Latitudes of Melt by Joan Clark

Author:Joan Clark [Clark, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37535-3
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2000-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

I had a hard time leaving Stanley, but I was expected to return to my job at the nursing home. I told Nancy that I was thinking of leaving Ocean View altogether in order to stay with Stanley, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said she would move to Beachy Cove and wouldn’t leave until he was ready to return to work, which she didn’t think would be very long.

Warren asked Stan if he wanted to see what remained of the wreck of the Florizel, which was off Cappahayden; this was a dive they had often talked of doing together.

“I won’t be diving again.”

“They say when you fall off a horse, you should get back on again.”

“No more diving.”

“What about going back to work? You can’t sit out in Beachy Cove forever.”

No, he couldn’t, but he understood why his mother had refused to leave Trepassey after his father’s death, why she had wanted to stay close to the Bay of Souls. Though he’d taken Anna’s ashes to Florence, she was still here, in the cries of the seagulls, in the mist and the fog. Any day now she would walk out of the water, wild-eyed, with seaweed tangled in her hair, a merwoman recovering from amnesia.

A month after Anna died, Jeff Jones, the engineer who had taken a submarine beneath the polar ice cap, called from the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge to say he was looking for a Ph.D. student to undertake ice research in the Antarctic next year. “Are you interested?”

“I’ll think about it.” Once Stan had wanted a Ph.D., and he’d wanted to work out of the Scott Polar; now he didn’t care if he ever did.

“Don’t think about it too long. I can give you a week to decide.”

It was Nancy who decided.

“You’d be a fool not to take him up on it,” she said. “It would give you a chance to spend some time in Cambridge and it would be good for you to get away. You could visit Sheila in Cork.”

He was thinking that if he left Newfoundland, he would have to give up the house in Beachy Cove, and wondered what he would do with Anna’s things. He couldn’t bear to part with her things.

“Stan. I’m talking about Sheila. I’m worried about her.”

“Why?”

“She’s throwing her life away on this Irish writer, keeping house for him and some students. I don’t want her making the same mistake I did.”

The thought made him wince: was Sheila a mistake?

“If you were in Cambridge, you could nip across to see her. You could let me know how she is. You could tell me what you think of Kevin Byrne.”

“It would depend on when I go to the Antarctic.”

“I’ll help you with Anna’s things. You can keep whatever you want at my house.”

He kept the pasta and cappuccino maker, the jars of oil, the cookbooks, but gave her clothes to the Harbour Light and sent her jewellery to Luisa Crump except for her wedding ring, which he wore around his neck.

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