I slipped out at nine o’clock the next morning and ran along to Beatty’s, in Chapel Street, to buy Lorna Doone, telling them to leave it unwrapped because I wanted to write in it and wrap it myself.
I should have liked to buy a card to go with it, but the purchase of the book consumed my entire capital. During the lunch interval I took the gift to my room and sucked a penholder throughout the greater part of the dinner hour while composing the inscription.
Finally, I wrote: To Diana, a New Year gift, from Jan, with all my Love. I hesitated a long time before I added the final words but finally decided that they could pass as a formality and could not be taken to mean anything forward on the part of the donor.
I now had to wait three days until the carrier called for the goods that Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton had bought before Christmas, for I had made up my mind to give Diana the present rather than risk a maternal interrogation that might follow the arrival of an unexpected parcel.
On the last day of the year the van arrived about eleven o’clock in the morning and Aunt Thirza packed me some sandwiches to take for lunch, as I was expected to stay and help with the unloading. My one fear was that Diana might not be sufficiently interested to come over to the cottages when we arrived or, worse still, that her mother would superintend the whole operation and keep us in view all the time.
I was lucky again, for not only was Diana awaiting us at the entrance to the drive but at once hopped on the tailboard and gave the driver his directions. She was dressed for work too, in blue jeans, a green sweater and a scarlet beret. She told me that her mother and father had returned to London the previous day and that Drip was expecting me to tea when the job had been completed.
“It won’t take us all the afternoon,” I protested, though secretly overjoyed at the invitation. “We shall be finished about three and the van will be going back.”
“Oh, I’ve fixed all that,” she said, airily. “I telephoned your uncle and said we wanted some help clearing out one of the cottages and that you were to stay and sort out anything he might want to buy.”
“Good Lord!” I said, aghast at her nerve. “Whatever did he say to that?”
“He said it would be all right and you could come home on the bus at six. Why should he object? You’re not scared of him, are you?”
“No,” I said, “not of him, but I’m scared of your mother.”
“Well, most people are,” she said tolerantly, “but she’s well over two hundred miles away, thank heavens! Praise Him from Whom all blessings flow for Boards!”
The van branched off the main drive and lurched along a narrow track that led through rhododendrons to the cottages, built on the Teasel side of the big paddock. Somehow it was much easier to be myself with Diana when she was dressed in hand-me-downs, a dirty sweater and the beret On all three of the previous occasions that we had met her expensive-looking clothes had intimidated me, but today she looked just like one of the fishermen’s daughters who played and flirted on the quay outside the Mart I asked her about her Christmas gifts (being careful to drop no hint about my present) and she said that she had been given a silver toilet set by her mother and that the horse I had seen her riding on Boxing Day was a combined Christmas and birthday present from her father. She made no mention of Drip’s wonderful gift.
This led us on to discuss the Boxing Day hunt and she told me that they had run the fox to ground at Nun’s Bay, where it had entered a cliff earth too deep to be opened with the crowbars. They had hung around there most of the afternoon, and apart from the initial gallop that I had witnessed it had been a blank day.
I had half a mind to tell her then that it was I who had saved the fox by misdirecting the huntsman but I checked myself, fearing that such a confession would endanger our relationship and spoil what promised to be a wonderful day. I had made up my mind that I would tell her but in my own time, when our friendship had thrown out stronger roots.
We got through the unloading in double-quick time and the van left soon after two o’clock.
“Now,” I said, finishing my sandwiches, “where’s all this other stuff I’m supposed to look at?”
She laughed and shook her curls. “Why, Jan, you great booby, there isn’t any! I made that up. I guessed you’d have to go back and I wanted you to stay, but it’s perfectly all right, you can say none of it was worth buying.”
I wasted no time pondering her ethics. I was far too flattered by the discovery that she wanted my company enough to invent lies to get it. The sky was overcast and rain was threatening, so I imagined that we should now return to the house. Instead, however, she suggested that we go up through the larch wood and across the common to another wood that I had not yet explored but had seen from a distance on the day of my encounter with the keeper.
“It’s the most exciting place in Sennacharib,” she said, “because it’s got the Folly in it.”
“What’s the Folly?” I asked and she told me that it was a kind of tower, built by one of the mad Gilroys nearly a hundred years ago, and was not ruinous and abandoned but quite habitable and just like a corner tower of a French chateau on the Loire.
It sounded well worth exploring so we set off at once, Diana having called to a woodsman and told him to tell Drip that she had had lunch with the furniture men and would be back at dusk for tea. I was on the point of giving her my present then but I decided it would be better to wait until we got to the Folly. The book was carefully packed in my knapsack, along with Aunt Thirza’s thermos flask and sandwich tin.
We climbed the main ride of the larch wood and crossed the fenced paddock to Foxhayes Common. The Folly was in a large, straggling copse that occupied the highest piece of land on the estate, apart from Overhang Head, above Nun’s Bay on the coast. This wood was not a plantation but a wild and lonely jumble of dwarf oaks, chestnuts and silver birches, and as we drew near it I could see the top of a leaded conical tower peeping from the seaward edge of the timber. I thought it very odd that I hadn’t noticed such an incongruity before It was, as Diana had described, just like a corner of a castle in an illustrated fairy-tale book, the kind of tower where giants and ogres lived and old women spun magic charms. It was exciting enough, but the excitement it generated was tinged with fear and I was at a loss to understand why anyone had chosen to build a tower in such a lonely spot, or what possible purpose it could have served when first erected.
Diana said she had wondered the same things and had sought information from the oldest estate worker, a man whose father had been a keeper at Heronslea when the house was still occupied by the Gilroys.
“The man who had it built was a bit of a loony,” she told me. “He used to come out here and sit by himself for days on end, or so old Venner told me. At one time it had little cannons on the top floor and Lord Gilroy’s cousin, or whoever it was who built it, used to play his violin up there. Poachers wouldn’t go near the place, Venner said, because they all thought it was haunted after he died. There was even a story that people heard a violin playing there long after he was dead and gone, but I don’t believe in ghosts, do you?”
I said I didn’t, but the Folly, when we came to it, was the kind of place that encouraged you to believe in them wholeheartedly, particularly on a gray December day, with a cold wind blowing from the northeast and the surrounding common looking pinched and defeated, as though it awaited a spring that would never come.
There was an overgrown path leading to the doorless porch and a flight of church-tower steps to the upper rooms, of which there were two. The triangular steps were hewn out of solid stone and were still in good condition, so we climbed up, passed through the middle chamber and reached the top room without any difficulty.
It was lighter and more cheerful up here, for we were now above the level of the nearest trees and could look down over the whole stretch of country between the tower and the sea.
Sennacharib was laid out like a map, with the blur of Teasel Wood to the east, the blue spirals of smoke marking She
pherdshey in the center, and the vast green clump of the Heronslea grounds to the west. Beyond the road you could see the red and gray huddle of Whinmouth and the estuary, and if the day had been clear the far side of the Whin would have been visible, as would have been Nun’s Island in the bay to the north.
Up here the sense of gloom that the first sight of the Folly had provoked was exorcised by the magnitude of the prospect and Diana, noticing my exhilaration, said, “You like it, don’t you, Jan?”
“Yes,” I said, “it’s a marvelous place! Does anyone come here now, anybody but you?”
“No,” she said, “not even the keepers. I know that because they were surprised to hear it was still safe to climb and you can see by the briers at the entrance that nobody ever uses the path. I’ll tell you what, Jan, it can be our place. I won’t ever bring anyone here but you and if we ever want to meet, and it isn’t possible to make proper arrangements, we can have the Folly as a thought code—you know, a prearranged rendezvous that doesn’t need any message—we’ll just know we can always meet here! Later on I’ll sneak some chairs and a table, and perhaps a bit of carpet and some tinned stuff and an oil stove for cocoa. It’ll be like the cave in Tom Sawyer or that place on the cliffs where Stalky and Co. used to hide.”
I was overwhelmed by a plan that plainly indicated that I was progressing at a prodigious rate, but the mention of Stalky and Co. suddenly reminded me of the gift and I took it out, my throat dry and my hands shaking a little.
“It’s for you, my New Year present,” I said, blushing. “I met Drip at the hunt and she said she’d forgotten to include this in that wonderful set she gave you.”
The presentation took Diana completely by surprise. She stared at me with parted lips for a moment and then she swallowed twice, very deliberately, and began to tear at the wrappings. I watched, enjoying every second of her suspense, and when she saw what it was, and had cooed her delight over the inscription, I was ready to burst with pride and satisfaction.
“Why, Jan!” she cried, holding it close against her chest “This is the nicest present anyone ever gave me … no, no, I mean it … because—well—you haven’t got much money and this is like … like Daddy giving me a thousand pounds, if you see what I mean!”
I don’t know how much Mr. Gayelorde-Sutton was earning in 1927 but the book represented three quarters of my weekly income. If he was drawing fifty thousand a year from his investments, as he did into the middle part of the thirties, then her extravagant comparison probably wasn’t far short of the mark.
It was easy to see that she had been reared against a background of dividends and shares values. The first thought that came into her head was the cost of the book and what the outlay had imposed upon the investor, but a more generous reaction followed as soon as she had reread the inscription and flicked through the pages.
“It’s the thought that’s exciting, Jan! You’re like old Drip that way. The presents I got from Mummy and Daddy don’t really mean anything, you see? They forget until I come home just before Christmas and then they suddenly remember that something is expected of them and rush out and splosh money on the first thing that comes into their heads. It was that way with the pony and the dressing set.”
I didn’t feel that I could take undue credit for the gift. Although an accomplished liar herself, Diana always made you feel that way, you shied away from pretense and wanted to tell her the whole truth, whatever the consequences.
“As a matter of fact it was an afterthought on my part,” I admitted. “I got the idea from Drip, when she showed me the marvelous present she had for you.”
“I don’t care, I still think it was wonderfully sweet of you, Jan … there, that’s how sweet!” and she placed the book on the broad window ledge, took my face in her hands, and kissed me on the mouth.
Sensations are difficult to recall over a gulf of twenty years. You always promise yourself that you will remember the best of them but you seldom do, not really, not in the active sense. There have been half a dozen moments in my life of which I could have said I was ecstatically happy, and each of those moments was a spontaneous gift from Diana. This, I believe, was the first of them, not only because it was the first time that I had been kissed by a girl and because that girl was Diana, but because her impulsive affection somehow transformed me from a boy to a man, marking that transition as nothing else could have done.
Adolescence, at least for the male, is a slow, tedious business and not so exclusively physical as is generally believed. I think that its progress involves so many workaday things, things like wages, the lack of privacy in tiny households, the attitude one is obliged to maintain toward parents and employers and even the attitude of bus conductors and civil servants. I had been doing a man’s work ever since I came to the West and I had always been treated like a man by Aunt Thirza and Uncle Luke’s customers, but I had never considered myself anything more than an overgrown boy until Diana’s lips touched mine and I caught the fleeting scent of her hair and my senses registered the pressure of her fingers on my cheeks.
I don’t recall whether I returned her kiss but I do know that I must have communicated something of my emotional turmoil to her, for her hands instantly left my face and she had to combat a flurry of embarrassment, rare for her but powerful enough to make her turn back to the window and change the subject.
“Do you ever go to dances in Whinmouth, Jan?”
Her abrupt change of manner shocked me. Somehow it depreciated the value of the kiss.
“No,” I said, with a touch of sulkiness, “I can’t dance.”
“Of course you can,” she said impatiently, “anybody can nowadays, there’s simply nothing to it but walking around to a rhythm! We have a dance every Saturday at school but it’s a bore dancing with girls. I have to be gentleman because most of the girls are smaller.”
Talk of her school always interested me, possibly because it was so unlike any school I had attended or visited. From the odd scraps of information she imparted I had conjured up a picture of a kind of social university, where the emphasis was on deportment rather than on dates, sums and irregular verbs.
“What are you going to do when you leave that place?” I asked her, not because I was anxious to know, but because I wanted her to do the talking, leaving my faculties free to imprint the memory of the kiss upon my mind.
“Oh that’s all mapped out,” she said, scornfully. “It’s all rather dull and I’m not at all sure I mean to go through with it! I shan’t leave till I’m seventeen and then Mummy’s determined to send me to Switzerland to be finished. She plans to keep me there about a year, rubbing up on languages and then I’m to go en famille to Paris before coming back to be presented.”
I had a vague notion what “being presented” and “finished” meant but not the slightest inkling of the meaning of “en famille.” I never minded displaying ignorance of this kind to Diana, so I asked for more detailed information.
She said that nearly all girls who were finished in Switzerland remained on the Continent for another year or so, living with a French family in order to become fluent in at least one other language. I said that this would probably be fun, but she shook her head and pointed out that her mother would be certain to select a family where boarders were heavily chaperoned and never allowed to leave the house alone. She went on to say that the sister of one of her friends was already domiciled in such a household and had written home to say that it was worse than being in prison.
I asked her to explain to me exactly what being presented entailed.
“Well, it’s a kind of here-I-am ritual,” she said, laughing. “It happens when a girl is about eighteen and she is prepared for it, the way you get prepared for confirmation. When it happens you have what is called ‘a season.’ A season means you stay in London and go to parties and naturally you have a big party of your own. The idea of the parties isn’t for fun but an opportunity to meet suitable boys.”
“Boys to go about with?”
Diana threw back her head. “Oh Jan,” she protested, “you’re so sweet—no, boys who’ll propose to you!”
I at once turned my face against seasons and muttered darkly that I had always supposed that this sort of thing was terribly old-fashioned nowadays and that even wealthy people married for love, the way they always did in books.
“Oh that’s so,” she said lightly, “but the man you happen to fall in love with doesn’t have to be poor, does he? Some of them who come to the debs’ parties are, of course, as poor as church mice if you did but know it, and all those are on the lookout for a girl with money, but money wouldn’t influence me one way or the other, so long as the man I accepted was somebody!”
“You mean a … a knight, or something?” I asked, guardedly.
“Goodness no!” said Diana, laughing again. Titles don’t mean a thing nowadays. You can buy them if you want to—in a roundabout way, that is. Mummy’s been after one for Daddy for years now, but it takes time and it’s got to be done tactfully. She’ll pull it off, though, mark my words! No, what I mean by being somebody is somebody who had done something out of the ordinary, somebody like, well, like Scott of the Antarctic, or Evans of the Broke, somebody I could look up to and who didn’t give a hoot whether Daddy was well off or not, but wanted me as a person. The point is, people like that usually haven’t got money, not real money, that is.”
Then and later I was fascinated by Diana’s phrase—“real money.” Our views of money were poles apart. Any money was real money to me but it wasn’t to her; “real” implied something over the five-figure mark, the kind of money I associated with film stars, and people like her father.
Her declaration gave me hope, however, for at least I was getting the kind of information I needed. I made up my mind to get more.
Diana Page 7