Late Nights on Air (41 page)

Harry asked her if she’d told her son about her time in Yellowknife and their trip on the Thelon River. “The delicious taste of Coffee-mate on porridge,” he said, and smacked his lips. “And all the animals. The herds of caribou, the muskox, your encounter with the grizzly. Our slog across the ice when you held that microphone between your teeth. You wouldn’t want him to grow up thinking city life is all there is.”

“You seem just the same, Harry. Well, maybe a little balder.”

“Wretch.”

She laughed. He was easy to talk to, he always had been. And no, she’d neglected to tell her son stories about the North, but she would correct the oversight. She said she wondered if she could remember all the lakes on their long route, and began to list them. Artillery, Ptarmigan, Sifton. “Burr Lake,” threw in Harry. French Lake, she continued. Kipling Lake. Harry Lake, she said with a smile. Beverly Lake, they didn’t say, but knew each other was thinking. A look of understanding passed between them.

“You sound like a radio announcer,” he said, “listing all the places the signal carries to.” All the faraway towns, he thought, filled with listeners who are only half-listening, their minds on other things.
I used to know that bedroom by heart
.

He said, “You were saying that marriage is hard.”

“Yes.” She looked up. “I find it so.” Here was the moment again. “But my mother-in-law is coaxing me to give it one more chance, for David’s sake.”

“So you’re thinking it over.”

“I’m thinking she’s probably right.”

“Yes,” he said heavily.

When their food arrived, they occupied themselves with eating, hardly looking up. Then Harry thought to tell her about the special trip he’d made to Dover, to Edgar’s school, to see the original red leather diary that lay inside a glass case in the headmaster’s study, also the plaque to Edgar’s memory in the school chapel. It felt profoundly circular, he said, that having stood in the very spot where the diary was written and then preserved in the cold ashes of a stove, he’d caught up with its final resting place. It made him wonder if the two places were separated—or if they were connected—by those several thousand miles.

Later, they walked back to Rideau Street. Harry offered to see her safely home. No need, she said, she’d grab a taxi, and she flagged one at the corner. She hugged Harry, then slid into the back seat as the light turned red, giving her a chance to watch him jaywalk across Sussex Drive, then continue up the slope past the Château Laurier. She had always loved the way he walked. Never in a rush, hands in his pockets turning a lighter or jiggling a few coins, shoulders square from having played rugby and from years in his father’s church choir. His left foot a little pigeon-toed. She liked the outward curve of his left shin and she couldn’t have said why, except that it seemed erotic.

A year passed before she phoned him again. This time she said, “Harry, when are you coming into my bed?”

ONE SUNDAY MORNING
, during a long, wet spring, Harry opened the paper at the breakfast table and glancing through the obituaries almost missed Dido’s. He read the short paragraph that summarized her life and early death, while the rain came down. It was almost tropical, the sound of the rain. All around them the steady beat, the full gurgle of water flowing off the roof, through the pipes, into the ground. Last night he’d heard voices outside at ten o’clock, laughter despite the weather and the hour, then a series of bangs that puzzled him until he remembered. He’d called to Gwen and she’d joined him at the bedroom window. Through a gap in the trees, they watched fireworks transform the rain-soaked sky into brighter and bigger cascades of colour until the final all-out volley and the sudden lights out. The twenty-fourth of May, the Queen’s birthday. Always an occasion for firecrackers. A constant, he’d thought, since boyhood. A reassuring custom that knit together a whole span of years.

He passed the newspaper across the table to Gwen.

Her
oh!
then silence while she read about Dido’s death “on May 17, after a long illness. Born 1947, in the Netherlands, only child of Johan and Griet. Cherished companion of producer and experimental photographer Edward Fitzgerald.
Adored aunt of Tracey, Erin, Joshua. Seven years at NBC. Filing cabinets filled with clippings about social justice, ideas for films, plays, screenplays, stories. Passion in search of a vehicle. An erratic, emotional, beautiful woman who never quite found herself.”

Gradually the rain stopped, but the sky stayed heavy and grey. Everything brimmed—the rivers, the canal, the lakes. Harry threw open a window and they heard the trickling away of water and the birds.

In the afternoon, while David played next door, Gwen and Harry went out for a walk. At first they were silent, skirting puddles, occupied by their own thoughts. Gwen mulled over the words Eddy had chosen, perhaps self-serving in some way, but they had the ring of truth. An erratic, emotional energy—quick to leap and quick to subside. Dido’s beauty had been the main event that summer when light made them tireless, like children playing outside till dark, but there was no dark.

“I’m astounded they stayed together,” Harry said. “I never thought they would.” He’d been remembering Dido in the art gallery, how she’d more than held her own.

“They must have loved each other,” said Gwen.

Too pat, thought Harry. Too easy. It doesn’t tell you anything. “Was it love, or something else,” he said. Some unhealthy need, he was thinking.

“She was loyal to him, he was loyal to her,” Gwen said simply. “They had a bond, call it what you will.”

Harry nodded slowly, and for some reason the tangle in his heart let go a little. He felt his view of the pair, not reverse itself but widen—a bond, call it what you will. He slid his arm through Gwen’s and they kept walking. They turned a corner
and two boys were biking through puddles on Euclid Avenue. It began to spatter rain and they headed back.

That night, when she woke at three and couldn’t sleep, Gwen did what she often did, she went north in her mind, into the summer air, down the road to Latham Island and out onto the pre-dawn waters. Usually Harry was sound asleep beside her, but now he spoke to her in the dark. The sound of his voice was the sound of that place, and it took her all the way back and brought everything forward. His voice was as dark as a plum, and the darkness in their room was the shade of a plum tree. He spoke to her again, and she felt held by his voice and taken under the wing of that faraway place.

In the morning, it was raining again. They heard it when they woke up, and Gwen murmured that they were lucky not to be in a tent. Or a boat, said Harry. The rain beat against the roof and slid down all the windows facing west. They felt vulnerable and protected, lying there, listening to the sounds the world makes in the month of May. How the earth could hold any more water they didn’t know.

Always in the background as I wrote this novel was George Whalley’s marvellous biography,
The Legend of John Hornby
(Macmillan of Canada, 1962), a book that has stayed with me since I first read it thirty years ago. The quotations from it, including “Garden of Desire” and “Country of the Mind,” have been used with the kind permission of his widow, Elizabeth Whalley.

The quotations from George Whalley’s radio drama,
Death in the Barren Ground: A Narrative of John Hornby’s Last Journey
, broadcast on
CBC
Radio on April 10, 1966, have been used with the permission of
CBC
Radio and Elizabeth Whalley. To suit the chronology of my own narrative, in these pages the broadcast occurs five years earlier.

Ken Puley of
CBC
Radio Archives was unfailingly helpful in finding the material I needed. I thank him most gratefully.

The thought on page 260 that “the robin in the egg doesn’t know that the robin’s egg is blue” comes from
Margaret Avison’s
A Kind of Perseverance
(Lancelot Press, 1993), and is used with her generous permission.

The quotation on page 8 from Alden Nowlan’s “The broadcaster’s poem,” included in his collection
I’m a Stranger Here Myself
(Clarke, Irwin, 1974) and reprinted in
Selected Poems
(House of Anansi, 1996), is used with the kind permission of Claudine Nowlan.

Other books that were of great help to me were Knud Rasmussen’s
Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921—24
(Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1930), E.W. Harrold’s
The Diary of Our Own Pepys
(The Ryerson Press, 1947), and
In a Sea of Wind
by Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott (Camden House Publishing, 1991).

I am deeply grateful to Mark Fried, Bella Pomer, and Mick Mallon for reading this manuscript at various stages and for giving me invaluable advice. My editor, Ellen Seligman, has been her usual astute, imaginative, and tireless self; it is impossible to give her enough credit for bringing this book into being. Heartfelt thanks, also, to Anita Chong and Jenny Bradshaw.

In the absence of a good memory, one needs old and good friends. I lived in Yellowknife from 1974 to 1978, I canoed the Thelon River in 1978, but I’ve turned to many others, many of them friends, to add detail and accuracy to my shaky recall. Without their knowledge I couldn’t have built a solid fictional world in which all of the characters, except historical figures, are fictitious. I thank everyone most gratefully who answered my questions. Let me name, in particular, Mick Mallon, John Stephenson, Peter Gorrie, Craig McInnes, Roy Thomas, Stuart and Peter Kinmond, Elizabeth Whalley, Diana Crosbie,
Dave Devlin, Doug Ward, Hal Wake, Sheila McCook, Linda Russell, Wendy Robbins, Catherine O’Grady, Eric Friesen, the late Lister Sinclair, Rosemary Cairns, Matthew Crosier, Richie Allen, Huguette Léger, Sheelagh Teitelbaum, Conny Steenman-Marcusse, Marian De Vries, Parker Duchemin, Stewart Chadnick, George Grinnell, Max Finkelstein, and David Kippen.

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the City of Ottawa.