The Diamond Waterfall (67 page)

Maureen said, her smile like a pussycat's, “Can't it do its own hair?”

“Just—it's, I've never had to do plaits on me. I used to plait my little sisters' hair, though.” Her voice faded away.

They were sitting on their beds staring at her.

“Did anyone speak?” Maureen asked. “I thought I heard an odd sound—”

“Wallpaper can talk, you know,” said Willow.

Angrily, Betty almost shouted,
“Chrissie
was meant to have that bed. Mother Augustine promised, absolutely
promised
that Chrissie could move in. It's a bit
muck
And she hasn't just broken her word, she's put a tree or a bush or something in with us instead. Willow will G.O. Agreed, girls?”

“Yes,” said Pauline. “You go and ask to be moved, Willow. Then Chrissie can come in like she should.” Pauline had thick, short, tangled hair and a large nose. She poked her face now threateningly at Willow. But when Willow the next day did as they'd asked, she was reprimanded.

The days had a pattern. That was perhaps what saved her from despair. The pattern, and then the ticking off of the calendar: only so many more days to half-term. But first there was the Coronation. Several of the girls were taken out for tea by their parents. Grandma and Erik sent Willow a tin of toffees with Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose on the lid. She wasn't sure about offering the toffees around. In the end she gave them all to the girls in Class III, the class below her.

The lessons weren't too bad. She thought that probably she would have been able easily to do the work of Class IV A, and possibly Class V too, but because she had never done French or Latin and had studied the wrong period in history, she had been put with girls who were all younger. Not that any of the work was very difficult, but Mother Benedict had made the decision very quickly after asking a few questions. In fact it was this being in IV B instead of A which had caused her to be put in the room with Maureen and the others. She would otherwise have been on the floor below. Perhaps that would have been better? Impossible to tell really—since IV A and V didn't go out of their way to be friendly.

After the weekend outings for the Coronation she noticed something strange. It began with Betty, who said to her, in a casual voice, almost friendly:

“You never said your grandmother used to be a Lady—” “Didn't I? Should I? I mean—what of it?”

“Oh, what of it,” said Chrissie, who was standing nearby, “what of it indeed? We know who she is, that's all.”

“She was very famous, on the stage,” Willow said. “King Edward came to see her.”

“Stale buns for tea, it's something else we know, about
you—”

“Go on then. Say it. Fire ahead.”

“Wouldn't you like to know,
new girl?”
said Chrissie. “Wouldn't you like to know?”
I might have guessed, she thought. How could I have hoped, without a change of name, that no one would find out? Sooner or later, in spite of what Reverend Mother had said …

Two days later she was sent for during evening prep, and told to go to Aunt Alice in one of the parlors. They sat opposite each other awkwardly. Willow answered questions about her schoolwork, careful not even to hint she was unhappy at Our Lady of Victories.

Suddenly Aunt Alice remarked, her voice very precise, “It was fortunate of course that the newspapers, when gathering their information, didn't know of my existence, and so did not embarrass the convent. There is something to be said for being buried alive.”

Willow, thinking her serious, bitter even, was surprised then to see a faint smile.

Someone came to fetch her. When she went back into the hall where they did their homework, lots of the girls turned to look. She blushed. It was like the way she'd been stared at when she visited the prison and later when she'd visited Mummy in the hospital there. She wanted to cry, could feel fifty, a hundred, curious eyes on her.

At suppertime Maureen said, “I hope you didn't go telling your aunt about us eating in the dorm. I bet you've been splitting on us.”

Pauline said she was surprised someone with a nun aunt wasn't a Catholic. “You've never told us why you're not a Catholic.”

“Because my parents weren't—”

“Oh, your
parents,”
said Chrissie. “Let's change the subject, shall we, girls?”

It was Willow's night for a bath. Mondays and Thursdays. There was a list pinned up outside the washrooms. Just before running the water, she went into one of the lavatories by the communal washbasins. She was just about to pull the chain when she heard her name spoken.

“You
know more about her. You sleep with her.”

“We wish we didn't—”

“Hey. Careful. Sure she's not—”

“Dead sure. She's gone for a bath.”

“Right. Honestly, though, wasn't it just the end, not telling us about a thing like a
murder.
I mean, if I'd known—crikey. Gosh. When Mummy and Daddy find out … I bet that's why Reverend Mutt's kept quiet till now. I mean, if Pauline's mother hadn't happened to say …”

“Some of the big girls knew. I'm sure.”

“Honestly, I thought I'd die when Reverend Mutt put on that
awful
voice—the same one she used for telling us about that funny girl who wet her panties.”

“Didn't she used to stink?”

“Like someone else I could mention.”

“But Reverend Mutt's voice. Honestly. ‘Girls, girls, what's this—'”

“You sound just like her, Maureen—”

“‘What's
this I've been hearing, girls? Ugly rumors about little Willow Gilmartin.' Little, my foot, she's more like a beanpole. ‘Yes, I'm afraid, girls, something nasty did indeed happen to Willow's parents. It is all very unsavory and is on no account to be mentioned.'
She's
got a hope! Honestly, we could have guessed a sneaky show-off like that would have something to hide.”

“But her mother's dead, that's awfully sad. And—”

“I think you're a bit soppy, Priscilla, if you want my opinion. How could she
love
her if she'd killed her father?” “But it's still sad. I think—”

“Don't. I must say it's nice to know she got that showy-off expression because she's been in the newspapers. Or her family has. I mean that was one of the things Reverend Mutt said, that it might make her a bit proud.”

“I don't know. Have you read
Murder in a Nunnery?”

“One of the big girls is going to lend it me. Don't spell things by saying who did it, will you?”

Gradually the group broke up. She waited till there was no sound, then crept along to the bathrooms. The bottom of the bath was gritty with scouring powder. After, she cleaned it again, scrubbing with a kind of hopelessness. She said over and over, “Mummy, Mummy …”

When she went back into the room, they were sitting on Evelyn and Maureen's beds, two on each. It was about fifteen minutes before lights out. Pauline was brushing her hair. No one spoke. Willow hung her towel up on the rail beside her bed.

“Fee fi fo fum, I catch the smell of an unwashed bum,” Maureen said.

“You were a long time in the bath,” Betty said. “I hope you used some soap.”

Suddenly it was summer, and they didn't need cardigans over the blue striped dresses. For a week or two the sun shone every day. The tennis tournament began, part grass, part asphalt—it was the luck of the draw on which you played. Willow was one of the oldest in the junior section, and although she had never really played before—only banged a ball about—she found she was quite good. When Miss Wedgwood, the games mistress, showed her the superiority of overhand serves, she developed quickly a deadly one with an unpredictable spin. “Forty love, deuce, van in, van out …” For minutes at a time she forgot that she was profoundly, desperately, never-to-be-cured unhappy.

That way the days passed somehow till half-term. (Half-term meant half over, halfway to being back at The Towers for the long summer holidays.) But the few days' break was gone almost before she knew it. She could not tell
Grandma or Uncle Erik anything, not even that the girls knew about her history. “Yes, I'm very happy, honestly,” she said to their anxious inquiries, “thank you.” How could she add to their unhappiness?

She was back again, with another six weeks to face.
I can't do it,
she thought.

They lay about on the grass in small groups. There was a Columbia gramophone, a portable that belonged to the convent. Some of the older girls had brought records, and these were played on Saturday afternoons, or weekday evenings while it was still light. When she was back from half-term, and quite despairing, she would hear the music coming over from the lawn. Their craze was Nelson Eddy, paired often with the steely voice of Jeannette Macdonald. “Stout-hearted Men” and “The Indian Love Call” came from behind the rhododendron bushes. Joanna Mays, she of the roan hunter, perhaps she was sorry for Willow, because she invited her to come over and sit with them. Mary Woodruff, a prefect, and several others were there.

Joanna was lying on her stomach reading Agatha Christie.

“Have you guessed?” Mary Woodruff asked. “I bet you haven't.”

“I think it's the Colonel, it
has
to be the Colonel.”

They were kind to her in a way she liked, by just talking among themselves, smiling at her now and then.

“Are we bothering with an end-of-term play? Reverend Mutt hinted that the last offering … Let's do a
murder,
something juicy. What about
Night Must Fall?
That wonderful bit where Danny—”

There was sudden silence. Dorothy, the one who'd been speaking, went very red. Mary said hurriedly:

“D, you might wind the gramophone—a new needle.”

“I'll do it,” Willow said. “Let me.” Hurrying, to show that although she had heard what they said, she had not taken offense, or been upset.

It was the Diamond Jubilee of Our Lady of Victories. The day fell by coincidence on the feast of Corpus Christi, so that as well as the usual procession there were to be celebrations, a special meal, speeches. For two weeks before, one of the nuns read the history of the school aloud to them during meals. The silence they had to keep made them restless. There was face-pulling, note-passing, and kicks under the table. Willow often got kicked accidentally on purpose.

She rather liked the history part. Although the order had three houses in Europe and one in Africa, it was an English one. The two women who began it all in 1877, Amelia Farringdon and Mabel Chesterton, had been childhood friends. One married very, very happily, but her husband was killed together with their only daughter, Laura,
in
a tragic accident in the Swiss Alps. The two friends both had a vision (or it might have been a dream—it wasn't quite
clear) in which they were asked by Our Lady to found an order to teach girls the way they would have liked the dead Laura taught. But no one would listen to them—priests, bishops, nobody. What was wrong with existing convents such as Princethorpe? they were asked. Couldn't they become nuns in one of these? Sadly they had gotten nowhere when the unmarried friend died suddenly of a heart attack. Immediately after (and surely this was Mabel arranging things in heaven?) the Pope himself had decreed that Amelia might found an order and a school to go with it. And since she lived in East Anglia and possessed already a capacious family house …

“It really is
rot,”
Chrissie said. “The only good thing is there's a rumor they're going to let us off next weekend. Friday till Monday. It'd better be true. Can I come and stay with you, Maureen?”

They heard next suppertime after the reading that girls who lived nearby might go home, and girls who did not might go with friends. Telephone calls to parents would be made immediately.

Maureen said, “I suppose you'll spend the weekend with your
aunt—
with Mother Hilda. They can hardly expect you to go to Yorkshire for two days.”

Betty, who was tidying her wash things—slimy flannel, caked soap box, uncapped toothpaste—said casually:

“She could come back with me, I suppose.”

“Aren't you taking anybody?”

“No, Priscilla's got an aunt in Newmarket. She's going there.”

Willow wasn't sure whether she was meant to have heard.

“Well, do you want to come, yes or no?” Betty said.

The Friday morning they left there was a letter from Michael in Romania. Betty was impatient to be off: “Mumsy and Daddy are coming at nine. We've
got
to be ready.” But some of the others were impressed. Willow thought, He has a kind heart, after all. The letter was skimpy and didn't tell her too much, but it had some photographs with it. Mostly mountain scenes, and some peasants in national costume.

Betty's parents bustled the girls into the car straightaway and were off. Mr. Lewin's driving was so swoopy it made Willow feel sick, stuck in the back as she was with Betty. A large red setter sat with them. His breath smelled terrible, and he licked Willow's face, hands, knees, more or less continuously. “He likes you,” Betty said. “Mumsy, Farmer likes Willow, isn't that good?”

Mrs. Lewin said, “You do ride, I hope? Betty didn't say.” She spoke briskly but kindly.

Willow was filled with dread, because when Betty had asked her about riding she'd said—curled up by the scorn on Chrissie's face, “Bareback, I've
only done bareback.” And Betty had said, “Oh, that'll be all right.” Why ever had she made up such a whopper?

“Mumsy, I'm sure Willow will want to ride when she sees Clover.” Willow remembered the framed photograph beside Betty's bed. “And she'll love Tootles.”

“Willow will, will she?” said Mr. Lewin. “Quite a name you've got there, haven't you, Willow?”