“But it’s absolutely bloody inhuman!” I protested.
She lifted her shoulders, another gesture I had forgotten but now recalled.
“It’s just us,” she said calmly, and left it at that.
We went out of the cafe, down Lower Regent Street and across the Mall to St. James’s Park. She walked freely now, swinging her arm and moving with long, even strides. There was no tension about her as we crossed the road, threading our way through slowly moving traffic, and her recovery left me free to think about the implications of her return.
Did her remark mean that she wished to cut loose from her parents forever and implement the pledge made on Nun’s Island all that time ago? Was she agreeing to marry me after all, to turn her back on Heronslea and become a small-town wife who kept house and went shopping in Whinmouth? I suppose I should have asked her this at once, establishing our new position from the very beginning, but it did not seem to me a sensible thing to do at that time, it was too much like taking advantage of my temporary ascendancy and her highly emotional state. I knew that when I did get an answer to this vital question I wanted it to be an absolutely honest one. I was tired of finding her and losing her, and was sick to death of this interminable game of hide-and-seek. In addition, at this moment, Uncle Reuben’s parting warning occurred to me—“Don’t make any tomfool promises one way or the other.”
I knew also, however, that I wanted her back. Diana had again banished the ludicrous Emerald and the only thing that really mattered was that Emerald should stay dead and buried, with Irving and the other victims of the crash.
“How about your things?” I demanded, suddenly. “There’s a train at three P.M. from Waterloo. Could you make it?”
“If I don’t then I never will!” she said.
I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes to one. We hurried out into Horse Guards Parade and hailed a taxi.
“It’s platform ten,” I said. “I’ll get there early, buy your ticket, bag seats, and wait for you at the barrier.”
She embraced me impulsively, and at the touch of her cheek I knew I was once more fully committed, in spite of Uncle Reuben’s warning and in spite of my own secret misgivings. We were beginning again, right from the start, and I could have shouted as much from the top of Nelson’s column.
I made my way over to Waterloo, claimed my hand luggage and had a wash and brush-up. Then I felt I needed a drink and I had two double brandies with barely a splash. At half-past two I bought her single, first-class fare, and ten minutes later I was back at the barrier, having tipped a porter to save us two corner seats in a smoker.
At four minutes to three there was a small swirl among the crowds beyond the bookstall and Diana emerged, driving two porters before her like mules. Each man carried two heavy suitcases and each had smaller luggage wedged under his arms. Diana was carrying, of all things, an unwrapped saddle to which long, trailing girths were attached.
The little procession swept past, gathering me in its stride. There was absolutely nothing about the laughing, breathless girl who seized my hand that one could associate in any way with the hesitant bundle of nerves I had greeted exactly four hours ago. I had no time to wonder whether this was a good or bad sign, whether it indicated that I alone was responsible for the transformation or whether it implied that her mind was so shallow that shame, misery and guilt could find no lodging there.
We bundled into our compartment and she gave the porters ten shillings each. Then the whistle blew and the train began to move.
“Made it!” she said, triumphantly. “Sennacharib! Here I come!”
It was as though someone had been juggling with time, whirling the clock back through the years to the summer evening when we set out for the regatta dance on the borrowed motorbike. It was as though everything that had happened since was the slow unfolding of a long, muddled dream, in which joy jostled misery and triumph defeat, a dimly remembered seesaw of delight, laughter and heartache. I looked from her to her mountain of luggage and back again. Suddenly the sheer idiotic improbability of it all set me laughing until my eyes filled with tears, and Diana bounced down beside me and curled up like a kitten, tucked her long, elegant legs beneath her and throwing her weight against me in a way that sent her hair tumbling across my face. Then, still chuckling, I listened to the rhythm of the wheels.
Five minutes after Clapham she was sound asleep.
Chapter Nine
THAT WAS the best time of all, early spring homecoming.
I must have misjudged Diana when she bustled up to the barrier at Waterloo with her hundredweight of luggage. She hadn’t wriggled from under the accident as easily as all that and during the first weeks in the West Country there were times when I sometimes wondered if her apparent recovery had been the last flicker of the flame that had burned in her so strongly throughout her adolescence. Her ribs still pained her and she was not sleeping well. She would meet me on Foxhayes, or on the wooden bridge over the Teasel inland from Shepherdshey and for an hour or so would talk and laugh in the old, familiar way. Then her expression would cloud over and she would move out of reach and at these times her hands were the clue to her thoughts. They were never still but constantly moved up to her hair, or plucked halfheartedly at whatever she happened to be holding, a riding crop, a twig, or, if we were riding, Sioux’s mane.
It was the springtime of Sennacharib that started her real convalescence. Toward the end of the cold snap, when the long slope from the larch wood across Big Oak paddock was silent under February snow, her moods became less erratic and she was less disposed to soar from gloom to the brittle elation that I associated with Emerald and men, perhaps, drop back again, setting me the job of finding something to level off her mercury. We spent a great deal of time together, walking and riding on the afternoons when I was free and sometimes taking a Sunday picnic farther afield. When I was unable to be with her she spent much of her time with old McCarthy, the Scots gardener, who had always been a pet of hers. They worked together at potting in the big greenhouses and I did what I could to encourage this activity, for McCarthy, a gruff, unsentimental old body, always treated her as though she were an irresponsible child of eight, growling at her when she handed him the wrong tool and even slapping her hand when she did something that outraged his surly professionalism. He was fond of her for all that and championed her aggressively when I mentioned the accident and asked if he thought she was on the mend.
“There’s nae wrong with you lass,” he muttered, “as couldn’t have been put right by a lick with a razor strop years since. It’s her folk that want it now, for raising the bairn the way they did! She’ll do, if she bides down here in the open.”
This brief conspiracy began an unspoken conspiracy between us. McCarthy held Mr. and Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton in contempt, and would have been sacked long ago had he not been the means of Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton’s winning prizes at fruit and flower shows for miles around. I like to think that, in his view, I compared very favorably with most of the young men who had been Diana’s guests at Heronslea. He knew everything that went on and Diana had probably confided in him from time to time, so that in the absence of the Gayelorde-Suttons I was able to come and go quite freely about the estate. The supercilious chauffeur, who seemed never to have recovered from the indignity of having to take me home in the Bentley that first night, continued to regard me as a tradesman delivering goods at the back door, whereas the butler, on the few occasions I encountered him, always looked fixedly over my left shoulder, as though determined to pretend that I was an optical illusion. The remainder of the staff, all Shepherdshey folk, were friendly.
My easy access to Heronslea had a curious effect upon my new relationship with Diana. The very complications we had encountered in earlier stages of our courtship had, almost in self-defense, encouraged me to think of the future in terms of marriage. Now, with the clandestine element gone, the urgency of establishing right of access to Diana had disappeared. In those first weeks I concentrated so
lely on getting her well and later on, in the continued absence of her parents, there seemed to be no urgency in planning ahead.
I suppose, away at the back of my mind, I still thought of marriage as the ultimate outcome of it all, but I was not inclined to explore improbable ways and means of achieving it, as I had done so often and so fruitlessly in the past. It was enough, for the time being, to know that I was necessary to her and to watch her salvage more and more of the real Diana. It was enough for the time being, to hear her laughter ring through Sennacharib and watch her hair stream into the wind as she urged Sioux up the slope of the paddock. In some ways it was like reliving my happy boyhood but without the anxiety that had always attended our meetings here. There was Sennacharib, Diana and I, and with each day that passed, Sennacharib stirred more vigorously under its winter vest of sodden leaves and snowdrifts, and the southwest wind passed whispering through the marching woods as patters of rain coaxed dog violets, wild daffodils and crocuses from the banks of Teasel Brook.
One day in early March Uncle Reuben died, and much as I loved him I could feel no real sorrow at his death. He was tired of lying propped in a chair, watching the tides rise and fall over the estuary, and more than once had hinted that he was impatient to be gone.
We buried him beside his father and mother in the steeply sloping churchyard on the Foxhayes road, and went home to Aunt Thirza’s to eat an immense funeral tea and hear what old Hawthorne, the Whinmouth Press executor, had to say about the future of the business.
The will was a very simple document. There was a modest cash legacy to Uncle Luke, another to the chapel, and a third to the Whinmouth Liberal Association. Reuben’s shares in the paper and printing works were equally divided between the sister and nephew of the original proprietor, and myself. These shares, together with those already given me, made me a full partner in the concern, with a guaranteed salary of four hundred a year, so long as I continued to work on the paper.
Diana questioned me at what I considered unnecessary length about my future as editor of Whinmouth’s little newspaper. She had never been able to take the Observer very seriously, even less so after I had invited her into the printing office one Friday night to watch the old flatbed trundling out the weekly edition.
“It’s all so terribly ‘Caxtony,’ Jan,” she protested, laughing. “You really ought to sell out to someone much older and then use your little bit of capital to do something important. How much do you suppose it’s all worth—your part of it, I mean?”
I discussed this with Hawthorne, the solicitor, who estimated that my share in the Whinmouth Press would now fetch some two thousand pounds on the open market. It might have been double this amount but Uncle Reuben had laid no claim to the freehold of the premises.
Two thousand pounds seemed a far larger sum to me than it did to Diana.
“It’s not a fortune,” she said, “but I daresay you could make a start with it. Daddy started with very little more but somehow I don’t think you’re cut out for his kind of hanky-panky. I suppose you wouldn’t know what to do with stocks and shares if you had any, would you, Jan?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” I told her, rather crossly, for although I had by no means resigned myself to spending my life as a smalltown newspaperman, it still seemed to me infinitely preferable to the complicated occuaption pursued so profitably by Mr. Gayelorde-Sutton. I was a bit of a snob about high finance and I suppose this distrust had been nurtured by my fear and hatred of Diana’s mother.
“Since we’re discussing the subject, what ant I cut out for?” I demanded. “I’m a good enough journalist for Whinmouth, but what I saw of Fleet Street while working in town didn’t whet my appetite for anything more ambitious in that particular line.”
Diana screwed up her eyes and her voice grew persuasive.
“I always see you as a farmer of one sort or another, Jan,” she said. “After all, it’s in your blood and you’re never really yourself unless you’ve got mud on your boots. What I mean is, you always look like a fish out of water in town, whereas down here you’re sort of … well … sort of real and belonging, if you see what I mean?”
I understood well enough what she meant. The older I grew the more I regretted that I had not spent my youth acquiring some up-to-date agricultural knowledge. Some of my happiest days had been at the county shows, plowing matches and other competitions organized by the Young Farmers Clubs in the area. I was keenly interested in forestry and land conservation and by this time I was on friendly terms with most of the farmers in the district, even those as far afield as Castle Ferry. In fact, farming and its tributary occupations had always seemed to me so much more vital than industry or shopkeeping, and Diana’s vague encouragement started a smolder of thought that blazed up like a heath fire when an opportunity came my way to change course a week or so after Uncle Reuben’s funeral. Before that, however, Diana piloted me on what was to prove a sentimental journey.
We had been cantering west from the head of Teasel Brook, intending to drop down the steepest part of the common toward the Folly Wood and then ride home via Big Oak paddock. At the junction of heath tracks, a mile from the main road, Diana pulled Sioux’s head to the right and before I could catch her we had dipped down into Foxhayes Hollow, the farm once occupied by my grandfather.
It was years since I had been that way and I was surprised to find the old farmhouse shuttered and unoccupied. We hallooed, thinking that there might be someone living in the cottage beyond the farm buildings, but nobody answered, so we made a circuit of the yard and soon realized that the farm was derelict. Docks grew in the sties, a heavy barn door swung loose in the wind, and closer inspection of the buildings showed that the place was well on the way to becoming a ruin. Winter gales and the weight of February snow had shifted pantiles from the roof and beyond the begrimed windows of the kitchen we could see pools on the stone floor. The barn door creaked dolorously and there was such an air of decay about the premises that I called to Diana to mount and race me back to the common. She stood, legs apart, looking up at me.
“What’s the matter, Jan? Don’t you like the old place any more?”
“Not the way it is,” I said. “It gives me the creeps!”
“There’s nothing here that couldn’t be made shipshape by a jobbing builder in a matter of weeks,” she said. “Did you know old Yeomans, the tenant, had left?”
I remembered then that Yeomans had died more than a year ago, and that Uncle Reuben had told me he understood Yeomans’ son was selling a holding in East Anglia and coming home to take his father’s place. I told Diana about this as we cantered back along the rutted track to the open common but all the way home she remained preoccupied, and it wasn’t until we were on the point of parting that she called, “Wait, Jan, I’m coming into town with you!” and climbed into my fifth-hand Morris Cowley and asked me to drop her off at the Gilroy Estate office, in Chapel Street.
“I’ve just remembered,” she said, carelessly, “I’ve got to see the agent about some timber. Daddy wrote about it yesterday and anyway, I’ve shopping to do.”
It was Thursday and I had all the proofs to read, so we arranged to meet on Saturday morning when the paper was out.
The next day, however, I had a visit from Hawthorne, the solicitor. It seemed that the nephew of the original proprietor of the paper was showing an unexpected interest in the property and had offered to buy me out, while retaining my services as acting editor at the same salary. He offered me eighteen hundred for my shares and a ten-year contract, breakable on either side at five years.
Hawthorne advised me to decline, pointing out that if I wished to continue as editor it was obviously better that I should retain some part of the control, but recent discussions with Diana on this topic had unsettled me and when I met her on Saturday afternoon I suggested we should leave the horses at home and tramp over the moor to the source of the Teasel. It was never easy to talk to Diana when she was astride a horse. Each conversation was spaced by a m
ad gallop or a breathless scramble over banks and ditches.
“You look terribly solemn today,” she chaffed, as we crossed the covert and made our way upstream.
“And you look as if you were hatching up one of your hare-brained ideas,” I countered.
She did indeed. There was a familiar “if-you-did-but-know” sparkle in her eyes, but I viewed it with tolerance, for it was clear evidence that she was now almost herself again. All the sun and wind we had shared during the last few weeks showed in her clear skin and lively bearing. I had never seen her look healthier or prettier. Emerald was banished and it was plainly Diana who skipped along in country brogues and a faded yellow sweater, moving like an eager girl discovering the country after a long spell in a city. Her thick chestnut curls looked as if they had never been within miles of a Bond Street stylist, and when the April sunlight fell on them they caught and held all the life and sparkle of the valley. The serenity of the countryside was reflected in her calm, untroubled gaze but its springing vitality was there also, as she bounded down the bank and hopped across the steppingstones at Teasel Curve and up again to the narrow footpath under the northern edge of Teasel Wood.
When we were a mile or so on our way, I told her of Hawthorne’s visit and she showed the liveliest interest.
“Why, Jan, you must do it! It’s the very thing! It couldn’t have come at a better time, surely?”
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