The Heart Specialist (37 page)

I shook my head and told her I had not come for medical help. It was cold at the door. She hooked a slippered foot around her standing leg and folded her arms, waiting for me to say more.

“I need to see the doctor,” I said again. “My reasons are personal.”

This last remark made her angry. She had a square jaw, which she thrust out at me now, although frankly I couldn’t have looked like much of a threat. I had deduced she was my father’s companion —
la femme qui n’était pas sa femme
. Her attitude certainly made it clear that she wasn’t a cook or a housekeeper.

To put her at ease I said I was a colleague. “We knew each other long ago.”

We were both freezing by this time, so she allowed me inside while she went down the hall to announce me to Dr. Bourret. “I promise you nothing,” she tossed over her shoulder as she left. “He seldom receives visitors.”

The house was dark and smaller than it seemed from the outside. Its few windows were narrow, more suitable for a military fort than a home. The walls were painted white, which brightened it a little, and the gas lamps were lit, but the atmosphere was generally dreary.

The orange-haired woman eventually returned and led me to a living room at the back of the house. Now that the door was shut, closing off the salty smell of the sea, other odours took over. My hostess, I soon noticed, smelled of alcohol. We walked wordlessly to a den. Inside this room my father was sitting on a couch with his legs up, wrapped in a rug. He didn’t get up when I walked in, just turned to me and squinted. And what a shock that gave me, for the face he turned in my direction was nothing like the one I’d held for years inside me. His upper lip was shaved clean. His hair was completely white. He still had a quantity of it. He was wearing glasses with lenses so thick they magnified his eyes to twice their normal size, making him look at once angry and amazed.

I stood in the doorway staring until finally he called me inside. “You will excuse me if I do not rise,” he said in a French that was clearly not local. “My joints are painful with the wet weather.” He motioned me forward. “Enter,” he said. “Come into the light where I can see you.”

The request surprised me for I was already in the light at a distance of only five feet. The orange-haired woman gave me a push. “Go on,” she whispered. “His eyes are bad. You have to go right up close.”

“I can hear you,” said the old man. “My eyes may be weak but there is nothing wrong with my ears.” He took off his glasses to reveal pupils the colour of milk. “I can’t even read the papers now,” he said, folding up an old copy of
Le Monde
and sticking it between his body and a cushion. “Solange has to read me the news.” He motioned with his hands again. “Come closer! You are a blur!”

I had to walk right up to the couch. I felt like a little girl about to receive either a slap or a kiss. He stared for some time then finally looked away. “No,” he said, as if answering a question. “I have never laid eyes on you.”

A brandy bottle sat on a low table with two glasses. The old man must have seen where I was looking for he started chuckling. “I guess I must offer you a drink. We were toasting the end of this particularly awful year. You will join us?” He held up a glass for me. “I’ve always felt it’s more important to bury the old year with a little pomp than to throw a party for the new one.” He pointed to a chair opposite his couch where he wanted me to sit. “Now tell me who you are. You say that we have met.”

He filled three glasses, handing one to me and another to Solange, who was standing nearby. “Come, my dear,” he said. “Help me welcome our guest.” He patted the free end of the couch and she sat down, reminding me of a tabby curling at its master’s feet.

“It was years ago,” I said. “I was just a child.” These were my first words to him, and I spoke them in English. Surprise registered on his face that I was not French.

He sat forward, trying to bring me into focus. For a moment he dropped his casual air. He turned on Solange. “I thought you said she was a colleague.”

Solange shrugged. “It’s what she said.”

“I did say that,” I said in French. I didn’t want to be the cause of a fight, and I certainly didn’t want to turn Solange into any more of an enemy to me than she already was. “I am a colleague now, a doctor like you.”

“You speak in riddles,” said my father. He was still looking in my direction, but the cloudy lenses made it difficult to know exactly what he was seeing. “You are English?”

I nodded.

“And a doctor.”

I nodded again.

“And where did you say we met?”

I steeled myself, half-expecting the floor to split open. “In Montreal.”

Honoré Bourret shrugged. “Then it is certain you are mistaken, for Montreal is a place I have never had the pleasure of visiting.” His strange, milky eyes looked straight at me. It was the oddest sensation to have this father who wasn’t quite my father deny me so brazenly.

“But you were born there,” I said.

“I come from England,” said Bourret. Solange watched me with sleepy, catlike eyes. The two of them were so insistent I began to waver. The face was different from the one I remembered. It wasn’t inconceivable that this Honoré Bourret was a stranger. I began to consider this possibility, but then caught myself. Three years ago William Howlett had sat with him in the Auberge des flots. Jakob Hertzlich had been a witness. He was lying. Looking me straight in the eye and lying.

“I have just sailed from England,” I said, “from the home of a friend of yours.”

He had relaxed somewhat, leaning back on the couch, but at the mention of Sir William he sat up again. He turned to Solange and ordered her to leave the room. When she saw that he was serious she objected. Why should she leave because of a stranger? This was her home too, in case he hadn’t noticed. What kind of a way was this to treat people? She heaped abuse on me too for disrupting her morning.

The old man had to shoo her out. It was an embarrassing spectacle that spoke volumes about their relations, or lack of them. “Women!” he said in English when he finally got the door shut. “Always such a handful.” He sat down opposite me again. “So Dr. Howlett sent you here?” He continued in English, probably to prevent his girlfriend from listening in.

I told him that Sir William had done everything in his power to dissuade me from coming, that he’d called the situation “complex” and tried to warn me away.

“But you came nonetheless.”

There was a pause during which we studied each other. I had no idea what he was thinking. Perhaps he was considering his options, trying to figure out his next move and just how much he wanted to reveal. Or perhaps he was considering me. The inscrutable eyes blinked shut. “I don’t know you,” he said for the second time that day.

I said my name — not the English one that my grandmother had given me but the older French one chosen by him. I said I was his daughter.

He did not respond for some time. He crossed one leg over the other and reached for a box of cigarettes. He offered me one. When I shook my head he lit one for himself. “I have never been to Montreal,” he said, exhaling. “William Howlett tried to dissuade you from coming here for a reason. It is a waste of time.”

I left soon after. Solange was in the kitchen, preparing lunch. She did not even look up as I passed in the hall. The old man had to accompany me to the door himself and hand me my coat and boots. The vestibule was quite small and he and I had to stand perhaps a foot apart as I dressed myself.

“You must not speak of this to anyone,” he said quietly.

By that time I had collected myself a little, or at least I thought I had. “What is there to speak of?” I said, also low-voiced, as if we shared a secret. “We do not know each other.”

“That is right,” he said and smiled.

Those were our final words. I was shaking as he closed the door behind me. He was closing me out now just as years ago he had closed out my mother and a much younger version of myself, and even before that as he’d closed out his crippled sister. It was only when I reached the street that I realized my hands were empty. I had forgotten the bag with my gifts in the house. I could picture exactly where I had left it beside the chair on which I’d sat, but nothing in this world could have induced me to go back inside to retrieve it.

A light snow had begun to fall over la rue de Verel and all the other streets of Calais. My father was probably in his kitchen now, trying to make peace with Solange. They would sit down to their noonday meal and eventually one or the other of them would return to the den and discover my bag. There was no chance that Solange would be able to decipher the materials I had so carefully packed and carried all this way, and no chance that my father would be able to read them even if he did get his hands on them.

29

JANUARY 1, 1919

When morning broke on New Year’s Day it was barely distinguishable from night. The cocks crowed despite the heavy black sky. I had not slept much, in part because of my father, in part because of the noise from the bar, which happened to be located directly beneath my room. The New Year’s Eve
réveillon
was an event at the Auberge des flots. Their annual party was renowned in Calais, and judging from the decibel volume half the town had dropped in to raise a glass.

I had stayed upstairs despite invitations from my hosts. When Eugenie heard me refuse her husband’s offer of complimentary champagne she invited me to sit with her and Charles in their rooms and share a hot milk. Even this I could not manage. All night I sat alone and wept. Just before dawn I dressed and went downstairs. The bar looked like a storm had blown through it. Glasses and bottles cluttered the tables. Two bodies lay prone on the floor. I tiptoed past them, found my boots, and slipped out the door.

This time I needed no map from the innkeeper to direct me. I simply followed my nose down avenue de la Mer to the water. The sky lightened as I walked, but aside from gulls and cormorants circling above the town and calling with their piercing cries I seemed to be the only living creature. I walked at a good pace, the wind at my back, breathing in the fecund, salty odours. Calais was fronted by an enormous beach, la plage Blériot, which I had glimpsed from the ferry when we landed. A large hotel had been built overlooking it, but this was now closed for the season, its doors and windows boarded.

I crossed the beach, whose sands were rippled by the wind, and made it to a pier with a little tower at the end. There I stopped. The tide was on its way out, which I didn’t realize right away. Rivers were what I had grown up with — the fast-flowing North River fronting my grandmother’s property in St. Andrews East, the St. Lawrence after I moved to Montreal. The ocean smelled different, of salt and seaweed and creatures in its depths. I stood there for a long time, staring out at the water.

In a single week I had lost the two most important men in my life. Yet the word “lost” was misleading. Neither had died and it had been years since either had played any outwardly discernible role in my life. Internally, however, they had been pivotal, at the centre of everything. Now that centre, my centre, had slipped. Sir William Howlett had lied to me. I didn’t care that the situation with Honoré Bourret was complex, or even that the lie in Howlett’s estimation was in my best interests. My father was no better. For years I had believed him to be a victim, an innocent man vilified by the small-minded Scottish community in Montreal for daring to be ambitious and different. As a woman with the same qualities I had identified with him.

My father had left a wife in the final stages of pregnancy without a thought for the consequences to her or to the child yet to be born. He had abandoned me when I was not yet five. And when I turned up on his doorstep forty-four years later he had turned away again, lying to protect himself. Such a man, I now realized, might be capable of disposing of a crippled sister who made heavy claims on him. The clues to my father had been there but I had shut my eyes to them.

The French word
fille
means “girl” as well as “daughter.” Yesterday at this hour I had still been a girl, with my hopes largely intact. I had been excited, wending my way through the streets to meet him, following the ridiculous hand-drawn map. I had pinned much on that meeting. The truth was, of course, I had left girlhood behind years ago. I wasn’t the
fille
of Honoré Bourret or of anyone else. I was forty-nine and the bottom had fallen out of my life. I thought back to the scraps of my existence I had collected for him. I had been like a schoolgirl, toting home prizes from class. Only now could I see how pathetic I was. He would no doubt toss out the bag unexamined.

The voices of children roused me and I realized I had been standing on the pier for some time. The beach was now wider and slick from the receding water. Sunlight was beating down strongly enough to have broken through the clouds. Sea birds were basking in it on the still-wet sand. A group of children had come to play by the water’s edge — two boys of eight or nine and a little girl. The boys were skimming stones and shouting, calling out the number of dips before the stones disappeared from view. They greeted me as I stepped down onto the beach. The oldest one wished me a Happy New Year and I reciprocated.