Poached Egg on Toast Page 3

  The waves cracked and knocked at the foot of the cliff; there was no boat that day. The old woman on the cliff could have told them that; she could see in both directions all along the coast. The nearest boats had been pulled up high in the fishing village, and the wind had tightened the knots in the ropes that held them. The wind kept the fishermen muttering, their arms folded.

  Again and again, Helen’s toes tipped against a sandbar; then, she lost even that in the sway. The wind rode hard on the waves. Though she could not see them coming from behind, she knew the precise moment each would roll over her head. She held the rhythm now, of dying. She tried to close her mouth and she held her breath with each wave, thinking, “Not yet, not yet you won’t, not yet.” And felt and heard water gurgling in her throat. “I can’t hold on, but not yet,” she thought. She had stopped hoping that the boat would come. The shore could not be seen because of the cloud in her eyes. She felt for the sand with her toes again, and kept her arms at her sides when she could, to keep the heaviness from her shoulders. “I am drowning,” she allowed herself to say. “Valerie was turned back and if she is not wanted too, then she is safe on shore. I am drowning, and she is safe on shore.” And once more, she said, “Valerie, Valerie.”

  The old woman pointed to the ropes as the men ran up the path of the cliff. The men flung the ropes down to shore and tied them, even the clothesline that had been strung out beside the vacant barn at the end of the field. The knots jerked and held; clothespins and colourfully braided fishing ropes sailed on the waves, out and out, a child’s gay purple raft bobbing at the end. The men and women made a chain—two with the raft, one at each section of line. The old woman watched the wooden clothespins dip in and out of the sea.

  Zebra-striped wings of seabirds wagged saucily on currents of wind. Heavy casual gulls soared, crying pit-a-tree pit-a-tree scree scree scree. With this last cry they dived through frothy caps of the highest waves, ducking out again as the waves furled and reached for the softness of their necks.

  Helen lay on the beach and accepted the warmth of blankets and the bright yellow towel. She heard voices as men and women stooped over her. She was carried up the path to the ambulance, which had backed as far as it could down the clay road. The old woman lifted herself from the chair and began the slow walk back to her farm.

  In early evening, the wind shrugged and lowered its shoulder. Boats pushed off from the harbour; fishermen raised their hands to one another as their small vessels chugged out of the bay in a steady purposeful line. The nets would be inspected; perhaps, if damage was slight, an evening catch would be hauled in. The sun-rotted carcass of the great white shark was towed back to sea. Cut free from the little boat, it was torn at and ogled as it sank past its fellow creatures.

  Just before sun began to set, each blade of marram grass was still; each blade gleamed in the last bright light so that together, all of the grasses covered the curves of hills and dunes, like clumps of sparkling diamonds.

  Megan

  The sounds of the dying were comforting. Comforting to Megan because she hated fur and fuzz and flapping wings, hated the quick brush against the cheek. Every few seconds, another night insect was electrocuted by the persuasive violet light, and each death was accompanied by a sizzling snap that could be heard up and down the long veranda. Sometimes two deaths occurred simultaneously—zzap zzaaap. Inside the dining room, she listened, and folded thick linen napkins into neat piles.

  Her guests—not hers, but hers all things considered—were still reading, or talking in the lounge. Beginning the bedtime conversation. The windows had been thrust up to allow any existing current of air to seep through the pores of the screens. In the morning (Megan would be last to bed but first up tomorrow), she would sweep into the peony bushes the indiscreet layer of winged bodies that she would find lying in a soft circle on the boards of the veranda. She would be pleased, selfsatisfied, as she was each morning with her new array of dead. It was at moments like these, broom in hand, when she would look up to the violet light and feel that the modern world had justified itself.

  In her early days, there had been sticky rolls of caramelcoloured flypaper coiled down from ceilings, hanging over open pots of gravy and over floured tables of dough. She recalled ceiling fans cutting the heat, shouts of “Shut the screen door!” You never knew in those days what you had in your rice pudding or your raisin bread. It made your stomach sick to think of it. One of the cooks—who could remember which, there had been so many—had told her that flies were high in protein, that in the poor countries long flat containers of milk were left sitting on top of mud huts so that flies could be collected for the evening meal. The milk caked and was sliced, like stiff pudding. Megan had never had the urge to travel; if she did, it would not be to the hot countries but to a place like the north of Scotland where it would be too cold for spiders, where she could relax in someone else’s wicker chair and listen to the brogues and burring tongues. She would wrap herself in thick mohair blankets and tartan spreads and the cold would not penetrate. Her cheeks would be ruddy and her guests would say how healthy she looked when she retired back to the sea.

  But for now she would set the last table for tomorrow’s breakfast, shake the tablecloth, polish the last piece of silver. She reminded herself to listen to the zapping of the violet light, and she whispered, “Good for you,” after each electrocution.

  She envisaged soft separate thuds on the veranda floor.

  How had it begun—the after-dinner group? The bedtime group, Megan called it, to herself. How had it begun? There they were, her guests, fidgeting a little, not quite settled. Things would not be exactly right until Megan sat among them. But there was work to do. She listened as she folded, her mind partly on tomorrow’s breakfast, partly on the owners in Montreal to whom she would send the account book in two weeks. The season was ending. Then, it was back to her rooms in Charlottetown; back she would go.

  One year, Megan returned to the lodge in winter. She’d been there so many summers, she’d purposely stopped counting. Every year, the lodge was sealed tight the day after Labour Day and reopened at the end of May. No central heating—from the beginning it was intended only for summer use. But Megan had always wanted to know what it was like in winter. Ravished by wild seas and north winds? Her nephew had driven her from Charlottetown, where she kept her rooms year round. It had been a bleak day; they’d followed slippery roads while shadows of farm buildings fell over the rim of sea-worn land. They left the car to follow the path made by park rangers, and circled in from behind. Megan stood on a hill and looked out to sea and back to the lodge. She’d known, of course, that from the lodge the sea could be seen only from the windows upstairs. The building itself was huddled behind a nest of dunes. Outside the dining room, the small fresh-water pond was frozen. Reeds and rushes were bent, windlocked to the snow. Megan had been unaccountably saddened by this raw glimpse of the place. She returned to Charlottetown with a chill and wondered what had ever possessed her.

  Someone was shouting into the telephone under the big oak stairs—one of her newcomers. A three-way conversation: wife to husband in the lounge, and back to the telephone again.

  “What’s the name of this island, Henry?”

  “Prince something.”

  “Prince Charles? Philip?”

  “Prince Philip! Isn’t he a Duke or something? Tell them we’re at Prince Philip.”

  “You’re wrong, Henry. It’s Edward. We’re at Prince Edward Island, darling. All greens and browns. No, the carrots were all right, it was the string beans I couldn’t manage. Oh, we drove all day. All day. Teed-jus, you know. The lodge is fine. But old. No television.”

  The lodge barely managed to stay alive because of the newcomers: transients, drifters looking for one or two nights’ shelter. Megan gave them the same outward welcome she gave her old-timers, her guests, but the former did not have ironed sheets, a wildflower in each room, an electric heater sent up when the sea breeze rose. The lodge, thoug
h sprawling, was small enough to allow Megan to control each careful favour. She heard the click of the receiver as it was replaced; she sighed as she looked out the dining-room window to the sheltering dunes. “No matter what I do,” she thought, “the curve of earth will always be there, where sea meets sky.” A long shiver rippled through her body.

  It was half-dark inside the lounge. Papers were folded but scattered; the rose-coloured walls above the bookshelves were more faded and cracked than they appeared by day. Megan knew that inside the covers of the books a dusty scroll spelled out: The wicked borroweth and returneth not again. Nothing had been added to the library since the Second World War. Most of the books were old novels, novels that could satisfy on a rainy day.

  Megan sat in an armchair, and Mr. Harries immediately began to talk, as if his story were addressed to her, which it was not. She had heard it before. Mr. and Mrs. Harries were sun-bronzed and unloved. Though they bathed together, they fought in the tub. The bathrooms had been modernized, but the walls were paper thin. There was little Megan did not know about her oldtimers, little she could not guess about her transients.

  Mr. Harries had an audience of eleven: his wife, Cora; Megan; the Sackvilles, a couple in their fifties; the Petersons; two single women, middle-aged travelling companions from Montreal; the couple from Pennsylvania who did not like the string beans; and Mr. Grenfell.

  Mr. Grenfell beamed at Megan as she sat down, and he pointed to the extra green button sewn inside the edge of his Viyella shirt. Mr. Grenfell loved things like Viyella shirts and warm Scottish sweaters. In the dining room, he wore tartan ties and loose-fitting cardigans, but when Megan served steamed clams he drank the cooking water from the extra bowl instead of using it to rinse the sand from his clams. He noticed the way Megan dressed and paid her the same compliments again and again, though she wore much the same clothing from summer to summer: pastel blouses and longish skirts, discreet touches of jewellery—a pin, tiny circles of silver at her ears, a gold watch left by her grandmother on her father’s side. Mr. Grenfell was from Ontario, and although he spent every summer on the Island, he never adjusted his watch from Eastern Standard Time because he liked the stability of living within range of the long dash. He had proposed to Megan one summer, but had upset them both by doing so. She had been rather vague about answering and finally mumbled, “I know too much about both of us to want to be married.” Neither of them had mentioned it again.

  “We had a magic act,” said Mr. Harries. “Cora and I. There wasn’t much doing that night. A VIP turned up from some important city—nobody was sure who he was. Cora and I were the only ones who brought costumes; the rest had to ask Megan for help, or sift through drawers of the lodge. Steak dinner that night, too—steak dinner, wasn’t it, Megan?”

  Megan nodded. Mr. Harries was broad shouldered and wore a T-shirt stretched across his puffed chest. He had a small, greying moustache and wavy greying hair, white shoes, and a maroon sports jacket over the T-shirt. His wife, Cora, kept looking away, towards the sea, although the sea could only be heard, not seen.

  “Cora was my assistant,” he went on. “I pulled a string of coloured scarves out of my sleeve, that sort of thing. Nice night. I tipped my hat to the VIP. Later, a chauffeur-driven limousine pulled up outside. The VIP bowed to us with a cigar between his teeth, and left. I think he enjoyed the magic. I was given a set once, when I was a boy. It was under the tree. A box of magic for Christmas.” He fell silent. Cora tugged at her skirt.

  Beyond Mr. Harries, Megan could see the shadows of four empty basket chairs on the front lawn, beneath a wind-stunted pine. Over the years she had watched the young trees on the north side become sea-dwarfed and squat. The basket chairs had been dragged—fetched—earlier that day, by Mr. Peterson and the Pennsylvania husband, whose wives had dispatched them. Megan had stood at an upstairs window and watched the men obey; they’d gone off glumly in opposing directions to serve their women, who expected but did not seem to appreciate their mates’ compliance. When Megan observed patterns of marriage, she sometimes compared her lone status to that of the guests around her. She did not do badly by comparison. What did they have? Soft teeth and bulldog chins, knee patting and early bedtimes. Rituals no better than her own. That harpy, life, continued to repeat its games over and over again.

  But there had been a time in Megan’s life (she would not have denied this) when she thought she might like to have a man. Someone to lean over her as she sat in her chair, someone solicitous and caring who would pat her sleeve, tell her when her skirt seam was crooked, someone who might make public but not distasteful gestures of love. Mr. Grenfell did not fit this vague description; she could not think of him in this role. What she did think was that she had never been familiar with the things men and women told one another, the core around which they built relationships and marriages. She half-suspected that there was no such core. What, for instance, drew this group together now? “We’re a little faded,” she thought. “Everything has changed around us, but we have remained the same.” Ah yes. Everything was changing. Those who came back came because they did not know what else to do.

  The elder of the two middle-aged women from Montreal shifted in her chair. A signal to the other. Newcomers, transients, they had been here only two days. They moved in and out of the group, not belonging, ebbing and flowing, though the younger, Megan could tell, knew more than she let on. Mr. Sackville, who was thin in the jaw and long in the leg, was looking up the skirt of the younger woman. His wife retaliated by pulling a stack of photographs from her purse. “Pass these around, Zee,” she said, nudging him. She always called him Zee, though his name was Robert. Designed to humiliate, these were photographs of Zee in the backyard of their home, barepaunched over the Bar-B-Q, holding up huge, disgusting pieces of rare meat. He’d been acting the fool and none of the likenesses was flattering. The single woman from Montreal, whose name was Claudine, looked them over closely and glanced back to Mr. Sackville. Megan knew that, despite the photographs, there might be a fluttering in the downstairs rooms that night. It had happened other summers. Mrs. Sackville would be redeyed tomorrow at breakfast; the middle-aged woman would quickly leave the Island with her female companion, and the two would follow the highway through New Brunswick and Maine, returning eventually through the Eastern Townships to Montreal. Zee would become attentive to his wife and would not (for a few days) send her out with her tape recorder after lunch to walk about the grounds. Her recorder, a gift from him, was leather-encased, fastened to a shoulder strap, and had in its accompanying satchel a repertoire of language tapes, baroque music and dull political speeches. Every afternoon, because he was allergic to bees, Mr. Sackville read on a chaise longue inside the screened veranda while his wife made good use of her holiday time. Every afternoon, when she returned and snapped off the recorder, he closed his book and asked, “What have you learned today?”

  “So, she’ll get a few days off,” Megan thought. And then, there was a beautiful moment of silence.

  “Anyone go out to look at the moon tonight?” asked Mr. Grenfell, breaking it. The violet light zapped outside, as soon as he spoke. The group was now sitting in the dark; no one made a move towards a lamp switch.

  “Not in those mosquitoes. Not on your life,” said Mr. Peterson.

  “Remember the bet you made with your wife, Harry? That summer?”

  “About the repellent?” Mr. Peterson replied.

  “It was the summer we tried the television—thank God we voted that out,” said Mr. Sackville. Though he did not add what everyone was thinking, that ever since the television had been removed, by complaint, bedtime had again slipped back to nine o’clock.

  “That was the evening you rolled up both sleeves and bared your arms to the mosquitoes at an hour when everyone else had been driven indoors,” said Mr. Harries. He rolled a new cigar between his teeth and blew smoke from the corners of his bronzed mouth and nostrils, remembering.

  “Sure,” said Mr. Peterson. “My
wife said my repellent was no good. I coated one arm and left one bare, to prove my point.” He flexed his muscles for emphasis.

  “And Megan had to send poultices to your room half the night,” his wife added, smugly.

  The recollection was as clear to Megan as if it had happened the day before. First, the pathetic scratching at her door which had revealed not Mr. Peterson, but Mr. Grenfell, in a tartan dressing gown, barefoot.

  “Please, Megan,” he’d begged. “Let me in tonight.”

  But Megan had told him to go back to bed.

  Then, Mrs. Peterson, tapping softly. “I didn’t want to wake you, Megan. But it’s for Harry—his arm is all swollen. Do you have any baking soda downstairs?”

  “I’ll look after it,” she said. “I’ll bring a poultice to your room.”

  Silently, she’d descended the stairs in the dark, feeling depressed and gloomy because of Mr. Grenfell’s scratchings. She was better off alone, wasn’t she? She argued with herself until her hand was on the kitchen switch, and it wasn’t until she reached the cupboard that she realized the presence of Mr. Sackville and one of the transients of that summer—a widow named Barbara, tall, with long bleached hair. They were on a blanket on the floor. Their clothes had been folded neatly across Megan’s kitchen stool.

  “What the hell, Megan, are you doing scaring a person out of his wits at this time of night?” Mr. Sackville had demanded, trying to rise from the blanket. Barbara muttered, “Christ!” through her teeth, and walked out, carrying her clothes.