The Diamond Waterfall (68 page)

She kept wondering all the time if Betty's parents
knew.
They must, of course. Betty would have told them. But if they did, they made no reference to it.

The riding began almost immediately, within half an hour of their arriving. A light drizzle had just started but Betty said it would take more than rain to stop her. “When I'm older, the next pony—horse—I have, I'll keep him at the convent. Like Joanna Mays.”

Tootles belonged to Betty's sister Audrey, who was away at a different school. He was a fat pony, of uncertain temper according to Mrs. Lewin. “Perfectly safe, of course—just gets a bit pooky.
Lovely
soft mouth.” Willow was fitted out with jodhpurs too short in the leg and a hat belonging to Audrey. Also yellow string gloves because in the wet the reins would become slippery. On first seeing her, Tootles drew back his lips from yellow, very fierce-looking teeth.

“He likes you,” Betty said. “Mumsy, I think Tootles likes her.”

Betty was much nicer to her than when they were at the convent. At the same time she seemed younger, the nine months between them longer.

“I think you're nearly too tall for Tootles—”

“I'll be nearer the ground and safer for falling,” Willow said.

“You aren't going to fall.”

But she thought she almost certainly would have, if the drenching rain hadn't made them turn back after only ten minutes.

“After all, you've only got to
walk,
” Betty had said before, “you haven't even to trot. And the place we're going to, you can just sit and watch me jump Clover.”

Luckily the rain didn't allow another attempt that day. The afternoon passed pleasantly enough, with a drive into Bury St. Edmunds for tea. By evening Willow was contentedly tired. Tucked up in bed in a room to herself —she'd thought she'd have to share with Betty—she tried not to think of the next day.

She hardly slept at all. There must have been some part of the plumbing system that ran through her bedroom. Sounds of someone in distress: she tried to pretend it was a dragon in his death agonies but the fantasy didn't work very well. In the morning, the sun shone from a cloudless sky. There would be no escaping Tootles.

“Listen,” Betty said, “stay in front of Clover all the time—away from
her hind legs. She's a bit of a cow kicker, Mumsy says it's the fault of her previous owner. Go on, Willow, up you get. … No, you get on from the other side—can't you tell left from right? Left foot in stirrup, right hand on pommel—that bit there sticking up. Now lean a bit, right leg over.”

Somehow, giving Tootles little digs all the time as instructed (“I really ought to have lent you a crop for him. He's awfully dozy today, it's the grass —must be the grass”), she arrived safely to where Betty and her friends were to practice for summer gymkhanas.

The sun shone and it was a pleasant place. Betty and two other girls were going over jumps of increasing height. Betty had said, “Back with you in a mo.” Now she seemed to have forgotten her.

Tootles pulled his head down. He seemed to want to graze. She let the reins go loose and he began to munch contentedly. She thought after a while, since he was so quiet, she would dismount and tether him. Dismounting was easy, the ground was so near. While Tootles munched, she swung her leg back as she remembered from yesterday. Her left hand lay loosely on the pommel. She thought she had the reins. As her leg went over, she felt the pony move. “Stop there,” she said. “Whoa, Tootles.” But he was walking on. She hung for a moment. Oh gosh. Oh golly.

Then suddenly she was safe on the ground. Tootles, trotting, gathered speed.

It all seemed to happen in a moment. Betty saw at once, and she and her friend Monica rode over to rescue Tootles. “Oh gosh, Willow—look what you've done.”

When they arrived back at the house:

“Mumsy, look, she's broken Tootles' reins! Tootles has put his foot through his
reins,
Mumsy.”

With that sort of beginning it amazed her that she agreed, even insisted on going out for a hack on the Sunday. It was a matter of pride. They set out straight after breakfast. She had been with them to early Mass. It was another hot, still day. She was all right at first and managed quite well. A friend, Monica, went with them—she and Betty talked a lot. Willow was careful to keep away from Clover's hind legs. Tootles seemed in a good mood. I am quite getting the hang of this, she thought. She even opened a gate for them, getting her hands mixed up and ending up facing the wrong way—but managing.

“Jolly good,” Monica said. “You've quite made up for yesterday.”

On the way back they were a few hundred yards from home, when, without warning, Tootles broke into a canter. She remembered with horror her own words—“I've only done bareback … cantering about, galloping.”

She pulled hastily on the reins—I must not break this pair. Pulled harder. Nothing happened. She pressed angrily against him, her feet slipping
farther into the stirrups. Betty shouted from behind, her voice sounding miles away, “Turn him, try and
turn
him, you fool.”

She supposed this speed to be a gallop. She tried pulling to one side, to turn him. She slipped a little in the seat. Leaned forward—then backward to pull harder. She slipped farther around in the saddle. And then she was down, but still attached to Tootles. Her head went bang, thump, bang. Her leg—shot through with pain.

“We've been told to be nice to you, that's why I'm here,” said Maureen. “I've brought you some Kunzle cakes and the
Horse and Hound.
Betty says you were jolly lucky only to break a leg, she thinks you're the absolute end mucking up the weekend like that. People who can't manage ponies shouldn't get on them.”

When Willow didn't say much, she went on:

“Cheer up,
do.
When are they going to take the bandages off your head? We've all got to be in this ghastly outdoor tableau, it's a bit from St. Lucy's life, her eyes were plucked out and she has to hold them on a plate—we're going to use peeled grapes or jelly sweets. Look, do open the cakes. I'm absolutely
ravenous.”

Maureen was her third visitor in the convent infirmary. Betty and Josephine came first. Betty was warily polite—and brought well-wishes from her parents. Willow's left leg, in plaster of paris to above the knee, was stretched out in front of her. Her head would soon be out of its bandages, but the scabbed red healing on one side of her face made her not want to look in the mirror. Luckily, although her visitors said some unkind things, they had not remarked on that.

At first after the accident she'd felt quite certain she would be allowed to go home. But after the first few days in hospital at Newmarket—where she was visited by a distraught Grandma—she was told that ten days or so in the infirmary was all that would be needed. After that she would be able to get about and attend classes. It would be a pity to take her home, Reverend Mother told Grandma, when she'd settled in so well and made so many friends.

She had had three days now in the infirmary. She was the only person ill at that time and had a largish room with four beds all to herself. The meals were the same as in the convent dining hall. Mother Veronica, who was in charge of her, was a tiny bustling woman, permanently hurried. Willow hated to ask her anything.

There was medicine to take, of course. She didn't care for the one she was given for her head. It was cherry-colored and sickly. It made her sleepy, and after the sleepiness had worn off she always felt like crying.

Aunt Alice had been to see her each day so far. Willow was certain she had been sent. She sat at the foot of the bed and asked polite and, Willow
thought, rather silly questions about her leg and head—although she reminded herself that her aunt had been a nurse in the Great War.

She and Mummy had the same father.
Looking now, she tried to find some resemblance to her own mother but could see none.

“Do the girls come and see you? You're not too lonely? I'm sorry I could bring only some
Messengers of the Sacred Heart,
they're not very exciting—”

Willow burst out, “You've just come because you've been told to. You're as bad as all the rest. You've been
told
to be nice. I expect it was a penance in Confession or whatever.”

She had surprised herself. Her aunt looked not angry but amazed, and hurt.

“I didn't mean that, you know,” Willow said. “My head aches and I get silly. It's very kind of you. Thank you very much for coming.” Then to her horror—it must be the medicine—she began to cry. She felt the tears fall before the sobbing began. Her cheeks were wet while her face was still composed. But then, once begun, she found she could not stop. Her head shook painfully. Her body heaved with sobs.

“Mummy,” she said, then over and over again, “Mummy, Mummy …”

Without moving from the end of the bed, Aunt Alice said, “You could tell me about it, if you wanted.”

“I expect you're going to say, ‘Big girls, girls of nearly fourteen, don't cry—'”

“Indeed I shan't. You look as if you haven't cried enough.”

“What
is
enough?”

“I wish I knew. I cried for
my
mother for many years, most of all when her place was taken. But then, I had my father, my home. I didn't have the— family tragedy you had.
Your
suffering.”

Willow had stopped crying now. She poured herself out a glass of lemon barley water from the bedside table. “Would you like some, are you allowed?”

“I saw your mother the day she was born, Willow. I was taken up to see her. She had hardly any hair, just a little pale fluff. Not like Teddy. But later —her curls—”

“Tell me, please, please tell me. Everything you can remember.”

She saw afterward from the clock that they had talked for over an hour. It seemed to her she had moved from the convent infirmary, with its white walls and cast-iron beds, to some in-between land. She, who'd been too shy to ask Grandma the things she really wanted to know, even to talk about her mother very much at all (and oh, they meant well, how well they meant), now could not stop:

“Did Mummy really,
really
—was she ever as naughty as that? When Margaret was very little she threw her sprouts on the floor once and Mummy said, ‘
I
never.' If we'd only known …”

She told Aunt Alice, “I used to put the two smallest ones in the bath together. It was our happy time before Daddy—Reggie—came back from work. Sailing boats, blowing bubbles. The
very
first thing I remember in my
whole
life, the big bathroom we had in the Surrey house, I had this clay pipe and I was blowing bubbles, Mummy did it with me, hers were the best—we had Fairy soap and water.”

“Floating soap, we had, Willow. Swan floating soap, it was called. And Nan-Nan used to allow me—my mother was never there at bedtime. Sylvia, your mother, I used to go in and give her her bath. She was so much younger —I felt more than a big sister. Almost a mother—”

“
I
was sort of mother too, to the little ones. Oh, I miss them so horribly. Canada's so far away. And if
they
cry for Mummy … I mean, Auntie Bar is sweet, but …”

Memories and more memories: “The winter I was four, Aunt Alice, the snow began at Christmastime and just went on and on and on. Mummy made me a treat lots of nights—a twopenny carton of cream and she put it on my windowsill, then when I woke up it was
ice cream
and so lovely.”

Oh, the luxury of talking to a
listener,
and someone who was family. When Aunt Alice said that it was, alas, Benediction time, Willow made her promise to come back the next day, with lots of time.

As she got up to go, Willow said, “Come here.” As her aunt approached, she threw her arms about her. “That's for being wonderful and saving my life.” She covered her in kisses.

Her aunt looked pleased. “I haven't done much, Willow. You know you can always talk to me. Anytime.” She said as she turned away—she was very flushed, “I wouldn't have kissed you unless you had first. I'm not a kissing person.”

“What a big boy!”

“Isn't
he a big boy!”

“Michael, you're here exactly for
le five o'clock
… You tell us now everything of Paris—Mariana wants to know about
hats.”

“Your aunt was telling us you are
little
—yes, I am certain she says
le petit Michel”

“Your French is very good. How was the journey? Say at once what you think of Bucharest.”

“Your grandmother knows my father, who is coming in one minute. And she knew also his brother, my Uncle Tino, who is dead, alas.”

Too many people, too much noise. They had come specially—all of them, to take afternoon tea in the town house of Ion and his wife, Elena. (Ion, whom Grandma Lily had known, together with his brother Valentin, at the turn of the century.) Their married daughter, Mariana, was there with her husband, Stefan, and twin sons, Cristian and Corneliu, and little girl, Dina. Two more of Ion's daughters. Friends, relations …

The only one easy to distinguish was the redoubtable Sophie, whom Grandma had told him about. Eighty now, with features almost obscured by fat, she laid a plump hand gently on his.

“Your dear, dear grandmother, such friends we were. And my dear Teodor also. We spoke to her of course in English—her French was not like yours.”

They all congratulated him on his French, which in Paris had not been thought much of. Often Teddy couldn't wait till he found his words and would talk for him.

There was a woman there, in her thirties he thought, whose name he didn't catch. Everyone, except for gray-haired Ion and Elena and white-haired Sophie, was dark. This woman was blond.