I hired out horses to people who wanted a ride but I never accompanied customers on their hacks, or gave lessons to beginners. I disliked my own company but I hated everyone else’s. I spent most of the days exercising the horses alone, or digging in the extensive vegetable patch behind the loose boxes. The nights I passed in drinking, sometimes in the private bar of the Rifleman but more often alone in the cottage. Gin and French was my tipple and I accounted for a prodigious amount of it during that summer and autumn. The weather was generally depressing, with whole weeks of rain, leaden skies and brief, gusty intervals when the sun tried to warm the sodden woods and waterlogged meadows.
Sometimes I made a halfhearted attempt to put Diana out of my mind and tire myself with heavy spells of work about the tumbled-down premises, but these bouts seldom lasted more than a day or so. Soon I was back to brooding over the bottle or, what was worse, brooding along the vales and gorse plateaux of Sennacharib where every bush, every pattern of copse and hedgerow reminded me of Diana, of something she had once said or the ring of her laughter as I had heard it when we had cantered over this ground during the past few years.
I recall very little of that period, only an odd day or two here and there when I was so defeated and depressed that I set Margot, the best mare in the stable, at hedges and ditches that were beyond her power to jump. I won’t say that I behaved suicidally but I was certainly indifferent as to whether or not we parted company at a hazard, and sometimes I came home bruised and battered by heavy falls.
I deliberately cut myself from all contact with the town and village. My stores, such as they were, were brought up by Fred, and I seldom saw a newspaper. Had I possessed a radio, and kept in touch with the news, I might have derived savage satisfaction from the steady deterioration of affairs in Europe during those months. It was the period when Spain was bleeding to death, Mussolini was blasting and gassing his way into Abyssinia, and Hitler was screeching threats into loudspeakers at Nuremburg, Munich and elsewhere. As it was I had no interest in the victims of Guernica and slaughtered Abyssinians. I had plenty of troubles of my own and I was almost insanely jealous of them.
Sometimes, I think, I was a little mad, as on my twenty-second birthday, the cheerless anniversary of the day that I met Diana in the larch wood behind Heronslea. On that day, hell-bent on turning the knife in my wounds, I went out with the gun, eager to vent my spleen on any rabbit or pheasant that presented itself. I walked up to Teasel Bend, crossed the steppingstones and went along the edge of the wood as far as the Big Oak paddock. Here, just as I was climbing the rail, I spotted the two buzzards circling above their favorite hunting ground.
The sight of them convulsed me with rage. I jumped off the rail and ran shouting across the turf until I was about twenty yards short of the oak. It was at this very spot where I had first watched them, an hour or so before Keeper Croker pounced on me in the wood. I put the gun to my shoulder and fired both barrels.
They were too high to hit but on the report they mewed defiance and dropped swiftly down the slope to the trees. Then I felt a little ashamed of myself and abandoned the idea of shooting, humping myself back to the river and following it down as far as the track under the wood.
One of the few impressions I recall of that dismal interlude was the curious effect that one’s mood has upon the aspect of a familiar landscape. Sennacharib had always held for me a holy significance. It was my private Arcady, my Isle of Avalon, my Never-Never Land, and my greatest joy had been to watch the seasons change on the two-mile slope between the common and the first cottages of Shepherdshey. I had looked across the woods for the cloud formations driven by the south wind and my greatest compensation for the passing of summer had been the slow march of copper and rust red across the tops of the Heronslea beeches. It was always exciting to find a late foxglove on Teasel Bank, or early wild daffodils in the marshy part of the larch wood. I had always felt better for a walk or a ride up here, but now Sennacharib’s power to heal must have crossed the Channel with Diana. The autumn colors seemed jaded and nondescript, it seemed always to be drizzling and the wind was forever in the southwest, driving sleet and shredded cloud across the estuary. Even when the sun shone, the undergrowth had the poisonous brightness of Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and where the water had failed to drain away, acres of alien swamp had spread to the riverbanks. I suppose much of this was my fancy but it was how I saw it that year. Where there once had been magic there was dullness that pressed on me like a rain-soaked cap.
Autumn passed, then winter, with no snow but still more rain. I rode, walked, dug, chopped wood, groomed the horses, and withdrew more and more into myself until I was little better than a morose recluse, inhabiting an isolated pigsty. It was ten months now since I had said goodby to Diana on the station platform and I had almost stopped thinking of her as a person. She now merged into the general tedium of my life, at one with the driving wind, the gray, empty sky and the eternal drizzle. Then, one February afternoon, my life changed course again, but this time Diana’s contribution to the switch was remote and indirect.
I had been over to Castle Ferry to find a sweep and try and get him to do something with the smoking chimney of the cottage. It was dusk when I returned and as I trudged up the muddy track I noticed to my surprise that the oil lamp was glowing in the window. I quickened my step, irritated at the prospect of an uninvited guest and determined to send him packing as quickly as possible. When I threw open the door I was amazed to see Drip, the friendly ex-governess, tending the fire.
She seemed to be very much at home. The room had been subjected to an intensive spring cleaning. Freshly washed curtains were drying on a line over the fireplace, a week’s accumulation of dirty crockery had been cleared, the table laid for supper, the slated floor had been scrubbed, and all the rugs brushed and beaten. It astonished me that one person could have achieved so much during my brief absence.
Miss Rodgers did not look a day older than when I had last seen her, now getting on for five years ago. She was one of those plump, breathless little women who display far more energy than the lean, stringy ones, and her round, good-natured face was shining with health and the heat of the huge fire. In the soft glow of the lamp the room looked cozier and far more inviting than it had ever looked in my brief tenancy, or during the lengthy occupation of Uncle Mark.
“Come in and take your filthy boots off, Jan!” she said, as though we had been sharing the cottage for months. “I couldn’t find slippers, so I warmed a pair of outdoor shoes. The fish is nearly ready and the kettle’s boiling. You make the tea, while I cut bread and butter.”
“Where on earth have you sprung from, Miss Rodgers,” I asked, “and how the devil did you get in? I locked up when I went out at midday.”
“You don’t hide the key in a very original place,” she said, smiling. “After I’d drawn blank under the bricks outside the door, I tried underneath the water butt. This place was a disgrace to a Christian! It positively stank when I came in and until the wind changed I was half suffocated by smoke. You’ll have to get that chimney seen to at once.”
Not knowing how to reply to this I said nothing, changing my boots and warming myself at the fire, where some fillets of hake were hissing in the long-handled pan beneath the spit. I noticed that the pan had been scoured. The smell of cooking put a sharp edge to my appetite.
“I came down from Wales last night,” she said, “and called at your uncle’s on the quay. As a matter of fact I stayed the night there, and your aunt is very worried about you. She has need to be, in all conscience. What kind of a man are you to turn your back on everybody like this, apart from living like a savage, and a very dirty savage at that?”
“It suits me well enough,” I grumbled, but my mouth was watering for those fillets and hunger coaxed the sourness from my voice.
“It doesn’t suit you at all,” she snapped, “because you’re really a very sociable person. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, a great hulking lout like you, m
ooning over a bit of a girl all these months! Haven’t you got any pride? I’d be a charwoman before I let a man do that to me! Not that one ever has,” she added, and winked so saucily that I laughed for the first time in months.
“And don’t call me ‘Miss Rodgers’ any more,” she pattered. “I’ve always known that you and Emerald referred to me as ‘Drip’ and I don’t mind a bit because, as things have turned out, I’m not nearly such a drip as either one of you has turned out to be! Here”—she lifted the pan from the fire and tipped the fillets into a dish—“get that into you and when you’ve finished you and I are going to have a very frank discussion, young man!”
We ate a silent but enjoyable supper, finishing the new loaf Drip had brought and making inroads into a pound of the best Cheddar that came up in the same basket. Afterwards I helped her to wash up, and when all the crockery was back on the dresser we built up the fire and I sat opposite her, smoking. It was by far the most peaceful hour I had ever passed in that room.
“Well,” she said, breaking the long, satisfying silence, “where do we begin, Jan?”
I asked her to tell me about herself and she said that her sister had died, and that she had suddenly been homesick for the West Country and had come down with the intention of buying a small property and ending her days in the district where she had spent the happiest part of her life.
“I was very happy at Heronslea,” she said, “although you may not have thought so. It almost broke my heart to leave and I kept in touch with the family right up to the time of the crash. I had a pension, of course, and it didn’t stop when poor Mr. Gayelorde-Sutton killed himself. It wasn’t very much but my sister and I ran a candy store and we managed very comfortably. Now I’ve got sufficient to last me out, providing I’m careful of course—but that’s enough about me. Tell me everything about you and Diana—everything, mind you, no skipping the important pieces! Start from the time you two silly children were fetched home from that dreadful island.”
I told her everything, how I had fared in London, how I had run into Diana outside Fortnum’s, and all that happened afterwards, up to the day that I called on Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton in Holland Park and began my nonstop sulk.
She listened carefully and made no comment. Then, without looking up, she said, “I had a letter from Diana last week. She’s got a little girl called Yvonne and she’s living outside a town called Saumur. Do you know it?”
“Not that part of France,” I said, “but I’ve heard of it. It’s somewhere on the Loire, isn’t it?”
“That’s right, but I’m surprised you’ve never been to Anjou. You speak French very well, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, glumly. “I learned to please Diana!”
She flushed a little at that and her head came up, her eyes regarding me seriously over the rims of steel-framed spectacles.
“Is that all you did on that account?” she demanded, crisply.
“No,” I said, “not by a long chalk!”
“What else, Jan?” The voice was much kinder now.
“I gave up secondhand furnishings for small-town journalism and then small-town journalism for this. I left home for London and then left London for home. I nearly broke my neck learning to ride horses in order to be with her. I learned how to ride a motorcycle in order to take her to a single dance. I was always in and out of hot water on her account, but I’m not grousing at that, for I judged it was worth it and I got my payoff at the time. What I do begrudge her is time, Drip—the whole of my blasted youth!”
She nodded as though she understood and sympathized and I fell into her trap. “All those years I never made a single friend,” I said. “Do you know anyone else rising twenty-three who had grown up in a town like Whinmouth and not made a single real friend, male or female?”
“There was never another girl, Jan?”
“One, before Diana came back, but I only saw her twice. I dropped her like a hot coal after one fresh look at Diana.”
Drip carefully removed her glasses and set them down. She did this as though she was playing for time before answering.
“Jan,” she said, at length, “have you ever wondered what you might have done with your life if you hadn’t met Diana?”
In all my moonings about Sennacharib during the past ten months I had never considered this. It was the sort of question that did not present itself, like a man wondering what it might have been like to have been born a woman.
“No,” I answered, “I don’t think I have, Drip. Can you tell me?”
“I can tell you precisely,” she said. “If you hadn’t met Diana that day in the woods you would still have been humping furniture around Whinmouth on your Uncle Luke’s barrow!”
I considered this and accepted it as true but it did not seem to prove very much.
“I was happy enough pushing that barrow, Drip.”
She made a gesture of impatience, a violent one for her.
“Don’t you see, Jan? Everything you are as a person you owe to Diana! Diana performed a kind of miracle on you and in spite of what’s happened I don’t think you have any right to quarrel with it.”
“Is it much of a miracle? I was Uncle Luke’s errand boy at fifteen and at twenty-two I’m a bad-tempered hermit, living just as you said, like a grubby savage in a kraal.”
“That isn’t Diana’s fault, it’s yours! There isn’t the slightest reason for indulging in this spectacular sulk, apart from the fact that I believe, deep down, you’re enjoying it in a gloomy, perverse kind of way. Because of Diana you got yourself a better job! Because of Diana you learned to ride and manage horses! Because of Diana you learned a foreign language! Diana taught you to dance, taught you to look for adventure, taught you how to buy clothes, cured your accent, taught you your table manners if the truth’s known, and goodness knows how many other things that you’ve forgotten or are in the process of forgetting, or have even come to believe you acquired by your own will power. You make me sick, Jan Leigh! Look at yourself in the mirror! Think about yourself! Talk to yourself if you like, but if there’s a spark of honesty left in you, you’ll end up admitting that Diana enlarged your life and gave it a shape and purpose that it could never have had if you’d married one of those bovine girls I used to see pushing their prams up and down Whinmouth quay on Sunday afternoons. Now you can get that car out and run me back to your uncle’s, but don’t imagine I’m going to leave you alone! I’m moving in here; for the time being I’ve found my little place in the country. You don’t have to pay me but you do have to pull yourself together, and you won’t see the last of me until you have, so there!”
It was a long and vehement speech for Drip and it left her rather breathless, so much so that I laughed outright and she laughed to hear me laugh. I drove her back to Uncle Luke’s and we all had a pot of tea in the kitchen before I returned home. The next day she kept her word, moving in bag and baggage, and we lived there, like aunt and nephew, until our world went mad.
It was a happy time, those last two and a half years under Teasel Wood. The stable prospered. I started a poultry farm, and Drip kept the premises as bright and cozy as a tea cozy in an illustrated fairy-tale book. She stayed on when I took a middle-aged Whinmouth gardener-groom into partnership and joined the army, in the autumn of 1939, and on that birthday, my twenty-fifth, she sent a cake to the battery in which I was serving outside Lille.
She took a big chance on that cake. It was made in the cottage bread oven and she had piped it with a large, pink heart. In the center of the heart was my name, transfixed by an arrow, and the point of the arrow passed through her own initials, piped near the rim.
I was cutting into it during an air-raid alarm that had sent us to ground when Ginger Beavis, the bombardier, exclaimed, “Those marzipan dots around the edge! In this half-light they look just like emeralds!”
Chapter Twelve
THE FACT that I had learned French all those years ago, and had been sufficiently interested to improve it during my Lo
ndon period and subsequently, stood me in good stead when the war came. Or did it? I was soon winkled out of the friendly antiaircraft battery and attached to Intelligence H.Q. in Paris. When the big breakthrough began, in May 1940, I was hustled down to Bordeaux to make arrangements for the evacuation of civilian personnel.
The great exodus had hardly begun, so that the journey southwest was tolerable, but by the time I arrived in Bordeaux it was a city of bewilderment and seething rumor, with nobody from politician to refugee knowing what was happening, or likely to happen, hour by hour.
When the panzers smashed through the Allied line and the British army began its retreat upon Dunkirk, I had urgent instructions to get my people aboard. My immediate superior, a major, was badly wounded in an air raid on the harbor, and from then on I had to use my initiative, sorting out the claims of the various groups, civilian and military, French, British, Dutch, Polish and even Spanish, who besieged me for a passage to Britain.
It was a thankless, harassing job. For a period of four days I went without sleep and on the fifth, when I had dispatched two crowded coal boats and had seen another sink under a Stuka attack, I was too dazed and dispirited to take much interest in the war. Then a Dutch skipper came to me and put his thousand-ton tramp at my disposal. I sent my sergeant to collect any stray units in the area and get them aboard as soon as possible, for the Dutchman was as impatient to be gone as everyone else in that fear-crazed city and told me that, empty or laden, he intended to clear the Gironde on the early morning tide.
The weather was insufferably hot. At that stage of the evacuation I was operating from a slipway and ferryboat landing at Blaye, just across the river from Bordeaux, and I had commandeered the ferryboat office, a squat, one-story building near the water’s edge. The would-be immigrants formed a long, untidy queue down to the waterside and a line of battered trucks, military vans, and hideously overloaded Citroëns and Renaults stretched from the ferryboat office to the main road, more than two miles inland.
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