In the end, the Gardeyloo moored at the docks in Quebec City. Passengers and cargo alike were deposited at the harbourfront on a hot and windy July day. From there, I went to the railway station and caught the train for the ten-hour journey westwards.
THE LAST HUNDRED miles of the approach to Camberloo were through a landscape with no lakes and no mountain ranges, in fact scarcely a hill of note. The near-empty train rolled past enclosed fields, some with stone farmhouses that might have been imported from the pastoral Lowlands of Scotland, and neat little towns with glimpses of quiet streets and church steeples. There were occasional patches of forest, some of the trees quite ancient-looking — relics, perhaps, of the original great forests that had once covered the land.
At last, the train slowly crossed an iron bridge over a placidlooking stream — the Grand River, according to a flaking sign on the bridge — and came into the outskirts of Camberloo, which seemed to be a larger version of the other towns we’d passed. A mile or so of further reluctant slowing down and the train squealed to a halt at Camberloo station.
The time was three o’clock.
I WAS THE ONLY passenger to climb down onto the sunny, deserted platform. The overwhelming heat surprised me — I’d expected the summer weather here to be nothing to me, after being so long in the tropics. Perhaps I’d become too used to the air-conditioned climate of the train, so this dry, stifling heat made me feel a little dizzy. I’d trouble sucking in oxygen and my knitted sweater bought especially for Canada’s arctic chills prickled my flesh.
Behind me the train slowly began to move away from the station. In the background of all its roaring and hissing and thumping, a mad voice was howling. But there wasn’t another person around. When the train had passed, I realized the howling was actually the noise of another, higher-pitched machine. It came from just across the tracks where an old factory with hundreds of sooty windowpanes vomited yellow smoke into the blue sky.
As I stood in the awful heat, I couldn’t help wondering why I’d ever agreed to come to such an unprepossessing place. Yet here I was and it was too late for second thoughts.
Nor was there any point in just standing there broiling in the sun, for no one would be coming to meet me. Gordon Smith had telegraphed the Gardeyloo the day before it arrived at Quebec City to say a room was reserved for me at a place called the Walner Hotel. Whenever I arrived, I was to make my own way there and he’d be in touch with me. So I picked up my canvas holdall and went into the station waiting room.
Immediately I felt much better. This waiting room wasn’t air-conditioned, but after the heat and glare of the platform it was quite refreshing. There was no one around except for a ticket clerk who looked up from his wicket when I came in. He was a middle-aged man with lank, sparse hair, carefully draped over his skull in a way that drew attention to his near-baldness.
I asked him how to get to the Walner Hotel.
“It’s about a ten-minute walk,” he said, looking me over doubtfully. “It’s a fairly expensive place, you know.”
With my unsuitable wool sweater and canvas bag I must have seemed an unlikely guest for the hotel in question. I told him that a room had been reserved for me there.
His eyebrows rose.
“Ah,” he said. “Well, it’s just along King Street. I can call you a taxi if you like.”
I felt a walk might be good for me after sitting so long in the train. So I asked him for directions to the hotel, went outside again, and with my bag in hand — it had nothing in it but a change of clothes, some paperbacks, and the jungle-stained notebook that was to be my epitaph before Gordon Smith came on the scene — I began to walk.
To get to King Street, I followed a side street the clerk had told me to take. It was lined with trees and big houses built in what I took to be the Gothic style, many of them with fake turrets and cupolas. They were so alike they might all have been designed by the same architect. But the old oaks and maples, which in some places formed a leafy archway over the street, grew according to their own rather individual plans. These trees, like many of those I’d seen from the train, must have already been huge long before Camberloo came into existence.
Eventually I got to King Street, which was treeless. The architecture here was of a different type, too — though, again, there was a sameness about it. Red-brick buildings of a commercial sort dominated. Some were big and square, some were small and square, but otherwise they were mainly distinguished from one another by such overhead signs as Grimm’s Tailor, The Hardware Company, and The Pig’s Eye Pub.
The buildings all seemed to be of much the same age — as though on a given day eighty years ago, perhaps, King Street in its entirety had been plopped down here. If any of the buildings were more recent, it was hard to tell, they’d been made to fit in so unobtrusively.
No sooner was I on King Street than I began encountering flies. These Camberloo flies were big and unpredictable, so it was hard to avoid bumping into them. After these collisions, they’d just buzz a little louder and continue on their way. In that sense, they were unlike those persistent little jungle flies I’d learned to hate — flies that howled and never missed an opportunity to bite or sting.
On this first walk along King Street I didn’t see a great number of pedestrians. Most of those I did pass were ordinarylooking and forgettable and avoided eye contact.
Except for one couple. The man’s face shone red in the sun and he clutched a walking cane with which he jabbed at the sidewalk viciously. She, a little woman with a black headscarf and thick glasses, staggered along some feet behind him. As they came closer I saw, quite clearly, that they were connected by a studded leather leash roped round both their waists. I couldn’t tell if he was pulling her along by it, or she was trying to hold him in check.
Naturally, I gave them lots of room to pass.
The only children I saw on that walk weren’t pedestrians.
They were two boys of maybe ten years of age playing in an alleyway between buildings, kicking a ball made of some scraps of black cloth bound loosely together. As I passed by, one of the boys kicked the ball towards me in what looked like a friendly gesture. I made to kick it back then saw it was actually a dead crow, trussed up with string. I shrank from it, causing the boys to laugh in a most unpleasant way.
I NOW ARRIVED at the junction of King Street and Princess where, just as the railway clerk had promised, stood the Walner Hotel. The structure was certainly the tallest and most imposing on the entire street, jutting out prominently into the junction like the prow of a ship built of red brick that had somehow become beached in this landlocked place.
I pushed open the brass-bound swing doors and stepped into the hotel lobby. Away from the brilliant sun, all colours became muted. The lobby was long with a floor of green tiles. Couches and reading tables with the usual scattering of newspapers and magazines took up much of the space. I could see a large mural on the wall alongside the reception desk. It looked like a nineteenth-century country scene: men in black hats and trousers with suspenders seemed to be at work bringing in the hay, or doing other agricultural tasks, with horses and wooden wagons in the background.
How charming, I thought: probably a depiction of pioneer days, part of Camberloo’s history.
But as I walked towards the desk, a startling feature of the painting caught my eye. In a remote corner of the field where the work was going on stood the figure of a naked man with upraised arms. His entire body was impaled on a stake that exited from his mouth. I could hardly believe that such a horrific scene would be displayed in a hotel lobby.