The Stone Diaries

by Carol Shields

  “Not many women feel that way about their fathers-in-law.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Magnus Flett was my great-grandfather,” Victoria put in, wanting perhaps to share responsibility for the brokenness of families.

  They drank their tea in silence. Then Lewis, determinedly bright, raised a celebratory tea cup and said, “Here’s to the bones of the real Magnus Flett! We’ll find him yet.”

  “You made a rhyme,” said Victoria, who liked to see eagerness in others.

  “Oh, well,” Victoria’s aunt said, her mouth smiling now, her chest full of heartbeats.

  The next day the wind died down. The sun came on surprisingly strong, and tourists in shorts and T-shirts and summer dresses poured off the ferry and thronged the narrow streets of Stromness, eating ice-cream, buying postcards.

  It was evening and the light still bright. Lewis and Victoria lingered over their shepherd’s pie at the Grey Stones Hotel dining room and explained to Victoria’s Aunt Daisy their reason for coming to Orkney. Lew pulled out a pencil and made a little sketch on his paper napkin, hastily executed, yet beautiful—or so it seemed to Victoria, who later folded the napkin carefully in two and pressed it in the back lining of her suitcase. The islands, Lew said, abounded with the fossil remains of small sea animals. But evidence of early plant life has been destroyed. The temperature of the earth was wrong, the plant structures too fragile. But back in Toronto, working with a set of computer-enhanced maps, the latest thing, he and Victoria had been investigating fossil patterns found in the north of Scotland, tracing a broad arc through the west of that country and up into Scandinavia—this arc, with just a little bending, passed through the outlying tip of Orkney’s Mainland, persuading them that certain rock formations at Yesanby, a few miles north of Stromness, held promise. The rock was different here, harder, so much so that islanders had traditionally gone to this remote point of land in search of millstones, the rest of the Orkney rock being too soft to serve. Lewis mentioned the Rhynie chert, he mentioned Middle Old Red sandstone. He explained how he had applied to the Science Council of Canada for a travel grant, and how he had assembled his equipment and his research team, a team that consisted of himself and Victoria Flett. The two of them had twenty-one days to poke around and write up their notes before the funds ran out. Both of them brimmed with optimism; biology, Lewis argued, will always frustrate the attempt of specialists to systematize and regulate; the variables are too many; the earth is sometimes withholding, yes, but more frequently generous.

  Victoria looked across the table and regarded her aunt, who appeared rested, serene, and flushed with the heat of a long day. Because of the fine weather she’d left her suit jacket upstairs in the room the two of them were sharing, and she was musing now about whether she should perhaps have a look in the local shops the following day, see if she could find a lightweight dress in her size.

  She’d slept soundly last night, solidly, which was just as well.

  Victoria, gazing at her aunt, felt a lurch of love, and claimed for herself a share of her aunt’s present contentment, her ease. She almost wished there were hardships she might save her from, gifts she might give her. Right now, right this minute, the little tongues of amity between Lewis and her aunt seemed beautiful to her, the beginning of something.

  Lewis was telling her about the bicycles and backpacks he had rented so that he and Victoria could ride out to Yesanby the following morning and start their investigation. “We’ll start digging for our little wonders,” Lewis told her, “and leave you to find Magnus Flett.”

  “Did I hear you say Magnus Flett?” the proprietor of their hotel said, pausing by their table and pouring out their coffee.

  The proprietor’s name was Mr. Sinclair. He was a large, nobly built man, a lifelong bachelor with a clever face and a headful of fine gray hair which he was forever palming back from his forehead. How on earth had this person got into the hotel business, Victoria wondered—he should have been a movie actor with his graceful, his almost silvery way of setting down plates on a table and his sweet droll country voice. His hotel, which had only six bedrooms, was advertised as having “All Mod Cons,” meaning some of the rooms were equipped with electric heaters. Mr. Sinclair in his neat gray overall, gliding up and down the carpeted stairs, was desk clerk, chambermaid, cook, server.

  “Did I hear you say you were looking for Magnus Flett?” he said politely, leaning in his silvery way over the table. “Now, you will excuse me for interrupting, but I couldn’t help overhearing you saying something or other about old Magnus Flett. Magnus Flett, why he’s just next door, you know.”

  “Next door?”

  “The Sycamore Manor. You must have walked right by it. It’s where the old folk are, the ones as have no family that can keep them. When I was a lad there were sycamore trees in the back garden but they’re gone now, of course. It was a private house before the Council took it over. That’s where old Flett is. The famous Mr. Flett, I should say.”

  Victoria shook her head; she looked more comely tonight than she would have guessed. “Our Magnus Flett’s dead,” she said with a measure of solemnity. “He was born in 1862. We don’t know when he died, but we’re sure of when he was born because the date is on some legal documents my aunt has.”

  “That would be his nibs all right,” Mr. Sinclair nodded, smiling. “That is if you believe he’s the age he says he is, and I happen to be of one of them who takes the man’s word on it. His picture’s in the Orcadian every year on his birthday. This year they had the London papers up as well. The poor old lad was a hundred and fifteen years old, just think of that. Oh, not more than a month or so ago it was, a birthday party like you never saw. They had a cake big as this table here. Candles alight, a regular bonfire, course he slept right through it all. Why, Mr. Flett, he’s the oldest man in the British Isles.”

  It was not his age alone that made old Magnus Flett famous. It was his prodigious memory.

  In the summer of 1977, the year Victoria and her colleague, Lewis Roy, and her elderly Great-aunt Daisy visited the legendary Orkney Islands on their separate expeditions of discovery, Magnus Flett’s reputation did indeed rest on those 115 years of his. This is a very great age. There is a woman in the Ukraine who is said to be 121, and a pair of brothers in Armenia whose ages are given, respectively, as 118 and 116 (with documents to support their claim).

  An Inuit woman living in the Anglican Church hostel at Rankin Inlet has sworn on a Bible that she is 112 years of age (she took up a cigarette habit at eighty-five, whisky at ninety). And then there is the undisputed champion of human antiques: Mr. Gee of Singapore, still ambulatory at 123, though only his wife (aged ninetysix) has actually clapped eyes on him in recent years. Proven or unproven, great old age is heartening to observe, and Magnus Flett with his remarkable span of years is a celebrity. He has been profiled in the British weeklies (“A Life in the Day of Magnus Flett,” The Sunday Times, 16 March 1962, p. 54). And once, ten years ago, he appeared before the BBC television cameras, staring straight out at the audience and doing “his thing.”

  “His thing,” much more so than his age, is what has made the man famous: his ability, that is, to recite the whole of Jane Eyre by heart, chapter by chapter, every sentence, every word. Mr. Sinclair describes this achievement to his visitors, his soft voice softened even further by awe.

  An impossible feat, some people might say, people who are unfamiliar with the retentive qualities of the human brain. Probably these same people have never heard how certain devout individuals in long ago days memorized the complete New Testament. That even at the beginning of our own century it was not unusual to find quite ordinary mortals who had the Gospels by heart, though, later, Sunday School prizes were given out for such trifling accomplishments as the Beatitudes or the One Hundredth Psalm. Scholars have for years insisted that the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf was recited at banquets by a single performer who had no text to refer to.

  Daisy Goodwill F
lett was told of his extraordinary achievement while a student at Long College for Women back in the twenties; during that same period of her life she herself committed the whole of Tintern Abbey to memory—not because her professor required her to, but because she felt a longing to take the oracular, rhythmic lines of William Wordsworth into her body.

  Naturally, at the age of 115, Magnus Flett’s memory has begun to fade, Mr. Sinclair acknowledges that. At the time of the television interview ten years ago he was able to recite only the first chapter of Jane Eyre, but this he did without once stumbling or hesitating.

  A year ago he could manage only the first page. And now, as Mr. Sinclair warns his North American visitors, the poor old fellow can handle only the opening lines of the opening paragraph.

  The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals. Why does young Victoria work so hard to keep old Magnus Flett out of her thoughts? And why does her Greataunt Daisy, day after day, put off her visit to Sycamore Manor?

  Every evening she offers her niece excuses, saying she has been seeing the local sights, or occupied with shopping for a summer dress. The warm temperatures continue, a new Orkney record for the last week of June, and she claims she wants to make the most of this unprecedented weather. In her new cotton skirt and blouse (a solid burgundy shade) and her newly acquired walking shoes, she’s braved the fields above Stromness, finding along the way heather, crowberry, various sedges and the beautiful, tiny Scottish primrose (Primula scotica) in all its pink profusion. “Love! tenderness! courage!” she murmurs to the tilted landscape, for no reason that she can think of. Mr. Sinclair, a connoisseur of the pastoral, accompanies her on some of her outings. After the hotel’s midday meal has been served, after the washing-up is done, these two set out together in his smart little Ford Fiesta, visiting the churches and graveyards of neighboring villages, and one day they come across a tombstone whose family name has worn away, but whose date—1675—and brief inscription remain clearly visible:

  “Behold the end of life!” A single ringing declaration. (You would think this shout from the land of the dead would have unsettled Mrs. Flett, but instead she falls under its spell, as though she has seen a vision or heard a voice speaking through that exclamation point, announcing a fountain of radiance glimpsed at life’s periphery.)

  “Did you visit Magnus Flett?” Victoria asks each evening, returning sunburned and dusty from the rock beds of Yesanby.

  “Tomorrow,” her aunt promises. “Tomorrow I’ll make arrangements.”

  The both know—even Lewis Roy knows, watching her, mute and patient with her tea cup raised—that she is preparing herself against disappointment.

  Mrs. Flett is discovering that the Orkney greenness is deceptive.

  What looks like yards of fertile black earth is only a thin covering over beds of layered rock. Rock is what these islands are made of, light shelfy limestone, readily split into flakes and flags, and easily worked; it’s everywhere. Each farm, it seems, has its own miniquarry, and the tools of quarrying—hammer, point, and klurer—are part of every farmer’s equipment. There being but little wood available, stone flags are used for roofs, for fences, for picnic tables and benches, for milestones and markers, bringing a smile to Mrs. Flett’s face as she thinks of her grandchildren’s favorite television show, The Flintstones. She imagines that the farmhouses she and Mr. Sinclair drive past are furnished with stone chairs and stone tables and even beds and dressers of stone. She recalls that her father-in-law, Magnus Flett, came to Canada at the age of eighteen or nineteen, already a master of his trade: stonecutting.

  He worked in the Tyndall quarry until he was sixty-five. A man of muscle and mechanical skills, a working man. By all accounts he had no softness to him. He spoke but little, according to his sons. Unyieldingness is the reputation he left behind. Narrowness. Stone.

  He was literate; he could read the Bible or the mail order catalogue if needs be, but he was not a man who would ever have sat himself down to read a book. Mrs. Flett knows this without being told. No, it would not enter his head to read a book. Particularly not a novel. Not a novel by an Englishwoman named Charlotte Brontë.

  And never that jewel of English literature, Jane Eyre.

  Impossible.

  “Do you want me to go with you when you visit Magnus Flett?” her niece offers, with something like reluctance.

  “If you like,” Mr. Sinclair says to her, “I could accompany you when you call on Magnus Flett.”

  “Tomorrow,” Mrs. Flett says. “Tomorrow.”

  But the next day she and Mr. Sinclair drove out to the Yesanby site where Lewis and Victoria were at work.

  The end of the road had fallen into disrepair, and they were obliged to park the car at the East Bigging crossroad and walk half a mile over the moors to the rugged promontory. Victoria, seeing them approach, waved both her arms and called out an exuberant welcome, her cries blending with the squawks of seabirds and the roar of the waves coming in below.

  The sun on the rocks was brilliant. And rising up at the edge of the shining, slippery stone terraces was the famous God’s Gate which Victoria had described to her aunt, an immense natural archway through which every seventh or eighth wave came loudly crashing. (Fifty years earlier, two amateur photographers were said to have climbed into the aperture, and, before the eyes of their wives and children, been swept out to sea.)

  It seemed to Mrs. Flett, blinking in the late afternoon sunlight, that she was all at once dwarfed by the hugeness around her: the overwhelming height of the rock formation, the expanse and violence of the sea below, and the high wide-spreading desolate moorland; at the edge of her vision, outside the boom and wash of the sea winds, was Mr. Sinclair’s parked car, no more than a speck on the horizon. Mr. Sinclair himself stood a few feet away, his large arms folded peacefully as wings across his broad chest, at home in his magisterial body. This lightness she felt!—her body suspended between the noise and the immensity of the world—what was it?

  She was unable for a minute to put a name to the gusty air blowing through her, softening her face into a smile, and then it came to her: happiness. She was happy.

  Mrs. Flett’s favorite niece, Victoria, and Lewis Roy, a man whose existence she had known nothing about two weeks ago, scrambled like insects on the plates of outcropping rock, and scraped with their tiny tools at the surface of the hidden world, hoping for what? To find a microscopic tracing of buried life. Life turned to stone. To bitter minerals. Such a discovery, they had told her, would be enormous in its implications—it excited them just thinking about such enormity—but at the same time the proof of discovery could be held lightly in the palm of a hand, a small rock chip imprinted with the outline of a leaf. Or a primitive flower. A trace, even, of bacteria, fine as knitting, the coded dots of life.

  So far, however, and with fewer than half a dozen days remaining, they had turned up nothing.

  During the long dark nights in the Grey Stones Hotel, Victoria lies in Lewis Roy’s arms.

  She waits until her aunt is sleeping soundly, then rises, feels about in the dark for her slippers, and makes her way noiselessly down the narrow passage to Room 5, where Lewis lies, ready. There is an element of French farce in her nightly excursions, and Victoria values this theatrical frisson and adds it to the mound of her present happiness. The dim corridor, with its gleams and shadows, its antique chest, mirror, and grandfather clock, is softly carpeted, and its dimensions are not entirely lost to darkness since Mr. Sinclair has thoughtfully provided a rosy little nightlight for his guests’ convenience. There is just enough light, in fact, for Victoria to make out the words on a pretty Victorian plate which is mounted on the wall next to the bathroom.

  Happiness grows at our own fireside and is not to be picked in strangers’ gardens

  Firesides! Gardens! Tip-toeing down the hall at two a.m. an
d pausing to read these words, she wants to snort with laughter.

  Both she and Lewis believe the verse to be an admonition against the kind of rapture they have uncovered these last few days.

  Night after night, in the crisp white sheets of Mr. Sinclair’s genteel establishment, they go deeper and deeper into that mystery, sleeping and waking, and bringing to life those parts of themselves they had thought stunted, disentitled. A year ago, even a month ago, each would have scorned the accidental convergence of island air, soft sunlight, long days—and the possibility of scientific miscalculation, even failure—convincing themselves that the rewards of erotic love were no more than a temporary recompense, a consolation for the poor in spirit.

  She has said nothing to Aunt Daisy about her discovery, or about her plans for the future, knowing as she does her greataunt’s concern over her son Warren, his two divorces, and now Alice’s bitter separation from her husband, Ben. Victoria suspects that Aunt Daisy—though how can she know this for sure?—might endorse the sentiments of the Victorian wall plate, believing that, all things considered, the gardens of strangers are more likely to bring harm than happiness.

  “I should warn you,” Mrs. Betty Holloway said, “he is completely bedridden. Incontinent naturally.”

  “Well, yes, I understand.”

  “Another thing, Mrs. Flett, he scarcely sees at all. Cataracts. Inoperable at his age.”

  “To be expected, I suppose.”

  “Surprisingly, he does have some hearing in one ear.”

  “Oh.”

  “But is completely deaf in the other. Has been for a long time.”

  “I see.”

  “He tires very easily.”

  “I won’t stay long.”

  “You’re a relative, you say?”

  “Well, I’m not sure. I might be. On my husband’s side.”

  “He has no family. Not around here at any rate. Sad, isn’t it.”