Black Diamond (8 page)

She made the journey anyway. How could she have stayed at home, when her father might be anywhere at all, and she wouldn't know about it? He could have written to her about plans to go on an expedition: it wasn't unknown for letters to be lost or delayed for months. He could be in danger, while some petty bureaucrat was entering his name in the wrong set of records. She remembered her father himself telling her that an acquaintance of his had had to travel all over the world as Mr Brown Gray simply because a clerk somewhere hadn't known how to copy out the information in his papers, according to which his hair was brown and his eyes gray.

As she moved from country to country, her father's friends came to greet her; like cities on a map, they were dotted across the great distances she had to go. And when she neared the end of her journey, two of them, an uncle and nephew named Hoffmann, took on the local and foreign officials while she stood or sat silent nearby. Sometimes she felt compelled to interrupt, especially as people seemed to keep changing their stories. Her father, she was told, might not have been exactly ill; he might actually have been poisoned – that is, murdered. There was a woman in the case: more than one woman. And that always made for danger.

‘This is ridiculous‚' she whispered to the Hoffmann uncle. ‘My father was used to having all sorts of friendships and so on. He never left anyone feeling resentful or unhappy.'

‘Perhaps a man who was a rival?'

‘Much more likely to have been a poor cook,' she said. Then, feeling just like Mrs Schuyler, she asked for information about the servants.

His household had loved and admired him. According to them, he'd had a fever. One of them – a superstitious man – suspected that the professor had caught the disease from
something
he'd found when he was digging up a grave: everyone knew that it was forbidden to disturb the dead.

She asked where her father had been buried. They were shown to a small cemetery for Christian Europeans. The
Hoffmanns
stood on either side of her, in case the emotion or the climate should prove too much for her. She found it impossible to believe that her father was there, in that space of earth. Could they have buried someone else by mistake? She wanted to ask to see him – just to be sure. But that would be impractical as well as shocking. Everyone agreed that the thing had happened and that he was there. Friends of friends had been at the funeral. She simply found it against the nature of the world as she knew it that he should suddenly not be there for her to talk to or to write to.

On the return journey she began to believe in his death. Everyone she had met going out tried to comfort her on the way back. So many people had loved him. It made her feel closer to
him to hear them talk, and yet it also persuaded her to accept the fact that he was dead.

When she got to Switzerland there were two letters waiting for her, from him. They were just like his usual letters, with no hint of bad feeling among his acquaintance or in the household.

She began to go through his papers, which were neatly arranged, as always. She kept herself busy. There were the clothes to be given away, the boxes of papers to be gone through: letters from his colleagues, his friends, and from her. All the letters from her childhood were there – every note she'd sent him from her schools in Egypt, France and Italy.

She used to wake in the night, choking with tears, bawling. Sometimes it was as if she were in the middle of a storm. The first time it happened, her cook, Maria, ran up the stairs to pound on her door. Beatrice shouted for her to go away; the next day she said that she was grateful for the kind thought but that since nothing could help, it was better to ignore these outbursts. She didn't try to stop.

For months she carried on mental talks with him. At times they became so real to her, she sometimes imagined that she could hear his voice. Perhaps if her mother hadn't died early, there would have been another strong influence in her life. As it was, although she had loved her mother dearly and with a particular kind of love that no other person she'd met could evoke from her, her father had always been at the center of her life. He had shaped her interests, passed on his knowledge and talents to her, yet he'd given her the freedom to leave, if she wanted to. Despite the fact that she had remained an unmarried daughter, she led a more liberal life on her own than any married woman she knew, whether happy or not. Her father wouldn't have minded if she'd wanted to travel to a different country, visit friends for long periods, spend her time in some new pursuit, or get married and move away. They'd known each other well enough for him not to have to explain that, as before, he'd speak out against any admirer of hers whom he considered unsuitable; and for her not to have to say that she sometimes felt guilty about
her comfortable life, knowing how much he'd have loved to have grandchildren.

She missed him all the time. For years – long after his death – as soon as she thought of him, his presence was with her. She understood how it was that many people became religious after a bereavement: it was because they were impelled by an urge to reach the other person again. In her case, she grew less religious. The act of prayer had become a process of having conversations with herself and her memory of her father. She didn't feel that she was developing eccentric habits – other people told her how they caught themselves thinking of what her father would say to such-and-such, and how dear he still was to them, how clearly recalled. She loved to hear people talk about him, especially if they were old friends who had known him before she was born, or even before he was married.

Sometimes she would remember, with a dreamlike vividness and immediacy, a phrase he used to favor, the way he'd looked at certain times, the sound of his chair scraping back over the floorboards as he stood up from his desk. It was as if in her mind she were once more writing him letters. The ancient Egyptians, he'd told her, used to write letters to the dead. They'd put up a statue of the departed person and inscribe the letter on the front. Usually the survivors wanted the dead to intercede; to help them in some way. Occasionally the letter was an accusation, saying: ‘Why are you causing me such bad luck, when I was always good to you?' Unhappiness, they believed, always had a cause. And usually the cause was witchcraft by other people, dead or alive. Beatrice's father had shown her one of the letter-statues when she was still a child. She had immediately realized that the writing was really for the living, not the dead, who couldn't answer. If the dead had been able to do anything, her mother would have spoken to her from wherever she had gone to.

*

One day while she was in Rome on a visit to the Arnoldi family, she looked up Dr Santini. His son had been one of her father's old schoolfriends. At the time of her father's death, the son had
written to her; a year afterwards, when the son was killed in an excavation, she had had to write to the old man. She wouldn't have gone to see him, except that his name came up and Signora Arnoldi said, ‘I hear he's dying.'

She sent a letter first, and was invited. The professor lived in a part of town she hadn't seen for many years. The house was large, underlit and cold. It had abundant tile decoration, some marble, dark wood paneling and many tarnished silver wall sconces adorned with ugly human figures. Three maids stood in the hallway to greet her. They were dressed in baggy skirts and shawls. For all she knew, they might have been relatives. The one who struggled up the staircase in front of her screamed down to another one near the kitchen entrance to get the tea ready.

The old man was delighted to see her. He said that he remembered her father as a young boy: when he'd come to visit his son, Giorgio, at their cousin's house on the island. The two boys had been up to all sorts of tricks. They were always inventing games and stories; her father, even then, was
fascinated
by the past. But he was also a boy who liked to play outdoors – not at all the bookworm type. Dr Santini could remember him and Giorgio catching the big, hard-shelled beetles they used to have on the estate: you could pick up any beetle easily while it fed on grapes or flowers – tie a thread around the middle of its body, and walk around with it that way. The beetle would fly at the end of the thread and make a loud, whirring sound like a bumblebee. What the children liked best about the game was the noise the beetles made, but the creatures were also wonderful to look at – black on the underside and on top a bright, emerald green that changed in the sun to gold. He could remember seeing her father and Giorgio – his son, Giorgio – walking down the path side by side, and their beetles flying above on strings. Everyone had loved her father. It was a pleasure when he came to stay.

‘And his mother,' the old man continued, ‘your grandmother; sometimes we'd see her. She was the most beautiful woman I've ever met. Did you know that?'

Beatrice said no, she hadn't known.

One of the maids brought tea and propped the doctor higher in his bed. He went on to talk about his own childhood and also asked about her life. She told him that at the moment she had to decide what to do with her father's collection. Some of it would go to museums. ‘And I ought to sell the rest, I suppose. All those things should be in a place where they can be seen. Where people can learn from them.'

‘And you must get married,' he said. ‘Don't smile. I can still see well enough to tell what expressions people have.'

‘If that's meant to happen –' she began.

‘You shouldn't wait. I waited for too many things. Sometimes there isn't another chance.'

‘But sometimes it doesn't matter. I'd rather be the way I am than the way I might have become if I'd married the first man who asked me.'

The doctor shook his head. He said that he'd probably been spoiled: he'd always had a large family around him and of course, he knew, it was the women who had to do the work in the house. But if you outlived all your family, it made you wonder what sense there was in anything. He blamed the French, for not providing adequate supports for the higher trenches on the site, so that when it rained the mudslide came down all in a flash and buried his son. It was a matter of seconds; nothing could be done for him. ‘This tea tastes bitter,' he said.

Everything tasted bitter when you were sick. Her father might have voiced the same sort of complaint, and that could have given rise to the rumors about poison.

She stood up, brought the sugar to him and offered to spoon some crystals into his cup. He asked her to take the cup away, which she did. And soon after that – seeing that he was tired and wanted to think about his son – she left.

She went to his funeral. She would have gone anyway out of respect, but the fact that she hadn't been able to attend any last ceremony for her father made her want to be there for her own sake too. Vittoria Arnoldi accompanied her. They, and the maids, were the only women. All the other mourners were old
men. Vittoria said she thought that they were probably part of the archaeological faculty of the university; unless, she added casually, they were something it had dug up. Beatrice slapped a handkerchief to her face and exploded into giggles. For several minutes she fought against hysteria. She hadn't known anything like it since her schooldays. Fortunately the handkerchief was large enough so that everyone would assume her to be weeping. Vittoria, having caused the trouble, remained unaffected, and unrepentant afterwards.

The lawyers sent Beatrice a letter to say that the doctor had left her a picture, which she could come to collect. She imagined that it would be something to do with her father or perhaps with the house where he and Giorgio had spent their school holidays. But a note on the package she was handed said:
This
is
your
grandmother.
She
was
more
beautiful
than
her
picture.
The portrait was in pen and ink, the face lovely, and the attitude so natural and modern that if it hadn't been for the arrangement of the hair and the set of the rakish little hat – both in the style of another age – it might have been of someone who was still alive. There was no resemblance to her father, nor to anyone else, as far as Beatrice could see. She was so pleased with the picture that for a long while she didn't ask herself how the doctor should have come to have it in his possession. It was possible, of course, that her father had given it to him. And while she was still wondering about that, she thought again how strange it was that, enigmatic as these lives were to her, they were all on one side of the family. She still knew nothing about her mother's people, not even where they had orginally come from. The parent about whom she kept finding out unusual facts was the one she already knew. Her mother, never known, could not be mysterious. Her mother had become a being she recognized emblematically: an
unalterable
, undifferentiated presence, stationed in another place, reaching her from another time; always the same. Her father had become the mysterious one: more could be known about him; more of his life revealed by other people.

Signora Arnoldi admired the grandmother's portrait so
extravagantly
that she asked for permission to have it copied. And
when the work was done and she held it in her hands, she said jokingly, ‘Who would ever have thought it of old Santini?'

‘Thought what?' Beatrice asked.

‘That he'd nurse a hopeless longing for years. He always seemed such a dry old fellow.'

Beatrice wanted to say that there was no proof of any longing, hopeless or otherwise, on anyone's part and that this was just gossip again; but since Signora Arnoldi had hit on the same suspicion she'd had herself, she let it go.

*

That summer in Switzerland she hired a young student named Ernst to help her with the recataloguing of her father's library. She also made preparations to sell most of the Greek and Roman sculpture and the larger objects from ancient Egypt. Some of them were very large indeed. Even statues smaller than life-size required the kind of lifting gear normally found only among the loading equipment in a harbor town.