Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [115]
They drank their tea in silence. Then Lewis, determinedly bright, raised a celebratory tea cup and said, "Here’s to the bones of the real Magnus Flett! We’ll find him yet."
"You made a rhyme," said Victoria, who liked to see eagerness in others.
"Oh, well," Victoria’s aunt said, her mouth smiling now, her chest full of heartbeats.
The next day the wind died down. The sun came on surprisingly strong, and tourists in shorts and T-shirts and summer dresses poured off the ferry and thronged the narrow streets of Stromness, eating ice-cream, buying postcards.
It was evening and the light still bright. Lewis and Victoria lingered over their shepherd’s pie at the Grey Stones Hotel dining room and explained to Victoria’s Aunt Daisy their reason for coming to Orkney. Lew pulled out a pencil and made a little sketch on his paper napkin, hastily executed, yet beautiful—or so it seemed to Victoria, who later folded the napkin carefully in two and pressed it in the back lining of her suitcase. The islands, Lew said, abounded with the fossil remains of small sea animals. But evidence of early plant life has been destroyed. The temperature of the earth was wrong, the plant structures too fragile. But back in Toronto, working with a set of computer-enhanced maps, the latest thing, he and Victoria had been investigating fossil patterns found in the north of Scotland, tracing a broad arc through the west of that country and up into Scandinavia—this arc, with just a little bending, passed through the outlying tip of Orkney’s Mainland, persuading them that certain rock formations at Yesanby, a few miles north of Stromness, held promise. The rock was different here, harder, so much so that islanders had traditionally gone to this remote point of land in search of millstones, the rest of the Orkney rock being too soft to serve. Lewis mentioned the Rhynie chert, he mentioned Middle Old Red sandstone. He explained how he had applied to the Science Council of Canada for a travel grant, and how he had assembled his equipment and his research team, a team that consisted of himself and Victoria Flett. The two of them had twenty-one days to poke around and write up their notes before the funds ran out. Both of them brimmed with optimism; biology, Lewis argued, will always frustrate the attempt of specialists to systematize and regulate; the variables are too many; the earth is sometimes withholding, yes, but more frequently generous.
Victoria looked across the table and regarded her aunt, who appeared rested, serene, and flushed with the heat of a long day. Because of the fine weather she’d left her suit jacket upstairs in the room the two of them were sharing, and she was musing now about whether she should perhaps have a look in the local shops the following day, see if she could find a lightweight dress in her size.
She’d slept soundly last night, solidly, which was just as well.
Victoria, gazing at her aunt, felt a lurch of love, and claimed for herself a share of her aunt’s present contentment, her ease. She almost wished there were hardships she might save her from, gifts she might give her. Right now, right this minute, the little tongues of amity between Lewis and her aunt seemed beautiful to her, the beginning of something.
Lewis was telling her about the bicycles and backpacks he had rented so that he and Victoria could ride out to Yesanby the following morning and start their investigation. "We’ll start digging for our little wonders," Lewis told her, "and leave you to find Magnus Flett."
"Did I hear you say Magnus Flett?" the proprietor of their hotel said, pausing by their table and pouring out their coffee.
The proprietor’s name was Mr. Sinclair. He was a large, nobly built man, a lifelong bachelor with a clever face and a headful of fine gray hair which he was forever palming back from his forehead. How on earth had this person got into the hotel business, Victoria wondered—he should have been a movie actor with his graceful, his almost silvery way of setting down