Читать книгу Laurier in Love - Roy MacSkimming - Страница 12
ОглавлениеLike a courtier spreading his cloak before her feet, the caretaker scatters sand down the icy front steps of Notre-Dame. Zoë, snug in her sealskin coat, descends gingerly to Sussex Street, each stair melting into a sandy blur before her eyes. She reminds herself it’s all right: she can see better at a distance.
Winter has arrived in Ottawa, and that much, at least, feels right, familiar. Zoë loves the exhilarating, ice-blue sky, the long sharp shadows thrown by a sun down low to the horizon. Safely arrived on the sidewalk lined with orderly snowbanks, she looks up at the cathedral. Its twin spires piercing the heavens are a grander version of St-Christophe, her own parish church high on the hill in Arthabaska.
Attending morning Mass has become her ritual since moving to the capital. Setting out for the cathedral lends purpose and comfort to her days, which yawn emptily ahead until Wilfrid returns from Parliament Hill at six. She misses Mass only on days when they’re entertaining, and she has to oversee arrangements in the Russell’s private dining room: they’re still living at the hotel.
But she hasn’t yet warmed to any of the Ottawa priests, much less to the austere Bishop Duhamel, known for his opposition to Wilfrid. She can’t imagine confessing to them, as she did to Father Suzor at St-Christophe, her shameful fantasies: gouging Émilie’s eyes, breaking her nose so it spouts blood like a whale, knocking out her ugly teeth. Father Suzor, who heard her confession for years, took it all in stride, gently reassuring her that the Lord understands the nature of temptation and loves us all the more when we’re tempted to sin but bravely resist. Courage, patience, acceptance, perseverance were Father Suzor’s counsel: above all patience, for God blesses those who wait without complaining. While remaining steadfastly loyal to her husband, she must offer up her pain to Him who sees and understands. The greater her suffering, the more stars would gleam in her crown.
Zoë sets off on her frigid walk back to the hotel. A bitter wind stings her cheeks, floods her eyes with tears. She won’t take a carriage. Wilfrid never exercises, and she has to get enough for both of them.
If the House of Commons was sitting, she’d go and occupy the seat reserved for her in the front row of the visitors’ gallery, directly above Mr. Speaker—an office Wilfrid has awarded to the literary James Edgar, in lieu of a cabinet post. To her great surprise she actually enjoys the fractious, theatrical spectacle as it unfolds in the pit below her feet, she who once had no use for politics. Watching Wilfrid in command of the unruly House, and by extension the unruly country, allows her to be more useful to him in their bedtime conversations. She’s forming opinions. Wilfrid says he finds her observations of men and motives helpful. But the first session of the new Parliament is over, its main purpose to vote the monies necessary for carrying on the public service, and in the process to display Wilfrid’s new government to the nation. Like a peacock, Zoë thought at the time, displaying his feathers to the female.
Doggedly she proceeds along St. Patrick Street, up Parent and into the By Ward Market. Her gloved hands press her fur collar against her cheeks. The market streets are much quieter in winter. In warmer months they’re crammed with the wagons of merchants and Jewish peddlers and market gardeners, the sidewalks crowded with customers lined up at fruit and vegetable stands shaded by giant umbrellas. Even now, with their doors closed against the cold, the little shops release their pungent smells of cheese and fish and freshly stuffed sausage into the air. The sidewalk is cluttered with discarded wooden crates. She has to squint to navigate around them.
Three sleighs stand side by side facing Lapointe’s, steam rising from blankets on the horses’ flanks, the occupants inside shopping for the day’s catch. Zoë enters, quietly taking her place in line. She needs to order lobster and oysters for Saturday night’s dinner party. Rather than let the Russell’s chef order her meats and seafood, she buys them herself to ensure quality and freshness, and to get the best price.
She likes being inside the shop’s sharp briny warmth. When M. Lapointe sees her, he makes the usual pleasant fuss, bypassing the other patrons to serve her first, and in French. His handlebar moustache reminds her of Émilie’s husband, Joseph. Lapointe asks in a conspiratorial whisper who’s on the guest list this time, and Zoë teases him by mentioning only the Clerk of the House and the Parliamentary Librarian. Lapointe’s eyebrows narrow in disappointment until she relents, adding the names of prominent newspaper owners from Montreal, Quebec City and Ottawa, and several cabinet ministers, all with wives. He licks the tips of his moustache and orders his boys to crate up his best crustaceans for delivery to the Russell House, care of M. Desjardins, the chef. As she leaves, the other customers turn to stare.
Trekking across Sappers Bridge over the Rideau Canal, Zoë reaches the Russell a little after eleven. Upstairs in their suite, she removes three long pins from her hat, struggles out of her coat, unbuttons her high boots. She sits on the bed and sighs: fatigued not merely from her walk in the cold, but her never-absent longing to be elsewhere.
This is how it was for Wilfrid years ago, on first arriving in Ottawa. The poor dear wrote letter after letter home to tell her how desolate and out-of-place he felt: “The session has not even begun, and already I want to see it end. As far as I’m concerned, the best thing about being an MP is the salary.” She knew back then his isolation was all the sadder for the memories it evoked: the boy of St-Lin being sent away to school after his mother had died, because his father wanted him to learn English from the Scots of New Glasgow.
Of course that doesn’t explain her own misgivings. By now, after several months as Prime Minister’s wife, she should be feeling confident in her role. But that’s the trouble: it is a role, mere playacting. There’s no school where she could learn the part, and even if she was bold enough to ask for her advice, the formidable Lady Macdonald, now a baroness, is living somewhere in the south of England, unreachable. Zoë simply has to do as Wilfrid did, learn from scratch. Yet there’s a crucial difference: it wasn’t her choice to live here.
She notices the enamelled pin lying on the dresser, white heather entwined with ivy, a gift to Wilfrid from Lady Aberdeen. The Governor General’s lady is another conquest. Not that he has to work at winning these admirers. On the day he was sworn in, Lady Aberdeen presented him with a sprig of real heather, enclosing it in a note explaining the old Highland custom: if a girl meets a man and gives him a piece of white heather when he embarks on a quest, it brings him luck. For good measure she also enclosed the pin, to serve as a reminder after the heather had wilted.
At dinner at Rideau Hall the other night, Wilfrid wore the pin in place of his usual horseshoe stick pin. Lady Aberdeen looked transported when he took her in to dinner on his arm. Zoë was on Lord Aberdeen’s arm, or rather one of them—on impulse the Governor General offered the other to Émilie, explaining rather too loudly that Madame Lavergne looked lonely with her husband out of town on business. A very peculiar sort of gallantry, in Zoë’s opinion.
All the same, Zoë trusts the Aberdeens, considers them friends and allies. Her Excellency has made up her mind that Madame Laurier is sad because she has no children: she herself has four. The concern is an extension of Lady Aberdeen’s maternal approach to Canada. She’s announced her intention of establishing a national order of nurses to provide home care for Canadians, in celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee next year. She believes it will complement the National Council of Women, her vehicle for improving Canadian society by giving women more influence.
In fact, the Aberdeens have done more than anyone to make Zoë feel at home here: ironic, considering they’re from Scotland. When Lady Aberdeen threw a mammoth fancy-dress ball in the Senate chamber, a revue of Canada’s history since the time of Jacques Cartier, she assigned Zoë a starring role as wife of the Sieur de Maisonneuve, awarding only a small subordinate part to Émilie. When Lord Aberdeen read the Speech from the Throne in August, he gave it first in French, posting plainclothes officers around the Senate to insist on quiet, since English MPs always chat rudely during the French. And when the Toronto Mail and Empire greeted Wilfrid’s election with a virulent diatribe against “French domination,” claiming Quebec would now “demand its pound of flesh,” the Aberdeens assured the Lauriers of their outrage.
It’s a blessing such people occupy Rideau Hall. She must offer up a prayer of thanks tomorrow for the Aberdeens. And when she thinks what a great doer Lady Aberdeen is, despite the migraine headaches that periodically confine her to bed, she glimpses her own salvation. Zoë too will have to take action. Here in Ottawa she’s going to stay, whether she likes it or not. She’s fated to belong to everyone and no one, when all she wants is to be once more the simple wife of the small-town lawyer of Arthabaska. That was the best time of their lives. But Wilfrid has no intention of going back, so neither can she.
God has a purpose to everything, and she’s beginning to discern His purpose for her. She’s in a position now to do things: to exercise influence over people and events. There’s no shortage of those who need her help. She can promote at the highest levels the clearly deserving, the unjustly ignored, the cruelly mistreated. She can advance the careers of gifted young musicians and artists, as she once did in the smaller sphere of Arthabaska. She can bring to Ottawa her mahogany grand piano, her menagerie of songbirds, her cats and dogs, even her dear nieces and nephews if she wants, as long as she can find a house big enough to hold them all. If only she’ll act, she can do all this and more. She can even recreate, after a fashion, their old home life, carving out a warm and welcoming island in this frozen English place.
Imagining herself doing these things makes it all seem possible. Zoë’s spirits begin to rise. In any case, it’s entirely up to her: Wilfrid has no time. He’s fully preoccupied with the exigencies and opportunities of the nation’s young life, all the promise and peril. Gold has been discovered in the Yukon wilderness. Canadian and American prospectors have rushed north, and Wilfrid has sent the North-West Mounted Police after them to keep order. The world needs Canada’s wheat, the prairies need more farmers. Immigrants will supply the necessary manpower, sturdy eastern Europeans, since English and French Canada can’t produce settlers fast enough. Every railway promoter in the land is lobbying Wilfrid for the right to build lines across the prairies to transport the immigrants west, the wheat and gold east.
Wilfrid has brought Clifford Sifton into cabinet, a strange, abrupt, impatient man who is rapidly going deaf, to oversee the westward expansion. To Sifton the future is already here, it must be dealt with immediately. The border with Alaska remains in dispute, making both Wilfrid and Sifton anxious to reach a settlement with Washington before it decides the Yukon is simply too tempting, too empty, to leave in Canadian hands. Voices south of the border are already clamouring to swallow Canada whole. An organization called the Continental Union League favours annexation, and it isn’t just a lunatic fringe: its headquarters are in New York, its members include Andrew Carnegie, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt. The problems are vast and bewildering, yet Wilfrid is exhilarated. One of these days he’ll worry himself sick over them, but for now he’s transfixed by Canada’s splendid and limitless future, and his own role in creating it.
For a woman of Quebec, it’s enough to contend with the bitterness in her own province over Wilfrid’s settlement of the Manitoba schools conflict. The bishops are outraged he didn’t restore full French Catholic rights after the provincial government dissolved them, but he insists he’s done all he can constitutionally, making the best of a bad job inherited from the Conservatives. With his gift for diplomacy—what the newspapers call his “sunny ways”— he’s forged a compromise and prevented a religious civil war. But that isn’t good enough for the bishops. They’ve denounced him to the Vatican as worse than liberal: as a free-thinker, anti-clerical, anti-Catholic. They’ve forbidden the faithful to vote Liberal on pain of being refused absolution. They’ve sent parish priests door to door to warn Liberals won’t be buried in holy ground, and they’ve banned the writings of Laurent-Olivier David and L’Électeur.
These attacks make Wilfrid furious, yet he refuses to strike back. Holding himself in check is costing him enormous anguish. Only Zoë knows how painfully he bears the fury of the Church, their Church—only Zoë and one other person.
The muffled knocking of a gloved hand makes her realize she’s forgotten all about her promise to go house hunting. Émilie lets herself into the room in a cascade of bright laughter scented with French cologne. She’s wearing a long dark-green coat trimmed with mink and a matching mink hat, and is already talking about the houses she’s picked out for them to visit.
Zoë falters. After her long morning walk, she’s not sure her legs are up to inspecting houses: she definitely knows her spirits aren’t. It’s never easy to deny Émilie, but in the firmest tone she can muster she proposes they first take tea in the Russell House café. And Émilie, who isn’t, after all, completely insensitive and inconsiderate, sees Zoë is tired and agrees.
They descend the grand staircase arm in arm into the lobby.
Sessional People, as parliamentarians and their staff are known, consider the Russell’s café the place to see and be seen in Ottawa. It’s done up with mirrors and gilt and dark wood panelling in homage to Paris and Vienna. During the lull between breakfast and lunch, the large room is nearly empty. Zoë and Émilie’s coats are whisked away, they’re shown to a corner table in its own little alcove. The tall, severely correct senior waiter takes their order for tea and petites madeleines, bearing it off to the kitchen like a royal decree.
Zoë fears she’s becoming too comfortable in the care of the Russell’s staff, acquiring a taste for being waited on. But since she dreads the prospect of poking into other people’s homes, with Émilie fingering the draperies and asking embarrassing personal questions of the owners, she’d gladly remain in the café right through lunch. Émilie’s colour is high, reflecting her excitement over their impending adventure. She sees tea as only a brief delay in her plans, a necessity to humour Zoë before plunging into the day’s drama.
As Émilie chatters on, Zoë observes her. Émilie relishes giving descriptions of the three homes for sale, all conveniently within walking distance in Sandy Hill. She knows the virtues and drawbacks of each, the order in which they should be visited. Zoë nods from time to time in absentminded agreement.
Ever since Émilie Barthe, as she then was, descended on Arthabaska in the early years of the Laurier marriage and cut a swath through local society, having lived with her father in Paris and London, people have said how extraordinary she is, how witty and worldly and vivacious and cosmopolitan. And how remarkable that her high spirits and entrancing conversation make one completely overlook her plainness. The sharpness of her nose. The narrowness of her mouth. Her weak chin. Her oddly large, heavy-lidded eyes with their yellowish pupils, said to result from her habit of reading late into the night. “Une jolie laide,” people called her from the very first: an ugly beauty.
People were right, Zoë thinks. Not that it prevented Émilie from becoming an immediate threat to every wife in their circle. Silly, really: it was only Zoë who had anything to fear. From the very first she saw that Émilie had eyes for Wilfrid alone and, since he was already married, that she’d take the next best thing and marry his law partner. Even then Zoë was a step ahead of Émilie. It was just that she could do nothing to stop her.
Of course it was never Émilie’s appearance but her knowledge of literature that Wilfrid admired. Their mutual love of reading is their self-described bond, and it’s unbreakable. Certainly it’s well beyond Zoë to share opinions about Madame de Staël or Victor Hugo (whom Émilie once actually met) or Byron or Mary Shelley. Once Joseph Lavergne married Émilie, changing her from a dangerous single woman into a supposedly safe wife, Wilfrid would rise from his desk in their small office every day, either at eleven in the morning or at English teatime, and announce: “Now, Joseph, if you will permit it, I will go and have a little chat with your wife.” And he’d walk to the door with a book under his arm. Joseph’s permission was always given, since in any case it was always taken for granted.
The Lavergnes’ pretty home, Le Vert Logis, was the setting for this long-running literary salon of two. It’s just four doors down the street from the law office, which in turn sits directly across the street from the Lauriers’ house. The Lauriers and the Lavergnes lived within constant sight of each other in those days: a very narrow compass indeed. Everything happened in full view of everyone.
“You mustn’t worry about the expense of buying another house,” Émilie is telling her, “the party will cover the cost. Mr. Mulock will see to that.”
“Oh—you know about his letter?” Zoë isn’t sure whether to feel betrayed, angry or just irritated by the inevitable. Mr. Mulock’s letter was a personal communication between the Liberal Party’s richest MP and Wilfrid. There’s no reason why Émilie should know about it. Or about the trust fund, or the promise to buy them a house. And if she does know, there’s still less reason for her to tell Zoë—unless it’s to flaunt her closeness to Wilfrid. And that too is unnecessary.
“I envy you the freedom to pick out any home you choose,” Émilie declares. “How many women get that chance? Really, Zoë, you don’t know how lucky you are.”
“Oh, I think I do,” she replies softly. She doesn’t want anyone to overhear them discussing such private matters, even though no one is actually within earshot. “But won’t you and Joseph be buying a house too?” She knows today’s outing is as much for Émilie’s benefit as her own.
“I certainly hope so. As long as he gets a judgeship.”
“Wilfrid says he deserves it.”
“Of course he does.” Émilie puts on her bravest smile, her mask of supreme self-confidence that dares the world to contradict it. “Wilfrid won’t fail us. He never fails either of us, my dear.”
Zoë looks away across the dining room, grateful for the approach of the waiter carrying a silver tea service on a silver tray. She never ceases to wonder at Émilie’s blithe assumption that all will be given her in time. Setting the plate of little cakes between them, the waiter asks the ladies’ permission to pour the tea, which has already steeped, into frail china cups.
“I adore le thé à l’anglaise,” Émile remarks.
This must be for the waiter’s benefit, since it’s hardly news to Zoë. She thinks how much more important this morning’s rituals in the cathedral are to her than her friendship with Émilie. Or, for that matter, than the mock drama and hollow battles of politics, which consume Wilfrid’s waking hours. Church, family, home: Zoë knows what matters. This morning she may make some progress toward a home, so Émilie is doing her a kindness after all. She should be thankful.
“The Americans have their White House,” Zoë says, “so the President already has a place to live. Perhaps we should be like them.”
Delicately Émilie inserts a madeleine between sharp front teeth and severs it in half. “Why would anyone want to be like the Americans?”
Zoë blows on the surface of her tea. “It’s an insult to one’s tea to blow on it,” Wilfrid tells her, but nobody is looking except Émilie, and flouting Wilfrid’s conception of good manners gives her a perverse satisfaction.
Émilie leans forward conspiratorially over the table. “What do you think about the knighthood?”
“What knighthood?”
Émilie leans back in her chair, grinning. She’s trumped Zoë once again. “There’s a rumour that the Queen is going to knight Wilfrid,” she says gloatingly. “He’ll be on her honours list for the Jubilee. You haven’t heard? I’m astonished, my dear.”
Zoë has never actually blushed in Émilie’s presence before.
Émilie goes on: “Imagine, ‘Sir Wilfrid.’ What could be more splendid? And you’ll be Lady Laurier!”
Émilie’s grin is manic. Zoë suspects it conceals misery, jealous hostility: a conviction that Zoë doesn’t appreciate such high royal favour, much less deserve it.
“Rumours are rumours,” Zoë says. “I know for a fact Wilfrid doesn’t want a knighthood. His supporters don’t care for titles, and neither does he. He prefers to remain plain M. Laurier, the same as he’s always been.”
Émilie reaches into her pearl-embroidered purse for more surprises. “Here are the houses.” Somehow she’s obtained little photographs of all three homes for sale. She pushes aside the plate of madeleines to spread the black-and-white prints on the tablecloth in an arc, a croupier dealing cards. “There. Which one do you like best?”
Peering uncertainly at the grainy, indistinct images, Zoë fumbles in her purse for her pince-nez. “I’d need to see inside first.”
“Of course you will. But from an architectural point of view, they’re all quite distinguished, don’t you think?”
Zoë studies the photographs. She doesn’t know what to say. She hates being put on the spot.
The first house is built of brick in the French style, with a mansard roof and dormer windows. It has three storeys, and its elegance and symmetry appeal to her. The other two are of stone, more horizontal in design, with white, intricately carved verge boards and front verandahs and gabled windows on the top floor. One of them is evidently part of a terrace.
Émilie keeps up a running commentary. The brick house is on Theodore Street, the two stone ones on Daly, not far from Sanford Fleming’s home. “Just think, you’d be walking along the sidewalk and Sir Sanford would step out of his garden and bow and present you with a long-stemmed rose. He’s wonderfully gallant, a true gentleman of the old school. That terrace, by the way, is named Philomene, after the original owner’s wife. Romantic, isn’t it?”
“I like the first house best,” Zoë offers.
“Oh, really? But stone is so much more distinguished than brick.”
“I don’t think I want to live in a terrace home. Too crowded.”
“Of course. It lacks grandeur.”
“There wouldn’t be room for a garden. Or our pets.”
“No, but the last occupant was the poet, Lampman.”
“The brick one is the prettiest. It reminds me of our house at home.”
“I suppose it does. But Zoë, at home you weren’t a great Prime Minister’s wife! Really, the nicest by far is the middle one. It has the most gracious lines and the largest rooms. You’d entertain splendidly there. You’ll have ever so many obligations to fulfil now, you must think of that.”
A brittle silence. “Since you like that house so well, Émilie, why don’t you buy it? I’m sure you and Joseph will want to entertain splendidly too, once you’re a great judge’s wife.”
Zoë stands up. An attentive young waiter rushes to pull out her chair, another hurries away to fetch their coats. She makes certain she exits the café first, as befits a Prime Minister’s wife, great or otherwise.
