A Visit to Stonehenge

Midsummer's Day, 22nd June 1905

'Right on time,' said Anthony.

'One should hope so,' said his sister.

They took it as a good omen, though no more than they deserved. At ten to five the rising sun's first rays caught the Friar's Heel monolith: just as they were meant to. The famous stone glowed like a beacon while all around was still undefined, and misty grey. Then all of a sudden there was glorious light, you could see everything bright and clear, and the longest day of the year was upon them.

Then it was time to take the train back to an overcast London. They'd travelled down the night before, snatched a few hours' sleep at the Rose and Crown in Salisbury, travelled the nine miles by cab to Stonehenge, and each paid a shilling's entry. Anthony was not particularly superstitious, but he was now Editor of The Modern Idler, a literary magazine, and needed to keep up with contemporary trends. He had observed an increasing preoccupation with all things occult and semi-occult in both readers and writers. Golden Dawns, the sacred fires of the Druids, the leaping and dancing of the cloven-hoofed Great God Pan and so forth now seemed to interest the progressive world almost as much as the wilder shores of experimental sex. If a man was obliged to earn a living, and Anthony now had no other option, he should at least enter into the spirit of things and do it thoroughly. A chilly Stonehenge dawn and a cavorting assembly of chanting white-gowned Druids – male and female and no telling which was which – would make a good editorial and was no real hardship.

Anthony didn't particularly like going anywhere alone without an audience, so he'd asked his sister to come with him. It happened to be Diana's birthday – she was twenty-eight, surely a rather terrible milestone for an unmarried woman – and no one else he knew was prepared to get up so early. More importantly, he had a proposition to make to her. He put it off until they were on the train back to Waterloo, during the course of a late Pullman-car breakfast. He had porridge and cream, kippers, and eggs, bacon, and sausages; she had grapefruit segments and scrambled egg on toast. Even the coffee was good.

'Diana,' he said, 'I must talk to you seriously.'

'I feared that was the case,' she said. She was a lively, clever, cheerful girl of the kind men made best friends of rather than wives – or so her brother feared. She was bold, direct, noisy, had too pronounced a chin for beauty, and seemed to him to be without any of the erotic principle that men looked for in a woman. Worse, she was penniless, as he was. Their father, Eric, Lord Ashenwold, had died three months earlier having made only the most meagre provisions for Anthony and Diana – the peerage, the estates and the money going to his eldest son and heir Bevis. Yet Diana's unmarried state did not seem to disconcert her at all.

'The fact must be faced,' said Anthony, after the customary clearing of the throat that went before one of his serious announcements (such as 'We have decided after much deliberation, Mr Kipling – or Haggard, or Benson, or Wells, or Hardy, or whichever wildly successful writer it was – 'that we will publish your next story'). 'You are twenty-eight today, Diana, and as an older woman have reduced marital prospects.'

'Don't be such an old crotchet, Redbreast,' said Diana. 'I daresay someone will come along. Not someone from the peerage, to suit Bevis, not some famous writer, to suit you, but somebody who suits me. Besides, I never want to marry. I don't like children any more than you do.'

'A man is not required to like children,' he said, 'only to do what he can for them. But a woman most properly is.'

'Then perhaps I am not a proper woman,' she said.

'What can you mean?' he said. 'What a pair we are!'

His voice was somehow strangulated, but then many men of his social background spoke in the same manner – as though all statements had to go through some kind of filter before they were released. The Honourable Anthony Robin, a second son, was a tall man with an overhung brow and startlingly blue eyes. He had the commanding and kindly stoop of an old Etonian of the non-sporting kind, but was not, Diana had concluded long ago, necessarily kindly. She suspected he had invited her on this excursion – much as she was enjoying it – not out of altruism, but to forward some devious scheme of his own. She was right.

'Your prospects being as they are,' he went on, 'you have no choice but to earn a living. You can work for me as my housekeeper.'

He waxed lyrical. He had just leased new premises from which to run The Modern Idler. From now on it was to be published monthly. He had found a charming little house in Fleet Street, looking straight into the Law Courts with Chancery Lane beyond. It was an area where journalists came and went and writers had their clubs. It had crooked walls and leaning floors and at night you could hear the death-watch beetle tapping away, though the old oak beams had such hard heartwood he'd been assured all their gnashings were in vain. An eccentric place for a dwelling, perhaps, but a fine one for the editor of a political and literary magazine.

'Oh Anthony, I see,' she said. 'You want me to move in and do all the work? Distemper walls, sand floors, fix lights, buy furniture, I daresay even create a garden where you can drink your coffee while you read your manuscripts and turn down aspiring hopefuls?'

'It sounds divine,' he said.

When the building work was done, he said, she could be his secretary.

'You can type, you can do the layouts, and the pasting up, and you can help with the editing, the subscription lists and so on.'

'Oh thank you, Redbreast,' she said. 'What if you got married and she hated me and threw me out?'

'I am not the marrying sort,' he said. 'You know that. I am a man of letters. I am the philandering kind. I believe in the Life Force and the odd...