A pan of lake trout: these were swimming this morning, Stephen says.
And a cake for pudding, made by Tasha, with ground almonds and tiny, sweet, intensely flavourful strawberries.
“Hundred-mile diet,” Kevin says, and then they are all off again, arguing, interrupting, changing sides. It is a new thing: she does not remember discussions like that happening at the von Täler table, nor at dinners with Adam's family. But she notices how, with Kevin present, the rancor does not grow. He exudes a kind of bonhomie, an openness that is a matrix for all of their interchanges. A kind of confidence that comes, perhaps, from being on his own turf: he is a professional chef.
When her opinion is elicited, she laughs and says that she does not cook at all.
Later, Hugh says that Kevin reminds him of Sidonie's father.
“My father!” She is appalled. No, no.
“Yes,' Hugh says. “That quality of friendliness. Peter had that, I remember.”
Possibly. But in her father it had been something of a different caliber, surely.
Hugh is often busy with his work on the bridge, and she feels that she must find activities to occupy Ingrid. She's a quiet girl, given to sleeping late, but otherwise easy to accommodate. She cooks, tidies up after herself, reads, goes for walks, does yoga in her basement room in the morning when the sun shines in. She is quite amiable. But she must not be made to sit in a suburban house for days, and Sidonie needs to work.
It's Alex who comes to the rescue, surprisingly, offering to take Ingrid out on days when he isn't working, which seem numerous, given the time of year and the purported construction boom. But it's a kindness; the girl must want to be with people her own age, and Tasha seems to have a full schedule, while Justin has proved a disappointment as an escort: he's reverted to being surly around Hugh's daughter, as if he has a grudge against her. Even Hugh and Cynthia have noticed this. Cynthia says that she's bewildered by it.
So unlike Justin, to not be a paragon of consideration, of good manners.
So: Hugh drives into town, to oversee whatever it is he is overseeing on the new bridge construction, and Alex comes by most afternoons to take Ingrid out.
In the evenings, Hugh and Ingrid, and often Alex, congregate at her house; they open the French doors, let in the lake breeze. Alex, she sees, is fascinated with her LP collection. Sometimes he'll take Ingrid out again, to a bar, she supposes. It's kind of him. One evening when they stay in, when Justin has come by as well, Hugh makes them look at the photo albums.
Justin is able to pick Sidonie's mother out of the crowd in the photo easily. You look just like her, Auntie Sid, he says. Alex, surprisingly, is the one to spot Hugh's mother.
Sidonie's mother, in this photo, must be fifty, and Hugh's mother is even older. They were old, for mothers of young children.
Hugh says, “This was my parents' second marriage. When they met in India, they were both married to other people. Mother had two children, who she lost custody of, when she ran off with my father.”
Sidonie had not known that. She knows little of her own parents' lives before their arrival in the valley, either.
In the early 50s, Mother had taken Sidonie and Alice on the train to visit her family in northern Alberta; they'd visited only that once. Mother's parents and grown brothers had lived in an unpainted wood house on a few acres of scrub land. They had seemed, even to Sidonie's seven-year-old self, very poor. She remembers little of the visit: only Granny showing her a photograph album, which, like everything important in the house, was kept put away in a tin box, wrapped in newspaper. In a photo with “Hastings Photography Studio” written in the corner in white, Father was wearing a suit, and Mother a little skirt and jacket and hat. There was a backdrop of trees and an archway that did not look quite real.
“I guess your ma always wanted to be high class,” Granny had said, suddenly. “I guess that's why she went for your pa.”
The summer that Mother is dying, Alice mentions that they must telephone Mother's brother Don, let him know. Sidonie asks, “Why were they so poor? It was like the thirties, there, wasn't it? Why were they so poor, still, in the fifties?”
Alice says, “I don't know exactly. There was one more brother, Howard, you know. He was killed in Europe, in the war. Mother always said he was her favourite brother.
“And her parents had a bad start, Mother always said. They were more or less deported from Scotland, you know. Ma's father did something â killed the laird's deer, or something stupid like that. Probably starving. I think he was probably a delinquent of some kind from the start. Mother says he liked horses, but never could hold down a job or make the farm work, and they owed a lot of money. Grandma was supposedly from a more educated class â her father was a schoolteacher â but she never seemed to have it together, did she? Mother always complained that her mother didn't have the sense to stop having children â she said that there'd have been money to put her and Don and Gordon through school, if it hadn't been for the other two being born.”
It was not to be answered, Sidonie's question. By this time, both of Mother's parents were long deceased; her brother Ken had moved to Edmonton, and was retired; her sister Mary already dead in a car accident. Don, who'd got the farm, had sold it when the tar sands were being explored, and now lived on Vancouver Island, purportedly a wealthy but miserly bachelor.
When Alice had told her these things, she had thought: that explains a lot about Mother. Now she wonders, as she did not then, why Alice had been told and not her. Mother, confiding in Alice. What else had Alice known?
On one side of the family, a down-at-the-heels, possibly depressive or alcoholic Scots. On the other, European bourgeoisie.
One of the von Tälers had come looking for Sidonie in the late 1970s, had tracked her down in Montreal. Or, to be precise, had not come looking for Sidonie, but for von Tälers in general. This was an American one, from California or Nevada; she can't remember precisely, now. A man younger than herself, looking, as people did then, for his roots. He'd found her in the phone book. He'd wanted to know about the rest of the family, but she hadn't much information for him. Her father had been dead by then. The American was setting up a group, he said. They could all connect with each other. All of the offspring and relations of the old count. Sidonie had declined, but offered him Alice's children. He had not, she thought, been particularly interested in the Kleinholzes.
A patriarchal structure: only the name had mattered, really. Primogeniture, too. Her father, born into a medieval town, his father the
Burgermeister
, his close relatives titled. If his father had been the older son, he'd have had a different life. As it was, when he was eighteen, the Archduke, a distant relative, had been assassinated; his country had been plunged into war. At twenty-nine, without patrimony or profession, he'd decamped for Canada, had used a small legacy from his grandmother to buy an orchard. (A small legacy? the cousin had said. In my family, we say that he swiped grandmother's jewel case.)
Father hadn't had any recent family photos. Her second cousin, though, has offered to share his collection with her. Come to think of it, he had said that they were available online, at the address he gave Sidonie. She must remember her password; that's how it was set up, she thinks, with a password. Possibly Stephen or one of the children will be interested.
Her father had told no stories of his childhood, of growing up in manor houses, visiting grandparents in a castle with an estate. Her mother had mentioned these details to her and Alice, occasionally. He had told them instead stories of gods and goddesses, of heroic exploits, sirens, sailors bewitched into pigs. Sheâd thought that he made them up, because none of the other children had known them; they only knew the usual fairy tales, or other popular books, like
Alice in Wonderland
. Though that wasn't really a children's story, she thinks, now. Later, in university, she'd discovered their sources in Virgil, Homer, Aeschylus.
And he'd told them of his walking trips with other young men he knew from university, through the German lowlands, across the Alps, and into Italy. He'd told them about visiting Rome and Naples, about the statues of gods and heroes. About the Italian countryside. He'd said, “You'll go there, one day, you girls. You'll see for yourselves.”
But they hadn't: neither she nor Alice. Though she has traveled for work: she has been to England, to France, to Australia and Japan.
She and Hugh and Ingrid
drive out to Marshall's Landing; Ingrid must see, Hugh says, the location of her ancestral home.
Hugh turns in at his old home Sans Souci, or what used to be his home: now it's called, as the large, carved wooden sign on the gates to the broad, newly paved road says, Arrowleaf Ridge.
“An appropriate name, don't you think?” Hugh comments.
“Balsamorrhiza sagitatta
,” Sidonie says. Balsamroot arrowleaf. The showy, golden-petalled sunflower indigenous to the dry interior. She glances at the treeless bluffs above them, but they are too late for the blooms. She can see the patches of leaves, pale matte grey-green, but not the deep saffron of the flowers. “Very good,” Hugh says.
Of course it had been Hugh who had taught them the Latin names of the indigenous plants, out of a field guide, and had translated the Latin, too. And had tested them all, and rewarded them for correct plant identification.
Hugh parks, and they get out and stand in the broad curved street. Here had stood Hugh's house and his family's orchards; his mother's peony garden and herbaceous borders had draped the landscape: green, well-manicured, civilized. The lawn where they used to play croquet and badminton; the flagstone terrace where Mrs. Inglis had served tea.
All vanished, replaced by this new housing development. That is the way of things, of course. And who is to say that the Inglises' very English establishment was a preferable tenant?
Still: a pang of nostalgia.
Hugh takes a professional interest in the swoops of wide street, the march of new houses, some lived-in, with established landscaping; others more rawly new, or still under construction. All are large, expensive-looking, with stonework, large windows, porches, gables, double or triple garages, sometimes detached.
Sidonie observes that Italianate seems the preferred style.
Hugh laughs. “Yes. We're obviously either in the late Republic, or the south English seacoast in the twenties.”
They pass the winery, which has been here for twenty years now, but is new to them. “We'll stop and try the wine and have lunch,” Hugh says to Ingrid, “on our way back up.” And then down to the beach.
Around the sharp, steep hairpin where Hugh had lost control of his mother's Anglia, fifty years ago. And then to the lake.
Which has not changed; which has changed. The bay flung out in its curve; the narrow strip of cottonwoods between the beach and the road, the profile of the blue mountains on the opposite side of the lake familiar, she thinks, as her own face. The jolt of recognition like electricity, old synaptic connections firing in surprise:
here, here
.
Hugh treads the shingle of small smooth pebbles, skipping flat ones out between the dock and the swimming platform, which are deserted this early in the year, but for a pair of mallards. “The beach has shrunk,” Hugh says.
“The water is high.”
“But the beach is smaller, too. When did the packing house come down?”
“In the mid-seventies,” Sidonie says. “You've surely been back since then.”
“But not down to the beach,” Hugh says.
Hugh stands scowling at the strip of houses with their private docks, their “No Trespassing” signs, lining the shore just to the south.
“How was this sold? It should have been kept for a park, a public beach.”“I wish now that I had kept some of the land,” Hugh says. “I could have kept a few acres, have somewhere to come to now.”
“To do what with, Dad?” Ingrid asks.
“These monstrosities of houses at Sans Souci,” Hugh says. “It's hard to get my head around them. I feel dislocated.”
“What do you mean, dislocated?” Ingrid asks.
“Cut off from my own past. My youth. I feel no connection between my roots and all of this.”
“It's just time and change, Dad,” she says. “You've built yourself grand houses, too. And you've lived where you chose to, all over the world.”
Ingrid takes off her shoes and shoulder bag and passes them to Hugh.
“You're not going in!” Hugh says. “The lake's much too cold still!”
But Ingrid makes a running leap, dives into the clear water, comes up with a whoop, water sheeting from her hair and clothing. “It's not so bad,” she says, grinning at them.
“You'll get my car seat wet,” Hugh grumbles.
But Sidonie smiles, sits down on the shore on her haunches, as she has done so many times in the past. She has a thick tartan blanket in her bag, she says; Ingrid can sit on that. And so she does, wearing Sidonie's cardigan over her wet t-shirt, all the way home.
She has something of her grandmother, Sidonie thinks. A kind of cheerfulness, a kind of fullness. Perhaps it is grace.
Hugh and Ingrid are leaving; Hugh is returning to Toronto, taking Ingrid with him. Stephen â Steve, the family calls him, now â and Kevin, who is visiting again, have made what Sidonie thinks of as an early-summer dinner: there is a salad of various leaves and flowers, mange-tout peas, snappish young radishes; baby carrots and squash and zucchini all lightly roasted; a pilaf with almonds and apricots; a dessert (brought by Sidonie) of strawberries and cream, both from the farmer's market, and flaky
palmiers
from the bakery. Kevin has brought some little pork medallions â organic wild pork, he says â that have been marinating in apple cider all the way from the coast, and are now barbecued. This time, everything but the almonds and rice are local. The day is sparkling, light-suffused, and they sit around the new gas brazier on Steve's patio into the long evening.