Diana

by R. F Delderfield

  Not that its demands worried Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton. She sat on the dais like an Ice Queen, flanked by a self-effacing Chairman of Council and his even more self-effacing wife. Neither of these worthies had the slightest say in the selections. Deftly and mercilessly Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton sifted the grain from the chaff. When she had made up her mind she beckoned the winner and extended the palm of her hand to the rejects. The latter gesture was exactly like the Phoenicians’ rejection of Celtic furs, in the famous picture dealing with early British trade.

  It may have been her regal manner, or it may have been the fact that this year’s competitors included a larger sprinkling of intractable children that caused this year’s six-to-eight class for girls to develop into a scene of lamentation. Rejects were required to move away from the dais as soon as they had been judged and pass behind the stage and through to the dressing rooms. The hall was packed and spectators were sitting in the aisles, so that there was no way in which the spurned Maid Marians and Columbines could fly to their mothers for comfort. They had either to move around behind the stage or stand blubbering under the eyes of the judges.

  There were, as I remember, nine rejects in this class, two others having been warned to stand by for the grand parade while the judges passed on to the nine-to-eleven class.

  The trouble began when one little girl, dressed in sacking meant to represent the tatters of a scarecrow, burst into tears the moment she realized that she was not a prize winner and then made an unsuccessful dash for the phalanx of spectators.

  She was headed off by a grinning steward and the event caused a titter, but the laughter died under the volume of howls touched off among the other rejects. In a few seconds eight children were screaming their heads off and Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton, more than equal to the occasion, began to strike a compeer’s gong and shout, “Cleah the areah! Ai can’t continue while thet’s going on!”

  Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton intimidated most people. Two of the stewards leaped forward to shoo the wailing children into the dressing room, but none would willingly be removed, so the most active steward tucked one child under each arm and tried to shepherd the others with his knees.

  At this juncture several indignant mothers jumped up from the body of the hall and began to contribute to the outcry. Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton sullenly continued to beat her gong, and the laden steward shouted for help.

  It arrived from an unexpected quarter. At the height of the uproar Diana swept from the dressing-room arch, lifted the squealing scarecrow, placed a fairy doll almost as large as the child in her arms, pointed to the arch through which she had moved, and then held up seven fingers!

  The action was so expertly timed and so deftly executed that all the children, including the two held by the perspiring steward, ceased their squalls and gazed ecstatically from Diana to the doll and then back to Diana again.

  Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton stopped beating the drum and stared bleakly down on her daughter but the audience cheered, as well they might I remained staring at Diana as she gathered the children in a bunch and swept them into the rooms behind the stage.

  It all happened with the speed of a dream sequence. When I had recovered from my surprise I sidled away from the stewards’ table and went into the dressing rooms, but inside I stopped short near the door, looking in upon another extraordinary sight. There was Diana, surrounded by children, each of them squealing with delight as she placed a large package in each pair of upraised arms. Scarecrow was seated at her feet, crowing over the fairy doll.

  Another child, wearing a ballerina’s frock from which most of the tinsel was missing, was nursing a huge Dutch doll. A third child had just torn the wrappings from a cardboard box and found an exquisite doll’s set, in blue and gold china. Each of the others had an expensive-looking gift of one sort or another and Diana was exercising complete control over the brood. There were no bickerings, no displays of greed, just a rhapsodic harmony that recalled the visit of Mrs. Do-As-You-Would-Be-Done-By to Kingsley’s water babies. It was as though some other and infinitely mature being had taken possession of Diana and appeared miraculously to arbitrate among us lesser mortals, as though she had suddenly burst from the chrysalis of adolescence and become a patient, tender woman, with a vast experience in the art of handling small children. They looked up at her as though she were a goddess sent to extricate them from an intolerable situation and when I drifted into the room not one of them noticed me, or lifted their eyes from Diana.

  I don’t think I have ever been as moved, or as genuinely surprised, as I was at that moment, but when Diana greeted me she did not appear to regard her situation as anything other than commonplace. She said, very offhandedly, “Oh, hello, Jan! I rather hoped you’d pop in; go out to the car and help Redman to bring in the rest of the boxes. I think there will be enough to go around.”

  Mutely I did as she asked. Outside in the forecourt the Bentley was parked and Redman, the aloof chauffeur who had driven me home that first autumn evening, was unloading crates of toys from the back of the car. Together we carried the boxes through the stage door, and as we unpacked them I noticed that here and there was a toy from which paint had been chipped.

  “Are these all yours?” I asked Diana. “I mean, you didn’t buy them specially, did you? They aren’t carnival consolation prizes, are they?”

  “Good Lord, no,” she said, impatiently, “as if those dots would ever dream up a consolation prize for the poor little toads! I came here with Mother and when she was judging the toddlers before the tea interval I saw what happened, so I nipped out and made Redman take me home for a good old rummage in the playroom. I was never very hard on my toys, Jan. To tell you the honest truth, I didn’t go for them very much. I always preferred ponies!”

  She began distributing gifts to the next lot of rejects, who came hurrying in from the main hall. Apparently word had got around among the losers that they were in for a far better deal than the prize winners; soon every dressing room was crammed with delighted children. I had a quick look at some of the gifts. The least of them must have cost someone a pound note and some were absurdly expensive-looking—tortoise-shell dressing-table sets, dancing shoes, party frocks, a mother-of-pearl Alice band, set in imitation pearls, books still in their cellophane wrappings, teddy bears, golliwogs, and every other kind of toy and trinket. The bounty represented the Christmas and birthday yield of Diana’s entire childhood and it was just as she said, she had not been hard on her presents. Most of them appeared hardly to have been unwrapped.

  I waited around until the judging was over. I ought to have gone back into the hall and collected the rest of the winners but I had lost interest in the contests. The music began to play and the children were rounded up by stewards for the grand parade. Only the little girl with the Dutch doll remained behind, tugging Diana’s pleated skirt. She had an alien accent, placing her somewhere around Hoxton. Diana told me she was Keeper Croker’s daughter.

  “Please, miss, ’is eye’s aht!” she stated, not unhappily but as one who states a simple fact.

  Diana stooped and cocked her head at the one-eyed Dutchman.

  “Ah, but it’s meant to be out, Susan! You see, he lost it in the war, fighting the wicked Germans, didn’t you, Hans?” And she lifted the doll close to her ear, paused and nodded thoughtfully, before restoring the doll to the child.

  “He says he’s glad you’ve got him, Susan, because nobody else wanted him with only one eye! You’ll take care of him now that I’m grown up, won’t you?”

  The child looked very closely at Hans and nodded, emphatically. It crossed my mind, idiotically perhaps, whether she would still possess the doll when she was old enough to learn that Holland had passed the World War as a neutral. Then the thought was lost in wonder at the assurance and maturity of a girl whom I had always thought of as a high-spirited tomboy, with a penchant for getting in and out of scrapes.

  “You’re absolutely marvelous with them, Di,” I said, as Susan Croker trotted after the others.
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  “Oh, I like kids,” said Diana, yawning. “They don’t pretend like all those jackasses in there. Do you have to go back? Couldn’t we go and see your printing works? I’ve never seen them, you know, and you promised me years ago!”

  “All right, Di,” I said quietly, At that moment I would have taken her to Samarkand or Delhi if she had asked me.

  We went along Fish Street and into our squalid little office, empty at this time, for Uncle Reuben was on the committee and the printing staff was working on the tableaux we had entered in the Trades Section. As we stood beside the old flatbed I suddenly put my arm around her shoulder, pulled her toward me and kissed her hair. It was only the second of our embraces in which I had taken the initiative and I think it startled her, so that she had to turn it aside with a little joke.

  “Say it with printer’s ink!” she said, but she found and squeezed my hand hard. I went out into the street feeling like a man who has stumbled upon the lost treasure of the Incas.

  4.

  Up to this time—that is, until the summer preceding my eighteenth birthday—I was untroubled by active jealousy. Diana was at school for eight months of the year and during the holidays she was mine almost exclusively, for her parents spent a great deal of their time abroad or in London and only used Heronslea for holidays or special occasions, such as the Conservative May Fayre, when they came down for the week-end.

  I was still vaguely suspicious of the French boy, Yves, but he and his family came to Heronslea only very occasionally and Diana had few contacts with local families. She wrote to me regularly when she was at school and the moment she came home we picked up the threads of our association without any trouble. I was always conscious of a threat to our friendship in the person of her mother and I never quite lost the dread of an open challenge from this quarter, but she had conditioned the staff of Heronslea to her erratic and unpredictable programs during the holidays and we were thus often able to spend whole days together in Sennacharib without anyone except dear old Drip being aware of our association.

  It seemed to me then that this happy state of affairs might continue indefinitely. It never once occurred to me that sooner or later some other young man, with far greater social advantages than I possessed, would notice that, in addition to being the most eligible girl in the district, Diana was also one of the prettiest.

  If I had thought about this at all I should have been alarmed at the prospect of some matchmaking mother entering the field on behalf of her son. At this time, when she was sixteen, she retained all the elfin prettiness of adolescence. Her blue eyes usually held in them a glint of mischief, her heavy chestnut hair was always untidy but its texture was smooth and fine and when the sunlight struck it, or she tossed it back to laugh or exclaim, a shower of stardust seemed to explode in your face. Her skin was smooth and pale, and no amount of sunshine would give her face an outdoor tan. Her ears were unusually small, white and flat, almost as if they had been overlooked and planted there as the afterthought of an affectionate creator. Her mouth was ripe and usually smiling, its broad curve matching the fun sparkle in her eyes, and it was a mouth that always appeared to be on the point of uttering a gay observation, something of no consequence perhaps but expressing the simple pleasure of being alive.

  If you looked only at her face she did not impress you as being more than a pretty and intelligent child, but it was otherwise with her figure, which excessive horseback exercise had prematurely developed. Her shoulders were braced and trim and her bust already that of a grown woman. Her narrow waist accentuated muscular hips and long, perfectly shaped legs, but she was vain only regarding her beautiful hands. They were certainly very shapely hands, with long, slender fingers and perfectly shaped nails. I never saw her ride or row without gloves.

  “They’re like Queen Elizabeth’s,” she once told me, with a laugh, and when I challenged this (after carefully studying a Holbein print, in one of Uncle Luke’s illustrated World Masterpieces she added, “Oh, I mean the hands on Elizabeth’s tomb, in Westminster Abbey! They’re supposed to be the most perfect pair of hands ever carved in stone.”

  I was suddenly made aware of opposition in the field toward the end of the summer holidays about a month after the fiasco at the Heronslea fete. All the wealthy local families had attended the fete and among them were the Brett-Hawkins clan, a flock of gentlemen farmers, all interrelated, who held large farms and a communal shoot over in the Brackenhayes country, some five miles beyond Teasel Wood.

  The acknowledged chieftain of this yeoman family was Colonel Brett-Hawkins, V.C., a hearty, professional soldier, with an active interest in dairy fanning and cattle breeding. He owned a large herd of Guernseys and was always winning prizes at the county shows. He also had a trio of tall, broad-shouldered sons, all at Repton or University, and I first noticed the youngest of these, Gerald, when he had distinguished himself at a local gymkhana. As a matter of fact it was Diana who pointed him out to me and told me that he was leaving school to attend an agricultural college and train to take over his father’s farms. I didn’t pay much attention to him until I attended a point-to-point meeting in the area, and noticed that he was riding Diana’s bay mare, Sioux. I had looked forward to the meeting and discussed it with Diana, so that it struck me as odd and disquieting that she had not mentioned to me that she was entering Sioux in the local hunter class. When I challenged her after the race (I was delighted to witness Gerald Brett-Hawkins fall on his hat at the last fence but one!) she was irritatingly casual about it.

  “Didn’t I tell you? I’m sorry, I must have forgotten. It was a last-minute arrangement anyhow, as Lance Fayne was down to ride her but funked at the last moment.”

  Lance Fayne was the only son of Major Fayne, the M.P., and I knew him as a frequent visitor to Heronslea. He had squired Diana on the occasion of his sister’s twenty-first birthday party but I had never regarded him as a serious competitor because his physical disadvantages canceled out his social qualifications. He was small, thin and undistinguished, a tough and determined rider to hounds, but so narrow-faced and foxy that it was ridiculous to imagine Diana would ever want to be kissed by him.

  Gerald Brett-Hawkins, however, was a much more serious challenger. He was an inch or so taller than I and possessed florid good looks, of the type Diana would classify “dago.” He had, in addition, an air of aggressive self-confidence, as I soon discovered when Diana introduced me to him in the car park, where she was drinking claret and nibbling chicken in aspic with her jockey’s boisterous family. I had seen her go there and was hanging about impatiently, hoping that she would leave them and rejoin me, when she called me over.

  “I say, Jan! This is Gerald … did you see him come a frightful cropper down there by the brook? Gerald, this is an old friend of mine, Jan Leigh. He’s a journalist and he’ll describe the lovely figure you cut, somersaulting over the bank!”

  We shook hands and he gave me a single, bleak look. I could see that he deprecated Diana’s readiness to introduce us, for his quick glance took in my cheap lounge suite and the fact that I was not wearing riding clothes or sporting tweeds. The word “journalist,” however, made him pause.

  “Really? What paper?”

  “The Winmouth Observer,” I muttered, flushing.

  He dropped my hand as though it had been a soiled dishcloth and resumed his talk with Diana about her mare’s propensity to sweat as soon as she came in contact with other horses.

  I stood about awkwardly for a moment or two and then left, mumbling something about having to collect the results of the last race for the paper.

  Nobody heard my excuse and nobody looked after me when I moved away. I mooched down to the paddock sick with rage, for it seemed to me utterly unfair that I should have to compete with someone like Gerald Brett-Hawkins, a boy with the terrifying advantages of a public school education, good looks, a powerful physique, well-cut clothes, money and, what was more valuable than all these things put together, a background that gave him compl
ete poise in the company of his equals and an ability to dismiss people like me with a limp handshake. I was glad that he had fallen so heavily and wished heartily that he had fractured his arrogant skull. The feelings of dismay he stirred in me that afternoon, however, were insignificant compared with the alarm I experienced when Diana told me that he was taking her to the Point-to-Point dance, at Swanley Lock Hotel on the following Tuesday.

  “With him? With that lout?” I exclaimed. “Why, he can’t even manage Sioux! What can you see in a chap like that?”

  She looked at me levelly. She had a way of making you feel very small when you lost your temper. I never saw Diana lose her temper over a trivial issue; she reserved all her fire for targets that she could hardly miss.

  “I don’t ‘see’ anything in him, Jan,” she replied, quietly. “He’s a good dancer and he’s good-looking but he’s not my type. He’s the kind of man who would always try to keep-the-little-woman-in-her-place, and you ought to know by this time that I’m not the kind of a girl who wants to be mastered.”

  This was a subtle dig at my challenge to her freedom of choice but it brought with it a crumb of comfort. I only had to think about it for a moment to realize that Diana and Gerald Brett-Hawkins would quarrel bitterly after an hour or so in one another’s company, so long as they weren’t distracted by noise and movement.

  “All the same that isn’t true about his riding,” Diana went on. “Sioux is too excitable for a Point-to-Pointer and neither you nor I would have got her as far around the course as Gerald did!”

  This was true, of course, but I continued to sulk and Gerald’s invitation to go dancing spoiled what might have been a pleasant evening’s ride in Sennacharib. We were on the point of parting at the lane that led to Whinmouth Hill when I roused myself, for I always hated to part from Diana in a sour temper.