You’ve seen my resume. It reads a little overinflated, doesn’t it? Top percentile, etc., etc., double masters in law and economics, a few years of appellate advocacy — I dreaded it, as I’m utterly traumatized by courtrooms — two years with the Securities Commission, and since then faculty at UBC. Acting dean since last year. Two politico-legal books under my belt, of which one bombed, the other caused a bit of commotion. I teach property, contracts, and commercial transactions.
They say poor Jim Mendel won’t recover from his prostate surgery. I could have been dean at thirty-eight, Gowan. Instead, I am about to become — in the lexicon of podspeak — outplaced. That’s likely to occur even if I’m acquitted — given the tenor of the times in the politically correct institutions that our modern universities have become.
I’m actually a fairly regular bloke for a rapist. I shoot pool, better at billiards. Still play a little old boys’ rugby. I drink beer with the students.
And I go out with single women. This, of course, will be painted as the crime of the century when I’m on the witness stand. There must be something abnormal about a chap who’s been a bachelor all his thirty-eight years. The jury will be thinking: This character can’t form lasting relationships. Let’s see, he’s not gay, so he must be some other kind of pervert.
Let me get under way. I’ll go straight to the bone. Pardon the expression. Gowan, I was so drunk I couldn’t have got it up with a tow truck. Can you call expert evidence about that? She was drunk. And how does that play out? Now, witness, you say she was passed out on your couch. Yes, she was. And do you deny you gave into your animal instincts and became a lusting beast and had your will of this innocent young creature?
Why had she painted herself red? The colour of blood — some pagan ritual while I slept?
I taught Kimberley Martin for a time this year, as you know. She’s twenty-three, middle-class, but rising: about to be married into excessive wealth. She’s in second year, and a rather — please don’t think I’d ever be unkind to Kimberley — less than brilliant student. She scrimped by first year. She’s by no means dull-witted, but she seems to have a lot of different things on the go. The Drama Society, for one. Watch out for the stage tears.
I’m not going to pretend she was just one of that sea of shining faces sitting in the lecture hall. She is not cosmetically disadvantaged. She’s a traffic-stopper, and you’d have to have a terminal case of myopia not to notice. Long ringlets of crimped russet hair, always brushing it away from those big, green, innocent eyes. Wide, pouty lips. Tall. Graceful. Self-assured. Hip. And engaged. To a handsome tycoon.
You know how students will try to avoid catching your eye for fear they will be asked to discuss, say, the rule against perpetuities. Not Kimberley. She always gave me the full frontal look. She didn’t know an answer one time, so she told a joke instead. It was funny, we laughed. I liked her then.
I started getting the impression she was coming on to me. It may be she uses her looks as a tool — perhaps she thought she could charm her way to a passing grade in Property 11. She started hanging about after lectures, wanting me to explain some obscure rule or other. The kind of woman who touches as she talks — delicately, always with two fingertips. Heavy eye contact and lots of come-hither erotic nuances. In the meantime, I was trying to appear hopelessly professorial.
Then, with odd regularity, I started to bump into her on the campus. Between classes. On the grounds. In the cafeteria. Oh, would you mind if I brought my coffee over? Not at all, said the fly to the spider. There was also a visit to my office in mid-November. She wanted some career advice; she was interested in family law. She carried on about how her betrothed wanted babies; she wanted a career.
And I’m about to lose mine. I love my work. I’m popular with the students. I’m a good teacher, Gowan. I was.
And here I am spending New Year’s Eve by my fucking self in my fucking den. I didn’t accept any invitations, to everyone’s vast relief. It spoils the party when someone’s pinging off the walls.
Gowan, can’t anyone talk to Arthur Beauchamp again? I mean, no reflection upon you, you understand that. Can I talk to him? Where is he being hidden?
The pillared courts of the Roman magistrates become an arena where the Emperor looks down upon my nakedness, and Annabelle is the queen beside him, crying shame. Guilty, I repeat. I am guilty. A loud rapping snaps me awake from this recurring eunuch’s dream, and I struggle to my feet and bump into a wall where there should be a door. And I realize I am not at home. Where am I? Are those birds I hear, and the lapping of waves? And this brilliant beam that pours through these dusty second-floor windows, could that be sunlight?
I am at home.
The rapping again, urgent, a shivaree of noise coming not from downstairs but from above. As I shamble to the window, I see the perpetrator, a flicker that takes flight from my shingled roof. The view outside makes me dizzy. Rosy-fingered Aurora has flung wide the gates of morn. Mists float above the pasture where three mule deer graze, like society matrons at a buffet table, daintily sampling a little of everything, grass and bush, and tree leaf. To better view this Turneresque scene, I throw apart the French windows, but in the fury of my rapture they bang against the wall, and the deer prick up their ears and look this way and that, then all three bound on springy legs into the forest.
I breathe deeply the sweet-smelling air of the country, then turn to my bathroom for my morning ablutions. The fellow who greets me in the mirror has tousled silver hair of a fullness that belies his years. Hazel, heavy-lidded eyes, glazed with sleep — one of them occasionally chooses a slightly different route from its brother. A nose too straight, too patrician (let us not bandy words: a beak). Hiding in its shadow, and not hiding well, an unwanted corpulence of form. I will immediately begin a diet.
Stoney does not show up this morning as promised, and I tire of waiting. A slave to habit, I cannot sit down for the first coffee of the day without a newspaper, so I walk the two miles to the general store, arriving there distressingly short of breath. The store is a dowdy establishment run by a laconic older gentleman with rheumy eyes: Abraham Makepeace, who informs me he is also the island postmaster.
“Mr. Beauchamp, eh? You’re the one bought the old Ashcroft place. Postcard here from your real estate lady thanking you for your business and hoping you’ll enjoy living here.”
He reaches into a drawer and hands the card to me so that I may read it for myself.
“Do you have this morning’s Globe?”
“We don’t get that here”
“I see. Do you have any newspapers?”
“Didn’t come in today. This here’s the Island Echo. Comes out twice a month.”
Tribulations must be borne on Garibaldi Island, but I shall survive them with equanimity. Back home in my club chair, instant coffee instantly at hand, I fold open the Island Echo and read about the recent lovely tea at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Rosekeeper of East Shore Road. Aha — cream puffs were served. And many compliments were “handed around” about the tasty mulled wine punch. An anomalous concluding sentence: “George Rimbold, returning from the function, skidded off the road, and is recuperating at home.”