She turned her face away.
“I’m sorry, I sometimes have too much interest in the explosion’s repercussions. You probably know that I was the head of the mortuary committee.”
“Yes, Fred thought highly of you.”
Barnstead sat back again, waiting. She told him the story of Fred’s arrest. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I was hoping you could help me. Him. But I can’t pay you right away.” She wasn’t sure how she would ever be able to pay him. “It could be that Fred can pay you, but I don’t know how to ask him. No one at the police station could tell me whether I can visit or even write.”
“Are you and Fred sweethearts?” Barnstead asked. “I only ask because it is important for me to understand your level of involvement in the case.”
“We’re … good friends. What’s happened is unjust. He’s a fine glass-maker and a kind man.” She thought of his beautiful arms and hands and looked down. “I hate to think of him locked up, without anyone to care what becomes of him.”
“Well, clearly someone does,” Barnstead said cheerfully. “You’re right, he is a good man. And, more importantly, he was turning into a pretty good birder too.” He smiled wryly. “Spotted a golden-winged warbler on the citadel.” Barnstead pulled at the hem of his suit vest. “I’ll see what I can do. But I can’t promise anything.”
THE DARKNESS WAS SO COMPLETE that she thought for a moment that she had dreamt everything since the explosion and had woken in the afterlife, a black liquid where her mind floated. But she could feel the blood pushing through her. She lay in her own heat, as if the only living thing left, the visions gathering behind her eyes.
It was still hours from sunrise. She turned on the nightstand light and took her portfolio out from under the bed. She studied herself briefly in the mirror, then she slipped her nightgown over her head.
She worked fast at first with loose light strokes, in circles and ellipses, the solid masses of head, torso, arms, and legs. Then she refined the angles the solid made with empty space. She moved from limb to limb, hands to feet, to neck, to head. She drew an intimate stranger, a dead sister, her mother as a young woman. She drew someone who was already two dimensions, compressed in the narrow cage of mirror — someone who might be just an idea: a woman with round calves and long thighs, the dark fold with its frill of pink flesh, the soft saddle of flesh over her hip bones, a narrow torso with small breasts, a face which was ordinary at first glance, tilted ears with small oval lobes, a slightly wide-bridged nose with neatly shaped nostrils, straight, glossy brows. She drew the closed eye, with its flaccid gaze, as if it had given up on seeing rather than been blinded, then moved to the open eye. Over and over she looked down at the paper then fastened the gaze back on itself. She did this so many times she became irritated with the woman for looking away, and then for veiling herself, for trying to hide something from her. But the artist saw it; she saw the longing in the woman’s face and how tired she was of waiting.
51
IT HAD STRUCK THE VILLAGE in the spring, taking a few sickly babies and old ones with it. Over the summer it gathered strength. More and more men were brought to the hospital each day with influenza. First they complained of terrible headaches and high fever. Some recovered, but for many the only thing the nurses and women from the village could do was wipe them down with cool water and catch the vomit and the blood, thick with foam, that they coughed up as their lungs filled with fluid.
When Natalie returned home at the end of one day, she sank into a chair in front of the fire beside Lucien. Coming in from picking the last apples, Leo found the two of them dozing. She woke with a start at the sound of the door hinges. Leo recognized the haunted look on her face. It was the look he had seen in the trenches, men waking from one nightmare into another.
“You don’t need to go to the village every day,” Leo said as he cut up the potatoes he had dug from the kitchen garden.
“They are short of nurses,” Natalie said. “Men are dying because there is no one to care for them.”
“Men are dying even with someone to take care of them,” he said, thinking of Passchendaele.
“What if it was Armand? What if it was you?” she said. “No one should die alone.”
Leo thought of Marty lying in the snow, the last look they shared.
“They say it has grown more contagious than before,” Leo said.
She laid her hand on his. “Don’t worry, I am strong. When all the other children got sick I had just une petite maladie.”
She told him once that she felt immune from fate, that it had already taken its tithe from her, with the death of Armand and little Marthe. He wondered if in fact, she had nothing more to lose. The problem was, he wasn’t sure fate had taken its tithe from him. Every morning when she wheeled out of the yard on her bicycle, his leg aching, knowing he couldn’t run after her, his throat closed before he could call her back.
Most days he walked to Hugo and Claudette’s farm. He and Hugo would sit at the table and talk crops and animals while Claudette made soup or bread, if she had been able to get flour in the village that week. Once in a while Leo complained that he could not go to the village without fear of being found out. Hugo suggested that he could pose as a deaf cousin. Claudette laughed. “Perhaps no one would guess that he was Canadian, but everyone would know right away that he was not French.”
Hugo grunted.
“Why?” said Leo. “Why can’t I pass for French?”
Claudette tossed her head. “It is obvious.”
“She’s right. I don’t know why but it is true,” Hugo said.
“It is a look in the eye, the way you hold your head,” she said. “You are not from here. To be from here, you must have eaten only cabbages, potatoes, and beets every winter. You must have spent every Sunday sitting on a hard church pew and every Saturday playing boules and, and …”
Hugo added, “Dancing. The estampie and the rondeau.”
“Dancing?” Leo said. “My father played the fiddle for local dances. I am a first class dancer.”
“Ah well, they are not the dances from here,” Claudette said.
“We will teach you,” Hugo said, slapping his big hand on the table, “Claudette and Natalie and I.”
The next evening Claudette and Hugo came over the hill as Leo was leaving the barn. Hugo had a small accordion under one arm. Claudette went into the house and Hugo and Leo went to look at the calf who was growing tall and strong.
“You are French with Natalie,” Hugo said. He looked at Leo thoughtfully. “It has been good for her to have you here. And for Lucien. It is a lucky thing she shot you.”
Leo laughed softly.
“It will be hard for her when you go.”
The two men left the barn without speaking. Natalie crested the hill on her bike.
“Hugo and Claudette have decided I need to learn the local dances,” Leo said, as she leaned her bicycle on the barn wall.
“He claims he is an excellent dancer,” Hugo said. “We shall see.”
She gave a tired smile. “You never told me you could dance.”
“I was too busy trying to walk,” Leo said.
THERE WERE FIVE EGGS that day, one for each of them, in an omelet with fried potatoes. Hugo had brought one of his bottles of wine and Claudette a loaf of fresh bread. There was a festive mood in the room. Natalie had news from the village. The Allies had broken through the Hindenburg Line, and some Germans troops were surrendering rather than retreat.
After dinner, Hugo took out his accordion and Natalie and Claudette showed Leo dance steps, while Lucien pounded out the time on his chair arm. After they finished the last of the year’s apple brandy, Leo hummed the fiddle tunes his father played, for Hugo to try on his accordion.
Leo taught Natalie the country dances he grew up with. Her dark hair flew out behind her as they twirled together. Her shining eyes and laughing mouth, her face, lit by kerosene lanterns, shone with beauty.
LEO FELL
INTO BED. Natalie went still beside him almost as soon as she lay down. He leaned over her expecting to find her sleeping, but she was lying on her back staring at the ceiling.
“What is it?” Leo said.
“The war is almost over,” she said.
“Yes, it seems so.”
“Everyone is so happy,” she said.
He stroked her cheek, still hot from dancing. A tear tracked from the corner of each eye onto the pillow.
“How can I be happy when it means you will leave?” she said.
“Shhhh, go to sleep, you are tired. We’ll talk about it in the morning.” He brushed away her tears.
He lay back, listening to an owl calling in the orchard, until the room spun him into sleep.
HE WAS WOKEN in the early morning by the heat from Natalie’s body. It took him some time to surface through the heaviness of his sleep and the effects of the night before. She moaned and he opened his eyes and rolled over to find her lying with one arm over her eyes, in the same position he had woken her from that first night.
Sweat beaded her forehead. He pulled her arm away from her face and she looked up at him, her eyes full of fear.
“Oh, dear God,” Leo said. He got up and filled a pail with cool water. Lucien followed him into the bedroom and sat in the chair in the corner while Leo kneeled by the bed, wiping down Natalie’s brow and neck. “Tell me what to do,” he said.
“There is nothing to do. Remember, I am strong.”
He wanted to believe her. She had to be strong to survive what the war had done to her.
By late afternoon, her body was burning with fever. Lucien remained in his chair in the corner, clicking through his rosary, his face drained of emotion, as if watching a stranger. Leo recognized that look, the mind, slipping into a grey place.
“I’m going to take her to the hospital,” Leo said.
Fear moved over Lucien’s face. He nodded.
“I’ll go to Hugo and Claudette and borrow their cart.”
CLAUDETTE WENT ASHEN when Leo told them why he had come. She had helped at the hospital when the men started coming in with fevers. After a week, Hugo forbade her to go back.
Leo carried Natalie out to the cart, where he had arranged blankets and pillows in the back for her. Hugo climbed up to take the reins. Claudette moved to join him.
“Please stay with Lucien,” Leo said. “He is confused.” He ran back to the house, kicked off his mended Canadian army issue boots for a pair of scuffed up leather boots from under the bed. A size too big for him, they were the only things of Armand’s that didn’t fit.
He fumbled with the laces, tying them quickly and stood. He turned to take a last look at the bedroom. Yellow light fell on the pillow where she had slept. This new enemy had sprung from war’s greedy misery, wolfing down lives. Rage flared in him. He tore the crucifix from above the bed and hurled it across the room where it hit the wall, emaciated plaster body parts of the saviour scattered across the floor.
“ARE YOU SURE you want to come into the village?” Hugo said, peering at him from under his grey eyebrows.
Leo, still breathing hard, climbed into the back and lay down beside Natalie. Holding her tightly as the wagon began bumping down the road.
“Armand,” she said, opening her eyes briefly. “I am so glad you are back.”
The nurses explained to him what to do and hurried off to attend to others. That night she began coughing up blood. Between the spasms, she lay back struggling to breathe while Leo drew the cool cloth over her face.
In the night she began shivering violently, wracked with coughing. By morning she was still and breathing shallowly. Her lips were blue. Leo took her thin hand in his. It was cool on his lips. She opened her eyes.
“Stay,” she whispered.
“I will stay, Natalie. I promise. Stay yourself. Don’t go.”
52
ON SATURDAYS CLARE HELPED with the children’s art classes, which Arthur Lismer had invigorated, combing the local schools for students. At the beginning of the term Arthur had stood at the front of Mary’s class, bouncing on his toes, a sign that he had something to say of momentous importance.
“Aristotle said that children should be taught to draw, that their perceptions of beauty might be quickened,” he began. “Some of you will be going into classrooms to bring the gift of art to your students. But meanwhile many children in this city are not being taught the basics of drawing and art appreciation. And so, they are being denied participation in a central part of life.”
When Clare told Geraldine about the classes, she made an appeal to the board to include some of the orphans. Every Saturday, Geraldine would arrive with two or three in tow, including Henry, the boy who had acquired a new eye from the oculist. As soon as Geraldine left the room, he was at Clare’s side.
“Why don’t you have a new eye like me?” he said.
Clare crouched down and pointed at her own eye. “I still haven’t found a match to this one. But now let me see you …” She took the boy’s face in her hands and turned it this way and that, looking into his bright blue eyes. “You must tell me which is the real one.”
He smiled and pointed to his right eye with a grubby forefinger, then happily ran to his station and began to work.
The boy picked up drawing quickly, hunching intently over the exercises on lines, curves, and simple shading. When other children’s parents or older brothers and sisters came to collect the children after class, Henry watched them furtively as Clare fussed over his drawings. Geraldine told Clare that, at the orphanage, he’d begun to spend all his spare time drawing.
LISMER WAS ZEALOUS about landscape. He had painted the countryside around Sheffield when he was a student and had made several painting expeditions into the wild Ontario bush before coming to Halifax. He stopped by the classroom to encourage Clare and a few of the students to form an art club for outdoor painting. “It’s time to stop looking to Europe for our paintings. These are our landscapes and Canadian painters must paint them,” he said, spreading his arms wide, taking in the world outside the windows.
Before the weather turned, Clare’s class spent their Sundays roaming the countryside around Halifax with light easels and pochade boxes under their arms. Clare wished that Jane were among them, she had the most talent and was by far the most entertaining. Plein air painting felt more authentic than the formal exercises of the studio. On these afternoons, her fingers chilled by the first cold autumn winds, Clare felt the surge of ambition; if she returned to the compositions, if she mixed and remixed her paints, if she looked hard enough, she might be able to recreate the sprawling, shining world of her good eye.
Sometimes Lismer or Mary accompanied the group of five or six women but more often they set out on their own. When Jane didn’t return to classes Clare had stopped by her house. “She’s in the hospital,” Mrs. Biggs had said, peering around the door in her housecoat. “She can’t have visitors yet.” When Clare asked which hospital Mrs. Biggs simply said, “One where she can get some rest,” and closed the door. Clare knew she couldn’t bring herself to say the Mount Hope Asylum.
Paris dimmed from view, like Mrs. Beddow’s promise of England. Clare fought her discouragement by turning to long hours in the studio, refining her landscape paintings and studies of the figure and completing the material normally taught to the evening students. Mary’s determination had finally prevailed and industrial and commercial design was now offered to women.
Fred’s absence was strangely affecting. The longer he was gone, the more often Clare thought of him. While working on a design for a glass vase, when she was walking through the first fogs of fall, while she cleaned her brushes at the day’s end, Clare would find herself wondering. What did he eat? Was he warm enough at night? Was he able to occupy his hands? She thought of his long fingers turning over his glassware, holding a pencil, touching her cheek.
SHE WAS SITTING on a bench in front of the school, drawing the branches, freshly stripped by wind
s on an October afternoon and didn’t hear the man’s footsteps until he had almost reached her.
Arthur Barnstead sat on the bench beside her. “I thought I would have to look for you. You’ve made it easy.” He glanced down at her drawing. “That’s quite good.” He couldn’t have been over forty, though he looked older, prematurely balding as he was. He had an intelligent face of the sort that would settle into a pleasant expression in old age. Her eye took its precise measure: there was world-weariness there. His work after the explosion must have taken its toll.
“I have bad news.” He squinted up at Clare’s branches. “I haven’t been able to get anywhere with the authorities. I tried going to the military. I worked quite closely with the first commander at Amherst. He was here at the time of the explosion and helped coordinate military response. But there is a new commander now and he insists that he has no power over internment sentences. I went to the provincial and federal authorities but they both said they couldn’t make exceptions.” He sighed, shuffling his feet through the dried beech leaves under the bench. “As far as I can tell there is little difference between internees and prisoners. It is a disgrace that men can be held without any crime or even proof of intent to commit a crime.”
Clare’s eye gathered its small pool of tears.
“The problem is that apparently Fred didn’t register when he should have. He spent a year as an unregistered foreign alien without citizenship. I’m afraid it doesn’t look good. But, on the bright side, it appears the war is almost over.” He patted her arm. “Hopefully your Fred will be out soon.”
53
THE FERRY TO DARTMOUTH was almost deserted; yet a middle-aged older couple took the seats directly across from Clare. The man opened yesterday’s paper, while the woman dropped her bouquet of asters and chrysanthemums on the seat, sat down, and fingered the clasp of her purse, opening it, snapping it shut over and over. Outside the window, the restless sea shone like tinfoil.
Dazzle Patterns Page 28
