Away
INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR
Away
“A dazzling novel … written by a major novelist at the height of her considerable powers.”
– Globe and Mail
“Away is a novel of extraordinary depth … . The people and the periods come vividly to life, at times creating a near cinematic effect.”
– Saskatoon StarPhoenix
“Her writing shimmers with lyric sensuality.”
– Vancouver Sun
“Away celebrates the talismanic power of memory and the possibilities inherent in the lyricism and magic that exist just beyond the edges of reality.”
– Kirkus Reviews
“[Away] is a treasure … a passionate and powerful story.”
– Winnipeg Free Press
“An elegiac, lushly lyrical, enchanting family saga … .”
– Publishers Weekly
“An extraordinary achievement; highly recommended.”
– Library Journal
“Few contemporary writers chart the intimate relationship between inner and outer landscapes with the passion, elegance and evocative power of Urquhart.”
– Kitchener-Waterloo Record
“Away is a ravishing evocation of the lives of those whose souls are irrevocably touched by nature.”
– The Independent
“Urquhart’s blending of the spiritual and political sides of the Irish makes an amazing story told in a language that is melodious and laden with complex imagery.”
– Booklist
BOOKS BY JANE URQUHART
FICTION
The Whirlpool (1986)
Storm Glass (short stories, 1987)
Changing Heaven (1990)
Away (1993)
The Underpainter (1997)
The Stone Carvers (2001)
A Map of Glass (2005)
Sanctuary Line (2010)
NON-FICTION
L.M. Montgomery (2009)
POETRY
I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace (1981)
False Shuffles (1982)
The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan (1985)
Some Other Garden (2000)
AS EDITOR
The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (2007)
Copyright © 1993 by Jane Urquhart
This Emblem edition published 2010
Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
Emblem and colophon are registered trademarks of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Urquhart, Jane, 1949–
Away / Jane Urquhart.
First published: Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-423-9
I. Title.
PS8591.R68A9 2010 c813’.54 C2010-901586-X
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com
v3.1
For my mother, Marian Quinn Carter,
and my father, Walter Carter,
and for the Quinn family
In memory of my Godfather Danny Henry,
my grandmother Fleda Quinn,
and Thomas J. Doherty
The three most short-lived traces: the trace of a bird on a branch, the trace of a fish on a pool, and the trace of a man on a woman.
– an Irish triad
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part I - A Fish on a Pool Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part II - A Bird on a Branch Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part III - The Trace of a Man on a Woman Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Acknowledgements
About the Author
I
A Fish on a Pool
THE women of this family leaned towards extremes.
All winter they yearned for long, long nights and short precise days; in the summer the sun in the sky for eighteen hours, then a multitude of stars.
They kept their youth – if they survived – well past their childbearing years until, overnight at sixty, they became stiff old ladies. Or conversely, they became stiff old ladies at twenty and lived relentlessly on, unchanged, for six or seven decades.
They inhabited northern latitudes near icy waters. They were plagued by revenants. Men, landscapes, states of mind went away and came back again. Over the years, over the decades. There was always water involved, exaggerated youth or exaggerated age. Afterwards there was absence. That is the way it was for the women of this family. It was part of their destiny.
Esther O’Malley Robertson is the last and the most subdued of the extreme women. She was told a story at twelve that calmed her down and put her in her place. Now, as an old woman, she wants to tell this story to herself and the Great Lake, there being no one to listen. Even had there been an audience of listeners, the wrong questions might have been asked. “How could you possibly know that?” Or, “Do you have proof?” Esther is too mature, has always been too mature, for considerations such as these. The story will take her wherever it wants to go in the next twelve hours, and that is all that matters; this and the knowledge that for one last night she will remain beside the icy, receptive waters of the Great Lake.
She paints a landscape in her mind, a landscape she has never seen. Everything began in 1842, she remembers her grandmother Eileen telling her, on the island of Rathlin which lies off the most northern coast of Ireland. Esther allows rocks, sea, to form in her imagination. There would be a view of a coastline with cliffs. It was the
morning that an unusual number of things came in with the tide, causing celebration and consternation among the islanders and permanently fixing the day itself in legends that are recounted around fires at night. “Your great-grandmother’s name was Mary,” Old Eileen had said to Esther. “She lived with her widowed mother in a cabin three fields from the sea. And it was Mary who was the first to approach the beach that morning.”
The night before, a furious storm had reduced the circumference of the island by at least ten feet. It had snatched over-turned curraghs from the shore and dispatched seven of Mary’s favourite boulders to God knows where. The sandy beach nearest the girl’s cabin had been made off with as well and had been replaced with a collection of stones resembling poor potatoes. No one – not even those who had spent some time on mainland beaches – had seen their like before and they were rumoured to have come from a land where no grass grew and nothing breathed. Parts of the neighbouring cliffs had tumbled into the ocean’s embrace, taking with them several sheep. It would come to be said that these animals had been replaced by less domestic and less stupid beasts who scuttled into the earth at first light and whose cries could be heard coming from the hills at twilight the third Sunday of every month from then on.
Esther has seen elemental upheavals of this nature from her own, Canadian parlour windows. Great Lake tantrums, she calls them, Loughbreeze Beach uproars. Her house is solid but it has always responded to stimuli. Made of slender pine boards, lined with cedar, insulated with sawdust, it is alive with a forest life never experienced by walls of stone or brick or cement. When the vehement storms that mark the end of summer come tumbling in over the lake, each gust of wind, each eruption of thunder, is felt in the house’s timbers, until, late at night, in the confusion of sleep, the women of this family have been known to believe that the house has become the storm; that some ancient quarrel is going on between that which is built and that which is untouched, and that the house might fling itself in a moment of anguish into the arms of its monstrous liquid neighbour.
The old house on Loughbreeze Beach is like a compass situated on the southern boundary of the province called Ontario, on the extreme edge of the country called Canada. Each of its many windows gazes stolidly towards one of four principal directions. When Esther looks to the east she sees a germinating jetty from where, over the course of time, things, in her life, had moved away. When she gazes to the south she sees the ever-present lake and its horizon. To the north lies the cedar wood, beyond which a threatening piece of machinery can occasionally be glimpsed. And past the orchard – in the west – the pier, the conveyor belts, the freighters of the cement company clutter up the shore of the lake.
Over the years the women of the family who have ventured out into the world have carried pictures of Loughbreeze Beach with them in their minds; its coloured stones shining through water, the places where fine pebbles give way to sand, certain paths the moon makes across the lake’s surface on autumn mid-nights. And some of the girls in the family were unable to leave the lake at all. It was in them to seek forever the beaches they were born near and to walk in landscapes where something liquid glistened through the trees.
A hundred and forty years before and thousands of miles away, the girl Mary had been the first to witness the beginning of the miracle. Stumbling across the new stones whose texture made walking difficult, she had turned to face the ocean which had robbed her of her favourite boulders. She had been, in those early days, cursed with the gift of eloquence – a gift that would be taken from her forever one hour later. The sea responded to her rant by turning an odd shade of whitish green and swelling up as if it were about to reveal a hidden volcano, and Mary watched, stunned, as thousands of cabbages nudged one another towards the shore. Soon the vegetables completely covered the new stones while behind them the ocean was divided into bands of colour; darks and lights separated by ribbons of glitter. The glitter, it turned out, consisted of a large quantity of silver teapots, so perfectly designed against spillage that they proved very seaworthy as they bounced cheerfully towards the beach. The darker bands revealed themselves to be barrels of whiskey – enough barrels of whiskey to keep any who might want to be, drunk every Saturday night for decades. Flung across two of these barrels was, as Mary gradually perceived, a human form; its head thrown back, one half of its face hidden by a profusion of dark, wet curls. As the barrels that carried it approached the shore, Mary waded through fifty clanking teapots to meet it, and found an exhausted young man who, when she grabbed his shirt in her fists, opened two sea-green eyes and spoke the name Moira before falling once again into semi-consciousness.
Esther knows that at that moment her red-haired great-grandmother would not have wanted to go on living, or at least to go on living in the way she normally had. Time would have frozen, her childhood would have disappeared, and the present would have descended upon her like the claws of a carnivorous bird. “Landscape,” Old Eileen had said to Esther, “shrank to a circle that could be measured by Mary’s arms, and in that circle the only familiarity was her own brown skirt swaying in a sea that had transformed itself into an undulating carpet of precious metal and wrinkled leaves.”
Mary heard the barrels creak as they touched and separated in the current. She heard the surf pant. But mostly she looked at the young man whose sodden shirt she held firmly in her hands – the dark curls pasted to his left cheek, the eyebrows like ferns, the lashes resting on the bones beneath his eyes. She absorbed, in these few moments, more knowledge of a man’s body than she ever would again. One of his arms rested, palm upwards, in the water, the sleeve torn open at the spot where his elbow bent. She saw the fortune lines on his hand, the blue rivers of veins under the marble skin, the creases on the vulnerable places of wrist and inner elbow. She saw the Adam’s apple and tendons of his exposed throat and the hollow between his collarbones just above his chest. By grasping his shirt she had revealed one of his nipples; the sun had dried the dark hairs around it so that they moved like grass in the breeze, as did the similar hairs that grew down from his belly towards the mystery that his trousers held. Fabric was glued by sea water to his legs and Mary could see the shape of the hard muscles of the thigh and the sharp slice of shinbone, and then the marble skin and blue veins of his bare feet. In the time that it took the sun to travel from one cloud to the next, Mary had learned so much of him that she would have been able to scratch the details of his features on a rock or mould an exact replica of him from clay. She recognized, immediately, that he came from an otherworld island, assumed that he had emerged from the water to look for her, and knew that her name had changed, in an instant, from Mary to Moira.
“Never allow anything to change your name,” Esther’s grandmother had warned her when she began to tell this story. “My poor mother – your great-grandmother – was destined to live out the actuality of Ovid’s intention. Of bodies changed to other forms I tell. Never allow anyone, anything to change your name,” she repeated. “My name is Eileen, yours is Esther. Let’s keep it that way.”
The twelve-year-old child, Esther, had been, even in her short life, pushed towards beaches by lightning and sand. She carried with her the same red curtain of hair and the same disturbing necessity for water, for passion and pain, as had the girl in the north of Ireland. Esther, however, was learning her lessons early from an old woman who had herself been silenced by passion before the age of twenty, and who had only now chosen to speak of the past.
“You are changing your name,” Esther had said to her. “Right now you are changing your name from Eileen – from Great-Aunt Eileen to Grandmother. Everyone’s name is changing – Grandpa Liam, Grandma Molly – and all because you are changing your name.” Esther’s face had clouded. She pulled a blue hair ribbon from her head – an expression of anger. “You are the name changer,” she said.
“That is not quite the same.” The old woman stared hard at Esther, who was squirming uncomfortably on the sofa her father called Wicklow Beach. “I always
knew I was your Grandmother even if you didn’t. I am speaking of the kind of name change that turns you into someone else altogether, someone other than who you are, the change that takes you off to somewhere else. By the time I finish this story you will have decided to hug the land – the real earth – the trees in the orchard, the timbers of this house. You will have decided never to go away.”
“Oh,” said the child that Esther had been, trying to adjust her ears to the sound of the old woman’s new voice.
Now Esther stands on one of the house’s creaking verandahs and looks towards the jetty where everything had, at one time or another, moved away from her. A man, a few beloved horses, the possibility of children. It seems odd to her that a jetty this important could have disintegrated, could have transformed itself into a rough collection of rocks rearranged by storms and trees that have grown to maturity in soil that has collected among boulders. But she knows that were she to step into a boat and glide near the spot on a clear, calm day, she would be able to look over the gunwales and see the old pilings, waterlogged and green, wavering beneath the surface like an unconscious memory. Then she would be able to look along the shore and see an aluminum pier and a hulking freighter taking blasted limestone to a refinery.
Except at the front where the Great Lake pounds and the beach stones form ever-changing terraces – solid waves of their own in response – Loughbreeze Beach Farm spreads in ruin around Esther. The parts of it that are not being claimed by that which is unclaimable are being excavated by industry: the growing quarry, the impossible earth-wound made by the cement company. Meadows she played in as a child, woodlots, cornfields, and pastures have disappeared into this gaping absence. Past midnight, when the lake is calm, Esther has, for the last ten years, been able to hear huge machines grinding closer and closer to the finish of her world. One morning a week she spends with the old wringer-washer laundering the cloths she uses to remove the limestone dust from her furniture. One evening a week she walks past the twisted unpruned trees in the orchard, past rotting snake-rail fences, past the obsolete nineteenth-century farm equipment that lies like the scattered skeleton of an extinct animal in the long grass. This evidence of decay the property of a cement company, and soon the evidence itself will be eliminated.