The Diamond Waterfall (66 page)

“We cannot have wives shooting inconvenient husbands who happen also to be drunk.

“It is no answer and does not amount to insanity in law, so as to make a man not responsible for his acts, that his resistance should be weakened or that his power of appreciation should be lessened. Therefore I have to tell you that, so far as that defense is concerned, you are bound to reject it upon my ruling …”

And now his last words:

“I must also tell you what your duty will be if you come to the conclusion that although this lady fired the shot which killed her husband, she did so without intending to kill or do grievous bodily harm. I ought to say to you —it is material—that under those circumstances the accused would not be guiltless. She would be guilty of the crime of manslaughter, because manslaughter is killing a person unlawfully, without any intention of injuring him seriously, and of course without any intention of killing him …”

Too little, too late, Teddy thought, watching the jury file out. That may be the letter of the law but it is a different spirit he has conveyed. And he looked
so
like Gib's father.

Sylvia swayed, watching the world spin. Her swollen eyelids felt as though she had been crying. (If I were to weep, would I ever stop?) She thought, It's certain I am ill. It cannot be all nerves.

There had not been a time since that evening in September that she had been without headache. It was her familiar. Aspirin, which they plied her with, only nauseated her, adding to the stomach pains, the burning throat. This
terrifying
headache, blurred eyesight. Some days I cannot see properly at all.

She looked down at her fingers. Gloveless, they lay on her lap. She could feel the tingling starting up again. First a numbness, then pins and needles. The prison doctor says it is my kidneys, prescribes barley water and a bitter mixture in a bottle. Every other symptom is of nervous origin, it appears. The second doctor: “You mustn't think, you know, you can get out of the trial through ill health.”

But I do not think at all.
Cannot
think. It is as if I listen to someone else's story. Mr. Spencer-Loring's speech—I have seen no one impressed. The sympathy has been all with Angie, with her
lies
that she so firmly believes.

To think is to remember.
I thought I remembered nothing.
That policeman who has given evidence that he came in answer to my call. I telephoned, and cannot remember that. “I have shot my husband,” I told him.

It was the nightmares brought it back first. They began the first evening in prison. The women guards were, are, all kind. They
wanted
me to sleep well (sleeping drafts, phenobarbital, but still I am half the night awake), to feel better,
to be acquitted.
And yet how can I be, since I did it. I pulled the trigger.
I wanted him dead.

I can remember that—now. So long before it came back. Hazy memory. Of sudden flash, rogue thought, wild thought. Thought, in the same seconds that I held the revolver. Such strength. How, weak as I am now, did I have such strength? That sudden … I would have liked to plead guilty, if it weren't for the children.

Oh, my children.
My children.
Who will, what will … if the worst happens, who will help? Shall I be allowed to see Willow?
What shall I say to her?

This is hell, nor am I out of it. My head, it will burst into a mass of—like Reggie.

Reggie is alive, so alive that in dreams he speaks to me, in
nightmares.
It's a dance at Dora Fisher's and I am young again. Captain Gilmartin, one-armed hero, wants to marry me. He asks me at the dance. My fingers touch a frock of pale orange georgette. The music goes on somewhere—always in another room—he asks me to marry him and when I begin to say no (there is some reason why I must not,
may not),
then his face changes. That is the nightmare, that terrible face—first drunk, angry, flushed—then changing, changing, dissolving,
bursting
into a mass of …
oh my God if only I could wake up then.
I've tried calling out, “I'm awake, I'm awake, it's not real,” just as I did as a child, as they told me to. I wake, and it is cold and half light, a
gray half-light from the first moment. I try and drag myself from it all—
and it is real

Once and once only—not a nightmare but a dream, of such happiness that I woke crying. Of course it was Geoffrey. It was our love again. Only why? When I haven't dared to think of him by day. In the dream we do not make love, we do not even talk. We only
are.

“Members of the jury, are you agreed upon your verdict? Do you find the prisoner, Sylvia Frances Gilmartin, guilty or not guilty of murder?”

“Guilty. But we should like to add a rider to that. We recommend her to mercy.”

“Sylvia Frances Gilmartin, you stand convicted of murder. Have you anything to say why the court should not give you judgment of death, according to law?”

O thou who changest not, abide with me … The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, he maketh me …

“Sylvia Frances Gilmartin, the jury have convicted you of murder with a recommendation to mercy. The recommendation will be forwarded by me to the proper quarter where it will doubtless receive consideration. My duty is to pass upon you the only sentence which the law knows for the crime of which you have been convicted …”

“Where is it?” Willow asked politely. “Where is this convent?”

“East Anglia,” her grandmother said. “It's the one where your Aunt Alice is a nun. Our Lady of Victory—or could it be of Sorrow?—I forget. But Erik and I, we were thinking …”

They were always thinking. That was part of the trouble, perhaps. Thinking always of her, and what would be best—when the best could only be to have Mummy back, and the terrible thing never to have happened. It wasn't mentioned in the house. No one mentioned it now.
Because Mummy is dead.
She had to go into the prison hospital the day after the trial. She was very, very ill. It was her kidneys, they said, kidney failure. They don't have any cure when it's as bad as that. But oh, J
want her alive again.

Aunt Teddy had invited Willow to come and live in Paris with her. But
how could she do that? She was frightened. Another strange place, she had thought. Another strange person.
I don't really know Aunt Teddy.

She clung to Lily, as the time drew near for going. “I want to stay with you. I'd much rather be here with you and Uncle Erik.” Grandma and Uncle Erik, with them she was safe. It was safe at The Towers.

Mummy told me about her childhood there. She was happy. And then the something terrible happened that made her marry the man I
used
to call Daddy. Who … Mummy told me about someone else being my real father, just a little about it. It frightened me. I don't know who I am, and I don't want to find out. Something was said at the trial, I think, by Aunt Angela. But she didn't say who
he
was. I think he has to have been wonderful for Mummy to have loved him. I know that she loved him—that is the one thing she said when she told me. I didn't ask her any more then. I didn't want to know. I don't want to know now.

Everyone has been so kind to me since she died. They try and say things to make it better, to show that it will be all right.
But it can't be.
There's this great yawning hole where there used to be my love for her. And hers for me.

She didn't need to die, why did she die? But if she hadn't, would they have—no, they would never have
hanged
her. But yes, women are … There was someone called Edith Thompson the year before I was born, and she hadn't even
done
the killing. There was to have been an appeal for Mummy, she would have been let off, everyone was absolutely certain. The jury was never meant to say what they did. She would have had that other verdict—manslaying or something. She would have been a little in prison and then
come back to us.

All five of us. Lucy, Jessica, Margaret, Beth. We were a family. The little ones cried because they didn't understand. I cried because I did. Little Beth clinging to me, not wanting to go to Auntie Bar. Canada is so far away. I've lost them. Although everyone says I may go and stay there. Not this summer —but perhaps the next, or the next.

It was raining as they turned into the convent drive. The motor car drew up at the door. I shall be too proud to cry here, she thought.

Afterward she could remember little of the first half hour. They had been shown into the parlor and there had learned that they were a day too early. Term began tomorrow. Grandma had gotten it wrong. But it did not matter, they were told, Willow would be taken care of. The whole of her time there, she would be taken care of.

Reverend Mother smiled at Willow, taking her hand in a cold, dry one. “Leave it to us, Mrs. Ahlefeldt-Levetzau. We are quite used to—upsets. For such children the sooner there is a return to normal life, the better.”

She says it as if I were slightly deaf, or not quite present, Willow thought. I wish I
weren't.
All the time Reverend Mother spoke, she wore her
proudest and “cleverest” expression. It made her feel safer (and in the old and happier days had made her friend Joyce laugh).

But then, after tea in the convent parlor, when she'd kept back her tears, eating the last sandwich to make Grandma happy—in had come Aunt Alice.

Reverend Mother said, “Mother Hilda has not been in the best of health. She is only able to do light work. Sacristy work.”

Aunt Alice was not at all what Willow had imagined. She did not look particularly holy. Nor, except that they were both thin, could she see much family resemblance. But then Aunt Alice was only half Mummy's sister.

What to say to her? She didn't seem one for talking. She and Grandma discussed politely a few items of family news (the real news, the
bad things,
were not mentioned at all). They spoke of Michael going to Romania. Aunt Alice said, “Ah, Romania …” as if she thought it the most boring country. Really, Aunt Alice wasn't very interested, or interesting. I can't imagine, Willow thought, what we shall talk about if we have to be together.

Then, suddenly, Alice was gone, and Grandma too. She heard the sound of the motor car turning out of the gates. Willow was alone in the parlor with Reverend Mother.

“I am ringing now for Mother Emmanuel, who will take you to your dormitory.”

“Oh, but just a sec. I forgot to give my aunt the present that—” “Mother
Hilda,
I think you mean, Willow. Perhaps you would remember while you are here, for the sake of discipline, that Mother Hilda is a nun first, and your aunt second.”

“Whatever is that accent? Honestly, I never heard anyone talk like that unless they were being funny in a music hall or something. Is it Cockney? Are you Cockney?”

“I'm Willow Gilmartin.”

“And I'm Chrissie Leatherley. And no one I know talks like that. Where on earth did you pick it up?”

“What makes you think I got it on earth?”

“Just be careful how you speak to me,
new girl
You may think you're the bee's knees and the camel's hips, Willow Gilmartin, but I can tell you
we
don't.”

There seemed so many of them, although when she did a count it came to far less than at Finsbury Park. It was something to do with the way they'd formed cliques—had already made their friends last September, if not years before. She was the only new girl for the summer term. There were of course older girls, a head girl, three prefects, but they paid little attention to twelve-and thirteen-year-olds. People like Willow got noticed only if they made a scene or broke the rules in ways that couldn't be ignored.

None of the big girls seemed very interested in being at the convent. When they were overheard talking, it was always about the holidays. Joanna Mays was head girl but spent most of her time with a bay hunter she kept in the stables and which she rode to hounds in the winter and hacked in the summer. When Willow asked one of her own class if Joanna and her friends were taking School Certificate this summer, she'd met an incredulous face.

“Honestly! Whatever'd they want Matric for? They're not going into some stupid job. They do art and things. At Easter they went to Florence, with Mother Augustine's brother. Anyway you can't swot
and
hunt. There isn't time.”

She hadn't expected to be happy, but she hadn't expected to be quite so
un
happy. From the first miserable evening and night alone, on to the dreadful afternoon after, when in a seemingly unending stream the girls had returned from their holidays:

Pauline, Chrissie, Evelyn, Betty, Geraldine, Maureen, Priscilla … They didn't introduce themselves, or speak to her, but behaved for the first twenty-four hours as if she were not there at all. And she could almost have preferred that.

But of course it had not lasted. “Are you the wallpaper, by any chance?” Maureen had asked. (Or the one she
thought
was Maureen.) Any answer to that would be wrong, so she kept silent, rather haughtily. That way there was no danger of crying. The worst imaginable would be to cry in front of
them.

She shared a large room, almost a dormitory, with Evelyn, Betty, Pauline, and Maureen. They were all Catholics except Priscilla. And even Priscilla knew when to genuflect, stand up, sit down, the words of the hymns, and what all sorts of things
meant
Willow did not. She hadn't thought to discuss this with Grandma, and didn't dare say anything to Aunt Alice (sorry, Mother Hilda), whom she hadn't seen to speak to since that first day.

They wore summer dresses of blue striped material with navy-blue sash belts and pale blue cardigans. All the uniform was blue, “Our Lady's color,” except the brown shiny galoshes which in wet weather were worn over their blue punch-toed sandals. She was Form IV B and so her hair could not be worn loose, it had to be plaited—one or two plaits. Two was easier so she settled for that. The second morning she was struggling when Evelyn, who was nearly as tall as she, and very dark and silent, offered to help. She didn't speak at all while she was doing it. Then when the second plait was almost finished she tweaked Willow's head so roughly it brought tears to Willow's eyes.