My hands remain clenched upon the steering wheel. “Very kind of you, but no.”
We turn onto Potter’s Road, on the sunny south end of the island, where my new home — eighteen waterfront acres and an ancient house — no doubt is eagerly awaiting the arrival of its new squire.
“That’s your neighbour Mrs. Blake’s place,” says Stoney. “It’s sort of like the local zoo, chickens, pigs, ducks, sheep, and they crap all over. You need any fence work done, don’t hesitate.”
A rambling frame structure with upper-floor dormers and a huge balcony. Nearby, cedar sheds, pens, corral, greenhouse, a small barn. The front yard is (so difficult not to paraphrase Wordsworth) a yellow sea of daffodils. A huge garden, well fenced, with spring flowers scattered among the rows of seedlings. Spring lambs rollick in her meadow. Several goats. Pigs. Mrs. Blake, doubtless a stern Orwellian, keeps a bustling animal farm.
“She lives alone?”
“Since her old man died. Had a heart attack a few years ago. Couldn’t stand the pressure.”
“Of what?”
“Living on this island.”
But I note his disarming grin. “It ain’t so bad,” he says.
Parallel ruts lead us past my gate through a grove of thick-waisted Douglas firs into a clearing where stands my own house, a two-storey frame structure, much gingerbread and leaded glass, but aging, tired, the wooden veranda like its new owner sagging at hips and stomach. The garage is in even sadder state.
“I do building, too, all phases of it,” Stoney says. “Renovations. Place could also do with a paint job.”
My companions help me unload my boxes and my chair. The house has not been lived in for several months, and smells musty, but the lowering April sun streams in through the west-facing windows, lending it an aureate richness. The house came as is, with some old but serviceable furnishings, a substantial fireplace, and all utilities including a freezer that makes an irregular grunting sound.
Outside, a terraced stone patio leads to a yard where a giant arbutus tree swirls her skirts, thence to a rock-strewn beach and a private dock that juts into a cosy bay where waterfowl forage amidst the kelp. At one side of the house is a garden plot protected by a sturdy deer fence. On the other side are a lily pond and a small orchard with apple and plum trees in redolent bloom, a sight not detracted from by the busy pecking beaks of chickens, escapees from the zoo, presumably, of Mrs. Blake.
Impotent I may be, but I am still capable of love, and this emotion rendered me quite helpless on my one previous visit to this site. I had seen a small advertisement under Country Homes and Acreages. I popped over on a weekend. The real estate lady, a creature of utterly unbearable sweetness, had me at her mercy as I fumbled for my pen.
“Fruit trees need pruning.” Stoney checks the woodshed and finds it only a third full. “You wanna cord or two, I also sell wood.”
Somehow, in my bemused and innocent state, I find myself contracting with this eager benefactor for some fencing as well as structural work to shore up the veranda. Nothing to it, I am advised: “You toss in a couple of big crossbeams there, and jack that old rotting timber out.” Stoney promises to start work early tomorrow.
They cannot be persuaded to be chauffeured home — Stoney knows a shortcut — and the two men wander across the sheep-cropped field, pausing to examine a broken fence railing before pushing on through the trees.
So I have met several of the island characters, the so-called yokels about whom my son-in-law sternly warned. Now begins the process of my own yokelization, the bumpkinizing of Arthur Ramsgate Beauchamp, Q.C. I take off my jacket. I gather some sticks for the fire. I situate my club chair in front of the hearth. I put water on for tea. I rummage through my tapes for the Boccherini cello concerto. I locate the collected libellus of Catullus. O quid solutis est beatius curis. Ah, what is more blessed than to put cares away.
Gowan Cleaver, Esq.,
Barrister and Solicitor
Dear Gowan,
It is about nine o’clock on New Year’s Eve as I begin this dissertation. My subject is the concept of innocence. I shall be exploring the variables of this complex conceit from a unique, personal point of view — that of one imprisoned within a nightmare from hell.
From time to time, I ask myself: Is this reality? Or do I suffer a mental disorder, a schizophrenia? Has a hereditary gene caused me suddenly to snap? (A second cousin believes he speaks regularly to God on a cellular phone.) Am I frozen forever into a state of paranoid delusion? Maybe I’m in an asylum — it’s called Western civilization and the inmates have taken over. That would explain why I keep hearing voices. They’re all saying, “How could this be happening to me?”
Gowan, I ask that question fifty times a day. God has yet to come up with a rational explanation. Does She have something against me? Was I too ambitious, too arrogant, too cruel to Professor Mallard in a recent book review?
These are the last lucid memories I hold: It is a brisk late-November day. I have just gone for an energetic hike through the university parkland. I’m happy. I’m tenured. I’m thirty-eight and I’m acting dean. I am back at work, in the library, content as a purring cat, reading the musty nineteenth-century cases I love. Enter Kimberley Martin. She says, “Promise to dance with me tonight?”
Cut. Twenty-four hours later. Close-up of Jonathan Shaun O’Donnell’s fingers being pressed into an ink pad by a ham-fisted cop. Script by Franz Kafka. A Hitchcock production.
Where did this damnable woman come from? The twilight zone? Straight from Satan’s stable?
I sense you may be finding me a little disconnected. I am alone, but not alone in spirit, for I am celebrating the end of the worst year of my life with a half-empty friend by the name of Jameson. My father, to whom Bushmills was mother’s milk, would disown me — if he had anything left to disown me with.
I am sorry to have been so long getting this off to you. I needed the whole month of December to clear my poor twirling brain. Then I had exams to mark. Life allegedly goes on.
You wanted some personal background. I think I shared my past with you many years and beers ago back in our student days. Do you remember when we argued that moot and I developed the hiccups? You were the only one who didn’t laugh. I’ve always liked you for that.
A quick c.v. ofJonathan Shaun O’Donnell. Born in County Fermanagh, in Ulster, and raised in the family estate until I was nine. You are aware that I am not proud to be the son of Viscount Caraway. Not just because of his extremism, though His Lordship’s occasional column in the Times expresses a politics that makes mine seem flaming bloody red in comparison.
Which it used to be, of course. You may recall that in our student days I was heavily into left-existential politics. A confused stew of Marx, Marcuse, and Sartre. When one is young, one hungers for utopias. As you get older, the shell around you hardens; you want its protection, you care less about the hungering masses. I presume that happened to me. Or do I bear the curse of my father’s DNA?
The latter, I suspect, is my therapist’s pet theory. Dr. Jane Dix — the Faculty Association referred her to me. She’s a hot-tempered Adlerian. Lots of encounter, although she prefers to call it reality therapy. Yes, I’m off to the couch doctor once a week. Kimberley Martin has driven your punchy client halfway to the cackle factory. I’m on a diet of Valium and whisky. I can’t sleep. I found myself watching a rerun of “The Beverley Hillbillies” last night. At three a.m.
Forgive me my digressions. Back to my family. My mother is only a year departed — but of course you were at the funeral. A sweet, frail woman who rescued herself — and me — from the tyrant of Lough Neagh Close. I hear the estate has been shut down now, all but the west wing — His Lordship is nearly on the rims. Skint, as they say over there. The grounds were cruelty, the settlement handsome. Mother took custody of me, but my older brother, Bob, stayed with him. Bob doesn’t inherit the title, by the way; Father is only a life peer — Maggie Thatcher decorated him for doing absolutely nothing to stop the Troubles as commander of the Royal Ulster Rifles. Mother never remarried, but she moved to Canada and sent me to the correct schools. St. Andrews in Toronto, UBC, Oxford, though she had some help from the late good-hearted Cecil Rhodes.