She shrugged. “Don’t tell me you’re religious?”
“I was an altar boy for years,” he said. She laughed. “You are religious! Sorry, I don’t mean to offend. I’ve never met anyone who believed in all that, except maybe Auntie, and she’s ancient. Not to mention a little strange. But never mind.… Do you have any children?”
The question jolted, broke her spell. He was glad of it. He turned away and in a voice that was little more than a whisper, answered, “Yes.”
“How many?”
“One.”
“Girl or boy?”
“Girl.”
“How old is she?”
“She’s …”
“You don’t know?”
“Thirteen.”
“You hesitated. Why?”
“I wanted to be sure.”
She picked up her glass and, reaching for the bottle sitting on the floor, poured a generous shot. He didn’t approve, but stayed immobile, as if suddenly he’d lost the right to interfere.
“So I take it you don’t see your daughter very often?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She was talking to the floor, avoiding his eyes. The whole conversation had suddenly turned heavy. He didn’t want to answer. He was leaning against the bookcase, propping himself up as though at any moment he might fall. All the strength seemed to drain from his body. “Are you all right?”
He nodded. She splashed an ounce of Scotch into his empty glass and handed it to him.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I didn’t expect, I mean, you don’t seem like the type to be someone’s … father. Well you could be, of course. Anybody could. But I thought …”
She sat down in the wicker chair, crossed her legs and, cradling the glass in both hands, said, “I wouldn’t mind having a father like you, someone who writes books. That would be all right.”
The thought seemed to slip out, sounding more like truth than anything she’d said all night. The tension disappeared. He stretched out in the recliner which had until now been kept for creative meditation, and closed his eyes.
“Where do they live, this mother and child?” she said softly. “Montreal.”
“Ah! Now that’s a city I would like to visit. Especially in the winter! I’ve seen pictures of a hotel built completely out of ice. Is there really such a place?”
“Yes,” he murmured.
I wouldn’t mind having a father like you, someone who writes books. That would be all right. Her words hung in the air. His chest tightened. She wanted to know more. What more was there to know? He could tell her everything, the story ran like a loop, a recurring dream buried under a firm decision to forget. But once begun, the words were unstoppable.
It isn’t the ice that matters, it’s the snow.
Her eyes were green.
Her hair was fair. An actress! Fresh out of theatre school and on the proverbial trip to Europe we all took in those days, before real life began.
I was reading Meister Ekhardt in the original German, open to the power of suggestion, illequipped to draw distinctions. Every creak in the floorboards seemed to mean something. I was a raw bundle of faith and concentration. For the first time in my life, I had plans. I was sure of who I was and what I was put on this earth to do. A life of contemplation. But we kept running into each other, first in Paris, then Amsterdam.
She was on her own and seemed (though I was wrong) completely lost. I suggested we might travel together for a while, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
“I’ve come over here to learn to be alone,” she said.
Ah! Imagine thinking you must learn to be alone. I’d always been alone.
I was not equipped to tangle with her logic, so I followed discreetly. Rotterdam, Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges. Standing by a stinking canal, she turned around and said, You’re following me.
I denied it, of course. The idea of coincidence had lost credibility. Some of the back roads of Britain are absolutely desolate. You can walk for days and still be alone.
So we headed north, hunted down desolation in the wilds of Scotland and Wales. I think she began to see the merit of travelling together. I’d wander off for hours every day. Spent time reading, kept up a diary, all of it to give her space. I said I was on a mission and would soon have to leave, which seemed to put her at ease. It was true … a spiritual mission. Weeks went by.
Finally, she said she had to meet up with a friend in Spain. She’d be back in Paris in a couple of months. We agreed to meet, and said goodbye.
A few months later, I saw her again. She was wearing one of my shirts. She looked good. I had to have the facts of life pointed out to me by a waitress who asked about the date: she was pregnant.
I’d already taken my first vows. I had plans. So did she. Everything happened so quickly. She said the decision was hers, she’d take care of it. She’s a fearsome person, doesn’t like being followed or told what to do. I offered what I had to offer, and we parted. On good terms, or so I thought. The minute I was on the train to Rome, a horrible sense of desolation descended. I was sure I’d taken the wrong decision. It gnawed at me. The emptiness.
Months went by. I wrote the occasional letter, always received a cordial reply. I was about to take the final vows that would make such letters impossible or at least unwise. I wanted to tell her in person, so I booked a ticket to Montreal. It was early January, the streets were a mess of slush and salt. Believe me, worse than the legendary cold. I phoned her from the airport, said I was passing through on my way to a conference in Boston. She sounded surprised. We agreed to meet the next day at a deli on Metcalfe Street. I cased the place first, arrived early to secure a window seat. When she walked through the door my first thought was, she’s carrying a birdcage under her coat.
I babbled on about my travels, world events, the books I was planning to write, did my best to present a credible life plan. She knew about my vocation. She said she had learned to be alone, a talent I’d cultivated for years, so the conversation went smoothly. We agreed to have dinner the following Friday. It was an outstanding night, as if we’d picked up an old conversation without losing a beat. When it was time to say goodnight I hung back, waiting for her to make a move, and it worked. She said her uncle had a cabin up north. Maybe we could go there for a couple of days, enjoy the snow.
I rented a car and the following weekend we set out for the cabin. It was farther than she expected, her map was not to scale. By late afternoon, after doubling back on a barely passable road, we found the landmark red mailbox and a few minutes later had a roaring fire going in the stove. The sun went down, the moon came up.
In the meantime, I had read up on the changes a woman’s body undergoes preceding birth, but nothing had prepared me for the spectacle of how far a lithe form can expand to accommodate life within. As she lay back naked before the fire I thought, there is nothing in all of art to compare with this astonishing feat of nature.
At dusk it started to snow. Huge flakes, no wind. Snow fell all night and on into the next day. Her uncle kept the cabin well stocked; we could have stayed till spring, and I secretly hoped this might come to pass. Sunday morning, as we sat by the fire, reading, I heard a clunk and looked up. Her book had fallen on the floor …
‘I think it’s time to go,’ she said, standing up. The chair and her skirt were wet.
I ran out into the yard and started the car. I tried to back up. I grabbed a shovel and shoveled for two hours, hoping to clear enough for a run at the road, but it was no use. The way was blocked. Inside the house things had become less calm. All I could remember was a single passage from the Penguin Book of Childbirth: the majority of human beings currently walking around on the planet were born without the assistance of medical personnel. So was my daughter, Celia.
While Piers confessed, Magali listened, Nelly wrote and slept. No
one heard screams on the front doorstep. Piers came upon the bloody mess when he opened the door to retrieve the newspaper. He found Nelly in the kitchen, asleep with her head on the kitchen table, and rested a hand on her shoulder so as not to startle her. She looked up, thought she was dreaming.
“I’m sorry to wake you,” he whispered. “Could you tell me where I might find a mop and a pail for water? There’s a problem in the front entrance.” The General caught his mood and growled. “What kind of problem?” She leapt up but he caught her by the arm. “No, please, I’ll take care of it.”
Still in the mist of the story she had written, where every mention of trouble was serious, announced or followed by gunfire, Nelly could feel the blood drain from her face, and leaned on the table for support.
“Don’t worry,” Piers said. “It’s just a stray cat. I opened the door and she got in somehow. Bit of a mess.”
The mention of an animal, there was no holding her back. She headed down the hallway, the dog and Piers in tow. Magali was kneeling over what looked like a lump of bloody rags on the floor. Badly mauled, its ears bloody, the cat had crawled into the entranceway, and died. Looking closer, Nelly noticed movement beside the cat’s belly, a tiny ball of fur.
“Look, kittens!” Magali cried. “She must have given birth just before she died. They’re all dead, except this one. He’s still bloody from the womb. His mother didn’t have time to lick him off. Oh, dear kitty. I hope you don’t die. Do you think he will?”
Nelly picked up the barely moving body in one hand and with the other began breathing gently into the spaces between her fingers. Taking it into the kitchen, she instructed Piers to light the oven, lined a wicker bread basket with cloth napkins and, placing the kitten in the centre, set it on the open oven door along with a pan of water laced with camphor. In a few minutes, the air was heavy with a sweet, damp odour. Using an eyedropper she placed a few drops of warm milk on the kitten’s mouth. It squirmed at first and kept its eyes firmly closed. Before long, a tiny pink tongue slipped out and licked the first drop. Its eyelids twitched. It took another lick. The next few drops went down quickly then the pink tongue disappeared. The kitten curled up and fell asleep.
EIGHT
A PASTILLE-SCENTED INCANTATION steeped in tobacco, Isabel Tweed’s voice on the answering machine sent discomfort through Piers’ body. In the hierarchy of threats, a phone call from London fell somewhere between an inquisitive email and the dreadful reality of a sealed letter. As usual, she opened on a casual note, as if her attention were somewhere else.
“Hello Piers. Tweed here.”
Pause.
He pictured her tight smile dissolving around the remnants of a cigarette, and waited for the cough.
“Where is the manuscript? Haven’t noticed anything in the papers about a postal strike in La Belle France.”
A second pause, wherein she expected him to laugh.
Tweed’s telephone style avoided personal pronouns, as though I were too intimate and you too specific. Her approach to the instrument was visceral, invasive.
Leaving a voicemail, she proceeded on the assumption that Piers was sitting by the phone, mute but attentive. Punctuated with thought-filled pauses and background noises, her rambling memoranda sometimes stretched over two or three calls before she was through. Even when replayed hours, days, weeks later, Tweed’s messages retained their terrifying immediacy. This one was short and ended abruptly. One final puff before she dropped the receiver into its cradle, a reminder of how hard a writer might fall, should Putterly decide to let go.
He erased the message. Turning on the computer, he called up the previous night’s file and began to read, slowly at first, from the beginning of Chapter Seven, then more quickly as the words lost their strangeness.
From behind the wall, footsteps and the whish of running water. His eyes followed the sound but he forced them back, sliding over one page and onto the next, but not reading at all, his mind cold to the blur of words. An aversion to The Lethal Guitar had been building up for weeks, surrounding his desk like a magnetic field, the moment of sitting down made painful by a fiery ring of doubt. Now Tweed’s eyes on the back of his neck clarified the problem: The Lethal Guitar was … He groped for a word. He came up with Bad. Searching further, he found Very, Very Bad. Finally, Awful.
Spinning away from the screen, he looked up at the plot chart pinned to the wall, a maze of coloured arrows pointing from one scene to the next, the stepping stones to a perfectly saleable Putterly thriller. Had he followed the plan, the book would exist. But something had gone wrong. The answer was in front of him. The slide began in Chapter Seven with the introduction of a junior detective, female. Intended as a catalyst, she had taken over The Lethal Guitar.
Who was she? Young, yes. Wise. Beautiful and gawky. Savvy, silly, an innocent-savant whose first action was to raise a cup of coffee to her lips, enough to send the seasoned police chief into reverie.
In a thriller?
A line, a paragraph perhaps, but no book released by Putterly Inc. would devote an entire chapter to reverie.
As for Jenkins, the weather-beaten gumshoe, a clear-eyed loner known to readers of the series as a man able to crack the most convoluted crime, Jenkins had ceded his drive to a misty female whose cheerful insights were responsible for every single advance of plot since her first appearance on page sixty-four. Turning back to the screen, Piers skimmed pages at random, picking out snatches of words, until finally he began to grasp the meaning of bad. Fragments. Metaphors. Far too many boldly inventive, sensually assaulting, palpitating, noisy, thirst-inducing adjectives. The whole thing was hopelessly tainted by poetry, long passages spent on lyrical descriptions of a junior detective whose name he did not know. He’d changed her name a dozen times and still none seemed to suit. As a temporary measure he’d begun typing XXX, planning to slot in the name as soon as he was sure, but now he knew the name was the least of it. For all the hundreds of words spent, XXX was still a bundle of contradictions: delicate, dark, wispy, imposing, statuesque, fair, sallow, pale, nimble, awkward, guileless, shrewd, poised. In truth, he had no clear picture of the junior detective, yet she had overtaken his story. He was lost.
He regretted erasing Tweed’s message. A blast from London would be welcome now. He thought of picking up the phone, but it was 3 a.m. She’d have gone home long ago, wherever that might be. He could not imagine Ms Tweed at home. She did have an answering machine though. The sound of her recorded message might suffice. Punching in the fourteen digits, he waited for the crackle of connection. London’s distinctive efficient buzz always made him sit up straight. The phone rang once, then stopped. A familiar voice barked: “Tweed here.”
He froze. A Tweedlike pause followed, dented only by the sound of chalk-red lips sucking on a menthol light. In the exhalation, a severely rhetorical question, “Is that you, Piers?” How could she know? “Yes,” he whispered meekly.
The words had hardly left his lips when she laughed, a sound like crumpling newspaper: The Observer, book review section.
“Glad to know you’re on the job. What can I do for you?”
He cleared his throat. “Has the manuscript arrived yet?”
“It has not.” She took a sip of liquid.
Her confidence inspired him with the strength to lie. “Well. That is quite … inexplicable,” he said, pinching his buttocks tight.
“Is it,” she said. No trace of a question. Tweed’s quest for truth required few words. A master of silence, she knew the power of a pause. He admired the method. He had even tried to use it on the page, building interrogation scenes around the brittle discourse between a huntress and her prey. But inevitably he broke down, identified with the underdog, slipped him a deft comeback or two and watched the whole thing collapse into repartee.
His hand was slippery with sweat, his throat as dry as a blank page.
Clock ticking, Lond
on time, Tweed turned brisk: “Are you working?”
He was, yes, oh yes, the computer was on.
“Of course,” he said, straightening his shoulders. “Just thought I’d ring and let you know … it’s coming.”
“Fine then, I won’t keep you,” she said, and dropped the receiver.
Still holding the live end of conversation, Piers took a deep breath, another. He set the phone down gently, returned to the keyboard, and raised both hands.
In a few seconds, twenty-five chapters had been selected, blackened, sent into oblivion. The machine paused, incredulous. Are you sure? Yes! He answered, DELETE.
Every word written since the beginning of October, in one push of a key, the manuscript was shorter by seventy-three percent. All reference to XXX gone. In her place, a new junior detective entered wearing a day’s growth on his strong, manly face. He thrust his hand at the chief, offering an unambiguous grip and introduced himself as Max. After a few words of exposition and a knowing nod to account for Jenkins, who would be back on the job in a page or two, Max walked out the door, bound for Marseille with a clear sense of purpose, a mission to accomplish. Not a whiff of poetry. That the agent of his plot now wore man-sized Adidas and carried a gun filled Piers with resolve.
The Lethal Guitar proceeded at a steady pace, according to a revised timetable both realistic and capable of staving off a showdown with London. For the first time in weeks, he resumed his morning dash around the ramparts. The effort left him agreeably exhausted, ready for a day of dreamless sleep. Heartened by the old rhythm, he began sorting through a summer’s worth of loose papers. He had his hair cut by a musk-scented woman on rue de la Carreterie. He took his winter coat to the dry cleaners, and stopped at a flower stall behind Les Halles to purchase a potted plant.
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