When we emerged into the foyer we were still in a patriotic fever and I was touched to notice that Diana had been weeping in the darkness and did not appear to be in any way ashamed of the fact.
“I think she was wonderful, just wonderful!” she said, dabbing her eyes. “Daddy showed me the place in Brussels where they shot her but it didn’t seem very important then. Gosh! I’d like to do something like that, you know, stand up to all those bullies because you believe in something!”
“I’d jolly well come and rescue you long before you got shot!” I told her, identifying myself with Jan Ridd once again, and she squeezed my arm and said that she knew very well I would but that it was high time we caught the bus for Victoria, for we dared not risk missing the train.
It was at that moment that Yves de Royden stepped up and whipped off his cap with a courtly flourish. I looked at him with interest because I thought he was very oddly dressed. He looked very well-to-do but somehow frumpish as well, in his pepper-and-mustard tweed suit and a kind of cravat, instead of a conventional collar and tie. His trousers were unfashionably tight at the ankle, for it was the era of wide Oxford trousers, and I noticed that he carried an ebony-handled cane which he tucked smartly under his arm as he bowed.
“Why, Yves,” exclaimed Diana, delightedly, “what a place to run into you! Whatever are you doing over here? Buying more horses?”
The young Frenchman looked at me as I stood slightly behind Diana. I was feeling, and doubtless looking, miserably embarrassed but Diana at once introduced us. “This is a journalist friend of mine, Yves, a Mr. Leigh, from Devon. Jan, this is Yves de Royden. You must have heard of his father, Hervé de Royden. He won the Ascot Gold Cup with Dantonist a year or so ago, and he’s quite famous, isn’t he, Yves?”
The French boy smiled and extended his hand, his fingers barely touching mine. He was about seventeen, tall and thin, with narrow hips and shoulders, like those of a girl. After the apology for a handshake he turned his attention to Diana and asked three rapid questions in perfect but slightly pedantic English.
“You have been to the films? You like the picture? You are on holiday from school?”
The faint impression of effeminacy was charmed away by his excessively good manners and adult bearing, but notwithstanding this I hated him, then and there, for he seemed to me to be typical of the kind of rival I should have to face in the future. I recognized that he was so much more a part of her world than I could ever be and my nervousness made me rather rude. I said, gruffly:
“We’ve got to catch that train, Diana!”
He turned his charm on me, repaying good for evil and making me feel more inferior than ever.
“You have a train to catch? But I will take you there! I have a car outside. It would be a great pleasure.”
“Oh, you’re an absolute darling, Yves!” exclaimed Diana. “Just wait till you see his car, Jan, he wrote me about it. Why, this is wonderful luck, we might have missed that train getting a taxi Come on, Jan, and you’d better step on it, Yves, it’s Victoria!”
She hustled us out of the foyer and he led the way to a side street off Cumberland Place, where a low-slung and exotic-looking cream sports car was parked. It was a Lagonda, the kind of car I had only seen in magazine advertisements. There were no rear seats, so Diana squeezed in between us and we zoomed off down Park Lane, passing every vehicle that showed ahead.
He drove superlatively well, maintaining a consistently high speed but taking no chances. Speech was impossible owing to the rush of air and roar of the engine, but I heard Diana shout “Lovely! Lovely!” as we skimmed past the sentry boxes outside Buckingham Palace. In a very few minutes we were at Victoria and Diana was telling me to buy two tickets for a place called Sanderstead, one single ticket and one return.
When I rejoined them in the yard they were still talking beside the car, but as I approached, Yves drew himself up to attention and extended his hand to its fullest extent, the way all Frenchmen shake hands. Then he gave a little bob toward Diana and to my intense astonishment took her gloved hand and raised it lightly to his lips.
“Until Ascot then,” he said, and Diana replied:
“If I can manage it. It’s in termtime, you know, but I’ll talk Daddy around. Good-by, Yves, dear, and thanks so much for the lift. I adore the car, it’s an absolute scorcher!”
He nodded once more to me, wriggled into the car and roared off into the traffic. To my great relief Diana seemed to dismiss him at once. “Come on,” she said, seizing my hand, “we’ll get a carriage to ourselves if we look spoony enough!”
We went to the far end of the waiting train and although one middle-aged man did ignore Diana’s look of savage disapproval as he stepped over our feet, he got out at the third station from the terminus and we made the remainder of the journey alone.
The advent of Yves de Royden and his splendid car had blunted the fine edge of my pleasure and she was quick to notice the fact.
“Why, Jan,” she said, smiling and propelling herself toward me, “I do believe you’re jealous! You needn’t be, silly. I wouldn’t dream of falling for a foreigner. Yves is a nice foreigner, of course, and fabulously rich but I never think of him as a real man, not like you. Why, if he had to take part in a fight he’d probably kick and scratch! They all do, you know, like Brigadier Gerard in the box fight.”
She knew exactly how to banish my gloomy thoughts and by the time we had passed another station I had almost forgotten Yves and his outlandish courtliness.
“I’ve had a wonderful day, Diana,” I told her. “It’s one of the best days I remember, like that one back in October, when we met for the first time.”
“It’s funny, Jan,” she mused, tilting her head, throwing out her legs and turning in her toes, “but I can’t imagine we’ve only known each other about six months. It seems as if you’ve always been part of Heronslea and the Devon half of me, if you see what I mean. Sometimes I feel I’m two quite separate people, the London Emerald and the Devon Diana. I like Diana best, of course, and when I’m with you I grow right away from the other person, so that she seems a stranger. At first I thought it depended on where I was in the flesh but now it doesn’t somehow, it’s got to do with you, the way you look and talk and even walk. Just now, for instance, in the car I mean, the fact of you being there kept Emerald at a safe distance. Does this sound crazy to you? I’m sure it must because you’re so … so very much one person all the time!”
Before I could think of an answer her practical streak reasserted itself, summoned by the hoarse shout of the station porter calling the name of a station.
“It’s the next stop,” she warned, “but don’t get out until the moment the train is moving and then go right across the bridge and wait for the next up train. It’s just possible that there might be someone from school on the platform. Now there’s one thing we’ve got to settle. How much have you spent, I mean altogether, including your fare?”
“Good Lord,” I protested, “that’s nothing to do with you!”
“Oh yes it is,” she said briskly. “I asked you up here and you can’t afford to splosh money around. There was the fare and the cafe and the pictures and then these railway tickets. Would two-pounds-ten cover it, or is it more?”
In view of the fact that the return ticket to Devon had only been ten-and-sixpence, two-pounds-ten was getting on for double the amount I had spent but I was horrified at the thought of her financing the excursion, or paying one penny toward the costs of our entertainment.
“I wouldn’t dream of taking your money,” I said, flushing. “It’s … it’s been wonderful meeting you like this and the man always pays, you know that, Diana.”
She looked at me gravely for a moment. “All right, Jan,” she said. “I knew you’d make a fuss, so I’ll have to make it up to you some other way. We shall be in in less than a minute, so you’d better kiss me, that is if you want to.”
In the early stages of our long courtship it was always Diana who took
the initiative, not only about when we should meet and how we should occupy our time but when we should embrace or even hold hands. She was so much more adult than I was, and we both knew it, but that occasion was the first that I was more than a passive partner in the act of kissing.
I put my arms around her and kissed her in what I hoped was a fair imitation of the couples on the films and her response was frightening. As our lips touched she tightened her grip on my neck and shoulders, pressing her cheek to mine and murmuring, “Jan, Jan, you belong to me! You’re my Jan, aren’t you? You are, aren’t you?” Then I forgot to be frightened and began to drown in a sea of sweetness, so engulfing that I did not even hear the porter shout “Sanderstead” or sense that the train was drawing to a halt.
She pushed me away, jumped up, and pulled her coat from the rack. I noticed then that her eyes were wet and that they had the same look of intensity that I had seen in them when she had gathered up her reins and ridden straight at the fallen tree on Boxing Day.
“Good-by, Jan,” she whispered. “I’ll write! I promise—good-by, darling Jan, my Jan!”
Then she was gone and I heard her footsteps pattering along the platform. The train jerked and I remembered just in time that I too had to alight.
I flung myself out of the carriage and came down on one knee, jarring it painfully, but I was up again at once and waited in the shadows between the station lights until the train was out of sight. Then I crossed the bridge to the up platform, feeling nothing of the smart of my knee but walking in a blissful state of suspension between the greasy planks of the steps and the sky. In this ecstatic trance I somehow found my way back to Waterloo.
I slept most of the way home and when the train ran into Whinford, about half-past four, the night had cleared and the sky was bright with stars.
My road home to Whinmouth Bay ran alongside the river and it was here, in the silence broken only by the steady crank of Uncle Luke’s ancient machine, that I emerged from the trance and was able to set about marshaling my thoughts and enjoying the sense of achievement they brought to me.
A little over thirty hours ago, I reflected, I had traveled over this same route toward an uncertain destiny, for despite my new-found confidence in myself, and in Diana’s encouraging behavior in the Folly on Old Year’s Day, there had remained deep down in me a nag of doubt that she would ever grow to regard me seriously. I had difficulty in ridding myself of the thought that my devotion was simply a scalp to hang on the belt of a spoiled child. Now I no longer had any doubts. Not only was I cheered in retrospect by the encounter with the French boy and by the lightness with which she had dismissed him, but as positive proof of her love I had the image of her tear-stained face when we parted and her whispered claim on me as we had kissed one another and she scurried out of the compartment.
I repeated her words over and over again to myself and each repetition brought more comfort and reassurance. I no longer pondered the outcome of her presentation parties, or feared her mother’s opposition to our preposterous courtship. Whatever the future held in store for us, wherever she was sent, however long we were separated, I knew now that Diana and I belonged to each other for all time and that nothing else was of the smallest importance.
By the time I rode into Whinmouth Bay the sky was paling over Nun’s Head and the shadows on Whinmouth Flats, on the western side of the estuary, were deeper in contrast. I no longer felt tired and jaded, for the fifteen-mile ride had seemed like five. Instead of going home to bed I propped the cycle outside the Mart and walked along the old jetty at the Point.
This was my favorite part of Whinmouth and I had a secret perch here, under the barnacled timbers near the lock gates. It was still barely light and being Sunday morning there was no one astir. I climbed down the piles and sat looking out over the wide estuary, waiting for sunrise to succeed the false dawn.
It was quiet and pleasant down here. Out on the bar gulls were wheeling over the shallows, wailing greedy protests at one another. The soft tide lapped the timbers of the jetty and across the river one or two early lights were showing under the hills. I always used to think of this scene as the Mississippi and it did indeed correspond in many ways to Mark Twain’s vivid descriptions of the big river, for if you took a slantwise view it was heavily timbered on each side and it never occurred to you that open sea lay on the immediate left.
I sat here a long time, my legs swinging from the cross-pile, thinking and thinking about love. I thought about it in relation to all the people I knew, Uncle Luke and his querulous Thirza in their poky little bedroom over the Mart, Uncle Reuben in the loneliness of a bed-sitting room behind the High Street, the landlady of The Rifleman and her two husbands over at Shepherdshey and, from thence, to the graceful, porticoed Heronslea, home of Diana and her ill-assorted parents.
I wondered about the relationship of Mr. and Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton, he with the big, wobbling head and square, clumsy body, she so elegant, groomed and stilted, and it puzzled me that these two people could have created a vital and adorable creature like Diana. People always said that if you want to see what you are getting when you lead a bride to the altar you should look closely at her mother, but how could this apply in my case? What link could exist between the eager, sparkling girl I had left on a suburban platform and the silly, prancing woman who mangled her vowels and performed such monstrous antics in order to impress dour old countrymen like Big Nat, the Shepherdshey sexton? Why had a financial wizard like Mr. Gayelorde-Sutton chosen such a creature for a mate? How could he suffer her to act such a charade, day in and day out, when his friends and business acquaintances must surely snigger behind their hands every time she opened her mouth? Was she like that when they were alone together?
Did she continue to twist every “i” into a strangled “aiee” when they went to bed together? Would she be more inclined to regard me as a social equal if I did the same thing, or if I learned to ape the courtliness of a boy like Yves de Royden and kiss her hand when I was introduced to her? Or was all this flummery due to money and nothing else? Did the mere possession of property and a big bank balance regulate her attitude toward everyone she met?
I was unable to answer any one of these questions but they were idle and irrelevant in my present uplifted mood. What anyone else thought about pledges exchanged between Diana and myself was unimportant. What mattered, all that mattered from now on, was that we belonged to each other, as surely as Heloise belonged to Abelard, Romeo to Juliet, Jan to Lorna.
When the shadows had lifted from the western bank I got up, stiffly. My bruised knee was paining me but I paid no attention to it. I scrambled up the timbers of the jetty and regained a quay now crowded with screaming herring gulls and lesser black-backed gulls quarreling among the lobster pots over gobbets of gutted fish.
I let myself into the apartment above the Mart and crept along to my room. No one was about so I did not wait to make tea but turned in and slept the clock around.
Chapter Four
DIANA’S EASTER holidays commenced on April 1st but she did not come down to Devon for the first week. She wrote to me from London a day or so after breakup to say that she would meet me at the Folly “very early in the morning” on the day after her return. I set the alarm for five A.M. and it was still dark when I cycled up the chalk road to Foxhayes Common and entered the Heronslea estate from the rear. I left the bicycle on the track leading to Heronslea Woods and climbed the spiral staircase of the Folly just as the sun was breasting Teasel Wood and every bird in Sennacharib was awake to greet it.
I had never seen Sennacharib in springtime and its beauty, viewed from the open casement of the Folly, made my heart ache. Every bracken frond of the common was laced with dew and beyond it, across the green downslope of the larch wood, I could just make out the white smudge of Heronslea House. Where the sun touched the southern slopes the primroses were growing in great, trailing clusters along the edge of the plantation, so thickly as to form a yellow hedge.
Ou
r two buzzards were astir, drifting lazily over their favorite hunting ground of the paddock. Every now and again one of them would pretend to swoop, dropping a hundred feet or so, but never pushing home an attack. I remembered then that Uncle Luke had said buzzards were cowardly birds, always waiting for easy prey and never attacking anything that might fight back, but this morning it seemed to me that they were enjoying the wind currents and their mastery of flight rather than searching out a meal.
I was still watching them when I saw something twinkle on the fringe of the larches and after a moment or two Diana rode into the paddock. She was mounted on her big piebald, Sioux, and was leading a saddled pony.
I could see her more than a mile off, moving toward the Folly at a slow trot, and the sun made the stirrup irons flash like naked swords. I watched her with quiet pride, sitting her splendid Sioux as nonchalantly as her celestial namesake, and when I waved from the window she urged the horses into a slow canter that sent the pheasants karking from the bracken and a pair of pigeons whirring out of the oaks beside the Folly.
When I was sure that she had seen me I ran down the staircase and out into the clearing. The sparkle of the morning glowed in her cheeks as she threw a leg over the pommel and slid to the ground with one of her breathless, good-to-be-alive laughs.
“Isn’t this wonderful, Jan? I thought it was the kind of morning you should learn to ride! Slip Nellie’s irons down and let’s see how you look. How did you get here so early? I made sure I’d be first. Come on, get up, for Sioux is raring to go!”
I obeyed without much enthusiasm, remembering the last occasion that she had bullied me into climbing up on Nellie, the dun pony she was leading.
I did not fear a fall so much as I dreaded to look ridiculous in her eyes, but Nellie seemed quiet enough on the leading rein and when I was awkwardly astride, Diana proceeded to give me my first lesson in horsemanship. I would have preferred a quiet walk along the primrose banks and the chance of starting a hare or fox from the dew-beaded gorse, but Diana was adamant. Once embarked upon the subject of horses she pursued it to the exclusion of all else.
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