The Master of Happy Endings Read Online Free PDF Page A

patches of sand and orange starfish until the water had risen to his hips. Then he set off in an underwater glide before surfacing to strike out in earnest in the direction of the opposite shore. The Australian crawl. Those who knew of this daily 200-metre habit occasionally asked if he was practising for the “Geriatric Olympics” or merely out of his mind. But he was the son of an athletic stuntman for the movies and had been, himself, a competitive swimmer in his youth, and had always made the effort to keep fit with a daily swim. Keeping in shape had made it possible, last summer, to swim out beyond good sense in order to save the life of Normie Fenton, who’d fallen overboard from his skiff and had no knowledge of how to save himself.
    Aside from keeping him in shape, his energetic ploughing through the waves was also an opportunity to think, away from the distractions of the human world. That he’d been a medal-winning swimmer long ago was just one of the facts he knew these islanders were aware of, despite his attempts to protect his privacy. At six foot eight he was the object of natural curiosity, the subject of invention as well. Apparently someone not content with his medals had reported that a statue had been erected in the town where he’d spent his career, a vaguely human shape constructed from twisted rods of steel—though no one ever claimed to have seen it. Not everything said about him was true.
    Not all of it was invented either. He knew that everyone was aware—probably because of Elena’s boasts during their summers here—that amongst the swimming medals at the bottom of his trunk were several “teacher of the year” awards, describing Axel Thorstad as “imaginative, innovative, courageous, and fiercely loyal to his students”—words that caused Elena to roll her eyes, though she’d quoted them accurately to anyone she decided should hear.
    Because of Elena, people also knew that hardly a year had gone by without his being reprimanded for overstepping the boundaries of normal teaching practices in a conservative school district. Yet the student who’d fallen from the cafeteria roof while acting out his own example of Absurdist Drama had convinced her parents not to press charges once the scrapes and fractures had begun to mend. And the student who’d disappeared into a crowd on a Vancouver street while Thorstad was taking a class to interview a poet had not been murdered or captured into a life of crime, but had shown up just in time to catch the ferry home, having on his own initiative found and interviewed a former neighbour of Malcolm Lowry.
    He’d faced a brief ripple of civic outrage when he allowed his students to write and perform a play lampooning the jingoistic leading citizens of their pulp-mill town, though he’d known a number of dignitaries and councillors would be sitting in the audience. At the end of the performance the mayor had mounted the stage to announce that he would be having a word with the Board of School Trustees in the morning. And indeed, a warning had later been issued, though allowances were once again made for the student-chosen “teacher of the year.”
    It was on that same stage, in that gymnasium smelling of old running shoes and adolescent sweat, that Thorstad had directed the now-famous Oonagh Farrell in her first starring role. That no one on Estevan Island had mentioned this fact suggested that no one here believed it—though this occurrence was as true as the medals at the bottom of his trunk and as easily verified as the mayor’s indignant speech. He could imagine the disbelief if they were told of the offstage role that Oonagh Farrell had played, long ago, in his life.
    Walking up the stony beach with water streaming off his body was perhaps the only time he was conscious of his exceptional height, of the long limbs and broad shoulders that had once inspired astonishment in