The Diviners (23 page)

“I thought it was really lucky,” Bernice says. “Blonde would've only made you look cheap, anyway.”

“And who says I am so expensive?”

“Brat.”

But Bernice, queenly and twenty-three, is their oracle in the area of beauty. Bernice knows which shade of nail polish to wear with which colour of dress. Bernice knows perfumes and lipsticks and shampoos like she knows her own name. This is great, from Morag's point of view, but she soon realizes that it has given Ella the feeling of being a hopeless incompetent. As Bernice prattles on about egg-and-lemon shampoos, the new Tropicoral lipstick and nail-polish set, and the best way of removing facial hair, Morag and Ella give each other the Sarah Bernhardt gesture, meaning in this instance, woe. They will not, they feel, ever attain the status of high priestesses at
Beauty's Altar. They will, indeed, be lucky if they get even one foot inside the temple door.

“You're crazy, both of you,” Bernice says disgustedly. “I don't know what you're complaining about. You could both be
gorgeous
if only you'd put your minds to it.”

“Our minds are on higher things,” Morag suggests.

“Listen, higher than a man's belt buckle Ella's mind never yet got,” Bernice declares, “and I bet you're not any different, either, Morag. Want me to do your hair? Look–it's lovely, that real shiny black, but the way you wear it–those braids over your head make you look like an old-maid school-teacher. No kidding.”

“Now, Bernice, you leave the girl alone,” Mrs. Gerson says severely from the kitchen, where she is ironing. “She's right–her mind
is
on higher things. She studies. Reads. Not like some people, you know what I'm talking, who quit after Grade Twelve and turn themselves into such a
lady
they can't even hang up their own nightgown, what a lovely way to be, such encouragement to give a young girl, who needs it?”

“That is Mumma's Bernice Speech Number One,” Janine murmurs. “Next comes a brief rundown of the entire Russian revolution.”

“Such disrespect.”

Mrs. Gerson slaps the iron down on the ruffled blouse and irons furiously. She in fact adores Bernice and stands in admiring awe of her daughter's prowess in the beauty game. She complains proudly about the house being cluttered up with Bernice's boyfriends. She feeds them egg-bread and bagels and strudel and coffee in huge quantities until Bernice, embarrassed, tells her to lay off–it looks like she's feeding them up for the slaughter. She then goes to the other
extreme and starts chatting to them about the iniquities of the City Council–all quite true, but it does not make a hit with Bernice.

Bernice does Morag's hair–a home permanent, because Morag cannot afford to go to Miss Bonnie, where Bernice ministers to the better-off. When the apparently endless process is finally over, Morag looks at herself in the long mirror in the Gersons' bathroom. Her hair is still quite long, and falls darkly shining into a pageboy style, very little curl, just enough to make the hair curve under. She feels peculiar. Not like herself. Yet better. Hopeful?

“Hey, it's terrific,” Ella cries. “It looks like a million bucks.”

Janine and Mrs. Gerson add their fulsome praise. Bernice, looking proud, says that she knew all along it would turn out lovely.

Morag has never known anything like this kind of house before. Its warmth is sometimes very much harder to take than any harshness could be, because it breaks her up and she considers it a disgrace to cry in front of anybody. When she finally admits this, out of necessity, the girls leave her tactfully alone. Not so Mrs. Gerson.

“Mumma, come
here
,” Ella hisses.

“I know what I'm doing,” Mrs. Gerson says adamantly.

She marches into the bathroom, where Morag has not thought of locking the door.

“So, what's the disgrace, Morag? Look at me–didn't I spend maybe half my life crying? It never meant any disgrace. It never meant I couldn't mop up, after, and blow my nose a little, and get back to work. So cry, child.”

Morag Gunn, nearly twenty, five-feet-eight, grown-up, puts her head down on the shoulder of Ella's mother and cries
as if the process had just recently been invented. What the hell is she crying about? Because of the unreal stab of hope she felt when she looked in the mirror? Because she fears she can't carry through with the New Her, and because in some ways she doesn't even want to? Because it shouldn't all be necessary but it is? Because she never knew until now that she has missed her mother as much as her father, for most of her life? Because she thinks of Prin and feels ashamed at not wanting to see her? Because she wants her own child and doesn't believe she will ever have one? Because she wants to write a masterpiece and doesn't believe she will ever write anything which will even see the light of day?

Because life is bloody terrifying, is why.

And under the tears, much deeper, Morag sees now why she feels close to Ella's mother. It is not only Mrs. Gerson's ability to reach out her arms and hold people, both literally and figuratively. It is also her strength. Morag doesn't know yet if she herself has the former ability. If she doesn't, it will go badly for her. Because she knows she has the latter. How is it she can feel totally inadequate and yet frightened of a strength she knows she possesses?

Flash–flash–all these thoughts like neons flickering on and off in her head while she sobs ludicrously on Mrs. Gerson's shoulder. Finally straightens up and blows her nose.

“Now, you'll have a nice little bit of dinner with us,” Mrs. Gerson reassures, “and then you go home and you don't study tonight, eh? You relax a little, you read a book for pleasure, you don't have to think of an essay on it.”

This magic combination is Mrs. Gerson's remedy for most of the psychic ills to which the human skull is prey. After the gefilte fish, Dostoevsky's
The Idiot
. What could cheer you up more?

Ella's ma has adopted Morag in some way or other, and is going to give her the same benefits as her own daughters receive. Cannily, she leaves the
HCPSU
(History of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union) until later on. For now, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev.

“Take, take, we're not in a hurry to have them back.”

Thus it is that Morag Gunn sets a tentative and cramped toe inside the Temple of Beauty at the same moment as she first truly realizes that English is not the only literature.

 

Memorybank Movie: Brooke

The New Image, courtesy of Bernice, does not actually alter Morag's social life out of all recognition. Still, she is asked out several times, albeit by boys in whom she is not interested. She feigns interest, though. Aims to please. She would go out with Dracula if he asked her, probably. This a despicable attitude to have. She has it. It is not the loneliness of not going out which she cannot bear. She is in fact rarely lonely when alone. It is the sense of being downgraded, devalued, undesirable. She knows men feel pain, too. But does not yet wholly believe it, having never really seen it, except in Christie. Or Lazarus. Or Lachlan. Or, in some way she doesn't understand, Niall Cameron. But like Christie, their pain seems in another dimension, pain perceived frighteningly by her, scarcely to be looked at. Also, not immediately relevant to her situation. They are old and she is not.

What about Jules? Yes. Sometimes she thinks of him, and remembers how it was, and wonders where he is and how he is getting on. But will not will not think of it much. Refuses to think of it.

She discovers, not greatly to her surprise, that the location of her boardinghouse does little to enhance her
popularity. Once a boy finds out that she lives half-a-mile from the end of the streetcar line and he has to flounder back out again after taking her home and wait for the next streetcar in the midst of a semi-blizzard or the icy stillness that sometimes puts frost straight into the bloodstream–he usually never asks her out again. Then, too, the Crawleys' arctic front porch cannot be called the ideal place for necking. Morag feels herself burning up with a sweetly uncomplicated lust the moment she is touched by a man. She is not modest or shy about having her breasts or inner thighs felt up, nor is she unwilling to press herself against him and feel the hardness of his cock inside his grey flannels. This she knows is called
leading him on
, which is not honourable on her part, as she is too scared ever to allow him inside her. Scared not of sex but of getting pregnant. She suffers the lack of real sex as much as he does–at least, if he suffers more, he must really suffer
plenty
. Both, no doubt, have the same solitary solution. If he, however, knew this about her, he would scorn her forever. Unfair, but factual. Passion, however, is curbed to some degree by the Crawleys' porch in mid-February. She cannot ask the boy into the livingroom. What if one of the Crawleys woke and came downstairs? There appears no solution except to move. This she is now afraid to do in case it should turn out to be: (a) no better; (b) worse; (c) not the porch but herself, insufficiently alluring.

“I make boxes for myself,” she tells Ella, “and then I get furious when I find I'm inside one. Do you think it'll be a lifelong pattern?”

“I don't know,” Ella says honestly, although obviously she would have preferred to be reassuring.

Ella's poem comes out in
Veritas
and Morag is nearly as glad as if it had been her own. Also, unbearably depressed.

“Did you mail them your story?” Ella asks.

“Yeh. But I don't imagine they'd bother returning it. I mean, think of the postage.”

Why did she submit it under her own name? Imagine writing
Morag Gunn
in cold blue ink.

“At this moment,” Morag says, “my life seems odious. Apart from your poem getting in, I mean.”

“Well, even with that,” Ella says, “mine is not exactly one huge barrelful of chuckles.”

They stamp snowbooted tweedcoated down the street to Ella's, singing, not caring who hears.

 

There'll be a change in the weather

And a change in the sea,

And most of all there'll be a change in me,

'Cause nobody wants you when you're old and grey–

There'll be some changes made Today

There'll be some chay-ay-anges made.

 

They cannot imagine ever becoming old and grey. Simultaneously, they live every day with the certainty of this fact, and with the fact of their own deaths. They seldom discuss this strange presence. There is no need. They know it from one another's writing. It is the unspoken but real face under the jester's mask. They do not pry, nor do they invade each other's areas of privacy. They simply recognize the existence of these.

Morag goes alone into the cafeteria after a late class. Very few people there, she is glad to see.

“Hello, Morag Gunn. Come here.”

She looks, and it is Dr. Skelton, who teaches the Seventeenth-Century Poetry course and the Milton course.
He is English (from England, that is) and has an impressive accent. He is also about ten feet tall–well, six-four anyway, and with a fine-boned handsomeness that gives him an aristocratic look, or what Morag imagines must be aristocratic. He wears dark framed glasses, which suit him. He's not terrifically old–in his thirties. His hair is prematurely grey and there is something nice about that, with the youngness of his face. He is, of course, swooned over by various birdbrained females in the class who couldn't care less about John Donne but just go to twitter over Brooke Skelton. Morag, who secretly thinks he is a prince among men, scorns such obvious ploys, although when she can think of some reasonably intelligent comment or question, she speaks it. She has never spoken to him out of class. In the cafeteria, he is always surrounded by his clutch of disciples, who hardly allow the poor guy a second's peace over a cup of coffee. Morag has sometimes wanted to join them, but pride forbids.

“Hello, Dr. Skelton.”

He motions to a chair, and she sets her coffee on the table beside his. In his hand is a copy of
Veritas
. Today's. She hasn't seen it.

“I've just read your story,” he says, smiling.

Morag snatches the paper from him, now unaware of his presence. There it is.
Fields of Green and Gold
by Morag Gunn. They've certainly set it up rotten–about a million typographical errors, and why did they have to use that airy-fairy type for the title? The story itself. Hm. The ending is rubbish. How could she?

She becomes aware again of Dr. Skelton. What must he be thinking. Amused?

“I quite liked it,” Dr. Skelton says. “In fact, I thought it extremely promising.”

“
Really?
”

“Yes. Really. Are you so surprised?”

“I'm astounded,” she says, truthfully.

“The ending is sentimental, I think,” he says, “but–”

“I know. I know it is. The story needs to be rewritten.”

“Well, if you'd like me to take a look at any more of your stories, I'd be happy to do so. I might be able to point out a few things which would be helpful.”

“Thanks. Oh–thank you.”

She must not gush. She clamps her mouth shut. Dr. Skelton smiles, easily, as though if she has been awkward, he hasn't noticed.

“I'm generally free on a Thursday, after four. You can come up to my office then, if you like.”

Morag phones Ella in the evening. They talk for one hour, approximately, about this strange happening. Mr. Crawley, timid though he usually is, comes and stands beside the phone, finally, making gestures at his watch, so Morag has to hang up. She goes to her room. Stays up until three in the morning, writing another story. This story is totally unsentimental. Also, totally worthless. She perceives that not even for Dr. Skelton can she write a story which wasn't there to be written. A humbling thought, but not daunting.