The Diamond House

by Dianne Warren

  She said, “When I heard that you and Salina had been married, I thought, ‘What a lucky man is Mr. Diamond.’ She was so pretty and so unconventional, two traits that I myself could never lay claim to. How can anyone ever replace her?” Then her hand went to her mouth and she said, “Oh my. I’ve spoken out of turn,” and she hurried away to join an older couple that Oliver took to be her parents. The father was looking at him as though wondering what his daughter could possibly have to say to Oliver Diamond, even though it was his mother they were there to remember.

  As the days passed before his planned return to the West, Oliver found himself thinking about Beatrice Shaughnessy and her kind words about Salina. He inquired discreetly and found out that she was unattached. She was young, younger than Salina had been, and he thought she had asked a very good question when she’d said, “How can anyone ever replace her?” Any woman he married in future would have to accept his love for Salina as something that could not be replicated. Did Beatrice Shaughnessy understand that? Beatrice had been wrong, Oliver thought, when she said that she herself was not pretty, although pretty was not what had drawn him to Salina. When he ran into Beatrice shortly after on the street in front of the tailor’s, where she had been picking up her father’s new suit, he told her he was leaving in the next few days, and he impulsively asked whether she would mind if he wrote to her. The suit—a dignified grey wool—hung over her arm, and she nodded and said that she did enjoy having pen pals and would welcome a letter.

  “A pen pal,” he said. “Exactly. I shall try my best to be a good correspondent, then.”

  He watched her walk away, shifting her father’s suit to the other arm, and he remembered Salina telling him that he’d better be entertaining if he was going to write to her. He could not imagine himself trying so hard ever again.

  On the eve before Oliver left for the West, Roseanne and Mrs. Passmore unexpectedly knocked on his father’s door and presented him with all of Salina’s letters: the ones from him that had been in her desk, and even her letters to her family and their replies. By way of explanation they said, “She belonged to us before the letters. It is clear that, from the first letter, she belonged to you.”

  “You’ll notice we kept the hair ribbon,” Roseanne said, “since it was her favourite.”

  In addition to the letters, they gave Oliver the white teapot, because Salina had written to him of it and sent him a drawing to show how proud she was of her accomplishment, in spite of its dripping spout.

  Oliver was overwhelmed by their generosity and did not know what to say.

  Mrs. Passmore said, “Truthfully, I do not want these reminders in the house. I wish to remember happier times.”

  “As far as the teapot goes,” Roseanne said, “we have the legacy of tea stains on the tablecloth. We advise you to avoid white linens, if they have use for such things as table linens in the West.”

  The two women declined an invitation to come inside, and Oliver understood that the Passmores were now done with him. He set the heavy teapot at his feet and absently tucked the letters inside as he watched Roseanne and Mrs. Passmore walk away, arm in arm. When they were out of sight, he picked up the teapot, and it seemed logical to leave the letters there. He fetched the others that Salina had written to him, and he sat on the edge of his bed and put them all in order, although he couldn’t bear to read them. When he was done, he retrieved from his valise the velvet jewellery bag containing the clay beads Salina had been given by the designer with the double-barrelled name. He could not see their appeal at all, nor could he imagine why anyone had bothered to make them, but he’d bought Salina the jewellery bag in London, and she had been delighted when he’d presented it to her, as though he understood that the beads were precious.

  He put the letters and beads—all that remained of Salina—in the teapot.

  Early the next morning he stepped from the train platform up into his passenger car with the teapot in hand, because he had not known how to pack it safely at the last minute. Since the seat next to him was free, he placed the teapot there, and as the train left the station he indulged himself with the melancholy thought that he had expected to have Salina ever after by his side. At that moment the factory hardly seemed worth it, and he felt no enthusiasm for his return.

  He travelled west with the teapot on the seat beside him when it was free, and at his feet when it was occupied. The ill-fitting lid bounced right off the pot on one especially rough section of track, and Oliver used his shoe to tap it securely into place in spite of the glaze drip, effectively sealing the letters and Salina’s beads inside. When he took the teapot with him to the dining car and a porter asked whether he wanted his tea prepared in it, he had to admit to himself that it had taken on more meaning than a teapot warranted. Still, he was paralyzed at the thought of leaving it unattended.

  He passed the hours on the journey thinking about what might have been. The miles clacked by and he thought it was likely the last such trip he would make, because he had no reason to return to Byrne Corners. His mother was gone, and his father and brother thought he was a fool. He tried to be sociable in the dining car, and even met a businessman at dinner who was a good investment candidate, but he had no stomach for business talk. Besides, he thought, what sensible person would go into partnership with a man who could not, it seemed, be parted from his teapot?

  In his head he wrote letters to Salina, until somewhere along the way he realized he was addressing Miss Shaughnessy, telling her all about Salina and the fire she had brought to his life. He tried penning his thoughts—he had promised a letter, after all—but he quickly realized how inappropriate it was to write to Miss Shaughnessy about Salina, while at the same time it seemed impossible to write of anything but her. He gave up on the idea of corresponding with Beatrice Shaughnessy altogether, but somewhere west of Winnipeg he began to think about the future and the fact that a man did need a wife, and there were not many single ladies to be found in the West. What harm was there, he wondered, in writing a polite letter? He had met Salina and Beatrice at funerals in the same churchyard, and perhaps that meant something. Perhaps, he thought, Salina’s spirit had been nudging him in Beatrice Shaughnessy’s direction.

  What could it hurt, he wondered, to write a letter?

  Once he was back in Regina and settled again in Mrs. Klein’s boarding house, he wrote a short note to Beatrice telling her that he had arrived and was finally shed of the travelling dust, and he provided a bit of description of the uncompromising western sky, saying that she would know what he meant if she were ever to see it. Her first letter to him was also brief. She was delighted that he had remembered she liked pen pals, and she wrote, “Most pen pals become bored with writing after a few exchanges. Please don’t apologize if this should happen in our case.” Another simple and courteous condolence on the death of his mother, and his wife: “Such a tragic loss for you and her family. The death of a parent is one thing, but it is especially hard to see God’s logic when someone as young as Salina is taken. We must trust in His higher understanding, must we not?”

  Oliver did not think so, but he didn’t say as much. Miss Shaughnessy’s thoughts were those of most good people, and he wrote back without commenting on God’s mysterious ways, and described instead the city in which he now lived and his plans for the brick plant. A further correspondence ensued, although not one as bold and electrified as his exchanges with Salina. Before long, Oliver realized that he was once again courting a woman by mail.

  He was apparently good at it. His exchange with Beatrice continued for six months, at which time Oliver proposed marriage, and she said yes, but with conditions. She would not, she said, announce their engagement until a full year after Salina’s death had passed. She expected to be married by a church minister, and she would not agree even to that until she had her father’s approval. She did not say so explicitly, but she made it clear that she was not about to head west on a train to marry a man she knew only by mail.

&n
bsp; As a result, Oliver returned once again to Byrne Corners to court Beatrice formally and in person while the factory construction neared completion without him, under the supervision of his partner, Nathaniel Thick. With his interest torn between the West and his new fiancée, Oliver endured a month in the house of his father, a good number of suppers at the Shaughnessy table, and nightly strolls up High Street with Beatrice while the whole town watched. He suffered through a painful conversation with Beatrice’s father in which he did his best to assure him of the future success of his business and the integrity of his intentions toward Beatrice.

  At that point, he felt he had to pay a visit to his former in-laws and give them his news, and when he knocked on the Passmores’ door, it was answered by a young boy with flour in his hair. Oliver was taken to the kitchen, where Roseanne was helping her mother make pies with the last of the winter’s apples. Oliver told the two women that he was getting married again, and Roseanne said, “So we have heard. I’m not sure what Salina would think of your choice, but I suppose you should not be deprived of a wife. Regardless, it is no longer our business, if it ever was.”

  “But thank you for the courtesy,” said Mrs. Passmore. She was wearing a flowered apron and was rolling out pie dough while Roseanne peeled the withered apples. The boy was now under the table playing with long curls of apple skin.

  Oliver was not invited to stay for tea, and he showed himself out.

  His wedding to Beatrice took place soon after, and on the very evening of the ceremony the newlyweds boarded the train and headed west. It was not soon enough for Oliver. He’d felt the eyes of the whole town on his every move, and the Morris factory’s shift-change whistle pierced his ears each time it blew. His father had shamed him at the wedding by telling Beatrice’s parents to expect the couple back in Byrne Corners before the year was out, and his brother George told him not to come asking for money when his so-called business failed. Was that really what they thought of him?

  As soon as the train was out of the station in Byrne Corners, he felt a sense of release. He realized that the city to which he was travelling with his new wife—Beatrice, and not Salina—was now his home. He thought about a house full of children who would never know of Byrne Corners and the Morris plant, and would instead grow up with their own family name on a factory sign. It was Diamond and Thick at the moment, but one day it would be Diamond and Son. Or Sons, plural.

  He settled into his seat on the train, desperate to get back to the West and begin the life he had imagined. Or, rather, reimagined, since it was bound to be different without Salina.

  * * *

  BEATRICE SHAUGHNESSY-NOW-DIAMOND sat quietly by Oliver’s side in the passenger car and admired the green velvet seats and the car’s polished oak railing. She thought the train was a very civilized way to travel to what was probably a very uncivilized destination, in spite of Oliver’s assurances. She had a new set of Royal Albert dinner china for ten packed in a crate in the baggage car, a gift from her parents, purchased from the drugstore in Byrne Corners. Beatrice had no idea who the ten people were that her parents expected to dine formally at her table, but the red-and-black daisy pattern was modern and she approved of it, even though she’d let her mother choose because she knew about these things and Beatrice did not. Beatrice did not know much about what she was doing or where she was going. She trusted that Oliver would take care of her, in spite of what had happened to Salina, whose illness could not have been prevented by anyone but herself. Women, Beatrice believed, had a duty to be sensible, and Salina, for all her admirable qualities, had not been that.

  Once they were on their way Oliver began to talk about his business plans. Beatrice listened as he went on about clay pits and levigation systems, and what his chemists were telling him about fritting and tempering, without trying very hard to understand because she did not see that she had much of a part to play in that side of their lives together. As Oliver talked, she worried about the china and whether it was travelling safely, and she worried also about the marital relations she and Oliver had not yet had, the ones that would result in the children she had always pictured herself with. Her mother had prepared her by alluding to her wifely duty, but Beatrice did not exactly know what this duty entailed. As the train passed through the pastoral landscape she was used to and into the ruggedness of Northern Ontario, she prayed that she would make a good wife and mother and learn quickly how to keep a household befitting an important businessman of the West. She had been forewarned by Oliver that her marital home did not yet exist. He had rented them rooms in an appropriate boarding house while he undertook to build them a grand new house on a lot that he had already acquired. He would build it, he said, with his own bricks. He did not ask her what she would like in a house. He seemed to believe he knew what a married woman would want.

  From Salina, she supposed. They must have made plans.

  As they passed into Manitoba after a night in upper and lower sleeping berths, Beatrice wondered how she would stack up to Salina, about whom they had not spoken since she had awkwardly expressed her condolences in the churchyard. It was as though they had an understanding that they would not speak of Salina. She had been one of a kind, Beatrice thought, but—God rest her soul—not likely a woman who would have adapted well to being a homemaker. A free spirit and a suffragist, if you could believe gossip. Beatrice was determined to adapt as well as any woman to the role of wife and mother. She would have that over Salina, even if Salina would always be Oliver’s first love. She, Beatrice, would offer him stability and a well-kept home. Beautiful daughters and industrious, handsome sons. For luck, she tapped the wooden panelling beside her not once, but twice, and then once more, just in case.

  “What was that about?” Oliver asked, and Beatrice grew self-conscious, because to imagine children was to acknowledge what she would have to do to get herself in the family way. When Oliver noticed she was blushing, he rested his hand on her forearm and patted it, as though he knew what she was thinking and was telling her, Don’t worry, there’s not much to it. They travelled for a time with Oliver’s hand on her arm, and then he went back to his notebook and the columns and figures he was working on, about which she could think of not a single thing to say.

  When they pulled into the station in Winnipeg, Oliver announced that they were having a night off the train. He had booked them a room and a table for dinner at the Royal Alexandra, a brand new hotel built by the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was a honeymoon gift, he said, a night of extravagance before they settled into their modest living quarters and he turned his attention once more to the brick factory. The hotel had been told they were newlyweds. They had prepared lamb dinner with potatoes and mint sauce, for which Oliver had acquired a taste in England. There were flowers on their table in the hotel’s dining room, and more flowers in their room.

  That night, Beatrice learned how marital relations worked, and she wasn’t much impressed. She found it all quite mortifying for the both of them, but she was glad to have it over and done with, a necessary step to becoming the wife she was determined to be. Oliver, she supposed, was used to the humiliation because he had been married before. No doubt, in future he would expect more of her by way of participation, and she would try to comply with whatever his wishes were. They didn’t speak much over breakfast, although he did reach across the table and squeeze her hand. She wondered if he was disappointed in her. She wondered if he wished she were Salina. If so, she could forgive him. She believed that in time she would replace his first wife, and that his memory of her would fade. Beatrice was a practical woman and did not believe in worrying about things over which she had no control.

  The next evening, they arrived at their destination. Nathanial Thick met them at Union Station wearing his cowboy hat, and Oliver introduced them.

  “You must be the Texan, then,” Beatrice said, trying to sound like a wife who knew about her husband’s affairs.

  “Always proud to be called a Texan, ma’am,” he s
aid, and he looked as though he might have gone on with a story or two, but Oliver was already guiding her toward the new Model T Ford parked outside the station doors, with “Diamond and Thick” stencilled on the driver’s side. Beatrice was concerned about leaving the china behind at the station, but Nathaniel said that he had arranged for the delivery of their baggage.

  “Things are well?” Oliver asked anxiously as they settled in the car. Beatrice was in the back seat holding her hat on her head even though they had barely begun to move.

  “Right on schedule,” Nathaniel said. “Bit of a delay with the trolleys but nothing to worry about.” Nathaniel turned to Beatrice, who was now holding her breath as well as her hat as they gained speed. She had never travelled so quickly on a city street. The signs of construction were everywhere, and the car often bounced when it hit a mound of dirt. Beatrice supposed this was the heavy clay soil Oliver had told her about.

  “We’re glad to have you here,” Nathaniel Thick said to her, “to keep this man happy so he can attend to business on our behalf. A lot rests on your husband’s clear head.”

  She did her best to nod knowingly in spite of the bouncing, and said, “I will keep him fed and satisfied,” to which Nathaniel laughed heartily, though she wasn’t sure why. She thought perhaps he was being cordial in the exaggerated way of people from Texas. It was obvious that he and Oliver knew each other well, which spoke to the life he had here, the one she knew so little about. She was happy to have this sense of Oliver’s life and her own future unfolding as they jostled around in what looked to her to be an entire city under construction.

  When Nathaniel stopped the car in front of a two-storey house on a residential street, Beatrice thought, This is it, where I will become Mrs. Oliver Diamond. She could see that a woman she presumed to be the landlady was waiting on the stoop.