Free Diamond Dust by Anita Desai Page B

the bars of the window receding into the distance, Diamond glittered like a dead coal, or a black star, in daylight's blaze.

Underground
    I N that small town, clustered around and above the bay, every third house was a boarding house, while hotels were strung out along the promenade, stolidly gloomy all through the year except in summer when wet bathing suits hung out over every windowsill and sunburnt children raced screaming across the strip of melting asphalt and onto the shining sands, magnetised by the glittering, slithering metal of summer seas. Sand dunes, dune grass, shells, streams trickling across the beach, creating gulleys, valleys and estuaries in exquisite miniature and shades of purple, sienna and puce. Boat sails, surf boards, waves, foam, debris and light. Fish and chips, ice-cream cones, bouncy castles, spades, striped windbreakers. 'Where can I pee-pee? I have to pee-pee!' 'Spot, come away! Come away, Spot!' 'I've cut my foot! Ooh, look, boo-ooh!' And a hinterland of blackberry bushes, rabbit warrens, golf links, hedged meadows, whitewashed, slate-roofed farmhouses—and the motorway flowing all summer with a droning, steady stream of holidaymakers baking in their beetle-backed cars.
    The White House Hotel alone appeared to take no part in this summer bacchanal. Summer and winter, spring and autumn, it remained the same: an immaculate whitewashed cottage built of Cornish stone, with a slate roof, red geraniums in green windowboxes, and wrought-iron gates shut to the road. Not exactly the kind of place you hoped to find when you came to the seaside—it was not far from the sea, true, but had no view of it. Instead, it looked out onto the long, low hills, their green downs speckled with the white fluffballs of grazing sheep, in their hollows the kind of woods that sheltered streams, bluebells, yellow flags and dragonflies. Pretty enough, but not providing that sense of being at the seaside which was what you came to this little town for, a hellish drive in August.
    Jack Higgins turned to his wife who had fallen silent and begun to take on a somewhat overbaked look. They had been imprisoned for far too long in that small, overheated car. 'What d'you think, Meg? Will it do?'
    She shrugged her roasted shoulders under the thin straps of her yellow checked sun dress (it had looked very much crisper that morning when he had slipped his hands under those straps, heard them snap against her skin). 'It'll have to, won't it. There's no room anywhere else.'
    That was true: they had already tried the hotels along the promenade, the houses clustered around the bay with their B & B signs. Every one had turned them away with the message: No Vacancy. It had taken them an hour to explore the possibilities and accept the inevitable.
    'Can't we stop for a drink?' she had asked at regular intervals, like a querulous child, and as time wound on, it had turned to 'What about supper then? If we stopped for a bite, we could go further—'
    But he had had enough of driving for the day. They had come a long way: it had been the hottest day of summer so far, and he would not tolerate another hour in that roasting oven of a car if he could help it. What he wanted was not a drink or a bite but a cool, shadowed room, a wash, a change and a rest. He knew that was what she needed too, even if she would not admit it.
    So he compromised. He had pulled up outside a shop in town, hung about with rubber balls, flip-flops, spades and pails, and went in to enquire: in a town as small as this, surely everyone would know where there might still be a vacancy.
    He was right: the woman selling fudge and postcards at the counter, once she had finished with the family demanding her attention and sent them off happily licking their lollies (four different flavours for four different children), asked, 'And what can I do for
you,
sir?' then launched into a description of every boarding house, bed-and-breakfast establishment and hotel in the vicinity. Jack