Although he could still do with a bath; he could do with a change of clothing.
Haack kept on going. He came to the wooden bridge at the foot of the harbour. Here the tide had receded, revealing mud flats and foam from the soap works. Old bottles, tin cans, stoves, and other materials less clearly distinguished decorated the sludge like fruit in a pudding. The flats, as always, smelled very bad. Haack plugged his nostrils and began to cross over.
Below him a few canoes were pulled up on shore. In these whole families lived. In the shallows on the sea side of the bridge, a man with rings in his ears and a long black beard poled back and forth, gathering garbage.
Between the cracks of the planks Robert could see more garbage, miscellaneous sea wrack, mussel-covered rocks. It was all as he had remembered it, and thus reassuring.
He needed his courage, and any reminder that the world he was entering was full of familiar things was welcome: for by crossing the bridge he was taking a risk. For on the far side were the prosperous suburbs, where tree-lined streets hid doctors and lawyers. It was here, and in the newly constructed quarters of the Legislative Assembly, that decisions were made and careers prospered. It was here that Robert Haack wanted to live. To be taken at face value for what he did, not for what he had done long before. It was, he believed, his only real chance. Not just a change in environment, but a revolution in outlook. It would alter how he thought of himself. And that, as he well knew, counted for much.
But first, now that he had crossed that bridge and taken that step, he wanted to view the city from his new vantage point. And so he climbed up on top of the heap of rubble, the granite, andesite, and slate, that had been discarded from the Belleville Street building site of the new Parliament.
Northward, on the shore from which he viewed, were the rowing club and boat house, the yacht and canoe clubs, and the boat-building premises of David Jones. In a few years, Haack thought, he would be on intimate terms with all these dwellings. In the harbour itself, commercial holding two hundred horses, all of them hired out by prospectors, St. Andrew’s church, and the post office. The customs house stood alone next to the field of stirring dogs.
Beyond these—landmarks, all of them, and noble and solid in demeanor—there was a border: not indicated by barriers, but by shanties and tenements and balcony urinals. By opium factories, boot works, and smoking laundries. This was the world on which Haack intended to turn his back.
To the west a bridge crossed an arm of the harbour to the Indian camp. Further to the north were the market gardens, where long ago he had lived. And way beyond these were the two little mountains he’d so often examined: Mount Tolmie and Mount Douglas, on which he and Charlie had built their cabin.
Robert Haack sighed. It was all laid out in front of him: a map of his choices.
He put his hand in his pocket. In it was the poem he’d been given by Stevenson. In it as well was an envelope that held the money he’d earned in jail. It was enough to rent a room and to get him started. It was enough to tide him over.
But tide him over to what? And for what? And is it money that counts? Robert climbed down from the jumble of rock and set his face to his task: to the three-storey houses, to white-painted fences and gazebos and sun parlours; to vegetable and flower gardens neatly attended; to old families with servants.
Down Menzies Street, up Simcoe, along Oswego, down Niagara, through to Carr, then to Birdcages Walk and Belleville Street he walked. There were a number of signs in windows saying “Boarder Wanted,” but when he applied, it turned out that the rooms were rented.
Perhaps it was his clothing, a jigsaw assembly if ever there was one; or perhaps it was his prison pallor; or it could have been his telling lack of luggage. Whatever the reason, he wasn’t wanted. He spent all day trudging those streets backwards and forwards, and when the sun went down he was no further ahead than when he had started.
Except that he’d lost confidence.
And so, was it any wonder that, as he passed back over the wooden bridge at the onset of darkness, he was discouraged and was tempted to answer the call of an old fellow hawking bad whiskey from a half-sunken boat? Was it any surprise that Robert Haack, just out of jail, wanted to return to it?
There was a chill in the air as mist blew in from the ocean, and there were long, dark hours ahead to fill. But suddenly, drawing on an inner strength he had somehow accumulated, Robert Haack turned away from the bottle and again crossed the bridge to the prosperous suburb. Past gaslit houses and through the quiet streets all the way to the beachfront. Where, behind him, the Dallas Hotel, where Jimmy Carroll had stayed, was lit up like Christmas.
The world, Robert Haack’s world, was empty. There was only the dimming landscape of the American shore opposite. He scraped a hollow in the sand and pebbles; he rolled up his jacket, and he lay down on top of it. And he began to shiver as the moon climbed through its last quarter.
Bitten by sand fleas, pierced by sharp rocks and sticks, chilled and feverish, Robert Haack, on his first night at liberty, slept.
He was a boy again in Monterey, California, having just left his home. His life was all ahead of him. As yet he had made no mistakes and had nothing to regret.
“You can’t let yourself drift, man,” said the poet, Robert Stevenson, whom the boy had just met. “A life needs a purpose, you have to give it shape.”
“Yes, sir,” said young Robert. The boy turned to Fanny, who was seated beside him. “You remind me of my mother,” he said.
Fanny nodded and gave him a book. “Read this,” she said.
He opened it up. On the first page, in delicate handwriting, there was a dedication: To India Thackery, it said.
“But where’s the rest?” the boy protested as he leafed through the blank white pages. The poet handed Robert Haack a pen.
“Write it yourself,” he said. Hesitantly, the boy dipped the nib in black ink. He wrote carefully on the first page, Treasure Island. He looked up at Stevenson, but the poet shook his head. Robert Haack thought. He turned to a fresh page, dipped the nib again and this time wrote, more certain of what he was doing, Kidnapped. Both Fanny and Stevenson smiled at him, and nodded.
Kidnapped! Robert Haack woke up with a start, as if he were being taken by force. Instead, he found that the tide had advanced to the top of his boots. He took them off and poured out the water, shivering all the while. Fortunately, there was no other damage. He removed his bed and belongings to a more sensible position.
He took out papers and tobacco and rolled a cigarette. He smoked it. Perhaps he had started off wrongly, he thought. It could be that that was the message sent by the poet. It wasn’t money that mattered, or how he got it, or where he lived, it was finding India that counted. It was Kidnapped not Treasure Island that was meant to be first on his list.
He tamped the cigarette out in the cool, damp sand. He regarded the sinking moon. But still, he thought, the stumbling block remained. He had to have money, there was no way around it. Rightly or wrongly—as the dream had suggested—he had made his plans and would follow them.
—
“Mr. Lam! Mr. Lam!” a female voice says in my ear. “Can you hear me? The doctor will see you now.”
I open my eyes slowly. Spirit, if spirit you are, stay with me now. She has short blond hair beneath her white nurse’s cap, deep grey eyes, and a fine-boned hand, decorated with a large diamond engagement ring, that is shaking my shoulder. “Mr. Lam, are you all right?”
I sit up straight. “I’m fine, just fine. What is it you want?”
“The doctor,” she says with a hint of exasperation that makes me wonder how long she’s been trying to arouse me, “the doctor is ready to see you now.”
I smile at her. Although I deeply resent having had to wait in this dark cave of an office while half the village went in ahead of me, and with nothing to eat or drink.
I haul myself out of the sprung-seated armchair and stumble against the chrome and glass coffee table that bears the marks
of the village hands, feet, cigarette ash, and jam sandwiches. At least some of the doctor’s patients knew enough to bring provisions.
“Mr. Lam!” exclaims the young woman, who I wish didn’t look at me as if I were her grandfather, as I stumble.
“It’s all right,” I say, “my legs are a little stiff from sitting, that’s all.” Clutching the nurse’s arm, I make my way into the inner medical sanctum. The grey-eyed nurse lowers me into a chair. “She’ll be with you in a moment,” she says.
Not grey eyes this time. Not eyes at all, but painted stones. The doctor is a woman in her middle thirties. Her blond hair (unlike the nurse’s) looks scarcely human. It has been bleached and dried to the texture of grass. I have to resist the temptation, when I look at it, to blow—as I did as a child near the Christmas Hill house—to tell the time on a dandelion clock. I feel even more like a child—that is, puzzled, humiliated, and near to tears—after she’s had her hands in my every possible orifice. She strips off her gloves, washes her hands, then begins to manipulate an impressive series of swabs, small scalpels, needles, lights, and hammers.
“Dizziness?”
“Yes.”
“Numbness in the limbs?”
“Yes.”
“Hallucinations?”
“Does it matter?”
She pulls a pair of spectacles out of her lab coat pocket, puts them on, and scribbles a page of notes.
She has looked, listened, assessed, examined, and told me absolutely nothing. She turns away, telling me to get dressed, and once more carefully washes her hands.
“I don’t know what all that was about,” I say resentfully, having recovered my courage along with my shirt and trousers. “A couple of hours on a light buoy hardly makes me a candidate for major surgery.”
She turns around. The flinty eyes are unlit. “Exposure is no trivial matter, Mr. Lam. You, of all people, in a job like yours, should know that.”
“What do you know about my job?” I say with annoyance. “I don’t recall telling you a goddamned thing about it.” Immediately the words are out, I am embarrassed. I don’t know what it is about her that makes me lose my temper. Perhaps it is because I feel she is looking at me from such a distance: miles of space or hundreds of feet of dimmest ocean water.
Doctor Annette—as she tells me she is called, as if to compel her patients to think of her as a friend—unexpectedly smiles. The effect is startling. She looks like Einstein. Formidably intelligent, slightly mad, and not unkind at all. I have an impulse to ask her what she’s doing in a place like this, but I cannot quite so quickly forgive the nipping of her fingers at my privates or the repeated jolt of her hammer blows on my bones.
“When the lifeboat makes a rescue we have to write it up,” she explains. “We write down who you are, where you’re from, and so on. You’d be surprised what the government wants to know.”
She smiles again. And I remember that it was Einstein who helped to make the atom bomb. “Brian Chapman told me all the answers so I wouldn’t have to quiz you. He said you were a private kind of man.”
“Tell him thanks,” I say bitterly, having pulled on my socks. “Tell him I’d prefer to be asked to my face and not have my affairs made public behind my back.”
She looks at me as if my further bad temper is no more than she might expect. Brian Chapman, insists the reproachful downturn of her mouth, just saved your life, you ingrate.
It takes me several long minutes to tie the laces of my shoes. My fingers fail again and again to form the loops. Doctor Annette simply watches. She must know that I am afraid of her and her knowledge.
“I’ll tell you what,” she says, when at length I’ve finished. “You put up with one more set of tests from me, then I’ll let you go.”
“More?” I ask her. “What can there be left?” She turns away and begins pulling out forms from a shelf by the sink. “I want X rays,” she says. “I think we need to have a look inside.”
“At what?” I say. “I hardly think exposure has jumbled my organs.”
“Not exposure,” she says carefully, not looking up. “You’re fine as far as all that goes, except for a touch of arthritis. I’m interested in some of the other symptoms I’ve noted.”
“And if I refuse?” I say, putting on my coat.
“Well,” says she, putting pen, spectacles, and stethoscope into her pockets, tidying up for whoever is next, “I cannot make you, of course, but I can say that you’re not fit to pilot a boat.”
—
Ten minutes’ walk through the streets of the village, with the general store and the post office being the principal buildings, brings me to the fishing docks; and a quick survey of the floats finds me my boat.
She is undamaged. They have even remembered to put her bumpers out. She rocks gently, emptily, when I jump on board. “Fan?” I call softly. But no one answers. I give the Rose a quick look over, but all seems shipshape. I check the level of the fuel tanks and am pleased to find them filled to the top. The salvager must have had a conscience. Maybe next time, before he goes to take a boat from its owner, he’ll look in the water for swimmers. Or it could be Brian Chapman, knowing how I’d feel after going to the hospital and seeing Doctor Annette, who was the good Samaritan.
Doctor Annette. Who did not answer when I asked where she was from. Who had a hint of an accent. German? French? Belgian? Who would have been in her teens when the war began. It could only have been the war, I thought, that could turn out a woman as competent and uncompromising as she was. I shiver as I think of the X rays she took of my head in an iron clamp: “Don’t move! Don’t breathe!” she commanded. I refused to wait for results and gave her the name of my regular doctor at home.
—
Heading down Templar Channel past Wickaninnish Island where the Tonquin went down. And by the Lennard Island lighthouse; keeping to the east of it and hitting, at long last, the great, rolling swells of the open blue Pacific. Staying about three miles offshore as we pass the foaming line of Wickaninnish Bay, and so on down the coast, carried along at speed by the wind and waves. While Lam Fan, who reappeared once we were at sea and looked pleased to see me, has made herself at home on deck. She calls out above the noise of the wind and the engine, “I thought you’d never come back, Robert Lam! I thought you were done for! You should never have taken such a chance for the sake of a light.”
“It was to help save lives, Fan. Mariners depend on those markers.”
“But that one never works,” she says.
“Who told you that?”
“Oh,” says she, “it’s common knowledge.”
It wasn’t to me, I think, but don’t say so out loud. “So, Fan,” I say instead, hoping to take her by surprise, “what can you tell me about the rope?”
“What rope?” asks my stepmother innocently. She looks around, as if casting about for what I might mean. “There are many ropes, Robert Lam, you will have to be more specific.”
“The one I knotted before I stepped off the Rose onto the buoy. The one that couldn’t possibly have worked its way loose by itself. Is that specific enough for you?”
“There you go again, blaming someone else for your troubles,” she says. She closes her eyes and leans back to take the sun.
“Fan,” I say. “I want an answer. I want the truth and I want it now. You don’t know what you put me through. I could have died out there from exposure.”
“It is summer,” she says, “and the weather is good.”
“Fan!” I exclaim, shocked to hear her so easily admit what I only suspected was true. “It was you! It wasn’t an accident at all!” I leave the wheel of the Rose (my craft is nicely throttled down and running steady) to confront her. She regards me complacently.
“Don’t throw stones from behind a glass window,” she says.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Fan! I could have slipped off and drowned. As it was, I was lucky not to have a cramp while swimming. What would you have done then? Waved bye-bye as I went down t
he third time?”
“I didn’t know someone would take your boat away,” she says defensively. “Don’t make such a fuss about it.”
I am left almost speechless. But not quite. “I had no idea you could be so heartless,” I say to her. “I simply don’t understand it. Despite all our differences I always thought you were on my side.”
She has the grace to hang her head. “I meant it as a joke,” she says into the thin bosom of her silk shift. “I didn’t mean you harm by it.”
“A joke? A practical joke? You, Fan, were playing tricks? I don’t believe it.” I stop, in doubt as to other choices. She nods, shamefaced. I think about this. What was she really up to back there? Whatever else Fan is, she is no great kidder. Yet I can’t believe that she meant to hurt me, and when I consider the circumstances, that we were near enough to land—we almost ran aground on that sand spit—and surrounded by settlements filled with seafaring men; that someone was bound to take note of us in good enough time, the fact is that I was uncomfortable for several hours but in no real danger of losing my life.
“Fan,” I say, believing I am nearing enlightenment, “are you worried about me? Did you want to get me to land to see a doctor again? Was that it? You musn’t worry about me. I’m going to be all right. I don’t need any doctor’s help, I just need to get this job done, finish what we’ve started. I’m much stronger than I look. I have you to give me courage. You were wrong to think you could put me off so easily. I won’t quit now, Fan, whatever happens, please believe me.” I watch her carefully, to see if I’ve hit the mark, and as I do I see a struggle take place on her face. Moisture springs to her eyes, and she blinks it away. Her mouth quivers, and a distinct sniffle flutters her nostrils. There are new lines drawn on her flesh amongst the others: deep lines of worry, and beneath her bright black eyes are grey circles. She scrambles to her feet with the wind folding her clothes tightly around her stick-thin body. Her sharp, thin shape is outlined like a knife blade; and she embraces me.
To All Appearances a Lady Page 33