The Diamond House

by Dianne Warren

  Foster had not, of course, considered brick; he’d based his figures on plywood and lap siding.

  “Give me until tomorrow,” Oliver said.

  He stayed up late into the night sketching diagrams and working out columns of figures and what he might get in return for a storehouse of brick.

  The next morning he presented Foster with a proposal: bricks and bricklayers for his original plan of twenty modest-sized buildings—cottages, he called them, not cabins—plus a loan that would ensure the installation of a septic system and running water. In return, Foster would repay the investment over time and provide cottage rental for two weeks every summer for the entire Diamond clan, five cottages, one each for Oliver and his four sons and their families. He told Foster that he had a grown daughter as well, an unmarried teacher, but she could stay with him and his wife. He was not sure that she would ever marry, he said. Teachers sometimes didn’t.

  By the time Jack and the fishing party collected Oliver again, he and Foster had struck a deal and their agreement had been roughed out on paper. Oliver knew enough about contracts to believe their lawyers would say it was an unusual deal, but not unfeasible. It was complicated somewhat by the fact that Foster did not actually own the land, which had been leased by his father from one of the nearby Cree bands, but it was a ninety-year lease with plenty of time left on it. Oliver proposed that the agreement stand for as long as Foster held the lease and owned the cottages, or for the next twenty-five years in the event that he sold them. Foster agreed.

  On the return trip south, Oliver did not disclose what he had done. Once he and Jack were home, he gathered the family together and announced that he would be easing into retirement from the plant, that he had sold the stockpile of construction bricks in the storage shed to Allen Foster, and that he had negotiated an annual Diamond family vacation in exchange for his investment in Foster’s cottage development.

  No one said a word. Beatrice, Estella, Jack, Oliver’s other three sons and their wives—each was as stunned as the other. Oliver had never before indicated that he wanted to retire from the plant. The family had never been on a vacation, and as far as they knew Oliver had no interest in outdoor pursuits of any kind. He was not a man who could be easily taken in, but they couldn’t help but wonder what had happened in the past week, and whether he had been bamboozled by this Allen Foster. Oliver was an entrepreneur, not an investor in the ideas of others, and especially not in the scheme of a man he had met by accident in a northern hotel dining room.

  When Beatrice found her voice, she said, “Oliver, I hope you do not expect me to join you in a forest full of wild animals, and possibly murderers hiding from the law. That is not my idea of a vacation.”

  “No, Beatrice,” Oliver said, “I do not expect that. Picture instead an idyllic cottage built from Diamond bricks, with a view of the lake, a modern bathroom, and window screens to keep the mosquitoes out. That is more what I have in mind.”

  Beatrice was still flummoxed. The other Diamonds remained silent.

  Estella was the only one whose interest was piqued, even though she was as surprised as everyone else by Oliver’s announcement. She had arrived at her career as a high school mathematics teacher somewhat indifferently, but it had led her to an organization called The Teachers’ Recreation Society, which owned several school buses, one equipped for cooking and the others outfitted as sleeping dorms for single men and women. The summer before, Estella had signed on to an especially adventurous camping tour down the American west coast to the remote beaches of the Baja Peninsula south of Tijuana. She’d been so inspired by the wild beauty of the ocean that she’d bought some paints and brushes and tried, without much success, to become a watercolourist. She’d almost fallen for a physics teacher on that trip, before she found out he had lied about his single status and had a wife and kids at home. Afterwards, she wasn’t sure whether she’d been smitten by the teacher or seduced by the Baja coast; she might have confused the two. Because of this, she arrived at a possible explanation for what had happened to her father: he had fallen under the spell of this place called Lake Claire, and because he was a businessman, he had developed a business interest as an excuse to return.

  She wanted to see Lake Claire for herself, and the next time Oliver headed north to meet with Allen Foster, she convinced him to take her along. Beatrice didn’t object, thinking that someone needed to go and report back on this Foster fellow and the scheme he had cooked up. Estella managed to get two days off school by pleading a family emergency, and when she told her mother this, Beatrice said an emergency was not far from the truth.

  It was late fall by this time. Estella and Oliver arrived in the village after dark. Oliver had booked them into The Travellers, where they met Foster for breakfast the next morning in the dining room. Estella could see the lake through the trees from the restaurant windows. The village was situated on a large bay, and a prominent rocky point jutted into the bay at the north end, the direction in which Foster held his lease, her father explained. She could not tell how big the lake itself was because it disappeared into the horizon to the west. A young boy cleared their dishes away when they were done eating. Shortly after, she saw a school bus collect him from the sidewalk in front of the hotel. She assumed that his parents owned The Travellers.

  After breakfast, Foster took them out on the lake in his boat. It was the first time Estella had been in an open boat, and as the nose dropped and the boat picked up speed, she pulled her coat around herself and shoved her hands up into her sleeves. She wished she’d brought winter mittens with her. They didn’t stay out for long on the water because of the cold—they even encountered ice in the shallow bays—but Estella saw the wilderness appeal of Lake Claire, and she liked Foster. He was not as rough-and-ready as she had expected him to be, and she learned that the cottage development was to be a family affair. He and his wife and three kids lived in a town an hour to the south, but they were planning to move to the village for the summer months and might eventually live there year-round.

  At supper that evening, again in the hotel dining room, Estella listened as Foster and her father talked. Oliver was speaking to Foster in an unusually reflective way, she thought, lamenting that all he had done since he had come from Ontario was work, and now he saw his sons doing the same. He said that he had always admired hard work and had provided well for his wife and children, but there were other things he had denied them. He had never taken his wife on a proper holiday, for example. He himself had been to Europe when he was a young man, but they had never been anywhere together, not even to the Rocky Mountains. He had not encouraged his children to seek adventure, he said, although his boys Jack and Andrew had found more than they bargained for when they enlisted. He told Foster that they had almost lost Jack, and he wondered if he had made a mistake by burdening his sons with his dream instead of encouraging them to create their own. When he suggested that Jack and Andrew had perhaps seen the war as a way out, Estella wondered for the first time if he blamed himself for Jack’s injuries and the years Andrew lost away from his family. He was feeling his age, she thought, even though he looked as fit as a man ten years younger.

  Then suddenly he was talking about his first wife. Estella had never before heard him talk about Salina.

  “I was married for a brief time to a woman who wanted to be an artist,” Oliver said to Allen Foster, almost as though Estella were not present. “She wanted to be a designer of fine china. Of course, that was a different kind of dream, and I fear that I did not take it as seriously as I took my own, even though I encouraged her.”

  “I suppose the artist in her had a hard time settling down to marriage,” Allen Foster said, assuming that the marriage had ended in divorce.

  “Oh no,” Oliver said. “That wasn’t it. She died.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” Foster said.

  “A lifetime ago, really,” Oliver said. “All in the past now.”

  Then he turned to Estella and said, “T
hose clay beads in the teapot, you remember the ones.”

  “Yes,” Estella said. It was disconcerting to be talking about the teapot, even hearing the word teapot out loud.

  “We were in England and she had met a woman, a pottery designer who later became quite famous, and this woman invited her alone on a private tour of the Wedgwood Pottery. When I found out afterwards, I must admit that I was jealous, and even annoyed, that she had managed to get to the inner sanctum of the Wedgwood plant when I had been unable to, but they were two artists and they shared an ambition that had nothing to do with business. The designer made the beads. I didn’t know at the time why my wife admired them so. To my eye, they were ugly things, but she saw them in a way that I did not.”

  He stopped talking, and Estella didn’t know why her father had chosen to tell the story now, in front of a stranger. After all those years, he’d so easily said “my wife” and meant someone other than Beatrice.

  The silence was broken when Allen Foster said, “Well, this is it, isn’t it,” providing an ending for the story.

  And then it was as though Oliver had never mentioned Salina.

  “So, what do you think of our grand plan, Estella?” he asked.

  She felt as if she were being catapulted into a new conversation when she was still thinking about the last one, the story of Salina the artist and her father the businessman. She said, “What about naming each of your cottages after an artist? Tom Thomson, Emily Carr. The Group of Seven.”

  Her father was immediately enthusiastic, since the suggestion was an indication of Estella’s endorsement. When Foster said, “Why not?” she agreed to come up with twenty cottage names for them. There was an art teacher in her school she could ask, a woman whose plein air paintings of the prairie landscape graced the walls of the staff room. Estella admired her ability and wished she had more of it herself.

  Their empty dinner plates were still on the table and the same young boy appeared and took them away, asking if they would like pie—“It’s included,” he said—and they said yes, cherry pie all around. As the boy set generous servings of pie and ice cream in front of them, Estella thought for the first time in a long while about her father’s other life, before he became the Oliver Diamond who married Beatrice and had five children and built a successful business out of nothing but a clay deposit.

  After Foster had left and she and Oliver were climbing the stairs to their rooms, she said, “I’ve never before heard you talk about your first wife.” She dared not look at him as she spoke and looked, instead, at the floral-patterned carpet on the stairs.

  “Is that so?” he replied. “Well, there’s nothing to speak of. All in the past.”

  It was the second time he’d said that—all in the past—in less than an hour.

  When they came to their rooms, he said good night and waited until Estella was safely behind her locked door, and then she heard him unlocking his own room across the hall.

  She put on her flannel pyjamas and got under the covers, reaching in the darkness for the extra blanket at the foot of the bed because the room was cold. As she pulled it up over herself, she wondered what—or whom—her father was thinking about at that very moment, and whether he regretted that he had not taken Salina’s dreams as seriously as he had his own. When he’d confessed that, Estella had had a little moment of déjà vu because of the way he’d dashed her dream of running the brick factory. In Salina’s case there had been no consequence because she had died, but there had been a consequence when he’d not taken his daughter seriously, and that consequence was her career as a mathematics teacher—a perfectly good career, but not a dream career. She could still hear his voice when she had asked for a job at the plant, not thinking there could be any answer but yes: You were five years old, Estella . . . surely you didn’t think I was making you a promise about your future. In fact, she had thought he’d made her a promise, but she’d realized at that moment that her future was somewhere other than the plant. The sign “Diamond and Sons” meant what it said.

  She had believed—and still believed—that she was in some way her father’s favourite, but she’d never really got over that he’d said no to her without considering her proposal. He’d said he wanted her to continue with her education, but then he hadn’t questioned her choice to go to normal school and the local college instead of going away to a good university, perhaps in the East. If her parents believed she had the potential to become the family genius, they hadn’t done much to encourage her, and they might as well have let her join her brothers at the factory. She wondered if her father would admit he’d been unfair if she were to get up right now and march across the hall and ask him. She no longer thought about working at the plant, but still, she’d have liked to know, just as she’d have liked to know more about Salina. It was easy for her father to say All in the past, but was that ever true?

  The room was freezing cold. Even with the extra blanket she was shivering, and she wondered if the hotel had any heat at all. She rolled over and sank into a dip in the middle of the bed, which somehow made her feel warmer. When she finally drifted off, she was jolted awake again minutes later from a dream in which there was an earthquake and Salina’s teapot was rocking and threatening to tumble from its shelf. At first she thought the dream had woken her, but then she realized a radio was playing Hawaiian music in the room next door.

  She lay there listening, trying to see in the darkness, and wondered what would have happened in her dream if “Ukulele Lady” hadn’t woken her up. She waited for the sound of someone rising next door—bedsprings, footsteps, a toilet flushing—but there was only the radio. She slipped her arm out from under the covers and knocked on the wall but there was no response. The radio played until morning, as though whoever was in the room had forgotten all about it, and Estella barely slept.

  They left Lake Claire the next morning, and when they got home in the late afternoon Oliver immediately drove out to the plant. Gladys had dropped in to show Beatrice a new quilt pattern, and Estella assured the two of them that Allen Foster was neither shifty nor feckless, and was instead a family man and an entrepreneur with a good idea, as far as she could see. Besides, she said, when had anyone been able to take advantage of Oliver Diamond? She told them they’d be ecstatic when they saw the lake and the brand-new Lake Claire Bungalows. Beatrice said she could not imagine herself being ecstatic about a cabin in the woods, but since the finished project was a long way off she could let the matter rest and hope that nothing would come of it except perhaps a few more fishing trips for the men.

  “Estella,” she said, “look at this pattern Gladys found. Maybe the two of us could make a quilt.”

  Estella had no interest in sewing or quilts, and it was clear Beatrice did not expect a response.

  THE COTTAGE CONSTRUCTION began the following spring. Oliver tried to encourage Jack to assume the foreman’s role for the bricklaying, but he wasn’t interested, and so Oliver took it on himself. When he was preparing to go north for the Victoria Day weekend, he asked Estella if she would like to come along once again, she assumed because he saw the usefulness of having an advocate. She was more than happy to oblige.

  Allen Foster had set up a bush camp at the building site, and Oliver was to stay with him in his tent, which had Beatrice shaking her head—the idea of Oliver Diamond in a tent! Oliver suggested that Estella stay at The Travellers—she could take his car back and forth from the site to the village every day—but she, too, insisted on staying in the camp with the men, and pointed out that, of the two of them, she was the experienced camper, not to mention significantly younger than he was. The week before the trip, she went out and bought herself a pair of Red Wing boots, wool work socks, and long underwear because Allen Foster had warned them it would be cold. She also bought her own white canvas tent and sleeping gear. Her mother was mortified by what Estella was planning to wear, and by the idea of her sleeping outdoors, and so close to the building crew, even if her father was going to be
there. She used the word “disgraceful.”

  “Those look like men’s boots,” she said, frowning at the pile of gear on her parlour floor.

  “Exactly,” Estella said. “They don’t make them for women. Anyway, stop worrying. It’s not like it’s my first time camping.”

  She got a bit of a shock, though, when she realized that Foster’s idea of camping was a little more rustic than what she was used to. He and his men—three of them—had cleared a spot in the bush and pitched their tents there, then built an open fire for cooking and keeping warm. There was no picnic table, just a few planks over a couple of upright logs upon which their cooking utensils rested. There were no toilets. “Plenty of bush for privacy, just don’t go too far and get lost,” Foster joked when Estella asked.

  Oliver tried once again to get her to go to The Travellers.

  “I will if you will,” she said, and of course Oliver wasn’t going to the hotel, so they both stayed. She put on her wool hat and her mitts, and she got her new tent out and strung it on the poles Foster had readied for her, respectfully placed a short distance from the men’s tents. Then she blew up her air mattress and rolled out her sleeping bag, and by the time she was done, it was already getting dark. When she came out of her tent to join the others, she saw that one of the men was cooking over the fire. For supper they ate rabbit and canned potatoes and peas, and they sat on camp stools close to the fire in order to stay warm. Estella wondered if she would be expected to wash dishes, but they all took care of their own and the cook rinsed the pots. In a way, it was as though she wasn’t there.

  It snowed that first night, and Estella was so cold in her tent she wondered if she’d make it until morning. As she lay awake in her inadequate sleeping bag, worrying about whether her septuagenarian father was warm enough, she couldn’t get the picture of the rabbit on a spit out of her mind. It had looked too much like a rabbit. She got up and put on every bit of extra clothing she’d brought with her, and still she couldn’t sleep. She didn’t stop shivering until morning, when the men got a good fire going for breakfast and she had her hands around a mug of hot coffee. If her father had spent an uncomfortable night, he didn’t say so. They all sat by the fire, the new snow melting within the ring of its warmth, and Allen Foster said to her, “Cold night. Hope you have a good sleeping bag.”