We’re like all shook up. But we sit there spooning up our grub like it’s just a real fun time we’re having, and the next thing you know we’re sitting on an airstrip somewhere in Labrador, an army base or something, and we’re like stuck there for twelve whole hours, the toilet malfunctioning, and then—”
“Aunt Daisy’s tired, I think,” Victoria hummed.
He fell instantly silent. Gnawed on his knuckle bones, yawned hugely, glanced about.
Victoria burned with shame. She knew how her aunt must feel about this young man, his hair flowing around his shoulders like a cape of fur, his boyish narrative masking his brilliance, his extraordinary tenderness transformed to male insouciance. The stewardess, at last, brought around blankets and pillows and dimmed the lights, and they all three pretended to sleep. Victoria could hear her aunt’s jagged breathing, almost a sob, and understood that this elderly person beside her longed with all her soul to be home in her Florida condo, to be anywhere but where she was, riding the night Atlantic with the little nightlight gleaming on the window frame and across her eyelids.
Victoria, the whole of her terrible radar on duty, could sense, too, the waves of sadness, of failure, emanating from Lewis Roy’s stiff body. Under the secrecy of her woolen blanket she reached sideways for his hand, found it trembling, and held it tight. She had never touched him before; he really was her instructor and she his student; they were not, then, on a footing of intimacy.
After a while she reached out her other hand and placed it on her elderly aunt’s tense wrist, saying with the pressure of her fingertips: everything’s going to be all right, trust me.
In this way, joined together by the dolorous stretched arms of Victoria Flett, the three of them exchanged one continent for another. They may have slept a few winks during the night. Each of them believed they lived on a fragile planet. Not one of them knew what the world was coming to.
The Orkney Islands are low-lying, green, cultivated, covered with winding roads and with sheep who picturesquely graze on sloping meadows, forming a tableau that could have been painted by a watercolorist two hundred years ago, three hundred years ago. Behind and beneath this pastoral scenery lie prehistoric ruins — villages, forts, cairns, burial chambers, and standing stones which might, or might not, be astronomical observatories. There are Iron Age remains, too, another layer. And the Norse monuments, ninth century. Also the medieval, the feudal, the monastic.
And other more contemporary additions — for superimposed upon the ancient and the bucolic are today’s small humming Orcadian factories modestly producing such specialties as Orkney cakes (delicious) or Orkney cheeses; then there are the craft enterprises, knitting for the most part (but this is sadly in decline), the tourist thrust (booming), and the always present background buzz of daily commerce and professional necessity — grocers, stationers, lawyers, clergymen, what have you.
None of this is what Victoria’s Great-aunt Daisy had expected.
Moorland, bog, heather was more what she’d had in mind. The Orkney houses lay strewn about in a dozen straggling villages or in the two main towns, Kirkwall and Stromness. Even Victoria was surprised to see the hundreds of townish houses, so solidly built, so plain. She looked at the unrevealing facades of these houses and imagined women inside, standing in front of mirrors, considering themselves, or men pulling sweaters over their heads, flattening down their hair. Hardly anyone seemed to be out and about. Of course it was early in the day. Of course there was a fierce wind blowing off the sea. Rain pelted down. Despite this, Victoria and her aunt and Lewis Roy were standing in the churchyard at Stromness reading tombstones. It was Victoria, shouting, who discovered:
A holy lyf a hapie end
The Soul to Christ doth send
Where its best To be at rest
Magnus Flett, born 1584, died 1616
For some reason this inscription made all three of them double over with laughter; it seemed Flett was a common Orkney name; Fletts came popping up everywhere, not only Magnus but Thomas Flett, Cecil Flett, Jamesina Flett, Donaldina Flett; the Flett family were the undisputed kings and queens of the cemetery.
The rain showed no sign of abating, and after a minute Lew took the two women by the arm and led them across the street to a tea shop where they sat out the storm, keenly aware of each other.
“What kind of man was your father-in-law, Mrs. Flett?” Lewis posed this question in a social voice, while spreading butter on a floury scone.
“Well, I’m not quite sure.”
“But you must have some kind of impression.”
“An unhappy man. Aggrieved. His wife left him, you see.”
“Aha!” Teasing. “One of those old-fashioned happy families.”
“His three sons took their mother’s part. They refused to see their father. They would have nothing to do with him.”
“And this made him bitter?”
“It drove him back here.” She swept a hand toward the window, taking in the drenched dark street, the black rain clouds. “When he was sixty-five years old. I can only think he must have been bitter.”
“But you don’t know for sure.”
“Actually—”
“Yes?”
“Actually, I never met my father-in-law.”
“I see.” Clearly he was taken aback.
“We never met, no. And I’ve always felt sorry about that. That we never met in his lifetime. I’ve always thought, well—”
“What?”
“That we might have things”—she paused—”to say to each other.”
“Not many women feel that way about their fathers-in-law.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Magnus Flett was my great-grandfather,” Victoria put in, wanting perhaps to share responsibility for the brokenness of families.
They drank their tea in silence. Then Lewis, determinedly bright, raised a celebratory tea cup and said, “Here’s to the bones of the real Magnus Flett! We’ll find him yet.”
“You made a rhyme,” said Victoria, who liked to see eagerness in others.
“Oh, well,” Victoria’s aunt said, her mouth smiling now, her chest full of heartbeats.
The next day the wind died down. The sun came on surprisingly strong, and tourists in shorts and T-shirts and summer dresses poured off the ferry and thronged the narrow streets of Stromness, eating ice-cream, buying postcards.
It was evening and the light still bright. Lewis and Victoria lingered over their shepherd’s pie at the Grey Stones Hotel dining room and explained to Victoria’s Aunt Daisy their reason for coming to Orkney. Lew pulled out a pencil and made a little sketch on his paper napkin, hastily executed, yet beautiful — or so it seemed to Victoria, who later folded the napkin carefully in two and pressed it in the back lining of her suitcase. The islands, Lew said, abounded with the fossil remains of small sea animals. But evidence of early plant life has been destroyed. The temperature of the earth was wrong, the plant structures too fragile. But back in Toronto, working with a set of computer-enhanced maps, the latest thing, he and Victoria had been investigating fossil patterns found in the north of Scotland, tracing a broad arc through the west of that country and up into Scandinavia — this arc, with just a little bending, passed through the outlying tip of Orkney’s Mainland, persuading them that certain rock formations at Yesanby, a few miles north of Stromness, held promise. The rock was different here, harder, so much so that islanders had traditionally gone to this remote point of land in search of millstones, the rest of the Orkney rock being too soft to serve. Lewis mentioned the Rhynie chert, he mentioned Middle Old Red sandstone. He explained how he had applied to the Science Council of Canada for a travel grant, and how he had assembled his equipment and his research team, a team that consisted of himself and Victoria Flett. The two of them had twenty-one days to poke around and write up their notes before the funds ran out. Both of them brimmed with optimism; biology, Lewis argued, will always frustrate the attempt of specialists to systematize and regulate; the variables are too many; the earth is sometimes withholding, yes, but more frequently generous.