The Paradise Engine

by Rebecca Campbell

  He left the bathroom, passing close by the dining room and smelling corned beef, onions and cabbage, and the gluey custard Mrs. Qualey favoured for her horrible Ritz cracker pies. He had almost escaped, when he thought he heard someone mention a theatre, and an explosion. He was not sure, but he thought he heard “Temple” and “bomb” and “a dozen or so killed.” He did not think anyone had been killed. They were all fools if they thought someone had been killed. He did not like the men and women at Mrs. Qualey’s. They were of low calibre and unpleasant.

  He had intended to leave directly he had finished his toilette, but instead he found he must return to his room. He took the hard little chair again and sat very still for twenty-five minutes beside the little fireplace that never held a flame. He set a hand on either knee and stared at the green pattern on the pink carpet. He stared at it with such attention that finally he could, again, look forward to seeing Hazel.

  He was half an hour late at the library, where she was waiting. Waiting conspicuously, he thought, with her arms crossed, and her foot tapping occasionally. Before he had even reached her, he heard her sigh.

  “Liam!” she said. “Liam, darling, what time is it?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s about half past eight.”

  “Oh, half past? Is it? But I thought we were supposed to meet at eight. But it’s half past now?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, half past. I was detained.”

  “By what?”

  “Business.”

  “At the lawyer’s?”

  “No.”

  They walked on in silence.

  “If it was the lawyer’s I would understand.”

  He said nothing. He wished she would be silent.

  “I heard some bad news today. I heard that there was some business at the Temple. Those men you were talking about, I guess. They were trying to hold some meeting. Probably something horrible—men like that always get so excited about things, and make so much noise it’s hard to take them seriously.”

  As she spoke, Liam recognized the sentiment because it was his own. He had said that to her one evening when he had wished to entertain her with his sophisticated commentary on world events: about how those revolutionaries would never be taken seriously with their loud voices and their constant complaint, because sensible people would only listen if they’d calm down. Hazel was still talking, though, and he should listen, but he would prefer not to listen, and so he was silent, and as they walked he concentrated on the people they passed and the lighted windows that lined the sidewalk.

  She was still talking. “Can we walk past it? I’ve never seen a bomb site!”

  “I would prefer not,” Liam said.

  “Darling! Don’t make me coax!” she said.

  Definitely a Bette Davis day, he thought. He should forbid her from seeing Bette Davis films; they made her insufferable. Liam did not respond to her last little comment. They were nearly at the theatre, and Liam knew he should change the subject and turn her derisive little laughs in some safe direction, away from the glitter of broken glass. He should turn her attention to the people they were passing, or the film they might choose to see. Or the annuity. “We had the meeting. With the lawyers,” he said, hoping to distract her.

  “But why can’t we walk past the Temple?” she asked again, and tugged his arm in that direction, where he did not wish to look, the street down which he did not wish to walk.

  “We had the meeting,” he said.

  She nodded sulkily, her bottom lip pushed out in a parody of Hollywood petulance. Shirley Temple?

  “About an annuity.”

  “An annuity? What’s that?”

  “A yearly stipend. A regular income from the Kilgour estate.”

  “Oh! Liam!” Hazel said, clinging to his arm and forgetting her out-thrust bottom lip. “Oh, how tremendous! How really, really lovely!”

  Having turned her attention from the carnage at the Temple, Liam relaxed as well.

  Liam’s second visit to Duncan’s Crossing was at Mrs. Kilgour’s request; he was to perform a concert in partial fulfilment of the will’s stipulations. Liam didn’t recognize the town’s name at first. He was reading his newspaper and imagining his trip south to dry air and heat, first California then Mexico, when they called his stop. It was only another of those red-painted stations, and they all looked alike. Out on the street, he again felt a familiarity: there was the hall where they had sung, and where he would sing again tomorrow night.

  It was too fine a joke to keep to himself. He wished he knew someone in town, someone he could take to dinner, and make a story of his strange relationship with Mrs. Kilgour, and reveal the amusing circumstances of his return to this little town. He would enjoy being generous. He could afford to be. They would eat roast beef, and he would stand the man cigars, if he knew someone, the best the town offered.

  There had been someone: Simon Reid. He had a kind of estate in the country, but he had been unusual in ways Liam had not liked. Reid was still stuck on the war, though in 1921 it was understandable that some people still should be. They had talked about survival. And being European. He would enquire in town, see if he could surprise the old man, treat him to a dinner, repaying the lunch with interest all these years later. He would even put it like that, when he phoned Reid; he would speak as though they had only parted last week. It was the sort of thing that would make a good story for the old man to tell, so dramatic and unexpected.

  The Tzhouhalem Inn had changed in the years since he had last been through. Though the heavy fir-wood staircase still ran four-square up the walls of the foyer, now the carpet was worn and the newel post was dusty. A man slept in a hard wooden armchair beside the front desk. A huge moose head hung over the pocket doors to the hotel’s drawing room. The manager—for the man could only be a manager—wore grubby tweeds, drenched in November sunlight so late it seemed almost amber.

  “Hello?” Liam called. He did not like to ring the bell. “Hello,” he said again, softly.

  The man in the tweeds woke and blinked. His eyes were pale and lashless in baggy-skinned sockets. “Yes?” he asked. “Yes?”

  “Hello, my name is Manley. I’ve got a reservation.”

  “Yes? Yes?” The old man hauled himself from his chair and to the desk, where he stood over the ledger. His mouth hung open with a white crust at one corner. “Yes,” he said. “Manley, did you say? Yes.”

  “Manley,” Liam said again, “Liam Manley.”

  The man fumbled over the pages of the ledger and Liam wished to reach out and turn them himself, run one finger down the column and help himself to a key. He did not. He kept his eyes on the bell, his hands behind his back while the man continued, “Yes, yes. Manley did you say?”

  He found the key, and there was the trouble of his bag. “I will ring for the boy,” he said and rang the bell. Then he rang it again. Now the man was close enough that Liam could smell him—greasy soup and elderly sweat and tobacco. They did not speak until the old man made a move to take Liam’s valise.

  “No sir,” Liam said, “I need the exercise. I will carry it myself.”

  “Oh no! Oh no, you will not! You will not carry it—”

  But Liam already gripped the dark handle of his valise, and together they climbed the dusty stairs. Liam matched his pace to the old man’s, who dropped the key into his waistcoat pocket and patted it, and checked the number, once, twice. At the door there was a moment of panic as he felt through his pockets; then he had it in his hand, but the lock stuck. Then, at last, they were in the room, and the old man opened the blinds and rattled the pipes for heat.

  When he was finally alone, Liam sat on the bed and listened to the hotel, the whole town, that sounded like it would always be five o’clock on Sunday. The November afternoon ticked away with the quality of the dreams one has when one sleeps during the day, so still, so long each moment.

  He would go down and ask about Reid. He would put in a telephone call and invite Reid to lunc
h and share the good news. It would be a fine joke. He would toast Mrs. Kilgour in whiskey and water, the old teetotaller, the old harpy. He would share this unexpected bounty as he had done with Hazel two nights before, their last night when he had been very kind and taken her to dinner in the city’s CPR hotel, a huge and appropriately Victorian edifice..

  For a moment he had a pain behind his ribs. He wondered if he ought to sit down. It was like the pain he felt when he could not breathe, and he hoped it was not the first sign of an episode. What was Hazel doing, just then? Was she working at the café, wiping tables with a dirty rag, or sitting with her mother, or had she gone for one of her walks along the beach to watch her own lights from across the bay? The question had hung there for a moment, between them, but when it came properly to the surface he had stopped, shocked by his own inclination to ask, not because he felt he ought to, but that he wanted to. For once, no Bette Davis affectations, her eyes were rabbity and pale and so still.

  She had found a job, she told him, at a café. A waitress. And she had said, “I don’t know if I will take it,” and looked at him. She had looked so intently at him, he wondered if she felt the question, too, but he did not think she did. He had been holding her hands on the table, and then the waiter had come with wine and his eyes broke with hers and then he had slid his hands away. She had a tiny glass like a thimble and ordered chicken. He had steak au poivre. Afterward they each had crème brûlée and he showed her to break it and that had made her smile.

  “So I shall be going to warmer places, south of here,” he said, lighting his cigarette, “when I have fulfilled Mrs. Kilgour’s wishes.”

  And he did not wish to remember further. The pain behind his ribs seemed a sympathetic ache, delivered in her remembered glance. So while he had forgotten her quite quickly in his journey north, she returned to him, not in mind but in body. Something in him remembered her, and held embedded within some hook and long slim line that followed all the distance he had travelled, yet only now made itself known by the little tear it left.

  He had been particularly careful to seem calm, because the last weeks had been full of such agitation: the meetings with the lawyers, the letters to and from ladies’ arts clubs along the coast. He had rushed to fulfill the will’s requirements and claim his annuity, which meant the recitals would be badly attended and poorly advertised, he was sure. He did not mind that. He was in a state of feverish energy that would not let him rest, and filled what sleep he did have with dreams he did not like. He wanted to be away from the city, southbound and feeling everything that had been fall away behind him, beyond the curve of the earth. The will had not stipulated a performance at the Temple, and though he would not have minded performing there if it had been necessary, he was glad he did not need to. He went so far as to tell Hazel he hated the theatre, and he did not think he could stand to set foot there again. Once on his way back from the post office he had accidentally glanced down the street and saw that the doors and windows were boarded up and the pavement swept clean. He wondered where the radicals met now. He hoped the theatre would be properly condemned, then demolished and replaced with something useful: an apartment block, a department store, a movie theatre.

  He found his health improved slightly and he could sleep when he limited his attention to three points: four recitals; the annuity; south. And now there was Reid and dinner and it would be such a good joke. He changed his shirt and walked down the stairs, but quietly because he saw that the old man was asleep again under the moose head.

  He walked through the sliding doors to the lounge where other guests spoke quietly, and a dog lay in front of the low wood fire.

  “Good evening,” he said.

  Three men and three women looked up at him.

  “Hello,” one man said. “A new guest?”

  “Yes,” he said. “My name is Manley. I wanted to introduce myself and ask after an acquaintance who lived in this neighbourhood.”

  They relaxed. The women returned to three-handed bridge. The man who spoke nodded and said, “Of course, sir. You should sit down. And about whom did you wish to enquire,” asked one of the other men, who sat on a low chair close to the coals, a heavy shawl around his shoulders and the dog—grey whiskered, hollow-eyed—sleeping on his feet.

  “His name was Reid,” Liam said. “He kept a kind of home place not far from here.”

  He heard a noise like fluttering leaves and the cooing of distant pigeons. A soft, anxious murmur above the snap of cards played, drawn, cast and swept over felt.

  The man who had spoken first addressed him: “Reid, eh? Simon Reid? Did you know Reid quite well?” There was a slight stress on “quite,” and no title. Reid, he was Reid here.

  “No. Not at all,” Liam said. “I hardly knew him.”

  “Yes. My name is Henry, by the way.” He reached out his knuckly right hand. The bones closed hard and dry around Liam’s fingers.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Henry.” Liam did not ask further. “Pleased,” he said again.

  “Yes, well, if you’re a friend of Reid’s, I’m not sure.”

  “I only met him once. He wanted me to join a kind of village. A model village he was building. This was ages and ages ago.”

  “Just after the war?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Yes, well. Not quite a model village.”

  “Not at all,” whistled the man with the dog at his feet.

  The third man said nothing.

  Liam looked up to see the women watching him as they passed their cards. One stared at him with the shiny black eyes of a crow. She looked down after a moment, addressing her hand. Her expression did not change. He thought she would bluff well.

  “Not a model village, then? He talked about, about Apollo,” Liam finished confusedly. So much trouble for one silly plan, what had he thought? To show up one man, to make a good story, to be for a moment original, and now this wheezing tea party sat about him, ruffling and settling their feathers, and he did not know where to look or what it meant.

  “If you wish to hear about your great friend Reid, you had better sit down, Mr. Manley.” Mr. Henry looked to the card players. “Alright there, ladies?”

  “Yes, of course, Archie. I, at least, am not so sensitive after a month.”

  Liam could not imagine that crow-eyed woman was ever particularly sensitive.

  Mr. Henry continued, “Reid has built a village, though there won’t be much left of it now. It’s quite empty now, I imagine.”

  “There’s Mickey Sweeney. The American.”

  “Michael was hardly one of them. I imagine he’ll stay on. I imagine it’s empty otherwise.”

  “Yes, quite empty. And until recently there’d been a veritable exodus,” the card dealer said. “The roads awash in refugees.”

  “But what happened?” Liam asked, feeling again that he would like to take the conversation from them and shake it straight.

  “They’ve been leaving, don’t you see, his model village.” So beautifully enunciated, those last two words, such quiet, killing irony. Liam remembered when that sort of voice always brought a blush to his skin, though he had never been able to say why.

  “The first was Alice, and her child, Archie, in September.”

  “Yes, my love, I remember. Her name was Alice Somers. She carried the child until she found a house with lights on. It was cold that night. Very wet.”

  “I heard she was barefoot. I heard her feet bled.”

  “The Borgersons took her in. They had seen many odd things and were not, I think, entirely surprised. They called a doctor, but the girl and the child were both remarkably healthy. She would not speak until her parents arrived.”

  “Alice wasn’t more than eighteen. Can you imagine? Eighteen!”

  “But by the time they had come for her, others were on the roads, only a few that first day. Then there were more than I could count, all throwing themselves on the mercy of the Tzhouhalem. Can you imagine?”

  “Th
ey’re gone now. Some of them had to be collected.”

  “But what happened?” Liam asked.

  “That is a matter for the courts, Mr Manley. We know only that Simon Reid’s model village is no more. His house is in ruins and his flock is fled. He did something wicked, though we aren’t sure of its nature. Common sorts of problems, embezzling from his own charitable organization. The sort of libertine-isms that attract men of Reid’s type. But more than that, some stories of the nature of his experiment, of his ambitions to—” Henry’s patter had been easy. Now he stopped and looked away, as though brought up short by what he was about to say.

  The third man spoke, his voice like an Anglo-Canadian bishop’s: sonorous, liquid, ambiguously accented. “It seems,” he said, “that your Mr. Reid had ambitions to bring about the end of the world.”

  No one spoke. Liam swallowed and wondered how he had come to be in this room, listening to words that made so little sense.

  The man went on, “I have it on good authority—the two Greenwood brothers were fishing near the model village on the night the girl and her child appeared at the Borgersons. And they heard sounds. Remarkable sounds.”

  Henry made a noise, sub-lingual, delicate.

  “The Greenwoods are quite reliable. They called it keening. The sort of sound that makes men remember a darker age. We may attribute it to banshee, boggarts, or jinn, if we must give them names. It is the sort of sound that makes one feel a chill that rises from the soles of one’s feet and look for fire and company.”

  “Yes, well, one doesn’t like to encourage—” Mr. Henry began.

  “That was only what they heard, Archie, there’s also what they saw.” Now all three men were quiet. But too late Liam had the girl in his eye, the barefoot walking girl, carrying her child.

  “What they saw, young man”—this to Liam alone, as though the Bishop saw the girl, too, and knew that only he and Liam shared the vision—“what they saw was Reid’s house, the Manor he called it. I never saw the point of such huge places. If one wants to return to some bucolic, pre-industrial state, one ought not be quite so married to one’s architectural history. Cob houses, perhaps, if one must. But really longhouses are the only appropriate alternative for this coast. They are the autochthonous architecture of the place, after all, and worked for many generations before the smallpox. After we follow the original citizens into the west, a return to longhouses seems quite poetic.