Breagh served tea at the kitchen table and two cups seemed to put Livingstone on the periphery. Anna relaxed. Had Breagh cooled toward him?
“You’re busy, I know,” Anna said. “But if you could take a break, would you pose for me? A figure study? Just for a while.”
Breagh took a slow, thoughtful sip of tea, her eyes on Anna. “No clothes, you mean? Whoa.”
“Yes. Nude.”
“Nude. That’s a shivery word, Anna. I’d have to think about it. Couldn’t you just do me …?”
“Clothed? It’s a figure study, Breagh. Artists have drawn nudes for ages.”
“I know that.”
“An elemental subject, really, the human form. Nice light today. But of course, if you’re not comfortable.…”
“It’s a cool room.”
“True.”
“Without a stitch on. Never done that, I have to say.”
“Of course. Why would you?”
“Why me?”
“You’d make an appealing model. And there’s your pre-Raphaelite hair.”
“What kind of hair?”
“Brilliant, full of colour. The Pre-Raphaelite painters in the nineteenth century loved vibrant hues. A famous model, Rossetti’s muse and lover, had such coppery hair. I only have my black charcoal with me, but I’ll touch it up at home.”
Breagh fetched a small bottle of rum from the cupboard and poured some in her tea. “Why not Lorna? She loves to run around in the buff.”
“Her figure is not rich like yours, and she’d never sit still. I need a mature form.”
“Rich? I’ll have to remember that when I’m fat and ugly. I’m not a prude, by the way.”
“I’m sure you’re not.”
“I’ll put Lorna down for her nap. You need rum in your cup?”
“No thanks.” Anna smiled. “Maybe you do.”
“Yeah, half a bottle.”
Anna listened to her gather Lorna up in the next room, their soft talk back and forth, Lorna resisting but by rote, then their slow steps up the stairway, their murmurs in a bedroom. Anna reached across the table for the bottle and took a quick nip of rum, coughing as it went down. Maybe she should not have asked. There was a long silence upstairs before Breagh came down. She had brushed her hair.
“Okay, Anna. All in the name of art, right?”
“Thanks, Breagh.”
She undressed, tossing her clothes among her sewing with an air of nonchalance belied by a blush high on her cheekbones. She stood awkwardly hugging her breasts while Anna suggested a pose. “Sit on this throw cushion, it’s less tiring.” On the floor she tucked her long legs under her, one hand in her lap, leaning on her other arm, her unbound hair falling over her shoulders.
“I hope that’s not a strain,” Anna said. “Tell me if you need a rest.”
“I’m not used to just sitting, naked as a baby at that.”
Sketching her gave Anna an odd feeling, seeing her outline emerge slowly on the sheet of paper, the graceful lines of her body, she didn’t need to diet or work out, she took her beauty for granted, as the young could do, at least for a while. Why did she seem so much more naked somehow than any life model Anna had drawn?
“You never posed for anyone?” Anna said.
“Oh … I let Livingstone take snapshots once, at that rocky shore back there, down the cliff. Nobody around. Nothing trashy. I just hoped he didn’t develop them at the supermarket. All he wanted was a tumble anyway.”
“Did you?”
“Want it? Do it? Well, yes, it was a beautiful, warm day. Wouldn’t you, Anna?”
She felt her cheeks heat up. “I wouldn’t be above it, no.”
“With Livingstone, I mean.”
“He’s a lot younger than me, Breagh.”
“Age has nothing to do with it, girl. You’re attractive enough.”
“Thank you. I’ll take that to heart.” Was Breagh teasing something out of her? Did she know after all? Gossip could touch anyone, even a woman from away. “I can’t imagine I’m Livingstone’s type.”
“What type is he?“
“I don’t know him well enough to say, Breagh. He’s just young, and I’m a middle-aged woman.”
“You’re new. You’re different. Men like that.”
“Not different enough, I think.” A flash of anger rose in Anna. Discrepancy in ages must have crossed Chet’s mind more than once, an issue, no doubt, he had dealt with successfully. He was, after all, a man, and Alicia Snow had been right there in front of his eyes. Anna could, if so moved, render Breagh’s face, those breasts, those limbs, any way her inner eye might choose, distort, exaggerate those maybe too-long thighs, the brown mole on her ribs, the incipient fat of her belly, imbue her body with something not visible in this room, do a Lucian Freud, for instance, she had the artistic licence. But she kept it straight and representational, seeking the currents that had passed between Breagh and Livingstone, Livingstone and Anna. She had asked Breagh out of her clothes, she was there as he had seen her, and so she owned a little of what they’d had—not enough to claim anything much, but enough to take the edge off her guilt, and her own feelings about that man. What was more selfish anyway than sex, more consumingly personal? Did she and Breagh even know each other well enough to think of that night as betrayal? It had turned into a certain kind of evening during which any sensible moral perspective seemed irrelevant, not in the emotional mix. Nothing shocking in that. Would Breagh, in Anna’s place, have done differently?
The drawing went smoothly, Breagh’s figure a rhythm of sure lines, of shadow and light. The soft scrape of charcoal lulled them both, the wind playing about the house. Anna glanced out at the ocean where a dingy white fishing boat was sheltering in the lee of Bird Island, no gulls swirling and diving above its stern as they usually did.
They talked softly back and forth, as if the enterprise were solemn. Anna didn’t want to keep her much longer from her sewing and the room felt cooler.
“Your shop all fixed up, Breagh?”
“Nearly. Isobel is up there now painting the inside. Lorna will like it. There’s kids close by and she can nap in the back.”
“I’m all but done,” Anna said when she noticed her shiver. “I’ll touch it up at home.”
Breagh pulled on a green sweater long as a short dress and stood over Anna’s shoulder. “So. There I am.” Anna could feel her staring at it as if making up her mind. “That’s classy, though. Too good for the likes of Livingstone.”
“It’s yours when I’m finished. If you like.”
“Really? I’ll show my friends when I’m old and grey, tell them, hey, that’s me, I used to look like that. If anyone cares.”
“Anyone who looks at it will,” Anna said.
Breagh smiled, shook her head. “Just don’t pin it to your wall, okay?”
“It’s between you and me, if that’s how you want it.”
She pressed upon Anna a whimsical hat, cloche-like, in three shades of purple and trimmed with black velvet. For the drawing, she said. Anna said no, you needn’t, but she rather liked herself in the hat—Breagh said she looked slightly wicked, possibly dangerous. Anna didn’t want to think, as she cocked her head in the full-length mirror, what would Chet say about it, but she did, hearing at the same time his sarcasm, which of course she would deserve. As for Livingstone, she could not guess.… If the hat had an occasion, it would be a private one.
Lorna had awakened and was calling for her mother.
“No need to run,” Breagh said.
“I won’t. I love seeing Lorna. But I might walk out back while you get her up.”
Behind the house the turf was a saturated mat under her boots, but the wind raced through the grass newly green. She did a quick sketch of old Dougal’s deer fence, the singing line of its poles corralling only weeds now. The ocean opened to the eye here, the field ended abruptly at a cliff. Bird Island’s bleak plateaus seemed nearer, and birds were there, bits of white and dark circling the cliffs
, diving. What a place for a little farm. Did that ever lighten the labour here, the sea always near? Island and sea. The weather must have hit them full-on, and oh how they’d be in it. Anna tried to steady her sketchpad but the wind buffeted her about and she had to quit with only the vertical lines of the fence. A steep path nearby zigzagged down the cliff face of clay and rock to a beach mostly stones where the swells swarmed and whitened. Was that where Breagh had undressed for Livingstone? Near the path a stream cut a narrow valley in the cliff, and at its mouth where the rocks were scattered flat lay an old boat cradle fashioned out of heavy poles, bits of bark still clinging to them. A rusty winch was affixed to the head of it to haul a boat up clear of the sea. Old Dougal’s rig, for when he’d fished. He was a tough old man until the rest home got him, Breagh had said, and that depressed him to death.
Anna looked back to the house and Lorna waved to her from a bedroom window, the curtain parted by her mother’s hand.
Come on, Connie, you’re the only one can get the damn dog into the car, he likes you. Livingstone says this to me. I didn’t want to do it, God knows I didn’t, but I was stone skint and already in up to me arse, Jesus Christ, I’d finished the only pint I had that morning. I didn’t want them to see me shake bad, you understand? Not those fellas for sure, they see weak knees in you and they kick your legs out. I wouldn’t fling the dog, though, I said that, no part of that, you fuckers, the whole bunch of you. I tried to get out the goddamn car before we hit the highway, I didn’t want to see it or be near it. I yelled, It’s just a dog, for Jesus sake, of course it barks! I had to do it, I had to, they’d’ve sent me crawling home without a drink. Drunk as lords anyway, all of them. I know Willard, know him well. Not like it was a stray. There’s lots I can go to hell for, it’s nothing new. I should’ve stopped it. I had to get a drink, all there was to it. Not like I can just climb in a car and head for town, you know? Just don’t tell me to get help and stop drinking. I absolutely never, not for one frigging second of any time in me life, wanted to stop drinking. Save your breath. Anybody tells Willard, I’ll kill them.
XVI.
RED MURDOCK, AFTER RAINS he couldn’t remember heavier finally broke, headed up into the mountainside woods, into their drizzling leaves and needles, the soft path shining with puddles. He’d been awake since the wee-hour dark when the rain fell so straight and thick he couldn’t but listen to it, hard as it was, it could have beaten a man to the ground, that grey water sheeting his windowpane. And when it stopped suddenly, as if a long wave had just receded, everything was noisy with water, the trickle of roof and eaves, an attic leak pinging in a pail, restless bushes shivering, dripping, rivulets snaking through the fields. The brooks were soft roaring torrents, worse than spring, than snowmelt. Sometime in the night they’d climbed their banks and rampaged down through the forest floor, gouging tree roots, flattening brush and saplings like grass, silting the glistening green moss brown, clotting recklessly with jammed rocks, plowed out by the force of the water and dammed against windfalls that had crashed across the streams. The light was peculiar, as if the woods were shocked, still shimmering with what had swept through them.
Murdock was soon lost in a pale mist, feeling out with his feet the rhythm of the ground, then the little clearing emerged that he’d cut out as a boy, to play in, to gaze out from, to be high up in alone. But he was going grey by the time he’d built a bench here, and from this nick in the mountainside he could see a long way in three directions, and not far behind him the mountain turned steep, bare, unclimbable.
Rosaire, on a fine autumn afternoon, crisp and bright, had come here with him. Tired that day, a little breathless, she was, her illness unknown then but eating politely into her. She was a strong girl anyway, her legs could stop his breath.
The look on her face when a kiss was coming, when she wanted a taste of him, her lips parting. Good God, what he would give.… The pain of impossibility, he could never have guessed how strong and real it could be.
He had hiked up here often since he and his father had hauled firewood down, twitched trees, they would fell a big one and leave two limbs for runners so the horse could drag it home.
He pushed on, breathing hard, he’d sprawled on his back in the kitchen too many days, on the keg, how could he have stamina? Proud of it once, he could work like a demon, daylight or lamplight. Oh, the grieving had drained him like a sickness, slowed him to a crawl. Rosaire was gone, for God’s sake, where was the will to be fit? Now he might snap like an old rope.
Before Rosaire took sick, he’d felt sharp enough and his body did, for the most part, what he asked of it. He could lift a day over his head if he had to, and his mind was clear as clear as that. Age hadn’t mattered so long as she was in it with him.
Nothing big, nothing shattering. Maybe a name came slow, a place, a year. Of course there was the boredom, the lack of will. Yet other times his mind fairly stormed with memory, with the lived and living. Anyway, he was a man all alone, duine ‘na aonar. How many times, in how many voices, had that message whispered through his head, Gaelic or English? Might as well have tattooed it on his bum.The bench sat in the dappled shade of old maples and birches, the mist had cleared. Out of the canopy burst a cold shower of drops. Far below, the strait lay leaden against the rain-brightened greens of St. Aubin’s hills. To the west the last of the fog streamed slowly through the bridge. A Cape Islander, a chalky, weather-beaten white he’d never seen, was making its way outward, in no hurry, a rolling wake. He knew all the boats from around, there weren’t so many now anyway. Had a big V8 rumbling in her. Maybe a pleasure boat, though it didn’t look fitted out for that, and not much pleasure to be found in this fickle weather. She wouldn’t be lobstering here, these grounds were taken. The boat veered suddenly toward shore, just off MacDermid’s Cove, they cut the engine. Someone in a black ball cap stepped out of the cabin and leaned over the gunnel like he was checking the depth. She was too big to beach at MacDermid’s, he’d need a dinghy or a rubber raft if he wanted a landing there. He yelled back something to the cabin and then ducked back in. Hard to keep people away, they sought out that cove for parties, though not likely in May.
Too far to pick up her name, but he watched the boat head out, turn southeast toward Cranberry Head, bouncing into a swell. Out of North Sydney maybe. He’d have a look down at the cove later on, he’d forgotten to do that, still getting back, as he was, to ordinary things.
On the bench, Murdock eased into that August afternoon some years ago he had built it out of driftwood, greyed in ocean salt, he’d toted here piece by board. Plain with a couple flourishes, suitable for two, maybe three if you weren’t too broad. A simple structure, but most of the afternoon he’d crafted it slowly—a backrest of lobster trap lattice, a wharf timber, smelling of creosote, sectioned for legs, wide bleached boards from a beach shack somewhere made a good seat, two-by-fours washed from a dock, a piece of a lifeboat gunnel he hoped to God had been scrapped. A saw, a hammer, a square, an assortment of nails, that’s all he had. Something about that day, working alone so high, all that world of his own out there and below him, a west wind weaving through the trees, white scars of current with the tide, two sailboats an hour apart gliding briskly past the point where the ebbing water curved darkly, into the sweep of the sea widening out toward Bird Island that a lone coyote had reached once across the winter ice but who, well-fed on its birds, had to be shot in nesting season, how contented that solitary animal must have been for a while. Murdock would stop his work and gaze out, isolated, timeless, the sun warm as it moved up the mountain. Every act felt good that afternoon. How often could you say that? Sawing a clean yellow line, joining two pieces, feeling the seat grow level and solid, planning the armrests, the seatback with a relaxing lean so it wouldn’t feel like a pew, that’s what Rosaire would like. How he felt that day he could not explain. Impossibly rich? He’d closed his eyes, under the sway of the trees, he didn’t need to be anywhere else just then or be any more than he was, no one
on earth knew his location, no one was expecting him anywhere. It was like being carried up in the first long swoop of a tree swing, and stopped still at the moment you peak, just there, squeezing the rope. Peace beyond words. He knew he’d never have that joy here again, so tight in his heart, when he’d been alone in a certain, unrepeatable way. And so it troubled him, uselessly, that even with Rosaire he had never found that same afternoon, though with her he had found others just as good.
He had liked his privacy, yes. How odd was that? To be on his own time, that’s all, without others’ opinions. But he’d had to take Rosaire into all that, hadn’t he? What she thought of him, what she saw in him began to matter, and so he was not really alone anymore, he’d just lived alone. On his own, still, but not entirely, not as he’d been. Some of himself he’d had to give up, offer it to her. A risky gift, Here I am. She didn’t ask him to, at some point he just knew he must, was ready to, maybe. The feeling was new, a little troubling. But hell, he’d been waking up in the wee hours, thinking of her already, she was in his head so much he’d taken up cigarettes again, and it had little to do with privacy.
Murdock stood up. The roofpeak of Anna’s house lay far below, mossed and maybe leaking now, marked with a few dark squares of flown shingles. Anna Starling. Shouldn’t he have checked back on her that morning, after her and the dog and the ice? He felt shamed by that ever since. He’d gone home and shut the door, shut himself away like he’d done for months. You don’t want to nose in, he’d told himself, she’s got her own life going there, a woman life, you can’t. He did send Breagh, he did, and she’d assured him Anna was doing all right that morning and she’d stop in again, in case Anna sickened or slid back. Still, he should have himself gone, she was his neighbour, she was on her own.
How had she fared off in this crazy weather? He would stop and ask, see what she’d done with the iron things he’d given her. He was shy to show up at her door without a mission, but maybe that was mission enough.
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