You might cross this road and walk a few steps to the edge of the cliff. Down below is the jagged water. All day it chatters back and forth across the gravel beach, unless the weather’s rough. Farther out it’s mauve like a pair of cold lips; closer in it’s copper-green, gun-grey, seducing seaweed to dance the seven veils despite the chill, chained to their rocks by the hair. And there on the cliff you might sit with your legs dangling even on a flinty winter day, and feel soothed by the salt wind. And if you were like Materia, you might look out, and out, and out, until what there was of sun had subsided. And you would sing. Though you might not sing in Arabic.
In time, Materia wore a path from the two-storey white house, along the creek, across the Shore Road, to the cliff.
They didn’t have much furniture at first. James bought an old upright piano at auction. In these early days Materia would play and they’d sing their way through the latest Let Us Have Music for Piano. Sometimes she’d slide down the bench and insist he play and he would, with gusto, the first few bars of some romantic piece, and then stop short, just as he did when he tuned pianos. Materia would laugh and beg him to play something right through and he would reply, “I’m no musician, dear, I’d rather listen to you.”
He built her a hope chest out of cedar. He waited for her to start sewing and knitting things — his mother had milled her own wool, spun, woven and sewn, a different song for every task, till wee James had come to see the tweeds and tartans as musical notation. But the hope chest remained empty. Rather than make Materia feel badly about it, James put it in the otherwise empty attic.
He wasn’t much of a cook but he could boil porridge and burn meat. She was young, she’d learn in time. On weekends he tuned pianos as far away as Mainadieu. Weekdays he cycled in to Sydney, where he swept floors at the offices of The Sydney Post Newspaper in the morning and worked as a sales clerk at McCurdy’s Department Store in the afternoon. Then he’d buy groceries, cycle home, make supper and tidy the house. Then prepare his collar and cuffs for the following day. Then climb the stairs and fold his dear one in his arms.
One day in spring he asked her, “What do you do all day, my darling?”
“I go for walks.”
“What else?”
“I play the piano.”
“Why don’t you plant a little garden, would you like me to get you some hens?”
“Let’s go to New York.”
“We can’t just yet.”
“Why not?”
“We have a home, I don’t want to just run away.”
“I do.”
He didn’t want to elope for a second time. He wanted to stay put and prove something to his father-in-law. He intended to pay for this house. He started going to school every night by correspondence with Saint Francis Xavier University — liberal arts. He knew that could lead to law and then he could go anywhere. He had his mother’s best-loved books, her Bible and her Shakespeare, Pilgrim’s Progress and Sir Walter Scott, all well worn, but he knew there were gaps to be filled if he was to become a cultivated man. A gentleman. Books were not an expense; they were an investment. He spotted an ad in the Halifax Chronicle and sent to England for a crate of classics.
He worked at the Sydney Post but he read the Halifax Chronicle to get a perspective on the world outside this island — the real world. The hacks at the Post thought he was just a broom boy, and those unctuous philistines at the store thought he was lucky to have a collar-and-tie job what with no family and no one to recommend him. He’d show them too, not that they were worth showing.
One evening that spring, he pried the lid off a packing crate and removed untold treasure: book after beautiful book, Dickens, Plato, The Oxford Book of English Verse — he paused over the latter, weighing it in his hands; just read that cover to cover, thought James, you could go anywhere, converse with the Queen. Treasure Island, The World’s Best Essays, The Origin of Species. He counted them; there were twelve in the crate, that meant he now possessed sixteen books. Just imagine, thought James, all that knowledge, and it’s here in my house on the floor of my front room. He sat cross-legged and surveyed the riches. Which to open first? Their gilded leaves and their crimson covers engraved with gold invited him.
He went and rummaged in the kitchen, returning with a pair of scissors. He selected a volume and lifted its front cover; the spine crackled, sending a shower of red flakes into his lap — no matter, it’s the words inside that count. He took the thin blade of the scissors and carefully cut the first pages. He called to Materia — she was about the house somewhere but he hadn’t seen her for an hour or two. “Materia,” he called out again as he cut the last page. When she appeared he said, “Where’ve you been, my darling?”
“The attic.”
“Oh. What were you doing up there?”
“Nothing.”
He didn’t pursue it, maybe she was up there secretly sewing something for the hope chest, planning to surprise him. He smiled fondly at the thought and said, “You look right pretty.”
“Thank you, James.”
Her hair was freshly braided and wound about her head, and she wore a rosebud print with puffed sleeves, matching ribbons and a hooped skirt.
“Look, my dear,” he said, “here’s a book you might enjoy.”
“Let’s go out.”
“Out where?”
“To town. To a dance.”
“But sweetheart, we can entertain ourselves for free right here, and you’ll see, it’ll be more fun.”
He gave her a warm smile and drew her down next to him on the horsehair sofa. He put an arm around her and turned to page one of the beautiful volume. He read aloud, “‘Book One. Of shapes transformed to bodies strange, I purpose for to treat …,”’ savouring the words and the warm weight of his wife cuddled close, “‘Then sprang up first the Golden Age…. ’”
He read and evening closed in. “‘Men knew no other countries yet than where themselves did keep. There was no town enclosed yet with walls and ditches deep…. ’” He read and the coals cooled to grey in the hearth. Reaching over to the lamp and raising the wick, he remarked to his wife, “Now isn’t this better than going out among strangers?” And turning to her for confirmation, he saw she was fast asleep. He kissed her head and returned to the book, “‘Of Iron is the last, in no part good or tractable…. ’”
He continued aloud because that was how he and his mother had read together and the thought made James’s happiness complete far into the night, “‘ … Not only corn and other fruits, for sustenance and for store, were now exacted of the earth, but eft they ’gan to dig. And in the bowels of the earth insatiably to rig for riches couched and hidden deep in places near to hell
By midsummer she was three months pregnant and crying all the time. James couldn’t figure it out — weren’t women supposed to be happy about something like that? He tried to be extra nice. He brought her sweets from town. He tried to get her to read so they’d have something to talk about.
He was at first amazed and then dismayed by her indifference to books. He assigned her a chapter a day of Great Expectations in order to cultivate a love of reading and at supper-time he quizzed her, but she was a sorry student and he abandoned the effort. He racked his brains to devise some sort of seemly diversion for her, having given up hope that she’d take to housewifery. But it was no use, and he tried not to judge her too harshly; she was young, that was all.