The Birthday Lunch Read online

  ALSO BY JOAN CLARK

  Fiction

  The Victory of Geraldine Gull

  Eiriksdottir

  Latitudes of Melt

  An Audience of Chairs

  Short fiction

  From a High Thin Wire

  Swimming Toward the Light

  Novels for children

  The Hand of Robin Squires

  Wild Man of the Woods

  The Moons of Madeleine

  The Dream Carvers

  The Word for Home

  Road to Bliss

  Picture books

  Thomasina and the Trout Tree

  The Leopard and the Lily

  Snow (with Kady MacDonald Denton)

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2015 Joan Clark

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2015 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Clark, Joan, author

  The birthday lunch / Joan Clark.

  ISBN 978-0-345-80956-8

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-80958-2

  I. Title.

  PS8555.L37B57 2015 C813’.54 C2014-906410-1

  Cover images: (cake) © Kemi H Photography / Getty Images; (cherries) © Wifred Morgan / Dreamstime.com

  v3.1

  For Diane Martin

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  I

  Hal McNab made love to his wife for the last time the morning of the day she was killed. Lily preferred making love in the mornings, in the dreamy space between wakefulness and sleep. Morning or nighttime were one and the same to Hal, but he went along with his wife’s preference, though it meant having to wait until Lily stirred before his hands and lips began travelling a body whose terrain he knew by heart, having explored every path, curve and hollow during their thirty-three years of marriage.

  By nine-thirty that morning the top sheet had been tugged from its moorings and their naked bodies were slippery with sweat both from lovemaking and from the moist creek air that had been easing through the open window while they slept. The creek was one of three that meandered through town before joining the Kennebecasis, a tributary of the mighty Saint John whose waters rose in the Appalachians of Maine and emptied into the Bay of Fundy. The sloping hills on either side of the Kennebecasis were patched with hayfields and pastures where cattle and horses grazed. In such a countryside a traveller could easily come across a covered wooden bridge built long before snowplows were used to clear the roads. But on this late June morning, no one was thinking of winter. The cloudless blue sky, the soporific warmth, the siren sea air drifting inland across fields and lawns had cast a spell of perpetual summer upon the town. Softened by the heat, townspeople seldom gave a thought to their Loyalist forebears, the settlers who had endured far worse winters, fording icy rivers, burning snowclad forests to open up farmland and to make space for the town they named Sussex after the fifth son of Mad King George.

  Before heading for the kitchen to put on the coffee, Hal belts his bathrobe, a habit drummed into him by his mother, Grace, who insisted her sons cover their manhood even as their father, Murray, strode naked down the hallway, barged into the bathroom, noisily urinated and flushed the toilet, without a thought given to the unlucky son who happened to be under the shower. The belted bathrobe now has less to do with Grace than with Hal’s wish to protect the innocence of the next-door daughters whose upstairs windows are a scant thirty feet away from his kitchen windows. The new neighbours moved in four months ago but there are still no curtains on their bedroom windows. There are no curtains on the kitchen windows either. Lily claims they would shut out the light, making the kitchen darker than it already is. Instead she has put up a frilled valance that matches the ivy wallpaper. Easy for Lily to ignore the next-door girls when they streak past the upstairs windows, naked as the day they were born. Much harder for Hal to ignore, but he knows better than trying to explain the prudery drummed into him by his mother. When his daughter, Claudia, was the age of the next-door children, she would run around the house after a bath, dancing and wiggling her bare bottom. Once she tried to climb onto Hal’s lap and when he pushed her away, she ran crying to her mother. No need to act like Billy Goat Gruff, Lily scolded.

  Hal spoons coffee into the basket, plugs in the percolator and heads for the shower. After a shave he splashes on Old Spice, Q-tips his ears and conceals the bald spot by side-combing his hair. “Hello, William,” he says to the mirror, a joke he sometimes uses to remind himself that he is handsome, a fact that is seldom acknowledged by his wife or children. Hal has never seen a William Holden movie but Jackie, the Scotiabank teller, often teases him about looking like the actor and later today, when he steps onto the carpet of the Admiral Beatty Hotel with Lily on his arm, Hal wants to believe it.

  Laverne’s brother-in-law is an early riser and most mornings by seven o’clock she hears running water from the upstairs bathroom at the back of the house, which means that soon he will be leaving for work. On weekdays Laverne and Hal leave the house on either side of eight-thirty, but not this morning because according to her wristwatch, which is punctual, it is almost ten.

  Although she won’t be going to school today, out of habit Laverne has already finished her morning ablutions: chin hair plucked, face powdered and rouged, red pincurls brushed out. She has always taken care with her appearance and today has chosen to wear a denim skirt and cotton blouse, casual clothing she never wears in the classroom. Some of the younger teachers try to cozy up to students by wearing T-shirts and sneakers. Not Laverne. Students are more apt to respect a teacher who looks professional, and on school days she wears tailored slacks, a silk blouse or pullover, a gold chain and pearl-sized gold earrings.

  Earlier this morning when Laverne was in her tiny kitchen apartment drinking a cup of coffee and gazing out the open casement window, she saw Sophie Power come down the veranda steps, pass the lilac bush and head downtown. Laverne rarely sees Sophie and apart from the appearance of half the rental payment on her monthly bank statement, she ignores the fact that a tenant occupies the first floor apartment directly below Lily and Hal’s.

  The Old Steadman House was built by Grover Steadman, a lumber baron with a large family. Originally the bedrooms on the second floor were occupied by Grover, his wife and children while the servants’ quarters were attached to the back of the house and connected to the second floor by a stairway that now leads to the upstairs kitchen. Following the Steadmans’ departure, the house was divided into apartments which for many years were occupied by a succession of families. Dur
ing this time, the servants’ quarters fell into disrepair. Laverne could have chosen to live in what is now Sophie Power’s apartment, but instead chose to live in what had been the servants’ quarters. Not only did those particular rooms provide the amount of space she wanted, they were connected to her sister’s apartment by the inside stairway. There was also the benefit of a U-shaped space between Laverne’s rooms and the house. Having occupied a trailer for thirty-one years, Laverne was enticed by the fact that not only would she would be living close to her sister, she would also have a garden of her own, and once the renovations were finished, she lost no time in planting a cherry tree and a variety of herbs in the new soil beneath the casement window.

  On weekday mornings, Laverne seldom has the pleasure of drinking a second cup of coffee while gazing out the kitchen window. She drinks her coffee standing up, not sitting on the kitchen stool admiring her small garden whose centrepiece is the spindly cherry tree, which for the first time holds the promise of fruit. So far the cherries are bullet hard, but if the heat wave continues, they may be edible in a week or two. Although the garden is still in shade, the basil is beginning to droop, and sweat is already gathering in Laverne’s armpits and behind her knees. Closing the casement window, she moves into the interior of the apartment. Here the light, a smudge of greenish gold on the wall opposite the side window, is muted and soothing. The room is cool but it is not its coolness that Laverne finds most pleasing. It is the room’s secret, a secret she has shared with no one, not even her sister, Lily.

  ——

  Four years ago, Laverne accepted an invitation from Jan Pronk, a former teaching colleague, to visit Amsterdam. She was immediately impressed by Holland, a compact, efficient country where, unlike France, her former summer destination, people spoke English and there was little risk of being corrected or dismissed.

  It was Jan’s lover, Lucas Verduyn, who showed Laverne Pieter de Hooch’s Woman and Child in an Interior in the Rijksmuseum. Lucas proclaimed that of all the paintings by the Dutch Masters, de Hooch’s painting was his favourite. “The painting is so calm and restful,” Lucas told her, “I would live inside it if I could.” Laverne was captivated by the painting and by the idea of living inside it. And she was more captivated by Lucas’s love of art than she was with Lucas. She was not in love with Lucas or with Jan. She had never been in love, never risked a full-blown love affair. There was too much to lose if a love affair didn’t work out, which is why she settled for an infatuation, usually with a younger man. When she taught school in Bridgewater in her thirties, Laverne had a crush on Bill Nauss, the handsome young teacher fresh out of college who accompanied her to staff parties and was a regular bridge partner until the night he drove her home. When she invited him into her trailer for a cup of tea, he pinned her against the padded settee, smacked her wetly on the lips and squeezed her breasts. Offended that he had taken such liberties, she ordered him to leave the trailer at once. From then on, she attended staff parties alone.

  By the time she reached her fifties, Laverne concluded that it was more rewarding to fall in love with a painting than with a man, and after Lucas showed her de Hooch’s masterpiece, she made subsequent, solitary visits to the Rijksmuseum. It was there that she decided to renovate the servants’ quarters to replicate the painting. She had already told Lily she would co-sign the mortgage agreement only if it stipulated that renovation expenses would be shared between them. After years of living in a trailer and scrimping and saving for annual trips to Europe, she deserved to live within the walls of beauty. And she deserved to live close to Lily.

  When Lily was a girl, she was given to making dreamy pronouncements out of the blue and not long after their mother died, she took her sister’s hand and said, “When we are grown up, Laverne, you and I will live in a little white house by the sea. There will be lupines and wild roses and a white fence.” For years Laverne held on to that dream until Hal entered the picture and the prospect of living in the little white house vanished.

  Although she hadn’t been unhappy with her solitary life in the trailer, Laverne was excited by the prospect of living in rooms very like those Pieter de Hooch painted, rooms that were functional, spare and welcomed the light. The next two summers were spent travelling to Holland and directing carpenters to renovate the apartment the way she wanted. Of course there were grumbles and whispered asides by the workmen when she insisted two small windows be installed just so in the U-shaped space between her apartment and the house. Laverne was reassured by the grumbles because it meant the carpenters had no idea they were helping her create an illusion. But the illusion will not be complete until she finds the blue pillow she wants for the kitchen chair, and the Friesland baseboard tiles for the wall between the kitchen and pantry, items she expects to find later this summer in the country she has adopted as her favourite. Holland, not Canada, is now her favourite. For a time Quebec—which Laverne has always thought of as a separate country—was her favourite but after a succession of summer schools in the province, her enthusiasm waned and she moved on to France where she spent summers at the Sorbonne until she became disillusioned by the arrogance of the French who winced if a word was mispronounced or the subjunctive mistakenly used.

  Although the summer holidays begin the day after tomorrow, Laverne has chosen to spend the day at home and earlier this morning she called in sick, which she rarely does. She is not sick, she is fed up. Every year the principal, Walter Coombs, assumes Laverne will be the events timer for Sports Day and she has finally put her foot down. She is tired of being taken for granted, of being expected to take on jobs other staff members refuse to do. As the hardest-working teacher on the staff, Laverne has done more than her share of recess and lunchroom duty, not to mention after-school remedial work. It is the same for her colleagues Jessie and Ivy, who are also single and therefore expected to carry a heavier load than married teachers who are often excused from extracurricular activities due to family responsibilities. Well, Lily is family, her only family, and Laverne is determined that nothing will prevent her and her sister from having a special birthday lunch.

  Of course Laverne will return to school tomorrow to pass out report cards and instruct students to clear out desks before they head for home. And next week she will invigilate matriculation exams. By then desks will be stacked in hallways, blackboards wiped clean, floors swept with Dustbane. Except for the matriculating students, the school will be empty, the more fortunate children in town having been whisked away to beaches and lakeside cottages while the less fortunate children will have to make do with the Kiwanis swimming pool and makeshift tents pitched in backyards.

  By the time Hal returns to the bedroom, a mug of coffee in either hand, Lily is leaning against the pillows, her long dark hair covering her breasts, a book propped against her knees. Hal guesses a novel but does not ask the title or what the story is about. He does not know how to talk about a novel, cannot think what to say that will not make him look foolish or slow witted. He places his wife’s mug on the bedside table, his own on the dresser while he puts on trousers, open-necked shirt and shoes. Later, when he returns from making the Waterford delivery, he will put on the dress shirt and the tie hanging in the closet.

  When he finishes dressing, Hal fetches the parcel from the back of the closet and holds it up. “This is from Claudia. Happy Birthday, sweetheart,” he says and lays the gift on the bed. Lily abandons the novel, placing it face down on the sheets and picks up the parcel. “What have we here,” she says, playing the game she used to play with their children. Never one to unwrap a parcel carefully, she rips off the paper. “Oh my,” she says, lifting a blue silk blouse and skirt from the box, “a summer suit, and look …” there is no mistaking her delight, “a necklace to match.” Resisting the urge to spill the beans and tell his wife about his birthday surprise, Hal settles for a compliment. “The suit is a perfect match for your eyes,” he says. “Why don’t you wear it today?”

  “I might,” Lily says, which i
s encouraging because sometimes she will mistake a good intention for unwanted advice. Hal finishes his coffee and pockets the car keys. Mindful of how easily time slips by when Lily has her nose in a book, he tells her that he will pick her up at twelve-thirty. “We’ll have lunch at Adair’s and afterwards there will be your birthday surprise.”

  “But Laverne has already asked me for lunch.”

  “Your sister isn’t calling the shots today. After you went to bed, I telephoned her and told her I would be taking you to lunch at Adair’s.”

  “She won’t like it.”

  “But it isn’t her birthday—it’s yours. Do you want to have lunch with her or with me?” There is no question of the three of them having lunch together.

  “With you, of course.”

  “Then it’s settled. I will pick you up at twelve-thirty.”

  “You’ll be at the store?”

  “Not today. I have a delivery in Waterford this morning. The young couple I told you about, the Huntleys, have built a country inn out there.”

  “Oh yes, the Huntleys,” Lily says vaguely. It is only when Hal is halfway down the stairs that she calls, “By the way, I have a two o’clock appointment at the hospital.”

  “On your birthday?”

  “A routine X-ray. After the last bout of pneumonia, Squank insisted I have a lung X-ray twice a year. Remember?”

  “I remember, but I didn’t know the appointment was today.”

  “It won’t take long,” Lily says and returns to The Book of Eve.

  Shackled by the heat, the maples hunch over the driveway as Hal walks beneath them on his way to the garage. Laverne parks her Volkswagen in the driveway. Not Hal. Unwilling to have the Chev Impala sullied by seed pods and bird droppings, he parks his car inside the garage. Lily teases him about the pride he takes in the Chev Impala. Your secret lover, Clarissa Imogene, she says. Lily has always named his cars: the turquoise Nash he drove when they were courting was Natasha; the Dodge Challenger Hal drove when he was on the road selling for Merck Pharmaceuticals, was Delores Christobel. Apart from naming them, Lily has never expressed any interest in the cars or in learning to drive and to be honest, because of the expense of buying and maintaining a second car, Hal has never encouraged her to learn.