After Alice (42 page)

Cashiel is suspended from school for fighting with his cousin, Gabe Clare.

Ingrid becomes pregnant again.

“Do they not know about birth control where she comes from?” Tasha asks, delighted.

A coyote gets into the henhouse, and kills seven of Ingrid's hens. Ingrid cries; Sidonie remembers Colette and the numbered hens of her childhood. Cashiel and Fearon make a marker for the mass grave, all of the hens' names burned on with Fearon's woodworking set.

Alex and Ingrid net approximately twenty thousand dollars in the summer and fall in produce sold wholesale to the restaurant and at the farmer's market. Alex says he needs to have the greenhouses by next spring, and a fruit and vegetable stand of his own. He and Hugh and Stephen begin to look at the bottom land to the east of the valley, where the vegetable farms have always been.

Debbie starts her own business making artisanal jams and salsas for the restaurant and for sale in the gift stores up and down the valley. In her first two months, she clears five thousand dollars. Tasha works for her: she puts on a natty suit and sells to other restaurants. Sidonie, along for the ride, sees Tasha assume a kind of polish, charm, that she had not thought possible.

“It's a costume,” Tasha says. “I can do this but I'm really only
me
when I'm in my jeans, working in the trees.”

She looks at Sidonie sideways, and Sidonie nods; something in her own body has loosened, opened. Her skin rearranges itself, slips more comfortably over her jaw and her shoulder joints. Yes.

She is walking with Hugh;
they've decided to attempt their old trail up the Kopje, retracing their childhood hiking route, but carrying a bottle of local
plonk
, as Hugh calls it, wine from right next door, but really quite good — an award-winner; some crackers and Camembert and grapes, instead of their old waxed-paper twists of jam or egg sandwiches. Sidonie climbs slowly, steadily, while Hugh makes little surges and then stops, panting. They do not comment on their modified pace.

Sidonie tells Hugh that she has met up with Miss Erskine, thinking that Hugh will be surprised. But Hugh has already found her, visited her himself.

“I am not a religious man,” Hugh says, “nor do I believe that churches should take up the job of governments in helping the poor. But it seems to me that she has got hold of the right idea of religion — she is extraordinarily aware and kind, you know. And she has taken on thankless work with the most despised of humans in our country.”

“We all thought she was hopelessly sappy and embarrassing, as children,” Sidonie says.

“Yes,” Hugh says. “Of course. But I suppose she was extraordinary then, too. Her brother, the reverend — he was pretty run-ofthe-mill. A closeted queer, of course. An adequate clergyman. But Daphne — she had something unique, a kind of conviction.”

“I suppose so,” Sidonie says, astonished at Hugh.

“She stopped me from trying to kill someone,” Hugh says. “I probably wouldn't have succeeded, but I'd have got myself into a lot of trouble, if I'd gone through with it. I was only nineteen or twenty. I'd have ruined my life.”

An eclipse of astonishment. “You were going to try to kill someone?
Who
?”

But Hugh is silent.

Sidonie does the math. “No,” she says. Then: “How did you find out?”

“Alice told me,” Hugh says. “Though my mother knew too, and I suppose your mother told her. I don't think anybody else knew, though of course it shouldn't have been a secret. He should have been arrested. But people thought differently then. And he was making so much money for Dad's orchards.”

A piece falling into place. There had been so little brouhaha, after Mother had found that note. Alice shouting, but not when Father was within earshot. The engagement broken off. But not much attention on herself. She had been left, for better or worse, to recover in privacy.

“Of course,” Hugh says, “my mother wanted to make sure he was fired and never worked again in the valley. But that wasn't practical: he was a good manager. My father couldn't have done without him.”

“What happened to him?” Sidonie asks.

Hugh says slowly, “He bought the place, you know, when Mother died. I was overseas — I didn't realize he was the buyer. The lawyers were handling it for me. It was Defoe who got the land out of the ALR and sold it for development. He must have made millions, even in the 80s.”

So: the end of a story.

Hugh says, “That was wrong, of course. For him not to be charged. He should have been charged. It shouldn't have been hushed up. My — all of our — mistaken sense of gallantry was not the right thing, in hindsight.”

Something shifts: something loosens inside her mind. It is the image, perhaps, of young Hugh, small Hugh, always ahead of her, always turning back to rescue her, to urge her along. She has shut herself off from that solicitous, tow-haired boy for so long.

They are on a grassy, flattened part of the slope: perhaps a cirque, scooped out by some ancient glacier, or perhaps just a ledge formed by a rockslide. A few stands of rabbit bush and some little prickly-pear cactus dot the still-green grass. Before them, the lake spills, a generous libation, between the long blue knuckles of the hills. How many gallons, how many molecules, of water? Sufficient and more to water the trees and vines, to wash the rocks of dust, to temper the summers and winters. The deep blue absorbs, contains, gentles the gaze. It parts and rejoins, seamlessly. It reflects the hills, drawing their blue down; it mirrors the sky.

“Shall we stop here and eat?” Hugh asks, “rather than go all the way to the top? I'm afraid the wine is getting warm.”

Though it is fall, the sun is warm; the rock outcroppings, with their colonies of lichen, are still radiating heat.

“Let's,” Sidonie says.

Ingrid urges them
all to sign up for yoga once a week at the community centre. Tasha signs up and persuades Sidonie to do so as well. “I don't,” Sidonie says, “do well with terms like chakra and third eye. I'm a scientist. I really don't speak that language.”

The class is hard: she finds herself grunting and stretching, struggling for balance. She notices that what is required is a strong feedback loop, the sort for which she has been developing therapies. Has anyone done work on yoga, in her field, she wonders, and then falls over yet again. The breathing, the focus on the position of her body: that is the challenge, the exercise. Can she train her mind to develop those paths? She will try; she will be her own experiment. There are moments when she experiences something different, something like highly improved reception, in herself. She will keep at it.

The class conflicts with the one of the nights Tasha waits tables at Sage and Plum, but Cynthia offers to take on that night. A food critic from a local tourism magazine visits Sage and Plum, and on his third visit asks Cynthia out. The family is abuzz, Sidonie sees: there is much speculation as to why Cynthia has remained single for two decades (the consensus is that she hasn't wanted to saddle Justin with a stepfather), and much discussion over the worthiness of the food critic. He is not prepossessing; he is in his fifties, balding; he wears thick-lensed glasses. He has fine, small hands, rounded shoulders. But he signs and is a teacher, like Cynthia, and when he speaks, in a voice quieter than any Kleinholz's or Inglis's or von Täler's, everyone stops and listens. All of them, Steve and Debbie and Kevin, Hugh, Sidonie herself, go around saying to each other,
I like him
. Sage and Plum gets a rave review in
Valley Life
magazine.

And then he is gone, and Cynthia is climbing up into the cab of Jack Rilke's pickup truck to go down to the Legion for a beer.

“Do not play around with Jack Rilke,” Steve says. “The Rilkes have been our neighbours for sixty years.”

Our neighbours
. Sidonie grins to herself.

The restaurant traffic is slower in the winter, but Kevin makes a pitch to a couple of wineries and the ski hills, and busloads of lunch customers help keep things afloat. Sidonie has taken to dropping by the place, to lend a hand on busy evenings, or to watch the boys. It makes a change from the little lake with the ducks.

Cashiel says,
“Want to hear my myth?” He has been bouncing, literally, off the walls; Kevin and Celeste are too busy to pay him attention. Sidonie has been about to leave; she takes off her coat and goes upstairs instead to sit on Cashiel's bed (her old bed-space!) while he reads out his assignment.

“It's a creation myth,” he says. “We had to make one up.”

“Go ahead,” she says.

“A boy created a video game. He made an avatar, and then he made a world for the avatar to roam around in. He made a quest, so the avatar wouldn't be bored, and he made monsters and traps, so that the avatar would get stronger.”

“Yes,” Sidonie says.

“The boy made some other friendly characters to help the avatar, so he wouldn't be lonely or despairing.”

“Very good.”

“But then there was a storm and the boy's computer got fried, and the avatar and his friends and all of the monsters got boosted up a million levels, and they escaped the computer and became real.”

“Oh, my!”

“So then the boy got his computer fixed, and tried to
unmake
them, but he couldn't. They were all loose in the world. In a different world, not this one. And the boy worried about them, but he couldn't help them. He only had to hope that they remembered all the rules and cheats that he had built into the game.”

“Yes, well: I guess that he would.”

“Do you like it?

“Very much. Tell me about the monsters. What they looked like. What powers they had.”

Cashiel shows her pages of tiny sketches, lists of attributes: pages of tiny drawings and crabbed writing. He has almost a book-sized manuscript of his drawings and lists. She thinks: And Cashiel is constantly in trouble at school for not writing enough, not doing the work. She contributes to his list of monsters,
Lastrygonians,
dracanae, hydrae, medusae, Cyclopes.
Cashiel is impressed.

“But there are more monsters than these,” she says. “Talk to your grandmother.”

He opens his eyes wide. “You mean those old stories? I could put those into my myth?”

Fearon says, taking an interest from his own bed, “This could be a new kind of game. Not a platform or a maze game, but a web game. The screens could connect. . .”

“In three dimensions!” Cashiel says. “Or add in interface, there's another dimension.”

“Yeah, it's all about the connections, then.”

Around the two of them, energy: light.

Kevin says they've decided
to close down the restaurant on Christmas Day and do a family dinner. “We'll lose some business, yes,” he says, “but there haven't been a lot of calls for reservations. It's not like in the city, where so many people live alone.”

“Live alone and can afford to eat dinner out,” Sidonie corrects.

They will all come: Cynthia, Justin, who has finally returned from his walkabout, Steve and Debbie, Alex and Ingrid, Tasha, Sidonie. Hugh is flying out as well. Cynthia's beau, as her brothers refer to Jack Rilke now, will not come; he will have Christmas with his parents and his ex-wife.

“Do you think it's strange,” Cynthia asks Sidonie, “for a man to spend Christmases with his ex?”

“I do,” Sidonie says firmly, swallowing her own alarms. “Strange and wonderful.”

Tasha announces that she will be bringing a friend: “A person called Don,” Debbie says.

“Or Dawn,” Alex suggests, winking.

“Oh, dear,” Debbie says. “I know it's really common now, but I hope. . .”

Sidonie, who has some idea, says nothing.

And Celeste's auntie Edith will come, though no other family members. “There's a better party going on at my uncle Roy's,” Celeste says. “But Edith and Roy are on the outs.”

There is a vote, and turkey is not on the menu. “Thank you!” says Kevin, who has been cooking for staff Christmas parties all month. Instead, there is moose — a great rib roast, donated by Celeste's dad — and quail.

“Not the little jobs with the topknots that run through the orchard!” Ingrid says, alarmed, and Kevin explains that they will be domestic quail. But he has a gleam in his eye, at her comment.

And crab, which is to be delivered, fresh off the boat, by a friend of Kevin's who is driving up from the coast Christmas Eve.

Everything else will come from the farm or orchard: tiny Andean button potatoes in various colours, which seem to like the valley soil; grilled peppers, cherries and rosemary for the sauce for the moose, currants and walnuts for stuffing the quail (the currant bushes and walnut trees discovered in the tangle of brush at the north edge of the property, by the gulley); pickles and chutney with Debbie's label: Sage and Plum Moveable Feast.

A cake thick with dried fruit and nuts.

Only the chocolate, the cheeses, and wine are not from the Sage and Plum Gardens, though the cheese and wine are locally produced. “But I bought the chocolate where it was made,” says Justin, who has returned with several pounds in his backpack. And a beard.

Sidonie dresses for the dinner.
She puts on, after her usual narrow black jeans, a thin black dress, which is quite lightweight, really. It falls to her thighs; the sleeves flutter. A pleasing dress, comfortable on the body. Tags cut out, as they scratched. Adam had bought it for her in 1967. She is pleased with the roll of the collar, the tiny, neat pockets and placket.

Then the tunic: this one patterned in a spectrum of oranges that she particularly likes: the colours of an Indian spice market, perhaps. Also, originally, a dress. Bought in 1972 for Adam's parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary party.

And last, the vest, which she is even fonder of than the dress and tunic. This a fine, cabled wool knit, narrow, with deep armholes. It had been Adam's: he had thought it too conservative, and she had taken to wearing it, in the late 70s, over large flannel shirts or turtlenecks: the Annie Hall look.