The Trout Read online

  Peter Cunningham is from Waterford, Ireland’s oldest city. He is the author of the Monument series, widely acclaimed novels set in a fictional version of his home town. His novel, The Taoiseach was a controversial best seller; The Sea and the Silence won the prestigious Prix de l’Europe. He is a member of Aosdána, the Irish academy of arts and letters, and lives with his wife, not far from Dublin.

  Also by Peter Cunningham

  The Monument Series

  Tapes of the River Delta

  Consequences of the Heart

  Love in one Edition

  The Sea and the Silence

  Novels

  The Taoiseach

  Capital Sins

  Who Trespass Against Us

  Sister Caravaggio (as editor and contributor)

  First published in Great Britain

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  Dochcarty Road

  Dingwall

  Ross-shire

  IV15 9UG

  Scotland.

  www.sandstonepress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright (c) Peter Cunningham

  www.petercunningham.ie

  Editor: Moira Forsyth

  The moral right of Peter Cunningham to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.

  The publisher acknowledges support from Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

  ISBN: 978-1-910985-21-2

  ISBNe: 978-1-910985-22-9

  Cover design by Mark Swan

  Ebook compilation by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore.

  For Carol

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  We think that we can reach one another but, in reality, all that we can do is to approach and pass each other by.

  Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

  Contents

  Title Page

  Part 1 - Bayport, Lake Muskoka, Ontario, Canada - Two Years Ago

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  Part 2 - Ireland - Two Years Ago

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  Part 3 - Waterford, Ireland - 1970

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  Part 4 - Ontario, Canada - Two Years Ago

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  Part 5 - Ontario, Canada - Two Years Ago

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  Part 6 - Ontario, Canada - Present Day

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  Part One

  Bayport, Lake Muskoka

  Ontario, Canada

  Two Years Ago

  1

  Winter, when it leaves Muskoka, often does so over the course of a single night. One evening, darkness falls over a steel grey, ice-bound landscape; next morning, red squirrels, beavers and racoons reappear on the islands and ice quickly becomes a memory. Within forty-eight hours, white-tailed deer can be seen along the shoreline, grazing the groves of maple and hemlock. The lake cottages, shuttered since Thanksgiving, reopen as if a single lock has turned and the accents of Toronto and Detroit can once again be heard in Bayport.

  A blue jay, squatting in the lower branches of the oak that stands on the boundary between our garden and the road, is calling to an unseen mate. Soon my room will lose its comforting redolence of books and paper to the fragrance of cut grass and pine. I know I like to deplore the short, cold days of winter, but the truth is that in winter I work best. During four such entombed seasons the story crept from me, word by word, until eventually it lay there in a stack of pages that went on to become a book.

  Our house, its foundations blasted into the sheet rock of the Canadian Shield, is built on rising ground half a mile outside the lakeside town of Bayport. Fifteen miles farther west by road, or ten miles by boat, lies Charlton, the district’s administrative centre. From our front porch, looking north through stands of white and red pine, birch and oak, Lake Muskoka can be seen: in winter white as bone, in spring—as now—joyfully blue.

  Kay walks down the path that runs diagonally to the gate. Tall, with iron-grey hair and strong features, she still moves like a cat. As the blue jay takes off, screeching, she waves a greeting to it, an age-old Irish superstition to deal with the magpie, cousin to the jay.

  A small boy with a large, purple rucksack on his back comes up the road, the sun’s rays dancing in his black curls. He runs the last few yards to his grandmother, who hugs him, then turns to where she knows I am, as if to say, Look who’s home!

  Up the path they come and the child runs ahead, leaving his grandmother to bring the rucksack.

  ‘Granddad, guess what?’

  I show him my puzzled face. ‘Tim?’

  He takes a flying leap into my arms, grabs my beard with his small fists and buries his head there.

  ‘We won! Our team won!’

  2

  The population of Bayport is 889. Although the town depends on the lakes for its living, in the off-season we still manage to tick over. Bridge clubs and book clubs flourish. Mr Amos, the local grocer, who ties flies for sale in the spring and summer, builds up his stock. The annual production of the town’s light opera society is traditionally unveiled at Christmas. Cross-country skiing expeditions thrive. Two churches serve the mainly Episcopalian and smaller Catholic congregations; there is one bar, the Muskoka Inn, and one restaurant, Francini’s. The mail for Bayport comes from Charlton, where you go to do banking business, to buy a new shirt or the latest book, or to catch the bus out of Muskoka.

  I worked for over thirty years as a teacher of English in Saint Celestine’s, Toronto. A lot of teaching. They say it burns you out in the end, or at least, that’s the explanation I settled for. When the school appointed a new, young headmaster with fresh ideas, bringing in a new regime, I quit. We sold our house in Milton and moved up here, so I could write full-time. That was all fine until the economic crash came along and took most of our investments with it. Not that we’re complaining—we’ve enough to get by on—but we’ve had to put travel plans on hold.

  Our son, Gavin, Tim’s dad, is the palaeontologist with a Canadian archaeological team that’s in China for six weeks to do whatever it is they do with the remains of a 200,000-year-old human. Tim’s mother died in a pile-up in Toronto when he was three. If there’s a school camp going when Tim comes to stay in Muskoka, we enrol him so he can be with kids of his age.

  As we sit on the porch with iced teas, the mail van ar
rives. In some quarters, the late arrival of the mail each day is a major issue: Mr Amos is chairman of a committee whose sole purpose is to have the delivery to Bayport made before noon.

  Kay is reading Tim’s school camp report, which she found in his rucksack. Birdsong is building along the canopy by the lakeshore. In just two days, the light has soared.

  ‘How’s he doing?’

  ‘He’s doing fine.’ She hands across the single page. ‘They say he’s got an eidetic memory.’

  At a desk just inside the window the child peers at the computer. Tim is dyslexic, of mid-range severity, according to the specialist in Toronto. He also exhibits behavioural idiosyncrasies, with which his father and we have become very familiar.

  ‘I hope enough is being done,’ I say.

  Kay smiles patiently, as if I’m deliberately missing the point.

  ‘Alex, the man he’s seeing is in the top three in North America.’

  I know what I want to say. I know whose medical opinion I’d really like to hear on my grandson’s condition.

  Kay gets up. ‘I’ve got work to do,’ she says.

  3

  The seats of the black Humber Hawk were of stitched red leather, including the rear bench-seat on which I knelt, bare-kneed, inhaling the leather fragrance, surveying the receding world. It was my world, different to what the doctor saw out of the front window: my world at seven years of age, seen through a much smaller frame and going in the opposite direction.

  As he drove, the doctor spoke of the power of learning, of the wisdom to be found in books, and of how literature is second in grace only to religion. He spoke in the deep, rich rhythms of Ireland’s south-east, his accent one of soft, uvular articulations. The doctor’s words, when his humour was good, swirled lovingly around me, but when his humour changed, it changed everything.

  The mailbox flap slaps down and the van speeds away. For years, a woman with a pleasant face has done the mail run; she has been replaced and now it seems like a new person every other week. Tiny shoots of growth are bustling either side of the path, luminously green pinheads. For Christmas, Kay gives me a subscription to The New Yorker. Once a week, as now, I savour the first glimpse of the magazine’s cosmopolitan provenance through its cellophane wrapping.

  Jerry Fisher, my literary agent, who initially placed my book with a publisher in Toronto, has promised early news on a sale in New York. No letter has come from Jerry, but there are several for Kay, who works as a psychotherapist in the hospital in Charlton. For our first year up here Kay relished the break from the job that had kept her so busy in Toronto and she threw herself into painting, at which she excels. Her work has been shown in a small gallery in Toronto, where every canvas sold. And yet, because of our circumstances, she feels she cannot rely completely on her painting, which is why she now works part-time in Charlton.

  I see a card from Larry White, who has come to live down by the lake in Bayport and is already trying to stimulate interest in next winter’s theatrical production. Larry, a former Mountie, arrived here late last year but already sees himself as Bayport’s leading man.

  Kay is looking out from the porch. Sometimes her glance, as now, contains sadness, as if she is harbouring personal regrets, or fears that our happiness is never more than provisional.

  The letter at the bottom of the pile is addressed in type on a brown envelope. A Toronto postmark.

  Alex Smyth

  Author

  Bayport

  Lake Muskoka

  Ontario

  Our postcode. Since the publication of my novel Sulphur, I have received three letters, written to me care of my publishers. Two readers called me a hero; the third, a woman in Vancouver, said my book made her physically ill.

  In the kitchen, I take the paperknife.

  4

  According to most dictionaries, the word trout is used to describe a number of species of freshwater and saltwater fish belonging to a subset of the salmon family. The colour of trout reflects the environment they inhabit: in the sea, these fish look silvery, whereas in rivers their appearance is much darker.

  By some estimates, fifty-two different trout varieties have been recorded. The brown trout is the only trout native to Ireland. He is among the most aggressive of the species and, as spawning time approaches, he will defend his territory with fury.

  ‘They’re very excited; they really want to get behind you.’

  Two days have gone by and Jerry Fisher has driven from Toronto. His expression is one of keen anticipation as Kay fills his glass from a pitcher of her home-made lemonade. Kay likes Jerry, she told me after she had first met him. Now he gives her a big smile, sips the drink and smacks his lips.

  ‘Thank you, ma’am!’

  Jerry is small and round, with a scrunched-up, weather-beaten face from four decades of sailing on Lake Ontario. Whenever he phones me, he uses his tone to convey the reality of my literary prospects. A downbeat opening, Oh, hello, Alex, so that at first I wondered if he had suffered a personal misfortune, paves the way for news of rejections; whereas, Alex!, a cry of joy, can only mean that the omens are promising.

  ‘Yes, this is a fantastic opportunity,’ Jerry says and puts down his glass.

  He’s been stoking the interest of an editor in a mid-size New York publishing house and now has a contract in his sights. A few days ago I would have relished this news.

  ‘Apart from the money, what will be involved?’

  Light bends through the birch trees in a golden arc. Jerry leans forward.

  ‘I guess nobody’s going to pay ten grand without a whole host of people in-house committing themselves to promoting you in a major major way. It’s what every author at your stage dreams of.’

  ‘What sort of promotion?’

  Jerry chuckles.

  ‘They’re not going to hand over the money and let you go fishing.’

  Fear surges from deep within me.

  ‘Let me think about it.’

  Jerry can’t hide his surprise. ‘Think about it?’

  ‘I’m quite a private person.’

  ‘I’m sure Alex just wants an idea of what he might be getting into,’ Kay says and her green eyes flash as she shoots me a look.

  All at once Jerry is uncertain of what’s happening. ‘It’s like what he’s done already, only more,’ he says to her in a wheedling tone.

  What I’ve done already involved an article in the Charlton Gazette, an interview with a Vancouver-based literary magazine and a tiny get-together—launch would be ridiculous—in a bookshop in Toronto, where twenty people drank budget wine and I signed some books. Jerry begins to describe what a low-to-mid-level publicity campaign in New York might require.

  ‘You grew up in Ireland, right? I mean, how else could someone write a great book like this? That whole business about the boy out fishing with his father—unforgettable. That’s what they want to hear!’

  5

  The shrimp is a shy and furtive creature that lives on the riverbed. Greenish in colour, it clings to stones with its tiny legs, back hunched, its head down. When the trout wants a shrimp that is crawling along the bottom of the river, he must shovel it off with the flat side of his mouth.

  The lake is still bright at Roger’s Quay, where for years I have rented a covered berth—a space in a long shed on a jetty with an electric hoist to lift my boat clear in winter.

  Jerry had left earlier. Although we’d agreed to meet soon in Toronto, it was obvious he was unhappy. I helped Kay tidy away the glasses.

  ‘I’m going to check the boat,’ I said, but she turned away. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong is that we sold up in Toronto and came here so that you could write. Now most of our savings are gone, but when you get the kind of break we were praying for and your agent comes to talk about how to promote you, you act like you’re autistic.’

  Beneath the spaced wooden jetty boards, the water twinkles. Boats are still coming in from the islands. This plac
e is cold and dead in winter, but from now on it will sing with activity.

  A man emerges from a berth. He is broad-shouldered, dressed in blue overalls, and his ink-black hair is tied in a ponytail, the way a lot of the Ojibweys wear it. I’ve never been able to gauge Keith’s age from his deeply creased brown face, but he has to be at least fifty.

  ‘Mr Smyth.’

  ‘Keith, how are things?’

  ‘Good.’ Keith is a man of few words. ‘Boat’s all set.’

  He can turn his hand to anything, the opposite of me. On his time off, for a few bucks he’ll come over and do odd jobs around the house.

  ‘I might take her out later,’ I say.

  ‘Keel’s good as new.’

  Maid of Kerry, my white-hulled, twenty-foot launch, has high bows, a spray-hood and a windscreen. Forward of the cockpit is a semicircular bench done in imitation white leather. The head of a ninety-horsepower Evinrude shines above the stern.

  ‘Looks great.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Keith says.

  There’s a story from way back about how Keith once did time in a juvenile prison, south of Chatham on Lake Erie, for trafficking in contraband cigarettes. Seems he worked there on a boat for old Danny Forman, whose son now owns the business here in Roger’s. When Keith got out of prison, Danny gave him a job.

  ‘Seen any strangers?’ I ask casually.

  Keith’s dark eyes fasten. ‘A few cottage people back.’

  ‘But no one hanging around.’

  ‘You expectin’ someone?’

  There’s another dimension to Keith, a different person who occasionally steps into view.

  ‘You know that book I gave you?’

  ‘Sure.’ Keith scratches his head. ‘Kinda started it, but . . .’