We were silent for a moment while she gave me time to absorb the information.
“When was it, Di?” I asked. “Was it that last time, that time when we quarreled and I hit you in the cottage?”
“No. Jan, before that. It was the day we walked up the Teasel and suddenly got tired of arguing about what we were going to do with your newspaper shares, remember?”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Absolutely, but does it matter that much?”
Somehow it mattered tremendously. It seemed to be of enormous significance that the attractive child asleep under my greatcoat was a living manifestation of Diana, of me, and of Sennacharib. Sitting there, in that shabby, airless little room, with the human wreckage of Armageddon lapping up to the very door, it mattered more than anything that our love, and our need for one another, had combined with the sun and the wind and springtime of Sennacharib to create something tangible, something capable of inheriting the yearning we shared for those few square miles between the estuary of the Whin and the firs of Teasel Wood. For the cottage, where we had healed our quarrel by an act of love, was not Sennacharib. It lay beyond the wood and had never, in my mind’s eye, been included in the domain, but the hollow under Teasel Bank, the quiet place where we had lain in each other’s arms that sunny April afternoon, that was the very heart of Sennacharib! The conception of a child—our child—in such a place, gave a kind of symmetry to all that had happened between us since she had come riding down the larch wood to vanquish Keeper Croker with a glance. It made sense of so much that had seemed to me, in the years since she had gone, so empty, wasted and sterile.
“Was taking over Heronslea to do with us?” I asked her. “Is that what you meant when you said that running into me like this gave shape to that dream?”
“That’s exactly it,” she said, joyously, “and I don’t even have to explain it, do I? It’s as if everything that happened to you and me in Sennacharib was … well … a kind of prelude, but a prelude so complete in itself that what’s happened since doesn’t amount to a row of pins! This idea of mine means that the prelude hasn’t been wasted, that maybe we were meant to live it not for ourselves but for a whole tribe of children, a representative bunch, a kind of juvenile League of Nations if you like. You and I managed to squeeze every drop of delight out of growing up in Sennacharib and this way we’re passing it on as a sort of answer to all the horror that’s piling up everywhere right now. Ordinarily it might be years before kids get a chance to romp and ride and laugh in places like Folly Wood, and on heathery places like Foxhayes, but this idea of mine makes it possible for at least a few kids to have that chance before they grow up and things get out of control, the way they finally did with us.”
She paused, breathlessly, and I waited. “I suppose this all sounds a bit precious and fanciful, Jan, and I’ll agree that it’s madly uncharacteristic of me, but I’m not fooling about this! It’s the only really imaginative thing I’ve ever done and I want it to happen, I want terribly for it to happen!”
I was going to beg her to abandon her crazy notion of staying behind. I understood, suddenly, why she was making this additional gesture. All her life she had resisted regimentation, and to Diana the very word “Fascism” must have been like a whiff from a sewer. She had been devastated by her husband’s cynical espousal of the creed and in her own unpredictable way she was trying to atone for his degradation. In the years ahead many French people were to react in an identical way to their country’s collapse, and I could see now that Diana had absorbed a great deal that was Gallic in essence. I don’t say that I fully understood all this at the time, but I understand it now as clearly as though she had written it down and asked me to learn it by heart.
She looked at me anxiously. “You’re not going to try to force me to go, Jan?”
“No,” I said, gloomily, “nobody ever succeeded in forcing you to do anything that you didn’t care to do, Di!”
“Then we can say good-by in here,” she said.
I crossed to the rear window, where Sergeant Bowles’ round, anxious face peered up from the yard.
“They’re aboard,” he whispered, “and I’ve seen the mate—high tide is at two and the skipper has given us fifteen minutes dead! Can you make it?”
“Yes,” I told him, “I can make it! Take this other child down to the dinghy.”
Diana had already lifted Yvonne, still wrapped in my greatcoat, and was now standing at my elbow. I passed the child down to Bowles and told him to give me five minutes to burn papers.
“For God’s sake don’t hang about,” he said. “Never mind all that bloody office bumph, let Jerry have fun with it!”
He disappeared and I closed the shutter.
“Turn on the light, Jan, just for a moment, I must see you properly,” she whispered.
I switched on a low-powered bulb and Diana stood quite still, facing me, her eyes roving from dusty flying boots to the crown of my head.
“Darling Jan,” she said, softly, and then, with a smile and a swift toss of her head: “You see, there were plenty of Doones left over after all! The whole of Europe is crawling with them.”
It would have pleased me to have matched her panache but that would have been like playing horse holder to D’Artagnan. I could only take a long, long look at her, noting the strange and independent life of her chestnut curls under the kerchief, the luster of her skin and the wide, generous curves of her mouth. I held her in my gaze like that for about a minute. I memorized—as if I had need to memorize—everything about her, the strong grace of her neck, the swell of her breasts, the line of her thighs and the eternal promise of her eyes. Then I kissed her, not as a lover, but as a boy might kiss a mature woman who has been teasing him.
“Go now, Jan,” she whispered, pushing me from her.
I remember de Maupassant saying somewhere that a deep and lasting love strikes the heart like a thunderbolt and leaves it a source of aching ruin, but my love for Diana was never like that. It was a slow-burning fuse that spluttered on and on throughout every phase of my life, sometimes sparking and sometimes smoldering but always inextinguishable.
I turned quickly and climbed through that wretched little window for the third time that night, and as I went I made an Orpheus-like resolution not to tempt fate by looking back. I broke that resolution and my final glimpse of her was standing framed in the window, her back to the light. It was a somber, theatrical picture, something to carry away, like the glowing memory of a Goya portrait.
I went down the slipway to the waiting dinghy. The broad Gironde, silent under the stars, looked uncannily like the Whin tideway from the summit of Foxhayes.
“Where’s that damned woman?” demanded Bowles. “We can’t wait … we …”
“She’s not coming,” I told him, “so for God’s sake push off, push off!”
He gave me a quick, anxious glance. How was he to know that my life had been enriched by two loves, Sennacharib and Diana, or that one was the complement of the other?
I kept my promise and took Yvonne on the leading rein through the larch wood and across Big Oak paddock to Folly Wood. It was exciting to watch her big, solemn eyes study the parched countryside, comparing it, no doubt, to the green, flat country in which she had grown up. Later that same day, about an hour before sunset, I returned to the tower on foot and climbed the crumbling staircase to our room. Diana had once called it a “thought rendezvous” and I wondered now if its spell would work. It did, but not in the way I had hoped and expected. Standing against the window through which I had seen Diana come trotting out of the wood and across the paddock on Sioux, with Nellie on the leading rein as my first mount, I thought not so much of Diana but of the meaning of the struggle we were engaged upon. By this time even Shepherdshey had joined in, and at this very moment Nat the Sexton was leading his patrol of L.D.V.’s over Nun’s Head. They were armed with rook rifles and two small-bore shotguns with which they were ready, if necessary, to do battle with tank
s. I had only been on leave forty-eight hours but it was long enough to discover that Whinmouth and Shepherdshey were enjoying the war. No one could blame them for that. This was the first time anything like this had happened around here since Napoleon lay encamped at Boulogne, a hundred and thirty-five years ago. There were blackouts, London evacuees, bustling A.R.P. wardens and all the outward trappings of total war, but to any who had been involved in the rout of France it was all rather like a group of children playing cowboys and Indians. Up there in the tower I wondered how long this mood would last, how long Hitler would suffer it to last, and then I remembered my boast to Diana as we sat side by side on the running board of her crowded Renault outside Bordeaux.
Was it really possible that one day arrogant young Teutons would come jackbooting through the ferns and gorse of Sennacharib? Would high-explosives crash down on huddles of cottages like Shepherdshey? Would the road to Castle Ferry ever boil with panic-stricken women pushing handcarts piled with bedding? Somehow I couldn’t imagine such things, and as I rejected the prospect I was able, at least, to think objectively of Diana, lurking about the woods and fields of Anjou in the company of homeless desperadoes like her Spanish gardener, risking her life—for what? Because she believed in democracy so passionately that she was ready to die for it? Or because she would find in this kind of adventure yet another excuse for hanging on to her youth and fending off the maturity that she hated to contemplate? I asked myself the question and told myself the answer. Diana never had and never would care two straws for democracy, but here was the best chance anyone had ever had of thumbing one’s nose at strident autocracy. How long would the war last? How long would Diana last? How long would any of us last when Goering’s air fleets had finished pounding the ports and airfields and switched to the cities?
It was very still up there in the tower. The Foxhayes blackbirds had gone to bed and the light was fading over Nun’s Bay. There was no evening twinkle of lights from Shepherdshey or Whinmouth. People had had a long winter to perfect their blackouts.
Then the silence was broken by a pleasant sound that rose up from the central aisle of the larch plantation and carried right across Big Oak paddock to the edge of Folly Wood. It was the sound of the Spanish children laughing as they romped down the broad ride toward Heronslea, laughing perhaps at having evaded Drip’s curfew, for it was past nine o’clock and they should have been in bed.
I listened carefully but the sound was not repeated. That did not seem to matter, for it had been unmistakable. Children were laughing in Sennacharib, so maybe there was something in Diana’s crazy dream after all.
I went down the staircase to the wood. It was quite dark among the trees but I walked without stumbling. I did not need a light to find my way across Sennacharib.
The Unjust Skies
“ … Ah, when the ghost begins to quicken
Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken
By the injustice of the skies for punishment?”
W. B. Yeats
Reverie
THE ROOM was about ten feet by twelve, with height clearance at the end nearest the door and a single window set deeply into the gable recess. It was remote and airless, looking out over acres of rooftops, the kind of room that poets and artists starve in and threadbare young lawyers might have rented in the decade that saw the storming of the Bastille. I can’t swear to the nature of bygone tenants but the room was certainly there in the eighteenth century, for just along the street was the hotel at which Charlotte Corday stayed when she came to Paris to kill Marat and Danton’s home was barely five minutes’ walk away.
Not that I did any walking myself, if one excludes the steady crunch from the door to the point where I had to crouch almost double, but I did do a great deal of thinking. There was absolutely nothing else to do. One might have said that I was “in retreat,” like a visitor at a Trappist Monastery, and I took the opportunity to travel vast distances over devious routes, using years as mileposts. I was my own guide. I knew these routes better than anyone alive, including Diana.
It was difficult to pause every now and again during these random wanderings and reflect that Diana herself was not more than a couple of miles away at this very moment, that she was sleeping, eating and changing her clothes in one of the most luxuriously-appointed houses in the Bois de Boulogne district, in the company of her pale, enigmatic husband, Yves De Royden, the youth whom I had once met wearing pepper-and-salt knickerbockers at the entrance of the Marble Arch cinema, and who was now one of France’s wealthiest industrialists and a prop of the Vichy government. I had to keep reminding myself that the tail-end of my reflections was not the final sequence of a dream but was, in fact, as actual as my fifteen year emotional see-saw with Emerald Diana Gayelorde-Sutton, now Diana de Royden, the spoiled only child of the man who had thought of himself as Squire of Heronslea, in Devon, and had grown bigger and bigger and bigger on a diet of Trusts and Corporations until, like the frog in the fable, he blew up and killed himself. It was even more difficult to remember that I was here in Paris, poised to kidnap Yves de Royden, and that only a few days ago Diana and I had collaborated in the murder of the man whose identity I now used, whose papers were in my wallet and whose actual clothes I wore.
Perhaps this reluctance to explore the very recent past was defensive. Perhaps my mind shied away from the squalid little incident on the Riviera, not because I regretted my part in it but because I had been a shocked witness to Diana’s degradation at the hands of the man whose shattered body had been carted away in a trunk. Lying on my bed, waiting and waiting for the summons that would bring us together again, I preferred to bask in older sunlight, the warmer for being bottled like the memories of summers in our youth.
The sun seemed to shine more often then. It had been shining that October day, the afternoon of my fifteenth birthday, when I had first entered the lonely, purple-wooded estate that Diana and I (but no one else) came to know as “Sennacharib” because the blaze of gorse against the purple heather had recalled Byron’s poem beginning:
“The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold
And his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold…”
It was that same afternoon that I met Diana as she rode out of the woods to rescue me from the grip of one of her father’s keepers and afterwards we had gone back to Heronslea to tea and Drip, her timid governess who became my friend and champion, played “The Lass of Richmond Hill” and “Allan Water” on her musical box.
After that there had been nothing and no one in my life but Sennacharib and Diana. It became essential that I should possess both and to do so I set to work with a single mindedness very rare in a fifteen-year-old odd-job boy, who earned five shillings a week in his uncle’s broken-down second-hand furniture mart.
The really astonishing thing is I almost succeeded, would have succeeded had it not been for Diana herself. All the years of our adolescence we played hide-and-seek with her parents and evaded the course they had mapped for her, fashionable schools, trips abroad, presentation at Court, the social round, a suitable marriage. Once we ran away to Nun’s Island in the bay and lived castaways’ life for three days and when we were caught she was sent away to France and we did not meet again until a few days before her eighteenth birthday. I was a guest at that spectacular coming-of-age party, or rather a stowaway, smuggled into the house and later into her bed when all “the suitable young men” were driving off in their Austins and Lagondas. After that I was naïve enough to think of myself as her master but it was not so; she had only used me, as always, as the rope-ladder down the battlements, or the key to experience, or the banner of the undefeated. Her virginity had been reckoned in the casualty list.
The discoloration of the distemper on the walls of my hideout made curious patterns. Forests, moors, ruined castles and winding streams and here and there a grotesque caricature of a rustic face, like the face of my Uncle Reuben,
editor of the weekly newspaper that I later came to own.
For a few moments I dismissed Diana and thought of Whinmouth, its steep, cobbled streets and untidy quay, its half-urbanised countryfolk and the stippled sky patterns over the estuary. It was here, as editor of The Whinmouth & District Times, that I had waited for Diana’s return. Waited and waited, for more than two years. When she came I had had to fetch her and she was only the nervous ghost of the girl who had ridden with me into the wind across Foxhayes Common, or swum alongside me in Nun’s Cove, for she had become caught up with the Crazy Set in London and had killed a motor-cyclist and his pregnant wife in a car crash. To this day nobody but me knew that she had been the driver of the killer car. Everyone else blamed the dead drunk they had fished out from under her.
It had taken me a long time to vanquish the guilt that tormented her but in the end my obstinacy won another round and there was a brief interval when she was the real Diana again. It was during that time that Yvonne, our child, was conceived in Sennacharib but I seldom had any luck, not with Diana, not with anyone or anything that mattered. Within a few weeks her father’s fortune crashed and she and her mother were penniless. This should have strengthened my suit but the reverse was true. Diana slipped away again, and I began my long sulk in the cottage on Teasel Edge, to be rescued at last by Drip, her governess, and steered back to the broader current of life. Diana had opted for comfort and married Yves de Royden, the son of the French tyre magnate, and it was not until the exodus from France in 1940 that she sought me out once more and told me about Yvonne.
In the long summer evenings, when everyday noises in the street had been reduced to a murmur. I could hear the Nazi military traffic passing down the street. The drivers pushed their vehicles along with Teutonic arrogance, slamming the gears and snarling the horns. The cacophony reminded me of the wild panic at the Bordeaux ferry, where Diana caught up with me again and gave me our child and four other strays to convey to England on one of the last boats out of the Gironde.
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