Daisy Belle

by Caitlin Davies

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ Dob laughed. ‘Because no one has done it before and they need a sensation to open the show.’

  I told him I wasn’t interested, I didn’t feel like diving at the moment. He taunted me that I had lost my nerve, pacing around the room, trying every which way to persuade me. And I let him, although I had already decided I would do it. Finally I agreed, on one condition: Dob must sign a declaration that the prize money would be in my brother’s name. That was ridiculous, he said, there was no need. We would share the money.

  I shook my head. ‘Then I shan’t dive. You must sign the papers and the money must go to Billy. Then I will give you half.’

  ‘Fine!’ said Dob, ‘if that’s that you want.’ I think he would have agreed to anything at that moment, never believing the money would not be his. And as for me, if I had to leap into a pond bound at the hands and feet then I would, because this one dive would set us all free.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  A week later we were sitting in a hansom cab on our way to Hampstead Heath. ‘Ten thousand at least,’ said Dob with a lick of his lips as we inched our way through the crowds. I didn’t reply but looked out at them keenly, sensing their expectation, boys running with flags held high, gentlemen with jaunty boaters and ladies with sun-scorched faces. Still the people came, the new arrivals spreading themselves out until the grass could barely be seen. A man lashed at a donkey, his cart laden with sacks of coconuts, another frantically pushed an ice-cream barrow, everyone racing for the best place. It was a fine sunny bank holiday and if there was an entertainment to be found then the crowd was here to find it.

  We drove onto a causeway and there was the bathing pond, a circle of water enclosed on three sides by trees of vivid lime. At the far end was a neat boatman’s hut nestled among the foliage. Then my eyes lifted to the diving platform and the top board suspended seventy feet above the water. Soon I would be standing there to prove myself for the last time. After this, I would never need to dive again.

  I heard the wheels of the cab rattling on the stones as we turned off the causeway and onto a lane, then we pulled to a stop and I climbed out. At once Dob was beside me, walking quickly in that impatient way of his, his left hand tucked in his waistcoat pocket. He had his other hand resting around my waist and I was forced to stop as he greeted the people he knew; we might have been away in America but Dob was a popular figure still. We came to a tent, its entrance decorated with garlands of yellow flowers, where the other girls were changing and I could hear the happy chatter from inside. Then there was the burst of a trombone as a brass band arrived, marching with a flash of medals and silver sashes down to the jetty on the water.

  ‘Here she is,’ called a reporter lounging by the boatman’s hut. ‘They may have lungs smaller than a man, but by God are lady swimmers blessed with natural life belts!’ I gave a wan smile as Dob released me, entered the hut and closed the door. It was silent inside as I readied myself, removed my clothes and put on the costume that Dob had had specially made. But the neck I’d found too high and the day before I had cut into the cloth with a pair of scissors because I wanted my throat quite free. Then I bound up my hair with a satin ribbon and drew a cloak around my shoulders. I thought I heard a whisper in my ear, ‘Dive pretty, Daisy. And don’t forget to smile,’ and I whirled around, half-expecting Father to be there. What would he think of this, his daughter diving bound into a pond? Would he think I had lost my mind or would he understand and wish me well? I so wanted to ask his advice on how I should perform this dive. But Father was gone; I was alone now.

  I checked everything was in place for afterwards: a bowl of clean water, lotion and powder. In half an hour or less I would be back in this hut, and then how my life would be changed. I bent over my clothing, looking for the letter I kept always in a pocket sewn into my skirt. But as I slipped my fingers into the cloth I found the pocket was empty. I was about to search through the rest of my clothing when the door flew open.

  ‘Why have you cut it?’ asked Dob.

  I touched the neck of my costume, feeling my fingers tremble.

  ‘To better show your décolletage?’ Dob walked in. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘wear this.’

  In his hand he held a golden crown, its arches decorated with shining stones. I put out my fingers to touch it; there was something about the crown I didn’t like, but I couldn’t argue, not now. I had to be fearless today, even more than usual, and if he wanted me to wear it then I would.

  ‘They’re waiting,’ Dob said. He pushed the crown down on my head and I was surprised at how heavy it was. ‘You’re their queen, Daisy. Don’t disappoint them.’

  For a second we looked at each other, Dob and I, and I found myself searching his face for the man I’d once known. I saw him lying on the Margate sands after I had rescued him and the way he had winked at me. And the next day, when he’d been sitting outside my auntie’s house and he had listened to me and fuelled my ambition. But that day when I’d saved his life it hadn’t been my skill he’d admired; he had seen the opportunity to take advantage and seized it with both hands. The man I’d first met had never existed; Dob had felt contempt for me all along. He had betrayed me at Rockaway and now I was going to betray him.

  ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘once you’ve made the dive stay under for as long as possible, make them gasp and wonder where you are. After three minutes I’ll raise the alarm and then the boatman will pretend to come looking for you.’

  I nodded, agreeing to everything. Then I stepped out of the hut and walked purposefully beneath the flower-decked arches down to the water’s edge. There I stopped and blew a series of kisses, and from all around the pond came the most delicious sound, the crowd erupting in cheers. Then I climbed up the steps of the diving platform, step by careful step, leaving the earth behind.

  There was a great hush as I stood at the top, and I savoured that moment when a crowd from above looks like shiny pebbles on a shore. But then a young girl raised her hand, a man glanced up and took off his hat, and that is when I saw the individual people, each with their own lives and loves and lusts. I searched the crowd for Billy, who had arrived from Margate two days ago, and saw him standing at the edge frowning. I looked as well for Robert Winkle, but he was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps this had never been his idea after all.

  I waited while my husband climbed up the steps behind me, thick coils of rope slung over one shoulder, heard the distant cries of ‘Oh!’ and ‘Ah!’ as he joined me on the platform. Slowly Dob removed my cloak and for a second, as he glanced at my costume stretched tight across my stomach, I thought he knew what I had suspected weeks ago: I was going to have a child. I felt giddy at the idea, anxious that he had found the letter hidden in my dress. I watched him cast the cloak to the ground and it fluttered slowly down, getting smaller and smaller, until a gust of wind picked it up and threw it across the water.

  There was a smile on Dob’s face as he slid the ropes off his shoulder and held them up to show the crowd. Then he kneeled down on the platform like a knight before a queen and slowly, deliberately, started to tie my ankles. He stood up and began to bind my wrists, the rope snaking around my flesh and digging into my skin, each tug watched with interest from below.

  Once he had finished I cleared my lungs, took a number of quiet breaths and shuffled my feet onto the board. I waited until Dob had climbed down the steps and then I thrust up my arms, waiting for the sound that would send me hurtling into the air. ‘Introducing…’ came the voice of the announcer, his words distorted by a megaphone, ‘England’s one and only… fresh from her success in America… bound hand and foot… the highest plunge ever known to man… Ladies and gentlemen, our very own DIVE-IN-ITY… Miss Daisy Belle!’

  I looked down at my stomach and said a whispered prayer, ‘This is for you, my baby.’ When the dive was over then we could leave.

  I inched my feet forward until they projected over the side of the board. I needed to kick out just enough to turn m
y body over; I must not leap too far up or out when both my hands and feet were tied. There was a brief, powerful silence, that moment of poise before the flight when I had to battle with a voice that urged me not to jump, not to be so foolish, and I had to remind myself why I must do it.

  I flexed my wrists as best as I could; if I kept them straight as I touched the water then I would go directly down. Then I would surface and rise to the top like Neptune’s daughter to receive my applause. The gun fired and I had no doubts now, my muscles would remember what to do. But as I hurtled through the air and hit the water I felt my neck thrown back and something snap. A moment later I had sunk like a stone.

  I tried to right myself, to thrust my bound hands up towards the surface, but I was struggling against gravity and the world had gone upside down. I held my breath, kept myself perfectly still and waited for my body to rise up naturally – but instead I sank further down. I felt a weed slip around my neck, the quiver of a fish somewhere nearby. Then I opened my eyes and saw nothing but swirling water the colour of tea. What had gone wrong?

  I stopped fighting; it was soundless in the pond but for my heart pounding in my ears. My lungs began to fill with water; my limbs became as heavy as mud. But my mind, how it raced with thoughts and images. I was standing on the deck approaching New York, submerged in the whale tank at the Royal Aquarium, learning to float at the Lambeth Baths. I thought of joyful days on the Margate sands with Billy and then I closed my eyes and I had the strangest, the most glorious impression of green, like fields or gardens, and I was a tadpole again, alone in an ocean paradise.

  Suddenly there was a disturbance in the water; something in my world had shifted. I heard a boom like distant thunder and a great splashing from above as an object, solid and heavy, hit against the pit of my back. It was the blade of an oar. The boat had found me. I had the sensation of someone leaning down towards me, of being hauled up and out of the pond, spluttering and gasping as I emerged into the air. Then I was lying on the bottom of the boat, looking at the sky, aware of the planks beneath me and the musty smell of wet wood.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  But neither Dob nor the boatman replied.

  ‘What have I broken?’

  Again they didn’t reply. Was it my arms, my feet? I tried to check my body, to see how badly I was hurt and as I did the boatman leaned over, his face above mine, with warm brown eyes and a white moustache. Then I saw his shocked expression, watched as a red flush spread up his neck and into his cheeks. That was when I felt the pain, radiating from my neck, across my chest, and down along both arms.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Dob.

  The boatman turned to one side and I heard him retch over the edge of the boat.

  I tried to move my head, aware that something was pressing down on me, and I looked at the boatman with pleading eyes. I felt his hands come down, heard his heavy breathing.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said, ‘it’s stuck fast.’

  Suddenly I knew what might have happened. That moment when I’d hit the water and felt something snap. Had the weight of the crown broken my neck?

  *

  The boatman rowed us back across the pond, and I lay there helplessly, listening to the creak of the wood and the rhythmic scrape of the oars. I felt the boat bump against dry land, heard a child scream, ‘She’s dead!’ and looked up to see two men peering down on me.

  ‘Get a stretcher,’ said one.

  The other shook his head. ‘There’s no point.’

  I thought I heard the sound of a lone bugle playing the starting notes of ‘The Last Post’ and I began to cry, tears rushing down my cheeks, unable to wipe them away. Just before I passed out, I thought of my baby. I had risked everything for the future of myself and my child. Now we would never get to Dover. We would not even survive the night. My dive was the end of all of us.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  There is little I remember of the days that followed, or perhaps I don’t care to. I recall waking one morning to hear the hospital chaplain saying prayers, and the sound of a screen being dragged down the ward and placed around my bed.

  ‘Can she feel that?’ the doctor asked Dob, tapping my right foot with a little hammer.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Then I glanced away, distracted by a lady crying from a neighbouring bed, and when I looked back the hammer was above my other foot. He’d tapped it when I wasn’t looking, and I hadn’t felt a thing.

  ‘It is doubtful,’ said the doctor, ‘that your wife will recover.’

  ‘What has happened?’ I asked.

  The doctor looked thoughtful and I could see that he wasn’t sure. ‘She appears to have fractured the bones in her neck. The spine may be damaged and hence the legs. Rest and prayer, that’s all that can be done now.’

  ‘Will I walk?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘It is doubtful.’

  ‘Will I swim?’

  ‘Swim!’ The doctor laughed. ‘I should hardly think so.’

  I thrust off the blanket and tried to grab the rail of the bed, desperate to show that I could at least sit up. That was when I realised that my body was bound to a board of wood, with bandages tied around my waist, my chest and neck.

  ‘Hysteria,’ said the doctor. ‘There is nothing we can do for her here. She must lie flat until the baby comes.’

  ‘The baby?’ asked Dob and I saw the colour drain from his face.

  ‘Yes, it is still possible she may have a healthy child. Rest and prayer,’ the doctor tapped my husband on the arm, ‘rest and prayer.’ I heard the click of his boots as he moved away and I wondered how he knew. Had I told the nurses when they’d examined me? Then Dob was leaning over the bed, a snarl on his face. ‘Whose baby?’

  I looked away.

  ‘Whose baby, Daisy?’ he asked. ‘It’s a puzzle, isn’t it? A very dirty puzzle. For a man to hear his wife is having a child from another man. But you’re still my wife, and that means what’s yours is mine. Even if you are nothing but a damned whore.’

  *

  I didn’t see my husband after that. I was of no use to him now, unable to swim or dive. Only Billy cared for me, and Violet came to join him, leaving little Percy with Auntie Jessie. Day after day they massaged my legs, applied lotion to my sores and tried to relieve the pain. ‘Take her home,’ the doctor told them, ‘there is nothing to be done for her here.’ But I could hardly move and I had no real home.

  Every night I had the same dream; I opened my eyes in a sun-filled room and there in the doorway stood Johnnie Heaven in his fine striped trousers. He began to walk towards me, getting nearer and nearer with strong buoyant steps and then just as he reached me, I woke up. Had he read about my dive, did he know what had happened and would he come to see me? It was impossible; he was over the ocean in America and even if he did know, what good was I to him or anyone else?

  *

  As the days went past I knew what I had to do and one morning I asked Billy to bring me pen and paper. I had a letter I must write; I could no longer get to Dover or anywhere else. I must set Johnnie Heaven free. He mustn’t wait for me; he could follow his dream and swim the Channel; he could start anew with someone else. I told him I had changed my mind. I’d had an accident during a dive but now I was fully recovered. I was staying with my husband. He should forget about me.

  When I put down the pen I felt the oddest sensation, as if a fish were in my stomach. But determinedly I sealed the letter and asked Billy if he could find the address of the swimming school in New York. He took it without further question, saying he would try his best.

  My brother and Violet did everything for me. They rented a room in Lambeth, where Billy began to teach swimming in the afternoons, while Violet dressed and fed and washed me as if I were a child. The pain in my neck lessened as the weeks went by and I was no longer tied to the board. My right leg hurt if it was touched, but the other had no sensation at all. I had to keep my strength up, said Billy; I must exercise my arms as best as I c
ould and he fashioned me a corset to keep me straight. But the left side of me remained far weaker than the right, and while I could freely use my arms there were days when only the fingers on my right hand would do as they were told. The one thing that gave me hope was the thought of my child. She had survived the dive, and now I must do the same.

  *

  The following spring I caught an infection and Billy took me to St Thomas’ where from outside the window I could see a view of Westminster Bridge. That was where I had stood as a six-year-old and said I wanted to swim the Thames. And I had; no one could take that away from me. Big Ben was my companion during those endless nights, announcing the hours to a sleeping world. In the morning I smelled the river through the open windows and sometimes, in the gloom, the patients before me all wrapped in blankets looked like a row of boats on the shore.

  *

  One day it started snowing and when I woke I was aware of a hush in the ward. I felt an odd shortness of breath and as I pushed myself up I realised I was panting. By the end of that day my baby was born.

  I lay in the bed, cupping my hands around her head, feeling the heat of her body against mine. I stroked her skin, as shiny as a wet pebble, looked deep into her black eyes, and when she shivered and grew goosebumps it was like touching a starfish. I didn’t sleep at all that night; full of wonder, studying every inch of her, counting each freckle high on her cheeks. What would I call her? I couldn’t decide. Every day I thought of a different name. Perhaps I would call her Cloelia.

  Two weeks later I woke from a fitful sleep; it was nearly dark in the ward and silent but for a lady coughing. I wanted to feed my baby, it had been hours since I had seen her, and so I called a nurse who was walking past. ‘Can you bring me my baby?’ I asked. ‘She needs to be fed.’ But the nurse continued on her round. I rattled the side of my bed, trying to get attention, asking another nurse, but she too walked by. ‘Why will no one answer me?’ I called. ‘I need to see my baby.’