I went up to my room with wildly beating heart, turning the blue envelope over in my hands and noting the elegant flourishes on the J in John and the L in Leigh, for Diana’s handwriting was new to me and as exotic as everything else about her.
It was a chatty, affectionate, schoolgirlish letter and succeeded in putting the Whinmouth & District Observer right out of my mind for the next forty-eight hours.
MY JAN [it began]—
As you don’t seem disposed to write to me, as you promised, I’m breaking all the rules (social as well as Passy-Glassy’s) by writing to you first.
School is as dreary as ever and I’m counting the days until we break up for Easter. Before that, however, we’ve got Lent exams and I’m sure to flop at practically everything, for I’ve slacked all term and its partly your fault, because I’ve been waiting and waiting to hear from you about our lovely Sennacharib and whether you’ve been to the Folly again and if you think of me as much as I do of you! (This is awful, I’m absolutely throwing myself at you!)
Seriously though, I have been awfully disappointed by your silence, and have made an absolute nuisance of myself with Marion. (She’s the day girl whose address I gave you to write to.) I must have asked her about fifty times whether there was a letter for me and now the hateful thing says no before I can ask! I had another and special reason for writing. Is it possible for you to come to London on Saturday? This may sound absolutely mad to you but there is a good chance of us being able to meet, in fact you could take me out somewhere if you wanted to and it would be a terrific adventure and a marvelous score over the school rules! I’m not going into details in this letter, a because you mightn’t be able to make it, and b for the more likely reason that you’ve cooled off and are going about with someone in Whinmouth Bay, in which case tear this up and forget all about it and me. If you can come to town, however, write and say so at once and I’ll write again by return and give you all the instructions for what our Lorna would have called “a tryst.”
All my love dear Jan,
DIANA
There was a single cross, artfully contrived out of the final flourish of her signature, and when I saw it, after rereading the letter for the third time, my hands shook with excitement.
I would have liked to have written a long letter in reply, telling her all about my new job and making it sound much more glamorous and exciting than it really was, but I had a busy day ahead of me and conditions were not conducive to composing my first love letter. Ordinarily I should have waited until I did have a chance to write, but the prospect of actually seeing her was more urgent than the desire to pour out my feelings on paper, and if she was to have time to write back and explain how and where I could meet her it was essential that I reply by return.
I worked out a plan to get to and from London. There was a semifinal Cup excursion from Whinford and I knew that I could borrow Uncle Luke’s bicycle and ride it to Whinford Junction on Friday, in time to catch the train at 10 P.M. I could leave the bike in the station yard against my early morning return on Sunday, and the prospect of such an exhausting journey involving the loss of two nights’ sleep made the occasion additionally romantic. I wrote a hasty letter explaining my plan and said that I would follow any instructions she sent. Wednesday and Thursday passed in an agony of anticipation. Then, on Friday, her second letter arrived. It said briefly that I was to meet her outside Swan & Edgar’s, in Piccadilly Circus, at three o’clock on Saturday afternoon and that I need not reply as she would be passing the rendezvous at that time in any case. The letter contained no endearments. It was blunt, very much to the point and, as I was to discover with the years, entirely characteristic of Diana when she had business to conduct.
I told Uncle Reuben that I wanted to take advantage of the cheap excursion and would like his permission to skip the tedious folding routine of publication day.
He was a good deal surprised at my request, so much so that I did not dare to pretend to a sudden interest in professional football but told him a lie that troubled my conscience. I said that my object in wanting to visit London was to put flowers on the grave of my parents.
He was very touched by this and instantly granted me leave, doubling the burden of my conscience by giving me ten shillings to buy flowers from himself, Uncle Luke and Aunt Thirza. I had no option but to take his money and it burned in my hand. I told myself that I would have to go to the cemetery now whether I had the time or not.
At the last minute I adjusted my plan and went to the junction at Whinford by train, taking Uncle Luke’s bike in the luggage van and catching the main-line train in good time. I was far too excited to sleep and sat hunched under the feeble compartment light reading Lorna Doone. The romance had become a kind of litany for the worship of Diana.
It was drizzling when I arrived at Waterloo and still wanted an hour or so to daybreak.
I left the station and walked along York Road and over Westminster Bridge toward the Houses of Parliament. It was a dank and dismal morning, and the Thames looked still and sinister in the glow of the Embankment lights. An early tram whined past as Big Ben struck five, telling me that I still had ten hours to fill before meeting Diana. The dreariness of the scene deflated me and I thought how strange it was that, although I was a Cockney born and bred, I should feel so lonely and desolate in the heart of my home town, so much so that I was already beginning to feel homesick for the rusty bracken of Teasel Slope and the dark smudge of Folly Wood against the skyline of Foxhayes Common. The tug of homesickness set me thinking deeply. Why was it, I wondered, that such a remote and rustic corner of England exercised such undisputed sovereignty over my heart, and that after a few short months of the least impressionable period of childhood? Was it the drag of an ancestral memory, or had it nothing to do with long-dead Leighs but everything with a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, whom I had met but half a dozen times?
When the first gray streaks of dawn began to show over the river I stirred myself and decided that what I needed to cheer myself up was a wash, a brush-up and a hot meal.
I found all three in the Covent Garden area and after some bacon and eggs, and three cups of drayman’s tea, I shed my pensive mood and was not even depressed by the prospect of traveling all the way to Brixton to visit the double grave. Somehow it seemed to me that this dismal obligation would be an act of finality, a final breaking of ties that held me to my drab London boyhood. I told myself that my mother, who could conjure up the smell of Devon gorse and heath after a separation of forty years, would surely have approved my new allegiance to Sennacharib and understood my almost physical repugnance for the huddle of slate, asphalt and yellow brick of which some Cockneys are so proud.
I spent Uncle Reuben’s ten shillings and seven-and-six of my own on a large armful of daffodils and narcissi and caught a southbound bus to the cemetery. By midday I was back in the Strand and after a modest lunch in a snack bar I walked up Whitehall to spend an hour in my favorite museum, gazing once more on the bloodstained shirt Charles I had worn at his execution and the pathetic skeleton of Napoleon’s horse, Marengo. I wondered whether Diana would share my enthusiasm for museums, or whether she would demand more sophisticated entertainment. When the clock said two-twenty-five I decided that it was time to find out.
I walked up to Piccadilly Circus, arriving far too early. The usual group of anxious-eyed pedestrians were drifting up and down the block, each endeavoring to give an impression that the appointment they had anticipated was of small importance, yet each betraying the same kind of nervous apprehension that I experienced. If ever we met in London again, I decided, it would have to be at a more original rendezvous.
I had no idea from which direction she would come, or what means of transport she would use, so that when, on the stroke of three, a taxi pulled up beside me I did not glance at it until the door slammed and a voice on the brink of laughter said, “Don’t scowl so, Jan! People will think we’re married and I’m an hour or so late!”
She l
ooked more grown up than ever. I had been half-expecting a girl in a school uniform and one of those dreadful floppy hats, but here she was in the smart little suit that she had worn at the Mart—“mufti” she called it, and added that it was only permissible when you were taken out by one’s parents. She had an outdoor coat over her arm and a little yellow straw hat, close-fitting and trimmed with tiny wings, like the hat worn by Gretchens in traditional Dutch pictures. I felt painfully shy in my ready-made suit of gray serge and a soft collar held in place by a narrow tiepin, but from the first moment she seemed to sense my awkwardness and set to work to overcome it, taking my arm and in full charge of the expedition.
“First, somewhere to sit and gossip,” she said. “How about Lyons, in Coventry Street? I’ve got until eight o’clock and it’ll take us forty minutes to get back to school. There’s a train at seven-thirty-five and you can travel with me as far as the suburban station.”
I was impressed by her efficiency and air of dispatch. It was as though she had been planning every moment of our meeting, anticipating each contingency before it revealed itself.
Fresh from Devon, I was bewildered by the swirl of traffic, but she guided me across to Eros and then over the wide stretch of Coventry Street as though I were one of her big, obedient dogs.
Even in that press of buses and taxis, however, I was conscious of the firm pressure on my forearm and the rhythmic bob of her brown curls that now seemed suspended from the rim of her little yellow hat. Delight in her company swelled inside me and with it came a kind of delicious dependence on her judgment and gently exercised authority.
When we reached the Corner House I made a big effort to assume my responsibilities as a squire. I piloted her to a corner table, far enough away from the orchestra to enable us to converse without raising our voices. It was the post-lunch lull and they were not busy. The waitress brought us tea and cakes almost at once and the orchestra tuned up and began to play excerpts from The Merry Widow.
“Jan, you’re looking wonderful!” she said, with enthusiasm. “I’m so thrilled you could make it, because I went to so much trouble and it would have been absolutely awful if you hadn’t been there after all. Just think, I might have run the risk of being expelled, all for nothing!”
“Expelled? Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “You don’t mean …”
“Why, naturally!” She laughed and squeezed my hand. “If I was caught here with a boy Passy-Glassy would have a seizure! When she finally came around she’d phone Mummy and I’d be out on my ear in twenty-four hours. This is positively the worst thing you can do short of bringing a man into your cubicle and I don’t think that’s ever been done, at least not in my time, though May Didcott is supposed to have done it the week before she stowed away for Switzerland.”
I would have liked to have heard more of May Didcott, but first I wanted to learn how Diana had arranged our meeting in the first place.
“Oh, it was all very simple really,” she said, gaily. “You see, we get one day each term out with our parents and everyone usually takes half-term, which was nearly a month ago. Mummy and Daddy were away in Nice at half-term, so I had a day due to me and they came for me after breakfast this morning. I’ve just left them at home.”
“But you couldn’t have,” I protested, remembering my five-hour train journey from the West.
“Silly! I mean home up here, in Palmerston Crescent. It’s only me who thinks of Heronslea as real home. I don’t think they’d go there much if it wasn’t for me, or if it wasn’t the thing to do—you know—to have a place in the country and play at being a squire weekends.”
“But if you’re supposed to be with them, and they think you’re supposed to be back at school, how on earth can you stay out until eight?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s where the brains come in,” she replied, lifting the teapot that the waitress had set before her and beginning to pour. “I know that you take sugar, but I forget whether you have milk in first.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, impatiently, “tell me what you did.”
“Well, I simply told Mummy that I had to be back by three for an important hockey match but I didn’t tell her until it was too late to get hold of the chauffeur, so then I had to go by taxi and the taxi brought me here instead of taking me back to school. I was lucky in one respect though. Mummy would have told the driver where to take me and he might have followed his instructions in spite of the big tip that I had ready, but just as he arrived the phone rang and Mummy answered it, so I gave him his instructions instead and just kissed Mummy good-by at the door! Now then, that’s enough about me, tell me everything about your new job. I’m terribly proud of you, Jan, perhaps because I had a sort of feeling you were just bragging up at the Folly and that when I came home at Easter you’d still be mucking about that awful furniture store. Do you go to fires and wrecks and attend murder trials?”
“I would if there were any,” I said, guardedly, “but so far there haven’t been. I did go out after the fire engine once but it was only a chimney fire in a semidetached on the Shepherdshey road. I like it, though, and it’s going to be exciting when things start happening in the summer. Uncle Reuben says that the spring is always the quietest time because it’s only the visitors who get themselves into trouble and give us the more sensational stories—you know, boating tragedies and beach rescues.”
She made me describe everything I did and even asked me to write something in shorthand on the paper napkin. I wrote: You look very beautiful today! and she teased me into translating. Then, when I could think of nothing more to tell her, she said:
“You don’t know how lucky you are, Jan, to be more or less grown up and earning your own living. Look at me, marking time and likely to be, for years yet!”
It was characteristic of Diana, then and later, to subscribe to the popular fiction that money and a cushioned background were obstacles that stood in the way of full enjoyment of life. She would always pretend that the circumstances surrounding her stifled self-expression and encouraged a general flabbiness of outlook. I don’t think that she really believed this, even then, but she found it useful as a banner of rebellion against externally applied discipline. It was also a challenge to her mother, the kind of challenge that she was making now, by sitting in Lyons Corner House instead of returning to school.
I remember that all the charm she exercised over me did not prevent me from debating this claim and that we had an amicable argument about it on the spot. I must have sounded very pompous when I pointed out the obvious advantages of a good education and of the opportunity to travel while still at school, and of all the glittering by-products of wealth, such as ponies and a legal claim to every square yard of Sennacharib.
“Well, all I can say is I’m jolly glad you haven’t got it anyway, Jan,” she said, when I had run out of the advantages of being Emerald Diana Gayelorde-Sutton, of Heronslea, Devon, and Palmerston Crescent, W.9., “because what I admire about you is the fact that you stand on your own feet! That’s what makes you different from all the other stuffed dummies Mummy introduces into the house. They’re all at public schools, of course, and they take the kind of background that I have for granted, but there isn’t one of them who could learn to be a reporter as you have, and on top of that I don’t think any of them would take this much trouble just to see me, so there!”
I could have sat there all the afternoon and evening hearing her talk like that, but the restaurant was filling up now and if we wanted to make the best use of our few hours together it was time to move.
“Have you anywhere special you’d like to go?” I asked. “I suppose you’ve been to the Tower and Madame Tussaud’s, and all that. If it had been better weather we could have gone on the Serpentine for a row. I used to go there with my mother sometimes.”
“I thought we might go to the pictures,” she suggested. “There’s a double feature at Marble Arch, a film about Nurse Cavell and a new comedy called Just Imagine. How would you like that?”<
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I said I should like it very much and called the waitress, who had been hovering around our table rather impatiently. It was nearly half past four and all we had ordered was tea, cakes and a second jug of hot water.
I paid the bill and we caught a bus to Marble Arch. A Pathé Gazette feature was showing when we went in and we had time to settle ourselves before the comedy started. I didn’t often get the opportunity to go to the cinema because we didn’t have one in Whinmouth Bay, so I was determined to enjoy myself, apart from the nearness of Diana. She asked me to help her off with her coat and when it was folded across the empty seat in front she let her shoulder touch mine and presently she took hold of my hand in the most natural way possible. I wouldn’t have changed places with a prince of the Indies.
The comedy was an original one to a cinema-goer fed on Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. The hero was transplanted into the world of the future, where laughs depended upon his reactions to the new habits of society. I remember bow I laughed when, having visions of a large, satisfying meal, he was given a small vitamin pill and exclaimed, “Give me the good old days!” I remember, too, how Diana laughed, and how secretly shocked I was, when a couple put money in a slot and a baby slid down a chute, giving the hero an opportunity to make the same remark, this time in tones of the strongest disapproval.
The Nurse Cavell film impressed us both tremendously and stoked up a tremendous hate for the suave German generals.
Looking back it seems strange that a cinema audience could wax so indignant over the execution of a single British nurse, but in those days Belsen and Lidice were nearly twenty years away and not even Germans used phrases like “total war” or “liquidation.”
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