The Diamond House

by Dianne Warren

  A week later, a letter arrived from a woman named Betty Ellen Thick in Texas, and Oliver received the news that his former partner had passed away several years earlier. Estella was surprised that her father seemed to be so affected by this news as he hadn’t seen the man for many years, since before she was born. When she had the house to herself she went on a search and found the letter in his writing desk.

  Dear Mr. Diamond,

  I am sorry to inform you that Nathaniel died by his own hand seven years ago. The Great Depression laid him very low. He never spoke unkindly of you, although I’ll say right here, Mr. Diamond, that I believe it was a dirty trick you pulled up there in Canada. Nate did not see it that way and always said, that’s business and I’m a businessman.

  My congratulations to you and your wife on your long and happy marriage.

  Sincerely,

  Betty Ellen Thick

  Estella wondered, what trick?

  The next morning at breakfast, while they were eating cornflakes, she told Jack what she’d read in the letter. It was Sunday morning and Beatrice was at church. They assumed their father had gone to the plant.

  “It’s like that, isn’t it,” Jack said.

  “What is?”

  “Business. You don’t get rich by being the man everyone likes.”

  “But people do like Father,” Estella said. “And we aren’t rich. It’s not like we live in a manor house. We don’t even have a powder room.”

  Jack finished his cornflakes and then picked up the bowl and drank the milk that was left. After he’d set it down again, he said, “I asked Theo what happened between Father and that Nathaniel Thick. He said there was something called a shotgun clause in the original agreement that allowed one partner to set a price and force the other out. They’d both agreed to the clause, so there wasn’t anything illegal about it. It could even have backfired and Nathaniel Thick would have ended up with the business, but Father counted on his partner to walk away, and he did. There. Now you know. Are you satisfied?”

  Just then Beatrice came in the front door, and the shotgun clause and the house’s lack of a powder room were forgotten. Beatrice stood in the door to the dining room looking blanched, the hat she always wore to church in her hand.

  “Can it be true?” she said.

  Jack said, “Can what be true?”

  “That war has broken out in Europe.”

  Jack immediately went to the radio and turned it on. An announcer was talking about the German invasion of Poland. Jack said he was going out to the plant to tell his father in case he hadn’t heard, and Beatrice sat down on the sofa and stared at the radio, still holding her hat. Jack left, and then he was back a minute later because the car was gone and he had no way to get to the plant.

  “Never mind,” Beatrice said. “He’ll have heard. Everyone’s heard.”

  “Canada’s not going to war,” Estella said. “There’s no point. Father said that.”

  “I think we will learn otherwise,” said Beatrice, and it was odd to hear her mother say something in opposition to what her father believed.

  But it turned out that Beatrice was right.

  WITHIN DAYS, BRITAIN and France declared war on Germany, and it didn’t take long for Mackenzie King to announce that Canada was at war. Then Jack came home with the news that he and Andrew had gone to the Armoury and enlisted in the Reserve.

  Beatrice just stared at him, as though she could not believe what she had heard.

  “But Andrew’s married,” Oliver said. “He’s a family man.”

  “Well, that’s what we’ve done,” said Jack. “It’s war. The rules are different now.”

  “You’re eighteen years old,” Oliver said, his face colouring with anger. “What do you know about the rules? What is wrong with the two of you?”

  Jack tried to say that there was little chance of them doing anything other than learning to clean weapons and march around the parade grounds at the Armoury, but Oliver kept repeating that he was eighteen years old and knew nothing. Estella covered her ears to block the sound of their raised voices, and finally Beatrice spoke and told them both to stop, and no more was said.

  For a time, it looked as though Jack was right. They were given uniforms and weapons and they went to the Armoury every day, but no news came that their regiment was being called into service. But then word did come, and off they both went, first to a training base near home, and then to Nova Scotia, where they eventually boarded the Empress of Russia bound for Britain. Oliver and Beatrice were in disbelief. Two of their sons had gone off in uniform, possibly to see active duty in Europe, and one of them was married. It was as though the world had been turned upside down again just when they thought it had righted itself.

  It was shortly after her brothers’ regiment left for Britain that Estella made her case for a job at Diamond and Sons. It was 1941 and Canada had been at war for two years. Estella was seventeen years old and about to finish high school. Diamond and Sons was now producing firebrick for warships, and Estella decided that she should join the war effort too. Women everywhere were donning overalls and learning to use industrial equipment. She could do the same.

  She was not expecting the reaction she got when she asked her father for a job. He was sitting at his writing desk, as always in his tweed suit, and he gave the impression that Estella was wasting his time when he had little to waste.

  “I’m good at math,” she tried, thinking he was objecting to his daughter working in the clay pits, or the pressing shop. “I could learn to do the books.”

  Oliver shook his head and barely looked up from the papers on his desk.

  “You don’t just learn to do the books like in the old days,” he said. “You go to school and become a bookkeeper or an accountant.”

  “But this is wartime,” she said, remembering Jack’s words. “The rules are different now.”

  “They are, are they?” her father said, finally looking up at her. “And what am I supposed to do with Colin Barrett? Let him go, to make a place for you, a girl who doesn’t actually need a job?”

  She thought back to all the times he’d indulged it when she’d said she would one day run the brick factory. She reminded him of it.

  He said, “You were five years old, Estella. You tell five-year-olds about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Surely you don’t think I was making you a promise about your future. Now forget this nonsense. I have work to do.”

  “Well, what about Salina?” she said, before she could think better of it. Then she stuck out her chin and brazenly quoted from one of the letters, words that he had written: “To think that a woman such as yourself would be hampered . . . it seems neither possible nor right in this modern time.”

  He stood from his chair and she thought he was going to leap across the desk at her.

  “Go upstairs,” he said. “To your room. And do not speak to me of her again.”

  She didn’t move. It was as though she’d forgotten how to move, until he said, or rather shouted, “Estella. Did you hear me? Go. Now.”

  She left the room in tears and ran into her mother on her way up the stairs. Beatrice wanted to know what was wrong but Estella pushed past her and threw herself on her bed. She stayed there crying until her mother came knocking to tell her it was suppertime. When Estella said she wasn’t hungry, Beatrice said, “Estella, you know we don’t tolerate histrionics in this family. You are expected at the table.”

  She went downstairs and sat at her place. She was determined not to speak to her father, perhaps ever again, but when he said, “I admit I was a little hard on you,” she couldn’t help it and she began to cry once more.

  “Estella,” he said. “Please understand. This war leaves us without two of your brothers and God knows what will happen to them. I am not going to let it deprive a smart young woman of an education.”

  “I agree with your father,” Beatrice said.

  That was the end of it.

  When Estella finished high
school, she pulled a career out of a hat and applied to go to normal school to get her teaching certificate. Since the Royal Air Force had taken over the teacher training building on College Avenue, she had to walk downtown every day to a temporary site, the old Sherwood Department Store. The only good thing about it was that the streets were filled with young servicemen. She began to go to dances on Saturday nights with some of the other girls from school. When one of the servicemen she danced with asked her if they could be secretly engaged, she laughed and told him she knew what he was up to, that is, he was looking for the fringe benefits of engagement without having to buy a ring, and he could forget it. She developed a reputation as hard to get, but she was a good dancer so she was never without a dance partner.

  The war dragged on in a way that no one had thought it would. Jack and Andrew were still not home, although neither had they seen active duty. Harmony, who’d found out she was pregnant after Andrew left, had given birth to their first child, Andy. He was already walking and talking. Estella graduated from normal school and got a job teaching high school mathematics, with a plan to study for a bachelor’s degree during the summers, in mathematics, she supposed. Everyone had hope that the war was coming to an end because the Luftwaffe raids were over and the threat to England was already diminished. When the Germans were defeated at Sta-lingrad, the family was sure Jack and Andrew would soon be home, but another year went by and still they were overseas. In a letter, Jack wrote that he was getting bored, and he joked to Estella that she was right and war was not all it was cracked up to be.

  Then came the Normandy invasion, and a telegram saying Jack was missing in action. There was no word about Andrew or where he was. The whole Diamond family gathered in their parents’ house every day and waited for news. Estella went to school but she rushed home as soon as the bell rang. Oliver left Theo and Mathew to supervise the plant’s operations, and he waited with Beatrice. A week later, another telegram arrived saying that that Jack had been badly injured and was in a hospital in France. The telegram didn’t say much about his injuries, just that they were serious. Then Andrew’s wife Harmony finally heard that Andrew had survived the landing on Juno Beach and had continued with his regiment into Europe.

  Once the Diamonds learned that Jack and Andrew had both been at the front—and Andrew still was—they thought about nothing else. Estella had little interest in her students or their grasp of mathematics. She waited for news with the rest of family, and at the same time dreaded that word would come saying Jack had succumbed to his injuries, or Andrew was missing, or dead. Harmony knew only that Andrew’s regiment was somewhere in France, driving the Germans back. Although there was talk of victory, it was almost a year after D-Day before an end to the war was declared, and the family heard, finally, that Andrew was alive, and Jack would in all likelihood recover.

  Andrew came home in 1945. He was introduced to his son, and went back to work at the plant as though nothing had changed. When Jack came home six months later, it was as though everything had changed. To Estella, he hardly seemed like the same person. When her school year ended in June of 1946, she changed her plan to take classes all summer and instead assumed Jack’s care, to save her mother all the trips up and down the stairs, which she didn’t seem to be able to make without stopping to catch her breath. The doctor called it fatigue due to the stress of worrying about her sons in Europe. He found nothing physically wrong other than slightly elevated blood pressure, and he suggested that she had perhaps had a nervous breakdown. He prescribed a sleeping pill.

  One evening, when both Jack and Beatrice were resting, Oliver told Estella how much he appreciated her help.

  “I wonder,” he said, “if you would consider taking a leave from teaching in the fall. Jack is going to need care for some time. It’s too much for your mother.”

  A leave from her job. It seemed like a lot to ask. Still, she said, “Of course,” because it was Jack.

  When fall came again, Jack was not much better. Estella was granted her leave from teaching, and she cared for him with the help of a visiting nurse. She read poetry aloud to him; he liked Robert Service and British sonnets, Wordsworth and Keats. Gradually, she coaxed him out of his bed every day to sit in the garden for fifteen minutes, and to perhaps walk around the block with her. She convinced him also to wean himself off the morphine he’d been taking, and to join her and their parents at the table for meals, just the noon meal at first, and then eventually all three. She managed to squeeze in a few mathematics classes at the College, but other than that, everything she did was for Jack.

  Finally, after almost a year of convalescence, he was able to go back to work at the plant. Oliver started him as Colin Barrett’s accounts assistant, two days a week. When Jack was ready to work full time, Oliver gave Colin a generous retirement package and Jack took over from him. Estella tried not to harbour any resentment toward Jack. She was the one with the knowledge of numbers, she thought, but she knew Jack needed the job, and that his integration back into the world was precarious. He met Phyllis not long after and they were married in a private ceremony.

  Once Jack was back at work, Estella returned to teaching because she didn’t want to stay home without purpose. A full school year had passed while she was caring for Jack, and she realized she had missed the classroom. She was lucky enough to get placed in her old school, where she knew the staff and the students, at least the ones who hadn’t graduated while she was away. That fall she learned about the Recreation Society and its buses from a flyer on the staff billboard, and the next summer she went on the first of her camping excursions, to the Black Hills in South Dakota. In the summers that followed she travelled to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and then took the trip to the Baja Peninsula. The next summer Estella passed on the tour of the Maritimes—by then her father had discovered his passion for the project at Lake Claire—and the summer after that she missed a trip to the Florida Keys. Then she lost track altogether of where the Recreation Society buses were going, because she didn’t care anymore. They had been replaced by a bush camp on Allen Foster’s lease.

  When she first went back to teaching after her leave, the staff had a party for her, with cake in the staffroom at lunch. One of the teachers dropped a little rum into their coffee mugs, and the principal said, “My eyes are closed. I did not see that.”

  When his back was turned, Estella dropped a little more in hers, and accepted that rum in her coffee mug at school was probably the best she could do in honour of Salina’s rebellious legacy.

  * * *

  THE DIAMONDS MADE their first trip to Lake Claire by train, or at least most of the family did. Oliver and his sons delivered their wives and children—two of them now grown and married—to Union Station, and then carried on to the lake in Oliver’s big Oldsmobile sedan with a trunk full of canned goods and breakfast cereal, and a list of supplies to be purchased in the village. Estella, who was used to travelling with her father, reluctantly found herself at the station with the other women, plus fourteen nieces and nephews and the baby and pair of toddlers who had made her a great-aunt.

  Her sisters-in-law were dressed fashionably for travelling. In their suitcases they had new cottage clothes, chosen from pictures in magazines since none of them had any experience with beach wear. Even Gladys, who was now in her forties, had a stylish new bathing suit in her beach bag. Estella’s teenaged nieces—Caroline and Val and Geraldine—were all wearing pedal-pushers and pastel-coloured canvas sneakers. Estella knew about the two-piece bathing suits that were packed away in their luggage, and she wondered what her brothers were going to say when they saw their girls on the beach with their midriffs on display. She understood teenagers since she spent most of her life with them at school, and she knew the three girls had every intention of showing themselves off, hopefully to boys with slicked-back hair and ducktails, who looked like Elvis or James Dean.

  At the station, Rose kept to herself. Her engagement to Jack was new and had come not long after his di
vorce from Phyllis. She was a quiet person, and it was obvious that she found the pandemonium to be a bit of an ordeal. She was to share a cottage with Estella and her parents, and Estella wondered if Rose even wanted to be there, although she could wonder the same about Beatrice, who still thought she was travelling to a cabin in the wild woods. Estella suspected Rose’s reserve was not fear of the woods but rather fear of the Diamonds; they did not always understand how intimidating they could be.

  There were several young children among Estella’s nieces and nephews, and some of them carried plastic pails and beach toys. The teenagers stuck together and pretended they were old enough to be travelling on their own. When the call to board came, they all filed from the station to the boarding platform, where the baggage car awaited their luggage. Estella watched her sisters-in-law shepherding children up the steps into their passenger car, and she thought she herself was like Rose, not sure she even wanted to be here. She boarded the train behind the others as they stowed their hand luggage and negotiated seats and travelling partners, and worried that the opening of Allen Foster’s cottages would be the ruination of Lake Claire, at least for her. It was not just the Diamonds who were heading there. She’d seen the billboards appearing as far south as Regina, with a robust-looking family of four—the parents, a boy, a girl, the lake behind them—and the slogan: Foster’s Lake Claire Bungalows. Come visit. Come home. She did not want Lake Claire to be home to people from anywhere and everywhere. She half hoped that a conductor would come along with an announcement that there was something wrong with the train, everyone off. She knew she was being ridiculous. What good were the cottages with no one in them?

  The Diamonds jostled and shuffled around until they were all at last seated. Beatrice sat next to Gladys, facing two of the children, with a table set up in between. The train had not left the station before Beatrice had the cards out for a game of Old Maid, a game Estella detested because one or another of the children playing never failed to point out that she was, in fact, an old maid. The other two sisters-in-law—Fay and Harmony—sat together surrounded by the remaining children, except for the teenagers, who sat at the back of the car away from everyone else.