Diana

by R. F Delderfield

  These questions became for me a litany of the French tongue and throughout that summer I was always dreaming something pleasant, although the majority of my dreams came by day as I walked and cycled about Whinmouth Bay, filling my notebooks with lists of mourners, the names of stall holders, and ratepayers’ complaints about the smell of decaying fish on the jetties.

  Most of the daydreams were inspired by Diana’s letters, a spate of which flowed steadily through the letter box all that summer. Their tone differed somewhat from the letters I had received during the previous term. It was at once more serious and affectionate, sometimes almost frighteningly so, for I think that Diana’s stage of adolescence coincided with an upsurge of competitive romance among her friends at school. It was, as she confided later, the Thing to maintain a passionate correspondence with a boy friend, and as time went on, her letters became more liberally sprinkled with dears, dearests and darlings, each of which lifted me to a slightly higher plane of ecstatic contemplation.

  There were photographs too, all kinds of photographs, snaps of Diana sitting on a log and displaying plenty of shapely leg, snaps of Diana in a hitched-up gym costume, snaps of Diana in a one-piece bathing costume, looking archly aware of her swiftly maturing figure, and each letter and photograph was read and studied a dozen times before being placed in a special box that I had acquired to receive them, a box shaped like a small treasure chest, with a lock and clasp wrought in the likeness of a heart pierced by an arrow.

  It is easy to look back on the joy these letters brought me, and dismiss the romantic impulse as the emotional outlet of a half-grown youth, but what letters reach us in later life that compare with those exchanged by adolescents believing themselves to be deeply in love? I don’t know whether the delight of receiving them was more or less than a grown man might feel on getting a letter from his fiancée, but I do know that I looked for the postman as impatiently as a shipwrecked sailor watches for a smudge of smoke on the horizon, and when Bill Clipper, the postman, hesitated outside the Mart before pushing one of Diana’s blue and gilt envelopes through the letter box, I had to stifle a shout of triumph and then force myself to walk slowly downstairs, retrieve the letter and scamper off to my room to enjoy it in solitude.

  One day, toward the end of June, she wrote saying that she had spent a day at Ascot and that Yves, the French boy we had met at the cinema, had been there with his father, the famous race horse owner. I was sick with jealousy all that week and some pictures that appeared in one of the smarter periodicals, showing a group composed of Yves, Diana, and their respective parents at the races, depressed me still further. Yves looked the complete man about town, with an expression of polite boredom on his thin, aristocratic face, but Diana, who was wearing a cloche hat and a flowered frock, looked utterly unattainable and almost as grown up as her mother, who was flirting a parasol and in the act, it appeared, of aiming a salvo of tortured vowels at the bland-looking Count de Royden. That was one picture of Diana that did not go into the chest. It was torn to fragments and dropped over the edge of the wharf.

  A week later much better news arrived. Her parents, she informed me, had now departed for Capetown, and would be absent from England until the end of September. This meant that she would be virtually unchaperoned throughout the whole of her summer holidays. I began marking off the days to July 27th, the last day of term.

  During the final week’s vigil I busied myself with certain preparations. I bought a wicker chaise longue, a light, aged armchair, a pair of rugs, an occasional table, and a wall bookshelf, and transported them, piece by piece, up to the Folly.

  It was no easy task, for I dared not hire a carrier, not even as far as the point where the path led onto the common, and the transfer of the chaise longue through acres of brambles from the Foxhayes road to Folly Wood occupied me the whole of one Saturday afternoon. The couch was too long for the spiral staircase, so the evening was spent in hauling it up to the top room of the tower by means of an improvised pulley.

  The armchair was easier to carry since I was able to upend it on my head, but its passage from the ground to the tower casement proved hazardous, for it slipped its cradle halfway up and crashed down, almost pulling me after it.

  By Sunday of the last weekend before Diana was due, however, I had furnished the tower room to my satisfaction, even adding an oil stove in case we should want to cook and a couple of framed reproductions, one of Botticelli’s “Venus Rising from the Sea,” and one of Fragonard’s “The Swing,” both stolen from Uncle Luke’s store.

  I should have liked to have lit a fire in the broken grate but I was afraid that the chimney would catch fire and someone would see the smoke. The crumbling old room looked cozy enough when I had finished, with a westering sun shafting through the unglazed windows and patterning the plaster walls, and I surveyed it all with quiet pride, reflecting that here was yet another surprise for Diana and one calculated to bring her special delight, for it was she who had suggested furnishing the Folly but had forgotten about it in the turmoil of the Easter holidays.

  Once or twice during my comings and goings I caught a glimpse of one or other of Mr. Gayelorde-Sutton’s keepers in the paddock behind the larch wood, but never once did I see the buzzards who lived there. It was strange how faithfully they fulfilled Diana’s early prophecy concerning their appearance. They never showed up unless we were together.

  On the morning of the day she was due to arrive I thought up another surprise, arranging with Uncle Mark’s hired man to have the old cob, Justice, brought into the stables for the night and left to await my collection. Diana had written to say that she would arrive late at night and that I was to meet her as usual at the Folly, about seven A.M. the following morning. By six-thirty I was over at Uncle Mark’s, had saddled Justice and ridden him over to the meeting place, tethering him under the trees and mounting the stairs in order to watch Diana ride from the wood on Sioux. I knew that Nellie, the pony, was out to grass and that she was very difficult to catch, so I banked on Diana leaving her free until she could bridle Nellie herself. Any horse or pony would come for Diana; she only had to lean on a gate and coo, holding the bridle behind her back.

  A few minutes after seven I saw stirrups flash on the edge of the wood and Diana came cantering out of the trees and across the paddock, taking a section of broken rail at a bound and calling softly to the big horse as it loped across the heather to Folly Wood.

  She was bareheaded and the sun gleamed in her hair, turning it momentarily from dark chestnut to ash blond. When she was within fifty yards of the tower, Sioux scented Justice and whickered, and from my high vantage point I could detect Diana’s surprise as she turned in the saddle and saw the cob tethered to the oak. Then I could wait no longer and pelted down the staircase, risking my neck in a frenzy of joy attributable not only to the pleasure of our reunion but to being abroad in Sennacharib on a warm summer’s morning and living in the same world as Emerald Diana Gayelorde-Sutton.

  I had some doubts that the endearments in her letters were conventional expressions and that, after the exchange of so many extravagantly romantic phrases, we should both feel shy at the actual moment of meeting. I think I was slightly apprehensive about this despite my excitement, but I need not have been, for the moment I emerged from the tower Diana dropped Sioux’s bridle and ran to meet me, her face alight with the same joyful expression as I had noted when we kept our first tryst in Piccadilly.

  She was as free of inhibitions as a child at a Christmas treat, throwing her arms around me and kissing me half a dozen times, squeezing my shoulders and laughing as she kissed.

  “Jan, Jan, this is wonderful, wonderful!” she exclaimed, when she had paused for breath. “There was I, cursing everybody for not catching Nellie and spoiling our first morning’s ride, and you’ve thought to bring your own horse after all.”

  “I’ve got lots of surprises,” I told her, “come and see the first of them,” and I pulled her up the staircase and proudly displayed th
e tower room, watching her prance from item to item with more delight than I had dared to hope when toiling through the brambles with that unmanageable chaise longue.

  “It’s wonderful!” she announced. “We can come here whenever we like, especially when it rains. You’ve got pictures, books and a stove … we can make tea and fry sausages … oh, it’s lovely, Jan, and I love you for it!”

  Then she kissed me again, more expertly this time, and the world stood still while I let my hand run along the back of her head. The scent of Sennacharib was in her hair and its freshness and sparkle in her eyes. I thought I had never seen anything so enchanting as the sweep of her long eyelashes, or the bloom on her cheeks.

  “I’m so terribly in love with you, Diana,” I told her breathlessly and she put her lips to my ear and whispered, “Me too, Jan! Darling, darling Jan! Me too!”

  It was strange how swiftly and cruelly the magic of that morning was shattered and how the second of my surprises, the one that I had judged would please her most, was the cause of our first quarrel, a quarrel that, notwithstanding its triviality, was to leave a small scar in my heart that never wholly disappeared.

  We returned to the wood and cantered knee to knee over the common as far as the Teasel bridge. As we went along, Diana glanced at me approvingly and I knew that she was noting my vastly improved seat and general management of a horse. Then my vanity urged me to make a false move, how false and ill-advised I could never have guessed, for it was to strike at three things that were fundamental in Diana’s nature—her almost hysterical demand for independence, her pride in what she considered the most important of her achievements, and her love of horses.

  At the corner of Teasel Wood, where the timber track skirted the northern boundary and ended by cutting across a corner of the covert and out to Uncle Mark’s stables, I suggested we should change horses and race the last half mile. I was quite confident of being able to hold Sioux and secretly mortified by Diana’s frank expression of doubt on the subject.

  “She’s very fresh, Jan,” she said doubtfully, “and I honestly don’t think you’d better.”

  I told her nothing of my lessons under Uncle Mark or the fact that I was regularly riding Polly, a mare of sixteen hands and often as much of a handful as the piebald Sioux. I wanted her to discover these things for herself and that was the real reason why I had brought the old cob to the first meeting, for I had planned to appear on Polly the following day.

  “Oh come on, let me show you how much I’ve improved,” I argued. “After all, you made me learn to ride, and if you’re afraid of your own handiwork …!”

  “Oh I admire you for wanting to, Jan,” she said earnestly, “but I don’t want her to run away with you and spoil your confidence and she will, you know, she’s got a funny temperament with beginners and after all you are still a beginner.”

  This made me more determined than ever. I slid from Justice and threw her the reins.

  “You climb down and I’ll show you how much of a beginner I am!” I boasted. “I’ll give you a head start and be at Uncle Mark’s gate by the time you and that old screw have come into the straight.”

  “All right, Jan,” she said quietly, “but take it easy. Don’t touch her with your heels and keep her on a tight rein every inch of the way.”

  She dismounted and swung up on Justice. I got one foot in the stirrup and then shouted, “Away you go!”

  The cob moved off in a collected canter and Sioux, savage at seeing her mistress disappear, bounded after her, so quickly that it was several yards before I could settle myself in the saddle and sort out the double bridle. When I did, and had Sioux well in hand. Diana was about thirty yards ahead, flying down the path and throwing up a screen of dust and chippings in her wake.

  Sioux was certainly a flier. I gave her her head and she tore over the ground, overtaking and jostling Justice before we reached the wide curve. I was drunk with pride and as Diana swerved to give Sioux more room I shouted, “Take the brakes off!” and swept past her without consciously noting her unsmiling expression as she crouched to avoid low-hanging foliage on the inside of the path.

  I think I managed the horse well enough and rode straight at the fallen spruce that marked the end of the gallop. I cleared it, or nearly so, for there was the slightest jar as I forced Sioux to slacken her pace. We slowed down reluctantly and as we pounded up to Uncle Mark’s gate there he was, leaning on folded arms, his big red face a study of delighted astonishment as he saw me bring the big mare to a standstill and leap from the saddle.

  “Gor damme!” he exclaimed. “What you got there, Jan? ’Er’s a praper job.”

  At that moment Diana came in view and I could see that she was driving the cob as fast and faster than he could go. When she came to the spruce tree she crashed through it rather than over it and Justice, landing badly, pecked and dug in his forefeet, throwing Diana over his head and into the blackberry bushes alongside the path.

  Then I knew terror and ran toward her, shouting, as she rose unsteadily to her feet and picked up her crop. I reached her at a run as she was dusting dried leaves from her jacket, but she did not look at me when I stopped just short of her.

  “Good Lord, Diana!” I gasped. “Are you hurt? You came a fearful cropper! I ought to have warned you about the jump but I forgot.”

  “Yes,” she said almost inaudibly, “you ought.”

  She looked straight at me then and I saw a very different person from the eager, sparkling-eyed girl who had thrown her arms around me less than an hour before. Her eyes were now smoldering with rage and her wide mouth, the mouth that had covered my face with kisses so recently, was clamped into a crooked line, as though it was holding back a howl of vexation and injured pride.

  She looked at me like that for a few seconds and I squirmed under the glance, for it had in it not only rage and hurt pride, but the kind of contempt she had used to humble Keeper Croker. Then she brushed past me to the gate and snatched Sioux’s bridle from Mark’s hand.

  On the edge of tears I ran after her and caught her by the arm just as she was passing in front of Sioux preparatory to mounting.

  “Diana!” I quavered. “I’m terribly softy about the jump. I thought I’d—”

  I was going to blurt out my excuses, to confess on the spot to the part Uncle Mark had played in my tuition and how much I had wanted to surprise her, but she gave me no opportunity to submit this abject apology. Suddenly she pointed to the small fleck of blood on Sioux’s shin. It was nothing much, just a scratch caused by one of the twigs of the spruce.

  “You big show-off!” she screamed. “You cruel, stupid, clumsy lout! I never want to set eyes on you again, never, do you understand!”

  Then, as though to make her meaning doubly clear, she stood back and swung her open palm at my face, landing a box on the ear that sent me staggering. Before I had recovered my balance she was in the saddle, had jerked Sioux’s head around and was thundering down the ride toward the common. She cleared the spruce with a foot to spare and I gaped after her, my hand still clamped to my crimson cheek.

  Uncle Mark spoke from the gate on which he had continued to lean throughout the entire incident.

  “Ah,” he murmured, “there’s sperrit there. More real sperrit’n I ever zeed in a maid!”

  I said nothing. Turning my back on him I went around behind the stables for my bicycle.

  Diana was not the only one to show spirit that morning. For nearly a year now I had been completely under her spell and ready, if necessary, to lie down and die for her, but that did not mean I was ready to concede superiority to a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, even such a girl as Emerald Diana Gayelorde-Sutton. This was my first experience of feminine unpredictability and I had no philosophy to match it. I had been lifted to the heights and cast to the depths in a period of less than an hour, and as I thought back over her behavior it seemed to me to display grossly bad manners and a lunatic’s illogicality.

  For a time my loyalty to Diana sought
excuses for her. I told myself that she had been shaken and scared by the fall, that she had been upset by the graze Sioux had received at the jump, that she had lost the race after a good head start and was mortified by a defeat at the hands of a beginner. None of these reasons, however, justified the humiliation she had imposed on me in the presence of a witness, and my resentment was increased by the memory that my stock with Uncle Mark, a veteran admirer of pretty girls, had been reduced to nil at the very moment when it should have soared, for I had planned to introduce him to Diana with a great show of nonchalance. I pedaled myself into a fury during the ride home, arriving hot, bad-tempered and ready to quarrel with anyone.

  As it happened the means for working myself into a tornado of self-pity were to hand at the office, for when I reached there someone was complaining to Uncle Reuben that I had done some careless reporting on a funeral the previous week and inserted the family mourners in the wrong order of precedence, thereby sparking off a family row. This kind of thing was often happening—the Whinmouthians set great store upon precedence in lists of mourners, and we usually had a good laugh about it the moment the indignant customer was halfway down the High Street. Today, however, it seemed to me that the entire world was conspiring to make what had promised to be a wonderful day into a hell of trivial irritation, and instead of apologizing I argued and then told Uncle Reuben, in the hearing of the complainant, that I was fed up with the pettiness of Whinmouth Bay and everybody in it. This was heresy to Reuben and he lost his temper, not only with me but with an unlucky printer’s devil who had just upset a frame of type and wasted two hours’ setting time. I was glad to escape from the strained atmosphere of the Observer and brood on my miseries in private during a walk over to the sports pavilion to get the latest scores of the tennis tournament.

  Here, on the well-kept courts adjoining the squat pier, I found fresh fuel for my resentment against humanity. Whinmouth Sports Club organized a very popular open tennis tournament and first-class amateurs came from all parts of the West to take part in it. They were the kind of young people who spent the entire summer traveling from tournament to tournament in sports cars, and today they were a bitter reminder of Diana’s class, the pampered children of the rich, who were never expected to earn money but were experts at spending it. I hated the sleek good looks of the girls and the studied heartiness of the men. I envied them their gay blazers and cars, their easy confidence and haughty bearing toward the ball boys and oafs like myself who were obliged to treat them with respect. They drifted about between sets calling one another “old bean” and “old thing.” The men drank small whiskies and soda and flirted with the girls, while discussing games in incomprehensible slang.