After that, there was nothing for it but to pick up the roller again. By lunchtime the job was finished and no one had phoned back. His shoulders ached and his throat was dry. Mrs. Straw came in, obdurately ignored the immaculate, gleaming walls and pointed out some paint marks on the floor. He assured her that the paint was water based and easily removable. Feeling as he did, he didn't actually undertake to clear the offending spots immediately, so Mrs. S. made a production number out of fetching a bucket and squeegee and soaking the entire floor just as the staff were arriving for their lunch break.
But there was something to lift his spirits, and it wasn't a compliment on his decorating. John Taffler grabbed him by the arm and said, "Come and look at this, mate."
Diamond followed him out to the garden, where the children had already started their playtime. Seated on a low wall beside the vegetable garden was Naomi. She had the drawing pad on her knees and she was using the marker, entirely absorbed.
With stealth, Diamond approached close enough to get a sight over her shoulder of what she was doing. She had drawn a series of fifteen or so diamond shapes, roughly similar in size, each one in isolation.
"How about that?" Taffler said. "Random, my arse. She's turning them out in batches."
Pleasing as it was to Diamond, the drawing left him mystified.
Taffler was crouching on Naomi's level and talking to her. "Nice work, my darling. Beautiful! Diamonds." He tapped several of the shapes consecutively. "Diamond, diamond, diamond." Then he pointed upwards. "Mr. Diamond. That's what you're telling us, sweetie, right?"
The child paused in her work and actually glanced up for a moment at Diamond. Inconveniently there was nothing in her look to support John Taffler's assumption, nothing remotely indicating that Diamond was on her mind. She frowned and turned away.
"Let's be thankful for what we've got," Diamond said, determined to be positive. "She's using the pen, and that's progress."
"Well, yes." Taffler stood upright again. "At least she's coming out of that totally passive state. On the other hand," he added as they started back towards the house, "it's a little worrying that she isn't drawing anything else. It could get obsessional."
Diamond was in no frame of mind to face that particular scare. Nor was he overjoyed to find Dr. Ettlinger in the staffroom when he returned there. The psychiatrist was holding forth to an audience of one-Mrs. Straw-about color in the working environment. Apparently apricot, or orange, as Ettlinger termed it, was a highly unsuitable choice for a common room, liable to stimulate aggression. Predictably, too, from a psychiatrist, there were sexual implications. Red and orange were the colors of heat and passion. Listening to all this, Diamond could hardly wait for the orgies over coffee and cheese sandwiches. Not content with putting suspicions of carnality into Mrs. Straw's head, Ettlinger went on to speculate that whoever had chosen such an unsuitable color must be in urgent need of therapy. There was a deep-seated and dangerous aggression in such a personality.
To which Diamond, dressed in his paint-spattered overalls, responded, "Rest assured, Doc, if I find him, I'll strangle him with my bare hands."
Hearing this, Mrs. Straw quit the room without her squeegee and bucket.
Ettlinger, the dour Dr. Ettlinger, actually raised a smile. He could appreciate a psychological quip, even if it was directed his way. "I didn't know you had suicidal tendencies," he said ponderously to Diamond. "Self-strangulation is difficult to achieve, I hear."
Curiously enough, this bizarre conversation got both men off on a better footing. Diamond admitted that he was feeling angry-not suicidal-about the decision over Naomi. This was the first Ettlinger had heard of it He shared in the indignation. After all, he regarded himself as the school's pet shrink.
Diamond suggested a coffee and switched on the kettle.
"I shouldn't say this about a professional colleague, but I will," Ettlinger declared. "Oliver Dickinson ought to be ashamed of himself. I defy any psychiatrist to diagnose autism in one session, particularly in the case of a child like Naomi, whose behavior is predominantly passive."
"He could be wrong?"
"I keep an open mind."
"I remember," said Diamond, sensing a way to pry more information from his new chum. "But without committing yourself, is there any other explanation for the fact that she refuses to speak?"
Ettlinger's eyes twinkled in triplicate through his thick lenses. "You want to muddy the waters a little?"
"I wouldn't say that, but I'm fishing."
"Well, it's not impossible that this is a case of elective mutism."
"Say that again."
Ettlinger obliged. "It's a psychological disorder that affects some children of three years and upwards. Something inhibits them from speaking. In certain cases this manifests itself at school and they talk normally at home. The most serious cases go totally silent, and keep it up for months and even years."
"Can it be treated?"
"There is no cure, as such. They grow out of it, and some of them are given help, but it's hard to say whether they would have recovered regardless. The best results are achieved one-to-one. Putting such children into a class with others is not always advisable, particularly if those others are disturbed in other ways. The child may imitate them, consciously or unconsciously."
"And ape their behavior?"
Ettlinger nodded.
"Such as biting?"
This drew a sly smile. "Why not?"
Diamond was finding elective mutism increasingly plausible as a theory. "Would this also explain the avoidance of eye contact?"
"I wouldn't regard that as the sort of behavior a child would notice in another," Ettlinger said. "However, if she is anxious to avoid speech, she will very likely shun situations requiring responses. So for that reason she may look away from people."
"You say nobody knows the cause of this, em, what did you call it?… Elective, er…?"
"Mutism." Ettlinger shrugged. "One can't generalize. Sometimes school phobia is thought to trigger it. You move the child to a new school, or a new class, and the speech returns. But in most cases the onset comes earlier in the child's life and the problem isn't so clear, or so easily resolved. It may result from some emotional disturbance of which adults are unaware."
Diamond made the coffee and handed over a steaming mug. "In Naomi's case, she's been parted from her parents. Abandoned, possibly. Is that the kind of disturbance you mean?"
"Yes, an experience as shocking as that could amount to a trauma."
"Trauma? That's a different ball game."
Ettlinger pulled a face at the metaphor, making it plain that matiness had its limitations. "I would define trauma as a deep emotional wound, an injury to the psyche."
"Can it make a child mute?"
"Certainly."
"And is it curable?"
"Let's say that the condition is usually of limited duration."
"So she will recover her speech?"
"I wasn't discussing a particular case."
Diamond conceded with a nod. "That's another possible explanation, then. So far we have autism, elective mutism, and now, trauma."
Ettlinger beamed. "Have we muddied the water sufficiently?"
Diamond nodded. Confusion wasn't the object, of course; quite the contrary. He'd enlisted the support of an expert in questioning the assumption that Naomi was autistic. He hadn't enough clout to prevent her being put on that flight to Boston on Sunday, but he felt more clear in his own mind that he was right to protest
Late that afternoon there was another boost. A call from the BBC. A generous minded producer who had given him not a glimmer of hope that morning had since talked to someone's PA over lunch at the Television Center, and she'd passed on the word about Naomi to her producer, who was now on the line. A new program Diamond had never heard of called "What About the Kids?" had been running on BBC2 for two weeks, a Friday afternoon show featuring children and presented by children. It consisted mainly of two- or three-minute items such as song and dance, circus acts, animal training, a word game, demonstrations of toys, interviews with kids who'd been in the news and with adults like writers and artists who produced work for children.