R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (55 page)

He was particularly aware of this early that first morning, when he opened his eyes and heard her humming to herself in the little kitchen of the wooden chalet they occupied on the deserted western shore of the lake, under High Dale Peak. It was a particularly isolated spot, with its own tiny beach, south of the little river Cunsey. Over on the Bowness shore the summer season was in full swing and boats were constantly coming and going, the voices of their passengers reaching them across the flat expanse of lake, like the echo of a junior football game played on the higher pitch under the planty. But nobody seemed to want to explore the south-western tip of the lake, and very few cars passed along the road behind the chalet.

She had been very clever to find it, he told her, when the taxi dropped them off, but she said it was luck mostly. A cousin of her father's had stayed here last summer when Segrave had made his fatal attempt on the water-speed record higher up the lake. She had remembered the name of the firm who hired out the chalets and a reference book had supplied her with its phone number. It was no more than a simply furnished shack, with a window looking eastwards across the water but as a hideout, she said, it had a lot to recommend it. Her father's cousin, who drove an Alvis, had taken a dislike to the place when he ran out of petrol here the day Segrave's boat had capsized, missing, as he had put it, all the fun.

It was getting dusk before they finished unpacking, and eating eggs and bacon she fried on the oil-stove, and when he proposed a walk as far as the island opposite she said, in that frank way of hers, 'Is that proposal made out of regard for my modesty, Davy? I mean, waiting until the light fades?' and when
he admitted that it was, she said, lightly, 'Then don't bother, lad. I've waited a long time. Almost as long as you. We'll go for a walk if you need the exercise but not otherwise.'

She had a way, he discovered, of sloughing off her earnestness, and her tendency to view most things from what she herself described as 'the Yorkshire common-sense angle', emerging as an altogether different personality. It was the one, he imagined, that had prompted her to dance naked on the college precincts when she was an undergraduate, a prank that reached the ears of her father and precipitated the first of many family rows. As a bedmate she was equally spirited and would have taken the initiative if he had given her the chance, for her gaiety, he discovered, was infectious. It had not been difficult to adjust to what he accepted as a final commitment, for he had learned something useful from the brief Julia Darbyshire incident.

They lay still on the rumpled bed, using the first few moments of the aftermath to assess both each other and themselves as lovers, admittedly out of practice, but then, turning to him, she raised herself on her elbow and studied him in a way that invited mutual laughter, for it was so transparently clear that each was engaged in the business of reappraisal.

'You weren't disappointed, then?'

'Did you think I might be?'

'No, not really, but as I said, it's been a long time. God knows I wanted a man often enough but I'm glad now that I obeyed my instinct to hang on and wait.'

He smiled, reaching up to pull her down, saying, 'I always said we're good for one another. I didn't know how good until now. It's tempting to make a virtue out of deprivation but I have. Sometimes I've come close to making a cult of the dead.'

'There never was anyone else? Before or after Beth?'

'There was one, but all that Julia did, looking back, was to add a shaving or two to the chip I was carrying around.'

'Tell me about Julia.'

He told her the story of Julia Darbyshire, and how he had seen intense physical relief as a permanent cure for loneliness that had led to his proposal.

'Would it be so very different with me?'

'I think it would.'

She looked thoughtful for a moment. Then, she said, 'I wouldn't commit myself, Davy, or not yet. Let's take it a step at a time. I had a special reason
for asking the question.'

'I can guess the reason.'

'I'll wager you can't.'

'It has to do with your marriage going on the rocks, and whether it was caused by inadequacy on your part. Right there?'

She sat up. 'Hey! You can be sharp when you try, can't you? I suppose that comes from listening to so many excuses, then writing those awful school reports – “Could do better” – “Doesn't concentrate” – are you going to write me one? I'd love to read it.'

'If I did you'd frame it and hang it over the bed.'

She eased herself back, clasping her hands behind her head, stretching out her long, graceful legs and wriggling her toes. Her long, contemplative silence implied that she was still in need of reassurance.

'Well, what's your problem? Don't hedge. I didn't hedge about Julia.'

'I don't mind telling you, Davy. I went into that marriage full of girlish confidence. All my problems were solved. This was IT, and Rowley was the knight in shining armour. When things began to drift from bad to worse, I kept telling myself that it was all his fault and I still think it was, mainly. But later, after we broke up, I got to wondering whether it mightn't have been fifty-fifty. Maybe I wasn't patient enough. Or clever enough. This way, I mean, flat on my back. I don't know. It's hard to tell after all this time.'

'You don't have to worry about it any more.'

'But I do, if I'm to learn the truth about myself. I only know that I did try. I tried damned hard, Davy.'

'Hasn't it occurred to you that neither of you was to blame? That you weren't the least bit in love with one another?'

'It's possible. I was flattered to be singled out from all those other girls, most of them much prettier, and all of them more sophisticated than I was. Maybe he needed sophistication, and felt cheated when he didn't find any. Do you suppose that was… what's so funny about that?'

'You are! Lying there without a stitch on, trying to make one guinea pig out of me and another out of yourself. All right, I'll humour you. Most men don't look for sophistication. They think that's their prerogative. What they like to find in a woman is generosity and you'll never run short of that. So cut the inquest on imaginary shortcomings. Ever hear what Napoleon said to his valet, Constant, after his first night with Marie Louise?'

'You mean that Austrian girl he married? The one who could wiggle her
ears, and had never been allowed to own a male animal?'

'That's her. He said, “My friend, marry a German. They are the best of all women, sweet, gentle, fresh and innocent as roses!” In your case, for “German” read “Yorkshire".'

'That's nice of you but it was boorish of him. To come down rubbing his hands and discuss the bride with his valet, I mean.'

'Well, he was feeling smug, and had to discuss it with someone. Constant was the only one around at that time.'

She turned impulsively and her arms went round him. He sensed, somehow, that he had succeeded in dispelling some of her doubts, and it may have been this that set the tone of their relationship as lovers all the days they spent alone by the lake. And because of an overwhelming tenderness, that multiplied in him day by day, he came at length to prize her in a way that would have seemed extravagant a week ago, when he was still subconsciously comparing her to Beth. What intrigued him, what sometimes amazed him, was the range of her personality, only now fully extended, with good humour as its base, and variants all the way from a gentle withdrawal to a gaiety capable of enveloping them both in a sense of release that was balm to a man scarred by war, by a deep personal tragedy and currently holding anxiety at bay.

As the time passed it seemed to him foolish that she could have ever doubted her capacity to induce anything but restorative peace in a man, any man, that is, with his wits about him. In her arms he found an enlarged confidence in himself, and beyond this a depth of relationship in another human being that had eluded him ever since the day Beth had died.

This sense of attainment reached him from many sources. From her effervescent sense of humour, seldom absent from their most intimate moments, from a freely offered body that he came to venerate, but mostly from her ability to communicate. He had no doubts now but that he returned her love, that she could, in essentials, fill the gap left by Beth. In her arms, in her company even, Bamfylde and Bamfylde's concerns moved a great way off, a place where he had suffered and learned, but he did not believe Bamfylde alone would ever satisfy him now. It would have to go about the task with Christine as the bridge between him and personal fulfilment. Time, a wide variety of interests, physical fitness, stemming from the active life he led up there, these things and the obsessive problems of his housemastership, had healed the last of his trench scars, but his emotional re-awakening, within the embrace of this girl, went a good way beyond that. It was a process of rejuvenation, stimulating the
nerves and quickening the imagination, so that what lay ahead for him seemed unimportant unless it was linked to her. He had thought himself deeply in love with Beth through that first, peacetime spring more than twelve years before, but Beth had grown on him, season by season, so that he had no clear memory of an onrush of affection such as this, a tumult of the senses that sometimes seemed too violent to last.

One afternoon, when they were lying on the bed watching the curtain of rain move across the lake, he voiced this doubt.

'It's an ideal, Davy, and something to be fought for, but face it, lad, it won't sustain us for the rest of our lives.'

'Now that's a depressing thought!' he grumbled, but she went on, 'It's a statement of fact, no more and no less. We'll need luck, and a lot of patience, so don't ever forget it.'

'Patience, maybe, but what kind of luck, other than fìnding a way of getting the divorce? And that isn't the moon. Knowing our own minds is the vital factor, and I know mine as regards you. I'd be very happy to take Bamfylde plus you, but you take precedence.'

'Over-simplification, Davy. Follow that through and what am I left with? Half of David Powlett-Jones, and that barn of a place on my conscience, where it would sit more heavily than Rowley. No thanks, Davy. I like you very well as you are, doing a job you enjoy.'

'That's a different line from the one you took in the church less than a month ago.'

'Yes it is, but I know you much better now,
really
know you. You'd never be happy or fulfilled in politics, or doing anything but what you are doing, so let's plan ahead from there.'

It did not seem worth an argument. The important thing was they both had direction and this seemed enough to be going on with. He said, lazily, 'That's the trouble with the Welsh.'

'What is?'

'Love of discourse, especially on abstracts and imponderables. What could happen if something else happened. We run up the pulpit steps at the drop of a hat –

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument…

Trust a Welshman to indulge in great argument, even when he's in bed with a girl like you.'

'Even a Welshman needs a breather now and again.'

He laughed and kissed her. It was easy enough to set imponderables aside with a woman like her in his arms. The future could take care of itself for a change. He was more than satisfied with the present.

1

T
HE BLOW FELL ON THE DAY OF THEIR FIRST EXPEDITION across the lake to Bowness, indeed, to anywhere save the fells, Lodore Falls, or the village where they bought stores. Three weeks had elapsed since they had read a daily paper and there was no wireless set in the chalet. 'We might,' she said, 'be living on Juan Fernandez. I'm sure my constituency wouldn't approve of me being in purdah this long. Why don't we hire a skiff, pull over, and find out what's going on, if you can row that far after your frightful exertions,' and when he suggested that they might leave well alone until it was time to collect Grace and go home, she said, 'We won't stay. Just an hour's shopping, lunch somewhere and back here for tea.'

They tied up to the jetty about eleven and the first reminder that they were back in circulation was a newspaper contents bill, clamped to a billboard outside a tobacconist's shop. It announced, 'MACDONALD TO HEAD NATIONAL GOVERNMENT'.

The starkness of the statement precluded exclamation or comment. They stood quite still, backs to the kerb, mouthing the words once, twice, three times, as though neither had the courage to acknowledge what it could mean in terms of their future. Then, releasing her hand, he went in and bought a paper, re-emerging to find her standing in the same stunned position outside the shop door. He read the headlines aloud, 'MACDONALD HEADS NATIONAL GOVERNMENT', 'LABOUR PARTY SPLIT – PROSPECT OF OCTOBER ELECTION', and other double-column headlines, all concerned with cataclysmic occurrences that had, it seemed, been piling one upon the other during the twenty days they had spent three miles east of this same, steep street.

She said, 'You know what this means, Davy?' and he replied, doubling the paper, 'To everyone or to us?'

'I must go back at once. You surely see that.'

The abrupt end of their idyll outraged him. 'No, I don't! Or not until we've had time to digest it, to… plan something about what happens from here.'

'How could we plan, with this hanging over us? I'm an adopted candidate. Dedicated people have put their money on me. Give me the paper.'

'We could have lunch, talk things over… you don't even know about trains, when you can start…'

He was talking to himself. Already, reading as she walked, she was retracing her steps down the hill to the boat and he followed, pausing to light a cigarette when she plumped herself down in the stern of the skiff and went on reading. He said, at length, 'Well, what's it to be? A private airplane? Or would a hire car do?'

She folded the paper and slipped it into her handbag. Her expression told him that he had lost her, temporarily at all events. 'He's sold us all out,' she said. 'He and Snowden. Traitors, the pair of them! Jimmy Thomas, too, and who knows how many others?'