Home Schooling (15 page)

She'd walked from room to room. The house had been cleaned, but still, she could tell. In the kitchen she stood at the window. Snow falling, wind in the chimney, a truck or car going past on the road. She imagined her father in the room, putting a bowl of food on the floor for his cat, straightening a chair, tentatively moving her brother's exercise book, left open on the table, as if he were searching for something he'd misplaced. She imagined turning and their eyes meeting and then she'd look away. She went outside and the icy air came at her tenderly, as if it had the utmost regard for her plight. She saw the cat near the fence. She asked Henry Morgan to please catch it for her. He ran, his long black coat billowing out, but the cat disappeared into the trees and she never saw it again. Henry
and Jane took her back to the boarding house. Henry walked her to the door. Is there anyone we can get to stay with you? he'd asked. No. There is no one, she'd said.

One night Henry and Jane came to her door. Pauline had been asleep. Jane's face was rosy from the cold, her hair in little damp tendrils. Henry removed his coat and pulled back the blankets and lay beside Pauline. He lifted her nightgown and began to make love to her, not roughly, but as if it were a duty, one of the lesser-known police duties he was compelled to undertake from time to time. He took her hand from her eyes. She was ashamed of her thinness, her ribs visible, the pallor of her skin. Jane sat on the bed and gently stroked Pauline's arm and eased the tangles from her hair. Where Jane and Henry touched her, Pauline became new, restored, transcendent. She thought: I am like them. In fact, she was like anyone; she was human, she was herself. She remembered how she used to write down her father's sermons as he dictated them to her, about how some would get victory over the beast, the image of the beast, and how they would stand on a sea of glass and their breasts would be
girded with golden girdles.
She could hear a dog barking, a shout, everything distant and safe, going on as it was meant to.

Before dawn, Jane and Henry left. Pauline got up and went to the window and scraped at the frost with her thumbnail, at the tiny, crystalline grains, which felt like sand but melted away in her fingers, and she understood — she thought she understood — that transience was a property also of things unseen, such as grief, sorrow, love. Loss was terrible, phantasmagorical and yet plain, unadorned, serviceable. It could, presumably, be survived.

That day she packed her few personal belongings into an old cloth valise that had belonged to her mother. She went to the bank where she'd worked and withdrew her savings, just enough for a one-way ticket to Vancouver. Once she was on the train she felt calm, yet eager, full of anticipation, and she was content just to
sit quietly and watch as the miles went by and snow fell without cessation in the dark forests.

Lydia, kneeling at the altar at her father's church, began to think of Julian. Almost in a trance she pictured him going into his house, at that very moment. Someone would have been there, caring for the child, and that person would leave, and Julian would go to a window with the child in his arms and look out at the rain and the dark sky. He'd remember, for no particular reason, Lydia creeping around in the lane behind his house and he'd try to work out what could have possessed her to behave like that — what had been in that girl's peculiar little mind? Lydia imagined that she went to his house again and he saw her and let her in. They would stand there in each other's arms, silent in their shared knowledge of what could happen in the world and indeed did happen, continually, without respite: acts of passion and bile, regret and love. At the same time, she'd see how ordinary the room was, a book open on the table, a coffee cup. A place of shelter. Yet there would be in that house the memory of tragedy, of loss. It would linger in the air, she would breathe it in. She'd have a sense, also, of the child's presence, the child deeply asleep in its crib in another room, dreaming something quite contrary to Lydia's dream, something necessary to its own survival.

W
HEN
I
WENT BACK
to the town where my mother, Bethany, and I had once lived, I wasn't surprised to see our house was gone. The lot was a dump. But I was happy to see that some of Bethany's garden remained: the hardier trees and shrubs, a hedge of western red cedar, unkempt, but grown impressively tall and lush. I remembered how Bethany would dig trees out of wild land and cart them home in the trunk of our car. She'd go around to nurseries and persuade the owners to give her their ailing or misshapen specimens, which she'd then plant and coax back to health. Where the sun was hottest, she'd planted heather, lavender, and roses. She liked everything about roses: the fabulous colours and intricate, perfectly arranged petals, the fragrance, the serrated leaves like little arrows, even the hurtful, distressingly numerous thorns.

The reason I was here wasn't important. I just was. It was a perfect spring day. I was standing near a trio of tulips, satiny-black,
fat as goblets, blooming with surprising vigour near what remained of the house foundations.

When we'd lived here, I'd just finished school and had got a job at the local radio station. I had no real training, but I could write grammatically and type with some accuracy. My manner on the telephone was, I believed, helpful without being effusive. But then, I was never very talkative, which made Simon remark, in a baffled, suspicious tone, “You write poetry, don't you? You must have some thoughts inside that head of yours.” It was true; I did. But I was used to being solitary and keeping my thoughts to myself and until Simon began to goad me I hadn't known this was a flaw.

Bethany called Simon a bad influence, and I suppose he was. I remembered driving home from some party with Simon and he'd be so woozy from drink he'd have to hang on hard to the steering wheel for balance. His tolerance, he'd said, wasn't as good as it had been. Simon was forty-seven, although I had the presence of mind to subtract a few years when Bethany pressed for details. Far from being a detriment, Simon's age made him seem a romantic figure to me. He had the dusty, tattered appearance of a traveller from some vast, arid country fraught with danger. His hazel eyes were flecked with grains of light, as if he were continually focusing on some new thing. His person was weighted down with well-thumbed note-books, ballpoint pens, a small tape recorder. He talked to me about serious things, world politics, economics, the books he'd read. He even looked at my poems and told me which ones he liked and which ones, in his opinion, didn't work all that well.

I pictured our house the way it had been in those days: small and plain, rundown, and me inside it, nineteen years old, slightly hung-over following another debauched night in Simon's company. I remembered getting out of bed at noon and going into the kitchen in my pyjamas to pour myself a cup of coffee. From the window I could see Bethany weeding a border of sweet alyssum and those little dwarf marigolds. It must have been a Sunday, because she
wasn't at work. I winced at the light, the radiance of the flowers, which seemed like nothing you'd find in an ordinary garden. Bethany used to make me do some weeding or pruning as punishment for some misdemeanour, like not phoning home to say where I was, or not getting home until nearly dawn. Where's the punishment in that, I'd ask, laughing and holding out my hands for her to see: gardening had already destroyed my fingernails and left dirt permanently embedded around my cuticles. Bethany had said, Fine, if that didn't sound enough like punishment, she'd lock me in my room. She would lock me in and swallow the key, if necessary. I'd laughed and said she wouldn't dare. She said try her and see.

It was hard to keep up to Bethany's high standards. She worked six days a week as a clerk at a building supply store, and after work she kept busy tending the house and the garden. That morning, I remembered, she was in faded denim cut-offs and stubby yellow clogs. She looked about twelve years old. She must have sensed I was watching her, because she'd stood up and shaded her eyes with her hand and called, “Is that you, Rachel?” Through the open window I'd called back, “It's me.” Who else would it have been, I'd wondered? I finished my coffee and rinsed out my cup and then tried to comb my hair into some kind of order before she saw me.

I'd met Simon at the radio station. He'd come across the street from the newspaper office to read the news as it came off the Teletype machine in the newsroom and then he'd stay, clutching torn-off sheets of newsprint, he and the station news director arguing about whether Patty Hearst had been kidnapped or had joined the Symbionese Liberation Army of her own free will, and about Watergate and the possibility the American president would be impeached. My desk was nearby, and as I worked I'd imagine Simon being as distracted by my presence as I was by his. No one was supposed to know we were seeing each other, mostly because Simon didn't want to get teased about robbing the cradle, as he put it. I didn't care. I
was pleased Simon was interested in me. The first time he'd asked me out was the same day the news director had introduced us, as an afterthought more than anything, as in: Oh, yes, this is our new girl, Rachel.

Simon and I got in the habit of driving over the Malahat to Victoria every Friday, to a theatre Simon was fond of that showed foreign films with subtitles. They were old films, even then. Simon had a way of becoming completely engrossed as the story unfolded on the screen. I would rest my head on the rough tweed of his sports jacket, which smelled of marine engine oil, salt water, and spicy aftershave lotion, and amuse myself dreaming up words that would in some measure describe my state of mind: bemused, ecstatic, well-content. Once, the word “happy” came into my mind just as it appeared on the screen. “Oh, I'm so happy,” a young Polish woman was saying to her lover. “I'm so happy,” I whispered in Simon's ear, and he patted my hand and said, Please, Rachel, be quiet and let me watch the film.

After the movie, Simon and I liked to stroll around the block in the June twilight to a restaurant he claimed made authentic British-style fish and chips. He told me how, when he was younger, he'd liked nothing better than to stand on a street corner in Durham eating chips straight out of the newspaper wrapping. His first foray into journalism, he said. He was born in the north of England and had lived there until he was thirty, when he and his wife, Rosemary, had immigrated to Canada. They'd divorced years ago. Rosemary still lived in the area, but Simon rarely saw her. He claimed his ex-wife was the most neurotic person he'd ever met, although her neuroses manifested themselves in small, obscure ways that had to do, mostly, with disapproving of whatever he did. For example, he said, when they were married she forbade him to eat fish and chips, partly because she couldn't abide the smell of grease, but mostly because she considered fish and chips to be working-class fare. Going for a beer after work was also working-class, in Rosemary's estimation, and so he hadn't
been allowed to do that, either. The worst thing, of course, was his acquiescence. Rosemary had trained him to be as docile as his dog, Mitzy, and Mitzy, he said, was an extremely docile animal.

By the time we drove home over the Malahat it was long past midnight and the road was free of traffic, which gave Simon an opportunity to demonstrate how fast his MG could go. The clean, cold mountain air, perfumed with the scent of dry pine needles, blew my hair around and made my eyes stream with tears, and all I could think was, well, if something happens, it happens; if we crash, we crash. As Simon leaned heavily into a corner, or grappled with the stick shift when he headed into a steep downhill bend, I found myself involuntarily repeating in my head one of the simple prayers Bethany had taught me when I was small.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,/Guard the bed that I lay on.
The words slipped through my mind at about the speed of light, which was approximately how fast Simon's car was travelling. I prayed my childish prayers and laughed too loudly, out of fear.

Simon lived miles out of town in a place called Venice Bay, a community of marinas, houseboats, and summer cottages situated at the end of a narrow unpaved road. Simon's rented cottage perched out over the sea on pilings coated with creosote. It had a deck shaped like the prow of a ship — or perhaps I should say a raft, since it had no railings. The sea, enclosed on three sides by forested land, was green, heavy looking, with iridescent pools of oil on the surface, and the air, thick with insects, had about it a drowsy, golden quality. There was a marina down the road where Simon kept his boat. The boat was a cabin cruiser with a diesel engine. It was an old boat, but it had a galley in good repair and bunks to sleep in. So far, though, we hadn't. We hadn't slept together on his boat or anywhere else. Naturally, Bethany suspected otherwise. Even though she'd had what she called a strict religious upbringing, Bethany had a harder time than most people recognizing the simple truth when she heard it. Of course, I found it hard to believe myself, at times. Was it that
Simon found me too immature, too boring? Or was it the other way around? Was Simon too mature to want to bother with sex? This seemed unlikely, based on what I'd learned from those foreign films, and from books, and even from the behaviour I'd observed at the parties I went to with Simon, where everyone told dirty jokes and some guy was always trying to cop a feel. I couldn't ask my mother for advice, obviously. Who could I ask? I thought of Dr. Bergius. Bring your problems to me, he had advised, running his hand over his crisp Sigmund Freud look-alike beard.

Dr. Bergius was the new owner of the radio station. He arrived four weeks after I started work. One of the first things he said to me was that people always told him he looked like Freud. Isn't it the truth? he'd said, touching a hand to his long, thin face and perfectly barbered silver beard. For all I knew, he did look like Freud. He looked like a lot of different people, a lot of older gentlemen. He sat behind his desk like a train passenger, apprehensive yet anxious to be off. He said he knew he wasn't a great psychoanalyst like Freud — he wasn't any kind of psychoanalyst, come to that. As a medical practitioner, however, his primary concern had always been to listen to his patients' stories, no matter how insignificant or pointless they seemed. He'd been in love with words since he was a boy in Germany and his mother had read to him before he slept. Great books, she had read, like
Robinson Crusoe
— in translation, of course — and also novels and poetry by German writers such as Theodor Storm and Goethe and the incomparable poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Why, even now he remembered perfectly certain of Rilke's lines, such as:
For her he loves and spoils her with felt skies.