This rocketed Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton out of the doldrums and she began to scream again.
“Ai’ll tell you something, Mr. Waht-ever-your-name-is!” she began, her accent returning as all trace of tears disappeared. “The moment Ai hed Aim’ald back Ai called in mai doctor, in order to make a certain examination and set mai mind at rest, once and for all. If his report had been other than it was, then you can be quaite certain that this would be a matter for the police, notwithstanding what yew hev to say about it!”
Her statement so horrified me that I felt physically sick. I saw, as one might regard a series of pictures resulting from a thumb-flick of a book, the sequence of events implied by her admission—the solemn arrival of moonfaced Doctor Barnes, their family physician, his brief interview with Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton, his heavy tread up the staircase and along the white passage to Diana’s room, his routine pulse-feeling of the patient pending the real examination that was to follow, and so on, up to the moment when Diana was face to face with a humiliation that converted our love into an obscene joke. Yet, even while my imagination shied away from this scene, I was ashamed for Uncle Reuben and I think I might have flung myself at Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton and bundled her out of the room had I failed to notice the curious expression on my uncle’s face.
He was not miserably embarrassed, as I had fully expected him to be, and he did not seem to be as irritated as he had been earlier in the interview. He was looking straight at Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton with a mixture of pity and disdain, as though he had just heard somebody say something that was certain to bring ridicule and disgust upon them, and had said it out of sheer ignorance and lack of ordinary consideration.
He stood up, reaching for the comfort of his pipe and hammering the bowl on his open palm at regularly spaced intervals. When he began to speak he continued this emphatic gesture, punctuating each phrase with a distinct rap, as though hammering nails into the coffin of Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton’s taste and breeding.
“Madam,” he said, without raising his voice, yet somehow contriving to enlarge its volume enough to be heard above the clack of the presses in the works, “I feel bound to tell you that I find you a contemptible creature! Thoroughly contemptible, do you understand? If you were a man I should have the greatest pleasure, the very greatest pleasure, in picking you up by the scruff of the neck and dropping you into the nearest dustbin!”
I forgot to be horrified when I heard this. I just gaped at them, staring at one another as they stood barely a foot apart. Uncle Reuben was still rapping away with his pipe, and Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton, colorless now, was staring at him like a rabbit facing a huge, hungry stoat.
“That you should find it necessary to take such steps with your hapless daughter is one thing,” he went on, in the same level tone, “and although I most sincerely pity her it is really none of my business. That you should find it necessary to come here and scream such disgusting admissions to me, in my own office, is my business, and I find it insupportable, d’you hear me? Insupportable, madam! I am not myself a father but if I was, and it came to my knowledge that you had sought to betray your trust in a girl of mine in that … that … unspeakable fashion, then I should turn you upside down and deal with you as I fear you neglected to deal with your daughter when she might have benefited from that form of correction! And now, Mrs. Sutton, go back to your big house and endeavor to regulate your family without wasting my time and making me despair utterly of the entire human race!”
With that he strode across to the door and flung it open, waiting beside it while she remained motionless midway between me and the cluttered desk.
I looked away from her then. It hurt me to see a woman in the grip of such a frightful temper. I believe that if she had been within the reach of a lethal weapon she would have killed him on the spot. She trembled violently from head to foot and her face, pink with temper a moment before, was now as white as her long, elegant gloves. At last she made an indeterminate sound that might have been a word, a cough, or an intake of breath. Then, before I could look at her again, she whipped around and walked jerkily through the open door and out of my life. It was years before I spoke to her again and when I did it was in vastly different circumstances.
I got up and drifted over to the smeared window, craning my neck around the intervening stack in order to see her climb into her car and shoot off up the incline in a flurry of blue exhaust. Uncle Reuben went back to his chair and slumped down in it, his Victorian eloquence spent and his heavy breathing betraying the fact that now the interview was over he was badly shaken by the turn it had taken. He sat for a moment pressing his hands on the desk and then muttered hoarsely, “Close the door, boy!”
I closed it and sat down near the window, exhausted, embarrassed and utterly wretched.
“I don’t blame you doing what you did, John, and I certainly don’t blame her daughter,” he said, suddenly. “If she was my mother I wouldn’t run away from her, I’d make her some toadstool soup, or push her under a bus when no one was looking!”
I said nothing; there seemed nothing adequate to say; and he mistook my silence and subjection for fear.
“You don’t want to worry about any of her crazy threats, boy,” he went on. “There isn’t a thing she can do and her solicitor has already told her or she would have done it. I’ll tell you something else, though. I think it would be a good idea all around if you cleared out of here for a bit. With her around and you going about your business, you never know what trouble she might go out of her way to begin! Go for a walk, boy, and let me think this out. Whatever we do ought to be done at once!”
I got up and stood beside him. “Thanks, Uncle Reuben,” I said, and meant it, from the bottom of my heart.
I went out and through the town, turning my back on Sennacharib and taking the riverside road. For the first time since I had gone to Heronslea on the afternoon of my fifteenth birthday, Sennacharib was somewhere I did not want to be. At that particular moment it suggested scribblings on lavatory walls.
3.
It was mid-September when Diana and I surrendered. By the second week in October I had left Whinmouth and, apart from an occasional holiday, was to remain away for nearly three years. Uncle Reuben must have moved with uncharacteristic speed, for within a few days of Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton’s visit to the office, I was installed as glorified office boy on the staff of The Illustrated Echo, off Bouverie Street, E.C. 4. Here I remained for my period of exile, my home a bed-sitting room, within a twopenny Underground ride of the City.
It was sound judgment on Uncle Reuben’s part to spirit me away from Whinmouth. The roar and bustle of London and the excitement of a new job in new surroundings enabled me to get my preoccupation with Diana into some sort of perspective and to isolate it from my everyday life of work, snack lunches and interminable journeys on the Underground. Soon I was able to enclose it in a kind of glass case, like a man living a shabby, hand-to-mouth existence who owns a single object of great beauty, something that is a source of comfort and inspiration to him.
Every night during those first autumn weeks, when my feet were aching from pounding asphalt pavements, and when I was shut off from the endless murmur of London and crouching over a minute gas fire in my second-floor back room, in Guilford Street, my mind would return to Sennacharib as an exile’s seeking home, and I would follow again the wide curves of Teasel Brook, or climb up through the larch wood to the oak paddock and watch for buzzards.
I cannot honestly say that I was unhappy. Sometimes the very consciousness of exile brought with it a curious satisfaction, as though I were doing an enforced penance for some unrepented sin, and when I remembered Diana it was not with a lover’s yearning. Part of my mind was occupied in preparing for the future, our future, and pondering the economics of our problem. With the other part I ranged the museum of the past, examining and analyzing each hour we had spent together and recalling every significant remark we had exchanged during our expeditions on the common, to the tower, or d
uring our stay on Nun’s Island.
I made no effort to get in touch with her, knowing that a botched attempt would jeopardize the future and very probably make things unpleasant for both of us. I had no idea where she had been sent, or what she was doing, and for a long time I made no attempt to satisfy my curiosity in this field.
Once, during a week’s holiday in Devon, I nerved myself to creep through the Heronslea copse on the Shepherdshey road, but the house looked deserted and Nat told me that the family never seemed to come now, although they continued to maintain a large outdoor staff. After that I went back to my job and my uninspiring lodgings, waiting for her to find a means of getting in touch with me, and as the months passed it became easier to put aside all thought of her, often for days at a time, and catch up on a youth that seemed, in some ways, to have been petrified since the day Keeper Croker applied his half nelson and she rode out of the woods like a princess in a fairy tale.
I made a few friends among the junior staff. I even took one or two of the girl clerks and packers to the cinema. I learned to drink. I explored London and parts of Kent, improved my French at a night school, and even attended an Italian class one night a week. The Illustrated Echo was a pleasant office in which to work and the job suited my inclinations very well at that time. The Echo was a weekly magazine that made two quite separate approaches to its subscribers. The main part of the publication was devoted to what might be called social and historical flashbacks; the remaining pages were crammed with a wide variety of literary competitions, quizzes, and crossword puzzles, all rather more original than was customary in this type of periodical during the thirties. The editor, Edwin Blacker, was a former County Observer reporter and an old friend of Uncle Reuben’s. That was how the job had been secured for me, and I think I did my best during that first year or so to acknowledge this debt and convince Mr. Blackler that I was a very ambitious young man, anxious to advance in my profession and grateful for the opportunity to arrive in Fleet Street before I was twenty.
My work was at first limited to errand running and stamplicking, but after a few weeks. when I had impressed myself upon the chief subeditor by giving him an idea, I was promoted to a very junior position on the editorial staff and given a raise that brought my salary up to five pounds a week. Out of this I had to pay out more than two pounds for fares and lodgings, but even so it was a great advance on what I had been getting in Whinmouth, and by economizing on lunches I was able to accumulate money in a post-office savings account. The first year I was there I was tipped the winner of the Grand National and made an extra twenty pounds. This might have tempted me to speculate further on racing, but luckily for me Mr. Blackler heard about it and being of the same nonconformist cast of mind as his friend Reuben, he called me in and read me a terrifying lecture on the evils of gambling. This would not have deterred me from joining in the office pastime of spotting winners but I was anxious at that time to make a good impression on him and left the bookies alone.
A week or two after that I went to Blackler with a sheaf of ideas and he welcomed them, for it was difficult to find something new and sensational in the flashback field every week of the year. He at once set me to work collecting material and old photographs for a ten-page feature on Jack the Ripper, and afterwards on the South Sea Bubble and, later still, material for a pictorial inquiry into the assassination of the Archduke that had touched off the First World War.
It was exacting but absorbing work. Most of the day I trotted about London, keeping a careful tally of my bus fares and visiting record offices, embassies, museums, picture galleries, and the like. Sometimes I would have a slice of luck, as when I found someone whose aged father had been associated with the actor Booth who murdered President Lincoln, and I was able to hand in some unpublished photographs of the sixties and a wedge of secondhand theories about Booth’s motives. Whatever its drawbacks, the job was never dull and left me free time in the evenings; I used this time to make myself thoroughly familiar with London and loiter in the Charing Cross Road bookshops.
This was not simply a means of passing the time. It was the result of some constructive thought about my future. I was determined, by now, to become a full-time writer, but the theatre interested me far less than it interested most young men and I greatly doubted my ability to write a novel. My strongest suit, I soon decided, was history, and I decided to put it to work in a way that was probably influenced by the Echo. It was an easy step from raking up material of a sensational aspect of the past to turning the same stories into full-length narratives.
My method of approach was naïve but nonetheless practical. I went through all the reference books relating to each subject that interested me and when satisfied that nothing had been published on it for the past half century, I noted it down and finally emerged with a curious list of characters who had never been presented to the reading public as anything other than two-dimensional people in the national biography.
My favorite among these was Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VII and leader of the Lancastrian cause throughout the Wars of the Roses. When I had amassed all the data I could find on her, I got a reader’s ticket to the British Museum and from then on spent a good deal of my spare time under the famous dome. I bought a fat exercise book, a folding card table and a battered old typewriter, and with these tools joined the martyred army of literary geniuses living in the square mile around Euston Station. I think I was more in love with my role than I was with my material, but for all that the book began to grow under the title of The Royal Tigress.
It was cold and desperately lonely up there in a narrow bed-sitter, overlooking a car breaker’s yard and acres of somber houses, but the room and the aspect were valuable stage properties, and as the story of the dynastic struggle took shape I congratulated myself on graduating from hack journalist to unrecognized genius. It was a kind of game I played and it helped to compensate me for the loss of the southwest wind off Whinmouth quay and the golden glare of the gorse thickets climbing Teasel Edge.
I suppose I had been working off The Royal Tigress for about three months when I came across an item in the gossip column of an evening paper. I had, as I said, made up my mind not to approach Diana, and because I saw no ready means of doing so I had been able to maintain this resolve. All the same, I kept half-hoping that she would contact me by writing to the Observer, in Whinmouth. When the months went by without her doing so, I began to wonder if Uncle Reuben, acting on the principle of doing something for someone else’s good, might have received and held back a letter or letters. This doubt nagged at me so persistently that I was at length forced to write to him and ask if any letters had come for me. I knew I would get the truth. Uncle Reuben never committed a lie to paper.
He replied innocently that there had been no letters, and his reply bothered me. I began to lose some of my smugness about Diana’s fidelity and, in the intervals between tracing the route the beaten Lancastrians had taken after Towton and in digging up photographs and material for the Illustrated, I wondered whether she had forgotten all about our pledges and had now regarded me as what she would have described as a “sixth-form pash.” Every day I began to doubt her a little more, and every tug of doubt disturbed the comparative tranquillity of spirit I had painfully acquired since we had stood together beside the island bonfire awaiting the arrival of the pilot boat.
By midsummer I was in a ferment about her and my anxieties, added to a heat wave that made central London an insufferable place in which to work and sleep, combined to make me a very wretched and homesick young man.
I was in this self-pitying frame of mind when I got my first lead. It came at the cinema, during a brief newsreel dealing with Goodwood races. The winner of the cup that year was a Frenchman, and although I did not recognize the name when it was spoken by the commentator, I sat up when I saw Diana’s French boy, Yves, mincing along beside his father as the winner was being led in after the race.
I searched the screen for Diana and would hav
e been grateful to recognize Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton among the spectators, but the item soon flashed by and although I sat through the desperately boring feature film twice in order to scan the newsreel again, I learned no more than the bare fact of Diana’s friend’s triumph.
That night, sleepless and half suffocating in my airless little room, I went over the social calendar of Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton—Goodwood, Wimbledon, Hurlingham, Ascot, and so on—wondering if Diana was likely to return from wherever she was to accompany her mother to any of these functions, and if she did so, assessing my chances of seeing her at one or other of them and attracting her attention without risking a snub or worse from her parents.
I decided the chance was slim. Our paper did not cover social or sporting events, and the Gayelorde-Suttons always had the most expensive seats. Lacking a press card I was unlikely to get within hailing distance of them, even supposing they were present. Toward daybreak I thought up another half-baked plan, that of phoning the Gayelorde-Suttons’s town house under an assumed name and accent, but this was a humiliating failure when I put it into operation the next day. A manservant at the other end of the phone at once asked my name and business and seemed entirely dissatisfied with my mumbled replies. Finally he rang off and I slunk away, telling myself that I was no good at this sort of thing and had no right to be within miles of Fleet Street. Any cub reporter, I knew, would have managed a good deal better than that.
I studied the glossies around Ascot time, hoping I might glean some information from the gossip column. Then I spent an evening or two picketing the house in Palmerston Crescent but gave it up when an elderly constable, after eying me distastefully from the opposite side of the road, crossed over with the obvious intention of moving me on or charging me with loitering.
All this led nowhere and only served to increase my anxiety and frustration. Gone was the resolute attitude of my first months of separation. I had to get information of some kind. The next time I was in Whinmouth I made another cautious tour of the Heronslea copses, and even went so far as to get into casual conversation with an estate gardener in the public bar of The Rifleman. From him I learned that Mr. and Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton were in America and “the maid was abroad somewhere but not along of ’em.” It was the first definite knowledge I had had in almost a year that Diana was still alive, and although it comforted me somewhat (for I reasoned that this went some way toward explaining her failure to write) it did nothing toward re-establishing contact.
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