Читать книгу The Silence on the Shore - Hugh Garner - Страница 8

CHAPTER ONE

While Walter Fowler waited for the taxi driver to place his bags on the sidewalk, he stared at the house across the May-green grass of its narrow lawn. It was a detached three-storey brick building, its Victorian gingerbread gone from its wooden porch, but its age and former social position still apparent in its stringy lace curtains, old-fashioned looking on a street that had long ago embraced the genteel drape. The large front window on the lower floor held a geometrically centred geranium, a bedroom flower moved by the exigencies of time and social change to what had once been a middle-class family’s parlour.

The house was like its neighbours, a tall austere old family dwelling, probably with steep staircases for skivvies to climb. It was a house that had grown too big for the families of the present, and too private in its shouldered intimacy with those beside it for the modern suburbanite. With a few eccentric exceptions all the houses on Adford Road and nearby streets had become the living quarters of semi-transient roomers, whose familial connections were as ephemeral as their connections one with the other.

The houses were now the habitations of bachelors, aging spinsters, working married couples, and men and women of indeterminate age who had a once-married look about them. Together, these tenants formed that amorphous group of urban dwellers which might be termed the lumpen middle class.

Adford Road, north of the university and south of the industrial fringe that bordered the crosstown railroad line, was a tree-ordered segment of the past, largely ignored by the boundary-bursting city. It was a social way station, devoid of nostalgia for those who had lived in it on their way up, and without sentiment for those who tried to remain on it on their way down.

As he prepared to pay the driver, Walter glanced above the roof of the porch to the twin second-floor windows, framed in a mascara of blackened paint. A woman’s face peered down from one of them, a handsome middle-aged face topped with tight straight black hair. Its stare was haughty yet softened into womanliness by its show of female curiosity. A fraction of a second before their eyes met, the face was withdrawn, and he idly completed his casual inspection of the house. From a cramped attic window beneath the peak of the acutely slanting roof a wide-eyed child gazed down at him. The child looked out of place in the house and on the street.

After the taxi had gone, Walter shifted his topcoat from one arm to the other, picked up his bags, and made his way up to the porch. He twisted the useless bell-ring until he was convinced it did not work. Then he knocked on the door beneath its stained-glass window.

He heard an inside door open and close, and knew he was being inspected by somebody standing in the vestibule. The door was finally opened by a woman between fifty and sixty, her short broad figure hidden beneath a nondescript dress over which she had thrown an unbuttoned cardigan. Her face was puffed and shapeless but well complexioned, set off by a twin set of badly fitting false teeth. Her grey-brown hair was loose and held in position by several careless hairpins that threatened to fall out with every movement of her head. She fixed him with a pair of cold suspicious blue eyes.

“I’m Walter Fowler,” he said. “The one who phoned about the room this afternoon.”

“Sure,” she replied, making no move to invite him in.

She looked him over carefully, satisfying herself that he was what he had claimed to be over the phone. He was fatter than she had pictured him, but younger, maybe forty-five. He looked like an early riser but not much of a water user. If he was a late arriver it would be caused by liquor rather than women. He still had most of his hair, and good white teeth which he didn’t try to show off by smiling. As a matter of fact he hadn’t smiled at all yet, which was a good sign.

While she had been looking him over he had been thinking how typical she looked. A neighbourhood drab who had switched her hatred of men from a departed spouse to the male roomers who had drifted into her trap. A sign hanger and raucous caller of names from the downstairs hallway. A landlady whose sex life was probably secondhand, whose tastes were vulgar, and whose aim in life was to fight to the death to protect her personal status quo.

“Come in,” she said, backing away from the doorway, while protecting herself from any untoward move on his part with the open door. Her voice was shrill even when modulated, with the shrillness of inferiority and insecurity.

He picked up his bags and entered the house, smelling for the first time in twelve years the pervasive odour of all rooming houses — the smell of age, dusty carpets, and vaguely food-scented air. Despite the smell the house was remarkably clean, the polished floor gleaming like glass.

“Upstairs,” she said as she shut the vestibule door behind her. He felt his way along the darkened floor to the flight of equally darkened stairs, trying not to scuff his heavy bags along the wall. As he climbed the stairs he heard her following him, and before he reached the top he could hear her presence, marked by the uneven noisy expulsions of her laboured breath.

On the landing he stepped aside and she led the way to a bedroom at the rear of the hall. In passing he looked through the open door of a bathroom, clean but with a claw-footed enamel-chipped bath and wood-enclosed wash basin.

He followed the landlady into the shiningly clean bedroom, giving a cursory glance at the cheap, fairly new bed and dresser. As he lowered his suitcases to the floor the woman walked over to the side of the bed and with a quick little jump sat on its edge, bouncing up and down to demonstrate its springiness. This almost girlish caper on her part astonished him, transforming her in a moment from a dour rooming-house chatelaine to an overweight and over-age sprite. There is lots of life in the old girl yet, he thought, unable to suppress a smile.

“The bed’s good,” she said. “I only bought last winter, when Mr. Cartwright had the room.”

He knew by the respectful way she mentioned the man’s name that he was expected to ask about him. “Mr. Cartwright?” he asked.

“Yes. He was with me for fourteen years, since 1945. He passed on in February. He was my longest roomer.”

Walter wasn’t overjoyed at the prospect of taking over a dead man’s bed, and she noticed the frown of distaste that passed over his face and the quick glance he gave to his unpacked bags.

“He passed away in the hospital,” she said hurriedly. “Heart trouble. It could happen to anybody.” Jumping up quickly from the bed as if to illustrate her exception to the mass prognosis, she stepped across the floor and flung open a closet door. “There’s plenty of room here for your clothes,” she said. “Mr. Cartwright used the closet for a kitchenette” — turning to give him a smile — “but of course I don’t allow kitchen privileges to anybody in the house but my regular apartment tenants.”

Aware that he had been shown his place in the house’s pecking order, Walter asked with suitable awe, “Apartment tenants, did you say?”

“Yes. There’s the Laramées upstairs — two small children but you never hear them; their apartment doesn’t reach this far back. There’s Mr. Martin who has the basement apartment, and Miss Karpluk who has the bed-sitting room and kitchenette at the front on this floor.”

The place began to seem a veritable anthill. “How many more people live in the house?” he asked.

“Well, there’s Mr. Lightfoot in the front room downstairs, and another downstairs room that’s rented but the young lady hasn’t moved in yet. She’s a quiet girl who’s gone to visit her family up north for a few days. She should be back soon. The three empty rooms, counting this, is because my university students have left. The middle room next door to this is empty too.”

Both of them stood in uneasy pre-contractual silence, Walter moving his eyes from the interior of the closet to the window and back again, and the landlady moving hers at a lower level, from his suitcases to his shoes and finally bringing them to rest against the modern sloping legs of the dresser. Neither made an effort to break the conversational impasse until a loud rasping voice from downstairs shouted, “Grace, I found your goddam cat in my room again!”

With a gasp the landlady threw herself through the door and disappeared down the stairs as though into a well. Walter, after the slight shock had worn off, walked to the window and gazed down into a backyard that was strangely beautiful.

It was as if the yard had been spared the deterioration of the house, and had remained a semi-rustic symbol of a day long past. Most of the other yards he could see were well freed and spacious also, kept neat and green and flower-planted by their present owners, an enclave of shaded quiet unknown and undreamed of by those in the steady stream of traffic on the street outside,

He heard a movement behind him, and swung around to find the landlady standing in the doorway holding a large yellow cat. She tried to smile but her face still bore traces of the sudden fear and concern she had shown when she rushed downstairs. She closed the door gently behind her and advanced into the room, gently placing the cat on the floor.

“That was Lightfoot you heard hollering,” she said. “Peanuts sometimes wanders into his room, and he hates cats.” She placed a hand against her mouth, drawing him into a whispered intimacy. “Mr. Lightfoot drinks,” she finished.

He watched Peanuts conducting a tour of inspection of the floor, with particular emphasis on his suitcases. Then the big cat approached him and rubbed against his legs. “He’s a fine cat,” he said.

“She’s a lady cat, ain’t you, Peanuts? Old man Martin in the basement says ginger cats are nearly always boys, but I don’t believe him. Anyway, she’s not.” As the cat continued to rub against him the landlady said, “She likes you.” He knew then, without particular enjoyment, that he had passed muster as a prospective roomer.

“It’s nine dollars a week, you said on the phone — ?” he began.

“Yes, Mr. Fowler. I run a clean and decent house here. This room has a good view of the garden, and you have garden privileges of course. As I already said I can’t allow cooking in here, but if you stay here next winter I might be able to fix you up with a hot plate and things for making a cup of coffee. I’m Mrs. Hill.”

“How do you do,” he said, proffering a ten-dollar bill.

Since meeting her he had been trying to pin down her slight accent. It was Germanic, and didn’t go with her name.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Hill,” he asked, “Are you German?”

She hesitated a second too long before she answered, “No, I’m Swiss.”

She extracted a receipt pad from a pocket of her cardigan and pulled an unseen pencil stub from the nest of her hair. As she wrote out the receipt she said, “Guests have to be out of your room by eleven o’clock, and I don’t like my men roomers bringing in too many women.” Clicking her teeth in a conspiratorial grin, “I know what men are, you know.” She pulled a crumpled dollar bill from the same pocket that had held the receipt pad and handed it to him along with his receipt, taking the ten dollars with the practised ease of a craps table croupier. Then with a flourish she handed him a pair of keys she had been palming all along.

“How long do you think you’ll be staying with us, Mr. Fowler?”

“I really don’t know.”

“You said on the phone you were an editor, I believe?”

“Yes.”

“What do you edit?”

“A small magazine. Just a trade paper. Real Estate News.”

“It sounds like a pretty important job.” Glancing around the room with an apologetic air. “This isn’t much of a place for a magazine editor to move into.”

“It’ll do. I’ve lived in worse places than this.” Seeing her bridle slightly, he hurried on. “I prefer to live in a furnished room — for now anyway. This one’s fine.”

She searched the floor for the cat as she said, “This isn’t much but it’s quiet here, I don’t believe in bothering my roomers.”

After she had gone he sat on the edge of the bed and contemplated the present. He wondered how Brenda and the boys were doing. Everything had happened so suddenly that he was still numbed from the shock of finding himself alone. For the past month he had tried to bring cohesion to his thoughts, to reconstruct piece by piece the march of events that had separated him from his wife and children. There was nothing when taken alone that was responsible, but a number of little things, insignificant in themselves but adding up to something that could be called incompatibility or even outright enmity between himself and Brenda.

Of course, there had been another woman. He smiled grimly as he thought of it. The woman was a proofreader employed in his office, a middle-aged spinster called Ivy Frobisher, a woman who meant less than nothing to him but who had served as the focal point of his wife’s irrational jealousy and hate. Once, when half drunk, he had mentioned an incident with Ivy which his wife had seized upon and used as an admission of things much worse between them.

Since then he had wondered why he had sacrificed a position of moral and ethical strength on the altar of his wife’s silly suspicions. At the time, he had wanted to show her that he was not a captive of marriage, that he was still a man whom some other women found attractive. Somehow, in his drunken state, this had seemed an opportunity he could not forego. Brenda had seized on it as a profession of guilt, and for the next six months had not let up on her insistence that what she knew was only part of the whole.

The whole story was much less than she believed, and was of such small consequence that now, long after it had contributed its venom to her hatred, he could scarcely credit it with breaking them up. The incident was this.

It was a cold autumn evening, and he had returned to his office to finish an editorial he was writing. He had been surprised to find Ivy still in the office, and had walked across to her desk.

“What are you doing here, Ivy?” he had asked.

“I’ve got some copy to go over, Mr. Fowler,” she said. “That piece about suburban school costs.”

Somehow as he looked down into her upturned face he saw her for a split second as she really was. Behind her heavy glasses and plainly handsome features she was a woman, and he had just discovered it. She saw his look, and taking off her glasses let her eyes pay naked thanks to him. He pulled her head against his chest and they remained like this for several seconds. Then, with a shudder, she rose to her feet and pulled him to her. Their mouths met in a long and trembling kiss, and her body curved itself against him.

When they drew apart and stared into each other’s eyes he knew she would do anything he asked. But then he felt the little cautionary twinge that warned him it would probably end as all attempts at lovemaking with other women had ended over the past few years. They drew apart and faced each other from a distance that was heightened by their recent kiss.

“If things were different, if I wasn’t married …” he said lamely as they drew apart.

“You don’t have to say anything, Walter,” she said, turning away. It was the first time she had ever addressed him by his first name.

He had returned to his own small office and sat there twirling a pencil in a hand that soon began to shake with feeling. Through his doorway came the sound of Ivy turning over the sheets of galley proofs. He could not rid himself of the knowledge that for one brief moment she had been his if he had wanted her, and he derided himself for his cowardice.

The fidelity that Brenda had been unable to procure with love and affection she had succeeded in bringing about, he believed, through inducing in him a psychological block that one woman had called his “misplaced moral standards.” It wasn’t that; he wished it were.

After a few minutes Ivy passed his doorway, walking as far from it as the outer office allowed.

“Good night, Mr. Fowler,” she said. “See you Monday.”

“Good night, Ivy,” he answered.

It had been a mistake to mention it to Brenda, of course, for she had twisted it into a sordid excuse for her decision to leave him.

The real breakup of their marriage, however, began with a visit from Brenda’s mother in the late winter. Lillian Hornsby was the kind of woman who thought that the filial devotion of children for their female parent was a one-way street, a divine right of mothers who could grandly ignore all but the ostentations of reciprocity.

She was a short woman, shrunk in size by seventy years and by a natural inclination to camouflage herself against her background. Her voice, like everything else about her, was quiet, not through reticence or politeness but through guile. She had been taught early in life that a soft answer turneth away wrath, and since then had pitched her poisoned darts disguised as little jokes, accompanied by a short cackle of weary resignation.

During the weeks she stayed at Walter’s house they had observed an armed truce, greeting each other with tooth-hidden scowls, generally managing to keep as far apart as the size of the bungalow would allow. Mealtimes had brought them into uneasy proximity, and Walter had choked down his food while listening to the old woman jokingly criticize the boys’ eating habits, his wife’s “newfangled” cooking, and his smoking at the table. From the boys he had discovered that his mother-in-law turned off their television cowboy shows and substituted children’s programs that were aimed at toddlers half their age. He had remonstrated with Brenda about this, but had been met with a half-angry “Mother means well. Just don’t say anything about it.”

One afternoon, after returning home early from the office, he had sat in the living room with his sons and their grandmother and had watched a series of children’s cartoons and some nonsense involving a pair of animal-like hand puppets. Instead of concentrating on the screen he had watched the face of his mother-in-law become transformed with idiotic delight at the silliness of the cartoons. It was a sobering revelation: Lillian Hornsby was not a quiet, dignified old lady, but a simpleton to whom such television fare was high entertainment. From then on he could scarcely stand the sight of her, and he parried her purported jokes with a biting sarcasm that brought a meek lowering of her head, and shrill angry remarks from his wife.

During supper one evening he remarked that the boys needed haircuts, and said that he would take them to the barbershop the following day.

Brenda turned from the stove and said, “Why tomorrow? You’ll have to pay adult prices on Saturday. I’ll take them down after school on Monday.”

Normally this was as far as the incident would have gone, but Mrs. Hornsby had to say, “I don’t know why you don’t buy a pair of clippers and cut their hair yourself.” Then with her self-satisfied little giggle she added, “My husband always cut my boys’ hair himself. You know, Walter, a penny saved is a penny earned.”

The sudden anger he felt for her was out of all proportion to what she had said, but he felt it hot the muscles on his jaws and fill the backs of his eyeballs. “I don’t give a damn what Fred did!” he shouted. “This is my house and these are my kids. When I was a boy I didn’t like going out with an amateur haircut, and by God these boys aren’t going to either! And don’t give me any of your moronic pap about saving pennies!”

“Walter!” Brenda had cried, jumping away from the stove, her face ugly with pent-up hate and sudden anger.

“It’s all right, dear,” her mother whispered, in those tones of phony forgiveness and resignation he loathed. “I was only trying to help.” She covered her eyes with her hand as if crying, her mouth still working on her unswallowed food.

“I’m taking you two down to the barbershop in the morning!” he had shouted at the boys, who were pressed back against their chairs in fear. Then turning to his mother-in-law he said, “I make a fairly good living at my job. I can afford to squander an extra couple of dollars now and then, on haircuts or anything else. What did poor Fred get from saving his pennies while he was alive?” His voice rising to a shout. “He got nothing! Not a godammed thing but the knowledge that he had pissed away his manhood saving his money so that you —” leaning towards her — “so that you could outlive your usefulness, if you ever had any, and make life miserable for everybody else!”

Brenda was also shouting, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” in a long tearful monotone, but he wasn’t finished yet.

“You are everything I hate and despise in an old woman,” he said calmly, his voice strangely flat and even now. “You and your dried-up kind are responsible for half the divorces and nearly all of the fears and hatreds of my generation. Under the guise of mother love, or some other high-sounding piece of platitudinous crap, your kind have corrupted all your children. Well, you’re not going to corrupt my kids. From now on they watch their cowboy programs if they want to, and not the silly baby shows which are the only ones you understand.”

When he looked around him the children had run out of the kitchen, and Brenda rushed over and placed her arm around her mother’s shoulders. Both of them were crying.

“Come on, Mother,” his wife said, lifting the old woman to her feet and leading her from the room. He sat staring at his half-eaten plateful of food, still too choked with the things he hadn’t said to worry yet about the things he had.

That night and for the week following, his wife and mother-in-law slept together in one of the boys’ bedrooms. He ate his meals near the office and did not arrive home until late in the evening when all were in bed. The drinks he had had in downtown bars raised his spirits temporarily, but soured on his awakened anger as soon as he entered his house.

The following Friday he arrived home to find the house empty of occupants and in darkness. A curt note on the telephone table informed him that Brenda and the boys had gone West with Mrs. Hornsby. He picked it up and laughed; Brenda left more personal notes for the milkman. About three o’clock the next morning he awoke with a heavy feeling of loss and remorse, and it was only then that he began to see the emptiness that stretched before him.

Brenda had taken the TV set, her wedding gifts, and most of the kitchen gadgets, and even a new set of drapes from the picture window. He had laughed bitterly at her instinctive choice of these symbolic possessions.

Now, as he sat in his room in the rooming house, he recalled these things. His life with Brenda had not ended with one swift determined action, but slowly over a period of a month. He had been impatient to finish it, to escape from the bungalow, to get rid of his possessions along with his memories. But that, apparently, was not the way of such things. There had been endless negotiations about the sale of the house, furniture, and car which kept him imprisoned in the bungalow long after his use for it had ended.

He had discovered a trait in himself that had gone unrealized up to then: that there were usable objects and possessions he would sooner destroy than give to others. There had been evenings when he had sat before the living-room fireplace and had carried on a solitary burning of books, photographs and even a few cheap paintings, in a lonely auto-da-fé of his heretical dreams for the future. When the house was finally free of all his possessions but his clothes, he had felt free himself at last, free to go back to where he had begun more than eleven years ago. It was this search for his former freedom that had sent him back into a furnished room rather than into the apartment he could well afford.

Now he could write the novel he had been putting off for years, the autobiographical book about his youthful struggle for recognition, with his disguised self as its protagonist. Up to now he only had its title, Lead Them Through the Deep.

Tomorrow he would bring home some paper from the office and begin the writing of it. What was the name he had thought up for the main character? Jason. Jason Simon. No, Simon was the fictional name for too many villains, and it wasn’t Anglo-Saxon enough. Jason Bancroft? No. Jason Bourne. That was a good name, Jason Bourne. He rolled it around on his tongue.

He mentally wrote the title at the top of a fresh sheet of paper; beneath it, carefully centred, “by”; and, beneath that, “Walter Fowler.” It was a good name for a novelist — twelve letters and almost phonetic.

Glancing at his watch he saw that it was after six. He pulled on his topcoat and left the room.

As he crossed towards the stairs in the half darkness he became aware of a human presence, and caught a whiff of a pervasive perfume. He looked behind him just as the figure of a woman glided past and disappeared into the bathroom

“I’m sorry,” he said before she disappeared. “I didn’t see you.”

Without a word the woman pushed the door shut behind her, plunging the hallway into darkness. He had recognized her as the dark woman who had stared at him from the front window when he alighted from the taxi. With careful steps he felt his way down the stairs until he reached the area of light thrown by a small bulb in the downstairs hall.

As he headed for the front door a familiar voice from behind him shouted, “Going to supper, Mr. Fowler?”

He turned his head and found a doorway at the rear of the hall half-filled with the stocky figure of Mrs. Hill.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m going to supper.”

The early spring evening bore the smell of upturned earth and of growing things and the cars passed him with their windows open, so that he could hear brief snatches of conversation from inside them. From Bloor Street, the main east-west street two blocks to the south, came the brake-gasps of buses, the clang of streetcar bells, and the raucous noise of speeding traffic. He thought of the woman who had glided past him in the upstairs hallway and tried to revive the odour of her perfume in his mind.

The landlady had told him the woman’s name, but he had forgotten it. It was something foreign, something Slavic. He turned the corner onto Bloor and walked in the direction of a cafeteria he remembered from his rooming-house days of a dozen years before.