He had been touchingly grateful, had said he realised it would be hard for her and not what she had expected. ‘But hopefully, darling, there’ll be little ones about soon, and they’ll be fun and keep you busy, and if there’s one thing I can offer you it’s a jolly nice house.’
That was true; they would have the Dower House, a seventeenth-century, six-bedroomed, beautifully proportioned place built by an unusually civilised and artistic Gunning for a wife, who had perhaps, Diana thought, been a refugee from the south like herself. It had huge fireplaces, a lovely staircase rising from the stone-flagged hall, and tall shuttered windows: but it was still grey, built of Yorkshire stone, and cold, so cold. Nothing grew up its rather forbidding frontage; it stood there, unadorned, stark and demanding. She could not love it, or even like it at first, but it was hers now and it gave her something to do. She had a talent for houses; she got rid of much of the heavy, seventeenth-century furniture – to Lady Gunning’s clear disapproval – and went eighteenth instead, moving some charming sofas and chairs and pretty side tables into the drawing room, and a lovely table for sixteen, with matching chairs for entertaining, into the dining room. She hung heavy curtains in the windows, a protest against the cold as much as the very plain shutters, installed two modern bathrooms upstairs, and even put carpets down in the bedrooms.
Guildford was half a mile from the Dower House; one of Diana’s first demands had been for a car of her own, and she bought a pretty little Austin 7 which became her lifeline so she could potter backwards and forwards to the house, down into the village and – she had hoped – to visit friends. But they had proved a bit of a mirage; as had the social life she had hoped for. Johnathan was always busy on the farm and estate, and too exhausted to host dinner parties. So the lovely table remained unused, and the drawing room was deserted as a place for Diana to pursue her (very limited) hobbies. She would sit in the kitchen by the Aga, listening to the radio and devouring any novels she could get her hands on.
She tried; she really tried. She offered to do the paperwork for the farm, knowing that she was efficient and would do it well. Johnathan, initially enthusiastic, consulted his mother and came back to Diana rather shamefaced to say that his mother said she was already doing it perfectly well. She made overtures to the other young women, joined their committees, helped with their charities, but she found no friends among them. She was an outsider, and they did not seem to like her enough to make an effort for her.
Johnathan was also too exhausted to want to have sex with her very often. That was a relief, in its way – it hadn’t really got much better – but she couldn’t help feeling rejected in another; it also of necessity lessened her chances of becoming pregnant. The first year came and went and she experienced her first Yorkshire winter, which created in her a true hatred of the place, with its violent raw winds, its long grey seemingly endless days, its icy daybreaks, its dreadful silence, devoid of birdsong or sunlight. She couldn’t walk, she couldn’t ride; it was too hostile, it seemed turned against her. She tried but she would return from some expedition almost before it had begun, defeated, raging silently, angry with Johnathan, and worse, with herself.
Occasionally she went to stay with her mother, in the sweet chill which was what the Hampshire winter seemed, and cried and railed against her fate. Her mother, worried about how thin she had become, how unlike her sparkling self, would allow her to stay an extra day or two, and then found herself insisting she go home again, literally forcing her onto the train.
‘Spring is coming, darling,’ she would say. She would prepare a parcel for her, packing copies of Vogue and Tatler, bottles of Dior scent, her favourite Coty make-up, some pretty lace hankies, novels by her favourite authors, Georgette Heyer and Angela Thirkell. Then she would drive home to West Hilton having dropped Diana at the station, weeping all the way. It was a dreadful thing to see your child so helplessly – and she was beginning to fear hopelessly – unhappy.
Laura was marking books when Tom came in. It was something she actually enjoyed, unlike so many of her colleagues. She spent a lot of time and trouble on it, adding comments to her ticks and crosses, even in maths books, so that the children could learn from them, rather than just look for the mark at the bottom of each piece of work, and move on. Like all the best teachers, Laura’s desire was to enthuse her pupils and expand their interest in subjects, rather than simply inform them; and although she was not always successful, she knew she did well. She particularly enjoyed the older children’s work, the nine-and ten-year-olds. The older pupils were gearing up for their examinations into the grammar schools; and while the subjects didn’t include anything more basic than English, arithmetic and the general paper, she knew that a child who had been enthused by a study of how the North Americans lived (other than fighting one another as cowboys and Indians) or was intrigued by how exactly the marriage of Henry VIII had changed the religious character of England was more likely to bring an intelligence and clear-sightedness to the hardest part of the eleven-plus.
Even as she coached her pupils, some considerable part of her fretted over this disparity and wished there could be some more equable solution so that all children might have access to the advantages of the grammar schools and not be cast aside into the limbo of the Secondary Moderns, failures for all the world, including themselves, to recognise at the age of eleven.
She had already finished one pile and was embarking on history, when Tom appeared. She never failed to be slightly surprised at the way her heart seemed to lift when he returned to her each evening. It wasn’t of course that she expected him not to do so, it was that she loved him so much and never felt that things were quite in order until he was there. She often wondered if their relationship was rare in its happiness; listening to her fellow teachers who were married, and her friends as well, come to that, she felt extraordinarily fortunate.