A Year Less a Day (36 page)

“I'll have to use Canadian salmon and Canadian cheddar in the sandwiches, David,” she had said as she'd made her shopping list. “And I suppose I should make a dessert using maple syrup.”

“Maybe they'd prefer something typically British for a change,” Bliss had gently suggested, but it had merely drawn a flippant rebuke.

“I could do tripe and onions, jellied eels, or haggis,” she had said with a straight face. “Though I noticed that the butcher had some chitterlings in his window yesterday—that's boiled pigs' intestines, David. Which do you think they might like?”

“I think they'll like the salmon and cheese,” he had laughed, and left her in charge of the remaining arrangements.

By the time that Bliss eats his way out of the Gay Friar, the British Airways flight from Vancouver has taxied to a halt at Heathrow, and Ruth's eyes are everywhere as she walks through the terminal attempting to see through the chimera. The ground feels solid enough; the strange accents of the immigration and customs officers
sound genuinely English; the posters and billboards advertising alien products are all well conceived, yet she knows that this isn't happening—although she would be the first to admit that whoever concocted the illusion has done a stellar job.

“How are you feeling, Ruth?” asks Phillips, noticing her perplexity, and she wants to ask,
How did they do this?
but realizes that it's a stupid question.

“I still can't believe it,” she says. “I'd ask you to pinch me, but this dream is so real that I'd probably feel it.”

“You're not dreaming,” says Trina. “Look, there's a ‘bobby' over there.”

“Don't ...” yells Phillips a fraction too late to stop Trina rushing up to the helmeted policeman as she pulls out her camera.

“Sorry, officer,” says Phillips as he grabs Trina's arm and starts to drag her away.

“I don't mind, sir,” says the constable. “I'm used to it.”

“Great,” says Trina, breaking free, and she quickly pushes Ruth into place so that she can get a group shot.

“I used to go out with a copper,” Trina tells Ruth and Phillips as they walk away.

“Where?” asks Ruth.

“In London,” Trina answers matter-of-factly. “I was a student here in my crazy days. I lived in a shoe-box overlooking Piccadilly Circus.”

“I didn't know that,” declares Ruth.

“I even lived in Moscow for awhile. Though I've forgotten most of my Russian,” she adds, then she spots the sign for the railway station and heads them in that direction.

“Why not take the train to Westchester,” Bliss had suggested to Phillips when he had called the previous day. “Then I can drive us up to London and show you around.”

“Thanks,” Phillips had replied, grateful that he wouldn't have to get his mind in gear for driving on the left; but as they stand in line for train tickets, he is beginning to wonder if it might not be quicker to rent a car. The line has been at a standstill for several minutes as the front man, an enormous Russian, battles with a belligerent booking clerk who is determined not to comprehend the foreign visitor. Despite the aspersions Trina has cast over her linguistic ability, she finally loses patience and steps in, saying, “He wants three return tickets to Westminster Abbey. Two adults and a child, please.” Then she turns to the new arrival and carries on chatting as cordially as if they were long lost friends.

“What were you saying?” asks Ruth in awe as they make their way down the escalator to the platform, with the Russian and his wife and daughter in their wake, and Trina sloughs it off. “I've no idea, but he seemed to understand.”

Ruth is mesmerized by the sights as the Heathrow Express zooms them into the heart of London, and she stands on the banks of the Thames pointing out the Houses of Parliament and London's giant Ferris wheel, saying, “Oh my God. I can't believe it, Mike.”

The locals say “Gob-smacked,” according to Trina, and she smiles at the happy couple as they gape at London's famous skyline, and she prays that the black spectre just over the horizon will turn out to be nothing more than a harmless will-o'-the-wisp.

The high-speed train from London to Westchester rockets along at over two hundred kilometres per hour, while Tudor hamlets with thatched cottages and Victorian towns with neat rows of brick-red houses fly past the windows.

“The cars are so cute,” says Ruth, watching the traffic as they run alongside a road for a few moments.
“They look like little ducklings zipping along to catch up their mother.”

The spring sunshine has swept away all but the very deepest drifts of snow, and the fields and hedgerows are bursting with fresh green growth. An ordinarily lazy river rushes with melt-water, snatching and tearing at the branches of a weeping willow as it trails its slender tentacles in the torrent, while another tree, a small oak, has succumbed to the urge and is riding the barrage all the way to the sea. Meadows of spring flowers splash past the windows in smudges of yellow and white, until the lowlands give way to the chalk downs, where the winter wheat has had the weight lifted off its back by the thaw, and is now spurting skyward in a verdant rush to the summer's harvest.

“Are you nervous?” Phillips asks Ruth as the train starts to descend into Westchester, and all the joy drains from her face as she suddenly remembers the purpose of their visit.

“Is it true that if you travel fast enough, you go back in time?” she asks, and Phillips nods. “I've heard that. Why?”

“I guess that's what I'm doing.”

“The past is the only thing that prevents you from grasping the future,” says Trina, sounding grandiose as she quotes from
Reader's Digest
again.

“I feel like I did when Mom disappeared,” admits Ruth. “Part of me wanted her to come home, but most of me didn't.”

A familiar smiling face greets Mike Phillips at Westchester station's platform barrier, and Ruth puts on a brave face as Bliss shakes her hand.

“We've brought a friend,” says Phillips, and sees Bliss's puzzlement as he looks along the near deserted platform. “She's just sorting out a little problem,” he
adds, pointing to Trina who is now crossing the footbridge to the opposite platform with a family in tow.

Trina has finally hit the jackpot as a saviour of strays and has scored a hat trick. While she had been making her way to the end of the carriage, readying to disembark in Westchester, she had been aghast at the sight of the Russian man, together with his wife and daughter, rising from nearby seats and preparing to leave the train with her.

“Westchinster?” the man had asked in pidgin English as he'd pointed to the “Westchester” signboard, and Trina's face had fallen, knowing that, at Heathrow airport, when she had said “Just follow us” in broken Russian, she had meant only as far as the station platform.

“At least she's not taking them to the pound,” laughs Phillips while they wait for Trina to guide the confused family to the correct platform for their return to London. Then he looks around, asking, “Where's Daphne?”

“She's probably lining up a ceremonial guard of neighbours for you to inspect,” says Bliss with a smirk. “Although knowing Daphne, it wouldn't surprise me if we get back to find the Regimental Band of the Royal Marines marching up and down the street playing the ‘Maple Leaf Rag.'”

“I know someone like that,” laughs Phillips, giving a nod in Trina's direction.

Ruth's nervous silence is palpable as they wait at the gate for Trina, and her striking ebony eyes dart back and forth as if she's expecting to be attacked.

“So when do we meet the man in the manor?” asks Phillips, knowing that someone will eventually have to bring up the thorny topic.

“We'll have lunch first, so that we can discuss tactics,” suggests Bliss, though he knows that he has no
plans other than a brazen frontal attack on the manor's main gate. “Daphne's laying out quite a spread in your honour,” he carries on, as he picks up Ruth's suitcase at the sight of Trina running along the platform toward them.

Daphne has called upon reinforcements to help with the preparations. Mavis and Minnie are scuttling around doing all the menial tasks, while she puts the finishing flourish on her pyramids of salmon and cheese sandwiches by adding a handful of miniature Canadian flags flying from toothpicks. A flask of rye whisky and several bottles of Canada Dry ginger ale stand on the sideboard and, over a large pan of boiling water in the kitchen, steams her
pièce de résistance
. Adding a distinctly Canadian twist to a traditional English favourite, she has made a gigantic maple syrup suet pudding, which she will serve with lashings of homemade creamy custard.

Superintendent Donaldson, in full regalia, pulls up at the house just as the visitors arrive, and leads the charge on the dining room. Trina quickly migrates to the kitchen, offering to help, and finds a soulmate in Daphne.

“What a brilliant young woman—and we even spoke in Russian,” Daphne tells Bliss, as everyone except Ruth digs in to the sandwiches a short while later.

“You speak Russian?” says Bliss without a hint of skepticism.

“I've forgotten most of it,” Daphne admits modestly, “but Trina and I did quite well, considering. It's so nice to talk to someone from another country; you can learn so much. I simply had no idea that Canadians put bananas in more or less everything.”

Ruth has found a corner and sits as glumly as a convict awaiting sentence, while the others try not to let her depression drag them down.

“I know it's Jordan. I always knew he wasn't dead,” Ruth moans to Donaldson when he gets too close, “but no one believed me.”

“We'll soon know for sure,” says the superintendent, and Bliss suggests that it is time for her to bite the bullet.

“Are you ready, Ruth?” he says as he holds out her coat. “I'll drop you at the gates, but you and Mike will have to walk up the drive.”

“Aren't you coming with us, Dave?” asks Phillips, but Bliss shakes his head. “I think I'm
persona non grata
. He'd probably come after me with a shotgun.”

“But what's Jordan doing there?” Ruth questions, having finally accepted the inexorableness of the situation.

“Plywood,” replies Bliss; then he tells them of his morning's chat with the truck driver.

“I didn't think he knew much about wood,” claims Ruth, but she doesn't push the point, realizing that there are a lot of things she doesn't know about her husband. Then she asks, “What does he look like now?”

Mike Phillips watches her expression closely as Bliss describes the man at the manor. “He's tall, about my height, distinguished looking—like a politician; he's got blue eyes, and his hair is just turning at the temples. If you had a photograph, I'd soon tell you.”

“There aren't any photographs,” says Phillips, though Ruth is more honest as she admits that Jordan had destroyed them all.

“You might have a problem getting in ...” starts Bliss, then pauses, realizing that there is no delicate way to tell Ruth that her husband might turn her away. “If he sees you on the security camera he might not open the gate,” he continues, but Daphne has an idea, and she quickly trots upstairs and returns with an enormous wide-brimmed straw hat. “He'll never see you under this,” she says plopping it onto Ruth's head.

“I just hope the wind doesn't get under it,” laughs Bliss, as Ruth uses both hands to balance it, and he's almost waiting for Daphne to explain how she'd last used it as a parachute to fly a Bulgarian dissident to freedom across the Iron Curtain, or some such spine-tingling escapade, when she confesses that she'd never worn it.

“You'd better stay here and keep Daphne company, Trina,” suggests Phillips, fearing her presence at the manor could inflame a potentially volatile situation, and the nurse pulls him to one side, whispering harshly. “If it is him, Mike—you drag her out of there by her hair if you have to.”

The main gates to Thraxton Manor are closed as Bliss drops off Phillips and Ruth, telling them that he will be watching from a parking spot further along the road.

“You'll have to use the side gate,” Bliss tells them as he leaves, but as they approach, a snarling bull mastiff throws himself at the fence and Phillips is forced to use the telephone attached to the gate pillar.

“I'm Sergeant Mike Phillips of the RCMP. I heard a fellow Canuck was in the neighbourhood,” he says cheerily in response to the gruff, “Yep.”

The remote-controlled surveillance camera swivels their way and Phillips hisses, “Keep your head down,” to Ruth. A silent whistle stops the huge dog mid-bark and sends it running back to the house, and an electronic “click” announces that the gate is now unlocked.

“Just walk straight up the drive to the stables. Someone will be with you in a few minutes,” commands the voice, and Ruth starts backing away, saying, “I'm gonna throw up.”

Phillips grabs her, slots her through the gate, and hustles her out of the view of the camera as
she heaves up her breakfast, while at the top of the driveway inside the stable apartment, the occupant is looking at his watch and praying that Mort will answer the phone despite the earliness of the hour in Vancouver.

“What?” yells Mort.

“What the hell's going on, Mort?”

“What's the f'kin time? An' I told you—no names on the phone. You never know who's listening—know what I mean?”

“I've got a pig from Canada at the door, says he was just passing by.”

“I dunno,” says Mort, still trying to get his mind straight. One of my shit-heads got hauled in by the fuzz for drillin' a hole in a kiddie's guinea pig, but he doesn't know nuvving. In fact, he's so f'kin useless that he's gonna have to go—know what I mean?”

“What do you think I should do, then?”