Diana

by R. F Delderfield

  When I got to my hotel a phoned message awaited me. Diana suggested that we meet in the sherry bar of Martinez’s in Swallow Street, so I went there, booked a table for lunch and sat down to await her in the bar facing the dim foyer, placing myself so as to see her before she saw me. I went about it coolly, without any of the bubbling excitement I had experienced immediately before our earlier meetings, but I was too smug by a mile. It was I, not Diana, who was caught off balance.

  She appeared some ten minutes late and I almost failed to recognize her. There was a jerky brittleness about her walk and bearing, as if she was playing at being a marionette. She was exquisitely dressed and groomed, but somehow the general effect was unpleasing. When I had met her by chance, in Fortnum’s, her smartness was a part of her, personality merging with clothes and accessories, but now it was as though a convention of talented couturiers and hair stylists had gathered together and drawn up a schedule decreeing “This is what the fashionable young woman of this season will look like; all else is drabness!” There was a cold uniformity about her appearance that banished the Diana of Sennacharib, replacing her with the kind of girl one saw leaning nonchalantly against an impossibly expensive coupé in magazine advertisements, and the transformation extended to her expression and features, from which the personality had been drained or neutralized. Her eyes had lost their glow, her mouth its mobility. Her chestnut hair still caught the light where it fell on the starched collar of her blouse, but it was no longer the kind of hair one wanted to stroke. It had a touch-me-not-it-cost-a-lot-to-arrange look about it, and this aura of prohibition invested her like an icy mist. It was as though the Diana I remembered and worshiped had died, giving birth to the Emerald that her training had conceived, so that for the first time since she had told me her name it suited her. She had a hard, greenish, gemlike quality that was fascinating at a distance, but repellent at close quarters.

  She greeted me very cordially and I ordered two sherries. We chatted about one thing and another, much as two slightly acquainted cousins might have discussed members of their family. Then she ordered two more sherries and insisted on paying for them. It was during this second drink that I noticed that Diana was not yet dead but shut away in solitary confinement and trying, very feebly, to make her presence known. Twice Diana called to be let out, once in the bar, and again when we were lunching upstairs. The first time was when Emerald faltered for a moment and Diana reached out across the table, touching my shoulders with the tips of her fingers, saying, “They’re so wide! I have to be sure they aren’t padded, Jan!” The second occasion was when, halfway through the hors-d’oeuvres, she suddenly asked if I had been across Sennacharib lately. This time, however, Emerald was on guard and the word became Senneckarib, much as Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton would have pronounced it.

  It took me at least half an hour to absorb the transition and adjust myself to its almost macabre manifestations. When I had succeeded in doing so, our passages became a sort of game, each maneuvering to catch the other at a disadvantage, like a judge and a competitor in a statue dance, where all movement must cease with the accompaniment. I think that on the whole I had the best of the exchanges, for behind her façade of guarded frigidity I thought I could detect a tiny flicker of guilt. She was rather like a woman who had sat down opposite me to settle a claim for damages, determined to yield no more than she was obliged to, but held in check by a conviction that, if the matter went to court, the decision would surely go against her.

  When we were sipping coffee the waiter came over to us with a bottle of cognac and Diana said she would like some. He poured a little into her glass but she laid her hand on his arm and kept it there, so that it became a treble. We had had a bottle of Beaune between us, as well as the sherry, and the effect of the alcohol now began to mellow her. She leaned back and smiled, no longer like a distant cousin, or a claim fighter, but like a rich aunt regaling a schoolboy nephew on a speechday outing.

  “Are you doing anything particular this afternoon, Jan?” she asked, and although the question was an idle one I knew that it was important to her that we should extend the reunion.

  “Have you anything in mind?” I said.

  “As a matter of fact I hev!” she replied.

  There it was again; “hev” not “have,” a formidable echo of her mother.

  “Well, Diana?”

  “I’d like you to take me to the Tower,” she said.

  “The Tower? The Tower of London?” It would have been an astonishing request from Diana; it was an absolutely outrageous one from Emerald.

  “I’ve never been,” she admitted, “and I don’t know anyone else who would take me. I heard a broadcast about the ceremony of the keys the other evening and said to myself, I expect Jan knows all about that place. Do you?”

  “I’ve been there several times,” I told her, “mostly when I was writing the Margaret of Anjou book. We’ll go if you really want to, we can get the Underground to the Minories.”

  She winced at the word “Underground” and I only just stopped myself laughing.

  “I’ve got my flivver outside,” she said, “providing you don’t mind being driven by a woman!”

  “No,” I said, beginning to enjoy myself, “I’m sure you’re a very good driver. Di.”

  She was too, as far as the mechanical processes were concerned, changing down soundlessly, judging distances with cool accuracy, and generally showing the same command over a car as she showed riding Sioux. I noticed, however, that she was impatient with less skillful drivers, and snarled at a man who slipped his clutch while trying to beat her over the traffic lights. In what seemed to me about five minutes we were on Tower Hill, where we parked and bought tickets at the gate. I showed her around. She did not seem specially interested in the block, the armory and the green, or even the crown jewels, which I thought might attract her, but she surprised me by dawdling beside the prisoners’ inscriptions in the Beauchamp Tower, and asked me to tell her something about the people who had been imprisoned there. I was telling her about Lady Jane Grey, and how she had watched the headless body of her husband carried by shortly before her own execution, when I noticed that she was not listening. She had pretended to curiosity in order to allow time for other sightseers to descend the spiral staircase, leaving us alone in the half-light of the winter’s afternoon. As soon as their steps died away she said:

  ‘Well, Jan, don’t you want to kiss me?’

  The odd thing was that I didn’t, not in the least, but it would have sounded so unfriendly to say so that I replied:

  “If you want me to, Di.”

  “I do,” she said, flatly, and tilted up her face.

  As our lips touched I wondered if contact would free the real Diana and reduce this unpleasant parody of Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton to a wraith as insubstantial as Lady Jane Grey, but it did nothing of the sort. Her kissing habits had changed like everything else about her. This too had conformed, and now the conference of hair stylists and couturiers had bowed themselves out, to make way for Continental love experts, who had reduced the art of kissing to a graded scale of intimacy—so much pressure, so much time, a place for each hand, a specified angle for the body. She kissed me near the top of this scale, her lips parted and her eyes closed. There was sensuality in the kiss but no hint of bestowal. Its effect upon me was to harden my obstinacy.

  I wondered, even while kissing her, whether her town escorts would regard this kind of embrace as something practiced by the lower orders in cinemas and parks. She must have sensed my detachment for she suddenly stepped back and stared at the floor. Doing this she looked so childish and pitiful that I felt a sudden and inexplicable sympathy for her, and at once tried to make amends. I kissed her again, softly and very respectably, but this time she did not attempt to respond, but tore herself free.

  “For God’s sake let’s stop playing ‘if-only,’ ” she snapped, and walked past me and down the stairs.

  As we emerged on the green a Yeoman of the Guard bega
n shepherding the last visitors toward the main gate. I drew level with Diana and looked at her sideways, expecting to find her flushed and irritated, but she wasn’t; the hard, poised look was back again and as we walked past the Traitors’ Gate she said:

  “Those beefeaters—do they stay here or do they come out sometimes?”

  “They come up for air every so often,” I said. “There’s usually two or three of them hanging about the ticket office.”

  She did not reply to this, and the significance of the question did not occur to me until, months later, I read that one of the trophies of a Mayfair treasure hunt had been a beefeater’s hat.

  Perhaps this was why she had wanted me to take her to the Tower. At the moment she was obviously anxious to be gone and asked me, with the air of addressing a hitchhiker, where I would care to be dropped.

  “Nowhere,” I said bleakly. “I’ve got to see a publisher and his office is near, I can walk.”

  It was a lie, but like her I had no wish to prolong the dismal occasion. She climbed into the car, started the engine, and revved up with unnecessary vigor.

  “Well, so long, Jan! Thank you for taking me and thank you for a nice lunch.”

  We shook hands—that was the monstrously unreal part of it—we shook hands, and the gesture slammed the shutter on our adolescence. As she drove off, her engine making a series of sharp reports, a wave of sadness swept over me and the ache nagged at me all the way home to Whinmouth. Yet it was impersonal sadness. I was not mourning Diana so much as all things in life that promise so much and yield so little. I was sad for the sunny day clouded by rain, for the kitten that grows up to catch thrushes, for the juggler with the fixed smile who opens a glittering program and drops his clubs halfway through the first act, for anybody and everybody who grows up believing that the world is an oyster but never discovers the means of opening the shell. Behind this sadness, however, was a vague sense of relief. It was all over now! It was something that could be tied up like love letters and left to fade under a pile of holiday snapshots and old phonograph records.

  I was free, really free, for the first time since that autumn afternoon in the larch wood a century ago, and I believe I faced this fact with the same kind of resignation as a man faces the prospect of learning to walk with an artificial leg. It could have been far better, but it might have been much worse.

  4.

  I said nothing to Uncle Reuben about the visit to London, but I imagine that he noticed my application to work throughout that spring and summer and probably related it to Diana in some way. In July I read that, following another motoring offense her driving license had been suspended for twelve months.

  Week followed week, with its usual round of petty sessional courts, council meetings, funerals, weddings, sales-of-work and the odd mild sensation, a fire or a sea rescue. I slipped into a swift rhythm, sometimes covering as many as a dozen jobs a day, and spending what spare time I had in boating and bathing. I went to a few dances and made two or three tepid friendships with Whinmouth girls. I had a ten-day holiday in Brittany, partly with the object of improving my French, which I had kept up by reading First Empire memoirs in the original, and occasional evening classes at the University. I went over to Uncle Mark’s riding establishment now and again, and when the hunting season opened I even had a day or two out on one of his cobs.

  It was a pleasant enough life. The riding and hunting, and sometimes an occasional shooting expedition at the invitation of local farmers, kept me in touch with Sennacharib. I remember crossing it under a gray, lifeless sky soon after my twenty-first birthday and bagging a couple of rabbits on Foxhayes Common, but I no longer thought of its gorse and plantations as in any way associated with Diana. I absorbed its color patterns and contours subconsciously, much as Uncle Luke might have watched the flight of a heron over the estuary, but it was now a background, not an Eden.

  Then the fun began again with the Bright Young Things. They got into trouble with the Customs and Excise, at Dover, and one of them, whose name had been linked with Diana in the past, received a short jail sentence for smuggling. Later, around about Christmas time, Diana herself figured in a more spectacular scandal. She was a passenger in a glider that crashed on a row of suburban houses in Kent. The pilot was injured, but she escaped with bruises and was photographed for the newspapers standing beside the wreckage. In common with most people I became rather bored with all this nonsense and sympathized with the comment of a vitriolic columnist in a “progressive” weekly, beginning: If Hitler seeks proof that our expensively educated young people are decadent he should follow the careers of certain ornaments of Mayfair these days. …

  Ordinarily these pranks would have aroused little attention but they were given prominence because of the sharp contrast they provided with the main news of those times—endless death and destruction in places like Addis Ababa and Guernica, a constant overturn of threats from the dictators, and irritated gloom among everyone with enough intelligence to wonder what was due to happen next. What irritated people like the gossip writer I have quoted was the impression that people like Diana had turned their backs on the rest of us, and despised us for wondering about the future. They certainly did give that impression, as though they were not only determined to live for the day but intended making as much song and dance about it as possible. The majority, who had to work hard for a living, envied them their freedom and probably found compensation in regarding their childishly high spirits as evidence of degeneracy.

  Then something happened that could not be written off as a Mayfair rag. Diana and a young man called Irving, who was the son of a wealthy cement king, were involved in a fatal accident on a country road south of London. Their car collided with a motorcycle combination, containing a young husband and his wife—an expectant mother. The woman was killed outright. Irving and the motorcyclist were critically injured. Diana escaped with two cracked ribs.

  At first it looked like just another road accident, but at the initial inquest (later adjourned in the absence of the injured parties) it emerged that Irving had been far gone in drink and would face a criminal charge if he survived. He did not recover, dying a week or so after the accident.

  The next day the injured motorcyclist died and the hunt was up. Relatives of the victims howled protests through the press, and feature writers jumped in with whoops of triumph. Diana, as the sole survivor of the crash, came in for some very sharp interrogation at the resumed inquest. As a mere passenger in living’s car, however, there was no painful sequel for her, and the papers rounded off the story by publishing pictures of her leaving the court, one arm in a sling and the other shading her face from the cameramen.

  Two days after these pictures had appeared, I came into the office to find a letter from Diana in my tray. It was a wild cry for help:

  MY JAN,

  I don’t deserve the slightest sympathy, least of all from you, but I’ve been in hell since the business, and no one else is the slightest use! If you could meet me, wherever you like, I’d never stop being grateful! If you won’t, tear this up and forget it. I should understand. It wouldn’t make me stop remembering you as the nicest person I’ve ever had the luck to meet!

  With love,

  DIANA

  I have said that I only remembered Diana impersonally, that when she disappeared in her cloud of blue exhaust on Tower Hill I had succeeded, at last, in turning my back on her. Since then I had adjusted myself to a routine in which she played no part at all. In essence this was true; I seldom thought about her these days, and when I did it was without bitterness. Her appeal showed me how grossly I had been fooling myself. The moment I read her cry for help I knew I must answer it, and I knew also that this would not be a matter of running to the aid of an old friend in trouble but the joyful stampede of a man hopelessly in love. Fortunately, I recognized this at once. It shocked me but I had the sense to go straight to Uncle Reuben and confide in him.

  He was far more doubtful about her than he had b
een when I had sought his advice about her letter of dismissal.

  “I don’t know, Jan,” he said, rubbing his chin, “she’s gone from bad to worse, boy. Surely you can see that? There’s a kind of devil in her, fed and watered by the kind of life she’s been leading since you last saw her. I know that sort. Catch ’em young and you can do something with ’em, but now … how old do you say she is?”

  I could answer that question with accuracy.

  “She’ll be twenty-one on the eighteenth of June,” I told him.

  “You want to go to her?”

  “I’ve got to, Uncle!”

  He looked at me sadly and nodded his big head. Inactivity had aged him. He looked more than his seventy years and tired to breaking point of pain and half-life.

  “I daresay you’re right, boy. It never pays to defy instincts. Go and see how the land lies at all events, but don’t commit yourself to any tomfool promises one way or the other.”

  I wrote saying that I would come to London that night, and meet her at the Swan and Edgar’s corner at eleven A.M. Then I changed into my best suit and drove to the junction for the night train. It was like a parody of my first journey to meet her, the time she had played truant from school. The London pattern was similar, too; a hunched walk through the drizzle of the January small hours, a breakfast in the Covent Garden area, a whiling away of time beside the Embankment, and finally a bus ride to Piccadilly.

  It was all there but somehow the parallel was not a pleasant one. It was as though I was the victim of a malign compulsion forced to re-enact a lost youth in order to prove to myself that the original journey had been a dream and that here, years later, was the reality. When I jumped off the bus and crossed over to the rendezvous, the first person I saw was Diana, anxiously scanning the faces of pedestrians as they hurried to and from Eros. It was the first time she had ever been the first to keep an appointment.