Lady Oracle (22 page)

“Remember who you are!” she managed to gasp. “You are a married man!” His only answer was a harsh laugh. Desperately she remembered the short thick needle she still grasped in her right hand. She lifted it and raked it across his cheek. More in surprise than in pain, he released her, and she made use of this moment to run for the door, to slam it behind her and twist the heavy key in the lock. She was too terrified to think of taking a cloak or even a shawl
.

Now she was hurrying through the Park, without knowing how she’d gotten there. Her thin black dress was little protection against the chill air of evening. Where was she to go, what to do? What explanation would Sir Edmund give the others, especially Lady Letitia, when they returned to find him locked in the schoolroom and the governess gone? Whatever he said would be to her discredit, she was sure; she could not return; and after that he would seek her out, hunt her down.… She had only a few pennies in her reticule. Where was she to spend the night?

Dark shapes flitted by on either side, and from time to time she heard low, mocking laughter.… Daughters of sin, vile abandoned creatures such
as she herself might have become had she not struggled.… But perhaps she was now in even more danger. Alone, weak, unprotected – to what dissolute reveler might she not fall prey? She had not forgotten the lecherous advances of the Earl of Darcy, Sir Edmund’s uncle. Then she had fled from his residence to Sir Edmund’s, seeking protection; but the protector had failed her.…

There were footsteps behind her. She shrank into the shade of a tree, hoping to escape notice, but a shadow loomed against the setting sun, there was a hand on her arm, and a voice, hoarse with passion, breathed her name.…

At this point in my rehearsal I felt something on my arm. I looked down at it; there
was
a hand on it. I screamed, quite loudly, and the next thing I knew I was lying on top of a skinny, confused-looking young man. Pieces of paper were scattered over us like out-sized confetti. Then I was being helped to my feet by several members of the crowd that had immediately gathered.

“Tryin’ to molest yer, was he, love?” said one, burly and beer-scented. “Bleedin’ agitators.”

“I was just handing her a leaflet,” said my assailant. To my horror I saw that he had a slight cut on his cheek. I felt like an idiot.

“Want to call a bobby, love? They should be put away, they should, bothering young girls.”

“No, thank you,” I said. An anti-vivisectionist and a prophet of doom had both come over from their soap boxes to help. They were almost identical, saintly refined old men with pale-blue Ancient Mariner eyes. When they saw I wasn’t hurt, each gave me a pamphlet.

“It was entirely my fault,” I told everyone. “It was a mistake. I thought he was someone else. I just panicked, that’s all. Here, let me get you a Kleenex,” I said to the young man. “I’m very sorry I scratched you.” I rummaged in my purse but was unable to find one.

“It’s all right,” he said stoically. He was on his knees, gathering up his leaflets, and I knelt to help him. The leaflets had a black-and-white drawing of an atomic bomb explosion, and the motto,
KEEP THE WORLD FROM GOING UP IN SMOKE.
“Banning the bomb?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said gloomily. “Not that it’s doing any good. But you have to keep on.”

I looked at him more closely. He was wearing a black crew-neck sweater, which I found quite dashing. A melancholy fighter for almost-lost causes, idealistic and doomed, sort of like Lord Byron, whose biography I had just been skimming. We finished collecting the pamphlets, I fell in love, and we went for a drink at the nearest pub. That wasn’t hard to maneuver: all I had to do was express interest in the cause. I would’ve preferred it if he’d had a British accent; unfortunately he was only a Canadian, like me, but I overlooked this defect.

While Arthur stood in line at the bar for my double Scotch and his Guinness – when he drank at all, he tended to drink things that were supposed to have health-giving minerals in them – I felt anxiously through my brain for whatever scraps of political lore might have lodged there inadvertently, like bits of spinach among front teeth. I’d presented myself as someone who was at least semi-informed; now I’d have to come across. I even took out the pamphlets I’d been handed and glanced rapidly through them, hoping for some hint or topic.
Do you know that
DOG
spelled backwards is
GOD?
one of them began,
DOG
, apparently, was the fourth member of the Holy Trinity, and was going to be in on the Last Judgment. The other pamphlet was more orthodox: Armageddon was at hand and if you wanted to come out of it you had to lead a pure life.

When Arthur returned with the drinks I was ready for him. Whenever the conversation got too specific, I switched the subject to the plight of the Palestinian refugees. I knew quite a lot about this
from my days in the U.N. Club at Braeside High. At the time, this area was obscure enough to catch Arthur’s attention, and I was ashamed to see that he was moderately impressed.

I let him walk me as far as the Marble Arch tube station. I couldn’t invite him home with me, I explained, because I shared a flat with a clerk-typist who was very fat and homely, and who became quite unhappy and depressed if I asked any men into the flat for whatever reason. It was best to avoid phoning, I told him, but if he could give me his number.… He didn’t have a phone, but, even better, he invited me to a rally the next day. Faint with lust, I went to the public library – the same one where I got my costume books – and took out all of Bertrand Russell’s books I could find, which caused some difficult moments with Paul when he came across them. “Communistic trash,” he raged. “I will not allow them within my household.”

“I was only doing research,” I said. “I thought I might do something a little more modern this time, set in the twenties.”

“It will not sell,” said Paul. “If you raise the skirts and cut the hair, it will not sell. They prefer it if the woman should retain her mystery. As I do,” he added, kissing me on the collarbone.

At one time I would have found remarks like this very European and charming, but they were beginning to irritate me. “Some mystery,” I said, “if all it takes is a few yards of cloth and a wig. Men are mysterious too, you know, and I don’t notice them wearing ringlets and waltz-length ball gowns.”

“Ah, but the mystery of man is of the mind,” Paul said playfully, “whereas that of the woman is of the body. What is a mystery but a thing which is remaining hidden? It is more easy to uncover the body than it is the mind. For this reason, a bald man is not looked upon as an unnatural horror, but a bald woman is.”

“And I suppose a moronic woman is more socially acceptable than an idiot man,” I said, intending sarcasm.

“Just so,” said Paul. “In my country they were often used as the lowest form of prostitute, whereas a man with no mind, for him there was no use.” He smiled, feeling he’d proved his point.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said. I stomped out to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea. Paul was puzzled. He was also suspicious: he still couldn’t understand my sudden interest in Bertrand Russell.

I had a lot of trouble with these books, and, I discovered, with theories and politics in general. I didn’t want to be blown up by an atomic bomb, but on the other hand I couldn’t believe that anything I could do would prevent it. I might as well be trying to abolish the automobile: if I got run over by one, I’d be just as dead, I reasoned. I thought Lord Russell had a very appealing face, though, and I immediately gave him a bit part in
Escape from Love
as a benevolent old eccentric who rescues Samantha Deane in Hyde Park by beating her assailant over the head with his umbrella.
(“Take that, sir! Are you all right, my dear?” “How can I ever express my gratitude?” “I see you are well brought up, and I believe your explanation. Allow me to offer you asylum for the night.… My housekeeper will lend you a nightgown. Mrs. Jenkins, a cup of tea, if you please, for this young lady.”)
I even supplied him with a hobby – he raised guppies – which made me feel quite friendly towards all his frontispieces and able to tolerate his policies and the awe-tinged admiration with which Arthur regarded him.

If Arthur had known about my little dramatization of Lord Russell, he would’ve been appalled. “Trivializing,” he would have called it, and did call it in later years, when I was less able to conceal this particular habit of mind. Also when I was less willing to simulate adoration of Arthur’s hero-of-the day: Arthur was fickle, he changed allegiances, and after I’d been through this a few times I became wary. “What about
Mrs.
Marx?” I would say, or, “I bet Marx’s wife wanted him to be a doctor.” All I would get would be a disgusted look, so I would go into the kitchen and fantasize about the home
life of Marx. “Not tonight, dear, I have a headache, you intellectuals are all the same, mooning around, why don’t you get out there and make something of yourself if you’re so smart, god knows you have the talent.”

I thought of Castro as a tiger in bed though, with those cigars and that beard, which would explain his vogue in North America. But Mao was my favorite, you could tell he liked to eat. I pictured him wolfing down huge Chinese meals, with relish and no guilt, happy children climbing all over him. He was like an inflated Jolly Green Giant except yellow, he wrote poetry, he had fun. He was fat but successful and he didn’t take any shit about it. The home life of Stalin was boring, too much was known about it, he was such a puritan anyway. But Mao, what a garden of delights. He encouraged jugglers and spectacles, he liked the color red and flags and parades and table tennis; he knew the people needed food and escape, not just sermons. I liked to think about him in the bathtub, all covered with soap, like an enormous cherub, beaming away and very appreciative while some adoring female – me! – scrubbed his back.

As far as I was concerned, it was impossible to love a theory. I didn’t love Arthur for his theories, although they lent him a kind of impersonal grandeur, like a crimson-lined opera cloak. I loved him for the way his ears stuck out, just slightly; for the way he pronounced certain words – “aunt,” for instance, and “grass.” Being from the Maritimes, he said
ahnt
and
grahss
, whereas I was from Ontario and said
ant
and
graass.
I found this exotic. I loved his deliberate threadbareness, his earnest idealism, his ridiculous (to me) economies – he used tea bags twice – the way he stuck his finger in his ear, his farsightedness and the battered reading glasses he had to wear for it. Once I said, “I guess that’s why you like me, you can’t see what I look like up close.” It was a little early to make this joke; he said, “No, that isn’t the reason.” Then there was a long, awkward pause, as if he was trying to think very hard about the reason he did
like me. Or perhaps, I thought with a sinking of the stomach, about whether he liked me at all.

This was a problem. I couldn’t tell what Arthur felt about me, if anything. He seemed to enjoy discussing the philosophy of civil disobedience with me, or rather telling me about it, for I was wise enough not to reveal my ignorance and mostly nodded. He allowed me to go around handing out leaflets with him, and ate with relish the sandwiches I would bring on these occasions. He told me about his background, his father the judge, his mother the religious nut. His father had wanted him to be a lawyer, his mother had insisted he be a medical missionary at the very least. He’d thwarted both of them by going into Philosophy, but he hadn’t been able to stick it through all the syllogisms (“A bald man is bald,” he said, “what does that have to do with the human condition?” and for once I could agree without hypocrisy … until I started thinking about it; what if you
were
a bald man?). He’d left after his third year, to take a break and meditate on the true path. (That was the difference between us: for Arthur there were true paths, several of them perhaps, but only one at a time. For me there were no paths at all. Thickets, ditches, ponds, labyrinths, morasses, but no paths.)

Then he’d gotten involved in the ban-the-bomb movement, which had absorbed him for two years. He’d devoted a lot of time and energy to the movement, but somehow he was still on the fringes, a leaflet man. Perhaps it was because he was a Canadian.

I radiated sympathy and understanding. We were sitting in a cheap restaurant, which smelled of lamb fat, eating plates of fried eggs, chips and peas, which was what Arthur mostly ate. He was running out of money; soon he’d have to take another occasional job, sweeping floors or folding napkins or, worst of all, washing dishes; either that or accept what he considered his parents’ bribery and go back to school at the University of Toronto, which he hated with a cool, abstract passion.

His Earlscourt flat had a small kitchen, but he didn’t like cooking, and the kitchen itself was a shambles. He shared the flat with two other men, a New Zealander who was studying at the London School of Economics and who ate cold, ketchup-covered canned baked beans and left the unwashed plates around like the scenes of tiny slaughters, and a gazelle-eyed radical from India who cooked brown rice and curries for himself and also left the plates around. Arthur was fastidious; he didn’t like messes. But he was so fastidious he wouldn’t clean them up, so we ate out. Once or twice I went over and tidied the kitchen for them, but this had no good effects and a couple of bad ones. Arthur was given another false impression about me: I wasn’t at heart a kitchen-tidier, and he was disappointed later when he found this out. The New Zealander, whose name was Slocum, pursued me around the kitchen with pleas (“Be a sport, I haven’t had one bit since I got to this bleeding cold-hearted country, not one bit”), and the Indian radical lost the initial respect he’d had for me as a politico of sorts and began to make cow-eyes and flare his nostrils. One could not, apparently, be both a respected female savant and a scullery maid.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t get any further with Arthur than holding hands; and life with Paul was becoming more and more insupportable. What if he were to follow me, find me handing out leaflets with Arthur, and challenge him to a duel, or something equally upsetting? It was Arthur I loved, not Paul, I decided. I took drastic measures.