The Hunter's Moon (Timeless Classics Collection) Read online

  The little inn was by the harbour in a fishing village which dribbled on either side of the cobbled quay. One peered from the dormer windows under thick thatch, to see the black lace of masts pointing upwards against the intensely blue sky of September. Old fishermen sat about in the evening, perched on steps, sorting out sea-urchins, lobsters and crabs from their wide baskets which smelt so salty. They talked in a language which none understood, and when the talking ended, there was the heavy sludging sound of sea boots against the pebbles.

  It was a new world to Diana, glorious to John who had often been here before. The inn was romantically thatched, with a purple clematis flowering round the porch, and in the tiny back yard (where in high summer people sat drinking by moonlight), a hedge of fuchsias, wine-red and purple. The food was simple, of course, with home-made bread, ‘thunder and lightning’, cakes as old Cook made them, and the eternal Devonshire cream. ‘One of these days it will turn up with the roast beef!’ Diana said.

  But here, her whole world had changed.

  There was the beach which at low tide showed miles of firm gold sands, patterned delicately, with the distant music of the sea, or the shrieking defiance of gulls against the cliffs. She loved the tree-ringed wishing well on the cliff where visitors stayed to drop a coin, and wish. There was a ripe happiness about this simple act which gave it charm; one almost believed that the wish would come true.

  She had forgotten Birmingham. She had escaped the dogma of a father who disliked happiness, possibly because his own temperament had made it impossible for himself to know it, a man who had made his wife little more than a nonentity.

  In Devonshire Diana was happy.

  They were together, time was no longer an enemy, life was sweet. John abandoned shoddy city suits and wore flannel trousers, and a vivid blue jumper which alone gave him a curious enchantment of its own. Time had not counted during the happy week, and when night came they walked by moonlight on the sands, where the harvest moon reigned, the colour of ripe corn and roundly profound.

  She remembered saying, ‘My hunter’s moon comes next.’

  ‘With second sight, prediction, “ghostsies” and bogeys for us all!’

  ‘I think it has made me see things.’

  ‘Not wise to encourage that, maybe.’

  She admitted to him, ‘At times I dream strange dreams, which somehow I cannot place. And I am not always alone in a room, for there is a shadow which comes, a shadow waiting to turn into something. I am aware of presences …’ and then, afraid, she held back. It is so hard to explain the inexplicable, and half the world doubts the supernatural.

  ‘Tell me?’ he asked gently, and the fact that he sought to know drew them closer together, and when she told him that it seemed that although she was not asleep, she was dreaming, he said, ‘Perhaps that is one of the world’s secrets, not asleep but dreaming,’ and he put kind arms about her. ‘Maybe all the world is a dream, and you and I are the only real people.’

  But now time was pulsating with life, real life; it was magnificently alive, for they were in love.

  There were the vivid afternoons, with the far croon of ships at sea, and a haze of tired amethyst on the horizon. They undressed in salty-smelling caves, honeycombed into the cliff, then ran down to the water’s edge hand in hand. How hot the sand had felt to bare feet! how glowing the sunshine against the cheeks!

  It was enchanting to be so deeply in love, away from home and from restraint, from her father’s formidable opinions, and the depressing environment of the somewhat suburban house at Solihull. Here they could dream the happy dreams of life, and dreams cost nothing, and here the shadow was not with her, asking for creation. It did not come to her. Yet there were moments when she had felt a ghost ahead of her, beckoning, also part of the legacy given by the hunter’s moon.

  She told John of it.

  ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,’ John had said, and it had been on the last afternoon.

  ‘I’ve been so tremendously happy.’

  ‘And this act ends now. But we’ll come back at Easter when there are primroses everywhere, lambs in the fields, and all that red red earth. You’d like to return at Easter?’

  ‘I’d adore it.’

  ‘We’ll say you are visiting Sarah. Sarah is so useful!’

  Not for the world would Diana have admitted that Sarah did not like him, criticised him, and felt that he was not good enough for her friend. It was the only matter on which they could never agree.

  But returning home had been vile. The shimmering loveliness of the holiday in the fishing village slipped into a haze, though Diana could never forget it. Does one ever forget the truly beautiful emotions of life? she asked herself. It had faded into mistiness, the details were smudged a little, their loveliness not so keen, a week when life had been so entrancing, so acceptable, so much their own; a week of sheer heaven.

  Of course Solihull was drab against it, and the house where her father ruled so supremely, cruelly stern. She had felt ill, listless, tired. Perhaps the holiday had been too happy and she could not bear the contrast of home.

  Today she had come to see John.

  The furnished flatlet was ordinary, and, being a man, he had put none of his personality into it. She waited helplessly until she heard the sound of his key in the door, and he came in. He looked exhausted, jaded by the day, not the hero of the sands and the sea and the masts sharply etched against the sky. He wore one of those creased city suits which tell their own story, of strap-hanging and bustling in crowded queues. It would seem that the war had left behind it a legacy of queues. His eyes brightened as he saw her, but he looked sad, fatigued, bored by living; secretly she knew that he hated the office where he worked. He could not change yet awhile, and this was the position of so many ex-pilots.

  ‘Darling, how nice you look!’ he said.

  She wore a pinky rose suit, which emphasised the dark brown of her hair and the deeply set eyes, with their fringe of long lashes. She knew that she flushed from the sheer pleasure of seeing him. Now everything was going to be all right ‒ everything! ‘Hello, John dear! How’s things?’

  ‘You must have got here earlier than you said on the ’phone.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  He flung aside a pock-marked brief case, the cheap leather pitted with small hangnails giving the impression of hard-upness, and of routine, which is the brake on happiness. ‘I hoped to be here to welcome my darling, but everything went dead wrong, and it was just one of those days. They insist on last minute post-mortems, commands to which I have to listen, and it is a bit tricky.’

  She smiled, realising that now her gaunt nervousness made her feel stupid, and her voice was faltering. She sat down on a cane-seated chair (though this was the era when they were out of fashion, for modern upholstery had come in in a big way); John’s flat was dull, with little colour and the drabness of poor means; she should pity him for this, but somehow she did not do so.

  His eyes danced a little. ‘You wanted a bit of a talk, didn’t you? Is it to be now, or shall we have tea first?’

  ‘I ‒ I had tea on the train.’

  ‘Then we’ll talk,’ and now she was scared to start it, and he thought it was because she felt he wanted tea. ‘I get something at the office; not what we’d call a slap-up show, dry as dust, but that’s that,’ and they sat down. Beyond the window lay the autumnal dreariness of a tired London square, its centre garden rotting, the shrubs gone ragged and thin, the trees naked. December was near, and disaster had touched the once flowery beds and clad them with the shroud-like dismalness of death. He went on again. ‘I thought you sounded very worried when you rang up, and maybe I was a bit off-hand, but they’re so damned sticky about outside calls. The old man explodes at the very idea, thinks it cheek. Has anything gone wrong?’

  ‘Yes … in a way … I’m just a bit worried.’

  ‘I bet it’s because that father of yours has said something, and then blew up
on the whole thing. What has he said now?’

  Diana told him abruptly, having planned to be kindly and gentle, almost evasive if it came to it, but the anxiety to save him any anxiety was suddenly submerged in the bitter truth, and she spoke fast. ‘I ‒ I think that I’m going to have a baby.’

  ‘Good God!’ John’s voice was one that she had never heard him use before. Shocked. Dismayed. Appalled. ‘But that isn’t possible! It couldn’t be,’ and he ended bluntly.

  She had thought that when he knew he would instantly console her; that soft voice of his, those tender arms, and the joy which had been theirs in Devonshire, would wipe away the stark horror and the anguish which had beset her, and make it different. Now she knew that he was even more shocked than she was.

  ‘I felt so ill, in a way that I have never felt before. I had to go to see the doc.’

  ‘Not the family medico? Ye gods!’

  ‘Of course not, a stranger in Birmingham. He ‒ he said the baby would come in June.’ She paused. ‘I had thought about then, myself.’

  ‘Heavens!’ He sat there beside her, and somehow she felt that he had become apart from her and was frightened, and she had been so sure that when she told him he would put everything right. For a second she remembered the fuchsia hedge in Devonshire, and the wine-coloured flowers, the haze over a blurred sea, and the whisper of those plaintive voices of ships, their fog-horns sounding, Ah-ee, ah-ee. He saw the agony in her dark eyes, and the tears not yet falling, but sadly waiting there.

  He said, ‘We shall have to get married on the sly, and say we did a year ago. Awkward, but possible.’

  ‘Could we?’

  She had prayed for this, yet when he said it there seemed to be a shroud of dismay over his voice. He did not glow. He accepted it as something they should go through (they’d got to cover it), there was little else they could do.

  ‘It’s a pest,’ he said almost angrily, and she knew that the brightness had gone out of his eyes, so that they had become almost sullen. ‘It’s happened to thousands of others, of course. What we have got to do now is to use some honest-to-God common sense.’

  To Diana common sense was like brine in a wound; she realised that she had longed for comfort, the outstretched arms, the kiss which took away the pain, and the knowledge that they were together in this, and therefore nothing could be really wrong for long. This man seemed to have aged before her eyes; now he was quite unlike the gay lover of the Devonshire holiday. She was face to face with the harsh experience of welding common sense to the loveliness of emotional love, and of being suddenly factual about a dream. She knew that this man did not appreciate the depths of her own suffering, and how scared she was within. She was haunted by the agony of realisation that her mother too would suffer, and there could be no escaping the stern fury which her father would display.

  Whatever they did now, as far as the pair of them were concerned, there would always be the knowledge that the child had been conceived outside wedlock, a thing she had always been taught was disgraceful; servants might do it, but most certainly the better classes never did.

  ‘John … John …?’ she besought him.

  She was pining for the lover whom she had adored, and now found that he was being entirely everyday. In horror she had seen him crash from the plinth on which she had set him with the magnification of her love for him. Perhaps in her own depth of anxiety she did appreciate the shock that this had been, coming so suddenly out of the blue, entirely unexpected, and he horrified as to what to do about it. They would have to marry, of course, but he had not got the income to meet the cost of marriage.

  She saw him as a stranger, for it seemed that the love of her life had perished. Could this be the same man as the lover who had taken her hand in his, and together they had raced down the moist warm sands to the sea? The man who had promised her the world, dreams beyond his power, of course, but the dreams which all young lovers believe somehow can come true? An incalculable emotion filled her with anguish, it was a loneliness verging on despair, for the old emotion between them had died.

  At last she spoke again. ‘John, what do we do?’

  ‘We mustn’t lose our heads.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Maybe the everydayness of her voice struck him, for he turned to look at her. ‘I’ll stick by you and do everything that is possible. You mustn’t get too worried, I mean it’ll all come out in the wash, the way these things do. It’s just for the moment that it’s such a pest. Bit of a shock too.’

  ‘It was all that to me!’

  ‘You’re spending the night with Sarah?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She doesn’t know anything about it?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Well, don’t you go talking too much. We’ve got to be sensible.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  It was then that she remembered that Sarah had never liked John, and that had worried her. For the moment she set Sarah to one side, for the present was being too difficult. She had loved him so much, far more than she could have believed possible, and in the last few minutes something had changed it all. For her it had been the death of a lover, and the end of an emotion within herself, and the longing, the desperate longing, to escape. She had entered this flat but half an hour ago, and then she had been in love and believed that feeling would last for ever. Suddenly it had gone. His calm dismay, the fact that he had not said a single word to comfort her, had struck her in a way which she could not understand. It cut through her.

  ‘Don’t tell Sarah. Don’t tell anyone. The fewer knowing it makes it easier for us to put it straight.’

  ‘Yes.’ Then there came the silence again, his worry, the knitted brows, and the seething anxiety in his eyes, and she felt all this to be treacherous to the emotion which had been so entirely of themselves. Helplessly she put out a hand. ‘John, you do still love me? Surely you still love me?’

  ‘Of course, it was just that neither of us had expected this … I didn’t see how … but there you are. Don’t worry too much. We can put it straight, and not a soul need know. I’ll get a special licence. It’s got to be quick, the sooner the better. Thank God you are of age, for that would have been the limit.’ But his eyes were shifting about the room, he did not look at her, and now when he paused, she had not got the heart left to fill the gap with a few bright words. He went on, forcing himself, and she could feel it. ‘It’ll be fun getting married, and after that nobody can say “bo” to us. It’s got to be a boy, dearest, do remember that, at all costs it’s got to be a boy.’

  She said ‘Yes’, but the tone was dull.

  The spontaneity had gone out of her, and she was calm because she had nothing to say. She had the feeling that he was almost a stranger to her, or a man acting a part, but not her lover any more, for although he was trying to be nice about it, he had changed so utterly. As a result, maybe she too was changing.

  ‘But what can we do about money, John? You’ve always said that you had insufficient to marry on, and because of that we had to wait.’

  ‘We daren’t wait now.’

  ‘But that won’t make us richer. We can’t live on bread and water, and I feel that my father … well, I am sure that he would not be very helpful.’

  His eyes nervously watched her. ‘Oh, I know that my salary is a disgrace, but somehow I don’t think your father would let you go without, perhaps …’ he was even more nervous now.

  She said slowly, ‘You’re wrong. Dad would not help, for he would feel it against his principles. He gets very keen on his principles, you know. Don’t rely on his coming forward, because I ‒ I don’t think he would.’

  ‘Damn!’ he said. Then he jerked himself together, she could see him doing it. He was as worried as she was, and whatever they said or did they were coming no nearer to a solution. He went on. ‘Well, if we do get stuck, maybe you could teach music, or French, or something like that. Beggars can’t be choosers. We’d ferret through somehow, and getti
ng married right now is definitely urgent for both of us.’

  Death of a lover! she thought in cold horror. She said not a word. A desperate forlornness seemed to surround her, so that she could not find words with which to express herself. He was now very much the business man trying to work out the satisfactory answer to the oldest worry of the world. Swift action was the main essential; she had appreciated this from the very second when the first doubt spiked through her. ‘It’s a hell of a mess,’ he said.

  ‘Oh John … John …?’

  The agony in her voice must have made itself heard, for he turned to her. ‘It’s okay, darling, don’t cry. We’ll get it fixed. We are not the first people in the world to have this happen to them. We will fix it. We’ll have to live for a while in this blasted little flat, because it’s cheap. The cheap is ever nasty. But whatever happens, we shall be together for ever …’

  When she told her people that she had slipped away and had married secretly, her father would rage at her, and her mother would weep. Which would be the worse? she asked herself. Whatever happened they must not guess the truth, she must set about deceiving them; her father would never forgive her, but she believed that if her mother disclosed her real self, she would never be anything but a darling. Now the ghost of dread walked beside her; if she spoke the truth, it had been there for some time now, and it seemed that it had a twin with it, an even more formidable twin; John would marry her. He would put everything right in the eyes of the world, but a fresh agony struck her, not only the death of a lover, but the realisation that she was no longer madly in love with him.

  She had thought that this evening would be the end of the worry. It was the start of a worse one. She recognised the appalling truth which lay with her baby within her. She was enceinte, but the tenderness of her emotion for her lover had perished.