by Heather Burt
You must be Isobel’s daughter! Margaret would exclaim. I thought I recognized you. You have your mother’s smile. It’s lovely to meet you.
You too. I enjoyed the service.
Oh, well, it wasn’t one of my better ones, I’m afraid. Like I was saying when you rang, I’ve been preparing for this conference in Edinburgh, and I’ve just had no time for my work here.
I hope I didn’t interrupt you when I called.
No, no, not at all. I’m sorry I had to run off so quickly. But the conference work’s all done now. So, are you going to join us for coffee in the hall?
She’d be obliged to ask this.
Well ...
You’re most welcome, but I also want to have you over for lunch. Are you free?
Sure. That would be great.
She would skip coffee in the hall and instead go to the bakery to buy pastries for dessert. She’d arrive at Margaret’s home—one of those narrow stone dwellings on the street leading to the abbey, the one with the bright red door and plants in the windows—and lunch would be just about ready. Margaret would reminisce about her friendship with Isobel.
Your mother was always very popular at school. Got along with everyone. We didn’t spend much time together, but she was always good fun when we did.
What would you do together?
Clare hadn’t the faintest idea what her mother would have done with her girlfriends here in Stanwick, but she gave Margaret a long reply nonetheless: schoolwork (Isobel was a whiz at math), strolling the high street, browsing the fashion magazines, listening to Beatles records (of which Isobel had saved a few). When she’d exhausted the possibilities and polished her own contributions, she considered at length the crucial segue: Did you ever meet her father’s apprentice? Do you remember her spending time with a Patrick Locke? Are any of her other friends still in Stanwick? In the end, she gave the transition to Margaret.
Oh, and on a Saturday afternoon, a group of us would always watch the lads playing rugby. You must have seen the rugby field on your way here.
I think so. Did you know any of the players?
A few of them, aye.
Any boyfriends? She’d smile.
Oh, I think your mother had one or two. Not from the team, though.
At this point she would try hard to appear casual.
Do you remember her going around with a Patrick Locke? Her father’s apprentice?
Patrick Locke?
Just before she met my father.
Aye—it was only for a wee while, I think. She never mentioned it. She could be secretive that way. But I do remember him.
“What was he like?”
“Pardon?”
Clare jerked straight in her chair. The pianist was playing; the offering was being collected. The woman next to her had whispered something, and for an instant Clare assumed she was doddery and ignored her. Then, like a creeping rash: the realization that she herself had spoken first. Out loud, to no one. Like a crazy person. She clenched her hands and whispered “Nothing” and “Sorry,” and the woman next to her smiled primly. She turned to Margaret, the real person, preparing to carry on with her service. Then she darted glances at the solemn, staring faces of the congregation and felt the truth like a slap. These things that went on in her head—the hijacked voices, the imaginary playmates—were not simply weird or pathetic, a quirk that others would chuckle at. They needed to stop.
Desperately she tried to blank out her mind. She listened unfalteringly to Margaret’s announcements about the Women’s Guild and the Tanzania Mission Project. She followed the closing hymn note by note and let the solid words of the benediction fill her. She read from Ecclesiastes until the woman next to her had left. And at last, when the pianist had dispatched his recessional hymn and there remained just a few stragglers chatting in the pews, she joined the dwindling line of people waiting to shake hands with the minister. It didn’t matter whether or not their conversation led to Patrick Locke; it most certainly wouldn’t. What mattered, what she needed, was something real.
Stationed at the doorway between the chapel and the main sanctuary, Reverend Biggar moved graciously but efficiently through her greetings. Clare inched her way along behind a hunchbacked man with a walker, impatient for her turn, ready to be drawn into whatever pleasantries her mother’s friend would choose to exchange. As the old man shuffled away, she hoisted the straps of her bag—a straw market bag Emma had bought in Guatemala—and fleetingly pictured her friend bargaining in her mangled Spanish, not caring how she sounded. Then she stuck out her hand and summoned a smile.
“Hi—I’m Isobel’s daughter. Clare.”
Margaret extended a plump, pale hand. “Margaret Biggar. Very nice to meet you.”
“You too.”
“And did you enjoy the service?”
“Yes ...” Briefly Clare struggled to remember something—anything—to comment on, but Margaret, eyeing her expectantly, seemed only to want her approval. “Yes,” she repeated, “very much.”
“Well, that’s good.” Margaret fingered her purple stole and glanced at the three women still talking and laughing in the pews.
“The church is beautiful,” Clare said. “How old is it?”
“Oh, yes. It’s lovely. The cloisters are twelfth century. Other parts have been restored.”
The minister jumped awkwardly from phrase to phrase, as if she were walking barefoot across hot asphalt.
Clare called up a look of astonishment. “Twelfth century. That’s incredible.”
“Yes, yes it is.”
“So ... your father used to be minister here?”
“Yes. Until 1974. Then it was Simon Deeks.”
“And when did you start?”
Margaret looked off to one side. “I transferred here from Glasgow in 1980. Simon and I worked together until he retired. In 1989 that was.”
“Are you the only minister now?”
“No, no. There’s Janice Murphy as well.”
“And ... so ... do you take turns conducting the services?”
“Usually, yes. She’s on holiday just now.”
“Oh? Whereabouts?”
“Greece.”
The stragglers were making their way over, so Clare stepped back. Her conversation with Margaret was more pointless that she’d expected, the minister herself a larger-than-life mirror of Clare’s own awkwardness. Again she felt the cold slap of truth: this was what others experienced in her company. Emma, Adam, even Markus. She wondered how they’d tolerated such awkwardness. How they’d tolerated her.
The three women disappeared into the abbey proper. Fidgeting with her stole, Margaret turned back to Clare. “Will you be joining us for coffee or tea?”
Clare forced a smile. “Thank you, but I think I’ll head off.” She took a step into the abbey then hesitated. The awkwardness circled them, a catlike creature, feeding off their silence. She met Margaret’s grey-blue eyes and took a breath. “There’s another of my mother’s friends I need to visit,” she said, and her bold words echoed in the vast sanctuary, nudging the creature away.
Almost imperceptibly, Margaret frowned. “Oh? Here in Stanwick?”
“Yes. On Farrell Road.”
She held Margaret’s gaze, urging her to ask the next question. But Margaret looked down at her hands.
“It was a surprise to hear from your mother after so long. I wrote her a few letters after she went away to Canada, but ...” Again her eyes met Clare’s, and the awkwardness slipped farther away. It was the quality, the intensity, of her expression. It conveyed not a lack, Clare now saw, but an abundance. A failure of language to carry the load. So easy to understand. “We did have lovely times together,” Margaret added, meaningfully, then she brushed past Clare, into the chapel. “I’ll just get my things, then I’ll see you off.”
Clare nodded. She wanted to start over, to go to the hall for coffee and chat about ordinary things, but it was too late.
Margaret returned to the pulpit, her s
tride a little lopsided. “Isobel mentioned in her note that you’re a pianist,” she said.
“Yes. I mean, I don’t play professionally; I work in a music store.” Clare drifted past the rows of empty chairs, toward the piano. “Used to work, I should say. I quit recently.”
“Really? What are your plans then?”
“I’m not sure. I have a few ideas.”
She stood at the piano, an upright of dark mahogany, old but well-maintained, and stared down at the keys. There was no shortage of possibilities: looking for work in London, travelling until her money ran out, going back to school, calling Markus and telling him she’d made a mistake. Each prospect seemed as viable, and as arbitrary, as any other. The only one she was certain about was moving to Vancouver—she wouldn’t do it. She struck middle C with her index finger.
“Actually, I have no idea.”
Margaret gathered up her papers from the pulpit and tapped them into a neat stack. “Well ... that must be frightening and exciting at the same time.”
“Yes ...”
Clare struck another note. She wondered what Margaret would suggest. She wanted to ask her advice, to have a sensible outside voice counsel her. Instead, she played a final note and lowered the heavy fall-board. But Margaret, stepping away from the pulpit, flapped her papers at the piano.
“Would you play something before you go?” she said with surprising ease. “If you don’t mind, that is. I’d love to hear a song.”
Clare frowned. “You want me to play for you?”
“Something by Bob Dylan maybe?”
She realized even as she puzzled over Margaret’s request that her reaction made no sense. She was a musician; playing for others was part of the role—a part she’d once fantasized about. And yet, no one had ever done this. Made a request of her this way. Spontaneously, hopefully. Twenty years at the piano, and no one had ever said Could you play such-and-such for me?
“I know ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’” she finally said. Her grade seven class had sung it at the spring concert. She’d asked Mrs. Aroutian if she could learn it, and for several months it had been her favourite.
“That would be great,” Margaret said. “I’ve always wanted to hear him in concert, but it’s just never happened.”
Clare sat down and lifted the fallboard. It had been more than a week since she last played—longer, perhaps, than she’d ever gone since the day of her first lesson with Mrs. Aroutian. Poised now over the stretch of keys, she was struck by their familiarity, their invariable arrangement of white and black and the precise tonal ratios locked within that arrangement. She played a few chords, tested the pedals, with which the black-robed pianist had been too enthusiastic, then turned to Margaret, who’d settled herself on a front-row chair.
“I can’t really—I mean, this won’t sound much like Dylan’s version.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’ll be just fine. Go on; give it a try.”
She began, and the intervening years closed up. She was back in the den, her father’s room, where the piano used to be. She played the song the way she’d learned it, without variation or improvisation, the way it was scored in ’60s Folk Classics for Piano, her thirteen-year-old hands tense, correct. How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? For a transcendent moment she rediscovered the solitary, introspective girl that she was, perched on her piano stool in denim cut-offs and a striped halter top, passionate about the mysteries contained in her music. Then she glanced at Margaret and saw the same thing. Her enormous body was slowly swaying, her cassock like a wide, white sail. Her eyes were closed, and she was smiling. There was no doubt she knew all the lyrics and was hearing Dylan’s wheezy tenor in her head, so Clare played every verse. She played to the teenage Margaret, a rosy-cheeked idealist with a record player in her room. It was so easy to imagine her.
At the end of the song, Margaret clapped noisily. Clare looked down at her own hands and noticed how they’d aged.
“I haven’t played it in a long time,” she said. “Sorry if it was a bit rusty.”
“No, no, it was perfect,” Margaret said. “Just wonderful. Thank you so much. I think our pianist would be delighted to retire and have you take over here.” She laughed.
Clare picked up her bag. “I should get going. They’ll be wondering what’s happened to you.”
Margaret didn’t protest. She pushed herself out of her chair and led the way back to the chapel entrance. In the main sanctuary, Clare tried to recall the greeting her mother had asked her to pass on. She looked at the floor and cleared her throat. Then Margaret touched her arm with a light but meaningful pressure.
“By the way, Clare,” she said, “which of your mother’s friends are you away to visit? It could be someone I know.”
Clare’s hands clenched. Back at the piano, she’d forgotten him, forgotten why she was here. She made herself look up.
“Patrick Locke.”
“The lad who worked with her father, you mean?”
“Yes.” Her insides quivered—a sensation more like swimming eels than butterflies. He was real. “Do you know him?”
“Oh, not well. I haven’t seen him in years. Isobel’s stayed in touch with him then?” She sounded puzzled.
“Not really. No. I just wanted to track him down ... for some personal reasons.” Clare held her breath.
“Oh?”
She believed that Margaret would understand. She suspected the whole story might be something her mother’s friend deserved to know. The words were in her head. But her too-brief relationship with Margaret didn’t warrant the uttering.
“My mother thinks he’s done a lot of travelling,” she said. “I wanted to talk to him about it.”
Margaret nodded. “Aye, I seem to remember him leaving on some grand adventure. Seems he and your mother both had itchy feet.”
“I guess so.”
Margaret nodded toward a distant door. “The hall is through there. Are you sure you won’t join us for coffee?”
Clare smiled and shook her head. She needed to return to the phone box across from Hobbs and Sons before her courage failed her. “No. Thank you. I’ll be off. It was good to meet you.” She extended her hand. “My mother sends her love. She’ll write again.”
Margaret gave a sharp squeeze. “Lovely to meet you, Clare.” She turned to the hall then turned back. “I think his house is out of town a wee bit. You may want to ask for directions.”
“Thanks. I will.”
In the phone box on the high street, Clare gripped the black receiver in one hand and stared at the slip of paper on which she’d written P. Locke’s telephone number. She thought of Adam, struggling to get back to his roots. His voice came to her weakly, but she shut him out. This wasn’t a homecoming. It was a departure, an irreversible transformation. She deposited a coin in the slot and entered the number. At the first double ring, her heart struck up a riotous pounding, and her hand clenched the receiver tighter. She hoped he wouldn’t answer, but knew at the same time that that wouldn’t solve anything.
After the third ring, a woman’s voice said hello.
18
THE PATH TO THE SUMMIT became steeper, narrower, wetter. The rain, angled by wind, rustled through the leafy shrubs and skinny trees and splattered the ragged flagstone steps. Rudy still had no sense of the peak as a whole. He’d imagined himself climbing the benign, two-dimensional hill of Uncle Ernie’s painting, but this was something entirely different. He followed his uncle blindly up the slippery ascent, stopping regularly to shake water from his hair and pluck small leeches from the legs of his trousers. Since their last stop, in a tiny clearing with sodden planks for benches, the pain in his pelvis had reached deeper, tightening its grip, so that his progress was now hindered by a limp. To carry on was foolish. Still, they climbed in silence, and gradually Rudy found himself anticipating the summit, allowing himself to believe that the red pavilion in Uncle Ernie’s painting would actually be there, warm and welcoming, when they arrived.
His optimism was dampened by the return of the teenage brother and sister from Toronto. Their T-shirts and sweatpants were smeared with dirt and soaking wet. They’d made it to the top but were clearly unimpressed.
“There’s, like, no view at all!” the girl complained, as if, despite the weather, she’d been expecting the glorious panorama of the tourist brochures. “It’s totally clouded over. But at least you get a workout.”
“Are there any buildings up there?” Rudy asked, aware that he sounded desperate.
“There’s some, but they’re all closed, I think,” the boy said. “You can see the footprint, though.”
His sister elaborated. “Yeah, it’s just, like, a big slab of concrete, though. It’s in a little temple thingy, but the whole place is locked up. There’s a guy up there with a key, and he lets you in. I don’t think he speaks much English, though. He kept speaking to us in Sinhalese”—she glanced at her brother—“but I can, like, hardly even speak Tamil anymore. Oh, and you have to take your shoes off! It’s, like, freezing! But the guy won’t let you in if you don’t. I mean, I understand we should respect the culture and everything, but that’s just a little extreme.” She rolled her eyes. “Don’t you think?”
Rudy gave a noncommittal smile and wondered if Kanda would acknowledge these Canadian kids as his kind. They could have been any of the hundreds of teenagers Rudy had taught back in Toronto, and he could easily have chatted with them at length about “home.” Even their talk about Sri Pada was steeped in subtle cues that identified the three of them, like a password or a secret handshake, as members of a particular club. It was comforting, but the very fact of the comfort, the reminder of what it signified, left him anxious to get away.