The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [86]
And so I continued to watch Emily, this person who had been for a while some kind of despot of beauty in my youth. Though I knew her also as quiet and cautious, even if she sometimes gave off the air of an adventurer. But the stories of her married life, in their various postings, and the affairs of the heart that had occurred, seemed a familiar version of my cousin, as she had been on the Oronsay.
Had she become the adult she was because of what had happened on that journey? I didn’t know. I would never know how much it had altered her. I simply thought it over to myself at that moment in Emily’s spare cottage on one of the Gulf Islands, where she appeared to be living alone, seeming to hide herself away.
“Do you remember our time on the Oronsay, the ship we took?” I finally asked.
We had never spoken about the journey. I’d come to believe she’d buried or genuinely denied the existence of what had happened that night by the lifeboat. As far as I could tell, it seemed to have been for Emily just a three-week journey that led to a vivid life in England. It felt strange how little all of it appeared to mean to her.
“Oh, yes,” she exclaimed, as if prodded and given a name she really ought to have remembered. Then she added, “You were, I recall, a real yakka, a real demon.”
“I was just young,” I said. She squinted at me thoughtfully. I could see she was beginning to approach her memory of it now, glimpsing a few incidents.
“I remember you caused a lot of trouble. Flavia really had her hands full. God, Flavia Prins. I wonder if she is still alive….”
“I believe she lives in Germany,” I said.
“Ahhh …” She dragged it out. She was thinking deeper into herself.
We stayed in her pine-walled living room till it became dark. Every now and then she turned to watch the ferries trail back and forth between Snug Cove and Horseshoe Bay. They would let free one long moan in mid-channel. By now they were the only lit objects moving in the blue-grey darkness. She said if she woke at six, she’d see the dawn ferry slide along the horizon. I realized this had become Emily’s world, the landscape of each of her days and evenings and nights.
“Come. Let’s go for a walk,” she said.
And so we began to climb the steep incline of the road we had driven down hours earlier, walking over the scurrying leaves.
“How did you end up here? You haven’t said. When did you come to Canada?”
“About three years ago. When the marriage ended I came out here and bought this cottage.”
“Did you ever think of contacting me?”
“Oh Michael, your world … my world.”
“Well, now we have met.”
“Yes.”
“So you live alone.”
“You always were inquisitive. Yes, I see someone. What shall I say … he’s had a difficult life.”
I recalled she always had known troubled, risky people. There had been a long arc to this aspect of her. I thought back to when she had arrived in England to become a boarder at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. I’d see her during the holidays, still part of the Sri Lankan community in London, some boyfriend hovering beside her. There was an air of anarchy about her new friends. And one weekend during her last year, she had slipped through the school gates, climbed onto the back of someone’s motorcycle, and roared off through the Gloucestershire landscape. In the accident she broke her arm, and as a result of the incident was expelled from the school. So she was then no longer a fully trusted part of that close-knit Asian community. She eventually got away from all that by marrying Desmond. It had been a quick wedding, he had been offered a post abroad, it was waiting for him, and they left soon after. Then, when her marriage finally ended, Emily decided for some sad reason on a sort of exile on this quiet island on the west coast of Canada.
It seemed a not quite real life compared with what she and I probably imagined when we were young. I still had memories of us on bicycles