The organizing of the workroom has been halted for nearly two weeks, since the baby was born. Amanda has continued to come for lunch many days, but then she has hurried off on grandmotherly duties, first to the hospital in Saint John and now to Carolyn’s house in Chamcook. Matt finds he doesn’t mind. This is no doubt due to a combination of sharing in her excitement and embracing the excuse for further delay.
He has been using the idle time in the afternoons to visit longer with Penelope. The mornings are devoted to research. Normally, the Charlotte County Archives are only open in the afternoons, but he has managed to talk the part-time archivist out of a key so that he doesn’t have to work under her curious gaze. He feels a little ashamed of using his big-city museum connection to intimidate the woman but knows it was the right thing to do.
The archives are themselves a kind of historic site in their own right, with shelf after shelf of microfilmed community newspapers and the mammoth machines, roughly the size of Smart cars, that are needed to read them. Matt doesn’t know of anywhere else that still has as many as two working hand-cranked reel-to-reel readers. In one corner of the single room is a small collection of published histories of the county, diligently labelled according to the Dewey Decimal system in case one can’t spare the two minutes it would take to scan the five shelves by eye. Steel shelving along one peeling wall houses unpublished family histories in manila files, with a finding aid bound in a water-stained Duo-Tang folder that reminds him of his school days in St. Andrews. He has thought about taking photos of the place, sending them to Ingrid to ask what she thinks Derrida might say.
If he came to laugh, though, he has found he has stayed to revel. The squeak of scrolling through the microfilms of newspapers in the otherwise silent building spirits him back to the earliest days of his MA work, and he allows himself now, as he did then, to read the columns that are peripheral to the focus of his research. As he does so, he recognizes that the thrust of the enterprise has begun to change anyway. It has become more of a tentative groping around — the gentle, expectant discovery of a new lover, rather than the conquest he had envisioned. Connections occur to him that he knows would not pass any test of scholarly rigour but are nevertheless — or perhaps, therefore — all the more persuasive. He supposes that it can all loosely be linked intellectually to the subject of model villages, in the sense that the town is itself one, but the lines he is drawing are far more intuitive, visceral, impossible to explain.
Afternoons with his mother have become, in a way he can’t quite identify, an extension of the morning’s work. He finds, once they have gotten the social niceties of the weather and the decor of her room out of the way, that she drifts farther and farther afield, the encroaching plaque increasingly playing hob with her synapses. She will embark on long and very detailed reminiscences, only to recount the exact same events entirely differently the next day. She shifts easily from her own self to, seemingly, becoming her mother without apparent notice, casting him in a series of shifting roles for which he has had no rehearsal. He supposes that stories Thora told her have become, through repetition over the years, as real to her as her own memories. Sometimes, when he tries to lead her down a lane of memory he has trusted for decades, she will happily accompany him, marvelling at his powers of recollection. Other times, she darts down a side path or looks blankly at him as though he is making it all up out of whole cloth.
“I’ll start to tell her an old family story, something I grew up with, and it will be like it never happened,” he tells Amanda one day.
“Maybe it didn’t. Is there any more soup? I feel like I’m eating for three somehow these days. How’s her cold?”
“She sounds dreadful. Half the time, though, she doesn’t seem to remember she’s sick.”
“There are advantages to the disease.”
He ladles the last of the pea soup into her bowl, starts to fill her wine glass.
“Better not. If I have any more I won’t want to move from this spot.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Not a problem. Definitely not a problem.” She puts her hand on his forearm. “But I’ve got to pick up diapers for Carolyn. Not having diapers, now that is a problem. We’ll see you for supper at Carolyn’s? Six o’clock? She’ll try to feed the baby and put her down — God that sounds like what a vet does to your dog — put her to sleep, and then we can have a civilized supper. Ha! We’ll see how that goes.”
Matt thinks that she is going to say something about how he must remember how it was, trying to have a baby and a life at the same time, but she catches herself. He wishes he could get his mother to reminisce about what it was like to raise him, but he knows there is no longer any sure way of steering her there.
Penelope has asked him about Grandfather Arnold’s candlesticks. She is convinced they are missing, that one of the helpers at the Lodge has made away with them. That was the phrase she used, straight out of a Victorian novel, he thought. He tried to assure her that the candlesticks were fine — and polished — in her house, but that announcement led down paths he regretted. Finally, he promised to produce them on his next visit. And so, he appears at the entrance to the Lodge holding aloft two Georgian candelabra. The guardians shrink back, seeing in him, he supposes, a Loyalist ghost, or perhaps the Angel of Death.
“Has the power gone out?” his mother asks when he walks through the door to her room.
“I just wanted to show you,” he begins and then realizes there is no point referring to yesterday’s conversation. “I thought you might like to have these here. Grandfather Arnold’s candlesticks.” He knows he can’t actually leave them, that if he does they will certainly disappear just the way she has already imagined they did. “While I visit, you know.”
“Is Pappa coming to visit?”
“No Mamma. I don’t think so. Not today.”
“It wasn’t his fault. How he treated Mamma. He couldn’t help the way he was. None of us can, of course. My mother blamed the war, the wars, and maybe that was it.”
“He was a hero.”
“Neurasthenia, they called it. That’s a big word. A cold word.”
“What do you mean when you say it wasn’t his fault, how he treated Mamma?”
“Have you come from Linkscrest?”
Matt knows this is the old name for the large house at the edge of the golf course. It’s part of the marine sciences operation now. He was reading about it this morning at the archives. In the second war it was a convalescent home for a while. The second war; not the first.
“Have you seen my Norwegian flyer?”
“Uncle Nils?”
“Good God, no.”
“My father was a flyer.” But Jonathan Reade was RAF, not Norwegian. “Was he wounded?” He can’t believe he wouldn’t have known about that.
“Who?”
He wonders whether he can steer her back to her own father.
“Have I always had those candlesticks?”
“Yes. Not here.”
“Who polishes them?”
“I did, Mamma. They belonged to my grandfather, didn’t they?”
“At one point, I suppose. My mother hated those things. But she rescued them.”
“Rescued?”
“He would pawn things, she told me. To buy drink. Luckily, it was a small town. The man would give him just enough for a bottle and then send a note around to my mother and she’d come and collect them. She ended up paying for the drink both ways. Cash and bruises.”
“He hurt her?”
“Not always. In the end, he went away. Somewhere they could help him. Try to help him.”
“To Linkscrest?” Matt knows that is impossible — wrong war.
“They didn’t help him. He fell from a window at the Royal Victoria three months later.”
“Jesus.”
“I helped out there, you know, at Linkscrest. During the war. It was mostly very sad.”
Matt knows he should pause to mourn his grandfather (nearly a hundred years too late), but right now he wants to know more about someone his mother apparently knew much better. “Is that where you met your Norwegian flyer?”
“Is it? Nielsen, I think his name was. Or Helmer. No, Cooper. A flyer or a sailor. A sailor, I think. Did I tell you about the winter my mother spent on a boat in Chamcook Harbour?”
“It must have been awful working at the convalescent home. Depressing.”
“They were all quite rough. Soldiers. You had to be careful around them. They mostly wanted one thing.”
And with that she drops off to sleep. Matt sits for five minutes staring at the candlesticks before he picks them up and tiptoes out of the room. At the nurse’s station, he turns and heads down the hall to look in on Amanda’s mother who calls him Florence Nightingale, which is more sign of presence than he has expected.
Supper at Carolyn’s is chaos. Carolyn’s husband, Mike, whom Matt has never met, is positively surly at first. Matt hopes it’s from lack of sleep, but fears Mike is pissed off that Amanda has dumped Jim the Lobsterman. There is nothing any new boyfriend could offer that would rival free lobster. Carolyn spends the first hour upstairs trying to settle the baby while the chicken dries out and Amanda and Matt drink more wine than they should. Mike keeps pace with them in beer. Carolyn, who is probably the one most in need, has nothing alcoholic and has managed to spill her Ribena down the front of her already stained shirt.
Matt tells the story of Amanda’s mother mistaking him for Florence Nightingale, which nobody finds as interesting as he did. Then Carolyn asks him to tell them about his research. He doesn’t see the trap at first and rehearses for them the outline of the proposal he made to the museum and what he has been able to find out about the sardine town, and his impressions of the local archives.
“And the idea is to produce a book or an exhibition of some kind?” Mike asks.
“I know it all sounds a little confused right now, a little unlikely, but yes.”
“Here?”
Matt hears the trap snap. “Um. Well, no. Probably not. In Toronto, I suppose.”
“Oh.” Carolyn doesn’t need to say more. In that single syllable she manages to pack volumes of disappointment and disapproval. Matt waits for Amanda to say something, to explain to her daughter how things are between her and Matt. That they are old friends who are helping one another through some things right now, and that there are no expectations either way. No plans for a future. And then he realizes he doesn’t want her to say any of that. The baby cries before he can reframe his answer. The nervous parents run off together to tend to her. Amanda smiles and begins to clear the dishes. When Matt stands to help her, she puts things down with a clatter and twines her arms around his neck. She tastes of wine and L’Air du Temps.