Two Solitudes (55 page)

At breakfast the next morning Paul saw the name Danzig on the front page of
Le Devoir
. After reading the headlines he threw the paper aside. War might be a certainty, but he was sure it would not begin before the harvest was in. Europeans always seemed predictable about things like that.

After checking out of the hotel, Paul drove the car back to the ferry for Lévis. Heather made no comment. She remembered that on the usual highway to Montreal along the left bank of the river lay Saint-Marc, and wondered if he were deliberately avoiding it.

He drove slowly all that morning and Heather sat quietly beside him. Only a few hours before them lay Montreal, holding the tangled roots and residues of their separate lives. The city waited for them ominously, something that had tried to dominate them as long as they were in it, something neither had really escaped even now. Occasionally Heather glanced at his profile, wondering if his thoughts were the same as her own. Her husband. No, that word made no sense. It was for other people, a fence put up to keep others out. Just Paul. Heather and Paul against the rest of them.

She closed her eyes, clenching her hands in fury as she thought about the cage which had surrounded her all her life. They would humiliate him. Her mother and the rest would get at her through him. And inside her brain, behind her closed eyes, she saw what would happen if they knew she had married him. She saw how they would hurt him, slash at his pride as though they had whips in their hands. And now, just at the moment when she herself felt free of them, she knew they could hold her through what they could do to him.

Opening her eyes she looked again at his profile. His jaw was tight and his hands grasping the wheel seemed nervous. Was he thinking the same things? It seemed amazing that he had married her in Halifax, for he was really a careful man, aware of the odds and calculating them. Had he calculated them all now? She looked away. If only it were not for Montreal! If they could go away some place where nobody knew them! But he would have to get a job to be able to do that. And through working at the job, what would happen to his writing? She looked back at him again, drew close, laid her hand on his knee.

Shortly after lunch they saw the smoke of Montreal lying over the horizon, dulling the sunlight. The hot air held it like an umbrella. The river water began to look darker, they saw the giant cross on the top of Mount Royal, then the trestle-work of the Jacques Cartier Bridge. A few moments more and they had reached its southern foot. Paul paid the toll and they moved onto the incline in a long row of cars. Then, as the bridge climbed over Saint Helen's Island which lay in mid stream separating the channel from the shallows, he turned the car to the left and descended the ramp. “Let's not go into town yet,” he said quietly.

They drove along the island and stopped on its farthest tip. There were few people about at this hour of the afternoon,
so they sat on the grass side by side and looked across at the city. It sprawled there ponderously, miles of docks, warehouses, grain elevators, factories, slums, office buildings, homes; a huge encrustation of concrete, brick, mortar and asphalt spreading back over the flats to Mount Royal and beyond, an enormous property.

He said quietly, “Heather, do you think things have changed much since I went away in 1934?”

She forced herself to answer. “Not much. My own part certainly hasn't. Huntly McQueen, Chislett, Rupert Irons–they're the same as ever, and so is everything else.” She looked fixedly across the river at the docks. “I think I hate them.”

There was a long silence between them. He broke it finally. “Have we both been thinking the same thing?”

She smiled ruefully.

“I don't think I've ever wanted property,” he said. “But I've never been able to get the old house in Saint-Marc out of my mind. I suppose land is in the blood of all French-Canadians.”

She pulled a blade of grass apart as he went on.

“I'd like to have a place of our own sometime. I'm quite commonplace and banal, really. I'd like to see you cutting roses in the garden.” She turned away, and his voice continued. “Somehow or other, we've got to get some graciousness back into human life. I seem to have seen so little of it. People may forget all about it, soon.”

Her hand found his and pressed it. “We'll have all that, Paul. We will!”

“Not in a single room.”

She continued to gaze across the river. In her mind she saw one thing clearly. Janet would try to help them with money. It would be constitutionally impossible for her to
stand aside if she believed that her daughter was living in poverty. And with her money she would humiliate him even if she restrained herself from hurting him in other ways. She would never understand how to respect Paul's way of doing things. She would never be able to leave him alone to arrange things his own way–slowly, tenaciously, by trial and error, as he seemed to do everything.

As if reading her mind, he said, “Heather–when we were married, it was on our own terms.” He nodded across the river. “Not on theirs. They aren't bad. It's an odd thing about this country–it has few outright villains. It's only their instincts that are wrong. People at the top now–their instincts betray them in everything they do. Look at Chamberlain.”

Her eyes remained on his. Keeping her voice steady, she said, “Our own terms, Paul?”

He got up to watch the slow process of a ten-thousand-ton freighter being warped out of her dock by a pair of tugs. The stern came far out and he read her name:
Borkum, Hamburg
. The swastika was flying from her mainmast.

Still looking at the
Borkum
, he said, “War's unavoidable now, you know. That's why I asked you to marry me before I had a job. Without waiting.”

She tried to hold his gaze, but she couldn't manage it. Looking away, she wondered how many millions of others were like them, waiting for war, all over the world waiting with different thoughts for it to come to them personally: to destroy the burden of their own identities, to give them jobs, to cut the umbilical cords that bound them to the past.

“All the way between Athens and Halifax,” he went on, “I kept telling myself that the world you lived in wasn't my world, and that it was still in authority. I suppose its rules hold even now. No matter how you might feel about it–I told
myself that it had no use for me and didn't want me. And all that counted in me didn't want it, either.”

The
Borkum
was casting off her tugs and getting under way. A tiny ridge was pressed out from her cutwater, surface tension holding it from breaking.

“The day after war begins,” he said, “you and I will be wanted.” With some bitterness, he added, “Then we'll be respected.” His face suddenly broke into a smile and he bent down, helping her to her feet. “But meanwhile the old rules still hold. I've got to get some kind of a job.”

A great wave of joy passed through her; joy at something which at first seemed quite vague, then almost tangible, then the most important thing in the world. Once more, each understood all that was in the other's mind. She knew that he was guarding his pride. He knew that she recognized it.

“If we weren't married,” he said, “what would you do now?”

“I've promised Mummy to spend a month with her in Maine.”

He brushed a dried leaf from her dress. “Go with your mother, Heather. I'll stay here and try to find a job. When I do…” The muscles of his face tightened. “When I do, it will be time to tell them we're married. Do you mind?”

Watching him, she knew this was the only way it could be. Earning a living in any other way but writing meant wasting his talent. She knew he would have to stand on his own feet as he had always done. No matter what happened, she would never ask him to do anything else.

They walked back to the car, drove up the ramp to the bridge and on into Montreal. She left him with his suitcase in front of the old house where he had lived five years before. It still had the same sign by the door saying that it took roomers.

 

FORTY-FIVE

The day after they separated began one of the longest weeks Paul had ever spent. Heather's absence was like a physical pain. It produced a kind of homesickness sharper than anything he had known in Europe; being in Montreal made it all the worse. The old sense of failure, of marking time against a brick wall, was heavy on him.

At the beginning of the week he went to the office of the university to see if they had a list of jobs available to graduates. Nothing. Because he wanted only to write, he found it difficult to think of possible jobs, and still harder to knock on strange doors to ask for work. Judging by want-ads in the papers, unemployment was still bad. No one wanted help. As usual. Always as usual.

During the next few days he walked the streets. He entered the offices of large corporations and made inquiries. He got the old smile and the old shake of the head. During one of his walks he passed the Forum. There it was, the length of half a city block, brown and forlorn in the grey summer weather; and years ago during cold winter nights he had played nearly two hundred games in it. It was hard to believe that he had ever been an athlete. He seemed suddenly old, with no sense of time.

There was a telephone in the common hall of the lodging house and it gave him a guilty feeling every time he passed it. He knew he ought to call Marius, but he dreaded raising the old ghosts that might surround him and put him back in the strait-jacket. Marius would be bitter because he had married an English girl, a daughter of the woman who had informed on him during the war. Old arguments would be thrown in his face, and again he would have to fight for his identity. Thinking
of this, remembering in detail how far he had drifted since the family had been broken up, he was overpowered by a homesickness for Saint-Marc. He had not seen it for years; not since he was eighteen. Perhaps if he saw it again it would be easier to meet Marius without quarrelling. Perhaps he might even feel at home.

One morning in the middle of the week he went down the hill to the station and bought a ticket for Sainte-Justine. His mind filled with old memories: Polycarpe Drouin and Frenette in the general store, the look of the river from the maple grove on the ridge, Yardley limping along the road telling his stories, the cool feeling of dew on the thwarts of the boat when they went fishing between dawn and sunrise, swallows dipping silently out of the eaves of the disused stone mill. With the ticket in his pocket he wandered about the station waiting for the gates to open. But when the train was called and the crowd began to pour through onto the platform, he turned and walked out of the station and back up the hill.

It would have been senseless to return to Saint-Marc. Polycarpe Drouin was dead. Yardley and his father were dead. Frenette was an old man now; after years of being his own master, he had been compelled to give up his forge and now was just another employee of the factory. Father Beaubien was in another parish. Saint-Marc was not a village any more; it was a small factory town, and some of his father's land had been turned into a golf course by the company. Instead of playing checkers in Drouin's store, coming into it informally whenever they felt like it, the villagers now played organized bingo games in a community hall on Saturday nights.

He knew that his home was irrevocably with Heather, in himself. His thoughts softened with recollections of her. You could be with a girl and never notice countless things about
her. But afterwards, if you loved her, you remembered them. Now he recalled the expression of her face when they had loved each other: a sort of eager graciousness opening into ecstasy. Afterwards she always brushed the lobe of his right ear with her lips, held them there and breathed softly. Her life was in her breath and it entered his brain in sound.

When he reached his lodgings his neighbour's radio was on. It was always on these days, and because the man was deaf he tuned it so loudly it blasted through the walls. The man listened to every news release. He got the cbc at eight and nine in the morning, Super Suds at ten, the bbc and cbc at the lunch-hour, and in the evening more cbc and bbc backed up by American commentators. Every single war and peace rumour, every half-baked prophecy sold to the networks at a thousand dollars a guess blared through the lodging house.

Sunday came, and a return of the heat: humid streets bleakly empty, workers uncomfortable in dark suits going to church, business men also uncomfortable driving in cars to the rich Protestant churches on Sherbrooke Street. About one o'clock, when he knew Marius would be home from High Mass, he finally forced himself to telephone. Emilie answered. He promised to have supper with them that night, and then he hung up the receiver with a faint sigh.

Marius was living in the same house in the same street into which he had moved just after he and Emilie were married. As more children came, they had taken the upper flat to get more room. Every house on the street looked as if it had been built from the same blueprint of the same contractor, of the same materials. Each was of two stories, yellow brick on the sides and back, grey stone in front. All had identical outside staircases of cast-iron which darkened the windows of the ground floor as they rose in bulging spirals from the sidewalks
to the second floor. All of them had mean little protuberant balconies overcrowded by large families on hot days. When Paul arrived at six-thirty the street was loud with the noise of playing children. He counted the stairs from the end of the block until he found the correct house, remembering that Marius was eleven from the corner. As he mounted the spiral, two nieces and three nephews darted inside from the balcony.

All that evening Paul felt a total stranger in his brother's house. It was so long since he had seen the children that he found it embarrassingly difficult to call them by their right names. He admired the way Emilie managed them. Although the clothes of the youngest had been handed down, they were all neat and clean. The supper passed pleasantly enough; even when Emilie inquired of Paul's mother, Marius made no comment. Then she went out to the back bedrooms to put the younger children to bed, while the middle one went down to the street to play, and the oldest boy left to visit a friend. Marius took Paul into the parlour. It was cluttered with furniture bought at auction years ago, a row of law books lay on a shelf along one wall and there was a table where Marius managed to work in the evenings. Newspapers, periodicals, religious tracts, political pamphlets and notes for political speeches were stacked on the windowsill. It was easy to see that Marius had a poor law practice. But with him, it was just another cause for grievance and he seemed quite unable to understand the reason. He was confident that he understood French-Canada better than anyone else, without ever having accepted the fact that at least up to the present its basic characteristic had been common sense. Nowhere on earth was a bad lawyer spotted more quickly than in Quebec.