by Wendy Orr
‘Isn’t it funny,’ said Megan, ‘you have three different names and they’re all different colours.’ And when Ruth did not immediately comprehend: ‘Granny calls you Ruth, so that’s a blue name. Mummy calls you Mom and that’s yellow, and Nana is red, round red like an apple.’
‘What about your name?’
‘White and red!’ Megan laughed, surprised at such an obvious question. ‘And Ralston is dark red and brown like a Jersey cow. What’s your last name?’
‘Dubois. That used to be your mother’s last name when she was a little girl.’
‘I like that one best of all,’ Megan confided. ‘Do you?’
‘Yes,’ said Ruth sincerely, but could not help asking, ‘What colour is it?’
‘You know! Blue like sky and gold like a sunset.’
More surprising to Jane was Ruth’s rapport with Ian. Although she’d badly wanted them to like each other, she could not help anticipating friction between two strong-willed people with no common interests. However, Ian’s dry humour suited Ruth exactly, and he enjoyed the way she argued with him. Why can’t I stand up to him like that? thought Jane, but did not yet feel strong enough to try. And since she also hadn’t learned to stand up to her mother, she tended to keep silent while they debated, as she had years ago with Winston.
All the same she felt enveloped by the love that had arranged this visit. And whether it was that, or time or her mother’s delight in Megan that made Jane see her anew and wonder how she could have ever wanted to share her love with another child, the black cloud began to dissipate.
Grade 2 was Miss Lake, Eatons catalogues and the Arctic. It might have been for a week, it could have been for two, but in Jane’s memory they flew north every morning—thirty-one individual planes standing neatly beside their desks, arms outstretched for take-off and vrooming over the Bay of Fundy and New Brunswick, across the St Lawrence and on over Quebec, the cold waters of Hudson Bay where its eponymous explorer had drifted and died, across the tundra to the Great North, the soul of the country, proud in its snow and cold.
Landing in the Arctic, they switched off engines and stepped out, knees high to show descent. Pretty Miss Lake led them to marvel at roaming herds of caribou, puzzle at lemmings hurling themselves over cliffs, shiver at howling wolves (in 1953, Never Cry Wolf still unwritten, wolves were still purely sinister). On sheets of white paper with firmly clenched pencils, they learned to build igloos, drawing bricks carved from ice and stacked round into cosy houses; and although they built their snow caves that year in the usual way, scooped from the snow-ploughed drifts, the rectangles they scratched on the walls felt satisfyingly authentic. In the evenings they did homework, poring over old Eatons catalogues to cut out pictures of provisions and supplies, parkas and boots, to be pasted in place the next morning.
At the end of the year Miss Lake left to marry and move to the north where she would live by the side of her own Arctic lake.
Adult Jane, being aware of the mix of memory with word association, imagination and superimposed knowledge, thinks this unlikely. It is more probable that the newly married teacher moved to Halifax, across the Bay to St John or to the bleakness of coal and steel in Sydney or Glace Bay.
But when faced with the statistics of girls of her era who turned to teaching because they could not see other careers beyond it, Jane objects. It was set firm for her, flying to the Arctic in grade 2.
Although I still believe that Jane chose teachers’ college for the wrong reasons, Ruth wrote to Mary, choosing her Christmas words with a fraction more care than July’s, it may have been the right choice for her. She has never been as confident as she deserves to be. Much as I would have loved to see her grow in the more challenging atmosphere of university (and still believe that her mathematical mind will be wasted on tiny children), it isn’t doing her any harm to be one of the brightest of her group.
For her part, Jane would always be grateful that although she must have thought it, Ruth never even suggested ‘I told you so,’ when her daughter began correspondence studies twenty years later, finishing her Bachelor of Education not long before she left teaching for good.
Moving into the dorm that first anxious, exhilarating day of term, Jane bumped bundles with a tall, slim girl. A few evenings later Gail came giggling into Jane’s room, ‘Oh God, I’m so embarrassed! You know those lights in the middle of town?’
‘The traffic lights?’
‘Mm—Do you have those in your town? I’ve never seen any before.’
‘Applevale’s too small, but . . . haven’t you ever been to Halifax?’
Gail shook her head. ‘Nowhere. You know, they’re pretty neat. When they’re red the cars stop and when they’re green the cars go again. So I was standing there on the corner watching, for quite a while I guess because all of a sudden that really tall lecturer came up to me. He said someone had phoned him . . . This is too embarrassing!’
‘They didn’t think you were . . . ?’
‘Trying to be a prostitute!’
‘God, that would be scary,’ Jane said. ‘How would you do it?’
‘If we fail teaching we can always find out.’
It became a password after that: ‘I can see that red light!’ as they came out of a particularly nasty exam or a rioting practice class. They were closer even than Jane had been to Patsy, now happily planning her wedding to Randy McLeod.
Jane’s only romantic interest was a pleasant but dull young man from the agricultural college, thus thwarting the founding fathers’ intentions of keeping the good girls of teachers’ college safe from the attentions of the agricultural men, although they mightn’t have felt thwarted if they’d seen how unbearably dull the romance was and how placidly the boy accepted Jane’s removal of his hand from the buttons of her blouse. Years later she wondered if he might have been gay, but in 1964 he simply seemed further confirmation of her own lack of sex appeal.
If Winston had enjoyed making love to me, she wrote in a diary which she later burned, he wouldn’t have left, no matter how determined he was not to be tied down at university. If he’d truly loved me then making love to me would have been more important than being free.
She wondered what would happen if she let the young farmer go further. However, on the next date, without even kissing her, he took her hand, gazing meaningfully into her eyes. ‘I’d like you to come home and meet my mother next Sunday.’
Jane jerked her hand back quickly from the weight of an invisible ring. ‘I can’t . . . I don’t think we should see each other any more.’
‘But we’ve had such a good time going out. I thought we might, you know, in a year or two—’
‘No,’ said Jane, before he could say it. Staying single would be infinitely better than dying of boredom. And if she was going to be free, she might as well make the most of it: ‘Let’s go to Europe,’ she said to Gail, some time in second year.
‘This afternoon?’
‘I’m serious. When we’re finished college. Don’t you want to see the world before we get old?’ Because she was aware that her own excursions to the province’s landmarks had not really made her much more sophisticated than Gail with her traffic-light wonder, and any map made it clear that Nova Scotia was a very small province, a peninsular footnote to a vast but young country.
‘Okay,’ said Gail, but fell in love in their first year of teaching, which shrank her travel plans to wherever the navy was going to post her fiancé next, and Jane ended up being bridesmaid instead of travelling companion.
‘I don’t mind,’ said Jane, having decided that she alone in this world of coupledom was unlikely to find love and had better get used to independence. After three years of teaching, living at home for economy’s sake and driving across the Valley to a small school on the South Mountain, not so different from the one she’d attended a few years earlier on the North, she was ready to go.
Jane was no exception to the rule that grandparents or remoter ancestors hold infinitely more f
ascination than the direct heritage of parents. All the same, if your mother has grown up in Chelsea where swinging young designers are now setting the world’s fashions, if her nanny had taken her to Kensington Gardens to stroke the soft-eared bronze rabbits of Peter Pan’s statue, if her bowler-hatted father had worked in the City like Mary Poppins’ Mr Banks, it’s difficult to differentiate between natural tourist interest and personal mythology.
So there was London and for similar reasons the rest of England, so tantalisingly nearly known: Dartmoor for The Far Distant Oxus, the Lakes for Swallows and Amazons as much as Coleridge, and Cornwall for Jamaica Inn. For someone who doesn’t consider herself a reader, Jane’s world will always be well peopled by books, although having grown up with the tangible history of Annapolis Royal, she also demanded ruins and historical evidence: Hadrian’s Wall and Edinburgh Castle, the archaeology of Rome and Pompeii: ‘Oh you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome, knew you not Pompey?’ quipped her mother, who never minded twisting a quote for her own purposes. Athens and Crete more ancient still; maybe even Egypt. There was Vienna for the Spanish Riding School and Siena for the Palio—‘heritage, history and horses’, was how Jane planned her trip, Bill claimed, but Jane’s longing for the Palio pre-dated her passion for horses. It stemmed from an Easter visit to Aunt Louise in Glace Bay eleven years earlier, and coming round a bend to see icebergs like ghostly ocean liners drifting in from the sea.
Bill told them the story of the Titanic. ‘Drift ice, just like that, and not so far out there.’
‘The unsinkable ship,’ Ruth added. ‘If it were fiction one would think the dramatic irony overstated.’ She placed a comforting hand on Bill’s knee. She was thinking that after the last war no one would ever again boast of an unsinkable ship, but knew that Bill was caught in the specifics of Bert in the icy water.
‘Look!’ shrieked Rick. ‘A boy on the iceboat!’
‘They’re not really boats,’ Bill explained. ‘Drift ice is very dangerous; you can’t ride it.’
‘There’s another one!’
‘With flags!’
‘Can we—?’
‘No,’ said Ruth.
Bill stopped the car. Through the grey water, scattered with smaller floes of drifting ice, floated several substantial white peaks, glowing in the sunlight, the stuff of arctic photography and sailors’ nightmares. Perched on the two nearest, indistinct but unmistakable, were brightly snow-suited figures, each with a firmly planted flag waving behind.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ said Bill, pulling back onto the road and into the McBain’s driveway.
Their cousins wandered in an hour or two later, snow-suits sodden, damp flags trailing from pockets—samples of the exotic souvenirs collected in their air force childhood in Europe, the flags, Louise explained, came from the banner-waving, riderless-horse mayhem of the Corso del Palio in Siena.
‘And isn’t that where the Brownings spent the summers before Elizabeth died?’ Ruth wondered, running up the stairs for a reference work on English poets.
‘It’d be good to see Holland, now it’s recovered.’
‘You can’t miss France—or at least La Rochelle—you’ll have to see where your ancestors came from.’
‘Why don’t you two go?’ Jane demanded, but Bill couldn’t leave the farm, which was more or less true, though why Rick couldn’t have worked it one summer holiday was never explained. Ruth switched tack—the Bras d’Or, after all, was as beautiful as Switzerland; if they wanted theatre the Neptune in Halifax was a lot closer than London and probably as good. Jane would never be sure of the real reasons for her mother’s reluctance to return, but suspected that much of it lay in the file of ATA newsletters and invitations to reunions, press clippings of former colleagues: speed records broken by Jacqueline Cochrane and Diana Barnato, a film review of Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, with special mention of the female stunt pilot, and lists of books. It sometimes seemed that Ruth was the only woman in the ATA not to have written a book on her experiences. Some were in the bookcases in her library, as were the surprisingly readable scholarly texts on Byron and Burns by her only correspondent from St Hilda’s. Surrounded by these mementoes, that surreally philosophical weekend alone, Jane would realise that happiness—and she was convinced that her mother’s contentment had been real—doesn’t always ensure against feeling a failure in the eyes of the world. Ruth’s generation had probably the hardest route of all, Jane would think then, having developed careers when young and been expected to drop them to find complete fulfilment in home and family.
But thirty years earlier she’d been planning the trip of a lifetime: ‘You won’t be able to see everything in three months,’ was Ruth’s most useful advice, undermined by her steadily growing pile of books.
Meanwhile Jane and Bill sat huddled over maps and atlas, charting alternative routes through long winter evenings. ‘If you got a train from Calais to Paris . . .’
Letters flew back and forth to Mary. Jane could stay as long as she liked, however she liked, live there for the whole three months or treat it as a hotel to return to for breathing space. Finally the itinerary was complete: on that first June day of summer freedom, Jane would leave Halifax for London. She’d return on the Labour Day weekend, just in time for school, which was the only part of this story that she would feel guilty about later.
On the way home from the registry office, with an hour to spare before meeting the funeral director, Jane thinks to ask when her mother was booked to fly home.
‘Oh Lord!’ says Mary. ‘Four-thirty this afternoon. I should have thought of it sooner if you were going to use the ticket!’
That was exactly what Jane had planned to do, though plan is not a particularly accurate word. It’s now eleven o’clock and, ‘Impossible,’ she realises, with a covert flicker of relief. Airline companies being unlikely to simply take one’s word that the ticket-holder, now travelling in a small casket, no longer requires a seat and would prefer it to be given to the casket-carrier, she’d realised that the transferring, if possible at all on a charter flight, would be laborious and draining, requiring death certificates and depositions. It is not the kind of experience to be faced when fragile or frazzled.
She phones Ian, who at nine-thirty is already asleep but in front of the television and glad to be woken; he’d intended to check the cows half an hour ago and go to bed. ‘I’m not going to be able to make Mom’s flight,’ says Jane, guilty at his fatigue.
‘Bloody hell.’
‘The funeral’s tomorrow.’ Is it a funeral, with no one else there? There’ll have to be another, a memorial service, in the Valley. ‘I’ll go to Canada after that.’
Ian, feeling that he hasn’t been as supportive as he ought, starts to say, ‘Give her my love,’ and realises it’s no longer appropriate. ‘She was quite a lady,’ he says instead. ‘I wish I could be there with you.’
‘So do I. Have you heard from Megan?’
‘No. She must be on that big hike she was talking about. She’ll probably call when she’s finished.’
‘I hope she’s alright.’
‘Just pity the poor bloke with her! A few days walking with Megan and he’ll be exhausted—which wouldn’t be all bad, come to think of it.’
‘What if she stays with him?’
‘She’s just met him! You’re imagining things because you’re overemotional right now. Anyway,’ he adds, ‘I thought you’d be happy for her to marry a Canadian.’
Jane’s not interested in patriotism. She doesn’t want her only child to live at the other end of the world and go through what she is doing now.
Jane’s only child is at that moment asleep in a tent at the start of the West Coast Trail, as her father suspected. The waves crashing onto the beach below her have rolled uninhibited from Australian sands to the rocky shore of Vancouver Island, or so Megan likes to believe. She is always more interested in possibilities than facts.
The man her mother suspects is rolle
d in his own sleeping bag beside her.
They will be together for seven days and nights, days of sweating and stumbling, of demoralising mud and debilitating drizzle; nights on stony beaches with damp wood for fires. They should pass the hikers starting each day from Port Renfrew at the other end of the trail, and they may meet some of the travellers on their own southern way, but apart from these brief encounters will be on their own. In case of real emergencies—‘not blisters’ the brochure warns—they will be able to summon a ranger for rescue.
It would test the most established relationship.
And so Megan and Adam are cautious. They are careful of privacy and boundaries. Adam is surprised at his own impetuousness in inviting her; Megan is not. Adam becomes reserved on the long bus trip from Victoria to Pahena Bay, wondering if he should say anything about sex, about not presuming. Sharing tents doesn’t mean sharing bodies. Seclusion doesn’t mean unbridled lust. Will it make it more awkward if he says so? Hiking partners; friends not lovers.
He hasn’t felt like this since he was sixteen and his hormones at their explosive peak; physical exhaustion and cold ocean may be his only safeguard. He’s brought condoms just in case.
Megan’s heart is singing. She sees his struggle and wants to draw him to her and comfort: what will be will be.
Tuesday when they met; Wednesday and Thursday Megan played tourist, explored the shops of Chinatown for ingredients not seen since her acupuncture student practice in Hong Kong; fed the squirrels in Stanley Park, walked the Seawall Promenade and, with a shock of pleasure, recognised Siwash Rock from the lithographs at the Gallery. Then the evenings, meeting after work for dinner, Wednesday at his apartment where he cooked fettuccine and spread brochures and books across the table. This is a seventy-seven kilometre hike, he explained, not a walk; you need boots, experience and ability.
Megan has brought boots; she’s hiked the Australian Grampians and Victoria’s High Plains; her legs are strong and supple, she flexed calf muscles and he didn’t care if they never left his couch. But did not want to frighten her off. He has a tent, sleeping bags, backpacker’s stove, has organised dehydrated food and everything else they need, he explained, impersonal as a tour guide and less jolly than most.