Black Diamond (10 page)

They had to walk in single file, the servant leading, over an old rag carpet; in several places it wasn't securely attached. Twice Jack had to catch Beatrice as she skidded to the side. The floor underneath was stone. And the house was quiet enough so that as they shuffled forward, the only sound other than that of their moving feet was the wheezing of the man in front.

They came out into a space that in another house would have been the hallway by the main door: well-lighted, with plenty of room to stand. There were chairs against the wall and carpets on the wooden floor. A large Venetian mirror hung from a ceiling rail. Beatrice wondered how old the place was. The curiously labyrinthine entranceways might have had something to do with an ancient system of defence.

A butler took their coats and showed them down two steps and through a door, into a reception room filled with people talking and raising glasses to their lips. An Egyptian in his
mid-forties
came up to them; he introduced himself as Hassan, the son of the house. ‘My mother is resting,' he told them. ‘But you must meet my sister and my uncle, Constantine.'

Uncle Constantine was a dessicated old gentleman who immediately attached himself to Beatrice and began to tell her about his young days in Paris. She enjoyed his stories, despite the fact that occasionally he'd repeat phrases or ask all at once, ‘Where was I?' or, ‘What was I saying?' The daughter, Ernestine, was also presented. Beatrice didn't recognize her until a few minutes after they had been introduced; she now wore her hair pulled back into a knot. Her face was thin, the skin dried out, and the light eyes – which had made such a startling effect in her youth – had lost their clear, open look; they seemed sunken into her face and their color no longer appeared remarkable. Her hair was lighter than before. Beatrice suspected that she'd been putting henna on it. That was surprising, but merely a detail. What troubled Beatrice was the greater change that had taken
place: from the striking-looking girl to this unsmiling, charmless woman.

Two waiters circulated through the room with trays of wine. Jack engaged Ernestine in conversation. Like all the Schuylers, he could talk to anyone, and on any subject. Beatrice said to Hassan that she hadn't realized there was to be such a large gathering.

‘Every week‚' he told her. ‘They come for the ceremony.'

‘Oh?'

‘Recitations from the classical texts. My mother started the custom years ago. This is just the usual crowd.' As he finished his drink, one of the waiters whispered to him. ‘I'll be back in a moment,' he said to Beatrice.

She could see Jack edging towards her. He waited until Ernestine and Uncle Constantine were drawn into larger groups and then eased himself away from them.

‘I recognize the son,' he told her. ‘We used to see him at the bank. He's got a reputation for business transactions that go a bit wrong for other people. He always seems to come out of them all right. Quick on his feet. Makes a lot of money and loses a lot, too.'

‘Hush,' she said. ‘He's coming back.'

Hassan bowed to Beatrice. ‘My mother would be very happy to show you the sanctuary now. Will you come this way, please?'

Beatrice and Jack moved forward together. Hassan said that it wasn't necessary for the gentleman to come: he could stay and amuse himself with the other guests, if he so wished.

‘I'm looking forward to seeing the statues,' Jack said. ‘
Immensely
.'

Hassan hardly paused. He said that his mother would be delighted. He led them up a staircase, down a long corridor and up another flight of stairs. Beatrice had to stop for a moment to catch her breath. At the end of the hallway two men who looked like bodyguards stood to attention in front of studded double doors.

‘Are you not well?' Hassan asked.

‘Very well, thank you. Too much dancing and champagne this week, I'm afraid. I'll be all right now.'

They moved to the doors, which now seemed to Beatrice like the entrance to a tomb. The guards swung the doors open to reveal a long, high, wide room like the main showroom of a museum. She recognized the sitting hawk and baboon, the two rams, and in the far distance the torso of Tuthmosis the Third. She did not recognize the woman who glided towards them, but felt that she ought to have.

‘Mother,' Hassan said, ‘this is Mlle Norbert. Mademoiselle, allow me to present my mother: Mme Cristo-Marquez.'

Beatrice stepped forward, smiled and took the woman's hand. She tried not to stare at the long, square-cut, dead-black hair that must have been a wig, or at the extraordinary, flamboyant
make-up
on the face in front of her. Mme Cristo-Marquez was painted to resemble an ancient Egyptian queen or goddess: the eyes were heavily outlined with black, the lids azure-shaded. The eyes themselves never stopped moving. She greeted Beatrice and Jack, looking at them and away again – at a stone jar, at a blue bead necklace, at Hassan, and at Ernestine and Uncle
Constantine
, who had followed them in. It took Beatrice a few moments before she realized that the woman was insane.

Mme Cristo-Marquez described an outward arc with one hand. ‘He would have wanted me to have them,' she said.

‘It's wonderful to see them again,' Beatrice told her. ‘But shouldn't they be on the ground floor? The weight –'

‘The weight of the past,' Mme Cristo-Marquez said
portentously
, ‘is always with us.'

‘They might actually go through the floor. We had a bad accident at home with a granite cat – quite a small statue, but it weighed –'

‘It weighs on my mind,' Mme Cristo-Marquez said. She laughed. Beatrice heard Jack draw in his breath. ‘Do you see my daughter there? My daughter, Ernestine. She looks like an Arab, doesn't she? And sometimes she looks almost like a Nubian. Do you know why? It's because of our association with the past. With history.' She prowled towards a lidded sarcophagus in the
center of the room and turned back without warning. ‘It's caused by thought‚' she declared.

Beatrice took Jack's arm. She prepared to make an excuse to leave.

‘She's your father's daughter‚' Mme Cristo-Marquez
proclaimed
. Ernestine showed no response, nor did her brother, nor the uncle. Beatrice began to feel angry as well as uneasy.

‘He loved me,' Mme Cristo-Marquez murmured. She closed her eyes for a moment, displaying the blue color to the full.

‘He loved everyone‚' Beatrice said. It wasn't quite true. He'd had no time for women who were silly without being beautiful or charming enough to make up for it. He'd never had much patience with posturing and melodrama: he liked people who had some sense.

Mme Cristo-Marquez swept towards the sarcophagus and draped herself against one of its corners. ‘I was the only love of his life,' she said.

Beatrice wanted to say:
How
long
did
you
last?
She felt herself being overtaken by the indignation of the legitimate. She tried to stop herself from saying anything that would hurt the woman. Mme Cristo-Marquez was repulsive, outrageous and offensive, but she was also ludicrous, pitiable, ill. And the rest of her family knew it. Her painted face, her stories about her daughter's parentage, her collection of objects, were all for nothing.
The
things
people
will
do
out
of
despair,
Beatrice thought.
And
then
afterwards
they
sit
there
with
a
handful
of
trash,
and
tell
themselves
that
they're
happy.

‘And in the end, he came to me. He came back to Cairo, to seek his final resting place. He died of love.'

A sense of her father's personality came to Beatrice so strongly that it was almost as if he were near her in the way people describe the presence of ghosts.
How
he
would
have
detested
the
impertinence
of
this
woman,
she thought.
How
he
would
have
disapproved
of
all
these
theatrical
trappings.
He
liked
reason,
science,
logic.
It was impossible that these people could have known him. ‘He died‚' she said, ‘of food-poisoning.'

‘There are poisons and poisons, you know. Some can work at a distance, and some over a period of time. Love is a poison.'

‘Love is a pleasure,' Jack said. ‘Always.' Beatrice squeezed his hand.

‘Not always,' Mme Cristo-Marquez shrieked. ‘But he knows better now. Now he's come home to me.'

‘He's buried near Bagdad,' Beatrice stated coldly.

Mme Cristo-Marquez made a snarling noise. She slapped the side of the sarcophagus. ‘Here,' she said. The other members of her family still hadn't moved. ‘Shall I show you?' she shouted.

Although Beatrice was incensed, the fact that she hadn't seen her father die – that she hadn't even been able to look at the body – suddenly made her fear that there might be something inside the sarcophagus. It was even possible that a crazed woman with enough money could bribe people to dig up a corpse and transport it from one country to another. She said, ‘Jack, would you take me back to the hotel, please?'

‘Certainly. Will you excuse us? It's been a delightful evening, but a long day. I'm afraid we must be going.' He drew her away, heading towards the doors. Beatrice said, ‘Goodnight,' as they turned.

Hassan made a move to follow them. His mother screamed that they were to stay, but he didn't try to stop them. He told Ernestine, ‘Stay with her,' and ran ahead of Jack. ‘Let me show you the way,' he said.

They went down the staircases in silence, across the carpeted lobbies, down the narrow hallways. In the foyer where the mirror hung, a butler presented Jack with his cape and Beatrice with the velvet cloak she'd bought in Florence. Hassan
proceeded
to the last, dim corridor and the door to the garden. Jack put his hand on the latch and opened the door before the arthritic servant could move. The cool air came in to them.

Beatrice stepped out so that she was halfway through the door, and turned. She asked Hassan, ‘What's in the sarcophagus?'

He shrugged. ‘My father or your father – perhaps more than one person. Why should it make a difference to you?'

‘Do you mean that she'd really go so far as to dig someone up in order to put him in there?'

‘And why not? It's what archaeologists do all the time. That's their job: digging up the dead.'

‘Their job is to add to the sum of human knowledge,' Beatrice said.

Hassan started to shut the door in her face. He'd forgotten that Jack was still inside. Jack threw him against the wall and pushed his way out of the door. He caught Beatrice by the hand.

They ran down the path to the gate. As soon as they were out on the street, they turned around to look back.

‘Those horrible people,' she said. ‘Your mother was right. My God, what a nightmare.'

‘Not a nightmare. A farce. Listen,' he said, freeing his hand and using both arms to imitate the dramatic movements of Mme Cristo-Marquez, ‘there are poisons and poisons.'

Beatrice laughed. From the house, faintly, came a doleful wailing.

‘I suppose that's from
The
Book
of
the
Dead
?'
he said. ‘They'll get a surprise when all that masonry comes thundering down on them one of these days. That'll really give them something to moan about.'

He led her to broader streets, more densely populated, bursting with crowds and brightly lit. Every once in a while he made her laugh by leaning to the side and whispering into her ear, ‘Love is a poison.'

Beth was still working on the crossword puzzle when Alan finished his section of the paper. He reached for the pile of letters that looked like bills and throwaways. There was a time when the mailman delivered letters from living people, not just from organizations and offices. Of course nowadays practically
everyone
picked up the phone instead of a pen. Beth, and Alan too, preferred the telephone. Unless they had to send a contract somewhere, nearly all their business was done over the phone and by fax. They had answering machines at the office and in the house. The telephone dominated their lives. It was a blessing; and it was a nuisance.

He lifted the heap of catalogues and magazines and dumped them at the right of her coffee cup. ‘Clothes, handbags, shoes‚’ he said. ‘Save the environment. One for jigsaws, one for music boxes, one that sells replicas of prehistoric animals. Two book clubs you can join.’

‘I don’t have time to read anything.’

‘Except the catalogues, and that’s a real waste of time.’ He shuffled through some more bills. She went back to her puzzle.

‘Hey‚’ he said. ‘I think I’ve won a prize.’

‘What for?’

‘Being good, of course.’

‘Oh, ha-ha.’

He held the paper up to her, but she didn’t bother to look. She was trying to think of a six-letter word meaning stop. ‘Listen to this‚’ he told her. ‘Two thousand dollars if I apply within
forty-eight
hours of receiving the enclosed. It’s got a date and a
time-stamp
on it. We’ve got a day more than they say.’

‘Desist‚’ she said. ‘Those urgent things are never important. Alan Q. Beasley, you could win a million dollars: remember?’

‘This looks okay. No pictures of Colonel Kentucky. No free stamps.’

‘Another bonanza from the black-diamond mine‚’ she said.

The black diamond episode had been about three years before; they’d been carrying on a smoldering quarrel for a couple of months. She’d begun to think that they weren’t going to pull out of it – that this time their marriage would end: and she wouldn’t have cared a bit if it had. One morning, another of those prize envelopes arrived for Alan. He’d actually sent for it. How dumb could you be, she said. He told her huffily that he’d written back to them just to see if they were crooked. ‘And,’ he announced, ‘I’ve won a black diamond.’ He opened the envelope and took out a little transparent plastic packet, in one corner of which rested a tiny brown ball of something that might possibly have been a piece of low-grade coal. He held it up. They stared at it. Then, both of them burst into laughter. They laughed so hard that they had to hold their heads in their hands. ‘A putative diamond,’ he shouted. ‘An alleged diamond,’ she gasped. They stopped for breath and started each other off again. They laughed, uncontrollably, until they ached. And somehow the quarrel had ended.

‘Two thousand bucks,’ he said, ‘if I apply within the
time-limit
.’

‘What’s the hitch?’

‘You’ll never guess. It’s got to be used on travel.’

‘That’s a joke.’

They ran a travel agency. They’d been in the business for six years. It took all their energy and thought. It was the reason why they didn’t have children: they kept figuring that next year they’d find time to plan their own lives. But they couldn’t even squeeze in the hours to work on future holiday schemes. They only just managed to keep up. Their range of vacation trips was still the same as when they’d started. If your standards were high, you had to spend money. Alan saw it as his job to make the
past – from which we ought to be able to learn – usable and habitable in modern terms. There was no point in going to a quaint English village or a picturesque Greek temple if you were going to have to sleep in a place with no running water. That would be ridiculous. Even Beth, who tended to get worked up over authentic atmosphere, agreed with him about that.

‘We do need to do some research‚’ he said. ‘Find a couple of new places.’

‘We can’t spare the time. We’d need lots of … we’d need weeks. Can you see Rosa in charge for that long?’

‘The Stones might help out for a while.’

‘And you know what they’d expect in return. They want our list. If they got their hands on that, we could say goodbye to the business. I don’t just mean what they got out of Mr Pettifer.’

‘I’m going to put in for it anyway. It can’t hurt.’

‘That’s right. We might win a fun-filled holiday in Butte, Montana.’

‘With two thousand extra, you could come, too.’

‘Too?’

‘Two thousand. That’s what it says. What we should really do is go over our itinerary. I wish people would let us know how things went.’

‘It’s like everything else,’ she said. ‘Who’s going to spend the time on it? People don’t like writing letters. Except cranks.’

‘If they send the money, would you come along?’

‘We can’t both leave the office at the same time.’

‘For a week, we could. Just.’

‘What could we do in a week?’

‘We could go over the part of the British tour we never got to. Wouldn’t you like that?’

‘Well, sure. I guess.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘That’s settled.’

Beth still wasn’t certain, but since she thought nothing was ever going to come of the idea, she didn’t say anything.

It was her day to have lunch with Faye. Faye worked in the magazine office a few doors away. Ella, Beth’s other lunchtime crony, was at the opposite end of the shopping mall. Beth had
once tried to introduce them to each other; everything had seemed to go well, but the next time she suggested a meeting, Ella and Faye complained so much about the distance, the dates, the pressure of work, that she knew it hadn’t been a success. So, she saw them separately, which took twice as much time. That was another thing, she realized: she’d been trying to get her two friends together in order to save herself an hour or two.

For three years, until the crisis in Ella’s life, Beth used to see her for a coffee break in the afternoons. Ella now needed that time for what she called ‘contemplation’ and what Alan
described
as ‘goofing off’. Ella’s life had been irreversibly altered on the day she’d lost her Filofax. She’d had a breakdown. Her doctor had referred her to a psychiatrist and a time-management consultant, but neither one had been able to help her. Someone – an aunt, or some other relative – had advised her to pray. Ella did better than that; she went on a pilgrimage. She got on a plane to Venice, took the train to Padua and joined the crowd of people waiting to beg St Anthony to find things, or people, they had lost. She moved with the others to the left of the silver altar, filed past the stone carvings that illustrated the miracles worked by the saint in his lifetime, and at last reached out, put her hand on the casket and asked him to get her Filofax back.

When Beth told the story, Alan said, ‘I can see it coming: she got home and there it was, right where she’d left it.’

‘No, she really had lost it. But when she got home, there was a package waiting for her. Somebody’d found it and mailed it back.’

‘St Anthony, no doubt,’ he said. He thought Ella was crazed and affected. To Beth, the story seemed a little zany but it made perfect sense. If there were such things as saints, no task could be too enormous for them, no request so silly that it was
unimportant
: they could do anything.

He said, ‘Why would a saint bother about something so trivial?’

‘Why not? For a saint, a big favor would be easy. So, a little one wouldn’t be any trouble at all. I think you could also count on his tolerance of human folly and petty-mindedness. It wouldn’t be
any skin off his back to grant something really idiotic. If you accept the basic principle –’

‘Well, if you accept that, you’re beyond hope to begin with.’

‘Maybe‚’ she said, meaning that she didn’t agree. It wasn’t surprising to her that ever since Ella had had her Filofax restored to her, she’d been preoccupied by questions of religion; she hadn’t gone so far as to take instruction, but she’d begun to spend a lot of time reading, meditating and trying to pray, which – she told Beth – wasn’t so easy as you might think. It took discipline. It was hard work. The afternoon break was no good any more. Ella became another lunch time friend, like Faye.

On three days of the week, Beth would usually stay in the office through the lunch break. Rosa, their secretary, would run around the corner to buy her a sandwich from the delicatessen. Occasionally Beth would say to Rosa that this was going to be a diet day. She never made it past two-thirty. Rosa didn’t mind the extra trip; she was on good terms with one of the boys behind the counter.

Their office was in an arcade, one of four that radiated from a central area where trees in tubs surrounded a large fountain. Between the trees there were benches. It was a pleasant spot for people to sit in after they’d done some shopping and were wondering where to go next. It was also a meeting place. The planners of the mall had originally called the center a piazza; when most shoppers were making an effort to get the name right, they’d come up with the word ‘pizza’, although normally everybody just said, ‘By the fountain.’

You were doing all right to have an office in one of the arcades near the fountain. The only trouble with the location was that a customer who tried to find you for the first time could get mixed up between the four arcades, which looked alike: they had been given the names of the four main points of the compass, but who knew one direction from another? Left and right were fairly easy for most people to remember, but you couldn’t expect everyone to race outside in order to check where the sun was; and anyway, that depended on something else, too. A mapmaker or a navigator would know about directions. Ordinary shoppers
didn’t. They got lost. That was how Beth had met Ella, who had ended up at the office after her first morning in the mall. ‘Where am I?’ she’d said, like someone coming out of a faint.

The great advantages of the mall were for those who worked there. Almost all the people Beth thought of as her friends were her neighbors at work. In fact, it seemed to her that the mall was really the neighborhood where she lived. The house that she and Alan owned was just for sleeping in and for giving parties.

She wouldn’t mind getting away from the house for a while. She wouldn’t mind leaving everything for a week.

As she picked up her tunafish sandwich, she asked Faye, ‘Have you and Hutch had one of those prize envelopes offering you two thousand dollars to travel with?’

‘No. Wish we had. What is it – something to do with a rival firm?’

‘I don’t think so.’ She bit in and munched, thinking that she’d have to ask Alan about that: it hadn’t occurred to her. ‘As far as I know, it’s just another one of those win-a-million things.’

‘But if you got the money, you’d go, wouldn’t you?’

‘You bet. I wasn’t so sure this morning at breakfast, but I am now. We both need a break. And I need some time to think about things. We just keep going and going.’

‘You love it.’

‘In a way.’

‘In every way. You thrive on it.’

‘But it’s taken over. I’m beginning to suspect that it’s done something bad to me. I think maybe Alan would like to get out, too. At least – well. I don’t know. We don’t have time to talk about anything at all any more.’

‘That sounds like a good time to take a vacation. You two should read some of your little leaflets.’

‘Aren’t they brilliant?’

‘You’ll have a great time.’

‘We haven’t won it yet.’

‘Don’t wait to win anything. Just go.’

‘That’s the trouble with you, Faye. You encourage my
weaknesses
. Act now, think later.’

‘It’s a good idea, isn’t it? You could afford a week off.’

‘Afford, sure. It isn’t a question of the money. Not really. It’s the time, as usual. The thing is – I have the feeling that if I went, I might not come back. I’ve been feeling that way for a long while.’

‘Something wrong at work?’

‘Nothing’s ever wrong at work. That’s the point. The work is always just great. It’s a substitute for everything else. I’m beginning to think it’s my excuse for not living my life.’

‘Oh wow, Elizabeth. Let me write that one down.’

‘You know what I mean. It’s everything; not just that we don’t have kids. Well, that’s the main thing. I realized a few months ago, last year: I kind of feel I’ve left it too late.’

‘What are you talking about? You’re still in your twenties, aren’t you?’

‘Well, not quite.’ She wasn’t prepared to say anything more exact, unless Faye spoke first. From the beginning of their acquaintance it had been obvious that Faye didn’t want any questions asked about her age; or, for that matter, about her first husband, her daughter’s experience at the boarding school they’d sent her to, or about anything at all connected with Trenton, New Jersey. ‘You know what I mean,’ Beth told her. ‘I’ve sort of run out of steam. I’ve put it all into the agency. Now I couldn’t start a family unless I gave up work. But that’s the one thing that keeps me going. It’s fun.’

‘It’s fun, but it’s killing you. I see.’

‘I guess I’m what they call a workaholic. Alan’s the same.’

‘Does he want to go on this trip?’

‘He was the one who suggested it. He’s sending in the form.’

‘Good.’

‘You could be right, you know. Maybe some other travel company’s doing a promotion. I’d better ask around.’

They said goodbye at the fountain. Beth turned off into her arcade. The clock in the jeweler’s window caught her eye. She began to hurry.

As she opened the agency door, Alan came out, saying, ‘Where were you? I’ve got to get over to Meyerson’s.’ He ran off, not looking back.

She sat down at her desk and reached for the telephone. She didn’t stop working until four o’clock, when she asked Rosa to go across the arcade for some coffee. She stretched in her chair and yawned. It had been a good afternoon.

The pleasure she took in describing places was founded on her need to communicate enthusiasm. You couldn’t call her
exaggeration
falsehood; it was a slight emphasis in the process of persuading and convincing someone about the fictions she already believed in. It wouldn’t be right to say that her work required her to engage in deliberate acts of dishonesty. She simply tried to get prospective clients into the right mood: to create an atmosphere. If people took off on their holidays with a few skilfully devised impressions in mind, they were pretty well certain to find them justified. That wasn’t doing anything wrong. It was smart salesmanship backing a worthwhile product – that was what Alan said.