Crow Lake (23 page)

Marie handed me the bowl. I took it, wordlessly, put it on the counter, poured the cream into it, and whipped the cream. I whipped it too much and it curdled and went lumpy.

“I’ve overdone it,” I said. “I’m sorry.” My voice sounded odd. I handed the bowl to Marie.

She said, “It doesn’t matter. Could you put some on the pies?” and went on decorating the cheesecakes. Her voice was mild now, as if she had said all she had to say and the rest was up to me. But I could think of no reply. If after all these years she still didn’t understand what Matt had lost, what was there to say?

When I’d finished the pies, I said, “Anything else?” and she said, “Not just yet. You might take a cup of coffee to the men.”

I poured three mugs of coffee from the pot Marie always has brewing and put them on a tray. I found a small jug in the cupboard, poured cream into it, found the sugar bowl, got three spoons from the drawer. All in silence. I took the tray outside to the men. They’d set up the tables by then, under the trees, according to Marie’s instructions. Matt and Simon were discussing chairs— how many and where.

“What do you think?” Matt asked as I came up. “How many will want to sit down? And in the sun or in the shade?”

“Only the women,” I said, holding the tray while they both stirred three sugars into their coffee. “They’ll want to sit in the shade.”

“Right,” Matt said. He looked at Simon. “How many women are there?”

“Mrs. Stanovich,” Simon said, “Mrs. Lucas, Mrs. Tadworth, Mrs. Mitchell, Miss Carrington …”

I looked around for Daniel. He was by the corner of the house, looking with interest at a clutter of machinery in the barnyard. I went over to him. I felt dazed, as if I were coming down with sunstroke. Daniel took his coffee and said, “Do you ever feel you might like to live on a farm? For real, I mean. Take up farming. Do some real work, where you see progress at the end of the day.”

“No,” I said.

He looked at me and grinned, and then he looked harder. He said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes, there is. What’s wrong?”

I shrugged. “Just something Marie said.” Her words were still echoing inside my head. Her accusations bothered me very much. I kept going over them, casting around for explanations, trying to understand how she had come to think as she did. Perhaps it was natural, if you considered her background. She would have no conception of what Matt’s life could have been like, had things turned out differently. And even if she had, she wouldn’t want to acknowledge it. She’d been the cause of his downfall, after all.

“About what?” Daniel said.

“Pardon?”

“You said Marie said something. About what?”

“About … me. Me and Matt.”

“What did she say?”

I had told him everything else, I might as well tell him this. “Oh just … she thinks I think what happened to Matt is a tragedy.”

He stirred his coffee, watching me.

I said, “Which is true. She said I think Matt’s whole life is a failure, which is not true, but it is true that what happened to him is a tragedy.”

Daniel put his spoon back on the tray. He didn’t say anything. I said, “The thing is, she doesn’t even see it. It’s not her fault, she doesn’t understand. But that’s a tragedy too, you see—that Matt is married to someone who has no idea, really no idea, what he’s all about.”

Daniel sipped his coffee, still watching me. Out beyond the fields, along the side road, you could see a cloud of dust boiling up. A car—Luke and Bo, coming to lend a hand. The car was going very fast and seemed to be all over the road; part of my brain puzzled over it, until I remembered: a driving lesson. Daniel said, “Well, I agree with you about one thing, Kate. I do think there’s a tragedy here. But I don’t think it’s what you think it is.”

A mosquito—an early forerunner of the hordes to come—landed on his wrist. He narrowed his eyes, handed me his coffee, and smacked it. He wiped his hand on his shirt and retrieved his coffee and said, “You’ll say I don’t understand, just like you think Marie doesn’t understand, but I think I do. Some of it anyway. Your family’s had a real struggle, all those generations and everything, all of you striving toward this great goal. And Matt’s obviously brilliant, anyone can see that. So I can see it was a disappointment. He had his chance and he blew it, which is a real shame.”

He gave me a brief, almost apologetic smile. “But it’s just a shame. It’s not a tragedy. It makes no difference to who Matt is. Can’t you see that? No difference at all. The tragedy is that you think it’s so important. So important you’re letting it destroy the relationship the two of you had… .”

He must have seen my incredulity, because he hesitated, eyeing me uneasily. He said, “I’m not trying to say it doesn’t matter to him, Kate—that he’s miraculously discovered that he loves farming, so it’s all turned out for the best, or some crap like that. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that from what you’ve told me about him and what I’ve seen of him, my guess is that he came to terms with it a long time ago. The problem is, you didn’t. And as a consequence, he’s lost what he had with you. That’s the real tragedy.”

Strange how parts of your brain can continue to function normally when other parts have come to a dead stop. I could hear Matt’s and Simon’s voices; I saw the car getting nearer; in the distance a couple of crows were quarrelling; my brain recorded it all faithfully. But within me, for a long moment, there was total silence. A paralysis of the mind. And then gradually things started up again, and with the return of conscious thought came an absolute flood tide of disbelief, confusion, and furious resentment. Daniel, of all people, an outsider, a
guest,
who had dragged the story out of me, who had known Matt scarcely twelve hours. That he could look at our lives and casually, carelessly, knowing
nothing about it,
come to such a conclusion. I could hardly believe that I had heard him right—hardly believe that he had said it.

I watched Luke’s car; kept my eyes fixed on its progress. It disappeared briefly behind the house, then reappeared as Bo hurtled into the farmyard and came to a halt in a cloud of dust ten feet from where we were standing. She was talking as she got out. “See!?” she said, defiantly. She waved at Daniel and me but she was speaking to Luke, who was in the passenger seat—she bent down and peered in so that he’d be sure to hear. “See?!”

I watched her, my brain recording the scene. Matt and Simon were coming over to greet them. They grinned at us as they came up; I knew the grins referred to Bo and Luke, but I was incapable of responding. I watched Matt, my mind churning with Daniel’s words, with Marie’s words.
“If you could see him when he knows you’re coming home, Kate … at first he’s so happy … but then as it gets closer, he doesn’t sleep …”

Bo slammed the car door, went around to Luke’s side, and opened his door for him. He was balancing a birthday cake on his lap and had a monstrous bowl of green Jell-O wedged between his feet. I heard Simon say to Matt, “He looks sort of … resigned,” and Matt nodded. “I guess that’s what happens when you face death on a daily basis. After a while it loses its sting.”

Bo had her head inside the car and didn’t hear. She took the cake, and Luke bent down and lifted the Jell-O up onto his lap and levered it and himself out of the car.

“How’s it going, then, Luke?” Matt said innocently.

Luke shot him a look and gave him the Jell-O. “Stick that where the sun don’t shine,” he said.

“All of it?” said Matt.

“Happy birthday, Little One,” Bo said, ignoring them and handing Simon his cake, a vast, gothic structure coated in chocolate. “You don’t look a day over twelve. Have you opened your presents? Morning, you two”—this to Daniel and me. I felt Daniel’s hand in the small of my back, easing me forward.

“Morning,” Daniel said. “That’s quite a cake.”

“Oh well, it’s a celebration,” Bo said. “We thought he’d never grow up.”

We made our way toward the house. Daniel’s hand still rested on my back. His touch made my skin prickle with resentment. I wished he would leave me. I wished they would all leave me. Go away, and let me think. Marie appeared, a dishcloth in her hands.

“Give us a job, Marie,” Luke said. “We came to help.”

“Oh,” Marie said. “Oh, well … all right. I think you can start taking things outside now. Plates and things.”

The world kept on turning. Marie organized us, after a fashion. I was given the job of washing glasses. As far as I could see they were already perfectly clean, but I was glad to do it; it meant I could stand at the kitchen sink with my back to the room. I washed them meticulously, one at a time, and dried them carefully, and placed them on trays for the men to take out to the tables. Daniel appeared beside me and said, “Like a dryer?” but I shook my head, and after hovering uncertainly for a moment or two he moved away. When I finished the glasses I washed the bowls Marie had been using, and the cutlery, and the cake tins, and the baking trays. Behind me Bo and Marie were putting the finishing touches to the food and the men were standing about, talking and laughing and getting in the way. Daniel was there somewhere. I could feel his eyes on me. Marie’s also. Several times she thanked me, and said, tentatively, that I’d done more than my share and wouldn’t I like a coffee, but I smiled quickly in her general direction and said that I was fine. I was relieved to find that I was capable of speech and that my voice sounded normal.

I wondered if I could stay there all day, washing dishes until the party was over, and then say that I had a headache and go up to bed. But I knew that wasn’t possible. There are certain occasions that nothing short of death excuses you from, and this was one of them. I didn’t know how I was going to get through it though. There was such turmoil inside my head. Still simmering under everything was my anger with Daniel, but on top of that my brain kept delivering snapshots from the past: Matt, sitting beside me on the sofa in the living room after Aunt Annie had broken the news that the family would be split up, trying to point out New Richmond on the map, trying to convince me that we would still be able to see each other. I could see my child-self, sitting beside him, my mind possessed by a whirlwind of despair.

Another snapshot: Matt in the aftermath of his exam results, taking me into our parents’ bedroom, sitting me down in front of the photograph of Great-Grandmother Morrison and explaining why he had to go away. Telling me about our family history, showing me that we played a part in it. I saw how important it was, knew it must be terribly important, or he would not leave me. And then he told me of his plan for us. Our glorious plan.

Yet another image, this time twelve years later, the night before I myself set off for university. Matt had come over from the farm to say goodbye. For years I had managed to block that evening from my mind, but now it came back to me, as fresh, as bright, as clear in all its details as if it had taken place yesterday. The two of us had gone down to the beach. We sat on the sand, watching the night creep in over the lake, and talked stiltedly about things that did not matter—tomorrow’s train journey, the hall of residence, whether there would be phones on every floor. We talked like strangers. We were almost strangers, by then. The weight of twelve years’ worth of things unsaid, unresolved, had made strangers of us.

When it was time for him to go—back to the farm and Marie and his son—we walked back up to the house in silence. It was dark by then. The trees around the house had drawn closer in the darkness, as they always do. At the door I turned to say goodbye to him. He was standing back a bit, his hands in his pockets. He smiled at me, and said, “You have to write me every detail, okay? I want to know every single thing you do.”

He was standing in the rectangle of light from the doorway, and I could hardly bear to look at him because of the strain in his face. I tried to imagine writing to him, telling him about all that I was doing—all that he should have been doing. I imagined him reading my letters and then going out to milk the cows. It was unthinkable. It would be nothing but rubbing salt in the wound, reminding him, constantly, of what he had lost. I didn’t believe he could possibly want such a thing, and I knew I couldn’t bear to do it.

So I had written very seldom, and said next to nothing about my work. I had wanted to spare him—to spare both of us. And now Daniel was trying to tell me that Matt had not wanted to be spared. That the strain I had seen, and continued to see, was because, try as he might, he could not re-establish the link between us. That he had just wanted me to write to him, regardless of the subject matter, and knew as well as I did that I would not.

I could not—
could not
—believe that interpretation. Daniel thinks he is right about everything, but he is not always right. He is not. I have known him to be wrong before.

But now, when I tried to close my mind to what he had said, when I looked around urgently for more dishes to wash—anything, an egg beater, a knife, a spoon—his words kept seeping back into my mind, sliding in, like water under a door.

The guests began arriving just after noon, and by that time I had gone beyond feeling much of anything. I felt light-headed. Unreal. It was almost pleasant. Mrs. Stanovich was the first to arrive, and when Marie saw her truck rolling along the side road and urged me to go out and meet her, I did so quite calmly. The men had been sent off on some errand, Daniel among them. I was relieved not to have to introduce him. I didn’t know how I was going to deal with him. I’d been aware over the course of the morning of his growing concern, and to be honest it gave me some satisfaction. I had in no way forgiven him. It wasn’t until later, when I was in a more rational frame of mind, that it occurred to me that it must have been difficult for him to say what he had said. The weekend meant a lot to him, and he would know he was putting it in jeopardy, and possibly risking more than that. At the moment of speaking I’m sure he thought he was doing the right thing, but I suspect he regretted it straight away.

He was right to be worried. My feelings toward him—well, I think if you had asked me, at that stage in the afternoon, if our relationship was going to continue, I would have said no. I suppose it was a variation on the theme of shooting the messenger—the bearer of bad tidings. I know it was unfair.