Kathleen Winter: Annabel

The Théâtre Capitole had been renovated. Everything was fire red, blue, and gold. Wayne and Thomasina sat in cabaret chairs that had been covered in velvet. There was a scent of blackened steak, which patrons ate with two-pronged forks, and the smell of Gitanes and expensive soap mingled with this. The evening was a program of Schubert presented by the Berklee College of Music in Boston and the Juilliard School in New York.

“Wallis,” Wayne read in the program. “Wallis Michelin.”

Wally Michelin wore a headpiece that winked and flung stars across the theatre. She wore a gown that billowed at the sleeve and a breastplate that made her look, Wayne felt, ready for a battle under the waves, with Poseidon and an array of glorious fishes. When her voice began, Wayne knew it did not come from the girl he had heard under the Croydon Harbour apple tree. It came from a different person, a person who had learned how to build a voice from the ruins up, a person who had lost everything and had begun from having worse than nothing. A person who had not given up believing she sang, that music would come to her because she wanted it to come, and it had to come, and she would use everything in her power to encourage it to do so.

“You go down to the green room,” Thomasina said at the end of the program. “I’ll wait for you here.”

Wayne stood against the tide of audience members as they left the theatre, then descended the stairs, passed the pillars, and took a corridor to Wally’s dressing room. He knocked on her door, holding flowers.

There were lights around a mirror and pots of makeup. Wally had taken her costume off and stood in her camisole and slip, taking makeup off her face with a sponge. She had peeled her stockings and hung them over the back of an unpainted chair. People had given her other flowers: yellow and red roses, and cream coloured roses, and lemon roses with blushing edges. There was a bird of paradise surrounded by freesias. But the flowers Wayne gave Wally Michelin were Labrador plants that Thomasina had kept alive in a piece of soaked caribou moss: Labrador tea with its orange furze under the leaf and its misty white bloom; wild rhododendron’s asymmetrical purple on a woody stem; sundew and pitcher plants, carnivorous and threatening and beautiful in a way only someone from Labrador would know. The first thing Wally did with the flowers was break a leaf of the Labrador tea so that its scent, which is the scent of the whole of Labrador, broke over the two of them.

The pitcher plant’s leaves, exactly like little jugs, still held ants and a few tiny flies caught in the sticky substance the plant produced as a trap. With pitcher plants, some creatures got away and others did not. The pitchers caught other things too. They caught the changing light of Labrador mornings and springtimes and snow light, and they caught the sounds of the harlequin and eider ducks and hermit thrushes, and some of the sounds were considered beautiful and others were not, but the pitchers caught them.

Labrador tea with the same scent grew undisturbed around the shore of that central lake in Labrador, the unnamed lake from which the rivers run both north and south. The same insects visited lethal pitcher plants and a sky looked down; some might call it a merciless sky. And now and then in the pitchers’ water a cloud journeyed, and so did patterns of ducks on their spring flight.

Treadway Blake came to this place as he had always done, this birthplace of the seasons, of smelt and of the white caribou, and of deep knowledge that a person did not find in manmade things. Only in wind over the land did Treadway find the freedom his son would seek elsewhere. Treadway was a man of Labrador, but his son had left home as daughters and sons do, to seek freedom their fathers do not need to inhabit, for it inhabits the fathers.

ITHANK MY BELOVED FAMILY and friends, especially my husband, Jean Dandenault. Thank you to my writing group: enginistas Danielle Devereaux, Lina Gordaneer, Julie Paul, and Alice Zorn. Thank you to Agnes Hutchings. Thank you to my wonderful agent, Shaun Bradley. Thank you to Sarah MacLachlan and the staff of House of Anansi Press. Thank you to Lynn Verge and the kind staff of Montreal’s Atwater Library. Special thanks to my editor, Lynn Henry, for her profound expertise and dedication. And thank you, dear reader.

KATHLEEN WINTER has written dramatic and documentary scripts for Sesame Street and CBC Television. Her first collection of stories, boYs , was the winner of both the Winterset Award and the Metcalf–Rooke Award. A longtime resident of St. John’s, Newfoundland, she now lives in Montreal.

House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, and 2010 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”

Copyright © 2010 Kathleen Winter

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All of the events and characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This edition published in 2010 by

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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Winter, Kathleen

Annabel / Kathleen Winter.

eISBN 978-0-88784-276-4

I. Title.

PS8595.I618A55 2010 C813’.54 C2009-906505-3

Cover design: Bill Douglas on The Farm

Cover photograph: Thomas Schmidt/Getty Images

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.