumspect. He decided that he would like to keep it that way, for she was a merry and informative companion, who seemed to enjoy showing him off to scattered local families, and although she looked undeniably attractive with her corn-coloured curls peeping beneath a hard hat and her pink cheeks glowing with health, she did not stir him in the way that Grace Lovell had when they had met on that first occasion in the nursery, or when she had accepted his gift of the screen at the sale. The screen had been collected the following day and since then he had not even glimpsed her although, on two occasions, he rode slowly past her house in the early morning, and at various times had ridden the grey, now named Snowdrop, along the tideline of the Bay.

  The grey’s name derived from a remark of Mrs Handcock’s, greeting him as he rode down from Priory Wood with, ‘I zeed ’ee cummin’, you an’ that gurt beast o’ yours! Just like a man zitting atop a gurt bunch o’ snowdrops!’ and thereafter Paul discarded the grey’s Irish name which was unpronouncable, and settled for ‘Snowdrop’.

  So the summer days slipped by, until Eph Morgan announced that renovations were finished, and Mr Craddock might write to the upholsterers in Paxtonbury for soft furnishings he and Rudd had ordered on their one expedition to the city. The day before they were due to arrive Claire turned up at the house on foot dressed, for once, in blouse, skirt and white straw hat, announcing that her horse had gone lame and asking if she could help arrange the furniture that was coming.

  Paul told her the vans were not due until late that afternoon. It did not occur to him at the time to wonder how she had managed to walk the four miles from High Coombe to Shallowford, on a sultry day and arrive looking as fresh as a spring daffodil. She seemed so disappointed that Paul, telling her that she was welcome to ride Snowdrop home and return him the following day, suggested they took a picnic lunch to Shallowford Woods, returning before tea to receive the vans. Claire brightened up at this and said it was a wonderful idea, providing Paul’s leg was strong enough to carry him that far over rough ground.

  ‘Hang it, Claire, I’m not a cripple,’ he said indignantly. ‘The hospital surgeon told me to walk as much as I could and since I’ve been down here I’ve never been further than the lodge on foot. I’ll get Mrs Handcock to pack up some pasties and tea and sugar. We can make a fire and boil tea if we take my army canteen with us.’

  They set out in high spirits, following the narrow path along the left bank of the river and skirting the shoulder of the Coombe to the edge of the woods, seeing no one except Hazel, youngest of the Potter children, said to be queer in the head and much given to talking to herself. She was doing it now, staring up at an isolated oak in the meadow and watching something half-way up the trunk. She did not notice their approach and they were thus privileged to overhear one of her impromptu poems.

  ‘I-zee-you-bobtail, a-patterin’-along thicky-bark,’ she sang. ‘Youm grey, and varmint they zay! But I loves ’ee! I loves ’ee bettern’n the red, ’cause youm like me, chaased be everyone, baint ’ee?’ but at this point Hazel must have heard their approach over the turf, for she swung round and took to her heels, speeding across the field towards the Coombe and covering the ground as fast as Matabele children Paul had watched in the kraals.

  ‘She’s an odd little thing,’ Paul said. ‘I don’t remember seeing her before. Does she live about here?’

  Claire told him that she was Hazel Potter, an afterthought on the part of Tamer and Meg, and was reckoned half-witted on account of her tendency to spend her days roaming the fields and woods, sometimes holding conversations with trees, birds and animals.

  ‘Well, I don’t consider that convincing evidence of lunacy,’ he said. ‘She’s a rather beautiful child and moves as fast as a greyhound. Doesn’t she go to school?’

  Claire said that she was enrolled at Mary Willoughby’s little school but was absent more often than not, for the Potters could not be induced to make her attend regularly, but she was clearly not interested in the subject and seemed preoccupied with thoughts of her own, so after watching the grey squirrel dart along the branch of the big oak and disappear into shadows cast by the leaves, he followed into the woods, wading through waist-high bracken to a ride that led down to the shore of the mere opposite the pagoda.

  Despite his boast he found his leg tiring and was glad to sit and let Claire gather sticks for the fire. She had thrown aside her wide straw hat while he sat under a willow by the shore, admiring the grace with which she moved to and fro in the scrub, every now and again bending swiftly to add to her armful of sticks. She was, he thought, a very supple creature, with a figure shaped by healthy ancestors, years of hard exercise, and, he suspected, very little farm drudgery. Everything about her was neat, cool and somehow deliberate. She walked with a slight sway, like a tall flower in the wind, so that again he thought of a daffodil growing by a lake and he was glad now that chance had given him an opportunity of seeing her in feminine clothes. On all their previous expeditions she had appeared at the house in a brown riding habit, and dull colours, he decided, did not flatter her as much as the cotton blouse and well-cut grey skirt she was wearing today. The water of the mere was very still and he could see the white ruin of the Burmese pagoda hiding in pines on the islet. The air was full of the hum of insects and far across the little lake the reeds stirred, affording him a fleeting glimpse of waterfowl—wild duck, teal or widgeon he supposed, making a mental note to ask Rudd if they ever shot down here.

  She came back to him still looking pensive and not much inclined to gossip, so they lit a fire and made tea in his battered canteen, afterwards disposing of Mrs Handcock’s pasties and talking lazily of one thing and another. He admitted then that his leg ached badly and she asked him about his wound. To satisfy her morbid curiosity he rolled up his trouser leg and showed her the bluish depression, where the Mauser bullet had entered, and the hollow where, after chipping the bone, it had emerged in the bulge of the calf. She studied it with concern, saying that until now she had been unable to relate all the papers had written of the war with actual physical suffering. Down here, she said, it had all seemed like something out of a history book happening to people in another age. Then she became embarrassingly silent again, sitting back, her weight resting on her hands and looking out over the water, so that after watching her slyly for a few moments he surrendered to an impulse that had returned to him since he had watched her gathering sticks. Leaning forward he kissed her on the mouth, not as any young man might claim a kiss from a pretty girl but more as a jocular attempt to re-establish contact between them. To his embarrassment she offered neither protest nor encouragement but continued to smile, saying, with the utmost self-possession, ‘Well, what now, Wicked Squire?’ and incongruously he thought of George Lovell’s album and the question he had asked himself on the day of the sale when she had surprised him with the mock Bible under his arm.

  ‘You wouldn’t know a wicked squire if you met one,’ he said but at this she laughed and said, lightly, ‘Don’t belie
ve it, Paul! We had one here for years!’

  He looked at her curiously then for her remark implied that Sir George’s weaknesses were general knowledge in the Valley. ‘How much do you really know of him, Claire?’

  ‘Oh, that he couldn’t be trusted a yard with a girl over fourteen and his son Ralph wasn’t much better! Everybody round here accepted that—after all, they had to, for people with that kind of money can behave pretty much as they like, can’t they?’

  It struck him then, and for the first time, that there must be a great difference between country-bred girls like Claire Derwent and their social counterparts in the suburbs, for she, it appeared, could discuss this kind of thing with a man without embarrassment or coyness. More than that; Lovell’s eccentricities seemed hardly to interest her.

  ‘You mean you know about his … well … his photography, a rather unusual kind of photography?’

  She looked at him frankly. ‘Why, of course! Everybody did. But who told you about it? Was it John Rudd?’

  He told her how he had found the album by chance, admitting shamefacedly that he had been looking through it on the day of the sale, when she had come into the library with her invitation to lunch and at this she gave a little yelp of laughter.

  ‘Oh dear! How awful for you! What did you do with his famous collection?’

  ‘I burned it,’ he growled, ‘what the devil else could I do with it?’ but she still determined to treat the thing as a great joke.

  ‘I imagine most young men would have kept it for their own amusement, and do stop looking so shocked, Paul! Do you think a girl can grow up in a place like this without knowing about things like that?’

  ‘Did he ever ask you to pose for him?’

  ‘No, he didn’t but he certainly would have if I’d given him half a chance! He did start pawing me in our barn one day and I dodged into the open and fled. But I didn’t see anything very unusual in it at the time. Rose was a bit shocked, and thought I ought to tell father; I didn’t though, because I thought it was—well—just silly. What I mean is, the Valley girls who did go into that messy little room of his and let him take pictures of them with their clothes off weren’t enticed there. They did it with their eyes wide open and for what they could get out of it! I daresay the elder Potter girls’ pictures were in that album, weren’t they?’