Long she sat half dressed, her hands clasped between her knees, her head drooping, steeped in the narcotic of remembrance, and with a strange feeling that all the lovers in the world were sitting within her on that bed bought at Pullbred’s in the Tottenham Court Road.
Chapter Eight
CONDAFORD resented this business of love, and was, with a fine rain, as if sorrowing for the loss of its two daughters.
Dinny found her father and mother elaborately ‘making no bones’ over the loss of Clare, and only hoped they would continue the motion in her own case. Feeling, as she said, ‘very towny’, she prepared for the ordeal of disclosure by waterproofing herself and going for a tramp. Hubert and Jean were expected in time for dinner, and she wished to kill all her birds with one stone. The rain on her face, the sappy fragrance, the call of the cuckoos, and that state of tree when each has leaves in different stage of opening, freshened her body but brought a little ache to her heart. Entering a covert, she walked along a ride. The trees were beech and ash, with here and there an English yew, the soil being chalky. A woodpecker’s constant tap was the only sound, for the rain was not yet heavy enough for leaf-dripping to have started. Since babyhood she had been abroad but three times – to Italy, to Paris, to the Pyrenees, and had always come home more in love with England and Condaford than ever. Henceforth her path would lie she knew not where; there would, no doubt, be sand, fig-trees, figures by wells, flat roofs, voices calling the Muezzin, eyes looking through veils. But surely Wilfrid would feel the charm of Condaford and not mind if they spent time there now and then. His father lived in a show place, half shut up and never shown, which gave everyone the blues. And that, apart from London and Eton, was all he seemed to know of England, for he had been four years away in the war and eight years away in the East.
‘For me to discover England to him,’ she thought; ‘for him to discover the East to me.’
A gale of last November had brought down some beech trees. Looking at their wide flat roots exposed, Dinny remembered Fleur saying that selling timber was the only way to meet death duties. But Dad was only sixty-two! Jean’s cheeks the night of their arrival, when Aunt Em quoted the ‘multiply exceedingly’. A child coming! Surely a son. Jean was the sort to have sons. Another generation of Cherrells in direct line! If Wilfrid and she had a child! What then? One could not wander about with babes. A tremor of insecurity went through her. The future, how uncharted! A squirrel crossed close to her still figure and scampered up a trunk. Smiling, she watched it, lithe, red, bushy-tailed. Thank God, Wilfrid cared for animals! ‘When to God’s fondouk the donkeys are taken.’ Condaford, its bird life, woods and streams, mullions, magnolias, fantails, pastures green, surely he would like it! But her father and mother, Hubert and Jean; would he like them? Would they like him? They would not – too unshackled, too fitful, and too bitter; all that was best in him he hid away, as if ashamed of it; and his yearning for beauty they would not understand! And his change of religion, even though they would not know what he had told her, would seem to them strange and disconcerting!
Condaford Grange had neither butler nor electric light, and Dinny chose the moment when the maids had set decanters and dessert on the polished chestnut wood, lit by candles.
‘Sorry to be personal,’ she said, quite suddenly; ‘but I’m engaged.’
No one answered. Each of those four was accustomed to say and think – not always the same thing – that Dinny was the ideal person to marry, so none was happier for the thought that she was going to be married. Then Jean said:
‘To whom, Dinny?’
‘Wilfrid Desert, the second son of Lord Mullyon – he was Michael’s best man.’
‘Oh! but –!’
Dinny was looking hard at the other three. Her father’s face was impassive, as was natural, for he did not know the young man from Adam; her mother’s gentle features wore a fluttered and enquiring look; Hubert’s an air as if he were biting back vexation.
Then Lady Cherrell said: ‘But, Dinny, when did you meet him?’
‘Only ten days ago, but I’ve seen him every day since. I’m afraid it’s a first-sight case like yours, Hubert. We remembered each other from Michael’s wedding.’
Hubert looked at his plate. ‘You know he’s become a Moslem, or so they say in Khartoum.’
Dinny nodded.
‘What!’ said the General.
‘That’s the story, sir.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know, I’ve never seen him. He’s been a lot about in the East.’