‘No nap today!’ Dora had warned her, over-enunciating as she strode briskly into Luiza’s room, pulling open the drapes. One must never be allowed to rest on the day of a party, thought Luiza as she lay on her bed, flipping through her old scrapbook.
‘Oh, Luiza,’ Dora sighed. ‘I asked you to sort through your things. You haven’t started packing at all.’
‘You said the movers weren’t coming until tomorrow. I’ll start now.’ Luiza made a move toward her dresser and began listlessly sorting things into piles until she heard the door shut loudly behind her.
Alone again, her whole body craved sleep. Today was a day of goodbyes, and yet she had been hiding out in her bedroom for most of the morning. She was meeting Carmichael for the last time today, and she still had to make up some excuse for leaving the house before the party. She’d also promised her father she’d help him pick flowers from the garden, but outside, the colours were too vivid, and the intensity of the light gave her headaches. Small sounds amplified in her mind and took on physical shape: if she dropped a spoon on the floor, its clatter reverberated for several minutes; when her father rubbed a wet finger around the edge of his wineglass to amuse the girls, it divided the hemispheres of her brain, thrumming in each side. When Evie pointed to rabbits among the clouds, Luiza saw only turds. Worst of all were Hugo’s delicate orchids. She’d helped him coddle them, but they were vulgar to her now, transforming into inverted ears, a spleen, sections of occluded rectum centred on the table at dinner.
Her mother didn’t want to hear about any of it—the naps, the headaches, the ‘so-called’ images, these psychic encroachments from the natural world. She cautioned Luiza not to indulge herself. In a few days, they’d be leaving for Canada. There wasn’t time for her to carry on.
Luiza left her room and went downstairs and out back to the veranda, inhaling the humid air. These days, Dora always seemed harried and put-upon, as though she herself would have to do all the packing and handle all the preparations alone, rather than simply bossing the maids around. Here she was again, scolding Luiza from the back doorway.
‘Luiza! Answer me, will you? Take this to your father.’
Luiza took the crystal glass of sherry from her mother, and was briefly mesmerized by the points of light that flashed in its cuts until she tripped a little and had to lick the sweet liquor that had gathered in the space between her thumb and index finger. But there wasn’t time for meditating on prisms today. As she walked out toward the garden, she wondered if her father would be able to detect her preoccupation on her face, how she kept thinking of Carmichael, how she’d been lying to her family for months now to hide the fact that she was having an affair with a man twice her age, slipping away to hidden, marginal places: the city’s northern beaches, unaired hotel rooms—places no one they knew would ever go. But she liked it, the dirty feeling that came with knowing they were living a life apart, the hushed details of secret meeting places, the sneaking around. Channelled into Carmichael, her hopelessness induced an oblique sort of pleasure. He needed her.
Still half expecting her father to read her mind, she fixed her face into wide-eyed stillness as she approached him, but he remained down on one knee, shirt sleeves rolled up over elbows, as he took the glass and sipped without looking up, murmuring his amateur gardener’s litany of self-recriminations: Really, he ought to have had Georges put the tomatoes beside the marigolds. And the geraniums weren’t really dead; they just needed a good cutting back. This year’s attempt at cantaloupes was a bit of a dog’s breakfast, he feared (and she did see in their withered skins something unwholesome: the extracted brains of infants or small animals). He could go on in this pleasant, preoccupied way indefinitely, that is if Dora didn’t come out and interrupt them like she usually did. Luiza used to think it was simply her mother’s childish envy at seeing them enjoying a calm moment together, but now she understood that these periods when he was relatively steady were, in some ways, the most frightening of all; they felt like a held breath. Her mother was watching for signs, preparing herself for what his next cycle might bring. And after Florida, even Luiza had to admit that while her father’s plateaus were contracting, the poles of his moods were growing farther apart, each becoming more extreme than the one before. These days, the glint of hope they’d had in Florida was too dangerous to remember. In Canada, they would return to the familiar, old pattern: hospitalization, sedatives, antidepressants. Symptom management.
But for now, they walked side by side through the freshly mown grass, which was safe from her perverted perceptions as long as they were together. Clusters of large, soft-bodied flies billowed up from underfoot, their long, fine wings segmented in iridescent green and blue.
‘I think these are the ones,’ said her father, gesturing his spade toward the cloud of insects, ‘that only live for one day.’ He said they must get it all done—mating, reproducing, the entire cycle in a single day.
‘Are they the same ones that mate for life?’ Luiza asked.
But he pointed out that two such exigencies forced on a single variety would be too cruel, and surely would have wiped them out long ago. So they agreed: probably more of a Roman approach.
Her father made a long face when they came to the bird of paradise plants, saying they looked very poor indeed and also needed cutting back. Some were fragrant and strong, but some had the blight, their blossoms rotting and stinking on their stems. Together they selected the best, her father laying the long stalks across her outstretched arms.
The flowers now neatly arranged in the basket, they sat for a few minutes on the garden bench and, at last, Luiza felt her heart beating at a regular rhythm, the breeze cool on her neck. She felt neither wild nor empty, nor even conscious of her own skin. This was why one lived: Love. Wind. Red. But think it and the moment’s gone, a saturated and irretrievable snapshot.
‘Pensive, poppet?’ her father said, gazing at her. She’d been speaking to him in her head again but hadn’t actually said anything out loud for some time. He seemed to be returning to her for the first time since Florida, and he was physically stronger than he had been for weeks. But she just smiled. No use in saying it: how tired she’d become of her own voice, her own thoughts.
‘I was just thinking about your beautiful gardens. What will happen to them when we’re gone? What if the new owners plant ugly things?’
‘We’ll have a new garden. Things do grow in Canada, you know. We’re not moving to the Arctic.’
‘But only for such a short time.’
‘We’ll pick the flowers with the prettiest names. Alyssum, pasques, bleeding hearts.’ He took her hand then and spoke very earnestly. ‘You wait. There’s nothing like spring after a long winter. It shocks you every time. Every year you think it can’t possibly come—nothing will ever live again. And then it does and you breathe with new lungs.’
She wanted so much to believe him, but she knew too well it was a confidence game. Her father could make anything sound beautiful, but she believed him less and less. Only seeing Carmichael could rearrange this day, relieve the pressure building behind her ribs. From all the numbing tasks she had still to accomplish, he would divert her. She just had to get to him.
‘A game, a game!’ Evie and Magda came running through the grass, launching themselves at Hugo’s pant legs. ‘We want you both to play a game with us.’
They all walked to the playhouse, Evie and Magda bickering about what to play.
‘Not bowls again!’ Evie wailed.
Her father snapped a flower from its stem and tucked it behind Luiza’s ear. Then his smile inverted, and he clapped loudly and broke up the girls, who were shoving each other now. ‘Boules, ladies,’ he said, pushing them apart. ‘Let us say boules. Let us not be vulgar.’
The cloth bag containing the small wooden balls was found, and they walked toward the green behind the house. Her father scooped Evie up and peeled her hair away from the dirt-streaked trail of tears, and it struck Luiza that at last he was strong enough do this. He was alive again.
‘Come, come, Evelyn. No crying. We’ll give Evie the mat, will we?’
Evie was pacified by this small gesture and aligned the jack.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘this is a venerable and subversive game we’re playing. It goes back to the thirteenth century, conjecturally even the twelfth. In his biography of Thomas Becket—’
Luiza tried to listen as she pulled the flower from behind her ear, inhaled its scent, and wiped the golden powder from its thin stamen, coating her palms while her father’s voice distantly sketched out medieval London. At the centre of the blossom was a tiny black bug that repelled her with its rapid, writhing movement, so she tried to rake it out with her nail and crush it without damaging the petal—‘… holiday amusements for young men …’ She peeled open the flower only to discover a swarm of the same tiny bugs—‘… leaping, shooting, wrestling, throwing of javelins and casting of stones …’—then killed them all by crushing the flower, and dropping it down in disgust, while Magda barked, ‘That one’s dead, Evie, you don’t get to chalk it!’ ‘In jactu lapidum …’ Her fingers coated in flower juice and dead insects. ‘But it touched!’ ‘Jactu lapidum …’ ‘It did not!’ ‘Lapidum …’
‘What did you say?’ Her voice was harsh. She hadn’t meant to say it so loud.
‘That is what they called it—casting of stones. In jactu lapidum.’ It was the jolt he needed and he was off again. ‘But the game was banned in the reign of Edward the Third, along with many others, of course …’
The catching on words, their compulsive iteration—her throat tightened as she noted the early signs of oncoming mania: soon there would be unopened shopping bags everywhere, slurred tributes to women’s body parts. A private, internal voyage to a fictive star. ‘… worried it interfered with the practice of archery so vital in battle, the war-mongers … ’ Then, inevitably, several weeks in his ‘winding sheet,’ the blinds drawn.
‘Let me show you something,’ he was saying to Evie now, placing a ball in Evie’s hand and her hand in his. ‘Have you heard of a forehand draw?’
‘You can’t help her!’ Magda, outraged.
Luiza knew she should stay, play their little game, be with her family—want to be with her family—stop pulping tiny insects. But the truth was, she couldn’t wait to get away from them.