After Alice (9 page)

Revisionist Hugh.

Graham, perhaps because he was older, had treated it all ironically. There had been no sign, then, of the illness that had ambushed him in his later teens. No lapses in judgment, no blurring of fantasy and reality. Had there?

Names: Hugh was Major Sinclair; Graham was also a major, but had to be called The Sandman. What were the others? Richard, she thinks, was Lieutenant Clare, though there was some dispute over that, wasn't there? He wanted to be a major too. So he was allowed to keep his own name, though the rule was that one must assume a
nom de guerre
.

Walt was Sergeant Jones: Graham named him. Masao was Lieutenant Smith.

Masao, the orphaned nephew of the von Täler's foreman, the only dark face in the group.

Alice was Lady Pomona Vere de Vere. Graham's idea again.

Sidonie was called May Day. She had not, then, seen the joke. Mayday.
M'aidez
. Graham had said she was a heroic Japanese double agent. The others had been apt to leave her behind sometimes — to run on and leave her crying, her short, fat legs unable to keep up. Once they had tied her to a tree to stop her from either following them or tattling to their mothers.

It was Hugh who noticed Sidonie missing, after Alice and Masao and Richard Clare had captured her and tied her up; Hugh who had found her. She had untied herself, though. He had offered to carry her on his back, but she had refused, had stalked resolutely behind him.

Hugh says that he does not remember that. He says, “In those days, we children had our own parallel world, didn't we? Apart from the adult world. Not created by adults. And we wandered pretty freely.”

Yes.

They were, as children, permitted to wander the countryside pretty freely. It was theirs — by virtue of their fathers' ownership of the orchards, by virtue of their having tramped all over it, following Hugh.

Hugh says, “Remember Mussolini?”

Yes.

Mussolini, who lived in a tumble of rough slate blocks on the south face of Spion Kopje. (Spion Kopje: they didn't know how to spell it, and called it Spine Cop, or Spy Cop. A South African name, clearly; one of the first managers for the land company must have been fresh from the Boer War.)

Mussolini: enormously fat, as big around as Sidonie's arm, and probably long as she was tall. He had a good territory; the hill was pocked with groundhog and vole tunnels. He liked to sun himself on the largest boulder near the peak. Coming up the hill, they would stamp and smack their walking sticks on the ground, to give him warning. That was the safe thing to do. But Mussolini wouldn't hide or retreat; he merely coiled his dull-grey, diamond-patterned body tighter, watched them pass with glass-bead eyes. Alice and the other girls would shriek; even the boys went pale. Walt said the hairs all down his spine stood on end. Masao said that Mussolini smelled like hot metal.

Graham and Hugh had argued about whether their response to the snake was conditioned or innate. Sidonie thought she would like to watch Mussolini, to memorize his flat blunt snout, the scales, the graduated ivory beads of his rattle — to fix him in her mind as Richard Clare did with his charcoal pencil in his sketch book. Mussolini was simple energy, she thought — not evil, but not good either — only a length of thick muscle.

When he left for his boarding school — he'd have been fifteen, maybe? — Hugh had called Sidonie and Walt for a meeting. He marked each of them on the inside of their elbows with a sooty thumbprint and told them to be observant. They should continue patrols, recruitment, training, and report to him. And especially keep an eye on Mussolini.

Hugh laughs. “The serpent in the garden. It's a wonder none of us died a premature death, hiking up Kopje, with those rattlers.”

And then he's abruptly silent, as if realizing what he has said.

Hugh drives her
here and there, up and down the valley, from Vernon to Oliver, north to Sicamous and Salmon Arm, west to Kamloops.

When Adam had come here with her, on their honeymoon in 1963, he had said: It looks like Italy. But it's all too new and temporary. Like people never meant to stay. None of the buildings are over thirty years old.

She supposes that there hadn't been the materials or the labour fifty or a hundred years ago to build permanently. Not the money. Adam had been concerned, as a young architect, with matters of culture and structures. What is culture, he had asked, if it does not leave permanent artifacts? What can be measured?

“What would you say is the culture of the valley?” she asks Hugh.

“I suppose it's let me do my own thing; everyone else can sink or swim. Look how the ridings have always voted.”

“That's an ethos, Hugh, not a culture.”

“You're right. Though ethos is part of culture, of course. That's a hard one. I guess the culture has changed. When we were young, it was all transplanted English village, wasn't it, Sidonie? Women's Institute teas and flower competitions.”

“Colonial, then. Your mother's hats,” Sidonie says.

“Exactly. And the schoolteachers and doctors always Scots.”

“Terrible,” she says to Hugh, “when you think of it. The way we were raised, privileged Europeans. The snobbery. It was like a plantation.”

“Do you think so? Aren't all societies the same, conquering, transplanting, then finally giving in to the local rootstock, getting assimilated? And anyway, how're you going to do something like orcharding without cheap labour? That means immigration and infrastructure, and the Europeans do that better. Democracy is a European idea. It's lucky the British were in charge. It could have been much worse.”

“But there were lots of German-speaking people around. The Knopfs, the Klopfs, the Getzkes and Bolskes and Mannskes.”

“They came later,” Hugh says. “In the early 50s. Don't you remember?”

Yes.

She remembers now — she would have been perhaps nine, in fourth grade, in a school that has suddenly expanded to include dozens of new arrivals. Who were these children? She remembers them as alarming, because strangers. The younger ones spoke English without an accent, but the older ones had heavy accents, and limited vocabulary. Strange clothing sometimes — cut-down women's and men's woolen things, and strange names, though these were quickly shortened and altered to Mike, John, Betty. For a while, they were regarded with suspicion, but after a few months, only the poorer of the original children, those partially marginalized themselves, kept up the term
bohunk
. But even people who considered themselves well-bred used the term DP.

Germans expelled from Poland, she guesses they must have been.

She remembers, in the spring, when she walked up the hill from the school, the sounds of saws and hammers, the odours of fresh timber, are everywhere: a spring chorus, like the frog ponds. A businesslike sound, a let's-get-down-to-it sound. A clean sharp smell, like the smell of the bath house, only yellower.

Her father had been pleased: good clean immigrants, he'd said. They'll contribute to society.

But Sidonie and Alice both pretended, suddenly, that they did not understand German, when the new children spoke to them.

A shame presses on her. The past is not a comfortable place to visit.

They picnic on a steeply sloping hill planted with vines above the blue, blue lake. It's only March, but the earth is already pleasantly warm, the sun like heated honey. They have stopped at the European deli and bakery, have bought cold meats, bread, chocolate: have purchased wine from the same vineyard they are looking over.

She says, “Adam thought it looked like Italy.”

“It does look like parts of Italy, here,” Hugh says. “Also parts of Chile. And Turkey. And California. The lake and the hills and the orchards and vineyards. Even the houses, the way they're built on the hillsides, and all stucco. And the tourists.”

“A culture of sunshine.”

He laughs. “
Oh, for a beaker of the warm South
,” he says. “Look, Sidonie: the buttercups.”

So there are, a slope of buttercups, shimmering in the bone-coloured, snow-bleached grass.

She recites their botanical names from memory.

“You should have been a botanist,” Hugh says. “You should have come back here and worked in botany. You should never have left us.”

He has stretched himself out perpendicular to her on the tartan car blanket, and put his white head in her lap. She doesn't move.

“Hugh, you left long before I did,” she says. Sensibly.

“You used to tell my mother that you wanted to go to Italy,” Hugh says. “It must have been a little after you told her that you were going to marry me.”

Yes. She remembers. Mother, her mother, sewing new drapes for Mrs. Inglis's new picture window. The Inglises' house had been undergoing renovations: a new wing added, the mullioned windows replaced with plate glass and the hardwood floors covered with linoleum and wall-to-wall carpeting. Everything painted too, and the old dining-room table and sofa and chairs, with their curvy legs ending in wonderful, terrifying animal feet, being sold at the auction and replaced by new Danish wood.

Mrs. Inglis was getting wall-to-wall carpeting in a shade called “Siena Wood,” which Mr. Inglis says is rust, really. The drapes Mother was sewing were a complementary blue: the blue was called “Lake Maggiori,” and Sidonie had thought it was the colour of
their
lake on a certain kind of day: an overcast day in September, when the cloud was very high and pearly.

Mrs. Inglis had said that Siena and Lake Maggiori were places in Italy, that she had been to Italy; she was on holiday there once, as a girl. “Napoli!” she had said — Sidonie can see her now, rolling her eyes upward, clasping her hands, parodying herself. “The art! The architecture! The beautiful young men!”

Napoli was Naples, she had known. Father has been there, too. Father had his pocketbook stolen by bandits in Naples. They are all bandits there, he had said. Father was attacked by the bandits in an alley where he had parked his motorbike. But Mussolini cleaned up the bandits, Father says. That was a long time ago that Father was in Italy: before he came to Canada.

Italy was in books, but Canada isn't, very much. And Marshall's Landing, never.

That shade of blue could be called Okanagan Lake blue. But who would know what that meant?

Mrs. Inglis had said, “Sidonie, dear, come and sit by me,” and Sidonie had realized that she had somehow crept under the machine and was holding onto the iron supports.

She remembers that it was difficult to refrain from mentioning that Mrs. Inglis had eaten four Nice biscuits. She knew not to do that, though she hoped Mrs. Inglis wouldn't eat the whole row that Alice had arranged, overlapping like fish scales, on the plate. Nice were Sidonie's favourite biscuits, with their odd vanilla-almond flavour, which called so much attention to itself and then disappeared, just as you tried to identify and hold onto it. And Mother didn't buy Peek Freans very often, so the old blue tin with its pictures of King George V and Queen Mary was only brought out for company.

“I think I'm going to go to Italy one day,” the little girl Sidonie had said to Mrs. Inglis.

“Fancy!” Mrs. Inglis had said. “What is it about Italy, all of a sudden? Graham wants to go there too.” Her glance, Sidonie noticed, was fixed on the last Nice biscuit. Sidonie couldn't help herself. Her hand shot out and snatched the biscuit, and it was entirely in her mouth before she knew what has happened. Mother had been mortified.

But Mrs. Inglis had laughed.

There was something sweet and lush and glowing about Mrs. Inglis: a warmth, like an orchard in the sun. Sidonie had wanted to grow up to be like Mrs. Inglis, with her auburn hair, her soft, curvy front and slim legs, her easy laugh, her lack of fear. She remembers thinking: Mother likes Alice best. But I have Mrs. Inglis. I am hers, and she is mine.

Sitting among the buttercups with Hugh's head in her lap, she thinks: I must be careful not to confuse my affection for Hugh's mother with my friendship with Hugh.

That night, she is awakened by a noise: something like a stone dropping and rolling across the floor has disturbed her. She can hear, then, Hugh's bed shifting, Hugh muttering, his feet padding on the hardwood. He has knocked something off his nightstand — likely a pill bottle, a water glass. More muttering, and shuffling, as if he has gotten down on his hands and knees to retrieve something from under the bed.

Should she go knock on his door, offer to help? But the image of the two of them, in pajamas, hair awry, minus glasses and bridges and who knows what, crawling around the floor, alarms her. She stays where she is, in her high firm bed. But then she can't sleep.

It occurs to her now that she does not quite see the point of the reminiscing on which she and Hugh spend so much of their evenings. What is it that Hugh wants? A pleasant story? She is not the right companion for him, in that case. She has serious misgivings. She enjoys Hugh's company: he is intelligent; they can have a conversation. But she does not see eye to eye with him.

Then Hugh leaves, flying back to Toronto. They have had a pleasant time, she thinks, but she is glad to see him go. She is glad to be on her own again.

Heading out for a walk, she meets up with her neighbour, and thinks again: she timed her leaving to intercept me. The little flat-faced dog licks her ankle.

“I see your husband is off again,” the woman says, chattily.

“He is not my husband.”

Perhaps her tone has been too abrupt, for the woman colours and says, a little sharply, “Boyfriend, then.”

Sidonie waits. She is good at waiting, making people say more than they intend to.

Of course, for both Alice and her, there must have been a kinship taboo in place. They had grown up too much with Hugh and Graham to consider them as romantic partners. And vice versa. Though there had been other objections, other barriers, as well. She remembers the odd conversation with Mother, in Mother's last illness:
Alice could have married anyone,
Mother had said.
We didn't need
Betty Inglis trying to foist off that Gordon Defoe on us
.
She thought she
was better than us, you know
.
But Cecil Inglis came here as a manager
for the land company
.
Somehow he arranged to get paid in shares when
the company was doing badly in the 30s, and he traded those shares for
that big parcel of land that they called Sans Souci
.
Really, they weren't
anyone
.
Betty was a soldier's wife, and Cecil was just an officer in India
.
They'd had to leave
.
They were fresh off the boat
.