Robert wiped his eyes and composed himself. “We’ve got to hurry,” he said suddenly, taking charge. “We must get up to the cabin before it’s dark. I’ve had no chance to fix it up. We can think what to do with you once we’ve got you safe.”
His sense of urgency was infectious. Still in a daze, still bewildered by this unexpected turn of events, unsure of herself, India let him lead her away from the circle of onlookers. He strapped her few belongings onto the saddle of a horse he had borrowed from the fishermen and helped her climb up. Then he took the reins and mounted the horse behind her.
It had happened so quickly: as when the moon eclipses a star, the star touching the edge of the moon then winking out: the star is there, then it isn’t. So it was that India exchanged one way of life for another. And all calculations, considerations, and second thoughts were blacked out. They left the past behind them as they rode away from the beachfront.
The sun began its magnificent descent behind Mount Douglas. The horse whinnied and twisted its neck for a last long sniff at the fishermen’s dinners, then horse and riders were encompassed by forest.
Fallen leaves slushed underfoot as the horse retraced its steps as far as the path that wound up Mount Douglas. Here they started to climb, with Haack clucking the animal round the turns and guiding it up gullies, through streams, across deer trails, up and up, to the top of the mountain where a half-ruined cabin slumped.
Lights, miniature as fireflies, flashed on in the plain below them, indicating dinners and card games and family recitals in a dozen farmhouses. India could only stare at them in wonder.
How had it happened? Where had she been? Her life on D’Arcy Island was like a dream. It was as if it had never been.
Robert helped her down and began to unpack their belongings and prepare the cabin. India stumbled over to a rock and sat upon it. She watched her old friend as he hurried to fix things up. He looked happy, full of hope. He kept turning to her and smiling as if he could hardly believe his good luck.
She turned to look over the edge of the mountain. Beyond the little lights of the Cedar Hill plain the city was haloed in gaslight. Shopping districts and government offices, ships riding at wharfside, telegraph and post offices: they were all spread out before her, indistinguishable from this distance, but evident, nonetheless, in the general outline of memory. Her sister, Lam Fan, was there, and her other friends. There was the work she had left behind. Her whole other life. All suddenly attainable, but impossible, yet, to realize.
“We’ll only stay here a few days,” said Robert Haack, coming up behind her and looking over her shoulder at the sprawling vista. He turned her towards him. “We’ll put this whole damned place behind us. I’ve got it all worked out.
“After we get married, of course,” he added, noting the flicker of doubt in her eyes. “I love you, India,” he said, tracing the bones of her face with his fingers. “I’ve thought of nothing but you for all these years. We’ll get married, I’ll buy the steamer tickets, then we’ll go to San Francisco.” He wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly.
She looked beyond him, blankly, feeling the warmth of his body seep into hers, not knowing quite what to say, suddenly full of longing for all she had missed: love and a home and family. Someone to look after her, for a change. She sighed, and Robert bent his head to kiss her.
“It doesn’t matter,” he whispered, a moment later. “Whatever has happened, wherever we’ve been, whatever we’ve done, it’s all over now. It’s at an end.”
Then it was all returning, as her memory, dormant from years of hard work, began to awaken: the long walks they had taken together; the talks about books; the rescue work; the sense of unhampered vision. They seemed, in retrospect, to have been so young. And now she felt young again.
The horse, left free to graze, whinnied as its nostrils picked up a dozen scents. In the circle of light from the lantern that Robert Haack lit, India watched their shadows dance and melt. Then she turned her face eastwards, searching in all the blackness for D’Arcy Island. As she watched, a light sprang up on the island’s southern tip.
“I’ll put some water on to boil if you want to wash,” said Robert, who had noted at what she looked. “Then I’ll cook us some dinner. The fishermen gave me a few fish.”
“I’d like that,” she said, turning to him with a smile. Once more he took her hands. “I thought I’d never see you again,” he said. “I thought I had lost you. Can you ever forgive me? If only I had known what Jimmy had done to you.”
She looked at him, puzzled. “Forgive you? But what for, Robert?” she asked. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was an accident. There was a robbery at the factory, and I stumbled into it.” She shrugged her shoulders. “You mustn’t blame yourself for what wasn’t your fault.”
Robert dropped his eyes, weighed down by his burden of guilt. “I’ll explain it all later,” he said. He had forgotten how little she knew, how great the gaps would be, how much he would have to reveal. What should he tell, what leave out? Was there any point in risking their happiness when they had only just found it?
He boiled the water on the fire as he had promised, then left India alone in the cabin to tidy herself. He sat outside and took deep breaths. He examined the stars. A simple life with simple pleasures was all he wanted. And it seemed to be possible, here and now, at the top of the universe. Why bother about what had been? Why let the past destroy them?
He returned to the cabin and lay down beside her. He blew the lantern out. Once more he took her in his arms and kissed her. Once more they remembered what both of them had missed.
—
As for what followed, as for jackets and shirts and torn Chinese vests, as for the aurora borealis displayed on closed eyelids…
“As for sex,” says Lam Fan bluntly.
“As for that, Fan,” I say with annoyance, “it is none of my business, as you’ve often told me.”
She looks sheepish. “But the point is, Robert Lam,” she begins in her own defence….
“The point is,” I tell her, “that it is the autumn of 1898, almost a year before my birth. Whatever happened that night between Haack and my mother, it had nothing to do with me.”
She sighs, as if life has passed her by and is sorely regretted. “You have so much, and I have so little,” she says resentfully.
“For God’s sake, Fan,” I say, “you lived to be a hundred years old!”
“It’s not the same,” she says.
“The same as what?” I ask her.
“What’s gone is gone,” she says, “it doesn’t make up for anything.” I look at Fan again. My stepmother with emotions and feelings? As a woman? My stepmother with a private life?
—
Bliss. To be released from the claims of creditors, on the one hand, and from isolation on a lepers’ island, on the other. And free, for the moment, of convention, of civilized mores, of the judgements of others. Of responsibilities and the hard facts of illness. Why shouldn’t my mother and Robert Haack have been lovers, even if he wasn’t my father? Why should I begrudge my mother her pleasure after all she’s been through?
Because she is my mother, and to condemn her for what I’d do myself is only traditional….
Yet my heart isn’t in it. Rather, I envy them their respite, of whatever it consisted. I envy them their innocence.
And so Robert Haack lay awake for hours with India’s head on his arm. He considered the future; he did his best to forget the past. He watched the face that he had loved so long in its absence. She lay serenely beside him as if that’s where she truly belonged, calm as a child, never doubting. She slept until the sun crept into the cabin.
—
It was not much of a wedding in the normal scale of these things: there were no banns posted, there was no wedding dress for my mother, no high neck and long train or lace veil to cover emotions; no jewelled hairpins or orange blossoms, no choir to sing “Praise Ye the Lord all Ye Heathen,” and no organ play
ing Mendelssohn. No bridesmaids or weeping spectators; no groom in frock coat faced with silk, and wearing cashmere trousers and boots of patent leather…. There was only my mother and Robert Haack, plus the minister, and his wife for witness.
They were married outdoors beside the Cedar Hill church. Leaves fell from the oak trees as the wind blew in gusts; and crows scattered from branches as the minister read the text. The minister joined their hands, closed his Bible, then had them sign a paper. And their two separate lives were joined together forever.
Robert walked a little distance with India on the way back to the cabin, where she was to wait for him. He was going to the city to purchase their tickets: for they had no time to waste, since the past that he’d outdistanced for a couple of days could quickly catch up with him. There were Yong Sam’s men, for example, and Sing Yuen’s friends, plus the customs officers, who would be on their way home from Deep Bay empty-handed and eager to find him.
He had told her as little about his problems as he could. But it was obvious, in any case, that it would be best if their movements were kept quiet. Moreover, India was still in a daze, stunned by her sudden change from one life to another; and they would have to find a way to account for her long disappearance. That she had ever set foot on D’Arcy Island was a secret they would have to keep hidden.
And so they stood for a moment and talked as the sun steamed moisture from the wet wood of the forest. And they forgot, in the obliterating joy of their marriage, about loneliness and unhappiness and plans gone wrong; they lost the very knowledge that these things could happen as they indulged in the language of hand touch and lip touch, in the everyday intimacies of love. They were at a fulcrum, a point of balance, suspended in time between city and cabin. There was one final kiss—with teeth clinks and inner lips, surfaces tickled and underpinnings undone, with tongue on top of tongue in advance and retreat…. It was like hunger and thirst.
That is, they kissed for the last time, time and again, then they parted.
—
My mother on top of a granite monolith, flea-sized in proportion to its mass and surface, as the sun sets into the saucer of the ocean and the stars blink open their cold all-seeing eyes; and the black bowl of the sky turns until she is dizzy with it. My mother, with her arms clasped around herself, alone on a mountain on her wedding night.
With the city to the west and the island to the east like perfect opposites. Waiting, while time, like time in space, elongates.
Time elastic. As when a spaceship (as scientists speculate) approaches a star at the speed of light, and time, relative to earth time, slows down. So that when the ship reaches its destination, thousands of light-years from home, the crew is no older than when it started out….
And then the return, where they land on earth and wander like ghosts in the future they’ve arrived in, in exile, out of time in the world that produced them.
My mother, India, on the brink of reentering the world she’d been torn from. Can it really be done? And what about the names she must never mention? What about those men who had been her friends, Sim Lee, Ah Sam, and Ng Chung, plus the others now gone?
And where does love fit in? And was it love that she felt? And how can she put the halves of her life together inside a marriage to Robert Haack?
—
“But why can’t we go home, Fan?” I ask my stepmother, having turned her pronouncement over in my mind. “I can’t think of anything we haven’t done that we should have, and we can be there in a matter of hours.”
“You can do what you want,” she says as we coast by the Sheringham Point light on as gentle a passage as I’ve ever had in these waters—it seems as if we are blessed: all obstacles melt before us—”but I’ll have to go on by myself.”
“But why, Fan?” I ask her again, exasperated. “You know we’re in this together, and I won’t leave you alone with whatever it is; but I do think I deserve an explanation.”
Fan looks unhappy but stubborn. “I can’t tell you before we get there,” she says. “You know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.” I sigh. Banks of cloud, low and enveloping, have softened the sky. Yet the sharp edges of the sea are aglitter with light. A troller passes us on its way to the harbour at Sooke, filled to the gunwales with fish.
“It’s important to whom, Fan?” I ask her. “To you or to both of us?”
“I can’t say any more,” she answers evasively. “It will become clear to you once we get there.”
“Where is there, Fan? I do have my limits. I’m not travelling around this island again, whatever you say. Let us have done with it.”
“Oh, no, Robert Lam,” says Fan instantly, “I wasn’t thinking of that. I just want you to take me back to where we started. To where I came on board,” she amends.
“To D’Arcy Island?” I ask in surprise. “Why go back there? We’ve just got my mother off it. Why should we want to return?”
She continues implacably. “That’s how it has to be.”
“It’s not good enough, Fan. You’ve got to give me a reason. I’m not a child to be ordered about at your whim.”
The mask of defiance drops, and I see on my stepmother’s face tight lines of fear. “Please, Robert Lam,” she whispers. “I beg of you. I shall never be at peace until we both go there and do what must be done.” She wrings her hands pathetically.
The cliffs of Beechy Head come into view, and I prepare to run Race Passage. For here, and in the vicinity of Race Rocks, the tidal streams can reach six knots. We must keep Bentinck Island shore aboard, that is, at a distance of about a quarter of a mile, or just outside the kelp, for the outermost danger on the southern side of the channel is covered at high water, and the strongest eddies are found near it.
Tide rips that have sucked men down within twenty feet of land. And with Bentinck Island on the port hand. Bentinck Island. Where the leper colony was moved from D’Arcy Island in the 1920s, and where one man, a Chinese who has been there from the age of seventeen, still lives. I have seen him myself as he stood on shore to watch the pilot boat go by on its way to meet ships. There is a doctor who visits him regularly, and a nurse who lives on the island. I wonder, suddenly, if he has ever heard of my mother.
It is only a second of inattention, but in that instant the wheel of the Rose slips through my hands and spins wildly. We are caught by a surge of the tide. The engine coughs as I push the throttle forward and try to power her through the whirlpool.
“Can’t you read the tides!” shouts Lam Fan sharply, her voice choked with fear. “I thought you knew your job!” I do not bother to answer. The Rose shudders and skids sideways as the engine misses. “No, Robert Lam!” cries my stepmother in despair as we draw nearer and nearer to the rocks. “Now it will never be finished!”
There is panic in her voice and in my heart as I fight to keep us afloat. We hold our ground, the Crown engine performing nobly, and then, just as I feel the Rose giving up this fight that is far too hard on her aging timbers, her boards shuddering and groaning as if they will split apart any moment, the tide slackens. I feel it in my bones half a second before the engine responds, then, as if it were nothing, the Rose leaps free of the eddy.
Fan’s face is ashen. The rocks that were so nearly our downfall have dropped far behind. “How could you be so careless, Robert Lam?” she asks as if she can hardly credit it. “We were almost shipwrecked.” She shakes her head in wonderment.
“I don’t know, Fan,” I say to her, badly shaken. “The tides in the passage are very irregular, but you can usually hit them right by reference to those at Turn Point. This has never happened to me before.”
We pass the quarantine station at William Head, the fixed red light at the end of the breakwater in Quarantine Cove, Mary Hill, Constance Bank, and Albert Head before I’ve regained my confidence enough to leave the wheel for a moment. I tick the points of our passage off on the chart.
Then I bear north-northeast for Baynes Channel, and the inside coast of Vancouver
Island, once again.
—
Robert Haack had made record time on the walk from the scene of his wedding on the Cedar Hill plain into the city of Victoria. Anvil-shaped thunderclouds, unusual for the season, hung over the city with dark foreboding. The air pressed down on him, and his joints ached. Yet his buoyed-up heart was full of hope, and he touched, now and again for reassurance, the money in his pocket. He turned from Hillside Avenue south of Government Street, and the pace of his heartbeat picked up. For now all was up to chance. If he could avoid meeting Lam Fan or Sing Yuen or any of Yong Sam’s men—for they would all be wondering what had become of him—he’d achieve what he’d sworn to accomplish. Even if they came upon him, he thought he could parry their questions, at least for a time. All he needed was an hour of freedom in which to buy the steamer tickets and get out of the city. Then, under cover of darkness, he and his new wife, India, would return to the docks and, as soon as the steamer came in, board it and be on their way to a happier life.
All he needed was a little luck.
But a man with an unquiet conscience, who doesn’t want to be noticed, is at a disadvantage. A man who owes a great deal of money, who had been blacklisted by the Workingmen’s Protective Association, who had taken part in a failed robbery and spent time in jail; a man who had deceived the customs officers of his adopted country and who had taken their money; a man who had just been married labours under a heavy burden of guilt. And such a man, in his attempt to mimic unconcern, could only succeed in conveying the reverse. His hands twisted in his pockets, and his attempt at a casual smile resulted in a grimace. There was, in fact, a general unease in his movements, which broadcast itself in a ripple effect throughout the streets until, not surprisingly (for he had garnered the attention of the most incurious), he was noticed by someone who mattered.
To All Appearances a Lady Page 38