“Hello–Mort?”
“Hi, Morag. How are you?”
She began coughing. It never failed when she began to speak to Mort, he being a doctor specializing in respiratory ailments and obviously not a champion of nicotine.
“Morag, I hate to mention it–”
“Yeh, I know. Mort, I have been trying to cut down.”
“Listen, dear, I don’t want to lecture you–”
“Mort, you never stop lecturing me. And you’re right. You’re right. Only I always cough worse when I begin talking to you. I’m addicted, and have the will-power of a flea.”
“Some flea, she writes a shelf of books. Want to talk to Ella?”
Shrieks and snorts of young laughter in the background. Then Ella’s voice.
“Morag–hi. How is it? How are you?”
“Well, not bad. How are you?”
Ella, who was presently raising five-year-old twins, had now four books of poems and was working on a fifth while also doing a certain amount of freelance radio work in her spare time. Good God, what spare time? Her first marriage, undertaken the year after Morag and Brooke married, had foundered. She had waited a long time for Mort. Now they were four people, a family.
“Oh, I’m fine, actually,” Ella said. “It’s going to be all right, but I get this feeling sometimes of living too many lives simultaneously.”
“I know. Jesus, do I ever know.”
“So what’s with Pique, then?”
“She’s coming home,” Morag said heavily. “She phoned last night. I’m a bit apprehensive. I mean, I’m glad she’s coming back. Naturally. But she’s split up with Gordon.”
“So?”
“So, did I pass that on? I mean–what if she can’t have any kind of lasting relationship?”
“It is not passed on with the genes,” Ella said sternly. “Anyway, if you would kindly examine your own life, you would see that quite a few people have been lasting in it.”
“Yeh. Most of them are dead, however.”
“Morag. Listen. Christie is dead. Prin is dead. I am not dead. McRaith is not dead. The Smiths are far from defunct. Pique is with us. I could name you a dozen others, but I trust you get the point. Look, kid, why don’t you come and stay with us for a while?”
Kid. The word they called each other, way back when. Meaning friend.
“Jesus, Ella, thanks. But I can’t. I’m not alone all that much, and anyway, I’ve got to try to work.”
“So are you?”
“I don’t even know. Yeh, I guess so. I always thought it would get easier, but it doesn’t.”
“No. It doesn’t.” A pause. Then, attempting cheerfulness, “By the way, my mother sends you her love. We had a letter today.”
“How is she? I can’t imagine her in retirement. Does she find it difficult?”
“You should know her better. Difficult, hell. She’s a member of the New Left. Actually, yes, I guess she finds it difficult. But she manages.”
“The New Left, for God’s sake?”
“Well, it’s not a party, you know.”
“Oh heavens, Ella, I know at least that much.”
“More a way of thought. I don’t imagine she is about to hoist a rifle and woman the barricades or that. She’s learning a lot, though, she says. Bernice is embarrassed. Her husband doesn’t approve of that kind of mother-in-law–better Mumma should be hovering over the grandchildren, forcing unwanted food down their gullets. Janine goes along with it, though, so that’s a help.”
Janine, last seen as a High School kid, how many years ago? Now producing TV plays, and, resolutely, no children. Bernice, ex-priestess of Beauty, a matriarch with six, assorted ages from twelve to twenty, she herself still avidly following the new shades of lipstick. Well, good for her. In a way.
“Give your ma my love when you write, eh? She’ll survive until she dies. Well, maybe I will, too. I wish I didn’t worry about Pique. It serves no purpose, but it’s hard to break the anxiety habit.”
“It’ll be all right. You’ll see. I’ll phone you next week. Phone instantly if you–well, if the need arises, eh?”
“I will. Listen, I can hear the twins raising Cain–you’d best go. Thanks, Ella. I feel better.”
This was true. Morag poured some more whiskey and sat looking out the window, with only one small lamp on in the kitchen, so she could see the night river with stars floating like watercandles in it. No sounds except the sometime shushing of wind through the light-leafed willows and occasionally the ghostfluttering of the wings of a flicker, hunting the moths that were clustering around the house windows, moths that always insanely wanted in, however dim the light inside.
How would Brooke remember those years? Not the same, obviously. A different set of memories from Morag’s.
Memorybank Movie: Raj Mataj
The unfamiliar city frightens Morag. Too many cars. Too much noise. When they go out, she holds tightly to Brooke’s arm. He laughs, but is pleased. The apartment is small, but beautiful in Morag’s eyes. They have filled it with secondhand furniture which they have painted in startling colours, orange and royal blue, lemon yellow. Brooke’s prints are on the walls, and the huge bookcases are filled to overflowing with his books. His desk is in a corner of the livingroom, and if he is working in the evenings, Morag sits quietly, reading, so as not to disturb him.
“Are you finished for the night, then, Brooke?”
“Yes, and about time, too. Twenty blasted essays I’ve marked tonight. You’ve a good girl, sweetheart, to sit there so quietly all this time.”
“I don’t mind. I was reading. Would you like some coffee now?”
“Please.”
She is reading her way steadily through the novels on Brooke’s shelves. English and American. Translations from French and Russian. Brooke is very good about discussing these with her. She is alone most days, and the apartment is easy to care for, so she has all the time she needs for reading. When they go out in the evenings, or when they have some of Brooke’s colleagues in, Morag says very little, mainly listening. Picking people’s brains.
Now Brooke sprawls tiredly on the chesterfield, stretching out his long legs onto the Indian rug which they have brought with them and which Brooke has had for a long time, having inherited it from his parents’ home in England. Brooke’s parents went back to England when they retired from India, and lived there until first Brooke’s mother and then his father died, a few years before the war. By that time Brooke was teaching in Canada, so he had the carpet and a few other things sent out to him. He has not been back to India since he last went out on vacation when he was sixteen, just before his parents retired. He tried to get there during the war, but instead had spent the duration, infuriatingly for him, as an officer in an Army training camp in Quebec. He refuses to talk about this period of his life, because he hated every minute of it except when on leave in Montreal, where there were lots of women. He talks about India sometimes, though, and with a kind of muted and concealed homesickness. Morag wants to know everything about him, about his previous life, so that she will know all of him.
“Brooke, tell me more about the kind of place you lived in when you were very young.”
He takes his coffee from her, and puts his other arm around her shoulders as she sits down beside him.
“What’s this? A bedtime story?”
“That’s it.” She smiles, then doesn’t. “It seems such a strange sort of childhood. Weren’t you lonely?”
“Not especially. Not then. I played with the servants’ children. I was allowed to, when I was small.”
“Not later on?”
“Well, no.”
“I think that’s horrible,” Morag says.
“Unfortunate, yes, probably. Just one of those things. It was the custom in those days.”
“What was your house like?”
“I remember it,” Brooke says slowly, “as a very large whitewashed establishment with a great many rooms, and garden which was almos
t a jungle, filled with purple bougainvillaea and–”
The way Brooke tells it, Morag visualizes a huge Victorian structure, white as alabaster with slatted wooden shutters drawn against the sun. There would be a wall, also white, around it, and in the garden a tumultuous variety of strange trees and flowers, greens and purples and scarlets in strange shapes. Bright-plumaged birds, unheard of here, would have strutted and swooped there, their voices raucous or else silver. Would it have been like that? Morag cannot ever know, not being able to see the pictures that must grow inside his head when he talks of it. She is glad, however, that he cannot look inside her head and see Hill Street, about which she does not talk.
“Wasn’t it very poor, there? The country, I mean.”
“Yes. Yes, it was. We didn’t often go to Calcutta, but I remember some of the markets there, where they sold carved ivory and teak and brass and all manner of baubles to Europeans, and the beggars there–most of them crippled, all skin and bones. Sometimes they used to maim children purposely, to use them as beggars.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Yes. It was.”
His face is grave, almost apologetic, as though he has seen things he would rather she didn’t know about.
“Is it better now, there?”
“Not a damn bit better,” Brooke says bitterly. “Worse, if anything, I should think. Whatever anyone may say of it, the passing of the British Raj wasn’t the answer.”
“But Brooke–surely you can’t believe it was right for them, the British, even for you, to have lived there like that, in that way, house and servants, while–”
Brooke puts his cup on the coffee table and strokes her breasts lightly.
“Little one,” he says, very gently, “there is no real justice in this world. I don’t say it was fair. It was just the best that could be done under the circumstances, that’s all.”
“But–”
“Hush, love. You don’t know. You just don’t know.”
True. She does not know.
“What was your mother like, Brooke?”
He smiles, although not with amusement.
“It’s odd,” he says. “I remember her always, even when they’d retired to England, as a kind of shadow, a quiet grey shadow of a woman, never daring to raise her voice to him. When I was a youngster she used sometimes to make feeble efforts to intercede on my behalf, but it never worked. Never. Not even once. I suppose I resented that, at the time. It always seemed she ought to have been able to do something. I guess I felt sorry for her as well. He was a difficult man.”
“What did he do? To you?”
Brooke shrugs.
“Well, he was a schoolmaster, remember, and very keen on discipline. He used to cane the boys at school–he reserved that pleasure for himself, incidentally, and never let any of the Indian teachers do it. He caned me, too, but he had subtler punishments as well. Caning was simple. Once he made me sit on top of a large steamer trunk, tied to it, actually, just outside the front gate of our compound, where everyone passing by, Europeans, and Hindus from Brahmans to outcasts, could see me. On my chest was a placard which read I Am Bad. Rather a gruesome sense of humour.”
“Oh Brooke–”
He laughs.
“I was supposed to stay there until I begged for his forgiveness. What I’d done I can’t remember now. He also thought he could make me cry–I remember being certain that was what he expected and wanted. I must’ve been nearly six. I didn’t cry, though, and I didn’t apologize. My mother wept buckets, as I recall, wringing her hands like someone out of a Victorian ghost story. Not that it did any good. Finally he had to cart me back inside.”
“That’s appalling, the whole thing.”
“He was a charmer, all right,” Brooke says, his voice cold. “Well, never mind. At least it taught me to stand up for myself.”
“Yes, like dropping a kid in the ocean, half a mile out and saying–learn to swim. He might, but what a way to have to do it.”
“It came in handy all the same,” Brooke says, “when I went to boardingschool in England. If you weren’t reasonably tough-fibred there, you were reduced to a quivering jelly in a very short time.”
“You make it sound like prison.”
“No, not really. I quite liked it, as a matter of fact, once I got used to it. There were awful things about it, but one learned how to cope with them. It was a military school, mainly for the sons of officers. It was considered a desirable place to attend. The boys there were all given ranks.”
“What?”
“It’s true,” Brooke grins. “I was absolutely determined I wasn’t going to be pushed around. We used to have kit inspection and drill and things like that. I worked at it like fury. I was a Sergeant at the age of eight. What do you think of that?”
He is laughing, but Morag cannot. She stares at him.
“You can’t mean it.”
“Come now, love,” he says teasingly, “don’t take it so seriously. It wasn’t so bad. I rather enjoyed it. I didn’t mean to turn this into a horror story. It isn’t.”
“I think it was pretty awful of your parents to ship you off like that.”
“They didn’t have many alternatives. My mother didn’t like it much, I suppose, although she never said so. Anyway, one thing I do know–I shall never be like my father was. Never. How his students must have railed inwardly against him. As I did.”
“You couldn’t possibly be like that in any way at all. Your students adore you. I did, when I was a student. I still do, although in a slightly different way of course.”
“How–different?”
“Sexier.”
“Well, that is what I call the beginning of a good bedtime story.”
Nowadays, when they make love, they almost always come at the same time, and often sleep the night in each other’s arms, still joined. Sometimes in the morning he is still inside her, and they separate slowly, reluctantly, but their inhabitance of one another never really ceases and never will.
“Brooke–couldn’t we make love and not mind if we had a child? I mean, just let it happen if it will?”
He outlines her face with his hand, as though his fingers are memorizing it.
“Aren’t you happy as we are, Morag?”
“Of course. Of course I am. You know that.”
“Well, relax then, my love. Plenty of time.”
That night Brooke does not sleep well. He is restless, turning away from her, and finally he begins moaning in his sleep, a weird low anguished voice, totally unlike his waking one. Morag puts a hand on him and finds the hairs on his chest wet with sweat.
“Brooke–wake up.”
“What? What’s the matter?”
“You were having a nightmare.”
“Oh–was I? Thanks, love.”
“Brooke–you were talking, sort of. I could only make out one word.”
“Oh? What was it?”
“It sounded like Minoo. Is that a Hindi word?”
“It’s–well, not exactly. It’s a name.”
“For a man or a woman?” She despises herself for asking this, and not unnaturally Brooke is annoyed.
“Oh for heaven’s sake, Morag. It’s a woman’s name. I can’t think what it meant. Now can we get some sleep, please?”
“I’m sorry, Brooke. I didn’t mean–”
But he is asleep again. What does it matter? It doesn’t. Morag does not own him or what goes on in his head, nor does she imagine he has not been with many women. If age sixteen, he would have been old enough. It would not matter at all, had he not sounded so hurt, in ways he would never admit to, when awake.
She wants to console him, for whatever it was, but how could you do that for hurts which must have gone deeper than he wants to know? He is enormously strong within himself. But once he wouldn’t have been. Once he would have been a six-year-old who had to teach himself never to give in, never to reveal his pain. What was it really like for him, away back then? Why would he no
t say? If he cannot tell Morag, who can he tell? Perhaps no one.
This is a frightening thought. She pushes it away, but lies unsleeping for a long while, beside him.
Memorybank Movie: The Young
Morag Skelton, age twenty-four, has now lived in Toronto for four years. She is able to go downtown without getting hopelessly lost. She has long since learned the various colleges of the university, which city bookshops are the best, where to buy clothes that Brooke will like on her, and how to do verbal battle with hairdressers in order to achieve (even if only partially) the style she wants, without submitting to the outlandish creations which they always seem to want.
She does not venture downtown very often, because unfortunately the city still scares the bejesus out of her. She does not, however, mention this fact to anyone.
Her long straight black hair has been cut much shorter and permed in the prevailing manner of the day, described by Helen of Miss Helene as just a few soft curls, Mrs. Skelton, and a little swirl over your brow. She feels slightly peculiar each time she gets her hair done, but Brooke likes her this way, and she has to admit it does look more feminine.
She watches her diet carefully and is slender. She wears lightly tailored suits in the daytime, with pastel blouses, sometimes frilled. In the heat of the summer, cotton dresses with flared skirts. Her shoes have what is known as Illusion heels, so that she will appear to be wearing high heels without adding too much to her height. In the evenings, meeting academic friends, she goes in heavily for the little black cocktail dress, not necessarily black, of course. She looks smart.
She is a competent cook. Her apricot bread and peanut butter cookies are splendid, and her chocolate cake with fudge icing is beyond compare.
She reads a great deal.
She asks the janitor of the apartment block if people are allowed to keep cats. He says No.
She grows African violets, which are pretty, and potted parsley, which can be used as a garnish on such dishes as tomato jelly.
She writes short stories and tears them up.
One day she throws a Benares brass ashtray through the kitchen window.
Appalled, she flashes down to the back alley and retrieves the brass vessel. It is not dented. They made their brass to last, all right, out there in Benares.
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