Annabel - Kathleen Winter [51]
Part Three
12
General Electric
WHEN THOMASINA RETURNED TO Croydon Harbour, she rented a room in the Guest House, the big white house built by Moravian missionaries and bought by Sir Wilfred Grenfell’s society to rent to new teachers and doctors. Thomasina did not intend to build again. She was past building, or sending down roots, or planning into the deep future. Approaching fifty, she knew there is a deep future in one’s life for only so long, then there is no deep future. There is a cliff, you drop off it, and your life comes to an end, and hopefully it has been a life in which you touched other lives with some sort of constructive tenderness.
Wayne’s grade seven classmates were not sure what to make of their new teacher. Some of their parents had a few things to say about Thomasina Baikie around the dinner table. How she had gone off gallivanting, after her husband, Graham Montague, had drowned with their little red-haired daughter. She did not look now the way she had looked before. Her hair had turned salt-and-pepper and she had cut it, and she wore wire glasses and jeans. You got the feeling something radical could happen with her around.
“What is she doing living in that place?” Brent Shiwack said at recess time. “My dad says she must be nuts to pay rent there. It’s only for visitors.”
In class Thomasina did not speak to her students as if they were children, and she did not single Wayne out.
“When you were all babies,” she said, “my husband died.”
Wayne knew this. He remembered the photograph of Graham Montague that had sat on her sideboard.
“I wanted to see the world, and he said that was all right with him, just wait a year. But it never happened. And then he died.”
The class did not know what to make of this.
“You don’t say died,” Donna Palliser whispered. “You say passed away.” There was an uncomfortable feeling in the room. Those who did not smirk tried to look respectful. A man had died.
“So now I can go wherever I want.” Thomasina handed them each a blue stone on a piece of elastic. Each stone bore a painted eye that looked out with severity. Wayne felt wary of the eye. The girls tied theirs onto their wrists and the boys laid them on their desks. The eyes had come from Greece. Thomasina showed them a clay lantern that was nothing but a bowl that fit in your hand, and you filled it with olive oil and lit a piece of wick that floated in the oil, and that was how you had light. Using the projector with clacking, whirring sprockets whose sound Wayne loved, she showed them a Greek dance in which everyone did steps that looked easy but were not.
“Why do we have to watch this, Miss?” Brent Shiwack said. “It’s queer.”
Wayne saw the dance as an elaborate knot but would not say so out loud. It was like the knots his father made in traps and bowlines. Wayne saw it as an interesting mathematical pattern, and wished he could trace its lines with his body.
“How come you don’t live in a normal house, Miss?” Brent Shiwack asked. “How come you live in the Guest House?”
“I used to live here in a normal house. I used to live in the house the Michelins live in now.” Everyone looked at Wally Michelin. Wally shrunk in her desk. “It’s a nice house. It’s a beautiful house for the Michelins. But if I was there I’d look out the windows and see my husband,