“No,” Mary said. “I’m sorry.”
“It always did seem a dream and it turned out to be just that,” Clare said.
“And now your young man has returned.” Mary contemplated Clare. “Perhaps Paris was a dream, but if you want to be an artist you will need to continue your studies somewhere.”
LEO STAYED AT the Camp Hill barracks in rooms made temporarily available to men passing through Halifax on their way home.
He and Clare walked the city — to see the damage and the new building since the explosion. He spoke little and tired easily.
Clare stood by the front door of the school one morning watching him walk up the street towards her. He seemed more clearly in focus than the landscape he walked through. Was it the light around him, sharpening his edges? Or had she always seen him in this way, as if he moved through her vision slightly magnified?
He was surprised at her new eye. “It’s a remarkable likeness. Where did you get it all of a sudden?”
“A glass-maker from the factory made it for me.”
“He’s a good friend?” Leo asked.
Clare looked away. “He’s a good man. He knew I was having trouble finding a match. There’s a shortage of glass eyes these days.”
They took a shortcut back to Rose’s through Fairview Cemetery. The sun laid long blue shadows at the feet of the grey headstones of the Titanic’s victims. Not far from them were a series of new graves, pale with their first summer’s grasses. Leo slowed to examine a stone: 98. Identity Unknown. December 6, 1917.
“These are graves of the explosion victims. Some were never claimed,” Clare said. She thought with an ache of Fred. He told her once that he sometimes visited these graves, that he felt close to those buried here. He had noted the colour of their eyes and what was in their pockets. He had undressed and washed them. He was their last connection to the living.
Leo stood in front of the grave, weaving a little.
“Marty,” he said. “I don’t know where they buried him.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
“The men on the fields, or what was left of them. I didn’t even know who most of them were. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if they were us or them.” He stared out at the lines of graves. “I was there when Marty was shot.”
He had told her about the tunnel collapse, being kept behind the lines to work, and that he had been shot trying to escape. Now he told her of coming upon Marty and watching him die.
“Let’s go sit down for a while,” Clare suggested.
The bench was set in a notch of dense hedge. Out of the wind, the sun was surprisingly warm. Banks of ribbed cloud were moving in from the south. The wind clicked through the overhead branches.
Across the park, a young man, missing one foot, sat in a chair, looking intently at an open book in his lap. Leo gripped the arm of the bench, opening and closing his other hand. “Most limbs were lost due to infection, not because of the injury itself,” he said. “The infections were fast and terrible. Mostly the doctors just whacked the things off to save themselves the trouble of having to do it later.” The young man still hadn’t turned the page of his book. And after a while, “You can’t amputate an infected mind,” Leo said in a whisper.
After a few minutes his head dropped onto his chest. His hands twitched in his lap. His shoes were worn but recently polished with a shade of brown darker than the original, which Clare could see on the tongues. His pants were clean but unpressed. In his face she saw the lines that would settle around his mouth and across his forehead as he aged. His skin had lost the dusty bloom she remembered. With the grip of consciousness loosened, his face fell slack and she could see what he had been hiding, that he was anxious and drained. The clouds swallowed the sun and the park became suddenly dim. He woke with a shout. “Natalie!” He shuddered, his whole body propelled from the bench and onto his feet even before his eyes were fully open. “Je suis ici!”
58
AFTER DINNER AT ROSE’s, Celia played a Haydn sonata for them. Leo sat next to Clare, dozing during the slow movement. She wondered if he only slept in these short interludes, in public places, where he wouldn’t be alone in the dark.
THEY STAYED IN the drawing room after the others had gone upstairs. The streetlamp shining through the firs cast patterns over the carpet’s floral.
“I need to go home to Grafton,” Leo said. He took her hand. “Come with me.” He pulled her towards him, holding her waist tightly.
“I can’t leave the city right now, Leo. I have my studies.”
“You can be an artist in Grafton.” He leaned closer to kiss her, his right hand moving up to cup one of her breasts.
“I’m not an artist yet,” she laughed, gripping his hand. “I have much to learn still.” She turned serious. “When do you plan to start your own studies?”
“I don’t,” Leo said. “I’ve done a lot of thinking in the last months.” He sat back on the sofa, the metal springs creaking, and placed his other hand on hers. “I have decided I want to take over the farm.”
Clare looked down at the hand in hers. His fingernails, which had always been trimmed, were still short but the cuticles split. Hers were stained red with paint. “I want to show you something,” she said.
They climbed the stairs without speaking.
She took her portfolio out from under the bed and opened it on her quilt. The drawing on top was of his mother, Evelyn, flying through the air, her hair streaming out behind her, carrying her infant son in her arms. He looked at it a long time. One by one he pulled out the rest of the drawings: a girl falling from a roof, a dazed woman trailing dirty blankets along the street, figures stretched out in a hospital corridor, horses and children, all the small armies of her tormenting visions.
“I had hallucinations after the explosion, a side effect of losing my eye. The only way I could endure them was by drawing them.”
The last drawing was her nude self-portrait. She had forgotten about it. She reached for it.
Leo held it. “Wait.” He looked at it a long time, at the breasts and the soft curve of her hips, the dark groin, and finally at the face, its one, half closed eye, the other staring longingly out from the drawing. “The thought of you. For a long time it’s what kept me going. It kept me alive,” he said.
“And then?”
“Then I needed to forget everything to survive.” He touched the portrait lightly, absently. “I’m sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” she said. “I’m the one who is sorry. Leo, we’ve changed. Both of us. I want to be an artist. I can’t be a farm wife.” She closed the portfolio. “Who is Natalie?”
He gave her a startled look.
“You called her name when you were asleep today in the cemetery.”
LEO SANK DOWN on the bed, reached for her hand, and let it pour out. He told her about his escape, about Natalie shooting him, about concealing himself on her farm, about her death, and how he had walked to the nearest military post afterwards and given himself up, before falling into days of sleeplessness, broken only by nightmares that left him sick and shaking. In the end, a compassionate military doctor signed his release. He was only moderately useful with his injured leg, and the war was almost over.
“Did you love her?” Clare asked softly.
Leo looked at her painfully. “We needed each other.”
“Did you love each other?”
His shoulders shook with silent sobs.
Clare took the portfolio off the bed, sat down, and wrapped her arms around him. Later she lifted his legs up onto the bed and pulled her quilt over him. She dozed in the chair in the corner all night, waking from time to time to watch him sleep, crying quietly, her ruthless eye seeing him clearly for the first time. The boy she had carried with her all these years was not this man. That boy was taken. This then is how time changes us, she thought, watching Leo’s face twitch in sleep. As if we move through a drawing, the outline of childhood filling in, creating a layered
painting we had never imagined, surprising even ourselves.
59
CLARE PULLED HER COAT COLLAR UP around her chin and ran down the steps of Rose’s house into an afternoon of burnt umber and indigo. She turned towards the city, walking fast, leaving behind the faint rising-falling notes of Celia’s piano scales.
Camp Hill Cemetery was empty except for an elderly coloured woman in a dark red coat and oversized boots, staring down at a grave marked only with a flat white stone. A cold wind passed through Clare, a visitation. Of life as it could have been, had worlds not been blown apart. She felt the weight of all who’d died. Of all who lost parts of themselves.
The trees in the public garden had dropped their last leaves. Between their bare branches shimmered the iced-over pond. Beyond it, the long grass of summer, in the corner where she and Leo had lain, would be bent under first frosts. Sorrow rose in Clare’s throat.
Downtown, Christmas garlands strung the shops, some still half rebuilt, others singed around their doorways. Clare caught a reflection of her face floating above a jumble of wagons and toy drums. A doll with blonde ringlets stared blankly back at her with brilliant blue glass eyes.
A woman pushing a pram slowed to inspect the window, her shoes scuffed and lumpy. The babe in the pram, almost lost in swaddling, was deep in newborn sleep, untouched by what happened here a mere year ago. On just such a morning, women, combing their hair and making tea, urged children to eat their porridge, lace up their boots, their husbands setting off for work with cold meat and thick bread slices in tin lunch cans, each oblivious to the precious ordinary moments. Just before they shattered.
A SUPPLY SHIP SHOULDERED its way into a pier. On the dock no towers of weapons or sacks of grain, no boxes of canned tomatoes and bales of hand-knit socks, no terrified horses or euphoric recruits. Only dockhands and clusters of people in long winter coats, stamping their feet and blowing into their hands, searching for the odd familiar face among the restless men crowding the ship’s rail.
Clare hugged her coat close, increased her pace, turning north where silhouettes of new buildings hunched among sites of rubble, neighourhoods sketching themselves back in. Still pieces of skyline missing. Not empty, but filled with light and colour, sea mist suffused pale lemon. What Mary called negative space. That absence which can define objects, sometimes the key to seeing the true shape of things.
CLARE WAS OUT OF BREATH by the time she reached the Lutheran Church, the bell clanging for the morning service, the door swung slightly ajar. A short older woman, wearing an olive-green coat of the type fashionable before the war, puffed up behind Clare, and shuffle-stamping her feet, waited for her to enter. When Clare hesitated, the women pushed past. “Too blooming cold out here.” Then called back, “Just go on in. Everyone is welcome.”
“I’m not here for the service,” Clare said.
The woman eyed her suspiciously, retraced her steps.
“I’m looking for someone. A man. Fred Baker.”
“Ah, Mr. Baker.” The woman flapped a dismissive hand. “Good luck! We tried to make him feel welcome but he never was one for church.”
“I wonder — might anyone know where he lives?”
The woman adjusted her hat, buying time. Clare had the feeling that she had no idea where Fred lived.
“I think he’s moved,” the woman finally said. “He hasn’t been here for a long time.”
“He was … away,” Clare said. “I have something I need to tell him.”
The woman looked Clare up and down, as if searching for whatever it was she might have to say to Fred. “Gerda knew where he lived.” She motioned for Clare to follow her into the church. The pews were only half full, resigned older women mainly, bundled in worn winter coats.
BLACK COURT WAS A squat building with flat plank walls and a barren inner courtyard. The thought of Fred going back and forth here every day, the loneliness of those months he’d lived alienated, friendless, dogged Clare with biting regret.
She walked up the first flight of dingy stairs to the door marked Dempsey, the name listed under Rental Inquiries at the main door. A thick-bodied woman with indistinct features, as if modelled from clay slapped together, opened the door. She wore a stained housedress and unravelling slippers. “We don’t let to young women,” she said.
“I’m not looking for housing. I’m looking for someone I think lives here. Fred Baker.”
The woman retreated a little back into her own doorway and peered at Clare narrowly. “Our single men aren’t allowed to have women visitors in their rooms.”
Clare straightened. “I’m not a visitor, I’m a friend. I need to tell him something.”
After a time, “He’s on the next floor,” the woman said skeptically. “Apartment three.”
“Thank you.” Clare turned towards the staircase.
“Good thing you came now,” the woman called after her. “He’s moving out today. Just got out of prison. Not our kind of tenant.”
Clare climbed the creaking stairs and walked down the dimly lit hallway. She could hear someone inside the apartment, the creak of his footsteps, a running tap. Leo was wrong. The past was not fixed, not something pressed into stone like the heart-shaped shell he had given her this morning, his gaunt form wrapped in his greatcoat, back bowed into the wind. No, the past was constantly being reshaped by chance events: standing at a window looking over the city on a winter morning, stopping to sketch a harbour — portents, becoming essential links in one’s small history.
A WOMAN PAUSES at an apartment door. She is holding absence. Trusting in the shape of things to come.
A MAN STANDS before an iron bed. He places two pairs of pants, three threadbare shirts, a sweater, a family Bible, a copy of Walter Scott’s The Monastery into a scratched suitcase. He will forget a photograph stashed in the nightstand drawer of a fair-haired woman in a wedding dress seated beside a German officer.
A knock on the door —
He turns to survey the room, his eye caught by the sudden flash of sunlight through glass. He picks up a bottle, holds it to marvel at the ship’s perfect reconstruction, before tucking it among his things, and walking towards the door.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
EVERY NOVEL IS A MIXTURE of fact and fiction. In historical fiction the two have an especially complicated relationship. In my research on the Halifax explosion, I found Janet Kitz’s books to be excellent. The extensive public record as well as the CBC’s Shattered City website were especially helpful.
The Canadian War Letters Project (housed in the Canadian War Museum), a collection of letters written by and to Canadians at war, was a rich source of personal experiences. A quote appears from a letter written by Gordon Shrum in Leo’s letter on page 36.
Some characters are modelled on actual people. Arthur Barnstead was indeed in charge of the makeshift morgue at Chebucto School (and his father was, in fact, the coroner responsible for the dead brought back from the Titanic, five years before). I have, however, taken fictional liberty with the character of Arthur Barnstead. As I have with the instructor Mary. Mary Ritter Hamilton was one the most accomplished and unsung Canadian artists of her time. Trained in the ateliers of Europe, she came home with the outbreak of WWI. She returned to Europe as soon as the war ended and for five difficult years painted the battlefields and devastated villages of France.
Arthur Lismer, who is known for his paintings of the ships in dazzle patterns in the Halifax harbour, went on to become a member of the famed Group of Seven. He was passionate about art education and much of what he says in the fictional classroom is in the public record.
I have taken other liberties with details as well: there never was a glass factory in Halifax, but there was one in New Glasgow. Nova Scotia continues to produce glass, in the form of NovaScotian Crystal. Mount Hope Hospital may not have been exactly as described, but it is typical of psychiatric hospitals of the time in its gardens, farms, and treatments.
There are other fine Canadian nov
els on the Halifax explosion, including Barometer Rising by Hugh McLennan, published in 1941. Each generation looks back at history through its own lens. As I wrote this novel, we were approaching the hundredth anniversary of the Halifax Explosion, and we now see the long shadow it (and the war from which it sprang) has cast on our own time in new ways. Those events reach into my own life — by the simple fact that I would not be here without them. My grandfather was a merchant seaman from the Shetland Islands, and my grandmother, Rosclena (Roxy) Holmes, was a rural girl who went to the city after the explosion to fill one of the many empty jobs. They met in Halifax in 1918.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANK YOU to the British Columbia Council for the Arts who allowed me to begin this story many years ago, in another form. Thanks also to my agent Carolyn Swayze (and Kris Rothstein) for taking Dazzle Patterns on and for carrying the book through the winding road to publishing.
So grateful to editors along the way: Pauline Holdstock for reminding me not to forget poetry, Gail Anderson-Dargatz, who built the foundation of craft, and Joseph Boyden, who helped me find the pulse of the story. And especially to Rosemary Nixon, miracle worker — thank you for your fierce dedication, for your ruthless eye, your finely-tuned ear, and for your endless patience with my incorrigible commas. Je t’embrasse.
Freehand Books, thank you for your faith in this story. Natalie Olsen for the beautiful cover image. Kelsey Attard, I feel so fortunate to have been placed under your meticulous care through edits and production.
This novel has been a long time in the making. Readers who have given me the confidence to carry on include Kelley Aitken, Isabelle Gutmanis, Carol Matthews, Kevin Patterson, Frances Sprout, Karen McLaughlin, Mary-Rose MacColl, and Sophie Waterman. Paul Chapman’s thorough and thoughtful read was especially appreciated.
Thank you Nancy Baron for your friendship and for your enduring interest in my creative endeavors over the years. Other friends who have buoyed me: Darcy Johnson, Judith Tye, Trudy Chatwin, Mary Jo Fulmer, and Jane MacRae. Special thanks to Denise Bonin, my running partner, who listened patiently to my many ruminations on the storyline.
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