“I am sorry about your father,” David said in a quiet voice beside me.
“It happened so quickly,” I answered. “And I suppose it was shock that made me behave as I did after the funeral.”
“What did you do?” he asked.
“I couldn’t stop crying,” I answered. “I just cried and cried, and Aunt Lucy, who was the only relation I sent a telegram to about Daddy, took me away with her.”
“To the Convent?”
“I didn’t realise it was a Convent for some time.”
“Why not?”
“I think I had a kind of brainstorm,” I answered, “or perhaps it was a nervous breakdown, I don’t know. But whatever it was, they only stopped me crying by keeping me more or less unconscious.”
“Poor Samantha,” David said. “I suppose I am at least partly to blame for that.”
“I think it was everything happening at once,” I answered. “After all, you and Daddy are the only people in the whole world I have to love.”
There was silence for a moment and then David said,
“Go on with your story, Samantha, I want to know exactly what happened.”
His voice was gentle and because we were alone in the dark I found it easy to talk in a manner that would have been far more difficult at any other time.
Not being able to see David, but knowing that he was there, was comforting and yet, at the same time, it was almost as he had been in my dreams.
Always when we had been together before I had been afraid of saying the wrong things, showing my ignorance or just upsetting him.
I expect it was because he was such an overpowering and vital personality that by contrast I felt insignificant and insecure.
But now because it was dark we were both as it were, disembodied, so that I felt able to talk to David as I had always wanted to, as if we were equal.
So I began telling him how when I became conscious I had found that the nun looking after me was French.
She was a refugee who had escaped from France when the Germans were advancing on Paris and she hadn’t gone back after the War.
She told me that “The Order of the Little Sisters of Mary” were Teaching nuns and there was a school attached to the Convent where she taught French.
I thought about this after she had left me to go to sleep and when she came back I said,
“Sister Thérèse, will you teach me to speak French? I know a little, but I am sure I have a terrible accent and no grammar.”
She was delighted at the idea and she insisted that I always spoke French to her whenever she came to my room.
It was then that the idea came to me that I must change myself into being what David wanted. He had said I was ‘abysmally ignorant’ and, of course, it was true.
My education, I realised, had been lamentable. I had been sent to Worcester High School for about three years, but my attendance had been very spasmodic.
If there was something extra to do at the Vicarage, I stayed at home. Also, if the weather was bad, I would find it difficult to get to school.
The station on the direct line to Worcester was three miles away and the only method of going there was by bicycle.
In the summer I rather enjoyed the ride, but in the winter when it was pouring with rain or snowing or there were strong winds, I dreaded having to bicycle off early in the morning and bicycle home when it was growing dark.
I think Mummy worried about my going alone in the train. She was always very insistent that I must find a carriage marked Ladies Only, and she made me promise that when I arrived at Worcester Station I wouldn’t hang about but hurry as quickly as I could to the High School.
Anyway, what with one thing and another, I have a suspicion that I was absent from school more times than I was present.
Before this I had a Governess, who had retired to live in a tiny cottage in Little Poolbrook, which she had inherited from a relative.
She was very old, rather disagreeable, and she used to get very cross when I didn’t understand what she told me the first time she said it. So rather than upset her, I would often pretend to have grasped the subject when I really had only the vaguest idea of what she had been trying to teach me.
I suppose if we had owned an extensive library I would have read lots of books. But apart from a set of Dickens and one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, most of the books in Daddy’s study were bound sermons or religious treatises that I found extremely dull.
Often Daddy would read extracts from the newspapers to Mummy in the evenings when she was sewing or embroidering, which she did so well, but I cannot say from that that my general knowledge was much to boast about.
In fact, David was right in everything he said about me and perhaps that was what had made me so angry.
No one really likes hearing the truth about oneself.
Lying in my bed in the little room in the Convent, which was really one of the nuns’ cells, I made up my mind that I would start to educate myself.
When Aunt Lucy came to see me, I told her what I intended and because she was so glad I was taking an interest in something and no longer crying, she went to a great deal of trouble.
She got Sister Magdalene, the nun who taught literature and history, to advise me what to read and she would bring me all the books that she thought would help me.
Surprisingly the nuns had quite a large library and, although naturally there were no modern novels and they would not have thought of including David’s book, there were plenty of the classics.
There was Thackeray, Jane Austen and Trollope, to mention but a few, and Sister Magdalene gave me books on mythology, which I enjoyed more than anything else.
The doctor insisted that I must rest, so I lay in bed and read. When he let me get up, I would sit in the garden, which was very peaceful and go on reading.
When I didn’t understand anything, I discussed it with Sister Magdalene and every day I talked to Sister Thérèse in French until she seemed really pleased with me.
Gradually I became stronger, although I still found it difficult to eat and the food at the Convent was not very tempting.
One day Aunt Lucy came out into the garden and said to me,
“Don’t you think, Samantha, that it’s time you returned to work?”
I looked at her in surprise. I had become so used to thinking of myself as an invalid that I really hadn’t realised that sooner or later I would have to either go back to London and Giles or find other employment.
Aunt Lucy had already told me that Daddy had left me everything he possessed, which wasn’t very much – just a few hundred pounds. Enough to keep me from starving, but I would certainly have to earn my own living for the rest of my life.
Somehow it was a shock to think that Aunt Lucy wanted to get rid of me.
“Do you want me to go away?” I asked.
“No, Samantha, I like having you here,” Aunt Lucy replied, “but you cannot spend the rest of your life doing nothing but read. You are young and this is not the right sort of existence for a young girl.”
“Some of the nuns are as young as I am,” I argued.
“Do you want to become a nun?” Aunt Lucy enquired.
I thought of David and knew that that was the last thing I wanted. I wanted to see him again, I wanted him to love me as he had done before he realised how very inadequate I was.
Unfortunately, learning had only made me realise how much more I had to learn.
I suppose I had always known that I was ignorant, but only when I began to study properly was I appalled to find how little I knew. There were great blank spaces in my mind that ought to have been filled with history and geography and knowledge of world events.
“There is so much I want to do here, Aunt Lucy,” I said.
She didn’t answer and I found out later that she had telephoned Giles and told him where I was.
He had, it appeared, been very worried by my disappearance, although he had thought at first that I must have gone home. Anyway he said he would like me back and he said the same to me when Aunt Lucy made me telephone him.
“Vogue and a number of other papers are asking particularly for pictures of you, Samantha,” he said. “You’ve made it very difficult for me running off in that irresponsible manner.”
“I’m sorry,” I said meekly.
“Your aunt tells me that you have been very unhappy over your father’s death,” Giles went on, “and, of course, in the circumstances, I must forgive you. But come back at once, Samantha. There is a lot of work to be done.”
I went back to London feeling nervous and rather frightened, not only of Giles but also in case I met David.
“I’ll come back only on one condition,” I said to Giles on the telephone, “and that is you don’t ask David Durham to the studio while I am there and that you don’t give him my new address.”
“Don’t you wish to see him?” Giles asked in surprise.
“No!” I replied briefly.
There was a silence as if he was thinking over what I had said and then he answered,
“Your private life is nothing to do with me, Samantha. If you don’t want to see David Durham, I shall certainly not tell him where you are living.”
When Giles saw me he was delighted that I had grown so thin.
Personally, I think I am all eyes with no face and Melanie teases me for looking like a lamppost. But Edward Molyneux and Norman Hartnell were thrilled and promised to design several dresses especially for me in their new collections.
One of the first things I did on getting back to London was to join a library and, after a week or so, they became used to my changing my books every other day and would joke about it when I appeared.
I was doing my best about my education, but I had not forgotten that David also said I was ‘absurdly innocent’!
I could still hear him saying the words in that scathing sarcastic voice that always seemed to flick me on the raw and make me feel miserable.
I thought of him with Lady Bettine and I knew that all the women who had hung around him in the past and whom perhaps he had loved, had been sophisticated and very very experienced.
It was not surprising, I told myself miserably, that he found me boring. How could I be anything else when I was as ignorant about love as I was about everything else?
The difficulty was that while I could read history and literature and other subjects, there didn’t seem to be a book to teach me about love.
I had, of course, while I was reading, learnt of the great love affairs down the centuries and, when I thought about it, I came to the conclusion that if I really loved David I had been wrong not to do what he wanted.
After all, Kings had given up their thrones, countries had gone to war, families had engaged in endless vendettas, men had been tortured or died for love!
Women had sacrificed their reputations, their children, their status in Society and even their lives, because they loved a man to the exclusion of all else.
Perhaps David was right and love was too important for us to refuse it.
I thought and thought about David and how he had wanted me to go away with him. It seemed to me that the more I read, the more I found that people were prepared to make a sacrifice of everything they held dear, if it was for someone they loved.
It took me a long time to think it out and then I told myself that if I loved David enough I must do as he wanted, however much it might be against my principles.
I kept feeling that to win him back I personally had to make a sacrifice and that nothing was too difficult or too frightening to do if it would make David love me again.
I lay awake night after night planning how the day would come when I would go to David and say,
“I’m no longer ‘abysmally ignorant’ nor am I ‘absurdly innocent’. I now know quite a lot and I am experienced in love.”
And then in my imagination he would hold out his arms and tell me that he loved me and we would be happy again.
Even to think of David holding me close and kissing me made me feel a little of that ecstasy and wonder he had given me when I first knew him.
It seemed a very long time ago, but there was one thing that was comforting and that was to know that, if he would not marry me, David was unlikely to marry anyone else.
‘Perhaps when he sees how different I have become and realises how hard I have worked because I love him, he will ask me to be his wife,’ I told myself.
Even as I did so I felt it was only a dream, an impossible fantastic dream that would never come true! But I had to try!
I had to struggle and fight to change myself simply because, as I said to myself, ‘Without David I will never be happy again and there will be no reason to go on living’.
I heard my voice die away in the darkness. I seemed to have been talking for a very long time.
I had concentrated so hard in recalling what had happened that, as I talked, I had almost forgotten that David was really there and was listening.
It had been like talking to the imaginary David as I had done every night since I had run away from him.
I started when suddenly he said in his deep voice,
“What happened then, Samantha?”
“I met – Peter and – Victor – ” I answered.
‘Tell me about them,” David demanded.