The Liverpool Basque. Helen Forrester
Chapter Thirty-two
Ignoring the pouring rain, he came out of the house, and then turned to check that the front door had closed properly behind him. Satisfied, he walked slowly down the path between the flowerbeds, empty except for a few winter aconites cautiously beginning to open.
When he reached the two steps which led down to the pavement, he paused before carefully descending them. As the wind off the Strait caught him, his shiny black oilskin flapped against his lean frame. A fringe of white hair fluttered round the edge of the black beret set firmly on his head; the beret had been arranged so that it had a small peak to protect his forehead and encourage the rain to fall down his cheeks instead of veiling his sight.
Safely on the narrow pavement, he lingered for a moment to look across the Juan de Fuca Strait. The Olympic Mountains were obliterated by the downpour, but nearer to hand a freighter was stubbornly butting its way through the sheeting rain towards Victoria Harbour. With a seaman’s eye for weather, he looked up at the louring clouds, pursed his lips and muttered, ‘Cold enough for snow.’
Water was trickling down his neck, so he heaved his collar up higher and then proceeded along The Esplanade towards the cemetery. He walked with his head bent, his shoulders slightly hunched, as if expecting to hit his skull on a door frame if he straightened up. Though his gait was light and steady, his old Wellington boots made an intermittent squishing sound as he slopped through muddy puddles.
In the large inside pocket of his oilskin was a single pink rose wrapped in damp tissue paper. He had bought it yesterday from the florist in Cook Street; throughout the winter he had a standing order with her, to purchase the flowers four at a time. He kept them fresh in a cut-glass vase on the dining-room table, and, regardless of the weather, he took one each day to the cemetery to lay on the grave of his wife, Kathleen.
Sometimes the florist was not able to obtain the pink or white blooms which he requested, and he would have to make do with red ones, which Kathleen had not loved quite so much. In summer, he cut roses in shades of pink or cream from the bushes which she herself had planted in their garden when first they had retired to Vancouver Island. While she had the strength, she had tenderly pruned and fertilized them herself. Then, when she had begun to fail, he had pushed her wheelchair on to the lawn, and had learned to look after them for her, doing his best to hide from her the agony of mind he had felt, as he watched her suffer the multiple infections to which leukaemia laid her open.
Seamen don’t get much chance to garden, he ruminated, as he gazed down at yesterday’s offering, which lay, tattered and sodden, on the grave in front of the memorial stone. But Kathleen had loved her garden, and every day he made this small pilgrimage to tell her that he was caring for it and for her household icons, and that he loved her still. Mostly, however, he came to ask her forgiveness for having failed, when she was so ill, to keep her out of pain. Mixed with the rain, tears ran down his face; no matter how the years since her death rolled along, they failed to obliterate from his mind the torture he had watched her endure. There were, of course, days when he took the walk to the cemetery from force of habit; but all too often he went in the hope of easing his own haunting memories. Today, his nightmare was very close.
He bent down carefully to avoid the dizziness which, nowadays, sometimes bothered him, and picked up yesterday’s battered bloom. Regardless of its wet condition, he stuffed it into his outside pocket. His chest felt tight, and he paused to take a few short breaths of the cold, damp air, before slowly opening his oilskin to retrieve the slightly flattened fresh rose from his inner pocket. He unrolled the tissue paper from it and laid the flower in front of the headstone. The wind was strong and capricious, so he picked up a small rock and laid it on the stalk to hold it down. Most people had a vase into which they put their flower offerings, but he laid them on the ground; in his mind’s eye he always saw the roses as lying between his wife’s perfect white breasts.
Then he addressed the marble headstone. He did not see the words cut into it, In loving memory of Kathleen Echaniz, beloved wife of Manuel Echaniz, born 3rd June, 1914, died 20th January, 1984. At peace. His first words were, as always, ‘Forgive me, my darling, forgive me.’ He paused, as if waiting for a reply. Then he swallowed hard, and lifted his head a little, to look out towards the heaving waters of the Strait. He saw his wife’s smiling face, her eyes unclouded by illness; he felt her fullness beneath him, before suffering reduced her to a skeleton; and, as he had always done, either by letter from distant ports or when they lay comfortably in bed together, he told her all that had happened to him in the previous twenty-four hours, all the funny things, all the small disasters. Today, he said that he had washed her Royal Doulton figurines in the cabinet in the sitting-room and had set them back exactly as she had left them, that last night he had cooked himself some fish for supper, and that Veronica Harris, her friend from next door, had brought him in some homemade cookies, as she did each week.
The soft words came out like a litany, not in Kathleen’s native English, but in a strange evocative language known only to a few, a language which Kathleen had never been able to master.
He spoke in Basque, a unique language of farmers and shepherds in the enclaves