(1993) The Stone Diaries (17 page)

"But I’m leaving," she told him, "on the four o’clock train."

"You just arrived."

"I’m on my way to Ottawa," she said, "to see an old friend."

"A he-friend or a she-friend?"

She stared hard. She wanted to reach out and slap the smile off his silly shining middle-aged face. At the same time she wanted this conversation to go on and on, to see where it might take her.

"A he," she said boldly.

"I knew it, I knew it."

"And how did you know?" This was obscene, continuing like this. And frightening.

"Your face. Your perfume. The way you said ‘friend.’ I have a nose for these kinds of things."

"What? What kinds of things?"

"I think you know what I mean."

"Well, I don’t," she said turning.

"I think you do."

Of course Barker Flett met Daisy’s train. As a matter of fact, he had had his new Hudson specially washed and waxed for the occasion, and drove it to the station slowly, as if it might explode under him, as if it were carrying him toward a punishment of biblical proportions.

The night was hot, though a vivifying breeze drifted up from the canal and entered the car windows. As a rule he disliked driving, but had learned, as he later told Daisy, to appreciate the feel of the polished steering wheel in his hands, and he liked, too, the sensation of this large quiet vehicle pushing its way through the summer dusk whose violet-tinted air was bordered at the top with a darker purple, so utterly different from the skies of his boyhood, from Manitoba’s abrupt evening light.

Thinking of Daisy, how he would greet her, his courage rose and fell, an echo, he supposed, of the clenching and release of memory. He clearly remembered her as an infant, how she had slept for several months in an old dresser drawer lined with cotton batting, and how, for some reason, this arrangement was always spoken of as a sentimental joke, the young infant and her improvised accommodation. After that, there is a great gap in his recollections, unflavored, flat, for Daisy is suddenly eleven years old and lying in a darkened room, recovering from a serious illness (measles? what?), looking up at him with eyes that seem no longer the eyes of a child. On the other hand, he might easily have imagined the entire scene, acquainted as he is with the existential insult of failed memory—though he can’t quite believe this is the case: Daisy’s young, possibly naked, body beneath the sheet—he is unable to clear his mind of it. He rehearses the moment again and again, not lasciviously, but in the hope that he may be wrong. He is fifty-three years old. And it is nineteen years since he saw the child. No, not a child. A woman of thirty-one years. A widow.

"Dear Daisy," he wrote to her less than one month ago, "It’s been so long. I am immensely pleased that you should be planning a visit to Ottawa."

What else had he written?

He can’t remember, and he’s not a man to make carbon copies of personal correspondence—he draws the line on selfconsciousness there—but probably he had penned the same hashed civilities he always imposed on her. Courteous sentiments.

Inquiries about her health, her activities. Dull summaries of his own circumstances, the weather in Ottawa (extremely hot or unbearably cold), the vexations of bureaucracy, occasional higher thoughts on nature, life, progress, the twentieth century, and more and more in recent years, paragraphs of hypocritical avuncular counsel. Counsel from him, her elder, her advocate, he who travels once each month to Montreal in order to relieve his body of its sexual tensions, he, a fifty-three-year-old man who occasionally still weeps at night into his pillow, who is obliged to pinch himself alive with a glass of spirits after a day of papers and meetings and putting out small administrative fires, he who keeps a cushion of awe between himself and women, pretending reverence but requiring protection. He who struggles over his letters to her, to Daisy Goodwill, his only felt connection on this earth, a being unrelated by blood and one who has entered his life by a bizarre accident (her mother’s death, his own mother stepping in), and whose consoling presence flickers always, at the side of his vision.

Apart from Daisy there is no one. To his brothers he writes once a year, at Christmas. Simon in Edmonton scarcely ever replies; Andrew writes back regularly, usually with a request for funds. As for Barker Flett’s father, Magnus, he has fallen through a hole in the earth’s crust. If by chance the old he-goat is still alive he would be in his seventies now, but it’s been years since he left Canada to go back to the Orkneys, and no one has heard so much as a word from him. No one has a scrap of news or even an address. No one, if the truth were said straight out, cares about Magnus Flett’s whereabouts or state of mind or whether or not the old grumbler is alive or dead.

It was always said of Magnus Flett that he led an unlucky life. Bad luck followed him in his marriage and in his dealings with his sons, and bad luck tracked him all the way to the Louisa, the ship that carried him from Montreal to Liverpool in the summer of 1927.

Everyone knows that early summer is a peaceful time on the Atlantic—it can be depended on—but the eight-day period of Magnus Flett’s crossing was plagued with freak storms. The old man was unable to eat or sleep, and he spent every possible moment on the open deck, vomiting into an enamel basin. The days and nights fused together in a width of misery. If anyone had asked him what his wish was at that time, he would have declared that he wished for death. The image came to him one morning, as he stood retching over the railing, of the quarry in Tyndall, the sunlight striking and warming the mottled rock surface, and a good day’s work waiting; he knew then what a perfect fool he was to have left. He vomited out the memory, erased it. He vomited out the sum of his pain and disappointment, his three sons, his disloyal wife; he vomited out the whole of his humiliation, so that when the Louisa arrived finally at Liverpool, he stepped out on to firm land light as a boy. Hurrying past the stink of the fish docks, he had himself a good feed of boiled beef and mash, a long night’s sleep in clean bedding, and woke feeling more vigorous than he had in years and more eager for life.

He sent his baggage on to Thurso by train, keeping only a change of clothing, a few odds and ends, and his copy of Jane Eyre.

At a Liverpool outfitters he bought himself a pair of stout boots and a spirit stove, having determined to walk his way up across the north of England and through the wilds of Scotland. This act seemed to him at first a defiance, then a compulsion. And then something as simple and natural as air. Nevertheless every muscle in his body lightened at the thought of what he was about to do.

The weather was with him, long soft days and evenings, and the ground dry and giving underfoot. He took his position from the sun, that only. Home; the word hummed in his ears as he walked along country roads northward, sweeter than any scattering shout of bird-song, filling him up like a meal of bread and good butter.

In a ditch he came upon a rod of smoothed wood that fit his hand perfectly, and with this he beat rhythmically against the dusty surface of the road. His whiskers grew out fine and white and soft.

The hills of England, so rounded and mannerly, grew steeper once he left Carlisle behind, but whenever he felt his legs giving way, he stretched out under a tree for an hour, opened his book and read himself out of his aches and blisters. Can this really be but an island, he said to himself, looking skyward, looking out beyond hedged pastures of sheep and cattle. This wide, green, stony land, this richness of darkness and light. He thought, with happiness, of all the undated winters that had passed over these fields, the snows, and then the slow warming up of spring. Later, reaching the treeless moors past Inverness, it seemed to him he was tramping on God’s broad seamy forehead. After that there was a leveling off, an airy sensation of descent, his mind gloriously emptied and calm.

The country hotels along the way offered a bluff, democratic welcome, and, though not a drinking man, he came to savor his pint of ale at the end of a long day’s walking. He bent his head low over his glass, sniffing, then drinking. Easeful conversation flourished in the public houses—"So what’s it like out there in Canada?" from farmers with red, rude faces—and once, in the town of Jedburgh, the landlady of a lodging house joined him for a few hours between the sheets. Her skin was roughened and full of folds, but smelt freshly of soap. Sometimes children followed him for a bit out of the towns, curious and noisy. A young woman with a ragged cough accompanied him for a day or two, talking about Jesus, talking incoherently, and he was moved to give her a few shillings before they parted.

Reaching Thurso at last, a wild wetted place with the sky pressing down hard on the horizon, he found the baggage he had sent ahead stored in the corner of a railway shed. On impulse he decided against claiming it—what was there anyway but rubbish he could get along perfectly well without. Hadn’t he proven as much?

He caught the St. Ola for Stromness, a short journey over a mercifully calm sea. He was home. He took a great gulp of air into his lungs, and at that moment a thought formed in his head, the notion that life might after all be made sweet. He would find himself a simple house up near the open fields of East Bigging where he’d spent his boyhood, and make it cozy with the help of a coalburning boiler, a warm bed, electric lights if he could manage it.

And a hidey hole to sock away his store of money. He would live like a king in this snug nest. And he would go on living forever.

During all these years Barker Flett has written to young Daisy Goodwill every second month.

Well now, that comes to six letters a year for twenty-two years, making 132 letters or thereabouts. He tells himself, and sometimes others, that he feels a responsibility for the child. He does not use the word duty, as he might have had he been born a generation earlier; but, still, he is a dutiful man. He is also calm, reflective and self-critical. He knows very well what underlies the compulsive side of his nature; it is the wish to escape that which he can’t comprehend, seeking safety in an unbendable estrangement.

He understands perfectly—and prides himself on this knowledge—how those ancient eremites were able to live out their lives in caves, and monks in their stripped cells. Even when he is in Montreal on one of his visits, lying in the arms of women into whose bodies he has discharged his passion, he longs for the simplicity of a narrow bed and a lacerating loneliness. This is what he has to fight against—wildness, chaos. When he is not fighting, he is giddy with pessimism for a cheapened world. Not always, but sometimes, after an Ottawa dinner party, he lies lifelessly in his bed, his mouth dry, thinking: how absurd I am on these occasions, holding forth like an aged actor in tones of fraudulent gladness. And how, afterwards, I beat back the world with a glass of warm whisky, trying to escape it.

He is too serious, he knows that, too willing to believe—and deaf to the comedy of mismatched couples and unseemly flesh. To comfort himself, he imagines the separate layers of his brain; there are spaces there, cavities that exist between the forces of sex and work. What is he to do with these fixed voids? Other people know. He’s never known.

His father, that austere, unfeeling and untutored man, had insisted his sons polish their boots every evening. Flett has learned to be grateful for this early discipline. It kept him breathing as a boy, provided a pulse, gave order to vast incomprehension. Later he found other ways.

He can’t recall when he learned the names of the plants in his mother’s garden, but he remembers how the exactitude of nomenclature lulled him into comfort. Early on, he knew himself to be one of those who are morally unhoused and in need of specific notation, plants, animals, the starry constellations. Soon, besides his mother’s domesticated flowers, he mastered the plantlife of the fields and woods. He had all of it quickly by heart, common names as well as Latin. Each time he was able to match a specimen with the illustration in Spotton’s Botanical Note Book he experienced a spasm of strength. The green world with its varying forms brought out an exotic tolerance in him and kept him calm. The discovery at the age of twelve or thirteen that the whole of the natural world had been classified, that someone other than himself had guessed at the need for this ordering, struck him like a bolt of happiness. He loved particularly the pockets within pockets, the great botanical divisions revealed and broken down into their tiniest branches, the smallest, most peninsular forms of life persisting valiantly in the bent corners of evolution. This miniature world, slime molds, algae, became his elected tongue—the genetics of plants, its odd, stringent beauty. Of his collection of lady’s-slippers—one of the world’s most complete, he likes to think—he loves best that one which is rarest, and of that particular bloom he values its smallest petals above the others, observing them respectfully under his microscope, memorizing the shape of the most minuscule cell, paying tribute to its position and function, and assigning it the dignity of its Latin name.

Like a chart on a wall, the complete organization of the botanic world is suspended in his consciousness. He can only suppose that the heads of other men are filled with comparable systems, with philosophies, histories, logarithm tables, texts, with points of persuasion or mapped cravings that bear them forward, as does his range of living classes, orders, families, species, and sub-species.

And into this system, which is not nearly as neat and logical as he had once believed, has crept the fact of Daisy. She sits far out at the end of one of the branches, laughing, calling to him. He sometimes shuts his eyes and wishes her gone, but she remains steadfastly there, a part of nature, confused with the subtle tendrils of sexual memory; he could no more ignore her presence than erase a subspecies of orchid or sedge. He nurtures his connection from a distance, writing to her regularly and awaiting her replies. The rhythm is fixed in his life now—a support and distraction, the way in which he confirms his most human feelings.