by John Metcalf
“Here at the date of this tale stood the Basket of Roses Inn, a mile or so away from a small village.
“. . . The Basket of Roses was the fairest dearest inn down all that billowy London Road . . .
“Old Tabrum the landlord was eighty years old now, with a bloom on his cheeks like an autumn pippin and two limpid blue eyes that looked straight into yours and, if you had any reverence at all, made the tears well involuntarily at the sight of such gentle beauty . . .”
David shifted on the desk.
“The ancient man was a great gardener as properly became a landlord whose sign was a swinging posy. What a garden there was at the back of this florious inn. The bowling-green surrounded by four grey walls was the finest ever known, and as for the borders, deep borders twelve feet wide, they were full of every sweet flower. There were Columbines and Canterbury Bells and Blue Bells of Coventry and Lilies and Candy Goldilocks with Penny flowers or White Satin and Fair Maids of France and Fair Maids of Kent and London Pride.
“There was Herb of Grace and Rosemary and Lavender to pluck and crush between your fingers, while some one rolled the jack across the level green of the ground. In Spring there were Tulips and Jacynths, Dames’ Violets and Primroses, Cowslips of Jerusalem, Daffodils and Pansies, Lupins like spires in the dusk, and Ladies’ Smocks in the shadowed corners. As for Summer, why the very heart of high June and hot July dwelt in that fragrant enclosure. Sweet Johns and Sweet Williams with Dragon flowers and crimson Peaseblossom and tumbling Peonies, Blue Moonwort and the Melancholy Gentlemen, Larksheels, Marigold, Hearts, Hollyhocks and Candy Tufts. There was Venus’ Looking-glass, and Flower of Bristol, and Apple of Love and Blue Helmets and Herb Paris and Campion and Love in a Mist and Ladies’ Laces and Sweet Sultans or Turkey Cornflowers, Gillyflower Carnations (Ruffling Rob of Westminster amongst them) with Dittany, Sops in Wine and Floramer, Widow Wail and Bergamot, True Thyme and Gilded Thyme, Good Night at Noon and Flower de Luce, Golden Mouse-Ear, Prince’s Feathers, Pinks and deep red damask roses.
“It was a very wonderful garden indeed.”
The insane shattering din of the day’s last bell.
Howie stared down at the page.
David stared at Howie’s pink pate.
When the clangour died, Howie raised his head.
“Yes,” he breathed. “Yes, it was a wonderful garden, wasn’t it?”
Reverently, he closed the book; softly laid it on the desk.
He looked up.
“Thank you, Mr. Appleby,” he said.
“Thank you, Mr. Bunceford,” said David.
He sat where he was while the chattering kids milled out of the door.
Bye, sir.
Afternoon, Mr. Appleby.
When they had all gone, he went and sat at his desk. The corridor was solid with noise – conversation, feet, shouts, piles of books dumped, the clang of lockers. He sat looking towards the window, unseeing, while the noise of locker doors and combination locks became further spaced, until the noises echoed in the emptying building, until the corridor was silent.
In the silent room, the buzz of an early fly working against the window panes, the tock of the minute hand jumping forward on the electric clock.
Outside from the Staff Parking Area just below his windows came the sound of feet running, sudden yells, the smack of a ball against the brickwork.
He walked down and stood watching the three boys. The desk under his palm felt rough; carved into it were the words,Who will suck me off?
Compasses, by the look of the workmanship.
A tall boy turning, jumping and plucking the football from the air, sprinting then for an imaginary touchdown. His yellow nylon windbreaker ballooning as he ran. David watched them through the double glass until they rounded the corner of the Metal shop.
Turning back to the room, starting with the back row, he began putting the chairs up on the desktops. From desk to desk, placing the chairs quietly, squaring them, row after row, he worked towards the front.
Then he went back to the windows and pulled them down by the brass handles completely shut, locked them with the brass catches.
Going to the front of the room again, he started to erase the boards, working in short sweeps. When he had finished, he placed the eraser on the ledge. The yellow chalkdust on his fingertips revealed the whorls and patterns of his prints. He stood by his desk rubbing at the chalkdust with his thumb.
Chapter Six
The strange noises rose again from the ventilation shaft. As if someone was attacking a radiator with a sledgehammer while groaning. Ten-thirty; the sun was shining. As long as the bugger didn’t start singing again as he had last night. David pulled down the blind.
He wondered why his sexual activities seemed doomed to hysterical interruption. The bedsprings, the Scots lady, the wilful blind, the afternoon on the Mountain when they’d been surprised by the constable on his horse, and now – booming French-Canadian ditties while in medias res. A bit bloody much.
But what would Gagnon be doing there again in the morning? He didn’t usually slop into view until midday. It was unlikely he was actually mending anything. Unless he’d been there all night? Hammering on a steel door, larding the ground with terrified sweat. Trapped like poor old Edward in the dungeon-hole of Berkeley Castle.
Good.
Fat, noisy sod.
He remembered escorting a coach-load of delinquents to Berkeley Castle in his first year as a teacher; “history field trips” such excursions were called. One element had promptly dropped his lunch down the dungeon-hole. As a prelude. Later, he’d got his arm stuck down a cannon-mouth.
The scene on the ramparts was vividly before him. The tugging mass of boys. The professional helper among them – “He’s always causing trouble, sir.” The snivelling trappee. The Custodian with the buckets of warm, soapy water.
Not, technically, a cannon. A smaller field piece. A culverin? A falconet?
David stretched. His exercised stomach muscles were sore. The thought of Gagnon immured in a ventilation shaft was pleasing. A touch of the Edward the Seconds was precisely what he deserved – a few inches of glowing poker up his arse. His just deserts for interrupting people.
Susan.
He hoped she’d make it home before twelve-thirty. The taxi had taken twenty minutes to arrive. All had been comparatively quiet on the Home Front; her mother had been praying for her again in St. Joseph’s Oratory; her father had been jocular of late often shaking his head and saying, “Oh, that poor shaykh. I’m a rotten man, may God forgive me. I hope he got Blue Cross.” On her bed, a magazine article, “Can a Young Woman Find Happiness With an Older Man: Twelve Personal Stories.”
His ear, the hair round his temple, and the pillow were sticky. Pink. Pineapple Chicken from the Nanking Dinner No. 5 for 2. What was so romantic about eating from scorching hot cardboard boxes in bed?
This room must be cleaned.
Susan, golden in the glow of the electric fire, looking down at herself as she rubbed sperm over her breasts and stomach.
“It’s good for the skin.”
“Who said?”
“I did.”
“It’s sticky. And it goes cold.”
“It’s nice. Millions of babies.”
A renewed outburst from the ventilation shaft.
“Displays of petulance will be punished,” said David.
He got out of bed and went to the kitchen. Sunshine was warm on his chest. A good day for a walk on the Mountain. There was no bread. He looked in the fridge but did not fancy pickled pimentos or mayonnaise. He ate a mouthful of cold rice from the Nanking bucket but thought of maggots. He put the kettle on to make coffee.
Jim was out – probably buying the papers; or by this time he’d have taken them on up to McGill library. There was a full hour before Garry was supposed to arrive.
He took the mug of coffee into the living room. Facedown on Jim’s chair was a Bellheimer book. He glanced at the first paragraph and saw the w
ord “neonate.” He looked it up in his Webster’s. He nodded; he had suspected as much. He settled into his armchair; an hour before he need wash and get dressed. Garry was usually late.
Saturday mornings in Canada seemed just like Sundays in England – coffee, pottering about, paper-reading. But he did miss the News of the World.
Midnight was too violent.
What Canada lacked, he decided, apart from widespread eccentricity, was hundreds of quavering, senile, dotty magistrates.
“What, exactly, are ‘panties’?”
Yes, thought David, centuries of culture and tradition.
Here, raw farmhands, driven mad by snow and bible-study, wiped out small communities in Northern Saskatchewan with .22 rifles. Perversity in England was more . . . mellow. One of his News of the World favourites, an exhibitionist who had been acquitted because he had not exposed his organ proper but merely a wickerwork facsimile strapped on and coated with cream cheese.
And the brave little man who had posed as a Municipal Health Department doctor and had gone all round a council estate in the mornings examining ladies’ chests for TB. Before leaving each house he had always said,“You’ll be getting your little green book next week.”
Genius. Pure genius.
It was not for several weeks that these women realized they had
been the victims of a vicious assault . . .
Nostalgia swept over him.
Hunger, too.
Perhaps he could persuade Garry to go out for lunch? But Garry never seemed to have much money with him these days and often claimed to have just eaten. He was always in a hurry, having to leave places to pick June up or take her somewhere. Better to just phone out for something after they’d had a couple of drinks – and leave the phone off the hook.
He’d thought about it, tried to make sense of it, struggled to feel the relationship, until he’d just given up and chosen not to think about it at all. It couldn’t be passion sweeping all before it, not with June. With her horsy teeth and drooping-pear behind. And they’d been married for six years anyway. And it certainly wasn’t her qualities as a companion.
Garry was ridden by enthusiasms; last year it had been A. S. Neil and This Magazine is About Schools which had lit the wasteland of Merrymount for him; lately, he had been reading Franz Fanon and some obscure bore called Marcuse, both of whom he had tried to inflict on David. Between these major enthusiasms, Garry read Beckett and Pinter, Ken Kesey, William Golding, Norman Mailer . . . with his various jobs and the grotesque hours he worked, David didn’t know where he found the time.
Yet June, the companion of his bosom, seemed to read nothing but Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and Good Housekeeping; poetry and novels were “serious” or “far too hard for me” – display of Macleans Teeth.
She emptied ashtrays between cigarettes and was jolly.
If you boys are going to work, you’re only getting one beer each!
Jolly smile.
If Garry suggested a pizza or Chinese food, she always countered with offers of hot dogs, and, if defeated, always contrived to be seen checking her purse.
Their child, a rather indeterminate four-year-old boy, was always being chauffeured to Creative Music for the Very Young, Painting Lessons, or to his Play Group.
As the hour wore on to eleven p.m. she excused herself and retired, always calling them “nighthawks.”
Jolly smile.
At school, Garry described his eight-hour production of Godot, the school he would like to start, the Canadian history text he intended writing to teach kids about the Winnipeg Riots, the dumping of pigs and grain into the sea off Vancouver during the Depression,
“fuck the fur trade”
“that’d be a good title” the internment of the Japanese and the theft of their property . . .
Garry’s eyes shining with laughter, they elaborated the exploits of Sir Charles Pharco-Hollister, proposed dreadful final solutions of the McPhee, Bunceford, Grierson, Hubnichuk and Follet problems.
The afternoon they’d gone to a tavern and become drunk on laughter writing an elaborate Bunceford and planning to send it under Howie’s name to the Montreal Star. The poem had been called “The Ruined Nest.” He’d forgotten most of it now – last year, last summer – but the opening lines were,Lo! In the crotch of a naked branch
Behold the hairy Nest!
They’d been eating peanuts, he remembered, hot from a vending machine; you’d had to catch them in a wax-paper cone. And that had been the first time he’d seen people putting salt in beer.
Yet the same Garry was married to June and supported that showroom, that glossy advertisement of a house.
June.
June of the inevitable stretch-pants and candy-stripe sneakers.
TV-Mother of the flowered coffee mugs.
David, a Pansy or a Snapdragon?
June of the Teak and anxious coasters.
June of the ski slopes and keep-fit classes.
June of the coiffured friends whose first names all ended in “ie.”
Juice-time, Chrissy!
June of the Budget.
June of the WEAK DRINKS.
And Garry supported it and her by teaching all day at Merrymount, by teaching two evenings a week at Sir George Williams High School, by tutoring rich half-wits, by slaving his summers away at an Educational Day Camp.
God!
Her body, her mind, even the whiteness of her teeth was offensive. All was sani-sealed. Asexual in her wholesomeness, like cheerleaders. The human equivalent of a slice of Weston’s bread.
But Creative Music for the Very Young!
Oh, Fanon! Oh, Beckett! Were there no limits?
He decided that when Garry arrived, he’d get some very strong drinks into him and release Grierson’s speech at Graduation, Grierson explaining to the Board’s Regional Officer the necessity of using the per capita library allowance to buy new uniforms for the football team, George Dimakopoulos trying to seduce Miss Burgeon . . .
He drained the coffee, the bitterness of the last mouthful making him shudder. The sun was warm on his feet. He got up and looked along the plank and brick bookcase for something to read. There wasn’t really much point in trying to think about the Garry thing; it didn’t make sense, it really didn’t make sense at all.
He considered a collection of Playboy cartoons, passed over a block of Jim’s twaddly neonate and sibling books, settled finally on Chandler’s The Little Sister. He sat down again and opened the book in the middle. It was falling to pieces; he should really buy a hardcover copy. One of the American greats. It was obviously something he was going to read for years. He knew the plot so well that now he just read random chunks, savouring the writing, luxuriating in the awful similies. Dashiell Hammett was good – no one denied Chandler’s debt to him – but Hammett just didn’t sparkle as much. It was no use arguing about it. Garry was quite wrong.
She stood so that I had to practically push her mammaries out of the way to get through the door. She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
David almost sighed with pleasure.
When the doorbell rang, he was still undressed, still reading. He walked down the passage and opened the door. Garry’s arms were piled with books and rolls of drawing-paper.
“Garry! Listen to this.”
She had pewter-coloured hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones.
“Isn’t that fine?” said David. “Chandler, asshole!”
“Your hallway and the stairs smell,” said Garry.
“You get used to it. It’s Gagnon. What’s all that stuff?” he asked as they walked into the living room.
“The books you lent me. Couple of others.”
“And what are these scroll things?”
“Ah!” said Garry. “Those are the answer!”
“Oh, Gawd!” said David. “They weren’t dictated to you, were they?”
“I’ve got it p
inned down, Dave. I know I’m right. The last act eh? Remember last Thursday – we just weren’t getting any spark there?”
“The Alice and Peter bit?”
“Right. Remember how soggy it was? Well, I’ve got it – it’s the actual physical distance between them. And they back off each other anyway – you notice they’re still doing that? But, look!” said Garry, choosing one of the rolls of paper.
“Let me get some clothes on,” said David. “Won’t be a minute. There’s some scotch on the counter in the kitchen.”
When he came back, Garry had one of the rolls spread over the arms of Jim’s chair, the corners held down with books.
“It was pretty dead, eh? Now look at this! All we’ve got to do is move the counter to here. Right? And have Alice out from here to here. What do you think?”
David looked at the diagram.
“First night’s Thursday, Garry. We can’t rehearse new patterns in three days, for Christ’s sake!”
“But what about the idea?”
“Yes, you’re probably right.”
“It isn’t as much as you think.”
“But there’d be the movements for the cops, too.”
“I’ve got that,” said Garry, tapping one of the rolls.
“Well, when could we do it?” said David.
“Monday after school – and here’s another thing. An uncle of mine died today and I’ve got to go to the funeral – I’ll be away all day Tuesday because it’s in Ontario. In Brockville. So you’d have to do it on your own on Tuesday.”
“And we can’t touch them on Wednesday. . . .” said David.
“What do you think?” said Garry.