So a throng of us went in my car. I was still sober enough to ask someone else to drive. Charles Stubb, a young Liberal with an obscene ambition — he wants to be prime minister. We were crammed four in the back seat, and I was thigh on thigh beside the Dragon Lady. I remember us both being sweaty from dancing. She began reciting lines from Saint Joan. Yes, Gowan, Kimberley is the shepherd maid of the battle of Orleans, the heretic saint. But it is I who shall be tied to the stake
Do you know, despite everything, despite the supposed trauma of being bound and raped, she gave four performances of that play? In the middle ofJanuary at the Frederick Wood Theatre. Shaw would have been proud, he loved his plucky heroines. Gowan, if you’d been tied up, and had your loins girded with Shameless lipstick, and been buggered and raped, could you sit around and memorize all those exhortations about going into battle with God on your side?
We went to some great shambling house in the West End where several students were jointly renting the ground floor. I think I was mostly talking to Charles, explaining how his beloved Liberal party was a collection of fuzzy ideologues in politically correct multiculturalist drag. Kimberley kept hovering. She had at least one refill. They didn’t have ginger ale, so she mixed her rye with Sprite one time, and if I’m not mistaken with lemonade a second time. We’re up against some dark forces here, Gowan. Satan rules.
After a while I said, okay, someone drive me to my house. There was a debate about the mechanics of this, and I agreed to pay for a taxi home to whomever volunteered. Several of them offered, and ultimately five of us left in my car, Charles Stubb driving again, and a young girl Charles was with — I forget her name, Asian Canadian, first-year arts — and a notorious sluff-off by the name of Egan Chornicky — I don’t know how these people find their way into law school. He was blowing about a.30. And of course Kimberley Martin came along. The next scene plays out at my house
Have I wronged Arthur Beauchamp in some way? We used to chum socially. He’s had dinner at my place, the very scene of the crime. He and his wife, Annabelle. Gowan, I beg, arrange for me to see him. Please.
Annabelle gives me no warning, and I am flustered beyond words when, having driven over on the early Monday ferry, she materializes in front of my woodshed, incredibly beautiful, radiant and cheerful, carrying on as if it were only yesterday we parted. She wears a colourful decollete sundress while I, of course, am adorned in the authentic garb of a rube, tractor cap, work boots, unshaven, unshorn, sweaty. I have been splitting wood.
Undeterred by what she sees and smells, she kisses me full on the lips, and I let go the axe and it falls on my foot. (The blunt part, but it pains nonetheless. A pain that can be endured.)
“Bristly. Are you growing a beard, darling?”
“What? Oh, no, I hadn’t thought so.”
“I think you’d look lovely in one.”
“I’m quite discombobulated.”
“What an awful word.”
“I’ll clean up. I was. . I’ll show you the garden and. . I have a boat now. My goodness, it’s delightful to see you.”
I lead her past my vegetable patch towards my leaning tower of Pisa. As the construction of my new veranda advances, the house seems to heave ever more to one side. Fortunately the girls from Mop’n’Chop were recently here and cleaned up the construction mess.
Annabelle sails inside and looks about with what seems an expression of approval — Janey and Ginger swabbed the inside as well.
I shower. I change. I make lunch. I am grateful Annabelle is in a talkative mood, for I can find nothing worthwhile to say. She is in excellent spirits, teasing me gently about my hitherto-unappreciated survival skills with axe and hoe, and kitchen stove.
It is a perfect June day under an effulgent sun, the island wearing a fresh green dress with floral decorations, so after lunch I take Annabelle touring in the Rolls-Royce, visiting many of the charming bays and overlooks.
My island does not receive the cynical review I had expected.
“It seems all so calm and clean, and pretty,” she says. “Such a sleepy little island. I get so weary of Vancouver. Everything is so unnecessarily hectic. Arthur, you know, maybe I could come out here for a few weeks this summer. Maybe after Gotterdammerung gets under way.”
“I’d love that. Come and enjoy the sunset of the gods here on Garibaldi. A spectacular performance every evening.”
Do I mean this as devoutly as it sounds? Do I still desire the pain? There are narcotics fiercer than alcohol, more tenacious.
I suggest a cruise over the waters next, but Annabelle is either leery of my seamanship or, as she says, prefers to exercise her legs, so our next journey leads us up an old fire road and through the forest. Annabelle, fitter than I — she has played tennis through the winter — is waiting at the bluffs at the top as I struggle around the last bend. Panting, wheezing, I light a cigarette.
The rocks on which we stand are thick and soft with moss. Chickadees scamper among the fir and arbutus. From somewhere the perfect silence is broken by the elegiac, distant bleat of sheep. Garibaldi lies beneath us, seemingly lifeless, torpid. There is the general store and there the school and there my house, and my demesne. Sailboats struggle on the wind-calmed ocean. But above, a more skilled sailor floats on outstretched wings, a bald eagle canvassing its vast, wide world.
Annabelle seems spellbound.
“That’s Vancouver.” I point to the brown haze to the north. “Behind us are the Olympic Mountains.” To the south, in the State ofWashington, a towering barricade, cloud-capped. ” ‘Many-peaked Olympus, the abode of the gods, ever unchanging.’ That’s from Homer.”
I wonder why I have such an unwavering compunction to be so patronizing and pedantic. I know she finds it tiresome. But she smiles.
” ‘Abode of the gods’. . Makes you wonder, Arthur, doesn’t it, if the things that seem important really are. Oh, God, I’m getting contemplative. It must be the clean air.”
“You ought to come up here with an easel. You’ve always wanted to get back to the palette.”
“You’re such a dear, Arthur. We should. . well, I think we are getting along a bit better, aren’t we?”
“Ah, I remember when we used to go for walks like this.”
“Stanley Park. Prospect Point. Every Sunday. And you with your poetry. I remember thinking you were trying so hard to be romantic. In your way.”
“In my own stuffy way, I suppose you mean.”
“Well, you were always a little. . not pompous. Donnish.”
“Pompous.”
“You don’t mean to be.” “Surely you can stay the night.”
“No, I have to get back tonight. Dress rehearsal tomorrow.”
“Oh, I regret that.”
“I’m going to take along a friend.”
From a distant copse a woodpecker shrieks and laughs at me.
“Little Nicky. It’ll mean a day out of school, but I think we should expose him to some of the good things, don’t you?”
I fear she sees how flustered I am.
“It’s the last production, then I’m off to Seattle. Salome.”
“Oh, he may enjoy that. Suitably bloody.”
“It’ll keep him away from the idiot box for a few hours.”
“Have a chocolate chip cookie. I made a batch.” I have brought along a bag of them.
“Arthur, you astonish me.”
She munches it daintily, afraid for her figure.
“So, Arthur, are you going to take Jon O’Donnell’s case?”
An odd turn in the conversation — this seems to be the major topic of our times. “Of course not. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, I talked to Hubbell. He flew over here to try to strong-arm you, didn’t he?”
“Yes. Tell him he can have his files back.”
“Arthur, you know Jon O’Donnell.”