The Liverpool Basque (2 page)

Although the morning’s winter storm had been so intense and Victoria’s Scenic Drive had been, for once, deserted, Manuel’s expedition had not gone unnoticed.

Seated in the bay window of the bungalow next door, Sharon Herman, daughter of an old friend of Veronica Harris, had noted with mild interest the very old man going for a walk despite the inclement weather.

She was a nurse who specialized in the care of the terminally ill, and she had just arrived to take up a position in a local hospital about to open a palliative care ward. Her interest in the elderly pedestrian was kindly and caring – she felt he should not be getting soaking wet at his age.

She turned towards Veronica, who was seated at her computer across the room, trying to unravel the complexities of Townsman’s Tailors’ accounts outstanding. An elderly widow, who lived alone, she earned her living by keeping the accounts of small businesses in the neighbourhood. Today, she was finding it difficult to work with someone else in the room, though she did not grudge, in the least, offering her friend’s daughter temporary accommodation until she found herself a flat conveniently close to the hospital.

‘Veronica, who’s the old man next door? He’s just gone out – in this weather! He’ll get soaked – hasn’t he got a car?’

Veronica turned impatiently towards Sharon. Then she glimpsed through the bay window the bent figure plodding up the road. Her expression changed, and she smiled. ‘Oh, that’s Manuel Echaniz – Old Spanish, Kathleen’s husband.
She was the friend I told you about – died of cancer.’

‘Is he Spanish?’

‘No. Kathleen told me he was born in the UK. She said he’s a Basque, whatever that might be. He speaks English and Spanish – and his own language, which only Faith seems to understand – that’s his daughter, you know.’ She paused to rub her eyes, tired from concentration on the computer screen. Then she said, ‘He’ll be going up to the cemetery.’

‘Does he work there?’

‘No. He goes up every day to put a flower on Kathleen’s grave. I’ve never known him miss a day since she passed away – must be eight years now.’

Sharon laughed. ‘You’re kidding?’

‘No, I’m not. You should’ve seen them together. They were great!’

Sharon moved uneasily in her chair by the window, and her book slid off her lap. She bent to pick it up. ‘He could take some flowers up every week – it would save him time. Or he could drive up on a day like this.’

‘Well, he does have a car – he doesn’t use it much, though.’ She smiled indulgently. ‘Weather never bothered him – I guess because he went to sea for years. And as for going every day, he told me once he wanted her to know that he thought of her each day.’ Her smile faded, and she sighed a little despondently; she had often wished that Manuel would think of her every day. He still seemed to her an attractive man, with his wide smile and twinkling black eyes. His finely lined face was still healthily tanned, and the long, narrow shape of it, with its flat cheekbones, still had the firmness of a much younger man.

‘Sounds like an old movie,’ Sharon was saying, as she put her book on a side table. ‘Do you think he’s got a screw loose?’

‘Not him! He’s in his eighties now, but there’s nothing wrong with his brains – and I’ve never known him be sick.’
She hesitated, and then added, ‘He’s a great old guy.’

Sharon made a wry mouth. ‘Veronica, you’re too sentimental,’ she teased. ‘Men aren’t like that. Do you think he feels guilty about her in some way?’

The question irritated Veronica. Sharon, still smarting from a recent divorce, might be bitter about men – but she was, Veronica felt, being very unfair to Manuel.

‘You’ve read too much pop psychology,’ she responded huffily, and swung her chair round to face the computer screen again. ‘I would have thought that you, with your special training, would know how long a person can grieve.’

The rebuke, from a woman who was usually very mild-mannered, jolted Sharon. She realized that the question had arisen from the resentment she still felt as a divorcee. Veronica was right; each individual needed his own time in which to recover from bereavement.

Ashamed, she inquired in a conciliatory tone if Veronica would like her to make a cup of coffee. Privately, she thought how glad she would be to begin her new job on the following Monday; it would take her mind off her own troubles.

Thankful to get her guest out of the room for the moment, Veronica said politely that she would like a cup very much, and the coffee was on the bottom shelf of the cupboard next to the sink. She wished heartily that the rain would ease, so that Sharon could resume her hunt for an apartment.

In the cluttered kitchen, Sharon put a clean filter in the coffee maker, followed by spoonfuls of coffee. She swore softly as the old kitchen tap spattered water over her when she turned it on. After filling the pot, she stared with some despair through the kitchen window at the sweeping rain. The weather was as cold and dismal as she felt herself; her only consolation was that Winnipeg, from which she had come a couple of days before, would be suffering infinitely
worse temperatures. In her pocket lay a well-thumbed last letter from her lawyer, enclosing his final bill for negotiating a parsimonious settlement with her husband. The letter wrote
Finis
to a whole segment of her life.

Divorce had been much more painful than she had expected. After seven difficult years of a childless marriage, she had anticipated a sense of joyous freedom; instead, she felt a numbing sense of loss. Was this how one felt after a bereavement? Was this how Old Spanish felt? God help her, if she still felt like this at the end of eight years. One thing was certain,
her
husband would never waste time putting flowers on her grave.

She had worked all her married life. Now, she was going to start anew, away from the people who had known her when she was married. It was the kind of work which would demand a great deal from her, as she dealt with the dying and with their grief-stricken families; yet, she knew from experience that the close relationship between patient and nurse was not a one-way situation; at no time did one come so close to a person as when that person was on his or her deathbed. Beside that experience, she considered as the coffee percolated, what was a divorce? Particularly when there were no children involved.

She carefully poured the coffee into two mugs, and told herself sharply to cheer up. After the coffee, she would go out to look at the apartments she had marked in the newspaper rentals column. Blow the rain. She took Veronica’s mug to her, and drank her own coffee despondently in the kitchen. Then, she quickly put on a raincoat, and took Veronica’s umbrella off a hook in the hall cupboard. Opening the door into the living-room a crack, she called to Veronica that she was going to look at an apartment and that she was not to bother about lunch for her. Then, map in pocket, she went firmly out into the rain.

The rain was lessening and the umbrella hardly necessary. She remembered suddenly her parents still living
together in their Florida condominium and managing to keep extraordinarily well for their age, under the Florida sun. Married for thirty-five years, she considered with some wonderment, as she crossed the road at a traffic light. How did they do it? Old Spanish must have been married at least as long. Some people had all the luck.

But was it luck? Or was it some secret formula that the older generation used to build a happy marriage? Cynics said they stuck together because women had no means of earning a living, but it could not be that alone, because even slaves in the States who had no hope at all used to run away.

She looked up to check the street number of an apartment block and then absently pressed a bell marked
Building Manager
. No matter what the secret is, this is where you begin all over again, she told herself as she waited for a response.

Unaware of the interest he had sparked in Sharon Herman, Old Manuel stood in his narrow back hall and shook the rain off his beret and oilskin before hanging them to drip in a small washroom by the kitchen door. Without them, dressed in a white shirt and sleeveless pullover, he seemed extremely frail and thin. As he paused for a second to watch the water running down the oilskin, he smiled to himself; his daughter, Faith, was always warning him to keep himself warm and dry. At his age, she told him, he must take care not to get wet.

He would always tease her by replying that Basques had been pounded by rain in their native mountains for at least five thousand years, and they were immune to it.

He slowly heaved off his Wellington boots and laid them neatly in a boot tray. Like many men who had been to sea, he was extraordinarily neat, because he was used to making the most of the tiny space of a ship’s cabin.

In his thick white socks, he padded into the kitchen to find something to eat for lunch. He slapped a cheese sandwich together and then plugged in the kettle to make some instant coffee, and looked forward to the nap he always took after the midday meal.

As he put his plate and coffee mug down on the kitchen table and pulled out a chair, he asked himself ruefully, ‘Manuel, my lad, what have you come to, when all you look forward to is having a nap?’

The answer was a resigned shrug of one thin shoulder; he had sensed lately that his time was running out.

He decided that after he had slept a little, he would ring
up his friend, Jack Audley, and suggest that he should come over for a game of pool on the billiard table in the basement family room. Jack was twelve years younger than he was, but they shared a common interest in fishing and ships – Jack had been a merchant seaman, too.

To help him get through his days without Kathleen, Manuel structured them as meticulously as he could, so that all the necessary domestic tasks and the garden were attended to. Sometimes, however, a thoroughly wet day upset the schedule.

If Jack was not at home, he thought, he would write to his young Liverpool cousin, Ramon Barinèta. He had already, on the first of the month, written to his oldest and dearest friend, Arnador Ganivet, another Liverpool Basque, who had been a Professor at the University of Liverpool, and he smiled gently at the recollection. Between himself and Arnador there was a frankness and concern for each other which probably exceeded that which might have been built up had they both spent their lives in Liverpool; the older they grew, the richer became the correspondence.

After supper each day, he added a page or two to the memoirs of his early life, which he was writing for the benefit of his granddaughter Lorilyn. He had a vague hope that, when she was older, she would read them and become interested in her Basque forebears. At times, her youthful scorn at his pride in his ancestry had hurt him so much that he longed to slap her; her ignorance of the world and its people, despite thirteen years of education, was absolutely abysmal, he fulminated. In frustration, he took to buying her, for her birthdays, books on European and Asian history. As far as he could tell, she never read them; the books were put on the bookshelf in the McLaren family room, their dust-jackets unbesmirched by handling, their pages stiff from never having been turned.

He never quite gave up on her immutability, though he had long since done so in the case of her mother.

He had remarked to Faith’s Grade Six schoolteacher that the child seemed to have no interest in her family’s past or their customs. The schoolteacher, who was an immigrant from Scotland, had tried to comfort him by saying that first-generation Canadian children were often so busy trying to be like the other children that they tended to discard, as much as possible, any trace of their immigrant origin. ‘It’s your grandchildren who will be passionately interested in where they sprang from; they’ll feel more secure,’ she had assured him.

But now, in Lorilyn, he had a grandchild, and she never read any book that she did not have to for her university courses. And what was she proposing to study? Engineering, God save her! Not a decent womanly occupation, like nursing or teaching.

While strolling along the cliffs with Jack, one fine summer day, when the gorse was in riotous yellow bloom and the bees were humming like tiny dynamos, he had broached the subject of human roots.

He said, ‘You know, Jack, people move around too much. A lot of ’em never see another relation, even their grandparents. Come to that, they don’t see much of their mum and dad either, in some cases.’

‘You’re right.’

‘All they’ve got is kids the same age as themselves or television to set the pace. They’ve no idea that we’ve learned ways to endure bad times – cope with difficulties – take disappointments in our stride. And the first time things don’t go just right – well, they’re sunk.’

He paused to watch a small yacht trying to tack against the wind, and muttered irritably, ‘He’ll drown if he don’t watch out.’ Then, picking up the original subject again, he went on, ‘There’s nothing much to make kids feel safe, no standards, no customs. They get no religion even – our
Lorilyn’s never seen the inside of a church since she were christened – and I wouldn’t like to offend her father by askin’ what she’s doing with that young man always hanging around her.’ He gave a barking laugh. Then he added, ‘There’s no family discipline – I wouldn’t like
my
grandfather to see her; he’d have made her toe the line a bit, and he’d have had the backing of everybody else. Sometimes I feel like a voice in the wilderness. Do you?’

Jack’s round red face wrinkled up in a wry grin. Before he answered, he stopped to strike a match and light his pipe, shielding it from the wind with his curved palms. Then, as the pipe glowed and they continued to walk, he nodded agreement. ‘I used to slam my kids when they needed it. It didn’t do much good, because I wasn’t around that much – the wife had to manage while I was at sea.’ He drew slowly on his pipe. Then he continued, ‘And things seemed to be changed almost every time I came home. Nobody else’s kids were going to church any more – so ours wouldn’t. Discipline in school went out, and drugs came in. Like you say, the kids went around in herds all the same age – and there were no cow hands to keep them in line. And God help a cop who boxed their ears for them. I knew what I wanted for my kids, but I didn’t have much luck putting it over.’

Manuel dropped his cigarette butt and ground it out with his heel. ‘Seems to me that when we were having Faith, nobody dared touch a child – even to bath the poor little bugger – unless they had read at least three books by experts! Kathleen had a row of books.’

Jack laughed. ‘Same with us. It was like learning to dance from books – as if we’d no ideas of our own. My mother never needed a book to tell her what to do, and we all grew up knowing what was right and what was wrong – even if we weren’t perfect. I wish my mother had been around when our lads were growing up.’ His red face under his straw hat was filled with pain.

Manuel could have kicked himself for bringing up the subject of children. He had, for the moment, forgotten what a bitter disappointment both Jack’s boys had been to him. They seemed to lack motivation and found it difficult to keep jobs – like homing pigeons, they came back from Vancouver every few months, to live on their father.

Jack was saying bitterly, ‘I wish I’d taken a shore job, so I could’ve been home more.’

‘It’s not your fault, Jack. I’m sure of it. It’s the way things are. They’re treated as kids for far too long. In the old days, by thirteen or fourteen, they would’ve been learning a trade under a weight of older men, who’d have kept them in line; and they’d have learned there’s a limit to what you can get away with.’

‘Jobs are different now. How many of them ever go to sea?’

Manuel snorted. ‘Maybe we should send the whole pack of them to sea for a bit,’ he suggested, trying to lift Jack’s spirits. ‘They’d either drown – or learn their responsibilities mighty fast.’

Unexpectedly, Jack chuckled. ‘They’d soon learn who’s boss.’

Manuel began to laugh. ‘Oh, aye, they would. It would be great to see some of the little bastards in a force ten gale, telling the Old Man they were as good as him – or arguing they had rights, while waves as high as the mast were coming at them!’

‘Mannie, they don’t know nothing about natural things, like waves.’

‘I wouldn’t put it past our Lorilyn to explain the physics of a breaking wave to me!’ responded Manuel.

This made Jack really laugh, as they plunked themselves down on a bench, two old men silhouetted against the rippling sea, which had taught them most of their skills with an iron discipline.

‘Are you glad you went to sea?’ asked Jack from behind a cloud of tobacco smoke.

‘Never dreamed of doing anything else. Not till I met Kathleen, that is; she’d got her eyes on a shore job for me. After we was married, she kept on her nursing and she put me through college, and I come out a marine architect. We had a good life – but I missed the sea.’

‘Humph. My dad was a fisherman, and he took me out to sea when I was nine or ten. I was wet and cold and seasick, but I felt I was a real man. At fourteen, I was a deck boy.’ He made the statement with pride, and then a grin flashed across his face, as he added, ‘I’d never heard of being a teenager; I was a lad learning to be a man under real men. Had some good laughs, though.’

‘Oh, aye. I were happy when I were a little kid, too, with me dad and me Uncle Leo coming and going from sea – and being took down to visit their ships, and listen to them grumble and laugh. And getting a bit of pie from the ship’s cook.’ He paused to light another cigarette, and then went on. ‘And in the house, there was me granny and grandpa to tell me stories. After me mam slapped me for being naughty, me gran would wipe me face – and explain why I got the slap!’ Both men were silent, as they smoked and contemplated the sea and the mountains before them. Then Manuel said in a puzzled way, ‘Our Lorilyn never seems to need a grandpa at all.’

While he recalled this rambling conversation with Jack, he took the handmade patchwork quilt off the bed and folded it carefully and laid it on a chair, and sighed. Though he had tried, he did not feel that he had been a very good grandfather – unlike his own grandfather, Juan Barinèta.

He sat down on the side of his bed, pulled a faded crocheted shawl out of the drawer of the bedside table, and slowly eased himself down on to the bed until he lay on his back. He paused for a moment, while every bone and
muscle in his body flashed with sudden aches, then he laid the shawl over himself, clasped his hands over his chest and thankfully closed his eyes. In the moment between waking and sleeping, he remembered Kathleen upbraiding him for resting on top of the patchwork quilt. Although he was tired from a very scary wartime voyage, he had pulled her down on top of him. They had forgotten about keeping the bedspread pristine, while they spent until nightfall making love so satisfactorily that even now, nearly fifty years later, he remembered it with awe. Had he really been that strong? And she so responsive?

After her death, he had come across the old quilt folded away at the back of the linen closet. Still beautiful, its colours muted by many drycleanings, it had been like meeting an old friend again. In a way, it had comforted him for the emptiness of the other side of the bed.

He had returned to his ship on the day following his happy afternoon with Kathleen, and her letter telling him the news about her pregnancy with Faith caught up with him in Galveston, Texas.

He remembered how excited he had been about the child, overwhelmed by the divine mystery of its existence and the sense of responsibility that it had laid upon him.

He had shouted the news to the few members of the engine room crew who had not gone ashore, and they had congratulated him on his sexual prowess with explicit pithiness. His news broke the astonished silence which had seemed to grip them at other news they had received that morning. The Yanks had dropped an amazing bomb on the port of Hiroshima and blown the whole city and its inhabitants to bits. The city was known to most of the crew and they had found it hard to accept its death – even if it was supposed to shorten the war. It was a port – like Liverpool!

He had immediately scribbled a few lines to Kathleen, expressing his pure joy at her news. After she was dead,
he had found the letter in her jewellery box; she had kept it all her life.

He had also written to his mother, Rosita Echaniz, in Liverpool, urging her to come on a visit as soon as the war was over, to see the babe as yet unborn.

He had hoped for more children, but Kathleen had been adamant about limiting their family. ‘How will we ever afford to send them to university?’ she had asked. ‘And if you go back to college after the war …?’

Manuel was still uncertain that he himself wanted to return to college, and had never considered that a real university might be within the reach of any child of his, so he had reluctantly said he did not know.

The family remained at one.

The rainstorm which had swept the Juan de Fuca Strait came to an end. The sudden quiet woke the old man from his nap. He rose stiffly and put the shawl which had been keeping him warm back into the bedside drawer. With an amused awareness of his own finickiness, he carefully replaced the bedspread on the bed.

When he phoned Jack Audley, Mrs Audley said he had gone to Vancouver for the day.

Before going to his old-fashioned roll-top desk to write to Ramon in Liverpool, he went into the kitchen and took down from a cupboard a bottle of wine, already opened. He poured a glass of it carefully, so as not to disturb the sediment at the bottom of the bottle. Then picking it up, he went to the window and stood idly twirling it in the light of the first rays of the sun to pierce the rain clouds.