Two Solitudes (47 page)

“Are you very bitter?”

He began pacing again. “Sometimes,” he said from the other end of the room. “But bitterness has stopped making sense.”

“It ought to be easy for everyone to have a job and plenty of everything, but people like Huntly McQueen just sit on their tails and do nothing.”

He gave a short, derisive laugh, and then he turned and grinned at her.

“You think I'm childish, don't you?” she said.

“No. Only optimistic.”

“But I'm not at all!”

He continued to laugh at her. “You're probably a socialist,” he said. “Or think you are.”

“But Paul!” She flushed with anger. “Why should you be against socialism? Why should a man like you agree with McQueen?”

“I'm not against it. And so far as I know, I don't agree with McQueen, either.”

“But you said…”

“I'm sorry, Heather. I don't want to argue with you.”

She looked away, baffled and hurt. Then she picked up the tea-cups and carried them to the paint-splashed sink and let water run into them.

“You make me want to talk about myself,” he said, still from the other end of the room. “Like your grandfather. It's simply that…” He hesitated. “I don't seem able to look at politics as if it were a science. I look at people instead.”

She kept her back turned to him. “But doesn't the system produce the people?”

“It would be pleasant to think so. At least you could change a system.”

“But you don't think so?”

When he made no answer she turned around to look at him. His face was in shadow, his back to the window, and his hands were clenched in his pockets. She returned to the sofa and curled up on one end again, and when she motioned him back he dropped down onto the other end, his knees spread and his hands clenched between them.

“Maybe it's just the way I've lived,” he said. “Maybe I'm wrong.”

“I asked you the other night what you'd been doing. Will you tell me now?”

Their eyes met. He looked away and back again. For a time he said nothing, then keeping his eyes on the floor he began talking, almost as though to himself. Ever since the family had moved from Saint-Marc, he told her, he had had no real home. Everything seemed to come back to that. He'd no place to go. At Frobisher it was all right, but then his father died and they were very poor. Gradually he found out what had ruined his father, mainly the fact that even when he had his land and was a member of parliament, he'd never found out how to get out of the strait-jacket of his own nature. No one
deliberately trapped him. Whatever it was, it was inside himself.

He paused and Heather felt a warmth spreading within her, entering softly like a visitor afraid of being noticed. Paul needed her, and the knowledge was new and rewarding. But she sensed a peculiar dominance in him, and an increased awareness of his strangeness, and she wanted to hold her breath, to say nothing that would cause him to with draw again.

“I can barely remember your father,” she said quietly.

He seemed not to hear her. But he added that his father was a remarkable man. He would have been completely at home in nineteenth-century Europe, and that made him about fifty years ahead of his time in Canada. Paul had found some of his papers, and only then was he able to appreciate the quality of his father's mind. But the set-up had been too much for him.

“I must be stupid,” Heather said, “but I don't understand. What do you mean?”

“You aren't French. You aren't in a minority. You English have always been on top of the world. You don't know the feeling of the strait-jacket.”

“Do
you
feel in a strait-jacket?”

“In a couple of them. If you have no money you're always in one. But a French-Canadian is born in one. We're three million people against a whole continent.” He looked around at her, smiling to take the drama from his words. “I don't intend to stay this way.”

His voice became low and slow as he picked his words carefully. He had found one of her pencils on the couch beside him and he began to twist it in his fingers, end for end, end for end.

“When I was a kid, in the old library in Saint-Marc, I used to read stories from the
Odyssey
in a book of my father's.
I realized a long while later that the
Odyssey
is a universal story. It applies on all sorts of levels. Science and war–and God knows what else–have uprooted us and the whole world is roaming. Its mind is roaming, Heather. Its mind is going mad trying to find a new place to live.” He got up suddenly and went back to walking the floor. “It sounds melodramatic. But it's true. I feel it–right here in myself. I've been living in the waiting room of a railway station.”

In the sunlit air outside the window a hawker was calling fish for sale. The man's voice, roaring an atrocious French, reverberated along the street from house to house. Paul returned to the sofa, and when he sat down he looked into her grey eyes. Had he intruded himself on her? Had he lost anything? Searching her face, he knew it was all right. When she asked if he wanted to go back to Saint-Marc he smiled and said that not even Marius thought he could go home by going back to Saint-Marc.

He told her a little about Marius, not because she asked but because he wanted to tell her. Marius was married, with more children than he could afford to support. When the Tallard land was lost he was old enough to understand what he was losing, but his idea of going home was to be a successful politician. He'd nursed his hatred of the English so carefully it was now a pretty fine flower. He could speak perfect English, but if anyone addressed him in English he affected not to understand a word of it. What he really wanted, of course, was vengeance. The only thing he really loved was a crowd. He always believed they were with him, and for a few minutes they generally were, but ninety per cent of them would go off and vote Liberal no matter what he said. “If Marius were a European he might get somewhere,” Paul said. “But not here. There are others like him. They're the safety valves for the
minority. That's all they are, and God help them, they never know it. When one fizzles out another comes to take his place.”

Suddenly talk seemed stupid. He turned and took her in his arms and his lips found hers. Desire broke within him like an explosion. He felt the firmness of her back against the palms of his hands, her breasts yielding against his chest, her hips with an involuntary movement surging in to him, and for a second their thighs and shoulders were almost one. Then she pushed him away and swung back out of reach.

“Please, no,” she said. But her face was filled with wonder. “Not now. It's…it's not…”

He looked about the room as though it were a cage, then he crossed once more to the window and Heather watched the line of his head and back as he leaned out. She wondered at the queer, sudden sense of fear he had given her. She felt as if she had never been touched before.

“Let's get out of here,” he said. “There's still a fine lot of day left outside.”

As he turned he saw her sitting upright smoothing her frock. Then she looked up and smiled, her wide lips making her whole face generous and open, bringing back to it a young gaiety without a trace of smouldering emotion. He felt overcome with gratitude because that was how she was.

“All right,” she said. “Let's. My car's downstairs. Let's drive. Let's even go for a swim, if you'd like.”

“Where?”

“Well, I know a place in Dorval. It's the house of a friend of mine. They're away for a month. It's got a beach.”

“All right. You'll have to stop at my place to pick up my suit.”

They went hand in hand down to the car. On the way to Dorval they decided to get sandwiches and beer at a roadside
stand, and by the time they reached Lac Saint-Louis the sun was moving low, but it was still warm. Heather parked her car in the driveway of a large house on the lake front and led Paul through a garden to a private beach. At one end of the beach stood a boathouse. Beside the door Heather lifted a stone and found a key under it, unlocked a padlock and led the way in. She pointed to a pair of canoes upturned on the floor. “You undress here,” she said. “I'll go upstairs.”

“This is communism,” he said, “the way you use your friends' property. Didn't they even leave a dog here?”

“No dog,” she said, her voice coming through the floor above.

Paul removed his clothes and laid them over one of the canoes. He was in his swimming trunks and on the beach before Heather came down. They swam for a bit, but the water was uninvitingly muddy and it smelled flatly of reeds, so they went back to the beach and lay and watched the sun ruddy-gold over the lake. From where they were it was difficult to realize that Lac Saint-Louis was part of the Saint Lawrence. Relaxed by the swim and the sun, Paul lay with his eyes half-closed as he watched a red-and-white lake boat ploughing upstream. She was ugly like all of them; the propeller foamed as she passed slowly up the channel marked by red cone-buoys; soon she would be in the Soulanges, passing up through a narrow canal with fields flush with her decks. Half a mile away her upper works would seem to be sliding miraculously over the surface of farms.

One summer he had worked on a lake boat and he knew the route. It was strange recalling it now. He could remember only a few moments out of the general routine, but they were so vivid he would never forget them. One was his first trip to the lakehead. A sunset burned through Fort William and
Port Arthur and hurled gigantic shadows of the grain elevators forward on to the trembling waters of Thunder Bay. After the grain had been hosed into the ship, they moved away, and as he looked back another grain-ship was caught in the flaming corona of the sunset like a black speck in a huge eye, the waters of the lake extending from the sun in a nervous, desolate plain, radiating into the darker east. As night closed over the ship the colour had died, and nothing was left but the sounds of millions of shallow waves turning over in the darkness, an astringent wind keening blindly out of the empty forest to the north, the quick spatterings of lifeless fresh water whipped by the wind over the waist of the ship and wetting the deck. It was only a few days later, away from this sense of desolation in the heart of a continent, that they were passing so close to shore in eastern Ontario he could look into the windows of houses when the lights were on after dark. He had seen men reading in armchairs and children going to bed, and once a naked woman had thoughtfully combed her hair before a window, her lips open as though she were singing to herself. The ship passed and left her there with a peculiar immortality in his mind, strangely transfigured.

Paul's thoughts came back to the present. Next week he would step aboard another ship in Halifax, quite different from the lake boats. He had no idea where she was bound. It might be Europe or South America, maybe only Newfoundland or New York. All he knew for certain was the fact that she was a four-thousand-ton freighter of British registry called
Liverpool Battalion
.

Yardley had said the Limeys were all right to ship with. He had added there would most likely be a Nova Scotian aboard, and if he turned out to be the cook, all Paul would have to do would be to show his appreciation of the old province
and the cook would be with him, hair and shoulders against any son-of-a-bitch of a squarehead that shaped up to him.

Paul smiled to himself. It was eighteen years since Yardley had been at sea. He wondered if the pictures he gave of it would turn out to be true, or merely a part of Yardley himself. Only once, in all the countless stories Yardley had told him, had there been anything like tragedy or grimness. So apparently things were what a man's mind made them. You had to find out for yourself.

“What are you thinking about?” Heather's voice came to him softly, floating into the red mist the sun made on his closed lids, floating in among the moving nets of darkness that crossed and recrossed the redness.

“Your grandfather. I was wondering if he was a liar.”

She chuckled softly and Paul added, “The kind of a liar I am myself.”

Leaning on her elbow beside him, Heather bent and looked close at his face. His eyes were closed and his lips slightly parted. She wanted to touch his hair and find out how it felt, particularly where it was a shade lighter and softer on the top of his head. Already faint lines showed at the corners of his eyes. It was strange to have him so quiet now, after all the talking he had done in her studio. She guessed it was more natural for him to be silent than otherwise. All his strength seemed to be held in leash. There was a scar on his left thigh, another on his chest; when he rolled over on to his stomach another appeared on the lower part of his back. She traced it with her finger.

“How did you get that?”

“Hockey.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“It's a good thing you stopped playing.”

“That's not why I stopped.”

“Why did you?”

“It took too much out of me.” He rolled over onto his back again. “After every game I was like a limp rag. And before every game I'd have to tighten myself up. You're useless unless you start nervous.”

“You love hockey, don't you, Paul?”

“I used to.” He shaded his eyes with his hands, his face wrinkling from the low-hanging sun. “Some winters I felt as if I lived in the Forum. I knew every scratch on the paint along the boards. There was one long gash near the south penalty box I used to touch before every game, and remember how it was made.”

“How was it?”

“Eddie Shore kicked his skate into it once when he was sore.”

“Were you superstitious?”

He looked at her from under nearly closed eyelids. “I was about hockey.”

She touched the scar on his chest and then took her finger away quickly. “How did you happen to do it–play hockey like that, I mean?”