Was it five minutes? Fifteen? Fifty? Did she move? Did she make a sound? He saw her this time, and he called to her. She supposed she’d meant him to. She supposed when she’d come upon him the night before, some part of her had wanted him to see her, to invite her into his world.
She exhaled against the sense of something fluttering quietly in the darkness, a bat, perhaps.
“Don’t worry,” she said to Graham. “I have an emergency kit with me.”
Had she heard him laugh before, really? His mirth as soothing as “Moonlight Sonata,” the music she plays as she closes patients in the OR, and at home at night, alone.
“You’re safe here,” he said. “I could have heard your call for help.”
“Could you?” She looked to the house with its square center tower, its slate roofs, the dark windows. The whole world was unlit by the thin sliver of moon that had left her feeling so vulnerable and exposed, somehow, when she’d seen it that first day in the clear blue sky. “I’d think those stone walls would keep out every sound.”
“Perhaps that’s why I’m out here. To hear you.”
She pulled off her hood and ran her hand through her wild hair. “I’m not in need of help.”
“How bloody wrong of me, then,” he said, a teasing lift in his voice. “I had you pegged as the type who might use some help but would never call for it.”
He moved the box of charcoal pencils beside him and scooted over on the bench—dry under the protection of the arbor—accidentally kicking over an empty wineglass at his feet. It cracked but didn’t shatter. He set it aside and lifted the bottle from the ground: the English wine he’d served that first night, uncorked but still full. He offered to fetch new glasses.
She took the bottle from him and put it to her lips, took a sip. “Ma used to say I’d be drinking bourbon right out of the bottle before I was eighteen, but I don’t imagine even she foresaw me drinking swanky British wine that way.”
He laughed again.
She held the bottle out to him. “I’m good at sharing, if not at asking for help.”
He didn’t ask what she was doing out so late, and she didn’t, either. He only accepted the bottle from her, took a sip himself, and set it on the bench.
He’d been sketching: trees in the foreground, the fortress of the house beyond them, what looked like a little birdie apartment house tucked up under the highest peak of roof. She looked from the page to the real house. The same little aviary was built up against the stone of a tower wall, above a single window high up in the stone.
Was the world ever this dark at home?
“Allison always thought this would be a splendid setting for a book,” he said. “Perhaps about the birds.”
“Some furry animal would live at the bottom of the tower,” Anna Page said, “where the little door would be even smaller.” She looked at Graham’s drawing. “Like in your sketch.”
The door in the tower opened out into the geometrically rigid herb garden, which in the story would play some role she couldn’t imagine, being a heart surgeon without an ounce of creativity, she always says—although she’s plenty creative at making up wild stories about her own life, hiding the truth behind theatrics that are exaggerations when they aren’t completely untrue.
She started to say how glad she was that he and her mother were getting along, but the thought got all twisted up with the night and the scent of rosemary on her skin, the taste of the wine, so that the words came out as a question she hadn’t imagined asking: “Did it bother you that your dad was a bigamist?”
He sketched a small beak poking out of one of the round holes.
“One doesn’t know when one is a child,” he said finally. “One doesn’t accept the truth about one’s parents until there is no choice.”
She took a sip from the bottle, recognizing the truth of this as he said it: all those Sunday morning breakfasts with her father. Church. How ironic that the only thing they’d ever done together as a family was go to the church that represented the sacredness of the vows her father flouted every day.
Graham sketched for another minute, and she sat silently beside him, imagining a bird landing at one of the circle-doors and disappearing into the aviary.
“I blamed my mother,” she said finally.
He tilted his head slightly. She braced herself for a defense of her mother that she didn’t want, didn’t need.
“One does, doesn’t one?” he said. “Fathers are so …”
His pencil remained still between his fingers, which were long and large, not graceful, not at all like she would have imagined an artist’s hands.
“I didn’t know my father was with another woman,” she said. “I thought he didn’t want to be with Ma. I thought Ma drove him away.”
Graham set the charcoal on the pad and tilted the wine bottle to his lips, then offered it to Anna Page. “Of course, my mother was the other woman,” he said.
“But she was your father’s first wife.”
“Yes, well … it wasn’t seen that way here.”
She supposed it wouldn’t have been, if everyone saw the neighborhood prince married to a fair young maiden before learning of the other wife.
“We didn’t know you were a half,” Anna Page said. “That’s not my term. It’s the way Hope talks about herself when she isn’t … liking herself, I guess.”
“How does such a lovely person not like herself?”
“I don’t know,” Anna Page said. “You tell me.”
She tilted her head at him, and smiled slightly, and took another sip of the wine, wondering how she ever could have blamed her mother for her father’s philandering. She never did blame her father. She never did blame the other Kath. She’d thought that if her mother were a better woman, the kind of woman she would be herself, her father wouldn’t have left. Even after she knew who the other Kath was, what Catherine’s relationship to her father was, Anna Page always imagined herself as the woman a man would leave others for, not the one who was left.
“It didn’t bother me that my father had other women,” she said. Women, she said, although as far as she knew, it had only ever been Catherine. “It bothered me that my mother put up with it.”
This wasn’t true, exactly, but she didn’t know how to phrase the truth, or perhaps how to face it. It bothered her that love was never quite complete anywhere she turned. It bothered her that this was true in her own life, that she didn’t love the way you were supposed to love, the way her mother did love her father: completely, with reckless disregard for herself. It bothered her that if you gave yourself over to love, you ended up hurt, and that if you didn’t, you ended up hurt. It bothered her that a heart was such a fragile, vulnerable thing, that it would beat on for others long after it was taken from where it belonged.
“Do you think you could ever give your heart away?” she asked Graham.
He closed his sketch pad and folded his hands over it so that the little light illuminated his charcoal-smudged fingers.
“It’s what I do,” she said. “I take hearts from bodies that have no more use for them, and I cut open chests and chop out useless hearts and put in new ones. Not new ones. Used ones. But I don’t know if I could do that myself. I’m not sure I could give away my own heart to save someone else.”
She had wept so over that photograph of the transplant and the family the first time she’d seen it. She didn’t know why. She doesn’t weep in the operating room; that wouldn’t do. She doesn’t weep when she’s talking with patients, or with donor families, or with other doctors or nurses or lecture rooms full of students, or with her parents and her friends. She doesn’t weep in front of her mother or the other Kath, and she certainly doesn’t weep in front of her father. She’d never told my mother about the weeping, not after weeping with her after that first loss. She’d never told Jamie. And they’d abandoned her to her secret, neither leaving behind a heart to share with someone else.
“It’s the generosity people show in the
face of tragedy, it makes me weep sometimes,” she said to Graham, whom she hardly knew. “People who’ve lost everything. What they are still willing to give.”
He wiped a tear from her cheek, one that had been pooling in her eyes since that night in the forest, when she’d suggested he might like her mom. She hesitated, but she pulled the silver box from her coat pocket and handed it to Graham. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Graham eyed the box, confused, before taking it from her palm.
“I took it that first afternoon, when we had tea in the Prospect,” she said. “I saw it, and I was afraid Hope would see it and know it was from her mother.” Though it wasn’t that, was it? Thinking about how Hope would feel had come later, to justify the taking. If that had been all there was to it, she’d have given it back at that first dinner in the Ainsley’s End dining room, when she’d learned who Graham was.
“Do you know how to open it?” Anna Page asked. “I can’t figure it out.”
Although she had already, the night she’d taken it. What was inside was too intimate to admit having seen without having been invited to.
He handed the box back to Anna Page and trained the reading light on it, indicating where to start. “It’s a very simple puzzle. Most are.”
She worked the panels at his instruction.
“And now you slip the lid aside,” he said.
“Is it empty?” she asked, beginning to doubt: he would let her see the strands of hair inside, but could she bear to see them again? “I saw the box and I …” She began to reverse the steps she’d just taken. She didn’t want to know what explanation he might give.
Graham kissed her, then, his lips soft and full on hers, his mouth warm and oaky with the taste of the wine that was the English wine and not the American one. His sketch pad slipped from his lap and fell to the dirt, sprawling open to a sketch caught in the small pool of the reading light: a woman with wild dark hair. The page bowed under the weight of the cardboard backing but didn’t crease as the charcoal pencil rolled to a rest against Anna Page’s gray hiking boot. She closed her eyes to it and to everything as Graham wound his large, unexpected hands into her hair and pulled her closer, again kissing her. She touched her fingers gently to his chest, as if to string a line of dental floss, to make the cut with the scalpel straight. What her bare skin met, though, was the strong beat of his heart and, beside it, the beat of her own in the moonless night.
[Pigling Robinson] had crossed five big fields, and ever so many stiles; stiles with steps; ladder stiles; stiles of wooden posts; some of them were very awkward with a heavy basket.… Robinson sat down to rest beside a hedge in a sheltered sunny spot. Yellow pussy willow catkins were in flower above his head; there were primroses in hundreds on the bank, and a warm smell of moss and grass and streaming moist red earth.… The walk had made him so hungry he would have liked to eat an egg as well as the jam sandwiches; but he had been too well brought up.
—FROM The Tale of Little Pig Robinson BY BEATRIX POTTER
KEVIN EMERGED FROM CUSTOMS THE NEXT MORNING WITH TIRED EYES, a red stubble of beard on his chin, and a single small bag hiked over his shoulder. I watched him for a minute, thinking of the reassuring sound of his voice: Not horror that I had taken a handful of the pulverized bone that had been my mother into the bathtub and smeared it all over myself. Understanding. She would have liked that. And there had been nothing to do then but pull the rubber stopper and let that bit of her disappear down the drain.
His gaze found me, and his face lit in a wide grin. He waved and I waved back, and he circled around the exit rail, dropped his bag, scooped me up in his arms.
“I’m sorry I let you come without me,” he said, his breath warm in my hair.
“I’m sorry I insisted,” I said.
“I’m sorry I let you insist.”
We spent the whole afternoon together, just the two of us. We walked down to the cottage and collected Mom’s bicycle, and Kevin rode me on the handlebars up the path to Wray Castle. We circled the empty beast of a place, riding down to the front gate and back up to the broken clock tower, glad to have no reminder of the passing time. We rode on to the Wray Castle boathouse, where a young boy and his dog eyed us suspiciously even after I’d hopped down from the handlebars and muttered the obligatory “Hiya.” Kevin put the bike on the kickstand and stooped to rub the dog’s ears.
“What’s this fella’s name?” he asked the boy, and before the public launch arrived some twenty minutes later, we knew everything there was to know about a lizard the boy had caught that morning but not yet named. When I proposed the name Judy—having read in Mom’s journal that Beatrix Potter had a pet lizard of that name—Kevin and the boy looked at me like I was loony. They settled on Wormtongue, with a long and pedantic explanation for my sake about wizards and devious servants and how easy the Rohirrim people were to manipulate. “Lord of the Rings,” Kevin explained.
Kevin and I crossed the water to Ambleside on the public launch. We left Mom’s bike outside an old cemetery and wandered the winding streets. Plenty of inviting restaurants beckoned on the walk, but it was such a soft evening that we hated to leave it. We wandered inside only when we came upon a charming bookstore at the top of the town. There, we read each other passages from the little Warne editions of Beatrix Potter’s books.
Outside again with a copy of The Tale of Ginger and Pickles tucked into Kevin’s jacket pocket for our nephew, we wandered across the street to Bridge House, a tiny, charming stone place built on a stone arch over the river. We settled on the wall downstream from it, watching the water run underneath the house.
“Could you imagine living in such a small place?” I asked.
Kevin replied, “Couldn’t you?”
A gentleman had a favourite cat whom he taught to sit at the dinner-table where it behaved very well. He was in the habit of putting any scraps he left on to the cat’s plate. One day puss did not take his place punctually, but presently appeared with two mice, one of which it placed on its master’s plate, the other on its own.
—BEATRIX POTTER, IN A JANUARY 27, 1884, JOURNAL ENTRY
“I THOUGHT I MIGHT OPEN A NICE BOTTLE OF WINE AND WATCH THE sunset in the Prospect, and I wondered if you might join me,” Graham said to Anna Page. “As an enticement, I will tell you there is plenty more silver that you might pinch.”
Anna Page laughed easily and said there was a small silver-handled knife she had her eye on. The blade as sharp as a scalpel, she thought as they settled on a settee before one of the windows, with a view to the sloping grade of forest to the west.
He poured two glasses from the bottle and set it at his feet as he had the night before, even though there was a table that would have served the purpose well. She liked somehow that he left the table clear, nothing before them but smooth wood and clear glass and the softening colors of the cloudy sky.
They clinked glasses and he said, “To …” But then didn’t finish the thought.
“To this lovely view,” she said. “To you, for putting Ma up. For putting us all up.”
He put an arm around her and said, “To you, Anna Page. More lovely than the sky.”
“And growing as gray,” Anna Page said—stupidly, she thought. She was usually so good with men. She could get them to say whatever she wanted them to say. And he was, Graham was saying all the right things, the things she wanted him to say. Why was that making her so uncomfortable?
He tipped her head down, observing her hair at the part line, where the grays were creeping in. “I prefer the gray,” he said.
She looked down to the hiking shoes on her feet, the ones he’d brought that first morning. The shoes were broken in, more comfortable. I’m a fair guess at clothing sizes, but feet don’t always match the rest, he’d said that first morning, before he’d even said his name.
He kissed her then. Kissed her as he had the night before, this time without the cover of the dark night and the outdoors.
She touched a hand to his ha
ir, healthy and thick but graying. She imagined the feel of it on her breasts, on her belly. She imagined running her fingers through it as he kissed the parts of her that she loved to have kissed.
She might seduce him now, she thought. She might have it over with and move on.
She sat beside him, watching the colors edge the clouds, listening to the quiet of the evening coming up: the crackle of the fire in the room’s large fireplace warming their backs, the lap of the lake, the flutter of a bird disappearing from sight in the direction of the aviary high above the tiny door to the herb garden, which was tinier in his sketch.
“I’m not very good in relationships,” she said.
“I haven’t been with a woman since Cornelia,” he said.
Cornelia. She’d heard that name recently. Where had it been?
Cornelia was a girl he’d loved at Oxford, he said, when he was too young to appreciate how rare a Cornelia was, or too wrapped up in his own problems to see that she was the solution, or part of it. As he told her about his old love, she remembered something Julie had said about a poem she’d been reading in the Ainsley’s End library, something Anna Page had only half heard, because what did she care about poetry? A poem about a man taking a boat across a lake in search of his dead love’s first lover, whom she’d known in school.
She remembered the first boy she’d slept with, when she was barely in high school, only fourteen. She’d imagined she loved him, but after she’d slept with him, she hadn’t liked even the sound of his name.
“I’ve been with men, but I’ve never had a Cornelia,” she said. “Why didn’t you ever go to Ireland to find her?”
At the horizon, clouds threatened the pink-orange sunset. Somewhere beyond the ridge, tiny drops began to plink into Moss Eccles Tarn, circles overlapping into ripples that, slowly and surely, would send the smooth water’s surface into something wilder, scarier, and more interesting.