I had a fleeting glimpse at the front part of the house, a large oval hall studded with dark oil paintings and spread with Persian rugs. There were several closed doors leading out of it and I had time to notice the lovely proportions of the staircase that swept in a wide scimitar curve to a three-sided gallery, a gallery lit by a huge crystal chandelier.
“We’ve got electric in this part of the house. We put in a plant to make our own,” Diana told me, “but the current isn’t strong enough to supply the back regions yet and Daddy says it’ll need another dynamo. I don’t care if we never have it, I like the lamplight in the kitchen. Where shall I tell Redman to go?”
Redman was the chauffeur who was waiting, capped and booted, just inside the porch. He said “Good evening, sir” when I came up with Diana but he shot me a shrewd sidelong glance nevertheless.
I told Diana I had better be put off at the bus center in the square, but that it was not necessary to have a car to convey me home, for I could easily walk.
“Don’t be so feeble,” she snorted, “it’s four miles and dark as a bag! Drop him at the bus center, Redman.”
“Yes, Miss Emerald,” he said and managed to convey the impression that he by no means relished the assignment but would perform it as a personal favor to her.
She followed me out on the half-moon of the graveled approach and the chauffeur opened the rear door and held it while I climbed in. The car was Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton’s Bentley, and far larger and more luxurious than any car I had traveled in up to that time.
Redman walked around and got into the driver’s seat, but before he could let in the clutch Diana opened my door again.
“Oh, there’s one thing I’d forgotten,” she said, a little breathlessly. “You can go anywhere in Sennacharib when I’m back at school, and I’ll see that Croker and the others are told about it Good-by, Jan. See you again sometime—next hols perhaps.”
“Yes,” I said, “and thank you for everything … it’s been wonderful … I …”
The chauffeur moved off then, just at the moment when a huge dog, either a Great Dane or a St. Bernard, ran barking from the house and thrust his great muzzle into Diana’s hand. Greeting the dog she seemed to forget about me and as the car sped down the drive I twisted around and looked back at the house, only to see that the front door was now closed and that a single spotlight shone out over the portico, picking out the tall Doric columns that graced the front of Heronslea.
I was the tiniest bit put out by the speed with which she had withdrawn, but soon I forgot this in rich contemplation of all the wonderful things that had happened since Croker had jumped at me out of the wood. I found this contemplation so rewarding that I forgot I was traveling in a chauffeur-driven Bentley, owned by the wife of the overlord of Sennacharib, and only awoke from my daydream when the car stopped and Redman’s voice rasped from the speaking tube. “This is it, I think!”
He didn’t say “sir” and he didn’t jump out to open my door.
Chapter Two
THE FIRST week in November brought a series of violent southwesterly gales. One after the other they beat upon the coast, drenching the town with fine, sticky spray, knocking holes in the promenade and reducing to debris such of the beach huts as had not been dismantled and carted away for the winter.
I had never seen seas like this and I enjoyed the spectacle very much. I liked to stagger along the esplanade, with the wind in my back, and scramble over the landship rocks to Nun’s Bay Head, where a little coast guard hut had been built on the highest promontory.
From here you could see the coastline from the estuary in the west to Nun’s Bay in the east, an entire seascape of heaving brown mantled in misty rain. The roar of the breakers provided a continuous undertone to the shriek of the wind, as it made its first landfall after a three-thousand-mile-haul across the Atlantic.
When the tide was out and the sandbanks were exposed it was sometimes possible to see the stark remnants of the Bonadventure, the wreck that had given a name to this part of the coast. Uncle Luke told me that the great ship had gone aground there in the early nineteenth century and that almost everyone aboard it, including a company of nuns on their way to the West Indies, had been drowned. Most of those that the sea returned were buried in Whinmouth but two were interred on the little island, now known as Nun’s Island, that stood about a mile out to sea. When the clouds lifted I could see the mouse-shaped rock with its thin covering of trees and scrub and farther east the abandoned lighthouse, put there by Winstanley years before his more famous lighthouse was built off Plymouth.
I did not go out to Sennacharib until late in the month and when I did I discovered that the gales had played havoc with my valley.
Two of the giant elms on the edge of the Heronslea rhododendron plantation were down, and one of the avenue beeches had fallen across the drive and was being cleared by estate timbermen. The Teasel Brook, which Diana and I had last seen as an insignificant stream some two yards wide, was now a brown torrent carrying a flotsam of twigs and leaves out of Teasel Wood. At Shepherdshey Bridge the water was almost up to the arch and the village street was ankle deep in frayed thatch, broken tiles and sodden twigs from the Heronslea timber.
I went on up the Teasel for a mile and found that the October colors had faded. The gorse guineas had turned to a dull copper and the purple sheen of the heath was rust red. It was still an exciting spectacle but its full glory had gone. There was loneliness in place of the mellow welcome of a month before.
I entered the estate boundary, partly to test the strength of the license Diana had promised me, but also in the vague hope of seeing her or getting some news of her. I met no one, not even Croker, who I suppose was busy clearing the rides behind the house, where the gales had done considerable damage among the larches and firs.
In the following month, as Christmas approached, my uncle’s business took me to Shepherdshey Village several times in one week and I came to know some of the folk who lived there.
They were a picturesque community, almost untouched by the twentieth century and in some ways as archaic as the tumble-down buildings they occupied.
There was Half-a-Crown Sam, the village cretin, so bowed and hunched that when seen from a distance he looked almost round. Sam was a professional idiot, with a smooth shining skin and great tufts of yellow hair peaked up like the hair of a circus clown. His eyes were the lightest blue but could narrow to the merest slits when someone invited him to demonstrate the trick that earned him his name—a choice between a half crown and a halfpenny. He invariably chose the halfpenny, muttering that it was less trouble to carry away. Shepherdshey people told me that he had been amassing money by this means for close on thirty years, so perhaps he wasn’t really an idiot at all.
There was Ada Macey, the shrill-voiced proprietress of The Jolly Rifleman. Ada said she could remember my Grandfather Leigh taking his first noggin of rum the night he buried his wife. She had a high color and hard eyes and her reputation had penetrated as far as Whinmouth Bay, where she was said to have two husbands, the landlord, Jack Macey, and his man-of-all-work, Harry Venn. Jack, so the story went, had been reported missing early in the war, and Ada had married Harry soon after Armistice Day. She was not in the least put out when Jack turned up in 1919, and since then all three had continued to live lively but by no means quarrelsome lives in the ancient hostlery, west of the Teasel bridge.
It was difficult to imagine Ada as a source of solace to one man, much less two. She was sharp-featured, short-tempered, and not averse to boxing the ears of any male customer who crossed her. I delivered some furniture there on one occasion and happened to scratch the paint off the banisters on my way upstairs. Her protests followed me down the street as far as the crossroads and some of her expressions were such as the Whinmouth fishermen used when trippers walked over their nets spread to dry on the quay.
Across the street from Ada’s pub was the village general shop, maintained by a swart, foxy little man called Pat B
ristow. Pat was a bachelor and his bosom friend was the sexton, Nathaniel Baker, who seemed to spend all his time seated on Pat’s counter.
Nat was a huge, slow-speaking man and the main occupation of these two consisted of issuing a running commentary on every customer who passed the window.
They were ruthless character slayers and in any less tolerant community would have soon been summoned to answer a slander writ. Pat would lay the accusations and wait for Nat’s thoughtful corroboration. Having secured it he would then cast about for new charges in respect of the next person to pass the window. Both male and female sinners were referred to as “’er.”
“There ’er goes, ol’ Nell Josling, looking as though butter wouldn’t melt in ’er mouth!” Pat would say, jerking his pipe stem at an elderly woman on her way to the bus stop. “Wouldn’t think to look at ’er she owed me four-pun-ten, would ’ee? Owes everyone over Whinmouth, so I hear. Ought to county court ’er, I ought, but I’m zoft. That’s my trouble, zoft as a feather bade I be!”
Nat would ponder the customer’s shortcomings for a few moments before adding, “They zay ’er insured old Trev Josling bevore ’er passed on. Dree-hundred-pun I ’eard it was. Tidy sum for a man in ’is condition, dornee think, Pat? And him a-bade two year or more, bevore us got round to burying ’un!”
Then Ada Macey would appear in the porch opposite to shake a mat and Pat would abandon the Joslings in order to comment on Ada’s experiment in polygamy.
“Going on long bevore 1914 it was! I used to stand here an’ zee ’em bob upstairs the minute old Jack Macey went out to his allotment. Time it to the split second they would. First you’d zee Jack, spade in hand, then Harry carrying out the empties, then Ada taking off her apron on the way upstairs. Always in a hurry she was, but Harry, he took his time like. He’d watch Jack out o’ zight around the church bevore he went up, then draw isself a pint on the way up, never mind ’er shouting for him from the best room! Makes ’ee laugh, dorn it, blamin’ it on the war?”
Then Nat would add his corroborative evidence regarding Ada’s character in earlier life: “Never no different she wasn’t! Smut Stover was the first there when she was fifteen. Store ’em once I did, in the corner o’ the churchyard when I was a choirboy. Fine place to start eh, top of a grave, but it’s true. Smut gimme a penny to forget what I zee!”
Smut Stover, the man they referred to, was still about the village. He was a notable poacher, always at odds with the keepers on the Heronslea estate and on Lord Gilroy’s coverts farther east. He was a cheerful ruffian and a crony of my Uncle Mark, who was said to have nameless business with him. Perhaps this accounted for Uncle Mark’s roll of notes, for Smut was half a gypsy and was regarded as a thief as well as a poacher.
There were respectable folk of the community, of course, but I had no occasion to meet them at that time, for they never patronized Uncle Luke’s Mart. They consisted of several farming families scattered around the area and one or two retired folk living in remote houses on the east side of the brook.
The farmers were as backward as everyone else in Shepherdshey. One never saw a tractor at work in the fields, only big, lumbering carts, painted sky blue and drawn by huge, patient shire horses. The vicar, Mr. Shelton, was as out of date as his parishioners.
He looked like a character in a Punch cartoon, trotting to and from the vicarage in shirt sleeves, a black bib and rusty clerical hat. He spent most of his time with his bees and usually had to be fetched from his hives on the edge of Teasel Wood when he was wanted to visit the sick, or perform a ceremony. He was said to be deep in the pocket of the Gayelorde-Suttons and dined with them whenever they were in residence. Another regular visitor to Heronslea was Colonel Best, V.C., a Zulu War veteran, who had taken part in the defense of Rorke’s Drift and received an assagai wound that left him with a withered arm. The village as a whole, however, thought very little of the new occupants of Heronslea, dismissing them as foreigners, or “foggy-do-men.” Everyone whose father had not been born in Shepherdshey was a foggy-do-man and the Gayelorde-Suttons, particularly Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton, were objects of derision, welcome enough for the gifts they distributed at Christmas and at various fetes held in their grounds but far short of what the villagers called “real gentry,” like the Gilroys.
The steady milking of the Gayelorde-Suttons was the principal hobby of the villagers. Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton was invited to become president of every social group and a fairy godmother to every activity sponsored in the area. Her delight in these forms of patronage ensured a steady flow of funds, jumble, produce and free labor, and in return for these bounties the villagers were ready to eat as much feudal pie as she set before them, mumbling their thanks, tugging their forelocks and laughing heartily at the provider the moment she drove away in her Bentley or Rolls-Royce.
During that first winter I wondered how much Diana knew of this rustic charade or whether she cared two straws what the village folks thought of her parents, but soon I had an opportunity of assessing Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton myself and guessing at the reasons for Diana’s hostility toward her mother.
I heard heels clicking on the slate slab, outside the main door and looked up to see Diana standing there. She was standing sideways to me, talking to someone out of my line of vision.
I slammed the book shut and jumped up to greet her, but at that moment she shrugged and moved away as a well-dressed woman came through the doorway. I guessed at once that this was her mother, the celebrated Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton, so I swallowed my welcome and remained quiet in order to get a good look at her.
She was a great deal younger than I had imagined, not more than thirty-three or thirty-four, and so stylishly dressed that anybody in a town like Whinmouth Bay would be sure to turn around and stare at her when she passed by. Skirts were at their very shortest just then and this made her look almost girlish, for her tailor-made costume finished well above her knees. She had very shapely legs and smart shoes, with heels that looked almost as long as her feet.
She was not particularly good-looking and possessed few of Diana’s striking features but the general impression she gave was one of sensational smartness, like a model on the cover of an expensive periodical, the kind of magazine you see people reading in first-class railway carriages. She had dark, close-cropped hair and greenish slightly prominent eyes. She was medium height, with a neat figure somewhat too thin. The only thing about her that reminded me of Diana was her chin, well rounded but very firm, too firm for a woman as willowy and elegant as she.
I studied her and was a little disturbed by what I found. There was something arrogantly aggressive about the way she sauntered around our pathetic display of goods, as though she were doing us a favor by just being there and was afraid of touching things as she tip-tapped among kitchen chairs, tables, mangles, washstands and battered commodes.
Then I heard her voice and realized instantly why the people in Shepherdshey made unpleasant jokes about her. It wasn’t a woman’s voice at all but a voice that belonged to an extravagant puppet. Its accent was so strained and strangled that it made you feel ashamed to listen and it struck me at once that her voice was in key to her personality, a whole jigsaw of effort and contrivance in striking contrast to her daughter’s effortless way of moving, talking and smiling.
When Diana moved and smiled everyone about her relaxed. The person at whom she smiled wanted to acknowledge the rhythm and orderliness of the universe, for contact with her made you feel tolerant and generous inside. When her eyes sparkled you knew that it was good to be alive and that everything was going to turn out all right in the end.
Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton’s presence had an exactly opposite effect. It made you feel tense and apprehensive, as though you were walking over rough ground in the dark and not sure what you would bump into, or how much you would be hurt in the process. It armed all your defenses against indignities and humiliations and even when she wasn’t addressing you the sound of her voice talking to somebody else made you feel e
dgy and small.
I’ve thought a good deal about Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton’s accent in the last twenty years. I’ve even gone to considerable pains to get it down on paper, but to do so with any accuracy is almost impossible, for it was the kind of accent that didn’t use any rules regarding the articulation of vowels or the emphasis of syllables. It was meant, of course, to be a high-hat accent, the kind the best people have used since accents became stock-in-trade in this country, but hers overreached itself so ludicrously that it plunged down into farce and was lost in a whirl of despair, laughter or downright incredulity, according to how important she was to you.
I knew that she was important to me because I was already hopelessly in love with her daughter, and the first dry crackle of her voice made me shy away in alarm and want to hide myself behind Uncle Luke’s junk.
I was still standing there, book in hand, when she swung round and tip-tapped into the Mart, her prominent eyes roving here and there for someone to hector. That was the very worst thing about her; you were always absolutely certain she would hector, it was so clear from the way she walked and held herself. Diana trailed along behind, almost submerged, I noticed, under this tide of arrogance.
Then Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton spied me, rooted to the spot in our pigsty of an office.
“Boy!” she pronounced. “Come over heah, boy!”
I edged forward like a pupil of Dotheboys Hall anticipating a sound thrashing.
“How mache is thet!” she said, flicking her hand from the wrist and indicating a marble-topped washstand marked ten shillings in Uncle Luke’s chalked scrawl.
I made a bad mistake straightaway. Licking my lips, and trying hard not to look at Diana who was now standing immediately behind her mother, I said that the article was marked and could be sold for ten shillings, plus delivery charges.
Diana Page 4
