Kitty soon decided that violent lust and emotional intensity were more immoral in a girl born with Diana’s advantages than they would be in anyone else. Diana had enough good things in life as it was; the folly and ingratitude of loving a man like Molloy made her sister-in-law truly angry.

Kitty knew that Lady Blentham would be furious too: and she told Edward that she meant to write to her, because Diana must not be allowed to wreck her life. Edward was shocked by his wife’s description of what she had seen, but he refused to do anything, and said that would be the wiser course for her to take as well.

Perhaps he was right, Kitty thought, when the letter to Angelina had been taken away. Perhaps her mother-in-law would not be in the least impressed by her writing, would even refuse to believe what she said. Lady Blentham had not once received her in the six years of her marriage, and Kitty hated her, though she understood. She wished that she were Angelina, able to be cruel sometimes and save Diana from ruin. Diana was a good, innocent girl, and worth saving.

Dear Lady Blentham,

You will, I am sure, be very surprised to receive a letter from me.

Angelina looked at the signature, and moved her lips silently, then returned avidly to the beginning.

Angelina looked across the breakfast table at Diana, who was dressed in her riding habit and had opened The Times. Probably she was reading the Divorce Court proceedings. ‘How dare – can you read the newspaper in front of me,’ said Lady Blentham in a low steady voice, and pulled it away from her daughter. ‘You know what my feelings are.’

‘Mamma!’

‘Be quiet, if you please.’ Lady Blentham was truly thankful that they were alone together. Charles was out, and Maud was in bed.

Diana watched the London dust floating in the sunlight before her mother’s pallid face, and with her eyes narrowed and blinking rapidly she thought of how she would marry Michael and live in Camden Town.

I am afraid Diana has formed a very unsuitable connection, – Angelina supposed that Kitty had searched a long time for that phrase – with an Irish painter, called Michael Molloy. I have met him at Arthur Cornwallis’s, and I suppose Diana met him there too, though exactly when I do not know. Whether he intends marriage or not, I also do not know. However, I do think that Violet – not even ‘Lady Montrose’ thought Angelina! – is in favour of the idea of them marrying. I hate to say anything so vulgar, but I saw Diana kissing Mr Molloy, at Violet’s little dance on Thursday.

‘Oh –’

‘Yes, Mamma?’

Angelina read on without replying.

Little Angel, an ugly baby, had been christened Angela after Lady Blentham, who considered the name a very inferior form of her own.

When Angelina laid down the letter, Diana said: ‘Mamma, I’m no longer so young that I cannot be allowed to read the newspaper for fear of knowing about things I should not.’

Angelina scarcely heard her. Her chief thought, for several moments, was of the woman’s insolence in doing right. Then, silently, she made herself concentrate on the sense of the ill-expressed letter.

‘Is that letter to do with me?’

‘Yes,’ said Lady Blentham at last.

Diana bent stiffly over her toast, and looked at it. ‘I should think it’s an impertinence.’

Angelina got up. ‘It is intolerably impertinent. From your sister-in-law.’

‘Kitty?’

‘Is it true, Diana, what it says?’

‘What does it say? I haven’t seen it.’ She guessed, although she did not know, and had never confided in Kitty.

‘You may read it,’ said Angelina in a voice of contempt.

Diana took it. No doubt, she thought when she finished reading, Kitty considered her letter a model of efficient dignity.

‘Well?’ said Lady Blentham.

Diana put down the letter and her napkin and went to the door. ‘I can’t talk about it now, Mamma. I’m going to see Kitty and ask her what she means.’

Angelina ran to her. ‘Then what she says is a falsehood? It’s slanderous, Diana?’

‘No, it’s not altogether a falsehood.’

‘Diana!’

‘No, Mamma!’ She left, and Angelina heard the front door slam.

Diana walked to the nearest cab rank, and told the driver to take her to Cadogan Square. Though in the past year she had had so much more freedom than before, she had been alone in a hansom cab only four times in her life. ‘I thought you were a friend,’ she said aloud to an imaginary Kitty, then realised she must not say anything so commonplace. She was as puzzled as she was bitter, and she was still trembling a little from her rejection of Angelina.

The hansom drew up before the young Blenthams’ house. Diana paid the cabman, rapped on the door, and was admitted by the butler, whose shocked and curious glance made her remember that she was still in riding-dress, and that it was far too early to be paying calls. She intended that, very soon, such things would no longer concern her.

‘Is Mrs Blentham at home?’

‘Yes, miss, that is –’

‘It’s important. Please ask her to see me – no, I’ll go up! Where is she?’ Kitty and Diana had had several friendly talks at odd moments in public, but no one could think them intimate. Diana had rarely been to their house even since her coming of age, and the butler had taken a moment to recognise her. ‘Come, tell me!’ she said to him.

‘I believe in the boudoir, miss,’ said the man coldly. ‘But I fancy …’

Diana went upstairs and found the room. ‘Hello, Kitty!’ she said. Kitty, who was reading a novel on the sofa in her dressing-gown, looked up.

‘Well! You’re up early – you don’t want me to come riding with you, do you, because I’m afraid I can’t. Do sit down, Diana!’

‘Thank you. I’ve come about the letter you wrote to my mother,’ said Diana, sitting down and thinking that the pink-and-gold boudoir full of huge photographs and too-expensive flowers was just the thing for an actress. She assumed that Edward and Kitty were heavily in debt: an inexcusable, foolish thing to be. ‘She had it this morning.’

‘Oh, you’re cross, are you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I meant it for the best, Diana.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘Why do you think I wrote, then?’ said Kitty, slowly closing her novel.

‘Some kind of spite – or jealousy. I can’t think what I’ve done to make you feel like that, to do what you have.’

‘Spite and jealousy?’ said Kitty.

‘Am I putting it too strongly?’ said Diana, consciously raising her eyebrows.

Kitty imitated her. ‘Rather, Diana. Of course I didn’t do it for spite, I did it for the very reasons I said. Because Lady Blentham will be able to stop you ruining your life, at least I’m pretty sure she will, which is what you’ll be doing, if you marry him – never mind if he seduces you. I’m sorry to speak so crudely, I’m sure, but you’re old enough to know what I mean!’

‘He wants to marry me. There’s no question of seduction.’

‘So much the worse!’ said Kitty. ‘In a sense.’

‘My mother won’t be able to prevent my marriage, neither will my father. I’m of age, though everyone seems to forget it.’

‘They’ll be able to – well, put pressure on you, and I just hope you’ll listen,’ said Kitty.

‘My mind is made up,’ said Diana.

‘So you’ll marry him, will you? And what will you live on, an allowance from Papa?’

‘Michael earns something and yes, I expect that once my parents have – recovered, they’ll give us something too,’ said Diana. She never took her eyes off Kitty, and her toes wriggled angrily inside her boots.

‘And supposing that’s so, how much do you suppose you’ll have?’

‘Four or five hundred a year? Many people live on less, though I don’t see quite why you …’

‘They do indeed, Diana. They live on much less, and do you know what it’s like! Now do stop looking as though you’d swallowed the poker, I thought I was a friend of yours.’

‘Diana, you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re just a girl in love, and you think you don’t care if you upset your family. D’you realise that if Michael Molloy marries you, you won’t be in Society?’

‘Realise it?’ said Diana. ‘Do you think I want to be “in Society” as you call it, any longer? When I could be …’ She did not say ‘just with him’, but she smiled. Until she met Michael, Diana had despised people who believed in what her father called love in a cottage on nothing a year. She felt much older now than she had felt a month ago, and not only older, but braver, wittier, stronger, more beautiful and wise.

‘I suppose he makes poverty look positively heavenly!’ snapped Kitty. ‘Well, I wash my hands of you.’

‘I’m so glad. Do you apologise for writing to my mother?’

‘No, I do not,’ said Kitty, sitting upright, with her hands crushed beneath her thighs. ‘Oh, I’m sorry if my doing that has only made you more headstrong about it all, and it looks as if it has! But I did the best I could and I can’t be sorry.’

‘If you wanted to save me from ruining my life,’ said Diana, ‘why didn’t you write to me, and give me your advice? Why did you write to my mother, Kitty? Why couldn’t you say all that – all this to me?’

Looking at Diana, Kitty herself wondered why for a moment.

‘Was it an attempt to please her, make her pleased with you?’

‘I daresay, but what nonsense you do talk.’

‘It didn’t please her.’

‘I should imagine not.’

‘Well,’ said Diana, ‘I don’t want to have an irreparable quarrel with you. I’m going – let’s forget it. Will you cut me, Kitty, when I’m married?’ She got up and arranged her skirts.

‘I just might.’

‘Oh.’

‘Diana, do you remember coming to call on me when you were a flapper, and we were just married? You managed to come alone in a hansom, and, oh, you were so excited and pleased with yourself. No harm in that at that age. But you haven’t changed a bit.’

‘You’re so jealous, Kitty,’ said Diana. ‘Do cut me in future, it should be quite amusing in the circumstances.’

‘Diana Blentham, you’re a bloody idiot!’

Diana smiled, because the Cockney swear-word shocked her, and of course it ought not to, things being as they were. She left the house feeling quite calm, and on the whole decidedly the winner: though at the back of her mind there was a new picture of Kitty as a powerful, well-intentioned yet unpleasant woman. Diana did not think she would see her again. Once Kitty had represented a wild and intoxicating, quite improper world; but it was hard to remember that now.

*

Within a day, Diana’s family seemed to her to become caricatures of their old selves, dancing foolishly around her in bewilderment and rage. She remained quiet and determined, observing their vagaries; and the thought of Michael entirely prevented her being made unhappy by them. They were almost strangers, and Diana felt free, because she no longer belonged to them.

Five days after Violet’s dance, Diana met Michael down by the trees north of the Serpentine, a part of Hyde Park visited by few of her friends. She could have met him in her sister’s house, as she had already done twice that week: but she wanted nothing to do even with Violet, who had been so sensible and kind.

‘Well, darling? Why’s the need to be so clandestine?’ said Michael, folding up his Irish newspaper as soon as she came up looking anxiously for him. ‘Lady Montrose hasn’t turned nasty?’

Diana jumped. ‘Oh, dear one! No, she hasn’t, but I don’t want to use her.’ She blinked at him and took in her breath. ‘Michael, tell me, are you perfectly sure –’

‘Do you want us to be married soon? Is that it? Why, Diana? Don’t you remember saying six months?’ he told her, smiling suspiciously, and putting one thin, heavy arm round her waist.

‘My love.’ She squeezed his hand because he understood everything at once, more quickly than she did herself. ‘It’s so difficult, you’ll be horribly insulted and I can’t blame you.’

‘Ah?’ Michael reached up and picked a sticky leaf from one of the lime trees. There were a few late boats on the Serpentine, and its water was soft steel blue: dark green in the shade.

‘Papa had the – impertinence, when he’d read Kitty’s wretched letter, which I told you about as you know, to get one of his friends at the Home Office to make enquiries about you at Scotland Yard. Words dropped in the right ear at Brooks’s, all so very discreet, don’t you know?’ She longed for him to kiss her.

‘Did he now?’

‘Well, of course, there’s been such a dust kicked up at home that Kitty’s letter was nothing to it. Of course I wasn’t shown anything yesterday, because I know there could be nothing to show, no papers but oh, you can imagine. Papa insists you’re the very worst kind of Fenian, and of course, he says he’ll cut me off without a penny if I marry you. Truly. So old-fashioned – so humourless – he was shouting so that people must have heard it across the street. I never guessed he could behave like that.’ She sucked in her lips as she thought of it.

‘So what precisely did he say, about my being a wicked Fenian, Diana? Which to be sure, I am.’

‘My dear,’ said Diana, turning her umbrella in her hands and looking at him with eyes as determined as his own, ‘he actually said the police suspect you of having been – mixed up in a minor way with that group of Fenians – is that quite the word – who murdered Lord Frederick Cavendish in Phoenix Park. Years ago. Apparently, there wasn’t enough evidence.’

‘Ah,’ said Michael. Suddenly he gripped her elbow. ‘And do you believe them, Diana? Would you believe me a murderer?’

‘Don’t be so melodramatic!’ said Diana, thinking irrelevantly of all he had said to her so fiercely on the subject of free Ireland and the treachery of Parnell.

‘You don’t? Say you don’t.’

‘Michael, I do not believe that, whatever you had to do with the Land League when you were young, you had anything to do with that kind of violence.’

‘I did not.’

Her head jerked. ‘Stop looking at me so coldly. Damn you.’

‘Diana! Ah, darling, don’t cry then – don’t cry – hey. But I have to be sure of you, don’t I?’

They cuddled, softly and warmly, and a nurse with a perambulator clucked at them. Michael took his head from out of her hair.

‘Well, shall I be making the arrangements for us to be married as soon as possible, at the registry office?’

‘Yes, Michael.’ How marvellous to submit.

He took hold of her chin, and studied her face, which was on the same level as his own. He had often wanted to be taller and to look down on more people. ‘Diana, this isn’t rebellion against your family? You want me, myself, all I can truly give you – not just to escape from home and shock the lot of them? It’s for love you’re doing this?’

‘Yes, I want you … dear one, you do understand? It’s got nothing to do with rebellion, as you say. That would imply that I almost enjoyed their – hatred of you, wouldn’t it? And I hope to God they’ll come round one day.’ To look at him make Diana feel charitably towards all the World.

‘Well, so they may, but I doubt it.’ He did not sound very displeased about this. ‘We’ll be poor, you realise that? I’m not deceiving you.’

‘Yes, of course I realise.’

‘You won’t have more than one maid, for everything. No servants, Diana. No pretty dresses.’

‘I can do very well without.’

‘Yes, you’ll look your best without. And when you’re my wife, you won’t be able to see your friends, only mine,’ Michael said, putting another arm round her.

‘Some of my friends may not cut me.’ Diana smiled.

‘Perhaps they won’t, then. So we’ll be married in a day or two.’

‘Yes.’ He was reality, she thought, the only reality.

‘I’d have you down on the grass now, if it weren’t so damned public,’ Michael said. He looked with a gleam in his eye at her dark grey dress, which had obviously been chosen because it was sober, suitable for Bayswater and almost middle-class. ‘But of course I can’t disturb your costume. My dear, your discretion is admirable,’ he said.

‘Kiss me,’ said Diana.

‘We’ve years to do that, and more,’ said Michael. ‘I said I wouldn’t disarrange your clothes, but I love you.’

When Diana returned to Queen Anne’s Gate it was twilight, and her parents guessed what she had been doing. She had meant them to guess. They hustled her into the morning-room at once, though it was time to dress for dinner at Lady de Grey’s.

Diana wondered why she had never before seen how stupid they were, and how idiotic was their way of life. She remembered her nursery and schoolroom and debutante days, Julian Fitzclare and the battle of the latchkey fought a year ago, and it seemed to her that never before had she questioned anything, or seen any truth at all. Now that she was perfectly certain in her own mind, nothing they said could affect her even for a moment. Yesterday, she had been affected for moments together: thrown back for whole minutes into their world by the mad revelation that Michael was a murderer.

The cynics about love are wrong, she thought: ‘a cynic is he who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.’

‘For the last time, Diana, have you been to meet Molloy?’

‘No, Papa, I have not.’ How glorious to lie, and how curious it was that she had never told a direct lie to either of her parents before.

‘Diana, it is – very difficult to believe you are not telling an untruth,’ said Angelina. ‘You hardly seem to want us to believe you. It’s your manner.’

‘Unconvincing!’ said Charles. ‘I am going to repeat myself, Diana. If you do marry this man – and I’ll never give you my consent, blessing, whatever arguments you use, I wouldn’t even if I were satisfied that the police’s suspicions are unjust – I’ll give you absolutely nothing to live on.’

‘No, Papa.’

He glared at her under his eyebrows, and she thought what a fine picture he made. ‘What a pity we don’t live a hundred years ago. I’d have no hesitation in locking you up in your bedroom – absolutely none. I’d do it now, if you were a couple of years younger. Oh, I give you credit for not being fool enough to try to elope, but I’m warning you,’ he added.

Diana imagined climbing down a rope-ladder. ‘Why are you so angry with me?’ she said. ‘You’ve never been angry before. You didn’t shout at me even when I gave up Julian – although you disapproved so much.’

‘Isn’t it clear!’ muttered Lady Blentham.

‘You weren’t proposing then to marry a man who’s very possibly the worst kind of anarchist!’ said Charles.

‘He is not an anarchist, and he’s never plotted to kill anyone.’

‘Whether he is or not,’ said Angelina with an effort, ‘he is a – a freethinker, Diana, and though I suppose you don’t object to that he … He would be an impossible match on every count. My dear, I know you are in love, but you can’t marry him. You know that. It won’t last.’

‘Mamma …’ said Diana, turning. Her father stared at Angelina too.

‘In love!’ said Charles, interrupting. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I am in love, Papa. Even though you may hate the expression – do you think it vulgar?’

‘I tell you you’re not going to marry him. You can’t possibly do so if you have no money and I-will-give-you-nothing, do you hear me, girl?’

‘Please don’t speak to me like that, Papa.’

‘Don’t you –’

‘Diana, neither of us will be able to see you, if you do this,’ said Angelina, though she did not mean this quite literally. ‘You must not do it. Oh God, if I only had not consented to your having a latchkey, a bicycle! If only I hadn’t tried – so hard – to accept that these are modern times – none of this would have happened. I wanted you to be happy. I blame myself, entirely.’ She was not going to horrify herself by treating Diana as she had treated Violet three years ago.

‘Angelina, don’t be so emotional. Really, my dear!’

‘Mamma, very likely something worse would have happened if I’d been – more innocent, ignorant. Isn’t that what you’re implying? Ignorance isn’t always a protection.’ The full truth of this struck her for the first time.

‘Oh, heaven help us.’

‘I won’t have any child of mine create a scandal. God, how does one cope in these cases – like a damned bad novel!’

Diana stood still, looking straight ahead of her at the undrawn curtains, still faintly smiling, because nothing could touch her save Michael’s hand. She was amused because her parents had at last surprised her, by acting just a little out of character. She had not thought Lord Blentham would be deeply distressed, as Angelina was, but she had expected him to persuade and to try to understand. She had supposed Lady Blentham would threaten and be unrelenting, in her own cold, disgusted style. It was her father, who made a show of his indulgent fondness for her, who was doing that now.

‘Love is not what you think it, Diana,’ said Angelina.

‘It’s silly to talk like this,’ said Diana, looking from one old person to the other, and thinking how odd and impotent both looked. They had been tyrants, but she forgave them. ‘If you don’t want anything to do with me – if I marry him –’ she said ‘if as a precaution against being locked in her room like a heroine, but she did not really feel vulnerable – ‘then just cut me, I shan’t mind – really, I don’t think I shall. I know what I want, what’s best, and if it happens, after a few months no one will remember – it won’t matter – it’ll be all right. Life is like that!’

This was the longest speech she had made to her parents on the subject of her love. Obviously, they hated her. Diana thought how frail a thing was family love, dependent always on good behaviour. It was that, of all things, which they expected her to try and preserve as the most precious thing in life. She did feel badly when she said: ‘Of course you’re quite right, I shan’t do anything very stupid, like eloping. I do hope you’ll consent.’

‘Don’t talk rubbish!’ said Lord Blentham.