by Ann Swinfen
He gestured around at the trees, standing stately up from the snow with the sun slanting through their bare boughs and the sugar sap drip, dripping with a metallic ring into the empty buckets.
‘Can’t beat it,’ Tirza agreed, and went back to carrying.
After dinner she lingered long enough to see the run-off in the sugarhouse before climbing back up to Three Springs. The morning’s sap had boiled for about four hours and Uncle Frank reckoned it was now up to eighty-five per cent sugar content. It was strained off through a series of troughs, and the top trough of the evaporator was refilled from the holding tank to start the next cycle. Larry, one of the hired men, was filling gallon jars from a spigot which ran off the bottom trough. He poured a little into a battered tin cup and handed it to Tirza.
‘Let that cool, now, or it’ll burn the tongue offen you.’
Tirza carried the cup outside and plunged it up to the rim in a bank of snow. Gradually the syrup stopped steaming and when she laid her hand against the side of the cup it was just warm. She stuck her finger into the syrup and licked it off – the first syrup of the season. It tasted sweet, but with a clean, smoky, maple taste that was like nothing else in the world. She sipped a little from the side of the cup and rolled it around on her tongue with her eyes shut. Sweet things usually made her feel sick. But maple syrup was different – like drinking the flavour of the forest. It made you feel your roots running right down into the earth, like the maple trees drawing up the spring water and food from the soil, even though they grew on such hard rocky ground. Behind her eyelids she could see the Abenakis, tasting the first syrup of the season, gift of the gods of the forest, promise of spring, promise of life returning after the bitterness of winter.
Tirza and Simon stayed four weeks at the sugaring. Some of the casual labour which used to come and work in a heavy season was not to be had this year – the men had gone to war, or joined the women in armaments factories which were paying good money. So the school-age boys and girls were needed as they had never been needed before.
At last, though, the run was over, the spiles pulled from the last trees, the sticky buckets piled up for the long business of washing up, the last tankful of sap boiled down to syrup.
‘Four hundred and thirty-seven gallons,’ said Uncle Frank at supper, ‘not counting what’s set aside for our own use. It’s a record year.’
He looked at all of them, family, neighbours and hired hands sitting around the table. Their eyes were red from working through the night and bending over the fire or the evaporator, their hands were stained and their hair and clothes sticky with sap. They were exhausted, but pretty pleased with themselves.
‘Sugaring-off party tomorrow,’ said Frank.
The night after the party, lying for the last time on the floor of the closed porch, Tirza watched the frosty sky through the opening where Aunt Helen had folded back one of the shutters to let in fresh air. She yawned and the three stars she could see in the patch of sky swam in front of her eyes. She wished sugaring could go on for ever. Because Harriet had brought bad news. Martha and Billy were arriving next week to live at the farm.
5
Intermezzo
Scotland: Spring 1980
Colin Tennant proved to be a dapper man of fifty, with a balding head and a cheerful manner. Tirza reckoned he would meet life’s trials head on and bounce back from any adversity. She liked him better than she had anticipated. The gallery was a grand building on George Street, one of the classical, porticoed houses of Edinburgh’s New Town, built in the eighteenth century after the draining of the Nor’ Loch and the exodus of the upper classes to the more salubrious lands to the north of the mediaeval city. The entire ground floor of the gallery was to be given over to the exhibition of her work and when she saw the grandeur of the surroundings and the eagerness of Colin and his staff to carry out everything according to her wishes, she regretted her earlier churlishness.
The question of whether the arrangement of the exhibition should be chronological or thematic had mostly resolved itself, since the chronological stages of her work fell naturally into themes, as she had moved from one type of assignment to another.
‘Did you work as a freelance right from the start?’ Colin asked. They were lunching in a tiny Italian restaurant in one of the many streets which form a grid linking George Street and Princes Street.
‘Yes.’ Tirza wound tagliatelle round her fork and fielded it deftly. She had been taught the trick by an Italian-American sergeant during a spell at base camp just outside Saigon.
‘I left high school before I was seventeen, and I’d toyed with the idea of going to college and getting some qualifications, but my father couldn’t afford college fees. So I took a vacation job that summer to earn some money. And I thought it would give me time to decide whether I really wanted to spend another four years cooped up studying.’
She put down her fork and gazed past him out of the window, where the Edinburgh traffic ground slowly past.
‘I was working as a waitress in a diner in New Jersey and I got to taking pictures of the people who stopped by. Truck drivers, mostly, and some families. Big families, without much money, the kind that stop at diners and fill the kids up with hamburgers and french fries. I’m talking about the days before the giant multinational franchises, you understand.’
She took another mouthful of pasta and washed it down with Frascati.
‘I was planning all along to be a photographer, and if I’d gone to college I would have done courses which were relevant. Though in those days you couldn’t take the sort of things you can now, like a degree in photographic studies.’
‘So did you sell those summer photographs?’
‘Sure did. Not to the people I photographed. That was my first idea, but they were mostly just passing through, and too poor anyway to be wasting their money on photographs they didn’t need. It was one of the truckers who suggested I should try selling them to a magazine. Of course at that age you think you’re going to go straight to the top and sell to National Geographic, but competition is fierce, and they wouldn’t have looked at anything from a teenage kid. However, he showed me a trucking magazine – it’s defunct now – and they paid me my first ever money.’
‘For pictures of lorry drivers? Can we have some of those for the exhibition?’
‘Sure, no problem. Of course that went to my head. Three photographs earned me more than a whole week of waitressing. I was nearly stupid enough to give up my job on the spot, but luckily I had the sense to stick it out till Labour Day, and it’s a good thing I did, because I didn’t sell anything else for a couple of months.’
She smiled wryly.
‘I’d have had to come begging for my job back, or starved. You see, I hadn’t taken into account the fact that the boss gave me my meals and an army cot in the kitchen to sleep on. So even though my wages for a twelve-hour day in dollars and cents could have been carried by a fairly muscular mouse, I had food and shelter. Then at the end of August I sold some of my studies of hot, tired, travelling families to an upmarket arty magazine, and they paid real money. I decided to give up the idea of college. If I could already make money taking photographs, why waste more time?’
Colin topped up her glass and they ordered tiramisu and coffee.
‘Did you stay on at the diner?’
‘No, my job finished after Labour Day, when the vacation crowds dropped off, so I bought myself a better camera and got a job as a staff photographer on a small-town newspaper in Rhode Island. Lasted two weeks.’
For a while they were busy eating. Then when the waiter had refilled their cups, Tirza sat back against the plush bench, stirring her coffee idly and gazing into space.
‘I was useless as a staff photographer. I was bored out of my mind, taking shots of bouncing baby competitions and the retiral of Mr Smith from town hall or Mrs Brown from grade school, complete with gold watch and attendant colleagues. And of course I couldn’t stand the discipline – it was
worse than being back at school. So I quit. For a while life was pretty hand-to-mouth, but I survived, and got some overseas assignments, and I built up a network of editors who would take my work. Then after the Vietnam war broke out, I persuaded one of them to make me their official war photographer and correspondent. It was a middle-sized town newspaper in middle America. All their staff reporters were middle-aged men with middle-sized families living in comfortable middle-class neighbourhoods. They weren’t clamouring to be sent to cover Vietnam. But I had my own reasons for wanting to go, which we will not discuss.’
‘Forgive me,’ said Colin, running his finger around the lip of his cup, ‘but weren’t you afraid? Or were you too young to realise what you were letting yourself in for?’
‘That’s very flattering of you, Colin, but I was in my thirties by then. No, I knew what I was letting myself in for. Or thought I did.’
She swallowed once, briefly, as memory surfaced.
‘Now, as for how this applies to the exhibition, I think all the stuff prior to Vietnam can go in one room, and within that we can arrange it by theme. The truck drivers – I went on photographing them. Still do, sometimes. Great faces. The families. Then there’s a whole series on Harlem. Later I hiked around for several years and took shots of forgotten places and forgotten people – Cajun country, the Indian reservations, the last throes of the sharecroppers in Louisiana and Georgia. In the mid- fifties I went down to Mexico and then South America. Even got up to Alaska eventually and shot the Inuits and a few crazy prospectors still around hoping for gold. Now there were some faces!’
She pondered briefly.
‘Between ‘59 and ‘62 I had a couple of trips to the Middle East and spent four months in India.’
Colin was taking notes in a black leather notebook.
‘Then Vietnam?’ he asked. ‘A whole room to itself.’
‘Yes. I was there from ‘63.’
‘I’d like to reproduce extracts from some of the pieces you wrote, and mount them amongst the pictures.’
‘Fine.’
The waiter reappeared with the coffee pot. Tirza shook her head at him, but Colin nodded.
‘Right. Now after Vietnam – Africa?’
‘No. I was in Vietnam till ‘68, then I went on a short assignment to South America for part of ‘69. After that I was back and forth between Cambodia and Vietnam from ‘69 to ‘73. I suppose we ought to display all the Vietnam and Cambodia material in one room, and put the ‘69 pictures with the earlier South American ones. Then there’s the work I did in Africa – central Africa and the Horn. That was ‘73 and ‘74.’
She paused, scraping at the dregs of coffee with her spoon.
‘I went back to Phnom Penh at the beginning of ‘75, to cover the final throes of the conflict. That was when a group of us – Western journalists and photographers, and some of the French diplomats – were caught up in the fall of the city to the Khmer Rouge. We spent a fairly unpleasant time holed up in the French Embassy until we were expelled. They forced us to make an unspeakably nasty journey in open trucks – getting lost in the jungle, alternately broiled and soaked to the skin. These fanatical boys of ten or eleven kept their AK47s pointed at us the whole time. Every time we hit a pot-hole, we expected the guns to go off, but eventually we made it to the border with Thailand.’
She laughed recklessly.
‘At least you valued every moment you managed to stay alive. Then I had another spell in South America for the rest of the year, mostly photographing street kids. That whole situation has got worse and worse since I was there. And there are some studies of shanty towns. Interesting to compare with the shanty towns that sprawl out around the cities in Africa. We could almost have a section on shanty towns all over the world, but maybe that would break things up. Forget it. Not a good idea.’
‘OK. Then India?’
‘And Pakistan and Bangladesh. I’d been working out there a couple of years when I took ill and had to come back.’
‘What about the recent Scottish work? Max says you’ve published hardly any of them.’
Tirza smiled.
‘Max is fed up with me. We’ve recently sold a few to the Sunday travel supplements, but that’s all. I’m thinking of putting together a book.’
Colin’s head came up like a gun dog fixing on a pheasant.
‘Why don’t we bring it out to coincide with the exhibition?’
‘You’re joking. Books take for ever to put together and print.’
‘Leave it to me. If you’ve got the shots, and can provide minimal text – just a caption indicating where they were taken – I can have it ready for the opening. You have to remember this is Edinburgh. There are a lot of small, efficient publishers right here in the city, and several specialise in high-quality glossy art work. They publish catalogues for exhibitions at the Festival, amongst other things, and one or two of them have done work for me before. It won’t be a problem.’
After the two days spent with Colin and his staff in Edinburgh, Tirza went back to the island. Grace welcomed her with surprising warmth, weaving affectionately around Tirza’s feet while she unpacked, and settling in her lap each evening. Angus Maclean, the postman, had been feeding the cat, but she seemed to have missed Tirza’s companionship. During the next week Tirza put together the collection of Scottish photographs with captions for Colin. She had intended to spend longer over the planning of her book, but once she began she found that it came together easily and she enjoyed the sense of urgency which had been missing from her life since she had come to live on the island.
At the end of the week she fixed the outboard on her boat and crossed over to the mainland to send off the parcel, rigid with layers of cardboard and brown paper.
‘That will be £2.50,’ said Mrs Maclean, ‘if you’re sure you want to spend all the extra on sending it registered.’
Tirza smiled. ‘Oh yes, it’s worth it. It’s a small price to pay to ensure I don’t have to do all that work again.’
Mrs Maclean was clearly longing to know what was in the parcel, but she was too polite to ask. Tirza took pity on her.
‘It’s just something to do with this exhibition I’m having in Edinburgh.’
‘You are having an exhibition in Edinburgh?’ Mrs Maclean was impressed. Like the other locals she did not know quite what to make of the American lady who seemed to have no visible means of support.
‘An exhibition of photographs, yes. At a gallery in George Street.’
‘Fancy!’ It was known that Miss Libby took photographs, but Mrs Maclean had not suspected anyone might want to exhibit them. She stored away this information for later dissemination.
Once her parcel was despatched, Tirza found it impossible to work. She was restive by day, despite the recurring bouts of tiredness that still afflicted her, and at night she lay awake turning over in bed, unable to relax her tense limbs. The last of the snow had melted and the microscopic wild flowers that lurked amongst the scrub and heather of her island were beginning to grow, but she could not summon the energy to crawl about photographing them from ground level. The gulls were holding raucous assemblies, fighting for dominance and pairing off, and the curlews which had nested last year at the foot of the rising ground in the centre of the island were back in the same spot.
The days began to lengthen and a little warmth crept hesitantly into the sun. With surprising speed the book proofs arrived and she checked them in a single day. Max telephoned about interviews he was organising.
‘Colin is going to book you into a hotel in Edinburgh for two weeks at his expense – starting a week before the opening so you can sort out any final details of the exhibition. I’m setting up the magazine and newspaper interviews for that week. We’ve got six newspapers – all broadsheets – and three magazines so far. I’m hoping that BBC and ITV news will cover the opening, but you can never count on it, not if some big news story breaks. And I’ve sorted out one TV interview and two radio interviews for the period aro
und and just after the opening. And Kaleidoscope will be covering it.’
‘Heavens,’ said Tirza, trying to sound impressed but feeling a sinking sensation, ‘you have been busy.’
‘Well,’ said Max, and she could hear a smirk in his voice, ‘I am rather pleased with myself. Mathilda Goldberg will be doing the TV interview. I think you’ll find her quite reasonable. That will be the day after the private view.’
A sudden thought struck Tirza.
‘Just a minute, Max. This isn’t going to be a live interview, is it?’
‘Now, don’t worry. There will just be a small studio audience, and it will be done in Edinburgh, so you don’t have to come down to London. Piece of cake.’
‘Max,’ said Tirza, ‘I could kill you.’
After the stress of overseeing the hanging of her photographs in the gallery, the thought of the private view – on the evening before the exhibition opened to the general public – seemed at first almost a relief to Tirza. She had not realised in advance just how disconcerting it would be to see her life’s work laid out like this – not only for the judgement of others but as a forced reassessment of what she herself thought she had been doing all those years. Her ‘juvenilia’, as Colin called them, were hung together in a corner just inside the door of the first room. He saw no reason to make any particular show of them, and she found that by walking swiftly forward whenever she entered the room she could avoid looking at them altogether.
During the week they were mounting and arranging the exhibition she was too much occupied to think very much, but as the first guests filed in from the warm spring streets she suddenly felt nothing but dread. Max had forced her to go shopping for an appropriate outfit with his assistant, Nina, a smart young London woman whose clothes were as slick as her hair and her maquillage. She had peered through her huge round glasses at the clothes Tirza was wearing and made small bleating sounds of distress. They had compromised on a trouser suit of pale green linen which felt comfortable, as long as Tirza did not look at herself in a mirror, where a strange creature (new haircut) looked back at her with hostile eyes.