On Canaan's Side Read Free

own breasts, somehow. Terrible, very terrible.
    ‘It is not always possible to know exactly what you are looking at,’ said Mr Dillinger, his body visibly shaking.
    Then he said nothing.
    ‘I apologise,’ he said. ‘Please forgive me.’
    ‘For what?’ I said. ‘I am very sorry what happened to your mother and sisters.’
    ‘I came to try and say some words about Bill,’ he said, his head down.
    ‘There’s no need,’ I said.
    Because of course there are no words of consolation, not really.
    Then he seemed to shake his head at the next thing he thought to say, and the next, and so continued to say nothing.
    I sat very quietly. I didn’t want to cry in front of him for one thing. Tears have a better character cried alone. Pity can sometimes be more wolf than dog. I wonder if I were to have an X-ray at the little hospital, would the machine see my grief? Is it like a rust, a rheum about the heart?
    At last he bestirred himself, and his face broke out into a warm smile. His blue eyes lifted their lids, those very eyes he had mentioned.
    ‘Mrs Bere, perhaps I have taken up too much of your time?’
    He rose nimbly from the chair, eliciting from it a halfmusical squeak, and stared down at me. He seemed to be waiting for an answer, but my throat was stuffed with silence. Then he nodded his head, bent down towards me, and patted my arm very briefly. Then he went silently into the hall and away out into the dusty brightness of the day. The light of the Hamptons, with the lustre of a pearl.
    Discretion.
     

    When he was gone I took down the book he had given me years before. I had never read it, as indeed he had predicted the day he gave it to me. He had been coming up my lane, he had said, after a long walk by the sea, the beach in a great shroud of fog, just the way he liked it. He had seen a little wren going in and out of a hole in the old roadway wall. Stretching away from it, he said, was the vast potato field. Stretching the other way, the great series of dunes and saltwater canals. Above this tiny bird was the colossal, clearing sky of the Hamptons, the fog being dispersed by the huge engines of the sunlight. This, he had thought, was a bird that didn’t know how small it was, that existed in an epic landscape, and believed itself to have the dimensions of a hero. This was a bird, he thought, that only read epics. And for some reason, best known to himself, whether he associated me with that bird, I don’t know, or because I merely lived next to it, that very same afternoon he had decided to bring me a gift, a red-leather-bound volume of Pope’s Homer.
    ‘You may read it, or not read it, that is not part of our contract.’
    The contract he referred to, I believe, was the contract of friendship.
    I smoothed the beautiful leather under my hand:
Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring

Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!

    The light sat on the myriad cobbles of the parade ground as if there were a bright penny balanced on each one. I was standing with my sisters and brother in a shock of vaguely made-up dresses and a slight stab at male grandeur. Our mother was dead my whole life and there was only my father’s hand and eye to manage these dark matters. It was I think the day my father was made chief superintendent, and we had moved that morning into our new quarters in Dublin Castle, because we were to be denizens of that place. It was a lovely square flower-pink house and I was still so young that I had spent the morning showing my dolls the rooms. But I don’t quite know what age I was. My brother Willie seems young enough too in my mind’s eye, so it was certainly before the Great War. But all that, whenever it was, before and after, was nothing to the emotion that filled me at the sight of my father in his new dress uniform. There was no guesswork in that. The commissioner, dressed as my father said ‘in a London suit of the finest sort’, had come over from said London and was