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She had started to weep. Not with grief but with an onslaught of relief that she had not known she was looking for. Now she looked into Rupert’s face and saw that his eyes were bloodshot and the skin around them puckered and dried out, as if he had been weeping, too.
He said, “She wasn’t lucky in her life.”
Enid excused herself and went to get her handkerchief, which was in her purse on the table. She was embarrassed now that she had dressed herself up in readiness for such a melodramatic fate.
“I don’t know what I was thinking of,” she said. “I can’t walk down to the river in these shoes.”
Rupert shut the door of the front room.
“If you want to go we can still go,” he said. “There ought to be a pair of rubber boots would fit you somewhere.”
Not hers, Enid hoped. No. Hers would be too small.
Rupert opened a bin in the woodshed, just outside the kitchen door. Enid had never looked into that bin. She had thought it contained firewood, which she had certainly had no need of that summer. Rupert lifted out several single rubber boots and even snow boots, trying to find a pair.
“These look like they might do,” he said. “They maybe were Mother’s. Or even mine before my feet got full size.”
He pulled out something that looked like a piece of a tent, then, by a broken strap, an old school satchel.
“Forgot all the stuff that was in here,” he said, letting these things fall back and throwing the unusable boots on top of them. He dropped the lid and gave a private, grieved, and formal-sounding sigh.
A house like this, lived in by one family for so long a time, and neglected for the past several years, would have plenty of bins, drawers, shelves, suitcases, trunks, crawl spaces full of things that it would be up to Enid to sort out, saving and labelling some, restoring some to use, sending others by the boxload to the dump. When she got that chance she wouldn’t balk at it. She would make this house into a place that had no secrets from her and where all order was as she had decreed.
He set the boots down in front of her while she was bent over unbuckling her shoes. She smelled under the whiskey the bitter breath that came after a sleepless night and a long harsh day; she smelled the deeply sweat-soaked skin of a hardworked man that no washing-at least the washing he did-could get quite fresh. No bodily smell-even the smell of semen-was unfamiliar to her, but there was something new and invasive about the smell of a body so distinctly not in her power or under her care.
That was welcome.
“See can you walk,” he said.
She could walk. She walked in front of him to the gate. He bent over her shoulder to swing it open for her. She waited while he bolted it, then stood aside to let him walk ahead, because he had brought a little hatchet from the woodshed, to clear their path.
“The cows were supposed to keep the growth down,” he said. “But there’s things cows won’t eat.”
She said, “I was only down here once. Early in the morning.” The desperation of her frame of mind then had to seem childish to her now.
Rupert went along chopping at the big fleshy thistles. The sun cast a level, dusty light on the bulk of the trees ahead. The air was clear in some places, then suddenly you would enter a cloud of tiny bugs. Bugs no bigger than specks of dust that were constantly in motion yet kept themselves together in the shape of a pillar or a cloud. How did they manage to do that? And how did they choose one spot over another to do it in? It must have something to do with feeding. But they never seemed to be still enough to feed.
When she and Rupert went underneath the roof of summer leaves it was dusk, it was almost night. You had to watch that you didn’t trip over roots that swelled up out of the path, or hit your head on the dangling, surprisingly tough-stemmed vines. Then a flash of water came through the black branches. The lit-up water near the opposite bank of the river, the trees over there still decked out in light. On this side-they were going down the bank now, through the willows-the water was tea-colored but clear.
And the boat waiting, riding in the shadows, just the same.
“The oars are hid,” said Rupert. He went into the willows to locate them. In a moment she lost sight of him. She went closer to the water’s edge, where her boots sank into the mud a little and held her. If she tried to, she could still hear Rupert’s movements in the bushes. But if she concentrated on the motion of the boat, a slight and secretive motion, she could feel as if everything for a long way around had gone quiet.
Jakarta
I.
Kath and Sonje have a place of their own on the beach, behind some large logs. They have chosen this not only for shelter from the occasional sharp wind-they’ve got Kath’s baby with them- but because they want to be out of sight of a group of women who use the beach every day. They call these women the Monica
The Monicas have two or three or four children apiece. They are all under the leadership of the real Monica, who walked down the beach and introduced herself when she first spotted Kath and Sonje and the baby. She invited them to join the gang.
They followed her, lugging the carry-cot between them. What else could they do? But since then they lurk behind the logs.
The Monicas’ encampment is made up of beach umbrellas, towels, diaper bags, picnic hampers, inflatable rafts and whales, toys, lotions, extra clothing, sun hats, thermos bottles of coffee, paper cups and plates, and thermos tubs in which they carry homemade fruit-juice Popsicles.
They are either frankly pregnant or look as if they might be pregnant, because they have lost their figures. They trudge down to the water’s edge, hollering out the names of their children who are riding and falling off logs or the inflatable whales.
“Where’s your hat? Where’s your ball? You’ve been on that thing long enough now, let Sandy have a turn.”
Even when they talk to each other their voices have to be raised high, over the shouts and squalls of their children.
“You can get ground round as cheap as hamburger if you go to Woodward’s.”
“I tried zinc ointment but it didn’t work.”
“Now he’s got an abscess in the groin.”
“You can’t use baking powder, you have to use soda.”
These women aren’t so much older than Kath and Sonje. But they’ve reached a stage in life that Kath and Sonje dread. They turn the whole beach into a platform. Their burdens, their strung-out progeny and maternal poundage, their authority, can a
Kath and Sonje have their own thermos of coffee and their extra towels, with which they’ve rigged up a shelter for Noelle. They have their cigarettes and their books. Sonje has a book by Howard Fast. Her husband has told her that if she has to read fiction that’s who she should be reading. Kath is reading the short stories of Katherine Mansfield and the short stories of D. H. Lawrence. Sonje has got into the habit of putting down her own book and picking up whichever book of Kath’s that Kath is not reading at the moment. She limits herself to one story and then goes back to Howard Fast.
When they get hungry one of them makes the trek up a long flight of wooden steps. Houses ring this cove, up on the rocks under the pine and cedar trees. They are all former summer cottages, from the days before the Lions Gate Bridge was built, when people from Vancouver would come across the water for their vacations. Some cottages-like Kath’s and Sonje’s-are still quite primitive and cheap to rent. Others, like the real Monica’s, are much improved. But nobody intends to stay here; everybody’s pla