Crow Lake (13 page)

Sally had been saying something, but she stopped when I came up. For a moment she looked irritated, but then she recovered herself and smiled at me. She turned to Luke and said, “Your little sisters are so cute. You’re really good with them, you know. Everybody says so.”

“Yeah?” Luke said. He automatically looked across at Bo. She’d started making a woodpile of her own about ten feet from the real one. She kept dumping bits of wood on top of one another and they kept rolling off. You could tell she was starting to get mad; she was saying, “Dat one, an’
dat
one, an’
dat
one,” and the
dat
was getting louder every time.

“Yes,” Sally said. “Everyone thinks it’s really amazing. You do everything for them, don’t you?”

“Most things, I guess,” Luke said, still watching Bo.

Sally watched her for a moment too, her head tipped to one side, her mouth curving in a smile. There was something odd about the smile. It was as if she were trying it on in front of a mirror, like a dress.

Still smiling, she said, “She’s just adorable, isn’t she?”

“Bo?”
Luke said. He thought she must mean someone else.

“Dat
one,” Bo said severely, dropping a log as big as she was on top of her woodpile. The whole thing collapsed.

“Bad stick!” Bo yelled. “Bad bad stick!”

“Here,” Luke said. He leaned the axe up against the woodpile and went over to her. “Stack them like this, okay? Put a big one at each end, then lay the little ones in between, like this.” Bo stuck her thumb in her mouth and leaned against his leg.

“Do you even give them their baths and everything?” Sally asked. She looked shyly at Luke under her eyelashes.

“Me or Matt,” Luke said. “Are you tired, Bo? Do you want a nap?”

Bo nodded.

Luke looked around and saw me with my branch. He said, “Take her in, okay, Kate? Bo, you go with Kate. I’ve got to finish here.”

Bo stomped over to me and we walked up to the house together. I waited to hear the whack of the axe but I didn’t hear anything. When we got to the door I turned around and looked back. Luke was just standing there, talking to Sally.

Bo and I went in and I took her coat off for her. You had to unplug her thumb to get it off and it made a popping sound, which made her smile, though she stuck it back in right away.

“Do you want a drink or anything?” I said.

A shake of the head.

“Do you want me to read to you for a minute?”

A nod.

She led the way to our bedroom. I cleared a space in the piles of our clothes that no one ever got around to putting away and sat on the floor beside her cot and started reading
The Three Billy Goats Gruff,
but before we even got to the First Billy Goat going trippity-trop, trippity-trop across the bridge she was asleep. I stopped reading and just turned the pages, looking at the pictures, but I’d seen them too many times. I closed the book and put on my coat again and went back outside.

Luke and Sally had vanished. I wandered back to the woodpile, looking for them. The axe was still there. The ground all around was very soft and spongy from absorbing years and years of sawdust and my feet didn’t make a sound. It was getting dark, and the cold was creeping in with the night. Matt had told me that cold was just the absence of heat, but it didn’t feel like that. It felt like a presence. It felt stealthy, like a thief. You had to wrap your clothes tight around you or it would steal your warmth, and when all your warmth was gone you’d just be a shell, empty and brittle as a dead beetle.

I went around the end of the woodpile, wondering if Sally had gone home and Luke had gone to the shed for something, and then I saw them. Sally was leaning against a tree and Luke was standing in front of her, very close. It was dark under the trees and I could barely make out their faces. I could tell Sally was smiling though—I could see her teeth.

Luke had his arms either side of her, hands resting on the trunk of the tree, but as I watched she took hold of one wrist and then took his hand in hers. She made an exclamation—his hand must have been cold—and rubbed it for a moment between both of hers. Then she smiled at him again, and took his hand, and slid it up under her sweater. I saw the white gleam of her bare skin, and she gave a sort of gasp and then laughed and pushed his hand farther up.

Luke went very still. It seemed to me he wasn’t even breathing. He dropped his head, and I got the impression that his eyes were closed. He stayed like that for about a minute; Sally was watching him, her eyes wide. Then, very slowly, he withdrew his hand. For a minute he didn’t move any other part of him; he stayed as he was, head down, one arm braced against the tree. And then—the thing was, even in that light I could see the effort in it, as if a huge magnetic force were drawing him toward Sally and it took every ounce of strength he had to withstand it—he pushed himself away.

I saw the effort. It didn’t mean anything to me at the time, of course, but later, when I had reason to think of such things again, I remembered it clearly. The hand that had touched her breast was hanging down at his side as if it were useless, and the other arm did all the work. It braced itself against the rough, dark bark of the tree and
pushed.

And then he was upright, free-standing, both arms at his sides. He looked at Sally, but he didn’t say anything. He just turned around and walked away.

That was what I saw, and what Matt didn’t know. That was why Luke found Matt’s teasing so unfunny. Because Sally McLean wasn’t just any girl, she was the daughter of his employers, and Luke was scared. He was afraid that if Sally decided that she was offended, if she felt herself to be a woman scorned, she would see to it that he lost his job.

part
THREE

chapter
THIRTEEN

I don’t understand people. I don’t mean that in an arrogant sense—I’m not saying people are incomprehensible because they don’t act as I do. I mean it as a statement of fact. I know that no one can truly claim to understand anyone else, but it’s a matter of degree. Many people are a complete mystery to me. I just can’t see how their minds work at all. It’s a fault, I guess.

Daniel said once in his mild way, “Does the word empathy mean anything to you, Kate?”

We’d been discussing a colleague who had conducted a highly unprofessional piece of research. He hadn’t exactly falsified the data but he’d been, shall we say, selective in the way he’d reported it. That sort of thing doesn’t do the reputation of the department any good, and his contract was not renewed the following year. I thought that was entirely appropriate. Daniel did as well, I was sure, but he seemed reluctant to say so, which annoyed me.

“I’m not trying to justify it,” he said. “I’m just saying you can understand the temptation.”

I said I couldn’t understand how anyone could want glory which they knew they’d gained under false pretences.

Daniel said, “Look, he’d been slogging away for years, he knew others were slogging away in the same field and might well get there first, he was sure that in the end he’d be proved right anyway.”

I said that was a pretty paltry excuse, if you asked me. And after a pause, Daniel said, “Does the word empathy mean anything to you, Kate?”

It was our first quarrel. Except that we didn’t quarrel, we withdrew, and were polite and distant with each other for several days.

Daniel is naive in some ways. He hasn’t had to struggle for anything in life and that has made him easygoing. Undemanding. Not so much of himself as of other people. He is generous and fair and tolerant, all of which are qualities I admire, but sometimes I think he carries them too far. Sometimes he makes excuses for people in a way which almost denies them responsibility for themselves. I believe in free will. I do not deny the influence of genetics or environment—what biologist could?—and I’m aware that we are biologically programmed to do many of the things we do. But within those constraints, I believe we have choice. The idea that we are carried along by fate, unable to resist or change direction, sounds suspiciously like an excuse to me.

But I’m getting off the subject. What I wanted to say was, I thought at the time that Daniel’s comment about empathy was very unfair, but it kept coming back to me, irritatingly, whenever someone did something really off the wall. And when I started thinking about Luke and Sally again, back in February when all this family business came up, I found myself trying to imagine what Sally had thought she was doing, all those years ago. What could have been in her mind? How could any girl want to become involved with someone as encumbered as Luke?

The only explanation I could think of was that she failed to realize that Luke’s situation was for real. I think she was highly sexed, and not very bright and therefore more than usually at the mercy of her hormones, and something about Luke’s situation appealed to her. Big brother looking after two little sisters—did she find some illicit sexual thrill in the idea? Or was it more innocent? Maybe Sally looked at us and saw a pretty picture and simply wanted to paint herself into it. Handsome boy, pretty girl, two ready-made children— maybe inside her head Sally McLean was playing house. But then Luke took his hand away and spoiled the game.

I can imagine the story she told her parents. She’d be a great storyteller. She’d have worked it out on her way home that evening and by the time she got there she would have believed it herself. She would have burst into the small living room the McLeans had at the back of the store, her hair dishevelled and her cheeks flaming with injured pride disguised as distress. Her parents would have looked up in alarm and stared at her, and she’d have stared back for a second or two and then burst into sobs.

She’d have said, “Daddy … Daddy …” in a broken voice, and poor wordless old Mr. McLean would have found words and said, “What, baby?” (Or “sweetheart.” He would have called her something like that.) “What is it?”

And Sally would have sobbed, “Daddy, you know Luke… .”

“Luke? Yes. Yes?”

“Well he … he tried …”

You can just see it, can’t you?

It’s possible that they didn’t believe her—however much they loved her, they must have had some knowledge of their own daughter. But it wouldn’t have made any difference. They would have known that if Sally had taken against him, it would be impossible to keep Luke on.

They didn’t tell him straight away. They must have agonized about it for a week or so, while Sally raged in the background and Luke allowed himself to hope. I can’t imagine how they finally broke it to him, both of them being at a loss for words at the best of times. In the end, Luke probably made it easy for them. Probably when they were locking up one night, Mr. McLean cleared his throat half a dozen times and finally said, “Uh, Luke.”

And Luke waited for a minute, hoping against hope that it wasn’t what he thought it was. And then the silence would have gone on until he knew it had to be what he thought it was, so he would have said, “Okay. Yeah. I know.”

Mr. McLean would have looked ashamed. He’d have said in a whisper, “Sorry, Luke.”

Though maybe I’m underestimating the extent to which even parental love is blind. Maybe they did believe Sally, and were disgusted by Luke, and felt that he had betrayed their kindness in the vilest way.

I doubt it though. We still used their store, there being no alternative, and they still beamed at me whenever I came in, and when I got home I always discovered that little extras had somehow found their way into the shopping bag: a couple of blackballs, a twist of licorice— the odd little treat that they knew we couldn’t afford.

As I said, it was back in February, when the invitation to Matt’s son’s birthday party arrived, that I started thinking about all this again. Normally when I’m about to go home for a visit the memories start drifting in, but this time they came in a real flood. Partly, I guess, it was the significance of Simon turning eighteen. But part of it, I’m sure, was due to the “problem” of Daniel.

Daniel had indeed seen the invitation. He had read it. He knew that he could have been included in it if I had chosen to include him.

That realization came to me slowly, but I got my first serious hint at an exhibition we went to the afternoon after the invitation arrived. The exhibition had the inspiring title “Microscopes Through the Ages,” and unsurprisingly, we were the only people there. In fact it wasn’t as bad as it sounded: there was everything from a collection of little flea-glasses from about 1600 to a magnificent and completely useless instrument that had been made for King George III, which was too tall to use if it was mounted on a table and too short to use if it stood on the floor, and had lenses which were incorrectly positioned. Apart from that, as Daniel said, it was perfect in every way. Fit for a king.

What told me that Daniel had something on his mind, though, was that a number of the more robust instruments had been set out so that you could play with them, and yet he didn’t. Daniel the great fiddler, Daniel the microbiologist. He stood in front of them one after another, staring at them thoughtfully but hardly touching them. Then he stood for a ridiculously long time staring at a century-old micrograph of the proboscis of a Victorian housefly, and then he looked at his watch and said that it was time we headed downtown to meet his parents for dinner.

Normally, I was happy enough to get together from time to time with the Professors Crane. I had to be feeling fairly strong to cope with a whole evening in their company, but they had accepted me without reservation from the first time we met, which had impressed me, considering the difference in our backgrounds, and biased me in their favour. In the early days I had found their battles at the dinner table stressful, but I think that was because I expected one or other of them to win. When I realized how well matched they were, I was able to relax a little. I was still sometimes enlisted or used as ammunition by one or the other of them, or even by both at the same time, but I was learning how to handle that.

That evening, though, they were both on particularly prickly form. I had difficulty concentrating on what they were saying because I was so conscious of Daniel’s abstraction, and throughout the evening I could feel the levels of tension within me rising like mercury in a barometer. The restaurant was one of their favourites, small, expensive, and airless, or so it seemed that night. Daniel’s mother spent most of the evening reminiscing about his childhood, which was something she hadn’t done before, and for the first time in my life I realized that there are advantages in having your parents safely dead.

“He was the most placid child, Katherine. From when he was still in diapers—I might say he was in diapers for an inordinately long time, but even so—you could take him anywhere, plonk him down in the middle of a cocktail party, an art gallery, a lecture hall—”

“This happened, did it?” Daniel’s father said, sounding intrigued. “I don’t recall seeing Daniel in diapers in a lecture hall. Or at a cocktail party, come to that.”

“You wouldn’t recall it, Hugo. By definition, you can only recall what you have taken in in the first place. Your mind was on higher things, dear. You were very seldom ‘with us’ in the mental sense. Physically very much so, but mentally, no. We did quite a lot of entertaining, Katherine, faculty get-togethers or dinners for visiting professors, you know the sort of thing, and so of course Daniel was very used to strangers. And he would come into the living room, dressed in his pyjamas, to say goodnight to the guests, and an hour later you would suddenly notice that he was still there, wide-eyed, taking in all that was being said, whatever the topic of conversation happened to be, politics, art, anthropology …”

“Astrophysics,” Daniel’s father said, droning as if reading from a list, “economics—particularly Keynesian, took that in like nobody’s business—philosophy—at the age of two he was taking in three philosophers a week. You were particularly smitten with the works of Descartes, weren’t you Daniel?”

Daniel was engrossed in the menu, but after a moment the silence reached him, and he looked up. “Pardon?”

“I said that at the age of two you were smitten with Descartes. That’s correct, isn’t it?”

“Oh,” Daniel said. He nodded. “Right. Smitten’s the word.” He returned to the menu.

“He was a very, very rewarding child,” his mother continued smoothly. “But of course he did benefit from being exposed to such a range of ideas and opinions from such an early age. It was a huge advantage, there’s no doubt about it. Most children suffer from a crippling lack of stimulation. The brain is like any other muscle; use it, and it develops. Ignore it, and it atrophies.”

Daniel heard that. “Just a small detail,” he said mildly, laying down the menu, “but the brain is not a muscle. It’s a shade more complex than that. I think I’m going to have the beef.” He looked around for a waiter and found one. “Is the pepper sauce very hot? Like, is it very peppery, or more creamy?”

“I think it’s more creamy,” the waiter said doubtfully “I’m not sure.”

“I’ll risk it. And I’ll have a baked potato. And carrots.”

“And especially when we were abroad, Katherine. Especially when we were in England. And when we were in Rome! Daniel was six. Was it six? Maybe seven. Anyway, within a month of our arriving in Rome his Italian was better than mine.”

I said, “I didn’t know you spoke Italian, Daniel.”

“I don’t,” Daniel said. “The waiter is waiting to take the order. What does everyone want?”

“But then neither does his mother,” his father said.

“The chicken,” his mother said. She smiled at the waiter and he quailed visibly. “No potatoes. Salad— please make sure it’s very fresh. No dressing with it. Mineral water to drink, no lemon, no ice.”

The waiter nodded, scribbling furiously. I found myself trying to picture Daniel’s mother in Crow Lake. It couldn’t be done. I tried to imagine her in the McLeans’ store, buying potatoes or toilet paper, and I simply couldn’t do it. I tried to imagine introducing her to Mrs. Stanovich and found that I couldn’t get the two of them into the same frame of my mind at the same time. Even Miss Carrington’s image slid nervously out of the picture if I tried to bring Daniel’s mother into it.

For a moment—and with a feeling of relief, because it would have been such a neat and simple explanation— I wondered if my reluctance to take Daniel home with me might be related to this gulf between my two worlds. Maybe that was the problem—they were simply too different. But I knew even as I had the thought that it was not the answer. I might not be able to imagine Daniel’s mother in Crow Lake, but I had no trouble at all imagining Daniel there. He would look out of place—if ever there was a born city slicker, it’s Daniel—but no one would mind. He is the most open and least judgmental of men.

They were all looking at me. “Oh,” I said. “Sorry. I’ll have the chicken. And a baked potato and salad.”

“Steak,” Daniel’s father said. “Extremely rare. Fries. No vegetables whatsoever. Everyone all right with red wine?” He swivelled his head around, looking for dissent. “Good. A bottle of the Bordeaux.”

Daniel’s mother said, “You cannot deny, Daniel, that the experiences of early childhood are hugely important to a child’s intellectual development. That’s why the parental role is so crucial. What you will be in adult life is set in childhood. ‘The child is father of the man’ and so on.”

Daniel nodded slowly. I wanted to catch his eye, to have him indicate by some small gesture that he knew the evening wasn’t a success and that we would go as soon as possible, but he did not look in my direction.

His father was talking to me, bending toward me confidentially and speaking out of the corner of his mouth so that his wife wouldn’t hear. “I’ve never had the faintest bloody idea what that expression means,” he said. “‘The child is father of the man.’ You happen to know?”