The Diamond House

by Dianne Warren

  Estella tried not to let on how miserable she’d been.

  There were six of them around the fire, Oliver and Foster and Estella, and the three men who were helping with the construction, who paid little attention to her. She assumed they were local. Oliver and Allen Foster rolled out the drawings of the cottage development on their knees and discussed the placement of the various buildings, the two-bedroom cottages along the lakefront, and the smaller ones behind, nearer the road to the village. Foster said he was thankful Oliver had convinced him to include running water and a septic system because it would be a lot harder to install once the cabins were built. They raised their coffee cups to indoor plumbing, and Estella wondered if there was something stronger than coffee in them. She noted that, to Foster and his workmen, the cottages were still cabins.

  After breakfast, the men went to work clearing bush from the building site, and Estella walked toward the village along the water’s edge, the sound of chainsaws cutting in and out behind her. The ice on the lake was breaking up, and she saw that it had splintered into needle-like crystals that were piled all along the shore, and the water was lapping and washing the crystals back and forth. They tinkled like wind chimes with each lap of a wave. She pulled her wool hat tightly down over her ears, and she eventually came to the public beach. There was not a soul on it. The lifeguard’s chair had snow still piled around its legs, and behind it was a half-finished building with a wooden deck, a new change house, perhaps. She could see a marina or fishing pier down the beach, and beyond it was a small railway station. The village was across the road. The whole place, including The Travellers Hotel, looked deserted.

  She wasn’t sure what to do. She walked along the lake, the crystals tinkling the whole way and the icy wind stinging her cheeks. When she came to the fishing pier and the railway station, she turned around and walked back toward the lifeguard’s chair again, wishing she hadn’t come so far from the campfire. She crossed the frozen sand, her feet numb in her Red Wings, and climbed the steps to the deck of the unfinished change house, where she tucked herself against a bare plywood wall to get out of the wind. If she waited a while, she thought, the sun would be higher and the air might warm up.

  There was a boardwalk from the village to the beach and she heard hollow footsteps coming toward her. A boy wearing a winter parka came into view from around the side of the building, and he was a carrying something. He climbed the steps to the deck and handed her what she saw now was a Thermos. When he tipped his parka hood back, she recognized the boy who cleared tables in the hotel restaurant.

  “What’s this?” she asked, trying to keep her teeth from chattering.

  “Hot tea,” the boy said. “My mom sent it. She seen you walking and said it’s too bad you come on such a nasty weekend, and then it snowed, and you must be cold.”

  Estella took the Thermos and poured herself some tea, trying not to be critical of the boy’s grammatical errors, and then she placed the Thermos at her feet.

  “Well, thank your mother very much,” Estella said. “I think she might have saved my life.” She wrapped her hands around the cup and took a sip of the hot, sweetened tea and immediately felt the chill diminish.

  “What’s your name?” she asked the boy.

  “Peter,” the boy said. “Peter Boone.”

  “And you’re what . . . ten years old? Grade five in school?” The boy nodded.

  She wasn’t sure how to introduce herself to a child. Her nieces and nephews all called her “Auntie.”

  “My name is Miss Diamond,” she said, sounding, she thought, like the schoolteacher she was. She told him where she lived, to the south, in Regina, the provincial capital.

  Peter Boone said that he had been there, to a boxing club.

  “Really?” she said. “There’s a boxing club? I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes, Miss,” he said. “I’ve been there to a camp for boys with promise. That’s what they said, that I showed promise. My uncle paid. We got to see a Golden Gloves bout at the club, but the contender got knocked out in the third round. They said he was off that night. He got food poisoning, they said, from eating Chinese food. Chinese duck, I think they said.”

  Estella studied Peter Boone and tried to imagine him as a boy with boxing promise. It was hard to tell under his winter coat, but she remembered how small and thin he was from the hotel.

  “You do boxing?” she said. “A young boy like you?”

  “Yes, Miss,” he said. “I have a training program. I ordered it through the mail.”

  She pictured the back of a comic book and the ad with a skinny man on the beach surrounded by bullies. What a peculiar boy this was. It was funny, the way he called her Miss, like a little English boy from a private school, when he was the farthest thing from it, and likely went to a one-room school in the bush and took a peanut butter sandwich for lunch.

  “Where do you go to school?” she asked.

  He said the name of a town she hadn’t heard of. “On the school bus,” he said.

  She nodded, remembering the bus that had collected him from the hotel. She finished her tea and put the empty cup back on the Thermos.

  “Well, Mr. Boone, I’d best be getting back to camp. My father is helping with the construction up the way.”

  “I know,” he said, and she wondered how.

  “You can walk with me if you like,” she said, “and scare the bears off.”

  They walked down to the water, and when they stopped to look at the ice crystals lapping back and forth along the shore, he returned once again to the subject of boxing and told her that when he grew up he was going to be a professional.

  “Lightweight, they say, unless I grow, but I probably won’t. My dad was only 160 pounds. He died in the war.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “Two of my brothers were in the war, although they both came back.” Then she said, “You want to be a boxer like Joe Louis, you mean?” and he said, yes, like Joe Louis, but more like Billie Hughes, because he was a lightweight.

  Estella didn’t know who Billie Hughes was.

  A Canadian, he told her.

  Then he said that his uncle drove him into Prince Albert once a week, to a boxing club there. Between times, he trained in his room at the hotel. He and his mother, he said, lived at the hotel.

  “What do you do,” Estella asked, “to train to be a boxer?”

  Footwork, he told her. And different punches, like jabs and hooks. And he went running every day.

  “But you’re only ten years old,” she said. She’d never heard of a ten-year-old training like that.

  “Yes, Miss,” he said seriously. “But you have to start young. I’m planning to grow, but if I don’t there’s bantamweight, 118 pounds.”

  He was so serious. She couldn’t laugh, although she wanted to. “You must be good at boxing, then,” she said.

  “Yes, Miss. I am. Them at the boxing club said so.”

  When they were at the end of the public beach he said, “I know a different way. It’ll be warmer. I run this way sometimes.” He cut into the bush on a narrow trail that Estella might not have noticed. The trail was wide enough for only one person so she followed him, wondering about the possibility of bears, but distracted from fear by the beauty of the new snow, heavy on the branches of the spruce trees. The trail was so narrow that the boy often brushed against a branch and the snow fell, and the branch sprang back, free of the weight. They walked without talking now since they were single file, and Estella hoped the boy knew where he was going.

  He stopped abruptly and said, “Just ahead, the trail will come out right by your camp. You’ll see it. I’d best be getting home. My mom will be wondering.” And he squeezed by Estella on the trail and went back the way they’d come, carrying the Thermos. Estella was left standing alone in the bush.

  “I’ll see you again sometime,” she called. “Thank your mother for the tea.”

  “Yes, Miss,” he said, and she thought again of an E
nglish schoolboy, only one with deplorable grammar.

  She stood alone, surrounded by trees and snow, and wondered if Peter Boone could possibly have played a trick and left her stranded on a snowy trail to nowhere. But then she heard voices, and a chainsaw started up, so she carried on and, sure enough, the trail left the bush not far from the camp. She could see the construction site, with fewer trees standing than when she’d left. One of the men was lopping branching off a fallen tree with an axe.

  She wasn’t cold anymore. The tea and the walk in the bush had warmed her up. Her feet were still numb, though, so she sat on a log by the fire while Foster and her father discussed pipes and trenching, and her father made notes on his pad of paper. Later, she heard them talking about boats and outboard motors and the potential for a golf course, and she thought this must have been what her father was like when he was planning the brick factory with Nathaniel Thick.

  That evening, Allen Foster handed her a ledger and asked her to check the figures. She sat by the fire and went over the columns, adding and subtracting numbers until she was sure they were correct, and then she handed the ledger back. She thought she saw a look of pride on her father’s face.

  At bedtime, Foster handed out extra blankets he’d come up with, and Estella slept well.

  THE NEXT SUMMER, Estella passed on the Recreation Society camping trip to the Maritimes that she’d been looking forward to, and instead travelled to Lake Claire every weekend with her father from May until freeze-up. She became the project’s unofficial bookkeeper and her mother’s reassurance that Oliver wasn’t going to kill himself accidentally with an axe, although Beatrice still disapproved of Oliver taking his daughter into the bush with only men for company. Sometimes she went for walks on the trails in the bush and more than once saw a bear, which she didn’t tell her mother. The Diamond siblings were all good swimmers thanks to the lessons they’d had at the YMCA, and once the water in the lake warmed up, she went for long swims by herself along the shore before heading back to the camp to warm up in front of the fire. When she and Oliver got home after one of their weekends at the lake, Beatrice always said they smelled like a campfire. She threw their clothes in the wash as soon as they were in the door and sent Estella upstairs to shampoo her hair so it wouldn’t be ruined by the smoke.

  On one such occasion they were at the dinner table on a Sunday evening in June with Mathew and Fay and their two youngest, one of them a sixteen-year-old girl named Caroline, who clearly thought Estella was out of her mind to want to sleep in a tent. Oliver and Estella had just returned from the lake, and Estella had not yet had a bath. When Beatrice mentioned her hair for the third time and said that she was going to have to wear a wig for the rest of her life if she didn’t start talking care of it, Estella told her mother to stop talking about her as though she were the same as age as Caroline.

  “I’m almost thirty years old, in case you haven’t noticed,” she said. “I think that makes me an adult.”

  “I won’t take that as an insult,” said Caroline, “but I agree with Nana. How can you stand having no running water?”

  “Not to mention the workmen,” said Beatrice. “It’s disgraceful, if you ask me. I don’t care how modern you think you are.”

  When the meal was over, Estella began to gather plates and cutlery and leftover food, all the time wishing that her mother would stop thinking she had some special kind of virtue and needed protection from strange men. She wasn’t sure what she’d done to make her mother think she might fall from grace so easily. She’d been virtuous all through the war, even as she went dancing with other single teachers and resisted the advances of soldiers and airmen who begged for secret engagements and all that went with them. One of Estella’s friends had fallen for it and found herself pregnant, and she’d lost her teaching job while her fly-boy fiancé had disappeared. To give him the benefit of doubt, he might have died in the war, but why had he never written, not once, after he left? In spite of her mother’s apparent lack of trust in her judgment, Estella had been a lot smarter than her friend. As she dumped a load of cutlery in the sink in the kitchen, she wondered if she should have gone to a hotel with that married physics teacher in Mexico, as he had suggested, and given her mother something real to worry about.

  She called her goodbyes from the kitchen when she heard everyone going to the door, and then she filled the sink with dishes and soapy water and waited for her mother to come and wash so she could dry, which was how they always did the dishes, and had done them for the last twenty years.

  When Beatrice came into the kitchen carrying the dessert plates, Estella said, “Why don’t I wash and you dry tonight?”

  “Why mess with a good system?” her mother said, and edged her away from the sink, saying, “Come on, scoot over.”

  When the dishes were done and put away, Beatrice said she had a bit of a headache and she was going upstairs to have a bath, if Estella didn’t want the tub first.

  Estella told her to go ahead, she had work to do for school the next day.

  Oliver left to make a quick trip out to the plant, and Estella found herself alone in the dining room with a pile of math quizzes on the table in front of her. There was a girl in her grade eleven class—Cora Hamish was her name—who had not gotten a single question wrong on a test all year. In addition to being a math whiz, she played the piano and was constantly winning competitions at the Conservatory and getting her name in the paper. Estella always looked forward to grading Cora’s tests in hopes of finding her first mistake. Once, in the staff room, Estella had said, “The absence of failure is not good for a teenager.”

  “You’re just mean,” one of the other teachers had said to her. They all thought Cora Hamish was on the road to a brilliant career. If not as a concert pianist, then something else. A brain surgeon or an architect.

  She found Cora’s quiz in the pile and graded it: 100 percent. Estella couldn’t even find a place in her method to deduct a point or two.

  As she went through the rest of the quizzes, she wondered about another piano player, the one who had propositioned her in this very dining room on the night of her parents’ thirty-fifth anniversary party. She couldn’t remember his name, or if she had ever known it, but he probably was a concert pianist by now. He’d been arrogant enough to get what he wanted.

  Well, good luck with that, Cora, she thought. She did not believe Cora had enough of that same brand of arrogance.

  She looked up from her grading when she heard Beatrice coming down the stairs. She had her nightgown on and her book in her hand.

  “Feeling better?” Estella asked.

  “A little, yes,” Beatrice said. “I think I’ll make a pot of tea.” Then she again insisted Estella’s hair had the whole house smelling like smoke, and said, “I still cannot understand why you want to be with your father and those men.”

  “Maybe you’d like me to become a nun,” Estella said.

  “I think nuns are expected to be Catholic,” Beatrice replied, and Estella was reminded that her mother did, on rare occasions, display a sense of humour.

  Beatrice went to the kitchen and was there for a long time. Estella had heard the water running, but not the kettle whistling. She was about to go and check on her mother when she came back to the dining room and said, “Oh. Estella. You’re here,” as though she had been looking for her.

  “What’s up?” Estella asked.

  “The strangest thing has happened,” Beatrice said.

  “What is it?” Estella asked.

  Instead of answering, Beatrice walked right by her and went back upstairs.

  That was odd, Estella thought.

  When she was finished grading, she went to the kitchen and saw that Beatrice had filled a cooking pot with water instead of the kettle. It was still boiling away on the stove, and when Estella looked inside the pot, she saw her mother’s book floating. She turned off the burner and set out some towels on the counter for the book, thinking her mother must have accidenta
lly dropped it but not sure why she would have walked away and left it there. She stood in the kitchen studying the soggy book on the counter, perplexed by the incident. When she heard her father at the door, she scooped up the book and dropped it into the garbage. Later, she took the bag out to the bin in the alley.

  The next morning she dressed and left for school, and when she got home at the end of the day her mother asked if she had seen her book, and Estella said no, and the book wasn’t mentioned again. She was unsettled by the possibility that the book had not just accidentally fallen into the cooking pot. She wondered if something was wrong with her mother. She’d recovered from the vague nervous illness she’d had when Jack was wounded, but maybe it was Oliver’s cottage project, and she was not dealing well with being alone in the house when Estella and her father were away.

  The next time Estella and Oliver went to the lake, Estella called Jack—who was on his own now, Phyllis had left him for good—and asked if he would stay with Beatrice for the weekend.

  “Tell her it’s for her cooking,” she said. “She knows you can’t boil an egg.”

  She decided, too, that she ought to take more seriously Beatrice’s worries about the men in the bush, even if they were unfounded. There were a lot of men in the camp now that the building was underway, and she would likely have the same worries if she had a daughter. She enlisted her father’s help to assure Beatrice that the workmen were all perfectly respectful, which was the truth, and Beatrice seemed relieved to hear Oliver say it. Before they left, she handed Estella a scarf and told her to tie her hair up, it might help protect it from the smoke.

  A few hours into the journey Oliver stopped for gas, and he got out to chat with the young attendant while Estella stayed in the car. The attendant filled the tank and then washed the windows, and when he leaned over the hood on the passenger side with his squeegee, he winked at Estella. Immediately, she heard her father say, “Hey, hey, mind your manners,” and she thought again of the hired piano player at her parents’ party, and how her father had told him in so many words to keep his hands off the boss’s daughter. She could almost hear him doing the same with the workmen in the camp.