Sussex Drive: A Novel (10 page)
“We need damage control,
tout de suite
,” Lise said sharply. “Do you know what he’s just done?”
“Who?” asked Becky, though she knew instantly exactly whom Lise was talking about.
“The PM. Quebec.”
“What?” said Becky. She’d spoken to Greg just before the arrival of the first guests and updated him about Martha’s flu, and how Martha would have to cancel a few campaign stops with him.
“He’s denigrated the arts. He’s said the
majority
—”
Becky tingled.
“—the
majority
of Canadians don’t give two cents about ballet and opera and esoteric literature and don’t want to subsidize it for the pleasure of the elites.”
Becky’s first thought was,
He’s right
. Her second thought was,
Minority, minority, minority, minority, minority
.
“You can imagine what’s happening. The artists in Quebec are very upset, the First Nations are upset—it’s all about culture, identity. A few of the anglo artists—the Ghost of Peter Gzowski cult, the Ghomeshi gang and a couple others, also on the blogs—all furious. Culture is subsidized, identity is subsidized—why has he done this?”
“I had nothing to do with it,” Becky said.
“And the ArtsCAN! Our gala! How can I work with you as co-chair? Where is my credibility as Governor General working with you on this?” Lise’s eyes were wide. “What are you going to do?”
Becky thought about it—the carefully cultivated list of corporate sponsors and spouses, all delighted to be rubbing anything with Greg, with her, and the Canadian luminaries who had fled the shallow Canadian turtle dish and become fast-swimming, sleepless celebrity sharks in the translucent global ocean. The waste of money, relationships and months of strategy.
Becky spoke carefully. “
Mamma Mia!
I’m starting the movie. Then I’m going to call my husband. Can you stay with the gals?”
Lise nodded. “Make him feex eet.”
Becky punched in the lock code for the swimming pool. It had been the same for years: 1217, December 17, Mackenzie King’s birthday. She pulled out her BlackBerry and plunked down on the end of a chaise longue. Steam rose from Mila’s Jacuzzi and she knew she was barely visible to security. So be it. She needed to be somewhere she wouldn’t be disturbed.
She punched Greg’s direct number and received his voice mail. “It’s Becky,” she said. “The kids are fine. Call me ASAP.”
She stared out the window into the dusk. The garden was just about under cover of darkness now, with the last stalks starting to rot from the root.
She called Doc.
“Becky.” Clipped, Mr. Importante.
“Give me the leader.”
“He’s with Chief.”
“Interrupt.”
“No can do.”
“Not good enough.”
Pause.
“All I can do is give him the message—”
“Get him!”
Pause.
“We’re coming in for a landing here in Winnipeg. Have to end. The pilot’s waving at me—”
Becky knew that pilot, the congenial Trenton commander. “Doc.”
The phone went dead.
She was about to call Greg back and leave a caustic version of her original message when somebody appeared at the pool entrance. Silhouetted and in uniform, he wasn’t anyone she recognized from the 24 Sussex staff. She had the insane feeling that she was in danger. She eyed a kayak paddle glistening on the deck six feet away. The boys hadn’t put it away again. Here was the sting: an official residence full of inebriated
guests singing an ABBA hit with the Governor General and here she was, far from the literally madding crowd, by a roiling hot tub haunted by the ghosts of prime ministers’ families past, with unnurtured children, and the lonely, loyal, preoccupied wives. Security was anywhere but upon her. Oh, for the
cojones
of Madame Chrétien.
Then she realized from the man’s gait, as he walked toward her, that it was Corporal Shymanski.
“Madame Leggatt.”
“Corporal Shymanski. What are you doing here? How did you get in?”
“The door—it was unlocked.”
Becky stared at him, supremely ill at ease. “It locks automatically.”
“Martha gave me the code.”
She was supposed to have the indelible upper hand, the authority of her husband’s office as chief executive of the dominion, but she didn’t. She felt violated, even threatened. “I need to get back,” she said. “My guests.”
“I am wondering how Martha is.”
“She’s sick.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“She’s probably got a virus. We all have to keep washing our hands. Take one of my party favours when you leave.” Becky got to her feet then, and moved past the paddleboards and mini-kayak. “I’ve packed little pocket-size dispensers. Rosemary and lavender. So soothing.”
Corporal Shymanski stepped in front of her.
Becky made herself taller, using some of the Mountain pose techniques—pushing the balls of her feet, in her high heels, against the tiles, pressing on the inside of her thighs, pretending there was a string, make that steel wire, lifting the crown of her head to the low ceiling.
“It was you who transferred me to Her Excellency.”
Becky’s voice was measured, calm. “You should not be addressing me. This is inappropriate.”
“It’s important.”
“You’re out of line, sir.”
“We both care about her.”
“Her Excellency?”
“Martha.”
“Corporal, the conversation is over and you’re out of here.”
“Elle est enceinte.”
Becky heard,
Elle est
a saint.
“She’s pregnant.”
Becky couldn’t breathe. This couldn’t possibly be happening. Yet, like the illustrations in the Christian pop-up books she still read to Pablo, events of the past weeks sprang from the page like a giant Noah’s Ark, or Burning Bush, so to speak: her knowledge of their relationship, Martha throwing up, the secrecy, her questions about Becky’s love life—all loomed, leered, waggled their collective misery at her, sticking out of the flat, uniform, linear, orderly and distinguished progress of her constructed life.
“That’s a lie,” Becky said.
It was hard not to recollect Corporal Shymanski’s record
in Kandahar at the Provincial Reconstruction Team and his heroic work with Lieutenant-Colonel Aisha K. She didn’t know much about him, but in a way she didn’t have to: they kept him close in Ottawa and that told her just about everything she needed to know. He was a boyish young man, desperate to reconnect with normalcy, and he had targeted her very young, serious, just-about-married-to-Jesus daughter. They’d been together or in close proximity all the hot summer. She had to tell Greg what had gone down; she could not possibly tell Greg.
“That is why the doctor is coming back tomorrow,” Shymanski said. “Tonight, Martha’s thinking about what to do. She needs your support. We need it.”
“You were supposed to take care of her, not pass on Stockholm Syndrome.”
“She is eighteen, Madame Leggatt.”
“Don’t tell me my own daughter’s age.” Becky pushed him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, sir. We have never had this conversation.”
After the guests had ebbed away, singing “Money, Money, Money,” and Corporal Shymanski had escorted Lise back across the street to 1 Sussex Drive, and Pablo had woken from a nightmare about that book he hadn’t read,
The Giver
, Becky checked in on Martha.
She was sitting up in her bed with her sketchbook across her knees. She’d drawn a unicorn and was adding shadings to its very pointy horn.
“I spoke to Corporal Shymanski,” Becky said.
“I know,” Martha said.
“Why didn’t you tell me about him?”
“I didn’t want him discharged.”
“You kept on seeing each other after the transfer?”
“Yes. He was on afternoon shift at Rideau Hall, so we’d meet on my lunch hours.”
“To do—?”
“Just walking. On the Hill or down by the locks.”
Becky sat down on the edge of the bed. “It’s not the flu, is it?”
Martha fixed her steady gaze on Becky’s face. Then she opened her bedside drawer and passed Becky the pregnancy test wand, two blue lines, the aroma of pale urine steeped in Jamieson multivitamin, the assurance of health.
Becky couldn’t help herself. “This is very serious. This is a crossroad.” She wrapped her daughter in her arms and didn’t think she could ever let go. This was one fucking epic maternal fail.
“I love him, Mom,” Martha said over Becky’s shoulder. “He’s a good person. He’s been through so much.”
“He should have worn a condom.”
“I wouldn’t let him.”
“Oh my God, Martha,” Becky said.
“I wanted to give him pure love. Who else is going to love him with one leg?”
“Terry Fox had one leg!” Becky let go of her. “Everyone adored him! He could have had any girl in the country! And their mothers too.”
“This is different. And Taylor may have PTSD.”
“It doesn’t mean you’re under any obligation to love him, honeybee. You’re just eighteen. This is your first—relationship. Your first obligation is to love yourself. To figure out what love even is, for God’s sake!”
“That’s not Christian, Mom.”
“Oh, yes it is. Jesus had terrific boundaries.”
“Christianity is about sacrifice. That’s what Dad says.”
Martha was tucked into her pink pyjamas with her hair tied up in a tight topknot. It didn’t seem possible that she could have had intercourse in the underbrush with a one-legged military Mountie. It would have been beyond Becky’s capability or empathy, at age eighteen, to make love with a physically challenged man.
“I do love him, Mom. But I don’t want to have a baby.”
Becky took her daughter’s hand.
“Not right now. Not yet. He’s not ready.”
Becky was ashamed at the relief flooding through her total Beckyhood. She wanted to walk her fingers up Martha’s back and croon “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Becky wasn’t hearing
marriage
, nor vaunted
motherhood
, and so she had finally found her window to fix this problem. “It’s about you, honeybee,” she said. “You first.” But she also knew it had a lot to do with Greg.
It was midnight when Becky threw on jeans, poncho, Roots cap, boots, boy glasses, all to hide her ginger-ness, and told security, “Car.”
Greg had not returned her call. She couldn’t stay in the house another second. When she was younger, just after she got her driver’s licence, she’d borrow her mother’s Honda Civic and head out on the country roads, the radio loud, Top 40, button-drunk, always pushing toward the next hit, any way she could get her autocratic father out of her head.
In Ottawa she was imprisoned, tethered like a Clydesdale.
It took only a few minutes to drive past seemingly quiet embassies—the U.K., France, Saudi Arabia. She turned the corner by
Maman
, the huge and ghastly metal spider outside Martha’s National Gallery of Art, past the newer U.S. embassy, which insisted itself upon the city like an armed fortress. Past Revenue Canada. Past the Governor General’s private entrance at the Château Laurier, with its ominous fading grandeur. She steered through the heart of the National Capital Region, the War Memorial, the Peace Tower, and she caught sight of the very human-sized sculpture of Terry Fox, with his own prosthetic toothpick. She cursed.
All the way down stately Elgin until the city became a neighbourhood, with laundromats, nail salons, barber shops and shawarma parlours. She parked the car by a fire hydrant and tucked into the diner, which was busy with a few post-clubbers and locals. She took a booth at the back and hid behind the brontosaurus-sized vinyl menu. She ordered the mac and cheese, and pulled out her BlackBerry. If she could have, she would have driven to Toronto and then carried on to Niagara Falls, over the border, and disappeared.
On the smartphone she drafted her resignation to the
ArtsCAN! (ArtsCAN’T!) board, cc’ing Lise and bcc’ing her husband. Sent it.
She pondered the Sarah Palin option, wherein she’d believed that the little Down’s syndrome baby had been the daughter’s, because the daughter had dropped out of school, and Sarah had hid her own pregnancy, and the age discrepancy was so slight as to easily throw her daughter’s baby into Sarah’s very own flock. Of course, Sarah hadn’t lied; she was just that kind of go-fer-it gal, you have your Down’s syndrome baby and run the state too.
She briefly mourned being a grandmother.
She devoured the mac and cheese. Didn’t even taste it.
On the way home, Becky turned on the radio in the car for the news. It had proven to be an effective way to keep track of her husband, and sure enough, she heard Greg right at the top of the segment. He was in Edmonton, where a female reporter with a sexy voice asked him if he thought he would be punished for his inflammatory comments.
“About the stock market?” Greg asked.
“About the arts,” the reporter said.
Greg replied, “Do you like punishment?”
In other news …
