Dinah's Husband: A heartfelt story of love and marriage in the 1930s

by Ursula Bloom

  She was dismissed and went back to her seat facing the map of the world, and the jar of faded asters some child (seeking to curry favour) had left for the teacher the day before.

  There was the funeral.

  Dinah did not think that she could bear it, but was persuaded to go, if only by the horror expressed on her parents’ part that she should contemplate staying away. She leant on her father’s arm, her father’s of all people! Mr. Treeves was nervous, and breathed heavily. He was not really a prop though he hoped to pose as one, and all the gaping onlookers, who were enjoying the service enormously, believed that he was being helpful. Aunt Lydia was there, and Uncle Kenneth. All sorts of dim relatives, seedy old maids, forgotten uncles in strangely green-black coats, a confusion of faces staring goggle-eyed at her, and the flowers which were heaped up beside the grave.

  Piers was there and still looking like a bronze. If only he would come to life, it would be so much easier; but he did not look as if he would ever be alive again.

  They went back to the cottage and Lisa had got a meal for everybody; the faint scent of tea pervaded the place, and the lingering essence from the wreaths of lilies which was dimly funereal. Nobody talked, and all the time Dinah felt that if only they would talk it would simplify matters. The hallmark of glumness had settled down upon them so that they did not dare to be natural, and finally trailed away in ones and twos, and the day was over.

  She saw Piers alone that evening, much against her father’s wishes. Her mother was indifferent to what was happening, and kept in the background. Piers came into the sitting-room and they sat down side by side on the sofa with the lamp shaded and the fire spluttering about the fir cones which she and Max had collected together. Everything reminded her of him; even ridiculous little things like that. Absurdities.

  ‘I’d got to see you,’ he said, ‘because of Malta. I hadn’t wanted to worry you before, but what are we going to do? You are free now.’

  ‘How can I do anything?’

  ‘You aren’t going to refuse to marry me?’

  ‘I can’t yet, Piers. We must have some decency. Max did this for us, we owe him some respect.’

  ‘It was an accident, dear, honestly it was.’

  She began to wonder if he really believed this, and truthfully thought that it had really been an accident. ‘No, Piers, you will have to go to Malta alone, and I’ll follow.’

  ‘How soon can you come out? It is so lovely in the spring.’

  She had the memory of the little dark island as it had been the night when she had seen it while leaning over the taffrail; of that afternoon when she had looked out of the porthole, with the dghaisas dancing in the harbour and their itinerant merchants clamouring for customers. Even then she had known that she would come back to it, some part of her future lay there.

  ‘Perhaps in the spring, Piers?’

  ‘You will promise me that? Spring seems an eternity away.’

  ‘To me, too. But you do see that we can do nothing now? It hurts to be talking about it to-night of all nights, when this dreadful business has happened. Yet I suppose that we’ve got to talk, there isn’t any time.’

  Piers bent closer. ‘Do you suppose that Max would mind? He was a very brave man, a most considerate one; he wanted to do the best for us always. If he was here he would want us to make plans, the fact that we had to make them to-night would not weigh with him.’

  ‘He was always a dear to me,’ she said.

  ‘For the time being I suppose you’ll shut up this place, and Hampstead too, and go home to your people? You can’t be left alone and you’d be better at Dukeleys.’

  ‘Should I?’ she asked vaguely. He did not know what Dukeleys could be like or he would not treat it so casually. But she said nothing because it was cruel to make him anxious just as he was starting for Malta.

  ‘You’ll promise to come out to me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We can be married the moment you get there. I can get it all fixed with the padre. There is no need to be afraid and we know that Max would have wished it.’

  Again she said, ‘Of course.’

  That was the last time she was to see him alone, because he left for Plymouth early next morning. Their parting was strained because her mother, who had no idea what was going on, was wandering about in her helpless fashion, and had decided to occupy the sitting-room. The last sight that Dinah had of Piers was seeing him walking, with that long loping walk, up the crazy path through the apple trees, their leaves going yellow, their fruit shining, as though it had been glazed. She had grown used to Piers staying in the village, used to having him with her; she could not believe that she would not see him again for a long time. The sound of his footfalls died.

  ‘Well?’ said her mother calmly, ‘this has been a business, now we can get on with the doings and everything.’

  5

  Dinah went home with her people.

  She was like a parcel handed from one person to another, and she did not seem to have any will of her own left. She was back again at Dukeleys, lying in the room where her youth had been imprisoned behind those bars which the blacksmith had set at the windows. ‘In case the likes of you falls out,’ he had told her. She lay there and heard the familiar sounds of the wind against the shutters and the boughs of the old trees soughing. She had suddenly become lethargic, and did not want to go out and about, but just to lie here and have Guppy wait upon her. It irritated her mother, who wanted a companion and did not understand it.

  With the best of intentions she would not let Dinah alone, but was for ever pottering up to the old nursery, and poking her head round the door. ‘Only came to see how you were, dear; it is a lovely day and you ought to be out and about. The what’s-it’s-names want doing.’

  Every time Dinah felt that if her mother did it again, she would scream, but Mrs. Treeves went on doing it again, and in the end the persistence of the poor old jack-in-a-box face for ever being thrust round the door did more to get Dinah downstairs than anything else. She hated life.

  The autumn came on quickly. Over the pool there lay the thick damp mist which seemed to penetrate into the house, and there were some days when they had to have the lights on all the time, because the place was so dark. No longer could she wander round the gardens, because they were heavy with that cloying wetness which comes with autumn, and smelt of rotting leaves, and drenching ditches and decay. She hated the trees when they gradually grew naked, and the fungi which stretched against their big trunks like some malignant disease. She felt that Max had died in vain, and her emotions were swung this way and that. She still loved Piers and did not believe that she could have continued without his letters, but he was a bad correspondent and often there were long gaps in the mails. She would go out to him in April, but she did not dare to break this to her people. She struggled on day by day, sometimes thinking that she ought to stay a widow until after Easter, torn this way and that.

  Just when she thought that she was in danger of losing her sanity in a world made up of innumerable days, each one so exactly like the last and so empty and uneventful, Aunt Lydia asked her to stay. Ordinarily Dinah was never sure that she had forgiven Aunt Lydia for that remark about being an old man’s darling, but her forlornness over the life she was living made her forgo that. It was just after Christmas when she arrived on the Essex coast for this visit, with a keen wind blowing in from the Gunfleet and Dovercourt sharp against the sky line. It was bitterly cold.

  Aunt Lydia lived in a large house just off the front, but conveniently placed near to the Royal Hotel, where Kenneth had a collection of dear old pals with no manners but great thirsts. ‘All jolly good pals,’ he would say, ‘the best a chap can want!’

  ‘I really took this house to suit Kenneth,’ said her aunt with a grin. Dinah would have thought it idiotic to take a house close to an hotel with a comfortable bar to suit any husband, but Aunt Lydia knew men. She understood Kenneth’s friendly disposition; even though he might
not have polished manners, he had a heart as big as the world, and she could condone any petty little weakness of his for that bigness of outlook.

  She came that first night into Dinah’s room, a round little figure in a red flannel dressing-gown, but with a merry twinkle in her eyes. She was clasping an additional hot-water bottle, which she alluded to as ‘the feverish baby’ in a concerned maternal tone. ‘And when are you going to Malta?’ she asked.

  ‘Malta?’ Dinah was taken aback. ‘Why should I be going to Malta?’

  ‘Because of course you are going to marry Piers Grant. It was obvious that you were in love with one another, so why in the world delay? You are only wasting precious time, and life’s short enough, goodness knows.’

  ‘But …?’ said Dinah.

  ‘Don’t you try to pull that one over me. I’m old. I’ve lived my life, thank God, and got something out of it. More than most. Damn this feverish baby, it must be a hundred and ten! Why don’t you have it? I always have one at my feet and one on my stomach; it’s comfortable that way.’

  She held it out, and Dinah took it with resignation. She could never pretend with Aunt Lydia, so she told the truth. ‘I’m going to Malta as soon as I can with decency; I thought early in April, perhaps?’

  ‘Why April? They get the sirocco then. You’re not used to that kind of climate, why not go earlier, and settle in before the sirocco, which can be the very devil?’

  ‘I thought people …’

  ‘You thought that people might think rotten things about you. They’ll do that anyway, so that is nonsense. They’ll think the worst of you whatever you do, so let them go to hell, and do what you want.’

  ‘For one thing, I haven’t told Father or Mother anything yet.’

  ‘I never supposed you had. What’s more, I shouldn’t tell them, if you take an old woman’s advice, which you probably won’t. I’d go a trip for my health. They’ll never see through that; much too stupid.’

  Dinah was glad that her aunt had come to her room. This was the language that no one could misinterpret and it was really helpful.

  ‘I hate cheating,’ she began.

  ‘So does everybody, but it is one of the things that have to be done. The first time that I put water into Kenneth’s whisky, I felt a cad! Then I told myself that I’d be a bigger cad if I didn’t do it, seeing that he’d get D.T.s years sooner, so I went on. Now I don’t turn a hair. You go for a cruise for your health, obviously that is excusable in any young girl after a great sorrow. You just don’t come back.’

  ‘Piers and I care deeply for one another.’

  ‘Of course, and he is much more your type. He is your age, and you’ll have a grand time socially out there, probably you’ll fall in love with the entire fleet, but what does a trifle like that matter? Nothing matters when you’re young. Go the whole hog and enjoy yourself!’

  Dinah said yes, she thought she would, and she went to bed with the two feverish babies, as she had known she would have to do from the moment that Aunt Lydia came into the room clasping the second one in her arms. She thought about making the sailing date earlier, and decided that she would write to Piers about it.

  Dinah stayed for a fortnight in the bleak house, that could never be dull because of the exhilaration of having Aunt Lydia in it. There was tonic in the bitter air that beat along the front, and although there were trying moments such as those when Aunt Lydia had to fetch Uncle Kenneth back from the hotel round the corner, making apt comments on his behaviour, Dinah had to admit that she enjoyed it.

  She wanted to stay loyal to the memory of Max, but she had to admit that this was fading; its first poignancy was gone, and now she was getting farther away from her marriage to him and seeing things in a different perspective, which was encouraged by Aunt Lydia.

  When Dinah went home again, she stopped on the way through London, and went to one of the big shipping offices in Cockspur Street. It was different from anything that she had ever done before, this making of her own plans, and it gave her a glow of self-reliance. A pleasant young man with well-smarmed hair, and an urbane manner, produced a plan of the ship. Before she knew where she was, she followed his pencil indicating the alternative charms of different cabins.

  She had not meant to go as far as this yet, since she had heard nothing from Piers; she had intended only to make tentative enquiries, go home and think them over peacefully at Dukeleys. Yet here she was, surveying the plan of the ship, expressing a preference for B over C deck, and a cabin well in the centre of the ship so that it felt the movement less.

  The young man did not release her. Might as well get everything fixed whilst you were at it, was his expression, and he brought out a chart of the dining-saloon. Did she prefer first or second sitting? Before she could stop him, he was discoursing on the joys of the first sitting, when you had your choice of chairs afterwards and a leisurely coffee, and the joys of the second sitting, when you lost the best chairs and the leisurely coffee, but need not be sitting down at 6.45 (which was an ungodly hour), and were not hustled through the meal to make way for the next relay chafing at your heels.

  He could get her booked at the purser’s table, he suggested; the purser, he commented, was a charming man.

  When Dinah walked out of the office the whole thing was cut and dried, save for the small importance of the cheque which she had promised would follow.

  There was sunshine in Cockspur Street, the first yellow-gold sunshine of the spring, which speaks thinly of daisies to follow, of buttercups, and of lambs frolicking in meadows. It made her heart dance. In an idiotic mood of childish impulsiveness, she went into a post office and sent Piers a cable.

  Arriving S.S. Rawdhui February 27th.

  It sent her down the street again with a wild desire to sing. If she danced she knew that the people would think her crazy.

  In the train for Dukeleys, she decided that she would pretend this really was for her health, and if they asked too many questions would have to admit the truth. But as it happened things were easier than she had expected. Her father was having a quarrel with Esther about the shop, which meant that he could think of nothing outside that. He had long ago lost any interest he had ever had in his daughter, and he was not agitated whether she went for a cruise or not. Her mother was in one of her vaguest moods.

  ‘Malta, oh yes; now where have I heard of that place? Oh yes, of course, it was in one of thingummy-body’s books,’ and she went prattling on.

  Two days later she said, ‘Do you think a funny place like that will do you any good? You might pick up all sorts of things on a cruise, you never know, do you? I mean it’s all so queer.’

  ‘I’ll be all right, Mummy.’

  ‘Of course you know best, but it seems to me that you may be making a mistake. Still that’s your whatever you call it, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll be all right, Mummy,’ she said again.

  She would have liked to confide in her mother, but knew that she could do nothing of the sort. One half of her was ashamed that she should be doing this, the other half declared that she had every right to do it when she was so deeply in love.

  Piers’ letter came, and when she read it, she knew that he was wildly excited. It had been worth doing to please him. It had been the right thing. Early in February she left home.

  TWO

  1

  It was extremely cold going down the Channel, and the ship (which was to travel through intensely hot weather later) was ill equipped against the chilly patch. Old ladies and venerable gentlemen clustered round the electric heaters, to the exclusion of the less pushful. The people who had come from India felt it the most, and Dinah was very sorry for them as they mournfully shouldered a couple of extra coats, leaving the arms swinging, and huddled about the saloons.

  In her new mood Dinah did not make friends, because she could find so much to think about in herself. She did not want to talk to people. It was unpleasant weather, though not obtrusively so, and the old sailors were insistent t
hat you could not have had a better trip at this time of the year. But it was choppy, and as they ploughed their way through a bilious-looking Bay, she lay in her cabin most of the time, and sent the stewardess up to the library to change books for her.

  Gibraltar was bright with spring, reminding her poignantly of her last visit there with Max. The souvenirs and the ivory monkey which had been given to her for making a good bargain. Although she wanted to forget that, she went ashore. There was the first warmth, the feeling of remoteness from England, which was left behind in the fog. The streets were full of the same old women selling freesias, and there were arum lilies growing in the Alameda, stiffly, like velvet flowers in the borders. She walked there and sat on a stone seat, watching the monkeys swinging in the trees of the Trafalgar Burying Ground. She had forgotten how beautiful the place was!

  She must have caught a chill in spite of the sunshine, and the pleasant warmth of Main Street, for she was in bed for the next three days, and missed seeing Toulon. When next she came on deck, Sardinia was in sight, and the night had changed into something miraculously lovely, made of dark sapphire embroidered with gold. It was hung with a million stars like spangles. She knew now that she was nearing, for the second time in her life, that dark little island which had struck her before as being grim and dour, and which now could only be romantic, since Piers was waiting for her there.

  She lay on a long deck chair, missing her first sitting for dinner because it seemed a shame to waste the beauty of such a night. Only when the diners from that sitting passed her with their coffee cups and their cigars, and she heard the bugle going again, did she realise that she had completely forgotten about the food. The steward brought her some chicken sandwiches, and she ate them lying there, with the blue-grey coast line smirched with stars, and the sound of the water against the ship’s sides in a strangely foreign music. There was the knowledge that she was retracing her way over a patch of water that once she had travelled with Max, and that now she was going to meet Piers.