Diana

by R. F Delderfield

  She chuckled at that. “Dear Jan, I can’t wait to be hugged!” she said.

  “If this is a Heronslea chore,” I grumbled, “why the blazes don’t you ring Harrington direct? He’s your foreman, not mine!”

  “Don’t be so churlish, darling! Harrington is hardly ever at Heronslea and he’s a frightfully difficult man to lay by the heels. Don’t worry about Daddy, he’ll be gone long before I get back and the weather up here is hot enough for swimming, how is it down there?”

  “I’m damned if I’m going to talk weather with you, Di,” I said, “and I’m getting bored with all these mysteries. Come on home and let’s go riding.”

  “Monday,” she said. “ ’Bye now, darling.”

  She had only been away a few days but the sound of her voice made me ache for her. I sat on in the stuffy little office, copy and proofs forgotten, pondering her message and the strange, schoolmarmy manner in which it had been delivered, wondering at her lack of interest in what seemed to me a momentous development in our lives. Then, suddenly, I was tired of mysteries and complications. All the years I had loved her we seemed to have been enmeshed in an intricate web of conditions, provisos and prohibitions. I wanted to cut every strand, throw her over my shoulder and walk out into the open to a place where we could behave like a normal man and woman in love, like a normal couple who planned their own destiny and led normal, unrestricted lives. I pitched the proofs and the reports into the copy tray and locked up, slamming the door on the musty little office that had enclosed so many dreams since my wild need of her had driven me to seek my living there. Illogically my sense of frustration extended to the Observer and to the silent array of machinery that nursed it. The whole premises became mean, squalid and inadequate. Maybe she was right, maybe a man could never develop in a field as small and restricted as this business and this town.

  I went home to have supper with Aunt Thirza and she found me very grumpy company.

  2.

  Early the next morning I drove up to the main road and down the cart track to Foxhayes Hollow. Long before I reached the dip in which the ramshackle farm was situated I noticed that something was astir in the area. When we were last here the track had been grass-grown and straggling bushes almost met at several points; now deep tractor ruts showed in the lane and the undergrowth had been cut back to allow the passage of carts or trucks. One or two new bricks and traces of cement lay about and I wondered whether a new tenant had been found, perhaps some fancy friend of Diana’s, who had enlisted her considerable influence with the Gilroy Estate.

  Notwithstanding this, I was quite unprepared for the sight that greeted me when I bumped into the clearing. The farm and buildings had been transformed. A new slate roof had been laid in place of the weather-beaten pantiles, the ground had been cleared of rubbish, the barn door had been rehung and the greater part of the premises repainted in white and horizon blue. The farm now had a raffish, gaudy look, as though the person responsible for this work had borrowed some chintzy ideas from a magazine article on amateur farming. Builders’ materials lay everywhere, and two early risers were already at work on the sties, operating a cement mixer. I recognized one of them as Davey, a member of the Heronslea permanent maintenance staff.

  “What the devil is going on here?” I demanded, when he greeted me.

  “Us is doin’ the ole plaace up!” he said, phlegmatically. “Do ’ee know who’s taaken the ruin?”

  “Not a clue,” I told him. “I’m looking for Harrington, the foreman. Is he around anywhere?”

  “Aye, he’ll be yer any minute, maister,” said Davey. “Praper slave driver he be! Us be workin’ overtime on this yer job, dawn till dusk. Praper bliddy hurry they be in!”

  “Who?” I wanted to know.

  “New tenants, pals o’ the family I yeard, London townees, zo they say. Bought into the big house lease, ’er is,” he added, nodding toward the farmhouse. “Always a freehold plaace in Ole Maister’s time, but ’er’s bought in now, zo they say.”

  I knew by Old Maister he meant my grandfather, for Davey was a Shepherdshey man and was just old enough to remember him. I don’t think he recognized me as a Leigh or he would have remarked upon it. At that moment Harrington the foreman drove up in his old Ford and came over to us. He was a stocky, efficient man, who seldom wasted a word on anybody. He gave me a curt nod and told the concrete mixers to “put a jerk in it.” Harrington knew that I was friendly with Diana. He had seen me riding with her and standing about in the stables. I gave him her somewhat cryptic message and he nodded, briefly.

  “I’ll see to it during lunch break,” he said, and then scratched his chin and gave me a shrewd glance.

  “You’re a Leigh, aren’t you?” he asked, suddenly. “Your people farmed here back along, didn’t they?”

  I told him that this was so and mentioned Uncle Mark, at the riding school, and Uncle Reuben, both of whom he had known as young men.

  “That’s funny,” he said, “that’s funny and no mistake!”

  He shot another sidelong look at me. “You behind all this?” he asked, flatly.

  “Me? This renovation lark? No, I’m not, and what on earth makes you think I am?”

  “I dunno, maybe the fact that your name is Leigh,” he said. “It all adds up.”

  “What adds up?” I demanded.

  He told me then that his instructions regarding the extensive renovations on the farm had originated from Diana, who had told him that she was acting on behalf of her father because he was exceptionally busy. “He was down here yesterday, I heard, but he had left when I rang up this morning,” he went on. “I’ve committed them for a real packet on this place. I didn’t realize it was so far gone. It needed reroofing and pointing and some of the outbuildings will have to be pulled down and rebuilt. I suppose it’s?all right, but I would have liked an okay from Mr. Gayelorde-Sutton before I went ahead with it. No sense in doing half a job. If they’ve had the place included in the Heronslea lease, they might as well make it habitable and workable but they’ll be a damned long time getting their money back, if I’m any judge! The work that needs doing here will stand them in about three thousand.”

  “Do you mean to say that you haven’t had direct instructions from Mr. Gayelorde-Sutton about the job?” I asked him, my stomach contracting.

  “Not a word of ’em,” he said, and his voice now sounded slightly anxious. “It all came through Miss Emerald. We rode out here together and saw what needed to be done.”

  I thought furiously for a moment, then I said:

  “Look, Mr. Harrington, it’s none of my business, but if you’ll take a tip from me, go straight down to the Estate office, get those papers she talked about, see the agent and find out who talked to him about including this place in the Heronslea lease. Then, no matter what the Gilroy agent says, get on the wire to Mr. Gayelorde-Sutton as soon as ever you can.”

  He looked pained and indecisive. “It must be authorized,” he argued. “Miss Emerald wouldn’t do a crazy thing like that without consulting her father.”

  “Wouldn’t she?” I said. “You don’t know Diana Gayelorde-Sutton as I do! Take my advice and check up right away.”

  I left him standing there, hands deep in his breeches pockets, a puzzled frown on his brown countryman’s face. Suddenly my brain fog had cleared. I was no closer to a solution of Gayelorde-Sutton’s strange behavior, but I had rumbled Diana’s plot. The penny had dropped when Harrington referred to my family link with the farm, and it had gone home the moment he told me that she had been acting independently in this matter. It was so simple that I was amazed I had not seen through her clumsy scheme long before, and I raced along the main road and down Foxhayes Hill to Whinmouth at a speed the old Morris had not traveled since she was new, in the early nineteen-twenties.

  This was her idea of a bumper surprise! This was her plan to force me out of a profession that she despised into one that she considered far more befitting a gentleman-husband. This—a tarted-up Foxh
ayes Farm—was my advance wedding present likely to cost her father three thousand pounds, plus whatever advance rent had been promised for the inclusion of the farm into the Heronslea lease. Whether I liked it or not, I was to become a yeoman, operating a newly renovated 250-acre farm, as a Heronslea tenant, and all this before I had had so much as a day’s training for the job.

  I wasted no time wondering how this plan of hers tied in with Gayelorde-Sutton’s sales talk of the previous day. Obviously he knew something about the farm, and was’ probably under the impression that I had far more capital than was the case. I could almost hear Diana lying to him: “He’s only a journalist now, Daddy, but he’s come into money and wants to farm!” I began to sweat at the thought of all the blarney she must have talked about me in order to bring a busy man like her father hotfoot to Devon, to have a look at his yeoman son-in-law.

  The fact that here was proof that Diana really did intend to marry me, that she had abundant faith in my ability to become a farmer, and that she was willing to commit her father to heavy expenditure on my behalf made no impression at all upon me. The fantastic recklessness of her gesture made me shudder, and so did her estimate of my pride. All this time I had been her slave. Nothing she had proposed was too risky or improbable for me to condone it and act upon it. Twice she had claimed me as a lover and over and over again she had assured me that no other man meant two straws to her, yet she was still able to go calmly about the business of buying me with her father’s money and enlisting me as tenant dependent upon her family’s grace and favor as landlord and patron.

  Before I clattered down Fish Street into Whinmouth I had a plan of my own. Gayelorde-Sutton had schemed, Diana had schemed, but neither had showed the least willingness to take me into their confidence. It was high time, I felt, that I started scheming, and I marched straight into Lawyer Hawthorne’s office and ordered him to sell my Observer shares for whatever he could get, providing the sale went through in twenty-four hours. He was startled and counseled delay, but I would not even listen to him. I had other things to do and shot off out of town again to my Uncle Mark’s stables, behind Teasel Wood.

  Mark had aged in the last few years and I knew that he was finding his muddled little business irksome and unprofitable. He was giving some promise of settling down at last and marrying one of his old flames, a hearty little widow who kept a boardinghouse in Jetty Road. He had been a frequent visitor there during her husband’s lifetime and the last time I had seen him he had joked about her wanting to look after him. “Though ’er’s a bit past it now, John,” he added, with one of his lewd grins.

  I found him standing in the little yard bullying Ned, his dull-witted stableman. When I said I had a proposition to put to him he led the way into his tumble-down cottage, which stood about a stone’s throw from the loose boxes in the shadow of the beech copse. It could have been a very attractive little dwelling if Uncle Mark had kept it clean, but now its big living room was cluttered with harness and dirty cooking utensils and the great open fireplace was blocked with a rusty old stove and litter of every description.

  “Do ’ee want that there cob after all?” he asked, for we had previously discussed the purchase of a neighbor’s skewbald.

  “No,” I told him, “I want the whole shooting match if you’re disposed to sell it!”

  He gaped at me. “You mean it?” he gasped, unable to believe his good fortune. “You really want to take over yer? Horses and all?”

  “Stables, horses, cottage, grazing, the lot!” I said. “What’s it worth, Uncle?”

  His eyes narrowed and he began to mumble something about me being Miriam’s boy and therefore entitled to a special price, but I knew him very well and cut him short.

  “It’s no good asking a silly price,” I said, “for I haven’t got much and I shall have to spend several hundred doing the place up. What about twelve-fifty, lock, stock and barrel?”

  “Damme, the horseflesh is worth five hundred,” he growled.

  “Don’t be silly,” I told him, “you couldn’t get three hundred for all six of them at the horse bazaar. I’m not daft, Uncle Mark, but I am in a hurry, and I’ve finished with newspaper work!”

  “Well that’s a relief, at all events,” he grunted, for his contempt for Uncle Reuben, and all Reuben’s works, had not been buried in his brother’s grave. “I’ll practically give ’ee the place, John—fifteen hundred.”

  “Thirteen-fifty,” I said. “It’s all I can afford!”

  He was far more eager to sell than I had anticipated. “Youm a bliddy old Jew!” he shouted, but we shook hands and I hustled him back to old Hawthorne to draw up a provisional agreement. In my absence Hawthorne had closed for nineteen hundred, so that I had a surplus of five hundred and fifty, less legal fees. As I intended to do the repairs by direct labor and to assist in the work myself, I considered this was more than sufficient. I had no clear idea what I would do with the place, but I knew that there was a good living in the livery stable, providing it was conducted on up-to-date lines, and I was sure that I could earn something more with the land, which comprised nearly fifty acres.

  By five o’clock that day the two deals were complete. I agreed to remain at the newspaper office until a substitute could be found and later on I drove out to Shepherdshey to enlist Nat Baker’s help in getting cottage and stables in order.

  The old sexton agreed to work by the hour and we went up there before dark. I made a list of the furnishings I thought we should need and Nat explored the structure, pronouncing it to be sound, despite its great age.

  Now that I had a place of my own, and a plan of campaign, however incomplete, I was as happy as a boy on holiday. It was Thursday when I bought the stables and by Sunday night Nat and I had transformed it. We made a vast bonfire of Uncle Mark’s rubbish and persuaded Ned, the stableman, to scrub the loose boxes and give the horses their first real grooming in months. Aunt Thirza and Uncle Luke rolled up with a truckload of their best secondhand pieces and Thirza stayed on to help with the springcleaning, leaving the cottage reeking of strong carbolic soap that mingled with the stink of creosote Nat was plastering on the fence rails.

  When they had all gone I toured the premises with a feeling of pride and achievement. I had a home, a small but promising home, and I had a means of livelihood, and both were inside the borders of Sennacharib!

  I decided to move in the following day, and after giving instructions to Ned, whom I decided to retain, I left the car in the yard and walked home across Teasel Wood, down the escarpment and along the elm bank of Heronslea to Shepherdshey. For the first time in my life I looked at the big house with a feeling of equality. I awaited Diana’s return with confidence.

  3.

  There was a letter on Monday morning, asking me to meet the eleven o’clock from Waterloo, due in Whinford about three-thirty. During the morning I had another idea. I went along to Awkright’s Garage and traded in my old Morris for fifty pounds. He had some good secondhand cars in his shed, so I looked them over. There was a re-sprayed Alvis sports that had been involved in a crash. Awkright wanted two-fifty for it, but I beat him down to two-twenty-five. It had a long, wicked-looking bonnet fastened down by straps, and a deep-throated exhaust that sounded like an airplane warming up. I took it out on a trial run, paid him his hundred and seventy-five and drove home to the quay to change into my best suit. On the way to Whinford I stopped at Kennard’s Nurseries and bought a huge armful of daffodils, narcissi, and purple iris. Then, feeling very artful and extremely pleased with myself, I drove to Whinford and awaited her train.

  She came down the platform followed by the inevitable porter and luggage. I never knew Diana to travel light. Wherever she went, be it only for the weekend, she took about a hundredweight of baggage. She looked extraordinarily chic and carefree, in her neat little two-piece and a close-fitting, Juliet-style straw hat that compressed her curls just so far, then split them over her shoulders. The moment she saw me she waved, broke into a run and kissed
me half a dozen times. I told the porter to bring the luggage to the Alvis:

  “Why Jan!” she exclaimed. “What on earth have you got there?”

  “One of several things,” I said smugly and stowed the luggage in the capacious trunk.

  “Flowers too! Why, Jan, you’re becoming almost gallant! Oh, I do love you so!” she added, ignoring the fact that the porter was still bustling around hoping to earn a bigger tip.

  He almost groveled when I gave him half a crown but it wasn’t the money, it was the Alvis and Diana. She climbed in and snuggled down in the red leather, shooting out her long legs and giving one of her luxurious, catlike stretches.

  “Mmmmm-mmmmm!” she cooed. “Whatever’s happened? Have you cashed in on your newspaper money?”

  “You’ll see,” I told her. “We’ll be making a call en route for Heronslea.”

  “You did give my message to Harrington, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but forget Foxhayes Hollow for the moment, we’ll go into all that later on!”

  She looked at me half-smiling as I let in the clutch and we roared off up the Station Hill.

  “Something sensational has happened to you while I’ve been away, Jan,” she said. “You’ve grown about two inches!” Then, probing me: “What did you think about the renovations at Foxhayes Hollow? Don’t you think Harrington is making a good job of it?”

  “Fine,” I said, “if someone has the idea of converting it into a roadhouse!”

  She did not know what to make of that, and it struck me then that we were beginning to learn the art of sparring after the manner of her father, a method of conversation we had never found it necessary to use before, not even when she was Emerald being conducted around the Tower of London.

  “There’s something funny about you this afternoon,” she complained. “Is it the car that’s making you sound so now-now-little-womanish?”

  I made no reply to this so after a moment she said: