Well, that was one way of looking at it. Glancing at the crewmen in the waist, Paul knew he could get another line from them. A hell of a place, they’d call it, cold enough to freeze your ass in winter and in summer nothing but rain and fog; no lights, no bars, the whores no good, and no place to take a girl you did pick up but the bushes in the park. And just when you were all set, the rain generally came.
He wanted to go astern and lean over the taffrail, but he wasn’t sure if it was permitted while the ship was at sea. The cook passed him on the way to the galley and Paul remembered what Yardley had said about finding a Nova Scotian on board. He’d been right; the cook was from Country Harbour in Guysborough County, a square man with hairy arms like tree branches and a straight, silent mouth; the only Nova Scotian aboard.
Darkness fell as they cleared the harbour, and at the land’s edge the sea doubled all the light that lingered in the sky, to hoard it along the surface long after the sun had passed into the interior of the land. Paul breathed deeply. For this one moment he could be himself, the man Heather had found and seen, for there was no one to watch his face and note the difference to use against him later.
He watched Thrum Cap slip by on the port side, a soundless fringe of foam white against its brown base. Some of the following gulls swooped away from the ship and went in to the shore in long glides. The ship lifted hard to the first groundswell, bit the sea, and with a rush of water under the bows gave a faint groan, and then a humming wind started in the shrouds. They passed beyond the farthest tip of McNab’s Island, the air got suddenly colder, and looking up the coast of Nova Scotia, Paul saw a crescent of lights flaring out of continental darkness into the sea, steady beacons on every promontory. He leaned over the rail and felt the beat of the propellers under his feet, leaned far over and saw the wake boiling away from the stern, and then he stood upright again to watch the lights recede slowly over the horizon.
PART FOUR
1939
FORTY
Athens was calm in the morning sun, the cone of Lykabettus just visible over the low roofs of the Place de la Constitution, the marble-topped tables at the sidewalk cafés mostly empty, some men in dark suits buying newspapers from the corner kiosk, soft-eyed Greek women passing, moving with liquid ease in the warm morning, Levantine eyes calm with instinctive knowledge, like wells receiving light and retaining it.
Paul left the American Express office with two letters in his pocket, one from Kathleen, the other from Heather. He walked around the corner into the square, sat at a table and ordered coffee. While he waited he brushed someone else’s crumbs from the table top and then sat still. He was so accustomed to being alone in crowded places that anonymous people passing were a part of his mind, almost a frame in which he himself became visible. In the five years since leaving Canada he had changed considerably. His black hair, once low on his temples, had receded, making his forehead seem broader. Although he was still a year under thirty, his hair was foxed with grey barely visible against its blackness. He seemed more solid through the chest and shoulders, less quick in his movements. His hands on the table were as strong as those of a labourer, but their skin was cared for. He was wearing a Harris tweed jacket with a white handkerchief in the breast pocket, grey flannel trousers and brown brogue shoes. To a European he looked English, but an Englishman would probably put him down as an American.
He slit the envelope from Pittsburgh and pulled out his mother’s letter. Kathleen was keeping well. A smile touched his mouth as he read her opening words; all her letters began with the same statement. She went on to say that Henry had bought a new car with a good radio because last fall at the time of the Munich crisis they had been driving down to St. Louis in the old car and for several days they had missed hearing Kaltenborn so it was just about as easy to buy a new car with a radio as to buy a radio and have it installed in the old one. Next year Henry expected to make at least eight thousand dollars and then they were going to move again, to a better house. She wished Paul would be sensible and come home. There was no need for him to live in Europe and meet peculiar people. She was worried about him whenever she wondered where he was. She sent him all her love.
Paul raised his eyes and looked over the roofs to the cone of Lykabettus. It glowed in the sun against a deep azure sky. It was early May here in Athens but it was like June in Canada. Homesickness stirred in him like sexual desire, followed by a quick lift of excitement. After nearly five years, he was going home. Within a month or six weeks he’d be there. If he could work his way back he would; if not, there was enough money left to pay his passage on a slow boat.
The waiter came with the coffee and a glass of water. Paul put Kathleen’s letter in one pocket as he reached in another for a few drachmas to pay the man. The waiter slipped away and he was alone again. A woman passed slowly: black hair and white skin, a soft body indolently alive at the hips. Two boys followed her, arguing vehemently.
Paul drank his coffee in three gulps. It was Turkish, brewed thick and syrupy, with heavy sediment in the bottom of the cup. He washed it down with the water that tasted flat with chlorine. Then he picked up Heather’s letter and looked at it. There was an American stamp in the corner, a New York postmark, and the address was written in the tidy, imaginative handwriting he would know anywhere as Heather’s. He broke it open and held the folded pages in his hand. For nearly five years he had been receiving her letters in strange cities and towns she had never seen, and because she was not afraid to talk to him on paper, he felt he knew her far better now than when he had left Canada. He could still desire her, but how much of the desire was the idea and how much memory he could seldom be sure, for the idea had been created by himself and it was pregnant with the same kind of life and reality he had put into the novel he had been writing for the past year.
The white sheets were unfolded in his hands and he began to read, but after seeing the words Very dear Paul he found himself looking over the roofs to Lykabettus again. How much had she changed in five years? It was a very long time at their age. They had both run away from Montreal for their own reasons, but in the simplest of terms it was to escape the strait-jacket of their backgrounds. Had she succeeded? Or did she feel as rootless in New York as he felt in Greece? Had she ever been as homesick as he was now? In spite of all the things he had done and the places he had seen, he was essentially unchanged: a Canadian, half French and half English, still trying to be himself and stand on his own feet. Through five years, that was what he had always been.
Between the summer of 1934 and the summer of 1937 Paul had been at sea almost continuously. For a year the Liverpool Battalion plied regularly along the American coastal route between Newfoundland and Trinidad. She carried salt cod, hardware, flour, salted beef and pork, along with various detailed supplies and consignments, from St. John’s and Halifax down to the West Indies. She returned with sugar, molasses, rum for the government liquor stores, bananas, limes, lemons and pineapples. For a while Paul worked as an ordinary seaman. He swabbed, chipped, painted, mended gear and occasionally worked with gangs under the bosun or the second mate making minor shifts in the stowing of cargoes in the hold. He passed through his first Bermuda hurricane just before Christmas in 1934. In February of the next year they ran into a gale in below-zero weather that followed all the way from Cape Race to Cape Sambro, and when they finally came into Halifax the Liverpool Battalion looked like a floating blanc-mange.
Toward the end of 1935 the ship was recalled to England. Paul went with her, and so missed Yardley when the old man returned to Halifax to live, in mid-autumn of that year.
In Liverpool the ship was laid up for nearly two months for a refit, and Paul rented a room in a cheap hotel and spent the time writing short stories. By the time the ship was ready to sail again he had half a dozen finished. They were all based on sea-life with accurate detail and great care in the descriptions, but the plots were largely formula. The day before they sailed he sent them off to an agent he had heard abou
t in New York and several months later when they called at Liverpool again he discovered that four of them had been sold to American magazines.
Paul was a quartermaster now, and the holds of the Liverpool Battalion were always full. From the movements of the ship and the cargoes she carried it was not difficult to see that the postwar slump had developed into a prewar boom. From Stockholm she carried Bofors guns to Luebeck. From Bremen she took small arms to Spain. Once in Liverpool Paul saw a deckhand spit over the side when drums of high-octane gasoline were hoisted aboard on a consignment to Genoa. Later in Barcelona they were held up a week; the Spanish civil war had just broken out and there were no stevedores immediately available to discharge the cargo.
Paul remained with the ship into 1937, writing whenever he found time and saving his money. At first his work had seemed just a job and a job was something he had to have. Then he realized that he had attained a certain kind of freedom. And with the freedom he had found a way to understand the wounding soreness that his earlier life had left with him. As the artificial pulling of the two races within him ceased, the sediment settled in his mind.
By the summer of 1937 he had saved two thousand dollars, and then he left the ship for good. During the previous winter he had applied for a teaching job in a school in Canada, but he was informed that he must have a more advanced degree to qualify with the other available teachers on the market. It was then that he remembered his father’s intention to send him one day to the Sorbonne, or even to Oxford or Cambridge.
Recalling the old house in Saint-Marc and his father’s library, in a life separated from the present by what seemed a desert of years, Paul suddenly revolted against the sweaty kind of ugliness that had surrounded him for so long. He wanted to relax, he longed to live again in decent surroundings. He told himself that he had a right to go to the Sorbonne or Oxford if he wished, and then he realized that he had enough money of his own for a year’s fees if he wanted to use it that way. His degree from the University of Montreal would admit him to either university. After careful consideration he decided on Oxford because he felt that some formal study in English literature would help his writing. So in October, 1937, he was admitted to the university.
After sixteen years of being homeless, of working with harvest stiffs, hockey players and sailors, being in Oxford was like opening a door and finding himself in a room containing all the things he had tried to create out of his imagination from books. It was the first leisure he had known since his childhood; leisure to study and think without having to earn a living at the same time. Once a week he went to a tutor in Oriel, and because this was the only college in which he had any work, he came to think of it as his own.
He liked to look out his tutor’s window across the front quad of Oriel to the tower of Merton which showed above the long dark roof. All through that winter he found himself waiting for the moment when the lights went on in the college hall and the coats-of-arms in the stained-glass windows began to glow like jewels in the dusk. On foggy nights he liked to stand by the porter’s lodge to watch dons and undergraduates drift in their gowns across the quad and up the steps under the portico into the hall. And always he listened for the cadence of St. Mary’s chime which preceded every hour with a full garland of sound. Nowhere else had he ever heard a bell note so pure, not even in Italy; it sang in over the tiles and chimney pots and through the windows, and the moment it ceased all the bells in Oxford began striking the hour in different keys.
During that year in Oxford Paul worked on a B. Litt., came to like his tutor better than any man he had ever known except Yardley, drank beer in the pubs, read dozens of books he had wanted to read for years, refused an invitation to play ice-hockey for the university, and laid the groundwork for the novel he felt had been stirring inside him since he could remember.
It was the novel which had brought him to Greece. Living was cheap there, and his tutor at Oriel had found a part-time job for him in Sparta with the museum kept by the British Association. As a result of the past ten months, he had four hundred pages of completed manuscript to show for his divided labours. And now he was in Athens on his way home.
He might have stayed longer if he had seen his way to finishing the book, but suddenly it had stopped moving and he was haunted by a sense of failure. Homesickness had moved in on him and there was nothing to do but put the book aside and find a ship that would take him home. The title of his book held its meaning clear, Young Man of 1933. The year of Hitler’s rise, a young man caught between the old war that was history and the new one whose coming was so certain it made the present look like the past even before it had been lived through. The idea had gripped him like iron at the outset. Why it had suddenly begun to grow foggy he didn’t know.
He picked up Heather’s letter and focused his eyes on her lines of writing again. “You never knew my Grandfather Methuen, did you? He died today. He was eighty-two. I can’t help feeling as though a good portion of Montreal had died with him. When I was little I was made to believe the whole city revolved around his whims. Now I know it will certainly go on without him, but something that made it stuffy and even rather funny will be gone. I’m going home on the night train and I can’t suppose I’ll come back. But don’t you imagine that maybe it won’t be so bad having to live there again after having once been able to get away? What do you think, Paul? Mummy and I will be all alone in that ark of a house on the side of the mountain. I can’t very well leave her alone now. Poor Mummy, how she’s worked to be at home in that house! Now it’s all hers, gargoyles, conservatory and all!”
Paul stopped reading and looked again at the postmark on the envelope, trying to think how many days it had been in transit. By now Heather would be living in Montreal again. And how much of New York would she have taken back with her? She had spent two years at Columbia taking an M.A. in the history of art. For a year she had taught in a preparatory school. During the past year she had been working in a museum. The coincidence of their most recent jobs had amused them both, in spite of the different nature of their occupations in their two museums as far apart as Sparta and New York.
He went on reading. “Did you know Grampa Yardley was very ill last winter? I can’t remember whether or not I’ve told you. I wanted awfully to see him, but New York can seem such a long distance from every place else once you’re in it. Now I’m going down to Halifax after everything is settled in Montreal and I’ll try to get Mummy to drive down with me. It should do her good. You probably know from Grampa’s letters to you how many friends he’s made down there, but he’s very frail now and he lives all alone in one room. Suddenly I feel as though I can hardly wait to see him. So many old people, especially the decent ones, are slipping off one by one while there’s still time. Who’ll be left? Huntly McQueen, I suppose. What is it about men like him? Men his age? They seem anaesthetized against the world we’re living in. In your novel, do you think you can really drive it through their heads how people like us feel? They hold on to the ball and won’t pass it to one of us, and yet they don’t seem to have the least idea what goal they’re playing for! I don’t suppose they think we do, either. Please come home soon, Paul. I wish you would. Now that I’m going back to Montreal I want you there, too. I can even wish you were here in New York right now. There’s a quarter moon and the park is filled with young green things and in Rockefeller Center they’ve set out blue hyacinths and yellow forsythia. I keep wondering how you’d like that favourite spot of mine in all New York. If you said the R.C.A. Building couldn’t equal the Parthenon I’d try to tell you how wrong you were. Whenever I get bogged down in despair about the States (isn’t it funny how all Canadians do that, as if the Americans cared what we felt about them) I walk down Fifth Avenue and look up at that beautiful shaft and then I know that a country able to build such a structure can do anything…. Look after yourself, my dear. And come home soon!”
Paul leaned back in his chair and the familiar presence of solitude was close. People sauntered
past or sat at tables in the sun. A loudspeaker in the square was broadcasting Danube waltzes. An itinerant bootblack wanted to shine his shoes. Two girls with almond eyes passed, laughing vividly, and his eyes followed them. After a moment he got up and walked across to a kiosk on the square, bought a postcard and returned to his table. He wrote Heather a short note saying that he was leaving for Canada as soon as possible and she might write to him next at Halifax. He stamped the card and mailed it, then sat down once more in the sunshine.
Heather wished he were in New York. But that was many days ago. He wished she were here in Athens. He’d like to take her to dinner at the Grande-Bretagne, and afterwards they would sip wine until dark, and then before the moon was up they would drive to the Akropolis in an open carriage and he would lead her up through the Propylaea, then up the time-smoothed steps to the white floor of the Parthenon itself. The moon would rise enormous and round over Hymettus tonight. They would see Parnes, Pentelikon, Lykabettus, Aegelos and Salamis framed by successive pairs of columns; they would listen to the dog that howled at the moon somewhere among the broken stones and monuments behind the temple; and moonlight would touch the caryatids. Heather had a body like theirs; not the greyhound figure made popular by advertising models. Her lines were female and fruitful in the memory. They would stand touching each other while they looked across the dark plain where the Long Walls had run down to Piraeus. They would see the moonlight flickering along the coastal waters from Salamis down to Sunium, and he would tell her how in the old days, when the triremes rounded the cape on their way home, the quartermasters seeing the first glint of sunlight from the spear of Athene on the Akropolis had raised their arms to salute the goddess.
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