“It’s all I want, Di,” I said, earnestly, “I can’t think of another thing I care a damn about!”
“Good,” she said, bending forward and kissing me lightly and having done so she laid her cheek alongside my bandages and slipped her cool hand into the open front of my pyjamas jacket, and let her fingers slide across my breast and under my ribs. At this precise moment the plump V.A.D. marched in with breakfast but Diana made no attempt to withdraw and the wretched girl almost dropped the tray trying to avert her glance.
“Did you bring any for me?” asked Diana, cozily.
“Why, of course, Madam,” said the girl, as though it was quite usual for hospitals to serve early morning visitors with breakfast.
“Then I’ve got a present for you for being so nice to my Jan,” said Diana, disengaging herself and opening an enormous white handbag that she had somehow acquired in the interval after our escape.
The girl looked startled. “You needn’t do anything like that, Madam! It’s wonderful to feel caught up in the real war at last! Ohhhh no, no, I couldn’t…!” and she backed away as Diana produced a brooch set with small emeralds. It probably cost her something between fifty and a hundred pounds. “No, really, I should get into trouble, I …!”
“Oh rubbish!” said Diana, impatiently, “I bought it for you! If it sets the matron and sister by the ears don’t show it to them, or just say your boy-friend bought it for your birthday!”
I wondered if the V.A.D. had a boy-friend and if she had, whether he would ever be able to afford a gift like that. Coming from most people the present would have seemed vulgar, but not from Diana. She could bestow expensive gifts in such a casual way that they were always acceptable. The girl stared at the brooch, absolutely overwhelmed, so I said:
“Let’s eat! I’m ravenous!” and the girl gulped, pocketed the brooch and took refuge in her professional duties.
Chapter Eight
I WAS detained in Cheriton Bishop Cottage Hospital for the better part of three weeks. de Royden’s blow had come very close to cracking my skull. The sharp edges of the screw-on nut had done the damage, stripping the scalp and causing lacerations that made probing difficult and very painful. Digby-Warren, the V.A.D.’s heart-throb, was not so competent as he liked to pretend and in the end they had to call in an R.A.F. specialist who was satisfied that there were no bone splinters in the wound. He warned me, however, that I might have severe headaches for a month or so, but insisted that there was no permanent injury. The headache warning was timely and I used it to get two months’ sick leave on discharge from hospital.
My old fuddy-duddy Group-Captain came to see me before I left and was very pleasant in a guarded kind of way, about my efforts in France. He said that when I was fit I could join Group H.Q. staff as an Intelligence Officer and I told him I would be glad to take the job. There was no immediate prospect of being posted abroad and the action I had seen in the last few weeks was more than enough to satisfy me for the remainder of the war. I was frank about this and the old chap chuckled.
“Oh I daresay you might get a jolt when the Second Front opens,” he said, “but that won’t be for a year or more. These clots who attend rallies in Trafalgar Square and chalk slogans on walls haven’t a clue what is involved. They want to see you over at Free French H.Q., by the way, but you’ll have heard about that?”
As soon as I felt fit I went up to town without waiting for Diana, who had done one of her disappearing acts again although she phoned every night. I didn’t worry about her now that she was home and dry. I thought it might be a good idea to let her get re-acclimatised in private. She sounded happy enough and Drip wrote me saying how popular she was with the children and how fit and cheerful she seemed.
The visit to the Air Ministry and Free French H.Q. did a good deal to restore my sense of proportion. Up to that time I had never been more than half reconciled to Diana’s view of the war, her “six-of-one-half-a-dozen-of-the-other” outlook, with a modest bias in favour of the allies. Diana saw the struggle as a war within a war and I had always felt her unorthodoxy had its roots in her antipathy towards any kind of discipline or collective effort. A few hours at the centre of the Allied web enabled me to get a glimpse of things from her viewpoint. de Royden’s money and position must have opened windows on the breeding ground of war that had been denied people like myself, and there were, as I saw, plenty of excuses for the cynicism. All her life Diana had moved in an atmosphere of deals, mergers and on the higher levels of what the Americans now call “payola.” It was she who had told me of the encouragement given to Fascism by groups of French and British politicians. All this is generally known now, but it wasn’t then, not to the rank and file fighting the war. Had it not been for her, I doubt very much if I would have recognized the childish place-seeking and pettiness that fidgeted under the mantle of patriotism in the offices where plans were hatched and invitations were sent out to the little folk to die gloriously on behalf of this cause or that. I saw and was questioned by half-a-dozen minor notables, French and British, during my stay in town and not one of them impressed me as much as, say, Raoul de Royden, or a Grenadier Guards sergeant whom I happened to see during the Dunkirk debâcle polishing his boots at a road block while he awaited the appearance of German tanks north of Lille. I was very glad to turn my back on it all for a couple of months and when I pocketed my leave pass and crossed London to keep my appointment with Diana, I felt like a schoolboy going on holiday after a gruelling first term at school. One side of my head was shaved to the skin and the headaches the specialist had promised were prowling around on the edges of the scar but these were minor worries. I knew now what it felt like to enjoy what the trench veterans of an earlier war called a “Blighty” and I meant to squeeze every drop of satisfaction from our incredible luck.
Diana had phoned to say she had got her car and would pick me up at any point I named as soon as I was through. This was too good a chance to miss so I told her, chuckling, that I would meet her outside Swan & Edgar’s at eleven o’clock on the first morning of my leave. The sharp angle of Piccadilly and Regent Street had been our adolescent rendezvous. Here she had come whenever she had played truant and I was able to travel up from Devon on a football excursion, and here she had appeared after her harrowing experience at the inquest on the victims of her car accident. Our association was like that from the beginning. Localities played an important part in it, for the dream we shared encouraged us to respect the backgrounds in which it had begun. It was foolish, I suppose, and even childish, but for us at least it had significance.
I wondered what kind of car she had been able to find and when she coasted round from Regent Street and pulled up alongside the kerb I laughed aloud. It was clear that she too was a victim of nostalgia, for she appeared driving an outrageously flamboyant sports model of the ’twenties, with wire wheels and a bonnet as long as a horse. It was a 1927 model with an engine-throb like a badly-serviced fighter plane and thick leather straps to hold the bonnet casing in place. Its exhaust growled and spluttered when she slipped into neutral and its last owner had painted it silver and blue. To sit in that car was to be transported back to a world of “Old Boys” and “Chin-Chins”, to a time when people danced the Charleston and used words like “topping”, to days when girls wore skirts inches above their knees and young men strummed “Ain’t She Sweet” on five-shilling ukuleles.
Diana was delighted at the impression the car made on me. She crouched low in the bucket seat, her curls imprisoned under a headscarf and we zoomed down Piccadilly and through Knightsbridge and Hammersmith to the Great West Road, playing hard at being kids again and enjoying every moment of it. I forgot the war and Rance and Yves and the tenderness of my skull. I was young again and more in love than I had ever been.
Notwithstanding its age the car had plenty of power and Diana pushed it along at a spanking pace. Soon Staines and Salisbury were behind us and after sandwiches and a drink in a pub I took the wheel and we turned on to a s
econd-class road and crossed the border into the wooded country of east Somerset.
There had been a long, dry spell and the cow-parsley in the hedges was bowed with dust. Women in aprons stood at cottage doors and watched us pass and old men in corduroys lumbered in the fields, looking like figures in a Moreland landscape. There was a kind of timelessness down here that banished not only World War II but all that had happened since August, 1914. It was like driving backward into the 19th century.
As we crossed the Devon-Somerset border and neared the coast I could sense her mounting excitement. She sat more upright and turned her head from side to side, sniffing the air like a pointer and when we came out on to the winding white road that led to Castle Ferry she suddenly laid her hand on my arm. It was about three o’clock and the mid-afternoon sun beat down on the castle ruin that crowned the hamlet and the shallow river that divided it.
“Let’s have tea here, Jan! Let’s see if Old Gramp’s still about and whether he’s pushed up his ha’penny ferry charge to wartime prices!”
I stopped the car outside the Castle Inn and we looked across to the ferry landing. I recalled so vividly the summer afternoon we first came here when she had introduced me to the foul-mouthed old boatman who plied to and fro for a halfpenny, a dirty, unsavoury old man, who stank of sweat and beer. I had been horrified when Diana had confessed that he was the skeleton in the Gayelorde-Sutton cupboard and her grandfather paid so much a month to keep his identity secret so that his daughter, Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton, could reign as the Lady of Heronslea, only a dozen miles away. I remembered too, Diana’s purpose in telling me this closely-guarded secret; “a tonic” she called it, administered in order to encourage me to believe that I was as good and better than a Gayelorde-Sutton and combat the inferiority complex that had been fostered in me by her mother’s airs and the family’s riches. I had loved her for this and I still did.
We couldn’t locate Gramp and his ferry service seemed to be suspended, so we ordered tea in the Castle Inn.
“Doesn’t he know even now that you’re his grandchild?” I asked her, while she was pouring out.
“No,” she said, “but I’ll confront him sooner or later. I sent him money through Drip before the war and I believe she still keeps an eye on him. You know Jan, I simply loved having that old pirate for a grandfather! I kept half-hoping he would stagger into the drawing-room at one of mother’s ‘At Homes’ and breathe stout and blasphemies over the local Conservatives! I wonder what happened to mother in the end?”
“Good God!” I exclaimed. “Do you mean to say you don’t know?”
She looked mildly astonished. “Well, naturally I don’t. How should I? I haven’t set eyes on her since the crash. She never wrote and you haven’t mentioned her again!”
This was true, but it was something that surprised me a great deal. Why hadn’t I told her about her mother? Why hadn’t I described how I had tracked her down weeks after Diana’s flight and told how Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton had met the challenge of sudden penury? Was it because I was still afraid of the past whenever it involved the opposition? I said:
“Look, Di, we’d better settle something right here and now before we go another yard into Sennacharib. It’s absolutely vital to both of us! We’ve got to really start afresh, beforé we get tangled up in loose ends, before we get drunk on nostalgia!”
“Well, Jan?”
She said this patiently, almost dutifully, and again the certainty crossed my mind that she was hiding something, holding something back, making one of her fireworks that would presently be lobbed at me and explode in my face. I can’t say why I felt uneasy, but I did. There was something deliberately vague about her smile, as though I was a child who had asked a question that couldn’t be answered until I was grown up.
“Look here, Di,” I burst out, “there’s something behind all this and I’m damned if I want today spoiled by mysteries. I hate mysteries, yours especially. They always end in muddle and heartbreak!”
She ceased to smile and ceased to look superior. She put down her cup and looked steadily across the table.
“Jan,” she said, levelly, “are you quite sure you still want to marry me?”
I spluttered for a moment but she didn’t smile at my confusion as I expected she would; she just waited, her expression mild and relaxed.
“Great Heaven, of course I want to marry!” I said at last “I should have thought I’d made that much clear by now! Don’t tell me you’re awaiting a formal proposal!”
She dropped her glance a little and began to trace patterns on the table-cloth with a cake knife.
“What I mean is, you don’t have to marry me, Jan! I’d never want to be parted from you again and I’ve made up my mind I won’t, ever, no matter what happens! But that still doesn’t mean you have to marry me. You might like to think about it, you know—just drift, until after the war.”
“I’ve been drifting for years,” I said, “and I’m coming ashore! Besides, there’s Yvonne to think of! Have you talked about us to Yvonne?”
“Yes, I have,” she said, in the same quiet voice, “but I wouldn’t dream of marrying you for that reason alone. Leave Yvonne out of it for the time being!”
“What exactly are you getting at?” I demanded, and for the life of me I didn’t know. She said, slowly:
“It isn’t as if there had only been Yves. It would have been easy enough to wipe out one mistake, one impulsive, selfish act, one betrayal even! But there was also Rance and I suppose I’m glad now that you saw what you did see at the villa. I don’t think I could have made you understand if you hadn’t!”
I began to get a glimmering of what she was trying to say. Perhaps the memory of her emerging into the street towards the gendarme, and rejoining me a few minutes later with her dress disordered, did as much to enlighten me as the act of abasement I had witnessed in the villa. What she was trying to convey, I think, was her natural drift towards haphazard promiscuity, the twopenny valuation she put upon sexual encounters and their triviality when measured against the kind of relationship that had grown up between us over the years.
“I want you and I’ll never be satisfied with anyone else, Di,” I said urgently, “but there’s a qualification and it’s this—don’t let’s take the easy way out and live in the past, let’s try and build a different kind of relationship that lives in the present and admits to a future! We can’t undo one jot of what’s happened but for God’s sake. let’s both try and learn from it and use our experience to find tranquillity and mutual trust! Does that make sense, Di? Does it?”
“Yes,” she said, in the same mild tone, “it makes all the sense I’m looking for so now I’ll jump the gun! Pay the bill, Jan, and let’s go on, but not directly to Heronslea. We’ve a call to make en route!”
“Call on whom?”
“You’ve waited this long, Jan, you can wait another fifteen minutes. I thought we’d be weeks getting around to this, but it seems you’re in too much of a hurry, so I’ll go along with you!” She faced me squarely as she rose. “From now on I’ll always go along with you. You’re the boss, Jan! Don’t forget that, don’t ever forget it, for your own sake and mine. Not even if you have to wallop me into remembering every so often!”
I hadn’t a notion of what she was talking about or on whom we were supposed to call but her forthrightness intrigued me and I paid the bill and we went out to the car. The discussion had given my headache a foothold and my wound was nagging, so she drove and we took the road that skirts Foxhayes Common and winds away from the coast and along the edge of the plateau, then down the Teasel Valley with the larch plantations of Heronslea to the west and the pines of Teasel Wood to the east.
It was early August and the country was drowsy with evening sunshine. Always at this time of year Sennacharib’s banks were lush with waist-high bracken and behind the bracken foxgloves grew in majestic ranks, a guard of honour all the way to Teasel Bridge. The magic of Sennacharib silenced us, soothing the ache in my
temples and wrapping us in an embrace of sounds and patterns and scents that was balm to the spirit. It was very still up here and when we stopped at the approach to the bridge I could hear the blackbirds rustling in the thickets and the long sighs of Teasel beeches, always an undertone to the whispering larches and spruces higher up the slopes. This was the very heart of our country and as we lingered there Diana turned her face to the sky and pointed.
“There! Over there, a hundred yards below Big Oak!”
It was true. There were our buzzards, the pair she always declared could never be seen unless we were in company, and a sense of fulfilment stole over me as I saw the two specks wheeling and gliding in their search for wind currents over the coverts.
“That clinches it,” said Diana. “Until now I wasn’t absolutely sure, I still thought we ought to have waited but not now, it’s a come-on sign! We’ll take the cart track up under the wood to your cottage! Don’t argue, don’t waste another second!”
I began to share her excitement although I couldn’t imagine who would be expecting us at the end of the winding track. I knew of no one who would be likely to occupy the cottage to which I had retired after Diana ran away. It was here that Drip, her governess, had found me shortly before the war and soon after, when I joined up, Drip moved into Heronslea to look after the children. As far as I knew the place was a ruin by now, I had not visited it since the Autumn of ’39.
But it was not a ruin. We rounded the final bend and she brought the car to a halt in the little clearing beside the stables. This was a courtesy title for a ramshackle array of sheds but there was nothing ramshackle or seedy about the property now. The whole place had undergone a very determined attempt at renovation. The garden beds had been weeded, the grass cut short, the cottage and sheds were newly painted in farm-wagon blue, the fences shored up with freshly-cut timber and there was even a wisp of smoke drifting from the squat chimney above the red pantiles of the roof. It looked, in fact, just like a cottage in a child’s book of fairy-tales, the kind of place that Red Riding Hood’s granny occupied.
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