‘Worst,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. But you mean if I lose the paper.’
‘Well, yes.’
‘I’ll be fine, love.’
‘Of course. I just want you to be looked after.’
‘Thank you.’
After a pause, he asked me if I knew why.
‘Why?’
‘Yes. Why she left you the house. Why not your mother?’
We were sitting together upstairs in the gallery, side by side like an old couple, looking down into the garden courtyard. I’d hoped that we could have lunch – our last day at work together before I flew – but he had a meeting booked, so we just managed a quick chat in the middle of the morning. Bright sunlight fell in through the windows overhead, and the pale stone walls hushed the space like snow in a clearing. Everything was glass and granite, which suits Ottawa well. Like ice, snow and bedrock.
‘Maybe she thought I’d like it,’ I said. ‘I might. Like it, I mean. You might like it, too. It’s a good house.’
At one end of the courtyard, volunteers were setting out materials for a children’s craft session – lots of coloured paper set on bright foam mats.
‘You mean to vacation there? I am not sure about that.’
‘There’s a beach.’
‘Not a real beach. Too cold for that, no?’
‘Maybe, but it’s lovely. With sand and everything. I used to swim there when I was a child.’
‘Under a frozen sun.’ He smiled and took my hand in his. He had beautiful Spanish hands, soft and perfect. Gentle. I tried to smile, too.
When I first knew Mateo, we used to meet here often. I’d pick up the phone when the shop was quiet and I could slip away and he’d leave his office or the archive to grab a moment together. We’d just sit. Maybe hold hands. I think neither of us could quite believe our luck. You don’t stumble on love like this, do you? Just open your eyes one day at work and there it is. That doesn’t happen. Except it does.
‘I suppose I might sell it,’ I said. ‘A bit more money for the condo. Maybe we could afford a little more that way.’
‘Yes, maybe. But there is another question. Did she give it to you or leave it to you?’
‘What’s the difference? She just wrote that the house was mine.’
‘Money is the difference. Inheritance tax. But I am sorry to be talking about money when you are grieving. None of this matters. I only wondered. And wondered about your mother, as well.’
The volunteers were laughing now, their voices brittle at this distance, their hair shining in the falling light. Mateo sat with me for as long as he could, still holding my fingers in his beautiful hands. After he left, I took my usual route back through the European rooms to visit the Klimt. I like her. Her face doesn’t change. In the shop, I sell a lot of postcards; so many people want to take her home. I want to ask them why. I wonder who they see in her eyes.
I pulled off the highway at a service station, a place where everything looked plastic and you could buy pre-wrapped muffins and coffee in cups to take away, or choose to sit at small tables and eat plates of fried eggs, ham and chips. I bought a boxed sandwich, a coffee and a chocolate bar I didn’t want and ate in the car.
Over the border into Scotland, the highway narrowed, the landscape rising on either side, and the traffic thinning away. I expected rain. Or sheep. Or both. Everything was green – so much greener than home – and the April sun was warm through the windshield. Then before Edinburgh, I saw a sign for Birthwood. The sudden scent of home: cedar, wild garlic, pennyroyal and pine. I glanced away and back again, but there it was. I hadn’t misread. Birthwood. She never told me it was an old name. A real name. It felt odd seeing it on an official sign. I wanted to stop and take a photo or turn off the highway to see – but to what end? Nostalgia. Suspicion. Romance. I kept going, driving north-east.
No more service stations now, just small villages with bakeries and convenience stores, low white houses with heavy black lintels, old stone walls. A few trees and, beyond them, fields that stretched out to the greening hills, then cloud-hills clustered up, grey against a grey sky. I turned the car radio on and off again. Birthwood must be a small place. There had been no sign of it on the map. A crossroads, then, or the name of a farm. Insignificant but for the fact that Felicity had never told me about it.
This stretch of highway ran along an old Roman road. That had been on the map. Ancient history in ten miles to an inch.
When I was a child, the woods at home were timeless. Bas taught me people had passed among the trees for centuries, following the seasons and animals, coming and going and coming again. Others arrived from further away – traders, priests and settlers. For a while, they tried to stay, then moved on and built cities elsewhere. The forest returned and thickened, but Bas could still find their traces. He showed me wheel ruts and weathered split-rail fences that divided up the now-indifferent bush, crumbled houses and broken barns kneeling like fallen dinosaurs or other long-forgotten beasts stumbling towards extinction. The built history of people didn’t last long. A couple of centuries at most. The trees themselves might almost remember.
Out here on the highway and beneath these bare hills, time felt different. Stretched and snapped. The Ninth Legion marched away at the end of my mother’s childhood. Tacitus scribbled notes in my grandmother’s living room. In the space between the Roman roads and the plastic sandwiches, you could lose your balance.
I could see why my mother left.
But that’s not fair. It would be different if you were born here. This is one of the places where my mother was born. Not quite here, but down this road, anyway.
She used to count out her births for me. The first happened so early she couldn’t remember it and she’d say that to make me laugh. Then she’d tell me about her mother’s labour, her grandmother’s flat, about her father who was a soldier and couldn’t be there.
The second was a beautiful picture – light after rain, pavements shining and the clatter of pigeons lifting from the rooftops to wheel over the city, out towards the sea. She was young and everything was starting. She told me this story after thunderstorms or when I couldn’t sleep. She stroked my hair, then whispered French rhymes in my ear.
There was a third story, too, but she wasn’t good at telling it. She’d polish it and change it after arguments or when she was worried. I sat on our cabin’s doorstep and watched the wind ripple the surface of the lake as she wondered aloud about the things we get to keep, the things we release and the way we might, if we’re lucky, get to choose.
I LIED MY WAY INTO AN INTERVIEW. THAT’S WHERE IT started. I hadn’t meant to, but what with the rain, my wet shoes and Dr Ballater that February, it happened. I wouldn’t have planned it. I didn’t have the nerve.
When I worked for Dr Ballater, I was docile. Polite. He came into my high school looking for a sensible girl to help with the surgery’s desk work. Just for a few weeks before Christmas, he said. Miss Jones suggested I would be suitable and summoned me to meet the doctor in her office. He stood quite close to the door so when I stepped into the room, I saw him immediately. I don’t think he meant to startle me; he just wanted to see how I might react. So, I didn’t. Or rather, I politely said