Your own,
DIANA
My head began to spin. There were so many fantastic statements in the letter that I had to read it over and over again before I could absorb the gist of it. My first reaction to the island plan was that it could not possibly succeed, and was no more than the semihysterical ravings of a spoiled, sulky child. I began to think about Diana as the person I had known over the past two years, and then, somehow, it did not seem irresponsible but vaguely Machiavellian, particularly when one reviewed the balance of power at Heronslea. If I had not had an opportunity of studying the real Mr. Gayelorde-Sutton, during his visit to the Observer office about the pig, I might have rejected Diana’s claim that her father would ultimately step in and take her part about going to Switzerland. After that glimpse of him it did not seem so unlikely. He was a man who would stand so much nonsense from his wife and then, when the limit was reached, quietly intervene and issue all the orders. Also, Diana obviously knew him much better than I did, and could better assess the likelihood of his championship. Then again, she was quite accurate in her estimate of the press reaction to a sudden disappearance. If she left a note, as I imagined she would, it was unlikely that local police would take her flight very seriously, whereas if she jumped the train or boat en route for Switzerland, there was sure to be no end of a fuss. Fleet Street would probably hint at White Slavers and invent other dramatic angles and the prominent social position of the family would lay them wide open to national coverage.
Her introduction of Lance Fayne into Friday night’s escapade was a stroke of genius, although, incongruously, I found myself resenting his blameless role. I imagined this part of it could be cleared up by a phone call on the part of her mother but as long as Diana would not actually admit to having danced the night away with Lance, Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton could hardly complain about it without risking a snub, which was something she would not care to receive from a Conservative M.P. Her object in sending Diana away almost immediately was obviously designed to safeguard her as well as prevent a quarrel between the families. What action she would take if she stumbled on the truth I hardly dared to contemplate.
As to the practical aspect, the plan to hole up on Nun’s Island, that was not as silly as it seemed, either. Scarcely anybody went there now that the holiday season was ending, and if the recent good weather continued, the old cabin of Crusoe Jack, the recluse lobsterman, would prove adequate shelter once the roof was repaired. Getting there unseen might be difficult but it was by no means impossible, providing we chose our time and the sea remained calm.
I then moved on to examine my own role in the escape and was surprised to discover that, once the first shock of her letter had been absorbed, I began to feel pleasurably excited about it. It was an essay into the realm of pure romance, a flight of desperate lovers to a desert island, with the object of preventing prolonged separation. From the standpoint of maturity I suppose it all sounds harebrained and even cruel, for whatever happened, the Gayelorde-Suttons were certain to suffer a good deal, but from the standpoint of a lad of seventeen, fast in the web of first love, it was a great and glorious adventure, a chance to prove my devotion to the person I admired more than anyone else on earth.
Thinking along these lines, it was a short step from the role of accessory to that of a full partner in the enterprise. The more I thought about it the more certain I became that I could not possibly take her to the island and then return home, but would be obliged to share her period of voluntary exile.
The prospect uplifted me and I thought less and less of the rights and wrongs of the matter and more and more of the bliss of being marooned with Diana in a place remote from human contacts. After considering this for a spell I worked myself into a mood of reckless abandon and set about making plans with the dispatch and resolution of Willie Douglas, whose rescue of Mary Queen of Scots from Loch Leven castle had always occupied a cozy corner of my imagination. Having made up my mind, I deliberately turned my back on common sense. Diana and I were in love. Diana was about to be spirited away. If she had the courage to fight back then so had I, enough to challenge half a dozen Mrs. Gayelorde-Suttons.
I cycled back to town and gobbled my way through lunch in order to have the rest of the day clear. By two o’clock I was down at the quay, inspecting the dinghy and loading it with things we might need. I took a tarpaulin sheet from the Furniture Mart, and half a dozen tattered rugs used for conveying fragile goods to and from the auction rooms. They were very soiled and smelled strongly of linseed oil but castaways could hardly be bothered by a thing like that. I then raided Aunt Thirza’s spotless pantry, filching some flour, sugar, biscuits, cans of fruit, a can opener, a whole Dutch cheese and a packet of salt. As an afterthought I took a bottle of Camp coffee, two cups, two plates, a saucepan, a mended kettle and a bull’s-eye lantern.
By the time I had it all stowed away under the tarpaulin it was evening, and while Uncle Luke and Aunt Thirza were at chapel I wrote two letters, one to Uncle Reuben and another to Aunt Thirza. I told Uncle Reuben that I had had a sudden notion of a job and had gone after it, and that he would hear from me shortly. I told Aunt Thirza much the same, but added that I intended combining a job hunt with a week’s camping holiday and that I had therefore helped myself to a few stores from her pantry. I knew that both Reuben and Thirza would be astonished by my precipitate departure but it was the best story I could think of at the moment and if there was any publicity about Diana’s flight I wanted to do all I could to avoid our absences being linked.
About dusk I pushed off along the edge of the bay, timing my arrival under Nun’s Head with the fall of darkness.
It was not until I had tied up under the deserted jetty that I began to wonder how Diana would escape the house and, having managed this, walk the three miles from Shepherdshey to Nun’s Steps carrying such kit as she had decided to bring. I was not overconcerned with these problems, for it was clear that a girl who was sufficiently determined to run away from home and isolate herself on a rock a mile out to sea would certainly contrive the preliminaries, notwithstanding the fact that a close watch was being kept upon her movements.
Fishermen were loafing about on the higher quay until after nine o’clock, so I did not dare to leave the boat for fear of being seen and recognized. I lay in the bottom, looking up at the stars and watching the moon play hide and seek with tatters of blue-black cloud. Out beyond. Nun’s Island I could hear the bell buoy toll and this meant a swell, but the water inshore was fiat calm and the tiny wavelets poured over the shingle with barely a sound. I was anchored in two feet of water and soon the gentle rocking motion sent me to sleep, for I was very tired after two nights’ broken rest. I was awakened by the sound of something clanking down beside me and I jumped up to see Diana, duffel-coated and hooded, climbing into the boat with an attaché case in one hand and a large canvas bag in the other.
“Lord, I was scared!” she said. “I was quite worn out when I got here and at first there didn’t seem to be any sign of you. I kept wondering if you had got my letter—push off, that’s everything!”
It was as casual as that! No explanations, no excited tale of her flight, or nervous speculations on the future; just “push off, that’s everything!” and she was gathering up the anchor and fending the boat from the jetty.
The extraordinary thing about that long pull to the island was that I was almost speechless with embarrassment. I don’t know why this should be so; I had never been embarrassed in her company before but I now found it almost impossible to begin a discussion on the situation. When we were three parts of the way across, and had entered the choppy water beyond the long finger of Nun’s Head, I at last forced myself to say, “I’m staying with you, Di, I’m not going to let you stay there alone, no matter what you say about it! If you don’t agree or think this will only make matters worse, then we’ll turn around now and go home.”
She looked surprised for a moment and then laughed. “I knew you would, Jan, but I wanted that
part of it to come from you. Quite honestly, I’d be scared stiff out here on my own but I could have faced it, so long as you promised to row out every night, or very early each morning.” Then, “Won’t you be missed? And won’t it mean they’ll be hunting for two of us?”
I told her about the false trail I had left and she said I was clever and that she had left a note on her dressing table in true eloping style. In her letter she said that she was running away because she hated the idea of leaving England but had money and would be quite safe. She promised to write within a week. “That should give them time to have a jolly good bust-up about it all,” she said, cheerfully, “and the bit about leaving England will get Daddy right under the ribs! I think he dislikes the idea of my going anyway, but Mummy says she won’t be answerable for what happens if I don’t, I’m so terribly out of hand.”
I pondered this as we swung east and rowed inshore.
“What would be your father’s attitude if he knew the real reason—about us?” I asked.
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” she said gaily. “He’s so weak that I’ve lost all patience with him. I hate the way they’ve brought me up, all this snob stuff, and trying to keep me a child as long as they can. Something like this had to happen soon, Jan, and it was making up my mind about you that sparked it off. If I don’t strike a blow for myself now I’ll be chivvied along by mother all my life, first this finishing-off nonsense, then being presented, men a ‘suitable marriage,’ and finally complete boredom with some awful droop like Lance, or a starched shirt, like Gerald Brett-Hawkins! I’ll just be pitchforked into leading the kind of life she leads!”
“What kind of life does she lead, Di?” I asked, realizing that. I had never really known despite all the oblique references Diana had made to it in our talks.
“Oh, playing at Big Business with Daddy and falling over herself to be noticed by the right people in all the right places,” said Diana, savagely. Then, very seriously: “It might seem to you that what I’m doing is a desperate thing, and I suppose it is, but then I am desperate. Jan, desperate of having my life mapped out the way she maps hers out, in a kind of fantastic calendar—Ascot, Wimbledon, Hurlingham, Henley, the ‘Season’—you know, and not because she enjoys the actual events but simply because somebody’s told her these are the right places to go and the right time to go there, d’you see?”
I saw a good deal more clearly than she realized. We had had these kinds of discussions before but she had not always been so explicit. I understood, for the first time I think, what caused Diana to go to such extraordinary lengths to resist her parents. It was as though she was being forced to serve an endless apprenticeship to a trade she loathed, and in which she could see no personal future beyond the ennui of aping the gentlewoman. It was her essential honesty that caused her to despise her mother’s incessant charade, but, in addition to this, her resistance had to do with the inherited outlook of the seedy old ferryman whom she claimed as a grandfather. Inside her, calling loud for release, was a peasant determined to do battle with the shams prescribed by her mother and buttressed by her father’s wealth. I learned a great deal from that conversation in the boat. It became very clear to me (though I would not, at first, admit it to myself) that it was not on my account that she was making this gesture of independence. Her flight was instinctive because, as she emerged from adolescence, she felt her resistance weakening with her threatened removal from the familiar, from Sennachairb that had been a kind of sanctuary all these years, and possibly from me also, for I was the talisman of her freedom.
I do not mean that she did not sincerely believe that she was in love with me but simply that I was of secondary importance in a struggle to develop her own personality. I did not resent this knowledge, then or later. For the moment it was enough for me that she found solace in my company and was drawn to me physically and spiritually. I was confident, as are most males at seventeen, that I could soon convert this warmth into a blaze as bright as my own and here I was, with a wonderful chance to prove it! As the boat grounded and we jumped ashore I set about doing just that.
It was fortunate that I had brought the bull’s-eye lantern. In its beam we made a careful examination of the shanty and I was soon able to patch the roof with the tarpaulin, weighing it down with heavy pebbles. We then recovered our kit and climbed the gully to the copse, gathering armfuls of bracken for beds. We were too busy for the next two hours to appreciate the beauty of the night, but when the shanty had been made habitable we stood together on the little rock shelf outside the shattered door and looked out on the huge expanse of moonlit Channel.
The shanty faced south, which was a lucky chance, for it meant that our fire would be screened from any observer on the coast and we could also move about fairly freely without the chance of being observed by the pilot boat or trawlermen, who passed inside the island on their way to the open sea.
To the west we could see the necklace of tiny lights that marked Whinmouth quay and the steep streets of the town: to the east there was only the blurr of Nun’s Head. The hamlet from which we had set out was obscured by the knoll and its copse. It was very quiet here, the only sound apart from the steady swish of the water being the irregular clang of the bell buoy three or more miles to the southeast.
“What are we going to do about drink?” she wanted to know.
I told her there was a spring somewhere, for Crusoe Jack had used it for years, but because I knew we should have some difficulty in locating it I had brought along a can of water and we could now make our first pot of tea.
“We can have some toast, too,” she said, “because I brought a loaf and we’d better eat it before it gets stale. Oh Jan. this is quite heavenly! It’s a kind of secret honeymoon! How long do you think it will last?”
“Don’t let’s worry about that,” I said grimly, for in spite of the sang-froid with which I had entered the adventure, I had a far more active conscience than Diana and could not quite banish thoughts of the hurrying and scurrying there would be when the hunt was up.
We had a hard task to find firewood by flashlight but we finally gathered a pile and I lit a small fire behind a carefully screened fireplace. The kettle took a long time to boil but when it did, and we had access to the red-hot ashes, Diana made some toast and I got out the plates and sliced the Dutch cheese. Rummaging about among the stuff we had brought with us, I discovered that the case she had carried wasn’t an attaché case at all but a portable phonograph.
“Why on earth did you bring a phonograph?” I demanded, for it seemed to me a ridiculous thing to have on a desert island and must have proved a dragging weight to lug over to Nun’s Head.
“Well, you see, I wasn’t at all sure you’d stay, Jan,” she said, laughing, “and I thought I might get very lonely. I only brought two records, a Gilbert and Sullivan medley and ‘Student Songs.’ They’re both rather pets of mine.”
We set it going and listened as we munched our toast and drank our smoked tea. The recordings were good and it added zest to the adventure to sit there listening to “The Lord High Executioner” and “The Duke of Plaza Toro.” Somehow it made the shack more like home and banished the eerie loneliness of the rock we shared with sea gulls and the bones of long-dead seamen. I was thinking of these men when Diana, who was uncannily accurate at reading my thoughts, brought the subject into the open.
“I’m jolly glad now that we had that service and put up that cross,” she said. “If their ghosts are still not laid then they’re absolutely certain to be benevolent.”
After supper we had the students’ songs and then I was very glad that she had thought of the phonograph, for the strong choruses reintroduced a devil-may-care atmosphere into the cabin. We joined in the ones we knew, “Gaudeamus,” “The Eton Boating Song,” and the Harrow school song, humming an accompaniment to the German songs on the other side of the record. When we had played them over twice I said it was time we went to bed and she lay down on her bracken couch fully dresse
d. I tucked her up with the least noisome of the rugs and she looked very like a child when she pronounced herself warm and cozy.
Diana Page 21
