“Hands down—elbows in—no, don’t turn your toes out! Press in and up, with the strain on the balls of your feet. That’s the way you learn to grip with your knees and you won’t even stay on old Nellie until you learn to do that. Don’t sit forward, Jan, not unless you want her to gallop! Loop your reins—look—like this, you’re holding them bunched, just like Daddy.”
“I feel like Daddy!” I told her, but she stuck to the lesson with the single-mindedness of a professional.
“Relax, Jan—don’t hunch—you aren’t going to fall off so long as you listen to me. Relax, and let all your muscles except your thighs go slack. That’s better! Now, I can’t have you on the leading rein at your age, so tie it up and let’s go!”
We jogged out of the wood and across the common to the moor. She rode alongside and kept looking doubtfully at my feet, occasionally tapping them with her crop. After a mile or so I began to feel more confident and presently she shouted something to Nellie, who rolled into a slow, easy canter, pushing ahead of the collected Sioux and widening the gap between us.
I was astonished then to discover how easy it is to sit a cantering pony. I did not know that Nellie was all of twenty years old and that countless children had learned to ride on her broad back. Then Diana flashed past me and blocked the narrow path, forcing Nellie to drop back into an uneven trot, and I had all my work cut out to maintain balance, especially after one foot had slipped from the stirrup and I pitched forward, clutching frantically at Nellie’s mane and rolling first to one side and then the other.
“Well, I’ve seen a lot worse,” said Diana, smiling, when at last she wheeled and grabbed Nellie’s drooping reins. “You’ve got long legs and you’ll be all right when your muscles build but you’ll have to practice for hours and hours until you can hardly limp around.”
“If we’re going to ride every morning,” I protested, “I’ll have to get the proper togs. These trousers ruck up and I’ve rubbed all the skin off the inside of my knee.”
“I’ll have a square foot of skin off your bottom before I’ve finished with you!” she promised. “When you come out tomorrow bring corduroys. They’ll do to begin with but never mind about riding now, let’s walk back to where your bike is, I’ve got to explain the scheme I’ve worked out for the rest of the holidays. Now listen carefully and do everything I say, then we can be together all the time until I go back.”
The plan had the hallmark of Diana’s shrewdness and reckless gaiety but she explained it in the matter-of-fact tone she invariably used when advancing a harebrained scheme aimed at getting her own way.
“You see, Mummy would squash it flat if she thought we had even a mild crush on one another,” she said, frankly, “so I had to think out a foolproof wheeze to explain your presence in Sennacharib for the rest of the hols.”
“You can’t mean to keep on buying loads of Uncle Luke’s furniture,” I protested.
“Good Lord, no,” she said, impatiently. “You work for a newspaper now, don’t you? Well, this has to do with a newspaper, and Mummy’ll fall for it hook, line and sinker, because she’s an absolute glutton for publicity, even publicity in a little local rag like yours.”
It was the first time Diana had spoken slightingly of The Whinmouth & District Observer, and I should have challenged her had I been less enthralled with the prospect of spending days in her company. She was right in claiming her plan to be foolproof, however, for it was based on Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton’s snobbery. Providing my employers proved co-operative I didn’t see how it could fail.
The idea was that my paper should set about collecting information for a series of weekly articles on Heronslea House and the history of the estate as a whole. I was to be introduced into the house as the gleaner of these facts and then either Uncle Reuben, or someone else, was to collate the information I had gathered into a series of features. The scheme was to be sparked off by a telephone call from me to Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton, after which I was to sell the idea to Uncle Reuben as having originated from her.
It worked surprisingly well. Uncle Reuben liked local features, though I had a hard job to prevent him from undertaking the fact-finding tour himself. When I pleaded that I needed experience, however, he gave way, and so it was that I donned my best suit and dutifully presented myself at the front door of Heronslea House, equipped with a notebook, three well-sharpened pencils and such confidence as Diana had been able to instill into me during that morning’s riding lesson on the common.
I had expected Diana to fly to the door the moment I arrived but when a traditionally disdainful butler led me into the circular hall and across it to a sunny room overlooking the small terrace, she was nowhere to be seen. I was shown a chair and told to wait until it pleased Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton to attend to me. I don’t know whether Masters, the butler, had been informed of the reason for my presence, but I gathered from his manner that I was not the type of guest he was accustomed to admit to his mistress’s writing room.
It was an interesting room, especially if you knew Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton. The walls and bureau photographs screamed her pretensions toward life membership in the Upper Ten. There were several oval oil portraits of bewigged gentlemen and brocaded ladies, a signed photograph of a recently deposed king, more photographs of groups of fashionably dressed people, including herself and husband taken on a racecourse somewhere, and a cabinet crammed with china, part of her Rockingham and Bow collection.
The furniture was mostly French. There was a large writing table, with slender legs and a mass of gilded ornamentation, a lovely rosewood escritoire, decorated with a pastoral motif on its bow front and a set of ribbon-backed chairs, with seats that matched the yellow curtains of the room. Although in many ways a ludicrously counterfeit squireen, it was clear that Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton possessed genuine taste. There was absolutely nothing wrong with her ideas of furnishing a large country house. Life with Uncle Luke, and attendance at scores of auction sales, had taught me a smattering of these matters and I sensed that everything in the room was what the dealers would call “right,” just as she herself always looked “right,” until the moment she opened her screwbag mouth and spoiled a good impression by strangled vowels and overstressed consonants.
Suddenly she swept in and subjected me to a long, disapprovingly intense scrutiny.
“The reportah from the peepah? But you’re only a boy! I expected someone oldah, mech oldah!”
Luckily I had anticipated this and made haste to explain that I was a mere fact assembler and that the proprietor of the paper would write the actual articles.
I must have been learning fast about Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton, for I scored a direct hit by a deferential tailpiece to the effect that this assignment was considered the most important one our paper had ever undertaken and therefore demanded the maximum preparation.
“Oh, I see, I see!” she murmuerd and then, after a moment’s reflection: “Ai’im far too busy to spend mai taime explaining everything to a boy, but there’s something in what you say. We don’t want to rush the business, do we? Ai think perhaps the best idea is to get mai daughter to show you around; then you ken read me what you’ve written, before submitting it to your editah.”
She opened the door and called, “Air-m’ald … Air-m’ald …!” There was the painful sigh in her pronunciation of the name as I had noticed on the occasion when she visited the Mart. “Come in here, Air-merald, Ai want you to meet someone!”
The strong element of farce in the situation made me want to giggle but I forced myself to maintain a mute, respectful expression while Diana was summoned and solemnly introduced to me. Her play-acting was far better than mine. She even managed to look petulant when her mother instructed her to escort me around the house and grounds and tell me what she knew of its history.
“How long is all this likely to take, Mother?” she demanded, implying that she regarded the entire business as a terrible bore.
“As long as Ai think fit, deah!” said Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton
tartly, and I noticed the deep-rooted antipathy that existed between them, even allowing for the fact that Diana was only playing a part and that her mother was addressing her in front of a stranger.
“All right, all right, I only asked,” grumbled Diana, “but I don’t want to spend the entire holidays cooped up in the house!”
It seemed to me that Diana was overdoing her show of reluctance but I later concluded that she was merely strengthening the knot that was to hold us together for the next three weeks. Her apparent truculence irritated her mother and made her determined to exert her parental authority. She gave Diana a little lecture on the importance of her escort duties and stressed that everything she said was liable to appear in print. Diana played her like a fish, pretending to warm to her duties as soon as Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton pointed out that the tour was to include a careful inspection of the entire estate and that this would mean rambles about the grounds.
“Does he ride?” she inquired demurely and winked over her mother’s shoulder.
“Oh yes, ma’am,” I told her, “I learned over at the Tally-Ho Stables, a year or so ago.”
“There then,” said Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton, with a certain amount of relief, “you can ride over the estate but Ai shall want the interiah covered first, you understand? All the chinah and pictures and particularly the Dutch and Italian gardens and McCarthy’s hothouse displays. When we’ve sorted it out,” she added, turning to me again, “your employer will hev to send a kemerah up heah, so now I’ll leave you to my daughter and you can show me what you’ve done when it’s time to go. Start in the library, Air-m’ald, and ask Mrs. Beddowes when she’s ready to let you go upstairs.”
“Yes, Mother,” said Diana, dutifully. “Come this way, will you, Mr. … Mr. …?”
“Leigh,” I said, promptly, and followed her out into the hall, closing the door behind me.
2.
Thus began the charade that lasted the greater part of the Easter holidays, and from everyone’s viewpoint it proved a remarkable success. The articles were compiled to Mrs. Gayelorde’s satisfaction, the Observer filled its center page without the aid of scissors and pastepot, and Diana and I had license to associate whenever we wished. Although it all began as an elaborate joke it soon developed into something more for me. To anyone at all receptive to beauty and good craftsmanship, an inspection of Heronslea House and estate was a rewarding way of spending an April day. Diana was at first incredulous, then mildly amused by my enthusiasm.
“You’re taking it all so seriously, Jan,” she complained, when I begged her to allow me more time in the library. “Nobody ever reads the books in here, they went with the house and they simply aren’t readable, none of them.”
“They smell exciting anyway,” I said and Diana laughed and gave me an affectionate little hug.
“Oh, you’re a funny boy, Jan!” she exclaimed. “Funny but nice! You know”—she stood back and regarded me as though making up her mind about a purchase at a counter—“I really think you are going to be someone after all. I’ll tell you what. For the house tour I’ll hand you over to Drip. She’s got quite a pash on you and I’ll get all my chores done before we start outside and combine this nonsense with some real work on the horses. I’ve got heaps of letters to write and an awful French holiday task and by the time I’ve done you’ll be through in here.”
Without waiting for my agreement she pulled me up the broad staircase, composed of stairs so shallow that one had little sensation of climbing, and along one of the curved corridors to a little suite beyond the schoolroom. This was Drip’s quarters and as we went in she said:
“Drip’s in our secret, of course, so you might have to grapple with her conscience! She won’t give us away, however, so you don’t have to put on an act with her.”
It was soon clear that poor Miss Rodgers was having a great deal of trouble with her conscience, and because I was genuinely fond of her I was unable to share Diana’s detachment. It did not take me long to discover that Drip was very well aware that my world revolved around Diana, and also that I was no more than a glorified errand boy with whom her charge was consorting in brazen defiance of her mother.
Miss Rodgers (I find it difficult to write of her as “Drip”) was torn between her adoration for Diana, her genuine kindheartedness, her liking for me personally, and her obvious duty to her employers, but Diana was correct in her assumption that our secret was safe, for Drip’s awareness of responsibilities as governess was outweighed by more personal considerations. After a good deal of preliminary tongue clicking and half-hearted protests she consented to take over Diana’s duties as guide.
“I don’t like all this hole-in-the-corner business, Jan,” she admitted, as soon as Diana had left us alone. “After all, I am supposed to be responsible for her whenever her mother isn’t here, and although I don’t see why you and she shouldn’t be friends, I don’t like being a party to a shameless deceit.”
“It isn’t really a deceit, Miss Rodgers,” I pleaded, “because we really are going to print the articles. Besides, I like the job and I think Diana’s mother will like what we do, so in the end everyone’ll be happy, won’t they?”
“Yes,” said Drip, doubtfully, “but I think you’d better tell me a little more about yourself, just in case anyone finds out later on. I mean … well … Diana’s mother is rather fussy about whom she associates with in the holidays, and I can’t help feeling that she might be furious if she found out that Diana had tricked her like this, if you see what I mean.”
I saw what she meant far more clearly than the amiable little governess imagined. Diana’s mother would be less inclined to explode over being so outrageously hoodwinked than over the discovery that her expensively educated daughter was gaily associating with a boy who had recently graduated from a secondhand furniture store to the post of junior reporter on an insignificant country newspaper, and a boy, moreover, who had left a council school at the age of fourteen and used a reedy, Cockney accent that placed him on a footing with the village boy who cleaned the silver.
My tour of the house in the wake of Drip served to emphasize the existence of the vast social gulf between us. Before I had inspected half of the sixty-odd rooms of the mansion it was plain that the Gayelorde-Suttons were far wealthier than I had supposed. I followed Drip from room to room with mounting dismay. It was like being taken on a conducted tour around Blenheim Palace, or Compton Wynyates. Drip let me browse in the library and jot down notes about some of the pictures on the staircase. There was a Cotman landscape and several small Fragonards. Down in the vast drawing room was a group of Isabey miniatures and two portraits by Raeburn. I knew very little about pictures and was content to make notes on the insurance figures quoted by Miss Rodgers, but my association with antique dealers had taught me something of the value of the French furniture in the ground-floor apartments.
The furniture alone would have merited a four-day sale and attracted every reputable dealer in London. There were samples of almost every well-known English craftsman of the eighteenth century, as well as a number of exquisite French pieces, of the kind I had already noted in the writing room.
There were Aubusson screens, Chinese carpets, Burgundian tapestries and Sheraton sideboards, loaded with Georgian silver. There was Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton’s personal collection of china ranging from early Chelsea and Plymouth, to exotic groups and centerpieces of Rockingham, Worcester, and Bow. There was a small armory containing chased Spanish morions, exquisitely wrought Italian armor, and a dozen cases of handsome dueling pistols, collected, I was told, by Mr. Gayelorde-Sutton during his various Continental trips. There was a little conservatory, full of oddities left by the Gilroys and containing, among other interesting exhibits, the charred stump of a stake at which the last witch of the district was said to have suffered. Dotted here and there among all these splendors were scores of framed photographs, each of them featuring the Gayelorde-Suttons during their swift rise to power during the opening years of the decade.
It was an early photograph of Mr. Gayelorde-Sutton wearing knickerbockers and deerstalker hat and taken alongside an early model of an open touring car that prompted me to ask Miss Rodgers if the family had always been rich, or whether, as was freely rumored in Shepherdshey, they had acquired their vast wealth during the 1914–18 war.
I saw by the instinctive tightening of the governess’s lips that the question challenged her honesty.
“Well er …” she temporized, “Diana’s father has always been very clever, of course, and he was doing quite well before the war, importing something or other from South America, but money makes money, doesn’t it? It was really during the war that he came to be really well-known, not in the newspaper sense, you understand, not like Rudolph Valentino or that man Lind something or other, who flew the Atlantic last summer, but among the city people who seem to make money without doing anything in particular.”
“But what does he really do?” I asked, for it seemed important to me that I should know this once and for all.
Drip wrinkled her pudgy little nose and looked very uncomfortable.
“I … I don’t really know,” she admitted. “I don’t think anyone here really knows, except that it’s something to do with … with high finance, and … and selling something to the government. Perhaps it’s something like he was doing before the war—that was nitrates, I believe, Chilean nitrates. I do remember that because I saw some illustrated charts hanging in his office when I had to call there the day war broke out.”
That was as much information as I got at that time about the source of the Gayelorde-Suttons’ wealth, but before Diana came to claim me and continue our tour of the gardens, Miss Rodgers asked me into her little sitting room adjoining the nursery and talked to me seriously over a cup of tea and some of her favorite muffins. I could see that she was still very worried over our association and at length she forced herself, much as she hated to pry, to explore the future of a friendship between Diana and myself.
Diana Page 11
