Duet

Duet Carol Shields Orange Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning Carol Shields’ tender, funny and wonderfully insightful portrait of two sisters struggling to rediscover themselves amidst the perplexing swirl of family life.Judith is a biographer whose life is subsumed by others: her eccentric husband, her secretive children and the Victorian novelist who is her subject. Her sister Charleen is a single mother and lapsed poet. While Judith analyses the minutiae of lives past and present, Charleen battles her own past ghosts and wonders desperately what her life has been about. As their mother’s wedding approaches, both sisters must come to terms with the paths they have chosen.Originally published as two companion novels: Small Ceremonies and The Box Garden. Duet Carol Shields Table of Contents Cover Page (#ua38c0ff7-dbfa-58be-8078-55de36cd3648) Title Page (#ufed16266-a265-5d2a-ade0-e598513d7045) Introduction (#ub32df058-7d5f-5418-95e9-455be3662587) Judith (#uf69c7b6e-696c-5f26-96b7-6ef942b81b24) September (#udafeee0d-830f-53d5-b463-5647ae5b31cf) October (#u64b1e6c4-1647-57d6-987f-3aba9461b592) November (#u3a161d74-bc77-5d3d-b819-7f21638a2173) December (#u896e5dff-84db-5e6b-bba9-2ca3813fb444) January (#uccf77386-53f1-5f56-b544-e4baa2735fc1) February (#litres_trial_promo) March (#litres_trial_promo) April (#litres_trial_promo) May (#litres_trial_promo) Charleen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) The Work of Carol Shields (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Introduction (#ulink_c716e171-6925-53ac-94b4-91005ae7ceb3) I’ve always thought of my first two books as ‘companion’ novels, a term I seem to have invented. Small Ceremonies was published in 1976, and a year later, 1977, came The Box Garden. There is no sense of this second book being a sequel to the first, but a number of threads connect them. Above all, they are about two women, Judith and Charleen, who happen to be sisters. The mother of the two women also appears in both novels. Mrs McNinn is an sour, disenfranchised housewife whose only relief is found in the manic redecorating of her small suburban house. Judith, a biographer, is scarcely touched by her mother’s narrowness; Charleen, on the other hand, a poet, has been thwarted by her bitter mother. These are both short novels, and the idea of publishing them together makes sense to me. Each enriches and fills out the other, and together they lead to the sisters’ discovery of what their mother really is; an artist who, like themselves, stumbles toward that recognition. Carol Shields Judith (#ulink_f3235177-7597-5e98-bc72-678829089a3d) For Inez 1902-1971 September (#ulink_bbce66cd-8a02-568c-a0a3-858618006dd0) Sunday night. And the thought strikes me that I ought to be happier than I am. We have high tea on Sunday, very Englishy, the four of us gathered in the dining ell of our cream-coloured living room at half-past five for cold pressed ham, a platter of tomatoes and sliced radishes. Slivers of hardboiled egg. A plate of pickles. The salad vegetables vary with the season. In the summer they’re larger and more varied, cut into thick peasant slices and drenched with vinegar and oil. And in the winter, in the pale Ontario winter, they are thin, watery, and tasteless, though their exotic pallor gives them a patrician presence. Now, since it is September, we are eating tomatoes from our own suburban garden, brilliant red under a scatter of parsley. Delicious, we all agree. ‘Don’t we have any mustard?’ my husband Martin asks. He is an affectionate and forgetful man, and on weekends made awkward by leisure. ‘We’re all out,’ I tell him, ‘but there’s chutney. And a little of that green relish.’ ‘Never mind, Judith. It doesn’t matter.’ ‘I’ll get the chutney for you,’ Meredith offers. ‘No, really. It doesn’t matter.’ ‘Well, I’d like some,’ Richard says. ‘In that case you can just go and get it yourself,’ Meredith tells him. She is sixteen; he is twelve. The bitterness between them is variable but always present. Meredith makes a sweep for the basket in the middle of the table. ‘Oh,’ she says happily, ‘fresh rolls.’ ‘I like garlic bread better,’ Richard says. He is sour with love and cannot, will not, be civil. ‘We had that last Sunday,’ Meredith says, helping herself to butter. Always methodical, she keeps track of small ceremonies. For us, Sunday high tea is a fairly recent ceremony, a ritual brought back from England where we spent Martin’s sabbatical year. We are infected, all four of us, with a surrealistic nostalgia for our cold, filthy flat in Birmingham, actually homesick for fog and made edgy by the thought of swerving red buses. And high tea. A strange hybrid meal, a curiosity at first, it was what we were most often invited out to during our year in England. We visited Martin’s colleagues far out in the endless bricked-up suburbs, and drank cups and cups of milky tea and ate ham and cold beef, so thin on the platter it looked almost spiritual. The chirpy wives and their tranquil pipe-sucking husbands, acting out of some irrational good will, drew us into cozy sitting rooms hung with water colours, rows of Penguins framing the gasfires, night pressing in at the windows, so that snugness made us peaceful and generous. Always afterward, driving back to the flat in our little green Austin, we spoke to each other with unaccustomed charity, Martin humming and Meredith exclaiming again and again from the back seat how lovely the Blackstones were and wasn’t she, Mrs Blackstone, a pet. So we carry on the high tea ritual. But we’ve never managed to capture that essential shut-in coziness, that safe-from-the-storm solidarity. We fly off in midair. Our house, perhaps, is too open, too airy, and then again we are not the same people we were then; but still we persist. After lemon cake and ice cream, we move into the family room to watch television. September is the real beginning of the year; even the media know, for the new fall television series are beginning this week. I know it is the beginning because I feel the wall of energy, which I have allowed to soften with the mercury, toughen up. Get moving, Judith, it says. Martin knows it. All children know it. The first of January is bogus, frosty hung-over weather, a red herring in mindless snow. Winter is the middle of the year; spring the finale, and summer is free; in this climate, at least, summer is a special dispensation, a wave of weather, timeless and tax-free, when heat piles up in corners, sending us sandalled and half-bare to improbable beaches. September is the real beginning and, settling into our favourite places, Martin and I on the sofa, Meredith in the old yellow chair and Richard stretched on the rug, we sit back to see what’s new. Six-thirty. A nature program is beginning, something called ‘This Feathered World.’ The life cycle of a bird is painstakingly described; eggs crack open emitting wet, untidy wings and feet; background music swells. There are fantastic migrations and speeds beyond imagining. Nesting and courtship practices are performed. Two storks are seen clacking their beaks together, bang, slash, bang, deranged in their private frenzy. Richard wants to know what they are doing. ‘Courting.’ Martin explains shortly. ‘What’s that?’ Richard asks. Surely he knows, I think. ‘Getting acquainted,’ Martin answers. ‘Now be quiet and watch.’ We see an insane rush of feathers. A windmill of wings. A beating of air. ‘Was that it?’ Richard asks. ‘That was courting?’ ‘Idiot,’ Meredith addresses him. ‘And I can’t see. Will you kindly remove your feet, Richard.’ ‘It’s a dumb program anyway,’ Richard says and, rolling his head back, he awaits confirmation. ‘It’s beautifully done, for your information,’ Meredith tells him. She sits forward, groaning at the beauty of the birds’ outstretched wings. A man appears on the screen, extraordinarily intense, speaking in a low voice about ecology and the doomed species. He is leaning over, and his hands, very gentle, very sensitive, attach a slender identification tag to the leg of a tiny bird. The bird shudders in his hand, and unexpectedly its ruby throat puffs up to make an improbable balloon. ‘I’d like to stick a pin in that,’ Richard murmurs softly. The man talks quietly all the time he strokes the little bird. This species is rare, he explains, and becoming more rare each year. It is a bird of fixed habits, he tells us; each year it finds a new mate. Martin, his arm loose around my shoulder, scratches my neck. I lean back into a nest of corduroy. A muscle somewhere inside me tightens. Why? Every year a new mate; it is beyond imagining. New feathers to rustle, new beaks to bang, new dense twiggy nests to construct and agree upon. But then birds are different from human beings, less individual. Scared little bundles of bones with instinct blurring their small differences; for all their clever facility they are really rather stupid things. I can hear Meredith breathing from her perch on the yellow chair. She has drawn up her knees and is sitting with her arms circled round them. I can see the delicate arch of her neck. ‘Beautiful. Beautiful,’ she says. I look at Martin, at his biscuity hair and slightly sandy skin, and it strikes me that he is no longer a young man. Martin Gill. Doctor Gill. Associate Professor of English, a Milton specialist. He is not, in fact, in any of the categories normally set aside for the young, no longer a young intellectual or a young professor or a young socialist or a young father. And we, I notice with a lazy loop of alarm, we are no longer what is called a young couple. Making the beds the next morning, pulling up the unbelievably heavy eiderdowns we brought back with us from England, I listened to local announcements on the radio. There was to be a ‘glass blitz’ organized by local women, and the public was being asked to sort their old bottles by colour – clear, green and brown – and to take them to various stated depots, after which they would be sent to a factory for recycling. The organizers of the blitz were named on the air: Gwen Somebody, Peg Someone, Sue, Nan, Dot, Pat. All monosyllabic, what a coincidence! Had they noticed, I wondered. The distance I sometimes sensed between myself and other women saddened me, and I lay flat on my bed for a minute thinking about it. Imagine, I though, sitting with friends one day, with Gwen, Sue, Pat and so on, and someone suddenly bursting out with, ‘I know what. Let’s have a glass blitz.’ And then rolling into action, setting to work phoning the newspapers, the radio stations. Having circulars printed, arranging trucks. A multiplication of committees, akin to putting on a war. Not that I was unsympathetic to the cause, for who dares spoof ecology these days, but what I can never understand is the impulse that actually gets these women, Gwen, Sue, Pat and so on, moving. Nevertheless, I made a mental note to sort out the bottles in the basement. Guilt, guilt. And then I got down to work myself at the card table in the comer of our bedroom where I am writing my third biography. This book is one that promises to be more interesting than the other two put together, although my first books, somewhat to my astonishment, were moderately well received. The press gave them adequate coverage, and Furlong Eberhardt, my old friend and the only really famous person I know, wrote a long and highly flattering review for a weekend newspaper. And although the public hadn’t rushed out to buy in great numbers, the publishers – I am still too self-conscious a writer to say my publishers – Henderson and Yeo, had seemed satisfied. Sales hadn’t been bad, they explained, for biography. Not everyone, after all, was fascinated by Morris Cardiff, first barrister in Upper Canada, no matter how carefully researched or how dashingly written. The same went for Josephine Macclesfield, prairie suffragette of the nineties. The relative success of the two books had led me, two years ago, into a brief flirtation with fiction, a misadventure which cost me a year’s work and much moral deliberation. In the end, all of it, one hundred execrable pages, was heaved in the wastebasket. I try not to think about it. I am back in the good pastures of biography now, back where I belong, and in Susanna Moodie I believe I have a subject with somewhat wider appeal than the other two. Most people have at least heard of her, and thus her name brings forth the sweet jangle of familiarity. Furthermore Susanna has the appeal of fragility for, unlike Morris Cardiff, she was not the first anything and, unlike Josephine, she was not aflame with conviction. She has, in fact, just enough neuroses to make her interesting and just the right degree of weakness to make me feel friendly toward her. Whereas I had occasionally found my other subjects terrifying in their single-mindedness, there is a pleasing schizoid side to Susanna; she could never make up her mind what she was or where she stood. The fact is, I am enamoured of her, and have felt from the beginning of my research, the pleasant shock of meeting a kindred spirit. Her indecisiveness wears well after the rough, peremptory temper of Josephine. Also, she has one of the qualities which I totally lack and, therefore, admire, that of reticence. Quaint Victorian restraint. Violet-tinted reserve, stemming as much from courtesy as from decorum. Decency shimmers beneath her prose, and one sense that here is a woman who hesitates to bore her reader with the idle slopover of her soul. No one, she doubtless argued in her midnight heart, could possibly be interested in the detailing of her rancid sex life or the nasty discomfort of pregnancy in the backwoods. Thus she is genteel enough not to dangle her shredded placenta before her public, and what a lot she resisted, for it must have been a temptation to whine over her misfortunes. Or to blurt out her rage against the husband who brought her to the Ontario wilderness, gave her a rough shanty to live in, and then proceeded into debt; what wonders of scorn she might have heaped on him. One winter they lived on nothing but potatoes; what lyrical sorrowing she might have summoned on that subject. And how admirable of her not to crow when her royalty cheques came in, proclaiming herself the household saviour, which indeed she was in the end. But of all this, there is not one word. Instead she presents a stout and rubbery persona, that of a generous, humorous woman who feeds on anecdotes and random philosophical devotions, sucking what she can out of daily events, the whole of her life glazed over with a neat edge-to-edge surface. It is the cracks in the surface I look for; for if her reticence is attractive, it also makes her a difficult subject to possess. But who, after all, could sustain such a portrait over so many pages without leaving a few chinks in the varnish? Already I’ve found, with even the most casual sleuthing, small passages in her novels and backwoods recollections of unconscious self-betrayal, isolated words and phrases, almost lost in the lyrical brush-work. I am gluing them together, here at my card table, into a delicate design which may just possibly be the real Susanna. What a difference from my former subject Josephine Macclesfield who, shameless, showed every filling in her teeth. Ah, she had an opinion on every bush and shrub! Her introspection was wide open, a field of potatoes; all I had to do was wander over it at will and select the choice produce. Poor Josephine, candid to a fault; I had not respected her in the end. Just as I had had reservations when reading the autobiography of Bertrand Russell who, in passages of obsessive self-abasement, confessed to boyhood masturbation and later to bad breath. For though I forgive him his sour breath and his childhood excesses, it is harder to forgive the impulse which makes it public. Holding back, that is the brave thing. My research, begun last winter, is going well, and already I have a lovely stack of five-by-seven cards covered with notations. It is almost enough. My old portable is ready with fresh ribbon, newly conditioned at Simpson-Sears. It is ten o’clock; half the morning is gone. Richard will be home from school at noon. I must straighten my shoulders, take a deep breath and begin. Far away downstairs the back door slammed. ‘Where are you?’ Richard called from the kitchen. ‘Upstairs,’ I answered. ‘I’ll be right down.’ At noon Martin eats at the university faculty club, and Meredith takes her lunch to school, so it is only Richard and I for lunch, a usually silent twosome huddled over sandwiches in the kitchen. Today I heated soup and made cheese sandwiches while Richard stood silently watching me. ‘Any mail?’ he asked at last. ‘In the hall.’ ‘Anything for me?’ ‘Isn’t there always something for you on Mondays?’ ‘Not always,’ he countered nervously. ‘Almost always.’ Richard dived into the hall and came back with his air-letter. He opened it with a table knife, taking enormous care, for he knows from experience that an English airletter is a puzzle of folds and glued edges. While we ate, sitting close to the brotherly flank of the refrigerator, he read his letter, cupping it toward him cautiously so I couldn’t see. ‘Don’t worry,’ I chided him. ‘I’m not going to peek.’ ‘You might,’ he said, reading on. ‘Do you think I’ve nothing to do but read my son’s mail?’ I asked, forcing my voice into feathery lightness. He looked up in surprise. I believe he thinks that is exactly the case: that I have great vacant hours with nothing to do but satisfy my curiosity about his affairs. In appearance Richard is somewhat like Martin, the same bran-coloured hair, lots of it, tidy shoulders, slender. He will be of medium height, I think, like Martin; and like his father, too, he speaks slowly and with deliberation. For most of his twelve years he has been an easy child to live with; we absorb him unthinking into ourselves, for he is so willingly one of us, so generally unprotesting. At school in England, when Meredith raged about having to wear school uniforms, he silently accepted shirt, tie, blazer, even the unspeakable short pants, and was transformed before our eyes into a boy who looked like someone else’s son. And where Meredith despised most of her English schoolmates for being uppity and affected, he scarcely seemed to notice the difference between the boys he played soccer with in Birmingham and those he skated with at home. He is so healthy. The day he was born, watching his lean little arms struggle against the blanket, I gave up smoking forever. Nothing must hurt him. Absorbed, he chewed a corner of his sandwich and read his weekly letter from Anita Spalding, whom he has never met. She is twelve years old too, and it was her parents, John and Isabel Spalding, who sublet their Birmingham flat to us when we were in England. The arrangements had been made by the university, and the Spaldings, spending the year at the English School in Nicosia, far far away in sunny Cyprus, left us their rambling, freezing and inconvenient flat for which we paid, we later found out, far too much. To begin with our feelings toward them were neutral, but we began to dislike them the day after we moved in, interpreting our various disasters as the work of their deliberate hands. The rusted taps, the burnt-out lights, the skin of mildew on the kitchen ceiling, a dead mouse in the pantry, the terrible iciness of their lumpy beds; all were linked in a plot to undermine us. Where was the refrigerator, we suddenly asked. How is it possible that there is no heat at all in the bathroom? Fleas in the armchairs as well as the beds? Isabel we imagined as a slattern in a greasy apron, and John we pictured as a very small man with a tiny brain pickled in purest white vinegar. Its sour workings curdled in his many tidy lists and in the exclamatory pitch of his notes to us. ‘May I trust you to look after my rubber plant? It’s been with me since I took my degree.’ ‘You’ll find the stuck blind a deuced bother.’ ‘The draught from the lavatory window can be wretched, I fear, but we take comfort that the air is fresh.’ Even Martin took to cursing him. (These days I find it harder to hate him. I try not to think of John Spalding at all, but when I do it is with uneasiness. And regret.) If nothing else the Spaldings’ flat had plenty of bedrooms, windy cubicles really, each equipped like a hotel room with exactly four pieces; bed, bureau, wardrobe and chair, all constructed in cheap utilitarian woods. It was on a bare shelf in his wardrobe that Richard discovered Anita’s letter of introduction. He came running with it into the kitchen where we stood examining the ancient stove. At that time he was only nine, not yet given to secrecy, and he handed the letter proudly to Martin. ‘Look what I’ve found.’ Martin read the letter aloud, very solemnly pronouncing each syllable, while the rest of us stood listening in a foolish smiling semicircle. It was a curious note, written in a puckered, precocious style with Lewis Carroll overtones, but sincere and simple. To Whoever is the Keeper of This Room, Greetings and welcome. I am distressed thinking about you, for my parents have told me that you are Canadians which I suppose is rather like being Americans. I am worried that you may find the arrangements here rather queer since I have seen packs and packs of American films and know what kind of houses they live in. This bed, for instance, is rotten through and through. It is odd to think that someone else will actually be sleeping in my bed. But then I shall be sleeping in someone else’s bed in Nicosia. They are a Scottish family and they will spend the year in Glasgow, probably in someone else’s flat. And the Glasgow family, they’ll have to go off and live somewhere, won’t they? Isn’t it astonishing that we should all be sleeping in one another’s beds. A sort of roundabout almost. Whoever you are, if you should happen to be a child (I am nine and a girl) perhaps you would like to write me a letter. I would be delighted to reply. I am exceedingly fond of writing letters but have no connexions at the moment. So please write. Isn’t the kitchen a fright! Not like the ones in the films at all. Your obedient servant, ANITA DREW SPALDING 9 It took Richard more than a month to write back, although I reminded him once or twice. He hates writing letters, and was busy with other things; I did not press him. But one dark chilly Sunday afternoon he asked me for some paper, and for an hour he sat at the kitchen table scratching away, asking me once whether there was an ‘e’ in homesick; his or hers, we never knew, for he didn’t offer to show us what he’d written. He sealed it shyly, and the next day took it to the post office and sent it on its way to Cyprus. Anita’s reply was almost instantaneous. ‘It’s from her,’ he explained, showing us the envelope. ‘From that Cyprus girl.’ That evening he asked for more paper. Once a week, sometimes twice, a thick letter with the little grey Cyprus stamp shot through our mail slot. At least as often Richard wrote back, walking to the post office next to MacFisheries at the end of our road in time for the evening pickup. We never did meet the Spaldings. We left England a month before they returned. We thought Richard would be heartbroken that he would not see Anita, but he seemed not to care much, and I had the idea that the correspondence might drop off when he got home to Canada. But their letters came and went as frequently as ever and seemed to grow even thicker. Postage mounted up, draining off Richard’s pocket money, so they switched occasionally to air-letters. Always when Richard opens them, he smiles secretly to himself. ‘What on earth do you write about?’ I asked him. ‘Just the same stuff everyone writes in letters,’ he dodged. ‘You mean just news? Like what you’ve been doing in school?’ ‘Sort of, yeah. Sometimes she sends cartoons from Punch. And I send her the best ones out of your old New Yorkers.’ I find it curious. I don’t write to my own sister in Vancouver more than four times a year. To my mother in Scarborough I write a dutiful weekly letter, but sometimes I have to sit for half an hour thinking up items to fill one page. Martin’s parents write weekly from Montreal, his mother using one side of the page, his father the other, but even they haven’t the stamina of these two mysterious children. Richard’s constancy in this correspondence seems oddly serious and out of proportion to childhood, causing me to wonder sometimes whether this little witch in England hasn’t got hold of a corner of his soul and somehow transformed it. He is bewitched. I can see it by the way he is sitting here in the kitchen folding her letter. He has read it twice and now he is folding it. Creasing its edges. With tenderness. ‘Well, how is Anita these days?’ My light voice again. ‘Fine.’ Noncommittal. ‘Has she ever sent a picture of herself?’ ‘No,’ he says, and my heart leaps. She is ugly. ‘Why not?’ I ask foxily. ‘I thought pen-pals always exchanged pictures.’ ‘We decided not to,’ he says morosely, wincing, or so I believe, at the word pen-pal. Then he adds, ‘It was an agreement we made. Not to send pictures.’ Of course. Their correspondence, I perceive, is a formalized structure, no snapshots, no gifts at Christmas, no postcards ever. Rules in acid, immovable, a pact bound on two sides, a covenant. I can’t resist one more question. ‘Does she still sign her letters “your obedient servant?”’ ‘No,’ Richard says, and he sighs. The heaviness of that sound tells me that he sighs with love. My heart twists for him. I know the signs, or at least I used to. Absurd it may be, but I believe it; Richard is as deeply in love at twelve as many people are in a lifetime. The house we live in – Martin, the children and I – is not really my house. That is, it is not the kind of house I once imagined I might be the mistress of. We live in the suburbs of a small city; our particular division is called Greenhills, and it is neither a town nor a community, not a neighbourhood, not even a postal zone. It is really nothing but the extension of a developer’s pencil, the place on the map where he planned to plunk down his clutch of houses and make his million. I suppose he had to call it something, and perhaps he thought Greenhills was catchy and good for sales; or perhaps, who knows, it evoked happy rural images inside his head. We are reached in the usual way by a main arterial route which we leave and enter by numbered exits and entrances. Greenhills is the seventh exit from the city centre which means we are within a mile or two of open countryside, although it might just as well be ten. Where we live there are no streets, only crescents, drives, circles and one self-conscious boulevard. It is leafy green and safe for children; our lawns stretch luscious as flesh to the streets; our shrubs and borders are watered. As soon as the sewers were installed nine years ago, we moved in. The house itself has all the bone-cracking cliches of Sixties domestic architecture: there is a family room, a dining ell, a utility room, a master bedroom with bath en suite. A Spanish step-saving kitchen with pass-through, colonial door, attached garage, sliding patio window, split-level grace, spacious garden. The only item we lack is a set of Westminster chimes; the week we moved in, Martin disconnected the mechanism with a screw-driver and installed a doorknocker instead, proving what I have always known, that despite his socialism, he is 90 per cent an aristocrat. It is a beige and uninteresting house. Curtains join rugs, rugs join furniture; nubby sofa sits between matching lamps on twin tables, direct from Eaton’s show room. Utilitarian at the comfort level, there is nothing unexpected. This is a shell to live in without thought. And in a way it is deliberate, this minimal approach to decorating. My sister Charleen and I, now that we are safely grown up, agree on one thing, and that is that as children we were cruelly overburdened with interior decoration. The house in which we grew up in Scarborough – the old Scarborough that is, before television, before shopping centres, the Scarborough of neat and faintly rural streets – that tiny house was in a constant state of revitalization. All our young lives, or so it seemed, we dodged stepladders, stepped carefully around the wet paint, shared the lunch table with wallpaper samples. Our little living room broke out with staggered garlands one year, with French stripes the next, and our girlish bedroom at the back of the house was gutted almost annually. Shaking his head, our father used to say that the rooms would grow gradually smaller under their layers and layers of paint and paper. We would be pushed out on to the street one day, he predicted. It was his little joke, almost his only joke, but straining to recall his voice, do I now hear or imagine the desperate edge? Better Homes and Gardens was centred on our coffee table, cheerful with new storage ideas or instructions for gluing bold fabric to attic ceilings. The dining table was in the basement being refinished, or the chesterfield was being fitted for slipcovers. The pictures were changed with the seasons. ‘My house is my hobby,’ Mother used to say to the few visitors we ever had; and even as she spoke, her eyes turned inward, tuned to the next colour scheme, to the ultimate arrangement, just out of reach, beamed in from House and Garden, a world the rest of us never entered. Nor wished to. Still we have put our mark on this place, Martin and I. The floor tiles rise periodically, reminding us they are now nine years old. The utility room is so filled with ski equipment that we call it the ski room. The dining ell has been partitioned off with a plywood planter which looks tacky and hellish, though we thought it a good idea at the time. Hosiery drips from the shower rail in the en suite bathroom. In the cool dry basement our first married furniture glooms around the furnace, its Lurex threads as luminous and accusing as the day we bought it; Richard’s electric train tunnels between the brass-tipped legs. The spacious garden is the same flat rectangle it always was except for a row of tomato plants and a band of marigolds by the fence. The house that I once held half-shaped in my head was old, a nook-and-cranny house with turrets and lovely sensuous lips of gingerbread, a night-before-Christmas house, bought for a song and priceless on todays market. Hung with the work of Quebec weavers, an electic composition of Swedish and Canadiana. Tasteful but offhand. A study, beamed, for Martin and a workroom, sunny, for me. Studious corners where children might sit and sip their souls in pools of filtered light. A garden drunk with roses, criss-crossed with paths, moist, shady, secret. This place, 62 Beaver Place, is not really me, I used to say apologetically back in the days when I actually said such things. ‘We’re just roosting here until something “us” turns up.’ I never say it now. If we wanted to, Martin and I could look in his grey file drawer next to his desk in the family room. Between the folders for Tax and Health, we would find House, and from there we could pluck out our offer-to-purchase, the blueprints, the lot survey, the mortgage schedule and, clipped to it, the record of payments along with the annual tax receipts. It’s all there. We could calculate, if we chose, the exact dimensions of our delusions. But we never do. We live here, after all. Up and down the gentle curve of Beaver Place we see cedar-shake siding, colonial pillars, the jutting chins of split-levels, each of them bought in hours of panic, but with each one, some particular fantasy fulfilled. The house they never had as children perhaps. The house that will do for now, before the move to the big one on the river lot. The house where visions of dynasty are glimpsed, a house future generations will visit, spend holidays in and write up in memoirs. Why not? Something curious. One day last week, having been especially energetic about Susanna Moodie and turning out six pages in one morning, I found myself out of paper. There must be some in the house, I thought and, although I prefer soft, pulpy yellow stuff, anything is useable in a pinch, I searched Meredith’s room first, being careful not to disturb her things. Everything there is so carefully arranged; she has all sorts of curios, souvenirs, snapshots, a music award stencilled on felt, animal figurines she collected as a very young child, cosmetics in a pearly pale shade standing at attention on her dresser. Everything but paper. In Richard’s room I found desk drawers filled with Anita Spalding’s letters, each one taped shut from prying eyes. Mine perhaps? Safety patrol badges, a map of England with an inked star on Birmingham, a copy of Playboy, hockey pictures, but not a single sheet of useable paper. Martin will have some, I thought. I went downstairs to the family room to look in his desk. Nothing in the top drawer except his Xeroxed paper on Paradise Regained, recently rejected by the Milton Quarterly. In his second drawer were clipped notes for an article on Samson Agonistes and offprints of an article he had had printed in Renaissance Studies, the one on Milton’s childhood which he had researched in England. The third drawer was full of wool. I blinked. Unbelievable. The drawer was stuffed to the top with brand new hanks of wool, still with their little circular bands around them. I reached in and touched them. Blue, red, yellow, green; fat four-ounce bundles in all colours. Eight of them. Lying on their sides in Martin’s drawer. Wool. It couldn’t be for me. I hate knitting and detest crocheting. For Meredith perhaps? An early Christmas present? But she hadn’t knitted anything since Brownies, six years ago, and had never expressed any interest in taking it up again. Frieda? Frieda who comes to clean out the house on Wednesday? She knits, and it is just possible, I thought, that it was hers. Absurd though. She never goes in Martin’s desk, for one thing. And what reason would she have to stash all this lunatic wool in his drawer anyway? Richard? Out of the question. What would he be doing with wool? It must be Martin’s. For his mother, maybe; she loves knitting. He might have seen it on sale and bought it for her, although it seemed odd he hadn’t mentioned it to me. I’ll ask him tonight, I thought. But that night Martin was at a meeting, and I was asleep when he came home. The next day I forgot. And the next. Whenever it pops into my mind, he isn’t around. And when he is, something makes me stumble and hesitate as though I were afraid of the reply. I still haven’t asked him, but this morning I looked in the drawer to see if it was still there. It was all in place, all eight bundles; nothing had been touched. I must ask Martin about it. As Meredith grows up I look at her and think, who does she remind me of? A shaded gesture, a position struck, or something curious she might say will touch off a shock of recognition in me, but I can never think who it is she is like. I flip through my relatives – like flashcards. My mother. No, no, no. My sister Charleen? No. Charleen, for all her sensitivity, has a core of detachment. Aunt Liddy? Sometimes I am quite sure it is my old aunt. But no. Auntie’s fragility is neurotic, not natural like Meredith’s. Who else? She has changed in the last year, is romantic and realistic in violent turns. Now she is reading Furlong Eberhardt’s new book about the prairies. While she reads, her hands grip the cover so hard that the bones of her hands stand up, whey-white. Her eyes float in a concerned sweep over the pages, her forehead puzzled. It’s painful to watch her; she shouldn’t invest so much of herself in anything as ephemeral as a book; it is criminal to care that much. Like my family she is dark, but unlike us she has a delicious water-colour softness, and if she were braver she would be beautiful. She is as tall as I am but she has been spared the wide country shoulders; there are some blessings. It is an irony, the sort I relish, that I who am a biographer and delight in sorting out personalities, can’t even draw a circle around my own daughter’s. Last night at the table, just as she was cutting into a baked potato, she raised her eyes, exceptionally sober even for her, and answered some trivial question Martin had asked her. The space between the movement of her hand and the upward angle of her eyes opened up, and I almost had it. Then it slipped away. Last night Martin and I went to a play. It was one of Shaw’s early ones, written before he turned drama into social propaganda. The slimmest of drawingroom debacles, it was a zany sandwich of socialism and pie-in-the-eye, daft but with brisk touches of irreverence. And the heroes were real heroes, the way they should be, and the heroines were even better. The whole evening was a confection, a joy. During the intermission we stood in the foyer chatting with Furlong Eberhardt and his mother, our delight in the play surfacing on our lips like crystals of sugar. Mrs Eberhardt, as broad-breasted as one of the Shavian heroines, encircled us with her peculiar clove-flavoured embrace. A big woman, she is mauve to the bone; even her skin is faintly lilac, her face a benign fretwork of lines framed with waves of palest violet. ‘Judith, you look a picture. How I wish I could wear those pant suits.’ ‘You look lovely as you are, Mother,’ Furlong said, and she did; if ever a woman deserved a son with a mother fixation, it was Mrs Eberhardt. Martin disappeared to get us drinks, and Furlong, by a bit of clever steering, turned our discussion to his new book. Graven Images. ‘I know I can count on you, Judith, for a candid opinion. The critics, mind you, have been very helpful, and thus far, very kind.’ He paused. For a son of the Saskatchewan soil, Furlong is remarkably courtly, and like all the courtly people I know, he inspires in me alleys of unknown coarseness. I want to slap his back, pump his hand, tell him to screw off. But I never do, never, for basically I am too fond of him and even grateful, thankful for his most dazzling talent which is not writing at all, but the ability he has to make the people around him feel alive. There is an exhausted Byzantine quality about him which demands response, and even at that moment, standing in the theatre foyer in my too-tight pantsuit and my hair falling down around my rapidly ageing face, I was swept with vitality, almost drunk with the recognition that all things are possible. Beauty, fame, power; I have not been passed by after all. But about Graven Images, I had to confess ignorance. ‘I’ve been locked up with Susanna for months,’ I explained. It sounded weak. It was weak. But I thought to add kindly, ‘Meredith is reading it right now. She was about halfway through when we left the house tonight.’ At this he beamed. ‘Then it is to your charming daughter I shall have to speak.’ Visibly wounded that I hadn’t got around to his book, he rallied quickly, drowning his private pain in a flood of diffusion. ‘Public reaction is really too general to be of any use, as you well know, Judith. It is one’s friends one must rely upon.’ He pronounced the word friends with such a silky sound that, for an instant, I wished he were a different make of man. ‘Meredith would love to discuss it with you, Furlong,’ I told him honestly. ‘Besides, she’s a more sensitive reader of fiction than I am. You, of all people, know fiction isn’t my thing.’ ‘Ah yes, Judith,’ he said. ‘It’s your old Scarborough puritanism, as I’ve frequently told you. Judith Gill, my girl, basically you believe fiction is wicked and timewasting. The devil’s work. A web of lies.’ ‘You just might be right, Furlong.’ When Martin came back with our drinks, Furlong issued a general invitation to attend his publication party in November. He beamed at Martin, ‘You two must plan to come.’ ‘Hmmm,’ Martin murmured noncommitally. He doesn’t really like Furlong; the relationship between them, although they teach in the same department, is one of tolerant scorn. The lights dipped, and we found our way back to our seats. Back to the lovely arched setting, lit in some magical way to suggest sunrise. Heroines moved across the broad stage like clipper ships, their throats swollen with purpose. The play wound down and so did they in their final speeches. Holy holy, the crash of applause that always brings tears stinging to my eyes. All night long memories of the play boiled through my dreams, a plummy jam stewed from those intelligent, cruising, early-century bosoms. Hour after hour I rode on a sea of breasts: the exhausted mounds of Susanna Moodie, touched with lamplight. The orchid hills and valleys of Mrs Eberhardt, bubbles of yeast. The tender curve of my daughter Meredith. The bratty twelve-year-old tits of Anita Spalding, rising, falling, melting, twisting in and out of the heavy folds of sleep. I woke to find Martin’s arm flung across my chest; the angle of his skin was perceived and recognized, a familiar coastline. The weight was a lever that cut off the electricity of dreams, pushing me down, down through the mattress, down through the floor, down, into the spongy cave of the blackest sleep. Oblivion. October (#ulink_e63cd20c-2262-5910-a37b-3441f7afba6c) The first frost this morning, a landmark. At breakfast Martin talks about snow tires and mentions a sale at Canadian Tire. After school these days Richard plays football with his friends in the shadowy yard, and when they thud to the grass, the ground rings with sound. Watching them, I am reassured. It is almost dark now when we sit down to dinner. Meredith has found some candles in the cupboard, bent out of shape with the summer heat but still useable, so that now our dinners are washed with candlelight. I make pot roast which they love and mashed potatoes which make me think of Susanna Moodie. In the evening the children have their homework. Martin goes over papers at his desk or reads a book, sitting in the yellow chair, his feet resting on the coffeetable, and he hums. Richard and Meredith bicker lazily. Husband, children, they are not so much witnessed as perceived, flat leaves which grow absently from a stalk in my head, each fitting into the next, all their curving edges perfect. So far, so far. It seems they require someone, me, to watch them; otherwise they would float apart and disintegrate. I watch them. They are as happy as can be expected. What is the matter with me, I wonder. Why am I always the one who watches? One day this week I checked into the Civic Hospital for a minor operation, a delicate, feminine, unspeakable, minimal nothing, the sort of irksome repair work which I suppose I must expect now that I am forty. A minor piece of surgery, but nevertheless requiring a general anaesthetic. Preparation, sleep, recovery, a whole day required, a day fully erased from my life. Martin drove me to the hospital at nine and came to take me home again in the evening. The snipping and sewing were entirely satisfactory, and except for an hour’s discomfort, there were no after effects. None. I am in service again. A lost day, but there was one cheering interlude. Shortly before the administering of the general anaesthetic, I was given a little white pill to make me drowsy. In a languorous trance I was then wheeled on a stretcher to a darkened room and lined up with about twelve other people, male and female, all in the same condition. White-faced nurses tiptoed between our parked rows, whispering. Far below us in another world, cars honked and squeaked. Lying there semidrugged, I sensed a new identity: I was exactly like a biscuit set out to bake, just waiting my turn in the oven. I moved my head lazily to one side and found myself face to face, not six inches away from a man, another biscuit. His eyes met mine, and I watched him fascinated, a slow-motion film, as he laboured to open his mouth and pronounce with a slur, ‘Funny feeling, eh?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As though we were a tray of biscuits.’ ‘That’s right,’ he said crookedly. Surprised, I asked, ‘What are you here for?’ ‘The old water works,’ he said yawning. ‘But nothing major.’ Kidneys, bladder, urine; a diagram flashed in my brain. ‘That’s good,’ I mumbled. Always polite. I cannot, even here, escape courtesy. ‘What about you?’ he mouthed, almost inaudible now. ‘One of those female things,’ I whispered. ‘Also not major.’ ‘You married?’ ‘Yes. Are you?’ I asked, realizing too late that he had asked because of the nature of my complaint, not because we were comparing our status as we might had we met at a party. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m married. But not happily.’ ‘Pardon?’ Courtesy again, the scented phrase. Our mother had always insisted we say pardon and, as Charleen says, we are children all our lives, obedient to echoes. ‘Not happily,’ he said again. ‘Married yes,’ he made an effort to enunciate, ‘but not happily married.’ A surreal testimony. It must be the anesthetic, I thought, pulling an admission like that from a sheeted stranger. The effect of the pill or perhaps the rarity of the circumstances, the two of us lying here nose to nose, almost naked under our thin sheets, horizontal in midmorning, chemical-smelling limbo, our conversation somehow crisped into truth. ‘Too bad,’ I said with just a shade of sympathy. ‘You happily married?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I murmured, a little ashamed at the affirmative ring in my voice. ‘I’m one of the lucky ones. Not that I deserve it.’ ‘What do you mean, not that you deserve it?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well, you said it,’ he said crossly. ‘I just meant that I’m not all that terrific a wife. You know, not self-sacrificial.’ I groped for an example. ‘For instance, when Martin asked me to type something for him last week. Just something short.’ ‘Yeah?’ His mouth made a circle on the white sheet. ‘I said, what’s the matter with Nell? That’s his secretary.’ ‘He’s got a secretary, eh?’ ‘Yes,’ I admitted, again stung with guilt. This was beginning to sound like a man who didn’t have a secretary. ‘She’s skinny though,’ I explained. ‘A real stick. And he shares her with two other professors.’ ‘I see. I see.’ His voice dropped off, and I thought for a minute that he’d fallen asleep. Pressing on anyway I repeated loudly, ‘So I said, what’s the matter with Nell?’ ‘And what did he say to that?’ the voice came. ‘Martin? Well, he just said, “Never mind, Judith.” But then I felt so mean that I went ahead and did it anyway.’ ‘The typing you mean?’ ‘Uh huh.’ ‘So you’re not such a rotten wife,’ he accused me. ‘In a way,’ I said. ‘I did it, but it doesn’t count if you’re not willing.’ Where had I got that? Girl Guides maybe. ‘I never ask my wife to type for me.’ ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Typing I don’t need.’ ‘Maybe you ask for something else,’ I suggested, aware that our conversation was slipping over into a new frontier. ‘Just to let me alone, to let me goddamned alone. Every night she has to ask me what I did all day. At the plant. She wants to know, she says. I tell her, look, I lived through it once, do I have to live through it twice?’ ‘I see what you mean,’ I said, hardly able to remember what we were talking about. ‘You do?’ Far away in his nest of sheets he registered surprise. ‘Yes. I know exactly what you mean. As my mother used to say, “I don’t want to chew my cabbage twice.”’ ‘You mean you don’t ask your husband what he did all day?’ ‘Well,’ I said growing weary, ‘no. I don’t think I ever do. Poor Martin.’ ‘Christ,’ he said as two nurses began rolling him to the doorway. ‘Christ. I wish I was married to you.’ ‘Thank you,’ I called faintly. ‘Thank you, thank you.’ Absurdly flattered, I too was wheeled away. Joy closed my eyes, and all I remember seeing after that was a blur of brilliant blue. ‘You haven’t read it yet, have you?’ Meredith accuses me. ‘Read what yet?’ I am ironing in the kitchen, late on a Thursday afternoon. Pillowcases, Martin’s shirts. I am travelling across the yokes, thinking these shirts I bought on sale are no good. Just a touch-up they’re supposed to need, but the point of my iron is required on every seam. ‘You haven’t read Furlong’s book?’ Meredith says sharply. ‘The new one you mean?’ ‘Graven Images.’ ‘Well,’ I say apologetically, letting that little word ‘well’ unwind slowly, making a wavy line out of it the way our mother used to do, ‘well, you know how busy I’ve been.’ ‘You read Pearson’s book.’ ‘That was different.’ Abruptly she lapses into confidence. ‘It’s the best one he’s written. You’ve just got to read it. That one scene where Verna dies. You’ll love it. She’s the sister. Unmarried. But beautiful, spiritual, even though she never had a chance to go to school. She’s blind, but she has these fantastic visions. Honestly, when you stop to think that here you have a man, a man who is actually writing from inside, you know, from inside a woman’s head. It’s unbelievable. That kind of intuition.’ ‘I’m planning to read it,’ I assure her earnestly, for I want to make her happy. ‘But there’s the Susanna thing, and when I’m not working on that, there’s the ironing. One thing after another.’ ‘You know that’s not the reason you haven’t read it,’ she says, her eyes going icy. I put down the iron, setting it securely on its heel. ‘All right, Meredith. You tell me why.’ ‘You think he’s a dumb corny romantic. Flabby. Feminine.’ ‘Paunchy,’ I help her out. ‘You see,’ her voice rises. ‘Predictable. That’s it, if you really want to know, Meredith.’ ‘I don’t know how you can say that.’ ‘Easy.’ I tell her. ‘This is his tenth novel, you know, and I’ve read them all. Every one. So I’ve a pretty good idea what’s in this one. The formula, you might say, is familiar.’ ‘What’s it about then?’ her voice pleads, and I don’t dare look at her. I shake a blouse vigorously out of the basket. ‘First there’s the waving wheat. He opens, Chapter One, to waving wheat. Admit it, Meredith, Saskatchewan in powder form. Mix with honest rain water for native genre.’ ‘He grew up there.’ ‘I know, Meredith, I know. But he doesn’t live there now, does he? He lives here in the east. For twenty years he’s lived in the east. And he isn’t a farmer. He’s a writer. And when he’s not being a writer, he’s being a professor. Don’t forget about that.’ ‘Roots matter to some people,’ she says in a tone which accuses me of forgetting my own. Nurtured on the jointed avenues of Scarborough, did that count? ‘All right,’ I say. ‘Then you move into his storm chapter. Rain, snow, hail, locusts maybe. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s devastating. Echoes of Moses. A punishing storm. To remind them they’re reaching too high or sinning too low. A holocaust and, I grant you this, very well done. Furlong is exceptional on storms.’ ‘This book really is different. There’s another plot altogether.’ I rip into a shirt of Richard’s. ‘Then the characters. Three I can be sure of. The Presbyterian Grandmother. And sometimes Grandfather too, staring out from his little chimney corner, all-knowing, all-seeing, but, alas, unheeded. Right, Meredith?’ Stop, I tell myself. You’re enjoying this. You’re a cruel, cynical woman piercing the pink valentine heart of your own daughter, shut up, shut up. She mumbles something I don’t catch. ‘Then,’ I say, ‘we’re into the wife. She endures. There’s nothing more to say about her except that she endures. But her husband, rampant with lust, keep your eye on him.’ ‘You haven’t even read it.’ ‘Watch the husband, Meredith. Lust will undo him. Furlong will get him for sure with a horde of locusts. Or a limb frozen in the storm and requiring a tense kitchen-table amputation.’ ‘Influenza,’ Meredith murmurs. ‘But the rest really is different.’ ‘And we close with more waving wheat. Vibrations from the hearthside saying, if only you’d listened.’ ‘It’s not supposed to be real life. It’s not biography,’ she says, giving that last word a nasty snap. ‘It’s sort of a symbol of the country. You have to look at it as a kind of extended image. Like in Shakespeare.’ ‘I’m going to read it,’ I tell her as I fold the ironing board, contrite now. ‘I might even settle down with it tonight.’ We’ve had the book since August. Furlong brought me one, right off the press one steaming afternoon. Inscribed ‘To Martin and Judith Who Care.’ Beautiful thought, but I cringed reading it, hoping Martin wouldn’t notice. Furlong seems unable to resist going the quarter-inch too far. Furlong’s picture on the back of the book is distressingly authorly. One can see evidence of a tally taken, a check list fulfilled. Beard and moustache, of course. White turtleneck exposed at the collar of an overcoat. Tweed and cablestitch juxtaposed, a generation-straddling costume testifying to eclectic respectability. A pipe angles from the corner of his mouth! It’s bowl is missing, the outlines lost in the dark shadow of the overcoat, so that for a moment I thought it was a cigarillo or maybe just a fountain pen he was sucking on. But no, on close examination I could see the shine of the bowl. Everything in place. The picture is two-colour, white and a sort of olive tone, bleeding off the edges, Time-Life style. Behind him a microcosm of Canada – a fretwork of bare branches and a blur of olive snow, man against nature. His eyes are mere slits. Snow glare? The whole expression is nicely in place, a costly membrane, bemused but kindly, academic but gutsy. The photographer has clearly demanded detachment. The jacket blurb admits he teaches creative writing in a university, but couched within this apology is the information that he has also swept floors, reported news, herded sheep, a man for all seasons, our friend Furlong. Those slit eyes stick with me as I put away the ironing; shirts on hangers, handkerchiefs in drawers, pillowcases in the cupboard. They burn twin candles in my brain, and their nonchalance fails to convince me; I feel the muscular twitch of effort, the attempt to hold, to brave it out. Poor Furlong, christened, legend has it, by the first reviewer of his first book who judged him a furlong ahead of all other current novelists. Before that he was known as Red, but I know the guilty secret of his real name: it is Rudyard. His mother let it slip one night at a department sherry party, then covered herself with a flustered apology. We grappled, she and I, in a polite but clumsy exchange, confused and feverish, but I am not a biographer for nothing; I filed it away; I remember the name Rudyard. Rudyard. Rudyard. I think of it quite often, and in a way I love him, Rudyard Eberhardt. More than I could ever love Furlong. Meredith slips past me on the stairs. She is on her way to her room and she doesn’t speak; she doesn’t even look at me. What have I done now? ‘Martin.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Just going over some notes.’ ‘Lecture notes?’ ‘Yes.’ It is midnight, the children are sleeping, and we are in bed. Martin is leaning into the circle of light given off by our tiny and feeble bedside lamp, milkglass, a nobbly imitation with a scorched shade. ‘Do you know I’ve never heard you give a lecture?’ ‘You hate Milton.’ He says this gently, absently. ‘I know. I know. But I’d like to hear you anyway.’ ‘You’d be bored stiff.’ ‘Probably. But I’d like to see what your style is like.’ ‘Style?’ ‘You know. Your lecturing style.’ ‘What do you think it’s like?’ He doesn’t raise his eyes from his pile of papers. But I reply thoughtfully. ‘Orderly, I’m sure you’re orderly. Not too theatrical, but here and there a flourish. An understated flourish though.’ ‘Hummm.’ ‘And I suppose you quote a few lines now and then. Sort of scatter them around.’ ‘Milton is notoriously unquotable, you know.’ He looks up. I am in my yellow tulip nightgown, a birthday present from my sister Charleen. I ask, ‘What do you mean he’s unquotable. The greatest master of the English language unquotable?’ ‘Can you think of anything he ever said?’ ‘No. I can’t. Not a thing. Not at this hour anyway.’ ‘There you are.’ ‘Wasn’t there something like tripping the light fantastic?’ ‘Uh huh.’ ‘It’s hard to see why they bother teaching him then. If you can’t even remember anything he wrote.’ ‘Memorable phrases aren’t everything.’ ‘Maybe Milton should just be phased out.’ ‘Could be.’ I have lost him again. ‘Actually, Martin, I did hear you lecture once.’ ‘You did? When was that?’ ‘Remember last year. No, the year before last, the year after England. When I was taking Furlong’s course in creative writing.’ ‘Oh yes.’ He is scribbling in the margin. ‘Well, on my way to the seminar room one day I was walking past a blank door on the third floor of the Arts Building.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Through the door there was a sound coming. A familiar sound, all muffled through the wood. You know how thick those doors are. If it had been anyone else I wouldn’t even have heard it.’ ‘And it was me.’ ‘It was you. And it’s a funny thing, I couldn’t hear a word you were saying. It was all too muffled. Just the rise and fall of your voice. And I suppose some sort of recognizable tonal quality. But it was mainly the rise and fall, the rise and fall. It was your voice, Martin. There wasn’t a notice on the door saying it was you in there teaching Milton, but I was sure.’ ‘You should have come in.’ ‘I was on my way to Furlong’s class. And besides I wouldn’t have. I don’t know why, but I never would have come in.’ ‘I’d better just check these notes over once more.’ ‘Actually, Martin, it was eerie. Your voice coming through the wood like that, rising and falling, rising and falling.’ ‘My God, Judith, you make me sound like some kind of drone.’ ‘It’s something like handwriting.’ I propped myself up on one elbow. ‘Did you know that it’s almost impossible to fake your handwriting? You can slant it backhand or straight up and down and put in endless curlicues, but the giveaway is the proportion of the tall letters to the size of the small ones. It’s individual like fingerprints. Like your voice. The rhythm is personal, rising and falling. It was you.’ ‘Christ, Judith, let me get this done so I can get some sleep.’ ‘The funny thing is, Martin, that even when I was absolutely certain, I had the oddest sensation that I didn’t know you at all. As though you were a stranger, someone I’d never met before.’ ‘Really?’ He reaches for my breasts under the yellow nylon. ‘You were a stranger. Of course, I realized it was just the novelty of the viewpoint. Coming across you unexpectedly. In a different role, really. It was just seeing you from another perspective.’ ‘Why don’t we just make love?’ But I am still in a contemplative frame of mind. ‘Did you ever think of what that expression means? Making love?’ ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’ ‘Milton, eh?’ ‘Uh huh.’ ‘Well, that’s quotable.’ ‘Fairly.’ ‘Martin. Before you turn out the light, there’s a question I’ve been wanting to ask you for weeks.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘I don’t want you to think I’m prying or anything. ‘Who would ever suspect you of a thing like that?’ His tone is only slightly mocking. ‘But I notice things and sometimes I wonder.’ His hand rests on the lamp switch. Judith, just shoot.’ ‘I was wondering, I was just wondering if you were really happy teaching Milton year after year?’ The light goes out, and we fall into our familiar private geometry, the friendly grazing of skin, the circling, circling. The walls tilt in; the darkness presses, but far away I am remembering two things. First, that Martin hasn’t answered my question. And second – the question I have asked him – it wasn’t the question I had meant to ask at all. I spend one wet fall afternoon at the library researching Susanna Moodie, making notes, filling in the gaps. This place is a scholarly retreat, high up overlooking the river, and the reading room is large and handsome. Even on a dark day it is fairly bright. There are rows of evenly spaced oak tables, and here and there groupings of leather armchairs where no one ever sits. The people around me are bent over enormous books, books so heavy that a library assistant delivers them on wheeled trolleys. They turn the pages slowly, and sometimes I see their heads bobbing in silent confirmation to the print. Unlike me, they have the appearance of serious scholars; distanced from their crisp stacks of notes, they are purposeful, industrious, admirable. What I am doing is common, snoopy, vulgar; reading the junky old novelettes and serialized articles of Susanna Moodie; catlike I wait for her to lose her grip. And though she is careful, artfully careful, I am finding gold. The bridal bed she mentions in her story ‘The Miss Greens,’ a hint of sexuality, hurray. Her democratic posture slipping in a book review in the Victoria Magazine, get it down, get it down. Her fear of ugliness. And today I find something altogether unsavoury – the way in which she dwells on the mutilated body of a young pioneer mother who is killed by a panther. She skirts the dreadful sight, but she is really circling in, moving around and around it, horrified, but hoping for one more view. Yes, Susanna, it must be true, you are crazy, crazy. Susanna Strickland Moodie 1803-1885. Gentle English upbringing, gracious country house, large and literary family, privately tutored at home, an early scribbler of stories. Later to emerge in a small way in London reform circles, a meeting with a Lieutenant Moodie in a friend’s drawing-room, marriage, pregnancy, birth, emigration, all in rapid order. Then more children, poverty, struggle, writing, writing by lamplight, a rag dipped into lard for a wick, writing to pay off debts and buy flour. Then burying her husband and going senile, little wonder, at eighty, and death in Toronto. It is a real life, a matter of record, sewn together like a leather glove with all the years joining, no worse than some and better than many. A private life, completed, deserving decent burial, deserving the sweet black eclipse, but I am setting out to exhume her, searching, prying into the small seams, counting stitches, adding, subtracting, keeping score, invading an area of existence where I’ve no real rights. I ask the squares of light that fall on the oak table, doesn’t this woman deserve the seal of oblivion? It is, after all, what I would want. But I keep poking away. No wonder Richard seals his letter with Scotch tape. No wonder Meredith locks her diary, burns her mail, carries the telephone into her room when she talks. No wonder Martin is driven to subterfuge, not telling me that his latest paper has been turned down by the Renaissance Society. And concealing, for who knows what sinister purposes, his brilliant hanks of wool. And John Spalding in Birmingham. Poor John Spalding, how I added him up. Lecturer in English, possessor of a shrewish wife and precocious child, querulous and slightly affected, drinking too much at staff parties and forcing arguments about World Federalism, writing essays for obscure quarterlies; John Spalding, failed novelist, poor John Spalding. How was he to know when he rented his flat to strangers that he would get me, Judith Gill, incorrigibly curious, for a tenant. Curious is kind; I am an invader, I am an enemy. And he is a right chump, just handing it over like that, giving me several hundred square feet of new territory to explore. Drawers and cupboards to open. His books left candidly on the shelves where I could analyze the subtlety of his underlining or jeer at his marginal notations. All that year I filtered him through the wallpaper, the kitchen utensils, the old snapshots, the shaving equipment, distilling him from the ratty blankets and the unpardonable home carpentry, the Marks-and-Spencer lamp shades and the paper bag in the bathroom cupboard where for mysterious reasons he saved burnt-out lightbulbs. Why, why? The task of the biographer is to enlarge on available data. The total image would never exist were it not for the careful daily accumulation of details. I had long since memorized the working axioms, the fleshy certitudes. Thus I peered into cupboards thinking. ‘Tell me what a man eats and I will tell you who he is.’ While examining the bookshelves, recalled that, ‘A man’s sensitivity is indexed in his library.’ While looking into the household accounts – ‘A man’s bank balance betrays his character.’ Into his medicine cabinet – ‘A man’s weakness is outlined by the medicines which enslave him.’ And his sex life, his and Isabel’s, strewn about the flat like a mouldering marriage map; ancient douche bag under a pile of sheets in the airing cupboard; The Potent Male in paperback between the bedsprings; a disintegrating diaphram, dusty with powder in a zippered case; rubber safes sealed in plastic and hastily stuffed behind a crusted vaseline jar; half-squeezed tubes of vaginal jelly, sprays, circular discs emptied of birth control pills – didn’t that woman ever throw anything away – stains on the mattress, brown-edged, stiff to the touch, ancient, untended. Almost against the drift of my will I became an assimilator of details and, out of all the miscellaneous and unsorted debris in the Birmingham flat, John Spalding, wiry (or so I believe him to be), university lecturer, neurotic specialist in Thomas Hardy, a man who suffered insomnia and constipation, who fantasized on a love life beyond Isabel’s loathsome douche bag, who was behind on his telephone bill – out of all this, John Spalding achieved, in my mind at least, something like solid dimensions. Martin was busy that year. Daily he shut himself inside the walnut horizons of Trinity Library, having deluded himself into thinking he was happier in England than he had ever been before. The children were occupied in their daily battle with English schooling, and I was alone in the flat most of the time, restless between biographies, wandering from room to room, pondering on John and Isabel for want of something better to do. Gradually they grew inside my head, a shifting composite leafing out like cauliflower, growing more and more elaborate, branching off like the filaments of a child’s daydream. I could almost touch them through the walls. Almost. Then I discovered, on the top shelf of John’s bookcase, a row of loose-leaf notebooks. His manuscripts. I had noticed them before in their brown-and-buff covers, but the blank private spines had made me disinclined, until this particular day, to reach for them. But taking them down at last, I knew before I had opened the first one that I was onto the real thing; the total disclosure which is what a biographer prays for, the swift fall of facts which requires no more laborious jigsaws. That first notebook weighed heavy in my hands; I knew it must all be there. I had already known – someone must have told me – that John Spalding had written a number of novels, and that all of them had been rejected by publishers. And here they were, seven of them. Since I had no way of recognizing their chronology, I simply started off, in orderly fashion, with the notebook on the far left. In a week I had read the whole shelf, the work, I guessed, of several years. I swallowed them, digested them whole in the ivory-tinted afternoons to the tune of the ticking clock and the spit of the gas fire. Before long a pattern emerged from all that print, the rickety frame upon which he hung his rambling stream-of-consciousness plots. Like ugly cousins they resembled each other. Their insights bled geometrically, one to the other. The machinery consisted of a shy sensitive young man pitted against the incomprehensible world of irritable women, cruel children, sour beer, and leaking roofs. Suddenly this man is given the gift of perfect beauty, and the form of this gift varies slightly from novel to novel. In one case it appears in the shape of a poetry-reciting nymphet; in another case it occurs as a French orphan with large unforgettable eyes. And large unforgettable breasts. A friendship with a black man, struck up one day on a bus, which leads into a damp cave of brothels and spiritualism. Thus stimulated, the frail world of the sensitive young man swirls with sudden meaning, warming his heart, skin, brain, blood, bowels, each in turn. And then a blackout, a plunge as the music fades. The blood cools, and the hand of despair stretches forth. On the journey between wretchedness and joy and back to wretchedness, the young man is tormented by poverty and by the level of his uninformed taste. He is taunted by his mysterious resistance to the materialistic world or his adherence to fatal truths. Thousands and thousands of pages, yards and yards of ascent and descent, all totally and climactically boring. Although, in fairness, the first book – at least the one on the far left which I judged to be first – had a plot of fairly breathless originality. I pondered a while over the significance of that. Had he lived this plot himself or simply dreamed it up? The rest of the books were so helplessly conventional that it was difficult for me to credit him with creativity at any level. Still, it seemed reasonable, since the least of us are visited occasionally by genius, that this book might have been his one good idea. Later I was to ask myself what made me pry into another person’s private manuscripts, and I liked to think that having discovered the bright break of originality in the first book, I read to the end in the hope of finding more. But it was more likely my unhealthy lust for the lives of other people. I was fascinated watching him play the role of tormented hero, and his wife Isabel too, floating in and out, bloody with temper, recognizable even as she changed from Janet, Ida, Anna, Bella, Anabel, Ada, Irene. But more was to come. Besides the loose-leaf notebooks there was a slim scribbler which turned out to be a sort of writer’s diary. I should have stopped with the novels, for opening and reading such a personal document made me cringe at his candour, my face going hot and cold as his ego stumbled beyond mere boyish postures, falling into what seemed like near madness. The passages were random and undated. This constant rejection is finally taking its toll. I honestly believe I am the next Shakespeare, but without some sign of recognition, how can I carry on? Constipation. It seems I am meant to suffer. An hour today in the bathroom – the most painful so far. It is easy to blame I. Fried bread every morning. I am sick with grease. I am losing my grip. Have not heard from publishers yet and it is now three months. No news is good news, I tell I. She smirks. Bitch, bitch, bitch. My hopes are up at last. Surely they must be considering it – they’ve taken long enough over it. We are ready to go to London or even New York the minute we hear. Must speak to Prof. B. about leave of absence. Should be no trouble as university can only profit by having novelist on staff. Have been thinking about movie rights. Must speak to lawyer. Too expensive though. Could corner someone in the law faculty. I am frightened at what comes out of my head. This long stream of negation. Life with I. and A. has become unreal. I exist somewhere else but where? Manuscript returned today. Polite. But not very long note. Still, they must think I have some talent as they say they would like to see other manuscripts. I expected more after six months. My first book was my best. A prophet in his own country… Stale, stale, stale. The year in Nicosia will do me good. Freshen the perceptions. Thank God for Anita, who doesn’t know how I suffer. Had another nosebleed last night. I read the notebook to the end although the terrible open quality of its confessions brought me close to weeping. Silly, silly, silly little man. Paranoiac, inept, ridiculous. But he reached me through those disjointed bleeding notes as he hadn’t in all his seven novels. That shabby flat. I looked around at the border of brown lino and the imitation Indian rug. Fluffy green chunks of it pulled away daily in the vacuum cleaner. Why did he save light bulbs? Did he believe, somewhere in his halo of fantasy, that they might miraculously pull themselves together, suffer a spontaneous healing so that the filaments, reunited, their strength recovered, were once again able to throw out light? I put the notebook back on the shelf with the sad, unwanted novels. I never told anyone about them, not even Martin, and I never again so much as touched their tense covers. John Spalding and his terrible sorrowing stayed with me all winter, a painful bruising, crippling as the weather, pulling me down. I never really shook it off until I was back aboard the BOAC, strapped in with a dazzling lunch tray on my lap and the wide winking ocean beneath me. November (#ulink_5a79a859-59ba-57f5-a03f-d2ae56f8d5d8) Richard’s friends are random and seasonal. There are the friends he swims with in the summer and the casual sweatered football friends. There is a nice boy named Gavin Lord whom we often take skiing with us but forget about between seasons. There is a gaggle of deep-voiced brothers who live next door. For Richard they are interchangeable; they come and go; he functions within their offhand comradeship. In their absence he is indifferent. And, of course, he has Anita. Meredith’s best friend is a girl named Gwendolyn Ackerman, an intelligent girl with a curiously dark face and a disposition sour as rhubarb. She is sensitive: hurts cling to her like tiny burrs, and she and Meredith rock back and forth between the rhythm of their misunderstandings; apology and forgiveness are their coinage. It is possible, I think, that they won’t always be friends. They are only, it seems, temporarily linked together in their terrible and mutual inadequacy. After school, huddled in Meredith’s bedroom, they minutely examine and torment each other with the nuances of their daily happenings, not only what they said and did, but what they nearly said and almost did. They interpret each other until their separate experiences hang in exhausted shreds. They wear each other out; it can’t last. For a quiet man, Martin has many friends. They exist, it seems to me, in separate chambers, and when he sees them he turns his whole self toward them as though each were a privileged satellite. A great many people seem to be extraordinarily attached to him. There are two babies in the world named after him. Old friends from Montreal telephone him and write him chatty letters at Christmas as though he really might care about their new jobs or the cottages they are building. His university friends often drop in on Saturday afternoons and, in addition, he hears regularly from his colleagues in England. He is not an effervescent man, but when he is with his friends he listens to them with a slow and almost innocent smile on his face. His closest friend at the university is Roger Ramsay who teaches Canadian Literature. Roger has a fat man’s face, round and red, with a hedge of fat yellow curls. But his body is long and lean and muscular. He is younger than we are, young enough so he is able to live with someone without marrying her, and he and Ruthie have an apartment at the top of an old Gothic house which is cheap and charming and only a little uncomfortable. Posters instead of wallpaper, ragouts in brown pots instead of roasts, candles instead of trilights, Lightfoot records instead of children. A growing collection of Eskimo carvings and rare Canadian books. Ruthie St Pierre is small, dark and brilliant; assistant to the head of the translation department in the Central Library. They both smoke the odd bit of pot or, as Roger puts it, they’re into it. We love them, but what we can’t understand is why they love us, but they do, especially Martin. In this friendship I am the extra; the clumsy big sister who is only accidentally included. My closest friend is a woman named Nancy Krantz. She is about my age, mother to six children and wife to a lawyer named Paul Krantz, but that is strictly by the way. Nancy is not really attached to anyone, not even to me, I admit sadly. I am an incidental here as well. She generally drops in unexpectedly between errands, usually in the morning. She almost, but not quite, keeps the Volkswagen engine running in the driveway while we talk. She is in a rush and she dances back and forth in my kitchen with the car keys still jingling in her fingers. I cannot, in fact, imagine her voice without the accompaniment of ringing car keys. Our friendship is made up of these brief frenzied exchanges, but the quality of our conversation, for all its feverish outpouring, is genuine. We talk fast, both of us, as though we accelerated each other, and there is a thrilling madness in our morning dialogues. Nancy has always just been somewhere or is on her way to somewhere – to an anti-abortionist meeting, to a consumers’ committee, to a curriculum symposium. And into these concerns, which in the abstract interest me very little, she manages to sweep me away. I stand, coffee cup in one hand, wildly gesticulating with the other, suddenly stunningly vocal. The quality of our exchanges is such that she enables me to string together miles of impressive phrases; my extemporaneous self reawakened. I pour more coffee, and still standing we talk on until, with a loud shake of her key ring, Nancy glances at her watch and flies to the door. I am left steaming with exhaustion and happiness. Today she has come from a committee which is fighting rate increases in the telephone service. It is her special quality to be able to observe these activities as though she were a spectator at a play. She can be wildly humorous. This morning, as a footnote to her recital, she delivers what I think to be a stunning theory of life, for she has discovered the mechanism which monitors her existence. Every month, she tells me, the water bill arrives in the mail. The Water and Sewerage Office informs her how much money she must pay and, in addition, how many gallons of water her household has consumed during the month. But that isn’t all. Underneath that figure is another which is even more fascinating, the number of gallons which she and her family have consumed on the previous billing. She has noticed something: since she and her husband Paul have been married, the number of gallons has gone up every month. There have been no exceptions over eighteen years, not one in eighteen years, twelve billing each year. By thousands and thousands of gallons she has gone steadily up the scale. It is inexorable. She and the meter are locked in combat. She would like to fool it once, to be very thrifty for a month, use her dishwater over again, make everyone conserve on baths, flush the toilet once a day, just to stop the rolling, rolling of the tide. It has become a sign to her, a symbol of the gathering complexity of her life. Tearing open her water bill she finds her breath stuck in her chest. Travelling from gallon to gallon she is inching toward something. Is there such a thing as infinity gallons of water, she has wondered. But recently it has occurred to her that she will never reach infinity. One month – the exact date already exists in the future, predestined – one month there will be a very slight decrease in number of gallons. And the next month there will be a further decrease. Very small, very gradual. It will work its way back, she says. And it will mean something important. Maybe that she is reverting to something simpler, less entangled. She doesn’t know whether it will be a good thing or bad, whether she is frightened or not of the day when the first decrease comes. But she sees her whole life gathered around that watershed. It may even mean the beginning of dying, she confides to the rhythm of her chromium-plated key ring. Winter is about to fall in on us. Early this morning when I woke up I could almost feel the snow suspended over the backyard. Outside our window there was a dense gathering of white, a blank absence of sun, and through the walls of the house the blue air pinched and gnawed. Downstairs in the kitchen I made coffee, and I was about to wake Martin and the children when I heard a thin waterfall of sound coming from behind the birch slab door leading to the family room. I opened it and found the television on. Richard and Meredith were sitting on the sofa watching. All I could see from the doorway were the backs of their heads, the two of them side by side, Richard leaning slightly forward, his hands on his knees. The sight of them, the roughed fur of their hair and the crush of pajama collars, and especially the utter attentiveness to the screen, made me weak for a moment with love. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked hoarsely. ‘Shhh,’ Richard rasped. ‘They’re getting into the Royal Coach.’ ‘Who?’ I asked, and then remembered. It was Princess Anne’s wedding day. ‘How long have you two been up?’ I asked. ‘Five o’clock,’ Meredith said shortly, never for a moment taking her eyes off the picture. ‘Richard woke me up.’ ‘Five o’clock!’ I felt my mouth go soft with disbelief. ‘It’s direct by satellite,’ Richard said. ‘But it will all be rebroadcast later,’ I said with sternness, feeling at the same time wondering amazement at their early rising. ‘It’s not the same though,’ Meredith said. ‘They leave out half the junk,’ said Richard. (Would Anita Spalding be watching too? In the Birmingham flat, linked through satellite with Richard? Probably.) While the coffee breathed and burped in the kitchen, I sat on the arm of the sofa watching the glittering coach drive through London. A camera scanned the crowds, and the announcer reminded us how they had stood all night waiting. The London sky looked tea-toned, foreign, water-thin. ‘I thought you didn’t like Princess Anne,’ I challenged Meredith. ‘I don’t,’ she told me, ‘but this is a wedding.’ Later, when Martin was up, we ate breakfast, and I told them about Princess Margaret’s wedding. There was no satellite in those days, so we didn’t have to get up at five o’clock to watch. Instead, a film of the wedding was shot in London and rushed into a waiting transatlantic jet. We were at home in our first apartment; Martin was writing the final draft of his thesis. It was just after lunch, and Meredith, who was very young, had been put into her crib for a nap. Our television was old, a second-hand set with a permanent crimp in the picture. The camera was focused on a bit of sky off the coast of Newfoundland and, while Martin and I and millions of others stared at the blank patch, a commentator chattered on desperately about the history of royal weddings. Finally a tiny speck appeared on the screen. The jet. We watched, breathless, as it landed. A man leaped out with an attach? case in his hand – the precious reels of film. Fresh from London. Rushed to the colonies. I remember my throat going tight. Stupid, but this man was a genuine courier, in a league with Roman runners and, though Martin and I were indifferent even then to royalty, we recognized a hero when we saw one. We watched him race, satchel in hand, across the landing field and then into a flat terminal building where the projector was oiled and waiting. There was a moment’s black-out, and the next thing we saw was the Royal Coach careening around Pall Mall. Miraculous. While I was telling Meredith and Richard this story over cornflakes and toast, their eyes were fixed on me; they never miss a word. The genes are true; my children are like me in their lust after other people’s stories. Unlike Martin, whose family tree came well stocked with family tales, I am from a bleak non-storytelling family. I can remember my father, a tall, lank man who for forty years worked as inventory clerk in a screw factory, telling only one story, and this he told only two or three times. It was so extraordinary for him to tell a story at all that I remember the details perfectly. A single incident fetched from his childhood: a girl in his high school tried to commit suicide by leaping into the stairwell. My father happened to be coming down a corridor just as she was sailing through the air. On impact she broke both her ankles and promptly fainted. This brought my father to the point of the story, the point as he conceived it being that the act of fainting was a benefice which spontaneously blocked out pain. He didn’t explain to us why the girl was trying to take her life or whether she managed to live it afterwards. He seemed oddly incurious about such a dramatic event, and it must have been his bland acceptance of the facts which restrained us from asking him for details. It is one of my fantasies that I meet this suicidal girl. She would be about seventy now – my father has been dead for ten years – and I imagine myself meeting her at a friend’s. She is someone’s aunt or family friend, and I recognize her the moment she touches on her attempted school suicide. I interrupt her and ask if she remembers a young boy, my father, who rushed to her when she fell and into whose arms she fainted. Yes, she would say, it happened just that way, and we would exchange long and meaningful looks, embrace each other, perhaps cry. From my mother I can recall only two frail anecdotes, and the terrible thin poverty of their details may well account for my girlhood hunger for an expanded existence. Once – I must have been about four at the time – my mother bought a teapot at Woolworth’s, carried it home, and discovered when she opened it on the kitchen table that it was chipped. It was quite a nice brown teapot, she later explained to us, and it might have been bumped on the door coming out of Woolworth’s. Or, on the other hand, it might have been chipped when she bought it. Should she return it? She never slept a wink that night. After a week she had still not made up her mind what to do, and by this time she had broken out in a rash. It attacked the thin pink meat of her thighs and I can recall her, while dressing in the closet one morning, raising the hem of her housedress and showing me the mass of red welts. But I don’t remember the teapot. She kept it for a year and used it to water her plants; then somehow it got broken. Her other story, frequently told, concerned a friend of hers who greatly admired my mother’s decorating talents. The friend, a Mrs Christianson, had written to Canadian Homes suggesting they come to photograph our house for a future issue. For a year my mother waited to hear from the magazine, all the while keeping the house perfect, every chair leg free from dust, every corner cheerful with potted plants. No one ever called, and she came to the conclusion in the end that they were just too hoity-toity (a favourite expression of hers) to bother about Scarborough bungalows. That was all we had: my father’s adventure in the stairwell, which never developed beyond the scientific rationale for fainting, my mother’s teapot and rash and her nearbrush with fame. And a sort of half-story about something sinister that had happened to Aunt Liddy in Jamaica. My sister Charleen, who is a poet, believes that we two sisters turned to literature out of simple malnutrition. Our own lives just weren’t enough, she explains. We were underfed, undernourished; we were desperate. So we dug in. And here we are, all these years later, still digging. On Tuesday Martin felt a cold coming on. He dosed himself with vitamin C and orange juice and went to bed early. He turned up the electric blanket full blast and shivered. His voice dried to a sandy rasp, but he never complained. It is one of the bargains we have. Years ago, he claims, I put him under a curse by telling him that I loved him because he was so robust. Can I really have said such a thing? It seems impossible, but he swears it; he can even show me the particular park bench in Toronto where, in our courting days, I paid allegiance to his health. It has, he says, placed him under an obligation for the rest of his life. He is unable to enjoy poor health, he is permanently disbarred from hypochondria, he is obliged to be fit. So he went off to the university, his eyes set with fever and his pockets full of Kleenex. I know the power of the casual curse. I have only to look at my children to see how they become the shapes we prepare for them. When Meredith was little, for instance, she, like any other child, collected stones, and for some reason we seized on it, calling her our little rock collector, our little geologist. Years later, nearly crowded out of her room by specimens, she confessed with convulsions of guilt that she wasn’t interested in rocks any more. In fact, she never really liked them all that much. I saw in an instant that she had been trapped into a box, and I was only too happy to let her out; together we buried the rocks in the back yard. And forgot them. Another example: Furlong, reviewing my first book for a newspaper, described me, Judith Gill, as a wry observer of human nature. Thus, for him I am always and ever wry. My wryness overcomes even me. I can feel it peeling off my tongue like very thick slices of imported salami, very special, the acidity measured on a meter somewhere in the back of my brain. Furlong has never once suspected that it was he who implanted this wryness in me, a tiny’ seedling which flourished on inception and which I am able to conceal from almost everyone else. For Furlong, though, I can be deeply, religiously, fanatically wry. Just as for me Martin is strong and ruddy, quintessentially robust. But by the end of the week he was ready to give in. ‘Go to bed,’ I said. ‘Surrender.’ Three days later he was still there, sipping tea, going from aspirin to aspirin. I brought him the morning mail to cheer him up. ‘Just look at this,’ I said, handing him a milky-white square envelope. I had already read it. It was an invitation to Furlong’s lunch party in celebration of his new book. A one-thirty luncheon and a reading at three; an eccentric social arrangement, at least in our part of the world. I squinted at the date over Martin’s shoulder. ‘It’s a Sunday, I think.’ ‘It is,’ Martin said. ‘And I think–’ his voice gathered in the raw bottom of his throat, ‘I think it’s Grey Cup Day.’ ‘That’s impossible.’ ‘I’m sure, Judith. Look at the calendar.’ I counted on my fingers. ‘You’re right.’ He muttered something inaudible from the tumble of sheets. ‘How could he do it?’ I said. ‘Well he did.’ ‘He can’t have done it on purpose. Do you think he just forgot when Grey Cup is?’ ‘Furlong’s not your average football fan, you know.’ ‘Nevertheless,’ I said, breathless with disbelief, ‘to give a literary party on Grey Cup.’ ‘For “one who embodies the national ethos,”’ Martin was quoting from a review of Graven Images, ‘he is fairly casual about the folkways of his country.’ ‘What’ll we do?’ I said. ‘What can I tell him.’ ‘Just that we’re terribly sorry, previous engagement, et cetera.’ ‘But Martin, it’s not just us. No one will come. Absolutely no one. Even Roger, worshipper though he be, wouldn’t give up the game for Furlong. He’ll be left high and dry. And there’s his mother to consider.’ ‘It’s what they deserve. My God, of all days.’ ‘And he’s so vain he’ll probably expect us to come anyway.’ ‘Fat chance.’ ‘I’d better phone him right away.’ ‘The sooner the better.’ ‘Right.’ ‘And Judith.’ ‘What?’ ‘Make it a firm no.’ ‘Right,’ I said. But I didn’t have to phone Furlong. He phoned me himself late in the afternoon. ‘Judith,’ he said, racing along. ‘I suppose you got our invitation today. From Mother and me.’ ‘Yes, we did but –’ ‘Say no more. I understand. It seems I’ve made a colossal bloop.’ ‘Grey Cup Day.’ ‘Mother says the phone’s been ringing all day. And I ran into Roger at the university. Poor lad, almost bent double with apology. Of course, the instant we realized, we decided on postponement.’ ‘That really is the best thing,’ I said, relieved that I would not have to admit we put football before literature in this house. ‘We’ll make it December then, I think. Early December.’ ‘Maybe you should check the bowl games,’ I suggested wanting to be helpful. ‘Of course. Mother and I will put our heads together and come up with another date. Now I mustn’t keep you from your work, Judith. How is it coming, by the way?’ ‘Well. I think I can honestly say it’s going well.’ ‘Good. Good. No more novel-writing aspirations?’ he asked, and for an instant I thought I heard a jealous edge to his voice. ‘No,’ I said. ‘You can consider me cured of that bug.’ ‘That’s what it is, a wretched virus. I can’t tell you how I envy you your immunity.’ ‘It was madness,’ I said. ‘Pure madness.’ ‘That was Furlong on the phone,’ I told Martin when I took up his supper tray. Soup, toast, a piece of cheese. He was sitting up reading the paper and looking better. ‘And? What did he have to say for himself?’ ‘All a mistake. He never thought of Grey Cup. So don’t worry, Martin. It’s been postponed. Way off in the future. Sometime in December.’ ‘We might even be snowed in with luck,’ he said going back to his paper. ‘Anyway, that’s the end of that story.’ Story, he had called it. He was right, it was a story, a fragment of one anyway. A human error causing human outcry and subdued by a human retraction. A comedy miniaturized. It’s the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It’s throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it. Breathing, waking and sleeping; our lives are steamed and shaped into stories. Knowing that is what keeps me from going insane, and though I don’t like to admit it, sometimes it’s the only thing. Names are funny things, I tell Richard. We are having lunch one day, and he has asked me how I happened to name him Richard. ‘I liked the “r” sound,’ I tell him. ‘It’s a sort of repetition of the “r” in your father’s name.’ ‘And Meredith?’ he asks. ‘Where did you get that?’ ‘I’m not sure,’ I tell him, for the naming of our babies is a blur to me. Each time I was caught unprepared; each time I felt a compulsion amidst the confusion of birth, to pin a label, any label, on fast before the prize disappeared. Meredith. It is, of course, an echo of my own name, the same thistle brush of ‘th’ at the end, just as Richard’s name is a shadow of Martin’s. Unconscious at the time; I have only noticed it since. ‘I’m not sure,’ I tell Richard. ‘Names are funny things. They don’t really mean anything until you enlist them.’ Now he confides a rare fact about Anita Spalding, introducing her name with elaborate formality. ‘You know Anita Spalding? In Birmingham?’ ‘Yes,’ I say, equally formal. ‘Do you know what she does? She calls her parents by their first names.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Like she calls her father John. That’s his first name. And she calls her mother Isabel.’ ‘Hmmmm.’ I am deliberately offhand, anxious to prolong this moment of confidence. But he breaks off with, ‘But like you say, names are funny things.’ ‘Richard,’ I say. ‘Do you know what Susanna Moodie called her husband?’ There is no need to explain who Susanna Moodie is. After all these months she is one of us, one of the family. Every day someone refers to her. She hovers over the house, a friendly ghost. ‘What did she call her husband?’ Richard asks. ‘Moodie,’ I tell him. ‘What’s wrong with that? That was his name wasn’t it?’ ‘His last name. Don’t you get it, Richard? It would be like me calling Daddy, Gill. Would you like a cup of tea, Gill? Well, Gill, how’s the old flu coming along? Hi ya, Gill.’ ‘Yeah,’ Richard agrees. ‘That would be kind of strange.’ ‘Strange is the word.’ ‘Why’d she do it then? Why didn’t she call him by his first name?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I tell him. ‘It was the custom in certain levels of society in those days. And there’s her sister, Catherine Parr Traill. She called her husband Mr Traill. All his life. Imagine that. Moodie is almost casual when you think of Mr Traill.’ ‘I guess so,’ he says doubtfully. ‘I like to think of it as a sort of nickname. Like Smitty or Jonesy. Maybe it was like that.’ ‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘I suppose it depends on how she said it. Like the expression she used when she said it. Do you know what I mean?’ I did know what he meant, and it was a common problem in biography. Could anyone love a man she called by his surname? Was such a thing possible? I would have to hear whether it was said coldly or with tenderness. One minute of eavesdropping and I could have travelled light-years in understanding her. It was Leon Edel, who should know about the problems of biography if anyone does, who said that biography is the least exact of the sciences. So much of a man’s life is lived inside his own head, that it is impossible to encompass a personality. There is never never enough material. Sometimes I read in the newspaper that some university or library has bought hundreds and hundreds of boxes of letters and papers connected with some famous deceased person, and I know every time that it’s never going to be enough. It’s hopeless, so why even try? That was the question I found myself asking during the year we spent in England. My two biographies, although they had been somewhat successful, had left me dissatisfied. In the end, the personalities had eluded me. The expression in the voice, the concern in the eyes, the unspoken anxieties; none of these things could be gleaned from library research, no matter how patient and painstaking. Characters from the past, heroic as they may have been, lie coldly on the page. They are inert, having no details of person to make them fidget or scratch; they are toneless, simplified, stylized, myths distilled from letters; they are bloodless. There is nothing to do but rely on available data, on diaries, bills, clippings, always something on paper. Even the rare photograph or drawing is single-dimensional and self-conscious. And if one does enlarge on data, there is the danger of trespassing into that whorish field of biographical fiction, an arena already asplash with the purple blood of the queens of England or the lace-clutched tartish bosoms of French courtesans. Tasteless. Cheap. Tawdry. That year in England I was restless. I started one or two research projects and abandoned them. I couldn’t settle down. Everything was out of phase. My body seemed disproportionately large for the trim English landscape. I sensed that I alarmed people in shops by the wild nasal rock of my voice, and at parties I overheard myself suddenly raucous and bluff. It was better to fade back, hide out for a while. I became a full-time voyeur. On trains I watched people, lusting to know their destinations, their middle names, their marital status and always and especially whether or not they were happy. I stared to see the titles of the books they were reading or the brand of cigarette they smoked. I strained to hear snatches of conversations and was occasionally rewarded, as when I actually heard an old gentleman alighting from his Rolls Royce saying to someone or other, ‘Oh yes, yes. I did know Lord MacDonald. We were contemporaries at Cambridge.’ And a pretty girl on a bus who turned to her friend and said, ‘So I said to him, all right, but you have to buy the birth control pills.’ And then, of course, I had the Spalding family artifacts around me twenty-four hours a day, and on that curious family trio I could speculate endlessly. It occurred to me that famous people may be the real dullards of life. Perhaps shopgirls coming home from work on the buses are the breath and body of literature. Fiction just might be the answer to my restlessness. ‘I think I might write a novel,’ I said to Martin on a grey Birmingham morning as he was about to leave for the library. ‘What for?’ he asked, genuinely surprised. ‘I’m tired of being boxed in by facts all the time,’ I told him. ‘Fiction might be an out for me. And it might be entertaining too.’ ‘You’re too organized for full-time fantasy,’ he said, and later I remembered those words and gave him credit for prophecy. Martin is astute, although sometimes, as on this particular morning, he looks overly affable and half-daft. ‘You sound like a real academic,’ I told him. ‘All footnotes and sources.’ ‘I know you, Judith,’ he said smiling. ‘Well, I’m going to start today,’ I told him. ‘I’ve been making a few notes, and today I’m going to sit down and see what I can do.’ ‘Good luck,’ was all he said, which disappointed me, for he had been interested in my biographies and, in a subdued way, proud of my successes. Notes for Novel Tweedy man on bus, no change, leaps off beautiful girl at concert, husband observes her legs, keeps dropping program children in park, sailboat, mother yells (warbles) ‘Damn you David. You’re getting your knees dirty.’ letter to editor about how to carry cello case in a mini-car. Reply from bass player West Indians queue for mail. Fat white woman (rollers) cigarette in mouth says, ‘what they need is ticket home.’ story in paper about woman who has baby and doesn’t know she’s preg. Husband comes home from work to find himself a father. Dramatize. leader of labour party dies tragically, scramble for power. wife publishes memoirs. hotel bath. each person rationed to one inch of hot water. Hilarious landlady. Lord renounces title so he can run for House of Commons, boyhood dream and all that. My random jottings made no sense to me at all. When I wrote them down I must have felt something; I must have thought there was yeast there, but whatever it was that had struck me at the time had faded away. There was no centre, no point to begin from. I paced up and down in the flat thinking. A theme? A starting point? A central character or situation? I looked around the room and saw John Spalding’s notebooks. That was the day I took them down and began to read them; my novel was abandoned. After that I was too dispirited to do any writing at all. I spent the spring shopping and visiting art galleries and teashops and waiting for the end to come. I counted the days and it finally came. We packed our things, sold the Austin, gave the school uniforms away and, just as summer was getting big as a ball, we returned home. Martin is better. Still on medication, but looking something like his real self. Today he went back to the university, and the house is quiet. For some reason I open his desk drawer, the one where the wool is. It’s gone. Nothing there but the wood slats of the drawer bottom and a paper clip or two. I look in the other drawers. Nothing. I hadn’t thought much about the wool while it was still there. I’d wondered about it, of course, but it was easy to forget, to push to the back of my thoughts. But now it has gone. It has come and gone. I have been offered no explanations. Was it real, I wonder. My hands feel cold and my heart pounds. I am afraid of something and don’t know what it is. December (#ulink_1c86bad5-13ae-5b39-ae8d-a470921cf982) The first snow has come, lush and feather-falling. As a child I hated the snow, thinking it was both cruel and everlasting, but that was the hurting enemy snow of Scarborough that got down our necks, soaked through our mittens, fell into our boots and rubbed raw, red rings around our legs. It is one of the good surprises of life to find that snow can be so lovely. Nancy Krantz and I skied all one day, and afterwards, driving home in her little Volkswagen with our skis forked gaily on its round back, we talked about childhood. ‘The worst part for me,’ Nancy said, ‘was thinking all the time that I was crazy.’ ‘You? Crazy?’ ‘It wasn’t until I hit university that I heard the expression d?j? vu for the first time. I had always thought I was the only being in the universe who had experienced anything as eerie as that. Imagine, discovering at twenty that it is a universal phenomenon, all spelled out and recognized. And normal. What a cheat! Why hadn’t someone told me about it? Taken me aside and said, look, don’t you ever feel all this has happened before?’ ‘Hadn’t you ever mentioned it to anyone?’ ‘What? And have them know I was crazy. Never.’ ‘You surprise me, Nancy,’ I said. ’I would have thought you were very open as a child.’ ‘Not on your life. I was a regular clam,’ she said, shifting gears at a hill. ‘And scared of my own shadow. Especially at night. At one point I actually thought my mother, my dear, gentle, plump, little mother with her fox furs and little felt hats was trying to put poison in my food. Imagine! Well, thank God for second-year psychology, even though it was ten years too late. Because that’s normal too, a child’s fear that his parents will murder him. And if they didn’t, someone else would. Hitler maybe. Or some terrible maniac hiding out in my clothes cupboard. Or lying under my bed with a bayonet. Right through the mattress. Oh God. It was so terrible. And so real. I could almost feel the cold, steely tip coming through the sheet. But I never told anyone. Never.’ ‘I wonder if children are that stoic today? Not to tell anyone their worse fears.’ ‘Mine are pretty brave. I can’t tell if they’re bluffing or not, though. Weren’t you ever afraid like that, Judith?’ ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘I was a real coward. But it’s funny looking back. Do you know what it was that frightened me most about childhood?’ ‘What?’ ‘That it would never end.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I was frightened, but it wasn’t so much the shadows in the cupboard that scared me. It was the terrible, terrible suffocating sameness of it all. It’s true. I remember lying in bed trembling, but what I heard was the awful and relentless monotony. The furnace switching off and on in the basement. Amos and Andy. Or the kettle steaming in the kitchen. Even the sound of my parents turning the pages of the newspaper in the living room while we were supposed to be going to sleep. My mother’s little cough, so genteel. The flush of the toilet through the wall before they went to bed. And other things. The way my mother always hung the pillowcases on the clothesline with the open end up, leaving just a little gap so the air could blow inside them. With a clothes peg in her mouth when she did it, always the same. It frightened me.’ ‘I always thought there was something to be said for stability in childhood.’ ‘I suppose there is,’ I agreed. ‘But I always hoped, or rather I think I actually knew, that there was another world out there and that someday I would walk away and live in it. But the long, long childhood nearly unhinged me. Take the floor tiles in our kitchen at home. I can tell you exactly the pattern of our floor in Scarborough, and it was a complicated pattern too. Blue squares with a yellow fleck, alternating in diagonal stair-steps with yellow squares with brown flecks. And I can tell you exactly the type of flowers on my bedspread when I was six and exactly what my dotted swiss curtains looked like when I was twelve. And the royal blue velvet tiebacks. It was so vivid, so present. That’s what I was afraid of. All those details. And their claim on me.’ ‘And when you finally did get away from it into the other life, Judith – was it all you thought it would be?’ She was driving carefully, concentrating on the road which was getting slippery under the new snow. I tried to shape an answer, a real answer, but I couldn’t. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said with a hint of dismissal. ‘The trouble is that when you’re a child you can sense something beyond the details. Or at least you hope there’s something.’ ‘And now?’ she prompted me. ‘And now,’ I said, ‘I hardly ever think about the kind of life I want to live.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘I suppose I’m just too preoccupied with living it. Much less introspective. And one thing about writing biography is that you tend to focus less on your own life. But I think of Richard and Meredith sometimes, and wonder if they’re taking it all in.’ ‘The pattern on the kitchen floor?’ ‘Yes. All of it. And I wonder if they’re waiting for it to be over.’ ‘Maybe it’s all a big gyp,’ Nancy said. ‘Maybe the whole thing is a big gyp the way Simone de Beauvoir says at the end of her autobiography. Life is a gyp.’ I nodded. It was warm in the car and I felt agreeable and sleepy. My legs and back ached pleasantly, and I thought that the snow blowing across the highway looked lovely in the last of the afternoon light. The motor hummed and the windshield wipers made gay little grabs at the snow. ‘It can’t all be a gyp,’ I told her. ‘It’s too big. It can’t be.’ And we left it at that. ‘Judith.’ Martin called to me one evening after dinner. ‘Come quick. See who’s being interviewed on television.’ I dropped the saucepan I was scraping and peeled off my rubber gloves. Probably Eric Kierans, I thought. He is my favourite politician with his sluggish good sense so exquisitely smothered in rare and perfect modesty. Or it might be Malcolm Muggeridge who, nimble-tongued, year after year, poured out a black oil stream of delicious hauteur. But it was neither; it was Furlong Eberhardt being interviewed about his new book. I sank down on the sofa between Martin and Meredith and stared at Furlong. We were tuned to a local channel, and this was a relaxed and informal chat. The young woman who was interviewing him was elegantly low-key in a soft shirtdress and possessed of a chuckly throatiness such as I had always desired for myself. ‘Mr Eberhardt–’ she began. ‘My friends always call me by my first name,’ he beamed at her, but she scurried past him with her next question. ‘Perhaps you could tell our viewers who haven’t yet read Graven Images a little about how you came upon the idea for it.’ Furlong leaned back, his face open with amusement, and spread his arms hopelessly. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that’s a perfectly impossible question to ask a writer. How and where he gets his ideas.’ Smiling even harder than before, she refused to be put down. ‘Of course, I know every writer has his own private source of imagination, but Graven Images, of all your books, tells such an extraordinary story that we thought you might want to tell us a little about how the idea for the book came to you.’ Furlong laughed. He drew back his head and laughed aloud, though not without kindness. The interviewer waited patiently, leaning forward slightly, her hands in a hard knot. ‘All I can tell you,’ he said, composing himself and assuming his academic posture, ‘is that a writer’s sources are never simple. Always composite. The idea for Graven Images came to me in pieces. True, I may have had one generous burst of inspiration, for which I can only thank whichever deity it is who presides over creative imagination. But the rest came with less ease, torn daily out of the flesh as it were.’ ‘I see,’ the interviewer said somewhat coldly, for plainly she felt he was toying with her. ‘But Mr Eberhardt, this new novel seems to have an increased vigour. A new immediacy.’ She had recaptured her lead and was pinning him down. Furlong turned directly into the camera and was caught in a flattering close-up, the model of furrowed thoughtfulness. ‘You may be right,’ he nodded in response. ‘You just may be right. But on the other hand, I wouldn’t have thought I was exactly washed up as a writer before Graven Images.’ ‘If I may quote one of the critics, Mr Eberhardt –’ ‘Furlong. Please,’ he pleaded. ‘Furlong. One of the critics,’ she rattled through her notes, cleared her throat and read, ‘Eberhardt’s new book is brisk and original, as fast moving and exciting as a movie.’ ‘Ah,’ he said, his hands pulling together beneath his beard. ‘You may be interested to know that it is soon to become a film.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Graven Images is to be made into a film?’ ‘We have only just signed the contract,’ he said serenely, ‘this afternoon.’ ‘Well, I must say, congratulations are in order, Mr Eberhardt. I suppose this film will be made in Canada?’ ‘Ah. I regret to say it will not. The offer was made by an American company, and I am afraid I can’t release any details at this time. I’m sure your viewers will understand.’ Her eyes glittered as she leaned meaningfully into the camera. ‘Wouldn’t you say, Mr Eberhardt, that it is enormously ironical that you, a Canadian writer who has done so much to bring Canadian literature to the average reader, must turn to an American producer to have your novel filmed?’ He was rattled. ‘Look here, I didn’t go to them. They came. They approached me. And I can only say that of course I would have preferred a Canadian offer but–’ an expression of helplessness transformed his face – ‘what can one do?’ ‘I’m sure we’ll all look forward eagerly to it, Mr Eberhardt. American or Canadian. And it has been a great pleasure to talk to you tonight.’ The camera grazed his face one last time before the fadeout. ‘An even greater pleasure for me,’ he said with just a touch too much chivalry. Meredith sitting beside me looked flushed and excited, and Martin was muttering with unaccustomed malice, ‘He’s got it made now.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Your friend Furlong has just struck it rich.’ I shrugged. ‘He’s never been exactly wanting.’ ‘Ah, Judith, you miss the point. A movie. This is no mere trickle of royalties. This is big rich.’ ‘Well, maybe,’ I said, not really seeing the point. ‘The old bugger,’ Martin said. ‘He’s going to be really unbearable now.’ ‘Tell me, Martin. Have you read it yet? Graven Images?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘I keep putting it off.’ ‘His party is next week. Sunday.’ ‘I know. I know,’ he said despairingly. ‘It may not be too bad.’ ‘It’ll be bad.’ ‘Do you really despise him, Martin?’ ‘Despise him. God, no. It’s just that he’s such a perfect asshole. Worse than that, he’s a phoney asshole.’ ‘For example?’ I asked smiling. ‘Well, remember that sign he had in his office a few years ago? On his desk?’ ‘No. I never saw a sign.’ ‘It was a framed motto. You Shall Pass Through This Life but Once.’ ‘Really? He had one of those? I can’t imagine it. It seems so sort of Dale Carnegie for Furlong.’ ‘He had it. I swear.’ ‘And that’s why he’s an asshole?’ ‘No. Not that.’ ‘Well, why then?’ ‘Because, after he got the Canadian Fiction Prize, and that big write-up in Maclean’s and the New York Times, both in the same month –’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Well, right after that happened, he took down his sign. Just took it away one day. And it’s never been seen since.’ ‘He’d never own up to it now,’ I said. ‘When I think of that sign and the way he stealthily disposed of it, another notch of sophistication – I don’t know. That just seems to be Furlong Eberhardt in a nutshell. That one act, as far as I’m concerned, encapsulates his whole personality.’ Meredith leapt from the sofa, startling us both. ‘I think you’re both being horrible. Just horrible. So middle-class, so smug. Sitting here. It’s character assassination, that’s what. And you’re enjoying it.’ She flew from the room with her breath coming out in jagged gasps. For a moment Martin and I froze. Then he very slowly picked up the newspaper from the floor, reached for the sports page, and gave me a brief but hurting glance. ‘I don’t understand her sometimes,’ was all he said. It was then that I noticed Richard sitting quietly in a corner of the room, unobtrusive in his neat maroon sweater. He was watching us closely. ‘What are you doing, Richard?’ I asked. ‘Nothing,’ he said. Frantically, neurotically, harried and beleaguered, I am addressing Christmas cards. Richard, home with a cold, sits at the dining table with me; he is checking addresses, licking stamps, stacking envelopes in their individual white pillars; the overseas stack that will now have to be sent expensively by airmail, the unsealed ones with nothing but a rude ‘Judith and Martin Gill’ scrawled inside them, the letters to old friends where I’ve crammed a year’s outline into two or three inches – ‘A good year for us, Martin busy teaching, the children are getting ENORMOUS, am working on a new book, not much news, wish you were closer, happy holidays.’ And Martin’s stack, the envelopes which Richard and I will leave unsealed so that tonight, after he gets home from the university, he can sit down and quickly, offhandedly write the funny, intense little messages he is so good at. The afternoon wears on, and outside the window snow is falling and falling. Since noon we have had the overhead light on. Richard in striped pajamas looks pale. This is a long, tedious task, and it irritates me to separate and put in order the constellations of our friends and to send them each these feeble scratched messages. But for the sake of the return, for the crash of creamy envelopes blazing with seals that will soon spill down upon us, I push on. For I want to hear from the O’Malleys who lived across the hall from us in our first apartment. I want to know if the Gorkys are still together and where the best man at our wedding, Kurt Weisman, has moved. Dr Lawrence who supervised Martin’s graduate work and his wife Bettina always write us from Florida and so do the Grahams, the Lords, the Reillys, the Jensens. What matter that they were often dull and that we might have drifted apart eventually? What matter that they were sometimes stingy or overly frank or forgetful? They want to wish us a merry Christmas. They want to wish us all the best in the New Year. I can’t help but take the printed card literally; these are our friends; they love us. We love them. Richard is studying the airmail stamp which goes on the letters to Britain. It is a special issue with a portrait of the Queen, an enormous stamp, the largest we have ever seen. The image is handsome and the background is filled in with pale gold. On the comers of the tiny Rustcraft envelopes, all I could find at this late date, it gleams like a gem. I write a brief note to the Spaldings, a spray of ritual phrases. ‘We often remember the wonderful year we spent in Birmingham. The children have such happy memories. Hope your family is well and that you are having a mild winter, best wishes from the Gills.’ Richard seals it and affixes the great golden stamp. ‘He’s writing a book,’ he says. ‘Who?’ I ask absently. ‘Mr Spalding. He’s writing a novel.’ Richard seldom mentions the Spaldings, but when he does, it is abruptly, as though the words lay perpetually spring-loaded on the tip of his tongue. ‘I suppose Anita wrote you about it?’ I say inanely. ‘Yes.’ ‘And is it going well? The novel?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘But she says that sometimes he stays up all night typing.’ ‘Well, I wish him luck,’ I say, thinking of his row of rejected manuscripts. Richard makes no reply, and after a minute I ask him, ‘What’s it about? The novel Anita’s father is writing?’ ‘How should I know?’ he says, suddenly querulous. I snap back. ‘I only asked.’ But I really would like to know what John Spalding is writing about. Maybe he’s incorporating some new material from the year in Cyprus. Or perhaps reworking one of his old plots. He might even have resurrected his one good one. I think of him typing through the night in the chilly, gas-smelling flat while the frowsy Isabel snores in a distant bedroom. I imagine his small frame, tense, gnatlike, concentrating on the impossible mass of a novel, and for a moment I see him as almost touchingly valiant. Then guilt attacks me; a pain familiar by now, a spurt of heat between my eyes, damn. The Magic Rocking Horse was the name of the novel I wrote the year we came back from England. I intended, and for a while even believed, that the title would convey a subtle, layered irony – a childlike innocence underlying a theme of enormous worldliness. But the novel never materialized on either level. Instead it simply stretched and strained along, scene after scene pitiably stitched together and collapsing in the end for want of flesh. For, unlike biography, where a profusion of material makes it possible and even necessary to be selective, novel writing requires a complex mesh of details which has to be spun out of simple air. No running to the public library for facts, no sleuthing through bibliographies, no borrowing from the neat manila folders at the Archives. That year the most obvious fact about fiction struck me afresh: it all had to be made up. And where to begin? For two or three months I did nothing at all but think about how to begin. Dialogue or description? Or a cold plunge into action? Once or twice I actually produced a page or two, but later, reading over what I had written, I found the essential silliness of make-believe disturbing, and I began to wonder whether I really wanted to write a novel at all. I discussed it with everyone I knew and got very little support. Roger and Ruthie told me, flatteringly, that it was a waste of my biographical skills. Nancy Krantz, sipping coffee, pursed her lips and pronounced, in a way which was not exactly condemning but almost, that she seldom read novels. Martin said little, but it was obvious that he viewed the whole project as somewhat dilettantish, and the children thought it might be a good idea if I wrote something along the line of Agatha Christie but transferred to a Canadian setting. Furlong Eberhardt was the only one who volunteered a halfway friendly ear, and when he suggested one day that I might want to sit in on his creative writing seminar, it seemed like a good idea; a chance to sit down with a circle of other struggling fiction writers, sympathetic listeners upon whom I might test my material and who, in turn, might provide wanted stimulation or, as Furlong put it, might ‘prime the old pump.’ Looking back, I believe the idea of again being a student appealed to me too. I bought a notebook and a clutch of yellow pencils, and each Wednesday afternoon I dressed carefully for the class which met in an airless little room at the top of the Arts Building; my fawn slacks or my bronze corduroy skirt, a turtleneck, something youthful but never going too far, for what was the point of being grotesque for the sake often undergraduates ranging from eighteen-year-old Arleen whose black paintbrush hair fell to her hips, all the way to Ludwig, aged about twenty-four, horribly pimpled, who stared at me with hatred because I was married (and to a professor at that), because I lived in a house, because I was a friend of Furlong’s, and possibly because my fingernails were clean. No, I didn’t fool myself that I was going to be one of them. And how could I since, despite my urging them to call me Judith, they always referred to me as Mrs Gill. And when I read my short weekly contributions, always a quarter the length of theirs, they listened politely, even Ludwig, and never ventured any remarks except perhaps, very deferentially, that my sentences were a bit too structured or that my situations seemed a little, well, conventional and contrived. Somewhat to my surprise I found that Furlong ran his creative writing seminar in a highly organized manner, beginning with what he called warming-up exercises. These were specific weekly assignments in which we were to describe such things as the experience of ecstasy or the effect of ennui, a dialogue between lovers one week and enemies the next. I sweated through these assignments, typing out the minimum required words and, when my turn came, I read them aloud, feeling like a great overblown girl, red-faced and matronly, who should long since have abandoned such childish games. The rest of them were not the least reticent; indeed they were positively eager to celebrate their hallucinations aloud. Arleen dragged us paragraph by paragraph through her thoughts on peace and mankind, and a girl named Lucy Rimer was anxious to split her psyche wide open, inviting us to inspect the tortured labyrinth of her awakening sexuality. Joseph, an African student, disgusted and thrilled us with portraits of his Ghanian grandparents. Someone called George Riorden dramatized his feeling on racial equality by having two characters, Whitey (a Negro) and Mr Black (a white) dialogue over the back fence, reminding us, in case we missed it, of the express irony implied by their names. Ludwig poked with a blunt and dirty finger into the sores of his consciousness, not stopping at his subtle and individual response to orgasm and the nuances of his erect penis. On and on. They were relentless, compulsive, unsparing, as though they had waited all their lives for these moments of catharsis, these Wednesday afternoon epiphanies. But looking around, when I dared to look around, I watched them wearing down, week by week exhausting themselves, and I wondered how long it could go on. Eventually Furlong, who until then had merely listened and nodded, nodded and listened, called a halt and announced that it was time to begin the term project. Each of us was to write a short novel, about ten chapters he suggested, a chapter a week, which we were to bring to class to be read aloud and discussed. I breathed with relief. This was what I had hoped for, a general to command me into action and an audience who, by its response, might indicate whether I was going in the right direction. I began at once on my first chapter, carefully introducing my main characters, providing a generous feeling of setting, and observing all the conventions as I understood them. It was all quite easy, and when my turn came to read, the class listened attentively, and even Furlong beamed approval. And then I got stuck. Having described the personalities of my characters, detailed where they lived and what they did, I didn’t know what to do with them next. The following week when my turn came, I apologized and said I was unprepared. The others in the class seemed not to suffer from my peculiar malady which was the complete inability to manufacture situations, and I envied the ease with which they drifted off into fantasies, for although they strained my credulity, their inventiveness seemed endless. A second week went by, leaving me still at the end of Chapter One. A third week. Furlong questioned me kindly after class. ‘Are you losing interest, Judith?’ ‘I think I’m losing my mind,’ I said. ‘I just can’t seem to get any ideas.’ He was understanding, fatherly. ‘It’ll come,’ he promised. ‘You’ll see.’ I waited but it didn’t come, and I began to lie awake at night, frightened by the emptiness in my head. In the small hours of the morning, with Martin asleep beside me, I several times crept out of bed, padded downstairs, made tea, sat at the kitchen table and felt myself overcome by vacancy, barrenness, by failure. A Wednesday afternoon came when I phoned Furlong before class pleading a violent toothache and a sudden dental appointment. The following Wednesday I went one step further: I absented myself without excuse. I was in descent now, set on a not-too-painful decline. There were days when I seldom thought about the novel at all. I went skiing. I had my hair restyled at a place called Rico’s of Rome and I shopped for new clothes. I painted the upstairs bathroom turquoise and joined a Keep Fit class. I went to the movies with Martin and Roger and Ruthie. I fringed and embroidered Richard’s jeans, wrote a long letter to my sister Charleen. Everyone was kind; no one said a word about my novel. No one inquired about the seminar I was attending. No one except Furlong. He kept phoning me. ‘You made a brilliant start, Judith. Your first chapter showed real strength. Head and shoulders above the rest of the little brats.’ ‘But I can’t seem to expand on that, Furlong. And not for want of trying.’ ‘You say you really have been trying?’ ‘I have rings under my eyes,’ I lied. ‘How about just letting your mind go free. Conduct a sort of private brainstorming. I sometimes find that helps.’ ‘You mean you’ve felt like this too? Bereft? Not an idea in your head?’ ‘If you only knew. The truth is, Judith, I can be sympathetic because I haven’t had a good idea in almost two years. And that, my old friend, is strictly entre-nous.’ ‘And you’ve no solutions? No advice?’ ‘Try coming back to class. I know you think you can’t face it at this point, but steel yourself. Most of what they write is garbage, but it’s stimulation of a sort.’ I promised, and I did actually go back for one or two sessions. And at home I forced myself to sit down and type out a paragraph every morning, but the effort was akin to suffering. And then one day, just as Furlong had said, it came. In the middle of a dazzling winter morning, ten o’clock with the sun bold and fringed as a zinnia, it came. I would be able to save myself after all. I would simply borrow the plot from John Spalding’s first abandoned and unpublished novel, the one I had so secretly consumed in Birmingham. Such a simple idea. What did it matter that his writing was banal, boyish, embarrassingly sincere; the plot had been not only clever – it had been astonishingly original. Otherwise I wouldn’t have remembered it, for like many rapid readers, I forget what I read the minute I close the covers. But John Spalding’s plot line, even after all these months, was surprisingly vivid. What I couldn’t understand was why I hadn’t thought of it before now. It was so available; what a waste to leave it stuck in a buff folder on a dusty shelf in an obscure flat in Birmingham, England. A good idea should never be orphaned. Luxuriously, I allowed the details to circulate through my veins, marvelling that the solution to my dilemma had been so obvious, so right, so free for the taking; it had an aura of inevitability about it which made me wonder if it hadn’t been incubating in my blood all these months – germination, growth, now the burst of blossom. I thought of the Renaissance painters, and happily, gleefully, drew parallels; the master painter often doing nothing but tracing in the lines, while his worthy but less gifted artisans filled in the colours. It had been a less arrogant age in which creativity had been shared; surely that was an ennobling precedent. For I didn’t intend anything as crude as stealing John Spalding’s plot outright. I already had my line-up of characters. My setting had been composed. All I needed to borrow was the underlying plot structure. I woke the next day feeling spare, nimble, energetic, sinewy with health and muscle, confident, even omnipotent. I felt as though the blood had been drained out of me and replaced with cool-flowing Freon gas. My fingers were lively little machines exciting the keys; my eyes rotated mechanically, left to right, left to right; the carriage rocked with purpose. My brain ticked along, cleanly, accurately, uncluttered. The first day I wrote fifty pages. I telephoned Furlong, shrilling, ‘I’ve finally got started.’ ‘All you needed was an idea,’ he said. ‘Didn’t I tell you.’ The second day I wrote thirty pages. Somewhere I had lost my miraculous clarity; my idea had softened, lost shape; everything was blurring. The third day I wrote ten pages and, for the first time, sat down to read what I had written. Appalling, unbelievable, dull, dull. The bones of my stolen plot stuck out everywhere like great evil-gleaming knobs, accusing me, charging me. The action, such as it was, jerked along on dotted lines; there was no tissue to it. It was thin; worse than thin, it was skinny, a starved child. Always when I had heard of writers destroying their manuscripts or painters shredding their canvases, I had considered it inexcusably theatrical, but now I could understand the desire to obliterate something that was shameful, infantile, degrading. But I didn’t tear it up. Not me, not Judith Gill, not my mother’s daughter. I wrote a quick concluding chapter and retyped the whole thing before another Wednesday afternoon passed. I even made a special trip to Coles to buy a sky-blue binder with a special, newly patented steely jaw. And I carried it on the bus with me and delivered it to Furlong’s office. ‘But I don’t want to read it to the class,’ I told him firmly. ‘Just do me a favour and read it yourself. And let me know what you think.’ He nodded gravely. He consoled me with his tender smile. He understood. He would take it home with him. I got on the bus and came home and started cooking pork chops for our dinner. And it was then, with hot fat spattering from the pan and the pale meat turning brown that I lurched into truth. Six-thirty; the hour held me like a hand. Doors slamming, water running, steam rising, the floor tiles under my feet squared off with reality. The clatter of cutlery, a knife pulling down on a wooden board, an onion halved showing rings of pearl; their distinct and separate clarity thrilled me. This was real. I flew to the phone. My fingers caught in the dial so that twice I made a mistake. Please be home, please be home! He was. ‘Furlong. Listen, this is Judith.’ ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ ‘My novel. The Magic Rocking Horse.’ ‘But Judith, I just got home. I’ve hardly had more than a few minutes to glance at it. But tonight –’ ‘The point is, Furlong, I’ve decided not to go ahead with the novel.’ ‘What do you mean – not go ahead? Judith, my girl, you’ve already done it.’ ‘I mean I want you to dispose of it. Burn it. Tear it up. Now. Immediately.’ ‘You can’t be serious. Not after all your work.’ ‘I can. I am.’ Christ, he’s going to be difficult. ‘Judith, won’t you sleep on it. Give it some thought.’ ‘I really mean this, Furlong. Listen to me. I mean it. I’m a grown-up woman and I know what I’m doing.’ ‘Judith.’ ‘Please, Furlong.’ I was close to tears. ‘Please.’ He agreed. ‘But on one condition. That you at least let me finish reading it. You may not have any faith in it, but I think, from the little of it I’ve seen, that it’s not entirely hopeless.’ ‘I don’t care, Furlong, just as long as you keep your promise to get rid of it. And please don’t ever discuss it with me. I couldn’t bear that.’ ‘Oh, all right. I promise, of course. But what are you going to do, Judith? Try another novel? Take another tack?’ ‘I’m going to write a biography.’ ‘Who this time?’ ‘I was thinking of Susanna Moodie.’ I had said it almost without thinking, only wanting to reassure Furlong that I wasn’t mad. But the moment I uttered the name Susanna Moodie, I knew I was on my way back to sanity, to balance. I was on the way back to being happy. The very next morning I began. Sunday afternoon. We are late, but since it is icy and since Martin is reluctant to go at all, we drive very slowly down the city streets to Furlong’s party. I feel under my heavy coat for my wrist watch. We should have been there at one-thirty, and it’s almost two now. I am sitting in the front seat beside Martin, and through my long apricot crepe skirt the vinyl seat covers feel shockingly cold. Because of the snow I have had to wear heavy boots, but my silver sandals are in a zippered bag on the seat. Meredith is in the back seat and she is leaning forward anxiously, concerned about being late and concerned even more about how she looks. She has been invited at the last minute. Mrs Eberhardt phoned only this morning to suggest that she come along with us. I had hung about near the telephone listening, knowing for certain that she was being invited to replace some guest who was not able to come, knowing she would be filling in as a fourth at one of the inevitable little tables set up in Furlong’s dining room. I had been to Furlong’s parties before and knew how carefully the glasses of Beaujolais were counted out, how the seating would have been arranged weeks before and how the petit fours, the exact number, would be waiting in their boxes in the pantry. I would have cheered if Meredith had refused, if she had said she had other plans for this afternoon, but of course she didn’t, nor would I have done so in her place. Under her navy school coat she is wearing a dress of brilliant patchwork, made for her by Martin’s mother last Christmas and worn only half a dozen times. She has done something marvellous and unexpected with her hair, lifted it up in the back with a tiny piece of chain, her old charm bracelet perhaps, and her neck rises slenderly, almost elegantly, out of the folds of her coat collar. But her nervousness is extreme. Martin brakes for a red light and comes slowly, creepingly to a halt. I see his jaw firm, a rib of muscle, he wants only for this afternoon to be ended, to be put behind him. Now is the moment, I think. Right now in the middle of the city, with apartment buildings all around us. I should ask him now about the eight bundles of wool that had been in his drawer. The fact that Meredith is here with us will only make it seem more normal, just a matter-of-fact question between husband and wife. ‘Godamn,’ he mutters. ‘We should have bought those snow tires when they were on sale.’ I sit tight and don’t say a word. Furlong and his mother live in a handsome 1930s building built of beef-red brick encircling a formal, evergreened courtyard. There is a speaking tube in the walnut foyer, rows of brass mail boxes; and today the inner door is slightly ajar, propped open with a spray of Christmas greenery in a pretty Chinese jardini?re. We make our way up a flight of carpeted stairs to the panelled door with the brass parrot-headed knocker. Beyond it we can hear a soft rolling ocean of voices. Meredith and I bend together as though at a signal and exchange our boots for shoes, balancing awkwardly on each foot in turn. Only when we are standing in our fragile sandals does Martin lift the knocker. It seems miraculous in all that noise that we can be heard, but in a moment Furlong throws open the door and stands before us. He is flushed and excited, and only scolds us briefly for being late. ‘Of course the roads are deplorable. Meredith, we are delighted, both of us, that you were able to come. You must excuse our phoning you so late, but it just occurred to us that you were a grown-up now and why on earth hadn’t we asked you earlier. But give me your coats. I want you to taste my Christmas punch. Martin, you are a man of discernment. Come and see if you can guess what I’ve concocted this year.’ He leads us into a softly lit living room where small circles of women in fluid Christmas dresses, and men, darkly suited and civilized, stand on the dusty-rose carpet. It is a large pale room, faintly period with its satin-covered sofa, its brocaded matching chairs, a cherry secretary, a Chinese table laid out with a punch bowl and a circle of cut-glass cups. Furlong pours us ruby-pink cups of punch and watches, delighted, as we sip. ‘Well?’ he asks Martin. ‘Cranberry juice,’ Martin says. ‘And vodka,’ I add. ‘And something spicy,’ Martin continues. ‘Ginger?’ ‘Eureka!’ Furlong says. ‘You two are the only ones who guessed. Meredith, I’m sure your parents will allow me to give you a little.’ ‘Of course,’ she and I murmur together. In a moment Mrs Eberhardt is upon us, gracious and dramatic in deep purple velvet gathered between her breasts. ‘We were so afraid you had had an accident. This wretched snow. But I told Furlong not to worry. I knew you wouldn’t let us down. Judith, you look delightful.’ She kisses my cheek. ‘I can’t tell you how grateful we are that you let us have Meredith this afternoon.’ Across the room Roger salutes us gaily. I am beginning to make out distinct faces in the early-afternoon light. I recognize Valerie Hyde who writes a quirky bittersweet saga of motherhood for a syndicated column in which she describes the hilarity of babyshit on the walls and the riotous time the cat got into the bouillabaisse just before the guests arrived. Her estranged husband Alfred is on the other side of the room with a hard-faced blonde in a sea-green tube of silk. Ruthie in cherry-coloured pants and a silk shirt is standing alone sipping cranberry-vodka punch and looking drunk and not very happy. I am about to speak to her when I see an immense fat man in a coarse, hand-woven suit. ‘Who’s that?’ I ask Mrs Eberhardt. She whispers enormously, ‘That’s Hans Kroeger.’ ‘The movie producer?’ ‘Yes,’ she says, hugging herself. ‘Wasn’t it lovely he could be here. Furlong is so pleased.’ Somewhere a tiny bell is ringing. I look up to see Furlong, silver bell in hand, calling the room to silence. ‘I know you must be ready for something to eat,’ he announces with engaging simplicity. ‘Lunch is ready in the dining room as soon as you are.’ It is a large room painted a dull French grey. Half a dozen little tables are draped to the floor in shirred green taffeta – in the centre of each a basket of tiny white flowers. Close behind me I hear Martin sighing heavily, ‘Jesus.’ ‘Shut up,’ I say happily in his ear. On the buffet table is Sunday lunch. There is a large fresh salmon trimmed with lemon slices and watercress, a pink and beautiful roast of beef being carved by a whitesuited man from the caterers; cut-glass bowls of salad, tiny raw vegetables carved into intricate shapes, buttered rolls, crusty to the touch, fine and soft and patrician within; Mrs Eberhardt’s homemade mayonnaise in a silver shell-shaped dish, cheeses, fruit, stacks of Spode luncheon plates. We serve ourselves and look about for our name cards on the little tables. I am by the window. There is heavy silver cutlery from Mrs Eberhardt’s side of the family, and a thick, luxurious linen napkin at each place. Furlong circulates between tables with red wine, filling each crystal glass a precise two-thirds full. Everyone is talking. The room is filled with people eating and talking. Talk drifts from table to table, accumulating, rising, until it reaches the ceiling. Roger is saying: ‘Of course Canadian culture has to be protected. For God’s sake, you’re dealing with a sensitive plant, almost a nursery plant. And don’t tell me I’m being chauvinistic. I had a year at Harvard, remember. I tell you that if we don’t give grants to our writers now and if we don’t favour our own publishers now, we’re lost, man, we’re just lost.’ Valerie Hyde is saying: ‘Of course women have come a long way, but don’t think for a minute that one or two women in Parliament are going to change a damn thing. Sex is built-in like bones and teeth, and, remember this, Barney, there’s more to sex than cold semen running down your leg.’ Alfred Hyde is saying: ‘Tuesday night we had tickets to The Messiah. The tenor was excellent, the baritone was passable, but the contralto was questionable. The staging was commendable, but I seriously question the lighting technique.’ Ruthie is saying: ‘There’s just no stability to anything. Did you stop to think of just where this salmon comes from? The fisherman who caught this fish is probably sitting down to pork and beans right now. And what happens when all the salmon is gone? And that just might be tomorrow. What do you say to that? There’s just no stability.’ Hans Kroeger is saying: ‘Twenty per cent return on the investment. And that ain’t hay. So don’t give me any shit about bonds.’ A woman across the room is saying: ‘Take Bath Abbey for instance. Have you been to Bath Abbey? No? Well, take any abbey.’ Furlong is saying: ‘In my day we talked about making a contribution. To the country. But that sounds facile, doing something for one’s country. Now don’t you agree that one’s first concern must be to know oneself? Isn’t that what counts?’ Meredith says: ‘I don’t know. I really don’t. Like in Graven Images, first things come first. I’ve started in on it for the third time. Empathy. That’s what it all comes down to. I mean, doesn’t it? Maybe you’re right, but making a contribution still counts. I mean, really, in the end, doesn’t it? Fulfillment, well, fulfillment is sort of selfish if you know what I mean. I don’t know.’ The blonde in green is saying, ‘Anyone from that socio-economic background just never dreams of picking up a book. What I’m saying is this, intelligence is shaped in pre-adolescence. Not the scope of intelligence. Anyone can expand, but the direction. The direction is predetermined.’ A man is saying in a very low voice. ‘Okay, okay, you’ve had enough booze. Lay off.’ Barney Beck is saying: ‘Class. You’re damned right I believe in class. Not because it’s good, hell no, but because it’s there. Just, for instance, take the way kids cool off in the summer. You’ve got the little proletarians splashing in the street hydrant, right? And your middle-class brats running through the lawn sprinklers. Because lawns mean middle class, right? Then your nouveaus. The plastic-lined swimming pool. Cabanas, filter systems, et cetera. Then the aristocrats. You don’t see them, not actually, because they’re at the shore. Wherever the hell the shore is.’ Mrs. Eberhardt is saying: ‘The important thing is to use real lemon and to add the oil one drop at a time, one drop at a time.’ And I, Judith Gill, am spinning: I feel my animal spirit unwind, my party self, that progressive personality that goes from social queries about theatre series to compulsive anecdote swapping. I press for equal time. Stop, I tell myself. Let this topic pass without pulling out your hospital story, your vitamin B complex story, your tennis story, your Lester Pearson snippet. Adjust your eyes. Be tranquil. Stop. I admonish myself, but it’s useless. I feel my next story gathering in my throat, the words pulling together, waiting their chance. Here it is. I’m ready to leap in. ‘Speaking of bananas,’ I say, and I’m off. Martin, at the next table, is not talking. What is he doing? He is lifting a forkful of roast beef, and slowly, slowly, he is chewing it. What is he doing now? He is listening. January (#ulink_841a1fc0-3517-5ce7-a6de-d0a60fe5410c) It was on the first day of the new year that I discovered the reason for Martin’s secret cache of wool; the explanation was delivered so offhandedly and with such an aura of innocence that I furiously cursed my suspicions. What on earth had I expected – that Martin had slipped over the edge into lunacy? That, saddened and trapped at forty-one, he might be having a breakdown? Did I think he nursed a secret vice: knitting instead of tippling? Or perhaps that he had acquired a mistress, a great luscious handicraft addict whose fetish it was to crochet while she was being made love to? Crazy. crazy. I was the one who was crazy. On New Year’s Day Martin sat talking to his mother and father who had come from Montreal for the weekend. His father is a professor too, himself the son of a professor; he teaches history at McGill. Gill of McGill, he likes to introduce himself to strangers. He is a spare, speckled man, happiest wearing the loose oatmeal cardigans his wife knits for him and soft old jackets, frayed at the pockets and elbows. His habitual stance is kindly (a Franciscan kindness) and speculative; he is what is known in the world as a good man, possessing all the qualities of a Christian with the exception of faith. The relationship between Martin and his father is such as might exist between exceedingly fond colleagues. Like brothers they flank Martin’s mother, Lala to us, a small woman who except for an unmanageable nest of sparrow-brown, Gibson-girlish hair is attractive and bright, known to her friends in Montreal as a Doer. Her private and particular species of femininity demands gruff male attendance, and she is sitting now in our family room between ‘her two men,’ although that is a phrase which she herself would consider too cloying to use. We have had a late breakfast, coffee and an almond ring brought by Lala from her local ethnic bakery in Montreal. The sun is pouring in through the streaky windows making us all feel drowsy and dull. Richard and Meredith, both of them blotchy with sleep, sprawl in front of the television watching the Rose Bowl Parade. There are newspapers everywhere, on the floor and on the chairs, thick holiday editions. And cups and saucers litter the coffee table. Lala leans back on the sofa, lazily puffing a duMaurier. Grandpa Gill asks Martin how his course load is going and whether he is doing a paper at the moment. Lala leans bird-like towards them, eager to hear what Martin has to say. I too am roused from torpor. We all wait. Martin tells his father about the paper that has been turned down. ‘I’ll show it to you if you like,’ he says. ‘Apparently it just didn’t measure up in terms of originality. One of the referees, anonymous of course, penciled “derivative” all over it.’ ‘That was bad luck,’ Grandpa Gill nods. ‘What a shame, Martin,’ Lala adds. I marvel for the thousandth time at the constancy and perfect accord with which they underscore their son’s ability. ‘To be honest,’ Martin continues, ‘it was pretty dull. But I’m working on something else now which might be a little different.’ ‘Yes?’ his mother sings through her smoke. ‘Well,’ Martin says, addressing his father automatically, ‘I think I can say that I actually got this idea from you.’ ‘Really?’ Grandpa Gill smiles. ‘Remember that chart you showed me. In your office last fall? A coloured diagram with the structure of world power charted in different colours?’ ‘Oh, yes. Of course. The Reynolds Diagram. Very useful.’ ‘Well, after I saw that I got to thinking that it might be a good idea to use a diagram approach to themes in epic poetry. To Paradise Lost specifically.’ ‘But how would you go about it?’ his mother presses him. ‘I thought it might be possible to make a graphic of it,’ Martin says. ‘Like the Reynolds Diagram, only using wool instead of paint since the themes are so mixed. In places it’s necessary to interweave the colours. Sometimes, as you can appreciate, there are as many as four or five themes woven together.’ His father nods and asks, ‘And how have you gone about it?’ ‘I thought about it for a long time,’ Martin says. Where was I while he thought so long and hard? ‘Finally I decided on a large rectangle of loose burlap for each of the twelve books. That way the final presentation could be hung together. For comparison purposes.’ ‘I don’t get it, Martin,’ I say, speaking for the first time. He looks faintly exasperated. ‘All I did was to take a colour for each theme. For instance, red for God’s omnipotence, blue for man’s disobedience, green for arrogance, and, let’s see, yellow for pride and so on. But you can see,’ he says, turning again to his father, ‘that one theme will predominate for a time. And then subside and merge into one of the others.’ ‘And how do you know just where in the text you are?’ Grandpa Gill asks. ‘I wondered about that,’ Martin says. Where was I, his wife, when he wondered about that? ‘And I decided to mark off the lines along the side. I’ve got them printed in heavy ink. The secretary helped ink them in.’ She did, did she? ‘I think that sounds most innovative,’ his mother says nodding vigorously and butting out her cigarette. ‘Is it nearly finished?’ his father asks. ‘Almost. I hope to present it in March.’ ‘Present it where?’ I ask, trying to control the quaver in my voice. ‘The Renaissance Society. It’s meeting in Toronto this year. I’ve already sent in an abstract.’ ‘I’m anxious to see it,’ Lala says. ‘Is it here at home?’ ‘No. I’ve been putting it together at the university. But next time you come down I’ll show it off to you. It should be all done by then.’ ‘But Martin,’ I say, ‘you’ve never mentioned any of this to me.’ ‘Didn’t I?’ He gazes at me. ‘I thought I did.’ I give him a very long and level look before replying, ‘You never said a single word about it to me.’ ‘Well, now that I have told you, what do you think?’ ‘Do you really want to know?’ All three of them turn to me in alarm. ‘Of course,’ Martin says. Wildly I reach out for the right word – ‘I think it’s, well, I think it’s absurd.’ ‘Why?’ Martin asks. ‘Yes, why, Judith?’ his father asks. I am confused. And unwilling to hurt Martin and certainly not wanting to upset his parents whom I like. But the project seems to me to be spun out of lunacy. I try to explain. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘I can’t exactly put it into words, but it sounds a bit desperate. Do you know what I mean?’ ‘No,’ Martin says, more shortly than usual. ‘What I mean is, literature is literature. Poetry is poetry. It’s made out of words. You don’t work poems in wool.’ ‘What you’re saying is that it’s disrespectful to the tradition.’ ‘No, that’s not really it. I don’t care about the tradition. It’s just that you might look foolish, Martin. And desperate. Don’t you see, it’s gimmicky, and you’ve never been one for gimmicks.’ ‘For Christ’s sake, Judith, don’t make too much of it. It’s just a teaching aid.’ The children have turned from the television now and are watching us. Grandpa Gill and Lala, almost imperceptibly, shrink away from us. ‘Martin, you’ve always been so sensible. Can’t you see that this is just, well, just a little undignified. I mean, I just feel it’s beneath you somehow.’ ‘I don’t see what’s so undignified about trying something new for a change. Christ, Judith. You’re the one who thinks the seventeenth century is such a bore. Literature can be damn dull. And especially Milton.’ ‘I agree. I agree.’ ‘What I’m doing is making a pictorial presentation of themes which will give a quick comprehensive vision of the total design. It’s quite simple and straightforward.’ ‘Couldn’t you just do a paper on it?’ ‘No. No, I could not.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘How can you put a design image into prose?’ ‘What about that paper they turned down. Couldn’t you do that one over for them?’ ‘No.’ ‘So instead you’ve dreamed up this lunatic scheme.’ ‘Judith, we’re talking in circles. I don’t think it’s all that idiotic. What do you think, Dad?’ Grandpa Gill regards me. Clearly he does not want to join in the foray, but he is being pressed. He speaks cautiously: ‘I think I partially understand what Judith is worried about. The publish-or-perish syndrome does occasionally have the effect of forcing academics to make asses of themselves. But, on the other hand, cross-disciplinary approaches seem to be well thought of at the moment. A graphic demonstration of a literary work, with the design features stressed, might make quite an interesting presentation if –’ I interrupt, out of exasperation, for I know he can go on in this vein for hours. ‘Look, Martin there’s another thing. And I hate to say this because it sounds so narrow-minded and conventional, but I, well, the truth is – I can’t bear to think of you sitting there in your office weaving away. I mean – do you know what I mean? – do you – don’t you think it’s just a little bit – you know –?’ ‘Effeminate?’ he supplies the word. ‘Eccentric. It’s the sort of thing Furlong Eberhardt might dream up.’ ‘And I suppose you think that reference will guarantee instant dismissal of the whole idea.’ ‘Oh, Martin, for heaven’s sake, do what you want. I just hate you to look ridiculous.’ ‘To whom? To you?’ ‘Forget it. I don’t even know why we’re discussing it.’ I start picking up newspapers and gathering together the coffee cups. Lala springs to my side, but I tell her not to bother; I can manage. I feel strange as I carry the cups into the kitchen. A nervy dancing fear is spinning in my stomach, and I lean on the sink for support. A minute ago I had been overjoyed that Martin’s wool was to be put to so innocent a purpose. What has happened? What am I afraid of? Guilt presses; I should have been more consoling when his paper was turned down. I should take greater interest in his work. Year after year he sweats out the required papers and what interest do I show? I proofread them, take out commas, put his footnotes in order. And that’s it. No wonder he’s developed a soft spot on the brain. To conceive of this bit of madness, actually to carry it through. And to carry it out furtively, covertly. For I am certain he deliberately withheld the project from me. Perhaps from everyone else as well. He probably even pulls the curtains in his office and locks the door when he weaves. I try to picture it – Martin tugging at the wool, sorting his needles, tightening his frame, and then pluck, pluck, in and out, in and out. My husband, Martin Gill, weaving away his secret afternoons. It might even be better if he did have a mistress. One could understand that. One could commiserate; one could forgive. But what can be done with a man who makes a fool of himself – what do you do then? Martin is crazy. He’s lost his grip. Or is it me? I try to think logically, but my stomach is seized by pain. I try to construct the past few months, to remember exactly when Martin last mentioned something about his work. I sit down on the kitchen stool and try to concentrate, but my head whirls. When did he last discuss the seventeenth century? Paradise Lost? The Milton tradition? Or something temporal such as his lecture schedule. When? I can’t remember. And then I think with a stab of pain, when did we last make love with anything more than cordiality? My head pounds. I open the cupboard and find a bottle of aspirin. And then, though it is just a little past noon, I creep upstairs and get into bed. The sheets are cool and deliciously flat. Below me in the family room I can hear the Rose Bowl Game beginning. Hours later I awake in the darkened room. In the upstairs hall the light is burning brutally; long, startling El Greco shadows cut across the bedroom wall. Footsteps, whispers, the rattle of teacups. Someone reaches for my hand, places a cold cloth on my forehead. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ I want to say, but my voice has disappeared, in its place a dry cracked nut of pain. My lips have split; I can taste blood. The inside of my mouth is unfamiliar, a clutch of cottonwool. ‘Drink this,’ someone says. ‘No, no,’ I rasp. ‘Please, Judith. Try. It may help.’ Lala was sitting on the edge of my bed, a figurine, a blue-tinted shepherdess. She was pressing a teaspoon toward me. I opened my mouth. Aspirin. Aspirin crushed in strawberry jam; its peculiar bitter, slightly citrus flavour reaches me from the forest of childhood (my father crushing aspirin on the breadboard with the back of a teaspoon when my sister and I had measles, yes). Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/carol-shields/duet/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.