The Dead of Winter

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘They do keep coming.’ Solange flaps her arms as if they were wings. ‘But I don’t suppose they’re night birds.’ She grins. ‘Like a cup.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘And then you’ll leave us for a few minutes, Solange. I need to have a private word with Pierre.’

  ‘As long as he doesn’t upset you.’

  ‘I’ll try not to,’ I say and wonder if I’ll be able to keep my promise.

  Mme Tremblay waits for her to leave the room then motions me towards a chair.

  ‘Have you seen the television news today?’

  ‘No. Was it unbearable?’

  Mme Tremblay squares her shoulders. ‘No. It was perfectly correct. Far better than the papers. An appropriate obituary.’ Tears spring into her eyes and she wills them away. ‘Nothing salacious. No sensational hints. But Pierre, look. I’m… I’m just a little worried. You know Madeleine, how she always leaves things lying about. Well, I’d like you to go to her apartment, just check things out. Bring me anything that… you know -- ’

  ‘I know.’ Mme Tremblay doesn’t want scandal. There are so many things in Madeleine’s life which couldn’t bear the weight of prurient eyes. Do these include what my brother has told me?

  ‘Before the press get their hands on them. They’re very persistent. There might be journals too. She kept them sometimes. Erratically, I think. I’d rather sift them first. Before the police… you understand. I’d know what to make of them. Madeleine will forgive me.’

  From a cannister on the dresser shelf, she unearths a pile of keys and places them in front of me.

  ‘I think you should go quickly, Pierre. Today. Now.’

  She stands in front of me and I nod, but I don’t move.

  ‘You’re tired?’

  ‘No. It’s not that. I… You see, Jerome…’ I stumble and look at her and in the rectitude of her presence Jerome’s words take on all the unreality of hothouse flowers, perverse, exotic blooms, forced into aberrant life. ‘No, it’s nothing.’ I shake free of their tendrils and get up.

  ‘Tell me, Pierre. Go on. It’s about Madeleine, isn’t it? Jerome saw her that night. ’

  ‘No, no. It’s not that.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It’s about Monique,’ I falter.

  ‘What about my daughter?’ She gives me a sharp glance.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It matters. I can see that in your face.’

  I shrug, try a grin which feels like a grimace. ‘Jerome has this mad idea that Monique and my father…’

  ‘Monique and your father?’ She stares at me in incomprehension. ‘Go on.’

  ‘That they were…’ I wave my hands unable to find the appropriate word.

  Suddenly her mouth drops open. ‘Pierre, really. Not you! And Jerome! He’s as bad as these snoopers I’ve got around here. No. The answer is a categorical no. There was never anything between my daughter and your father. It was Jerome.’ She laughs. The sound is so startling that she seems to realise it herself and stops mid-way. ‘He was infatuated with Monique, never knew where to put his hands when she was around. It wasn’t his fault, of course. She used to tease him mercilessly. But your father! Jean-Francois. No. That’s pure projection. Not Jean-Francois.’

  Something about the way she voices my father’s name makes me feel it with a hot suddenness. It was she who loved my father. Loved him like a brother perhaps, but loved him all the same. I have no way of knowing and I certainly will not ask.

  ‘No. Your father was always extremely kind to us. Even when Monique disgraced herself with that scoundrel of a Papineau. Too handsome by half he was, that piano teacher. At the seminary, too. And when I confronted him, he packed his bags and ran. That very day. I have no idea where he ran too. I didn’t try very hard to find out, I have to confess. Maybe I already knew I wanted Madeleine for myself.’

  She is wringing her hands. The knuckles are white, bloodless.

  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have --’

  ‘No. It’s my fault. I ought to have told you. But I never thought about it. All so long ago. Monique wanted an abortion, you see. She was only seventeen. But I wouldn’t let her. It was too dangerous back then. And wrong. I told her I would help her with the baby. We fought. Then and afterwards. I didn’t handle my own daughter very well.’

  There are tears in her eyes.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me all this.’

  ‘No, no, I do. I should. When Madeleine arrived, Monique made a volte face. It was partly to spite me I guess, but in any case, she said I was to have nothing to do with Madeleine. She could manage perfectly well without me. So she stayed in Hull, which was where we’d gone for the last months of the pregnancy. Monique couldn’t bear being in Ste-Anne - all the gossip - and I had a cousin in Hull, dead now.

  ‘Then she met Arthur Blais and she lost all interest in the child, though she wouldn’t admit that to me, not at first anyway. When I went to visit them in Maine, I was distraught at the way they treated poor little Madeleine. I started working on her again slowly, more tactfully. Eventually I even offered Blais money…’

  She peers up at me sharply as if she has heard a rebuke I haven’t made.

  ‘I was desperately worried for her,’ she says in apology. ‘And Blais said yes, sure, take the brat. Raise her. I don’t want anything to do with her. Monique wasn’t prepared to make it so easy. We arranged for visits, all that… The intervals between them grew longer and longer. Madeleine didn’t like staying with them.’ She throws up her hands. ‘You know the rest.’

  ‘Have you contacted Monique now?’ I ask softly.

  She shakes her head. ‘We haven’t seen each other for more years than I care to remember. But I guess I’ll have to. For the funeral.’ Her voice catches and she sobs once, harshly. ‘Probably she won’t come. And if she does, she’ll tell me it’s all my fault. And she’ll be right. If I hadn’t asked Madeleine to come up here for Christmas…’

  She scrapes her chair back from the table and stands on visibly shaky legs.

  I put my arm round her shoulders. ‘Don’t think like that Mme Tremblay. You mustn’t.’

  ‘You all right in there?’ A hearty voice calls from the hall.

  ‘Yes, fine. Fine.’ Mme Tremblay presses the key ring into my hand. ‘Go, Pierre. Come and see me as soon as you’re back.’

  The autoroute into Montréal is quiet -- a stretch of flat montonous grey flanked by white. The grey seeps into my mind, inducing trance. I curl into it with relief, barely aware of my foot on the accelerator. Cars on my right vanish into oblivion. Saplings rise in the distance, grow into dense huddled pines and disappear into mirrored specks. A shaft of sunlight breaks through cloud. It dances over the chrome of a truck, splits into radiant shards, dazzles. I speed past and suddenly remember the medallion. I haven’t thought of it for years.

  The sun found it, picked it out of a grassy verge near the college chapel. Spangles of heavy silver shaped into a sun, the signs of the zodiac dotted round its centre. The object sparkled and glinted like temptation itself. I picked it up and held it in the palm of my hand, felt its satisfying weight, then whipped it into my pocket. The medallion became my talisman.

  I must have been about fifteen then, by turns a gregarious and solitary boy. In my solitary moments, day dreams would besiege me. All of them had to do with women. Those holiday meetings with Madeleine apart, I had never been close to a girl, let alone a woman. Never held a conversation with one. The college was a male fortress. On our rare forays into the streets of the city, we would glance furtively at those alien creatures that women were. Sometimes, if a gust of wind or a stride up the steps of a bus accidentally exposed a forbidden expanse of smooth female skin, a throttled sound would emerge from the throat of one of our cohort with all the force of a collective gasp. The teacher’s rebuke was always swift and aimed at all of us.

  My medallion became my magical pathway to women. Its leather thong around my throat, I would fantasize
myself into bold escapades. A mere flick of my shirt, and its silver dazzle would catch the eye of the most beautiful passer-by and hypnotize her into my power. She would follow me obediently to the ends of the earth, past the last bus stop, to some remote fog-bound castle where my pictorial imaginings ceased, but where the words ‘fruit of thy womb’, repeated daily in our Hail Marys, took on a throbbing resonance which had not a little to do with the blood rushing into my penis, its trembling more intense, since I knew with doomed certainty that this pulsing, sinful pleasure condemned me to the fiery ravages of hell.

  It wasn’t just one woman. It was any woman, all women - blondes, brunettes, redheads, small and curvacious, tall and lithe: at the sight of my sun, they grew as docile as robots, attended my every wish, were more compliant than Mary Magdelene faced by Jesus. More obliging than my hand on my wilful adolescent cock.

  That summer, it must have been just before she went off to Europe for the year, I showed my medallion to Madeleine. We were in the small apple orchard beneath her house. The buds on the trees were plump and dappled with pink. The stubby grass beneath our backs was warm and fragrant. Maybe it was the medallion, maybe it was simply the warmth that made me brave, but I touched Madeleine, let my fingers caress the downy softness of her arm.

  We were fast friends by then, but we had never touched. We had spent all of the previous summer gambolling in the fields together, or when it rained, listening to music on her transistor radio in the loft of the barn. Or sneaking into the local cinema and watching whatever double bills were on offer.

  That in itself was an adventure. We had to pretend to be sixteen. Some perverse accord between church and provincial government had decreed that, special showings apart, movies were closed to children. So we dressed up. Madeleine donned lipstick and piled her hair on top of her head. I pulled on a jacket and with butterflies in our stomachs we braved the cashier and half ran into a darkness of mouldy smells and rough plush seats and flickering images. The illicitness cemented our bond, but it had nothing overtly physical about it. Maybe it was because Madeleine hadn’t yet sprouted breasts.

  The next summer, as we stretched lazily beneath the apple trees, I noticed the marvel of these new curves beneath the thin cotton of her shirt and my hand strayed of its own accord. She didn’t stop it. She let my fingers wander - up her arm, across her neck and then with a breathless sense of destination arrive at her bosom. I touched, I stroked. I felt ripe peaches in the palm of my hand. And then I felt something else. Madeleine’s fingers. They were on my shirt, my jeans. They curved round the bulge at my crotch, rubbed. My vision grew furry. My ears rang.

  I think it was then I showed her my medallion. I don’t know what I thought it might do.

  She held it in the palm of her hand and contemplated it, then lifted it up and let it swing, like a pendulum, so that light flickered and spun through the branches.

  ‘Tu me le donnes?’ she asked and without waiting for an answer, she lifted the medallion over her neck and patted it where it lay between her new breasts. Then she kissed me quickly on the lips and raced off.

  I was so startled, I couldn’t move. I simply stared after her, stared for a long time after she had disappeared.

  It was my first intimation that women weren’t simply distant and enticing machines set into motion by some superior magician. They had a consciousness of their own. An unthinkable independence. Far from following the scenario of my fantasy, Madeleine had just run off and taken my precious talisman with her.

  She never returned it. She should have returned it.

  The mountain which gives Montréal its name looms out of flatness. Astride its rounded, ancient volcanic mass, the university tower rises like a pale sentinel. I smile to myself and think I will tell Madeleine how she taught me a crucial lesson the day she ran off with my boyhood medallion. Then, as I join the snarl of rush-hour traffic at the junction of the Boulevard Metropolitain, the realisation pounces upon me, brutal in its sudden vividness. There is no longer a Madeleine to speak to.

  Tears crowd my eyes. I do not wipe them away. I do not want to be lulled into forgetfulness again. Yet I no longer have the courage for Madeleine’s apartment. The direction I need to follow grows blurred in my mind. Which is the best route to take?

  In the dying light, the office and factory buildings which border the road look deserted - grimy facades opening onto nothing. All life is concentrated in the stream of vehicles moving like lazy waves up and over the crest of the road’s elevation. I could stay in this sea forever, a willing captive to a flow which has nothing to do with volition.

  But the car behind me hoots impatiently when I fail to move with sufficient speed into the five foot gap in front. I do so with a lurch and find myself veering dangerously towards the next exit.

  Rows of well-tended ranch houses fringe silent streets. There is less snow here, just a sprinkling through which the knobbly grass of extensive gardens is still visible. I wake up to the fact that I am in the Town of Mont-Royal. This used to be a WASP enclave. But the city has changed now, old demarcation lines between French and English have shifted slightly. Strongholds have been scaled. An iluminated crèche, complete with three wise kings and shining star adorns a lawn which in the past might only have sported a discreetly-lit pine.

  Closer to the old railway yards, affluence gives way to a terrace of brick triplexes. Winding exterior staircases complete with ornamental railings relieve the box-like flatness of the buildings. Each staircase leads to a separate apartment containing a regulation six rooms.

  After 1911, the city made exterior staircases illegal. Too many children and old people hurtled down their icy winter treachery. Now these oddities of cheap local architecture have taken on a historic sheen. While the working class and the immigrants move out to the newness of the suburbs, the young and rising colonize the past.

  South of Van Horne lie the tree lined streets of Outremont with their comfortable two and three story houses. A mere century ago, this north side of the mountain was an area of market gardens and orchards. Then, sniffing the wind of change as shrewd clerics in our city have often been known to do, the St Viateur religious order bought up all the land and fostered development. Outremont was transformed into a prosperous suburb, the first neighbourhood in Canada to be interested in its own beautification. A far-sighted mayor had the utility companies agree to lay telephone and electricity wires underground. Trees and bushes were distributed to citizens at cost price.

  When I was a boy, Outremont was to the French, what Westmount was to the rest of Montreal’s population - the most desirable of residential enclaves. To us, the WASP fortress of Westmount was impregnable, even in wish. And we French were ‘outre’, other, never the centre. The granite barrier of the mountain straddled our imaginations, separating us out on either of its sides more decisively than it divided the topography of the city.

  Two of the founding fathers of Québec nationalism lived within a street of each other in Outremont, though the differences between them have over time mapped out a rift wide enough to drop a country into.

  Henri Bourassa was an MP, a champion of French language and culture and also, it goes without saying, of French catholicism. He battled for a strong, united Canada which respected its two separate cultures equally. An anti-imperialist who opposed Canadian participation in British wars, he nonetheless favoured a link with Great Britian. Britain was Canada’s bulwark, he thought, against absorption by the United States. It was Bourassa with his pebble-bright eyes and drooping moustaches who at the turn of the century founded the newspaper I used to work for.

  Walking towards me past the one time home of the Abbé Lionel Groulx are two Orthodox Jews, tall hats perched regally over ringlets, faces pale above long black beards. The Abbé would not have been pleased. His evocation of a separate state called La Laurentie, an independent Québec ruled by an elite of well-spoken French heroes, had a distinct bias towards racial purity. Around the Abbé and his radical dreams of independe
nce, the nationalists of the twenties and thirties congregated.

  With varying inflections, Québec continues to vacillate between the positions voiced by these two men: equal and different within a Canadian federation; or valiantly independent, a French-speaking island dyked against the waves of the North American sea.

  Why am I thinking about geography and politics? Is it the influence of these streets so close to the sites which mapped out my political education? I know myself better. I am avoiding thoughts of Madeleine and the ordeal that awaits me.

  With a sense of impending panic, I make a detour into the Rue Laurier. The brightly lit cafés and restaurants remind me that I have not sat down to a meal in days. I need the fortification of food. That is why I have come here. Of course. It all makes sense now. I must have been planning this all along.

  I pull into the first available parking space and walk into Luigi’s where I know the food is good and plentiful and the tablecloths are always starched to glistening perfection.

  I sit at a table at the back, away from the fashionably dressed couples in the window seats. I order the first items that spring out at me from the menu. Spinach and ricotta ravioli in a pesto sauce, a pan fried slab of veal buried in mushroom. Without thinking, I ask for a carafe of house Chianti. This is not a night for gourmet reckonings or fine decisions. I swallow wine and wolf down food without pausing to taste it.

  Only as my eyes rise from my plate, do I realise that I have made a mistake. Luigi’s is too well-liked a haunt amidst my one-time circle for me to emerge from dinner unaccosted.

  A woman in a trim black trouser suit is already upon me, her hand covering mine. Her face is a battleground between beauty and ugliness. Somewhere between the dramatically hooked nose and the liquid eyes, beauty wins out.

  ‘Pierre,’ she murmurs. ‘What a disaster!’ She runs long, knobbly fingers through a thatch of short, dark hair. ‘We’re all devastated. Everyone at the theatre. We can’t believe it. I wish you could tell me it wasn’t true.’