They sat for a picnic in the long grass. A cold wind blew in. She could feel it rifling through her.
She could go now, thought Emily. Return to Newfoundland, alone. She would face the days, alone. She would write. Find a small content. A graceful levity.
The lake was tidal. It seemed to stretch forever to the east, rising and falling like a breathing thing. A pair of geese went across the sky, their long necks craned. They soared in over the cottage and away. They looked as if they were pulling the color out of the sky. The movement of clouds shaped out the wind. The waves came in and applauded against the shore. The languid kelp rose and fell with the swells. She could be forgiven the thought that she was already stepping back towards the sea.
1978
darkdown
HE IS, IN ALL RESPECTS, A PRETTY GOOD SHOT. PLENTY OF power. He can whip a forehand from the back of the court. If he wanted to, he could cover the back line in two or three leaps. But he is more of a loper. His lofty head. His mass of blond curls. An advertisement for ease. His shirt hangs off him, his shorts hang off him, his hangdog features, too. Even his socks have a slouch. Missing their Slazenger. Lord, what she would not give for a gentle cattle prod to wake her grandson for a moment, watch him come to life on the other side of the court. When he returns the ball he does so with a fair amount of accuracy. Can put some sting on a ball when he wants to. Not a bad backhand either. Lottie has seen him slice with artful backspin. A natural talent for the game, but a better one for daydreams. She tried once to engage him in the art of tennis as it related to angles, vectors, trajectories, percentages, any sort of arithmetic she could think of, but he wouldn’t take the bait. Nineteen years old and a fine young mathematician, but he will never storm the outer edges of Wimbledon.
She’s not exactly Billie Jean King herself, but she can still stand and knock the ball back and forth near the net. Especially on a late-summer’s evening with the light still lengthy on the northern sky. Nine in the evening. Sunset still a half hour away.
She can feel the rattle through her bones when she catches one of his returns on the volley. All the way up her fingers, along her wrist, through her elbow, into her shoulder. She is not a fan of these new metal racquets. In the old times they had fishtails, fantails, flattops. Wooden presses. Immaculate workmanship. Now it’s all sleek lines and metal heads. One of these days she’ll return to her old trusty Bancroft. She leans backwards and scoops another ball from the bucket, eases it along the middle line towards Tomas, a smidgen to his left. He watches it bounce blithely past. She should tell him to wake his carcass up, but it is enough that he has come out here with his ancient grandmother in her white knee-length skirt, to knock a ball around. The sight of him alone is easy on the eye. He’s a long handsome drink of water, with Hannah’s sweet face and his long-gone father’s Dutch stare. A little slice of Ambrose in him, too. The curls. A hint of chubby cheek. The bottle-green of the eyes. All the more so because he does not know it: if she told him he was a heartbreaker, he’d be stunned. He’d rather write a theorem for desire. There’s not a young lady around who wouldn’t swoon for him, but he’s more likely to be found in the university library, leafing about, trilling figures through his head. He wants to be an actuary of all things, a creature of predictions and possibilities, but this evening she would simply like to know the chance of him hitting another forehand.
—Get a grip! she shouts. Only six more left. Bring your left foot into it. Easy with your hip.
—All right, Nana.
—Pretend it’s rocket science.
Lottie reaches down for another ball. A slight twinge in her back. A whisper of genetics. A drop of sweat thickens over her lip. She straightens up. She is amazed to see Tomas, at the back of the court, leaning down to pull up his socks, all six foot two of him, beginning to bounce on his toes, the Björn Borg shuffle. She cannot help but chuckle. She rolls the white ball in her fingers, releases it and knocks it gently towards him, the ping off the strings, making sure it has enough of a bounce for him to come in beneath it, and he does, with great gusto. She expects him to miss it altogether, to swing empty, or to balloon it over the fence, but he connects with the ball, and not only that, but he turns his wrist over it, follows through with his shoulder, steps his left foot forward, brings every long inch of himself into the motion, and it whizzes past her at the net, a perfect height, a proper speed, and she turns to see it land, and although both of them know that it bounces inches outside the line, she shouts rather too loud: In!
ON THE DRIVE back to Belfast they are stopped at a checkpoint on the Milltown Road. A half dozen young soldiers, fresh-faced, camouflaged. Always a tingle of fear at the back of her neck. Tomas rolls down his driver’s-side window. They are, they say, checking licenses. Not normally a soldier’s job, but Lottie says nothing. The young soldiers are no older than Tomas himself. A bit scruffy and open-necked. Once upon a time they dressed smartly: shining brass badges and pipe-clayed belts.
One of them leans in the window and glances at her. A whiff of tobacco from him. She is hardly a vision in her wide white skirt and open cardigan, she knows, but she gives him a full smile and says: Anyone for tennis?
The soldier is not too fond of flippancy—no love, no deuce—and he walks the full length of the car, circles it slowly, checks the R sticker on the back, then touches his hand against the bonnet for heat, to see how far they have been driving. Since when might grandmother and grandson be a suspicion? Where might their rocket launchers be hidden? How likely is it that they are off down the Falls or the Shankill for a spot of punishment beating?
Not a word is exchanged and the soldier flicks his head. Tomas puts the car in gear, careful not to make too quick a getaway, towards the house just off the Malone Road.
IT HAS BECOME somewhat shabby over the years, though it has remnants of Victorian beauty. Redbrick. Bow windows. Three stories. Intricate lace on the curtains.
They step down the narrow path, amid the floribundas, the tennis bag over her shoulder. They stop at the cracked steps and he leans down to kiss her cheek.
—Night, Nana, he says, and his lips brush her ear. He has lived these past few months downstairs in the basement flat. Close enough to the university and far enough away from his stepfather. She watches him descend, a little gusto in his step, his blond curls darkening in the shadow.
—Not so fast, hey.
She has taken on many elements of the northern accent, though it is still bedrocked by her Newfoundland days, so there are times that it catches, and the music mixes, and she is not sure which is which anymore. Tomas trundles back up the steps, aware of what is coming. Their Wednesday ritual. She slips the twenty-pound bill into his hand, tells him not to spend it all in one bookshop.
—Thanks, Nana.
Always the quiet boy. Model airplanes. Adventure books. Comics. As a child he was always well-kept in his school uniform: shirt, slacks, polished shoes. Even now, in university, his scruffiness has a slight edge of stiff to it. She would like one day for Tomas to come home in one of those ripped-up T-shirts, with safety pins amok, or a bolt of a ring in his ear, show some proper rebellion, but she knows full well he will probably spend the money wisely, put it towards a telescope or a star map or some other such practicality. He might even put it away for a rainy day, hardly a good idea in this sodden city.
—Don’t forget to phone your mother and father.
—Stepfather.
—Tell them we’ll be out for the weekend.
—Ach, Nana, please.
He loves the cottage out at Strangford Lough, but dislikes his stepfather’s hunting weekend with a passion, poor boy. Hannah’s husband is a gentleman farmer, and he has arranged it for many years, first weekend in September, duck season. More of a Tuttle than the Tuttles themselves.
Tomas darts his eyes heavenward, smiles, ambles down the steps towards the garden flat. Glad now, she’s sure, to get away.
—Oh. And Tomas?
—Aye, Nana?
/> —Find yourself a girlfriend for crying out loud.
—Who’s to say I don’t already?
He grins and disappears. She hears the basement door close, and she climbs, alone, to the house. A scraggly dog rose runs up along the steps to the house. A city flower. A climber. Yellow with a small red center. Every bloom with its own little violence.
Lottie stops in the stained-glass doorway. Puts her key in the wobbly latch. The paint is chipping from around the letterbox, and the base of the door has begun to crack. Hard to fathom, but it is almost fifty years since she first stepped through these very doors. Back then it was all fine silverware and high bookcases and shelves lined with delicate Belleek china. Now it’s smoke-tarred lightbulbs. Water stains. Peeling wallpaper. She shouts out a greeting to Ambrose but there’s no reply. The door of the living room is slightly ajar. He is at his desk, the round white of his dome shining. Hunkered down into the checkbook, stacks of papers scattered all around him. Deaf as a post. She leaves him be, steps along the squeaky floorboards, past the gauntlet of her recent watercolors, some of her old photographs, into the kitchen, where she drops her keys, runs the tap, fills the pot, lights the stove, waits for the whistle. Some chocolate biscuits, why not? Four of them on a plate, the sugar, the milk jug, the pair of spoons nestled together.
She elbows the door gently, goes quietly across the worn carpet. A row of tennis trophies on the shelf to the side of the mantel. Mixed doubles, all. She was never one for singles. Always liked the company of a man, though she was tall and strong, known for taking the back court at times. Could whip the backhand down the line. Always loved, afterwards, the dinners in the clubhouse. The champagne toasts, the trill of laughter, cars weaving down the road in a firefly line of headlights.
Ambrose is startled when she slides the tray onto the edge of his desk, sends a fountain pen rolling towards his lap. A curmudgeonly grunt, but he catches the pen in midflight. She kisses the cool of his temple near a bloom of dark skin. She should bring him to see a dermatologist one of these days. Small isolated continents mottling his scalp.
His desk is an endless stretch of debt. Bank statements. Canceled checks. Letters from creditors.
She leans her chin on the top of his dome and kneads the ample flesh of his shoulders until he loosens a little, and allows his head to fall back against her. She can feel his hand stretch the round of her bottom, happy to see he’s still capable of adventure.
—So how was Stranmillis?
—He’s ready for center court. Any day now.
—A good wee lad.
—We crashed a checkpoint on the way home. A high-speed chase.
—Is that so?
—We lost them in Crazy Prices. Down by the fruit aisle.
—They’ll get you yet, he says. You can’t escape.
He taps her rump as if to prove his point, then settles back down to the checkbook. Lottie pours the tea, the greatest Irish art of them all. She has learned through the years to get the best of the leaves, to soak, to stew, to pour. Even when she lived in England there was never as much fuss made of the tea. She drags a chair beside him, to peer around his shoulder. The linen business went bust a long time ago. Nothing now but empty halls and broken pails and the ghosts of some ancient looms. They inherited it all. The curse of privilege. Janitors for the ambitions of the dead.
Still and all, there’s just enough in the kitty to get by. His RAF pension. The cottage out at Strangford Lough. The investments, the savings. She wishes Ambrose wouldn’t worry so much, that she could coax a longer laugh out of him, that he would rise from the desk and leave it behind, if only for a moment or two, but he is a secret worrier. The crash of ’29. They were hardly out of their wedding clothes. The Great Slump. He left the RAF, returned to Belfast. Linen for parachute harnesses and airplane wings. Military gliders, light reconnaissance. They soon disappeared. The business took a nosedive. Then it was linen for the war effort. An ill-advised venture into lacy handkerchiefs. Her photography fell by the wayside after the war, dissolving away in the chemicals of the time, a child, a business, a marriage. Lottie even worked in the factory office in the 1950s and early ’60s, plied her way amongst the looms and the lonesome pitch of the afternoon factory horn, sad beyond all telling.
She drains the last of her tea and puts her arm around the back of his chair. A clockchime from the hallway.
—Our Tomas might have a girlfriend.
—Is that so?
—Maybe, maybe not.
—Is that a hint?
She laughs, takes his arm and he rises. His cardigan, his open shirt, the sag of his trousers. In every pocket he carries pencils and pads of paper, crumbs of yesterday and tomorrow. The little tuft of gray hair at his chest. Still, there is something impish about him yet. An ability for youth. He caps the fountain pen and shuts the account books, and they move out into the dark of the corridor, towards the stairs.
TWICE BY SHIP, once by plane. They traveled together. The first was to visit her mother, back in the Cochrane Hotel. A vicious wind blew off the Atlantic. They stood on the deck, wrapped in blankets. Lottie leaned against the railing. Ambrose stood behind her. He never cared that she was a full head taller than him. There were times she worried that he was just holding some secret grief, burying his head against her shoulder, that they were locked in an interdependence that would someday shatter in sorrow. They docked in Boston and then rode the railroad along the Eastern Seaboard. Her mother was virtually immobile then: she lived in a chair in her room, but still wrote—plays mostly. Short, sharp, funny pieces that were performed by a troupe on Gilbert Street. An immigrant theater. Macedonians, Irish, Turks. Her mother sat in the rear seats in her knit hat, watching, hands folded into one another, white on her dark dress. Theater was a new form for Emily. She enjoyed it immensely, though the seats were mostly empty. One afternoon they drove together to Lester’s Field and paced the length of the overgrown grass. The runway was inhabited now by sheep.
The second visit was in 1934, two months after her mother’s death, to clear up her affairs. Lottie couldn’t bring herself to throw away the boxes of Emily’s papers. She packed them in the trunk of a car and drove all the way to northern Missouri. There were no ice farms anymore. She and Ambrose slept in a small roadside motel. She left the boxes on the steps of a local library. She wondered for years what had happened to the papers. Most likely burned, or blown away. When she returned to Belfast she took along her own negatives, watched Alcock climb from a bath of chemicals. She liked the notion of him rising from the dark.
Their last journey was in 1959, on their thirtieth wedding anniversary, when they took a plane from London to Paris, then Paris to Toronto, then Toronto to New York, where Ambrose had business with the linen dealers on White Street. They spent much of their savings on a first-class ticket. They tucked the serviettes at their throats and looked out the window at the shifting cloth of cloud. It amazed Lottie to think that she could get a gin and tonic at twenty thousand feet in the air. She lit a cigarette, nestled close to Ambrose, fell asleep with her head against his shoulder. She took no photographs on that trip. She wanted to see how well it could be put together by memory alone.
THE SKY LIFTS the hem of Belfast. At the window she looks out over the rooftops. The endless slate and chimneyscape. It’s a dreary city, but there is something about it that charges her in the early morning.
She knots the belt of her dressing gown. Down the stairs towards the kitchen. Cold rises through the linoleum floor. She finds her slippers at the base of the stove. Lord, but they’re still cold. So much for the last of summer. She opens the front panel of the stove to spread the heat, sits down at the wooden counter that looks out into the rear garden, scoots her feet back and forth to warm them up. The roses are in bloom and there is a spot of dew on the grass. There was a legend long ago that if you rubbed the early morning dew on your face you would stay forever young.
She takes two slices from the loaf in the bread bin, pops the
m in their new silver toaster, fills the kettle for some instant coffee. Mixes the milk in first and whisks it around. A fine frothy concoction. She is wary of bringing the radio to life. It’s always a temptation to see how the world itself has frothed up during the night: what riot took place across town, what election was rigged, what poor barman had to broom up the bodies. Seldom a week goes by without some calamity or other. Been that way since the days of the Blitz. One of the things she noticed early on about the women of Belfast, even back during the war, was that they all carried a lace handkerchief in the sleeve of their dresses. An odd fashion statement if ever there was one. A glance at the wrist, a little time capsule of grief. She took to carrying one herself, but the fashion has waned now over the years. Less sleeve, more sorrow. The skies, in those days, were a candelabra of violence. She and Ambrose retreated to Strangford where they watched as the planes turned the night sky into a giant orange bloom.
The pop of the toaster startles her: why such an insistent jump? Out hop the slices, like pole vaulters or prison escapees. One of them even reaches the countertop. She rummages around in the fridge, butters both slices, reaches for the marmalade and spreads it thickly. She spoons her coffee and carries it to the counter.
Her favorite moment, this. Perched on the wooden stool, looking out. The small window of silence. The sky lightening. The roses opening. The dew burning off the grass. The house still cold enough to feel that there is yet a purpose to the day. She has taken to painting watercolors in recent years: a pleasurable pursuit, she rises in the morning, a few strokes of the brush, and soon it is evening. Vast seascapes, the lough, the Causeway, the rope bridge at Carrick-a-Rede. She has even taken her camera out to Rathlin Island, working afterwards from photographs. There are times she paints herself all the way back to St. John’s, the footnote the town made to the sea, Water Street, Duckworth, Harbour Drive, all the little houses propped on the cliff as if in a last-ditch attempt to remember where they came from.