Summer in February (19 page)

I read his long letter twice. The second time I read it I found more than half my mind was running towards the smaller, enclosed
envelope. Soon I found myself opening it very carefully, something I have never done before in my life, and an act I would
only admit in the absolute secrecy of these pages. I eased it open with a pumping heart and with all the skill I could manage.
BY HAND he had written on the envelope, and it was with a guilty shaking hand that I read his words.

I resealed the envelope. There was no visible sign of tampering, and later that night, I placed it through her front door.

Florence was there, waiting for me.

To my mind she had never looked more lovely.

In the days before our meeting the hands on the clock walked, as it were, with boot-clogging clay. I worked hard on the estate
and did extra little jobs in my rooms (new hooks on the back of my bedroom and sitting-room doors), nothing was too trivial
if it passed the time, or I stared away minutes looking at the fading rug by my bed, with my fingers fidgeting and my mind
racing ahead. The maid scurried out of the ironing-room and cleaned around me as if I were a statue. Would Alfred arrive back,
full of his stories, on the very day before the St Buryan races? Or would she wake up unaccountably bored and scream out loud
and change her mind at the last moment? I really had little idea what kind of ‘mind’ she had, so how possibly could I judge?
What if his love poem had gone straight to her heart, affecting her in some new way that would ruin the whole enterprise?
Would she refer to Alfred’s proposal of a visit to London and, if so, how exactly was I supposed to fit in to such a joint
venture? I would not be a pawn. Above all it was imperative I gave no indication whatsoever of having read the contents of
his note to her. Each time I thought of that I blushed.

The day dawned, Alfred had not returned from Norfolk, and she was waiting for me.

She looked – the words will have to do – so beautiful.

Botticelli’s Florence, Botticelli’s Venus.

Furthermore, there was none of the fashionable delay which some simpering girls favour in such circumstances. Jory, jingling
the harness, still smelling of beer and pickled onions, carrying in his clothes what he called a ‘whiff of The Wink’, drove
me up to her cottage in the trap. I could see Florence sitting upright in the little front sitting-room. She stood up and
waved gaily. She did not wait for me to knock, but rustled past me as I approached the door, with:

‘Good morning, Gilbert … Good morning, Mr Jory, thank you for being on time, I am so excited I can barely contain it.’

She smiled confidently and settled beside me. For the expedition to succeed I knew I had to be confident, courteous but confident.
Women, I had noticed, do not like ditherers. Women, I had also recently suspected, do not like errand boys. In the stream
I have, while fishing, missed many good fish through striking too late; in billiards, fortunately, I strike at the right time.
We sat side by side. I had, by the way, hired Jory for the whole day. With me, even when he had a hangover, he was never ratty,
indeed he was only too willing to help, partly I suspect to spite his wife – in a sense they vied with each other for my approval.
Most men try to soothe their angry wives; Jory provoked his further. The other side of his keenness, of course, was that he
greatly fancied a day at the races himself. And there he was driving us, with his large lower lip, his one-sided smile and
his one wobbly tooth, grumbling happily, blinking his hangover away, telling Florence which horses he would give the time
of day and which only a blind fool would follow. When it came to temptation Jory was both wild
and tenacious. Florence listened attentively to him, then turned to me.

‘Gilbert, may I ask you a favour?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘It’s quite a large favour and it may not fit in with your plans.’

‘It’s I can help you, I will.’

‘Alfred has asked me to join him in London, and he is wondering if you would accompany me. If you would I would be delighted.
It would make all the difference.’

Jory seemed to choose that very moment to drive on more quickly.

‘London? I see.’ I paused, as if to give myself time to think this over. ‘Go with you to London? When would this be?’

‘As soon as possible. As soon as you will agree, oh, please
do
agree.’

‘And for … how long?’

‘I don’t know … a week perhaps. Perhaps less. Would you be able to get away? Wouldn’t you enjoy such a break? I’m sure you
need one.’

‘I could ask the Colonel … It could prove difficult, there’s a lot on.’

‘Would it be a help if I asked him too?’

The suggestion, she could see, rather put me on the spot, so with her hand hovering over my arm, she added:

‘Anyway, would you please give it some thought … think of London!’

All the way through the narrow lanes to St Buryan she was absorbed and excited, admiring that cleanly cut hedge, pointing
out the fuchsias, and did I happen to know where that path or that lane led. My eyes followed her gaze and Jory or I answered
as best we could. While she spoke to Jory about the horses I examined her face. Had she done her hair
differently? Had she lavished any extra care on herself, or was she natural? She was natural. I then heard her enlisting Jory
to persuade me to travel to London with her.

‘If
you
won’t, sir, I will,’ he laughed, revealing his tooth, ‘if the young lady do ask me.’

From this familiarity it was, when we arrived, a small step to marking her card. Jory put a small pencil cross next to four
horses, his tips. Florence seemed to pay the most serious attention to all this.

Over lunch, an excellent hamper, I tried to ask her about her painting from life but she would have none of it. Nor did she
seem at all keen to talk of Alfred or to know the contents of his letter to me, while a question about her brother Joey plainly
irritated her. But the sight of the horses, the jockeys carrying their crops and the smell of the animals meant that Alfred’s
spirit loomed over us; indeed I found his raucous presences were distributed throughout the day. It was as if I kept bumping
into him. I looked at Old Jory sitting there, scratching his head, eating bread and cheese and hevva cake, and I looked at
Bess, his horse, with her nose in a big hessian bag full of feed, and I thought, ‘If Alfred was with us he would be painting
them even as we sit talking.’

The damned man was there even when he wasn’t!

I said ‘loomed over us’ but it was not clear to me whether Florence was as aware of his dominating unseen presence as I was,
nor if she missed him at all. Surely she had not ‘given herself away so lightly’ that she now never even thought of him? No.
More likely she was so sure of him she felt no need to refer to his name.

As soon as we had finished lunch she left, alone, to study the runners. She insisted on being unaccompanied.

‘Please,’ she said to me, ‘it’s
so
good not to be pampered and protected, and I have ample money.’

I was on my feet to accompany her, but she was adamant. She put a restraining hand on mine.

‘No, thank you, Gilbert, you really are kind, but I would rather meet at the end of each race. Then I will enjoy your company
all the more.’

The next few hours of pounding horses passed in a whirl. She was like an escaped bird, her eyes full of exhilaration, tension,
despair and shrieking fun. On one occasion, when her horse seemed for a while about to be overtaken, I thought truly she might
go mad. She ignored Jory’s advice in every race and gambled the whole hog. Three times I saw her place substantial sums.

‘It is essential,’ she turned to me with absolute seriousness, ‘that the rules do not hold us.’

There was little, too, of her promised conversation at the end of each race because she was either collecting her winnings
or having her attention drawn to the next event. Excited myself by her excitement, I trailed her at a close distance, so near
and yet so far. Munnings might be the lucky man but as I watched her, so animated in a way I had never seen before, I felt
my life too was peppered with good things.

A moment or two before the last race she suddenly said:

‘I did not think very much of his poem, did you?’

‘What … poem?’ I managed.

She looked down at her race card.

‘Oh, I beg your pardon, what am I thinking of, the races are making me muddled.’

She was a substantial winner. On our way home, her mood uncontrollably elated, she tried to press a considerable proportion
of the money she had made into my hands. I could not possibly take it and told her so. She said it was of little consequence
to her and it would give her so much
pleasure to part with it. I nodded towards Jory’s back. For a while he too resisted: no woman, no lady, he said, had ever
given him money and he’d been properly paid for his services by Captain Evans but, even though he had lost on every race,
he arrived back at The Wink a much richer man, a man who could not believe his luck.

‘I’m as loaded as a bee,’ he said.

I arrived back at the hotel feeling troubled. For, as we parted, Florence reached up to kiss me on the cheek, saying:

‘You will come to London, won’t you? Both Alfred and I hope you will.’

‘I’ll ask the Colonel if I can.’

She moved back a little and looked at me.

‘And let’s go for a walk tomorrow. You choose which path, Gilbert, and tell me when we meet. There’s so much I want to talk
about.’

‘Is there?’

‘And there’s no one else in the world, no one else I can count on, no one of your loyalty. And it was a wonderful day at the
races, wonderful, and whatever happens in the future, I’ll always look back on today with pleasure.’

As I sat, disturbed, on my bed and ran through all that had been said and done, I felt both a winner and a loser.

How many men, I wonder, live their lives with a woman in their minds, and that woman more alive than any reality? And for
how many men living in that daily anguish is the woman in their mind another man’s wife? Not that Alfred was married yet to
Florence, but as good as.

The alacrity with which Colonel Paynter acceded to my request for a few days’ leave was gratifying. Indeed he pressed on me
the notion of staying up in town for the full week if I so pleased. I declined. Good though the
workmen are I had no wish for standards on the estate to slip, although the Colonel added that recently I had looked tired
and that he was sure I deserved a rest.

Alfred had booked me a room at Fuller’s Hotel, near Hyde Park, and was, by way of a ‘thank you’ for escorting his fiancée,
to pay my bill. Florence was to stay at her family home. As for Alfred’s precise plans, Florence was vague, beyond that he
would be meeting our train at Paddington.

Mrs Jory handed me a hamper for the journey with a disapproving pout before Jory drove me to collect Florence and be at Penzance
station in time for the early train: a pleasant enough spin until some fool came tooling down the middle of the road in his
Wolseley and as near as dammit had us all in the ditch. Though it was no fault of Jory’s or mine I found myself apologising
as I helped Florence back into her seat. Sometimes my attempts at courtesy come out as misplaced apologies.

‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘it’s rather fun to feel one’s heart hammering. After all, they’re crossing the Channel by aeroplane now.’

‘Cars and aeroplanes!’ Jory said viciously.

After the spill Jory raced on, scattering some chickens on a bend, and soon had us nicely settled into our carriage. There
were four other occupants and one of them, a sullen individual with a red nose, seemed unaccountably disgruntled at our presence
and Florence’s luggage.

‘You and your wife,’ he said, ‘are not the only pebbles on the beach, you know.’

Florence smiled at me without moving a muscle. I was so flustered by the reference to my wife that I stammered out a rather
ineffectual retort along the lines that I lived in Cornwall and knew quite enough about pebbles and beaches, thank you.

I had not been to London for nearly two years, not in fact since I very nearly agreed to go to Peru. Instead of being a fisheries
officer in South America, at the last moment I had, however, decided to be a land-agent in West Cornwall; and thank God, otherwise
I never would have met Florence nor had those hours close by her side on the train, even though she passed some of them reading
Browning. I did not feel excluded or unwanted as her eyes were held on the page, her full lips slightly apart. Instead, I
tried to imagine what kind of life she was expecting in her marriage, but when she put her marker in the book all I asked
her about was the poem. She was surprised.

‘Have you not read
The Ring and the Book
?’

I had not and told her so.

‘It’s a Roman murder story.’

‘It looks very long.’