Then, half-consciously, he noticed something else about her, that she was no longer smiling her slightly superior smile but was looking at him boldly as though assessing his mental confusion and perhaps weighing her advantage and his vulnerability; her eyes, watchful as a cat’s, never wavered, so that he felt more than ever confused and began to bluster.
‘Oh, I daresay you think me a greenhorn!’ he began, but that was all he said for suddenly she was lying full-length beside him with his face held between her hands and was kissing him not as he had kissed her a moment since, but in a fashion no one had kissed him before. He was not, however, really aware that the initiative had been hers alone for it had all happened in a matter of seconds. One moment they had been sparring with words, the next embracing with a recklessness that swept away all traces of the restraint that had governed every moment of their relationship up to that time. He thought, fleetingly, of all that possession of her here in the summer woods might entail, a complete surrender of dignity for her and for him God alone knew how many obligations, but the check was momentary. The softness of her mouth and the scent of her hair banished the last of his scruples and almost at once he began to assert his mastery, bearing down on her with his full weight, and fumbling at the fastenings of her blouse in his eagerness to use her as she so clearly intended to be used. There was no flicker of tenderness in his handling of her. She might have been the half-caste girl he had purchased for a few sweaty moment in the Cape Town brothel, for when the blouse buttons resisted he dragged at her skirt and continued to press brutally on her mouth. It was as he sought to extend his grip on her clothes that she somehow extricated herself, taking advantage of the bank and throwing herself sideways so that suddenly she was clear of him altogether and standing between the willow and the water’s edge, with her face turned away and her hands busy with her blouse that had broken free of the waistband of the skirt. Watching her from the crest of the bank he suddenly felt very foolish and very deflated, and his shame was not less intense because it was fused with exasperation. He rose slowly to his feet and when she had finished tucking in her blouse, and was lifting her hands to her disordered hair, he began to mumble excuses. They emerged as half-finished sentences, without conviction and without much sense, but almost as swiftly as she had left him she was beside him again, and her voice had an almost pitiful earnestness as she said, shaking her head so that pins fell in a shower, ‘Don’t, Paul! Don’t apologise! Just listen to me, so that we have a chance of starting again, of starting differently!’ and when he stared at her uncomprehendingly, ‘Don’t you see? I meant it to happen! Don’t you see, you idiot?’
He said, slowly, ‘What the devil do you mean, you meant it to happen? I know you didn’t mind my kissing you but …’ She made a gesture and looked so distracted that he stopped, giving them both a moment to compose themselves. It was she who benefited from the pause, for suddenly she was calm again, and said, turning away, ‘It’s just that I lied about the horse. Flash isn’t lame. I dressed for the part and then got a lift as far as the lodge in Willoughby’s trap. I knew very well that stuff wouldn’t be coming until evening and that you would suggest coming here, or somewhere like here. Now do you understand?’
‘Getting me out here was one thing,’ he mumbled, still greedy for a major share of the blame, ‘but don’t try and tell me you hoped …’
She turned, interrupting him again, and this time she looked angry and exasperated, as though she was prepared to pound the truth into his head.
‘Paul Craddock!’ she said. ‘You’ve got to realize you had no part in it, do you understand? None that you could help, that is, so do stop trying to be gallant, and face up to what I’m saying, because if you don’t it’ll come to you sooner or later, and then it’ll seem far worse than it is! Will you listen! Will you stop pretending?’
‘Well?’
She came a little closer to him, shaking her hair free and sitting on a stump a yard or so away. ‘Any man would have acted as you did given the opportunity, any man who was a man, that is! That’s what I’m trying to make clear to you, and if you think back a little and put two and two together you’ll see me for what I am, or what I almost was! I’ll tell you again since I have to—I meant something like this to happen, it’s what usually happens, it’s how most marriages about here begin! The girl baits a trap in the grass and the man walks into it.’
He baulked at this, moving swiftly across to her and saying, explosively, ‘For God’s sake stop talking like that, Claire! You’ll be damned sorry for it tomorrow!’
‘I’m sorry for it now,’ she said, ‘about as sorry as I can be. The one thing I’m glad about is that I had enough honesty left in me somewhere to bring me up short at the last moment! Even that I can’t take much credit for; if you had been just a little less clumsy I’d have gone through with it all right, and what would either of us have gained by frankness afterwards? You would have resented me for the rest of your life I daresay, whereas now—well, at least we can go on being civil to one another!’ She got up, brushing the shreds of bracken from her skirt. ‘Let’s get the things and go home.’
They gathered up dixie and basket and began the climb up the ride to the edge of the wood but it was not until they were clear of the trees that he spoke again. ‘Look here, Claire, we could pretend it never happened, couldn’t we? Nobody else knows about it! Just the two of us!’, and she stopped, looking at him intently, her head slightly on one side.
‘Don’t deceive yourself over that,’ she said. ‘Every busybody in the Valley knows about it! Oh, not that I hatched a silly schoolgirl plot, got you out here and encouraged you to seduce me, but the fact that I had it very much in mind! I could almost hear them as we rode around the estate together— “Claire Derwent is quick off the mark, isn’t she? Claire isn’t a girl to let grass grow under her feet!”’ She gazed around, looking back at the woods, then forward across to Coombe Bluff and the sea. ‘Sometimes I hate this place and everybody in it! Including myself!’, and she walked on so quickly that the effort of catching her up brought a sharp twinge to his wound.
Chapter Five
I
The yellow-eyed herring-gull who, in mild weather is the scavenger of Coombe Bay fishermen, will fly inland as soon as the autumn gales blow from the south-west, and the route he uses whilst awaiting better weather never varies.
He flies inland over the Bluff, crossing in two minutes a cliff that an active man cannot scale in under an hour and heads for Deepdene Farm to see if there are any pickings to be had from the Willoughbys. Then he flies low over High Coombe, veering north-west along the edge of the wind, croaking his way over Shallowford Woods and the mere, and on across the orchard of the big house to Priory Wood and the outbuildings of Hermitage, where he sometimes swoops to steal pig food from the troughs of Arthur Pitts and his son, Henry. Henry usually sees gulls and takes pot shots at them with his rifle, so this heads them into the wind, or almost so, for they fly on south-west by west across the Sorrel to Four Winds and if there is nothing to be had there on again over the moor to the Teazel, and so out of the Shallowford domain altogether.
The herring-gulls are greedy, cunning, inquisitive birds, with little sense of family but they are matchless aeronauts, cresting the strongest gusts and sometimes making pinpoint landings on chimneys and stable roofs to see and hear what is going on in the estate. If they could write diaries and read thoughts it would be possible to know everything that was happening hereabouts for they miss nothing, are witnesses to every trivial incident, and are so common that nobody notices them until they swoop to steal.
It was such a gull that saw Sam Potter and his pregnant wife Joannie loading their few things on to the family cart and setting out for their new home in Shallowford Woods, on the last day of September 1902. The first of the autumn gales had arrived ahead of time and the elms in the Potter Dell were creaking under strong Channel gusts, with leaves that were still only hal
f yellow floating down on the smoking camp fire over which the rest of the Potters sat trying to look as if Sam’s departure caused them more than the minimum concern. Tamer, as usual, sat removed from his family, on the steps of the ramshackle farmhouse and Meg was off somewhere along the coast selling mats and baskets that the girls had made when the Potters decided that it would be courting sunstroke to work in the fields, but the girls were all there—Pansy, Cissie, Violet and Hazel—talking and giggling among themselves and so was Smut, the poacher, helping brother Sam to stack the waggon with furniture that most families in the Valley would have discarded long ago.
Sam, his big vacuous face wreathed in smiles and his stiff, carroty hair standing up like a forest of rusty pikes, was glad to be off, but no more so than his wife, for although her time was still two months away she was already enormous and there was little cheer in waddling about a leaking, draughty house where there was nowhere to sit and her gnawing hunger remained largely unsatisfied. She had inspected the little cottage in the woods and was very grateful for this chance to make a home of her own, with Sam drawing regular money at last. Climbing on to the box seat of the waggon she heard her husband warn Smut to confine his expeditions to the west of the estate, well beyond the limits of Shallowford Woods. He sounded apologetic but firm.
‘Dornee come my way, Smut,’ he said gently, for Sam was a gentle man, ‘dornee come out-a-long! Just you stay down-a-long or up-a-long, zee?’
To the Potters, indeed to everyone in the Coombe, ‘out-a-long’ meant east, ‘down-a-long’ meant south, and ‘up-a-long’ indicated Priory Wood and Codsall land over the river to the west. Sam reasoned, no doubt, that as a woodsman living on the eastern border of the estate he could not be held responsible for the loss of game, chickens or geese beyond a three-mile radius of his cottage.
‘Dornee fret,’ Smut reassured him, ‘I’ll leave that zide to you, Sam! Anyways, I’ll be across the Teazel mos’ nights in and about ole Gilroy’s covers. Good luck to ’ee, an’ you too, Joannie! If that li’l tacker o’ yours be a boy you c’n call ’un Fred after me, for no one yerabouts uses me real bliddy name, do ’em?’
That was the extent of the Potters’ farewell to the eldest of the family and soon after, as the lurking gull rose and flapped inland, the waggon moved off up the steep track and across the meadow where Hazel watched squirrels in the big, isolated oak.
The gull, who should have known better than to waste time looking for scraps in the Dell, rode a gust over the elms and crossed the neglected stubble fields into Deepdene land where the children were in school chanting out spellings like two rows of besmocked choristers and Elinor Willoughby was talking to her hens in the neatly-fenced yard, north of the schoolhouse.
The gull hovered, hoping she would leave so that he could beat in with flapping wings, frighten the strutting cockerel, and grab a beakful of meal, but Elinor did not go away for this morning she had a great deal on her mind and there was no one but the hens in whom she could confide. Her father, the solemn Edwin, who thought of all love as the love of God, had never given a thought to the yearnings of his daughter of her lover, Will Codsall, over the river, whereas Elinor was far too shy to consult her spinster Aunt Mary on such matters as courtship and marriage, so she told her story to the hens who were obliged to listen if they wanted their morning corn.
‘’Tiz cruel,’ Elinor told the complacent Rhode Island Reds under her feet, ‘’tis cruel, and there baint a particle o’ sense to it! I’d make Will a good wife, for I loves ’un as much as he loves me, so why shouldnen us go to Parson Bull an’ put up banns, same as anybody else? I wish that mother o’ Will’s dead, that I do!’ and she flung a handful of grain at the nearest bird as though she had been a feathered Arabella Codsall.
The gull heard nothing of all this. He was far too busy watching the scattering grain and had been far out on the sandbanks fishing all last evening, when Will Codsall and Elinor Willoughby had walked hand in hand along the rutted lane east of the wood discussing their dismal situation.
Will had confessed that his mother’s nagging was driving him out of his mind, and that she returned to the subject of Elinor Willoughby every mealtime and often in between meals.
‘Mazed about us, she be,’ he muttered, ‘fair mazed! To hear her prattle you might think you, your father and your Aunt Mary were wasters, like they Potters, yonder! Says I should vind a maid who could bring a dowry to the farm, same as she did, just as if money grew on trees like flamin’ plums, and could be gathered all seasons of the year! I said to her, “Listen here, Mother, listen, will ’ee, an’ stop yammerin’ for a minute, for the love o’ Christ! They Willoughbys is decent folk, as good as any family about here, so doan talk about my Elinor as though ’er was hard up for a man, because ’er baint, bein’ the prettiest maid in the Valley”.’
The indirect compliment pleased Elinor so much that she made light of her future mother-in-law’s opposition. Now that dusk had fallen she lost her shyness in his presence and slyly plucked his sleeve as they passed the five-barred gate dividing Deepdene lane from the common pasture that separated the Coombe and the woods.
‘Dornee fret about it, Will dear,’ she said, ‘it’ll come right in the end,’ and she put up her face to be kissed which was thoughtless of her, for the discussion of his mother, followed by the gentle pressure of Elinor’s body, fired Will with impatience to be separated from the one and have the other beside him all night. So he kissed her in a way that startled her, indicating that he might not brook further delays.
He said, gloweringly, ‘There’s talk of a new farm Young Squire’s trying to buy, a plaace up behind Hermitage on the edge o’ the moor. It’s rough land, and not much of it but there’s no knowing what us might make of it. For two pins I’d call and ask if us could lease it and they could get along at Four Winds as best they could! The farmhouse is half a ruin, and the outbuildings are cob, with the water running down the walls but it’d be better than nothing mebbe! What do ’ee zay, Elinor? Would ’ee live in a plaace like that, providin’ I fixed it up for ’ee?’
‘Ay, I would that,’ Elinor told him fervently, and thought fleetingly of the new Mr Craddock and all his money and of his junketings about the estate since last June, but before she could speculate on their chances Will, making the most of his time, kissed her again in a way that made her knees buckle and she said, although not very convincingly, ‘No, Will! Not now, Will, please!’ as his big hand slid over her shoulder, across her tight bodice and then below the waist to fondle her little buttocks.
The gull, caring nothing at all for lovers’ problems, decided that Elinor would stay in the yard all the morning so he flew off across the slopes of Deepdene to two small fields adjoining the cliff path, where Edward Derwent was leaning on a stile considering what use could be made of his new land and also what had prompted that unpredictable young fellow Craddock to incorporate it into High Coombe without raising the rent. There must, be reasoned, be a hidden motive for such an unrewarding act on the new Squire’s part, for Derwent himself had never done anything without a profit motive. He pondered the possibility of Craddock’s intention to sell High Coombe, and ask a higher price for a slightly enlarged farm but decided that this was unlikely, for two small fields would not merit the addition of twenty-five pounds to the purchase price. It then occurred to him that Craddock might have made him the free gift of the fields at the suggestion of his daughter Claire, and this led to serious contemplation of Claire’s involvement with the young fellow and whether it was within the bounds of credibility that he might have a real live squire for a son-in-law. The possibility, remote as it was, warmed his heart. The fellow obviously had a great deal of money (made in scrap iron it was rumoured) and was, on the whole, a likeable chap, as far as a city-bred man could be likeable. Perhaps it was not so improbable; perhaps Claire would steer the Derwents into a lawyer’s office where the new Squire, enslaved by his bride’s beauty, would hand o
ver the entire acreage of High Coombe for a nominal sum! As he thought of this, and of Claire’s golden hair and blue eyes, his stern face relaxed until it was about half-way towards smiling and he reflected that Claire was growing more like her dead mother every day and that between them they must have been very clever to breed a young chit pretty enough to monopolise the attention of a rich scrap-merchant turned landowner. Then his pessimism caught up with him and he thought of the recent change in Claire, and her solemn face at the breakfast table that morning, and also of her silent withdrawal into herself of late which was very uncharacteristic of his younger daughter. If she was in love, he decided, then so much the better, for that meant that his hopes had at least some foundation and if she was not, and there was no more in this association than a bit of flirting on Craddock’s part, then she was probably sickening for something and would doubtless get over it as quickly as she had recovered from chickenpox and measles in her childhood. At this point his practical mind reverted to the use of the new fields. Barley, oats or wheat? He wasn’t sure yet, he would have to sleep on it.
The gull decided that there was no profit in hovering over Derwent’s unploughed fields and whirled into the wind, coasting along its warm, wet currents to the window-sill of the Derwent parlour, beyond which, through small panes of glass, he could see the fair head of Claire Derwent bent over a letter she was writing. The envelope beside her was already addressed to ‘Paul Craddock, Esquire, Shallowford House’, and the letter was by way of being a distress rocket, fired from a trim vessel adrift on a sea of uncertainty.
Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By) Page 14
