“Diamonds,” Em sang. “Oh diamonds, where are you!”
And David smiled at everyone with his eyes, and it was like a lamp shining. It made you want to get closer, because David thought he was special, and within the ring of light he cast, you were special too.
Still, I kept a careful distance. For Peter’s sake, for Marcus’s.
Later, parked up in the lanes, Marcus leaned forward to tune the van’s radio.
“It’s nice for Peter, you know, to have someone, a friend, isn’t it? Peter’s important to you, kind of like a brother.” His eyes flicked from the dial to my face, looking for confirmation of something. Later, when I kissed him, I tried to give him the answer he was looking for.
* * *
Peter photocopied pages from the books in the library. A photograph of Mary Ashton as a debutante, flanked by a Mitford and an Astor, the diamonds slung around her neck, remarkable only from the other baubles on view by the single teardrop diamond, glistening like a fat tear in the suprasternal notch. There were a few black and whites of Lord Denford himself, and one of young Denford in uniform—his pose heroic but his eyes terrified as though he was facing down, not the lens of the camera but the barrel of a gun. Perhaps most exciting of all, was the picture of James Mortimer, an artist’s sketch of the dead man’s face printed in newspapers across the country in the hope that someone would come forward to identify him.
I kept a folded copy of it in the back pocket of my jeans. Over time, the image became less and less like something human, and more and more like a fortress, a silent fortress, built to guard a secret. I liked to take it out and look at it when no one was watching, the face of the dead man, a blind seer, a map to nowhere on earth. Some things touch something inside you, and you don’t know why. Then you get a feeling, not a usual feeling, but something special, like there were two of you, the everyday one and another. The other was often absent, not there, or asleep, a Merlin buried deep under his mound, and the special feeling was an awakening, an eye inside sliding open.
I’ve read about people feeling such things when they are in love, an awakening, a coming alive, but I was not in love, not yet anyway.
* * *
In the rose garden, David emptying cans of beans into a saucepan. The sun was already gone, but in the west the clouds were raging crimson and pink and orange. Swallows dropped from the manor’s eaves, to bob over the lawns.
A fortnight in and we had the place kitted out: a camping stove, a set of pans, torches, blankets and sleeping bags, cans of food, cereal, coffee, long-life milk. The camping gear was ancient, had belonged to Peter’s parents.
“Have you mentioned us being here to Uncle Darren?”
Marcus shook his head.
“He wouldn’t mind though, would he? It being us?” I had my head on his knee. I looked up, as sweet-faced as I could manage. In the corner of my eye I checked to see if David was watching. I avoided looking at him directly, but Peter made up for it. Marcus looked at me, and Peter looked at David, and David and I did not look at one another, and Em looked at all of us, pencil in hand, sketchbook on her lap.
“Wouldn’t have thought so. But he’d want to be asked.”
“But then he might say no. I don’t think you should say anything, Marc.”
I think we all shared Peter’s alarm. Darren saying no. Or perhaps even worse, him saying yes, and it not being secret anymore. I liked Darren. In the pub, he drank pints of orange juice and lemonade, never a sip of beer, but he had a drinker’s complexion. Even his hands were red, as though he had more blood than the rest of us. There were rumors of him putting a Paddy in the hospital for smashing up one of his diggers.
When Marcus was tiny, his dad had run off to Spain and not come back. There was a black mark next to his name that was never quite explained. It had been Darren trying to squash himself onto one of the school’s plastic chairs come nativity. Darren standing at the side of the pitch cheering encouragement and shouting at the ref. And when we were twelve and they’d started a trampolining club, Darren drove the minibus, turning out every week for a term to give a handful of us a lift there and back, playing what he called proper music and asking about school. Darren had left at fourteen, kicked out for punching out a teacher who’d tried to cane him. How we’d loved to hear that one! When I got something right in the office, he’d say, “Good girl,” and I’d feel a sort of doggy joy.
Still, I don’t think any of us fancied the idea of Darren dropping in to enlighten us about the Yardbirds or the Moody Blues in the rose garden, to tell us at length about the problems involved with modernizing old plumbing.
So we left it at that. I laid my cheek back on Marcus’s thigh. He held the end of my plait between his fingers. Once, before we were going out, I’d had him brush my hair. His mum was out and we were up in his bedroom. The curl made it knotty. I’d shown him how you had to start at the bottom. He went so slowly, like I was made of something much more fragile than I was. By the time he finished his breath was all funny.
Em took up a spoon and began stirring the beans. For a second, I thought I saw a flicker of irritation cross her face, but then she said, “Happy memories,” in a passable imitation of the vicar. “Did I ever tell you about our honeymoon, Patricia’s and mine, hunting for fossils on the west coast of Wales?”
* * *
The game was Em’s idea too. She found the diamonds in a charity shop. When the old died, their families emptied their wardrobes and dressing tables and took the contents to Sue Ryder or Prospect. In and among the usual rubbish, there were musty morning suits, monogrammed golf clubs, cashmere twin sets, satin purses embroidered with seed pearls, clip-on earrings like great dazzling barnacles in trays of costume jewelry.
In the manor kitchen, Em took the necklace out of her bag. We were in the big room, where it was always cool and dim. There were giant flagstones on the floor. We made tea there on the camping stove, and in its deeper recesses, the milk would last for days.
The diamonds were dull until she took them to one of the low, long windows and held them up to the light.
“They’ve got the right shape, with the big tear drop. Same as in the picture. There were loads of them.” She coiled them up and then rubbed them on her shirt. “Mum says I should put them in bicarb.”
Peter stretched out his hand for them. “They’re heavy.”
We passed them round. By the time it reached me, the necklace was warm. It did have weight to it. The stones were square cut, apart from the teardrop, which had come from India, a gift to a Colonel Ashton from a maharaja for saving him from a tiger. Had this been real, how many carats would it have been? The settings and the clasp were tarnished, it was impossible to see the color of the original metal, but it was probably nickel, at most silver-plated.
“How do we know these aren’t the real ones?”
“Because they cost three quid?”
But if you’d laid the real necklace, also dirty, also tarnished, next to this one, I doubted I could tell them apart, the real from the fake. When David was gone, I’d trust myself even less.
Em had found them, so the first time Em hid them. We waited in the kitchen, listening to her footsteps disappear, trying to hear the creak of the stairs, of the opening of a door; and when she returned searching her face for clues, for traces of the hiding place. She did a good inscrutable. She was a good keeper of secrets.