“Wait and see,” said Sophie. “Ian loves corn.”
Ian bowed when he presented Eve with her drink, and after she had tasted it she said, “This is most heavenly.”
Ian wasn’t much as she had remembered or pictured him. He was not tall, Teutonic, humorless. He was a slim fair-haired man of medium height, quick moving, companionable. Sophie was less assured, more tentative in all she said and did, than she had seemed since she’d been here. But happier, too.
Eve told her story. She began with the checkerboard on the beach, the vanished hotel, the drives into the country. It included her mother’s city-lady outfits, her sheer dresses and matching slips, but not the young Eve’s feelings of repugnance. Then the things they went to see-the dwarf orchard, the shelf of old dolls, the marvellous pictures made of colored glass.
“They were a little like Chagall?” Eve said.
Ian said,
“Yep. Even us urban geographers know about Chagall.”
Eve said, “Sor-ry.” Both laughed.
Now the gateposts, the sudden memory, the dark lane and ruined barn and rusted machinery, the house a shambles.
“The owner was in there playing cards with his friends,” Eve said. “He didn’t know anything about it. Didn’t know or didn’t care. And my God, it could have been nearly sixty years ago I was there-think of that.”
Sophie said, “Oh, Mom. What a shame.” She was glowing with relief to see Ian and Eve getting on so well together.
“Are you sure it was even the right place?” she said.
“Maybe not,” said Eve. “Maybe not.”
She would not mention the fragment of wall she had seen beyond the bushes. Why bother, when there were so many things she thought best not to mention? First, the game that she had got Philip playing, overexciting him. And nearly everything about Harold and his companions. Everything, every single thing about the girl who had jumped into the car.
There are people who carry decency and optimism around with them, who seem to cleanse every atmosphere they settle in, and you can’t tell such people things, it is too disruptive. Ian struck Eve as being one of those people, in spite of his present gracious-ness, and Sophie as being someone who thanked her lucky stars that she had found him. It used to be older people who claimed this protection from you, but now it seemed more and more to be younger people, and someone like Eve had to try not to reveal how she was stranded in between. Her whole life liable to be seen as some sort of unseemly thrashing around, a radical mistake.
She could say that the house smelled vile, and that the owner and his friends looked altogether boozy and disreputable, but not that Harold was naked and never that she herself was afraid. And never what she was afraid of.
Philip was in charge of gathering up the corn husks and carrying them outside to throw them along the edge of the field. Occasionally Daisy picked up a few on her own, and took them off to be distributed around the house. Philip had added nothing to Eve’s story and had not seemed to be concerned with the telling of it. But once it was told, and Ian (interested in bringing this local anecdote into line with his professional studies) was asking Eve what she knew about the breakup of older patterns of village and rural life, about the spread of what was called agribusiness, Philip did look up from his stooping and crawling work around the adults’ feet. He looked at Eve. A flat look, a moment of conspiratorial blankness, a buried smile, that passed before there could be any need for recognition of it.
What did this mean? Only that he had begun the private work of storing and secreting, deciding on his own what should be preserved and how, and what these things were going to mean to him, in his unknown future.
If the girl came looking for her, they would all still be here. Then Eve’s carefulness would go for nothing.
The girl wouldn’t come. Much better offers would turn up before she’d stood ten minutes by the highway. More dangerous offers perhaps, but more interesting, likely to be more profitable.
The girl wouldn’t come. Unless she found some homeless, heartless wastrel of her own age. (I know where there’s a place we can stay, if we can get rid of the old lady.)
Not tonight but tomorrow night Eve would lie down in this hollowed-out house, its board walls like a paper shell around her, willing herself to grow light, relieved of consequence, with nothing in her head but the rustle of the deep tall corn which might have stopped growing now but still made its live noise after dark.
The Children Stay
Thirty years ago, a family was spending a holiday together on the east coast of Vancouver Island. A young father and mother, their two small daughters, and an older couple, the husband’s parents.
What perfect weather. Every morning, every morning it’s like this, the first pure sunlight falling through the high branches, burning away the mist over the still water of Georgia Strait. The tide out, a great empty stretch of sand still damp but easy to walk on, like cement in its very last stage of drying. The tide is actually less far out; every morning, the pavilion of sand is shrinking, but it still seems ample enough. The changes in the tide are a matter of great interest to the grandfather, not so much to anyone else.
Pauline, the young mother, doesn’t really like the beach as well as she likes the road that runs behind the cottages for a mile or so north till it stops at the bank of the little river that runs into the sea.
If it wasn’t for the tide, it would be hard to remember that this is the sea. You look across the water to the mountains on the mainland, the ranges that are the western wall of the continent of North America. These humps and peaks coming clear now through the mist and glimpsed here and there through the trees, by Pauline as she pushes her daughter’s stroller along the road, are also of interest to the grandfather. And to his son Brian, who is Pauline’s husband. The two men are continually trying to decide which is what. Which of these shapes are actual continental mountains and which are improbable heights of the islands that ride in front of the shore? It’s hard to sort things out when the array is so complicated and parts of it shift their distance in the day’s changing light.
But there is a map, set up under glass, between the cottages and the beach. You can stand there looking at the map, then looking at what’s in front of you, looking back at the map again, until you get things sorted out. The grandfather and Brian do this every day, usually getting into an argument-though you’d think there would not be much room for disagreement with the map right there. Brian chooses to see the map as inexact. But his father will not hear a word of criticism about any aspect of this place, which was his choice for the holiday. The map, like the accommodation and the weather, is perfect.
Brian’s mother won’t look at the map. She says it boggles her mind. The men laugh at her, they accept that her mind is boggled. Her husband believes that this is because she is a female. Brian believes that it’s because she’s his mother. Her concern is always about whether anybody is hungry yet, or thirsty, whether the children have their sun hats on and have been rubbed with protective lotion. And what is the strange bite on Caitlin’s arm that doesn’t look like the bite of a mosquito? She makes her husband wear a floppy cotton hat and thinks that Brian should wear one too-she reminds him of how sick he got from the sun, that summer they went to the Okanagan, when he was a child. Sometimes Brian says to her, “Oh, dry up, Mother.” His tone is mostly affectionate, but his father may ask him if that’s the way he thinks he can talk to his mother nowadays.