Diana envied him desperately. She was finding the autumn and the ending of the season very dull and disappointing after a whirlwind summer; and until the winter party season began, almost every invitation seemed to be to an engagement party, some for girls in her year. Diana found these hugely irritating; it wasn’t that she actually wanted to be engaged (and indeed was quite vocal on the subject) but she liked to shine, and seeing diamond rings flashing on the fingers of other girls, while her own left hand remained indisputably bare, clearly made this difficult.
‘Well – let’s hope,’ was all she said now.
‘Darling, don’t be negative,’ Caroline said. ‘Now, I had thought we could do a dinner party, but Michael said they’d rather keep it just family. He and Ned have had a very heavy few weeks and they don’t even want to go hunting; Ned’s not a horseman apparently. So it’ll just be the five of us for dinner on Saturday. Unless you want to invite a girlfriend, darling. Suki, perhaps – we still owe her for her cocktail party.’
Diana didn’t. If Ned Welles was even half attractive, the thought of anyone amongst her girlfriends vying for his attention was not a happy one. On the other hand, she didn’t want him to think she had nothing else to do for a whole weekend.
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘No, she’d be bored. She’s a party girl and this is family, you said so yourself.’
Caroline looked at her with a sweet expression. ‘Well, I realise it would make the weekend a bit man-heavy, but what about inviting Johnathan Gunning? He’s such a sweet man, and you get on rather well. He’s a bit stuck in London at weekends, with his people living up in Yorkshire. He told me last time I saw him how much he loved hunting.’
‘I thought Ned didn’t want to hunt,’ said Diana.
‘Darling, Ned is Michael’s friend and responsibility, not yours, so you could give Johnathan a day’s hunting.’
She looked at Diana hopefully. Johnathan Gunning’s family was not only rich but titled. He was the third son of Sir Hilary Gunning, Bart, and thus an Hon. The extra h in his name was a family idiosyncrasy and Diana rather liked it; you couldn’t hear it, of course, but written down, especially with the Hon. in front, it made it look rather special. He had grown up in considerable grandeur in the family seat, Guildford Park in Yorkshire, and was training to be a stockbroker in his uncle’s office.
Although he wasn’t exactly handsome, he was very nice looking, with light brown hair and dark eyes, and more of a chin than so many of his compatriots. He was charming, if in a slightly quiet way. He lived in a flat in Knightsbridge belonging to his mother, where Diana had been to a couple of dinner parties. The flat was quite grand in an old-fashioned way, and it seemed to her to symbolise unimaginable grown-upness and independence.
He was in many ways a considerable catch and at nearly twenty-four the right age for her. The catching was a distinct possibility and her mother was very excited by the idea. He clearly liked Diana and as well as the dinner parties had escorted her both to Ladies’ Day at Ascot and to Goodwood, and to the theatre a couple of times. The only thing was, she found him rather dull. He was certainly very clever – he had a First in Classics – and he loved going to the theatre – the proper theatre, not musicals, but Shakespeare and Restoration comedy (which had seemed extremely unamusing to her); he also liked to talk about politics and the situation in Europe. Of course, that was extremely important and worrying (her father never stopped talking about it either) but again not exactly fun over dinner.
So, with the season over, they had rather drifted apart; Johnathan worked very hard in London, she was very much back in the country, and there were few opportunities for them to meet. Maybe this weekend would be a chance to make quite sure it wasn’t worth trying. Hunting would be fun, and with him sitting next to her at dinner Ned Welles was more likely to find her attractive and interesting.
‘That’s a good idea,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you ring him up, see if he’s free? Only do make clear it’s for the hunting, won’t you? I don’t want him to think I’m chasing him.’
‘Darling, of course I will. Now dinner – pheasant do you think, or some good old-fashioned beef?’
Diana hardly heard her mother chattering on. She was worrying now that she had done the wrong thing, encouraging Johnathan, muddying the possible waters with Ned Welles. Oh, for goodness’ sake, she thought, he was probably short, with pimples. She decided to go for a ride. It wasn’t quite raining and it would pass the morning.
It was pathetic to be leading the life of little more than a child when she was nearly eighteen, she thought, turning her horse towards the Downs. She occasionally thought about getting a job in London, but then what on earth could she do? She had no skills or qualifications. It was how things were, so it wasn’t her fault. You had to wait until you were married and then you were busy, running a house and entertaining and having babies. Maybe when she saw Johnathan this weekend she would find him more, well, more what she wanted. But . . . she just didn’t find him attractive. There was no spark there, he just wasn’t sexy. She had been kissed enough by sexy boys to know what that felt like. Being kissed by Johnathan was perfectly pleasant, but it didn’t create that hot churning feeling inside her that some of the other boys’ kisses did. She had a fairly clear idea of what sex might be like, and a few of her more daring girlfriends had actually Done It – Suki Riley-Smith amongst them, which was another reason for not letting her near Ned Welles at dinner – and reported varying degrees of satisfaction, ranging from ‘rather thrilling’ to ‘absolutely amazing, impossible to imagine’.
Diana, however, had no intention of sampling the pleasures; she adhered to the old-fashioned view, heavily stressed by her mother, that your virginity was something best saved for your future husband, and if it wasn’t, you risked losing respect and gaining an unsavoury reputation.
As she rode back, still with a sense of restless depression about herself and her situation, she passed the cottage where she had had the encounter with Tom Knelston as he dug out his parents’ drain. The meeting came back to her with great clarity. Now he was really attractive, absurdly good-looking with his dark auburn hair and wonderful green eyes, and quite – well, very – sexy, his eyes moving over her, half in appreciation, half in a sort of mocking disapproval. His whole demeanour, in fact, had disturbed her even then, when she was sixteen. He was a year younger, or so Michael told her; he had played in the village cricket match against him for the last two years, and pronounced him a bloody good player for a village boy. She had seen him occasionally at church, cycling through the village on his way to school, occasionally helping his father deliver the post at Christmas, growing ever taller and more handsome.
She was sure Tom Knelston had quite a lot of experience of Doing It.