She kept her promise and told me that same night.
After an explosion of tenderness Diana always slept but I never did, or seldom so. A man is reluctant to close the lid of the coffer that contains proofs of his personal triumphs and nothing I ever achieved came within hailing distance of winning Diana, or having her asleep in my arms under Sennacharib stars. It was immature I suppose, this conscious gloating at my time of life, but I made no apologies to myself for it, then or later. Diana never ceased to be the Arthurian damsel snatched from the tower or the girl of all the cheap popular melodies of the ’twenties. We get older and greyer but we don’t change that much, not in essentials.
She lay with her head on my shoulder, breathing deeply and quietly and her hair alongside my cheek stirred to the rhythm of her breathing, bestowing the lightest of kisses. I thought of the verse in Genesis that had puzzled me as a boy; “… and Adam knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Abel” and felt I understood it so well now, that old, Biblical verb “knew.” I knew Diana as I had never learned to know her in previous encounters scattered thinly across the years and remembered with a tinge of guilt that sprang perhaps from Puritan ancestry, and all the sermons I had sat through in Uncle Reuben’s Gothic tabernacle down on Whinmouth quay. After all, they had not been so frequent, these encounters and none so rewarding as now. Fear had gone from them and impatience, so had urgency and the goad of tomorrow. The war was still on and I was pledged to engage in it, but war was a global concern. My war was won and the spoils were under my hand.
I lay there with a shaft of moonlight cutting across the foot of the bed, half-listening to the night sounds of Sennacharib, noises that were so much a part of the place that they might have been scripted into the pages of a play or film, the south-west wind soughing through the trees, an owl hooting, the far-off murmur of the rising sea under Nun’s Head. I thought of the first time we had lain thus after she had smuggled me into her room and all her coming-of-age guests had driven off, flushed with liquor and bawling their good-nights. It seemed so improbable and so long ago that it might have happened to two other lovers in another century. I thought of the next occasion when we had consummated what she had called “a marriage in Sennacharib” in the glen beside the Teasel and created our child, Yvonne, to inherit the woods and moors and sky that had been our inspiration. Then I remembered the third time, when Diana’s contempt for the dream had enraged me and I had struck her and after that, the curious release she had sought in me from the fear of Rance at the villa. Not one of these experiences had been a genuine act of love for each had its source in emotions alien to the need we had one for the other. In all of them there had been abstract factors, curiosity, a search for reassurance, a conquest of fear or self-disgust but tonight all these things had been absent from our union and it seemed to me that, no matter what happened in the future, these particular spectres would never bother us again. It might not have been so had we married in some other place. As it was, we had arrived together and now there was a shape to it all, a shape and a sense of purpose. We had found the speck of light at the end of the cave and the shadows had achieved substance that could be touched, even as I could touch Diana now and listen to her steady breathing and feel the kiss of her hair on my cheek.
I passed my hand down over her head and across her bare shoulder to her ribs and she drew a long breath and stirred, catching my hand, lifting it to her breast and holding it there. She said, briskly considering she had been sound asleep a second before:
“I didn’t tell you, Jan! About this morning. I promised, didn’t I?”
“Forget it, who cares?”
“I care! It’s important in a way. I hadn’t forgotten, I was waiting for the right moment and this is it, Jan!”
“Very well, then what?”
“You were right, I was praying. ‘Supplicating’ I suppose you’d call it Not just for us though, for a son. Several sons!”
I was mildly amused at her gravity and by the issue she seemed to want to make of what I now regarded as a piece of exhibitionism, a little play each of us acts for ourselves, openly as children but secretly as adults.
“He’s on the way,” I said, feeling sleepy now but my reluctance to discuss the matter made her impatient and she gave me a little shake.
“Listen Jan! Don’t go to sleep! You could have slept while I was asleep. Why didn’t you?”
“I was thinking how adorable you are and how possessive!”
This mollified her somewhat and she chuckled. Nobody was ever more serious than was Diana about love-making when actually engaged upon it yet nobody found it more amusing in retrospect. It was a kind of reflex. She not only laughed at her lover’s enthusiasm, but at her own.
“The first time I ever went down to the beach at that time of day was before I met you,” she said. “It was the summer before I met you and I was nearly fourteen. I had religion. Quite badly!”
“You never had religion and you certainly never had it badly!” I said.
“Oh, but I did! How could you know? You hadn’t set eyes on me! We had only just arrived at Heronslea but before that I’d been confirmed at St. John the Evangelist, in Palmerston Square and I was chock full of sin!”
“You still are,” I said, but I was attentive now. I always enjoyed Diana’s confessions. They had a kind of off-beat primness that perched on her like a saucy jackdaw on the shoulder of a bishop officiating who was at a royal wedding.
“At first it wasn’t anything special,” she went on. “All girls that age go through it and dream of taking the veil. I don’t suppose boys do, they don’t appear to at all events. Well, because Daddy had so much money and because Mummy used it so vulgarly this hit me quite hard. I suppose I found difficulty in fitting it in with the poor inheriting the Kingdom of God or the rich threading the eye of the needle!”
It made sense. Diana had always been ashamed of her mother’s ostentation and I imagine that, at the age of fourteen, it must have been painful to live it down in a community as forthright as ours.
“I did all the usual things about it,” she continued. “I prayed and prayed and asked God to make us poor and I even talked to the local rector about it—you remember—that dreadful little man who took snuff and toadied to Daddy when he moved in as Squire. He did his best to make me feel comfortable again, told me it was a trust and that I must learn to use it for the benefit of the less fortunate! Even at this distance that seems outrageous hypocrisy on his part. I can understand him better now, however, he was an absolute pig for port!”
“Never mind the rector, tell me about your conversion to paganism!”
“Well, it happened that very morning, the morning I was down there by myself. You’ve read Pilgrim’s Progress and you remember when Christian got to the top of the Hill of Difficulty and his bundle of sins went rolling down, giving him wonderful freedom of movement? It was exactly like that! Bunyan knew his stuff. I went down there very early to the exact spot where you saw me yesterday and it just happened. I saw the sun come up over Nun’s Island and spread across the bay, and it was all so big and wide and wonderful that the kind of religion I’d been practising up to that moment seemed a shrivelled little thing, like a … like an old peapod on top of a dustbin! I thought ‘They’ve been having me on! It isn’t like that at all, it hasn’t anything whatever to do with Churches, or your Uncle Reuben’s Chapel where they whine about the blood of the Lamb, and the Holy Spirit, and repentance and renunciation and fornication and God knows what else! This is it,’ I thought, ‘this is really it! The sun and the patterns on the sand, the smell of the wet weed and the swoop of gulls, the scent of the gorse and the song in the larches, the shepherd’s crook curve on the top of the tallest foxglove and the kind of curtsey that cow-parsley makes when its lace is weighted with summer dust!’
“I tore off all my clothes and said my new prayers there on the tideline and one of the things I prayed for was someone to share it with, someone who would listen and understand!
I suppose I was so damned lonely, Jan, until you came and after that you were caught up in it, in a sense you were it, and as I matured the sensuality of Sennacherib seemed to centre on you, so that I shook at the knees every time you touched my hand, or said anything that I could construe into the discovery that you wanted me as a woman and a mate! You could have had all of me before I was fifteen but it took me a long time to realise that men don’t develop at anything like the speed of women or that men like you idealise women and sometimes frustrate them to the point of eruption! I learned to control myself of course. You would have scared off if I hadn’t but it wasn’t until that time we were on the island alone that I learned how to come to terms with your male gentleness and even be grateful for it! Anyway, I’ve rather wandered from the point, what I really wanted to tell you was that this sense of being at one with the Seasons, and with everything that grows and dies and is born again in Sennacharib, stayed with me and is still with me. Looking back on everything that has happened, this is the only really consistent thing in my life and it’s locked up in you and only you! That was why, on the day we were to be married it seemed essential that I should acknowledge it and put into words the primaeval need of every woman, to bear male children for the man who is the focal point of her existence. I was doing just that when you saw me! I was admitting that my happiness depended upon that and begging the life-force in Sennacharib to make me fruitful at once and often! Is it so fanciful, Jan? Is it?”
It wasn’t in the least fanciful, not from her and certainly not expressed as she had expressed it. It made so many things clear that had never been more than half-clear in the past. It tied up so many loose ends and closed so many uncalculated columns, even underlining the answers and turning the page. It accounted for some of the things that had shocked and puzzled me, for her unpredictability, her eternal restlessness, her sudden, impulsive demands to be taken by force, to be used roughly and masterfully and then flattered and coaxed and spoiled! How could I have understood all this as a boy growing up in a small, remote community, with nothing but a few books and my instincts to guide me? How could I have been anything but troubled and frightened by the pressure of her child’s body to mine when I parted from her after our stolen hours and secret meetings? And afterwards, when she was so wayward and elusive, when she had disappeared from Sennacharib for months and sometimes years on end? Did she do that because I failed to soar with her but had remained boorish and churlish, rejecting what she offered because the offer was premature, or because the time was inopportune, or because measured alongside her, I was poor of spirit?
I didn’t know the answer to this and I made no attempt to seek it. I was too busy rejoicing that she had made it her business to tell me these things here and now, and that she had had the sensitivity to hold them back for the right time and place. I said: “It’s not in the least fanciful, Di darling. It might sound so to others but it doesn’t to me. I understand every word of it. I’ve been damned arrogant all the way, imagining even you could never feel as I did about this place. I realised that you could hear the theme but I thought you missed the grace notes. It’s very obvious that you didn’t and I’m sorry I was heavy-footed and smug. I’ll make up for it, you can depend on that!”
She threw both arms around me and held me so closely that I could feel the beat of her heart.
“You were never heavy-footed, Jan, never! If it hadn’t been for you that feeling I had down there on the beach that morning would have never taken root, it would have blown away on the first new excitement, a pony, a holiday abroad, a flirtation at a party!”
“Is having another child all that important to you, Di? We’ve got Yvonne!”
“Yvonne is me. I want to reproduce you, Jan! That’s more important than anything, apart from being a good wife to you!”
I could understand this, or partially so, but it wasn’t all that important to me, not really, not if I was completely honest with myself. My imagination had never carried me beyond Diana to the contemplation of Diana’s children. I loved Yvonne, but Yvonne was a by-blow and I remembered how incredulous I had been when Diana told me that she was our child and had laughed at my amazement. We might have more children or we might not, it was something I was happy to leave to chance.
“Why is it so important Di?”
“Two reasons and I don’t know which comes first. I know which ought to but I’d have to think about it.”
“What reasons Di?”
“I’ve got a good deal out of life, Jan, but so far I’ve put precious little into it. Up to now you’ve always been the giver and I want to change that, I’m determined to change, and it isn’t just a first-night resolution, believe me. I’ve wanted to’ do it ever since I ran away and married Yves. Making you a good wife, and giving you children, seems to me about the sanest way of making up lost ground.”
“But why does it have to be a boy?”
“That’s the other reason—continuity! It’s the pattern and the rhythm. I know why you always felt like you do about Sennacharib. It isn’t just me, you know, it isn’t just because we met and fell in love here or because all your happiest hours were spent here. It’s deeper than that, deeper than you know! What have I to do with this place really? My family came here a few years ago to play at being Squires. We bought our standing-room for hard cash, but your people didn’t, they earned it! There were Leighs working Foxhayes Farm centuries back and some of the dirt on their horny hands was passed on to you. You would have belonged here in spite of me, I only helped to glamorise it when you were an impressionable boy. I want to contribute to that continuity; to me Sennacherib is just you. It’s a lot more than me to you, that’s why it has to be a boy! It’s the difference between owning a place and being a weekly tenant!”
I lay there listening to her and wondering if there was anything in what she said, whether in fact my love for the place was an ancestral memory, or whether it was a byproduct of the woman who lay beside me; I wondered whether the sense of belonging that I had experienced walking my first mile up the Teasel Valley, would have taken root had it not been nurtured by the girl who rode out of the woods on a pony and gave vitality and purpose to a boy’s dream. I didn’t know and couldn’t tell and musing on it I fell asleep.
When I awoke it was full day and the sun was streaming through the open window and making the dust motes dance. Outside in the thickets the blackbirds and finches were chattering like an impatient audience and inside, both hands tugging at her hair, was Diana. Not Emerald Diana Gayelorde-Sutton. No longer Madame de Royden. Plain Diana Leigh, wife of John Leigh, of Teasel Cottage, Shepherdshey, in Devon. I crunched this knowledge like candy, then I stretched and called:
“Di! Mrs. Leigh! Wife!”
She stopped combing and turned her head, looking over her shoulder so that her lovely hair slipped forward and swung into the sunlight, catching great greedy handfuls of its radiance and playing with it like a miser toying with gold. She put down the comb and crossed to me, kneeling beside the bed, placing her hands alongside my cheeks and bending her head so that her curls shut out the light. Then, very gently, she began to rock as though I was the child she wanted so much.
Chapter Ten
A MAN remembers exciting times, the good and the bad. He remembers most of the high tides of his life but only occasionally do they coincide with those of the community in which he lives. It was this way with me. Some of the stones that marked the miles for me did the same for the Allies in their struggle with Hitler but not many, and none at all in the months that followed our home-making on the slope overlooking Heronslea Woods.
They were placid months, despite the war and my trivial part in it. The calendar was marked not by the advances and retreats on the Heronslea war map maintained by Drip but by a succession of leaves and departures, by the march of the seasons across the bracken and gorse thickets and the slow change of the beeches from bright green to crimson and then to gold and finally to dulled bronze.
I managed to
get down there pretty frequently in those days, for they were very tolerant with me at Command H.Q. They seemed to think that I had earned a break approximating to that given to bomber crews after a tour of operations. My duties at Command H.Q. were not exacting, for the most part I interrogated returning crews and helped with the business of sorting and interpreting photographs and general information relating to Western France. I was shameless in wangling forty-eight hour passes and two or three times, when there was work about, Diana travelled to the market town close by and put up at “The Mitre”, the haunt of boisterous young bomber-crews living on wallop, nerves and borrowed time.
One of the most satisfactory developments at this period in my life was the steady improvement in the relationship between Diana and Yvonne. It was not spectacular but it was obvious, even if one made no special effort to look for it. They were never like mother and daughter but they soon found a mutually satisfactory compromise, that of a couple of sisters with a wide gap in their ages, one tolerant and inventive, the other, thrustful and dominant, the way a certain terrier behaves when it finds itself in the company of a bigger dog who is willing to engage in a rewarding frolic. It seemed to suit them very well and I encouraged it.
Meanwhile, the war rolled on, hopefully but with little indication as to when it was likely to end. Italy dropped out and Russia began its counter-attacks. Lancasters and Halifaxes pounded German cities to rubble and there was endless speculation about the date of the Second Front. More and more Americans began to appear and the daylight bombing offensive began. Losses were formidable and the “We can take it” mood of the earlier part of the war was replaced by a collective yawn on the part of the British public. People in trains spoke less of pincer-movements and more of petrol shortages or the unpleasantness of the local black-out warden. Then, in the first week of May, 1944, the chopper came down.
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