After Alice (17 page)

After, Adam and Sidonie were beckoned into the back room, where Mr. Tanaka served them green tea in the tiny porcelain cups with no handles that Sidonie remembered from their cabin, and Masao, with an ear for the door chimes, sat and talked to Sidonie in his old teasing way. Has she learned to speak French yet? Does she talk more in French than in English? (That wouldn't be hard!) And has she broken all of her new wedding dishes yet? And has she learned to cook for her new husband, or poisoned him with her awful food, like the last one? Adam had smiled, and Mr. Tanaka had laughed and rubbed his hands together.

Mr. Tanaka, Masao said, had had a stroke. Since his stroke, he can't remember how to speak English, though he still understood it, some of the time. “When he wants to,” Masao said, mischievous again, and Mr. Tanaka had chuckled, as if he got the joke.

And Sidonie's father had loaned Masao a good part of the money to get the store started: did Sidonie know that? That was very generous.

Her discomfort,
then, that Masao had clowned, and kowtowed to Adam. Or so she had seen it.

He'd likely be living in the same house — the little brown-painted bungalow with its porch and maples that he had bought back in the late sixties. She imagines him there, on his knees cleaning out the peony beds, as old Mr. Tanaka had done, coming inside to make tea, to put something on the stereo. Imagines the sandalwood and jasmine smell of his house, the shade of the bamboo blinds.

Perhaps she could give him a call. He must be in the telephone book.

She will ask Hugh if he has heard from Masao first, perhaps. That'd be the smart thing. She and Hugh could make a visit together, next time Hugh is in town.

But later, she thinks:
foolish, foolish
. What would she and Masao have to say to each other? Even with Hugh there. She has witnessed these conversations between the elderly, on meeting old acquaintances. The shock of alteration, the awkwardness, the inventory of memories, not always shared, the slow trickle-in of grief, the ineffable sense of loss. The descent into the maudlin, if alcohol has been imbibed.

A pointless exercise. Pointless and painful.

She will not speak to Hugh, after all.

Sometimes
she and Alice and Masao do not go to Masao's cabin, but instead head through the trees, following the irrigation pipe as it skirts the camp and then makes a line across the ridge of the hill. On the other side is a rough granite outcropping, and from this mass of rock, the lake stretches out for fifty miles in two directions, north and south. The hills on the other side are far enough away to be blue, and the lake is cobalt on sunny days, steel when clouds dull the sky. Sometimes the paddle-wheeler can be seen, traveling between the dock, invisible at the base of the hill a mile below, and Fintry, on the other side, and sometimes little sailboats, white specks moving back and forth.

In the rock outcropping is an old gold mine, like a cave. They must not go inside, Masao says, for the shaft has partially collapsed, and they might fall down and be crushed. The opening is full of spiders' webs and old lumber: Masao lifts a board to show the black widow clinging underneath, shiny as coal. He uses his penknife to flip the spider over; underneath is the red hourglass. Sidonie feels a sort of horror at the mine that extends to the outcropping itself. She shakes when she first sees it, even though Masao shows her the trove of white quartz pieces in front of the mine opening.

Alice and Masao, Sidonie sees, both like the outcropping, with its astonishing vista. Once up there, they relax as if they are at home. Alice sometimes packs a picnic lunch: egg sandwiches, oatmeal biscuits, apples. Masao sometimes brings soda. That's a treat: they don't have it at home. Father says it rots the stomach; Mother says it is too expensive. Masao apologizes for it: he can't bring food, he says, as he doesn't have access to the kitchens. But Sidonie loves the soda: the bottles with their narrow necks, the fizziness, the sweetness, which she thinks of as Masao's sweetness, a kind of honeyed lilting softness that spills over onto Alice and her and the trips themselves.

Sidonie picks the chocolate lilies, with their deep glossy brown and green checkered bells, but only if they walk along the trestles on the way home. Out of water, the lilies don't last half an hour. She picks the Indian Paint, too, for the flash of its orange flame in the shadowy parlour. But on their picnics, she gathers only a certain family of flower, which grows everywhere in a dozen or more varieties, so common and unprepossessing as to be nameless. No: some have names. Vetch, alfalfa, clover, locoweed. But the others are anonymous, overlooked short bushes, tangled vines, tall, hairy stalks. What makes them a family is that they all produce peablossom-shaped flowers. Some of the flowers are yellow, some, like those of the alfalfa, blue ranging through lilac and purple, some a striking violet-pink. Some of the blossoms are arranged in long spikes, others in ball-shaped clusters, and still others in single blooms.

She can't say what fascinated her first: that there were so many of these plants, or that there were such subtle variations among them. (That they were related, connected, was a premise
a priori
, apparently.) She has begun, unable to find out their names, to keep track of them in a notebook: drawing in the flowers, numbering them, making cryptic notes about where she has found them, what date. They are intricate to draw, and for some, she has borrowed her father's magnifying glass and gazed at the blooms, nodding to herself, humming, as the familiar flattened trumpet shape, the inner and outer lobes, the furred throats, slip into focus. Some of the blossoms are flatter, some longer, some more pouched, some veined. But all share the base pattern of a flared tube — a tube with nectar at its foot, and the two pairs of symmetrical, fused, cleft lobes, the smaller hooded by the larger, outer — that reminds of her of something she can't quite identify.

Often, Sidonie brings her notebook along on the forays. She remembers now the intensely sweet scent of the little yellow bells. The dark mouth of the mine, the vertigo of the rock peak.

How often had they gone? Had she always been invited, or had Alice and Masao made the excursion on their own?

They had done that hike together for years: until Alice and Masao were in their late teens, maybe. And to her, Masao seemed a childhood friend, familiar as their own orchard, as Graham or Hugh Inglis, as shy tow-headed Walt.

She remembers the lowing of cattle from Tiefendale's dairy farm to the south and west of the picnic hill. Did Alice once or more than once send her down the rutted dirt road to ask Mary Tiefendale, in her droopy print dress, her hand covering missing teeth, smudging her words, for a pint of milk?

She remembers how the light grew thick, and blue butterflies, the same purplish-dusk-fading-to-turquoise as the blossoms of the alfalfa that attracted then, clung to her page, their antennae exclamation points above her pea-flower drawings. The blue butterflies, the little Azures, resting their thread legs, their comma feet, on the page of her sketchbook. Did her eyes close in the heat of the afternoon, the buzz of the insects, and Alice's and Masao's voices fuse into one murmur, as if a clear small spring were trickling over the parched soil, the glittering, broken granite slope?

Hugh returns, as promised, in late June, bringing his youngest daughter, a sturdy girl in her early twenties, with the thick blonde hair and short upper lip that Sidonie associates with the Dutch. She seems natural, wholesome, Sidonie thinks, dressed in khaki shorts and t-shirt. She looks very much like Hugh, and like Mrs. Inglis, whose presence is startlingly conjured up by Ingrid's round hazel eyes and grin.

Her neighbour calls to her over the railing as she's watering her pots of geraniums: “I see you've got your boyfriend's granddaughter visiting. She's the spit of him, isn't she!”

“Hugh is not my boyfriend,” Sidonie says. “Ingrid is his daughter, not his granddaughter.”

“She's a lovely girl,” the neighbour says.

Sidonie invites Cynthia and Justin for the evening, in order to meet Hugh and Ingrid, and then also invites Alex and Tasha. The arrangements cause some confusion; Justin, who has been anxious to meet Ingrid, Cynthia says, had been put out to hear his cousins had been also invited. But Hugh had thought that Ingrid would like to meet more people her own age. There is much telephoning back and forth, with Justin a sulky go-between, and Sidonie feels annoyed: there must be simpler ways to arrange an evening. The plans expand: now Kevin, who's going to be in town, is invited as well, and Stephen and Debbie. And then, when he arrives, Justin greets Ingrid with what Sidonie can only interpret as shock or great disappointment. Had he been expecting Ingrid to be somehow different? Sidonie can't see that there is anything wrong with her looks.

Hugh makes up for the awkwardness, becoming voluble, almost overbearing. “It's time Ingrid saw a little of her other country,” Hugh says. Ingrid's mother, also an engineer, has remarried and remained in Zimbabwe. But the farm on which her family has lived for several generations has been taken over. “Think of that,” Hugh says. “A hundred and fifty years, one family cultivated that piece of bush, made it profit, and it's just taken away,
snap
.”

This is out of Ingrid's hearing. She and Alex are at the end of the living room, engrossed in Sidonie's music collection.

Justin says, “But they were colonists, exploiters. It's the African people's land. It should go back to them. The British and Dutch had no business there in the first place.”

“But Europeans have lived there now for generations,” Cynthia says. “The people who lost it, Ingrid's grandparents, weren't colonizers. They had just been born into that life. Why should they lose everything?”

“Anyway,” Hugh says, “they've made a mess of it now. The natives can't or won't farm it; this last trip, when I drove out there, everything was dead. Nothing was being cultivated. They'd cut down the trees for firewood. It was all dust blowing away.”

“Maybe it shouldn't be farmed,” says Justin. “Let it return to its natural state.”

“But the blacks there are starving,” Hugh says, impatience in his voice. “They are just sitting there, starving, begging their mealiemeal from the local warlords. Nobody grows anything but ganja weed.”

Justin says, “If they are starving, it's the white people's fault. They kept the Africans from getting educated or learning to run their country, and made them dependent on Western things. It's a known fact.”

Tasha says, “I think it should all go back to the way it was before. The people can go back to living naturally off the land, the way they did before white people came.”

“Well,” Hugh says, “That's a nice idea, but they all have guns now, and all of the industrialized nations want their natural resources. And they're killing off the game. White rhinos are gone. Elephants nearly gone. Your children will never see those animals.”

Justin says, “But the Europeans hunted game. Look at all those movies from the 1950s.”

Sidonie suddenly remembers: in 1953, she and Alice and Hugh and Graham had been taken by Mrs. Inglis to see
Mogambo
; she remembers Hugh putting his hand over her eyes just as Grace Kelly and Clark Gable — playing characters married to other people — had been about to kiss, and also when Clark Gable had shot the gorilla. And after, Graham arguing with his mother about the portrayal of the gorilla: humans were much more dangerous to gorillas than vice versa, Graham had insisted, angrily, costing them all a stop for ice cream. Does Hugh remember that?

“The Europeans have a lot to answer for,” Hugh says. “And yes, they probably shouldn't have been in Africa at all. But more harm is being done now, and stupidly.”

It is a serious discussion, tinged with anger. She wants to shake Hugh: he is too sure of himself, too knowing. Justin is very young. Perhaps he is naïve, but he is young. She remembers something Clara used to say: if you vote conservative when you are under twenty-five, you have no heart, and if you vote liberal after you are twenty-five, you have no head.

Is that what it comes down to?

Cynthia says, “I don't know what's wrong with that boy. It's like he's suddenly become a sullen teenager. I thought we had skipped that stage.”

Kevin is also there. Alice's second son. He looks even more startling than Stephen did; he has arrived from the coast on a motorcycle, wearing a ripped and high-smelling leather jacket, and when he shrugs off his jacket and helmet, he reveals a shaved head, a preposterous reddish mustache, and forearms so thickly tattooed that he appears to be wearing printed sleeves. He is ebullient: he bearhugs Sidonie, disconcertingly. His nephews and niece obviously idolize him as a counter-culture figure. Shades of Buck Kleinholz. Sidonie tries not to purse her lips; she glances at Hugh, but Hugh is laughing, delighted.

And she has to admit that Kevin is more likeable than his father. He lacks that permanent sense of grievance, or whatever it was, that Buck had. He seems, she has to admit, quite comfortable in his inscribed skin.

Alex and Ingrid have drifted off to Sidonie's patio and have to be called a second time for dinner, Sidonie notices. Cynthia gives her a raised-eyebrow glance. But Alex has a girlfriend, Jessica, who usually comes to family things, and is out of town now, working at a resort. And Ingrid will not be here in a week or two. It is nothing. She does not see how Alex is preferred, but though Justin seems to have recovered his politeness, and in fact is behaving with charm, Ingrid does not respond to his attention.

Sidonie has contributed to the dinner only the use of her kitchen and what she could find at the German deli: prosciutto-wrapped asparagus, local cheese, wine, of course, and thick chewy bread from the very good local bakery. But now Cynthia serves up watercress soup with watercress picked from the creek, and cream and flecks of something light and smoky. “Nigella's recipe,” Cynthia says. “I saw it on TV.” What is the smoky meat? “Guess,” she says, then tells them. Smoked pheasant, local, bought from a charcutier at the weekend market.