When they were near the end of the trail through the woods, Estella led the porter off the path toward the lake, and they found themselves on the sandy beach. There was no moon and the black sky was full of stars. They stood listening to the sound of waves lapping the shore, and she was not surprised when Eugene pulled her to him and kissed her full on the mouth. Before she knew it she was dropping her canvas pack to the ground, letting him unzip her jacket, slip her cotton blouse out of its tuck in her jeans, and slide his hands up her back, against her bare skin. She thought perhaps she should push him away, but then she thought, What the hell, I’m thirty-one years old, why not? Instead of stopping him, she pulled his cap from his head and tossed it onto the beach, and then led him into the shelter and darkness of a sand embankment that had been created by the eroded roots of an old spruce tree. She grabbed a tree root above her head to keep from slipping down into the sand as Eugene tugged at her jeans and pressed her up against the bank.
She wanted to laugh—surely this was funny?—but she was too uncertain of the rules to risk it. But it was funny, the two of them pretending to be hidden in a spot that she knew was wide open in daylight, doing this with the other Diamonds barely out of sight, unpacking and putting children to bed. She hung on to the tree root and tried not to laugh out loud. The little moans Eugene emitted with his thrusts matched the rhythm of their steps along the railway tracks—thrust thrust, oh, thrust thrust, oh—and when it all came to a crescendo and he stopped moving, Estella was no longer able to stifle the laughter. She had sand in her eyes, her hair, everywhere, and she was clinging to a spruce tree with her clothes half off—her blouse and bra hanging from one arm, and her jeans around her ankles, prevented by her boots from coming off altogether.
Eugene appeared to agree that it was funny. He bumped his head on the root when he tried to stand, and they both laughed at the absurdity as he stood rubbing his head and trying to hike up his pants and his underwear. Then he turned away from her to get himself in order again, and she got her blouse and her jacket back on, and she held her head upside down and tried to shake the sand out of her hair. She zipped up her jacket just as Eugene found his cap and adjusted it on his head.
When they were both out from under the tree and standing on the beach again, he said, “That was a pleasant enough end to a long walk.”
She slipped her canvas pack on her back and said, “I doubt I’ll forget it, if that’s what you mean.”
“I guess I should get you back,” he said. “They’ll be wondering where you are.”
She pointed over the embankment toward the cottages and said, “We’re just up there. No need to walk with me. My family is a nosy bunch.”
He didn’t argue. “Well, good night then,” he said, and he walked away down the beach. He began to whistle, a song she recognized from the radio, but she couldn’t quite think what it was. She watched him go, watched his shadow merge into the darkness until she couldn’t see him anymore, hardly believing what had just happened. She’d thought he might ask for her phone number or address or some way to get in touch with her, even though she wasn’t sure she wanted him to be in touch. Still, wouldn’t that have been the thing to do: ask whether she might like to see him again, whether she might like to do that again, because he had enjoyed it, and he wouldn’t mind a repeat performance?
Oh, what the hell, she thought for the second time that night, he’s probably married anyway. She stepped up the embankment away from the lake and cut across the lawn between the beach and the cottages. Once she had thought of the porter being married, it became the most logical explanation. Almost everyone was married by the time they were her age. So, that was that, then. She’d had a very brief fling with a married man.
And that made her want to laugh again. She, Estella Diamond, thirty-one-year-old spinster schoolteacher—the one to whom Caroline had said on the train, You used to be our fun aunt—had just had a fling. She was almost sorry that her family, especially Caroline, would never know.
When she was halfway across the lawn, she stopped and looked at the row of cottages that she knew had been reserved for the Diamonds. Her father was sitting on the deck of Emily Carr, his feet up on the railing, smoking a cigar. She saw how contented he looked, so pleased with himself that he had pulled off the feat of getting every single member of his family settled into a Fosters bungalow. She looked back to the beach to make sure he couldn’t have seen anything in the darkness, and then she crossed the grass and climbed the steps of the cottage.
Her father took a puff on his cigar and then said, “I hear you walked to the station when the train broke down.”
“I figured someone had to,” she said.
She half-expected an admonishment, something about worrying her mother, but he didn’t say anything more about it. She sat with him for a few minutes and then said good night and went inside, and she guessed correctly in the darkness which of the twin beds Rose would be in. She crawled into her own bed in her underwear, hoping that she would not leave any evidence of her encounter with the porter on the bedsheets.
She was almost asleep when Rose whispered, “Where were you? We were wondering.”
She had not known Rose was awake.
“Just walking along the beach,” she said.
“That’s what your father said. ‘We shouldn’t worry. Estella will be down at the water.’ I so admire you, Estella. You just do what you want.”
Estella wondered, was that true? Did she do whatever she wanted? If she did, it was news to her. Otherwise, she would have jumped into bed years ago with a serviceman who thought he could dance like Fred Astaire.
She said good night to Rose and rolled into a more comfortable position, and then they both went to sleep.
ESTELLA AND THE rest of the Diamond family were awakened the next morning by the sound of crows in the spruce trees. They all gathered outside on the cottage decks—some of the women still in their dressing gowns—to see in the morning light where it was that Oliver expected them to spend two weeks every summer for the rest of their lives. Emily Carr was the showpiece of the cottages with its bay window and oversized deck. The other four Diamond cottages were adjacent to it, all of them facing the water.
It was clear to Estella that her father was waiting to hear what her mother thought. He watched Beatrice closely as she leaned on the deck railing and took the measure of her surroundings: the lake, the lawn that Allen Foster had seeded in front of the cottages, the children’s play equipment, the picnic tables and park benches placed about the compound, all freshly painted. When she turned to look down the row of cottages at her children and grandchildren on the decks, she said, “Just look at all of us,” as though she had not before realized what a big family she had. Then she said she’d best get dressed if she wanted to make the most of this vacation Oliver had planned, and she went back inside.
The sisters-in-law followed her cue, leaving the men in charge of the youngest children, who then spilled from the decks and took over the playground. A family with two young girls approached the swings and waited their turn, but they gave up and went down to the beach instead. When Beatrice stuck her head out the door and said she was making pancakes for everyone, Oliver directed his sons to pull the picnic tables together. They lined five of them up in front of Emily Carr, and the sisters-in-law began carrying plates and cups and cutlery from their cottages.
Estella went back inside and found her mother with two frying pans on the stove, and Rose helping her mix pancake batter. Beatrice’s old brass bell was on the counter, the one she’d rung at the bottom of the stairs every morning when Estella and her brothers were still in school.
“I can’t believe you packed that,” she said.
“Your father’s idea,” Beatrice said.
Instead of offering to help, Estella went back to bed. There were curtains on the bedroom window—a repeated cherry pattern—but they did not adequately block the light. Half an hour later she was still awake, and her mother was rin
ging her breakfast bell on the deck outside. Estella gave up on sleep and got dressed, wondering what the non-Diamonds in the fifteen other cottages thought of the bell. She made her bed after brushing the sand out—the only sign she could see of the night before—and went outside to join her family. They were seated around the tables eating pancakes and everyone seemed to be talking at once. Each table was covered with a matching plastic tablecloth, and Estella wondered who had thought to bring them. Gladys, she guessed, who knew how to set a good table, according to her mother.
She sat down on the top step of the deck with a cup of coffee and watched the other Fosters guests walk around the picnic tables, no doubt wondering where this crowd of people had come from. The Diamonds were all talking at once about the near-disaster, or more than one disaster when you considered the train fire and the hours stranded on the tracks in the company of wolves and bears and other dangerous creatures. No one asked Estella about her walk through the bush. They were too busy talking about their own adventure.
When Estella had finished her coffee, she picked up a plate and heaped it with pancakes, and then she carried it down to the beach, where she sat in the sand not far from the place where she and the porter had done what they had. In the light of day, the spot under the tree was not hidden at all. What if someone had come down to the beach to see the lake in the darkness? Her teenaged nieces, perhaps, or her father? The thought was horrifying.
When she was done eating, she stashed her plate where she could retrieve it later, and she walked along the lake to the train station, almost certain that Eugene would not still be around. She asked the station attendant about him—“You know, the redhead who walked from the train fire with me last night”—and he said only that another engine had been sent out, and the train was gone, the porter with it, whose name, he thought, was Eustace.
“Eugene, you mean,” she said.
She never heard from him again, not that she expected to. She could still hear him whistling his way up the beach in the darkness, and she remembered the song: “Blueberry Hill.” It was perfect. He’d found his thrill and then hopped on the next train. She did not think he had used protection—she didn’t remember him fumbling with himself or any foil package—but she refused to believe she might be pregnant, and was confident she wasn’t when she did the calculations in her head. Even mathematics teachers sometimes got questions that teenaged girls couldn’t ask their mothers.
After breakfast, the Lake Claire vacation began in earnest, and it was soon apparent that everyone, including Beatrice, was going to have a good time. The men went fishing most mornings while the women supervised children who refused to get out of the water until they were blue with cold. There were trips to the village for ice cream and hikes in the woods—without fear of bears because the Diamonds were so noisy there was no danger of running into any wildlife at all. Estella tried to go for a swim by herself every day, but there were always others who wanted to go with her. By the end of the first week she made it as far as the north point of the bay with three other Diamonds in the water, and Jack and Rose in a canoe beside them. There was a deserted sandy beach on the tip of the point and they did the swim a few more times with picnics packed in the canoe. On one of these times she saw the boy, Peter Boone, emerge from the trees in running shorts. They’d eaten their picnic and were lying in the sand in the sun before heading back when Peter stepped onto the beach, his thin legs sticking out of his running shoes like toothpicks. He stopped, not expecting to see anyone on the point, and then he gave Estella a shy wave and ran back into the bush.
By the time the two weeks were up, the whole family was talking about returning, as though there had never been a doubter among them, not even Beatrice.
It was in Allen Foster’s new office that first year that Oliver was referred to as a “kingpin.” He was handing in his family’s cottage keys at the end of their vacation and saying his goodbyes to Foster. The Diamonds were waiting outside with their bags, and Beatrice sent Estella in to see what was taking so long, they were going to miss the train. Estella opened the office door just as another man and his wife were checking out, and the man turned to her father and said, “You must be the kingpin of that big family.” Oliver laughed and said, “I guess I am,” and he shook the man’s hand and said he hoped he would see him again next year.
After the man and his wife left, Oliver said to Allen Foster, “That’s us, eh, couple of kingpins.” Then Oliver noticed Estella standing there and said, “Beatrice sent her messenger. Time to go.”
As Oliver and Estella left the office, he said, “Did you hear that? I was just called a kingpin.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good thing,” Estella said. “It makes you sound like a hoodlum or a mob boss.”
An hour later, Estella and the others were on the train south again.
* * *
IN 1959, FOUR YEARS after that first summer at Lake Claire, Beatrice had a stroke. She had been having mini strokes ever since the incident with her book in the kitchen, but she’d dismissed them and they were never properly diagnosed. After the big stroke she could still speak, but she was confused and mostly bedridden. Oliver refused to hear of moving her to a home so Estella took leave for a second time from her teaching job and became her mother’s nurse. None of her brothers tried to talk her out of it. They were grateful. Estella insisted that Oliver move down the hall into Theo’s and Mathew’s old room so he could sleep, saying that she didn’t need him having a stroke too, but sometimes Beatrice would wake in the night and wonder where he was, and Estella would have to wake him up to sit with her until she went back to sleep.
Most of the time, Beatrice tried not to be any trouble. She said things like, “Don’t bother with lunch, Estella, I’ll get myself a sandwich when I’m hungry,” or “I think I’ll be well enough by Sunday to do a roast for everyone so you can have a rest.” At the same time, she didn’t argue when Estella brought her meals on a tray. It was as though she knew the truth about her condition even as she asked whether it was laundry day and told Estella to leave the bedding, she would do it herself.
During the day, Estella tried to keep her mother entertained. Sometimes she stretched out beside her on the bed and read to her from the humour sections of Reader’s Digest, or recipes from Chatelaine. She didn’t try to talk to her about anything of substance because Beatrice couldn’t follow the conversation. Estella tried to choose safe topics: the mundane things she’d done that day, the garden, the plans for Theo’s daughter Lynn’s wedding. There was no date yet but she had recently become engaged.
At the end of the school day, there were always grandchildren popping in for a quick visit. Beatrice would forget their names, or sometimes not remember them at all, and Estella would have to take them aside and explain why. It was upsetting to the children, that their grandmother could forget them. Some days Beatrice seemed to think Estella was still a teenager and she wondered why she wasn’t at school. Estella would tell her it was a holiday.
Once, Beatrice said to her, “When you were born your father wanted to name you Sally. Aren’t you glad we didn’t? I don’t like that name at all.” Another time, she told Estella, “I think your father might have had an affair with that other woman. But it was a long time ago. Water under the bridge.”
Even though Estella knew her mother was not thinking straight, she began to worry that Beatrice meant Salina, and that she had felt, through all the years of her marriage, like Oliver’s second choice for a wife. Estella began to feel guilty that she herself used to imagine Salina as her mother. She’d been so obsessed with the letters when she was a girl. They’d been her Anne of Green Gables or Little Women. She thought it was possible both she and her mother had shared the house with a ghost all these years.
One day her mother mumbled something about a stack of letters, and Estella thought she must have been referring to Salina’s letters. She did not seem to be upset, and so Estella asked, “Which letters do you mean, Mom?”
> “The ones in the teapot, of course,” her mother said, and Estella didn’t pry any further.
Another day, she thought to ask, “Where did you meet Dad, anyway? I don’t think I know.”
Beatrice didn’t hesitate. “In a cemetery,” she said. “At a funeral.”
Estella assumed her mother was thinking about Salina again, but then Beatrice said, “His mother’s funeral, in fact. Our mothers knew each other from the church. His father was not a very nice man.”
It sounded credible enough that Estella later asked Oliver, and he confirmed that they had in fact met at his mother’s funeral.
When Beatrice told Estella once again that she thought Oliver might be having an affair—present tense this time—Estella said it was impossible, that Salina had died. Beatrice looked happy to hear it, even though she said, “That’s sad. Perhaps we ought to send a card.”
After that, Beatrice never mentioned Salina again. Instead, she became preoccupied with the state of the house. In her mind, a cyclone was blowing bricks from the walls. There had been a cyclone in 1913 that had badly damaged some of the Diamond brick buildings in the city, but Estella assured her that there had been no cyclone since then. Beatrice kept bringing it up and fretting about the house, so Estella finally told her, yes, there had been a cyclone the day before, but Oliver had a man there right now, on a ladder outside, repointing all the bricks. That seemed to satisfy her. Then she began to count out loud, her index finger moving rhythmically through the air.
“What are you doing?” Estella asked, curious about what was going through her mother’s mixed-up mind.
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