The Heart Beats in Secret

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.