Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [60]
Reaching Thurso at last, a wild wetted place with the sky pressing down hard on the horizon, he found the baggage he had sent ahead stored in the corner of a railway shed. On impulse he decided against claiming it—what was there anyway but rubbish he could get along perfectly well without. Hadn’t he proven as much?
He caught the St. Ola for Stromness, a short journey over a mercifully calm sea. He was home. He took a great gulp of air into his lungs, and at that moment a thought formed in his head, the notion that life might after all be made sweet. He would find himself a simple house up near the open fields of East Bigging where he’d spent his boyhood, and make it cozy with the help of a coalburning boiler, a warm bed, electric lights if he could manage it.
And a hidey hole to sock away his store of money. He would live like a king in this snug nest. And he would go on living forever.
During all these years Barker Flett has written to young Daisy Goodwill every second month.
Well now, that comes to six letters a year for twenty-two years, making 132 letters or thereabouts. He tells himself, and sometimes others, that he feels a responsibility for the child. He does not use the word duty, as he might have had he been born a generation earlier; but, still, he is a dutiful man. He is also calm, reflective and self-critical. He knows very well what underlies the compulsive side of his nature; it is the wish to escape that which he can’t comprehend, seeking safety in an unbendable estrangement.
He understands perfectly—and prides himself on this knowledge—how those ancient eremites were able to live out their lives in caves, and monks in their stripped cells. Even when he is in Montreal on one of his visits, lying in the arms of women into whose bodies he has discharged his passion, he longs for the simplicity of a narrow bed and a lacerating loneliness. This is what he has to fight against—wildness, chaos. When he is not fighting, he is giddy with pessimism for a cheapened world. Not always, but sometimes, after an Ottawa dinner party, he lies lifelessly in his bed, his mouth dry, thinking: how absurd I am on these occasions, holding forth like an aged actor in tones of fraudulent gladness. And how, afterwards, I beat back the world with a glass of warm whisky, trying to escape it.
He is too serious, he knows that, too willing to believe—and deaf to the comedy of mismatched couples and unseemly flesh. To comfort himself, he imagines the separate layers of his brain; there are spaces there, cavities that exist between the forces of sex and work. What is he to do with these fixed voids? Other people know. He’s never known.
His father, that austere, unfeeling and untutored man, had insisted his sons polish their boots every evening. Flett has learned to be grateful for this early discipline. It kept him breathing as a boy, provided a pulse, gave order to vast incomprehension. Later he found other ways.
He can’t recall when he learned the names of the plants in his mother’s garden, but he remembers how the exactitude of nomenclature lulled him into comfort. Early on, he knew himself to be one of those who are morally unhoused and in need of specific notation, plants, animals, the starry constellations. Soon, besides his mother’s domesticated flowers, he mastered the plantlife of the fields and woods. He had all of it quickly by heart, common names as well as Latin. Each time he was able to match a specimen with the illustration in Spotton’s Botanical Note Book he experienced a spasm of strength. The green world with its varying forms brought out an exotic tolerance in him and kept him calm. The discovery at the age of twelve or thirteen that the whole of the natural world had been classified, that someone other than himself had guessed at the need for this ordering, struck him like a bolt of happiness. He loved particularly the pockets within pockets, the great botanical divisions revealed