‘Sometimes you get reporters. Trying to find out about writers, looking for a story.’
‘You goin’ to be famous, Mr Smyth?’
Something mocks in Keith’s slow smile.
‘Hope not. But you never know—you could get someone poking around.’
‘Want me to keep a lookout?’
‘Just in case.’ I make myself smile. ‘Best be ready.’
‘Like they say,’ Keith says, ‘no smoke without a fire.’
6
Put yourself into the mind of a trout, braced against the current of the river, two fathoms down. Suddenly, up in the bright air dome something changes: a shadow splits the light above your head. What do you do? Memory deep as oceans clutches at you. All you can think of is survival. What do you do? You do nothing. In the cool recess of the bank you wait. You sit it out. If you stay down here the danger will disappear. You do nothing.
Kay lifts her easel from the box room where it has spent the winter, and her palette, and brings them out to the porch with a canvas, a box of paint tubes, brushes and white spirit. Tim is with the Echenozs, our neighbours, whose son, Pierre, is eight years old. The wind has gone south. Across the fence Dimitri Echenoz is barbecuing.
Over the years Kay has tried to paint indoors, but has never liked it. And whereas she seldom paints what she sees, her thickly layered and richly coloured oils hailing from deep in her psyche, it is only out of doors that she can find her stimulation. She spins the wing-screws that adjust the easel’s legs, secures the canvas, assembles the brushes and jars on a low table and begins.
As she paints, she tries to relax. She has been worried about our marriage for some time. Over the years, when I have become depressed, when an inner turmoil has overcome me, when I have been prey to nightly panic attacks and feel I am being suffocated, she has urged me to go into analysis, but I have always resisted. When Gavin, our son, grew up and we moved to Milton, we both had careers that ate up our days and often our weekends, but we valued our time together. We were financially secure. That was before I took early retirement. Now, in Muskoka, we spend most of our days under each other’s feet and have to watch every dollar. We seldom have sex more than once a month.
She thought that writing the novel would be a catharsis for me, that it would amount to a form of self-analysis that might help me come to terms with my problems. It seems the opposite has happened; I have become even more eccentric. Today with Jerry Fisher was a new low, as if I had deliberately placed at risk everything I have worked towards. Kay grits her teeth. She doesn’t know how much longer she can take it.
Since we moved to Muskoka, our lives have become more isolated. At least in Toronto we had professional friends and colleagues, but here, in this lake wilderness, she realizes, there is no one to turn to.
When she begins to paint, Kay seldom does so with any fixed idea. Even at the moment when the loaded brush meets the canvas, her mind is divided: one part guides her hand, the other sorts, analyses and files away matters that until now were circling in the air. She extends the line downwards in a graceful curve.
We got married when we were nineteen years old, children, something she often thinks about now and wonders once more if our decision was a mistake. Neither of us knew anything about life, or what we did know amounted to so little. She wonders about the huge gamble we took and, in the process, the great potential she may have left behind.
Her father died when she was a child. A big strapping man, rowing on the river had been his sport. She keeps a photograph of this young man of splendid physique, in a singlet and shorts, one of a crew of eight, standing on the Ferrybank side, the Suir their backdrop. One morning he stood up before a class of twelve-year-old boys and, as he began to chalk a mathematical equation on the blackboard, fell down dead. He was thirty-nine years old and a brain aneurism was discovered in the post-mortem.
The priest told her that God had wanted her father for special business in heaven. When God calls someone, that is the greatest honour that anyone can ever receive, the priest said. Kay knew that there had been a mistake, that God would never take her dad when he was also needed so badly at home.
At times of difficulty, like these, she sometimes tries to imagine her life without me. What would it be like? She would have buried her mother and watched her younger sister die of cervical cancer at the age of forty. Lived in the house in Waterford that her father had bought when she was born. Never become an outsider, which was how she felt at her sister’s funeral, like she often feels in Canada.
Freedom and a sense of puzzled excitement seize her with these old thoughts. She wishes she could see clearly into my soul, for even though she once trusted me, now she is not so sure. Everyone has secrets, she reflects, as under her hand a human form takes shape; this emerging image has its secrets, which it will share with me alone. Her brush has been moving continuously and now she pauses, sits back and the air is sucked from her. The moulded back of a powerfully built man springs from the canvas, the long twin muscles diving down into the mystery of his waist. He is beautiful. Kay bites her lip. She savours him achingly until she can no longer bear it, then she takes a palette knife and scrapes the whole thing away.
7
The doctor’s residence on the outskirts of Carrick-on-Suir was entirely consistent with professional integrity and social standing. A cow and her calf grazed beneath two-hundred-year-old beech trees on the property’s five acres; the River Suir ran along the bottom of the land. The doctor’s patients were seen in the front room where, for a few short years, my mother had entertained.
Every morning, at seven o’clock, his day began at the local church with Mass and Holy Communion. Days ended in his study, where, having written up his journal, he poured himself a whiskey. For hours we spoke of fly fishing. How to cast, and where; the best rods to buy; the wiles of those trout he’d almost caught; how to judge water; how to make a variety of dry flies. Christ was a fisherman too, you know, he’d sometimes tell me, with a smile.
Over the years, I’ve been medicating for high blood pressure. It comes and goes, like a current in my mind, rising and falling. Alone, I listen to the wind in the roof, gnawing at the shingles like a dog at a door. The whiskey hits the back of my tongue. Maybe I’m being paranoid. Maybe it’s the kind of man I have become.
‘We need to talk,’ Kay says and turns off the television.
‘Fine.’
She removes her spectacles and places them on the table beside her. The grey is spun through her hair like chalk seams through slate.
‘What is it?’ she asks.
My instinct is to brush her off. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, what’s happening? First of all, you send Jerry away wondering if he’s wasting his time with you. Ever since, you’ve been going around like a zombie. You’re drinking too much and swallowing blood pressure pills like M&Ms. What’s going on? If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were having an affair. Maybe you are—are you?’
I shake my head and pretend to laugh.
‘It’s not funny! You have this look on your face all the time. What is it?’
A large tabby cat that belongs to the Echenoz family has come to sit on our windowsill.
‘Nothing… nothing at all.’
‘Come on, Alex! We need to work this out, whatever it is.’
I take a big breath. ‘Look, I’m trying to come to terms with something, okay?’
‘With what?’
‘It’s very far back and deep down…’
We sit in throbbing silence.
‘… one moment it’s there, the next it’s out of reach. Gone. I think I’m afraid.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Once, years ago, I tried to tell someone, but they wouldn’t listen. Maybe I’m just a coward, afraid to try again.’
Kay takes a deep, impatient breath. ‘You’re not a coward. But let’s stay with that. What did you try to tell someone years ago?’
‘I’m no
t sure. I have to try and get my head around it.’
She does this for a living, listens to people like me who are trying to get their heads around their lives.
‘I wrote a book.’
‘I know.’
‘But it wasn’t true.’
‘It was fiction, Alex.’
‘It was a eulogy to my father.’
‘Okay.’
‘There’s stuff… I was a child.’
‘When we are young we often have encounters that leave us deeply marked,’ she says after some moments. ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of. A child is innocent.’
‘This was different.’
‘We all think we’re different.’
‘No, this was different.’
Another pause as she shows me her patient, professional side.
‘Tell me why it was different.’
I get up and stretch; my back has begun to hurt. ‘The truth is that my father didn’t deserve a eulogy.’
‘You can’t spend your life blaming your father for everything.’
‘I sometimes have bad dreams that I can’t remember, and yet I remember the feeling of the dream, tiny snippets, like a smell, or a flavour that reminds me of something from long ago. It’s as if my memory has big holes in it.’
‘What’s brought this on now? Is it Jerry?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘What, then? Some event? Something you read?’
‘No.’
This is my first outright lie.
‘What then?’
‘I need time.’
‘I can help you. Tell me.’
‘I’d like to, but… but that’s it for now.’
‘It’s not very much.’
‘I’m just not ready yet. I’m sorry.’
‘So am I,’ she says and fixes me with a cool look.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I said at the outset, we need to work this out.’
‘So you interrogate me?’
‘This is a discussion between a married couple, not an interrogation.’
‘It sounds to me like an interrogation and I don’t feel like continuing.’
‘And I don’t feel like living under the same roof as someone who’s behaving the way you are,’ she says.
Perhaps it’s the whiskey, but I say: ‘Well then maybe you should find someone else’s roof to live under.’
The blood drains from her expression.
‘What did you say?’
I’m trembling. ‘I can’t help being the way I am. If that doesn’t suit you, perhaps we should rethink things.’
‘Maybe we should!’ she cries and springs to her feet. ‘Maybe that’s exactly what we should do.’
8
All trout eat each other, including females, who regularly consume their young. In the case of the alpha male, the choice and preferred size of prey is an adolescent fish, one-third of the predatory trout’s body-length.
Tim is already in his wetsuit. The sky over Roger’s Quay is clear blue and the young maple trees on the shoreline are holding the sun in their fledgling leaves. Way up in the thermals, a hawk is pinned. We walk out along the warm boards to the covered berth. Keith is working on a boat, out on the water. He waves. Tim waves back. The boat’s engine fires and I loosen the painter. Sometimes, in the mirror, particularly when I am tired, or upset, as I am now, I see the doctor. Then I get a fright, and realise I must have been afraid of him. North-east of Roger’s Quay there’s not much traffic and it’s sheltered from southerlies.
‘Hermit’s Island’s up this way,’ Tim says.
‘How do you know that?’
‘I know lots of things.’
‘You been there?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I see. So why’s it called Hermit’s Island?’
‘Keith says an old Indian once lived out there on berries and cigarettes.’
‘That’s all he lived on? Come on!’
‘Okay, I guess he also ate stuff like rabbits, birds’ eggs, lake weed, wild potatoes, bark, perch, trout, roots...’
‘Okay, okay.’
The child’s laughing face is bathed in sunlight. The engine idles as he jumps over the side and fumbles on his skis. I’m so proud of him. I didn’t learn to swim until I was thirty.
‘Ready, Granddad!’
Forward throttle.
Deep in the river, you flex your body with the stream, waiting for the shadow to disappear. This is your hunting ground, your private realm, the place you live and feed and reproduce in. Every fibre in your body shimmers. The light above your head slowly changes. Sooner or later, you will have to rise.
Tim gets up on the third attempt. On a wide expanse of empty water between islands, I keep the boat on a due-east heading so the sun won’t blind him. Either side of us, between the islands’ pine trees, figures sometimes move, dark, gliding shapes, people I have never met.
A boat comes up behind, wide out on our port side; the skipper waves. It’s Larry White, on his way to fish off one of Muskoka’s many islands. Larry’s a tall, athletic man, around my age, with penetrating blue eyes and a head of full, dark hair. Last year, shortly after he arrived in Bayport, he and I found ourselves side by side on a ten-mile cross-country ski-hike for a children’s charity. For most of that day he said nothing, but then, as we trudged through snow-sagging pines, Larry suddenly told me that in cases of spouse murder, the police always start with the surviving party. The remark surprised me, for it came out of nowhere and made me wonder at Larry’s mindset.
I wave back as his boat keeps a north-east bearing and we head for home. Illuminated foam flies over the bows as we gently thud-thud across the wake we made in the turn. Tim is a study in concentration.
9
The moon has begun to wane. Kay looks up from her desk and out of the single window of her ground-floor office in Charlton Hospital. It’s nine-thirty and her last patient has just left. Across the gardens, in the wire-fenced hospital parking lot, the yellow lights have come on. She lays her hands out flat before her. It happens the whole time, she thinks: people walk away when they have nothing left to say, even after forty-plus years.
She lays her head down on her arms and begs the night to claim her. She can remember exactly the first time she saw me: where she was, who she was with, the lovely waft of ozone on the air, laughter coming from the sea. She was on her half-day, with two other girls who were also trainee nurses, and they had taken the bus out to Tramore. Anything than spend another afternoon with her mother in a house of interminable sadness. When they got off the bus and walked towards the sea, a group of youths outside the slot machines had whistled, and the girls had laughed as they pretended not to hear.
The sea breeze blew their skirts tight to their legs as they walked the length of the strand, well over a mile from the town. She felt young and suddenly liberated. She belonged with the lazy gulls floating high over the waves, in an element she could feel but not yet imagine. She could look down and see this tall, slender girl, so full of beauty, her whole life before her, a speck on the long strand. Her arm was caught; her two companions had stopped and were looking into the sea where a large group of boys were thrashing.
‘Look! Some of them can’t swim!’ her friend giggled and the three of them had doubled up.
Kay gets up and walks to the water cooler by the window of her office. With a plastic cup she stands, watching the night as it slowly inks out the shrubs and flowerbeds and leaves the wire fence of the parking lot like an illuminated prop on an empty stage.
She can tell that Larry White, the former Mountie, is attracted to her. At first, she thought nothing of it, since, like any good-looking woman, she has long known how to deal with such advances. Yet, when she met him a week ago in the aisle of the supermarket in Charlton, and Larry made her laugh about something—now she can’t even remember what it was—she came home that night and lay in bed with a tingling want in the base of her stomach.
&n
bsp; She refills the cup and presses her forehead to the cool window. Larry, who is without a wife, looks younger than his years. His body is lean, his hands strong, and when he sees her he seems to recognise something that I have forgotten, she will later say. Of course, nobody knows where he comes from, or what he did in the Mounties, or why he now lives in Bayport. Larry is a man with no past and, for reasons she cannot understand, Kay finds that attractive too. She makes herself breathe deeply, closes her eyes, opens them again and looks into a man’s face at the other side of the window glass.
She leaps back and gasps. She screams. A man seems to be stuck there. His gaze follows her. Kay reels, turns, grabs the telephone receiver and punches out a number.
‘Security.’
‘This is Kay Smyth.’ She makes herself turn again to the window. ‘There is . . . .’
‘What is it, Mrs Smyth?’
The window is empty. Kay is shaking violently.
‘A man . . . a man has just been outside my window.’
‘In, uh, in A3?’
‘Yes, but he’s gone now.’
‘Stay in your office, ma’am. Lock the door. I’ll be right there.’
She cannot bring herself to go over and lower the blinds. She stumbles out to the corridor, its walls white, the sterility of the hollow space suddenly chilling. Silence hums. She shrinks into the doorway of the washroom, unwilling to enter and lock herself in a cubicle, unable to bring herself to leave the building. The door is open to her office and from where she stands she can just about see the window. There is no one there.
His face was distorted, the way he pressed it against the glass, or he might have disguised it, for it seemed unnaturally pale. If he was one of her patients, she would recognise him, although she sees no one from the high-risk end of psychiatric pathology. In all likelihood it was a vagrant, or a drunk, who has wandered into the hospital grounds and been drawn to her illuminated window. The recession has played havoc with people’s lives. Kay breathes more evenly. She does not want the security guard to find her cowering in a door-well. She returns to her office.
The Trout Page 2