Poached Egg on Toast Read online

  “Yes, that was the summer of the television,” Megan told the group. “I’m just as happy that we got rid of it.”

  The persuasive violet light sizzled and snapped outside on the open veranda. The sounds of the dying were comforting. Claudine and Mr. Sackville had exchanged the necessary eye arrangements and Claudine’s travelling companion wore the hurt look of the eliminated on her face. It was she who moved first.

  “I’ve had enough sea air today,” she said. “Too many long hours on the beach.”

  The others pushed back their chairs. It was exactly nine o’clock—eight by Mr. Grenfell’s watch. Mr. Grenfell beamed at Megan as if to say, “Tonight I’ll break down the door. I’ll come armed with two clubs and won’t take no for an answer.” But they were past that, they both knew.

  Some day, Megan would send the account book to Montreal and she would turn her back on this lodge and on the sea. She would climb into a large sleek jet, trusting what invention had done and could do. She would wander through the sights of the civilized world. And if someone leaned over her in a café, solicitous and caring? Well, she was getting ahead of herself. She would take things as they would come.

  Mr. Grenfell put a hand on her shoulder at the bottom of the oak stairs and, nodding towards Claudine who was stepping onto the landing above, he whispered, “She might be all right for him, Megan, but she doesn’t have earrings like yours.”

  Marx & Co.

  “She did ask for me?”

  And Wilf said, yes, could she come first thing in the morning? Jill had an eleven o’clock appointment at the hospital, and she wanted Margot, no one else, to accompany her.

  The purple smudges shifted on the sea far below the slope of the field. Margot hung up the phone and stood at her kitchen window, watching the tide slide off sideways towards the Point, towards the red cliffs where she and Jill had lounged in canvas chairs, where they had run down the dunes spilling onto the beach, leaving the splay prints of mammoths behind. Jill had been her friend for twenty-two years. They had raised children side by side on these two farms. But was this surprising?—only once, years ago, had they articulated the friendship. They had been laughing, but in a serious way. Jill was healthy then, her straw-coloured hair blown out behind her in the wind.

  “If ever there comes a day,” Jill had said, “if ever the day comes when I need you, you’ll hear my cry all the way across the ridge. You’ll hear it piggy-backed on the north wind.”

  But it hadn’t been like that. During the past four months—eleven, since the mastectomy—a distance, a formality, had grown between them. Yes, it was during the last four months that Jill had withdrawn to a place Margot was not admitted. Not Margot, not Jill’s husband, Wilf, not anyone. And what astonished and troubled most was that Margot could not tell Jill how she felt about her. How she loved her and valued her and how Jill had been the best friend Margot had ever had. These things didn’t matter anymore, because Jill had turned her face towards death. She became irritated, impatient, when anyone tried to talk to her about love. All the while, her face sucking in the pain. Even while she slept, while Margot or Wilf sat in a chair beside her, her mouth and eyes and chin twisted to the pain. How could anyone reach through that? What did love matter then?

  Margot and Wilf held brief low-toned conversations in the kitchen doorway; there was a hushed, almost secretive air in the rooms. Death was circling the old farm. Wilf continued to look after his foxes. Margot would go back to James, to her own home, and sit quietly, and think of Jill propped against five pillows in the sickroom, Jill turned towards the window where the curtains were pulled back sharply, Jill looking out and down at a sullen ribbon of sea.

  Was this, then, the cry, piggy-backed on the north wind? What is meaning? What is life? she and Jill used to call out over the sand. Tears pouring down their cheeks as they laughed and cried their way through years when they had not had a moment to themselves. The third eye of each had always looked to the flat sand as the children below skittered sideways like the crabs they pursued, as they stamped tiny feet at waves swooshing in, sucking out. “Look, Mommy, look! See what I’ve made in the sand.” “Look at the rope, Momma.” Holding up Medusa-like tangles. For the children wanted to check, to know that their mothers were there, laughing crazily as they might be, but there, to nod, to wave, to call back, to say that things were right.

  And the treasures the children heaped at their feet: moon shells that lost their sparkles of pink and green even before they had dried in the sun, hermit crabs coiled in houses too large for them, chipped razor clams and mussels, rarely a perfect specimen. Dulse and twigs and brittle sea urchins and knobbed walking sticks were heaped at the feet of the two friends, who called out, laughing, crying, What is life? And who agreed—bringing up the rear of the parade between the paths of corn as their children turned towards home, supper, bed; as the red dog pelted past the silhouette of the Point in its last frenzy before turning to the barn—agreed, that if only they knew the right questions to ask, if only, then they might learn the answers. And after the children were in bed, brimming, it seemed, with excuses to stay awake, each of the women became aware of the other in the next farm, the ridge separating the two stretches of land. Aware of children, husbands, friend. In those fatigued moments, those final moments before giving over the end of the day, leaning separately with every one of the senses, to the sea. To the clouds, now pink, now black, now grey and dolphin-like, heaped in a corner of the sky; to the cool salt smell on the air. For always the sea could be smelled, even in a rising storm, even in the barnyard close to the fox pens and clumps of dried manure; always, could they smell sea. Gathered that last moment of day when the fields sloped through the night down and down to the outline of cliffs, when waves lapped at the edge of the continent as on a map carved from memory—memory accreted from separate days, each one distinct and brought into brilliant relief, but altering in so slight a way as to be unremarkable, the etchings grafted onto and making up the greater whole.

  In the kitchen, Jill’s kitchen. It had been four months since Margot’s eyes had been admitted beyond the cupboard doors. Wilf spoke, again in low tones; he’d be outside, feeding the foxes. Jill wanted to have a shower, and she needed Margot’s help for her dressings. The spring water was in the jug, the tea in a bowl by the stove. Wilf’s hand made the gesture, the final futile gesture that summed all of life. The tea was in the bowl. Herbal tea. A package lay on the countertop. In the cupboard above, the door open, row upon row of bottles, labelled, were arranged by colour and size. What were these? But Wilf lowered his head. And clomped outside in his rubber boots.

  What had Jill been consuming? Powders, herbs, extracts, vitamins of every shape, colour, dimension; for months, it seemed, as there were hundreds, thousands of capsules and flat discs of pills. Jill, in her purple dressing gown, was suddenly behind Margot.

  “What, Jill, what have you been—?”

  But some questions bear no scrutiny. There were no answers, only the noise of caps removed, bottles tipped, sorting and counting, a handful swallowed with three glasses of spring water. An entire handful. No, no answers, because this was grim business, the business of holding off death. Yet Margot’s eyes had been admitted beyond the cupboard doors.

  In the bathroom, after her shower, Jill watched Margot’s face in the mirror as she let the towel drop from her shoulders. Wilf had already set the chair before the sink. “I haven’t been to my doctor,” Jill said, “since May. I broke off the appointments. I’ve been seeing a specialist in herbal remedies, instead.” She, too, made the gesture. The tea was in the bowl. She needed Margot to apply the dressings before they drove to the hospital clinic. “The teabags,” she said, “squeeze them until they’re not dripping; put them directly on the cancer. You’ll have to cover them with gauze, tape them. My arms are too weak.”

  Jill watched Margot’s face as Margot inspected the chest wall, now dug out in craters, even where the one breast had been removed. Some craters were pinpo
int, some as wide as two and three inches. Marching across the skin. The teabags were still warm and were set, now, into the worst of the craters. Then, layers of gauze, a piece of plastic wrap and tape. It was not easy to find an area where tape could be stuck, everything so excoriated and raw.

  They cried together as Margot did the best she could with the soggy tea. Poor body, she said, over and over to herself, poor, eaten-away body.

  Margot pushed Jill in a wheelchair through right-angled halls, reported to the desk, sat with rows of patients in a room grown silent with disease. There was nothing, nothing to say. They waited forty minutes until a nurse called Jill’s name and led them to an examining room that had three white doors. One off the waiting room, one off an internal corridor—for the doctor’s entry—one at the side leading to the nurses’ station.

  “The Marx brothers,” Jill said, between her teeth. “Marx and Company. Are you ready for The Act?”

  The nurse scowled when she saw that Margot was staying with Jill. “I want her here,” Jill said. The nurse left a gown, said they had only a few minutes before the doctor would be in. Patient was to sit on the edge of the table; gown to be open at the front.

  And then, Marx & Co. The Act. Did it really happen the way Margot’s memory etchings held it in relief? She was often to wonder as she looked out her kitchen window at a sky of raw wool, raked by a wire brush. Wondered what she had been a part of when, weeks and months later, she watched the face of the sea change from day to day and without warning. Wondered until she knew she could be certain of nothing. What is meaning? What is life? The door to the waiting room locked; the door to the nurses’ station closed; Jill hissing, “Quick, she’s gone. Get the teabags off. Hide them. He’ll think I’ve been to a witch doctor.” Margot’s fingers working at the buttons of Jill’s blouse, slipping it over her thin and fragile bones, tugging at the tape, whipping off the gauze, stuffing the teabags into the wastebasket, ramming the bandage, the plastic wrap, the twisted tape on top, the two of them doubled over, choking, dying with laughter. The tea was in the bowl. What is life? The third white door opened suddenly, admitting Dr. Paley, his intern, his medical students. Smiling when he saw their tears of laughter, or were those—?

  Margot and Jill suddenly sober. Dr. Paley took Jill’s hand in his, his expression unchanged as he examined her chest. Jill’s eyes never leaving his face, watching for a sign, a white flag waved, a piece of rudder cast adrift. Not a single question from him about where she’d been the past four months, why she’d broken off her treatment.

  “You’re very sick, Jill. I’d like to admit you as an in-patient. Will you? In a day or two? Will you think it over?”

  Jill having left the ship to go out into the current, clinging to the rudder, yes, but already having been swept away.

  Margot drove back from hospital, headed up the lane into an afternoon sky of shifting violets and blues. Jill looked straight ahead, saying, “You know the way we talked all those years, Margot? About how we’ll never find the answers until we know what the questions are? It’s taken a long time, but I finally know some of the answers.”

  “Do you now?”

  “You know what else?”

  “What?”

  Jill grinned. “I’m taking them with me.”

  And they ended the afternoon that way. Laughing until the tears poured out of them, until Jill began to cough and went into spasm and Margot thought she’d have to pull over, but she made it to the crest of the hill where Jill’s house marked the descent to the other side, down, down the sloping fields to the sea. Wilf coming out of the house when he heard the car, and when he looked at Jill and Margot and saw them laughing, he, too, smiled and followed them inside, a secret, pleased look on his face.

  And Margot, her thoughts both invaded and blocked by Jill, experiencing the deepest sort of pessimism, as if the structure and bone of life were falling away. Years later, looking away from the kitchen window, from the sink, from the cupboard door, from the row of corn bowed to the yoke of the sea breeze, from the clouds, blue and whipped in the western sky, recalled herself the way she sat by the cliffs, reading in the canvas chair in the stillness of afternoon heat that held only the cries of gulls. What is meaning? What is life? Recalled herself and the way she looked up at gulls drifting across the sky, the act confirming the sluggish feeling of somehow having been interrupted. A recollection as inconstant as the roar of sea that moved inside the head when the north wind began to blow. Weaving itself down through the cells of the brain until it was impossible to remember whether true silence had ever existed.

  Pack Ice

  Ah, Sea. September winds blow the head clear. “Level out, level out,” her friend Jay had said, over the phone. “Go to the Island. Start something entirely new. Get back into yourself. Maybe a story will come to you there.”

  As if stories distilled from salt air. It was he who’d phoned two weeks earlier and said, “Now I want you to put down this phone, have a long bath, soak, relax, put on your best perfume and negligee, and when Richard comes home from work, make love to him.”

  She heard it for what it was. Male power. The vision, the cure-all. What else could a woman possibly need? And she’d never owned a negligee. Always slept in her bare skin; could not imagine sleeping any other way. Her nakedness pressed into Richard’s nakedness, every night of her life. Almost every night. Not here, at the sea, alone. Jay had added, in his quick, high-pitched voice (Ah, here was the real conversation), “It can never be me, don’t you see, Josie, it can never be me.”

  “You’re moving too close,” she’d warned Jay. But he did that. Barged in, disturbed, and then pulled away quickly, as if he’d spilled out too much. Friendship interruptus.

  Cosmos—after the Greek, Kosmos. Order and harmony in the universe. She saw them at the road’s edge in the early morning as she walked towards shore. Bright faces with their painted disks on long stalks. Showy flowers. Show flowers. Reminded her of school fairs in the fall. Pressed dried petals. Maple leaves and oak under cellophane. Smell of scrapbook paper, labels underlined. The Catholics, the Protestants, only time of year the two schools combined. Where winning a ribbon was made to be everything. Even third place better than not winning at all. Winning, and the smell of fall, the two things brought forward thirty years. Pumpkin, apple, Indian corn, arranged with random artistry across the front of the stage. And huge bouquets of brittle red leaves.

  Thirteen years ago, on this island, in a holiday cottage near these same roadside cosmos, she and Richard had sat in a tiny living room, glaring. No order and harmony then. They’d fought—not a serious ongoing argument, but a fight over which of them would stay to look after the children while the other would go to the lodge to have evening tea with the guests. Both wanted to go. Both were tired at the end of a baby-filled day. Both wanted—needed—other adults.

  So neither went and, once the children were asleep, the two sat in the living room, their stony heads buried in books, each knowing that the other could not concentrate enough to read.

  The adjacent cottage shared a wall with theirs, but had a separate entrance. Because she and Richard sat in frosty silence on their side of the wall, the couple who checked late into the next cottage must have thought the other was vacant. Or could not have known then that the walls might as well have been made of onionskin. Or perhaps didn’t care. Because they arrived and were heard to lock the door, and immediately began to make urgent love on the chesterfield, inches away from where Richard was leaning back against the wall—which began to move in and out like a bellows. Josie was in an armchair a few feet away. If they hadn’t been so angry, she and Richard might have tiptoed into the bedroom and made love, themselves.

  But because they’d remained motionless at the beginning, it would have seemed rude somehow, intrusive, even obscene, to start moving about the room. So suffered, yes, suffered the panting and rolling (would two writhing bodies come bursting through the wall?) and the frantic, final moments that culminated
in the woman’s terrible, desperate cries (Oh God, No, No!). And then, all was silence.

  Josie and Richard, who hadn’t looked at each other throughout this, still could not move. Uncomfortably aware of their own anger. And would it not have been in poor taste to let the couple know they’d shared their passion with unwilling strangers?

  She and Richard laughed about it later, but Josie never forgot those terrible, desperate cries. Learning and relearning the ancient lessons of love and pain. (Jay barging into her life—he didn’t like it when she said barging, but there were things about her that seemed to drag him to her and drive him away. Visiting her the first time—Richard was not at home, of course—telling her, suddenly, that he loved her. Phoning later, saying, “You’re so sensual, Josie. Everything about you is so sensual.” And another phone call—the phone was safe, after all—”I’d like to come over there right now, and take you in my arms.” That was Jay all right. Blurting it out and then later, trying to cover his tracks.) And Richard? It was impossible to let Jay or anyone know how deep a love like that could go. Wasn’t love just one measure of life in the same way that life was one measure of love? Now I want you to go and make love to Richard. I want you to have it all.

  Her feet tramped hard into sand as she skirted the cliff, a brief moment out of the wind’s roar behind a dune. Urgency fell away and she slowed her pace and then stopped when a sudden rainbow arced perfectly in a sky heaped with thick grey clouds. The sun broke through over her shoulder, invisible spray blowing into her face from the northeast. No one was on the beach. Two gulls were lifted by the wind, not having to move a wing; two sandpipers scurried like busybodies on their way to market. She clenched her teeth again when a long line of geese overtook her, the V shaping and reshaping in flight; and then another, and another, from behind.