Late Nights on Air (17 page)

She nodded and heard Abe’s commanding voice in her head: “It’s not about you, it’s about the script, the story; think of that.” And thinking of that, what did she see? Dido. Something the matter between Dido and her, something she didn’t understand. What Abe had dinned into her over the course of the week was the need for excellence, the need to take risks to get excellence. She’d felt excited, raised up, inspired. Maybe she’d even seemed sure of herself. Maybe that’s what Dido was talking about. And Gwen felt lost in the enormous gap between how she felt inside and what others thought of her. Dido was wrong. Wrong about her. Unless, of course, she was right.

On the way back to the station, she made a detour to the Explorer Hotel. Teresa had mentioned that the formal hearings of the Berger Inquiry were instructive and more interesting than you might expect. She went whenever she could to sit in the audience and listen. Now Gwen made her way through the hotel lobby and down the hall to the big meeting room, and Teresa was there, in one of the chairs set out for the public. Gwen sat down next to her. A lawyer for one of the pipeline companies was talking, a large man in a perfect suit and tie.
“Arctic Gas,” whispered Teresa with a grin. “Watch out.” He was cross-examining an expert witness, an engineer employed by his own oil and gas consortium, to explain and defend what they were proposing—a pipeline that would be bigger in diameter than any existing gas pipeline in North America, that would be operated at a maximum pressure of 1,680 pounds per square inch, and designed to withstand this pressure, and reinforced, besides, with steel bands or “crack arrestors,” meaning it couldn’t ever crack, rupture, burst. “Ha, ha,” said Teresa, loud enough to turn a few heads.

Judge Berger sat alone at a small table at the front. He listened and made notes by hand. In keeping with the official nature of these formal sessions, he wore a navy blue pinstripe suit. Gwen was more familiar with his relaxed appearance in newspaper photographs taken at community hearings. Here, she gathered from Teresa, the expert witnesses sat at a table on his right. The reporters who covered the inquiry full-time sat on his left at an extended table that was spread, as were all the tables, with a white cloth. The lawyers—for Berger’s commission of inquiry, for the pipeline companies, for the native organizations, for environmental groups—sat at other tables, their backs to the audience. When the hearing stopped for a coffee break, Teresa said she supposed she should get herself to work. Gwen left with her, and a moment later they were outside in the afternoon light walking back to the station. “Malarkey,” Teresa said, and laughed. No purpose was served, she said, by all the malarkey that happens when people aren’t honest.

“In white culture, people are so busy lying through their teeth. So busy thinking about getting ahead and making
money, so busy thinking about how they come across, that they can’t be themselves in a natural way. It builds up such a complicated and depressing web.”

Teresa wasn’t laughing any more. To Gwen she looked tired, uncharacteristically worn out.

Teresa went on, “If someone is sitting across from you and says, ‘I want your land.’ And you say no, I happen to like it here and I’ve been here forever, then they should respect what you’ve said, and that’s an end to it. They shouldn’t try to get around you. They shouldn’t read something else into what you’ve said. They should
respect
you.”

In the coming months, Gwen would often attend the inquiry. She noticed other townspeople who came repeatedly, a grey-haired woman who was always knitting, a wide-faced mother who breastfed her baby. They heard the native organizations push their moral high ground, and the pipeline companies don the cloak of thoughtful realism, and church and environmental groups attack the amorality of multinational oil. Of equal interest to Gwen was the science. All the types of snow, all the complications of the soil, all the varieties of wildlife she’d never given much thought to. Everyone addressed Berger when they spoke, and he guided them forward, passionate about every aspect of the issue, you could tell, but sober, balanced, Leonard Bernstein as parson, a force field of quiet attention. If something wasn’t clear he asked a question, and every single person listened.

After they realized they’d been overheard, Eleanor and Dido and Harry stood frozen in place for a moment until Dido began to laugh—embarrassed, shocked, working up a kind of carelessness to ease her guilt. Harry went over in his mind what he’d said—what the other two had said—not so bad, really, no great harm done, he hoped. But he’d better find Gwen. He went to the record library. A pile of records on a chair, but no Gwen, as he told them when he came back.

Eleanor wished that she’d nipped the whole thing in the bud. And yet she knew these regrettable conversations happened, were even necessary entertainment of a kind. Friends, good friends too, take the measure of each other behind the other’s back, pronouncing with injudicious yet satisfying finality. They do it to make themselves feel better, only to end up feeling slightly ashamed. They do it as a form of emotional release. They do it, in some way, not to bury the relationship but to keep it alive.

But there were consequences. No one who hears ill of herself quite trusts the friend again.

What were they to do? Harry said he’d talk to Gwen the next time he saw her, he’d joke her out of it. But Eleanor said some gesture of friendship was needed, and Dido was the one who suggested they celebrate Gwen’s birthday. It seemed to the others a generous thought, and Eleanor offered her place for the party.

“A
surprise
party,” Dido specified. “Otherwise, she’ll find an excuse not to come.”

Eleanor was dubious, but she agreed to be the one to invite Gwen home for a drink without divulging what lay in store.

Later that afternoon, when she saw her come into the station with Teresa, she called to her and Gwen came over to her desk. Eleanor searched her face and said quietly, “You’ve been gone quite a while.”

The sympathy in Eleanor’s voice picked at the thread of her self-pity, and tugged, and Gwen felt herself unravel childishly. She bit her lip.

“You overheard us talking,” said Eleanor.

Gwen looked down, her face a study in embarrassment, and a phrase came to Eleanor’s mind: proud flesh. In an old medical book of her father’s, its yellowed pages smelling of sweet dustiness, like an old church, she’d read among other things about burns and scalds, about suppuration, pain, excessive granulations or “proud flesh,” and, unless skilfully treated, ugly scars.

“People say all sorts of things, Gwen. It doesn’t mean much. It doesn’t mean they aren’t fond of the person, very fond.”

Gwen still couldn’t meet her eyes, and Eleanor reached across her desk and touched her hand. “Listen. Your birthday’s tomorrow. Let’s have a drink together.”

Gwen looked at her then, a look of gratitude. She nodded and smiled. Then, fingering some of the papers on the desk, she said, “Dido,” and stopped.

“Dido isn’t as confident as she looks. And you can seem very sure of yourself sometimes.”

Gwen stared back at her amazed. “I don’t
feel
sure of myself.”

“I know.”

GWEN TURNED A QUARTER OF A CENTURY
on her day off, Friday, August 1. Nothing from her brother, not a phone call, not a card. She thought of him in the jewellery store he’d taken over after their father died, her father a jeweller who never looked up, her brother a businessman who never stopped glancing around for another sale. Being on the radio, she’d discovered, was easier than dealing with certain people. There was a restfulness, an intimacy, a wonderful privacy when you didn’t have to speak to someone face to face. She’d fallen into the habit of reading out a bedtime poem “for all you lie-awakes” before she signed off at night. Then afterwards she liked to take her time going home, roaming around on summer nights that at their darkest were still light enough to pick berries by. But things were changing now—it was becoming cooler, duskier.

Friday evening, she arrived for her birthday drink with Eleanor at seven o’clock, and Dido was there. Dido, making an effort, she could see that. A measured effort, a measured welcome, and as they worked at making conversation, and nothing was easy, Gwen understood that she was going to have to live with this—her negative effect on someone who used to like her, someone she still admired.

Between glasses of wine, and during an awkward pause, Gwen took herself to the bathroom. She followed the beige-carpeted hallway, pausing to look in through the door of the small spare bedroom, Dido’s room, and it looked barely inhabited, its narrow bed more a shelf for books and papers than a place for sleeping. So she was spending her nights with Eddy. The second door was the bathroom, but a third door—the open door to Eleanor’s bedroom—offered another view, another way of stalling, of avoiding Dido. Idly, she gazed in at the unmade double bed, the armchair, the window shades, when something caught her eye. A few feet away, a bottle of patchouli on top of the dresser. An unattractive scent, she’d always thought. She noticed a pair of Dido’s slingback shoes on the floor.

As Gwen retraced her steps to the bathroom, a penny dropped in her mind.

At eight o’clock the bell rang, the door burst open, and in came Harry and Ralph and Teresa with overzealous cries of
Happy Birthday
.

Gwen felt tears spring to her eyes, and she smiled. She embraced everybody. “Thank you,” she said, and her voice was husky. But, in truth, she hated surprise parties. She couldn’t help feeling that it was cruel to string a person along, to say nothing all day in order to give her a hard, brotherly punch of affection at night.

For an hour or two she did her best. She mingled, listened, asked questions. She ate cake. After a while, she hid for a time inside a book she found on Eleanor’s shelf, Rasmussen’s
Observations on the Intellectual Culture of the Caribou Eskimos
. While Harry doctored himself with Scotch and Ralph satisfied
his sweet tooth, Gwen was out in the arctic wastes and fifty years back in the past when the Inuit were still living much as they had for hundreds upon hundreds of years.
Small flocks of caribou were extremely shy and could not be hunted on the creaking snow in good weather, but only in a snowstorm, when it was sometimes possible to stalk quite close up to them
.

Rasmussen had entered the Barren Grounds in the spring of 1922, having heard as he travelled “many harrowing tales of the privation that had prevailed that winter.” Everywhere Eskimos were starving. He followed the Kazan River looking for inland tribes, “the people of the whirlpools” and “the people of the willow thicket.” The months of March and April were always the most dangerous time. Winter food caches had been used up, the May caribou migration hadn’t begun.

“Hornby wasn’t the only one who starved to death,” Gwen thought, and she looked up to see Ralph watching her indulgently. “A serious reader,” he said. “A woman after my own heart.” He, too, liked to retreat behind a book or a magazine at parties, especially now that he had no wife to accuse him of being unforgivably and boyishly rude.

Gwen smiled and relaxed. She put the book down and returned to a party that seemed more complicated in its social tensions than the straightforward business of starving to death. A party she found touching and baffling and tiring and hard to navigate.

Dido was dancing by herself in bare feet. Teresa kicked off her shoes and joined her. Gwen watched from her armchair, fascinated by both women, afraid she’d be expected to dance too, charmed by their lack of inhibition, and envious.
Would she ever be like that? Dido was much the bigger of the two, yet her hips were almost as narrow as Teresa’s. They were dancing to the Beatles—Dido reached over and jacked up the volume, she slipped her loose watch off her wrist and set it on the stereo—flirtatious, girlish, free, encouraged by applause from Ralph and Harry, who seemed as disinclined to dance as Gwen, and over the din Eleanor heard the doorbell.

It was Eddy on the doorstep. An entrance that changed everything. A visit in the manner of a visitation from an uninvited guest, although Eddy had been invited. He apologized for arriving late, he acknowledged Gwen with a squeeze of her shoulder. But the playful mood vanished, the women stopped dancing, and the music changed. Eddy had a new recording he wanted them to hear. Soon Joe Turner was singing slow, funky blues backed up by wailing trumpets. “I Know You Love Me Baby.”

Eddy and Dido were dancing, and Gwen could see exactly what Eddy brought to Dido. Dido moved differently with Eddy. She was slower, unhurried. Her breasts looked heavier, riper, her hips wider, lower, fuller. She shone with a different glow, a dark, erotic radiance.

By now Teresa was sitting cross-legged on the carpet beside Gwen’s armchair, rolling a smoke, her hands trembling. Looking down at her, Gwen could see the traces of grey that she’d never noticed before in the dark hair on top of Teresa’s head. She could see the side of her face, and was struck by what seemed to be a sad and knowing smile. The other day Teresa had told her that although she’d followed her sister into the nunnery, she’d never followed her into a bad
marriage. That was the great sadness of her life, she said. Her sister’s terrible marriage.