“I … I know you’re very young, Jan,” she began, her pendulous cheeks flushing, “but I’ve got a dreadful conviction that you’re … well … beginning to feel the same way about Diana as I do, and I can’t see how you’ll be able to stop getting hurt later on. You see, I’ve known Diana from the minute she was born and she’s always been this way—thoughtless and terribly impulsive, always rushing into things that she thinks of as … well … as adventures, I suppose. I don’t mean that she’s silly enough to imagine she’s in love, or anything of that nature, and I suppose I shouldn’t even say that to a boy of your age anyway, because I’m sure you won’t let your mind dwell on that kind of thing for years yet, but I do think a young person can be hurt as much by a broken friendship as grown-up people are hurt by love affairs, and I don’t like a nice boy like you being picked up and … and well … led to believe things and then dropped and laughed at, do you know?”
Despite her obvious good intentions I found myself resenting her estimate of Diana. I suppose I failed to make sufficient allowance for the fact that Miss Rodgers had been reared in a Victorian atmosphere and accepted rigid class distinctions without in the least resenting them. It seemed to me at that time that she was being stuffy and old-fashioned, as well as slightly disloyal to someone who had never hinted at the social barrier between us, except as a fence to be crossed and recrossed in defiance of her mother’s edicts.
I fell back on a rather surly justification of myself as a not altogether-impossible squire for the daughter of wealthy and distinguished parents. Drip’s halting references to impending disaster had touched my pride in a way that Diana’s frank acceptance of parental opposition had never touched it, and I said, without looking at her:
“I’m not going to stay a small-town reporter, Miss Rodgers. I’m going to get on a bigger paper and be famous, so that in the end we won’t have to pretend any more and then Diana and I can be married without any fuss!”
Poor Miss Rodgers was so startled by the mention of the word “marriage” that she dropped her pince-nez spectacles on the carpet.
“Jan, you … you mustn’t think about things like that,” she protested, her plump hands fluttering as she groped for her glasses. “You must see that just saying them puts me in a dreadful position. I don’t know what to say, I simply don’t know what to say!”
She trailed off miserably and I was sorry then that I had confided in her. At the same time, I felt the necessity of convincing her that it was quite possible for a boy of fifteen and a half to be hopelessly in love, and that I would not accept her disqualification on grounds of age quite apart from those of class and education.
“People grow up quicker than they did when you were young,” I declared, quoting from a newspaper feature I had read a day or so before, and feeling a hot flush creep into my cheeks. “I’m nearly sixteen now and all the boys about my age in Whinmouth have a girl they like better than any other girl. I’ve never met anyone who could compare with Diana, not just to look at, I mean, but as a person, as someone who’s wonderful to be with. All the girls in the town seem so … so feeble compared with her, and she seems to like me, otherwise why should she go to all this trouble so that we can be together?”
Miss Rodgers seemed to consider and for a moment the concern left her expression. When she spoke again she sounded wonderfully gentle and understanding, so much so that instantly I changed my mind about her and was glad that I had forced the matter out in the open.
“You haven’t got a mother or father, have you, Jan?” she asked and when I told her they were both dead she folded her hands on her lap and smiled, her faded blue eyes radiating so much kindness and comfort that I swallowed quickly and had to look away.
She went on: “I’m afraid I’m a romantic, Jan, just like you, and what you’ve just said makes it clear to me that I was quite wrong to pooh-pooh the idea of being in love at your age. You are in love, the right kind of love, and I don’t suppose anything I can say will stop you being, not for a year or so at all events. All I want to say now is that you must realize Diana isn’t in love in the same way, perhaps because she hasn’t grown up as fast as you, or perhaps because she’s had so much of everything. That means that she hasn’t developed in the way that you’ve had to develop, partly, I think, because you lost your mother and father at a time when you most needed them but more so because you’ve been pushed out in the world to earn your own living. All the other young people Diana knows have still got two or three years more of schooling ahead of them and this friendship with you is a kind of game to Diana. Although I’m sure she likes you very much, most of the fun to her is just having you around and scoring over her mother; that is, doing something that she knows very well is strictly forbidden.”
She paused a moment and then added, “I don’t suppose this makes much sense to you now, but I think you’ll see the wisdom of it later on. I’m going to have a little talk with Miss Diana and it’s going to be tonight!”
She got up and smoothed her dress, looking so resolute that my heart sank at the prospect of our association being severed there and then.
“If you say anything like that to her I won’t be able to see her, Miss Rodgers,” I pleaded. “You needn’t be frightened I’ll do anything you wouldn’t like. I’ll just go on being friends, the way we are.”
I thought, fleetingly, of our secret meeting in London, and of the despairing kiss that Diana had given me as the train drew into the station. I wondered what Drip would say and do if she knew the whole truth of our association to date, and whether such knowledge would cause her to regard the matter less sympathetically from my point of view.
“All the same, I’m going to talk to Diana,” said Drip, “but don’t think for a moment I’ll say anything at all to her mother, or that I’ll make it any more difficult than it already is for you to see one another. To begin with, that would only make Diana more determined than ever, and the truth is I’m thinking of you more than her because you’re the one who is going to be hurt most and I won’t have that, ever, do you understand? I won’t have that!”
I left Heronslea that day without seeing Diana again and my thoughts were so wretched and confused that I made no attempt to sort out the notes I had made, but retired to my room after supper on the pretense of doing this and sat for a long time watching the moon rise over the estuary beyond the empty quay.
Whichever way I looked at the situation, I could see no hope in the immediate future and I slowly came to hate Drip for what seemed to be a monstrously unjust interference in our lives.
I set the alarm for five o’clock again and cycled up to Foxhayes to watch the dawn, but although I hung about the Folly for almost two hours Diana did not appear and I freewheeled back to town in black despondency.
Diana’s failure to keep the tryst seemed to me clear evidence that all was now known to her mother, and quite apart from the misery of losing her I began to feel very apprehensive of my reception at the office.
I did Drip a grave injustice. There was no showdown. Uncle Reuben was just as interested in the articles as ever, and was obviously expecting me to bus over to Heronslea for the next day’s note taking. He even complimented me on the material I had already gathered and said that if I wished to knock it into a draft article, without first submitting it to him in detail, I was welcome to try as soon as I returned.
His attitude was puzzling but not nearly so puzzling as Diana’s. She greeted me the moment I entered the drive, and talked gaily of a book that she had unearthed dealing with the history of the house and estate under the Gilroy who had built the Folly.
We inspected the Dutch garden as she chattered on about this and that until I had almost persuaded myself that Drip’s nerve must have failed her at the last moment and that she had never, in fact, had her talk with Diana. Then, as we passed the box hedges and entered the Italian garden, I thought I detected a nervous brittleness about Diana’s chatter, as though she were only talking in the hope of preventing me f
rom voicing the subject uppermost in my mind. This conviction grew until at last I was unable to keep silent any longer and blurted out: “Well, did Drip say anything to you last night, Diana? Anything about us?”
She stopped in the middle of a sentence and looked at me sharply, her head on one side, her thumb pulling her lower lip.
“What does it matter what Drip said? Who cares about Drip’s opinion one way or the other? I told you she wouldn’t give us away and that’s all that counts, isn’t it?”
“No,” I said, glumly, “it isn’t, and what’s more you must know that it isn’t!”
She looked at me then with an expression I had never seen in her face. It was hard and challenging, as though at any moment her eyes would blaze with anger. When she spoke her voice was equally harsh and strange.
“Why should you say a thing like that? Just exactly what did Drip say to you about me? What made you afraid of coming here?”
“I’m not afraid, Diana,” I protested, “it’s just that …”
“You are afraid, Jan! All the sparkle’s gone out of you. Yesterday it was fun and today you’re as jumpy as a cat. You’d better tell me everything Drip said and be done with it.”
I told her, withholding nothing, and she heard me in silence, keeping her gaze on me in a way that made me feel wretched and ashamed.
“Is that all?” she said, when I had finished.
“All I can remember,” I said, sulkily.
She stayed quite still for a moment, reflecting.
“You know what she was getting at,” she said at length. “I mean, what she was really driving at when you peel away all the cotton wool that she wrapped it in and all that gaff about me encouraging you just to spite Mother, and so on?”
“She didn’t seem to me to beat about the bush very much,” I growled.
Diana threw back her head and laughed. It was not her pleasant abandoned laugh, the one I loved to hear, but an expression of unspeakable contempt, contempt for Drip, for me, for Heronslea House and everything in it.
“People like Drip always go all around the mulberry bush to soften the blow,” she said. “They think they’re doing it out of consideration for people but they aren’t, you know, it’s just lack of guts on their part. Drip’s a dear old thing in many ways but she hasn’t the spunk of a rabbit. She ought to have said exactly what she meant while she was about it.”
“What did she mean, Di?”
“Simply that nothing could ever make you into the sort of person that I should care to be seen with—outside Sennacharib, of course. Just that you weren’t ‘our class’ and never could be, and that everything about you was wrong, clothes, accent, outlook, everything! Well, do you believe that? Because it’s what you think that really matters, Jan. Do you believe it, deep down, inside you?”
Did I? I think I did on the rare occasions when I could escape from the web of romantic dreams I had been spinning since the day Diana had ridden out of the larch wood and rescued me from the keeper. I had changed my job because of her. I had obeyed her every command, as a dog runs to a whistle. I had lied to myself, to Uncle Reuben, to Aunt Thirza, to her mother and even to Drip, simply in order to continue dreaming, but if I was once seriously challenged could I continue to fool myself? Would I ever convince myself that Diana and I could ever really belong together, or would I wake up and face the fact that no efforts on my part would ever establish a relationship between us that was capable of outgrowing the friendship of two adolescents, a pair of kids who had absolutely nothing in common but a love of the woods, fields and hedgerows?
I was searching for words to convey this to her when suddenly she took pity on me and her expression softened. She took hold of my wrist and ran her fingers up the sleeve until they were pressing my forearm. Her touch was like a salve, soothing the raw wound of my pride and injecting vigor into my dreams. Confidence and self-esteem seemed to radiate from her finger tips and flow through into me, the glow warming every nerve in my body.
“What you need is a tonic, Jan, a real, live tonic! Meet me at Whinmouth Station after lunch and we’ll go out after it, but don’t ask me about it now, just be there. We’re going on a little trip somewhere.”
“How far?” I asked, astonished at both proposal and change of mood.
“Oh, not so far,” she replied, gaily, “ten or twelve miles. We’ll be back before dark and by that time you’ll have things straighter, a whole lot straighter, I promise you.”
That was all she would say at that time and we devoted the rest of the morning to an inspection of McCarthy’s spectacular hothouses and banks of blooms. I made various notes, but my mind was not on my work, it was probing and probing into the mystery behind Diana’s knowing smile and her brisk, business-like manner.
I left Heronslea shortly before lunch and gobbled a meal in time to be at our little railway terminus by two o’clock. About ten past Diana came into the booking hall and without glancing in my direction went straight to the window and bought tickets. I heard the clerk say, “Two returns, Castle Ferry, two-and-four, miss,” as he gave change.
“Why on earth are we going to Castle Ferry?” I wanted to know, as we passed the barrier.
“You’ll find out as soon as we get there!” was all she would tell me. “Now don’t keep pestering me with questions and let me enjoy my surprise. I know what I’m doing, I always know what I’m doing, Jan!”
I knew her well enough by then to keep my curiosity to myself and find other topics to talk about. Fortunately an obvious one was at hand, for Castle Ferry was a fishing village a dozen miles along the coast and to get to it by rail one had to travel inland to the county junction and then, by branch line, southeast through the pine and bracken country beyond Teasel Wood and the boundaries of Sennacharib.
I had been there once before and knew it for a picturesque little place, just beginning to enjoy popularity as an artist’s colony. It was too picture-postcardy for my taste, the kind of seaside one sees in scores of amateur water colors, all pebbles, white cottages and heeled-over boats draped around with nets and lobster pots. It had, I suppose, plenty of conventional charm but lacked the solitude of Sennacharib, or even the strident vitality of the rural slum that is often the hard core of towns like Whinmouth.
We had our heads out of the window all the way and vied with one another in spotting landmarks, but before we reached the junction the fact that we were alone in a railway compartment reminded me of the short railway journey we had made together in London, and I began to hope that Diana would say something to stage a repetition of the moment of parting. She was not, however, in a romantic mood, for when I let my arm rest on her shoulder and lightly brushed her hair with my lips, she ignored the gesture and said, rather pointedly, “Look, Jan! You can just see the top of the Folly above the wood.”
We left the train at a point a mile or so from the coast and walked down the steep lane between high, flowering hedgerows to the foot of the village, where a shallow stream emptied itself into the bay that divided Castle Ferry into two unequal halves.
The castle, a rounded ruin, was on the far side and under it was an old tavern, The Sloop Inn. There was no bridge and people who wanted to cross from one part of the village to the other used a rowing boat that was hauled along a taut cable by hand. There was no regular service. Ferry customers crossed the shingle to where the boat touched shore, and if the ferry was on the far side the ferryman, who spent almost all his time in the pub, was summoned by a hail.
Easter was gone, the summer season had not yet begun, and there was hardly anyone about. The boat was moored on the far side, so we put our hands to our mouths and shouted in chorus. Nothing happened for a few moments, then the ferryman emerged from the Sloop, a fat, shambling man in a fisherman’s jersey and a battered yachting cap. He waved his arm, very irritably I thought, and began to haul the boat toward us.
“Take a good long look at this Johnny, Jan,” said Diana as the ferry neared us, “because he’s the reason we’re h
ere.”
The ferryman was worth noting. He was the most picturesque old ruffian I had ever seen, a cross between a W. W. Jacob’s illustration and a buccaneer run to seed. He was aged, I should say, between sixty and seventy, and his face was a flabby ham, framed in tumbling iron-gray locks that were almost as long as a girl’s. His complexion was a light mahogany but not pleasing, for grime filled the crevasses of his huge ears. His eyes were as soft and blue as Diana’s, but the cunning squint in them changed to a surly contempt when he saw that his passengers were only a couple of youngsters and therefore unlikely to pay more than the requisite halfpenny. Seen at close range his bulk, and particularly his belly, was immense; when he seated himself in the bows preparatory to hauling on the cable, the stern was out of the water until we had stepped in and sat down. He smelled very strongly of beer and when he opened his mouth to jam a clay pipe between his discolored teeth I saw that his tongue was horribly furred. One way and another, he struck me as being an extremely unsavory old man, the kind of pseudo-fisherman who hangs about quays cadging from visitors, who usually tell one another: “Here is a real old salt, the kind that are getting rare these days.” We had our own contingent of longshoremen at Whinmouth, but none of them were quite so repellent or professional-looking as this one. His hands were as big and rough as everything else about him, and the tar from the cable had ingrained itself as high as the wrist. He looked to me as though he had never washed since he was a boy and apart from the reek of beer it was an unpleasant experience to travel with him, for he also exuded an odor of stale sweat.
He said nothing to us during the five-minute crossing and only grunted when I handed him sixpence, twelve times the fare. We got out and took the path up the knoll to the castle and I saw him stumble into the pub the moment he had moored the boat.
Diana Page 12
