The call from Jennifer woke Matt from a sound sleep. It was midnight. She always forgot about the hour’s time difference.
To his mumbled account of recent events, she responded, “You did? She has? It’s done?” She sounded as though she were actually concerned.
“When ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.”
“What?”
He decided the Lady Macbeth reference was a little harsh. “Nothing.”
“So you can come back.” If the prospect afforded her any relief, she hid it well.
“Soon, I think.”
“How soon?”
He wondered why she wanted to know. Was there someone who would need to move out of her bed? “There are a few things.”
“Of course. The research.”
“And the house. And I need to make sure she’s settled, happy — as happy as she can be.”
“It’s not as though there is an alternative if she isn’t.”
“Still.”
“Right. So another week? Two?”
“I’ll have a better idea in a few days.”
“Can’t somebody help you with the house? There must be services like there are here. People who come in and help you clear out. They sell what they can and give the rest away. Or chuck it. You don’t have to do anything but make a few decisions.”
“It’s not Toronto.”
“Well, just somebody your mother knows, then. Her cleaning lady.”
Matt was too tired to try to explain to Jennifer about his mother’s domestic arrangements. “Sure. I’ll … ask around.” He didn’t mention he’d already had a surprise offer of help. “How are classes going?” He knew it was the surefire way to distract Jennifer. Bracing himself for a twenty-minute diatribe, he slid his back down the hallway wall until he was sitting on the chilly floorboards.
Amanda had phoned the house the morning after their awkward drunken lunch at the Smoked Mackerel. If there had been caller ID on the land line he probably would not have picked up. When he heard her voice he thought she was maybe calling to apologize, but she didn’t mention lunch. Carolyn had apparently thought that Matt might need some help, some support, she said, going through his mother’s house. She’d suggested that Amanda should call. It was either the clumsiest effort at matchmaking or genuine professional concern, but Matt decided he could, in fact, use some company as he waded through the contents of the house.
When Amanda arrived the next afternoon, straight from the restaurant, she was still in carpenter pants and T-shirt. “Sorry, I look a mess. Good for pitching in and working, though, right? Actually, I could use a coffee before we start. Is that okay?”
She followed him to the kitchen. “Wow.”
“What?”
“This place.”
“Oh. Right. Was your mother’s house —”
“Also stuffed with things, but she had moved around a bit, so things got rearranged. And her things weren’t ever as interesting.”
As they took their coffee through to the living room, he prayed she would not reminisce about the late evenings when they had fumbled on the carpet in front of the fireplace, giggling and hushing one another so they wouldn’t wake Penelope.
“We should make a plan,” she said. “Tackle it room by room.”
“I don’t want you to feel —”
“The restaurant’s not very busy. I can give you a few afternoons a week.”
He wondered for a second whether this was a negotiation, whether he was supposed to suggest an hourly rate.
“Nobody should have to do this stuff alone, Matt. I’d like to do it for you, for …”
He was afraid she was about to say “old times.”
“For your mother.” She looked into her coffee cup. “And it will be fun to have a little time. That’s all.”
They decided to continue what Matt had begun in the workroom.
“You say you’ve started on this?” She laughed when he opened the door.
“The problem is, you go down rabbit holes. I’ll pick something up and start looking at it, thinking about it, and suddenly half an hour’s gone.”
“That’s what you need me for. Somebody completely disinterested.”
Matt decided not to take that the wrong way. He also doubted it was true, or that it would be true once they got going.
“Some of this stuff looks really old. I mean older-than-your-mother old.”
“She kept everything of my grandmother’s.”
“Who started the business.”
“Right. My mother only took it over after the war. In ’46, I think. Not long after she was married, anyway.”
“So, when did your grandmother start it? After she was married?”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? After the first war. Grandfather Arnold would have been the one with all the money. That’s what you’d think. But she had the business before she had him.”
“He must have been pretty progressive, you know, to marry a woman who had her own business. He must have seen how good she was at it.”
“Maybe he was proud of her. Or maybe he just liked having her out of the house. I’ve always wondered about that. But then he left anyway, so it can’t have been that.”
“He left her?”
“He was what they called neurasthenic, shell-shocked. His life wasn’t great. He was miserable.”
“PTSD before PTSD.”
“I guess so.”
“Oh look. She saved his … his cap badge, it must be?” Amanda cupped in her palm a bronze-coloured maple leaf. There was a large number 4 in its middle. At the top of the leaf was a crown with the word “Canada” beneath it, and around the perimeter: “Overseas Pioneer Battalion.” Behind the number 4, a rifle and a pick were crossed. He had to get quite close to read all the lettering.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“I’m not sure about the number four. I thought Grandfather Arnold was with a different numbered troop.”
“Take it to your mother when you visit. Trust me, you’ll want things to talk about. She’ll know all about it, and that will make you both feel better.”
“Where was the badge exactly?”
“No wonder you get stuck down rabbit holes. Does it matter? In this bag.”
She handed it across to Matt. The decoration on it was another aberration from his grandmother’s standard Charlotte County scenes. The background was identifiable, with Deer Island in the distance across the bay, but the figures in the foreground were from another world altogether. It took him a minute to decode. A nearly naked female figure was chained to a rock, with a saw-toothed sea monster in the offing. Between the two, and above, a male figure was swooping in on a horse — to the rescue, Matt supposed, though there was something more than a little sinister about the severed head the deliverer swung in one hand. Perseus and Andromeda. On Passamaquoddy Bay. “Let’s put it back for now.”
“Matt. You’ll never get through this.”
“Just for now. Just while I try to work something out. Let’s tackle some of these boxes.”
They worked until the light faded, pausing over the odd recipe for blueberry dye or notes for mixing a particular pottery glaze, sometimes chatting but mostly not — each, Matt thought, contentedly aware of the other’s animal presence in the room. He was anyway.
“Oh shit. Is that the time? I’ve got to get to the Mackerel. Sorry, Matt. I’ll come round again tomorrow. Same time?” She gave him a peck on the cheek. Before he could think what that meant, she was gone.
Supper was a chicken breast he had found in the freezer, furry and forlorn. He braised it in white wine and made a mustard-caper sauce to drown out any lingering traces of where it had been and for who knows how long. There were roast potatoes left over from Penelope’s Last Supper the night before last, and frozen peas. The peas might have been pressed into service, more than once, as a cold pack for pain in shoulder or hip, but he ate them anyway. Everything has a history, he told himself, even the bottle of bourbon he had found tucked in the back of the sideboard, though with the bourbon he couldn’t imagine what that history might be.
After finishing the dishes, and armed with a fresh dose of whisky and a zip-lock freezer bag, he returned to the workroom. A faint trace of Amanda’s perfume lingered. He fought the distraction and focused on finding that sheaf of papers, the ones he had liberated from the Ship of Fool bag. The bag was nowhere to be found. He remembered having it in the kitchen but it was not there now. His mother must have returned it to the workroom, he thought, but, if she had, he couldn’t see where.
He closed his eyes, tried to reconstruct where he had originally found the bag. It was the northwest corner, he thought. So he stood there and called up the sensations of the dusty tickle in his nostrils and the catch in his throat when he had taken the papers out of the bag and set them aside a few days before. He located them almost right away then.
What had been, in memory, only a nondescript pile of papers quickly resolved itself into several distinct subcategories as he sat on the floor and sorted through them. There were pages from some kind of ledger, filled out in a beautiful copperplate hand. Interleaved with these were what looked like diary entries in the same careful hand, the dates entered in capital letters at the tops of pages. A quick rifle through indicated they were all from the fall and winter of 1913–14. His breath caught when he unfolded a series of delicate sketches of harbour scenes. Even with the fine grid of pencilled lines that overlaid each one, you could tell the artist had been really gifted.
On the floor beside him, he found two items that he supposed had fallen from the stack of papers when he first took them out. The first was what must be a passbook of the kind they used to use for banks. He remembered the printed ones, of course, but this was entirely in hand entries. “The Bank of Nova Scotia.” “Miss Thora Halvstad.” The dates matched those of the diary pages. The autumn pages showed a series of what were probably quite substantial deposits in those days. There was no activity through the winter, and then in the spring several withdrawals before a more balanced rhythm of back-and-forth was established.
Whether it was the dust or the drink, Matt suddenly felt too tired to continue. He tucked the papers carefully into the zip-lock bag and took himself to bed. When Jennifer called at midnight, he said nothing about the documents he had discovered. Neither did he mention that Amanda was already helping him sift through the contents of the house.