Black Diamond (6 page)

William wouldn’t have minded if nobody turned up but the preacher and a witness. He’d have had the whole business done in a registry office if he hadn’t believed it would be more fun for Coralee, and more like a party, to have a church ceremony. When he saw the way she took to the white dress, with its train and veil and little crown of flowers, he knew he’d been right. She glowed with pleasure.

The dressmaker’s two small nieces had been chosen to hold up the train. During the rehearsal Coralee kept turning around to peek at the children and then all three would laugh wildly. The cook’s family arrived and sat proudly near the front, as William had told them to. Other people from around town were scattered among the pews. A bass and soprano sang to piano
accompaniment
. The pianist was a relic from William’s schooldays; she was blind now and had almost cried with gratitude when William telephoned her. On the day of the wedding she did a good job; the singers too suddenly came into their own, delivering without affectation the simple old hymns about belief in the Savior, love of the Lord.
I
believe,
they sang.
I
believe.
William could feel that beside him Coralee had realized all at once where she was. He held his arm around her lightly, protectively. The singers’ last words rang in the air, stopped, and echoed and left. The minister said afterwards that it was one of the most moving betrothals he could remember: sometimes it was like that – the spirit would seem to be fully present. The importance or grandeur of the family made no difference, nor the size of the congregation. Sometimes it was especially touching to have just a few
witnesses
there, when those few had love in their hearts.

To the people in the first three pews the church didn’t seem empty; they sensed only good feeling and friendliness. There were even a few strangers who had wandered in and – seeing that there was a marriage ceremony in progress – had sat down to watch. The minister felt that their presence conferred additional blessings upon the happy pair: it was as if the extra observers stood for the rest of the world, who didn’t know the couple being joined together, but wished them well.

Among the uninvited audience, almost on the aisle at about the midway point, was Jean. She’d seen the announcement in the papers.

She had changed: the shape of her body, the way she sat, her hair, the expression on her face where the action of the poison she’d taken had caused scarring. The damage to the skin was mild, but it was there; it made a slight difference to the overall facial look. If her parents had been at the wedding they would
have known her. And Harvey would have recognized her from the many photographs he’d seen of her; he’d been trained to spot resemblances, even if a face had aged or been deliberately disguised.

She wasn’t disguised, nor was she disfigured, although she looked old and clumsy. The doctors had told her that she was always going to have trouble with her health, and so maybe it was just as well that she didn’t have a husband or children.

When she saw William with his bride, she knew it wasn’t her health that was to blame for everything going wrong in her life – it was being without him. It was the fact that he hadn’t wanted her.

She watched the whole ritual: the ring being put on, the kiss. She heard the promises:
till
death.
And William turned around, his strange, vacant companion on his arm. He shook hands with people in the first rows; he pulled the bride along with him down the aisle, coming nearer. He bowed to a couple of women in front and to the left of Jean, then he looked at her: right into her eyes.

He moved forward, still looking at her face. He came closer, near enough to speak to her. Her lips parted, as if to shape his name: she almost said it out loud.

He smiled, his eyes going to the doorway beyond her. He passed on by. He didn’t recognize her.

The Norbert family had lived in Switzerland for generations. Although they had orginally come from farther north, by the 1830s, when Professor Norbert was born, his relatives had forgotten most of the habits and languages of their former homelands. He didn't try to find out about his ancestors; his interest lay in the distant past, among the great progenitors of humankind: their cities, statues, buildings, paintings and religions. He passed on his enthusiasm to his young daughter, Beatrice; she came to share his passion for lost civilizations because, from the very beginning of her life, the times when he was explaining the past to her were those when she was most certain of his paternal affection, pride and attention. She did not share his merry and inquisitive temperament. She was a quiet girl, serious even when she was happy, but often melancholy.

The house of Beatrice Norbert's childhood seemed to her to be set in a landscape that was reminiscent of the south – that is, the south of Europe. Later she would become acquainted with the sweltering countries of the equator, the deserts and plains, where people wrapped up their faces and bodies against the heat as if protecting themselves from a winter storm. Her parents took her along on their travels only once, when she was four years old; the journey so broke her sense of time that she forgot all of it but a few moments that she could call back like pictures out of a dream. What she remembered and thought of as her true life was home, in Switzerland.

The summers were hot and hazy, the parklands lush with flowering plants. Their house had a large garden that led down
to a lake. And she remembered her mother as a lovely creature who was always wearing white dresses and standing under a blue sky. They had gone on picnics and boating parties together.

Her mother's name was Celeste; she had died young. Beatrice's memories for a few years on either side of the funeral were disrupted: she recalled staying in places where her mother, talking, had once walked with her, but to which her mother would never return. She remembered looking up for long periods at the sky and being confused between the words Celeste and celestial. Someone had foolishly told her that the dead went to heaven and became stars: that was why there was so many stars – innumerably, inconceivably many.

She was still a child when they moved away from the lake so that her father could be near town. He taught and lectured at the university. He wrote his books. And for a while he took her on his travels. They went to Turkey and Syria, to Petra; to Cairo, where Beatrice spent three years in a French school for French and English-speaking children. Most of the other girls were the daughters of diplomats, lawyers or bankers and they talked about the fashions and gossip of Paris, the theater and opera and the magnificent evenings – dinner and dancing in the ballrooms of palaces – for which they were destined: at which they would meet the men who were to become their husbands. She became enraptured by all things Parisian. She was sure that Paris had to be the center of the world. She listened avidly to the stories told by girls who had been there during the holidays. What was everyone wearing, she wanted to know; what had they had to eat? And the weather? Even the smallest scraps of information were enthralling.

It never occurred to her that there might be girls in Paris who would think Cairo exciting and exotic, and who would long to go there. For her – at that age – wherever she was, was normal. What most people considered ordinary had always seemed strange and marvelous to her, and unknown: the life of children who had both a mother and a father, and who stayed in one place until grown up. That was normal, but she couldn't imagine it.

She did well in school. Her father was proud of her. He'd made
arrangements that she should study subjects not ordinarily taught by the school. Special tutors arrived to give her lessons in languages, architectural design, the natural sciences.
Fortunately
there was one other girl, Claudia Schuyler, who shared these extra classes with her. If Beatrice had been the only odd one, she might have been singled out by the other girls as hopelessly different and therefore perhaps an object of dislike. Claudia soon became her best friend, although she was a year younger than Beatrice. They studied together every afternoon, listening to the instruction of four different men – two of them quite young – who had been chosen to teach them. Mlle Dubourg, their chaperone, sat on guard at the back of the otherwise empty classroom. The high windows looked out on to the tops of palm trees.

Claudia's mother was half English, half Italian; her father, American. She had a younger sister at the school, one younger brother at home, an older one at a boys' school a few streets away, and another older brother who was just starting work in a bank. She invited Beatrice home for weekends and holidays.

Beatrice had dreamt for several years about the family that would one day be hers – when, of course, she found the right husband. But the desire for a husband had been prompted by her wish to have sisters, brothers and a mother. She didn't feel the need for a different father, despite the fact that her own father was so often away; he wrote regularly to her, and besides, was so loving and so willing to share his life with her when he did see her, that she was never without the sense that his presence was with her, nor that she was always in his mind and heart.

One day when Beatrice was staying with Claudia, Mrs Schuyler said, ‘You know, I think I once met your father, many years ago. In Rome.'

Beatrice was too old to think it natural that somebody else should know everyone she knew. She had also passed the stage where it seemed an amazing coincidence that anyone should have thought the same thought or visited the same city, or loved the same person as someone else. But it did strike her as unusual that she and Claudia should be daughters of two people who had
met years ago in another country; it seemed a good omen. She asked, ‘Did you also meet my mother?'

Mrs Schuyler paused and then said no: she hadn't had that pleasure.

Beatrice was to remember the small hesitation when a week later she was in a shop with Mlle Dubourg to buy copybooks for the German class. A young man behind the counter was helping the chaperone to decide between different qualities of writing paper. The old woman who ran the shop was already occupied with a girl about five years older than Beatrice; the girl also had an older person with her – a man who was evidently her servant; he was Egyptian, whereas the girl herself had the look neither of an Egyptian, nor a European. Her eyes were light, her hair and skin – in striking contrast – palely brown. She resembled women Beatrice had seen in the south of France – light-complexioned dancers and singers from the West Indies and South America. As the girl turned to go, she looked briefly at Beatrice. The look said that Beatrice wasn't worth considering. She went through the doorway, followed by her servant, who carried all the packages.

The old woman shut the door behind them. She said to Beatrice in French, ‘That was your sister.'

‘I don't have a sister,' Beatrice told her.

‘Maybe you don't,' the old woman muttered, ‘maybe you do.' She started to walk away behind the counter.

Beatrice went after her. ‘I've never seen that girl before in my life,' she said. ‘Who is she?'

The woman pretended that she didn't understand French. When Beatrice changed to Arabic, she turned quickly and went through the curtains at the back of the shop, where the living quarters were.

‘Is something wrong, Beatrice?' Mlle Dubourg asked.

‘Did you see that girl? The one who was in here just a minute ago?'

‘I didn't notice. Why? Have you lost something?'

Beatrice repeated what the old woman had told her. ‘And she went behind there. She doesn't even know me. What did she mean?'

Mlle Dubourg called the young man over to them. But no amount of discussion could persuade him to make his
grandmother
come out again; she was ill, he said: forgetful, her thoughts not always completely collected. She often said things that made no sense. She was old.

The incident troubled Beatrice for days. If she'd been staring pointedly at the other girl, the old woman's remark might conceivably have been a rebuke – a way of saying that one girl was no better than another: all were alike. Such an explanation seemed far-fetched. And anyway, she hadn't been staring. She wanted to talk to someone about it, but she felt that Claudia wasn't the right person to go to. She needed someone who was grown up and who had lived in the city long enough to know who everyone was. Was it possible that her father had been in love with another woman before he'd married her mother? Perhaps if she'd had a sister, or even a brother, the idea wouldn't have made such an impression on her. As it was, her sleep became so disturbed that at last she was summoned to the office of Mme Bonnier, the principal of the school.

She stood by the desk. Madame sat on the other side; she was impeccably dressed, as usual, and looked as if she found life highly enjoyable. She told Beatrice to sit down, asked her the cause of her distress and said that it simply wouldn't do to drift around the schoolrooms, looking like a ghost and falling asleep over her lessons.

Beatrice told her. She described the girl from the shop and said, ‘Do you know who she is?'

Mme Bonnier dismissed the story. The old woman, she said, wasn't right in the head; you wouldn't believe the things people muttered to themselves when they relaxed their concentration – even young, sane people.

‘But who is she?'

The identity of the girl couldn't possibly be of importance, Madame said, because the old woman didn't know what she was talking about.

Mme Bonnier was embarrassed. Years later, Beatrice was to understand the nature and extent of the embarrassment: once
she'd realized that her father had been quite a ladies' man and that he'd know Mme Bonnier, as well as many other women. Beatrice might have had sisters and brothers over half the globe.

But at the time, her attention was trained on one person: the girl in the shop. And her worries were mainly theological. If the girl were a sister, she reasoned, that would mean that her father had been married twice. It followed that the other wife had to be still alive, otherwise the daughter would have stayed with him.

‘And if that's true,' Beatrice said, ‘then in the eyes of the Church, his second marriage, to my mother – you see what I mean? I might be the child of sin. One of us has to be.'

‘Nonsense, Beatrice.'

‘Well, is that girl's mother still living?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then she's the real daughter. And that makes me –'

‘Your father,' Mme Bonnier said, ‘was never married to this girl's mother. Nor, as far as I know, to anyone but your mother. Does that make you feel better?'

‘Of course,' Beatrice said. ‘It's a great relief.'

‘Good. I'm glad to hear it. Now you can get some sleep.'

‘But is it true? Is she my sister?'

‘I've just told you.'

‘No, Madame. You've just told me that they weren't married.'

‘I see. In that case, I must say that to the best of my knowledge, no: she isn't. But her mother is one of those women who's always lived a very free life. So, people gossip about her.'

‘And my father?'

‘I've never heard anyone say a malicious thing about your father. He's always talked of with kindness. This is more the sort of tittle-tattle you'd expect to hear directed against a woman.'

‘It was directed against me. She wanted to hurt me.'

‘You know the kinds of people who gossip,' Mme Bonnier said. ‘And you say she was old. Perhaps she didn't see well. There seemed to her to be two girls in her shop, both of them to her mind looking foreign. Do you understand? There's no great mystery about it.'

Beatrice had once heard her father say that when it was a
matter of something serious, it was always a good idea to get a second opinion. She went to Claudia's mother.

Mrs Schuyler knew the girl as soon as Beatrice described her. ‘Ernestine,' she said. ‘It's a peculiar family. They came here from Brazil. They were running away from something.' She appeared to think that the question had now been answered. She reached for another almond cake. The family was at the dining table for tea; one of the younger boys had broken a leg off the tea table: he'd been jumping on the top, but the parents weren't supposed to find out about that. Beatrice felt honored to be treated so completely as part of the family that she was expected to keep from one member of it the secrets of another.

‘What were they running away from?' she asked.

‘Oh, I don't know.'

‘Something political,' her husband said, getting up from the table. ‘In that part of the world.' He put down his napkin and took his teacup with him into his study.

Mrs Schuyler said that every country had its politics.
However
, in the case of the Cristo-Marquez family it was probably something simpler: debts, or a partnership that had fallen to pieces. ‘There are lots of reasons why people leave a country. If the whole family has to get out, it's liable to be business, I suppose.'

‘Or politics,' Claudia repeated.

‘Yes, but they aren't that kind. The mother's a stay-at-home, the father's reserved and silent. They hardly talk to anyone. You see them out shopping with their servants and they never open their mouths. I don't think anyone in town has ever been inside their house.'

‘Is it a very small house?' Beatrice asked. People who shared a small house with a staff of servants might not have room to ask anyone in.

‘Enormous. Like a palace. One can't imagine what they find to do with themselves. Unless you believe the gossip, of course.'

‘What does the gossip say?'