Diana

by R. F Delderfield

  She made a convincing story of it and for a moment or so she almost fooled me. Then the months and years I had wasted thinking about her paid off, and I knew she was only weaving in and out of an elaborate smokescreen. There was no point in letting her do it indefinitely, so I called her bluff.

  “It’s personal, isn’t it, Di? One hundred per cent personal!”

  She looked at me like a child caught in the act of spending her Sunday collection penny. For a moment I was quite sure that she was going to laugh, as she always had laughed when I walked away from one of her firework displays. But she didn’t laugh. She looked straight at me for a few seconds, her expression so deflated and hopeless that she seemed almost plain and middle-aged. Her eyes were bleak and dull and the curious brickish colour returned to her cheeks. Then, without a word, she slipped the catch of the door and heaved herself out of the jeep. Turning her back on me she began to walk swiftly across the waste patch towards the road.

  I was after her in a second. I couldn’t bear her to go like this, without a word about our child or Sennacharib, without the remotest prospect of ever seeing one another again, to slouch off like a tired, defeated saleswoman who had had a door slammed in her face. I knew that I was throwing in the sponge again. Nothing she had said had shaken my belief that she was on a hopeless tack and that I had, or could ever have, any place in her work outside her imagination. Nevertheless I ran after her, calling. The past was too strong and its road too brutal.

  I caught her up on the lip of the plateau where the silver birches began and the path met the road.

  “Does it mean as much as that, Di? Does it?”

  She stopped and faced me. If she had ever been honest with me for a single moment of time over the years I believe it was then.

  She said: “It was my only chance, Jan. My very last chance, but you were right, it is purely personal.”

  She began walking again and it was not another bluff, she had made her decision, but I caught her arm.

  “Listen, Di, why can’t you pack it in and go back to Heronslea? Old Drip would look after you and damn it, there’s Yvonne, you owe her something! You’d be happy there, I know you would and anything that needs healing would get healed. The bloody war can’t go on for ever. There must be an end to it sometime and maybe we could begin again down there. It isn’t impossible, is it?”

  She continued walking, shaking herself free. “It was impossible for you, wasn’t it? And I know it would be for me! There’s a rule about these things, Jan. ‘Take what you want and pay for it.’ I took what I wanted when I panicked and ran off that time, and it still has to be paid for somehow, sometime. I’m tired of living in debt! I want to pay up or finish!”

  She had lifted the curtain slightly, not much perhaps, but enough to afford me a glimpse of the crowding forces that had compelled her to make this journey and do her utmost to involve me in her atonement. She wanted very badly to fight her way out but she needed me on hand when she did it. If we were together there was a chance, a very slim chance, and I think this flash of understanding gave me the final push.

  “Okay, Di,” I said, breathlessly, “okay, I’ll do it! I’m not much good on my own either!”

  She stopped and faced me, regarding me intently as though trying to make up her mind how much my decision was due to weakness and how much to conviction. Then she nodded and walked slightly ahead of me back to the jeep. For the first time I got a really good look at her. She was breathing hard and I was almost sure that she was pregnant.

  Chapter Three

  DIANA AND her associates were hostlers. I don’t know who was backing them at De Gaulle’s headquarters, but whoever it was he must have had direct access to people who counted. It was early February when I surrendered to her. By the sixteenth of the month I was cleared at Free French H.Q. and three days later I began my course.

  It was a very strenuous course and the demands were far more than physical but I was grateful for it. I went to bed exhausted in mind and body and there was little opportunity to brood on past or future. By mid-April I had passed out, having learned all they had time to teach me about the use of explosives, how to use a portable radio transmitter and how to hit somebody with a revolver. I had also learned bow to kill a man with my hands without making more than the minimum amount of noise, and how to make some kind of show at parrying awkward questions about my papers and identity. It was all imparted with laconic objectivity, as though my instructors shared my own doubts regarding my ultimate usefulness. There were times when I almost made up my mind to call their bluff and drop the pretence that I was likely to be of service to them. Then the memory of Diana’s face as she jumped out of the jeep would return and I would call a truce with myself and let things take their course. I had a curious feeling of helplessness about events, as though I was standing off and watching an old friend make a fool of himself and was unable to decide if and at what point I should intervene. It was as though I engaged in some kind of game played at a distance with Diana, not the Diana who had come to me in the little church within half an hour of Alison’s funeral but the Diana of Sennacharib and Heronslea far back in the past. It was loyalty to those days that kept me at work going through the motions of training as a cloak-and-dagger man. It was a very odd sensation, this fourth dimensional feeling, but it was also a spiritual sedative. I wondered if it would disappear when they asked me to plunge head-first into the desperate business or whether it would be replaced by terror, the nightmarish terror of facing responsibilities I was incapable of shouldering. In the meantime, however, I cannot say that I experienced physical fear, only this curious, half-dreamy sense of detachment at finding myself plucked from the current of the old, boring war and groomed for entry into a very different kind of conflict.

  After an initial briefing I was given a week’s leave and went down to Heronslea, in Devon. I had been home several times in the days since Dunkirk but this time it was different because I knew I might be seeing it for the last time and my reunion with Diana had reinvested it all with something of its former enchantment, a quality that it had lost the day she abdicated from Sennacharib.

  It was the best time of year to return. After I had dropped in to see my Uncle Luke and Aunt Thirza at the Quayside Furniture Mart, and watched the same fishermen lounging on the same bollards alongside a harbour cluttered with beach obstacles dating from the invasion scare of 1940, I went up the hill and along the chalk road that skirts the edge of Foxhayes and took the high-banked lane to Folly Wood and Big Oak Paddock above Heronslea. Diana was with me all the way. I saw her among the primroses that hung in great clusters along the banks, and in Folly Wood, and beside the early bluebells round the foot of the old tower that had been our rendezvous. I scrambled up the steps and entered the crumbling, mould-smelling room at the summit, the place where I had given her a copy of Lorna Doone for a fifteenth birthday gift and received her first, impulsive kiss. I came down and crossed Big Oak Paddock to the wood, looking about for the two buzzards who were symbols of our association but they were not to be seen, they seldom were unless we were together. Then, at length, I dropped down the central ride towards the big house, passing the glade where she had ridden out from the young trees to rescue me from Keeper Croker’s half-nelson. This was the beating heart of Sennacharib, this was the spot where it had begun all those years ago. It was what happened here, in this clearing, that had set my feet upon the least rewarding of all quests, the pursuit of lost youth, and this struck me so forcibly that I paused, as though half-decided to turn my back on it all, to grow up, to try a new side of the hill. It was no use, the pull of Sennacharib was too strong and I went on down the ride and came at last to Heronslea.

  “Drip”, Diana’s old governess, greeted me with tears in her poppy blue eyes and was obliged to wipe her gold-rimmed spectacles before she could embrace me wholeheartedly. She was the only person on earth who knew the real story of Diana and myself for she had been present at the very beginning of it, the afternoon
of the October miracles. I wished heartily that I could confide in her and seek, if not her advice then at least her solace, but that was not possible. I was a very amateur secret agent but I was not so amateur as to realise that the word “security” was rather more than an excuse for bullshine to men like Raoul de Royden. I listened to Drip’s prattle about the hopelessly rapid growth of the evacuee home at Heronslea and all the problems attendant upon tending two score children of mixed nationalities in a remote corner of the country and when she had talked herself out I told her that I was posted overseas. I said nothing at all about my meeting with Diana.

  “Do you know where you’ll be going or shouldn’t I ask?” she said tremulously, for she loved me more than anyone on earth.

  “You shouldn’t ask,” I told her, smiling, “but it’s probably just Canada, for air-crew training!”

  “Oh,” she said, brightening at once, “that isn’t so bad, is it?” then, tentatively: “I … I don’t suppose you’ve had any word from Diana?”

  “No,” I lied, “have you?” There was a remote possibility that Diana had communicated with her in some way. There had been one letter, early in the war, through the Swiss Red Cross organisation.

  “No,” said Drip, sniffing, “nothing more, but I wonder and wonder, sometimes half the night long. I suppose you do, don’t you, Jan?”

  “Not so much as I did,” I said, “I never knew anyone more able to take care of herself than Diana.”

  “That’s true,” she said, cheering up again. Drip was probably the most gullible soul ever to attain the age of eighty. Suddenly she got up and pointed: “Look, there’s Yvonne! Doesn’t she remind you of Diana on a horse?”

  I looked through the tall morning-room windows to the small paddock. A dark, intent-looking child was walking a barrel-bellied pony alongside the palings and she was deep in conversation with a rangy boy of about ten. The boy had a curiously sturdy walk and carried himself like a proud peasant.

  “Who is that boy?” I asked Drip, and she reminded me that he was Manuel, the son of Diana’s Spanish gardener and eldest of the five children I had brought home from Bordeaux in 1940. “He’s very devoted to Yvonne,” Drip said, “she’s a kind of queen here and he’s her Prime Minister!”

  “Poor little devil,” I said, remembering so much.

  I realised that I must do something about Yvonne and do it without awakening Drip’s suspicions. She knew that Yvonne was our child, of course, but Yvonne—if she thought about it at all—must still think of herself as the daughter of Diana and Yves de Royden. It seemed to me quite wrong to go away without telling her the truth, so I said: “How much does she remember about France and Diana?”

  “Not very much, she isn’t an introspective child. I can’t recall her ever having referred to her supposed father, or to her early childhood in France, but she still thinks Diana is fighting Germans, like the Spanish boy’s father.”

  “She ought to know about Diana and me,” I said. “Suppose the pair of us bought it?”

  “ ‘Bought it’?” said Drip, looking very puzzled. The poor old soul wasn’t at all familiar with wartime slang.

  “Look, Miss Rodgers,” I went on, “nobody knows what might happen to me or to Diana. I’m not out looking for medals but hundreds of chaps get killed training and Diana might die a natural death before the war’s over. Suppose we both died? The kid’s financial future is okay, I imagine, Diana’s funds in London will take care of that but I’m damned if I’d want her to go on thinking she had a Quisling for a father. I think I’ll talk to her tonight.”

  It was obvious that the prospect shocked Drip. She belonged to an age of uniformed governesses and afternoon calls, of tea under the chestnuts and family prayers in the breakfast room.

  “Surely she isn’t old enough to understand …?” she protested.

  “I’ll have to do the best I can,” I said, “I know I’m right about this and I know that Diana would agree with me.”

  “Very well, Jan,” she said, meekly, “you do what you think is right and when you go you’ll write, won’t you, you’ll write whenever you can?”

  “Whenever I can,” I compromised, “but sometimes it isn’t easy from overseas, sometimes mail is forbidden. What time does Yvonne go to bed?”

  “When it’s getting dark,” she said, “I can never get her in until then. She’s even more self-willed than Diana was and sometimes we have quite a scene over it. I do wish she’d set a better example to the others.”

  “You and I were always wishing people would set examples,” I said, “and it never got either of us anywhere, did it?”

  I went into Yvonne’s room at dusk. She had a room to herself in the east wing, where Drip’s old quarters had been when she was resident governess at Heronslea. The old mansion was impossibly large but even so it was getting overcrowded. The staff and children numbered over thirty and I used a camp-bed in one of the lumber rooms. Drip had told Yvonne I was calling on her and she was sitting up in bed awaiting me. So far our relationship had been easy without being intimate. I think she regarded me as a kind of uniformed Uncle, who popped up from time to time with packets of Naafi chocolate in his haversack. I don’t think I was very important to her at that time and I know she didn’t think much about me when I was away.

  I sat down on the end of her bed and studied her. Temperamentally she favoured Diana but physically she was four-fifths Leigh, with my countryman’s build, dark hair and gipsyish complexion. She was a very assured child but there was laughter behind her eyes and a kind of quiet ruthlessness that was another of her mother’s legacies.

  I came straight to the point, she was the sort of child likely to appreciate this.

  “What do you remember about living in France, Yvonne?”

  She looked surprised and then composed herself conventionally, clasping her hands behind her dark head and looking up at the arched ceiling.

  “Funny things that don’t go together!” she said. “A lake near a castle, a castle like this!” She sprang up suddenly and flicked through a book of nursery rhymes until she came to a page illustrating a conical-towered chateau, the kind of tower the Lady of Shalott lived in on the island in the river.

  “Yes? What else? What about the lake?”

  “Mummy used to take me there to see irises. Huge irises they were, much bigger than ours here and a different colour. Yellow, I think! She used to sit there and tell me about England and Heronslea. She must have told me a lot because when I came here I knew it, you know … I could sort of find my way about! Sometimes it seems I dreamed everywhere else. Mummy liked living here didn’t she?”

  “Yes, she did, very much,” I said, “we had a wonderful time about here when we were young.”

  I groped for something to focus her attention and remembered the pony she had been riding earlier in the evening. “She taught me to ride on a pony like yours. The first time I fell off and cut myself. Drip had to bandage me up.”

  “Did you live here too, Jan?” she asked, and I could see that she was now genuinely interested.

  “No,” I said, “I lived in Whinmouth and I wasn’t really allowed up here, but we didn’t take much notice of that! Mummy and I spent all our holidays here and even when she was away at school I used to come here a lot. Drip was the governess and she was always on my side. You see, Yvonne, Mummy was very rich and I was very poor.”

  “Are you still poor, Jan?”

  “About the same, but it doesn’t matter so much now as there’s a war on and money doesn’t count all that much. Winning the war is all that matters, beating Hitler!”

  This held her interest but it did not seem to be getting me much farther so I plunged.

  “Mummy and I were very much in love with one another, right from the first time we met! We were going to get married.”

  “What stopped you? The war?” Her logic disconcerted me. She had exceptional reasoning powers for a child of eight but although her remark offered me a way out I was reluctant to us
e it.

  “Not exactly,” I said, “Mummy went off to France and married somebody else and I didn’t see her for a long time, not until that time she brought you and the gardener’s children to me and I took you back to England on the boat.”

  “What on earth made her go to France and marry somebody else?” she demanded, almost indignantly, I thought, and somehow her indignation brought her closer.

  I didn’t know the complete answer to this and doubted if I would ever know it, so I said:

  “People in love don’t always know their own minds, Yvonne, they do silly things on the spur of the moment. This was one of them I suppose. But the point is, people who love one another sometimes have children. You know about that, I suppose?”

  She looked at me sharply and I saw that her mouth was quivering with laughter.

  “You needn’t fuss, Jan,” she said, “I know how babies come, we’ve got cows and pigs and all sorts here and Old Mac’ let us see one of the cows calve. Then Drip told us but said we mustn’t talk about it, and was jolly angry with Mac’ but we do—talk about it, I mean!”

  I was grateful for the cows and for Old Mac’s indifference but still I had not arrived.

  “People aren’t exactly like cows, Yvonne,” I said, “but they sometimes have babies without being married. Your Mummy and I aren’t married, not yet that is, but we had you and you belong to me and her.”

  I expected almost any reaction but the one I got. She nodded slowly, not surprised, or pleased, or even puzzled but somehow sympathetic.

  “Like Alice,” she said, resignedly.

  “Who the hell is Alice?” I exclaimed. I felt like a drill instructor who had just watched a first-day recruit strip a Bren gun in record time.

  “She was a maid here,” said Yvonne, calmly, “and she got fat and had a baby. She wasn’t married either but Rachel, the other maid, said she ought to have been. To a sailor,’ she added as a kind of postscript and while I still gaped: “Drip was awfully mad about her, too. She won’t let her come back now that the baby’s being minded!”