by John Metcalf
“Oh, yes,” said Forde. “Oh, yes.”
He scooped her into his arms and they stood together, he rocking her.
“I’ve loved them for years,” he said, “yes, the presence of them. Icon’s exactly right.”
He stooped and kissed her cheek.
Headlights swept across the windows.
Hanging from the mirror in the taxi, a cardboard pine-tree air freshener filling the car with a raw chemical stench, which also brought to Forde the smell of the yellowed mothballs in the urinals of the Beaverbrook’s River Room, a smell that was beginning to make him queasy. Too cold for lowered windows.
“Sorry. Say that again.”
“The daily round,” she said, “going to the butcher’s, returning library books, walking the dog, the newsagent’s—the daily round—and underneath it all, this unhappiness. It was always with me, not disabling, but sapping, undermining; no, not even that—I’m being dramatic again—more a slow leaching out of some of the colour of every day.”
She snuggled up to him, tucking her arm into his.
“It was being shut out,” she said. “It was watching greatness from the gods.”
Forde offered sympathy in a sigh.
“Which,” she said, “is, I suppose, a round-the-mulberry-bush way of saying The Pavilion, Torquay—”
“And Norman’s Conquest,” said Forde.
“I thought that, maybe, coming home, drawing a line under life there, it would go away.”
“And?” he said.
He felt her shrug.
“I shouldn’t complain. I have a nice little job three days a week and I really enjoy it. It’s in a rather chichi package store. I play oenophile. I’ve heard in roundabout ways that I’m called ‘The Wine Lady.’ This is the ultra-rich part of Connecticut, remember: hobby farms, estates, weekend mansions for New Yorkers. More money, as Mary would have said, than sense. I dispense oenophilic wisdom in a slightly snotty manner—‘This Australian shiraz is more complex, more engaging than—well, the French, as you doubtless know, called the same wine, the same grape, Syrah, or Sirrah, and frankly…’
et cetera
“And I amuse myself antiquing. Pin money, really. Some lustreware, not much, but surprising pieces of transfer-printed ware. People tend to think it’s much later than it actually is. And Harold much enjoys these outings. We get him old model aeroplanes. And he takes Jack for walks. Jack’s a Jack Russell. I know you’re going to think dotty old lady and pampered pet, but Jack isn’t that at all. He minds his manners with us but generally he’s a case of mindless aggression. He suddenly attacks inanimate objects that affront him, chair legs. He’s dainty, a born dandy. Elegant as a fox. No unseemly sniffing for him, no wallowing-sniffing, no slurping-sniffing round lampposts. The mildest sniff, a ‘so what’s the hoi polloi been up to’ sniff. Dogs put you in touch with the natural world, don’t you think? I’ve always thought that. If you follow where they lead you. A stag beetle, a caterpillar humping across the sidewalk, fungus—they grow out sideways—dinner-plate things—on the boles of trees—Jack always pauses before he attacks.”
“Mine’s called Pogo,” said Ford. “That was my kids, not me. He’s old now and leaks Alpo fumes. Sheila tells me he goes to my study every day to see if I’m there. She pretends to only just tolerate him—his farts really are enough to make you gag—but I know that she buys him Salisbury-steak treats I’m not supposed to see.”
“But never mind dogs getting old,” she said. “I have to think about when I go and what’s going to happen to Harold. There’s the house, of course, and I’m not really impoverished but Harold will have to go into a home, and anywhere humane is grotesquely expensive so my steamer trunks of—what was that odd word? ‘CanLit’ was it? Do you really think they’ll…?”
“A good chance,” said Forde. “We’ll give it the old college try.”
“Well,” said Anna, “as you said, he did paint himself into rather a public corner. What was his name?”
“Toomer,” said Forde. “Premier Toomer.”
“What a dreadful morning!”
“Gitchee Gumee!” said Forde.
She slapped his knee.
“Yes,” said Forde, “if we get the Gleaner onto it. To get the ball rolling. Yes,” he said, “I really do think The Toomer, as they call him, painted himself into a corner.”
He snorted in amusement, thinking of the Fink-Nottle stiffeners.
“Rhapsodized himself into a corner.”
Forde drifted off into his habitual mental maze in the formal garden of words. Anna, too, had fallen silent. Found himself thinking of P.G. Wodehouse, Gussie Fink-Nottle, newts, and stiffeners, Bertie’s waking words to Jeeves,
‘… get me one of those bracers of yours, will you?’
‘I have one in readiness, sir, in the ice-box.’
The bracers, the stiffeners, a proprietary brand in a brown glass bottle with a Victorian figure in a striped bathing costume on the label, drooping mournful moustache, reared walrus looking leery, first man to swim the English Channel—Scott? No, Webb. Captain Webb! Awarded a medal by the Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned. Figured on matchboxes in his long-gone childhood. Could the matches have possibly been called, could they have conceivably been called… England’s Glory? He would market the stiffeners—along the lines of Carter’s Little Liver Pills—None Genuine Without This Signature … Toomer’s Matutinal Tots.
Paths of light, spears, shards, across the water of the Saint John River, ice, changed sound of the taxi’s wheels over the bridge.
The pine-tree freshener swaying.
Then darkness, faint light from the dashboard.
The brown bottle from its shoulder to its mid-point ribbed, a feel somehow medicinal.
“That Juggernaut—”
The sound of her voice dragged him out of this.
“Pardon? What did you say?”
“That Juggernaut, when I couldn’t stand smiling any more or turning my head or inclining to left or right and the noise was smashing inside my head like waves smashing on a breakwater, when I was feeling most desolate and lost, I used to put my reading glasses on—astigmatism, too—and stare at the colours and the shifts in the gleaming. I couldn’t really see Jagganath sitting there or the pulling-and-pushing chaps, it was all just a silver shape that shrank or jumped as the candles flared or guttered. And that was what I wanted. Seeing it and not seeing it. And I just sat, just sat lost in it till Tony had me driven home.”
*
Above the bar of the Legion Hall was affixed a long, polished wooden aeroplane propeller of World War I vintage, a propeller from one of those tiny planes, the toy-like relics he’d seen hanging from the ceiling in the Imperial War Museum: wood, wire, canvas.
“Evening, Mr. Forde.”
“This is one of your haunts, then?” said Anna.
“Darts,” said Forde. “My present abode is a place of low, silent corridors and women with brittle hair and men in undershirts. There’s noise here, people, drink, and usually I’m co-opted to play for the university against the Legion. Most of the university guys are Brits, ex-pats, immigrants, it’s funny, no arts people, no sciences people, engineers mostly, geologists. And even if born-and-bred New Brunswickers, most of the Legion team are anglophiles—spent their horrible youth there in the war—these are Marmite-and-Welsh-Rarebit men, HP Saucers.”
He nodded politely to the Ozarks pair at the bar.
The man returned a grudging tilt of his head.
Bright-white dentures, unlaced high-tops, feral sideburns to the angle of his jaw. The woman with him, a grey pigtail. Under the fabric of the T-shirt, fabric thinned from washings, the bra-less mounds swaying, the nipples visible as darknesses the size of prunes.
Anna stood looking about at her.
Military “collectibles” crowded
and cluttered the walls, what pickers and pack-ratters now dubbed “militaria.” Two further words that caused Forde a twinge. Photographs in crude passe-partout frames, pennons, gas masks, displays of medals, cap badges, cloth shoulder flashes on a long, hanging piece of carpet, dog tags, battered Lee-Endfields, a sagging Sam Browne belt and holster. The photographs were fading, yellowing, some sepia, laughing-boy air crews, grinning tommies giving thumbs-up and V-signs, crews standing at attention beside ack-ack guns in—where? a town—a park? Passe-partout desert men in shorts, brewing up tea in sand-filled oil drums beside Sherman and Crusader Tanks.
Hammered through its cover and pages to the wall with a fat construction nail a grubby Part One Pay Book.
An ancient—was it water-cooled?—machine gun, bracketed and bolted to the wall, a decal of a wolf’s head stuck on top of the barrel shroud, and underneath the head, the letters AW(F)SQN. He stooped to read what was stamped into the hasp that secured the breech block:
J.P. Sauer & Sonn. Suhl. 1917.
He wondered how such an oddity from World War I had ended up in World War II in an RCAF mess in Dartmouth.
Curious.
“Well, I suppose we’d better stake out a table,” he said, “before people arrive for the match.”
He watched the barman preparing a refill for the pigtail woman. It involved thick pouring from a carton of 18% table cream, grenadine, an egg white, a shot of tequila, a shot of rye, the scooping out from the jar with a long spoon of a maraschino cherry.
As this concoction was set before her, the sideburns man, pointing, said, “Can I have that?”
“You had my cherry years ago,” said the pigtail woman.
cackling.
“Ne’mind,” said Sideburns, “you’ve still got the box it came in.”
“Christ!” said Forde, glanced at his watch, “relatively normal people should be coming—Christ!—this beer is dreadful.”
Looking at the picture on the label, Anna said, “How sad the moose!”
“How High the Moon,” said Forde.
Sideburns barked a belch.
“Silly name,” said Forde, “because if you want two, ‘Mooses’ sounds odd, so you have to say ‘Two Moose,’ which makes you sound as down-home as—”
He moved his head to indicate the couple at the bar.
“Poor Forde!” said Anna, “Harrowed by language.”
“Anna?”
She flung back her head and raised surrendering hands like little paws.
“Poor tortured Forde!”
“Anna!”
“Mmmm?”
“I’ve been thinking—not intending to be rude or anything—but a couple of acting classes at the Philadelphia Academy of the Arts when you were, what? Nineteen? Twenty?”
He spread his hands, raised eyebrows.
Evening, squire
A Fair Isle pullover strained over a burgeoning paunch
Forde, raising a finger to his brow, sketched a salute
“How did I get a job,” she said in a plonking voice, “with a British rep company?”
“Just curious.”
“As well you might be. But I was taken on as an ASM, not an actress. Assistant Stage Manager.”
“But you auditioned. The Fry thing—”
“A formality,” she said, “a nicety. But you’re right. I wouldn’t have managed even that had not strings been pulled.”
“What were the strings?”
“Sir Charles G.D.”
She grinned at his expression.
“When he lived there he’d become friendly with a banker, and his family, a great cultivator of the wealthy, Sir Charles, so I was told, and he’d renewed this contact when he was knighted in 1935—Henry Broadley, this man’s name was, though we might well be talking about his son here—even his grandson? I’m hopeless about dates. But anyway my mother had somehow become part of all this, the Broadleys had visited Fredericton and Toronto and gone across Canada by train and there was some connection with Childe—Christmas cards, Childe’s effusions, photographs of sundry children and Broadley knew Shaw G.B. and sent newspaper clippings and G.D and Childe and my mother had gone to England together in the early thirties, 1933 I think it was, on some sort of Canadian Authors junket—”
She dismissed detail with imperious hand.
“—and so Childe had met this Broadley at some posh dinner in London, where Shaw apparently trashed all the Canadian poets, bless him, though as a playwright he’s a clunker, and my mother wrote a letter to him—Broadley, I mean—or his son—I’m really not sure, but the famed Lewis Normande was indebted to one or the other and—”
Forde held up a hand.
“I really do not like this beer,” he said. “As our President is paying, what would you say to a brandy?” “Probably unwise,” said Anna, “as I’m more than a little—but what the hell. They don’t call me ‘The Wine Lady’ for nothing. What was it you said he was?”
“Trinidad Asphalt and Bitumen.”
“Well, the hell with him,” she said. “We’ll ruin him from within.”
The bar was filling, the noise was rising, the air already thickening with cigarette smoke. While he waited, Forde watched two young women shrugging off parkas, tank tops cut generously loose and low, tarty.
Voices through the hubbub.
As he was bearing the snifters to the table—
Fordie!
Raised one of the snifters in greeting.
“Only Stock, I’m afraid. It’s all they had.”
“The robust earthiness,” said Anna, “of stalk and leaf.”
“Aaah!” said Forde.
“Do?” repeated Anna. “Well, being on the book, I suppose, the props table. Book? Sorry. Well, then—everything’s changed now, of course—but then we had a copy of the script that had been taken apart and mounted on large sheets of construction paper, where we noted every actor’s movements and every technical cue. Always referred to as ‘the bible.’”
“This was prompting?”
She nodded.
“And the props table was my responsibility, too. For each entrance the needed prop would be waiting at the right-hand edge of the table—a book, umbrella, flashlight, birdcage that kind of thing. And then the theatre duties before the curtain—checking the half, the dressing-room calls—”
“The half of what?”
“Oh, the board at the stage entrance where everyone has to have signed-in half an hour before house lights—and the dressing rooms, 15 minutes, 10 minutes, Beginners, please…”
… so he rips the cord and then all shit breaks loose…
Forde leaned closer the better to hear her.
“And I was usually understudy to the female lead. If disaster struck—and, of course, it didn’t until Torquay—I couldn’t act but I could have said the words without reading from a script. That was my real talent. I could learn a script in three days flat and that’s probably why Normande kept me on. That, and slave wages. His rehearsals and notes were electric, though. A gestapo of a man. Wore a reddish toupée and plus-fours. His critiques were addressed to his spaniel. It had a seat next to him in the stalls. It had sad, bloodshot eyes and it was called Madame Noni.”
She sat back in her chair nodding slightly, lost, Forde thought, in memories.
Cigarette smoke was gathering under the ceiling tiles, forming a false ceiling which quivered whenever the door at the top of the stairs opened or closed. Like a layer of fibreglass insulation. Those pink slabs.
Called?
Called?
“Batts!” he said in triumph.
“Who is?” said Anna.
… fucking guy freaked me shitless…
The voice seemed to be coming from one of the two tarty young women, the abyss of cleavage aquiver, nudging into Forde’s mind the wor
d ‘fecund.’
In a glass case against a painted background of weeds, a monster muskie.
“I was always walking backstreets learning lines or pounding the towpath along the canal. The scripts were mimeographed and clasp-bound. You know what I mean? Two flat, tin spikes—sort of tangs, is that the word? No, prongs. They went through holes in the pages and then you bent them over to slide into clasp-things—”
“I think the American is ‘bradbound,’ but maybe that means a big stud-head thing on a sort of split-pin sort of affair because ‘brad’ in England—”
“Yes, yes,” said Anna. “You get the idea. So I was always having to take sheets out as I was walking, and I was nicking or cutting myself on these bloody tin things, fingers, palms, and one Thursday—a matinee—I’d come in with a bad one on my palm. My hanky was soaked and Theodore James, who was operatic, took my palms, there was a scar on the other, and did a great catch of breath and everyone turned to look at him and then, still holding my hands, he fell to one knee and bowed his head—and you have to imagine all this as atrocious silent film—and then he lifted his face heavenwards and said—uttered—declaimed—‘By all that’s holy! Doris and June Alison! She bears stigmata!’ And they were all amused at his fooling around because I was always teased about being passionate about theatre, about being, well, I suppose reverent, and from then on they fell into calling me Stig, then with that Brit thing, you know, ‘biccies,’ I became Stiggy.”
“Because,” said Forde, “they liked you.”
You playing arrows, Fordie?
He tapped the snifter with a fingernail
Shook his head
“Near legless, mate”
Pointing to the head mounted on a wooden shield, Anna said, “What is that?”
“An eland,” said Forde.
“But—”
She gestured about her at the militaria.
“But why an eland?”
He shrugged.
“Why a muskie?”
“Eland,” she repeated.
… so he goes where’s the breadknife and I go what breadknife, I don’t know what he’s talking about, breadknife, well it turns out it’s special for bread, breadknife, so I go…