Cormorant Books

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Finding Home (Preview)

The first event that took me to England was my wife's announcement that she wanted her freedom. I wasn't sure what she meant, right away. "What for?" I asked her. "To play more tennis?" Always looking for the snappy response, the quick quip, that's me. My intentions are usually harmless, at least just epigrammatic, but the impulse is there, even in situations where I would do well to keep my mouth shut.

"That, too," she said, and I knew that this was serious.

"Too?" I asked.

She said nothing.

"What do you plan to do?" I asked.

She stayed silent, waiting for the right question. Then she said, "I'll move out on the weekend."

The other event that preceded this story and now begins it was my mother's funeral.

It was raining when I arrived at the crematorium, a drizzle only, but I had no umbrella or hat and I was early, so I crossed the street to take shelter in a café opposite the crematorium gates. Three elderly people, two women and a man, were sitting at a table by the window. One of the women caught my eye and made as if to rise, and I walked over quickly.

"Aunt Phyllis?"

She looked pleased. "That's right. Will, is it? I saw you across the street. I wasn't sure you'd know me. This ..." she gestured to the other woman, "is your Aunt Olive and this is Uncle Albert."

Both of the women were wearing hats, unusual for them, I guessed; they seemed to be holding their heads warily, as if recently crowned. Albert nursed a grey trilby on his lap. I shook hands with my uncle, kissed my aunts on the cheek and sat down. I guessed that the fashion of kissing on both cheeks had not yet reached the English working classes but I never knew how nephews greeted aunts. The lips or the cheek? And did funerals make a difference? Did they hug now? Perhaps at funerals. Having immigrated to Canada thirty years before, I had missed all the funerals of the older people I had grown up with. The only funerals I'd been to in Canada had been of those whose lives had been cut short by accident or disease, people of my generation.

I kept alert for any signals from my aunts that they had expected something more but they looked properly saluted. Now, what next? How much of a show of grief or sadness was appropriate?

"She had a good innings," Albert said. "None of us in the family can complain about that. Good genes, I dare say."

That was all right, then. We could move on. "I hope I inherited them," I said, with a smile to give it a light, self-mocking twist. I wanted them to know I didn't take myself solemnly. It was like meeting one's dinner companions on a cruise ship for the first time. I knew nothing about these people, and I didn't want to reveal myself until I had heard the topics to avoid.

Albert and Olive looked at each other. Albert said, "There's no particular reason why you shouldn't have inherited them, is there, that you know of?"

Before I could wonder what he was talking about, Phyllis said, "Did you have a good trip?" and gave Albert a look designed to silence him forever.

"Hullo," I thought, like Peter Cook in one of his monologues. I said, "Yes. The plane was half empty." I picked up the menu. "Been a lot of changes," I said. "I mean in London, not the menu."

"Haven't seen you for fifty years," Albert said, or rather shouted, in a conversational manner, as if he were making himself heard in a bar on a Saturday night.

"Nor me," Olive agreed, nodding. They were a raucous pair. Olive sounded like a Monty Python housewife.

"His mum was too busy," Phyllis said, giving Albert another, only slightly less violent, look.

"Too busy for her own family?" Olive asked, and I heard the rumblings and felt the tremors of an old grudge surfacing. Olive turned to me. "We had to rely on Phyllis here. She kept us informed."

"I'm grateful for that," I said. "And thanks for coming today." I watched them soften slightly, especially Phyllis, who had made all the arrangements. For it was my job she had done, my mother who had died.

"Your Aunt Lottie, my wife, sends her best," Albert said. "She'd have come but funerals upset her."

Olive and Albert had not come to my father's funeral, either. No one had, except Phyllis and the charwoman from the guesthouse my parents ran. The publican on the corner had sent a wreath as he always did when a customer died. That was all. Afterwards, the four of us — my mother, Phyllis, the charwoman and me — had enjoyed a meat tea in a hotel on the seafront. My mother was pleased that I had flown over but, a businesswoman herself, she understood when I had to return the next day. "The world doesn't stop for funerals," she had said.

"Why didn't the others come?" I had asked Phyllis then, meaning Olive and Albert.

"Your father never encouraged them while he was alive," Phyllis had said. "He choked them off when they tried to drop by, and Albert's not one who needs choking off twice. So, them not being welcome when he was alive, they let him have his privacy when he died, so to speak."

"Wouldn't go near the place so long as he was there," Albert was reported to have said. So he had taken the opportunity of the funeral to show what he thought of my father.

Now, though, it was their sister's funeral.

"How many you got?" Albert inquired, still shouting.

"Two," I said, guessing that Albert was referring to children.

Albert said, "Olive's got two and I've got three. They're all your cousins. Between them they've got seven kids, all your second, or your first cousins once removed. I don't know how that works. Any on your wife's side? I heard somewhere she was an orphan. That right? None of my business. Pity the kids haven't got to know each other, though." The remark was accompanied by a straight look that made it slightly barbed. Albert was taking the opportunity to show that any distances between me and the other members of the family was no fault of his.

I acknowledged the pity with a small headshake. At all costs, I thought, don't get into an argument.

"Time to go," Phyllis announced.

We crossed the busy road outside the café and walked through the grounds of the crematorium to the chapel, arriving ten minutes early for the ceremony. It was still raining.

There were three chapels, and cremation ceremonies were scheduled at twenty-minute intervals. We waited our turn along with other mourners, huddled in the communal porch.

The ceremony, conducted by a minister on the staff of the crematorium, was modified Anglican: the stripped-down burial service from the prayer book, the music for a stanza of "AbideWith Me," which we stood for but did not attempt to sing, a tiny eulogy honouring all mothers, their duty done. "We are here to celebrate a life," the minister said, in the modern way. One final "Lord's Prayer," which we mumbled together, and we shuffled outside. An attendant in a black suit led us along a concrete path to view what he called "the floral tributes," three small bunches of flowers lying in the rain at the end of the path: little enough tribute after eighty years, but my mother had belonged to no community beyond the family.

The others looked at me, waiting. I looked at my watch. This, too, was a new role for me, in charge of a family occasion. I had seen Phyllis only once since I emigrated, at my father's funeral. I had no memory of ever meeting Albert or Olive. "I hope you'll all have a bite of lunch with me before you go," I said.

It was the right thing to say, what they had been waiting for, their reward for coming. "Where did you have in mind?" Albert asked. "I noticed a Tartan Steak House on the walk over. That seem all right?"

"Lovely," Olive said. "We got enough umbrellas?" The rain had stopped but the clouds seemed to be gathering for a fresh downpour. I said, "I'll get a taxi."

"Get out of it, Rothschild," Albert said, boisterously shouldering me away from the idea. "It's only a hop and a skip. Come on. Step it out."

We left the porch of the crematorium and bustled along to the restaurant, continually making way for each other in a jolly fashion. It was an outing now.

"This is nice," Olive said, as the manager came forward to seat us. "Tablecloths. Proper napkins, too."

"They do a smashing sticky toffee pudding, this lot," Albert shouted. Some of the other customers stared at us.

I ordered drinks all round, bitter beer for me and Albert, a "drop of gin" for Olive and a sherry for Phyllis. When the food arrived I ordered a bottle of Australian burgundy.

"That won't go to waste," Albert said. "You've done all right, then?" he asked speculatively.

Now would begin the very English process of trying to find out how much money I made without actually asking me.

I tried to cut it short by describing our life in Toronto, the summer cottage we rented on the French River, the condominium in Arizona we had a share in. I did not tell them that Janet and I were separated. I would never see these people again.

"You sound very comfortable," Albert said. "When I heard all that time ago you were going to Canada, I thought p'raps you would become a lumberjack or something." He laughed. "Or running away from some girl you'd got into trouble. But you don't look much different from what you would be if you'd stayed here."

"Nothing like that," I said.

Nothing at all like that. As soon as I landed in Toronto thirty years before and started to look for a job, it became obvious that the thing to do was to find some work I knew something about, office work of some kind, and I more or less immediately became a clerk again. It was a stroke of luck that I got a job in the head office of Decker Construction, a company with contracts that ranged from building grain elevators in Saskatchewan to relocating a whole town inManitoba when the ore that the town had been built to mine ran out, and a new seam was opened fifty miles away. I was hired as a timekeeper, the on-site clerk who kept track of labour and materials for the company. My usefulness to Decker was that, as an immigrant, I had no ties to keep me from being sent to wherever the company needed me — Medicine Hat or Loon Lake, it was all one to me — and in the three years I was with them I worked in four different provinces. It was a good beginning, for Decker paid for my room and board while I was out of town, and I got the same wage I would have earned in Toronto. Thus I was able to save a lot as well as get some very useful experience: above all, a crash course in some aspects of Canadian society I would never have got from reading the papers or watching television. After three years, though, with some money in the bank, I felt the urge to think about the future, to create a plan for myself. I quit Decker Construction on the best of terms, with a promise of being able to fall back on work in Yellowknife or South Porcupine any time I needed it, and began to look about me.

"Did you ever meet your grandparents? Do you remember?" Albert asked.

"I remember Gran. She used to come down in the summer holidays, didn't she? I don't remember my grandfather at all." "Our dad," Albert said. "No, he didn't like being away from home."

"Did your dad get along with them?" Olive asked me.

"What a question," Phyllis cut in. "Course he did. He had to, didn't he? You know what Gran was like. I was there. Will was just little."

"I'm not sure that's right," Olive said, belching lightly. "There was always an atmosphere when our mother and Henry were in the same room. You said so, yourself."

Phyllis said, "Did I? Then I've forgotten. That was before Vera and Henry were married, I'm sure, and anyway, I made a little resolution before I left home today: Let's not have one of those funeral scenes, I promised myself. You remember Uncle Fred and his brother Tom coming to blows over what happened to Gran's jet beads? Our Gran, I mean. Right there beside the grave?"

The others protested. "Who said anything about scenes? We were just reminiscing," Albert said.

"One thing leads to another," Phyllis said. "It doesn't do to rake up the past. What's done is done." She stood up, stumbling slightly. "Now I'm a bit tipsy. Never mind. Your mum wouldn't have minded." She turned to me. "We should be off."

Albert said, "We'll say goodbye, me and Olive. Sad occasion,Will, but p'raps it takes that to get people together. You going right back to Canada? Look us up if you've got time. Worcester Park. Train from Waterloo."

"I've got some business over here," I said, "And I want to spend some time on my own. I've seen more of Canada than I ever did of England, and I thought I'd take the chance to see the country a little. Sort of be a tourist in my own country. I'm in no hurry to go back. I thought I might rent a car."

This was my first try at explaining my state of mind, to myself or to anyone else. I was feeling slightly giddy from being no longer anchored by wife or mother or — I'll get to this later — by job. I had been set free, mentally and physically, and I wanted to investigate my new state.

"Hire a self-drive, you mean? You can manage the driving, can you? It's different over there, I know," Albert said.

I remembered that Albert was a long-distance bus driver. "I don't know. I never learned to drive before I left home, so I'll be like every other North American tourist."

"I don't suppose the left-hand drive will bother you, though, will it? You like driving?"

"Not much. My wife says I'm a lousy driver." I smiled so he wouldn't take me too seriously, but it's true, I don't like driving, and I was distinctly nervous about driving on the left. But it had to be done if I was to see anything of England.

"What you need is a chauffeur. Best of luck, then. If you get lost give us a ring. I'll send someone to fetch you." He laughed. Olive struggled to her feet. "You might find me on your doorstep one of these days, Will. I'm not too old to travel yet."

"Give us lots of warning, Aunt Olive. We're away a lot," I said, to protect myself from having them descend on me with plans to stay a month and expectations that I would supply daily outings. I kissed my aunt, shook hands with my uncle, and we left the restaurant, Albert and Olive heading for the Underground, Phyllis and me to find a taxi.