Quill

Quill

Quill met Philip on the Wolfe Island Ferry, on her thirty-sixth birthday. She was on her way to her cottage for two weeks of summer holidays, and she spotted him on the upper deck, talking with a handsome older woman. At the time Quill knew this woman, who sometimes comes into the library where she works, just enough to speak to her. She also knew she had to meet Philip before the ferry reached the other side. She did something completely out of character—blame her birthday, blame the sun and wind or her holiday recklessness—and introduced herself, learning in the process that Philip was the woman’s son. He was briefly home from Europe—he was a violin-player in a symphony there—and the two of them, Philip and his mother, were going for an afternoon of cycling on the island.

Quill did another surprising thing, and invited them over to her cottage. For once, just what she was hoping for happened: Philip said they couldn’t come that afternoon, there would not be time, but that he might come, if she would like, later on in the week. He suggested a picnic. Quill said that a picnic would be delightful.

*

Of course Quill is not her real name. The name that was given to her forty-three years ago by her middle-aged parents, is Francis. A name having connotations of wiry pragmatism, facial hair and support-hose, sturdily-borne disappointment, grumpy dependability. A Sunday-school teacher’s name. A spinster’s name. It is Quill’s contention that parents naming anyone Francis could never have imagined that child as a cheerleader (she was), a rebellious teenager (that too), a person in university in the seventies (complete with the weed and bellbottoms). It was during these years when anything seemed possible, during university, during the seventies, that she decided to get rid of Francis. She was meaning, even then, to be a writer, and she tried to think of a name somehow suggestive of that more unique way of life. At first she came up with “Pen,” which could have been a short form of Penny, but she didn’t like Penny, with its brainless suggestion of loafers and juke-boxes. “Quill” came to her like a lovely light, mellow, cool and brimming, like willows near water, like the kind of person she was intending to be.

Not that there is anything wrong with the way she has turned out. For one thing, you would hardly guess that she is forty-three. Short and slight with wavy blonde hair, she works out and dances daily, and has a shape that her friends, whose own bodies have long-since been worn out by husbands and child-bearing, envy and decry. Her personality is equally flexible, bending gracefully to accommodate the foibles and obstacles and puzzlements of life, turning disasters and disappointments into anecdotes and outrageous tales for dinner entertainment, presenting her broken heart and flat tires and betraying friends as a kind of comic theatre, with herself as the baffled and mortified, but ever-optimistic protagonist. She is a good person to have at dinners and parties because of this. People cheer up around her, looking forward to whatever she might be going to come out with next. She gets invited out a lot.

*

Like her name, the cottage Quill was staying in was not strictly speaking her own, either. It belonged to one of her former professors, and was really an old boathouse, converted for holiday use as a summer place. Now that the professor was getting too old to enjoy such rustic arrangements, he rented the house to friends and former students who appreciated its tasteful restoration and antique furniture, and the wild roses which grew on trellises against its weathered walls. Quill did indeed appreciate all these things, and she loved the view of the lake and the nearby dock, where the ferry came and went.

*

The ferry came and went a lot of times the week that Philip was supposed to visit, without bringing any sign of him. Then one day when Quill had pretty much given up, he appeared around the corner of the house, practically giving her a heart-attack. It was a hot afternoon. She had been sunbathing after swimming, and she grabbed for her towel. Philip protested, insisting that she must not cover herself so hastily.

“Why?” she laughed.

“Because you are so beautiful.” What was his accent? A little bit French, a little bit German. Maybe some British. A lot of charming.

Quill pulled on her shorts and T-shirt, and they cycled to the little island store, to buy supplies for their picnic. You would have thought they’d known each other forever, to see them whipping around in there with the shopping cart together. That’s how Quill describes the way they got along that mellow afternoon. She says you would have thought they were an old married couple, to have seen them.

Back at the house, Quill began to sort out and organize their purchases.

“No,” Philip said, “I will do everything.”

“Can I at least open the wine?” Quill enquired. Its misted green shape, held in her hand, brimmed with languid possibilities.

Philip considered, appraising her through wicked white eyelashes. “You may do this.”

Now he got to work, arranging the meat and cheese, the buns and fruit and chocolate, with the elegant ease of a maitre d’. He even marinated the asparagus, tossing it carelessly, expertly, over the crisp leaves of romaine.

Quill wanted to know where he had learned to do such things.

“I do not know what this means, ‘learn’; food is beautiful—natural—there is nothing to learn, only to celebrate.”

Demonstrating, he held the wooden bowl of salad in his arms like a partner executing a twirling dance-step; then, with a flourish, he handed the bowl to Quill. Together they carried the food and wine out into the grass behind the cottage, passing the heavy-headed roses, which nodded and dropped their petals as they brushed by.

When the food and wine had begun to work their mischief, Philip rolled toward Quill and massaged oil up and down her back, his hands (Quill imagined him in a tux, stroking his burnished violin) as calm and capable as they had been in the kitchen, preparing the salad. He told her about his life, over in Europe, about the very old flat in Bonn, which he had recently purchased and was in the process of restoring, about his piano teaching, his porcelain collection, his pupils. He showed her photographs, of the flat at various stages of redemption; of his colleagues in the symphony; of his dog, a silky golden lab, of the Marktplaz where he bought his fruit and vegetables each day. He described his friends—he had many—all of whom, it seemed, he adored.

Quill could not help wondering if there might be one particular friend, one special one, that he cared for more than the rest.

“I have a … companion: A long-time friend and colleague. We play and teach together. She understands me.”

Apparently he did not want to ever get married or to have any children, which was one reason Philip was devoted to all women, and not to one in particular. He liked his life as it was; he did not wish to be tied down.

Quill said she thought that was fair enough. Which was not what she was thinking. What she was already thinking—she was still capable of such imaginings, back then—was that Philip had perhaps not yet met the woman who could make him glad to be ‘tied down,’ who could change his mind about such things as weddings, and children. Already she had gone so far as to imagine that she herself might be that remarkable, life-altering phenomenon among her kind. Already, too, she was enjoying the sound of their paired names: Quill and Philip. Philip and Quill. They would have the kind of life she had long-ago changed her name for, flitting back and forth between Europe and Canada, Philip and Quill, writing books and concertizing: elegant, intense, enviable. Perhaps, for such a life, she could even do without children, if he would really not relent. Perhaps instead, with so much time and experience at her disposal, she would write something truly significant.

Earlier in the week, Quill had set a bouquet of roses on the woodstove. When the sun went down, Quill and Philip went inside and curled up on the couch in front of the heavy blossoms, breathing in their mysterious scent of lake and evening.

“What would you like me to do for you?” Philip said quietly. With one accomplished finger he was stroking her forearm.

Quill had already made up her mind not to sleep with him, not yet. She said, “Come back.”

He smiled. “This is a promise.”

A sweet rain was falling when Philip left to catch the midnight ferry, his bike rattling down the earth-smelling lane. Quill watched him out of sight, then turned on the radio and danced to the jazz on the CBC while the ferry slipped quietly away.

*

As it happened, Philip and Quill were not able to meet again at the island, before he had to head back to Bonn. They met at one of the cafes in town though, and then went back to Quill’s house, her real house, afterward. Philip went through the house with her, making helpful comments and suggestions about her own attempts at house-restoration. Then they said a chaste but passionate good-bye. Chaste but passionate letters soon followed, at least until Philip’s concert-season started to heat up, and then there was a lull. No lull on Quill’s part though, she kept on, writing entertaining stories about the progress of the winter in the city, about the cranky patrons who came to the library, about dry skin and wet boots and lost tempers and pallor. She included the poems and sketches and stories she was working on. She worked in reminders of the summer and of roses, of the time they had spent together.

Months passed, and more months. Philip was not sure when he would be back in Canada: it was dependent on so many things. He could not go into these matters in a letter, it would be too boring! But he would tell her about them all when he saw her, he hoped, soon.

One Wednesday in July the ‘phone rang, and it was Philip at last, at home, at his mother’s, only a few minutes away from where Quill was standing, clutching her phone. He was busy that evening but they met the next day, at the same café where they had spent their final evening, a year before. Quill in her white dress was trembling, despite the humid heat.

Over the Bloody Caesars their shyness eased. Philip told about the recent frantic weeks of teaching and playing, of untimely disasters (a broken drier, a chimney flue fire) at his flat, of his difficulties finding someone to look after his dog, of his last-minute packing marathon, before racing to the airport. He said that now he could finally relax, at least until his friends arrived!

“Your friends,” said Quill brightly, “when will they be here?”

“They are in New York for the rest of this week,” he said. “They will arrive here on Saturday; then I will take them to Toronto and Niagara Falls, Quebec City, show them these Canadian sights of yours.”

Quill took this in.

Now Philip wanted to play a guessing game. “Who else do you think could be coming?”

Quill waited. Should she know?

“What thing could have changed, since last summer?”

She could not imagine.

“How might I be a totally different person, since you saw me before?”

He was grinning.

It turned out that his friend and colleague, the one that understood him, had accidentally become the mother of his child not long after she, Quill, had met him last summer, and that this woman and her infant son were amongst the friends who were at this very moment just across the boarder, in New York.

“You must not look so shocked,” he laughed proudly.

“But I thought you said you didn’t ever want to get married or have children,” said Quill in a voice she hoped did not sound whiney. Her hands, thrust between her cotton knees, were clammy.

Philip said that was because he had not been sure, at the time. The baby had been a surprise, and a year ago he had not been at all certain that he had wanted to be anyone’s father. He had changed his mind though, at least about babies, the minute he had seen its purple little crumpled-up face in the delivery-room, and now parenthood was the most thrilling and absorbing thing in his life.

“You must try it,” he urged.

Quill smiled and said that the ‘Canadian sights’ did not belong personally to her.

*

Telling about that conversation Quill says, “I should have slept with him when I had the chance, maybe he would have had two happy surprises.”

She would prefer not to think about how much she means this.

Mostly she keeps to herself the part about how they took the picnic out onto the lawn, that hot afternoon at the cottage, so long ago. Lying in bed sometimes on winter nights she will recall how, just before they dropped to the grass, Philip reached up and plucked one of the full-blown roses, sprinkling its petals over the salad and the stone step, and the bare brown shoulders of Quill, a thing which could never have happened to Francis.

She closes her eyes, amazed, letting the petals rain down.