He’s not sure how much of his feelings she returns. “Arthur, I love you,” she will say, but brightly, playfully. On their last night together, she shunned his touch in bed. She’d been deeply in love with popular, outgoing, fiddle-playing Chris Blake, who died untimely of a heart attack three years before Arthur plodded onto the scene. His ghost still haunts Blunder Bay, flitting in through bedroom windows, hovering, watching, judging.
Beauchamp returns home to an unbearable echoing silence. He misses Margaret’s bell-like voice, on the phone, rallying the troops. He misses their evening walks with Slappy, his diligent inspection of every rock and bush and turd. He has company in misery-Shiftless, the yellow cat, is pouting on her mistress’s reading chair.
Brian Pomeroy is on the answering machine: “When I saw you sneak out of court the other day, Arthur, I was overcome with a concept of staggering grandeur: a majestic piece of theatre, Arthur Beauchamp’s comeback…Please call me. I’m falling apart here, I’m suicidal, only you can talk me down.”
He seems in one of his demented moods, or well into the sauce. Arthur isn’t up to dealing with Brian tonight. He has chores to do. He must confer with the Woofers (tofu burgers again, tonight) about the mystery of the escaping goats. Fat, farting Barney must be exiled to rockier pastures.
He enjoys these duties-he has known no life as placid and rewarding as being the hired hand to Margaret Blake. The thought of even brief banishment from these shady vales and daisy-speckled fields causes him gloom. Gearing up for a trial, firing the engine, the huge mental and emotional toll-the prospect sends a shudder up his spine.
“Face it, Beauchamp, you’ve lost the quickness. You have become old and forgetful. You haven’t read a Supreme Court case in years, the law has moved beyond you.” Arthur is talking to no audience but Barney and Shiftless, on a trek to the upper pasture. “You’ve lost the fire.”
He has never understood why he succeeded so well in court-he is not disputatious by nature, and every client’s trial was almost as severe a trial for him. A shy man when not on stage-but when he donned his robe: behold the confident persona. Arthur hasn’t been able to figure out the mechanics of that-call it a dissociative disorder. The primary identity is passive, dependent, and depressed.
After Blunder Bay is tucked in for the night, he sets a fire, and is about to snuggle into his club chair with the Satires of Juvenal when the peace is disturbed by the phone: Brian Pomeroy, boisterous and drunk.
“Arturo, maestro, hero to all who struggle to fill the void since you left.”
“Dispense with the blarney. The answer is no.”
“I sympathize. You’ve got an ecological disaster on your hands and your wife is five flights up a tree-by the way, that’s such a heart-warming story that I cried watching you on TV. You’re looking great, in fighting trim.”
“Too long out of training, Brian. I shall not be auditioning for your majestic piece of theatre.”
“Give me half an hour of your miserable, lonely time, Arthur. Audi alteram partem, the first rule of fairness: listen to the other side.”
“Nolo episcopari.”
“What’s that?”
“The first rule of Beauchamp. I am declining to serve.”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday, and I’m catching the morning ferry and I’m coming over there to pitch you with a few friends in tow. Please don’t tell me you have to be in church or milking cows or some other lame excuse, just give me the directions.”
A few friends in tow. Arthur doesn’t know quite what to expect. Friends adept at the arts of persuasion? He will not bend, even under torture. He doesn’t owe Nick Faloon anything, he’d done his best. “Brian, you’re most welcome, but…”
“I hear you’re still off booze, congratulations, remind me to ask how one does that. Now I learn you’re not supposed to drink when you’re doing Prozac.”
“Follow the signs to Potter’s Road and Blunder Point…Never mind-I’ll meet you at the ferry. How are the children?” Three of them, adopted when toddlers, Central American orphans.
“They’re beautiful.”
“And Caroline?” His equally acerbic wife, an English professor.
“That’s why I’m taking the Prozac. I, too, choked on a pair of panties. Ciao”
Arthur isn’t able to decode that. Brian’s affiairs are infamous, his separations with Caroline noisy. He’s famously neurotic, but Arthur always enjoyed sharing courtrooms with him; he has a cutting wit.
He eases himself into his venerable chair-it has long accommodated itself to the shape of his body-adjusts his glasses, leafs through the Satires, reading the poetry aloud, then pausing with eyes closed to translate from the Latin: “‘Conceived by a girl ashine with Iulian blood, and not from one who weaves for hire by the windswept walls.’ Isn’t that lovely, darling?”
Only silence greets that unanswerable question.
8
Because the ferry takes a meandering multi-island run on this sunny Sunday, it is one o’clock when the Queen of Prince George shudders into the Garibaldi dock, sending pigeons fluttering. Lounging by the Winnebagel, behind a faceful of cheeseburger, is the editor of The Bleat, who pauses mid-bite to watch a classic fin-tailed Cadillac convertible sweep off the ramp, bearing four off-islanders already looking lost.
Arthur signals them to pull over. Brian Pomeroy climbs out, lights a cigarette. “I have a grisly hangover. The air smells too clean here, I’m not adapted for it.” He looks wan and unhealthy.
The others are cronies of Faloon. Willy the Hook Houston, who must be in his seventies now, a grey spry Brit, distinguished in bearing and appearance. Cat McAllister, Faloon’s stall for many years, in her early forties, still exquisitely formed, a tight cerise dress, platinum hair. At the wheel is Freddy Jacoby, expensive suit, well filled out, a seller of financial advice and a buyer of suspect goods, whose handsome retainers often graced Arthur’s desk.
Now advancing is Nelson Forbish, licking mustard from his fingers. Arthur beckons to Brian to join him in his truck, waves to Jacoby to follow. But Brian takes too long savouring his cigarette, and Nelson’s cherubic face fills the driver’s window. “What’s up?”
“Not now, Nelson.”
“There gonna be some action?” His voice lowers. “Looks like you’re bringing the boys in.”
“These are not boys.”
“The muscle, the weight.”
“They are merely film producers, Nelson.”
“What film?”
“That fellow driving? You’ve likely caught him on TV. Academy Awards.”
Nelson looks at Arthur suspiciously: he has been fooled before, Arthur’s little joke about the nudist protest. “They gonna shoot a movie here?”
As Brian gets in, Arthur leans to Nelson and whispers, “I’ll give you an exclusive in good time.” He heads off, the Cadillac following.
Brian stares bleakly out the window. “By some mysterious form of random mimicry, on the same day Doctor Eve choked on her white nickers, someone stuck red bikinis in my jacket pocket. If it’s Brovak, as I suspect, he won’t own up to it and he’s a prick. When I tried to tell Caroline it was an April Fool’s joke, she laughed her head off, then kicked me out. I’m staying at the Ritz.”
No wonder Brian is making a botch of the Faloon case. He got roaring drunk last night with no cause to celebrate. If this man isn’t having a breakdown, he’s teetering at the edge.
“You’ve got a marriage that works, Arthur. You and Margaret fit like comfortable shoes. Tell me how you do it.”
Instead, Arthur attempts to introduce his island, pointing out the sites, the tiny steepled church, the dowdy island graveyard, but Brian expresses little interest. He is finally roused from his moping by his cellphone, a chime, a few chords from the Fourth Brandenburg.