‘It was because of your father that I came,’ I said.
I thought that would steady her, but she didn’t seem to hear. ‘You came here and you hurt people and you do not care. Please, please, leave us alone.’
‘But your father — ‘ I began.
‘My father is dead,’ she cried. ‘He is dead — dead; do you hear?’ Her voice was wild, unrestrained, her eyes wide and scared.
‘But suppose my father was right,’ I said gently. ‘Suppose that transmission — ‘
‘Your father! Man Dieu! You do not care about us — what we feel. You are afraid to admit that your father is mad so you come here to make trouble.’ Her small fists were clenched and her tight breasts heaved against the leather of her Indian jacket. And then, whilst I stared at her, appalled, she reached out her hand with her breath caught and said, ‘No. That was wrong of me.’ She was staring at me. ‘But it is so horrible,’ she breathed. ‘So very horrible.’ She turned away then, her face towards the sunset. ‘I do not mind so much for myself-father is dead. There’s nothing to do about that. But for Albert’ — she pronounced his name in the French way — ‘it is driving him out of his mind. I have just been talking to him. It is a terrible thing you are saying.’ This last in a voice scarcely above a whisper.
‘But suppose he has made a mistake?’ I said.
She rounded on me then, her eyes blazing. ‘You don’t seem to understand,’ she cried. ‘He is with my father when he died, and it is because of him they stop the search. And now you come here and try to tell us that my father transmit on the radio, not when they crash, but two whole weeks after. That is what is terrible.’ She was crying now — crying wildly in a terrible flood of feeling. ‘It isn’t true. It can’t be true.’
What could I say? What did you say when what you’d come to believe tore another human being in half? And because I didn’t know, I stood in silence, scared by the sight of a passion that was quite foreign to me.
‘You say nothing. Why?’ She made a quick movement and caught hold of my arm. Tell me the truth now. Please. The truth.’
The truth! What was the truth? Did I really know it? Was it really what was written on the pencilled page of that logbook? ‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured. ‘I don’t know the truth.’ And I added, ‘I wish I did. All I know is what my father wrote. He believed your father was alive and that he was transmitting from a place called Lake of the Lion.’
She caught her breath then. ‘Lake of the Lion!’ She was staring at me and now there was intelligence as well as passion in her eyes. ‘You say Lake of the Lion. How do you know?’
‘The transmission,’ I said. ‘It was implied in the transmission my father picked up.’
‘It only said a narrow lake with a rock in it.’ Her voice trembled slightly. ‘That was all. I read it myself. Albert showed it to me.’
‘Did he show you Ledder’s reports, too?’
She shook her head.
‘Lake of the Lion was mentioned in that.’ I spared her the context and went on to tell her about the map in my father’s room and the log books and how my father had been obsessed with Labrador because of the Ferguson Expedition. And all the time I was talking she was staring at me, her eyes wide, almost shocked. ‘So you see,’ I finished, ‘I felt I had to come.’
She didn’t say anything for a moment and her face had gone quite white. ‘Lake of the Lion.’ She murmured the name to herself as though it were something she’d dreamed about. ‘My father talked about it — often … over camp fires. He knew the story, and always he thought he would find it some day always he was searching. All my life I hear that name on his lips.’ She had turned away from me, staring at the sunset. ‘Dieu me secourrait!’ she breathed. God help me! Her hands were gripped together as she said it, as though she were kneeling before an altar. She looked at me slowly. ‘You are honest. At least you are honest. And I thank God for that.’ Her eyes held mine for a long moment and then she whispered, ‘I must think. I must pray to God.’ And she turned and walked slowly away, and there was something so forlorn about her, so matching my own mood of loneliness that I started after her.
But I stopped, because with a sudden perception that I scarcely understood, I realized that I could do no good. This was something that she had to discover for herself. It was a terrible choice, striking as it did at the roots of her relationship with Laroche, and I felt her dilemma as though it were my own. And in some strange way it strengthened my resolve. It was as though this other human, whom I had never met till now, had reached out to me for help. I knew then that I couldn’t give up, that I must go on until I’d found the truth.
It was strange, but the past and the present seemed suddenly inextricably mingled, with Lake of the Lion the focal point, and I turned my face towards the north, feeling the chill of the faint wind that blew from the Labrador plateau.
This was my mood when Bill Lands drove up in his mud-spattered station wagon and told me to jump in. ‘I’m not going,’ I said.
He stared at me, still leaning across the passenger seat with his hand on the door he’d thrown open for me. ‘What do you mean, you’re not going?’
‘I’m staying here,’ I told him. ‘I’m staying here till I’ve discovered the truth.’
The truth? You’ve had the truth. You had it from Bert Laroche this afternoon.’ He was frowning at me. ‘Did Paule find you? Did you talk to her?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you say to her?’ His voice was trembling with anger and his fist was clenched as he slid across the passenger seat and out on to the gravel beside me. ‘Did you try and tell her that her father was still alive out there?’ He stood over me, his eyes narrowed and hard, looking down into my face. ‘Did you tell her that?’ I thought he was going to hit me.
‘No,’ I said.
‘What did you tell her then?’
‘She asked for the truth and I said I didn’t know what the truth was.’
‘And that set her mind at rest, I suppose? Why the hell Bert had to tell her about you, I don’t know.’ He gripped hold of my suitcase, wrenching it from me and tossing it into the back of the wagon. ‘Okay. Let’s go. You’ve done enough damage for one day.’ His voice still trembled with anger. ‘Go on. Get in.’
‘But I’m not going,’ I repeated, my voice childishly stubborn.
‘You’re going, son, whether you want to or not.’ Then he caught hold of my arm and literally flung me into the seat and slammed the door.
There was no point in arguing with him — he was a big man, powerfully built. But as he got in behind the wheel and we drove off, I said, ‘You can take me down to the airstrip, but you can’t make me board the plane.’
He looked at me, frowning. ‘I don’t understand you,’ he said. ‘Why the hell don’t you accept Bert’s statement and leave it at that?’ And when I didn’t say anything, he asked, ‘How much money you got — Canadian money?’
‘None,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘That’s what I thought.’ He was smiling. ‘How the hell do you expect to stay on here? This is a boom town. It costs money to live here.’
‘Staffen’s short of engineers,’ I said quietly. ‘And I’m an engineer.’
We had swung out on to the dirt road and he headed east, his foot hard down on the accelerator. ‘Alex won’t give you a job, and nor will anybody else when they know you’re just here to make trouble.’
‘I’m not here to make trouble,’ I said. ‘I just want to find out the truth. And if it’s the girl you’re worrying about,’ I added, ‘then don’t you think she’s entitled to the truth too? She knows I’m here and she knows why. She knows about that transmission, and if she never learns the truth of it, she’ll wonder about it all her life.’ He didn’t say anything and I went on: ‘You say her father was a hero to her. Well, she knows there’s one person who doesn’t believe he’s dead, and if it’s left at that she’ll worry about it till the day she dies.’