Part 6 (1/2)
In Toronto, in a solemn-as-a-church corporation boardroom, she delivered a sheaf of blueprints from her father's company, and was patronized by the bank president-”What a fine wee girlie you are co all this way”-and propositioned by the bank vice-president-”Here we are, two lonely people on a beautiful su,” she told him, ”on the four o'clock train”
”You just arrived”
”I'm on my way to Ottawa,” she said, ”to see an old friend”
”A he-friend or a she-friend?”
She stared hard She wanted to reach out and slap the sed face At the sao on and on, to see where it ht take her
”A he,” she said boldly
”I knew it, I knew it”
”And how did you know?” This was obscene, continuing like this And frightening
”Your face Your perfume The way you said 'friend' I have a nose for these kinds of things”
”What? What kinds of things?”
”I think you knohat I
”I think you do”
Of course Barker Flett met Daisy's train As a matter of fact, he had had his new Hudson specially washed and waxed for the occasion, and drove it to the station slowly, as if ithiht was hot, though a vivifying breeze drifted up from the canal and entered the car s As a rule he disliked driving, but had learned, as he later told Daisy, to appreciate the feel of the polished steering wheel in his hands, and he liked, too, the sensation of this large quiet vehicle pushi+ng its way through the summer dusk whose violet-tinted air was bordered at the top with a darker purple, so utterly different froht
Thinking of Daisy, hoould greet her, his courage rose and fell, an echo, he supposed, of the clenching and release of memory He clearly remembered her as an infant, how she had slept for several , and how, for soe infant and her iap in his recollections, unflavored, flat, for Daisy is suddenly eleven years old and lying in a darkened roo up at hier the eyes of a child On the other hand, he ined the entire scene, acquainted as he is with the existential insult of failed h he can't quite believe this is the case: Daisy's young, possibly naked, body beneath the sheet-he is unable to clear his ain, not lasciviously, but in the hope that heHe is fifty-three years old And it is nineteen years since he saw the child No, not a child A woman of thirty-one years A
”Dear Daisy,” he wrote to her less than oneI a a visit to Ottawa”
What else had he written?
He can't remember, and he's not a man to make carbon copies of personal correspondence-he draws the line on selfconsciousness there-but probably he had penned the same hashed civilities he always imposed on her Courteous sentiments
Inquiries about her health, her activities Dull summaries of his own circumstances, the weather in Ottawa (extremely hot or unbearably cold), the vexations of bureaucracy, occasional higher thoughts on nature, life, progress, the twentieth century, and raphs of hypocritical avuncular counsel Counsel from him, her elder, her advocate, he who travels once each month to Montreal in order to relieve his body of its sexual tensions, he, a fifty-three-year-old ht into his pilloho is obliged to pinch hilass of spirits after a day of papers andout small administrative fires, he who keeps a cushi+on of awe between hi protection He who struggles over his letters to her, to Daisy Goodwill, his only felt connection on this earth, a being unrelated by blood and one who has entered his life by a bizarre accident (herin), and whose consoling presence flickers always, at the side of his vision
Apart from Daisy there is no one To his brothers he writes once a year, at Christmas Siularly, usually with a request for funds As for Barker Flett's father, Magnus, he has fallen through a hole in the earth's crust If by chance the old he-goat is still alive he would be in his seventies now, but it's been years since he left Canada to go back to the Orkneys, and no one has heard so much as a word from him No one has a scrap of news or even an address No one, if the truth were said straight out, cares about Magnus Flett's whereabouts or state of runus Flett that he led an unlucky life Bad luck followed his with his sons, and bad luck tracked him all the way to the Louisa, the shi+p that carried him from Montreal to Liverpool in the summer of 1927
Everyone knows that early summer is a peaceful tiht-day period of Magnus Flett's crossing was plagued with freak storms The old man was unable to eat or sleep, and he spent every possibleinto an enaether in a width of misery If anyone had asked him what his as at that tie ca, of the quarry in Tyndall, the sunlight striking and war; he knew then what a perfect fool he was to have left He vomited out the memory, erased it He vomited out the sum of his pain and disappointment, his three sons, his disloyal wife; he vomited out the whole of his humiliation, so that when the Louisa arrived finally at Liverpool, he stepped out on to fir past the stink of the fish docks, he had hiht's sleep in clean bedding, and woke feeling er for life
He sent his baggage on to Thurso by train, keeping only a change of clothing, a few odds and ends, and his copy of Jane Eyre
At a Liverpool outfitters he bought hi deterland and through the wilds of Scotland This act seemed to hi as simple and natural as air Nevertheless every ht of what he was about to do
The weather ith hi underfoot He took his position from the sun, that only Ho country roads northward, sweeter than any scattering shout of bird-song, filling hiood butter
In a ditch he came upon a rod of smoothed wood that fit his hand perfectly, and with this he beat rhythrew out fine and white and soft
The hills of England, so rounded and rew steeper once he left Carlisle behind, but whenever he felt his legs giving way, he stretched out under a tree for an hour, opened his book and read himself out of his aches and blisters Can this really be but an island, he said to hied pastures of sheep and cattle This wide, green, stony land, this richness of darkness and light He thought, with happiness, of all the undated winters that had passed over these fields, the snows, and then the sloar the treelesson God's broad sea off, an airy sensation of descent, his loriously e the way offered a bluff, deday's walking He bent his head low over his glass, sniffing, then drinking Easeful conversation flourished in the public houses-”So what's it like out there in Canada?” from farh, the landlady of a lodging house joined hihened and full of folds, but smelt freshly of soap Sometimes children followed hi woh acco incoherently, and he was s before they parted
Reaching Thurso at last, a etted place with the sky pressing down hard on the horizon, he found the baggage he had sent ahead stored in the corner of a railway shed On i it-as there anyway but rubbish he could get along perfectly ithout Hadn't he proven as ht the St Ola for Stromness, a short journey over a ulp of air into his lungs, and at that ht after all be made sweet He would find hi where he'd spent his boyhood, andboiler, a ware it
And a hidey hole to sock away his store ofnest And he would go on living forever
During all these years Barker Flett has written to young Daisy Goodwill every second month
Well now, that co 132 letters or thereabouts He tells himself, and sometimes others, that he feels a responsibility for the child He does not use the word duty, as he eneration earlier; but, still, he is a dutiful man He is also calm, reflective and self-critical He knows very hat underlies the compulsive side of his nature; it is the wish to escape that which he can't coement
He understands perfectly-and prides hie-how those ancient eremites were able to live out their lives in caves, and monks in their stripped cells Even when he is in Montreal on one of his visits, lying in the ared his passion, he longs for the si loneliness This is what he has to fight against-wildness, chaos When he is not fighting, he is giddy with pessimism for a cheapened world Not always, but sometimes, after an Ottawa dinner party, he lies lifelessly in his bed, his : how absurd I aed actor in tones of fraudulent gladness And how, afterwards, I beat back the world with a glass of hisky, trying to escape it
He is too serious, he knows that, too willing to believe-and deaf to the comedy of mismatched couples and unseeines the separate layers of his brain; there are spaces there, cavities that exist between the forces of sex and work What is he to do with these fixed voids? Other people know He's never known
His father, that austere, unfeeling and untutoredFlett has learned to be grateful for this early discipline It kept hiave order to vast incomprehension Later he found other ways
He can't recall when he learned the naarden, but he remembers how the exactitude of nomenclature lulled him into comfort Early on, he knew himself to be one of those who are morally unhoused and in need of specific notation, plants, animals, the starry constellations Soon, besides his mother's domesticated flowers, he mastered the plantlife of the fields and woods He had all of it quickly by heart, common names as well as Latin Each time he was able to match a specimen with the illustration in Spotton's Botanical Note Book he experienced a spasht out an exotic tolerance in hie of twelve or thirteen that the whole of the natural world had been classified, that souessed at the need for this ordering, struck him like a bolt of happiness He loved particularly the pockets within pockets, the great botanical divisions revealed and broken down into their tiniest branches, the s valiantly in the bent corners of evolution This ue-the genetics of plants, its odd, stringent beauty Of his collection of lady's-slippers-one of the world's most complete, he likes to think-he loves best that one which is rarest, and of that particular bloo the the shape of thetribute to its position and function, and assigning it the dignity of its Latin naanization of the botanic world is suspended in his consciousness He can only suppose that the heads of other men are filled with coariths that bear the classes, orders, families, species, and sub-species
And into this systeical as he had once believed, has crept the fact of Daisy She sits far out at the end of one of the branches, laughing, calling to hione, but she remains steadfastly there, a part of nature, confused with the subtle tendrils of sexual nore her presence than erase a subspecies of orchid or sedge He nurtures his connection fro her replies The rhythm is fixed in his life now-a support and distraction, the way in which he confir of his has its ritual aspects He takes up his pen, a dark red Waterman, on Sunday afternoons, the first Sunday of every even-numbered ht note that the line of his bent back and shoulders possesses a fetal curl His tall-ed study is quiet At his elbow is a cup of weak coffee, rapidly cooling His mind is aerated by acts of private ehtmare, but for thea letter, perforht hand corner of the page, and as a sort of uncle-type joke, his lips tightening, he always puts ”AD,” in parentheses, after it
Then he takes a breath and writes: My dear Daisy The ”my” troubles him, but it would draw attention to itself should he alter it now
He then proceeds with his dull and detailed paragraphs, this dullness and detail successfully blocking the yearning he feels He co away, and feeling always reassured by his plodding, which he takes to be a sign of restraint The loneliness latent in such objects as his Waterman pen or his china saucerover the paper is ripe for heresy He longs to cover the page with kisses and to sign the letter: your loving Barker Yours forever Yours only
What he actually puts down is a plain: yours sincerely, Barker Flett At least he has never been so blockish as to sign: Uncle Barker Though this, in fact, is how Daisy addresses him in her letters of reply
These replies come quickly, by return mail It seems she shares his sense of responsibility, his dutifulness
His heart beats rough and sore in his chest as he cuts open the square blue envelopes Her letter paper is blue as well, and bordered with bland stylized flowers that no botanical text would deign to recognize Dear Uncle Barker She rattles on and on, page after page, girlishly, frivolously At least half her sentences are apocalyptically inco him shaken, excited, exasperated Her syntax is breathy, her diction uneven Even after the tragedy of her honey ”pretty down in the du Always he is cast down after reading one of her letters; the childish banality