Black Diamond Read online

  ‘We do need to do some research‚’ he said. ‘Find a couple of new places.’

  ‘We can’t spare the time. We’d need lots of … we’d need weeks. Can you see Rosa in charge for that long?’

  ‘The Stones might help out for a while.’

  ‘And you know what they’d expect in return. They want our list. If they got their hands on that, we could say goodbye to the business. I don’t just mean what they got out of Mr Pettifer.’

  ‘I’m going to put in for it anyway. It can’t hurt.’

  ‘That’s right. We might win a fun-filled holiday in Butte, Montana.’

  ‘With two thousand extra, you could come, too.’

  ‘Too?’

  ‘Two thousand. That’s what it says. What we should really do is go over our itinerary. I wish people would let us know how things went.’

  ‘It’s like everything else,’ she said. ‘Who’s going to spend the time on it? People don’t like writing letters. Except cranks.’

  ‘If they send the money, would you come along?’

  ‘We can’t both leave the office at the same time.’

  ‘For a week, we could. Just.’

  ‘What could we do in a week?’

  ‘We could go over the part of the British tour we never got to. Wouldn’t you like that?’

  ‘Well, sure. I guess.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘That’s settled.’

  Beth still wasn’t certain, but since she thought nothing was ever going to come of the idea, she didn’t say anything.

  It was her day to have lunch with Faye. Faye worked in the magazine office a few doors away. Ella, Beth’s other lunchtime crony, was at the opposite end of the shopping mall. Beth had once tried to introduce them to each other; everything had seemed to go well, but the next time she suggested a meeting, Ella and Faye complained so much about the distance, the dates, the pressure of work, that she knew it hadn’t been a success. So, she saw them separately, which took twice as much time. That was another thing, she realized: she’d been trying to get her two friends together in order to save herself an hour or two.

  For three years, until the crisis in Ella’s life, Beth used to see her for a coffee break in the afternoons. Ella now needed that time for what she called ‘contemplation’ and what Alan described as ‘goofing off’. Ella’s life had been irreversibly altered on the day she’d lost her Filofax. She’d had a breakdown. Her doctor had referred her to a psychiatrist and a time-management consultant, but neither one had been able to help her. Someone – an aunt, or some other relative – had advised her to pray. Ella did better than that; she went on a pilgrimage. She got on a plane to Venice, took the train to Padua and joined the crowd of people waiting to beg St Anthony to find things, or people, they had lost. She moved with the others to the left of the silver altar, filed past the stone carvings that illustrated the miracles worked by the saint in his lifetime, and at last reached out, put her hand on the casket and asked him to get her Filofax back.

  When Beth told the story, Alan said, ‘I can see it coming: she got home and there it was, right where she’d left it.’

  ‘No, she really had lost it. But when she got home, there was a package waiting for her. Somebody’d found it and mailed it back.’

  ‘St Anthony, no doubt,’ he said. He thought Ella was crazed and affected. To Beth, the story seemed a little zany but it made perfect sense. If there were such things as saints, no task could be too enormous for them, no request so silly that it was unimportant: they could do anything.

  He said, ‘Why would a saint bother about something so trivial?’

  ‘Why not? For a saint, a big favor would be easy. So, a little one wouldn’t be any trouble at all. I think you could also count on his tolerance of human folly and petty-mindedness. It wouldn’t be any skin off his back to grant something really idiotic. If you accept the basic principle –’

  ‘Well, if you accept that, you’re beyond hope to begin with.’

  ‘Maybe‚’ she said, meaning that she didn’t agree. It wasn’t surprising to her that ever since Ella had had her Filofax restored to her, she’d been preoccupied by questions of religion; she hadn’t gone so far as to take instruction, but she’d begun to spend a lot of time reading, meditating and trying to pray, which – she told Beth – wasn’t so easy as you might think. It took discipline. It was hard work. The afternoon break was no good any more. Ella became another lunch time friend, like Faye.

  On three days of the week, Beth would usually stay in the office through the lunch break. Rosa, their secretary, would run around the corner to buy her a sandwich from the delicatessen. Occasionally Beth would say to Rosa that this was going to be a diet day. She never made it past two-thirty. Rosa didn’t mind the extra trip; she was on good terms with one of the boys behind the counter.

  Their office was in an arcade, one of four that radiated from a central area where trees in tubs surrounded a large fountain. Between the trees there were benches. It was a pleasant spot for people to sit in after they’d done some shopping and were wondering where to go next. It was also a meeting place. The planners of the mall had originally called the center a piazza; when most shoppers were making an effort to get the name right, they’d come up with the word ‘pizza’, although normally everybody just said, ‘By the fountain.’

  You were doing all right to have an office in one of the arcades near the fountain. The only trouble with the location was that a customer who tried to find you for the first time could get mixed up between the four arcades, which looked alike: they had been given the names of the four main points of the compass, but who knew one direction from another? Left and right were fairly easy for most people to remember, but you couldn’t expect everyone to race outside in order to check where the sun was; and anyway, that depended on something else, too. A mapmaker or a navigator would know about directions. Ordinary shoppers didn’t. They got lost. That was how Beth had met Ella, who had ended up at the office after her first morning in the mall. ‘Where am I?’ she’d said, like someone coming out of a faint.

  The great advantages of the mall were for those who worked there. Almost all the people Beth thought of as her friends were her neighbors at work. In fact, it seemed to her that the mall was really the neighborhood where she lived. The house that she and Alan owned was just for sleeping in and for giving parties.

  She wouldn’t mind getting away from the house for a while. She wouldn’t mind leaving everything for a week.

  As she picked up her tunafish sandwich, she asked Faye, ‘Have you and Hutch had one of those prize envelopes offering you two thousand dollars to travel with?’

  ‘No. Wish we had. What is it – something to do with a rival firm?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ She bit in and munched, thinking that she’d have to ask Alan about that: it hadn’t occurred to her. ‘As far as I know, it’s just another one of those win-a-million things.’

  ‘But if you got the money, you’d go, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘You bet. I wasn’t so sure this morning at breakfast, but I am now. We both need a break. And I need some time to think about things. We just keep going and going.’

  ‘You love it.’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘In every way. You thrive on it.’

  ‘But it’s taken over. I’m beginning to suspect that it’s done something bad to me. I think maybe Alan would like to get out, too. At least – well. I don’t know. We don’t have time to talk about anything at all any more.’

  ‘That sounds like a good time to take a vacation. You two should read some of your little leaflets.’

  ‘Aren’t they brilliant?’

  ‘You’ll have a great time.’

  ‘We haven’t won it yet.’

  ‘Don’t wait to win anything. Just go.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with you, Faye. You encourage my weaknesses. Act now, think later.’

  ‘It’s a good idea, isn’t it? You could afford a week off.’<
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  ‘Afford, sure. It isn’t a question of the money. Not really. It’s the time, as usual. The thing is – I have the feeling that if I went, I might not come back. I’ve been feeling that way for a long while.’

  ‘Something wrong at work?’

  ‘Nothing’s ever wrong at work. That’s the point. The work is always just great. It’s a substitute for everything else. I’m beginning to think it’s my excuse for not living my life.’

  ‘Oh wow, Elizabeth. Let me write that one down.’

  ‘You know what I mean. It’s everything; not just that we don’t have kids. Well, that’s the main thing. I realized a few months ago, last year: I kind of feel I’ve left it too late.’

  ‘What are you talking about? You’re still in your twenties, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, not quite.’ She wasn’t prepared to say anything more exact, unless Faye spoke first. From the beginning of their acquaintance it had been obvious that Faye didn’t want any questions asked about her age; or, for that matter, about her first husband, her daughter’s experience at the boarding school they’d sent her to, or about anything at all connected with Trenton, New Jersey. ‘You know what I mean,’ Beth told her. ‘I’ve sort of run out of steam. I’ve put it all into the agency. Now I couldn’t start a family unless I gave up work. But that’s the one thing that keeps me going. It’s fun.’

  ‘It’s fun, but it’s killing you. I see.’

  ‘I guess I’m what they call a workaholic. Alan’s the same.’

  ‘Does he want to go on this trip?’

  ‘He was the one who suggested it. He’s sending in the form.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You could be right, you know. Maybe some other travel company’s doing a promotion. I’d better ask around.’

  They said goodbye at the fountain. Beth turned off into her arcade. The clock in the jeweler’s window caught her eye. She began to hurry.

  As she opened the agency door, Alan came out, saying, ‘Where were you? I’ve got to get over to Meyerson’s.’ He ran off, not looking back.

  She sat down at her desk and reached for the telephone. She didn’t stop working until four o’clock, when she asked Rosa to go across the arcade for some coffee. She stretched in her chair and yawned. It had been a good afternoon.

  The pleasure she took in describing places was founded on her need to communicate enthusiasm. You couldn’t call her exaggeration falsehood; it was a slight emphasis in the process of persuading and convincing someone about the fictions she already believed in. It wouldn’t be right to say that her work required her to engage in deliberate acts of dishonesty. She simply tried to get prospective clients into the right mood: to create an atmosphere. If people took off on their holidays with a few skilfully devised impressions in mind, they were pretty well certain to find them justified. That wasn’t doing anything wrong. It was smart salesmanship backing a worthwhile product – that was what Alan said.

  She picked up the receiver again and punched the buttons for the Stones’ number. The Stones were their friends but it was a business friendship, not personal. A personal friendship might be like marriage, whereas this particular business friendship was like having a lover who lied and cheated and was unfaithful with friends and enemies, yet who managed to remain so attractive and charming in other ways, so desirable, that one didn’t want to break off the affair. They liked the Stones and they didn’t trust them an inch. Several times Pete and Marcie Stone had tried to poach customers away from them. They were, Beth believed, the kind of people her grandmother had once described to her: they’d come to dinner and try to hire your cook out from under you. Once or twice Alan had done things back to them, just to show that he and Beth weren’t pushovers. There was no point in ending the friendship, as long as the others kept within bounds; Marcie and Pete had shown that they could be useful people to know. On the other hand, one more outrageous stunt like the one with Mr Pettifer, and Alan and Beth would cut them adrift.

  She got Marcie at the other end of the line. They talked about the new airline prices and Beth asked about the two-thousand-dollar offer.

  Marcie said, ‘It’s news to me. But I’ll ask around.’

  ‘I was thinking: it might be nice to get away for a week anyhow. We could check out the places they never bother to tell us about.’

  ‘Hey, I got news about that. I had a customer drop in. Two of them – husband and wife.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Honest to God. Five years in the travel business and these are the first people that ever came back to tell us what the trip was like. When you see them again, they never stop to talk – they just ask how much it’s going to cost to go somewhere else. Nobody’s ever got a spare minute. God, they were so nice. I nearly cried. They said they just wanted to thank us, because they’d had such a good time.’

  ‘I hope you asked them a lot of questions.’

  ‘I certainly did. And there were a few changes I thought I’d pass on to you: opening times at a couple of country houses, restaurant hours – that kind of thing. It was the south of England, including London, and over to Paris and Rome.’

  ‘We’d love any information,’ Beth said. She thought Marcie must be feeling guilty about wangling Mr Pettifer’s little list away from him.

  ‘Okay. I’ll send you a copy of what we’ve got. And if you’re taking a trip, let us know what you find out, hm?’

  ‘Sure,’ Beth promised. ‘Unless we have such a good time that we just never come back.’

  After she’d hung up, she thought, I’ve said something like that before: today, at lunch. When I was talking to Faye.

  Rosa brought some hazelnut cookies with the coffee. The delicatessen was giving them away as a special, introductory offer. She had a big bag of them and she was chewing on one as she came in. Beth said, ‘Don’t let them near me.’ Rosa tried to break her down, but she wouldn’t be tempted. She concentrated on work until closing time.

  *

  She sat in the rush-hour traffic with Alan and blanked out a little, while he complained about Meyerson’s. They were always having trouble with the brochure, but they never did anything about it. There weren’t any other printers around who could do a good job. It was specialized work. Their only consolation was that half of the other agencies in the vicinity used Meyerson’s, so they were all in the same boat.

  When he’d talked everything out of his system and then done the paraphrase, Beth told him about her afternoon phone call.

  He’d been thinking all day about a trip, he said. ‘I think we should go anyway. Cassie could take over for a while. She’s always said she’d be happy to.’

  ‘But it might not be a good time for her.’

  ‘I don’t want Pete and Marcie in there, not for a hundred peace-offerings.’

  ‘Why don’t we just close for a week? We could send out a leaflet to everybody.’

  Alan thought the idea was impossible. Cassie was related to his brother-in-law and was trustworthy. She and Rosa could keep things running: he thought so until they got through the traffic, reached home and sat down to cocktails. He thought so until well into the first bourbon; but by the end of his second drink, he’d changed his mind. ‘We’ll wait a week,’ he suggested, ‘to find out if we’ve won the prize.’

  ‘Nobody wins those prizes.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  He made the airline reservations for two on the transatlantic flight; it left in the evening and arrived in England early in the morning, London time, which would still be night for them. He bought himself a new suitcase. She tapped out a letter on the computer, printed out stacks of copies and gave them to Rosa. Then she had a quick word with the people next door, before running in to town to buy a new raincoat. While she was hanging the coat up in the front hall closet, she saw Alan’s suitcase and decided that it was just the kind of thing she needed. The next morning she went out and bought one, to find on her return that he – having admired her new raincoat on its
hanger – had gone shopping again and had found a coat just like it for himself. ‘We ought to have done everything together‚’ she told him. ‘We’d have saved a lot of time.’

  He said, ‘I’m looking forward to this. We should have taken a trip a long time ago. I think I was in a rut.’

  ‘And I was in something worse. I didn’t realize until a few days back. I’d lost hope.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when we’re away from everything.’

  ‘Let me take you away from all this,’ he said, throwing an arm around her.

  The day before they were set to fly out, a check came through from the prize people. There were no stipulations, no strings attached.

  ‘See?’ he said. ‘I was right.’

  The check was issued by an organization called United Holdings and Travel Co. They’d never heard of it. Beth picked up the brochure that came with the letter of congratulation. She flipped through the pages, saying, ‘I’d like to know who their printers are. Look at the quality of the pictures. Isn’t that incredible – color reproduction like that? This is as good as one of those art magazines.’ She reached the section where, at last, they found the catch. She read out the passage: Prizewinners who apply for the Finborg weekend will automatically receive a further one thousand dollars.

  ‘It’s in the letter, too,’ Alan said. ‘You agree to go there, all the expenses are paid, they give you the round-trip ticket from whatever city you name, and you’ve got a luxury weekend in this top-notch castle full of swimming pools and gourmet cooking. It’s a promotional gimmick. I guess they’ve just converted it.’