by Ursula Bloom
‘I thought that you were the sweetest little girl that I had ever seen. It’s a May and December marriage, and I’m chaining nineteen to sixty. You realise that, darling?’
‘I’d like to spend my whole life with you.’
‘That’s because you know so few people, and you can’t see far ahead. I ought to look ahead for you, because I have experience, and the time may come when there is somebody else in your life. Somebody young and attractive, with whom you fall in love.’
‘I don’t think that I am the sort that likes very young men,’ and she said it in a voice that had a tendency to wobble. She remembered the camellias that had bulged out Aunt Lydia’s Bible, and the first letter in which Keith had called her darling. She said quickly: ‘There was Keith, you know. He was awfully silly in some ways.’
‘Listen, dear kid. If you ever did fall in love with anyone else, I should want you to trust me. I shouldn’t make a scene, because I’m not that kind of man. I should be completely reasonable. I love you, you see, and I shouldn’t want you to pay the price of your whole life for marrying me. If ever you did want to leave me afterwards, I would make it easy for you. That’s only fair.’
She lifted up her face and kissed him gently as she would have kissed her mother. She was exhilarated by the impulsive joy of the teens. ‘You’re silly, Max, I’d never want to leave you. I’m not that sort.’
‘You don’t know life, little Dinah. You’re young. You’ve got that wistful look as though everything was enchanted. We won’t worry about the future, anyway. I’m content with the moment.’
‘So am I! So happy. Oh, Max, what fun it is all going to be!’ She danced on the lawn, and he watched her, amused by that spirit of youthfulness which is exalted by the joy of living. Like lambs playing in a meadow, forgetful of the morrow; like kittens twisting and turning after an autumn leaf, regardless of the fact that one day autumn will touch them too.
Dinah was radiant.
The engagement was announced, and there was a party at Claridge’s. Dinah could hardly remember it all, because it was so dreamlike. She believed herself to be the happiest girl in the world; then Aunt Lydia came to stay. That was the beginning of waking up to it, going deeper, perhaps that was it; seeing further.
Aunt Lydia was nice, but the black sheep of her mother’s family. In her youth she had done well for herself in marrying an officer in the Indian Army. But Lydia had a roving temperament, and she got bored with Lahore and Simla by turns, and the ladies who live in high places but have feline instincts. She became attracted to a very common manufacturer who had gone to India on business, and was destined ultimately to become Uncle Kenneth, by the back door means of the divorce court. Uncle Kenneth was large and hearty, with a wide expanse of chest, and three chins which he had difficulty in stowing inside his collar. Lydia was a great deal happier with him than she had ever been with the definitely refined officer in Lahore, and she boasted of it. Kenneth might tuck his napkin into his collar, and wear disarming loops of watch chain across a waist-line which could not compete with that sort of ornamentation, but he had a kind heart. She was all for parading her happiness. After Aunt Lydia had met Max, she mentioned him to Dinah in the austere spare bedroom at Dukeleys with a great deal of Victorian curtain, and over-patterned carpet.
‘Personally I’d hate to be an old man’s darling,’ said she. ‘How does it strike you, Dinah?’
‘It doesn’t strike me that way at all, because I don’t think of Max as being old. Mother and Father, yes; but not Max.’
‘Oh well, perhaps so, but after you have been married a few years you may think differently. One year with a man of sixty is as three with a man of thirty; you ought to think of that, you are such a child to get tied up to somebody old, it might be an awful pity.’
Aunt Lydia was frank but human, and Dinah confessed the truth to her. ‘I’ve been so lonely. I always wanted somebody to love me. Living here is like living on a pincushion, all prickles and embarrassments, and oh, I do hate it so much. Max is the first person who has really loved me, and you can’t imagine the thrill of being wanted and cared for. Of being happy.’
Aunt Lydia surveyed the small flushed face with the eager eyes, and the hair that was still too young to lie flat. ‘By Jove, I do understand. But couldn’t you get all that with a younger man? I do think that you ought to be quite sure before you get tied up.’
‘I’m sure now,’ said Dinah, and believed it.
Getting married was her own business, and she would go about it her own way.
‘Well, good luck, my gel,’ said Uncle Kenneth amiably. ‘I must say I’d have liked to see you tying up with some younger chap, rather than a man old enough to be your grandfather, but there’s no accounting for taste, as the saying goes. Oh yes, of course …’ He caught his wife’s eye and lapsed into uncomfortable silence.
He had a habit of making unfortunate remarks, and he always knew when Lydia got that particular look on her face that she meant he was putting his foot in it. He helped himself to a large brandy ‒ it was one mercy that drink flowed plentifully at Dukeleys ‒ and he said no more.
‘We’re in love,’ said Max, when Dinah told him about their comments. She never had been able to keep a secret successfully, it worried her. ‘There is no age in love.’
Probably neither of them recognised the pretty lies with which lovers wilfully mislead themselves, and which are only too palpable later on.
7
Dinah’s people were disappointed when she said that she wanted a quiet wedding, for although she would not admit it to them, and hardly to herself, at heart she was sensitive on the score of Max’s years. She did not want staring crowds who would chatter together. She would prefer it all to be quiet and unostentatious.
She found herself one August day, dressing in the bride’s suite of an hotel adjoining a London church. In a daze she walked down the stairs, and took her father’s arm quite mechanically, crossing the road to the church hidden in green limes already slightly yellowing. She had the impression of big doors opening, of distant music ‒ Max knew that her stay in Germany had made her love music; she saw candles burning dimly, and smelt white lilies.
Afterwards there was a small reception, whereat Uncle Kenneth got atrociously drunk. Dinah had the impression that all this was unreal, and she was not really a bride standing here beside Max. The candles had not burnt for her, nor had the lilies poured out that exquisite scent, which some people say is the scent of death, but which is more like the scent of life and love, for it pervades so many marriages.
It was over.
The ceremony was done and the party finished, like a rather bad dream fading into the relief of waking. Dinah was driving away to Victoria by Max’s side, and she had definitely crossed the rubicon into another world. If she had made a mistake she had to abide by it, and she would abide by it. Her eyes still had that young lost look, her hand was in his; she was nothing but a very little girl being taken away for a treat.
She loved him.
At first she had thought that this was only an extraordinary fondness, that in her deep appreciation of anyone caring for her, she was carried away to care in return. But she found that it was love. Such considerate tenderness as Max’s could only provoke a response. Max had been lonely through the years, and admitted it; he had wanted a companion too, and until he had met her, had had no idea that one would ever come into his life. A hundred swift confidences made closer the bond between them. He told her all the foolishnesses which lay behind him. The exciting May Days when he had wanted to be a king; himself and Robert driving beside their mother in velvet; Oxford, and the shock of Robert’s behaviour, and the ignominious battle wherein he with his good intent had been considerably worsted.
She told him of her one fight, of coming crashing through the rhododendrons, and hitting the Bint in the face. When she came to think about it, they had so much in common and could share the stories of their lives.
They went down to the
South of France first, and although it was the wrong time of year, it was lovely to a girl who had never seen anything like it before. The darkness of the caps stretching out into the sea, and mildness of that sea. The flowers in the gardens and the cedars flung darkly like a cirrus of storm clouds against the sky. They went on into Italy.
‘No honeymoon is complete without Venice,’ said Max.
‘I’ve always wanted to go there. One of the maids had a picture of it, and showed it to me when I was very little. Guppy hated it. She thought it was “one of them heathen places’’.’
‘We’ll take the next train,’ he told her.
‘Max, how lovely you are! You understand that I want to do everything in a hurry. Let’s go now.’
‘Of course we will,’ and he laughed at her impetuosity.
Venice was the perfect background. They sat in the square with the sun dazzling on the unbelievable mosaic of San Marco, and the pigeons flirting impertinently as they strutted about the arcades. They listened to the tinkle of stringed music from Florian’s, a music which never got too loud or too definite, and was always alluringly subdued and merely an accompaniment, never the theme. The Serenata at night, with the moon so big and wise above the Campanile, and the music rising in a tide of melody and floating out to them across the lagoon.
It was a couple of months before she was back in Hampstead, grown misty with October fog, and with wet brown leaves being stamped into the gutters, and the heath growing darkish and barren.
‘You must hate leaving Venice behind,’ said Max, that last evening when they were staying in Switzerland, and beyond the chalet, which was so entirely ‘picture-book’, the Jungfrau rose in a snowy peak against an absurdly blue sky. The little round Swiss roses were still clustering about the carved doorway, for here summer died late.
‘But I like Hampstead. Your house is so charming, I am sure I’ll be happy there.’
‘We’ll buy a little place in the country if you like the idea.’
‘I’d like that awfully.’
‘We could furnish it together from junk shops, and the Caledonian Market. Ever been there? It’s fun.’
‘It would be marvellous.’ She danced again on the points of her toes. ‘Aren’t I lucky to have married you? Aren’t I the luckiest girl in the world?’
‘You’re the sweetest,’ he said.
8
She kept telling herself that she was completely happy with Max and that everything Aunt Lydia had said had been wrong. She dwelt on it so much that she might have guessed she was trying to convince herself against some inner truth; but Dinah was too young to analyse such emotions. She came back to Hampstead and enjoyed haphazard housekeeping, supervised by Lisa, the Austrian maid whom Max had recently engaged.
They knew many people, went to the theatre a great deal, and to concerts, and for the first time Dinah’s life was full. Every day brought something new for her to see or do. She did not go to Dukeleys often, and every time that she did a wider gap seemed to have sprung up between them. Now she wondered how she had ever cared for her father at all, and how she had blinded herself to the fact that her mother was hopelessly ga-ga. Curiously, the scent of lilacs and jasmine were the only ties with the old memory, and those ties held fast and were peculiarly tenacious.
At Christmas, when they were wondering how they could escape a visit home for this particular season, Dinah contracted bronchitis, so that at the end of January Max took her away on a cruise to recuperate.
The ship steamed out into the Mediterranean, whilst there was fog and rain in the Channel, and long green rollers in the Bay; but off the coast of Spain there came that first whisper of spring, a warmer glow in the sunshine, a quieter sea. They called in at Gib with its thin main street where women in full striped skirts were sitting on the steps of the cathedral, selling roses and freesias. Dinah became so gaily enthusiastic that she infected Max with it.
‘It’s good to take a girl about, a girl who has seen so little, and who isn’t blasé.’
‘Let’s travel a lot, Max. Let’s go everywhere and see everything. You make me feel such a dunce when you talk of all the places you’ve visited, when I’d never seen anything at all before we married but that stupid old Germany.’
It flashed through his brain that there might not be much time. He was now sixty, and for him the sand in the hour glass was beginning to stream but thinly. Dinah had everything before her, but he was left with only a handful of years.
When they got back to the ship, they laid the trophies they had bought on the cabin table. There were the usual souvenirs which everybody buys in Gibraltar. Flowers, which are luxurious for the day only and then die; a silken shawl for which much too big a price had been paid, endorsed by the fact that a small ivory monkey had been hurriedly thrust into Dinah’s hand, ‘for souvenir because you have made big bargain.’
‘Look! Isn’t it sweet of them? Aren’t they lovely people?’ she asked, and he did not undeceive her, though he knew that it was a definite sign that they had been villainously fleeced in the price they had paid.
They went on through that sea which is almost tideless, and carries a ship kindly as a mother carries her baby.
‘Time just passes on board ship,’ said Dinah, sitting in the cafe and sipping a sundae through a long straw, ‘days don’t matter. Why didn’t I always do this sort of thing?’
She had always thought being grown-up would be glorious, and she was finding it was living up to expectations.
One night they passed Malta. The last island she had enquired about leaning over the taffrail with Max’s glasses slung over her shoulder, had been Pantellaria. She had hated the information that one of the ship’s officers had given her. She thought she would never want to see an island again; then they came to Gozo.
‘Look, Max, isn’t it pretty?’
‘Yes, it’s green, such a contrast to Malta.’
‘Where is Malta?’
‘Over there,’ and he pointed beyond, and in the dimness of the night which comes so quickly after the dropping of the sun, she saw the stark dour island, darkly sinister against the sky. The sea was much darker here, yet brilliant, with the gleam which often can be seen upon a rich sapphire, and the depth and the smouldering fire of a jewel.
The ship was travelling fast and Dinah saw the island coming nearer, and knew in the way that a man knows when he retraces his way along some dimly remembered track, that it held some meaning for her. This was not a memory, because she had never been anywhere near this part of the world before; it was more of a premonition that the dark island was bound up in some intangible way with her own life. There was something about it more than passing it in a ship, with the evening falling about its shores.
As they went by the entrance to the Grand Harbour, she could see the hoops of arches along the Upper Barracca, with the first stars peering through, and the rectangular houses piled up high and close and making Valletta. She stood there, straining her eyes to follow the island whilst she could still see it, with the ship steaming steadily eastwards, and the feeling that suddenly she had touched upon a time and a place that were waiting. For her. That was the unbelievable part. She did not attempt to explain herself.
Max, misjudging her mood, said ‘Travel suits you. We shall have to do this often.’
But in that short space of time she had changed her mind. She knew now that she did not want to travel very far, perhaps never farther than this again.
‘No,’ she said, ‘somehow to-night I feel that I don’t want to come through the Mediterranean again.’ She kept on thinking about the night when they had passed that silhouette of an island, St. John’s standing up high for the landmark of Valletta, and the pin pricks of light on Senglea and Vittoriosa, after which there had been the gaunt clumsy shape of a forbidding shore, something so untameable that it impressed itself in her mind.
When they returned from the cruise, the ship put into the Grand Harbour for a day, and for some curious reason Dinah fou
nd that she was dreading it. In one way she was almost glad that she had a bad sick headache which made it impossible for her to go ashore. The glare would have been cruel. Max wanted to stay with her, but she insisted that he should go, if only to tell her what it was like. She wanted to know; in some way she and the island were bound together; yet she was afraid to land there herself.
Whilst he was ashore, she lay in her cabin drowsing, all the time poignantly aware that here was a pivot about which she herself one day would spin. In all lives there is some destination that has to be reached; this was the one allotted to her. But not this time. This time she would pass it by.
Max came back just before the ship sailed. He had been across the island to Citta Vecchia, to visit the cave where St. Paul is said to have preached, the stone walls of which have healing propensities. He had brought her a chip, wrapped up in his handkerchief, and he laid it kindly upon her head.
‘Poor little kid! It is so rotten for you being ill. Really the island is most interesting.’
‘I’m sorry, but I couldn’t. Nothing would have been interesting to me to-day.’
‘I know. I brought you these to see if they would help you, but I’m afraid they aren’t much. Citta Vecchia took longer than I expected, there was very little time left to shop.’
He had brought her from an Indian shop, a kimono embroidered with golden humming birds, a carved pearl crucifix on a thin chain, and a bunch of dark red roses which had grown in the garden of the Governor’s summer palace, so the flower man had assured him, and he surmised that they had been stolen.
‘Poor darling,’ he said, ‘I missed you, but never mind, and the moment we put to sea the air will be fresher, and you’ll feel better. Look, we are sailing now!’
She had not meant to peep out at the island again, but now she raised her head and looked out of the port-hole. She saw the blue and green dghaisas floating on the water, some filled with oranges, and sponges, and Maltese lace, for sale, from which insistent vendors frantically urged people to buy. She saw the island beyond, with the Capuchin monks walking in twos, and the women in their faldettas standing in groups to gossip. There was the smell of the East about it, of sun, and sand, and sweat, yet it was not of the East.
