The Dutch Wife (9 page)

Frequently, we’d come to the conclusion that while love might not be an illusion, attempts to define love might well be.

“Someone could be in love,” my wife had once wisely said, “without even having a word for it. And someone else could have all the right words yet never have experienced the feeling.”

Anyway, in the course of this particular phone conversation, I told her all about Thomas Vanderlinden’s mother and the man who appeared at her door and how she took him in and lived with him for two years without ever knowing who he really was. “Can you imagine?” I said. “Their entire relationship was founded on mystery. I must say, I was surprised Rachel put up with that. I always thought that, for women especially, real love depends on openness and complete honesty. Isn’t that so?”

Four thousand miles away, my wife laughed. I loved her laugh, just as I loved talking to her about love, because we loved each other.

“Men always think they know what women feel,” she said.

I was still considering that when she said something that surprised me even more. “Rachel must have believed it was boredom, lack of mystery that ruined her marriage,” she said. “So she felt she’d be better off living with someone who was essentially a stranger. It certainly seems to have worked for her. She spent two happy years with that man who appeared at her door. Then she spent the rest of her life remembering him as her great love.”

“But what about honesty?” I said. “Doesn’t true love mean you’re able to unveil your soul to the person you love and he or she will love you even more for that?”

“Maybe it’s the other way round,” she said. “Maybe you have to love someone first, before you really know all that much about them. Then, no matter what revelations may come, the love’s too strong to be destroyed by them.” She paused for a moment. “Certainly a mother’s love’s like that, isn’t it? How do you explain a mother’s love?” It was one of those questions asked to call attention to the impossibility of an answer.

At the end of our phone conversation, I told her how much I loved her and I promised I’d let her know how the Vanderlinden story worked out. Then I went into the library and sat in front of the fire with my wine. Corrie came in too and jumped on my knee, making little cat-noises as she often did, trying to simulate conversation. So we chatted back and forth for a while till I’d finished my wine and stumbled up to bed.

– 15 –

THE NEXT DAY,
I drove to the hospital around one o’clock. The sun was shining brightly and the few clouds were like cotton balls that had been squashed. When I got to Thomas’s room, I was delighted to see he’d had another of his little resurrections—as though overnight his soul had trickled back into his body.

“It’s good of you to come!” he said as I sat down with my coffee. “But you look tired.”

I realized he was right. I suppose other people can know more about us than we do about ourselves, for they can see our unconscious body language.

“I guess I had too much wine last night,” I said. “On top of that, I had a weird dream I can’t get out of my head.”

“Tell me about it,” he said. That was one of the reasons I liked him—that he didn’t mind hearing about my dreams.

So I did tell him about it: I was walking along the street towards the house when I noticed for the first time that some of the ancient maple trees that lined the sidewalk had faces carved into them—as if those massive totem poles on the West Coast had taken root again and were sprouting branches. I was stunned to discover that one of the faces was my own father’s. He’d died more than twenty years ago when I was on my travels, far away. His face was just at head height and it was so gnarled it was as much tree as human—soon it would be indistinguishable from the trunk itself.

“Interesting,” Thomas said when I’d finished. “I don’t suppose you’ve read Gilberto’s
Nox Perpetua?
”

I made my usual admission of ignorance.

“It was one of the popular books on dreams in the mid-sixteenth century,” he said. “Gilberto contends that you don’t choose your dreams; your dreams choose you.”

I said I didn’t like the sound of that.

“The main proposition of the book,” Thomas said, “is that the world isn’t nearly as rational as we like to think. For Gilberto, night-time proves the point. When darkness falls, sleep comes, bringing with it madness and terror.”

I didn’t like the idea of that either. “But surely, back in those old days,” I said, “there were so many awful things in daily life it would have been easy to believe the world was insane.”

Thomas Vanderlinden shook his head and for a moment looked at me the way he must have looked at especially dull undergraduates. “Well, that’s a matter of opinion, of course,” he said. “But arguably it would have been a lot easier to make a case for the world’s sanity then than now.”

I was awaiting the inevitable lecture.

But he spared me and instead started to talk about his mother again. “You surely must have been wondering why she let the stranger in, in the first place,” he said, “and why she would never let him tell her who he really was.”

“Indeed I have,” I said.

“I asked her those very questions, of course,” said Thomas. “She said the only man who could answer them properly was her husband—the real Rowland Vanderlinden—and she wanted me to find him! I was astonished, for I’d just assumed he must be dead. So I told her it would be pointless: the kind of man he was, he was almost certainly dead and buried at the other end of the world somewhere. And, even if he was alive, why would he want to see her after all these years? And why would he know anything about the man who knocked on her door?” Little crow’s-feet of irony appeared at the edge of Thomas’s eyes. “But I was wasting my time. You’ve no idea how frustrating it could be arguing with my mother when she’d made up her mind about something. She was a very stubborn woman. She just kept saying: ‘
Track him down! Bring him to me!’
”

He reached over and, from the drawer in the little bedside table, took out another photograph, this time without a frame. He handed it to me.

“She gave me this. She thought it might be some help to me,” he said, “though it had been taken a long time ago.”

It was one of those old sepia photographs with the edges fading. A man in tropical gear—vest full of little pockets, white pith helmet—was standing in front of some pyramids. In fact, the photograph made him look as tall as the pyramids, yet, at the same time, so small and flat I could hold him in my hands. He was thin-faced and serious-looking, with the beginnings of a beard. There were tents nearby that looked as though they belonged to an archaeological expedition.

“That was the first time,” said Thomas, “I’d ever seen the real Rowland Vanderlinden. I was on leave from the University that year. I had time at my disposal. So, with that photograph, I began my search.”

PART TWO

R
OWLAND
V
ANDERLINDEN

– 1 –

THE EVENING THOMAS’S MOTHER
ordered him to find Rowland Vanderlinden and bring him to her, Thomas asked for guidance from Doctor Webber after she had gone to bed. Webber, retired from the practice of medicine now, had moved into the house to keep an eye on her while she was ill.

Thomas and the Doctor sipped brandy and smoked thick cigars, sitting in wide armchairs, the leather of them soft with age, before the library fire—it was a cool night for early September. The heavy brocade curtains were drawn against the night.

This room was the repository of most of the books Thomas had read as a young man. If there was such a thing as the geology of a mind, his was formed here. Rachel herself had never been much of a reader, so few additions had been made to the library since he’d left home. He liked to think he could still have found his way around these shelves blindfolded—that he could have picked out many of the books by feel. Some were old friends he was comfortable with. Others were trophies, hard won. Others represented defeats or unfinished struggles.

Doctor Webber, the moist cigar smoke trickling out of his dark nostrils, was watching him. Thomas was accustomed to those green eyes that had a certain flatness about them, as if they lacked one of the dimensions. He seemed to Thomas an ancient man, though he was in fact only a few years older than Rachel. He was the essence of thinness—thin legs made thinner by pinstriped pants, thin veined hands, thin bony face, thin long nose.

Except for his lips, filtering the cigar smoke. They were thick and red and moist—the lips of the man Thomas had once heard say to his mother: “The only reason I’d like to have my innocence again would be to enjoy losing it once more.” She had laughed.

The Doctor was yet another descendant of those Puritan farmers who, generations ago, fled some religious persecution in the South and lumbered northwards in covered wagons. Clothed in black, they’d arrived in this vast, forested country and had instinctively begun to eradicate the mortal enemies of farmers—the forests themselves. They had succeeded in that task, prospered and become the first burghers of the towns they’d built.

From such unlikely stock, Doctor Webber had arisen. He had become acquainted with Rachel when she was a volunteer at the hospital during the War years. Thomas hadn’t particularly liked his mother’s thin, special friend. Then, one day, when he wasn’t doing as well as he ought at school, he overheard her ask Webber for advice on how to deal with him.

“Let him be. He’s a fine boy. You should be proud of him,” Webber told her.

After that, Thomas was ashamed he’d ever disliked the Doctor and forgave him whatever there was to forgive. Especially this: Rachel often invited Webber home to dinner after a hard day at his surgery or the hospital. And sometimes at night he was still sitting with her when Thomas went to bed.

On such a night, when Thomas was twelve, he awoke after midnight and couldn’t get back to sleep. He went down to the kitchen for some milk. As he passed his mother’s room, he noticed the door was ajar, and at the bottom of the stairs, he saw the kitchen light was already on. Half asleep, he opened the door, expecting to see her. Instead, he saw Doctor Webber, who’d been a dinner guest. The Doctor was standing by the open refrigerator, completely naked, his thin body startlingly hairy. He looked at Thomas awkwardly and Thomas didn’t say anything but quickly went back up to his bedroom. Soon, he heard the Doctor come back upstairs. In a few minutes, there was more creaking on the stairs, and the front door opened and closed.

It was a week or so after that Thomas heard Webber speak in his defence. Hence, the forgiveness. Now Webber could stay overnight without any subterfuge. At no time, however, did Thomas see him kiss or touch his mother, the way an ordinary lover might. Most often, after their shared dinner, the Doctor went back to his own house in the central part of Camberloo, near the hospital. This odd relationship had continued even into their old age.

IT WAS TO WEBBER,
then, the faithful lover of his mother, that Thomas turned for advice. He was just about to say, “She wants me to find someone,” when the Doctor, as he often did, anticipated him.

“So, she wants you to find Rowland?” he said. “I gathered she was going to ask you.”

“Did you know him?” said Thomas, not quite convinced the Doctor hadn’t read his mind.

“Only very slightly,” said Webber. “I met him occasionally when I worked for the Coroner. We’d occasionally consult him. That was a long time ago. Before I knew your mother.”

“Should I do as she says?” Thomas said. “Should I try to find him?”

“I don’t see why not,” the Doctor said. He sipped his brandy and licked those lips that seemed to defy old age. “Anyway, you know what she’s like when she’s made up her mind.” He said this fondly, the way he always did when he talked about Rachel. “Give it a try—just to please her. Maybe it’ll be hopeless. Rowland always seemed to have been drawn towards the most unhealthy parts of the world. I wouldn’t be surprised if he died long ago.”

“All right,” Thomas said. “I’ll see what I can do. But I don’t know where to begin.”

“I know a man,” the Doctor said. “If anyone can find him, he can.”

– 2 –

ON A MORNING A FEW WEEKS LATER,
Thomas received a phone call from a woman with a smiling voice. She said she was the secretary of Mr. Jeggard, of the Jeggard Agency, and that he wondered whether Thomas could come to his Toronto office the next day.

So it came about that on an October day, when the leaves on all the trees along the highway were dying in their most dramatic colours, Thomas Vanderlinden drove to Toronto. He parked outside Jeggard’s offices on York Street, just north of the Strathmore Hotel. The sign,
JEGGARD INVESTIGATIVE AGENCY—3RD FLOOR
, was discreetly inscribed on a brass plate beside the entrance of the elegant, angular building. Thomas’s footsteps echoed on the stone staircase on which the Fall sun beat down through skylights, making the air stuffy.