Without our noticing, Aunt Kath had slipped closer to the tarn’s edge, leaving us to ourselves. Watching her, I realized she hadn’t said why my mother had wanted me to bring her ashes here, although I felt certain she knew.
“It’s a bit rough coming up here without your mum, isn’t it?” Graham said. “I had such a sense of … belonging when I was here with her. Belonging, yes, I suppose that is the word.” He touched a brush to the empty boat on his easel, painting three quick bolsters into the boat’s center. I put on my Michigan hat that had been Dad’s, threading my hair through the hole at the back.
“How can you be sure you and Mom are related?” I asked, an easier question with him turned from me, not looking into my doubt.
He put down the brush and selected a thinner one. He added grab lines in the center of the boat like the ones on the outside. “Love isn’t blood-limited, Asha,” he said. “By the time we might have thought, say, to have a DNA test? It no longer mattered.”
I ran my fingers through the grainy ash of my mother in my pocket. “She wanted her ashes brought here to you.”
He turned from the painting, his long lashes behind the wire-rims blinking, my mother’s long lashes. “Asha, Asha,” he said, the way my mother would when I was upset. Not Hope but Asha. Not once but twice.
He set down his paints and took my hands in his. “There isn’t a person in this world your mum loved more than you and your brother. She never questioned that she belonged with you. I think perhaps she was … I think asking you to bring her ashes here was a gift to me.” He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with his hands, leaving a streak of the yellow of the boat across his cheek. “Because I needed something of her more than you or your brother did. Because you had each other. Or perhaps this was her way of bringing you to me, now that she’s gone.” He wiped his eyes again, leaving a second, fainter yellow streak. “She told me once, when we were working together on the mutt book—”
The mutt book—a phrase that had to be Mom’s.
“I’m sure you grew up hearing this, but I didn’t,” Graham said, “and it meant a lot to me. She told me I wasn’t two halves of anything. She told me I was a whole something new.”
Mom’s voice in the words.
“She told me that, too, all the time when I was growing up,” I said. “I don’t know if I ever believed it.”
“You should,” he said. “You should.”
“Or even knew what it meant,” I said.
Graham chose another brush and began adding something in the water beside the boat. A water lily, I thought at first, but then it took shape, improbably, as a candle floating in the water.
“Do you think this is where Mom wanted me to leave her?” I asked him, and I turned to Aunt Kath, rejoining us, to include her in the question. “Here at this tarn?” I scooped the ash of my mother from my pocket and held it in my fist, lest it blow away. “I’ve been carrying her around with me, little bits of her, hoping she would somehow tell me when I’d found the right place.” I looked out across the tarn again, thinking if I spread her ashes here, I would do it from this side, facing the peaceful valley rather than the more dramatic mountain view I preferred. “I feel like wherever I choose, I ought to make it some big ceremony,” I said, “but I can’t imagine how to do that, either.”
“Your mama didn’t stand on ceremony,” Aunt Kath said. “I can’t see her resting in peace in a marble orchard. Surely she’d come back to haunt us all if we did anything fancy.”
A light breeze kicked up then, and I imagined the ghost of Mom sitting at the sprawl of our dining room table, leaving little ghost bits of herself everywhere.
The clouds, having broken past the barrier of the mountains, were rolling quickly overhead. Lightning flashed behind us, an echo of gentle thunder lasting far longer than the quick pop of light.
“It’s a sign!” Aunt Kath said. “Your mama telling you to pour on the grits while the griddle is hot. You Wednesday Children think all of life has to be lined up perfectly before it can be lived, but the Lord’s good truth is that it doesn’t ever line up the way you want it to. You just have to trust it to line up the way it ought, and plunge on ahead.”
Aunt Kath touched my hair where it poked out of my father’s Michigan cap, a tender caress that I’d taken for granted my whole life.
“Sam thinks she belongs at home, near us,” I said. I didn’t have to tell her that he’d declined to make this trip with me, that he’d tried to persuade me not to come.
Graham set down his brush. In the painting, candles floated on the water, circling out from the boat like the first ripples from a tossed pebble. The sky over the field beyond the tarn, where we’d seen the sliver of crescent moon that first morning here, was free of clouds despite the heavy gray overhead.
“It’s Diwali,” I said, realizing it only as I said it. “No-moon day. The festival of lights. Ama always sent us candy and saris. In India, you light lamps.”
“To mark the end of the harvest season,” Graham said. “To pray for a good harvest in the year to come. My ama sent candy, too, but sorry, no saris for me!”
I remembered standing in Mom’s bathroom one Diwali, torn between wanting to climb into the tub with her and not wanting to take off my new sari. It was evening, and she had the candles lit, celebrating Diwali in the tub although Diwali was my father’s holiday, Christmas hers. “You don’t have to choose, Hope, you can put the sari back on after the bath,” Mom had assured me. Yes, instead of my pajamas. She didn’t think the sari would be all that comfortable to sleep in, but I could give it a try if I liked.
“Mr. Pajamas needs a sari,” I’d informed Mom as she tucked me in that night. “And Mr. Jackson.”
She’d kissed me and suggested I take that up with Aunt Frankie. I don’t remember if I ever did.
Cecily Parsley lived in a pen,
And brewed good ale for gentlemen.
—FROM Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes BY BEATRIX POTTER
JULIE READ THROUGH TO THE LAST POEM IN ROBBIE’S BOOK, AND SAT IN the Ainsley’s End library for a long time before heading out to the wonderful little phone nook off the entry hall, and finding the number for Robbie’s boat taxi service, calling him and saying she needed a ride across the lake.
“Do you, now?” he asked. “And where will you be going?”
“I thought we might go to Hawkshead,” she said. “I thought I might buy you a bitter.”
He laughed his easy laugh and said, “You can’t get to Hawkshead from Ainsley’s End on a boat, but I do expect you know that.”
She allowed that she did.
She could hear the smile in his voice as he answered, “And the best place to have a bitter wouldn’t be Hawkshead; that would be too easy, and neither of us likes the easy way, do we? The best place to have a bitter would be at the Drunken Duck. They make a fine one at Barnegates Brewery, beside it. That idn’t on the water any more than Hawkshead is, but I could fetch you in the banger, if that would do.”
A bitter, it turns out, is a gorgeous pale beer. “Hoppy and bitter. Perfect after a day out on the fells,” Robbie said after their first sips, to which Julie said perhaps that was the problem, she hadn’t had her daily hike yet. But the Drunken Duck was lovely, from its very name on. The legend, which Robbie was ripe to share—Julie wondered if perhaps it would show up in a poem someday—had it that centuries ago a barrel slipped its hoops, draining beer to the floor and into the ducks’ customary feeding ditch, whereupon the birds made good use of it, to the bad effect of regaining consciousness already plucked and oven-bound. “But the landlady, a kinder sort than likely exists in the realm of restaurant owners who gather dead birds off the road,” he said, “had mercy, and even knitted the poor defeathered birds waistcoats of Hawkshead yarn to wear until their feathers grew back.”
Julie laughed.
“Now you’ll be wanting your legends believable, I’m sure,” Robbie said.
The bar was all clean leather and soft l
ights, wide-planked oak floor and beamed ceilings, an open fire, a helpful barman who told Julie, when asked, that the bar top was made of Brathay Black slate from a quarry on Duck Hill. He suggested she might prefer a Cat Nap to the Tag Lag. It was fruitier, with citrusy zest.
She took a first sip from the new mug, looking over the top and into Robbie’s patient gaze. “They don’t serve Hawkshead Bitter here,” she said. “In your poem …”
“Ah,” Robbie said. “Is that what this is about? The ladies will wet the tea leaves for a poet, won’t they. So much more romantic than a river rat.”
Julie, ignoring him, said “Hawkshead Bitter” was a lovely poem. She’d thought it must be set at his favorite drinking hole.
He ran a weathered hand over the black slate bar. “Perhaps a hawk’s head is a better metaphor than a tag lag or a catnap. Perhaps this is my favorite drinking hole. Or perhaps I thought this place would most impress a lass who prefers a biro to an oar.”
“I did read your poems,” she admitted. “Aunt Kath, after she met you, called someone at the office and had them messenger out an advance copy of your book. She said it hasn’t come out yet, that it releases next month.” She looked away, to the water. “ ‘For Cornelia.’ That one breaks your heart.”
“It’s a long time ago now,” Robbie said. “Coming here, this was the last thing I had to do.”
“To meet Graham.”
He looked into the pale circle of ale in his glass, the bitter. “Is anything in life that simple, d’ you suppose?”
Julie guessed if it were, we would have no need of literature, but she kept the thought to herself.
“I’d not be the first poet to come to the Lake District for inspiration,” he said. “But it’s true that the hills here are steeped with Cornelia. He’s carried her around here as I’ve carried her around at home. And I’ve had no one to share the love of her with before.”
“But you haven’t ever told him.”
He held her gaze, considering. “It’s a way of sharing, idn’ it? Being with a body even if they don’t know all that you know.”
“Or writing it into a poem,” Julie said. When he didn’t answer, she said, “He’ll know when he reads the poems.”
“He’ll have the silver tray and the china but not the poetry books,” he answered. “He’s a good sort, but he’s not a poetry-reading sort.”
She supposed he was right. The books Graham had shown her that first day at Ainsley’s End, when he’d been so determined to show her his library, had been his grandfather’s and his father’s but not his own.
“He would read a poem written about himself,” she said.
“And how will he know of it? His Mrs. Anders will not read poetry, either.”
“Why don’t you want him to know?” When again he didn’t answer, she said, “I feel understood. When I read your poems, I feel understood. Even though they aren’t about me at all.”
Robbie nodded, and she could see that he was gathering his emotions, uncomfortable somehow with what she’d said.
“Thank you,” he said finally.
She realized then what a compliment she’d paid him, that this was what the best poetry was about: uncovering hearts.
“It’s a funny thing,” he said. “You pour a cup of your grief out into a line of poetry, or twelve lines, or two hundred, and this thing you can’t swallow yourself becomes a thing others want to drink.”
In his words, in the phrasing, she remembered talking with her mother over the strawberry waffles before her mother went in for the surgery she couldn’t promise them she would survive. Always, always, you make me the happiest mommy in the world.
Julie adjusted the position of the beer mug, the saltshaker, the cup of nuts, aligning them straight and tidy, as if they were library books. “Maybe you’ll write a poem about me someday?” she said—ironically, and not.
Robbie watched the movement of her fingers until she, self-conscious, brought them back to rest on the cold mug.
“But they’ll all be about me, won’t they,” he said. “My poems, they’re about the falls, and they’re about the stars that aren’t there anymore, they’re about Cornelia and Erin, about Graham, even. But in the end, they are all about me.” His blue eyes dark with the black of the Brathay slate. “I can see a lot, Julie, but I can’t see everything, and it’s not the same as seeing it yourself, is it? That’s the thing. To see it yourself. That’s the only way back from loss.”
He touched her elbow like he had that night in the boat, as if all her grief might be there, or it might connect directly to her heart.
“How can you stand it?” she asked. “How can you stand to write about the love Cornelia had before she loved you, the love that she still felt? That’s what your poems suggest.”
He tilted his mug so that the circle of ale became an oval, like the old lover in “Hawkshead Bitter” does. “Love isn’t a tap you turn on and off with a handle, a temperature you can mix,” he said. “It’s a crashing force that washes you down rocky cliffs and into gentle eddies. It meanders so that sometimes you seem to go in the wrong direction, but all in all, it takes you toward an open sea. If the riverbed ever dries to muck, there is something wicked wrong, but the wicked wrong is at the source.” He traced a finger around the rim of the mug, like the husband in his poem does after his wife’s lover sets his money on the black slate bar and disappears out the door. “We all have scars,” he said. “We all do things we regret. Mortallers, even. Capital S sins. Not a one of us will get into any heaven run by a wrathful god. The thing is to understand that we’re human. Not to imagine how we might have done better, but to accept that we are who we are, that we do the things we do, and if we had a chance to do them again, we’d sure enough make the same choices, because we can’t see around the bend. And what good would a life be if we could? What good would a life be without the gifts, or even without the regrets?”
He ran a finger from her elbow to her palm, ran it over the silver rings on her fingers. “Maybe you’ll write a poem yourself someday,” he said.
She studied his weathered face in the reflection of the bar mirror but didn’t answer.
“If I tell him,” he said, “I lose the last possibility.”
“The last possibility of finding someone who shared the love of Cornelia?” she said, remembering the line in the poem. And when he didn’t answer, “Or maybe you find it.”
His touch lingered on her one empty finger, where only the indent of her wedding band remained. “I already have, haven’t I, in your reaction to the poems.”
All the emotion that had welled in his face when she’d said the poem made her feel understood—he’d have heard this from an editor, but maybe not face-to-face. And it’s a different thing to be able to see, to be able to touch.
“Maybe Graham, not being a poet, needs it even more than you do,” she said. “ ‘It’s a way of sharing, idn’ it? Being with a body even if they don’t know all that you know.’ But that eases only your grief. It doesn’t help him at all.”
Robbie traced his finger up to her fingertip, then took up his beer mug, turned it a half turn so the handle was at his right hand, then turned it back. “Ah, you’ll be the bard, then, Julie Mason. You’ll be taking all the literary prizes I’m hoping to find draped all over myself.”
From the Journals of Ally Tantry, the Final Entry
The Groom’s Cottage, Ainsley’s End. Bea and I spent another morning at the Armitt Library going over her manuscripts, she again suggesting what I wanted to see were the mushroom drawings. “Fungi,” she insists. Afterward, Graham joined us to stretch our legs with another hike up to Stock Ghyll Force. I do think I’ve come to like that hike at least as much as the trip over the hill to Moss Eccles Tarn, although I don’t think I’ll ever tell Graham that. The tarn is his favorite place, and he likes that we share the love of it. But Hope would love Stock Ghyll Force, the drama of the ninety-foot waterfall. I feel her beside me whenever I’m there.
 
; —But of course the best part of the Stock Ghyll loop is the latter part of the longer hike, Bea says, as it circles up toward Troutbeck Park.
Troutbeck Park is her favorite of her farms. But she was too exhausted to tackle that seven-mile hike today.
—I was tired, Allison? she says.
I drew a bath when we got home, and was letting it cool when Bea said maybe she would have a go of it.
—A bath? I said.
—You’re not the only one whose poor old bones ache after a day on the trails, Bea said.
—My bones don’t ache, I protested.
—No, of course not, Allison. I forget. That’s my purpose here, to take on the pains you’re reticent to admit. Well, perhaps you could be persuaded to turn your back while I undress?
I gathered the candle from the cabinet in the bathroom, and several more from the kitchen, and I lit them all over the room for her; there is nothing much nicer than a bath by candlelight. Now I’ve stretched out on my bed with my journal, waiting for the water to cool, while Bea is submerged to her chin the way Hope always loved to be.
—Didn’t you ever want to be a mother? I ask.
Perhaps I’m still in search of that fresh angle that Kath wants for the biography. Or perhaps in understanding Bea, I mean to understand Hope’s reluctance to have a family.
—I never have cared tuppence for the modern child, Bea answers. They are pampered and spoilt with too many toys and books.
—Too many books, Bea?
—Too many books.
—You don’t mean that.
—I had Water Lily, of course, she says.
—Oh no you don’t, Bea. We are not going back to the sheep.
Bea takes a loofah I’ve set on the marble table by the tub and submerges it, lifts it up, and squeezes, letting the water trickle down slowly, like Hope used to do with washcloths in the tub with me.