I sit next to her. A few tendrils of delicious smoke drift from the side yard, where Rimbold’s coho salmon is resting on a grill in Margaret’s brick charcoal stove.
She stares at my flowers, suddenly thoughtful. Please, please, do not tell me that Chris used to give you flowers.
But she says nothing. I am urged to make mindless chatter, to break this log-jam of silence. “That opening line came from Lucretius. I must admit to having practised it in front of a mirror before coming over.”
She smiles again. “Well, it got the effect it deserves.”
This seems ambiguous. Stuffy, Donnish Beauchamp has created a classically pompous beginning to the evening. But he cannot control his maundering tongue. “Lucretius was a great philosopher as well as a poet. He is said to have taken a love potion that made him go mad. He took his own advice: ‘Embrace, thou fool, a rest that knows no care.’ Committed suicide.” I am dying like Lucretius, dying standing up; the audience is restless. Old Uncle Arthur, spouting on and on.
“Latin poetry seems awfully appropriate. Have a bloodless Caesar.”
She stirs the contents of a pitcher with a celery stalk and pours a glass for me. I am dry of mouth, and take a big sip. “Tastes like the real thing.”
“We’ll pretend.” She sniffs the flowers, then rises. “I’ll find these some water, and check on the fish.”
At seven o’clock, the sun, all day confined behind a gloomy shroud, descends to the Pacific Ocean. Ducks waddle among grazing sheep. A rooster crows, confused by the twilight. This Elysian scene should relax me, but I’m too keyed up: as much by an impending major trial as by the fearsome chore of wooing Margaret. Dare I make a formal announcement tonight? Margaret, my dear, I wonder if I may be allowed to speak of certain matters of the heart. Oh, pompous Beauchamp, fan your aging embers, find some fire.
I would give my right arm for a very dry martini. .
“I guess I’ve been saving up for this,” I say apologetically, spearing the last fresh baby potato. Rimbold’s gift is nearly skeletonized. I have been utterly tedious with my vapid encomia of Margaret’s exquisite table. My recent loss of appetite, I realize, had as much to do with my own inept cooking as with being lovesick.
Our only light comes from two bulky candles on the dining-room table. This is the way it was, Margaret tells me, in the old days, before the island had power.
“I think of it as a more romantic time,” she says, “living without light bulbs.”
I feel a twinge of pain. She is thinking about Chris. Over salad, Margaret tells me she has decided to announce her candidacy for island trustee this fall.
“You’ll win in a walk. Kurt Zoller seems vulnerable.”
“I don’t know. When Chris was trustee, there seemed so much work.”
He is at the table, the Banquo of Garibaldi Island. “You should get all his vote. He’s well remembered.”
“Mostly by me — I think that’s what you mean.”
“I wish I had such happy memories.”
Out of the blue, aghast to find myself doing so, I begin talking about my own marriage. It is a topic I’d shied away from during our innocent trysts at the fence, uncomfortable with those pathetic twin images of cuckoldom and impotence.
But here I am spouting a self-indulgent history of innocence betrayed, of tearful confession, of breakup, of reconciliation. Of alcoholism. And Annabelle’s continuing parade of squalid affairs to which I was so willfully blind — denying the scent of other men’s salt and sex upon her.
Margaret’s eyes are riveted to mine. Perhaps she has been waiting for me to reveal my inner turmoil, to return in kind what she has so generously given me: her own past, her own marriage.
“For all those years I refused to accept the truth. But her affairs had been going on not so much behind my back as almost in front of my nose — they must have been notorious, the subject of locker-room ribaldry.”
“I guess you didn’t want to know.”
“I think I didn’t want to admit to myself that I was the cause of her philandering.”
Margaret waits, silently demanding clarification.
“I suppose I was no great shakes as a lover.”
Margaret now stands up, quietly gathering the spent plates. I have a feeling she is about to announce the evening is at an end; she is repulsed by my whining confessions.
“Let’s take coffee and dessert in the living room,” she says. “You can smoke inside if you make a fire.” She is blunt, businesslike, and I worry that I am on my way to a ruined evening. Her cat gets up from the rug, sniffs dismissively at my socks, and follows Margaret to the kitchen.
As I walk into the living room I am confronted for an agonizing moment by the poster that reads L-o-v-E. I lower myself onto my knees as if in prayer before the old stone fireplace: no newspaper starter here except a few old Island Echoes, and it seems a desecration to burn collectors’ items. These cedar shavings and kindling will do.
But the fire is slow to catch, and when Margaret joins me I am still bent to my task. She kneels beside me, placing a tray on the hearth with mugs of coffee and dishes of apple crumble.
“Doesn’t want to burn,” I say. What kind of man is this? He can’t light a fire in either hearth or heart.
“Wood’s a little damp.” She refrains from taking charge, though I suspect it is her instinct to do so. Has she set me this task as a test of manhood? She is frowning, as if in inner debate. She seems stiff with me, uncomfortable.
“Why do you say you were no great shakes as a lover?” Bluntness reigns. I pause in my labours. I must tell her I am impotent and be done with it.
I hedge: “Frankly, I couldn’t keep up with her in bed”
A flame flickers, a splint of cedar catches, then dies.
“Did you think you were at fault?”
“I must have been.”
“Must be godawful to be a man. All that social conditioning. Did you ever think Annabelle might have had an unhealthy appetite for sex?”
“I don’t know what the standard of comparison is.” I add more sticks to my recalcitrant fire: Its impotence seems too apt a metaphor for my own. I laugh softly, though at myself.
“I’d say her standards were pretty low. I’m sorry if that sounds nasty, but that’s how I feel.”
She is giving me licence to let go, to unlock, to open the gates of anger. And a few months ago I might have done so, but I realize there is no steam left to blow; all that repressed fury with which I arrived on Garibaldi Island has somehow dissipated and, like this fire, flickers only feebly.
“She gave me my freedom. I hope she is happy with her new lover.”
Margaret sips her coffee, but keeps her penetrating grey eyes fixed to mine, digging in, excavating for hidden information. “It sounds as if you were too much in love with her, Arthur.”
“Well, actually. . no.”
“No?”
“I thought I was in love. It was something else. My daughter calls it masochism.”
“What do you call it?”
“Masochism.”
“Oh, come, Arthur. You’re so hard on yourself.” She frowns. “Don’t tell me you’ve never been in love.”
“Not until now.”
There is dead silence. She is looking at me with what I perceive to be utter astonishment. Good old Uncle Arthur, the wise adviser from next door, has made a social blunder of astronomic magnitude.
“What do you mean?”
“I am in love now. With you.”
She slowly puts down her coffee. I frantically return to my fire, busy myself by constructing a funeral pyre of cedar sticks and twigs. I apply a match. I pray to Vesta, life-giver, goddess of fire and the family hearth. I have just confessed my innermost feelings: Do I not have the right to a reaction?
“I think it’s catching.”
What is? Yes, the fire. Flames leap up.
I find the strength to turn to her. She is sitting, hugging her knees. Why is she smiling? Does she find this so excruciatingly funny?