The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (52 page)

He claims an “old family tie with Newfoundland,” namely, that his father spent eight years here running about with a beetle bottle, catching insects, managing to pass off as “entomology” behaviour that in others would have been sufficient proof of madness.

We are supposed to be charmed that the Gosse household in Devonshire was full of insects, pickled and preserved, from Newfoundland.

Perhaps Gosse might not have found them so charming had they attacked him in the manner their like did me when last I ventured out of doors six months ago.

Perhaps Gosse
fils
was kept from visiting Newfoundland by reading this passage in Sir Richard Whitbourne’s
Discourse on the Island of Newfoundland
: “Those flies seeme to have a greate power and authourity upon all loytering people that come to the Newfoundland; for they have the property that when they find any such lying lazily, or sleeping in the Woods, they will presently bee more nimble to seize on them, than any Sargeant will bee to arrest a man for debt.”

But no mind. It is November now, and even the hardiest of bugs will have retreated to whatever hellish places bugs retreat to in the winter.

We are supposed to feel a kinship with Gosse, or acknowledge his with Newfoundland, because there arrived each year of his childhood at their house in Devon kegs of capelin from Carbonear. Easy enough it is to speak bravely of capelin when they are dead and if put down one’s shirt do not flop about and cause one to act in a manner amusing to one’s less bookish siblings.

We are supposed to commiserate with Gosse that his father did not live to see the fruit of Prowse’s labours. Rest easy, Philip Henry Gosse. In what agonies might you have spent your final days had you not had the good fortune to die before you were obliged, by your son’s sycophantic friendship with its author, to read the cursed book.

That BOOK! Had we departed from this world ignorant of its existence we should have been happier than we expect to be when the final curtain falls. Little comfort is it now that upon the publication of our History all memory of his will from the minds of the reading public be erased. If not from mine. No, never from mine, unless one of the balms of heaven be amnesia!

The Most Intimate of Circumstances

I
READ
F
IELDING’S COLUMN
every day for the next few weeks, still expecting to find in it some irony-laden account of her “date” or some send-up of the Yanks, who, it seemed to me, badly needed sending up. But nothing like that appeared. I even thought I detected a certain mellowing in the way she wrote, but dismissed it as being nothing more than my imagination.

I did not go so far towards acknowledging the possibility that Fielding might be “in love” as to think the words. Even had I acknowledged the possibility, it would have been only to refute it something like this: Fielding could no more fall in love than I could. The relationship we had had was the closest to falling in love that either of us would come. It was not in our natures. There were too many more important things to dedicate one’s life to than romantic love. It was because we agreed on this one thing that we could not bear each other’s company. I had married sensibly, and Fielding, sensibly, had remained unmarried. Still, it was important to me that I knew and sometimes crossed paths with a
kindred soul of the opposite sex. It was important to me that Fielding go on being Fielding, and in the life of the real Fielding there was no place for Captain Hanrahan.

And so, what happened three months later in mid-January was, at first at least, almost comforting. I met an acquaintance of mine from the
Evening Telegram
while walking along Duckworth Street one day. We talked for a while, then parted.

“Oh, by the way,” he shouted back. “Did you hear about Fielding?”

“No,” I said, trying to sound offhandedly interested, “what about her?” He made a drinking motion, hand to his mouth, head tilted back. Then, shaking his head and grinning, he walked off.

Fielding drinking again after — what had it been? — nearly seven years. I had not seen her since that night at Fort Pepperrell. She had shown no signs of backsliding then.

I headed straight for her boarding-house on foot, for it was closer than my car. I dreaded the thought that this Hanrahan meant so much to her that he had something to do with her going back on the booze. Had he jilted her? Had he been killed in action? This last possibility was intolerable. A lover whom she had not known long enough to discover his flaws, whom she would idealize forever.

I climbed the stairs to her floor, walked down the dingy, cabbage-reeking hallway to her room. I could understand why she lived there when she was drinking and spending all her money on Scotch, but why she had stayed there through seven years of sobriety was beyond me.

Taped to the door was a note bearing Fielding’s barely legible scrawl: “Shorthall: Gone to Press Club. Do not disturb unless absolutely necessary. Tell Harrington to run one from the file. F.” Shortall was the printer’s devil who collected her copy every day to spare her the walk to the
Telegram
and back. She did not own a car, did not have a driver’s licence. The “file” was an assortment of all-purpose columns of hers that the
Telegram
kept on hand for days when she was too sick or otherwise indisposed to write.

I all but ran down the hill to my car, then drove to the Press Club, where reporters in St. John’s gathered after work but at which, as far as I knew, Fielding was not a regular. But then, neither was I. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.

The Press Club was in the basement of an office building, accessible from a narrow alleyway that ran between Duckworth Street and Water Street. I descended the two steep flights of stairs to the landing, opened the door and went inside. Lit only by a fireplace just inside the door and by one ground-level window in the far wall, the place was so dark that at first I could make out next to nothing and simply stood there, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the lack of light.

I barely heard her call my name, though she pronounced it emphatically as if she had already said it several times to no effect. I looked in the direction of her voice and saw her in the alcove formed by the walls of the washroom and the coat check. She was sitting on a pew-like bench, side-on to a table, with her bad leg fully extended. Her left hand was heavily wrapped in a white-gauze bandage.

“What happened?” I said.

“Fell down,” she said. There were two brim-full glasses of Scotch on the table.

“I’m replenishing with my own supply,” she said, tapping her blazer. I heard the clunk of what I presumed must be her flask. “Don’t tell him,” she said, cocking her head in the direction of the bar, where a waiter from whom she was hidden and whom I knew in passing nodded at me, looking as if he was glad to have the reinforcements.

“What can I get you, Mr. Smallwood?” he said.

“Just a glass of ginger beer,” I said and sat down opposite Fielding. We were the only customers. The place oppressed me. I was all too familiar with the way bars look and feel on winter afternoons when there is not much light left. I remembered it from my childhood, when on Saturdays my mother sent me to fetch my father home from one of his “establishments.”

“What brings
you
here?” she said.

“You do,” I said.

She put her cigarette in the ashtray, picked up her Scotch, sipped it, put it down, picked up the cigarette. “Best I can do with one hand,” she said. “Who told you I was here? Harrington?”

I said nothing.

“Figures,” she said. “So you’re today’s knight in shining armour.”

“You had it licked,” I said. “Why did you start again?”

“Suddenly I’m everybody’s business.”

“How long?” I said.

“Two weeks, I think,” she said. “Haven’t written a word in two weeks. More fun talking, don’t you think? I was talking to myself when you arrived.”

The waiter came with my beer, looked at Fielding, then meaningfully at me.

“Been giving him a hard time, have you?” I said when he went away.

“He has come to the conclusion that there is no way that he can throw a crippled woman with a broken wrist out of his bar that will not make him look ridiculous.” She stretched out her leg, wagged a new orthopedic, thick-heeled shoe back and forth. “It’s supposed to make me limp less. I think it’s why I fell.” She patted her cane, which lay on the bench beside her, as if to assure it that it would never be replaced by this new shoe.

“What happened, Fielding?” I said.

She shrugged.

“Seven years,” I said. “Something must have happened. Was it Captain Hanrahan?” I prayed for a scornful reply.

“I haven’t seen Captain Hanrahan,” she said, “since that night you two met at the movie-house. It was by that time not quite three days since he and I first met.”

“You seemed to know him fairly well,” I said.

She shook her head. “I didn’t,” she said. “I didn’t know him at all.”

“So you started drinking again for no reason?” I said.

“I stopped for no particular reason,” she said. “I stopped. I started. As simple as that. Things are almost always that simple, Smallwood. Almost everything is exactly what it seems to be. No surprises. No disappointments. Life so far has met my expectations.”

“I think you should go home, Fielding,” I said. “You’ve only been back on the bottle for two weeks. It wouldn’t be that hard to quit again. Not as hard as it was before. Not as hard as it will be a year from now.”

She picked up one of the glasses and drank it dry. “I should have stayed home,” she said. “But I can’t bear to be by myself these days.”

“I’ll go home with you,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows and put her hand on the neckline of her dress.

“I mean I’ll make sure you get there,” I said. “I’ll even listen to you for a while.”

“I probably should leave before the boys from the
Telegram
show up,” she said. “You never know who might take advantage of a girl with a bum leg. Lucky for me it’s hollow, too. I’m widely presumed to be hard up for it, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” I said under my breath as I stood up. “You’re not often proposed to, but you’re often propositioned.”

“I’m often disposed to, too,” she said.

“You’re drunk,” I said.

“Probably,” she said. “I’m out of practice after all.” She downed her remaining drink, took some money from her coat pocket and put it on the table, then picked up her cane from the bench. I left some money, too.

“Where’s your purse?” I said.

“Do you mean to say, Smallwood,” she said, “that in all this time, you’ve never noticed that I don’t carry a purse?”

She laughed, eased out from behind the table, then stood up. Swayed, eyes closed. I took her beneath the arm.

“Out we go,” I said. “Purse or no purse.”

“You haven’t touched your ginger beer,” she said.

“Out,” I said, waving to the sheepishly grateful bartender.

Outside, we barely managed to climb the stairs together. Fielding paused every few seconds to lean back against the building, her overcoat open, her bandaged hand on her chest, her breath coming in rasping plumes of frost. She closed her eyes and looked as though she was ready to fall.

“Come on,” I said. “My car is parked right at the top of the steps.”

We made it to the car and Fielding, once inside, revived somewhat, catching her breath, smiling, closing her eyes in relief as if we had found shelter from a cloudburst. I drove to her boarding-house and helped her up the stairs to her room, the door of which she had left unlocked.

“Wait here,” she said, “there are some things I have to put away.” She closed the door. I heard her inside, moving slowly about, her cane clunking on the hardwood floor. I heard a door, a closet door it must have been, opening then closing. Likewise some dresser drawers. Fielding crossed the floor again.

There was a prolonged silence, then suddenly the sound of the cane clattering with force on the floor and something overturning with a crash. I pushed open the door and hurried inside. Fielding, still clutching her cane, lay supine on the floor, her chest heaving, beside her an upended kitchen chair. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine. It’s just my leg. And that damn new boot. Nothing new in falling down. Done it a thousand times.”

I helped her to her feet, followed her as she headed for her bed, a daybed that was pushed against the wall between her closet and the bathroom. She collapsed onto it, lifted her bad leg up with her
good one, hooking one boot beneath the other. She was instantly asleep, her cane companion-like on the bed beside her.

She might be there for days like that, I thought, in her coat on top of the blankets.

“Fielding,” I said, nudging her shoulder. She stirred, murmured some complaint.

“
Fielding
,” I said. “You’ve got to take off your coat and boots and get under the blankets.”

In the manner of someone irritated at having been woken from a deep sleep to perform some pointless task, she sat up in bed and swiftly began to undress. She seemed amazingly supple under the circumstances — sitting up in bed without support, with one bad leg and one bad arm, while profoundly drunk. She gave a little hop, just enough to raise her backside so she could pull her coat out from beneath her. She was wearing a white blouse and a full-length pleated black skirt.