The Diamond Waterfall (28 page)

Alice said anxiously, “Gib?”

“I'm all right,” he said. “Perfectly all right. I'll just go back up …”

She held on to his arm as they went up the staircase almost as if it was she who had been hurt. They came into the sitting room not particularly quietly, but without speaking. Mrs. Radcliffe lay, head back, in the armchair before the fireplace. Her mouth open, probably snoring, deeply asleep. There was a jug and basin in his bedroom. She said, “I'll bathe your face for you.”

She thought he was a bit shocked, although he laughed nervously. He said, “A fine thing to happen to a chap—”

“You were only protecting me—”

“It's quite usual, gate-crashers—but several together, and good-humored.
He'll
have worse than a bloodied nose, I fear. Shouldn't wonder if he's rusticated—sent down temporarily.”

She wiped his face carefully until all the blood was removed. “Thank you,” he said. When she had quite finished, she took his face, all clean now and tidy (I am his mother, his sister), between her hands and kissed his cheek.
Once, twice. His temple, his cheek. Blood was flowing again from one nostril. Some ran into her mouth.

I am his mother, his sister. I kiss him better …

He said awkwardly, “Really, I'm rather a mess.” They went back into the sitting room. Mrs. Radcliffe had not moved. She was snoring now. Voices then on the stairs. Others of the party coming up. It was time for them all to go to Saint's.

“Well, old chap,” Vesey said, “well.
Si sapias, sapias?
Be wise, if you are wise.”

Gib said, “I think it was
Vinum incendit iram.
He was
very
drunk.”

“My turn,” said Vesey. “
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
If you wish for peace, prepare for war. Next time you must be ready with
your
fist.”

Somehow the rest of the night, the visit to John's, the coming of the first light, was enchanted still. As Gib's face and eye began to turn slowly yellow, brown, black, they joined up with Saint in the Market Square. At about four-thirty it was light enough for their photographs to be taken. The Market Square was deserted—the early farm wagons just arriving. They were pictured by the fountain. Gib wanted to hide.

Then, she was in some sort of dream, they took, ten of them, punts up the river, where they ate breakfast.

Several times on the journey home she would suddenly taste the metallic flavor of his blood, remember the smell of his skin. Why? He had not remarked on it. Everything was the same as before. And yet …

She was going home ahead of him. He followed next week. She hurried the train on. Hurried time on, to when it would all be
ordinary
again.

She called on the spirit of her mother. She liked to imagine their two mothers, in heaven, talking together. “Alice will take care of Gib,” her mother told his. “I know no one better.”

She hurried the train as it rattled over the rails. Back to Flaxthorpe— and the long summer. Gib at the Vicarage. She at The Towers.

Hal said, “Tomorrow—Jack won't be coming for the hay.”

“Summat up with him?” Stephen asked.

“Mrs. Hawksworth says he mayn't. It's sneezing. He sneezed all the way
home. Then his eyes went all red and puffed up, and his nose … he could scarcely breathe. And he's got to be well to go to his school in September.”

“Hay seeds, it'll be,” Stephen said.

“But
I'll
be up,” Hal went on, “unless that beastly Pettinger keeps me. I can't really cut any lessons. Bally things …”

What a nuisance they were. All part of the bad luck that made him Master Henry Firth (aged twelve) of The Towers and not Stephen Ibbotson (aged fifteen) of Lane Top Farm. Not that he would for a moment have changed
mothers
—privately he didn't think much of Mrs. Ibbotson, who drooped. But what he'd realized gradually was that really he simply wished more than anything else to be a farm boy. And after that, a farmer.

But one didn't speak of such things. What one did was to spend every free moment, every moment that could be spared from Mr. Pettinger, up at the farm. Sometimes that meant hasty, badly done Latin parsing for the next day, but mostly it was easy enough, especially the arithmetic and Euclid. Once or twice it occurred to him that perhaps he was clever, and that was why he could often do in fifteen minutes what might take Jack an hour or more. Most of the work set, anyway, was to do with Jack's requirements for school—Harrow, in two months' time.

Hal's life would change then, because Gib Nicolson (“I think you should perhaps call him
Mr.
Nicolson now,” Alice said) was to be his tutor instead of Mr. Pettinger. Gib would leave the school where he was presently teaching, Marlborough, and live instead at home, coming each day to The Towers. Life, Hal feared, might become serious. Because even though he was not strong enough to go to school (sports, fights, general rough and tumble—the dangers had all been explained to him) he was expected to go to university—for no reason he could see, except that most chaps did. Gib had, of course. Cambridge in the summer, Alice told Hal, was “the most wonderful, beautiful place.” (Maybe she thought so…. But how could it be compared with evenings on the lower moor, creeping over the stones in the stream while the brown water gurgled below and the sky above faded and darkened, watching and waiting with Stephen for the trout to rise?)

His heart: in a way it had done him a good turn. For it gave him no trouble he could notice, so that he was no longer frightened by it, although sometimes it beat wonkily, and then he would wonder if
that
was the trouble. Luckily, most of the things he wanted to do were the very ones allowed. All part of the exciting, happy life he led. He and Jack and Stephen. A trio. A triumvirate.

It had been gradual, really, beginning with that Easter Monday adventure, caught in the hailstorm near Stephen's farm. Then the sad silence afterward, as if a door had been slammed in his face. (“But Stephen
promised,
he
said
we would go fishing.”) The disapproval of his elders. And then—Jack becoming
interested because fishing was his new craze. Alice being roped in to plead for them. And, finally, a visit to the farm: Alice, Jack, Hal, and yes, Fräulein, all setting out in the yellow dog cart. Mr. Ibbotson was spoken to. Stephen was asked to take them fishing. Hal hadn't liked the formal atmosphere but was happy at the result. He was to be allowed to spend time at the farm, provided he did no heavy work. It was even considered good, since days spent indoors marshaling his lead soldiers, Jack as the opposing general, were nothing like as healthy.

A happy summer. Fishing, sheep clipping, haymaking, gathering bracken (even swimming in the icy streams until he was found out and, with horror, forbidden. “The
shock
you might give your heart …”). Jack there too, nearly always, for he was as bored by Edith and Amy as Hal was with Teddy and Sylvia. Ugh. The worst thing about them, and Jack felt the same, was that they whined. They also giggled, which was horrible, and, silliest thing of all, fought each other to get attention from the grown-ups. (He and Jack could do with a lot less.)

The next winter, 1909, Will Ibbotson died in the cold days of February, of pneumonia. He was just nineteen. Two of the four boys gone now. Stephen didn't speak of it much—he stayed away awhile from Hal and Jack, and they from him. The bad weather made visiting difficult. When Hal was back there again, Mrs. Ibbotson still had red eyes. Olive kept running up to put her hand in her mother's. Although he would never have asked Olive out with them, he liked her pretty well. She didn't behave like a sister. Often he did her sums for her, as that first time, but later he made sure that she understood the answers. “A farmer's wife,” Will said, “she's the reckonings to do often as not. Olive'd best learn.” She'd finished with school now, leaving the year she'd turned twelve.

Haymaking time in the hot, hot summer of 1911. He woke every morning to a sky more blue than white, to what they called a “hayday.” If at all possible he went up to the farm, even if it could not be till afternoon. His whole, his
real
life was up there.

The Paddies had come to help with the hay. Tim and Pat O'Rourke, brothers, had been coming for fifteen years, and their father and uncles before that. Large men who got through more bread, milk, and cheese before their day's work than Hal could in a week. He rejoiced in them. Adding their accent to his repertoire. But when he spoke back to them with a brogue they didn't even notice. Pat taught him some songs. Tim had a mouth organ. When the haymaking was all over there would be a feast, a “mell,” with plenty of beer and singing and dancing. Hal wouldn't be there, of course. Jack thought him very odd for wanting to. “Tim and Pat, they're good sorts,” he said. “Only—not
our
sort.”

Perhaps. Yes. Maybe. Tim and Pat lodged in one of the two big field
houses a little way from the farmhouse, sleeping upstairs where later the hay would be stored. They mowed with a skill which gained respect from all. They brought their own scythes with them, with very soft blades so that if they hit a stone they would not break. Tim, Pat, James, Mr. Ibbotson, all in a row—it was a fine sight. On days of close heat they wore cheesecloth over their faces to keep off the midges. Hal, Stephen, and Olive were straw boys and girl, tossing the hay first over one shoulder then the other to keep it light.

Now Jack must stay away. He was angry, Hal knew, not so much because he liked haymaking but because it meant he couldn't be with Hal. Lately, perhaps on account of being about to leave home, he had been reading a lot of boys' school stories. Before that it had been adventure. Fairy stories he'd never liked. When he'd caught Hal at nearly eleven reading
The Green Fairy Book,
he had mocked.
His
book at the time had been
From Powder Monkey to Admiral
When he'd finished it, he declared that he would join the Navy. “When the war comes …” What war? Hal had asked.
“The
war—I dunno. The Pater says, everyone says … Germany. They're spoiling for a fight, and it'll be at sea. We shall have to show them probably, sooner or later, that it doesn't do to get too big for your boots.” Only a month after that, he thought the Foreign Legion was the thing. Then it was Canada, and the Mounties. Hal marveled.

“It's beastly luck,” he said to Jack now, “about the hay fever. After it's all over, we'll try and do something jolly, if the sun keeps up, which it
will”

“Bonus, bene, melius, melior,”
Jack said. “Meanwhile I'll just have to stay indoors with Caesar and his bally Gallic Wars. Beastly lingo.” Then: “I say,” he went on, “when I'm back with you and Stephen, why don't we all become blood brothers? In this story I read …”

The hay had been led in. Loaded on the sledge, tied up with rope at the back because they were going downhill. Stephen led Bluebell. The next day, while Tim and Pat were sleeping off the feast, and after an hour's cricket practice with Mr. Pettinger, Hal and Jack went over to the farm on their bicycles, stopping as always for Hal whenever the incline was steep.

Jack didn't expect to sneeze again. Some folk, Stephen said, sneezed all summer. “Grass here is that herby.”

He and Jack were together again, and soon would be even more so, for lessons finished completely in a week's time. Jack had caught up, more or less. Gib could help at the last minute, if necessary. Mr. Pettinger was about to leave for Switzerland with two boys he was to coach for the summer.

“It'll be ripping to see him go,” Jack said. “He thinks I'm an absolute duffer at everything. But I wouldn't be bad at cricket, if I hadn't his beastly mug to look at when he bowls.”

There was a new calf at the farm. While they were admiring it, Jack said
again, “Let's be blood brothers. It'd be awfully jolly.” When he had an idea he would never let go of it.

“Whatever's that, then?” Stephen asked, a little scornfully. Jack explained.

“And then you mix the bits of blood together …”

“Sounds daft to me.”

“It's a very old custom. Gypsies do it.”

“There's no call for us—on account of some gypsy folk—”

“But I'm off to school, and we'll all be parted.” He said desperately, “Haven't you heard of the Three Musketeers? We could—” Then he broke off because Stephen was laughing at him.

Stephen said good-naturedly that he wasn't bothered. If it was what Jack wanted …

“We can any of us call on the others if we're in trouble, for the rest of our lives,” Jack said. “It's a
bond.”

To Hal it seemed a good idea. He would if possible have chosen a brother over a sister any day. They did it that afternoon, using the fishing knife for the cutting. They cleaned it with earth first. When their blood was all mixed together, Jack said to Stephen, “Now you're one of us.” Stephen still thought it daft, and said so. Hal supposed it was because Stephen was almost a grown man: fifteen and three months. Although Hal had nearly a head over him. (“Don't grow too fast for your heart,” someone had said only the other day.)

They idled, spoke of fishing later, but hadn't brought anything. When they learned the trap was going into Flaxthorpe, they put their bicycles in the back and climbed in. Stephen came with them. When they reached the Hall, Jack took his bicycle and left them. But at The Towers, Hal said to Stephen, “Come in. Stay awhile with us.”

Stephen looked uncertain. James, holding the reins, grew impatient. “It's aye or nay, Stephen lad.”

Stephen jumped down. Hal said, “All right then, I'll show you everything. We're brothers, remember?”

“Right. Aye.”

“I could show you my room—my treasures. Everything.”