The Last Woman (22 page)

A
nn walks toward the boathouse, the sounds of the dinner party receding behind her. The sun has set and in the silvering channel the inverted reflections of pines tremble in a deepening obscurity. She is thinking of the last time she went down the path, a few hours before, following Billy to the dock, wrapped in the queer sense they were leaving together, like a husband and wife called away by an emergency. On the dock, he had untied his bow rope and swung his boat around, the hull making a hollow, trickling sound as it slid lightly over the water.

Instinctively, to calm him, she had placed her hand on his back and was shocked at the heat radiating from him. “You’re not well,” she said, and pleaded with him to rest,
to lie down, to let her get Dr. Clemens at his cottage. But he paid no attention. “Billy, what happened to you?” He did pause to regard her then, finally: paused with the rope in his hand, above his gently chafing boat. But whatever solace the contact brought her was instantly swept away, for his look held her with a terrible clarity.

He got into his boat then. She hovered as he ripped his motor to life, too stunned to say anything, and as he drove away, she turned and walked back to the cottage.

In the darkened studio, she sits on the small cot by the wall. From the house drifts the sound of laughter, and she thinks of Elaine Shewaybick, dignified, silent Elaine, whose grandson had hanged himself, moving around the porch as she served them. The taste of shame.

Drawing up her feet, she lies curled on her side. When a loon calls, its plunging, liquid cry seems to sound inside her. She is merely a point of consciousness now, an ear, an eye, alert in a corner of the dark studio – waiting for the loon to cry again. As if
it
might have the answer to the question in Billy’s face:
What was she doing with her life?

Some time later, she hears her husband call her name softly from the dimness beyond the screens. She can hear his feet scuff on the path. A flashlight beam flicks over her windows like a passing ghost. Now comes the creak and slap of the boathouse door, and her name spoken
again. His heavy tread on the stairs, preceded by the probing light.

As its glare finds her, she shuts her eyes – not just the light but being seen is unbearable. His rubber soles squeak as he approaches the cot.

“Ann?”

“Don’t shine that on me, please.”

The light falls away: a white transparent blanket drooping from his hand. “What’s going on? Reg and Marilyn are concerned.
I’m
concerned. Are you ill?” An impatient note:
Ill again?
She thinks of her mother. Was it like this for her? Feeling that to do anything but stay in bed was an impossibility.

All at once, she swings from the cot, an action that leaves her dizzy as she stands. He catches at her arm. “I’m all right,” she tells him sharply and starts toward the stairs.

Single file they go up the path. Richard is trying to be helpful, shining the light over her shoulder. Rocks and steps appear momentarily, vanishing to be replaced by more rocks, more steps, the black bole of a tree. They pass the side of the cottage and go along the screens and up the porch steps into quavering candlelight, where two faces, scarcely known to her, look up expectantly.

She dreams she is lying in a hospital bed, so encumbered with tubes and pulleys and covers that she cannot move. She is having a dangerous operation – some kind of machine is drilling away at the back of her skull. She
wakes to sunshine behind curtains. The machine is still drilling though; as she listens it grows fainter and she understands it is Elaine Shewaybick, setting off in her boat for Pine Island.

Beside her, Richard lies asleep on his stomach, a bit of drool shining at the corner of his mouth. He has thrown off the sheet and at the base of his back, just above the elastic waistband of his shorts, is the little tuft of hair that always intrigued and repelled her – like a small furry animal settled on his back. For a long time she studies him. Fourteen years together. She knows everything about him. And she knows nothing.

During breakfast, Reg Benoit slips off to make a call; returning, he announces that he and Marilyn must leave. The premier wants some revisions,
pronto
, to a statement to be released the next day. “’Twas ever thus.” Reg shrugs while Marilyn confides a wan smile to her coffee mug.

The trip to the Harbour feels endless. Ann sits with Marilyn in the rear seat, excused from being sociable by the racket of the outboard. Ahead, Richard leans toward the minister and shouts over the din about his desire to run in Nigushi.
Confident I can beat Ferrero. Would like to really work the north side there. The new policies should help
. The fragments she can pick up seem propelled by boyish eagerness: she feels sad for him, protective.

At the Harbour, they tie up and walk the Benoits to their car. Richard and Marilyn make exuberant noises about the
visit; everyone kisses like old friends. Reg says to Richard: “These things are a matter of strategy. I’m optimistic something will work out. But I’ve got a lot to consider – just not ready to commit at this point.” Their guests get into their car, and Marilyn continues to shower them with goodbyes through a rolled-down window. As soon as they are out of sight, Richard stalks back to the boat without waiting for Ann.

That afternoon, she thinks she will paint, but when she stands before her canvas, not a single idea emerges. Going outside, she takes a chair overlooking the water. In the shadow of the next island, a duck is floating, motionless as a decoy.

Richard comes down the rock. He goes past her and stands for a few seconds facing the water, hands on hips. “Well, if I get the nomination, it’ll be a bloody miracle –”

“We don’t know,” she says. “I thought he was encouraging.”

“My God, Ann. It was a disaster. Your friend showing up didn’t help.” He says no more, but from the fierceness of his glance, she understands he is far from calm.

A
bove the BMW, a loose wall of logs slides past as Richard accelerates. Huge butts leaking sap. Scored trunks. The cab’s assortment of mirrors, with the driver’s face held in each of them. In a few seconds the transport is a toy in the rear-view, while before them, the flat highway divides the bush like a runway.

“Awfully fast,” Ann says. Ignoring her, Richard speeds over a rise. And there’s a jam – a chain of vehicles curving away toward the flutter of emergency lights.

Swearing, he touches the brake.

They join the slow parade. They’re still an hour away from Black Falls. Beside him, Ann rustles in her bag. She
has been mostly silent since they left. He feels that, this weekend, she has let him down. Badly.

“Want an almond,” she says, holding out a small plastic bag.

He shakes his head. In the next car, a kid has raised a sign that reads,
Honk if you Believe in Jesus
. Richard heaves an impatient sigh; he leans back in his seat, his arms stretching to the wheel.

They are nearing the accident. A police officer directs cars along the side of the road. The remains of a compact sit on the opposite shoulder, its front half utterly crushed, the twisted steering wheel visible through the shattered back window. Beside it, on the ground, a blanket-covered stretcher lies, and from the shape beneath the blanket, and from the absence of any visible face or limb, they know what it hides.

They creep past, and even when the highway opens again, drive no faster than the other cars, which are all obeying the speed limit now. Everyone, it seems, has been affected, subdued. But as the miles pass, and the other cars gradually speed up, Richard, too, presses the accelerator.

After the night Ann told Richard about her time with Billy, neither of them brought up the subject of their affair again, though Richard thought of him often: his lonely figure standing beside the highway, his silence as they drove him to the Falls. He was intrigued by Billy and when, some weeks later, he saw him in Carton Harbour,
he reintroduced himself. Billy was carrying several fishing poles and had just come back, he said, from taking out some clients for the Blue Osprey. They stood in the midday sun, among the tinkling masts of the boats, making awkward small talk. Billy would not keep his side of the conversation up, not in the way Richard was used to, so that Richard wondered if he had offended him in some way – offended him perhaps by marrying the woman he had once loved, and perhaps loved still. But he did not in the least hold Billy’s past against him; he thought of himself as a generous person, and as a result tended to act that way. Standing with Billy on the quay, he was flooded with goodwill, felt a rather sentimental affection for the shy, younger man who had known Ann as a girl and who smiled so disarmingly and took such time with his answers. Without thinking, he asked Billy to dinner for the next evening at six, an invitation Billy accepted with a murmur.

“You
didn’t
!” Ann cried when he told her. Outside the kitchen window, the top of a ladder went jouncing by. Her father was at Inverness for the weekend. Ever since Charles had arrived, he’d been on a mad fixing campaign, hammering on top of the cottage and under it, broadcasting (to Richard’s way of thinking) his disappointment with how he, Ann’s husband, was letting things slide. Richard was a bit wary of Charles Scott – a hardness in the man, and under his bluff, democratic friendliness, an impatience that seemed a cloak to disapproval. Richard had never felt accepted by him.

“I really wish you’d checked with me first, Richard.”

“Actually, I wonder if he’ll even come. He seemed rather vague about it.”

“He’ll come,” she said with an odd certainty, and when Richard asked her how she could be so sure, she simply shook her head.

She began to move around the kitchen, taking items from the fridge, setting out bowls with brusque efficiency, while he watched with rising agitation.

“I’ve obviously botched this. Why don’t we cancel?”

She looked at him as if not understanding. “Why?” she said, almost defiantly. “Why shouldn’t he come to dinner?”

For the rest of the afternoon and into the following day, Ann seemed distracted. He saw her bustling in and out of her studio, as if she couldn’t concentrate. A couple of hours before Billy was expected, he noticed her trying on dresses in front of their bedroom mirror. At six o’clock, she came out of the cottage in an off-white sundress with a low neck and joined Richard and her father at a table they had set up under the pines.

When Billy finally appeared in his boat, Richard rose from his chair, but Ann said, “I’ll go,” and started down the path toward the dock. Charles had lowered his newspaper and was following the boat’s progress, his face expressionless. Recently, Ann had told Richard about how hard it had been to bear her father’s excessive anger over what had happened. Hadn’t he known Billy since he was a boy? “For years, he couldn’t stand for me to mention Billy’s name.” But Charles had eventually softened, she’d insisted – to the point where, when she told him Billy was
coming to supper, he had accepted the situation readily enough. Billy had reached the dock now, and as he climbed from the boat, Charles sent Richard an odd, questioning look, as if to say,
And you’re all right with this?
Then he buried himself again behind his paper.

Ann and Billy stood talking together for some minutes on the dock. When they climbed the path together, Ann seemed ill at ease, while Billy could scarcely meet their eyes. “Billy,” Ann’s father said, in a grave, level voice as they shook hands: formal but not unfriendly. Ann had already moved into hostess role with a nervous energy Richard had rarely seen in her, offering Billy a chair, making a lame joke about her culinary skills, telling them in detail, for some reason, about the ingredients of a marinade she was using for the lamb chops. Richard felt for her, for Billy too: he looked overwhelmed.

Yet with the help of the wine, the little party gradually moved into a mellow phase. When Billy, finally, began to talk at length, his contribution was so unexpected that a deep, listening stillness prevailed around the table. He spoke in his quiet, rather droll way of a camping misadventure with some of his Blue Osprey clients, a saga involving a leaky tent, torrential rain, and a midnight visit by a bear. They all laughed. Charles especially seemed to come alive. He began to tell his own stories of life in the bush, directing them mainly to Billy, and before long they were trading anecdotes, Charles pausing to light a cigarette now and then, going on in his rough, warm voice that seemed to have been weathered in the remote camps and
shooting blinds he was describing. Beside him, Ann turned the cork of a wine bottle in her fingers and seemed to be listening. Richard was content to let Charles and Billy do most of the talking: the world they evoked was new to him. He had drunk quite a bit and as the sun settled, sending shadows across the glowing rock, he felt a deepening sense of well-being. When Charles chided him about never having hunted, he wasn’t in the least offended, but shook his head in dismayed acknowledgement. “A man’s not quite a man until he’s hunted,” Charles went on. “Isn’t that right, Billy. You people know that if anyone does.”