The Diamond Waterfall (27 page)

For all that she ate so well, she was only moderately stout, but her color was high and she was short of breath, needing a long time after she'd gotten into the train to get her breath back. They were in a Ladies Only carriage, and when after a while she took her hat off”, Alice saw she was wearing one of those made-up combs with a fringe of hair attached. Unfortunately Mrs. Radcliffe's own hair didn't match the brown with chestnut lights on the comb. Alice wondered suddenly, Shall I ever look like that one day?

“So you're the Miss Firth, the Alice Firth that Nicolson speaks about incessantly?”

Gib said, “You won't have met Saint. He's not a Marlburian—”

Saint said, “I'm not even Cat's—forgive me, St. Catharine's. My college is John's.”

Gib said, of another undergraduate who had just come in to join them for tea, “But Vesey here, he's a Marlburian—not that you ever came across him, I think.”

Vesey was slight, with thin pale-brown hair and gold-rimmed spectacles. His face was kind. She didn't think Saint looked particularly kind. His real name was George Andrew Sainthill and he and Gib had met through sharing the same classics coach last year.

“You could say Thucydides brought us together. We get along like smoke, Nicolson and I. Though I can't pretend to share his brilliance—”

“Cut that,” Gib said. He told Alice, “He's always ragging me. It's just that
I
work—”

Saint said, “My father's coach—the best a man ever had—told him it was ‘absurd to work in the afternoon, a great mistake in the evening, and
almost impossible in the morning.* My governor managed on about ten minutes a day. Fifteen's very fair.”

Mrs. Radcliffe looked distracted. Her mind, Alice realized, was on the tea table. Chocolate cake, large currant buns, sandwiches, marzipan fruits, dough cake, tea, lemonade …

“Take a pew, Vesey, take a pew,” Saint said, for all the world as if they were his rooms. He was sitting on the leather sofa, Alice and Mrs. Radcliffe either side of the fireplace in basket chairs.

She looked around. Fire screen, with college crest. A Wedgwood biscuit barrel which she remembered from the Vicarage. On the door, his black gown, his cap, with its stiffening board removed, draped over the fire screen. A clutter of books—many marked, others lying open.

A Toussaint engraving of the college gateway. And photographs. Examples of their joint work: views of The Towers, the Hall, Flaxthorpe Bridge, Lane Top Farm. She herself was there: a picture he had taken two years ago when she had begun to eat again, done with her new portrait lens. She had forgotten that picture.

“Be a decent fellow and offer the sandwiches.” They ragged each other all the time. She wasn't sure really how she had thought it would be. Saint talked the most. He would be going to his own college ball, he said. “My sister and a friend of the most breathtaking beauty will arrive in three days' time.”

He teased Gib and Arthur Vesey. Their college, “Cat's,” was small, only some sixty undergraduates. “That size,” he said, “it can only be the exclusive, and the excluded.”

Gib said that they took care to exclude the exclusive, and were perfectly happy.

Saint said, “Did you know that this fellow has just got a Gold Medal? For a Latin ode, in imitation of Horace. Written effortlessly—”

Vesey said to Alice, “Didn't he tell you, Miss Firth?”

“No,” Alice said.

“Well, that
is
clever,” Mrs. Radcliffe said. Her stomach rumbled suddenly in the silence.

Vesey said quietly, “Nicolson's human, though. Example—we've to sign the book in the porter's lodge instead of morning chapel. Four minutes to eight Nicolson puts a coat hurriedly over his pajamas—gets there just as the clock strikes. He can be asleep again before ten past.”

Saint affected to be shocked. “He must have a good gyp—which is a sort of valet,” he explained to Alice, “to warn him…. And surely it happens only when he's been burning midnight oil? Always up and about when I'm a breakfast guest. Yes, life's serious for Nicolson.”

“Life's serious anyway,” Vesey said, smiling.

Gib said, “Vesey and I—we row well together. He sits there quietly puffing his pipe. We have the same view of life.”

“Which is too serious,” said Saint. “I'm here like my father before me, to amuse myself.”

Mrs. Radcliffe asked him what were his ambitions for the future.

“I might care to startle the world. But
that
isn't done by putting your head in a book. Certainly I don't intend to become famous for gathering fragments of Praxilla—or polishing Pindar.”

Vesey was going into banking, he told Mrs. Radcliffe, “Unless something wonderful happens, and I get a fourth year.”

“And you, Gib dear?” Mrs. Radcliffe asked, almost as if she had to earn each slice of cake she was so eagerly accepting, and which Alice feared she would later regret.

“One or other of the more obvious,” Saint said. “Parson or pedagogue—”

“Si vis ut loquar, ipse tace,”
interrupted Gib. “Martial. In other words and translated for guests—Saint, if you want me to speak, be silent yourself—”

“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Radcliffe, “that's a foreign language.”

“I'm not capping that,” Saint said. “You and Vesey can play quotation matches—I don't have the equipment….
Quid afferre consilii potest, qui seipse eget consilio,
Nicolson.”

He turned to Alice. “And now Miss Firth, be honest—are we at all like you thought we'd be?”

Mrs. Radcliffe's stomach rumbled again loudly. And as if she felt in some way responsible for it herself, Alice spoke quickly to muffle the sound.

Gib had found them rooms in a house on the corner of Benet Street, so that they looked out on to King's Parade and also were not far from Cat's. That night she was too excited to sleep. Standing at the window, she saw the proctor go past with two top-hatted porters, “bulldogs” as they were called, searching the streets for undergraduates without the cap and gown obligatory after dusk.

She was happy. As she lay in bed she thought, I am here, and Gib is there. All is well. The same feeling, only better, as when he came home for the vacations (I am at The Towers, he is at the Vicarage.
All is well.)

Gib and Vesey took her to the last day of the May races, when the college boats tried to bump each other. They watched Saint rowing for John's, but took care to cheer only Cat's—who alas were bumped, but did not bump. They crossed from Stourbridge Common over to the tow path on the horse-drawn ferry, the Big Grind. She wore the best of her hats. It was an interesting blue, very big, with lace, kilted, a small wreath of roses and long
blue ribbon. Kingcups grew in the meadows. The river smelled quite different from a Yorkshire river.

Saint had a friend with a motor car and they went right out into the country one morning. The next evening to a concert in his college. They walked over to Grantchester, to the Orchard, for tea. These are charmed days, she thought.

Mrs. Radcliffe of course was there all the time. She insisted that she was thoroughly enjoying herself. “Their talk is so
clever.”

The day before the college ball, which would bring the visit almost to an end, they went to tea in Saint's rooms. Vesey was asked too. Saint's sister, a tall lively girl, had arrived earlier that morning together with her friend, a Miss Fox, whom Saint had described as “enchanting.” Miss Fox spoke a lot in a breathy, nervous voice. She seemed to take amiss Alice's few polite questions, so that Alice was glad she would not be of the party the next evening.

Saint's rooms, more colorful than Gib's, had theater bills on the walls, and a rented pianola in one corner. There was much talk of theater and entertainment. Both Miss Sainthill and Miss Fox were very keen, it appeared. Although Alice didn't mention Belle Maman, Gib did. Miss Fox looked with new interest on Alice: she told them her older brother had pictures of Lily Greene in
The Duke and the Shopgirl
and that she herself had seen
Princess Violet.

Gib had been looking among the pianola records. He put one on the roller—a cakewalk, “Ma Tiger Lily.” The sitting room filled with the prancing sound.

Saint remarked, “I borrowed those. A Yankee who keeps in the next staircase. They are his.”

Saint's sister said that she just
loved
that sort of music. “It's the
dernier cri,
and quite deevy. Lots more fun than all those stupid lancers and waltzes from gay Vienna.”

“You'll have to be happy with those tomorrow,” Saint said.

Gib put on another—“Happy Darkies.” Alice thought that she hated the sound: it seemed, she didn't know why, to take him a long way from her. Mrs. Radcliffe merely looked surprised. Miss Fox tapped her small foot. Vesey asked permission to smoke and, trying to light his pipe, filled the air with tobacco. The window was thrown open, sending the cakewalk into the court below.

Saint said he would show them the rest of the college: “We go through to the New Court …” Crossing the Bridge of Sighs: “Cockney Gothic,” he remarked. And then: “Mr. Wordsworth was unhappy the other end, among the kitchens—I wouldn't care to have kept his rooms.” He was in the Tudor Court—much the best to be. The new buildings, he said, were a great mistake.

They walked in the gardens, and in a place called the Wilderness, heavy with trees and the scent of wild flowers.

Toward the end of the afternoon Alice realized that Miss Fox, confused by the stepmothers and stepsisters, thought she was Gib's elder sister. Oh, thought Alice, if only that were so. Standing there among the trees, her happiness as fragile as the wild flowers about her feet, If only …

She who had never wanted to attend any social occasion she could possibly avoid was now longing for and full of excitement about—a ball. She hardly slept the night before. Heard every quarter of an hour strike from Great St. Mary's Church. She sat up in bed reading Mrs. Humphry Ward's
Marriage of Wiliam Ashe.
Other balls were held that evening. Voices, laughter. Once a party came up the street. When the horse trams started up, clopping by on the stones, she realized that the night was over. She did not feel tired.

Her dress, Belle Maman's choice, was mostly cloth of gold and chiffon, sparkling gold tissue on the tunic. Lace too, just enough not to make the dress heavy. She saw that the gold warmed her skin. Looking in the glass, she realized that just as the blue hat had completely altered her, so—the dress. She did not look sharp anymore. Rather, soft.

The party for the ball was held in Vesey's rooms, which were larger than Gib's and had, she suspected, been very tidied up for the occasion. They were a party of eight. Vesey's sister was there and two men who had invited twin sisters from their home town of Chichester. After a dinner party at the Blue Boar, they walked down to the college. Colored candles, lights, were strung along King's and Cat's. Mrs. Radcliffe had had trouble with her dress: too tight in spite of extra corseting. She told Alice, “When I have the chance, dear, I think I shall just loosen something here and there.”

There was a marquee with orchestra: waltzes, lancers, veleta. They danced to “Frou-Frou,” “Kissing Is no Sin,” “They All Love Jack.” Alice didn't think of herself as a good dancer. And she had never, formally, danced with Gib. But like everything this evening, it was easy. Perhaps because he did it so well, perhaps because … The Gib of the gently swaying waltz was not a cakewalker.

The evening wore on. It could only become happier. She wasn't tired at all. About three o'clock in the morning they were to visit Saint and his friends at John's. Now four of them were sitting up in Gib's room with Mrs. Radcliffe, who appeared a little wilted. Alice noticed her surreptitious loosening.

There was to be a recital of comic songs in the marquee and they were about to make their way down there to secure a good place. Mrs. Radcliffe said, “Perhaps, my dears, you will excuse me? I don't feel very comic.”

As they went down the staircase, she and Gib last:

“How fearful to be a chaperone,” he said. “I fear she will yawn till dawn.” He said it exaggeratedly, drawing out the rhyme. Alice laughed. Vesey
and his sister were ahead of them as they crossed the court. In the marquee they were playing the waltz “Catch of the Season.”

“I say, I shay,” came a voice, thickly. A young man in evening dress, but with one of the tails torn, his tie hanging loose. He put out a hand to block their way. “I shay, damnation. You Wesley-Dutton?”

“No,” Gib said. Then politely: “If you'd perhaps excuse us?”

“No, will
not.
Bloody damnation, will not.” He continued to stand in front of them. His eyes had an odd boiled look. Gib said, raising his hand very slightly:

“If you please. There
is
a lady with me—”

“Whash lady? That lady?
Ship's
a lady. Hey and ahoy and—whoah, oah she
goes…
. Putrid bilge … whoops …” He leaned forward, swaying, pressing his shoes on Gib's toes.

Gib said, “Look here, cut it, would you? Make off. I don't know you.
And
you're drunk.”

The man lashed out suddenly, hitting Gib hard across the cheek and temple. Then again quickly, on the nose and mouth. Alice thought for a moment that Gib was going to turn the other cheek. Instead, he pushed the man hard, with his forearm.

By now the others had turned around. The college porter came up:

“Now, sir, now, Mr. Nicolson. You all right, sir?” He and another man had hold of the drunk. “This won't do at all. Very inebriated. He's not one of our gentlemen, Mr. Nicolson.”

The drunk had perhaps decided to be quiet. The porter said, “We'll soon have his name and college, sir. A bad night's work it'll be for him.” A lot more people had gathered around. The blood ran freely from Gib's nose.