Black Diamond (28 page)

‘It’s all right. I’ll just go see who it is. You finish your sandwich.’

*

She walked back through the dining room, the hall, and past the living room. A young man stood outside the front door. He looked like an executive type, not the sort of person to be selling anything door to door or to know her Aunt Marion. A step up from Bert, anyway. Perhaps something had gone wrong with his car or his telephone. Or maybe he was another one who was lost. The knowledge that one other person was in the house – even though underage and possibly not right in the head – made her feel safe against intruders. She opened the door.

He smiled. He said that he was sorry to disturb her.

‘That’s all right.’

‘I wonder if you’ve seen a boy, about eleven: my son.’ He raised a hand as if to indicate a flood level, and added, ‘About this high. Hair kind of, um, more or less like mine. Eyes …’

He was better-looking than his son, though it was impossible to tell how eleven-year-olds were going to turn out, especially in the matter of looks. He seemed completely all right and normal, not a cruel father or a man who was claiming to be something he wasn’t.

‘I did see a boy when I was out walking this afternoon,’ she said. ‘He was coming from the direction of town, over there, and I passed him on my way back here. Has something happened?’

‘What did he look like?’

‘He was on the other side of the street. He just looked like a schoolboy. You know. Except that he was all dressed up.’

‘That’s right. He was supposed to be going to a party, but he didn’t. He skipped out of it.’

‘Is he in some kind of trouble?’

‘No, no. This happens periodically. He runs off for a while. Anything he doesn’t want to do.’

‘It might have been some other boy. I don’t know. If I see him again, should I phone the police?’

‘No, don’t do that. Here. I’ll give you my phone number.’ He took a notebook and a pen out of his breast pocket. From inside the book he produced a business card, which he handed to her. ‘And I wonder if you’d mind giving me your name. I’m Roy Martinson: it’s on the card. My son’s called Eric. And this is number –?’ He stepped back. His eyes went to the doorframe and the brass numbers on it. ‘Twenty-three.’

‘Sandra,’ she said.

‘And do you have a phone number?’

If the house or the telephone had been hers, she would have hesitated. The thought didn’t occur to her that by giving out the phone number she might be subjecting her Aunt Marion to a spate of unpleasant anonymous calls. She told him the number.

‘I’ve been running around for hours,’ he said, ‘and you’re the first person I’ve met who might have seen him beyond Hillside Avenue. Plenty of people saw him at the Perrys’, when he was walking out of the party, but they know him in that neighborhood. So, I think I’m going to knock off for a while. Go back home. He might be there already, waiting for me.’

‘I hope so,’ she said. Everyone did that: told lies and
hypocrisies
because they wanted to change things, but couldn’t. They wanted to appear helpful and comforting, even when their actions were obstructive. They needed to be liked. She hoped that everything would be all right for him. She wanted him to be happy. But she didn’t tell him that his son was in the kitchen.

He thanked her and turned away. She closed the door. She
went back to the kitchen, where Eric was sitting behind a pile of jars and plates, his face rigid, his eyes large.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I said that I’d seen a boy, just some boy not specified, going in the opposite direction. But I think maybe I ought to call up and get you back home.’

‘You’re a real fool, aren’t you?’ he said. His tone was so assured, adult and nasty that it stopped her in her tracks. He had a look to go with it. Where did an expression like that come from – from the attractive father?

‘Why’s that?’ she said.

‘I know a lot about this house now.’

‘And I know your father’s phone number.’

‘And I know yours. I think I’ll stay. Got some videos we can watch?’

‘No.’

‘Try and make me go.’

‘That’s easy. I pick up the phone and say you arrived just after your father asked about you.’

‘He isn’t my father,’ the boy screamed. He raised the knife he was holding, until it pointed towards her at a definitely
deliberate
, offensive angle. Luckily it was one of the kitchen table knives – not a carving knife, but the sharper ones weren’t far away. ‘You’d better not,’ he shouted at her.

For some reason she wasn’t afraid. She didn’t believe he could hurt her with a blunt knife. And she was bigger than he was. She stepped up and took the knife away from him. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.

The situation was too much for her. He was too much. Suddenly she just didn’t want him in the house. ‘He seemed,’ she said, ‘like a nice man.’

‘Oh, yeah. Women like him.’

They liked him because he made a good impression, even if you didn’t count the looks, which made a big difference to begin with. The son made a bad impression, although he’d figured out how to overcome other people’s reluctance; he’d kept her talking for hours, persuaded her to invite him to a meal, made her feel guilty about him.

‘I like him too,’ she said. ‘But if you really don’t want to go back to him, I won’t call him up. I’ll phone the police instead.’

‘No.’

‘Then, your mother.’

‘No, no.’

‘You choose,’ she told him. ‘It’s up to you.’ Three impossible choices – that was freedom. Her own childhood had been like that. She’d never understood why children had to be subjected to that kind of cheating. Now she knew – it was simple; because otherwise, you couldn’t get them to do what you wanted them to.

She took out the calling card and went to the phone. She dialed the number.

He didn’t move. The phone rang and rang.

She thought that she might have to hang up: the father hadn’t had time to get home yet, or he’d gone out again.

There was a click. A man’s voice said, ‘Hello.’ The voice was a little different, but Sandra recognized it. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘It’s Sandra Beale from Number 23, Wheaten Road. You were asking about your son.’

‘Is he there?’

‘Yes, but he doesn’t want –’

‘I’ll be right over,’ he said, and hung up. She put the receiver down.

From the kitchen doorway Eric said, ‘That’s not fair. I told you not to.’

‘That’s what you told me,’ she said, ‘but sometimes people say things they don’t really mean, because it’s a way of playing for time. You know that you’ve got to settle things with him. He’s the one you live with. If you really don’t want to stay with him, there’s your mother.’

‘I don’t want to live with anybody. I want to live all alone. Like you.’

‘Well, that’s no problem. You’ll just have to wait. Till you’re grown up. Then you can do it. Do what you like.’

‘It’s too far away,’ he said miserably.

His father, the real Roy, was at the house in a few minutes. His face was serious. The boy couldn’t look at him.

‘Come on,’ he said.

Eric shuffled forward. Roy put an arm around him. ‘That’s right,’ he said. He moved a step back and opened the door. Over Eric’s head he said, ‘Thank you,’ to her, and left. She nodded. She’d done the right thing, but she’d betrayed someone in order to do it; someone who was weaker than she was.

She closed the door after them. She stood there a long while before locking up and putting the chain on.

*

She went back to the kitchen and sat down at the table. The evidence of Eric’s hunger was everywhere in front of her: jars, open boxes, bottles. She stood up again to put the mayonnaise into the icebox. She was beginning to feel bad.

She cleared up the table, put things back where they were supposed to be, washed the dishes and got out the dustpan and brush. She felt a little better. What was either of them to do with her? They were strangers.

She took a long time cleaning up in the kitchen. To keep herself company, and to stop herself thinking about Eric and Roy, she turned on the radio. She worked until everything was spotless but she was almost ready to start the job all over again. It wasn’t so much that her aunt’s high standards of housekeeping urged her towards imitation; rather, that she was in the sort of mood that was drawing her deeper into itself.

She cleaned the sink, the counters and tabletop, the floor. Then she made sure that the back door was locked, looked at the windows to see that the catches were on, and turned out some of the lights. She hadn’t thought about Bert for hours. It was time to give serious attention to the subject. She’d planned to use some of her time over the weekend doing just that.
Right,
she thought:
Bert.
What
am
I
going
to
do
about
it?
Nothing came to her. She didn’t have anything in common with him, he took her for granted, she’d never believed that he loved her; and as a matter of fact, she didn’t like him enough, either. The hell with him.

She made herself a cup of coffee and took it around the corner
into the alcove between the hall and the dining room, where the television set was. Aunt Marion maintained that she looked at the news and nothing else, but Sandra suspected that she watched a couple of quiz shows too, every once in a while. A capacious, stiff-backed armchair was positioned in front of the set. A small table stood to the right of the chair, a footstool in front. In the seat, and against the back, several cushions had been bunched into a second, inner shape. Sandra pulled the chair back a few feet, pushed the pillows around and tried them out in different ways.

She looked at a documentary about an Indian landowner who had made his family property into a nature reserve. Among his many schemes for maintaining the natural balance of plants and animals was one that would restore the original wildlife to the numbers on record before drought, famine, flood and – worst of all – hunters had disrupted the populations. Tigers had died out of the area, but one of the workers in the reserve had brought him a female leopard cub. The film was about how he trained the leopard to go back to the wild.

She watched to the end of the program and then for a little while longer, through the start of a comedy, until she began to yawn. She turned off the machine, checked the doors and windows once again, looked around the kitchen and went upstairs.

She took her book with her. Aunt Marion read a lot, mostly biographies and history books; if she had a few minutes of extra time, she’d pick up her embroidery or her knitting. She was a real person, full of information and practical experience: someone you could take seriously. When she died, she would leave behind many useful things that she’d made herself and given to other people. Her character too was generous. She sometimes dispensed advice, although usually only when asked for it, but all the time – in a transaction as easy as breathing in and out – she gave understanding. Whenever Sandra was with her for a few hours, she could feel herself taking on the way Aunt Marion looked at things. For all her traditionally spinsterish ways, Aunt Marion was a woman whose type was that of a mother. She
would know what to do about a runaway child.
Never
mind,
Sandra thought.
It’s
all
settled.

When she was ready for bed, she no longer felt like reading. She left the book on the night table and turned out the light.

She dreamt that she was standing on the outer stairs of a grand plantation mansion. The steps she stood on, the columns at either side, the building behind her, were all white, like the dress she was wearing. She could actually feel the dress, in which she stood as if captured: the skirt went out and down from the waist like the sides of a balloon and she was lashed into the center of its many lacy spheres. As the dream began, she’d been looking outward, evidently expecting someone to arrive, but there wasn’t anyone there.

The next thing she knew, she was standing inside the house. She was still waiting, but now she had no view of the outside, nor of the front entrance leading to it. Several men appeared suddenly, carrying something. Of course, she thought: Aunt Marion had told her to let the workmen in. She went forward into another room and met the gang of men. She started to give them directions about where to put the window; she now knew exactly where it was to be. As she pointed to a wall in front of her, there – as if it had been there all along, and not made up by her on the spur of the moment – was the empty space where the window was to fit.

The men went to work. The window was in place. She was alone again. But once more she could see – looking through the newly installed window to the front of the house – the steps, the carriageway and the garden beyond. The window became a door. A man walked up the steps and rang the bell. She could see through: it was Eric’s father, Roy. He said, as before, ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’ She let him in.

They went into a large room, also white. They stood there for a few minutes while he told her something about what had gone wrong in his son’s life. Then he put his hand on her breast. They made love. They talked about getting married. Aunt Marion came in with a wedding dress and veil. She was accompanied by deliverymen who carried flowers. The house changed into a
church: the wedding was about to begin. But Roy wasn’t there. In his place stood his child, Eric. Aunt Marion was at her side; she seemed to think everything was normal. So did everybody else. And she, Sandra, was the bride – she was there to get married. She took Eric’s hand. She said, ‘I do.’ He said, ‘Sure, I guess so.’ Then they were going back down the aisle together. Everyone else was happy; some of them were even applauding. But she felt defrauded. She didn’t see why she hadn’t been able to get the one she’d wanted. ‘Where is he?’ she asked her aunt, who said, ‘He’s on a tropical island.’

* * *

The next morning was a sunny day. A light, springlike breeze fluttered across the neighborhood gardens and twirled back on itself, playing. She felt it on her face when she opened the front door to take in the newspaper.