Chance Developments (7 page)
Read Chance Developments Online
Authors: Alexander McCall Smith
For some years after the War he painted very little. He took a job teaching art in a school; it was unchallenging, but he found that he enjoyed it rather more than he had anticipated. He drifted into a relationship with a woman who taught history at the same school, and they lived together for almost ten years, before they parted, without acrimony and slightly regretfully. After his father died, he decided to sell the house in Argyll. He had spent very little time there, anywayâno more than a few weeks every summer. He went back to the waterfall, though, every visit, and on each occasion he found himself moved by the experience. The places that loom large in our lives, the places where things have happened that we cannot forget, can retain their power over us for as long as memory persists. Here I was sad; here I saw you for the last time; here I realised I was in love: these private thoughts can be attached to a place, as inseparable from it in our minds as its prevailing weather.
The history teacher said to him, “You're in love with somebody else, you know. Who is she? Can't you tell me?”
He frowned. “I wouldn't deceive you.”
“Oh, I'm not talking about that. I'm not accusing you of having another loverânot right now, not somebody you're seeing.”
He somehow knew that her words signalled the end of their affair. Ten years could be brought to an end with a few words of reproach, or, as in this case, of truth. But he did not want to admit it. “Then what are you saying?”
“I'm saying that there's somebody you've never got overâsomebody you're never going to forget.”
He had been silent.
“I'm right, aren't I?” she said.
He did not answer.
She sighed. “There are some people who hold a candle for somebody elseâa first love, perhaps. They hold it all their lives, in some cases until they die.” She looked away. “Don't you think that sad?”
He nodded.
There was no recrimination in her tone. “To spend your life with the wrong personâ¦That must be a terrible thing, you know. You're with one person and you want to be with another. And you know that we only have one shot at life, one chance, and that you've wasted yours.”
A month after this conversation, they went their separate ways. With the sale of the estate, he was able to resign from the school and return to painting. He surprised himself. He had not imagined that there was so much that he wanted to say and that it could come so urgently, so effortlessly. He submitted a painting to an open competition, and it was not only accepted for display, but won an award. A friend urged him to work for a show. There was an exhibition in Edinburgh and one, for his fortieth birthday, in London. He was taken on by an influential gallery and his paintings were bought by collectors. He attracted press attention; being described in one review as a successor to Nash and Ravilious. Another said he was a neo-classical answer to the excesses of modernism, an afterthought to a movement that was far from finished. His friends found this amusing. “How does it feel to be an afterthought?”
“Strange. Not entirely unsatisfactory.”
“Like a footnote to history?”
He laughed. “A bit like that, perhaps.”
He drafted a letter to Jenny. He said, “I know that I shouldn't be writing to you. I know that you are married now and that everything that happened between us is a long time ago. I know all that, but I still didn't want to dieâas we all mustâI didn't want to go to my grave without telling you that I wish that things had turned out differently. I have had a lifetime to regret what happened and what didn't happen. That's all I want so say.”
He read what he had written. He tore the letter up, oddly aware, even as he did so, that he was making a further mistake to add to those that had gone before.
As his reputation as a painter grew, he attracted the attention of wealthy patrons. Berenson invited him to I Tatti and suggested a lecture in Florence. “I have little to say,” he remarked. “I draw.”
“And how!” said Berenson.
While at I Tatti he was invited to lunch by a woman from Pittsburgh, the wife of a steel manufacturer. She had a villa in the hills near Fiesole and she gave lunch parties that were often mentioned in the press. Her salon hosted Blunt, Auden and Britten, as well as Hemingway, whom she was said not to like.
He went to the lunch, at which there were over twenty guests. They were served what was described as a simple Tuscan lunch, but which ran to six courses. Just before they sat down, the last of the guests arrived.
He saw that it was Jenny.
He manoeuvred himself away from the seat he was about to take. Leaning down, he whispered into the ear of the man who was to be seated next to Jenny. “Would you mind terribly? We're very old friends⦔
The man looked up at him resentfully and was about to refuse when Jenny leaned over too. “Please,” she said. “It's very important.”
The other guest agreed, but with very bad grace.
“What a horrible man,” Jenny whispered.
“People are selfish,” he whispered back.
Then they looked at one another. It was 1968, and they were both coming up for their forty-eighth birthday. They had not seen one another for thirty-two years.
He said, “I don't know where to begin.”
“I've followed your career,” she said. “I know about most of it.”
“You always did. You knew more about me, I thought, than I did myself.”
She smiled. “I heard from Angus.”
He looked blank.
“My cousin. He wrote to me just before he was killed.”
“I didn't know⦔
“He died in a stupid way. That happened to so many people. They survived those horrendous battles and then they fell down stairs or something like that. Angus choked on an olive.”
“I'm sorry to hear that.”
“He was a complex man. There was something that made him unhappyâI never worked it out.” She paused. “Did you have any idea? Did you hear anything?”
He shook his head.
The dead may still wish their confidences to be respected.
“He passed on my message?”
She reached for a glass of water. “He did. And you had nothing to apologise for, you know.”
On the other side of the table another guest was holding forth, to the amusement of the general company. Harry and Jenny took it as cover.
He spoke with urgency, as if he might suddenly be silenced, and lose his chance to say what he had to say. “There hasn't been a dayânot one single dayâwhen I haven't thought of you. You know that? Not one day.”
If she was surprised, she did not show it.
“And I've thought of your babyâ¦our baby, and what it must have meant to you to go through with it all and then have the baby taken away from you.”
She looked down at her hands. Then she raised her eyes. “But she wasn't,” she said. “I kept the baby. We were discreet about it. My mother raised her for the first few years. Then I married when I was just twenty. I was very young, but remember it was wartime, and people did.”
He struggled with the revelation. “You kept her?”
Jenny nodded. “Noelâhe was my husbandâwas perfectly happy to be stepfather. He was a wonderful stepfather, by the way.”
His mouth felt dry. “Was⦔
“Noel died. He had a heart problem that nobody knew anything about. It was one of these hidden things. He died eight years ago.” She took a sip of water. “His family had a villa in southern Tuscany. I started to use it more and more, and now I'm there most of the year. Julie comes often, even if only for a week or two. Her husband can't get away all that much. He's a psychiatrist.”
He sat quite still.
“She's here at present. I've left her down at San Casciano with her two little ones.”
“Julie⦔
She looked at him. “Our daughter,” she said.
He looked up at the painted ceiling. A line of cypress trees crossed a Tuscan hillside. Angels, della Robbia in appearance, crossed a clear blue sky.
It came back to him. “Do you remember that we once talked about angels? Do you remember that?”
She toyed with her fork. “I think I do.”
He pointed to the ceiling. “There,” he said. “Look up there.”
It was while she was looking up that he said, “Do you think that you might marry me? After all this time?”
She did not answer immediately. After thirty-two years, she thought, what was a minute or two, even five?
In any photograph of the land, there is the land and the person who takes the photograph. In any photograph of two people there are three people: the two in the picture, in this case the man sitting on the woman's lap, and then there is the person behind the camera. We see the two people, smiling over something, pleased that they are there rather than somewhere else, pleased, we assume, that they are who they are rather than being somebody else. We do not see the young man who has pressed the lever to open the shutter. We do not see that he is twenty-two, that his hair is cut short, that he is wearing working trousers, that when he has taken this photograph he steps forward and shakes the man's hand, and that the woman then stands up, dusts down her skirt, and says to him: “Thank you, Eddie.”
Sometimes we can tell what the person behind the camera is thinking. Sometimes the choice of subject is so striking that it can only be the work of an attentive and sympathetic eye, attuned to the moment. In those famous photographs of men and women caught up in warâthat poor girl running naked from the napalm, for instanceâit is the photographer's understanding of what is happening, his feeling for the sorrow or terror of what he sees, that gives the photograph its impact, that makes it every bit as powerful as a painting by Titian, say, or Picasso's great indictment in
Guernica
.
Often we have no idea of who the photographer was, or what he was thinking at the time. He may have been a passer-by, asked to take a photograph with the subject's own camera; he may have been a professional photographer just doing a job, not caring very much about the people he is photographing; he may even have been one who would have wished for some reason to be in the photograph himself. What if Eddie, who took this photograph, secretly imagined that it was he, rather than Frank, who was sitting on Ruby's lap? A photograph may speak to the photographer's envy or disappointment just as much as it may reveal his anger or disapproval. And even if a photograph records a joyous occasion, behind it there may still be more than a small measure of heartbreak on the part of the photographer. A small measure of heartbreak? One might think such a thing impossibleâif your heart is broken, then surely it is broken completely. Yet the truth is that we can live with a minor fault-line in the heartâmost of us do, in one way or another.
Eddie, as the woman addressed him, was Edward Orpheus Beaulieu, who was born in Kingston, Ontario, on an unusually hot afternoon exactly seven months into the twentieth century. His mother, Hope, was from Toronto, a member of a family who owned a successful grocery store; his father, Aristide, had been a fur trapper in Quebec, but had grown tired of the loneliness and discomfort involved in trapping. Having taken a course in bookkeeping, he established a small office in Kingston and set about gathering clients. He discovered a talent for making up figures for traders who had been lax in keeping a note of money-in and money-out. He did this as honestly as he could, hoping that the entries he made reflected what had actually happened. If anything, he erred on the side of caution, with the result that many of his clients paid slightly more tax than they were required to pay, but, as he pointed out to any who objected, “At least you can sleep easily in your bed if you've paid the government too much.”
Eddie was an only son, although he had two sisters, Martine and Joan, both of whom married earlyâMartine at seventeen and Joan at nineteen. Martine moved with her husband, a glazier, to Buffalo, New York, while Joan married a farmer from Guelph. The Beaulieu parents were proud of their two girls, and of the sound marriages they had made. They were quickly rewarded with grandchildren, including a set of twins.
“Our girls know where they're going,” confided Hope to a close friend. “Unfortunately, Eddie doesn't have quite the same sense of who he is and what he wants to be.”
The friend sympathised. She did not know that Hope Beaulieu was completely wrong. Sometimes the reason why parents think their offspring have no idea of what they want to do is that they simply cannot accept their child's real wishes. Eddie knew exactly what he wanted to do: he wanted to be a showman, and, in particular, a fortune-teller.
This ambition showed itself at an early stage when, as a schoolboy of twelve, he was found to be reading palms in the school playground for two cents a time.
“You're going to be very rich,” he would tell the boys. “You won't be rich until you're very oldâprobably about thirtyâbut then you'll be one of the richest men in Canada. It's here in the lines on your hand. See? That one there. You only have that shape of line if you're destined to be rich.”
That went down very well. But there was more.
“You're going to marry a woman with very big breasts. See those bumps in your palmâright thereâsee those? That's the sign. You'll marry herâbut only if you want. If you do, then you're going to have five sons, and all of them are going to be great hockey playersâreal champs. You're going to die when you are just short of one hundred. You'll have only four teeth left by thenâtwo on the top and two on the bottom. But you're going to be real happy.”
That was a typical fortune for a boy, although there were considerable variations, depending on whether Eddie liked or disliked the boy consulting him. Those whom he disliked were often warned of impending disaster, sometimes in fairly vivid terms. “Be careful that you don't go out in really cold weather,” he might say. “This line here tells me that your nose is going to get frostbite one of these daysâI can't tell whenâbut when it happens, you're going to lose half of it. Sorry about that, but I have to mention bad things as well as good.”
Fortunes for girls tended to cater for more feminine interests. “You're going to marry a guy called Percy who has a big house in Toronto, with two maids. You'll marry this guy after you've received proposals from many other men. You'll reject them all because you only want to marry the one you love, who has this big house in Toronto.”
The authorities discouraged him. “Edward Beaulieu,” scolded his teacher, “if I catch you telling fortunes one more time you're going to get such a tanning that you won't sit down for a week. That's your future, young man. So heed what I say.”
Even if this led to greater discretion, the interest in fortune-telling persisted, although as he progressed into the later teen years he also became adept in card tricks, conjuring, and Pelmanism. He discussed each new interest with his parents, demonstrating his tricks, lapping up their praise when one of the tricks worked. They were generally tolerant of their son, but, as the years passed and he showed no signs of leaving home, they began to find his company rather tiring.
“If only Eddie would think ofâ¦,” began his mother.
“Moving on?”
She looked at her husband. “It's not that I find him⦔
“Tedious?”
She gave her husband another look. “Eddie could do so much for the world,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow. “You sure, honey?”
“It's just a question of his finding what he really wants.”
Eddie's father shrugged. “He seems to have quite a good idea already.”
“But none of this stuff will earn him a living, Aristide. He's got to get a proper job. He can't get by helping in that store four mornings a week. He can't live on that.”
“Well, he seems to think he can,” said his father.
She shook her head. “Because we don't charge him rent. If he had to pay rent, he wouldn't have enough to keep body and soul together. You're going to have to talk to him again, you know.”
When it occurred, that conversation ended just as had the last one on the subjectâin stalemate.
“Eddie,” said his father, “I'm talking to you man-to-man. You're twenty now, which means you're not a boy any more. You're a man, and men have to get out there and work.”
“I'm already working, Dad: Henderson's store. And Mr. Henderson said the other day that he couldn't imagine how he could run his store without me.” He paused, watching the effect of his words. “That's what he said.”
“That's as may be,” said his father. “I know that you're not a slacker. It's just that that job is never going to be more than part-time. Old Henderson can't pay more than you get already.”
“Something will turn up, Dad. I'm keeping an eye open. And I'm studying, remember?”
“This Pelmanism of yours?”
“Yes, that's it. I'm sticking with it, Dad, because it has the answer we're all looking for.”
His father fixed him with a stare. “What
is
the answer then?”
Eddie sighed. It was hard to explain things to his parents. It was not that they were slow; it was more a question of getting through to them
.
They were on one wavelength and he was on another. That could happen, he knew, even when people lived in the same house, read the same newspaper, did much the same things in their everyday lives.
“I don't know the answer, Dad,” he said. “That's what I'm trying to find out. That takes time.”
“Well, what's the question? You don't know the answer, but then what's the question you're trying to answer? Maybe you can explain it that way. Who knows?”
There was another patient sigh. “The question isâ¦Well, I'm trying to find out what the question is. That takes time tooâand a lot of study.”
“So you don't know the question and you don't know the answer. That means you don't know nothing, doesn't it?”
“You don't say
you don't know nothing
, Dad. I know it's difficult for youâbeing French and allâbut you don't say
don't know nothing
. Not in English. That means you know something, because nothing is the opposite of something, and if you don't know nothing you must know something.”
Now it was his father's turn to sighâa deep, heartfelt sigh, followed by a gazing up at the ceiling, as if to find there the elusive answer to the equally elusive question.
Hope persuaded him to apply for a job with the postal service. He was interviewed in Kingston, and she accompanied him to his appointment, sitting in the waiting room while he went inside. She had only ten minutes to wait before he came out, picked up his hat, and walked out on to the street without giving her a glance.
The chairman of the interview panel emerged and looked at her anxiously. She knew him from the church they both attended. He held out his hands in a gesture of resignation and, she thought, apology.
“I'm very sorry, Mrs. Beaulieu.”
She bit her lip. “It didn't go well?”
“I did my best, but he didn't really answer the questions the board asked him.”
“He refused? He refused to speak?”
The chairman shook his head. “No, it was the opposite problem, really. He spoke rather too much, but about the wrong things. He went on about thisâ¦this⦔
“Pelmanism?”
There was flicker of a smile on the chairman's lips. “Yes, that's it. He seemed to think it relevant to our questions, but frankly it wasn't. So we more or less dried up, I'm afraid.”
She shook her head. “I'm very sorry, Mr. Andrews. You know how young people are these daysâthey get ideas. He's a good boy, Eddie, and he's a hard worker, you know. He's never been afraid of hard work.”
“I'm sure. Bobby Henderson speaks highly of himâalways has.”
“It's just that he has these odd interests. He loves telling fortunes; card tricks too. And this Pelmanismâ¦it's a sort of hocus-pocus memory course as far as I can make out.”
The chairman looked at his hands. “He'll find something. I always say to my boys that whatever shape of peg you are, there's a hole for you somewhere.” He paused. He knew that was only partly true, and an aphorism that was only partly true was hardly an aphorism at all.
She walked home and told her husband what had happened. He rose from his desk and walked to the window. His breathing was shallowâa sign of the anger that was welling up within him. Why couldn't Eddie be like his sisters? Where did he
come from
? Why did he feel that he had to spend the eveningâevery eveningâpractising his conjuring tricks on them, making them listen to his endless lectures on Pelmanism? How many times had he himself fled the house on the pretext of having work to do in the office, leaving his wife to bear the brunt? “I'm going to give him an ultimatum. I'm going to tell him we have to start charging him rent.”
“But he can't pay much.”
“Then we tell him he's going to have to go.”
She drew in her breath. She was as frustrated as her husband was, but she was a mother. “No, Aristide, we can't tell Eddie to go. He's our flesh and blood. You can't tell your own flesh and blood to go. You just can't.”
He was silent for a few moments, but then his anger subsided; he had never been able to sustain it. “No, I don't suppose we can,” he muttered. “But I'm going to start looking for a job for himâseriously. There must be something.”
“Perhaps he could go into show business,” said his wife. “He's a good conjurerâa very good one, some say. Remember what Mrs. Harper said when he pulled that mouse out of her purse. She was adamant there had been no mouse there beforeâadamant.”
“Hmm. It's the sort of thing somebody might deny, of course.”
“What? Having a mouse in your purse?”
He smiled. “Possibly.”
She brought the conversation back to Eddie's talents. “And there are those card tricks of his. He could get a job in the theatre.”
He thought about this. He remembered that one of his clients had a brother-in-law who was the proprietor of a small circus. He recalled his client saying to him a few days ago that his brother-in-law was staying with him because he had had an operation and needed somewhere quiet to spend a month while he recuperated. “He has a circus business,” the client said. “Odd business, in my view, but he does pretty well out of it. He has a set-up in Toronto that tours over the borderâNiagara and so onâas well as one over in Vancouver. He's making good money, you know.”
“That's good.”
“Yes. People love the circus, although I wouldn't fancy living away from homeâall that travelling and so on. No, not for me.”
Nor for me, thought Mr. Beaulieu, but possibly for Eddie. In fact, what better job was there for a young man who needed encouragement to leave the nest?
“Have you ever thought of joining the circus, son?” he asked that evening.
The question was casually put, but it elicited an immediate response.
“Oh, that would be greatâreally great. I'd
love
a job in a circus.”
“Would you now?” said Mr. Beaulieu, thoughtfully.