By then he had resolved to send Mrs. Kilgour flowers. As he read his morning newspaper at the White Lunch and waited for Hazel, he wondered where he could find Lilies of the Valley. Appropriately Victorian, he thought, and stored up the phrase to tell Hazel when she arrived. She laughed when he said it to her, and rolled her eyes and repeated in a delicately sarcastic way Liam took credit for, “appropriately Victorian.” Together they went to a flower shop that Hazel knew—so few in the city, she said, recognizing that it was something to disdain—and he wrote a short note and Hazel asked the florist to add some appropriately Victorian ferns to the arrangement, and they had it all sent to the Castle. Liam felt good afterward, and though it was far more expensive than he liked, he still treated Hazel to lunch at a little café called Moderne. She was a good girl, anyway, and he could rely on her to order from the cheapest part of the menu. He did not like that he was thankful to her for that little economy. He wanted to be generous. He would have liked to treat her to other things, buy her the little presents that one should give a mistress.
Initially he had not known how to refer to her. He had carefully avoided the issue as too awkward to discuss, but then one evening he had picked up the bill at the Commodore Ballroom for Hazel’s whiskey sour and she had offered him money and he had smiled and said, “I must surrender something for the pleasure of your company. A man must keep his mistress happy, and money is such a little thing.” He had bitten his tongue then, and there had been a moment of silence that could have been awkward, but then Hazel had fluttered in a way that reminded him of a dreadful film he had seen, once, about debutantes. After that, she had regularly referred to herself as his mistress. When he first heard her repeat it, he thought she liked the little frisson of bohemia, but later he worried that she saw some affectation in the word and teased him with it. He was not sure, though, because just when he suspected her of subtle derision, she’d change so quickly, wilt in his arms and smile a dewy, girlish smile, and he could not believe her capable of such sharp wit.
Having sent Mrs. Kilgour the Lilies of the Valley and the note, he did not think any further about her. That evening he and Hazel were caught in the rain and found a chop suey place east of Main Street. Every time Hazel went east of Main she made the same joke: “Really, Liam,” she said, “east of Main? Nice girls aren’t allowed over there. That’s where the White Slavers work!” She’d say it and then she’d take his arm and walk east as though flouting a particularly bourgeois convention, an appropriately Victorian anxiety regarding the virtue of unaccompanied white women. After they’d eaten, Hazel brought out her little pack of Sweet Caporals—the same one she’d had last week, he guessed, it did not look depleted—and held one to her lips, waiting conspicuously for him to light it. She’d probably been to the movies again, he thought, as he brought out his lighter and watched her dribble smoke out her mouth. In other circumstances, he would find this sort of behaviour irritating, and tell her to cut out the little games, but watching the cigarette burn down to her fingertips, he felt something else in his breast, something warm and sticky that made him look on her with nothing but affection.
The next morning, he had asked Hazel to meet him at the little pastry shop, Bon Ton, for breakfast. He was badly overspending on the girl, but economy, he thought, required a certain narrowness of spirit. While he knew in a vague way that he would soon regret the coins that slid out of his pockets, he could not stand the smallness, the pettiness of those thoughts. The girl was hungry for fine things, as he had been, and he felt charity in his heart when he watched her smoke her cigarettes, and feel her way around words like bourgeois and convention, and learn to deride the city that had quite recently seemed adequate to her adolescent desires. He cultivated her natural good taste, and taught her to be embarrassed that her mother liked to sing “With My Little Ukulele in My Hand” around the house, and listen to Gracie Fields on the radio, and repeat antique witticisms familiar to Liam’s own mother: My face I don’t mind it because I’m behind it it’s those in the front that I jar. He suggested Caruso’s more accessible recordings, and bought her a selected Keats. All this was absorbing work, but expensive. He would approach Mrs. Kilgour when she had recovered, and then there would be a little more money. He decided that he would make Hazel known to the old woman. Mrs Kilgour liked protégés. Perhaps she needed a secretary. Hazel would make such a pretty secretary.
He walked six blocks to Bon Ton and arrived early, taking a morning paper on the way. It was one of those unusual November mornings that felt spring-like, rather than autumnal: the air was soft, and the sun shone on the remaining leaves, yellow rather than green, but still bright. His lungs were clear. He had slept well. Soon he would see Hazel, then kiss her, then lead her back to Mrs. Qualey’s, where they would slip upstairs for an hour or two. He sat down at one of the little tables, and turned to the social column.
Mrs. Kilgour was dead. If he had known she was so ill, he would have gone to see her sooner—braved the dark eaves of Craiglockhart and knelt at her bedside. He could have sung her a song, one of the Scottish ballads she always liked, “Will Ye No Come Back Again” perhaps, and held her hand, and she would have been happy to see him, if she could not see Clive. He thought he would have done those things, and more, if he had known her illness was so final. There would have been more flowers, too.
He did not permit himself to think about the change this would make to his plans. At least, not until he had properly lamented the lonely old woman locked up in the Castle. He thought he had seen her at a kind of peak, before the Edwardian idyll of Craiglockhart faded along, with everything else bright and hopeful, aging centuries in a year or two. Mrs. Kilgour shipwrecked in the present with her prima donna gowns and her ostrich feathers and her benevolent societies, her Great House, her nouveau riche noblesse oblige.
Then Hazel arrived, walking smartly into the patisserie and removing her hat, shaking out her hair in a gesture that looked familiar. Perhaps this one was Bette Davis. Hazel often talked about how much she loved Bette Davis, and held her up as a model for unconventional elegance.
Liam pulled out a cigarette. “I’m afraid there’s some rather bad news,” he said.
The funeral service was at a largish stone cathedral downtown, one of the older C of E churches in the city, though to Liam, Mrs. Kilgour had always seemed oppressively Kirkish. Liam had timed his arrival so the pews would be full, and with the latecomers he found a place at the back, near one of the stone pillars. He found he did not mind sitting far from the centre of things; her whole clan was present, including a much older, fatter Goshawk.
After the service, he lingered for a while on the steps outside, standing in the thin sunshine and watching all the dowdy-genteel families trickle out of the cathedral. He meant to speak with Goshawk, but then Euphemia and Nora were there, Euphemia dressed like an American, Nora still virtuously plain. They did not look in his direction, though at one time he’d flirted with Euphemia and she had liked it. Well, he had changed. They wouldn’t know what to do with him.
Goshawk was hurrying people into cars, and Liam watched him walk up and down the pavement in the thinning crowd, pointing, directing, fussing. He thought about how Goshawk had made such a peculiar but comfortable life for himself here at the end of the world. It was good to be without ambition, Liam thought, and resigned to the small tasks that suited one’s talents. Goshawk was a success in a way he had not previously recognized, even with his thickening waist and his thinning hair.
He was so preoccupied with this line of thought, he failed to notice that Goshawk had tidied his charges into their cars and now stood on the pavement nearly alone. The man stopped for a moment, and had just taken a cigarette case out of his pocket when he raised his eyes and stared straight at Liam.
Inadvertently, Liam held his breath, wondering if Goshawk would know him, and thinking he couldn’t possibly. But then he was on the steps, holding the case out toward him, and Liam was nodding and had taken a cigarette, and the
y were smoking together in the pale sunshine of Mrs. Kilgour’s funeral afternoon.
“She was touched by the flowers, you’ll like to know. She regretted that she was unable to issue an invitation, but visits were exhausting in that last week.”
“I wanted to send something.”
“It is good to see you, Liam. I always thought you would have done well here if you had stayed. We would have seen you to a place somewhere. A school perhaps.”
“Yes.”
“I saw your engagement advertised. I meant to attend, but with Mrs.
Kilgour in the state she was in … Would you come to the house today?
I’m sure Nora would like to see you again.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean to impose at all.”
“It is a good time to share our grief. You’d be welcome. You could sing her a song.”
That was just the wrong thing to say. Liam dropped the cigarette and said no as he ground it into the pavement. “I only wanted to say goodbye in the service,” and as he turned to leave, Goshawk asked him where he was staying. Before he could think, Liam mentioned Mrs. Qualey’s. Perhaps Goshawk knew the place, with the corned beef and the damp walls. As he walked away, he wished he’d lied.
THE TEMPLE
A few days later, he was glad he hadn’t lied, because a large buff envelope arrived for him at Mrs. Qualey’s. Liam had already outstayed his engagement at the Temple by nearly two weeks when Mrs. Kilgour died. Distracted by Hazel, then by the change to his plans, he was unsure what to do next. His only other commitment that season was a week’s worth of evenings in Alberta where he had an ongoing relationship with the ladies who organized Palm Court recitals each Christmas in Edmonton and Calgary. Until then he was a free, albeit poor man.
He thought about Hazel and the future as he sat by the stove in Mrs. Qualey’s front room. He opened the large envelope to see a copy of Mrs. Kilgour’s will and a letter in Goshawk’s fussy blue hand: It is in confidence that I send you both this letter and the document. I only hope that they reach you before you leave the city again. You will see that Mrs.Kilgour remembered you even at the end of her life. While her estate is still a little tangled in the lawyer’s probate, it is my feeling that we may be able to do something about your particular bequest. There was an address as well, and the hours he kept, and a suggestion that the following afternoon would be suitable.
The next morning Liam did not see Hazel. She stayed dutifully at home with her mother and sister writing letters to possible employers. It was just as well. At noon Liam cleaned his shoes, and at half past he dressed carefully in his best. He left at one for Goshawk’s office, so early that he sat for half an hour on a park bench. He tried not to think about how quickly the will would be executed. Whether he would have the money within a month. Whether it would be next year. How much longer he could stand to wait.
When he thought the hour was no longer too eager, he left the park bench and climbed the stairs to Goshawk’s office and knocked. The door opened. He was shown through to another office, where Goshawk nodded and said, “Please sit down, Liam. It’s good to see you again.”
When he walked home late that afternoon, he hardly felt the pavement beneath his feet, or the thin place in his coat where the damp penetrated to his skin. It was fifteen blocks from the lawyers’ offices to Mrs. Qualey’s, and the meeting had finished at three that afternoon. Including a profligate stop at a department store—not the cheap place Hazel liked, but one a little superior, right downtown—for things he had previously economized on, like socks and underwear, he walked slowly toward the Temple Theatre on his way home. There were no matinees that day, and the evening shows hadn’t begun, so the scruffy men in work boots still used the auditorium for one of their very large meetings. On his last day there, the stage manager told Liam they were having more meetings every week, and that more shabby men were attending, and he did not like the crowds, as they didn’t tend to stay for matinees, to but to slink off somewhere, most likely to other meetings. If that kept up, he wouldn’t allow it anymore.
Liam was so distracted by the thought of his annuity, he didn’t notice the unusual crowd: the men in heavy boots and caps had spilled out of the lobby and into the street so he had to shoulder through them. As he did so, he thought of the next weeks: no more begging for work, or writing hat-in-hand letters to his Toronto agent. He needn’t worry, now, not when he had that annuity. That had been the sound of respectability to him, as a young man. He remembered looking at the advertisements in an Officer’s Field Service pocketbook, and reading the list of banking services as though it were a psalm: club subscriptions paid, periodicals attended to; allowances credited (and customer advised); half-pay and pensions of every description collected and credited to customers’ accounts. To be advised that one’s allowance had been received and one’s club subscription(s) had been attended to—it had the quality of a fairy tale.
Now, thanks to his gentlemanly instincts and his way with the ladies, he was pretty near a real gentleman. There was justice in that, as well as a generosity he had not expected from the universe, as though someone had, all along, been watching him, and on weighing his sacrifices had determined his reward, then written a cheque for services rendered.
He must have been smiling, because as he wound through the crowd, the men in work boots smiled back at him, and some shook their heads, but he did not care because their elbows were not akimbo and they did not make him walk in the gutter. It was when he realized how crowded the street had become that he stopped for a moment under the Temple’s sign. He was standing beside one man he knew—the man he had spoken to on his first afternoon, before that evening performance when he had seen Hazel.
“Liam Manley, Sweet Singer of Sweet Songs!” the man said. “Have you come to join us?”
“Join you?” he asked.
“We could use your voice.” The man smiled at Liam, “They’ll hear us pretty near across the whole country!”
“Where are you marching?” Liam asked. “What should I sing?”
The man was laughing. He said, “Whatever you want, Mr. Manley, but I’ve always liked that old song ‘The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.’ Do you know it?”
Liam nodded and hummed in his best, clearest voice, dear one the world is waiting for the sunrise ev’ry rose is covered with dew. The other man was about to say more, Liam thought, or perhaps he would join in and they would sing the whole song right there on the pavement, and then begin marching to it (though it was a bad song for marching; they would have to foxtrot to city hall, or wherever it was the man wanted to go) and Liam’s voice above them all.
It was just five o’clock in the afternoon when Liam looked over his new friend’s right shoulder toward the Temple’s front doors—thick crystal with copper vine patterns and pointed arches like the Alhambra—and watched the glass leap out of the door frame and into the street. The glass on either side of the doors erupted as well, and as Liam watched, it hung in the air for a moment in a perfect half-circle around the frames, blown outward like a bubble. The men who stood directly before the doors dropped to the ground, their hands thrown across their heads, and a white glitter settled over their coats and the wet pavement.
Liam knew there was shouting around him, but did not know what was said. He was aware only of the oppressive noise and the pain in his head that was not the sharp pain of flying glass but the dull kind, and of the weight in his guts and the sweat that ran down his spine and under his arms. Then he was walking quickly away toward Mrs. Qualey’s Boarding House, brushing at his sleeves and shoulders, for there might be glass in his coat. The noise followed him: a deep, tuneless ringing that reverberated through his skull but did not dissipate. He had heard ringing like that before, many times before.
The foyer was blessedly empty, and he climbed the stairs to his room and sat in the hard little chair beside the fireplace. After an hour, he remembered that Hazel was to join him in celebrations that evening and stay the whole night. Sh
e had already arranged an alibi, having shown an unnerving aptitude for deception: she liked to talk about how dull and trustful her mother was, and how bourgeois expectations made her too easy to deceive. He was to meet her at eight at the library, and they were to go to the movies until between nine-thirty and ten, when they would slip back to Mrs. Qualey’s house, their arrival coinciding with Mrs. Qualey’s favourite radio program and glass of port and ginger ale. Hazel enjoyed planning their assignation, especially when she learned that Mrs. Qualey forbade overnight guests, and doubly forbade unmarried overnight guests. Mrs. Qualey was, therefore, both bourgeois and Victorian, and ought to be deceived just as Hazel’s mother was.
When it was suppertime, he preferred not to join the other guests at Mrs. Qualey’s table. Instead he took the time to bathe in the bathroom off the kitchen. That made him feel he could face the rest of the evening, even if the ringing in his ears did not subside. He should not pay any attention to the ringing. Instead he should think about the annuity, and Hazel and the night ahead.
He put his mind to shaving, taking time to strop his razor and turning his whole attention to the careful negotiation of his lip and nose, the fine skin of his throat. When he had finished, he felt better, and turned that single-minded attention to his hair, then his tie. By the time he was respectable—he did not look at all like the kind of man who would be at those sorts of meetings in the lobby of the Temple Theatre, he hoped—he was prepared to enjoy Hazel’s company.
The Paradise Engine Page 20