Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  He glanced at Paul shrewdly, knowing that the young man’s mind was not entirely monopolised by the memory of Smut Potter’s blanched face, as he had stumbled from the dock with a policeman at each elbow but was trying to adjust itself to the prospect of facing his wife waiting at home. He said, slowly, ‘I still think you did right persuading him to come in, Paul, and this doesn’t really change things you know. The law is far from perfect, but it’s the only law we’ve got and without it where would any one of us be? You’ve got to make your wife understand that, for if you don’t then what you’re trying to achieve back there won’t amount to much. Would you care to see Smut before he’s sent off? I expect it could be arranged.’

  ‘Yes,’ Paul told him, gruffly, ‘I owe the poor devil that,’ and Rudd went back into court, leaving Paul to look down on the city basking in the afternoon sunshine. John’s reassurance regarding the rightness of his decision brought him no comfort. There was, he realised, a direct link here between his decision to coax Potter out of hiding and his own tenuous relationship with Grace, who seemed only to respect him as long as he was waving a rebel banner under the noses of authority. She would, he felt sure, back him every inch of the way if he resolved himself into a kind of Sorrel Valley Robin Hood, contemptuous of even such social reforms as those advocated by progressives like Grenfell. She was really, he reflected, a kind of anarchist who welcomed turmoil but he had no wish to live like that. He favoured steady, ordered, constitution progress, where tolerance and education for the underprivileged promised hope of justice and stability but she had no faith at all in this dream. Her sympathies were with people like the Pankhursts, still raising hell up and down the country and it was on this cleavage that their relationship, fragile from the beginning, seemed likely to founder, for what was that she had said when he told her Smut Potter had agreed to give himself up? ‘I was badly wrong about you, Paul. You aren’t a rebel at all and could never be! That scene with Gilroy and Cribb was just a flash in the pan. Perhaps you knew I was listening and hoped to make an impression!’ He thought it a bitter thing to have said and realised now that she regretted it but they had been strangers to one another ever since, with Grace resisting all his attempts to put this stupid business into its correct perspective and stop her using it as a looking-glass held in front of his character.

  John came back and said they could spend a few minutes with Potter. He looked around for Meg but she was not to be seen, so they followed the police sergeant down a long, gas-lit corridor under the court and were shown into a waiting-room where Smut sat with his hands on his knees, wearing the same dazed expression as he had worn throughout the trial. His pale blue eyes kindled when he saw Rudd, whose approach to him had always been that of a jocular schoolmaster, dealing with a wilful but not unlikeable scholar. ‘Well, it was a lot more’n I reckoned, Mr Rudd,’ he said. ‘It was like I tried to explain, they’d ha’ done fer me if I hadn’t got one in first! You believe that, dornee, Mr Rudd?’

  ‘Yes, I believe it but it’s too late to think about that now, Smut! Mr Craddock is here to say you can come back to the Valley when it’s all over.’

  The eagerness of the young man’s expression as Rudd said this touched Paul more deeply than anything he had witnessed in court. He said quickly, ‘That’s true, Smut, and I’ve told your mother the same. I’ll find a place for you somewhere and perhaps give you a job like Sam’s, where you could use your skill with the gun and all you know of the Valley.’

  A flicker of humour crossed Potter’s face, ‘Me, a gamekeeper? That’ll zet the boys laughing all right, Squire, but I’d like to come back some time. I’d like that, Mr Craddock, Squire, and it’s good o’ you to tell me. It’ll give me something to think of where I’m going.’

  ‘You’ll get time off if you watch your step, Smut,’ Rudd said and Paul envied the ease of the agent’s approach.

  ‘Yessir, they told me that,’ Smut said, and then, hesitantly, ‘Do you reckon one o’ you gentlemen could spare the time to look in an’ give me news once in a while? I’d like to know what’s goin’ on back there and letters baint no gude. I never could read much more’n me own name!’

  ‘I’ll come and see you,’ said Paul, and felt better for saying it. ‘Good-bye and good luck for now, Smut, and don’t worry about the family. I’ll see they’re left alone in the Coombe.’

  They shook hands and went out, walking into the hot sunshine of the castle yard and down the hill to the livery stable where they had left the trap. As it was being brought out, and Rudd was already on the seat, Paul felt his arm jogged and turning looked into the face of James Grenfell. ‘I heard about it,’ he said, ‘and it was a damned shame in the circumstances! It won’t do Gilroy any good about here, if that’s any comfort.’

  ‘It’s no comfort,’ Paul told him, ‘but I tell you one thing, Grenfell. From now on, I’m your man! I’d like to help to break the crust around here and I think I can promise Rudd and my wife, too, will back me up.’

  ‘Well, we can certainly do with your help,’ Grenfell said, and then, with a smile, ‘But it won’t always be this way, you know! It’s going to change sooner than you think!’, and he nodded and went on down the steep street, a small, insignificant figure among the lumbering farmers and draymen discussing the trial outside The Mitre.

  It was in Grace’s heart to be sorry for him in the days that followed the eclipse of Smut Potter but she found it difficult to forgive pedantry on his part, and on John Rudd’s, that had resulted in a man being shut behind bars for five years, and yet, she realised how humiliated he was in being proved so wrong so quickly.

  The shadow of Smut Potter seemed to linger in the Valley and harvest prospects, which had looked so good, were cut back by heavy summer storms that left wheat and barley in disarray and put everyone’s temper on edge. The semi-estrangement between them persisted because Paul seemed almost to nurse his defeat like a sulky boy but in the end it was his sulkiness that encouraged her to find a way of breaking the tension in the house. It was odd and a little pitiful, to see him fling himself into a frenzy of work alongside Honeyman’s Home Farm team, to come home tired and skulk in the library, trying to lose himself in pamphlets James Grenfell had sent him, as though he sought there a means of reversing Smut Potter’s sentence by social upheaval. Then a way out of the ridiculous impasse presented itself, for the certainty that she was now carrying his child persuaded her that two adults could not, after all, spend an entire summer brooding about a man in gaol.

  Her own feelings about her pregnancy surprised her. She would have thought that it would compensate her for the life she had chosen to lead here in this wilderness, where every man, woman and child was a slave to the march of the seasons and men half-killed one another over the ownership of a buck, but this was not the case. The child, she reasoned, would be one more anchor, final proof of submission to men and their chattels and the only satisfaction she derived from the prospect was a conviction that, all things being equal, it was likely to inherit a world that was changing at speed and where ideas were likely to blow up under the noses of people like Gilroy.

  About a fortnight after the trial she got up from the breakfast table and followed him into the office, where he looked up from a heavy leather book in which he was writing. She recognised the book with a start and for a moment was so astonished that she could only stare at it and her anxiety increased when he closed it hurriedly and seemed to wish it out of the way. She said, forgetting why she had come, ‘That was Lovell’s Bible! But it wasn’t a Bible! He kept pictures of girls in it!’

  He looked, she thought, very embarrassed at this, so that the thought of him sitting here, seeking compensation for her withdrawal in contemplation of old Sir George’s picture gallery made her want to laugh. He looked so shocked, however, that she bit her lips as he said, ‘You know about that? You saw them?’

  ‘Yes, I saw them,’ she told him. ‘I imagine most people who were allow
ed in here were shown them. He wasn’t ashamed of having them.’

  ‘He must have been a disgusting old reprobate!’ he growled and then, rather pompously, she thought, ‘Did you ever tell your father the kind of man he really was?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘because he was quite harmless. He never molested his models, he was quite content to gloat over them, as you seemed to be doing!’

  He flushed at this but then, perhaps because she was now smiling, he laughed and opening the book showed her that there was nothing between the covers but manuscript pages of cartridge paper, the first of them covered with his neat entries.

  ‘It’s my estate diary,’ he told her, ‘a kind of record of what happens. I destroyed the pictures the day I found them but I didn’t do it as a puritanical gesture. It seemed to me the wrong people might have got hold of them and I recognised two of the Potter girls.’

  ‘Oh? Anyone else?’

  ‘No, not even Arabella Codsall!’

  He laughed, less at his little joke than with relief at being once again on joking terms with her and she joined in gratefully enough, reflecting that it would have shocked him into speechlessness to hear all she could tell of this little room, once so dim and stuffy, now so functional. It seemed a lifetime ago when she had stood over there where his map-rack stood, posed against an improbable background of stage woods and ferns, with that old rascal Lovell, headless under his black cloth, his sibilant voice muffled and his elbows jutting as he crouched over his tripod. That was the first time, when he had persuaded her to be photographed as a faun and had loaned her a costume from a trunk of props he kept. At thirteen she had been flattered and, a year or so later, amused when he posed her as The Boy David, for a photographic competition, or so he told her, and then again as Juliet on a rustic balcony. She had not much minded his partings and pawings, or even his sudden appearance round the end of the screen when she was half-dressed. It was some time after that, when she found out how her mother came to die, that she posed for him from entirely different motives, a thrust at the world of men, especially her father, a sneer at all their shoddiness and cruelty. She wondered what had happened to those particular pictures. Obviously they had not gone in the book and neither, it would seem, had any of the more innocent ones, or Paul would surely have remembered them. Perhaps George had kept the nudes for his pocket book and sniggered over them among cronies at his club. She recalled then that she had hoped her father might see one of them and realise how whole-heartedly she despised him, and what venomous ways women had of proclaiming contempt.

  He broke into her reverie. ‘You came here to tell me something, Grace. Or was it to hear me admit how right you were about Potter?’

  She forced her mind back to him, saying, ‘No, it wasn’t that at all. Something quite different and rather more cheerful! To the devil with Smut Potter and Gilroy. I came to tell you I’m going to have a child in the New Year!’ and she waited for him to exclaim, or to do whatever expectant fathers did when they heard this kind of news. He did not whoop or coo or do any of the things she thought conventional. He simply took her hand, looked down at it for a moment and said, quietly, ‘I was wondering when you would tell me. I thought— “If she holds out much longer I daresay I shall hear it from one of the maids”!’

  ‘But I really did believe you hadn’t the least idea, Paul! I don’t know why, but I did!’

  ‘Well, I may be a bit slow on the uptake but I happen to look at you quite often,’ he said, smiling, and she was glad then that she had used this means of restoring the atmosphere of the early weeks of their marriage.

  She said, suddenly, ‘It’s a lovely day, Paul. Why don’t we call a truce and take a walk up through Priory and onto Shallowford Woods? It’s surely time we did!’

  He seemed pleased with the suggestion but said, ‘That’s all of six miles. Do you think you should walk that far?’ and she laughed, heartily this time. ‘Good heavens, Paul, the baby isn’t due until January! It’ll do us both good and when we get back we shall be too tired to argue the pros and cons of poor old Smut and his troubles.’

  He picked up the book, selecting a key from his ring, ‘Very well then,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing here that can’t wait!’, but as he was putting the diary in his desk she said, ‘What exactly do you write in The Book From Which There’s No Rubbing Out? Is it very private?’

  He opened it at random and pointed to an entry, dated March 7th, ‘Married Grace Lovett, my very dear wife,’ and she thought, ‘Dear God! He doesn’t belong to this century at all! Yet maybe a lot of us could do with his directness and simplicity!’, and she kissed him impulsively and went upstairs to get a sun bonnet and a pair of walking shoes.

  They passed one of the biblical shepherds (Grace could never tell one from the other) preparing a sheep dip in the hollow near the sawmill and climbed the slope of Priory Wood to the spur where they could look down on Hermitage and away, on the very crest of the moor, the white smudge that was Will Codsall’s little place, Periwinkle Farm. Up here, backs to the firs, stood great ranks of foxgloves, some of them as tall as grenadiers and each with its cluster of mottled bells at a regulation angle to the sturdy green stems. The Sorrel below looked as lazy and heat-drowsed as everything else in the Valley and only one or two of Henry Pitts’ big red Devons ambled along the shade of the hedge seeking sanctuary from the flies. The sky was cloudless but what little breeze there was still carried the faintest tang of the sea and sounds travelled easily too, for over a distance of three miles they could hear the clank of the Four Winds’ pump and the dry rattle of a trap on the moor road. He told her this was his favourite spot on the estate for up here there was a sense of permanence and in clear weather like today the Valley had the promise of eternal fruitfulness so that one could discount days of sleet and snow when nothing thrived about here or could keep warm or find food. She did not say what lay deep in her mind, that it was fair enough but empty for all but those wanting refuge from new ideas and new thoughts.

  They crossed the extremity of the Hermitage holding to the deep rutted lane that led down to the north-westerly tongue of Shallowford Woods and then by a stile into the cool depths of the big beech grove and finally to the edge of the mere where the Lovells’ ruinous boathouse still stood, with its half-rotted pier and punt. They used to fish here as children, she told him, Hubert, the elder boy, Ralph and herself and on summer days had sometimes bathed from the old punt, with the boys’ tutor, then a much persecuted undergraduate, now a canon. He asked her what kind of man was Hubert, the heir, and she said very stuffy and dominated by his livelier brother. ‘It seems curious that all those years of growing up here should have ended in a couple of skirmishes in Africa,’ she said, ‘and then you should come running from the same battlefields to step into their shoes. Why don’t we punt over to the islet and take a look at the pagoda? That old tub can still float and I don’t suppose you have ever been there, have you?’

  He admitted that he had not, so they freed the punt and poled it through the reedy shallows, approaching the islet from the bank directly opposite Smut Potter’s hideout. The island was no more than thirty yards broad and perhaps twice as long and the pagoda, a tiered structure roofed with shingles, stood in the centre, its lower half screened by firs and clumps of evergreen. She told him she had not been here for more than five years but did not add that the act of setting foot here gave her an extraordinary sensation of recapturing her adolescence, yet her mood must have communicated itself to him for when they sat side by side on a fern-grown terrace he suddenly turned her face to his and kissed her on the mouth and when she returned his kiss with an eagerness that surprised them both, she said, as his hand sought her breast, ‘You want me? Well, why not?’ and although gratified by the invitation he was mildly shocked when she carelessly unhooked her skirt, slipped out of her single undergarment and motioned him nearer the pagoda where the ferns grew shoulder-high.

  There had n
ever been an occasion like this. From the outset she had been dutiful, complaisant even, but she had never once matched his excitement or, indeed, appeared to have more in mind than a wish to accommodate him. She matched it now but what surprised him as much was the deliberate and almost ritualistic manner in which she went about it, restraining him until she had removed the last of her clothes which she then used to make a bed among the ferns before embracing him with a kind of zestful gaiety. Only when the fire had gone from him, and she was lying still and contemplative in his arms, did he reflect upon the distance they had travelled since she had walked into his office that morning with her flag of truce and then the humour of it struck him and he laughed, saying, ‘Well, I can’t think of a better way of signing a peace treaty!’ and set about helping her to dress. At the same time he glanced, a little apprehensively, at the mereside track opposite, remembering that it was often used at this time of day by Sam Potter and Aaron Stokes, the reed-cutter. Nothing stirred over there and when he met her eyes again he realised that she too was enjoying the comic element of the reconciliation and the pleasant absurdity of a man and wife making love in such improbable circumstances.

  ‘Was anyone over there?’ she asked, and when he told her no, ‘It’s just as well! Otherwise it would soon be all over the Valley that history was repeating itself and new Squire had got a love nest in the woods!’