The Custodian of Paradise Read Online Free Page B

I have as many pots and pans as I need,” I said. “I have dishes, utensils, oil lamps. Those trunks hold a lot. And they’re very heavy.”
    “There’s a stove and a chimney.”
    What did he see when he looked at me? A lame woman who he probably thought was in her fifties, though I was only forty-one. Surely the tallest woman he had ever seen. I wondered if he thought, as many men still did, that I was beautiful. I wanted to assure him that he would not be leaving me to die. I looked closely at him. I doubted he was capable of keeping from me or anyone else the sort of secret I suspected him of keeping, of entering into some sort of clandestine arrangement with an outsider.
    He was clearly not going to ask why I was doing this, why it was necessary to come all the way out here, to impose upon myself such absolute isolation, just to write a book.
    “Do you want to know what my book will be about?” I said, thinking that, by playing out my own pretence, I might discover his.
    “I can’t read or write,” he said. “Not one word. Not even my own name.”
    I saw instantly that it was true. I felt myself flushing with shame. I had embarrassed him. Not just now, but when I spoke of the note that I would give him concerning my supplies. And when I asked if anyone had written to him about me. I wondered if to apologize would only make things worse.
Not one word. Not even my own name
.
    “The rest can read and write,” he said. “Irene and the children. She teaches them.”
    Then books were for women and children, sissified pursuits that no man could be bothered with.
    I felt another spurt of panic. All of this might, for perfectly innocent reasons, be a charade, the loading of my things into the boat, the trip to Loreburn. He might think that, not in my right mind, I would be less upset at losing Loreburn if I could see for myself what it was like. Irene, even now, might be preparing for me a place to stay in Quinton, a room in their house, and sending for someone from St. John’s to come and bring me home.
    I faced into the sea breeze and the spray that it blew back from the prow and from the crests of waves that were so black I forgot we were sailing on salt water until I licked the droplets from my lips.
    “What do you think of the war?” I said.
    He shrugged.
    I wondered if he had thought of enlisting in spite of Irene and the children. I knew of many married men with children who had enlisted, and of some who considered a man a coward if he cited his family as his reason for staying home.
    “Have you ever seen any submarines out here, Patrick? Ours or theirs? Or any of our patrol boats?”
    He gave no sign that he had heard me.
    “A German sub was sunk by airplanes just a few miles from St. John’s,” I said. “About a hundred yards offshore at a place called Bell Island. Hundreds of people watched the planes drop their bombs. Everyone cheered when the wreckage of the sub came bobbing up.”
    Still no response.
    “A sub could surface right in front of us. Or a periscope.” Periscope. I felt that I had just warned him about some mythological creature believed in by people who knew nothing of the sea.
    He looked over his shoulder, glanced at my thick-soled boot and at the cane that I had carried like a spear as he helped me climb down into his boat in Quinton. I sat with the cane planted in front of me, both hands on the silver knob, one atop the other, a pose that required me to spread my legs so that my dress hung limp between them. Churchill’s pose, which I had seen in newspaper photographs. Not that I was aping Churchill. I had sat like this when I was a girl, when the cane was just an affectation. Sent to me from New York one Christmas, the first Christmas of her absence, by my mother, along with a note that read: “I think it will suit you some day.”
    “I’ll be able to manage, in spite of this,” I said, tapping my right boot with the cane. He looked out across the water. He seemed mortified,