The Diamond Waterfall (77 page)

A punt moored in the willows, upstream. Early evening, smell of summer grass.

“Jay says he's so pushed this week he's had to renounce all sorts of things—including taking me out.”

He'd asked her once, did Jay know she was seeing
him
as well? “Oh yes,” she had said, “I've mentioned it often. He says we should all three get together one evening.”

He did not like
that
at all. Also, he had become very determined. When a little later, he held her in his arms, sitting there on the riverbank, he wanted to say,
almost
said, “I love you, Jilly.”

The days were passing, it was almost May Week. “About that ball,” he said. “Are you going to one or not?”

She laughed. “Not that I know of.”

“You know of now,” he said. “You're coming to Clare Ball with me.”

As simple as that, too simple perhaps. For two days afterward he walked about in a happy dream. (I do not have to think about France and the trenches and gas masks and aeroplanes shrieking over Guernica.)

So he was all the more surprised when it happened.

Jilly was away for the weekend, at home. He was restless so Chas took him to a party in Pembroke. He left early and came back to his rooms, sleepy with beer. It wasn't much after ten. He lay back on the chesterfield for a few moments and was almost asleep when a knock came on the outer door.

Jay stood there. “You didn't get my note?”

“I've had nothing from you. Haven't seen you since—”

“Since you stole Jilly from me. I don't know where the note went—I wrote the damned thing.” Then: “Can I come in? I'm
going
to come in.”

He sounded as if he had been drinking too. Lively still, but a very slight slur to his speech:

“You might have kept your hands off her—”

“Why?”

“Because she's mine.”

“That's not what she thinks.”

“Look, all I know is—I get tickets for a ball, I ask her—she says no, sorry, I'm already going with your cousin.”

“She doesn't
have
to come with me.

She's coming because she likes to be with me—”

“She's liked to be with me, since the fall. Since we met.”

“Perhaps she needed a change.”

“Jilly's
not
like
that.”

“You say so. You're just angry because you didn't think to ask her yourself, too busy with your jazz. And now you're singing ‘Somebody Stole My Gal.'“

“I don't think in song titles, thanks.”

“You're not engaged or anything. I know because I asked.”

“We were a couple, for Chrissake.”

“Yes, Jay and Jill.”

Michael kept expecting to be angry, kept waiting for it to happen. He felt only calm, sleepiness all gone—almost superior.
Jay, who always does it right, who sorts everybody out, tells everyone what to do …

He said mockingly, “Jack and Jill. You know what happened, Jay?
Jack fell down and broke his crown.”

And Jill came tumbling after. … He remembered the next line as soon as he'd spoken.

Jay said, “There's no law to stop you poaching on another guy's territory. I can't stop you. I'm just hurt. And I holler when I'm hurt—”

“Doesn't say much for the way you were brought up. Barging in here, raising cain when you can't get what you want.”

“I'll take remarks from you, O.K., but don't you say anything about the way I was raised—
you leave my family right out of this.”

It was about then it turned ugly. He wasn't sure who started it, who was abusive first. The insults bounced from one to the other.

“When I've finished with you, you won't know if your arsehole's bored or punched.”

“Poopstick—”

“Runt, you little
runt—”

“Get wise to yourself would you and
grow up!”

“No need to blast me to high heaven—”

“Right then—swords or pistols? Do we go up Gog Magog?”

“That
Cambridge apology for a hill? Look, for heaven's sake, Jay, just calm down.”

“If I want to raise ‘Hail, Columbia,' I'll raise it—and I don't need your leave.”

It ended lamely. “Look, you'd better go,” Michael said. “Get out, would you. Whose rooms are these?”

“O.K., O.K., I will—”

“Clear out—and look where you're going down the steps. Just keep on singing ‘Somebody Stole My Gal.'”

“Don't worry, I will.”

“And pull all the stops out.”

He could think only, in his shaken state afterward, how it would upset Jilly. She must never know.

An apology, written, came from Jay. He thought perhaps he should send one back (“… we both behaved badly …”). In the end he did nothing. He thought, I never liked him very much anyway.

Jilly knew about it, of course. He supposed she had been given an edited version because she only said, “Jay says you've had words over me. How could you? Two little boys squabbling. Really, Michael. Jay has a quick temper, of course. How about you?”

Anger. Corina.
Something happening.
He changed the subject.

He was dressing for the ball. White shirt, starched front, starched single cuffs. Square-cut gold cuff links. Tie with narrow knot, wide ends.

They were quite a large party, eight or ten. Sitting out would be in Chas's rooms, since they were the largest. Jack Harris's Band was to be the main attraction.

They all had dinner first at the University Arms. He could not take his eyes off Jilly. She wore a mid-blue taffeta dress that rustled and billowed. It had the same embroidery at waist and neckline. He saw that the sun of the last weeks had faintly dusted her face with freckles.

After all his talk, Chas had imported his sister's best friend. She was very smart and wore a dress with padded shoulders, and her hair up, with an Edwardian look. She told Chas, “I had Jack Harris for my coming-out dance. He's all right. You should have got Jack Payne. He's far more robust.” She said to Jilly, “Don't you smoke? I'm just
lost
without my filigree holder.”

When they were sitting upstairs between dancing, he had to ask her how it had been with Jay. He had meant not to.

“Well, yes, he
does
dance better. But then …”

Another guest was saying, “In life, you see, the girl with the least principles draws the most interest.”

Someone else said, “You know this one? He: May I have the pleasure of this dance? She: What do I have to lose? He:
You
ought to know.”

Chas said, “She had to go and lose it at the Astor, I suppose.”

Groans. Oh well done, Chas. Stick to dancing and leave the cabaret to others.

Chas said suddenly that he, and two others who should be nameless, had a book on the first of their crowd to be married. He looked meaningly at Michael. “Want to know
your
odds, Firth?”

Jack Harris played “Us on a bus.” Jilly said, “Jay says we should have tried to get George Lewis for cabaret. Jay seems besotted with his clarinet playing. Runs up to London after him. In fact, Jay says—”

I don't mind, he told himself. She is mine now.

They walked outside together along the Backs. There was little or no moonlight. They leaned over the bridge to where the river ran below. A bat swooped, just missing her bent head. Bats were gothic, part of the river smell, the willows, the scent of summer evenings.

“Watch out …”

“I'm rather fond of them,” she said. “The babies specially. Mice with wings. Flying mice. That makes them sound quite ordinary—not at all sinister.”

Sound of a cornet, a saxophone carrying across the water. Coming from the ball. I shall not think of Jay. He will go back to the States. Will have to, if the war …

“Is it all right,” he asked, “about Jay?”

“Of course it isn't.” She said it gently. “How can it be all right when he loves me and I don't love him back? I don't come out of it at all well. I would have come out of it even worse if I'd pretended.”

They went back to dance. He held her very close now. Whatever happens, I shall,
we
shall, have had this night. A ball on the eve of Waterloo. Because of the accident, perhaps, and what he had glimpsed, because of his father even, he would freeze suddenly in the middle of a dance, thinking,
Who of us will be the first to go?

They walked out again just when dawn was coming up, the sky lilac. They held hands. He could feel fatigue and exhilaration run together.

“The idea is to go up to Grantchester for breakfast. The whole party.”

“Yes.” He wanted already to be back with her in his arms on the dance floor. Feel her breath on his cheek when she spoke. Close, closer, closest …

“Could I meet your people?” he asked. “I'd like to do that. If you don't mind.”

“Of course. It's only London. I—”

“Time seems so short somehow. I'm not twenty-one yet—not till next year. But with the balloon about to go up …”

Their hands tightened. His mouth then, in her hair, kissing her.

“I love you so terribly,” he said.

They were silent a few moments. She said, with a sigh:

“We ought to turn back, I think—if we're all to get into punts.”

“I suppose,” he said, “it's much too soon to ask you to marry me.”

“I suppose it is. Honestly.” She turned to him, smiling. “But I wish you would.”

Once she used to be excited by dinner parties. Somewhere in that decade between life with Saint and the year of Ferdy, the very invitation would excite her, with its wonderful Perhaps. Always the possibility that here, invited quite by chance, would be
the
person: the beloved, the husband, father of my children. Unreasonable to hope—and yet …

Then I gave up. Each invitation means less and less. Until tonight
I can hardly be bothered.

Teddy looked down the dinner table. I should have had babies. If I hadn't the orphanage … When I follow their progress now it's as if they were my own. One-legged Vincent, who has been able to study law, who will be all right if—when—the war comes.

“Pierre was ill today, Pierre at Desfosse. He
always
does my hair.” Denise de Lanessan, sitting opposite, had a hard face that closed up as soon as she finished speaking. In her hair, some sort of bird on the wing, jeweled. It reminded Teddy of the extravagances of guests dining at The Towers, whom she glimpsed as a child.

It seemed to her this July of 1939 that social life had become like the set for a costume movie. Paris slipped back into the eighteenth century. Last season peasant kerchiefs had abounded, encrusted with jewels at nighttime. This year they were worn by tandem riders in culottes, hooted at in the Rue Royale. To be smart now was to wear a velvet hood and cloak with a picture frock. And why not? It made a change, to appear a little romantic. Or was it just Marie Antoinette again, playing at shepherds and shepherdesses?

Easy enough to understand how it had come about. The near miss last autumn, Daladier back from Munich, the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Events since then had only made the final outcome more likely. Here in Paris, they did not talk about it much.

The guest on her right turned. “Everyone here tonight has spoken a little of themselves—but you, nothing …” His voice rose, a question mark.

“Probably because there's nothing to say.” Her tone was almost rude. She did not feel flirtatious tonight.

“That I find very difficult to believe,” he said, smiling. She liked him even less when he smiled. She had been displeased at being seated next to him. Earlier when they had drunk champagne upstairs, balcony window open
onto the Paris evening, she had wished she had known a few more of the guests. Her hosts were not close friends.

And he, this man (M. Seydoux—or was it Feydeau, Peydeau, who cared?) seemed known to no one. A male guest had cried off this morning and other guests, a Colonel Martin-Galliflet and his wife, whom she didn't know either, had brought a business acquaintance, in Paris for a few days. He was about her height with dark thinning hair and glasses. His face was keen, his look could even be described as piercing. She noticed the fourth finger missing from his right hand. She felt that he was critical of her. Let him have something to be critical about, she thought.

“That I find very difficult to believe,” he repeated. He was still smiling.

“Hardly. Since I lead a completely idle life.”

“These days? It's possible? Yes, of
course
it is, if a person wishes—”

“I do wish,” she said. “I wish to be completely aimless and trivial and all the other adjectives which are waiting to balloon from your mouth, like in those cartoons.”

“I do assure you—”

“Please,” she said, “you're boring me.” She lifted her glass. The giant ruby and diamond ring (Firth inheritance, reset in platinum for last decade's fashion) caught the light, matched the color of the wine.

No one heard, or commented. Everyone else from the party of twelve seemed otherwise occupied. Perhaps Aimée Ribourel, her hostess, noticed something, for as Teddy turned, she leaned forward, asking M. Seydoux whether he knew Paris well.

“Alas, I only visit her for business, and even then it's so short always—I sail for Canada next week, our office in Montreal. For about three months.”

A little farther down the table, brightly, the voice of Michèle Rochard, telling a story a little too loudly:

“… on the corner, Raspail, Montparnasse, they have this flower wagon on the pavement and it's too priceless. They stop for lunch but
completely.
Table, chairs, four courses. A sideshow in itself. Mouth-watering dishes simmering all morning among the blooms. I tell you, some people know how to live.”