The Diviners (32 page)

He stares at her, then smiles warmly.

“Well, that's marvellous, darling. That's absolutely splendid. I didn't even know you'd sent it out.”

“Are you glad, Brooke?”

Dumb question. What does she expect him to say?

“Of course I'm glad, idiot child. How could I be otherwise? Do they want any changes made?”

“They suggested some things.”

“I'll take a quick run through it, if you like,” Brooke says.

“Well, thanks, but that's pretty well settled, the changes.”

“I see. My reactions aren't any longer welcome to you.”

“It's not that. It's–I know you know a lot about novels. But I know something, as well. Different from reading or teaching.”

“With that insight, perhaps you'd like to take over my English 450 course in the Contemporary Novel? I'm sure it could be arranged.”

Morag, standing in the diningroom doorway, feels a spinning of blood inside her skull. She recalls having been as
angry as this as a child, but seldom since. It acts upon her precipitously, like about six double scotches taken at a gulp. She picks up the peacock-blue Italian glass bowl from the centre of the diningroom table and heaves it against the livingroom fireplace. Naturally, it shatters dramatically.

Total silence. Inside her head and stomach, sickness like a hangover. Brooke stands beside the long windows. Very very tall, absolutely straight, his face like the carved face of the unknown soldier.

“You'd better clear that away,” he says finally, in a perfectly controlled voice. “I wouldn't advise you to do that again, Morag. The burden of your complaint, these past months, seems to be that I treat you like a child. Might I suggest you stop acting like one?”

True. All true. How in hell has she done such a thing? She can barely believe it herself, even with the blue-chipped evidence all over the carpet. What can ever make up for this enormity?

“Brooke–I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

“Just clean it up, Morag,” he says, tiredly. “I'm going in the study. I've got papers to mark. I won't want any dinner.”

She sweeps up the broken glass. The doorbell inconveniently rings. It is a telegram. Morag has written to Ella some days ago about the novel. The telegram reads:
MAZELTOV AND TWO MILLION HURRAHS LOVE ELLA
.

“What was that?” Brooke says, emerging from study.

“The woman in 70-B wants me to take delivery of a parcel from Eaton's.”

“Oh. I thought it was a man's voice.”

“Her husband.”

That night, in bed, they turn to one another.

“Brooke–”

“Listen, my love, let's not have these upsets. Please.”

“I won't. Not any more. I promise.”

She strokes the skin of his shoulders and back. Then they make love, and it is fine, except that at one time it seemed an unworded conversation and connection and now it seems something else. An attempt at mutual reassurance, against all odds.

 

The dust jacket for
Spear of Innocence
shows a spear, proper, piercing a human heart, valentine. Morag is beside herself with embarrassment and fury, combined with the feeling that because they have published the damn thing at all, she ought not to experience quirks nor qualms about such trivia.

The reviews, clipped out and sent to Morag by the publishers, aren't all that bad although by no means overwhelmingly laudatory. Stomach churning, Morag forces herself to read them. Some of them do not appear to refer to the novel Morag wrote at all, and this is true even of some of the favourable ones. So she cannot believe even the few comments she would like to believe. A cross-section shows, if nothing else, a bewildering diversity of views.

 

“A first novel of some wit and perception, marred by the author's too-obvious playing upon the fashionable theme of homosexuality.”

“Lilac is a winner.”

“Miss Gunn obviously has it in for the Church.”

“A tale of a primitive lumber town.”

“The final scene in court gives an admirable picture of man's misunderstanding of man.”

“A dreary novel about–yawn–a goodhearted tart.”

“A piquant and exciting novel about abortion.”

“Lilac Stonehouse, with her nonchalant vulgarity, will live on in the head for some time.”

 

She has not, unfortunately, told Brooke, until the book appears, that it is being published under the name of Morag Gunn, not Morag Skelton. He looks at the dust jacket, agreeing that it is pretty bad, then looks at her.

“Didn't you want to take the chance, Morag? Of putting your married name on it?”

“Brooke–it wasn't that. It was something quite different. It goes a long way back.”

 

Or is he, perhaps, quite correct?

She knows now that she does not want to stay with Brooke. Leaving him, however, remains unthinkable.

Uncertainty grows to panic proportions. She begins forgetting ordinary things such as turning on the oven so the dinner will be ready at the correct time. She stays out longer in the afternoons, sometimes coming back to awareness in some totally unknown area of the city, to discover that she should have been home an hour ago.

The feeling of being separated from herself increases. She is unable to speak of this feeling to anyone, not even to Ella. Her letters to Ella are cryptic, and, as she sees one day, full of passages which are virtually meaningless to anyone but herself.

How many people has she betrayed so far?
Don't count–you might scare yourself too much.
How many will there be before her life is over? Should you count yourself among those, or only others?

She is walking along a street of flimsy board houses, boardinghouses,
Rooms Weekly or Nightly
, no curtains on windows, a greyness over all. The day also is grey, autumnal
grey, or seems so until she comes out of herself to some degree and notices that in fact the air is crisp blue. Clear yellow leaves are being blown from the already-sparse branches of the few thin trees that fringe the street, and the sun has the warmth of Indian summer. One day she will be dead and not able to see all this any more, and now she is wasting whatever there is. How can she write if she goes blind inside?

She is filled with the profound conviction that she will not write anything more, anyway. Big deal. Keel over with sorrow, world. As if it would matter.

A man is walking out of one of the houses, and something in his gait makes Morag slow her pace and look at him. Fairly tall, slightly gone to belly around the middle, dressed in denims and a blue flannel shirt, a wide brass-buckled belt at his waist. Lank black hair, hawkish features, light brown skin. Lazarus Tonnerre. It cannot be, of course, but it seems to be. Then Morag sees that it is not Lazarus.

“Skinner!”

She calls the old nickname without thinking. Jules looks up, startled, frowning. Then he grins.

“Great God, it's Morag! How about that, eh?”

Again, without prior thought, knowing only how glad she is to see him, Morag runs towards him and puts both arms around his shoulders, holding him tightly, holding onto him. He gives a surprised laugh, then hugs her, also. Only for a second. Then they look at each other.

“I never thought to see you in this part of the city,” Jules says. “You knew I lived in Toronto, though?”

“Yeh. Christie told me, last time I was in Manawaka, back last spring.”

“When did we last see each other, Jules?”

“Going on ten years, I guess. How you been?”

“Oh, not so bad, I guess. You?”

“Not so bad, neither. You want some coffee?”

They go to a small and shabby café where the walls are papered with old Coca-Cola posters and the coffee is served in thick white cups decorated with a dark green line. Not unlike the Parthenon in Manawaka.

“You've got thinner,” Jules observes, lighting cigarettes for them both, and eyeing her carefully.

“You haven't.”

“Nope,” he says cheerfully. “I'm gettin' a beer belly.”

“I thought when I first saw you that it was your dad.”

His eyes narrow, and only then does she recall that he always said he would never become like his father. Even after he no longer hated and resented Lazarus.

“Lazarus died this past spring,” Jules says.

“I didn't know. I'm sorry. How old–”

“Fifty-one,” Jules says angrily. “Only fifty-one.”

Not to be talked about, she sees. Or not yet.

“How long you been in Toronto, Jules?”

His face, still wary, relaxes a little.

“You still say
Jewels
. Don't worry. I got damn little French myself. More than I used to, though. I lived in Quebec, there, coupla years. I been here for about five years or like that. I done okay. Wanna know how I make a living these days?”

“Sure. How?”

“Singing. How about that, eh?”

“That's great. You always did have a good voice.”

“How would you know?”

“I used to sit at the back of the room, too, in school, and I heard you.”

“Some memory you got there, Morag.”

“What kind of singing?”

“Oh, country and western, mostly. Lotta them are crap. I sing some I made up, too. Maybe they're crap as well, but at least it's my own crap. None of it pays so good. I do a coupla small clubs and some coffee-houses and that, and travel around some. But it's better than working in a lousy factory.”

“Your own songs? What about?”

“What about? What a question. People here and there, mostly, I guess. I'll sing one for you sometime, maybe. What about you?”

“You knew I was married?”

“Yeh. You married a rich prof after all. I told you you would, didn't I? Jesus, you sure wanted to go
somewhere
.”

She had got what she wanted. Not, however, what she'd bargained for.
It's your bed, Morag. Lie on it.

“He's not what you'd call rich,” Morag says, looking away from Jules. “Not that I'd want him to be. That doesn't matter a damn.”

“Something else does, though, eh?”

She looks again into his face. His dark eyes are looking at the expression in her own. What is he reading there?

“Yeh. Well, never mind that.”

“You got kids?”

“No,” Morag says. “No kids.”

She does not realize, until she has spoken, how resentful her voice is. Jules shrugs and does not pursue the subject.

“Jules–come back for dinner, will you? I gotta go and get it ready now, and we've just begun talking.”

He hesitates. Then, perhaps hearing some appeal in her voice, he nods.

“Sure. Okay. Why not?”

At the apartment, he sits at the kitchen table while Morag prepares dinner. She pours a scotch for both of them, and drinks hers while she works. Then she sits down, across the table from him, and refills their glasses.

“You play guitar, Jules?”

“Yeh. I picked it up, here and there, along the way. A pal of mine plays his guitar along with me. Billy Joe, that is. He's Ojibway. Comes from away to hell and gone, northern Ontario. I been up there coupla times with him. I liked it fine. Liked his family. They got nothing, though. Except a lot of sick kids, last time I was there. Some died, since.”

He falls into silence, and Morag cannot ask him. Everything he knows, everything he has seen, the films there in his head–all unseen by her. It has not occurred to her before to wonder how scornful he must feel about this apartment, but she wonders now. Then he laughs and comes back.

“I don't dress like this when I'm singing,” he says. “I wish to christ I could, but no go. You should see me. One-man circus. Satin shirt with a lotta beadwork, and sometimes a phoney doeskin jacket with fringes and a lotta plastic porcupine quills in patterns. That's what they like.”

“That's–bad.”

“Oh, it's not so bad. It's a load of shit, but I don't worry much as long as they let me do the singing. It's when they start joining in that makes me want to puke. If they want a community singsong, let 'em have it, but not with me. That's mostly the older people do that. Like to go slumming, I guess. They wouldn't know a good song if they heard one. They just get loaded and start thinking they're Roy Rogers or something–for God's sake, who'd
want
to be? Christie said you were writing a book.”

“Yeh. It's published. It's a novel.”

“Can I see it?”

“Sure. You can have a copy, if you want one.”

“I'd like that,” Jules says.

She gives him the book, and he gets her to write her name in it. She writes
Morag Gunn
. It seems strange to write that surname, after so long. But it never occurs to her to add
Skelton
.

Brooke is late. Morag and Jules have another scotch. She reaches her hand across the table and puts it very lightly on his hand. He does not move. He neither withdraws nor responds. She does not know, herself, why she has done this. She is not making a play. She wants only to touch him, someone from a long long way back, someone related to her in ways she cannot define and feels no need of defining.

“I'm glad to see you, Skinner. Sometimes it's–I don't know. I hate this city.”

“Yeh. It's not much. You're not very happy, are you, Morag?”

“No. Not very.”

“Care to say?”

“Yes. But I don't think I can. Well, never mind that. Prin died last summer. I was back then.”

“That must've been only a few months after I was back. I saw Christie, and he said his wife wasn't too good. I only stayed long enough to get Lazarus put under the ground.”

“What was–what did he die of?”

Jules doesn't reply for a while. Then he withdraws his hand and picks up his glass, holds it up.

“This, partly, I guess,” he says. “The doc said it was pneumonia. My dad was alone down there, the past few years. I don't guess he cared much. It was all the same to him, whether he died or didn't die. He had a lotta troubles in his life.”