by Louise Penny
He wasn’t foolish or blind enough not to also see the homeless men and women, or the bruised and battered faces that spoke of a long and empty night and a longer day ahead.
But at his core he believed the world a lovely place. And his photographs reflected that, catching the light, the brilliance, the hope. And the shadows that naturally challenged the light.
Ironically it was this very quality that had caught CC’s eye and led her to offer him the contract. An article in a Montreal style magazine had described him as a ‘hot’ photographer, and CC always went for the best. Which was why they always took a room at the Ritz. A cramped, dreary room on a low floor without view or charm, but the Ritz. CC would collect the shampoos and stationery to prove her worth, just as she’d collected him. And she’d use them to make some obscure point to people who didn’t care, just as she’d use him. And then, eventually, everything would be discarded. As her husband had been tossed aside, as her daughter was ignored and ridiculed.
The world was a cruel and insensitive place.
And he now believed it.
He hated CC de Poitiers.
He got out of bed, leaving CC to stare at her book, her real lover. He looked at her and she seemed to go in and out of focus. He cocked his head to one side and wondered whether he’d had too much to drink again. But still she seemed to grow fuzzy, then sharp, as though he was looking through a prism at two different women, one beautiful, glamorous, vivacious, and the other a pathetic, dyed-blonde rope, all corded and wound and knotted and rough. And dangerous.
‘What’s this?’ He reached into the garbage and withdrew a portfolio. He recognized it immediately as an artist’s dossier of work. It was beautifully and painstakingly bound and printed on archival Arche paper. He flipped it open and caught his breath.
A series of works, luminous and light, seemed to glow off the fine paper. He felt a stirring in his chest. They showed a world both lovely and hurt. But mostly, it was a world where hope and comfort still existed. It was clearly the world the artist saw each day, the world the artist lived in. As he himself once lived in a world of light and hope.
The works appeared simple but were in reality very complex. Images and colors were layered one on top of the other. Hours and hours, days and days must have been spent on each one to get the desired effect.
He stared down at the one before him now. A majestic tree soared into the sky, as though keening for the sun. The artist had photographed it and had somehow captured a sense of movement without making it disorienting. Instead it was graceful and calming and, above all, powerful. The tips of the branches seemed to melt or become fuzzy as though even in its confidence and yearning there was a tiny doubt. It was brilliant.
All thoughts of CC were forgotten. He’d climbed into the tree, almost feeling tickled by its rough bark, as if he had been sitting on his grandfather’s lap and snuggling into his unshaven face. How had the artist managed that?
He couldn’t make out the signature. He flipped through the other pages and slowly felt a smile come to his frozen face and move to his hardened heart.
Maybe, one day, if he ever got clear of CC he could go back to his work and do pieces like this.
He exhaled all the darkness he’d stored up.
‘So, do you like it?’ CC held her book up and waved it at him.
TWO
Crie carefully got into her costume, trying not to rip the white chiffon. The Christmas pageant had already started. She could hear the lower forms singing ‘Away in a manger,’ though it sounded suspiciously like ‘A whale in a manger.’ She wondered, briefly, whether that was a comment on her. Were they all laughing at her? She swallowed that thought and continued dressing, humming a bit as she went.
‘Who’s doing that?’ The voice of Madame Latour, the music teacher, could be heard in the crowded, excited room. ‘Who’s humming?’
Madame’s face, birdlike and bright, peeked round the corner where Crie had crept to change alone. Instinctively Crie grabbed her costume and tried to cover her near-naked fourteen-year-old body. It was impossible, of course. Too much body and too little chiffon.
‘Was it you?’
Crie stared, too frightened to speak. Her mother had warned her about this. Had warned her never to sing in public.
But now, betrayed by a buoyant heart, she’d actually let some humming escape.
Madame Latour stared at the huge girl and felt a bit of her lunch in her throat. Those rolls of fat, those dreadful dimples, the underwear disappearing into the flesh. The face so frozen and staring. The science teacher, Monsieur Drapeau, had commented that Crie was top in his class, though another teacher had pointed out that one topic that semester had been vitamins and minerals and Crie had probably eaten the textbook.
Still, here she was at the pageant, so maybe she was coming out of herself, though that would take a lot of doing.
‘Better hurry. You’re on soon.’ She left without waiting for a reply.
This was the first Christmas pageant Crie had been in in the five years she’d been at Miss Edward’s School for Girls. Every other year while the students made their costumes she’d made mumbled excuses. No one had ever tried to dissuade her. Instead she’d been given the job of running the lights for the show, having a head, as Madame Latour put it, for technical things. Things not alive, she’d meant. So each year Crie would watch the Christmas pageant alone in the dark at the back, as the beautiful, glowing, gifted girls had danced and sung the story of the Christmas miracle, basking in the light Crie provided.
But not this year.
She got into her costume and looked at herself in the mirror. A huge chiffon snowflake looked back. Really, she had to admit, more of a snowdrift than a single flake, but still, it was a costume and it was quite splendid. The other girls’ mothers had helped them, but Crie had done her own. To surprise Mommy, she’d told herself, trying to drown out the other voice.
If she looked closely she could see the tiny droplets of blood where her pudgy, indelicate fingers had fumbled the needle and speared herself. But she’d persevered until she finally had this costume. And then she’d had her brainwave. Really, the most brilliant thought in her entire fourteen years.
Her mother, she knew, revered light. It was, she’d been told all her life, what we all strive for. That’s why it’s called enlightenment. Why smart people are described as bright. Why thin people succeed. Because they’re lighter than others.
It was all so obvious.
And now Crie would actually be playing a snowflake. The whitest, lightest of elements. And her own bit of brilliance? She’d gone to the dollar store and with her allowance bought a bottle of glitter. She’d even managed to walk straight past the chocolate bars, stale and staring. Crie had been on a diet for a month now and soon she was sure her mother would notice.
She’d applied glue and glitter and now she looked at the results.
For the first time in her life Crie knew she was beautiful. And she knew, in just a few short minutes, her mother would think so too.
Clara Morrow stared through the frosted mullions of her living-room window at the tiny village of Three Pines. She leaned forward and shaved some frost from the window. Now that we have some money, she thought, we should replace the old windows. But while Clara knew that was the sensible thing to do, most of her decisions weren’t really sensible. But they suited her life. And now, watching the snow globe that was Three Pines, she knew she liked looking at it through the beautiful designs the frost made on the old glass.
Sipping a hot chocolate she watched as brightly swaddled villagers strolled through the softly falling snow, waving mittened hands in greeting and occasionally stopping to chat to each other, their words coming in puffs, like cartoon characters. Some headed into Olivier’s Bistro for a café au lait, others needed fresh bread or a pâtisserie from Sarah’s Boulangerie. Myrna’s New and Used Books, next to the bistro, was closed for the day. Monsieur Béliveau shoveled the front walk of his general stor
e and waved to Gabri, huge and dramatic, rushing across the green from his bed and breakfast on the corner. To a stranger the villagers would be anonymous, even asexual. In a Quebec winter everyone looked alike. Great waddling, swaddling, muffled masses of goose down and Thinsulate so that even the slim looked plump and the plump looked globular. Each looked the same. Except for the toques on their heads. Clara could see Ruth’s bright green pompom hat nodding to Wayne’s multi-colored cap, knitted by Pat on long autumn nights. The Lévesque kids all wore shades of blue as they skated up and down the frozen pond after the hockey puck, little Rose trembling so hard in the net even Clara could see her aqua bonnet quiver. But her brothers loved her and each time they raced toward the net they pretended to trip and instead of letting go a blistering slap shot they gently slipped toward her until they all ended up in a confused and happy heap on the verge of the goal. It looked to Clara like one of those Currier and Ives prints she’d stared at for hours as a child and yearned to step into.
Three Pines was robed in white. A foot of snow had fallen in the last few weeks and every old home round the village green had its own toque of purest white. Smoke wafted out of the chimneys as though the homes had their own voice and breath, and Christmas wreaths decorated the doors and gates. At night the quiet little Eastern Townships village glowed with light from the Christmas decorations. There was a tender hum about the place as adults and children alike prepared for the big day.
‘Maybe her car won’t start.’ Clara’s husband Peter walked into the room. He was tall and slim and looked like a Fortune 500 executive, like his father. Instead he spent his days hunched over his easel, getting oil paints into his curly gray hair as he slowly created his excruciatingly detailed works of abstract art. They went for thousands of dollars to collectors internationally, though because he painted so slowly and produced only one or two a year, they lived in constant poverty. Until recently, that is. Clara’s paintings of warrior uteruses and melting trees had yet to find a market.
‘She’ll be here,’ said Clara. Peter looked at his wife, her eyes blue and warm, her once dark hair streaked with gray, though she was only in her late forties. Her figure was beginning to thicken round the stomach and thighs and she’d recently begun talking about rejoining Madeleine’s exercise class. He knew enough not to answer when asked if that sounded like a good idea.
‘Are you sure I can’t come?’ he asked, more out of polite-ness than a real desire to squeeze himself into Myrna’s death trap of a car and bounce all the way into the city.
‘Of course not. I’m buying your Christmas gift. Besides, there won’t be room in the car for Myrna, me, you and the presents. We’d have to leave you in Montreal.’
A tiny car pulled up to their open gate and an enormous black woman got out. This was probably Clara’s favorite part of trips with Myrna. Watching her get in and out of the minuscule car. Clara was pretty sure Myrna was actually larger than the car. In summer it was a riot watching her wriggle in as her dress rode up to her waist. But Myrna just laughed. In winter it was even more fun since Myrna wore an ebullient pink parka, almost doubling her size.
‘I’m from the islands, child. I feel the cold.’
‘You’re from the island of Montreal,’ Clara had pointed out.
‘True,’ admitted Myrna with a laugh. ‘Though the south end. I love winter. It’s the only time I get pink skin. What do you think? Could I pass?’
‘For what?’
‘For white.’
‘Would you want to?’
Myrna had turned suddenly serious eyes on her best friend and smiled. ‘No. No, not any more. Hmm.’
She’d seemed pleased and even a little surprised by her answer.
And now the faux-white woman in her puffy pink skin, layers of brightly colored scarves and purple toque with orange pompom was clumping up their freshly shoveled path.
Soon they’d be in Montreal. It was a short drive, less than an hour and a half, even in snow. Clara was looking forward to an afternoon of Christmas shopping but the highlight of her trip, of every trip into Montreal at Christmas, was a secret. Her private delight.
Clara Morrow was dying to see Ogilvy’s Christmas window.
The hallowed department store in downtown Montreal had the most magical Christmas window in the world. In mid-November the huge panes would go black and blank, covered by paper. Then the excitement would start. When would the holiday wonderment be unveiled? It was more exciting to Clara as a child than the Santa Claus parade. When word spread that Ogilvy’s had finally taken off the paper Clara would rush downtown and straight to the magical window.
And there it would be. Clara would rush up to the window but stop just short, just out of eyeshot. She’d close her eyes and gather herself, then she’d step forward and open her eyes. And there it was. Clara’s village. The place she’d go when disappointments and dawning cruelty would overwhelm the sensitive little girl. Summer or winter, all she had to do was close her eyes and she was there. With the dancing bears and skating ducks and frogs in Victorian costume fishing from the bridge. At night, when the ghoul huffed and snorted and clawed beneath her bedroom floor, she would squeeze her tiny blue eyes shut and will herself into the magical window and the village the ghoul could never find because kindness guarded the entry.
LOUISE PENNY is an award-winning journalist who worked for many years for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She lives south of Montréal where she writes, skis, and volunteers. Still Life won the CWA New Blood Dagger Award for Best First Mystery and the Arthur Ellis Award, which is given to the Best First Novel in Canada , Visit her website at www.louisepenny.com.