Still, hers is the only account there is, written on air, written with imagination’s invisible ink.
Having read his Bertrand Russell, Barker Flett has long since cast off a belief in conventional morality, but, as a senior civil servant in His Majesty’s government (Executive Director of Agricultural Research), he is compelled to observe a certain level of propriety.
A young woman under his roof? How would this look?
A niece, he might explain, but Daisy is not really his niece. His ward? No, his guardianship has never been formalized. What is he to do? How will he explain her presence.
It occurs to him that his housekeeper, Mrs. Donaldson, who comes in daily to clean and to prepare him a cold supper, might be prevailed upon to stay overnight during the period of Daisy’s visit.
He asks her, delicately setting out the problem. She bluntly refuses. She has her own family, after all, to go home to; what he asks is impossible.
He sighs, immensely relieved. And then he begins to worry once again. His life with Daisy has not even begun, and already there are all these vexing problems to be dealt with.
“In one hour I will be there,” Daisy writes in her travel journal, underlining “there” three times.
It is unbearably hot on the train, but she has managed, with the conductor’s assistance, to open a window. As a result her hair is blowing about wildly, and the fading sunlight shines through it, so that she appears to be wearing a kind of halo or else a hat made of burnt fur.
To still the loud beating of her heart she stows her journal away safely, or so she thinks, and replaces her gloves. She holds herself upright, rigid. A stillness that purifies. Barbara Stanwyck with a head of foxy hair.
She is overwhelmed at times — and this is one of those times — with the wish to ask forgiveness.
Now darkness is coming on gradually, and the Ontario sky fills up with diamond dust. These particles, she senses, have nothing to do with her. The villages that rush by are foreign and unyielding. They seem to turn their backs on her. At the end of the railway car, on the other side of the aisle, four men are playing a noisy game of cards — rummy, most likely — and so engaged are they in this cheerful amusement and in the rough pleasure of each other’s company, that she might be snatched suddenly from their midst and they would never so much as glance in her direction.
She knows that when the train arrives in Ottawa, all of these men will hurry off into the contained nexus of their real lives, while she is about to hurl herself into whatever accident of fortune awaits her. She will accept “it” without protest, without question, for what choice has she?
She is powerless, anchorless, soft-tissued — a woman. Perhaps that is the whole of it, that she is a woman. Yes, of course.
It occurs to her that she should record this flash of insight in her journal — otherwise she is sure to forget, for she is someone who is always learning and forgetting and obliged to learn again — but the act of recording requires that she remove her gloves, rummage through her bag for her pen and for the notebook itself. This is more than she is capable of doing. And so she forces herself to sit quietly, her pulse racing, as the train rolls into the gentle, shadowy outskirts of Ottawa, capital of the Dominion (Do-min-i-on) of Canada.
He is at the station a full ten minutes before her arrival. He has allowed for this, knowing he’ll need a cushion of calm in which to arrange his thoughts, his body too. “Well, well,” he plans to say to her, draining the drama off the moment with his heartiness, “so you’ve made it all in one piece, have you?”
Or something about the heat. Or perhaps? — he doesn’t know what. Everything seems suddenly at risk. Even his long legs have gone unsteady.
He wouldn’t dream, though, of sitting down on one of those long, varnished benches. No, he pulls himself straight, his shoulders, his back, his hands clasped behind him, and paces the marble floor of the concourse. He pauses, staring up into the dome. A handsome building, yes indeed. He examines it carefully, its decorated frieze and fluted granite pillars with their classical pediments. He memorizes these stone surfaces, staring hard as though he may never again have an opportunity to see this clearly.
His life is on the cusp of change. Love, that sudden dissolving of art and nature, of language itself, is about to overcome his senses.
He breathes deeply, and glances up at the station clock. Yes, the train is on time. On the minute. Precisely. This fact he finds deeply satisfying. Also worrying.
And there she is. Coming toward him.
Some men are described as having an eye for an ankle. Not Barker Flett. He has no eye at all. Nor any notion of what is owed him or what he may desire. This moment, this meeting, was arranged years earlier.
Here she comes, her gloved hand already extended as she moves forward, and for a moment he believes he may actually take that hand in his and shake it, a social gesture, murmuring: how nice to see you, and was the train crowded? Did you find a place next to the window? Are you exhausted?
Instead he takes her in an embrace. Not a real embrace, for there is no question of their bodies coming together. No. His hands reach out and lightly graze her shoulders, then travel down to her upper arms (these arms bare below the elbows and slightly damp), then moving upward again to her face, touching it with his fingertips, cradling it. He has forgotten all his resolve; his blood is on fire.
Her knees are shaky after so many hours on the train. The sudden light of the station unbalances her, and she can think of nothing to say.
“Daisy?” he murmurs across the combed crown of her hair, making a question of it. Almost a sob. He forgets what he said next.
At his age he could not face the fret and fuss and jitters of a fullscale wedding, and so they were married quickly, quietly, in a judge’s chambers. August 17th, 1936. The telegram dispatched to Cuyler and Maria Goodwill in Bloomington minutes before the ceremony was framed in the past tense: “We have just been married. Letter to follow.”
Both Daisy and Barker Flett felt cowardly about this announcement, and awaited a reply with some embarrassment.
The erotic realm is our nearest approach to the wild half of our nature. So thinks Barker Flett. There is a part of the human self that is unclassifiable. This is what he must learn to accept. And to be open to visitations of ardor without the thought of shame stealing in through every window. Why must everything be flattened by the iron of goodness and badness? Why?
He confesses to Daisy that he has in the past paid money for the attentions of women. She, in turn, resting her fingers lightly on his hair, confesses her true state: that she is untouched (her word), that something went wrong in her brief marriage to Harold A.
Hoad; she’s not sure what it was, but she may possibly have been at fault in the matter. He does not want to hear this; at this time in his life he needs all Daisy’s strong feelings for himself.
These kinds of confessions, these points of honor, are almost always comic when viewed up close — and equally comic when viewed from a distance. All that unnecessary humiliation and preening honesty. And afterward, regret. Was any of it really necessary? Of course not.
One thing puzzles Barker Flett: he cannot understand how Daisy’s nine years of widowhood were spent (in much the same way Daisy is unable to imagine how her father’s youth in Stonewall was passed — year after year after year). He can picture Daisy darting about Bloomington, well dressed, nicely shod, prettily gloved, a healthy, hearty American girl who swims, walks, dances, and plays golf. But what did she do?