His answer came very quickly:
MY DEAR DINNY, –
I was delighted to get a letter from you. To answer your last question first. I will do my best to get the lawyers to ‘come clean,’ but if they won’t tell you, I can’t imagine their telling me. Still, I can try. Though I fancy that if your sister or young Croom insisted they’d have to tell. Now about pigs – [there followed certain information, and a lamentation that agriculture was still not being properly tackled.] If only they would realize that all the needed pigs, poultry, and potatoes, nearly all the vegetables, much of the fruits, and much more than the present dairy produce, can really be produced at home, and by a graduated prohibition of foreign produce encourage, and indeed force, our home growers to supply the home market, we should, within ten years, have a living and profitable native agriculture once more, no rise to speak of in the cost of living, and a huge saving in our imports bill. You see how new I am to politics! Wheat and meat are the red herrings across the trail. Wheat and meat from the Dominions, and the rest (bar hot climate fruits and vegetables) home-grown, is my motto. I hope your father agrees. Clare is becoming restive, and I’m wondering if she wouldn’t be happier in a more active job than this. If I can come across a good one, I shall advise her to take it. Would you ask your mother whether I should be in the way if I came down for the last weekend this month? She was good enough to tell me to let her know any time I was coming to the constituency. I was again at Cavalcade the other night. It wears well, but I missed you. I can’t even begin to tell you how I missed you.
Your ever faithful
EUSTACE DORNFORD
Missed her! After the faint warmth those wistful words aroused, she thought almost at once of Clare. Restive! Who would be otherwise in her anomalous position? She had not been down at Condaford since the case. And that seemed to Dinny very natural. However one might say it didn’t matter what people thought, it did, especially in a place where one had grown up, and belonged, as it were, to the blood royal of the neighbourhood. And Dinny thought, unhappily: ‘I don’t know what I want for her – and that’s lucky, because one day she’ll see exactly what she wants for herself.’ How nice to see exactly what one wanted for oneself! She read Dornford’s letter again, and suddenly faced her own feelings for the first time. Was she or was she not ever going to marry? If so, she would as soon marry Eustace Dornford as anyone – she liked, admired, could talk to him. But her – past! How funny it sounded! Her ‘past’, strangled almost from birth, yet the deepest thing she would ever know! ‘One of these days you’ll have to go down into the battle again.’ Unpleasant to be thought a shirker by one’s own mother! But it wasn’t shirking! Spots of colour rose in her cheeks. It was something no one would understand – a horror of being unfaithful to him to whom she had belonged in soul if not in body. Of being unfaithful to that utter surrender, which she knew could never be repeated.
‘I am not in love with Eustace,’ she thought; ‘he knows it, he knows I can’t even pretend it. If he wants me on those terms, what is it fair for me – what is it possible for me to do?’ She went out into the old yew-hedged rose garden, where the first burst of roses had begun, and wandered round, smelling at this and that, followed half-heartedly by the spaniel Foch, who had no feeling for flowers.
‘Whatever I do,’ she thought, ‘I ought to do now. I can’t keep him on tenterhooks.’
She stood by the sundial, where the shadow was an hour behind its time, and looked into the eye of the sun over the fruit trees beyond the yew hedges. If she married him, there would be children – without them it would not be possible. She saw frankly – or thought she did – where she stood in the matter of sex. What she could not see was how it would all turn for herself and for him in the recesses of the spirit. Restless, she wandered from rose-bush to rose-bush, extinguishing the few greenfly between her gloved fingers. And, in a corner, with a sort of despair, the spaniel Foch sat down unnoticed and ate a quantity of coarse grass.
She wrote to Dornford the same evening. Her mother would be delighted if he would come for that weekend. Her father quite agreed with his views on agriculture, but was not sure that anyone else did, except Michael, who, after listening to him carefully one evening in London, had said: ‘Yes. What’s wanted is a lead, and where’s it coming from?’ She hoped that when he came down he would be able to tell her about those costs. It must have been thrilling to see Cavalcade again. Did he know a flower called meconopsis, if that was the way to spell it, a sort of poppy of a most lovely colour? It came from the Himalayas, and so would be suitable for Campden Hill, which she believed had much the same climate. If he could induce Clare to come down it would rejoice the hearts of the aborigines. This time she signed herself ‘always yours’, a distinction too subtle to explain even to herself.