The Diamond Waterfall (71 page)

That night he told himself that his father married before he was twenty. At university there'd been married undergraduates after the Great War. He could ask for his wealth in advance. There was plenty. When she saw The Towers, for all its vulgarity, she would—it would probably be the sort of place she liked. Grandma and Erik could continue to live there.

In the sun and the high mountain air, two, three days passed. He was at once nervous of asking her and impatient. He couldn't wait to make her happy. He thought he'd like to ask her, not in bed where it might seem obvious, but somehow in a celebration.

He told the others, “I'm taking Corina out for a meal. Partly an early farewell, partly a celebration.” When they asked, “What of?” he said, “Does it have to be
of
anything?”

On the way there in the Bugatti, they met traveling gypsies. He saw it as some good omen. Their joint mood was one of absolute gaiety. He told himself,
She knows.

The restaurant was open-air, vine-covered. She had taken a party of them there at the beginning of the holiday. He remembered it as a place where the tables were well separated. He wouldn't want to be overheard.

They ate pastrami and then crayfish with saffron. They drank a very dry Aligote. He was almost too nervous to eat. He felt instead a deep thirst. He said to her, “You might look sad at my going.”

“I am,” she said, laughing. “You remember where we were when I told you that. Yesterday. What we were doing.”

Then: “Oh,” she said, “what am I going to do?” Her face suddenly very solemn. She fingered her wineglass, looking out a little beyond him. “Life isn't easy, Mikki.”

He started the wrong way, of course. He could have guessed he would do it wrong.

“Corina,” he began. “You know I'm going to be very rich?”

She said, “I'm very happy for you. Rich people—sometimes they're happy. I hope you will be.”

He said, “That's not the sort of thing I meant.” He tried again. “I've told you about the Waterfall. The Diamond Waterfall.”

“Oh yes,” she said,
“that
So lovely.”

“You remember what you said?”

“What? When?”

“You said the other evening—
you remember where we were
…‘What a lucky woman Mikki's wife will be. Diamonds trickling down her.
Lucky,
' you said.”

“Certainly she'll be fortunate—and rich.”

“Corina, listen, please. Corina, Corina—now listen to me,
I want you to be that woman.”

“What ever are you saying?”

“I want you to be … I want
you
to wear the Diamond Waterfall.”

She opened her mouth a little.

“Corina darling, I want you to be my wife.”

She put her head on one side. “Oh Mikki—Mikki.” It was a funny little voice.

He said, “You think I'm not serious?”

“Are you?”

“Corina, don't”—He trembled, felt the sweat grow cold on his forehead —“don't I look serious? Look, darling, I've thought it all out …” He could hardly look at her as he explained everything, all that he had pictured, and planned.

“You'll like England—and there'll be money enough to travel, to shop in Paris—and Rome and … You see, my father married very young, and two of my aunts … It's meeting the right person, it's
knowing
…” His head was turned away.

An unexpected sound distracted him. Yes. No. Yes, she was
laughing
She put out a hand. “Mikki, you are a funny little boy.”

“What's funny? What do you mean,
funny?
”

“All right, funny
big
boy. It's just so—” And she started to laugh again. “It's just the idea. You, me—”

“Well, what's wrong with
us?”

“Oh Mikki, it's—absurd, Mikki. Mad. Crazy. You're a dear boy, and of course you make me happy, and we have fun—and we're perhaps a little in love, but—to be
married …”

Cold with anger, he said, “It is
not
funny!”

“But it is,” she insisted. “It can't be that you haven't seen … we've been having
fun,
that's all, Mikki.”

“Funny,” he said,
“fun.
What about love?”

“Well, what about love?”

“It's what I feel for you. God, it's what I feel for you. And I think, I thought it's what you felt for me. You said—”

“Mikki, darling Mikki, please—your voice down. Look, Mikki, of course when people are in bed, and they say it, they mean it. And I do, I
do
love you —when we are having fun.”

He couldn't speak, couldn't answer her.

“Mikki,” she said, “it's been a holiday and soon it'll be over. You go back to England, to your university. You forget me. I—forget you. That's all. And our memories are happy.”

“I don't want memories,” he said. “I want
you.”

“Oh well,” she said. Her voice had an edge of impatience now. “You can't have me then, can you?”

“But why?” He said it again, like some lesson he couldn't understand, “Why? I thought you loved me. That all this was
serious.
You said—”

“Mikki, please. We have had a good meal, we are going to have a drive. We go back to the villa, maybe have a little sleep—”

“No,” he said. “No. Corina, please, please be serious. I love you. I want to
marry
you.”

She stood up from the table, refastened her hair clasp, picked up her handbag.

“Where are you going?”

“Look,” she said, “I go to the ladies' room—it's allowed, yes?”

She was gone five or ten minutes. Perhaps she meant him to calm down. He poured more of the wine, tapped on his glass for the waiter, called out
“Domnulef”
twice. He ordered a
ţuicâ
then one for her, and more coffee.

She came back. “What's this? Do we start again?”

“Yes,” he said, “I want to talk to you. Please, can we talk about it?”

Her voice snappy: “No, we can't. I thought while I was out there, I thought—Mikki is being a nuisance, Mikki is spoiling it all.”

“How can loving you be spoiling it?”

“Listen,” she said, “listen. How can I say this? Now you know how to do it, what we do together, then really one cunt is as good as another. Maybe even, one cock.”

He didn't or couldn't answer. She accused him then of sulking.

He paid the bill. He felt strange. His head, which had been clouded, was now clear. Anger, which he couldn't distinguish from pain.

They went out to the Bugatti. There she stood in all her beauty. He thought then,
Something is going to happen.

She got in beside him—he hadn't showed her in. She didn't speak. He started up the Bugatti almost before she had shut the door. She was still arranging some things in her handbag. The car shot forward and everything fell from her lap.

“Mikki,” she said. “Look, Mikki—”

Oh beautiful Bugatti. Naught to thirty in seconds. They drove toward the afternoon sun.

“Look, Mikki, what's that—you're crazy, that's—you're on the
left
of the road.”

Anger growing, he swerved back to the right. They were near a corner. He took it at great speed. The car swooped. She called out,
“Don't drive like that—”

I want the world to end. The world must end soon.
Soon.
And her with it. He drove faster still as the road sloped downward. The speedometer— seventy-five, eighty. On either side were the pine woods.

“Stop that!
It's much too fast. You're
crazy.”

Her scent. Mitsouko, Mitsouko, came over in waves. She must have put more on when she left him in the restaurant. She was desirable, disgusting, beautiful, she could not mean to be so wicked.
She never said all that, she could not have meant it.

I shall drive faster and faster. We shall … where shall we go?
Something is going to happen.
I shall make it happen. His rage and sorrow terrified him. Faster, faster.

Something will happen to her.
But it must not. She must be saved. At once. He pulled the car across the road, brakes on suddenly. The tires screamed. She fell forward—putting out a hand to guard her face.

“My God,” she said, “you're mad. Save me, God—”

“Get out,” he said, “you whore. Get out. Out. Whore.”

She was already opening the door. He gave her a push. She stumbled a bit, then, righting herself, stood on the grass edge by the roadside. Her red slashed mouth was open in fear. He banged the door shut.

And away. Bottom gear, second, third. She can do seventy uphill in third. Top gear. Foot down. Speedometer rising—eighty, ninety, ninety-five …

Of course I should be driving on the left.
You drive on the left …

The engine roared in his ears. A hundred, hundred and five, hundred and ten …

The sun made a pattern through the trees. A way through the pines. The sun fragmented, like stars.

Oh my God—oh my God, my God …
Something is going to happen …

Send for Teddy, Teddy to the rescue. It was Sophie who telegraphed Paris: MICHAEL IN MOTOR ACCIDENT STOP NO DANGER STOP PLEASE COME. Later, Mother had called from Yorkshire.

She was glad she'd postponed the trip she was planning to the States— she had been about to sail on the
Mauretania
the first of September. Now, instead, here she was on the Orient Express.

Michael was in hospital in Brasov when she arrived, but the next day came back to Sinaia. A broken arm, cracked ribs, neck injuries, multiple cuts and abrasions. It could have been much, much worse. Everyone thought it a miracle he had survived. He had been protected of course by the long hood of the Bugatti.

The Bugatti—or what had once been a Bugatti. What business had they, she thought angrily, allowing him the freedom of such a powerful animal? The sheer folly of it. (Although of course I knew. He enthused enough, in the few letters he wrote.)

And then, there was something else. When she spoke to Ion and Elena they were guarded, even enigmatic, looking at each other before speaking. Punctuating remarks: “Perhaps he was overexcited. And this motor, so easy to go too fast. We ask ourselves whether …”

“Well, at least he was alone,” she said. “A passenger would have been killed.” The right-hand side of the car, she had seen it. Nothing but buckled twisted metal.

“Oh yes,” Mariana told her, “it was such a good thing that this friend he was with—you will hear that he was with a family friend—that she wanted to take a little walk, and so got out first.”

This was not the way she had wanted to come to Romania (
if
she had wanted to come to Romania). There seemed little time for the luxury of emotion about being at last in her father's country. She thought, I learned what I learned too late. When I already had Gib. And now, I no longer want a father.

She met Sophie and liked her very much. It was only when talking to her, giving her loving messages from her mother, that any references were made to the past.

“You are my dear Lily's child, I am so
so
happy to meet you. Your mother was happy here. I think she took some of Romania back with her in her heart.”

Not only in her
heart,
Teddy thought. She could almost have smiled.

Sophie said, “She has known such
fine
people here. Men, one man perhaps who was very good.”

Now is my chance, she thought. I can say that I know everything, can ask about this Valentin who loved my mother,
who was my father.
Photographs, memories—Sophie would give me all those if I asked. But somehow, for some reason, it is all too late. I do not even
feel
very Romanian. And if not here, in what is partly my native country, then where?

I am not even sure that I like Romanians very much. Individually, yes, although they seem sometimes almost childishly irresponsible, and charming with it. But charm is not enough. Altogether,
en masse,
they will not do.

Echoes of what was already happening over too much of Europe. Germany, Italy, Spain. What she learned through conversation (as a family they did not seem interested) of the political situation here did not reassure her. A king who had abdicated twelve years ago over his affair with the red-haired Magda Lupescu. Divorced by his wife in 1928, then back on the throne in 1930. “I like being King,” he was reported as saying. The same man who as a young prince at the Front in the Great War had been dubbed Carol
Bolshevicul
and accused of stirring up socialist agitation, now reigned surrounded by his green-shirted Iron Guard—fascists all. And everywhere a distinct smell of anti-Semitism, boding ill.

She had to speak to Michael after a day or two, had to voice her suspicions that the accident was not quite what it seemed. But she was all the same surprised when he confided in her, very briefly, head averted as he spoke. I can't bear it, she thought, when he had finished. I can't bear the weight of it all, others' sins added to my own, others' failures, wounds. Then she thought cynically, He's young, he'll get over it.

She betrayed neither shock nor surprise, comforting him as best as she could. “We need never speak of it again,” she said. “Unless
you wish to.”

She thought perhaps she should meet this Corina. But from the day of her arrival, Corina had been indisposed. A migraine which apparently would not yield to any drugs.

The day before she was to take Michael back, Teddy called on Corina. She came downstairs wearing a swansdown wrap. She was utterly charming. Her nephew was a dear boy, she told Teddy.

“Dear Mikki,” she said, “I think perhaps your family has sent him out too young. This experience he had. It was too much. Such a
big
motor. A Bugatti is a very—”