The Diamond Waterfall (55 page)

Everyone was understanding about that, too. Often, especially in the first week, he would go and spend all day with his father. At The Towers he sat for hours on end up in their bedroom in a chair by the window. Once he asked for the key to the tower room where he and Alice had worked with their photography. She wondered if he worried about Alice, and dared one day to ask him. He looked at her with blank surprise.

So blank—it was almost dislike. She had to fight to keep back the tears. This was worse, much worse than the irritable, probably shell-shocked Gib of early 1917, the Gib who had shouted at poor Dougie.

The word that came into her mind most often was “dead.” Once in bed
at night she almost burst out, “You might as well be—” Biting her lips, she caught the word in time.

Yet in truth there was nothing about him, or indeed the two of them as a couple, to remind her of life. They never made love. He had not touched her except formally since his return.
(How would they ever make a child?)
She could only believe, as others kept telling her, that in time he would be better.

One morning, shyly but with the same expressionless voice, the dull eyes, he handed her a small package:

“I want you to look after this, Teddy.”

“It's—what?”

He said flatly, “A diary. Some thoughts, experiences—after they took me.

She didn't know if she was meant to read it, then decided that she could not, and put it away. That night, he made love to her. Anxious, awkward, mechanical almost, silent and without tenderness. Cold arms about her in the cold December night—ghost of the gentle lover of summer 1917. Through all her months of desire, for all her longing for a child, she had never imagined this, this hurried, dry coupling.

“I slept with a dead man.” The words came into her mind next morning.
“I slept with a dead man.”

The week after Christmas, Spanish flu appeared in Flaxthorpe. Erik and Lily and four of the servants were among the first victims. Then old Mr. Nicolson and his household and, last, Teddy herself.

She emerged weak, barely able to sit up, only to learn that Gib, who had been kept away from her, was now ill too. She insisted (“I'm immune now, surely.”) on helping to nurse him. Wrapped in blankets, she sat by his bedside. He was worse than she had ever been. His temperature rose steadily, a hundred and three, four, five. He didn't recognize her. Delirious, he called for Alice, and then for his mother. Over and over again for his mother.

Once he seemed to be laughing, clutching perhaps at remembered happiness:

“Saint, there's a good chap, no,
my
turn. I give you Horace—
nam tua res agitur,
yes,
nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet.
Cap
that!
No, no, damn Horace and let's have tea, tell Vesey, don't be late. Only can't see Vesey …” His voice grew suddenly anxious:
“Can't see Vesey …”

Eating nothing, he could of course only become thinner, more emaciated. With difficulty, a professional nurse was gotten in. The fever raged on— he was wrapped again and again in sheets wrung out in cold water. His furnacelike body dried them out.

Then, just when it seemed it could go on no longer, the fever died down. His first day without it, in the afternoon, he said to her weakly, as if recognizing her from a long way away, “Thank you.” Then a little later, and as if
surprised: “Not chums, I think. It's Teddy isn't it? My head's quite clear now. A lot of love. Thank you.”

He fell almost at once into an exhausted sleep. Exhausted herself, she left him for a while. He slept through the afternoon and early evening. Next morning his face had become a dark bluish color, almost purple. He was breathing with difficulty and did not appear to know her. The nurse and doctor took a very serious view of this new change. They used the word “cyanosed.” She did not dare ask more, for she knew the answer.

He did not speak again. All that day there was his breathing—a harsh whistling sound. In the early evening, he died.

An astonishing number of people sent letters of sympathy. Even after four years of drawing on them, the wells had not run dry. The irony of his death— everyone remarked on that. To have survived so long. (But had he?
I slept with a dead man.)

His few possessions he left to her. Small bequests and personal mementoes for George Sainthill and Arthur Vesey, from Cambridge days. Vesey of course was dead. But Saint, not yet discharged from the Navy, was in London working at the Admiralty.

He came to visit her. She did not know what to make of him. They talked self-consciously of Gib. Alice too. He was plainly surprised by what had been the turn of events, but she did not want to discuss it, was embarrassed by it (The Letter, she thought.). Hastily telling him as much as she knew about Alice's present life, she changed the subject.

“What shall you do, when you leave the service?”

“Something mad or bad,” he said dryly. “I might enter the lit world or Grub Street—or even go to Paris and try
la vie bohème.
Whatever's least like life on the ocean wave. And you?”

She murmured that she supposed she would pick up the pieces—much as other war widows.

He said, head on one side, looking at her quizzically, “And you're truly only—eighteen, is it?”

She said, “Gib was ruined by the spell in Pomerania. You'd scarcely have known him.”

“I fear so, I fear so.”

“He kept a diary there, which he gave me.” She hesitated. “I haven't read it—”

“Do,” he said lightly, “do. He'd want you to. Why else give it to you?”

She had not thought of that, but still she left it in its wrappings. It was not till last year that she had read it.

She read it the morning after sleeping with Saint for the first time, nearly three years after their first meeting. Then, casually, he had asked her to keep
in touch. But in 1919, deep in her mourning, she could not imagine life beginning again.

Indeed it had seemed, the spring after Gib's death, that even nature had forgotten to renew itself. In the continuing wintry cold, leaf buds remained obstinately furled, hedges bare of anything but old leaves of brambles. Dry-stone walls glistened still with frost. From her window at The Towers, the view stretched gray and hopeless.

She lived through that year and the next somehow, as if waiting. Robert had become ill by then—she felt a detached concern, and worried most for Sylvia. She went to Alice's convent to see her clothed as a novice, feeling that to allow Alice to forgive her, and to accept that forgiveness, was something she could do for both of them. For Gib too.

In the autumn of 1920, with her real father's death in Romania, she became well off in her own right. When her mother began a complicated explanation of how the money came to be hers, she told her that she knew the truth, but she did not betray Alice. Her explanation, garbled and emotional, suggested papers, a letter, accidentally glimpsed. Lily did not press her. On the contrary, she seemed glad Teddy knew. But neither of them, perhaps for their own reasons, had wanted to pursue it further. (“Of course, darling, anything you might want to know about him, any time. He was a war hero, you see. … You,
we,
can be proud.”)

In the summer of 1921, of age now, she decided to travel, to flee home and memories for a while. At Christmas, prompted by she didn't know what, she added to her annual card to Saint, “I'm thinking of a spell in Paris. Did you ever get there?” He wrote back from a Paris address to say he'd been there for the last eight months.

When she arrived, they drifted together. There was no other word for it. Irrationally, the first time she went to bed with him, she felt unfaithful, and then consoled herself with the idea that because it was Gib's friend, it was all right, better than it might have been, that he would not have minded.

The next day she read the diary.

Neat hand, schoolmaster's hand, a little shaky.

May 1918. We are about twelve British officers and some four thousand other ranks, of every possible nationality. Conditions are very bad, starvation rations. All our talk is of food, and home— waiting to hear. Do they know yet, does
she
know? I have no feeling for time, it stretches out before me, beyond the barbed wire, the huts and the rows of potatoes growing between. The sandy plains of Pomerania, which is at the end of the world.

June 1918. An account of how I came to be here. I was hit very early in the morning—we'd attacked just before dawn, my second
day back in the line. The bullet, a rifle bullet, got me up by the neck. It seemed to lift my body, it was as if I flew upwards. I thought I was going to die, and was
almost happy.
The next thing I knew I was lying alone in a shell hole in inches of water, blood, unspeakables. I tried to move but couldn't. Then I must have lost consciousness again, because next it was dark. I felt intensely cold. The blood had soaked my front. I knew I would die. Just before dawn I heard the voices—skirt of a long gray coat. A torch flashed in my eyes. I saw a revolver and knew I was to be disposed of. Killed like a rat.

But there's kindness, humaneness. The wild movements I made to try and speak must have served. I remember little afterwards until the terrible coming round at the Jerry clearing station. An RAMC doctor-prisoner, overworked and scared. No antiseptics, no anesthetics. He feared not only gas gangrene but typhus too. I was lying on a foul bunk thick with dried feces. My first food, an evil-smelling bean porridge in a filthy encrusted iron vat. My time there is blurred in memory with the terrible journey to Pomerania. Pain and thirst.

September 8th. Back in the present. My dreams are growing worse, so that I dread the night now even more than the long days. I see myself: gaunt, unshaven, blood-soaked figure, lying in the stinking shellhole. But when I look again (and in the dream I'm always compelled to), then
she's
there—my poor mother, my
little
mother, as she was at the end. Each day growing smaller. She shrank. She shrinks now every night, wastes before my eyes.

It happened like that, of course. But
then
I was saved, by Alice. Without Alice, where would I have been? She was the rock in the stormy seas. Always there. Sister, mother, lover.

Why not wife?

October 23rd. I can think only of the dreadful thing I did to Alice. In my dreams I don't know if it is Alice or Mother that I see—the horrible vision—it is
one and the same person now.
I only know that it is my fault,
my
doing.

November 7th. It would be easier if I didn't love Teddy (Theodora, gift of God) more than life itself—for that is how it feels. But each day that I realize my wickedness, each day I'm less worthy of her. It's all a pressing confusion. Head, neck—the pain runs from neck up into head so that my mind is clamped—giant pincers of punishment.

Why,
how,
can a gift of God be an instrument of wickedness? I wonder, did God allow the Devil to tempt me through Teddy?
No.
There the circle
begins again
—because
she is good,
but is tied to me —I am a monster of wickedness.
Wicked beyond forgiveness.

November 20th. Nine days now since the Armistice. I thought this
morning, does it matter if or when I go home? The best that could happen would be for me to die first, and be punished. For God will surely punish me—but those I love, and loved, will be free of me.

December 10th. I shall not speak very much in the future. Dead men have little to say. I dreamed last night that I was already dead and knew this morning that that is how it is to be. They will know I am dead. I shall say, “Look, Teddy Bear, look.” The doctors, what can they do? They may insist that time will cure everything. How little they know.

Some words from Revelations came to me this evening:
“And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them …”

How long, oh Lord, how long?

There seemed so many of them. American cousins. It was overwhelming at first. That, and the New World.

They all spoke at once:

“My name's
Jay.
You're Cousin Teddy Bear.”

“Cousin Teddy, can you see whose sister
I
am?”

“Can you tell us, Teddy, why you've been so long coming to see us. David said—”

“Teddy, I sort of like
promised
Jay you'd sit with him.”

Even those who lived out of New York had come to be there for her arrival. It was all part of that great lift of her heart she'd had as the liner came through the Narrows. Standing at the rail, seeing the Statue of Liberty. The New World (Oh, how she
needed
a new world).

Aunt Daisy, her mother's sister—she hadn't expected her to be so like Lily. Photographs of the two as young girls—even later pictures—had not shown it. It was Mother's turn of the head, laugh, voice. Most of all—voice.

Nearly forty years now since she escaped to marry her Joszef. Teddy liked him at once. White-haired and frail, old for his age. Gentle. She wondered how, as her mother had said, two such gentle people had managed. Except Daisy had been strong with it,
must
have been strong.

Daisy talked freely to Teddy of the bad times. “Some of it your mother never knew. We wouldn't have wanted her to. And then in the end, she was
so good to us.
The money—I think it must have been the whole proceeds of her stage success.”

Teddy had wanted then, suddenly, to tell her about Romania. This was, unlike her own mother, someone in whom she would find it easy to confide. Yet (and I am able to tell casual acquaintances, shipboard friends like Daphne) she didn't feel it was her own secret to pass on, it was her mother's.

There had been money, but not so much of it until their eldest son, Joe, joined his father in 1905 at the age of eighteen. Within five years the business
had taken off. Joszef's partner, approaching seventy, sold out. Joe, it seemed, had moneymaking talents inherited from who knows how many forebears. The Greenwood touch—he had that certainly.