Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  She read the letter through twice and handed it back to him, together with Claire Derwent’s address in Bayswater.

  ‘Ikey,’ she said, ‘either you’ll end up in gaol like Smut Potter, or you’ll be Prime Minister! I couldn’t improve on that in a thousand years. Now tell me about yourself, and how you’re getting on at that big school in North Devon.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  I

  It was not until she was alone in the room that Claire Derwent knew with certainty she had come home for good, that never again would she willingly exchange this view and these scents, for the asphalt of Bayswater or the genteel atmosphere of Tunbridge Wells. It was mid-April now and in the afternoons the sunlight over the paddock was the colour of buttermilk, with wide belts of river sedge lying like strips of green velvet on either side of the stream, and flocks of starched clouds moving slowly down from the Bluff casting patches of creeping shadow over the stubble fields of Four Winds and the long slope dividing the two rivers.

  She stood by the big window a long time, occasionally glancing at the man on the bed, unworried by his restlessness, for they had warned her that he would be feverish for a day or so and the doctor had promised to look in on the way back to the village to ‘make him a little more comfortable’. Claire had attended enough V.A.D. lectures at St Thomas’s to accept this phrase as a cliché that not even a lady doctor like O’Keefe’s down-to-earth daughter could avoid using.

  He looked, she thought, supremely uncomfortable, with his left arm awkwardly angled in its shiny metal splint, his body slumped in a position half-way between sitting and lying and his head turbaned in bandages, like the heads of wounded soldiers in illustrated magazines. He needed a shave too, and perhaps tomorrow they would allow her to shave him. That was something she had learned in the first series of lectures—‘How to remove hair from the helpless’—and the memory of the sub-title made her smile, so that she had to chide herself for feeling so cheerful in a sick-room and turn again to look at the view, taking a brief minds­eye ramble over the horizon where the Shallowford ford beeches formed the eastern frame for the landscape.

  She had not realised how little thought she had given this place in the last few years. Once the first wave of homesickness had receded, and she had become absorbed in the tea-shop adventure, she had felt rather patronising about the Sorrel Valley and Sorrel Valley folk, thinking of them as a collection of raggle-tailed rustics without benefit of the urban delights of a fashionable spa and out of reach of the great city, where she had spent the final year of her exile. But now, only three weeks since she had been lured home by that fantastic letter (penned by what was surely the Squire’s most devoted tenant!) it was the people of the Spa and of the faceless houses along the Bayswater Road whom she thought of as underprivileged. What had any one of them to compare with this except a formal park or two, or a village already cluttered with honking, dust-trailing motors and enclosed by clusters of red-brick houses, where prosperous merchants were caricatures of men like Craddock? Yet, she had only made the journey on impulse, and with no intention of doing more than pay a hasty call on her father and Rose, and perhaps, in response to that devoted stable-boy’s plea, to congratulate the hero of the Valley on having put the Sorrel Valley on the front pages of the newspapers for the first and probably the last time in history.

  She had made her call and had returned to High Coombe shocked by his appearance and afterwards, with no real object in mind, she had hung on, waiting for the crisis of his attack of pneumonia, a not unexpected result of his incredible exertions on the night of the wreck. She found the rhythm of the big house shattered. People came and went, and the placed seemed half full of foreigners, not foreigners who lived within half-a-day’s ride of the Valley but real foreigners, who spoke a foreign tongue. Poor old John Rudd went about with an undertaker’s face and Mrs Handcock wept freely into her pastry. The only lively person about the place was two-and-a-half-year-old Simon, who soon made friends with her and clamoured to be taken for rides of the pommel of her saddle.

  Then, like the false dawn of a new era, Doctor Maureen O’Keefe, the Coombe Bay physician’s fully-qualified daughter, swept into the Valley, the first lady-doctor that any of them had heard of much less attended, with her mixture of sardonic humour, brisk efficiency and shrewd Irish charm that had succeeded in routing prejudice in less than a week. She had brought with her a sense of rapid change, fresh air and wide open windows, so that soon news began to spread that Squire Craddock was on the mend, and ‘thicky lady-doctor’ had miraculously repaired his damaged ribs and set one of his fractures, using the big kitchen as an operating theatre. Even John Rudd was seen to perk up a little and Mrs Handcock ceased her eternal snivelling. The boy Ikey lost his look of tragedy and optimism returned to the Valley in the wake of spring. Yet, although Doctor Maureen showed a certain interest in Claire’s claim regarding V.A.D. training at St Thomas’s it was not until after the second operation on Paul’s arm that she accepted her offer as sick-room nurse, whilst she drove her gig about the Valley, bullying blushing labourers into peeling off their shirts and answering her questions about diet and cottage hygiene.

  At any other time the invasion of a woman doctor in the Valley would have provided a pub topic for a month but so many things had been happening here of late that Doctor O’Keefe’s daughter was able to play herself in in a matter of days. Rumours rushed up and down the Valley like flights of starlings. The Squire was dying. The Squire was recovering. Old Tamer Potter was being buried in a common grave with seven German sailors. Old Tamer Potter was having a granite memorial tombstone all to himself paid for by the Kaiser. And then rumours that grew out of these rumours; young Palfrey, the stable-boy Squire was trying to turn into a gentleman, had run away, been caught and sent back by the police; Claire Derwent, who was once said to be marrying Squire, had been rushed down from London to nurse him as soon as it was known that Squire’s wife, that mad Lovell girl, had been locked up yet again; Smut Potter, languishing in Paxtonbury gaol, was said to be due for early release, an official reward for his father’s heroism, and finally, perhaps the most disquieting rumour of all, old John Rudd, a widower with a son old enough to drive motors and seduce wives, was said to be madly in love with the lady doctor and courting her, while her father was taking a cure in an alcoholic ward of Paxtonbury asylum! It was too much, too quickly served and the Valley was unable to digest it, so that soon it gave up trying, the weather being warm, spring well advanced and work waiting upon idle hands in field and byre.

  Slowly the great springtide of speculation receded but the Valley families were never to forget their moment of high drama. In farms and cottages newspapers containing stories of the wreck, and the funerals that followed it, were carefully folded and laid away in chests of drawers, so that future generations could appreciate the national importance of the Sorrel Valley in years to come.

  II

  He saw her sitting sideways to the bed, an open book on her lap and the afternoon sun, flooding through the tall, mullioned windows, playing games with tendrils that had escaped from her golden ‘bun’ and hung like tiny tongues of autumn bracken over her ears.

  It took him a moment or two to realise who she was for when he saw her sitting there, with her knees pressed together and her head bent low over the page, he at once associated her with a picture he had seen somewhere and the effort of establishing the link tired him, so that he closed his eyes again and went about disentangling the fabric of dreams from reality. Then, when he opened his eyes again, he remembered. The woman sitting beside the bed, knees pressed together, smooth, rounded face half-turned to the window and a book on her lap, was Bathsheba, reading the message from King David, yet also—and this was puzzling—she was Claire Derwent, late of High Coombe farm. He studied her very carefully, or as carefully as his damnably awkward posture would permit, trying to remember whether she had been there during his few lucid intervals when he had exchanged a w
ord or two with John Rudd before being pulled this way and that by a strange woman said to be a doctor and the daughter of that drunken old Irishman, O’Keefe. He could not recall seeing Claire in the room then and this disturbed him, for it suggested that he was still dreaming and that Claire Derwent, or Bathsheba, belonged to the world of fantasy. Then she looked up and saw that he was awake, and her eyes lit up as she smiled in a way that somehow reassured him. She said softly, ‘Hullo, Paul! More yourself?’ and reached out to take his pulse. This again struck him as odd, for it seemed extremely improbable that there should be two lady doctors in the Valley.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, ‘and why the devil am I still trussed up like this?’ but this time her smile was professional as she said calmly, ‘Which question would you like answered first, Paul?’ and because her voice and touch soothed him he smiled back, saying, carefully, ‘They were going to reset this damned arm. That’s the last thing I remember. Is it done now? Is this why I’m still in a straitjacket?’ and she told him that this was so, that ‘the lady doctor’ would be in to look at him again soon and that meantime she had volunteered her services as nurse. ‘Semi-professionally­,’ she added, with a touch of pride, ‘for I did V.A.D. training in London but I don’t think you should talk much now. Suppose I get you a cup of tea?’

  ‘I don’t want a thing to eat,’ he said, ‘but I could do with some tea! I’ve got a mouth just like the bottom of old Honeyman’s sawpit! Chloroform I imagine. Get tea, Claire, but don’t go away, because I want to know what’s happened. I’m still very hazy.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ she said, ‘you’ve just come round from an anaesthetic but you’ll be all right in the morning. I’ll get tea now,’ and she rustled out of the room and hurried down the backstairs to the kitchen.

  Without understanding why she felt elated, perhaps because his recognition of her, and his inclination to chat, gave substance to Maureen O’Keefe’s assurances of a swift recovery. Mrs Handcock read good news in her face and in the demand for a pot of strong tea. ‘Is ’er comin’ round, then? Is ’er really on the mend, do ee’ think?’ she asked and Claire told her that he was very definitely on the mend, and that she could pop in and have a word with him after the doctor had been. The bulletin transformed the housekeeper. She puffed out her cheeks with relief and waddled to and fro laying the tea-tray, saying, ‘Tiz been a turrible carry-on about yer, Miss Claire! A turrible carry-on! Right plaized to zee you back I be for mebbe you c’n maake ’un smile again! What with one thing and another us didden know ’ow ’twould end sometimes. My Horace has been in a rare ole tizzy about ’un, I can tell ’ee!’

  ‘I can believe it, Mrs Handcock,’ said Claire, and took the tray up the backstairs to the bedroom, cooling the first cup with plenty of milk in case he spilled it, then putting her arm round his shoulders to steady him as he lifted it to his mouth with his free hand.

  He drank it gratefully and asked for another and hotter cup but while she was pouring he passed his hand over his chin and exclaimed, ‘Good God, I’ve got half-an-inch of stubble! Why the devil didn’t somebody shave me before they brought you here?’ and she laughed and said she would shave him herself if the doctor gave permission and then let him drink his second cup without help, remembering the stress laid upon such niceties in the lecture entitled, ‘Convalescence!’

  ‘All right,’ he said, when she had relieved him of the cup, ‘now you can tell me how you happen to be here and something of what’s going on. That woman doctor can’t because she’s a stranger here and as for John Rudd, he fusses like an old hen every time I ask him a straightforward question! All I get from him is “Don’t fret, Boy! Leave everything to me!” as if that helps a man to clear his head!’

  ‘Well, he’s right,’ she said, ‘for you have been rather ill, you know. Apart from being badly knocked about you had pneumonia and pneumonia plus broken ribs can be very dangerous.’

  He grinned and she realised he was laughing at her readiness to dispense medical knowledge.

  ‘So you sold that wretched tea-shop and took up nursing?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘but I might. I was always interested in nursing and would have gone in for it years ago if Father hadn’t sat on the idea. I enrolled for a V.A.D. course at St Thomas’s when I left Penshurst and opened a shop in London.’

  He remembered vaguely that she had taken new premises in Bayswater about a year ago and that news of this had reached him through Rose after the arrival of a Christmas card showing a sketch of her shop. It gratified him that he could remember such things and that his brain seemed to be working normally, and after being prompted to tell him more she explained that she had read of the wreck in the London newspapers and decided to come home and hear about it first-hand. She said nothing of Ikey’s letter, deciding that it was not for her to tell him that her presence here was in fact due to the boy’s statement that he had called out for her in a delirium. Then he asked her the date and seemed surprised when she told him that it was April 8th, nearly a month since the night of the wreck, yet with this reminder she witnessed a mild puff of pride when he said, being careful to speak collectively, ‘We did a good job down there, didn’t we? Seven out of the nine on that rock but it was more by luck than judgment! Poor Old Tamer was the real hero and I wish to God he’d lived to realise what he’d done, and have people respect him for once! Will you remind John Rudd to see that Meg and the girls don’t want for anything until I can get about again?’

  ‘You really can’t start fretting over things until you’re really well,’ she told him severely. ‘For heaven’s sake let the Valley look after itself, Paul! It’s been doing it for centuries, you know!’ and then she regretted having said this for it implied that his leadership was a non-essential, so she added, quickly, ‘That doesn’t mean that everybody round here doesn’t think a very great deal of you, Paul! I realised that the moment I talked with Father and you know how difficult he is to impress! He said the Valley people would never have achieved anything like that under a Lovell and that you’ve done a wonderful job here and this proves it.’

  He pondered this for a moment and she took the opportunity to draw the curtains. When she returned to the bed he was asleep and as she stood looking down at him it crossed her mind that he had the face of an Elizabethan, with a jaw-line and high cheekbones that were uncommon today, especially about here, where almost everyone had the squarish Anglo-Saxon cast of features, or, where the Celtic strain predominated, a smoother, chubbier face. There were plenty of dark-skinned men in the Valley but their beards had a bluish gloss that his lacked. All in all, she reflected, he was a strange, alien man to want to make his life here where he had no roots yet his doggedness was making itself felt, even upon men as conservative as her father. He was like a wedge that had first attached itself to the soil of the Valley by its own weight and every blow strengthened its bite. There had been that awful Codsall business, then the dismal Smut Potter affair and the quarrel with Gilroy and finally the strange abdication of Grace Lovell but nothing seemed capable of dislodging him, not even the recurring scandals of his wife’s gaol sentences. He absorbed all these setbacks, still clutching at his rather old-fashioned conception of duty. His outlook would have amazed his predecessors and was said to have exasperated his wife but this ought not to have surprised him—anyone could have told him that a well-bred woman like Grace Lovell would be incapable of seconding his arch ideas.

  She stood there a long time and the memory of their association returned to her like a windsong, pleasant but unsubstantial, without a clearly recollected beginning and with no promise of renewal. She had once thought of herself as madly in love with him but now she understood that her self-deception had grown out of the prospect of co-owning the acres on which she had been born and where she had spent such a happy childhood. She had forgiven herself all those clumsy schemes to capture him, supposing that any girl of her age and limited experience would hav
e done her best to catch a husband who was rich, young and very amiable. Perhaps he was the real loser, for surely no one else in the Valley understood him as she did and had done from the moment when she had been able to evaluate his terrible earnestness. The thought interested her. Had Grace Lovell really been obsessed with the campaign to win votes for women or had she run off simply because she was bored to death by his obsession with chawbacons and their affairs? And wouldn’t any intelligent, educated woman be bored with them if she had access, through his money, to a richer and fuller life? It was, she decided, unfair to ask herself this question, for she had never regarded herself as an educated woman and had been brought up to accept the authority and the wilfulness of males as uncomplainingly as one faced up to a wet haymaking season, or a false spring half-way through January. A Valley wife did not necessarily have to embrace her man’s enthusiasms; she either absorbed them or shrugged them off and went about the business of making a home and rearing children. Yet would it be as simple as this with Paul Craddock? Whoever married him would marry the estate, and personal happiness with a man as obstinate as he could only be achieved by a fusion of interests that went beyond those of hearth and nursery. It was not simply a matter of acreage either, of cob, thatch and husbandry. Whoever shared his life would be required to know the Christian names of every soul dwelling inside the magic circle, together with their needs, hopes, fears and capacity for skilled and unskilled work. It was something to which she had not given a thought when she made such a goose of herself beside the mere and in the days immediately before the Coronation soirée.