The Custodian of Paradise Read online

  “I can’t read or write,” he said. “Not one word. Not even my own name.”

  I saw instantly that it was true. I felt myself flushing with shame. I had embarrassed him. Not just now, but when I spoke of the note that I would give him concerning my supplies. And when I asked if anyone had written to him about me. I wondered if to apologize would only make things worse. Not one word. Not even my own name.

  “The rest can read and write,” he said. “Irene and the children. She teaches them.”

  Then books were for women and children, sissified pursuits that no man could be bothered with.

  I felt another spurt of panic. All of this might, for perfectly innocent reasons, be a charade, the loading of my things into the boat, the trip to Loreburn. He might think that, not in my right mind, I would be less upset at losing Loreburn if I could see for myself what it was like. Irene, even now, might be preparing for me a place to stay in Quinton, a room in their house, and sending for someone from St. John’s to come and bring me home.

  I faced into the sea breeze and the spray that it blew back from the prow and from the crests of waves that were so black I forgot we were sailing on salt water until I licked the droplets from my lips.

  “What do you think of the war?” I said.

  He shrugged.

  I wondered if he had thought of enlisting in spite of Irene and the children. I knew of many married men with children who had enlisted, and of some who considered a man a coward if he cited his family as his reason for staying home.

  “Have you ever seen any submarines out here, Patrick? Ours or theirs? Or any of our patrol boats?”

  He gave no sign that he had heard me.

  “A German sub was sunk by airplanes just a few miles from St. John’s,” I said. “About a hundred yards offshore at a place called Bell Island. Hundreds of people watched the planes drop their bombs. Everyone cheered when the wreckage of the sub came bobbing up.”

  Still no response.

  “A sub could surface right in front of us. Or a periscope.” Periscope. I felt that I had just warned him about some mythological creature believed in by people who knew nothing of the sea.

  He looked over his shoulder, glanced at my thick-soled boot and at the cane that I had carried like a spear as he helped me climb down into his boat in Quinton. I sat with the cane planted in front of me, both hands on the silver knob, one atop the other, a pose that required me to spread my legs so that my dress hung limp between them. Churchill’s pose, which I had seen in newspaper photographs. Not that I was aping Churchill. I had sat like this when I was a girl, when the cane was just an affectation. Sent to me from New York one Christmas, the first Christmas of her absence, by my mother, along with a note that read: “I think it will suit you some day.”

  “I’ll be able to manage, in spite of this,” I said, tapping my right boot with the cane. He looked out across the water. He seemed mortified, as if I had disclosed some womanly complaint.

  “The legacy of an old illness,” I said. “A lame pun. Which itself is not so lame a pun.”

  I looked behind at the wake that led like a slowly vanishing road back to Quinton.

  The shape I had seen from the wharf at Quinton was indeed the island of Loreburn, which Patrick indicated by looking at me as he pointed at it. From this distance it resembled a massive rock with a dark green mantle of grass dotted white with gulls.

  I was struck now, as I had been many times before in my life, by the wild but somehow purposeful cacophony of seabirds on remote islands. Patrick and I might have come upon an entirely self-sufficient city in flourishing commotion, a city at the height of its daily commerce, in mid-mayhem and oblivious to the very existence of an elsewhere with other motives and pursuits.

  Suddenly, it seemed that the island and the sky above it had started to revolve. I took hold of the gunwale and closed my eyes in the hope of waiting out this vertigo as I had done so often as a teenager when, having had too much to drink, I lay down and tried to sleep. I wondered what I would do if, when I opened my eyes, the world was still revolving. My whole being was giddy with the effort of holding on lest the spinning culminate in a mad disintegration of my mind. I knew I must not let Patrick see me like this or he might deem me unfit to live alone on Loreburn and take me back to Quinton. The legacy of an ancient illness. I clung more tightly to the gunwale, clenched my teeth and stomach muscles, praying that Patrick would remain as intent as ever on what lay in front of him. At last, the great wheel to which I was bound began to spin more slowly.

  I felt the cold breeze on my forehead, opened my eyes and thought for a moment that I must have hit my head on something, for my vision was blurred by what I thought was blood. It pooled like mercury into smaller shapes, and still smaller ones until the strange evaporation was complete and all things looked as they had before. I drew a deep breath and slowly let it out. I was not often able to breathe so deeply without difficulty. My lungs had never been the same since I was “cured” of TB. Such a young woman, Miss Fielding. Such a shame.

  It seemed there was no entryway to that rock, no passage at the end of which there might lie a beach, and beyond the beach, land flat enough and deep enough in topsoil that houses could be built on it. I was soon able to make out individual rocks at the base of the cliffs and to see that what had seemed to be sheer rock had fissures, in the shelter of which grass and small trees grew, improbable spruce trees eking out their stunted life as if their roots were tapping, artesian fashion, into some reserve of water deep within the cliffs. Loreburn Island. But no sign of the settlement. We seemed to be headed straight for the highest, most sheer, least promising headland, were well within the cool dark shadow of it, close enough to shore to hear the breakers and the great multitude of seagulls overhead and to convince me that soon we and our boat would be dashed to pieces on the rocks, when Patrick began furiously to turn the wheel counter-clockwise. The prow of the boat moved slowly from the perpendicular towards the parallel, its slowness at odds with the flurry of motion that was Patrick’s arms.

  When we were at right angles to our wake, I got up and stood in what little space there was beside him at the wheelhouse. And there, abruptly, incongruously, at the end of an inlet to navigate whose narrows he had had to make so wide a turn, was Loreburn.

  Looking like it had somehow been gouged out by the founders of the settlement was a great recess in the cliff. There was a beach, one more deserving of the name than the beach at Quinton, a wide, many-tiered wall of sea-smoothed stones that, for anyone, would be difficult to keep your balance on and, for me, all but impossible. I saw on the rocks the waterlines of the tides and above them those of storm surges, the rocks growing a darker green the higher up the “steps” I looked.

  From this prospect I could see the shape of the entire settlement. On the highest point of open land stood a small white church with a single steeple, the church front facing me so squarely it might have been a mere facade. Within the Roman arch that once had framed the door was a sheet of plywood. In the belfry, dangling like the fragment of a noose and swaying slowly in the breeze, was a piece of rope from which the bell had hung.

  Starting directly in front of the church, a cart road zigzagged downhill among the houses. It consisted of two paths on either side of a ridge of high grass, wheel ruts that had been worn so deep it might be centuries before anything took root in them again.

  All the houses faced the sea and, like the houses of Quinton, had their windows boarded up. Loreburn looked to be in a permanent state of mourning, each family withdrawn to endless solitude behind those boarded windows. The houses were like faces whose eyes and ears had been patched and whose mouths had been taped shut.

  There was nothing that looked like it might have served as a school, though given how few people had lived here, it was possible that the children of Loreburn had been taught to read and write in the front room of one of these houses.

  I searched among them for the place that he had mentioned, starti
ng from the top and working down. I scanned from side to side, counting the houses as I went, conducting my own census, looking for a window, a rogue pane of glass, a door with a latch, a pile of firewood, a clothesline. But I saw no sign that any of the seventeen houses had recently been lived in. Nor any that someone was waiting for me.

  “Patrick,” I said, “which one is yours?”

  “Not mine,” he said. “Just a place I fixed up, that’s all.”

  He pointed slightly away from Loreburn, where, almost hidden among the largest of the trees and nearer to the beach than any of the other houses, stood a house that was larger by one storey than its fellows. A three-storey house perhaps a hundred yards removed from its nearest neighbour. House number one, or house number eighteen. The house of someone who, for some reason, had chosen not only to live apart from the others but out of sight of them, and almost out of sight of anyone regarding Loreburn from the sea.

  There were still a few remnants in the water of the wharves and fishing flakes, posts that had once supported them protruding at jagged angles from the water like the masts of sunken ships.

  The only wharf still intact lay in front of Patrick’s house. It was not new but looked like an old one that had been restored. After manoeuvring the boat to a ladder on the side of the wharf, he tied the trunks with khaki-coloured canvas straps to which he hooked and fastened the nylon rope of his boat’s small winch. He cranked with both hands as he had done at the wharf at Quinton, but there it had been much easier because it had only been necessary to lower the trunks into the boat, not lift them from it. I watched the trunks sway and revolve as they rose from his boat.

  Also in the trunks were the notebooks. The ones in which for years I had kept a journal. And the ones Sarah said David had written and had told her to send to me in case … I knew that I should not think of the notebooks or of my children now. What would Patrick do at this point if I began to cry? I stared hard at the trunks, terrified that the rope or winch would break or the trunks would come loose from the hooks and their contents spill irretrievably into the water.

  By the alacrity with which he went about the business of hoisting the trunk from the boat, he might have landed travel trunks at Loreburn every day. There were glistening drops of what might have been either sweat or seaspray in his hair, both perhaps. He drew the back of his hand across his mouth.

  “Do you need help up the ladder?” he said.

  “No,” I said and climbed up as briskly as I could.

  It was late afternoon. He said he would help me unload the contents of the trunks and carry them to the house, for the trunks, weighing what they did when full, had gone as far as he could take them.

  “I can unpack the trunks,” I said. “I haven’t done a thing all day to help you. And I can manage with the boxes and the baskets too.” I was sincere in wanting to spare him any more trouble on my behalf. But I was also anxious that, although he knew of my supply of Scotch, he not set eyes on it, on the sheer, profligate abundance of it, that he not have to labour politely and discreetly in the service of my dipsomania. Nor did I want to set eyes on the notebooks until I was alone.

  “Why don’t you show me the house?” I said.

  He turned and made his way along a path that was so canopied with alders that even he had to duck beneath them. The smell that young birch trees give off in the fall was everywhere, a smell both sweet and rancid. Despite the canopy of alders, the path was well-worn. In places, in the dried mud, there were not very old footprints that were of the right size to be Patrick’s.

  “How often do you come here?” I said.

  “Oh, now and then. Depends on the weather.”

  Why would anyone with nothing to hide answer questions so evasively? Why do you come here? I almost asked again, then told myself that, as I was about to see the place, the answer might soon be evident.

  “Never leave that river if you go into the woods,” he said loudly, as if I had just stated my intention to do that very thing. He said there were so many criss-crossing paths that I would get lost.

  The path meandered around some large rocks, then sloped upward. He turned sharply right, and as he held back a branch so that it would not lash me when he let it go, I saw the house.

  The top two storeys were boarded up. In the windows of the first storey there were panes of glass. Except for the windows and the extra storey, it looked just like all the other houses of Loreburn, the structure sagging slightly, grey with age, without a trace of whatever colours it had once been painted.

  The path led around the house to the back door—the front was boarded up—an old storm door that had no window but whose latch looked almost new. Three stone steps comprised the threshold of the house, the top a slab of granite in which footprintlike hollows had been worn that now held little pools of water from the last time it had rained.

  Climbing the steps, Patrick raised the latch and opened the storm door to reveal another door, this one with a window and an ornate glass knob. There was a keyhole, but he turned the knob and pushed the door open, giving it a slight but unmistakably practised nudge with his knee.

  I followed him into a large windowless porch, which, by the dim light from the open door, I could see was almost empty. There was a long, makeshift table along one wall on which, neatly spaced in a row, stood several lanterns partway filled with oil.

  Beside us, as crumpled as a pair of pants, were a pair of mud-encrusted hip-waders. I smelled what I thought was the oil in the lanterns, but when I sniffed he told me it was paint that I could smell. “I repainted everything about a year ago,” he said.

  I saw what I thought was another table. Set into it, in a round hole that it fit perfectly, was a large, white, enamel bowl, a washbasin big enough for sponge baths, and beside it a blue enamel jug, as well as an unwrapped, once-square, now-concave, butter-block-sized bar of soap. It bore the imprint of his hand and fingers. Or someone’s.

  On the floor in front of the basin was a round wooden tub in which, I guessed by the size of it, you were meant not to sit but to stand. I felt that I was intruding on his privacy, that I had all but barged in on him while he was bathing.

  “There’s more soap in the cupboard there,” he said, pointing, but I could not make out what he was pointing at. “The crank pump in the shed out back still works. If you want, you can warm up the water on the stove.” Meaning, it seemed, that he preferred to use cold water.

  An image of my chilly self standing there half-naked or naked in the porch went through my mind.

  I had thought I would have to lug pails of water from the nearest stream, had imagined chopping through the frozen surface with an axe every winter morning. But this and other such things I would be spared, all because of the intervention, the inexplicable generosity of this stranger and the apparent coincidence of my having chosen this very island.

  A door frame to which no door was attached led from the porch into the kitchen. He raised his arms and let them drop to his sides as if to say that, as he had warned me, there was not much to it. There was a pot-bellied soot-blackened wood stove whose pipe ran up through a hole in the ceiling. On the stove was a cast-iron frying pan that still bore a trace of grease from some recent meal. “I should have washed that pan,” he said.

  “Well, it’s not as though you were expecting visitors,” I said. “Or is it?”

  “The stove was here when I fixed up the place,” he said. “That and a few other things that would have been more trouble to move than they were worth.”

  Against the far wall was a table with four chairs. Opposite the table, a daybed on which lay blankets in such disarray it looked like someone might have slept in it the night before. Beside the bed, as if the sleeper had removed them just before retiring and meant to step straight into them upon awaking, were a pair of knee-high rubber boots.

  “I’ll get my boots out of your way,” he said. “And I’ll fix up those blankets for ya.”

  How strange it would be to live, for the fi
rst time in decades, in a place where there was no one for whom my floor served as a ceiling. No broom-handle thumping from below in protest of my typing or my lop-gaited pacing of the room.

  “I closed off all the rooms upstairs,” he said. “All the doors are sealed and I chinked up all the drafts. And then I painted everything. Or papered it. Otherwise you’d freeze to death down here, even in the fall.”

  “You really have fixed it up,” I said.

  “There’s three more rooms.” he said. “There’s the front room. That’s what it was, anyway. And there’s two rooms to sleep in.” Neither the word “bed” nor “bedroom” seemed to be in his vocabulary.

  On our way out of the front room, I saw a staircase that gradually faded from view the higher up I looked, the bare, newly painted wooden steps seeming to grow less and less substantial until, as though losing all substance, they petered out in darkness.

  “Is it safe to use the stairs?” I said.

  “They’re safe, but they don’t go anywhere. The upper storeys are all sealed off.”

  Sealed-off rooms hung with squares of plywood whose shapes by day would be traced with light around the edges, light that seeped in like air between the cracks.

  I said I hoped that he had not made the house so draft-proof that I would smother unless I left a window open. He rubbed the back of his neck as if I had posed him some conundrum of carpentry he doubted he could solve.

  “I’m only joking with you, Patrick,” I said.

  “Well. I suppose it’s a lot less than you’re used to,” he said.

  “On the contrary,” I said, “it’s a lot more than I’m used to, and a great deal more than I expected.” Or deserve, I felt like adding. Where would he go now to do whatever it was that he once did here? What years-old habits was he forswearing, supposedly on a whim of generosity?

  He showed me the other rooms. The two bedrooms each contained nothing but one well-made-up bed, an enamel washbasin and jug and identical chests of drawers. As in the kitchen, there was nothing even faintly decorative except the floral-patterned paper on the walls.