Читать книгу: «The Heart Beats in Secret», страница 4
We walked across the sand together, our shoes wet through though there was only an inch of sea water on the sand. It was rippled and dimpled with puddles and the bay kept draining away. Further out, we saw the marks that seals make when they pull themselves back to the water. We almost missed the wrecks and had to veer left and in towards the shore, too. Their ribs stood out like something hungry.
‘Not big, were they?’ Dad said. ‘Hardly seems like there’d be space, but four men would crew each of these. Volunteers, I mean. You couldn’t make a man climb in.’
‘I’d hate it.’ My voice sounded rough from yelling and I wished it didn’t.
‘They probably did as well. But they did what needed doing. That’s what they would have told themselves. But it must have been hell. Cold and condensation. And all the way up to Norway. I couldn’t have done it. Not my field, of course, but there’s no way.’
I thought he was going to say hell again and I waited for it. Then he laughed, but not like it was funny. He laughed with a seal’s cough, I thought, or a mouth full of sand.
‘Did you know that the engine they used in these XT subs was the same engine they used for a London bus? Gardner Diesels. Bet you didn’t know that.’
‘No.’
‘Well, now you do. Look at that. You just got cleverer. I know, not funny. But that’s why I followed you out here. I used to come out here myself when a laugh wouldn’t work. Sometimes you need the space, don’t you?’ He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked up at the sky. ‘Listen, chum. It’s not about me, is it? This door-slamming tick of yours. About me and your mum? Because if it is, I want you to know that people jump to conclusions and talk rot when they don’t understand and maybe when they are scared, but we’re solid. We always have been. And your mum just needs quiet sometimes. Like you need space. I know you get angry and have questions and all, but she’s doing her bit and her best, too. She’s holding us together, you know.’
After this, he was quiet, and I was, too. We mooched out to the second submarine, squelching our feet in the mucky sand. I kicked the side and there sounded a dull thud. Above us, a skein of geese cut across the sky, and Dad raised his arms as if he was holding his gun, but he’d left it at home and they were flying too high anyway. I wondered what he’d do if the powers that be managed to get the bay pronounced a nature reserve. Less goose on the table, I’m sure. I teased him about that on the walk back and he pulled a grimace, then picked up his tune again.
And I can hear the tinkling waterfall
Far among the hills
Bluebirds sing each so merrily
To his mate in rapture trills
They seem to say ‘Your June is lonesome, too,
Longing fills her eyes
She is waiting for you patiently
Where the pine tree sighs.’
Before I left Scotland, Dad told me about the whales found a thousand miles from the sea. Not in Montreal itself, but even further inland near a place called Cornwall where the river was island-strewn and slow. I asked how they’d managed and he laughed.
‘Fossils, my dear. Ten thousand years old. They were found by men digging clay for bricks half a mile from the railway station and two hundred feet above sea level. White whales, I think. Proves the story of the long-drained sea, but then so does the clay. It’s quick clay, tricky stuff. Formed under the oceans and riddled with salt. With the tides gone, the clay dries out, the rains wash the salt away and it shifts. So cracks appear on buildings or suddenly, a whole hillside slips away. Sometimes, fossils emerge that way, too. Sometimes, they’re dug up intact.’
I wasn’t sure why he told me this. A token fact to ease my way into a new country. And a nod to what he knew, who he was. Clay and old stone, deep time and soil. It could have been that. But later, walking through Montreal looking up at the skyscrapers, a new understanding started to surface. Above me, the half-moons of hotel windows, the ribs of towers rising, and under my feet, things still hidden.
Was I the fossil-hunter then? Or the whale?
7
PIDGE: 2006
MATEO WAS STILL AT WORK AND I WAS MAKING SALAD when she called. Slicing cucumbers and preserved lemons, pitting green olives. When I picked up the phone, I could smell their sharpness on my fingers.
Felicity’s voice was so quiet I thought she was ill, but she said no, it was only sad news. She’d had a phone call that afternoon from Scotland. One of the elders from the kirk in Aberlady was working through Gran’s address book, wanting to let her friends and relations know.
‘Kind of him, wasn’t it? Not to leave it up to a lawyer or someone, but to get in touch personally. He said the funeral was yesterday. Prearranged. It seems your grandmother sorted it all out ahead of time. She didn’t want … a fuss.’
‘Would you like me to come?’ I asked.
‘Here? No, no,’ she said. ‘No, I think not. I’ll be fine. It’s just I haven’t seen her in a while. I … I don’t quite know what to do. Now. What to do now. That’s it. I don’t know what to do now.’ She let go of her breath, and I could see her, standing in the farmhouse kitchen, her hair falling forward to curtain her face. She paused, and I could see her hold her hand up to her mouth, her long fingers, the blue of her veins. Outside the window behind her, another evening was beginning, a greying sky above the trees, the lake still and growing darker.
‘I’ll come,’ I said. ‘I can take some time off work. Someone can cover for me.’
‘No.’ She sighed again, and I waited. ‘I just wanted you to know. There really is nothing to be done, but I thought you should know.’ She told me Bas sent his love, and Rika, too. The snow was melting and mud beginning to show between the trees. They’d started tapping the maples. The beginning of another year. She said she would be fine.
‘I know,’ I said, softly.
‘Yeah. I know, too.’
When Mateo came home, I cooked fish and he opened a bottle of wine. I opened the window, so the kitchen wouldn’t get hazy, and to the east, I could see streaks of light. For a moment, I wasn’t sure what they were. They looked like scratches or tears on the surface of the sky. I watched as they changed, brightened, grew longer and strange. Then I saw they were only vapour trails catching the last light of the setting sun. I thought about picking up the phone again and calling the camp to tell Felicity about them. She’d like that. On the other hand, she might think I was checking in, prompting or trying to get her to say something else. Better let her be. I’d tell her when we spoke next, I decided, and then it struck me she might be thinking similar thoughts, out beside the lake. That she couldn’t pick up the phone to tell her mother about the bright things that caught her eye. Not this evening or in the morning or later. She had to let her be.
At the bungalow, I’d decided to sleep in the front bedroom because that wasn’t where Felicity and I slept. We were always given the back bedroom – her room before she left, now stripped and painted white. Felicity said that she’d asked her parents to do it – to make it neutral – when she left. She’d wanted to close a door like that. To make a fresh start.
Even so, the double bed with its nubbly white coverlet was utterly Felicity to me. The pillows might have only just been shaken out, the sheet folded over. If I lay down, I would feel her hands soothing my spine, her hair warm beside me and, in the morning, tangling over me so I’d wake laughing. I would be a child again, too young for this empty house, and I knew I’d never sleep for her whispered stories, her gentle questions, and my own held answers.
In Gran’s room, I told myself the clock would be soothing, the photographs interesting, and the knick-knacks would leave no space for ghosts. The wash of the sea would sound like wind in the trees at the camp or like trucks on the highway in Ottawa. But, inevitably, I slept fitfully. Maybe the smell of her soap never quite let me settle. Maybe I was just overtired. A little after dawn, there were birds in the garden and I started to compile an inventory in my head.
The books. The photographs. The rag rug. All the boxes on the shelves. The letters. The things in the shed. The kitchen things, too. The teacups. The small jars. I might have slept again, thinking through the shelves and counting, but the blue glass cake-stand on the top of the cupboard brought Felicity’s voice close.
‘It was just this colour, wasn’t it, Mum? Do you remember that? The blue moon when I was wee?’
I was sitting with two cushions wedged beneath me as she took it from the shelf. The collar on my new dress was itchy and wrong, but I held Granny’s coffee mill tight between my knees, turning the crank to grind the beans. Granny sat beside me, the pen in her hand paused over a sheet of white paper.
‘Goodness, Felicity. I’m surprised you do. It was a very long time ago. Be careful with that, dear. It was a wedding present.’
‘But the colour was just like this, wasn’t it? Don’t you think?’
‘Hmm. I hadn’t made that connection before. I always wished it were green, which was more fashionable back then. Auntie Jean wouldn’t have known that. She must have purchased it in Jenners, I suppose. Imagined it sitting in pride of place in my matrimonial home. That was the sort of thing the Morningside aunts said.’
‘I don’t remember it at all,’ Felicity said.
‘Well, when you were small, I didn’t have much cause to use it. Too hard to make cakes on the ration. And people didn’t come around then. At least, they didn’t come here.’
‘Well, they will come tomorrow,’ Felicity said.
‘Yes. They will. They will come for your father.’
Felicity placed the cake-stand on the table, tracing her finger around the rim, and I waited for her to say the words to our bedtime poem. The moon is round as round can be. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth has she. But you need a face for the moon and a cake-stand has no face, no chin at all to tickle.
‘How’s that coffee coming along?’
‘Almost done,’ I said. ‘I can still feel a few scratchy bits.’
‘Well, I certainly don’t want any scratchy bits in my cup. Be sure to grind them carefully.’
‘Was the moon really blue, Granny?’
‘That night it was. A long, long time ago now. And the next night, too, though not so clearly perhaps. It was a strange sight. Like a painting of the moon someone had slipped into the sky, trying to fool us all.’
‘Did Granddad see it, too?’
‘Yes, pet. Your granddad saw it. He thought it was very special. In fact, he took his chair, that chair you’re sitting on right now, and placed it in front of the window in the sitting room so that he could watch the moon travel right across the sky. He sat and sat, just watching that beautiful blue moon.’
‘All night? I like to stay up all night.’
‘Well, maybe not all night. Until it was bedtime.’
‘Felicity lets me stay up all night when it’s a full moon and there’s a baby coming hard.’
‘Having a hard time coming, perhaps?’
‘Yeah. That’s coming hard. Sometimes they do. Babies.’
‘Your mum helps a great deal when that happens, doesn’t she?’
‘I do, too. When I stay awake.’
Gran put down her pen and laid her hand flat on the paper. Her skin was tea-brown from afternoons outside, and her veins ran like rivers under thin skin. She wore a thick gold wedding band, and a finer pearl ring set with small diamonds. I thought her hands were beautiful.
‘Was it blue like veins, Granny? Or blue like the sky?’
‘A little like the sky. But more like bluebells. It was a thin, translucent blue, and still very shiny. Perhaps like the blue in the very centre of a candle flame.’
‘Why was it blue? It isn’t blue now.’
‘No, it wasn’t blue for long. Just a couple of nights. They thought it was probably caused by smoke from forest fires drifting over from Canada.’
‘Just like us.’ She smiled when I said that and then held out her hand to Felicity. I kept on with my grinding and she continued. ‘Some people thought it was worse than that, not smoke at all but something to do with nuclear activity, all that meddling about with the atom. There’s one for your protest friends, Felicity. Ban the bomb or the moon will turn blue. They’d run with that one.’
‘I’m sure they would,’ Felicity said. She laughed and shook her head, her hair falling over her shoulders, almost down to her waist. ‘A great slogan. See? You still have a knack for poetry.’
‘Haud yer wheesht,’ Gran said, but she smiled and that was all right and then the sound of the coffee mill changed in my hands, and the crank turned smoothly.
‘Can I open it now?’ I asked. She nodded and told me to be gentle.
‘I will. This is the best part.’ I placed the mill on the table and pulled out the little drawer with its perfect gold knob. Inside, a small mountain of fragrant coffee grounds looked like rich, dark earth, and I imagined I could make out a tiny pathway snaking up the hillside, tiny people walking in line towards the peak. I winked and the hikers looked up into the kitchen sky, my one open eye a shining blue moon above them.
‘Your dad didn’t like any of those explanations,’ Granny said in a voice suddenly tired. ‘He called them all theories. He wanted to believe the magic. Said that he believed we’re entitled to a blue moon every once in a while. I can hear him saying that, can’t you? Just like that. As if saying made it so.’
I was pulling on my jeans when I heard a honk. Under siege again. I opened the curtains but couldn’t see the goose. The day was clear and the sky a swept blue. The house here sat below the level of the road, and the lane to the door ran downhill, but by a trick of the lane’s angle, I could see the sea from the front bedroom window. Out on the water, birds were bright flashes diving white among the waves – gulls of some sort; fish-eaters. Felicity would know. Or Gran. I could only guess. But the goose was unmistakable – a run-of-the-mill, plain-as-my-face Canada goose. There was nothing else it could be. Big and brash and, as if the thought conjured it, there it was again. Another honk blasted from somewhere behind the house. Well, it could have the shed, if that’s what it wanted. I’d spend the morning inside. There were maybe two jobs in hand. Or three. Yes, three. The first was the inventory and that was the biggest. The second was to look for whatever it was that Gran had left me. The third was the difficult one: to decide what to do next.
I’d thought again about the auction house idea but selling everything would be absolute. There’d be no chance to search and sort if I handed the house over to the professionals. And if there was something to find, perhaps I’d better be the one doing the looking.
I took out my notebook and wrote: To keep. To rehome. To let go.
I’d start with the desk. That was sensible. If Gran had left me something, it would likely be there. I opened each drawer carefully but found only tidy stationery supplies. Then an address book and a neat diary, mainly empty. A set of utility bills held together with an elastic band. There was a new set of blank postcards and a book of stamps. Nothing old at all. Nothing resembling news.
I turned to the bookcase, scanning the shelves. Was there a notebook wedged in backwards? A small box hidden behind the novels, containing – what? Something.
Gran must have imagined me like this. Searching. Looking for family secrets, reading the old letters, the dusty diary, finding the crucial photograph.
Everything looked dusted.
The flow of books seemed natural. Dictionaries to bird books, walking guides, then maps. Pebble identification. Edible wild foods. Mrs Beaton. Then poetry below, with historical fiction, anthologies and folk tales. A collection you might find on the shelves of anyone of a certain vintage and a certain class. Still, something wasn’t right. Working in the gallery shop, I’d learned to read a shelf. What was missing, what had been moved. I stood, looking, balancing from the balls of my feet to my heels and back, trying to work it out. George Mackay Brown. Byron. The King’s Treasuries of Literature. Legends of Vancouver. All interspersed with knick-knacks. A bowl of marble eggs was displayed in a willow-pattern bowl next to the Scrabble dictionary. French poetry books stood upside down so that their titles aligned with their English fellows, and each of the shelves was pristine and polished. Everything looked ready to be seen.
I needed Mateo. He never spoke about his work, but I pictured him like this, poring over bits and pieces, looking for patterns in a collection. I needed a good eye. An organizer. A curator.
But maybe that was it. That was what seemed strange. Everything had been made ready. Everything was ready to be seen. Like the start of every day at the shop. Everything was dusted and arranged as if at any moment, the time might come to unlock the door and let the day begin.
Was that how I remembered my gran? Ordered, polished and ready? I wasn’t sure. I remembered the soft woollen rug with its tangled fringe, the warm electric fire and the bowl of marble eggs. I remembered her soap. Imperial Leather, and it smelled like the forest and cinnamon and sandalwood. And like geraniums, too, but without the prickle in the nose. The bar sat beside the bathroom sink – a heavy block the colour of maple cream, I thought, or the Caramac bar she would set out on the tea tray for me beside Felicity’s mug. I remembered Gran standing at the sink, scrubbing our grey underwear with her Persil powder, sighing that our homemade camp soap never got anything white. She pinned the laundry to the line in the garden and I remembered chasing Felicity through the cities of sheets and shirts, the wind itself white and clean. Then I remembered Gran combing out my hair in the evening, and Felicity saying yes, it was all right, as Gran lifted me up on the table to cut my hair off at chin level so it swung. Just like a wee land girl, she said. Muriel used to wear her hair like that. You need a Kirby-grip over your eyebrow and then you’ll be jaunty.
I remembered Gran working hard and liking beautiful things. I imagined her readying this room. Standing here by the shelf, straightening the books and the photo frames. Maybe she caught her own eye in the mirror, too, and looked and wondered when, and then set things in order for me. Muriel said she knew I was coming. So, she knew she was going. And she made things ready.
My grandmother was tall, as was my grandfather. The height of the mirror was telling. As was the height of the bookshelves and the shelves where the boxes sat. Some were labelled in my grandmother’s precise script – what my mother would call ‘educated handwriting’: Photographs. Felicity’s letters. Recipes. Buttons. Then there were the boxes marked with Granddad’s scrawl: Pebbles. Scribbles & Poems. Feathers. Maybe.
I pulled out the desk chair and climbed up. Felicity would like the recipes. An easy to keep, I thought. The box held neat bundles of pale-blue index cards bound with sensible elastic bands and marked with white tags. Soups. Vegetable Sides. Game. Puddings. Sweet Treats.
My gran’s coconut macaroons were the most exotic objects in my childhood. And her golden cheesy fish, baked in a casserole and covered in breadcrumbs that crackled in the middle and bubbled at the sides. Chicken in mushroom sauce meant a whole chicken breast just for me, and a white napkin to spread across my lap. Water in a cut-glass tumbler. Margarine.
I leafed through the recipes, hungry for the familiar. But you can’t flick through memories like that. They don’t turn on like the lights. You need to kindle them and wait.
Sloe gin
1 lb sloes
8 oz white sugar
1¾ pint gin
Sterilize a good strong darning needle in a candle flame, then use it to prick the tough skins of the sloes all over.
Place sloes in large bottle and add sugar and gin.
Seal well and shake. Keep bottle in a cupboard and shake every second day for the first week. After that, shake once a week and gin will be ready to drink in two months. Lovely at Christmas.
Note – Muriel’s mother says to try this with brandy and blackberries.
To dry rosehips
Wash your rosehips, top and tail then finely dice and dry them on newspaper in the sun.
Tip the dried rubble into a metal sieve and shake gently to remove the tickly hairs. They will easily fall away, leaving you with clean dried rosehips, ready to be used for tea, jam or jelly. Good for preventing colds and as a treatment for stiffness.
Coconut macaroons
Line a sandwich tin with sweet pastry.
Mix in a bowl:
1 cup coconut
¾ cup sugar
1 switched egg
Smooth into tin and bake at 400˚ for about 25 minutes.
Sweet pastry Felicity likes
2 lbs plain flour
1¼ lbs margarine and lard (mixed)
½ lb sugar
2 eggs
Pinch of salt
Makes a lot so a child can play with extra as pie is readying.
