Diana

by R. F Delderfield

  “I suppose you’re wondering what this is all about?” he said, after we had both taken a sip or two.

  “Not really,” I said, shortly. “I imagine that you want to talk about Diana.”

  He smiled, a very fleeting smile, the kind of grimace that fond mothers sometimes claim as a smile when their babies burp.

  “I know that you and Emerald have been close friends for a long time,” he said.

  “Since my fifteenth birthday,” I told him, “and now I’m getting on for twenty-two.”

  “That’s a long time to court a girl and an early age to begin!” he said, without taking his eyes off me, and without ceasing his rhythmic blink.

  I was mildly surprised by his use of the word “court”. It implied a certain regularity about an association that had always been clandestine, but before I could reply he suddenly stepped outside his board-room manner and became, if not affable, then at least heavily sincere in his approach. It was as though he had decided upon one approach but, after the preliminary exchanges, switched to another, suddenly making up his mind to project himself as a parent and not as a company director.

  “Look here, Leigh,” he said, lowering himself into his desk chair and placing his palms downwards on the red leather, so that his forearms formed a neat rectangle, “I don’t think I’m being quite fair to you. The onus of this discussion is on me, since I invited you here, and the fact is, I know a great deal more about you than you imagine. I knew a little about you a long time ago and when I heard you had whisked Emerald down here after that unpleasant business in town, I made it my business to find out a great deal more. Now I daresay that appears somewhat presumptuous to you, but my daughter ha—has money coming to her, and certain inquiries on my part were obligatory. Do you follow?”

  One thing puzzled me more than anything he had said. He was going to say “had money” and changed it, at the very last moment, to “has money.” It was the kind of slip that a man like him ought not to have made and because my wits were razor-sharp that morning it told me more than it need have done.

  “I’ve always known your daughter as Diana,” I said, with the air of a man clearing the ground, “so can’t we call her that for today? I can never think of her as Emerald.”

  “Very well,” he said, gravely, “let it be Diana if you wish. I had a talk with her the night she came up to town and your name came into that talk. You won’t mind my being frank?”

  “Not in the least,” I told him, folding my arms and looking, I hope, a good deal more self-assured than I felt.

  “Right!” he said. “I take it you are genuinely attached to my daughter?”

  That was something I could bite upon and I did, without the slightest hesitation.

  “I’m a good more than that, Mr. Sutton. I’m in love with her and it’s only fair to tell you that I’m going to do my damnedest to marry her. I don’t know how or when, but nothing you or her mother can do or say will make any difference to my trying!”

  It was a deliberately provocative statement on my part and I made it in the hope that it would galvanize him into terminating the interview. The situation was beginning to irritate me, partly because his board-room cat-and-mouse act was an affront to my pride but more, I think, because it somehow cheapened my estimate of Diana. All the years I had known her we had never found it necessary to spar as this flabby, blinking man and I were sparring now. If we had anything to say we had said it and if we hadn’t, then we respected one another’s privacy in a way that this man could never begin to understand.

  My words, however, had an extraordinary effect upon him. He neither recoiled, nor flushed, nor displayed any reaction at all but sat perfectly still, blinking at an accelerated rate, so that I soon began to feel like a man who has pressed the trigger of a large blunderbuss and produced nothing noisier than a half-audible pop. Then, as I floundered about in this anti-climax, I was slowly conscious of his curious change of manner and expression. Quietly and smoothly his whole body relaxed, as though the frame of ice that had kept him so rigid had suddenly melted, leaving him free to stretch himself, uncurl his long fingers and flex his knees; but the strangest thing about this almost physical thaw was that it somehow reduced his stature and made him look as helpless and as pitiful as when he was astride the big gray at the Boxing Day hunt. His face crumpled and his pursy little mouth twitched, as though he was on the point of tears. He realized this and it shamed him. He got up and turned first one way and then another, like a man suddenly awakened in a railway compartment and told he has slept past his station. Then he saw the glass of brandy on his desk and he snatched it up and drained it, slamming it down with such violence that I was surprised the vessel survived the shock. The brandy helped him to collect himself but he said nothing during the moment that it took him to come out from behind the desk and cross to the tall window, where he remained standing with his back to me.

  “I’m glad you told me that,” he said, quietly, “it helps a great deal. You see, my boy”—he suddenly swung around and faced me—“I’m going away quite soon … a long way off, I’m afraid, and I shall be gone some time, some considerable time, do you understand? I asked you here because … well, because I wished to satisfy myself on certain things regarding my daughter.”

  He broke off but continued to look down at me. I sat twiddling the stem of my empty glass.

  “Here—have another drink!”

  I handed him the glass and he almost filled it. This time his aim with the siphon was totally inaccurate and I suddenly realized that he was a dreadful bundle of nerves. The board-room techniques that had sustained him throughout our opening gambits had now disappeared and he was quite lost without them, so much so that I began to feel slightly sorry for him. For the first time he looked as though he might be Diana’s father, but the kinship was limited. He was as remote as ever from the Diana of Sennacharib but within hailing distance of the frightened girl I had watched scanning the crowds outside Swan and Edgar’s a few months ago.

  “I believe your name is John, isn’t it?” he asked, after another brief silence, but before I could reply added: “Do you mind if I call you John … or Jan, is it?”

  “John!” I said, hating the idea of his using Diana’s pet name, and longing for him to return to his board-room seat and drop his clumsy skittishness.

  “Well, John,” he said, “as I told you, I made certain inquiries, and I discovered two things—two things that led up to this talk we’re having. One was the fact that you actually work for a living and the other is that you must think a great deal of Diana, or you would have sold out long ago.”

  “Just where does that get us, Mr. Sutton?” I asked him, but he had a much thicker skin than I supposed and clung desperately to his embarrassing affability.

  “I’ll tell you my boy, I’ll tell you!” he squeaked. “You came up here on the defensive, didn’t you? You imagined that I was going to make the same kind of scene about your association with my daughter as my wife once made in your newspaper office some years ago? Well, I’m not. Not at all! … As a matter of fact, I … I’m in favor of it. I’ve no objections at all and as far as I’m concerned you can marry my Emerald tomorrow, if she’s agreeable. Now what do you say to that, eh?”

  I had nothing at all to say to it. Once I would have been immensely flattered by this astonishing declaration but in those days I was far less certain of Diana and was also young enough to be taken in by an animated adding machine like Gayelorde-Sutton. Today, as a man full-grown, I was so incredulous and suspicious that I sat grasping his enormous brandy and glowered at him. There was something grotesque about his eagerness to put himself on the right side of me, and I found it impossible to accept anything he said at face value. His tongue seemed to be working independently of his brain, as though his head and mouth were master and apprentice, with the latter having been sent out by the former to try his luck at bamboozling the public. All the time he babbled on I could see the instructor squatting like Fagin behind
the furiously blinking eyes and watching his bungling little Oliver make a fool of himself. Taken all around, it was a very unsavory experience, rather like a prolonged interview with an excited idiot.

  “I was very glad when you persuaded her to come down here for a spell,” he went on. “Those people up there are no good to her, you know, and she’s such a madcap that she’ll probably get into worse trouble if she goes back among them. Now a nice, steady, pleasant young fellow like you … I daresay that’s what she really needs, all she needs maybe, and if I was in your shoes, do you know what I’d do?”

  “What?” I said, flatly.

  “Why, I’d marry her and keep her down here! I’d give her some work to do, a family to look after … nothing really wrong with her that a decent home and roots wouldn’t cure … .”

  He said a great deal more in the same vein, but I recall very little of it, because I was no longer listening. What appalled me, I think, was not so much his arch line of patter—that might well have been borrowed from a second-feature film on the father-daughter relationship—but his complete and utter ignorance of Diana as a human being. He was as dismally miscast in this role of encouraging parent as it was possible to be, but with every word he uttered he convinced me that if indeed he and Diana had discussed our prospects, then neither of them had said anything worth saying. In other words, he was lying outrageously, but why? Uncle Reuben had discovered more about Diana after a glance at the single letter I had shown him than this man had discovered during a period of more than twenty years under the same roof. Where had he been all the time she had been growing up? What did he know about her that he could not have learned from reading newspaper reports on the antics of the Set, or a glance at one of her school reports?

  Then, as I climbed slowly out of my disgust, and tried to peer at his hidden purpose objectively, I saw that there was something quite terrifying behind his blather, something so strange and unnatural that it almost stank. What this something was, and what made it so frighteningly evident to me, I had not the least idea, but it was there all right and it made me shiver, not only for myself but for Diana and everything surrounding her. I felt I wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake it out of him, like money from his trouser pockets. I wanted to thrust my face within an inch of his and shout: “Stop it, you old fool! Stop it, for Christ’s sake! What’s happened to you? Why are you suddenly handing me Diana as though you couldn’t wait to get rid of her?”

  Then he was handing me a blank sheet of notepaper, with an embossed heading printed on it.

  “I said I was going away,” he ended at last, “and that’s the address of my solicitors … good firm … sound people … go to them if you want to, but not until Emerald is of age, understand? We don’t want her mother making more difficulties, do we, eh?”

  “Where is her mother now?” I managed to ask, folding the paper mechanically, and stowing it away in my pocket.

  “France,” he said, offhandedly, “South of France. Spends most of her time there nowadays.”

  “You said you had a talk with Diana the night before last,” I asked him, in a final attempt to extract a grain of realism from this senseless interview. “Did she give you to understand that we were eng—”

  I never finished the question, for at that moment his desk phone rang and he snatched up the receiver like a greedy child grabbing a lollipop.

  “Yes?” he snapped, and instantly his features took on the board-room mask of impassivity that they had worn when he ushered me into the room. All the eagerness and excitement ebbed from him, like air from a balloon. He even began to hold himself stiffly again, nodding and blinking an accompaniment to the insistent rasp of his caller’s voice.

  “Right!” he said at last, and then, still into the phone, “Excuse me a moment, I have someone here.”

  He put down the receiver and turned to me.

  “I’m afraid that’s all for the present,” he said, distantly. “This is one of those timed, transatlantic calls and it happens to be rather important. Thank you for coming. I’ll see you to your car.”

  I think this bland dismissal surprised me more than anything else that had taken place, but I was so grateful for the interruption that I made no protest and let him lead me into the hall and out onto the porch.

  “Are you down for any length of time, Mr. Sutton?” I asked, for even then I found it impossible to believe that he could leave matters between us to remain as they were and would be obliged to ask me to call again after I had discussed this extraordinary interview with Diana.

  “I can’t really say,” he said, vaguely, “but you’ll be seeing my daughter again very shortly, I imagine.”

  “Before the weekend,” I told him, “but …”

  “Please excuse me now,” he said, “that call … I’ve so much to do, so much to see to!” and he was gone, leaving the door ajar and myself standing openmouthed on the top step.

  I did not return to the office but drove up over Foxhayes, to the highest part of the moor. Here I parked and tried to empty my mind of everything but four distinct puzzles that presented themselves as a direct result of the interview. There was a great deal I failed to understand, but to explore the subject as a whole would, I knew, result in lunatic confusion, so I deliberately separated the particular from the mass, and examined the most obvious puzzles one by one.

  First, what had prompted Diana’s father to send for me at all? Second, having sent for me, why had his initial reception been so formal and distant? Third, why had my frankness regarding the relationship between Diana and myself produced such a startling change in his manner? Finally, after having almost begged me to elope with his daughter, why did his interest evaporate at the sound of a telephone bell?

  I looked at it carefully, point by point. He had sent for me, no doubt, in obedience to a demand on the part of Diana expressed during their talk the night she arrived in town, and this talk had a strong bearing on puzzle number three—his almost indecent eagerness to accept me as a son-in-law. It now seemed fairly clear that Diana had not only nagged him but threatened him, with what I could not even guess, for I knew absolutely nothing of the relationship of father and daughter. His stiffness on my arrival at Heronslea might have a simple explanation. He was obviously a very shy man, constitutionally ill-equipped to make headway with any conversation outside the realm of business, but his abrupt switch from embarrassing amiability to downright rudeness was not so easy to explain. It was possible, of course, that the call represented the gaining or losing of thousands of pounds, and that the caller had jolted him back to the principal interest of his life, but this hardly explained the way in which he had rushed me out of the house and skipped back to the study without even pausing to shut the door. If the call had been of an excessively private nature he would surely have made certain that I was clear of the premises before he returned to the phone.

  I teased myself with these speculations until late afternoon and I gave some thought to other aspects of the conversation, notably his slip of the tongue when he mentioned Diana’s monetary prospects. This, in some ways, was the biggest mystery of all, for while I found it difficult to doubt the sincerity of his wishes regarding our marriage, it seemed odd that he had already made up his mind to disinherit Diana if she did what he appeared to want her to do. Had man and wife disagreed on this matter? Was the phone call an unexpected call from Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton, thus presenting him with the opportunity to win her over or justify his sponsorship? Did Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton know anything at all of what was going on? Was the slip about the money not a slip at all but an assumed one, intended to let me know that if I married Diana after her twenty-first birthday we could expect nothing in the way of a settlement? Did he still think of me as a person on the lookout for a substantial dowry? Was he such a poor judge of character that he failed to understand that I hated the very idea of marrying Diana without separating her, once and for all, from her family background? God knows, I had endeavored to make this much c
lear to him, but had he lived and worked among moneyed folk for so long that he could imagine no other spur toward marriage?

  Finally I gave it all up and drove slowly back to town. There was plenty of work to be done, an inquest and two weddings to be written up, proofs to be read, the layout to be sketched in, and I was hard at it, trying to make up for lost time, when the phone rang and I was relieved to hear Diana’s voice on the line.

  She was calling from London to warn me that it was unlikely that she could return until Monday. In the meantime, she wanted me to do something on her behalf, something rather urgent. I was so eager to tell her about the interview that I interrupted her before she had said more than a few words. The telephone was not the best medium for such an involved story, but I was so certain that she would want to hear every word that I began to gabble into the receiver at top speed. I was halfway through before I sensed that she was not nearly as surprised or as interested as I had anticipated. I broke off and said:

  “Are you listening? Don’t you want to hear all about it?”

  “Of course I do, and of course I’m listening. Go on.”

  I was by no means reassured. She still sounded bored and impatient, but I finished the story and breathlessly awaited her comments.

  All she said was: “I see! Poor Jan! It must have been dreadful for you!” Then, completely dismissing her father, she began: “Now listen carefully to what I want you to do …”

  I was so dismayed by her lack of response that I did listen, but with growing bewilderment.

  “First thing tomorrow I want you to drive up to Foxhayes Hollow, and give a verbal message to Harrington,” she said, as if she had been a schoolmistress issuing orders for homework. “I want you to tell him to go down to the Gilroy Estate office, ask for the agent and get the papers from the Heronslea file. Tell him it’s all satisfactory this end but Harrington is to take the papers home and read them, and have them ready for me when I come. Did you get that?”

  “I’m a journalist,” I said, grimly. “I’m accustomed to taking phone messages.”