by Ursula Bloom
The tweeny had helped, she seemed to have been a lively girl with an extensive imagination and love of action. She had produced the pennyroyal pills, and they had worked. But Aunt Chrissie had been wretchedly ill for a time. She wrote further of her father’s stroke, and through the diary one walked with a Victorian miss who had loved too well. The shattered regrets seemed to fray the leaves, her own self-reproach, and her devotion to the sick father, nursing him through to the end.
He had left her everything. He knew that Chrissie was not his daughter, and said so, and she mentioned this. In fact, further on there were these lines:
I have sought to find my natural father. They tell me that he was Ned the tinker, and his children (now grown to manhood) collect old iron, and live in vans in that part of the common known as Hooter’s Vale. I am visiting there next week.
But the visit had been a mistake.
The old tinker was dead; he had never recovered from the shot put into him by an unscrupulous gamekeeper, when he was poaching in the forbidden woods beyond the van site. He had died mouthing oaths against the gentry, and apparently never thinking any more of Chrissie’s mother who had died giving Chrissie birth. But as Diana read the entries, she felt herself carried away into a world which smelt of rotting bracken and dying leaves. A world of first frosts and the imperial scarlet fungi in moss at morning.
That is the world to which I belong, Aunt Chrissie wrote, and the world in which I shall never be.
Then apparently when she knew that the old tinker was dead and gone she had settled quietly down to spend the rest of her life in Tall Trees. Further on in her diary there were references to her most charming great-niece Diana, who had been born under the hunter’s moon, and perhaps had been endowed with much of the strange uncertainty of that moon, the gift of second sight for one; the gift of apprehension for another.
The wood fire crackled as Diana went through the papers. She had loved staying with her great-aunt, and was glad that her aunt was pleased to have her. How amusing she had been about chocolates giving one spots! At home Diana was never allowed any nice food in case this should be the result. Aunt Chrissie had never had these silly scruples.
When Diana turned into the teens she had sent her a box of ravishing face powder and a glowing lipstick to go with it. Mother had been shocked, her father angry, but the child had surreptitiously used them, and had congratulated herself on an ancient aunt who could be so understanding.
She read the diaries and the few letters, and perhaps the spirit of the hunter’s moon urged her on. She had the vivid realisation of a greatness in this woman who herself had loved. She saw her in a new light. I wish I had known all this whilst she still lived, she thought.
The solicitor was helpful, but what his bill would be she simply dared not think.
As the days went on there were constant letters from John, and she dreaded the day, which she felt sure would come, when he opened the gate.
‘You can always throw him out again,’ Sarah said.
There had been the problem of the name. She meant to adopt a married name, to put things right for herself. Then she waited; she had the premonition that there was no hurry, and then Christian James spoke to her about it.
‘You must start as you mean to go on.’ Still she waited. She did not know why. These people were trying to help but she had the feeling that she must help herself; out of the shadows in her life surely form would come?
‘You’ll regret this,’ Sarah said.
‘I shan’t.’
With Sarah’s aid they eventually sold the old Rolls, and at a much better price than they had thought. They made the acquaintance of a local doctor at Christian James’s suggestion, an impersonal man, placid but also prepared to help.
‘We’re doing fine,’ Sarah said.
‘Yes, it is almost as though everything was starting to shape, I must say.’
‘All the same it would be a good idea if you dropped out the fact that you married last year, and he was run over by a ’bus or something. Delay won’t help. You’ve got to get going about it, you know.’
Diana glanced at her. ‘The odd thing is that it is not worrying me for a single moment. Life happens that way. I just feel that it doesn’t matter.’
‘Whatever you are going to do, you should do now.’
‘Plenty of time,’ and she smiled.
Sarah looked critically at her. ‘Do you put that down to the old hunter’s moon?’ she asked, and even as she said it the light fell on the watch which Diana was wearing, the strange watch with topaz on it, which Herbert Jamieson had made his wedding gift to her.
‘Perhaps, I don’t know, all I know is that it does not matter. Life will show me the way.’
It happened on the Saturday before Sarah’s return to Pont Street, and out of the blue. The two of them had just finished lunch together, a cold pheasant pie, with the day warm for the time of year, and amiable. They had taken the washing-up into the kitchen for Miss Howland, who was trying to get accustomed to the new washing-up machine which Sarah had insisted was a ‘must’. She had given it to Miss Howland as the present above all others. Now suddenly the bell went. ‘I’ll go,’ said Sarah.
There was the old-fashioned communicating door between kitchen and the front part of the house, a door which was baize-covered so that it closed silently, but for ever marked the ‘class distinction’ between front and back rooms. Sarah opened the door, and to her horror saw that John Hayward was standing there. The one person whom he had not expected to see was obviously Sarah Jamieson, and she horrified him. She recovered from the shock sooner than he did.
‘Good God!’ was what she said.
‘I’ve simply got to see Diana. Time’s running out.’
Sarah’s life had never given her any difficulties in facing a trying situation, and at Chatterworth, as the French mistress or old Stoggins would have said, she had the glibbest tongue in the class! ‘You’ve chosen the wrong day. She’s in bed with a sick headache.’
‘Look here, Sarah, I’ve come a long way and it is beginning to rain. May I come inside?’
On this Sarah stood firm. ‘She told me that she never wanted to see you again.’
‘That’s a bit thick.’
‘It’s what she said, and I’m with her. So what?’
‘But we’ve simply got to get married.’
‘You should have realised that before. Diana does not want to marry you, and says so. She has got the guts to see the whole thing through just as she is. And if she has to be Dad and Mum in one, she doesn’t give a hoot.’
‘But she can’t do that!’
‘I bet she can.’
‘It ‒ it’s horrible. It’s cruel. What about me?’
Sarah was far too clever to argue. ‘She is going through with it just as things are.’
‘But, damn it all, I had a share in it.’
‘Yes, and if you ask me, you’ve had your fun! You’ve no right to keep coming here and making things worse.’ That was when she glanced down and saw that he had taken the cad’s precaution of putting his foot in the open door so that it would not close. It infuriated her, and Sarah infuriated was no mean enemy.
‘Get Out!’ she said, then set her high heel on the toe of the shoe, and ground it round. ‘Get Out!’ she repeated.
In agony John squirmed the shoe free and the door slammed in his face. Through the side window Sarah saw him stumble against one of those stone urns of which Aunt Chrissie had been so fond. It would be awful if she had broken his toe, and then he could not get away, for she was convinced that he was the sort of man who would make a horrible fuss. She acted on instinct. She had just seen Gowry, the odd-job man, who chauffeured in spare moments, and she went after him.
‘Gowry, get out the car and bring it round. There is a gentleman in the front of the house. He was being awkward and I shut the door on his foot. We don’t want him here again. At the moment he can’t walk so well, and looks to have got stuck. Get him into the c
ar, and be quick. Take him into Newbury, to the station, please. We want to get rid of him.’
Sarah had always believed in speaking the honest truth, and she did not care what Gowry thought about it. The vital detail of the moment was to get John out of the way for ever, and as far as she was concerned the accent was on the ‘for ever’.
‘Yes, madam.’
She called after him. ‘Be quick about it, Gowry, be very quick about it,’ and shut the window again.
He was very quick; she heard the car come out of the garage and go round to the front, and somehow she got the idea that he had smelt the rat, and knew why she wanted to be rid of John. It’s a hard world, she thought, but I did the right thing. It’s no good letting Diana go on drifting this way and that. She’s got to burn her boats behind her. She went back into the lounge.
‘Who was it?’ Diana asked.
‘Just the Little Sisters of the Poor wanting alms for the love of Allah.’
Diana looked at her. ‘I had an idea … oh, I know it’s silly, but I had an idea that someone ought to be waving me goodbye.’
For a single second Sarah swung between doubt and determination. Then she said, ‘Perhaps he was. If so, maybe it could be a good thing, who knows? The great thing to remember in life is that the past is the past.’
‘You’ve got something there, and the future is the future,’ Diana whispered half to herself. She sat back. This, she felt, was the first act and the curtain was coming down on it. She must treat the past as being dead, but the future lay before her. That was her own. A shadow curled lightly in the corner, a shadow which had no real form. If I could give it form! she thought, then brushed so foolish an idea aside.
PART TWO
HARVEST MOON
Chapter Six
VISITING
When Diana asked her mother to come down to stay with her, never for a moment did she imagine that Mrs Richardson would come. Under it all Diana had the faint, and of course entirely foolish, sensation that her mother knew more about this than she herself had reckoned on. She did not suppose that Mrs Richardson would appear; she would argue that ‘someone must see after Dad’, but what she had forgotten was her father’s ever insistent eye on the main chance.
Diana’s invitation arrived at the comfortable if slightly stodgy house in Solihull when they were having the usual Tuesday morning’s breakfast. Meals ran to rule, for ‘your Dad’ hated change, and this was kidneys and bacon day, when he had found a piece of gristle in the kidneys, which he detested.
He expounded on this. ‘I’ve said it before, and I’m always saying it, why can’t that Mrs Brown cook the kidneys properly? There is no need to try to kill me before my time, and no need to send the blasted things up with bullets in them. You know, my dear, I’ve said all this before.’
As though she didn’t know!
‘I am so sorry, dear, so very sorry,’ and she said it with that humility which her husband always expected of her. Then, adroitly changing the subject, ‘I have had such a nice letter from Diana. She is in her new house, and has sent such a pretty snap of the way she has changed the drawing-room.’
‘Let me see it?’ and he grabbed it, saying nothing when he got it, which was a sure sign of stern disapproval. The moment did not seem to be promising.
‘She wants me to go down there and spend a week with her,’ ventured Mrs Richardson, but furtively. She did not suppose for a single instant that he would agree, even if she could get Mrs Brown (who had erred with the breakfast kidneys) to come in for the week and see after him.
‘Let me see it?’
She handed across the letter without saying a single word, then sat back waiting for the explosion. He was peculiarly silent ‒ for him; usually he was nothing if not vigorous when it came to expressing an opinion from the opposition. He read it calmly. Then, after the silence, he asked, ‘I suppose you wish to go down there?’
It was so surprising that such an idea should even occur to him that Mrs Richardson felt herself almost numbed by it, but she spoke with the caution born of experience. ‘Well, of course I should like it. Every mother is interested in her daughter’s new home. She hasn’t been too well, she says, as you see, and perhaps she ‒ she needs her mother to be with her for ‒ for a few days.’
At all costs she must make it clear that the visit would not be for long. He carefully folded the letter, being extremely exact about the corners. He was at heart a far-seeing man, who privately had been irritated by this splitting up of the family. Diana had done well by it. She had done very well, getting everything which should have been her father’s, of course, he told himself; born under a lucky star, was what he would have said. The split had come a shade too fast for him to say it; he had detested the thought of his daughter inheriting money from his own aunt, and she had been a silly old fool to leave it to her. The fact that Chrissie had been his own aunt he would have thought had given him the prior right to the lot, but he felt that in an extremely awkward situation he had maintained a disciplinary calm on which he congratulated himself. He was proud of that.
If he insisted that his wife did not go for the suggested week to Newbury, then it would get them no nearer the end, which would be a party with all of them together for Christmas. Personally he felt sure that his wife’s visit would put a lot straight, which he inwardly admitted was beyond his own scope, for she was one of those sentimental women who deal agreeably with such problems.
He said, ‘And who would see after me if you went?’
She recognised this as being the first sign of her husband coming round and giving approval. Mrs Brown would perhaps come along, and she was quite the best person to have, for she was slightly deaf (though would not admit it), and this meant that some of Mr Richardson’s ruder remarks never got to their destination.
‘There is Mrs Brown?’
‘I’ve never liked the woman.’
‘I know.’ (As though she didn’t know when her nose was for ever being rubbed into it!) ‘But she is the most obliging comer-inner we have had for years.’
‘You understand that it would not be proper for her to sleep here?’
‘Oh no. Of course not. I never thought of that and would not ask it. She could get the breakfast …’ (He burbled something about having kidneys like they had been today, but she ignored it.) ‘Then she could stay most of the day, and do the things that I do.’
‘You never raise a hand’s turn,’ he reminded her, for this was the churlish faith in which he revelled. He maintained that she had never even lifted a duster, and blinded himself to the difficulties of the eternal domestic liabilities of post-war England. His argument was that they could not get suitable help not because it wasn’t there, but because his wife did not try hard enough, or quarrelled with them when they came. His further argument was that Mrs Brown’s deafness had saved the situation, because then she could not hear his wife’s complaints.
‘You really wish to go?’ he asked with surprising amiability.
She was still cautious. ‘Oh, I’d like to go, of course. But I don’t want you to be uncomfortable while I’m away.’
‘All right, go! You’ll want some money. Get yourself a new hat and coat. You’ve worn that thing for ages. Don’t stay longer than the week.’
‘No, dear, of course not,’ but she could hardly believe her ears. She saw him off to the office, helping him into his coat, although she knew that as far as he was concerned she always did it wrongly. She smoothed it down, and gave the jacket under it the correct tweak.
‘Just write and tell Di that you’ll be along,’ he said. ‘Ta-ta,’ and he walked out of the house with the old familiar farewell of all these years. She thought as she stood there watching him, that her eyes were filling with tears. If only he would say ‘Damn your eyes!’ instead of ‘Ta-ta’ it would be a help. She rang up her daughter, and heard the enchantment in Diana’s voice.
She would send the car to meet her mother in London, for it was the second part of the journe
y which was always so tiring.
Sarah was leaving for Pont Street today and heard what was happening. ‘Don’t you get too sentimental,’ she warned her friend.
‘No, but she is my mother.’
‘Yes, and you are going to be a mum, too. I wonder how she’ll take that one?’
‘She’ll never blame me.’
‘Oh no, she won’t do that, which is decent of her. There’s something strange about mothers. Fathers never get the same reaction to life that they do. Fathers never quite understand.’
In the end Diana went herself to meet her mother at Paddington, which was a station which she had never liked. It was one of her ‘good’ days, for she had had trouble ever since she had got down to Newbury; it seemed to be the inescapable trouble of those early days of having a babe.
She saw her mother coming along in her pet navy blue, a new coat and a new hat. Whatever had got her father to be so extravagant? for he must have volunteered, Diana knew, Mother would never have asked. I wonder why the old generation always clings to navy blue? she thought. Somehow the smoky backcloth of Paddington station seemed to be the wrong setting for this meeting.
‘Darling!’ she gasped, and clasped her mother to her. ‘How was it Dad let you come?’
‘You know, he was all for it from the first. I think he has been fretting privately, and saw this as a means of getting you back into the fold, and home for Christmas; that would be so nice.’
Would be, Diana thought, but it won’t work. They got into the car, and started off for the Great West Road. Diana had made plans about how she would tell her mother, gradually working up to confession. Not at once. For the moment her mother looked dead tired, and she was annoyed that Diana was wearing a pale blue coat.
‘You really ought to be in mourning, dear, for your poor aunt.’
‘Oh no, Mummie, and anyway your navy blue is hardly black. Mourning is dead as the dodo now, nobody ever wears it.’
