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

  He saw that something was wrong.

  ‘You poor kid. It’s hell, isn’t it?’ he said and took her hand. ‘So awful for you going to a strange doctor, and all that sort of thing. Thank God he was a nice fellow,’ and as he said it another idea forcefully struck him. ‘You ‒ you don’t suppose he could be the answer to the maiden’s prayer, do you? That he would give us a hand in this? I mean, help us out? In the early days I believe there isn’t a thing to it, and it isn’t even dangerous if it is properly done, by a doctor in hospital. No funny stuff … no …’

  His voice trailed away into nothingness, perhaps because he had seen the look on her face, and seeing it had realised this was too much, so that he came to a halt with that uncomfortable flicker in his tone.

  ‘But that is murder,’ she said quietly.

  He was apprehensive. ‘Yes, in a way, though not really. I mean, we have got to think of ourselves, you know. No money, no immediate prospects, and with a babe to keep! I could ask amongst my friends, for after all we are not the first people this has happened to. They might know of a good doc. I … I want to help …’ and because suddenly he had realised how bitterly she was crying, ‘You’re upset, poor kid! Come and lie down on the bed for a bit, and I … I’ll nip round to the shop to see if they have a lemon meringue pie left. You like them, and perhaps it would cheer you up.’ Then, ‘I am so deeply sorry.’

  ‘I feel so awful.’

  ‘I know, you poor dear, but lie down and try to stop crying. Now dry your eyes and I’ll get the lemon meringue pie.’

  ‘Very well.’

  He had always been a kind man, and the grey-blue eyes were anxious now. She went into the bedroom, and lay down on the uncomfortable bed. There was a photograph of his mother on the bedside table, a quiet lady sitting in the garden in a basket chair with a cat in her arms. It was such an ordinary photograph that somehow that agitated her more. Whatever she thought or did, she knew that the deeply passionate wonder of fulfilment had gone, and she was starkly unhappy.

  She did not want marriage. That was the truth.

  It would have been easier if her father had been more modern, not the hardboiled business man who prided himself on his remorselessness. Her mother would not dare to help her. She thought of old Aunt Chrissie, perhaps twice their age but far more understanding, and then she knew Aunt Chrissie was too old.

  The shadow was here in the room. The unformed presence. An unknown unreality which was totally real, she knew, yet could not explain it. Impossible, she thought.

  She lay there sobbing, hating Solihull with the post-war Birmingham creeping out towards it. Detesting the bungalows in profusion, picture windows and cheap verandahs, armies of little houses everywhere like strangers trespassing on the sweetly live land. Her father accepted them, for he was investing in a form of inferior roofing, and as far as he was concerned the more the merrier; the wreck of an established beauty did not fret him.

  Thinking again, the girl wondered if the fact that she had gone to school at Chatterworth had in some ways upset things. Her mother had wanted it for her, and she had always felt that she had been lucky to go there (anyway that was where she had met Sarah). But now, was this so? Aunt Chrissie had said, ‘Good schools are all right, but they cause splits in the home.’ What a lot that nice old lady had known!

  Lying here, suddenly the tears ended. The phantom shadow seemed to reach out and to touch her with a lazy finger, almost as though persuasively it would guide. Life shows the way … was what it said, and at that moment she remembered the significance of the hunter’s moon under which she had been born. Other people were unaware of the occasional second presence in a room, or walking across a garden with them, or being vaguely near. They felt that they were the only people in this hard world, and had not eyes with which to see, and ears with which to hear.

  As she remembered these things, Diana suddenly appreciated a dominant fact, life was changing within her. Here, in what she would have thought to be her darkest hour, she saw light. The flame colour of a fiery moon.

  Chapter Two

  DECISION

  John returned rather triumphantly because he had managed to get the last lemon meringue pie and a pot of clotted cream to eat with it. He then occupied himself with the final arrangements of getting the tea, for, after all, Diana would have to eat something even if she did not fancy the idea. When he brought in the pot, she had the collapsed sensation of one who is utterly lost, and it was then that John produced the brandy flask from his hip pocket.

  ‘A spot of this will make you feel worlds better, darling,’ he announced, entirely recovered, one would have thought.

  It did.

  Five minutes later she asked in a completely calm voice, ‘John, why do we have to get married?’

  He turned to her in surprise. ‘What an extraordinary thing to ask! What do you suppose people would say? What do you imagine your father would think?’

  ‘They wouldn’t know, for we could pretend.’

  For a moment he considered it, then dismissed it. ‘Oh no. The baby must have a name, my name, for after all he is my son.’

  Then more quickly, ‘Now for heaven’s sake don’t argue. I expect you feel ill, and no wonder, but I’ll get a taxi and take you along to Sarah, it’ll help you seeing her. I hope you’ve got some money? I’ve almost run out.’

  ‘Yes, I have. I’m sorry to be difficult, but I feel strange, almost as if I were not entirely here.’

  ‘Perhaps most women feel like this when they are going to have a baby.’

  Possibly he was right, and even as he said it she felt a longing to escape from the flat where she had told him everything. It had something of the prison about its make-up. Sarah would, of course, make her feel better, for she was a quick commanding personality, who had always known all the answers to life’s problems, even when it came to the difficulties of ridding oneself of that objectionable French mistress who twisted the arm when enraged. It was Sarah who discovered her aversion to wasps, and took some into the classroom in a tiny jewel box which she kept for the purpose.

  ‘I’ll slip down and get a taxi,’ John said.

  Diana waited in the doorway for him, knowing that she did not want him to come along to Sarah with her, and not knowing how to persuade him to stay behind. Sarah had never really liked him, and was one of those girls who find pretence difficult. Yet maybe Diana would be mistress of the situation, for the part that Sarah would utterly understand was the poignant realisation of Diana’s coming here to tell her lover, and perhaps to recapture some of the enchanting emotion from which this babe had been created, and then to have been so shocked. To her shame she no longer loved John. Against this background the man had altered entirely, or she herself had. It bewildered her to feel like this, but she could not fling the feeling aside.

  John had been entirely middle-class and everyday in his anxiety to give his child a name and a legal position, and perhaps even more to ease the awkwardness of the dilemma. He had suggested that a doctor could put everything right for them. That if they were too hard-up, Diana could teach music or French, a thing she hated to think of. The idea had flashed back a Victorian picture into her mind, of an impoverished gentlewoman who filled a post of this kind when her finances were crippling her. This now was the forties of a changing England which had survived the war, a world with a future; it was unbelievable.

  Now she could not associate this man with the lover, for the lover had been ecstatic, with the salty sea before them, the chattering shrieking chorus of gulls on the wing, and the feeling that the entire world was theirs. It was of course a foolish feeling, following the supremely foolish pattern of love, riding high on an emotional tide, but maybe none can stem that tide.

  John was anxious to be matter-of-fact and to drift comfortably over the predicament, yet he had dismayed her by suggesting that a doctor could be a help. He did not seem to understand that this was a live being, their son or their daughter. He had showed himself in a tra
gic new light, and perhaps for the first time she saw him as he really was. She hated to see through him, right through him, with that startling clarity which comes when life suddenly rounds a corner.

  He came back eagerly. ‘The taxi is outside.’

  ‘I’ll come. I’m quite all right now, and please, John, I would much rather go there alone. I … I’d like it better that way.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ yet under it she had the vague suspicion that the suggestion had relieved him.

  ‘Absolutely sure.’

  They went down the stairs which smelt of indifferent lino and cheap paint, yet nothing in the way of decoration could change the hard crude lines of the building, the too steep, too erect stairs, and the sharpish drop down to the too narrow hallway. He talked hard all the time, and Diana realised that it was because he was dismally afraid.

  ‘You’re not to worry about this, dear, because I’ll get the lot fixed. When we’ve done it, through with the wedding and all, then we’ll tell your folks what has happened. We had better say that we were secretly married last year and had to wait all that time for Devonshire as a sort of honeymoon. In a way that was exactly what it was. Don’t worry. There’s no need to be losing sleep over it, you know,’ and he gave a small rather nervous laugh.

  ‘You think that is the only thing to do?’

  ‘But of course. Now cheer up! I promise you it is all going to be okay, and it will be a truly lovely baby.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  They approached the waiting cab, an old one, of the type which always reminded her of hens squatting in the dust at a farm near Solihull where she and old Cook used to go for eggs. Squat hens, hens with the middle-aged spread!

  ‘Take my advice, dear, and don’t tell Sarah too much. She’s the talkative kind, and we don’t want this being chattered about yet. The fewer people who know what has happened, the better, I’d have said.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good!’ He had recovered from the first shock and was trying to keep up the gaily happy exterior. That was something he had inherited from the R.A.F., that slightly exaggerated gaiety without which they could not have lived, the spirit which had saved England, but which now somehow struck a discordant note, or so it seemed to her. ‘I’ll ring you up tonight, precious; take care of yourself, for you are precious.’

  ‘I don’t feel particularly precious.’

  ‘But by jingo, you are! Of course you are!’

  She kissed him, ashamed that it should be almost casual, then she got into the cab and gave the man Sarah’s address. She turned to glance out of the back window as the taxi throbbed violently and started off, but already John had gone inside; perhaps he had not expected her to do this; and for a moment now she could afford to relax, not to think too deeply, to pray a little, and to hope. Surely it was not as bad as she thought? Something would put it right, she still had the desperate faith that something must happen, a premonition, a shadow within her, a sense of understanding, and yet if nothing happened … what? It would be nice to see Sarah, her friend from school days; Sarah the daughter of a baron who had never got over the fact that she was not a son.

  ‘I was the horrid surprise,’ was the way she put it. ‘The bother is that it takes all sorts to make a world, the nice ones and the nasties. Poor Ma, and poor poor Charlie!’ She had always called her father by his Christian name, half derisively at first, just as she spoke of the baroness as ‘Ma’, hotly resented at moments. They never had the son they so desired. Sarah put it casually, ‘Something went wrong with Ma soon after I was born, and she had to have the bag of tricks removed. Beastly for her, but once gone never regretted, I should have thought.’

  Diana thought of Sarah with amusement, with the sense of delight and confidence which her friend could always give her. Perhaps Sarah was the only one with whom she talked about old Cook and the hunter’s moon. Sarah was convinced that it meant that Diana was psychic, and insisted that she told her fortune. In fun, Diana had played up and had pretended to do it.

  The hand lay within her own, a picture of small hillocks of flesh, of lines carved intricately and closely, and of a central plain. Then somehow she did not have to pretend as she had expected, for predominant facts shuffled into the picture, and the words came in an eager flow. They were not words that she read from a book, or spoke herself, but appeared to be poured into her, and she repeated them, not knowing whence the next ones would come. There was the rich marriage to a man who was older than herself. Later there were events coming into the story, but for now a cloud hid the full picture, and she could give only the immediate surroundings.

  Sarah had watched her with those lovely greenish eyes of hers which went so well with her red hair. She spoke of it as being ‘The Cleopatra Combination’, and reminded others, ‘I always recall what happened to that poor lady, I shall be pretty careful for myself. No asps for me, thank you!’

  Sarah had left school when Ma died rather suddenly, which was entirely unexpected, and the shock of it made her only child believe that she had cared far more deeply for her than had been the case. Sarah was eighteen at the time, and she had panicked. A year later Charles re-married, and Sarah hated the slapdash modern girl whom he had selected, within six years of her own age, and almost immediately she got busy on the crying need to have a son. In fact she had twin sons.

  ‘Too much,’ said Sarah with determination, and she packed her bags and left home. Only a short time later she married Herbert Jamieson.

  Diana would not have picked Herbert for her, he was not the sort of man whom one admired enormously, nor was one attracted to him. In the mid-thirties, he was not tall, and threatened to put on weight. He was a director of one of those big firms which had done so remarkably well in the war, and (if their prospectus could be believed) looked like doing even better in the peace. It was a big wedding, Charles wanted that. St Margaret’s, Westminster, and the flowers alone cost a fortune, the red carpet ran into pounds a yard. Herbert was kindly and had a generous heart. He gave the sole bridesmaid a handsome present, a hunter’s moon watch, which she adored. ‘To bring you luck,’ he told her.

  They were happy, of course, for Herbert spoilt Sarah, and she was one of those people who mop up spoiling with a lusty appetite. They lived in one of the well-built houses which stand behind Harrods, with a pale blue front door and matching shutters pinned back beside the windows. Herbert could afford to spend a fortune, and the house asked this. If he had waited a trifle late to wed, now most certainly they need want for nothing in their marriage.

  Diana got out of the taxi feeling better; she paid the man, climbed the three white steps and rang the bell, to be promptly answered by the manservant who led her within; Sarah always managed to get servants when others couldn’t. Diana was escorted into the lounge at the back of the house which looked out on to one of those paved London gardens with bay trees in it. In the room Sarah awaited her. She was a tall girl, much taller than Diana, with vivid auburn hair cut like a boy’s on a delicately poised head. Her bright green eyes had captivated Herbert and won him over. Perhaps Sarah was one of those girls who are born to command, and she knew exactly what to do with her own life, and when to do it. She was undoubtedly fond of Herbert, and he was very good to her.

  She glanced at her friend, and in an instant summed up the situation for Diana. ‘You’ve been seeing John?’

  ‘I ‒ I came up for that.’

  ‘Sit down,’ and then, as the door shut on the manservant, ‘You look absolutely washed out, what on earth have you been doing to yourself? Or is it something John has been doing?’

  ‘He’s been most awfully kind,’ she lied, for at all costs she must try to keep the situation in hand.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure. That’s just about all John can be. If you ask me, you are wasting your time on him, and I’ve always said so. Now have a cocktail? Maybe it will put some colour into your face. My goodness, you do look wishy-washy!’

  ‘You know that I hate cocktails.�
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  ‘That’s bosh! Just rubbish! You need something to brisk you up a bit,’ and at that very moment the manservant reappeared with a tray of cocktails which he set down before Sarah. She handed one to Diana, and the girl did not know why it worried her so much. She did not know what to do because it seemed that her heart was actually turning over inside her.

  As the door shut behind the man, she spoke again. ‘I don’t really want it, and I’m sure that I oughtn’t to have it.’

  ‘But why not?’ and then, as a thought suddenly pierced through Sarah, and startled her, ‘Oh, my God! Don’t tell me that you’re like that!’

  Possibly Diana would never know why she spoke the truth save that perhaps she had the feeling that she was utterly exhausted and had come to the end of her tether. Perhaps John had been just too awful, and she herself too worried, she did not know, but she set down the glass, and looked straight up at her friend. ‘Yes, I am,’ was what she said.

  ‘Good God! Not John’s? I didn’t know that he had it …’ she pulled herself up short, and changed her tune. ‘Not John’s?’

  ‘Yes, of course it is.’

  ‘Who would have thought it? It has got me beat. John … John behaving that way …’

  The moment had come when Diana realised that she could hold back no longer, she knew that she had to tell somebody about it, and it had far better be her old friend. Whatever John had said, she must talk, for he did not realise the loneliness, the sense of horror and misery, and the need for comfort, yet when she spoke her voice was quite calm.

  ‘It was last September when we went down to Devonshire for that holiday. I sent you a postcard of the little inn, it … it was all utterly charming. The crowds had gone, we never heard a trace of the Lancashire accent, and … and John had a blue jersey which somehow attracted me. There were thatched roofs, and beds of fuchsias in flower, God only knows why that sort of thing makes such a big difference, but it does. It did for me, I mean.’

  ‘It does for everyone, and they find it out sooner or later, for Nature is a proper old cheat,’ said Sarah. Her voice had gone quieter, the first surprise dead, and now there was intense sympathy in it.