The writing had tailed off again and there had been another pause. I could imagine her battling and battling with her weakness and marshalling all that remained of her vitality for the final effort. She resumed:
“I’ll have to risk short cuts Jan. What I want most desperately to say is this: teach yourself to accept everything that has happened between us as a phase and not the be all and end all of life! You’re as strong as a bull and you’ll live another fifty years. You’ll see all sorts of changes and have all manner of new experiences if you let yourself! And do let yourself, Jan, please, please, so that my claim on you wasn’t so bloody greedy after all, so that everything we brought to one another doesn’t go stale inside you, and make you heavy and dull and unresponsive to everything else about you! And by ‘everything’ I mean life outside Sennacharib. Keep gambling and exploring, Jan! Get married again if you want to and have six more children. I don’t care what you do, so long as it’s something demanding, something that helps you develop into a bigger and kinder and more genuine person than even my Jan! Don’t let the memory of our love stunt that growth the way it’s tended to in the past. Use it, Jan, don’t tie it up with blue ribbon and stick it away in a drawer, because if that happens our love will have been so feeble and useless that you might just as well have stayed in that Whinmouth junk shop where I found you and married someone who thought of you as the man who paid the rent and made love on Tuesdays and Saturdays, instead of someone who always thought of you as a force and a wonderful way of life!
“Goodbye now, Jan, and thank you for everything, absolutely everything! I hope to God this letter does what I meant it to do because then I won’t have a conscience and at least there’ll be one person left to thumb his nose at the Doones and stir himself to kick some of them in the pants! Because that’s all I ever made of Democracy. Maybe it’s all there is to be made of it—that, and the right we claimed so often, the right to walk in moonshine holding one another’s hands!”
That was all, save for the scrawling signature and the usual cross contrived out of the final flourish of the last ‘a’ in Diana.
I read it over three times before I heard the thrumming of Peggy’s hooves returning down the ride. Around me Sennacharib maintained its unnatural stillness so that I heard twigs break under the pony’s shoes all the way down the slope from Big Oak. Before horse and rider came round the last bend I got up and there was a spring in my legs that had not been there when I sat down. I put the letter in my hip pocket and rubbed my hand across my eyes and then I was ready, or as ready as I ever would be. The letter had done what it set out to do. I could begin again. I had good enough directions.
Afterglow
THAT WAS the end of it all, or almost so; it wasn’t quite the end because there was a Spring postscript to that letter, pages that might well have gone into the grubby envelope but somehow didn’t because she was unable to write more, or perhaps because she was too modest, though “modest” is an odd word to use about Diana.
I kept the home going as she insisted and in a sense did find myself again or enough of myself to be useful about the place. When the ache was less urgent I went through her things and one evening, when I was packing up her books, I found a half-used writing pad on which was scrawled, in her handwriting, the cryptic words: “This is awful—fourth draft—try again …”
I thought for a moment that the self-criticism related to the earlier drafts of the last letter she had written. In moments of exasperation Diana had often addressed herself and she might have done so on paper, it was a characteristic that suited her exactly. But I soon discovered that the words did not refer to the letter for when I turned the page I found a draft poem that was clearly original.
I had always flattered myself that I knew everything about Diana. I knew her likes, dislikes, prejudices, her sources of enthusiasm, quirks, characteristics, moods, preferences, the lot! Yet here was something that I had not known! I had not known that she wanted to write verse. I had always imagined that the poetry inside her was satisfied to use her personality as its outlet.
The discovery excited me very much and very pleasurably. I went to the window, holding the notebook to the light. The verses had been written in pencil and were difficult to decipher. There were many crossings out and here and there odd words written in the margin but at last I made out the text and it was with a deep sense of discovery that I realised it was a faltering but terribly earnest attempt to express all she felt about Sennacharib. It was called “Senile Countryman” but some hidden reservation had caused her to set it down in the third instead of the first person. It ran:
He found his faith in the foxglove bell
His creed in the clustered stars
Of Ladies-lace, where dust-bent stems
Played games with sunlight bars.
In the moist, gold shine of the celandine
He hunted Heaven’s grace.
Sermons he heard in every copse
And many a gorse-grown place.
He did not need the parson’s plea
To note a godly hand
In the age of the oak or the bluebell smoke
On an April-stirring land.
His psalms were sung to the tissing larch
His hymns to the purple heath
To the iris clump on the marshy edge
Of the shallow lake beneath.
His prayers were said on a beech-leaf bed
Where the drifts lay deep in the lane,
And his saints rode out on a South-West squall
To kiss his poll with rain.
Thither he’ll go when his time runs out
And his loins have lost their swing
No fear in his heart but sorrow perhaps
In not outliving Spring.
Senile? Perhaps, but less I think
Than those who work by night
Earning, yearning, tax-returning,
Under electric light.
I whipped through the leaves of the book hoping for more completed poems. There were odd lines and phrases, most of them scratched out with a fine impatience, and I was beginning to think that this must have been her sole essay in poetry when I found, on the very last page, another almost completed poem entitled “Codicil.” I read the first line and then I stopped. It was as though Diana had stolen up behind me and whispered in my ear. I sensed then that the room in which she had died was not the place to read it but that I should take it to its source, the high ridge under the larch wood that overlooked the valley all the way down to Nun’s Head, the place where Sennacharib had been christened the day we met and the one to which we had returned that last day.
I put the notebook in my pocket and went out, crossing the paddock to the elm clump and passing a gap in the hedge that led along the Teasel bank to the wooden bridge. It was an early evening in late March, the hour and season when the valley is lit with a curious light that is neither silver nor white but something in between, when the blackbirds are active in the thickets and the smell of peat is lifted and jockeyed by the breeze coming in from the sea, when the tall timber on Teasel Edge stands darkly against the sky and the half-mile rank of beeches guard Heronslea like a row of sentinels. Only the birds broke the intense stillness as they fidgeted in and out of the clumps. Primroses and campion splashed the hillside under the banks and there were violets hiding under the yellow clumps and here and there a few celandines. For the first time since Diana had gone I knew peace, real peace that warmed me through, so that blood began to flow in my veins and my senses stirred as from a long, troubled sleep. I could see and hear and smell Sennacharib again, and the sense of re-awakening so quickened my step that I almost ran up the long slope to the wooded spur.
Here I sat down on the stump with my face to the sea and read her poem. It was, I thought, a kind of blessing on me for having found the courage to honour our pledge for now I was certain that she was here, all about me, in the flesh, in the spirit, in person. Pandora’s chest had been emptied and all
the devils had gone, leaving Hope to hammer on the unlocked lid. I did not need to seek out old Nat, the Sexton, and get confirmation of the spot where he had laid her. I knew that it was here and could only be here, for she had written:
On Foxhayes edge go scatter my ashes
Above the ground in sunlight splashes,
Where all about my powdered bones
The trefoil weaves between the stones,
Where what I was feeds foxglove roots
And robust April parsley shoots
Five miles or more from churchyard drab
Where, underneath a lettered slab,
The body that has served me well
Would bloat in clay, pathetic shell.
At Foxhayes edge atop the grass
I’ll sense successive seasons pass
I’ll see the beeches overhead
Turn tangerine and rusty red
I’ll hear the sky-seen of their leaves
Wind-gossiping to younger trees.
Then, with the fall of blue-smoke dusk
I’ll settle in the rustling husk
Of brittle, sun-dried bracken stalk
To hear the spruce and larches talk
And see the lovers come and go;
Or later, when the New Year’s snow
Builds up in drifts below the hedge
Crisping the blades of dock and sedge
I’ll wait content, to stir in sleep
The hour the earliest violets peep.
For with them all the wood will rustle
Under the west wind’s old-maid’s bustle,
Lifting perhaps a speck of me
And bearing it, due south, to sea.
I sat very still for a long time while dusk stole over the wood and lights began to twinkle in Shepherdshey village. I was searching the sky and in the last few seconds of light I saw what I sought, two specks plummeting over Teasel Wood. I was not in the least surprised that they should be there at this hour. Diana had always promised that they would come wheeling in the moment we were reunited.
About the Author
R. F. Delderfield (1912–1972) was born in South London. On leaving school he joined the Exmouth Chronicle newspaper as a junior reporter and went on to become editor. He began to write stage plays and then became a highly successful novelist, renowned for brilliantly portraying slices of English life. With the publication of his first saga, A Horseman Riding By, he became one of Britain’s most popular authors, and his novels have been bestsellers ever since. Many of his works, including A Horseman Riding By, To Serve Them All My Days, the Avenue novels, and Diana, were adapted for television.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1960 by R. F. Delderfield
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-4804-9048-2
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
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R. F. DELDERFIELD
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