It was not as though Matt absolutely needed to start in on the workroom that day. God knew, he wouldn’t be able to finish up before he absolutely had to be back in Toronto; he would have to come back again in any case. And Penelope was still very much in the house, spending hours in the workroom herself. Bernadette had suggested he make a start, said she would take Penelope for a drive. They would join the motorcade of ancient townspeople who crept around and around the point at ten miles an hour, their shrunken heads peering up over the edges of car doors that had been built in the previous century. That was Bernadette’s description. When he looked shocked, she reminded him she was entitled. For him to make such a comment would be cruel; for her, it was simply wry and philosophic. He told her he felt a little bit ghoulish going at his mother’s things before she was … before she was … dead, Bernadette had prompted. Then she had told him that the clearing would be much less sad now than leaving it until Penelope was gone. Without her to interpret, the contents of the workroom would be a random collection of husks, mute witnesses to an irretrievable past. Besides, she said, Penelope might derive some joy from things he unearthed.
He had never spent much time in the workroom, he realized, as he opened the pitted pine door. Whether that was Penelope’s doing or his own he was no longer sure. Perhaps it was both: his lack of interest as a child and her need for a sanctuary, though she had never uttered that word that he could remember. The smell of sheep and dust had been less noticeable, he thought, on the day when the Three Fates had made their assessment visit. Or perhaps his mind had been on other things. He wondered whether he should give himself an extra puff of Symbicort before getting down to work, decided that was merely a procrastinating tactic, rolled up his sleeves, and pointed himself at a pile in the farthest corner of the room.
The pile was made up of handbags, the kind his grandmother had fought over with some outfit in Québec that claimed to have introduced them. Penelope used to try to placate her mother when she became especially agitated on the subject. Matt could clearly remember her reasoning. She would propose that the notion of any kind of exclusive ownership of design in the field of traditional crafts was at the very best a grey area. This only served to inflame Thora more. He wondered why, then, Penelope never tried anything more than to repeat the exact same argument every time the matter arose.
All of the work in the pile was his grandmother’s. His mother had made some of this kind of bag in her time, he knew, but Thora’s hand — Thora’s eye — was evident in every one of these. The top three were familiar scenes: one farmland and two seaside. He paused to admire how she had captured in felt and floss so much of the essence of the place. You knew you had been there, even if you could not immediately identify exactly where there was. She never completely repeated herself with her needle. But there were generic elements that ran though the designs, signature flora and strata, architectural quotations that marked the piece as hers. Matt understood why his mother had never been able to part with the bags, regardless of how unsaleable they had become with time. He tried to imagine them in a bin at Value Village, couldn’t, and set them aside.
The fourth bag bore a scene unlike any he could remember. The approach was clearly his grandmother’s, the way she managed at one and the same time both to reduce and to elevate her subject to its essentials of line, form, colour, texture, and ornament. But in this case, the subject was industrial. You were looking at the sardine factory from across Chamcook Harbour — from Ministers Island, it had to be, Matt thought. The hard vertical lines of the factory tower were cut by the diagonal of the conveyer belt. In the distance, and very muted, the model town rose in concentric circles up the hill. The design might have been made in the thirties, Soviet-inspired, if Matt didn’t know the scene had to date from before the first war because of the way the factory looked. He crossed the room and leaned the bag against the door frame. He would ask his mother about it later.
Farther down the stack, after another scene of Market Wharf with a Cape Islander in the offing, and a rendition of a country dance — unusual for his grandmother, who seldom included human figures — was a bag whose entire surface was taken up by a highly distorted and impossibly compressed version of a sailboat. The only word for the thing was grotesque, Matt thought. It could never have been intended for sale; it would give its carrier nightmares and frighten off dogs and children. It looked almost medieval, a glimpse of a way of seeing that predated single-vanishing-point perspective. It was more in the style of brooches unearthed from Viking barrows than of the Bergen art school Thora had reportedly attended. She had managed to suggest at once the kind of yacht that dotted Passamaquoddy Bay in the early twentieth century, and a war craft worthy of Leif Erikson. Across the stern, which was visible in the same plane as the gunwale, she had stitched “Ship of Fool.” Matt looked in vain for the final s, thought at first it must have disappeared around an impossible corner, but finally concluded that the use of the singular was deliberate.
Inside the bag was a sheaf of foxed papers crusted in dust. He set them aside. As he began to wheeze, he heard the Volvo in the driveway. Suddenly once again a guilty schoolboy, he gathered up the bag, hooked the other over his wrist as he passed through the doorway, and headed down to ask his mother how she had enjoyed her drive.
“She needs the bathroom,” Bernadette announced, helping Penelope out of her coat.
“I know, I know, you told me to go before we left the house.”
Matt could not tell whether this was a joke or time slippage. He watched his mother scurry through the dining room to the bathroom.
“How was she?”
“Oh, you know. She seemed to like being out anyway.”
“Thank you.”
“Not a problem. Not every day I get to drive. I really should have renewed my licence.”
Matt laughed, then wondered if it wasn’t a joke. Bernadette was pulling on her gloves. He gave her a hug, moved to help her down the front steps.
“Go to the boss. I can manage a few steps.”
He watched her shuffle down the walkway. As she passed the Volvo parked in the driveway, Matt noticed that the driver’s door was wide open and there was a stream of exhaust still pouring from the back end. Neither appeared to attract Bernadette’s attention as she set off along the street. He waited until she disappeared around the corner before going out to turn off the car and shut the door.
“Nice drive?” Matt asked his mother as he filled the kettle. “Bernadette didn’t go too fast?”
“Bernadette is a competent driver. A little timid. But she likes to get behind the wheel, so why not let her?”
“Lots of traffic?” He knew the answer. It had been a standing joke between them as long as he could remember.
“I suppose. I wasn’t paying that much attention to the other cars.”
“Just enjoying the scenery. That’s good.”
“We went up by the hotel and Lazy Croft.”
Matt pretended to inspect the kettle. Lazy Croft had burned to the ground years ago, before his mother was born. There was a family story about how his grandmother had supplied some of the felt for the dining room walls. Wallcoverings made with felt had been used to decorate cottages back before the first war, his mother used to tell him. They didn’t plaster and paper. They fitted planks and then covered them in felt. So it had been a kind of family tragedy when the place burned.
“Then we kept along Prince of Wales all the way to the dump.”
Matt wondered whether the flock of gulls that wheeled endlessly just offshore from the park cherished an inherited memory of the old days. “It’s cleaned up pretty nicely, hasn’t it?”
“Has it? Don’t let mine steep too long, Matt.”
“Since when?”
“What?”
“Nothing.” He poured the barely amber tea into both their cups.
“I think the Vaughans will rebuild.”
“The Vaughans?”
“The shipyard. What an awful thing, that fire.”
The shipyard fire was sometime near the end of the war. “They were making minesweepers, weren’t they?”
“Fishing boats, really. They called them minesweepers. Big wooden trawlers with a few extra bits of equipment. When the war ends, they can go back to fishing.”
“That’s a sensible plan.” Matt wondered whether any of the Vaughan trawlers were still afloat. It wasn’t unlikely. A few of the old Casarco boats could still be found in the bay and they’d have been thirty years older. He pulled one of Thora’s bags from beneath the pine table. “This was Gran’s work, wasn’t it?”
“Good heavens. That’s the old sardine factory.”
“Not her usual style.”
“You could smell it from there, you know, from Ministers Island. That was one consolation. All those CPR folks, who owned the business, had that smell in their noses every time they visited the grand house. For as long as it lasted.”
“And then they had the smell of failure after that. I wonder which they minded most.” Everything Sir William Van Horne handled turned to gold, Matt knew, everything but the sardine factory.
“I could never get the smell out of my clothes. My hair. The smell of the herring and the smell of the mustard and vinegar, the tomato sauce.”
Matt was about to correct her: you mean your mother couldn’t. Then he thought better. “It must have been hard work. Packing.”
“We were to use the French method. That just means quality over quantity. It wasn’t a race. There weren’t that many fish, which was just as well for me. I’d never packed a damned sardine before I washed up there.”
“But didn’t they bring in Norwegian girls on purpose, because of their experience?”
“Nobody ever asked point blank. They advertised for girls to work in a modern sardine-packing factory in Canada. It was printed in Morgenbladet every day for a week. There was free passage, and free lodging and medical care, your passage home covered if you stayed a year. And anywhere from three to five dollars a week. That was good money for sixty hours of work. Who could resist? Never mind that I’d never touched a brisling. If they chose to imagine that every Norwegian girl knew how to pack sardines, that was their lookout, wasn’t it? And how hard could it be?”
“And the men who came out?”
“I don’t want to talk about Nils.”
“Your brother?” He nearly said your uncle.
Penelope laughed. “So clever. Such an original ruse, we thought. Who was fooled, I wonder? They set the men to work helping with the construction. Nils had never swung a hammer. He wasn’t that kind of man.”
“What kind of man was he?”
“The kind a girl’s parents don’t like. The kind your girlfriends warn you away from but you go with anyway. He quickly got bored with the work. Not being able to do something is one of the surest ways to boredom. He started making trouble.”
“Was he deported?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“One day he wasn’t here anymore.” Penelope’s voice broke and Matt knew not to pursue it. “Is this our usual tea?”
“It’s a little weaker, Mamma. But yes, the usual. Gran loved her tea, didn’t she?” He supposed this was as good a way as any to undo whatever was left of the folding over, to remind her that she and her mother were two separate entities.
“It was a way of fitting in.”
He showed her the bag with the Ship of Fool then, asked her what she could tell him about it.
“She made some things like that in the 1950s, before you were born. Never really wanted to talk about them. They’re grotesque, aren’t they? She did tell me this one had something to do with a yacht that was owned by one of the bigwigs at the factory, the head man, but that was all she’d say. You haven’t been rooting around in my workroom, have you?”
“I was just clearing some space so I could see about patching the wall.” It seemed a harmless enough lie amidst all the others he was learning to tell.