“I waited and waited … I tried to phone your aunt’s … quickly Jan! Doctor Fosdyke’s there now …!”
I ran through the hall and up the staircase. The local doctor was standing with his back to me looking out of the window and the night nurse was beside the bed, holding Diana’s wrist. Fosdyke turned when I crashed into the room and nodded curtly to the nurse who went out without saying anything.
“I’ve put through a call to Mr. Parker-Strachey,” Fosdyke said, “but he can’t get down here until late tonight. Is there anyone nearer you’d like? Someone from Plymouth or Bristol?”
I shook my head and he turned back to the window. She was breathing very lightly and her hand, when I took it up, was warm and dry. Where the lamplight fell on her face it struck a sharp angle of the pillow, so that her mass of hair lay in a section of shadow that made it seem as dark as a gipsy’s. Her eyes were closed but once her lips moved and I bent low to catch what she said. I only heard four or five words and recognised them at once. They were from the poem she had underscored and they showed that the testimony of Lucinda, of Spoon River, was in her mind at that final moment. She said: “ … too strong for you” and then, after something I could not catch, “love life”. After that she lay very still for nearly an hour and at last Fosdyke came and touched me on the shoulder. I put her hand under the sheet. It was not until I did that that I realised she was dead.
Chapter Fifteen
WHEN WE were children Diana and I promised one another that whoever survived would make sure that the other was cremated and their ashes scattered in Sennacharib. Young people make such pacts, for at that age, death is something that only happens to other people. We had long arguments as to the most suitable area for scattering. She could never make a choice between Folly Wood and Big Oak Paddock. I favoured the other side of the Teasel, where the broad, sandy path ran along the western edge of the wood.
The biggest effort I ever made in my life was that needed to honour this light-hearted pledge. I wanted nothing whatever to do with Diana’s funeral. I had a horror of discussing the disposal of her body with an impersonal man like Kinglake, the local undertaker, and my instinct was to leave all such matters to Drip or whoever would undertake the task. I won this battle over my cowardice. The pull of loyalty was just strong enough to hold on and I got Doctor Fosdyke to call in his partner and arrange the cremation. I didn’t go to the city Crematorium but left poor Drip to go there alone. I went instead to find old Nat Baker, the Shepherdshey Sexton, who had known Diana as a girl and asked him if he would perform the final act on my behalf. He was a big, good-natured fellow, genuinely fond of us both and agreed very readily without asking for reasons or directions. I let him choose his own spot, knowing that it would be somewhere inside Sennacharib and not wanting more exact knowledge.
The next day he waited for me at the lodge and told me, briefly, that it was done. He stood thinking for a moment, his big, grey head cocked on one side, as though listening for a distant sound.
“’Er was a rare maid for the open,” he said presently and then touched his cap and shambled off. It was an epitaph that would have pleased Diana.
So it ended and yet it did not, not as one might have supposed and certainly not as I had expected. There was a great gap that I could not bridge. I was somehow rooted to the moment I had turned Sioux’s head down the slope after the interval we spent watching the buzzards. I moved my body sluggishly about the place but my brain was hardly functioning at all. Most people kept out of my way and those who did not, like my well-intentioned Aunt Thirza, were rudely rebuffed and soon went their way.
I believe almost everyone agreed that the madcap outing had hastened Diana’s death, but nobody reproached me about it and I had no regrets. I was very glad now that I had taken her up there and the bitterness of my loss would have been even greater if I had denied her this last service. Even so, from the moment of her death my senses atrophied. I did not feel grief so much as a kind of stunned confusion, which made it impossible to fix my mind on any one aspect of our private tragedy. After a day or so I went through the motions of living, talking to Drip and Yvonne, and eating what was put in front of me but I could not sleep. I lay for hours at a stretch with a bedside light switched on and one of Diana’s anthologies on my knees.
I tried very hard to read the book and make something of the poems she had marked with pencil strokes but the words and phrases meant nothing at all. They buzzed about on the edge of my consciousness like a swarm of flies. Only a fragment of one poem got through to me and made me wince, some lines of Yeats’ Cold Heaven that ran:
“ … 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?”
For the rest, a black, hopeless despondency settled on me, perhaps not alone the result of shock but a delayed reaction to the strain of the war that had been held in check by the sustained anxieties of Diana’s illness. Now, when the focal point of my life had been removed, futility wrapped me like a wet fog and my mind was free to conjure with facets of horror and despair that must have stamped themselves on my memory during my service on the Continent. They were odd and often unrelated snapshots but each was dreadfully stark and clear. I remembered things like the foolishly lolling head of the young German I had shot in the cutting, and the toughness of the throat muscles of the S.S. man I had killed under the prison-van in the ambush and these memories merged into a general picture of hopelessness and paraded up and down before a background of ruined towns and country roads choked with the debris of a civilian exodus. The prospect of Sennacharib, in its autumn coat of red, gold and purple, was blotted out by a much larger canvas of a ruined continent and a civilisation slowly bleeding to death.
Presently it seemed to me that it was pointless to continue such a march when the means to end the journey were at hand. On the morning of the twelfth day after Diana’s death I took my twelve-bore from the tack room, slipped a couple of cartridges in my pocket and went out across the small paddock to the larch covert.
I am not sure, even now, that I meant to take my life. I was too confused and desolate to make such a clear cut decision and perhaps what I did was simply a childish gesture, a shrill challenge to someone to prove to me that there was a future worth having, not only for me but for everyone.
I left no note and I went quite openly at eleven o’clock in the morning, when the larches were whispering under the steady pressure of a south-westerly breeze and the previous night’s rain dripped from their leaves, covering the floors of the glades with a soft, russet mush. Under the spell of the same crazy compulsion, I located the actual tree under which I had offered Keeper Croker a farthing damages for my trespass, and here I slipped cartridges into the breech and stood the gun against the tree, listening intently but not by any means sure what I would do next.
Then, out of the silence of the wood, I heard the overture of the third and final October miracle, a faint and far-off drumming and the crackle of broken twigs.
The sounds, distant as they were, did not at first register for what they were, the passage of a fast-moving horse up the long, central ride of the wood. Instead they struck me as a routine wood-noise, a solo played above the steady drip of the leaves and the whisper of the wind in the larches. Then, as the hoofbeats grew louder, a sense of guilt and shame stole over me and I thrust the gun behind the tree and walked forward into the glade. It was here that I heard Yvonne’s voice calling my name.
“Jan! Jan! Where are you, Jan?”
I began to sweat and tremble then and looked over my shoulder to make sure that the gun was out of sight. Reassured, I stumbled forward to the southern end of the glade and at that moment, riding at a fast canter, Yvonne swept round the bend and up the slight incline.
She was mounted on her own pony, Peggy, a barrel-chested little mare with vicious stable manners, an
d as horse and rider appeared I gasped at the astonishing likeness between the child leaning forward over Peggy’s short back and my memory of Diana moving down that same path on Nellie, in October, 1927. They had the same seat, the same rapturous identification with the pony’s thrust, the same easy grace in drawing rein and half-rolling from the saddle in what looked like an effortless but was in fact a minutely-judged, movement and as she lifted her gloved hand and pushed back her hard little hat beads of perspiration showed on her forehead. She drew her glove across them laughing and talking through her laughter, the way Diana had done times without number.
“Drip said you’d gone up to Big Oak! She said you’d gone shooting but I told her she must have made a mistake because you haven’t shot since the war, have you? Mummy told me why, she said that you said everything found it hard enough to keep alive without show-off sporting types popping off at them at fourpence a cartridge! Is that true Jan, or was she pulling my leg? Won’t you ever go out after pigeons and pheasants again? Or don’t you count game we kill to eat?”
I took a deep breath like a man who, against all expectations, has risen to the surface after a desperate struggle under ten feet of water. I said, painfully:
“Diana wasn’t teasing, Yvonne. It’s true I don’t get any fun out of shooting now. I never was much of a sportsman. I once gave the Heronslea huntsman a bum steer when Diana and he were right on top of a fox! I told him the fox had turned right-handed to the cliffs when it had gone up country to Foxhayes. Did she ever tell you about that?”
The confession interested her and her eyes opened wide.
“No, she didn’t, and I can see why,” she said. “She must have been ashamed of marrying someone who would do an awful thing like that!” Then, grinning: “I say, Jan, where did it happen?”
“Just over there!” I said, pointing through the trees to the blurr of Teasel Wood, “but it’s true that I did bring the gun along today. I didn’t shoot anything and got tired of lugging the damn thing around. But why aren’t you over at Whinford with your grandmother?”
“Oh, I can’t breathe in towns, even little towns!” she said, carelessly. “Besides, everyone was patting and ‘poor-dearing’ me!” She looked at me very steadily for a moment. “I don’t feel that way about Mother, Jan, and I know she’d hate it if I did! I like to think of her as … as … well, as someone who was killed in the war, someone who was always taking chances for the hell of it! She was like that, wasn’t she Jan?”
“Yes,” I said, “very much like that and you’re right about her not wanting us to mope and snivel! You go right on thinking like that about her, Yvonne! She’d want it so, I’m sure!”
Suddenly the conversation seemed to embarrass her and she turned aside, fondling Peggy’s muzzle. She remained like that for a moment and then she looked at me with a swift, sly grin, one of the grins that had heralded Diana’s counter-attacks against grown-ups inclined to shush-shush and now-now.
“But you’re moping, Jan. Drip says so and anyway, any fool can see you are!”
The manner in which she said this, or perhaps the look of concern that lurked behind the grin released in me a flood of affection such as I had never yet felt for her. Until that moment she had been a gay, mischievous and slightly dominating child but now, suddenly, she was so much Diana’s daughter and such a part of Sennacharib that I cried out with pleasure. I threw my arms round her and hugged her. “I was, Yvonne, but not any longer, not any more!”
She submitted to the embrace with a comic dignity and then, extricating herself and dropping Peggy’s rein, she fished into the pocket of her riding jacket and came up with a fat and very grubby-looking envelope.
“What’s that?” I demanded, my heart thumping as I recognised the handwriting under the smears.
“It’s a letter,” she said, gravely, “the letter! You can have it now! I wasn’t to give it to you until you were in the right mood. Mummy gave it to me the day before I went to Whinford.” She looked down at it and grimaced. “I say, it is a bit messy, isn’t it?”
I took the letter and she watched me expectantly as I slipped my thumb under the flap and pulled out several neatly folded sheets.
“Was this the letter she wrote before I went over to Whinmouth, the one I offered to take and she said you could post?”
“That’s it,” said Yvonne, “but there weren’t any more, she was days writing that one, or so Drip said!”
I stood thinking for a moment. Suddenly it seemed unnaturally still in the wood. The breeze had dropped and the larches were silent. I could feel strength flowing back into my loins and moist, salty air filling my lungs. It was an extraordinary sensation, almost like coming round from an anaesthetic.
“Were you going anywhere special or were you just out looking for me?”
“Nowhere special,” she said, evasively, I thought. “I meant to take Peggy up to Foxhayes and give her her head to Teasel Ford. She hasn’t had any exercise since I’ve been away. All the others are scared of riding her!”
“All right Yvonne,” I said, “you do that and I’ll read the letter. If you aren’t back soon I’ll walk up to Big Oak and meet you in about half-an-hour. Then we can go down to lunch together!”
She nodded happily, obviously glad of an excuse to be off. Disdaining the stirrup she belly-rolled into the saddle and thumped her heels into Peggy’s flanks. They were off in a second and in ten more were out of sight round the bend.
As the thud of hooves died away I went up the glade to a spot where a larch had been uprooted and had fallen to form a handy seat beside the path. I sat for a moment feeling the edges of the folded sheets. Then I smoothed them out and began to read, slowly, and with the kind of relish a man feels when he mulls a favourite passage in a much-read book. The letter was dated the day before her death. It began:
“My Jan; I don’t know how long it will be before you get this; that depends on you. If I was writing to Yvonne she could have had it straight away, but then, Yvonne is even more of an extrovert than I was at her age, so it isn’t necessary to write to her at all! My guess is that you won’t be able to absorb the little I’ve got to say until the old spell of Sennacharib has stolen up on you again, relegating me to a role of first mate instead of captain. Sennacharib and I have always been jockeying for precedence and lately I’ve had the edge on her. Surely that was my due as the fading heroine on the couch!”
I let the pages rest on my knee for a moment while I absorbed this preamble. Foremost among my reactions was an astonished admiration that she was able to jest so determinedly in the face of death. Surely this was the kind of courage that I had needed so often and so desperately during the last few months yet had never glimpsed, much less won. She went on:
“I had to write this letter for two reasons, one big and one insignificant. Let’s get the little one out of the way first. It’s money! While you were away getting demobbed I had two sessions with a London solicitor. You know the firm, they were nice to you that time I ran away and told you where to locate my mother, though what good that ever did you I never did discover! They told me then they had almost finalised Yves’ affairs and when everything is settled I shall get (or rather you and Yvonne will get) about a fifth of the original estate. I haven’t a clue how much this will amount to but they say it should be enough to endow Heronslea as a children’s playground (I almost used that dreadful word ‘home’) for years ahead. I’d like you to go on with this, because I think it will be damned good for you, and give you a chance to develop the one characteristic of yours that I have adored since the day we met. You know what I mean—your great, woolly bearish male-gentleness which always spills over and drowns everything else about you, even your dreadful obstinacy! Don’t have any qualms about using Yves’ money for this purpose. After all, he and his kind broke up the background of the children and it’s clearly just that they should help to reconstruct it! Keep Heronslea going with the money and never go very far away, or if you do, not for long because I’ll
always be here or hereabouts and I’ll be as jealous as a burned witch if you ever turn your lumping great back on me for good!
“Now to the main reason for writing. What’s to be done about you, Jan? I told you this has been my biggest headache since I was sure about what was going to happen and when. This is something about which it isn’t at all easy to be objective because, you see, I’ve so loved having you all this time and sometimes I’ve been so proud of this one thing in my life that it made me sorry for every other woman in the world! I’ve loved being able to ‘come inside out of the rain’, I’ve loved all the things we’ve shared and all the fun we’ve had, but most of all I’ve enjoyed our joint suzerainty over Sennacharib for nearly twenty years. Most people have never had anything like this Jan, and I suppose this is why I don’t feel resentful of dying at thirty-two.”
There was a blot here and the writing became almost illegible but the blob was not the result of a tear. It was plain that the physical effort of penning this letter had taxed her strength beyond limits. She continued after a breathing space and the writing was firm and clear again.
“Where was I? I know … listing my dividends from you. Well, Jan, as I say, I’ve loved all the spiritual part of our partnership but I’ve also enjoyed the physical side, right from the very beginning, from the first kiss in the Folly, the day you gave me ‘Lorna Doone’, to our last day on the islet before we got bounced by Jerry and even beyond that, right up to recent days, when I coaxed you into kissing me as a woman ought often to be kissed, invalid or not! I always got the old-fashioned kind of thrill out of touching you and lying in your arms and even yesterday, when you were holding me on Sioux, it was just the same, like a cat being stroked and stroked in front of a warm fire!
“What bothers me, and what I’m really writing this for, is how much I’ve given back? Since we got married as much as I could and without any effort on my part I can assure you! But over the whole time not nearly as much as I would like to have given, and this leaves me with a feeling of inadequacy every time I think of it. I believe it would have balanced out if I could have hung on a few more years, or if I could have given you sons like I wanted to, but as it is my one big regret about the way things have turned out is that you really aren’t equipped to make a fresh start on your own, not unless I can still bully you into beginning again! I could do this all right if I could employ the standard artillery! I’d have you seeing sense and eating out of my hand as soon as we had disentangled ourselves but wait, wait—what am I saying? I want you to stop eating out of my hand, don’t I? Otherwise what point is there in all this feverish scribble?”
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