The Diamond Waterfall

by Pamela Haines

  Days ran into each other. She knew that her restlessness only lay hidden. I could not be here all the time. One night in early November a savage wind tore at the last of the leaves, howling around the house. She felt it mirrored something in herself.

  In the morning she felt sick and exhausted. Sitting at Lily’s bureau in the drawing room, she wrote to Saint. She was trying for a determinedly cheerful note, when one of the parlourmaids spoke:

  “Mrs. Nicolson, ma’am, two persons want to see the mistress. I said as how … It’s a woman and a little boy, ma’am, but they’re—they ought to … the back door, ma’am.”

  When they were shown in, the woman was very red in the face, and she appeared agitated. The boy, large, fair-haired, looked about five or six. The woman had hold of his hand. He gazed about him, staring at Teddy, who smiled at him. He smiled back slowly, revealing two missing front teeth.

  The woman said:

  “I’d best not beat about, Mrs. Nicolson. It were Lady Firth I’d a mind to speak to. But—you’ll do. I’m not one for writing, you see, so I thought it’d be best to come here, like, and—fetch the lad up too—”

  The boy, interrupting, said to Teddy directly:

  “I’m Michael—Michael—”

  The woman slapped his hand sharply. He didn’t seem to mind. She did it with a kind of hurried affection, going on talking then as if she hadn’t been interrupted:

  “It’s Slader, they call me. Nellie Slader from Kingsbridge. Father—Mr. Slader—and I, we was married ’99. I’m North Riding, Pickering way. He’s Devon. They’re a strange lot down there, but they farm well enough.” She glanced over at Michael. “Telling him off, made a confusion, it has. Where did I reach?”

  Teddy thought, What is all this about? She couldn’t take her eyes off the boy, who had left the woman’s side and was sitting on a tall tapestry chair, swinging his legs.

  “It’s been a sad journey. But I wanted to fetch the lad up, to show, like …” She paused. “To show Lady Firth her—grandson.”

  “I’m sorry,” Teddy began, her voice puzzled. “I don’t think—I mean—” She felt the boy’s eyes on her.

  “Mrs. Nicolson, I’d not have made this journey to tell fibs. This lad’s a grandson right enough.”

  Teddy was trembling. She lit a cigarette to calm herself, passing the cigarette box to Mrs. Slader. She said, “I shall ring for some coffee—or would you prefer tea? And perhaps some milk or lemonade for—Michael?”

  Then in the silence that followed: “If you could please explain?”

  “My niece, that was his mam—she died it’ll be three month, and the lad —I’d have bringed him up myself and I wanted to tell Lady Firth that. I’d have done the job only that my niece, she asked afore she went …”

  She’d become flustered now in the telling of her tale. Teddy said gently, “Can we go a bit further back? Perhaps to—the beginning?” She wondered too if the boy should be present? She said, “Would Michael like perhaps to play with some toys?”

  “There’s nowt he can’t hear, Mrs. Nicolson. He’s a good lad. There’ll be nowt said, only what he’s to be proud of.”

  Teddy thought Michael looked as if he would like to cry. Her own mind raced.

  “You’re Lady Firth’s daughter, that’s right, Mrs. Nicolson? Well, the lad —he’s the son of your brother Henry. Hal, that was lost in the war. And his mam, you’ll know her, she were Olive Ibbotson, from Lane Top Farm—”

  Teddy said, interrupting her, “But of course my mother would have wanted … at once. If she …” Her voice faltered. “She would only wonder, I know, that Olive wasn’t in touch with us when … it first happened.”

  She was still trying to take it in. That Hal … that all those years up at the farm had led to this … that he had gotten Olive into trouble. Had possibly never known …

  “She were a stubborn lass, were Olive. Right from the start. I said to her then—for I’d the care of her—I said, ‘Olive, you’ve a duty to the lad. Tell them,’ I said. ‘Tell his folk.’ But, ‘I’ll not,’ she said, ‘I’ll not. Hal knew that, I’ve never been beholden,’ she said, ‘and I’ll not be it now.’ I knew well, though, she worried on account of his schooling. There was times she’d be of two minds. We’d a happy house, though—I can promise you that, Mrs. Nicolson. And Olive, she were a bonny girl. There’s pictures here’ll show you.”

  Teddy, looking at the photographs (recognizably an Ibbotson sitting somewhere on a harbor wall, grimacing in the sun—in another, holding a baby in long robes and smiling), thought, How unreal all this is. Mrs. Slader was putting them away—talking again:

  “And then, when we’d all but lost Olive—it were consumption, like her mam afore her—she said then, those last days, ‘I’ve changed my mind, Auntie Nellie—I’ll not burden you with him.’ And I said to her, ‘It’ll be no burden, we love him like as if he’d been ours.’ She said then, ‘He’s to go up to —them.’ She’d often call you ‘them.’”

  While they spoke Michael had been sitting, head forward, his legs swinging from the high-seated chair. Now he began to swing them faster, faster, so they kicked continually against the wood. Mrs. Slader stopped her talking and slapped his legs.

  Teddy almost cried, “Don’t!” but restrained herself. It was none of her business. Then realizing suddenly, But I’m more closely related than she is. My nephew, she thought.

  Mrs. Slader said, “I’ve her lines here.”

  Teddy, for a moment puzzled: “Lines?”

  Michael spoke up. He said in his Devon accent, “Lines are for fishes.”

  “Her lines,” Mrs. Slader went on, as if he hadn’t spoken, “her lines to show when she were wed. When she wed your brother, Mrs. Nicolson.”

  Teddy said, letting her breath out with a great sigh, “What?”

  “Daft it were, all secret like. I said to her, the times I said to her, ‘Wed in secret, all right,’ I said, ‘but not after, not after...’”

  She brought out an envelope and removed a sheet of paper. “The lines,” she said. “Go on now. Take a look.”

  Teddy, stubbing out her cigarette, unfolded the paper with care.

  They were such happy days, those first ones with Michael. At first, thinking the break would be too sudden for him, she had wanted Mrs. Slader to take him back to Devon for a week or two. She wasn’t certain he realized he was actually coming to The Towers to live. But Mrs. Slader assured her it had all been carefully explained.

  “The sooner he’s begun on his new life …”

  At five, he was an unusually self-possessed boy. At the same time Teddy could see that often he was bewildered. Apart from the enormous difference between Nellie Slader’s house and The Towers, there was the absence not only of his mother but of the person who’d taken her place these last months.

  Once he suddenly stopped what he was doing, sat down, and cried heart-brokenly. The local girl who’d been engaged as a nurse for him rushed to Teddy. But after saying half a dozen times, “Think I’ll go back to Mam, think I’ll go back to Mam …” he got up just as suddenly and ran off to play.

  At night when she came to read to him, Teddy talked to him about Olive, and Hal too. She brought down from one of the attics some of his books, The Blue Fairy Book.

  “Soon your Grandma will be coming—she will love you a lot …”

  Totally absorbed in settling in Michael, she could hardly bear to deal with all the implications of his arrival. She felt that until her mother and Erik came back she should do nothing, tell no one. To the staff, she had half explained, and asked them to respect the confidence.

  Sylvia she had told at once. That same afternoon, by telephone. Sylvia had wept with happiness, she had never for a moment doubted it was true, and had spoken of coming up to Yorkshire as soon as possible. But only a few days later Reggie had telephoned to say that she’d had a miscarriage. Yes, yes, she was all right. His sister, Angie, was there to help.

  Lily and Erik returned three weeks late
r. Teddy traveled down to London to meet the boat train, wondering only if she should have left Michael even the day and night it took her to meet the honeymooners. Would he feel abandoned all over again?

  That evening at their hotel, she told them, and she saw that, just as she had been, her mother was completely overwhelmed, yet shocked by happiness. But wary—more wary than Teddy had been. Erik too:

  “The marriage certificate. The birth certificate. These are genuine?”

  Her mother, calmer now: “You’re quite certain?”

  “That he’s Hal’s child? Yes, absolutely. And you will be also.”

  There had never been any doubt in her mind. Mrs. Slader, odd, brusque, flustered woman, would never have lied.

  “I talked to her, Mrs. Slader, a long time before she left. Everything she said … it would be hard to see Olive as anything but a good person. A proud person.”

  Her mother, hurt all over again. She remembered now Lily’s pain, confusion, when after Hal’s death his clothes, his few personal effects, had been forwarded to the “Miss Ibbotson” listed as next of kin—back in the days when he had run away to be a soldier. … They had spoken then of following it up, but in their grief they had done nothing. Of what use to distress a much-loved giri friend, also mourning?

  Teddy had been to see the family lawyer, she told them now. “I felt he should be informed at once.” He had checked on all the documents. Robert’s will, made before Hal’s death (and with only the codicil that cut her, Teddy, out after she received her Romanian money), was quite clear. After the bequest to Hal, the straight inheritance, the words “or any legitimate issue.” Sylvia, no longer the heiress, would have to be told. She would now have some capital of her own, the sum that would have been her dowry. But great wealth, the Waterfall, no.

  Getting out of the motor car at The Towers, Lily saw Michael. He was standing on the front step with the servants, his nurse beside him. Teddy thought, I need not have worried. Michael stared at her a few seconds, then ran toward her. She gathered him up in her arms. Teddy, hiding tears, looked the other way.

  Erik, standing beside her, said, “This is the best news since our marriage. And the best wedding present possible.”

  “I think that too,” she said.

  Back in Paris, she was greeted by Saint. He said, “You behold me, fangs drawn, trussed for slaughter—”

  “What’s all this?”

  “I’m to be married. Believe it or not.”

  Her shock, and then, his explanation. The girl whose father was over on business for a year. A vague family connection. An invitation to dinner, months ago. Seeing more of her while Teddy was away. Being asked to paint her portrait and doing it very badly.

  “I met her in the sort of dull circles you and I have always been so rude about. Just lately I’ve got to know her—fairly closely. It’s come to marriage. Daddy wants it that way. So does she. And, we all come to it, don’t we? I’m thirty-five, Teddy—forty’s in sight.”

  She asked dully, what sort of life was he going to lead? A semi-bohemian one still?

  “I’m going into their family business. From today I shall cease to épater les bourgeois. Henceforward, I shall be bourgeois.”

  7

  “It can’t go wrong,” Reggie was saying. “A cert, absolute dead cert. Soundest scheme ever.” As he spoke he sipped a neat whiskey. The two other men nodded in agreement—Claude Mulcaster, Sidney Johnson. New business acquaintances.

  Sylvia looked with disgust at her own glass of weak orangeade. Perhaps she should have something stronger to be in this company—but she was two months pregnant, almost everything made her nauseous, more so than ever before. She had told herself that if this new one was not the longed-for son, she would have something fitted. Go to London and make some arrangement privately. Tell Reggie nothing. I cannot go on forever.

  Willow, Lucy, Jessica, Margaret. Four little girls sleeping upstairs. Earlier, of course, the two miscarriages. And then the stillbirth—a boy. Reggie, saying it was not her fault and yet twice, after an evening spent with the whiskey bottle, shaking her awake, hissing at her, “You carry only sows— what about a boar, eh? How about a boar next time you’re in pig … eh?”

  The vulgar, the drunken side of Reggie—not seen so often but more often than once (never, never, please God, so alarming as that prewedding telephone call). Who would believe that he was like that, looking about the pleasant drawing room of their Surrey house, this autumn evening of 1932.

  He turned toward her. “What about a spot of music? I’ll set the gram up. Jolly good gadget this.” Moving about, skillful with one arm. “Does six at once, you know. Drops ‘em down.”

  Perhaps the business discussion was over? She had not really been listening. Later tonight, if he hadn’t drunk too much, he might elaborate it for her. Yet another doomed scheme.

  “Don’t be blue at all it won’t do at all”

  He liked a steady diet of dance music, although he never seemed able to recognize a tune. Tonight the selection would be years out of date and never the numbers she heard from the wireless dance bands. Henry Hall, Carroll Gibbons, Jack Payne: when Reggie, and Angie if there, went out drinking, she would sit quietly, mending, and listening to them. She did not dance now. As for the piano—there wasn’t one in the house. The person who had played at The Towers, who had offered refuge in the storm to Geoffrey, had been someone else.

  Reggie, filling up glasses now:

  “Feeling seedy, Sylvie? Angie’ll be here soon, help on Nanny’s day off.”

  Oh but, she thought, I don’t want help from Angie. I don’t want Angie here at all.

  Angie, spending at least six months of every year with them since 1924— and the first miscarriage. Coming to help then, sent for by a scared Reggie: “to hold your hand, old thing, keep you calm.” So as not to lose their son.

  But she never knew if it would have been a boy, for even lying quite still, not moving from the bed in the darkened room, she had lost it. Less than three months old—messy, whisked away.

  That 1924 miscarriage—it was not necessary. Because it had been his fault and his alone, Reggie had been scared, repentant.

  She looked at him now, mellow with whiskey, optimistic beyond reckoning over this wonderful new idea that was to make them all rich.

  That had been the trouble, of course. There should not have been any need to worry. He’d thought, had he not, that he’d married money? At twenty-five she was to inherit. Everything held in trust for her—not least the Diamond Waterfall. (Limitless security through that alone.) A rich woman in her own right.

  And then the happy (how could she ever see it as anything else?) arrival of Michael. Who could be unhappy that all of them, and especially Mother, had now something left of Hal? People are the real riches, she thought. When an excited Teddy telephoned it had seemed to her good news from another world, beyond the grave. My big brother Hal lives still.

  Perhaps that was it. Her great happiness, the expression on her face, tone of voice, rushing to tell Reggie that evening. (She had already told Willow. Willow, standing up in her cot, pulling at the strings of her jacket. “Willow, Willow, Hal didn’t die after all. You’ve a surprise cousin, my darling.”)

  To Reggie it had not been wonderful at all. She thought she would never forget: voice, face, words.

  “What’s all the smiling about, old thing?”

  “I’m happy. I—Reggie, what—”

  He’d turned away in exasperation. Then his so strong right arm shaking her—and again.

  “You haven’t thought? You really haven’t … My God, good God, let me get a drink. A chap needs …”

  Two double whiskies in quick succession. She had stood there trembling, feeling the happiness seeping from her, the nausea ignored all day rushing over her.

  “Money, that’s the matter. Ever thought about your father’s will? Where’s that damn bottle? Fill her up, steady now. Listen, Sylvie, little fool, in pig and a fool—listen. The mone
y, all of it, the Diamond Waterfall, yes, the bloody Waterfall they were all your brother’s. Or his legitimate issue. Understand, eh? No hope the wretched little bastard is a bastard, I suppose? The truth is you are not going to be bally rich—we shall be bloody poor.”

  She could not believe her ears. She felt herself sway. “I don’t mind. I mean—it’ll alter things, of course. But it’s not—” (What was it not?) She reached for a chair.

  “What rot’s that you’re saying? We’re done for, you know. Every bloody hope and plan.” He paused. “Are you smiling, Sylvie?”

  She would not have dared; a frightened smirk only. But he’d been angry, she didn’t want to remember now how angry—first with her, then with himself.

  It was that evening he’d brought out the revolver, the one she had seen first in the South of France, in Mentone.

  “Reggie—whatever? Put that away!”

  He held it to his head, against the temple.

  “Reggie!”

  “Just fooling. Next time …” He tossed it onto the carpet.

  Shaking and sobbing: “How could you, how could you?” she had cried.

  He only laughed, but when she couldn’t stop crying he became angry again. He had been drinking before coming home. Now, four whiskies later, he was impossible.

  Shaking her by the shoulder, jerking her neck. It wasn’t that, she was sure it was not. Her body—a baby—could take more than that. Rather: the shock of happiness, followed so soon by a dreadful thought.

  He didn’t, couldn’t have married me for my money. Alone in bed later— for he had stayed downstairs to drink—she had tried not to think that his kindness, the way he’d rescued her, had been only about that. It wasn’t true.

  But her body must have thought otherwise. Two days later she lost the child. Reggie, who seemed to have forgotten most of what he’d said, asked shamefacedly: