That was what really hurt, the hideous, shattering sham of it all! For clearly it had been a sham, right from the night that she took me back to Heronslea on the pony, and we ate muffins and listened to Drip’s musical boxes. Remembering this I recalled Drip’s warning, and from this point it was fatally easy to gather together the clues that Diana had strewn along our path—her long silences between letters and meetings, her mysterious abstraction that time in Fortnum’s, even the steady, almost calculating way that she had looked at me sometimes. It explained the odd remark she had made when we parted after the party night—“Thank you for loving me, Jan!” had not meant what I thought it had meant at all. In my male arrogance I had imagined it to refer to the act of physical possession, whereas it was now clear that she had begun composing this letter, or something like it, within an hour of our lying in one another’s arms.
Blind rage ousted misery for a moment and I would have ripped the letter into shreds, had not Aunt Thirza called from the stairs at that moment.
“Supper, Jan! It’s put out, so come and eat ’un while ’er’s hot.”
It is curious how compelling are the ordinary routines of life. I folded the letter, replaced it in its envelope, and went down into the kitchen, where Thirza mistook my glumness for overwork.
“Why bless ’ee, I dorn reckon you’d stop that there tap-tapping long enough to eat if I didn’t drive ’ee to it,” she grumbled, ladling out liver and onions and pushing a huge plateful in my direction.
I ate her supper in silence. It was like munching my way through a dish of sand.
2.
For a week or more I hugged my misery to myself but at last, whether I would or not, I was driven by sheer wretchedness to share it with someone. I had to find a confidant. I had scores of acquaintances in Whinmouth but no real friends apart from Aunt Thirza and Uncle Reuben, and I inclined toward the latter. After all, Reuben had already been introduced to the problem, and Reuben had met Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton. Outwardly he was a narrow-minded old bachelor, but what drove me to confide in him was the certainty I had of his deep affection for me, and a belief that a man of his age and experience might be able to give me worth-while advice. I was not disappointed; to the day he died I never stopped discovering Uncle Reuben.
I went to his bungalow and found him sitting like a stricken Cromwell in the big armchair, facing the superb river view. He had always been a very active man and he hated his inability to get out and about, and his dependence on the visits of cronies to bring him all the local news that did not appear in the Observer. He was always pleased to see me, however, and his face brightened up the moment I passed in front of his window. We exchanged a few banalities and then I went straight to the point, showing him Diana’s letter.
He read it carefully, his hedgebank eyebrows drawing together in a puzzled frown. When he had digested it he said, very quietly:
“All right, boy, you’d better tell me the whole of it now, right from the beginning.”
I told him everything. I described how we had met and how I had once lied to him about going to London to put flowers on my mother’s grave. I told him how he and others had been hoaxed by our cover story of the journalistic tour of Heronslea, and how for years Diana and I had used the local social and sporting events in order to meet without her parents knowing anything about me. I told him the full story of the island adventure, the dance that preceded it, and of our chance meeting in London. I finished with a truthful but shamefaced admission of what happened at the party, the previous June.
He didn’t interrupt once but punctuated my story with a series of explosive little grunts. When I had finished he turned his big, gray eyes on me and I saw with relief that there was genuine concern in them, as well as pained bewilderment.
“Is that everything, boy?” he growled. “She wouldn’t be in any sort of real trouble, would she?”
“That’s everything I can remember, Uncle Reuben,” I said, “and if she was in trouble you can be pretty sure we should have heard about it by now from the usual quarter.”
“Ah,” he muttered, “I daresay you’re right at that.”
He folded her letter and returned it to me. Like most printers he had been a snuff addict from boyhood and now he fortified himself with two enormous pinches and a volley of shattering sneezes. “Well now, tell me first what you make of it. Do you regard that letter as final?”
“There’s not much doubt about that,” I said.
He looked at me searchingly. “Isn’t there? Then why did you come to me about it?”
Why had I come to him? Was it because I had been nursing this secret for years and had now allowed it to grow into an obsession, or was it because I wanted someone to blow on the ashes in the wild hope that a small spark had survived the cold douche of her decision? Had I come to him for sympathy or reassurance? To have my hand patted or to learn how to regroup my scattered wits for a counterattack?
He answered me himself, and the nature of his answer proved what I had long suspected—that underneath the harsh, radical shell of the Puritan there was an unrepentant romantic.
“See here, boy,” he said, groping for his pipe and heaving his big frame half out of the groaning chair, “I’m a crabby bachelor, and have never had but one love affair in my life. It didn’t amount to anything, not even as much as yours, you reckless young idiot, but it did teach me something about women. It taught me there’s a right and wrong way to go about wenching.”
I think I was more shocked by his admission than he had been by mine. Not only was it a great surprise to learn that he had once been in love, but his use of the word “wenching” was so uncharacteristic that it was almost as though he had started to tell me a dirty story.
“Who was she?” I asked wonderingly.
“She was the doctor’s daughter, and in my young days a doctor was somebody in a place like this. Grace, she was called, Grace Dainton, tall and dark as a gypsy and as handsome a woman as you’d see anywhere, especially when she was up on her father’s gig, driving a big gray up and down the town. We used to meet in the spinney, at the back of her father’s place up on the Foxhayes road, and although I wasn’t out of my apprenticeship at the time, and didn’t have two pennies to rub together, she was mad to marry me and wanted us to run off when her father set about marrying her off to one of those Earnshaws, who owned the big brewery over at Whinford. Wealthy family and good-looking young chap, but she wouldn’t have any part of him. You can’t arrange these things, never could and never will! Here was me, several years younger than her and, as I say, without a penny in the bank, and there was this Earnshaw fellow, with all the money in the world and the first motorcar ever about here outside her door every night of the week. For all that, she’d get shot of him and come running down the spinney to me as soon as it was dark. Came in her nightdress once, aye, and bare feet at that!”
As he said this one of his rare smiles crossed his face. I was so astonished by his story that for a moment I forgot all about Diana.
“What happened, Uncle Reuben? Why didn’t you marry her?”
He looked quite fierce for a moment and then, drawing on his pipe, relaxed and grinned again.
“Why? Well, for the same reason as you’re disposed to take that drivel at face value,” he said. “Mind you, this class nonsense was even worse in my young days! You were either born a gentleman or you were born to mind your p’s and q’s—none of this Jack’s-as-good-as-his-master business you get nowadays. With Grace and me it wasn’t only a question of money but a matter of birth and education. Now these Suttons aren’t real quality, that’s what makes the woman so insufferable! You’re as good as they are and I daresay, if you went far enough back, you’re the better bred of the two. When Grace Dainton begged me to run off with her I should have done it but I didn’t, and not because I wasn’t head over heels in love with her, because I was, but because I thought I’d be doing her an injury.”
“You’re sorry you didn’t?”
&
nbsp; He thought for a moment. “Yes, I am. I’m sorry for my sake but more for hers. I was doing her the injury by letting her go, because in the end she didn’t marry anyone and by the time she was thirty-five she was a leathery old maid, grumbling over a sick father and putting flowers on the altar of St. Luke’s Church. She died before she was fifty and all the money that had kept me from running off with her went to the Whinmouth Animals’ Dispensary. They built that red brick place at the top of Fish Street with it and I never pass the monstrosity without wanting to spit at it.”
“But this is different, Uncle Reuben!” I protested, impressed by his story but far from appreciating the parallel. “This time the boot’s on the other foot. It’s her who has had second thoughts about it, not me.”
“Ah boy,” he said kindly, “don’t you believe it! She’s written the letter, but what brought her to the point of sitting down to write it? She’s a girl of spirit, just like my Grace was before I turned her into a sour old maid by shuffling about and apologizing for being who I was and what I was. Now you’re doing the same thing, standing aside and letting her make all the decisions. Don’t do it, boy, make some yourself, and right or wrong she’ll come to respect you for it. If there’s one thing a woman can’t abide it’s a man who lets her call the tune. Before you know where you are, it’s unholy discord!”
I had expected censure and possibly kindly meant grow-up-sonny-advice, but certainly not an advocacy of aggression.
“I’ll never have her kind of money, Uncle,” I began, but he gave a loud snort of impatience and slapped his huge palm with the bowl of his pipe, the way I remembered him doing during the violent discussion with Diana’s mother two years ago.
“Money! Class! Keep your station! Keep in line! What the devil has a generation of radical progress done for you, boy? There was some excuse for me when I was your age. You daren’t let it be known you voted anything but Tory if you worked for a Tory or paid rent to a Tory landlord. But today—damn it, I don’t often swear but you drive me to it—today there’s more real equality than I ever dreamed possible. It’s now, not 1884! You don’t have to kowtow to people like the Suttons, just because they made a fortune out of nitrates and pit props in the war. If you want this girl as much as you say you do, then in God’s name go in and get her! If she’s been laughing at you behind your back all this time, then at least you’ll soon know where you stand and be well shot of her! If she hasn’t, if she’s written you that mealymouthed letter because she thinks you’ve always accepted the situation and are therefore likely to go on doing so, then show her different. Thumb your nose at her background, tan her backside if you have to, and she’ll want you the more for it! Maybe that isn’t the kind of advice you thought you’d get from a dry old stick like me, but it’s the kind I’m inclined to give you, seeing that you’re no longer the moonstruck boy you were when you played truant on the island, but a man old enough to make love to a woman and then slink off with your tail between your legs, sniveling excuses about class and income!”
I was very much taken aback by this outburst but it did me a power of good, for it challenged my entire conception of the situation. He was entirely accurate in his assumption that I had never made more than a token attempt to kick over the barrier that separated us. I had accepted the limitations it imposed with a kind of masochistic fatalism, and although I had repeatedly told myself that I could do very little until she was legally of age, I now realized that this was only a cowardly way of evading the issue. The truth was, I had always stood in awe of Diana’s background. Keeper Croker’s agonizing half nelson still kept me in check. I raged at the necessity of coming and going to Heronslea by stealth, but I had never contemplated taking a stand in the middle of the big paddock and bawling defiance at the Gayelorde-Suttons. Uncle Reuben’s comments, the first I had ever had on the subject apart from Twining’s disparagement at the office and Old Drip’s gentle dissuasion years ago, set me wondering whether Diana’s behavior throughout our association had been conditioned by mine. I remembered now her curious, half-symbolic act in taking me over the Castle Ferry in order to show me her rough-tongued old grandfather; it seemed to me, looking back, that many times she had presented me with a tentative opening to challenge the opposition but had resorted to secrecy when she realized that I accepted stealth as a condition to our partnership.
All at once I began to feel a great deal more sure of myself. Uncle Reuben had greatly oversimplified the situation, but at least he was on the right lines, while I had been hopelessly off them for years. From confidant to whom I had been driven by unbearable loneliness he now emerged as a powerful and active ally.
“Look here, Uncle Reuben,” I said, “Diana isn’t twenty-one for more than two years yet. We couldn’t marry without her parents’ consent and, although I’ve got better prospects than most fellows my age, I haven’t got enough to marry on. Just what is the best way of going about it?”
“Let me look at that letter again,” he said, and when I gave it to him he sat hunched up for the better part of ten minutes, rubbing his nose with his forefinger and drawing his brows together so closely that they looked like a quickset hedge dividing his face neatly hi two. Finally he looked up.
“I’d let her sow her wild oats for a spell, and then catch her on a rebound,” he said.
“But she’s been sowing wild oats ever since I’ve known her,” I complained.
“Down here … rural oats! … Wait until she’s sown a bag or two in Mayfair! I know her sort all right … they provide all the copy for the ‘silly’ seasons and they either end up with a loveless marriage, or an overdose of drugs. Point is, you’ll have to watch your timing but that won’t hurt, you’re young enough in all conscience, and you can use the interval collecting ammunition—money in your instance. If you want the real key to all this it’s here,” he went on rapping his pipe bowl on page four of the letter. “She won’t get what she wants from those anemic guardsmen and younger sons, and the moment she realizes how badly she wants it, pounce, and good luck to you, boy! Now tell me what you’ve been up to this week and what you’ve laid by for the inside pages. I’ve had enough kiss-in-the-ring for one afternoon.”
We talked on general matters, more easily and naturally than we had ever conversed in the past. When I left him there was a twinkle in his eye and he called as I reached the door:
“Feel any better for the heart-to-hearter, boy?”
“Better than I’ve felt for months,” I admitted, gratefully, and hurried back to the office to give the Thursday proofs a good deal more attention than they had been getting since they became my responsibility.
3.
Uncle Reuben had lived his entire life in a rural backwater but his knowledge of the world was far wider than one might imagine it to be. His forecast in respect of Diana proved astonishingly accurate.
Over a year passed. It was December when I went to him for advice. The following spring, Diana was back in England and within two months of her return she was hard at work providing Fleet Street with silly-season material. She was doing it, moreover, in the company Uncle Reuben had predicted, that of guardees and younger sons, collectively known as Debs’ Delights. Together with high-spirited companions of previous seasons they were recognized as the Bright Young Things. They were the very last legatees of the gay twenties.
Diana’s recruitment into this set had its advantages. It made her movements easy to follow, even from as far away as Whinmouth. Regularly each month Diana and her boon companions made a bow to the newspaper-reading public, at first as participators in widely publicized charity efforts—balls, bazaars and dramatic entertainments—then as habitués of some of the more popular night clubs, later still as the organizers of bow-tie sprees and bizarre practical jokes, such as the digging up of a section of the Strand dressed as L.C.C. workmen, or the tarring and feathering of statues. It was all very gay and sophisticated, and I can imagine Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton outwardly wagging a reproving finger but secretly being i
mmensely proud of her daughter’s antics, for they surely signified an acceptance of a way of life toward which the mother had been pushing her daughter since childhood.
Some of the left-wing newspapers were very scornful about these pranks and howled for less tolerance on the part of the police and a far tighter rein on the part of the parents, but the public as a whole gloried in the fun and I suppose most young people living quiet dull lives in quiet dull towns like Whinmouth, secretly envied Diana and her set their uninhibited exploitation of youth.
Certainly the newspapers played up to them, often devoting more space to a Mayfair treasure hunt than they would allocate Mussolini’s latest bluster over Abyssinia. It was on one of these crazy treasure hunts, then the peak of West End fashion, that Diana’s escort, a young man known as the Hon. Newton Symes, overstepped the wide limits of public tolerance and gave the Socialist press a chance to compare the antics of these young British socialites with those of French aristocrats, immediately prior to the revolution of 1789. The comparison was somewhat strained. Diana and the young Honorable had not killed a peasant’s child by driving a coach over it, they had merely driven head on into a coster’s barrow and when the man’s truculent attitude annoyed them, had refused to pay compensation without recourse to law.
The incident left a bad taste in the public mouth and from then on even the sensational dailies began to lead their columns against the Bright Young Things, and publish a steady spate of letters from Tunbridge Wells, and Budleigh Salterton, deploring their wild behavior in and around London.
I did not see Diana all this time, neither did I write or attempt to get in touch with her. I watched her pranks from a safe distance, and I kept an eye on the calendar. Then, one day after she had been in trouble over a motoring offense at Maidenhead, and had been threatened with suspension of her driving license, I decided that it was time for a reconnaissance and took a few days’ holiday in London. Before setting out I wrote briefly to her town home, saying that I would be delighted to say hello and take her out to lunch. It was the letter of an old friend, resigned to his dismissal as a lover.
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