Diana

by R. F Delderfield

  “Can he still be ridden?” she asked, “could Jan ride him if he kept to a walk?”

  “Good Lord, yes!” Yvonne told her, “Manny and I took him up the main ride on Sunday and he kept wanting to trot!”

  The information seemed to please her. “That’s wonderful!” she said, “he’s indestructible. Do you know how old he is, Jan?”

  I calculated back to the Boxing Day meet in 1927, when Sioux had been presented to her by her father. He was a two-year-old then, just broken and would now be rising twenty-one.

  “By God but he could skim along!” said Diana without wistfulness, “I was scared of riding him that day, do you remember Jan?”

  “You didn’t look it!” I said, wishing that Yvonne would either conceal her impatience or go away.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, Yvonne,” Diana said suddenly. “Go and catch him, saddle him up and Jan can take him as far as Big Oak tonight. You’d like that, Jan wouldn’t you? I’ve got a dressing between seven-thirty and eight!”

  I raised no objections. For some reason that I didn’t understand, she was anxious that I should ride Sioux again, so I told Yvonne to do what she asked and the child rushed away. I heard her shouting for Manuel as she ran down the stairs.

  “She absolutely loathes these duty visits!” said Diana, calmly.

  “I’ll have a word with her,” I suggested, but Diana shook her head vigorously.

  “For God’s sake, don’t, Jan! It’s right that she should feel this way about sick people! I don’t want a little Flo Nightingale mooning about the place. Yvonne’s attitude is healthy and normal, so don’t make her feel that she’s expected to waste hours practising small-talk at the bedside!” She smiled and took my hand again. “I know you don’t feel that way. Mind you, I should, if it was you lying here, but then, you’ve always been madly Holy-Graily haven’t you? You probably get a hell of a kick out of sick-visiting!”

  It was very encouraging to hear her talk this way again. We had not had a conversation like this since that final day on the islet. I noticed then that her cheeks had a bloom and that she had gone to a great deal of trouble with her make-up.

  “You look very pretty tonight, Di,” I said and to my delight she flushed and crushed my hand to her mouth. Her lips were warm and very soft. It was like being touched by a petal.

  “Kiss me Jan,” she said suddenly and then, raising her head, “kiss me properly!” and the moment I touched her lips her long, slender fingers slipped over my head and tugged playfully at the hair on the back of my neck. It was a favourite trick of hers and the gesture fanned the pitiful flame of hope into a glow.

  “Jan,” she said quietly, when I had settled myself against the bedhead and put her head on my breast, “how long have I got? Will you tell me your guess?”

  She spoke in a level tone, as a person might ask a casual question. Her words descended like an extinguisher.

  “Don’t say that, Di! It isn’t brave and noble, it’s just bloody stupid!”

  “Oh no it isn’t, Jan,” she replied, but just as quietly, “it isn’t stupid whatever else it is! I don’t know how much you know or suspect, I don’t know how much of the real truth they’ve told you or to what lengths you’re capable of deceiving yourself about me. You can think what you like but I’m the one who has the right to decide exactly how we face up to this thing and I’m damned if I want myself padded round with shock-absorbers. They may prevent bed-sores but I’m more interested in fresh air!”

  “I’ve talked to half-a-dozen doctors and specialists and not one of them said the same thing,” I told her, truthfully. “You can’t be better informed than any of them, so don’t let’s speculate until we have to!”

  “That isn’t strictly true anymore, Jan,” she said, “I wormed the truth out of Parker-Strachey the day before yesterday.” Parker-Strachey was the Scots surgeon who had performed her last operation, a taciturn, rather prickly celebrity with a European reputation and the kind of man impatient with everything outside his profession. I had not liked him much but that meant very little, I disliked them all.

  “What makes his opinion so special?” I demanded.

  “Oh I don’t know,” said Diana, glancing up with laughter in her eyes, “maybe it’s his objectivity. He’s more adult than the others so I took a chance on him.”

  “Well?”

  “I insisted on seeing him alone before I was discharged. At length I managed to persuade him that I was a big girl now and didn’t fall for the now-now-soon-be-better line of patter!”

  “What exactly did he say?”

  “He told me it wasn’t simply a question of spinal damage, they’d more or less coped with that, and that as the heart had held out all this time it probably wouldn’t kill me now. My real trouble is pernicious anaemia. He admitted that he was damned surprised I’d weathered the last op.! Would a man like Parker-Strachey tell a patient all that if it wasn’t true?”

  “He may think it’s true, it’s only his opinion!”

  “Dear God!” said Diana smiling, “how pig-headed can a man be? Of course it’s true and of course he’s right! It’s a matter of months or weeks, and that’s why we’ve got to stop playing ‘I-spy’ Jan. I’ll go along with all the others, with Drip and Yvonne and the nurses, but not with you! There’s too much at stake and too little time, don’t you see?”

  So it was here. The tiny flame had finally gone out and it was Diana who had extinguished it. I said, in a whisper:

  “If you’re so sure why do you ask me ‘how long’?”

  “I wanted to know if you knew as much as me and now I’m satisfied that you didn’t! It was a loaded question, Jan, right in the ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ category!”

  What astonished me was not her fearlessness—I would have expected that for she had always had three times as much guts as anyone else—it was the consistency of her character. Her approach to dying was a kind of bridge linking the laughing girl of twenty years ago to the mature woman whose objectivity could so easily be mistaken for bravado but was really something much more fundamental and admirable. I thought awhile, then I said:

  “We’ve come through a good deal together, Di, and maybe we can get through this. I don’t give a damn what Parker-Strachey says, he doesn’t know you as I do. To him you’re just another patient and these chaps are wrong as often as they’re right. You can’t expect me to sit here and accept that kind of verdict. If you want to act as though it was final then go ahead—make what dispositions you like and I’ll listen and carry them out for you, but I’m incapable of resignation as far as you are concerned and all I promise to do is to humour you until you’ve talked yourself out! Is it the estate or money? Is that what you mean when you talk about time?”

  “No,” she said, “mostly I lie here and worry about you, Jan! You’re my biggest headache! You always have been, you know!”

  Although she smiled she wasn’t joking and I knew exactly what she meant. To her, ours had always been a very lopsided relationship and even before she married Yves she never mastered her guilt-complex about me. It kept cropping up in letters and conversations. She had a conviction that somehow, by falling in love with her as a boy, I had missed my way and that she had wasted my life or destroyed its potential usefulness. In a very limited sense this was true. I had never succeeded in outgrowing my boyhood emotions and had directed every ounce of my nervous energy into winning her, but as she reminded me of this I remembered Drip’s declaration, the one the old governess had made when she found me living as a recluse on Teasel Edge shortly before the war. Drip had said: ‘All that you are you owe to Diana! … Diana taught you to live, to look for adventure, even such things as how to buy clothes and how to cure your accent! She taught you your table manners if the truth’s known …’ The memory of this was sufficiently clear for me to be able to quote aloud exactly what Drip had said on that occasion. Diana listened, gravely.

  “Well, I suppose there’s something in it,” she admitted, “but
for all that I always longed for a chance to justify myself, really justify myself! Now I won’t have that chance and it’s the one thing I can’t bear! Even if I lived to a ripe old age I could never be a wife to you. We’ve had two years it’s true but more than half of that had been something and nothing. That isn’t much return on an eighteen year investment, is it?”

  Was it? If, with foreknowledge, I could have put back the clock to October, 1927, to the exact moment before I had met Diana Gayelorde-Sutton as she rode out of the woods to rescue me from Keeper Croker, would I knowingly have chosen a path that lead away from Sennacharib and down the road to a come-day-go-day existence as a Whinmouth worthy? It wasn’t an easy question to answer. It might have been, if we had come through unscathed but it wasn’t now.

  She knew very well what I was thinking and the fact that I hesitated must have caused her some distress for I saw her teeth bite into her lower lip and she seemed to be pondering deeply. Finally she said:

  “Very well, Jan, we won’t have a show-down, not yet! Go for your ride but come in before you go to bed and tell me how old Sioux stood up to your weight. Oh, one thing I forgot, Parker-Strachey will be here tomorrow and maybe you’ll want a pow-wow. Will you see him alone or shall we make it a threesome?”

  I couldn’t take any more just then so I kissed her swiftly and left without answering. I went out into the yard to find Yvonne waiting with Sioux. She was right about the animal’s agelessness. As I climbed into the saddle he tried to buck me off and Yvonne, watching, squealed with delight. I turned his head into the rear drive and crossed the small paddock to the larch coverts. The sun was setting over the estuary and the sky about Nun’s Head was splashed with huge, formless dabs of crimson and indigo. There was so much savagery in the spectacle that it was with relief I turned my back on it and passed into the green funnel of the woods.

  Parker-Strachey, the specialist, arrived the following afternoon and we saw him together. Although a dedicated man he seemed to me to be far less positive than any of his predecessors. It was clear that he had conceived a grudging admiration for his patient but whether the source of this lay in her war record, or in the fortitude she had displayed under his care I never discovered. Such conversation as I had with him was limited to her health.

  It was from Parker-Strachey that I learned, for the first time, what was really the matter with her and what havoc those murderous bullets had caused. He told me unequivocally that he would not gamble on her survival until winter but he also succeeded in convincing me that Diana herself infinitely preferred death to the life of a helpless invalid milestoned with sustained periods of agony. Slowly, over the next few weeks, I came to terms with the situation, at least, I persuaded myself that I had done so and this was all that mattered when I was alone. When I was with her I continued to reject the monstrous idea altogether for she was so relaxed, spiritually and even physically relaxed, that it was difficult not to convince oneself that she was slowly regaining her strength.

  We used to sit together for long periods, sometimes without saying much and when we did, discussing abstract subjects or things that had happened and people we had met.

  She was now reading nothing but verse and her bedside table was stacked with collected poems and anthologies, English, American, French and even German. She seemed almost to feed on these and poetry coloured most of her thoughts.

  She had her favourites, Yeats, Hardy, Sassoon, Blunt and Wilfred Owen but she re-read poets who had sparked off her enthusiasm as a girl, Tennyson, and our old friend Alan Seager, the American boy who had died on the Somme and who had seemed to us at the time to crystallise adolescent love more effectively than any of the better-known writers. I think I was rather jealous of these old and new friends. They seemed to be able to bring her far more comfort and tranquillity than I was able to and once I admitted this, expecting her to laugh at the idea, but she didn’t, she just said:

  “Oh, they’re useful as substitutes Jan, and some of them teach real values but they can’t compete with you! I’m still interested in the flesh. Kiss me and see! Touch my breast—there, leave your hand there! It’s warm and firm and real, so much more satisfying than reflected sunshine! Besides, your turn is coming.”

  I wasn’t by any means sure what she meant by this hint and I didn’t ask. I was grateful for morsels and swallowed them thankfully. It was a great joy to realise that she was still vital enough to want caresses and kisses, and to discover that, virtually helpless as she was, she was still able to stir me as effortlessly as when we were both young and hungry for one another. Her concern for me in this respect was one of the sweetest things about that time. She would contrive all manner of artful little tricks and subterfuges to rouse and satisfy me, and when I remember this now I can never understand how I had ever thought of her as a selfish woman. She took immense pains to overcome the natural reluctance I had to stimulate either her or myself in the physical sense, and she did it with such maternal gentleness that after a time each manifestation was a joy and a lover’s triumph.

  She took great pains with her appearance and I never saw her when she wasn’t well-groomed and composed, with her hair carefully brushed and her skin glowing. It was only when I was away from her that Parker-Strachey’s words made any sense and then I had to scratch about for tiny crumbs of comfort in the specialist’s warning that, as time went on, she would become utterly helpless and that emergency arrangements would have to be made to feed her. No merciful coma would blot out periods of pain and all that would be left to her was a clear brain with which to measure her present helplessness against the memory of the woman she had been. Then, when I remembered her immense vitality, I could only wish that she would die in her sleep, taking the gulf between present and future in a single leap, but this prayer was never once completed. Always it fled under the softest pressure of her fingers, or the caress of her glance as I entered the room.

  She was quick to notice the effect that this see-saw between fatuous hope and gloomy fatalism had upon my nerves and as usual, she had a prescription for it.

  “You’ve got to get out more, Jan!” she urged. “You must ride and walk about Sennacharib all the time you aren’t actually beside me! That’s the only way you can live with it and if you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me! I can only see two aspects of Sennacharib from here and I should like to know what’s going on in the north and east.”

  I suppose she was half-jesting but I took her at her word and after that I went out on Sioux every day, returning to tell her where I had been and whom I had met. I thought I knew that area better than anyone alive but I was wrong. There wasn’t a bush or a tree or a rabbit-run that she had forgotten and sometimes she caught me out on a short cut, or a point where an overgrown track crossed the upper reaches of the Teasel. It was as though she had taken hundreds of thousands of close-up photographs of the country that lay between the sea and the London road across Foxhayes, and it was her pleasure, whenever she was alone with her thoughts, to sift through them and interpret each picture yard by yard. Since her return here the entire heritage that had once been shared between us had passed to her and all I retained now was a few square miles of scrub and coverts, almost identical with any other rural backwater. God knows, I did not grudge her the inheritance, realising at last that my claim on Sennacharib had been physical whereas hers rested upon her kinship with forgotten and neglected gods and goddesses of whom she alone was aware.

  She was at one with this pagan cult as never before and I think it contributed to her tranquillity. Up to then her worship had been a kind of game that she played with herself, as when she stood naked on the beach the day we were married, but pretence was behind her now and sometimes, when I saw her looking out across the ploughland to Nun’s Head, she was as much in communion with her deities as a priest before an altar.

  This was proved by what happened a day or two before my thirty-third birthday, in the second week of October.

  The Scots surgeon had been dow
n again that afternoon and this time she insisted on seeing him alone. I hung about on the stairhead while they were closeted together and once or twice I heard the murmur of voices raised in argument and once Diana’s soft ripple of laughter. When he came out he was looking very puzzled. All traces of his professional arrogance disappeared when he took me by the arm and asked if I could find him a drink.

  I led him into what had once been Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton’s morning room and gave him a stiff whiskey and soda.

  “By God, yon’s a fey lass!” he muttered, pushing forward the glass for a refill and then, watching me closely from under his sandy, tufted eyebrows: “Will ye no’ tell me something aboot this ‘Sennacharib’ nonsense?”

  I was astonished by his request. Sennacharib had always been a very jealous secret between us and I could not recall a previous occasion when she had discussed it with a stranger. Parker-Strachey was not the type of man who encouraged one to bare one’s soul yet now he was curious to interpret something that she had confided in him. I told him, briefly, the circumstances surrounding our first meeting and a little of what had happened in and around Heronslea prior to her runaway marriage to Yves. Then, feeling it might help, I described Diana’s behaviour in Nun’s Cove on the morning we were married three years before.

  He listened carefully. Finally he said:

  “Ah, then there’s no help for it! Has she spoken aboot takin’ her up there?”

  “Up where?” I asked, mystified.

  “Ach, to the top o’ the hill, mon!” he said, irritably. “I dinna ken where exactly but I thought you would!” He puffed furiously at his pipe for a moment, staring hard at me. “Mind you,” he added suddenly, “I’ll have none o’ the damned nonsense aboot a horse! If ye go then ye’ll go up by car, and ye’ll give her a bare five minutes, d’ye ken? Five minutes by the clock!”

  I had no clear idea what he was talking about but he seemed reluctant to be more communicative and told me I had best continue the discussion with Diana. Then he left, glad to be gone. Perhaps he was ashamed of having lost his professional composure in front of a chawbacon.