She had been happy that evening, September of 1917, the seventeen-year-old bride arrived back from her honeymoon. Happy because, like everyone in those days, she had learned to snatch the present. Happy perhaps because of what had just been. And sure, sure that she was with child.
Pleasantly tired, looking idly through the pile of mail—congratulations, good wishes, offers of photographs, advertisements. Then seeing The Letter. Secreting it at once (I must have known, she thought afterward), and reading it by herself late that night, locked in the bathroom.
… I can’t think why I ever loved you or called you sister, to think I used to help you with your sewing when you were little, and that I went on loving you after I knew WHAT I KNOW. You see, you are just like your mother and that is nothing to be proud of, the sort of person who steals away a man. She is a cheap and deceitful—what I have to call a WHORE. Do you know what that means? No, you are too innocent or think you are, but really you are very, very wicked and you will be punished. Not him but you, because it was you did the wicked thing. I think that you are really a witch and wove a magic spell, because you are ROMANIAN—there, that gave you a surprise, didn’t it? And now I am going to tell you all ABOUT IT.
On and on, written in scratchy black, two large blobs where she must have shaken the pen. It had smelled too of hospital, even though Alice had said, “I am sitting in a cafe, filled with hate and anger.”
She had wanted to believe it had been written at once, without time to think, by an overwrought, exhausted, war-torn woman. But that what Alice had revealed to her might perhaps not be true—she had never thought that. Long before she spoke with her mother about it, she had known it to be true.
She had destroyed the letter at once. The one person who must not know, must not be distressed by it, now or ever, was Gib. Deeply shocked, trembling, she passed off her upset as grief and worry about his departure. She herself felt unclean, wicked—and uncertain who she really was, as if a tree under which she sheltered had been felled. …
Gib’s departure, how soon that happened. Now I shall never know peace of mind again. A day like autumn. Up behind the house the wind tore at the trees in the copse. Stray rose petals blew into the lily pond. A few hours after he left, even as she grieved, came proof that there would be, this time at least, no child.
Berthe and her mother had moved over to Harrogate, to lodge and work with a family there. Amy was more in love than ever with her Basil, who by now had made an almost complete recovery. He was to appear before a board any moment, and after that he too might be sent back to France. “We have a secret understanding, Teddy. You won’t tell a soul?”
Six long months passed. It was the winter of 1918. By now Basil was back out again. She heard regularly from Gib, but no mention of leave. Then in March he was reported missing. She thought “missing” a cruel word, in spite of, or rather because of, its small grain of hope. How many people in the end heard good news? When exactly did one give up hope?
Easter, spring, Maytime, blossom—the war news worse and worse. She began to think of herself as a widow (“It’s best, really it’s best.”). Her mother was especially kind. So much so that often she would ask her about the Romanian story. Even Robert seemed sympathetic. She supposed someone had told Alice—since she had not. (She tried now never to think of The Letter.) She was helped, supported, by all the officers now at The Towers. Everyone knew, everyone cared. Amy, when she received a letter from Basil, would be afraid Teddy might be upset, would hesitate before mentioning it.
In June, Settstone had its Midsummer Fair, held every five years, although there had been talk of postponing it because of the war. Amy and Teddy, taking an afternoon off, made the round of the sideshows: Teddy, for Amy’s sake, trying to put enthusiasm into weight-guessing, shove-penny.
There was a small tent behind the coconut shies with a notice: Gypsy Eliza Lee, Fortuneteller to kings, emperors and moguls.
Amy said, “Oh, let’s—shall we?”
Why not? Inside the tent Gypsy Eliza, a dark spotted scarf down over her forehead, sat at a small table. She had a lot of hair on her face, particularly the chin.
“That’ll be five shilling.” Her accent was very Yorkshire. When they had handed over a half-a-crown coin each, she told them to sit down. The tent was hot and smelled of stale beer and rubber. They waited in hushed nervousness.
“You’ll have questions then, about loved ones? It’s nowt else these days. I’ll do best I can.”
As, hands still, she concentrated on the crystal ball in front of her, it seemed to Teddy, waiting her turn, that here, last resort of all, must be the key. I believe, she told herself—as if she were in church.
“Basil, you said? I’m looking hard—we’re—he’s over there, is he, somewhere in France? I see—no, it’s not clear. It’s gone misty, love, quite misty, I’m having difficulty, dear. Wait … he’s smiling now, he’s in white, yes, dear, that’s him, he’s—I think he’s throwing a bomb would it be? No, a ball”
“Yes, yes,” Amy said eagerly. “Cricket, he only thinks about cricket. He—”
But Gypsy Eliza interrupted her, staring at Teddy: “What’s his name, young lady? … Well, I see Gib. He’s fair, dear, and tall, yes? But thin— was he always too thin? Wait a while, he’s lying down, yes, he’s … what’s this, there’s sand—where’s he fighting, dear? I’m a little confused—but he’s moving, don’t fear, he’s alive right enough. But it’s hot, dear, and you’ll pardon me, it doesn’t smell nice, there’s something, some bad smell.”
Suddenly Teddy had had enough, and she ran out, hungrily breathing in fresh air outside. Amy followed her. “We shouldn’t have …” She was almost crying. “People are right, you shouldn’t—I was frightened even though it’s nonsense. Except …” she hesitated, “she seemed to think Basil’s all right. And Gib—she didn’t know Gib was meant to be missing.”
But Teddy didn’t want to talk about it. She said hurriedly, pulling out her watch, “We’re meant to be in the Red Cross tent at four o’clock.”
The evening mail brought Amy a letter from Basil. Someone was getting a team together to practice a little bowling when they came out of the lines for a rest next week. Two days later she heard of his death at a casualty clearing station, of head wounds.
For Teddy the wait was longer. When the news came through that Gib, wounded and then captured, was a prisoner of war in Pomerania, relief and joy made her almost ill. He is alive. She mourned with Amy, but each night, kneeling by her bedside, prayed that Gib would soon be healed and the war over. … No longer a widow, she became once again the wife who waited.
Hal, and tragedy again. Mourning … Then November and the longed-for Armistice, and hope that Gib might soon be returned to her.
When he arrived, she could not believe what she saw. A tiring journey hadn’t helped—he had been continuously sick between Rotterdam and Hull —but this emaciated, dull-skinned man could not be her Gib. She felt it was a stranger she embraced in front of the family, lined up to kiss him too. (Alice, sad Alice already departed. Hurrying to fulfil her vocation, her call from God.)
At first she believed his physical state, the weakness due to malnutrition, would soon be cured by good food, bracing Yorkshire air, and love. But the malaise went much deeper. Alone with him, night after night beside his chilled, almost inert body, she knew that. Rubbing his limbs, talking to him all the while, kissing him, as if the very heat of her breath could warm him deep down.
The Towers as a hospital was being wound up; as many as possible had gone home at Christmas. Gib was still in the Army, officially on convalescent leave. No mention yet of being demobilized. He himself never spoke of it. In fact, he hardly spoke at all.
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 the
ir 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.
The Diamond Waterfall Page 41