by Ann Swinfen
That night, Tirza awoke still tangled in a dark net of dreams. She lay staring upwards, to where the rough beams would be, floating above her in the moonless air. The old dream of the burning city lurked in fragments in the corners of her mind, but something else had followed, something that had left her cold and clammy, although the air of her room as her breathing steadied was mild.
Faces had drifted up towards her from the sea-bed, drawn up as she winched a lobster pot aboard Louisa Mary. Or was it one face? Already scarred by scavenging sea creatures, it seemed at one moment to be the face of the German airman, at the next, Wayne’s face, laughing and jeering at her.
‘Goin’ to be a swell day’s fishin’, my dad says. Shame you ain’t got more capacity on that little boat o’ yourn!’
‘But a shark’s torn your net,’ she said. ‘It’s the end of the herring run.’
When the shadows were drawing in the next afternoon, Tirza stumbled into the clearing around Christina’s cabin. Her grandmother was sitting in her old wicker chair with a book in her hands, but she was not reading. Tirza knelt down on the ground beside her, hunching up, huddled against the coarse russet cloth of her skirt. Christina put her book down on the rocky ground and laid her hand gently on the downturned dark head.
‘We have to learn to accept it, my darling. The only thing we can be sure of in our lives is our death at the end of it.’
Tirza’s shoulders jerked rebelliously.
‘He was only fourteen, Girna. Why did he have to drown? Why poor Wayne? What had he done?’ She drew a long breath, and her head trembled under Christina’s touch. ‘I’m sorry about his dad too – of course I am – and Eli, but they were grown-up. They’d had plenty of time. Grandma says...’ She gulped. ‘She says it’s God’s chosen who die young. It’s a blessing, she says, to be spared growing up. I hate her! I hate her God! It’s all lies. Isn’t it, Girna?’
She raised a tear-stained face pleadingly.
Christina twined a lock of the soft, unkempt hair around her finger and looked down at her.
‘It was the Indian belief that when a person dies, it is the same as when a flower dies or a tree dies. We all take sustenance from the earth, we all return to it. And by the earth they meant the whole of the created universe, of course. Man has a spirit, but so has every deer or eagle or whale or oak or clump of wild cloudberries. When the material body dies, the spirit wanders but is free to return again in the same or another form, and pass through the cycle of life again. They had a saying: Next time it will be better.’
‘But what about now?’ Tirza cried. ‘It’s now I want to know about.’
Christina shook her head. ‘I don’t know. We have to accept and keep on living, however much we rage against what happens to us in life, Tirza. Remember that all life is a circle, with the flowering tree of the soul at its centre and its four quarters which sustain that tree: the south with its soft warmth, the west with its nourishing rain and the east that brings peace and light. But there is the north, too. The north sends the great winds that train us to be strong and courageous. All life is made up of these elements. Without them it is incomplete. A broken pattern. Try to hold a little of Wayne in your memory. That way, he goes on living as long as you do.’
The following day, the funeral for Wayne and the memorial service for Walter and Eli was held in the white clapboard church on the headland overlooking Flamboro harbour. The women had brought armfuls of flowers from their tiny gardens, tended with such care and difficulty on the poor sandy soil of the town. Mostly, they were the old cottage flowers – hollyhocks and delphiniums, portulacas, black-eyed susans and lupins. The children had gathered wild flowers from the field edges up behind the town, and Miss Molly had recklessly cut large bunches from the old-fashioned scented rose bushes brought back from England fifty years ago by Captain Penhaligon. Everyone was there, even Miss Susanna, driven the few yards to the church gate and half carried into the church by Nathan and Charlie. Her skin was so pale that it looked transparent, but although her eyes were more deeply sunken even than a few weeks ago, they were as bright and alert as ever.
‘I believed I should be the next to require the minister’s services,’ Miss Susanna murmured to Harriet. ‘I thought my heart would break when I heard about young Wayne and the others. After a lifetime of knowing the sea’s implacable hunger, I still find myself crying out against it.’
Christina was sitting on Miss Susanna’s other side. She took her hand.
Tirza, in the pew behind, could hear their soft voices. She looked up at the plain white ceiling of the church and the windows of clear glass against which the flowers arranged on the sills laid patterns of colour – branches thick with lilac blossom looped and fretted with vines of the wild white morning glory, and stiff furred sheaves of hollyhock, whose flowers looked fragile against the parent stems. Outside the window to her right a late golden robin was singing. The melody rippled and bubbled like a spring of fresh water, as if nothing was wrong, as if this summer – as if the life of the village – could go on unchanged. She wondered if Wayne’s spirit was around here somewhere, watching what was happening, or whether he had already chosen another body, as a fox, maybe, or a herring gull. Something independent and fierce and quarrelsome.
The murmuring stopped as the minister walked up the aisle, and the service began. The members of the congregation lifted their voices in a hymn that held a particular significance for the people of Flamboro, for whom the rocky land and rocky ocean were the foundations of life itself.
Rock of Ages, cleft for me.
Let me hide myself in Thee.
Unknown waves before me roll,
Hiding rock and treach’rous shoal.
Later, Nathan stepped forward to read from the Psalms in memory of his friends and the young boy now lying in the plain pine casket in front of them all.
If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me.
15
Intermezzo
Fall 1980
Boston
September 1, 1980
Dear Ms Libby
I enjoyed our meeting last month at Max Prescott’s office in London. It was great to hear from him that you’ve agreed to come over for the opening of the exhibition on September 14. I’ve booked you a hotel suite here in Boston for the first five days, September 11 to 15. After that, we’ll talk about what you’d like to do. I hope maybe you’ll visit with me and my family at our country place in Vermont. We would just love to have you do that.
I’ve lined up seven interviews with national newspapers and magazines, and have another three possibles. There will be four radio slots, and I’ve been lucky enough to get you on the Gary Gemmings Show. Max has told me you don’t care for live TV interviews, but don’t worry! The Gary Gemmings Show is pre-recorded, and if anything goes wrong, they just do it over. The radio interviews will be done in studios right here in town, and most of the journalists have agreed to meet with you at your hotel. Two of them, however, want to get some shots of you in the gallery, so for those interviews I thought we’d use my office here. I hope these arrangements suit you, but if not just let me know and we’ll change anything you want.
My assistant has booked your flights from Edinburgh to London and London to Boston, and your tickets will be waiting to be collected at Edinburgh airport. (See enclosed sheet with details.) She got you an open-ended return ticket, since we weren’t sure what your plans might be after you finish here. I’ll meet you with a car at the airport and drive you to your hotel. I look forward so much to seeing you on September 11th.
Yours truly,
Pam O’Rourke
Ballinuig,
Inverness-shire
5 September
Dear Tirza,
Yes, I do think that you’re right to go to Boston. I’m sure it won’t be the ordeal you say that you envisage in your panic-stricken moments. What are a few wealthy
Bostonian matrons compared with the Vietcong or the cut-throat drug dealers of Columbia, that you should give then even a passing thought? Go and be polite for a few hours, say your piece nicely for the journalists, and then enjoy yourself! I wish I were coming with you. From all that I’ve heard, New England is beautiful in the autumn. Will the leaves have started changing colour by the time you’re there? Once you’ve finished all your official duties, it will be almost October, so I’ll be picturing you amongst flaming scarlets and oranges, photographing white clapboard churches. Or would that be too obviously beautiful for you? Anyway, you’re bound to find something of interest, to contrast with our bleak Highland scenery.
We’re well into the harvest here. I’ve been sitting on a combine from 5 a.m. till 10 p.m., and I’m now writing this with one hand and forking up scrambled eggs with the other, which was all I could be bothered to cook. My backside is so tender I’ve put a cushion on top of the kitchen chair. It makes me ache all over to think of farmers a generation ago, who had to sit on those bare metal seats, exposed to everything that the wind and weather could throw at them. I dare say we’re getting very soft nowadays.
Douglas is arriving tomorrow, at the end of his year’s VSO at the orphanage in Pakistan. He’ll give me a hand with the harvest until he starts university in a month’s time. Alison has been a great help over her summer holiday, but of course when the schools started a fortnight ago she had to go back to work. I hope it won’t be too long before you meet them. They’re not bad kids. When they were smaller, I used to wonder whether losing their mother so young would leave a permanent scar, but they seem OK. It helped having my mother with us till she settled in Edinburgh with her sister three years ago.
I’ve looked through the dusty old boxes in the attic, as I promised, but found nothing relating to Maine. All I have is the large manila envelope I told you about before. I looked through the contents again, especially the photographs. There is that one of you in Stormy Petrel. I don’t want to part with it, but I’ll have a copy made and give it to you when we meet.
Thank you for agreeing to have dinner with me in Edinburgh before you set off for the States. I’m looking forward to it more than I can say.
Take care of yourself.
Yours aye,
Alex
Boston
15 September
Dear Max,
Well, the launch went off successfully, I think. I promise I did you credit. I confronted all those faces and did not retreat to the Ladies, though I felt like it a few times! I suppose I’m accustomed now to the more restrained British way of doing things. Over here I have felt once or twice that I was being devoured. Truly, I can’t understand people’s attitude. It’s the photographs that are important, not me. They’re here to look at them. Instead, people seem to want to touch me all the time. Disconcerting, and enough to drive me back to Scotland, if Pam weren’t so kind and excited about it all.
Tell Colin that the American edition of the book is selling well – they’ve already had to order a reprint. I’ve been approached by one of the big publishers over here to do a large-format book based on my work over the years. I’ve referred him to you, so you should be hearing from him soon. Also, a local Boston firm has a proposal for a calendar – alternate views of New England and Scotland. I’ll need to think about this. I don’t yet have any work on New England. He’s also got your address.
In a couple of days I’m going with Pam to her family home in Vermont. She’s been very insistent, and it will be good to get away from the crowds and the city. They go there as often as possible, and want to fit in a quick visit before their children start back at their private schools in Boston. I plan to take some pictures of the countryside and the farming community, then I may rent a car and drive around a bit when the O’Rourkes come back to Boston. I’ll let you know when I’m more certain of my plans.
See you before too long.
Love,
Tirza
Portland
September 16, 1980
Dear Miss Libby
I hope you will forgive my writing to you like this on behalf of one of my clients. The exhibition of your work (of which, may I say, I have long been an admirer) and your own visit to this country having been reported extensively in the newspapers, my client has asked me, as his legal representative, to contact you. Indeed, for the last year he has been anxious to reach you, but it has proved somewhat difficult to trace your whereabouts.
It appears from the interviews I have read that you plan to stay in New England for a few weeks after the opening of the exhibition. I wonder whether I could prevail upon you to pay a visit to our office in Portland, so that we might discuss certain matters which will be more appropriately dealt with in person? Alternatively, I could call on you in Boston, but if Maine is on your itinerary, it might be more satisfactory to be able to view all the relevant documents here in the office.
Perhaps you would be good enough to call me, or to inform me where I may contact you, so that we can arrange a meeting.
I remain yours very truly,
Gabriel C. Foss, Jr.
Maple Lodge
Vermont
23 September
Dear Alex,
We’ve been here five days now. You would love it. The woods have all the colours you were expecting and I had forgotten. Strange, isn’t it, the tricks memory plays? Some things I remember so clearly. Others I have forgotten, till something jogs the brain, like an electric shock, and then – click! – the memory is there again. That’s how it has been with the sight of the woods in full autumn splendour.
A couple of odd things have happened since I called you from Boston. First, a letter from a Portland lawyer was forwarded to me here from the gallery. It’s very portentous and breathes heavily of ‘matters to discuss’ and a client who is anxious to trace me. He wants me to meet him in Portland or Boston, but divulges nothing. Can’t imagine what he is talking about. I haven’t made up my mind whether or not I’ll agree to a meeting. I don’t really want to waste time going back to Boston before I catch my flight home from the airport, but I certainly hadn’t planned on going to Maine. I know you say I should go back, but I’m not sure I agree.
The other curiosity is this. Pam and I drove into the nearest town yesterday for groceries and afterwards while she went to the bank I pottered around a second-hand book store, where I found a big glossy book published about five years ago, called Todd’s Neck: Victorian Summer High Life. Talk about coincidence! I bought it, of course, and though I haven’t had time to read it yet, I’ve been dipping in. It is based on a collection of 1880s and 1890s photographs which came to light about ten years ago, taken by a New York high society photographer who used to summer at the Mansion House on Todd’s Neck soon after it was turned into a hotel. The text details the way Maine became the fashionable summer place for the rich from New York and Boston.
I wasn’t so interested in that as in the early pages describing the area before it became popular. Apparently the Libby family owned far more land than I realised. From the seventeenth century our land reached from Flamboro down about five miles south of Todd’s Neck. The Todds owned most of the Neck itself, but when they overreached themselves in the mid-nineteenth century, one Elias Libby bought a large part of the land from them, except for the area around the Mansion House. I think he must have been my great-(great?)-grandfather. Then about twenty years later the family had to sell land themselves, including most of Todd’s Neck and the area south of it.
Now remember what I said just now about memory? I have a very faint recollection of some family property beyond Todd’s Neck being spoken of, but I paid it no mind (as we used to say) at the time.
The book also reproduced an 1890 map showing Todd’s Neck and Flamboro, with the householders’ names printed next to their houses. All the familiar names leapt out at me – Libby, Flett, Penhaligon, Larrabee, Tremayne, Pelham, Swanson. I can’t tell you how peculiar it made me feel. There is this map,
nearly a century old, and there are the same houses, with the same names next to them. The Libbys at Libby’s Farm would be my grandparents. (Or maybe my great-grandparents?) I never knew my grandfather, but my grandmother Abigail lived with us when I was a child. Flett’s General Stores and Post Office is shown. Capt. Penhaligon was the old sea captain I told you about, and his three daughters were already grown young women when that map was made. It is really unsettling – like stepping back into history and coming face to face, not exactly with yourself, but with your own shadow.
I never wanted to go back. Ever. But perhaps enough years have passed now. Perhaps I can face it. Perhaps I should face it. The lawyer’s letter, and that map – they seem to be prodding me. I think if I don’t go, I’ll regret it. Be ashamed of myself, even. All these years I’ve tried to turn my back on what happened there, and by doing that I’ve frozen part of myself. Perhaps we aren’t truly adult until we can face our childhood honestly and without fear.
Anyway, I’ll let you know what I decide. I wish you were here.
Tirza
Maple Lodge
Vermont
25 September
Dear Max
I promised to keep you informed of my movements.
I’ve rented a car, as planned, and will be taking more photographs as I tour around. First, though, I’ve decided to drive to Maine. Some lawyer in Portland wants to see me, though he won’t divulge why. I plan to take my time driving over there, and I’ve booked in at the Mansion House Hotel, Todd’s Neck, Flamboro, for a couple of nights. Not sure how long I’ll stay, but I don’t expect to be there more than a week. I’ll call you from there to let you know my next moves.