Читать книгу Duet - Carol Shields - Страница 9

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 déjà 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 jardinière. 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.