Diana

by R. F Delderfield

  I was, ravenously hungry and my mouth was parched with the back-kick of the pep pills. “I could eat anything, preferably hot,” I said, “but first, how did you know I was here? I’m damned sure I should have jumped up if anyone had opened the bedroom door.”

  “You left your grip in the kitchen,” she said lightly but managing to convey reproof. “Anyway, I was expecting you and I went outside and looked through the window. I could hear those snores through the glass. That’s a good reason why people should sleep together before they make up their minds to marry. You can get a divorce on those grounds in the States. Come into the kitchen unless you want a shower first.”

  “I’ll take a shower later,” I said and we crossed the hall into the spotless kitchen. I could smell coffee and it made my mouth water.

  What impressed me most I think was the ease with which we found the guidelines of our old relationship. There was no fumbling, no casting about for handholds and useful crevices. We arrived at the summit at once, as if there had never been that tense meeting after Alison’s funeral, as if we had come together again after a separation of about a fortnight and were attuned to one another like a man and woman approaching their silver wedding. It was a kind of miracle this fusing of our personalities, this renunciation of past and future. In the old days we had often been separated for long periods but when we met again it was never quite like this, not even during our happiest spells. Always there had been mutual shyness, a brief but painful waiting-for-the-train-to-start atmosphere and usually it was never dispelled until we had embraced. I sat at the little metal table and watched her pottering to and from the electric cooker in her feathery mules, trailing a yard or so of towelling and throwing the damp curls out of her eyes and it made me ache with joy to see her so engaged. I felt like a newly-wed husband who had returned home unexpectedly and demanded a scratch meal and I had to keep reminding myself that we were here on desperate business, a couple of amateurs pitting their wits against thousands of professionals. She poured the coffee and then came up with a vast plate of ham and eggs. It was the most heaped-up looking plate I had seen for nearly three years and I complimented her after the first few mouthfuls.

  “This is wonderful! I’ve never seen you cook anything before, Di.” She was pleased but made a show of concealing her pleasure.

  “Everyone cooks over here,” she said, “men, women and children. It’s only in Britain that women are the exclusive drudges.”

  While I was drinking my third cup of coffee she ran the bath. When she came back she had discarded the robe and wore an inadequate black brassiere, black lace panties and one stocking. She stood by the stove, tugging at her hair with a fancy-looking comb. I remembered then that Diana never seemed to want privacy for dressing or undressing. It was not that she was deliberately provocative, or liked to display herself, but she liked to dismiss modesty as a tiresome, old-fashioned notion. I looked at her objectively for a few moments and then my curiosity got the upper hand.

  “You were pregnant in February, Di. What happened?”

  She stopped combing and looked at me steadily for a moment.

  “We’ll talk about that later,” she said.

  “All right, Di,” I said, cheerfully, “but hadn’t we better talk about the job? No agent ever touched down with a sketchier brief than me and sooner or later somebody will have to tell me something. Or will they?”

  She thought hard for a moment, contracting her brows and making a slow circular movement on her chin with her index finger.

  “Raoul will be down presently and he’ll brief you before Rance arrives. But that shouldn’t be for at least forty-eight hours. I thought we might take a sort of holiday. We might never get another chance.” Then she looked at me less certainly. “It’s up to you of course. About the holiday, I mean.”

  “Is Rance the Svengali type you told me about? The one who works for the de Royden outfit?”

  Her expression changed. For a moment or so she looked hunted.

  “That’s him and that’s really why you’re here. It’s also why they told you to grow that ridiculous Van Dyke beard!”

  “I don’t get it,” I protested.

  “No,” she said, deliberately, “you won’t yet, but you will when Raoul and the others show up. The point I’m making is this, we’ll be up to our eyes in it within a day or two and maybe, if we’re lucky, it will be all over this next week. We can’t do a damned thing one way or the other until Raoul gets here, so why can’t we let it ride and enjoy ourselves? We can even go out in the car if we want to. The whole idea of your being here is that you should be seen. I’ve got all the props, clothes, papers, the lot.”

  “My props?”

  “That’s it. Well?”

  “I’m presumably under your orders or Raoul’s orders but it’s like I said, I don’t even know why or what in hell I’m supposed to do. If you know you might as well tell me. Do you know?”

  “Only the bare bones,” she said, reluctantly, “not the details.”

  “All right, then give me the bare bones and then we’ll talk about the holiday. First, however, for God’s sake, get something on! I’m human and I can’t be expected to concentrate with you standing there looking like a pin-up in ‘Men Only’!”

  She brightened at this, as if she had begun to suspect that I was unimpressed. She threw me a swift smile and drifted out into the hall, returning a moment later in a jazzy-looking kimono. It was a startling and voluminous garment but she left it flapping and sat down on the edge of the table, crossing her legs and lighting a cigarette. I wanted to laugh again. She was acting the conventional French tart in a second feature film and doing it rather well.

  “We’ve found out what Yves and his father are up to, more or less,” she said. “It’s the propelling unit of a missile, some kind of bomb that is supposed to home under its own steam. It’s one of the famous secret weapons but not quite so secret as it was when Raoul and I came over. Rance is their key man, that’s why he left the factory in the south and came to Paris. They’ve been working on it for more than a year.”

  I was not much impressed by this. Like most British servicemen, I had never taken Hitler’s secret weapons very seriously. We had heard so much about them ever since the first month of the war. There had been the magnetic mine, which was countered in a matter of days, and since then the Press were always running stories of new and devastating devices. The very fact that the newspapers could print such stories drew the sting from the menace, for nothing worth reading had appeared in the British press since September, 1939. Over there, security was a cult, like the blackout and digging for victory. Some of my scepticism must have revealed itself to Diana.

  “It’s more serious this time,” she said. “Raoul’s people have given it top priority. Nobody knows how far they’ve progressed with it and Yves’ unit is only concerned with our part of it, possibly the direction-finder, or more probably the propulsion, we don’t know yet. We’ve got a threefold job and I only know the first leg. That’s straightforward enough, the impersonation of Pierre Rance!”

  I noticed two things about the way she said this. One was that Rance’s Christian name was a slip of the tongue, and that she had not meant to use it, the other that the slip had embarrassed her. She recovered herself almost at once but not quickly enough to prevent her gaffe from registering. She made what was for her a singularly inept attempt to mask her confusion by slipping off the table and crossing over to the stove. Once there, she kept her back towards me and pretended to be busy with the coffee pot. I gave her a moment or two and then said:

  “You still haven’t told me where I come in, Di. You don’t have to and maybe you’d better stop there.”

  She thought about this for a moment and then turned, pressing her hands against the stove and looking at me very steadily.

  “I can tell you that, Jan,” she said, quietly, “there’s no point in your not knowing now. Your job is to double for Rance. That’s where the beard comes in. You�
��re very like him, extraordinarily like him! Not exactly a double but close to it, close enough to take a chance, at least, so I’ve always thought. It was my idea originally and in the end Raoul backed me up. You’re almost exactly his height and build and you’ve got his colouring and even … sometimes that is … his sixteenth year is way of holding himself!”

  I began to glimpse one or two outlines in the fog that had surrounded my part in this business from the beginning and in some ways I found them humiliating. Until then I had had no alternative but to assume that my presence here, and the fact that Raoul de Royden had taken the trouble to seek me out, had been based wholly upon a whim of Diana’s. If I hadn’t known her so well the premise would have been ridiculous. People like Raoul, and the men who screened volunteers at the Free French Headquarters in London, did not engage recruits at the behest of a woman but Diana was not simply a woman, or even a tested ally. She was the wife of a very prominent collaborator and the mere fact that she was not in an internment camp argued that Yves must stand very high with Vichy and the Nazis. I had assumed that she had struck some kind of bargain with them and that I was involved in that bargain. I knew, none better, how ruthless she could be at getting her own way and if there was a person capable of going to any lengths to exploit her usefulness that person was Diana. Yet it seemed to me that Raoul had engaged upon the business of enlisting me half-heartedly, that he did not believe me capable of serving his cause effectively. If I really was this man’s double then he must have considered the project seriously and must, moreover, have convinced a number of shrewd and suspicious men that such a possibility did in fact exist outside the realms of Diana’s imagination. This led me directly to Diana’s slip when she had used Rance’s Christian name, Pierre, so that I was not at all surprised by her next remark.

  “I was Pierre Rance’s mistress, Jan. I suppose I still am, or he imagines that I am. It was his child I was having.”

  The lost, pitiful look that I remembered seeing when we had talked in the jeep returned and it had the strangest effect upon her because, although the fear remained in her eyes, it somehow communicated itself to the corners of the mouth and caused the skin on her cheeks to flush that curiously mottled colour I had noticed on the previous occasion. For a moment or so she looked almost raddled. Then, with a conscious effort, she regained control and health seemed to flood back into her face. She straightened up and the fear and uncertainty in her eyes was extinguished by a flicker of challenge, half defiant, half appealing. That was the wonderful thing about Diana. She never went under for long, she never ceased to fight back.

  “We don’t have to go on with this, Jan,” she said.

  “We do,” I said stupidly, “we’re committed, aren’t we?”

  She made a gesture of impatience.

  “I don’t mean the job! … I mean us! All sorts of things will become clear if we don’t force it, if we don’t hold one of your famous inquests. I think that was half the trouble with us. You always wanted an inquest, you would never do what I did for so long, let everything go down with the sun and start fresh in the early morning. Will you do that now, Jan? Will you? Until Raoul gets here?”

  It was not an appeal but a supplication. I saw her mouth quivering and suddenly all the realities of the situation slid away like a cliff erosion. Suddenly there was no betrayal, no lost years, no Yves, no Rance and no war. The only thing that had the least significance was her little girl’s mouth, her anxious eyes and the mass of tumbling hair that seemed to rally to her appeal. I pushed back the chair and crossed to her, throwing up her chin and grasping a handful of her hair and twisting it until it spilled out between my fingers. I knew then how fatuously I had lied to myself about her, how many futile years I had spent creating an image of her that was totally false. There was really nothing spiritual about my yearning for her, not since the day we first met and I was a boy just entering his sixteenth year. I cared nothing at all for her faults or qualities as a person, for her gallantry, her crude selfishness and her hopeless and baffling unpredictability. All I wanted from her was what any man wants from a woman whose entry into a room in which he is standing causes his pulse to quicken and his mouth to dry. I wanted her naked on a bed, her mouth to mine and her breast under my hand. I wanted to give and receive, over and over again. Everything else was deception.

  I think she must have realised this simultaneously for in that first, frenzied embrace it seemed to me that our youth reflowered. We might have sat in conclave for a month, solemnly retracing old routes, scratching among the errors and omissions of the years without learning a fraction of what was revealed to us in that moment. She was right, of course, right about the inquests. They had always been too many and too searching and what sterile verdicts had they produced? Bitterness and resentment turned sour in the heart and futility. It was like digging holes to house the rubbish taken from other holes.

  I lifted her and was surprised to find how little she weighed. I looked down at her for a moment, choked with tenderness, and her heavy chestnut curls, worn even longer than when she was a girl, swung down below my knees. I walked with her into the bedroom and kicked the door open and shut. She opened her eyes as it banged and there was triumph in them, relief also, a world of gratitude and relief. I knew then that I had found a way out of the cul-de-sac and that the Odyssey I had thought over and done with years ago was scarcely half completed. I knew also that whatever happened here, and however closely and dangerously we became involved with people like Yves and Raoul and Rance, we would achieve something and achieve in partnership.

  It was still dark when I awoke. Through the gap where the curtains should have met I could see one or two stars and a few lights down near the harbour. After a moment or so I knew that Diana was awake too and touched her cheek. I smiled when I thought of us lying here in Rance’s four-poster, and how we had not even paused to lock the outside door, or pull the curtains properly, or take out the guns and place them within reach. It was a droll way of fighting a war, far removed my conception of marching under the Resistance banner but the reflection made no difference and sounded no alarms. My brain still had a cramped corner for the war but my body, relaxed and drowsy, had renounced it altogether. Presently it occurred to me that at least I should lift her arm from my chest and get up and lock the back door but when the thought caused me to stir slightly, her hair fell across my cheek and again I lay perfectly still. She said:

  “I can talk now, Jan. Here, while it’s still dark. I used to hate waking in the dark, but not any more. Do you want to go to sleep again?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m too happy to sleep, Di, so talk if you want to.”

  “First about Pierre Rance,” she said.

  “No,” I said, “not about him. Damn the past. We’ve done with it at last!”

  “No, Jan, not now we’ve got this chance to start out again.”

  “Who was it put the ban on inquests?”

  “This isn’t an inquest, Jan, it’s a map. We need a map or we might get lost again.”

  “All right,” I said, for gratification had drowned me in tolerance, “tell me about this Rance!”

  “I never lost the physical image of you, Jan, and it’s important that you should believe that. Never for an hour, not after all that time. I did everything I could think of to lose it, drink, casual affairs and later on, living dangerously and trying to lose myself in the cause, you know, like a frustrated woman taking the veil! But it was pretty pointless, all of it, and sometimes at night I ached so that I’d get up and go looking for a man, any man! Whoring without a fee!”

  “Don’t, Di, let’s take it as read!”

  “No,” she said levelly, rising and turning on her elbow, “because it doesn’t hurt any more and I want you to understand. I want that more than anything! Then Raoul found me and took me on, so that for the first time in my life I felt vaguely useful to someone other than you and the ache ceased, not much but enough to make me hope. Up to then, I had been using the
Resistance like the bottle but under Raoul it did take on some kind of meaning and purpose. I thought I was getting somewhere but that spell only lasted about three months.”

  “Well?”

  “Then, out of the blue, Pierre appeared and because he seemed to me a kind of distorted double of you he pushed me under again. Right under! I went down deeper than ever and the wonder is that I didn’t kill myself. I can’t understand now why I didn’t because I had nothing to live for and if someone had told me this miracle could happen I wouldn’t have believed them.”

  “No two men are that alike, Di,” I said, “and you never have been that much of a fool. I don’t resent Rance, not in the way one might imagine I would, you obviously needed him, or someone like him and to feel jealous of him would be as stupid as you resenting Alison.”

  “He doesn’t seem much like you now, Jan, and I’m certain he won’t seem at all like you when he comes again but when Yves first introduced us I almost cried out. It was uncanny. I kept on wanting to call him ‘Jan’ and when he saw what was happening he jumped to the wrong conclusion and lost no time in following up. He’s a one hundred per cent bastard but he’s very bright, not just scientifically and where money-making is concerned but really bright and in some ways utterly original. I think he was rather flattered at first but later on, when he realised I wasn’t in love with him and was only substituting him for someone else, the sadist in him had a field day! I believe he knew I was flirting with the Resistance and he used this to improve his hold on me. It was about then that I conceived his child and the only trick I ever won against him was keeping it from him!”

  “How the hell did you manage that?” I asked, disturbed in spite of myself. Di wasn’t easily frightened and the fact that she was obviously terrified of this man made him that much more important.

  “I was lucky,” she said. “Before it became obvious he and Yves went off on the inspection tour of Germany and by the time he returned I had got rid of it. That wasn’t very difficult, Raoul arranged it all. As soon as he heard you had agreed to come he said this was essential but I should have done it anyway unless you had turned me down.”