all those sunsets and sunrises, and miles between us and the sidewalks below. I agreed to see a model penthouse one afternoon and, after my shift, I waited for him in front of the gallery. I watched the sun catching the spires of the basilica, and a family lingering underneath the spider, their toddler dancing between the legs. I thought about what it would be like to live so close to work and in such a small space, too. Mateo had said that it wouldn’t feel small – not with those views. When he came through the door, he told me I looked lovely in the light, and we walked together through the Market, past all the tourists and the tempting patios.
‘Later,’ he said, squeezing my hand. ‘After we’ve had a look. Maybe we’ll have a decision to make?’
The condo was beautiful, it really was. I liked the view from the kitchen, right up to the Gatineau Hills. He liked the quiet. ‘It feels like there is no one else up here at all. No one living on top of us. No dogs or footsteps or tricycles.’ He laughed and put his arms around my waist and I pressed my mouth into his neck, his skin dry and warm. ‘We could be happy here. Alone on the top.’
Out the window, I could see the goose grazing between the apple trees. I felt hungry. The fridge, unsurprisingly, was empty. The lawyer’s letter had also mentioned that all the perishables had been cleared away. Not words to send to a bereaved family, I thought. There must be a better way of describing a scrubbed kitchen.
I dug my own meagre supplies out of my backpack. A roll of biscuits. Two apples. A bottle of wine. I’d need more or tomorrow I wouldn’t be fit for purpose. There was a fish and chip shop in the village, so I found my coat and flicked all the lights on before closing the door behind me. It wasn’t yet properly evening, but I didn’t like the idea of walking into the house in the dark. Overhead, more geese crossed the sky, a dark V on the bright air, their rusty voices calling.
MATRON CLAIMED TO BE MOTHERLY, BUT SHE HADN’T a clue. My mum never put her foot down. She had no God-forbidding anything. She was much quieter than that.
Ahead of me, a gaggle of student nurses made their way down the corridor, looking pert and starched. From their chatter, I could tell they were due up in Maternity where they’d watch the ward nurses teach new mothers how to swaddle properly. Not Matron, though. No babies for her. I could imagine her eating them, with her cracked red lips, her pocked chin, and her eyes like lift buttons behind those thick plastic glasses. Standing behind the nursing desk, she watched every footfall on the ward, utterly unsparing. To get the attention of errant junior nurses, she snapped tongue depressors. She never drank tea. That afternoon, she’d spent her five o’clock sermon on me, filling my ears with her God-forbids. She said she was being maternal. I should be more respectful. I shouldn’t look up when receiving instruction, shouldn’t distract or interrupt, merely pay better attention and perform. My job was to trot along behind the doctors with my neat nurse’s basket, carrying the requisite tongue depressors, thermometers, scissors, and gauze. I was to be careful. Take notes. Agree. My questions were not needed. The litany ended, Matron attempted a smile.
‘I know I must sound like a proper old battleaxe,’ she said. ‘But do try to take it on board. Just a little nudge to the straight and narrow and you will be happily with us a long, long time.’
She patted my sentenced hand and released me down the corridor.
I walked slowly and thought about my mother. I pictured her out by the bay, tall in my father’s old trousers with the hems tucked into black wellies and her hands reaching up, picking sea buckthorn. Too early yet this year, of course. The berries would still be plumping back home and my mother focussed on raspberries in the garden, but when I conjured her, I saw her by the sea. I saw how the wind caught wisps from her bound hair and how small clouds scudded across the sky above her like impossible stepping stones set against the blue. She always took her time picking berries, making the day last as long as it might, and when I was little, I would be there at her feet, digging out caves in the sand dunes, hoping to find rabbits or buried treasure. Now in that bleached corridor, I remembered the berries’ sharp stickiness and their smell like sour wine. Mum mixed them with sugar and cooked them down to make a marmalade bright as oystercatchers’ bills. I missed her marmalade and all her jams – raspberry and bramble, blackcurrant from the manse garden, jellies from rosehips, haws and sloes from every hedgerow along the coast. At home, Mum kept them on a high cupboard shelf, closed away to keep their colour, and later in my Edinburgh flat, I set them along the window sill so they could cast their stained-glass colours on the cold floor. Here, I bought grape jelly at Steinberg’s and spread it on white bread.
Outside the hospital, the afternoon was hazy, and the road filled with fast cars and buses. When my hospital contract came for the agency, I thought the road name completely romantic. Côte-des-Neiges. The side of snows. It had been the name of a long-ago village, sitting halfway up the hillside, looking down on Montreal. It must have been where the winter snows piled thickest, I thought, finding it on a map. There was a cemetery, too, called Notre Dame des Neiges, which made my heart almost break with a cold kind of loneliness. Now, walking the road every day to the bus stop after my shift, it was the width that held my eye. So very Canadian. So much space for anyone that wanted it. If I could pick up Aberlady with my fingers, all her crow-stepped roofs and whitewashed houses, the little kirk and the ancient trees, if I could carry her here and lay her down in this wide-open road, how much room would she take up? How little. With my back to the hospital and the mountain behind, there was no horizon here and so much space.
But Aberlady was moon-far away, remote and removed. Or rather, I was. I was the one who had done the leaving, after all. Gave my notice in an insufficient letter to Dr Ballater, and shuffled off. Sold my car, bought a ticket and packed my trunk full of nursing textbooks and uniforms, too – though of course they were the wrong ones. Matron soon set me straight and ensured I had the correct hem-length.
A bus pulled up to the stop and I ran down towards it, waving to catch the driver’s attention. He waited and laughed when I stepped up into the bus.
‘Every day, I get a running nurse or two,’ he said. ‘All the pretty nurses. It’s a good route.’
I forced a half-smile and found a seat towards the back. The windows were open and, as the bus pulled away from the kerb, the air felt surprisingly cool. It was often crowded in the late afternoon, but that day there weren’t many folk on the bus. Summer holidays, perhaps. Everyone away at cottages, spending time by the lakes. Some of the nurses had been talking about cottage weekends, which sounded delightful. Canoes and campfires and hikes in the woods. Everything I might have imagined, but not yet found. Early days, I thought. There would be plenty of time.
When I’d told my parents about my Canadian job, Dad had asked if that meant I was turning down Dr Ballater.
‘Of course, she is, Stanley, and it’s no bad thing,’ Mum said. ‘He hasn’t tried anything with you, has he? Has he been pestering you?’
‘No, nothing like that. He’s been a gentleman. He’s just not … It’s not … It’s hard to explain.’
Dad cleared his throat. ‘You want an adventure,’ he said, softly.
‘I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.’
Mum didn’t return to the question after that, nor did she try to talk me out of anything. Instead, she helped me make lists of things I would need, even things I would like: novels, toffees, nylons, a pair of white sunglasses.
