The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [85]
I recognized no one as I walked over the sliding metal ramp. She was not there to meet me. I waited as the cars drove off the ferry. Five minutes passed, and so I started up the road.
There was a woman alone in the small park across the way. She shrugged herself off the tree she was leaning against. I recognized the walk, the gestures, as she came cautiously towards me. Emily smiled.
“Come. The car’s over there. Welcome to my neck of the woods. I love that phrase. As if it were part of a body.” She was trying not to be shy. But of course we both were, and we didn’t say anything as we walked to her car. I realized she had probably been watching me as I’d stood there on the dock and looked around for her, making sure I was what she might have been expecting.
We drove off quickly, and after going through the town, she slowed the car onto the shoulder and turned off the ignition. She leaned over and kissed me.
“Thank you for coming.”
“One in the morning! You always call people at one in the morning?”
“Always. No. I was trying to get you all day. I tried about ten hotels before I found where you were. Then you must have been out. I was afraid you might be leaving before we could meet up. Are you okay?”
“Yes. Hungry. Surprised by all this.”
“We can eat at home. I’ve got some lunch for us.”
We went along the road and then veered onto a narrow lane towards the water. We were going downhill, and she turned onto an even narrower track called Wanless Road. It really didn’t deserve a name. There were four or five cottages overlooking the sea, and she snuggled the car beside one. It looked like a place of solitude, though the nearest neighbour was twenty yards away. Inside, the cottage felt even smaller, but its deck looked out onto water and infinity.
Emily made sandwiches, opened up two beers, and pointed me towards the one armchair. Then she threw herself onto the sofa. And we began talking immediately, about our lives, her years with her husband in Central America, then South America. His nomadic career as an electronics expert meant their friends changed every few years. Then she had left him. She said the marriage had been a cautious one, and she had stepped out of it, recognizing it was “too cold a building” to live in for the rest of her life. It was some years since the breakup, so she could speak with easy authority about what had happened, sketching with her hands in the air above her the situations they had lived through, the landscapes they had lived in. It was as if my faraway connection to Emily made it possible for her to be open with me. So she drew her life for me, as she spoke. And then she was quiet, and we just watched each other.
I remembered something about Emily at the time of her marriage. The wedding was, as they all seemed to be in those days, a culmination, a clarity of shared purpose. Desmond was good-looking and Emily a catch. There were few other considerations in those days for a successful marriage. Anyway, at some stage before I left the reception I happened to notice her. She was leaning against a door and looking at Desmond. There was a distance in her gaze, as if what she was doing now was something that had to be done. Then she had quickly slipped back into the spirit of the party. Who would recall those few seconds at the wedding? But that is what I’ve always thought of when I remembered her marriage—that it was an escape perhaps from disorder, just as in an earlier time she had escaped a tempestuous, uncertain father