The Island Walkers by John Bemrose Page B

towards a belvedere on the brow of the hill. The untended garden belonged to the old Bannerman estate, which was now a nursing home: a tangled place where the surviving flowers fought silently with the weeds.
    Mann was going on about the arrowheads and other artifacts he had found in the hill. Someone from the museum in Toronto was coming to have a look at the site. Joe nodded automatically, scarcely hearing.
    Now she was in the belvedere, kneeling with one knee on the narrow wooden bench, looking into the valley. As they approached, she turned. Each time Joe saw her face it seemed new to him, a revelation. Again he saw that dart of amusement in her eyes, as if their arrival were the beginning of an adventure she had half-expected. But there was also a candour that chilled him. He wondered if she remembered him from the river.
    Mann introduced himself and shook her hand. “This is Joe Walker, one of your classmates.”
    “Yes,” she said, putting out her hand. Joe took it, and was conscious of its firmness in his, and of the coldness of his own.
    She looked back to Mann. “I was just thinking about what you said. About how Shade fell in love with this place. Do you think certain places call to us?”
    “I suppose it depends to some degree on your individual psychology,” Mann said, “and of course there’s the general human need for shelter. But there’s also something beyond those things. People, at least most of them, don’t like to pitch their tents just anywhere.”
    She was watching the teacher with her head a little to the side, ignoring Joe. He stood like a servant, miserable and grateful.
    “Take this place,” Mann said, gesturing to the valley behind her. “There’s something about it that satisfies a need.”
    “Beauty,” she suggested.
    “Yes, maybe it’s as simple as that,” the teacher said, his eyebrows going up.
    “Or as complicated.” She was looking at Mann with a kind of fencing irony, clearly enjoying herself.
    “Indeed. I wasn’t born here, not like Joe,” Mann said. Her gaze flicked over Joe and returned to the teacher. “But when I came — well, I was rather like Shade — I felt I belonged here.”
    “It reminds me a little of Europe,” she said.
    “Oh yes? What places?”
    “Oh …” She trailed another, idle look over Joe. He had never in his life heard people discuss beauty as a thing in itself, as though it were possible to meet Beauty walking down Bridge Street. “The Dordogne, maybe, bits of Italy. You know, limestone and bridges. That old feeling.”
    “Yes!” Mann said, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. When he smiled, which he did rarely, his face was radiant. “I’ve often felt that myself. The feeling of lives that have gone before. Of course the spirit is different here, and I’m afraid the food isn’t as good.”
    “I don’t suppose,” she said.
    “Where are you from?” Mann said. He glanced at Joe, as if inviting him to participate.
    She gave a short laugh at that, as if this were at once the most simple and most complex question in the world: really, it had no answer. “I was born in Montreal,” she said, with an arch emphasis, as if getting born were a kind of joke, “but my father’s worked all over the place. Abroad mostly. I’ve lived almost as much in Europe as here. My mother’s French.”
    “Aha,” Mann said. He looked again at Joe, with a kind of shining blankness. Joe felt he was invisible to them both. He had never been to Europe, which was a mythical land to him, a land of wars and towers. He felt completely out of his depth. He shifted and smiled vaguely as they talked, and hoped she couldn’t smell his shirt.
    “So what brings you to Attawan?” Mann said.
    “Oh, my father’s working here now. He’s an accountant. His company’s just bought some mills here.”
    “Bannerman’s,” Mann said. “Joe’s father works there too.”
    “Really,” she said, sounding not at all interested. But at least she looked at him