The Diamond Waterfall

by Pamela Haines

  The tune had changed: “I haven’t said thanks for that lovely weekend …” Vera Lynn had sung it. She said something …

  “Oh yes, well, Vera Lynn,” he said. “What must it be like to be Forces’ Sweetheart?”

  “Rather nice, I should think. We all want to be loved.”

  “Agreed. Only some of us go about it in an odd way.”

  He spoke lightheartedly enough but with a bitter undertone. She thought probably he was referring to his wife. The marriage, she had heard, was not good. She wondered idly, Am I beginning another affair?

  “The song’s been banned in the States.”

  “Why’s that?” he asked.

  “Because it doesn’t actually say the couple are married.”

  “Ah. Yes. A dirty weekend.”

  They were back at their table, and drinking Algerian wine. Dining and dancing in 1943—it was what one must expect. And the food … ubiquitous rabbit. Fricasseed or, as tonight, curried. (Is it cat sometimes? she wondered.)

  They danced again: “The last time I saw Paris.”

  “This is better—quickstepping’s more my mark. … ‘The last time I saw Paris’ … 1937. A two-hour wait for the Dijon Express, and just the Gare de Lyon restaurant for sustenance. Could have been worse.” He twirled her around. “And when did you last see Paris?”

  “In 1939, July,” Teddy said.

  “Last fling, was it? Know her well?”

  “I lived there.”

  Voice, face, alert.

  “Really? That’s interesting.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, other people—what they do, why they do it. … Did you live there long?”

  “Since 1922.”

  “So if it hadn’t been for Jerry,” he said. “Nearly twenty years. French good?”

  “Possibly somewhat Belgian, but yes, very. I learned it well in the last war—a family from Bruges. The daughter was my age.”

  “Which is? A gentleman never asks, but I’m interested—you look too young. A small child then, in the last war?”

  “I age with the century. It’s convenient, and I don’t have to think.”

  “Fit? Are you fit?” He asked it idly enough, but she sensed interest. My God, she thought, he can’t be planning Free French basketball.

  “I don’t play games—”

  “I didn’t suggest it. Health, stamina, resilience?”

  “You’re quizzing me. I can run for a bus without noticing and I’m never ill. Good enough?” Her tone was sharp.

  “Sorry. I’m being boring.”

  At the table he picked up the empty bottle. “Another Algy? I’ll summon the waiter—”

  “It can give one a frightful head, and I have to be up early. I’m on a seven a.m. And these cold mornings … one thinks sometimes it will always be wartime.”

  “Please sit down, Mrs. Nicolson. I’m sorry, this room does have a somewhat depressing appearance. Wartime and all that. A hotel bedroom of the smaller variety. I wrote to you, invited you here, Mrs. Nicolson, because I think you could possibly be of help to us. I know your present war work is essential—”

  “Driving ambulances? Yes. Though with the bombing a little quieter—”

  “Let’s hope it stays that way. I’m told your French is excellent and that you know France well. Paris in particular.”

  “I lived there, yes.”

  “And you hope one day to go back?”

  “Not hope. Shall.”

  “I see. Good. And the day now perhaps not so far away as it was once. And a lot nearer than when your French friend was killed in March of ’41.”

  “You seem to know a great deal about me. Who’s been talking to you?”

  “Yes, I think so. But favorably. A suggestion that you are perhaps the sort of person—intelligent, fit. The stage in the family—so you have some acting ability, perhaps? French-speaking, habituée of Paris. Not young but with mature outlook, experience of life. There might be something for you. Work—”

  “Work where I could use the language? I—”

  “Work where you’ll be able to use no other. In the country itself, in France.”

  “That’s ridiculous, and hardly likely.”

  “Mrs. Nicolson, what does the word agent mean to you?”

  “Spy. Anarchist. Joseph Conrad.”

  “I see. Yes. Well. Let me put it this way, then. We are an organization. We train men and women to work in France alongside the Resistance movement there. Our agents are dropped into the country, where they act as wireless operators, saboteurs, couriers. Sabotage is a very important part of our work. Messages have to be taken—often long distances—and people accompanied across France. A great deal of the work is boring, monotonous. Quite unlike any possible fantasies you may have of the spy world. But however humdrum, it is never without danger.”

  “Scarcely surprising.”

  “For an agent, the penalties of being discovered are very serious. There’s always the possibility he or she will fail to return. The Geneva Convention— you would count as a spy.”

  “How many have failed to return? In ordinary language—how many have you lost?”

  “That’s not the sort of information—”

  “Two can play at question and answer. And by the way, aren’t you, and this place, something to do with the War Office? Perhaps you could tell me the truth, then, about the Dieppe raid last summer. I wasn’t happy with the official line.”

  “Not our department. Mrs. Nicolson, I think perhaps, to change the subject … Can we go back a little? I’d like to ask you something more about yourself, if I may? What have you, who have you, in the way of dependants? Close relatives?”

  “A nephew, married, in the RAF. A niece—she’s nineteen, working for the Ministry of Aircraft Production.”

  “Yes. I want to ask you also … Could you live a lie, Mrs. Nicolson?”

  “It depends on the lie. Yes, I could.”

  “Are you courageous?”

  “Possibly not.”

  “Or possibly—yes? Mrs. Nicolson, what I’ve told you, all I have spoken of today, is of course confidential. I would expect you to respect this confidence. I should like you to think about it all very carefully. In fact, it is very important that you give it considered thought. Remember, there is no shame in refusing. Better to refuse than find later you should never have accepted.”

  Her mouth was dry. She looked for water but could see none. A handbasin in the corner. What must have been a simple hotel bedroom …

  “Go home quietly. As you drive your ambulance around in the next week or two, think about what I’ve said. When you’re ready, then let me know, yea or nay.”

  “If it’s yea,” she said, “how soon could I start?”

  24

  “Well then,” Mrs. Parr told Willow, “there’s been a big victory in Africa. They’ve got that General von something and I don’t know how many took prisoner. They said it on the news, you’d have heard if you’d not been snoring. And what about your breakfast? It’s all dried up now, is your scrambled egg.”

  Willow stifled a yawn, expecting to hear from her landlady that if only she didn’t stay out so late nights, she’d be bright in the morning. That was as may be. The other piece of good news, which Mrs. Parr had told her before the news of victory in the North African campaign (which must mean Jay would be safer. Please, God.), was that another girl would be coming to share her billet. Three weeks alone with Mrs. Parr had been much too much.

  She looked at her plate and felt nauseated. The food’s origins as dried egg powder were very obvious.

  “I have to queue, you know,” Mrs. Parr said. “You girls don’t have the worries I have. Sitting on your backsides all day, coming home to a nice hot meal.”

  “I meant to say I’m not in for tea tonight. Some of us are going to a dance in Knaresborough.”

  It was her second billet since coming up to Harrogate. The first had been a really lovely house in York Place, also run by a widow.
They were four girls there, and then the landlady had become too ill to have billetees.

  Altogether Willow had been nearly three months in Yorkshire. She did clerical work for the Ministry of Aircraft Production, using some of the typing skills she’d learned from the Triangle. She had never finished there, because she’d left London almost immediately after the Café de Paris incident.

  Mrs. Parr had three housedresses in flowery patterns: a red, a blue, and a yellow, all with a brown background. She wore curlers in the morning, and if she planned to go out in the evening would be wearing them still when Willow came back at six. With them out, her hair looked like two rows of greasy sausages, and reminded Willow horribly of their owner’s cooking.

  Till now Willow had been the only billetee, succeeding a Miss Mason, who had gone back south. Willow had realized from the first day that it wasn’t going to be easy.

  The piano, for instance. The piano took pride of place in the small front room:

  “You’ll not touch that?” Mrs. Parr had said, the day she arrived.

  “I can’t actually play the piano,” Willow had explained.

  “I just want it clear between us at the start. If folk play it, there’s anything might happen to a piano. It does it no good, having its keys struck.”

  May 1943. Two years and two months since the Café de Paris. She thought she must be over it by now, but was not sure. It didn’t seem like it when the dreams came, the nightmares. It was as if the two terrible times in her life had been joined together and made one. She was back in the eerie half-light, in the Café de P. Her legs buckled under her. She was rooted then. She could not move. She was looking for her Gerry—she was looking for her mother. If she could move, then she’d be able to rescue her. Only Willow could save her. “Fm coming,” she would try to call out. “Don’t worry, I’ll save you.” But just as she couldn’t walk, neither could she talk.

  Once the dream was almost happy, because she found her. It wasn’t the mother she remembered, but Sylvia, from the photograph. She was so beautiful. The air raid, everything, had been a mistake. They even laughed about it. Sylvia was dressed in white and at her neck and throat and almost down to her waist she sparkled with diamonds. They were reflected in the glass at the sides of the dance floor. She was waltzing with a tall man, and looked wonderfully, wonderfully happy. She shone even more than the diamonds. Willow could see only the man’s back as he danced by. But she knew, in the dream, that the man was her father. Sometimes now she would think, Mummy, Gerry … to lose people, I only have to love them.

  She’d thought for so many months afterward about Gerry. She felt certain it had truly been love. It would have lasted—even though separated they would have grown closer to each other. She imagined herself writing to him every day, watching anxiously for the mail. Getting to know him better and better through his letters. They had already so much in common.

  Now over two years had passed, and the terrible thing was she couldn’t remember what he looked like. Isabelle’s face, yes. The major’s … as if it were yesterday. But Gerry was just a face among dozens of others, a sort of amalgam of all the good-looking young men who’d flirted with her, escorted her since 1939.

  Here in Yorkshire, in Harrogate, she was busy building a new life. She had made friends at work (even if one of them was a mischief-making hard-faced girl called Olga, who wore a turban and slacks and too much lipstick, and smoked all the Lucky Strikes she could get from the Americans at the camp). She went out dancing with the RAF, the Free French, the Poles, the Czechs. The days, the evenings, weren’t long enough.

  Her day went something like this: two very loud alarm clocks ten minutes apart, then Mrs. Parr banging on the door. A quick wash in the chill bathroom—as many as four days a week the bath would be full of Mrs. Parr’s washing, cold soaking. Requests for a bath were greeted by “What’s wrong with a good stand-up wash? At least you know you’re clean.” She couldn’t trust Willow either, she said, not to go over the line, painted in bold red paint, showing the limit for patriotic bath water. “My last billetee, I could see by the ring she left. Never bothered scouring, didn’t Miss Mason.” Miss Mason had been so terrible that Willow thought she must be better just by comparison.

  The ministry had taken over a hotel, the Harrogate Hydro. After breakfast there was the walk—no, the run—up there to sign on by nine. At ten past, a red line went in the book and latecomers had their pay docked. She couldn’t afford that. She had to live on her pay and a very small allowance. Even if she’d had the coupons to spare, she couldn’t have bought half the clothes she wanted. Teddy, who’d arranged all her finances, kept her on a strict rein. The money Grandma had left her was all tied up.

  She hadn’t seen anything of Teddy for a long time. Teddy, once a second mother to her, who’d become a friend. She wrote to her every fortnight. Teddy’s letters, not too frequent, were mostly concern about Willow, that she was coping all right.

  A few months ago Teddy had joined FANY—First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. The uniform was smart and suited her. They wore silk stockings. Willow supposed she was still driving, but officers now, not ambulances. It seemed somehow less useful work.

  In a way, if anyone could be said to have taken special care of her, it had been Jay, at least until he’d gone to fight in North Africa. For a while after they’d met in the raid, she had been so upset that only he had really been able to help. Teddy had been too close, too much part of it all.

  The day after the raid he had telephoned the flat on his way back south again, to see if both of them, she and Teddy, were all right. She wrote him quite a long letter of thanks the next day. She remembered she’d never thanked him properly for all he had done when she’d run away to Cambridge. (Yet it was his fault, wasn’t it, that they’d lost touch?)

  Now it was twice he’d saved her. She had told him in the letter that she felt worse now than on the night of the bombing. Much, much worse. “But I don’t want to worry Teddy with it.”

  He telephoned her when he was passing through London about ten days later. He’d already answered her letter.

  “How is it?” he asked. “Did it get better at all?”

  “It comes and goes,” she said.

  “And right now?”

  “Bad,” she said, beginning to cry. She felt so weak.

  “I can’t get to see you, not this week. But listen, Willow … write me. Whenever it comes on bad, write me. Exactly how you feel, right that moment. It’ll be safe with me.”

  “You’ll destroy them?” she’d asked anxiously. For some reason she imagined letters left lying around, as she had seen letters from Stingo strewn about in Michael’s room.

  “Sure I will. Sure.”

  And so she had begun the habit then of writing to him. Sometimes he wrote back a quick scrawl, sometimes long pages of advice. He seemed rather to like it when she told him she hadn’t taken the advice. “That’s right, I’ve made you think.” She took to putting near the end, when she’d said what was worrying her, large or small, “What does Jay say?” She liked the sound of it. She signed herself “Willow the Wisp” because of a teasing remark he’d made. Often he would mention girls’ names. For a while it was Laura, the one she’d met in the raid. But usually a name would appear in two or three letters, then disappear.

  Now she was more than thrilled by the news—she was relieved. A victory in North Africa! She had only gradually realized how much she’d counted on Jay’s coming through safely. Family: she had not so much of it that she could afford to lose any more.

  Her sisters, the little ones (she still thought of them as that, absurdly. Lucy must be nearly sixteen by now.) sent letters and photos. One day she would go and see them again, they would come and see her.

  Her fellow billetee arrived two days later. Her name was Diana Howe. She was much smaller than Willow and had naturally curly black hair, which she wore very short. She told Willow, “I’m frightfully easy to get on with. Except I giggle a lot.”

 
; They discovered there were only two weeks between their birthdays. Diana had two older sisters, both in the WRNS, and a brother in the Navy. Her family lived near Ilkley so she hoped to see them quite often. “They’re wonderful,” she told Willow, “I’ve been so lucky. I’ve always been happy. When I see what families some people have …”

  About the second week, when they were eating chips sitting on the end of Diana’s bed (she’d been given the larger, better room), Willow told her about her mother, and the trial and the whole terrible time. “He wasn’t my real father, of course,” she said. “But my little sisters—he was their father.”

  As she talked, she felt an unease stirring, a disease almost—the sudden need to know something more about her own father. Then it was gone again.

  Diana listened wide-eyed. She was quiet for several minutes afterward. Then: “How absolutely terrible,” she said. “I don’t know how you managed. I never thought of things like that happening to anyone I know.” Her chips grew cold and greasy in their newspaper.

  Willow said, “We’d better wrap those up in something—I’ll open the window and get the smell out. She’s sure to notice.”

  It was good to have an ally against Mrs. Parr. Not that Diana was really worried by her. Altogether she was much bolder than Willow. Very bold, really. One evening when Mrs. Parr had gone out for a church meeting, Diana said she wanted to play the piano.

  “I expect it’s got moth and mouses’ nests,” she said. Willow had never dared to open it.

  “It’s ghastly,” she told Willow later. “Half the keys don’t work, and the pedals … one’s gummed up and the other gone loose. There might be mouse dirt.”

  Not long after Diana’s arrival, there was trouble over food. Mrs. Parr decided that if a meal wasn’t eaten and properly appreciated, they would have to do without most of the next. Two mornings later they didn’t eat the Spam provided for breakfast, and that evening found only bread and beets and lettuce, with vinegar. “I’d bologna planned to have alongside, but as you don’t like meat, I’ve not bothered. I know when something’s not wanted.”

  “I suppose we could complain to somebody,” Willow said. “I’m sure we’re meant to be properly fed. She’s got our ration books. She gets all the stuff.”