The Diamond Waterfall (32 page)

“Very nice. Thank you.”

Great-aunt Minnie said, “A spoilt lad, Robert. Lily. That's the trouble with the eldest. Impossible to please. A
spoilt
lad.”

The police were called in. They arrived the next day. He did not know whether his father had doctored the date of discovery. All the staff and several people in the house were interviewed, Hal among them. He was treated kindly if a little severely. He was asked some questions about Stephen. To all of them, whether relevant or not, he answered:

“He didn't do it.”

Sergeant Appleyard said,
“Who
did it is our business. Just answer the questions, sir, young fellow-me-lad.”

(But they had been blood brothers. … He wanted to say,
“We were blood brothers!”)

Afterward he didn't know what was happening about it all, and was afraid to ask. His father seemed to be deliberately avoiding him. In the end he asked his mother. She seemed as before, embarrassed by it all. She said only:

“I don't think the police are much farther forward.”

He thought he might perhaps of his own accord go up to the farm. But he did nothing. Then, the first market day of the New Year, he went into Settstone. It was an icy day with snow already falling as he walked toward the market square. He had come on his bicycle, which he'd regretted: he had had to walk a great deal of the way even where the ground was not hilly.

There was a good hope of seeing Stephen at the market. He felt certain the Ibbotsons would be selling wethers there. And he was lucky—if what happened, he thought later, could be called luck.

Where the shivering sheep were penned together, there were James, Stephen, and two boys from Moor Bottom Farm. At first Stephen didn't see him. Then as Hal got nearer, and was about to speak (he kept thinking, if I can speak to him alone only a few moments,
I could explain),
he must have noticed. For he looked straight at Hal—then through him. Beyond.

He was near now. He said, “Stephen—”

Stephen said loudly, to the others, “Right. Aye. I'll be away, then.” He touched the shoulder of one of the boys, and moved off. James looked awkward. Pushed at one of the sheep with his hand, then turned his head away. He had colored. Hal turned away too. There was, after all, nothing to be done.

But he could not, would not, give up so easily. Nothing more had been said about the stones. There were no more visits by the police. When he asked Alice, she told him:

“Oh, I think the insurance people are paying.”

It had all been, they seemed to imply, a bit of a storm in a teacup. A storm, yes—but in a teacup? It seemed to him that it had been his whole world rocked.

In the end, because he could bear it no longer, he decided to go up to the farm. He would somehow force his way in, make them listen, make
Stephen
listen. I
must
be forgiven.

Lessons had already started again. He had some Xenophon to prepare for Gib, and sitting over it one afternoon, Liddell and Scott open beside him, he suddenly threw it down and set out for the farm.

It was another bleak, icy day. The light, scarcely arrived, was beginning to go already as he came up the lane to the farm. Tess barked as he came into the yard.

“Hush,” he cried, “hush. You know me—you know me.” That she should bark at him seemed in itself a bad omen.

It was Olive who answered the door. He tried to smile. She didn't.

“Well,” he said. “Can I come in?”

She shook her head, her face grave. “You'd best not.”

“Is Stephen there? Because …”

She shook her head again, her hand on the door, ready to push it to.

“I want to come in.
Please.”

She looked unsure. Then, as if cornered: “I can't stop you, then.”

The kitchen had only Granny Willans in it. She was asleep, her cotton cap fallen forward, the unlaced boots a little too near the hearth. Hal said:

“I'll be very quiet.”

Olive said, “There's no call. She'd sleep through a stampede. Her ears, they're going fast.” Her voice had for a moment slipped into its old friendly tone.

His boots slithered a little on the sandy floor. He sat down at the scrubbed bare table. Olive picked up a broom, and began sweeping the sand from the floor. It was a Friday: tomorrow he knew they would lay down rags. Her clogs squeaked.

“Olive—Where's Stephen? If I could just—”

She burst out, “He's gone. And it's your fault.”

“What do you mean,
gone?”

“Like I said, gone.” Her voice caught, and he saw she was crying. “He's gone for a soldier.”

“What?”

“What I said. He went through to York. It's militia or summat. He's— they said a drummer, on account of he's not a very big un. And, well, that's it. He's left us and all.”

“But—why a soldier? Olive,
why?”

“On account of he was angry. Very, very angry—”

“With me?”

“Have I to talk about it, then? Have I to tell you all? I'd rather not—” She said it in a brave little voice. Then, pushing the broom aside, she sat at the table and buried her face in her hands. Granny Willans snored on.

“I wish you'd tell me. I can't get anybody—nobody'll talk to me at all.”

She said, tears in her voice, “What happened was, they came. Police came. Fetched him down to t'station. He was there while breakfast-time—all t'time you're allowed there without they put you away. And there were others up here … going through everything.” She said with disgust, “Prying. Nosing. Great hands in … What do'ye think that means to us? Mam, she's took to her bed. She's been badly since. Right since Stephen left us. She took it bad, very bad—”

“I never meant,” he said. “If only—”

“If only,” she said,
“if only
—then he'd not be gone, would he? I'm that sick at heart. The shame.” She shuddered. “What do you ken, that kind of shame?
Honest
folk …”

He did then what he knew to be wrong—and hopeless too.

“But,” he protested, “if I can't come back … can't come here … what shall I do? Tess, when she has her puppies in the spring, I was going … And, Olive, I'm used to lead the bracken down, every year. Every year.” He said desperately, “You
need
me.”

“Nay.” She said it kindly, but firmly. “You're not needed. And that's all about it, Hal Firth.”

There seemed nothing to do then but go home. When he got to The Towers again it was already quite dark. He could remember nothing of the walk back.

Lily watched as Teddy sang, her voice surprisingly deep:

“I'm Gilbert the Filbert, the Knut with a K,
The pride of Piccadilly, the blasé roué …”

She strutted to and fro, wearing a silk opera hat.

“O Hades! the ladies who leave their wooden
                                                  huts …”

Her fourteenth birthday party, held partly in, partly out of doors. On one of the hottest days in that hot July of 1914.

“Come on, Gib.” She stopped suddenly. “Come on—you do it
much
better.”

Amy Hawksworth urged too. “Come on, Gib.”

Gib had been at the piano. He got up, and said good-naturedly, “All right, Teddy Bear. Give me the hat.”

When she sang, her face at an angle, shadowed, looked suddenly like Valentin. Familiar stab at the heart. Memory. Then: as we were.

Teddy and Gib sang together:

“O Hades! the ladies who leave their wooden huts,
For Gilbert the Filbert, the Col'nel of the
                                                  Knuts …”

French windows, open onto the lawn. Tea, which had been served outside, was now all cleared away. The party was almost over.

“O Hades! the ladies …”

Lily wondered if Hal would join in. She suspected him of having more talent than either Teddy or Gib, even if it was at this stage only imitative. But he looked now thoroughly bored by the whole occasion. She suspected he would like to be off somewhere, by himself probably. Where? Certainly he no longer went to the farm, not since the upset. The Ibbotson boy had anyway enlisted. Thief or no, better that way, perhaps.

“It's the cutest little thing …
Don't you ask me what it means …”

Amy at the piano stumbled over the notes.

“Hitchy koo, Hitchy koo …”

Gib and Teddy dancing together. Teddy in white
broderie anglaise
party frock, well above her ankles, was at least comfortably dressed. Lily, never able to resist fashion, wore this afternoon a new dress, primrose yellow, ninon, cloth of gold, but so tight around the ankles that she could walk only with ridiculous little steps. She could certainly not Hitchy Koo.

Gib and Teddy held hands. Teddy said, “My thanks to Mr. Nicolson. Ladies and gentlemen, that is positively the end of my birthday recital.” She bobbed a curtsey, giggled. Amy giggled too.

Alice, wearing
her
best frock, was not looking happy. She seemed on the whole to dislike frivolity: was sometimes quite irritable with Gib when he and Teddy fooled together—as they so often did.

Lily wondered sometimes about this whole question of an engagement beween Gib and Alice. It seemed to her altogether a strange affair. I could not tolerate it, she thought. Certainly officially, there was no engagement. Robert was not for it at all. When the subject had first been broached, a year or eighteen months ago, he had not been encouraging. And Alice, Lily knew, would never think of defying him.

“Pleasant enough fellow, Nicolson,” he had remarked to Lionel at Christmas. “Does a good job as a tutor. But—as a son in law—hardly a brilliant—even a particularly suitable match. And how is he to support her? A schoolmaster. Too proud, I trust, to live off his wife. We shall see. But it's scarcely I think—to be encouraged.”

Yet they seemed suited enough. And the situation in the meantime was, if nothing else, slightly awkward, unconventional. She wondered if she should suggest to Alice that she intercede for her? After all, Alice is twenty-nine, not exactly a child, nor beautiful. It is not as if many Prince Charmings had come begging for her hand (perhaps we should have been firmer about a Season?). To many, Gib, with his good looks, might well pass as Prince Charming. She thought of Daisy, who had left her upholstered home in Westcliffe Avenue for one room in the Leylands, and yet that fairy story, a real one, looked now to end happily ever after.

“Can't Amy play the piano for us?”

“I
can't
I haven't any pieces without the book.”

“You know In the Shadows,'” said Teddy. “Gib and I want to do a funny dance as an encore.”

“Who encored you?” Alice asked, seeming to joke, but her voice tart.

Robert wasn't there. (Fortunately, Lily thought, since he seemed to find
difficulty in being anything other than cold and critical toward Teddy.) Nor was Sadie. Sadie, happily, sat with her feet up at the Hall. She would not be going out again till after the baby. She had stopped all her work some while since, delegating much of it to Lily, so as to give herself every chance to have a child safely. And although she'd miscarried yet again, at Easter last year,
this
baby, due in a few weeks, would surely be the long-awaited second son— who could not possibly replace Jack, but who might help to blunt just a little the sorrow Sadie felt still so keenly.

Sadie said, “This cousin of Charlie's, at the Curragh camp, they're really worried about war. I know it's maybe different for me, but Unionists, Nationalists—British fighting British—it's like brother fighting brother. Charlie says the situation really looks ugly. Civil war.”

She was lying outside on a chaise longue. The afternoon was even hotter than yesterday. She was dressed in white, lace at her wrists and throat. Her small face, concerned, rose from the frothy white. Her hands, though, lay quiet over her belly, as if she kept the child safe.

She said, “I'm not sure I even understand it really.”

Lily said, “The Protestants in Ulster want to go on belonging to England. They don't want Home Rule for the Irish. And they are prepared to fight about it.”

Then: “Why, there's Charlie,” Sadie cried. “I was just saying to Lily, Charlie, that you're worried about Algie.”

“The cavalry cousin. Yes, he's about to resign. Can't countenance fighting against Ulster. A sorry tale … perhaps my wife's country will send back some of its dollar millionaires—who one time fled the famine—to make possibly an industrial nation of the Irish.”

He sat at Sadie's feet, long legs stretched out. After a moment he said, yawning:

“There are matters in Europe I suppose one should at least be noticing. Those dreadful Balkans again. Austrian emperor on his high steed, Russkies getting involved. When I think my grandfather fought them at Sebastopol

He poured himself a glass of the lemonade that stood on the table beside Sadie, and mopped his brow. “Good stuff. Perhaps something stronger, in a bit? Shall we?”

A fortnight later, on the last day of July, Sadie had her baby, a son. Lily saw him on Bank Holiday Monday when he was two days old. She was one of Sadie's first outside visitors.

Charlie came upstairs to join them. There was champagne. The baby was perfect, although not very pretty. They had spoken often of how they would celebrate. Their mood now was odd, fragile.

Sadie said, “I guess it's not really joyful the way it should be. I just wish —the news …”

Charlie said, “What's happened is that we're going to show Germany you don't do that sort of thing. Stern lesson required. Walking over Belgium indeed! There's wild enthusiasm reported in London. I wouldn't mind having a go myself.”