Leaving the World Page 14

  An hour after leaving St Andrews I stopped in Saint John, an old port and mill town, now ossified. Run-down red-brick buildings, depressing shops, gray people in gray clothes, an air of shabby listlessness hanging over the downtown. I grabbed a bad sandwich and pushed on further east, stopping for the night in the town of Sackville, right on the Nova Scotian border. It was a college town – one of Canada’s best universities, Mount Allison, was located here – and I immediately felt at home amidst its faux-Gothic architecture, its used bookshops, its student cafés and bars, even an old-style fifties cinema where they were screening a Kubrick festival that week. Funny, isn’t it, how we always respond to that which is cozy and familiar and fits into the way we want to look at the world. Before heading here I had this image of New Brunswick as a chocolate-boxy vision of Anglophilia in the New World. Instead, with the one small exception of Sackville, it was all blimpish, down-at-heel. Even the little hotel which I found on the main drag of Sackville reminded me of something out of an Edward Hopper painting – that low-rent 1940s world of the cheap and the sad, the sort of place where I could easily have imagined a retired showgirl – all peroxide hair and running mascara and wildly rouged lips – smoking filterless Chesterfields while downing her nightly fifth of Canadian Club. When I sipped my coffee the next morning in some local café I realized that I would go mad teaching in a small college town like this one. My brief flirtation with money had truly contaminated my once clearly defined world-view.

  I left Sackville that morning and headed further east, stopping for two nights in Halifax. I’d read somewhere that the city had a trendy caché. The downtown seemed chewed up by new buildings from the reinforced-concrete school of seventies brutalism. Yes, I did find a quarter-mile stretch of shops and boutiques and ‘we’re trying to be New York’ restaurants which gave the appearance of being vaguely hip – but I wasn’t buying it. Like Saint John, Halifax dispirited me – and I would have turned tail and headed north towards Quebec if I hadn’t, by chance, discovered a beach with the very un-Canadian name of Martinique.

  The discovery came courtesy of a concierge in the little hotel where I was staying. I mentioned that I might be leaving town the next morning.

  ‘That’s earlier than expected,’ he said, noting that I had booked myself in here for another three days.

  ‘I don’t think Halifax in January was the best of ideas,’ I said.

  ‘Well, before you go, you really should take a drive out to Martinique Beach and have a walk – that is, if you don’t mind taking a hike when it’s minus fifteen.’

  ‘I’m from New England. We all take hikes in idiotic conditions.’

  Martinique Beach was a forty-five-minute drive from Halifax. I negotiated my way through a series of ugly suburbs, punctuated by gasoline alleys and the usual strip malls, until the road narrowed and I passed through little nondescript towns, most of which lacked much in the way of rustic charm. But just when I was about to write off this stretch of road as charm-free, the route narrowed. I turned a corner and, suddenly, there was water. A patch of forest, then a glimpse of the Atlantic. A small town, a bridge, another fast sighting of the sea. A house, a meadow, another patch of aquatic blue. Driving this road was like being visually teased all the time – just the most transitory sightings of sand and surf.

  I followed the signs to Martinique Beach, cruising down a back road with the occasional barn or house breaking up the empty wooded landscape. Then I was suddenly driving alongside dunes, with scrubby vegetation pockmarking the sand. Though I had both windows closed up against the cold, I could still hear the roaring of the surf on the nearby beach. There was a little parking lot up ahead – absolutely empty, as only a masochist would venture out here on a January morning like this one. I parked the car and, zipping up my parka and pulling a wool hat down over my ears, I stepped out into the cold.

  And, by Christ, it was cold. Though the temperature back in Halifax had been minus fifteen, here there was a boreal wind that must have lowered it by another ten degrees. But I hadn’t driven all the way here to suddenly turn tail and head back to shelter. I was going to walk the damn beach. Plunging my gloved hands into my pockets, I followed the little wooden walkway over the dune, then found myself staring straight out at the Atlantic. The beach was vast. It stretched for miles – and on this sub-arctic day, it could have passed for an outpost of the Mongolian steppe or the furthest reaches of Patagonia: the ends of the earth. The tide was out. The wind emitted a low-level but persistent howl, beyond which the percussive thump of the surf was more than discernible. That’s because the breakers were ferocious, primal – slamming down against the sand with an Old Testament vehemence. The sky was slate-gray, the world drained of color. Martinique Beach, with its harsh monochromaticism, had an elemental grandeur.

  I started to walk. Fortunately the wind was to my back – but that, of course, meant that I would be facing into it on my return. The breeze propelled me forward. I held my head up, my eyes wide to the cold, my nostrils frozen, but still imbibing the deeply salted air. I was the only person on this beach – and it struck me that, were I to twist an ankle and become immobilized, I mightn’t be found here for days. By which point . . .

  But this thought didn’t trouble me. Maybe it was the endorphin rush of walking in sub-zero temperatures on an empty, limitless shingle of sand. Maybe I was having a major pantheistic moment, in which the sheer overwhelming power of the natural world gave me a sense of larger forces at work on this strangely benighted planet of ours. Or maybe it was the simple brutality of the cold – and the dark, angry majesty of this seascape – that suddenly released me from all thoughts about any life beyond here, or any of the baggage I always carried with me. Whatever the reason, for an instant or two, all external considerations melted away and I actually felt a sort of happiness. A pure, undistilled sense of just living in the here and now; of being liberated from the complex narrative that was my life. Was that all that happiness amounted to? A moment, here and there, when you could run away from yourself? When you fled the stuff that haunted your thoughts and ruined your sleep and remembered that temporal existence was pretty damn wondrous? Did it take the extremities of cold and wind – and the detonation of surf on an empty beach – to remind me that simply being here was a cause for happiness itself?

  I walked on for another mile and then it began to snow. Lightly at first – a gentle cascade of hesitant flakes. But within a minute or so, it transformed itself into a minor blizzard; the downfall so dense that all visibility was curtailed and all I could see in front of me was a white void. It caught me unawares and the silent serenity of it all was instantly superseded by a larger consideration: getting off this damn beach right now.

  But with limited visibility this was no simple task. I kept my head down and pushed forward, trying to retrace my steps as best I could. My progress was slow, my eyes stinging with the wind-whipped snow, my hands beginning to stiffen. The moment of clean, absolute happiness had turned into a grim trudge.

  But then, out of nowhere, the snow stopped. It was as if someone had flipped a celestial switch and turned off the blizzard. The beach – now frosted by this sudden storm – was returned to me. I moved as quickly as possible back to the car. Once there, I turned the heater on full blast and stared at myself in the rear-view mirror. My face was a deep shade of crimson, my lashes and eyebrows iced up. But as hot air started returning my body temperature to something approaching normal, I felt that weird exhilaration of someone who had stumbled into physical danger and then managed to stumble their way out of it again.

  That’s the greatest relief in the world – knowing that you have got away with something you really shouldn’t have.

  I sat in the car for a good ten minutes, waiting for myself to thoroughly thaw out. Then I stripped off my parka and gloves – it was now that warm inside – and began to drive back to Halifax. But just at the end of the beach road, I saw a sign on a mailbox, flapping in the wind. It read:

  FOR
RENT. CALL SUE AT: 555.3438.

  The mailbox was at the end of a driveway. Intrigued, I turned into it – and drove the hundred yards up to a modern Scandinavian-style A-frame house. It was shuttered and dark. The door wasn’t boarded up, however. Peering inside I could see a simple sitting room, nicely furnished in a country style, with an old pot-bellied stove in one corner.

  An image passed through my head of me sitting in the rocking chair by the stove, reading Melville or Flaubert and listening to classical music on the radio. I returned to the car, drove back to the mailbox and, using my cellphone, called the woman listed on the sign.

  Luck was with me. Sue Macdonald lived around five minutes away and happened to be at home.

  ‘You really want to rent the place?’ she said, sounding genuinely surprised and also wheezing that wheeze which hinted at a lifetime’s involvement with cigarettes.

  ‘If it’s not taken,’ I said.

  ‘Not taken? It’s January in Nova Scotia – of course it’s goddamn available. Hang on, be down there in a tick.’

  She showed up a few minutes later – a woman in her late fifties with short, stiff gray hair, dressed haphazardly in jeans and a mothy cardigan underneath an old army greatcoat. A cigarette was hanging out the side of her mouth. I liked her immediately, even if she did size me up with suspicion.

  ‘So if you don’t mind me asking,’ she said while opening the front door, ‘are you on the run or something?’

  ‘Nothing that glamorous,’ I lied. ‘I got fired from a job, I got a nice pay-off, and I decided to hide out somewhere for a while, think things through . . .’

  ‘Well, you sure as hell have come to the right place for being alone with your thoughts. Martinique Beach is so dead during the winter we actually had to shoot someone a couple of years ago to start a cemetery.’

  The house was – as expected – simple, but with a certain degree of ascetic charm. The furnishings veered towards the Shaker. There was a very comfortable armchair, a traditional rocker, a nice four-poster double bed in the one upstairs room, a functional kitchen with pine cabinets, a large shortwave radio on a coffee table near the stove, no TV.

  ‘Now I suppose the two biggest questions you have are: How do I heat the damn place, and how much is it going to set me back? Well, there’s an oil-fired boiler which I currently turn on once a day to make certain the pipes don’t freeze. If you decide to take the place I’ll turn it on now full-time and you’ll move into a warm house by this time tomorrow. In the utility room off the back, there’s a whole cord of chopped wood, which you can also use in the stove. And everything else is electric, so it’s not like you’ll have to stoke a fire in order to cook. What the hell did you say you did down south?’

  ‘I didn’t say . . . but I used to work in finance. Now I’m trying to finish a book based on my doctoral dissertation.’

  She looked at me warily.

  ‘You got a Ph.D.?’

  I nodded.

  ‘From where?’

  ‘Harvard.’

  ‘Heard of it. And what’s the thesis on?’

  I told her. She lit up a new cigarette.

  ‘I once started a Ph.D. in English literature, just like you. “Jane Austen and the English Blah Blah Blah . . .”’

  ‘You never finished it?’

  ‘Came back from McGill one summer, hooked up with a local fisherman and was stupid enough to kiss Montreal goodbye and live with the guy for the next twenty years.’

  ‘After which . . . ?’

  ‘After which he had the nerve to die of a sudden heart attack – and break my heart at the same time.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not as sorry as me.’

  ‘When did he die?’

  ‘Eleven years ago – and the thing is, it still feels like yesterday. Will ya listen to me, getting all self-pitying. The rent is one hundred per week and for that I’ll change the bedclothes twice a week and also get the local girl to come in here and clean the place for you every Tuesday. How long would you be thinking of hiding out here?’

  ‘A couple of weeks, I guess, maybe three.’

  ‘You really don’t have much of a plan, do you?’

  ‘You mean, beyond getting this book finished? No, none at all.’

  Considered now, the three weeks that followed were among the happiest of my life. What was that oft-quoted pensée of Pascal about man’s unhappiness all coming down to his inability to sit alone in a small room and do nothing? Well, I didn’t do nothing during those three weeks but I did spend most of my time alone in a small room. And it suited me.

  I moved in the afternoon after seeing the place. Not only had it been scrubbed clean of all the accumulated dust, but there was a fire roaring in the pot-bellied stove and fresh flowers in jugs on the dining table and on the bedside table. The fridge was full of milk and cheese. There were even two bottles of local Nova Scotian red wine on the table by the rocking chair. And there was a note:

  Hope you’re comfy. I’m getting out of Dodge this afternoon to sunnier climes – as in that Yankee dump, Florida. Marge – she’s the cleaner – will be in twice a week to change your sheets and tidy up. If you plan to stay longer than three weeks, no sweat. Just give Marge the dough. Hope you get done what you want to get done . . .

  I settled in, blaring CBC Radio 2 – their classical service – as I unpacked. I used one end of the long dining table as a desk. I set the manuscript of the book to one side of my laptop, putting several well-sharpened pencils on top of it.

  The next morning I was up at six. I made oatmeal and coffee. I left the house at first light and walked forty minutes up the beach, forty minutes back. It was minus five outside, according to the thermometer posted by the front door of the cottage, with no wind whatsoever: perfect walking weather. By the time I returned home it was just eight-fifteen. All residual grogginess had been blown away by the morning cold, the sea air. My head was open. I was ready to work.

  And work I did – five hours every morning. I ripped through the manuscript with relish, excising all digressions, sharpening up the arguments, and injecting what I hoped was a necessary vein of wit to a very academic book. The work went rapidly – especially as I maintained a diligent schedule. Up every morning before dawn. Breakfast. The eighty-minute walk on the beach (why eighty? I’ve no idea – it just worked out that way), then five hours on the book, then lunch, then another two hours grinding through the manuscript, then a further eighty-minute beach hike, then reading, then dinner, then more reading. And I was in bed every night by ten.

  Why this need for such a rigid schedule? Discipline is all about the imposition of control – the belief that, by following a precise regime and avoiding distractions, you can somehow keep the disorder of life at bay. Maybe that was the reason why I was up so early every morning. The discipline allowed me to keep my mind off the worry that the Feds might now be enquiring about my whereabouts. And it also allowed me to dodge the belief that no one would ever read the book I was rewriting. But I still had to finish it – because it was the one thing in my life right now that gave me some sort of focus, some raison d’être. Was it guilt that was keeping me going? Every time I did my twice-daily walks on Martinique Beach I thought of David: how much I missed him every hour of the day; how he so loved walking the sand at Popham; how I kept seeing his body on that road, a look – I imagined – of bemusement on his face, as if to say: So this is it? And how I kept trying to tell myself that he so wanted to live; that he could never have fallen into such despair as to . . .

  The lover for whom you wrote your thesis dies opposite a beach . . . and then you rent a cottage on a beach to finish the transformation of said thesis into a book.

  God, how we are all prisoners of our own baggage. Why can we never really free ourselves from its malignant weight, and the way it so dictates the way our lives map out?

  I had no answers to such questions. I just kept working. I had no outside contact, no intrusive stimuli bar the news on the
radio. Reduce everything down to certain essentials and you can live a very agreeable existence – as long as you also choose not to risk anything.

  However, guilt made me phone my mother once during my time away. I began the call by breaking the news about my departure from Freedom Mutual. Her reaction was classic: ‘Your father will be so disappointed. He would so have liked you to have succeeded for a change.’

  As per usual, I said nothing, swallowing my rage, and instead told her what I was doing up here.

  ‘I suppose that fills the days, dear,’ she said. ‘You will send our library a copy if it gets published?’

  ‘You can count on that, Mom.’

  A silence. Then: ‘I’m very cross at you about something, Jane.’

  ‘What might that be?’

  ‘I had two gentlemen from the FBI stop by the library asking to see me. It seems your father has been wrongly accused in some financial swindle thing . . .’

  ‘Wrongly accused?’ I heard myself saying.

  ‘Don’t sound so suspicious. Your father is a brilliant businessman.’

  ‘My father is a crook.’

  ‘So you believed everything the FBI told you.’

  ‘How did you know that—’

  ‘An Agent Ames informed me that they interviewed you – and that you filled them in on everything you knew about your father’s business dealings.’

  ‘Which wasn’t very much.’

  ‘You still cooperated.’

  ‘They were the FBI, Mom. I mean, the man cheated his friends and then cheated me out of ten thousand dollars—’

  ‘I’m not listening to this.’

  ‘Of course not. That would be too goddamn painful – to admit the truth. Because that would mean admitting—’

  ‘I’m hanging up now.’

  ‘Dad’s dishonesty cost me my job.’

  ‘Don’t you go trying to blame him for—’