When she was little, she’d toss off her hat to let her hair get soaked. She’d yank off her Wellies and run barefoot through the wet fields, twirling about, her head lifted high, as if she were celebrating some wonderful news. You could hardly get her to come inside. Sometimes she’d stand for ages in the street, watching raindrops hit the puddles. “I hear music!” she’d tell me. It was like the plinking of the notes in her ballerina music box, she said.
Today, though, when Pamela seems so precarious, I suppose I should be happy the sun is shining. Rain draws her like a siren call. Most of the time, the call is innocent. But not always. Sometimes it’s . . . well, I don’t understand it. I think she hears things. It does sound mad, but I think—I think she thinks—the rain talks to her. Somehow it beckoned her out that terrible night.
We were still living in Macdougal Alley then. Pamela was working furiously in those days, and she often spent the night in her studio, just across the alley. She was already twenty or so, too old for me to monitor, but still I would look to see if she was there, if the light was on or not. On nights she knew she’d be up late working, she’d come over or ring us up to say good night. But that night we didn’t hear from her.
How it rained! A relentless rain. Drenching. No light was on in Pamela’s studio. When I couldn’t bear it anymore, I went over to check. She wasn’t there, of course. Francesco said not to worry. She’s grown up, you can’t keep doing this. But I couldn’t help it, all night I kept getting out of bed, looking for a light across the way. Sometime towards dawn I threw on my robe and ran barefoot across the courtyard. It was so dim in the studio I could barely see. But I could feel that she was there.
I found her all curled up on the sofa, lying in the dark, soaking wet. Water stains blackened the velvet cushions. When I touched her, she felt hard, tense. Her fingers were clenched into tight fists. I worked them open, and smelled a meadow, a wet field. In her fists were the smashed stems of flowers. Where on earth had she been?
She wouldn’t talk to me. I calmed her as best I could, rubbing her back, but it was a long time before she’d let me help her out of her wet clothes. I loosened her hair, toweled it, brushed it out as I hadn’t done since she was a child. I stayed with her until she slept.
In the afternoon I went back to the studio, determined to get through to her. I thought if her misery had anything to do with Diccon, and I was sure it did, it was time to face things. Things were quite different now. We needed to talk about Nancy.
I came armed with the latest B. Altman catalog, a distraction tactic. Something easy and amusing, I thought, before I broached the subject of Diccon. It was one of our favorite diversions, poring over the fashions together, laughing at the hats and dresses we’d never own.
Pamela was just as I had left her, lying on the sofa in her nightdress.
I sat by her and thumbed through the pages until I found “Evening Wear.” That autumn—it was the autumn of 1928—someone highly placed in the world of haute couture had decided it should be the season of metal. Perhaps, I thought, these improbable, gorgeous dresses would draw Pamela away from her gloomy thoughts.
“Listen to this dress, Pamela! ‘French blue silk crepe blooming with a copper and gold floral design, a tracery of metal lace.’ Lovely, don’t you think?”
Pamela was silent. I tried again.
“Or this evening wrap—how can we live another moment without ‘a glimmer of metal tissue against velvet?’ Really, we must run out and get one for each of us.”
Still there was no response. I closed the catalog.
“Pamela . . . perhaps we should talk about Diccon . . . ?” She cringed slightly but made no sound. I went ahead anyway.
“Diccon is . . . well, of course you know how fond he is of all of us, and you especially, but Nancy has been . . .”
She edged away from me then, huddling close to the wall.
“Please, Mam. I don’t want to talk.”
It was just a whisper. She turned her face to the wall.
pamela
I have to close my eyes, they’re so awfully tired. All that counting, all the going up and down the wallpaper, it makes me dizzy.
Just the daisies now.
I lie in a meadow of daisies.
You must pluck all the petals, you must. You must find out the answer.
He loves me, he loves me not. Pluck. He loves me. Pluck. He loves me not. Pluck. Pluck. Pluck, pluck, pluck. It always comes out wrong, it’s always loves me not.
No, it’s not true, it’s not right. . . . Just one more flower and it will come out all right. He loves me, I’m sure of it.
The scent of lilacs fades, disappears.
The air is cooler, wilder, behind my eyelids.
Apples. I can smell apples.
Diccon.
Once, just to say the name Diccon to myself could open a hole in my heart. For so long Diccon meant—simply—almost everything to me. Though at the time it was anything but simple. I thought I would die of it.
margery
Well, it was no use. Pamela turned her face to the wall, and I had to leave her. I would get nothing out of her.
What had drawn her from her studio out into that stormy night? Whatever it was, the rain had fooled her, turned against her. I had no idea where she’d been or what she’d done, but I was sure we were in for a bad time.
And I knew she could not—would not—let go of Diccon.
It wasn’t just Pamela. I suppose we all fell a bit in love with Diccon that summer in Wales.
Diccon, the Pied Piper of Harlech. That summer, none of us would have dreamed of planning a picnic or a hike to the top of Snowdon without racing over to find Diccon, to dig him out of his stone cottage where you’d find him writing a new poem or painting dragons on the walls.
He looked a bit like that actor they’re all swooning over now, Errol Flynn. No, that’s wrong, Diccon wasn’t handsome in a movie-star way. He was too irregular, too professorial with his high, pale forehead and longish nose. He looked like what he was—a poet. Still, it just takes a little squinting of the mind to imagine him in the role of Robin Hood, or Captain Blood, his dark hair blowing wild in the wind. I see him now, tall and purposeful, striding over the windswept hills, waving his walking stick in the air as he belts out one of those old Welsh fighting songs he loved. He’s wearing his lumberman’s shirt, red-and-black-checked wool, and rough pants tucked into greased boots.
Diccon was twenty, about to enter his final year at Oxford. Pamela was thirteen.
We were staying with William Nicholson and his family in their summer home, an ancient stone cottage. William was a well-known figure, a brilliant artist and the publisher of a literary journal in London, The Owl, but to us he was simply an old friend. Over dinner one night in London, he’d asked if he could do a portrait of Pamela. And then he’d made a suggestion.
“Why not do it over holiday at my cottage in Wales?” he said.
“Yes, why not?” we agreed. We were happy to leave the city.
It was on our very first night in Harlech that William announced that there was someone he wanted us to meet, a poet who was staying nearby.
“Richard Hughes. Diccon, he calls himself. You’ll quite enjoy him, we’ll have him to dinner.”