The Diamond Waterfall (17 page)

“But I am a nasty person, my behavior—you don't think all Romanians are like this? Please say—”

He shan't get round me in that fashion. “I was not particularly pleasant either,” she said. “Let us leave it at that.”

But all that day he seemed to be at her side, returning again and again:

“Did you like our wine at luncheon? It's from Tante Sophie's family— their vineyard in the Dobrudja.” Then:

“How is your little baby? I think you have a son?”

She was disarmed a little. He said, “Tell me about him, please. What is he called?”

“Henry. But he is known as Hal.”

“I cannot believe you are a mother. So young.” That evening he said, “I want us to be friends, please. Tante Sophie has already remarked that she thinks we look awfully well together. A spiffing couple. I am dark and you are so fair—”

“I am sure Sophie did not say ‘spiffing.' “

It was not so easy to deflate him. “But I've translated. I do it jolly well, don't I?”

She was seated next to him at dinner. Madame Xenescu was not there— she had spent the day in her room, while her children amused themselves with Ion and the others.

Valentin said, “Now I want to ask some questions about London, because I was there only a few times, taking out these actresses.”

Even though annoyed, she found herself talking, telling him. For one so lively, he was a good listener. She had seen the night before how he had listened to Madame Xenescu.

Toward the end of the evening he told her, “I've arranged everything we do tomorrow. There's to be an expedition—we all go on ponies up the mountain. We shall eat up there.”

And what of Madame Xenescu? Really, Lily did not know what to think. Perhaps, she decided in the scented darkness, the wind sighing in the larches outside,
perhaps I should not think?
Just before she had settled for bed, Sophie had come in, saying mysteriously, “You've been making a great conquest, you know. Please allow that he pays attention. He is such a dear boy and you will find certainly you are amusing together.”

The ponies were small and shaggy with long flowing manes and tails. Usually the saddles were only rough wooden ones but hers was sheepskin and comfortably padded. They climbed slowly up through the forests, where it was cool in the glades. The peaks of the Bucegi Mountains, inaccessible, snowcapped, filled her with longing. The fir trees grew right to the tip of the Piatrà Arsă. The air was champagne again.

“The flowers, you see how many grow here—we have them all spring
and summer—roses of the mountain, violets, gentians, carnations. You will find even edelweiss …”

They saw a bear. They had been sitting resting and Valentin was adjusting the cloth of her saddle for her:

“Bruno's very daring, to come so far down—he's after the wild raspberries. Because they're so very, very delicious.” He said easily, “I think perhaps your mouth tastes as they do.”

When they arrived back, the Xenescu children heard that they were to leave in the morning. Their mother was still not about. Valentin appeared unworried, but Sophie told Lily:

“Ana Xenescu—there's a little upset. She has jealousy.”

“Whatever for?”

“Oh, for you. Because he look at you. But Tino is not her
amant.
That is being over with one year. She think it begin again but it don't.”

Tired after their expedition, most of them went to bed early. The next morning only Take and Tante Elise were about. Take sat at a table in the garden surrounded by papers. Some fellow zealots were coming from Paris soon for a meeting.

Sophie joined them outside. “Oh, these politics,” she said. Tante Elise looked up from her tatting:

“I'm not sure that all this should happen in our house—it is dangerous. I ask myself what the Castle would say? He would not be
persona grata—”

A little later, noticing few people about, Lily heard that Valentin and Teodor and some others had gone off shooting. Sophie said, “They go very early, before the sun rises, and will sleep in some huts. They pass some days with it.”

For Lily it was as if the sky had suddenly darkened. She was horrified at the strength of her feelings—was certain that everyone present must have noticed something…. But the Xenescu departure soon after with its noise and bustle—the children reluctant, Madame wan and proud-looking—served to distract. … All the same, it was a long day. She wrote to Sadie. To Robert. To Alice. She did not sleep during siesta time, but walked to and fro in her room.
What is happening to me?
Sweet reason—but she could not stay still long enough to apply it.

In the middle of dinner, he reappeared. “My apologies, my apologies, I am late.” He opened his arms as if to embrace everyone.

“But, Tino—where are the others? Where is my Teodor?”

He said, surprised, “In the mountains of course, dear Sophie.” He explained, “It is only I who've returned. It was suddenly
ennuyeux
—to be away…”

All the while he hadn't looked directly at Lily at all. Her heart thudding, the color rushing to her face—oh, but surely she could not hide her delight. A
place made for him at the table—near to Sophie but opposite to her. The food tasting now quite different, bright colors of saffron rice, tomatoes, flavor and texture of quails. Wine: amber and jewel red. A bunch of small white grapes. She was possessed by a feverish excitement so that as the candles glowed on all the colors she hardly knew where to look—it was as if everything had been touched—with what? The very air hummed. (Oh dear God, what is happening to me?)

“Please, may I come inside your bed tonight?”

“Certainly not,” she said airily. “Whatever will you think of next?”

“But I'm especially back from the mountains, just so that—”

“I don't care if you traveled from Manchuria. The answer is no.”

“Please—I'm so sad otherwise, too sad.
Please
—Lily. I shall be very careful, I am always very careful—”

“You're very free with Christian names, aren't you? And perhaps—just a little absurd?”

“No, no, it's you who are foolish. But I don't pay attention. I come inside anyway.”

Her bedroom door had a lock. The window had shutters, which she fastened tight. It was only when she was already in bed that she realized she had not, after all, locked the door.

I never meant, she thought afterward, I could never have meant to lock it. She lay very still then, as if waiting. Her body didn't move but her heart thudded still, and all her skin felt as if fevered.

Just after midnight she heard the door handle turn.

He didn't say anything at first but just placed the light he was carrying beside the bed, and then knelt down near her pillow.

“Whatever?
You know what I said—”

“And you remember what I said? Yes, yes, you
do
—oh, but you are a silly lovely lily and now is not at all the time for
talking …”

Certainly it was not the time for talking. The great wooden bed so wide and generous—the flutters of thought, she was soon rid of those—she was all body, all feeling. All that glowing of skin, thudding of heart had been for this. The same body which all those years ago—the fumbling of Frank, clumsy eagerness of Edmund, dreadful bejeweled pain and humiliation in Nice, in Paris …

For a while afterward he tried to still her trembling.

“Just lie very quiet please in my arms—you're not frightened of me that I make you so happy? And that I don't talk, only to say what beautiful breasts you have and other things that I only know how they're called in French…. You do like me a little? It's not that you're angry I'm so naughty? No, I don't go to sleep—
-you
may, but I stay now to talk to you, and touching, always touching, until it is time we begin again.”

She wasn't sure which were best, the days or the nights. Those enchanted days which she and Val (for she called him that, preferring it) spent now always together. By common consent, a couple. Days that rushed by. And yet stretched out, each one a great length of shining cord. Days joined to nights …

Somehow in all the excitement she had not expected to
like
him. She distrusted charm, good looks even more (what of Edmund?), self-satisfaction most of all. A rich and probably spoiled young man. That was what she had seen—yet been unable to resist. Her happiness she put down to the pleasures of the bed, the mountains, the scented pinewoods, the long late summer days. … So how to explain her terror, her sudden glimpses of the silken cord snapping? The woods growing dark, bears hunted in the mountains, hungry wolves making their way down to the villages. Cold winter. Endings …

But of course the nights were the best. Then after pleasure and more pleasure, there would be the quiet talking:

“Sophie told me that perhaps you're not very happy, so I watched always. Now you can tell me about this Robert, and Lionel and—everything.” It was easy, good even, to tell the story, which was like a shameful secret. She told every sad detail. Val took it matter-of-factly, “Ah, but there are people like that,” and then exploded with anger on her behalf. He went around the room, kicking at furniture, thumping the end of the bed. “It shan't be, it shan't be.”

“Oh but it is,” she told him sadly. Feeling the sudden cold wind of hopelessness. For what could Val, would Val, do? What else could all this happiness mean except—endings?

And the necklace, the Diamond Waterfall—how to explain that she had sold her soul for that? “Ah no,” he said, lying still, hands cupped over her breasts, “you sell your
body
—and that is not important, not important at all.” He stopped for a moment. “Oh, what frightful tosh I'm talking.
I
mind that you did,
I
mind—and
that
is important.”

“You think yourself, your darling self, very important—”

“But I've always been so—to my mother, my sisters, my brothers, to Ana.”

“Ah yes, Ana.”

She had thought there would be upset about Ana Xenescu, his former mistress. But almost from the beginning he'd spoken of her, although not often, always quite naturally. It was she, Lily, with her sudden spasms of jealousy, of nagging curiosity, who asked, and asked.

“But, Lily, when I was sixteen, seventeen, I had to learn to be pleasing. And Ana, who had a husband always away from home and very
complaisant,
she chose me—and I was very proud. She was altogether very beautiful then. It's only lately she's become so fat—it is easy for Romanians to become fat.
She and I, we had many many happy days together. So of course, I became very good for other women. Then after some time what happened was that when it should all end, she didn't want it to. And because she is older and of a jealous temper, she's angry when I look at others. But it was all over for me nearly two years ago, when I was twenty. Then she saw me here—perhaps she hoped I'd return—and I'm weak and give her little attentions, but because I don't come to her room anymore, and you are here and are so beautiful, there's a
crise de nerfs,
and what can I do?”

“I found her difficult, a little,” Lily said. “I think too that before this, she didn't like me. Now I'm sorry for her.”

“Lily, I also was giving—you understand what I mean? It's not right that because she has been the teacher, she shall be
accaparante.”

Lily thought, I must not monopolize him either. I must never become like that. And yet she could see it so clearly, how it might so easily be that way. When, oh when, did the light easy conversation, the badinage, when did it suddenly hint at boredom? (“I like women very much,” he had said.)

She said lightly:

“It's my turn to tease you now. Your English is so good—but we say, you know, ‘come to or
into
bed.' Not ‘inside' as you said. ‘Inside' is for when you come into me.”

“But that is what I meant. Whatever else did you think I spoke of?”

Time passing. Autumn crocus everywhere already, pale blue. “It is only here in Transylvania, that it is this color.” Excursions, walks in the pinewoods, an evening of dancing with the peasants, above Sinaia, on the grassy plateau outside the monastery. Music, the wild, sad sound of the pan pipes, trying to take the sound inside herself so that one day she would be able to call their music up, to remind her. For surely she would wish to be reminded—or haunted?

September melted into October. October. And now its days ran away too.

“I shall certainly be home for Christmas, Alice. I have told your Papa so. Really I would not have believed when I first left that I should agree to stay so long—two months already! But although I think about little Hal many many times every day, I know he is in safe hands (and two of those hands are yours!). I am now quite well again—my spirits completely recovered. I wish that you too, Alice, might have a visit such as this! Many of the guests mentioned in my letters have left us. Take is in Paris, and Ion grew bored and returned home. There are just a few relations left now. In three days' time we leave for the capital, Bucharest.”

They were so silly together. It was as if she had missed somewhere in her life the time for being silly. (Vicky, even dear Vicky, we weren't
really
so.) All manner of stupid games. They joked about anything. The story of Red Riding Hood—

“What a big—I don't know the French—you have!”

“All
the better to—how do you say?—prick you with…. Oh, oh, ah
yes.
Now kiss me. And Lily—”

“Yes?”

“What a little
trou
you have …”

“All the better to—oh, Val…. Never leave me, never leave me …”

She asked him, “But what about Bucharest? You have a home there. We cannot—”