The Custodian of Paradise (64 page)

“Your mother wrote to me before she died and said that she wished she could forgive me. She said she knew that by withholding her forgiveness she was ‘imperilling’ her soul. Was this faith or fear? She must have thought her God to be as gullible as Dr. Fielding. She did not think to ask me to forgive her. I would have done so. And asked for her forgiveness. Her true forgiveness.”

“In what sense was I twice-fathered?”

“By me. And by my delegate. We called you his ‘charge.’ But also his daughter. He asked, and I gave him my permission, to adopt you.”

“What is it that you want from me?”

“Now that I can no longer watch over you, I have come to ask for
your
forgiveness. But also something else. Far more important.”

“David,” she says.

“Who if not for me might still be alive. Might have chosen a path that would not have led him to a battlefield in Europe.”

“Just as he might not have done so if I had raised him. Or told him when he came to St. John’s what he already knew. Four words. ‘I am your mother.’ How he must have longed to hear them.”

“It is not to secure a place in heaven that I have chosen you as my confessor. I will not kneel before a priest who serves a God as vengeful as I once was.

“This is my final confession. And in a way my first. My other child is here, Miss Fielding. My daughter or my son. Your brother or your sister.

“I wrote to you in my first letter of three crimes, three sins for which I would one day ask your forgiveness. Do you know what they are?”

“No.”

“They are: the death of your unborn brother or sister, which if not for my stupidity and negligence would have been prevented; the death of your son—It was out of sheer spite that I told him the truth. Why should it have mattered to me if a child that was not even hers and whom I had never met believed that I had raped her or by threats against your life forced her to leave you. My third crime I committed against you. Miss Fielding, the girl and woman that you would have been had your mother not abandoned you. Every time she looked at you she thought of how you got your name and also of the child that she destroyed.”

“My mother was guilty of the same three crimes, if that is what they were. Even more directly so than you.”

“And died unforgiven for them. Unforgiven by you, by David and herself. I am not asking you to save my soul, Miss Fielding. I am merely asking your forgiveness. My contrition is sincere. I expect no reward for it. I ask for your forgiveness. Which must also be sincere.”

“How will you judge its sincerity?”

“I will hear it in your voice.”

“What if I refuse? What if I doubt my own sincerity? Or the sincerity of your contrition?”

He shakes, then bows his head. His back is hunched, his huge form slouches over the pew that has not been occupied in fifty years. Out of the pulpit from which Samuel Loreburn has not preached in fifty years, he rose a few minutes ago.

“You should be asking for my gratitude, not my forgiveness. You saved my life, more than once.”

“I want only your forgiveness. The only woman that I ever loved is dead. The Faith I thought I’d lost has been restored to me. I will not stop you if you try to leave. With or without your forgiveness and your blessing, I will die. But I am in every sense responsible for you. I did not know that it would end like this. I merely knew that it would end. It was not only for forgiveness I came. I did not want to die alone. Unloved. Never seen by you.”

“You wait so long to come out of the shadows—”

“I am a father asking forgiveness from his daughter.”

“You are a father who cannot bring himself to say his daughter’s name. The name you gave her.”

“Will you not forgive me?”

“Why do you speak of dying?”

“Because I
am
dying, Miss Fielding. I have been taking nitroglycerine tablets for my heart for years. I brought only enough to get me here. I have none left. And very little time. I leave what little I have to you. The flat full of books in Manhattan. In my pockets you will find enough money to transport me back to the place where I was born.”

She walks to the pew in which he kneels again and pulls his head against her stomach.

“Father,” she says. Tears flow freely down her cheeks. She runs her fingers through his white hair that is so thick and soft it might be that of the man he was when they first met. He, too, begins to cry, his great head quivering against her body, his eyes closed. “Father, I forgive you.”

He bows his head and with one palsied hand he blesses her and then himself. Kisses his thumb and forefinger and with his thumb against his forehead draws a cross. The cross on which the God that he did not believe in was crucified. He clasps his hands and sits back in the pew with a sigh like someone who has been on his feet for days.

“You spoke of something more important than forgiving you.”

“Yes. Forgiving your mother.”

“How can I do that?”

“You will never be at peace until you do.”

“I can’t promise it. Not yet. Some day, perhaps.”

“Mother meet your daughter,” he says. “Daughter meet your mother.”

It seems he is about to speak further, but his head falls forward.

It sounds as though he is sleeping deeply. A final breath trails into silence.

There is nothing I can do but wait for Patrick.

It is mid-morning. The snow has stopped. It crunches beneath my feet, reminding me of the first night I waited to be noticed in St. John’s, a mere girl who could not face the day without a drink, stamping out the butts of cigarettes and coughing, hoping to be heard. Back when my cane was but an ornament.

I start down the hill and manage quite well. Only where the road turns is the slope so steep that I have to fight to keep my balance.

Several times, I stop to look down.

The houses seem both festive and forlorn. All of Loreburn seems revived by the freshly fallen snow. As if the place has just been built and will soon be lived in by newcomers who, when they take the shutters down and look out across the bay, will long for home.

I picture a priest-led procession coming up the hill, stopping at each house for the blessing of the rooms.

The clouds are in so close I can’t see the gulls but hear them on the headlands to the east, shrieking, conferring raucously it seems, assessing what might be the first ever such catastrophe of snow.

There is still no wind. Were there people in the houses, columns of smoke would rise straight up from the chimneys.

There is no sign of the pack, who I suspect will stay put until their prey have no choice but to stir from their winter hiding places.

But the horses, seeming unfazed by the storm, walk from the gap in the woods in single file, their manes white with frost. Somewhere in the woods the ground is bare.

The sway-backed white mare is among them, looking the same as always. It would seem that she was not lost nor sick nor hurt. Maybe for the others, her being inexplicably absent for a while is commonplace.

I watch the horses make their usual way between the houses, forgoing the road. Each one of them snorting twin plumes of frost, they part when they near me but do not run. They scale the hill obliquely, heading northwest, seemingly unmindful of the church and its new resident to whom I attribute the distress they showed when I saw them last.

Even if I lived on Loreburn all my life I feel the horses would never acknowledge me except as a harmless and easily avoidable obstacle whose location varies unaccountably from day to day.

I decide to wait a while near the shore in case Patrick’s boat comes into view. Six gunshots I fired in the air last night. My shoulder feels as though it has been punched repeatedly—either I didn’t notice it before or the pain has just begun.

It’s getting colder now that the snow has stopped. It will be colder still when the wind goes round to the west and the sun comes out.

I turn and face the water again, the sea that takes its colour from the sky.

I’m in the house when, just before sunset, Patrick knocks on the door.

The snow continued to fall in Quinton long after it stopped in Loreburn. He did not hear the gunshots, but came because he was worried about how I would fare in the storm.

The next day we leave Loreburn, by which time I have told Patrick a version of my story and have pried loose most of his.

We stayed up all night in the kitchen, talking.

Irene is his sister, not his wife. The children are hers. Her husband is overseas, still writing letters, still reading what she writes and soon to come back home.

“There’s a woman down the shore. We’re engaged. No one knows. I told her I had to wait until Gus got home from the war. Or else Irene would put her foot down. Tell me that her and the young ones don’t need my help. Tell me to go and get married. We won’t live here all year long. Just in the summer when the fishing’s not too bad.”

He stared at the flame in the lantern on the table.

I told him that my Provider was a distant relative from away. For once I was glad Patrick was a man of few words.

The light begins to fade. The sky is clear. The stars are out before the sun goes down.

I sit in the stern, Mr. and Mrs. Trunk, now empty, flat on the deck behind me, my cane across my lap, looking back at Loreburn. Patrick steers, his eyes on the light that comes and goes from Quinton, the light that Irene flashes just for us.

I have never seen Loreburn from the water at this time of day. From a certain distance, you can easily imagine that the lights of early evening will soon appear, windows lantern-lit from the row of houses above the beach to the one below the church. And the same lights later going out one by one until the town is dark.

They will ask me who he was when I get back to St. John’s, why he followed me to Loreburn. Will they be suspicious when they hear how tall he was?
The rumours we invented and tormented Dr. Fielding with were true
. It may take a Forgery or two to shut them up.

   
Chapter Eighteen
   

T
HOUGH THE TENDENCY OF EVERYTHING OPPOSES OUR DEPARTURE
, we depart. The wind, the tide, the waves that brought us here almost bear us back, but we make it to the Narrows, then turn east.

I face forward again just in time to see a flash of light from Quinton, the first of many that should it start to snow again will lead us home.

Back to my life, now, back to my boarding house on Cochrane Street. My corner windows.

I’ll go out walking, if it’s not too cold and my legs are up to it. I’ll stop where there’s no wind and look up at the sky the way I did the night I met my Provider.

I am returning to a war that I have never really left.

No lights allowed after sunset. You must not strike a match outdoors. Or indoors until the blackout curtains have been drawn.

The city at night will be as dark as Loreburn. And almost as silent.

Every house dark, as if the city’s inhabitants, like Loreburn’s, left one day after boarding up their doors and windows, having played out to its failure some colonial experiment.

The enemy is at the gates.

Nothing will be more unnerving than a foggy day when we can’t see the enemy or a moonlit night when the enemy can see us.

Ladies’ Lookout. On Signal Hill, women with binoculars will scan the sea for submarines. They will talk of the white flag of surrender that was made from someone’s shirt.

Rumours of Germans commandeering houses on the outskirts of the city. Do not hesitate to ask a stranger for credentials.

I will have to make my way in the dark, navigate from memory and use my cane as the blind use theirs.

I was several times, before I came to Loreburn, escorted home by men on night patrol who at last resigned themselves to my recalcitrance and merely warned me not to smoke.

“It’s only Fielding,” they whispered to each other, turning away when I mock saluted with my cane. I will still compose my column while I walk, but not out loud.

It will be hard to keep my mind from wandering, hard not to think of David on nights when I walk where we walked, stop where we did, which I know I shouldn’t do but will.