by Wendy Orr
Friday Adam had things to do—he did not say what and Megan was content to let him sort whatever needed to be sorted. She is a self-sufficient person, gregarious but rarely lonely and was shocked at the length of a day without him, though not at her Saturday morning excitement. From different sides of the city they travelled separately to meet at the ferry terminal; Adam, more cautious or more pessimistic, showed strain, as if he had not been sure he’d find her there. She kissed him gently, for his worry. ‘Trust me!’ her heart sang, and her words too, more lightly.
A buffet breakfast on the ferry, leisurely luxury. ‘Don’t get used to it!’ Adam warned. The postcard scenery outside the window, watching the other’s face, fingers holding toast, hands cupping coffee, tongues cleaning crumbed lips—all more absorbing than the blue water and islands rising like mountaintops from its depths. Breakfast, even buffet-restaurant breakfast after being up for hours, keeps its early-morning aura of intimacy.
On the bus Megan thought of a line from The Transit of Venus, about a bus not being able to throw bodies together that do not want to be so thrown. These bodies wanted: shoulders rubbed companionably; knees bumped from time to time and did not jerk away.
But this first night they are each wrapped politely in their own cocoons.
The drizzle has lifted; they wake to the rare west-coast sunshine and the trail is not just a trial of mud and exhaustion, it is also eagles soaring and sea lions barking, modern-art driftwood and cathedral-ancient firs, soft moss on old logs and the private life of tidal pools. It is triumph and exaltation; it is magic and it is Canada. And Megan, who doesn’t have an ancestor from west of Manitoba, has found her roots.
What will be will be.
And if, in this country of jutting rocks and soft yielding moss, of spraying waterfalls and secret silent pools, of ferny crevasses and totemic trees, if, in the cool, cougar-wandering night, after he has bandaged her blisters and she has massaged his cramp, there is only one thing that is right to happen, then it will happen. And if there are lips and tongues and fingers and sighs, if there is discovery and knowing, magic and completeness, then that is what will be, and Megan and Adam in the twining of their love know that is the only way it could ever have been.
The Pacific Rim National Park is not the tropical Pacific and the West Coast Trail is not a honeymoon idyll. Megan and Adam are lucky with the weather and have nearly five days of sunshine in their week—possibly a record, Adam says, for an area with a three hundred centimetre annual rainfall. The first time he hiked it, as a teenager, it had rained without stop.
‘And you’re doing it again?’
‘I was trying to figure out why people think it’s so great.’
It had been thirteen years earlier and the trail not so well established with boardwalks; he shows her places where he’d fallen, slipped, been covered in mud. Though it’s hard to be sure. ‘We’d lost interest in the scenery by then; we were hoping one of us would sprain an ankle so the ranger would insist on evacuating everyone.’
Like Ruth and Bill through their letters and Jane and Ian on their bus, they weave a tapestry of stories for each other: warp of lives and woof of fact, of interest, of flights of fantasy, of anything that touches them.
Perched high on a gnarled bole of a red cedar—a sapling when white men first landed on the east coast of this land, ancient when they came to stay—they talk of chi. ‘Energy,’ says Megan, ‘like the essence of your life.’ Untranslatable, she admits, tracing a meridian from neck to toe, which certainly sparks some sort of energy through his body.
On the salt-sprayed rocks Adam paints a picture of foundering ships and peoples the thundering breakers with dead and dying—the reason, he says, for the trail’s beginning: a life-saving path from the Graveyard of the Pacific. They touch hands and imagine climbing this route as battered survivors of a shipwreck, starting in gale and rain without benefit of guidebook or boardwalk, ladders or hope. ‘In long skirts,’ Megan imagines, feeling sodden draperies twist around her legs. And they are grateful, for life and good hiking boots, and for each other.
By the side of a campfire, damp wood blazed by cedar shavings, resting backs against a moss-covered trunk, they talk of past and dreams, of family and friends, of legends and land rights, black bears and wombats.
Nothing is taboo except the future.
It is skirted around in suddenly polite questions, impossible to look past the ending of this week, when Megan must travel on across the country with uncle-stops along the long road to her grandmother in the east. And cousins, she offers, second cousins or twice removed, but still Christmas-card kin, in Cape Breton, who speak Gaelic.
Though Gaelic-speaking cousins are a poor temptation to move on from the small V’d scar in the hollow of this man’s collarbone. ‘Ran full tilt into a branch when I was seven,’ he tells her tracing fingers. ‘My mom had suspected for a while that I needed glasses, but I lied so desperately she let it drop. The branch blew my cover—straight off to the optometrist the next day.’
And they’ve swung around to the safety of the past, away from the risky future and its promises, because they are too worldly-wise to believe that love could happen like this, and too much in love to doubt it.
The funeral director, a solid man with a comforting presence and deep Midlands accent, is a surprise. In some confusion of Dickensian characters and despite her experience when Ian’s father died, Jane pictures undertakers as Uriah Heep characters, oily and hand-rubbing. He anticipates her questions and advises on details of cremation, coffin and casket; and as if she hadn’t filled in enough forms with the Coroner, has still more for her to sign. She hadn’t known death was so complicated.
Details organised, he takes her to see Ruth.
So long dreaded, and in some ways worse than the dreading, it’s at the same time somewhat of an anticlimax. The body bears a strong resemblance to Ruth but is so obviously not, because her mother, that most vital of people, is so definitely not home, that she finds it difficult to relate to it as the source of her grief.
‘Goodbye, Mom,’ she says, because she feels she has to say something, and after some hesitation kisses the forehead, which is just as cold as books have led her to expect. She does not stay long, but the funeral director, who’s told her to take whatever time she needs, does not appear surprised to see her reappear so soon.
At the end of a long damp day, six nights into the trail and one to go, Megan is light-headed with exhaustion. Fording a creek in the morning she’d slipped, thrown by the current and tumbled by it with a feeling of what it would be like to drown, only moments but that’s all it takes. Her swept-away legs are wooden until evening, when her blisters bleed. Adam feels a primeval urge to spear a bear or a fish for dinner, but cooks dehydrated noodles and tells her to eat before she sleeps. His heart is tight with the image of her slipping and the fear is still sour in his mouth; he knows that, river or not, she’ll slip away from him soon. He watches her breathe in sleep, feeling like a protector and an intruder; it’s not sex he desires but to be part of her, all of her, without waking or moving a muscle. He curls beside her and is content to breathe in unison.
Later, but still before the August night is fully dark, she wakes them both by sitting up suddenly, tears in her eyes. ‘Nana’s dead.’
‘It was a nightmare,’ he says, ‘because of the creek.’ His own sleep has been full of restless, broken snippets, but Megan says no, it was not a nightmare, it wasn’t horrible. She had simply met her grandmother’s soul whirling in the void, not troubled but travelling. ‘Like stars,’ she explains; it’s not what she means but as close as she can come: the essence of a person, distilled into light.
‘But you were just dreaming,’ Adam says, and she could weep to think he doesn’t believe in the truth of what she feels, till he adds, ‘she might have been dreaming too.’
Which could be true; which could just as easily be true and she opens her arms to him for comfort and gratitude.
Mary’s
White Cottage, significant in different stages of Jane’s life, had been more full than usual with stray animals in the summer of ’69. As well as the three dogs and two cats, there was a broken-winged crow and a baby hedgehog—‘Mrs Tiggywinkle, naturally.’ That first week of June, Mary had taken a week’s holiday from the animal shelter to devote herself to her guest’s all-important introduction to England. Into London for the Changing of the Guard the first day, Windsor Castle the next; Oxford and then London again, this time the Tower . . . Busy days rounded off with energetic walks with the dogs in the long summer evenings.
But however happy Mary was to have her, the village was too far from London for leisurely exploration. After a last quiet day when she returned from busing her way around Britain, north as far as the grey stone and history of Edinburgh—a time of magic with money disappearing before her eyes—Jane went back into London on her own. If she could find somewhere cheap enough to stay, she could explore the city properly before her trip to the Continent.
Chambermaids wanted, said a discreet sign in a Bayswater window. Eight pounds per week, room and board included.
It was a pleasant looking hotel, white and Georgian, facing a locked park that she would learn to call a square, but to which she would never be allowed a key. She applied within.
Work started at six, so apart from serving at the occasional evening meal for a school party, virtually the whole afternoon and evenings were free. The interview was a matter of checking name, nationality and whether she could start tomorrow; basic cleaning and waitressing ability were assumed inherent in a female. She phoned Mary, who sounded slightly disappointed that she’d found something so easily.
Her room was a furnished, windowless broom cupboard on the second floor, a long way down the hall to the toilet—which she had just learned not to call the bathroom, after dumbfounded looks or directions to rooms with baths and sinks but not the item she was looking for—and further still to the actual room with a bath. She had a saggy single bed and not quite enough space to open the wardrobe door, which faced the wrong way. It was independence in the greatest city of the world, and she could have danced with excitement at the sight of it.
Some of the other chambermaids were going down to the pub ‘about half seven’, and Jane was grateful, ready for her initiation into Swinging London. And if the pub itself was nothing like she’d imagined, it was still quite different from anything she’d ever experienced: darker and smokier, the music more deafening, the patrons much drunker and the pick-up attempts infinitely more blatant. Compared to the Canadian taverns she’d visited, where the law insisted on drinkers remaining staidly seated for barmaids to hand them their drinks, as if standing upright with glass in hand was the first step towards total depravity, this was a positive den of iniquity, or a more honest admission that the purpose of the evening for most of the men and a large proportion of the women was to get as drunk as possible and with a bit of luck get laid as well. Jane felt virginally provincial.
She was with two Greek Cypriot girls, a brash Londoner about the same age as herself, and a Liverpudlian who was leaving in the morning. The Greeks stayed demurely sober, but the Cockney sang aggressively all the way home and the Liverpudlian, swaying on her feet, suddenly began to cry.
‘Poor old thing,’ Jane said sympathetically, uncharacteristically throwing her arm around the other girl’s shoulders. She felt supremely happy but blurred around the edges. One more drink, she thought, and I might have been drunk. She couldn’t remember how many she’d had, and gave up the effort of working it out.
As well as the girls she met that first night, there was a constantly changing flux of workers using the hotel much as she was, staying a week or month before setting off again on more adventurous travel. Two South African physiotherapists flitted through, annoying Jane equally with their self-righteousness as they handed around bowls of thin soup from the large Jamaican cook, and by their quite legitimate superior activisim, having left the country more quickly than anticipated after an anti-apartheid demonstration had turned nasty. And then there was Maggie, a tiny, rather frail looking girl from Newcastle, with an accent so thick that Jane could understand one word in two—occasionally they had to resort to writing down phrases unintelligible to their differently trained ears.
‘Will you come shopping with me?’ Maggie asked one morning. ‘I want to make myself a new dress.’ Jane, touched but confused by the misery on the girl’s face, put aside her afternoon’s plans. Keat’s house had waited a long time without seeing Jane; it would still be there tomorrow.
Walking to the big department store on the corner, she thought of shopping expeditions with Patsy and later with Gail; silliness and fun enhancing acquisitive pleasure. Shopping with Maggie didn’t appear likely to be long on any of these qualities, but Jane tried valiantly, half best friend, half big sister: with legs like Twiggy’s, why not a miniskirt and top, something a little more fitted, ‘show yourself off a bit!’
‘I’m not that thin,’ Maggie muttered, which made Jane, fully conscious of the stodgy hotel food already settling around her own middle, laugh derisively. She stopped when the younger girl, on the verge of tears, smoothed her sloppy top over the neat round bulge.
‘Oh God,’ Jane groaned, wondering whether knocking her head repeatedly against Whiteley’s fabric counter would be adequate apology. No, not even close. The poor kid had presumed that Jane—sensible, educated, older—would have already guessed her shame but instead, Jane had managed to drag every ounce of humiliation out into the open. A miniskirt, for crying out loud!
She felt as if she were the one in shock and had to rouse herself to be sensible, finding a pattern for a peasant-style dress gathered loosely under the breast and a small-flowered cotton print to make it from. ‘It’ll suit you—and it’s one anyone could wear; you wouldn’t have to be . . .’
Maggie dragged along like an obedient child, barely speaking except to say yes, she liked the navy better than hot pink. It was hot in the shop and she looked as if she might faint again, as she had last week in the steamy breakfast kitchen (a sign anyone would have recognised in a film or book, but more difficult to read in life). Jane picked up the parcel and steered her towards the door and the coffee shops of Bayswater Road for a cup of tea.
The coffee shop was Turkish, hard glossy tables and smoky air; they were the only women and the only English speakers and though it wasn’t quite the comforting atmosphere Jane had been looking for, Maggie began talking as soon as her tea was brought. Maybe, thought Jane as the rush from the sweet muddy coffee hit her brain, it was the best place after all, with no discreetly eavesdropping matrons.
Maggie’s story was from another era but it didn’t strike Jane that her self-possessed mother might find this story more painful than interesting.
This isn’t exactly how I’d imagined London, but working in the hotel I’m seeing the city’s subculture rather than the middle-class façade. I’m pretty sure a lot of the girls here are illegal immigrants; heaven knows what they get paid, and they never get days off—after all, who can they complain to? They’re sad, exploited creatures, but even the English girls seem to move through life as if they’ve never heard of ordinary rules and laws. The Cockney I met the first evening is getting married next month. She already has one husband but doesn’t know or care where he is . . .
The pregnant young Geordie girl is the one who really bothers me. The couple who own the hotel are very good to her, cutting her working hours and giving her lighter duties in reception—which surprised me, because their treatment of the illegal immigrants hadn’t suggested a particularly philanthropic bent. However the story is, if you haven’t guessed, that they’re childless and are going to adopt the baby, and apparently without any complicated legal arrangements—because they’re not British and can’t adopt here? Because they’ve met the girl and can’t bear to let the opportunity pass? I don’t know; and I’m not about to ask. As for little Maggie, I think she’s just grateful to be
able to solve her problem without having to go to a welfare authority—her own family seems to be out of the question. The poor kid. These people will give the baby a good home, they obviously want it so badly that I’m sure they’ll love it and the baby won’t have to spend any time in limbo in an orphanage. I guess it’s an ideal solution if you don’t mind about details like birth certificates and other legalities.
Shortly after Bill dies, Patsy McLeod brings Ruth a long scroll of paper. ‘I thought you’d be interested, being English and knowing how you like family history stuff.’ She’s traced her family tree back to an Essex baronet in 1763: the names are captured, pinned to her sheet with dates of deaths and births.
‘It’s very satisfying to have it done,’ she admits with honest smugness. ‘You want to do yours before it’s too late.’
‘Before I join the dates?’ Ruth asks and Patsy covers quickly by telling her about the offer that had come in the mail from a company that traces coats of arms and will sell them mounted on a plaque for the hall.
‘Tess Durbeyfield’s father would have liked that,’ Ruth murmurs, and feels mildly contrite at the eager offer of an address. It’s not Patsy’s fault that after fifty years the thought of searching for guarantees of identity still leaves her with a dry mouth and faint nausea.
The vicar from Mary’s village church is a young, bouncy man with a bushy beard who comes to the house when they’ve returned from the funeral home. He’s new and not popular in the village, Mary tells Jane, because of his guitar playing and up-beat theories, but he assures them that the funeral service will be entirely traditional. Jane is relieved; she doesn’t like to tell this enthusiastic believer that the words of the King James Bible had been infinitely more important to Ruth than the meaning behind them.