Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [63]
How good it is to see you again, Uncle Barker.
Her lips move silently against the train window. One slender arm reaches out, shaking hands with the air. Such a pleasure. After all these years.
Maybe now is the time to tell you that Daisy Goodwill has a little trouble with getting things straight; with the truth, that is.
She had a golden childhood, as she’ll be happy to tell you. Her loving adopted "Aunt" Clarentine, her adoring "Uncle" Barker.
Warmth, security. Picnics along the river. A garden full of flowers.
And then at age eleven finding her real father, a remarkable (everyone said so) self-made man who showered her with material plenty, as well as the love of his heart.
Well, a childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction. Which is why you want to take Daisy’s representation of events with a grain of salt, a bushel of salt.
She is not always reliable when it comes to the details of her life; much of what she has to say is speculative, exaggerated, wildly unlikely. (You will already have realized that no person in this world could possibly be as insensitive, as cruel, as her mother-in-law, Mrs. Arthur Hoad, is made out to be.) Daisy Goodwill’s perspective is off. Furthermore, she imposes the voice of the future on the events of the past, causing all manner of wavy distortion. She takes great jumps in time, leaving out important matters (her expensive, private education, for instance—Tudor Hall, Long College). The acts of her life form a sequence of definitions, that’s what she tells herself. Writing letters to her Uncle Barker, she elects the language of childhood, deliberately naive, wistful, girlishly irresponsible, safe. Sometimes she looks at things close up and sometimes from a distance, and she does insist on showing herself in a sunny light, hardly ever giving us a glimpse of those dark premonitions we all experience. And, oh dear, dear, she is cursed with the lonely woman’s romantic imagination and thus can support only happy endings.
Still, hers is the only account there is, written on air, written with imagination’s invisible ink.
Having read his Bertrand Russell, Barker Flett has long since cast off a belief in conventional morality, but, as a senior civil servant in His Majesty’s government (Executive Director of Agricultural Research), he is compelled to observe a certain level of propriety.
A young woman under his roof? How would this look?
A niece, he might explain, but Daisy is not really his niece. His ward? No, his guardianship has never been formalized. What is he to do? How will he explain her presence.
It occurs to him that his housekeeper, Mrs. Donaldson, who comes in daily to clean and to prepare him a cold supper, might be prevailed upon to stay overnight during the period of Daisy’s visit.
He asks her, delicately setting out the problem. She bluntly refuses. She has her own family, after all, to go home to; what he asks is impossible.
He sighs, immensely relieved. And then he begins to worry once again. His life with Daisy has not even begun, and already there are all these vexing problems to be dealt with.
"In one hour I will be there," Daisy writes in her travel journal, underlining "there" three times.
It is unbearably hot on the train, but she has managed, with the conductor’s assistance, to open a window. As a result her hair is blowing about wildly, and the fading sunlight shines through it, so that she appears to be wearing a kind of halo or else a hat made of burnt fur.
To still the loud beating of her heart she stows her journal away safely, or so she thinks, and replaces her gloves. She holds herself upright, rigid. A stillness that purifies. Barbara Stanwyck with a head of foxy hair.
She is overwhelmed at times—and this is one of those times—with the wish to ask forgiveness.
Now darkness is coming on gradually, and the Ontario sky fills up with diamond dust. These particles, she senses, have nothing to do with her. The villages that rush by are foreign and unyielding. They seem to turn their