The Stone Diaries: Pulitzer Prize Winner By Carol Shields - 10

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ease, 1977

Victoria Louise Flett is only twenty-two years old, a student at the University of Toronto, a tall stringbean of a woman with large hands and feet and straight blond unyielding hair that she bends carelessly behind her ears. So much for her coiffeur. She favors jeans and sweaters and an old denim jacket—as a matter of fact, she owns no other clothing. These clothes are dark in color and dense in weave, as though she’s trying to keep the bad dreams of modern life out. To correct her nearsightedness she wears glasses with round metal frames, and her eyes behind the rather spotty lenses appear cold and serious. It is 1977; she is no longer the tenderly sheltered child of a large household; her voice, an embarrassed voice, shunts between adult censoriousness and teenage perplexity. Her emotional rhythms are sometimes uneven, as you might expect, and yet she is capable of generous insight.

She’s confided to her Aunt Daisy, for instance, that she can understand the genealogical phenomenon that has burst forth all around her. She finds it moving, she says, to see men and women—though, oddly, they are mostly women—tramping through cemeteries or else huddled over library tables in the university’s records room, turning over the pages of county histories, copying names and dates into small spiral notebooks and imagining, hoping, that their unselfish labors will open up into a fabric of substance and comity. Victoria doesn’t believe these earnest amateurs are looking for links to royalty or to creative genius; all they want is for their ancestors to be revealed as simple, honest, law-abiding folks, quiet in their accomplishments, faithful in their vows, cheerful, solvent, and well intentioned, and that their robustly rounded (but severely occluded) lives will push up against, and perhaps pardon, the contemporary plagues of displacement and disaffection. Common sense, that prized substance, seems to have disappeared from the world; even Victoria realizes this.

Victoria’s great-aunt Daisy, now retired and living in Florida, has become preoccupied in her mature years with the lives of her two dead fathers: Cuyler Goodwill, her blood parent, and Magnus Flett, her father-in-law. But Victoria’s aunt pursues her two departed fathers in an altogether different spirit than the usual weekend genealogist. She’s more focused for one thing, and, at the same time, more dreamy and ineffectual, wanting, it seems to Victoria, to pull herself inside a bag of buried language, to be that language, to be able to utter that unutterable word: father. It’s true Aunt Daisy has read a few works of social history, memoirs, biography—quite a few more in recent years than her niece would ever imagine—but she does not go on detective outings to local libraries and graveyards, and she has not traveled to her birthplace, Tyndall, Manitoba, to visit the famed Goodwill Tower built in memory of her own mother; she imagines, anyway, that the structure has been sadly vandalized, stone after stone carried away by souvenir hunters, so that nothing remains except a slight doughnut-shaped depression in the ground. She has not contacted the Mormon Archive in Salt Lake City and has no plans to do so. She’s sent off no letters of inquiry. She sits comfortably, very comfortably indeed, on the flowered settee in her Florida room (three walls of louvered glass), and thinks about her two departed fathers. That’s as far as she goes: she just thinks about them, concentrates on them, dwells on them. For her grandniece, Victoria, the two fathers are described, but never quite animated; their powers are asserted, but not demonstrated. Aunt Daisy mulls over their lives.

She wonders what those lives were made of and how they ended: noisily as in the movies or in a frosty stand-off? Of course, she doesn’t do this all the time—only at odd moments, late in the afternoon, for instance, when the day feels flattened and featureless, when she’s restless, when she feels her own terrifying inauthenticity gnawing at her heart’s membrane, and when there’s nothing of interest on television, just the local news from Tampa or the weather report.

Her life at seventy-two is one of ease. Three times a year she gets a good perm, as opposed to an ordinary perm, and ends up with hair springy as Easter basket grass; she’s submitted (once) to a painful facial, tried (two or three times) a new shade of lipstick, thinks (every day) about having her varicose veins done. And she’s bounded back from the depression that struck her down some years ago. Her physical health is good-to-excellent. She has money in the bank, plenty of it, though she lives modestly. Ten years ago she sold her large Ottawa house and moved to Florida’s west coast, purchasing a three-bedroom condo in a Sarasota development nearby to where her old friend Fraidy Hoyt has settled, and not far from Birds’ Key where another friend, Labina Greene Dukes Kavanaugh, lives with her third husband, Bud.

Since moving to Florida Aunt Daisy has learned to play shuffleboard and to decorate plastic headbands and bracelets with gluedon seashells—these she sends as birthday gifts to her half-dozen granddaughters scattered across England and the United States; to her grandsons, Benje and Teller, she sends leather wallets that she stitches together herself down at the Bayside Ladies Craft Club.

She doubts very much whether they like or appreciate these handmade articles, but she has always, especially since her breakdown in 1965, believed in keeping her hands occupied, filling more and more of the world with less and less of herself. Visitors notice how the balcony of her condo is crowded with the lush greenness of tended cacti and tropical plants. Her famous botanical thumb is still very much in evidence; she is a sensualist when it comes to the world of horticulture, though she complains, good-naturedly, about the sogginess of the Florida landscape and swears she’ll never be able to accept the scraggly-barked, poodle-headed palm tree as anything other than a joke on nature.

Young Victoria, her grandniece, defends palm trees. She doesn’t like them much either, but she feels a compulsion to rouse her aunt to debate. It seems to her this is the least the young can do for the old.

She’s read somewhere that the elderly learn to step back in order to see more, that their eyes squint, and crowd in new possibilities.

In the wintertime, when Victoria is up north in Toronto attending lectures and preparing papers and writing exams and worrying about her non-existent love affairs, she thinks of her elderly great-aunt so peachily settled down in Sarasota, tweezing dead blooms off her balcony plants and playing bridge and doing her volunteer afternoons at the Ringling Museum, and “bumming” with Fraidy and Labina in the boutiques around St. Armand’s Key.

She thinks, a little enviously, how settled Great-aunt Daisy’s life is, also how nearly over it is, and she can’t for the life of her understand why an old lady would want to speculate about two old men moldering in their graves: the eccentric Cuyler Goodwill, the vanished Magnus Flett. She entertains the suspicion that her aunt is really in search of her mother, that the preoccupation with her two fathers is only a kind of ruse or sly equation.

If anyone should be on a father quest, it should be Victoria herself, that’s what she sometimes thinks; in fact, she doesn’t give one golden fuck who her father is; her Aunt Daisy once overheard her say as much. Victoria Louise knows a little about her paternal parentage, but not much, only what her mother let slip from time to time. Her father was some jerkhead out in Saskatchewan, married, fat-bellied, probably dead now, probably a boozer, so dumb he never even knew her mother was pregnant for God’s sake—and Beverly Flett didn’t trouble herself telling him, just hopped on a train and came east and moved in with Aunt Daisy’s family in Ottawa, and when people said to her round about the eighth or ninth month, “Aren’t you going to put that little baby up for adoption?”

she shook her head and said, “Nope.”

This was in 1955; hardly anyone kept their babies back then.

Now Beverly’s been gone for four years, cancer of the pancreas, and Victoria spends her vacations down in Florida with her Greataunt Daisy—who mails her a plane ticket, who meets her at Tampa airport in an air-conditioned cab, who makes up the guestroom with crisp cotton sheets, who has a little African violet blooming on the bedside table, who has plans for the two of them to get all dolled up and have their Easter lunch at the Ringling Hotel—where they’ve got a new smoked salmon quiche on the menu with green salad on the side—and if the waitress turns out to be the friendly type, if she says, “So you two gals are out on the town, huh?” then Aunt Daisy will say, shaping her words into soft ovals of confederacy, “This is my grandniece all the way from Toronto, she’s just finishing her Master’s Degree in paleobotany, and, she’s thinking seriously of starting her doctorate next September,” and Victoria, already ill at ease in her jeans and torn T-shirt—it is heartcatching the way she adjusts and readjusts the neck of that stretched garment—will wiggle uncomfortably in her seat and think how her aunt didn’t used to burble on like this, she’s turned into a regular Florida blue-head with her beads and cork-soled sandals and white plastic purse, but she, Victoria that is, will also bask in her aunt’s warm pride and probably, once the waitress has sashayed back into the kitchen, reach across the table and pat that dear dry old powdery hand. A hand she knows almost as well as she knows her own.

Cuyler Goodwill died back in the spring of 1955, the same year Victoria Flett was born. He was out working in the backyard of his house on Lake Lemon, a man of seventy-eight years, when he felt himself go suddenly light-headed. Probably he shouldn’t have been out there at all in the bright sun without a hat on his head; that’s what his wife Maria was always saying.

This strange dry dizziness—it was friendly enough at first, accompanied by a persistent buzzing noise and a corner-of-the-eye glimpse of bees’ wings, like blurred spheres of sound, invisible.

He stretched himself out on the soft grass, flat on his back, his laced shoes pointing skyward. A cool breeze came along, rippling across his forehead, stirring a strand of his thin hair, and almost immediately he felt stronger. Still he did not get up.

There’s no hurry, he said to himself, I can lie here all morning if I like.

Maria had taken her big straw shopping bag and walked around the Point to the Bridgeport Grocery Store; she was out of butter.

She’d announced this at breakfast—she was always running out of something or other, never having accustomed herself to the bulk-buying habits of North Americans. Her husband knew she would be gone for at least an hour; she liked to dilly dally on the Lake Road, especially now that the redbud was coming into bloom, and their young neighbors, the MacGregors, Lydia and Bill, would be out working on their new cedar deck. She’d be sure to stop by their place and pass the time of day—and never notice for a minute that she was interrupting or that the two young people were passing looks back and forth, rolling their eyes and making minute shrugs of exasperation. On and on she’d jabber, gesturing at the trees, the waves on the lake, the cloudless sky, making suggestions about the support brackets for their deck, about the loose shingles on the back of their house, about their rhubarb plants, whether or not they received enough sun, and neither Bill nor Lydia would understand one word she said.

Talk, talk, talk. Meanwhile, here he lay, an old man sprawled on his back.

The novelty of his position amused him at first, and very gradually he became aware of the warmth that rose out of the earth, penetrating first the crushed grass beneath him and then passing through the smooth broadcloth of his checked shirt. This was surprising to him, that he should be able to feel the immense stored heat of the planet spreading across the width of his seventy-eight year-old back. When had he last lain like this on bare ground, fitting the irregularities of his physiognomy, muscles, bone, cartilage, against a bed of recently clipped grass, giving himself over to it? Only young people surrendered themselves to the earth in this unguarded way, allowing it to support them, the whole weight of their bodies trustingly held.

Minutes passed. He had nothing much to think of, so he thought about the angle of the sun, which was almost directly overhead, and about his body, his seventy-eight-year-old body, hatched up north in Canada in another century by parents now firmly erased, growing to strength there in his early years, and now, removed as if on a magic carpet to this other place, lying flat on a patch of Indiana grass like a window screen about to be rinsed off by the garden hose.

He lay in the backyard of a lakeside cottage, but one that he and Maria now made their permanent home. They’d been here for some years, since his retirement from business. The wide pie – shaped lot was landscaped with lilacs, forsythia, and mock orange, with the result that his body was obscured from the view of passing motorists, not that there were many of those in the middle of the day. Only locals used the Lake Road, and of course it was too early for the summer people.

He loved this time of year, April. Life shone through the latticed trees, shone everywhere—life.

Round about him robins sang in the grass. He stared at them with a thickened gaze. How important these robins suddenly seemed with their busy, purposeful movements, their golf ball heads bobbing.

The sky overhead was a brilliant blue. Maria would be home any minute now, unloading her groceries on the kitchen table, clicking her tongue about the price of staples in the country stores and saying how much cheaper such things were in the Bloomington supermarkets, not that she’d go back to living in town for a million dollars. She would say all this in a dithyrambic mixture of Italian and English that he alone in the world seemed able to understand.

He attempted to rise to his feet, but powerful cramps seized his thighs and urged him to stay put a little longer. Rest a bit, he said to himself, lie still. To dull his brain he tried to conjure the sunlit streets of Stonewall, Manitoba, his boyhood town, but was, as always, discouraged by the muzziness of blocked memory. The visible walls of his father’s house remained disengaged from its secret inner rooms, its beds and crockery, the jam pot on the cupboard shelf where the family cash was kept, the soft, decaying dollar bills.

(Air—he needed a breath of air, this would not do.) He forced his way out through his mother’s garden—a few weak rows of cabbages, some spindly wax beans—and along the sun-struck confusion of Jackson Avenue as it was sixty years ago, past farmers’ wagons and the high aroma of tethered horses, the hardware store on the corner, the primary school, the Court House, the struggling civic flower beds, and at the center of town, in a trapezoid of light, the Presbyterian Church with its hard limestone adornments, now, suddenly, melted to ash.

He may have dozed off, then woke suddenly to a fear that seemed to tunnel out of childhood. What was this? His back, meanwhile, had grown stiff.

That back of his, he speculated, must be speckled with age by now; the skin would be mottled and creased and thinned out like tissue paper, but who ever sees their own backs? A person would have to wiggle and squirm in front of a double mirror, and even then there were parts of your body you’d never get a glimpse of.

There are bits of your body you carry around all your life but never really own.

This thought, this puzzle, made him smile inside his head, though it brought with it a twinge of nostalgia. He remembered how as a young stonecutter in Manitoba he’d worked bare-chested in the summer months—all the quarry men did—and how, out of delicacy for his young wife, he’d let the sweat from his back dry off before slipping on his shirt while walking home to his supper, home to his beloved.

Not Maria, no, not then. Home from a day at the quarry to that other wife, the wife of his young manhood.

Even in old age he thinks of this wife at least once every day; something will rear up and remind him of that brief marriage which in time has come to seem more like an enclosure he’d stumbled upon than a legal arrangement formally entered. She is always, in his recollections, standing at the doorway, waiting for him, a presence, a grief, an ache. In fact, she had never once waited for him at the doorway, being occupied at this hour with supper preparations. He must, however clumsily, get that part right, that he had not been awaited.

But what was her name? What was her name? His first wife’s name? A suppressed rapture. There is something careless about this kind of forgetting, something unpardonable. His dear one, his sweetheart. Her face had the quality of a blurred photograph, yet he knew her body, every inch, and remembers how he woke one night to the loudness of the rain with his arm across her breast. All that was good, that soft breast.

Feeling foolish, he started through the alphabet: Amelia, Bessie, Charlotte, an old fashioned name, Dorothea …

Emma, Fanny.

He stared down the length of his body, his neatly buttoned sport shirt, the rumple of his khaki pants, to where his feet made a kind of v-shaped frame through which could be seen the stone pyramid he had been working on when his dizzy spell struck.

How he’d grown to hate it.

For close to ten years he’d been at work on this structure, a scale model of the Great Pyramid, begun just after the end of the war, and only about a quarter of it now completed. Other men built boats in their retirement, or swimming pools or garden ornaments, Snow White and the seven dwarfs cut out of boxwood with a jigsaw and set up among the petunias. Other men saw their projects completed and then began something new, but he for some reason had allowed himself to become mired in this mocking piece of foolishness. (“One thing at a time”; how often had he uttered those words, persuading himself of their wisdom.) But this pyramid had become an eyesore, to his eye at least. A folly. The scolding voice he so often hears in the dark says: “You will never be able to equal your first monument, you’ve lost your touch.” Furthermore, measurements taken only one week earlier, told him the structure had gone out of plumb, and that it would grow worse as he progressed. If he continued, that is.

Fanny, Gladys …

Most people need an envelope in which to concentrate their thoughts, and Cuyler Goodwill achieved his unique concentration regarding his pyramid through an imposed perspective, his compacted elderly spine stretched out along his own recently mown lawn, his angle of vision significantly diminished, and therefore radically altered. Something fortunate happened, a trick of perception.

He was suddenly clear, at any rate, in his decision. He would not continue with this ugly piece of backyard sculpture, pale shadow of that long-ago tower he’d raised in memory of his first wife. (What was her name?) No, he would call a halt to it this minute. Right now. Tomorrow he would telephone a contractor in Bloomington and have them send out a bulldozer. Then he’d get a truck to carry away the stone chips. It would take no more than a day or two. Astonishing. Of course there would be a terrible scar left in the middle of the back lawn, but come fall he could plant one of those fast-growing ornamental cherries in its place. A thing of beauty.

Yes. In fact, why wait for fall?—he’d put it in right away; he never could understand why trees had to be planted in the fall. It didn’t make an ounce of sense, it went against sense.

I’ll knock her down, he said inside his throat, jubilant, anesthetized against tomorrow’s faint heart and second thoughts, uncertain whether he was moving close to the center of his life or selling off some valuable part of himself. But immediately, with a shudder of joy, he knew that what might be done, could be done.

Happiness coursed through him in that instant, decision’s homely music.

A choice made when one is flat on one’s back is no less a choice.

Its force sends out random jolts of energy, and this energy struck now in the center of Cuyler Goodwill’s chest, bringing with it on this fine April day the chill of midwinter. His feet and hands, he realized, were suddenly icy, separated from the sensations of his body, attached to it only by a tough filament of pain. Where was he now? What had he been thinking?—Fanny, Gladys, Harriet, Isabel …

He allowed the pain to occupy him—it seemed the only thing to do. It filled him up—perfectly—leaving only one small part of him empty, a portion of his mind where a question knocked. No, not a question, but something asking to be remembered. Something about the bulldozer scraping across the grass and knocking down his pyramid, his shame, something he had forgotten in his joyous moment of decision—what was it now?

What? Snagged in a convulsion of thought, he rounded the muscle of his mouth, squeezed his eyes shut and saw a kind of cloudy steam roll over his mind, teasing him with his own dullness. What he needed to remember was a simple and concrete detail. An object, in fact, a precise object fixed in time. If he could manage to raise his hand he would be able to touch that object and identify it, but his hand, it seemed, that icy weight, had gone to sleep.

And then, lifted by a spasm of concentration, he remembered: there was a box buried under the pyramid’s foundation—a time capsule no less. He had placed it there himself. A little steel box about twelve inches square, perhaps four inches deep. Of course.

He remembered buying the box at a local hardware store; it was the sort of container intended for fishing tackle, but stronger in its construction than such boxes usually are. It possessed, in addition, a well-fitted lid, and even a little lock and key. Fifteen dollars, he’d paid for it. Ungrumblingly.

Isabel, Jeanette, Katie, Lillian …

He remembered that he had put considerable thought into what should go into the box. This was a long time ago. Since that time much had slipped out of his mind. These last ten years had been a period of disintegration; he saw that now. He had imagined himself to be a man intent on making something, while all the while he was participating in a destructive and sorrowful narrowing of his energy. Still it would be a surprise to open the box and see what he had secreted there. But he would have to make sure it was not damaged. He would have to explain carefully to the driver of the bulldozer about there being a little box just beneath the foundation; this explanation would tax his energy terribly, but it was necessary if the treasure were to be saved.

But what treasure was this?

Something tugged at the hem of his thoughts. Something of value lay secreted in the box, something that had belonged to his young wife. (What was her name?) It was so long ago he’d buried the box in the earth, since he was a young man walking home from the quarry with his shirt slung over his shoulder and the sweat on his back drying; so much had happened, so many spoken words and collapsed hours, the rooms of his life filling and emptying and never guessing at the shape of their outer walls, their supporting beams and rough textured siding.

Now he knew from the position of the sun that it must be late afternoon. Evening, in fact. The stars were streaming across the sky, a visiting radiance, bringing with them the perfectly formed image of a wedding ring. Her wedding ring. And the flickering moment when he had eased it off her dead finger. (Not that this scene takes sensory form, not that it even materializes as thought; it is, in fact, undisclosable in its anguish; there are chambers, he knows, in the most ordinary lives that are never entered, let alone advertised, and yet they lie pressed against the consciousness like leaf specimens in an old book.) His wife’s wedding ring, his wife Mercy. Ah, Mercy. Mercy, hold me in your soft arms, cover me with your body, keep me warm.

The thought of his only daughter either did or did not occur to him in his final moments, a daughter who is now seventy-two years old and living in a luxury condominium in the sun-blessed state of Florida.

Victoria’s great-aunt has become a wearer of turquoise pant suits.

They’re comfortable, practical too, and they conceal the fissured broken flesh of her once presentable calves. Her lipsticked mouth—a crimped posy—snaps open, gapes, trembles, and draws tight. Her eyes have sunk into slits of marbled satin. She looks in the bathroom mirror and thinks how that pink-white frizz around her face cannot possibly be her hair (though it’s true she sometimes pats at it with deep satisfaction), or the appalling jowls or the slack upper arms that jiggle as she walks along the beach in the early evening, tossing chunks of stale bread to the seagulls. No one told her so much of life was spent being old. Or that, paradoxically, these long Florida years would scarcely press on her at all.

Everything she encounters feels lacking in weight. The hollow interior doors of her condo. The molded insubstantiality of the light switches. The dismaying lightness of her balcony furniture.

The rattling loose-jointed cabs she sometimes takes when visiting Labina and her husband out at Birds’ Key. Even her white plastic shoulder bag with its neat roll of cough drops, its mini-pack of tissues, and slim little case of credit cards that have replaced the need for cash.

In the foyer of Bayside Towers stands an artificial jade plant, and she is unable to walk by this abomination without reaching out and fingering its leaves, sometimes rather roughly, leaving the marks of her fingernails on the vinyl surfaces, finding sly pleasure in her contempt. In the late evenings she’s taken to watching Johnny Carson on television. She remains baffled by the mean hard outline of his mouth, a mouth that looks as though it were drawn on his face with pen and ink, but she likes his opening monologue, that quick run of jokes strung together with the wide familiar golf-swing and with Johnny’s repeated transitional phrase: “moving right along.”

“Moving right along” is what she murmurs to herself these days—on her way to Hairworks for her weekly shampoo and set, on her way to the post office or her doctor’s appointment or downstairs to the club room for her daily round of bridge. Moving right along, and along, and along. The way she’s done all her life.

Numbly. Without thinking.

I have said that Mrs. Flett recovered from the nervous torment she suffered some years ago, and yet a kind of rancor underlies her existence still: the recognition that she belongs to no one. Even her dreams release potent fumes of absence. She has her three grown children, it’s true, but she wonders if these three will look back on her with anything other than tender forbearance. And her eight grandchildren are so far away, so diminished by age and distance, so consecrated to the blur of the future. Perhaps that’s why she is forever “ruminating” about her past life, those two lost fathers of hers, and hurling herself at the emptiness she was handed at birth. In the void she finds connection, and in the connection another void—a pattern of infinite regress which is heartbreaking to think of—and yet it pushes her forward, it keeps her alive. She feeds the seagulls, doesn’t she? She telephones her grown children every Sunday without fail, Alice in London, Joan out there in the wilds of Oregon, and Warren in Pittsburgh (soon to be transferred to New York), and despite the sometimes insane lunges and loops of these electronic conversations she manages to simulate a steady chin-up cheerfulness and repress the least suggestion of despair. She cooks herself a proper dinner, doesn’t she?—a chop or a chicken breast, green vegetables. She doesn’t take pills; she doesn’t hear noises.

She does lie on her bed, though, in the early morning, her eyes turned toward the window, staring at the hard Florida light that creeps in between the slats of her blinds, and feeling its unforgiving brilliance. Sometimes she bunches her fists; sometimes tears crowd her eyes as she lies there thinking: another day, another day, and attempting to position herself in the shifting scenes of her life. Her life thus far, I should say—for she sees years and years ahead for herself. That life “thus far” has meant accepting the doses of disabling information that have come her way, every drop, and stirring them with the spoon of her longing—she’s done this for so many years it’s become second nature. The real and the illusory whirl about her bedroom in smooth-dipping waltz-time—one, two, three; one, two, three. On and on she goes.

The synapses collapse; well, let them. She enlarges on the available material, extends, shrinks, reshapes what’s offered; this mixed potion is her life. She swirls it one way or the other, depending on—who knows what it depends on?—the fulcrum of desire, or of necessity. She might drop in a ripe plum from a library book she’s reading or something out of a soap opera or a dream.

Not often, but occasionally, she will make a bold subtraction, as when Fraidy Hoyt reported she had almost certainly glimpsed Maria Goodwill, widow of Cuyler Goodwill, in Indianapolis, walking down Ohio Street on the arm of an elderly gentleman—but this is impossible, laughable, since Maria has long since gone home to her Italian village and transformed herself into a black draped figure of mourning with a bowl of knitting in her lap.

If you were to ask Victoria’s Great-aunt Daisy the story of her life she would purse her lips for a moment—that ruby-red efflorescence—and stutter out an edited hybrid version, handing it to you somewhat shyly, but without apology, without equivocation that is: this is what happened, she would say from the unreachable recesses of her seventy-two years, and this is what happened next.

It’s hard to say whether she’s comfortable with her blend of distortion and omission, its willfulness, in fact; but she is accustomed to it. And it’s occurred to her that there are millions, billions, of other men and women in the world who wake up early in their separate beds, greedy for the substance of their own lives, but obliged every day to reinvent themselves.

In June of 1977, just two months after their Easter lunch at the Ringling Hotel, her grandniece, Victoria Flett, phoned from Toronto and said, “Hey, guess what?—I’m going to the Orkney Islands on a research project. Next week. Why don’t you come with me. It would be a terrific holiday, and we can”—for some reason Victoria’s voice carried a ribbon of laughter—”we can go put some flowers on Magnus Flett’s grave.”

“The Orkney Islands!” her daughter Joan said during their customary Sunday telephone call. “But I thought you said you were going to come up to Portland this year, you said you’d stay with the girls so Ross and I could get away for a couple of days, they were looking forward to seeing Grandma. It’s always Grandma this and Grandma that, and now you’re talking about the Orkneys.”

“Have you looked this place up on a map?” her son Warren said.

“Do you even know where the Orkney Islands are?”

“Why the hell not?” Alice said in her acquired English accent.

“About time you crossed the pond. As long as you stay with me and the kids for a few days coming and going.”

“Of course you’ll go,” Fraidy said. “I’ll do your volunteer afternoon for you, and we’ll cancel bridge for once.”

“Leave your passport to me,” Labina’s husband, Bud, said. “Just get your photos done, fill out the form, and I’ll drop it off at the federal building in Tampa where I just happen to have a few connections—a fellow there who owes me a favor. The whole thing’ll be over and out in ten minutes flat, take my word for it.”

“What you need,” Labina (Beans) said, “is a proper wool suit.

These Florida blends won’t do in that unholy climate, not at all. I almost froze my behind off that time I was in Scotland, and that was only Edinburgh, not way up north where you’re heading. A wool suit, a Perma-press blouse and a couple of very, very fine sweaters to switch off with, you won’t need another thing.”

“Walking shoes,” Victoria said on the telephone. “Never mind what they look like.”

“And an umbrella.” Fraidy said. “The folding kind.”

“Cancel the umbrella,” Victoria said. “See if you can get one of those plastic ponchos with a hood.”

“Sorry we can’t get you the package deal,” the travel agent in Bradenton said, “but the fact is, we need at least three weeks’ notice for that, and besides, we don’t have all that much information on the Orkney Islands.”

“Frankly,” said Marian McHenry, who lives in the condo across the hall, “I’d rather see my own country first instead of traipsing around over there. Have you seen Washington D.C.? I mean, really seen it?”

“No one needs inoculations any more for Europe,” Dr. Neerly told her, “But I’m going to write you a prescription for travelers’ trots. Also one for constipation. And you’ll want to take along your own anti-allergy pillow, they probably still use chicken feathers over there, or straw.”

“I hope to heaven you’ve made firm hotel reservations.”

“Personally, we wouldn’t dream of booking ahead, it takes all the fun out of it, we like to play it by ear, you know what I mean?

Will o’ the wisp, that’s us.”

“You honestly haven’t been to Europe since 1927? Honest? Oh boy, are you in for a surprise.”

“I didn’t know you’d been to Europe before.” (Joan, phoning from Portland on a Tuesday night.) “I mean, you never once mentioned it.”

“For God’s sake, don’t stay in hotels over there. Because, listen, they’ve got these darling little bed and breakfast thingies all over the place, they’re much more homey, and you get a real feel for the day-to-day life as it’s really lived kind-of-thing.”

“Take my advice and avoid two things. First, bed and breakfast establishments. Some of them actually stick you between those godawful nylon sheets, yech, and serve you mushy hot tomatoes for breakfast, I kid you not. Two, don’t drink the water out of the faucet. Haven’t you ever wondered why they drink all that tea over there? Because tea requires boiled water—boiled, get it?”

“Travelers’ checks.”

“Money belt.”

“Two small suitcases are better than one big one, that’s the smartest thing I’ve ever been told.”

“When we were in Canterbury—”

“The time I went up to the Lake District—”

“—fish and chips, wrapped in newspaper.”

“—a little plastic case with your own soap because—”

“My great-great grandmother came from the Isle of Wight. Is that anywhere near where—?”

“If you could just pick me up one of those cute little Wedgwood ashtrays, the green color though, not the blue.”

“—keep your valuables on your person at all times—”

“—these itty-bitty earplug thingamajigs, you can buy them at Winn Dixie.”

“The Orkney Islands? Never heard of them.”

Young Victoria, meeting her great-aunt at Mirabelle Airport in Montreal, was in a knot of nerves. “I’d like you to meet Lewis.

Lewis Roy. Lew, this is my Aunt Daisy.” Tonguing each word.

“How do you do, Mrs. Flett.”

“Lew’s going to the Orkneys too,” Victoria said, her voice rising. Her face as she said this was awful. So was her hair, lank, unevenly cut.

“Oh.”

“He’s kind of, you know, in charge of the project. He’s”—she performed a grotesque rolling shrug of nonchalance, “he’s my prof, sort of.”

“Really just a post-doc, Mrs. Flett. Victoria and I came up with this proposal together. It was mostly her idea.” His face appeared strong, his mouth eager, ready to be amused.

On the plane the three of them were seated side by side, Lewis Roy on the aisle, Victoria in the middle, her aunt by the window.

They drank some champagne and ate a dinner of chicken and sliced carrots, and in the daze and rumble of airline ritual became easy with each other. Then Lewis plunged into a long, complex account of a previous flight to Europe, and as the story progressed he fell, egregiously, into the present tense. “So the pilot makes an announcement. Hey, one of the motors is kaput. Right. We turn back.

We’re like all shook up. But we sit there spooning up our grub like it’s just a real fun time we’re having, and the next thing you know we’re sitting on an airstrip somewhere in Labrador, an army base or something, and we’re like stuck there for twelve whole hours, the toilet malfunctioning, and then—”

“Aunt Daisy’s tired, I think,” Victoria hummed.

He fell instantly silent. Gnawed on his knuckle bones, yawned hugely, glanced about.

Victoria burned with shame. She knew how her aunt must feel about this young man, his hair flowing around his shoulders like a cape of fur, his boyish narrative masking his brilliance, his extraordinary tenderness transformed to male insouciance. The stewardess, at last, brought around blankets and pillows and dimmed the lights, and they all three pretended to sleep. Victoria could hear her aunt’s jagged breathing, almost a sob, and understood that this elderly person beside her longed with all her soul to be home in her Florida condo, to be anywhere but where she was, riding the night Atlantic with the little nightlight gleaming on the window frame and across her eyelids.

Victoria, the whole of her terrible radar on duty, could sense, too, the waves of sadness, of failure, emanating from Lewis Roy’s stiff body. Under the secrecy of her woolen blanket she reached sideways for his hand, found it trembling, and held it tight. She had never touched him before; he really was her instructor and she his student; they were not, then, on a footing of intimacy.

After a while she reached out her other hand and placed it on her elderly aunt’s tense wrist, saying with the pressure of her fingertips: everything’s going to be all right, trust me.

In this way, joined together by the dolorous stretched arms of Victoria Flett, the three of them exchanged one continent for another. They may have slept a few winks during the night. Each of them believed they lived on a fragile planet. Not one of them knew what the world was coming to.

The Orkney Islands are low-lying, green, cultivated, covered with winding roads and with sheep who picturesquely graze on sloping meadows, forming a tableau that could have been painted by a watercolorist two hundred years ago, three hundred years ago. Behind and beneath this pastoral scenery lie prehistoric ruins—villages, forts, cairns, burial chambers, and standing stones which might, or might not, be astronomical observatories. There are Iron Age remains, too, another layer. And the Norse monuments, ninth century. Also the medieval, the feudal, the monastic.

And other more contemporary additions—for superimposed upon the ancient and the bucolic are today’s small humming Orcadian factories modestly producing such specialties as Orkney cakes (delicious) or Orkney cheeses; then there are the craft enterprises, knitting for the most part (but this is sadly in decline), the tourist thrust (booming), and the always present background buzz of daily commerce and professional necessity—grocers, stationers, lawyers, clergymen, what have you.

None of this is what Victoria’s Great-aunt Daisy had expected.

Moorland, bog, heather was more what she’d had in mind. The Orkney houses lay strewn about in a dozen straggling villages or in the two main towns, Kirkwall and Stromness. Even Victoria was surprised to see the hundreds of townish houses, so solidly built, so plain. She looked at the unrevealing facades of these houses and imagined women inside, standing in front of mirrors, considering themselves, or men pulling sweaters over their heads, flattening down their hair. Hardly anyone seemed to be out and about. Of course it was early in the day. Of course there was a fierce wind blowing off the sea. Rain pelted down. Despite this, Victoria and her aunt and Lewis Roy were standing in the churchyard at Stromness reading tombstones. It was Victoria, shouting, who discovered:

A holy lyf a hapie end

The Soul to Christ doth send

Where its best To be at rest

Magnus Flett, born 1584, died 1616

For some reason this inscription made all three of them double over with laughter; it seemed Flett was a common Orkney name; Fletts came popping up everywhere, not only Magnus but Thomas Flett, Cecil Flett, Jamesina Flett, Donaldina Flett; the Flett family were the undisputed kings and queens of the cemetery.

The rain showed no sign of abating, and after a minute Lew took the two women by the arm and led them across the street to a tea shop where they sat out the storm, keenly aware of each other.

“What kind of man was your father-in-law, Mrs. Flett?” Lewis posed this question in a social voice, while spreading butter on a floury scone.

“Well, I’m not quite sure.”

“But you must have some kind of impression.”

“An unhappy man. Aggrieved. His wife left him, you see.”

“Aha!” Teasing. “One of those old-fashioned happy families.”

“His three sons took their mother’s part. They refused to see their father. They would have nothing to do with him.”

“And this made him bitter?”

“It drove him back here.” She swept a hand toward the window, taking in the drenched dark street, the black rain clouds. “When he was sixty-five years old. I can only think he must have been bitter.”

“But you don’t know for sure.”

“Actually—”

“Yes?”

“Actually, I never met my father-in-law.”

“I see.” Clearly he was taken aback.

“We never met, no. And I’ve always felt sorry about that. That we never met in his lifetime. I’ve always thought, well—”

“What?”

“That we might have things”—she paused—”to say to each other.”

“Not many women feel that way about their fathers-in-law.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Magnus Flett was my great-grandfather,” Victoria put in, wanting perhaps to share responsibility for the brokenness of families.

They drank their tea in silence. Then Lewis, determinedly bright, raised a celebratory tea cup and said, “Here’s to the bones of the real Magnus Flett! We’ll find him yet.”

“You made a rhyme,” said Victoria, who liked to see eagerness in others.

“Oh, well,” Victoria’s aunt said, her mouth smiling now, her chest full of heartbeats.

The next day the wind died down. The sun came on surprisingly strong, and tourists in shorts and T-shirts and summer dresses poured off the ferry and thronged the narrow streets of Stromness, eating ice-cream, buying postcards.

It was evening and the light still bright. Lewis and Victoria lingered over their shepherd’s pie at the Grey Stones Hotel dining room and explained to Victoria’s Aunt Daisy their reason for coming to Orkney. Lew pulled out a pencil and made a little sketch on his paper napkin, hastily executed, yet beautiful—or so it seemed to Victoria, who later folded the napkin carefully in two and pressed it in the back lining of her suitcase. The islands, Lew said, abounded with the fossil remains of small sea animals. But evidence of early plant life has been destroyed. The temperature of the earth was wrong, the plant structures too fragile. But back in Toronto, working with a set of computer-enhanced maps, the latest thing, he and Victoria had been investigating fossil patterns found in the north of Scotland, tracing a broad arc through the west of that country and up into Scandinavia—this arc, with just a little bending, passed through the outlying tip of Orkney’s Mainland, persuading them that certain rock formations at Yesanby, a few miles north of Stromness, held promise. The rock was different here, harder, so much so that islanders had traditionally gone to this remote point of land in search of millstones, the rest of the Orkney rock being too soft to serve. Lewis mentioned the Rhynie chert, he mentioned Middle Old Red sandstone. He explained how he had applied to the Science Council of Canada for a travel grant, and how he had assembled his equipment and his research team, a team that consisted of himself and Victoria Flett. The two of them had twenty-one days to poke around and write up their notes before the funds ran out. Both of them brimmed with optimism; biology, Lewis argued, will always frustrate the attempt of specialists to systematize and regulate; the variables are too many; the earth is sometimes withholding, yes, but more frequently generous.

Victoria looked across the table and regarded her aunt, who appeared rested, serene, and flushed with the heat of a long day. Because of the fine weather she’d left her suit jacket upstairs in the room the two of them were sharing, and she was musing now about whether she should perhaps have a look in the local shops the following day, see if she could find a lightweight dress in her size.

She’d slept soundly last night, solidly, which was just as well.

Victoria, gazing at her aunt, felt a lurch of love, and claimed for herself a share of her aunt’s present contentment, her ease. She almost wished there were hardships she might save her from, gifts she might give her. Right now, right this minute, the little tongues of amity between Lewis and her aunt seemed beautiful to her, the beginning of something.

Lewis was telling her about the bicycles and backpacks he had rented so that he and Victoria could ride out to Yesanby the following morning and start their investigation. “We’ll start digging for our little wonders,” Lewis told her, “and leave you to find Magnus Flett.”

“Did I hear you say Magnus Flett?” the proprietor of their hotel said, pausing by their table and pouring out their coffee.

The proprietor’s name was Mr. Sinclair. He was a large, nobly built man, a lifelong bachelor with a clever face and a headful of fine gray hair which he was forever palming back from his forehead. How on earth had this person got into the hotel business, Victoria wondered—he should have been a movie actor with his graceful, his almost silvery way of setting down plates on a table and his sweet droll country voice. His hotel, which had only six bedrooms, was advertised as having “All Mod Cons,” meaning some of the rooms were equipped with electric heaters. Mr. Sinclair in his neat gray overall, gliding up and down the carpeted stairs, was desk clerk, chambermaid, cook, server.

“Did I hear you say you were looking for Magnus Flett?” he said politely, leaning in his silvery way over the table. “Now, you will excuse me for interrupting, but I couldn’t help overhearing you saying something or other about old Magnus Flett. Magnus Flett, why he’s just next door, you know.”

“Next door?”

“The Sycamore Manor. You must have walked right by it. It’s where the old folk are, the ones as have no family that can keep them. When I was a lad there were sycamore trees in the back garden but they’re gone now, of course. It was a private house before the Council took it over. That’s where old Flett is. The famous Mr. Flett, I should say.”

Victoria shook her head; she looked more comely tonight than she would have guessed. “Our Magnus Flett’s dead,” she said with a measure of solemnity. “He was born in 1862. We don’t know when he died, but we’re sure of when he was born because the date is on some legal documents my aunt has.”

“That would be his nibs all right,” Mr. Sinclair nodded, smiling. “That is if you believe he’s the age he says he is, and I happen to be of one of them who takes the man’s word on it. His picture’s in the Orcadian every year on his birthday. This year they had the London papers up as well. The poor old lad was a hundred and fifteen years old, just think of that. Oh, not more than a month or so ago it was, a birthday party like you never saw. They had a cake big as this table here. Candles alight, a regular bonfire, course he slept right through it all. Why, Mr. Flett, he’s the oldest man in the British Isles.”

It was not his age alone that made old Magnus Flett famous. It was his prodigious memory.

In the summer of 1977, the year Victoria and her colleague, Lewis Roy, and her elderly Great-aunt Daisy visited the legendary Orkney Islands on their separate expeditions of discovery, Magnus Flett’s reputation did indeed rest on those 115 years of his. This is a very great age. There is a woman in the Ukraine who is said to be 121, and a pair of brothers in Armenia whose ages are given, respectively, as 118 and 116 (with documents to support their claim).

An Inuit woman living in the Anglican Church hostel at Rankin Inlet has sworn on a Bible that she is 112 years of age (she took up a cigarette habit at eighty-five, whisky at ninety). And then there is the undisputed champion of human antiques: Mr. Gee of Singapore, still ambulatory at 123, though only his wife (aged ninetysix) has actually clapped eyes on him in recent years. Proven or unproven, great old age is heartening to observe, and Magnus Flett with his remarkable span of years is a celebrity. He has been profiled in the British weeklies (“A Life in the Day of Magnus Flett,” The Sunday Times, 16 March 1962, p. 54). And once, ten years ago, he appeared before the BBC television cameras, staring straight out at the audience and doing “his thing.”

“His thing,” much more so than his age, is what has made the man famous: his ability, that is, to recite the whole of Jane Eyre by heart, chapter by chapter, every sentence, every word. Mr. Sinclair describes this achievement to his visitors, his soft voice softened even further by awe.

An impossible feat, some people might say, people who are unfamiliar with the retentive qualities of the human brain. Probably these same people have never heard how certain devout individuals in long ago days memorized the complete New Testament. That even at the beginning of our own century it was not unusual to find quite ordinary mortals who had the Gospels by heart, though, later, Sunday School prizes were given out for such trifling accomplishments as the Beatitudes or the One Hundredth Psalm. Scholars have for years insisted that the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf was recited at banquets by a single performer who had no text to refer to.

Daisy Goodwill Flett was told of his extraordinary achievement while a student at Long College for Women back in the twenties; during that same period of her life she herself committed the whole of Tintern Abbey to memory—not because her professor required her to, but because she felt a longing to take the oracular, rhythmic lines of William Wordsworth into her body.

Naturally, at the age of 115, Magnus Flett’s memory has begun to fade, Mr. Sinclair acknowledges that. At the time of the television interview ten years ago he was able to recite only the first chapter of Jane Eyre, but this he did without once stumbling or hesitating.

A year ago he could manage only the first page. And now, as Mr. Sinclair warns his North American visitors, the poor old fellow can handle only the opening lines of the opening paragraph.

The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals. Why does young Victoria work so hard to keep old Magnus Flett out of her thoughts? And why does her Greataunt Daisy, day after day, put off her visit to Sycamore Manor?

Every evening she offers her niece excuses, saying she has been seeing the local sights, or occupied with shopping for a summer dress. The warm temperatures continue, a new Orkney record for the last week of June, and she claims she wants to make the most of this unprecedented weather. In her new cotton skirt and blouse (a solid burgundy shade) and her newly acquired walking shoes, she’s braved the fields above Stromness, finding along the way heather, crowberry, various sedges and the beautiful, tiny Scottish primrose (Primula scotica) in all its pink profusion. “Love! tenderness! courage!” she murmurs to the tilted landscape, for no reason that she can think of. Mr. Sinclair, a connoisseur of the pastoral, accompanies her on some of her outings. After the hotel’s midday meal has been served, after the washing-up is done, these two set out together in his smart little Ford Fiesta, visiting the churches and graveyards of neighboring villages, and one day they come across a tombstone whose family name has worn away, but whose date—1675—and brief inscription remain clearly visible:

“Behold the end of life!” A single ringing declaration. (You would think this shout from the land of the dead would have unsettled Mrs. Flett, but instead she falls under its spell, as though she has seen a vision or heard a voice speaking through that exclamation point, announcing a fountain of radiance glimpsed at life’s periphery.)

“Did you visit Magnus Flett?” Victoria asks each evening, returning sunburned and dusty from the rock beds of Yesanby.

“Tomorrow,” her aunt promises. “Tomorrow I’ll make arrangements.”

The both know—even Lewis Roy knows, watching her, mute and patient with her tea cup raised—that she is preparing herself against disappointment.

Mrs. Flett is discovering that the Orkney greenness is deceptive.

What looks like yards of fertile black earth is only a thin covering over beds of layered rock. Rock is what these islands are made of, light shelfy limestone, readily split into flakes and flags, and easily worked; it’s everywhere. Each farm, it seems, has its own miniquarry, and the tools of quarrying—hammer, point, and klurer—are part of every farmer’s equipment. There being but little wood available, stone flags are used for roofs, for fences, for picnic tables and benches, for milestones and markers, bringing a smile to Mrs. Flett’s face as she thinks of her grandchildren’s favorite television show, The Flintstones. She imagines that the farmhouses she and Mr. Sinclair drive past are furnished with stone chairs and stone tables and even beds and dressers of stone. She recalls that her father-in-law, Magnus Flett, came to Canada at the age of eighteen or nineteen, already a master of his trade: stonecutting.

He worked in the Tyndall quarry until he was sixty-five. A man of muscle and mechanical skills, a working man. By all accounts he had no softness to him. He spoke but little, according to his sons. Unyieldingness is the reputation he left behind. Narrowness. Stone.

He was literate; he could read the Bible or the mail order catalogue if needs be, but he was not a man who would ever have sat himself down to read a book. Mrs. Flett knows this without being told. No, it would not enter his head to read a book. Particularly not a novel. Not a novel by an Englishwoman named Charlotte Brontë.

And never that jewel of English literature, Jane Eyre.

Impossible.

“Do you want me to go with you when you visit Magnus Flett?” her niece offers, with something like reluctance.

“If you like,” Mr. Sinclair says to her, “I could accompany you when you call on Magnus Flett.”

“Tomorrow,” Mrs. Flett says. “Tomorrow.”

But the next day she and Mr. Sinclair drove out to the Yesanby site where Lewis and Victoria were at work.

The end of the road had fallen into disrepair, and they were obliged to park the car at the East Bigging crossroad and walk half a mile over the moors to the rugged promontory. Victoria, seeing them approach, waved both her arms and called out an exuberant welcome, her cries blending with the squawks of seabirds and the roar of the waves coming in below.

The sun on the rocks was brilliant. And rising up at the edge of the shining, slippery stone terraces was the famous God’s Gate which Victoria had described to her aunt, an immense natural archway through which every seventh or eighth wave came loudly crashing. (Fifty years earlier, two amateur photographers were said to have climbed into the aperture, and, before the eyes of their wives and children, been swept out to sea.)

It seemed to Mrs. Flett, blinking in the late afternoon sunlight, that she was all at once dwarfed by the hugeness around her: the overwhelming height of the rock formation, the expanse and violence of the sea below, and the high wide-spreading desolate moorland; at the edge of her vision, outside the boom and wash of the sea winds, was Mr. Sinclair’s parked car, no more than a speck on the horizon. Mr. Sinclair himself stood a few feet away, his large arms folded peacefully as wings across his broad chest, at home in his magisterial body. This lightness she felt!—her body suspended between the noise and the immensity of the world—what was it?

She was unable for a minute to put a name to the gusty air blowing through her, softening her face into a smile, and then it came to her: happiness. She was happy.

Mrs. Flett’s favorite niece, Victoria, and Lewis Roy, a man whose existence she had known nothing about two weeks ago, scrambled like insects on the plates of outcropping rock, and scraped with their tiny tools at the surface of the hidden world, hoping for what? To find a microscopic tracing of buried life. Life turned to stone. To bitter minerals. Such a discovery, they had told her, would be enormous in its implications—it excited them just thinking about such enormity—but at the same time the proof of discovery could be held lightly in the palm of a hand, a small rock chip imprinted with the outline of a leaf. Or a primitive flower. A trace, even, of bacteria, fine as knitting, the coded dots of life.

So far, however, and with fewer than half a dozen days remaining, they had turned up nothing.

During the long dark nights in the Grey Stones Hotel, Victoria lies in Lewis Roy’s arms.

She waits until her aunt is sleeping soundly, then rises, feels about in the dark for her slippers, and makes her way noiselessly down the narrow passage to Room 5, where Lewis lies, ready. There is an element of French farce in her nightly excursions, and Victoria values this theatrical frisson and adds it to the mound of her present happiness. The dim corridor, with its gleams and shadows, its antique chest, mirror, and grandfather clock, is softly carpeted, and its dimensions are not entirely lost to darkness since Mr. Sinclair has thoughtfully provided a rosy little nightlight for his guests’ convenience. There is just enough light, in fact, for Victoria to make out the words on a pretty Victorian plate which is mounted on the wall next to the bathroom.

Happiness grows at our own fireside and is not to be picked in strangers’ gardens

Firesides! Gardens! Tip-toeing down the hall at two a.m. and pausing to read these words, she wants to snort with laughter.

Both she and Lewis believe the verse to be an admonition against the kind of rapture they have uncovered these last few days.

Night after night, in the crisp white sheets of Mr. Sinclair’s genteel establishment, they go deeper and deeper into that mystery, sleeping and waking, and bringing to life those parts of themselves they had thought stunted, disentitled. A year ago, even a month ago, each would have scorned the accidental convergence of island air, soft sunlight, long days—and the possibility of scientific miscalculation, even failure—convincing themselves that the rewards of erotic love were no more than a temporary recompense, a consolation for the poor in spirit.

She has said nothing to Aunt Daisy about her discovery, or about her plans for the future, knowing as she does her greataunt’s concern over her son Warren, his two divorces, and now Alice’s bitter separation from her husband, Ben. Victoria suspects that Aunt Daisy—though how can she know this for sure?—might endorse the sentiments of the Victorian wall plate, believing that, all things considered, the gardens of strangers are more likely to bring harm than happiness.

“I should warn you,” Mrs. Betty Holloway said, “he is completely bedridden. Incontinent naturally.”

“Well, yes, I understand.”

“Another thing, Mrs. Flett, he scarcely sees at all. Cataracts. Inoperable at his age.”

“To be expected, I suppose.”

“Surprisingly, he does have some hearing in one ear.”

“Oh.”

“But is completely deaf in the other. Has been for a long time.”

“I see.”

“He tires very easily.”

“I won’t stay long.”

“You’re a relative, you say?”

“Well, I’m not sure. I might be. On my husband’s side.”

“He has no family. Not around here at any rate. Sad, isn’t it.”

“Very.”

“And, of course, when you get to his age, not that many do, well, you don’t have a great many friends come visiting.”

“Do you happen to know if Mr. Flett ever lived in Canada?”

“Canada? Well, I don’t know now. It used to be lots of our young men would go out to Canada for a few years. Make their fortunes.

There wasn’t much opportunity here in those days.”

“But about Mr. Flett. There must be records. Something written down.”

“All we know is he was living up at Sandwick before he came here. Looking after himself. Living on his own. Growing a few vegetables, cutting his own turfs. Folk who knew him then said he was a bit of a hermit. Kept to himself. Very fond of reading.”

“Jane Eyre.”

“Yes, to be sure, that’s the one.”

“But when he came here to live, he must have had some papers, some old letters perhaps.”

“Not that I know of, no letters, no personal papers, if that’s what you mean, birth certificates—no, nothing like that.”

“A wedding ring, perhaps.”

“I don’t believe so, no. Of course men didn’t used to wear wedding rings, now, did they? Well, things are different now.”

“That’s true.”

“He did have one old photograph, all folded up under his clothes. We put it away for him.”

“Do you think I could see it?”

“Well, seeing as you’re family—”

“Oh, I’m not absolutely sure of that—”

“Now I’ve got that photograph here somewhere in his folder.

It’s a bunch of women, a sort of portrait, if I remember—ah yes, here it is.”

“What a pity it was folded, the faces all cracked. Oh. They’re lovely though, what I can make out. Oh.”

“Yes, well, it was folded when he came in here. He must have folded it himself. We do our best to look after the personal effects of our patients.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“There’s something written on the back.”

“Oh, yes. It says … it says, ‘The Ladies Rhythm and Movement Club.’ But there’s no date.”

“Early in the century, I should think. From the looks of those dresses.”

“A long time ago.”

“Yes indeed. Well, shall I show you in to Mr. Flett’s room?”

“Please.”

The first thing she noticed was a milky film over his irises. And the white sheets, also the white coverlet that made him look as though he were wrapped in bandages.

Magnus, the wanderer, the suffering modern man—that was how she’d thought of him all these years. Romantically. And believing herself to be a wanderer too, with an orphan’s heart and a wistful longing for refuge, for a door marked with her own name.

And now, here was this barely breathing cadaver, all his old age depletions registered and paid for. A tissue of skin. A scaffold of bone; well, more like china than bone.

“It’s Daisy,” she said into his ear, unable to think of anything else. “Barker’s wife.”

A rustle from the cocoon of sheets.

“Your son Barker.”

Nothing.

“You had a wife, Mr. Flett. Her name was Clarentine. Clarentine Barker Flett. Just nod your head if it’s true.”

No response.

“Please.” She waited, feeling foolish, and worrying that she might cause his heart to stop. “Just blink your eyes, Mr. Flett.

Blink your eyes if Clarentine Barker was your wife.”

A few seconds passed—she let them pass—and then he opened his mouth, which was not a mouth at all but a puckered hole without lips or teeth. She had to lean forward to hear what he said:

“There was no possibility”—he paused here—”of taking a walk that day.” Another pause. “We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery—” He stopped.

“Why, that’s just wonderful, Mr. Flett,” she said, as though praising a young child, “But can you remember—can you tell me—if you lived in Canada at one time? If you had a wife named Clarentine?” She said again, louder. “Clarentine.”

His eyelids came down. “There was no possibility of taking a walk.”

“Your wife, Mr. Flett. Clarentine.”

“Clarentine,” he said. This word, this name, came out in the form of an exhalation, whistling, sour.

“Yes,” she said, encouraged. “And your son, Barker.”

The terrible hole of a mouth moved again: “Bark.” The word whispered its way, leaking around the edge of sound.

“And I’m Daisy,” she said.

He seemed to have stopped breathing. The silence was terrible.

“Daisy Goodwill,” she said loudly into his good ear.

“Day-zee.” He sighed it out, the tops of the consonants, at least the wind of vowels. He pronounced it, she could tell, obediently, mechanically. An echo—how could it be anything else?—but something in it satisfied her. She felt moved to grope under the sheet and reach for his hand, but feared what she might find, some unimaginable decay. Instead she pressed lightly on the coverlet, perceiving the substantiality of tethered bones and withered flesh.

A faint shuddering. The rising scent of decomposition.

“I’ve come to visit you,” she said, despising the merry, social tone she took. “And I’ve finally found you.”

She would like to have said the word “father,” testing it, but a stiff wave of selfconsciousness intervened.

She believes, though, what she sees in front of her. She believes the evidence of her eyes, her ears, her intuition, that mythical female organ. Naturally it will take some time for her to absorb all she’s discovered. A conscious revisioning will be required of her:

accommodation, adjustment. Certain stray elements which are anomalous in nature, even irrational, will have to be tapped in with a jeweler’s hammer. Reworked. Propped up with guesswork. Balanced. Defended. But she’s willing, and isn’t that what counts?

Willingness has been a long time gathering for Daisy Goodwill Flett.

The old man drifts into sleep, and she slips out of the room, feeling weakened, emptied out, light as a spirit, and seems for a few minutes to hold in her arms that weightlessness, that fragrance that means her life. Oh, she is young and strong again. Look at the way she walks freely out the door and down the narrow stone street of Stromness, tossing her hair in the fine light.