Diana

by R. F Delderfield

  She said, touching my hand: “Did you come alone, Jan? Is nobody here but you?”

  “Just the parson,” I said and the huskiness of my voice surprised me.

  “He’s gone,” she said, “he drove off as I came in,” then: “Do you want to stay here or is there somewhere else we could go?”

  “How did you get out here?”

  “By bus. There’s another back at five.”

  “I’ve got a jeep,” I said. “We can go through the wood and up to the Old Ring. Do you know this area?”

  “No,” she said, “I’ve never been here before.”

  That was all we said at that time. It was like a pair of studiously polite strangers meeting in a park. Nobody overhearing us would have imagined that we had grown up together, lain in one another’s arms, conceived a child now nearly eight years old, or been separated by a world at war. And nobody would have imagined that I had just buried my wife.

  We went out into the churchyard and down to my jeep at the lychgate. A blackbird piped in the yew clump and across the valley an engine fussed over its trucks. Apart from these two distinct and isolated sounds the landscape was silent and empty of life.

  A doubt seemed to strike her as she opened the door of the jeep and began to climb in.

  “You don’t mind, Jan? You wouldn’t rather be by yourself? If you would, I …”

  “Damn it, get in!” I snapped, and then, relenting. “I’m glad you’re here, Di,” and meant it from the bottom of my heart.

  We drove out across the valley and climbed the hill through the woods to a plateau, fringed with firs. It was, I imagine, a favourite summer picnic spot in peacetime, but there was nobody here at this time of year. We could see the camp and the sprawling town spewed along the coastal strip and beyond it the blue-grey line of the Channel. I knew somehow that she was comparing it with the view from Foxhayes over Nun’s Head and also that she was homesick and desperately unsure of herself. I think she had relied upon surprise to win a headstart and when she found me shockproof she was at a loss how to begin.

  “How the hell did you get over here?” I asked her presently.

  “What does it matter?”

  “It does matter. We’ve got to begin somewhere so let’s begin there!”

  “It wasn’t all that difficult,” she said, deliberately. “I refused to put anything on paper and they badly needed a progress report on Yves’ activities at the factory and I was the only one who could supply it so I blackmailed Raoul and he had to arrange it. It would have been impossible last year but we’ve got secret landing grounds now. I came over in a Lysander and I’m going back in one!”

  She had found and used her sally-port.

  “You’re going back in one!” It hadn’t occurred to me that she was here temporarily, that she would run the frightful risks of a return journey to accomplish her crazy plan of enlisting me in the Resistance.

  She looked at me with genuine surprise. “Well, of course I’m going back! I’ve got to go back, whether you come or not!” Then, a little pompously: “After all, this isn’t a private war, Jan!”

  “You’re trying damned hard to make it one!” I retorted and she looked at me very steadily, almost pityingly, I thought. Under her scrutiny I lost my advantage.

  “I don’t think I am, Jan,” she said, “but you are! Even Raoul understood that much!”

  “Look here, Di,” I protested. “Raoul absolutely disapproves of the whole thing! You went to work on him the way you used to work on me when you’d made up your mind about a certain course of action. Raoul may act tough but I daresay he’s as gullible as the rest of us!”

  “Raoul was right about something else,” she said. “You hate me so much that you can’t imagine I may have grown a little or learned anything.”

  “I don’t hate you, Di, but I don’t believe you’re any different, or ever could be.”

  She sighed and looked away, out over the crest of the hanging wood to the sea. “All right then, let’s talk about something else, Jan. I haven’t very long, I’ve got to be back in town this evening. Tell me about your wife if you like, tell me if you made a better job of marriage on the bounce than I did! You should have, because you didn’t really marry on impulse. What was she like? Anything like me at all? They say men always fall for the same kind of woman.”

  “Alison wasn’t in the least like you,” I said, “not in the smallest particular! Here …” and I dragged out my wallet and gave her a snapshot taken during our three-day honeymoon in Anglesey the previous September.

  As Diana reached out to take the photograph I noticed that her hands were shaking. Not simply trembling, as from nervousness or embarrassment but shaking so badly that she had difficulty in closing her finger and thumb on the creased print. She saw that I had noticed this and bent her head. Her cheeks were flushed and there was nothing pretty about the blush that coloured them. It was a hard, brickish blush and made her skin look coarse. She looked closely at the snapshot.

  “She was pretty, Jan, and very dutiful-little-wifey! Just like I imagined, in fact, just right!” and suddenly she returned the photograph and turned her head away but not quickly enough to conceal the tears that brimmed over and ran down her cheeks. I had never seen her weep before and her tears embarrassed me. I put the snapshot away and gave her a moment or two to recover. She made a great effort to do so but it was not wholly successful.

  I cleared my throat and said: “Look, Di, why the hell don’t we have done with this nonsense? You’ve got out of France by a miracle, so why not call it a day and go back to Drip and Yvonne in Heronslea. I don’t know, maybe after the war we could start from scratch again. I can’t think how but we might, or you might! All I know is, right now you’re in a far worse state than when I took you home after that accident before the war. You aren’t fit to go stealing milk bottles, never mind pitting your wits against those bastards!”

  By the time I had finished she got herself in hand and blew her nose on a handkerchief about two inches square.

  “Raoul didn’t even begin to make you understand, did he?”

  “He didn’t try,” I said.

  “It was a mistake expecting him to break the ice,” she went on, “I didn’t realise how thick it was!”

  She put her hand on the door-catch and turned, facing me squarely. “Oh God, how you must have hated to let it fester like this! It’s odd but when we met that time during the fall of France I didn’t notice it. You were on your dignity and the same old stiff-necked Jan, but there was no rancour gnawing your heart out! Why was that? Why didn’t I notice? Was it because you were touched by finding out Yvonne was your child or has it built up in you because you found somebody else? Did Alison teach you to hate me? Could anyone be so bloody jealous of the past?”

  “Alison wasn’t jealous of anything or anybody. That was about the one thing you and she had in common!” I said.

  “Then perhaps my timing was bad. Is that it, Jan? Is it seeing me so soon after losing her?”

  Was it? I didn’t know. I was beginning to wonder if I knew anything worth knowing about Diana or Alison, or even how to jog along living for the day, as most people seem to be able to do without much trouble. I didn’t know whether I wanted to spend the rest of my life mooning over this woman or to turn my back on her and forget she ever existed. Millions and millions of words have been written about first love but no one has ever explained why the roots it sends down tug this way and that, tearing the heart out of you, uplifting you, plunging you down a vertical drop into a pit of seething, scalding emotions. First love ought to be a steady and sobering something that enables men and women to measure distances and calculate risks. It ought to be a simple melody that is easy to remember, not an overture played by a brass band.

  “We’ve only got about an hour, Di, providing you really are going back with your cousin,” I said.

  “I’m going back,” she said and lifted her hand from the catch. For the first time since we began talking, ther
e was hope in her eyes.

  “Right,” I said, “then don’t let’s waste the hour starting innumerable hares. Let’s go over it all sanely and logically as I imagine your tough-guy relative has already done. First, tell me just what you hope to achieve by staying married to a toad like Yves de Royden? Tell me, what have you achieved so far and what have you got lined up for the future? He’s working for Hitler or Raoul said, but Raoul dribbled out information like a Security Officer lecturing a recruit. Is it Raoul’s intention to blow up his factories or cut his throat or hold him to ransom, or what? And anyway, where do you fit and where, in the name of sanity, would I if I was crazy enough to sign on for the job?”

  My tirade had given her a chance to compose herself. When she answered she was within hailing distance of Diana planning a swoop on one of her mother’s Conservative fêtes.

  “Well, Jan, which question do you want answered first?”

  “Any of them! Give me the griff! Don’t keep hinting at a sensational coup d’état without telling me who’s to be made king.”

  She was silent for a moment, considering, then she said:

  “Do the words ‘Vergeltungswaffe Eins’ mean anything to you?”

  “Not a thing. The only German I know is ‘Kamerad,” ‘Mein Gott!’ and ‘Gott mit uns!’ It is German, I suppose?”

  “It means ‘Reprisal Weapon No. 1’ and Yves and his father are helping to make it at this moment.”

  “One of those dreary Secret Weapons? We’ve had a string of them starting with the magnetic mine. Is this one so special?”

  “We don’t know what it is, we haven’t a clue so far. We’ve been exploring blind alleys ever since Rance arrived and took over.”

  “And who is Rance? A Jerry scientist?”

  “No, he’s French, or pretends to be. He was in charge of one of the de Royden experimental labs in the southeast but six months ago Yves’ father installed him as Director of the Paris factory.”

  “I thought Yves was the boss.”

  “So he is, in a way, but he and Rance are very close, at least they work closely together. It’s a poisonous relationship.”

  “How do you mean, ‘poisonous’? Is Yves a queer?”

  “Not in the accepted sense,” she said casually, “at least, I don’t think so. At first I thought Rance was his boyfriend, but …” She faltered for a moment and then went on, “Rance definitely isn’t a queer, he’s just … just one hundred per cent evil!”

  “How does this relationship affect you? You have nothing to do with the factory, do you?”

  “Nothing whatever, but socially I’m expected to pull my weight.”

  “You mean, entertain and that sort of thing?”

  “Especially ‘that sort of thing’!”

  I digested this. It sounded like the plot of a Continental film but not really any more improbable than many things that had happened to Diana. Once again I made the effort it needed to remember Yves from the one occasion I had met him and from the pictures I had seen of him in the days when I was a lovesick reporter keeping track of Diana through the glossy magazines and gossip columns in the papers. All I had was a memory of a slim, undistinguished-looking young man, always faultlessly dressed, always hovering in the shadow of his race-going father, always suggesting but never quite establishing the outward mannerisms of a pansy.

  “Never mind about Rance,” I said, “tell me about Yves. What kind of man is he and what kind of marriage did you have before Jerry took over?”

  “It wasn’t a marriage at all, Jan,” she said, but without bitterness, “it was an arrangement Yves is extremely intelligent and very ambitious and his main interest was always the firm and its future. Most of the de Roydens are playboys—Raoul was until the Nazis turned him into something more positive—and the old man, Yves’ father, is a kind of rumbustious patriarch presiding over them and their social legend.” She saw this confused me and tried to enlarge it.

  “It must be difficult for you to understand. We’ve got an entirely different kind of upper crust over here, a good deal healthier, I’d say, and anyway less vicious. I learned my way around easily enough because I spent a good deal of time in France, you remember, after mother found out about us and determined to keep us apart. I lived with the de Roydens then and went everywhere with them. In a cussed sort of way, Yves’ father is very fond of me, even now.”

  “Did you ever live with Yves as man and wife?”

  “Oh yes, for a year or so and then he backed out and began to devote more and more time to his factories and I went about with his set, mostly his relatives. His father was good to me. They have a curious sense of snobbery, they don’t mind lovers as long as one stays inside the family circle. It’s a very wide circle.”

  I think she thought that she was going to shock me with this information. There was an element of masochism in the admission but I wasn’t shocked, just puzzled that a woman of her positive energy and courage had been prepared to pay this kind of price for wealth and security, yet even this shouldn’t really have surprised me. All through my youth and early manhood I had been fighting her background and I only won the odd skirmish. Every major engagement had resulted in a humiliating defeat, all the way to Waterloo.

  “You see, Yves had a dream,” she went on, presently, “the kind of dream a certain class of northerner had over here halfway through the nineteenth century. He believes machines are superior in every way to human beings, more efficient, more useful and a whole heap more predictable. That’s why he was able to adapt himself to the Occupation and pay lip service to the Nazis’ political philosophy. He sees the world as a kind of vast factory, controlled by a select few who understand why the wheels go round. Nothing else touches him at all and all the battle-cries and patriotic claptrap on both sides are just the cries of children playing in the street. In his Shangri-la everything is controlled by buttons and switches and the Nazi programme, with a master-race using experts like him to control serfs, would suit his book far better than a democracy hamstrung by demands for welfare, week-ending and individual privacy. He’s not unique, of course, I daresay you could find a handful like him in every country in the world, particularly Russia and America but they don’t take over because no other industrial nation has Germany’s tradition of obedience.”

  Listening to her I began to understand a little of France’s collapse. You couldn’t learn this kind of thing from political hand-outs or radio news-bulletins. I also understood something of the dismay of men like Raoul de Royden, who were intelligent enough to have guilty consciences over their contribution to what happened in the West in the summer of 1940. Away and beyond this, however, I was impressed by Diana’s grasp of the situation and by the evidence of a certain maturing of mind and spirit that was quite new about her, at least as far as I was concerned. In the old days she had never cared a fig for politics, national or local, and was bored by newspapers and popular talking-points. It was clear that she had been doing some thinking lately and had discussed these things with somebody reasonably well-informed on the Collapse. I wondered if it was Raoul, although he had not struck me as a man who would discuss politics with a woman.

  “How close are you to that cold-fish cloak-and-dagger merchant?” I asked her and she smiled, touching my knee and tilting her head in another gesture I remembered.

  “Not with Raoul,” she said, “not even in the old days. I’m not his type and since he joined the Resistance he’s been celibate. We take our pleasures as sadly as the British these days, Jan.”

  I thought for a moment, realising that even now I had not learned very much about her or the situation.

  “How is it you won’t be missed? The round trip is bound to occupy several days.”

  “I’ve got two alibis,” she said, “men and antiques. Both are permissible within reasonable limits and, anyway, Yves and Rance are both on an inspection tour in Germany.”

  “This Secret Weapon, have you really got on to something, or is it too Top Secret to t
alk about?”

  “We’ve got very little but the name as yet. I happened to see a file with the words ‘Vergeltungxwaffe Eins’ on the outside. The rest is pure conjecture so far.”

  “That’s pretty vague, isn’t it?”

  She laughed for the first time since we had met that day. I had forgotten what a joyous sound Diana’s laughter could be.

  “Oh Jan, you haven’t changed a bit! Do you expect the Nazis to drop leaflets about it during one of their Baedeker raids? Of course it’s vague, and there’s only a hundred to one chance we shall ever get any direct information on a thing as big as that but we’ve found one bit of jig-saw and all over Europe people who hate their guts are staking their lives looking for other pieces! When we get five or six we can start guessing. The point is, I’ve got the best view, the only view, as far as the de Royden contribution is concerned. I know where Yves goes and who he sees. Whatever I pass on is sifted and sorted and pieced together by people who are experts in their own particular field.”

  “I can appreciate all that,” I said, “but what I don’t get is what makes you think I could do anything but make a bloody great fool of myself in this business. I can imagine some clot of a C.O., or amateur Security Officer, suggesting I volunteer, but not you, unless you’ve completely forgotten the kind of person I am. I could never keep you in the dark about a birthday present.”

  “There’s such a thing as double-bluff,” she said, “and it so happens, by a series of coincidences, that you’re qualified to play it. You’re about as far removed from the run-of-the-mill Undercover Strong-Arm type as it’s possible to be, and that’s not a bad disguise to start with, but you’ve got several bonus qualifications you don’t even know about. You speak French with a Canadian accent, and not at all as most Englishmen speak it. You’ve had a certain amount of technical training with the artillery and you’ve worked in the antique trade. If necessary, we could pass you off as a Montreal-educated picture expert. Not a soul knows you over there and you might even get into the house if you have to. We’ve been over all this with your Special Operations Executive and if you don’t trust me you might trust them. They’ve done a pretty good job so far.”