He understands perfectly—and prides himself on this knowledge—how those ancient eremites were able to live out their lives in caves, and monks in their stripped cells. Even when he is in Montreal on one of his visits, lying in the arms of women into whose bodies he has discharged his passion, he longs for the simplicity of a narrow bed and a lacerating loneliness. This is what he has to fight against—wildness, chaos. When he is not fighting, he is giddy with pessimism for a cheapened world. Not always, but sometimes, after an Ottawa dinner party, he lies lifelessly in his bed, his mouth dry, thinking: how absurd I am on these occasions, holding forth like an aged actor in tones of fraudulent gladness. And how, afterwards, I beat back the world with a glass of warm whisky, trying to escape it.
He is too serious, he knows that, too willing to believe—and deaf to the comedy of mismatched couples and unseemly flesh. To comfort himself, he imagines the separate layers of his brain; there are spaces there, cavities that exist between the forces of sex and work. What is he to do with these fixed voids? Other people know. He’s never known.
His father, that austere, unfeeling and untutored man, had insisted his sons polish their boots every evening. Flett has learned to be grateful for this early discipline. It kept him breathing as a boy, provided a pulse, gave order to vast incomprehension. Later he found other ways.
He can’t recall when he learned the names of the plants in his mother’s garden, but he remembers how the exactitude of nomenclature lulled him into comfort. Early on, he knew himself to be one of those who are morally unhoused and in need of specific notation, plants, animals, the starry constellations. Soon, besides his mother’s domesticated flowers, he mastered the plantlife of the fields and woods. He had all of it quickly by heart, common names as well as Latin. Each time he was able to match a specimen with the illustration in Spotton’s Botanical Note Book he experienced a spasm of strength. The green world with its varying forms brought out an exotic tolerance in him and kept him calm. The discovery at the age of twelve or thirteen that the whole of the natural world had been classified, that someone other than himself had guessed at the need for this ordering, struck him like a bolt of happiness. He loved particularly the pockets within pockets, the great botanical divisions revealed and broken down into their tiniest branches, the smallest, most peninsular forms of life persisting valiantly in the bent corners of evolution. This miniature world, slime molds, algae, became his elected tongue—the genetics of plants, its odd, stringent beauty. Of his collection of lady’s-slippers—one of the world’s most complete, he likes to think—he loves best that one which is rarest, and of that particular bloom he values its smallest petals above the others, observing them respectfully under his microscope, memorizing the shape of the most minuscule cell, paying tribute to its position and function, and assigning it the dignity of its Latin name.
Like a chart on a wall, the complete organization of the botanic world is suspended in his consciousness. He can only suppose that the heads of other men are filled with comparable systems, with philosophies, histories, logarithm tables, texts, with points of persuasion or mapped cravings that bear them forward, as does his range of living classes, orders, families, species, and sub-species.
And into this system, which is not nearly as neat and logical as he had once believed, has crept the fact of Daisy. She sits far out at the end of one of the branches, laughing, calling to him. He sometimes shuts his eyes and wishes her gone, but she remains steadfastly there, a part of nature, confused with the subtle tendrils of sexual memory; he could no more ignore her presence than erase a subspecies of orchid or sedge. He nurtures his connection from a distance, writing to her regularly and awaiting her replies. The rhythm is fixed in his life now—a support and distraction, the way in which he confirms his most human feelings.
This letter-writing of his has its ritual aspects. He takes up his pen, a dark red Waterman, on Sunday afternoons, the first Sunday of every even-numbered month—February, April, June, and so on.
An observer might note that the line of his bent back and shoulders possesses a fetal curl. His tall-windowed study is quiet. At his elbow is a cup of weak coffee, rapidly cooling. His mind is aerated by acts of private embarrassment and distressing nightmare, but for the moment he brushes all this aside. He is a man writing a letter, performing an act of obligation. The date goes neatly into the right hand corner of the page, and as a sort of uncle-type joke, his lips tightening, he always puts “AD,” in parentheses, after it.
Then he takes a breath and writes: My dear Daisy. The “my” troubles him, but it would draw attention to itself should he alter it now.
He then proceeds with his dull and detailed paragraphs, this dullness and detail successfully blocking the yearning he feels. He completes one page and begins another, plodding away, and feeling always reassured by his plodding, which he takes to be a sign of restraint. The loneliness latent in such objects as his Waterman pen or his china saucer must be kept from view. But his face bending over the paper is ripe for heresy. He longs to cover the page with kisses and to sign the letter: your loving Barker. Yours forever. Yours only.
What he actually puts down is a plain: yours sincerely, Barker Flett. At least he has never been so blockish as to sign: Uncle Barker. Though this, in fact, is how Daisy addresses him in her letters of reply.
These replies come quickly, by return mail. It seems she shares his sense of responsibility, his dutifulness.
His heart beats rough and sore in his chest as he cuts open the square blue envelopes. Her letter paper is blue as well, and bordered with bland stylized flowers that no botanical text would deign to recognize. Dear Uncle Barker. She rattles on and on, page after page, girlishly, frivolously. At least half her sentences are apocalyptically incomplete, engineered with portentous dashes and dots, leaving him shaken, excited, exasperated. Her syntax is breathy, her diction uneven. Even after the tragedy of her honeymoon she writes (bravely?) that she is feeling “pretty down in the dumps” but hopes to be “hunky-dorey” before long. Always he is cast down after reading one of her letters; the childish banality.
Disappointment lingers for days, but the weeks pass, a month, two months, and by the time he once again picks up his pen, his devotion has been restored. It is inevitable that each of us will be misunderstood; this, it seems, is part of twentieth-century wisdom.
Let it be said that Daisy Goodwill has saved every one of Barker Flett’s letters; she has them still, though she would be hard put to tell you just where they are. In a drawer somewhere. Or a cardboard carton.
Her letters to him have not survived.
Nor are there any photographs of her dating from this period.
Still, you can guess how she must have looked as she neared the end of her train journey to Ottawa—although, as a captive of her own drama, she is likely to touch up this image more than a little; for instance, she sees herself as having already removed her hat—knowing full well that a woman never travels hatless—and next thing you know she’s shaking out her reddish-brown hair with its eruptions of gold. The last of the sun’s rays enter the train window and gather on the folds of her linen dress. (Cut on the bias. Smart by the standards of Bloomington, Indiana.) She is clasping her hands firmly together on her lap much as Barbara Stanwyck did in The Woman in Red, indicating sprightly female determination. And she hopes the line of her jaw, like Garbo’s, conveys a similar attitude.
What will she say to him? What will be her first words?
A scene offers itself up: she is taking his hand, shaking it gravely, holding herself a little aloof so as not to alarm him. She speaks quietly, sincerely of her journey. No, she is not overly tired.
It was really very pleasant. Scenery just heavenly. The miles flew by. She is anxious to demonstrate good will, while patiently waiting for candor to establish itself.
What if they have nothing to talk about? Nothing in common?
Well, she must find something. She will put her mind to it.
Again she presses her hands together. Gloveless. Ringless. A stranger might guess her to be engaged in an act of silent prayer, and in a sense she is, for her concentration has a devout intensity.
She is traveling to Barker Flett as to a refuge. It comes down to that.
She cannot go back to Vinegar Hill to be the daughter of Cuyler Goodwill and the step-daughter of Maria, not in that house, not in Bloomington, not at her age, it is out of the question. This last year she has been in danger of becoming an eccentric or else one of those persons who does not bother to put a saucer under her cup.
Her father’s tiresome freestone metaphor comes back to her with all the dead weight of its evangelical offering: as with a chunk of Indiana limestone, he says, a person can split off his life in one direction or the other; the choice is open.
But no such choices are available to her at this time in her life, a woman on the verge of middle age—or so she thinks. A person arbitrarily named. A person accidentally misplaced. How did this happen? She’s caught in a version of her life, pinned there.
A thought comes into her head: that lately she doesn’t ask herself what is possible, but rather what possibilities remain. At this moment she is clearly on a one-way journey, though her return train ticket lies safely in a pocket of her leather handbag. Curiously, she is not afraid, knowing as she does that love is mostly the avoidance of hurt, and, furthermore, she is accustomed to obstacles, and how they can be overcome by readjusting her glance or crowding her concerns into a shadowy corner.
She closes her eyes for a moment—not Garbo eyes, no, nothing like so brave and chilly—and thinks of these last few days of travel.
Everything she has seen or done has jagged edges around it. Her various conversations with strangers go round and around in her head, exhilarating but also exhausting—that man at the Falls, wasn’t he the limit! All of them.
From surfeit to loss is a short line. She cannot go back. She will have to make new plans. These plans grow in her head, wild as they are, sending out tentacles, scenes, whole conversations.
How good it is to see you again, Uncle Barker.
Her lips move silently against the train window. One slender arm reaches out, shaking hands with the air. Such a pleasure. After all these years.
Maybe now is the time to tell you that Daisy Goodwill has a little trouble with getting things straight; with the truth, that is.
She had a golden childhood, as she’ll be happy to tell you. Her loving adopted “Aunt” Clarentine, her adoring “Uncle” Barker.
Warmth, security. Picnics along the river. A garden full of flowers.
And then at age eleven finding her real father, a remarkable (everyone said so) self-made man who showered her with material plenty, as well as the love of his heart.
Well, a childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction. Which is why you want to take Daisy’s representation of events with a grain of salt, a bushel of salt.
She is not always reliable when it comes to the details of her life; much of what she has to say is speculative, exaggerated, wildly unlikely. (You will already have realized that no person in this world could possibly be as insensitive, as cruel, as her mother-in-law, Mrs. Arthur Hoad, is made out to be.) Daisy Goodwill’s perspective is off. Furthermore, she imposes the voice of the future on the events of the past, causing all manner of wavy distortion. She takes great jumps in time, leaving out important matters (her expensive, private education, for instance—Tudor Hall, Long College). The acts of her life form a sequence of definitions, that’s what she tells herself. Writing letters to her Uncle Barker, she elects the language of childhood, deliberately naive, wistful, girlishly irresponsible, safe. Sometimes she looks at things close up and sometimes from a distance, and she does insist on showing herself in a sunny light, hardly ever giving us a glimpse of those dark premonitions we all experience. And, oh dear, dear, she is cursed with the lonely woman’s romantic imagination and thus can support only happy endings.
Still, hers is the only account there is, written on air, written with imagination’s invisible ink.
Having read his Bertrand Russell, Barker Flett has long since cast off a belief in conventional morality, but, as a senior civil servant in His Majesty’s government (Executive Director of Agricultural Research), he is compelled to observe a certain level of propriety.
A young woman under his roof? How would this look?
A niece, he might explain, but Daisy is not really his niece. His ward? No, his guardianship has never been formalized. What is he to do? How will he explain her presence.
It occurs to him that his housekeeper, Mrs. Donaldson, who comes in daily to clean and to prepare him a cold supper, might be prevailed upon to stay overnight during the period of Daisy’s visit.
He asks her, delicately setting out the problem. She bluntly refuses. She has her own family, after all, to go home to; what he asks is impossible.
He sighs, immensely relieved. And then he begins to worry once again. His life with Daisy has not even begun, and already there are all these vexing problems to be dealt with.
“In one hour I will be there,” Daisy writes in her travel journal, underlining “there” three times.
It is unbearably hot on the train, but she has managed, with the conductor’s assistance, to open a window. As a result her hair is blowing about wildly, and the fading sunlight shines through it, so that she appears to be wearing a kind of halo or else a hat made of burnt fur.
To still the loud beating of her heart she stows her journal away safely, or so she thinks, and replaces her gloves. She holds herself upright, rigid. A stillness that purifies. Barbara Stanwyck with a head of foxy hair.
She is overwhelmed at times—and this is one of those times—with the wish to ask forgiveness.
Now darkness is coming on gradually, and the Ontario sky fills up with diamond dust. These particles, she senses, have nothing to do with her. The villages that rush by are foreign and unyielding. They seem to turn their backs on her. At the end of the railway car, on the other side of the aisle, four men are playing a noisy game of cards—rummy, most likely—and so engaged are they in this cheerful amusement and in the rough pleasure of each other’s company, that she might be snatched suddenly from their midst and they would never so much as glance in her direction.
She knows that when the train arrives in Ottawa, all of these men will hurry off into the contained nexus of their real lives, while she is about to hurl herself into whatever accident of fortune awaits her. She will accept “it” without protest, without question, for what choice has she?
She is powerless, anchorless, soft-tissued—a woman. Perhaps that is the whole of it, that she is a woman. Yes, of course.
It occurs to her that she should record this flash of insight in her journal—otherwise she is sure to forget, for she is someone who is always learning and forgetting and obliged to learn again—but the act of recording requires that she remove her gloves, rummage through her bag for her pen and for the notebook itself. This is more than she is capable of doing. And so she forces herself to sit quietly, her pulse racing, as the train rolls into the gentle, shadowy outskirts of Ottawa, capital of the Dominion (Do-min-i-on) of Canada.
He is at the station a full ten minutes before her arrival. He has allowed for this, knowing he’ll need a cushion of calm in which to arrange his thoughts, his body too. “Well, well,” he plans to say to her, draining the drama off the moment with his heartiness, “so you’ve made it all in one piece, have you?”
Or something about the heat. Or perhaps?—he doesn’t know what. Everything seems suddenly at risk. Even his long legs have gone unsteady.
He wouldn’t dream, though, of sitting down on one of those long, varnished benches. No, he pulls himself straight, his shoulders, his back, his hands clasped behind him, and paces the marble floor of the concourse. He pauses, staring up into the dome. A handsome building, yes indeed. He examines it carefu
lly, its decorated frieze and fluted granite pillars with their classical pediments. He memorizes these stone surfaces, staring hard as though he may never again have an opportunity to see this clearly.
His life is on the cusp of change. Love, that sudden dissolving of art and nature, of language itself, is about to overcome his senses.
He breathes deeply, and glances up at the station clock. Yes, the train is on time. On the minute. Precisely. This fact he finds deeply satisfying. Also worrying.
And there she is. Coming toward him.
Some men are described as having an eye for an ankle. Not Barker Flett. He has no eye at all. Nor any notion of what is owed him or what he may desire. This moment, this meeting, was arranged years earlier.
Here she comes, her gloved hand already extended as she moves forward, and for a moment he believes he may actually take that hand in his and shake it, a social gesture, murmuring: how nice to see you, and was the train crowded? Did you find a place next to the window? Are you exhausted?
Instead he takes her in an embrace. Not a real embrace, for there is no question of their bodies coming together. No. His hands reach out and lightly graze her shoulders, then travel down to her upper arms (these arms bare below the elbows and slightly damp), then moving upward again to her face, touching it with his fingertips, cradling it. He has forgotten all his resolve; his blood is on fire.
Her knees are shaky after so many hours on the train. The sudden light of the station unbalances her, and she can think of nothing to say.
“Daisy?” he murmurs across the combed crown of her hair, making a question of it. Almost a sob. He forgets what he said next.