Three Views of Crystal Water by Katherine Govier

up just as soon as she left him alone. He would wash, and put on his white shirt for the office. Vera would pay a little better attention in school but still make haste for Homer Street immediately after.
    On Sundays – most Sundays, if it wasn’t raining – they walked. This particular Sunday the sun was shining. They started at English Bay. James wore a wide straw hat, and Keiko wore a headscarf, blue with white figures on it. People glanced at them, as they passed, no doubt thinking they were an odd group. But Keiko never seemed to notice. She loved the bleached, lost logs that rolled in on the tide and was forever marvelling.
    ‘So big, so big,’ she said. ‘Where from are they?’
    ‘They’ve been logged somewhere up north I suppose,’ said James. ‘And sent down in a log boom, and got loose from it.’
    ‘Oh, oh,’ said Keiko.
    Vera liked the kelp with its beads of bright green, which she could squeeze between her fingers and pop. She wandered down to the water to pull up some kelp and back to her grandfather to walk beside him, and away again to walk along a log and hop over another tangle of them, teetering on a rock. No one told her not to now. Her mother had loved to walk on the beach too, and they would pick up shells, and sometimes sit in the lee of the sea wall, looking at what they’d found. But her mother had been nervous of the sea and especially of Vera on the beach, afraid she’d be swept away or fall off a log. They talked about her mother a little then. How she had gone to boarding school in England. How he had been out of touch for so long, until she came to Paris. ‘We all lived together then,’ said James Lowinger reflectively. ‘Until she found Hamilton Drew. Or he found her.’
    They reached the path through Stanley Park.
    Keiko was different here from the woman she was at home.She seemed to have known the water for a long time. She cast an expert eye on the rivulets and the bubbles in the sand and knew exactly what rock to pick up to find the crabs. She walked beside James, head inclined toward him, attentive to his words and to his step, if it faltered. But she was also listening to the wind on the water, and smelling the salt. Sometimes she stood and scanned the horizon.
    ‘Weather changing,’ she would say, or, ‘tide changing.’
    ‘Keiko knows all about the sea,’ James would say, squeezing her elbow. ‘All my life I have wanted a girl just like her. A deep diver,’ he would say. Then he would laugh, that dry chuckle that wasn’t really aimed at anyone. ‘Has all my life come to this?’ he said. ‘Do I talk about it as if it was over? I suppose it will be, soon. I suppose I could begin to sum it up.’
    They went as far as the benches at First Beach before he sat. Keiko had tea in a thermos. She poured some into the tiny china cup that she brought for him. And when he spoke his eyes looked far out to the east as if there might appear, on the horizon, one of the great sailing ships he’d been on as a boy.
    ‘At weddings, the Indians used to bring up a pearl from the bottom of the sea and bore it through with a hole to symbolize the taking of a maidenhead. You wouldn’t understand –’
    ‘Of course I would. Do you think I’m an infant?’
    ‘We did it when your mother married that man, my son-inlaw.’
    ‘You hate my father,’ said Vera sadly.
    ‘We saw through him, that’s all. It wasn’t difficult. We saw him for what he was. An opportunist. I saw that in him maybe even before he saw it. But your mother was determined. You couldn’t stop her. Even her mother couldn’t stop her. She said she’d give her a wedding and give her a pearl and give her away and that would be the end of it. Never speak to her again. And she never did.’
    He shook his head and laughed again without humour, out of amazement, perhaps. ‘Far as I knew. Of course she wasn’t speaking to me either. When she stepped up to the priest Bellewore one rosee pearl in each ear, a perfect