by Joan Barfoot
Praise for Joan Barfoot’s LUCK
“Luck took me right out of myself—I read it in one gulp, and it never let me down. Sharp and surprising but always responsible, no tricks for tricks’ sake, so satisfying, with its shifting and puzzles. So much fiction turns out to be diversion, in spite of fancy claims, and doesn’t really look at anything. Well—this does.”
—Alice Munro
“Barfoot … displays a quiet brilliance in her latest novel… . Wryly humorous and bittersweet, it is full of surprises.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Mortality and its backwash are the stuff of Barfoot’s acerbic observation. The gimlet perceptions of a seasoned inkspiller, mixed with fundamental curiosity and mordant wit, make Barfoot a compelling observer, both in life and art…. One of the must-read CanLit books of the season.”
—Calgary Herald
“Barfoot is at her best in Luck”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
“Barfoot has been compared to Carol Shields and Luck, her tenth novel, will not disappoint. From the start her comic talent is clear, while her eye for ‘the miracle of life’s sudden perfections’ confirms her as a writer of considerable power. Luck is one of her best yet.”
—Daily Mail (UK)
“Barfoot is a novelist who should be known to all aficionados of black comedies about the trials of love and marriage: her … novels read like Margaret Drabble rewritten by Patricia Highsmith and arehugely, horribly entertaining.”
—The Times (UK)
“The writing in Luck is so assured so, well, Barfoot-like, which, given her oeuvre, has come to mean an author in command of every comma, syllable, word and sentence… . Suffice to say, the novel, shot through for added enjoyment with bits of dark humour, never flags.”
—Ottawa Citizen
Books by Joan Barfoot
Abra
Dancing in the Dark
Duet for Three
Family News
Plain Jane
Charlotte and Claudia Keeping in Touch
Some Things about Flying
Getting over Edgar
Critical Injuries
Luck
THEFIRSTDAY
One
There is good luck, and there is bad luck, and then there’s the ambiguous sort of luck that’s a lot of this and some of the other. For instance:
When Philip Lawrence, already recipient of a reasonably gratifying life, has the misfortune to die, he is just forty-six, which in some other part of the world or some other century would be a grand old age, but is terribly young in this place and time. On the other hand it is his good luck to die quietly in his bed, apparently in his sleep, a remarkably mild and merciful, even enviable, ending. So when Philip Lawrence drifts in the embrace of good luck and bad out of life in the course of an August night, while the air conditioning wafts its comfort indoors, while outside, grass shrivels, flowers wilt, trees droop, animals pant for moisture and air, when the moon is bright but the curtains are drawn and the big old house is mainly silent except for the sounds big old houses make to themselves in the night, there is no particular need to feel sorry for him. Surely if he has suffered at all, it can have been only briefly.
A different matter entirely for the living.
Not at all enviable or awash in good fortune is whoever wakens beside him and stretches, running the planned events of the day muzzily through the mind, reorienting slowly to the deliciously ordinary or the warmly anticipated, and finds herself on the pillow next to, on the same mattress as, the inert, the cooling, the truly departed. An unambiguously nasty moment for that person, turning to speak, turning to touch. This is no way for a day to begin; nor, really, for anything else to begin, but like it or not there is death lurking, life’s great big vanishing question mark. Might as well see what’s to be made of it. Buck up and face it since, one way and another, everyone must.
Today death is rolling into the lives of Nora, Sophie and Beth, and it won’t be long before the entertaining question will arise: which of the three draws the cosmic short straw, who wakens amiably beside Philip Lawrence and is hurtled, unprepared, into horror and shock? What does she do? How does she tell the others—oh, many questions to spark the tongues of the villagers; those villagers, Nora has lately come to feel, who might in another country, another century, have gathered up torches to carry to the house on the hill, intending to punish, and with any luck burn.
But Nora’s imagination is in morbid overdrive anyway, since she is, in fact, the one who draws the short straw. It’s Nora who feels consciousness creeping back an hour or so after the dawn. Who is cooled by air conditioning, not by death. Who rolls onto her back and stretches her legs and curls her plump arms over her head, feeling the exhilarating blood warming her arteries and her veins. Who begins ticking off in her mind the anticipated events of the day ahead, and who finally turns to Philip, her husband (and wouldn’t the villagers be disappointed to know it’s Nora respectably beside him at this unrespectable moment?), and sees him smiling a strange, drawn, pale smile.
A rictus, as it turns out. Nora does not understand this right away. Most people don’t absorb new information quite that swiftly. She thinks he is having a dream. Even a pleasant dream, considering the strange smile.
There’s much to be done, though, no time to waste waiting for dreams, however pleasant, to run their generally unmemorable course; and so she says, softly but cheerfully, intending to give an optimistic bounce to the start of the day, “Philip, wake up, time to get going.” Their plans are to drive to the city a couple of hours away and meet up with Max for lunch and a discussion of a show of her work within the next year or so. Max, who owns a gallery and has represented her for almost two decades, only a few days longer than she’s known Philip, wants to set tentative dates. He has also mentioned he would like to see fresh directions, as she would herself, but these things take time to begin revealing themselves, and then to sink in. So: lunch at a fine and far-away restaurant with Philip and Max, an intense but also languorous conversation with two good men on various interesting subjects—what could be a happier prospect?
Not to mention that this could be one of those exciting days in which new directions come clearer.
As it will be.
“Come on, let’s go, we’ve got lovely big plans.” Philip, an exuberant man, tends to respond to exuberance, if also, less openly and appealingly, to certain kinds of mute need. Whatever his preferences, Nora can only use the devices and charms she has. It is too late to figure out new ones.
Later than she could have imagined. Philip is not merely resisting her, content in his dream. She realizes this as her hand grips his arm, intending to shake him, although gently, beginning the day as it should be begun if it is to continue as it ought to continue. His arm is curiously unmalleable. It will not be easily shaken. It implies an absence that has not been implied before.
Nora screams. She leaps up.
She immediately regrets, not the leaping—who would not leap?—but the scream. It calls attention, it calls the others, she has lost the moment that was just hers. Drawn by the highly unusual sound of Nora screaming, Beth dashes into the bedroom doorway from one direction, her thin cotton nightie awry, and from the other direction comes Sophie still in the process of struggling into her robe, one arm caught and the material flying. Sophie sleeps naked, which it would please the villagers to know, but which does not please Nora, already thoroughly distressed and in no mood for a vision of Sophie’s large, bounding breasts, her fleshy hips, that clutch of invasive red pubic hair, particularly tasteless and bold in the circumstance.
Also, what if Philip weren’t dead, what sort of state would this be to arrive in?
“What? What?” Beth has the slight voice of a girl, insufficient
to many occasions, absurd and offensive in this one. Sophie’s tone, her “What is it, what’s wrong?” is also inappropriate. Too hearty, too ready to take action: to defend or to diagnose and then repair.
No defence possible. No repairs to be done. Diagnosis too late.
“He’s dead,” Nora says, her own voice, not quite under control, still surprised.
Well, what a mixture of voices then, a choral chaos—what is to be done? Make coffee, make tea, close the bedroom door, not in that order. Shut out the sight of Philip, dead and smiling his dreaming rictus smile, shut out his easy overnight departure, shut out the tightening of his limbs, shut out the chill.
Call his doctor. Call an ambulance. Why? Never mind, it’s what’s done. No one thinks to get dressed, except for Sophie pulling her peacock-bright robe properly around her large bounding breasts, her fleshy hips, her invasive red pubic hair; and so Beth is still in her cotton nightie, Nora still in her white panties and Philip’s blue pyjama top, all three of them in disarray when the ambulance screams up, its mechanical wail a reproach, making Nora’s already-lost scream insufficiently shocked, inadequately shocking, for the occasion.
Philip’s doctor, Ted Marlowe, pulls up in his Jetta. Here comes a police car as well, although without sirens or lights.
A man and a woman in matching dark blue rush from the ambulance up the bricked walkway, and up the four steps, and across the hardwood-floored porch to the massive front door, already opened by Nora. Between them they are wielding a stretcher of black rubber, black plastic and something like chrome. “Up there,” and Nora gestures to the staircase. “Second door on the right.” Her thighs, revealed to the daylight, are not what they once were. Neither are Sophie’s, or even Beth’s, but theirs are concealed.
Ted Marlowe touches Nora’s hand before proceeding upstairs. The cop follows. It seems necessary for the three women to wait silently at the bottom of the shiny wide staircase, listening to the mutters and shufflings, awkward movements above. Beth grasps the newel post of the banister in a pose perhaps suggestive of frailty. Sophie and Nora are sturdier, although otherwise different. There is a version of Philip’s death that some unpleasant villagers, having speculated and ruminated, perhaps with helpful hints from the ambulance attendants, Ted Marlowe, the cop, will prefer to believe, and that being so, it will become mythic, a vibrant tale large in its lurid sins and shameless combinations, its dark secrets all the darker for being played out in the deepest hours of night.
This is the story of Philip’s death those interested villagers will whisper, adding from one lip to the next various delightfully repeatable frissons: that Beth was riding him, riding him hard, while Sophie’s luxuriant breasts fell onto his lips and Nora’s sharp tongue roamed his flesh. And Philip exploded. Blew up all over them. To their shame, to their pleasure, to their just desserts.
There is nothing the three women can do about this, no quiet quibbles by those who know better, least of all them. The ambulance attendants, struggling down the stairs balancing the stretcher with its bagged burden, do not meet their eyes. The woman attendant says, “Excuse me,” so that Nora steps out of the way, taking her closer to Sophie, but that’s it. The women have nothing to say either. They’re busy staring at the bulky black zippered bag riding on the black and chrome stretcher, trying to understand that inside it is, suddenly, Philip. That he is just—gone. Heavens, is what Beth is thinking. Sweet Jesus, no, are the words in Sophie’s head. Nora has had an instant longer to redirect her perspectives, and so as that household emperor, that domestic paladin Philip is borne out the door, down the steps, down the walk, and is slid, not without jostling, into the back of the ambulance, and is driven slowly downhill towards disapproving or sorrowful or envying myth, Nora is thinking, Now what? Not unsentimentally, not at all without grief and grave shock, but nevertheless: now what?
Two
How disappointingly undramatic the actual facts of Philip Lawrence’s last wakeful hours are. There was no great abandon. No one was naked or even especially active. The four of them gathered around the Philip-built coffee table in the living room, where they played two peaceable games of Scrabble. Nora and Sophie shared a bottle of wine, Beth had one of her teas, Philip a couple of after-dinner bottles of beer. Philip won one game, Sophie the other, and Nora rang up third place both times. As usual Beth had the lowest scores—she doesn’t seem to know many words—but she never appears to mind losing, at Scrabble anyway. Then Nora and Philip went off to bed, an early night in advance of today’s busy schedule. “Wake me up in good time,” Philip said. Sadly unimpressive last words.
“I will. Goodnight.” Those, too. Nora likes to sleep on her side. She turned away while he adjusted his pillow, making himself comfortable to sleep, as he generally did, on his back. Presumably Sophie and Beth headed off shortly, one this way, one that, to their own rooms, and the house fell silent, until Nora woke up and leaped up and screamed.
How untitillating. Nevertheless, “I’m scared,” says Beth.
But Beth too often trades on delicacy, which over time and in close quarters creates a hardening of response. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, why?” Sophie snaps, and the hostility diverts them slightly from bewilderment, from loss, from the fact of Philip being gone, not out to clear his head or his temper with a brisk march down the road, not off fishing by the riverbank for a few hours, not out for a drink “away from all you women,” as he put it on days he was refusing to recognize the sum of his blessings, but—gone.
How can this be?
“Well, because, all that,” Beth says, waving a languid arm. “Everybody out there. Everything.”
“Don’t be sillier than you have to be, Beth. This is no time to be stupid.”
Beth has a point, though. If lurid tales amuse one faction of the local populace, there’s also that opposing, dangerous, lightning-strike extremity to take into account.
Is it fair to cast those villagers, as these days Nora does, as drooling, gap-toothed, hunched, lopsided, moronic? As in Frankenstein (the movie, that is, the zesty, wild-haired original), with destruction on their lips, bloodlust in their hearts, torches and pitchforks in their upraised hands?
No. And yes.
This is not Frankenstein country. Nor for that matter is it an inbred backwoods, although no doubt it contains its representative share of sins of that sort. This is not even a village, but an unamazing town of merchants, retired farmers and shopkeepers, young families. It even has a few minor industries. Its public institutions include an elementary and a high school, a hospital and a very old, stone, public library. Besides stone, the town’s primary building materials are brick and wood, here and there covered by more efficient and recent aluminum or vinyl siding. There are lawns and gardens and trees, and for the most part streets go directly from one edge of town to another. It is a simple matter to keep going on one of those roads all the way to the very large city a couple of hundred kilometres away for a night or a weekend, a trip to the theatre, the museum, a decent hotel. Some people do this often. Nora and Philip were planning to go there this very day.
Nor is the house itself foreboding. It’s on more of a knoll than an actual hill, for one thing, and not in the isolated country but only on the outskirts of town. It has no turrets or dungeons or even secret panels to secret rooms. True, it is large, and more than a century old, and set apart from its nearest neighbours by hedges and fences and a gate and a small acreage of lawn gone more to seed and weed than when Nora and Philip moved in; but nothing about its sprawled brick two-storeyness, its gingerbreaded front porch, its farmhouse-style rectangular windows, its small cement iron-railed back stoop, and far across the backyard its unattractively utilitarian, steel-clad workshop-that-once-was-a-small-barn, suggests evil afoot.
And evil is not afoot, never has been. Ask Sophie, for one, what evil looks like, and her answer will have nothing to do with this house or even this town.
I’m scared? Beth doesn’t get out enough. Or at all, really. Nora ei
ther. Only Sophie and Philip have stayed in close touch with the town, Sophie because she is paid to deal with the outside world, Philip because, maddeningly, he insisted on actually liking the place.
At least it’s diverting of Sophie and Beth to have squared off in a small quarrel. It’s also irritating. Their voices grate on exposed, wired nerves. “Please, both of you,” Nora snaps. “Have some respect,” although respect is not quite what is required. And, “This doesn’t help,” although she understands that it does. And, “We have to calm down, there are things to be done,” although there aren’t, really. Not right away. Basically Philip, and problems and tasks associated with Philip, are in others’ competent, professional hands. What is left for Nora, Beth and Sophie to do right this second? Wail, mourn, grieve, rend their garments and howl?
They are not, any of them, wailing, rending, howling sorts of women. “Okay,” Sophie says, turning from Beth, annoyance suddenly vanished—such an actor she is, maybe a hoaxter. “Maybe we ought to get dressed.”
But if Beth removes her light cotton nightie, with what does she suitably replace it today? Sophie’s garish robe is clearly inappropriate, but then what? Nora’s white panties have only been worn overnight, but Philip’s pale blue pyjama top—she is going about barely covered by something that belongs to a dead man! An amazing, stupendous, unbelievable notion: Philip is dead! Not possible.
At least get his pyjama top off.
Upstairs there are smudges on the hardwood floor of Philip and Nora’s bedroom, and the sheets are tossed about. It is suddenly an unbearable room. Nora focuses on the closet, the drawers, finding something to put on, flinging her nightclothes aside. When she and Sophie and Beth arrive back in the kitchen, they find they have each, without consulting, gone traditional: all three in black blouses, black pants, a trio of crows. They will roast outdoors on this hot August day, though indoors they’re fine. The air conditioning hums as if nothing has happened, immune as all machinery to human event, and a very good thing that is, since otherwise how could they brew up more coffee, how could Beth, who shuns coffee as poisonous in the long haul, boil the water for the elaborate preparations of another of her elaborate teas?