Solomon was determined to finish the table by Friday noon, but the first day he was content to square his lumber, smoothing the edges with a joiner plane.
He had met her father once. A big man, barrel-chested. My name is Russell Morgan, Jr., K.C., look on my inheritance, ye mighty, and despair. He was active in the Empire League and a colonel in the Black Watch. He was the inept, hard-drinking senior partner in Morgan, MacIntyre and Maclean, whom the younger partners tolerated only because of his esteemed name and useful Square Mile connections. He was a notorious snob. But, to be fair, there was also something quixotic in his nature. Twice he had stood for parliament in Montreal as a Tory and twice he had gone down to inevitable defeat. Once, a Liberal heckler planted at one of his meetings put a question to him in French. Russell Morgan, Jr. tried to dismiss him with a wave of his hand, but the heckler persisted. “Is it possible,” he demanded, “that your family has been here all these years and you still do not speak French?”
“It is no more necessary for me to speak French, my good man, than it would be contingent upon me to understand Chinese if I lived in Hong Kong.”
Mr. Bernard, terrified by rumours that the brilliant Stuart MacIntyre might be representing the government in court, had foolishly approached the firm himself. Russell Morgan, Jr. had never heard of anything so outrageous. So Mr. Bernard, compounding his folly, tried to seduce him with numbers.
“Oh, isn’t that rich, boys?”
Finally Mr. Bernard played his ace in the hole. “I wonder if you are aware that your grandfather and mine were once involved in a business negotiation? The New Camelot Mining & Smelting Company.”
“Miss Higgins will show you to the door, Gursky, as surely as Stu MacIntyre will see you and your brothers behind bars where you belong. Good-day.”
THE LIGHT WAS FAILING when Solomon slipped into the kitchen to find a sour Ida waiting for him.
“Ida, you look adorable.”
Her shoulder-length permed hair had been gathered into a flat rolled chignon. She wore a black lace dress by Chanel, that threatened to split at the seams. “It’s nothing,” she said, sucking in a breath.
Barney had already eaten and been put to bed when Ida served dinner by candlelight. Morrie, bubbling with good humour, said, “Maybe I should take him on as an apprentice. What do you think, Ida?”
Solomon was out of the house at six-thirty every morning and didn’t return until nightfall. But he didn’t spend all of his time in the workshop. He also went for walks. Once he saw her from a distance. At ease in her rose garden, cutting blooms for the table. She wore a broad-brimmed straw hat with a pink bow. She will keep the book she is reading on the surface of her table. It will be encased in a tooled leather slipcover with a red silk bookmark. Say, Sense and Sensibility or Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. He will read aloud to her at night. He would tell her about Ephraim in Van Diemen’s Land and on the Erebus and how her grandfather had held him prisoner in that hotel in Sherbrooke.
“Say,” Ida said, “could you use a sweeper-upper in there? I charge two bits an hour, but no pinching.”
“It’s a surprise,” Morrie said. “I told you. We’re not allowed in there.”
“Oh, did you remember, Morrie?” Solomon asked.
“Did he remember what?”
“Miss Diana Morgan is coming to tea,” Morrie said, averting his eyes.
“Hey, I live here too. Why wasn’t I told?”
“He’s telling you now.”
“If you think you’re going to screw her, mister, you’ve got a surprise coming.”
“Ida!” Morrie said.
“Ida! Pish pish. I’ll bet even a milk bottle isn’t safe alone in a room with Solomon. Poor Clara, that’s all I can say.” Ida shoved her chair back from the table and marched out of the dining room, pausing at the door. “She won’t come, Solomon. At the last minute she’ll have to shampoo her horsey-worsey or go to church for confession. Forgive me, Father, but on the hay ride last Saturday night Harry McClure kissed me on the lips and slipped his hand under my skirt. Describe it, my child.”
“She’s not a Catholic,” Morrie said.
“Big deal. Neither am I.”
“And who is Harry McClure?” Solomon asked.
“Just one of the many young men who are after her. I mean talk about naches. She’s by Sir Russell Morgan a granddaughter. I’d be practising my curtsies right now only I know those people and she ain’t coming to this house, her father sees me on the road you’d think he’d stepped in dogshit.”
The wild cherry wood table was finished by Friday noon. Solomon covered it with a blanket, locked up, and went into the house to bathe and change his clothes. Punctually, at 4:30, a Ford pickup twisted into the long winding driveway leading to the house. Emile Boisvert, the Morgans’ caretaker, had come to collect the bookcase. “Miss Morgan sends her apologies,” he said. “She is not feeling well.”
Solomon went directly to the workshop, picked up an axe and, at the last minute, drove it not into the table but the floor. Then he carried the table into the house, still covered with a blanket.
“My surprise,” Ida exclaimed, jumping up and down.
Solomon announced that he wouldn’t be able to stay for dinner, he had to get back to Montreal, and then he pulled the blanket free and revealed the table.
“Now that’s what I call a cabinet-maker,” Ida said.
Morrie ran a hand over the surface of the table. He stooped to stroke the legs. He opened and shut a drawer.
“Say something,” Ida said, nudging him.
“It’s beautiful.”
Early the next morning Morrie trudged out to his workshop, sat down at the craftsman’s bench and held his head in his hands and wept. He packed his tools away and covered both the bench and his foot-pedal lathe with a sheet and then padlocked the workshop from the outside, intending never to return again.
Ida had taken her bread and jam into the living room, where she could admire the table as she munched.
“We’re going back to Montreal,” Morrie said.
Ida wiped her sticky fingers with a napkin and put the record on the victrola again.
She shimmied. He watched.
Eight
By the time Moses got to the Chalet Antoine, early one spring afternoon in 1968, it had changed hands many times. In its most recent reincarnation the chalet was a nursing home, septuagenarians sucking up sun on the flagstone terrace where Solomon had once told Diana about the Kingdom of Prester John. Moses didn’t linger, but drove right on to the cottage on the lake that was still owned by Mr. Morrie. Happily, the French-Canadian caretaker, a convivial old man, was pleased to join Moses for a crêpe aux pommes and several beers in the village and then show him around the estate and the cottage.
“The family doesn’t stay here any more,” he said, “but Mr. Morrie keeps an eye on things. He may not come out for months at a time and then he’s here twice in the same week.”
The furniture was covered with sheets.