Katie Munnik - The Heart Beats in Secret

And I can hear the tinkling waterfall

Far among the hills

Bluebirds sing each so merrily

To his mate in rapture trills

They seem to say ‘Your June is lonesome, too,

Longing fills her eyes

She is waiting for you patiently

Where the pine tree sighs.’

Before I left Scotland, Dad told me about the whales found a thousand miles from the sea. Not in Montreal itself, but even further inland near a place called Cornwall where the river was island-strewn and slow. I asked how they’d managed and he laughed.

‘Fossils, my dear. Ten thousand years old. They were found by men digging clay for bricks half a mile from the railway station and two hundred feet above sea level. White whales, I think. Proves the story of the long-drained sea, but then so does the clay. It’s quick clay, tricky stuff. Formed under the oceans and riddled with salt. With the tides gone, the clay dries out, the rains wash the salt away and it shifts. So cracks appear on buildings or suddenly, a whole hillside slips away. Sometimes, fossils emerge that way, too. Sometimes, they’re dug up intact.’

I wasn’t sure why he told me this. A token fact to ease my way into a new country. And a nod to what he knew, who he was. Clay and old stone, deep time and soil. It could have been that. But later, walking through Montreal looking up at the skyscrapers, a new understanding started to surface. Above me, the half-moons of hotel windows, the ribs of towers rising, and under my feet, things still hidden.

Was I the fossil-hunter then? Or the whale?

MATEO WAS STILL AT WORK AND I WAS MAKING SALAD when she called. Slicing cucumbers and preserved lemons, pitting green olives. When I picked up the phone, I could smell their sharpness on my fingers.

Felicity’s voice was so quiet I thought she was ill, but she said no, it was only sad news. She’d had a phone call that afternoon from Scotland. One of the elders from the kirk in Aberlady was working through Gran’s address book, wanting to let her friends and relations know.

‘Kind of him, wasn’t it? Not to leave it up to a lawyer or someone, but to get in touch personally. He said the funeral was yesterday. Prearranged. It seems your grandmother sorted it all out ahead of time. She didn’t want … a fuss.’

‘Would you like me to come?’ I asked.

‘Here? No, no,’ she said. ‘No, I think not. I’ll be fine. It’s just I haven’t seen her in a while. I … I don’t quite know what to do. Now. What to do now. That’s it. I don’t know what to do now.’ She let go of her breath, and I could see her, standing in the farmhouse kitchen, her hair falling forward to curtain her face. She paused, and I could see her hold her hand up to her mouth, her long fingers, the blue of her veins. Outside the window behind her, another evening was beginning, a greying sky above the trees, the lake still and growing darker.

‘I’ll come,’ I said. ‘I can take some time off work. Someone can cover for me.’

‘No.’ She sighed again, and I waited. ‘I just wanted you to know. There really is nothing to be done, but I thought you should know.’ She told me Bas sent his love, and Rika, too. The snow was melting and mud beginning to show between the trees. They’d started tapping the maples. The beginning of another year. She said she would be fine.

‘I know,’ I said, softly.

‘Yeah. I know, too.’

When Mateo came home, I cooked fish and he opened a bottle of wine. I opened the window, so the kitchen wouldn’t get hazy, and to the east, I could see streaks of light. For a moment, I wasn’t sure what they were. They looked like scratches or tears on the surface of the sky. I watched as they changed, brightened, grew longer and strange. Then I saw they were only vapour trails catching the last light of the setting sun. I thought about picking up the phone again and calling the camp to tell Felicity about them. She’d like that. On the other hand, she might think I was checking in, prompting or trying to get her to say something else. Better let her be. I’d tell her when we spoke next, I decided, and then it struck me she might be thinking similar thoughts, out beside the lake. That she couldn’t pick up the phone to tell her mother about the bright things that caught her eye. Not this evening or in the morning or later. She had to let her be.

At the bungalow, I’d decided to sleep in the front bedroom because that wasn’t where Felicity and I slept. We were always given the back bedroom – her room before she left, now stripped and painted white. Felicity said that she’d asked her parents to do it – to make it neutral – when she left. She’d wanted to close a door like that. To make a fresh start.

Even so, the double bed with its nubbly white coverlet was utterly Felicity to me. The pillows might have only just been shaken out, the sheet folded over. If I lay down, I would feel her hands soothing my spine, her hair warm beside me and, in the morning, tangling over me so I’d wake laughing. I would be a child again, too young for this empty house, and I knew I’d never sleep for her whispered stories, her gentle questions, and my own held answers.

In Gran’s room, I told myself the clock would be soothing, the photographs interesting, and the knick-knacks would leave no space for ghosts. The wash of the sea would sound like wind in the trees at the camp or like trucks on the highway in Ottawa. But, inevitably, I slept fitfully. Maybe the smell of her soap never quite let me settle. Maybe I was just overtired. A little after dawn, there were birds in the garden and I started to compile an inventory in my head.

The books. The photographs. The rag rug. All the boxes on the shelves. The letters. The things in the shed. The kitchen things, too. The teacups. The small jars. I might have slept again, thinking through the shelves and counting, but the blue glass cake-stand on the top of the cupboard brought Felicity’s voice close.

‘It was just this colour, wasn’t it, Mum? Do you remember that? The blue moon when I was wee?’

I was sitting with two cushions wedged beneath me as she took it from the shelf. The collar on my new dress was itchy and wrong, but I held Granny’s coffee mill tight between my knees, turning the crank to grind the beans. Granny sat beside me, the pen in her hand paused over a sheet of white paper.

‘Goodness, Felicity. I’m surprised you do. It was a very long time ago. Be careful with that, dear. It was a wedding present.’

‘But the colour was just like this, wasn’t it? Don’t you think?’

‘Hmm. I hadn’t made that connection before. I always wished it were green, which was more fashionable back then. Auntie Jean wouldn’t have known that. She must have purchased it in Jenners, I suppose. Imagined it sitting in pride of place in my matrimonial home. That was the sort of thing the Morningside aunts said.’

‘I don’t remember it at all,’ Felicity said.

‘Well, when you were small, I didn’t have much cause to use it. Too hard to make cakes on the ration. And people didn’t come around then. At least, they didn’t come here.’

‘Well, they will come tomorrow,’ Felicity said.

‘Yes. They will. They will come for your father.’

Felicity placed the cake-stand on the table, tracing her finger around the rim, and I waited for her to say the words to our bedtime poem. The moon is round as round can be. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth has she. But you need a face for the moon and a cake-stand has no face, no chin at all to tickle.

‘How’s that coffee coming along?’

‘Almost done,’ I said. ‘I can still feel a few scratchy bits.’