Diana

by R. F Delderfield

  “Well?” said Diana, throwing herself down on a level stretch of grass beside the tower. “What do you think of Dan’l?”

  “I think he’s a complete phony,” I said, “and a pretty smelly one at that!”

  “Not a character? Not a tarry chip of Old England?”

  “No,” I said, “not on your life! Chaps like him are ten-a-penny in Whinmouth, but most of them wash once in a while and all of them say thank you when they get a tip.”

  She curled her legs under her and leaned back on her hands, the familiar smile playing hide-and-seek round the corners of her mouth, while her eyes regarded me with affectionate mockery.

  “Look, what is all this?” I demanded. “What’s he got to do with us being here?”

  “He’s the tonic I told you about,” said Diana, “he’s your private pick-me-up.”

  I was always ready to stand a great deal of chaff from Diana but that day I was too nervous about the immediate future to put up with her teasing indefinitely. I said, shortly, “For goodness’ sake say what’s in your mind and let’s begin at the beginning!”

  “All right,” she said, softly, inserting a grass stem into her mouth with the casual grace she displayed when she slipped from the back of one of her ponies. “Dan’l is Mummy’s father and my grandfather!”

  I jumped as if I had found myself sitting on a wasps’ nest, utter incredulity depriving me of speech for nearly a minute. At last I found my tongue.

  “That … that ferryman! … Your grandfather!”

  “Uh-huh!” she said, enjoying every moment of my outraged astonishment. “His name is Daniel Best and Mummy is his youngest daughter. She doesn’t know that I know, of course; in fact, nobody knows that I know except you, but it’s true, all right, and if you look really hard you can see it, at least I can, because I’ve seen Mummy without make-up.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, weakly, “I just don’t understand how the chap and your mother …”

  I trailed off, for it was impossible to contemplate the relationship, much less put it into words. I thought back to the first glimpse I had ever had of Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton, tip-tapping on her high heels into Uncle Luke’s store, splendidly arrogant in her elegant clothes and addressing me as though I was something left behind by the tide. I remembered how she had screwed her small, red mouth into a tight ball of distaste and called in strangled vowels to Diana, “Air-m’alde! Air-m’alde! Come heah, Air-m’alde, Ai want you!”

  I compared her mincing charade with the sour, uncompromising heaviness of the ferryman Dan’l, searching my memory for some characteristic or suggestion of a characteristic, that might link them as father and daughter, but my mind shied away from the possibility, not only on account of its staggering improbability but because, deep in my heart, I was feeling the first stirrings of pity for Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton and wanting to absolve her from a relationship with a sullen drunkard who smelled vilely of sweat and stale liquor.

  “How did you find out? Why are you so sure?” I asked, holding on to a tendril of hope that this was just one of Diana’s elaborate jokes.

  “I’d always wondered about Mummy’s people,” she said. “I think I began to suspect something years and years ago, when I first realized how terribly phony she was and why she tried so terribly hard to convince even me that she came out of the top drawer. Then I got a clue from a book of check stubs she left lying around and did some detective work among her papers before coming over here to make sure. It wasn’t all that difficult, it only needed common sense and luck. She pays him to stay away, you see, and as long as he gets regular beer money and his cottage rent paid, he never gives any trouble. He isn’t anything like as truculent as he looks, just rather pitiful, I always think.”

  “Do you mean you actually rooted about among your mother’s things for clues?” I demanded.

  “Certainly, and don’t expect me to apologize for it,” she said sharply. “I’ve a right to know who my own grandfather is, haven’t I?”

  I conceded her this but remained doubtful of the ethics of her action.

  “Does he know … about you?”

  “Well, he knows I exist, but he certainly doesn’t recognize me. That was obvious, wasn’t it?”

  I thought for a moment and then began to ponder her tortuous motive in bringing me here, introducing me, so to speak, to the family skeleton. I remembered the word she had used—“tonic.” What exactly did that mean? How was knowing about Dan’l a tonic to me? Then, quite suddenly, I saw her object and she realized that I had understood.

  “Well, Jan, do you catch on? Does it make sense now—why I brought you here, I mean?”

  I said, “I imagine it was to prove to me that your family wasn’t really any better class than mine, Diana.”

  “I should say you had the edge on us if anything,” said Diana, laughing. “I’ve seen all your uncles and none of them measure up to our Dan’l, do they?”

  Suddenly she whisked out of her bantering mood and her eyes became serious. “Don’t you see, Jan, it isn’t what you are, it’s what you become that matters! If Mother had just broken away from a family like that and struck out on her own, I think I should have admired her, but as it is, what possible right can she have to choose my companions and lay down rules and regulations for me? She doesn’t just laugh at Dan’l, or give him enough money to lie low. She doesn’t even send him out of the country—she’s too scared to do that and wants him fairly handy where she can keep an eye on him. It’s almost as though he was a criminal, and in a way he’s worse than a criminal to her, certainly worse than a criminal with a public school background. It makes me absolutely sick when people like her and Drip look down on somebody like you, someone who earns his own living, and tries to keep himself decent on a few shillings a week! I brought you to see Dan’l in the hope that it would help you to see straight, the way I’ve seen since I was old enough to sit up and take notice. If a person like you wants to change enough, he can always do it. Thousands of people have had worse starts and become all sorts of things without being ashamed of what they were born, as Mummy is. I suppose I’ve got a thing about this snob business because I’ve been hedged in with it all my life, and when Drip came up with her pi-jaw last night I wanted to hit her. Then I was angry with you, for letting her persuade you to eat humble pie and pull a forelock at squire’s house. Don’t ever eat humble pie, Jan, and don’t ever pull forelocks! If you do I’ll hate you, and I don’t want to hate you because you being in love with me is the nicest thing that’s ever happened to me!”

  Her logic wasn’t very original but I still think hers was a remarkable outlook for a fifteen-year-old girl who had been brought up to regard almost everyone about her as a social inferior. I know that at the time I admired her for it tremendously, and that my heart, already hers, swelled with pride because she had faith in me and was prepared to go to such lengths to prove it. I loved her honesty and courage. I loved her high spirits and irrepressible sense of fun. I loved her grasp of realism and utter lack of pretension and I was beginning to respond to her physically in a way that was new to me, despite our occasional kisses and childish protestations. This would doubtless have happened before, but until her latest declaration my awareness of her eager, elfin prettiness had been held in check by her unattainability. I had been ready to serve her, to perform any and every feat she demanded of me. I had been eager to worship but, if necessary, to do my worshiping from a respectful distance. Now, within a few months of my sixteenth birthday, I wanted to possess as well as worship, I wanted to begin training as the man who would ultimately soar to the ecstatic position of mastery over her, and as I watched the afternoon sun light up her hair and breeze stir the uneven fringe that seemed always to be reaching for the arch of her left eyebrow, I made up my mind that I would commence that training without confiding in her and then lay my accomplishments, one by one, at her feet as the forfeits of rapture.

  We sat there a long time watching the empty bay, talking of o
ther things, apart from beery old Dan’l and what kind of childhood her mother must have had in the crowded cottage that he continued to occupy behind the boat sheds. Then we climbed down from the castle and ordered a Devonshire tea in a tiny gift-shop-cum-café under the red cliff, afterwards re-crossing the ferry piloted by her grandfather, who became embarrassingly servile when presented with Diana’s half crown at the point of disembarkation.

  We had to share the compartment back to Whinmouth,which distressed me, for I had made up my mind to kiss her without awaiting her usual invitation. As it happened, with three other people in the carriage, I was obliged to remain content with letting my hand rest on hers as we sat close together on the dusty cushions. I saw her to the bus stop shortly before dusk and then, with singing heart, went home to sort my Heronslea notes and file my latest memories.

  Chapter Five

  DIANA RETURNED to school the last week in April. By the first week of May I had made my plans and put the two of them into operation.

  I had learned a good deal in the holidays. It was plain that Diana was not prepared to share her life with a man whose achievements were limited to chronicling smalltown events, and while my present job was good enough to be regarded as a training ground for wider fields, I realized that I must look ahead for something more spectacular and certainly more rewarding. In the meantime I decided to employ the interval by overhauling my social equipment, leaving my career in abeyance until I was experienced enough to apply for a post in Fleet Street.

  It was still nearly three years before the great industrial slump of the early thirties and the word “unemployment” did not, as yet, loom very large in Whinmouth. I went so far as to discuss my future with Uncle Reuben and although he shook his head when I told him, with the brashness of youth, that I was determined to see the world and start by getting myself a job on a national newspaper, he commended my ambition and promised that when the time came he would do everything in his power to help me.

  “You’ll find that every middle-aged reporter in Fleet Street dreams of running a little provincial weekly like ours, John,” he warned me. “Taken all round, there’s a lot to be said for being a big fish in a small pond. Up there they earn good money, of course, but it’s a rackety life and most of them end up by drinking too much or go to the bad in one way or another. However, I’m not so old as to realize that you won’t want to spend the whole of your life in a place like this, and I think you’re bright and willing enough to merit something more than a job on a small paper you aren’t ever likely to own. Let’s shelve the whole business until you’re eighteen; then we’ll get Mr. Priddis to give us some introductions and try our luck in somewhere a bit bigger than Whinmouth Bay. In the meantime we’ll give you a raise to thirty shillings a week.”

  I thanked him and was ready to leave it at that but privately made up my mind to do something about improving my position before another two years had elapsed. In the meantime, as I say, I reached out in other directions. I learned how to ride properly and began to acquire a working knowledge of French.

  The riding lessons were easily arranged. I went over to Uncle Mark’s stables, determined to improve my acquaintance with the old rascal. Having studied his battered signboard, which proclaimed lessons were given and liveries received, I demanded to be taught to ride and offered a fee of five shillings per lesson. Uncle Mark was pleased, I think, by my forthrightness, and by my sly admission that I was presenting myself in defiance to staid Brother Reuben’s advice.

  “You’ll get nothing but dirty stories from that scoundrel,” he had warned me, when I told him of my intention. “He’ll take all your money and give you nothing better than a filthy taste in your mouth!”

  I didn’t repeat this comment to Mark but I told him that Uncle Reuben had dismissed horsemanship as a giddy pursuit for the idle rich, and that was enough to put Mark on his mettle.

  “Damme, I’ll teach ’ee for nowt if you’ve a mind to learn praper!” he growled, and when I told him I had already had a few lessons on one of the Gayelorde-Sutton ponies he looked me up and down much as Diana had done after persuading me to ride Nellie at the Folly.

  “Do you think I’ll ever make a really good rider?” I asked him.

  “I dunno!” he grunted. “Us’ll zee when us gets ’ee up!”

  He brought out an old cob called Justice and taught me to mount and dismount, and having expressed grudging satisfaction that I “zeemed to get the ’ang of it better’n most o’ the young bleeders,” he saddled his own horse and took me over the common, thumping out the rhythm of the trot on my left thigh until it was sore to touch.

  After that we made remarkably good headway. I slipped out to Uncle Mark’s three or four times a week, and by midsummer we had exchanged Justice for a lively mare called Polly, whom I took over some of the smaller jumps in Mark’s grid, behind the stables.

  I worked very hard, for I was absolutely determined to surprise Diana when she came home for the long holiday, and Uncle Mark became almost amiable as he watched my progress. The day we galloped round Teasel Wood and finished a neck-and-neck race by clearing a fallen spruce in the ride approaching his premises, he rolled from his sweating mount and waddled over to wring my hand in both of his.

  “Giddon, us’ll ’ave ’ee ’untin’ in no time!” he exclaimed. “Damned if you ab’n got a natural zeat, me boy, aye, an’ bliddy gude ’ands too, or my name ain’t Leigh! I’ll tell ’ee what, you come yer an’ zaddle up Polly any time you’ve a mind to, and you tell that bliddy preacher of yours down in the town that Mark’s done more to making a man of ’ee than ever ’im an’ ’is penny backscratcher ’as!”

  Uncle Mark disapproved of my association with the Observer, which he always referred to as a penny backscratcher, an implied criticism of the lavish praise it doled out to its regular advertisers in reports of their various social and political functions. I said very little about my riding to Uncle Reuben, however; indeed, I kept it a close secret from everyone, for I was now itching to demonstrate my prowess to the only pair of eyes that mattered.

  In the meantime I was making steady if less spectacular progress with elocution and French, under the tutelage of Miss Beddowes, the daughter of a former king’s messenger, who lived in one of the big, detached houses on Foxhayes Hill. Miss Beddowes taught elocution free of charge at the local evening Institute. She was a prim, rather leathery little spinster with a passion for dispensing education among the deserving poor. She ran the local Book Club that did duty for a county library in Whinmouth, and we became friends after I was able to help her in an appeal for unwanted books to stock the club shelves. It was through me that she was given a case of classics from Uncle Luke’s store and she was so grateful that she invited me to tea in her big, old-fashioned house on the hill.

  She was an energetic little woman whose undoubted talents as a teacher had been wasted while caring for invalid parents. Now that both were dead, and she was comfortably provided for, she was trying to make up for lost time by throwing herself heart and soul into all kinds of social work. Apart from running the Book Club and teaching at the Institute, she was a leader of the Girl Guides and the only female member of the Urban District Council. She was not, at first acquaintance, a very likable person, being entirely without a sense of humor and very much inclined to take herself too seriously, but I grew very fond of her later on and exploited her shamefully when she suggested that I should try to shed a Cockney accent that was beginning to crossbreed with West Country brogue.

  From these lessons it was an easy step to elementary French, and I was gratified to discover that I had a mild flair for languages. Perhaps the work seemed easy because I was young and eager, or perhaps the real spur was the prospect of astonishing Diana in yet another field of accomplishment. At all events, Miss Beddowes was pleased with my progress and spared no pains to bring me to a point where my own interest in the subject supplied the main impetus.

  I was totally ignorant of French when I came to her but
this, I gathered, was an advantage.

  “You’ve nothing to unlearn,” she said crisply, when I apologized for my utter ignorance of the subject, adding:

  “It’s quite dreadful when one reflects that of all the thousands of children who are taught French at school not one—not one, mind you—can make himself or herself understood when they set foot at Calais. The trouble is, of course, that the method of teaching is ridiculous, quite ridiculous! A child is bored with unintelligible grammar before its ear is attuned to the language. Now you have a dozen of my oral lessons and listen to my set of records on the phonograph, and I’ll have you speaking French as well and better than you can speak English before the next Christmas!”

  She did not quite justify this boast but she went an appreciable way toward doing so. She spoke perfect French herself, having lived in France during the greater part of her youth, and all that summer, when I had completed any Observer assignments, I cycled up to the big, red brick house on Tuesdays and Fridays and sat in Miss Beddowes’ study, listening to her carefully articulated conversational French and the excellent supplementary lessons on the horned phonograph. I can see her now, across the years of slumps, booms and wars, sitting bolt upright in a high-backed chair and making a series of careful mouths as she struggled to perfect my accent, both in French and my mother tongue. Sharp at nine o’clock the elderly maid would enter with cocoa and biscuits, and there was a fifteen-minute break while we talked town politics over refreshments. Then on would go the phonograph and lesson until the chiming clock on her mantelpiece struck ten, when she would rise, dust her plain dress with her hands, and say, “Well, John Leigh, that’s all for tonight! Remember, you must think in French, beginning as soon as you wake, pull back the curtains, and say, ‘Does it rain? Is the sun shining? Is my breakfast ready? Did I dream something pleasant?’ ”