Good Hope Road: A Novel (3 page)

The detritus of six generations of Stonebridges, all captured and compressed on to the convex surface of the mirror. The blackness of the glass absorbed both colour and light, its opacity rendering the reflected images flatter, less vivid. The apple trees framed in the window, the edge of the barn just visible, the winter sun – all as if diluted when viewed in the mirror, sundered from frost and shine and the depth of everyday living.

His father’s face was no longer florid, the vein in his forehead smoother, the pallor of his broad but finely formed hands accentuated as he drummed on the arms of the chair, stopping now and again to sop up the moisture that still dribbled down his cheek. He’d squeezed the errant eye shut to control the twitching, but Jim saw how the other one darted still, from this corner of the room to that, as if hunting an unseen enemy.

‘Can never be too careful,’ the Major said abruptly. ‘Tricky bastards, the Boche.’ He drummed his fingers on the arms again, frowning as a thought struck him. ‘This woman,’ he said suspiciously, ‘she could have been—’

‘Just tourists,’ Jim repeated.

The Major looked up sharply, recalling the mirror on the wall, and was suddenly aware of his son’s scrutiny. Their eyes met, the small subterfuge of the son evident in the slight and momentary widening of his eyes; a percussive flush of shame. Then anger, in the father’s at the concern he saw in the other’s face, at himself, for placing it there. Both faces grew shuttered in the very next instant; nothing left to see but a studied blandness. The mirror leaching the blue so thoroughly from both pairs of irises that the years between them seemed to fall away: two pairs of matched, water-colour eyes, watching each other in the dark mirrored glass.

Jim flipped the flies over with deliberate casualness. ‘Flatlanders. Early this year. Flew so low, they spooked the fish.’

The Major stared coolly at his son. He nodded. ‘Flatlanders,’ he agreed.

A wind came whistling up towards the house, rattling the shutters and reaching draughty fingers under the kitchen door. The Major hawked his throat in response, spitting a rich, dark-coloured stream of tobacco juice into the fire where it hissed and spluttered in the flames.

He frowned. ‘You ought to have waited. They’d have returned. The
fish
,’ he elaborated irritably. ‘After the sound quieted, they’d have come back.’

im did not think of the girl from the plane in the days that followed. Still, when he saw her next, in the general store two weeks after, Jim knew it was her at once. She stood with her back to him, examining bolts of some pale fabric at the counter. It was her hair he recognised. Rich red, as deeply coloured as he remembered from when he’d seen it streaming behind her in that plane. It curled loose about her shoulders now, a lush, vixen pelt.

She glanced briefly over her shoulder as the door chime sounded, before turning back to her scrutiny of the fabric. For some reason it annoyed him, the brevity of her attention, as if he’d expected her to recognise him too. He let his gaze linger, taking in the way the blue dress she wore moved with her, moulding to the supple waist, the long legs, the surprisingly defined calves.

‘Jim.’ Mrs Dalloway beamed from behind the counter. She stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. ‘Your father, how is he?’

He shrugged.

She took the grocery list from him, not bothering to read through it as she began setting out packs of smoking tobacco on the counter with practised ease. ‘Do you know, I almost ran out of these? One of those flatlander tourists came in looking for a few just the other day. Said I was all out though, knew you’d be coming by soon enough . . .’

‘Excuse me.’ The girl smiled at Mrs Dalloway. ‘I don’t mean to interrupt, but may I have a look at the teal, over there?’

‘Of course, dear.’ Glancing apologetically at Jim, Mrs Dalloway bustled over, donning the pair of spectacles that dangled perman- ently around her neck. ‘Now, which one is it that you wanted? The green-blue one over there – or is it blue-green? It’s pretty, isn’t it?’

‘You been out yet this season, Jim?’ Mrs Dalloway called. She nodded at the flies tied in a corner. ‘The river’s running again.’

He looked involuntarily at the girl, as if she might somehow connect this mention of the river, and fishing, with him. ‘Still too cold for the fish, I reckon.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, with this spell of sun that we’re having . . .’ she gestured at the chairs set around the old potbellied stove. ‘Been keeping even the regulars away, that’s how warm it’s turned.’

Jim had passed old Asaph and Jeremiah Thompson beside the church earlier that morning, sunning themselves on the benches around the large maple. ‘They’ll be by. Isn’t anyone strong enough to keep away from your coffee, Mrs Dalloway.’

She laughed, her cheeks turning pink with pleasure at the compliment. ‘You could be right, you could be right.’ She turned back to her customer. ‘So, what do you think, dear? It does suit your colouring.’

‘I’m not sure . . . They are all so pretty, it’s hard to decide.’

A hint of iron entered Mrs Dalloway’s voice. ‘Well now, you need to make up your mind, dear. Here, why don’t I let you decide while I finish up with Jim.’

She resumed stacking the tins of tobacco on the counter. ‘Flat- landers!’ she mouthed to him, rolling her eyes. ‘Now let’s see. Coffee, flour—’

‘Hi, you there, in the overalls. Help a girl out, would you?’ Jim turned, startled. The girl had two different swathes of fabric draped over her, tucked over each shoulder and about her waist. She cocked her head, smiling, and that mane of hair fell to one side. ‘The teal, or the rose?’

He began to say something, caught off guard, then shrugged, embarrassed. The girl laughed, a low throaty sound that seemed to him all kinds of knowing, making him feel like a fool.

‘Well, that decides it,’ she declared. Unwinding the bolts from about her, she piled them onto the counter. ‘I’ll buy both, and that’s that.’

She sauntered over, her heels loud on the wooden floor as Jim handed his father’s card to Mrs Dalloway.

‘Why, is that a veteran’s card?’

‘Yes, dear.’ There was still a touch of asperity in Mrs Dalloway’s voice. ‘It’s Major Stonebridge’s – Jim’s father. He was in the war.’

‘The town must be proud.’

‘That we are,’ Mrs Dalloway agreed, her tone softening at the girl’s interest. ‘He was decorated in France you know. A real Yankee doughboy.’

The girl turned to Jim, intrigued.

‘Do you think we might meet him? My friends and I, we have a summer theatre camp going. Well, spring camp, I suppose. We thought we’d begin early this year, no point in waiting about when we were all quite bored.
Any
way, we’re working on a play. It’s about soldiers. And the Great War. Do you think your father might accord us the pleasure of his counsel? Lend some authenticity to our shenanigans?’

‘No.’ Jim didn’t bother elaborating the bald refusal, still prickling from his earlier fumble.

‘He’s a private sort, dear, the Major,’ Mrs Dalloway piped up helpfully. ‘Keeps to himself, a real stay-at-home. Why, I don’t think I’ve seen him in years, isn’t that right, Jim?’

‘Yes, but I’m sure if he knew . . . Oh!’ The girl paused, her mouth rounding dramatically over the ‘Oh’. ‘Why, how rude, I’ve yet to introduce myself!’ She extended a slim-boned hand, not put off in the least by his reticence. ‘I’m Madeleine. Madeleine Scott.’

After that morning, he thought of her. That rich red colour. Suddenly, it was everywhere. In the roan of a cow, in the threads unravelling from the velvet of his father’s smoking jacket. In a portrait on a wall, a past Mrs Stonebridge wearing something red and sparkling about her throat. In the seams of the leather armchair, and the bridles glistening with oil against the wall of the barn. In the apples that lay fallen around the oldest tree in the orchard, arcs and moons of red on snow-patch ground.

Jim turned from the window, glancing restlessly at the black mirror. He could still see the tree, grafted from the earliest on the orchard. It seemed to list even more crookedly towards the barn when viewed in reflection, the memory of last year’s storm in its jagged crown and gnarled, arthritic stem. The littered apples seemed at once attenuated and exaggerated, the red of their skins muted, but taking on a strange, subterranean glow, as if they were on an illustrated plate in one of his great-grandfather’s books.

The image jogged Jim’s memory, reminding him of a book he hadn’t thought about in years. He waited until the Major had stepped outside, vaguely guilty as he watched him make his way through the dooryard. Only then did he head upstairs. He pulled out the book from the corner cupboard, shaking it to dislodge any insects that might be roosting within its pages despite the cedar roses that Ellie had thought to place along the shelves.

He whacked it against the windowsill and a puff of rust-coloured rot rose from the leather spine. It hung in the air, soft and amorph- ous, before drifting down, obscuring and then revealing the blurred image of the Major through the thick-paned glass. Jim studied his father for an instant, watching as the Major stooped and fussed around the fruit trees that were trained over the stone walls of the orchard. He turned his attention back to the book. It was a cyclopedia of painters and paintings. He flipped through the plates of reproductions, and there she was, just as he’d remembered her.

Venus Anadyomene
.

‘
Aphrodite
’, the Major had pencilled in the margin. ‘
Made famous
in a much-admired, now-lost painting by Apelles. Said to be inspired by Phyrne, the famous Greek courtesan, who, during the festivals of the Eleusinia and Poseidonia, was given to swimming in the sea, naked
.’

The woman in the black-and-white illustration was full-hipped and bare, squeezing the water from hair that hung over one shoulder. The lack of colour rendered the image flat, antiseptic, but nonetheless he still remembered the thrill he’d felt as a boy when he’d first happened upon her. The illicit tingle of pleasure as he’d taken in that expanse of unclothed skin.

‘It’s a very famous painting,’ the Major had explained to his young son. ‘Well, a painting of a painting, although no one knows for certain what the original looked like. Titian. He was the artist. His name also means “a shade of red”.’

He’d said nothing in front of his father, but later, he’d stolen open the book and coloured in the woman’s hair and the tips of those perky, gloriously naked breasts with a stick of bright-red Crayola.

A good thrashing it had earned him too, he remembered as he stared down at the page. Venus – or Aphrodite – who had once appeared so alluring now looked to him doughy and lumpen. The hair though . . . he touched a finger to it, tracing the strokes of red crayon, smudging the colour gently into the paper.
A blue dress. A mane of red hair, tumbling down her back.
He trailed his finger lower, down the exposed throat, to the chest, to the tips of the woman’s breasts.

There was a flare in his groin. Suddenly restless, Jim shut the book with a snap and put it back in the cupboard, the rot settling on to his corduroys like soft, rust-coloured soot.

The third time he saw her, it was in the woods again. When Ellie came in the following Wednesday to cook and tidy up the place, she told Jim about a bobcat sighting, over by the Garland place, said that her kid had mentioned it to her. He set out the next morning, not particularly hopeful of bagging the creature without a dog to trail and tree it. Still, a bobcat sighting could hardly be ignored, not with the bounty paid by the State for each furred head.

He walked about the brush where the animal had last been sighted, methodically combing the ground. Sure enough, there they were: a neat set of tracks. His gut told him that if the cat was headed anywhere, it would be to the ridge that lay eastward, towards the river. Plenty of rocks and ledges there for resting places, and the wetlands teeming with hares and such for prey.

The problem was, the ridge lay plumb on the Garland property. It didn’t seem like anyone was around though, not this early anyhow. The Garlands usually just came up from the city in the summer . . . He hesitated, only momentarily, before crossing the dirt road and passing the posted trees that marked the land as private property.