Black Diamond (20 page)

At the end of the day Alma went back to her room and lay down on the bed. She shut her eyes. The moment had been there and she’d missed it. She thought:
I
was
the
one
who
should
have
said
something.
Why
didn’t
I
tell
her?
I
ought
to
have.
But
I
couldn’t.
I
ought
to
now.
But
I
can’t.
That
was
the
time.
And
I
let
it
go.

*

Bruce had the two girls exactly where he wanted them. They were frustrated and baffled. They’d been used to calling the tune. By the time they realized that he was going out with both of them, and each suspected that he might be sleeping with the other, he was entirely in control of the situation. He denied his complicity, while seeming to enjoy the flattery of accusation. He said, ‘Oh, she’s exaggerating. She’s making it up. She’s jealous. I take her out sometimes because she’s your sister. I feel sorry for her. She’s sort of got an obsession. She says it feels better to talk about it.’

It was like being in a school play again, but doing half a dozen parts at the same time. He had to keep remembering what he’d said to which one.

He was introduced to the parents. Ray made an effort to engage him in conversation about newspaper space and
advertising
. Joanna looked him up and down and smiled slyly. She flirted with him, though not so openly that her husband could see it. Bruce couldn’t make up his mind about whether she’d be an unfaithful wife. He guessed that maybe she would, if she thought she could get away with it, but she might be afraid of her husband. It was possible that Ray too was the type to have somebody else on the side, but if so, it wouldn’t be serious; you could see that he was crazy about Joanna. And he was full of plans and schemes and deals that kept him busy. He’d probably never had much time to spare for the daughters; he was proud of the way they both looked, but Bruce didn’t think he’d have any idea that they weren’t pure as lilies and actually hadn’t been that way for a couple of years.

Bruce gave Joanna a sympathetic look as she complained about the state of the garden. He said that if she didn’t know what to
do about the laurel bushes at the end of the path by the trees, he’d take a look at them: he wasn’t an expert, but he’d picked up quite a lot of information while he was working on people’s lawns.

‘Oh, we have a man for all that,’ she said dismissively.

‘Well, tell him they’re dying, then. It isn’t just the weather. The boxwood bushes don’t look too hot, either, and they’re American box, aren’t they?’

Her eyebrows rose. She looked utterly disdainful. He didn’t know how he’d offended her, but he had. He’d also made her interested in him, he could tell. So, the other part didn’t matter.

He smiled pleasantly and said, ‘Just a suggestion. It’s your garden.’

*

After closing time Alma went back to the library to look for a letter that she thought she’d left there. She searched all around the places where she’d been doing the reshelving downstairs, then she walked up to the gallery.

The late afternoon sun threw a pattern of bars down from the upper railings to the stairs she was climbing. Her footsteps echoed in the empty building. She thought how strange sound was: a voice or a step could be soft, yet the effect of it was to touch everything. Even a breath could be heard, if you were listening for it, from one end of a building to the other.

The stairs creaked. When she reached the top, she crossed to the point farthest away from the front door downstairs. From where she stood, she could see the two staircases leading down on either side and, beyond them, the opposite wall like the other half of an egg: built in a curve similar to the one she stood against. All the wall was lined with book-filled shelves, but in front of her and on the right-hand side, windows let the sun in. Motes moved soundlessly along the trails of light. Now that everything had been closed and locked for the night, the atmosphere was becoming slightly stuffy.

She found it hard to imagine what would have been there a century before. Perhaps there had been a ballroom with a
balcony. It seemed unlikely that a private gentleman would have made provision for such an extensive library.

She turned to the wall, where she’d been standing earlier in the day. There were the three stray books she’d meant to check and, under them, the letter from Merle. She pulled the letter out from underneath. As she did so, the floorboards at the far end of the gallery began to squeal. She turned around, the letter in her hand. She stared across at the windows.

There was nothing. But the wood continued to make
intermittent
, small noises. She put the letter into her pocket and waited. She was about to head for the stairs when the sounds changed from single, isolated noises to a pattern. Clusters of tapping came from the floorboards at the opposite end of the oval; they moved in bunches, like spurts of rain.

Arnie Lodz, who taught science to the seventh graders, had a theory about the library and its ghost. Long before he’d been told what he might expect to see, he’d come across an apparition. Naturally, he wasn’t discounting the possibility that indirect influence had prepared him. First of all, he’d heard a regular step that sounded like someone walking in high-heeled boots or shoes. At the same time there had been a rustling and swishing sound as of a long skirt in motion. His explanation of the phenomenon cited temperature, displacement of weight, the drop and warp of timbers. He also suspected the proportions of the solid parts of the structure compared with the spaces in between. Everyone who had ever lived in an old house, he said, knew about the noises you could hear at night from the expansion or contraction of the wood.

Arnie had taken measurements in the gallery, had removed samples of wood and plaster, had noted the temperature at different times of the day and night. He’d studied the moisture level and he’d rigged up an apparatus for detecting any airwaves that might be expelled from the walls or floorboards as changes took place within them. In addition to all that, he’d left a sensitive recorder in the building overnight. But none of his researches bore fruit. He’d never figured out where the
manifestation
– whatever it was – had its source, nor along what lines it
proceeded. And he’d never encountered the ghost again. ‘If it weren’t for the fact that I’d actually seen the thing myself,’ he’d told Alma, ‘I’d say the origin of it is that people know it’s supposed to be there.’

Her eye traveled from the windows to the floor and back to the extreme end of the gallery. She waited.

The sounds began again. As before, they started next to the far windows, along the floor: the stepping, the whispering rustle and the patter of little creaks. But this time they seemed to be coordinated, so that as she listened, the uneven bursts fell into a forward-winding scheme almost like something that might issue from a slow, uncertain worker at a typewriter, but more akin to lines of music being tapped out with slight variations at every repeat.

She was about to walk forward to investigate, when it was as if she’d been anticipated: the repetitive snapping and creaking moved from the end of the gallery and began to follow the curve of the bannisters along the right side of the oval. As they approached the place where she stood, they grew louder and faster, hammering. She turned her head to the right. She tried to trace the drumming course of the noise along the railing, but her eye was caught by something above – a movement in the air.

It was in a hurry, coming at her fast, but she couldn’t understand what it was; it seemed to be a large smear or a wave or a knot of movement, or as if something had gone wrong with her eyes.

Her mouth opened, her hands gripped the edge of the shelf to her right. The noises came straight up to her, almost to her feet and, as they stopped, the wavelike bundle of smudges unraveled and rolled away into nothing. It was as if the air were coming apart.

The light in the library appeared to settle itself at a lower pitch. Everything looked normal. Whatever it was, had gone. And as soon as she realized that it was over, she knew that what had happened was so strange that it was impossible.

God,
she thought,
what
was
it
?
It wasn’t a person, so it couldn’t have been a ghost. It was like seeing an eclipse, if you didn’t
know what one was; if you didn’t realize that it was natural, you’d be frightened.

But perhaps there wasn’t any explanation.

* * *

Alma was in the middle of taking the sixth graders through the scrubland behind the science lab, when a senior named Muriel started to shout her name from the paintshop steps. The girls and boys had their notebooks out to write down descriptions of insects and plants; a boy called Roger had even brought a magnifying glass with him, although he and his friends were using it to look into each other’s noses and ears; before being warned, they’d tried to light a fire with it.

Alma appointed a bossy girl to look after things. She hurried to Muriel, who said that there was a phone call from her father. She ran.

Elton told her that Bess had had a heart attack and had been taken to the hospital: she’d had another, minor one when she arrived there. He wanted Alma to come home. He also wanted to know if she had Bruce’s telephone number, because it didn’t seem to be anywhere in the house. She told him that she was coming straight away and that she’d call Bruce for him.

She found Rose, who began to organize the taxi, the packing and the money, so that there would be no need for Alma to waste time by going back to her room.

She telephoned Bruce. He answered, but she didn’t recognize his voice. ‘I’ d like to speak to Mr Manson,’ she said. That was the name he’d chosen for his locked mailbox.

‘How did you get this number?’ he asked. He hadn’t
recognized
her, either. He sounded furious.

‘Bud,’ she said, ‘it’s Sissy. It’s an emergency.’ She told him about Bess and Elton. She said that he’d be able to get home before she could, even if she caught a flight.

‘I can’t,’ he told her.

‘You’ve got to.’

‘I just can’t, Alma. You go, and hold the fort for me.’

‘She may die.’

‘If she does, there’s nothing I can do about it by being there.’

‘She’s had two heart attacks.’

‘I’ve got to go now,’ he said. ‘Call me when you get there. Goodbye.’ He hung up.

She telephoned the airport. There were cancellations because of fog; what flights there were had been delayed. She wouldn’t be able to fly direct in any case: all the seats were booked. She’d have to take a bus and try to catch a plane farther along the line. At least she’d be on her way, heading east.

Rose put her into a cab and told her not to worry: the library would be all right, the school would hold her salary. ‘We’ll be thinking of you,’ she said.

The moment Alma was on the bus, she took a pill to calm herself down. It didn’t work; it didn’t even get rid of the headache she had, but after an hour she fell asleep. She dreamt that she had a quarrel with Bruce. He was sitting next to her in the bus, telling her that she had to make excuses for him because that was her job. She started to cry with hopelessness and vexation. She told him it was bad enough that he didn’t love her, but to force her to lie to somebody he ought to love, was worse. He said, ‘You’ve got to,’ and she answered, ‘I can’t.’ Then he told her, as if in punishment, ‘I’ve got to go now,’ and he
disappeared
. At that moment the bus swung sideways, crashed and turned over. The windows changed into partly emptied spaces of white granules, like cracked sheets of ice. People screamed and coughed. A thick, dark smoke began to fill the tangled interior, pouring past her and out of the lacy, fragmented windows. Someone tried to climb over her. She hit and kicked, struggling to get ahead, until at last she pulled herself through and fell on to the road. She still had her coat and shoulderbag clutched in one hand.

She ran along the road. All she could think of was that she had to get to the hospital and now she was late. It was like those dreams where you thought you were either going to miss something important, or else you wouldn’t be able to stop
something terrible from happening: you were afraid, all the time, that you wouldn’t get there soon enough.

The roadway was in confusion; cars were stopping and traffic was building up. She saw a police car and ran to it. The driver honked the horn at her. He almost drove into her. Both men inside screwed down their windows and started to shout at her, to get out of the way. She yelled back at them, saying that she had to get to the airport because her mother was in the hospital. ‘You’re blocking the road,’ the driver told her. She said that if they didn’t get her to the airport, she was never, never going to buy another ticket to the policemen’s ball and, besides, she’d taken down the number on their license plate. The one in the passenger seat said, ‘I guess you’d better get in, otherwise Murphy here won’t have anybody to dance with this year.’ He opened the door. She got in. The driver said, ‘Christ Jesus, Frank.’ His friend told him, ‘Have a heart.’ He explained to her that they had to stay at the scene of the accident, but they’d call another car for her and it would take her to the airport.

She waited. Then she was in the car; and right after that, at the airport. She stood at the counter. Once again, people tried to get in her way. Some of them kept asking her if she was all right. She told everybody about having to get to the hospital. Finally they let her have the boarding pass. The next thing was a scene where she was standing in front of a mirror. Her blouse was ripped and covered in blood and her face was streaked with dirt. Near the hairline, on a level with her ear, she had a small cut that had bled copiously. A woman in a uniform put a bandage over the cut and cleaned the rest of her face. Alma kept jerking away. ‘I have to get to my mother,’ she said. She looked into the mirror, where she saw herself getting into the bus that was driving out to the plane. Bruce was still sitting next to her. ‘Look,’ he said. Right in front of them a plane turned sideways and hit the wing of another plane.
Not
again,
she thought. The bus swerved and braked. The driver backed up. He drove out on to the grass and stopped. Alma could see ambulances going past. Bruce said again, ‘I have to go now.’ She asked, ‘Why?’ ‘They’re coming to take me away,’ he told her. When she looked, he was gone, just
like the other time. She turned back and peered at the window. She was in the plane. The man next to her said, ‘You’re not very talkative.’ She closed her eyes. The man said, ‘Not very friendly, are you?’