Moving methodically about the room, he traced the flow from a series of three converging intake pipes coming through the outer wall below the frost line — these would be from the bottom drains in the formal pond — into the self-cleaning filter in the first vortex chamber and the other chambers, through a two-speed pump into a huge bead filter where little nubules devoured nitrites and ammonia from fish waste and released harmless nitrates back into the water, past a sequence of three ultraviolet lights enclosed in chrome tubes the size of torpedoes, and finally to an outtake pipe leading underground back to the pond.
There were various configurations of short pipes and shut-off valves whose purpose he couldn’t quite divine, a couple of tanks that looked like hot water heaters that were on a bypass, a completely separate smaller system to activate and flush out the skimmer, and an outlet accessed from the main line by a series of valves that led in the direction of the lower pond, perhaps to top it up if the natural system broke down.
Against the wall beside the door he had come through there was a computerized control console, and beneath the raised window that looked out through shrubs at ground level across the garden there was an old-fashioned concrete laundry tub. Draped over the brass waterspout, inconspicuous in its everyday utility, was a rag that on close examination might once have been lingerie.
A door leading to outside steps up into the garden was sealed. He had noticed the low window partially obscured by shrubbery the previous night but had assumed it accessed a closed-in crawl space. The cellar stairway outside must have been filled in. One could only get to this plumber’s fantasy through the den or the garage, which seemed a little inconvenient, though with everything run by computer and insulated from the winter cold, there would be no need to spend much time here. He expected the computer could be monitored from somewhere else in the house, probably the study on the second floor where he had noticed a daunting array of electronic paraphernalia that stood out from the shelves of books like zircons on a platinum ring.
Turning to leave the way he had come in, Morgan noticed a scrap of yellow notepaper pinned against the edge of a shelf above a workbench. He leaned over the small array of power tools and read slowly, finding it difficult to decipher the smudged script:
Jacques Lacan suggests language is an essential precondition to the development of the unconscious mind, without which there could be no consciousness, and therefore no sense of the self.
There were a couple of lines he couldn’t make out. He pulled the note from the pin and took it to the window, holding it slantwise into the light. Several sentences were intentionally obliterated, as if half-formed thoughts had been deleted, then it continued with a certain obstinate obscurity that Morgan found pompous and provocative:
It seems reasonable to suggest that in the evolution of the species it was the emergence of language that led to consciousness, and not the reverse. Signifieds in the environment had to separate from signifiers before signs became possible —
The text stopped abruptly, but the writer had found his ruminations worth keeping, if only impaled on a cellar shelf. Morgan folded the note neatly and stuffed it in his pocket to show Miranda.
As he turned back into the subterranean labyrinth he had come through, made somehow macabre by light bulbs dangling against shadows, the notion of this as a mausoleum for his anonymous forebears gave way to images of the catacombs beneath poppy fields outside the walls of Rome. He half expected burial niches in the walls, an illusion the play of light and shadow on the rough foundation reinforced.
Morgan remembered how eerie it was that, for all the desiccated corpses and piled bones he had seen in the crypts of Europe, he had felt a stronger presence of death from the absence of human remains in the catacombs. Meandering at the back of a guided tour, past gaping small tombs cut into the lava rock, he had been struck by their emptiness as a mockery of resurrection, their occupants dust inhaled by cadres of tourists. He had felt the cold impress of mortality then, despite the relative warmth of the place. And he felt it now, the familiar chill, yet given the nature of his work and why he was here, morbidity seemed appropriate.
He stopped again at the wine cellar and peered through the double glass window, regretting not having a flashlight. Only in movies did flashlights appear from nowhere as the plot demanded. If he were in a movie, he would be a younger Gene Hackman. When the credits appeared, his name wouldn’t be there. He would still be inside the story. Closure was only for actors and authors.
It was in Europe that he had decided against graduate school, though he had tried it briefly when he came back. He went over for two and a half years, crossing both ways on the Stefan Batory, one of the last passenger ships not flaunting itself for the carriage trade. He hadn’t taken out student loans, having been on a scholarship and working in the north each summer, one year building a spur line into a mine, two years on road crew, and one year, the toughest and most lucrative, planting trees. Unlike his middle-class contemporaries, he finished university with money in the bank.
Trees paid his way through Europe. He was a high-baller, sometimes planting three thousand trees a day, and his savings, subsidized by illegal bar-tending jobs in London and for a while on Ibiza, meant he came home broke but debt-free.
In graduate school he felt distant from other students who had gone directly into their programs, and had little in common with the older students who were making meaningful career changes. He hadn’t picked up his graduate fellowship cheque by the end of the first week, so he just walked away. At the end of the next week he was enrolled in criminology at George Brown College. It had never occurred to him to join the police; it just happened.
His first autumn in London he met the woman he should have married. Susan. He married Lucy.
From the beginning, when Susan answered the door next to his, after he moved into a shabbily genteel bedsitter in Beaufort Gardens on the fifth floor of one of the last unreclaimed buildings in Knightsbridge, he called her Sue.
“Very Canadian,” she told him. “In England it’s with two syllables.”
She was amused, however, and agreed to join him for a Guinness at The Bunch of Grapes on Brompton Road.
He had never before had a friend like her, someone so emotionally complete. Through the long, wet autumn, winter, and spring, when he wasn’t working, they spent weeknight evenings in his room, which was smaller than hers and easier to heat. They were relatively impoverished — London was expensive and wages were low — but they talked their way through the seasons and hardly noticed. He realized, more than two decades later, he must have done most of the talking, while Sue listened with cheerful forbearance, filling gaps in his rambling narrative with self-deprecating anecdotes and funny explanations about the fine points of being English.
On the weekends she went home and Morgan wandered London. Some Saturday evenings he returned to his garret so exhausted by the miles he had walked that he fell asleep across the top of his lumpy single bed without undressing, pulling his thick Canadian coat around him, shoes still on for warmth. He slept until dawn, got up, peed in the rickety sink, splashed water on his face from the single faucet, brewed a quick cup of tea on his hot plate, and ventured out into the pale green spaces of Hyde Park to watch early arrivals, even in the dreariest weather, taking their morning constitutionals. Then he wandered for the rest of the day, and by afternoon began to anticipate Sue’s return so he could tell her about London.
They didn’t have a storybook romance; they didn’t fall in love with each other at the same time. He was in love with her now, though his memories of her had merged with Miranda. Sue was patiently in love for at least part of that year before he took off to the Continent. With her coppery red hair and refined complexion, gentle good humour, and patiently inquiring intelligence, she had been remarkably lovely. But Morgan had constructed his personality as someone astonished by the adventures that lay before him, desperately