The Dutch Wife (3 page)

On the bedside table, I noticed, there were no flowers, no cards. “Do you have any family?” I asked quite innocently as a conversation opener.

He didn’t blink, but it was as though a spare eyelid, like a lizard’s, descended.

I suspected then that I was his only visitor.

ON THAT DAY,
and on my subsequent visits—I went there exactly seven times—Thomas Vanderlinden mentioned his illness only once, and that was really just to illustrate a linguistic point. “Sixteenth-century physicians would have called what I have ‘Gripe in the Guts,’” he said one day. “Such colourful phrases are no less useful than the technical language used by today’s specialists. That’s because language of any kind is severely limited. ‘
Words are the shadows of things; and shadows can never show the light
.’” He gave me the impression he was quoting some well-known, indisputable axiom.

Of course, I’d never heard of it.

AT THE END OF MY VISITS,
which usually lasted a couple of hours, he often looked worn-out, for he did almost all the talking. But overnight, he’d have a little resurrection, and his eyes would be bright again when he welcomed me the next day.

One afternoon just after I’d arrived, his doctor, a tall, balding man named Doctor Moleman (curiously, he had three prominent moles on his right cheek), came in to examine him. He shook his head at the sight of his patient, propped up, talking animatedly.

“Now, now, Professor Vanderlinden,” he said. “You should be resting, not exerting yourself.”

I went out in the corridor till Moleman finished his examination. When he came out, I asked him if it would be better if I cut my visits short.

“No, no,” he said. “He knows very well I only tell him what a doctor’s expected to say. Let him talk as much as he likes. It won’t make any difference.”

That sounded ominous, and Thomas Vanderlinden must have noticed that I felt uncomfortable when I went back into the room and sat by the bed.

“When I was young,” he said with a little smile, “I used to consider death as something exotic and distant. But now it seems to me fairly domesticated, like a pet animal. I’m quite prepared for it.”

I knew he said that to reassure me. Through all my visits, he seemed less concerned about his own health than about keeping me entertained.

– 5 –

AS I’VE HINTED,
one reason for my willingness to spend hours each day at the hospital was this: I welcomed the distraction from my own work. Writing a novel isn’t as easy as some people think. You get yourself up out of bed each morning, eat some toast, drink some coffee and go to your desk, ready for action. But that’s only the preliminary. Now you have to reassemble that fictional world and—hardest of all in the mornings—wake up your characters. Often they can be even more sleepy-headed than you are and stubborn as cats. Some days, they won’t remind you what they were doing yesterday, or they might even change their names to confuse you. And so on. Yes, the whole endeavour can be quite irritating at times.

On top of that, this particular novel I was working on was giving me a lot of trouble. It was called
The Kilted Cowpoke
and it was about a group of Scottish farmers who’d immigrated to the Wild West in the early part of the nineteenth century to become ranchers. They did all the usual cowboy things: herded cattle, battled against wild Apaches and Comanches, were involved in stampedes and shoot-outs and so on. I built in a typical Western plot about dynastic squabbles: the patriarch dies and his two sons, who’ve always loathed each other, fight over the division of the land. The mandatory love-element was in the plot too: the heroine admires the older brother, but her heart goes out to the younger.

Misfortune and mayhem result.

But what made the story interesting for me was that I was trying to allow the characters to keep their authentic Scottish trappings: for example, they wore kilts and sporrans (the little purses that hang in front—I put their six-shooters in there). More important, for the sake of realism I made them speak in Scottish Lowland dialect: they called the steers “coos”; the older brother always referred to the younger as “the wee crapper”; the ranch foreman told a captured Apache: “Ah’m gonny rip aff yer herry cheuch!”; the heroine pleaded with her lover: “Och, c’mon, laddie. Dinnae brek ma herrt, wulye?” And so on.

A major problem was this: when I read out parts of an early draft to my wife she could barely stop laughing at the dialogue—even at what I’d intended to be the most moving parts. So I was faced with quite a conundrum: how to have the characters speak a perfectly respectable and ancient dialect, without turning tragedy into farce.

In the midst of this struggle, it was a relief to go to the hospital and visit my neighbour—he insisted by then that I call him “Thomas.” With an extra-large coffee from Tim Hortons to keep me alert, I’d sit contentedly at his bedside for as long as he wanted me there.

– 6 –

ON MY THIRD VISIT,
I’d barely settled myself when he handed me a silver-framed photograph he’d taken out of the bed-table drawer. “That’s my mother, Rachel,” he said. “Rachel Vanderlinden.”

The photograph was a black-and-white head shot of a young woman in a high-necked blouse wearing a little pillbox hat with flowers. She had a handsome enough face, with confident eyes and the same longish jaw as Thomas. It was certainly a face full of character.

“Before she came to Camberloo, she lived all her life in Queensville,” he said. “Do you know it?”

“Of course,” I said. It was an old town, on the shores of the Lake, two hundred miles north of Camberloo.

“Her father was a judge there till his death,” he said. “But he also served on the circuit courts around Camberloo, in the summers. So he bought a house down here, too. That’s where this photograph of my mother was taken. She was expecting me, at the time. She told me that in the first months, it felt quite gigantic, like having a sore in the mouth. She said she didn’t experience the pregnancy so much as it experienced her.”

I gave him the photograph back.

“She’s been dead for more than twenty years now,” he said, looking at it for a moment. “I still find that fact hard to believe. I used to feel guilty at letting other things interfere with the memory of her. But they do, they do.
‘For memories melt like teardrops into oceans of oblivion.’
”

That sounded like another of those well-known quotations, so of course I nodded.

“When my mother was as old as I am now,” he said, “she began to have heart problems and couldn’t get about much any more. She said she had something very important to tell me.” He looked at me, making sure he had my full attention. “And indeed what she told me was quite surprising. It was about the man I’d always known as my father.” He breathed. “She told me he wasn’t her husband.” He looked at the photograph again, immersed in it and silent for a long time.

Of course, I didn’t find his revelation all that startling. Who would, nowadays? But I wanted to humour him. “Did she explain?” I said. “I mean about him not being her husband?”

He looked up at me, almost as though he’d forgotten I was there. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Indeed she did. She said it all started, long ago, while she was still living in Queensville . . .
late on a Saturday afternoon in early Fall
.”

THAT WAS HOW THOMAS VANDERLINDEN’S STORY
began. Over the course of my visits, this quite ordinary-looking old man told me some of the most extraordinary things I’d ever heard—so much so that I began keeping notes, a thing I rarely do. Though I don’t need notes to remember the little smile on his face when he first told me about his mother’s confession. Or how he lay back in his hospital bed, narrowed his eyes and fixed them on that day in the distant past, as though it were a comet trailing dust and ice.

PART ONE

R
ACHEL
V
ANDERLINDEN

– 1 –

. . . LATE ON A SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN EARLY FALL,
Rachel Vanderlinden waited for her husband, Rowland, to come home from abroad—he’d been gone from Queensville for more than three months. He’d sent a telegram to say he’d be arriving by train from the East Coast that day. She needed, once and for all, to talk to him.

She was standing at the kitchen window looking across the lawn to the Lake: the waves were still rough with whitecaps from the storm. Last night, even this big stone house had felt as though it might be ripped away. But the wind was moderate now and the window was slightly ajar. Through it, she heard a sad noise and looked skyward: a huge formation of geese was flying overhead, bringing scraps of the north with it. She shivered and went to the stove and poured some more coffee.

She was sitting at the table, leafing through the
Gazette,
when the doorbell rang: three long, distinct rings. That was always the way Rowland rang, announcing his arrival before letting himself in.

She sat still, breathing evenly, waiting for her husband, the returned traveller, to enter. She needed to be calm.

The bell rang again. Again three long, distinct rings.

Perhaps he’d lost his key, she thought.

She got up and walked slowly out of the kitchen, along the polished wooden hallway to the front door. Passing the full-length wall mirror, she checked herself: a young, brown-haired woman in a green dress, of medium build, with a longish face, the shadows under her eyes well disguised with make-up. She glanced quickly into those familiar green eyes, trying, as always, to catch them by surprise, testing to see if they would ever accidentally betray something about the mystery of herself.

Not today. She looked perfectly calm, as she would need to be.

She went to the door, took a last deep breath, and opened it.

A stranger stood there, a sturdy man in a brown cloth cap, which he took off. He had a bent nose and scarring above the eyebrows. The eyes themselves were a washed-out blue, giving a mildness to what would have been a hard face. He didn’t seem sure of himself.

“Yes?” said Rachel Vanderlinden. She thought this stranger might be one of those beggars looking for a meal in return for mowing the lawn.

The man mumbled something she couldn’t quite make out—he had an accent of some sort, Scottish perhaps.

“I beg your pardon?” she said.

He shuffled his feet. His black boots were dusty, his brown corduroy suit was worn and tight. He clutched his cap and cleared his throat. This time, when he spoke, she could make out the words “your husband” quite clearly.

Her heart stopped. “My husband?” she said. “What about him?”

The blue eyes now looked directly into hers.
“I,”
he lingered on the word, “am your husband.” His smile was partly a frown.

“What?” she said, scrutinizing his face. “What are you talking about?” She was beginning to be afraid.

He ran his fingers through untidy fair hair. He had the hands of a working man. “I’m your husband,” he said again. “I’m just back from England.” As though reciting words he’d memorized, he said: “I arrived in Halifax last week. I sent a telegram.” He waited, then said again: “I’m your husband.”

The man stood, awkward, waiting. He seemed to think he’d delivered some message in a code she’d understand and expected a reply.

And in that instant of waiting, she all at once did understand. Her heart beat faster, her mind was in a ferment.

He watched her for a moment, then he said: “This is stupid. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” He turned away and started down the pathway to the street.

She was relieved. She wouldn’t have to say anything. She would just let him go.

Then, as he was opening the gate, she changed her mind. “Wait a minute,” she called.

He stood at the gate and looked back.

She looked at him for a long moment. She had to clear her throat. “Come inside,” she said.

“Are you sure?” he said.

She thought for a moment. “Yes,” she said.

And he came back up the pathway and into the house.

THEY’D BEEN SITTING IN THE LIVING ROOM
for almost an hour, he in one of the plush armchairs, she on the couch at an angle to it. Her black cat, Lucy, had sniffed him over cautiously and now lay across his knees, purring as he petted her with his rough hand.

“I need a while to think,” she’d said when they sat down. “Please don’t say anything and please don’t look at me.” He had kept his eyes away from her, though she could watch him as he sat, biting his bottom lip now and then, knowing that she was looking him over and thinking. She had a lot to think about.

The clock on the mantel chimed six slow chimes. She rose from the couch and went and sat in the armchair opposite him. “All right,” she said. “You can look.”

His pale blue eyes showed he wasn’t quite sure yet what she meant.

“I’m so glad you’re home,” she said.

His eyes widened.