London suburbs but left it after two years. She became an unsuccessful commercial artist, she worked in an advertising agency. But mainly she just lived. She moved to Earls Court. She had adventures. She lived with men, some rich ones who found her puzzling and gave her expensive presents, and some poor ones who took her money and got drunk and wept. All this she recounted to Miles later on, enjoying his incomprehension and his quite involuntary twitches of disapproval. She had been looking for him, she told him, all this time. She had dreamed of a separated man, a sad austere secluded man, a man with a great sorrow, an ascetic. She was a moth that wanted to be burnt by a cold cold flame.
She loved him very much and although he told her at first that he was an empty vessel, a nothing, and that her love was to him a nothing, she succeeded at last in attracting his attention. Miles was thirty-five. Diana was twenty-eight. Miles became aware that she was beautiful. She was a fair-haired brown-eyed girl with a straight assertive nose and a big well-made mouth and a large flat brow and an ivory complexion and a cool enigmatic expression. She tucked her hair well back behind her ears and thrust her pale smooth large-eyed face boldly forward at the world. A quality in her which seemed at first to Miles to be shamelessness later seemed to him more like courage. In the early days of his interest he apprehended her, not without a certain pleasure, as a courtesan; and later, when he was certain that she loved him, he felt her “adventurousness” as intensifying, not diminishing, the love which she had to offer. When he married her he still felt that she was his mistress, and that pleased both of them.
Of course Diana understood about Parvati. She knew that for Miles this had been something supreme, a love not of this world only. She submitted, in a way which touched his heart and first made him believe absolutely in her love, to being the second not only in time. She accepted indeed the fact that there was not even any question of a contest. A place in his life, a part of himself, perhaps the best part, was simply not available to her. This Miles tried to explain to her while he was still trying to dissuade her love. Soon after, perhaps even then, he was relieved to find that he had laid every vexation upon her and told her every unhappy truth without dissuading her at all. In the end he stopped fighting and let her use the whole huge force of her woman’s nature to comfort him, to lure him out of the dark box in which he had been living. His pleasure in her joy was the best experience in his life for many years.
They moved to the house in Kempsford Gardens and after a while, although she said nothing about it, Miles knew that Diana was hoping for a child. Miles was not sure what he felt about children. His child, the one, had died in the Alps. Could there be another? He began vaguely to want a son. But the years passed and nothing happened. They looked at each other questioningly in the spaces of the house. Their life was simple. Miles had never craved for company. Now that he had Diana he was perfectly contented. He would have been happy to see no one else. Diana met her friends at lunchtime. They hardly ever entertained.
Diana supported, even invented, the formalities of their life together. She made the little house in Kempsford Gardens as ceremonious as an old-fashioned manor house. Meals were punctual and meticulously served. Miles was not allowed in the kitchen. The house was always filled with flowers with never a petal out of place. Miles was forced to adopt a standard of tidiness which he found unnatural and absurd and to which he became completely used. It was as if Diana was determined to make him feel that he was living rather grandly and after a while he did begin to feel it. She had a power of making small things seem large, just as she had uncannily made the garden seem large, made it seem to go on and on like an enchanted garden in a tale. Miles suspected that, in all this, Diana was fighting back against her childhood in Leicester. She had once said to him thoughtfully, “You were the most distinguished of all my suitors.” Diana had her own strict routine, her own invented personal formalities. Entirely without other occupation, she filled her time with household tasks and enjoyments. There was her hour for working in the garden, her hour for doing the flowers, her hour for doing embroidery, her hour for sitting in the drawing room and reading a leather-bound book, her hour for playing on the gramophone old-fashioned popular music which Miles disliked, but to which also he had become accustomed. Diana would have enjoyed an eighteenth-century country-house life of peaceful
A change came into the life of Miles and Diana. Perhaps in a way they welcomed it, though at first it made both of them rather apprehensive. Diana’s younger sister Lisa had made a very different start in life. She read Greats at Oxford and got a first. She went to teach in a school in Yorkshire and joined the Communist Party. Diana, who was very fond of her sister, lost touch with her for a while. Lisa came south for Diana’s wedding and met Miles. Then she vanished again and when next heard of she had become a Catholic and joined the order of the Poor Clares. “I’m sure she was just attracted by the name,” Diana told Miles. “She was always rather a literary girl.” After a few years Lisa emerged from the Poor Clares and the Roman Catholic Church and went to live in Paris. She came back to England with tuberculosis and stayed with Miles and Diana during her convalescence. She got a teaching job in a school in the East End. The idea vaguely materialized that she might stay on living with Miles and Diana. She stayed on.
All three of them needed a lot of persuading that it was a good idea but were at last entirely persuaded and soon it all began to seem quite natural. Perhaps Lisa seemed to fill the gap left by the absent child in the life of the married pair. The sisters were deeply attached to each other and Miles came to be fond of his sister-in-law and to rely upon her presence. He enjoyed the sisterness of the two women, the fugitive resemblances. He liked it in the evenings when he found them sit ting together sewing. Lisa, not by nature orderly, had surrendered, even sooner than Miles had, to Diana’s domestic tyranny. It was good, after all these years
Also in some vague yet evident way Lisa did need looking after. Diana used to generalize about her sister. “She has somehow missed the bus of life.”
”She is like someone who breaks his bones if he falls over.”
”She has lost the instinct for happiness.”
”She is a bird with a broken wing.” Lisa was graver, gaunter, darker than Diana and was usually taken to be the elder sister. She was nervy and reticent and silent and solitary though she sometimes talked philosophy with Miles and was more ardent than he to complete the argument. Sometimes they got quite cross with each other and Diana had to part them. Lisa appeared to be contented in her school work and in the holidays did voluntary work for the local probation officer. Miles enjoyed her company. She puzzled him and he pitied her. She seemed a cold dewy yet wilting flower. Sometimes indeed she seemed to him simply an apparition, a shadow beside the solid reality of her sister. He and Diana shared an anxiety about her which occupied them not unpleasantly.
The sky was almost dark now, hung with a blazing evening star with tiny pinpoints of other stars round about it. The traffic was humming evenly in the Old Brompton Road. A blackbird, who always sang at the last light, was unwinding in a nearby tree the piercing and insistent pattern of his Kyrie. The damp air was turning chill in the darkness. Down below something pale was moving. A woman in a pale dress was walking slowly across the paving stones and along the path of clipped grass towards the archway. Which of them was it? The obscurity defeated his eyes as he watched the moving figure in silence.
Suddenly the light in the room was switched on.
Miles turned round abruptly and then with the same movement closed the window and pulled the curtain.
”Diana, I wish you wouldn’t do that!”
”I’m so sorry.” Diana was dressed in an old-fashioned blue embroidered kimono. Her straight hair, not yet grey, had paled without losing its lustre, to a sort of pearly sandy yellow. Her ivory face was unlined, like a face in a miniature.
”I’m sorry, I wasn’t sure if you were here.”
”Where else would I be at this time for heaven’s sake? I wish you wouldn’t come porlocking. I’m trying to work. What’s that you’ve got there?”
”A letter someone delivered by hand. It said ‘urgent’ so I thought I’d bring it up at once.”
”Don’t go, sweet. Forgive me. Who the hell’s it from, I don’t know the writing.” Miles tore the letter open.
Dear Miles,
I expect you will be surprised hearing from me like this out of the blue. The thing is this, your father is ill, as you know, and although there is no immediate cause for concern he is naturally thinking in terms of arrangements and all that. He would like to see you. He wants me to emphasize that he has nothing special in view here but just feels that he wants to see his son. I very much hope that you will feel ready to see him, as he is anxious to see you.
