‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, he gets everything set up, lights and angles and everything, and spends hours working out the composition and the poses with one of his little boy assistants – standing in for the model, I mean. They look so sweet in their black jeans and T-shirts, posing as if they were in ball gowns, and then finally you get called in and he tells you where he wants you to stand and how, and then after about another half-hour fiddling, he summons one of the assistants, stands back, folds his arms, and says, “Now!” very peremptorily. The assistant presses the button or the Rolleiflex lead or whatever. He’ll do that a few times, and then you have to move a fraction, or he tells the fashion editor to tweak the dress an inch, and then, when it’s all exactly as he likes, he does it again. Fascinating. Tiring, though,’ she added.
‘And what sort of clothes tomorrow?’
‘Evening. Hartnell and Hardy Amies. I’ve been told to bring lots of costume jewellery; I haven’t got that much, but as it’s Vogue they usually supply quite a lot themselves. And evening shoes. Last time I got ticked off for only having two pairs of gloves. I must do a bit of a stock-up this time. Will you come with me? Or are you too tired? I’m staying on an extra day. Just for fun, really, and to do a bit of shopping. Mummy will love it and Johnathan just won’t notice.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ asked Wendelien. ‘It seems strange to me.’
‘Wendelien, honestly, I’m sure. He has absolutely no interest in what I do in London, and what’s more he doesn’t care. He wouldn’t even mind if I had a lover, I swear. God, I wish I did,’ she added, and Wendelien was quite shocked by the seriousness of her expression, the ache in her voice.
‘Well, I can’t quite believe that he really doesn’t care,’ Wendelien said. ‘And he must see the pictures in the magazines. It does sound a bit – odd.’
‘He is odd,’ said Diana dismissively.
God, it had been a mistake. A dreadful, shocking, obscene mistake: Johnathan felt so angry with himself. How had he made it? How had he been blind enough, deaf enough even? Everything she said now drove him to distraction. How could he not have seen it was witchcraft, that she had worked some spell, confusing him with her beauty, her charm? Why had he lacked the sheer common sense to see that she was using him to get what she wanted: the fashionable life in London, the chic house, the smart friends?
How had he thought she could possibly want what he wanted, care about what he cared about? He supposed she had tried at first; and he could see it was hard for her, the brutal weather, the harsh, forbidding landscape as it must have seemed to her – and yet so lovely when you got to know it, with its crags and waterfalls and great stretches of moorland with its ever-changing colours and vast, amazing skies.
It was so painfully obvious that she was never going to fit in. All the women he knew up here in Yorkshire had done their best, asked her to join things and to help with things and had in the early days asked them for meals. She had given a few and they had felt bound to reciprocate. She had so clearly not enjoyed their dinners, sitting looking bored while the talk ranged from farming to county shows and county politics. Of course, it wasn’t as charming as London gossip. But it all mattered to him, and he would have hoped she would make an effort on that account. His mother wasn’t easy, he could see that, but she had tried very hard at first to be welcoming and she had so much to cope with. Not once had Diana gone over to sit with his father or take him out for a drive, amuse him just for a few hours. That, more than anything, hurt and angered him.
As for sex, Johnathan literally couldn’t remember when they had last made love, and he was miserably aware that even there she found him a disappointment. He should have ended the whole thing immediately after the war, when he had known, could see as they sat there in that bloody restaurant in the Savoy how much she would hate it and how hopeless it would be. He could have done it there and then, cleanly, easily. He could have made her a generous settlement and they could both have begun again, for there had been no children. There he always stopped, thinking of Jamie, his beloved Jamie with the floppy dark hair and the wide brown eyes and the hero worship and the assumption that he was the source of every possible wisdom. Little Jamie, stomping round the farm after him, afraid of nothing, not the hugest shire horse, the most massive bull, the largest herd of cows – as long as Johnathan was with him, holding his small hand in his big one. He was his constant companion, sitting beside him on the tractor, following the plough with him, stomping through the muddiest field, watching, his eyes huge with wonder as the lambs were born.
He had bought him a pony for his fourth birthday, a sweetly sturdy Yorkshire Fell pony, darkest grey, the colour of the Yorkshire crags, with the black shaggy mane and long tail that were the breed’s trademark, steady as a rock but fast, or would be one day when it was asked of him. He loved to ride with Jamie when he had time, which was rarely; but Diana had usurped him there, for she had plenty of it to fill, and he never disliked her more than when watching her riding out of the yard, Jamie on the leading rein, heading for the moors, looking back and chatting and smiling at him.
He didn’t know what to do. He would have loved to have got rid of her but he couldn’t divorce her now. He had no grounds and besides, that could mean losing Jamie, or certainly risk losing him. The only way he could be sure of getting custody, or fairly sure, was if she could be convicted of adultery. That seemed, given her present mode of behaviour, a real possibility; but getting proof would entail sordid procedures like having her followed by a private detective, and the resulting court case would be squalid beyond belief. Maybe that didn’t matter; his mother would be delighted to be rid of Diana, she hated to be so much as in the same room as her, and it really would have no effect on their position in Yorkshire and the circle they moved in. And most people would be sympathetic, kind even; nobody liked Diana and although no one ever mentioned it, her increasingly frequent absences hardly spoke of a successful marriage.
But then he thought again – how would it affect Jamie? If nothing else, Diana was a good mother, surprisingly patient, loving and fun, endlessly inventive with games and treats, reading to him by the hour, playing the tedious make-believe games he loved. Did he really have the right to deprive Jamie of that?
All these things and more Johnathan pondered as he rode the tractor one long, lovely spring afternoon, when Yorkshire agreed to soften just a little and yield some blossom in the hedgerow here and an occasional cluster of daffodils in some hidden hollow there: and when he knew he would get home to an empty house after Diana had set off again to London.
Unbidden, the thought of Catherine came into his head.