Читать книгу The Silence on the Shore - Hugh Garner - Страница 9

CHAPTER TWO

After she watched the new roomer close the front doors behind him, Grace Hill returned to her kitchen and sat down at the table. Peanuts lay on the inside sill of the back window absent-mindedly washing one of her shoulders but keeping a green eye focused on the movements of some sparrows that were chasing each other through the budding leaves of a pair of lilac bushes against the fence.

Grace watched her for a moment before she said, “Peanuts, you red devil, what are you doing?”

The cat gave her an insolent glance over her shoulder and went back to her toilet, first stifling a bored yawn.

Grace planted her slippered feet more firmly on the patterned linoleum of the kitchen floor, cupped her chin in her hands, and gave herself up to thoughts of the coming summer. This year, she decided, she would go to the Sun Lovers’ Club every weekend. Not like the year before when she had missed too many trips because of her fear of leaving the roomers alone from Saturday morning to Sunday night.

She was going to enjoy the coming season, with its long days in the sun and the beautiful nude young men strolling above her on the grass of the sunny hillsides. It would be wonderful! Which reminded her that she hadn’t yet mailed in her application and membership fee. Here it was the second of May, with the club opening up on the first of June.

She crossed the narrow kitchen to an old-fashioned kitchen cabinet and rummaged in a top drawer until she found a pen, a half-used package of envelopes, and the skinny remains of a writing pad. With these in her hand she once more took her chair at the table and began to write, in German, to the secretary of the club. When the application was written she pushed herself to her feet with a sigh and shuffled over to the large pantry that she had converted into her bedroom. She returned to the table and made out a cheque to the club, signing it with her maiden name, Gretchen Stauffer.

Peanuts was now standing on the windowsill, her back slightly arched and her tail twitching, intent on something below her in the yard. Grace walked over to the window, as the cat gave her a quick nervous glance, and looked down at the lawn. A big tom tabby stared up at her with unblinking eyes. Even from that distance she could almost count his gaunt ribs which ran back from a pair of heavily muscled shoulders. She stared in fascination at his flat head with its scars from a hundred fights. The tom took his eyes from the window and moved his head slowly from side to side, taking in the lawn on both sides of him and the bushes that lined the fences.

Grace picked up Peanuts and whispered in her ear, “Is that your lover, you red devil? Eh, is that your lover? Eh?”

She trembled as she carried the cat to the kitchen door, opened it, and placed Peanuts on the floor of the back porch. The big red female tried to squeeze herself back into the house but Grace blocked her with her legs. The tomcat didn’t move but stared intently at the frantic female as she tried to regain the safety of the kitchen. Grace, with a series of gasping giggles, said, “Here she is, cat. Here’s your sweetheart for the night.” With a quick jump she got back inside the door, closing it behind her.

She ran to the window and looked out. She could not see Peanuts, who was hidden from view as she pressed herself against the door, but she stared in breath-holding fascination at the tomcat who had pulled himself up to full height, his eyes on the porch and his tail slowly flicking from side to side. As he stared at Peanuts he shoved out his tongue and licked his dry lips, before glancing over his shoulder to reconnoitre the garden behind him. Then, his eyes on the female again, he took a stiff-legged forward step, then another, bringing himself closer to the steps that led up to the porch. Grace heard Peanuts backing her haunches against the door, and she laughed quietly, her eyes still on the tom. Though he had not returned her glance since his first insolent stare, Grace knew that he was aware of her presence at the window.

She heard Peanuts give a warning mew, and the tom stopped momentarily and glanced about him carelessly before moving slowly ahead as before. The door rattled slightly as Peanuts backed herself against it, and Grace gripped the sill with both hands as she urged the tom on under her breath. He placed one scarred paw on the bottom step and his head rose like a cobra’s as he tried to stare into the eyes of the ginger female. Slowly he began his upward climb, each step a calculated movement, each movement a flowing forward of lithe rippling muscle and taut shivering ganglions, the head seeming separated from the crouching flowing body beneath.

Peanuts gave a strange cry and hissed at him, but as if knowing that it was only female coquetry and invitation the big tom let his body flow on to the floor of the porch, where he stood in momentary indecision, showing his independence by glancing over the garden once again. Peanuts began a series of guttural cries, far different than any noises she had ever made in the house.

Grace stared at the gaunt tomcat with a fascination that was almost mesmeric in its intensity, her fingers digging into the wood of the windowsill and her mouth hanging open. Now that she could see the tom from a distance of a few feet she was aware of the strength and maleness of him, of the sexual concentration that was apparent in his unblinking eyes and quivering haunches. As she watched he mewed piteously, making the sound of a woman in pain. He was answered by a cry from Peanuts that started deep down in her throat and rose to a hysterical pitch of quavering trills.

“Hurry up, hurry up!” Grace pleaded with him. He advanced across the porch towards the female, moving himself a section at a time. His head disappeared from view behind a corner of the window, and she stared at his shivering hindquarters and his fiercely lashing tail. Both cats were now crying to each other, their voices sometimes raised in thin feline screams and at other times muted as they talked in tones of unbearable sadness. Suddenly, almost too quick to see, the tom disappeared completely in the direction of the doorway, and the door rattled on its lock as they met against it.

Grace heard her cat give one long-drawn-out cry and then they tumbled into view, the tom gripping Peanuts around her belly with his forepaws while he searched for a tooth-hold on the back of her neck. The yellow cat was trying to drag herself toward the steps, but the full weight of the tom pressed her hindquarters to the floor. She strained with her front legs as her back legs dragged behind her elongated body, and the back legs of the tom tried to find a grip on the smooth board floor. Neither cat was crying now, their full efforts being concentrated on their straining purpose. Grace pushed herself against the windowsill until it bit into her middle through her girdle, and she clenched her teeth on her tongue.

Suddenly from upstairs came the sound of running water, then with a swoosh and clatter the ancient toilet flushed and gurgled as it emptied noisily down the pipe that lay hidden in the wall behind the kitchen sink. The tomcat loosed his precarious grip upon the ginger female and swung his eyes toward the house, crouched now for a hasty spring away from the startling noise. Peanuts in a few quick bounds reached the fence at the north side of the garden and clawed her way to the top of it, where she stood poised for a moment surveying the yard beyond.

With a lithe bound the tomcat reached the grass and threw himself upon the fence a split second after Peanuts had left it. In a moment both cats had disappeared into the maze of gardens, backyards, and laneways that stretched a full block between the rear of the houses on Adford and the next street, Bemiral Road.

Grace Hill let her hands relax from the windowsill, wiped her mouth with the back of one hand, and glanced up at the ceiling.

“You crazy Russian!” she shouted, knowing that it was Sophia Karpluk who had flushed the toilet. “You dirty Russian schlampe!”

Then she collapsed on a chair, staring with unseeing eyes at the pattern of the linoleum at her feet.

Later on she hurried into her bedroom and pulled an old shoebox from beneath her bed. She carried it into the kitchen, took a pair of scissors, a bottle of India ink, and a lettering pen from a cabinet drawer. Cutting one end off the shoebox, and using the pen and ink that had belonged to a former roomer, she began lettering a new sign for the bathroom. With tongue between teeth she wrote, dont flush toilet exept is neccesery. g. gill.

She sat back and surveyed her handiwork. That should fix that stuck-up Russian.

After a few minutes she heard the front door open and the creak of the stairs leading to the upper floors. It was almost seven. That would be Paul Laramée coming home from his job with the city parks department. She gazed up at the cuckoo clock above the table, waiting for the bright-painted little bird to spring through the door and make its double-voiced iteration to the movement of the earth in relation to the sun. Though she was expecting it, the sudden appearance of the bird and its noise startled her momentarily, as it always did.

She had brought the clock with her to Canada in 1929, and through the depression and the years of her subsequent unhappy marriage to Clarence Hill she had cherished it as a tie with her family and childhood in Bad Kissingen. In 1942 she had run away from Clarence, a Montreal tool-and-die maker, and had come to this city where she had lived ever since.

There had been rumours in the neighbourhood that a syndicate was going to buy all the houses in the block on the west side of Adford, from Berther to Lownard Avenues, and replace them with a high-rise apartment project. Her house, number 120, was spang in the middle of the block, and she had already made up her mind to sell. With the money she would take a trip to Germany to see her aging mother, then return and open a nature farm.

There was a heavy authoritative knock on the door leading to the downstairs hall, and she recognized it as Gordon Lightfoot’s. She pushed herself to her feet, feeling a twinge of the lumbago that had been bothering her for several months. She mustn’t forget to get herself another bottle of pills on her way home tonight.

She opened the door and faced Gordon, her longest current tenant and certainly the most drunken of any roomer in the neighbourhood. Gordon was fully dressed, a condition that had become a rarity over the past two weeks. His sparse grey hair was carefully combed, his shoes shined, and his expensive suit cleaned and pressed.

“Guten Tag, Liebchen,” he said, raising a hand that held a bottle of Rhine wine. “I have brought you a drink from your native country. May I come in?”

She opened the door and he walked in with the exaggerated steadiness of the very drunk. Placing the bottle on the table he sat down in her usual chair, being very careful to hitch the press of his trousers over his knees.

“Haven’t you bought a corkscrew yet?” she asked him. She knew that his visit had not come about because he wanted to share his wine with her, but because he had no means of removing the cork. For a person whose alcoholic tastes were as constant and catholic as his were, the non-ownership of a corkscrew was a foolish oversight.

“You may not believe this, sweetheart,” he said, “but I have never owned a corkscrew.”

Though his flushed face was in repose and he seemed in a good humour, she had learned to be wary of his quick drunken changes of mood. He had frightened her half to death one time when he had first moved into the house.

He had owed her two weeks’ rent, and she hadn’t been able to catch him out of his room for several days. He had insisted on doing his own housekeeping when he took the room, and she had not found any legitimate excuse to enter his room. However, one afternoon she had walked along the hall and knocked on his door. There was no answer, so she had repeated her knock again and again, growing angrier by the minute. Finally she had heard the bedspring grumble, his drunken fumblings for the catch on the door, and then the door was flung open and he faced her.

Except for his necktie and shoes he was fully dressed, his coat and trousers wrinkled and stained, his shirt collar unbelievably dirty and bent, and his lint-covered socks hanging over the ends of his toes, He stared at her angrily from a face that hadn’t been shaved in days, from beneath hair that stuck up in sweat-sticky disarray. His teeth were yellow from neglect and there were salty crusts around his eyes. A big vein on each of his temples was pounding, and his face was bloated and red except for yellow-white patches on both his cheeks.

“Mr. Lightfoot!” she had exclaimed in horror, stepping back from the open door.

“What do you want?” he asked, his voice catching as if forced through a windpipe too small to contain it.

“I wondered — I came to see if you were all right,” she said, trying to smile reassuringly but only managing a frightened grin.

“All I ask in this house is to be left alone,” he said, his voice a queer falsetto. “I don’t ask for anything else, do I?”

“No, Mr. Lightfoot.”

“Then why in hell are you knocking at my door!” he suddenly shouted, taking a step forward.

She backed herself against the stairs. Despite her fear and disgust she noticed his physical weakness as he stepped toward her, and her fear melted before her desire to dominate him and assert her authority.

“You owe me two weeks’ rent,” she said. “I want it and I want it right now!” Supported by her new bravery she stepped forward and peered through the doorway into the room. The bed was unmade, with most of the bedclothes trailing on the floor beneath the window. The dresser top had been swept clear of its normal bric-a-brac and now held several empty wine and whisky bottles and two half-filled vials of pills. There were other bottles lying on their sides on the floor, along with empty paper bags, cigarette packs, and a partly eaten sandwich, its crusts curling with age. His shoes were placed neatly beneath the wooden clothes closet, but his necktie lay twisted and vomit-stained beneath the dirty and discoloured washbowl. The room smelled of cheap wine, sweat, vomit, and decay. She fell back into the hall again.

“Well, what do you think of it?” Lightfoot asked her.

“It’s disgusting!” she shouted. “Dirty, filthy, and disgusting! Even a pig wouldn’t live in such a place!” Feeling braver by the minute she added, “You’re nothing but a dirty Trunkenbold!”

His face seemed to narrow and lose some of its colour as he pulled himself erect. “I’ve been sick drunk for a week, but all my dirt is out there where it can be seen. When I make dirt I clean it up by myself, understand! I didn’t ask you or anyone else to help me. In the meantime stay away from this door!” His voice dropped into its usual register again. “Please just leave me alone to get better, that’s all I ask.”

Grace wanted to escape from the sight and smell of him but felt impelled to have the last word.

“That geranium needs some water,” she said, pointing to the flower pot in the window.

The next day, grey and drawn but cleanly scrubbed and dressed, Lightfoot knocked at her door. Without a word he handed over two weeks’ rent and waited in the doorway while she made him out a receipt. Then he asked for a pail, broom, scrub brush, and laundry soap, and she handed them out to him without a word.

For most of the day she heard him scrubbing and moving furniture around in his room. That evening, slightly drunk again but with his colour back, he returned the cleaning things and a bundle of bedclothes, which she exchanged for clean ones. When she heard him leave the house, she opened his door with her key and gazed astounded at the room. The wash basin had been scoured to a high polish, the empty bottles and other garbage were gone, and the linoleum had been scrubbed along with the floor mat that lay neatly beside the bed. She hurried to the window and found that even the earth in the geranium pot was damp from watering.

One morning as she placed his mail under his door, he opened it and apologized for the mess he had made a few days before. He was quite sober, and he stayed that way for nearly three weeks. From then on she didn’t interfere with him, and he kept to himself when he was drinking. About six months after moving into the house he brought a bottle with him to her kitchen one day, and they sat and talked for an hour or so. She never succeeded in finding out where his money came from, though he didn’t have to work. Her early hatred for him changed to a grudging respect, and she never tested his temper too much after the first time.

“Where are you going tonight, Grace?” Lightfoot asked as she poured a second drink of wine into his glass.

“To the Gardens,” she replied. “There’s a double main bout on the card and a tag match.”

He smiled at her across the table in the faintly supercilious way he had when she mentioned wrestling matches. His smile always angered her momentarily, but she recognized it as the mark of his superior intelligence, and afterwards she would picture it to herself and bask in its mocking scorn.

“A new roomer moved in today,” she said, sipping at her wine. “He’s got the back room on the second floor, Cartwright’s old room.”

“Yes, I heard you talking to him in the hallway. What is he, an unemployed chimney sweep — or another college kid with an inordinate urge to howl at the moon on the evenings of monthly remittance days?”

“He’s an editor,” she said triumphantly. “He told me he edits a magazine called Real Estate something or other.”

“Oh.” His enthusiasm disappeared as quickly as it had been aroused. Then as if remembering something, “Where’s that cat of yours?”

“She’s out. She stays out every night now that the weather is getting mild,” she said defensively.

“She’ll be having another litter of kittens again, I suppose,” he said. “You’ll be able to enjoy your vicarious pregnancy again this summer.” And as he turned towards the door with the wine bottle in his hand he said over his shoulder, “I thought you looked a trifle parturient when I came in.”

She went upstairs later and affixed the sign she had lettered beneath the chain-operated water tank on the bathroom wall. When she left the bathroom she walked along the second-floor hallway and switched on the fifteen-watt bulb that cast a feeble light from dusk to dawn. From upstairs she could hear Monique Laramée playing with her babies.

How could a woman tie herself down to children like that, she wondered. There was too much fear and worry in bringing up a family, and besides children could die or be killed by a car. Still, the Laramées seemed happy enough, and they paid their rent every week without fail. Of course they were French Canadians, and she knew plenty about them, having lived in Montreal. Bed, babies, and beer was all they thought of. Dirty devils mostly, but she had to admit that Monique kept the two attic rooms and her children scrupulously clean.

She knocked on the door of the front room and heard Sophia Karpluk shuffling towards her in her slippers.

“Hello, Sophy,” she said as the door was opened.

“Hello,” Sophia answered, gazing at her without enthusiasm.

“I smell something good,” Grace said. “Stew?”

“You might call it that,” the woman answered, motioning to a small curtained-off kitchenette at the rear of the big front room.

“How was the hospital today?”

“The same as always.” Sophia had a more tenacious accent than Grace, perhaps because she had only been in Canada for a few years.

Grace stared around the room. There were some small modernistic paintings on the walls, and the ancient davenport was covered with a piece of heavy material whose gold threads glittered in the light from a tri-lite lamp. A hanging bookshelf held some paperback novels, an English-Polish dictionary, a pair of volumes on practical nursing, and a book of art reproductions. A second-hand Turkish rug covered much of the linoleum.

“You’ve fixed the place up nice, Sophy.”

Sophia shrugged.

“A friend of mine is in your hospital,” Grace said. “Mrs. Lillian O’Brien. She goes to the wrasslin’ every Thursday night.”

“Oh,” said Sophia noncommittally.

“She was taken there yesterday. Gall bladder,” Grace said. “You must have admitted her if you work in the admitting office.”

“I’m not the only one in the office,” Sophia said. “I may have booked her in and I may not.”

“She’s a little Irish woman lives in the west end. Always wears a blue suit and flowered hat this weather.”

“I don’t remember her,” Sophia said impatiently. She glanced towards the kitchenette. “My dinner will be burning, Mrs. Hill. I’ll have to go now.”

“I just wanted to see how you were getting along,” Grace said as the door was closed gently in her face.

She cursed the younger woman under her breath. She’d lived there six months and hadn’t yet invited Grace into her room, the lying Russian slut. Pretending she was better than other people, her and her friend Lotta going to the ballet and concerts and stuff. Making out she was the artistic type and worked in the office of the West End Hospital, when Grace had phoned there and found out she worked in the hospital laundry. Grace had kept this bit of intelligence to herself to be used when it was needed. Sophia said she was a Polack too, though Grace was sure she was a Russian. But who’d want to claim to be a Polack if they weren’t? Anyways, she had lied about her job so there was no reason to believe she wouldn’t lie about her nationality. You couldn’t trust either a Polack or a Russian anyhow.

Grace returned to her own quarters, took a dime from her purse, and returned to the pay telephone in the hall outside her door. She dialed the number of her girl friend, a German widow named Martha Greber.

“Hello, Mart’?” she asked.

“Yes.... Yes it will be good.... King Koenig will kill that dirty American bum.... I just have to put on my coat.... Make sure they’re near the dressing-room ramp.... Was?… Ja …” As she lapsed into German, Grace lowered her voice through habit. Because the call cost money she was reluctant to hang up too soon, and she talked for fifteen minutes about the uninteresting events that had bridged the ennui of her day.

When Walter Fowler entered the house Grace gave him a quick nod from her position at the top of the cellar stairs. He had fallen considerably in her estimation since Lightfoot had dismissed him so quickly. Apparently he wasn’t as important as she had first believed him to be.