Luck by Joan Barfoot

Author:Joan Barfoot
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Contemporary Fiction, Contemporary, Literature & Fiction
ISBN: 0786716460
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Published: 2010-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

Twelve

And so winds down the long second day of Philip Lawrence’s remarkable absence; an absence now recognizably final, no more imagining he’s just out for a few hours or gone for a couple of days, no more sensing his presence either dispersed through the universe or overhead and observing.

Second days tend to be given over to practical arrangements—funeral plans, flower orders, ministerial consultations—and the less diverting but onerous burdens of coming to grips. Absorbing new information. In another sort of household, survivors might turn to each other, hold each other up, join in mutual grief and consolation. In this household, not so. On the second day they have turned away from each other instead, into their own notions, memories, and even some hopes.

Tonight Nora is back in her own bed. Well, for one thing she is disinclined to ask any more favours of Beth, whose fervency about granting those favours has made Nora, perhaps for no good reason, uneasy. Anyway, she has to learn sometime to be alone in this room. A couple of nights ago she made the mistake of sleeping with her back turned to Philip. Now, too late, she lies facing the flattened space he formerly occupied. If she stares long enough, will flatness come to seem normal, or will she always be conjuring Philip’s bulky shape in the night, and would that be comforting or go on being a hard, heavy, constant lump of sorrow? She faces, too, a bewildering kind of solitariness that contains no breathing except her own after so many years of mutual inhalings, exhalings.

This is crushingly, silently, lonely.

Still, is it shameful that while shocked and unconsoled, she is no longer quite surprised? At some point today the empty spaces—Philip’s chair at the table, his place on the sofa, silences rather than voice, laughter, footsteps—have grown less startling. It does seem to be the case that the quality of Nora’s disbelief has become smoother, rounder, less knife-like.

On her second day of widowhood she has had a frenzy of sorting Philip’s possessions and drawing sketch after sketch of them. She has been reminded, yes, that there are a few people outside these walls who perform right, or at least appropriate, acts, and as a result she, Sophie and Beth have some decent food in the house. After dinner, Beth made a pot of tea, naturally, and Nora and Sophie killed another bottle of wine. Nora heard more about the funeral home as Sophie saw it today, and the fellow who runs it, whom Sophie seems charmed by, given that in a low-key, low-voiced way it must be his job to be charming. Sophie remarked that the funeral home is not unlike this house, in that it is large and high-ceilinged and old, and that she thought Philip would have liked Hendrik Anderson’s own living quarters within it; but whatever was she doing in the man’s apartment?

All this has occurred in its unfolding way, but if Nora were going to illustrate and summarize the day with colour and texture, the resulting canvas would be wholly flat black.

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