Trial of Passion

by William Deverell

  A

  No, none.

  Q

  You were searching for some means whereby she could have been tied up.

  A

  Yes.

  Q

  And saw nothing.

  A

  No.

  Q

  No whips or chains. (Witness laughs.)

  A

  No.

  Q

  Out in the yard, when Professor O’Donnell asked you if this was some kind of joke, you said, “Not that I’m aware.” Why?

  A

  Well, all I knew about the complaint was from this note that had been left on my desk. Naked woman covered in lipstick, claim of assault. I thought maybe it was a practical joke.

  Q

  You never did arrest him.

  A

  He did come by that afternoon with his lawyer, and we had a clearer picture of the allegations then. And, ah, I met with my superior officer. And I charged him. And we did the fingerprints and the art.

  THE COURT:

  The art?

  WITNESS:

  Sorry, it’s an expression. Mug shots.

  MR. CLEAVER:

  A term of art, your honour. No more questions.

  THE COURT:

  Anything arising from that, Miss Blueman?

  RE-EXAMINATION BY MS. BLUEMAN

  MS. BLUEMAN:

  When you were looking about his house, did you check the fireplace?

  A

  Yes. There was ashes in it, some burnt sticks.

  Q

  Could you tell if it was a recent fire?

  A

  I never got that close to it.

  Q

  And I suppose you never thought to take a sample of the ashes —

  MR. CLEAVER:

  She’s cross-examining her own witness.

  THE COURT:

  Now, Miss Blueman —

  MS. BLUEMAN:

  Shoddy, disgusting —

  THE COURT:

  I can’t hear you.

  MS. BLUEMAN:

  Never mind, I’m through with this witness.

  MR. CLEAVER:

  Perhaps we should take a Valium break, your honour.

  THE COURT:

  Fifteen minutes.

  After my photograph and interview appear in the Island Echo (“Mr. Arthur Beauchamp, Q.C., a former colourful lawyer, pictured here on his dock”), several of my shy fellow islanders begin emerging from their dens: neighbours with gifts of homemade bread and pickles.

  So it appears I am being finally accepted as a permanent. (Lower in class are the weekenders. The lowest and most contemptible class is that of the mere visitor.) Like my fellow permanents, I have developed a complacent scorn for the spiritually impoverished inmates of the city. These are men who must daily adorn themselves with that floppily hanging wedge of decorative cloth known as a tie. These are women who daily must put uncomfortable shoes on their feet. They must all enter small, rectangular spaces known as offices and remain there however pleasant the day.

  But prisoners are allowed weekend passes, and on this breezy Saturday in May as I mingle with my fellow Garibaldians, we see them, our friends and kin, furiously waving at us from aboard the ferry churning towards the dock. The vessel finally jolts to a shuddering stop and a swarm of cyclists pours over the ramp and begins pumping up the hill — young men and women in multicoloured garb that clings obscenely like an outer skin. I, in drab contrast, am in my garden grubs; a John Deere cap is perched cockily on my head. Ah, yes, I am melding into the community, and proudly wear its uniform.

  Now debouch the foot passengers. Advancing towards me are Nicholas Braid, mutual-funds specialist; wife, Deborah, educator, and eight-year-old Nick, Jr., looking grumpy.

  Deborah hugs me furiously. Her husband grasps my hand and Nicky stares up at me with eyes already laden with the boredom he is about to endure. No television, no computer games.

  “Wasn’t easy to get away from the pits for a weekend,” says Nicholas. “Going nuts. They made me manager of a new fund. Resources, oil and minerals. Neck’s in a noose if I don’t get it up twenty points in a bull year.” His staccato half-sentences tend to lack pronouns.

  “Oh, please change the subject, darling,” says Deborah. “It’s quite boring. Dad hasn’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. He saves his money under a mattress.”

  “Better off leaving it there than investing so heavily in land, Arthur. It’s overpriced. Heading for the downhill run.”

  “Ah, but I have made a clear profit already. Note that lines of worry have disappeared.”

  I lead them to my shining carriage, all recently washed and waxed by Mop’n’Chop. But Nicholas, doubtless missing his weekend trot around the golf course, is determined to walk the three miles to the farm, and he manages to challenge his son’s virility sufficiently to force him to join him.

  My daughter peers at me closely as if examining me for skin disease. “Well, your complexion is okay. And you’ve lost some excess baggage, that’s good. Still smoking, though. You haven’t had any dizzy spells?”

  I explain to this keeper of my health that I am in excellent shape and will soon be subsisting on my own garden greens, and then I stumble my way onto a topic less comfortable. “And how is your mother?”

  “You saw her the last time I did. So she hasn’t come out to see you once?”

  “She has phoned a few times. She sounds well.”

  A long, desperate silence.

  “I think . . . I’m going to say it — you should let her go, Dad.” “Perhaps we ought to find another topic —”

  “Stop doing it to yourself.”

  “Deborah —”

  But she suddenly lets flow a torrent. “I suppose she loves you in a way. It’s a form of possession, though, isn’t it, keeping you flapping on the line. It flatters the shit out of her to have you down there kissing her boots before she kicks you in the face another time.”

  “Deborah!”

  “I’m sorry, the venom is leaking.” A pause. “I care for you, Dad. Really. I love you. It’s just that I wish you’d stop being such a —” “Masochist.”

  It is one of her favourite terms of loving abuse towards her father.

  “Oh, my God, I’m just being rotten and cranky. It’s a beautiful day, I’m in a beautiful place, and I’m happy and you’re happy, and I’m sorry.”

  “Ah, yes. Did you bring the onion sets?”

  “They’re in my bag.”

  “That’s all that matters.”

  The weekend with my kin must draw mixed reviews. Deborah, I feel, enjoys herself, but her husband spends most of his time practising golf strokes with an imaginary club. He is disgruntled to learn I am not on-line; I have neither fax nor computer. But he makes do, spending many hours on long-distance calls to the bourses of exotic capitals of finance: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris. He is handsomely off, but has earned his money the hard way, the Canadian way, a life of unrelenting worry, fear, and pain.

  Little Nick surprises himself by finding things to do: trees to be climbed, stones to be hurled into the bay, the neighbour’s stray chickens and sheep to be chased. After he is finally led exhausted to bed, his parents and I chat near the fire over our evening tea.

  “How goes the work?” I ask Deborah. “With those young . . . What is the acceptable term of the day? Clearly not mentally handicapped.”

  “Just call them challenged, Dad. Exhausting. I can hardly wait for summer break. Two months in Europe, right, dear?”

  Nicholas lifts a golf ball, sending it down the fairway of my living room. “Busman’s holiday. Tax-free.”

  I regale them through the evening with tales of Garibaldi and its oddball cast of characters. As we are about to depart for bed, Nicholas asks if I’ll be handling Professor O’Donnell’s case.

  “Why would you ask such a question?”

  “Just that I heard your name mentioned. Happen to know one of the characters involved in the case.”<
br />
  “Indeed.”

  “That girl, what’s her name . . . Kimberley Martin?”

  “The complainant.”

  “Met her fiancé. Clarence de Remy Brown. Brown Group of Companies? Owns some gold mines in South America I’m thinking of taking a flyer on. Hard-nosed chap, temperamental. Brought the subject up over lunch at the club. Knows your reputation, of course. Asked me if you were taking the trial. All sort of awkward.”

  “No, I shall not be involved in that case.”

  Today’s visitor is our island trustee, the twitchy Kurt Zoller, who is again, for some enigmatic reason, apparelled in a life jacket. Perhaps he suffers a phobia of drowning. Mr. Zoller is enlisting support for a public meeting soon to be held for a rezoning, an expansion of Evergreen Estates.

  “Fifty more lots, Mr. Bo-champ. More people, more clout. New and better roads, more tax money to pay for them. We need your voice, because a lot of people are going to be there who want to live in the past. They don’t want to enjoy all the comforts. I see a day coming when we will all have a mall, our own police office. Cablevision.”

  “Ah, yes, that will be a boon. But, Mr. Zoller, I am a newcomer — it might be seen as brash of me to loudly add my voice.”

  “We have to stand up to them.”

  “Who?”

  Though we are alone, he lowers his voice: “Margaret Blake and the eco-freaks. “This has the sound of a popular music group. “There are quite a few of them here. Most of them don’t advertise it. They look and act just like us.”

  I ask Mr. Zoller how he came to be chosen to represent his fellow islanders.

  “I was their unanimous choice.”

  “How remarkable.”

  “I won by acclamation.”

  “Ah, no one was willing to run against you.”

  “Exactly.”

  Testing a theory that plants respond to fine music, I have set speakers out on the back deck so that my peas and carrots may enjoy Bach and Vivaldi while I hack away at the uncultured thistles with my hoe. The flowers of late May are making a vigorous show: daisies, foxgloves, lupines, purple roadside sweet peas. The song sparrows are in full-throated ease. The days are growing longer; summer waits anxiously in the wings for her grand entrance.

  In response to a notice in the Island Echo (“14-foot runabout with engine and canopy that runs like new for sale at marina, just ask Emily”), I stop by the marina office. Emily is fetched from The Brig, where she has been tending bar, a woman of middle years who wears tight jeans that make a swishing sound between her bounteous thighs as she walks towards me with extended hand.

  “Hi, I’m the manager here. Emily Lemay.”

  Ah, this is the seductress I have been warned against. I will strive to keep my honour intact.

  She leads me to the boat, which is tied to one of the slips. It is homely, but looks serviceable and safe. During a demonstration of the thirty-horse engine, the arms of Emily Lemay entwine with mine, and I am overcome with the smell of ripe peaches with which, apparently, she has perfumed her ample bosom.

  “I’ll sell it to you cheap,” she says. “One of the local characters gave it to me to pay off his bar bill. George Rimbold? Met him?”

  “I have read of his exploits.”

  We negotiate a price, and she offers a drink to seal the bargain.

  “Thank you, but I don’t. Any more.”

  “Well, then, a coffee.”

  “Tea, if you don’t mind.”

  We repair to The Brig, which is empty in the afternoon of all but a loud table of four who are debating politics, hotly castigating the government for reducing welfare benefits. These I am told are the local drunks. Is one of these lads the notorious George Rimbold?

  I survey with trepidation the many alluring labels of bottles arrayed on the counters behind Mrs. Lemay. I wonder if there is not, on this sinful island, a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Mrs. Lemay is a woman without secrets, and she babbles merrily on about various marriages she has suffered — brutish, callused men, none of them the gentleman she perceives me to be. I am rather flattered by her attentions, for she is attractive, open and gregarious, a full-fleshed woman of the type celebrated by the Dutch masters.

  She extracts from me the confession that though I am married I am currently living alone, and as I rise to leave she offers to come visiting one day. I am too polite to demur to this, though I suspect her intentions are dishonourable. But why should I, the impotent cuckold, worry? No stirring of the slumbering weakling below answers her call.

  In the men’s room, I unleash my fearsome weapon (spineless soldier, when last did you go forth to battle?) and piss into the urinal, a stream the colour of cowardice. Am I different from other men? I always marvel at the locker-room tales of multiple conquests that I have heard, of concupiscent appetites, of night-long rigours between the sheets. Oh, there was a time when I could rut with adequate if not extravagant vigour. Enough to perform my duty to the species. But soon after my wedding, a series of humiliations proved I was unequal to the task of responding to Annabelle’s womanly wants, and I went as dead as the poets of antiquity.

  And yet — as I keep proclaiming (can anyone hear me?) — I hold this unyielding affection for Annabelle. Call me ill, call me twisted. I love her.

  I was thirty-three and she was twenty-four. She was newly graduated from a prestigious school of fine arts, with a budding career as a set designer, but when we met, her role was as a Crown witness in the courtroom. A fraud case, something to do with an arts grant: the dreary details are forgotten.

  I cross-examined her for two hours. She stayed on in the courtroom and, as she said, “watched me” for the rest of the day. Afterwards she complimented me on my victory. I stammered out an invitation to buy her a drink.

  Three months later we married. We quickly parented a child of whom neither of us saw enough. Little Deborah was entrusted to a nanny while Annabelle furthered her career — set design, art direction, the stage, then opera — and while I busied myself gaining fame and fortune, and a reputation as a wonderful fellow to have a drink with.

  But I presume she became progressively bored with windy Arthur Beauchamp, with all his bloated, orotund posturings. I was about as romantic as the sacking of Rome. I didn’t know until later on she’d had a series of suitors. As sharply tuned as I may have been in the courtroom, I was a blind witness to the transgressions of the woman with whom I had sworn to share my life. But upon one wine-soaked evening, overcome by an unguarded desire to repent, Annabelle reeled off her list of lovers and I died as many deaths.

  I am sorry, Gowan, if I have seemed so self-pitying. As I have admitted, I am slightly under the influence. Okay, let us make haste to the dance. It was well under way when I arrived. Kimberley spotted me immediately, pounced like a cougar, grabbed my hand and yanked me onto the dance floor, where we staggered around for a while in imitation of Astaire and Rogers. Afterwards — I will admit this, however incriminating it might be — I offered to buy her a drink. A rye and ginger, that is what she asked for. I should have realized right then she was not a well person.

  I had a double whisky. I was packing it away, frankly, getting sloshed. It had been a tough week of marking mid-term papers. Was that it? I don’t know what my excuse was. Maybe it was the strange electricity in the air. Maybe I should worry about my drinking. . . .

  God, what’s my father going to think? Or would the old roué even give a sodding damn?

  So I escaped from her, circulated, joked it up with the jocks, talked football — the Grey Cup was on Sunday — but every time I turned around she was in my face. Making merry conversation, all bright green eyes and bright red lips (a product called Shameless!) in a huggy little basic-black mid-thigh mini. I actually had a good time with her. She keeps coming at you from places you don’t expect. She’s a stitch. She has incredible timing.

  Gowan, she is going to be brutal to cross-examine. She has an élan. Blunt. Chatty. Makes lots of eyeball c
ontact. She’ll play to the jury; she’ll have all the men smitten. I don’t think we ought to have too many males on this jury, Gowan. I fear we are the more stupid sex. There’s a tendency among members of our endangered gender to think more erratically than erotically when dealing with matters carnal. Don’t you think women are more likely to see through her?

  I began thinking: O’Donnell, old sport, is she offering her body for a passing grade? Be on the alert. But all the time she has this gold chain around her neck with a cross on it, and a ring on her finger as big as a stop sign. Where was her fiancé, I asked. She said, “We’re enjoying a little time apart together.” Apart together. We both realized how odd that sounded. We laughed. You know how people sometimes connect? I liked her.

  Gowan, I’m not going to lie. I had thoughts. Any normal human male would have thoughts. But that’s all. It’s not as if I’ve been forced to make out with Man Friday on a desert island for all my years of manhood. I date. I’ve had girlfriends. We commit consenting acts.

  I didn’t pursue her. I am the victim.

  In current time, as I write this, it’s almost 11:30 p.m. In half an hour I’ll put on my funny hat and blow one of those paper whistles that curls out like a snake and bops someone on the nose.

  Happy New Year, Gowan. I look forward with joy to the unfolding events of the coming year. I’ll finally emerge from jail talking like a greeting card. Best wishes to my favourite parolee on his seventieth birthday. You’ll have to forgive some of my typing errors. My fingers keep slipping between the keys.

  We had the last dance together, a slow one, but I managed to keep her at arm’s length. She carried on in this deep, melting voice of hers about how she enjoyed my classes. Thought I was a wonderful teacher. Such understated wit. So cute with my little half-moon spectacles perched on my nose. I think I said something flattering, too, which no doubt will be used against me.