The Dutch Wife (32 page)

As I was leaving, I passed the basement door and the hairs on my neck stood up. I peeked in and switched on the light, but I didn’t go down the stairs. The earth floor smelled as earthy, the dark corners mocked my timidity. I switched the light off, shut the door firmly and went outside into the cold, fresh air.

– 6 –

THAT WAS TEN YEARS AGO.

This present March, I was sitting on the balcony of our latest apartment, sipping coffee, glancing through the
Camberloo Record
. On the back page was a brief report on an accident on the highway south of Toronto. A certain Miriam Vanderlinden-Smythe, daughter of the late Professor Thomas Vanderlinden, had been killed, along with her entire family—her husband and two children—in a collision between their car and a truck.

I was saddened. I’d only met Miriam once, at her father’s funeral, but I’d liked her and regretted never having got in touch with her—even if it was only to ask if our meeting at the funeral had been purely accidental. Or why she didn’t think it worth mentioning that when her father left home, he only moved next door.

Then again, who can make sense of what other people do? Often it’s hard enough making sense of what we do ourselves. I remember saying something of that sort to Thomas, but, of course, he didn’t agree. He just quoted a couple of memorable lines from some old poet I’d never heard of:

I didn’t argue. But, to be honest, I wasn’t even sure what the lines meant till some time after his death.

It was a late summer’s evening, and my wife and I were climbing Barden Hill at the southern edge of Camberloo, where the city suddenly becomes country. The hill isn’t all that high, but old—one of those drumlins formed by a deposit from one of the Ice Ages, a billion years ago, or whenever it was. Perhaps, as hills go, a billion years isn’t that old. But Barden Hill isn’t much of a hill, either: getting to the top is less a climb than a sweaty, mosquito-attracting walk.

That particular night was warm and cloudless. When we got to the top, we had a clear view of the Milky Way spread out across the skies. Looking earthwards, to the north, we could see all the street lights of Camberloo, with Regent Street dominant, intersected by innumerable lesser streets and avenues.

But when we moved just a hundred yards along the crest of the hill, my wife drew my attention to something strange. From where we’d stood at first, Camberloo had looked all laid out in an orderly, human way. But from here, the order was completely disrupted. The city had become a sparkling chaos, just like the chaos of stars above.

That was when I remembered those lines Thomas had quoted and I thought I understood what he’d meant. That your own life is a chaos to you—you’re inside it and you’re so overwhelmed by the detail, you despair of ever finding any consistent order or meaning in it. Whereas an outsider—an observer of your life—is able to move about and, with any luck, might be able to find an angle to view it from and make some sense of it, might be able to spot the tendencies and symmetries and coincidences you yourself can’t possibly see.

– 7 –

COINCIDENCES, COINCIDENCES.

Six months ago, the Vanderlinden property came up for sale again—and this time I decided to buy it. The two sides of the original house, separated for more than half a century, had been reunited by the previous owners and completely renovated. At the front, the western entrance had been expanded, the eastern door had been bricked off. Out back, the hedge over which I used to talk to Thomas Vanderlinden had been excised to make an unbroken expanse of lawn.

The changes to the inside of the house weren’t, to my mind, for the better. The dark-brown wainscotting and the lovely old mahogany furniture were gone. The walls throughout were now covered in eggshell-blue paint. Other things were simply disconcerting: the rooms that had been on either side of the partitioning wall were now doubled in size—I felt as if I were walking right through a mirror. The library, which before I had thought quite large enough, now seemed so massive I felt myself dwarfed by it, and even more overwhelmed by all those books I’d have no more excuse for not reading. Another thing I regretted: the quirky bathrooms off the two main bedrooms had been conventionalized. The raised toilets had been lowered, the multiple showers replaced, the rusted clocks removed.

When we eventually took possession, our cats (three of them now) enjoyed roaming through the house after the confinements of apartment life, and we sometimes lost track of them for hours. But we could always be sure they weren’t in the basement. In that regard, the younger cats took their cue from Corinna—twelve years old now, with grizzled whiskers—and always steered well clear of the basement door. Even my wife wasn’t keen on going down there. That was my fault; I hadn’t been able to resist telling her how Thomas’s wife had died.

I, on the other hand, did have to go down from time to time to check the plumbing or the electrical fuses. The door had been changed by the renovators, so there were no scratches on the back of it, but the stair was still creaky. The basement itself was doubly cavernous now that its dividing wall had been removed. The caged ceiling bulbs were just as gloomy as before, so the corners were in semi-darkness. You could barely see that there had once been an equivalent little stairway at the far side; it had been dismantled and the door above it walled over. The size of the place and the earthy smell of it always made me think of one of those little cemeteries you see at dusk beside country churches.

NOW THAT WE LIVED THERE
permanently, I even had a recurrence of the nightmare I used to have—of the beautiful creature lurking behind that basement door, waiting to destroy me.

It must have been around midnight when I heard the noise and got out of bed, quietly, so as not to wake my wife. I went downstairs and crouched in the darkness outside the basement door. I knew exactly what was coming and my heart was battering. I could hear the creature stealthily climbing the creaky stairs. When the doorknob slowly began to turn, I got myself ready to pounce. The door opened and there it stood in all its beauty (I knew it was beautiful, even in the darkness) for just a moment. Then I shoved it back and slammed the door against it. I had absolutely no doubt it would have destroyed me if I hadn’t.

– 8 –

AT ANY RATE
, it wasn’t long after having the dream again that I began to consider seriously the feasibility of making a book out of the Vanderlinden story. Maybe I thought telling the story would lay the ghost to rest, I don’t know. But the idea of doing it must have been in my mind somewhere, all along—that was why I’d kept notes of my various conversations with Thomas.

“It’s just like
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
,” I said to my wife. “You know—the bearded old man who can’t die in peace till he’s passed on his story. And I’m the wedding guest chosen to hear it, and all that stuff. I feel sometimes as though
I’m a part of someone else’s plot
and Thomas made sure I rented the place so that he’d end up telling me his story.”

“But you’ve always said you prefer making up your own stories,” my wife said.

“Yes, but this one is so interesting,” I said, “it outdoes fiction. Even the things he didn’t tell me, like the fact that when he separated from his wife he moved next door. It’s astounding.”

“You really believe it’s all true?” she said.

“Before I write a word,” I said, “I’ll check up as much of it as I can. It’s a pity his daughter’s dead. She vouched for him. She said it was all true.”

My wife sighed.

“Women don’t always tell the truth, you know,” she said.

“Not even the women I like?” I said, trying to butter her up.

“Especially not those,” she said.

IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING
that conversation, I set out to reassure myself about the basic facts of Thomas Vanderlinden’s story. I dug up my notes from our talks and did a little research.

Here’s a sample of the results:

1) Rachel Vanderlinden:
I found her listed in the
Provincial Registry
of 1920 as the daughter of the eminent Judge Ebenezer Dafoe. Her marriage to Rowland Vanderlinden was recorded, too.

2) Will Drummond:
I could find no references to him. On the other hand, Scottish newspapers of the period were full of sensationalist reports on such matters as
The One-legged Miners at Muirton; The Abyss at Stroven; The Talking Disease at Carrick;
and
The Mackenzie Family Atrocity
.

3) Doctor Jeremiah Webber:
He was cited frequently in
Ontario Medical Records
. He figured prominently on Medical Boards in the community of Camberloo for more than half a century.

4) The Jeggard Agency:
It was no longer in existence but was mentioned in several old issues of
The Police Journal
as a reliable source of investigative information. Apparently Jeggard himself, now dead, had once been a member of the Force.

5) The Sorrentino Family:
This Italian family was lauded in early ecological journals. But I also found references to their work even in quite recent monographs (e.g.,
Of Apes and Italians
, by the well-known activist Alfredo Romano). Their far-sighted attempts to preserve exotic animals, early in the century, were said to be truly remarkable.

6) The Loss of the S.S.
Derevaun: Many national newspapers reported the ship’s foundering without mentioning the matter of survivors. In
The Abridgement of Maritime Commissions
I came across a report that the ship’s officers were exonerated,
post mortem
, of all blame.

7) Herbert Froglick:
He published one rather dry, academic piece entitled, “Sunami-type Occurrences off the East Coast”
(The Journal of Marine Meteorology)
. It was full of graphs and technical matters based on many years of observations made on Wreck Bar. It was quite unreadable to a layman; but I was thrilled to find this note at the end: “To my co-researcher and beloved companion,
the late Eva Sorrentino
, this article is dedicated.”

8) John Forrestal:
In
A Cultural History of Latin America
by J. M. Barthez, a paragraph is devoted to the Quibo Museum. The politically correct author, while rejoicing that the era of foreigners as Curators is long since past, commends the work of “such early administrators as the North American John Forrestal.” I could find no information on his wife and daughter.

9) Rowland Vanderlinden:
He is listed in the most recent
Canadian Almanack of Anthropology
as a “former honorary affiliate of the National Museum.” He’d been erroneously reported as killed in action in the War. He’d published numerous articles (including “Fetishistic Devotion Among the Arborean Boma”) and received the prestigious Haas Corporate Endowment to pursue his research indefinitely. One of the perks of the Endowment was that the University Press would publish the holder’s research (presumably that was why Rowland had intended to visit the Press during his visit). I then made a sad discovery in a special Preface to an old issue of the
Universal Journal of Field Anthropology
(vol. xxx): The
Journal
issued a heartfelt plea to working anthropologists to see to the publication of their research in a timely fashion. It cited a tragic case in point.
“After his death in Manu, the anthropologist Rowland Vanderlinden was ritually cremated—a signal honour for an outsider—-by the Tarapa tribe among whom he’d spent much of his career. Ironically, as part of the ceremony, all of his notebooks—a lifetime’s invaluable observations—were added to the funeral pyre.”
The
Journal
noted that information on this incident had been garnered from a certain Alastair Macphee, an agent for the Pacific Information Bureau.

10) Alastair Macphee:
I immediately contacted the
Pacific Information Bureau
, whose Head Office was in Wellington, New Zealand. I hoped I might be able to phone Macphee, or even meet him. The Human Resources Department for the P.I.B. told me, however, that he had retired long ago. For at least a decade, his monthly pension had been forwarded to various remote islands. Several years ago, the cheques began to be returned, uncashed. Macphee himself was presumed dead.

11) Rowland’s Consort and daughter:
This was the least fruitful line of inquiry. Apparently the custom in the Manu Highlands was for widows and orphans to be adopted by other members of the tribe and to change their names accordingly. Since I’d no idea of their original names anyway, I abandoned the search.

12) Thomas Vanderlinden:
Out of curiosity, I paid a visit to the History Department at Camberloo University, where he’d been on the faculty for thirty-five years till his retirement. The Chair of the Department was a plump, nattily dressed man who said he only vaguely remembered Thomas as an old-fashioned scholar who’d dabbled in the Renaissance:
“He was one of those amateurish types who managed to survive in academia at a time when standards weren’t so rigorous as nowadays. I can’t imagine why anyone should be interested in him.”
I smiled (inwardly, of course). Thomas had once referred to this same Chair of History as a “total pisspot.” He’d seen my surprise at his use of such language and assured me it was a perfectly respectable term of abuse—in the sixteenth century.

13) The Bizwas:
This was perhaps the most astonishing discovery. I came across an article in
Anthropological Investigations
(vol. lxvii), from more than half a century ago. It was written by Rowland Vanderlinden himself and is illuminating.

A Bizwa Custom

One night, the District Commissioner and I were invited to the dining hut as guests of the tribe and were greeted by the Chief, who was a woman. Like most Bizwa women, she was quite tall and muscular with a shaved skull. Her all-male councillors were at least a head shorter than she was.

The Commissioner greeted her on behalf of the Government and presented her with a roll of silk.