The Black Brook

by Tom Drury

  Just then, some children from Vertige came clanking up the dusty road with tin cans tied to their ankles, singing “Frère Jacques.” But instead of the morning bells ringing “Bing bong bing,” they rang “Bim bom bim.”

  “What’s that all about?” said Pierrick.

  “They’re playing,” said Rosine.

  Mary worked on The Black Brook in a small room under the eaves on the third floor. She painted at night while Paul cleaned up in the kitchen, Rosine fed the animals, and Axel and Judy watched Les Rues de San Francisco on television. Axel had built Mary an easel from ash boards he had found in the barn, and Paul had helped her stretch and staple canvas to a wooden frame thirty-three by twenty-two centimeters. She primed the canvas with three coats of gesso, sanding between each coat. With a pestle she ground her paints on the glass top of an old dresser, adding, by eye dropper, siccatif de cobalt to make them dry faster. The attic room was often hot by the end of the day, and Paul brought up a large standing fan that whirred and oscillated as Mary worked in shorts and a T-shirt.

  She decided to proceed from the lightest to the darkest parts of the portrait and so began with an underpainting of the figure of the seated woman, whose shoulders leaned one way and narrow forehead tilted another, and whose long and slender fingers were interlaced over her knees. Contrary to Carlo’s description, the woman wore not a skirt but a loose golden dress, of which only the lower half and the voluminous cuffs of the sleeves were in the light. Her face, shaded, was a warm reddish color, and her hair was gathered behind her ear like a young woman’s. One short strand had strayed over her forehead, and behind her lay the darkness of the stream.

  Sometimes Françoise slept beside Mary as she worked, in a carrier on the broad planks of the floor, but if the infant was awake, Paul would look after her. Those evenings he walked around the house and grounds holding her like a sack of potatoes, balanced belly down on his left shoulder, with her arms hanging over his back. She seemed to like this mode of travel. He would not see her eyes but everyone said they were either wide and happy or half-closed and sleepy, depending on how long ago she had been fed. Paul and Françoise would cruise Mary’s garret, checking out the debris that had been stored there over the years. He showed her, for example, the controversial boar’s head. “This belongs to your Uncle Gustave,” said Paul. “But if anyone tells you it is Uncle Gustave, don’t listen, because this is an exaggeration.” In a torn chair Paul read to her, Kipling stories or an illustrated book from 1914 called The Forest of Arden by George Wharton Edwards.

  In the forest villages may still be found the true principle of marriage all unconsciously observed. In the large cities they say that love matches are becoming more and more rare, and it may be so; but in these simple villages the lover does not usually seek a mate because of her dot, which is rarely of great account, and the young people do not marry until the swain is well able, through his own thrift and industry, to support a wife and family.

  “This is a fairy tale,” said Paul.

  Mary leaned toward the painting. She touched the fibers of a coarse brush to a smear of white on her palette and then transferred the paint to the canvas in subtle feints — pressing hard at first and then pulling quickly away. The brook came alive with these nervous marks.

  “Françoise will not marry until she is famous,” said Mary. “That’s what Judy says.”

  Paul held the baby and looked into her eyes. “She’s going to study at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole.”

  “And she won’t marry in this country.”

  Paul laughed. “Well, if she’s going to be famous, it goes without saying that it won’t be in this country.”

  Mary searched through a clay jar of brushes. They clicked peacefully together. Her diamond caught the light from the unshaded bulb over her head. “Tintin’s famous. And where do you think oil painting was invented?”

  “In Flanders,” said Paul. “Van Eyck. The Betrothal of the Arnolfini.”

  “Good for you,” said Mary. “But they don’t believe that anymore.”

  ••

  In the meantime, the professor named Glover had organized a club that on weekends engaged in war games in the forest. A number of Vertigians joined the club, following the lead of Cornet the locksmith, Guissard the grocer, and Avaloze the pharmacist. The plan was to restage the eighteen days between the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940 and the surrender of Leopold III, but they did not have nearly enough people to make this credible. So they imagined themselves as a crack squad of saboteurs, which at least made it possible for them to put on old clothes, shoot rifles, and wade stealthily in the river.

  At the end of the day they would clean up and meet at the Auberge des Moines for a big supper. They drank beer and ate stewed rabbit and talked with straight faces of the bridges and railways they might destroy to hinder the German advance. Cornet, who in addition to fixing locks served as the mayor of Vertige, led the strategy sessions in his quietly authoritative way, but most of the others spoke loudly, as if to underscore their stubborn resistance, and Pierrick would tell them that if they did not pipe down their plans would be known to all of Germany. After dessert they would resume their real identities and play cards. The staff of the inn tolerated the make-believe while considering it foolish. Rosine pronounced the war club a sacrilege. Axel went out with them twice before slipping on loose gravel and twisting his knee.

  Then one day Glover’s rifle misfired and part of a blank cartridge lodged in his neck. His comrades carried the bleeding professor out of the woods and through the kitchen door of the inn. Rosine followed them with a mop, and Paul cleared a zinc table where Glover could be laid out.

  “The professor is wounded by a sharpshooter,” said Guissard.

  “Stop that,” said Paul. “I’ll call the doctor.”

  “Don’t call Andelot,” said Avaloze. “He makes fun of us in the town.”

  Glover held a towel to his neck and sighed with a rasping in his throat.

  “This is a pretty thing,” said Rosine.

  “We were firing blanks,” said Henri Guissard. Charcoal striped his sweating face. “Our blanks have never malfunctioned before.”

  “He is shaking,” said a retired butcher who held Glover’s booted ankles.

  Dr. Andelot had gone fishing, so Paul called the midwife who had come to the inn on the night the baby was desperately hungry. She removed the fragments of the blank with tweezers, applied antiseptic to the wound, and gave Glover a shot that would allow him to sleep. She asked to see Mary and the baby, but they were nowhere to be found. After the war gamers had cleared out with sheepish expressions, Paul went looking for Mary. She was neither in her room nor in the office nor in the barn. Finally he saw her up in the meadow with Françoise and Pierrick Gilloteaux. They were sitting on the grass where they had had the picnic after his and Mary’s return from London.

  That evening, Mary and Paul stood in the attic looking at the portrait of the woman by the stream. It was nearly finished, and Mary was not happy with it. Or she was fairly happy with it. It had not gone the way she wanted it to go. It had turned into something entirely different from what she had expected. She respected what it had become. She had given it her best and made something, whatever that might be.

  “I love it,” said Paul.

  “There’s a starchiness to the dress that eludes me,” said Mary.

  “I think her dress looks starchy.”

  “Do you?” said Mary

  “Oh, definitely. If it looked any starchier, she would seem uncomfortable,” said Paul. “And I love her hands. I thought they would be really difficult, but you seem to have had an easier time with them than Sargent did.”

  “I do like her hands,” said Mary “I think the shadow is good, I think the redness of the fingertips is good. Well, she’s almost done. I still have to lay the
lavender light over her arm. You know, she’s really kind of forlorn when you look at her.”

  “Pensive,” said Paul. “That was Tommy Maynard’s word.”

  “You talked to Tommy Maynard?”

  “Yeah. He’s the one that stabbed me in the face.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You said. It’s healing well.”

  “Thank you. How long will the painting take to dry?”

  “If we ship it so that nothing touches the surface, you want to be on the safe side . . . two weeks.”

  “They’re not going to say anything.”

  Mary wiped her hands on a rag. “What will you do when it’s done?”

  “Go to Scotland,” Paul said. “I met a woman who wants me to check on her daughter.”

  “Let her go to Scotland.”

  “She can’t get away.”

  “Spin those wheels,” said Mary

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Tell me.”

  “That you run around, and run around, and pretty soon you’ll be old and you won’t have anything.”

  “I don’t need anything?’

  “Well, that’s good, because that’s exactly what you’re going to have.”

  “I promised that I would go to Scotland.”

  “Well, go then. I’m not stopping you,” said Mary. “I’m not stopping you, I’m only telling you. I’m only giving you a warning?”

  Within the week, Glover had packed for his return to Alberta. Paul drove him to the train station in Jemelle and carried his trunk to the siding. Glover boarded the train, and while Paul did not see him inside the car, he waved at the blank windows as the train pulled away.

  Mary finished the painting in time for the local carnival commemorating the driving of the rats from the granary. Axel built a frame and Paul placed the painting on the mantel in the dining room of the inn. They ordered cases of beer and champagne and threw a party Villagers gathered around the painting and celebrated Mary’s reemergence as an artist. Their fingers reached for the rough texture of the paint but stopped short of touching it. The mayor, Cornet, asked Mary to paint his portrait, and she agreed. Rosine took Mary by the hands, kissed her, and said that the young woman by the river was more beautiful than anyone ever could be.

  24

  Paul had heard about the hard history of Scotland, and some of the people he met there seemed to project the bitterness of the recently conquered. In a grocery store in a southern town, a young girl asked her mother if she could have a sweetie, and the woman behind the counter said, “Where did she get that horrible English accent?” Then the mother and child left, and the grocer told Paul, “My husband’s father has never spoken a word in his life, but I consider him lucky next to a Scot with an English accent.” She said the English reputation for loyalty and discipline was a farce and that someday the Romans would return to Richborough.

  “We’ll see,” said Paul.

  He found the grocer’s regional animosity antiquated and small until considering that regional animosity characterized every place he had ever heard of. Take the Flemings and the Walloons. Take Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts. Playing out your frustrations on the unknown other was one of the most consistent human traits. Take, for that matter, his own impressions of the Scottish character, about which he knew nothing, really.

  Paul adapted to left-side driving by repeating the phrase “Lean left, wide right” like a prayer. The first part meant both stay to the left and take sharp or “lean” left turns; the second part reminded him to loop into the far lane when turning right. Bonner the lawyer’s map lay beside him on the passenger seat with the town circled in red. Kirkmadrine was a port on the Irish Sea, and even on a map it looked bleak and romantic.

  A plume of rain rose on the horizon but Paul’s windshield remained dry. He stopped at a roadside restaurant where the special that day was a lettuce sandwich and tea. Thinking he had encountered some local shorthand, he asked the waitress what all was in the lettuce sandwich, and she said, “Lettuce and butter.”

  The paper mat beneath his plate had a timeline of Scottish history.

  1513:Battle of Flodden. Defeat and death of James IV.

  1542:Declaration of war on England at the request of France. Rout of the Scots at Solway Moss.

  1544:Burning of Leith and ravaging of the Lothians.

  1546:Beginning of the Religious Revolution; burning of George Wishart and murder of Cardinal Beaton.

  It was raining when he left the restaurant, but the recent birth of his daughter had given him a resilience he could not shake. When parents perceive the world as it appears to a child, they realize both the beauty of paradise and how far they have strayed from it. It does not matter if this paradise cannot last, or if there are severe limitations on the child’s exercise of free will. From the parents’ perspective, the child’s dependence is part of the appeal. For if the child is in paradise, and if the child is ruled by the parents, what does that make the parents but the king and queen of paradise? This suggests why parental doting can be so obnoxious. Paul had not found it hard to leave Mary and Françoise, and he wondered why. Maybe it was because he had nothing left to do in Vertige, or because he had been meant to go to Scotland, or because it was easier to love people from a distance. If that was true, he thought, then all of human society is a house of cards.

  Paul took a room in Kirkmadrine, an overdecorated room in a light blue house facing the bay. There are uncannily specific elements to bad taste that make it seem deeply embedded in human nature, a pinwheel chain of DNA. Pastel colors repeat, as do techniques of textile manufacture that strive to emphasize the individual strands, and decorative covers for things that do not need covers. His long-dead grandmother from Woonsocket could have walked into this room across the ocean without missing a step. She would admire the sconces, the handmade dolls, the puppy photographs. He pictured a black-and-white documentary with stark narration: “And here, in a room where time had virtually stopped, the innkeepers conducted their bizarre experiments.”

  Actually the innkeepers seemed too meditative to conduct experiments. Their names were Catherine and Mike.

  “How did you find us?” said Catherine. “Even the English don’t find us.”

  Mike sat forward in a big chair in the parlor, pulled up his socks, and let his pant legs fall over them. “There’s very little here beyond the golf course,” he said.

  “I’m looking for an American woman named Kim,” said Paul. “She would be in her thirties.”

  “Try the golf course,” said Mike.

  Paul walked on the strand in the late afternoon. Kirkmadrine had black streets lined with granite houses and painted wooden doors. The town sloped down to the harbor. A sailboat heeled so hard in the driving wind that the sail threatened to take on water. Paul stood for a long time watching the sailors bring the boat around a stone breakwater and come up from the docks in yellow raincoats. The three men seemed tossed still by the motion of the waves.

  “I’m looking for an American named Kim,” Paul said.

  “You would do better to be less particular,” said one of the men. “We just came from Northern Ireland.”

  He kept walking. Where the houses ended, two wooden posts stood on either side of a trail that climbed steeply through hills of coarse grass. Paul followed the path as it wound along the cliff above the water. Packed gravel gave way to footbridges over deep gullies with pummeling waves far below. Clouds hid Northern Ireland and darkened the air. The trail arrived at last at a small castle. Invaders would have had a hard time attacking from the water; they would have had to land down the coast and loop around. The jagged holes of the lower windows gave no light. Everything in his childhood suggested that something waited in the castle to rip his heart out, and everything in his adul
thood told him he would fall in a hole, break a leg, and starve to death, his calls for help heard only by the wheeling and indifferent terns. He stepped up into the doorway of a round tower. Moss blanketed the stone steps and the sky hung in a velvet circle far above. A crow cawed and flapped from a place that seemed right beside his ear, and then the black shadow lifted and disappeared against the soft gray disk of sky.

  Paul climbed the turning steps to the second story and stepped into a long room with light in it. The roof of the castle had long since evaporated, and there seemed to have been another floor or two at some point, because the gable walls continued to climb, as did fragments of chimneys, forming black spikes against the sky. Paul walked on the long matted grass of the room, where narrow windows looked out on the sea and birds’ nests clung to the windowsills.

  The air seemed full of time. He wondered how many people had been here before him, all believing as he did that now was the only moment that mattered, that the past was a comic prelude and the future a disorganized rumor. Probably a lot of people — generations of royals and servants locked in their lopsided dependency. As a child he’d had a repeated nightmare involving some massive object from space descending on a ring of children mired within its growing shadow. Just then he realized that the falling body in his dream was only the earth, sweeping down to bury the dead.

  Mike and Catherine carried bowls of water down the stairway of the hotel.

  “We have a hole in the roof,” said Mike.

  “We call this kind of rain a haar,” said Catherine.

  “I found a castle outside of town.”

  “When I mentioned the golf course, I forgot to mention the castle,” Mike said.

  “The story goes that a terrible siege occurred there in 1317,” said Catherine, “and was broken by a flock of corbies bearing the features of John Baliol.”