Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  There was a scrunch on the gravel outside and she looked down from the window to see the doctor’s gig cresting the drive. As she watched Doctor Maureen handed down by John Rudd, she thought, ‘Well, O’Keefe’s clever daughter may know what’s wrong with his body but I could do a better job on the real man, so I’m hanged it I give that tea-shop another thought until I’ve made him laugh again!’

  III

  No poet lived in the Valley so there was no one to idle along the banks of the Sorrel, or sit musing beside the mere that season and make some shift at capturing the magic of spring in the fields and bottoms, or the effect it had upon the men and women who lived there. Hazel Potter sensed what was happening because she communed with each successive season but Hazel had great difficulty in writing her name and her poetry either stayed in her head or was expressed through gibberish or the flash of her nut-brown arms and bare legs, as she ranged the woods, or crossed the moor as far as the railway line. Hazel saw the drifts of bluebells under the beeches west of the mere and the trailing clusters of primroses nestling in the steep banks of the back lanes between Hermitage plateau and the thickets of the Bluff. She heard the oratorios of the thrushes, blackbirds and finches and in the birch woods and laurel clumps, and saw the voles slipping along the Sorrel flats between the straight, green stems of wild iris. She knew some of the otters by name and the badgers too, where they had their holts in the broken hillside north of the mere, and she often stood for an hour talking to darting squirrels in the oak on the meadow above the big house.

  Tamer’s death brought her no sorrow. She had never been afraid of him, as were the older girls, and her appraisal of death differed very materially from that of almost everyone else in the Valley. When the Valley folk heard Parson Bull intone at the graveside of the German sailors, using phrases like ‘man springeth up and is cut down like a flower’, or ‘in the midst of life we are in death’, they did not understand these warnings as Hazel understood them, regarding them as no more than extracts from the Prayer Book. Hazel, so accurately in tune with the rhythm of the Valley and with the cycle of life and death that involved every living thing in the Valley, accepted the phrases as plain statements of fact. Every creature, every leaf and every flower in the Valley lived its hour and died its death, sinking back into the earth again and reappearing in changed form next spring, or the spring after that. There was no profit in deploring this, or in wearing mourning and uprooting flowers to pile on pits at places where men and animals and even windfalls and the husks of horse chestnuts were recommitted to the earth. There they had been and there they went and that was that; there was no dividing line to be drawn between a pot-bellied drunkard like Tamer Potter and, say, a hedgehog struck by a hawk. It was the pattern of things and to question it or even think about it was futile. Yet this did not mean that Hazel Potter was deaf to the muted trumpet of spring, or that the throb of renewed life in the Valley aroused no response in her heart. Her step was lighter and her eye and ear sharper than when she trod these same paths in autumn or winter and her heart beat faster as she silently dogged the movement of Ikey Palfrey (whom she still thought of as ‘The Boy’) in his lonely tramps through the coppices and bramble brakes behind the big house.

  She had been surprised to see him again for they said that Squire had sent him away to a big school, and it must have been so for he had stopped coming down to the mere opposite the Niggerman’s Church to wait for her. She did not resent this severance of their association, supposing him to have passed out of her orbit after being condemned to sit all day scratching among papers like a squirrel making a dray but sometimes she was curious to learn what had induced him to abandon the jolly life of a stable-boy for a wearisome life like the Squire’s and whether, in fact, the change had been imposed upon him as a punishment, perhaps for stealing away and meeting her in the woods. Her curiosity encouraged her to keep a close watch on him and one morning she followed him across the bluebell orchard behind the house and through Priory Wood to the high-banked lane linking Hermitage land to the northern boundary of the Home Farm. When he turned east, as though making for Shallowford Woods, she stepped from behind a big ash and called so that he stopped in his tracks and looked surprised and undecided. Then, when he saw her slide down the bank, he blushed and seemed on the point of running back the way he had come.

  ‘Where’ve ’ee been, Boy?’ she demanded, ‘an’ why didden ’ee come upalong, like ’ee used to?’

  His embarrassment left him as soon as he heard her voice but was replaced by a kind of wariness. He said, ‘I thought maybe you wouldn’t be there, on account of your father being drowned,’ and at this she looked surprised, not so much by the remark but by the dramatic change in his voice, as though it had been dug out of him, put through a mangle and replaced, a lisping relic of the original.

  ‘You spake diff’rent,’ she proclaimed, gleefully. ‘How cum you do that, Boy?’

  He said, with dignity, ‘My voice has broken. All men’s voices change when they are fourteen.’

  This seemed to interest her, as though it was one of the few processes of nature that had somehow escaped her notice.

  ‘Is it zo?’ she said, ‘I never heard tell of it bevore,’ and then, forgetting his voice, ‘Do’ee want to zee the badgers, Boy?’ and he conceded gravely that he would like to see them and they went up the lane, across the wood and round the edge of the mere to the hill near where she had found him in the snow.

  They did not see any badgers but they saw many other things that interested him, a bullfinch’s nest with three eggs, an otter diving near the island, a lame vixen at the entrance of an earth close to Smut’s hideout, and soon a little of their effortless relationship returned so that he found himself slipping back into her brogue and wondering about her again. He asked her if her father’s death had made her as miserable as the Squire’s illness was making him and was shocked by her seeming indifference.

  ‘Giddon, no,’ she said contemptuously. ‘Er’s dade idden her? And ’er diden know a dandelion from a daisy!’

  Unable to follow this logic he said, ‘Well, he was a hero down in the cove, Hazel!’ and she replied, glumly, ‘Ar but ’er smashed our boat to tatters bringin’ they foreigners off the rock!’ The discovery that she valued the boat far above her father gave him another clue to her character. She had always intrigued him, with her astonishing knowledge of woodlore and her free communion with wild creatures, but now he saw her as the one person of his world who had achieved complete independence and it seemed to him a very wonderful thing, this ability to remove oneself at will from the ties of authority and wander over the Valley, impervious to social obligations and the weather. In a way he thought, she was a kind of queen with privileges denied men and women tied to chores and caught up in the rhythm of the seasons. She was beautiful too, with her great brown eyes, healthy, freckled skin and a wild mass of chestnut hair that fell, free of all pins and ribbons, to her shoulders. Contemplating her, as they sat side by side on an old log beside the mere, he said, enviously, ‘You have a marvellous time, Hazel, doing exactly what you please! Why can’t everyone do as they please, just the way you do?’

  She gave him a shrewd, sidelong glance, her strong teeth flashing in a merry smile. ‘Mabbe tiz along o’ they old books, Boy,’ she told him, ‘they’m all mazed about books. I dunno why. What can ’ee vind in ’em that baint starin’ ’ee in the faace about here?’ and she reached out and plucked a celandine growing in the bank behind them, holding it between a grubby finger and thumb and twirling it, so that the moist gleam of its petals changed it from a flower to a golden ring. ‘Idden ’er pretty now? Dorn ’ee think on that when youm in skuel, along o’ they ole books?’ It was a salutary object lesson and impressed him tremendously for somehow it revealed to him his own duality, part waif like her, part gentleman-in-the-making, and for the moment the latter role seemed very sterile. He reached out, tentatively and touched her hair, finding it unexpecte
dly soft and glossy. She did not move or smile but sat quite still as the tangled tresses slipped through his fingers but when the impulse to touch her was spent, and he shyly withdrew his hand, she said, ‘Tiz soft, baint it?’ and shook her head so that hair tumbled about her shoulders and then, with her head on one side, ‘Do ’ee think I’m beautiful, Boy?’ He said, sadly, ‘Yes, you are beautiful, Hazel, and the best times I ever had have been out here with you but I’m going back to school tomorrow, so I shan’t see you again until the summer holidays. Suppose … suppose I write you a letter from school?’

  ‘No dornee,’ she said, laughing, ‘I coulden read un,’ but then a thought struck her and she added, ‘I could get Pansy to spell un out mebbe. ’Er’s the best scollard of us.’

  ‘No,’ he said, hastily, ‘I wouldn’t like that!’ and suddenly feeling deflated he got up and began skimming pebbles into the mere, watching them break the surface all the way to the islet.

  She sat on the log watching him, plagued by emotions that she did not understand and moved by impulses that were the first she had been unable to obey as soon as they were felt. The recollected touch of his hand as it passed over her hair made her shiver and this puzzled her greatly, for the sun was very warm on her bare neck and legs. She got up, puzzled and angry with herself, and went quietly up the slope through the close-set timber. When he tired of throwing stones and returned to the log she had disappeared behind the trees.

  IV

  The fingers of spring were probing everywhere in the Valley now and their licence was not restricted to the young and untrammelled. High on the long slope of Blackberry Moor, Elinor Codsall was aware of them that same morning, when the persistent twitter of birds awoke both her and Will at first light, and in yielding to him she casually conceived a third child, despite their plan to limit the family until they had enough capital to buy some portable hovers Will had coveted at the experimental poultry farm, north of Paxtonbury. He had thought at first that he could make hovers as good as these but the days were far too short and they could not afford hired help like the other farms in the Valley. As soon as he had done with her Will began to snore again, a gross indulgence on his part in view of the fact that it was time to rise and start work, so she prodded him, calling ‘Will! Will! Dornee drop off again! I’ll brew tea an’ us’ll make an early start today!’ He grunted and sat up, knuckling his eyes and then, in the soft light of dawn, grinned down at her fondly and possessively. ‘By God Elinor,’ he declared, ‘youm prettier’n ever, midear! I reckon I could taake ’ee again if us had time,’ and although she said, ‘Giddon with your old nonsense!’ and slipped hurriedly out of bed in case he was tempted to waste more time, she was pleased with the compliment, reflecting that most men of Will’s type, having been so recently indulged, would have grumbled at being dragged from sleep.

  The sun almost shouted at Sam Potter, striding over the dyke-banks at the eastern end of the mere on his way to fell timber for a pheasant compound. He walked as though all his joints were fitted with small, steel springs, covered just over a yard at each stride, and as he loped along he sucked in great mouthfuls of sharp April air, sparing a thought for poor old Smut, now ending his third year behind bars and due, so they heard, for release on licence in the new year. He did not think of his father, Tamer, lying in Coombe Bay churchyard surrounded by such unlikely names as Ledermann, Schmitt and Kohlhoff, for it was not a morning to contemplate death and shipwreck. Instead he watched, with an admiring grin, a great dog-fox leap clear of the bracken and bound across the soft ground towards the badger sets. ‘Show a leg, you ole thief!’ he shouted, ‘us’ll be arter ’ee when the nights draw in!’ Then, having selected a sapling, he swung his axe in a wide, slashing arc and the sound of the stroke rang through the woods, flushing out three moorhens and sending them skimming across the lake for their sanctuary on the islet.

  The Codsalls and Potters were habitual early risers but Arthur Pitts and his son Henry over at the Hermitage worked to a more leisurely schedule and ate enormous breakfasts before issuing out of doors. They were munching away now with their womenfolk moving to and fro from the stove, Martha and her great tawny daughter-in-law from over the Teazel, absorbed into the cheerful atmosphere of Hermitage kitchen and privately thanking her lucky stars that she had chosen the genial Henry for husband, instead of the buck-toothed kennelman at Heronslea. The Hermitage, she often reflected, was a home in the very best sense of the word and she now thought of herself as settled for life, although it sometimes puzzled her that Henry, with so much to offer in the way of good temper and security, had remained a bachelor for so long. She was not entirely convinced by Martha Pitts’ explanation that ‘Henry was waitin’ on Mrs Right an’ you be ’er m’dear!’

  Four Winds usually erupted about the time Will Codsall, at Periwinkle, was making his first rounds of the hen-roosts, and filling the hoppers while Elinor followed in his wake collecting the eggs. It was strange that a cautious and sober man like Norman Eveleigh and his practical wife, Marian, should have produced between them such a noisy, rollicking brood, or that they should suffer them to make so much noise as they trooped down the uncarpeted stairs to breakfast, spilling over one another in their eagerness to get to the table and squealing with laughter when Sydney Codsall (now regarded as one of the family) used one of his long, unintelligible words when making a simple request, like ‘Pass the marmalade!’ Their father and mother had impressed upon them that they must show great kindness to Sydney, who had lost both father and mother and thus qualified as an orphan but they found it difficult to avoid teasing him, for he was so unlike any other boy in the Valley, so solemn, studious and unblinking behind his steel-rimmed spectacles that he sometimes seemed more like a little old man than a schoolboy.

  Sydney ate sparingly, paying more attention to a book propped against the cruet than to the home-made bread and jam piled on the wooden platters. Marian had given him permission to read at meals for he was already recognised as an exceptionally clever boy, who would go far, although in what direction nobody had yet decided. The headmaster of the Whinmouth Secondary School was said to take a keen interest in him and had told Eveleigh that he was a boy to be encouraged. He was therefore absolved from any work on the farm and spent hours in a room upstairs that was not much bigger than a closet. Up here, although he worked methodically, he did not spend every moment of his isolation preparing lessons. Sometimes he gazed out of the little window at the sons and daughters of the new tenant of Four Winds as they moved to and fro about their regulated tasks in the yard and deep in his heart he despised them all as a gaggle of geese, boys and girls who would never amount to anything but hewers of wood and drawers of water. He had inherited his mother’s hunger for gentility but even at fourteen he could see quite clearly where his mother had made her first and fatal mistake. She should never have married a clodhopper like his father, for the road to gentility lay not through labour but through attentive study and the accurate memorisation of cohorts of declensions and tables. The headmaster had told him that knowledge was power and power, some time and in some undefined sphere, he was determined to possess. Then all those giggling, skylarking Eveleighs would work not for their father, a jumped-up farm foreman, but for him, Sydney Codsall, the real master of Four Winds and all the acres beyond. After breakfast he set out on his bicycle to pedal the nine miles to school. The sun was hot by then and the birds sang in chorus all the way to the bridge over the Teazel but spring had no message for Sydney. He did not even notice it, being fully occupied repeating to himself a list of irregular French verbs.

  ŸŸŸ

  The warm spring weather and the tumult it provoked in the thickets and hedgerows of the Valley did have a very dramatic effect upon someone old enough and experienced enough to know better. This was John Rudd, rising fifty-three, and a widower for more than twenty years but age and experience had not prevented him from falling hopelessly in love with Maureen O’Keefe, M.D., and that at first sig
ht, when she drove her gig over to the lodge a day or two after the shipwreck and told him, in her pleasant Irish accent, that she was ‘after taking Father’s place for a spell’.

  From the moment she consented to take tea with him in his little parlour, and they had discovered in the city of Cork a topic of mutual nostalgia, he found her the most engaging young woman he had ever met and he continued to think of her as young after she had admitted to thirty-four. It was her humour and frankness that engaged him during that first meeting, but later, after she had paid several visits to Paul, she rapidly enlarged her hold upon him so that he began to think of her small, puckish features as beautiful, and her sturdy, thick-set figure as statuesque. Yet he was not such an old fool as to imagine that she was in the least attracted to him and would have been more than satisfied with her friendship, for she was the only ‘liberated’ woman in his experience who did not make a tiresome fetish of emancipation. He was as astonished at the arrival of a qualified doctor in petticoats as everyone else in the Valley for it was a phenomenon that he had neither encountered nor imagined but after watching her at work on Paul and other equally embarrassed males in the Valley, he had conceived an enormous admiration for her skill and her easy approach to cottagers that overcame their prejudices and won their confidence in the course of a single visit. She was obliged to rely on him a good deal that first month, for she was a complete stranger to the Valley and her close relation with O’Keefe did not help, for the old man had been losing his grip lately and even patients who had suffered him half a lifetime were beginning to distrust his diagnoses and his rough and ready surgery. She was very frank, however, about her father’s shortcomings, admitting that the old man was no longer fit to attend a sick cat and this, she said, was the real reason she was here, to save him making a mistake that would ‘blot his copy-book and mine, on account of our names being one below the other in the Medical Register’!