When I turned back to the house, the goose wasn’t there. The key turned smoothly in the lock and I stepped inside, closing the door behind me. The house was quiet. Empty. Smelling citrusy. L for lemon.
I set my bag down in the hallway next to the teak trolley where the telephone sat watching, squat beside a bowl of keys and Gran’s brown wallet. Right out in the open, the first place to look. Logical, I thought, and the leather felt soft in my hands, but there were only cards inside. No folded letter, no secret photograph. I picked up the phone and there was no dial tone. The lawyer’s letter had said nothing had been disconnected and everything should be fine. Well, there’s something to add to the to-do list. And I would need to find another way of calling Mateo, too, and maybe Felicity. I thought I should let her know where I was.
The living room was a shrunken version of what I remembered. Shabbier, too, but only from the passage of time. Everything looked faded – the ashes in the fireplace, the rag rug Felicity had made at the camp sun-bleached like the photographs on the mantel, familiar and distant. There was a well-dressed Victorian couple framed in silver, he in tweeds and thick sideburns, she with lace cuffs, and her hands folded on her skirt. Then my mother as a grinning toddler running across grass, caught almost in flight. My grandparents in a wooden frame, new parents, my mother a bundled infant, my young grandmother with her head bent, adoring. My grandfather wore a zippered cardigan under his jacket and met the camera’s gaze, shy, defiant, present and looking at me as if I shouldn’t be unsupervised in his house.
Their wedding photo was framed in silver. My grandmother was all high cheekbones and a shine in her eye, and my grandfather watched her, laughing. They held their hands up between them, fingers intertwined, as if they wanted the photographer to capture the new gold band on her finger. Linked. She wore an elegant fox fur around her shoulders and it must have matched her hair, though in the black-and-white photograph, both the fox and the hair looked silver. I’d grown up with the photo. Felicity kept a copy on the table in our cabin and I liked to look at it when I was small. That Klimt look on Gran’s face and Granddad’s laugh.
‘Was it like that with you and my dad?’ I asked once. ‘When he was around?’
‘Oh, Pidge, you’re getting too old for that story. You know you don’t have a dad. Only a father. And no, he wasn’t like that.’ She pushed her fingers up through the paleness of her hair, then smiled at me. ‘If he was, he’d be around now, and I’d have to share you. And then what would we do? I couldn’t ever share you.’
When I was almost twelve and we were up late together after a long night-birth, I asked why her dad hadn’t been there when she was born.
‘It was the war, sweetie. He was away. You can’t always be where you want to be. Not when there’s a war.’
‘But Gran had help, right? There were midwives there?’
‘A doctor. And her mum. She could have had a nurse, too, but there were enough people out that night already. That’s what she said. But I think it was more about privacy, really. Your gran is a very private person.’
She made it sound like she would describe herself otherwise. Or maybe it was just a slip.
In the kitchen, the fridge hummed gently and the clock kept ticking, its electric cord twisting down to the outlet near the cooker. Pinned to the wall by the door, there was a postcard from the gallery. Felicity must have sent that over – a photo of the giant spider sculpture that sat between the gallery and the street. On the back, a note in her handwriting:
Dear Mum,
Hello from Pidge’s shop – all lovely books, silk scarves & calendars. She’s happy, I think, selling gifts – says it reminds her people are thinking of others & that’s beautiful. She has a generous heart, doesn’t she?
Thought you’d like the spider. 30 feet tall & her belly full of marble eggs. An elegance of legs and space.
All love,
Felicity
I opened the back door for fresh air and so that I could see tulips growing at the edge of a cobbled yard. There were several outbuildings – sheds and things – and beyond that, grass with a stone bench and a path that led down to a small orchard. I remembered these trees – just a half-dozen apple trees, too small to climb and wind-twisted even there behind the house. I could smell the sea, too. Salt. Coins. Rust.
Then a sound. I startled, half expecting to see – who? Gran? Granddad? Not Mateo. Or Felicity, suddenly arrived with suitcase in hand to surprise me, hello and my love. But no, none of that. Nothing as gentle. Instead, the goose paced across the cobblestones, honking and squonking, sticking its neck out and making a God-awful, ear-quaking racket.
MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS TO SLAM THE DOOR TO KEEP it out of the house. And the others, too, assuming there were others. Geese aren’t solitary birds, are they? They come in flocks. Or is it skeins? Which sounded like something in flight and the one I could see certainly wasn’t. It stalked around the shed, upturning stacks of flower pots, buckets and bins. Everything crashed to the ground, bouncing on the hard stones or shattering to pieces. I checked the lock on the kitchen door. It felt strange to be alone.
I slipped my shoes off and pulled myself up onto the counter so I could watch out the window more easily. With its hard, black beak, the goose hammered on the shed door and then, as I watched, pushed the door open and marched inside. Then, a bedlam of brushes and boxes, more broken pots and an imperious honk. More clatter and a yellow tin clanged across the yard.
Fry’s Cocoa.
I supposed it didn’t really matter how much mess the goose made out there. Everything would need to be sorted through and disposed of one way or another. You couldn’t sell a property full of stuff. Besides, there might be something interesting to take back to Ottawa. Maybe not dented old tins, but something. A lantern. An old tackle box. Something antique.
I looked around the kitchen to see what was there and, on top of the cupboard, I spotted Gran’s blue glass cake-stand. Mateo might like that. In the cupboard, I found an olive-wood cruet set, three pottery jugs, and a gravy boat. The coffee mill, which would certainly be useful. Folded paper napkins wrapped in waxed paper, empty jam jars, scrubbed clean, and a tall berry-dark bottle marked ‘sloe gin’. Behind another door, a stack of lovely teacups – some chipped, but enough to make up a set, certainly. Then, pushed to the back, a row of squat bottles with ground-glass stoppers. Inside, there were dried needles like rosemary, seeds like apple, and dusty flower petals, pink, red and yellow. Nothing familiar, not quite at least, and I wondered what Felicity might make of them. I probably couldn’t get them through customs. Not without knowing what they were. Mateo tried to bring sausage home last summer – a long loop that he bought at a Spanish market. I told him that it was never going to work, that he was really just buying lunch for the airport staff, but he shrugged, looking smug. I was right, of course, though he put on a show for the officials.
‘I promise I will not share it. No risk to the Canadian population, I assure you. It will pass no other lips than my own. Unless you would like to try? I might share with you.’
The customs officer shook his head and Mateo had to leave the sausage behind.
Maybe I should just sell the lot. There was never going to be space in a new condo for these old things. I could call an auction house and have them clear the place. Sell everything and head back home.
Another tin clattered across the yard. Oxo this time.
Home meant Ottawa. Mateo. Work. Home meant routine and habit, and that didn’t have much