T. Boyle - Water Music

Ailie is twenty-two, and patient as Penelope. She was fourteen when she first met Mungo Park. He came to live with them, her father’s apprentice. Eight years ago. When he left for the university he asked her to wait for him. Leaves were turning in the trees. She cried for joy and confusion. After two years at Edinburgh he kissed her brow and signed on as ship’s surgeon on a spicer bound for Djakarta. She waited. When he returned he was morose and restive. They were to be married. But then, out of nowhere, there was a letter from London, from Mungo’s brother-in-law. Would he accept a commission from the African Association to explore West Africa with the object of locating the Niger River? She could read the answer in his eyes. Two weeks later, his bags packed, he stood at the door of the London coach. “I’m going to make a mark in the world, Ailie,” he said. “Wait for me?”

She’s been waiting ever since.

Of course, there isn’t a man in the Borderlands can hold a candle to him. They’re all a bunch of plowboys and fops, with about as much adventure in them as a sick housedog. Look at Gleg — her father’s current apprentice — he’s no more than a tadpole compared to Mungo. He wouldn’t know adventure if it took hold of one of his great flapping ears and bit into it. Ailie sighs, sets the bath oil beside the hairbrush, and then calls out to her brother. “Zander! Help me haul the tub out, would you?”

Alexander Anderson is in the parlor, alternately staring down at Southey’s Joan of Arc , which lies open in his lap, and gazing out at the languid feathery flakes drifting past the window. He is savoring the storm, and the quiet, glad for the respite from the comings and goings of medicine. Glad too for the presence of Gleg. Ever since the spring, when he left the university, his father has been dragging him along on housecalls, thrusting splints and scalpels at him, blustering, cajoling, imploring him to take up the standard of a country physician. “What’s with ye, lad?” the old man would boom. “Ye plan to loll about lickin’ yer hinder parts like ye was some sheep o’ the field for the rest o’ yer days? — or are ye going to find yerself some God’s work for yer idle hands as befits a mon and an Anderson? Eh? Speak up, lad — I canna hear ye for all the anger and puzzlement belaborin’ the runnels o’ me brain.”

But Zander has no desire to set up as a country doctor. He loathes the smell of the sickroom, the blackened lips and foul breath. There’s a man pinned beneath a cart, the ribs like pink stakes driven into his chest; an infant hacking in the night, blood on her chin; bones breaking, vessels rupturing, hearts seizing. He wants no part of it. Mortality is a cancer, a running sore — does he need to stare it in the face ten times a day? Drunken men, pregnant women and filthy children with their ruptures and boils, their poxes and plagues — they strike him with terror, not compassion. He doesn’t want to probe wounds or let blood or tamp poultices round tumors and lesions — he wants to vomit, he wants to run.

Thank God for Gleg. He may be awkward and two-faced, gangling and graceless, an alien and obtrusive presence in the house, but he lives and breathes, walks on two feet and provides a clear and unmistakable target for the old man’s enthusiasm. Since Gleg arrived, the pressure’s been off. When there are horses to be hitched, bones to be set, herbs to be gathered and pounded, it’s Gleg who gets the call. When there’s moralizing to be listened to, or carping about prices, weather, powdered hair or the “grate Kraut King,” it’s Gleg who must bow his head and look attentive. This is not to say that the good doctor has been neglecting his only son — not by any means. He still scolds and lectures, berates him for his dreaminess, his lack of ambition, his clothes and hairstyle and opinions, and he still drags him out into the cutting winds to make the odd housecall. No, that will never change — so long as Zander is under his father’s roof. But at least Gleg has diverted the old man for the time being. Zander can breathe. He can sit back and sip sherry before the fire. Play patience, read a book of poetry. Or wrap a scarf round his throat, wander the blighted hills and wonder what in God’s name he’s going to do with his life.

“Zander!” Ailie is in the doorway, a bathtowel in her hand. “Help me with the tub?”

Zander looks up from his book. Outside the snow has begun to change to sleet. “A bath?” he says. “In this weather?”

♦ ♦ ♦

The tub is an heirloom. Dark and massive, smelling of the sea, of rancid soap, of wet hair and mold and age. Euan Anderson, Ailie’s grandfather, bathed in it after the battle of Culloden. Her great-grandmother, Emma Oronsay, was kicking up a fine froth of soap bubbles as Handel coasted down the Thames on a barge, and Godfrey Anderson, great-uncle on her father’s side, was found dead in it, the water gone red, his wrists cut through to the bone. Ghosts and echoes. Ailie’s last memory of her mother is bound up in the feel and smell of the thing. A warm light from the candles, kettles singing, she and Zander kicking and splashing, and that woman with the sad and suffering eyes, with the hair like a field in bloom, that woman, her mother, reaching out soft hands to scrub their backs and ears and the spaces between their thighs. She disappeared one day. Left for a weekend in Glasgow and never returned.

Euphemia Anderson, née St. Onge, was a devotee of astrology. She charted the heavens, spoke of stars in ascendancy and planets in conjunction. “Buy into the grain market, James,” she would tell her husband, “the time is ripe.” Or: “The mare will foal tonight. It’ll be a bay stallion with a bad hind leg.” She was a Gemini. “My twin is an Arabian Princess,” she would say. “Out in the wide world. I will never know her.”

Her daughter was born in June, nine and a half minutes before her son. Alice and Alexander. Twins. She dressed them identically, now in short pants, now in skirts. She would stop people on the street to introduce her darlin’ little daughters one day, and her bold little sons the next. Obsessed with the concept of twins — twin bodies, twin minds, twin fingers and toes and ears and eyes — she was incapable of accepting the momentous and wrenching disparity indicated by so trifling a thing as a cleft or a wrinkled flap of skin no bigger than her thumbnail. It offended her sense of proportion. When she left for Glasgow, Dr. Anderson took the twins in hand. Zander was sent to boarding school and Ailie fell into the lap of a governess.

She was six when Mrs. Alloway arrived. Mrs. Alloway explained to her that ladies were meant for hoops and finery, for accomplishment in verse and music and other anodynic arts, that ladies above all else were ladies, the fleece and plumage of society. Ailie cut her hair at the shoulder in protest. She’s worn it that way ever since.

But now her mother is a memory, indistinct, loose at the edges, and Mrs. Alloway has shrunk into insignificance, an old woman, her bulk loose on the bone, death’s pensioner in a leaking cottage. There’s always an homage to pay to this old tub, memories caught in a scent or the feel of the roughened wood, but today is a celebration of life, and she squeezes her eyes shut and summons Mungo, his face drifting in a thousand guises, smiling, winking, the pitch of his upper lip as he begins a funny story, the look of befuddlement as he steps in a bucket or tumbles from his horse. The water is hot, comforting and sensuous. It flushes her skin. She’s in Iceland, Norway. A hot spring, snowflakes melting on the water and a figure looming through the mist, naked and athletic, her name on his lips — but dammit, she’s forgotten the washcloth. It crouches on the table, just out of reach.