What the Heart Keeps

by Rosalind Laker

  “You could divide off a small section of your large photography room.” Seeing that he was about to give a strongly negative answer, she held up an admonishing finger. “Think of Harriet. If she and Lisa get on well together, as I’m sure they will, you wouldn’t want the companionship split up simply because there was no room for Minnie. Remember that Lisa has her obligations, too.”

  “I’ll see what can be done,” he conceded, “but I’ll have to give any alteration to that part of the house a good deal of thought.”

  “Not necessarily,” she argued persuasively. “A dividing screen and a little wall-bed is all that is needed.” Then, to stem further argument, she gave an encompassing smile to the girls. “I’ll show you to your bedrooms now. You must both be tired after your journey. I’m going to retire at the same time. Good night, Alan.”

  “Good night, Agnes,” he replied drily. “I knew I could rely on you to solve everything.”

  Agnes’s eyes twinkled merrily. Ignoring Henry’s scowl at hearing that Minnie was to stay on, she ushered the two girls before her up the stairs. Henry was jealous of sharing her with anyone, even a child, and for that reason Minnie’s sojourn in the house could be for no longer than was absolutely necessary. In the meantime, she would enjoy the little girl’s company. Tomorrow she would write to her sister Jessie at home in Toronto and tell her about the young guest. Her family did not like to think of her being too much alone, which was the fate of women in these parts, but she accepted it.

  In the morning the rain had gone and the sun returned with a blaze of heat to set the whole of Granite Bay asparkle. The giant trees were revealed in all their full splendour in a luxuriant range of greens. Lisa, ready to leave with Alan after her overnight sojourn, came out of the house and looked about her, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun’s brightness. She could see white pines and cedars, maples and firs and hemlock. Across on the far side of the bay a small gap revealed a skid-road made up of tree trunks laid side by side, which indicated the direction in which the logging out of the forest was being carried out in that area. Unlike the previous night when it had seemed that there was not a living soul anywhere but at the Twidles’ home, there were several people about. Down by the shore, two Indians were repairing a canoe. On a bench outside the store some loggers lounged in the sunshine, waiting for Henry to open up there, and they stared across at Lisa, their jaws moving rhythmically as they chewed quids of tobacco, occasionally spitting out the juice. On the bay, in a row-boat, an old trapper enjoying summertime leisure, his dog sitting in the bow, was busy with a line and bringing in a silvery catch that glistened as it came out of the water.

  Any second thoughts that Minnie might have had about being left behind had been dispelled by the discovery that the Twidles’ cat had two five-week-old kittens. She barely took time to say goodbye to Lisa before returning to them.

  “Don’t worry about her,”- Agnes said as she walked down with

  Lisa to where Alan had readied his long, narrow boat in which the journey was to be made. “I’ll look after her and it will do her good to learn not to be entirely dependent upon you. After all, you’re very young to have shouldered such a responsibility.” She handed over a package. “Would you give this to Harriet? There are two novels in it that I’m sure you’ll both enjoy, and a few other things that I think she’ll like to have. I’m sure that you two will be good friends from the start. Harriet is a dear, kind person, as you’ll soon find out for yourself.”

  The Twidles stood side by side on the wharf to wave to Lisa as Alan started up the engine and turned the boat in the direction of the narrows. Although Henry went to open up the store almost at once, Agnes was still waving when the trees finally shut her out of sight. Granite Bay was left behind, and ahead, beyond the narrows, lay Kanish Bay.

  “There is something I should like to ask you, Alan,” Lisa said. His attitude towards her was polite enough, but no less chilly than it had been the evening before.

  “Yes?” He turned his head to glance at her, his eyes shaded by the wide black brim of the hat that had dried out since the rain of the previous evening.

  “I was told by Mrs. Grant that she had sent a severe report on me to you and your wife.”

  “Didn’t you deserve it?” He was faintly mocking.

  Her shoulders straightened and she stiffened on the thwart where she sat. “No, I did not. I just wanted to know why you both still agreed that I should come here.”

  “The explanation is simple enough. Harriet’s reasoning was that if we were going to open our house to a stranger, then it should be to someone in need of a good home. Her natural choice was a Home girl. The fact that we were informed that you were a deserving case in need of moral guidance sealed the issue. She is prepared to ignore the advice given that we should deal harshly with you.” His mouth twitched sideways in faint amusement.

  “I find it humiliating to be dogged quite unjustly by disgrace.”

  He shrugged. “Forget it. My wife will accept you as she finds you.

  “What of you?” she challenged. “You have made it plain that you resent the intrusion of an outsider in your home.”

  “Two outsiders eventually,” he pointed out sharply. “I’ll remind you that you didn’t come alone to Quadra Island. Since we are speaking frankly, I admit that I resented you before you even arrived, but I’ve managed to keep that from Harriet. If you and I are to get along at all with each other, I trust you will keep up my harmless deception for her sake.”

  “Such possessiveness appals me!” she burst out. “Can’t you bear to share your wife’s company with either kith or kin, no matter how lonely she might be?”

  His expression became fierce, his nostrils dilating dangerously. “As it happens, my wife has no kin. She grew up in the care of her late mother’s sister, and that lady has since died. Do you imagine that it pleases me to commit my wife to a hard and lonely existence? In normal circumstances, in a house in a town or city, I probably wouldn’t even notice you under the same roof, but in the present confined quarters of our home I resent the prospect of never coming home to a meal alone with her and being unable to share a winter evening without the constant presence of another person!”

  “I’ll stay in the kitchen. I’ll keep out of your way.” She was as fierce as he.

  “Wait until you see the house before you make any more such offers,” he replied brusquely. His profile was towards her as he looked across at the passing shore where the seemingly impenetrable forest pressed down to the water’s edge from the high slopes above. Its green luxuriance moved outwards across the surface in floating logs and twisted branches and mossy driftwood, which sometimes bobbed away in the wave created by the boat’s bow. “This island and these forests would never be my permanent choice of habitation, although I appreciate the grandeur of it all. It’s because at heart I’m a city man, having been born and bred in London. Harriet, on the other hand, is a country girl from a Connecticut farmstead and is happiest in the depth of nature. Because I believed it to be therapeutic for her to recover from a miscarriage amid surroundings of her choice, I agreed to try to recoup our finances by putting my, engineering skills at the disposal of a prosperous lumber company as a means to an end of getting a cinema of my own again.”

  “You had a cinema? I didn’t know. Agnes mentioned your interest in moving pictures.”

  “As so often happens, I had followed my father’s footsteps into engineering, but from the start I was drawn to the bioscope and the technicalities of film projection. To gain wider knowledge I went to France to investigate the Lumiere cinematographic equipment, and then came via Germany and the developments there to New York, which is the main centre of film-making and a magnet for anyone interested in that fast-moving industry. Harriet was working in one of the offices. We met and married within a matter of weeks. By that time I had designed and patented my own film projector, but so had a good many other people. Naturally I considered mine to be the best on the market. The
one I’ve built more recently in my workshop outstrips the first, which I used when Harriet and I left New York. After a few months of putting on travelling picture shows, we set up our own movie house.”

  “Where was that? In the United States?”

  He shook his head. “Nickleodeons had sprung up everywhere there in the wake of the earlier Kinetoscope Parlours and the Vitascope Halls. Canada had not expanded with the same rapidity and I felt the whole country was ready to be opened up on a grand scale. From my first beginnings in Winnipeg, I was already looking to the day when Fernley cinemas would be spread right across the continent. Then disaster struck in a fire and we lost everything. It was through shock that Harriet lost the baby she was expecting. That’s why, through her choice, we came to British Columbia and to Quadra Island.” His eyes hardened angrily on her. “So in future, Lisa, you may keep to yourself any other inaccurate suppositions you care to harbour about my attitude towards my wife, possessiveness included.”

  She coloured uncomfortably and forced herself to give a nod. No good would come of constant friction with him. Somehow she must try not to let him rile her. Perhaps it would be easier in Harriet’s presence.

  “Look!” he exclaimed suddenly, pointing ahead. “The whales are running.”

  There appeared to be a school of them. She could see them clearly as they rolled above the surface of the sparkling water and dived again, bursts of spray accompanying their harmless passage, for they were far from the boat and there was no danger. Somehow the sighting eased the tension and for a while he talked quite amiably, telling her of the salmon and other fish that abounded around the island as in neighbouring waters. Deer and grouse were to be had by any good shot in the forest, and fortunately the wolves and bears had long since gone from Quadra. Only the occasional cougar prowled in the deepest wooded depths as yet not approached for logging out by the lumber companies. As for shellfish, clams, and oysters, they were easy to come by along the boulder strewn shoreline.

  “Had I not been ambitious,” he conceded, “it might not have been hard to settle on such an island with so much to offer, but you know my feelings there. Yet take Henry Twidle now. He is in his element. Only old age and infirmity will ever make him return to the mainland.”

  Lisa’s thoughts went to Agnes. The island was as alien to a Toronto-raised woman as it was to a London exile. Both Agnes and Alan had come to Quadra Island through love for their respective partners. Alan, at least, had a chance of returning to his natural environs. Agnes did not.

  It was late afternoon when he sailed the small craft into an inlet that must have been spectacular before it had been logged out by the lumbermen and then abandoned. New trees had sprung up, but the regrowth had been hindered by a forest fire at some time, which had left a blackened scar across the landscape. High on the bluff, a slender tawny-haired woman hurried into view, waving to the approaching craft. A large dog of mixed origins darted forward from her side to bark noisily in recognition of its master’s return. Alan waved back vigorously to his wife, his expression transformed by the sight of her, all glowering looks completely banished. As soon as they were within earshot of each other, he cupped a hand about his mouth.

  “I’ve brought you a surprise! This is your new friend-to-be here with me!”

  She nodded to show she understood and, catching the dog by its collar, she turned for a nearby path that would bring her down to the shore.

  Lisa glanced at Alan. “That was a kindly introduction. I appreciate it.”

  He shrugged. “I told you before,” he said drily, “that all that matters to me is Harriet’s peace of mind. So when I smile at you, Lisa, just make sure you smile back.”

  Oh, she would smile all right, she thought, angered by him again. But it would be with her lips only and not with her eyes.

  As soon as the boat was beached and Alan had sprung ashore, he snatched his wife into his arms. They kissed with such ardency that Lisa busied herself getting out of the boat unaided, dismayed by the rush of physical yearning for Peter that had been unleashed in her at the sight of their passionate embrace. The dog, after an exuberant greeting of its master, had come across to await her without hostility. She patted its head, making friends.

  “Leo has taken to you,” Harriet said, smiling, having stepped across to meet the newcomer.

  “Now he will have two of us to guard,” Lisa smiled in return. Alan’s wife was gentle-looking, kindness in the magnificent amber eyes and a sweetness about the pretty mouth. Her face was openly sensitive, full of the light and shade of vulnerability to the pain and joy of love. Lisa thought her beautiful, but too taut with inner personal distress, nerves frayed almost through to the surface.

  “This is a great day for me.” On impulse Harriet took both of Lisa’s hands into hers, it being natural to her to give spontaneous and generous emphasis to her welcome. They faced each other in mutual respect and in the first stirrings of the friendship that each had hoped to share with the other.

  Lisa felt quite moved. “You shall never regret letting me come to your home, Harriet.”

  “I believe that with all my heart. How did it happen that you were able to get here earlier than we expected?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Then it shall wait until you have rested. Let’s go up to the house.”

  Alan, unloading crates of supplies he had brought in the boat, had already set Lisa’s valise down on the sandy shore. She picked it up quickly, not wanting to be beholden to him for carrying it for her, and gave Harriet the parcel from Granite Bay.

  “Agnes never lets Alan leave empty-handed,” Harriet said, turning the parcel about in an attempt to guess the contents. “I know she will have remembered that I have had a birthday since he last called there.” She made a bleak little grimace. “I’m two years older than my husband, and I was thirty. It feels like middle age when one has no children.”

  They reached the top of the path which continued across a slope to a single-storeyed cabin that had not been visible from below. Built of dark seasoned logs, it had a sloping roof and small windows. Harriet explained it was the property of the Hastings logging company for which Alan worked, which was why they had been able to rent it with its simple furnishings. Lisa paused on the threshold to look back over her shoulder in the direction of the scorched forest.

  “How long is it since the fire took place?”

  “It happened shortly before we came to live here, and the whole of the rest of the summer some of the stumps still smouldered. I used to pour water on those in the immediate vicinity right up until the snow came.” She indicated the direction the forest fire had taken. “It was lucky that the flames missed the house or else we would have had to stay longer with the Twidles while we found somewhere else to live. By a lucky chance the orchard escaped as well, which means I can pick white cherries and apples and pears in season, and in spring it’s the prettiest sight with all the blossom. I have lilac trees as well and I always count the buds as soon as they appear.”

  Lisa was suddenly assailed by a wave of homesickness. “It was spring when I left England. In a way I haven’t known a real spring since, because on the day I sailed I met someone and then parted from him again a while afterwards.”

  Harriet tilted her head with sympathetic inquiry. “Shall you tell me about him when we know each other better?”

  “I think so. A little anyway.” They smiled at each other again. Then Lisa followed Harriet into the log house.

  The living room took up the greater part of the house, with a black range and kitchen facilities at one end and at the other an open hearth. A flight of steps led up to a sleeping loft, and through a side door below was Alan’s workshop where his cinematographic equipment and tools covered every available scrap of space on the benches. Lisa could not see any room for a wall-bed to be made for Minnie. Her own sleeping quarters, entered by another door on the opposite side of the hearth, had once been a small storeroom and was far too narrow and low-ceili
nged to accommodate a second bed or even a bunk bed above the one in which she would sleep. Lisa was thankful that it did have a small window for light and ventilation.

  The only piece of furniture in the house that the Fernleys had brought with them to Quadra Island was the upright piano in the living room, which was a replacement for the one they had lost in the cinema catastrophe. Harriet explained that she had played accompanying music for the movies that Alan had shown and still played at the shows he put on for audiences from time to time. While she opened the package from Agnes, Lisa sat down at the piano and played from the sheet music on the rack. Harriet listened with appreciation.

  “You’re a pianist, too,” she declared, coming across to show Lisa the unwrapped trinket box that Henry had made and carved for her. When Lisa had admired it, Harriet went up to the sleeping loft to transfer some pieces of jewellery into her gift from the Twidles.

  *

  That night the muffled sounds of Alan making passionate love to his wife kept Lisa from sleep. In her white cotton nightgown she knelt on her narrow bed, her hands pressed over her ears, and looked out of the window towards the moon-dappled water, where small islets lay like risen jewels upon the surface.

  When eventually she fell back onto her pillow, she was racked by a physical yearning for the man she still loved and who was lost to her. Long after the lovers overhead had fallen asleep in each others’ arms, she continued to lie awake, enduring her own personal torment.

  Alan left again next morning. Harriet went down to the shore to see him off, Leo at their heels. When she returned to the house she stayed outside and did not enter. Lisa put away the last of the breakfast dishes she had washed and went out to her.

  “Are you all right, Harriet?”

  The woman nodded, pacing restlessly. “I hate this house more every time Alan leaves it. Take no notice of me. It’s just that I never want to go back into it on my own when he has gone.”

  “You’re not on your own now. I’m here.”