Black Diamond (12 page)

It would be nice, she thought, to have a long, cool drink; better yet, to wade into a pool of refreshing water. She imagined doing it – stepping in slowly. She could picture the water, pure and effervescent as a drink of bottled mineral water. She thought of the fountain back at the mall, in the center of the meeting place by the arcades, near their office, at home.

Alan was at her side again. He said, ‘I’ve found it. We’ll have to walk a long way, but there’s plenty of time.’

‘Good. I’d love a nice, big drink of spring water.’

‘Oh, Beth. Can’t it wait?’

‘I guess so. I thought we had so much time.’

He started to push the trolley forward. ‘We’ve got time to catch the plane,’ he said. ‘No customs. They’ll look at our passports and cards at the gate.’

She followed him. She wondered if her thirst had been brought on by dreaming of fire; or, it might have been the other way around – that her mind had produced a fire-dream to account for a thirst she’d already felt in her sleep.

They reached a smooth passageway, slightly ramped. Alan raced along it with the trolley. She trotted to keep up. ‘I had a terrible dream,’ she said.

‘So did I.’

‘About the plane.’

‘Uh-huh. Don’t tell me.’

She didn’t think he’d had any dream. He simply hoped to stop her talking. There were times when he didn’t enjoy keeping up a conversation: when she’d be rattling away on some topic and all at once would notice that he was taking part reluctantly. In the early days of their marriage she’d been hurt by that kind of thing.
Now it didn’t bother her. People were different not just in temperament but in their sense of pace. There was no reason why they should be in perfect symmetry every moment of the day and night; it was probably just those incongruities that kept them attached to each other for so long.

They had to wait for two officials to look at their airline tickets and passports, then they were motioned towards another
hallway
; it led to a waiting room where their bags were taken from them, to be loaded on to the plane.

They studied the other people in the room – four couples, one man on his own and a single woman. The couples seemed to be much like themselves; one of the women was pretty, one had red hair, one was fat. The redhead’s husband had a mustache, slicked-back hair and a sharp-featured face. He looked like a bandleader from the thirties. Another husband, standing up, was tall and beefy and was dressed in a frontiersman’s outfit: fringed deerskin jacket, stetson and western boots. ‘Myron,’ his wife called to him. Myron returned to his seat. He put his hands on his knees. His wife – definitely a city type – had on a dark business suit and black patent-leather shoes with very high heels. She handed him a map, which he accepted without interest.

‘Look at that woman’s shoes,’ Beth said to Alan. ‘I thought we were all supposed to be travel agents. One of the first things I tell a female client is not to wear exaggerated heels on a plane. She must be incredibly uncomfortable.’

‘Maybe they came here by car. It’s a short flight, anyway.’

‘Well, just the same.’

The single man – tidy, bespectacled and wearing tweeds – resembled a math teacher at the school Alan had gone to the year before highschool. The man reminded him all at once of the whole year: of the street corner where he’d waited for the bus; and the drive out to the school through the suburbs and into what looked almost like real country. There were several nice houses they passed; a park, and streets with big trees on either side. There was one particular part of the ride he’d never forget – a stretch of road lined by tall maple trees that arched over and
formed a tunnel: in the fall it was like driving through a land of jewelry, the leaves scarlet and gold. Every morning for about two weeks he was made happy by the sight of that gorgeous avenue. He would have liked to see it going in the other direction too, but in the afternoon the busdriver took a different route. He’d thought then: some places made an impression on you that you never recovered from. They were special. Some of them used to be hard to reach, yet now that air travel was so easy, it was possible to get to countries and landscapes that – only as far back as the last century – couldn’t have been visited by anyone but explorers and pilgrims. That was one way in which the world had improved; the convenience of modern travel was wonderful.

At that age, when he was young, he’d wanted to go
everywhere
, anywhere: after Europe, to Asia, the South Seas, Africa and South America. He’d wanted to get to the Arctic. He’d yearned for places where no one else had ever been. And later, he’d hoped to open up the world to other people; to allow them to be in marvelous places and to see fascinating things. He’d never quite outgrown his adolescent longing, never completely achieved his dream, which was to find himself suddenly, and as if magically, somewhere else. And, as it had turned out, the one place that was the most beautiful for him had been at home: on that ride through the maple trees. They had remained his vision of beauty on earth, of the best from all the world outside the school bus. He hadn’t realized it before. He’d forgotten, for years.

‘That woman looks like your Aunt Nora‚’ Beth said.

He looked. The woman was the one he’d decided was unattached. When he’d first noticed her, she’d had her head down and was reading a booklet. Now that she was talking with the tweedy man, he could see what Beth meant, although he didn’t agree. ‘Sort of‚’ he told her, ‘but not much.’

Two airline officials, a man and a woman, came through the entrance. Their uniforms were immaculate, their smiles toothy. They looked a little like mannikins from a store window – perfectly regular and bland. The woman stood at the microphone and made an announcement: they could board the plane.
Everything was ready. The passengers stood. Beth and Alan joined the group.

They had to duck to get into the small plane, and to crouch as they moved to their seats. The aircraft had fourteen seats, seven on each side.

It was a bumpy ride. The engines made so much noise that conversation was out of the question. Beth tried to sleep. She closed her eyes, but couldn’t drift off. She felt as if they’d been traveling for years. It was impossible to imagine going back home. London had vanished from her mind, together with America. The house, work, the office in the mall, were like memories from as long ago as early childhood.

Alan looked across the aisle at her. They were near enough to hold hands without stretching, if they wanted to. He would have liked to reach out to her, but he saw that she was trying to sleep. He had no wish to sleep. He’d had his fill of nightmares. The one he’d had on the plane from London was enough to last him a lifetime; he’d dreamt that they’d crash-landed in flames, that he’d jumped out of his seat to get a place for both of them in the aisle; and as soon as he’d turned around to help pull Beth clear, the other passengers had swept him away. The dream ended as she was holding her hands out after him, the fire roaring towards her, and he was being carried ever farther away.

It was only a cliché, of course – one of the basic dreams; one of the earliest myths: Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Euridice. You turned around and she was gone, or dying, or transformed. Or, maybe, just divorced. It was possible that that was his real fear. Years before, for a long time, he’d wanted to leave her. He’d waited for the right moment to talk about it. But time passed, the moment never came and suddenly everything was all right again. Now he was afraid that perhaps what had happened to him could happen to her. One day she might feel that she’d just had enough, and she’d want to get out.

Their landing this time was easy. All the passengers had to stoop, almost to crawl, out of the cramped cabin. It was like emerging from a cocoon or coming up from a tunnel.

The plane sat in the middle of an enormous clearing
surrounded
by pinewoods. A road ran across one end. Near the road stood a shed with a corrugated metal roof. Boxes were stacked against two of the walls and piled up next to a
neighboring
shack. A mound of fuel drums had been set some distance away from the buildings and also from the trees. There were no other planes in sight.

Their transportation was waiting. As Alan and Beth stepped down from the narrow ladder, people were already pointing at two old-fashioned, horse-drawn carriages that were heading towards them from the shelter of the woods.

‘Not bad‚’ Beth said. ‘Right on time.’

‘They probably pulled up back in the trees there‚’ he told her. ‘Otherwise the horses might have been spooked by the plane.’ He knew nothing about horses. He was guessing. In the early days of their marriage she’d been in the habit of asking him all kinds of questions, as though he were an authority on
everything
; and he’d taken to acting like one: if he thought or suspected a thing, he’d say it was true, certain. It gave him confidence in his abilities. His speculation became fact. The odd thing was that so often he turned out to be right. Sometimes he even felt that he had insights of a kind that could be called psychic; he’d know things almost before they happened – not that he really believed in such powers, but belief was part of the phenomenon: her faith in him had made him capable. It might also be true that his unwillingness to concede an equal capacity in her had kept her in a state where she didn’t feel that her life was important, or that she had anything special to contribute. He’d taught her to assert herself when she was at the office. Outside business hours, she was unchanged. What she needed, he thought, was just one or two friends who weren’t crazy. A woman should have a few women friends, so that they could all get together every week and complain about their husbands and families, not bring everything home to the dinner table.

The robotlike steward and stewardess unloaded suitcases. The carriages stood one beside the other, facing the same way; every so often one of the horses on the inside would swing its head over and try to nip the nearby horse of the other pair.

They joined the rest of their group, who were already getting into the high seats. Alan chose the carriage that had their bags on it. He climbed up and held out a hand to pull Beth after him. They were sitting next to the redhead, Gina, and her bandleader husband, who was called Sonny. Like Beth, Gina worked in her husband’s business. ‘We met‚’ she told Beth, ‘when we were both operating one-man outfits.’

‘She kept cutting my sales down to nothing,’ Sonny said. ‘I got to thinking: Who is this broad? I figured I’d better go straighten her out, make some kind of a deal with her. So, one day I drop in at the address, I open the door, and – wham, it’s just like the songs: there she is sitting there, and Love came and tapped me on the shoulder. That’s how we amalgamated.’

Gina said, ‘We sure did. We amalgamated in under
twenty-four
hours.’

The single woman, who had taken her seat in front of them, turned around and smiled. She introduced herself. Her name was Myrtle. She’d been talking to the tweedy man, Horace, who was worried about whether the coachman had packed his bag upright and not sideways. ‘I’ve got a lot of bottles in it,’ he explained.

‘Don’t they have any liquor over here?’ Gina asked.

‘Oh, it’s just aftershave and that kind of thing. But I don’t want it to spill all over everything.’

They started off. The fat woman, behind Alan, spoke with approval of the wide, comfortable seats. ‘They should build things like this nowadays,’ she said.

‘Nancy,’ her husband told her, ‘that’s asking too much.’

‘Trains, buses, the subway – everything nowadays is plastic. And skimpy.’

‘It’s the times we live in,’ he said.

Beth and Alan turned their heads and said hello. They exchanged names. Nancy’s husband was called Ed.

The coach entered the pinewoods. All at once the world was darker, quieter. It was like going from daylight into night. Beth looked at her watch. What it said meant nothing to her. There were time-differences between countries; that could mix you up
to begin with. On top of that, you got tired. She asked, ‘Does anybody know what time it is?’

Gina said, ‘I always lose my sense of time when I’m on vacation.’

‘You find another way of measuring it, that’s all,’ Alan said.

Nancy and Ed told a story about ordering breakfast in Mexico, but because they hadn’t specified whether it was to be at a.m. or p.m., the waiter brought it up at eight-thirty in the evening, while they were still drinking their cocktails on the balcony. ‘That was a different sense of time, all right,’ Ed said.

Beth began to feel strange. She waited until it wouldn’t seem that she was spoiling Ed’s story, then she asked again if anyone knew what time it was. No one did. ‘Relax,’ Alan said to her.

The carriage rolled on. The landscape around them seemed without sound. They were the only noise passing through, their chatter foreign to the place, the steady rhythm of the horses’ hoofs like the muffled pounding of a machine.

Beth said, ‘Maybe this is that famous Scandinavian long night you read about.’

‘But this is the wrong time of year for it,’ Myrtle said over her shoulder. ‘That’s in the winters.’

‘It feels like winter.’

‘I didn’t get any information at all on this part of the trip. It’s all very mysterious. You know what would be fun? If it’s one of those mystery games – know what I mean? They give you characters to play, and then there’s a murder and you have to solve it. I had a couple of clients who wanted to go on one, but the price was too steep for them.’

Horace said, ‘I heard about one of them they held in Venice. Somebody fell into the canal.’

‘We’re all tour operators, aren’t we?’ Alan asked.

From the back seat Ed spoke up. He said, ‘What do you mean, Scandinavia? We were booked for Yugoslavia.’

‘Austria‚’ Horace said. ‘But it could be a lot of places. It sure looks foreign. That’s about all you can say.’

‘Well, where are we?’

‘Ask the coachman‚’ Nancy suggested.

The coachman, sitting high up and beyond the barrier of his seat, was too far removed from them to be reached. They called out to him, but he didn’t turn around.