Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Katie Munnik 2019

Cover photographs © Elizabeth Ansley / Trevillions Images

Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Katie Munnik asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

Excerpt from The Trail Of The Lonesome Pine Words and Music by Harry Carroll and Ballard MacDonald © 1927 Shapiro Bernstein & Co Inc Shapiro Bernstein & Co Limited, New York, NY 10022-5718, USA

Reproduced by permission of Faber Music Ltd All Rights Reserved.

Excerpt from Basho, translated by Lucien Stryk, Penguin 1985

Excerpt from A Doctor Discusses Pregnancy, William G. Birch, Budlong Press 1963

Excerpt from Everybody’s Pudding Book, by Georgiana Hill, Richard Bentley 1862

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008288044

Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008288068

Version: 2019-02-25

Dedication

For Mike, of course.

Epigraph

What are heavy? Sea-sand and sorrow:

What are brief? To-day and to-morrow:

What are frail? Spring blossoms and youth:

What are deep? The ocean and truth.

Christina Georgina Rossetti

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One

Chapter 1: Pidge: 2006

Chapter 2: Felicity: 1967

Chapter 3: Pidge: 2006

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6: Felicity: 1967

Chapter 7: Pidge: 2006

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10: Felicity: 1968

Chapter 11: Pidge: 2006

Chapter 12

Part Two

Chapter 1: Jane: 1940

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Part Three

Chapter 1: Felicity: 1969

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Close: Pidge

Jane: 2006

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Katie Munnik

About the Publisher

For Columba Livia,

to be delivered after I am dead

Well, my dear, the house is yours. Regardless of what your mother might expect, I think it only makes sense. She wouldn’t really want it anyway. All the way out here on the other side of the world, isn’t it? Perhaps she might like to sell it and use the money, though I’m not sure that’s necessary. She seems comfortable where she is. And she’s never been one to look for windfalls or godsends. But maybe you could use a few, so I’m leaving it to you.

It’s a good old house. Friendly in its way. I’ve been happy here. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t be offended if you sell it, and I won’t haunt you. I promise. But before you decide anything, do come and see the old place. You haven’t been out here since you were a child, and it may feel different to you now. So come and stay for a while. Long enough to get a handful of warm days – we do get them here, you know, the kind when you open the windows in the morning and leave them open all day, forgetting about them until the curtains blow in just before sunset, when the wind shifts. I have never figured out why it does that. I always meant to ask someone, but never got around to it. Does it happen elsewhere? Or is it only here in this house? Maybe you know, my dear Pidge. Does anyone call you that any more? I must say, when I was drawing up the official paperwork, I had to be so careful with the spelling of your real name. Your mother was right – it has a lovely ring to it. But I was right, too, wasn’t I? It is a strange name to saddle any child with. Yet you, my dear, wear it well. Felicity said that the other mothers wanted to use old-fashioned names, like the ones their grandmothers wore – Jean, Rosa, Edith. Or natural-sounding names like Oak and Ivy, which are only apt out there in the woods. But she wanted something distinctive for you. Oh, your grandfather laughed! It is a beautiful name, even a little fancy in the best way, though pigeons are just as common as the rest of us. But perhaps no one knows Latin these days so that doesn’t matter. I hope you haven’t found it a burden. We all burden our children, I suppose. One way or another.

I hope this house won’t be a burden for you. It’s only a house. Or a bit of money, if you want it that way instead. You would need to clear things out first, so that’s another reason to visit. There may be a few things here you would like to keep. Books or photos, or sentimental odds and ends. It is all fairly old, but it has been useful. Useful or lovely.

When you come, you can take the car out, too. I’ve left that to you as well, though there’s a man in the village who would be happy to buy it. Just ask at the hotel and Muriel will point you in the right direction. She’ll also have a set of house keys for you, if there’s any trouble getting them from the lawyer. You’ll know her when you see her. I thought it best to provide local solutions so you don’t need to go into the city unless you’d like to. There’s more than enough to see around here. Drive out along the coast. Go see some ruins. Or the old doo’cots. There’s a man named Izaak who lives near here. A few years ago, he put together a calendar with drawings of all the local doo’cots. Beehives and lecterns and all that. He’s clever at shading and really captures the way light touches old stone. There should be a copy of it somewhere around the house. Maybe in the bookcase. I can’t quite remember.

Anyway, be well, my dear. Be happy. Live where you like, but when you’re here, do take some flowers to the kirkyard and think of me a little. And if you stay until they are ripe, be sure to eat all the brambles you can find.

With all my love,

Gran

PART ONE

1
PIDGE: 2006

LONDON AND BREAKFAST AT THE AIRPORT. JUST COFFEE and a scone – a crumbled thing that tasted of margarine, and the coffee was too hot so I drank it down quickly. It was only fuel. Mateo had arranged the rental car for me. He likes to do that sort of thing. Said that if he couldn’t be there, he could at least help with the details. So he bought me a guidebook about local history. He planned out my route and bookmarked the maps. And he’d arranged the car. I could pick it up at the airport, then drive north to Edinburgh. I could have flown, but it was cheaper to drive. Mateo said I was crazy – these Canadians and their long distances – but really, I wanted the space. And the effort. I didn’t want to be delivered to my grandmother’s empty house like a package. I wanted to make a journey of it. So I’d drive straight through, listen to the radio, watch the weather. Then a hotel room for the night and a bus in the morning to Aberlady. Mateo had written all the details on a bit of paper that I slipped into my passport, and he also sent it all by email so I’d have everything in one place, if worse came to worse.

‘Worst,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. But you mean if I lose the paper.’

‘Well, yes.’

‘I’ll be fine, love.’

‘Of course. I just want you to be looked after.’

‘Thank you.’

After a pause, he asked me if I knew why.

‘Why?’

‘Yes. Why she left you the house. Why not your mother?’

We were sitting together upstairs in the gallery, side by side like an old couple, looking down into the garden courtyard. I’d hoped that we could have lunch – our last day at work together before I flew – but he had a meeting booked, so we just managed a quick chat in the middle of the morning. Bright sunlight fell in through the windows overhead, and the pale stone walls hushed the space like snow in a clearing. Everything was glass and granite, which suits Ottawa well. Like ice, snow and bedrock.

‘Maybe she thought I’d like it,’ I said. ‘I might. Like it, I mean. You might like it, too. It’s a good house.’

At one end of the courtyard, volunteers were setting out materials for a children’s craft session – lots of coloured paper set on bright foam mats.

‘You mean to vacation there? I am not sure about that.’

‘There’s a beach.’

‘Not a real beach. Too cold for that, no?’

‘Maybe, but it’s lovely. With sand and everything. I used to swim there when I was a child.’

‘Under a frozen sun.’ He smiled and took my hand in his. He had beautiful Spanish hands, soft and perfect. Gentle. I tried to smile, too.

When I first knew Mateo, we used to meet here often. I’d pick up the phone when the shop was quiet and I could slip away and he’d leave his office or the archive to grab a moment together. We’d just sit. Maybe hold hands. I think neither of us could quite believe our luck. You don’t stumble on love like this, do you? Just open your eyes one day at work and there it is. That doesn’t happen. Except it does.

‘I suppose I might sell it,’ I said. ‘A bit more money for the condo. Maybe we could afford a little more that way.’

‘Yes, maybe. But there is another question. Did she give it to you or leave it to you?’

‘What’s the difference? She just wrote that the house was mine.’

‘Money is the difference. Inheritance tax. But I am sorry to be talking about money when you are grieving. None of this matters. I only wondered. And wondered about your mother, as well.’

The volunteers were laughing now, their voices brittle at this distance, their hair shining in the falling light. Mateo sat with me for as long as he could, still holding my fingers in his beautiful hands. After he left, I took my usual route back through the European rooms to visit the Klimt. I like her. Her face doesn’t change. In the shop, I sell a lot of postcards; so many people want to take her home. I want to ask them why. I wonder who they see in her eyes.

I pulled off the highway at a service station, a place where everything looked plastic and you could buy pre-wrapped muffins and coffee in cups to take away, or choose to sit at small tables and eat plates of fried eggs, ham and chips. I bought a boxed sandwich, a coffee and a chocolate bar I didn’t want and ate in the car.

Over the border into Scotland, the highway narrowed, the landscape rising on either side, and the traffic thinning away. I expected rain. Or sheep. Or both. Everything was green – so much greener than home – and the April sun was warm through the windshield. Then before Edinburgh, I saw a sign for Birthwood. The sudden scent of home: cedar, wild garlic, pennyroyal and pine. I glanced away and back again, but there it was. I hadn’t misread. Birthwood. She never told me it was an old name. A real name. It felt odd seeing it on an official sign. I wanted to stop and take a photo or turn off the highway to see – but to what end? Nostalgia. Suspicion. Romance. I kept going, driving north-east.

No more service stations now, just small villages with bakeries and convenience stores, low white houses with heavy black lintels, old stone walls. A few trees and, beyond them, fields that stretched out to the greening hills, then cloud-hills clustered up, grey against a grey sky. I turned the car radio on and off again. Birthwood must be a small place. There had been no sign of it on the map. A crossroads, then, or the name of a farm. Insignificant but for the fact that Felicity had never told me about it.

This stretch of highway ran along an old Roman road. That had been on the map. Ancient history in ten miles to an inch.

When I was a child, the woods at home were timeless. Bas taught me people had passed among the trees for centuries, following the seasons and animals, coming and going and coming again. Others arrived from further away – traders, priests and settlers. For a while, they tried to stay, then moved on and built cities elsewhere. The forest returned and thickened, but Bas could still find their traces. He showed me wheel ruts and weathered split-rail fences that divided up the now-indifferent bush, crumbled houses and broken barns kneeling like fallen dinosaurs or other long-forgotten beasts stumbling towards extinction. The built history of people didn’t last long. A couple of centuries at most. The trees themselves might almost remember.

Out here on the highway and beneath these bare hills, time felt different. Stretched and snapped. The Ninth Legion marched away at the end of my mother’s childhood. Tacitus scribbled notes in my grandmother’s living room. In the space between the Roman roads and the plastic sandwiches, you could lose your balance.

I could see why my mother left.

But that’s not fair. It would be different if you were born here. This is one of the places where my mother was born. Not quite here, but down this road, anyway.

She used to count out her births for me. The first happened so early she couldn’t remember it and she’d say that to make me laugh. Then she’d tell me about her mother’s labour, her grandmother’s flat, about her father who was a soldier and couldn’t be there.

The second was a beautiful picture – light after rain, pavements shining and the clatter of pigeons lifting from the rooftops to wheel over the city, out towards the sea. She was young and everything was starting. She told me this story after thunderstorms or when I couldn’t sleep. She stroked my hair, then whispered French rhymes in my ear.

There was a third story, too, but she wasn’t good at telling it. She’d polish it and change it after arguments or when she was worried. I sat on our cabin’s doorstep and watched the wind ripple the surface of the lake as she wondered aloud about the things we get to keep, the things we release and the way we might, if we’re lucky, get to choose.

2
FELICITY: 1967

I LIED MY WAY INTO AN INTERVIEW. THAT’S WHERE IT started. I hadn’t meant to, but what with the rain, my wet shoes and Dr Ballater that February, it happened. I wouldn’t have planned it. I didn’t have the nerve.

When I worked for Dr Ballater, I was docile. Polite. He came into my high school looking for a sensible girl to help with the surgery’s desk work. Just for a few weeks before Christmas, he said. Miss Jones suggested I would be suitable and summoned me to meet the doctor in her office. He stood quite close to the door so when I stepped into the room, I saw him immediately. I don’t think he meant to startle me; he just wanted to see how I might react. So, I didn’t. Or rather, I politely said hello, shook his hand and sat down in the chair Miss Jones offered. Dr Ballater spoke in a soft voice, describing the work and the practice, meeting my gaze directly as he did so. I folded my hands in my lap and nodded.

Before the war, he may have been handsome, but now it was hard to tell. He had what can only be described as a splodge of a face. I suppose that’s not kind, but I’m not sure how else to describe it. A puckered welt ran from above his left eyebrow, across his misshapen nose, and down to his chin. The skin around the wound looked raw and mottled. He didn’t make me nervous – there were plenty of injured men around when I was growing up. Still I kept noticing how his skin pulled as he spoke and how each expression dragged on long after his words. It was difficult to act naturally. He seemed a kind and tired man.

I thought he was my father’s age, and maybe he was. He said that when the war started he had only recently qualified. Like so many young men, he’d been persuaded by the call to arms.

‘I assumed I would be given ambulance duty,’ he said. ‘Like the writers in the Great War. Instead, they planted me in a field hospital as a surgeon. That didn’t last long. A bomb fell on us and they sent me home.’

He told me that on my first day. I guess he wanted to get it out in the open. After that, he never spoke about the war, nor did he speak about his return home, so I needed to fashion that part of the story myself. A long convalescence in a grand manor house somewhere in the west of Edinburgh. Daffodils on the lawn. Starched sheets and painkillers. I imagined a nurse with gentle hands. Soft eyes meeting his. And tragedy, too. There must have been tragedy because I knew he lived alone. That part of the story needed work. Maybe she was married; maybe she had died. Influenza perhaps, but that didn’t strike me as wonderfully romantic. Maybe she’d been caught in an air raid. London then, I supposed, but maybe Edinburgh. Mum had told me about the planes over Marchmont on the night I was born. Maybe Dr Ballater’s sweetheart was killed that night. How strange to imagine.

This was how I passed afternoons at the surgery, keeping an eye on the mantel clock, and half dreaming out of the window. At quarter past four, Dr Ballater liked a pot of tea brought through to his desk. At first, that was my least favourite part of the day. The kitchen always smelled like bleach, and the bamboo tray felt too light to be sturdy. I balanced my way along the short hallway from the kitchen, and Dr Ballater opened the door just as I arrived. I hated knowing that he stood waiting for me, listening to my steps. That face behind the door. It was better when he walked back towards his desk and cleared a space for the tray. He opened a drawer and removed an elaborately embroidered tea cosy. The lost love must have made it for him, of that I was sure. He set it on the teapot with such precision and told me he was happy to have me. My typing was good, and the patients thought I was friendly.

He started asking me to join him in the afternoons. ‘Just a wee blether and a cup of tea, wouldn’t that be nice?’

He told me about his childhood in the countryside, not far from Biggar, about the hills there and the clear sky at night. He asked me how I liked school, about my parents and how they were feeling. Once he asked me what my plans might be for after school and I waffled nervously. I really hadn’t thought that far, not in detail at least. I imagined a flat somewhere. Maybe over in Glasgow, though Edinburgh might be more practical. I would be chipping in with other girls, of course. Cooking small meals over a hotplate, sharing adventures. The previous Christmas, I’d worked the January sales in Patrick Thomson’s, and one of the other temporary girls talked on about her bedsit, which sounded exciting. I could imagine that. But just what I’d be doing there, I hadn’t a clue. That wasn’t an answer to Dr Ballater’s question. So, I said I was looking into university and might read geology. It didn’t sound unreasonable as I said it.

He suggested that nursing might be a better fit.

‘It’s a good life and there are always those that need helping.’

In the end, that’s what I did. Signed up for the new degree programme at Edinburgh University and found a flat-share which was cold and nowhere near as romantic as I’d hoped. We all worked hard and stayed over in the hospital when we could, to keep warm. Sometimes, we went for coffee or to the films, and on Saturday evenings we were welcome to join the boys at the student union for the weekly dance.

The spring I graduated, one of the medical students invited me to the May Ball and I cut my hair like Sylvie Vartan, bobbed and fringed. I barely knew him and we danced until they turned the lights on. Was that polite? I suppose it was. Then he walked me home to my student digs in Marchmont, a long beautiful saunter along Coronation Walk. The cherry blossom was thick overhead and underfoot – blossom soup, blossom salad – and the night was so clear and almost bewitching, but he was certainly polite and I wished he wasn’t. I climbed the stairs alone and felt a little guilty for my loneliness as I fell asleep. In the morning, I caught a train home to East Lothian to see my parents, the sea and the sky dirt-pearl grey.

There was a job waiting for me with Dr Ballater. That worked out rather well. My parents were happy to have me home again, and we all knew that it wouldn’t be a permanent arrangement, but in the meantime, I could save up for a car. I banked my money in an empty margarine tub on the shelf next to my alarm clock.

For the next five years, I worked for Dr Ballater. Each year, I weighed and measured all the schoolchildren, and inspected their scalps. I bought that car and established a rota of housebound widows who might benefit from a visiting nurse. In the autumn, I helped with the kirk jumble sale. In the spring, it was the Easter tea. Mum couldn’t be bothered with all the village business, as she called it. She was far happier pruning the trees in her orchard or foraging about in the hedgerows. Sometimes, she would have the minister’s wife round for a cup of tea or Muriel would come up from Drem, but mostly, she and Dad lived quietly and left the social affairs to me. I found I liked it when the village ladies dropped by the surgery with invitations and requests for assistance. It kept me busy and helpful. Cheerful, as befits.

Then it was February 1967 and I noticed snowdrops beside the surgery door. Maybe they grew there every spring but I only noticed them that February afternoon when the front windows were open and Dr Ballater was whistling, a thin, windy whistle, lilting and sweet.

I opened the door softly, hung my coat on the hook in the hallway and checked my hair in the mirror. Combing it back into place with my fingers, I wondered if it might be time for a trim.

Dr Ballater was still whistling when I entered his room and noticed the tea tray was already placed on his desk. He asked me to marry him.

Abrupt as that.

I said nothing, and he apologized, the meat of his face flushing red.

‘I should let you come in the door properly. I should let you settle.’ He turned away from me, adjusting the mugs on the tray. ‘Can I pour you a cup of tea?’

‘Yes. Thank you, Dr Ballater.’ The words felt brittle in my mouth.

‘George. Please,’ he said, and his hands shook a little as he filled a mug, or maybe it was just that the pot had been overfilled. ‘There. Milk? Sugar?’

‘Yes. Please.’

A splash and then two spoonfuls, heaped, and he placed the mug in front of me, awkwardly passing me the spoon, too, in case I wished to stir my tea. I did and then crossed my ankles.

‘So, will you?’

‘I … I don’t know. I didn’t …’

‘No, no. I’ve rushed things, I’m sure. You didn’t expect this. I can see that now. But I do … I should think you will need to marry someone. You are not the kind of girl who wouldn’t. I should be glad if you would have me. I can always find another nurse.’

The wind caught the curtain, blowing it out into the room with a curve like a bell, and I thought of those snowdrops outside. They must have been there every year. They must.

‘Here, this is for you, Felicity,’ he said, my name sounding too soft as he held out his hand stiffly, giving me a twenty-pound note. ‘Take it. You might like to go buy yourself a dress from Edinburgh, or something of that ilk over the weekend, and think, think about it. We will speak next week.’

The steps out of Waverley station were always windy, and I hadn’t worn my working shoes. My good shoes – low heels, patent leather toes and a clever covered buckle – made an unfamiliar click as I climbed the steps. I’d worn my trench coat, too, which might be protection against any rain, but wasn’t really warm enough at all. The weather was bright and brisk with thin grey clouds wisped high over the castle as I walked towards Woolworths. This was silly, I thought. I didn’t need a dress. I didn’t want a dress. Maybe I should head to the top floor for a coffee in the tartan-carpeted restaurant. Instead, I browsed the book selection. Twenty pounds would buy me a very solid armload of stories. But that wasn’t what Dr Ballater had in mind.

So, instead I found a white pillbox hat made of thick felt, which matched my trench coat and looked stylish. I also bought a leather bag with a good shoulder strap and two stout handles. The kind of thing you might take for a weekend away somewhere. Paris. Bruges. Would Dr Ballater take me to Paris? Would we sit together on a terrace drinking coffee, or a glass of wine, even? If I said yes, I would find out, I supposed. That was the trick of it. I had to give him an answer and things were going to change whatever it might be. The shop girl wanted to wrap my hat and place it in a smart box, but I told her that I would like to wear it. She paused, then said, Of course. I told her I could carry my bag, too, just as it was.

I stepped out of the shop into a different day, the sky slate grey and a sharp wind. My mother would say that I really did need a pair of gloves, but the new leather handles felt good in my bare hand, and a brave face conceals all shivers. Which was something else she might say. I turned the collar up on my coat and adjusted my purse under my arm. If you didn’t know, you might just think that I had arrived in town from parts far flung and sophisticated rather than dumpy old East Lothian forty minutes away. Yet if that was true, and if I were really that person, why on earth would I come here? What would I want to see? Old stones and old folk standing in the rain.

That morning, I’d told my parents about Dr Ballater’s suggestion.

‘Oh,’ said my mother.

‘And how are you going to respond?’ Dad asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘No,’ said Mum. ‘It looks like you don’t.’

‘Do you like him? You do, don’t you?’ Dad asked. ‘I knew his family during the war. Good people. He might be as good a chance at happiness as any.’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Mum. ‘He is older, isn’t he?’

‘Felicity has always been an old soul.’

‘Yes,’ she said, and it didn’t sound like encouragement. They didn’t say anything else, just sat together at the kitchen table, over half-cups of tea and the crossword puzzle like every other morning for the last hundred years. I kissed them both and said I’d be home again in the evening in time for tea.

I crossed Princes Street towards the gardens, pushed along by a swift, rushing wind and my mind filled with the words of the old hymn – so wild and strong, high clouds that sail in heaven along – so filled, so full I could almost sing. But best not to. Spring wind or no, Edinburgh might not approve. I kept my peace and walked sedately into the garden. Past the gate, down and down the steps in my pinching shoes, no angel blocked the way, no flaming sword to bar my path, but a gardener walked towards me holding a giant arrow under his arms. He smiled and nodded at me and, looking the other way, I saw another gardener on the slope beside the steps, surrounded by dozens of small potted plants. I wondered if I imagined them, summoned them somehow. Only once I was sitting down did it occur to me that they must have been working on the floral clock. That would have been interesting to watch. Still, it felt so good to sit down and slip my shoes off for a moment.

You are not the kind of girl who wouldn’t.

What the hell did that mean? What kind of girl was I?

Predictable. Suggestible. Polite.

The castle looked down from its rock foundation like Edinburgh’s broken tooth against a threatening sky. I took off my hat and folded it in half, opened it again and set it on my skirt. A sensible skirt my mother had made me in hunter-green tweed with flecks of purple. The kind of material that might be fashioned into an interesting tea cosy.

Then the rain started in earnest. Princes Street was crammed with cars, so I headed east. The North British Hotel has a lovely lobby, and I figured I could loiter there until it dried up a little. Stepping inside, I was surprised to see so many other women standing about. Mostly my age or younger, although also here and there, older women checking their watches and watching the crowd. A woman stepped forward, holding a clipboard. She wore her dark hair in a neat chignon, a serviceable broach pinned to her lapel.

‘Your interview number, please. Do you have it to hand?’

‘No, I—’

‘Did you not receive one by post? With your interview invitation?’

‘No. I didn’t.’

‘Oh dear. Another one. There have been so many slip-ups and confusions today. Some days run smoothly, and others … well, if you give me your name and details, I will add you to the list. Don’t spend a moment on worry, dear. It will come right in the end. Teaching or nursing? Teaching?’

‘No. Nursing.’

‘Ah, my apologies. I’m usually right with my guesses. Clever of you to catch me out. And better luck for you. Not so much of a crowd for nursing here today. Your name?’

‘Felicity. Felicity Hambleton.’

‘Perhaps doubly lucky, then. By name and by nature. It will be your turn soon.’

‘Thank you.’

She smiled and turned to speak to the next girl come in from the rain, a redhead in NHS spectacles clutching a soggy brown envelope to her chest.

So, nursing interviews. I’d never call it answered prayer, but maybe a way forward. I looked more carefully around the room and saw a sandwich board propped up near the reception desk.

Agnew Employment Agency:

Canadian Recruitment

Teachers:

Protestant School Board

of Greater Montreal, Quebec

Nurses and Midwives:

Various – Montreal, Quebec,

the Northern Territories

Near the doors to the hotel ballroom, folding chairs were arranged in a row, and girls sat waiting, shuffling along each time a name was called. Teachers or nurses: so that was the game. For some, it was easy to guess. I looked for wristwatches, writers’ calluses, inky fingers. I could imagine chalk dust brushed out of tweed skirts that morning, shoes polished before bed last night. My own shoes looked the worse for wear, water spots marking the patent leather toes, but you pay a price for glamour in Scotland. And, as the lady said, I might just score a few points for being distinctive. I sat down, opened my handbag and applied more lipstick.

Let’s see. Canada. The frozen north. What did I know about Canada? Cold and snow. Ice hockey. Indians. French. Oh dear. I hadn’t thought of that. Any job in Quebec would require French, wouldn’t it? Proper working French, which was likely a notch or two more advanced than mes lunettes sont sur la table. I tried to remember the other posters that hung on the French room wall at school. Les légumes verts. Les saisons. Chaud. Froid.

When my name was called, I was thinking about imperfect conjugations. What the hell – let it happen, whatever it would be. It was sure to be better than a walk in the rain. I picked up my new bag, smiled at the girl sitting next to me and stepped into the ballroom.

The interview was brief, the interviewer a thin, pale man in heavy glasses, sitting at one of the many small tables in the room, each with another interviewer just like him. He held a red Parker Duofold with a gold nib, but most of the notes were taken by the woman beside him. She sat very straight in her chair, her papers set at an angle on the tabletop, and she was writing with her left hand. She paused at the end of my name.

‘Avec un y,’ I said, quickly. ‘Not ie.’ The woman smiled. I crossed my ankles and straightened the hem of my skirt over my knees. The interviewer apologized for misplacing my details. There had been problems with the administration. Might I be able to send a fresh copy early next week?

‘Of course, of course. Pas de problème.’

He asked about my experience and my training, nodding as I mentioned the University of Edinburgh.

‘That is one of the reasons why we are here. The best programme in Europe, it is. We’re lucky to be able to scoop up girls like you.’

‘Are there no appropriate Canadian nurses?’

‘Yes, yes, of course. Still, the Edinburgh degree programme is cutting edge, and there’s a greater chance of real bilingualism here than, say, in Edmonton. Your French is good, I assume?’

‘Bien sûr.’

‘The proximity to France, no doubt. And the Auld Alliance, too, I should think. Now then, Church of Scotland?’

‘Yes. Does that matter?’

‘No, it isn’t crucial. For the teachers, yes, with board regulations, but in the hospital, it can still help. Montreal is a city of Presbyterian expats, at least on the anglophone side.’

‘Quite.’

‘So, not the north? No grand polar adventure for you? Is it Montreal you want?’

‘Yes. Yes, I suppose it is.’

His assistant spoke out in a clear, crisp voice.

‘You will do nicely.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, but she kept her face set and slid an envelope across the table towards me.

‘Here is a packet of information from the agency. In it, you will find a copy of the contract, details about immigration, and about Montreal as an international city. And, naturally, about the agency’s involvement with your career. There are forms to finalize as well. You will find it all quite self-explanatory. If you have any questions, there are telephone numbers for our representatives in London.’ She wrote a note next to my name, glanced at her watch, and looked past me towards the doors. All settled.

‘Thank you,’ I said again. The interviewer stood to shake my hand.

‘You’re welcome. Enjoy Canada.’

Outside, the rain had stopped, and the afternoon was brash with daylight. I stepped away from the shadow of the hotel and onto the still-wet pavement. Pigeons, hundreds of pigeons clattered up before me, a broad arc of flight over the gardens and, above the castle, the sky was slashed open into gold, bright gold. All those wings and gold, too. My breath felt sharp and new, and, away to the west, the pavements shone.

No one, it seems, is born just once.

3
PIDGE: 2006

MY MUM TOLD STORIES WHENEVER WE TRAVELLED. We’d be hitchhiking out from the camp in the cab of some truck, headed to Ottawa, or Montreal, and I’d sit up on Felicity’s blue-jeaned knees, her long hair tickling my face as I leaned back into her skinny chest and all the way she’d make the driver laugh with her tall tales and stories, her toothy laughing smile. Sandy Gibb the Glass Man, astronauts at Expo and swimming pregnant in a moonlit lake. She could make a story of anything. Maybe I should have told her about this trip. I told the gallery that I needed time away to sort through my grandmother’s things. They filed that under ‘personal reasons’ and then reasonably told me to take as much time as I needed. I told Mateo that I would need to organize the details of her estate, and he said that he understood. I told myself I’d be cleaning the bungalow. Before I left Ottawa, I’d imagined lots of cleaning. All those large windows and the wooden floors, too. Linoleum tiles in the kitchen. Then the bath to scour, old pots to scrub, and Persian carpets to shake out in the sunshine. It seemed like therapeutic work. Cleansing. Solitary.

Mateo said once that it was my aloneness that first caught him. I wondered if he meant loneliness, if he was mistranslating, but he said no, he meant aloneness. He said it was intriguing.

Maybe it was living at the camp with Felicity. There was lots of time then to be alone. In the night when she was at the birthing house. Or in the afternoon, when she opened her books and settled down to work at the small table in our cabin and she liked to have the space to herself, so she sent me outside. In the summer, there were always lots of children to play with, but as soon as the nights got too cold for tents, the field would empty and I’d be alone again.

When I was a little older, around nine or ten, Felicity started to take me with her to births, particularly when there were small children. She had me tell them stories and invent games to keep them entertained and distracted. Rika thought it best for children to keep away from a birth, but she never made rules, only suggestions. I’d heard Rika talking about this with Felicity one afternoon, and because they were talking about children, I listened.

‘What about when a mum wants them there?’ Felicity asked. ‘Should we come up with some pretence to get them outside anyway?’

‘No. Always only tell the truth. She needs to go so far into herself to open for the baby, and lies aren’t going to help that.’

‘And neither are kids in the room?’

Rika laughed. ‘You got it, babe. It can be hard to open for one baby when you are listening to another one prattle.’

I lay above them on the top bunk with my National Geographic. They probably forgot I was there, but it didn’t matter. They never kept anything from me. I’d heard everything, all the complications and contradictions. I learned how things can be difficult when babies come and how sometimes they don’t. How it’s possible to hope for two things at once. Release. Safety. Or time and space. I looked up from my magazine and let my eyes trace the lines on the river maps pinned to the wall. Blue ink meant water, and in this neck of the woods, the names were beautiful. The Ottawa, the Picanoc, the Gatineau, La Pêche.

‘If she really wants them close, then make space by all means. But often she only thinks she wants them so that she can keep an eye on them. So, we give the kids a safe, cared-for space away from her, and likely she’ll choose to be quiet and alone.’ Rika was always teaching like this and Felicity wanted to learn. She’d come to the camp pregnant, and after I was born, she decided to stay and help out.

I tried to explain all this – the work, the help, the study, and Rika – to Mateo in our early days, but he was more interested in my stories of long days spent alone in the woods, of climbing trees and swimming naked and summer nights and winter afternoons spent in snowshoes out on the ice. I told him how I lay down flat on my back on the snowy lake and imagined the cold depth of the water hidden beneath me, the hollow sky above me. I told him that lying there alone, I felt contained like a coin in my own pocket and perfectly happy.

On my own, the travel felt long. I arrived in Edinburgh late in the evening and found the hotel, just as Mateo had suggested. In the morning, the streets were wet, and through the window in the hotel’s breakfast room, I watched tourists with umbrellas, golf bags and suitcases pass by on their way to the trains. Pigeons huddled on the damp rooftops, and I drank strong tea, thinking about the house.

It sits away from the village and you can see the sea from the house, but not the sands. For the sands, you need to cross a footbridge and walk out past the flat lands, the marshlands and scrub trees. You pass through places where the way is lined by barbed-wire fencing, keeping the sheep in and the dogs out, and then places where the path is only a trace through open landscape. It is a bit of a walk to get to the beach, but a good walk.

Closer to the house, the shore is thick with black silt washed down from farmland nearby. A small stream cuts through the mud, a snaking path for the running tide. The bay is wide, open like a bowl, but the sea here is narrow, a silver band between East Lothian and Fife leading into the North Sea. When the tide fills the bay, it comes in quick and strange, leaving a wide sandbar dry across the mouth. That’s where the geese gather at night and where the shipwrecks sit. Felicity never let me walk out that far. She said they were just rusty submarines left over from the war and not particularly interesting.

The house was a place we visited in winter because in the winter Felicity got homesick. Gran kept the back bedroom ready for us, just in case. She knew that Felicity found the white winters at the camp hard. The days were quiet and short, the trees were bare, the path deep with snow and she had to tuck my trousers into the tops of my knitted socks to keep me warm.

When it got too quiet, too cold, and too bright, she pulled down the army surplus backpacks from the rafters and filled them with sweaters, skirts, books and warm scarves. We’d leave behind the textbooks, their precise illustrations, and the river maps. Then Felicity would bundle me into my thick winter coat, rub my face with Vaseline to keep the wind away, and we hitchhiked off to the city to find the airport bus. We never had enough pennies to commit to an annual flight, but whenever we needed to, we managed to fly. Felicity said that this was yet one more advantage of staying away from the public schools: flight was always possible. She also said that there were ample books at the camp to fill anyone’s brain usefully, and that if there was anything extra that I wanted to know, I could always ask Bas.

I could ask Bas anything and he gave me answers like small prizes slipped into my waiting hands. He was the one who told me pine needles keep you healthy like oranges do. He showed me how to hold hens’ eggs up to a candle to see the chick growing inside, and taught me that adult loons leave the lake a whole month before their children every autumn. The next generation migrates alone, relying on instinct, and he said instinct was a feeling and feelings matter. In return, I told him all the things I knew. That some grown-ups kept their eyes open at the table when we said the blessing. That all my mother’s hair was fair and curly – under her arms, too, and even under her skirt – while mine was dark and flat. That some spider-webs could outlast thunderstorms. That pennies smell like blood and blood smells like fish and that you couldn’t smell bruises at all.

I suspect my gran had something to do with the enough pennies when it came to airplanes. We never had much. We didn’t need much, really. Life in the woods wasn’t about pennies, and mainly the camp was self-sufficient anyway. We grew plenty of food in the fields across the lake and sold what we wouldn’t eat at the road-end all through the summer. Pies, tarts and deep baskets of strawberries and raspberries from the gardens, and wild blueberries from the rocky places along the lakeshore. What we couldn’t eat or sell, we saved. Bas made berry schnapps and wine coolers, and throughout the summer and into the fall, the canning kettle boiled on the woodstove and the air in the farmhouse kitchen was thick with sugar, vinegar and cloves. Felicity said she came by canning honestly, and told me about Gran’s preserves: rosehips, apple chutney, gorse wine and bramble jam. Saving things up must be in her blood and she crinkled her forehead a little fiercely when she said it, though no one would ever say she wasn’t authentic. A good camp word, authentic. Rika used it like a compliment, as though some folk weren’t and might only be acting. Did adults do that? I wasn’t sure. When I asked Bas, he shrugged and pulled the dressing-up box from the cupboard, asking who I was going to be that afternoon. I acted out every story my mother told me. A pirate tree-nymph. A mountaineering beaver. Or my favourite role of all: the Blessed Virgin herself. Bas always made time for stories, layering me with blankets, helping me to belt a pillow to my middle that I might stagger my way towards Bethlehem. He played every innkeeper with arms open wide, and with a straight face and a shining eye, found a footstool for my swollen virgin ankles and wondered if I might like a mug of tea.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Did they have tea then?’

‘I’m not sure. Maybe that comes later. It’ll be the wise men who leave some with you, but I don’t think you’ve met them yet, have you?’

‘Are you foolish, Bas? Or wise?’

‘Probably foolish, your holiness. Most probably.’

‘I think you’re wise. You know how to make bread. That’s wise, isn’t it?’

‘Wise enough for this world. Would you like some jam, too, m’lady?’ He spread it thick and I ate it stickily with fingers and lips jelly red.

Bas always knew what to offer, how much to ask, when to be silent or serious or good. He was good at keeping a story going. Much later, I realized the gentleness that took, and the strength.

Stories are fragile things, eggshell thin and porous.

After breakfast, I picked up a few groceries in a small convenience store near the hotel. Enough to live on for a little while, I thought, and there would be shops to explore in Aberlady once I’d settled in.

Then I turned in the car at the rental agency and found the bus. It shuddered out of the city, through suburbs, past rows of stucco houses with gravel yards or small lawns and the occasional incongruous palm tree. Most of the people on the bus were old, chatting with their neighbours, holding shopping bags. A pile of free newspapers at the front of the bus sat untouched, and I thought about leaving my seat to collect one but looked out the window instead.

The road passed on through small towns and smaller towns until at last the way opened up and I could see the colour of the fields and the line of the coast. The clouds had lifted, or maybe the wind had blown them back out to sea. It was a windy landscape, with small, crooked trees and hawthorn hedges along the roadside, and white birds hovered high above the waves, holding the wind in their wings. Then a wooded stretch, denser now, and in between the trees, old cement blocks sat heavily – anti-tank defences left over from the war. I remembered Felicity telling me about them, and about the railings set in the churchyard’s stone wall. They had been sawn off when the country needed more metal for airplanes, leaving iron coins set into the stone. She showed me how to press my thumb in each one – one a penny two a penny – and how to climb up the loupin-on stanes, that long-abandoned set of steps that Victorian ladies used to climb up to their high horses.

Just past the church, the bus stopped and I collected my bags. I hadn’t packed much because I wanted space to bring things home again. I wasn’t sure what, but maybe Gran had left something specific for me to find. Heirlooms or papers or photographs. I’d search the house as if for clues and maybe find why Gran had left it to me. Felicity had trained me to look for stories, hadn’t she?

I crossed the street to the hotel – a big whitewashed building with picnic tables and plant pots out front, trellises against the wall, and ivy. The door was open and no one sat at the desk in the front hall. I wasn’t sure about ringing the bell. It looked as if it would make a great deal of noise. I stood there for a moment, examining the map laid out on the wooden counter, the coastline curved like the back of a fish, or like a belly facing the sea. Then, an old woman came through a door behind me and cleared her throat.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Are you looking for a meal?’

‘No. Well … I’m really here to collect keys,’ I said. ‘For my grandmother’s house. Jane Hambleton. I was sent a letter that mentioned there would be a set of keys here. With Muriel?’ I opened up my shoulder bag and pulled out the letter for the woman to read, but she just looked into my face with a soft smile.

‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘That’s me. And you are Jane’s little Pidge. Felicity’s, I mean. You and I met when you were small. You won’t remember me, but your mother brought you here. And you look just like her. Except for the hair, maybe. The colour suits you.’ She coughed a little laugh and asked about my mother. ‘Is she keeping well? She’s here with you too, then?’

‘No, it’s just me. She’s back in Quebec. She’s well. Happy.’

‘Ah, yes. Settled there, I suppose. Such a shame that she couldn’t make it home in time for her mum’s funeral, but I suppose it was unexpected, wasn’t it? And so quick. But such a shame. And just before your own arrival. She was so looking forward to seeing you. She told me so many times that you were coming and that you might pop in here first, and that’s when she left the keys here. I think she was worried you might arrive when she was out for a walk or even down in the garden and that she wouldn’t hear you. But I’m sure all that’s in the letter, isn’t it? Ah well, things come out as they will, won’t they? Are you planning to stay long?’

‘I don’t quite know. There’s the house …’

‘Yes, I suppose it will need sorting through. All Jane’s lovely things. And Stanley’s books and papers, too. I don’t think she let go of much after his death.’

‘She left it to me. The house, I mean.’

‘Oh, that’s wonderful. It’s a good house, a cracking garden. So, you think you might stay?’

‘I live in Ottawa. My partner is there, and my work.’

‘Of course, of course. Yes, you’ll just be wanting to see it and sort, won’t you? Well, while you’re here, do pop in again. The kitchen does a lovely bit of lunch, if you ever need a meal. Cooking for one can be awkward, can’t it?’ Muriel reached over and straightened a messy pile of golf brochures beside the bell on the desk. ‘But you need the keys and you must be tired. Just arrived, and all that way, too. Ah yes, here they are.’

She found a small brown envelope under the counter and slid it across the map towards me. It looked as if there might be anything inside. A wedding ring. Ashes. Dragons’ teeth. I slipped it away into my pocket. ‘Thank you.’

‘Would a cup of tea help? You must be absolutely shattered. You’ve only just arrived, haven’t you? You have the aeroplane look about you.’

‘I’m just off the bus. I stayed in Edinburgh last night.’

‘Well, you come along through here and I’ll see about some tea. Unless you’d prefer a coffee?’

‘No, tea’s fine. Thanks.’

I followed her through the door at the end of the hallway, past a bar and a lounge with sofas and chairs and then into a larger room with tables set for lunch. White napkins and slate coasters.

‘Sit anywhere you like. Do you fancy something to eat?’

‘No. I’m not sure. I can’t quite fathom what time of day it is.’

‘Travel will do that. You sit down now. You’ll feel better with the tea in you. Sugar, too. It does wonders. And I’ll bring you a scone as well. You look like some bulking up might do you good.’

‘Thank you. That sounds wonderful.’

I chose a small table by the window. My fingers picked at the flap on the back of the envelope and then ripped the paper and shook out the contents into my hand. A heavy mortice key fell into my palm and sat there like a finger bone. No wonder Felicity thought in fairy tales, if this was the key to her childhood home.

My mother’s third birth came in bits and pieces. There were always sliced apples and something about the grass growing outside the cabin. She tried out new versions on me, changing the weather or time of day, approaching everything from a different angle. I liked it best when she began it in the afternoon. The morning story often featured rain and sometimes books left on the lawn. Once, she told me a fox ran across the grass with a vole in its mouth, and a crow shouted down from the trees, startling the fox so she dropped her prize as Felicity sat with me on the porch, watching. I didn’t like that telling at all. But the afternoon story went like this: we were together on the porch, Felicity on a stump stool and me sleeping swaddled in a blanket that Rika had knit, lying in a cradle Bas had carved. The rain was over, and the weather would be dry now, so she sat slicing the apples into rings, then threading them onto garden twine to dry in the wind. I could see her hands doing all this; she did it every autumn. Out on the lake, a loon surfaced and called, and I woke gently, my eyes bright as water. I didn’t cry or make a fuss and all afternoon, the loon sat there on the lake, calling and calling, and Felicity sliced all the apples and not one was wasted. Later, she’d hook the twine over a peg high up on our cabin wall, where the apple rings would grow dark and leathery. Felicity liked saving things to use later, saving up the seasons. I don’t know why this story counted as a birth, but she said it did.

My own birth was a tale she told lightly. When I asked questions, she smiled and said I already knew what I needed to – I had seen Rika working, helping, and I knew what needed to happen. It was like that, Felicity said. Like every other birth. Every mother is strong like that.

But all her counted stories made me wonder how many births I might have. Do you get to decide? Can you make them happen?

4

MOST VILLAGES AND SMALL TOWNS GROW UP ALONG one main road, which is like a spine or the trunk of a tree, but the road through Aberlady had a sudden dog-leg bend that turned sharply as if to say that’s enough of that, let’s look at the sea now. The wind pushed at my back, rushing me out past the edge of the village towards the house. The tide was coming in and shining waves chased the light over mudflats. In the distance, I could see the bridge now, the end of the shoreline and the beginning of the burn, but there across the road was the house.

Houses play tricks on us, or maybe it’s memory. I remembered the house as enormous: wide rooms, oceans of carpet with rug rafts in front of the fire, vast bookshelves reaching from floor to ceiling, crammed full of books and boxes, and a step stool in the corner. A giant’s chair and footstool and windows full as the sea.

But whenever Felicity spoke about the house – with Bas or Rika or with one of the girls – she called it a minuscule bungalow. I asked once what that meant, and she said ‘A small house. Cramped and with no stairs.’

‘Like a cabin, then?’

‘No. Smaller.’ But Bas laughed, so I didn’t believe her.

Funny how the truth becomes real. From where I stood across the road, the house was both small and strange, sitting low under the tall trees and the whitewash looking too bright in the sunshine. I hadn’t remembered the stepped roofline or the crown-shaped chimney pot, but the cheerful red-tiled roof was familiar. As I approached, crows flew up from the trees beside the road, calling out loudly to each other. They circled in the sky before settling again to their treetops, their nests loose jumbles of sticks in the high forks.

A small lane led from the road down to the house. The front door was hidden behind a half-wall, a sort of L-shaped windbreak. L for Livia. L for love.

Then I heard a sound in the doorway.

A shifting sound behind the half-wall followed by the stillness of someone waiting. I paused. It seemed a quiet village. But the house had been empty for a couple of weeks now. Someone could have found a way in and set up camp. I held my breath. Then I heard the sound of feathers.

Only a bird, then. Well, that was a relief. I waited a moment, and then another, for it to emerge, but when it didn’t, I cleared my throat to startle it. Nothing.

‘Hello?’ A human voice would scare it away, I thought. Still nothing. But then another shift, so I took a step and peered around the half-wall.

A goose filled the space. It was startlingly tall and its long dark neck snaked from side to side, its white chin-strap bright in the shadow beside the door. When it looked over its broad brown back towards me, I balked and stepped back. Weird to see a Canada Goose here, I thought, but maybe it was thinking similar thoughts about me. I raised my arms in a sort of loose-winged flap and made a few hopeful noises, but the goose stayed put. It looked as if it was waiting, but obviously not for me.

‘Go!’ I said, firmly.

And nothing. The bird would not budge. It turned towards the door and looked in through the window, making throat-clearing sounds. The key felt heavy in my pocket, but I walked back down the path, sat on the low stone wall at the end of the garden and dug an apple out of my pack. Banished.

The wind blew through the tall grasses on the verge. Grey clouds gathered out at sea. By the road, tulips nodded heavy purple heads, and I wondered if they’d been Gran’s idea. Did she fling out a few bulbs, let them fall where they might and bury themselves to wait for spring? I could imagine that. I could almost see her, standing here at the very edge of her garden with a fistful of bulbs, watching the cars pass by, waiting for the right moment. She’d glance back at the house to see if he was watching and maybe he was or maybe he wasn’t, and she wouldn’t mind one way or the other, and then, with the road clear each way, she would reach back and let the bulbs fly.

When I turned back to the house, the goose wasn’t there. The key turned smoothly in the lock and I stepped inside, closing the door behind me. The house was quiet. Empty. Smelling citrusy. L for lemon.

I set my bag down in the hallway next to the teak trolley where the telephone sat watching, squat beside a bowl of keys and Gran’s brown wallet. Right out in the open, the first place to look. Logical, I thought, and the leather felt soft in my hands, but there were only cards inside. No folded letter, no secret photograph. I picked up the phone and there was no dial tone. The lawyer’s letter had said nothing had been disconnected and everything should be fine. Well, there’s something to add to the to-do list. And I would need to find another way of calling Mateo, too, and maybe Felicity. I thought I should let her know where I was.

The living room was a shrunken version of what I remembered. Shabbier, too, but only from the passage of time. Everything looked faded – the ashes in the fireplace, the rag rug Felicity had made at the camp sun-bleached like the photographs on the mantel, familiar and distant. There was a well-dressed Victorian couple framed in silver, he in tweeds and thick sideburns, she with lace cuffs, and her hands folded on her skirt. Then my mother as a grinning toddler running across grass, caught almost in flight. My grandparents in a wooden frame, new parents, my mother a bundled infant, my young grandmother with her head bent, adoring. My grandfather wore a zippered cardigan under his jacket and met the camera’s gaze, shy, defiant, present and looking at me as if I shouldn’t be unsupervised in his house.

Their wedding photo was framed in silver. My grandmother was all high cheekbones and a shine in her eye, and my grandfather watched her, laughing. They held their hands up between them, fingers intertwined, as if they wanted the photographer to capture the new gold band on her finger. Linked. She wore an elegant fox fur around her shoulders and it must have matched her hair, though in the black-and-white photograph, both the fox and the hair looked silver. I’d grown up with the photo. Felicity kept a copy on the table in our cabin and I liked to look at it when I was small. That Klimt look on Gran’s face and Granddad’s laugh.

‘Was it like that with you and my dad?’ I asked once. ‘When he was around?’

‘Oh, Pidge, you’re getting too old for that story. You know you don’t have a dad. Only a father. And no, he wasn’t like that.’ She pushed her fingers up through the paleness of her hair, then smiled at me. ‘If he was, he’d be around now, and I’d have to share you. And then what would we do? I couldn’t ever share you.’

When I was almost twelve and we were up late together after a long night-birth, I asked why her dad hadn’t been there when she was born.

‘It was the war, sweetie. He was away. You can’t always be where you want to be. Not when there’s a war.’

‘But Gran had help, right? There were midwives there?’

‘A doctor. And her mum. She could have had a nurse, too, but there were enough people out that night already. That’s what she said. But I think it was more about privacy, really. Your gran is a very private person.’

She made it sound like she would describe herself otherwise. Or maybe it was just a slip.

In the kitchen, the fridge hummed gently and the clock kept ticking, its electric cord twisting down to the outlet near the cooker. Pinned to the wall by the door, there was a postcard from the gallery. Felicity must have sent that over – a photo of the giant spider sculpture that sat between the gallery and the street. On the back, a note in her handwriting:

Dear Mum,

Hello from Pidge’s shop – all lovely books, silk scarves & calendars. She’s happy, I think, selling gifts – says it reminds her people are thinking of others & that’s beautiful. She has a generous heart, doesn’t she?

Thought you’d like the spider. 30 feet tall & her belly full of marble eggs. An elegance of legs and space.

All love,

Felicity

I opened the back door for fresh air and so that I could see tulips growing at the edge of a cobbled yard. There were several outbuildings – sheds and things – and beyond that, grass with a stone bench and a path that led down to a small orchard. I remembered these trees – just a half-dozen apple trees, too small to climb and wind-twisted even there behind the house. I could smell the sea, too. Salt. Coins. Rust.

Then a sound. I startled, half expecting to see – who? Gran? Granddad? Not Mateo. Or Felicity, suddenly arrived with suitcase in hand to surprise me, hello and my love. But no, none of that. Nothing as gentle. Instead, the goose paced across the cobblestones, honking and squonking, sticking its neck out and making a God-awful, ear-quaking racket.

5

MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS TO SLAM THE DOOR TO KEEP it out of the house. And the others, too, assuming there were others. Geese aren’t solitary birds, are they? They come in flocks. Or is it skeins? Which sounded like something in flight and the one I could see certainly wasn’t. It stalked around the shed, upturning stacks of flower pots, buckets and bins. Everything crashed to the ground, bouncing on the hard stones or shattering to pieces. I checked the lock on the kitchen door. It felt strange to be alone.

I slipped my shoes off and pulled myself up onto the counter so I could watch out the window more easily. With its hard, black beak, the goose hammered on the shed door and then, as I watched, pushed the door open and marched inside. Then, a bedlam of brushes and boxes, more broken pots and an imperious honk. More clatter and a yellow tin clanged across the yard.

Fry’s Cocoa.

I supposed it didn’t really matter how much mess the goose made out there. Everything would need to be sorted through and disposed of one way or another. You couldn’t sell a property full of stuff. Besides, there might be something interesting to take back to Ottawa. Maybe not dented old tins, but something. A lantern. An old tackle box. Something antique.

I looked around the kitchen to see what was there and, on top of the cupboard, I spotted Gran’s blue glass cake-stand. Mateo might like that. In the cupboard, I found an olive-wood cruet set, three pottery jugs, and a gravy boat. The coffee mill, which would certainly be useful. Folded paper napkins wrapped in waxed paper, empty jam jars, scrubbed clean, and a tall berry-dark bottle marked ‘sloe gin’. Behind another door, a stack of lovely teacups – some chipped, but enough to make up a set, certainly. Then, pushed to the back, a row of squat bottles with ground-glass stoppers. Inside, there were dried needles like rosemary, seeds like apple, and dusty flower petals, pink, red and yellow. Nothing familiar, not quite at least, and I wondered what Felicity might make of them. I probably couldn’t get them through customs. Not without knowing what they were. Mateo tried to bring sausage home last summer – a long loop that he bought at a Spanish market. I told him that it was never going to work, that he was really just buying lunch for the airport staff, but he shrugged, looking smug. I was right, of course, though he put on a show for the officials.

‘I promise I will not share it. No risk to the Canadian population, I assure you. It will pass no other lips than my own. Unless you would like to try? I might share with you.’

The customs officer shook his head and Mateo had to leave the sausage behind.

Maybe I should just sell the lot. There was never going to be space in a new condo for these old things. I could call an auction house and have them clear the place. Sell everything and head back home.

Another tin clattered across the yard. Oxo this time.

Home meant Ottawa. Mateo. Work. Home meant routine and habit, and that didn’t have much space for china teacups. Home used to mean the camp, but I left because it was time for me to choose. A free woman chooses – that’s what they had always taught me, and I got to the stage where staying didn’t feel like a choice any more. It was just procrastination.

I’d been working in the village store, selling cigarettes, groceries and booze. The kind of job teenage girls pick up after high school when they’re waiting for life to start, and it was like that for me, too, in a way. After I mailed my equivalence tests in the province and they sent me my diploma, I started at the shop as a way of making money before my next step, but then I stuck around. It was familiar and comfortable – like everything else. Most of the year, I knew everyone who came in, though it was different in the summer, with the cottage people and folk heading north to go hunting. But mainly, it was routine. Mothers came in mid-morning with small kids. Seniors needed help finding things every week. Just after the mass at one o’clock, a grey-haired man always bought a two-four of Molson and told me to smile. Always the same. Except one day, he asked me what I was waiting for. He said I looked tired, like maybe I was drowning. Who was he to comment? But later, I wondered if he recognized something. I couldn’t say what I was waiting for. People came through Birthwood and told us how lucky we were to have this slice of creation for our own. Maybe I was waiting to feel that. Bas and Rika did, obviously. And Felicity, too. I thought it would come with time or age. Except now, apparently, I looked like I was drowning. Well, that wasn’t true. I was just – what? Caught in an eddy, going round and round and watching the same piece of sky.

So, I made up my mind and chose to move to Ottawa.

I’d leave most of my things behind: my old photo albums and papers, the bookshelves Bas made me and my work clothes. I’d rent a furnished apartment at first, I decided, and find a new job. I could learn to live alone in the middle of a city. Eat meals on my own, visit museums and galleries, maybe even find work there, and when I actually managed to do all that, I told people that was why I had moved. For work and culture. For art.

But that wasn’t true. I moved to Ottawa because it sat at the end of the river. The T-junction of the Gatineau and the Ottawa. T is for time to go.

When I was small, the river map on the wall showed the Gatineau curled like Felicity’s hair. It laced among a hundred lakes and Bas told me the name was Algonquin – Te-nagàdino-zìbi – which meant the river that stops your journey. There were rocks to portage around and narrow places where even a canoe couldn’t slip through. But there was also a story about a French explorer who drowned in the river, and he was called Gatineau, too. Nicolas Gatineau. There was a high school named after him and I found his name in a history book. Some stories come twinned and some things are true.

Gran’s tea towels still hung on the hooks by the stove, and her spices sat on the thin shelf with the egg timer. But no coat by the door, no teacups to be rinsed. I noticed these things and waited for grief. I expected it and watched myself, waited. But it didn’t come. Instead, I felt disconnected and cold. I didn’t know how to do this.

Felicity should be here. Well, not sitting on the counter. She’d likely know what to do about the goose outside. And about the cupboards and the cake-stand and all the photographs and books. She’d negotiate presence and absence all right. She’d cry and swear and find a way to be practical, too. And, apart from everything else, she’d know the house inside out. She’d know where to begin.

When Mateo and I had moved into our apartment on Cartier Street, she’d been full of suggestions. Shelves and rugs and paint for the window frames. I had to explain to her that it was a rental and that we weren’t planning to stay. Mateo had always wanted to buy something new, something shiny. He had his eye on one of the glass condo towers going up in the Market with their beautiful views of the river, all those sunsets and sunrises, and miles between us and the sidewalks below. I agreed to see a model penthouse one afternoon and, after my shift, I waited for him in front of the gallery. I watched the sun catching the spires of the basilica, and a family lingering underneath the spider, their toddler dancing between the legs. I thought about what it would be like to live so close to work and in such a small space, too. Mateo had said that it wouldn’t feel small – not with those views. When he came through the door, he told me I looked lovely in the light, and we walked together through the Market, past all the tourists and the tempting patios.

‘Later,’ he said, squeezing my hand. ‘After we’ve had a look. Maybe we’ll have a decision to make?’

The condo was beautiful, it really was. I liked the view from the kitchen, right up to the Gatineau Hills. He liked the quiet. ‘It feels like there is no one else up here at all. No one living on top of us. No dogs or footsteps or tricycles.’ He laughed and put his arms around my waist and I pressed my mouth into his neck, his skin dry and warm. ‘We could be happy here. Alone on the top.’

Out the window, I could see the goose grazing between the apple trees. I felt hungry. The fridge, unsurprisingly, was empty. The lawyer’s letter had also mentioned that all the perishables had been cleared away. Not words to send to a bereaved family, I thought. There must be a better way of describing a scrubbed kitchen.

I dug my own meagre supplies out of my backpack. A roll of biscuits. Two apples. A bottle of wine. I’d need more or tomorrow I wouldn’t be fit for purpose. There was a fish and chip shop in the village, so I found my coat and flicked all the lights on before closing the door behind me. It wasn’t yet properly evening, but I didn’t like the idea of walking into the house in the dark. Overhead, more geese crossed the sky, a dark V on the bright air, their rusty voices calling.

6
FELICITY: 1967

MATRON CLAIMED TO BE MOTHERLY, BUT SHE HADN’T a clue. My mum never put her foot down. She had no God-forbidding anything. She was much quieter than that.

Ahead of me, a gaggle of student nurses made their way down the corridor, looking pert and starched. From their chatter, I could tell they were due up in Maternity where they’d watch the ward nurses teach new mothers how to swaddle properly. Not Matron, though. No babies for her. I could imagine her eating them, with her cracked red lips, her pocked chin, and her eyes like lift buttons behind those thick plastic glasses. Standing behind the nursing desk, she watched every footfall on the ward, utterly unsparing. To get the attention of errant junior nurses, she snapped tongue depressors. She never drank tea. That afternoon, she’d spent her five o’clock sermon on me, filling my ears with her God-forbids. She said she was being maternal. I should be more respectful. I shouldn’t look up when receiving instruction, shouldn’t distract or interrupt, merely pay better attention and perform. My job was to trot along behind the doctors with my neat nurse’s basket, carrying the requisite tongue depressors, thermometers, scissors, and gauze. I was to be careful. Take notes. Agree. My questions were not needed. The litany ended, Matron attempted a smile.

‘I know I must sound like a proper old battleaxe,’ she said. ‘But do try to take it on board. Just a little nudge to the straight and narrow and you will be happily with us a long, long time.’

She patted my sentenced hand and released me down the corridor.

I walked slowly and thought about my mother. I pictured her out by the bay, tall in my father’s old trousers with the hems tucked into black wellies and her hands reaching up, picking sea buckthorn. Too early yet this year, of course. The berries would still be plumping back home and my mother focussed on raspberries in the garden, but when I conjured her, I saw her by the sea. I saw how the wind caught wisps from her bound hair and how small clouds scudded across the sky above her like impossible stepping stones set against the blue. She always took her time picking berries, making the day last as long as it might, and when I was little, I would be there at her feet, digging out caves in the sand dunes, hoping to find rabbits or buried treasure. Now in that bleached corridor, I remembered the berries’ sharp stickiness and their smell like sour wine. Mum mixed them with sugar and cooked them down to make a marmalade bright as oystercatchers’ bills. I missed her marmalade and all her jams – raspberry and bramble, blackcurrant from the manse garden, jellies from rosehips, haws and sloes from every hedgerow along the coast. At home, Mum kept them on a high cupboard shelf, closed away to keep their colour, and later in my Edinburgh flat, I set them along the window sill so they could cast their stained-glass colours on the cold floor. Here, I bought grape jelly at Steinberg’s and spread it on white bread.

Outside the hospital, the afternoon was hazy, and the road filled with fast cars and buses. When my hospital contract came for the agency, I thought the road name completely romantic. Côte-des-Neiges. The side of snows. It had been the name of a long-ago village, sitting halfway up the hillside, looking down on Montreal. It must have been where the winter snows piled thickest, I thought, finding it on a map. There was a cemetery, too, called Notre Dame des Neiges, which made my heart almost break with a cold kind of loneliness. Now, walking the road every day to the bus stop after my shift, it was the width that held my eye. So very Canadian. So much space for anyone that wanted it. If I could pick up Aberlady with my fingers, all her crow-stepped roofs and whitewashed houses, the little kirk and the ancient trees, if I could carry her here and lay her down in this wide-open road, how much room would she take up? How little. With my back to the hospital and the mountain behind, there was no horizon here and so much space.

But Aberlady was moon-far away, remote and removed. Or rather, I was. I was the one who had done the leaving, after all. Gave my notice in an insufficient letter to Dr Ballater, and shuffled off. Sold my car, bought a ticket and packed my trunk full of nursing textbooks and uniforms, too – though of course they were the wrong ones. Matron soon set me straight and ensured I had the correct hem-length.

A bus pulled up to the stop and I ran down towards it, waving to catch the driver’s attention. He waited and laughed when I stepped up into the bus.

‘Every day, I get a running nurse or two,’ he said. ‘All the pretty nurses. It’s a good route.’

I forced a half-smile and found a seat towards the back. The windows were open and, as the bus pulled away from the kerb, the air felt surprisingly cool. It was often crowded in the late afternoon, but that day there weren’t many folk on the bus. Summer holidays, perhaps. Everyone away at cottages, spending time by the lakes. Some of the nurses had been talking about cottage weekends, which sounded delightful. Canoes and campfires and hikes in the woods. Everything I might have imagined, but not yet found. Early days, I thought. There would be plenty of time.

When I’d told my parents about my Canadian job, Dad had asked if that meant I was turning down Dr Ballater.

‘Of course, she is, Stanley, and it’s no bad thing,’ Mum said. ‘He hasn’t tried anything with you, has he? Has he been pestering you?’

‘No, nothing like that. He’s been a gentleman. He’s just not … It’s not … It’s hard to explain.’

Dad cleared his throat. ‘You want an adventure,’ he said, softly.

‘I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.’

Mum didn’t return to the question after that, nor did she try to talk me out of anything. Instead, she helped me make lists of things I would need, even things I would like: novels, toffees, nylons, a pair of white sunglasses. We went into Edinburgh to go shopping and she didn’t ask me how I’d made my decision or what I was hoping to find. She bought me a book about North American wild flowers and, walking out of Woolworths, tucked her arm through mine and grinned. She even suggested we go to a café for a spot of lunch, somewhere young, she said, and modern. But I knew she’d also brought along sandwiches in her handbag and I said we should eat them in Princes Street Gardens. Walking past the gardener’s cottage, she told me about the air raid shelters erected there early in the war.

‘It’s strange to think about all that now,’ she said. ‘How dangerous everything felt and how every effort was made to make safe places for everyone.’ She squeezed my arm again, and we found a bench where we ate our lunch. I hoped that she wouldn’t speak again about Dr Ballater or ask any more questions. I didn’t want to defend him, but I couldn’t explain, either. I’d been shocked by the whole episode. Knocked for six. I decided then I wouldn’t tell anyone else about Dr Ballater. About George. I would give him that much. No more stories or questions or hypotheses. I would let him be. Like my mother, I’d keep mum.

She’d always been good at that. A cultivated quiet with no need to talk everything through. It really wasn’t necessary, was it? It was enough to be still together. Without words. Without shouting or slammed doors. All that unnecessary bluster.

I’d been good at bluster when I was twelve. Slammed the door and stepped into the rain. I only had my cardi on and that didn’t matter then. I didn’t even care. I just needed out. I’d hop on a bus and go somewhere, right? Only it was Sunday and I had no money, so no. Hitchhike, then? But I never had and, likely as not, I’d know the driver – or worse, he’d know Mum. Then it would be over. I’d be right back at that kitchen table and she still wouldn’t be saying anything. I could tell when something was up. I wasn’t stupid. And the way they were keeping the radio off and not letting me see the newspaper. It had to be about the Bomb. I knew it was. Ever since I’d read that article about Nevada and Las Vegas and Miss Atomic Bomb. And the mushroom clouds like opening umbrellas and the costumes they made girls wear in the clubs and the Dawn Bomb parties and Atomic cocktails and I got so angry and I couldn’t sleep. I tried to talk to my parents about it, but they wouldn’t listen. They didn’t want to hear. Maybe they were just as scared as me. Or more scared? They acted guilty, as if they were to blame. As if all this fear was something they made and silence was a way of keeping it down. That door-slammed afternoon, the radio had been on and Mum suddenly – fiercely – shut it off and looked at Dad with something like excitement, something like fear, and I asked if it was the Bomb or another war or what, but she wouldn’t talk. She bloody wouldn’t talk and I stormed out and slammed the door.

I crossed the road and then the bridge and headed out to the sands. The tide was far out so there would be a good walk, and I didn’t care how far I went. Wondered if I could live out there, even just for the night. Would that be possible? Not in this rain. It was easing off, but even a drizzle would make for a miserable night. It might be different if it were dry. I could stretch out under the sky and sleep on the sand. I’d see the stars, and the moon, if I was lucky, and then the larks would wake me up. They were rising now before me as I walked. Flying straight up out of the wet grass. Strange joy, as Dad would say. He always said that whenever there were larks. That’s when I heard him on the path behind me; his paced footsteps, his whistled tune.

‘Mind if I chum you to the shore?’

I didn’t say anything.

‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘Silence is good. And this is a good place to be silent.’

But he kept whistling and quickened his pace to keep up with me. A hare leapt out and for a moment, it sat frozen on the path and I saw the yellow of its eye, the quick black circle taking in the world as it crouched with long ears, black-tipped, flattened, and then it erupted and ran. A lolloping stride escaping into the grass. In the quiet after it was gone, Dad picked up his tune, humming this time.

I didn’t mind. Really, I didn’t. It was fine that he was there. That he thought to follow me. It was fine.

Oh June, like the mountains I’m blue –

Like the pine, I am lonesome for you …

At least he wasn’t asking questions. Or being silent. I kept walking out towards the sands and he kept on with his tune. It was an old Laurel and Hardy number. Probably predated them, too, but it was their song as far as Dad was concerned. Sometimes he swapped Jane for June if he was singing when Mum was around.

… in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia

On the trail of the lonesome pine.

I hoped he just kept with the song and didn’t start with the slapstick to get a laugh. I wasn’t in a laughing mood. The wet sand was hard under my feet and the rain stopped as we walked towards the sea. Dad quickened his pace now and it felt like he was the one leading the way, which was just fine by me. I didn’t mind.

‘Thought we could go and take a look at the submarines. Think the rain has washed them away yet?’

They sat about a half-mile from the high tideline out by Jovey’s Neuk. Two wrecked subs that had been there as long as I could remember. Forever or something like it – though probably only since the war. There were fair-sized holes in both of them and the subs themselves weren’t that big. Mum warned me not to go out here – not all the way out on the sand at least. She’d rather I stayed closer in, maybe picked flowers round the Marl Loch. She’d rather I didn’t wander. But it was okay with Dad. He trusted me.

We walked across the sand together, our shoes wet through though there was only an inch of sea water on the sand. It was rippled and dimpled with puddles and the bay kept draining away. Further out, we saw the marks that seals make when they pull themselves back to the water. We almost missed the wrecks and had to veer left and in towards the shore, too. Their ribs stood out like something hungry.

‘Not big, were they?’ Dad said. ‘Hardly seems like there’d be space, but four men would crew each of these. Volunteers, I mean. You couldn’t make a man climb in.’

‘I’d hate it.’ My voice sounded rough from yelling and I wished it didn’t.

‘They probably did as well. But they did what needed doing. That’s what they would have told themselves. But it must have been hell. Cold and condensation. And all the way up to Norway. I couldn’t have done it. Not my field, of course, but there’s no way.’

I thought he was going to say hell again and I waited for it. Then he laughed, but not like it was funny. He laughed with a seal’s cough, I thought, or a mouth full of sand.

‘Did you know that the engine they used in these XT subs was the same engine they used for a London bus? Gardner Diesels. Bet you didn’t know that.’

‘No.’

‘Well, now you do. Look at that. You just got cleverer. I know, not funny. But that’s why I followed you out here. I used to come out here myself when a laugh wouldn’t work. Sometimes you need the space, don’t you?’ He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked up at the sky. ‘Listen, chum. It’s not about me, is it? This door-slamming tick of yours. About me and your mum? Because if it is, I want you to know that people jump to conclusions and talk rot when they don’t understand and maybe when they are scared, but we’re solid. We always have been. And your mum just needs quiet sometimes. Like you need space. I know you get angry and have questions and all, but she’s doing her bit and her best, too. She’s holding us together, you know.’

After this, he was quiet, and I was, too. We mooched out to the second submarine, squelching our feet in the mucky sand. I kicked the side and there sounded a dull thud. Above us, a skein of geese cut across the sky, and Dad raised his arms as if he was holding his gun, but he’d left it at home and they were flying too high anyway. I wondered what he’d do if the powers that be managed to get the bay pronounced a nature reserve. Less goose on the table, I’m sure. I teased him about that on the walk back and he pulled a grimace, then picked up his tune again.

And I can hear the tinkling waterfall

Far among the hills

Bluebirds sing each so merrily

To his mate in rapture trills

They seem to say ‘Your June is lonesome, too,

Longing fills her eyes

She is waiting for you patiently

Where the pine tree sighs.’

Before I left Scotland, Dad told me about the whales found a thousand miles from the sea. Not in Montreal itself, but even further inland near a place called Cornwall where the river was island-strewn and slow. I asked how they’d managed and he laughed.

‘Fossils, my dear. Ten thousand years old. They were found by men digging clay for bricks half a mile from the railway station and two hundred feet above sea level. White whales, I think. Proves the story of the long-drained sea, but then so does the clay. It’s quick clay, tricky stuff. Formed under the oceans and riddled with salt. With the tides gone, the clay dries out, the rains wash the salt away and it shifts. So cracks appear on buildings or suddenly, a whole hillside slips away. Sometimes, fossils emerge that way, too. Sometimes, they’re dug up intact.’

I wasn’t sure why he told me this. A token fact to ease my way into a new country. And a nod to what he knew, who he was. Clay and old stone, deep time and soil. It could have been that. But later, walking through Montreal looking up at the skyscrapers, a new understanding started to surface. Above me, the half-moons of hotel windows, the ribs of towers rising, and under my feet, things still hidden.

Was I the fossil-hunter then? Or the whale?

7
PIDGE: 2006

MATEO WAS STILL AT WORK AND I WAS MAKING SALAD when she called. Slicing cucumbers and preserved lemons, pitting green olives. When I picked up the phone, I could smell their sharpness on my fingers.

Felicity’s voice was so quiet I thought she was ill, but she said no, it was only sad news. She’d had a phone call that afternoon from Scotland. One of the elders from the kirk in Aberlady was working through Gran’s address book, wanting to let her friends and relations know.

‘Kind of him, wasn’t it? Not to leave it up to a lawyer or someone, but to get in touch personally. He said the funeral was yesterday. Prearranged. It seems your grandmother sorted it all out ahead of time. She didn’t want … a fuss.’

‘Would you like me to come?’ I asked.

‘Here? No, no,’ she said. ‘No, I think not. I’ll be fine. It’s just I haven’t seen her in a while. I … I don’t quite know what to do. Now. What to do now. That’s it. I don’t know what to do now.’ She let go of her breath, and I could see her, standing in the farmhouse kitchen, her hair falling forward to curtain her face. She paused, and I could see her hold her hand up to her mouth, her long fingers, the blue of her veins. Outside the window behind her, another evening was beginning, a greying sky above the trees, the lake still and growing darker.

‘I’ll come,’ I said. ‘I can take some time off work. Someone can cover for me.’

‘No.’ She sighed again, and I waited. ‘I just wanted you to know. There really is nothing to be done, but I thought you should know.’ She told me Bas sent his love, and Rika, too. The snow was melting and mud beginning to show between the trees. They’d started tapping the maples. The beginning of another year. She said she would be fine.

‘I know,’ I said, softly.

‘Yeah. I know, too.’

When Mateo came home, I cooked fish and he opened a bottle of wine. I opened the window, so the kitchen wouldn’t get hazy, and to the east, I could see streaks of light. For a moment, I wasn’t sure what they were. They looked like scratches or tears on the surface of the sky. I watched as they changed, brightened, grew longer and strange. Then I saw they were only vapour trails catching the last light of the setting sun. I thought about picking up the phone again and calling the camp to tell Felicity about them. She’d like that. On the other hand, she might think I was checking in, prompting or trying to get her to say something else. Better let her be. I’d tell her when we spoke next, I decided, and then it struck me she might be thinking similar thoughts, out beside the lake. That she couldn’t pick up the phone to tell her mother about the bright things that caught her eye. Not this evening or in the morning or later. She had to let her be.

At the bungalow, I’d decided to sleep in the front bedroom because that wasn’t where Felicity and I slept. We were always given the back bedroom – her room before she left, now stripped and painted white. Felicity said that she’d asked her parents to do it – to make it neutral – when she left. She’d wanted to close a door like that. To make a fresh start.

Even so, the double bed with its nubbly white coverlet was utterly Felicity to me. The pillows might have only just been shaken out, the sheet folded over. If I lay down, I would feel her hands soothing my spine, her hair warm beside me and, in the morning, tangling over me so I’d wake laughing. I would be a child again, too young for this empty house, and I knew I’d never sleep for her whispered stories, her gentle questions, and my own held answers.

In Gran’s room, I told myself the clock would be soothing, the photographs interesting, and the knick-knacks would leave no space for ghosts. The wash of the sea would sound like wind in the trees at the camp or like trucks on the highway in Ottawa. But, inevitably, I slept fitfully. Maybe the smell of her soap never quite let me settle. Maybe I was just overtired. A little after dawn, there were birds in the garden and I started to compile an inventory in my head.

The books. The photographs. The rag rug. All the boxes on the shelves. The letters. The things in the shed. The kitchen things, too. The teacups. The small jars. I might have slept again, thinking through the shelves and counting, but the blue glass cake-stand on the top of the cupboard brought Felicity’s voice close.

‘It was just this colour, wasn’t it, Mum? Do you remember that? The blue moon when I was wee?’

I was sitting with two cushions wedged beneath me as she took it from the shelf. The collar on my new dress was itchy and wrong, but I held Granny’s coffee mill tight between my knees, turning the crank to grind the beans. Granny sat beside me, the pen in her hand paused over a sheet of white paper.

‘Goodness, Felicity. I’m surprised you do. It was a very long time ago. Be careful with that, dear. It was a wedding present.’

‘But the colour was just like this, wasn’t it? Don’t you think?’

‘Hmm. I hadn’t made that connection before. I always wished it were green, which was more fashionable back then. Auntie Jean wouldn’t have known that. She must have purchased it in Jenners, I suppose. Imagined it sitting in pride of place in my matrimonial home. That was the sort of thing the Morningside aunts said.’

‘I don’t remember it at all,’ Felicity said.

‘Well, when you were small, I didn’t have much cause to use it. Too hard to make cakes on the ration. And people didn’t come around then. At least, they didn’t come here.’

‘Well, they will come tomorrow,’ Felicity said.

‘Yes. They will. They will come for your father.’

Felicity placed the cake-stand on the table, tracing her finger around the rim, and I waited for her to say the words to our bedtime poem. The moon is round as round can be. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth has she. But you need a face for the moon and a cake-stand has no face, no chin at all to tickle.

‘How’s that coffee coming along?’

‘Almost done,’ I said. ‘I can still feel a few scratchy bits.’

‘Well, I certainly don’t want any scratchy bits in my cup. Be sure to grind them carefully.’

‘Was the moon really blue, Granny?’

‘That night it was. A long, long time ago now. And the next night, too, though not so clearly perhaps. It was a strange sight. Like a painting of the moon someone had slipped into the sky, trying to fool us all.’

‘Did Granddad see it, too?’

‘Yes, pet. Your granddad saw it. He thought it was very special. In fact, he took his chair, that chair you’re sitting on right now, and placed it in front of the window in the sitting room so that he could watch the moon travel right across the sky. He sat and sat, just watching that beautiful blue moon.’

‘All night? I like to stay up all night.’

‘Well, maybe not all night. Until it was bedtime.’

‘Felicity lets me stay up all night when it’s a full moon and there’s a baby coming hard.’

‘Having a hard time coming, perhaps?’

‘Yeah. That’s coming hard. Sometimes they do. Babies.’

‘Your mum helps a great deal when that happens, doesn’t she?’

‘I do, too. When I stay awake.’

Gran put down her pen and laid her hand flat on the paper. Her skin was tea-brown from afternoons outside, and her veins ran like rivers under thin skin. She wore a thick gold wedding band, and a finer pearl ring set with small diamonds. I thought her hands were beautiful.

‘Was it blue like veins, Granny? Or blue like the sky?’

‘A little like the sky. But more like bluebells. It was a thin, translucent blue, and still very shiny. Perhaps like the blue in the very centre of a candle flame.’

‘Why was it blue? It isn’t blue now.’

‘No, it wasn’t blue for long. Just a couple of nights. They thought it was probably caused by smoke from forest fires drifting over from Canada.’

‘Just like us.’ She smiled when I said that and then held out her hand to Felicity. I kept on with my grinding and she continued. ‘Some people thought it was worse than that, not smoke at all but something to do with nuclear activity, all that meddling about with the atom. There’s one for your protest friends, Felicity. Ban the bomb or the moon will turn blue. They’d run with that one.’

‘I’m sure they would,’ Felicity said. She laughed and shook her head, her hair falling over her shoulders, almost down to her waist. ‘A great slogan. See? You still have a knack for poetry.’

‘Haud yer wheesht,’ Gran said, but she smiled and that was all right and then the sound of the coffee mill changed in my hands, and the crank turned smoothly.

‘Can I open it now?’ I asked. She nodded and told me to be gentle.

‘I will. This is the best part.’ I placed the mill on the table and pulled out the little drawer with its perfect gold knob. Inside, a small mountain of fragrant coffee grounds looked like rich, dark earth, and I imagined I could make out a tiny pathway snaking up the hillside, tiny people walking in line towards the peak. I winked and the hikers looked up into the kitchen sky, my one open eye a shining blue moon above them.

‘Your dad didn’t like any of those explanations,’ Granny said in a voice suddenly tired. ‘He called them all theories. He wanted to believe the magic. Said that he believed we’re entitled to a blue moon every once in a while. I can hear him saying that, can’t you? Just like that. As if saying made it so.’

I was pulling on my jeans when I heard a honk. Under siege again. I opened the curtains but couldn’t see the goose. The day was clear and the sky a swept blue. The house here sat below the level of the road, and the lane to the door ran downhill, but by a trick of the lane’s angle, I could see the sea from the front bedroom window. Out on the water, birds were bright flashes diving white among the waves – gulls of some sort; fish-eaters. Felicity would know. Or Gran. I could only guess. But the goose was unmistakable – a run-of-the-mill, plain-as-my-face Canada goose. There was nothing else it could be. Big and brash and, as if the thought conjured it, there it was again. Another honk blasted from somewhere behind the house. Well, it could have the shed, if that’s what it wanted. I’d spend the morning inside. There were maybe two jobs in hand. Or three. Yes, three. The first was the inventory and that was the biggest. The second was to look for whatever it was that Gran had left me. The third was the difficult one: to decide what to do next.

I’d thought again about the auction house idea but selling everything would be absolute. There’d be no chance to search and sort if I handed the house over to the professionals. And if there was something to find, perhaps I’d better be the one doing the looking.

I took out my notebook and wrote: To keep. To rehome. To let go.

I’d start with the desk. That was sensible. If Gran had left me something, it would likely be there. I opened each drawer carefully but found only tidy stationery supplies. Then an address book and a neat diary, mainly empty. A set of utility bills held together with an elastic band. There was a new set of blank postcards and a book of stamps. Nothing old at all. Nothing resembling news.

I turned to the bookcase, scanning the shelves. Was there a notebook wedged in backwards? A small box hidden behind the novels, containing – what? Something.

Gran must have imagined me like this. Searching. Looking for family secrets, reading the old letters, the dusty diary, finding the crucial photograph.

Everything looked dusted.

The flow of books seemed natural. Dictionaries to bird books, walking guides, then maps. Pebble identification. Edible wild foods. Mrs Beaton. Then poetry below, with historical fiction, anthologies and folk tales. A collection you might find on the shelves of anyone of a certain vintage and a certain class. Still, something wasn’t right. Working in the gallery shop, I’d learned to read a shelf. What was missing, what had been moved. I stood, looking, balancing from the balls of my feet to my heels and back, trying to work it out. George Mackay Brown. Byron. The King’s Treasuries of Literature. Legends of Vancouver. All interspersed with knick-knacks. A bowl of marble eggs was displayed in a willow-pattern bowl next to the Scrabble dictionary. French poetry books stood upside down so that their titles aligned with their English fellows, and each of the shelves was pristine and polished. Everything looked ready to be seen.

I needed Mateo. He never spoke about his work, but I pictured him like this, poring over bits and pieces, looking for patterns in a collection. I needed a good eye. An organizer. A curator.

But maybe that was it. That was what seemed strange. Everything had been made ready. Everything was ready to be seen. Like the start of every day at the shop. Everything was dusted and arranged as if at any moment, the time might come to unlock the door and let the day begin.

Was that how I remembered my gran? Ordered, polished and ready? I wasn’t sure. I remembered the soft woollen rug with its tangled fringe, the warm electric fire and the bowl of marble eggs. I remembered her soap. Imperial Leather, and it smelled like the forest and cinnamon and sandalwood. And like geraniums, too, but without the prickle in the nose. The bar sat beside the bathroom sink – a heavy block the colour of maple cream, I thought, or the Caramac bar she would set out on the tea tray for me beside Felicity’s mug. I remembered Gran standing at the sink, scrubbing our grey underwear with her Persil powder, sighing that our homemade camp soap never got anything white. She pinned the laundry to the line in the garden and I remembered chasing Felicity through the cities of sheets and shirts, the wind itself white and clean. Then I remembered Gran combing out my hair in the evening, and Felicity saying yes, it was all right, as Gran lifted me up on the table to cut my hair off at chin level so it swung. Just like a wee land girl, she said. Muriel used to wear her hair like that. You need a Kirby-grip over your eyebrow and then you’ll be jaunty.

I remembered Gran working hard and liking beautiful things. I imagined her readying this room. Standing here by the shelf, straightening the books and the photo frames. Maybe she caught her own eye in the mirror, too, and looked and wondered when, and then set things in order for me. Muriel said she knew I was coming. So, she knew she was going. And she made things ready.

My grandmother was tall, as was my grandfather. The height of the mirror was telling. As was the height of the bookshelves and the shelves where the boxes sat. Some were labelled in my grandmother’s precise script – what my mother would call ‘educated handwriting’: Photographs. Felicity’s letters. Recipes. Buttons. Then there were the boxes marked with Granddad’s scrawl: Pebbles. Scribbles & Poems. Feathers. Maybe.

I pulled out the desk chair and climbed up. Felicity would like the recipes. An easy to keep, I thought. The box held neat bundles of pale-blue index cards bound with sensible elastic bands and marked with white tags. Soups. Vegetable Sides. Game. Puddings. Sweet Treats.

My gran’s coconut macaroons were the most exotic objects in my childhood. And her golden cheesy fish, baked in a casserole and covered in breadcrumbs that crackled in the middle and bubbled at the sides. Chicken in mushroom sauce meant a whole chicken breast just for me, and a white napkin to spread across my lap. Water in a cut-glass tumbler. Margarine.

I leafed through the recipes, hungry for the familiar. But you can’t flick through memories like that. They don’t turn on like the lights. You need to kindle them and wait.

Sloe gin

1 lb sloes

8 oz white sugar

1¾ pint gin

Sterilize a good strong darning needle in a candle flame, then use it to prick the tough skins of the sloes all over.

Place sloes in large bottle and add sugar and gin.

Seal well and shake. Keep bottle in a cupboard and shake every second day for the first week. After that, shake once a week and gin will be ready to drink in two months. Lovely at Christmas.

Note – Muriel’s mother says to try this with brandy and blackberries.

To dry rosehips

Wash your rosehips, top and tail then finely dice and dry them on newspaper in the sun.

Tip the dried rubble into a metal sieve and shake gently to remove the tickly hairs. They will easily fall away, leaving you with clean dried rosehips, ready to be used for tea, jam or jelly. Good for preventing colds and as a treatment for stiffness.

Coconut macaroons

Line a sandwich tin with sweet pastry.

Mix in a bowl:

1 cup coconut

¾ cup sugar

1 switched egg

Smooth into tin and bake at 400˚ for about 25 minutes.

Sweet pastry Felicity likes

2 lbs plain flour

1¼ lbs margarine and lard (mixed)

½ lb sugar

2 eggs

Pinch of salt

Makes a lot so a child can play with extra as pie is readying.

8

THE BOX LABELLED FELICITY’S LETTERS WAS A NEATLY bound archive, the envelopes marked BY AIR MAIL/PAR AVION. I remembered these. The paper thin as onion skin. The blue-and-red marked edges and the acrid taste of the glue. I could see Felicity bent over the table in the cabin, writing by candlelight. She filled page after page and sometimes let me add pictures, too. Her ballpoint felt important in my fingers and awkwardly precise, my smiley birds looking far scratchier than they ever did drawn in crayon on Bas’s cut-open paper bags.

Felicity drew pictures, too – little sketches perched at the beginning of paragraphs or squeezed in along the margins. There were babies’ faces and Rika’s hands. The table in the birthing house with its neat rows of instruments set out ready. A chipmunk in the woodpile, its eye reflecting the shape of the treetops against the sky. The rough-roofed cabins. The road into town and the patterns of leaves. And among all the details and the sketches, in letters that predated me, I found stories I’d never read before.

Montreal, January 1969

Dear Mum and Dad,

I guess I should start by apologizing for my last letter. Way too abrupt and I’m sure you were shocked. I could have managed it with more grace. Still, I wanted you to know about the baby, and I didn’t know how to say it gently. I shouldn’t have written what I did about keeping it or not. Let’s just pretend I never did, okay?

It’s beginning to feel like a real baby now. When I wrote before, I just felt sick and tired, but now it’s moving about a lot. There are most definitely feet and elbows in there. The textbooks say it’s supposed to feel like butterfly wings, but that’s not right at all. A bit like hiccups, maybe, but with a completely different kind of anticipation. Jenny and Margaret are being lovely with hot-water bottles and they rub my feet when I come in from a long shift at the hospital. They’ve even given me the sofa cushions for my bed. I’m still feeling sick sometimes, though I’ve got through last month’s exhaustion which is truly wonderful. I kept falling asleep at the nurses’ desk and getting scolded by the matron. She assumed I’d been out dancing like all the other girls and told me that it simply wasn’t respectable to come to work so shattered. Not sure what she’ll say when she notices the real cause for my doziness, but so far so good. I seem to be more or less the same shape at this point. Well, a little wider in the waist, but there’s room in my uniform. Last month, I was only thirsty but you won’t believe how hungry I’ve been today. I ate two sandwiches for lunch. Which felt like a luxury but didn’t break the bank.

I’m writing this from the deli on the corner. It’s not quite as cold here as at home, and the man behind the counter is kind. He keeps coming by to fill my mug with hot water. He’d pour coffee on the house, he says, but I say no, it’s fine, I like the hot water just as it is. Besides, coffee would make the baby jump and keep me awake, and it’s my day off so when I get home I’ll just want to sleep as best I can. Of course, I don’t explain all that to the deli man. He probably can’t even tell about the baby. I’m pretty wrapped up. It’s a good thing it’s cold like this. At work, we’ve been given permission to wear an extra layer and that’s probably bought me another month of work. That and my snazzy maternity girdle. The glories of synthetic yarn.

The money at the hospital is decent, so I won’t be putting in for a clinic job anytime soon. Anyway, I still like the bustle of the hospital. It’s right in the middle of everything here and as crazy as the city. So many people, so many stories. When I first arrived, I thought everyone might speak French and that I’d be forever struggling to take notes from French specialists. As well you know, my spelling is rather atrocious – and sadly so it proves in French, too. I fudged my way through the interview with feeble school French and it was such a fluke they picked me up because officially, all the hospitals here are either French or bilingual. I was sure it would be just a matter of time until someone called my bluff and likely as not, it would come out in the middle of an emergency triage, some poor child’s life dangling and my incomprehension making a mess. But it seems not. Half the nurses at the General are as bad as me and the first question every single doctor asks is, Do you speak English?

I hope you aren’t too scandalized by all this. It might not be quite how you imagined this chapter of my life working out, but it’s your grandbaby, so I thought I should let you know how it is growing, and how I am, too.

I haven’t come up with a better word than it so far. He or she seems presumptuous and I don’t fancy cutesy pet names at this stage. What did you call me before I was born?

It’s taken some thinking but I might have a solution for the birth. Not the General, at any rate. I couldn’t face that. So, I’ve been asking around for other options. Margaret – she’s one of the girls in the flat – is active with the women’s movement on campus. She’s still a student herself – politics and art history – isn’t that a great combination? She told me about a place in the woods where girls can go to have their babies. Not a Catholic home for unwed mums or delinquent girls or anything. It’s really wholesome. A few families have built cabins by a lake and they are farming there, or at least gardening, and they welcome anyone who needs a place, and they look after you when your baby comes. She says they are amazing. A couple of McGill girls went there last year. I think I’ll look into it. My job won’t last too long at the hospital once the matron finds out the real reason for my snoozes, and I don’t want to skive on rent here with the others. I’m not coming home. I don’t say that to hurt you, just to be honest about how things are. I came over here and I got myself into this … I was going to write mess, but I can’t. I’ve got to keep my words precise and language like that isn’t loving and it isn’t positive and I can’t bring a baby into the world in that frame of mind.

I’m going to end here because I need to head home and forage in the fridge for some dinner. It’s my turn in the kitchen tonight and I promised them something better than tinned to-may-to soup. See, I can even talk Canadian now. I miss you both and I’ll write more soon.

Lots of love,

Felicity

* * *

Montreal, February 1969

Dear Mum and Dad,

The weather is still cold. I’ve been absolutely living in that mohair wrap you sent over for Christmas. Again – thank you. The colour is perfect. Like East Lothian daffodils against the old drab snow of Montreal. At Christmas, there was romance to all that white, but now it’s stale, scrubby grey and it’s hard to feel inspired. I haven’t seen the ground outside my building since November. Some of the doctors come into work in parkas with fur around their hoods. Wolverine, apparently, because it won’t freeze regardless of the temperatures. Others wear black fur hats, something between a tea cosy and a Russian officer’s hat. They are the senior doctors and don’t even speak to the junior nurses except about patients, and hardly then. The students who come around to our flat all wear camel duffel coats with floppy hoods and toggles and most wear black galoshes zipped over their shoes. They leave these in puddles by our door and they drape their coats over the radiator or on all the kitchen chairs. The students themselves pile into the living room with Jenny and Margaret, spreading out newspapers, smoking like forest fires and arguing about the salvation of Quebec. The air grows rank and it all sounds foreign and zealous and strange, but I’m happy here. I feel I’m settling into something entirely new.

The light here is amazing. Cold and white and blue. New snow brightens everything, and then there are layers of reflections – neon and shop windows and all the cars. The snow piles up in high banks along the streets and on the spiral staircases outside apartment buildings. From my window, the fire escape looks both laden and lightened with all the snow. The city trucks come by and scatter salt on the pavements to melt the ice, but they call them sidewalks here like the Americans, or les trottoirs. Mincing along, trying not to slip, I think of pigs’ feet. I read in the paper that there’s talk of heating them from underneath so that the snow will melt on contact. Isn’t that crazy? Very space-aged, like so many things here. Since the Metro system was built, there have been extensive expansions underground, so it’s like a brand-new city just under the surface. Shops and restaurants, even a church and a discotheque. Imagine all that under Princes Street!

Despite the cold, there is so much life in this city, so much feels just about to happen. And I love the mix of people. The whole world is here, all bundled up in a thousand layers against the freeze. French and English, obviously, and a fair number of Scots among the mix. But black people, too, with fantastic French accents, and Hungarians and Jews and even Chinese. I hope to go down to Chinatown soon to try one of the restaurants Jenny keeps talking about. I’ll let you know all about it when I do. I wonder if foetuses like ginger.

Did I write to you about Expo? I know I sent the book about it, but I can’t remember what I told you. Probably not much. I know I didn’t write much when I first arrived – I’m sorry for that. Everything was so new and I was so ready to be far from home, but I should have been better at writing. Anyway, Expo was amazing. Space-age for real, with real Apollo capsules and an American astronaut suit. I first went with Jenny a month or so after I moved into the flat. We took the Metro and stood all the way to Île Sainte-Hélène, which is an artificial island made of earth dug out from the Metro tunnels and deposited in the middle of the St Lawrence River. Then everything was built on top – all the buildings of the world. I loved the American Pavilion. A 200-foot geodesic dome covered with a shiny acrylic skin. Dad would love it: a great clear bubble filled with spacecraft and Raggedy Ann dolls, Andy Warhol prints and totem poles, cowboys and neon, and Elvis Presley’s guitar. Pure poetry. The Americans hated it. Not enough about technologies and arms, not enough about trade. Instead, it was all American imagination and so beautiful in its glorious gaudy way. But more than the exhibits, it was the space itself that I loved. A shining bubble floating above the island, the light shimmering in triangles. It was honeycomb and patchwork quilt and crystals and constellations all at once. A mini-rail train ran right through the building, and giant escalators climbed to the very top. Everywhere you looked, there were people moving, bright colours, and a sense of beautiful space.

Everyone came to Expo. All the languages in the world on one little Canadian island. Like the war was finally, finally over, and everyone was together in a place that was new and glowing.

It was all supposed to close at the end of October and all the countries were to pay for the individual demolition of their pavilions. But the powers that be changed their mind and opened it up again this summer. Renamed it, too. Couldn’t very well be Expo ’67 in perpetuity. Now it’s ‘Man and His World’, which ticks Jenny off no end. Margaret, too, but Jenny is louder. All this mind-expanding globality, she says, and they go for the archaic misogynistic tag. I can’t say I’m bothered, but she is, so we hear about it continually. It’s even worse in French, she says. ‘La Terre des Hommes’. And just when do we get our world, she asks over porridge and tea, waving her spoon about histrionically. I shrug and she says I’ve been brainwashed by the patriarchy and need to wake up, but I say I’m tired out by ten-hour shifts and a growing lump of humanity in my belly and I don’t feel excluded by an historically accepted inclusive noun. She’d prefer ‘Humanity’s World’, which suffers poetically, but maybe equality has higher value than poetry.

Jenny is from London and used to teach primary school, though that’s impossible to imagine now. She’s far too loud and bright and flamboyant for any classroom. Maybe things were different in London. She wears ground-trailing skirts and her hair is short and dyed jet black to match her mascara. And she’s an actress now, which she says isn’t a world away from teaching. She’s managed to get leading lady roles in a few Shakespeare plays – says it’s the accent that kills at auditions. She thinks it’s a riot I’m still in nursing. A last-generation job, she calls it, perfect for old-fashioned girls. I’m not quite sure she understands wanting a stable life. And it’s not like she has pots of money to prop her up. Before she moved into the flat, she had a basement room with no furniture. Just a mattress on the floor and a radio to keep her company. She says it did wonders for her Canadian accent, all that talk radio. The prime minister is said to be very upset about this room-er. Tomorrow, the high temperature will be twenny-three degrees.

Heat is supposed to be included in our rent, but the flat is still cold. Jenny walks about draped in blankets. Margaret says that the weather will be warmer by March. I’ve already been through a full year, but Montreal weather is hard to anticipate. Margaret keeps saying things like when the snow melts … and that was before the dog days. They roll off her tongue quite naturally, but then, she’s from here. I should be keeping a logbook, I think, marking down temperatures and the superstitions of the natives. But she’s right to remind me. Seasons change quickly here, and spring doesn’t linger. Last year, it was such a shock. Ice and blizzards one week and then the crocuses were up and gone the next. Blink and you miss it and everyone’s in bare legs. Margaret says I should really call the folk at the camp soon and see if they can help, if that’s my plan. She said it so sweetly. You’d like her. I guess I want you to know that I’m being looked after. We’re a family of sorts here at the flat, the girls like sisters and guardian angels – their friends and suitors, too.

I’m not going to write to you now about my baby’s father. I don’t mind that you asked and I will tell you at some stage, but for now he isn’t important. And I’m fine with that. That sounds defiant, or defensive. It isn’t meant to. I am well and as peaceful as I can be in this cold and troubled city. Jenny says get used to it – not just snow but bombs, too. Bienvenue au Québec, baby. But don’t worry about me. I am well and safe and more or less happy.

Lots of love,

Felicity

* * *

Montreal, March 1969

Dear Mum and Dad,

So much for nonchalance. Even if I didn’t have to, I’d want to leave my job now. Not because I’m tired out – though I am – and not at all because of the people, because they really are lovely. But the work is getting scary and so is this precarious city. You probably don’t hear much on the BBC, so here’s the scuttlebutt, as Dad would say.

Last night, there was hell of a march. The anglo press is reporting it as a peaceful protest, but at the hospital, we see another side to things. Of course, they are comparing it to last month’s attack at the stock exchange. No bombs last night, so no structural damage, but there were ten thousand people out on the streets, at least. From what we saw, the police got rough, or possibly the protestors did first. I was in the flat and there was so much noise outside. Someone lit a bonfire in the middle of the street like we were in a war zone or revolutionary Paris, and there were firecrackers or worse, too. Some were even shouting ‘A bas la Bastille!’ but it wasn’t the prisons they were protesting about or even the government. It was McGill. For heaven’s sake, a university. But a symbol, too. Everything is becoming a symbol, or a slogan. ‘McGill au Travailleurs!’ they chanted. ‘McGill Français!’ They’re demanding that the university become a unilingual French, pro-worker institution. So much for art history and politics if that happens, though I suspect nursing would still get funded. They’d need it.

At the hospital in the morning, we saw a lot of bruising, twisted ankles, and more than a few broken legs, too. One boy, who was carried in dangling between two cronies, came in with a fractured skull. They were all grinning, which was perhaps the most disturbing part. ‘Had a good night, boys?’ one of the doctors asked, but they only whispered to each other in French and kept on grinning.

One of the students who had been demonstrating came by the flat this evening, and got angry when I told him what I’d seen at work. He’s half French and mostly fervently separatist, but he likes hanging out with us British girls. I made a pot of tea and he told me about his grandmother – mémé. She had a digestive problem and it turned out to be cancer in the end and he spent a lot of time in the hospital with her, translating. Officially, everyone is guaranteed medical care in their own language, but he said it’s never really that way. His mémé needed a specialist, but the specialist didn’t speak a word of French and neither did half the nurses. Not like you, he said. You try at least. ‘Bonjour’ alone works wonders. He told me his mémé went downhill pretty quickly after she was admitted. He couldn’t be with her all the time and she spent her final weeks fumbling through the few English words she knew, trying to make herself understood by the busy anglo nurses. That’s no way to go, is it?

I see the injustice, but it’s all getting scary. There were four bombs on New Year’s Eve then three mailboxes exploded in the next few days. And those are the ones that get reported because they’ve exploded. I wonder how many other bombs have been found and stopped in time. Two exploded at the end of November at Eaton’s downtown. Even Jenny is getting apprehensive. She’s talking about heading out of town for a bit. I might try to convince her to come out to the camp with me. I called them the other day and the woman on the phone was lovely. No trouble at all, she said; come as soon as you like. There is a space where I can stay, and she wanted to know if the father was coming, too. A gracious way of asking. I told her that he wasn’t and she really gently suggested that I talk to him. Tell him where I was going. Give him the option, she said, so he could know and choose for himself. I don’t know. I’d rather do all this on my own. It isn’t like he’s going to turn around and ask me to marry him. He’s not that type. But he knows about the baby, so maybe I should talk to him before I go.

I’ve been having weird dreams, which isn’t surprising. I dreamed the baby was stuck in a postbox and I couldn’t get it out. When I looked down through the slat, I could see it all curled up on top of the letters like it was floating, way down at the bottom of a well. Then I dreamed that the baby was a package and I was wrapping it up with paper and string and worrying about the postage. What does it cost to post a baby? The woman at the post office was being difficult, and then, when I finally had it all wrapped and stamped, I realized I didn’t know how to address it. Isn’t that odd?

I hope this letter gets through – well, gets out of Montreal, I mean. I keep thinking about all those letterboxes. Sorry this is all so disjointed and rambling. That’s just how I’m feeling myself. I hope you are well. Thanks for the description of Aberlady Bay. It’s nice to think about things continuing on just as they always have – the wild flowers, the rabbits and the deer.

Lots of love,

Felicity

* * *

Montreal, April 1969

Dear Mum and Dad,

I will be moving soon. Yesterday, I went to the campus with Margaret to talk with some of her friends about the camp – they looked like a bunch of radicals with long hair and jeans, but they were kind. One of them had lived at the camp last summer and the other – Annie – was friends with the folk who started it up. She says she goes back and forth a lot to help them out. I asked if it was a cult or anything, but both girls said no. Annie said the folks who started it were Christians and there are some hippies now, too. Some folk are radical, but not everyone. It’s a real mix and it’s just a good place to be.

She showed me photos of the farmhouse where the midwife lives. Just a humble log house, really Canadian with a porch along the front, and a swing and gardens, too. They grow lots of food, and anyone who wants to can share in the meals. It’s about three hours away from Montreal, which sounds good to me.

Margaret’s going to be moving, too. Not far, but also to somewhere pretty different. She’ll be out along the St Lawrence Seaway in one of the new villages, living in her grandmother’s old house. When the province flooded the Long Sault Rapids ten years ago and the Seaway went through, whole villages were abandoned and people relocated, but some houses were moved instead. Margaret’s grandmother’s house was one of those – picked up and planted in a new village made from old homes. The Hydro Company promised the process would be gentle and everything would be safe. Even said they could leave the kitchen cupboards as they were, with all the plates and bowls still inside. It was that easy. The Hartshorne House Mover would arrive on the Thursday. All the family needed to do was pack a change of clothes and wait a day or two for their house to be delivered to New Town 2 where it would be built on a new foundation supplied by the Hydro Company. Safe and sound. Her grandmother worried – she hadn’t cradled the family china all the way from Ireland thirty years before to be smashed up by a machine now. But her grandfather took the company at their word. Even filled a teacup and left it on the kitchen table to see what would happen. That was Tuesday. But when the Hydro men came by on Wednesday and cut all the elms behind the house, he stood on the porch and cried. Margaret’s grandmother knew then that everything was changing.

Last winter, she passed away after eight years on her own. Margaret said that neither of them really felt settled after the move. They’d talked of moving to the city to be near their sons, but never got around to it. Margaret’s glad because it’s nice to have a family house to return to.

It would make me dizzy, I think. A house you know in a strange new place with different views out of the windows and a different piece of sky overhead. Margaret told me that when she was small, she used to help her grandmother dig potatoes in the garden behind the summer kitchen and they stored them for the winter in a dry root cellar with a red trapdoor. Now, the garden and the cellar are both under the river, but Margaret says she doesn’t mind. She told me she likes walking along the new shore. Everything still there, she says, but also washed away. You can see where the old highway runs right into the water. And Dad, it’s not far from your whales – only 10 miles or so. I suppose if there were more bones still buried, then the waters have covered them again. Margaret says where there used to be hills, now there are islands and if I go for a visit, she’ll take me out in a canoe to see. But that will have to wait until after the baby.

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