Diana
Page 20
When I got up to my room it was almost daylight and although I too intended to remain wide awake and recapitulate every moment of the past few hours, I confess that I failed to keep the tryst, falling asleep half-undressed and remaining so until I heard Aunt Thirza bustling about in the kitchen, with her usual accompaniment of rattling crockery as she assaulted the night’s dust on the dresser. I pulled off my clothes, held my head under a running tap, threw on a pair of flannels and went down for a cup of tea, but Aunt Thirza was not fooled for an instant.
“Been out gallivanting half the night. I ’eard ’ee!” she grumbled, in her rich brogue.
I never had to apologize to Aunt Thirza. I was a grown man in her eyes and took shameless advantage of the knowledge that she had one set of rules for me and another for everyone else.
“Well, youm on’y young once, John!” she relented. “Yer, ’ave zum tay, boy, and dorn ’ee hurry to work, zeein’ tiz Zat’day!”
I had forgotten what day it was. I had so much else to think of that it was fortunate for the readers of the Observer that Saturday was the day I collected no facts and typed no copy.
Uncle Reuben noticed my preoccupation but put it down to a late night. He didn’t hold with dancing and motorcycling, and began to counsel a more serious approach to life, pointing out that I was now nearly eighteen and ought to be thinking of implementing my decision to widen my professional experience on a more important paper.
This gave me an opening and I think I rather surprised him with the sudden enthusiasm I showed for bettering myself. I did not tell him that my reason for wanting more money and greater responsibilities had to do with supporting a girl whose father was reputed to be the wealthiest man in the district. He was always so deeply immersed in his own affairs—the paper, his lay preaching, the treasureship of the local Liberal Party, and many other activities—that he had no knowledge whatever of my friendship with Diana. He had, however, carried out his promise about finding me a better job and had been awaiting a favorable opportunity to discuss it, together with another and more sensational proposal that had been maturing for some time.
“It will probably work out very well all around, John,” he told me, “because after you’ve had a year or two on a bigger paper you can come back here on an entirely different basis. You see, since we’re now embarked on the subject, I think I can tell you a good deal more than I was inclined to admit when we had our last discussion about your future. Mr. Priddis is leaving the Observer and works to me in his will, and who should I have to pass it on to but you?”
His information, so casually imparted, overwhelmed me. Coming so quickly upon Diana’s declaration, it converted my entire future into something reasonably foreseeable. I had never thought of myself as the owner-editor of the paper but simply as a junior employee of the present proprietor, whose health was deteriorating very rapidly and giving all employed on the paper and printing works a certain amount of anxiety about our livelihood. Only the previous day Coleman, the motorcycle owner, had drawn my attention to the possibilities.
“If Priddis kicks the bucket what’s to happen to us?” he had speculated. “I’ll lay you six-to-four the paper will be bought by one of the big chains and they’ll put their own chaps in, you can bet your life on that!”
Unemployment was rife at the time and there was some justification for Coleman’s gloom. Our local population in Whinmouth was about twelve thousand but our unemployment figure already stood at over four hundred and would go higher when the season ended.
If the business passed to Uncle Reuben we were likely to remain undisturbed and if, in the course of time, it then passed to me, I had an assured if limited future for as long as I cared to remain in the district.
“How does it appeal to you, taking on here after I’ve gone?” asked Uncle Reuben, eying me doubtfully.
“It couldn’t be better!” I told him and smiled when I saw his face light up with pleasure. “I’ve been very happy here, Uncle Reuben, and things being what they are, where could I expect to do any better?”
He jumped up and thumped me on the shoulder. “God bless my soul, it does me good to hear you talk like that, John! You know, I expected you to be lukewarm about it and mumble a lot of nonsense about Whinmouth being a dead-and-alive hole and no place for a chap of your age! I still think you ought to have a bit of daily paper experience, mind you, but if you’ve got something established like this to come back to it makes all the difference in the world, it gives you roots, and a purpose in life. Now I’m off to see Mr. Priddis this weekend and perhaps we’ll get something on paper. In the meantime I’ll jog him for that introduction to a daily. It would mean leaving here, you understand, and I daresay you’d be away three or four years. How do you feel about that?”
“It depends where it is,” I told him, with secret visions of frequent meetings with Diana in London and all the advantages of a press card with which to entertain her. “If it was London I think I should like it very much!”
He looked a little puzzled at this. “But I thought you were a converted countryman, John. Luke tells me you spend all your spare time up on the moor, or pottering about in the bay.”
I was tempted to tell him then about Diana and ask his advice, which was always objective. In the light of what happened I rather wish I had, but something prompted me to continue to keep my unlikely courtship to myself and I replied, “I wouldn’t care to leave the West Country for good, Uncle Reuben, but it’s like you said, the more experience I get at my age the better journalist I’ll make in the end.”
It sounded rather pious but he was a pious man and took the explanation at face value. He beamed on me, paternally.
“By George, I wish you’d been my boy, John! I think I must have misjudged your father when he took young Miriam away from us all those years ago. He must have had some good stuff in him somewhere.”
I felt guilty at deceiving him so outrageously but not nearly as abject as I was to feel a few days later, when his opinion of me was to dip to zero.
He went off to North Devon to see Priddis and I forgot him the moment I had the office to myself. I wasn’t able to concentrate on anything but sat drumming my fingers beside the phone, waiting and waiting for Diana’s call, and hoping with all my heart that she would be able to meet me at the tower that night. I had so much to say to her, so much to promise, and my yearning for her nearness, for the touch of her hand and the sound of her voice, was so intense that I ached.
One o’clock came, then two, but no call; I was ravenously hungry but afraid to leave the office. I phoned Uncle Luke, using the phone with demoniac speed lest it should block Diana’s call, and asked him to tell Aunt Thirza that I was busy and couldn’t get home. Then I tried to read, hanging about until late afternoon and pacing the deserted printing works like a man awaiting a reprieve. Over and over again I told myself that there was a perfectly simple explanation for her silence and that her parents had whisked her off on a social visit to a place where she was unable to use a telephone.
By five o’clock I was driven by hunger to call it a day and hurry home to my warmed-up dinner. I decided that I could not hope to get news if I stayed in the town, that my best plan was to go up to Heronslea and hang about on the fringe of the paddocks, hoping to catch a glimpse of her and perhaps get a signal.
By this time I was becoming alarmed, but not seriously so, for I reasoned that even if she had been missed during the night it was unlikely that I would be connected with her escapade. I was equally convinced that her mother knew her well enough by now to regard a descent from the bedroom as something entirely characteristic of Diana and punish it as a mere prank.
There was the dance frock, of course, and then, to complicate matters, her dripping hair, but Diana was a very accomplished liar where her mother was concerned and I had every confidence that she would be able to talk her way out of the situation and persuade her mother to accept it as just one more childish whim on the part of a tiresome daughter.
It was a long time getting dark. The wood was full of scuttling life and as the sun went down behind the larches blackbirds sang and once or twice a rabbit frisked across the lawn beneath the beeches. It was a lovely, pastoral scene, with the old, beautifully proportioned house in the near distance, bedded down in a wide circle of deep green timber and tussocky lawns, with the deeper green of the laurels and rhododendrons half-screening the pink walls of the kitchen quarters and stable yard. As I waited, the last rays of the sun struck the sloping panes of the conservatory and they flashed a dull ruby. The air was so still that the swift, rending sound of Sioux’s rhythmic grass cropping carried right across the enclosure to where I sat, waist-high in bracken. I was not very receptive to the peace and beauty of Sennacharib that evening, however, for Diana’s declaration had changed the direction of my thoughts and feelings about our relative status. I was no longer content to hang about awaiting the fall of Heronslea crumbs, keeping out of sight, and taking advantage of the Gayelorde-Suttons’ absences in order to woo their lovely daughter. All this time I had accepted the barrier between us as something in the natural order of things, like a desert to be crossed, or a mountain range to be climbed, but now I wanted to blast my way through the barrier and tell the whole world that Emerald Diana Gayelorde-Sutton was in love with me, that we had swum naked by moonlight in Nun’s Bay, that we had pledged ourselves to one another and that, come what may, Gayelorde-Sutton millions notwithstanding, I was going to marry her, care for her and share my life with her, somewhere in this vast green silence with which we, and no others, were in true accord.
It did not occur to me, then or later, that I might with some justice be regarded as a youthful fortune hunter or that I was doing Diana a wrong by encouraging her to imagine that she was in love, at seventeen, with a boy unlikely to earn more than one of her father’s head clerks. I never thought of Diana as an heiress, only as the daughter of wealthy, snobbish people, and my daydreams did not embrace Heronslea House but laid claim to Sennacharib as a whole, to its woods, commons and beaches. Somewhere inside this realm I dreamed of building a home of our own, a haven that would be in sharp contrast to the elegant pile that dominated the estate.
This was admittedly illogical but I make no excuses. I was seventeen, and deeply in love with a pretty girl. There was pride and wonder in the knowledge that Diana loved me but it was not the kind of pride that Mrs. Mabel Gayelorde-Sutton would have understood.
When it was dark, and before the moon rose, I slipped out of the wood and went around to the front of the house. Moving very cautiously I approached the glassed-in terrace. It was uncurtained and I peeped into the dining room, the main room upon which the terrace opened.
There was a dim light inside and the door was half open. Presently I saw the butler’s figure across the aperture and then, by crawling crabwise along the outside wall of the terrace, I positioned myself to look right into the dining room.
What I saw brought no relief to my anxiety. The Gayelorde-Suttons, father, mother and daughter, were at their meal, waited upon by Masters, the soft-footed butler. The radio was playing “Sleeping Beauty Waltz” and the family did not appear to be conversing. Mr. Gayelorde-Sutton sat at the table end nearest to me, his wife was at the other end, and Diana, wearing a dark evening dress, was sitting midway in between, half facing me. They all looked rather solemn and helped themselves to dishes absent-mindedly, as though they were eating not because they were hungry but because someone had struck a gong and told them that it was time to eat.
They had reached the dessert stage before I had an idea. Then, catching my breath with nervousness, I whistled a line or two of “Dolly Gray” and was instantly rewarded by the sight of Diana’s head coming up. Her father and mother took no notice of the start but continued to peel fruit. After a pause I tried another note or two, and this time Diana did not look up but Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton said something to the butler, who crossed over and closed the door, cutting off my view.
Baffled and irritated, I crept back to the main drive and stood indecisively beside one of the largest beeches, ready to bob out of sight if anyone appeared in the front of the house. About a quarter of an hour passed and then I saw a chink of light and heard a dog bark. Almost at once there was a scamper of paws on gravel and a moment later Sheila, Diana’s golden Labrador, lolloped up to me, snuffling a welcome and panting with pleasure at being released for a few minutes’ probe among the rabbit runs of the paddock.
Sheila and I were old friends. She had accompanied us on dozens of rides and not a few dips in the bay. She was small for a Labrador but very active and almost stupidly affectionate.
“Here, Sheila, here!” I whispered, as she located me and jumped up for a pat “Where’s Diana? Is she with you? Is she coming out?”
Then I noticed that a fold of paper had been tucked into her collar and wound around two or three times to make it fast. I grabbed the dog and unwound the spill, resisting Sheila’s attempts to snatch it back and take it in her soft mouth.
It was too dark to read any message that might be written on the paper and anyway at that moment Mr. Gayelorde-Sutton, his cigar end glowing, moved out onto the terrace. I slipped behind the beeches and made off back to the copse, Sheila following until a distant whistle recalled her to the house.
Deep in the wood I sat down and struck a match. The message was only a few words of scrawl and had obviously been written in a desperate hurry. It said: Don’t write or phone. Awful row. You not involved yet. Come to church. Sophia Grangerford’s trick. All my love, Di.
My feelings on reading this extraordinary note were very mixed. I was thoroughly alarmed about the row and apprehensive at the obvious reference to last night’s affair implied in the word “yet,” but at the same time I was comforted by Diana’s ingenuity in warning me, by her alertness at responding to the “Dolly Gray” signal so quickly and, above all, by the invitation to attend church and learn more of what had taken place since we had parted. I had no difficulty at all in ciphering the “Sophia Grangerford” piece. Among the books that Diana and I were fond of discussing was Huckleberry Finn, and Diana’s favorite chapter in that delightful story was the one in which Huck spends a period with the feuding Grangerfords on the river plantation. We had often talked about Sophia, the girl who caused massacre by running off with Harney Shepherdson, and Diana had remarked that Sophia’s trick of exchanging plans with her lover through the medium of a note left in her prayer book was a “marvelous wheeze.” It was now obvious that she intended to use the same medium and this, I decided, was very clever of her, because there was nothing to prevent me from attending morning service at Shepherdshey Church tomorrow morning and retrieving a letter from Diana’s prayer book when the congregation had filed out. The Gayelorde-Suttons were conventional churchgoers when they were in the country and they occupied a pew near the front. Here they sat, surrounded by their estate employees, like a feudal family at church in Plantagenet times. It was a gesture that must have given Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton a good deal of satisfaction. This was one occasion when I appreciated her game of squiress.
Sharp at ten fifty the following morning I was in position a few pews away from Diana, in the pretty little church of Shepherdshey. Worshipers were sparse and I knew them nearly all. Nat Baker, the big sexton, was doling out hymnbooks, Half-a-Crown Sam, the cretin, sat moonfaced under the lectern, Ada Macey, flanked by her official and unofficial husbands, sat close to the door, and most of the other villagers I knew were in attendance, including about half a dozen keepers, gardener
s and their families from the Heronslea estate.
I was very glad of their company, for I had entertained a horrible suspicion that, apart from the Heronslea contingent, I might prove to be the sole parishioner and this would make the inspection of Diana’s prayer book a risky undertaking.
The rector droned through the service and the last hymn, I recall, was Whinmouth’s most popular wedding hymn, “The Voice That Breath’d O’er Eden,” which I took to be a very good omen. Diana was taking no chances at all. If she saw me she didn’t advertise the fact but kept her eyes straight before her as she stood, a small, trim figure in a blue two-piece and white straw hat, between her mother and father in the second pew from the front.
When the service was over I waited until the family had moved past my pew and down the center aisle, burying my head in my hands but keeping a wary eye on Diana as she went by, in order to note any signal she might want to give. She did give one, a slow, solemn nod, and as soon as the church was cleared I hurried to the Gayelorde-Sutton pew and rummaged frantically among the hymnbooks in the rack.
I was unable to find a prayer book but then I noticed that one of the hymnals had an envelope in it. I quickly gathered it up and thrust it into my pocket, allowing a little time for the churchyard to clear, and hurried out into Teasel Lane. From here I made my way up toward the gorse slopes, to the spot where I had watched the hunt move in pursuit of the fox I lied about.
The envelope contained two pages covered with Diana’s neat, stylish handwriting; it took my breath away.
John dear, it began (latterly Diana had not been so lavish with written endearments; when she used the word “darling” it meant something).
Thank goodness you had the sense to get in touch! As you will have gathered, I was collared on the way in last night and I’ll tell you all about that when we meet. Right now there are much more important things to discuss, so here goes! To begin with Mummy doesn’t know the truth, or any part of it. She thinks I was at a village hop, with Lance Payne, the M.P.’s son, and I let her go on thinking so (without actually admitting it) because it spikes her guns. The one person she doesn’t want to quarrel with right now is the M.P., not just because he is who he is but because of the coming election! She has, however, made an awful decision. I am not to go back to school at all but to go straight off to the Finishing School, the one in Switzerland that I was booked for next year. It is a country place, stuck away in a place called Thun, in the Bernese Oberland, and I haven’t the faintest intention of going! At first I planned to do a bunk en route and get a job in London, where we could still see each other as you said we might later on, but I see now that my disappearance in that way would start a national hue and cry, and get into all the papers, whereas if it happened down here Mummy would sweat blood to keep it dark until I was located. So I’m going to run away now, and stay hidden for about a week, or until they find me. You might think that won’t help much but it will, because Daddy will be in such a state by the time I’m found that be won’t let me go to Switzerland and all that will happen is I’ll leave school and stay on at Heronslea most of the year. Now my plan—hold your breath—is to go and hide on Nun’s Island, where no one will ever think of looking for me. I have to get there, of course, and this is where you come in. Get the dinghy and bring it along to the place where we bathed after dark last night. Bring anything you think would be useful to a castaway. I’m bringing food but there is a limit to what I can carry. Can you find a waterproof sheet and perhaps some rugs or blankets? I am absolutely determined on this, Jan, because I think it is the only way to make her see sense and I’m dreadfully afraid that if she finds out about us I’ll be sent even farther away, and probably never see you again, and that I just couldn’t bear, Jan, because you are the only person in the world I really care about, darling, and I know now that I’m really in love with you, as I said.