A Place Called Winter (10 page)

Once he had reassured her that she and Phyllis would be provided for financially, whatever success or failure he made in the far West, they avoided the topic of his imminent departure by common, tacit consent. Instead, the two of them made his remaining days a sort of holiday, although the spring was proving late, wet and cold. They took Phyllis to the zoo, where he hid his alarm at being reminded just how large grizzly bears were, and to Kew Gardens, and impulsively took a chilly, eccentric day trip back to Herne Bay to walk beside the sea and eat overcooked sole in a deserted hotel dining room, where Winnie suddenly touched the back of his hand and murmured, ‘I feel I’m sending you off to war.’

Nobody came with him to King’s Cross to see him off. Instead, Winnie and Phyllis saw him as far as Strawberry Hill’s little station. There Phyllis picked up on the atmosphere, and cried so hard that conversation became impossible and husband and wife were able to part in laughter.

Chapter Eleven

He had already communicated the official version of his departure to Jack, and Jack had sent back a telegram saying,
Blimey, Governor. Stay night before. Will see you off L’pool.

He thought about dodging this kindness, if only out of cowardice, knowing it would be even harder to lie to Jack than to Winnie, easier simply to slip out of the country like a felon. Then he thought of all the times he had put himself out for his brother as they were growing up and realised that those small sacrifices had been a kind of burden on Jack. Travelling from Chester to Liverpool docks and waving off his boat, and being made in the process a party if not to his disgrace, then to its codified implication, would be a liberation for Jack. It would complete the process of maturing and severance that moving away, marriage and fatherhood had begun in him.

On the long journey to Crewe, Harry read, until he could recite passages by heart, the booklet he had bought from an impromptu bookstall someone had set up near Canada House.
The Settler’s Guide
, it was called,
Or the Homesteader’s Handy Helper
. A fulsomely bearded farmer was pictured on the front, under a large straw hat and with a pitchfork over one shoulder and a hand jauntily on hip. He was worryingly uneven of gaze, as though drunk or exhausted. Making repeated use of the phrase
in actual bona fide residence
, the booklet seemed to have been written for the dim-witted or for those with only a frail grasp of English.
Write your name in full and plainly. As far as possible, confine each letter to one subject.
One mealy-mouthed pronouncement in particular began to haunt him to the point where he wished he had not read it even once.
It happens not infrequently that a settler finds after a year or two’s trial that he has unfortunately settled upon a piece of land which is not suitable for farming and out of which he cannot reasonably hope to make a living.
Since the promised virgin territory had been divided up into mathematically precise squares for settlement – and Harry had looked at one of the remarkably unrevealing domain lands maps in the emigration office – what was to stop him accidentally assigning himself land that was all rock or entirely under water? Such things could happen, the booklet blandly assured him; in so large a country, how could they not? But all he had to do in such an unhappy predicament was to file notice of abandonment and start the entire process afresh. He noted that the booklet had been published as long ago as 1894, fourteen years earlier. If this process had been in train so long already, surely all the best quarter-sections would have gone and only the bogs and rocks be left?

George spread out a map, which was seventy years old so did not show Saskatchewan or Manitoba – merely a sort of here-be-monsters void in between two relatively settled coasts – and declared she was really very envious of him and did he want a housekeeper, and Jack demanded to see the one-way boat ticket as proof they weren’t being hoodwinked.

When George left them alone for a while after dinner, however, Jack asked more serious questions. What did Winnie think? Surely she didn’t want him to leave her and Phyllis and would be coming out to join him? And surely the money situation wasn’t so dire suddenly? And why now? Why not wait for the warmer weather and an easier crossing? And how on earth was Harry, who had never so much as weeded or tended a flower bed, going to plough a field?

Parrying the questions as best he could, Harry met gravity with gravity and said he now considered Jack in effect Phyllis’s guardian and preserver of Winnie’s best interests. He said he had transferred to Canada only such capital as he felt he’d need to set himself up until he could become self-sufficient, and had apprised both lawyer and broker of his change in circumstances and told them Jack was to be their contact regarding all his financial affairs in England until further notice.

That winded Jack. At last he asked, ‘Is everything with you and Winnie . . . you know?’ to which Harry simply said,

‘No. Not really.’

At which point George came back in to see what was keeping them and rescued the conversation.

Travelling to Liverpool the next day, Jack was careful, talking only of immediate concerns, what they could see from the train windows, the absurdity of Harry’s having to take evening dress for the boat, which he would surely not be needing on the prairies. Playing the man of science, he teased Harry about his cholera belt, asking how on earth such a thing was supposed to work. As a parting gift, he handed over a wooden campaign mirror. ‘George said you’re bound to grow a wild beard out there, like everyone else, but we Canes can’t have standards slipping too far, now, can we?’

The little object, with its tiny folding shelf, felt as poignantly useless as the leather prayer book his favourite housemaid had given him when first leaving him on his own at school. Standing on the dockside, shaking Jack’s hand for as long as he could, with the black, cliff-like bulk of the ship looming beside them, the image of a forbidding future, he felt wretchedly alone. If anything, the feeling was worse because he was thirty now, not five, so not an obvious object of anyone’s pity.

As he presented himself and ascertained that his steamer trunk had indeed arrived and been taken to his cabin, he was formally entered on the ship’s passenger list. ‘How many of us are there?’ he asked.

‘Five hundred and eleven, sir,’ he was told. ‘If no one gets cold feet.’

‘So many?’

‘Well some of you have more room than others, sir.’

Feeling a pang of guilt, Harry moved on through the barrier and looked about him. He was pleased to see several families, wives looking anxiously about, children fascinated by the business of the wharves. And the languages were an amazing mixture. He heard Irish and Scottish accents as well as English and what he guessed was a Canadian one, but there were also people speaking some sort of Slavic language, and German, and another tongue, at once musical and liquid, which baffled him.

‘Excuse me,’ he asked. ‘But what are they speaking?’

‘Welsh,’ he was told. ‘They’ve given up on Patagonia and are trying their luck in Canada instead. No land for sheep, mind you. Not with all those bears and wolves.’

As people began to board, he saw that most were entering by a lower gangplank. None of the family groups seemed to be climbing to his deck. He reflected that had he been buying berths for a wife and several children as well as himself, he too would have economised. His cabin was no great stateroom, far from it, but it had its own minute bathroom and a porthole, at least, and access to a deck for fresh air and exercise.

He discovered at dinner that the majority of passengers on his level were young, male and upper class in ways that reminded him of the worst aspects of his schooldays. They had declared themselves by heartying around on deck, some already quite drunk. Their rowdy good cheer discomfited him, the more so as he saw the few women in evidence flinch from it. At dinner he found himself seated amongst them and felt guilt by association, as they teased the waiters and cracked jokes about seasickness and dubious meat presented as veal cutlets.

I’m not with them
, he wanted to assure the waiter and sommelier.
I’m not like them in the least
.

They weren’t so bad once they drew him into conversation, merely young and untested. By chance, those nearest him were all third sons.

‘There’s the heir and the spare and the heiress-beware,’ one said. ‘And most of us are the heiress-beware.’

While it was possible their parents had packed them off to the Canadian West on the off chance they might actually make fortunes out there, or at least become respectable landowners like their older brothers, most seemed to regard it as a lark. His neighbours laughed when he confessed to being a little apprehensive about the realities of farming, and said they planned to go fishing instead and that apparently the shooting was excellent – wild duck on every puddle.

‘But what about meeting the conditions for claiming your land after the three years?’ Harry asked one.

‘Oh,’ he said airily, ‘the Troll’s taking care of all that. Good old Troll. No sense of humour but he takes care of everything, what?’ He gestured vaguely towards the other end of the long table, to where two ladies, who were either missionaries or in deep mourning, were taking an early leave as the ocean’s swell began to rattle cutlery and glass. Harry could see nobody remotely troll-like.

The conversation then descended into a shouty competition for other rhymes with
heir
and
spare
.
Mama’s despair
was popular and
grizzly bear
was riotously received. The boat gave a lurch towards the bows that sent a decanter crashing to the deck, and soon after that, one young man was violently sick, with no warning, into his neighbour’s lap.

Never having sailed further than across the English Channel on calm summer days, Harry assumed he would prove as weak as his fellow men and had prepared for the worst, packing a powdered preparation said to be good against
mal de mer
and armed by George with a box of strong ginger biscuits she claimed had helped her with morning sickness.

The movement of the ocean was dramatic, its effects often noisy and frightening, sending objects and people toppling. When darkness and the lack of horizon made it hard for the brain to make sense of the violent sensations it was receiving, he convinced himself the boat was going to be broken into pieces. Waves seemed regularly to smash against his porthole – which he only had the folly to open once – so the fear and discomfort suffered by passengers on the lower decks did not bear imagining. And yet, to his surprise, he suffered no sickness. All around him passengers retreated to their cabins where, when the noises of ship and sea allowed, they could be heard groaning and worse. Presumably the crew all had their sea legs, but they too seemed less in evidence for a day or two, as though taking discreet advantage of the prostration of the passengers. On his deck, at least, they ministered to the sick, and he saw them bundling soiled sheets into sailcloth bags or mopping a corridor floor where someone had failed to reach a sink or bucket in time.

The restaurant was deserted. Only in the nearby bar could two or three fleeting revenants be spotted on occasion, wordlessly dosing themselves with Scotch or brandy, each in their own unsociable corner. For the most part, though, it was like walking through a ghost ship, its dimly lit saloons unoccupied, its occupants encountered only as muffled sighs or whimpers.

Harry took possibly dangerous constitutionals around the deck, putting his new waterproof coat to the test as he clung to this railing or that, gasping at the wind and marvelling that the ship could safely slam into such walls of grey water. He borrowed books from the library and played rounds of patience. He picked out tunes on the piano but found that made him both self-conscious and powerfully homesick. He wrote letters, mad, passionate, excoriating letters to Winnie and Browning, to Robert and Jack, which he crumpled and threw off the deck into the hungry brine. He took lunch in his cabin, thinking that would cause less bother, but felt the need to dress in the evening and go to dinner, if only to lend some sense of closure to an odd day.

There was one other man sufficiently well to have an appetite for solids: a tall, strikingly handsome individual with the bearing of a school bully and short, thick hair so white-blond he might almost have been an albino. The first time he sat at one of the small tables sensibly laid around the perimeter of the room, where there were plenty of handholds for both waiter and diner to seize. On that occasion they did no more than bow to one another. The night after that, however, again coming in after Harry and seeing him dining in solitary state, he approached his table.

‘May I?’ he asked.

‘Please do,’ Harry said. ‘I’ve spoken to no one but myself and the crew all day.’

‘The only two real men on the deck, eh?’

‘Well . . . I don’t know about that. I was quite surprised to be so unaffected.’

‘Perhaps you have seafaring in your lineage?’ His accent was curious, neither English nor Canadian. ‘Munck,’ he said, holding out a hand. ‘Troels Munck.’

‘Ah!’ said Harry before he could stop himself.

Munck held Harry’s hand and gaze slightly too long for comfort. His grip was firm. ‘They call me the Troll,’ he said.

‘English schoolboy humour. They’re very young. Munck I can guess at, but Troels? Was there a St Troels?’

‘I doubt it. It means Thor’s Spear. My parents are proud nationalists.’

‘You’re Danish.’

‘Well done.’

‘Hardly an educated guess. I went by your hair colour.’

‘Ah.’

Harry saw that he was vain and, after they had been served mulligatawny soup and a glass of sherry each, decided to please him further. ‘You have no accent,’ he lied. ‘At least, you don’t sound Scandinavian.’

‘We moved to Halifax when I was a boy, then to Toronto. It’s a wonder I don’t sound Irish.’

They were of an age, Harry guessed, though the other man’s bulk and air of steely assurance made him seem the older. Harry was fascinated by the size of his hands, which seemed out of proportion, and the fastidious way he ate every morsel before him, wiping his soup bowl so clean with pieces of bread that it shone in the swaying lamplight.

Troels Munck noticed him watching. ‘I am not starving,’ he said. ‘Our mother used to beat us if we wasted food, and old habits die deep.’

‘Hard.’ Harry could not stop himself. ‘We tend to say they die hard.’

He stuttered on
die
. There was a pause, as the waiter cleared away the soup. Harry feared it signified offence.

‘Of course,’ Munck said eventually. ‘Alliteration is a very Nordic habit. I should have remembered.’ He murmured a few vigorously rhythmic lines of what was presumably Danish poetry, then smiled at Harry in a way that once again put him in mind of school and dangerous prefects. ‘So are you also coming to Canada to seek your fortune?’ he asked after their glasses had been refilled.