Now much better, thank you, but unable to sleep for counting and recounting, he endured the same rain as it seeped in through the window and up through the soles of his shoes. Still in the slight grip of fever, he found this train indistinguishable from the many he had ridden in the last months, from this city to the next. Stopping his count for a moment, he reflected that his days—or his weeks, for he thought now in terms of engagements—were a handful of grubby beads. Not pearls, as he had once imagined when he was the sort of boy who aspired to apposite sentiment. Definitely cheap glass beads, probably hung round the neck of some aging tart.
He shrugged into the collar of his overcoat, resting his chin against the velvet for a moment and liking its texture, though that velvet was the other reason for his current obsession with numbers. He had paid cash for it in San Francisco (the exact price did not bear thinking), enjoying and regretting the sensations of a rich man almost in the same moment. The coat and his illness had forced an uncharacteristic fit of asceticism: he took a cheap ticket ($4.63) and nothing but a cup of tea (5¢) before this night spent sitting up, rattled like a bag of bones by every crossing. He had in his pocket seventy-four cents to see him through to his next payday. Though he could depend on a week’s credit at the hotel (which catered to theatre people), that was still only one and a half meals each day, as the establishment served the thinnest of breakfasts and no lunch. There was laundry, as well, and the occasional glass of rye. There were his shoes, which badly needed resoling. He had got so thin he did not like the way his one good suit hung from his shoulders.
He did not wish to panic, and when he felt the rising financial claustrophobia, he disciplined his mind and turned away, picking up the book he had dropped into his lap one hundred miles earlier: Caruso’s The Art of Singing, which was elementary but soothing in its familiarity. He imagined a scale that ran to the elusive C. In ascending the scale the furrow in the tongue increases as we come to the higher notes. Noiselessly he allowed the cavities of the head free play with his breath. He imagined perfecting the throb that escaped him at the top of “Ô Souverain, ô juge, ô père,” and knew he wouldn’t sing it on any of the stages he was visiting this quarter. “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” maybe, or if he was lucky “The Rose of Tralee.” In his mind, though, “Ô Souverain.”
In reality, he was careening into another wet western city, for another eleven minutes before the intermission, billed Liam Manley: Sweet Singer of Sweet Songs. In fact he’d spent the night watching whistle stops through the glass. Sometimes among the larger crowds there were legless and armless men. Blind men, half-blind men from whom he averted his eyes, though they couldn’t see him, blind as they were, hidden as he was in his car. He tried to suppress a cough.
He awoke in the tiny, yellowish room. He was not sure how he came to be there. The night before was populated by insubstantial memories of his early morning arrival. Like the previous night’s journey, these memories had the quality of dreams, so he forgot his room number but remembered the lobby’s thin carpeting, and the brass door handle under his fingers, how it was dull but for a thumb-shaped spot where a thousand hands had rubbed it bright.
He turned over and the bed squeaked. His shoes were below the steam register; his only remaining clean shirt hung above it. He got up and reached under the mattress where he had left his trousers in an attempt to re-form some sort of crease. They were appalling, but he set about picking off under-mattress lint. For a moment he regretted his belief that one could tell a gentleman by the crease in his trousers or the care he took with his shoes (he would have to get at least a shine in the next day or two). He could imagine that natural aristocracy shone through fustian (well-cut fustian, of course) but not, somehow, through cheap gabardine.
He made his way downstairs in the afternoon, counting off the meal he had missed and deducting it from his bill. In the hallway he passed another theatre man, a dancer, judging by his tight trousers and the pretentious, syncopated flourish as he took the stairs two at a time. Liam nodded as he passed and the man—he was sure of it—the man gave him a peculiar look. On the street outside he wondered whether it was something he had forgotten? Someone for whom he had been mistaken? He stopped short in the middle of the sidewalk just a block shy of the Brixton Palace Theatre, and the woman behind him said “Pardon me!” and pushed past. No, he had seen that look before. He must have been talking in his sleep, and the man had heard. Or worse, he might have been dreaming, and—he did not like it, but he must admit he had occasionally done so in the past—shouting in his sleep. The man had heard, and not knowing what to think, had dismissed him as a madman or a drunkard. He thought the man had stepped unnecessarily wide in the hall, as though Liam were someone to be avoided.
He wanted to go and find the man and explain to him. He wanted to make the point that he was not mad, just unwell. But in the past he had tried explaining, and it had left him feeling even more peculiar, and the person to whom he explained would grow very quiet, and then when he finished the silence was unpleasant.
The theatre was old, but not yet old enough to be picturesque. It was still a frontier sort of place, with raw boards in the collective dressing room and an ugly plush curtain. From the stage door he walked a narrow, cold hallway to the manager’s office, and then found his way to the stage. It was still early, before the matinee, and he sat on a scarred chair at stage left and watched all the men in shirtsleeves walk up and down the aisles after their brooms. Above them the smoke-brown walls were stencilled with crooked lozenges in brick-coloured paint.
Colonials, he thought.
Even so, the stage was deep and black and still. When the men spoke, their voices were lost in the hollow of the huge room. It was cold. His nose dripped. He smoked a cigarette and thought of rye whiskey. He thought of how he’d look incandescent and singing, and how stage lights would hide the ugly stencils and render the empty space around him a luminous dark. He allowed the cavities of the head free play.
After that it mattered less that outside the air was a clammy suspension of coal smoke, and every surface on the east side of the city bloomed with that floating particulate. The theatre was beyond all that: if he measured it, he’d find it larger inside than out. He’d find that corridors and insufficient forty-watt lighting ran for mile beyond mile on either side, emerging in other theatres, dressing rooms, stage doors.
And if he began walking along those corridors what would he find? He would find an exit somewhere among the doors that opened on other doors, a final threshold that would lead somewhere else entirely. In search of such an exit Liam had sung in dull, flickering halls from Portland to Seattle to Edmonton and back again, avoiding places where people knew a damned thing about music. Therefore condemned to places where his perfect tenor’s name and face—like Ivor Novello! Like Rudolph Valentino!—was more valuable than what was left of his voice. Liam crossed the creaking boards of all those stages, stood before frayed red velvet seats, or garish fresh velour. He clasped his hands as though crossed in hopeless love, and in every audience he knew which women smiled wetly and imagined themselves the object of his song. He always knew the ones who would wait outside the theatre for him, who would introduce themselves, and say “yes” when he asked them to take a walk. They always smelled like Quelques Fleurs.
On the morning of the fourth day of his engagement, Liam lay on the lumpy chesterfield in the hotel drawing room, breathing the sweet, whitish smoke of the magician’s pipe. The magician sat in a wingchair beside the fireplace, reading a newspaper. Liam hadn’t recognized him without his turban (which was purple silk with an enormous ruby fastener), and had only realized who it was when they’d been sitting in silence too long to be politely broken. Liam was nearly asleep, with his jaw unhinged and a bead of drool forming in the corner of his mouth. He stayed in the lobby because it was the least chilly room in the hotel, though he had never seen a fire. Instead of a fire, the grate held a fan of shiny, orange paper.
Somewhere f
ar away a door opened and closed, followed by a murmur, then footsteps fast and sharp, driven like the blows of a hammer right through the thin carpet to the floorboards. Liam opened his eyes and his heart hiccoughed. He wiped his mouth free of the drool, then he sat up quickly and the blood left his head. A voice cut through in his momentary disorientation: “Mr. Manley! I have been looking for you!”
Liam coughed. “Oh—yes?”
“Yes. Mr. Manley. It is absolutely crucial that you and I discuss the details of a great undertaking and waste no time, for your presence is imperative for our success!” The man who stood above him wore a bowler hat and carried a furled umbrella. He was immaculately dressed, his face so clean it shone.
“My. Presence?”
“But in my excitement I have pressed too quickly, and offended your sensibility, no doubt, for which I apologize. My name is Goshawk, and I am here to present you with an opportunity.” They shook hands. Goshawk’s was small and cool.
“Please sit down, Mr. Goshawk.”
“Thank you, Mr. Manley, I will! Now I feel I must speed to the heart of the matter, as there is no time to waste! You, sir, are a man of high culture and real European sensibility.”
Liam ran one hand over his hair and his fingers came away oily—a nervous habit he had long endeavoured to break. He could not wipe them in the open, though, and let his hand rest on his knee, palm up. Some men wiped them on their shirts, at the back under their jackets, but he thought that a dirty habit. A response seemed necessary, so Liam nodded.
“Are you familiar with the local benefactor, Mr. David Kilgour?”
“I have heard his name.”
“Then perhaps you’ve heard of my employer, his wife, Mrs. Leticia Kilgour. She is a woman of remarkable sensitivity who, due to the straitened conditions of her youth, never benefited from a complete education—at least, not as a young person. However, being a woman of superior character and dedication, she pressed on in the face of all obstacles. She has now determined to pursue a course of action in keeping with her early ambitions. She combines a prodigious will with a fine natural sensibility, Mr. Manley. Truly—a great woman made greater by her early difficulties.”
Here Mr. Goshawk paused to contemplate Mrs. Kilgour’s personal greatness.
Liam felt he had to ask, though he was not sure it was polite to be so direct: “What course did she wish to pursue?”
“She was gifted with a fine soprano, and through dint of effort she has improved on nature! Her goal in contacting you is threefold. First, for the simple joy of singing with one as gifted as yourself. Second, to enlist your help in support of the Arts, and arrange a tour through the west, a tour for the benefit of those not commonly exposed to the more cultivated pleasures of the European concert hall. Finally, a series of recordings.”
“Recordings?”
“Solos and some of the historical duets—the great moments in German and Italian opera that call men’s hearts to better things! My employer believes strongly in the improving nature of fine music. It is her goal that others should benefit as she did.”
“She’d like to sing duets with whom?”
“With you, sir! She is aware of your gifts, as well as the years you spent in Paris under the best masters! She wishes to work with you, sir, the aim being a performance that would present the greatest moments in the recorded catalogue.”
“I must. That is. I must think this over.” He wondered how he should ask about payment, and looked down at his hand. The slight film of hair oil was not visible, at least.
“Of course. Mr. Manley, there will be some small remuneration involved, though I do not wish to upset you with such worldly matters.”
Mr. Goshawk mentioned a sum. For a moment Liam didn’t breathe. Then he thought about new handkerchiefs and bespoke shoes.
“Well, I’d better meet your employer, then.”
Three minutes past the appointed hour, Liam brushed his coat for the second time, and adjusted his tie. In the foyer he studied the only decent mirror the hotel afforded, and with a careful ceremony placed his hat upon his head. Mrs. Kilgour’s car stood at the curb. He had seen it from his window, and when the message came, he had sent back that the driver should wait. Then he had counted to sixty before he opened the door. He left the hotel, careful not to make eye contact with the man in grey serge who stood beside the car in the rain. Liam had decided earlier that the driver should recognize him as a gentleman, and open the door. He slowed slightly, to give the fellow time to do so, looking at the silver figure—a winged woman—on the car’s hood.
“Sir,” the man said, with a lazy little tap on the brim of his hat. Liam acknowledged it with a nod he thought would be called “cool.”
Once inside, Liam relaxed a little, and examined the black leather and walnut interior with curiosity and pleasure. He had imagined quite clearly what it might be like to sit in this sort of car, though in that version of events it was his own automobile, of course, and a grey Lagonda. But this black Rolls-Royce did very well. The car passed the railway tracks and the station, the city’s low, sprawling business district, and then neat, suburban houses just going up. Neighbourhoods came and went, the lots grew larger, now fenced and gated, pointed and curlicued towers rising over the shrubberies. There were grey-green rhododendrons piled up against the stone and brick walls; there were rose gardens behind iron railings. There were black-frocked women marching children, airing babies in huge perambulators. If one had to settle at the end of the world, he thought, this might not be bad.
The car slowed and drew up to a grey stone gatehouse. The chauffeur exchanged a few words with the shirt-sleeved man who opened the gates, and they drove through a small park full of bare rose bushes, a drab little army encamped around squares of grass. He did not know whether to be impressed or horrified, especially when he saw the monster at its heart— Craiglockhart Castle—a sham baronial manor in coastal granite, squatting in the garden like an ogre, shaggy with towers, points, a cupola, and medieval arches.
After the chauffeur dawdled a moment, Liam slid out of the back seat, and approached the massive, bronze-studded doors in the porte-cochère. Using the same tactic he’d employed outside the hotel, he stalked up the steps without hesitation, and again (miraculously) the doors opened.
The hall was grand, but it lacked the texture of age that had so impressed him in the large houses he had seen in London. Stained glass (pictures of King Arthur, he thought, and knights and ladies) tinted the grey light a flattering gold. His hat and coat disappeared in the hands of a maid, and he was shown to a south-facing drawing room, decorated with pre-Raphaelite paintings of St. Cecelia, Orpheus, and the nine muses, one half of it occupied by an enormous piano. Alone and not sure where to stand, he went to the windows that overlooked the rose gardens.
He heard her footsteps first, and then her voice, “Mr. Manley!” Her accent was common Canadian, carefully refined by long vowels and a drawled “r”. Mrs. Kilgour wished to speak with elegance.
When he turned to face her, he saw a tall woman—grave and handsome, dressed in dull purple, as though in a late stage of Victorian mourning. Her chin was weak, but she countered it with a powerful jaw. Her fingers were white, thick, folded neatly when she was at rest. Her skirts hung below the ankle, but beneath them he detected enormous feet. “Sit down,” she said, “and talk to me of music!” As though no one ever did.
Five minutes later he did not like to admit that he was out of his depth. She watched him closely, and had he been a few years younger, he would have blushed under her long gazes and smiles, though she was of such an age that he could not regard it as impropriety. He had expected a coquettish denial of her ambitions, had come prepared to draw her out, press her to sing for him. This was not the case.
“I am very glad of the opportunity to labour beside you, Mr. Manley,” she said very businesslike as soon as they had properly introduced themselves. He was scandalized, though a little relieved that he would not have to flirt it out of
her.
“Mrs. Kilgour, I’m flattered, but I’m not sure why you’ve chosen me when there’s a fine opera company in town that would welcome you.” He was not sure he wanted to know how she had come to hear his name.
“But Mr. Manley, it is only a little bit of a company! And as to where I found your name, well I heard you sing once in the home of my great friend, before the war.” She mentioned a name, a place he had sung in the early spring of 1914, in a room full of conservatory roses. He had been there half the night, because after the contracted hour-long recital, the ladies had requested sentimental Scots ballads (he remembered transposing them so that he need not face the high B or even the A) and he had not known how to withdraw politely. Around midnight they dismissed him and he had gone home with his scarf wrapped twice around his throat. He had taken away a rose for his lapel, and warmed it in his bare hands so that it would not wilt in the cold of his homeward walk across the city.
She went on. “I can’t think why you take such work, Mr. Manley, and in vaudeville! When I saw your name, I thought I had been sent a gift. I remember how sweet you sang ‘My Luve is Like a Red, Red Rose.’ There are few men alive that can sing that song as sweet as my father did, and you are among them. And I thought, I’ll send for him and we will do this work together!”
“What work is that, Mrs. Kilgour?”
“Why, there are men and women up and down this coast with not a note of music in their lives! And some of them with a natural feel for it, I’m sure—but no opportunity for the God-given pleasures of the human voice raised in song. We must do something, give them wholesome food of the spirit on which to sup!” Liam found himself nodding. “We will start in the coal mines. There are good people there, who will welcome us. After that, we will see what is needed farther north, among the fishermen and the poor Indians.”
Liam shrivelled, but pressed on. “Did you have a program in mind? I imagine recital pieces?”
The Paradise Engine Page 4