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4
MOST VILLAGES AND SMALL TOWNS GROW UP ALONG one main road, which is like a spine or the trunk of a tree, but the road through Aberlady had a sudden dog-leg bend that turned sharply as if to say that’s enough of that, let’s look at the sea now. The wind pushed at my back, rushing me out past the edge of the village towards the house. The tide was coming in and shining waves chased the light over mudflats. In the distance, I could see the bridge now, the end of the shoreline and the beginning of the burn, but there across the road was the house.
Houses play tricks on us, or maybe it’s memory. I remembered the house as enormous: wide rooms, oceans of carpet with rug rafts in front of the fire, vast bookshelves reaching from floor to ceiling, crammed full of books and boxes, and a step stool in the corner. A giant’s chair and footstool and windows full as the sea.
But whenever Felicity spoke about the house – with Bas or Rika or with one of the girls – she called it a minuscule bungalow. I asked once what that meant, and she said ‘A small house. Cramped and with no stairs.’
‘Like a cabin, then?’
‘No. Smaller.’ But Bas laughed, so I didn’t believe her.
Funny how the truth becomes real. From where I stood across the road, the house was both small and strange, sitting low under the tall trees and the whitewash looking too bright in the sunshine. I hadn’t remembered the stepped roofline or the crown-shaped chimney pot, but the cheerful red-tiled roof was familiar. As I approached, crows flew up from the trees beside the road, calling out loudly to each other. They circled in the sky before settling again to their treetops, their nests loose jumbles of sticks in the high forks.
A small lane led from the road down to the house. The front door was hidden behind a half-wall, a sort of L-shaped windbreak. L for Livia. L for love.
Then I heard a sound in the doorway.
A shifting sound behind the half-wall followed by the stillness of someone waiting. I paused. It seemed a quiet village. But the house had been empty for a couple of weeks now. Someone could have found a way in and set up camp. I held my breath. Then I heard the sound of feathers.
Only a bird, then. Well, that was a relief. I waited a moment, and then another, for it to emerge, but when it didn’t, I cleared my throat to startle it. Nothing.
‘Hello?’ A human voice would scare it away, I thought. Still nothing. But then another shift, so I took a step and peered around the half-wall.
A goose filled the space. It was startlingly tall and its long dark neck snaked from side to side, its white chin-strap bright in the shadow beside the door. When it looked over its broad brown back towards me, I balked and stepped back. Weird to see a Canada Goose here, I thought, but maybe it was thinking similar thoughts about me. I raised my arms in a sort of loose-winged flap and made a few hopeful noises, but the goose stayed put. It looked as if it was waiting, but obviously not for me.
‘Go!’ I said, firmly.
And nothing. The bird would not budge. It turned towards the door and looked in through the window, making throat-clearing sounds. The key felt heavy in my pocket, but I walked back down the path, sat on the low stone wall at the end of the garden and dug an apple out of my pack. Banished.
The wind blew through the tall grasses on the verge. Grey clouds gathered out at sea. By the road, tulips nodded heavy purple heads, and I wondered if they’d been Gran’s idea. Did she fling out a few bulbs, let them fall where they might and bury themselves to wait for spring? I could imagine that. I could almost see her, standing here at the very edge of her garden with a fistful of bulbs, watching the cars pass by, waiting for the right moment. She’d glance back at the house to see if he was watching and maybe he was or maybe he wasn’t, and she wouldn’t mind one way or the other, and then, with the road clear each way, she would reach back and let the bulbs fly.
When I turned back to the house, the goose wasn’t there. The key turned smoothly in the lock and I stepped inside, closing the door behind me. The house was quiet. Empty. Smelling citrusy. L for lemon.
I set my bag down in the hallway next to the teak trolley where the telephone sat watching, squat beside a bowl of keys and Gran’s brown wallet. Right out in the open, the first place to look. Logical, I thought, and the leather felt soft in my hands, but there were only cards inside. No folded letter, no secret photograph. I picked up the phone and there was no dial tone. The lawyer’s letter had said nothing had been disconnected and everything should be fine. Well, there’s something to add to the to-do list. And I would need to find another way of calling Mateo, too, and maybe Felicity. I thought I should let her know where I was.
The living room was a shrunken version of what I remembered. Shabbier, too, but only from the passage of time. Everything looked faded – the ashes in the fireplace, the rag rug Felicity had made at the camp sun-bleached like the photographs on the mantel, familiar and distant. There was a well-dressed Victorian couple framed in silver, he in tweeds and thick sideburns, she with lace cuffs, and her hands folded on her skirt. Then my mother as a grinning toddler running across grass, caught almost in flight. My grandparents in a wooden frame, new parents, my mother a bundled infant, my young grandmother with her head bent, adoring. My grandfather wore a zippered cardigan under his jacket and met the camera’s gaze, shy, defiant, present and looking at me as if I shouldn’t be unsupervised in his house.
Their wedding photo was framed in silver. My grandmother was all high cheekbones and a shine in her eye, and my grandfather watched her, laughing. They held their hands up between them, fingers intertwined, as if they wanted the photographer to capture the new gold band on her finger. Linked. She wore an elegant fox fur around her shoulders and it must have matched her hair, though in the black-and-white photograph, both the fox and the hair looked silver. I’d grown up with the photo. Felicity kept a copy on the table in our cabin and I liked to look at it when I was small. That Klimt look on Gran’s face and Granddad’s laugh.
‘Was it like that with you and my dad?’ I asked once. ‘When he was around?’
‘Oh, Pidge, you’re getting too old for that story. You know you don’t have a dad. Only a father. And no, he wasn’t like that.’ She pushed her fingers up through the paleness of her hair, then smiled at me. ‘If he was, he’d be around now, and I’d have to share you. And then what would we do? I couldn’t ever share you.’
When I was almost twelve and we were up late together after a long night-birth, I asked why her dad hadn’t been there when she was born.
‘It was the war, sweetie. He was away. You can’t always be where you want to be. Not when there’s a war.’
‘But Gran had help, right? There were midwives there?’
‘A doctor. And her mum. She could have had a nurse, too, but there were enough people out that night already. That’s what she said. But I think it was more about privacy, really. Your gran is a very private person.’
She made it sound like she would describe herself otherwise. Or maybe it was just a slip.
In the kitchen, the fridge hummed gently and the clock kept ticking, its electric cord twisting down to the outlet near the cooker. Pinned to the wall by the door, there was a postcard from the gallery. Felicity must have sent that over – a photo of the giant spider sculpture that sat between the gallery and the street. On the back, a note in her handwriting:
Dear Mum,
Hello from Pidge’s shop – all lovely books, silk scarves & calendars. She’s happy, I think, selling gifts – says it reminds her people are thinking of others & that’s beautiful. She has a generous heart, doesn’t she?
Thought you’d like the spider. 30 feet tall & her belly full of marble eggs. An elegance of legs and space.
All love,
Felicity
I opened the back door for fresh air and so that I could see tulips growing at the edge of a cobbled yard. There were several outbuildings – sheds and things – and beyond that, grass with a stone bench and a path that led down to a small orchard. I remembered these trees – just a half-dozen apple trees, too small to climb and wind-twisted even there behind the house. I could smell the sea, too. Salt. Coins. Rust.
Then a sound. I startled, half expecting to see – who? Gran? Granddad? Not Mateo. Or Felicity, suddenly arrived with suitcase in hand to surprise me, hello and my love. But no, none of that. Nothing as gentle. Instead, the goose paced across the cobblestones, honking and squonking, sticking its neck out and making a God-awful, ear-quaking racket.
5
MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS TO SLAM THE DOOR TO KEEP it out of the house. And the others, too, assuming there were others. Geese aren’t solitary birds, are they? They come in flocks. Or is it skeins? Which sounded like something in flight and the one I could see certainly wasn’t. It stalked around the shed, upturning stacks of flower pots, buckets and bins. Everything crashed to the ground, bouncing on the hard stones or shattering to pieces. I checked the lock on the kitchen door. It felt strange to be alone.
I slipped my shoes off and pulled myself up onto the counter so I could watch out the window more easily. With its hard, black beak, the goose hammered on the shed door and then, as I watched, pushed the door open and marched inside. Then, a bedlam of brushes and boxes, more broken pots and an imperious honk. More clatter and a yellow tin clanged across the yard.
Fry’s Cocoa.
I supposed it didn’t really matter how much mess the goose made out there. Everything would need to be sorted through and disposed of one way or another. You couldn’t sell a property full of stuff. Besides, there might be something interesting to take back to Ottawa. Maybe not dented old tins, but something. A lantern. An old tackle box. Something antique.
I looked around the kitchen to see what was there and, on top of the cupboard, I spotted Gran’s blue glass cake-stand. Mateo might like that. In the cupboard, I found an olive-wood cruet set, three pottery jugs, and a gravy boat. The coffee mill, which would certainly be useful. Folded paper napkins wrapped in waxed paper, empty jam jars, scrubbed clean, and a tall berry-dark bottle marked ‘sloe gin’. Behind another door, a stack of lovely teacups – some chipped, but enough to make up a set, certainly. Then, pushed to the back, a row of squat bottles with ground-glass stoppers. Inside, there were dried needles like rosemary, seeds like apple, and dusty flower petals, pink, red and yellow. Nothing familiar, not quite at least, and I wondered what Felicity might make of them. I probably couldn’t get them through customs. Not without knowing what they were. Mateo tried to bring sausage home last summer – a long loop that he bought at a Spanish market. I told him that it was never going to work, that he was really just buying lunch for the airport staff, but he shrugged, looking smug. I was right, of course, though he put on a show for the officials.
‘I promise I will not share it. No risk to the Canadian population, I assure you. It will pass no other lips than my own. Unless you would like to try? I might share with you.’
The customs officer shook his head and Mateo had to leave the sausage behind.
Maybe I should just sell the lot. There was never going to be space in a new condo for these old things. I could call an auction house and have them clear the place. Sell everything and head back home.
Another tin clattered across the yard. Oxo this time.
Home meant Ottawa. Mateo. Work. Home meant routine and habit, and that didn’t have much space for china teacups. Home used to mean the camp, but I left because it was time for me to choose. A free woman chooses – that’s what they had always taught me, and I got to the stage where staying didn’t feel like a choice any more. It was just procrastination.
I’d been working in the village store, selling cigarettes, groceries and booze. The kind of job teenage girls pick up after high school when they’re waiting for life to start, and it was like that for me, too, in a way. After I mailed my equivalence tests in the province and they sent me my diploma, I started at the shop as a way of making money before my next step, but then I stuck around. It was familiar and comfortable – like everything else. Most of the year, I knew everyone who came in, though it was different in the summer, with the cottage people and folk heading north to go hunting. But mainly, it was routine. Mothers came in mid-morning with small kids. Seniors needed help finding things every week. Just after the mass at one o’clock, a grey-haired man always bought a two-four of Molson and told me to smile. Always the same. Except one day, he asked me what I was waiting for. He said I looked tired, like maybe I was drowning. Who was he to comment? But later, I wondered if he recognized something. I couldn’t say what I was waiting for. People came through Birthwood and told us how lucky we were to have this slice of creation for our own. Maybe I was waiting to feel that. Bas and Rika did, obviously. And Felicity, too. I thought it would come with time or age. Except now, apparently, I looked like I was drowning. Well, that wasn’t true. I was just – what? Caught in an eddy, going round and round and watching the same piece of sky.
So, I made up my mind and chose to move to Ottawa.
I’d leave most of my things behind: my old photo albums and papers, the bookshelves Bas made me and my work clothes. I’d rent a furnished apartment at first, I decided, and find a new job. I could learn to live alone in the middle of a city. Eat meals on my own, visit museums and galleries, maybe even find work there, and when I actually managed to do all that, I told people that was why I had moved. For work and culture. For art.
But that wasn’t true. I moved to Ottawa because it sat at the end of the river. The T-junction of the Gatineau and the Ottawa. T is for time to go.
When I was small, the river map on the wall showed the Gatineau curled like Felicity’s hair. It laced among a hundred lakes and Bas told me the name was Algonquin – Te-nagàdino-zìbi – which meant the river that stops your journey. There were rocks to portage around and narrow places where even a canoe couldn’t slip through. But there was also a story about a French explorer who drowned in the river, and he was called Gatineau, too. Nicolas Gatineau. There was a high school named after him and I found his name in a history book. Some stories come twinned and some things are true.
Gran’s tea towels still hung on the hooks by the stove, and her spices sat on the thin shelf with the egg timer. But no coat by the door, no teacups to be rinsed. I noticed these things and waited for grief. I expected it and watched myself, waited. But it didn’t come. Instead, I felt disconnected and cold. I didn’t know how to do this.
Felicity should be here. Well, not sitting on the counter. She’d likely know what to do about the goose outside. And about the cupboards and the cake-stand and all the photographs and books. She’d negotiate presence and absence all right. She’d cry and swear and find a way to be practical, too. And, apart from everything else, she’d know the house inside out. She’d know where to begin.
When Mateo and I had moved into our apartment on Cartier Street, she’d been full of suggestions. Shelves and rugs and paint for the window frames. I had to explain to her that it was a rental and that we weren’t planning to stay. Mateo had always wanted to buy something new, something shiny. He had his eye on one of the glass condo towers going up in the Market with their beautiful views of the river, all those sunsets and sunrises, and miles between us and the sidewalks below. I agreed to see a model penthouse one afternoon and, after my shift, I waited for him in front of the gallery. I watched the sun catching the spires of the basilica, and a family lingering underneath the spider, their toddler dancing between the legs. I thought about what it would be like to live so close to work and in such a small space, too. Mateo had said that it wouldn’t feel small – not with those views. When he came through the door, he told me I looked lovely in the light, and we walked together through the Market, past all the tourists and the tempting patios.
‘Later,’ he said, squeezing my hand. ‘After we’ve had a look. Maybe we’ll have a decision to make?’
The condo was beautiful, it really was. I liked the view from the kitchen, right up to the Gatineau Hills. He liked the quiet. ‘It feels like there is no one else up here at all. No one living on top of us. No dogs or footsteps or tricycles.’ He laughed and put his arms around my waist and I pressed my mouth into his neck, his skin dry and warm. ‘We could be happy here. Alone on the top.’
Out the window, I could see the goose grazing between the apple trees. I felt hungry. The fridge, unsurprisingly, was empty. The lawyer’s letter had also mentioned that all the perishables had been cleared away. Not words to send to a bereaved family, I thought. There must be a better way of describing a scrubbed kitchen.
I dug my own meagre supplies out of my backpack. A roll of biscuits. Two apples. A bottle of wine. I’d need more or tomorrow I wouldn’t be fit for purpose. There was a fish and chip shop in the village, so I found my coat and flicked all the lights on before closing the door behind me. It wasn’t yet properly evening, but I didn’t like the idea of walking into the house in the dark. Overhead, more geese crossed the sky, a dark V on the bright air, their rusty voices calling.
6
FELICITY: 1967
MATRON CLAIMED TO BE MOTHERLY, BUT SHE HADN’T a clue. My mum never put her foot down. She had no God-forbidding anything. She was much quieter than that.
Ahead of me, a gaggle of student nurses made their way down the corridor, looking pert and starched. From their chatter, I could tell they were due up in Maternity where they’d watch the ward nurses teach new mothers how to swaddle properly. Not Matron, though. No babies for her. I could imagine her eating them, with her cracked red lips, her pocked chin, and her eyes like lift buttons behind those thick plastic glasses. Standing behind the nursing desk, she watched every footfall on the ward, utterly unsparing. To get the attention of errant junior nurses, she snapped tongue depressors. She never drank tea. That afternoon, she’d spent her five o’clock sermon on me, filling my ears with her God-forbids. She said she was being maternal. I should be more respectful. I shouldn’t look up when receiving instruction, shouldn’t distract or interrupt, merely pay better attention and perform. My job was to trot along behind the doctors with my neat nurse’s basket, carrying the requisite tongue depressors, thermometers, scissors, and gauze. I was to be careful. Take notes. Agree. My questions were not needed. The litany ended, Matron attempted a smile.
‘I know I must sound like a proper old battleaxe,’ she said. ‘But do try to take it on board. Just a little nudge to the straight and narrow and you will be happily with us a long, long time.’
She patted my sentenced hand and released me down the corridor.
I walked slowly and thought about my mother. I pictured her out by the bay, tall in my father’s old trousers with the hems tucked into black wellies and her hands reaching up, picking sea buckthorn. Too early yet this year, of course. The berries would still be plumping back home and my mother focussed on raspberries in the garden, but when I conjured her, I saw her by the sea. I saw how the wind caught wisps from her bound hair and how small clouds scudded across the sky above her like impossible stepping stones set against the blue. She always took her time picking berries, making the day last as long as it might, and when I was little, I would be there at her feet, digging out caves in the sand dunes, hoping to find rabbits or buried treasure. Now in that bleached corridor, I remembered the berries’ sharp stickiness and their smell like sour wine. Mum mixed them with sugar and cooked them down to make a marmalade bright as oystercatchers’ bills. I missed her marmalade and all her jams – raspberry and bramble, blackcurrant from the manse garden, jellies from rosehips, haws and sloes from every hedgerow along the coast. At home, Mum kept them on a high cupboard shelf, closed away to keep their colour, and later in my Edinburgh flat, I set them along the window sill so they could cast their stained-glass colours on the cold floor. Here, I bought grape jelly at Steinberg’s and spread it on white bread.
Outside the hospital, the afternoon was hazy, and the road filled with fast cars and buses. When my hospital contract came for the agency, I thought the road name completely romantic. Côte-des-Neiges. The side of snows. It had been the name of a long-ago village, sitting halfway up the hillside, looking down on Montreal. It must have been where the winter snows piled thickest, I thought, finding it on a map. There was a cemetery, too, called Notre Dame des Neiges, which made my heart almost break with a cold kind of loneliness. Now, walking the road every day to the bus stop after my shift, it was the width that held my eye. So very Canadian. So much space for anyone that wanted it. If I could pick up Aberlady with my fingers, all her crow-stepped roofs and whitewashed houses, the little kirk and the ancient trees, if I could carry her here and lay her down in this wide-open road, how much room would she take up? How little. With my back to the hospital and the mountain behind, there was no horizon here and so much space.
But Aberlady was moon-far away, remote and removed. Or rather, I was. I was the one who had done the leaving, after all. Gave my notice in an insufficient letter to Dr Ballater, and shuffled off. Sold my car, bought a ticket and packed my trunk full of nursing textbooks and uniforms, too – though of course they were the wrong ones. Matron soon set me straight and ensured I had the correct hem-length.
A bus pulled up to the stop and I ran down towards it, waving to catch the driver’s attention. He waited and laughed when I stepped up into the bus.
‘Every day, I get a running nurse or two,’ he said. ‘All the pretty nurses. It’s a good route.’
I forced a half-smile and found a seat towards the back. The windows were open and, as the bus pulled away from the kerb, the air felt surprisingly cool. It was often crowded in the late afternoon, but that day there weren’t many folk on the bus. Summer holidays, perhaps. Everyone away at cottages, spending time by the lakes. Some of the nurses had been talking about cottage weekends, which sounded delightful. Canoes and campfires and hikes in the woods. Everything I might have imagined, but not yet found. Early days, I thought. There would be plenty of time.
When I’d told my parents about my Canadian job, Dad had asked if that meant I was turning down Dr Ballater.
‘Of course, she is, Stanley, and it’s no bad thing,’ Mum said. ‘He hasn’t tried anything with you, has he? Has he been pestering you?’
‘No, nothing like that. He’s been a gentleman. He’s just not … It’s not … It’s hard to explain.’
Dad cleared his throat. ‘You want an adventure,’ he said, softly.
‘I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.’
Mum didn’t return to the question after that, nor did she try to talk me out of anything. Instead, she helped me make lists of things I would need, even things I would like: novels, toffees, nylons, a pair of white sunglasses. We went into Edinburgh to go shopping and she didn’t ask me how I’d made my decision or what I was hoping to find. She bought me a book about North American wild flowers and, walking out of Woolworths, tucked her arm through mine and grinned. She even suggested we go to a café for a spot of lunch, somewhere young, she said, and modern. But I knew she’d also brought along sandwiches in her handbag and I said we should eat them in Princes Street Gardens. Walking past the gardener’s cottage, she told me about the air raid shelters erected there early in the war.
‘It’s strange to think about all that now,’ she said. ‘How dangerous everything felt and how every effort was made to make safe places for everyone.’ She squeezed my arm again, and we found a bench where we ate our lunch. I hoped that she wouldn’t speak again about Dr Ballater or ask any more questions. I didn’t want to defend him, but I couldn’t explain, either. I’d been shocked by the whole episode. Knocked for six. I decided then I wouldn’t tell anyone else about Dr Ballater. About George. I would give him that much. No more stories or questions or hypotheses. I would let him be. Like my mother, I’d keep mum.
She’d always been good at that. A cultivated quiet with no need to talk everything through. It really wasn’t necessary, was it? It was enough to be still together. Without words. Without shouting or slammed doors. All that unnecessary bluster.
I’d been good at bluster when I was twelve. Slammed the door and stepped into the rain. I only had my cardi on and that didn’t matter then. I didn’t even care. I just needed out. I’d hop on a bus and go somewhere, right? Only it was Sunday and I had no money, so no. Hitchhike, then? But I never had and, likely as not, I’d know the driver – or worse, he’d know Mum. Then it would be over. I’d be right back at that kitchen table and she still wouldn’t be saying anything. I could tell when something was up. I wasn’t stupid. And the way they were keeping the radio off and not letting me see the newspaper. It had to be about the Bomb. I knew it was. Ever since I’d read that article about Nevada and Las Vegas and Miss Atomic Bomb. And the mushroom clouds like opening umbrellas and the costumes they made girls wear in the clubs and the Dawn Bomb parties and Atomic cocktails and I got so angry and I couldn’t sleep. I tried to talk to my parents about it, but they wouldn’t listen. They didn’t want to hear. Maybe they were just as scared as me. Or more scared? They acted guilty, as if they were to blame. As if all this fear was something they made and silence was a way of keeping it down. That door-slammed afternoon, the radio had been on and Mum suddenly – fiercely – shut it off and looked at Dad with something like excitement, something like fear, and I asked if it was the Bomb or another war or what, but she wouldn’t talk. She bloody wouldn’t talk and I stormed out and slammed the door.
I crossed the road and then the bridge and headed out to the sands. The tide was far out so there would be a good walk, and I didn’t care how far I went. Wondered if I could live out there, even just for the night. Would that be possible? Not in this rain. It was easing off, but even a drizzle would make for a miserable night. It might be different if it were dry. I could stretch out under the sky and sleep on the sand. I’d see the stars, and the moon, if I was lucky, and then the larks would wake me up. They were rising now before me as I walked. Flying straight up out of the wet grass. Strange joy, as Dad would say. He always said that whenever there were larks. That’s when I heard him on the path behind me; his paced footsteps, his whistled tune.
‘Mind if I chum you to the shore?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘Silence is good. And this is a good place to be silent.’
But he kept whistling and quickened his pace to keep up with me. A hare leapt out and for a moment, it sat frozen on the path and I saw the yellow of its eye, the quick black circle taking in the world as it crouched with long ears, black-tipped, flattened, and then it erupted and ran. A lolloping stride escaping into the grass. In the quiet after it was gone, Dad picked up his tune, humming this time.
I didn’t mind. Really, I didn’t. It was fine that he was there. That he thought to follow me. It was fine.
Oh June, like the mountains I’m blue –
Like the pine, I am lonesome for you …
At least he wasn’t asking questions. Or being silent. I kept walking out towards the sands and he kept on with his tune. It was an old Laurel and Hardy number. Probably predated them, too, but it was their song as far as Dad was concerned. Sometimes he swapped Jane for June if he was singing when Mum was around.
… in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia
On the trail of the lonesome pine.
I hoped he just kept with the song and didn’t start with the slapstick to get a laugh. I wasn’t in a laughing mood. The wet sand was hard under my feet and the rain stopped as we walked towards the sea. Dad quickened his pace now and it felt like he was the one leading the way, which was just fine by me. I didn’t mind.
‘Thought we could go and take a look at the submarines. Think the rain has washed them away yet?’
They sat about a half-mile from the high tideline out by Jovey’s Neuk. Two wrecked subs that had been there as long as I could remember. Forever or something like it – though probably only since the war. There were fair-sized holes in both of them and the subs themselves weren’t that big. Mum warned me not to go out here – not all the way out on the sand at least. She’d rather I stayed closer in, maybe picked flowers round the Marl Loch. She’d rather I didn’t wander. But it was okay with Dad. He trusted me.
