Diana

by R. F Delderfield

  I have never witnessed such a scene of chaos. The French, ordinarily a brave, philosophical people, had completely succumbed to the virus of panic and defeatism. They fought one another for places in the vehicle queue that led down to the berth of my Dutch steamer. Some of them wanted to go to Britain and picketed my office, shouting and gesticulating, each urging his or her claim to be saved from the Boche. Others were not interested in being evacuated but were trying to reach Bordeaux and join up with relatives from whom they had been separated on the trek west. It was useless to try to organize the fugitives and their vehicles. Car and truck drivers persisted in edging out of line and creating vast jams, and every now and again a fight started with other drivers and gendarmes who tried to stop them. Pedestrians clambered over the line of interlocked transport in the hope of bypassing my office and reaching the ship’s gangplanks. The scene reminded me of Ségur’s description of the passage of the Beresina during the retreat from Moscow.

  Toward sundown, I locked myself in and did business through the window and I was here, praying for darkness to descend on the lunatic confusion, when my sergeant found me, fighting his way through the crowd and approaching near enough to shout a message to me.

  “There’s a Judy back up the road who says she knows you,” he bawled. “She’s stuck there, with a tribe of kids, about a dozen of them. She sent a note … catch! Did you ever see such a bloody shambles?” Then, having thrown his note, he disappeared, clawed down by two men who held him and screamed into his ears.

  The message, a crumpled ball of paper, sailed through the window and fell beside my desk. I retrieved it without much interest, smoothing it out among the litter of papers. Then I nearly hit the ceiling. The note, scribbled in pencil, was in Diana’s handwriting.

  It said:

  Heard you were here, Jan—come and get me again! Be gallant, like Mr. Ridd!

  Love,

  DIANA

  Just that; just as if we had lost one another in a Cup Final crowd!

  I sat on, facing the hideous turmoil immediately under the window, indifferent to the grinding crashes of colliding vehicles and the shrill fury and despair of their drivers.

  So much had happened during the last few weeks that no thought of Diana had entered my head. I had not even remembered that she was resident in France and had a French husband, for at last, at long last, the affairs of Europe had lapped over Sennacharib and were submerging it like a drowned civilization. Now Diana’s note acted like an underwater beam, probing through the deluge and revealing a well-remembered contour. Looking down at her scrawl, as the last rays of the sun slanted across the road, I saw another stream, the tiny Teasel, chattering over its stones to Shepherdshey Bridge and its outfall at Nun’s Bay. I saw the looming shape of Teasel Wood high above the left bank and the two vain buzzards, soaring and drifting above the larches of the plantation. It was all as vivid as a film flashed on a cinema screen. I had not set eyes on Diana or her handwriting for four years, yet a few words, scrawled on a crumpled piece of paper, had that much power to move me.

  The moment it was dark I escaped from the ferry office via a rear window and crossed the fields, joining the stationary queue about half a mile inland. I went slowly down the line, shining my flashlight into the interiors of trucks and cars. Forlorn voices called to me but I ignored them. I was interested in only one refugee and at last I found her, on the grass verge beside a road junction where the road ran between high, sloping vineyards.

  She greeted me gaily. We might have met after parting at the foot of Shepherdshey Hill the previous evening. Her car, a large Renault, seemed to be packed with sleeping children and there was a mountain of baggage tied to the roof with fencing wire. She saw me just before I spotted her and called out, so that I flashed my powerful flashlight in her face. She was much thinner than I remembered, and a long, gray dust cloak gave her unexpected height. Her hair was clamped under a colored handkerchief, tied tightly beneath her chin. Her voice had an unfamiliar timbre,acquired through speaking so little English during the past few years.

  “Well, Jan!” she laughed. “Lady-in-distress, as usual! You really ought to have ridden up on a big gray and then we might have done an Uncle Tom Cobleigh into Blaye.The numbers would have been right—I’ve got five more in there for Widdkombe Fair!”

  Her gay courage impressed me so much that I forgot to be amazed by the wild improbability of our encounter. In any case, she answered my question before I could frame it:

  “It isn’t exactly coincidence, Jan,” she said. “I put a call through to British H.Q. and then the Bordeaux consul.The Bordeaux Johnny said a certain Lieutenant Leigh was the Big Cheese at the quayside, so I said ‘ I. Leigh?’ and he said ‘Yes’ and I said ‘A husky great chap, with shoulders so wide?’ and he said ‘How did you know?’ and I said ‘We’re buddies!’ and that was that!”

  She had me laughing again, just as if there had never been a market crash, a suicide, an atrocious personal betrayal and, to end it all, a bloody great war. She was irrepressible, unique, the final, final word in cool cheek and inspired selfishness! No one but Emerald Diana Gayelorde-Sutton would push blithely through the swirl of foundering nations in order to put through the two long-distance telephone calls about shipping space for herself and five children, and no one but Emerald Diana Gayelorde-Sutton would have received anything but a howl of indignation from the other end of the wire! Even my own presence in that place and at that time did not strike her as incredibly providential but merely a kind of jolly surprise, like the acquisition of an unclaimed seat at a popular first night.

  “Diana,” I said, at length, “you’re not only priceless, you’re also the slightest bit tiddly!”

  “Yes I am,” she admitted, “but I wasn’t greedy, I saved a noggin for you—and you look as if you could do with one, poor dear!”

  She rummaged in the glove compartment of the car and handed me a half-empty bottle of cognac. I took a long, grateful swig. It was excellent brandy and helped me to match her mood.

  “How did you really trace me? There must have been more to it than a couple of phone calls.”

  I sat down on the broad running board of the car and she seated herself beside me.

  “Yes, there was,” she said. “I saw this coming months ago so I wrote to Drip to make … well … certain arrangements. She gave me your Paris address and I called there, soon after you’d gone. The conversation I had with the Bordeaux consul was true. I gave you a build-up there!”

  “In the meantime what the devil has happened to your husband?” I asked. “Is he boxed up in the Maginot Line, or somewhere?”

  “Yves?” She laughed, unpleasantly I thought. “No, dear, he and his papa have gone over to the Opposition.”

  “Joined Jerry? The Nazis?”

  It was the first I had heard of active French collaborators and I was shocked.

  “Great possessions, Jan!” she said, shrugging. “They usually incline you to the winning side. After all, I ought to know, shouldn’t I?”

  It was neither the time nor the place to hold an inquest on her madcap marriage, so I ignored the opening and said, “Do they really think Jerry is going to win?”

  “Don’t you?” she said, quietly.

  Did I? It seemed to me that I had never had a chance to study the possibility. Up until April it had not been a real war at all and ever since I had been acting as a kind of whipper-in to a traveling lunatic asylum.

  “He won’t beat us, not in the long run!” I growled, and she laughed, more pleasantly this time, and squeezed my arm.

  “That’s the stuff!” she said. “Death to the Doones!”

  “By the way,” I went on, “why five children? You haven’t been that enterprising, have you?”

  “Only the youngest, Yvonne, is mine,” she said. “All the others belong to our Spanish gardener. His wife was killed in an air raid and as a militant anti-Fascist he’s already on the run. Shall I wake up the kids now?”

  “Yes, an
d you’ll have to ditch car and baggage,” I said. “We can make it over the fields, but for God’s sake keep them quiet or we shall have half the French nation behind us! Give the kids the old Whinmouth Carnival treatment.”

  She laughed again. “You remember that, Jan?”

  “I remember everything! Every damn thing that happened to you and me!” I said grimly.

  She opened a rear door and prodded the children. They emerged yawning onto the road. Her own girl, Yvonne, was a pretty little thing, with jet-black hair cut in a straight fringe and huge brown eyes that stared up at me with solemn intensity.

  “This is my Jan, Yvonne,” said Diana briskly. “You’ve heard all about Jan, haven’t you?”

  “Oui!” said the child, stifling a yawn and then, after subjecting me to another solemn stare: “Il est très gros, Mamma!”

  Diana chuckled. “Yes, I told you he was,” she said, lightly. Then, “Come on, you others—Philip, Manuel, girls—this English soldier is going to put you on a big boat and take you all across the sea!”

  The Spanish children formed a ragged line, Yvonne standing a little to one side, like a tiny N.C.O. on parade. Diana said something in Spanish to a child a year or so older than Yvonne and when the girl asked a question she replied rapidly in the same language.

  “She wants to know if she’s being taken to her father,” said Diana, “but I told her that her father has to stay and beat Franco first.”

  “Good God!” I exclaimed, for nothing would have surprised me overmuch that night. “Is he coming in against us?”

  “It’s the same war to her,” said Diana, simply.

  “Poor little devils,” I said, and the sight of the children, standing in pathetic, quasi-military formation as they knuckled the sleep from their eyes, reminded me sharply of all the misery and bewilderment I had witnessed during the last few days. Rage against the Germans rose in my throat like bile. I stooped and lifted the smallest of the Spaniards to my shoulder and Diana lifted Yvonne.

  “You others hold hands and Manuel is to keep hold of the back of the soldier’s coat,” she said. “Don’t chatter, any of you, and from now on do exactly as you’re told!”

  Reflecting that I would sooner have Diana than anyone else in the world to share this sort of adventure, I led the way off the road and over the shoulder of the vineyard. I walked slowly and carefully, keeping my torch to the ground. The little procession straggled along behind, Diana and Yvonne bringing up the rear, and in this way, without exchanging a word we reached the rear of the ferry headquarters.

  I left them all outside and climbed through the rear window, to find Sergeant Bowles sound asleep on the floor. He had shuttered the window that opened onto the slipway and everyone outside seemed to be asleep.

  “Christ! I was pretty sick when I got back and you weren’t here,” Bowles said, when I awakened him. “That bloody Dutchman is casting off first light and had the gangplanks removed. Orders came through on the phone an hour ago—we’ve got to go with them. He’s flying the Yank flag, so we stand an even chance against Stukas, but it looks as though we’ll ride home on the anchor chains!”

  “There are six more outside,” I told him, “and we have to get them aboard right now.”

  “It’s dicey,” he said. “They’re already five deep on deck and the crew have got rifles and orders to shoot last-minute gate-crashers.”

  “We’ve got to try,” I said. “They’ll have to come aboard with us.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said, “I’ve got an idea!”

  He was a useful sergeant, a thirty-year-old Terrier who had been a chemist’s assistant in Hereford less than a year ago. “We’d better use the dinghy and pretend we’re only crossing over. I put two of the gendarmes to guard it—it’s moored under the jetty.”

  “Okay—take four of the kids and then come back for me,” I said. “I’ve got stuff to burn and I’ll need half an hour or so.”

  We rejoined Diana and I explained what was going to happen. She passed on the instructions in Spanish and the children remained passive. They were adults in everything but size. Without a whimper they followed Sergeant Bowles down the slipway and I climbed back into the office.

  “Hand Yvonne through to me and then come in yourself,” I told Diana.

  She passed the child through and I noted that Yvonne was sound asleep. I laid her down very gently on an old leather sofa and covered her with my greatcoat. Then I helped Diana to climb through, shuttered the window and switched on the flashlight.

  “If we show much light we’ll have everybody clamoring at the window,” I explained. “Did you bring that brandy along?”

  She passed the bottle and I swallowed half the amount that remained.

  “Keep it,” she said “I can get plenty more, Jan.”

  “You won’t find every mod. con. on that Dutch tramp steamer,” I said, gruffly. “They’re standing on one another now!”

  “I’m not taking passage on your smelly old steamer,” she said.

  Overwork, lack of sleep and probably the emotional shock of meeting Diana again had combined to make me extremely irritable.

  “Now look here, Di!” I shouted. “Let’s not have any bloody heroics! This is everybody’s last chance and if you don’t believe me, take a peep outside.”

  “I never intended going, Jan,” she said, “so please don’t try to hector me! All I wanted from you was a chance to get the children away. I know what I’m going to do and my being here is part of the plan.”

  “You and your slaphappy plans!” I began, but she checked me by raising her hand.

  “Listen, Jan, it’s as I said, I’ve known this was coming all winter and that’s more than Winston Churchill can say. The minute you’ve sailed I start back to the Loire to meet Ramond.”

  “Who the blazes is Ramond?”

  “The father of those children, our gardener at Saumur.”

  “And what do you and Ramond intend doing? Fighting a civil war as a Lewis-gun team?”

  “Not yet,” she said, seriously, “but we probably shall as soon as the nights draw in, as they used to say back in Devon.” She leaned back in the chair and clasped her hands behind her head, regarding me with that judicious mixture of amusement and affection that I had once found beguiling but now made me feel like a frustrated father coping with a willful child.

  “Dear Jan,” she said, “you haven’t changed the tiniest bit! Still glum, truculent, explosive, but still utterly dependable! Just think,” she went on, “in less than a week you and Yvonne will be in Heronslea. Will you promise something? Will you sit her up on old Nellie, and take her on the leading rein up the main ride and across Big Oak paddock to Folly Wood? I should like to think of her doing that for the very first time, with you.”

  I suddenly felt desperate about her. No trace of rancor remained and the hard shell of indifference that I had grown, scale by scale, since the damp afternoon that Drip had forced her way into my life and talked some sense into me, now cracked and fell away, leaving all the scars she had caused, sensitive to her glance, her touch, and the sound of her voice.

  “Diana, you just aren’t equipped to play cloak-and-dagger games with those bastards, and you’ve got to come!” I pleaded. “There’ll be checkups, rationing, identity cards, God knows what kind of restrictions …”

  She cut in, quietly but very decisively. “Don’t be so insular, Jan. I’m French and I’ve lived over here a long time now. I know what’s going to happen far better than you British amateurs. It’s going to be tough but we’ve had plenty of time to arrange all this. We started getting an organization together months ago. That was why I took a duration lease on Heronslea.”

  She planned to surprise me and she certainly succeeded.

  “You what?” I shouted.

  “I did it through our old solicitors and it’s all organized and paid for, with my funds transferred to London last January. Drip will explain everything when you see her. She’s going to be in charge, you see.�
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  “In charge of what? Damn it, when I was on leave last December they were making Heronslea into a Polish hospital!”

  “That’s all canceled,” she said blandly. “It’s going to be a refugee children’s home and those Spanish kids and Yvonne will be among the first batch. As time goes on, I expect there’ll be lots of others, all kinds of kids, who’ll begin to turn up the minute they start bombing London.”

  “Are you operating through a government department?”

  “Oh no,” she said, “this is my own idea. It’s a kind of dream I had when the war started, but now it isn’t a dream any longer because meeting you has given it a kind of shape and solidity. You see, you’ve got a real stake in it now, because Yvonne is your child, Jan!”

  She took advantage of my stupefaction to lift the flashlight and direct the beam on the sofa, where Yvonne was still asleep under my greatcoat.

  “That child … you mean …?”

  She put down the flashlight and reached across the table for my hand. She was smiling but her expression was as gentle and serene as I ever recalled.

  “Didn’t it ever creep into that great wooden head of yours? Didn’t it ever occur to you as a remote possibility? No, of course it didn’t! I can see that now. Well, it’s true, for all that, and if you take a good look at her you’ll see it is. She’s got your jawline, your hair, your coloring, and a quite unmistakably Leigh gait. She’ll have your obstinacy too, so watch out, or you’ll have a problem on your hands!”

  “Are you sure—absolutely sure?”

  “Good Heavens, of course I am! I can count, can’t I?”

  “Does … does Yves know?” I managed to ask, after a long pause.

  She looked just as she used to look when she was on the point of revolting against one of her mother’s edicts. “He didn’t but he does now,” she said, grimly. “I wanted him to have something to think about when his Nazi friends began lecturing him on racial purity, selective breeding and all that claptrap!”