Diana

by R. F Delderfield

  On the whole I inclined toward the more hopeful alternatives. Diana had always been highly unpredictable, and I finally resolved to muster what patience I could command and settle down to await a summons. Fortunately for my employers it was not long in coming. All day my thoughts were full of Diana and there was no room left for research into the financial panic that followed the Young Pretender’s march to Derby, or the Chartist agitation of 1832. In fact, I was becoming bored with the past and impatient with the present.

  Less than a week after our meeting in Fortnum’s, a Carter Paterson’s man appeared in the office with a small crate, addressed to me personally. Inside was a magnificent Remington portable and a note from Diana on the label. All the note said was: A little something to help poor Margaret over her labor pains! Love, Diana.

  I sat goggling at the wonderful gift for fully fifteen minutes, oblivious of everything save the astounding fact that she had made such a spectacular acknowledgment of my literary ambitions. Was it possible to read into her generosity a desperately serious intention to secure independence for both of us? All in all, I was elated with the turn of events and carried the typewriter home in triumph, taking up my manuscript and hammering away until the lodger underneath me knocked on his ceiling with a broom handle, something he had not had to do for months. I became so absorbed in the work, and found it so effortless after the maddening ribbon jams and type cloggings of the ancient machine, that I progressed at a very respectable rate and had the first draft finished by the last week in May. During those feverish weeks I stopped wondering about Diana. Perhaps her generous means of encouragement had reconciled me to leaving the initiative to her.

  Then, halfway through June, I received a telegram. It read:

  SEE LAST WEEK’S GLOSSY STOP HALFWAY HOME STOP PARTY HERONSLEA FRIDAY STOP GET WEEK OFF STOP TOWER EVERY MORNING 7 A.M. LOVE DIANA

  I was not wildly elated by this communication, for journalism had been doing its best to convert me into a cynic and I began to suspect that Diana was now playing some kind of elaborate game. If she could send a telegram, I told myself, she could just as easily have written a coherent letter, and if she had to rely on a telegram, then why compose it like an agony column quote in a magazine serial?

  I searched through the glossies in our morgue, thankful indeed that I did not have to go out and buy them all, and soon came across the feature to which she referred, a ten-page spread devoted to recent presentations, Diana’s among them. There was the usual display of flashbulb photographs of debs at stately homes and night clubs, all the girls looking impossibly arch, and all the young men looking as though they would have preferred to be back in the Sixth, at Eton.

  Diana’s picture was no better or worse than the others. I found it impossible to identify the doll-like creature that blinked at the photographer over the hunched shoulder of an anonymous dancing partner, with the sveldt and elegant young woman who had greeted me in Fortnum’s a month ago. The pictures and their captions made me even more impatient with the idiotic saraband that her mother was compelling her to dance, and I threw aside the papers and sat down to make what I could of the message.

  The “halfway home” was easy. I supposed it to mean that the presentation part of the ritual was done with, and that the town parties, or the more important of them, had already been held. The date of the Heronslea party was plain enough but I might easily have read into the “get week off” a bold invitation to attend it, and clearly this was out of the question. I deduced, however, that she wanted me to be in the vicinity on the great occasion, and her last sentence, about a tower rendezvous, implied that no firm date could be arranged and that my best plan was to go there each morning in the hope that she could ride out on one or more occasions.

  This was all very well and extremely promising in its way, but her theatrical secrecy and the obvious pleasure that she was deriving from it was instrumental in stoking up the resentment I had once felt while crouching like a thief in the Heronslea copse, waiting to escort her to the regatta dance.

  Two years in London had done something to enable me to get Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton into perspective. Although her spectacular snobbery and, more particularly, her tireless game of squiress-among-the-chawbacons had earned my disgust as a boy, it had nonetheless gone some way toward persuading me that she was a strong personality. Now I realized that there was nothing very special about her after all and that almost every district in Britain had a Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton, most of them the product of rapidly acquired wealth in the period 1914–1918. I had discovered a little about the family, and how they came to acquire their money. Unlike his wife, Gayelorde-Sutton originated from a fairly prosperous industrial family, but they had never been reckoned as wealthy until Eric, the second son, secured large interests in a nitrate firm. His money now stemmed partly from this and partly from the timber business which had boomed so dramatically during the period of trench warfare in Flanders. Gayelorde-Sutton himself was reputed to have a first-class business brain and according to a city editor’s clerk—the source of my information—would soon be knighted even as Diana had once predicted.

  I was on the point of trying to change my holiday week when something happened to make an office reshuffle unnecessary. Poor old Uncle Reuben was knocked down by a racing cyclist while acting as a judge at the annual grass-track meeting of the Whinmouth Wheelers, and his injuries included a broken thigh, something to be reckoned with at his time of life.

  Somebody phoned my editor and I was given time off to go down and see him, my leave being extended indefinitely after Uncle Reuben had written and asked if he could borrow me to keep the Observer going until he was fit enough to return to the office.

  He never did return and I never returned to London.

  When I visited him at the Cottage Hospital I was shocked by his appearance. I had never thought of him as anything but an elderly man, although he was still a year short of sixty when I joined the Observer staff. Now he looked as though he was dying. His eyes were tired and his memory, once so accurate about Whinmouth affairs, was hazed by pain and shock. He was delighted to see me and gripped my hand with an eagerness that I found very touching.

  “Ah, John,” he muttered, “sorry you’ve got to see me trussed up like a Christmas fowl, and sorry to bring you back here before you’ve had your fill of smoke! The fact is, I don’t know how we’ll manage if you can’t take over for a spell. That’s the trouble with newspapers, boy, even little unimportant ones like ours. You can’t put ’em in cold storage when you run into trouble. I remember old Joe Arscott, who ran the Clarion over at Ferndale—he had to put a carnival edition to bed on the day his wife and kids were killed in a road smash. How do you feel about staying down here until autumn?”

  I said I should be glad to remain in Whinmouth until he was up and about, but said nothing about Diana or the party. In my heart I was glad of the opportunity. Diana’s return had awakened in me a wild longing for Sennacharib and an equally strong distaste for my stuffy little bed-sitter and the fumes and roar of London. I comforted him as best I could. He was more worried about the Observer than he was about his injuries. This was the first time he had ever been laid up and the first going-to-press Friday he had missed since he was a printer’s devil, in the eighteen-eighties.

  “Come up here as often as you can and tell me what’s going on,” he commanded, as though he was a wounded general addressing a flustered aide-de-campe in the midst of a battle.

  I promised and went home to Aunt Thirza, who was equally delighted with my unexpected return.

  “Why bless ’ee, John!” she exclaimed, throwing her fat, freckled arms around my neck. “Us’ll soon ’ave the color back in they cheeks, and a bit more spread to your belly. Praper pasty you look, and I don’t wonder, breathing nothing but they ole vogs an’ vumes all this time.”

  I went up to my old room, which seemed even smaller than the one I had abandoned in Guilford Street, but the moment I threw open the window I found myself blessi
ng the chance that had brought me back.

  It was a still summer evening and the estuary looked blood-red under the setting sun, its leisurely traffic of boats making hardly a ripple as they moved to and from the jetties. Far across the river, on a ketch moored beyond the tideway, a fisherman was hammering at something metallic and the sound of the blows reached me seconds after his arm was raised to strike. It made me think again of Huck Finn on the broad Mississippi, and I hoped that Diana was already at Heronslea and could see the bronze and heliotrope cloud formations over Nun’s Head. Uncle Luke’s favorite herring gulls, and lesser black-backed gulls, fished at their ease; Old Yelland, the pilot who had taken us off the island, stood on the quayside chatting to Ferris, the lobsterman, probably about football, for they were both vice-presidents of the Whinmouth Club. I stood there a long time, drinking the salt breeze and feeling older and more serene than I had ever felt in London.

  I was up at the tower before seven. The Sennacharib bird chorus was deafening and the buzzards were there, looking as though they had been wheeling and mewing over the paddock oaks ever since I went away.

  Foxhayes was aflame with gorse and heather and seemed to have put on its best clothes to welcome me home. From the tower summit I looked down on the long sloping larch wood and saw a wisp of smoke rise from the invisible chimneys of Heronslea, signifying perhaps that the family was in residence. Our room was much as we had left it but cobwebs had gathered and there was mold on the carpet strips, so I occupied the time tidying up and shaking the carpet from the window, keeping a sharp eye on the end of the ride from which Diana would emerge if she was coming.

  She did not appear that morning or the next, but on the third day, the Monday of her birthday week, she came striding out of the wood and waved as soon as she had climbed the fence into the paddock. I was far too impatient to wait in the tower and ran down to meet her.

  Even when we were hundreds of yards apart I saw that she was once more my Diana and not the girl I had met in London. She wore an old gray skirt and a sleeveless blouse, with a blue scarf tied countrywise over her hair. We both broke into a run and when we met rushed into an embrace, laughing breathlessly as a pheasant kuck-kucked from the bracken at our feet and then running hand-in-hand for the privacy of Folly Wood.

  We exchanged no greetings. The place we were in, and the careless, girlish clothes she was wearing exorcised the awe she had created in me when we last met. I felt no awe for her now, only the wildest tenderness and delight in her presence. It was as though we had been parted for a day, or were still alone on Nun’s Island before the storm, and I could not wait until we had climbed the tower steps but kissed her mouth a dozen times as we clung to one another on the brier-choked path to the porch.

  One thing was changed, and that the nature of the kisses we exchanged. They were no longer the kisses of infatuated adolescents, owing more to the wonder of discovery than to physical desire. We kissed breathlessly and greedily, and all the time our lips were touching she strained her body to me so ardently that I had to brace myself against the masonry. Her scarf came off and I plunged my hands into her hair, speaking her name as I had spoken it during our island adventure and hearing my voice sound strange under the stress of emotion.

  At last we climbed the tower and she looked ruefully at the signs of decay.

  “I’ve never been here since, Jan,” she said. “I often started out to go but I never got beyond the paddock. It seemed so depressing alone … look, there are our buzzards!”

  “They were here yesterday and the day before,” I said.

  “But they shouldn’t have been! They’re only supposed to show up when we’re together.”

  “They knew you were in the offing, Di, and anyway, we’re together now. I’m home for several weeks. How long will you be here?”

  “Not long, Jan. After the party we’re all going to Nice and this week it isn’t going to be easy to see you, not even in the early mornings. So many people are staying, and Yves likes to ride before breakfast. I had to tell half a dozen whoppers to get here today. Oh dear, I wish I could invite you to the party but that’s quite hopeless, even if you come as a pressman. Mother will be certain to recognize you after that frightful to-do at your office!”

  Her mention of the brush between her mother and my uncle reminded me of its cause—her examination by a doctor after our escapade.

  “What happened that time?” I asked her. “How did it seem from your end of the business?”

  She did not mind talking about it. She described how, on the day after surrender, she developed a frightful cold and was locked in her room for more than a week.

  “I didn’t care anyway,” she said. “I wanted to think and think about it all. I’ve never forgotten how sweet you were that time, Jan, and that’s what made Mother’s suspicions so beastly and ungenerous. She believed we had been lovers, of course, and it was only for your sake that I stopped letting her go on thinking so. It was when she started talking about police court proceedings, and got our solicitor in to talk jargon about it, that I had to let them know I was still a virgin.” She looked at me without a trace of embarrassment. “I still am! Are you?”

  I found it impossible to meet her gaze but she only laughed, reached out and pushed up my chin with the tips of her fingers.

  “Oh don’t look so dreadfully hangdog, Jan, it’s different for men, isn’t it? Was it with one girl or several?”

  “One,” I muttered, but she didn’t seem to notice my distaste for the subject.

  “What was she like, Jan? Was she pretty? Were you in love with her?”

  “No,” I admitted, relieved by her attitude but still miserably embarrassed, “I wasn’t a bit in love with her. I’ll never be in love with anyone but you, Di, and I think you’re quite sure of that and always have been!”

  “Yes, I think I am, Jan,” she said lightly, “but I wouldn’t have blamed you a bit if you’d found somebody else. After all, in most ways you’ve been a man for years. Sometimes I think you were born one.”

  “What are we going to do—about seeing one another?” I demanded, not only anxious to change the subject but worried about the difficulties that continued to beset us.

  “Well, we can’t do a thing yet,” she said calmly. “If Mother gets so much as an inkling that you’re back in circulation, she’ll let Heronslea and we’ll never see one another at all.”

  The morning clouded a little and suddenly the tower room seemed dank and sunless.

  “How long have we got to go on like this, Di?”

  “I suppose until I’m twenty-one, Jan.”

  “And what then? If I’m back in Whinmouth for good, and running the paper, would you have enough guts to tell her and your father to go to hell and get engaged—properly, openly—without all this hole-in-the-corner routine?”

  She smiled and for some reason I was sure that the smile was slightly forced.

  “That’s the second proposal you’ve made to me in this old tower,” she said, “and it puts you one ahead; the one on the beach in Nun’s Cove was really mine, wasn’t it?”

  I was determined not to joke about it this time and pressed her hard for a direct answer. The maddening frustration of the situation was more than I could bear. I had held her in my arms again and believed I had learned from her response that she felt about me the same way as I felt for her, but for all that I did not get my answer, not then, not for a long time to come. She turned away and stood beside the window, looking down over Sennacharib.

  “Well?” I demanded, after nearly a minute had passed.

  “You mustn’t stampede me, Jan. Women are a lot wiser than men about this kind of thing. You’re entitled to an answer and you’ll get one, I promise you that, but don’t panic me, don’t drag an answer from me that is only part of one and has to do with biology rather than all kinds of other things.”

  “Such as economics?” I asked, grumpily.

  Her head came up and she looked straight at me.

&
nbsp; “Yes! Why not? That’s the basis of our trouble, isn’t it?”

  I was alarmed at this and tried to talk my way out of it. Looking back I can see that my attempt was ingenuous but it seemed logical at the time. Eagerly I told her about the owner of the paper and printing works having willed his property to Uncle Reuben and how Reuben had promised that it would pass to me.

  “It isn’t the kind of money you’ve been used to and never would be,” I argued, “but it provides a good living and later on, when I’ve got another income from books, we shouldn’t be at all badly off. We’d have plenty to live the kind of life we want to live, and I daresay we could even manage to hunt if you wanted to.”

  She heard me out and I think my case impressed her. She smiled again, genuinely this time, and kissed me lightly on the cheek.

  “Dear Jan,” she said, and then, in the old familiar way, “dear, darling, sober, solid, dependable Jan Ridd! Will you wait until Friday? Everything’s gone haywire at home and there’s been so many things to see to. I want time to think everything over. We’ll talk more about it then, I promise, Jan!”