I think I was inclined to be a little irritable with the child and I soon discovered that I had made insufficient allowance for the weakness of the hold Diana already had upon her when she passed into my charge in 1940.
“Look here, Yvonne,” I said, after we had topped the large wood and were walking across the short turf of the paddock, “it wasn’t your mother’s fault that she had to part from you. She sent you over here because the Germans had came and then stayed on to fight them.”
“I can’t remember much about that,” Yvonne replied, glumly, and then, with the frankness of her mother that I found astonishing in a child not yet nine: “What’s eating you Jan? Why are you so stuffy this afternoon?”
I remembered just in time that I was talking to Diana’s daughter and that no one was likely to be less impatient with a compromise.
“Mummy thinks you don’t want things to change. She thinks you don’t want us to get married and live together after the war!” I said, feeling like a gambler who is staking a month’s salary on the turn of a card. Yvonne considered this, gravely. The statement caused her no shock or embarrassment. She accepted it for what it was worth and pondered for a moment.
“Well, it’s true I don’t want anything to change, Jan,” she said coolly, “but I suppose they have to and I daresay I’ll get used to it! I never thought much about Mummy before she turned up here. I know you tried to make me remember her every time you came, but then you would, wouldn’t you? I mean, you’re bound to, because you’re madly in love with her!”
“Yes, I am!” I said, feeling a pricking sensation behind the eyes, “and I always have been, Yvonne! That’s something you’ll understand much better in a year or so!”
“Oh, I understand it now,” she said, screwing up her face and looking so like Diana that I almost choked, “but you see, Jan, you can’t expect me to feel the same! At least, not all at once! It’s like … like someone grown up coming to stay with us, don’t you see? I mean, she’s beautiful and a wonderful rider and everybody goes for her but she’s still someone who—well—who has popped up from nowhere, if you see what I mean!”
I did see what she meant and I was touched by her honesty, touched and to some extent reassured. She had my colouring and build and gait but fundamentally she was all Diana. She couldn’t pretend about anything, not for an hour, not for a second, and not even to someone she loved and admired. I don’t know why but I felt relieved and grateful for this discovery and after that I didn’t give her lack of enthusiasm for Diana another thought.
We went on across Foxhayes and round the fringe of Folly Wood and when we were returning down the dusty Shepherdshey road to Heronslea Yvonne slammed the door on the subject by saying, with a sly, sidelong glance:
“Don’t fret, Jan! It’ll all come out in the wash, like Doris said!”
“Who’s Doris?” I asked, grinning and running my hand over her dark mop of curls.
She stopped and looked surprised. “Gosh, don’t you remember? Doris was the girl who had the sailor’s baby—the one I told you about!”
“Ah yes!” I said, conscious of a tumult in the pit of my stomach, “I remember now,” and we turned in at the lodge and walked up the long avenue of beeches to the house.
I was awake about five-thirty on my wedding morning and lay still in the big four-poster thinking luxuriously of inconsequential things, of the grain of the polished mahogany of the canopy pillars, the sense of purpose in the face of the gallant chasing the serving-wench in the Fragonard picture, the pleasant sough of the early morning breeze fluttering the little muslin curtains that Diana had fitted over the enlarged window. Then I got up, knowing I should not sleep again and not wanting to miss the freshness of this particular day stealing over Sennacharib.
I looked sideways in the speckled glass of the dressing-table mirror and examined the slow growth of new hair over the side of my head that had been shaved clean by the surgeon who had first dressed my wound. It was coming along very leisurely I thought and reflected that this was a clear sign that I was past my prime, and moving up towards the brow of the hill. Then I grinned at myself, thinking of the snort of contempt Diana would give if I told her I was getting old. I sluiced myself with well-water, slipped a pair of flannels and a sweater over my bathing trunks and went out whistling, moving along the winding path that followed the ridge of Teasel escarpment and looking west across the valley to the blue-grey stillness of Heronslea Woods.
It was an almost windless morning, with a clear sky and the promise of warm sunshine later on. I climbed up through the pines and chestnuts, listening to the shrill chorus of the birds, starting a cock-pheasant from the bracken and sending him whirring across the valley squawking indignation. At the top of the rise, where the trees thinned, I could look back on the whole of Sennacharib to the winding Teasel, Shepherdshey church and cottages and beyond into the wooded triangle of Heronslea estate then southward to the sea and Nun’s Island still half-hidden in haze. I paused up here and breathed a kind of prayer over it all, or perhaps it wasn’t really a prayer but an incantation to the wood spirits and hedgerow sprites who had shared this place with us since we were children. It all seemed so utterly remote from war and the Nazis that I might have been inhabiting another planet in an age before any Cleverdick turned his misguided energies to devising guns and submarines and barbed wire.
Then I hurried across the clifftop and down the landslip to Nun’s Cove where nobody was astir and the sea looked cold and placid. I left my slacks, sweater and towel on the tiny quay and waded in, finding that the water wasn’t as cold as it appeared and swimming with slow strokes to a moored boat about a hundred yards offshore.
I hung on to the buoy rope a moment getting my second wind, then pushed off and made for the tip of the long, curving breakwater that bounded the eastern edge of the bay. I swam slowly, enjoying the loneliness of the scene and the physical release that movement through placid water brings to a swimmer. When I reached the rock barrier I climbed out and picked my way up the boulders to a point overlooking the next cove, a tiny sanded bay no more than a hundred yards across and isolated from the village by the bulk of Nun’s Head. Here I gasped, my eyes level with the summit. In the exact centre of the beach, wavelets breaking round her feet, was Diana.
She wore no costume and was standing quite motionless, perhaps thirty yards away, her eyes fixed on the southernmost point of Nun’s Island across the bay, but it was not her presence or nudity that caused me to smother the hail that rose to my lips. Rather it was her pose which was one of complete rigidity and preoccupation, with her arms raised and extended seawards, as though absorbed in the performance of some archaic rite.
This impression was so strong that it would have been folly to distract her and I felt this most forcibly in the first instant of sighting her. It was obvious that at that moment she wanted to be alone and unobserved and to break the spell would have been unforgivable. It struck me then that she was engaged in a form of supplication that had nothing whatever to do with Christianity, or with any known cult, but with something that had its roots in far-off centuries when tribes acknowledged allegiance to the things about them, the moon, stars and winds, to the red sun now rising from behind the headland and laying its rays across the bay.
Diana looked beautiful but her beauty transcended the physical, pulsing upwards and outwards, like ripples of colour and sound and striking the eye and ear as something both seen and heard. I crouched close against the rock watching her, watching the waves swirl round her feet and the light breeze ruffle her curls, worshipping her with my eyes and my soul, and as the sunplay scattered diamonds across the bay the strong, pinkish light found her sturdy thighs and seemed to caress her breasts and belly with a sure, loving touch. What was even more wonderful to see was her reaction to this, for she smiled and swayed ecstatically, like a woman pleased with the power she exerts over a lover.
Perhaps a full minute I remained there motionless and then, but with infinite care, I ba
cked away and slipped into the water, swimming with careful strokes to the quay where I had left my clothes. Absent-mindedly I dried myself and dressed, thinking over what I had seen and reflecting that this was perhaps the strangest and most compelling discovery I had ever made about Diana and wondering whether I should admit to having seen her at her devotions. It was a difficult decision to make. At first I thought the better way would be to let her nurse her secret for as long as she wished. Then I thought that this would be a betrayal of Sennacharib, for Sennacharib was something we shared and if our lives together unfolded, as they promised at this moment, then I had a right to understand the compulsion that lay behind her action. Perhaps it was necessary that I should understand it, for it seemed to me that the key to her entire complex character lay in the impulse that had driven her down to the beach at first light to perform this act of obeisance.
I had still not fully made up my mind when I took the path across the landslip to the Teasel plateau and here fate decided for me, for as I reached the junction where my path joined the track leading over the headland to the cove, we came face to face and both stopped in our stride.
I don’t think she was surprised to see me or if she was she recovered more quickly than I did. For a few seconds she looked angry, as though I was a trespasser caught in a private garden, but then she smiled and gave me a moment or so to master my embarrassment, or perhaps to consolidate her grasp of the initiative.
She was wearing an old grey skirt and a heavy sweater and her hair was not damp, so that I guessed she had not actually entered the water. Then I recalled that she had gone into Whinford for a hairdo the previous afternoon and that she never used a bathing cap.
“Well, say something!” she remarked, after what seemed an almost intolerably long pause.
“I’ve been for a dip!” I said foolishly and she laughed, breaking through the barrier by stepping up to me and kissing me on the cheek.
“You’ve got trunks and towel in your hand,” she reminded me and then, “All right, Jan, you never could keep me guessing could you? You saw me didn’t you? I don’t mind, not really, though it is rather a shame after all these years! If it had been anyone else mind you, I think I’d kill them to stop their silly tongues, but you … my Jan … well, maybe I’d have told you myself in the end!”
I said nothing. I was wondering how she could have kept a thing like this all to herself in the days when we were growing up here together. She went on, as though dismissing the subject altogether, “I could do with a coffee, couldn’t you? Let’s make one at the cottage on the way back. Then I’ll leave you to get into ceremonial. You’ll have to do it all on your own, won’t you? You really ought to have found a best man from somewhere, but who?” She gave me one of her shrewd, sidelong glances, the parent of the glance her daughter had given me a day or so before, “You’ve never had a male friend, have you? At least, not one of your own generation!”
“No,” I said, only half-jokingly, “I never had time to cultivate one, I was always too busy keeping track of you!”
We climbed to the edge of the wood and down through the grove to the path along the eastern bank of the Teasel.
“You were worshipping, weren’t you, Di?”
“In a way,” she said, “but I don’t much like the word. It conjures up visions of morning service in Sunday best and a lot of pi-faced people singing ‘For All the Saints’. Why don’t we settle for ‘acknowledging’?”
“Acknowledging what?”
She gave me another tolerant glance.
“You’re a bit exasperating sometimes, Jan! Imagine you, of all people, asking such a damned silly question? Acknowledging this”—and she swept her arm round in a half-circle that took in Heronslea Woods, the Teasel Valley and the gorse-covered crown of Nun’s Head.
Someone who knew her less well than I might have been fobbed off with the answer, but I wasn’t. I had had a good long look at her as she had stood by the tideline and I had been near enough to note the intense concentration and earnestness in her pose and expression. She had not been playing a game with herself, or expressing a purely physical exhilaration as someone might in an idle and relaxed moment, she had been taking herself very seriously indeed. I was piqued by her evasiveness. It was as though she had denied me access to her body or had set limits on the liberty of my hands and lips, but I had no wish to pursue the matter. I had an uneasy feeling that it would lead to a quarrel so I went into the kitchen, poured milk into a saucepan and set the cups.
When the coffee was made I carried a tray into the main room but she was not there. I called, getting no answer, and went into the bedroom. She wasn’t in the cottage and she wasn’t anywhere outside.
It was unreasonable I suppose but at once I succumbed to the wildest panic. I ran to and fro, shouting her name and I think I was more frightened then than at any time during our adventures in France. It was like a final echo of all her other disappearances and I raged about, sick with dismay. It was so true to the merciless rhythm of our association. One day she was there and the future glowed, the next she was gone and the future stretched before me like a desert that had somehow to be crossed before I could find her again. It had always been this way; holidays then term, elopement to Nun’s Island and then two empty years to follow, the ecstasy of her surrender on the night of her eighteenth birthday then her letter rejecting the future; her return, broken in nerve after her road accident and then her abrupt flight the night her father killed himself. Here and gone, kisses and protestations, then silence. Yet always, long after the silence the trumpets again, as at the Bordeaux Ferry during the panic of 1940 and the sound of her footsteps in the church after Alison’s funeral.
I had no idea what I should do, how I should begin to set about looking for her and telling her she could keep as many secrets as she wished, I was too shocked to stop and reflect how childishly I was behaving. I suppose I was conditioned to disappointment where Diana was concerned and this time it reduced me to the helplessness of a small child lost in a fairground, running this way and that bleating its misery.
I went back into the cottage and foraged in the old bacon cupboard beside the fireplace, fishing out a bottle of cognac that she had put there two or three days before when we were laying in stocks. It was unopened and I was far too impatient to find a corkscrew. I struck the neck of the bottle on the edge of the fireplace and slopped a measure into a cup. As I raised it to my lips a voice said:
“He knocked off the neck as one well accustomed to the habit!”
Diana was standing inside the cottage door, leaning against the great oak doorpost and smiling across at me with an expression that was half amusement, half concern. I remember the quotation, it was from ‘Treasure Island’ and I recalled too that Israel Hands, Flint’s treacherous master gunner, was one of Diana’s favourite characters in fiction. I swallowed a mouthful of the spirit and it rallied me, so that I was able to grin shame-facedly and quote back at her.
“ ‘By Thunder but I needed some o’ that!’ ”
I offered her the bottle but she shook her head.
“It’s all right for the groom to reek of brandy but it’s asking too much of the bride!” she said, picking up the cup of luke-warm coffee.
I had imagined that I was familiar with most of her moods but this one baffled me. She was composed and deliberate yet still half-inclined to mock and tantalise. But behind the mockery was gentle laughter and behind that again a wisp of uncertainty.
“Did you really think I’d run out on you, Jan? Did you really believe that?”
“Yes, I did!”
The uncertainty mastered the laughter, driving it from the corners of her mouth and clouding her eyes. She swallowed once or twice and stopped fiddling with the cup handle.
“I suppose I deserve it!” she said, sighing.
“Deserve what, Di?”
“Distrust; to that extent!”
I forgot everything then under one of the shuddering waves of tenderness t
hat had always drowned me at times like these. I ran to her and pulled her close to me, letting my hands slide over her shoulders to her waist.
“I can’t explain it, Di! The fear was crazy but it was real! By God, it was real!”
“Yes, I know,” she said, “that’s why I stopped teasing and came back!”
“I didn’t want to pry and I’ll never want to, Di, I promise!”
“There’s nothing to pry into, Jan, nothing you wouldn’t understand, nothing, you hear?”
We stood like this for a few moments and outside everything seemed still and timeless. I remembered other moments like this, just a few of them spread over a long period of time. Each was a tiny interval of unimagined happiness, worth waiting for and hoping for, worth every penny of the toll they demanded. Diana said:
“I’ll tell you, Jan. Tonight!”
Then she slipped away and was gone and I heard her swishing through the bracken as she took the short cut down to the river and across the chestnut grove to Heronslea. I went to the window and waited to see her emerge from the trees at the stepping stones, a tiny, girlish figure in shapeless grey skirt and sweater. She didn’t wave or look back and a moment later she had scrambled over the low wall into the estate and was lost among the big timber. I washed the cups and cleared the broken glass from the fireplace. Then I went in to shave and change.
Diana Page 60
