Hugh laughs. “The serpent in the garden. It’s a wonder none of us died a premature death, hiking up Kopje, with those rattlers.”
And then he’s abruptly silent, as if realizing what he has said.
Hugh drives her here and there, up and down the valley, from Vernon to Oliver, north to Sicamous and Salmon Arm, west to Kamloops.
When Adam had come here with her, on their honeymoon in 1963, he had said: It looks like Italy. But it’s all too new and temporary. Like people never meant to stay. None of the buildings are over thirty years old.
She supposes that there hadn’t been the materials or the labour fifty or a hundred years ago to build permanently. Not the money. Adam had been concerned, as a young architect, with matters of culture and structures. What is culture, he had asked, if it does not leave permanent artifacts? What can be measured?
“What would you say is the culture of the valley?” she asks Hugh.
“I suppose it’s let me do my own thing; everyone else can sink or swim. Look how the ridings have always voted.”
“That’s an ethos, Hugh, not a culture.”
“You’re right. Though ethos is part of culture, of course. That’s a hard one. I guess the culture has changed. When we were young, it was all transplanted English village, wasn’t it, Sidonie? Women’s Institute teas and flower competitions.”
“Colonial, then. Your mother’s hats,” Sidonie says.
“Exactly. And the schoolteachers and doctors always Scots.”
“Terrible,” she says to Hugh, “when you think of it. The way we were raised, privileged Europeans. The snobbery. It was like a plantation.”
“Do you think so? Aren’t all societies the same, conquering, transplanting, then finally giving in to the local rootstock, getting assimilated? And anyway, how’re you going to do something like orcharding without cheap labour? That means immigration and infrastructure, and the Europeans do that better. Democracy is a European idea. It’s lucky the British were in charge. It could have been much worse.”
“But there were lots of German-speaking people around. The Knopfs, the Klopfs, the Getzkes and Bolskes and Mannskes.”
“They came later,” Hugh says. “In the early 50s. Don’t you remember?”
Yes.
She remembers now — she would have been perhaps nine, in fourth grade, in a school that has suddenly expanded to include dozens of new arrivals. Who were these children? She remembers them as alarming, because strangers. The younger ones spoke English without an accent, but the older ones had heavy accents, and limited vocabulary. Strange clothing sometimes — cut-down women’s and men’s woolen things, and strange names, though these were quickly shortened and altered to Mike, John, Betty. For a while, they were regarded with suspicion, but after a few months, only the poorer of the original children, those partially marginalized themselves, kept up the term bohunk. But even people who considered themselves well-bred used the term DP.
Germans expelled from Poland, she guesses they must have been.
She remembers, in the spring, when she walked up the hill from the school, the sounds of saws and hammers, the odours of fresh timber, are everywhere: a spring chorus, like the frog ponds. A businesslike sound, a let’s-get-down-to-it sound. A clean sharp smell, like the smell of the bath house, only yellower.
Her father had been pleased: good clean immigrants, he’d said. They’ll contribute to society.
But Sidonie and Alice both pretended, suddenly, that they did not understand German, when the new children spoke to them.
A shame presses on her. The past is not a comfortable place to visit.
They picnic on a steeply sloping hill planted with vines above the blue, blue lake. It’s only March, but the earth is already pleasantly warm, the sun like heated honey. They have stopped at the European deli and bakery, have bought cold meats, bread, chocolate: have purchased wine from the same vineyard they are looking over.
She says, “Adam thought it looked like Italy.”
“It does look like parts of Italy, here,” Hugh says. “Also parts of Chile. And Turkey. And California. The lake and the hills and the orchards and vineyards. Even the houses, the way they’re built on the hillsides, and all stucco. And the tourists.”
“A culture of sunshine.”
He laughs. “Oh, for a beaker of the warm South,” he says. “Look, Sidonie: the buttercups.”
So there are, a slope of buttercups, shimmering in the bone-coloured, snow-bleached grass.
She recites their botanical names from memory.
“You should have been a botanist,” Hugh says. “You should have come back here and worked in botany. You should never have left us.”
He has stretched himself out perpendicular to her on the tartan car blanket, and put his white head in her lap. She doesn’t move.
“Hugh, you left long before I did,” she says. Sensibly.
“You used to tell my mother that you wanted to go to Italy,” Hugh says. “It must have been a little after you told her that you were going to marry me.”
Yes. She remembers. Mother, her mother, sewing new drapes for Mrs. Inglis’s new picture window. The Inglises’ house had been undergoing renovations: a new wing added, the mullioned windows replaced with plate glass and the hardwood floors covered with linoleum and wall-to-wall carpeting. Everything painted too, and the old dining-room table and sofa and chairs, with their curvy legs ending in wonderful, terrifying animal feet, being sold at the auction and replaced by new Danish wood.
Mrs. Inglis was getting wall-to-wall carpeting in a shade called “Siena Wood,” which Mr. Inglis says is rust, really. The drapes Mother was sewing were a complementary blue: the blue was called “Lake Maggiori,” and Sidonie had thought it was the colour of their lake on a certain kind of day: an overcast day in September, when the cloud was very high and pearly.
Mrs. Inglis had said that Siena and Lake Maggiori were places in Italy, that she had been to Italy; she was on holiday there once, as a girl. “Napoli!” she had said — Sidonie can see her now, rolling her eyes upward, clasping her hands, parodying herself. “The art! The architecture! The beautiful young men!”
Napoli was Naples, she had known. Father has been there, too. Father had his pocketbook stolen by bandits in Naples. They are all bandits there, he had said. Father was attacked by the bandits in an alley where he had parked his motorbike. But Mussolini cleaned up the bandits, Father says. That was a long time ago that Father was in Italy: before he came to Canada.
Italy was in books, but Canada isn’t, very much. And Marshall’s Landing, never.
That shade of blue could be called Okanagan Lake blue. But who would know what that meant?
Mrs. Inglis had said, “Sidonie, dear, come and sit by me,” and Sidonie had realized that she had somehow crept under the machine and was holding onto the iron supports.
She remembers that it was difficult to refrain from mentioning that Mrs. Inglis had eaten four Nice biscuits. She knew not to do that, though she hoped Mrs. Inglis wouldn’t eat the whole row that Alice had arranged, overlapping like fish scales, on the plate. Nice were Sidonie’s favourite biscuits, with their odd vanilla-almond flavour, which called so much attention to itself and then disappeared, just as you tried to identify and hold onto it. And Mother didn’t buy Peek Freans very often, so the old blue tin with its pictures of King George V and Queen Mary was only brought out for company.
“I think I’m going to go to Italy one day,” the little girl Sidonie had said to Mrs. Inglis.
“Fancy!” Mrs. Inglis had said. “What is it about Italy, all of a sudden? Graham wants to go there too.” Her glance, Sidonie noticed, was fixed on the last Nice biscuit. Sidonie couldn’t help herself. Her hand shot out and snatched the biscuit, and it was entirely in her mouth before she knew what has happened. Mother had been mortified.
But Mrs. Inglis had laughed.
There was something sweet and lush and glowing about Mrs. Inglis: a warmth, like an orchard in the
sun. Sidonie had wanted to grow up to be like Mrs. Inglis, with her auburn hair, her soft, curvy front and slim legs, her easy laugh, her lack of fear. She remembers thinking: Mother likes Alice best. But I have Mrs. Inglis. I am hers, and she is mine.
Sitting among the buttercups with Hugh’s head in her lap, she thinks: I must be careful not to confuse my affection for Hugh’s mother with my friendship with Hugh.
That night, she is awakened by a noise: something like a stone dropping and rolling across the floor has disturbed her. She can hear, then, Hugh’s bed shifting, Hugh muttering, his feet padding on the hardwood. He has knocked something off his nightstand — likely a pill bottle, a water glass. More muttering, and shuffling, as if he has gotten down on his hands and knees to retrieve something from under the bed.
Should she go knock on his door, offer to help? But the image of the two of them, in pajamas, hair awry, minus glasses and bridges and who knows what, crawling around the floor, alarms her. She stays where she is, in her high firm bed. But then she can’t sleep.
It occurs to her now that she does not quite see the point of the reminiscing on which she and Hugh spend so much of their evenings. What is it that Hugh wants? A pleasant story? She is not the right companion for him, in that case. She has serious misgivings. She enjoys Hugh’s company: he is intelligent; they can have a conversation. But she does not see eye to eye with him.
Then Hugh leaves, flying back to Toronto. They have had a pleasant time, she thinks, but she is glad to see him go. She is glad to be on her own again.
Heading out for a walk, she meets up with her neighbour, and thinks again: she timed her leaving to intercept me. The little flat-faced dog licks her ankle.
“I see your husband is off again,” the woman says, chattily.
“He is not my husband.”
Perhaps her tone has been too abrupt, for the woman colours and says, a little sharply, “Boyfriend, then.”
Sidonie waits. She is good at waiting, making people say more than they intend to.
Of course, for both Alice and her, there must have been a kinship taboo in place. They had grown up too much with Hugh and Graham to consider them as romantic partners. And vice versa. Though there had been other objections, other barriers, as well. She remembers the odd conversation with Mother, in Mother’s last illness: Alice could have married anyone, Mother had said. We didn’t need Betty Inglis trying to foist off that Gordon Defoe on us. She thought she was better than us, you know. But Cecil Inglis came here as a manager for the land company. Somehow he arranged to get paid in shares when the company was doing badly in the 30s, and he traded those shares for that big parcel of land that they called Sans Souci. Really, they weren’t anyone. Betty was a soldier’s wife, and Cecil was just an officer in India. They’d had to leave. They were fresh off the boat.
Fresh off the boat: she remembers her mother using that phrase. She can remember what her mother said almost perfectly, she thinks. She had been horrified, appalled. It had seared into her. Her mother complaining in an unfamiliar, petulant voice: but they always had a little more money than us, and Betty acted like Hugh and Graham were headed for Oxford. It was her idea to send them to that private school in Vancouver, you know. And they sent Graham off to the one in England when he was fifteen. But he got sick and had to come back, and then Betty said that the air here was healthier. But it was because Graham was not right, even then. She had it in her head that the boys would both marry upper-class girls. She thought Alice wasn’t as good as them, though Alice was the prettiest girl around, and your father would have been titled, back in Europe.
Mother, rambling, displaying unattractive grudges and jealousies, letting loose some old secrets, in her last weeks. She had been in pain, and the morphine had disinhibited her, of course. But a shock to find all of that festering, when she had grown up knowing Betty Inglis as her mother’s closest friend. A shock to have secrets revealed.
Revealed and not revealed. She had thought, then, that Mother had meant that Alice should have married Graham or Hugh. But Graham had become ill in his early twenties, and Hugh, who was Alice’s age, had never seemed like a possible partner for her. He had been a boy still, when Alice was already grown. And they’d all grown up as siblings. There had been no possibility of romance between them. Had there?
And she herself had been too much younger, had left the valley before she was grown up, so the question had not arisen. There had been no possibility of romance between herself and Graham, or herself and Hugh.
Had there?
POMONA
She could have found her way on her own, but Walt Rilke is waiting for her in the long, rutted driveway, in his green gabardine work clothes, his leather work boots planted squarely on the centre ridge, among the colonizing dandelions and plantain and a dwarfish, determined race of mustard, as though nothing has changed in two decades.
Though as she gets out of her car and walks toward him, she thinks, for an instant: No, not Walt. White hair tufts out from under his cap, at the sides; the skin of his neck and face has leathered to a permanent tobacco-brown, is shirred around his prominent blue eyes, stretched taut and shiny at his knobby cheekbones. Moles of various species cultivate his cheeks and forearms. His grin as usual — full curving lips pulled back over serviceable teeth, eyes disappearing into their puckered lids. Who is this old man?
She would not have recognized him, except that he resembles his father. Then the images of him, past and present, serigraph in her mind and he is just Walt, whom she has known nearly all of her life. Trusty sidekick Walt, trudging after her in his short pants and gumboots, his red cheeks, his white-blond hair like milkweed silk, transparent against the sun.
He stretches out both hands. “Sidonie. Long time no see. How the heck are you?”
“Walter,” she says. “Good to see you.”
And here Walt’s son Jack — looking like the image she’d had of Walt, a middle-aged man now, his tow hair darkened, but tufting out in the same way under his cap.
“Dr. von Täler.”
Firm grip; callouses. She remembers Jack as a small boy, remembers Walt at the same age, and at the age Jack is now, remembers Walt’s father, old Mr. Rilke, at the age of Jack and the age of Walt. Layers of memory: the images all ranged one behind the other, like one of those stylized watercolours of mountain ranges. Only instead of retreating into mistiness, her memory-images become sharper the further they are in the past.
But how like his father Jack is — the stocky build of him, the sturdy neck, the face all knobs and creases. She sees all of her images merging into just this one, this genotypical Rilke.
The Rilkes breed true, her father had said.
“It’s been what, a dozen years?” Walt says.
“Twenty-one this June,” she says.
They stand about in the driveway, grinning at each other. The Rilkes are not talkers. She is not a talker. They commune by standing still, shuffling their boots. It’s faintly ridiculous. She could have found her way by herself. And really, it wasn’t necessary for her to drive out at all. She does not need to see the orchards — Walt’s usual annual report, delivered over the telephone, would have been sufficient.
But it’s a ritual, she recognizes. An important one, for two grown men to take half a day from whatever else they might be doing. The message is that they have been working hard. She must fulfill her seigniorial role, and acknowledge, adjudicate their hard work.
Jack clears his throat. She wonders about Jack, who must be in his late thirties now, perhaps forty. Still living at home, working for his dad. Hadn’t he taken a heavy mechanics course just out of high school and gone north to work at one of the big mines? But he’s been back some time. Not married any longer, or so she’d been informed in one of Christina’s Christmas cards. The type of man who might find it difficult to meet a girl. Shy, a hard worker, but something of a plodder. The Rilkes are a race of garden gnomes, Alice had said.
“It’s a beautiful day,” Jack
says.
It is beautiful, this April day: bright and clear and warm, the sky cloudless, the lake cobalt. The hills, which will be sere and yellow by July, are green. The trees are all in blossom or fresh leaf. A day of spring. Beautiful and bucolic, here in the countryside. On either side of the driveway, the rows of mature Delicious, each tree grown to its full extent, the circumference of a room. Wrinkled purple-grey limbs; bronze-green branches in full leaf now. Soft clear-green of spring leaves; their silvery-grey undersides; the blossoms just peaking, their rounded cups unfolding, Schiaparelli-pink sepals and white, white petals.
On this day of her appointment with Walt, she has awakened with an unusual sense of purpose, put on her jeans and Gore-Tex boots and layers: T-shirt, pullover sweater. Hiking gear, because she doesn’t own orcharding clothes these days. She knows they will start their walk in a cool morning wind, damp air rising off the lake, and then, as they march up and down through the trees and the sun rises in the sky, they will get warmer and warmer, and finish off in Walt’s kitchen, which will be hot from his wife Christina’s baking. She must layer on and be prepared to layer off.
Her foot has healed, as the emergency-room doctor had said it would, in the six weeks since the accident. She is able to walk again, a little more each day. She does not attempt the lake path, but she can drive herself, walk about the stores. She has retrieved her car, which is unscathed: only the radio station settings have all been changed. She has had to reset the buttons to CBC One and Two.
She has driven north along Highway 97, past the new supermarkets and gas stations, the Esso and the Petro-Canada, the A&W, the McDonald’s. Past the old plaza, built in the early 60s, with the CIBC, the IGA, the bakery and liquor store, the little one-storey buildings re-fronted, patched up, painted, this decade, beige and burgundy, bearing new signs, but still recognizable. Plain, even ugly buildings, she sees now, the old and the new. Not planned; built of necessity. Strung along the highway, the most basic way stations. On the side roads, more modernization: the high school tarted up with a glassed-in entry; some frou-frou apartment blocks. But there is more sameness than change.
After Alice Page 7