Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [113]
"Take my advice and avoid two things. First, bed and breakfast establishments. Some of them actually stick you between those godawful nylon sheets, yech, and serve you mushy hot tomatoes for breakfast, I kid you not. Two, don’t drink the water out of the faucet. Haven’t you ever wondered why they drink all that tea over there? Because tea requires boiled water—boiled, get it?"
"Travelers’ checks."
"Money belt."
"Two small suitcases are better than one big one, that’s the smartest thing I’ve ever been told."
"When we were in Canterbury—"
"The time I went up to the Lake District—"
"—fish and chips, wrapped in newspaper."
"—a little plastic case with your own soap because—"
"My great-great grandmother came from the Isle of Wight. Is that anywhere near where—?"
"If you could just pick me up one of those cute little Wedgwood ashtrays, the green color though, not the blue."
"—keep your valuables on your person at all times—"
"—these itty-bitty earplug thingamajigs, you can buy them at Winn Dixie."
"The Orkney Islands? Never heard of them."
Young Victoria, meeting her great-aunt at Mirabelle Airport in Montreal, was in a knot of nerves. "I’d like you to meet Lewis.
Lewis Roy. Lew, this is my Aunt Daisy." Tonguing each word.
"How do you do, Mrs. Flett."
"Lew’s going to the Orkneys too," Victoria said, her voice rising. Her face as she said this was awful. So was her hair, lank, unevenly cut.
"Oh."
"He’s kind of, you know, in charge of the project. He’s"—she performed a grotesque rolling shrug of nonchalance, "he’s my prof, sort of."
"Really just a post-doc, Mrs. Flett. Victoria and I came up with this proposal together. It was mostly her idea." His face appeared strong, his mouth eager, ready to be amused.
On the plane the three of them were seated side by side, Lewis Roy on the aisle, Victoria in the middle, her aunt by the window.
They drank some champagne and ate a dinner of chicken and sliced carrots, and in the daze and rumble of airline ritual became easy with each other. Then Lewis plunged into a long, complex account of a previous flight to Europe, and as the story progressed he fell, egregiously, into the present tense. "So the pilot makes an announcement. Hey, one of the motors is kaput. Right. We turn back.
We’re like all shook up. But we sit there spooning up our grub like it’s just a real fun time we’re having, and the next thing you know we’re sitting on an airstrip somewhere in Labrador, an army base or something, and we’re like stuck there for twelve whole hours, the toilet malfunctioning, and then—"
"Aunt Daisy’s tired, I think," Victoria hummed.
He fell instantly silent. Gnawed on his knuckle bones, yawned hugely, glanced about.
Victoria burned with shame. She knew how her aunt must feel about this young man, his hair flowing around his shoulders like a cape of fur, his boyish narrative masking his brilliance, his extraordinary tenderness transformed to male insouciance. The stewardess, at last, brought around blankets and pillows and dimmed the lights, and they all three pretended to sleep. Victoria could hear her aunt’s jagged breathing, almost a sob, and understood that this elderly person beside her longed with all her soul to be home in her Florida condo, to be anywhere but where she was, riding the night Atlantic with the little nightlight gleaming on the window frame and across her eyelids.
Victoria, the whole of her terrible radar on duty, could sense, too, the waves of sadness, of failure, emanating from Lewis Roy’s stiff body. Under the secrecy of her woolen blanket she reached sideways for his hand, found it trembling, and held it tight. She had never touched him before; he really was her instructor and she his student; they were not, then, on a footing of intimacy.
After a while she reached out her other hand and placed it on her