Diana

by R. F Delderfield

  “What did I tell you, young Leigh?” he chaffed, when he overheard me making a date with the switchboard operator at work. “You’re a changed man since that night out we had in Tonbridge. You ought to hand it to that pal of Peggy’s, she’s made a man out of you! Have you seen her again? Has she come down on you for seven-and-six yet?”

  He meant this as a joke and I accepted it as such, but if he had known the hours of worry I had undergone regarding this very contingency he would have laughed his silly head off. As a matter of fact, I still had qualms about Madeleine and they were not wholly selfish. I could not forget her pathetic response to my lighthearted compliment and eagerness she had shown to win my affection. If I had been as cynical as I am now, I should have wasted no sympathy on a girl who surrendered to a greenhorn like me after such a poor show of resistance, but in those days I was deeply ashamed of the fact that I had used her, not as a human being but as a means of defiance, a jeer at someone who had hurt me. It was because of these misgivings that I did not write to her, though she had pressed her address upon me when we parted. I don’t suppose I should have seen her again, had she not passed a message to me via Twining, saying that she and Peggy were coming to town one Saturday and suggesting that we meet and go to a show. Twining, to his regret was unable to accept, but he advised me to meet her, and we had tea in Fuller’s, and then went to a film. I had regarded the expedition as an act of penance, but Madeleine looked so attractive in a little blue and white pinafore frock and matching beret, and proved so agreeable a companion up to the moment of parting at Victoria Station, that I recklessly made plans to meet her the following Saturday and even found myself looking forward to the occasion throughout the week.

  We made no reference during our conversation to what had taken place at Tonbridge. Confronted with her again and lacking all hope of privacy in London, I was too shy, while she, sensing as much, was apparently learning the value of tact. I was determined that on the next occasion we met we should have some privacy and although it was against house rules to bring girls into our rooms, I determined to risk it and laid in a simple supper, planning the evening so that we should have a couple of hours alone before her last train at eleven o’clock.

  It was not a cold-blooded maneuver on my part. I was fond of Madeleine, and the prospect of making love to her again filled me with the kind of excitement I had once felt in keeping an early morning appointment with Diana at the tower. Even so, I am not pretending that it was more than the normal anticipation any youth feels for the company of a girl who he knows will accommodate him. During that week, whenever I thought of Madeleine coming all the way up from Tonbridge to spend a few hours in my company, I did so with a male arrogance that was new to me. I no longer regarded her as a weapon against Diana’s indifference, and that in itself was significant, for it meant that the embers of the Sennacharib fires were now almost extinct. Chance, or another miracle, was to demonstrate how hopelessly wrong I was in this respect.

  Madeleine’s train was due into Victoria at three twenty, and I had a lunchtime call to make on behalf of the Echo, in Soho. After making the call and eating a quick lunch, I sauntered out into Piccadilly with an hour or so to spare, intending to walk slowly along toward the Ritz and cut across the park to the station.

  I had reached Hatchard’s and was idling beside the window absorbed in the new titles, when I heard a voice that made me spin around like a teetotem. There, paying off a taxi about five yards from where I was loitering, stood Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton, and Diana waiting alongside her.

  It was fortunate that they were not looking in my direction. I was so staggered by their appearance, and by the immense changes in Diana’s appearance, that at least thirty seconds elapsed before I could collect myself sufficiently to turn my back on them and keep them in view in the plate-glass reflection. I stood there trembling as Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton moved off past me toward the Circus and Diana crossed the pavement and disappeared into Fortnum and Mason’s. Then, hardly able to believe my luck, I rushed in pursuit and watched her pass through the main part of the shop and turn into the dimly lit tobacco department. It was a convenient counter at which to observe her. I stood half-concealed behind a pillar and gazed and gazed at the elegant young woman who had replaced the tousled schoolgirl I had held in my arms under the tarpaulin on the night of the gale. I could never have believed that a person could change so much in so short a time.

  She had developed a dress sense that rivaled her mother’s. She wore a light, heather-blue coat with a wide fur collar and under the coat, which was open, a calf-length dress in a darker shade of blue, picked out with tiny white bows, like those on the dress of the celebrated Renoir girl. She had silk stockings, crocodile-skin shoes with three-inch heels, and a matching handbag as big as a satchel. Her hat was an outrageous piece of nonsense, a cross between a hussar’s and a cossack’s, flattened over the left eye and crowned with a blue tassel that matched her coat. Her thick chestnut hair had been severely disciplined, and although she was using plenty of make-up, the bloom and freshness of her complexion owed little to cosmetics but sprang from a radiantly healthy skin. Her cheeks had the soft glow of petals and her eyes, as huge and blue as I remembered, still held in their depths the laughter and mischief of Diana of Heronslea. It was all that was left, except perhaps the promise of her mouth.

  Her figure had greatly improved. In her beautifully cut clothes she looked as trim as a model, her narrow waist emphasizing the firmness of her breasts and the long line of her shapely legs. My mind went back to the winter’s day when she and her mother had come into Uncle Luke’s quayside Mart to buy cottage furniture, and I recalled how gauche and insignificant I had felt when they inspected our seedy wares in the light of a single, naked bulb. Today the contrast was even more marked, for here she stood in one of the most exclusive shops in the world, once more giving the impression that she had paid the management a great compliment by entering it.

  For a split second, as this memory crossed my mind, I was tempted to leave the place without speaking to her. Always unattainable, she now seemed to have removed herself to another planet, for how, I reasoned, could such an enchanting creature look at a down-at-heel wretch like me with anything but amused patronage? How could she be blamed for murmuring a few polite words and excusing herself gently but absolutely from a situation that could only bring us stuttering embarrassment? Then what remained of my pride came to my aid. It was an inadequate reinforcement but just enough to make me stand my ground. As she completed her purchase and moved away from the counter, I stepped out from behind the pillar and whipped off my ten-and-sixpenny trilby.

  “Hello, Di!” I said, my voice not much above a whisper.

  She stopped about a yard away, her lips parted, her eyes as serious as I had ever seen them. For several seconds we stood there facing one another, and then, with a rush of delight that made me want to shout at the top of my voice, I saw her cheeks flush with pleasure and she rushed forward to seize both my hands, hitching the shoulder bag to give free movement to her arms, and pulling me toward her so violently that the battered trilby I was holding slipped from my grasp and rolled on the carpet.

  “Jan!” she exclaimed. “Oh, Jan, Jan!”

  I was so moved by the warmth of her greeting that I was unable to say another word. As I stared at her, feeling the strong pressure of her gloved hands on my fingers, all the doubts and dismays of the past two years fell away from me like Christian’s sins and went tumbling down into limbo. I was left with a lightness of heart that I could not hope to express in conventional greetings, for inside me, buried under a debris of loneliness and drabness, the spring and glory of Sennacharib stirred, bursting through the sour crust of London and soaring like the buzzards above the paddock oaks.

  I must have said something when she proposed tea in the adjoining lounge, and I must have followed her to the little whitewood table in the alcove where we spent the next hour, but I remember nothing of this and not much of what we spoke a
bout after the first breathless exchanges.

  “Jan, it’s been so long, so long!” she said, studying me from head to foot, her eyes dancing and flashing with excitement “You’ve grown so! Stand up! Let me look at you! Let me take you in!” And when I stood somewhat shamefacedly (for she was the same uninhibited Diana and made no effort to keep her voice low): “Mmmmm! Mmmmmm! You’re bigger and broader and more masculine than ever! I knew you would be, of course, but you’ve filled out much more than I expected and you’re still growing—you’re over six foot now.”

  “Six-one-and-a-half,” I said. “But now for heaven’s sake let me sit down! I feel an absolute Charlie, standing up for inspection in Fortnum and Mason’s tea lounge.”

  We both laughed aloud. That was what I found so remarkable about this meeting. Within minutes we were perfectly at ease with one another and the waiting months, which had wrought such changes in each of us, had been scattered like a drift of leaves. “Well?” she said, as soon as the waitress had set down the tray and turned her back on us. “How about me? Do you think I’ve changed at all?”

  “You look absolutely wonderful, Diana,” I told her. “Grown up—frighteningly so—and so marvelously pretty that they must be absolute idiots not to sign you up as a film star!”

  She was pleased and did not mind showing it. “As a matter of fact they’ve tried to,” she admitted. “Not here, though—I’m not the Elstree type—but in France, you know, where they only make films about precociously sexy little misses, who keep running away from convents. Now tell me more about yourself. What are you doing in London? What kind of job have you got up here? How does a husky like you keep all the flappers away? Tell me everything—everything, Jan!”

  I told her almost everything: how and why Uncle Reuben had whisked me away from Whinmouth, all about The Illustrated Echo and about the book I was writing on Margaret of Anjou, and how I hoped it would be published before I was twenty; also something of how I had hoped and schemed to get in touch with her over the last year.

  She nodded gravely when I came to this and said, “We’ll discuss that later, Jan. In the meantime, I want to hear exactly what you aim to do in the future. Do you want to be a real London journalist, you know, Fleet Street pubs, a stained raincoat, frenzied dashes to trouble spots and all that? Or would you much prefer to be an author who crams a special subject and then unloads it on an unsuspecting public?”

  It sounded as though she was disinclined to take my writing very seriously and I was slightly piqued. She noticed this at once and added, hurriedly, “Oh I’m not pooh-poohing the idea, Jan. I always knew you’d turn into some kind of writer but right at the back of my mind I always had a different kind of hunch about you. I had it from the first day we met.”

  “What sort of hunch?” I asked curiously.

  “Oh, I don’t know … nothing really specific, just something to do with land—farming, dairy cattle, poultry breeding, market gardening—that’s in your blood, Jan, whether you know it or not.”

  “Is it?” I asked, lamely.

  “Yes, Jan, it certainly is. I always recognized that because you can’t feel about a countryside the way you feel about Sennacharib unless it’s a part of your nerves and blood and bone.”

  “Do you mean that you’d be disappointed if I stayed a journalist all my life, Di?” I asked, puzzled by the sudden turn the conversation had taken.

  “Yes, I think I would,” she said slowly, “and so, in the end, would you, Jan!”

  We had our tea and she told me a little about what had happened to her—how she had been abroad practically the whole time, either at a school in Tours or, during vacations, with the French horsy family near Périgueux. I did not give her my full attention. I wanted to think about what she had said. It was odd, I reflected, that none of the conversations we had had while riding and wandering in Sennacharib had led us to this subject—the prospect of my returning to the occupation of all my West Country forebears, up to the time that Grandpa Leigh took to swilling rum and rode to his death on Nun’s Bay rocks, but it was difficult to think objectively in her presence, I was far too elated and excited. All I wanted to talk about was us—how we could start again, where we could meet, how much personal freedom she had, how often she went to Heronslea, and dozens of other questions directed at a single target—how soon we could be as important to each other as we had been during those days of isolation on the island.

  Before I could explore this vital subject she glanced at her watch and said that she had arranged to meet her mother at four o’clock, at Brown’s Hotel, where they were staying while the decorators worked on their town house, in Palmerston Crescent.

  “It’s being renovated from top to bottom,” she said, “and the party is being held there on the eleventh of next month.”

  She told me then that this was to be the first of her coming-out parties and that there were to be a whole series of them throughout her season. Later on, in mid-June, she thought, there was to be a country party at Heronslea and about the same time she was being presented, just the way it had been planned, years and years ago.

  “Don’t look so tragic, Jan!” she laughed, reaching across the table and patting my crestfallen face with her glove. “I expect I shall survive it. Everyone else seems to.”

  I knew very little more about young girls’ seasons or presentations at court than I had known when she had first described the ritual, but what did depress me as she outlined her program was the conviction that I had no place in any part of it. The whole silly business would remove her from me more effectively than she had been removed during the past two years. What made it even worse was that she now seemed to be reconciled to all the fuss and glitter that attended a season. There was none of the pouting disparagement that she had shown in our Sennacharib days. Coming out, I brooded, would mean constant chaperonage and behind that the shadow of serious competitors.

  I said nothing about all this, for she gave me no opening. Although, from the very outset of our meeting, her attitude toward me was very frank and friendly, she made no reference to our former relationship. When she looked at her watch again I called the waitress and asked for the bill, but I dared not let her go without some kind of reassurance.

  “When can I see you again, Diana?” I demanded. “We can’t just … just meet and part again like this!”

  She began pulling on her gloves and frowned at her hands. For a second, as she did this, I saw a wraith of the old Diana, muttering terrible incantations against the thieves of her freedom. Then the frown disappeared and she gave me a brittle little smile.

  “You must leave that to me, Jan dear! The fact is, we can’t see one another just yet and for the moment it really is ‘hail and farewell,’ but if you’ll be patient, very, very patient, Jan, then something will turn up, something exciting maybe, the way it always used to, remember?”

  And with that I was obliged to be satisfied, for she walked briskly out of the restaurant, leaving me to pay the bill at the desk.

  When I had collected my change I hurried down the steps to the floor level of the shop and saw her standing just inside the main door, looking in my direction. As our eyes met she put her hand to her lips and waved. It was a clear hint that she did not want me to follow her into the street, and because I was uncertain and bewildered I hesitated long enough for her to slip through the doors and enter a curbside taxi.

  Then I thought of Madeleine, hanging about Victoria Station, and conscience drove me to hail another taxi and drive to the terminus, where I arrived an hour after the scheduled arrival of Madeleine’s train. I made a halfhearted search of the buffet and along the bookstalls and platform exits, but there was no sign of her. An inspector told me that a train for Tonbridge had just left and I supposed she had boarded it and was already making the cheerless journey home.

  I never saw Madeleine again and I can never pass Victoria Station without a sense of shame.

  5.

  The chance meeting with Diana did n
ot solve very much, for I was now bedeviled by fresh uncertainties. I went over her cordial but indeterminate attitude toward me but I found it impossible to decide how she looked upon our former relationship and whether, now or at any time ahead, she would ever regard our association as a prelude to marriage. To me, throughout all the time we had been separated, there had been but two possible solutions—either she would defy her parents on the day she attained the age of twenty-one, or she had already dismissed me as a presumptuous hobbledehoy with whom she had passed part of her girlhood. I had never demanded an “understanding” as to our plans when she was of age but I now felt that she owed it to me to clarify the situation. I had expected more from our reunion. I had hoped for a passionate reavowal, but in the absence of it a frank and unsentimental “old-pals” approach would have told me all I wanted to know. As things were, I could form no strong impression of her attitude; regarding essentials she had remained mysteriously neutral. All the next day I studied my impressions. There was the hint that I ought to turn my back on journalism and learn farming; there was her refusal to commit herself about future meetings; there was her abrupt departure, without even a handshake or a good-by, and looking at it from these angles it appeared that she was putting me in my place almost as ruthlessly as her mother might have done. Looking at it another way, however, I believed that I had grounds for supposing that she had one or more of her aces in reserve, and was, in fact, on the point of bringing off a characteristic coup … “If you’ll be patient, Jan, something will turn up, something exciting maybe, the way it used to, remember?” If she had persuaded herself that our love had been no more than a phase of adolescence, then why had she been so explicit about the future? Precisely what was likely to turn up? Another chance meeting? A day in Sennacharib together? Or a wedding, with a fairy-tale ending?