The Hunter's Moon (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  The Hunter’s Moon

  Ursula Bloom

  Copyright © The Estate of Ursula Bloom 2021

  This edition first published 2021 by Wyndham Books

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  First published 1969

  www.wyndhambooks.com

  The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover image © Mariia aiiraM (Shutterstock)

  Cover design © Wyndham Media Ltd

  TIMELESS CLASSICS COLLECTION

  by Ursula Bloom

  Wonder Cruise

  Three Sisters

  Dinah’s Husband

  The Painted Lady

  The Hunter’s Moon

  Fruit on the Bough

  Three Sons

  Facade

  Forty is Beginning

  The Passionate Heart

  Nine Lives

  Spring in September

  Lovely Shadow

  The Golden Flame

  Many more titles coming soon

  www.ursulabloom.com

  Ursula Bloom: A Life in Words podcast

  Listen to the free, five-part podcast series based on the autobiographical writing of Ursula Bloom. The podcast covers Ursula’s life as a young woman on the Home Front in the Great War, and her rise to success and fame in the publishing world of the 1920s to 1940s.

  www.ursulabloom.com/ursula-bloom-a-life-in-words-podcast

  Contents

  PART ONE: THE HUNTER’S MOON

  CHAPTER ONE: BEGINNING

  CHAPTER TWO: DECISION

  CHAPTER THREE: INHERITANCE

  CHAPTER FOUR: AFTERMATH

  CHAPTER FIVE: RESOLUTION

  PART TWO: THE HARVEST MOON

  CHAPTER SIX: VISITING

  CHAPTER SEVEN: SPRINGTIME

  CHAPTER EIGHT: ADVENTURE

  CHAPTER NINE: VISITATION

  CHAPTER TEN: HOLIDAY

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: ACCOMPLISHMENTS

  CHAPTER TWELVE: BEAUTY

  PART THREE: THE NEW MOON

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: CORSICA

  Preview: Wonder Cruise by Ursula Bloom

  Preview: Youth at the Gate by Ursula Bloom

  Preview: Victoria Four-thirty by Cecil Roberts

  Preview: Wind on the Heath by Naomi Jacob

  Preview: The Print Petticoat by Lucilla Andrews

  Preview: A Shaft of Light by John Finch

  Timeless Classics Collection by Ursula Bloom

  To

  Joan May

  with my love and grateful thanks

  It is an old country belief that those who come into this world under the Harvest Moon are buoyant, endowed with happiness and the blessing of a kind fate. Those who come under its successor, the Hunter’s Moon, are born with second sight and the power of seeing ahead into the uncertainty of tomorrow, and for ever anxious for the commitments of yesterday.

  PART ONE

  THE HUNTER’S MOON

  Chapter One

  BEGINNING

  Unhappily Diana slipped the latchkey into the bleak keyhole of John’s flat, and knew that whereas once it had actually given her a thrill, today it made her despair. She felt almost a Judas; the girl who had betrayed him.

  John had had the second key made for her a month back, and it had been a romantic property to her. ‘If ever you want me, darling …’ he had whispered. She had wired that she would be here when he got back tonight. She had come up to stay with her friend Sarah Jamieson, to shop, and would come to see him first. The matter was urgent.

  She knew that John disliked Sarah, she was ‘too much the outcome of a first-class girls’ school’ for him. Chatterworth had done that for both girls, but Diana did not show it so much, Sarah did. John had been to a grammar school, he had fought for his country with the R.A.F., prepared to die, and thank God he had lived. I love him so much, she glowed.

  As yet he was not home; she saw it as she walked into the fusty sitting-room, and to the window to open it. The paint was blistered by summer, it needed dusting, and the curtains were greyly grimy. It was a shoddy flat, its main asset a low rent; also he had chosen it in a hurry. Not that he had had too big a choice at his price. The foggy air drifted in and she saw the dark nakedness of tree branches in the square. Now she became aware that ever since she had left Snow Hill station she had grown more and more uneasy. Scared too. Why did this have to happen to us? and now? she asked herself.

  Four years back the war had ended, and John had been demobbed from the R.A.F. He had been a resilient young pilot, he had brightly laughing eyes, a boy’s eyes, and a fascinatingly cheeky smile. He had been demobbed into a changed world, and perhaps then none of us had realised how hopelessly changed it was. She remembered the horror of Coventry. Her family lived at Solihull, and one could hear the distant rumble. She had been nineteen then, unable to join up, for osteomyelitis stopped her passing the medical.

  Her father was a Birmingham business man, the possessive type, and her mother was afraid of him. The house at Solihull betrayed nothing of its heart, nor of her people. The past was their interest, the future never. Perhaps Mother, who was a darling, had never had a chance to assert herself against the positiveness of her father.

  Diana had met John at a party, a young man who could laugh at life, and maybe the only way that the R.A.F. had won the war was by laughing at death with that amazing courage of theirs.

  ‘That young fellow will never hold down a good job,’ her father had said when they met, ‘and it’s a chap’s job that matters in life; not what it is, mark you, but the way he handles it.’

  She had said that John was shy, he could not bluster, and as she had said it she knew that none could ever explain anything to the father who eschewed explanations, unless they were his own.

  ‘Shyness is no job-getter,’ he said, and unhappily he was right.

  John’s sparkle was the sharp rime frost of the R.A.F., and when the mildew of peacetime returned, it disappeared. John had been Diana’s only boy friend. Her father would not have liked ‘young men hanging about’ as he would have put it; Mother would have helped had she dared, but she was too afraid. Maybe, thought the girl, she had been born too late in their lives, and her own dark eyes dimmed.

  Her mother had been over forty when the unexpected baby had come; her father five years older. In a marriage which was ten years old, they had been convinced that now there would be no children, and then Mother felt suddenly off colour. She connected it with sombre practicality with the change of life, was sure that it had started early with her, and she was surprised. The surprise was Diana.

  The baby had come in October, a month of amber leaves and scarlet berries under the hunter’s moon. She had come with an unexpected suddenness when there was the moon’s copper glow in the night sky, a glow which succeeds the extravagant gold of the harvest moon, and is more knowledgeable. Old Cook had told the little girl of it later, saying that it was a magic moon, for those born under it saw shadows and had what was called ‘second sight’.

  Diana remembered standing in the kitchen listening, when some unfortunate mishap had burnt t
he breakfast toast and her father’s fury troubled Cook.

  ‘Second sight means you sees things afore others,’ she said. ‘Fortune-tellers are they sort. Reads the stars, and that. What’s more, you’ll be seeing things afore they happens,’ and swiftly she snatched back her toasting fork, before a second piece of bread suffered the disastrous fate of its predecessor.

  Growing older, Diana had found within her this strange recognition of the unborn future lying bare. It was like a shadow, which had the power to take form. Like clay in the sculptor’s studio awaiting the hand to shape it, yet without shape for the moment. She remembered the time when the horrible road accident occurred outside the Solihull house. At breakfast she had said, ‘Something is going to happen in that road. I can feel it in my head.’

  Her father was angry, he said she needed a pill. Anyway this was spooky stuff, dangerous nonsense. The girl required a tonic, or something, and Mother ought to see to her, for it wasn’t natural for a little girl to talk that sort of tripe.

  By midday the skidding ’bus had crushed the Ford car into pieces in the gutter and a young girl lay dead there, staring up at the sky. She was a pretty girl, too, and aghast the child saw it. A man came out of the house across the way, a Baptist minister (and because of this they could not know him, for the family knew only those people in their own class bounds, and felt anything but the established church to be beneath them, especially the R.C.s. The R.C.s were not only beneath them, but they were also designing, so her father always said). The young man brought a blanket out with him, and laid it tenderly over the poor dead girl, folding her hands on her breast. Diana had watched him with horror. Life ends like that! she thought appalled, and even as she thought it a shadow quivered in a corner of the room, as though a real person disturbed it. A girl laughed. She did not actually hear the sound, but the echo of it stirred down into her heart, vibrantly, an established fact and not ‒ never ‒ a dream.

  Maybe Cook knew, she thought, and there is something about the hunter’s moon. She stirred with tender dark eyes, heavily fringed with lashes. She knew that she had beautiful eyes, eyes which saw far, but she was too pale.

  ‘Never had enough air,’ said old Cook years back, for old Cook had been the daughter of a Cotswold shepherd and knew what very fresh air was.

  It was strange that she should remember these things today when she sat here, over-pale, as she knew, and the eyes larger than ever, for she had had such a bad headache. ‘It’s my dark hair that makes me look so white,’ she said rather wretchedly to herself, and then, ‘I’ve got to tell John today, I have got to tell him as soon as ever he comes in, or I’ll lose my courage.’

  Her people had not worried that she was coming up to stay with her school friend Sarah. They had always accepted her with respect because she had an Honourable before her name, and Diana’s father appreciated what he recognised as being ‘class’. Sarah had not had a penny then, and had wanted Diana to help her run a dress shop somewhere off Bond Street, but that had irritated her father, even if Sarah was an Honourable, and so should know.

  ‘I can support my girl,’ said he, ‘and I’m not having her earning. It isn’t right. She’ll marry when the time comes, and that’ll be her career.’

  He was a bullet-headed man, with a short pulpy neck which went red when he was angry. Stockily made, he stipulated for good meals, and the right sort of wines. He took no nay, and Diana had had to tell Sarah that she could not do it.

  ‘Well,’ said Sarah, ‘the career is pro tem for me. I want a first-class rich marriage, a full larder for life, and lots of fun. I am not the kind who enjoy going short,’ and Sarah had tossed back her auburn head and had laughed.

  Diana thought then what a vigorous radiant beauty Sarah was. Flamboyant red hair, and she had her eyelashes and brows darkened. She had light green eyes, and that cameo clear skin which goes with red hair. Of course she had married extremely well, at twenty, and Diana had been her only bridesmaid, and had loved it. She always felt that it was the first time that she really got away from her father.

  The marriage had been a noble affair at St Margaret’s, Westminster (even her father had approved of that), and the bridegroom had given Diana a glorious little watch made like a hunter’s moon, and glowing in its heart a fiery topaz. She had worn it as she followed Sarah up the aisle, the whole affair spoilt for her because the other attendant, a small girl page, a mere tot, had announced her intention of being sick in the church as they awaited the bride in the porch.

  She paused as she remembered it.

  Life had changed so much since the war, so desperately. The peace had re-dressed life. Of course her father still ruled the house and her mother dared not defy him, but old Cook had been taken away long ago to a home for the elderly. She had clung to her job even though she was five years older than she had ever admitted, but she was betrayed because her legs gave out.

  ‘I’ll always remember you, ducks,’ she had said with raucous sobs. ‘I likes folks what comes under that hunter’s moon, they knows things, and they goes on knowing things.’ Then she had dropped her voice. ‘Sometimes they knows too much.’

  When old Cook left, Ellen the parlourmaid had joined up, early in the war, and had married a Captain, which had infuriated her father; after that, Mother had had to rely on ‘women in’. Between the wars one could never have imagined that the mistress of the house would ever have to wash up, and very often turn out as well. But this was what had happened.

  Diana sat there waiting. She was not too tall, and from the first had been very slender. A girl with a pallid skin, which at times flushed apple-blossom pink like some Victorian cameo, or a warm ivory. Her eyes had the depths of mulberries, their depth enhanced by long black lashes, which for ever gave them shadows. Her mouth was naturally a deep red, her father would never have permitted lipsticks even if they had been here since the first world war, but he detested them and thought of them as being the tools of Jezebel. Her father said that she took after her great-aunt Chrissie, who lived near Newbury and was said to be extremely well off. Both Diana and her mother realised that he had his eye on Aunt Chrissie’s fortune as an excellent backing for retirement, not that he ever wished to retire, but it was better to stand back rich than to be poor. At the same time they all knew that he was afraid of Aunt Chrissie, and that she could manage him.

  Sitting here in the rather sour small room, with furniture which had little to recommend it, Diana was remembering how once she and her mother had gone to Newbury to stay. There had been no servant shortage there, for the house was run by Miss Howland, the excellent companion-housekeeper whom Aunt Chrissie kept.

  Her great-aunt had spoilt the child, had coaxed secrets from her, had bribed her with delicious chocolates, and then had laughed over it. Mother had wept with horror, knowing that a hard-headed husband forbade chocolates, and she, poor thing, dared only echo his opinions and indignations on modern youth, jazz, Americanisms, and the mismanagement of the peace.

  Long after that Diana had found out more about Aunt Chrissie. She had been but a half relative, for although Diana’s great-grandfather had accepted Chrissie, he was not her real father. He had been an old man at the time, married to a golden-haired wisp of a young girl, who had been afraid of him. When Diana learnt this it told her whence husband-fear had first come, and on whose example her father had shaped himself. Aunt Chrissie’s birth had come late in the marriage, when the first child ‒ a son ‒ was ten years old, and the baby was the daughter of a black-eyed tinker who had visited the home to sharpen scissors and knives. But he had had youth, he had had vivacity and love to offer her.

  Diana had found this out from a conversation she had overheard when she had returned from that visit to Newbury, a conversation between her parents. She had kept it secret, believing that that was what would be expected from her, and today of course tinkers had disappeared, no longer touring the countryside to sharpen scissors and knives and seduce pretty girls.

  I must forget tha
t, she thought.

  She had come to London, to see John first, then to go on to Sarah’s for a couple of nights. She felt worried to death, distracted, and horribly confused. Something terrifying had happened in her life, based, she supposed, on love and loneliness, the two eternal rebels, and in them much of the mystery of the hunter’s moon.

  I wonder if it is all invention, she thought, and if the moon is like all the other moons. Here in this room with her was a shadow. A portent, she felt, something which had the power to stab her heart. She was not alone. How many times in her life had she been conscious of this inherent ‘awareness’ of others? How many times had she not been alone? But the hunter’s moon did not offer her help; it did not suggest what she could do now; that would have to come from John.

  He will help me, I know that he will help me, she thought.

  Her mind went back to the holiday, the exquisite holiday of the late summer, when John had been given a small rise at that unpleasant office where he worked, and from which he hoped one day to escape; but jobs were hard to find, especially good ones. Too many men had returned from the war with bright hopes in their hearts, and there were too few appointments for them to fill.

  He had taken this job in a back street of the city, in an office with windows which never opened, and smeary glass to them. The furniture was pock-marked, the walls dirty, and the companionship in the office galling, but he could not afford to choose. There were hundreds of R.A.F. officers in the same boat, and for the moment prosperity was not in every lap.

  He and Diana had made sudden plans together. The doctor wanted her to go away for a holiday, for she had lost weight. John had a holiday due to him, and in the late September they planned to go to the same hotel. There was nothing imprudent about it, they were secretly engaged, outwardly just good friends, and the visit could be covered by a trip to Devonshire with Sarah. Sarah had been a valiant friend to Diana, and they had gone away together before this. It had been at a time when war fatigue flooded the world; the shock stayed, the memories were still horrible scars, and London in parts still slipping down into the dust, where in summer the rosebay willow herb flowered so bravely that it almost gave one fresh hope.