It wasn’t so impossible. I had a book to write, and could support the three of us. Jean ached to write fiction. If we found the right island, we could be in touch with London and New York by cellphone. Was there such thing as cellfax? Presumably. We’d need a place where other young children were not so far away as to be unavailable for play dates and sleep-overs. We’d need …
A floatplane in scuffed blue-and-silver livery banked over the lagoon, came in low over the entrance, climbed sharply, and flew back seawards for a second attempt. This time its floats grazed the treetops, then it plopped into the water as gracefully as a descending swan, webbed feet outstretched, and taxied across to where I was standing on the raft. I climbed in with my gear and sat up front beside the pilot, shaking hands on the way with my only fellow passenger, a logger going home from a job in Knight Inlet.
“Your boat?” the pilot shouted over the throb and clatter of the engine.
“Yes.”
“Nice!” he yelled, and pointed at my camera. “Want to take some pictures of her?”
“Sure!”
Growling, then roaring, we skidded over the dimpled surface of the lagoon. As the plane came unstuck from the water, it rose with the dizzy momentum of a cork exploding from a carelessly opened champagne bottle. The forest went into a sickening roll. For a moment, John Walders’s raft stood perpendicular to the plane, with my boat defying gravity like a daddy longlegs on a wall.
“You can open the window if you want!”
The air rushed past at hurricane speed, bringing tears to my eyes. I had trouble focusing on the image in the viewfinder. The late afternoon light had turned Potts Lagoon to a burnished olive-gold, the color of carp scales. I snapped my boat and then the Walders’s buoyant household, zooming in on its domestic details—the covered woodpile, propane tanks, twin chimneys, rainwater ducting system. Squeezing repeatedly on the shutter, I knew I was trying for a shot that was impossible, a picture so opulently detailed that my wife would see what I saw in it: a new life that we might yet lead together.
* The Latin translates roughly as:
Raven replied, “The skin of the testicles is the best bait to use.” Bear said to Raven, “Would mine be useful too?” But Raven said, “They wouldn’t do—they’re all worn out.” A little while later, the sickly bear said, “Cut them off.” Then Raven, with a little sharp knife, said, “Lower your rear end.” Then Raven lopped off the bear’s balls, and Bear, roaring, dragged himself round the canoe and, dying, put his ass in the waves, with terrible groans.
Not quite a bedtime story for Julia, but hardly XXX-rated either.
V. RITE OF PASSAGE
Twenty-four hours later, hot and dirty from my travels, I stepped out of another plane, the jet shuttle from Vancouver to Seattle. My small family was waiting for me at the gate, and Julia leaped into my arms. She clung fiercely to me, silent, her face buried in my shoulder, inhaling me in long deep drafts. From the alien potpourri of smells—the vile Port Hardy motel room, diesel fuel, sweat, the airline miniature of Johnnie Walker—she was busy extracting a vital essence-of-father. The knowledge that I possessed this precious scent made me weak with love and pride.
“She hasn’t napped today,” Jean said.
The pale sterile corridor of the main terminal stretched ahead of us, a dozen deserted departure gates.
“She’s put on weight.” I wriggled my shoulder to investigate my daughter’s face. She was fast asleep.
“I have to go to a dance concert tonight. Your proofs came. Your mother called.”
“I’ll ring her tomorrow.”
Home was unexpectedly enormous after the dollhouse of the boat. I rambled with pleasure through our warren of rooms: all those high ceilings! those views from the windows! two bathrooms! Jean had bought me a bottle of Oregon Pinot Noir, and we sat out on our third-floor deck, looking out across the Ship Canal to Ballard and Phinney Ridge, while I riffled through the daunting pile of mail and faxes.
“Bob Silvers wants you to call him. He made it sound urgent.”
“It’s a gift he has.”
“There’s more stuff in your office.”
I couldn’t stop smiling. The novelty of being home after less than three weeks away was overpowering. Before Julia was born, when I was fifty, it was never like this. Now, late in the day by any standards, I knew what home meant, at long last.
Next morning, after Julia was at preschool and Jean at her desk at the Seattle Times, I began marking up the proofs of my book Bad Land, about drought and disappointment in a dry country, a thousand miles from the nearest ocean. I’d always conceived of it as a sea story—the shipwreck of a hopeful fleet of wooden houses on the dusty shoals of Montana and North Dakota. It had been my passionate occupation for two years, but now, seeing it in severe print for the first time, I was embarrassed by it. This was the British edition, and a London copy-editor had helpfully translated my American prose into English English. Where I had written “parking lot,” it read “car park.” “Railroad” was “railway line.”“Store” was “shop.” “Windshield” was “windscreen.” “Trunk” was “boot.” I spent a couple of hours erasing these corrections, yet their lingering presence tainted the whole book for me. All I could see were clumsy bits of narrative construction, as if the story had been cobbled together with hammer, nails, and two-by-fours.
Needing a break, I called my parents in England. My father came to the phone.
“Peter—hi! I’m back in Seattle for a couple of weeks. How are things?”
“Fair winds?” he said. The connection wasn’t as good as usual; his voice was faint.
Full of my trip, I told him of my defeat by the storm-forecast and the snug berth I’d found in Potts Lagoon; I rattled airily on about crags, precipices, cascades, whirlpools. I was trying to whet his appetite for spectacles of nature, for as soon as I returned from Juneau, my parents were setting off on an American adventure of their own. My idea was that they should fly to Minneapolis, rent a car, and drive to Seattle along the minor highways of the West, taking the better part of two weeks. No interstates, I said; choose dirt roads over blacktops. Use the DeLorme state atlases, with their large scale and full contours. They’d put up for the night in one- or no-stoplight towns. I promised them that they would discover an America rarely seen by Americans. They’d cross the Plains, the Rockies, the Cascades. My plan was that they’d lose their ingrained British notions of “the Yanks” and see something of the grand, complicated, and hospitable country that had made an immigrant of me. I saw them arriving in Seattle astonished at the country, all their preconceptions and prejudices gone by the board.
“You’ve got the state atlases now?”
“All in the study, old boy. And the what’s-it … the Rand McNally.”
“Forget the Rand McNally. The roads that you’ll be taking aren’t marked in Rand McNally.”
“One thing, old boy?”
“Yes?”
“Just a slight question mark’s cropped up. Lately, I’ve been having a spot of tummy trouble. You know.” He made the noise—sniff, snort, chuckle—with which he usually greeted such nonsenses as the latest ruling from the Church of England Synod or daft goings-on in the town-planning department of Market Harborough.
Eighteen months before, he’d been through surgery and chemotherapy. “Nipped it in the bud,” he’d said cheerfully, and never mentioned cancer again.
Now he said: “Tests …” and “Looks as if we might have to put our American jaunt on hold for a bit, I’m afraid, old boy.”
He was telling me that he was dying.
In London, people were frying in the May heat. The city was airless and thinly overcast, the sun showing like a pockmarked orange from behind its perpetual veil of cloud. “Global warming” was the phrase of the moment, though I took the unseasonal heat to be just another of the vagaries of English weather. Jean, Julia, and I camped out in Brixton, in the
tall, narrow, and mercifully gloomy house of an old friend of mine and her eleven-year-old son. Julia fell besottedly in love with Francis, resplendent in his Arsenal Football Club regalia and his coxcomb of gelled black hair. Asked if she liked her first taste of English ice cream, she said, approvingly, “It’s wicked,” in an earnest imitation of the South London whiffle.
Like any foreign visitor, I had rented a car at Heathrow; and as soon as we were settled, I drove alone to Market Harborough, stopping first at Fortnum & Mason’s to buy candied ginger for my father.
“It’s good for him,” my mother said over the phone. “He can keep it down, you see. I have to build his strength up. So we can go to Scotland …” She had set her heart on one last holiday together.
I loaded the boot, not trunk, with an armful of jars of ginger, then let myself back into the car on the passenger side, wondering where the steering wheel had gone—the beginning of a morning of jet-shocked strangeness.
I took my usual route north. I could do it in my sleep: Marble Arch to Seymour Place, to Lisson Grove and Abbey Road, with wedding-cake stucco giving way to serious oxblood-brick and then to pebbledash, concrete, and facetious mock-Tudor. At Brent Cross I fed the car into the gray chute of the M1, jamming my foot down hard on the accelerator to keep up with the crowd. We drove at 85 mph, nose-to-tail, a streaming caravanserai of colored tin.
At intervals of every mile or so, giant placards stood on the verge of the carriageway, saying KEEP YOUR DISTANCE! The signs were weatherworn, their lettering beginning to fade; but they were new to me, though I had driven this route less than six months before. We were going so fast now that the signs ran into each other, keeping up an impotent, repetitive chatter. KEEP YOUR DISTANCE! KEEP … YOUR … DISTANCE! They might as well have been addressing the coupled carriages in an express railway train.
Keeping one’s distance on this overcrowded island had always been a thorny problem. Within my own living memory, the vast and labyrinthine intricacies of the class system had helped to compensate for England’s chronic absence of breathing space. In club or pub, drawing room or lounge, miles of distance could yawn between people once someone opened his mouth and spoke in an accent inappropriate to the setting. The country house, at the end of its rhododendron-guarded drive, lay at an immense remove, in language and manners, from the village that provided its postal address.
But in the last quarter-century or so, the class system had eroded to the point of almost total collapse. One of the lessons administered by Margaret Thatcher, during her long, despotic, and intransigent reign as prime minister, had been that money, not class, divided the English. It was a good lesson, and long overdue; but money was poor insulation by comparison, and everyone in England now seemed more tightly squashed-up together, bumper-to-bumper, elbow-to-elbow, in a manner that—fresh from the wilds of British Columbia—I found surreal. There appeared to be no distance left to keep, as England sped north up the motorway in its new American-style sport-utility vehicles. My rental car—the cheapest on offer from Avis—made a poor showing against the mob of Jeep Cherokees, Nissan Pathfinders, Range Rovers, Ford Explorers, Mitsubishi Shoguns, and Toyota Land Cruisers.
The language had changed, too. Over the car radio came the dialect of the new England, a contrived accent known as Estuary English. BBC announcers, politicians, writers all spoke it. The estuary in question was the Thames, and the idea was that everyone should try to talk like a laid-back, street-smart car salesman from suburban Kent or Essex. The most determined Estuary-speakers were men who’d been to traditional boarding schools, followed by the universities of Oxford or Cambridge. During a newsbreak on Radio 4, I listened with bemusement to the leader of the Labour Party, Tony Blair (Fettes School and Oxford), talking in Estuary as if he’d just returned from a long, arduous, and not altogether successful session with the official New Labour elocutionist.
My accent had become a relic from another age, with its too-distinct imprint of an army-oriented boarding school in the 1950s, plus several generations of Anglican country vicars. I was unselfconscious about it on the west coast of North America, where I was usually nailed as an Australian; but in England it sounded offensively languid and plummy in my own ears, a lah-di-dah voice for which the Estuary word was probably “poncy.” Though I had fallen so far out of touch, I realized, that “poncy” would now almost certainly be thought poncy.
Unable to keep up with the frantic pace of modern Britain—the swerves from lane to lane, the cuttings-in, the disdain of signals, the great impatient free-for-all—I left the motorway just past Milton Keynes and entered an easier, more familiar world. Here was the England that every homesick exile conjures for himself on lonely evenings: rolling, green, deciduous; with dry-stone walls, thick hedgerows, tall church steeples, houses built of honey-colored local rock, red pillar boxes with the initials V.R. ornately entwined above the mail-slot, pub signs on chains (The George & Dragon, Dog & Duck, Coach & Horses, Star & Garter, Pig & Whistle), footpaths through the fields, thatch on the (occasional) roof, cottage gardens, parish pumps, horses at pasture, hawthorn in bloom (a blackbird sings on the top branch of every bush), tottering signposts (LITTLE BRINGTON 3¼), manorial houses with ha-has and oak avenues, blind bends in the lanes (concealing from view the oncoming green Massey-Ferguson tractor), scarecrows, duckponds, skylarks, hayricks, bells chiming the quarters—the whole sweet sentimental boiling.
This was the England that Captain Van had read into the raw coniferous land on Puget Sound. Two hundred years on, Captain Van’s England was still visible here, as Bedfordshire bled into Northamptonshire and Leicestershire. The immemorial elms were gone, reduced to stumps, victims of Dutch elm disease in the 1970s. The old villages had grown “outskirts” much bigger than themselves, of 1950s council-housing and newer, Crayola-colored, vinyl-clad townhouses. Captain Van would have been flummoxed by England’s new canary-yellow hillsides, where hundred-acre fields were now given over to the cultivation of oilseed-rape. The yellow, far too fierce and brilliant for England, made half the landscape look as if it had been transplanted, wholesale, from Languedoc; it belonged in a painting by Van Gogh, not Constable.
Yet enough of the old still remained for one’s eye to edit out the new. Driving through the Bringtons (Little and Great, both tiny), I could see how they had been in Captain Van’s time, or in 1918, when my father was born, or 1942, when I showed up. After the here-today-gone-tomorrow settlements of the American West, they looked like forever, even though the larger houses now probably belonged to London merchant bankers and villagers got CNN by satellite. The eye alone could be deceived: I was seeing only the surviving husks of a rural life that had withered long ago. But there was comfort in looking at the husks. At this particular moment, I was in need of the old churches, old houses, old trees, old walls; of a cultivated landscape that had long preceded, and would certainly outlive, the sparrow-flight passages of my father and myself.
I stopped at a pretty, low-beamed pub, its walls tricked out with horse-brasses, yards of ale, and sepia photos of dead cricket teams, and ate a 1990s lunch of microwaved steak-and-kidney pie and Bird’s Eye frozen peas, whose green was as exotic a hue as the yellow of the rape outside. The pub was evidently a favorite watering hole for office workers from one of Northampton’s outlying industrial estates; it was full of people, and all of them were laughing.
I had forgotten that laughter. No nation on earth laughs as loudly, frequently, and insincerely as does England: the land of ha-ha-ha and haw-haw-haw. In the pub, newcomers were greeting the already arrived with an exchange of hearty guffaws. Around the tables, the laughs were coming thick and fast, each performed in a studiedly personal style. The alpha-male trumpet-laugh. The wry, thin sneeze delivered through the nose. The Falstaffian explosion, beginning in the belly and aimed at the ceiling. The complicit chuffing sound of a steam locomotive getting underway. The nudge-in-the-elbow snigger. The preferred women’s laugh: an upper-palate, saliva-powered “Ngh!
hng! hng! hng! hng! hnng!” that was capable of shattering glass.
Not that anything said—in my earshot, at least—was funny, but in this country humor was valued in abstraction, like love or honor.
“Laugh? I nearly died,” people would say.
“Well, it’s good for a laugh.”
“There’s nothing like a good laugh, I always say.”
“Give us a laugh.”
“He only did it for the laughs.”
Laughter was a serious business here. I badly wanted to tell the man sitting next to me that I was on my way up to Market Harborough to see my father, who was dying of cancer, just to listen to the jovial honking noise that I was sure would be his response.
And I would have been glad to hear it.
There was a strange car in the driveway of my parents’ bungalow on Coventry Road, and a strange face at the door when I pressed the bell.
“I’m the district nurse!” confided the face, in a whisper, as if she were a burglar. “You must be one of the sons.” From behind the nurse, my mother appeared, looking uncertain of her standing in her own house. Beside the unshapely largeness of the nurse, my mother looked tiny, an elf-woman, her eyes huge and exhausted.
“Jonathan! Are you all right? You’re so thin. You’re all skin and bones!”
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