The Diamond Waterfall (26 page)

“She fashioned them,” her mother said. “Olive fashioned them.”

“I like to bake.” Olive said it solemnly. “Even rest days.” She pointed to an iron plate beside the fire. She said proudly, “It's there I bake them, after I've pulled the dough out, like.”

“Give lad a bite of it—”

“Do ye want some, then? Will ye eat some?”

It tasted very good. It had a thick slice of cold bacon laid across it. It tasted like nothing at The Towers.

After a while, not much notice was taken of him. There was some talk, about lambing mainly. He liked the way Olive watched him all the time. Whenever he caught her eye, she smiled at him.

James said, “She can't manage her school work—”

“It's a rest day—” she began.

“It's to be done,” Will said. “If you've brains you'd best learn to use them while chance comes your way.”

“Fuss, fretting,” Mr. Ibbotson said. “Content yissen running farm, or learning to. Day'll come, soon enow, I'll not be able …”

“Nowt much amiss with ye
now,
” Will said a little sulkily.

“There will be, lad, there will—”

By way of answer Will fetched over a large red book with gold lettering on the cover, and buried himself in it.

Hal asked Olive, “What is it you've to do?”

“Sums,” she said promptly. “Like this.” She slipped down from the table and brought him over the copybook.

“ ‘If a draper sells braid at sixpence three farthings for nine yards, what is the cost per foot?' “

“Easy,” he said. “There's three feet in a yard, so that's three times nine to find your feet, and …”

Some time later, and after he'd eaten a meal with them, Mrs. Ibbotson said, “I reckon they'll be worried at Towers. So if ye're warm and dry, lad …”

Home. But he didn't want to leave.

Will said, “It's let up, the weather. It's faired up enough. He can be away.”

They discussed it among themselves. “Light's going fast…. He'll have been missed. … He could go wi t'pony…. He'd be best in cart. …”

Mr. Ibbotson said, “James, tak t'cart, then. And Bluebell. Stephen'll go along of ye.”

It was further going down by the road, and around and up again, over the moor. Strange dark shadows. A lamp swung from the cart. James didn't speak. To look at, he was like his father. Occasionally he murmured something to the gray horse, with its shaggy winter coat. “Hoa there, easy there, Bluebell …”

Stephen talked. About fishing, rabbiting, going to market. About how clever Will was.

Fishing. “I know t'best places,” he boasted, hand pointing over to where in the darkness the river ran away as a stream. When Hal said nothing, he said, “I could mebbe show you—if ye've ever a mind.”

“I might,” Hal said. (I shall, I
shall)
A curtain drawn back, showing a bright warm different world. Dangerous, even.
Different …

Hailstones lay by the road still. The lamp on the cart showed them up. A white landscape now, where this morning there'd been sun. But on the lower road there was little sign of the storm.

“It's alius worse up our way,” James said. “We was snowed off
eight week
t'year Ted were born.”

“Ted?”

“Ted that died,” Stephen said. “He'd the same sickness as I took. He were first—then Will and me…. Diffy sickness they call it, when there's poison right across t'throat. I were took bad three days afore Ted went. Our Mam thought we'd all be lost. Eh, James?”

“Aye,” James said, without moving his head. “That were a bad time and all. Diphtheria,” he enunciated slowly. “They brought it up from Settstone village.”

Hal said, “I was sick with it.” He added, not without pride. “
I
all but died too.” He kept quiet about his heart.

“You're a wicked boy. A bad wicked boy …”

His mother, his beautiful mother.

“I thought, we thought—
dead.
Some terrible accident. We've been
out of our minds,
Hal.”

But how? Why? The King of Goldland safe home who had been lost in the forest. Saved by the stranger….

Mother cried over him. Father was
very angry.
Alice fussed and looked pinched from the upset. He protested:

“But Nan-Nan said—”

“No excuses, young fellow-me-lad. No excuses, sir. Eight o'clock of an evening—and last seen at
two
in the afternoon. Outrageous …”

His clothes, tied up in a bundle. Nearly dry now. The feeling of disgrace (the same feeling as when his nightshirt, his sheets, were discovered wet— when he was much, much younger. He thought he'd forgotten how that felt.). Everything spoiled. Gold that was really dust. Like in the fairy tales. King of Goldland …

“The Ibbotsons. Yes. They will be thanked, and the clothes returned.” He heard money mentioned. “A small token, some appreciation naturally. Although it was only their duty.”

Later Nan-Nan, cross too, said, “We've the worry already that you don't catch measles off Master Jack—then you go putting on farm boy's clothes.” She sniffed, and held up the trousers with their frayed leather belt.
Farm boy's clothes.

“He—the boy whose clothes those are, he's going to show me, about fishing. Stephen's twelve. He goes anywhere by himself. He takes one of their collie dogs along the walls, after rabbits.”

Such tiredness, such happy tiredness.

“And I'll be seeing him again. Soon.”

“That's as maybe,” Nan-Nan said.
“What
a bag of moonshine.”

Sadie's mouth trembled a little. She said, “The boys—Mr. Pettinger won't have finished yet. For Greek, they have always an extra half hour.”

Her manner was very odd. As Lily stepped forward to embrace her: “Lily—no!” She stood back a little. “I don't care that you should. I've—” Her fingers were clawing at the silver clasp of her belt. “There's something, I want to say something to you. I was going to—maybe call, but seeing you're here—I—”

“Whatever is it, darling?” It wasn't the Sadie she knew. Overtired, yes. She had been doing too much lately. Perhaps they both had?

In the end the Braille work had not been nearly enough for Lily. It had been Sadie's suggestion they should work together. Just now they were raising funds to help children whose fathers were in prison. “Why should the innocent suffer?” Lily drafted letters, suggested from among her large acquaintance speakers who might touch hearts, and purses, used shamelessly all her theatrical connections. She was thoroughly busy, and more than a little consoled. She was worthwhile, useful. She felt, too, that it made her a better mother. And although Robert mocked, she found that it made her more able to withstand his jibes—and the emptiness of their relationship.

It was so good to work with Sadie, to talk in free moments about anything, everything. (No, no, not
everything.)

Long days of summer: Hal and Jack still being tutored at the Hall. Jack, his father's son, with Sadie's vivacity. Impulsive, often obstinate but never sulky. Sadie said once:

“Let others be angry with him. I can't. Perhaps he'll go to the bad with my spoiling.” She had smiled fondly. “And perhaps not.”

Indeed Lily couldn't imagine it. Hal and Jack, inseparable, although lately often making off to that farm where Hal had sheltered. Going fishing with one of the boys. Besides Hal's seriousness, intensity, Jack was an excellent foil. Both had two younger sisters, both expressed scorn for them. Each son was quite different. And quite perfect.

Today she was bursting with news from America. Sadie followed always so closely the fortunes of Daisy and her family. A letter from New York today that said all was well. Daisy's daughter Anna, at nineteen, had just married a lawyer's son. It was a really good match. And so happy together.
Joe, Daisy's eldest, doing well too. Daisy was helping with immigrants at the Henry Street Settlement.

“No,” repeated Sadie. “No, don't, Lily—
don't
sit down!”

“Sadie …” She grew more alarmed. “Darling, has something happened? I can't …”

Sadie, turning the key in the lock, moved around to face her:

“Stand there. Don't move, please. I'll stand too.” Then she burst out, “Lily Firth, I'm so
mad
at you—and you call yourself my friend! I just don't know how you
dare
…” She was breathing deeply. Trying to hold back tears.

My God, Lily thought. Oh, my God.

“You've a husband of your own and anything you want, and yet you
… What did you want with Charlie?”
Her voice rose hysterically.

“Sadie—just a moment …” Lily's voice shook. “It's not like that.”

“It's not like, it's not like—it
is
like that! He's been unfaithful. And with you, you,
youl”

“Last year, Sadie, all right. Yes, last year. Once, in Scotland.”

“I don't want”—her voice was a screech—“don't want to hear how many times. Or why, or when—no, Lily,
let me finish.
I just want to tell you that you're no friend of mine!
Friends
don't—they do
not,
Lily Firth.”

Hoping perhaps to calm her, trembling, Lily asked, “How did you find out?”

“That's all you care about, Lily Firth, you whitened sepulcher. Being
found out.
I'm so mad at you,
mad.
I guess you thought it just didn't
matter.
It's—Charlie told me himself. Yesterday. He was … we …” She had calmed down just a little. But she clawed desperately still at the silver clasp.

“He couldn't bear it another moment. We'd—there'd been words about, I don't recollect. He told me then. Confessed.” She gave a little sob. “He said he'd wanted to for months. And that he felt bad because there'd never been— he hadn't before—other women. I don't care, but there
hadn't.
He asked me that I shouldn't say anything—but I'm not like that. If I get mad I … Lily, I'm just so mad at you, I could kill you!” She burst into tears.

What, what, what have I done? thought Lily. Most of all now, she wanted to throw herself in Sadie's arms. To tell her
everything.
Valentin, Teddy. To beg forgiveness for the unforgivable. But how to do that now? She heard her voice coming out calmer than she felt. In it, none of her sorrow, her remorse, her fear of the loss to come.

“If I thought an apology, or even an explanation—”

“Don't bother,” Sadie interrupted, more quietly. “What good would it do? None at all, I guess—if I'm to live here among your sort of people, I've just to—well, it's the way of Society, isn't it? It's just the moral climate, I guess. There's nothing you can do really about
climate.”

Lily began, tentatively, “Sadie, if we—”

“I tell you though, I tell you, Lily Firth—something else.
It's all over between us.
I don't ever want you as a friend. Ever, ever again.” She was sobbing once more. “We're going to be mighty polite with each other
in public,
in our work. I don't ever want Jack or Hal, or any of them to suffer, because you … No one'll ever know but you and me.”

And Charlie, thought Lily.

“No one'll ever know that we're finished. My word, I'll act. You'll see, Lily Firth, who's good at acting! … And now, just clear out.”

With the coming of the warm weather, Alice's spirits rose. The treat, which she had carried around with her like treasure ever since Gib had gone back to Cambridge in January, was that she should visit him in June. He was now in his second year at St. Catharine's College, where he was a Scholar (dear clever Gib). In the Lent term of his first year she had visited him for the day from London with Papa and Belle Maman. But it had been a stiff affair: going out to luncheon at the Blue Boar, and not meeting any of his friends.

This time it would be different. She was to spend several days there, to watch some of the May Races, and best of all to go to his College Ball. A May Ball. Some of his friends had asked their sisters up. A chaperone, a cousin of Gib's, Mrs. Radcliffe, had been arranged.

How to wait? And would it never be summer? The month of May was unusually cold; earlier in the spring she'd been upset by the assassination of Manuel of Portugal and his Crown Prince. The illustrated papers had been full of drawings, even photographs. She couldn't help thinking that one moment they had been alive and confident, and the next, were not. Because of violence. She found it hard to imagine. Violence within—ah, that I understand. Although, too, it could be physical: as that hand which had shot out seven years ago and struck Uncle Lionel. (Nowadays he kept a distance from her, which was almost insulting in its obviousness; although she fancied nobody really noticed.)

Now at last it was June, and Gib and the ball. She needed new clothes for the visit. The balldress was perhaps the most important. Belle Maman sent for a number of spring patterns from Paris. There would be three day dresses, and at least two hats. “There are sure to be some smart persons from London,” Belle Maman said. Alice wanted to reply “Oh, any old thing will
do to go on my head,” remembering suddenly that, oh so dreadful hat-buying morning in Beaulieu, feeling a momentary flare-up of all the old hatreds and resentments.

Gib's cousin, Mrs. Radcliffe, turned out to be older than she had expected. Alice hadn't known much about her and rather suspected that Gib did not either. He had arranged it all by letter rather hastily. As she lived not far from Peterborough, she joined Alice's train there, and they finished the journey together.

She had heard about Alice. “You're the little girl with the camera.” (And I am twenty-two! Alice thought.) She seemed disappointed that Alice hadn't brought her photographic equipment with her. “You could take such nice pictures of the undergraduates amusing themselves.” Her main interest, it appeared, was in food. She confided in Alice that it was her misfortune to be almost continuously in good appetite, and yet always to have to pay the price. She was not sure what she would find at Cambridge. “I think some of these boys eat very rich foods when they send out.”