by Julie Cohen
‘Not here,’ said Adam. ‘The current’s too strong in front of the house.’
Robbie stood up. ‘I’ll walk you down to the bay,’ he said. ‘You can throw a ball all you want for him there down by the landing. You won’t all fit in the dinghy but I can borrow Little Sterling’s launch and give you a ride if you want. Want to come, William?’
‘I’m Francie,’ said Francie.
‘Well then, do you want to come, Francie?’
The little girl hopped off her daddy’s lap and put her hand in her grandfather’s. ‘Can I have an ice cream at the store?’
‘You just had ice cream,’ said Shelley, but Robbie winked at the little girl and said, ‘Shh, don’t tell your mother.’
‘I’ll come too,’ said Chloe. ‘Mom, can I borrow your phone?’
Shelley rolled her eyes, but handed over the phone.
‘Are you coming, Em?’ asked Robbie. ‘I’ll buy you an ice cream too. The biggest ice cream you ever saw, for my sweetheart.’
‘Adam will come with you, won’t you, Adam?’ Adam nodded, and Emily kissed Robbie’s cheek. ‘I’ll stay here and do the dishes. Dry the dogs and kids off before you let them back into the house.’
He kissed her and she watched him go, accompanied by their son, surrounded by grandchildren and dogs. Other than the grey of his hair, from the back he could still be the man she’d first met all those years ago, before they’d imagined any of this was possible.
He’d called Francie ‘William’.
In the kitchen the two women filled the dishwasher, working in an easy rhythm. Some of Emily’s friends had problems with their daughters-in-law, but Emily knew she was blessed. Shelley told her about their plans for the rest of the Fourth of July holiday weekend, taking the kids up to Rangeley where Shelley’s family had a camp on the lake. They’d stay up there a couple of weeks, so the kids could play with their cousins and Shelley could catch up with her extended family. ‘It’s the best part of being a teacher,’ she said, wrapping up the remainder of the cake. ‘The summer holiday.’
‘I don’t believe that for a minute,’ said Emily. ‘You love your students.’
‘You could join us. You and Robbie would be really welcome, and we’ve got an extra bedroom. You could bring the dogs; they’d love the lake. My brother has a little sailboat he doesn’t even know how to use.’
‘I’d like that. I’ll have to ask Robbie. He’s doing some work around the house this summer.’
‘Adam said that, from the looks of it, he’s got about six projects going at once. He was complaining because Robbie had always told him to finish one job before starting the next.’
‘Is that so?’ said Emily vaguely. ‘Well, he must have a lot of repairs to do. It was a hard winter. Have you heard from William lately, by the way? He hasn’t called since last month.’
‘He sent an email last week with some photos of the kids. I’ll forward it to you, if you haven’t got it.’ Shelley opened the refrigerator to replace the jug of milk, and paused. ‘Er . . . what’s this?’
‘What’s what?’
Shelley took something out of the refrigerator and held it up. It was Robbie’s wallet.
‘He’s going to have trouble buying ice cream without this,’ said Shelley, beginning to laugh.
Emily turned away quickly, back to the dishes, before her daughter-in-law could see her face. ‘One of the kids must have put it there as a joke,’ she said, indistinctly, rinsing a glass. Though she knew it had not been one of the kids.
Fireworks exploded in the distance, over Clyde Bay, around the point a quarter mile from their house. Some years they watched them from the boat, with a view of the lights on the shore and the fireworks reflected on the water. This year the kids had left too late and Emily had been too tired to bother with getting the boat off their mooring. The main problem with being older: being tired. And this afternoon, happy though it had been, had been a strain, too, with watching Robbie and watching Adam and Shelley to see if they noticed, if they understood.
William had called late in the afternoon to wish them a happy anniversary. It was only three o’clock where he was in Alaska. He’d called her phone instead of the house phone and from the look that Adam and Shelley exchanged when she answered the call, she knew that one of them had sent him a text to prompt him to ring. She pretended not to know as she chatted with him, told him about the cake and the sunshine and how the dogs and kids had tracked half the beach into the house with them. William’s laughter, a continent away, sounded just like Robbie’s.
‘Your father would love to speak with you,’ she said, and passed the phone to Robbie. ‘It’s William.’
She watched as Robbie took the phone. ‘Hello, son. Yes, thank you. All good there? Good, good.’ A silence, and Emily tried to hear if William was speaking on the other end.
‘You probably want to talk with your brother.’ Robbie handed the phone to Adam, and Emily drew the familiar sigh.
Now, from the spare bedroom they used as an office, Emily could see flashes through the window, though she couldn’t see the fireworks themselves. Wrapped in a dressing gown she sat at the desk and checked her email. As promised, Shelley had forwarded her William’s email as soon as she’d got home. Emily opened it and gazed with pleasure at the photographs of William’s two children. It was tough for him, splitting custody with their mother; but he only lived a couple of miles from her and saw them almost every day.
The girl, Brianna, most resembled what William had looked like as a child: gap-toothed, dark-haired – even a haircut much like William had had in the 1970s. Emily supposed everything came back into style, eventually. Brianna posed with her older brother John in front of a lake and pine trees, with fishing rods in their hands. Alaska looked a lot like Maine, though William said that they had even more vicious black flies there.
She was about to call Robbie to come in and look when she saw that she had another email as well, from someone called Lucy Knight. The subject was Christopher.
Dear Emily,
I hope you don’t mind my emailing you out of the blue like this.
I thought you would probably want to know that Christopher passed away last month. I would have told you sooner, but everything seems to take so much more time for me since he’s been gone. He didn’t suffer; he died in bed, suddenly, of a heart attack. I woke up and he was gone.
I know we never met bar the once, but Christopher often spoke of you, as a colleague and a friend. He regarded his time in South America as – he never said in so many words that it was the happiest, because, as you know, he could never be anything but kind – but he spoke of it as one of the most productive times in his life, as the time he felt he did the most good. He was a fine man and I was very lucky to have him. I miss him very much.
Yours sincerely,
Lucy Norris Knight
She put her hand over her mouth. Christopher.
‘Sweetheart?’ Robbie came in and rested his hand on the back of her chair. ‘Coming to bed?’
‘I . . . was looking at a photo of Brianna and John and I just got this. About Christopher.’ She swivelled the chair so that Robbie could read the email over her shoulder.
‘Oh, Em, I’m sorry.’ He pulled up a second chair and put his arm around her shoulders.
She had tears in her eyes. ‘Sometimes I think of him. I often wondered how he . . . but I didn’t ask. I don’t know how Lucy got my email address. That’s his wife, Lucy. She must have looked it up somewhere.’
‘Polly?’
‘I doubt it. I don’t think Polly knows it. It must have been a search engine or something.’
‘Maybe Christopher had it.’
‘He never emailed me. I saw him for the last time at my mother’s funeral.’ She shook her head. ‘I think of him now and I just picture him the way I knew him at Cambridge. I can’t picture him an old man, or
even as he was when we were – when we were in Bolivia together. I see him skinny, with that hairstyle he had, so neat, and those horn-rimmed glasses he used to wear. There’s been a whole lifetime since then. Isn’t that funny?’
‘He was your best friend.’
‘For a very, very long time, yes, he was. Until you.’ She put her palm on Robbie’s cheek and he turned into it and kissed it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That’s sad news.’
‘I knew him so well. I knew everything about him, once.’ She scrolled down the email, but there was nothing else. Just the fact of Christopher’s death, and the kind words from his wife, who was obligated to send her nothing but had anyway.
‘He knew,’ she said. ‘He knew . . . that . . .’
Robbie frowned slightly. ‘He did?’
‘I told him, once. Or he half figured it out. When we were still at Cambridge, doing our exams. We only spoke about it once and he never mentioned it again. Not even when you and I . . . when I left him.’
‘Do you think he told his wife?’
‘I don’t think so. Christopher was a gentleman. I told him to keep it a secret and he would have done. He was a good man.’
Robbie gazed at her. ‘That means,’ he said, slowly, ‘that no one else knows, now.’
She nodded.
‘Not Polly?’ he said.
‘I don’t even know if Polly is still alive. But I don’t think she knew. She didn’t want to know. Not Marie?’
‘I never told Marie.’
‘So no one knows.’
‘Only you and me,’ said Robbie. ‘We’re the only people left alive who know it.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. Just you and me.’
‘Then we’re free,’ he said. ‘Finally, you and I are free.’
Chapter Three
When Emily woke up, Robbie was gone. She put her hand out to touch his pillow and it was still warm, still bearing the imprint of his head. The sun had risen and was shining through their bedroom window.
When they’d first moved to Maine, they could only afford seafront property by buying a lot with a near-derelict house on it: a boxy, strict Victorian farmhouse, weathered and sagging, with holes in the roof. Robbie had renovated the house so extensively that little of the original footprint remained. It was a three-gabled, cedar-shingled house with a wide porch on the side facing the ocean, white trim on all the doors and windows, and a garage workshop on the side. But sometimes, when Emily looked up at the house, she could see the ghost of that old nineteenth-century building standing there, too.
The original master bedroom had been at the back of the house, facing the woods, but Robbie had moved it to the front, facing east and the water. He wanted to hear the ocean as they slept, and he wanted to see the sun rise.
In practice, he was usually awake before sunrise, even since he’d retired.
Emily smiled and listened for him around the house. He whistled, sometimes, moving from room to room. He always listened to rock music, but he whistled Bach. She didn’t even think he consciously realised he was doing it. It was a thread of sound that tied their years together: along with the dogs’ toenails on the floor, children’s footsteps, the radio in his workshop, the constant susurration of the sea.
She didn’t hear him this morning, but she kept listening anyway.
The phone rang; she let it go for a couple of rings to see if Robbie would pick it up downstairs, since at this hour it was bound to be for him, not her. When he didn’t, she reached over for the extension on his bedside table.
‘Dr Brandon?’
She recognised the voice at once: he’d never quite lost his Quebec accent. ‘Good morning, Pierre.’
‘I wondered if maybe you wanted to come down to the boatyard? It’s not a problem, we’re always glad to see Bob, but—’
She sat up straight. ‘What’s he done? Is he all right?’
‘Oh, nothing to worry about. He’s fine. But maybe you want to come down, you know?’
She dressed in a hurry and left in her own car, noticing that Robbie’s truck was gone.
Pierre hadn’t changed the name of the boatyard when he bought it from Robbie on his retirement; the sign was still painted blue on white, Brandon’s Boatyard. Pierre had had it repainted recently, from the looks of it. When she got there, Pierre was waiting for her near the entrance to one of the work bays, standing next to Little Sterling, both with Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups in their hands. Pierre was small and scrappy, descended from generations of woodsmen; Little Sterling, despite his name, was a mountain of a man descended from generations of lobstermen. The two of them made a Laurel and Hardy silhouette together, though this morning Emily didn’t find them comical at all.
‘He was here when I got here this morning,’ Pierre said to her. ‘And he’s been working steady, won’t have coffee or nothing. Says he’s got to get the ketch done by the weekend, but you know, there’s no deadline on her, she just come in yesterday.’
They all looked down to the water, where Robbie worked on one of the boats in the slips. His back was turned to them.
‘Did he . . .’ She swallowed. ‘Did he know who you were?’
‘Oh yeah, he did. He told me I’d never finish my apprenticeship if I stood around drinking coffee all day.’
‘Is he all right, doc?’ asked Little Sterling.
‘I’m sure he’s absolutely fine,’ she said, firmly, and walked down to the slips. Her footsteps on the wooden pontoons announced her presence and Robbie looked up from his work on the white-hulled boat and smiled at her.
With that smile she could tell that he knew her. She didn’t know how afraid she’d been until she felt the relief.
‘Robbie? Are you all right, love?’
He put down his wire brush. ‘Never better.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘I’m working on this ketch. She’s . . .’ He faded off, and for a moment he looked confused.
‘It’s not your boatyard any more,’ she said to him, gently, touching his wrist. ‘You sold it to Pierre, remember?’
‘Pierre?’
‘Pierre L’Allier. You said he was the best person to take it on when you retired and you let him have it at a ridiculously good price.’
‘Oh. Oh, yes, I did. Daylight robbery.’ Robbie looked around at the boats in slips, the boats in the yard, the white-painted workshop. Pierre and Little Sterling had disappeared into the building, presumably to give them some privacy.
‘Why am I here?’ he asked Emily.
Her heart wrenched in her chest. ‘I . . . you don’t remember?’
‘Maybe I wanted to do some work on Goldberg Variations?’ He looked around again. ‘But she’s on the mooring, isn’t she?’
‘We could take her out today.’
Robbie nodded, seemingly relieved. ‘I’d like that. Let me . . . let me put away these tools.’
‘I’ll go ask Pierre if we can use his dinghy to get out there so we don’t have to go into town.’ She kissed him on the forehead, and went up to the workshop. Pierre and Little Sterling were standing by a mobile hydraulic lift, talking quietly. They looked up when she entered.
‘It’s all fine,’ she said. ‘Thanks for calling me. We’re going to go out on the sailboat; I wonder if we could borrow a dinghy?’
‘Fourth will give you a lift,’ Little Sterling said. ‘You just call him when you want to come back.’ He reached into his pocket for his cell phone. ‘I could have sworn Bob thought he was still working here, when I saw him this morning.’
‘It’s all OK,’ Pierre said quickly. ‘He’s welcome here any time. Far as I’m concerned, it’s still his place. He built it up from scratch.’
Emily nodded, and swallowed, and tried to ignore the burning, sick feeling of shame in her stomach.
Fourth – real
name Sterling Ames, the Fourth, the son of Little Sterling who was the third of that name – drove his motor dinghy up to the end of the slip with the careless competence of a person who has been piloting boats since childhood. Robbie hopped in and helped Emily. He still had that look on his face: that lost look, almost helpless, almost as if he were desperately searching for some meaning.
It was not an expression that sat well on his face. Robbie had always been able to do anything. This expression made him appear almost a stranger.
Their sloop was on a private mooring in Clyde Bay proper; Fourth steered them to it without having to ask where they were going. People around here knew each other’s boats as well as they knew each other’s children. She watched Robbie’s face as they approached their boat and saw his lost look gradually being replaced by pleasure. He’d made that boat with his own hands: shaped it and sanded it, rigged it, varnished the teak, painted its decks white and its hull a deep green, lettered the name on the stern himself. It was countless weekends and afternoons and mornings, this boat: time and memory made visible.
‘That’s a fine boat,’ said Robbie.
‘Pops says there’s no better wooden sloop in the state of Maine,’ said Fourth.
‘There isn’t,’ Emily said. ‘She takes a lot of care, but she’s worth it.’
‘Like a woman,’ said Robbie, automatically, and she smiled and squeezed his hand.
‘I always meant to ask,’ Fourth said, ‘is Goldberg your maiden name, doc? Is that why you called her Goldberg Variations?’
‘No,’ said Robbie. ‘It’s . . . it’s a . . .’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Goldberg, it’s a . . .’
‘It’s a piece of classical music,’ said Emily, to Fourth rather than to Robbie, though she was saying it for him. ‘By Bach. It’s an aria, followed by a series of variations in different tempos and moods, which ends with the same aria. Sort of like a circle.’
‘That’s it,’ said Robbie, reaching out for the railing on the stern. ‘I knew I’d remember.’
