The Diviners (26 page)

I hope this is okay with you, and I hope Prin is reasonably all right.

All the best,

Morag

Dear Morag–

Well you are getting married that is some news all right and I wish well to you and him. You know damn well I would not say no and it is your life and I hope all goes well too bad he is English and not Scots ha ha. Come home when convenient. Prin not good in herself these days.

Yours,

Christie

 

Memorybank Movie: Hill Street Revisited

The house is just the same, only worse. Perhaps Morag notices it more now. The sour smell is sourer. The exposed light bulb in the kitchen looks bleaker, dimmer, than before, the old sideboard more cluttered with newspapers and unironed clothes, Christie's shaggily upholstered chair more shabbily torn and worn.

“Hello, Christie.”

He is fifty-six, only. He looks about seventy, his hair sparser than she recalled, his badly shaven jaw more tweedlike with sprouting hairs, his eyes less blue, more clouded. As expected, he also stinks. But has put on a relatively clean shirt for her visit. The effect is somewhat diminished by the fact that the shirt was made to wear with a detachable collar which has got itself detached permanently and is no doubt among the dustballs under a bed or sofa.

“Hello, girl. By all the saints, then, and by the lord Harry, and by the–”

“Yes. Well. How's Prin?”

“She's–she's took to her bed now, Morag. Doesn't rise, these days. Can't hardly manage to rise. She ain't old, you know.”

“No. I know.”

The hulk in bed is barely discernible under the thick welter of blankets and eiderdown. Christie pulls away the sheet from the face. Prin's skin is the colour of uncooked pastry, yellowish-white. Christie shouts, as though to penetrate the veil of the years which comes between Prin's mind and now.

“Here's Morag to see you, Prin.”

The eyes flutter open, and a smile, small and faint as the ghost of a child, crosses the puffy lips.

“Morag–Morag?”

“Leave me be, with her, for a bit, Christie, will you, then?”

“Sure, girl. Whatever you say.”

Morag sits down beside Prin's bed. Prin smiles again, trustingly, like a young girl about to be married.

Morag becomes different, in this house. Older, older. With Brooke she feels young, too young sometimes, ignorant. Here she feels too old, too knowing. She should stay here and look after Prin, look after both of them. But cannot. Will not.

“Prin, I'm going to be married.”

The faraway eyes try desperately to focus on Morag's face, to understand.

“Marry? Morag–little girl.”

A soft giggle from the mound, as though somewhere inside that skull there is the image of an unchanging little girl. Morag who will never grow up, never go away, never be different, always four or six years old.

No use. No use trying to explain. Morag reaches out and holds one of Prin's swollen hands, the left one on which the wedding ring has long been overwhelmed and lost in the fat flesh.

Then an odd thing happens. What causes this swift and then swiftly vanishing streak of almost pure lucidity? Do the very very old have flashes of pure and painful sight, sweeping senility away for a second's unbearable perception of everything, everything? Prin, the doctor says, is prematurely senile. Her voice, this instant, is as clear and sweet as it might have been when she was a young girl. But what she says is neither sweet nor, at first, clear.

“That Colin,” Prin says. “He never done that for my Christie. Saved him, like. Or maybe he done it. I dunno. He was a boy, just a boy, and that scared. Poor lamb. The poor lamb. He would cry, and Christie would hold him. Sh-sh. There, there. It's all right now. He's all right now, that Colin. Ain't he?”

Then the shutters come down over the eyes again, and although Prin's eyes remain open, they are seeing something Morag doesn't see, the fields or faces from a long way back.

“Yes, he's all right now, Prin.”

Colin Gunn. Christie's tale of Gunner Gunn and the Great War. How Colin saved Christie, staved off his dying,
that time away out there, on that corner of some foreign field that is forever nowhere. It hadn't happened that way, then, or probably not. It had happened the way Prin said. Christie holding Colin in his arms. Colin probably eighteen. Eighteen. Amid the shellfire and the barbwire and the mud, crying.

After a while, Morag goes back to the kitchen. On the table is a pot of tea and two cups. She recalls the half-bottle of whiskey.

“Here–I brought this for you, Christie.”

“Well, thanks a million, Morag. That was real kind.”

Kind. Half a bottle of whiskey. Not even a whole bottle. They sit and drink in silence. Then Christie, slowly, begins and she is terrified lest he launch into one of the old rants. He does not, however, do so.

“Married, eh? When will it be, then?”

“In about two weeks, Christie. It's not a–I mean, it's just going to be very quiet–no one there, really–”

She has all the subtlety of a two-ton truck. He's not stupid.

“It's okay,” Christie says, his voice suddenly cracking like fire. “I wouldn't turn up, Morag. Never fear. I'd have to borrow a suit from Simon Pearl, eh? Think he'd lend it to me?”

“Oh Christie–I'm sorry. I never meant–”

“Sure you meant,” Christie says, pouring himself another huge slug of whiskey. “No need to fib to me, Morag. I have known you since you were knee-high to a grasshopper. Listen here, now, don't worry. I can tell you plain, and without fear nor favour, and this is the Almighty God's almighty truth, and I'd swear the same on a stack of Bibles and on the blood and bones of the whole clan of Logans from the time of Adam–look here, it's a bloody good thing you've got away from this dump. So just shut your goddamn trap and thank your lucky stars.”

“Do you really think that, Christie?”

“I do,” Christie says, knocking back the whiskey. “And also I don't. That's the way it goes. It'll all go along with you, too. That goes without saying.”

But it has been said.
The way it goes–it'll all go–that goes.
Does Christie bring in these echoes knowingly, or does it happen naturally with him? She has never known.

“You mean–everything will go along with me?”

“No less than that, ever,” Christie says.

“It won't, though,” Morag says, and hears the stubbornness in her own voice.

Christie laughs.

“Who says so, Morag?”

“I say so.”

In some ways she would welcome one of their old arguments. But it is better to change the subject.

“Christie–how do you manage here?”

“I'm still working, for Christ's sake,” he growls.

“I know. I meant–with Prin, and all.”

“Oh–that. Eva comes in on Saturday and washes Prin and changes her bed and that. I can make do for the rest. Prin has to use the bedpan now. But hell's bells and buckets of blood, girl, if I can still heave around them trash barrels, I can heave around my own woman when need be.”

Coals of fire on the head. He doesn't mean it that way. Or does he? With Christie you never ever really know.

“Eva–Winkler?”

“The same.”

“Where–what's she–”

“Married one of the McKendrick boys–he farms out by Freehold. The family was that put out, you would have bust a gut laughing.”

“You mean,
his
family?”

“Of course. You wouldn't think old Gus Winkler would object, would you? He was glad to get rid of her.”

“Did Gus ever find out? I mean–”

“No,” Christie says, frowning. “It ain't ever talked about here, neither.”

“You needn't worry. I wouldn't. Has she got a–is she–well, it's only a year.”

“No kid yet,” Christie says, “nor won't be.”

“Who told you?”

“Eva did. They're going to adopt. She works her fool head off, that girl. Thinks she should be grateful to young McKendrick for marrying her. He knows, you see. She told him. She would. The Winklers was never well-known for their brains.”

“I see. Oh Christie–”

“Yeh, it's a bugger all right. So you go, Morag, and don't look back, you hear?”

Eva, coming into town on Saturdays, coming here and bathing Prin, hoisting that whalewoman, unwholewoman, unwholesome flesh, wholly alone inside her lost mind.

“I hear, Christie. I'm–I'm sorry.”

Christie's eyes take on almost the same blue sharpness they once had.

“Don't ever say that word again,” he says. “Not to me nor to anyone, for it's a useless christly awful word.”

“I can't help it.”

“Nobody can't help nothing, Morag, so best shut up about it, eh?”

The next day she goes away again.

 

Brooke meets her at the bus depot.

“Was it all right, love?”

“Yes. But I missed you. I'll never go away from you again, Brooke. Never. Not even for a day.”

They go to Brooke's apartment, and this time she wants him more than ever, and there is no apprehension in her, only the simple need to be with him and to feel him inside herself. His entry into her is gentle and fierce, and they are close close close.

“Brooke–Brooke–”

“Yes. Yes. My love–”

And then no words no words at all, and after all there are no words, none.

She wants, then, to tell him, to praise him. To let him know. But there isn't any need, because he knows. They lie very still and close together, still joined, not speaking. Both shaken by the mystery they have known.

 

Memorybank Movie: Leavetaking

Morag and Ella are skimming along the street on the way to Ella's house, and it is real spring at last and the time of the singing birds has come. The sidewalks no longer flow with torrents of muddy water, the ex-snow. Small leaves are beginning to appear on the elms and maples, and the winter-anaemic grass shows signs of recuperating after all. The little stucco or frame houses look barer, greyer, without the whiteness of the snow on and around them. In a few yards, people are painting their front doors or porches.

“Hey, Ella, what means
The voice of the turtle is heard through the land?
”

“Well, you see, turtles have got this very soft croaking–well, more sort of creaking voices, heard only in spring. You
have to listen very carefully. It helps to be a member of the Turtle Watchers' Association.”

They are running running through the warm cool air, their laughter unabashedly loud, brash, brazen.

“Have you ever heard a turtle dove?” Ella enquires.

“Hell, no,” Morag says. “I didn't know that turtles
did
dove.”

Suddenly Morag feels bereft, about to journey to a strange land, knowing no one there.

“Ella, I'll sure miss you. I feel–well, you know–at home at your place. We'll write–letters, I mean. We won't ever lose touch, will we?”

“Of course not,” Ella says. “Of course not.”

Then they look at each other, frightened that this will not prove to be so, that friendship may not be weatherproof. Or frightened that neither of them can know what will happen, or how many years are ahead, or what manner of years they may turn out to be.

“It's terribly good of your mother to have the reception, Ella.”

“Her pleasure. As you know.”

“Does she cry at weddings, your mother?”

“Like the Assiniboine in flood.”

“Do you think it's kind of silly, for me to be married in white?”

“What's so silly? A nice virgin like you, white you deserve.”

Laughter. Spring. Like kids. Running. Wisecracking. They are almost twenty, both of them. Will Morag be able to act like this, when she feels like it, after this day?

“Ella, I'm kind of scared.”

“Don't be dumb. All right–change your mind, then.”

“No. I didn't mean that.”

“It happens to everybody, so I'm told. Quit worrying. Brooke's probably nervous too.”

“Brooke's never nervous.”

Is he?

 

SIX

T
he air always cooled off at night here, with the breeze from the river, thank heavens. Morag turned on a small lamp on the sideboard and poured herself a careful scotch. Pure malt whiskey. Royalty cheque on small continuing sale of previous books received yesterday and this was the celebration. Or Thanksgiving libation, as the case might be. The case. Did anybody actually buy scotch by the case? Imagine sauntering into the liquor store and saying casually
I'll take a case of Glenfiddich
.

Morag sat down in the big old armchair beside the kitchen window. The chair she had purchased in McConnell's Landing for two bucks fifty, and Maudie Smith had cleverly and beautifully recovered it in grey felt embroidered with leaves and flowers in brash shades of pink and green. Damn Maudie for being able to turn her hand to anything. Or rather, bless her for being so generous with her time and her work.

On the scotch bottle was the motto of the Grant clan.
Stand fast.
Morag sighed. Didn't any of them ever have mottoes such as, let's say,
Take It Easy
or
Rest Your Soul
? Nope. Stiffen
the spine. Prepare to suffer,
but good
. The Logan crest with the pierced heart, ye gods.

She wished all at once that she could talk to Christie. As he had now been dead for some seven years, that was not exactly possible. How great if one could believe in a re-encounter beyond this ridge of tears. When They Call the Roll Up Yonder, I'll Be There. How Christie would laugh at that. Would there be a special corner of heaven, then, for scavengers and diviners? Which was Morag, if either, or were they the same thing?

But the need to talk remained. She had long ago given up feeling guilty about long-distance phone calls. She settled herself on the high stool beside the side-board, and dialled.

“Hello–Mort?”

“Hi, Morag. How
are
you?”

She began coughing. It never failed when she began to speak to Mort, he being a doctor specializing in respiratory ailments and obviously not a champion of nicotine.

“Morag, I hate to mention it–”

“Yeh, I know. Mort, I have been trying to cut down.”

“Listen, dear, I don't want to lecture you–”

“Mort, you never stop lecturing me. And you're right. You're right. Only I always cough worse when I begin talking to you. I'm addicted, and have the will-power of a flea.”

“Some flea, she writes a shelf of books. Want to talk to Ella?”

Shrieks and snorts of young laughter in the background. Then Ella's voice.

“Morag–hi. How
is
it? How
are
you?”

“Well, not bad. How are you?”

Ella, who was presently raising five-year-old twins, had now four books of poems and was working on a fifth while also doing a certain amount of freelance radio work in her
spare time. Good God, what spare time? Her first marriage, undertaken the year after Morag and Brooke married, had foundered. She had waited a long time for Mort. Now they were four people, a family.

“Oh, I'm fine, actually,” Ella said. “It's going to be all right, but I get this feeling sometimes of living too many lives simultaneously.”

“I know. Jesus, do I ever know.”

“So what's with Pique, then?”

“She's coming home,” Morag said heavily. “She phoned last night. I'm a bit apprehensive. I mean, I'm glad she's coming back. Naturally. But she's split up with Gordon.”

“So?”

“So, did I pass
that
on? I mean–what if she can't have any kind of lasting relationship?”

“It is not passed on with the genes,” Ella said sternly. “Anyway, if you would kindly examine your own life, you would see that quite a few people have been lasting in it.”

“Yeh. Most of them are dead, however.”

“Morag. Listen. Christie is dead. Prin is dead. I am not dead. McRaith is not dead. The Smiths are far from defunct. Pique is with us. I could name you a dozen others, but I trust you get the point. Look, kid, why don't you come and stay with us for a while?”

Kid.
The word they called each other, way back when. Meaning friend.

“Jesus, Ella, thanks. But I can't. I'm not alone all that much, and anyway, I've got to try to work.”

“So
are
you?”

“I don't even know. Yeh, I guess so. I always thought it would get easier, but it doesn't.”

“No. It doesn't.” A pause. Then, attempting cheerfulness, “By the way, my mother sends you her love. We had a letter today.”

“How is she? I can't imagine her in retirement. Does she find it difficult?”

“You should know her better. Difficult, hell. She's a member of the New Left. Actually, yes, I guess she finds it difficult. But she manages.”

“The New Left, for God's sake?”

“Well, it's not a
party
, you know.”

“Oh heavens, Ella, I know at least that much.”

“More a way of thought. I don't imagine she is about to hoist a rifle and woman the barricades or that. She's learning a lot, though, she says. Bernice is embarrassed. Her husband doesn't approve of that kind of mother-in-law–better Mumma should be hovering over the grandchildren, forcing unwanted food down their gullets. Janine goes along with it, though, so that's a help.”

Janine, last seen as a High School kid, how many years ago? Now producing
TV
plays, and, resolutely, no children. Bernice, ex-priestess of Beauty, a matriarch with six, assorted ages from twelve to twenty, she herself still avidly following the new shades of lipstick. Well, good for her. In a way.

“Give your ma my love when you write, eh? She'll survive until she dies. Well, maybe I will, too. I wish I didn't worry about Pique. It serves no purpose, but it's hard to break the anxiety habit.”

“It'll be all right. You'll see. I'll phone you next week. Phone instantly if you–well, if the need arises, eh?”

“I will. Listen, I can hear the twins raising Cain–you'd best go. Thanks, Ella. I feel better.”

This was true. Morag poured some more whiskey and sat looking out the window, with only one small lamp on in the kitchen, so she could see the night river with stars floating like watercandles in it. No sounds except the sometime shushing of wind through the light-leafed willows and occasionally the ghostfluttering of the wings of a flicker, hunting the moths that were clustering around the house windows, moths that always insanely wanted in, however dim the light inside.

How would Brooke remember those years? Not the same, obviously. A different set of memories from Morag's.

 

Memorybank Movie: Raj Mataj

The unfamiliar city frightens Morag. Too many cars. Too much noise. When they go out, she holds tightly to Brooke's arm. He laughs, but is pleased. The apartment is small, but beautiful in Morag's eyes. They have filled it with secondhand furniture which they have painted in startling colours, orange and royal blue, lemon yellow. Brooke's prints are on the walls, and the huge bookcases are filled to overflowing with his books. His desk is in a corner of the livingroom, and if he is working in the evenings, Morag sits quietly, reading, so as not to disturb him.

“Are you finished for the night, then, Brooke?”

“Yes, and about time, too. Twenty blasted essays I've marked tonight. You've a good girl, sweetheart, to sit there so quietly all this time.”

“I don't mind. I was reading. Would you like some coffee now?”

“Please.”

She is reading her way steadily through the novels on Brooke's shelves. English and American. Translations from French and Russian. Brooke is very good about discussing these with her. She is alone most days, and the apartment is
easy to care for, so she has all the time she needs for reading. When they go out in the evenings, or when they have some of Brooke's colleagues in, Morag says very little, mainly listening. Picking people's brains.

Now Brooke sprawls tiredly on the chesterfield, stretching out his long legs onto the Indian rug which they have brought with them and which Brooke has had for a long time, having inherited it from his parents' home in England. Brooke's parents went back to England when they retired from India, and lived there until first Brooke's mother and then his father died, a few years before the war. By that time Brooke was teaching in Canada, so he had the carpet and a few other things sent out to him. He has not been back to India since he last went out on vacation when he was sixteen, just before his parents retired. He tried to get there during the war, but instead had spent the duration, infuriatingly for him, as an officer in an Army training camp in Quebec. He refuses to talk about this period of his life, because he hated every minute of it except when on leave in Montreal, where there were lots of women. He talks about India sometimes, though, and with a kind of muted and concealed homesickness. Morag wants to know everything about him, about his previous life, so that she will know all of him.

“Brooke, tell me more about the kind of place you lived in when you were very young.”

He takes his coffee from her, and puts his other arm around her shoulders as she sits down beside him.

“What's this? A bedtime story?”

“That's it.” She smiles, then doesn't. “It seems such a strange sort of childhood. Weren't you lonely?”

“Not especially. Not then. I played with the servants' children. I was allowed to, when I was small.”

“Not later on?”

“Well, no.”

“I think that's horrible,” Morag says.

“Unfortunate, yes, probably. Just one of those things. It was the custom in those days.”

“What was your house like?”

“I remember it,” Brooke says slowly, “as a very large whitewashed establishment with a great many rooms, and garden which was almost a jungle, filled with purple bougainvillaea and–”

The way Brooke tells it, Morag visualizes a huge Victorian structure, white as alabaster with slatted wooden shutters drawn against the sun. There would be a wall, also white, around it, and in the garden a tumultuous variety of strange trees and flowers, greens and purples and scarlets in strange shapes. Bright-plumaged birds, unheard of here, would have strutted and swooped there, their voices raucous or else silver. Would it have been like that? Morag cannot ever know, not being able to see the pictures that must grow inside his head when he talks of it. She is glad, however, that he cannot look inside her head and see Hill Street, about which she does not talk.

“Wasn't it very poor, there? The country, I mean.”

“Yes. Yes, it was. We didn't often go to Calcutta, but I remember some of the markets there, where they sold carved ivory and teak and brass and all manner of baubles to Europeans, and the beggars there–most of them crippled, all skin and bones. Sometimes they used to maim children purposely, to use them as beggars.”

“That's terrible.”

“Yes. It was.”

His face is grave, almost apologetic, as though he has seen things he would rather she didn't know about.

“Is it better now, there?”

“Not a damn bit better,” Brooke says bitterly. “Worse, if anything, I should think. Whatever anyone may say of it, the passing of the British Raj wasn't the answer.”

“But Brooke–surely you can't believe it was right for them, the British, even for you, to have lived there like that, in that way, house and servants, while–”

Brooke puts his cup on the coffee table and strokes her breasts lightly.

“Little one,” he says, very gently, “there is no real justice in this world. I don't say it was fair. It was just the best that could be done under the circumstances, that's all.”

“But–”

“Hush, love. You don't know. You just don't
know
.”

True. She does not know.

“What was your mother like, Brooke?”

He smiles, although not with amusement.

“It's odd,” he says. “I remember her always, even when they'd retired to England, as a kind of shadow, a quiet grey shadow of a woman, never daring to raise her voice to him. When I was a youngster she used sometimes to make feeble efforts to intercede on my behalf, but it never worked. Never. Not even once. I suppose I resented that, at the time. It always seemed she ought to have been able to do something. I guess I felt sorry for her as well. He was a difficult man.”

“What did he do? To you?”

Brooke shrugs.

“Well, he was a schoolmaster, remember, and very keen on discipline. He used to cane the boys at school–he reserved that pleasure for himself, incidentally, and never let any of the Indian teachers do it. He caned me, too, but he had subtler punishments as well. Caning was simple. Once he made me
sit on top of a large steamer trunk, tied to it, actually, just outside the front gate of our compound, where everyone passing by, Europeans, and Hindus from Brahmans to outcasts, could see me. On my chest was a placard which read
I Am Bad
. Rather a gruesome sense of humour.”

“Oh Brooke–”

He laughs.

“I was supposed to stay there until I begged for his forgiveness. What I'd done I can't remember now. He also thought he could make me cry–I remember being certain that was what he expected and wanted. I must've been nearly six. I didn't cry, though, and I didn't apologize. My mother wept buckets, as I recall, wringing her hands like someone out of a Victorian ghost story. Not that it did any good. Finally he had to cart me back inside.”

“That's appalling, the whole thing.”

“He was a charmer, all right,” Brooke says, his voice cold. “Well, never mind. At least it taught me to stand up for myself.”

“Yes, like dropping a kid in the ocean, half a mile out and saying–learn to swim. He might, but what a way to have to do it.”