Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  During the days, Hallam and Mrs. Rowe went their separate ways, unless there was some agreed task to be done that required them both. Hallam deposited her six pounds to his general account at the Bank of Montreal and kept careful count of the interest that accrued to her capital. He had no intention of keeping her money, but as it was the cornerstone of their agreement, he felt he had to honor the terms that found him holding her entire personal reserves. Between the two of them there was a worldly fortune of nearly one hundred pounds, about a fifth of the amount Hallam would have expected the shop to bring in by 1857, had he not scuttled it to live. But one hundred pounds was enough to survive on, and build on, and he allowed himself the luxury of some hope.

  At first, when they were together in the room, his discomfort at the new arrangement overwhelmed any other feeling. There was no privacy, and he had the instinct to announce himself if he were about to so much as shift in his chair, for fear it would startle her. The effort at politeness exhausted them. Never had either said Oh yes, thank you or Oh that would be very nice, yes, thank you or Oh, well, no, I’m fine, thank you so many times, and Hallam began to feel as if he were playing a role in an amusing satire on newlyweds.

  Bedtime was, as he had imagined, exquisitely painful. He allowed Mrs. Rowe to sleep on the floor, as she had originally suggested, since there was no way he could allow her to take the bed he’d slept in all those months and also retain any sense of propriety if she did. To send her to the floor was for certain ungentlemanly, but he felt keenly, and she agreed, that this part of their agreement had to remain sacrosanct to ensure there was no illusion of greater familiarity between them. And once she had unrolled her belongings, a layer of sweaters and the unneeded winter coat made fine bedding, and Hallam felt convinced after the first week that she was not uncomfortable.

  At night, bowing with excruciating politeness, their bodies twisted as far away from each other as possible, changing into their nightwear under the bedclothes like children playing at a game — it was profoundly embarrassing, but to Hallam (and, he allowed himself to imagine, to Mrs. Rowe as well) it was also replete with pleasure. To scent another body nearby! To hear the happy, unconscious sigh as her tired body settled into the bedding . . . it did his spirit good to be in the span of such simple human moments.

  With time, they gradually unknotted this unease. Mrs. Rowe was good company and a good guest. She guided them into their queer arrangement gracefully, never displaying any discomfort greater than her host’s. Hallam allowed himself to think that if Alice knew the whole truth of his situation, and knew his heart then as he did, that she would have approved of the arrangement. It was felicitous to his mental health. Mrs. Rowe was funny and clever, and within two weeks (working with an agreed-upon budget that she believed burdened their finances equally) she transformed the little box he lived in into something almost like a home. She bought an inexpensive rug and put it down over the most conspicuous of the bolt holes, pushing the rag plugs down level with the boards. It was as if no violence had ever been done to the floors. She purchased a heavy white curtain as well as a hanging rod, which she herself installed, and divided the room into two clean halves, including the window, so to allow each of them moonlight and a portion of the sunrise. The curtain was drawn after supper if either wished to have privacy to do whatever they would, or it remained open until their game of chess or discussion of the evening was complete. Hallam endeavored to stop drinking tea at an earlier hour than he normally would, and ensured that he made water before retiring, although he kept a pan beneath his bed in case an urgency arose in the middle of the night. This way, Mrs. Rowe had use of the hallway water closet and he did not have to pass through her side of the room. He found the pan an infernal discomfort when he did need it, and the effort to relieve himself silently was excruciating. He entertained the thought of an open window, but being well-born, he suffered with the pan when absolutely necessary.

  Mrs. Rowe also entered a subscription with the ice man, and took delivery of a block of ice twice a week to place in the hayed icebox Hallam tricked up out of a couple of crates and a tin tub. The ice melted much faster than it would have in an expensive, insulated larder, but he didn’t have the money to risk on a proper one, and they made do with the toy icebox he felt proud to have constructed. Into this new cabinet, Mrs. Rowe placed such rarities as butter and fresh meats and occasionally cheese — never more than they could consume in a week — and so to the lonesome dry goods that sat dejectedly in Hallam’s cupboards were added such things as might result in a good toad-in-the-hole or even a chicken vol-au-vent, should the person in control of those things have the knowledge of how they might be so transformed, and Mrs. Rowe did. This was achieved with the assistance of a wedding-gift copy of Mrs. Beaton’s Book of Household Management she had brought with her to Toronto. On Friday mornings, she told Hallam to call a number at random, upon which she would open Mrs. Beaton to the same page and announce what the Friday supper would be. Boiled round of beef one week, sheep trotters another. As he did not like wild birds or rabbits, he learned not to choose the page numbers in the vicinity of four hundred and fifty.

  To be at home with the scent of something a man could not possibly prepare on his own (or even, perhaps, know to order in a restaurant), and then be sent to the table to taste the proceeds of his good luck . . . the improvement this provided Hallam’s body and soul was hard to measure. For the first time in nearly a year, he fattened. Not so that it was obvious, but he could feel himself fitting his garments better, and Mrs. Rowe herself observed that his cheeks had filled with flesh.

  Mrs. Rowe did not go to St. James’s — his church — as this would have invited the kind of scrutiny they could not answer to, but he did introduce her as an employee of his to the pastor at St. Michael’s, and she was welcomed to that congregation. She did not wish to go back to the church she and her husband belonged to because she could not bear the looks of pity she got there. Once they returned to the flat of their separate Sunday afternoons, however, they had sermons to compare. And although they recognized quickly that neither was as observant as they were presumed by the other to be, the questions brought up by their respective pastors were interesting to them. Charity was a popular subject at Mrs. Rowe’s church, as the building was on the border of MacCaulaytown, and it frequently took up collections for widows and children in that part of the city. She came back to Hallam’s rooms on one June Sunday disturbed by the pastor’s assertion that a legitimate child was more deserving of charity than one had outside of marriage. That there were “true” widows and “false” widows. “But imagine punishing a child for the sins of its parents,” she said. She had made some beef rissoles from a rump she’d roasted on the Friday, and she had put it before them with a pot of good gravy on the side. As was their habit, through some unspoken agreement, they served themselves, although this made sense to Hallam. Alice would have served him, and Alice was his wife. Serving the person you love, with whom you’ve chosen to share your life, is a kind of joy and a duty. Here, he and Mrs. Rowe did not have those sorts of duties to each other; there were no rituals to reinforce the meaning of their lives together, as their “togetherness,” as he saw it, was a side effect of his social obligation. Her word arrangement — which she always used to describe how they were living — seemed to him a good and true way to describe them to themselves. So he served himself some lemon-fragrant croquettes and poured his own gravy and ate in utmost contentment with, as time went on, less and less of a sense that he was living in a state of gross betrayal.

  “Maybe your pastor wants to reinforce the importance of the marriage sacrament,” Hallam said. “It wouldn’t be unusual for him to do that. If the women of MacCaulaytown see their married neighbors receiving more of the church’s aid, they’ll think twice of getting a child outside of that sacrament.”

  “That species of morality is a luxury for educated people, Mr. Hallam. Everyone else lives in hordes and gets by as best they can. I think
outwardly condoning immoral behaviors is not in the church’s interest, of course, but could anyone condone giving a child less to eat only because his mother is unmarried?”

  “No,” he said. “I see what you mean. Sin should not be hereditary.”

  “Indeed, but more important, charity should be blind to everything but need. Our personal feelings should not determine whose starvation is legitimate.”

  “Are they our personal feelings, or are they laws?”

  “They’re our laws, if anything, and I’ve been subject to them enough to know that they are applied unevenly, depending on how things appear. Imagine this. If you were a doctor, and came upon an accident in the road, and there were two men lying on the cobble bleeding, and one was drunk and the other not, who would you treat first?”

  “The one who was more badly injured.”

  “Fine. Then say they are injured about equally, and the sober man is quietly waiting for attention, while the drunk is shouting and cursing and waving his hands in the air. Now who receives your ministrations?”

  “I understand the point you’re making,” he said, and halved a croquette with his fork. He wished to change the subject, worrying that he’d accidentally reveal some native flaw in himself that would show him inclined, say, to turn a blind eye to the suffering of someone he disliked. There were relatives in life that tended to sink you in logical discourse. “We should try to depend upon our reason when in situations where we might be tempted to react with feeling. Is that not so?”

  “I think we have to see our responsibility to all people as equal. I don’t believe a thin line of spiritual alikeness connects me to the child with an unmarried mother, and a thicker line connects me to the one who was born in wedlock. That makes me an agent for something morally odious, and I don’t want to be that agent.”

  “Well, that’s brave of you. Because you can even out the thickness of all the lines that emanate from you, outward to humanity, but you’ll never have the luxury of controlling those directed toward you.”

  “I’ve managed well enough, though. Here I am, fed and with a place to sleep, right? When a mere three months earlier, I was a fallen woman.”

  “Touché,” he replied, and he rose to get them both a glass of beer. “But you are probably the exception.”

  “If you’re talking about the lines of connection that come to me from elsewhere, then it’s you who are the exception, J.G. Hallam.” She took the glass and poured herself a draft of ale, then raised it to him. “Thank goodness you work from a different spiritual account book than Father Caufield’s.”

  “To your health,” Hallam said, and they clinked glasses.

  She drank, watching him, thinking. She’d barely touched supper, even allowing for the fact that she usually ate about half of what he did. She put her glass down and made a sound like hmff, and then picked up her fork.

  “No,” he said.

  “No, what?”

  “No to whatever conclusion you just drew. Don’t think I can’t hear the gears spinning in your head.”

  “I’m gearless, Mr. Hallam. I plot nothing. Except that I just realized that I can ask you something and you’ll do it.”

  “And what is that?”

  FIVE

  THAT TALK IS a form of action is not well understood. One should not agree to the terms of something in debate, whether heated or polite, but neglect these terms in life. Many people do, but most try not to, and liking one’s morals only in theory is likely to lose a person both friends and business.

  In agreeing, theoretically, to Mrs. Rowe’s terms in their discussion about charity, Hallam agreed, without knowing he was doing so, to remake his acquaintance with Mr. Ennis, who was apparently suffering alone in his cottage on Adelaide Street. Hallam had not known that Mrs. Rowe had continued, throughout May and into June, to visit with Mr. Ennis, although she insisted that she was not posing for him, and he believed her. By her estimation, whatever natural syndrome afflicted him had worsened and required better medicine than he could ferret through his own channels. And so it was agreed that Hallam would withdraw whatever money was required and take the man to a doctor in the good part of town.

  Hallam found a cab waiting outside of St. Lawrence Hall and took the hack out to The Ward. The driver was instructed to wait while Hallam went inside to see for himself how Ennis was. He found the older man covered in a worn blanket, lying on his pallet. A pig in his sty, thought Hallam. It would have been difficult to judge the place a greater mess than it had been when he’d last seen it, but it was even more neglected. He noted two glass jars full of a clear liquid on each windowsill in Ennis’s little chamber. A suck of the good stuff within arm’s reach, no matter where he was in the room. And the milk can was still in its place beside the bed. Ennis could have a gutful of drink without having to sit up straight.

  Ennis was dozing on his back, his breathing apneic. Hallam calculated in his mind the levering force it would take to get Ennis onto his side, where the weight of his body would not afflict his lungs so. With Ennis incapacitated, it occurred to him that he could go into the studio and try to find out how much of his photographic practice was illegal. If the use to which he had been putting Mrs. Rowe was typical, only God knew what examples of his work might be in the drawers in the other room. But he was at Ennis’s home on a supposed mission of mercy and so he shook him awake. When the man opened his eyes it was immediately apparent that his palsy had worsened: he seemed to have suffered a paralysis, and the left side of his face had fallen down like a torn drape, drawing his cheek and mouth away with it. “My old friend,” he said, blinking. He held out a hand to be helped up and Hallam pulled at him until he was sitting upright. Ennis’s left arm seemed all but useless, and Hallam realized that the Irishman had suffered a stroke. He would have to carry that great bulk out of the cottage and into the hack. “Have you come to rescue me as well?”

  “You already have your freedom,” Hallam replied.

  He found his anger still fresh, but in coming to know Mrs. Rowe’s character it should not have been so, since she was clearly never as helpless as he’d imagined her. In thinking of the episode when he first met her, Hallam still felt the bite of distaste, but now it was caused by something different. It was that he’d been betrayed by this man, whom he’d allowed to take him on as something of an apprentice and friend.

  “I have a horse and carriage outside for you, Mr. Ennis,” he said. “I have a medical man willing to see one such as you.” Hallam helped him up to standing and put a dead arm over one shoulder. Ennis steadied himself and glanced around the dirty room as if he were leaving it for the last time. From Hallam’s point of view, it would have been cause for celebration to be delivered of this place, with its bowed floors and shabby, broken furniture, not to speak of the human and chemical funks that met like two weather systems and became a dank stench.

  Ennis’s arm was strangely pliable, as if the muscle had changed to taffy, and cold as well. His legs were steady, but nearly all his energy was sapped. “How bad is it?”

  “It doesn’t hurt,” said Ennis. “It’s as if I went to bed drunk one night and woke up with only half my body sober. But it doesn’t hurt.”

  “As if you went to bed drunk? When do you not go to bed drunk, Mr. Ennis?” Hallam pointed his jaw toward one of the windows. Sunlight processed through the glass jars spread a fan of color along the graying sills. “The air in this room could make an entire household drunk.”

  Ennis’s eyes drifted from the windows and back to Hallam, and he laughed in a halting fashion. “Those are concoctions of your own making, Mr. Hallam.”

  “That is no medicine of mine.”

  “No, you’re right. They’re jars of silver nitrate solution. You have to sun it, don’t you know? To clean it.”

  “You have to clean it,” said Hallam, his voice flat.

  “It becomes adulterated with filth. But if you expose the impurities to sunlight it becomes elemental silver and sinks to the bottom o
f the jar. Then you flush it out, recharge the solution, and off you go.” He laughed more heartily now, searching Hallam’s face. “You think me so perverse, Jem, that I would drink my own silver?”

  “No, I did not think that.”

  “But you would begrudge me it, a dying man by rights, if I had a thirst for it, wouldn’t you?” His face had become solemn now. “You hate me, Jem Hallam.”

  “I don’t. I am uninterested in you now.”

  “I see. Well then, I suppose you had better get me to your undertaker. Perhaps he will have an opinion.”

  DOCTOR COTTER HAD his surgery at Queen and Church streets. The office was a few doors away from the general dispensary, and Hallam believed that if he explained his former profession and spoke knowledgeably enough, the doctor might be able to obtain Mr. Ennis’s medication at a fraternal rate. His room smelled of oiled wood and rubbing alcohol. The doctor’s portrait hung behind a heavy mahogany desk and an imposing leather chair: it was a place to instill confidence. He had Ennis sit on his examining table and looked at his eyes and in his mouth. He ran a stick along his tongue and examined the damp sludge that came off it. “Your breath is rank,” he told Ennis.

  “I don’t have the money for parsley.”

  “You have enough for wine, I’d judge.”

  Hallam stood off to the side, listening quietly and observing the doctor’s technique. He listened to Ennis’s chest and tapped his entrails with his hand flat against Ennis’s belly. Hallam had seen this particular sleight performed a number of times and had never had the courage to ask what was discovered by the resulting sound. However, the secrets of Ennis’s moist insides were hardly necessary; his most obvious symptom confronted them both factually: his face was hanging from his skull.