After their interviews are done, Charles and Paula, perhaps to escape the continuing embarrassment of my sulking company, decide to walk to the ferry. Augustina stays — carefully avoiding topics that cause pain, such as alder trees and Phantom v’s — and instead rambles on about the O’Donnell case.
“He gives them taxi fare,” she says. “They all take off. They leaveKimberley behind. I’ll just bet that Mr. Goody Two-Shoes Charley Stubb knew they were going to make out. Hecouldhave removed the temptation, but he probably wanted to be able to hold something over the professor. Feels guilty now, that’s why he’s being so helpful.”
“Does cocaine — with some people — cause them to go over the edge? I don’t presume you’re an expert.”
“I don’t think so. But maybe. I’ll do some reading.”
Good afternoon, Jonathan.
You’ve cut your hair, Jane. I like it.
Different look. There’s a current trendy theory it alters personality. New look, new persona.
It’s soshort.Makes you seem younger.
Thank you. You look much better yourself these days. Jonathan. . look, let me say something at the outset: I was upset last time you were here. I wasn’t in very good form. I’d like to blame it onPMSor something facile like that, but I was just bloody taken aback when you admitted you had lied to me. I have to get that out of the way.
I deserved it.
Okay. So I want to ask you: Are there any other secrets?
Um, no, Jane, there aren’t.
Jonathan, how many relationshipshaveyou had? With women?
Do you have affairs with men?
Of course not. We’re not counting women I’ve merely dated.
We are not counting one-night stands.
I’m not very good at keeping relationships going, Jane, can’t seem to find the right woman.
Well, that puts the blame squarely where it lies, doesn’t it? It’s their fault.
I’ve never lived with anyone. I’m not very good at love affairs. My longest relationship? About seven months.
Who was that?
Part-time lecturer in the fine arts department. That was a couple of years ago. A sort of bohemian painter. Exotic woman. I think I like exotic women. Actually, there’s something of that quality about you. That’s not a come-on.
Really?
Yes.
It was just a compliment?
I suppose you think I’m a bit of a womanizer.
I’m more interested inyourself-analysis, Jonathan.
Is there something horribly dysfunctional about being attracted to women? I’m single. Married rules don’t apply.
Sure. But you’re not a very successful womanizer, are you? You’re attractive enough. You’re bright, you’re engaging when you want to be, you have this world-weary sense of anomie that appeals to many women. But it only adds up to a bunch of occasional dates and seven months with a bohemian artist. Isn’t that about it?
I guess a phobia about marriage runs in the family. My brother never married. And you know about my father. He’s on his fifth try.
The sins of your father are not hereditary.
Maybe I’m afraid I’ll be like him, promiscuous in marriage, chasing after younger and younger women, thinking I’m thirty when I’m seventy. Or taking a fling at marriage, and failing miserably and hurting a good woman — someone like Mom. The old warhorse never found a woman he ever loved. And neither, I’m afraid, will I.
You don’t think you’re capable of love?
What’s the diagnosis? I’m emotionally castrated, aren’t I? Obviously unable to relate to women on any committed basis. I consider them mere objects and playthings, don’t I?
Stop making up false images of yourself. I’m not saying that. I think you’re perfectly capable of love. I think you also may be afraid of it. I’d like to know why.
Fucked-up childhood.
That’s often such an easy excuse, Jonathan.
We had such a strict moral code, except when it applied to my father. I suppose the seminal event in our loving relationship was when I walked into the bedroom and caught him and Mother in the act.
How old were you?
Six. He spanked me raw. I was seven when I was graduated to the whip. Sign of manhood. If it was good enough for Viscount Caraway, it was good enough for his sons. He got whipped as his forefathers got whipped. I can hear him carrying on: “Trouble with Charles and Diana and that lot, no one’s ever applied a nice bit of leather to them.”
Did he abuse your mother?
He never raised a finger. It was his whoring around that tore up the marriage.
Yet you sound ambivalent towards your father. I used to be angry at him. Because of his strictness?
No. For ignoring me. Christmas cards and the odd letter, that was all. For almost twenty years. But there was a kind of rapprochement — after Mother died. He tracked me down when I was in London, asked me up to his club. Turns out he’s been following my career, hadboth my books. I remember, we were laughing about the most recent cabinet sex scandal. Little did we both realize. . He couldn’t figure out why I turned out so well while brother Bob became a lazy playboy. Bob’s one of those hilarious Brit snots. You have to like him.
Have you heard from your father since this business with Kimberley?
No. I hate to imagine what he thinks. They’ll be talking at the club. “I say, old boy, sounds like something out of the sodding House of Commons.”
Do you think your father ever loved you?
I don’t know.
Did he ever say so?
Of course not. Wasn’t done, you know.
How do you feel about that?
I don’t have any feelings about it.
Bullshit.
On this last Monday of July, the day when justice pays its bimonthly visit to Garibaldi Island, the weather continues uncommonly hot. The grassy spaces outside the community hall — our jury-rigged courthouse — have been toasted sere by unrelenting Apollo, who rides naked and high in the heavens. Though I arrive late, I see no sign of plaintiff Margaret Blake.
What must she think of me now? That ugly episode with Emily Lemay is all about the island, magnified, twisted into many farcically obscene versions. I disgust Mrs. Blake. I am the lecher who lives down the road. My hopes for comity with the woman — and I expect nothing more — have been dashed.
Inside the hall, profusely sweating, fuelling himself with sugared doughnuts, Not Now Nelson Forbish of theEchosits at a small table.About twenty folding chairs — several of them occupied — are set haphazardly about. Near the front is that miscreant Bob Stonewell, alias Stoney, toppler of trees and garages. I’d forgotten: He faces trial today as an accused cannabis gardener. His case has just begun, and on the witness stand is his arresting officer, Constable Horace Pound, the lawman who controls crime on Garibaldi every second Tuesday of the month. He is a serious young man with a permanent frown.
The circuit judge for these islands is his honour Timothy Wilkie, judge of the provincial court, a former small-town Lions Clubber whom I recall as lazy and slow of thought. He recognizes me and nods, but almost surreptitiously, as if embarrassed to see me as a common defendant in his court. He is in his shirt sleeves — the metal roof of the building radiates heat like a convection oven. But Constable Pound is bravely uniformed.
“Upon arriving at the premises, which I have visited on several previous occasions, I observed numerous scrap vehicles as well as a workshed and a partly built house with only one room closed in. I ascertained that no one was present in the woodshed, though I noted the presence within it of a hoe and some garden tools, and fertilizer. I then proceeded to the house.”
Why do so many officers tend to talk in this stilted foreign tongue? What fussy master of the particular and the correct trains them in their speech? I can picture theROMPinstructor who is charged with the teaching of strangled English: stern, incorruptible, and humourless.