Lady Oracle (23 page)

I waited till Paul had left for the bank; then I packed everything I owned, including my typewriter and the half-finished manuscript of
Escape from Love.
I scribbled a note for Paul. I wanted to say, “Darling, it’s better this way,” but I knew this was not dramatic enough, so instead I wrote, “I have been making you unhappy and we cannot go on like this. It was not to be.” I didn’t think he would be able to trace me, and I didn’t really think he would try. Still, he was a great one for points of honor. Perhaps he would materialize in
the doorway one evening with some grotesque, theatrical weapon, a paper knife or a straight razor. I didn’t see him using the revolver; it was too modern. Before I could lose my nerve, I bundled all my luggage into a taxi, and unbundled it onto Arthur’s doorstep. He would be home, I knew, I’d checked it out the day before.

“I’ve been evicted,” I told him.

He blinked. “Just like that?” he said. “I think that’s illegal.”

“Well, it’s happened,” I said. “Because of my political sympathies. The landlord found some of those leaflets … he’s violently right-wing, you know. There was a terrible row.” (This was a version of the truth, I felt. Paul was the landlord, sort of, and he was right-wing. Nevertheless I was an impostor, and I felt like one.)

“Oh,” said Arthur. “Well, in that case.…” I was a political refugee. He invited me in so we could consider what I should do, and he even helped me carry the luggage up the stairs.

“I don’t have any money,” I said, over a cup of tea which I’d made myself in the filthy kitchen. Neither did Arthur. Neither did either of his roommates, he knew for a fact. “I don’t know anyone else in London.”

“I guess you can sleep on the sofa,” he said, “until you get a job.” What else could he say? We both looked at the sofa, which was ancient and lumpy; stuffing dripped from its mangled side.

I slept on the sofa for two nights; after that I slept with Arthur. We even made love. I’d been expecting fervor of a kind, because of his politics, but the first few times it was a lot more rapid than I was used to. “Arthur,” I said tactlessly, “have you ever slept with a woman before?” There was a pause, during which I could feel his neck muscles tense. “Of course I have,” Arthur said coldly. It was the only direct lie he ever consciously told me.

Once I was there, installed in his own house under his very nose, Arthur began to pay more attention to me. He even became affectionate, in his own way; he would brush my hair for me, clumsily but
with concentration, and he would sometimes come up behind me and hug me, apropos of nothing, as if I were a teddy bear. I myself was bliss-filled and limpid-eyed: the right man had come along, complete with a cause I could devote myself to. My life had significance.

There were difficulties, though: the Indian and the New Zealander were ubiquitous, opening our door in the mornings to borrow shillings from Arthur, the New Zealander leering, the Indian remote with the ascetic disapproval he’d assumed as soon as he found out we were sleeping together. Or the New Zealander would sit on the sofa, listening to his transistor radio and doing rapid calculations under his breath, while the Indian took baths, leaving the wet towels on the floor; he was fond of saying that no one understood the evils of the class system the way he did, since he’d been raised in it, but he couldn’t get over the habit of regarding anyone who picked up a towel as a servant. Both resented my presence; or rather, they resented what they regarded as Arthur’s good fortune. Arthur himself wasn’t conscious of their resentment, or of his good fortune either.

The other difficulty was that I could find neither time nor space to work on
Escape from Love.
When Arthur went out, he expected me to go with him; and if by any chance I could avoid that, one of the others was sure to be there. I kept the manuscript in a locked suitcase, as I suspected the New Zealander of snooping in our room. One day I returned to find that the Indian had hocked my typewriter. He’d repay me later, he promised, but after that I resented every grain of brown rice he ate. I didn’t have enough money left to get it out of the pawnshop myself, and I’d counted on at least two hundred pounds for the finished work. I grew daily and secretly more desperate. Arthur didn’t know about this problem; he kept wondering why I hadn’t yet got a job as a waitress. In the fictitious past I’d constructed for his benefit I’d included a few items of truth, and I’d told him I had once been a waitress. I also told him I’d once
been a cheerleader, and we laughed together over my politically misguided past.

When I’d been with them three weeks I was almost broke. Nevertheless, one day I blew a few precious shillings on some remnant material for bathroom curtains, a red-and-orange floral print. They’d make the bathroom less chilly and cavernous, I thought. I was going to sew them myself, by hand. I’d never sewn anything before in my life. I came up the stairs, humming to myself, and unlocked the door of the flat.

There, standing in the middle of the parlor floor, was my mother.

H
ow had she found me?

She was standing, very upright, on the clay-colored rug, dressed in her navy-blue suit with the white collar; her white gloves, hat and shoes were immaculate, and she was clutching her purse under her arm. Her face was made up, she’d drawn a bigger mouth around her mouth with lipstick, but the shape of her own mouth showed through. Then I saw that she was crying, soundlessly, horribly; mascara was running from her eyes in black tears.

Through her back I could see the dilapidated sofa; it looked as though the stuffing was coming out of her. The hair on the back of my neck bristled, and I leapt back through the front door, shut it behind me, and leaned against it. It was her astral body, I thought, remembering what Leda Sprott had told me. Why couldn’t she keep the goddamned thing at home where it belonged? I pictured my mother floating over the Atlantic Ocean, her rubber band getting thinner and thinner the farther it was stretched; she’d better be careful or she’d break that thing and then she’d be with me forever, lurking around in the parlor like a diaphanous dustball or a
transparent Kodak slide of herself taken in 1949. What did she want from me? Why couldn’t she leave me alone?

I opened the door again, to confront her and have it out finally; but she was gone.

I immediately rearranged all the furniture, which was difficult as it was old and heavy. Then I went through the flat, checking for open windows, but there weren’t any. How had she gotten in?

I didn’t tell the others about this visitation. They were a little put out about the furniture; not that they cared, but they felt I should have consulted them. “I was trying to save you the trouble,” I said. “I just think it looks better this way.” They put it down to housewifely instincts and forgot about the incident. I didn’t, though: if my mother had managed to get her astral body across the Atlantic Ocean once, she’d be able to do it again, and I didn’t welcome the next visit. I wasn’t sure that rearranging the furniture would keep her out. Leda Sprott had used it for unfriendly spirits, but my mother wasn’t a spirit.

I got the telegram five days later. It had been sitting in Canada House for four days; I’d continued to get my mail there and I’d used it as my return address on the infrequent postcards I’d been sending my father, in case my mother should ever have taken it into her head to sleuth me out and hunt me down. I didn’t pick up my mail very often, because all I ever got was the occasional postcard from my father, with a picture of the Toronto skyline as seen at night from Centre Island – he must’ve bought several dozen of them at once – and the message, “Everything all right here,” as if he were sending me a report card.

The telegram said:
YOUR MOTHER DIED YESTERDAY, RETURN PLEASE, FATHER.

I read it three times. At first I decided it was a trap: my mother had sent it herself, she’d got the address off one of my postcards left carelessly lying around by my father, she was trying to lure me
back within striking distance. But in that case she would have said
YOUR FATHER DIED YESTERDAY.
However, she might have realized that I wouldn’t want to return while she was still alive, and sent the telegram as a false all-clear signal.

But what if she really was dead? In that case she’d turned up in my front parlor to tell me about it. I didn’t at all want this to be true, but I suspected it was. I would have to go back.

When I reached the flat, the Indian radical was sitting cross-legged on the floor, explaining to Arthur, who was on the sofa, that if he had sexual intercourse too much he would weaken his spirit and thereby his mind, and would become politically useless. The thing to do, he said, was to draw the seminal fluid up the spinal column into the pituitary gland. He used the example of Gandhi. I listened to this conversation for a couple of minutes through the half-opened door (listening outside doors was a habit I’d retained), but since I couldn’t hear what Arthur was answering, if anything, I walked in.

“Arthur,” I said, “I have to go back to Canada. My mother died.”

“If she’s dead already,” he said, “why go back? There’s nothing you can do.”

He was right, but I needed to know she was really dead. Even if I phoned the house long-distance and spoke with my father, I couldn’t be sure.… I would have to see her. “I can’t explain,” I said, “it’s a family thing. I just have to go back.”

Then we both remembered that I didn’t have any money. Why hadn’t my father sent me some? He’d assumed that I was competent and solvent; he always assumed that there was nothing the matter with me, I was a sensible girl. My mother would have known better. “I’ll think of something,” I said. I sat on the bed and chewed my fingers. My typewriter was in hock,
Escape from Love
was locked in my suitcase, untouched since I’d moved in with Arthur; it was only half done. I had hardly enough money for the paper to complete it. I
could write my father for money, but that would be a precious pound, and besides, my bank account here was in the name of Louisa K. Delacourt. That would be hard to explain to my father, especially by telegram. It might hurt his feelings.

I slipped the manuscript into my bag. “I’m going to the library,” I told Arthur. Before I left, I pinched one of the New Zealander’s cheap yellow notepads and a ballpoint pen. No use to borrow: there would have been an inquisition.

For the next two days I sat in the library reading room, laboriously block-printing and tuning out the rustlings, creakings, wheezings and catarrhal coughs of the other occupants. Samantha Deane was kidnapped precipitously from her bedroom in the house of the kindly guppy man; threatened with rape at the hands of the notorious Earl of Darcy, the hero’s disreputable uncle; rescued by the hero; snatched again by the agents of the lush-bodied, evil minded Countess of Piedmont, the jealous semi-Italian beauty who had once been the hero’s mistress. Poor Samantha flew back and forth across London like a beanbag, ending up finally in the hero’s arms, while his wife, the feeble-minded Lady Letitia, died of yellow fever, the Countess, now quite demented, plunged to her death off a battlement during a thunderstorm and the Earl was financially ruined by the Pacific Bubble. It was one of the shortest books I’d ever written. Fast-paced though, or, as the jacket put it, event followed event to a stunning climax. I picked up a copy in Toronto when it came out. Samantha was charming in blue, her hair rippling like seaweed against an enormous cloud; Castle DeVere turreted with menace in the background.

But I got less for it than usual, partly because of the length – Columbine paid by the word – and partly because the bastards knew I needed the money. “The conclusion is a little
unresolved
,” said the letter. But it was enough for a one-way airplane ticket.

My mother was dead, all right. Not only that, I’d missed the funeral. I didn’t think to telephone from the airport, so as I walked up the front steps of the house in Toronto I didn’t know whether or not anyone would be there to welcome me.

It was evening and the lights in the house were on. I knocked; no one answered so I tried the door, found it open, and walked in. I could see she was dead right away because some of the plastic covers were on the chairs and some were off. My mother would never have done a thing like that. For her, they were either on or off: the living room had two distinct and separate personalities, depending on whether or not she was entertaining. The uncovered chairs looked faintly obscene, like undone flies.

My father was sitting in one of the chairs, wearing his shoes. This was another clue. He was reading a paperback book, though abstractedly, as if he no longer needed to absorb himself in it completely. I saw this just for an instant before he noticed me.

“Your mother’s dead,” he said. “Come in and sit down, you must have had a long trip.”

His face was more furrowed than I’d remembered it, and also more defined. Previously it had been flat, like a coin, or even like a coin run over by a train; it had looked as though the features had been erased, but not completely, they were smudged and indistinct as if viewed through layers of gauze. Now however his face had begun to emerge, his eyes were light blue and shrewd, I’d never thought of him as shrewd; and his mouth was thin, even a little reckless, the mouth of a gambler. Why had I never noticed?

He told me that he’d found my mother at the bottom of the cellar stairs when he’d returned from the hospital one evening. There was a bruise on her temple and her neck was oddly twisted, broken, as he recognized almost immediately. He had called an ambulance for form’s sake although he knew she was dead. She was wearing her housecoat and pink mules, and she must have tripped,
my father said, and fallen down the stairs, hitting her head several times and breaking her neck at the bottom. He hinted at the amount she had been drinking lately. The verdict at the inquest was accidental death. It could not have been anything else, as there were no signs of anyone having been in the house and nothing had been taken. This was the longest conversation I ever had with him.