The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [32]
For Avery it had always been three, until his father died. For Jean it had been two, longing for the third. Now they were three, and each felt the rightness of it.
– When my father came to Canada to work on the seaway, explained Avery, my parents searched for a place to please my mother. She chose the black fields of Holland Marsh. They moved into an old farmhouse and my father built a painting room for her. The house is bright white and sits like a ship on that good, black earth. A canal flows at the end of the garden. The colours and grandeur of the vegetables in the fields can pop open your eyes. After my father died, my mother thought she'd remain only temporarily in that house; but the longer she stayed, the less inclined she was to move. She found work illustrating for a children's press in Toronto. She bought a rowboat and docked it in the canal at the end of the garden.
The isolation suits her …
History soaked the ground of Marina's story-forests. One could almost hear the earth in her paintings grinding up the bones. Armed with only a heel of bread, a small basket, a walking stick, or a song; without resources and with the handicap of one's innocence, a child met the terrors of the dense, dark, unhappy wood, the winding paths from which one must not stray yet lead to the inevitable terror.
Marina's illustrations were the colours of plant rot, rain-soaked earth, shadow-coldness. The colours that hide under stones. Peering closely into the darkness of her paint, almost invisible, one saw half-faces, crippled hands, mad eyes, desires exerting their will on the events of the story. Is a curse anything more than a monstrous will at work?
Jean looked at the strong, compact body of Avery's mother, in her cheerful striped apron, swishing hot water in the teapot, chewing a biscuit, and she blurted out:
– Where do these forests come from?
Marina answered without a moment's pause.
– From home.
When Avery was working up north, Marina took Jean into her studio, set up a table there, and gave her exercises in looking. Then she let Jean's hand go free. Page after page, fast sketches dropped to the floor. Then again slowly – a single drawing each morning. They went on walks, they cooked together. Marina made pronouncements over the sound of the water as she washed the vegetables. “What is the meaning of the kitchen in a children's story? It is the mother's body!”
– William was away for so much of Avery's young life, said Marina, that they did not really know each other. But after the war, William took Avery everywhere with him in his Norton Big Four. He packed Avery into his blue Swallow sidecar along with their gear and they rode up to Scotland and down to Wales for the hydro-electric projects, Glen Affric, Glen Garry, Glen Moriston. Claerwen Dam, Clywedog Dam. William was part of the first underground power stations in England, in Strathfarrar and Kilmorack. But always he envied his colleagues who were busy building the underground in London.
We met on a train in Scotland, on the way to Jura, continued Marina. William was travelling with his father. The island of Jura is long and narrow. It has only one road. It was no surprise that our paths would cross again, and they did. As he came closer, I saw that he was the same man I'd talked to on the train. It was not a real road in those days, just a track really and, on either side, the wet bog. I was suddenly so shy I didn't even think but jumped down into the verge. Of course the instant I'd done it, I knew he would think I'd lost my wits. I lay down in the wet and clutched my book to my chest and closed my eyes. William slid down next to me. He just looked at me and asked, ‘What are you reading?’ It was outrageously funny, but at the same time I realized very suddenly how afraid I'd been that his first question would be ‘Are you a Jew?’
I was almost twenty-three. I'd answered an advertisement to be a companion to an elderly woman who could no longer live alone. It turned out that I was the only applicant because the woman, Annie Moorcock,