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Overview
Richard Wilson, a professor of English literature, and his wife, Carol, are injured in a landslide that destroys their home and takes the life of their student boarder. Richard heals from the injuries caused by the accident, but, emotionally traumatized, he withdraws into his own world, threatening his marriage.
When the beautiful, intriguing Jacintha enrols in his seminar on The Tempest, Richard gradually falls under her spell. But on the verge of succumbing to his desire, he receives information that shatters his belief in himself as a moral man. He tries to distance himself from Jacintha, but she has other plans that can only lead to more anguish for everyone involved.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781459744554 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dundurn Press |
| Publication date: | 11/19/2019 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
January 2005
RICHARD DREAMED HE was lying half-drowned on a beach while a group of women and children pointed and laughed at him. He heard faint music, but it wasn't sweet. It was menacing. Water gurgled sporadically from his mouth, as though he were a damaged fountain gargoyle. Carol was there, dressed in rags, but he didn't recognize anyone else. He was guilty of something, but what? Racked with guilt. Wracked. Wrack was seaweed washed up on shore. Washed up. His legs were covered with small, sharp things that pricked his skin and felt like needles entering his bones to their aching marrow. He tried to brush the tormentors away and a few small crabs fled, but the other blue-black things clung. The colour of barnacles, but not barnacles. Creatures with teeth and claws.
He woke with a cry of fear, and Carol reached out and stroked his forehead, saying, "It's all right, Richard, you're safe."
Both his legs were in casts. His concussion had turned out to be mild, thanks to plaster rather than timbers or toilets striking his head. Carol, her left arm in a cast and her ribs taped, had been released from hospital. She was visiting Richard before she went to meet the parents of their boarder, Jenny, at a funeral parlour. They had flown in from Montreal to take her body home.
"Bad dream," Richard said. "I'm all right." What a hollow phrase, he thought. More often than not a lie, a glib social lie.
When his head cleared enough to understand Carol's mission, he asked her if she'd bought a card of condolence, and when she said she hadn't yet, he told her his requirements for the card, so particular that he could tell it was all Carol could do not to lose patience with him.
"Not one of those white lily things, you know — embossed. They're so gloomy. Dire. Sorry, odd word. It is dire, after all. Not too much colour, of course, but maybe a little — a pale-yellow rose, maybe, although Jenny was such a red rose, if she were a flower, wasn't she? And no verse; no soppy verse. I'll write something. Oh God, what will I write?"
"Write that she was a wonderful girl and you were very fond of her and so glad to have known her — something like that," Carol said.
"Very fond. It seems too lukewarm. It was more than that, but I can't presume to say I loved her, can I? After knowing her such a short time? Not to her parents."
"Say something conventional. Write a letter to them later, when you've had some time. You'll think of the right things to say."
"No, you write in the card, from both of us. Say I'll write later. Or I'll phone them. We can talk on the phone. I wish I could have been the one to tell them. I feel it was my duty. It shouldn't have happened. We shouldn't have let it happen."
"Look at me, Richard. And listen. We didn't let it happen. It was an accident. An accident."
Richard said nothing, looked away.
Carol took his chin in her hand and turned his face toward her, as though he were a pouting child. "Say it."
"An accident," he said flatly.
It had happened less than forty-eight hours earlier. He had heard the roar first; an unearthly, apocalyptic sound. He'd thought absurdly of gods hurling boulders, thundering, throwing down lightning bolts. He should run, but which way? When the river of mud crashed through the living room ceiling, he was thrown to the floor. Something fell across his legs and he screamed in pain. Things were still falling, and he put his arms up to shield his head. When he dared to look, he saw all around him chairs, lamps, bureau drawers, clothes. Jesus! He lay perfectly still in the cold mud, most of which had rushed past him, smashing the French doors on the way out. He was held somewhere between panic and numbness, each vying for supremacy. After a while, a terrible stillness fell.
Carol. Where is she? He tried to call her but his voice broke, rasping like an animal's. He tried again.
"Carol!" A croaking sound. Not loud enough. Try again. "Carol!"
"Here, Richard. I'm here. In the dining room."
"Are you okay? Are you hurt? Christ, Carol, what the hell happened?" Panic was winning.
"I think I'm all right. Are you?" Her voice was weak, but he thought she was trying to sound brave.
Brave, Richard thought, and then the word floated away.
"I'm okay," he said. With an effort he tried to push himself up, but his hands slipped and he fell down again. His back was wet and cold. The oak bookcase was across his shins and books lay everywhere in the swamp of mud. My books are drowning. Why that phrase?
Oh, yes. He'd been reading by the fireplace, which was gone now. Its tiles lay in shards. Bathroom sink from upstairs on the floor. Furniture upside down. Floorboards hanging. Chunks of plaster. The cliff above must have tried to bury them. Not tried. No. Pathetic fallacy. Act of God. No God. Act of nature. Fuck! Completely random fucking catastrophe.
Yes. By the fireplace. He had been reading The Tempest, because of Jenny, thinking of Jenny, beginnings of an erection. A pleasurable guilt. No. Shouldn't.
"Richard. What are you doing?" Fear in Carol's voice. "Can you come to me?"
His heart thumped. A moan escaped him. "No, I'm trapped. Can you move?"
"I'm squashed up against the wall. Our mattress fell on me."
"Mattress? In the dining room?" Why not? The toilet is now in the living room.
"I thought it might smother me, but it's leaning on something. A chair is pressing me into the corner."
"Oh, Jesus. Carol, I'm going to try to get free, come to you." He managed this time to sit up.
It was awful now. Timbers creaked. The whoosh of heavy rain lashed the house. Plaster and dust and water fell in sudden flurries. Something more was going to come down. Maybe the whole upper floor would fall on him. On Carol.
And Jenny! Oh god. Was she here? "Jenny! Jenny! Answer me, please, Jenny!"
Nothing.
"I think Jenny's gone to class," Carol called.
He could hear she was suffering, but fear overcame his sympathy. "You think? You think? Shit. Has she or hasn't she?"
"Richard, please calm down. Don't panic. Please."
"Don't panic? The house has fallen on us and I don't know where Jenny is. I'm trying to lift the bookcase off my legs." He tightened his arm muscles, willed them to be steel-like, lifted the case an inch or two, but it dropped back down and he yelled.
"Richard?"
He steadied his voice. "I'm all right."
On his next try, he lifted the bookcase high enough and long enough to free his right leg. With his arms straight out and straining, it was going to require a terrible twist of his body to push the bookcase to the left and shift his left leg to the right. He couldn't get any traction and his shoulders were giving out. He lost his grip and the bookcase dropped the last inch and thudded onto his leg again and he fell back and began to cry and then everything went dark.
He woke to see black rubber boots and yellow rubber pants. A man looking at him.
"Can you hear me, sir?"
Richard tried to sit up, but the man squatted, put his arms around Richard's shoulders, and gently eased him down. "Don't move now," he said. "We're bringing a stretcher in. You're going to be all right."
"I feel dizzy."
"Probably a concussion. Some of the ceiling seems to have fallen on you."
There were things he should remember. What were they? Carol, yes. "My wife?"
"She's all right. She's in the ambulance. You'll see her soon."
"Is she badly hurt?"
"No, a broken arm. Maybe a cracked rib."
And then he remembered. "Jenny," he said. "Where's Jenny?" He called her name, once, twice, his voice rising to a wail.
"Sir, sir, please stay calm. Is there someone else in the house?"
"Yes, Jenny. She boards here. I don't know if she left for class. She has an afternoon class."
"Okay. Just a minute. I'll check." He went away. Came back after what seemed like a long time. "Yes, your wife told us about her. We've looked around already. But we'll look again. Don't worry."
"Don't worry! Who the fuck are you people? Can't you do a proper search?" He began to whimper like a child and was crying uncontrollably as they loaded him into the ambulance.
They found Jenny's body in her bedroom. The roof had fallen on her and she'd been crushed and buried under the debris. Richard, concussed and in shock, wasn't told about her until the following day.
"I think it would lift your spirits a little if you heard from Imogen," Carol said. "I left a message for her telling her you've been injured but you are going to be all right. Have you heard from her?" Imogen was Richard's daughter from his first marriage. She'd lived in England with her mother ever since the divorce thirteen years ago, when Imogen was seven years old.
"No, I called last week and Grace said Imogen was travelling in Europe with her boyfriend."
"Well, I hope she gets in touch soon."
"Yes, well." Richard looked out the window and didn't speak for a moment. The droop of his mouth reminded Carol of the way he had looked on visits with Imogen — a look of pain and regret and longing.
"I guess no flowers for the Walkers," Richard said. "If they're flying home right away. It seems a shame, no flowers." He started to cry. "Yes, get flowers. They can take them or not, but get flowers. Roses."
Carol bought a blank card with a yellow rose on it and wrote exactly what she'd suggested Richard write. She bought a bouquet of pale-yellow roses as well. She had been fond of Jenny, but the word, now that she thought about it, did seem lukewarm. How could anyone not love a young woman as bright and pretty as Jenny? So pretty she'd made Carol, who usually believed she looked young for her age, feel old and rumpled, especially in the mornings when Jenny was dewy and Carol's face was lined with pillow creases and she'd yet to put on her eyeliner and mascara.
She found Jenny's parents, Gordon and Amanda Walker, in a stuffy little reception room lit by a lamp and a trickle of daylight from a small, high window. It smelled of stale perfume and some kind of chemical. Carpet cleaner? Embalming fluid?
Codeine was making Carol woozy.
Amanda Walker looked like she didn't know whose clothes she was wearing. The fur coat seemed massive on her — more like a fur blanket, or a bearskin with its limp arms around her. (The weather would have been icy when they left Montreal.) Her black fur hat was at a strange angle, maybe knocked askew without her noticing. Or caring. Only the salt-stained suede boots seemed to be hers. She bent down for a moment and traced the salt lines with a finger as though the lines were part of a map to a place she'd lost, a place Jenny might be. Carol drew in her breath sharply, as sadness hit her, and the woman looked up at her.
Carol introduced herself and thrust the roses toward Amanda, who took them with a vague glance and put them in her lap.
"Thank you," she said.
She looked down at her boots again and mumbled something.
"What's that, Amanda dear?" Gordon Walker asked. He was about sixty-five, tall, with very short, grey hair. He wore an impeccable dark suit and a navy-blue overcoat of heavy wool. Expensive. Jenny had told them he was the president of a chain of supermarkets — twenty years older than her mother, whom he'd met while she was working in one of his stores. Her mother had since made a career as a charity fundraiser; a "lady who lunches," Jenny had said with a mixture of amusement and disdain.
Gordon Walker's expression was stern, perhaps in an effort to keep his emotions from bursting forth. His taut and shiny skin seemed to be holding it all in. He put his hand on his wife's shoulder, which drooped under the pressure. She looked up at him, puzzled.
"Never mind," he said.
"No, no. It's all right. I said the salt on the sidewalks always ruins suede boots. That's what I said. I don't know why I buy them." She was as beautiful as her daughter, even with her swollen eyes. Dark curls like Jenny's spilled from her hat. She was crying silently, her tears running over her high cheekbones and down to the corners of her lips.
Carol said, "Jenny was lovely to have around. We feel so terrible about what happened. A lovely, lovely young woman. It shouldn't have happened. Our house, you know, it shouldn't ... it shouldn't have ..." She began to cry, too.
"Please, it wasn't your fault," Gordon Walker said.
Husband and wife sat and listened to Carol cry. Amanda's eyes were dryer now. Nearer to the deserts of grief they would become.
When Carol could speak again, she asked, "Will you have a funeral in Montreal?"
"In our church, yes," Gordon said.
"It is your fault," Amanda said, every icy word precisely separate.
"Amanda!"
"No, Gordon, I will say it." Again she mouthed the carefully separated words, then went on. "You and your husband should have had the risk assessed, living at the bottom of a cliff like that. What kind of fools are you?" Her voice became high pitched. "It was criminally careless. Criminally. Oh, yes. But I can't make a criminal charge against you. Or even a civil one. My lawyer advised me neither would hold."
"Amanda! When did you talk to our lawyer?"
"I thought about it on the flight and this morning I phoned him and told him the house must have been unsafe, that these people should have known, and he said it would be too hard to prosecute successfully." She stopped to suck in air, a drowning woman. "And anyway, it won't bring Jenny back. But I want you to know. I blame you. I want you to suffer, knowing that it's your fault. And that I'll always blame you."
Carol was unable to speak.
Gordon raised his wife out of her chair and held her close. "Amanda, Amanda," he crooned, and kissed her eyes, wet again with slow tears.
After a minute, she pushed him away and left the room, a room now seeming to be emptied of whatever air and light there had been.
Carol continued to sit in stunned silence.
"I apologize for my wife," Gordon said. "Grief can make savages of us all. Did someone say that? Is it a quote? Anyway, it's true. I know I seem to be bearing up all right, but if I break down now, I won't be able to help my wife."
"Yes, it's all right. I understand," Carol said. I can't tell Richard this, she thought. He already blames himself. I can never tell him this.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Walker,
I've phoned you several times to offer my condolences but haven't been able to reach you. I can understand you wanting to be quiet in your grief.
I'm grieving, too, very much. Jenny was a bright light in what seems to me a world growing darker and darker. A shining girl.
I know from our conversations that she had an excellent mind and was very insightful. We sometimes discussed her courses and I was particularly pleased with her love of Shakespeare's plays, which I have taught for many years.
I won't make this too long — please call me sometime when you want to talk about Jenny. I'd like to share some memories with you. You can reach me in the hospital at 555-233-9495. I'll give you my home number when I know where I'll be living.
With my heartfelt sympathy for your great loss, Richard Wilson
A week later he phoned again and got the Walkers' answering machine. He left his name and number again. Another week went by without a reply.
"Maybe they don't want to talk to me," he said to Carol. "Maybe ..." The truth hit him suddenly, a hammer to his gut. "Maybe they blame me for her death."
"Don't read too much into not hearing from them, Richard. It's only been three weeks and they're devastated and probably are talking only to friends and relatives."
"No, no. They blame me. Oh god, they do, don't they? They blame me." It should have been obvious to me, he thought, had I not been wrapped in my cloak of self-pity. "Did they say something to you about this?"
"First of all, if they blamed anyone, they'd blame both of us, not just you. But they said they blamed no one, that it was a tragic accident."
"Oh, Carol, is that true?"
"Yes. It's true."
CHAPTER 2THEY'D LOST EVERYTHING. Everything had been buried in mud and rubble or was too water damaged to salvage, and even if it had been salvageable, they couldn't have got to it. The house had been declared out of bounds, yellow-taped like a crime scene, waiting for the bulldozer.
Carol had done the tedious job of replacing their social insurance, health insurance, and Visa cards, as well as other necessary papers and cards. They both bought new laptops. They'd had no cellphones, having agreed that such devices were great for herding teenaged offspring, of which they had none, but highly unnecessary for phoning to say that you were ten minutes from home, unless someone ill was waiting for you, or, as Carol joked, "someone was pining for you as strongly as a Norwegian blue parrot pines for the fjords."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Jacintha"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Lorraine Davies.
Excerpted by permission of Dundurn Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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