Dinah's Husband: A heartfelt story of love and marriage in the 1930s

by Ursula Bloom

  Esther Johnstone liked Dinah and knew that it would be a joy to dress her. One after another she helped her to choose her clothes. Be it said to Esther’s credit, it was not only the thought of the accruing bill which would greet Mr. Treeves that spurred her on. The girl was worth dressing. Esther made her change in the small showroom behind the shop, and put on the navy suit and the Breton sailor hat, and the full white childish blouse, and go out to lunch in it.

  Dinah knew that the suit made her look different, and felt the glow of enthusiasm.

  ‘I can’t believe that I’m myself,’ she said.

  ‘You look lovely in that what’s-its-name,’ said her mother, ‘and the hat with the thingummy, it suits you awfully well.’

  They walked proudly down the street. Mrs. Treeves did not know where to lunch, she always forgot names of places, and it was Dinah who propelled her into the Berkeley.

  ‘It must be very expensive,’ said her mother.

  ‘I should think so, but why shouldn’t Daddy pay for us, for once?’

  ‘I know. That’s what I always say. Why shouldn’t he?’ and she fidgeted again at the chains.

  As they sat down at the table, Dinah knew that the young man nearby looked at her, not as a schoolgirl any more, but as somebody worth noticing. Men had looked at Daisy that way, the young German officer had looked at her like that before the box of petunias had fallen on his head! Afterwards he hadn’t looked again! The knowledge of her appearance gave Dinah a new power, an awareness that she was a different person, and it was most refreshing.

  The young man at the next table was bold. He managed to get into conversation with Mrs. Treeves, who had a vague idea that this must be some friend of her husband’s and was therefore over-affable. It was Dinah who had to be firm.

  ‘I’m sure your father knows him,’ said her mother, when finally the young man had been obliged to centre a concentrated interest on his menu.

  ‘Of course he doesn’t.’

  ‘Really, dear, you girls! Oh well, I suppose I was the same; it is all part of it, isn’t it?’ said she, a propos of nothing.

  When Mrs. Treeves started to talk this way she alarmed Dinah, who saw ahead of her years in which she was tied to the apron string of a woman who dithered. This wasn’t really her mother. It was a shrine wherein the flame of life and logical thought and action had been almost blown out. Only the appearance of that shrine remained, and occasionally there came for a moment a glow, as though the flame flared again, but it never really endured.

  Dinah could not talk to her, because coherent conversation was impossible. Then, turning round, she saw an older man coming into the restaurant, a man bigly built, with thick silver hair, and she knew that it was the friend who had been so kind to her in the train. She rose, her face flushed.

  ‘Oh, Mother, there he is!’ she said.

  ‘Dear me, now isn’t that odd? What you’d call a thingummy!’

  That was how she and Max met again.

  5

  Max Hale came down to stay at Dukeleys. Her father liked him, declaring that he was his idea of a pukka sahib. He was usually rabid in his ideas and likes and dislikes, but he respected Max, who did not reciprocate.

  Max was nearly sixty. He looked little more than fifty, save for the definite heaviness of his tread, and the first sign of droop in shoulders that had become massive. He was a big man, six foot two, with width and a soldierly bearing which made strangers suppose that he must have been in the army at some time in his career. But Max had never served. He disliked the idea of killing, and in that leonine outward form there was a gentle, almost womanish heart, easily stirred to pity and consideration.

  The second son of a well-to-do family, he had been at Oxford at perhaps the best years of our history, the latter part of the nineteenth century. Then England had been lovely in her prime; she had enjoyed a long spell of prosperity, and living was easy and cheap. The strictness of mid-Victorianism was relaxed, yet the broader life of the Edwardians had not begun. Although the Hales’ income was not a figure which would have supported them in similar style with the income tax of the nineteen-twenties, then they had been squires of four villages, living in a seventeenth-century hall, with a deer park surround. The deer, and the oak trees, and the big lake flanked by marble lions (who appeared to be in an advanced stage of bloated inebriacy), were happy backgrounds of his youth.

  As a little boy he had been latently jealous of his brother Robert, who would inherit. They had gone to church, looking like little angels, to sit side by side in the big oak pew, where forefathers had sat before them with equal dignity. They were surrounded by monuments bearing immodest eulogies on the talents of these gentlemen, and the virtues of their wives, and there the little boys had made handkerchief rabbits, with which to tease the choirboys. He had been driven in a brougham by the side of their mother (he always remembered her wearing velvet gowns, and a toque like a church hassock); he had given away gifts at parish meetings, and had joined whole-heartedly in a festival known as May Day, kept up by the bounty of the squire.

  On May Day there was a great deal of white muslin and blue ribbon, and well-crimped hair, and disturbing cases of pneumonia afterwards. Village mothers considered that Queens of the May should appear in nothing that was not airy and virginal, even if it laid the seeds of consumption. After tea they played games in the park, where a May east wind blew with painful regularity, and the airy and virginal suffered in consequence.

  Robert was a clever child, who held tapes for the racers, and threw comfits for scrambles, behaving in faithful imitation of everything that was desirable in the young squire-to-be. Max was clumsy. He had always had a secret longing to be a King of the May himself, but knew that this was something to which he could never aspire. Later, as a Harrow boy, he could not think how he had demeaned himself to such an unwholesome longing. The little kings wore velveteen knickers, grotesque sashes, and unworthy crowns of silver paper obviously made by mother. He did not know how he had ever encouraged such morbid aspirations.

  But still Robert threw comfits and held tapes far better than Max ever could.

  Robert fell from grace with the wallop so often put by for the good boy of the family. He fell in love with one who worked in a tobacconist’s shop in Oxford. Max knew this was going on, and did the best that he could to deter Robert, who became aloof. His parents learning of it, rushed in where Gabriel would have hesitated, and enlisted the sympathies of Max’s aunt, a majestic widow who had married money, had disposed of her husband, and was comfortable for life, who besought Max to make himself useful. The result of Max’s further interference was a humiliating quarrel in Robert’s rooms, out of which Max ultimately staggered, bleeding unpleasantly, with a headache which sent him to bed for the rest of the day. His aunt showed anxiety, seeing that he had ventured in only at her behest, and from that moment a deep friendship developed between them.

  Robert married the girl out of the tobacconist’s shop, and early in 1902 inherited the park, and the hall, and the four villages with the May Days. He found that his father, a nice old man with handsome whiskers but no financial acumen, had mortgaged the estate. Three villages were sold to put the hall and the other one in order. The tobacconist’s girl took this to heart because she liked to think of herself as queen of the villages in the plural. She had a baby every year, all girls, and when she had collected four of these, treating them to peculiar adjectives which shocked the neighbourhood considerably, she had a puny little boy with a withered arm.

  Justice pursued Robert. He tired of the tobacconist’s girl, and started drinking. He took up sport on the racecourse, and betted heavily with the butler, who was supposed to know a good thing when he saw it. But he never saw it! Robert was always extraordinarily ill-advised. His life started sliding helplessly in the wrong direction, and at the beginning of the Great War the place had to be sold. The tobacconist’s girl had gone off with the bailiff, a most undesirable young man, and Robert was left with a crowd of
children whom he could not afford to educate. Max had done better.

  He need not have envied Robert in those young days when he sat in the family pew at home, because he himself had been the one with the silver spoon in his mouth. His aunt had been touched by the way that he had tried to prevent Robert from ruining his life. She cultivated Max more closely than would otherwise have been possible, and, dying when he was only twenty-five, left him her entire fortune. Max had seen enough of other people playing the fool with finances, and he went warily. He learnt something about investments, and where to get good advice, and he travelled.

  He had always wanted to see the world, and he spent the next ten years in going about. The lust to see was something which he could not appease. Surfeit only made its appetite the keener. He went to Japan and spent two years there, thinking of it afterwards as a period when time stood still. It was so unreal that time did not matter. He went to Canada, crossed to Jasper Park, and stayed there through one glorious summer until the snows came, and he was pursued by that remorseless winter which has no fear of God or man.

  He came back, spending some years in a villa in the south of France. There for a fortnight he fell in love. Perhaps he was struck by her sophistication in contrast to his own simplicity, by the slick lines of her black frock and the white violets that she wore on her shoulder. He had never seen anyone so burnished, and for a fortnight he suffered all those anguishes and desires which made him suddenly more tolerant of Robert in his passion for the tobacconist’s girl. The lover is undoubtedly blind to defects. Max could not have stayed that sudden passion had he tried, and he did not try because at that time he believed that it was reciprocated. When he confessed to her that she attracted him, he was amazed to find that she accepted this attraction as part of an everyday routine. She was so lovely that she expected men to adore her; it was her right. But she told him that she never intended to marry. She had no heart.

  When he awoke to the truth he could hardly believe it. He had never thought of such loveliness being carved from ivory, and as cold.

  He left the Riviera, sick of the smell of clove-scented stocks, and the shade of the pepper trees, and the pleasant artificial gardens at Monte Carlo. He wanted something bigger, less unreal, and he went to the Yorkshire moors.

  There he lived a man’s life, seeing no one save his keepers and enjoying the tranquil country which had none of the devitalising, enervating beauty of the Riviera, but was starkly formidable. He recovered himself. Finally he took a smallish town house in Hampstead, one of the little old houses where once Keats had lived, and which still carried some sentimental memory of the poet like a rosemary. Max had always liked Hampstead, because he could think of it as a village in London; but after the Great War, it had grown much less villagey. Perhaps he would have done better to have bought back the park in the Midlands, and the four villages, and the church with immodest memorials to Rabelaisian forefathers. Only somehow when the frightfulness of 1914-18 was lived down, he felt that such things would be encumbrances. Gone were the comfortable days of country squires who drove about in broughams with leisurely dignity; gone were the May Days when little boys charged the tapes, and little girls scrambled for comfits on the cold May grass. May Day was now wrapped about with a new disturbing meaning, less English; it had gone red. Robert had been killed just before the armistice, and his daughters were scattered. Nobody knew what had happened to his wife and the unpleasant bailiff.

  Max stuck to the house where Keats had once dwelt, loving it for its simple graceful rooms and that rosemary atmosphere which nothing, not even modernity, could destroy.

  The years passed; there was so much to do in the little joys of living that he did not recognise the fact that he was growing old. Then he had taken himself that late summer holiday to Germany, and had gone out to Oberammergau to see the country. He stayed on for the winter because the country fascinated him, and he would not have left then, save that he was wanted at home. It was in the train returning that he met Dinah. She was different from the ordinary schoolgirl, in that she had retained a personality even though set in a scholastic setting. It might be that she had gone to school too late to lose this, and that the Fräuleins’ system of education was more of the private house than the school.

  Max thought about Dinah, and although he went to the Hampstead house, she was a little grey ghost who danced round the table there. Then he walked into the Berkeley, and saw her, changed; grown-up; it was the miracle which transforms the girl of the crocodile into the lovely young deb with dewy eyes, and moist enquiring lips.

  But for all that she was still Dinah.

  They began to talk. Her mother was confused as to who the stranger might be, but gathering that he was a friend, encouraged him, and finally asked him down to Dukeleys. Instantly he accepted; that readiness would have given his feelings away, had it not been that Dinah was too young to understand, and her mother far too vague.

  It was arranged that he should come for the day the following Sunday, and he arrived in the late morning, unfortunately coinciding with a visit from Esther. Mr. Treeves had the unhappy kink of mixing his women. The unobtrusive love round the corner gave him little pleasure, compared to the love that he could parade at home. Every Sunday one of his girl friends arrived for lunch and more often than not it was Esther, for he was extraordinarily faithful. Fidelity was his lead in an unfaithful suit; it was a curious complex!

  Max appeared in a large car. He fell in love with the place immediately, for the tranquil blueness of Wrotham Hill, and the trees thickly grey, with the patches of primroses showing in the grass round their roots. Infused with some of his admiration, Dinah took him round the garden and showed him the lilacs that had cheered her nursery with their scent, and the white jasmine, which in late June sprawled in a starry diadem across the broken wall. She showed him the south border which smelt of green leaves, and verdure, of hyacinths in late spring, and night-scented stocks in summer. He liked the pool, and the canoe which her father had given her one year, now badly in need of a coat of paint. Max volunteered to come down one day and help her do it up.

  That would be lovely, she said, and danced on the tips of her toes. She was really very young indeed, faun-like. Tender.

  Max stayed on to dine, and afterwards they sat and talked in the library with the blinds drawn, and the stars lit. It had been quite a hot day with the full promise of an abundant spring to come.

  Already Max knew that he was in love.

  6

  In the next two years Max remained in love, but apart, whilst Dinah went through those phases of youth which are all a necessary part of the ultimate living of adult life. There was a time when he trembled for her, because she was attracted to a reckless young airman, son of a neighbour. The airman, called Keith, seemed to Max to be horribly happy-go-lucky. They went everywhere together and did everything. Dinah secretly believed that she was going to fall in love, but suddenly, when the affair was reaching a climax (or had it passed it? she never quite knew), something changed. Keith was not with her so often, there came the time when he ceased to make excuses for the breaking of appointments, treating them as rather a joke. Alarmed, she made the childish mistake of challenging him, found him evasive, and a week later he got engaged to somebody else.

  That, she thought, was terrible.

  Dinah flung herself down on her bed, and believed that her heart was broken. It hurt her dreadfully, because it was her first affair, something that she had looked forward to all these years, and had set such store by, and now, although it had seemed so real at the time, she knew that it had meant nothing to Keith. He had been flirting.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said her mother, less vague than usual, ‘you are one of those girls who don’t appeal to young men. I have heard there are thingummybodies of that sort. Well, well, well, you never know.’

  ‘I do like older people, because they are more understanding,’ she said, dabbing at her eyes with a pathetic little handkerchief.

  ‘Yo
u’ll be an old man’s darling,’ said her mother, who would have been grateful if her own husband had been twenty years her senior instead of her own age. Then she could have been more sure of keeping him at home.

  Dinah burnt Keith’s photo, and the letter in which he had called her darling, and the camellias he had given her that birthday, pressed flat in the Bible Aunt Lydia had sent her, bulging it out horribly, and spoiling the binding. She would rather destroy everything. She cried a great deal as she made a clean sweep of the things that had been so precious and started again.

  She tried to hide the distress, which hurt horribly, and she hoped that nobody realised that she was fretting, but Max understood, although he said little. It was not then that he pressed his own suit, because he was afraid that pique might drive her to a decision she would otherwise not have made. Six months later he told her that he loved her.

  That was a summer’s night, when the flowering shrubs were dead but the June roses were in full blossom twining over the pergolas and in the round beds by the pool. Home had been particularly difficult recently, and her mother had gone to bed to cry, whilst her father had become silently angry, refusing to speak to anyone. Dinah had arrived at snapping point, when she felt that she could not bear it any longer. Max told her how deeply he cared; he asked her to think it over, and let him know some other time, because there was so much to be weighed up. He was an old man, and she was very young, but he thought that he understood her, and could perhaps make her happy. He would do his best.

  ‘I think I care for you more than any man in the world; much more,’ she said with truth.

  He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘You are a dear kid. I wish I could give you that youth and love which are your right. I wonder if it is fair to marry you when I am such an old fossil?’

  ‘You’re not an old fossil. You’re Max and I do love you,’ and then, a little frightened, ‘I knew when we met that first time in the train. I did know then. No, don’t laugh at me, it’s true. I did know.’