the top by a graceful semicircular window that my reading had taught me was known as fanlight. The effect was, as Eric Fedoruk would have said, elegant.
From the moment Hilda suggested paying a condolence call on Justine’s family, I had felt an adolescent thrill at the prospect of meeting Lucy Blackwell face to face. Her name summoned forth a kaleidoscope of images that were part of the cultural history of every woman my age. In the youthquake of the late sixties, Lucy had been a Mary Quant girl in thigh-high clear plastic boots and leather mini, her eyes doe-like behind the kohl eyeliner and fake eyelashes, her hair ironed into smooth sheets the colour of pulled taffy.
She had been a ripe sixteen when she recorded the first song that brought her recognition. The song was called “Lilacs,” and she had written it herself. Its subject, the painful process of losing a first love to a heartless rival, was an adolescent cliché, but Lucy’s treatment of the angst-ridden convention rocked between low farce and elegy, and her voice was a husky sensation.
In the seventies, shod in sandals hand-tooled in Berkeley by people who’d got their priorities straight and wearing granny gowns of hand-dyed batik, Lucy had woven flowers in her hair and sung songs of misplaced faith and love gone wrong that became anthems for a generation of middle-class kids raised in the warm sunshine of Dr. Spock but yearning for the storm of sexual adventure. We mined the lyrics of each new song for autobiographical details. Was that “singin’ man” who left her on the beach, “cryin’ and dyin’ as the tide washed in,” James Taylor or Dylan? When she sang of “that small white room where I left behind a gift I could never retrieve,” was she remembering the abortion clinic in which, it was whispered, she had gone to have Mick Jagger’s baby cut away? It was heady stuff.
When the decade ended, she settled down somewhere on Saltspring Island with a man none of us had ever heard of and announced she was going to raise a family and write an opera for children. For a time she disappeared, and it seemed Lucy Blackwell was destined to become a candidate for a trivia-quiz answer. Then, in the early eighties, she surfaced again. She was alone and empty-handed: no man, no babies, no opera, but there was savage light in her eyes and a new and feral quality in her voice. Within a year, she’d written the score for a movie and the music for an off-Broadway show; both were hits. She was back, and with her beautiful hair permed into an explosion of Botticelli curls, her body hard-muscled from feel-the-burn exercise, and her voice knife-edged with danger, she was the very model of the eighties woman.
For three decades, Lucy Blackwell had been the first to catch the wave, but the woman who stood before me that Labour Day afternoon seemed to have left trendiness behind. She was barefoot, wearing bluejean cut-offs and a man’s white shirt, with the sleeves rolled up to reveal a dynamite tan. Her eyes were extraordinary, so startlingly green-blue that they were almost turquoise, and her shoulder-length hair shone with the lustre of dark honey. Lucy was a Saskatchewan-born forty-five-year-old, but she had the long-limbed agelessness of the prototypical all-American girl.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, extending her hand. She was holding an old-fashioned scrub brush, and when she noticed it, she laughed with embarrassment and lifted it in the air. “Trying to fix what can’t be fixed,” she said distractedly. “I’m Lucy Blackwell. Won’t you come in?”
Hilda and I followed her through the entranceway and down the hall. The parquet floors along which we walked were scuffed and sticky underfoot, and the air was heavy with the rotting-fruit smell of forgotten garbage. “I hope you don’t mind if we visit in the dining room,” Lucy said. “My mother had some curious guests in the last year. The dining room’s the only room in the house that doesn’t look as if 2 Live Crew has been playing a concert in it.”
The room was a damaged beauty. A wall broken by lancet windows looked out onto the yard. The shell-pink silk curtains that bracketed the view were coolly ethereal, but they were stained at child level. A rose Berber carpet that must have cost a king’s ransom was discoloured by the kind of patches that are left by dog urine. Lucy motioned us to sit