The Other Side of the Bridge (14 page)

The same problem applied to going all the way with girls. He knew with complete certainty that if he “did it” with a girl just once—once!—she’d get pregnant. Even if he managed to get hold of a safe—and how was he supposed to do that in a town where his father and the pharmacist had known each other all their lives?—even if he managed to get hold of one, from a friend, say, it would turn out to have a hole in it.

Still, when he was out with Cathy, he always pushed things as far as he could. Over the past few months he’d managed to persuade her to let him touch her top half, and he kept trying to work his way further south. It was a long, slow process, though. There seemed to be a number of stages you had to go through. Initially, she let him feel her breasts but wouldn’t let him see them, which was strange and frustrating, though better than the other way around. The softness of her breasts astounded him. The way the nipples hardened under his touch. They were incredible. Miraculous. He couldn’t get enough of them. Though sometimes, right in the middle of fondling her (these sessions took place at the Jessops’, who were friends of Cathy’s parents and whose two-year-old Cathy babysat most Thursday evenings), he would find himself wondering what Laura’s breasts would feel like. The idea made him breathless, dizzy with lust. Made him try to slide his hand up the warm, silky skin of Cathy’s inner thigh and force her down onto the Jessops’ sofa, his erection throttled by his jeans. Cathy would push him away, hissing, “Ian, stop it! Stop it!” Though despite her fierce commands Ian was pretty sure she liked it when he got so steamed up. She couldn’t know that she wasn’t the sole cause. It made him feel vaguely ashamed, though not ashamed enough to stop doing it.

His mother sent him a present for his birthday—a large package, wrapped carefully in brown paper, which arrived several days before the event. He opened it at once, to get it over with.
Hope you like it, darling,
his mother’s note said.
I’ll be thinking of you all day.
It was a jacket, waterproof, lined with some material light and warm as goose down. He would never wear it.

His father gave him a canoe. They already had a canoe that had belonged to Ian’s grandfather, but it was broad and beamy and paddled like a pig, whereas this one was long and slender—you could see that it would slide through the water like a knife. It was cedar strip and had been varnished, inside and out, until it glowed like warm honey.

“Where did you get it?” he asked his father. He’d never seen anything so beautiful. It was tied to the dock, resting on the water so lightly you’d think it weighed no more than a leaf. It was their own dock. Ian’s grandfather had bought the plot of land between their house and the lake and had cut a path through the trees so that they’d have access to the water. There was a bell on the dock, a large brass one, hanging from a gallows, that could be rung to summon the doctor if he happened to be out fishing when his services were required. Ian’s grandfather had been a keen fisherman and so was Ian’s father, though nowadays he seldom had the time. They had their own small bay, with a crescent of beach sheltered between two long points of rock. On a rough patch of ground behind the beach they’d built a boathouse, where the old canoe and the rowboat lived. The doors to the boathouse were open and Ian saw that another rack had been fitted for his canoe to rest on.

“Temagami,” his father said. “I asked John Raven to keep a lookout for one. He spotted it when he was down there a while back. It’s been in the boathouse down by the docks for the past month. Pete brought it over for me last night.”

“It’s beautiful,” Ian said. His father looked at him and smiled, and Ian had to look away. His father so badly wanted him to be happy that it made him sad. I’m fine, Ian wanted to say, which was true, most of the time. You’re the one who’s not. You should worry about yourself.

“Think I’ll go for a little test run,” he said, crouching down to unlace his shoes. “Want to come?”

His father shook his head. “Another time. Don’t be late for church.”

Ian undid the mooring line and stepped delicately, barefoot, down into the canoe. It shivered slightly under his weight but it took him only a second or two to get the balance of it. The floorboards were warm and mellow under his feet.

“Thanks, by the way,” he said, looking up at his father. Dr. Christopherson nodded. It was still early morning, not yet eight o’clock, but already the sun was strong. It beat down on them—his father on the dock, himself in the boat. A little band of ripples sprang up out of nowhere and patted the sides of the canoe.

He paddled down the shore, listening to the slippering of the water under the hull, wondering about his father’s motives in giving him such a present. It must have cost a lot of money, for a start, and they weren’t rich. His father was useless—Ian’s mother’s word, and he hated to agree, but it was true—at extracting payment from his patients. “In due course,” he’d say uncomfortably. “When you feel able.” The whole business of money embarrassed him.

But leaving the cost aside, a canoe was a strange gift, when you thought about it, for someone who would be leaving home in a little over a year’s time. Hardly something you could stuff in your suitcase and take with you. He wondered if that could possibly be intentional. No, that was stretching things, not intentional. But unconsciously, could his father have sought to give him something that he would love but would have to come back to Struan to use? Could he be trying to plant in Ian’s mind a seed of longing for the North that would grow in him while he was away and finally draw him home? His father took it for granted—Ian knew this—that he would go to college, would in fact have pushed him if he’d been unwilling to go. But he also knew his father wanted him to come back. He had never said so, but he didn’t need to. Ian knew it in his bones. Deep down, his father hoped that he would go into medicine and join him in the practice. If you confronted him with this, he would look astonished and deny it. He would say that it went without saying that Ian must choose what he wanted to do with his life. But it also went without saying that he hoped Ian would choose medicine, and Struan.

It would have been bad enough, to disappoint him, to leave home with no intention of returning for anything but the odd holiday, if everything had been normal. But in the circumstances? Leaving his father alone, knowing how low he could get? It scared Ian sometimes—the depth of his father’s depression. He had always thought of his father as invulnerable, thought he had the answer to everything. That was the impression he gave, not just to his patients but to Ian as well. He looked rock solid. Unshakable. But it wasn’t so.

Mostly he seemed to be all right while he was working. He kept his regular office hours with Margie Bannister, his nurse, and did his rounds and listened to his patients and their woes, just as he always had. And he was generally fine in the mornings; at breakfast they both sat in the kitchen and read the paper. They were both early risers, so even on school days breakfast was a fairly leisurely affair.

It was in the evenings that he went downhill. He fought against it; Ian could see that. He tried—in fact, the trying was the most painful thing to watch. Supper times, when he was going through a bad patch, were an endurance test, made worse by the fact that his father seemed to think they should eat “properly,” sitting at the big polished table in the dining room as they had done when Ian’s mother was there. Ian disliked the room. It still reeked of his mother’s presence. It and the living room were full of her little touches: the lacy runner on the sideboard, the cut-glass vases (which had never held flowers because there was nothing but weeds, his mother maintained, within four hundred miles of Struan), the low table lamps on each of the side tables. (“Don’t they look charming?” he remembered her saying when the lamps first arrived. “You see the way they cast little pools of light? It’s so simple. So elegant. Don’t you think?” She had moved one of the lamps fractionally to the right. It was one of the few times he remembered her looking happy, which made the memory all the more painful.)

She didn’t buy the lamps in Struan, of course. You could get oil lamps at the hardware store to guard against the possibility (in fact, the certainty) of power-cuts during winter storms, but they were functional. Struan hadn’t caught up with the idea of a “charming” home yet. Struan had never heard the word
decor
. Eaton’s catalog (“the other Bible,” Ian’s father called it, because in many of the homes he visited it was the only other reading material in the house) hadn’t heard of it either, but at least they had proper lamps, and with a little bit of imagination—Ian’s mother said wistfully—you could create the sort of look that turned a house into a home.

In Ian’s opinion they should have thrown everything out the day she left, cleared the house of the ornaments and knickknacks, the candlesticks and picture frames, but they hadn’t, and all of them were still sitting there, covered with dust (dusting wasn’t Mrs. Tuttle’s forte), waiting to ambush your memory. Why couldn’t they eat in the kitchen, which had always been Mrs. Tuttle’s domain? Why couldn’t they sit in there in the evenings as well as the mornings?

Though the truth was that he knew why. He knew that his father felt the need to maintain a semblance of “normal” family life. So he said nothing, and they sat in the dining room, night after night. Mrs. Tuttle prepared their supper (on Fridays she made things that they could heat up on the weekend) and set the table before she left, and they ate there, formally, and made polite conversation, even when there was nothing to say.

“Loaded with fat,” his father would announce, his voice strained with the effort of lightness, helping himself to a piece of Mrs. Tuttle’s fried chicken. “Grease coagulating in your gut, arteries clogging up. We’ll both be dead within the year.”

“Worth it, though,” Ian would say, going along with it, playing his part.

His father would nod in agreement. “Oh yes. A fine way to go.”

Or they’d discuss their days.

“Joyce Ingrams was in again today.”

“Yeah, I saw her sitting there. She should have a chair with her name on it. What was the matter this time?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Can’t you just say, ‘You’re imagining it. Go home’?”

His father shook his head. “She needs the reassurance. Hypochondria is a disease, in a way.”

Like depression? Ian thought. If so, he did feel sorry for her.

“Maybe what she needs is to actually get sick,” he said. It seemed to help his father if you could get him involved in conversation, as if his brain were less vulnerable when it was concentrating. But it was hard work getting him there, like winding up an old gramophone that was forever running down. “Then she’d know the difference. Has she ever had anything really wrong with her?”

“Not that I can recall. Had the flu a few years back. A mild dose, no danger.”

“She’ll be really pleased when she dies,” Ian said. “She can have ‘I told you so’ carved on her tombstone.”

His father smiled. It was a small triumph to make him smile. Laughter, in the evenings, was beyond him.

Ian thought the bad patches were a little further apart than they had been at first, but there were still times when it almost seemed as if gravity doubled its pull on his father. The skin of his face sagged; his big frame seemed weighed down. He looked exhausted. Was he ever going to get over it? And if he didn’t, how could Ian leave him? The thought of it swamped him with guilt, and the guilt made him angry. You shouldn’t have to feel guilty about living your own life. You shouldn’t have to be responsible for your parents’ happiness. It wasn’t fair.

The day was warming up and the morning mist was lifting slowly off the surface of the water. He slid through it, the canoe making no more sound than the mist. It was a beautiful craft, and here he was, gliding along in it, stewing about something that was still more than a year away. He was fed up with himself, with the way he worried about everything—he drove himself crazy. He should be enjoying the canoe. It was a great birthday present and the odds were that his father had bought it for him simply because he knew he would love it. Just that, no more, no less.

In the wake of the mist a light breeze was stirring and the clean acid smell of the trees drifted across the water. He dipped into Blake’s Bay but there was no sign of Pete, so he carried on to Hopeless Inlet and found him anchored in the marshy bit, where the pike liked to hide, hunched over his fishing line like an old troll.

“Well, well. A white man in a canoe,” Pete said as he came up. “Whaddaya know.”

“Not bad, is it?” Ian said.