Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 87

Louis knocked on the frame of Fanny’s bedroom door. “May I come in?”
She looked up from the book she was reading. “Of course.” “Do you want to hear a bit more of Weir of Hermiston?” “Yes,” she said.

He sat down on a chair opposite her, but before he started, he blurted out, “I have been downhearted.”

“I know. You tend to get down in the dumps just before you write something wonderful.” He shifted in his seat. “What do you say we bury the hatchet?”

“For what?’

“For everything that hasn’t been good in the past year,” he said. “For all of it. It’s not helpful for either of us to carry around the bad old feelings. I would like to return to what we used to have.”

“It’s that simple?” She shot him an ironic smile.

“Ah, Fanny. I know this life you’ve had with me hasn’t been easy. You’ve given over a whole chunk of your life to being a nurse. You’ve had to pick up and move so many times. It  occurred  to  me  that  I  don’t  ask  what you  long  for.  You  never  talk  about  missing California.”

She tipped her head thoughtfully. “Since the day we married, you were my home. I never longed to go back to America. And I never felt lonely until the past year or two.”
“You’ve been lonely?”

Fanny  laughed.  “How could I  not be? You don’t come to me when  you are thinking something through, or to tell me about your day, as you used to. We have drifted pretty far afield from each other, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’ve made mistakes. I have said things I regret, Fanny.” He sighed deeply.  “Sooner or later, we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.”

“It’s my fault, too. I know that. Maybe I’ve wanted too much of you. But lately, it seems you don’t care to know what is inside here.” She put her palm to her breast.
“I can see how you might have felt that, but it changed when you broke down. Truly.” Louis reached over and picked up his manuscript from the ?oor.  “I want you to listen to this. You remember the premise, don’t you? A young man, Archie, is at odds with his father,

Lord Justice Clerk, a terrifying man. Archie has denounced his father publicly for hanging a man, and he’s been banished to the family’s country estate. That’s where Archie meets a woman named Kirstie.”

“There are two Kirsties, as I recall.”

“Aye.  The  ?rst  one  we  meet  is  the  aunt,  who’s  handsome,  passionate—she’s  the housekeeper  at  Hermiston.  She  spends evenings talking  deeply  with  him,  ranging  over many subjects, and becomes a  bit sweet on  him, though he’s much younger. Later, she introduces him to her niece, Kirstie, a pretty, coquettish girl, and Archie falls in love with her.”

Louis read to Fanny for nearly an hour. He stood as he read, and swayed as he felt the rhythm of the sentences in his body. Near the end, he came to a part he’d written about the aunt.

Kirstie had many causes of distress. More and more as we grow old—and yet more and more as we grow old and are women, frozen by the fear of age—we come to rely on the voice as the single outlet of the soul … Talk is the last link, the last relation. But with the end of the conversation, when the voice stops and the bright face of the listener is turned away, solitude falls again on the bruised heart. Kirstie had lost her “cannie hour at e’en”; she could no more wander with Archie, a ghost if you will, but a happy ghost, in ?elds Elysian. And to her it was as if the whole world had fallen silent; to him, but  an unremarkable change of  amusements. And she raged to  know  it. The e?ervescency  of  her passionate and irritable nature rose within her at times to bursting point.

When Louis glanced up, he saw that Fanny looked troubled. “So I am the elder Kirstie,” she said.

“A man’s wife gets into his ?ction. You are in her, my girl. But there is much Fanny Stevenson in the young Kirstie, too.”

He read on, and when he finished, he sought out her eyes. “It’s startlingly good,” she said. “Your language is cleaner. Simpler.” “You noticed.”

“And the Kirsties—both aunt and niece—are flesh-and-blood women.” “Thank you,” he said rather formally. “It’s a love story. And there are always problems
with a love story.”

“I know,” she said.

“For instance, I’d prefer to write the sex part of it frankly, the way I write the rest of it,” he went on, “but no publisher would allow it to see the light of day.” Louis felt Fanny warm to him. He sat down on the bed and rubbed her feet as he used to.

“Does it have a tragic ending?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I suppose it should. The funny thing is that I suspect it will have a happy ending. We shall see. This time, when I picked it up again, the words just ?owed. I hope it continues at this pace, but I am not going to rush. If I take my time, it may turn out to be the  best  thing  I’ve  ever  done.” He  laughed.  “My  God,  they  should put  up  a  plaque  at Rutherford’s bar as a nudge to all those miserable Scottish lads who long to be writers. I can’t tell you how often I hung about that bar pitying myself, despairing of ever writing a full book, let alone ever having a wife.”

“Look at you now,” she said.

“And what a ?ne, ?ne wife I have.” He got up and began to pace around the room, his hands ?uttering as he talked. “I’ve been thinking lately, we need to have fun. A cotillion is in order, wouldn’t you say? I want to see you again in that dress I gave you.”
“Oh, we’ve had so many people up.”

“Dancing, wonderful food. It is one of the things we do well together.” “Throw parties?”

“Some of the best.” “What do you say?”

She looked at him skeptically, and he stopped pacing. “It’s a normal thing to do, Fan, a happy thing. That’s all.” “All right,” she said. “I’m game.”

On the afternoon of Louis’s birthday, November 13, a hundred people came up the main road and took the new cuto? to the house. Recently completed by the chiefs after their release from jail in August, the new section bore the name they had given it: the Road of the Loving Heart. Friends of every stripe came: British, Samoans, Germans, Americans. The captain of the H.M.S. Curacoa brought sixteen of his men. The jailer, Wurmbrand—who’d lost his job for allowing Fanny to sneak old P’oe out of the jail—stayed until the end. Grudges were set aside all around as people danced and changed partners.
How strange it was that the hundreds of turns in Louis’s life had brought him to the spectacle playing out just now. Never could his bounteous imagination have conjured such a  picture when  he stood on  the North Bridge in  a  whipping wind, watching the trains leaving Edinburgh and longing, longing to be on one. Around him, the native members of the Vailima clan wore the Scottish plaid lavalavas Belle had sewn for them. The seamstress

herself, who was flirting with every sailor on the premises, wore a sash in the same plaid.
Louis studied Fanny as she talked to guests, sparkling. She was wearing every diamond in the establishment, from her own  earrings to Maggie’s necklace and brooch. She looked lovely in her black velvet dress, and he felt a ?ush of longing for her in the old way. If he could go back to that day on the North Bridge and alter the years that had intervened, he would change a few things. But not this woman.