Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [118]
He was literate; he could read the Bible or the mail order catalogue if needs be, but he was not a man who would ever have sat himself down to read a book. Mrs. Flett knows this without being told. No, it would not enter his head to read a book. Particularly not a novel. Not a novel by an Englishwoman named Charlotte Brontë.
And never that jewel of English literature, Jane Eyre.
Impossible.
"Do you want me to go with you when you visit Magnus Flett?" her niece offers, with something like reluctance.
"If you like," Mr. Sinclair says to her, "I could accompany you when you call on Magnus Flett."
"Tomorrow," Mrs. Flett says. "Tomorrow."
But the next day she and Mr. Sinclair drove out to the Yesanby site where Lewis and Victoria were at work.
The end of the road had fallen into disrepair, and they were obliged to park the car at the East Bigging crossroad and walk half a mile over the moors to the rugged promontory. Victoria, seeing them approach, waved both her arms and called out an exuberant welcome, her cries blending with the squawks of seabirds and the roar of the waves coming in below.
The sun on the rocks was brilliant. And rising up at the edge of the shining, slippery stone terraces was the famous God’s Gate which Victoria had described to her aunt, an immense natural archway through which every seventh or eighth wave came loudly crashing. (Fifty years earlier, two amateur photographers were said to have climbed into the aperture, and, before the eyes of their wives and children, been swept out to sea.)
It seemed to Mrs. Flett, blinking in the late afternoon sunlight, that she was all at once dwarfed by the hugeness around her: the overwhelming height of the rock formation, the expanse and violence of the sea below, and the high wide-spreading desolate moorland; at the edge of her vision, outside the boom and wash of the sea winds, was Mr. Sinclair’s parked car, no more than a speck on the horizon. Mr. Sinclair himself stood a few feet away, his large arms folded peacefully as wings across his broad chest, at home in his magisterial body. This lightness she felt!—her body suspended between the noise and the immensity of the world—what was it?
She was unable for a minute to put a name to the gusty air blowing through her, softening her face into a smile, and then it came to her: happiness. She was happy.
Mrs. Flett’s favorite niece, Victoria, and Lewis Roy, a man whose existence she had known nothing about two weeks ago, scrambled like insects on the plates of outcropping rock, and scraped with their tiny tools at the surface of the hidden world, hoping for what? To find a microscopic tracing of buried life. Life turned to stone. To bitter minerals. Such a discovery, they had told her, would be enormous in its implications—it excited them just thinking about such enormity—but at the same time the proof of discovery could be held lightly in the palm of a hand, a small rock chip imprinted with the outline of a leaf. Or a primitive flower. A trace, even, of bacteria, fine as knitting, the coded dots of life.
So far, however, and with fewer than half a dozen days remaining, they had turned up nothing.
During the long dark nights in the Grey Stones Hotel, Victoria lies in Lewis Roy’s arms.
She waits until her aunt is sleeping soundly, then rises, feels about in the dark for her slippers, and makes her way noiselessly down the narrow passage to Room 5, where Lewis lies, ready. There is an element of French farce in her nightly excursions, and Victoria values this theatrical frisson and adds it to the mound of her present happiness. The dim corridor, with its gleams and shadows, its antique chest, mirror, and grandfather clock, is softly carpeted, and its dimensions are not entirely lost to darkness since Mr. Sinclair has thoughtfully provided a rosy little nightlight for his guests’ convenience. There is just enough light,