‘Well, Maurice,’ she said.
‘Hallo, Diana. Let’s go, shall we?’
‘Maurice, don’t you think it’s rather extraordinary of you to have decided to come along after all this afternoon?’ She said this in full-blooded oral Chick’s Own style, with tiny hyphens of silence between the syllables of the hard words. To say it all while being seen to do so, she had to bend both neck and knees and also rely on my remaining twisted round in my seat and leaning deeply over towards her.
‘We can talk about that when we’re on our way.’
‘But don’t you think so? To be prepared to make advances to somebody else’s wife less than eighteen hours after you’ve seen your father die?’
The lack of hesitancy about the number of hours, evincing previous calculation, had a point to it. I understood now why I had been so sure earlier that she would appear as asked: I had sensed that she would not have been able to resist the chance of such a meaty interrogation-session. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘If you’ll get in I’ll see if I can explain.’
‘I mean, most men who’ve had that happen to them wouldn’t even contemplate that sort of thing. What makes you so different?’
‘I’ll be giving you a full demonstration of it shortly. Come on.’
As if only then making up her mind, she settled herself beside me. I took her in my arms and kissed her forcefully. She remained passive until I put my hand on her breast, when she promptly removed it. Nevertheless, I was sure she was going to yield that afternoon when she was ready to, and this time understood at the same moment why I was sure. By opening her legs to me today of all days, she would be being strangely responsive to my strange need, finding herself strangely in tune with this strange man—in other words, she could represent herself as an interesting person. But before she got on to being strangely responsive, she was going to exact her full toll by making me put up with her questioning patiently enough, and long enough, for it to seem that I agreed she was an interesting person. Seeming, luckily for me, was all that was going to be required, since she needed no real confirmation of her view of herself. True, but why, then, was there any need for me even to do any seeming? Most likely she was just looking forward to the simple pleasure of watching my antics as I battled to master my impatience.
Diana had opened her newspaper—The Guardian, of course —but was evidently not reading it. When, as we approached a corner, an old man sitting in his garden came into view, she hid her face in the middle pages. Good security, and a further good sign, had one been needed, but if she wanted to avoid being seen in my car why had she just now stood by it in the open for a full minute? Other people’s priorities are endlessly odd.
‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked.
‘Well, I’m afraid there’s nothing in the love-nest line available, but it’s a warm day and there hasn’t been any rain for nearly a fortnight, so I thought we could manage very nicely out of doors. There’s an ideal spot less than a mile from here.’
‘Well known to you from previous use for the same general purpose, no doubt.’
‘That’s it.’
‘Maurice, will you be frightfully annoyed if I ask you something?’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so. Try me and see what happens.’
‘Maurice, what is it that makes you such a tremendous womanizer?’
‘But I’m not. I was fairly active in my youth, but that’s a long time ago.’
‘You are a tre … men … dous womanizer. Everybody in the village knows that no attractive female who comes to your house is safe from you.’
‘How often do you think an unattached one of those comes wandering in?’
‘They don’t have to be unattached, do they? What about the wife of that Dutch tulip-grower in the spring?’
‘Soil expert. That was different. He passed out in the dining-room, David put him to bed, and she said she didn’t feel sleepy and it was a beautiful night. What could I do?’
‘But what’s at the back of it all, Maurice? What makes you so determined to make love to me, for instance?’
‘Sex, I should imagine.’
I knew this would be nowhere near good enough for Diana in her present mood, indeed in the only mood I had ever seen her in in the three years I had known her. Glumly, I tried to run up in my mind a spontaneous-sounding remake of the standard full answer—reproductive urge, power thing, proving one’s masculinity (to be introduced one moment and decisively rejected the next), restlessness, curiosity, man-polygamous-woman-monagamous (to be frankly described as old hat but at the same time not dismissible out of hand) and the rest of it, the whole mixture heftily spiked with pornographic flattery. However, I had barely started on this grim chore when Diana herself let me off that particular hook by attending to our route.
‘Where are we going? You’re taking us back to the village.’
‘Just round the edge of the village. We cross the main road in a minute and go up behind the hill, a bit beyond where the new houses are going up.’
‘But that’s almost opposite the Green Man.’
‘Not really. And you can’t be seen from there.’
‘Pretty close all the same.’ A farm lorry came into view ahead and The Guardian went up again. From within it she continued, ‘Is that part of it, Maurice? Part of the thrill for you? Flaunting it?’
‘There’ll be no flaunting if I have any say in the matter, and as I said no one can see you anyway.’
‘Still…’ She lowered the paper. ‘Do you know another thing that’s been puzzling me dreadfully?’
‘What?’
‘Why you haven’t done anything about me until practically the other day. You and I have known each other jolly nearly since Jack and I moved to Fareham, and you just treat me as a friend, and then you suddenly start making these colossal passes at me. All I’m asking is, why … the change?’
This was her least dispiriting query so far, at any rate in the sense that I could think of no answer, either then or later. Almost at random, I said, ‘I suppose I’ve realized I’m nearly an old man. I haven’t got all the time in the world any longer.’
‘That’s complete and utter rubbish, Maurice, and you know it, darling. You haven’t got a paunch and you’ve got all your hair and I can’t think how you do it when you drink so much but you look about forty-four or five at the outside, so don’t be so silly.’
She had more or less had to say something on these lines, since to declare a fondness, whether sneaking or flagrant, for budding old-age pensioners would have made her seem to herself one of the wrong sorts of interesting person. But it was nice to hear it said just the same.
We duly crossed the main road beside the dilapidated and overgrown churchyard where Thomas Underhill was buried, and climbed a twisting lane where a hazy afternoon sun came down diagonally through a straggle of poplars. Just beyond the crest I drove the truck into a turning so narrow that the hedges brushed the doors on either side. Two minutes later I took us off this into a space almost enclosed by a high bank, a rough semicircle of brambles and a sudden rise in the ground between us and the main road. I stopped the engine.
‘Is this it?’
‘It’s nearly it. There’s a splendid little hollow in the ground by those bushes that you can’t even see from here.’