Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [58]
"I think you know what I mean."
"Well, I don’t," she said turning.
"I think you do."
Of course Barker Flett met Daisy’s train. As a matter of fact, he had had his new Hudson specially washed and waxed for the occasion, and drove it to the station slowly, as if it might explode under him, as if it were carrying him toward a punishment of biblical proportions.
The night was hot, though a vivifying breeze drifted up from the canal and entered the car windows. As a rule he disliked driving, but had learned, as he later told Daisy, to appreciate the feel of the polished steering wheel in his hands, and he liked, too, the sensation of this large quiet vehicle pushing its way through the summer dusk whose violet-tinted air was bordered at the top with a darker purple, so utterly different from the skies of his boyhood, from Manitoba’s abrupt evening light.
Thinking of Daisy, how he would greet her, his courage rose and fell, an echo, he supposed, of the clenching and release of memory. He clearly remembered her as an infant, how she had slept for several months in an old dresser drawer lined with cotton batting, and how, for some reason, this arrangement was always spoken of as a sentimental joke, the young infant and her improvised accommodation. After that, there is a great gap in his recollections, unflavored, flat, for Daisy is suddenly eleven years old and lying in a darkened room, recovering from a serious illness (measles? what?), looking up at him with eyes that seem no longer the eyes of a child. On the other hand, he might easily have imagined the entire scene, acquainted as he is with the existential insult of failed memory—though he can’t quite believe this is the case: Daisy’s young, possibly naked, body beneath the sheet—he is unable to clear his mind of it. He rehearses the moment again and again, not lasciviously, but in the hope that he may be wrong. He is fifty-three years old. And it is nineteen years since he saw the child. No, not a child. A woman of thirty-one years. A widow.
"Dear Daisy," he wrote to her less than one month ago, "It’s been so long. I am immensely pleased that you should be planning a visit to Ottawa."
What else had he written?
He can’t remember, and he’s not a man to make carbon copies of personal correspondence—he draws the line on selfconsciousness there—but probably he had penned the same hashed civilities he always imposed on her. Courteous sentiments.
Inquiries about her health, her activities. Dull summaries of his own circumstances, the weather in Ottawa (extremely hot or unbearably cold), the vexations of bureaucracy, occasional higher thoughts on nature, life, progress, the twentieth century, and more and more in recent years, paragraphs of hypocritical avuncular counsel. Counsel from him, her elder, her advocate, he who travels once each month to Montreal in order to relieve his body of its sexual tensions, he, a fifty-three-year-old man who occasionally still weeps at night into his pillow, who is obliged to pinch himself alive with a glass of spirits after a day of papers and meetings and putting out small administrative fires, he who keeps a cushion of awe between himself and women, pretending reverence but requiring protection. He who struggles over his letters to her, to Daisy Goodwill, his only felt connection on this earth, a being unrelated by blood and one who has entered his life by a bizarre accident (her mother’s death, his own mother stepping in), and whose consoling presence flickers always, at the side of his vision.
Apart from Daisy there is no one. To his brothers he writes once a year, at Christmas. Simon in Edmonton scarcely ever replies; Andrew writes back regularly, usually with a request for funds. As for Barker Flett’s father, Magnus, he has fallen through a hole in the earth’s crust. If by chance the old he-goat is still alive he would be in his seventies now, but it’s been years since he left Canada to go back to the Orkneys, and no one has heard so much as a word from him. No one has a scrap of news or even an address. No one,