The Diviners

by Margaret Laurence

  Morag and Christie hold their wake in the kitchen at home, by the thin light of the one exposed bulb, the bottle of scotch on the table between them.

  “She was not what you’d call an old woman, Morag.”

  “I know that, Christie.”

  “The strange christly thing about it,” Christie says, “is that she always seemed old, from the moment I first laid eyes upon her, and yet she always seemed young. I don’t mean happy young, you see.”

  “I know. Yes.”

  “I mean, more, young like a young child who’s yet to learn much speech. I think they had told her–her father, and maybe them teachers in the few years of schooling she’d had–they’d made her believe she was kind of simple in the head. Maybe she was. I never figured it out, quite.”

  “Maybe she was simple in another way,” Morag says. “Another meaning of the word.”

  Even eight or nine years ago, when she saw him last, Christie would have grasped this simple thought, this thought about simplicity. Not now. He looks at her from shrouded eyes, knowing he has not understood her meaning.

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” he says, pouring more scotch for them both, “but I seen the way she was. It’s a bloody christly terrible life sometimes.”

  Morag prays that he will not now go into the old act. He does not. He sits silent and shrunken, diminished. And then she wishes for the lost wildness, which would not, she sees now, embarrass her any longer.

  “I was a hard man for her to live with,” Christie says. “I had a darkness in me. She could never see rhyme nor reason for it, as why should she?”

  “Her life would’ve been a lot worse without you, Christie.”

  “That,” Christie says, “we don’t know.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you, then?” A momentary blue light in his eyes. “Well, you’re young. You know a whole lot you won’t know later on.”

  Morag laughs. How weird to laugh, here and now. But it seems right. They are both getting fairly drunk.

  “Christie–remember those stories you used to tell me when I was a kid?”

  Silence.

  “I remember the telling of them to you,” Christie says at last, very quietly, “but I don’t recall no more what it exactly was I was telling, then.”

  Morag wants now to tell him, to tell him all the tales. But cannot. She can do nothing at all, except to reach her hand across the table and touch Christie’s leathered lizard-skin hand.

  Prin’s funeral is a church funeral. Prin went to church for all those years, and liked the hymns, so it is only right and proper. Christie and Morag are agreed upon this. Morag tells the minister that they will not be requiring any short inspirational talk–just the service for the dead, and one hymn.

  “Who will attend, and sing?” the young minister enquires pathetically.

  “Could you not get the choir?”

  “It’s not usually done, Mrs. Skelton, unless–”

  He breaks off, unhappily. Unless the deceased is a well-known citizen.

  “If you could just get the organist, then,” Morag says, angrily.

  “Yes, I can do that all right. It’s my wife.”

  Oh lucky wife.

  In fact, there are eleven people there. Eva Winkler’s mother, and Eva, with her husband and three adopted kids, Eva looking older and thinner. And several elderly ladies, whom Morag does not recognize. Professional funeral attenders, perhaps, but at this moment Morag is grateful.

  “Hi, Morag.” Eva, just before they enter the church.

  How to say anything at all to Eva, who speaks softly and apologetically as always?

  “Eva–thanks. For all you did for Prin.”

  “It wasn’t that much,” Eva says. “She was always good to Vern and me.”

  Sure. Prin gave them the occasional jelly doughnut. She gave Morag her only home.

  “Where’s Vern these days, Eva?”

  “Oh, he’s away out at the Coast now. He’s doing real well. We had a card, year ago last Christmas. He’s changed his name.”

  “What?”

  Vernon Winkler, smallboned, as a sparrow, in those days, being beaten by his father Gus, bear-man, pig-man, himself probably beaten by some longpast father in Europe.

  “He calls himself Thor Thorlakson,” Eva says, smiling. “Sounds nice, don’t it?”

  Eva, having dragged around a small brother for what must have seemed centuries to her, is now able to rejoice that Vern has made it. Vern is another one who has decisively left–more so, perhaps, than Morag, even. A card, a year ago last Christmas.

  “Yeh. Very nice.”

  They part. Eva and Morag, drifting apart into the church.

  Service for the Burial of the Dead. The old words.

  We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

  Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears.

  For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.

  A sojourner, as all my fathers were. Then the hymn. The hymn Prin used to like the best. They stood, all eleven, in the almost-empty church.

  Jerusalem the golden

  With milk and honey blest–

  The singing is embarrassed, sparse. The organ pumps out the tune, to cover the paucity of voices. Christie stands, but silently. Morag sings, feeling crazily that it is all she can do for Prin now.

  They stand, those halls of Sion,

  All jubilant with song,

  And bright with many an angel,

  And all the martyr throng;

  The Prince is ever in them,

  The daylight is serene,

  The pastures of the blesséd

  Are decked in glorious sheen.

  Those halls of Sion. The Prince is ever in them. What had Morag expected, those years ago, marrying Brooke? Those selfsame halls?

  And now here, in this place, the woman who brought Morag up is lying dead, and Morag’s mind, her attention, has left Prin. Help me, God; I’m frightened of myself.

  The service over, the coffin is carried into the waiting hearse. Niall Cameron stands beside the newish vehicle, not the same as the one down in the valley, a long time ago.

  Niall is a great deal older. The lines on his face have extended like shorthand scribblings, perhaps to be deciphered only by someone who knows that particular shorthand. His hands shake on the hearse doors. His eyes are not evasive, only absent. She wants to ask him if he remembers that day, and the fire. But cannot. She has the feeling that it would be too much, that he could not bear it. Niall Cameron, who undertakes the strange responsibility for the town’s dead, seems to bear now the mark of his calling upon him. His calling calls. He has lived among the dead a long time. Will this make it easier for him, or the reverse, to die among the living?

  “Mr. Cameron–”

  “Morag Gunn.”

  “Yes.”

  “I never knew much about her, you know, Christie’s wife.”

  “Most didn’t. It’s–it can’t be helped.”

  “Lachlan MacLachlan died a year or so ago,” Niall Cameron says. “You used to work for him on the Banner.”

  “I didn’t know he’d died.”

  “He chose it,” Niall Cameron says. Then, as though pulling himself together for the sake of someone as young as his own children, “Well, he never did get over the boy’s death, I suppose.”

  Lachlan’s son, who died at Dieppe. Jules didn’t die. Amazingly.

  Christie stands beside Morag.

  “If I’d had it up to me–” Christie is trying to say.

  “What?”

  “I would have buried her my own self.” Christie mumbles, but strongly. “In the Nuisance Grounds.”

  Morag takes the old man’s arm as they prepare to go to the graveyard.

  Memorybank Movie: The Tower

  Now, and somewhat oddly, considering the a
wfulness of the house on Hill Street, the apartment in Toronto seems more than ever like a desert island, or perhaps a cave, a well-lighted and beautifully appointed cave, but a cave just the same. Could one say cave if there were windows? Morag looks out the long high-up windows and sees the cars hurtling along Avenue Road, all apparently bent on destroying one another, or, more particularly, united in their desire to wipe out that anachronistic species, the pedestrians. From this height they look scarcely less lethal than they do at earthlevel. She hates and fears them, and refuses to learn to drive.

  She busies herself with this and that–goes out window-shopping, or to an art gallery or the museum. Seeing nothing. She phones friends, women who also have nothing to do and who are not friends anyway. Her own fault. Brooke says she does not make an effort to make friends, and this is true. She does not. Her lifeline depends on letters from and to Ella in Halifax. Morag has not heard yet from the publishers. The waiting is intolerable. Ella writes reassuring letters, counselling patience and cursing publishers.

  Maybe tower would be a better word for the apartment. Crestwood Towers is in fact the name it bears on the flossy brass plate outside the thick plateglass doors. Crestwood. Crest of what? And not a wood in sight. Who thinks up these names? A tower it certainly is, though. The lonely tower. Self-dramatization. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your long hair. Your long straight black hair, not golden waves. Who the hell could let their hair down here? Even the little worshipful group of Honours English students (Thurs., 8:00 P.M.) argue in well-modulated grammatical voices, devoid of epithets, bland as tapioca pudding. Since Prin’s death, and the last sight of Christie, Morag has experienced increasingly the mad and potentially releasing desire to speak sometimes as Christie used to speak, the loony oratory, salt-beefed with oaths, the stringy lean oaths with some protein in them, the Protean oaths upon which she was reared. But of course does no such thing.

  Morag stops going to the hairdresser and lets her hair grow. How could you ever let your hair down if there wasn’t anything there to let down? This is, she suspects, a bizarre concept.

  “We’re going to the Morgans’ tomorrow,” Brooke says. “I expect you’ll be getting your hair done.”

  “No,” Morag says carefully. “I thought I’d let it grow out. I can’t go to the hairdresser any more, Brooke.”

  “For God’s sake, why not? Are you allergic to whatever it is they put on your hair? Why don’t you go to the doctor?”

  “Yeh. I’m allergic. But not physically.”

  “Morag, will you kindly enlighten me? Your hair–not to put too fine a point upon it–looks a mess.”

  “I’ll brush it back and hold it with combs until it’s longer, it won’t look that bad. I don’t like those places, Brooke. I never have. You don’t know what it’s like–all these mauvesmocked little perfumed dollies floating around, making me feel fantastically inadequate, and yet I don’t agree with the way they turn me out. I don’t want to look like that. I don’t know. I can’t explain.”

  But all he really wants is that his wife should look decent, a credit to him. Is this asking too much? Sometimes she thinks Yes, sometimes No.

  Brooke rises from the Danish Modern sittingplace, and comes over to where she is standing. Puts an arm around her shoulder, and she turns to him and holds him, holds onto him tightly, in need.

  “Now wait a minute,” he says gently. “I think you’re getting all worked up over nothing, little one.”

  Morag withdraws. He looks at her in–what? Bewilderment? Annoyance? Surprise?

  “For God’s sake, what is it now?” he asks, or states.

  What indeed? Perfidious Morag, acting like a child. She sees this, and is trapped by it.

  “Listen, Brooke–please don’t misunderstand me. Only–I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

  “Call you what, for heaven’s sake? What’ve I said wrong now?”

  “Little one. Brooke, I am twenty-eight years old, and I am five feet eight inches tall, which has always seemed too bloody christly tall to me but there it is, and by judas priest and all the sodden saints in fucking Beulah Land, I am stuck with it and I do not mind like I did once, in fact the goddamn reverse if you really want to know, for I’ve gone against it long enough, and I’m no actress at heart, then, and that’s the everlasting christly truth of it.”

  “You,” Brooke says, “are hysterical. Are you due to menstruate?”

  Morag stands absolutely silent. I do not know the sound of my own voice. Not yet, anyhow.

  “No,” Morag says. “That was, of course, an ill-considered outburst, and it owes more to Christie’s way of talking than mine, I guess. But it was meant.”

  She is, she realizes, very very angry, and at the same time doubtful about her right to be angry, at him or at the composition of her own composite self.

  “As I see it,” Brooke says, “you really are–in some way quite mysterious to me, Morag–rejecting affection. Don’t you realize that when I say little one, it’s the affectionate diminutive? You must see that much.”

  True. All true. How could anyone reply to that?

  “I know,” Morag says. “Look, I do know. But it’s just that, somehow, with the way I am, with the long past I’ve had–because I have had a long past–for me, the term isn’t good. When I was a kid, I was never treated like a kid, and that was both fortunate and unfortunate. I guess my own parents must’ve treated me like a kid, but I don’t recall, except a few fragments and the fantasies I composed about them later on.”

  “It’s too bad you had to go back to the town this last time,” Brooke says. “You had effectively forgotten it. Now it’s all risen up again, and it’s only upsetting you, Morag. Can’t you simply put it from mind?”

  “I never forgot any of it. It was always there.”

  “When you first came to me,” Brooke says, “you said you had no past. I liked that. It was as though everything was starting for you, right then, that moment. You used to make me laugh–I don’t mean at you, I mean with you. Don’t you remember? I don’t, I suppose, laugh easily. You had a lightness of heart that I loved–I really loved.”

  His terrible need. His terrible need for someone who could bring him light, lightness, release, relief. How could you fight that? How could you withdraw from the terrors of the cave in which he lived almost always alone? But what if remaining there meant to be chained forever to that image of yourself which he must have and which must forever be distorted?

  “Brooke–I remember. And I’m sorry. I think I lied to you, without meaning to, right from the first.”

  “You didn’t lie, love. You couldn’t. Not you. You were without guile. That was the reason I loved you.”

  “Brooke, I haven’t been without guile since I was four years old. I didn’t think you’d care about me if I let you know, that’s all. I mean, let you know about my own darkness, that comes on sometimes.”

  Brooke goes and stands by the windows, looking down at the traffic weaving its metallic violent ballet.

  “Don’t you think we are making too much of all this, Morag? I think you’re exaggerating, if I may say so. Look–we’ve been married nine years. It’s been all right. There were bound to be some difficulties. Don’t you think I’ve felt them, too? Don’t you think I’ve held back, many times, coming home and finding you sitting there at the typewriter as though hypnotized, and no dinner in sight? Well, that’s trivial–what I really mean is, no welcome in sight. Don’t you think I’ve ever felt attracted to other women, to women who seemed mainly to care about connecting warmly with a man?”

  “Yes. Yes, I know. Sometimes I’ve wished you had–”

  “You don’t wish that at all,” Brooke says bitterly, his face containing such pain and such ambiguity that she has to look away.

  “Brooke–just accept that I’m not the same as I was. Or maybe I’m the same, but it scared me, before. Now I can’t–”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Can’t bear not be taken seriously,” Mo
rag says, the words sounding melodramatic to her ears, although true. “Can’t bear to be treated as a child.”

  Brooke looks at her. His very tall frame is rigid and separate. “Do I? Does the way in which we make love strike you that way? Has that been anything except good?”

  “It’s been–you know it’s been good.”

  But even there, the game these past years, rewards and punishments. Have you been a good girl? She cannot bring it up now. Because their coming together has been fine so many times over the years that if she were never to make it with a man, ever again, she couldn’t depart this life complaining.

  “Well, then,” Brooke is saying, “maybe you’re simply worrying needlessly.”

  “Yes. Maybe. I guess so. I’m sorry, Brooke.”

  “It’s all right, love. Everything’s all right. That visit to Manawaka just upset you a bit, that’s all. Now, I’m going to make us both a very dry martini, and you’ll have your hair done tomorrow, and we will cease worrying about things that don’t matter, shall we?”

  “All right, Brooke. Yes.”

  She wonders whether, if Brooke now suggested that she should try to have his child, she would any longer agree.

  Spear of Innocence comes back after seven months, with a polite letter of rejection. Morag sends it out again, willing herself not to think.

  After three months, the manuscript is returned, with a letter saying We do want to publish this novel but we do feel that certain parts… etcetera.

  Morag has not looked at the manuscript for going on a year. Looks at it now. Bloody hell. Some of the editor’s remarks strike home as true; others seem ludicrous. She rages. But goes back inside the novel. Tries this time, more than anything, to bring Lilac’s own unstilted speech into more being, into more relevance with the rest of the story. This rewriting is a thousand miles from the first setting down. No half-lunatic sense of possession, of being possessed by the thing. In fact, this is much easier, but without exhilaration.