To All Appearances a Lady

by Marilyn Bowering

  MARILYN BOWERING is an award-winning novelist, poet and playwright whose first novel, To All Appearances a Lady, was a New York Times Notable Book. Her second novel, Visible Worlds, was shortlisted for the prestigious Orange Prize, nominated for the Dublin IMPAC Prize and awarded the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.

  Bowering was born in Winnipeg and grew up in Victoria, B.C. She has lived in the United States, Greece, Scotland, Spain, and Canada, and now makes her home in Sooke, British Columbia.

  ALSO BY MARILYN BOWERING

  FICTION

  The Visitors Have All Returned

  Visible Worlds

  Cat’s Pilgrimage

  What It Takes to Be Human

  POETRY

  The Killing Room

  Sleeping with Lambs

  Giving Back Diamonds

  The Sunday Before Winter: New and Selected Poetry

  Grandfather Was a Soldier

  Anyone Can See I Love You

  Calling All the World

  Love As It Is

  Autobiography

  Human Bodies: New and Selected Poems, 1987–1999

  The Alchemy of Happiness

  PENGUIN

  an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  First published in hardcover by Random House of Canada Limited, 1989

  Published in paperback by Penguin Canada, 2007

  Copyright © 1989 by Marilyn Bowering

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request to the publisher.

  ISBN: 9780143053460 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9780735234321 (electronic)

  v4.1

  a

  to Michael, and to Xan

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Marilyn Bowering

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Acknowledgements

  While my heart’s disturbed by

  leaping tigers and insistent bugle’s blast.

  Now I watch the white-throat blackbirds

  until they disappear with the sunset;

  Only the spring returns as of old:

  Everywhere are cotton flowers, red against the wall.

  YEH MING-CHEN

  VICEROY OF KWANGSI AND KWANGTUNG

  Good fortune tends to enslave the one who enjoys it by deceiving him with spurious happiness. Bad fortune frees him from the bondage to mutable things by showing him the fragile nature of earthly felicity.

  BOETHIUS

  Translated by Richard Green

  Prologue

  “In one of the dense fogs which sometimes hang over the entrance of the strait, a sailing vessel should not close the land; but should stand off sufficiently far to avoid the set of tidal streams and currents. If the fog is very dense, a stranger should proceed no further, but should anchor; it must be remarked, however, that not infrequently the weather is clear a few miles within the strait while the entrance is totally obscured.

  BRITISH COLUMBIA PILOT, VOLUME I

  Spring 1957

  I had stepped over to the closet hoping to get a look at the embroidered silk jackets that she knew I coveted when Lam Fan opened one eye and said, “Get away from there you silly boy,” scratched at the bedspread with her long red nails, and died.

  This scene, like so many others, took place in the small decaying farmhouse at the foot of Christmas Hill where Lam Fan lived. We had had our last argument over what I would do without her: “You must stay on in the house,” she’d said, “it is your home.”

  “My home is the sea, Fan,” I replied, “I’ve told you a hundred times that if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be here at all.”

  Which wasn’t quite true: although I’d run away at fifteen, just after Sing Yuen’s death in an anonymous trench in France, I’d returned a number of times over the years and was by now nicely settled down into my job as a coastal pilot—a far cry from deep-sea days when I sailed the world for months at a time. In fact I had my eye on the clock right then. The Galafkos had radioed in her ETA, and I was expecting a call from the dispatcher. As first man on the board, I had to be ready to go.

  “What would Sing Yuen think!” said Fan. “He built the farm for you. You were his son!”

  She was sitting in her chair with her long, elegant feet in my lap. I rubbed them vigorously to warm them.

  “First of all,” I said, “Sing Yuen’s been dead for forty-two years, and I doubt that he’ll much care, and secondly I’m not his son, nor yours, so even if I wanted to I couldn’t carry on the family business. Besides, Fan, I’m fifty-seven years old, and I’ll damn well do what I please.”

  My ancient stepmother withdrew her feet, snorted, and, gathering her long robe around her thin brittle body, stood up and made for the stairs.

  “You think you know everything, Robert Lam,” she called over her shoulder as she began her difficult ascent. “You think you can live your life all by yourself. You just wait and see!”

  “I intend to try, Fan,” I answered irritably. “So far I haven’t had the opportunity. And what’s more,” I continued, “since it’s what we’re really talking about—I intend to keep the boat and fix her up with what I get for the house!”

  I know I shouldn’t have said it. Fan had hated the idea of my living on the Rose ever since I’d first mentioned it. She disliked small boats, although a forty-foot converted troller isn’t what I think of as small, and would change the subject every time I talked about where I wanted to go: to some of the smaller islands, or all the way up the Inside Passage to the old whaling station at Rose Harbour. I was going to do it, too: my month’s leave was a few weeks away, and all my plans were made. Although I’d sailed the seas since I was a boy, it would be my first long trip alone.

  “You can sit all you want, Fan,” I cried out after her (she was taking the stairs particularly slowly), “but I won’t change my mind.”

  “You’ll be sorry, Robert Lam,” she shouted down, “you are just as stupid now as when I took you in.”

  “And whose fault is that Fan,” I answered. “I was an infant. You and Sing Yuen taught me everything I know!”

  We weren’t always so rude to each other, but I was tired of her bad temper. I wasn’t used to looking after anybody but myself, and Fan was a poor patient.

  I listened until she reached her room safely. I could hear her moving things around in her bedroom, scraping across the fl
oor in her hard-soled slippers, opening and shutting drawers; and taking advantage of her absence began what I foresaw would be the long process of sorting through her effects after her death.

  It was a warm, airless night. After a while I heard Fan snoring. She had a weakness, developed in the past few months (and forgivable in such an old woman) of falling asleep after the briefest exertion. When I had finished with the kitchen drawers, emptying out handfuls of tangled string, broken elastic bands, Christmas light bulbs, used stamps, and articles clipped from magazines (“Radioactive Clams on West Coast Seabottom”), I opened the front door. The frogs were singing from the ditch, and I could hear the munching of a cow that had strayed through a break in the fence into the orchard. A damp mist at ground level made the sky above seem heavy and thick, but as I watched, a sickle moon cut its way through. Then one by one the stars.

  We lived in the house in which Fan had always lived. A gravel lane ran by it eastwards to the thumb-shaped peninsula of Vancouver Island. At one time, before the First World War, a railway passed nearby. It stopped at our sheds to load produce, and the farm workers, most of whom lived in Chinatown, travelled in and out on it every day. Where the roadbed skirted the hill, you could still find rusted spikes, rotted ties, and the occasional old bottle.

  From our front yard, stretching across the lane and out of sight to the north, was the orchard. Long rows of grey trunks with the branches pruned to make wide bowls. In summer these filled with apples, and the labourers reached in with quick hands to twist the fruit free and drop it gently into their sacks. I helped to wash and pack it in boxes, and when I was older, carried the boxes on my back to the loading shed. I gathered the falls for Fan to put up, or fed them to the cows. Or threw them on the lane where they smashed into stars, staining the dry earth red. Now, of course, there were few trees, and these—unpruned and neglected—were hung with strands of pale moss so that the little yard looked as if it had been swept by a tide. The bark was white and flaking, and I could count the number of blossoms on my fingers.

  During the Depression, when I had been sailing the world for the SilverLine, Fan had cut down most of the trees and turned the farm over to potatoes and a half acre in vegetables. It was all that people could afford to buy. Those who had no money, like the army of starving men who straggled between the work camps on the peninsula and the town, stopped at the farm anyway. There was always something to eat, since much of the food remained unsold and Fan needed little for herself. The men worked for what she gave them, cutting wood, feeding the cows, mending fences. All the jobs that should have been mine. I’d objected at first when I’d come home on leave. I didn’t like the thought of Fan alone with them. They were hardened men, used to fighting to stay alive. Unwanted men, homeless and unemployed, with nothing to lose. Who were being made ready, so it came to seem to me afterwards, to be soldiers.

  “You have never really been hungry, Robert Lam,” said Fan to my objections, “or you would understand. It is the man you don’t feed who is dangerous, not the one with a full stomach.”

  Fan and I on opposite sides of every question. Fan in the house while I wandered.

  Lam Fan on the steps, banging a tin pan to call us for dinner. Lam Fan at night, twisting up her hair in front of the mirror, wearing gold and jade earrings, or sitting in her chair in the kitchen smoking, turning over the pages of magazines.

  Lam Fan in the beginning, with my hand in hers as we walked the miles westwards to the city. Where there were tram cars and dentists and ladies wearing hats. Where telephone poles and steamers at the wharves made a network that linked horizons. Where, in Chinatown, I’d wait in a restaurant while Fan went about her business. Or going to the theatre, the Victoria, or the Pantages or the Chinese Theatre round the corner from where The Place of Ten Thousand Occasions had been. Or to the temple where the smell of joss was like the inside of Lam Fan’s closet.

  —

  I sat on the broken steps and looked out into the darkened world I had known since childhood: the ghosting apple trees, the tilted greenhouses, and surmounting all the dark face of Christmas Hill. In this International Geophysical Year, in which nations had joined harmoniously together to observe the marvels of the earth, atmosphere, and space, in which boys in their twenties handled millions of dollars’ worth of rocketry, I, Robert Louis Lam, three years from retirement, had quarrelled with a one-hundred-year-old woman over my future.

  I sighed and thought about the Rose and what it would be like to set sail in her and never come back. And as I did, an icy hand gripped my shoulder and a voice shrill with anger cried out, “Dirty Robert Lam! Dirty, dirty Robert!” I turned at that to see Fan standing there in her nightgown, holding a knot of papers in her shaking hand. Behind her in the hallway were the emptied drawers and the bags of rubbish that I had meant to throw away before she wakened. “Dirty Robert!” she cried again, summoning unexpected reserves of wrath.

  I stood up and put my arms around her. Her head touched my chest, her arms felt like small dry sticks. She tried to say more, but her mouth was dry, and I could smell on her breath the sour fume of opium. So that was what the retreat to her room had been about—Fan taking refuge in her pipe. Well, I was used to that. But as for her outburst….

  I suppose I deserved it. Certainly I was ashamed of myself, and it must have seemed to her as if I were hurrying her death. But the truth is that she’d picked an inconvenient time to fall ill. Cardboard boxes, old clothes, cupboards full of false hair, bleaching creams, and catalogues: it was a daunting prospect for a bachelor, and I had only a month each year to use for myself; if Fan was running out of time, well, then, so was I.

  “I’ll take you back to your room, Fan,” I said, trying to steer her in the direction of the stairs. She stiffened under my touch, then she sagged against me, and tears of frustration or sadness, I don’t know which, seeped out of the corners of her eyes. I had never seen her cry before, and I didn’t know where to look.

  “There, there,” I said digging into my job bag among tide books and course books for a clean handkerchief, “there, there.” I let her daub her own face. I put my hands into my pockets, afraid to touch her. I did not know what the tempest was about, but it deeply disturbed me. I was used to dealing with facts—they were the only terms on which a man could be a pilot. This was a different Lam Fan—one with uncertain depths—and I didn’t know what to make of her.

  —

  We made our peace. I apologized for my lack of tact, and Fan offered to help me pack. There wasn’t much to do, but I let her assist.

  “Is this a long job or short job?” she asked, refolding the clean shirt and underwear I’d already put out.

  “Just overnight, I think. As far as I know the ship’s headed for Vancouver, but it could change course at the last minute. It depends on where the agent gets the best price for cargo—they call it ‘subject to orders.’ She could head up to Rupert or even Alberni for all I know, but that’s unlikely. If we were going to the west coast I’d know by now and be on my way out to Cape Beale instead of Race Rocks.”

  I’d explained it to her maybe twenty times, but she’d never understood. She leaned against the kitchen windowsill and looked out. The apple trees bowed and straightened in the gently rising wind. The mist had blown clear, and a few moonlit clouds feathered the sky.

  “I don’t like it,” said Fan. “Why do they send you out on such a bad night? There is a big storm on the way, the radio said it.”

  I turned away and put a book on top of my case. Since my interest in the whaling stations had been piqued, first by photos in a paper called Seamen’s Institute taken by the Reverend Ratcliffe in the twenties (one showed a one-hundred-foot serpent in the cut-open belly of a sperm whale), and then by Captain Larson of the B.C. Standard, whose father had been captain on the S.S. St. Laurence, whaling in the Gulf of Georgia in the teens, I had been trying to find out more. The book, a history of whaling in the Arctic, was all I’d been able to find. If I were lucky, I would ha
ve a few hours to read it on my way back from taking in the Galafkos; if I were unlucky, like MacCrimmon two weeks ago, I’d have time to read half a dozen books: he’d been caught in a fog outside English Bay for eleven days. The sawmills were going at full blast, and it took a lot of wind and rain to disperse the smoke from their beehive burners. At last he’d spotted a little freighter with what he thought was a radar mast, and trailed her in, taking the chance only because they’d run out of fresh water.

  “There’s no storm coming, Fan. The forecast is good. I’ll have no trouble at all with the Galafkos.” Fan looked doubtful. I had made the mistake, some months before, of taking her out on the pilot launch. She had seen for herself, for the first time, what climbing the pilot’s ladder meant, watching as I went up the side of a ship on the frail rope ladder, swinging out over the sea.

  It had been a mistake in other ways, too. She hadn’t known, and I hadn’t thought to tell her, that I spelled my name at work as “Lamb.” “It’s for professional reasons, Fan,” I’d told her when I’d seen her face as she read the board. I’d seen the faces of the others, too—the dispatcher and launchmen—when they met Fan. I suppose they’d never considered it—I took most of my looks from my European mother—but I was half Chinese.

  I’d wanted to say that she was nothing to do with me. She was an absurd-looking old woman with a painted face, and her clothes were twenty years out of date. For the truth was I’d been ashamed of Fan. But in the end I hadn’t denied her, at least I hadn’t done that.

  It was shortly after that that I bought the Rose. She was tied up—a lady in a junk heap—among the derelict boats at the foot of Fisgard Street. There, where time, rust, and rot had taken their toll, I also found the Green, last of the five identical whaling vessels, built in Christiania (now Oslo), Norway, that had made up the Victoria Whaling Company. The other ships—the Black, Blue, Brown, White, and Grey (the tender ship)—were auctioned off and scrapped ten years ago. The Green had made her last voyage out of Rose Harbour in 1944—which is what had given me the idea of taking the Rose north to that closed-down station. Call it a pilgrimage, if you like, but I wanted my boat to test the same waters. It was too late to rescue the Green herself—she’d sunk at the end of her rope during a recent storm—but I could still resurrect her memory.