The Diamond Waterfall (80 page)

When lucid, she gave all her love to Erik, telling him again and again, in Teddy's presence, in Willow's, that he had saved her life. “You don't know, never will know, though I've tried to tell you, how you came and saved me when it was impossible. When it was
all impossible. “

Listening to her, Teddy thought, If I could have hoped for something like that! But Mother was older than I am now. I
should
hope. Only where are these people? Erik, Henri (but
I must not think of him).
Where are they to be found?

She had been uncertain whether or not to do something about Henri. In a moment of sudden hope she had thought, I could try and get Aimée Ribourel's address in the Romanche—she will know who were the guests who brought him. An advertisement in the principal Montreal newspaper saying that if Henri will contact Teddee, he will hear something to his advantage. There was something pathetic, distasteful even, about that notion.

War grew nearer by the day. So did Lily's death. When on the first of September, Hitler invaded Poland, Lily was comatose and semidelirious. That evening, in a voice tired and pain-filled but clear as that of a young girl, she told Teddy, “I have been so happy, I was so lucky. Try to be happy,
Teddy darling.” Willow, who had sat by the bed all day, was holding her hand. “And Willow too. Willow …”

She was unconscious most of Saturday the second. Then late in the evening:

“Strange,” she said, “we've been having a little tea party under the trees. Sadie in the hammock. She expects her baby any moment. No, the war. Christopher was born the week, July 1914. Now another war starts. And I'm dying. Strange.” Then she added, matter-of-factly, “I think I shall have to go, soon.” Three hours before war was declared, she died.

Teddy wrote to the American relations. Daisy wrote back, sad about Lily's death. She included some family news. One of her granddaughters, Jay's sister Esther, had just married. Jay was home again in New York but she wasn't certain of his plans. There had been girl trouble—she didn't say in which country. Teddy wondered … Hadn't Michael's fiancée been Jay's girl? He will recover, she thought. She'd met Jay only once since 1923 but had thought, I recognize in him (mixed with whatever other heritage) that fall-on-your-feet, survivor's streak that Mother had, and darling Sylvia lacked. Which old Grandad Greenwood had almost too much of.

Alice, still in Switzerland, wrote that she would be staying on there. She promised Mass offerings for Mother, she was well and happy, she said. Her tuberculosis, it seemed, was either quiescent or cured, and her spirits good. Whatever the crisis had been … She enclosed a letter for Willow. Willow did not show it to Teddy, but told her, “I shan't worry about Aunt Alice now.”

“Underneath the spreading chestnut tree, Neville Chamberlain said to me, ‘If you want to get your gas masks free, join the blinking ARP.'”

But they were free anyway, Teddy thought. To everyone. The little children at The Towers had Mickey Mouse masks. Some panicked, some found them fun. Dear God, may it never be for real.

The children slept on little canvas camp beds, with donated patchwork quilts. By six-thirty every morning they would be up and running around. They were dressed, given breakfast, and potted—she had not done much potting at the orphanage. Then except for the really tiny ones, they sat in a ring, Teddy in the middle, and she read to them. They all had to blow their noses before she began.

“And Baby Bear said, WHO'S been sleeping in MY bed?”

At lunch they sang grace:
“Thank you for the world so sweet, thank you for the food we eat. “
The older ones waited on the younger. In the afternoons they ran about, then after a bath at six were read to again. By seven they were tucked up. They cried for their mothers regularly.

The arrangement was only temporary. Other plans were being made for
them. A convent on the Yorkshire coast might be evacuated here instead. But meanwhile, Teddy loved the children.

Sadie, typically, had turned the Hall into the permanent wartime home for a hospital of crippled children, evacuated from Liverpool. Rows of small white cots, little ones hopping on crutches (reminding Teddy of Vincent all those years ago). Charlie stayed quietly in the rooms set aside for the family. His disease, diagnosed now as Parkinson's, had become since the beginning of the war rather worse. Sadie was in her element with these children: Teddy imagined it kept her mind off the worry of Christopher, already over in France.

Although nothing much was happening there. From the copies of French
Vogue
she continued to receive, and from letters, it seemed lighthearted still in Paris. While here, Christmas in sight already, and not a sign of a bomb. The Bore War, the Funny War, they called it.

The blackout was bad, but must be much worse in the big towns. Here it was simpler not to venture out after nightfall. Rationing had not yet begun. It would start in the New Year, they were told. They would get four ounces of bacon and four ounces of butter a week.

As expected, Erik had gone to Denmark to join his daughter and her family. “After all, Erik dear,” Teddy told him, “it's your own country. Here in Yorkshire you have only memories, however happy …”

She wondered how Henri fared in Montreal. He had planned to be there three months. She mourned him still, but could not think now, in wartime, of any way to trace him. Her story, her loss, seemed so puny beside the enormity of what was happening in the world.

Finland, oppressed by the Russians, suffered. There was an appeal for furs. Teddy sent Lily's persian lamb, and her own white lamb. Then wondered if she should have sold them and donated the money.

Henri offering to buy me a wild mink. What world, what life was that in?

Willow is in love. His name is Gerry and he's dark and a little taller than she, provided she wears flat shoes. He is not the first: she's spent the time between her sixteenth birthday on the eve of the war and now, March 1941, falling in love. One time it lasted three months, another—three weeks. Once it was all of three days.

She told Teddy, “It's funny. Each time I'm quite absolutely certain. I mean, it
feels
right—and then … All these princes that turn into frogs. When it's finished, I can't think how I ever.” It was all tremendously exciting.

Willow did wonder sometimes, thinking how Teddy had married so young, and had lots and lots of men friends. “Teddy's boy friends,” someone had remarked once. “They'd make a rugger fifteen,
and
the opposing side.” Perhaps she had inherited a tendency like that herself? But seventeen, she thought, was a bit young to hang a label on oneself. And much too young to be serious about anyone.

Or so she'd thought, before she met Gerry.

She was living with Teddy now, and had been since the New Year. There had been a difficult patch last year when The Towers was turned over to a girls' convent, evacuated from the east coast. She found some irony in this transformation of her home into a
convent
(Whenever she thought now of Our Lady of V, she shuddered.)

Teddy was driving ambulances, working very hard on alternating day and night shifts. After leaving the north a year ago, she'd rented a mews flat in central London. Willow had pleaded to join her, but although before Dunkirk it had looked possible, after it had not. When the raids had begun in earnest it seemed foolhardy for Willow to be there rather than somewhere safe. “It's quite different for me,” Teddy had explained. “Someone has to work here. Anyway, I've
had
my life. Yours is yet to come.”

Then the raids had eased off. Living with them had in any case become a way of life—although sometimes when she saw Teddy looking worried, she would think that perhaps she shouldn't have persuaded her … but she hated the idea of being sent up to Flaxthorpe. A couple of weeks ago they'd had the worst snowstorm there since 1888. Snow falling for over fifty hours and the troops in to clear the roads. She had liked imagining The Towers Convent (they called it St. Anne's) under siege.

Since January she'd been doing a secretarial course at the Triangle in South Molton Street, and enjoying it a lot. Shorthand was a wonderful blend of secret code, pictorial art, drawing puzzles, and a foreign language. She found each new series of squiggles exciting. The other girls thought her mad, although they said so very nicely. She liked typing too. Playing the piano in the dark was how she thought of it, those early days with the keyboard covered up.

As well as attending the college, she helped at the Feathers Club, doing lunches or breakfasts. It was there she'd met Gerry, or rather Gerry's mother and, later, Gerry. He was in the Navy, at present working at the Admiralty, though he expected, and Willow feared, that soon he would be back at sea.

She liked living with Teddy. They seemed to get on well and to be friends —perhaps because they did not have to spend too much time together.
Mostly too they kept off any very deep subjects. Once, though, almost by chance, they had begun talking and then gone on far into the night.

That was the time Teddy told her
who
her father was. The man that Mummy had loved. It wasn't she who had asked. She could see too that Teddy was surprised she hadn't asked before. It gave her a curious feeling,
knowing.
It meant nothing, he wasn't a
person …
just a father.

She didn't even ask what he was like. It was Teddy who said:

“I expect you'll want to know something about him. Of course Mother, your grandmother, would have known more. I only met him once, when I came over for Robert's funeral. He was tall. Thin. Your build—lanky. Gentle. He had an invalid wife. Three children.” (My half brothers and sisters, Willow thought.) “He was in Flaxthorpe less than a year. Went abroad. The colonies—Kenya, Rhodesia, somewhere like that.”

The information sank like a stone. That was just how it felt. A stone in her heart.

Teddy wasn't at all strict. In the four weeks she'd known Gerry, Willow had been allowed a lot of freedom. They went out usually in the early evening, not staying late. It was light till well after six, now that the clocks had been kept forward. Once they went to the Savoy with Gerry's parents and danced to Carroll Gibbons' Orpheans, playing underground. Sometimes they ate at the Causerie in Claridge's. She got on very well with his parents. There was another brother, John, in the Army, who had been captured at Dunkirk.

Teddy had a protégée, Isabelle, the daughter of French friends. She'd gotten out of Paris last year before the invasion and now worked at the Free French Club. She and Teddy sat and gossiped sometimes. Occasionally there would be a night out when Isabelle and a partner would join Teddy and Willow and
their
men.

And that means Gerry, Willow thought. She had a photograph beside her bed of him in his lieutenant's uniform. His hair grew very thick and he had beautifully chiseled lips and very blue eyes. He was in love as well, with Willow.

Isabelle would be twenty-one on March the ninth, a Sunday. Teddy wanted to make up a party for her. “It will have to be the Saturday,” she said. “A nightclub. Four or six of us. I'm on an early shift that day.”

Willow told Gerry. “You'll come, won't you? In fact you're officially invited.”

He phoned her:

“Mama says why not the Café de P? Douglas Byng's in cabaret there, I
think
we like him. It was a favorite prewar haunt of John's. As the little brother, I never got asked along …”

Teddy agreed. “A better idea than Quag's or the Four Hundred—or that one that used to be the Stratton before a bomb took it. The Suivi, is it?”

Willow bought a new evening dress, without asking Teddy's advice. It
was pale blue organza with a tiered skirt and wide straps above a square neckline, and with artificial flowers at the waist and one shoulder. She liked it when she'd bought it, although she thought it made her look a little frail.

The party was for Saturday the eighth. On the Thursday evening before, she had a gritty throat. I'll ignore it, she thought. Every day in every way I am getting better and better. But when she woke on Friday her throat was swollen and sore. Teddy said, “It doesn't look suitable for taking out dancing…”

“I'll be all right,” she said. (I shall be too.)

But Teddy wanted to cancel the party. “Postpone it, rather. Isabelle won't mind.”

“Go without me,” Willow said. “It's just that, Gerry and I—we were
terribly
looking forward …” She sneezed.

Although very snuffly, she was a little better on the Saturday. “You've had your way,” Teddy said, “you can give everyone your cold. We're going, definitely.”

Teddy had invited a Major Beazley. One of her men, Willow supposed, although he was a bit old. Fiftyish. But perhaps Teddy needed them older and older. She was
forty,
after all.

That night Teddy wore a lovely midnight-blue velvet dress. Isabelle, her hair a mass of dark curls, wearing a very bright lipstick and a dark red dress, arrived in a taxi with a Capitaine Raoul Lemercier of the Free French. She was bubbling with excitement. She told Willow, who was dabbing at her sore nose, “I'd never forgive you if you couldn't have come to my
anniversaire.”

Willow had two pairs of silk stockings for Isabelle, but she refused to tell anyone where she'd got them. She felt hot and cold, a little feverish, very much wanting Gerry to arrive. Now that she had seen Isabelle's dress with its tight-fitting bodice and simple cut, she wasn't quite so sure about her own new one. She longed for Gerry to tell her she was beautiful.

And suddenly, here he was. The beloved, looking so wonderful in his uniform. Better even than in white tie and tails.

They sat for a while drinking sherry. The major seemed boring. He stared at Teddy a lot. The best, Willow thought, was knowing Gerry watched
her
all the time as she talked and laughed—and sneezed.