Antarctica

by Claire Keegan

  They gave each other things. That was their first mistake. He took a small pair of surgical scissors from his pocket and snipped off a lock of Cordelia’s hair. He kept this lock of hair between the pages of a book named Doctor Zhivago. Another time, having lain out in the dunes past dark, they accidentally wore each other’s scarves home. He gave her old books whose pages were edged in gold. And Cordelia wrote long, lavish letters on thick notepaper, pasted petals on the headings. In the middle of the night, while his wife and children slept, the doctor climbed high up above the drawing room, pushed the attic door open and placed the things she gave him under asbestos insulation between the joists. He knew they would be safe there, for his wife was afraid to climb.

  But the doctor never wrote a line to Cordelia. When he went away to Lisbon on vacation with his wife, Cordelia received no word from him, not so much as a postcard. The only specimen of his handwriting she’d ever witnessed was when he gave her painkillers for an earache. Across the label in an almost illegible hand was written: One to be taken with water (or vodka) three times daily.

  *

  Cordelia is almost there. She passes concrete railings at the car park and climbs the steep incline up, up through the dunes, under the shadow of the mountain. She stands to get her breath back, watches the toss and turn of the blue-bellied tide breaking into perpetual, salty lather on the strand. Reeds are bending low to let the wind pass. There’s little to show human presence; the wind has rubbed all footprints from the sand. Just a broken plastic spoon, the wrapper off a choc-ice, a buckled beer-can, a child’s beaded purse. Cordelia stops and stoops to pick it up, but it’s empty, its lining torn.

  Lights from the town throw an orange sash across the east. She hears music, travellers playing Jim Reeves records in the halting site, the systematic purr of a generator. A piebald mare whinnies and canters down along the ocean’s edge as if she too has dreamt of a man holding a gun to her head. Clouds accumulate, thicken into darkness. Cordelia finds the mossy patch upon the hill where they first sat down ten years ago. She lies down in the reeds, pulls her collar close around her throat, and listens. She remembers the sound of his car, the veins of his wrist, the wind singing.

  *

  The doctor’s wife climbed up into the attic. He entered his drawing room one afternoon and found there on the floor the piece of black ribbon he’d taken from Cordelia’s hair to bundle up her letters, each one addressed to his surgery and marked ‘strictly confidential’. When he raised his head, he saw legs dangling over the edge of the manhole. They were the muscular, white legs of a tennis player, his wife’s legs.

  ‘Whose hair is this? Who sent these letters? Who have you been seeing? Who owns this ribbon? Who? I want to know; speak to me. I want to know. Who is Cordelia? Cordelia who?’ The doctor kept his hands in his pockets while his wife read aloud from the pages. She began to cry. It was late afternoon when she began. He sat down in the armchair by the fire and through the window watched the shuddering rosebushes. She dropped each page to the living-room floor as she read. The pages floated on the air, cascading down towards the rug, and by the time she’d finished reading, she had asked for a torch to read by and the rug was littered with pages. At the end of many of these pages was written, in a generous hand, the name Cordelia. The doctor’s wife would not come down. For a long time afterwards she sat there, insisting she would jump if the doctor would not tell her the truth.

  ‘Are you in love with her?’

  ‘No,’ said the doctor.

  ‘She’s obviously in love with you.’

  The doctor did not answer.

  ‘Are you going to stop?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you going to leave me?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Eventually his wife was lured down. A splendid fire throve in the hearth, for the doctor, out of nerves, had thrown shovelfuls of coal on to the flames. Before dawn, in the presence of her husband, she slowly burned every one of Cordelia’s letters. The doctor watched as fire devoured the pages, Cordelia’s lock of milky hair singeing in the blue heat.

  ‘She’s a blonde,’ said the doctor’s wife and breathed deep the scent of another woman in the cashmere scarf before throwing it to the fire.

  The doctor called Cordelia into his surgery and in a low, sensitive voice, informed her their affair was over. He joined his hands and pushed his thumbs round in small, anti-clockwise circles. This must be what it’s like to be informed of a terminal illness, she thought. He talked and talked, but Cordelia had stopped listening. She was reading the eye-test chart behind his head. She could read down to the seventh line. Maybe she needed glasses.

  But then the doctor’s voice changed. He put his head in his hands.

  ‘Oh Cordelia,’ he said. ‘I can’t leave my wife.’

  ‘How romantic.’

  ‘You know I can’t leave. Think of the children. Think of them asking, “Where’s Daddy?”’

  ‘Would you leave if you hadn’t children?’

  ‘Wait for me,’ he said. ‘In ten years’ time the children will be grown and gone. Promise you’ll meet me on New Year’s Eve at the turn of the century. Meet me that night and I will come home and live with you,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

  Cordelia laughed outrageously and that was the last she saw of him. She passed patients in the waiting room; was everyone waiting for this man? The snivelly middle-aged woman with the tissues, the pale man with his bandaged arm, the wounded.

  *

  Gradually, the bad dream faded. The green curtain and the window furled backwards into memory, but the promise stoked like a bright blade in Cordelia’s head. Cordelia coveted her solitude. She started reading late into the night, playing her piano, practising uncomplicated airs. She talked to herself, speaking disjointed sentences freely in the empty rooms. Slowly Cordelia became a recluse. She covered the TV with a tablecloth and put a vase of flowers there; she threw the transistor radio away. She made lists, paid her bills through the mail. She got the phone in, realised the turfman, the grocer, the gasman, anyone she wanted, would call round and deliver. They left the cardboard boxes, the gas cylinders outside the house, took the cheques from under the stone. She rose late, drank strong tea, made a ritual of cleaning out the grates. She stopped attending mass. Neighbours knocked on her door and peered in through the windows, but she did not answer. A powder of rust-coloured ash fell over the house, accumulated on the sills, the curtain rails. It seemed that every time she moved she raised dust.

  Evenings, she lit the fire, watched the whoosh of flame around the turf, and listened to the rhododendron hedge, the leaves of the Virginia creeper rubbing against the window panes. Cordelia imagined someone out there in the dark, licking a finger, a thumb, rubbing a peep-hole in the dirty glass to see in, to see her, but she knew it was the hedge. She had always kept the garden, stayed out in summer with the clippers, trimmed it all back and raked the ear-like laurel leaves off the sandy path, mowed the grass, lit small, inoffensive fires whose smoke poured down beyond the clothes-line. The neglected hedge began to intrude upon the house, grew so thick and close that all the downstairs rooms loomed in constant shadow, and when the sun was going down, strange, monkey-puzzle shadows poured into the sitting room. Cordelia could sit under the light of the reading lamp in daytime and pretend it was night. Time altered, took on unfathomable dimensions. Sometimes, when the weather was warm and the rhododendron buds opened, she walked naked around the sheltered house, brushing against the smooth, damp leaves, the swollen blooms, and petals fell around her feet. Nobody ever saw her.

  *

  Hunchbacked clouds slide across the headland at Strandhill, grey-dull clusters gathering momentum out along the cliffs while behind them night discharges darkness. A mossy parchment with a view of the sea. Nothing and everything has changed. Cordelia feels tired. She feels that she has run a very, very long race and now her heartbeat is slowing down to normal. She puts her hand up to her face, takes comfort in her hot breath. She
feels the wind dying, the slop of ocean on the strand. She pulls her coat around her, fastens up the buttons. She waits. Not long now. She closes her eyes, remembers rhododendron petals falling, pale pink blooms and grass, damp, long grass, beneath her feet. The snip, snip of a hedge clipper, his scissors cutting her hair, hot, broken sleep, a green bruise fading on her neck, fallen apples, his hand winding her hair, the pale man in the waiting room.

  She wakes to the sound of a small parade, people marching across the hill, holding torches, gearing up for midnight. Brass, trumpet music. A boy in costume beating a drum. They march in their own time. Girls in mini-skirts, twirling batons, making for the lights of town.

  ‘Cordelia.’ The woman to whom the voice belongs stands over her, keeping her hands hidden. ‘You don’t know me. I believe you knew my husband; he was the doctor,’ she says.

  Was the doctor? Was?

  ‘I have come here to tell you that the doctor won’t be coming.’

  Cordelia says nothing. She just sits there and listens.

  ‘You didn’t think I knew?’

  The doctor’s wife is a lithe, small woman with lots of white in her eyes. She pulls the belt of her raincoat tight around her waist as if to make it smaller. ‘It was obvious. When your husband comes home from house-calls with sand in his shoes, his shirt-buttons done up wrong, hair brushed, smelling of mints, and a gigantic appetite, a wife knows.’ She takes out a pack of cigarettes and offers Cordelia one. Cordelia shakes her head, watches the woman’s face in the flame of the lighter. Heart-shaped face, short eyelashes, a determined chin.

  ‘You write nice letters.’

  A drum is beating on the headland.

  ‘You know the funniest thing?’ the doctor’s wife says. ‘The funniest thing is, I used to pray he’d leave me. I used to get down on my knees and say one Our Father and ten Hail Marys and a Glory Be for him to leave me. He kept your letters and things in the attic; I used to hear him up there at night, getting the ladder. He must have thought I was deaf. Anyway, I was sure he’d leave me when I discovered them, when he walked in. If it’s any consolation, he was in love with you. I’m sure of that. I didn’t have the heart to leave him, nor him me. We were cowards, you see. It’s a damned tragedy.’

  She looks out towards the ocean and composes herself.

  ‘Look at your hair. Your hair’s white. What age are you?’

  ‘Not yet forty.’

  The doctor’s wife shakes her head, reaches out to touch Cordelia’s hair.

  ‘I feel like I’m a hundred,’ says Cordelia.

  The doctor’s wife lies down on her back in the reeds and smokes. Cordelia feels no ill-will towards this woman, none of the biting envy she imagined.

  ‘How did you know I would be here? Nobody knew, only he and I. And I thought it absurd when he first asked me to wait.’

  ‘He has a terrible memory, writes everything down. And he believes his handwriting is illegible. You’re pencilled in. “C. Strandhill at midnight.”’

  ‘Strandhill at midnight.’

  ‘Not very romantic, is it? You’d think he would remember something like that.’

  The parade drifts into town. The travellers have lit a fire in the car park. There’s a smell of burning rubber and then the doctor runs up the dunes, breathless and smiling until he sees his wife.

  ‘I took a wild guess,’ says the doctor’s wife.

  He stands there, looking ten years older, looking at Cordelia. In the moonlight, his suit is shiny. He is alive and it is almost midnight. Cordelia is pleased, but nothing is as she imagined. The doctor, stiff with shock, does not reach out for her. He does not lie down in the tall grass and put his head in the crook of her arm as he used to. He stands there as if he has arrived too late at the scene of an accident, knowing he might have done something if only he had come earlier. Behind their backs the perpetual noise of the ocean folds in on itself. Together they listen to the tide, the waves, counting down what time remains. Because they don’t know what to say or do, they do and say nothing. All three of them just sit there and wait: Cordelia, the doctor and his wife, all three mortals waiting, waiting for somebody to leave.

  Where the Water’s Deepest

  The au pair sits on the edge of the pier this night, fishing. Beside her, cheese she salvaged from the salad bowl at dinner, her leather sandals. She removes the band from her ponytail and shakes her hair loose. Leftover smells of cooking and bathsuds drift down from the house through the trees. She slides a cube of cheese on to the hook and casts. Her wrist is good. The line makes a perfect arc in the air, drops down and vanishes. Slowly she reels it towards her, where the water’s deepest. She’s caught a nice perch this way before.

  Lately she’s not been sleeping well, wakes to the same dream. She and the boy are in the yard at evening time. Wind bloats the clothes on the line and black trees are nuzzling overhead. Then the ground trembles. Stars fall and jingle around their feet like coins. The barn roof shudders, lifts off like a great metal leaf, scraping clouds. The earth fractures open and the boy is left standing on the other side.

  ‘Jump! Jump, I’ll catch you!’ she yells.

  The boy is smiling. He trusts her.

  ‘Come on!’ She holds her arms open wide. ‘Jump! It’s so easy!’

  He runs fast and jumps. His feet clear the canyon, but then the strangest thing happens: her hands melt and the boy drops backwards into the darkness. The au pair just stands on the edge and watches him fall.

  Sometimes she dreams this twice in the same night. Last night she got up and smoked a cigarette in the bathroom and watched the moon. The light slid off the gold-plated taps, dipped into the porcelain sink, making shadow. She brushed her teeth and went back to bed.

  *

  That afternoon they’d dug up worms and carried their fishing gear down to the lakeshore. The au pair flipped the boat right-side-up and slid it into the water, held it steady for the boy. ‘Right-ho!’ she said and rowed them out past the shade of the pier. The boy was wearing a Salt Lake City baseball cap his father had brought back from a business trip. Freckles had grown together across his nose; the scab on his knee was healing. His hand dangled over the side and tore the water’s surface as she rowed. When she raised the oars and let them drift, mosquitoes gathered quickly in a small cloud around the boat.

  ‘Do they have bugs in the Reef?’ the boy asked.

  The au pair’s voice changed when she talked about home. She talked as if she could reach out through the past and touch it with her hands. She baited his pole, told him how she’d learned to scuba-dive and snorkel with a spear, explored the hidden world under the ocean. Gigantic mountains where the fish swam in schools and changed direction all at once. Seaweed swirling. A turtle with great spirals on his back, swimming past. Seahorses.

  ‘I wanna go scuba-diving here,’ the boy said.

  ‘We can’t, love. Your lake’s too dark and muddy; the bottom isn’t sandy like the ocean, it’s mud. Mud deeper than two grown men standing one on top of the other. Way too dangerous for diving.’

  The boy turned quiet for a while. Quarter horses in the meadow whinnied and cantered down the hill, snorted to a stop at the water’s edge.

  ‘Let’s play “What’s-it-like?”’ she said and slapped a bug on her arm.

  The boy shrugged. ‘Okay.’

  Shewent first: ‘This boat is like one half of a big Brazil nut.’

  ‘Your head is like a cabbage.’

  ‘Your eyelashes are the colour of a palomino’s mane.’

  ‘What’s that?’ the boy asked.

  ‘A horse. I’ll show you a picture some time.’

  ‘I’ve eyes like a horse?’

  ‘Your turn.’

  ‘Your farts are like baked beans.’

  ‘Your farts are like deadly silences,’ she said.

  ‘You’re like a mama,’ he said, and looked into her eyes.

  ‘Speaking of mamas,’ she said, ‘your mama should be back soon. We better get on home.
’ She gripped the oars and rowed them to the shore.

  *

  Easter is coming. Before dinner they sat on rugs in the den and made cards out of thick, expensive paper his mama bought downtown and called each other partner: ‘Merry Easter, partner. Eat lotsa eggs,’ his card read. She held his hand, wrote the letters for him, but he told her what to write. He drew the ‘X’s on the bottom by himself. On the front, in crayon, he drew two stick figures on a brown background.

  ‘What are those?’ his father asked. A big, red-haired man with Irish ancestors and eyes an unrelenting shade of blue. He was smoking a cigar, watching CNN with his feet up.

  ‘Scuba-divers,’ the boy said.

  ‘I see.’ His papa smiled. ‘Come here, son.’

  The boy rose and climbed up on his father’s lap.

  ‘Take a break, sweetheart,’ the man told the au pair.

  She got up. She passed the dishes in the kitchen sink, walked out into the night and slammed the door.

  *

  Down at the lake the au pair hears the toilet flush, then the swash of bathwater in the pipes. Bedtime. The boy’s mama, a tall, blonde woman with high cheek-bones who runs a real-estate agency downtown, always puts the boy to bed. That is the arrangement. She bathes the boy, reads Green Eggs and Ham or Where the Wild Things Are. His mama is well educated. Sometimes she reads from a book of poems by Robert Frost and plays Mozart on the stereo. Later, the au pair will go in and see if the boy is still awake, kiss him goodnight.

  *

  Last winter they travelled north, a three-hour flight to New York City for a long weekend. They stayed in a hotel suite nineteen floors up with a small balcony and a view of Manhattan. That evening the boy’s mama dressed up in a loose silk dress and a mink jacket, took her husband’s arm and they went out to dinner. The au pair ordered a pizza funghi and Coca-Colas from room-service, played snakes and ladders with the boy. He threw the dice, and they climbed and slithered up and down the board till bedtime. The au pair stayed up, took a hot shower and wrapped herself in the fluffy dressing gown with the hotel crest impressed on the lapel. She opened the balcony door and from the armchair watched the skyline, the evening bleeding into darkness behind the tallest buildings; but she didn’t dare go out and look down. Instead she wrote letters home, saying she might not be back for Christmas after all, how she missed the ocean, but they were good to her; she wanted for nothing.