Borderline

by Janette Turner Hospital

  He did not remember me — fifteen years is a long time — and I saw no reason to point out my connection with the cottage. I was on the trail of Felicity’s absence, checking out every nook and innuendo and cranny.

  “Unmistakable,” he said again. “The odour of moral torment.”

  He enjoyed his own homilies. He had been rolling that phrase around in his mind, he liked its bouquet, it had aged in his mouth. He shook his head lugubriously. “Moral torment,” he sighed, savouring the taste.

  The detection of it, he told the police, was an advanced spiritual skill. In his calling, over the years, he had become adept. He liked that phrase and repeated it. “In my calling, officer, a man sees many …”

  “Of course, Father,” the police hastily conceded. “The nature of your calling, we don’t dispute it. Though not something we can take down as hard evidence, you understand.”

  Father Bolduc understood. He was simply filling in certain gaps. He sensed, with spiritual antennae that over the years had become highly … he sensed that the woman had witnessed something traumatic and was unable to speak about it. This was not a question of language. Her French was quite good, though rather formal. Learned in a classroom. But she seemed deliberately vague about why they were going to the cottage. Something about a woman in need of help; he had to read between the lines. Some sort of guilt, of complicity, was very apparent, and he had recognized the struggle of someone wanting to make a difficult confession.

  “Of course,” he said, “if she had made confession, my hands would be tied.”

  The police had driven down from Montreal and did not have quite the same order of patience as L’Ascension’s elderly constable.

  “Could you get to the point, Father?” they prodded gently.

  Father Bolduc said sternly that the nature of wrongdoing, and its effect on the soul, was the point.

  “Of course, Father,” the police agreed. “But we mean, from our point of view. In the way of actual occurrence.”

  Father Bolduc had recognized the cottage. It used to belong to that painter, the famous one, a godless man.

  “Quite godless,” I could not resist interjecting, delighted. “And godawful too.”

  Father Bolduc was not gratified by my agreeing with him in this particular way. “We are all the children of God,” he reproved. “Even those who reject him are precious.”

  I said dryly: “The Old Volcano despises the precious. On aesthetic grounds alone.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow …”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Not relevant. You were saying that his cottage …?”

  “No, no, it used to be his cottage,” said the priest. According to gossip, he had given it to one of his mistresses, though hardly anyone ever saw her. In fact, according to some there was no such person; and according to others, she was what you would expect of an artist’s woman. He was unable to say whether the woman who had come to the rectory in the middle of the night was the mistress in question.

  At the cottage he had waited on the steps while she lit a kerosene lantern — a task that seemed to take an unconscionable length of time. Her match and then the flame had gone out several times. She had talked incessantly but in a way that was difficult to follow. At times she seemed to be speaking of political matters. He remembered thinking that this was a very peculiar emergency. “I thought this woman was injured,” he said to her. “I thought there was some urgency involved.”

  Yes, she said, flustered. There was. And then she managed to get the lamp lit, though she went on talking in a more or less incoherent rush. “I’m counting on you, Father,” she said, “to ensure that she will be safe.” She mentioned — he was sure that she mentioned — Mary Magdalene. In retrospect, of course, all of this made sense.

  “The Magdalen, you will remember,” he explained to the police, “was the harlot who came to Christ.”

  It was when he caught the word “rape” that he began to realize.

  “You see, I’ve had this experience before. They always have to tell me obliquely. It’s a dreadful and violent thing, of course, but the sad truth is, they know they are partly to blame.”

  He sighed. He regretted to report that she — the woman Felicity — had been provocatively dressed. When he saw the two wine glasses (one smashed, the picked-up pieces in a little heap on the counter) he knew it was the usual story.

  “You see,” he explained, “up to a certain point she had been willing.”

  Until they entered the cottage, he said, Felicity had given every indication of genuinely believing there was another woman inside. Indeed, she appeared absolutely stunned when she saw the bed. Until that moment she had been able to deny her own involvement. She had convinced herself that it had happened to someone else. This was a not uncommon defence mechanism. And shock — in the clinical sense — would have played its part. A kind of necessary amnesia.

  Father Bolduc shook his head, pondering the complexities of intention and innocence. A theological line, precarious though it was, had to be drawn.

  “I think, you know, it must have been quite violent,” he said heavily.

  There was not just the blood on the bed. There were spots across the floor and on the porch steps. Also the intensity of the woman’s need for repression had to be considered. When he had seen from the tyre marks that two other cars had been present, pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. One extra glass, two extra cars. It had begun with a flirtation, one man invited in, and then the others had arrived. Another summer gang rape, not uncommon in these parts, weekend people and alcohol and isolated cottages — a devil’s brew. This was why he had called the police: to avert further violence in the area.

  The police appreciated his concern but there were, from a legal point of view, problems. Apart from the blood on bed and floor — which could after all have been menstrual — there was no real proof of violence. True, the smashed wine glass was suggestive, but a number of interpretations was possible. It could not be considered hard evidence.

  “You must understand, Father,” they said, “that unless and until the woman presses charges, no crime has taken place as far as we are concerned.”

  Father Bolduc did not understand. He knew what he knew. But he would content himself with prayer for Felicity who had been so strangely oblivious to him on the drive back, who had left him at the rectory and fled, who had been in such patent moral torment. The stink of it was still in his nostrils.

  Felicity! I’ll say when she phones from some room with a view of the Aztec ruins. You have to do something about this odour problem. And I’ll tell her what the priest in L’Ascension said.

  Honestly, she’ll laugh. You’re outdreaming me, Jean-Marc.

  13

  From L’Ascension Felicity drove to Montreal, her eyes on the past.

  She never forgot the day she had last seen her father though she rarely spoke of it to anyone, especially not to Seymour, who plundered the memories of those close to him. He had painted her father chasing God (as he put it) — the shape of a man plunging into cobalts and hot pinks and a jungle of greens. This was recent, part of his “violent period”, his experimentation with acrylics and strident colours. But she recognized her father.

  “I wish you would leave him alone,” she said when they met at his retrospective.

  “I paint whatever I’m impelled to paint,” Seymour said. “He’s been floating up lately, all our old college arguments. Persistent bugger won’t leave me alone. I think he still has hopes for my soul.”

  This was the kind of comment that gave Felicity involuntary spasms of jealousy.

  She said tartly: “You know nothing about tropical colours. Pure second-hand Rousseau and Gauguin.”

  Seymour roared with delighted laughter. “Oh Felicity,” he said. “Your father’s daughter.” He stroked her cheek. “Let’s get the hell out of here. Let’s go back to my studio.”

  And she did, of course, though not without a moment’s compun
ction for the gallery’s poor press secretary who actually caught hold of Seymour’s coat lapels in an effort to stop him from leaving. Please, he implored, there are people who’ve been promised interviews, I’ve given my word. He was wringing his hands.

  “If my paintings needed my small talk,” Seymour told him gaily, “they wouldn’t be worth a retrospective.” And he waved farewell with a bottle of champagne plucked from an ice bucket in passing.

  “I do hope this means you’re being unfaithful to someone,” he said when they reached his studio. “I love trespassing.”

  “You’re incorrigible.”

  “So your father always said. About this businessman in Boston, this Aaron fellow.” He poured champagne over her and began to lick it off. “I keep tabs on you, you know. Can you really have sunk to a businessman?”

  “Tell me about the first time my father brought you home.”

  “Oh your aunts,” Seymour laughed. “Your ferocious aunts. It was such fun to ruffle their feathers.”

  (A dreadful man, the aunts always said. A perfectly dreadful man. Felicity, my dear, of all the men in the world, how could you? We certainly never wanted to see him again.)

  “Did you make passes at them?” Felicity asked.

  “Well of course I did. Your Aunt Norwich had splendid breasts, though she kept them behind a deal of upholstery. She squealed in the hallway when I felt them, a pure gesture of aesthetic appreciation, I might add. Of course your Aunt Ernestine was madly jealous, and your father said he was disgusted. He was hot on the track of truth and I loved to goad him.”

  “He never mentioned you. Never.”

  “God swallowed him whole. That predatory cobalt you noticed. It’s not a tropical flower, you delicious shrew, it’s the bite of truth.” He bit the soft flesh of her inner thigh. “Why don’t you move back in? I miss you.”

  She ignored this. Absently, she stroked his silver though still abundant hair.

  “The last time I saw him,” she began, but stopped.

  Seymour said irritably: “He had an annoying habit of self-preoccupation. It runs in the family.”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  “He elevated fervour to an art form. For his ordination portrait, I did him as St Sebastian.”

  She sat bolt upright, incredulous, outraged. “Ordination portrait?!”

  He laughed. “You didn’t know about that, did you?”

  She was speechless with accusation.

  “Your aunts were incensed,” he chuckled. “They bought it to silence it. My first professional income, you could say they started me on my way.”

  “But they’ve never —”

  “Of course not. That was the point.”

  And where, her eyes asked, is it now?

  “How would I know where it is? I should think, somehow, it still exists. Even your aunts, I would think, I would hope, couldn’t have brought themselves to destroy it. Must be in a bank vault somewhere. I was still dabbling in realism, so it’s something of an actual likeness. Then the war got him, then God. But I caught him in the first flush of that passion for selflessness, which of course is the worst kind of egotism. He must have been hopeless as a father.”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “What does a child know?”

  “You know nothing about our life over there. Nothing.”

  Seymour laughed. “You think you’re free to invent him as you wish. I know more about both of you than you’d ever dream.” With his tongue he stopped her from answering, and then said by way of evidence: “We were both in New Guinea when word of Hiroshima came. It did strange things to the rest of our lives.” He drew fingertip swirls on her breasts, the route maps of convoluted lives. “He went lusting after God, and I went to the devil.” He laughed again. “The last time I saw him, the day he sailed off to hunt down his own Holy Grail, he said he loved me because I sinned boldly.”

  “If somewhat repetitively,” Felicity murmured through a mouthful of his flesh.

  “Heartless bitch. You don’t love me at all.”

  “Don’t be silly. Of course I do.”

  Pensively he stroked her pubic hair. “He said I’d paint my way to salvation eventually.”

  “He wasn’t God,” Felicity said. “He could be wrong about things.”

  “You’re an idea of mine, remember that. You should never wear clothes. Once you put on a dress, you’re very ordinary. Anyway, what does a child know?”

  A child, Felicity thought, knows everything; but one matures into so much uncertainty.

  She had become grateful for the tactile, the visual, the quantifiable: the glissando of tyres on the highway, the song of speed, the meteoric pines flitting through high beam between L’Ascension and Montreal, the pungent statements made by butchers, blood on the fingers.

  What a will to live, she thought. It is something new in this part of the world. Like the discovery of electricity or the conquest of space. There will be unpredictable changes.

  But where had the woman found the strength to crawl away and hide? And what of her trail of blood?

  With a flamenco swirl of her torn black skirts, La Magdalena alighted in the passenger seat. I am inconvenient, she said.

  Felicity, sniffing at the smear of blood on her fingers, conceded: I would much rather have imagined you.

  La Magdalena rattled her castanets. I have offered you a moral reprieve, she said.

  Felicity laughed: I don’t believe you. I can feel your hooks in my flesh. There’s a catch somewhere.

  There was a rattle of drums. I am inconvenient, La Magdalena said again, but I don’t coerce. You are as free as you wish.

  I know your type, Felicity accused. You’ll gobble me up. And I won’t have it! One martyr in the family is enough.

  “The trouble with integrity,” her father used to say, more to himself than to her, “is that you can never be certain if you’re inspired or simply misled.”

  Frankly, La Magdalena said, I spit on that. I couldn’t care less about your integrity or lack of it. I’m bleeding out here in the woods.

  “And the trouble with heroics,” Felicity’s father said, “is that one always inflicts difficulties on the innocent. Anyway, your grandparents are right, Felicity. This is no way to bring up a child.”

  “I’m not going to go,” Felicity said.

  “You’ll love Australia,” he promised. “And your grandfather’s house — the air smells of your mother’s hair. And you’ll love school too. I can’t deny you the normal things. All this” — they were passing a gaunt cluster of men and women, skeletons wrapped in skin, sitting motionless behind their begging bowls — “will never be real to anyone over there. How can it be? I can’t leave them, there aren’t enough doctors. But it’s not a fit life for a child.”

  “If you send me away,” Felicity said, “I’ll be so unhappy I’ll just die.”

  “No one ever dies of unhappiness,” he said. “It’s too comfortable for both of us if you stay here, which is not a good sign. Always be on guard against being too comfortable. That’s what kills.”

  “What bullshit,” Seymour laughed when she told him. “But typical of him. That sort of nonsense should have died out with hairshirts and flagellation, when the saints went the way of the dinosaurs.”

  On the last day she saw her father, the long and slender snake boats were drawn up high on the sand. “What can I teach the fisher people?” he asked her. “They know more than I do. I give what I can in return: see the clouds growing over their eyes? Those are cataracts.”

  “I’ll hide in one of the boats,” she said. “I’ll go out with you. I’m not going to go to Australia.”

  “You’ll come back here for school vacations. Now run along and help Didiji pack your things.”

  “I won’t go.”

  But he was already mingling with the fishermen, bundling nets, dragging the boats to the water. Seawater came gurgling up the keel tracks like an afterthought and foamed around her toes. She stood alone on the
beach and watched the flotilla move out. “I’ll be back by dusk,” he called. She heard the beating of gigantic black wings — thump, thump, thump inside her head — and cried out to him in sudden fright. He waved. Above the slap of bamboo paddles she heard his laughter. “Don’t wait!” he called.

  Touching, La Magdalena said, but you survived. And frankly, I’m for survival.

  Well, exactly. Felicity parried all the voices. So why should I put myself in jeopardy? I’ve had enough trouble, I’ve paid my dues. If our positions were reversed, you’d go for safety. And yet I did take an enormous risk on your behalf, I was prepared to shoulder all the responsibility, I released that hapless innocent you’d beguiled with your eyes.

  Who asked you to? La Magdalena said.

  I’m still covering for you, Felicity persisted. I’ve convinced the priest you don’t exist. And Jean-Marc will back me up if it’s necessary. My stepmother, he’ll say, has an overly vivid imagination.

  La Magdalena put her thumb to her nose. I can manage, she said, with or without your help. She flapped her skirts and flew out of the car window, but her shadow hovered like a vulture’s and darkened the windshield.

  Felicity, Jean-Marc would say, amused and mildly exasperated, have you picked up another stray?

  Honestly, the aunts would say, stirring their tea and arranging the damask pillows, the things you invent, Felicity!

  She drove into the outskirts of Montreal and called Jean-Marc from a telephone box. It was now well after midnight. He answered on the fourth ring, his voice smudged with sleep.

  “Jean-Marc, I’m sorry to call so late. Did I wake you?”

  “What?” She pictured him surfacing from dreams, his hair tousled. He was twenty-five now, but still a child in her eyes. “Felicity? Where are you?”

  “In Montreal. Did I wake you?”

  “It doesn’t matter. What’s happened?”

  “Can I come by?”

  “Naturally.”