Lake had a good view of this road from his window, which was on the third floor of the inn and looked out to the north and the expanse that stretched from Land’s End on the left to the Bodmin moor a couple of hours in the distance to the right. At first he thought he would rather have a view of the sea, on the other side of the building. But the guest room downstairs had such a view, and after a week or two he became drawn to the desolation of the moors, their chrome light dribbling over the heath. In the flash of the storms the land disappeared altogether, leaving the window a square of rain. After a couple of months of walking the coastline Lake exhausted his attraction to the bay and the ships and the castle of St. Michael’s Mount; but the moors, which on the face of them offered much less to see, never bored him. It’s true that for a long time he went out into them to listen; the wild brush and hidden ponds seethed with their own life and, he might have thought, their own sound. It’s true that he thought he might hear some kind of music there. When he didn’t he thought he was disappointed, until he realized that what he mistook for disappointment was immense relief. That he loathed himself for such a surrender seemed a small price to pay.
As I understand it, my great-grandfather and -grandmother came here once, about a year before Victoria became queen. My great-grandfather, Edwin Lake, was married to another woman. My great-grandmother, Jane Shear, was the daughter of a peddler. The affair between the two lasted three minutes and took place in the alley behind a sweat shop off King’s Road, and it wasn’t nearly enough for her; she pursued him as he vacationed with his family in Southampton and, the story goes, was walking up the street to his hotel one morning when he saw her through the dining room window. He set down his tea, patted his mouth with his napkin, and excused himself from breakfast; his wife asked if he felt well. Quite well, he told her. He explained he would return in a few moments. He walked from the dining room, out the back door of the hotel, and to the train station. He took a train to Exeter. By now of course he knew everything was over, he had already passed the point of no return. He had made the mistake of toying with a girl who did not understand that passion was a country where there were definite borders. She did not see the borders; she crossed borders as though crossing an empty avenue at midnight. In Exeter he contemplated his ruin for several days until Jane Shear showed up there as well; then he took another train. This time he crossed the Tamar River from Devon into Cornwall; he crossed, then, into the final no-man’s-land of the Old World, he went as far as the Old World could go. She followed without a second thought. I have had the miserable misfortune, my great-grandfather thought ruefully to himself, to make love to a woman who will pursue her passion to the edge of her world and perhaps beyond. At Land’s End he jumped into the sea. She might well have followed except that while her passion was such as to transcend borders and worlds, her maternal instinct was not; she watched pregnantly from the rocks of Land’s End and turned around, going back to London where she bore a son, giving him the name of his father. The son in turn would go to America and bear three sons, Bart, Dirk, and Jack Mick, names that were in spirit rather the antithesis of Edwin. Thus my great-grandfather and great-grandmother lived in a country they each called passion but which was in fact two different countries; each crossed into the country of the other without knowing it. When they did not honor each other’s borders, they believed each other to have committed treason; for each, treason was the same crime by a different law.
Lake had casually noticed Anne many times before he saw the similarity with Leigh in appearance. In fact the Englishwoman seemed almost softer to him, though he decided later it was the person who was softer rather than the face. As he watched her wandering up toward the inn through the streets of the town that tumbled back down the hillside, the wind of the bay lifted her hair in a way that the wind off Lake Michigan would lift the hair of a judge’s daughter. On the other hand, Leigh was now of so long ago he couldn’t completely trust the memory this new woman resembled. In every other way Anne was utterly different. Sometimes Lake could barely hear her when she spoke to him, and she flushed slightly and looked anxious around the corners of her smile. Her heart was different, bound in a tourniquet and fighting to live.
Rather dully, he took even longer to understand her interest in him, since she wasn’t the kind to express it directly. By now the long sexual death to which he’d committed himself almost twenty years before was no matter of steely will but willful resignation; for a while he hadn’t realized it was happening. A year passed after Leigh’s death before it occurred to him he hadn’t had another woman since; but the resolution of this abstinence became apparent not with Leigh’s death, not with his mother’s death, not with any other death at all but rather with the night on the banks of the river when he
