Over in the east thunder continued to mutter but the rain held off and it was decided to hold the dancing in the open air. Paul went into the refreshment hut for a badly needed drink and was served by a tall, thin, bespectacled young man, whom he did not recognise until Doctor Maureen, sipping a brandy close at hand, told him the volunteer barman was Keith Horsey, son of the rector, still known as New Parson, although he had now occupied Parson Bull’s pulpit for more than three years. He went across and talked to the youth, finding him very shy and afflicted by a slight stammer.
‘Does Ikey know you are here?’ he asked, ‘you were at school together, weren’t you?’ and Keith said that this was true but that he had returned home from Oxford only that day and had so far not spoken to Ikey although he had watched him win the mile. Paul said, ‘There’s dancing going on now and a chap your age would be better employed following his fancy. I’ll find someone to take on here!’ but the boy began to protest and his stammer increased, so that Paul would have left the matter there had not Ikey lounged into the tent at that moment, greeting Keith with genuine pleasure. Paul noticed that the parson’s son lost his stammer at once and the way he looked at Ikey, with myopic brown eyes, reminded him of Grace’s retriever anticipating an ear-rub in front of the library fire. He thought, smiling to himself, ‘He’s got a way with him has Ikey! There isn’t a soul here who doesn’t perk up when Ikey walks in and this poor little toad obviously worships him!’ and on the pretence of buying Maureen a drink he disposed of Keith for a moment and said, ‘Take that kid down to the dancing enclosure and make sure he gets a girl! He’ll do no good standing here serving drinks for the rest of the night!’
‘A girl! Beanpole Horsey with a girl?’ said Ikey, laughing, ‘I know you’ve just bankrupted the bookies by winning the chariot race, Gov’nor, but don’t ask for miracles! Beanpole wouldn’t know what to do with a girl if he was locked up with one.’
‘What sort of chap was he at school?’ Paul asked, and Ikey replied a first-class brain but that was about all. ‘He’s a trier all right,’ he added, ‘and he’s got guts but somehow they don’t show. I like him and always have. I’ll get working on him tomorrow, Gov.,’ but for some reason Paul persisted, saying, ‘No, Ikey, not tomorrow, now! All the girls will have gone tomorrow and some girls like self-effacing types! They don’t all fall for the cocky bounders like you!’
‘Well,’ Ikey said, ‘always willing to oblige, especially after your performance!’ and he ambled over to Keith and Paul watched them stand chatting for a few moments after which Keith took off his barman’s apron, folded it neatly and left the tent like a poacher’s lurcher trotting at its master’s heels. It was a trivial incident, perhaps the most trivial of the day, but he was to remember it long after the excitement of the chariot race had faded from his memory.
III
Keith Horsey, now eighteen, would not have survived his first year at High Wood without the patronage of Ikey Palfrey. After fighting for him, and giving him an essential breathing space, Ikey had found it difficult to shed partial responsibility for the ungainly youth and although Horsey was regarded as a useless weed by almost everyone in the school Ikey soon realised that this was by no means the whole truth about the Beanpole. He possessed, for instance, a great deal of moral courage, and moral courage was in short supply at High Wood. As it was, buttressed in some measure by Ikey’s friendship, Beanpole not only survived but made some kind of impact by his stand against the code of Bloods, notably, that part of it condoning smut and cribbing. In the course of this lonely crusade he collected innumerable beatings, both official and unofficial, but he never yielded ground and no one succeeded in extracting from him so much as a yelp. As Hillman, the Captain of Fortescue, once put it, ‘It’s like walloping a deaf mute and a man can’t do it and then sit down to tea and buns with an easy mind.’ So, in the end, they left him to himself and to Ikey, and the Beanpole shot rapidly up the school to the Sixth where he won the coveted open scholarship to Oxford at the unprecedented age of seventeen and left to read economics and philosophy. Although Ikey had lost touch with him since entering Woolwich the previous year he had by no means forgotten him and was genuinely pleased to see him at the Jamboree. For an hour or more they talked, watching the dancers moving over the clipped turf to the blare of the Yeomanry band and it was not until Ikey saw Rachel Eveleigh partnerless on the far side of the square that he recollected his instructions. Bidding Keith wait for him he lounged across and greeted her.
Rachel was the second daughter of the Four Winds string of children and the most like her placid mother, Marian. She had red-gold hair, a good-natured, slightly freckled face and blue eyes that tonight had something of a snap in them.
‘I’m pairing up on Squire’s instructions, Rachel,’ Ikey told her, ‘do you know Keith Horsey, the parson’s son?’ and when Rachel admitted that she knew him by sight, ‘I wonder if you would do Squire a favour and bring him on a bit? He’s a nice chap but on the shy side so you’ll have to make the running,’ and to Ikey’s surprise Rachel replied in her soft Devon brogue, ‘I’d love to meet him, he’s always seemed a very polite boy and there aren’t so many around tonight!’ and without waiting to be introduced she walked across the enclosure and stood smiling in front of him while Ikey, temporarily losing the initiative, said, ‘Er … Keith old man, this is Rachel Eveleigh from Four Winds … Rachel … you’ve er … you’ve seen him in church, maybe?’ Keith said nothing but stood blinking at the girl who took him by the hand with a cheerful, ‘Come on, this is an easy one, the Military Two-Step. Follow me all the way round!’ and Ikey was left standing with his mouth open having always thought of Rachel Eveleigh as hardly less shy than Keith. He did not notice another solitary figure, a boy about his own age wearing spectacles nearly as thick-lensed as Keith’s, slightly apart from Rachel when he approached, and who remained to watch the couple merge into the long file of dancers circling the bandstand, but Rachel was very much aware of Sydney Codsall, standing by with an expression of baffled irritation on his face for her ready acceptance of Ikey’s appeal had been the direct result of a sharp exchange between them earlier that evening.
Sydney Codsall had not wanted to attend the Jamboree, regarding it as a mere chawbacon’s carnival with little to offer a man who ‘worked clean’—that is to say, wore a starched collar and cuffs. He was only there because, of late, he had been cultivating Rachel for reasons that had nothing whatever to do with her amiability, her red-gold hair or her pleasing, freckled face. He had grown up with the Eveleigh family and had no great affection for any of them, having always regarded them as interlopers whom circumstances had contrived to make him a lodger in his own house. He had been glad to break out of the family circle when he became articled to Snow and Pritchard and took lodgings in Whinmouth but his recent foray into the property market had caused him to have second thoughts about abandoning the Eveleighs altogether. A month or two back he had learned by chance that the parcel of land adjoining the brickworks site was registered in the name of a Mrs Amelia Page and he recalled that Marian Eveleigh had been a Miss Page before her marriage. A little cross-checking during the lunch interval when he was alone in the office had confirmed his guess regarding the ultimate owner of the land, no other than Mrs Eveleigh, old Mother Page’s only surviving child. He also discovered that old Mrs Page was pushing ninety-three. The land comprised no more than a couple of acres but it had a common boundary with his holding in Coombe Bay and if it could be had cheaply was clearly worth a great deal more to him than to anyone else. Sydney gave matters like these very careful thought and it seemed to him that, whereas a direct approach would probably result in drawing the land-hungry Squire’s attention to the parcel, an oblique approach through the most pliable of Marian Eveleigh’s daughters might lead to a bill of sale before anyone else was aware that there was another plot of land to be had on the outskirts of the village.
He set to work at once to court Rachel and made wha
t he considered steady progress, for Rachel had never forgotten her father’s instructions that they were to be kind to the orphaned Sydney. Soon, or so it seemed to her, kindness cracked the crust of Sydney’s aloofness, for he seemed willing to sacrifice precious hours that should have been devoted to study walking her along summer lanes and telling her how much he appreciated the kindness her family had shown him and also—and this interested her rather more—how much more ladylike she was than any of her sisters. It was some time, however, before Rachel, a modest soul, could persuade herself that the rather prickly Sydney was actually courting her, for there were aspects of his attentions that were very puzzling. For one thing he never once tried to kiss her or even to hold her hand; for another all their walks, no matter in which direction, seemed to bring them to the fence surrounding Grannie Page’s field, alongside the old brickworks. For some reason Sydney seemed more bemused by the field, which was quite an ordinary-looking field, than by her red-gold hair, her blue eyes, her dimples, or anything about her, including her ‘ladylike’ conversation. It was not until the tea interval at the Jamboree, a month after the sombre courtship had begun, that Sydney confessed to a keen, personal interest in the field and asked her outright if Grannie Page was likely to live much longer and if Rachel thought her mother would be prepared to sell it for, say, ten guineas per acre?
Rachel Eveleigh was a very amiable girl but she was not stupid. Moreover she had the advantage, which Paul Craddock, in his dealings with Sydney, had not, of having lived cheek by jowl with him for years, so that it did not take her more than a moment to price Sydney’s courtship at twenty guineas, less solicitor’s costs. She had her mother’s complaisance but her father’s pride. After pondering a moment, in order to be quite certain that she was doing no one an injustice, she lifted her hand and smacked Sydney’s face so hard that he lost his balance on a tussock and fell backwards into the shallow river. By the time he got to his feet she had gone and before he could condemn his stupidity for rushing his fences so recklessly she was dancing with the parson’s son, Keith Horsey, and looking very much as if she was making the running. He watched them sourly for half-an-hour but she did not even glance in his direction and before the first rocket soared over the paddock he was bicycling back to Whinmouth, having learned a valuable lesson in tactics but lost a golden opportunity of enlarging his Coombe Bay holdings.
In the meantime Keith Horsey was blithely unaware to whom he owed his adoption by the prettiest of the Eveleigh girls, the titian-haired one, whom he identified as the second unit of a descending row of heads when the family took their places in church. Although shy and ill-at-ease with men he was more relaxed in the presence of women, for he had grown up among church workers who were predominantly female and was thus familiar with feminine topics of conversation. Rachel, who had only taken him in hand as a mean of alleviating the smart caused by Sydney’s baseness, soon found him agreeable company and was secretly flattered at having one of the gentry all to herself, although she could have wished for one with rather more experience in the art of dancing. By the time the fireworks were due to begin, and the band had disappeared into the refreshment tent, all her toes were bruised and on her right thigh was a tender patch of skin where Keith’s knee struck a blow every time they turned. It was very pleasant, however, to find a man ready to admit his shortcomings, especially after a month’s courting with Sydney who had never confessed to one. Keith made no excuses for his clumsiness, saying that his cousins had long since given him over as a hopeless hobbledehoy but if he could not dance he at least treated her with an elaborate courtesy that she found very welcome after the rumblings and neighing laughter of partners at village hops she had attended since putting her hair up. Rachel had pride, as her reaction to Sydney’s proposal had proved, but like all the sons and daughters of tenant farmers in the Valley she recognised her place in the graded society into which she had been born. On one side of the fence lived Squire, the freeholders, the doctor and the parson, and on the other the tenants, the tradesmen, the cottage craftsmen and the hired hands, in that order of progression. To be asked for a single dance by a young man from the other side of the fence was one thing, and might happen to any girl on an occasion like this, but to dance with a college boy who was also the parson’s only son eight times in succession, and then to be escorted by him to the refreshment hut for ice and lemonade, was quite another. By the time the fireworks were started, and Keith still showed no desire to rejoin the gentry, Rachel had decided that the Squire’s Coronation Jamboree promised to be a milestone in her life, the more memorable, perhaps, because there had been so few. Then the Valley gods took a hand in the affair. As the third volley of rockets soared forked lightning flickered over the Bluff and seconds later thunder rolled, so that she had every excuse to reduce the space between them; and because he was such a gentleman, and had such nice manners, his hand, cool if bony, took hers and she told the first deliberate lie of her life saying, in reply to his inquiry, ‘Yes, Mr Horsey, I am frightened of thunder,’ hoping that he would ask her to address him less formally. He did not but she made progress in another direction for he at once enlarged his hold upon her plump hand and held it tightly for the remainder of the display.
For those in charge of the fireworks it was a race against time. With the fall of dusk the atmosphere over the field became oppressive and the rumbles of thunder beyond the Bluff every more frequent. Presently, before the set-pieces had been touched off, a few heavy drops of rain splashed down but nobody minded them much for it was not often the Valley could watch a firework display and some of the spectators recalled the display here in honour of King Teddy, in October 1902. Among these was Pansy Pascoe, plain Pansy Potter when watching the last descent of green and crimson balls over the chestnuts. She was here again tonight, with her brood of four, three cooing and ahhing and the fourth, two-year-old Lizzie, asleep in the go-cart, which Pansy now realised she would have to push all the way home to Coombe Bay for Walt, her husband, had been last seen far gone in drink in the refreshment tent with certain other revellers. Pansy was not given to brooding but the link between the firework displays was too obvious to be ignored. In 1902 she recalled, she had been as one with her sisters living a semi-gypsy life in the Dell taking her fun wherever she found it; now she was a woman apart, with a house to keep clean, a husband to cook for and a steadily increasing tribe of children to make impossible demands on her time, so that fun passed her by and she was losing her figure. She could not help wondering if she had chosen wisely in settling for Walt, simply because he owned a cottage and earned a pound a week, summer and winter. There were times, particularly of late, when she yearned for the cheerful muddle of the Dell as it had been in old Tamer’s time, for up there an odd baby or two had never seemed to matter much and children did not get under one’s feet as they did in a four-roomed cottage. At the firework display of 1902, she recalled, she had considered herself the sharpest of the Potter girls but tonight she was not so sure, in spite of the rumour that Big Jem, the hired hand, kept Cissie and Violet on a very tight rein. Her thoughts, becoming more nostalgic with every new discharge, were interrupted by an impatient tugging at her arm and in the glare of golden rain she looked down into the face of her eldest boy, Timothy, now rising seven and said, without troubling to ask what he wanted, ‘Go over there, Timmy, an’ dornee be tiresome! No one’ll look at ’ee an’ iffen they do then who gives a damn, boy?’
Then, as Timothy slipped away, she was aware of the gleam of a waxed moustache at her elbow and sensed the not unwelcome presence of Dandy Timberlake, eldest and by far the sprucest of the Timberlake boys. All the Timberlake boys had a roving eye but Dandy’s roved to more purpose than his brothers’ and with another pang Pansy recalled larking with him in the hay about a thousand years ago, when everybody in the Valley was free and young and spry. He said, sorrowfully, ‘I’ve come to tell ’ee, Panse, Walt’s dead drunk and like to stay for the night! How be gonner get the family back home?�
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‘On shanks’ pony,’ she said grimly, ‘how else do ’ee think, Dandy?’ but she was pleased to see him nevertheless and not much surprised when he said, ‘If I walked so far with ’ee would ’ee ask me in for a brew o’ tea for old times’ sake, Panse?’
She considered; Walt would probably lay up in the barn with all the other over-indulged loyalists and she had always liked Dandy, with his penchant for fancy waistcoats and fierce Kaiser moustaches, the effect of which was softened by a pair of twinkling brown eyes. There could be no harm in him walking her home, cumbered as she was by four children, for it would not be practicable to stop en route. If, at journey’s end, he claimed a small reward for his services as escort and go-cart pusher was that so unreasonable?
‘Mebbe I would at that, Dandy!’ she said, ‘but tiz time us started backalong, for the kids is tired out, baint ’ee, my loves?’
The nature of the reward, she decided, could be left in abeyance and would depend upon how tired she was on arrival, but it might have been otherwise had she known that Dandy had set his sights elsewhere only a few moments before their encounter, having edged along the line of spectators until he stood very close to Violet, her sister, sandwiched between Cissie and Jem, all standing with their faces to the sky. Dandy had always had a slight preference for Vi and seeing that she and Jem were engaged with the fireworks he approached from behind, pinched her bottom, squeezed her hand and let it run lightly upwards until it had sufficient purchase to incline her towards him. She turned then and flashed him a smile, for Jem’s pitiful performance in the wrestling ring had blown upon embers of resentment in her heart. Like all the Potters she had been born free and tonight she chafed at the bond of honourable captivity. Jem continued to stare upward and she was so deceived by his air of abstraction that she reached out and touched Dandy, her hand moving tentatively, like the hand of a penniless connoisseur fingering an exhibit in a museum while the curator’s back is turned, yet she ought to have remembered that Jem had eyes in the back of his head. He said, quite amiably, and without turning, ‘I was worsted be that sodger but I could still maake mincemeat o’ Dandy Timberlake!’ whereupon Dandy moved on to seek Pansy Pascoe and Vi, much piqued, grumbled, ‘The trouble wi’ you, Jem, is youm so bliddy greedy!’
Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By) Page 75
