Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [117]
Daisy Goodwill Flett was told of his extraordinary achievement while a student at Long College for Women back in the twenties; during that same period of her life she herself committed the whole of Tintern Abbey to memory—not because her professor required her to, but because she felt a longing to take the oracular, rhythmic lines of William Wordsworth into her body.
Naturally, at the age of 115, Magnus Flett’s memory has begun to fade, Mr. Sinclair acknowledges that. At the time of the television interview ten years ago he was able to recite only the first chapter of Jane Eyre, but this he did without once stumbling or hesitating.
A year ago he could manage only the first page. And now, as Mr. Sinclair warns his North American visitors, the poor old fellow can handle only the opening lines of the opening paragraph.
The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals. Why does young Victoria work so hard to keep old Magnus Flett out of her thoughts? And why does her Greataunt Daisy, day after day, put off her visit to Sycamore Manor?
Every evening she offers her niece excuses, saying she has been seeing the local sights, or occupied with shopping for a summer dress. The warm temperatures continue, a new Orkney record for the last week of June, and she claims she wants to make the most of this unprecedented weather. In her new cotton skirt and blouse (a solid burgundy shade) and her newly acquired walking shoes, she’s braved the fields above Stromness, finding along the way heather, crowberry, various sedges and the beautiful, tiny Scottish primrose (Primula scotica) in all its pink profusion. "Love! tenderness! courage!" she murmurs to the tilted landscape, for no reason that she can think of. Mr. Sinclair, a connoisseur of the pastoral, accompanies her on some of her outings. After the hotel’s midday meal has been served, after the washing-up is done, these two set out together in his smart little Ford Fiesta, visiting the churches and graveyards of neighboring villages, and one day they come across a tombstone whose family name has worn away, but whose date—1675—and brief inscription remain clearly visible:
"Behold the end of life!" A single ringing declaration. (You would think this shout from the land of the dead would have unsettled Mrs. Flett, but instead she falls under its spell, as though she has seen a vision or heard a voice speaking through that exclamation point, announcing a fountain of radiance glimpsed at life’s periphery.)
"Did you visit Magnus Flett?" Victoria asks each evening, returning sunburned and dusty from the rock beds of Yesanby.
"Tomorrow," her aunt promises. "Tomorrow I’ll make arrangements."
The both know—even Lewis Roy knows, watching her, mute and patient with her tea cup raised—that she is preparing herself against disappointment.
Mrs. Flett is discovering that the Orkney greenness is deceptive.
What looks like yards of fertile black earth is only a thin covering over beds of layered rock. Rock is what these islands are made of, light shelfy limestone, readily split into flakes and flags, and easily worked; it’s everywhere. Each farm, it seems, has its own miniquarry, and the tools of quarrying—hammer, point, and klurer—are part of every farmer’s equipment. There being but little wood available, stone flags are used for roofs, for fences, for picnic tables and benches, for milestones and markers, bringing a smile to Mrs. Flett’s face as she thinks of her grandchildren’s favorite television show, The Flintstones. She imagines that the farmhouses she and Mr. Sinclair drive past are furnished with stone chairs and stone tables and even beds and dressers of stone. She recalls that her father-in-law, Magnus Flett, came to Canada at the age of eighteen or nineteen, already a master of his trade: stonecutting.
He worked in the Tyndall quarry until he was sixty-five. A man of muscle