“Behold the end of life!” A single ringing declaration. (You would think this shout from the land of the dead would have unsettled Mrs. Flett, but instead she falls under its spell, as though she has seen a vision or heard a voice speaking through that exclamation point, announcing a fountain of radiance glimpsed at life’s periphery.)
“Did you visit Magnus Flett?” Victoria asks each evening, returning sunburned and dusty from the rock beds of Yesanby.
“Tomorrow,” her aunt promises. “Tomorrow I’ll make arrangements.”
The both know — even Lewis Roy knows, watching her, mute and patient with her tea cup raised — that she is preparing herself against disappointment.
Mrs. Flett is discovering that the Orkney greenness is deceptive.
What looks like yards of fertile black earth is only a thin covering over beds of layered rock. Rock is what these islands are made of, light shelfy limestone, readily split into flakes and flags, and easily worked; it’s everywhere. Each farm, it seems, has its own miniquarry, and the tools of quarrying — hammer, point, and klurer — are part of every farmer’s equipment. There being but little wood available, stone flags are used for roofs, for fences, for picnic tables and benches, for milestones and markers, bringing a smile to Mrs. Flett’s face as she thinks of her grandchildren’s favorite television show, The Flintstones. She imagines that the farmhouses she and Mr. Sinclair drive past are furnished with stone chairs and stone tables and even beds and dressers of stone. She recalls that her father-in-law, Magnus Flett, came to Canada at the age of eighteen or nineteen, already a master of his trade: stonecutting.
He worked in the Tyndall quarry until he was sixty-five. A man of muscle and mechanical skills, a working man. By all accounts he had no softness to him. He spoke but little, according to his sons. Unyieldingness is the reputation he left behind. Narrowness. Stone.
He was literate; he could read the Bible or the mail order catalogue if needs be, but he was not a man who would ever have sat himself down to read a book. Mrs. Flett knows this without being told. No, it would not enter his head to read a book. Particularly not a novel. Not a novel by an Englishwoman named Charlotte Brontë.
And never that jewel of English literature, Jane Eyre.
Impossible.
“Do you want me to go with you when you visit Magnus Flett?” her niece offers, with something like reluctance.
“If you like,” Mr. Sinclair says to her, “I could accompany you when you call on Magnus Flett.”
“Tomorrow,” Mrs. Flett says. “Tomorrow.”
But the next day she and Mr. Sinclair drove out to the Yesanby site where Lewis and Victoria were at work.
The end of the road had fallen into disrepair, and they were obliged to park the car at the East Bigging crossroad and walk half a mile over the moors to the rugged promontory. Victoria, seeing them approach, waved both her arms and called out an exuberant welcome, her cries blending with the squawks of seabirds and the roar of the waves coming in below.
The sun on the rocks was brilliant. And rising up at the edge of the shining, slippery stone terraces was the famous God’s Gate which Victoria had described to her aunt, an immense natural archway through which every seventh or eighth wave came loudly crashing. (Fifty years earlier, two amateur photographers were said to have climbed into the aperture, and, before the eyes of their wives and children, been swept out to sea.)
It seemed to Mrs. Flett, blinking in the late afternoon sunlight, that she was all at once dwarfed by the hugeness around her: the overwhelming height of the rock formation, the expanse and violence of the sea below, and the high wide-spreading desolate moorland; at the edge of her vision, outside the boom and wash of the sea winds, was Mr. Sinclair’s parked car, no more than a speck on the horizon. Mr. Sinclair himself stood a few feet away, his large arms folded peacefully as wings across his broad chest, at home in his magisterial body. This lightness she felt! — her body suspended between the noise and the immensity of the world — what was it?
She was unable for a minute to put a name to the gusty air blowing through her, softening her face into a smile, and then it came to her: happiness. She was happy.
Mrs. Flett’s favorite niece, Victoria, and Lewis Roy, a man whose existence she had known nothing about two weeks ago, scrambled like insects on the plates of outcropping rock, and scraped with their tiny tools at the surface of the hidden world, hoping for what? To find a microscopic tracing of buried life. Life turned to stone. To bitter minerals. Such a discovery, they had told her, would be enormous in its implications — it excited them just thinking about such enormity — but at the same time the proof of discovery could be held lightly in the palm of a hand, a small rock chip imprinted with the outline of a leaf. Or a primitive flower. A trace, even, of bacteria, fine as knitting, the coded dots of life.
So far, however, and with fewer than half a dozen days remaining, they had turned up nothing.
During the long dark nights in the Grey Stones Hotel, Victoria lies in Lewis Roy’s arms.
She waits until her aunt is sleeping soundly, then rises, feels about in the dark for her slippers, and makes her way noiselessly down the narrow passage to Room 5, where Lewis lies, ready. There is an element of French farce in her nightly excursions, and Victoria values this theatrical frisson and adds it to the mound of her present happiness. The dim corridor, with its gleams and shadows, its antique chest, mirror, and grandfather clock, is softly carpeted, and its dimensions are not entirely lost to darkness since Mr. Sinclair has thoughtfully provided a rosy little nightlight for his guests’ convenience. There is just enough light, in fact, for Victoria to make out the words on a pretty Victorian plate which is mounted on the wall next to the bathroom.
Happiness grows at our own fireside and is not to be picked in strangers’ gardens
Firesides! Gardens! Tip-toeing down the hall at two a.m. and pausing to read these words, she wants to snort with laughter.
Both she and Lewis believe the verse to be an admonition against the kind of rapture they have uncovered these last few days.
Night after night, in the crisp white sheets of Mr. Sinclair’s genteel establishment, they go deeper and deeper into that mystery, sleeping and waking, and bringing to life those parts of themselves they had thought stunted, disentitled. A year ago, even a month ago, each would have scorned the accidental convergence of island air, soft sunlight, long days — and the possibility of scientific miscalculation, even failure — convincing themselves that the rewards of erotic love were no more than a temporary recompense, a consolation for the poor in spirit.
She has said nothing to Aunt Daisy about her discovery, or about her plans for the future, knowing as she does her greataunt’s concern over her son Warren, his two divorces, and now Alice’s bitter separation from her husband, Ben. Victoria suspects that Aunt Daisy — though how can she know this for sure? — might endorse the sentiments of the Victorian wall plate, believing that, all things considered, the gardens of strangers are more likely to bring harm than happiness.