An Audience of Chairs Page 11

  Behind the woman, Moranna saw Duncan in the distance, returning along the path. The woman saw him too and grabbed Moranna’s hand in hers. “Come, dearie,” she said, “I’ll show you something else.” Moranna allowed herself to be tugged back to the stone circle before disengaging herself from the woman’s grasp.

  “Look now,” the woman said and, spreading her legs, braced her rump against the giant megalith at the centre of the circle. “When it was the time of the month to receive his Seed, the woman waited against this moonstone for the man to shove it in. They didn’t fuck lying down but standing. Like this.” The woman lifted her skirt and began rubbing herself between the legs. “Before he planted his Seed, he primed her.” The woman continued stroking, grinning maniacally, holding Moranna in a feverish spell. Convinced the woman was an ancient crone in disguise, an oracle who guarded the deep well of sex bubbling with seeds of the unborn, Moranna could no more have broken the spell than she could have stopped the seepage between her legs. Bewitched, she wanted to stay within the spell, but abruptly, with a howl of ecstasy, the woman dropped her skirt and slipped away, leaving Moranna dazed and shaken. She felt inexplicably forsaken. She saw a man coming toward her and behind him, walking slowly, a family of five. It took her a moment to realize that the man was Duncan, her husband, her mate. As he came closer, he looked at her with concern, “You’re pale. Are you feeling okay?”

  “Hold me,” Moranna said.

  He put his arms around her and they stood together until the children raced ahead of their parents and began running among the stones.

  Duncan removed the book from his pocket. “Let’s see if we can figure out what these stones mean.” He began reciting theories of Druidic and Norse circles, the juxtapositions of the sun and moon. Moranna made a pretense of listening but her mind was elsewhere—as the woman had said, the meaning of the stones wasn’t found in a book.

  “Callanish is a time wheel,” Duncan said. “It’s a primitive clock.”

  “Yes,” Moranna said absently. She looked across the moor, but there was no sign of the woman.

  After she and Duncan finished tramping among the stones, they returned to the tea house, and Moranna asked the elderly proprietor about the woman.

  Leaning across the counter until his face was close to hers, he said, “That would be Black Morag. She’s off her head. Some call her a witch. A regular nuisance she can be with visitors, going on about mating rituals and the like.” He moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue and Moranna caught an insinuating glint in his eye. “I hope she didn’t give you any trouble.”

  “Oh no,” Moranna replied. “None at all.”

  Her answer seemed to disappoint the proprietor and, straightening up, he adopted a hectoring tone. “You mustn’t judge her. You have to make allowances. She’s crackers, you see.” Pointing to his head, he made a circling motion.

  That night Moranna and Duncan went to bed early and she willed his Seed to enter her womb. She didn’t tell Duncan she had left the diaphragm in the suitcase. She had decided that conception was her decision and hers alone. She didn’t want a discussion about whether they should have a child when she couldn’t explain the decision to herself, let alone him. What had happened to her inside the stone circle defied explanation. Even if she could explain, why should she? The woman at the moonstone had made it clear that the time of mating was the woman’s choice. All that could be said for certain was that when the moment of procreation reached its peak, Moranna lifted her hips and received the Seed.

  PART II

  SIX

  DUNCAN HAD BEEN RIGHT about the Stones of Callanish being a time wheel. Although she was only half listening all those years ago when he was explaining the meaning of the stones, Moranna has since come to think of the Callanish circle as a clock. She doesn’t own a clock, not even a calendar, although she could have picked up a free one at the pharmacy when she went to the village last week after the hullabaloo of New Year’s had passed. But what is the point of having a calendar when she doesn’t bother looking at it, not even on her birthday. She’ll be fifty-nine in June but like Christmas, the occasion will be ignored, as will her daughters’ birthdays, which are a few days apart in March. Years ago Murdoch gave her a watch which she seldom used and when she noticed it was missing, didn’t bother looking for it although it’s likely somewhere in the house. Moranna has no wish to wear a timepiece especially now that they have become a fad. She’s seen the gnomic clocks inside key rings and pens and purse locks being sold in the village and doubts that the owners of these gimmicks know any more about time than she does. In her view, the more people count out their lives in minutes, the less they know about time.

  Because she has lost so much of it to madness, Moranna considers herself an authority on the subject of time. Lost time is how she thinks of the blanked-out collapses she has spent in bed. When she forgets something that happened during a time lapse, she will say to Murdoch or Lottie or Bun, “That must have been when I collapsed from exhaustion.” She will not say the words “mentally ill” aloud—pride forbids her from stigmatizing herself. She has nothing but contempt for those who try to categorize what they think she is, and lecturing her audience of chairs, she’ll say, “It’s ridiculous for the so-called experts to think they can label me as bipolar or manic depressive”—she knows the terms. “As if the essence of who I am can be labelled and stuck into a file or a book.” By now she may well be shouting. “The uniqueness of the self cannot be pigeonholed! The self is always changing, always in transit and it’s preposterous to think it can be nailed down by a definition. Only small minds would think so.” She also rejects the idea that her emotional weather might have been passed on to her by her mother, because to admit it opens the possibility that she might have passed the same weather on to her daughters, who reside in her memory as perfect and unassailable children.

  The years she lost with her children is the only loss that matters to her now. She was not a good mother. She has said it to herself more than once. Not every woman is up to motherhood and she was one of those. It was having to be indispensable that wore her down, the realization that her daughters would be dependent on her until they were adults, which to a young mother seemed an interminable stretch of time. She remembers holding Bonnie after her birth—nine months to the day she was conceived after the visit to the Stones of Callanish. Seeing the squashed and wrinkled baby for the first time, Moranna was gripped by the terrifying reality that the health and well-being of the squalling infant lay in her hands. She never fully recovered from the shock of that moment, and during the years she was looking after her children, the terror and fear would unexpectedly swoop down. That didn’t mean she didn’t love her daughters, because she did, she loved them fiercely, but her ability to translate that love into the practical demands of motherhood failed because it required a dedication to mundane duties she couldn’t sustain. When she looks back on those short years she spent with her children, she thinks of motherhood as a language she couldn’t master. But at no time did her failure to master it lessen the love she felt for her daughters.

  She once wrote a sermon about love that, like the watch, she subsequently misplaced. It was about the different kinds of love and the demands and limitations of each. She remembers making the point that married love was constantly being tested and judged. Not that she was aware that love was being tested and judged during her marriage—at that time in her life she hadn’t closely examined love and assumed she and Duncan loved each other. During the early part of her marriage, she was beguiled by the idea of love, and because she didn’t think of the future except to imagine herself playing one role or another, she mistook her admiration of his ambition for love. She married too young, before she knew anything about the nature of love between a man and a woman.

  She and her lover, Bun, never speak of love; in their years together the word has never been said. Sometimes Moranna thinks they are wary of even speaking of the possibility of love, not bec
ause their relationship is particularly fragile, but because it isn’t. Why tamper with an arrangement that both together and apart suits them both?

  Still, some practical changes are needed. The last time he was here, Bun tried once again to persuade Moranna to have a telephone installed. He said that without a telephone he and Moranna couldn’t stay in touch the way he wanted and that there should be a telephone in the house in case of an emergency. She said she’d think about it but she hasn’t and is only doing so now because she hasn’t heard a word from Bun, not even a message sent through Lottie, which he has managed to do several times during his long absences from Baddeck.

  There used to be a telephone on the kitchen wall where the fist-sized hole is now. After her daughters were taken away, Moranna used it to telephone the Frasers, demanding to know where her children were. For weeks she telephoned their Chester number several times a day and failing to reach them tried the Armdale number. When the Frasers unlisted their numbers, she repeatedly telephoned the brewery office until Malcolm came on the line and told her that if she didn’t stop bothering the family, she would be charged with harassment. When Murdoch got wind of these calls, he had Moranna’s telephone service cut. His reason was that she was too impulsive to be trusted with a telephone. In a frenzy of impotent rage she pried the telephone off the wall with a crowbar, leaving the dangling wires as silent testimony to her brother’s high-handedness.

  Murdoch has since changed his mind and like Bun wants her telephone reinstalled. He says he’s tired of driving to Baddeck to settle a problem when a telephone call would serve as well. So far Moranna has stubbornly ignored her brother’s argument. The main reason she’s been able to manage life on her own terms is because she isn’t distracted by a telephone or a television, leaving her free to use time in ways that suit herself.

  When he’s here, Bun makes a weekly call to Fox Harbour to talk to his mother, Doris, using the pay phone in the corridor outside the Thistledown Pub. In their early days together, Moranna made the mistake of ridiculing Bun for telephoning his mother every week. “So you’re a mama’s boy,” she sneered, “tied to her apron strings.”

  Bun flinched but Moranna was too smug to notice. He didn’t say a word but went out to the workshop he’d built himself in the barn, slept on the sofa and took his meals in the village. Moranna seldom considers how what she says or does affects others and, for this reason, almost never apologizes. But after three days of being shunned, she went out to the workshop and apologized. In a rare moment of insight, she said, “Sometimes I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “You’re right about that,” Bun said.

  Bun avoids writing letters but from time to time he sends Moranna a postcard with a note scribbled on the back. Although she never writes to him, she expects to receive these cards, and when none have appeared in her mailbox by the second week in January, she decides to go to the village and telephone Fox Harbour. While she waits for the road to be ploughed, she sits at the piano board and plays one of Chopin’s Ballades. Sitting erect, no swaying or humming with Chopin, she picks out the high prancing notes with the right hand, using the left to chord. Chopin requires intense concentration, and as her fingers reach for the notes she feels she’s searching for an antidote to the immense sadness that is at the heart of his work, and her life.

  When the Bay Road is clear, Moranna trudges into the village, pulling the sled for the newspapers she expects to bring home. On her way to the Thistledown, she stops at the post office to inquire if there’s a postcard for her. The woman at the counter informs her that there’s no postcard and that if one had come in it would have been delivered to her mailbox. Like most villagers in Baddeck, Maisy McLeod knows Moranna by sight and is careful to treat her firmly but politely.

  Moranna plods to the Thistledown, disappointed to have been let down by the post office once again.

  For years after Bonnie and Brianna were taken away, Moranna wrote them letters that were really short messages signed Love, Mama—that was what her daughters called her, Mama.

  My darling daughters, I miss you and hope we will be together soon.

  My dear little girls, I want you to know that I love you and am longing to see you.

  At first, when she assumed Duncan was still in the picture, she drew stick figures of their family, the four of them touching with twig fingers.

  Weeks and months passed, then one year after another, and although she continued writing sporadic letters to her children, there were no replies. It was as if her daughters had vanished into thin air. She didn’t know where they were or if her messages had reached them. Eventually, she became convinced that the post office was withholding her mail, that Bonnie had printed out replies to her letters, which had been confiscated. On a bleak March morning five years after Duncan left her, she wrote a note to the postman claiming she was terminally ill, “near death’s door” was how she put it, and asked him if he could possibly deliver the mail to her house. She sealed the note inside an envelope addressed to the postman and put it in the mailbox at the end of the drive.

  Because her father had arranged for the tax and electrical bills to be sent to him, Moranna rarely received mail and months went by without the postman coming to her door. On a warm day in July, the postman, Max Freeman, a small wispy man dressed in shorts, pedalled along the Bay Road, whistling like a cheerful elf. Remembering the note Moranna had left in the mailbox, he turned into her driveway.

  Moranna was sitting behind the house on the swing her father had put up for her children—she often sat on the swing or the hobby horse where she felt closer to her daughters. When she heard the postman whistling up the driveway, she streaked into the kitchen and sat at the cluttered table. Leaning the bike against the woodpile, Max leapt up the steps and tapped on the door, holding a letter from Duncan. When he saw the woman in a nightgown—there were days when Moranna never dressed—slumped at the table, he stepped inside and inquired, “Are you all right, Missus?” At that time Moranna wasn’t well known in Baddeck, and approaching her, he held out the letter. She didn’t take it and he was leaning over to place the letter on the piano board when her hands shot out and grabbed his wrists, forcing them behind his back with a strength that shocked him. Before he could recover his wits, she had him belted to a chair and his hands tied with a scarf. He sat, eyes bulging, sweat beading his forehead. “Why are you doing this?” he squeaked, having at last found a voice.

  She straddled a chair, facing him, her elbows hooked over the back. Although she was three or more feet from him, he could smell the sourness of her body and the filth of her nightgown. With her wild, uncombed hair, she looked like a gigantic, grotesque spider.

  “You are in possession of my mail,” she said. “And I want it back.”

  “What mail?”

  “The letters my children sent me that you have purloined.”

  Max didn’t know what “purloined” meant, but he nevertheless stated his case.

  “I only deliver the mail. I don’t sort it. I have no control over the mail.”

  “So you say.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Maybe if you sit there long enough you’ll tell me where the letters sent to me have gone.”

  She made no move to get up and stared at him balefully while he waited her out. Without moving his head, he allowed his gaze to wander the room. Beside him on the plank floor was a square hole with an open trap door leading to a cold cellar that used to be common in old farmhouses. He shivered when the sweep of cool air fanned his bare legs. Why was the trap door open? Did she plan to shove him down there? To keep his mind off that prospect he looked at the table beside him piled with dirty dishes and scraps of food. Among the jumble was a long bread knife. The knife unnerved him, and forcing his gaze to move away, he looked at the far end of the room where an axe was stuck into a two-by-four and there was a pile of rubble on the floor. Clearly he was inside the house of a dangerous madwoman who had weapons close at hand.<
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  After what seemed an interminable length of time during which Max tried to loosen the scarf without making any noticeable movements, his captor asked if he had anything to confess.

  “I have nothing to confess. I only deliver the mail.”

  “Oh well then, you might as well go,” she said and getting up from the chair wandered down the hallway. She seemed to have lost interest in him and forgotten that she had strapped him to a chair.

  “Aren’t you going to untie me?” he bleated. If she were to stay out of the room long enough, he might succeed in loosening the scarf but he didn’t want to take the chance of her changing her mind.

  She returned grudgingly and, untying his hands, again wandered back down the hall. Max unbuckled the belt and, as he told people later, hightailed out of there before she came after him with the bread knife or the axe.

  He laid charges against Moranna, which Ian MacKenzie persuaded him to drop, writing him a hefty cheque and explaining that if his daughter was brought before a judge she would be committed to the asylum. “That’s where she belongs,” Max said, but he took the money and withdrew the charge. Within a month, a bundle of returned letters held together with elastic bands appeared in Moranna’s mailbox. Apparently a postal worker had stuffed the letters into a bag and it had fallen behind a shelf where it lay undetected for years. But this only accounted for some of the letters, the others apparently having been destroyed.

  The pay phone is in a hallway outside the Thistledown Pub, which is largely deserted during winter, allowing time for a lengthy phone call—although she seldom uses a telephone, Moranna becomes anxious if anyone waiting to use it listens to her end of the conversation.