by Mary Lawson
Though I don’t have much experience of solving problems I can’t even put a name to.
At that point there was a hesitant tap at the door and I turned and saw one of my second-year students, Fiona deJong, framed in the doorway. Normally a student in the doorway is a sight that fills me with unreasoning impatience, but at the moment any distraction seemed worth having, so I asked what I could do for her. She’s a pale girl, not very attractive, with limp, mousy hair. From what I’ve seen of her in class I’d guess she doesn’t socialize much, but she is one of the few students of mine for whom, academically speaking, there is some hope, and her work depresses me less than most.
She said, “Could I … talk with you for a minute, Dr. Morrison?”
“Sure,” I said. “Come in, Fiona. Have a seat.” I nodded at the chair against the wall and, still hesitant, she went and sat down.
Some of my colleagues, mainly female, complain that they are endlessly interrupted by students—again mainly female—coming to ask their advice on subjects totally unrelated to their studies. Personal problems and so on. I don’t suffer much from that sort of interruption. Perhaps I don’t look the sympathetic type. I guess I’m not the sympathetic type. Sympathy and empathy are linked, after all. So I was expecting Fiona’s problem to be related to her work and I was surprised and rather alarmed when I saw that her mouth was trembling.
I cleared my throat. After a minute, when things didn’t seem to be improving, I said very calmly, “What’s the problem, Fiona?”
She was staring into her lap, obviously battling to collect herself, and I suddenly thought, Oh God. She’s pregnant.
I can’t deal with that sort of thing. The university has its own counselling service staffed by qualified psychologists who have experience in such matters and who know what to say.
I said quickly, “If it’s a personal thing, Fiona … if it isn’t connected to your work, then I may not be the best person …”
She looked up. “It is connected to my work. It’s— well, I just wanted to tell you that I’m leaving. I’ve decided it’s the best thing to do. But I just wanted to tell you. Because I’ve really enjoyed your course and everything, so I wanted you to know.”
I stared at her. As well as surprise, I was conscious of a small flicker of pleasure. Here was a student telling me that she had actually enjoyed my course.
I said, “Leaving? You mean leaving university? Or changing to another course?”
“Leaving university. It’s, well, it’s difficult to explain, but basically, I don’t think I want to go on.”
I blinked at her. “But you’re doing very well. What—what do you see as being the problem?”
So she told me what she saw as being the problem, and it was nothing to do with being pregnant. She told me that she came from a small farm in Quebec. She described it to me, but she didn’t need to; I could see it perfectly well. I could practically see the pattern on the blue and white china on the kitchen table.
She was one of five children, the only one interested in learning. She had won a scholarship to university. Her father had been both astonished and annoyed when she said she was taking it up. He couldn’t see what good a degree would do her. A waste of time, he said, and a waste of money. Her mother was proud of her, but mystified. Why would she want to leave home? Her brothers and sisters thought she was weird anyway, so their opinion remained unchanged. Her boyfriend tried to understand. She looked at me entreatingly when she told me that. She wanted me to like him, to admire him for trying.
The problem was that she was growing away from all of them. When she went home now, none of them knew what to say to her. Her father joked acidly about how brainy she was. He called her Miss Fiona deJong, B.A., B.B., B. Whatever. Her mother, whom she had been close to, was shy with her now. Afraid to talk to her because she had nothing intelligent to say.
Her boyfriend was angry a lot of the time. He tried not to be, but he was. He saw condescension where there wasn’t any. He saw disdain, when in fact she admired him. He had left school at sixteen. When he was eighteen his father had had a stroke, and since then he’d been running the farm more or less single-handed. He was kind, she said, and as intelligent in his own way as any of the boys in the course, and about a hundred times more mature, but he did not believe she thought that. He didn’t say so, but she was sure that secretly he thought that if she really loved him, she would give up the course and come home and marry him.
Fiona stopped talking and sat looking at me, her face full of mute appeal. I tried to think what to say.
Finally I said, “Fiona, how old are you?”
“Twenty-one.”
Twenty-one. “Don’t you think you’re … a little young to be making decisions like this?”
“But I have to make it. I mean, either way it’s a decision, isn’t it?”
“But you’ve completed two years of your degree. You’re halfway there. If you give up now, those years are wasted. Surely at this stage the sensible thing would be to finish your course, and then—then you’d be in a better position to make the other decisions.”
She looked at her lap. She said, “I just don’t think it’s worth it.”
“You said you were enjoying the course.”
“Yes, but—”
“You also said your mother is proud of you. I’m sure your father is too. He may not understand what you’re doing, but I’m sure that deep down he will be proud that you’ve done so well. And your brothers and sisters too, though probably they wouldn’t want to show it. And as for your boyfriend … don’t you think that if he really cared for you he wouldn’t want you to give up something so important? Something that can make such a difference to your life?”
She was silent, staring at her lap.
I said, “I understand what you’re feeling, I come from a background that is not all that dissimilar to yours, but I assure you, it has been worth it. The pleasure, the satisfaction—”
Something dropped into her lap. A tear. Tears were rolling slowly down her cheeks. I looked away, out of the door, into the ordered chaos of my lab. I thought, That was a pack of lies. You do not understand what she’s feeling. You do not come from a similar background. The fact that there were fields and trees around does not make it similar. And anyway what are you doing, trying to convince her to make the decision you would have made? She came to tell you that she was leaving, not to ask your advice. She came out of politeness.
She’d found a tissue in her jacket pocket and was mopping herself up.
I said, “I’m sorry. Just forget what I said.”
She said, her voice muffled by the tissue, “That’s okay. I know you’re probably right.”
“I’m probably wrong.”
She needed another tissue. I got up and searched through the pockets of my coat and found one for her.
“Thanks,” she said, and blew her nose. “I’ve been thinking about it and thinking about it and now I just get such a headache that I can’t think at all.”
I nodded. That at least was a feeling we shared. After a minute I said, “Would you do something for me?”
She looked uncertain.
“Would you go and talk to someone at the counselling service? I don’t think they’ll try to persuade you one way or the other. I think they’ll just help you to think it through, so that you’re sure in your own mind.”
She agreed to do that, and a couple of minutes later, more or less composed, she left.
When she had gone I turned my chair back to the window and resumed my study of the rain. I thought about her brothers and sisters, who had always thought her “weird,” and I thought about Luke’s and Matt’s pride in my achievements. No, we did not come from similar backgrounds. No one had ever suggested that I should not go as far as I could. It had been expected of me, and I had been encouraged every step of the way.
And I had never regretted it. Not for one moment. Not even now. Because now, thinking about it again, I saw that whatever my l
ittle “crisis” and my current problems were caused by, they were not caused by my work. That was a red herring. I might not be a very good teacher, but Daniel was right, I wasn’t all that much worse than most. And I was very good at research. We were making a contribution, my little invertebrates and I.
I thought about Fiona. Her fear of growing away from her family. Was that the problem? My conscious mind said that I was prepared to pay that price, but perhaps my unconscious mind did not agree.
But I hadn’t grown away from them. Not from Luke and Bo, anyway. There was a temporary split, during my undergraduate years, but now I was as close to them, emotionally, as I would have been if I’d stayed in Crow Lake. We didn’t have a great deal in common, but we were close for all that.
Matt, then.
I thought of Matt, and there was … a moment of truth, I suppose. Fiona was afraid of leaving her family and her boyfriend behind and the truth was, she probably would. Her boyfriend might well be intelligent “in his own way,” but his way was not hers.
Matt’s way was mine. It should have been impossible to leave Matt behind.
This crisis I was going through, not to mention the ache which I seemed to have carried around with me for most of my life—of course they were to do with him. How could it be otherwise? Everything I now was, I owed to him. All the years of watching him, learning from him, coming to share his passion—how could I not be affected by the way things had turned out? He had wanted his chance so badly and deserved it so much, and through his own fault—that was the worst of it— through his own fault he had thrown it away.
I sat at my desk, listening to the hum of the university behind me, aching with the pity of it all. I had imagined, once upon a time, that we would always be together. The two of us, forever side by side, staring into the pond. His plan—that absurd, naive, glorious plan. Childishness. Things change. Everyone has to grow up.
But not grow apart, as we had done, surely?
That was the real heart of it. I had never loved anyone as I loved Matt, but now, when we saw each other, there was something unbridgeable between us, and we had nothing to say.
chapter
TWENTY-ONE
“It seems crazy to try to farm up here,” Daniel said, scratching his ankle. We’d picked up a cargo of blackflies when I’d stopped for a pee.
I’d been so far away that he startled me, and it took me a minute to work out what he was talking about. The landscape, of course. There was a fair amount of rock about.
I said, “The soil isn’t too bad. The land around Crow Lake’s pretty good. Though it’s a short growing season, of course.”
“But think of the effort. They must have been desperate to come this far north.”
“They didn’t have much choice. They had no money, most of them, and the land up here was free. Crown land. Back then, provided you cleared it you could have it for nothing.”
“I can see why, if you don’t mind my saying so.” He scratched savagely. It looked as if his love affair with Uncharted Wilderness was going to be a short one. Daniel knows about blackflies in theory, of course, but there’s no substitute for firsthand experience when it comes to bugs.
“It’s not so bad near the lake,” I said. “And the farm’s fine, except where the fields border the woods.”
“You grew up right on the lake?” he said.
“That’s right.”
“You never lived on the farm?”
“No.”
I’d started telling him the story—the whole of it— just before we got to New Liskeard. I hadn’t intended to; in the main it is Matt’s story, and I have protected it from public gaze all these years. But as the miles ticked past I realized that Daniel would have to know; two minutes of conversation with Matt would tell him that Matt should not be where he was. Still, I put off the telling of it until shortly after we passed Cobalt, when Daniel remarked—referring to me—that it seemed an unlikely environment to have produced an academic. That irritated me. Surely the most unlikely place to produce an academic is a city, with its noise and confusion and lack of time for thought or contemplation.
I started arguing the case, trying to explain why Crow Lake was actually the perfect breeding ground for academics, given certain other conditions such as encouragement and time to study. And inevitably I used Matt and his passion for the ponds as an example, and of course that led to questions, and the whole thing came out. To my extreme annoyance I had difficulty keeping my voice steady when I told him how it all ended; Daniel noticed, of course, though he didn’t let on. If he was baffled by the fact that I was still so upset about it after all these years, well, he was no more baffled than I was.
Now he said tentatively, “Luke and your sister—Bo. Do they still live there? In the house you grew up in?”
“Yes.”
“What do they do? Bo must be … twenty?”
“Twenty-one. She works in Struan. She’s a cook in a restaurant.”
Still happily slinging saucepans about. She did a cookery course down in Sudbury. She could have done a degree in household economics or whatever it’s called—I offered to help with the cost—but she said she wasn’t interested in the academic side.
“Does she have a boyfriend?”
“From time to time. Nothing permanent, so far. Though she will in due course.”
In a world of few certainties, that is one of them. Matt says some poor guy is wandering around out there still blissfully unaware of what fate has in store for him.
“And is Luke still the janitor at the school?”
“Only on the side. He makes furniture.”
“Furniture? He’s started a business?”
“Sort of. He turned our garage into a workshop. He employs a couple of boys off the farms. He does all right.”
He does quite well, in fact. Rustic furniture is all the rage.
“Is he married?”
“No.”
“That girl—the one you said kept hanging around him.”
“Sally McLean.”
“Yeah. He didn’t ever get it together with her, then?”
“Heaven forbid. No, she managed to get herself pregnant by someone else about a year after Luke turned her down.”
“Someone else in Crow Lake?”
“Yes. Tomek Lucas. I don’t think he was convinced he was the father, but she swore he was so they got married. But then she saw someone better-looking at the cattle market in New Liskeard and she went off with him. Left the baby with Tomek. His mum brought it up. Sally probably has ten more by now. She probably has ten grandchildren by now.”
I thought suddenly of Mr. and Mrs. McLean. How they would adore ten grandchildren.
“You make it sound like centuries ago,” Daniel said. “If your parents died when you were seven, it’s barely twenty years.”
“It feels like centuries,” I said.
Sally McLean, of the long red hair. When I was thirteen, just starting high school, a new classmate said, “You’re the one with no parents, aren’t you? And you’ve got a brother who’s queer.”
I didn’t know what queer meant. I can’t describe the shock when I found out. I remembered, then, that little scene I’d stumbled on, Sally leaning against a tree, taking Luke’s hand and guiding it so smoothly, so competently, to her breast. Luke standing, motionless, head bowed. And then the effort, as if against some huge invisible force, as he pushed himself away.
For a long time I was convinced that it must have been Sally who started that rumour. Now I’m not so sure. I suspect that many people found it hard to accept Luke’s sacrifice for what it was. He was only nineteen, remember, and such generosity at such an early age put other people to shame. So they had to belittle it. There’s nothing noble in giving up something you didn’t want anyway. Nothing noble in resisting sexual relationships with women if you’re gay. Nothing noble in turning down a place at teachers’ college if you didn’t want to go. That was another theory I overheard.
T
hough maybe there was some truth in that one. I suspect Luke wasn’t all that interested in becoming a teacher. It was what our parents wanted and he didn’t have any alternative suggestions at the time, or didn’t dare to voice them. And it’s probably also true that he didn’t realize, on that day when he announced to Aunt Annie that he was going to look after us, how much he was going to have to give up for our sakes.
As far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t lessen his sacrifice. When he found out what he was going to have to give up, he gave it up. As Sally McLean found out.
I wonder if he knew about those rumours. I wonder if that was another thing he had to contend with.
“So there’s still no woman in his life?” Daniel asked. He sounded dissatisfied. I looked at him with amusement. Daniel would be astonished if you told him he was a romantic. “How old is he now?”
“Thirty-eight. As far as I know there isn’t anyone.”
Though strangely enough, I started to wonder about that the last time I visited. Miss Carrington dropped in, as she always does when I come home, and it seemed to me that there was—how can I describe it?—an easiness between her and Luke. I could have imagined it, I guess. She’s at least ten years older than he is. Though she doesn’t seem that much older now.
“Maybe it’s become a habit,” Daniel said.
“What has?”
“Self-denial. Resisting temptation.”
“Maybe,” I said. Thinking of Matt.
I switched on the headlights. It had reached that stage of twilight where the sky is still clear and light but the road and the trees and rocks are merging into a smoky blur. Far ahead, you could make out the winking of a light each time we crested a hill. Struan. Half an hour after Struan, we’d be home.
There’s a lot I have to guess at. I’m guessing, for instance, that Mrs. Pye was in a really serious state that summer, and that worry about her, coming on top of everything else, was more than Marie could bear alone. So she turned for comfort to Matt. If she’d had more friends, or if her mother had had family living near, or if Calvin hadn’t alienated the whole community to such an extent that no one knocked on the door any more— if any of those things, then maybe Marie would not have needed to turn so hard, so urgently, so appealingly, to Matt.