Mercifully I had. Only a few days previously I had found a copy in a box of books that had been trundled into the Mart on Uncle Luke’s handcart and had read as far as Jan’s escape with Lorna in the snow. I was not sure that I relished her description, “lanky and serious-looking,” but on the whole I found the comparison flattering. Jan Ridd was big, strong and fearless and Lorna was dark, winsome and strong-willed, so that at once my mind began to weave a rich pattern of rustic romance in which Keeper Croker was Carver Doone and this girl had been snatched from him after a merciless contest between us. Then my imagination ran against a bulwark of fact, for in this instance the roles of rescuer and rescued had been reversed, running contrary to all accepted courses. It was the girl who had released me from the clutches of Carver, and sent Carver about his business with his tail between his legs.
I returned to the subject of her name, Emerald.
“It’s a funny name,” I said, “I’ve never heard it before.”
“I don’t use it, only Mother insists on using it! It was her idea … she named me after Lady Cunard because she’s such a terrible snob. As if a name can do anything for a person—I mean, to make them like anybody else! I always used my second name, Diana. Don’t ever call me anything but Diana and don’t ever tell anyone about Emerald. You won’t, will you?”
“Of course I won’t! I like Diana much better. It suits you and I like it Diana what?”
She laughed again. It was wonderful to watch the play of the dimple and the heavy stir of her hair when she threw back her head. Every moment I spent with her added volume to the tide of worship that rose in me. As we walked along I began to feel lifted on it, just as the earlier miracle in the valley had lifted me, but this time my exhilaration yearned for some form of expression. I wanted to shout and dance and sing. I was no longer John Leigh, odd-job boy at Leigh’s Furniture Mart, a clumsy overgrown lout fresh from Brixton Road Council School and wearing a gray serge suit utterly unsuited for a ramble through a larch wood in the company of an angel. I was Jan Ridd, vanquisher of Doones, striding along beside his adored Lorna and conveying her to a place of safety and repose.
“Diana Gayelorde-Sutton,” she said, this time with a trace of contempt. “Gayelord is more snobbery, because daddy’s real name is Sutton and mother dug up the Gayelorde soon after we took Heronslea. I don’t know where she found it, she’s very touchy about it when I ask her, but it was all done properly, you know, deed poll and all that!”
I was not at all sure what “deed poll” was but I was beginning to glimpse a formidable picture of her mother, a person for whom it was clear that Diana had no respect whatever. I wanted to know more of her and more of the family, how they came to be here, how rich they were, why it was necessary to name Diana after someone whose name I associated with ocean-going liners and why the family’s surname had to be dressed up with the aristocratic-sounding Gayelorde.
She told me a good deal about herself that afternoon and demanded little in return. I told her proudly that my family had once farmed Foxhayes and that I now lived with an uncle in Whinmouth Bay but she showed no real interest in my family or, indeed, how I came to be on the estate. I didn’t find out everything about the Gayelorde-Suttons that afternoon but as I walked beside her along the ride she talked very freely and gaily about her life and background, and I listened to everything she said with respect, awed at being the confidant of such a wonderful creature.
It seemed that the Gayelorde-Suttons, father, mother and daughter, had leased Heronslea from the Gilroy Estate less than a year ago, when Diana’s father had made a great deal of money in some kind of business that Diana appeared to understand but was utterly unintelligible to me. It was, she said, something to do with shares, holdings, or mines, either in Africa or South America, she wasn’t sure which.
He had been rich before this but was not fabulously wealthy, with another house in London, a horde of retainers and a Rolls-Royce sedan, in addition to the country estate, rustic retainers and two more cars, a Bentley for Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton and an Austin station wagon for use at Heronslea.
All this was impressive enough but there was more to come. The family went abroad a good deal and when they traveled during the holidays they sometimes took Diana with them. She had been to France several times and to Spain and Italy on two other occasions. When they were in London her father spent most of his time “sitting on boards,” which struck me as a strange occupation for a man who owned a Rolls-Royce and two large houses. I was foolish enough to probe her statement and Diana, after shouting with laughter, explained that a board was a group of people in charge of a business, and that her father, aside from his African or South American activities, administered dozens of smaller businesses in the City.
She herself, she said, hardly ever stayed at the London house because she was a boarder at a snob school in Surrey. She would have been at school now but there had been a “lovely, lovely, outbreak of measles,” and everyone who didn’t show spots had been sent home for “a fortnight’s mooch, smack in the middle of term!”
She told me a good deal about her school and I was on more familiar ground here, for I was an avid reader of the Magnet and Gem and I recognized her school as a girls’ equivalent of Greyfriars and St. Jims, where every pupil’s father was fabulously rich and famous people arrived in limousines on speech days.
She hated school more than most children, finding all the mistresses “stuffy,” and all the lessons “grisly.” From her description of the place I knew that I should have liked it. It was certainly a very different kind of school from the one that I had attended in the Brixton Road. All the girls had little rooms of their own and the meals, which she described as so-so, sounded to me like a series of modest banquets.
They even had little parties in the evenings, “to learn how to drink sherry without giggling,” and after prep, on winter evenings, one of the mistresses read aloud from David Copperfield, or The Mill on the Floss. There were plenty of outdoor activities too, hockey, tennis, lacrosse and a game of which I had never heard called “squash,” but Diana, although very much an outdoor girl, disliked games as much as lessons. “I kick against anything organized,” she told me. “That’s why I like riding and that’s why I love it down here, with no one but dear old Drip.”
“Who’s Drip?” I asked her, imagining it to be either the pony she was riding, or a favorite dog.
“Drip is a kind of governess that Mummy got for me,” she said, “after Passy-Glassy told Daddy that I wasn’t doing any work and must cram during the hols. She’s a terrible dreary old thing to look at but she worships me and I can do absolutely anything with her. I should be having conversational French right now but I easily talked her out of it. I said I had a bad headache, and needed fresh air. You’d like Drip, she’s a pet really!”
“Then who on earth is Passy-Glassy?” I wanted to know.
“Oh, she’s Head at Mount Waring and she’s a fearful droop! She’s called Passy-Glassy because she’s always checking up on accents and one day she threw us into fits by telling us about a girl from the north, who said ‘Passs me a glasss’ with a strong Lancashire accent. She said it ought to have been ‘Parse me a glawse, I want to hev a barthe,’ and the whole Middle School went up in smoke at the idea of Miss Endicott-Brookes taking a bath in a glass! She’s as fat as a barrel, you see.”
It was a silly story I suppose, but it made me laugh, partly because Diana was clever at imitating accents but more, I think, from relief that she was so gloriously free of snobbery, and this made an association between us possible.
I don’t think I had ever met anyone quite so free of class prejudice. I knew that I possessed a strong Cockney accent, for already the Devonians in Whinmouth Bay had made me conscious of it, but Diana minded it as little as my trespass of her father’s property and from the first moment we were alone she always treated me as a social equal.
At the time I mistook this for a natural broad-mindedness on her part; it was only
later that I discovered that it was a deliberate act on her part, part of her ceaseless counter-offensive against her mother.
While we had been talking we had followed the ride that led to the eastern edge of the wood and suddenly we emerged from the trees and looked down over the valley. I forgot Diana for a few moments as I studied the view, for I had never seen it from this angle, and the impact of all that color was so powerful that it made me run ahead of her until I came to the extreme edge of the escarpment. Then I looked back and saw her framed against the green backcloth of the larches and I knew that she was the jewel of Sennacharib and as rightly mine as any part of it.
I made a vow then that somehow, at some time, no matter how many difficulties interposed, or how long the conquest took me to achieve, I would marry Diana Gayelord-Sutton and we would live together in that big white house, the roof of which I could glimpse from where I stood.
3.
She kicked her pony alongside and looked down at me curiously but even at that stage of our friendship it wasn’t necessary to explain to her how I felt about Sennacharib.
She said, “You love it, don’t you, Jan? You feel about it just as I do! You do, don’t you?”
I don’t think I was surprised that she had guessed my secret so quickly. Somehow it had never really been a secret from her.
“It’s Sennacharib,” I told her, and recited the opening lines of the poem.
She didn’t laugh, or look blank, or quarrel with them in any way but sat perfectly still on her pony, looking over my shoulder and down the golden hillside to where the Teasel crept between folds to Shepherdshey, then up the further slope into the blue-black vastness of Teasel Wood.
It was one of those magic moments that come perhaps twice in a lifetime, the moment before a single word, or a sigh of wind, breaks a crystal of pure happiness. We stood together for perhaps a minute and then the buzzards came drifting over the wood, mewing their soft, plaintive call. The moment passed as we saw them dip across the elm clump in search of fresh wind currents.
“How would you like to come home for tea?” she said, when the birds had disappeared. “There’s no one there but Drip and me, and Drip won’t mind, she’s always saying I spend too much time alone.”
I tried not to show elation, mumbling something about muddy boots and the Whinmouth bus, but she ignored excuses and kicked the left-hand stirrup iron.
“Jump up behind,” she said. “Nellie can easily take two of us.”
“I’ve never been on a horse,” I protested, for the second time that afternoon.
“This isn’t a horse,” she said, “so do as I say, and hold me around the middle!”
It was as much an order as any she had given Croker. I put my foot in the free stirrup and climbed on the pony’s broad back, clasping my hands around her narrow waist and letting my legs swing free.
“Tighter!” she commanded. “Or we’ll part company on the bends. Giddup, Nellie! Stir your stumps!” and we were off at a brisk trot, heading back into the wood and down the broad path toward the house.
It wasn’t a very comfortable ride but what it lacked in comfort it made up for in exhilaration. Soon I was clinging to her as a drowning man clings to a breakwater and even the fragrance of her hair could not obliterate the fear of being hurled from my seat and flung against the trunks of the close-set firs that replaced the larches farther down the slope. At the same spanking pace we left the wood and entered the level paddock leading to the kitchen garden and stables. Then a madness entered her and she urged Nellie forward, shouting and kicking furiously with her heels.
The pony did not seem to mind its double load and broke from rolling canter into a stretched gallop, streaking across the grass and clattering onto the cobbles of the yard at top speed.
I did not know then that a horse needs no urging when its head is turned for home, but neither did I know that it always stops outside its own stable door. It did so now with an abruptness that sent me flying over Diana’s shoulders and onto the cobbles under its feet. The impact drove all the breath from my body and stripped the skin from my knees and knuckles.
Diana did not even leave the saddle. When I struggled to my feet she was helpless with laughter.
“You should have braced!” she gasped. “Braced back, directly we passed through the arch. I say, you haven’t really hurt yourself, have you?”
I had but I wasn’t going to admit it to a girl. My knees and knuckles were smarting horribly but I thrust my hands in my pockets as Diana slid down and a bowed old groom clumped out of the house and led Nellie into a lighted stable.
“I’m all right,” I said. “It was fun, but I did tell you I’d never been on a horse before!”
A middle-aged woman, with graying hair scraped back into a tight bun and a permanently worried expression creasing her bespectacled face, appeared on the stone platform that projected from the rear of the house.
“What’s happened? Who’s that? I was worried about you,” she called to Diana. “It’s long after teatime!”
“Oh you’re always worried about something, Drip,” Diana called back. “I’ve brought someone to tea and we’re both ravenous! We’ll have it in the kitchen.”
“You can’t entertain guests in the kitchen,” Drip said. “You know very well that your mother would be furious.”
“She won’t know unless you tell her, so don’t fuss, Drip. Just call through and tell Cook we’ll have crumpets. Do you like crumpets?” she said, turning to me, and when I said I did she took me by the hand and ran up the steps to the kitchen door where Drip was waiting to usher us into the house.
We went along a dim passage and into the large, cheerful room in which there was a great deal of heavy oak furniture and a large fire burning in an open grate. There was a wonderful smell in here, a smell made up of baking bread, lamp oil and smoldering wood. Diana peeled off her string gloves.
“Good Lord, you’re bleeding like a stuck pig!” she suddenly exclaimed, staring at the blood on her glove. “Take him down Hangman’s Drop and let him wash off, Drip. Let me see!” and she seized both hands and stared at the gravel rash. “That’s nothing at all,” she went on. “Put some powdered alum on them. I know there’s some in there, I used it this morning.”
Drip cluck-clucked almost continuously but she did everything Diana ordered her to do, taking me down three steep steps into a washhouse where there was a big, lead sink and enamel bowl. The room was at least three feet below the level of the kitchen and Diana, who had a nickname for everyone and everything, always referred to it as Hangman’s Drop.
Drip, whose real name was Miss Emily Rodgers, superintended the washing and cleaning of my cuts and bandaged a long graze on my knee. She was a simple, sympathetic little body and I didn’t envy her chaperonage of a high-spirited fourteen-year-old like Diana.
“She hasn’t even introduced us,” grumbled Miss Rodgers, when Diana’s voice came to us from the kitchen, where she was now beguiling the fat, freckled cook. “Are you one of the boys she met at the Conservative gymkhana in the summer?”
“No,” I admitted, “I got lost in the woods higher up. I live in Whinmouth Bay and my name’s Leigh, Jan Leigh.”
“Well, Jan,” she said lightly, “don’t let her lead you into any mischief. She’ll try, mark my words. I’m not firm enough with her, I know, but she’s got such a way with her, and she always does exactly what she chooses to do the moment her mamma’s back is turned. There now, that doesn’t hurt any more, does it? Come and have tea and then I’ll get someone to take you home.”
We found Diana lifting the cover from a silver muffin dish stacked high with dripping crumpets. I was ravenously hungry and so, it seemed, was she, for between us we ate a dozen, finishing off with huge slices of rich plum cake.
I don’t remember enjoying a meal more than I did that evening. It wasn’t simply the food, which was plentiful and beautifully prepared, or the presence of Diana, bubbling on the edge of laughter as she maintained a running
fire of teasing aimed at poor Drip and the cook. I think my delight stemmed from a sense of pride arising from where I was and from the coziness of the warm kitchen overlooking the stable yard, where the autumn dusk was creeping in from the woods and isolating the yellow glow of the stable lamps. There was a kind of timeless comfort and security in here, a sense of being wanted that soothed the ache of my mother’s death and stilled the upheaval that had followed it, and when Drip, in response to Diana’s urgent pleas, brought in her musical boxes, a final drop of delight was added to my cup and I remember thinking how wonderful it would be to live like this always, here, with Diana, in the very heart of Sennacharib.
Drip, or Miss Rodgers as I always preferred to think of her, was a collector of musical boxes, some of them very old and intricately constructed. Her favorite was one made of mother-of-pearl and crowned by a willowy woman in a high-waisted frock and a Quality Street bonnet. It played “Allan Water” and the pure, tinkling notes brought a lump to my throat.
I was surprised and pleased to discover that Diana was affected by the tune, for when I looked at her halfway through the second playing I noticed that her huge eyes were brimming with tears and that she did not seem in any way ashamed of them but let them brim over and roll slowly down her cheeks. I had already noticed how beautiful she looked when she was angry but there in the lamplight, sitting quite still as the music box tinkled out “Allan Water,” she looked like a girl out of one of the eighteenth-century portraits I had seen in the Tate Gallery. Her presence filled the room and the whole universe became a place of enchantment.
“I think Mr. Leigh had better get ready to go now,” said Miss Rodgers when the tune tinkled to a close. “His people will be getting worried about him and he’s missed the last bus from the crossroads.”
I was so surprised and flattered at being referred to as Mr. Leigh that I did not hear Diana tell the cook to order the car. It was not until Diana grabbed me by the hand, pulled me into the passage and through a white door into the hall that I realized it was now half-past six and that Aunt Thirza would have been nagging Uncle Luke about my absence since the half-past-five bus had arrived in Chapel Square.
Diana Page 3
