The Diviners (42 page)

“This is my daughter. Pique, this is–an old friend of mine, Brooke Skelton. And–Mrs. Skelton.”

Pique says a desultory
Hi
and returns to the pink house with purple chimney which she is creating.

“Do you like it here, Morag? You're getting along all right?”

Brooke is, she sees, genuinely concerned, whatever other motives he may have had.

“Fine,” she says quickly. “Fan's not really a landlady. More a friend. She's in kind of bad shape right now. Her snake's just died.”

Good heavens–why babble on about that?

“
Snake?
” Anne says.

Morag explains. Brooke smiles, but somewhat forcedly. They stay barely fifteen minutes and refuse a drink. Brooke does not say whether or not he has read the novel. They depart, as politely and mysteriously as they have arrived.

Why? To see if I really was all right? Or only to allow me to see his wife? I could have asked them into Fan's livingroom. I didn't have to take them upstairs. But I had to show off Pique.

They have had to hurt one another, evidently, this one last time.

Brooke, forgive me. May we forgive one another for what neither of us could help.

 

Memorybank Movie: Songs

Snapshot:
After this year, the album will not be so meticulously tended. But now the colour prints are still pasted in, and the place and Pique's age written in white ink on the black page.
Pique, 5. Begonia Road.
Pique is a round-faced sturdy child, her pink apron-dress somewhat incongruously frilled at the shoulders. Pique, like Morag, is scarcely the frilly type, but at this stage she favours frills and Morag is afraid of inflicting psychic damage by discouraging this trait, out of which she will no doubt grow. Morag (age thirty-four, but this is not written down in white ink) sits beside Pique on the front steps, wearing a green summer dress. They are both smiling hesitantly at the person behind the camera, who has just refused to have his own picture taken.

 

Morag hears the doorbell, and goes out into the upstairs hall to listen.

“Does Morag Gunn still live here?” the man enquires.

“What's it to you?” Fan is growing more suspicious,
paranoid almost, and now opens the front door on the chain, initially, to see.

The man's soft husky voice changes, rasps.

“Listen, lady, I asked you a simple question, there. Is it yes or no?”

“Oh,” Fan says suddenly. “You must be–”

“Yeh,” Jules says. “I am.”

Morag runs down the stairs, and then stops, all at once uncertain. He is standing in the front hall. Fan, eyes watchful, stands in the doorway of her livingroom. All three are held for an instant in suspended animation, waiting.

Jules has aged in five (no, nearly six) years. He must be thirty-seven now. His hair is as black as ever, a little longer than before, and he wears it combed back, like a mane. His body doesn't look any different–still only the beginning of a belly above the wide lowslung leather belt. He wears jeans and a brown shirt open at the neck, the sleeves rolled up. It is his face which looks now more like the face of Lazarus, the narrowed eyes seeming more sunken than before, the bones more obvious, the lines in the skin etched deeper.

What is he thinking of her, of how she looks?

“Aren't you even going to say hello?” he says.

Morag goes to him then, but still with uncertainty, not doing what she wants to do, which is to hold him tightly. What if he does not want her to hold him? When she touches him, however, and catches the warm dust and salt sweat smell of his skin, she forgets to wonder what he is thinking of her. They hold one another with strength, not kissing, just holding together, but Morag can feel his sex stiffening inside his jeans, and her own sex responding.

“I take it,” Fan says, disappearing into her livingroom, “that you
do
know this guy, then.”

Unclinch, and they both laugh.

“She's upstairs?” Jules asks.

“Pique? Yes.”

“That's what you call her?”

“Yes. Skinner, I couldn't call her, every day, by the–”

“Okay, okay,” he says quickly. “You don't need to go into it. What'd you say of me, to her?”

What indeed? Many things, beginning when Pique first learned language.

“Oh hell,” Morag says, “it'll probably sound like shit to you. I told her you had to be away because you had to sing songs for lots of people–a person has to put things kind of simply for a little kid–and maybe someday you'd sing them for her. I guess I've told her a few lies, like saying you'd written and asked after her. Maybe I'd have done better just to say it was my idea to have her born, mine only–”

Jules reaches out and takes her right wrist in his hand.

“Sure, Morag,” he says. “She's yours, all right. But she's mine too, eh?”

They're mine, them, there.
Lazarus at the fire. Lazarus, snarling his pain, a stranger in the place where he lived his whole life. Lazarus, dead at fifty-one. Will Morag tell Pique all she knows of Lazarus, or of Christie, for that matter? How will the tales change in the telling?

“Yes. She's yours, too. Come on up.”

Pique, Morag now sees, is stationed quietly in the upstairs hall, listening, peering through the stair railing. Pique's eyes are very wide and serious, and it is impossible to tell what she is thinking. She looks straight at Jules.

“I know who you are,” she says.

“Sure,” Jules says, looking at her carefully, but not approaching too closely. “Of course. Hi.”

He walks in and sits down at the table.

“God, I'm beat. Got a drink, Morag?”

“A little rye. Some beer.”

“Let's try the rye first, eh?”

He is not ignoring Pique, but neither is he forcing her to recognize him, or to talk.

“I got a picture of you,” he says finally to Pique.

“Of me? How come? Where is it? Can I see it?”

“Sure. It's right here.”

He pulls out his wallet and shows her the snapshot of herself, aged two months.

“Hey, I know that one,” Pique says. “It's in our book.”

“It's got your name on it,” Jules says, grinning.

He turns it over. On the back he has written
Piquette Gunn Tonnerre
. In that order.

“Are you really–you know?” Pique asks.

“Yeh. Want me to say it for you? Your dad. Yeh, I am.”

Pique is silent for a while, but remains beside him.

“How long will you be in Vancouver?” Morag asks.

“Hard to say. Coupla months, maybe.”

“Want to stay here?”

“Sure.” Then he laughs. “You got room for me?”

“Yes. I've got room for you.”

Pique says very little more that evening. This new presence is obviously going to take some getting used to. And what, then, when he goes away, as he will? Time enough to think of that then. When Pique goes to bed, she says goodnight to Jules, but from a distance. She does not call him by any name.

“Why're you here, Jules?” Morag asks.

Jules opens another beer. He does not look at her.

“My sister Val. She's sick.”

“I never knew she was living here. What's the matter with her?”

“She's–how the hell should I know what's the matter with her? She's just sick.”

“Is she in hospital?”

“Not yet. I'm trying to get her to go.”

“Why won't she?”

“Because she's a crazy woman, is why. She don't want no charity, that's what she says. Charity, my asshole. She's crazy. Let's talk about something else, eh?”

“Is there–I mean, could I help in any way?”

Jules puts his hand under her chin and looks at her, only his mouth smiling, his eyes hard.

“No, lady, you could not help in any way.”

“You never let me forget it, do you?”

“No. I never let you forget it.”

“Where's the rest of your family, now?”

“Jacques moved up to Galloping Mountain awhile back. He's some guy. He's not like me. Nor like Lazarus, neither.”

“There were two younger boys.”

“Yeh. My youngest brother, Paul, he was drowned. He was working up north as a guide. His canoe overturned at some rapids. At least, that was the story. He just disappeared. Body never found. The tourists, coupla American guys, they got back all right after a few days in the bush, and reported it to the Mounties. Jacques tried to get an enquiry, but he never got to first base with it. They took the tourists' word for it. Paul was the best hand with a canoe I ever saw. They said he'd been out alone in it one evening. We won't ever know.”

“What–what do
you
think happened?”

“I don't know,” Jules says slowly. “But I'm pretty damn
sure it wasn't what they said happened. So there's only me and Jacques, now. Not many, eh?”

“And Valentine.”

“Oh yeh. Her. Sure. For the time being.”

“She's really that sick, then?”

“No. Not yet. Let's just say she's not gonna find out how it feels to be an old woman. You know something, Morag? After I wasn't killed there, at Dieppe, I had this crazy idea, see? I thought nothing could kill me. I could do any damn thing, and nothing could kill me. I didn't think I'd live forever, or like that. Just–nothing could kill me before my time.”

“It's a nice thought. Maybe it's even true.”

“It's a nice thought. But no, it isn't true. I'm not even sure it's that nice a thought. Anyway, about Jacques. He's got a small farm–the land's no hell, but he seems to like it up there. It wouldn't suit me, but it suits him. Maybe he's right. Maybe it's not too late for him and his. He doesn't waste his time in brawls, like Lazarus used to, and I've had my share of that, too, I guess. He never went berserk when Paul got drowned, or whatever happened to him. I never did, neither, although I guess I did, some. Val went nuts. She was the one who looked after Paul the most, when he was a little kid.”

“When did it happen, Jules?”

“Two months ago. Know how old Paul was? He was twenty-five.”

What to say? There is nothing that can be said. Is this one reason Jules has wanted to see Pique? Morag cannot touch him right now, or say anything that might reach him.

“What do you hear from Christie, Morag?” he asks finally.

“He's–he's seventy now. He still lives in the old house.”

“You oughta go back,” Jules says offhandedly. “You oughta go back and housekeep for him, there. It's a hell of a
town, but this city's no place for the kid, once she's older. It's a killer, and I mean it.”

Morag's anger is directed against–whom?

“Listen, Jules, just don't tell me what to do, eh? It's the one thing I can't stand. I can't go back. I cannot go back.”

Jules takes her hand.

“Yeh, I guess you can't. Okay. C'mon, Morag. We've finished the beer. Let's go to bed.”

We've finished the beer, so we may as well go to bed, seeing as there's nothing better to do–is that what he means? But when they are in bed, his sex rises quickly and the tiredness falls away from him. They make love urgently, both equal to each other's body in this urgent meeting and grappling, this brief death of consciousness, this conscious defiance of death. Only at the final moment does Morag cry out, and he stops her cry with his mouth. They are left drenched with sweat in the summer night, their bodies slippery as spawning fish together.

“Let's sleep now,” Jules says, “and after a while we'll wake up and fuck some more, eh?”

In an hour or so, Morag wakens, and puts her head between his legs, sweeping her hair across his thighs. She takes his limp cock very gently in her mouth and caresses it with her tongue, and it lengthens and grows hard before he is even awake. Then he wakens and says
deeper
. After a while, she disentangles and he raises her until she is looking into his face in the grey-light of the room.

“Ride my stallion, Morag.”

So she mounts him. He holds her shoulders and her long hair, penetrating up into her until she knows he has reached whatever core of being she has. This time it is he
who cries out. Afterwards, they do not speak, but they go to sleep this time in each other's arms and remain so until the morning comes.

 

Jules goes out most days and stays away until dinnertime. Morag does not ask him where he has been, and he does not say. He tells her one day that Val is in hospital. Two weeks later, he says Val has left hospital. Cured? Discharged herself without cure? He doesn't say. Perhaps he would even in some ways like to talk to Morag about it, if he felt there was a way he could do so without betraying Val, but he clearly does not. Occasionally he comes back shambling drunk, but always very late at night when Pique is asleep, and the next day he sleeps late and is irritable. Usually, however, when the depressions hit him, he merely retreats into silence. Sometimes he sits for an entire evening with Morag, after Pique has gone to bed, and does not speak at all. Sometimes he turns to her in his half-sleep, and holds onto her, shaking in every nerve. But the next morning he does not remember.

He is not morose with Pique, nor does he ever get angry at her, even though (once she grows accustomed to him, which takes a surprisingly short time, at least on the surface) she often pesters him with questions or with her witty converse, hoping to impress him. He permits himself to be impressed, then makes fun of her, but gently, so that she laughs.

“So you're not gonna call me Dad, eh?” he says to her one evening.

“Do you want me to?” she asks.

“Naw–I don't give a shit, really.”

“Then I won't.”

“What if I'm kidding you, there? What if I want you to?”

“Then I will.”

“Okay, so I do, then.”