‘No, I haven’t met anyone else,’ she said. ‘Yet.’
‘Perfect, let me do the honours, and then we are planning on indulging in some cake from Shelley’s Deli, while we sit and have a natter,’ Janet said. ‘I want to talk gardening, if that’s not boring to you?’
Diana shook her head. ‘I could talk gardening all day,’ she said truthfully. She realised she still wanted to talk about gardening; she just didn’t have anyone to talk about it with anymore. Until now.
She unclipped Trotsky’s lead and let him wander off to explore at his own leisure and took Janet’s arm when it was offered to her.
‘Did Amanda show you where the koi pond used to be?’
Janet shook her head. ‘No, how fascinating. How did you protect them from the birds?’
‘Let me show you,’ said Diana.
*
1960s
It had been two months since Douglas had left her at the gates of Moongate. Diana spent her days waiting for something but she wasn’t sure what it was that she was hoping for. She knew Douglas wasn’t coming back anytime soon, especially when she had walked away without a goodbye when he had taken her back to Moongate after the disastrous hotel trip. Douglas had said he would return to marry her but she didn’t believe him. If he had wanted to marry her then he would have stayed.
She had tried to distract herself with shopping, books, going out to clubs with Helen, anything – but she couldn’t focus. She missed Douglas; she missed his hands and mouth and laughter. She missed riding on his motorbike and, more than anything, she missed having a secret.
Diana had thought about Douglas every day since he left and the heartbreak hadn’t left her. She was sick to the bone, tired, her body ached, her head ached, nothing working properly anymore, she noticed.
But the sickness came in waves. Sometimes when she woke in the morning, she would lie with her eyes closed and hope that if she kept them closed all day then the tears and nausea wouldn’t come.
It was Helen who called it first.
‘I can’t be – I was careful,’ Diana hissed over the phone.
‘Not careful enough it seems,’ said Helen.
Diana didn’t speak; instead she sat on the Queen Anne chair in the hallway where the phone was kept in Moongate Manor.
‘You can go to a doctor in Newcastle. There is a new lady doctor there; she has a clinic for women’s issues,’ Helen was saying but Diana couldn’t think clearly.
A baby? She couldn’t have a baby. Douglas had left her. She was supposed to be finding a husband and getting married and wearing a white moiré wedding dress by Victor Stiebel with a chapel-length veil and carrying a bouquet of white eucharis and lily of the valley.
A baby. No, she couldn’t. Diana hung up the phone without saying anything more to Helen.
If she didn’t talk about it, it wasn’t happening, she told herself.
Her mother appeared in the hallway. ‘Diana, why are you sitting there as though you don’t have things to do?’
Diana stood up. ‘What do I have to do, Mother? Tell me, please. I would love something to do. A job, studying at university, a task – anything would be a pleasure over sitting here waiting for my life to start.’
Her mother’s mouth dropped open. ‘Diana, you have never spoken to me like that before. What’s happened to you?’
‘Nothing’s happened to me. That’s the problem, Mother. I’m bored, I’m so bored I could die. I need an adventure. I need to see Europe, see the world, ride a motorbike.’
‘Ride a motorbike? Diana, what’s happened to you? Are you ill?’ She called out: ‘Edward, Diana is unwell.’
‘I’m not unwell,’ said Diana. ‘I just hate it here.’ And with that she turned and ran upstairs to her room.
She lay on her bed and closed her eyes, willing everything to go back to how it was before.
A few moments later her mother knocked at her door and opened it slowly, as though afraid that Diana would throw something at her.
‘Diana, I have spoken to your father, and he suggested I take you to Europe for the summer next year. We can go before the Moongate Festival and be back in time for the exciting event. That’s something to look forward to, isn’t it?’
