Apart from this one setback the year had passed happily and eventfully, with his plans slowly taking shape and the Valley expanding under his thrust and initiative. His touch was surer now and she gave herself a little credit for this, for he was always relaxed and seemed to find in her someone who could match his enthusiasm for the Valley. Yet there was far more to it than that. After the barest minimum period of adjustment she had become wholly his, as much his as this wide, wooded valley and everything growing on it, as much a part of him as his secret dreams. She could laugh now at old wives’ whispers of the indignities demanded of a woman given in marriage, and had, indeed, never taken their warnings very seriously, for she had been born and raised on a farm and a witness from earliest childhood of the farm cycle.
For all that marriage presented her with a variety of surprises and not the least of them had been his unexpected gentleness during their first few weeks together. Although far less inhibited than the average city girl of her generation Claire had experienced a certain amount of anxiety as regards the purely physical aspects of marriage and her doubts were centred on his previous marriage to a woman of a different milieu from her own. Grace Lovell had been accepted in the Valley as a ‘modern’ woman, possessed, no doubt, of all kinds of mysterious, ‘modern’ ideas, some of which she may well have communicated to her husband and it was this that caused Claire to magnify her own ignorance. Her mother had died when she was nine and no one had taken her place, for Rose, and later Edward Derwent’s second wife, Liz, were even less experienced than she was herself. She had read very little apart from the romantic lady novelists of the period and such information as they could supply on the subject of marriage stopped short at the altar. This was why, once the modest tumult of the wedding was over, Claire Derwent found her confidence at low ebb, particularly after they had arrived in Anglesey where she had elected to spend the honeymoon.
They took a suite in a hotel and it was here, in a matter of hours, that she was blessedly reassured, for she found him not merely tolerant and patient where tolerance and patience were not to be expected of a groom but able, in a way that was peculiarly his own, to spice his ardour with a humour that soon demolished such reservations as had survived her upbringing on a farm under the eye of a man of her father’s temperament. With this shedding of false modesty on her part came other discoveries, chief among them a secret delight in his frank worship of her body. She had never thought of herself as more than pretty and even that in a somewhat countrified way, but he obviously thought of her as beautiful and under the stimulus of his glorification she learned to respond to him in a way that not only brought him gratification as a lover but stature and authority as a man, and to a degree that had eluded him since he first came to live among them. It pleased her enormously that she should have been able to achieve this so rapidly and so effectively that, on their return, even people like John Rudd noticed it, but for all the accord and delight they found in each other’s arms laughter was never quite banished by urgency. These lighter notes were struck, in the first instance, by his appetite for love which had mildly surprised her until she remembered that he was only four years her senior (which was something she had half-forgotten during his long illness) and also that he had been deprived of a woman for almost two years and had not, it seemed, consoled himself elsewhere after Grace’s desertion. Sometimes, when he was asleep beside her and his arm lay across her breast, she would feel herself blushing at the memory of an encounter, of words that had escaped her and extravagances she had actively encouraged and sometimes half initiated but then her sense of humour would reassert itself and she would smile in the realisation that there was surely health and resilience in the sharing of so much ecstasy compounded with so much silent laughter.
She stood by the stile at the north end of the orchard watching the coral pink sky shedding its veils of light over the Bluff as the sun topped the eastern slope of the cliffs. The bluebells were already half out, spreading handfuls of pale blue dust between the older apple trees, and in hedges crowded by clusters of primroses, solitary campions, violets and periwinkles peeped, like shy neighbours in a street of extroverts. She thought, ‘God knows how scared I was, scared of comparisons, of him accepting me as a second-best, a good-intentioned hobbledehoy but there was nothing to be frightened of after all! All my instincts about him were accurate, for where there is kindness and courage anything is possible given goodwill on my part and that he always had in abundance!’ And suddenly life and prospects seemed as smooth and round as her belly and the future as predictable as the seasons. With a song on her lips she went down through the wet grass, stepping in her own footsteps and then round to the forecourt and in at the big door that they never locked since the night of the Codsall tragedy.
There was still no one astir and she went through the library and into the office to get the Bible-camouflaged estate record. His gesture in giving her this book to maintain had been one of the most rewarding in her life and she took great pains to justify it although, under her pen, it had become less of a record and more of a great, gossipy diary. She carried the book back to the library and sat facing the empty grate, and as her eye fell upon the bearskin hearthrug she laughed for this morning the rug had a special significance for her and for the child in her womb, conceived here on the blustery night they had both taken too much of Martin Pitts’ punch at Hallowe’en and had rattled home by moonlight to find a great fire burning and the room more inviting than the bedroom overhead. She paused, often opening the book, to reflect on the moment, half in wonder and half in amusement, recalling his boisterousness and her own halfhearted protests about the possibility of prowling servants. A single kiss had driven all thought of them from her mind and there they had lain for an hour or more, with the room lit by the flicker of pungent-smelling apple logs and the familiar tide of gratified accomplishment sweeping over her, for although he was soon asleep, and the punch or the makeshift couch made him snore, she would never forget what he had replied when she had said, ‘We’re behaving more like a pair of precocious adolescents than a respectable married couple!’ He had said, running his hand through her disordered hair, ‘Having you restores my adolescence, Claire! Every time I touch you, look at you even, I feel about seventeen, and surely it must be good for a man to have that kind of wife within reach!’
She remembered this now and it produced the satisfied glow she had experienced at the time, so that she no longer had patience with the book and put off writing an entry about his purchase of the cart-horses, flicking through the latter pages and scanning items like ‘Smut Potter’s second-hothouse erected’, and ‘Stream End block of four cottages, in Coombe Bay, bought and rethatched’, until she arrived at blank pages and wondered what events would be recorded on them after the final one which read, ‘April 22nd, 1908. Jem Pollock signed on as foreman, Low Coombe. Dell problem solved but in what a curious way! Squire’s approval still conditional.’ Then she closed the book, replaced it in the safe and went out to brew some tea, filling two china mugs and carrying them trayless to the main bedroom.
He was still asleep when she drew the curtains and she woke him by holding a braid of her hair and drawing it slowly across his face. He opened his eyes and looked bewildered for a moment and then, with a laugh she said, ‘I’ve been out! It’s wonderful! Just like the early morning of the world up there in the orchard! Take it, it’s freshly made’—and she gave him his tea, but as he sat up to drink it he noticed her bare feet.
‘You ought to wear shoes out there, Claire! Maureen warned you to be more careful this time!’
‘Not about getting dew on my feet,’ she said, and lifting her foot invited him to feel it, which he did, finding it unexpectedly warm.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ he grumbled, only half seriously, ‘if old Chivers saw you walking barefoot in the orchard at crack of dawn he’d probably tell old Horace Handcock you do it to elude my early morning demands on you!’
‘He’s only got to look at me to discover I didn’t succeed!’ she said and faced the full-length mirror on the clothes closet door, adding ruefully, ‘I’m enormous, Paul! About twice as big as I was last time. Is that a good sign, do you think?’
‘It’s probably a sign that you’ve badly miscalculated,’ he said grinning.
‘Oh no, it isn’t. I’m not likely to make a mistake about that. As a matter of fact I’ve just been in the library remembering. You and your Hallowe’en parties! A fine climax to nibbling apples in a bowl and wearing turnip lanterns I must say!’
He put down his mug and clasped his hands behind his neck, regarding her humourously. ‘Come over here!’ he ordered, and when she came a little closer but remained out of reach, ‘What were you doing when I opened my eyes just now? Were you pulling the bedclothes from me?’
‘Nothing so heartless,’ she said, kneeling on the bed so that her hair covered his face. Just this! Surely the most enchanting awakening a man can expect, even from such a doting wife as me!’
‘Yes, it is,’ he said, seriously, gathering a double handful of tresses and kissing them, ‘but I’m hanged if I don’t believe you’ve forgotten what day it is,’ and before she could indignantly deny the fact he threw aside his pillows and produced a small leather box, pressing the spring and showing her a beautifully wrought brooch, with a heavy gold circlet and a central star composed of one large and a score of much smaller diamonds, the whole being suspended on a thin gold chain. She showed the wild excitement of a child opening a Christmas stocking.
‘Paul, it’s lovely! I didn’t expect anything, honesty I didn’t! I didn’t dream …’, and then, as her hand reached for it, ‘Did you really buy those cart-horses yesterday? Is that really why you went all the way to Torhaven?’ and he told her, chuckling, that it was indeed and that the purchase had been an after-thought that occurred to him minutes before the quay curiosity shop had closed, that he had walked inside without an idea in his head and had seen the brooch on a blue velvet cushion, surrounded by a lot of trumpery jewellery.
She crossed to the mirror and fastened it to her blouse, jerking her head this way and that and cooing like a pigeon.
‘Well, it’s wonderful and I wouldn’t have given you credit for such marvellous taste,’ she said. ‘Look! Isn’t it right! Isn’t it different!’
He said, smiling, ‘No, it’s you who are different, Claire! And you don’t need jewellery to convince me!’
II
The Dell problem had indeed been solved and it was not flippancy on Claire’s part that had prompted her to write ‘in a curious way—Squire’s approval conditional’ in the record book. The Dell had always been a nursery of Valley scandal but never more so than in the spring of 1908, some time after Smut came out of gaol on licence, having served three years, eight months of his five-year sentence. He at once astonished his welcome committee by declaring that he intended to become a horticulturist, specialising in hothouse and bedding-out plants for sale in the city.
This ambition baffled everyone who had known him but in many other ways he was a parody of the Smut Potter they recalled as the terror of Shallowford and Heronslea coverts with his gun and traps. His impudent smile had gone and in its place was a sleepy, ingratiating grin; his stubby hair had streaks of grey and his loping, poacher’s walk had shrunk to a careful shuffle. Instead of balancing himself on his toes, as of old when he had always seemed on the point of leaping for cover, he now stood with joints relaxed, as though awaiting the bark of command before he moved in any one direction. Yet one thing about him had not changed. He was still extremely obstinate and nothing could induce him to have a hand in uprooting Sam and his family from their cottage and taking Sam’s place as woodsman and keeper. Yet, to their dismay, neither would he consent to having Tamer’s lease transferred to him and settling himself on the derelict farm. He was done with poaching, he said, but also with pig-farming and crow-starving. All he wanted to do was to grow flowers in a greenhouse and if Squire Craddock, bless his warm heart, could see his way to dismantle and re-erect the dilapidated glasshouse now standing empty behind the Shallowford rose garden, then he would raise pot plants that had never been seen in the Valley and sell them as far afield as Paxtonbury. He knew he could do it if only he had a single quarter-acre under glass, and if Squire would not part with his greenhouse he would set to work, collect discarded panes from all over the Valley and build one on the long, sunny slope where the Potter land ran down to the river east of Coombe Bay.
The Potters went into conference with Paul and the upshot of their deliberations was that the project was just possible, although Meg expressed private doubts as to Smut’s staying power, saying he would be more likely to keep out of trouble if he went to work in the woods. It was Claire who finally won them over. She came out as an enthusiastic ally of the ex-poacher, reporting that Smut had obviously acquired an extraordinary amount of expertise in the prison gardens and not only knew the names of a wide variety of fashionable conservatory plants but could designate them in Latin! This piece of information convinced everybody that Smut was in earnest and for three days after Paul had given assent to his plan the Potter haywain trundled to and fro along the river road with its loads of glass panes and metal frames to be reassembled on the southern slope known as Seafield, and subsequently repaired and repainted by a team of volunteers, including one of the Eveleigh boys who enlisted as an apprentice.
Old Willoughby, of Deepdene, himself interested in horticulture, gave Smut a good deal of useful advice and a supply of seeds and most of the other farmers chipped in with second-hand tools and supplies of manure, so that Smut was soon established and working sixteen hours a day, sleeping in a poacher’s shelter built against the greenhouse boiler that had been hauled over the bluff on Timberlake’s tree waggon, along with its complement of cast-iron pipes.
It was encouraging, Paul thought, to see the Valley folk rally round the rascal, giving their labour free and taking collective pride in the ungainly structure on the downslope of the Low Coombe boundary. When all was as ready as could be Claire presided at a half-humorous official opening, launching the enterprise with a bottle of Meg’s hedgerow wine smashed against the boiler at the southern end of the house. Everyone, it seemed, was pleased to see Smut home again and all wished him well in his unlikely venture. His initiative, however, did nothing to solve the vexed future of the Potter farm as a whole. Meg had little interest in steady farming or animal husbandry and spent most of her time collecting ingredients for her elixirs, or making the mats and baskets she sold across the Teazel, whereas the girls, who could make a shift at looking after pigs and occasionally ploughed a few acres, were unsuitable as long-term tenants for they were now in their mid-twenties and unlikely to remain single indefinitely.
It was through their agency that the matter was settled, and although the manner in which this took place caused scandalised comment in the Valley, the arrangement drifted on until it was hallowed by time, and Big Jem Pollock was generally accepted as the master of the Dell, and in some ways proved a worthy successor to old Tamer.
Jem was not a farmhand, although he had worked on farms during his semi-vagabond life before appearing in the Valley with a travelling fair licensed to set up on Blackberry Moor each Whitweek. The fair billed him as ‘Jem Pollock, the Goliath of Bideford’ and his act consisted of tying knots in iron bars, hauling struggling teams of yokels across the ring and driving six-inch nails into billets of wood with his bare fists. The fair was a seedy little attraction, with the usual collection of swings, roundabouts, giant-slides and catchpenny booths but it attracted a public from as far away as Paxtonbury in the north and Whinmouth in the west whereas the Valley folk always attended en masse. The Potter family, very much at home in this kind of atmosphere, invariably downed tools and attended every evening, the two girls, Cissie and Violet, acquiring trinkets and entertainments by means of their personal cunning. It was here that
they encountered and passed under the spell of Jem Pollock, the Bideford Goliath, or it might be more accurate to say that it was they, a pair of slingless Davids, who brought Goliath low, for having arrived in the Valley with no intention other than making sport of panting locals at the end of a rope Jem remained there until attracted to the colours by Kitchener’s arresting finger.
It happened on the final night of the fair. Jem had a barker and a tent to himself, and during the previous visits the Potter girls had watched spellbound as he bent over knotted bars, buried nails in tree-trunks with blows of his enormous fist and won frenzied cheers by marching round his patch of sawdust trailing six of the lustiest Heronslea estate workers on a tow rope. The Potter girls had always appreciated a man and were connoisseurs in this field, having, between them, sampled most of the available men living within walking distance of the Dell, but never before had they looked upon a man like Jem, whose calves were like half-grown pine trunks and whose biceps and magnificent torso reminded them of illustrations of the famous Sandow. But it was not his display of muscles that drew giggles from them so much as his working costume, consisting of a leopard-skin toga augmented by pink and excessively tight-fitting hose that left very little to the imagination and had spectators comparing him to Eveleigh’s prize bull. Another unusual thing about the Bideford Goliath was his geniality and the vacant mildness of his expression as he performed in the ring. He had the innocent gaze of a timid girl and features that were delicate for one so huge and muscular. On his splendid limbs grew forests of short, golden hairs that glistened with sweat as he stood flexing his muscles between each act. He also lacked the vainglory of the professional giant and seemed to find nothing very remarkable in his extraordinary feats of strength, which was strange considering the effect they produced upon his audiences, particularly upon the ladies, who flocked to his tent in large numbers for every performance.
Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By) Page 61
