Sussex Drive: A Novel (4 page)

“L
ISE, TU LES AS TROUVÉES?”

Lise dug through the storage bin on the deck.
“Un instant.”
She was still pre-caffeine and hunting for her hiking boots. They’d been muddy and she’d left them outside, but the help had moved them when restocking the rustic Seven Dwarves–sized cottage.

René, her husband, tousled and purposely unshaven, waved acknowledgement from the patio flanking their cottage. He was languid in the hot summer morning air, enjoying his own post-coital perspiration. Niko fidgeted beside him, swatting at a frenzy of bugs with his red hippie bandana.

“Maman, maintenant.”
Niko’s voice was as low as an elephant seal’s.

Her son, her sixteen-year-old only baby, now seemed to be growing by centimetres hourly, akin to a cinematic alien infant time-lapsed into a six-foot filial aberration, with hairy dirt on his upper lip and a bouquet of taut whiteheads on
his chin that pierced any person’s train of thought with their eminent squeezability.

“Race you,” René said, and they took off out to the road, where Becky and her boys, and other rock-climbing types, were to meet them at eight sharp. It was 8:05.

Lise wandered back inside and found her boots under the kitchen table. She sat to lace up. Slumming it in this cottage, with its kitschy mix of Moroccan carpet and Kirkland kitchen mats, and now gulping that first bullet of bitter espresso Lise was relieved to be away from 1 Sussex Drive, the Governor General’s official residence—hers—in Ottawa. Not because she found the thirty or so hectares of Rideau Hall—a Victorian villa with ice rink, tennis court, toboggan slide, rock and other gardens, art collection, and what René called a wet dream of a wine cellar, with vintages as tenderly aged as him—onerous or tiring, what with the constant glad-handing, flag-waving, flower-sniffing and air-kissing, and the pressure of back-door intelligence-gathering and deal-making, but because it was a boon to be utterly free of a certain newly installed staff member. Miss Margaret Lee Yeung.

And to be able to walk around naked, if so inclined, and think a wholly banal thought.

“Maman!”

Lise grabbed the insecticide and headed back out the door. Niko was impatient, and it was unlike Becky to be late, she who didn’t even seem to make a pee stop that was unscheduled or non-tactical. But they’d all been stirred by a helicopter or two, earlier, and Lise surmised that something
had come up for the Prime Minister. Trade glitch? Border skirmish? Bee sting and anaphylactic shock?

“Je m’en viens,”
Lise said.

Before Niko could bellow again, René started chasing him around an archaic maple.
“Je vais t’attraper, Niko man.”
He grabbed at his shirt, ripping it, and wrestled him to the ground.

“René!” Lise called.
“Sa chemise!”
But she wasn’t mad at all.

Niko turned onto his back, regained his own two feet and returned the favour; René was pinned under his stepson.
“Y’m faut un stunt double! Un stunt double!”

Niko exploded with happy guttural honks and this brought such pleasure to Lise.

For the camaraderie was new, born from Niko slowly accepting the loss of his own father, Brett Neeposh, the Cree academic and environmental activist who’d mysteriously drowned seven years ago. They’d been inseparable. Brett had been raised near Lake Mistassini, on the land, but had also snagged a degree in environmental law along the way and a gig at McGill. On Niko’s sixth birthday, Brett had paddled with his son, leading a convoy of canoes, down the Ottawa River to Parliament to protest a uranium find on their trapping grounds.

Lise had been moved by Niko’s ever so gradual gravitation toward René, her second husband and a Québécois movie star (who’d scored as an undercover drug and arms dealer in a César-, Silver Bear– and
BAFTA
-winning foreign film, among others), as his stepfather. The relationship had fostered the best in each of them. Which made it all the
more damaging that René was hoping to pack his bags in a few weeks and disappear to Europe. She’d been aghast when he dropped the news on her last night.

Lise stepped further into the clearing and doused herself with Deet, showering her strong legs and ankles, her tank top and arms, and rubbing the poison around her delicate stalk of neck, down her back.

They’d only been married five years. She’d been a high-ranking children’s charity fundraiser, the star of
oui
Care, and with her inheritance could afford the job. She also produced
oui
Care’s “program” on the NGO Channel, with healthy ad buys from cash-fat corporations looking to bolster their philanthropic profile. She met René, the middle child and sole son of a Liberal MP and former minister, on location in Freetown, Sierra Leone—and he’d told her about exchanging his Grit
rouge
heritage for the peripatetic career of a rogue thespian. When Lise had hired him as celebrity guest empathizer for her infomercial about child soldier reconciliations, she witnessed his gently sure touch with traumatized kids. She fell hard. She wanted that in the life of her own fatherless AfriCree boy.
Et pour elle aussi
.

They’d been shocked by the offer of this Excellencies post, although she’d had hints (from corporate sponsors) that the RCMP had been digging for detritus about her parents and her past. The Mounties had even flown to tiny St. Bertrand, the African nation her now-deceased parents had fled for flusher Canadian pastures (and tax credits for textile factory owners), to interrogate the former head nun at her
private school. Despite her many trips to that continent, Lise had successfully avoided dropping in on
le vieux pays
, even though her older sister, Solange, had repatriated, marrying a doctor and settling in the capital, Jolie Ville. Lise supposed she considered herself estranged from her past, even as her public and now political profile had been built upon it. Her viceregal coat of arms prominently featured St. Bertrand’s smoking volcano; twin egrets flew away with broken slave chains falling from their wings. Canada, or Quebec, was represented by a fleur-de-lis pennant stuffed in the beak of a Canada goose.

The invitation to Lise had been extended by the pre-Greg prime minister, a Liberal, for complicated reasons that included Quebec. She and René both knew that Canada had been complicit in the removal of the first democratically elected president of St. Bertrand, Jean-Louis Raymond, a regime change brought to the country by Bush. French-speaking military from Bushy-tailed allies including Canada had been helpful in this covert operation, although the Canadian media hadn’t covered it. It was clear that the then PM could kill two birds with one stone by appointing a St. Bertrand expat and Québécois African to the highest title in the country. The First Nations blood connection was a bonus.

René had argued vociferously, almost recycling his performance as Louis Riel, that they had to be
inside
the system, ultimately, to change things. “If you don’t have a seat
à la table, alors, tu es au menu.”
He’d gone on to vent about the
example of his father. “ ‘We must be the change you want to see,’ was what he always said.”

“Gandhi was the one who said that.”

“So they were both right,” René said, undeterred. “For you to have any power—and prestige is power—to implement change, say, for Africa,
et moi pour le Québec
, this position is what we need.”

But she’d not really wanted to become the Governor General and Commander-in-Chief.

When the last woman to hold the office had taken a circumpolar tour (because the site beneath the melting Arctic Ocean, claimed by
tout le monde
, potentially housed the biggest oil reserve on Earth) at the request of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, bringing along an entourage of ballerinas and buskers and cartographers, she’d been blasted by the Opposition (Greg) and the media. The then PM
avait fait le poireau et s’était tourné les pouces
, allowing the Auditor General to add up the cost of caribou, caviar and dry cleaning, which really aired the GG laundry.

But René had been insistent.

Now the viceregal consort had this incredible opportunity. He’d gotten off the phone with his agent and almost collapsed with the momentousness of the offer. Not so much financial as creative prestige.

“It’s the writer-director of
In Bruges
,” he’d said to Lise the night before.

Niko had left for a hootenanny with Becky’s kids; Lise could speak freely.

“René,” she said, her mind clipping at a breakneck pace, “
c’est vraiment formidable
and won’t it interfere—”

“It’s Benicio del Toro.”

“Yes! Yes.” She paused. “But won’t it take you away for the fall? The Official Schedule—”

“There will be a hiatus,” he shrugged. “In the shoot. It’s not like there’s going to be an election.”

“But Greg and the Privy Council have set this up—the African mission, St. Bertrand.”

“I’d have to miss it.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Your sister’s there.”

“It’s not about Solange. It’s about I don’t want to be there without you.”

“But you haven’t been back in decades.”

“Well, it’s always on the brink of civil war or elections or natural disaster—”

“Lise,” he said, “I can’t express to you how important this opportunity is.” He was wearing a white silk shirt, unbuttoned, and was tanned and compactly strong. He casually stretched out on the couch.

“And Niko,” she went on. “If you’re away, and I’m doing the Official Schedule on my own, he may as well be an orphan. This is not good. Not what I intended. Why I didn’t want to be the head of state in the first place.”

“Perhaps he can stay with Maxim and his parents—”

“Maxim’s mother deals.”

“Or another friend—”

“He doesn’t have any.”

He paused. “I see.”

“St. Bertrand is sketchy,” she said, easing down beside him. “So is Foreign Affairs and International Trade—like dealing with the CIA.”

They had made up before midnight,
bien entendu
. He played the trooper and murmured about plums—there would be other plum roles, plenty of plums, a plethora, in his personal fantasy orchard. He’d taken a shower to cool off and collapsed beside her, naked, on his side, facing head to her big toe, on the sheets. He’d bent his knee and placed the firm rough ball of his foot, just so, and explored her area with a consistent mellow pressure until it grew so sweetly intense that she slid all the way down to his end, where his legs scissored her and secured her sex to his willing mouth.

When she was thus engaged, doing her duty for Canada and by her spouse didn’t seem so contradictory. “Take the role,” she’d advised.

Becky and her boys roared up the road in her practical Jeep, stored at Lac Mousseau, with Peter’s hand pressed to the horn. They were closely tailed in a four-wheel drive by the rock-climbing guru and the personable RCMP corporal. Becky pulled over, climbed out of the driver’s seat, and handed her keys to Corporal Shymanski.

“Lise!” Becky said. “Chick hike.”

“But—” said Lise.

“Give the boys a break,” she said, winking at René.

It occurred to Lise that an hour of alone time with Becky might not be a bad thing.
“D’accord,”
she said.

Corporal Shymanski awkwardly fitted himself behind the wheel of Becky’s Jeep. Niko joined him, riding shotgun, and Lise saw Niko looking down at his own hairy legs next to the prosthetic of the Mountie. René swung in with the guru in the four-wheel drive and Peter and Pablo threw themselves in behind. Pablo wasn’t as garrulous as Peter, who took after his chatty mother. Both of Becky’s boys were athletic, which was to be expected with Becky practically throwing Peter onto an ice rink in his cruising diapers and hiring a fitness coach for Pablo before he could pronounce Greg’s surname. The Leggatt boys had been livid at not being allowed to attend the Beijing Olympics, and when Becky had explained to them that they were trying to help the poor Dalai Lama and nice Tibet, Peter had apparently put up a photo of Monsieur Lama and hurled darts at it. In his temper, Peter took after Greg.

And now René and the monkeys were gone.

Becky set off up the trail at a blazing pace, the same way she’d charged into Rideau Hall with a French vintage the day after Greg’s minority victory. “Howdy,
voisine
,” she’d said, as if in a cameo on
Desperate Housewives
. “Pinot!” She was always chairing 10Ks for charity—fundraising for a potpourri of cancers, parrot literacy. Her gams and glutes had been whittled to seduction.

“Did you hear, Lise?” She talked over her shoulder—she always had to be in front.

Lise struggled to keep up. “The helicopter?”

“No, no, that was just a forest fire drill. No, about John McCain.”

“Pardon?”
Lise said, trying not to audibly pant at the grade. “What about him?”

“He’s choosing a woman!”

“What?”

“As running mate—can you believe? And not just any woman. Our next-door neighbour and best friend, Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska.”

“How do you know?”

“Greg and I put her forward! I met her at a Midnight Sun golf tournament last year, and she’s just the ticket for the ticket—if I do say so myself! Her husband drives an Eskimo sled-dog taxi. She’s a volunteer firewoman. She delivered her own baby in a kayak.”

“Ms. Can-Do!”

“Hell, make that Mrs., yeah. Makes Joe Biden look like Captain Kangaroo.”

Lise dropped to one knee to retie her laces and change the course of the conversation. Easier said than done.

“It will be interesting to see what happens to Obama’s poll numbers now.” Becky jogged on the spot. “Especially since he’s got all those spurned Hillary supporters breathing down his neck.”

“And Hillary.” Lise was back on her feet and charging.

“Yes, and her. Divisive for the Democrats and the country.” Becky smiled at that misfortune and pulled ever so slightly
ahead of Lise again. “Besides, I wouldn’t want that woman mad at me.”

“Have you ever met her?”

“Yes. OMG.”