“It’s terribly nice, Diccon, and if you’re trying to get me to take offense you’ve missed your mark—I’ve always known you liked Mam best. Everybody does, you know!”
It was true. Everyone wanted to be near her, to trust her with secrets.
The hotcakes were thin and buttery and sugary. “Mmmm,” I said.
Diccon plunked down his tin plate, sitting so close to me that his woolen shirt grazed my arm when he reached for the buttermilk. He devoured his hotcakes.
“Mmmm,” he said, widening his eyes, teasing me. “Told you I was good at it.”
“More?” he asked.
“Yes, please,” I said. He reached for my plate, then stopped. He looked at me with great concern. Before I could react his face was on top of my face and his tongue ran around my upper lip. It was over before I could even think.
“Don’t want to waste even the littlest bit of that lovely buttermilk, do we?”
Diccon looked at me, his eyes widened—he was terribly amused, I could see—and let out a great laugh.
I didn’t know what to think. I sat there frozen, feeling my face burn.
Diccon was at the stove, humming.
Had he just kissed me? Could that have been a kiss?
Diccon was letting out little whoops of glee as he tossed the hotcakes in the pan, and by the time he sat down again he was back on the subject of gypsy girls, and it seemed as though nothing had happened at all.
“I think you’ll quite like this one, Pammy—I shall give it to you.”
He bounded across the room to his little desk. He came back with a handwritten copy of his new poem, “Gipsy-Night.”
I walked home slowly, all warm inside, light as a milkweed seed floating in sunlight. I stopped again at the rock by the apple tree and sat down to read Diccon’s poem. He wrote of a dark night, rain dancing on roofs, wind sliding through the trees. Of Dobbin, the horse, stabled with bracken up to his knees. And wanting to dance with gypsy girls. . . .
My heart—foolish, innocent, tender, untrammeled—beat with newfound happiness.
Apple trees.
Hotcakes.
Poetry.
Gypsies.
Buttermilk kisses.
And Diccon—tall and strong, clever and kind—was mine. We would be together forever, just as soon as I was grown up.
margery
William told us, in confidence, of Diccon’s tragic past. So many deaths in the family, and now he was an only child with an overly protective mother. That summer in Wales was, I think, the first time Diccon experienced the warmth and comfort of family life, and the personal freedom he was never able to feel under his mother’s roof. He was like a frisky colt, nosing among the herd. We all felt his eagerness, his curiosity, and his pleasure, and were glad of it.
Diccon may have been happy in our company, but, truly, he was ecstatic just to be in Wales. He could trace his ancestry to ancient Welsh kings and felt a strong connection to the land, though he’d only just visited it for the first time the year before. But that was all it took. Diccon had so fallen in love with Wales—every bog, hill, and rock, he said—that it had inspired him to change his name. When he returned to Oxford, he announced that he’d no longer answer to that inelegant English name, “Dick.” In future, he declared, he would be known by his Welsh name, “Diccon.”
It’s true that Diccon did seem to spend an inordinate amount of time with Pamela that summer. He took her on day-long hikes, cooked hotcakes for her in his tumble-down cottage, and rode around with her on that motorbike of his, Pamela holding on to him, screaming deliriously into the wind as they bounced off over the moors and the old Roman roads.
And he could do no wrong in her eyes.
One day he said something extraordinary about her. Right in front of her. It was terrible, really. Diccon had made some sort of joke, and Pamela laughed, and then Diccon looked at her and cocked his head and said, “I’ve got it, Pammy . . . I’ve been trying to think, and now I’ve got it, what you look like sometimes . . . half pig and half cat!” I was aghast. How could he say such a thing? But Pamela just laughed.
And then I saw it. It was when she grinned. He had it precisely.
My beautiful little Pamela, half pig and half cat!
It’s easy to think now, should I have said something to her? Something like, “He is twenty, Pamela, not someone for such a young girl like you to be hanging her dreams on. . . .” But I never thought to, I simply didn’t think beans of it at the time, and anyway she wouldn’t have listened. She would have made her “Oh, don’t be silly, Mam” face.
Nothing I did or didn’t do would have mattered. Even in the beginning I couldn’t have dislodged Diccon from Pamela’s heart.
No, that summer in Harlech I never worried at all. Pamela may have been spellbound, consumed by first love, but I could see that to Diccon, she was just a little girl. He was oblivious to the yearnings of a thirteen-year-old, especially one who looked so very childlike still. I thought I understood why he wanted to spend so much time with her. He was fascinated by her. She was, after all, a girl with preternatural talent. He admired that terribly. And she was a very famous little girl. After Turin, there’d been her first solo exhibition, in London. The Leicester Galleries. It was a wild success. At the end of the show, there was only one drawing left on the wall—a cauliflower and some onions done in pencil and gouache. William and a friend tossed a coin for it. William won.
After that exhibition, everyone in Europe knew the name Pamela Bianco, the famous child prodigy, the little flaxen-haired girl who drew with the confidence of an Old Master. A genius, all the critics said. They called her a “child miracle.” The things they wrote in those days!
Perhaps Diccon even had some vague hope that her great success would rub off on him. He never hid his ambition, always talking of books he hoped to publish, plays he thought he’d write one day. He longed for recognition. And here was this golden child. . . .
pamela
God, what am I doing?
This rocking, rocking. It’s worse than the pacing.
But he is back now, and I cannot send him away.
Swaying, rocking.
A hammock, in Wales, blown by breezes.
Dawn. Diccon lies asleep.
Our time in Wales is running out. We have to be back in the city soon. One last long hike, we decide. We’d all go.
Diccon leads the way, tall and sure-footed—swashbuckling, I think—striding like the lord of the land in his greased boots and red-and-black-checked lumberman’s shirt. He sings an ancient Welsh battle song in a loud, exaggerated baritone, striking his walking stick on the ground for emphasis.
Men of Harlech! In the hollow
Do ye hear like rushing billow
Wave on wave that surging follow
Battle’s distant sound?
Tis the tramp of Saxon foemen
Saxon spearmen, Saxon bowmen
Be they knights or hinds or yeomen
They shall bite the ground!