The Island Walkers (60 page)

But his escape was problematic. As he was trying to tell a story, in French, he watched Estelle’s face grow hard. Thinking he’d made some terrible gaffe, he rushed his telling, then fell silent. A train was passing — the main line connecting Toronto and Windsor ran in the hillside, just below the back fences of the houses along the south side of Banting — and for a few minutes it became nearly impossible to hear anybody speak as the cars throbbed and clattered by, out of sight below the fenced edge of the yard. A stink of oil and heat crept under the maple tree. Estelle picked solemnly at her food. A deep unease had spread around the table. Joe felt he was glimpsing the outskirts of some ongoing family crisis. There was a tension, as if Anna and her father were half-expecting some outburst from Estelle. Her ears, below her untidy nest of hair, had grown bright pink.

When the clattering and rumbling finally grew distant, under the retreating wail of the diesel, Anna began to chat volubly about some restaurant in France. But Estelle kept under her cloud. She scowled and picked at her food and generally gave the impression, for all her dignity, of a sulking child.

Suddenly interrupting her daughter, she turned to Joe.

“This is your last year at the school?”

“Oui —”

“Et l’année prochaine? L’université?”

“Oui — l’université de Toronto. Je vais étudier l’histoire.”

“Ah bon!” Estelle spoke rapidly in French, and a bit irritably, to Anna. Joe hardly caught a word. He did, however, recognize the word “Sorbonne.” It was where Anna planned to go, in the fall. He had glimpsed a letter on her desk, bearing the rich purple of a French stamp, with the Sorbonne, Paris, as its return address. He’d tried to persuade her to go to Toronto with him, but without actually contradicting him, she had seemed amused, at best, by the very idea. She was planning to leave in August. Already — and it was only May — he was dreading the end of the summer.

Anna bowed her head, under her mother’s scolding. She shook her head, and smiled with closed lips in a way that suggested she was making a familiar refusal, in a state of bland tolerance. But she was upset, he could see: her arms were moving, where they disappeared out of sight below the edge of the table. He supposed she was tearing at her hangnails.

Andrew was murmuring to his wife in French, placatingly.

Estelle looked haughtily around at their empty plates and asked Joe, with great formality, ignoring the others, if he would like dessert.

After supper they escaped for a walk. Down Banting, the rich, low light of the spring evening infiltrated the deep crevasses in the bark of ancient maples, making them glow like golden cork. She had shown him a special way of holding hands, two fingers interlocked in an unusual way, and they fell into this manner now. To him it was a secret language, the pledging of a pledge. It established a claim on the future.

Her hand was fine-boned and light in his. She seemed a creature of lightness. She walked with her mother’s erectness, her head held up and a little back.

“Mama’s not very happy. I guess you saw that.”

“I thought she was ticked off at something I said.”

“No, every time a train passes, she’s reminded of where she is. She has no friends here. She doesn’t understand the way of life. She thinks people here are crude, the life here is crude. It’s all about hurry, and money, she says, and — a lack of pleasure in things. She’d go back to France tomorrow, if she could.”

“Is that what she was saying to you?” He felt included in her mother’s criticism.

Another train was rumbling behind the houses, sounding its blatant horn. Her hand slipped his.

“She likes
you
,” she said. “She was telling me I should go to Toronto with you.”

“A wise woman!”

“An angry woman,” she said. “She talks against herself. It’s like there’s a splinter in her, she has to push it in deeper. I’m just glad it wasn’t worse.”

“You mean she doesn’t really want you to go to Toronto?”

“I don’t think she knows. But she likes you, she really does. It’s wonderful the way you spoke French to her.

“Let’s go down here,” she said suddenly, pulling him to the right.

The sidewalk on Peter gave way to packed earth thick with spruce needles. They passed an old mansion, gloomy behind its wall of dark green, and came to the black iron rail bridge. It rose a little in the middle, and from this summit they looked to the west. The tracks gleamed in their great arc, rounding towards the Junction, where an old water tower, like a block on legs, stood silhouetted against the sunset. To the left, from the depth of the valley, thrust the mansard roof of Bannerman’s hosiery mill, with its dormer windows. “Like a château,” she said. That it reminded her of France both pleased and saddened him. Sometimes she seemed to be travelling away from him and coming closer, both at once.

Beyond lay the sloping fields of Wiley’s farm, fringed with darkening woods that hid the bend of the Attawan as it made its way into town. A huge, molten sun had settled on the horizon.

“Sometimes I wish I was a painter,” she said, leaning forward at the rail. “I’d paint this. Though I’d never get it. No artist ever gets anything, really. It kind of makes you ill — the failure to
get
anything.”

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

“ ‘The edge of terror we’re just able to bear.’ ”

“What?”

“It’s from a poem.”

“One of yours?”

She shook her head, apparently amused.

“What’s so funny? You’re laughing at me because I don’t know the quote.”

“No I’m not.”

“You are. You think I’m a bit of a clodhopper.”

She looked at him with great seriousness, alarmed.

“I don’t,” she said. “I don’t at all.”

He was only half-appeased, and embarrassed at exposing his own insecurity. He turned back to the rail. The sun was a thin, low hillock now, quivering as it sank.

“Anyway, I’ll bet this is just as beautiful as anything in France.”

She was still looking at him. When he turned back to her, the light in her eyes — wounded and fond — sparked a desperate desire in him. He kissed her gently, holding the back of her head with his hand. When he opened his eyes, to peek, she was looking at him. He wondered if his kiss had touched her at all.

“You didn’t close your eyes,” he said, piqued.

“I wanted to see you.”

They looked back to the valley. A jet was tracking overhead, outracing its own vacant, drifting thunder. Its vapor trail shone and slowly separated. Down the sky, a few solitary clouds had turned sumac red. He drew his fingers across the small of her back, touched her hair, as he looked out at the flaming sky. He seemed to be touching the pulse of life itself. It would be impossible to get closer. Though he wanted to reach out and seize it all, he knew that only a delicate touch would do. There was a sadness in him, a faint, sad desperation, that he was so close, and yet could get no closer. Life could not be taken by force: life was elusive, this light brighter than noon was elusive, a thing to be briefly touched, not held.

They descended into the shadowy lower town. On Station Hill, near the house where the Catholic sisters lived, two birches glowed in the bluing dusk. She stopped to watch a cat hurry across a lawn. It was long and black with a look of slinking determination, a cat on its way to kill.

“Take me to your house,” she said impulsively. “I want to meet your family.”

“Now?” He had taken pains never to mention his family. He wanted to be born out of thin air to her, with no past.

“You’ve seen my family. I want to meet yours.”

He told her she could meet them another time — perhaps she could come to dinner some Sunday — but she insisted with such tenacity he finally gave in.

Flush with her victory, she went along swinging his hand, excited by the idea of a neighbourhood called the Island. He knew she was bound to be disappointed — as he told her, in self-defence, it wasn’t exactly Hawaii. At the low bridge over the race, she stopped and peered at the dark water littered with old boards and rubbish while he watched in a misery of apprehension. “You see what I mean,” he said. “It’s not much of an island.” “Shut up,” she told him. “It’s an island to me.” She looked down the little street crowded with houses. “Actually, I think I was here once, on one of my walks. I just didn’t notice it was an island.” Nearby loomed the metal sheds of the town yard, with its dimming piles of sand streaked with salt, a scarred yellow road-grader — signs, to him, of the decline in neighbourhood since they’d come off the Hill. But she spied an old snowplough, its curved, rusted blades rising like wings. “An iron angel,” she declared, running her palm over the scabbing paint.

When they reached his house, she stopped and looked at it, while he fidgeted beside her. “We’re planning to move,” he told her, clutching at the family myth, which normally he despised. Before them, the whitewashed facade with its dark-green shutters (one had begun to sag badly!) looked out with a starkness that appalled him. “It’s like another century,” she declared. This was apparently a
compliment, though with her he could never be sure, irony shadowed so many of her enthusiasms. A sprinkler was throwing twists of silver around the tiny front lawn.

His mother was in the back, working in her garden. She had seemed weary and remote of late, her eyes shadowed with a darkness he found painful to contemplate. But it was the yellow-purplish bruise staining much of her right cheek that he was acutely aware of now. She had told him the whole sordid tale — his father’s refusal to take the job of assistant manager, his striking of her — with a tone of cheerless exhaustion he had never heard in her before, all the while watching him steadily, as if demanding to know what
he
was going to do about it. Not long afterwards, he had confronted his father in the backyard. Alf had born his (embarrassingly) tearful recriminations —
Hadn’t he taught Joe never to strike a woman?
— in a silence that unsettled Joe because it made him wonder, later, if he had the whole story. In any case, his mother’s revelation had gone on working inside him, like a chemical reaction producing anger and revulsion. He was set against his father, but really he was sick of both of them, of their standoff that had filled the house with a deepening tension.

To his relief, his mother roused to her old bright, English self. And in the dusk, the bruise on her face hardly showed. He was hoping they could have a few words in the garden and leave. But she insisted they have tea. Joe followed miserably into the kitchen, where Anna walked around the kitchen table, complimenting his mother on her decorating — that blue with that yellow — so cozy and bright! “It reminds me of farmhouses in France,” she said. “That’s what I was thinking of,” Joe’s mother said. “I used to holiday there when I was a girl.” They talked cheerfully of Normandy while Margaret boiled water and put out a plate of Peak Freans at the kitchen table. “We don’t keep much in the way of biscuits any more,” she apologized. “Not since Joe’s sister got diabetes.” Joe sat beside Anna, smiling thinly, conscious of the bruise on his mother’s face. It seemed to him that the good cheer that had filled the kitchen was a sham created by Anna’s politeness. He was aware — surely Anna was aware
too — of the nicks on the kitchen chairs, the cracks and worn spots in the linoleum, the sad, weak light from the overhead fixture.

A noise in the hall startled Joe, who feared his father was about to appear. But it was only his sister and brother. Introducing them, Joe watched Penny sneaking glances at Anna’s birthmark. Jamie, dressed for bed in his yellow-and-brown polo pyjamas, was more straightforward: “What’s that on your face?”

“Jamie,” Joe’s mother scolded.

“Did you hit it on a cupboard?”

Joe’s mother turned away.

“No,” Anna said, laughing. She explained to Jamie about birthmarks, while he stared like someone at a zoo. “You can touch it if you like,” Anna said. As the boy tentatively put out his fingers, she slipped a smile to Joe.

A few minutes later, they were all sitting at the table when Joe’s father came in, his face weary, his hair collapsing over his ears. Joe was instantly on guard: he felt he no longer had anything in common with the man. Yet he didn’t want Anna to think ill of him, so he managed a warmer note than usual with his father as the two of them shook hands.

“You’re even more handsome than your son,” Anna told Alf.

“Well, I’ve tried to teach him as best I can,” his father said. His pale-blue eyes, suddenly decades younger than his face, blazed happily at Joe. Joe looked away.

“She’s got a birthmark!” Jamie cried.

“Yes, I can see that,” Joe’s father said, looking at it frankly. “I’d call it more of a beauty mark.”

Anna laughed, charmed. To Joe’s dismay, his father made himself comfortable at the table. Across the kitchen, his mother had retired into silence. Whatever was between his parents was in the room, he felt: a dark pool spreading beneath the merriment. “We’ve been talking about France,” Anna told him. “Ah yes, France,” Joe’s father said, running his hand over his head in a contemplative way. “I once spent a good many months in France.”

“On holiday?” Anna said.

“No, no,” Joe’s father said, blushing a little, with a glance at his wife. “The war —”

“I forgot!” she said. “You were in the war!” A new tone had come into her voice, at once excited and reverential, almost breathless. Joe waited in suspense: this mention of the war seemed bound to drive his father into an awkward silence. Around the table, Joe’s brother and sister lowered their gazes to their half-finished glasses of milk. Like Joe, they’d been brought up not to ask about the war.

To Joe’s astonishment, his father seemed not the least bothered by Anna’s questions. Sitting back in his chair, he told a story Joe had never heard, about borrowing two bicycles with a soldier pal of his and heading off into the hills. They had stayed with a French family. He recalled their warmth, and the fine bread the woman had made in an outdoor oven. “It was the only time I actually felt like I was
in
France,” he told them. “The rest of the time — you were just too — wrought up. You’d see some spot — some village or a grove of trees — and you’d
know
it was beautiful, you’d
know
you wanted to spend time there, but even if you did, you weren’t really there, you know? You couldn’t really get comfortable. France was, I don’t know, sort of a dream. I kept thinking, Later, when the war’s over, I’ll come back, I’ll really have a look at the place.”