I approached her from behind and touched her shoulder. She swung around with a sharp exclamation and I saw at once that she was in a state of extreme nervous tension. When she saw who had touched her she almost cried out with relief.
“Jan! I was terrified you’d cry off! I got it into my head that your idea of arranging to meet me here again was … well, a sort of pay-you-out trick. Can we go somewhere and talk? Where shall it be? Martinez? Fortnum’s?”
She spoke with extreme rapidity. Each statement was a question.
“It was Lyons the last time we met here, Di, but we’ve moved up a bit since then,” I said, trying a joke in the hope of calming her nerves.
The joke fell flat. “Was it? I don’t remember … everything’s muddled … maybe it’s the shock, or the bump I got on the windshield … you decide—somewhere quiet, somewhere inside!”
I took hold of her arm and noticed that she was trembling. She looked so pale, and seemed so helpless and distraught, that I wondered at her doctor allowing her out. Her state of mind was reflected in the clothes she wore. She, who had always been so trim and fashionable, now looked as if she had grabbed any garment that came to hand and had not even troubled to arrange her hair or tidy herself before leaving the house.
She was hatless and gloveless and her lovely hands showed traces of London grime. The varnish on her nails was chipped and her make-up was sketchy, too much lipstick having been applied to one side of her mouth and not enough to the other, so that the cupid’s bow looked almost clownish.
I was so shocked by her manner and general appearance that I was obliged to take command of her in a way that would never have been possible in the past.
“We won’t go anywhere where you’ll have to make an effort, Di,” I told her. “What about a snack bar I know, for coffee and a sandwich in strict seclusion?”
“Anywhere,” she said, gratefully, “anywhere at all! It was marvelous of you to come so quickly, Jan.”
She grabbed my arm and hugged it tightly, as though she had no confidence in her ability to negotiate the traffic. We crossed into Lower Regent Street and made our way to a tiny taximan’s pull-up that I knew in a side street behind the Plaza. There were no other customers at this time of the morning and the proprietor, a sallow young man with heavy sideburns, was out of earshot behind his zinc counter. I bought two coffees and two cheese sandwiches, carrying them across to an alcove at the far end of the shop. In the few moments it had taken me to get them she had made a brave effort to pull herself together and was now feverishly making up with the aid of a little hand mirror.
“I must look a terrible mess!” she said, sounding more like herself. “You’ve never seen me looking like this, have you, Jan?”
“Never mind that,” I said, “just try to relax. We’ve got all day today and tomorrow as well, if you like. It’s a lucky job your letter came on a Friday. I’ve put the paper to bed and I’m clear until the Petty Sessions, on Monday.”
She sipped her coffee. It was very good coffee and she nodded, appreciatively.
“How much was this, Jan?” she asked, irrelevantly.
“Threepence a cup,” I said, grinning. “I can run to that, Di!”
She smiled and it was exciting to see a trace of color return to her cheeks. She propped the hand mirror against the cup and, bending low, touched up her lips and tugged at her hair. Presently she replaced the things in her bag and straightened up, finishing the coffee in a series of quick gulps.
“I know places where they’d charge half a crown and it wouldn’t be nearly as good coffee as this,” she mused. “It was clever of you to know about a place like this but then, you lived and worked in London, didn’t you? I keep forgetting that.”
“On about thirty bob a week,” I told her, “and it makes for careful housekeeping!”
I had been right to bring her somewhere like this. The traffic roar was very much subdued and there were no distractions, as there would have been in any of her usual haunts about the West End. She began to nibble the sandwich, gingerly at first but enthusiastically after the first bite or two.
“This is the first food I’ve had in forty-eight hours,” she admitted. “I haven’t swallowed a thing except pills since that awful inquest.”
“What sort of pills?” I demanded.
“Oh, the usual … pheno and something else added,” she said lightly, “but don’t let’s talk about pills, Jan. It’s lovely being here with you; it’s making me come alive again. I feel a lot better already, my Jan.”
It was callous of me but I wasn’t big enough to resist it.
“So I’m your Jan again, am I?”
For a moment she looked exactly as she had looked when we were skylarking up on the common.
“Yes,” she said, “whether you like it or not!”
“Do you want to talk about the accident? I’ve read all the papers had to say about it. We do get London papers in Whinmouth,” I added, noting her look of surprise.
“Yes,” she said, firmly, “let’s get it over and done with. I’ve got to have somebody’s opinion about what to do or I’ll end up in the bin! It’s odd, Jan, you go on getting further and further away from life and then, suddenly, a single jolt pulls you up and you see where you’ve been heading and at what a fantastic speed. Do you see what I mean?”
“You’d better start from the beginning,” I said, “but don’t tell me anything you might regret telling me later on.”
“All right, Jan,” she said, meekly, “but order some more coffee and sandwiches first. Get ham and plaster it with mustard. I’ve suddenly realized that I’m famished!”
I went over and bought more coffee and ham sandwiches. Out of the corner of my eye, as I stood waiting at the counter, I saw her take out a cigarette, stick it between her lips, pluck it out again and return it to the case.
“The papers only got half the story,” she began, when we were seated again. “We’d been down to a country-club dance, near Maidstone, and Irving was so tight that I made him let me drive, even though my ban doesn’t expire until midsummer.”
This really frightened me. “You were driving? You mean, when it happened?”
She nodded and did not take her eyes off me.
“But how … I mean, does anyone know?”
“No one but you, Jan!”
I began to understand the reason for her semihysterical condition. All the time she was giving evidence at the inquest she must have been stricken with guilt, as well as terrified of what might happen to her if the truth emerged.
“How the devil did you manage to persuade the police that Irving was driving?” I asked.
“That was easy …” She said it with a touch of the old Diana, planning mischief in Sennacharib. “There was no one about, not until later, and I was the only one conscious. I did it all instinctively—defense mechanism I suppose you’d call it. As soon as I sorted myself out, a minute or so after the impact, I climbed out and pushed Irving into the driving seat. After all, if he hadn’t died he’d have still been for it, for letting me drive! I was with him when I was disqualified, so he couldn’t have said he didn’t know about the ban.”
“But how about the others, the couple in the motorcycle combination?”
“I didn’t even see them until the ambulance men arrived. I didn’t even know what we’d hit! It was all such a frightful shambles. We were piled up under a bank and my side hurt so much that I must have passed out myself after somebody had stopped and carried me into a house for first aid.”
It didn’t need a vivid imagination to picture the scene—four badly injured people, three of them half dead, in the wreckage of vehicles on a dark, lonely road; a bewildered motorist concentrating on the one victim of the crash who was the least helpless; a sleeping householder dragged from bed by thunderous knocks on the front door; phone calls, ambulance men, solemn police poking about among the mess, taking measurements. As a reporter I was familiar enough with the scene.
“What hap
pened afterwards? After you’d all been taken to hospital?”
“The police came in the afternoon and took a statement. They had already been ferreting around the club where we’d been, and when they hinted that Irving was tight when he left there, I saw at once it was no good lying about details. Then Daddy sent his solicitor in and I made a statement to him. I didn’t say any more than I could help, I just said I was dozing and never even saw the motorbike and sidecar.”
“Did you see it?”
“Just about … it’s all a bit vague.”
Suddenly she lost her grip again and her eyes filled with tears. “It was when they told me the woman was expecting a baby that I felt like a murderer,” she said, her fingers drumming on the table. “Sometimes I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again … all three of them, and the baby inside her killed, just like that! I wish to God I’d been killed too! I’ve been wishing it ever since!”
There was no point in offering her the conventional consolations, telling her she’d feel better later on, that time was a healer, that what was done was done and couldn’t be altered. She was in too deep to be helped by platitudes and shoulder pats. She was racked with a misery that stemmed directly from a deep sense of guilt, and would probably suffer even more when the physical and mental shock of the accident had been absorbed. I was not sure that I could help her but I was certain that no one else could, least of all her parents or any of her society friends. Yet the responsibility of helping her, of calming her down and trying to rationalize the circumstances, pressed down on me like a slab of concrete. Only one approach suggested itself. It seemed to me that the most promising line I could pursue was to steer her back to the high-water mark of our association, to the moment when we had parted outside the flower-room door on the morning after her party.
“If I hadn’t answered your letter what did you intend doing, Di?” I asked her.
She blew her nose and avoided my glance.
“I think I would have gone to the police and told the whole truth,” she said. “Come to that, I still might. I would if you said I should.”
“How would that help?”
“It would help me,” she said, biting her lip. “I’d go to prison, I suppose, and that would help to wipe it out somehow!”
“Were you tight, as tight as Irving?”
“No, I wasn’t. I’d had a few, spread over the evening, but I’ve been much worse than that other times and got the car home without a scratch.”
“Yet you can’t remember anything about the moment before the collision?”
“No, just a glare of lights and then an awful crash!”
“Were you blinding along, just before that?”
“How could I have been? The crash was at the end of a steep hill and I’d only just changed from third to top.”
I began to see a gleam of light. Her threat of a confession had scared me and my brain was now working at top speed. I wasn’t looking for facts, not real, solid facts, such as they drag from witnesses in court. What I needed were a few threads that I could weave into something that she could hold on to during the next few weeks. With relief I remembered that I had kept two or three newspaper reports of the inquest and had put them in my wallet to reread in the train. I took them out now and ran my eye down a column of print, stopping at the paragraph dealing with the evidence of the motorcyclist’s brother, who had told how the dead man and his wife had left his home shortly before the crash. He admitted that the motorcyclist had “had a couple of beers.” As one well versed in motoring cases I interpreted this to mean he had probably had five or six. Witnesses are generous to the dead, especially when big insurance claims are involved.
“Now listen, Di,” I said, “and don’t interrupt! First of all, forget that screwy idea of going to the police and confessing. It can’t do anyone a ha’porth of good now and it will almost certainly land you in jail. Whatever claims there are will be fought out by insurance companies. I’ve seen a lot of this sort of thing and it’s their job, and an absolutely impersonal one. If there were dependent kids it might be different, but there aren’t and any admission on your part wouldn’t amount to more than a bleat, and God knows how much it would complicate matters! That’s point one—forget the confession angle, and don’t even admit it to your solicitors, it would embarrass them no end. Point two is the accident itself. It’s natural enough that you should feel to blame, but how do you know that you are? You only took a chance on driving because Irving was stinko, and if you’d let him drive you might have killed half a dozen people instead of two! As to the chap and his wife who were killed, they’d been drinking too—that’s been admitted, and anyone who takes his pregnant wife out in a sidecar at night after sinking a few beers is sitting up and begging for it these days. It might even have been his fault, or at any rate, six of one and half a dozen of the other, so stop torturing yourself and write it all off as craziness on everyone’s part. Look at it this way: if you had all four been injured and had come into court to give evidence on a motoring charge, what would have happened? I’ll tell you. All four of you would have sworn on oath that you were doing about twenty miles an hour on your correct side of the white line, that you sounded your horn all the way up the road, that you dipped your lights like good little drivers and that you might have had one for the road but certainly no more before you set off! I’ve sat through dozens of these cases and they’re all the same. No one is to blame. It’s always the other fellow, and all it amounts to in the end is who is the better liar, or which of you has brought the slickest mouthpiece into court.”
It was probably the longest speech I’d ever made and she heard it through, without taking her eyes off me. When I had said all I had to say she sat quite still, her head slightly to one side, her eyelids puckered at the corners, in a way that I remembered had heralded her short sudden laughs. The hunted look had disappeared. She had a natural color and her lovely hands, no longer fluttering, were clasped and pressed hard against her breast.
“You’re marvelous, Jan!” she said at length. “You’re an absolute tonic! You ought to have a room in Harley Street and get fifty guineas a time for sorting people out.”
I wasn’t at all sure whether she was trying to pay me a genuine compliment or half-laughing at me, the way she had often teased me when we had argued over something and I had seemed to her to champion stuffiness and caution.
“It’s the way I see it, at any rate,” I said, “and if you really want advice and not just a bit of ‘there-there-now-now’ I’ll tell you something else while we’re about it.”
“Well?” She was smiling openly now, her teeth holding her lower lip, as though she was afraid a smile might offend.
“Cut loose from the Set and get to hell out of here, once and for all! Come back to Heronslea if you like but take it easy, at least for a spell. Stop chasing whatever your lot are chasing and grow up! We’ve all got to sooner or later.”
She considered this a long moment, then she said, “When are you going back, Jan? Today?”
“I could,” I told her, “but I shall have to travel down on Sunday night in any case.”
“Would you take me with you—now?”
I had done my inadequate best to comfort her because it had distressed me very much to see her in such a pitiful state of depression. It had seemed important to me because, buried under the years of stress and disappointment that she represented, was the image of the person around whom my entire life had revolved, the girl who, somehow or other, had represented all the sweetness and joy of life. In the weeks that had followed our last meeting, on the afternoon we went to the Tower, I had persuaded myself that the Diana I had adored no longer had substance, that she had, in effect, been permanently superseded by the brittle, stilted upstart of Emerald, someone who, against all probability, had modeled herself upon Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton and starved Diana of Sennacharib to death. Even the nervous creature that I had met an hour ago, outside Swan and Edgar’s, was not really Diana but simply E
merald reduced to size, Emerald scared and threatened into something almost pitiful by worry and tragedy. Now, however, when this disheveled creature had sunned itself a little in my clumsy attempts at reassurance, it seemed to take on the flesh and spirit of a girl who had once galloped shouting through the larches into Big Oak paddock, and in as short a space of time I was back again at starting point, having my arm twisted by Keeper Croker, running to meet her from Folly Wood, holding her close as the raindrops splashed down on the laurels through a short summer night.
“You mean come home for good, Di?”
“I’ll be twenty-one in June. I can go where I like, do what I like. For that matter, there’s no real problem now. Daddy is up to his neck in mysterious deals—I hardly ever see him—and after the inquest Mummy buzzed off to the Riviera and left here in a towering rage because I flatly refused to go. I’m glad now that I had that much guts.”
“Then who looks after you at home?” I asked, wondering again at the strange callousness of parents who could smother a child with material benefits and yet be so niggardly in accepting responsibilities one associates with parenthood. “You can’t mean that they stood aside during this business and let you battle it out on your own?”
“More or less—they got the best lawyers, of course, and Daddy paid the barman at the country club to say I had been wallowing in tomato juice,” she said lightly. It was clear that she did not resent this incredible disinterestedness on their part and was so accustomed to it that it did not even strike her as unusual.
“It’s something I just can’t understand,” I said, remembering anxious and carefully dressed parents in Whinmouth Court who invariably put in appearances when their sons or daughters were in trouble with the law.
“That’s reasonable,” she said, “for you’ve never really understood anything about our sort. You see, Jan, once you get caught up in big business, and the kind of life that goes with having a lot of money, you step right outside life as most people live it and sooner or later it warps you altogether. You don’t have the same set of values about anything at all. I noticed that with Mother. That motorcyclist was a bricklayer, and once she knew this, Mother’s sole reaction to the smashup was irritation arising out of unsavory publicity! Apart from that she didn’t turn a hair. Daddy was a bit more concerned but, as I said, he’s been terribly preoccupied with business lately and what happened to me was a sideline.”
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