Black Diamond (25 page)

There were other shows to watch afterwards, but she’d had enough. He wasn’t going to call.

She took the bath she’d been putting off. Then she brushed her teeth. If he’d tried to phone, that was too bad.

She sat propped up in bed with a magazine open on her lap. She read for a while, but she lost interest. Her mind kept going back to the South Sea island in the movie: the exotic jungle, the pagan crowds baying for blood, the idol that guarded its shimmering diamond, the escape of the two lovers as the island went up like a torch. That was what she loved about the movies – they gave you everything like a dream. It wasn’t just that she liked them, even though they weren’t true: she liked them precisely because they weren’t. In real life, what would have happened to the hero and heroine? That would have been a different kind of human sacrifice. She could imagine it: eight years later, the two of them trying to make a living in an American city somewhere; the heroine would look back and say to herself,
I
had
a
fortune
right
in
front
of
me
and
he
kicked
it
away.
What
kind
of
a
fool
would
do
that?
We
could
have
lived
like
kings.
And he’d be thinking,
If
only
I’d
gone
for
the
diamond
and
not
the
girl.
I’d
be
happy
now,
have
new
women
whenever
I
liked,
and
my
own
boat
again
–
my
own
island,
if
I
wanted
it;
freedom
for
the
rest
of
my
days,
and
a
good
life
for
all
my
children,
even
if
I
had
hundreds
of
them.

And what would have happened to the diamond? It would be all right, even if the island sank to the bottom of the sea. It was not, like human love, vulnerable to change. That was the trick to real life: you could walk through fire for each other and still end up wishing you’d never married.

She put the magazine on the night table and turned out the light.

*

The next morning she packed a nightgown, the summer sandals she wore as bedroom slippers, the book she’d been intending for months to read straight through. She set out early enough to miss the traffic in town. 

It was a cloudy fall day but the sky looked as if the weather might clear up later. It had been a bad year for trees. The long drought in June and July – maybe even the strange spring weather before that – had done something to their leaves: instead of turning color, they’d just dried up and gone brown.
Halloween
was less than a week away and still there had been no beautiful trees to look at. Everyone felt disappointed. It was like seeing a spring when the fruit trees failed to blossom.

All night long she’d expected the call from Bert. Now she was glad that she knew how things were. She was also happy to get away from the city for a few days. She drove fast. Before she arrived, the sun came out. She hummed a little tune as she entered the neat, picturebook suburb in which Aunt Marion had a medium-sized frame house surrounded by flowerbeds, lawn, picket fence and everything else her neighbors had too. It seemed a nice place to live – peaceful and pretty, and not – as she used to think of such districts – dull, houseproud and
undoubtedly
full of bigots.

Aunt Marion had left a note by the telephone. There were instructions about the stove, the lights, how to double-lock the front door and what to do to the handle of the guest-room toilet if the water kept running. A long list of foods followed – all the delicacies Sandra could and should help herself to. And then there was the information about the window. Sandra had trouble reading the name of the delivery firm, but she got as far as
Lo-something
. She put the note into her pocket and went to the kitchen. She inspected the icebox crammed with food. It almost looked as though her aunt had spent the night cooking meals for her: a fish casserole, puddings, cold chicken and ham. There were glass containers of peas and rice. And in the cold room were two cakes, several full jars of cookies, fudge and walnut
brownies
. Unless Aunt Marion had made a lot of new friends recently, she must have been holding bridge parties at her house, or entertaining people from the garden club she belonged to.

Sandra walked back to the dining room and on to the living room. It had been several months since she’d been in the house,
yet everything seemed to be exactly as when she’d last seen it. She took her suitcase upstairs. Most of her visits to Aunt Marion had been for the day. She hadn’t spent the night in one of the guest rooms since her childhood. And it had been years since she’d stayed long enough to explore the neighborhood.

She unpacked. After that, she wandered downstairs again. The house was beginning to feel strange. It was an odd thing about empty houses; this one felt quiet in a way that wasn’t restful. It was as if the absence of the owner had brought on a parallel absence within the house: as if the air had died.

She got out her book. As she read, the sun outside brightened and warmed the room around the big, high-backed chair she’d chosen. She sank deep into the story. It was about a southern belle who was falling in love with a scoundrel; he wanted to take over her family’s plantation. The heroine was struggling hard against her feelings and wondering whether she ought to let him dance with her at the cotillion, when the doorbell rang. Sandra jumped.

She opened the door without bothering to look first. It could have been anyone, but in a suburb like this it would be ridiculous to suspect the kind of attack that happened in big cities. Life wasn’t like that here.

Three hefty workmen stood on her aunt’s gray-and-white painted porch. One of them – the one in charge – had rung the bell. The two others held between them a large pane of glass in a frame; they had rested it where it was just about to dig into one of the strategically placed potted geraniums that made the porch look so cheerful and welcoming, or – as Sandra had once believed – so maddeningly tidy. All three men wore white overalls. The leader had removed his cap.

She welcomed them with a smile, showed them through the house and opened a door next to the pantry, where Aunt Marion had said the window should go. Gardening equipment and vases had been pushed back to make room. When the time came to slide the window into its space, the man in authority lent a hand. ‘Over to the right,’ he told the others. ‘Don’t let her down yet. Look out for the edge there, Jake.’ It all went smoothly.
Nothing was broken or knocked over. Everyone seemed pleased. Sandra thanked the men profusely. She told them how delighted her aunt would be. They said they were glad to help out: you needed the windows to be right, now that the cold was coming on. The one named Jake gave her a little wave and all three trooped out.

She closed the door behind them. She hadn’t offered a tip, since Aunt Marion’s note had expressly cautioned her not to let the men have anything.
I’ve
given
them
plenty
already,
she had written,
and
this
window
is
late.

She waited until the workmen had driven away, then her city habits forced her back to the front door. She put the chain on and turned the lock.

All the rest of the morning she read. She made herself a sandwich and salad lunch, listened to some music on the radio and went out for a walk. She could have driven to another town, gone to a museum or tried to get into an afternoon show somewhere, but she felt that she was responsible for keeping an eye on the house. She didn’t think that she should get too far away. If the year and the trees had been better, she’d have cruised around the countryside and looked at the fall colors.

While she walked, she thought about Bert, about how she was going to start regular exercise at the Y this year – swimming or aerobics; about whether she could afford to go away in the spring and, if so, where she should go. She realized all at once that if she could get together the money for a really nice trip somewhere, she wouldn’t want to take it with Bert. If he were with her, her time would be spent in paying attention to him, not absorbing new sights and thoughts. Maybe he’d felt the same way. That could be the reason why he hadn’t wanted to spend the weekend with her.

She’d been out walking around the neighborhood with her aunt twice before: once when she was about eight years old, and once again three years before her Great-Aunt Constance had died. On that visit they’d gone to look at a nearby memorial – a bronze statue erected to a woman who had dressed as a soldier in order to follow her husband into battle during the time of the
Revolution. Sandra remembered the statue as pretty and looking rather like the portrait of a musician, although – perhaps because of the ponytail hairstyle – too obviously a woman.

She walked until she realized that as far as the statue went, she was lost. It wasn’t to be found in the direction she’d taken. She turned back, trying not to feel upset. Just lately – no doubt because of Bert – whenever anything didn’t pan out, she’d add it to her list of what wasn’t going right for her.

She would have liked to see the memorial for reasons other than its prettiness. She’d have liked to see the visible
corroboration
of the woman’s story. Of course, it was a famous theme: the loyal wife. And she remembered that there was a folksong, supposedly based on fact, about another woman from farther south, who had also tried to join her husband at the war but hadn’t been able to get across the river at one stage; she’d had to follow the river for miles, all the way up north. It had taken her about three years, until nearly the end of the fighting.

She couldn’t remember if the woman had found her husband in the end. Probably, for the song to make sense, she must have, although in a way that didn’t matter. It was the effort that counted. Some women were just brave: they would try. Where did they find the reserves of courage – was it simply necessity that brought out noble action in people? That couldn’t be all there was to it. You had to be pretty good to begin with. The woman in the folksong had had children: sometimes motherhood made timid women strong. But often it worked the other way – it wore them down. And was it a sign of strength to leave your children in times of trouble, or was it better to stay with them? There really were no rules for behavior. Half the time she didn’t even understand her own actions. But she knew that nothing would have persuaded her to pick up a gun and go off to the wars dressed like the young Mozart. She’d have crawled into a hole somewhere and waited till the action was over. Perhaps it was an appreciation of her cowardice that made her admire these decisive, revolutionary women; she wasn’t particularly impressed by men who were of the same, heroic type. Men were supposed to be like that. Men of action were nothing special.
They liked it. It was a biological compulsion, or so she’d been led to believe.

It was still light when she got back to the house. She had time to make herself a cup of tea, sit down again with her book and get through the villain’s seduction of the heroine’s cousin, before she had to turn on a lamp.

She was somewhere among the arguments about what the Dredd-Scott Decision had done to influence ordinary people’s lives, when the doorbell rang again. She switched on more lights, including the one outside on the porch. It was quite likely that the delivery men had just discovered that they’d brought her the wrong thing earlier in the day.

This time she looked, leaning to the side and peering at the gauze-covered panel windows to the left and right of the door. She saw no delivery men. She saw a child: a small boy of about ten, who was dressed in a jacket and tie, as if he were going to a party. She assumed that he was one of the children whose parents had decided to set Halloween on the weekend, rather than on Monday.

She undid the chain, opened the door and said hello.

‘Um, good evening,’ he said. He stood there smiling and nervous, and as if he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

‘I’m afraid I wasn’t expecting any Halloween callers tonight,’ she told him. ‘And besides, why aren’t you wearing a costume?’

‘Halloween’s Monday,’ he said. ‘It’s not about that. Ah. I need help.’

‘Are you lost?’ Few children got lost after the age of six or seven, but it was an explanation she was always ready to accept. She got lost all the time herself.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s right. I’m lost.’

‘Well, you’d better come in, I guess.’ She held the door open. He walked in after her. She led the way to the living room and to the hallway where the telephone sat on its table. ‘We can call your parents,’ she said.

‘Oh no, that’s just the trouble. I can’t.’ He sat down in a chair quickly, as if he’d be safer there. He held on tight to his knees. His look of discomfort seemed to be based on something other
than the fact that he was too small for the chair. ‘It’s a long story,’ he said. ‘And it sounds weird.’

She sat down in the chair facing his. ‘Well, you just tell me,’ she said. She’d never been the mainstay and comfort of a child before. She felt like a fake. She’d always imagined that motherly talents came naturally after childbirth and probably had
something
to do with hormones.

‘It sounds impossible,’ he began. ‘But I didn’t want to go to the police.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, you know what the cops are like. They’ve got their hands full already. They won’t want to take care of some kid who’s off his rocker. They’d put me in a psychiatric ward.’ As he began to talk, he stopped looking so jittery. And his gestures, his facial expressions, were like those of an adult: matter-of-fact and easy.