‘Ahh,’ said Jem, still without taking his eyes off the suspended green balls in the sky, ‘I daresay I be but that’s how it is, Vi midear! I’ve told ’ee bevore an’ I’ll tell ’ee again, dornee let me catch either of ’ee we’ no man or I’ll tan the hide off ’ee, do ’ee mind now?’
‘So I should think!’ said Cissie virtuously and Violet, reflecting bitterly that her sister had not been tempted, ground her teeth with rage but judged it wise to make no further comment.
Edward Derwent, standing at the foot of the avenue with his wife Liz, his son Hugh and his daughter Rose, watched the rockets soar with more satisfaction than any man in the valley. It was not that he set much store by fireworks, considering them pesky, noisy, unpredictable things but simply that they helped to reveal the fat of the years, particularly the last few years, that had done so much to mellow him. For in that brief span of time Claire had shown them. Not only had she married the Squire and presented him with heirs but, almost in passing, she had cured her father’s land-hunger, for where was the sense in yearning to own High Coombe when, in a way, he already owned it, together with every other farm in the Valley? His mind returned to the occasion he had last stood here watching fireworks and he recalled his bitter disappointment at the apparent inaccuracy of their assurances that Young Squire was madly in love with his prettiest daughter, and likely to demand her hand at any moment. Well, Young Squire had taken his time but it had come to pass in the end and now he was the Squire’s father-in-law, just as they had predicted. As the years passed his pride in his daughter had grown and grown, just like one of his neighbour Willoughby’s vegetable marrows earmarked for the harvest festival, and whereas everyone in the Valley had, in some degree, warmed their hands at the glow issuing from the Big House, Derwent had been warmed through and through by events up there. And some of this warmth had passed through him to his wife Liz, she who had tried so hard and so unsuccessfully to fill the shoes of her predecessor, for whereas, in the early days of her marriage, Edward had treated her like a scullery-maid, he now yielded her the respect due to a tolerably efficient housekeeper and with this she was more than content. Silently, as a set-piece of the Battle of Trafalgar began to sputter, Liz Derwent breathed a prayer of thankfulness that things had turned out so well for all of them.
A few yards removed from the families and lovers a thickset figure sat perched on a shooting stick, also contemplating the fireworks although not as a source of entertainment. Professor Hans Scholtzer, formerly of the University of Jena, liked firework displays because they reminded him that the early Chinese civilisations had shown so much more sense in their use of gunpowder than had their imperial successors in the West. Here, in this remote valley, however, the old German had found something of the peace he had sought all his life and at least once a day he relished it, as he was relishing it at this moment. He hoped with all his heart that the simple folk around him (who reminded him sometimes of peasants he had met in the forest clearings of Lower Saxony) would never be tempted to put gunpowder to other uses and involve themselves in the interminable bickerings of the Hohenzollerns, the Romanoffs and the Hapsburgs, to say nothing of the shifty politicians in Paris. For if they did not only would his peace be shattered but also the peace of the valley, possibly for generations, and the Kaiser’s minions would reach out and pluck the Professor’s fine son Gottfried from his studies and enrol him as a private soldier under the Kaiser’s double-eagle. The Professor sat on his shooting stick like a carefully balanced toad but in the white glare of the rockets those about him did not see him as a toad but as a caricature of a fat German bandsman, such as they had often seen in the streets of Paxtonbury. His round head shone and his eyeglasses twinkled and every now and again he blew out his cheeks, as though he was flexing his facial muscles for an assault on the trombone.
Then, when everybody had quite forgotten the mutter of thunder over the Bluff, the storm that had been threatening all day burst and rain began to hiss down on upturned faces and lightning shamed the puny flashes over the chestnuts. The Battle of Trafalgar was left to fight its way through to an indecisive finish and everyone ran clear of the trees and made for tents or outbuildings, remaining there while the giant thunderclaps echoed all the way down the Valley and the rain drummed on taut canvas, telling one another what a good thing it was that the storm had held off all day and spared the Squire’s Jamboree.
Claire was already in the house when the storm burst, happy to kick off her shoes and shoot her long legs towards the empty grate, reflecting that she had been very wise to insist that the helpers’ dance was postponed until the debris was cleared from the paddock and stubble field for she did not think she could have kept awake after such a long day in the open. She did not light the lamp but sat sipping hot, sweet tea, watching the lightning play over the chestnuts and hoping Paul would be along soon and they could go to bed. It had been, she reflected, a stupendous success and had done everyone credit, particularly the man who was to foot the bill for all the beer consumed and all the gear hired. There could be little doubt but that everyone had enjoyed themselves immensely but then, it did not take very much to amuse the people of the Valley. The men, she reflected, invariably used these occasions to drink, wench, and air their collective rivalries, whereas the women concentrated on displaying their clothes and practised a different kind of rivalry, and Claire, valley-born, could view these activities without patronage. After all, were the so-called gentry very different? Their own life, hers and Paul’s, trod an equally narrow circle; they ate, drank, made love, slept and planned the expansion of family and estate, which was only another form of rivalry.
The rain continued to pour down and she wondered how people would get home and how many would stay overnight in the barns and lofts. Well, they were welcome, every one of them, but their presence would mean another early start in the morning, and the thought made her yawn. At last Paul clumped in and greeted her just as she was slipping into a delicious doze.
‘It’s set in for the night!’ he said, ‘thank God it held off until now! We got most of the fireworks off the ground before the fuses got wet. Is that tea? By thunder I could do with a cup! Is it long made?’
‘No,’ she said, heaving herself out of the chair, ‘I fell asleep drinking mine—here you are.’ He stood, feet astride, looking her over with a smile and said, as she handed him his cup, ‘I couldn’t have brought it off without you, Claire. And the food was first-class, everybody says so!’ but she was far too sleepy to be flattered and replied ‘Good! Well drink it up and let’s get some sleep, dear.’ She kissed him on the cheek and drifted off and he looked after her a little ruefully for, in spite of his exertions during the long day, he did not feel tired and would have enjoyed sharing his sense of elation with her. Hearing her footsteps above he pictured her movements, observed so often from a horizontal position for she was a confirmed bedroom potterer and he was always the first to climb between the sheets. Then, in a mood of contemplative sensuality that her presence often brought to him at this hour he lounged across to the bookcase and lifted out a heavy volume in a series called Famous Paintings of the Western World. He turned the pages until he came to Rubens’ ‘Bathsheba Receiving King David’s Letter’, the picture that Grace had shown him the first time she had met Claire in this house. He had never looked at it since but now that he did he saw how accurate Grace’s observation had been. Claire did look extraordinarily like the fair Bathsheba, with her habit of sitting with knees pressed together at an angle to the chair and a kind of overall ripeness—those had been Grace’s words—in every line of her strong, plump, flowing figure. He thought as he closed and replaced the book, ‘Well, nobody could blame David for trying …’ and chuckled, making a mental note to ask Claire how she regarded the old rascal’s summary despatch of Uriah to the forefront of the battle.
Perhaps it was reaction from the clamour of the day, or seeing so many familiar faces, or the picture-link with Grace that
set his memory bells ringing. He went over to the tall window watching the flicker of lightning playing over the chestnuts and listening to the thunder rolling up to the Sorrel source beyond the railway. A feeling of accomplishment warmed him, derived not only from the day’s achievements but enclosing the whole cycle of the years he had spent here, every one of them packed with incident. The long procession of the seasons went marching on through the hiss of summer rain and every now and again somebody looked back and lifted a hand in greeting or in farewell—Grace, old Tamer Potter, Parson Bull, Martin and Arabella Codsall, and many, many others, whose names appeared fleetingly in the estate diary and whose destinies, one and all, had been linked with his since he came here, a callow young man with a limp accepting a challenge that seemed, in retrospect, immensely daunting. And then as he took a final look at the blurred landscape, the roundness and finality of his tenure made an almost physical impact upon him so that he was able to stand outside it and study it as he could observe the detail of the tallest chestnut with every branch and twig illuminated by the white glare of lightning. And beyond it, sensed rather than seen, were the decades ahead, years and years possibly of safe, secure living, with the land yielding a richer harvest every summer and his own children and those of the Pitts and Eveleighs and Potters growing up to take their places in the endless and unchanging life cycle of the Valley. Permanence reigned here, permanence, predictability, and within those limits—narrow to some but not to him—was fruitfulness, the rich bounty of the land, claimed and unclaimed, and the bounty of every womb between here and the sea. It was a reassuring thought on which to close an era and he would have lifted out the estate diary and tried to express it in words had not Claire, at that moment, rapped with her shoe on the floor above, reminding him that the day was done and anything new could wait upon tomorrow. Smiling what she would have called ‘his smug, patriarchal smile’ he turned out the lamp and added the clump of his boots to the long roll of thunder booming down the sky.
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Chapter One
I
They were Squire Craddock’s vintage years, the brief, crowded period beginning immediately after the fillip given to the Sorrel Valley by the 1911 Coronation Jubilee, and moving on into the blazing summer of 1914 that, on looking back a little later, seemed as remote as the Middle Ages.
Some guide as to what occurred in and around the Shallowford Big House and its seven farms during these thirty-six months could by found in the Bible-bound estate record kept up to date by Squire’s wife Claire—‘the Derwent Maid’ as many Shallowfordians continued to call her, notwithstanding the fact that she had been Squire’s second wife for four years and had already presented him with three children and sometimes by Paul Craddock himself, particularly when he felt more than ordinarily complacent.
Into that great book, once used as a pornographic photographic album by Craddock’s predecessor, poured the trivia of the years, a tumultuous hotchpotch of births, deaths, marriages, crop records, boundary adjustments, structural alterations, floods, frosts, droughts and occasional unrehearsed farces, like Craddock’s short-lived addiction to the internal combustion engine. It was much more than an estate diary, for Paul Craddock did not see himself as a landlord to most of the hundred-odd people who lived between Blackberry Moor and the Sorrel outfall at Coombe Bay but as a kind of self-appointed tribal headman, part reeve, part mayor, part father-figure and friend. Nobody in the Valley contested this claim or would have wished to contest it, for not only did he perform the office efficiently but brought to it the thoughtful zest of a junior officer commanding his first platoon in the field. He grumbled a good deal and frequently cursed the responsibilities he had laid upon himself when he bought the estate back in ’02, but for all that he was so jealous of them that he begrudged his agent John Rudd a small share of the packload.
John would have told you that Paul Craddock made his own decisions and Claire, Paul’s plump, pretty and practical wife would have added that he enjoyed making them and even derived a certain gloomy satisfaction from his failures. Either one of these prejudiced witnesses could have told you everything worth knowing about this eccentric, generous, dedicated, self-opinionated young man, who had ploughed a fortune into the remote thirteen-hundred-acre estate between the main line and the sea but they would have preferred you to settle downalong and find out for yourself, the way everyone else had done in the years between the two coronations. For all the signposts were there, pointing across the river to Four Winds, down the river-road to Home Farm, over the shoulder of the hill to where the Pitts’ family farmed Hermitage, and across the great belt of old woods to the three Coombe Farms and the steep, cobbled street of Coombe Bay. He knew and he loved every tile and every sprig of yellow gorse hereabouts. He could tell you how many Friesians Norman Eveleigh of Four Winds numbered in his herd, how many pigs Henry Pitts of Hermitage marketed last year, how the half-gypsy Potter tribe were faring over at Low Coombe now that old Tamer had died a hero, and how many of his tenants’ wives were pregnant at any one time. He missed very little (unless it occurred under his nose on his own hearthstone) and because of this Claire found him far easier to manage than she had anticipated in view of his first and dolorous marriage to Grace Lovell. Two things only he demanded of her—identification with the Valley, which was his lifeswork, and a regular access to her ripe and blessedly complaisant body. Both demands were readily, not to say gaily fulfilled. Why not? She was Valley-born, deeming those born elsewhere deprived and luckless wights, and she had desired him as bedmate and helpmate ever since he had ridden into her father’s rickyard as a city greenhorn within a month of her nineteenth birthday. And by now, like every other Shallowfordian, she had come to terms with his first disastrous marriage even though it had cost her five frustrating years of her youth. After all, every dog in the Valley was forgiven a first bite even when they bit Quality and at least he had emerged from the unlucky encounter with a ready-made stepson who was easy to love.
Typical of the entries written into the estate record by Claire during this three-year halcyon period was one dated February 12th, 1912. It read: ‘Today. Doctor Maureen Rudd, M.D. wife of John Rudd, agent of Shattowford, delighted and astonished Sorrel Valley by presenting her husband with a bouncing boy! It was her first and she is, we think, more surprised than any of us, for she declares her age to be 39 although privately we think she is 37’.
Whether or not Maureen Rudd was indulging in a little blarney about her age Claire was not exaggerating when she wrote that ‘Lady Doctor’ (as her patients continued to call her) was quite astounded to discover that she was pregnant. She had dashed up and down the Valley inviting all and sundry to witness the miracle, and would say, when they hastened to congratulate her, ‘It’s the air in this damned Valley, so it is! It’s a forcing-house for women! Every woman, married or single, this side of the Teazel calls me out in the middle of the night sooner or later! And now who the Devil can attend me?’ They all laughed with her and reassured her, for she was one of the most popular figures in the Valley and the initial prejudice against her sex had long since disappeared, banished by her explosive laughter and her habit of cutting the cackle and coming straight to the point but John Rudd, who loved her dearly, had never quite recovered from the shock of having his diffident proposal accepted, voiced his anxiety to Paul after Maureen had returned from seeing a specialist in Paxtonbury.
‘She says Clifford Goreham has assured her everything will be all right,’ he said, ‘but it’s obviously a risk for a woman to have her first child at that age. If anything happened to her I’d never forgive myself.’
‘For God’s sake don’t say that to her,’ Paul told him, ‘or she’ll throw something heavy at you, John! It’s the kind of remark that would infuriate her if I know Maureen.’
‘Oh, it’s well enough for you,’ John grumbled, ‘Claire is only twenty-nine and she’s already had thre
e children, but damn it I just couldn’t believe it when Maureen told me and, strictly between ourselves I feel a bit of a fool! After all my son Roddy is thirty and I’m not far off sixty!’
‘Obviously a young sixty,’ Paul joked, having been warned by Claire to laugh John out of his anxieties. ‘As for Maureen, she’s as fit as a fiddle, whether she’s thirty-nine or, as I’m inclined to believe, thirty-seven for it’s just like her to make the most of a situation like this! Believe me, John, everything is going to be all right, so let’s wet the baby’s head in advance.’
And so it proved when Maureen’s baby was born in a Paxtonbury nursing home ‘on the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday’, as the almost incoherent father informed Paul and Claire by telephone. Maureen had had a stiffish time, he said, and was very tired, but Goreham who was attending her was pleased with her on the whole. The baby weighed seven pounds and they were going to christen him Paul, after his godfather!
‘How many godchildren have I got around here?’ Paul asked Claire, after he had passed the news to the anxious kitchen staff and Claire, after consulting the record, told him seven, four girls and three boys, and she would have to make a special entry in the back of the book so that he did not overlook anyone’s birthday. She kept her promise the next day and read the list to him over the luncheon table. The first, Sam Potter’s eldest daughter, was now nine and between Pauline Potter and Paul Rudd came one of Will Codsall’s boys, Eveleigh’s youngest daughter, a son of Henry Pitts, a child of Honeyman’s foreman at the Home Farm, and the daughter of a cottager employed by Edward Derwent, whose wife had died in labour.
Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By) Page 76
