These were the bare outlines of my uncle’s life as I knew them. I was aware of gaps and missing years; episodes that blurred into one another; contradictions of time and place. What I knew, I knew imperfectly, and I was sometimes confronted with objects that showed the limits of my knowledge.
One evening, looking for a book to read, I found an album of photographs on one of the shelves in the library. They were of Patrick and my father some time in the 1950s. I knew instantly they had been taken in London, in winter or early spring. It was something about the colours. A rainy London day has a very specific palette. And the two brothers had the wintry, grey faces of early morning commuters. I turned the page, idly wondering who had taken the pictures, and saw two or three more, all in the same location (Wandsworth or Streatham Common?). These were all permutations of three people: Patrick, my father and my mother — looking improbably blonde and pretty. There were perhaps ten pictures of them, and the last two showed all three of them standing together. They were smiling awkwardly in the first — at whoever had been corralled into taking the picture — the second had been taken immediately after, and already the pose of the first had begun to dissolve, my father had turned away from the camera, my mother’s eyes were closed as she laughed and brushed her hair out of her face. Patrick’s hand was on her shoulder, and he looked absently across the frame.
The fact that Patrick had visited London came as a revelation. I didn’t recall his ever mentioning it. I knew he had travelled in Europe — the rest of the photos were snaps of various European capitals, and blurry ones that looked like they had been taken out of a train window (Poland? Russia?) — and I suppose that would make a visit to London inevitable, but neither he nor my father had ever said anything about it.
It was only a glimpse into a single afternoon of three lives, but it implied that the dimensions of my ignorance were vast.
For a few days, I got so caught up thinking about the past that I stopped paying attention to the present. When I came back to myself, it was with the dawning realisation that coming to Ionia had led me to a dead end. It wasn’t a flash of insight — a conversion — but something more slow-growing and deeply rooted: I couldn’t stay. Sooner rather than later, I knew I would have to move forward and that meant leaving the island. What I didn’t — couldn’t — foresee was that going forward would just lead me more circuitously into the past.
FIFTEEN
AT THE BEGINNING, when I wasn’t painting, I found myself odd jobs to do: I rooted around in the shed, planted vegetables and put up a bird feeder in Patrick’s Japanese maple tree. I harvested pears and peaches from my orchard and delivered some in a brown paper-bag to the Fernshaws with a note thanking them for their help on the day of my arrival. There was no one at home, so I left the bag on the steps of their house. I occasionally passed Nathan selling lemonade on the empty highway as I drove back and forth to the Colonial Market for milk and newspapers.
I made a point of stopping every time. He was unfailingly rude, which I began to enjoy in a strange way. It became one of the reliable features of my routine. I always pretended not to notice, and chatted happily to him when I pulled up to buy his lemonade. He never took off his headphones, but served me with the music leaking out of them into the sunshine.
My proprietorial zest for my new home soon waned. I found living in the house even more uncomfortable than I had anticipated. To stay there with time on your hands was to get sucked into the unwinnable war against entropy that Patrick had been waging halfheartedly for years. For every one thing I fixed, two more seemed to break. Or, the quest for the right tool would take me to another part of the house where I would uncover worse damp, more dangerous wiring, or an impassable mountain of crockery that had been stacked up because the cabinet it was intended for needed fixing.
If I was careful, the situation wouldn’t get any worse, but improvements were pretty much out of the question. House and owner had found themselves in a kind of stalemate between order and chaos and things had stayed that way for years. There might have been occasional skirmishes (grass-cutting, cleaning windows, taking trash to the dump), but no significant exchanges of territory.
Even though I intended to leave before the summer was up, I wanted to postpone my departure at least until I’d finished my first painting. It was also a way of deferring making a decision. I knew I needed time to figure out what to do next. If I went back to London, I would have nowhere to live until Mr Bakatin’s lease expired.
As a result, there wasn’t much incentive to work quickly. But I didn’t fully share Patrick’s talent for procrastination, and one Friday lunchtime in early August, I finished my picture. I hung it up in the summer kitchen; hammering the nail in gave me an illicit thrill. What would Mr Blair of the churchmen’s fund have to say about that? I wondered.
But standing back to look at the completed painting, I felt deflated. It could have been any stretch of coastal Massachusetts. It lacked the sense of menace that I felt up on the widow’s walk, where the disparity between the size of the ocean and the size of the island suddenly became clear.
I gave myself the rest of the day off — which meant a day away from the house. Getting out of the house was a little like coming off a nuclear submarine. Leaving my clothes at the laundromat in the local mini-mall, I was struck by its spaciousness and efficiency. Opening the washing machine, I half expected to be confronted by a collection of baseball cards, or a crate of empty jelly jars. Two weeks in Patrick’s house would have made a minimalist out of anyone. I wanted to spend an afternoon in an air-conditioned shopping mall, surrounded by clean glass and the smell of new sneakers.
The sky was clouding over as I drove into Westwich. The road curved past a handful of shingled houses, and for a couple of miles it was shaded with trees. These, and the stone walls that divided up the cleared land into fields, made me think of the Kent countryside — where many of the island’s first settlers had come from. There were still some orchards, but little of the countryside was agricultural. Some of the smaller houses had boats or lobster traps outside them, but the real income of the island came from tourists.
The islanders bitched about them — they drove too slowly or they drove too fast; they had too much money; they spoiled the views with obscenely large holiday homes — but there was no future on the island without them. Still, when motorists fought over parking spaces and rights of way, ‘I’ll still be here in September’ was sometimes used as a battle cry.
The traffic was backed up on the main road into Westwich. The bridge into the harbour had been raised to let an enormous yacht pass under it. Its sails were raised, but it was travelling under the power of its engines, and the canvas flapped uselessly in the light breeze. The people on deck were the bluebloods of Ionia’s visitors. Theirs was an exclusive lifestyle that centred on the marina and a handful of waterfront properties in fashionable parts of the island. There was a circuit of elite cocktail parties that sometimes counted the President among their guests. Ionians were openly proud that they hosted such grand visitors. It always baffled me that those people came at all. It must be something puritanical in the American character that finds a kind of rugged virtue in the chilly water and craggy beaches of Ionia. It’s nobody’s image of a holiday island. From the ferry, the original houses with their tiny seafront windows look as if they’re narrowing their eyes against the wind.