Chapter One

ANGLICAN COWBOYS
‘Brass holds well in the hand
And less coveted,
It makes a good lend.
Its weight accounted
And quality noted,
Brass returns with a smile.’

SATURDAY

The morning after the hanging party Paul Magarry quit his guard job. He quit before Elizabeth Preston, far too prominent a Member of the Board of the Art Gallery of Ontario, could take aim at him cowering behind a plaster Moore. He didn’t doubt she’d plow Pissarro’s orchard to be rid of him. The hanging hadn’t been a gallery do, but rather Elizabeth’s own drinks for three hundred reception to honour her choice of Katherine Bailey’s painting for the newly refurbished grand foyer of the Imperial Trust. The bank paid, Elizabeth’s George was Chair.

Paul held onto the toilet bowl and understood that he ought not to have had cocktails before the reception, that he ought not to have put his face into another pail once he had arrived. He wasn’t above admitting irresponsibility, he could look a twelve-step program in the eye and believe that loved ones could get hurt, that having cocktails wasn’t always fun, that it might grieve God on a grey day, but he didn’t seriously think it was his fault that a gathering of frocks and pin-stripes had turned into a free-for-all.

I didn’t invite anybody. It was Katherine’s picture, it was Elizabeth’s party. Sorry, not my table. It was her own sister invited the gypsies. I may have said a few things, but it was Katherine’s mother who started bawling, and her grandmother who thought of the cheeseknife. Big deal, I spoke out of turn, but it was old George who went missing with the gypsies, and it was Katherine’s silly tit of an agent who got pissed and fell on the floor and it was her painting that fell on the floor and it was her husband who invited me, but I didn’t actually do anything!

Paul knew remorse for what it could be, a day of tremors and fasting, instead he released the toilet bowl, phoned the duty office and quit. He brushed his teeth and took his roommate out to breakfast.

“Why not quit, Ter? I hate it. Don’t touch the ART! And now the Bitch Queen of Culture is going to do pesto with my nuts. It’s time to go, Ter, opportunity puts boots to the door, just one of those confluence things, a trip to the moon on the wings of a snow white dove, gone while the good are going. Besides, come the revolution, it’s gonna be ‘Up against the wall, Art Guard!’, so why not quit with dignity?”

“You’re still drunk. Aren’t you going to eat?”

“Not after driving the porcelain bus for an hour, I’m not. I’m healed! I am too cleansed to eat, just coffee, lots of coffee. You eat, though, whatever you want, eggs benedict, eggs florentine, eggs tempera, eggs-pressionism, you eat.” Paul waved two fingers at a Toni-permed waitress carrying a loaded Silex and a fistful of creamers.

“Enough, Ter, I’ve had enough of this fucking blister-pack culture. No wonder I can’t paint anymore. Why should I bust a brush just so some asshole critic can flog his remedial reading skills and tell the world he’s seen it all before? When are people going to stop believing manic-depressives? This town wants a cutural Disneyland and they’re gonna get what they want, and us prop pixies had better just be grateful we’re let to decorate the floats. Yessuh! Come on up to Ethnic World! Safe, clean fun for the entire family. Liquor available to well-behaved singles, double occupancy. It’s truly the big-time big-top. At last, a city for world-class assholes!”

“You need a change, Paul. And I need a great big bloody mary.”

“Whatever you want, Terence, whatever you want. I’m paying for advice here. You want champagne cocktails? Let’s have champagne cocktails. I’m free, I can go home again!”

“This is not professional, this is not therapy__ You have no job, you can’t afford champagne cocktails. D’you mean home to Mother? You’re sick, Paul. That’s professional. Don’t you know your Tom Wolfe? Let alone your Freud.”

“Christ! It does mean Mother, doesn’t it? How about just the coffee and an order of toast?”

“That’s good, you’re joining hands with reality.” Terry ripped the foil from a creamer, “Your hair’s kind of tight today, Edna. We’ll have large bloody marys, please.” He rolled his eyes from the waitress back to Paul, “On me. This means I’m left alone, stuck with the apartment, an empty room.”

“It’s yours, you can afford it. Turn it into a den.”

“Do I look like a bear?”

“Well, you could stand to lose a couple… Ouch! Ah, come on, Ter, it won’t take five minutes to find somebody who’ll jump for it, this town’s so tight. What about that pup you’ve been dragging around the bars?”

“Never! I am not attracted to morning mouth and someone else’s soiled shorts, thank you very much. You keep your shorts in your room, that’s different. But a lover? I want dates. I want purity. I want clean underwear and party manners. I used to be anal retentive, now I’m scared shitless. Sex is so unlikely anymore, I might as well give it up and go straight.”

“Straight people have sex, Ter.”

“I never did.” Thick tumblers of red juice and shrubbery were thumped onto the table. Terry glanced from the waitress to the bar counter and back to his watch, “They keep it in a pail. Could we have poachies with wheat toast under and homefries without any onion in? Thanks, Edna. Hot, if possible.”

“You’re a vanishing breed, Ter, the heritage queer, going the way of the red neckerchief and matching stemware.”

“We’re all on the endangered list, Polliwog, not just the ruby-shoed gerbil, all of us. Fucking pandas don’t have to wear rubber to get laid. First they took disco and then they took sex, we’ve been assimilated and we didn’t even get to go to those dreadful schools.”

“Who’s we, Kemosabe? Who’re they, for that matter?”

“Oh, don’t be a smart-alec!”

“You’re my mother in drag, aren’t you?”

“What did I just say? Nobody likes a smart-alec, Paul.”

“You are a deep one, Ter. You are deeply disturbed.”

“You’re the one who’s disturbed. You and your unappreciated creativity complex. Please don’t lick your celery.”

“If you’d slip into a scuzzy pink housecoat and pucker your lips, like this, I wouldn’t have to take the bus.”

“Don’t be silly. You really are going. Oh, dear. They’ll probably have to shoot you, protect the species. Well, put all your knicknacks down in the locker, there’re some clean boxes to pack… Oh, never mind, you’d just throw things in anyhow. I’ll do it, and then they’ll be decent when you come back, or whatever. Maybe you’ll find yourself a nice forest ranger to settle down with and then you can send for your things and do a really smart ‘Song of the Loon’ sort of cabin treatment. Do you really have to take a bus?”

“No other way without a car.”

“I suppose it’s a bit far for a taxi. Poor Paul, public transit after thirty. You’re not a success, are you?”

Elizabeth Preston decided the sheet was definitely grey. It hung in a fold down over George’s shoulder and against the fine silver white of his hair__ he still had a lovely head of hair, though he could have gone quite bald by now, which was acceptable in a banker, but George had instead achieved a thistledown perhaps more suited to a man of the cloth, purple cloth, she thought would be nice__ against the white of his hair, the sheet was dull and lifeless. She would have to speak to Missus Quaid, obviously something was being neglected, either bleach in the washing, or the discreet sun-drying on the line hidden in the shrubbery which Elizabeth insisted on despite the housekeeper’s objection to lugging wet sheets ‘half the way to Moscow’ as she told Mister Quaid. Or could it be these weren’t her own sheets, but some inferior count of unnatural threads, switched by gypsies? Elizabeth tried not to squirm, the sheet didn’t look old, it just wasn’t white. “D’ you think maybe Missus Quaid’s got past it, George?”

George grunted his exasperation, considered the alternatives of ignoring his wife or screwing her brains out the top of her head, knew he couldn’t ignore her, she’d just repeat herself on a higher note, and felt a distinct wilting that left him no option at all. What was he doing with an erection at his age anyway? He’d probably just needed to take a leak. His wife was plucking at the bed sheet falling from his shoulder. He grunted again and waited for the blood to rise above his belly.

Probably, he should be worrying about her instead of trying to screw her. After all, her destruction of Katherine Bailey’s painting in the presence of a few hundred patrons of art and of finance was likely going to put an end to her career as Lady Bountiful. The embarrassment was nothing that the Imperial Trust’s public relations people couldn’t handle, though they’d have to arrange for some expensive flummery from a couple of senior critics__ reading of the event, the public could be given to understand that an important performance piece discussing the integrity of the real and the surreal imagery of stone had climaxed in a dramatic involvement of audience and art__ something like that. But embarassment was the least of the problem, she had reached beyond her usual role of arrogant busybody, reached over a balconey rail to bomb the crowd, and there was no telling what she might do next. She was becoming dangerous, an actual physical threat to life and limb.

“It’s this sheet, George. I’m thinking she’s not up to pulling her weight around here anymore.”

The point about Elizabeth was that he’d married her for her instincts and, despite her sometimes ravenous nature and her always startling capability for casual offence, she’d never before been a worry to him, managing her own insecurities, when she had any, with the sureness of a shark. He neither could, nor wanted to, control her. Indeed, what possible use could he be, he who every day felt his own grip weaken in the clasp of indifferent hands that soon enough wouldn’t even bother to wave. The world seemed no longer designed for his opinion, it didn’t care what he thought of the year’s new Beaujolais, about the state of anarchy among suit jacket lapels, no one tried to seduce him to Jamaica. Of course, his approval might be sought for a merging of vintners, a shearing of wool futures, and anyway the bank had a pink house in Bermuda whenever he needed it, but it wasn’t the same. And it didn’t matter that he thought wine a weak drink in the first place, or that he invariably wore notched lapels, or that he thought the act of visiting Jamaica in this day and age must be a bit like slumming into the Harlem clubs once was. Nobody cared what he thought about the frivolous things and that made him feel unwanted.

Supporting his own weight on his elbows wasn’t the problem, it was what to do with his knees that he found increasingly complicated as the years improved, once in place they tended to lock and fall off to sleep. He needed to collect enough strength in his shoulders to make his next move graceful. His feet, of course, might as well be dead, what with all the blood pooled at his groin, and he’d have to clutch the corner of sheet where it fell from his shoulder in order to roll off, taking his knees with him without uncovering Elizabeth.

“That corner, yes, look at how grey it is. What are you doing? Oh.” It just happened that way with her. Elizabeth had noticed quite some time ago that she had__ at some point on her way to sixty, so actually not that long ago__ she had noticed that her mind just never seemed to lie still with her body anymore. Perhaps it never had and her youthful lovemaking had been simply a lack of responsibility, fewer important thoughts to be busy with. She did feel an obligation to George, though, a duty, and that made her uncomfortable because she knew that a woman of Germaine Greer’s generation__ wonderfully preserved for a horsey woman__ shouldn’t feel guilt so much as annoyance. Annoyance with George for fumbling about, pawing at her like an old spaniel, while she was trying to do her best to deal with this… well, disaster, really. Her sheets weren’t white, her housekeeper was losing it. My god, I don’t know where the vacuum’s kept! And all George can think of… !

It’s not guilt, it’s anger. That’s better, anger’s the thing, the appropriate response to this… well, abuse, really. He has nothing on his mind but the satisfaction of his lust. Rather pathetic when you come to consider it. Forcing himself into the busy office of your mind, trying, in a manner of speaking, to have you over the desk of your responsibilities. It’s too much! Anger’s correct, morally and politically, “It’s morning for godsake, George. Grow up.” He spanked her then. He’d had enough, he threw off the bedcovers, rolled her on her hip and spanked her ass. And because his hand was a banker’s hand, the spanking cracked like whip snaps.

At first he felt very modern and liberated, rather like a letter to a magazine editor, but then he felt like a very tired old school-master who’d lost control of the lesson, like Mister Chips the day the first accusation turns up on the police blotter. It was a feeling he’d come to fear, for fear made him tired and he was tired of feeling afraid. He wanted to feel young and know that everything he did was the right way to do it. He seldom felt justified anymore, he acted and reacted and doubted his right.

It simply had not occurred to him that Elizabeth had never been spanked before, but when he saw the shock in her eyes, he knew. Her mother had died giving her birth and her father had stayed down at the barn, so of course by the time she was old enough to cause trouble, there was only her sister Maude to pull rank and Maude had never been a spanker, she was the kind who moved the outhouse when you were in it. He had done a terrible thing, but he didn’t feel bad so much as stupid. Had he lost control, or taken control? He didn’t know, he couldn’t tell. To punish? To prevent? Oh, god, don’t let me start justifying myself to her when I don’t know what I’ve done. You know what you’ve done. But I don’t know why. She deserved it. No! That’s what I mean, you’ll make it her fault, just leave it. Go away and think about it. I can’t. You’d better.

Absorbing the first directly applied physical reproof she had ever endured, the slapping of her husband’s hand on her backside, Elizabeth desperately ignored the melted pleasure of her loins, a startling, unknown pain, and tried on every other emotional response she could muster, including one or two coloured in blood and brains that had previously hung in the back of her mind. She considered Barbra Stanwick and pearl-handled revolvers and pictures of Nancy Reagan flipped through her mind. Silver-plated, I suppose, just a little one, nice tucked under a pillow. If I ever find out what that senile old bitch Quaid’s done with my good sheets…! Her eyes grew round and stayed open for a good while before she noticed and oiled them shut with squirts of eyewash.

George phoned from the bathroom, asking for the car and Clarence, the driver, to be readied for a run up to the lake, then started to dial his secretary, Darla Sampson, at her home number. She’ll be out with her team in this weather. I don’t want her machine. He hung up and turned on the shower. She needs to know what you’re doing. She won’t ask any questions. Thing is__ He bowed his head beneath the spray__ I wish she would, she’d understand this better than I do. I’ll tell Clarence to give her a call when he gets back. Give me a day to think. She’ll cover, always phone if she has to.

Missus Quaid knew Clarence, the ex-piper who chauffeured the big car on the infrequent occasions Mister Preston requested it. Her own Quaid, after all, quartermaster to the Highlanders, had recommended Clarence back when he’d lost his lip to a minor stroke. But that didn’t make her pleased to see him when he appeared in the kitchen doorway to say he had the car out front and ask was ‘The Big Guy’ ready to roll? Normally, Missus Quaid was unusually sensitive to atmospheric pressures, sensing storms before they happened, but she’d been buried in the back pantry all morning rooting through a clatter of pans in pursuit of a sweet rancid smell of old fat and had missed the frost on the second floor. Mister George always informed her of his comings and goings and she was quite sure Clarence was making a damned fool mistake, that his stroke had blown more than a lip, so that when she slipped up the backstairs prepared to roll her eyes with scorn, and found George in his dressing room packing a bag, her announcement, was startled into a question, “Car?”

“Yes. Thank you, Missus Quaid,” George finished folding a shirt into his bag and turned to her, “I’m off up to the lake. Unexpected, I realize, but… diplomatic, I think. Missus Preston’s suffered something of a shock. Last night’s reception wasn’t exactly a happy affair and I’m afraid I’ve… Well, I’ve not helped matters.” For the ten years of their association they had maintained a formalism that protected each other’s secrets, “My respects to your husband, and would he agree to your staying-over for the night? Just tonight, I should think. I’m sure she’ll recover soon enough. She’ll very likely want a tray in her room later. She’s apt to be a bit cross, Missus Quaid, so be vigilant. I doubt I’ll be more than a day or two, but I’ll have Darla call when she has my schedule sorted. You’re in charge, as always, so until we meet again, keep the home fires etcetera.” He looked at her with affection and nodded once, “Thank you, Missus Quaid, I rely on your good sense. Tell Clarence I’ll be down shortly.”

He approached his wife rigid at her dressing table and bent his lips to the back of her head, “I’m going up to the lake, Elizabeth, give us both some time to think. Take care of yourself.” The car was out front as he came down and George thought that Clarence looked a trifle too understanding as he held the door.

Katya Saarila woke at first light fully clothed, cheek down on the diningroom table, a rye crisp clutched in her left hand, her right elbow in a red rind of soft cheese. She then made it naked into her feather bed without surfacing and so managed to sleep soundly till noon, when she woke again, enormously hungry and quite willing to imagine how the cheese had gotten eaten. Goblins. Definitely Little People of some sort, without good homes of their own, get bored, come poking about in respectable people’s houses, getting into all my things, leaving drawers open, throwing stuff all over everywhere, no wonder I can’t keep this place tidy. And they’re into the fridge and they’ll have eaten everything. This has to stop. I’ll set traps. I will. I’ll set leg-hold traps for bad fairies. And you’ll be hung in the town square for Nice Thinking violations. Yes, yes, leg-hold traps with… with poison! Yes, with poisoned bait and… and sharp bamboo stakes and beds of nails and beds of hot coals and… and we’ll get the truth, yes, at long last the truth… Yes, I distinctly remember a bad fairy. Bena got out of the cab at her place, I remember that__

Bena had gotten out of the cab at her place, empress of all she surveyed, risen to new majesty in the glow of the Imperial Trust’s disastrous reception, revealed at last as the true consort, the other woman reduced to tatters. Bena unmistakably had her world by the orb and sceptre. She didn’t sleep.

__I remember that, though I don’t know… Did I pay for the taxi, then? Must’ve. I had money in my hand… Yes, from Maude, she shoved it at me at her house, yes, and then to Bena’s, no forced cash there, not from the gypsy on horseback, the Hungarian hors d’oeuvre, and then to here… Yes? Must have. Maude was on about making sure the driver knew we had money so we wouldn’t be put out in the street just because we’re a thin and dying race. Yes, yes, and the cabby said, “Not so thin, lady,” and Maude demanded to know who his mother was, and it turned out she’s Irish, an O’ something or other, and Maude said not to tip him with her money, he’d only spend it on whisky, and she yelled, “Bog Irish!” when she slammed the car door. I remember that.

Bena had had no need for sleep, or for plum brandy, and so had made herself black tea in a thick tall glass. Reaching into her hair, she’d unpinned the golden filigree crown, left her hair to droop stiff brass wings and slipped the gilded circlet up the waist of her tea glass. She’d carried it from room to room, slowly sipping, as she furnished, discarded, refurbished each room with tables, sofas, men and chandeliers, with pictures, chairs and fire screens, with plate and cavaliers. She’d embroidered the air with tossing fingers and draped and lit and coloured it. A glissade on parquet declared a ballroom, she waved a vast piano before the windows and a line of braided, booted, brave young men stepped forward to her hand. She drank tea.

Elizabeth had known about spanking. How could she not? Wasn’t it an element of the human condition, like shelter, the survival instinct, shoes? Something of the kind. People did it from necessity, to correct misbehaviour. Possibly original sin, she believed, if the Catholics weren’t complete fools. Children, so she understood, had read, seen the film, were quite accustomed to corporal punishment, accepted it and sat up to the table afterward.

She knew, after all she wasn’t stupid, she knew all about spanking, although she personally had managed to avoid the experience. She knew there was controversy amongst those who practiced spanking. Apparently, some people liked it. She was fairly certain she didn’t know any of them, none of her crowd wore leather, except gloves, and she believed – shoes too, of course – that the whole – bags – spanking thing was largely a problem among people who couldn’t manage very well. Belts.

Which meant that she had fallen amongst them! She assumed a mental crouch, scanned the room for her purse, located it in the striped silk lap of a slipper chair, and gave it a mental pat. Her furnishings began to look suspicious, the green and gold striped silk looked shifty. If Quaid’s cheating on the bed sheets, how safe’s the Spode?

I’m a bad manager. My sheets are grey. I’ve been spanked. Just like they said would happen, but it wasn’t Mr. Clean’s big sea-calloused hand, it was George’s glass-smooth banker’s hand, and I… Her mind snapped shut. She’d been spanked for being a bad manager, she could see it now, the sheets were proof, they might fit, but they were grey. Indeed, she was fallen amongst the bad managers.

She needed Maude. Maude would say, Lizzie, it’s okay. No, she won’t, she’ll be mean, she’ll say it serves me right, but she won’t say it that way, she’ll say, “It’s the chute, Bessie, downhill from here!” That’s what she’ll say, I know her. It’s her fault I’ve never been spanked before. I had the right to know. She’s deprived me of my rights! Abuse! She’s abused me. I knew it, I knew it. They say a third of women, and I’m certainly not one they’d have missed, a third of us have been abused. And by family members! My own sister didn’t spank me and look what it’s done to my life. I need Maudie, I’m a bad manager.

Old as she was and without responsibility, Tillie Sutherland found that she seldom slept past sun-up anymore. She could lie abed if she liked for hours, wondering why, trying to worry, drifting in and out of the dreams of people she’d never met, escaping dull care in vivid memory, hiding under the blanket, but then the extra lie-about would mean finally rising stiff as well as sore, so it was best that she poked the dry sticks of her body from under the eiderdown, to try a moment for balance, to lurch to the chair, to lift the tartan flannel and fling it, one dry wrist popping, over the blade of her back. She needed to be in her kitchen before her daughter arose.

Bea was awake, in fact, she’d say she hadn’t slept at all, would insist she was only resting her eyes, despite the snoring. But she really was awake and horrified. It had come to the worst at last. Disaster, destruction, collapse had finally happened, complete and utter, unretractable misbehaviour and humiliation, in a bank, in front of people. Branding couldn’t be worse. Starting to bleed between Sunday hymns couldn’t… Bea’s eyelids ached over a fury of tears. She needed coffee, but her mother had passed down the hall to the backstairs and it was too late.

Tillie poured herself the first cup, strong and clear, coffee the way Bea could never learn to make it, from fresh cold water and heaping spoons. The way Stewart liked it, the way he told her to make it even when it was scarce or dear, better one proper cup than a half-dozen weak ones.

Bea felt her entire self, body and soul, cut to the quick. She twisted beneath the bedclothes, in mortification, she thought, of the flesh and of the spirit. Well, maybe not the flesh, really, other than repeated cold sweats she didn’t suffer so much on the surface, no gridirons or lashings, but surely the crushing of her mind and heart, thought and feeling pounding each other to a jelly, more than balanced the absence of rack and coals. Besides, she argued, her inability to take any breath deeper than an ashtray, mouth-breathing she thought it was, could be considered mortification of the flesh. Yes, and it could be my heart, too, I think it’s fast. So, it’s total, body and soul, complete mortification. And Bea thrust the blankets from her chin and let the tears flow and as they ran she sucked great gulps of air.

Tillie cradled her cup to her nose for the rich black smell and up with it slipped a ripe and weedy memory of a smoking pipe and she hollered, “Get that foul damned thing out of my parlour, Stewart Sutherland!” She clattered her cup to the kitchen counter and stalked off through the hall to the front room, furious with her husband’s slyness. He wasn’t there, but the smell of his pipe was enough, “Again and again, till I’m blue in the face, get out of the house, or into the cellar with that stinking old pipe and when you’re down there take a look at the furnace, we’ll need it on soon enough, if we still have a roof over our heads after last night’s shenanigans. What with wearing that hat and bawling in a bank, Bea could have us hounded into the poorhouse for all I know what those people can get up to. She’s just not appropriate. Hats were a thing, it’s true, for a long time – who knows better than I do? Sewed net and straw and bugle beads to get you to the altar. But you’d hardly see a hat in church today and d’ you think your daughter’s even noticed? And tears! Look at her cross-eyed… Tears! It’s just a mercy she doesn’t still wet herself.”

Loud as it was, her father’s name caught Bea mid-snuffle, so that her breath stopped and her ears pricked up in time to catch ‘stinking old pipe’, her own name, and ‘poorhouse’, before she choked and gasped and coughed for air. Watching her breathing to keep her throat open, she heard nothing more, but her focus slid from the heave of her chest to imagine her mother leaning in a doorway shouting at an empty room and she thought, I’d rather be dead. I would, I really would. She’s away at it again and I can’t take it. Senile. She’s senile she’s senile she’s senile. There. I can’t take it. I won’t. I’ll die. I mean it.

Tillie stumped into the morning gloom of the parlour, snatched up an arm cover of plush emerald ferns and waved it snapping in the air before the chair. “For the sake of Heaven, man, I’ve the Institute here this afternoon, Missions and tea and we have to organize the Fowl Supper. D’ you think I want the Lettie Girls in here with their noses slappin’ after the smell of your smoke? Pair of damned terriers, yappin’ and snuffin’, breathing pastilles, stuffin’ wet hankies in their sweater sleeves. And they’ll bring their godforsaken pickles!”

The Lettie Girls, although dressed identically, were not twins. Velma was seventy, Vera sixty-two. A known fact, though not visibly apparent, for they appeared equally lined, sallowed and starched with age. Old-fashioned without calculation, their gardening frocks and hats and gloves and shoes, their cloth coats, fur collars, round felt brims, summer lisle and winter woolen stockings were what they had always liked and still managed to preserve.

Their mother Annie’s father had surveyed the county, built a house with the money and died of influenza, his wife following within the week. The house was high-pitched Victorian provincial, gaunt yellow brick dressed in a double front of bays with a parsonage porch and trefoil gingerbread in every eave.

Albert Lettie, coveting respectability, had accepted the house from Annie as her bride-price and ever after resented the cost of upkeep. He’d been so greedy for the house, he’d not counted the cost of heating high-ceilinged parlours, of keeping the paint in trim, and when his job went with the failure of the banks, they had barely made do with a big garden and Annie working out to laundry. Summers, the girls scoured and cleaned in a fishermen’s lodge on the river and ran up two outfits to a pattern on a treadle machine.

Velma was boarding with cousins and attending the Normal School in Orillia the year Annie died. She brought her diploma home to the grade three class in Strawbridge and Albert arranged with the School Board to collect her salary himself. With a bit of a push, Vera followed in her sister’s wake, took up the grade twos and doubled Albert’s income. Quarterly, he handed them the same allowance he’d settled on Annie at marriage and retained the rest for the keep of the house. The girls went on making do with too little, wearing coats in the house and preserving every stump and stalk from the garden. Believing Albert to be the pattern of men, they stayed unwed.

Albert died the autumn Velma passed cruelly into menopause and that winter, in an orgy of heat, she uncovered the tin trunk buried in the coal bin. With Albert’s hoard of cash and their own incomes finally in hand, the girls understood that they had been fools never to question his use of their money. Pride dictated. They allowed themselves a car – Velma took lessons – which was kept with great care, and heated the house as much as they liked, but otherwise maintained their frugal public face and added quarterly to the box under the coal. ‘Mean as a Lettie’, people said, and they no longer meant Albert.

The Lettie Girls pickled. “Puckered old maids,” Tillie’d said more often than enough, watching her daughter’s lips purse, “They get sucking the alum and forget to drop it in the crock. Use so much bluestone their icicles look like blueberry popsicles. Wouldn’t know how they taste, nasty, I expect, I’m not one for abuse.”

And Bea would force a deep sigh through her nose, “Mother, you know very well what they taste like, don’t tell stories.”

“How would I?”

“Don’t be silly, I’ve seen them on your plate at any number of church…”

“Never!”

“Now that’s enough. You have, I’ve seen you. The Girls are always so good about doing the relish plates for…”

“On my plate, maybe, I’ll grant you that. On my plate, but never over the gums.”

“Mother, you are…”

“Not fool enough to pretend the Lettie Girls are normal. Lord, Bea, they dress the same, they walk the same, they talk the same… For crying out loud, the damp hankies in their sleeves match! They’ve eight years difference between them and they go walking around like a salt and pepper set, always have. Their icicles are flatulent, syrupy and blue and I haven’t bitten into a Lettie pickle since Velma was eighteen, the year Annie finally had the sense to up and die on that miserable coot, Albert, and Velma declared that she and poor Vera would carry the torch, their mother’s pickles would never die.

“But Annie’d never put a word to paper, she was close with a secret and the old miser was likely too cheap to let her have pen and ink, and Velma thought too much of herself to use Maxine Aicheson’s recipe from the Institute Cookbook, so she pretended she’d learned her pickles at her mother’s knee and to this day… Stop shuffling your feet, girl, I’m telling you this for your own good! Ever since, Velma Lettie’s pickles have been blue and her hair’s been mouse brown henna. Vera’s too, of course.”

“Oh, Mother,” Bea was ever exasperated by this point, “You don’t know it’s henna.”

“No, of course not. Their hair hasn’t changed in sixty-five years. The style hasn’t. Of course it’s henna! They matched the colour back when they first bought those scrappy fur neck-pieces they drag out of mothballs every Decoration Sunday. Mind you, I’m not saying there’s any great harm in them, the Girls, not the weasel collars, but just the same… All those years of sniffin’ chalk dust… They still substitute, you know. All the youngsters they’ve hunkered over in their siamese twin-sets, generations of hot breath and ruler abuse. It makes you think.”

“They love to take a knife to a cucumber, Stewart. In truth,” Tillie took another swipe at the air, then smoothed the cover back over the arm of the chair, “In truth, they’re man-hungry old virgins and I don’t want ‘em in here crawlin’ all over my armchairs. So get to the cellar, man.”

Bea beat her fists into the quilts and denied herself responsibility for the crashing shambles of her daughter’s career reduced to an embarrassment of ripped canvas and shattered wood heaped about their feet in the shocked echo of the Imperial Trust’s smart new foyer. And Katherine’s marriage! Like her own, a husband gone… Why? Bea denied the responsibility, but she took the entire guilt to be her own. She’d committed some monstrous sin against propriety to deserve such humiliation; some failure of well-mannered behaviour had earned punishment. A lapse of motherhood, she thought. Not strict enough with Katherine in her bringing-up, for surely such disasters resulted from an excess of self-regard, of forwardness, of rudeness.

Don’t you be bold! She ought to have been sterner. It had been hard. It was a father’s place to be stern. And I lost hers. Well, it wasn’t deliberate. Don’t be silly. No. Well, it wasn’t. He left without a fight. He left without a word, Bea. Yes. I guess he didn’t have much in the way of stern about him anyway. Face it, your own father was never the tough one either. Oh Lord, is it just me, my men who’re sweet as butter, and as soft? You should’ve had more. I think maybe now I should have. I couldn’t then, I thought I’d lose my place, I wouldn’t be nice. And I never did see another man I wanted so much. My father and my husband weren’t tough. Tillie was tough. Yes, the way I should have been with Katherine. Oh Lord, it is my fault.

With Stewart out of the chair, Tillie gave the back a couple of thumps to remove any lasting impression. Her hand noticed the chill on the nap and a sharp, quick sight of her husband in a coffin stabbed ice in her belly and fear shot anger to her tongue, “Annie hated him, you know. Hated his miserly old guts, she told me once, so much she wished him dead. A mouthful for Annie, she kept her lips bit shut.

“Albert Lettie was so cheap he’d hop to the cellar first thing out of bed to measure the gauge on the oil tank, to make sure Annie’d not sneaked the furnace on in the night. The woman wore an overcoat in her own kitchen. The man wouldn’t buy an apple, he knew every tree grew next a fence in the county. But Annie kept her tongue and did what was right for twenty years. Except she didn’t give him a boy, like she should’ve done. Like I didn’t you, Stewart. I suppose that made him meaner than he was, though he was always mean.

“You haven’t come to hate us, have you, Stewart? Bea and me? Only women to dream with? Do men need sons to dream up dynasties? It makes sense. When you’re out to the back fence with your pipe, or down by the furnace, what d’ you imagine? Strong backs and long acres and cattle penned in oak, loving cups and garlands for good breeding? How it might have been, would be, if you’d had one boy to build it with.” Tillie followed back the hall to the kitchen, retrieved her cup from the counter and took a long swallow to wet the tears dried in her throat, “Did you ever dream for Bea, Stewart? I never could. There’s never seemed an ounce of cussedness in her worth dreaming for. I imagined her married and not a worry. I guess you could say that was a dream.”

From the bottom stair, Bea watched her mother drink coffee and speak to the air. Hiding in the bedcovers had failed to protect her, the chill on her soul couldn’t be warmed by eiderdown and putting an end to the torture required her to be up and about and planning. If she was going to die, she’d need to see that Tillie and Katherine didn’t make a mess of things. So she had forced her corns into her traveling slippers, a bit of petit-point on beige, wrapped herself in her away-from-home kimono of flowered cretonne, poked her fingers through her hair, and sighing a deep breath of prayer, had slipped down the backstairs to the kitchen.

“Albert Lettie ignored his girls, because they were girls, and Annie, because he believed she’d deceived him, as if he’d had some divine right to sons. And Annie came to hate his guts, his miserly old guts, she said. Couldn’t even have the Institute to the house, they’d have to sit in their coats and he wouldn’t give her the money for a pound of tea. She longed for him to die and had to do it herself to get relief. You’d wonder if Annie dreamed husbands for those two. I doubt Velma and Vera ever imagined marriage to be a good thing.” Tillie noticed that she was staring at the cellar door for some reason and caught sight in the corner of her eye of a loud flowered gown at the foot of the stairs. She blew her breath and drained her cup.

“Mother!” Bea stepped to the kitchen floor, letting the little heel of her slipper crack on the boards, “You’re talking to yourself again.” She made for the cupboard to get herself a mug. “I wish you wouldn’t still use this old percolator,” she poured for herself, “The high heat’s dangerous, you could wander off and leave it.” She took a deep drink and the heat ran down to her bowels. “I think you should get yourself some sort of coffee machine, be a lot safer, they have ones now that shut off automatically when they’re left alone. I think…”

“You’d like to have me shut off automatically when you leave me alone, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t have to worry I’d boil dry when your back’s turned, eh.”

Bea had no time for nonsense, if she was going to give up her life, she had to sort out her mother first, “You’ve sounded pretty close to cracking the pot the past two days, Mother. Yesterday you stood in the drive and yelled at the backyard. Last night you had far too much to drink and talked like a… I don’t know, a hippie, or something – rude remarks about the fruit in your drinks, flirting with men young enough to… And old ones, too! And here this morning you’re banging around the house yelling at Dad and planning weddings for the Lettie Girls.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that.” And Tillie burst into giggles at the flashing of images that rushed through her eye; matching blue garters on dry wrinkled thighs, matching men with matching blue pickles for… “Or, maybe I would.” She tried to stop laughing and poured herself more coffee.

Bea set down her mug and folded her arms in a confusion of flowers, “Maybe we’d better think again about you giving up this house. You know the Chateau’s really lovely now the landscaping’s had the chance to fill out.”

“It could be in the middle of the bush and it’d still be a nursing home!”

“Oh, it’s not! It’s a retirement home. You have your own things, your own privacy, everything you need, just more manageable, is all.“

“Everything shoved into one room and a bath the size of a privy. A one-holer. Over my dead body, Bea.”

“Oh, don’t say things like that!” Bea tapped the wood of a cupboard door, “You are completely wrong about everything, as usual. The Chateau has quite nice little apartments with real bedrooms and their own kitchenettes and very modern bathrooms with those sensible handles and…”

“Crib rails, I’ll bet. And the doors are wide enough to get a coffin through.”

“…and really big storage cupboards and proper alarm systems and good locks on the doors…” She swept an arm at the house, “I mean, look at this place, seven, eight doors to the outside and you could break through any one of them with a wet sneeze, and more windows than you can count…”

“Eighteen, not counting the porches.”

“You’re not safe!”

“I’m not sorry, either. And I would be in that old people’s home. Worse than the poorhouse. I’d rather mend shirts and make license plates than sit around listening to that bunch up there carry on about the price of their pills and what they think they had for lunch. I’d be around the bend in no time.”

“Mother, you’ve been around the bend for the last half-hour. You hollered at Dad to get his pipe out of the house. I heard you.” Bea nibbled a lip, “And you asked him if he ever dreamed for me, since you never bothered. Ring any bells?”

Bells. Wedding bells, wedding belles… and again Tillie saw blue garters, blue veins and old yellowed flesh, a parody of ritual. Velma and Vera in satin and eyelet lace was a mockery of a girl’s one best illusion. A mockery. And Tillie saw a wedding party framed in the arch of her kitchen window and the bride was a boy and the groom was a girl and all the attendants were reversed… “Yes, oh yes, we must have a Mock Wedding!” Hands clapping with excitement, Tillie did a small jig on the kitchen floor. “We did when we were girls. They were ring-bearers, the Lettie Girls were.” She paused and took a look at her feet, “In short pants and boots, I’m sure it was them… I remember two girls.” She lifted her head at Bea, “It wasn’t you? No, it was long before you. We used to have fun then, dressing-up and play-acting. You never did that. Was it Maude and Lizzie Everett? D’ you suppose… No, it was the Girls. There must be some old snaps of that.”

Stinging with slaps, Bea’s thoughts charged her mother – Nasty! Cruel! Viperous old… Bitch! Her eyes watered with anger and the effort to not say the hard words. Her hate frightened her, she couldn’t live like this, it had to stop, “You have to stop! You’re crazy, old woman! You’re crazy!” Her heart raced with panic and closed her throat. Her mother must go into a home. And Katherine, her daughter, well… She would go her own way, and what would it matter? The air went out of Bea, her head fell with her shoulders in shame and she remembered nothing of life but disappointment.

Tillie was shocked. If Bea was at the hollering stage, they were in trouble, real trouble. If Bea was losing her grip – Tillie shuddered with a bone-cold chill – no, she must not look at the twisting black skein in the centre of her vision – Look away! she commanded herself. With a quick shake of her head and a deep sucking breath, she made herself smile at her daughter, “I expect you’re right, but I’ve no idea what to do about it. I’ve just gotten this way somehow.”

“It has to stop.” Bea’s voice was a husky whisper of tears, “It has to stop.”

Tillie knew better, “I don’t believe it does, dear.”

“Well, you have to change it.”

“Yes, but I don’t know how.”

Tillie was matter of fact and the very flatness of tone told Bea that her mother was speaking the truth, and she felt a softness gathering despite herself. “Doesn’t it bother you? Doesn’t it frighten you? It frightens me.”

Tillie considered that point for Bea’s sake, “Not really, no. I suppose I’ve become used to it. It’s friendly enough. Around here it’s company, and when I’m out, which isn’t often, you know, I’m usually with somebody who’s got a weaker grip on it than I do, so it doesn’t show.” She fluttered a hand at her daughter, “Not you, of course, I’m safe with you.” She looked sly, “I always know where I am when you’re about.” She told herself to watch it, she could lose sympathy here.

“It’s why I carry a stick, d’ you see. You worry I’m going to fall over, but there’s nothing wrong with my legs, the hips are original and they can still do a shimmy. But a stick’s a handy thing. You just fold your hands in a ladylike way,” she laid one hand across the other in the air between them, “and turn yourself into a tripod, whenever your mind steps out on you.”

“Oh, Mother!” Bea was horrified and terribly sad.

“Oooh, Daughter!” Tillie mocked despair with a flip of her hands, “It’s not that bad. Have you never noticed that people give berth to a fellow with a camera set up in even the busiest crowd? And people step round a statue, not into it. It’s the pose, maybe, or it’s the three-leggedness of the thing. A picture on an easel, now, people step aside.”

Or a three-legged dog! Bea shaded her brow with a hand and rolled her eyes for her own relief. It wasn’t possible to support pity for this vainglorious old egoist, “You think you’re a monument. You think anything and everything should be excused by your monumental vanity.” Bea’s breathing quickened. Tillie raised an eyebrow and waited. “And last night?” Bea was sarcastic and hard, “Were you a tripod last night, Mother? When you raised your precious stick and tore a hole through Katherine’s painting, what kind of monument was that? I’ll bet we looked a picture in front of that crowd!”

“Oh, for petesake! We’d have looked pretty damned foolish trapped in a heap underneath it. Could’ve broken bones, smothered, before they got it off. We’d have been brought to our knees at the very least with the weight of it. And I’d not kneel to Lizzie Everett, or Preston, or whatever she is. It was going to be the ruin of the picture anyway, when it landed on us, better to be standing for it. Katherine understands that, I don’t know why you can’t see it.”

Maude Matthew didn’t want to get up, she wanted to stay huddled under her mound of blankets and think about convenient death. Where, for instance, could she get the cyanide capsule to crush with her teeth some morning when she woke, some morning not much worse than this. Or where could she get herself hooked to the intravenous opium drip she’d heard so much about, that allowed the patient to push the button herself and keep on pushing. Or what about those tales of aboriginal types just lying down and dying when they felt like it. It wasn’t snowdrops on kittens, or whatever, but it’s what she wanted to think about.

Whether or not despair would allow her to pick her teeth out of their cup, rinse them, and mouth them into place to break the cyanide ampoule, that needed to be mulled over. Could her gums break glass? Would it be glass? Glass in your dentures? I don’t think so, how awful. Would you notice? Would you care? If she just lay still and concentrated on not being, or didn’t concentrate on being, whichever way the aborigines went about it… Now where would you look that up? Under religion? Or philosophy. Maybe anthropology, or sociology, there’s that woman… Kubla and Ollie, or something like that, she does books about dying. You’ve never read her. I know, but I could, she’s in the shops. You’d think there’d be something in the encyclopedia. Psychology, pathology… Hey, I bet there’s something in Toynbee, there’s always something in Toynbee, bottom shelf in the bathroom, I’ll go… Put that blanket down! You’re not getting out of this bed alive.

She yanked the top blanket, the red Hudson Bay, tight across her nose to slow her breathing. Oh Lord, I’ll never make it! I’ll never manage to keep my mind off a cigarette and a cup of coffee. I’ll go into withdrawal and convulsions and then I’ll go crazy and get up and face the kettle and find my smokes and then I’ll go on living. Damned addictions! She coughed, felt the weight of blankets on her chest and rolled onto her side toward the window. I suppose you have to prove you’re really in pain before you get the opium button. Like you actually have to be dying. Nice of them to be so thoughtful.

If I got my teeth in, there’d be no real reason not to have a piece of toast first, before the cyanide. Would there? Can you lie down and die on a full stomach, after a proper death-row breakfast? Sausage and ham and bacon and eggs, even a mess of greasy potatoes fried up with onions. I would if I knew I’d be dead before I blew up. There isn’t any bacon. There might be some in the freezer. No, you ate that already. No, there’s another package, a bit in a baggie, from ages ago. You ate it. No I didn’t. We’d better go see.

Feeling herself still to be smarting from the flat of George’s hand, Elizabeth skipped hose and stepped into cream satin knickers, a simply wrapped skirt of pewter wool to the shins, suede pumps, and tucked tight a dull silver poplin shirt. She searched velvet boxes for grey pearls for her ears, but feeling the heat of blood in her lobes, saw an oyster melt and replaced the studs in their case. Fingering through, she encountered her old circle pin, a thick hoop of pink Italian gold, once given to herself at Havergal for the cost of her book allowance; she had borrowed texts and was avid for chastity, making herself a club that excluded sluts.

The absence of a circle pinned to the breast was an absence of hymen, according to dogma, and Elizabeth was Abbess. High church, but not Catholic, the schoolgirls had limited themselves to anguish and would have been as severe with flagellation as they were with fornication. Birthdays were celebrated with surprise feasts and Little Womanish sentimentality, no boisterous whacks. Elizabeth had remained unspanked.

The brooch was a hollow ring, she saw that now, not the infinite circle, but the empty hole. She tried in the mirror to mock her own eyes as she slid the pin through the throat of her blouse. It wasn’t that she’d liked George’s hard hand, but her flesh had glowed with heat she hadn’t felt before. She drew on a heavy sweater-coat with dolman sleeves, warm against a chill, loose for air. Too moist for gloves, her hands hanked a square of Liberty over the closed mouth of her carpet purse, and padding down the front stair, an ear cocked to the traitorous Quaid deep in the pantry wrestling roast pans, she tweaked her keys from the hall table, slipped locks out the front door, darted back the drive and once in the garage, drove all automatic into the street.

“Katya, we will go, you and I, to visit Maude Matthew, she will give us coffee. She told me this,” Determined to brook no resistance, Bena had not bothered to telephone and now cantered a circle about Katya’s diningroom table, “That Missus George, she will be having the psychiatrist and we must help her sister to decide this.”

“You evil harpy.” Katya calmly munched fruit and cheese, buttered a rusk, “You knew who she was, you’ve been carrying on god knows how long with her husband. You dragged me along, lying through your teeth…”

“I did not speak a lie from this mouth, Katya!”

“…lying through your great, long, aristocratic beak, then, Harpy! Deliberately not telling me what was going on, deliberately setting me up – Me? – the whole damned world set up to explode just because you can’t resist… What? What is it you can’t resist, anyway? Men? Disaster? Explosions? What? And now you want to go hang your buzzard beak over the corpses!”

Bena reined herself in, fighting her blood’s desire to thrash insult, and resting her whip hand on the back of a chair, threw a hard look at her friend, “Maude Matthew offers coffee.”

“You are not getting another cup of coffee out of me, you gypsy witch, and that’s a promise.” Katya crunched into and spoke around her rusk, beyond manners in her disgust, “You have fast-talked me into making fools of ourselves for the last time, Bena. That woman might just as easily have jumped from that balcony as dropped a picture and you can get right off your horse, I will not be cowed by your princess act, either. I do not offer you coffee. It is not a lapse of hospitality. It is a lapse of interest in your existence.” Katya concentrated on loading a bite of rusk with shavings of jarlsberg, “I will not participate. I’ve quit the circus.”

Pushing a very clear picture of Katya in pigboots and a reindeer shawl from her mind, Bena chose diplomacy, withdrew the chair and arranged herself with magisterial complacency at the table, “It is true that the woman called you a bag lady. So…” She raised an anticipating hand, “… so, you cannot argue, a bag lady, she said, I heard, I am your witness. The Missus George, she saw…” Bena fought back the sight of pigboots, “…she saw my Katya, my European widow-lady friend with a house of her own dressed for a visit because she has been invited by her very good friend to look at the pictures in the Gallery of Ontario Art…”

“Art Gallery of Ontario.” Katya rolled her eyes and shaved cheese.

“Yes, and my Katya squats with her bags in the street, feeding her little apples out, the pigman’s wife! What else could that woman see? Missus George, I understand her.”

“I sat on the benches waiting for you, as I recall, and I made little piles of crabapples because nobody wants to eat them, but they’re beautiful to look at and people should pay attention. It seemed appropriate at the AGO. I wore rubberboots to bother you and who knows, it could always rain. You can’t insult me, Bena. No coffee. I’m not going to play with you.”

“She called you a D.P.!”

“She did not.”

“She should have.”

Katya swallowed. She laid the butter knife beside the cheese and studied the figure enthroned across the table. If the old dead monarchies had thrown a garden party for the families, the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs down to the Viennese cousins for a picnic spread and a spin of crown and anchor, then this bizarre figure, from brass-coloured top-knot to blood-coloured toes, this Imperial Hungarian gypsy, this vision off a tarot card, wise-woman, witch, fruitcake, expression of fate, this misplaced shard of a culture so long in the saddle that the high, shy viciousness of horses coursed in her nature, then this mad, bedizened, jewel-bedecked kewpie would be the prize for the sack race.

Katya sighed, nodded, and pushed from the table, “Okay, Bena, coffee. But it’s going to cost you. Okay? You have to answer a skill testing question and I expect a serious answer.” Holding her friend’s gaze tight with her own, Katya hesitated, took a deep breath and asked, “Why are you so relentlessly ethnic, Bena?”

For once, Elizabeth was so preoccupied with the scramble of thought and emotion, the cruel things her sister would say, the cruel thing her husband had done, her memory shriveling from last night’s behaviour, her skin tingling through satin and wool to feel the leather seat beneath her, so unusually preoccupied was she, that the staggering slowness of mid-town traffic failed to irritate her.

Having shown her hand in public, the hand with the knife in it, Elizabeth needed change. She knew she had no choice but to slide herself out of the gallery game. For the sake of face she would pay to keep her memberships intact and she would try, with some adroit politicking and the weight of George’s name, to get her privileges extended on a promise of good behaviour. But it was certainly obvious that she needed to find herself a new stunt.

It would have to be one of the Muses, of course, there were standards to maintain. Who’s left? Dance is always so dowdy. Fanatical. No one with an ounce of sense can believe those bodies, so not Terpsicore, all buttocks and… Stringy little waifs and the men with those… No, not dance! Nothing obsessive. Poetry? You’d have to drink coffee and wear tights and none of the furniture has legs. I don’t imagine they even have a Board, too busy being sensitive. Someone should tell them it’s the incense.

Music! Who’s that, Harpsicore? Don’t be silly, you’re cheating. There you are, you see, I know nothing about it. Perfect. I adore music as long as it’s not bothering me. I’m never what you could call passionate about it, really only a bit of cheap sentiment when all’s said, although I do have an ear for it just the same, I know when it’s not what it should be.

So, the best music then, the classics, the Percy Faiths, the Henry Mancin… no, perhaps not… The Beethovens, I guess, and the Mozarts, and I’ve always liked the sound of that Rachmaninov, such a rich sounding name, so Russian, so fur-hatted, such great tall guardsmen with… and that nice Borodin, a really musical name if you know how to pronounce it. And yes, I think there should be a little group with someone to tell about the music… Well, there you are, we’d need a conductor. I’ll have to look about, there must be some, quite a few I’d imagine, what with all the cut and slash to culture, symphonies going begging. And there, I’ll need a symphony. One of each, I guess, a conductor and a symphony. You mean an orchestra, a symphony’s what they play. Yes, whatever. D’ you suppose they come as a set? Can you get them from Venice? Do I mean Vienna? I imagine, yes, cream cakes, Europeans, yes, that passionate blood of the… uh… whatever, those big prairie sort of places, those sort of people, men. Yes, attractive ethnics on horseback with sabres rattling on long muscled… Horses, yes. And harness.

A Russian, I imagine, would be too dear, they’re rare, expensive to keep. Now a Hungarian, or a Pole, for instance, might be a little more grateful for the attention. I suppose one shouldn’t expect the whole… band, the symphony… You mean the orchestra. Yes, the band, we can’t expect all of them to be European, too. Well, obviously there are local people, just Canadians, who manage to do pretty much the same thing. So, you’d make do with those and find a nice, ripe European to cheese it up. Sounds like a recipe, girl. Something to do, something to do, something to… Yoo-hoo, Ethnics! Elizabeth hummed and sang her way into her sister’s drive and came to with a jam on the brakes and the memory of why she had come, the rush of need she had for comfort and for punishment.

Elizabeth had been taught not to be bold, back when boldness was immodest, not merely brave. She had been taught it, but had not learned it, and so she was bold, indeed, she quite enjoyed being critical and outspoken. But I’m not bossy, I’m sure of that, no matter what Maude says. She’ll be mean, she’ll say what she likes, but she can’t say I’m bossy. She better not. I’ll tell her right away that George spanked me and maybe she won’t go on so long about last night.

She shoved open the car door hard on its hinges, a thing she knew George hated to see, adjusted the mirror and tied the square of Liberty into a scarf on her head in what she believed to be the Jackie Kennedy style, found dark glasses in her carpet bag and slipped them on. Ringing her sister’s doorbell, she was quite sure she looked like the victim, heroic, bereft, perhaps even considering the veil.

Why was she ethnic? Relentlessly ethnic, so it would seem that her dear Katya, a friend of so many years, whose morality she hadn’t thought of in question, chose to think. Why was she ethnic? Bena had to take a sharp bite of her lip and breathe through her nose. A quick thought was necessary, not for herself, but for the unimaginable tactlessness of Katya’s question.

How could dear Katya have so abandoned the finely woven veil, the careful, embroidered diplomacy of a stranger in the land? Perhaps she simply did not have it ever. Once she was a Finn, and then she was a Canadian. One and then another. I do not know how she can do it, perhaps it is because she is round, like a hen. Move her nest, she will follow it, and she will sit again. Perhaps that is what it is. Bena’s back arched against the chair. I am the eagle flown from the Imperial shield, I am the real thing.

“I am Hungarian, Katya, I am not ethnic. In this country I am Canadian because it is Canada that makes the tickets, but who I have come from is just as important as where I am, and so I am still Hungarian. They worry in this country that too many cultures in one place will fight with one another. It is not the cultures that fight, it is the bad-mannered bullies who fight.”

“You bully me all the time,” Katya set water to boil, “Come here, go there, wear something nice!”

“Aach, but you are a friend, it is good to expect the best from a friend.”

“The best is what you want.”

“The best is what you will give to me after a fight.” Bena eyed the can in her friend’s hand, “Do you keep the good coffee for special, Katya? A visit from God you are saving it for?”

“You’re getting this, it’s perfectly good coffee.”

“Excellent! Then we will put in it a little taste of your pear brandy, so special, and it will be perfectly wonderful European widow-lady with a house of her own type coffee. Yes? How I envy your sense of occasion, my Katya. Me, I have but myself and a few poor rags and bits of old bone to offer, while you…” Bena swept a bangle clash of arms at the vivid, jumbled clutter of eating, sleeping, working and playing that cushioned and bundled her friend’s rooms, “…you make such a rich, busy ceremony for everything you do. Your food you eat with great display and with gratefulness. You are eager, I think, to be warm and happy. How fast you make a sweater, make a flower to grow. Aach, a miracle. Your colours… beh, they are noisy and I cannot like them, but you are so happy in them, dressed in your best idea, I must smile.” Bena blew an affectionate kiss at Katya spooning coffee by the stove, “Good and strong, my Katya, that the poîre may rest on top.”

Shaking her head at the highwire act, Katya trickled steaming water over the grounds, “Why do you really want to visit Maude Matthew, Bena? Just for aggravation’s sake?”

“No. Because I like her. It is not so often, Katya, that you and I find people to like. She may have a sister who belongs on the couch, but… That is not for me to say.”

“No, it’s not. You like her because she stuck up for your George. What am I saying, your George! Katya clanged the kettle to the stove, “Her sister’s husband, George! See? There you go again, spinning me up in your wicked web. You are incorrigible.”

“I am what, my Katya?” Genuinely curious, Bena was still ready to rear.

“Smooth, Bena, really smooth. Get cups,” Katya tilted her head at a corner cabinet filled with a lilac coffee set, “Muumi’s cups,” and finished pouring into the filter. Setting the coffee pot on the table, she pushed the honey jar nearer Bena who rolled a delicate porcelain cup in her fingers humming. Katya went to the cabinet herself and from the bottom cupboard lifted a quart mason jar and from the drawer a small silver ladle, “You pour the coffee. I’ll do the pear.”

“You are good to me, my friend.” Bena poured and stirred honey into her cup.

“Yes, well, I need a hair myself after last night.” Careful not to rattle the perfect naked pear resting on the bottom, Katya opened the jar, dipped the ladle and tipped brandy gently onto coffee. They smiled at each other over their cups, breathing up the fumes, “To the good things in life, Bena.”

“And to God, Katya. Will you come with me to visit Maude Matthew? She invited us.”

“She did, didn’t she? And she handed her sister the knife, didn’t she? And she raved at the cab driver last night, if I remember correctly. Is she nuts, Bena?”

“She is like us, Katya. Maude Matthew is one of us.”

“Yes, okay. Well, let me get some clothes on and…”

“Perhaps you could wear something…”

“Shut up and drink your coffee.”

“What d’ you mean, you’re a bad manager?” Maude growled in the gloom of her livingroom, “A manager’s somebody who manages to get the job done despite all sorts of damn fool interference from the likes of you. Your Missus Quaid’s a manager, she runs your house on her little bent back, cooking, cleaning, picking up after you. Manager! You haven’t managed anything heavier than a purse in your life, Lizzie.”

Rocking her thighs on a cutting edge of Scandinavian design, Elizabeth bridled and kicked, “Don’t even mention that traitor’s name. And it’s not as if you’ve ever carried a lunch bucket, Maudie!”

“Maybe I never worked out, but I’ve always done my own housework, Elizabeth.” Maude was weighty with elderhood.

Stabbing her jaw at the mossy haze of the under-upholstered parlour, Elizabeth poked at her sister, “Not that that really amounts to much, since nothing ever happens here, but it’s not as if you ever had to. Harry could always afford it and so can you.” She bunched her face at the old-fashioned tat of her sister’s Danish Modern.

Maude knew that expression, “Bugger off, Lizzie, it came with the house. I’ve never wanted somebody else poking into my things. And I’ve never expected somebody else to get into a sweat so I could do my nails and sit on my backside.”

‘Backside’ did it. Elizabeth choked and gagged out a sob, “Oh, Maudie, he spanked me!” delivered on a rising wail.

“Who did? Spanked you? George did? Well, hallaloo, hallaloo. Lord knows you’ve forever had it coming to you, let alone last night’s ridiculous performance, but I’m surprised all the same,” Maude sighed a great breath to keep her lips from curling and slid a hand over her glasses, that a twinkling shouldn’t show, “I suppose one of those spa places is the best thing for you now, one of those Betty Ford sort of booby hatches where they shrink you all round, not a fat farm so much as a funny farm, a Harbour Light with menus. You’re nuts, Lizzie, you’re over the top this time. It’s kind of late for George to start spanking now, my fault, I suppose, should have started you early, but you were such a little bawler, it wasn’t worth having to listen to you. Even the pigs couldn’t take it. Remember?”

Elizabeth felt damp quite suddenly, clammy, and she wriggled under wilting poplin, “You’re cruel, Maude. I knew you would be. I told myself on the way over that you’d hurt me, tell me I’m…” she waved surrender with both hands, “…I don’t know, going to hell in a handbasket, I don’t know. But I’m not, you know, I’m just trying to bring a little…” she batted at the venetian light slatting through the air, “…little beauty, a little order, taste, good taste, of course, elegance, yes, well, I bring… culture… you know…” her voice trailed, then rose on consideration, “Culture just needs a little organization.”

Maude rested her eyes closed to relieve exasperation, “You know, you’re just like Mother,” she didn’t have to see to know that her sister had gone rigid, “I wasn’t very old, but I saw enough of her to know that what Old Alice said was true.”

“Cousin Alice?” Elizabeth had only sarcasm for defence, “Dubious source, I’d say.”

Eyes flashed open, “Yes, Cousin Alice! Practical Old Alice, who bought us our husbands, Lizzie. Bought you Havergal and George, bought me a portfolio and Harry. Old Alice was a shopper. Be grateful, girl.

“She said Mother was a bossy, opinionated do-gooder of the worst sort. Didn’t have the faintest inkling of what she was doing good about. Not a clue. She was nice to the poor because she thought they liked tugging their forelocks. She believed in the heathen and thought they went to heaven if they were good servants. Thought that of the Irish, too. She played Committee Lady because she couldn’t knit, couldn’t garden, couldn’t sew and wouldn’t cook. She could afford to have the heavy work done and believed the hired girls were quite happy doing it for her. Mother believed she was gentry, Alice said, and if you think air-headed, bone-lazy, self-regard is gentle, then Mother had it made, Alice said. And you…” Finding herself hunched with her palms on her knees, Maude rolled back in her chair and reached for her cigarettes, “…you’re just like her.”

With nothing left for protection, Elizabeth drooped from her perch on the thin couch and sought pity, “You don’t care that he hit me, abused me.” She pursed her lips at her sister’s cigarette, “I’m one in three, you know. Perhaps it’s four, it may even be four, but I’m one of… whatever, you know, just a statistic,” she raised woebegone eyes, “a number, just a number, Maudie, ohhh…” and she burst into a bawl.

Maude’s elbows went to her knees, her head in her hands, smoke curling through her hair, “Lord God, give me strength, shut up, Elizabeth. Shut up, or I’ll give you something to really cry about.” She shook her head and smoked deeply until the sounds of stifled sobs choked and gagged and finally settled to rapid, ragged sniffles. “What’s wrong, Elizabeth?” There was only an irritating snivel in reply.

“Lizzie,” Maude’s head had begun to remind her of last night’s scotch and this morning’s intention of dying in bed, comfortably. Having noted that the afternoon movie was a Hopalong Cassidy that she’d never seen, she hoped a little encouragement might dry her sister’s tears and get her off the couch, “Lizzie… you’ve been a grand success. Till last night, anyway. D’ you not think I know you think I envy you? D’ you think I don’t? Well, I do. Of course I do. How could I not? You’ve always lived the very life you wanted…”

“Oh, now, that’s not true,” Elizabeth swallowed a sniff, “George doesn’t let me use the car, you know, with Whatsisname, the driver. And I certainly deserve an Order more than that bleached out alcoholic snob, Isob…”

“Lizzie, Lizzie, if there wasn’t a pea, you wouldn’t even know you’re a princess. You’ve got your own car, for petesake, and they’ll give you a gong like everybody else soon as you start losing body parts, quit your bitching, you’ve managed to have whatever you like so far. You got the dolls and the dresses, you got Havergal and hats, you got the parties and the attitudes and tinker tailor soldier sailor, Lizzie, you got yourself a merchant chief and you’ve lived like a princess ever after. What George puts up with from you… The man’s a prince. Close as makes no difference.

“I, on the other hand, got you,” Maude stubbed her butt and fell back in her chair, “And then I got Harry. The two of you…” she rolled her head and snorted a sigh, “…always scrambling for higher ground, not a care in the world for what you stood on…”

“Oh, Maude!”

“…or who.”

“Harry was a Greeter!” Snatching up her bag from the broadloom, Elizabeth stuffed in her discarded sunglasses and the Liberty scarf, dug out a tissue to dab at her nose, “A Joiner and a Greeter, Maude. I’ve certainly never been…”

“What, agreeable? Mind you, he was only agreeable if he was with the boys, but then, he always was. No, Lizzie, the real difference between you’s that Harry loved the idea of the Round Table and you’ve always wanted the Head Table. Me, I’m just your kitchen stool, something to perch on when you need a comfort, something to stand on when you want to reach.”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes, poor Maude! Who never made an effort, who booked herself a corner in childhood and couldn’t even be bothered to decorate it. Look at this room, for godsake, just the way you bought it! You never wanted to do anything but read and you never have. God knows you never tried to put yourself forward, even Old Alice had to trap Harry for you with her whisky money. And Lord knows, I’ve certainly done my best for you.

“All these years you’ve practically spit on me for the things I try to do. You’ve no idea how much you hurt me when I encourage you and you sneer and say mean things, things people don’t even say, or they shouldn’t anyway. But I only try to do some good around me and I try to get you involved and you spit! You probably thought you were being very funny when you invited those dreadful women to my reception yesterday. That carnival, that side-show gypsy and her bag-lady friend. I’ll bet you thought that was a big laugh at my expense and look at the disaster they turned it into. You’re a monster of cruelty, Maude, my own sister!” She made a snuffling blow into her tissue and looked betrayed.

Maude stared in disbelief, removed her glasses to her lap, massaged the bridge of her nose with one hand, her temples with the other, “Awesome, Elizabeth, you are truly awesome.”

“Well, you did! You invited them.” She suspected it wasn’t undiluted praise.

“I did, yes, I did. I invited them. Well, Katya, really, and she’d mentioned a friend. I did it because you were so insistent that I go and I thought it’d be nice if there was at least one person there I could talk to.” It was a theoretical truth.

“Oh, that’s a lie! You knew who that woman was and you deliberately…”

“No! I did not. I did not know Bena, and I certainly didn’t know she was a friend of George’s.”

“I don’t believe you!” Elizabeth was shrill, scenting equivocation.

“On Mother’s grave, Elizabeth.” Maude was low and flat.

“Well, maybe…” Backing from danger, mulling alternatives, Elizabeth felt the wet Kleenex in her fingers and rid herself of it with a toss at the ashtray, or fruit dish, or… ugly purple glass thing, “Well, somebody did, somebody…” She brushed her fingers dry on a limp little throw-pillow covered in blue denim that… “That’s it! That Paul person knew her. There, at the Gallery, in the afternoon, those women, he knew them! And the husband! He knew the husband, I saw them. The painter girl’s husband was wearing blue jeans and he… Oh, my god! Of course, he’s Bea‘s whatd’y’callit, son-in-law! Maude, do you see? It all fits! They planned the whole thing right there in front of me. They all knew each other, I see it now. He found that Bena creature right there on the street. They’re all street people, you know, these painters and foreigners and… those boys. Just like the winos they all know each other and somebody must’ve seen George being kind to that creature. Apparently, he’d bought her a cup of coffee once. He’s like that. I tell him it’s no use, they can’t appreciate it and they’ll only ask for more, but George is foolish that way, something happened to him in the War, you know. And they used her and that simpy Bea McAlpine and her old bat of a mother to make a scene over that…” Elizabeth’s jaw dropped long enough to take a breath, “That painting, Martin! That conniving, deceitful, traitorous little… Fag. There, I’ve said it. It’s his mother’s fault, Madge, she was always a dingbat, she’s supposed to have the best taste, I always suspected her, just pretends to like you, she couldn’t make friends at school.” Confident that she’d reached the bottom of it, Elizabeth slumped to the back of the couch, “I see it all now, jealousy, the mad passion, Madge always envious of my friends, Bea hateful when she lost her husband, just because I mentioned the obvious, and this Bena creature… Well, possibly just mad, I suppose. A plot, definitely a plot to hurt me, I’m sure of it. You didn’t even have to be cruel, Maude, you didn’t even have to invite those horrible women, they’d have been there anyway, obviously they were determined to humiliate me, make a mockery of my whole contribution. I see it now.”

“Awesome.”

“Exactly. People are so jealous of leadership, trying to destroy my faith in George, have me believe he carries on with trash like that, trying to revenge some old grudge just because that spineless McAlpine knocked Bea up and took a walk… What? twenty, forty years ago? As if anybody cared. And that Paul… I don’t know, he’s just a guard at the Gallery… He damned well won’t be anymore, if I’ve got anything to say!”

The thought that she would be unlikely to have any say, indeed, would most likely be asked to resign, gave her a clue, “Of course! It’s a revolution! He’s one of those types who want to turn everything upside down and marry each other and have benefits… Good God! That’s why they got poor Martin so drunk, he wasn’t in on it after all. He was just falling down drunk and rude, not like him at all. They were probably planning to kidnap him, some sort of statement, you know, and do who knows what filthy things to him and bomb the bank and shoot everybody down in cold blood… It doesn’t bear thinking, poor Madge, maybe now she’ll be glad to know I put a stop to that before they started mailing his ears and asking for money.

“You know, Maude, I expect I saved hundreds of lives, important lives, now I think of it. And you too, of course, you were a help, slipping me that little cheese knife right under the terrorists noses. Yes, I’m not surprised you’re choking, I’m astonished myself, now I realize the danger I was in. It’s a wonder we all didn’t go down in a hail of bullets.”

“Amazing.”

“Yes. And what thanks did I get? George beat me.” Elizabeth bit down hard and nodded her chin, righteousness restored.

Maude couldn’t help but be proud of her sister’s virtuosity of repression, revision, and rationalization. The pure hogwash that muddied Elizabeth’s stream of reality had always gotten to Maude’s affectionate heart. And stuck her with the ungrateful task of reinforcing the truth, “Well, you certainly made a damned fool display of yourself last night. That’s it for awhile, I’m afraid, best you put yourself on hold before they do it for you. Maybe if you’d invited the Queen and knocked her hat off and stomped it and pulled her hair and slapped her, maybe you might be in worse trouble, but not much. You could have killed somebody, you know.”

“Maude, I liked it.”

“What?” Maude’s head snapped up from her hand and she glowered at her sister, “You’re sick, Lizzie! You can’t get away with murder and mayhem, no matter who the hell you think you are. You’re round the bend, girl, you can’t be going through the change again, you’ve got a dose of Alzheimer’s, or something. Old Alice said it’s in the family, the MacKenzie side. She said Mother’d have been mad as old Bill King, if she’d lived past you. That’s what it is. Does George know?”

“George spanked me. And I liked it.” A clearing sniff restored her to her perch on the edge of the couch and Elizabeth re-crossed her legs, both feet on the floor.

“Oh.” Staring hard at her sister, Maude was quite sure she didn’t care to hear this. Losing sharpness a little at the edges, as she did herself, a scarf on her tea kettle, inexplicable fights with cabbies, that sort of thing wasn’t so bad, didn’t automatically bring the white-coats with the back-to-front jacket, there was a bit more understanding in the world today. Stress was what it was, apparently, and aging. But losing it and liking it? Dear God, the possibilities!

If Elizabeth had suddenly discovered, at a time when most of the leaves were off the autumn of her years, discovered that she liked being punished for her bad behaviour, well, then the world was no longer safe, life more than ever not worth getting up for. For Elizabeth had been born not only backwards, but with a big curl right in the middle of her forehead, and when she was bad… God help us! But then again, what if she meant that she liked… “D’ you mean..?”

Grinning sheepishly, Elizabeth felt the heat rise to her hairline in a dizzy rush and she mumbled into her fingers fiddling at her lips, “Sexy, yes. I felt… I’m not sure… Maybe I… For the first time it… I’m not sure…”

“Gawd!” Maude threw herself back in her chair, “I don’t want to know this. I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t want to think about it. Just when you think it can’t get worse… Go home, Lizzie.” She hid behind her hands.

No matter what Harry had tried to encourage his cronies to think, that he’d had to keep a lascivious Maude locked up at home to protect his private pleasure, she certainly hadn’t lived the life of any courtesan. Harry came first when it came to sex and that’s all there was to it. But Maude had learned to take her own pleasure when she needed and so she wasn’t strange to the erotic, but ardour having cooled, she’d just really rather not have this conversation, not now, not with her little sister, not ever.

Should’ve stayed in bed, should not have answered the door, should’ve pulled the blanket over my face and faded away. She’s going to drag you into the smelly parts of her life, if you let her. I won’t. I can’t. I don’t want to. I’ve managed to keep her at bay all these years, now’s not the time to go down. I don’t want to know she’s just discovered the orgasm, if that’s what she’s on about. George gets a little rough, finally, the man must have more self-control than God, he snaps at last, slaps her ass and she gets off like… “I don’t want to think about it, I don’t want to hear about it, I don’t want to know about your sex life, past, present, or future. Call a hot-line, don’t tell me. If you’ve decided to become a motorcycle moll, discuss it with anybody else you like, I won’t care. Use my name, blame me, whatever, just leave me in peace. Please, Elizabeth, find a group.” The chiming of the doorbell shocked Maude to her feet, eager for any interruption.

“We must have a taxi, it is all uphill and I have danced too much and we should arrive with our winds, we will need our winds, my Katya, you will see.” Bena phoned for a car while Katya dressed, pulling on the skirt and sweaters she’d left in a heap around dawn, unwilling to ask, or even to think about Bena dancing.

With a foot on the doorsill and patting the roof, Bena looked up from the cab to the sky, “When I lived in Paris, the air always it was sweet.” She sipped a long breath and wagged her nose like a bee to a flower.

Katya took a sharp sip of air and wagged her head in disbelief at the mysterious chronology of Bena’s past, ever in flux, requiring constant reassessment, adjustments of personnel, of place, of geological formation. As the bones and the shards surfaced, the scale of her passage had come to resemble history itself. “When was that, Bena?” She shoved her in and followed, slammed the door and instructed the driver.

“Aach, the spring time, of course, my Katya, but in all seasons, truly I remember the sweet Paris air. Sometimes too sweet, but…” She spread her hands in tolerance, “…the drains.”

“I mean, when, what year, what era?” Katya had once calculated that if Bena had truly been all of the places, seen all of the things, known all of the people she said she had, she would have to have been born some time before the Flood. Avoiding provenance like a wily dealer, she offered herself as found treasure.

“I was a teacher of the French tongue, my Katya.”
“WHAT?”

“Not all of us had lived in society and knew the French. Certainly we needed a civilized tongue, it makes it easier to buy bread. Having the tongue makes it easier to buy anything from a Parisian, always they insist on painting the lily and making you wait while it dries. They dye even their flower blooms, my Katya, in buckets of red water stand the daffodils to blush and bleed. Sauciers are chevaliers. Paris has a long memory that serves it very well. We were just exotic enough for them to overlook our shabbiness, to give us not credit, but belief. We were arrogant and they adored us. Will we sit in the kitchen at Maude Matthew’s house, Katya? Or will we be polite and sinking into chairs too low and worrying about getting out of them again with saucers under our cups?”

“We sat in the kitchen when I was there yesterday. Yesterday… oh, Bena…” Touching a hand to her breast, Katya clutched at the hanging strap in the back of the cab, “I can’t take this pace.”

“Aach, my Katya, it is just that you are in this little place, you will be better when we are there. Hah! And we are there, are we not? Stop this car! Here, it is my celebration.” And Bena had reached the porch and the doorbell by the time a shocked Katya had finished paying the driver from a fistful of bills that Bena, Bena? had thrust at her.

Hurrying up the walk, Katya was vaguely aware of the car parked in the strip of drive on the far side of Maude’s patch of lawn. Something familiar… expensive… hadn’t she seen..? “Don’t lean on the bell, Bena, give her time. There’s a car, she may have company, it might be the doctor, it could be…” and as the door was yanked open by a grinning Maude, “It’s the sister, that car, it’s her, it’s the wife!”

“What about next Sunday?” Tillie stood with her stick in the gravel of the drive saying goodbye to her daughter through the car window which would no longer wind up. Bea had tried tentative turns on the handle, but the gear was gone, the teeth cracked and crushed from old age, and the futility weighed on her with the burden of a crumbling world and a crumbling body and the fuss and the expense and the rapid ebbing of faith in anything.

And here was her mother, her batty, scatty, senile old bitch of a mother trying to add herself to the load. Bea pretended ignorance with a throw-away tone, “I’ll call you in the afternoon, when the rates are still down.” And she reached to crank the ignition.

“Don’t be cute,” Tillie saw the hand reach to the keys and thumped her stick against the door skirt, “You know what I’m talking about, none of your sneak, girl. Isn’t there an Institute meeting Wednesday? What’re we doing for the Fowl Supper? When are you picking me up? You do your green wobbler and I’ll do my squares.” There was only one answer Tillie didn’t know and an edge of worry inspired her to protect it with easy confirmation. Bea’s lime green cottage cheese aspic was as automatic as Tillie’s oatmeal and date squares when called upon to feed Strawbridge church-goers and strangers, as automatic as an Institute meeting in the middle of the week before a church supper. “Of course, the Lettie Girls’ll be doing the pickle plates.”

“Yes, Mother.” Yes Mother. Yes Mother. Yes, yes, yes! Bea hated herself for the easy aquiescence, for what seemed a groveling, lick spittle, spineless abdication of her own need for calm and solitary peace, for a singularity beyond reach of dry old clutching hands, bony and translucent in their claw-like grip on the walking stick inches from her nose. She yanked one more savage crank on the handle and with a gritty crunch, the window slipped the last inch below the frame. “Okay. I’ll come for you Saturday. You be ready for once and we can get back before dark. Bake on Friday. Make sure you don’t forget your squares in the oven. I’ll phone.”

Katherine Bailey had had as much as she could take, certainly as much as she was going to take, she was fed up to the teeth with humiliation and… and… just plain bullshit! Enough already! Whatever it was, greed, envy, hate, just plain pig-headed stupidity, she’d had enough. In one night she’d lost her man and lost her future and she was so mad she couldn’t even cry. Why? Christ, I don’t even know how! That bitch Preston, who hates my mother, where the hell’d she come from? And who stole my husband? Bastard says it’s just me. Yah, sure. That friend of his, whatsername, Jane, the gynecologist__ and isn’t that pathetic, made for tv, the stirrup queen steals your man__ I know it’s her. Bitch. I know her. Shops for men. Lives in her shower. She’s so perky! Stupid, dumbass, wait till he finds out she hasn’t heard a word he’s said.

She’d pack a frequent change of clothes, one or two momentos, a can of beans and a case of wine, slam the door on this terminally adolescent culture and go pitch a tent up somewhere beyond cottage country. She’d need bug dope and a corkscrew. Have the oil checked. She didn’t own a tent, but she had credit cards. She’d always thought she’d like housekeeping cabins, they looked cozy on the side of the road.

Write down wooden matches, coffee, wine, red and white, vodka, bottle of Jack, eggs, a decent pillow, maybe the eiderdown, bug dope, Martin, a nice piece of cheddar… I’ll take Martin. Why? Make him bring the vodka, a couple nice sirloins, he can cook. He’s probably not even conscious yet. Oh, he’ll be conscious, he’ll have figured out by now how last night’s entirely my fault. I’m not going to talk about it. He will. I’ll tape his mouth shut. Lose the little bastard in the bush, if I have to. Why not? I hope he’s got such a hangover his head falls off. She reached for the phone.

Martin Knight was soaking his crystal candlesticks when the phone began to ring. He squinted at his watch hanging from a cupboard knob, one o’clock, and adjusted the taps. His head felt like a belfry by the time the phone gagged in the middle of the eleventh ring. There were twelve candlesticks, six pair in graded heights, and Martin cleaned them two by two, addressing them by name as he set them to drip on a line of paper towels laid on the countertop. Arnie and Sly were fourteen inches, his own brothers were four. By the time the sink was drained and scrubbed, the telephone had taken to screaming a dozen rings at a time. He made himself a hair of the dog from a heel of vodka and some wizened peel. The phone rang and he picked it up.

“Get some sirloins, maybe a couple good rib-eyes. And dress warm, forget silk anythings. Wool. Something for breakfasts would be fun. Can you get no-fat sausages? Somewhere, I bet, if you look. Blue jeans only. But not bacon! Unless it’s that really lean pea-meal. We shouldn’t, though. They’ve got it at DeVoors. You’re near. And for godsake don’t wear that eau de fruitfly, Martin, you’ll get eaten. You’ll go mad and I’ll have to shoot you.”

Martin fingered the phone cord, waiting to respond. He had decided the night before, when the good hemp rope he had used to hang Katherine’s enormous acrylic rockcut up a marble wall at the reception for the Imperial Trust’s grand new foyer was attacked with a cheeseknife, he had decided, having already given in to considerable glasses of consideration and acknowledging to himself that he was in the deep kneebend of responsibility under pressure and way too many little stems of wine, and deciding that he was decided anyway, he had decided that he must for good and all throw up… No! Give up. Resign! No. Well, yes. Give up these pathetic attempts to bring art to the little people, resign his soft job in mattress publicity, descend to the streets and take up a life of__ Propped among the biscuits and the brie, Martin had raised his eyes to Katherine’s canvas of granite sliding down the marble, and as the slide hit the slates with a cannoning boom, had fainted without looking into David Bailey’s arms.

“Hello?” He was sure he was managing the voice of innocence, “Katherine? Is that you?”

“Who the hell d’ you think it is? You haven’t got any friends, of course it’s me. Now go get shopping, we’re driving up to Manooth tomorrow.”

“Like hell we are going anywhere together ever again! You are nothing but trouble. And I don’t wear eau de anything! It’s cologne, very pricey cologne, and it happens to be called…”

“Every bug ever lived calls it a gin and tonic. You’re a cocktail party for flies, Martin, take my word for it. Take long showers and don’t touch the soap. Get whatever you like at DeVoors, just make sure it’s lean. And don’t forget vodka. Get the good Russian stuff, this’s serious escape. I’m getting Jack and the coffee, that’ll get us through campfires and mornings.”

“I am going nowhere with you! Certainly not paddling around some backwoods gene pool. Where the hell’s Manooth? Up in cousin country? This a roots thing, Katherine?”

“Martin, the reason you have no friends is because you’re a real prick. D’ you ever consider that? You always have to curse the apple and poison the princess, don’t you?”

Martin took a very long breath, twice during which he considered hanging up, but she couldn’t have the last word, “I didn’t say I was here for a nice time, Katherine, I’m here for a long time, and I don’t intend to be left for dead in some godforsaken redneck bar in the tight end of the Ottawa valley!”

“Ottawa Valley?” She snorted derision, “It’s not the Ottawa Valley. Meaner than that. Further west.”

“Oh good, cowboys.”

“You wish. Not that far, Indians and the fightin’ Irish, probably some rock farms and bush hippies. If you’re just gonna bitch, forget it, I’ll live without you, I was thinking of leaving you in the bush anyway.”

He let his breath whistle through his teeth and explode with a puff of lips, “I have no friends? Of course you, Maggie Bloody Muggins, Bludgeon in Her Own Time, are no doubt surrounded at this very moment by an entourage of loyal fans, yes? You don’t have friends, Katherine, you have party guests.”

“Fuck off, Martin. Get what I said. I’ll pick you up at noon. Out front, on the dot, I’m not getting out of the car. Gives us lots of time to get up to Manooth and find a place. Might even be time to stop for cocktails. Okay? Y’ only really need a change of socks. Your own blanket and pillow, if you’re fussy. No stuffed animals. Oh, and bring candles.” Katherine thumped the phone down and went to the bathroom to look at her hair.

Either he’d do as she said and be on the sidewalk tomorrow, or he wouldn’t. She really didn’t care. Company would be nice, someone to talk to, but she could likely find a hitch-hiker who’d do as well. Better, actually, Martin might just drive her nuts with his flippy little moods, his sometimes vicious chatter that made her want to duck. She pulled a brush through her hair and wondered why she’d picked Manooth. She wasn’t even sure she’d been there, though she knew where it was, vaguely, a place she’d heard of up beyond Bannock, up towards the Park. It had the sound of being nowhere; she had a general idea of direction, which was important, because maps drove her to distraction; you couldn’t read one unless you stopped and if you stopped you could see where you were, so why would you need a map? Manooth just sounded like strangers, people she’d never set eyes on, which was exactly what she wanted, and maybe a lake or something, a river at least. There had to be some reason for these places to exist.

Somebody said they’re all Irish up there. And Indians. Good. Should be a decent bar. The hairbrush stuck in a tangle. The important thing was, Manooth wasn’t Strawbridge, her mother’s place; they were a long way from each other. Well, maybe not so much as the crow flys, but she didn’t think there were any roads between them. She sniffed herself and decided she was clean enough for shopping, picked up make-up, mirror and bag, went out and arranged herself at the kitchen table.

I’m not calling Bea. I’m not calling David. I’m not thinking about it. Gran’s okay. The day after her career collapsed at her feet, Katherine used balls of Kleenex and an apricot cleanser to wipe her face down to her shoulders. Around her feet, actually, the huge canvas had ripped over the tip of Tillie’s cane, split and coasted down with a fluttering fart around the three of them, her grandmother, her mother and herself. She stroked an astringent cream thickly about her eyes, it tickled and stung and puffed over the lines.

Well, not her entire career, she supposed, she could still paint, after all, still teach – her contract at the school required her return for the January semester, though after that… Who knew how far that knife of Elizabeth Preston’s reached? Tenure was not a word in Katherine’s employment file. Obviously, she couldn’t even keep a husband. And certainly any public career in the big city was sure as hell in the trash can along with that busted canvas. A thin foundation went on smoothly, evenly, with a brush.

I don’t care. I’m fed up, sick of the bullshit, I just want to paint, go away and paint. I don’t care. I’m not phoning. I’ll put a message on the machine. A pencil did for her eyes. Crap! All of the hangings, galleries, dealers, men, assholes, curators, juries, pretentious shit… I’ve had it up to here! She stroked more cream into her throat. It’s always bad food, cheap wine, and money for everybody but me. Stupid, stupid, stupid people, “And where do you get your ideas, Katherine?” She did her lips with a single ripping stroke, threw tubes, jars and brushes into her kit bag, folded the mirror on top, stood from the table, spotted her blue ballcap on top of the fridge, clapped it on with a shove of hair under the elastic back, scooped her purse from a chair on her way through the dining room, remembered and went back for her list, looked to see the stove was off, and didn’t even pause at the hall mirror on her way out the door.

Bossy, bossy, bossy! She’s headed for cow country, it figures. My god that woman’s bossy. But Martin wished Katherine were still on the phone so he could beat her to slamming the receiver. Not cows. She said rocks. Rock farmers. Not really?

He didn’t want to go anywhere. He wanted a dozen new candles and a whole lot of fresh flowers, not boutique beef and gold-plated vodka. Not for her to swill, that’s for sure. I’m not going to be able to afford her idea of fun anymore, now I’ve quit my job. Oh god, have I? I haven’t said so, have I? His memory dripped and his own voice, not quite words, but hard sounds, leaked through, and an over-exposed glimmer of his own finger wagging and stabbing at a face… Whose face? Elizabeth Prest… Oh, sweet fucking Jesus and his mother Mary! I might as well be dead. He yanked his memory shut.

He sat down at a black lacquer table to make a list. His little grandfatherly trust could keep him roofed, the lights on, but it wouldn’t squeeze. She can make do with hamburger and something cheap. There’s Canadian vodka, Alberta, that’s cow country. She wouldn’t know lighter fluid, if she couldn’t see the label. Martin unscrewed his black Mont Blanc and blotted ink on his notepaper. Pig of a woman! Fuck, I hate her guts! I’m not going! Twelve tall candles, the soft cream ones, for me, special. And glads, I’ll get glads. Lots of glads. Sprays. And nobody’ll know if the wine’s not right. I can drink rosé if I want. Fingers plucked absently at his throat. She’s lost David Dear and she can’t make do without a man, so she thinks she can drag me along to do the dirty work, selfish bitch. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt her to discover that every man doesn’t have to be a walking erection to be useful.

Musk. Bugs probably don’t like musk, it must be what they smell like around cows anyway. And I’ll need one of those farmer hankies. Red, or blue? Better get one of each, she’ll want to go out to god knows what kind of barnyard dance, or some hippie hoedown. Boots, I’ll need boots. The yellow cowboy kickers… and a pair of… no, better not. A boots and barefoot weekend. How Audrey Hepburn. She did say weekend, didn’t she? Well, she said just a change of socks, so that’s two days. Okay. Do you trust her? No. She needs me. She sure as hell needs somebody! Take the little stove thing, they mightn’t have fire yet. A hat? No hat. Use the good conditioner. I should take a cap though, might have to wash in a horse trough, I’ll have flat hair. A peak cap, then. No way! She’ll be wearing that filthy blue ballcap and we’ll look like a team. Okay. I can use the Visa at DeVoors.

There had once been a Daimler for the Chairman of the Imperial Trust, but allegiance was attached to portfolios and in the years of southern expansion an American saloon had demanded the job. At the time, remembering his father’s affection for a long blue McLaughlan, George had spoken for a Buick. The car was now dated, although immaculate, since he mostly walked in the city and it was off-limits to Elizabeth. He figured that the rate this global thing was going, all the eggs in one basket, a new Daimler was not far off, but he intended to resist till they came up with a proper blue.

As the car rolled north, George stared out the window and considered his position. He was grateful for having been born into well-founded money, it had assured his place in the long hierarchies while he had learned and proved himself and aged towards a wise and balanced ship of state. He believed he’d not have made it otherwise, that the driveling truisms, the false spiritualism of management corporate-speak would have choked him, or forced him to a spitting spew that would have defrocked and shamed him. He could afford to have no small talk. It wasn’t that he didn’t have an interesting life, it was that he wasn’t supposed to.

Being driven was hard on George, he walked in the city because he liked it, but he also walked because he’d known young that it might well be all the heavy breathing he would get in any day. Walking had kept him from regular vice and more recently from seizing up at the urinal. So, this too-extended sit from the city to the lake, pampered on the ride of the best Fischer carriage, smooth on an old moneyed road to the summer; this sit without hurdles, without a free hang in warm air, or a shriveling chill to flex by nature, if not by fear, this inertia was going to mean the pain of feeling really old when he came to take a leak. He’d need a good clamber over the rocks once he reached the point.

Rolling by Strawbridge, George saw the big letters, black on the white signboard, under the jackpine on the church lawn, and the car was through the neck of granite before his mind read the message of a Fowl Supper, Sunday, All Welcome, and he saw himself standing to the wheel of the old cruiser, bringing her down out of the lake into the river to the bridge, a royal progress to a banquet among forbearing Christians.

Now there’s a position to get myself into. Me a spanker, a man who’s raised his hand to his wife__ lowered, actually__ out of the need to correct her way. Shame. And the trestles’ll be set up in the church hall where Elizabeth went to Sunday School. The turkeys and the pies’ll be whipped up by women who knew her. Maybe I should get myself a tee shirt with ‘I spanked her’ on it. It could sell in Strawbridge. A chuckle escaped as a snort and George saw Clarence’s eyes flick to the mirror, and he was further ashamed.

He often wished he could just roll onto his back with his paws in the air; what a relief it would be to offer his throat, belly and balls with the sure faith of dogs. All the elaborate rituals of men, homages and handshakes, stand-ins for a gutting with claws, all of the rules seemed made forever to be bent, broken, forcing a vigilance for position which George found increasingly exhausting. He’d been courageous in his youth, closing on extinction in his Spitfire and poker, liquor and celibacy, but his youth was past, a story to be told at need and the need grew less as fewer asked until there was no need at all and he was Chairman of the Board. Slumped in the backseat of the Buick, he was well aware that he would feel alive, useful and horny if he were behind the wheel, but certain forms of inertia must be observed and Clarence was too much the kiltie to allow that. Besides, years of walking had thinned George’s confidence in his own road skills.

In the Saturday traffic on the haul home, Bea tried to list in her head the order of steps toward extinction. Why do I have to be orderly? Why can’t I hit the gas and pile into an overpass like other people? Because you weren’t brought up to spontaneity, Beatrice. You never had yourself another man and you never bought a pair of saddle-shoes and you can’t wipe yourself out without tidying the house first. You aren’t television news, Bea, anguish doesn’t count as a respectable disease, no foundation and funds, no annual runs, anguish belongs to the church and psychiatry, and neither approves of suicide for paying clients. You’re a black-edged box in the local paper, once, on a Wednesday. No teddy bear shrine for Beatrice. I’m on my own. You’re on your own.

She could see that her trickiest problem was going to be a sane division of property between her daughter and her mother, neither of whom was much good at even finding a bankbook. Tillie thought you got money by telling the bank you wanted it. Katherine looked at a maturing bond and saw a new pair of boots. It was the most grievous burden of Bea’s life, this unlooked for accumulation of responsibility, the muffling, smothering fog of possession, but she carried it well, having absorbed her father’s Calvinism, and understanding stewardship she took care of what belonged to her, its possession being temporary, according to God’s will and her own good behaviour.

With great care for mirrors and judgement, Bea depressed the indicator stem and waited for the determined ‘plink plink’ and the untrustworthy wink of light on the dash, the supposed assurances that a signal she couldn’t see no matter how she craned over the wheel, actually worked. No matter how I behave, they’ll find something to criticize. They won’t like anything I’ve got to bury me in. The habit of arm signals had lasted long after lights became standard equipment, and Bea had given them up reluctantly to the new fashion, greatly admiring the persistent old men who wound down windows in January sleet to shove out an arm and point. Just because you can never be too sure. As it was she didn’t trust what she couldn’t see. Surely I won’t have to listen to them once I’m dead. With no faith whatsoever, Bea shoved an arm through the empty side window, nosed into the passing lane and overtook a cruising tow truck.

At the Landing, George rested a moment to gather his legs and to tell Clarence to please call in to Darla for instruction when he got back, thanked him for the ride and let himself out of the car with his bag. Collecting his keys from the marina office, he was forced to endure the bonhomie of a man he didn’t like in the presence of a woman he pitied, until he chose to see a salute in a hand that was raised for emphasis, returned it smartly and escaped to command the jetty. Dumping his bag into a battered dinghy, he handled ropes and throttle with release and seamless pull and the old Crestliner rose and purled out on the water and lay down for the end of the lake.

When Bea pulled off the highway at the bridge, she noted that the letter board on the church lawn already announced the Fowl Supper and she thought that was nice, good to see Reverend Ross on his toes, and then realized that the sign said only, Sunday, All Welcome. Didn’t it? Yes. Tomorrow’s Sunday, but the Supper is next Sunday, which everyone knows, except for the people driving by, people who don’t live here, the people the darned sign’s for! Phone the manse and warn Anna.

“Tell him he’d better add ‘next’ to the sign, in front of Sunday, or you’re liable to have a porchful of hungry people tomorrow night,” Knowing that Anna’s loaves and fishes were salmon-salad triangles with the crusts off, “And they won’t be happy. Better yet, tell him to put the date, too, people might think it’s been up a week already. Not much else open this late, the Carousel looked closed-up when I came by, there’ll be cold city people looking for a hot dinner and some atmosphere, and they’ll be cross when you don’t have it, and then they won’t come back when we want them to, and we’ll be left with empty places at the tables and the church can’t afford that. Have you remembered the ice-cream? Call the Dairy, Anna. And remember, Wednesday at Helen’s. Now don’t forget, you tell him to scoot right out and fix that sign first thing, or we could end up in an awful stew.”

Easing over the massive shelving, George putted the dingy back the shoreline into the shallow cove where the rock almost pinched the point into an island. Light walking on the rippling wash bent and bounced sparkling and shadowing up the granite spine, and his flesh shrank from the sight of Elizabeth at the top of the rock slicing her arm through the air. He blinked, and a scrag of cedar waved again with light. Careful to breath from his belly, George pulled a thick sweater from his bag and slipped it on, he tipped the motor, slid cushions and lay down in the bottom, and concentrating on feeling direction, allowed himself to melt into the cradling roll. He dozed in the flickering sunlight, opened his eyes to check the drift, and dozed again. And when his bones began to chill, he came out of his nap determined, though he didn’t know what for, and he took the dingy back around the point to dock and go ashore.

“Yes, dear Katya, it is true, my mother was a countess.” Bena had entered into Maude’s house in her smoothest hackney glide, knees flashing, her hand extended to accept and bestow the pleasure of meeting, and swiftly passing, with a wink for her hostess, to the other unexpected guest, the wife of her friend George, she had given her hand and said, “Elizabeth Preston, you and I, we must be friends. If we fight again, they will turn us out.”

Releasing hold, Bena swept the room with an interested turn. Each window was hung with a great bosc swag of slick fabric in the upper sash, old enameled venetians in the lower, lending a green and pear-shaped light to the room. One could see only past the shoulders of things. Bena had no intention of being overlooked and the colour of her hair, she knew, was acid in this light. She offered her hands to Maude and Katya gaping in the hallway door, “And such a charming room is kept, I think, for all the very most important visitors, who are happy to sit for a little while on this Lutheran furniture with its so thin cushions. But we are not special, my Katya is an old coffee friend who is pleased at the kitchen table, and I also wish for the coffee without a saucer. So, my dear Maude Matthew, let none of us be over-proud and we will put our elbows up.” And with a toss of the wrists, Bena had commanded them all to the rear.

Elizabeth’s nose had flared and stayed that way, the nostrils wide, flesh white and quivering. Maude kept a hand hovering before her own face to hide repeated grins as she encouraged her guests to pull up chairs and get comfortable at the kitchen table. She busied herself with kettle and coffee as Katya and Bena settled. Aware of her sister’s continuing freeze, she rooted out a cream pitcher from the cupboard, thrust it into Elizabeth’s hands and nudged her toward the refrigerator, “Just milk, not cream, but there’s lots. I had to go down to the corner first thing I got up, my cupboards are unbelievably bare, must do something about it. If I’d known you were coming, I’d have bought a cake. Oh, maybe…” Maude slid open a drawer and poked a finger at some mis-shapen biscuits, “Nope, hockey pucks. Fill ‘er up, Lizzie.”

Having accepted the small blue and white pitcher into a palm still shocked from Bena’s grip, Elizabeth’s numbness took a moment to recognize the delicate old willow piece which she knew, as she cupped her other hand for safety’s sake, belonged to… “The sugar bowl, I suppose that’s long gone? You’ve no sense of things. Mother’s Crown Derby, I don’t know why you should have gotten it. All crammed into the back of a kitchen cupboard like…” she trailed to a murmur during a close examination, “…mmm, looks whole, a miracle, filthy, give it a wash, no, I will.” She made for the sink, “So, the bowl’s gone. Wasn’t there a tray, a little one for the two pieces? I might as well have this if you’re not going to use it, at least I’d appreciate it and not bury it in…”

“Shut up, Lizzie, I am using it. Just give it a rinse and fill it with milk and put it on the table with this!” Maude didn’t bother to suppress a smirk as she opened another cupboard and presented the pitcher’s mate half full of sugar cubes. “There was never a tray, you’re thinking of the lemon plate, candy dish, whatever it was, and I haven’t a clue, lost track of it years ago. If you’d moved as many times as I have, Sister dear, you wouldn’t be so attached to things, especially things you never even use. Milk, Lizzie.” Steering her sister to the refrigerator, Maude turned her attention to Katya and Bena, “What kind of stuff do you get stuck with? What do Finns inherit, Katya?”

“Felt boots and fish recipes,” Bena’s attention was fastened on Elizabeth, but she could spare a thought to general conversation.

Startled, Katya raised an eyebrow to examine the festooning of chains, pendants and beads that graced Bena’s breast, she reached to wag a finger at the clusters of bracelets choking her wrists, “And you, Bena, anything you couldn’t wear?” She glanced up with a grin to Maude by the stove, “A couple of peasants? Twenty miles of standing wheat? Can Hungarian horses be inherited, or are they expected to commit sati like Indian widows?”

A teasing Katya was one thing, grinning complicity with this new friend Maude was another, but the beady black-eyed stare over top of the refrigerator door was too much; how swiftly laughter turned to cruelty had been broken into Bena’s bones. She saw a flash of rifle butts and uniforms and had a need to stand and wheel, to be quickly out and elsewhere. But the kitchen held her, as kitchens always had, with a memory of rising bread, heat and her grandmother’s hair, and she feared that she could lose her Katya here if she rode herself away. She must offer something, so she told them that her mother was, had been, a countess.

“Not a rich one, not even a charming one, but she was a countess and my father wanted one of those. You shake your head with disbelief, my Katya, thinking that the ethnic, the relentless ethnic, so you would say, is telling a German fairy tale to make a proud name for herself in this Canada still wet behind the ears. But it was so, a countess.” Bena had held herself erect and hieratic, but now relaxed and laid her arms upon the kitchen table.

“It is no longer so, there is nothing now to be countess of, the house is gone and even the fields are no longer fields, but raped dead earth salted with the filth of making steel. A whole river once carried my mother’s name, her father’s name. It flows in a different country now, in a different language, with someone else’s name.”

The eyes above the open refrigerator still stared, but hostility had dimmed to curiosity and when Maude, turning a sympathetic smile from Bena, admonished her sister’s waste with a look and a wave of the hand, Elizabeth found the milk and didn’t slam the door. Katya, however, trembled and shook and though her lips were sealed, she leaked tears. Bena was not amused, “There is no future in regret, Katya, but my mother could command more than a curtsy and there are some things, my friend, I could wish that had not changed!”

“Sorry!” One quick squeak was the best Katya could do before she burst into bawling laughter.

To hide a snuffling giggle, Maude fussed over the coffee, lost count of spoonsful, inhaled some finer grind and sneezed into sputtering heh hehs, which Elizabeth found entirely unattractive, “The two of you are completely inappropriate! The poor woman’s a victim of… Well, I’m not sure just who, exactly, but she’s lost a great deal, had a dreadful come-down. A countess, it’s all gone, d’ you see? The what d’ y’ callums, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. The Russians, or the Muslims, maybe. It wouldn’t be the Blacks over there in… Where? Bena?”

“Magyar, Elizabeth.” Bena lobbed a soft one.

“Oh,” It was one of those words Elizabeth had never quite gotten the meaning of, “…and that would be…” though she had made a memory hook that swung her over to a set of, perhaps, decent people with difficult names and an annual ball, who dressed rather too… too fast… food… hungry… “Hungary! And that would make you a…” Elizabeth waved both hands and the milk, “If they’re all gone over there, dead, you know, perhaps you’re a princess.”

Hoots of fresh laughter greeted Elizabeth’s leap. Katya was astonished once more by Bena’s dog-eared biography. Inside of an hour, she’s gone from professing French in Paris, to a fat county in Mittel-Europa, no, a thin county, and a dead one at that. How very tidy, names changed to protect the imagination. Ah, sweet Bena, such lovely arrogance, it really doesn’t matter if the truth comes before the fact, or after. And Katya settled into intermittent fits of giggles.

Maude figured Bena to be more than capable of handling hecklers. If she can glad-hand Elizabeth after last night’s performance__ I seem to remember old, gypsy, and tramp being words out of Lizzie’s mouth__ I doubt she’s likely to be put off her feed even by a couple of ninnies like Katya and me. But Elizabeth… greedy, gullible, she’d bid on a knocked-down aristocrat and stiff the waiter. A displaced person’s a DP, but the properly-born, displaced by what d’ y’ callums, now that could be a dinner party.

“You know, all of Lizzie’s dolls had to be princesses,” Maude spoke into coffee steam, “Started with the one she stole from me. It had to be a princess so she could rescue it from my evil clutches. She likes to deal at the princess level because she thinks it excuses her greedy, arrogant little heart, thinks noblesse oblige means free parking.” Holding a steady stream from the kettle, Maude swung her head for a look down the counter at her sister who was snatching the ears off the milk carton, “Am I right, Lizzie?”

The cruelty. Elizabeth squeezed a hot tear from an eye to plop into the milk’s shaky stream filling the shell-thin vessel cupped in a hand that urged a crushing squeeze, a shattering blue snap and flood of white. You know just where to sink the blade, don’t you, Sister? Years at it, my whole life at it, and there’s no getting you back because you don’t care about anything and you try to drive me mad, but I won’t go.

“Well, there we are,” Having managed with mechanical fingers to restore milk and pitcher to the counter, Elizabeth brushed her cheeks with fingertips, “There you go once again proving you don’t have the sensitivity God gave a lout. You’re dreadful, pedestrian…” Furious, she yanked and slapped the milk back into the fridge, and muttered in the slamming of the door, “No wonder Harry threw you out.”

“What?” Maude slopped water and had to put the kettle down, she was sure she’d heard that. “Harry what?”

Elizabeth was trapped, as she knew she’d be, but it was Maude who was forcing her to say these things, “I said, that you’re so cruel and selfish that it’s no wonder Harry didn’t want to live with you anymore.”

“No you didn’t.” Maude left the filter to drain and faced her sister, “You didn’t say that at all, you said he threw me out. Yes? Wrong. You know darned well I walked out. I was tired of being a wife. I never loved Harry, never pretended, took him on as a convenience, thought it’d give me a place to be, bookshelves and comfortable chairs. And Harry, he loved my safe-deposit box. The man had black ink in his veins in case he bled on a balance sheet. Jesus!” And Maude blew out a bellyful of disgust. “My crime, Sister dear, was making a dumb choice, a lazy choice, and I paid for it with darned near a life sentence of boredom. You, on the other hand, love every bit of the clap-trap you’re saddled with, and miracle of miracles, you’ve got a husband who seems to care enough about you to try to make you behave. So, don’t bother thinking you can make me feel bad about Harry,” Maude focused her sister with a lift of the head, “Just because George finally spanked your bottom.”

Elizabeth was stalking to the door when Bena swept wide an armful of bangles to stop and touch fingers to her wrist. Bena knew where the pain was and held it gently by the pulse, clearing her mind of the sight of George’s hand slapping, slapping, slapping this round haunch, this grey-clad haunch, this haunch by her shoulder__ Clearing that and rocking softly on her thigh bones, she coaxed her own black cone of pain into sympathy with the thundering hooves of Elizabeth’s heart.

My god, sisters , these two’d eat you alive, if you let them. Katya shivered a goose from her grave and wriggled a bit more comfortably onto her chair, careful to not draw fire. Just when you think they’re going to be nice. Fewer things meaner than girlhood games. And now Bena’s going to jump right in and skip along with them. I might’ve known this would happen. I did know, I said so. “Did you have skipping then, when you were a little countess-in-training, Bena? Did you skip rope in another country, another language, Bena? Double-Dutch, maybe?”

Distracted from lancing Elizabeth’s pain, Bena was stern, “We jumped rope in my country, but it was dangerous. It was not your Carl Larsen, Katya, it was not your pretty pigtails and little red boots. Who held the rope, that was important.” Feeling the blood ebb from Elizabeth’s wrist in her fingers, she let go, folded her hands in her lap and offered what she had, “I could be the countess. If I wanted.”

Men on horseback, sabres dangling, difficult names, but decent people, I think. Perhaps. Dressy, anyway. Elizabeth’s head rose to a firmer rein. Sabres slapping, a countess, even possibly a princess, Anastasia, foreign, ethnic, european, moldy old manors, moldy manners, cream cakes… Would she…? “Are you musical, Bena? Do you know any… you know… what d’ y’ callums… men with baton things…” Catching herself making a measure with her hands, Elizabeth bloomed a hot wet slick of shame and felt it melt cold and dry on the furnace of her skin, “You know, men with, uh… Orchestras! Yes, orchestras. Conductors! Yes.” and her hands escaped the sensuous measure in a sweep of relief.

She is mad, Bena thought, mad with always having her way. Whatever she has wanted, she has taken. Mad with possession, mad with position. Ferocious to rule, she sees only jackals in her green lust, and swipes her claws. Her madness has brought her to destruction, malicious and damning, and for this crazy cruelty her man has beaten her. Spanked, her sister says, which would be the way with George, not vicious, smiling to see pain, but driven to correction. He means to keep her. I will be useful, “Yes, yes, Elizabeth Preston, yes!” Swanning with a bounce of girlish gaiety and grasping once again the wrist she had released, Bena clapped hands with Elizabeth and said, “I know a Pole, a great artist of the orchestra with his baton, who…”

“Not that wing nut, Ziski, for godsake, Bena? Not that broken down…”

“Katya, my dear Katya, you have not, I think, the knowledge of the music, or the taste to judge these things and…”

“…soak.”

“Soaked in the very finest European classical music, my Katya. A maestro who has lifted his baton in La Scala, a small program, an emergency, but still, La Scala. And very many of the cities of Poland and other capitals,” Bena bent a look on her old friend that told her to keep peace, “In Paris I knew him. He came to me to learn to speak. I taught him useful forms of flattery, si vous voulez, and took him to buy clothes. To Paris, tout les autres, are badly dressed monkeys, if he wished to raise a stick to the French, he must look a splendid ape. Fortunately for sentiment, Poland was once a fashion for second sons of France, and since their manners hide their condescensions only from themselves, he found it quite easy to play on their conceits and their pianos and so made something of himself.

“But he could not go home and he needed to believe in words of affection, and the French keep their language for themselves, so he came here, to Canada, to Ontario, to the Polish people up there in their high lands before the wilderness, and he makes music when he can.” Having set the bait, Bena again clapped the hands still held in hers, “For what, Elizabeth Preston, do you wish to know a conductor?”

“To catch the train to the bin!” Laconic, disgusted, Maude plunked the coffee pot in front of Katya, “Would you pour please, Katya,” She collected mugs, spoons, the sugar and the milk from the counter edge and delivered each to the table with a rolling of eyes and a wagging of head at her sister, “Look at her, happy as if she’s in her right mind.”

And indeed, Elizabeth was glowing with the excitement of so soon finding the answer to her new stunt. A conductor, a maestro! and perhaps not too expensive after all. To hell with pictures! she said to herself, and to the others, “To create a truly lovely musical experience for the appreciation of those of us who…” she searched for reason, “…who appreciate the fine…”

“Snobs. Have a cup of coffee, Bena. If you let go of her, maybe she’ll float off and save us the bother of having her put down. I’d leave her out in a snowdrift, but she won’t stay.” Maude placed spoons, “You’re batty, Dear. Had a little tanty last night and spoiled your own picture party, didn’t you? And now your picture party friends aren’t going to let you play anymore, so you’re going to muscle in on the music game. Am I right? Little musicales for a hundred, perhaps? Strings in the sunporch? Piccolos in the parlour? Something like? You’re about to be lynched by the painting trade, so now you want to ride herd on a bunch of cellos, eh. See? I know you, Lizzie, right from one end of the schoolyard to the other looking for a game to boss. And you always want to be in at the top of the game, no line-ups for Lizzie, no sinkful of dishes, either. You’re a ruthless, self-regarding tyrant, Sister dear, one real hell of a princess.”

“Oh, a queen!” Proclaimed Bena with all the appearance of sincerity, “The qualities of a queen, I am sure of it.” Maude’s upper plate dropped with a click and Katya aimed coffee into mugs with full attention.

The intrigue surrounding royals had always made Elizabeth nervous, as she was never absolutely positive she knew which way was up and someone was always trying to move the ladder. But being royal, of course, meant that the intrigue was constant and eternal and therefore the inability to get it straight was understandably just one of those things… those Latin tag things. She was sure there was one of those quid something, or quo sayings for summing up the problem, an old one, obviously if they said it in Latin, so the kind of thing that proved what she’d known all along, “You’re not very nice, Maude. It’s obviously not my fault. I guess I’m just…” She flicked a glance at each of them and sighed forgivingly, “…just that much more sensitive than the rest of you.”

The stirring of spoons hammered the silence as Maude and Katya and Bena considered responses. Oddly coincidental, Bena and Maude were both thinking of pinching thumb and forefinger through the circle of gold at Elizabeth’s throat and drawing her body through the hoop. Bena drew her right through, saving the head for last. Maude stopped halfway, leaving her sister for the time being folded like a napkin in a ring. Katya thought about sharks. The three of them eyed each other, looking for signs of weakness, hurt feelings, murderous intent, but all three faces remained impassive, perhaps a bit stunned, the eyes mild and thoughtful, till Maude asked, “This Ziski, this conductor, you say he’s somewhere north?” And in a softer voice, head lowered over her mug, “Broken down soak. Is there any point in this?”

There I go, calling people names again, Katya thought, and I hardly know the man. But he is a soak, or he was, so he can be again. I suppose he doesn’t have to be, “I honestly don’t know him well enough to know what he’s capable of.” Though one way or another, I think we can depend on Wit Ziski stripping any excess sensitivity from the likes of Elizabeth Preston.

“He has genius,” Bena flew her fingers to the world, “So, once in a while he loses faith and he drowns a little bit the pain,” This silly woman thinks her husband is a drunken, lustful beast. Hah! Love pats and sober as judges is what she knows. I will feed her to Maestro Witold Ziski. Bena arched and turned to see Elizabeth, “But give to him the inspiration of his music, be to him a Muse, divine, and he will clasp his heart and raise his stick…” Bangles clashed like cymbals as Bena shaped the air, “…and you will be amazed!”

Bea woke from a doze on her couch, irritable and unrested. She felt short-changed when sleep failed to knit up its share of raveled care and she had a crick in her neck. She toasted the crusts of a loaf and with a pot of tea sat herself at the dining table where she could watch the day fade on the river at the end of her yard. I can’t stand being alone anymore. I can’t take it. You’ve been alone forever, you’re just worn out, you’ll get over it. No. You will. And the whole mess with Katherine’s painting and Liz Preston, that’s got you down. That isn’t it. Sure it is, you’ll get over it. No! I don’t care, that’s not it! I don’t want to be alone. I’m tired of being alone. Get used to it, now’s hardly the time to complain, you’ve got years to… Yes. And I don’t want years.

With a deep sigh and aching bones, she rose from the table, crossed through the livingroom and stooped to a cupboard beneath bookshelves next the fireplace. From behind stacked boxes of board games and puzzles, she slid a battered gray tacklebox and straightening with a grunt carried it back to the table. Despite its hiding place and the serious steel lock through its hasp, the box held nothing precious, only copies and lists of what was securely deposited with two banks and a lawyer. Bea was aware that perhaps her precaution went a bit far, after all, who was there to see her papers tossed in a desk drawer, even dumped in a heap among withered oranges in a fruitbowl on the sideboard like some people she could name. Still, both her mother and her daughter thought nothing of fingering through anyone’s privacy if it came upon their attention in the ordinary way of idling about opening drawers and poking into cupboards, though she didn’t think either of them patient enough to fiddle open a four number combination.

She broke her stare with the lock and poured herself another cup of tea. She knew the entire contents of the box by heart, could quote codicils, describe scrolled edges on facsimile certificates. There wasn’t a lot of point in spinning the combination, but she must do it anyway, for the ritual. She swallowed tea. And to remember the numbers. She hadn’t yet relinquished control, every statement passed before her eye, every cheque under her hand, nothing was delegated except the annual fiscal review of her figures by an accountant who knew better than to dawdle on her time. She didn’t like doing it; if she liked doing it, she’d have been an accountant, but she had to know the distance to the poorhouse.

Discretion, of course, required that she not be seen to have purchased the big life policy with a bomb strapped to her waist. She wasn’t about to give people the chance to say she’d profited by her own death, by ensuring that her mother stayed off the street and her daughter out of the bin. Or, yes, she thought, the other way about.

Perhaps it was finally time to give in to them all, the banks, the utilities, the caring funds, the insurers, the government bookies, the shopping channels, all the people who begged for the privilege of automatically dipping into her account whenever they felt the need for a nourishing debit. Let them all get a trotter in the trough, reassuring themselves of her good intentions. Send them each the voided cheque with signature. Fat and able to feed for a month or two post mortem, they mightn’t suspect predetermination, would accept accident as tragedy. I’m damned if I’ll look foolish and have Velma Lettie say so.

Bea had been bookkeeper and then manager of Bateman’s, a department store that had begun life as the village post office and egg-grading station with a general stock of drygoods housed in a cramped one story shop in the business street. When first she went to work after highschool, the edible stock had already been reduced by health regulations to cheap biscuits and chocolates firmly packaged, making space for Cosmetics and Toys. Presently the government built the postal service a new station and Hats got a room of their own, but the candle-ing and packing of eggs still went on in the chilly annex behind, leaking an acrid bite of dirty straw into Men’s Shoes and the back-corner office. Despite the confusion of merchandise, it remained a simple enough operation, with a single till and duplicating sale slips, that Bea’s birthing of Katherine caused only a week’s disruption in the paperwork and she was considerately allowed to have the accounting books at home in the first days of nursing and adjusting the baby to bottled formula.

The house that her new husband had taken in the month before the birth was a clapboard bungalow on a piece of McGee property next to the Hardware with the rent cheap enough that Bea was able to pinch by alone when McAlpine deserted for the Rockies. It was damp and cold beside the river with only a draughty fireplace and a rusted Quebec heater against the winter, and in the yard the skin of soil was too thin, she knew, for more than creeping moss and Indian paintbrush, but white pine roots had found cracks in the rock and a line of old willows draped the water’s edge and Bea with her baby and ledgers found enough moments of relief from the world that she decided she wanted to stay.

Ted McGee, her friend Anna’s brother, was younger, but had already by dint of aggression and a canny head grabbed the wheel of the family’s interests, so that when Bea offered him a mortgage payment equal to the rent, the torch Ted had carried through highschool allied with a precocious recognition that he was going to need all the goodwill he could buy, if he intended to climb his way through politics, softened his grasp and over the objections of his elders, he agreed. He took pleasure in informing his miserly old prick of a grandfather, who’d insulted every citizen he hadn’t bankrupted, that he hadn’t even asked for a downpayment.

When Katherine had more or less accepted the bottle she was given over by day to the unmarried Hoy girl who minded one of her own and the telephone switchboard in the kitchen of her mother’s house and Bea hauled the ledgers back to Bateman’s hen-scented office.

The store was one of three scattered over the county, the last enterprise of a merchant family once proud in Orillia society that had descended to a bored woman past middle age who drank lunch and hoped her managers were honest. When her Strawbridge trusty disappeared with the Christmas receipts and the Ladies’ Wear clerk, she drank her breakfast, called the store staff together and asked how much money she’d lost. Only Bea knew the answer and told her. Miss Bateman went home to lunch and made a decision. If Bea could make the store produce additional profit equal to the loss before the next Christmas season the manager’s job was hers for good. And because they were cursed women in a cruel man’s world, anything over and above the replaced amount would be a bonus she would split with Bea. In fact, to hell with that, she had enough of her own, Bea could have the whole bonus if she’d drop by for a cocktail and stay to talk. Which Bea did, phoning her excuses in to the switchboard.

The following evening Bea had bundled the baby and dragged herself next door to ask Ted for advice. He’d spent the last of the fall out back of the Hardware ripping out the old jetty and the cylinder hand pump that had served to gas a couple dozen fishermen in a season, and in their place had built a broad wharf with a proper service station pump, a slipway and dockshed where she’d found him knocking together benches and shelves to suit a mechanic’s need. “Tourism, Bea, that’s the future. We’ll never get more than dimes out of our own, independent bastards’d rather squeeze a nickle and get the cousin or the in-law to do what needs doin’ for the sake of a beer and the loan of a hand. We gotta sell to the tourists who don’t know the neighbours and don’t know the price of bugger all anyway. We’re just gettin’ a trickle yet, ones who’ve been goin’ up to the lakes over the years still make the run on up to Tier for supplies, but the new road’s comin’, straight as a hard-on, be here in a year. They blast that jeezus rock to Kingdom Come and the trippers’ll be pourin’ through the gap like a run of smelt. Couple of years, they’ll be thick as the flies both sides of the river right up to the lakes. We give ‘em what they need right here and they won’t have to get off their arses the rest of the summer. Tier’ll dry up and blow away. Except we gotta go wet, beat the damned bluenoses and get ourselves a liquor store. You vote wet? Make sure you do, and stick a cracker up every butt you know likes to take a drink, blackmail ‘em if you have to. City people want their booze and we want ‘em comin’ here to get it, spendin’ their money.

“You take that job, Bea, and you cram that store full of every bit of summer tourist crap you can think of, kind of stuff you’d want yourself if you had more money than brains and dick all to do for a livin’. Get some of them Hawaii shirts and big dumb sunhats won’t stay on in a wind and canvas chairs that fold up and swimsuits and fancy sunglasses and suntan oil, maybe even some of these Bermuda shorts they’ve got for men to wear now. That’s what you wanta do, sell ‘em what they don’t even know they want yet. And you get yourself another cash register or two, for chrisake, city people’re in a hurry, they hate waitin’ in a line, and you can turn that piddly-ass five and dime into a goin’ concern. Take my word for it, tourism’s the wave of the future ‘round here.”

“You could be right about all this, Ted, but it won’t do me any good this summer without the road going through till next year. The profit off the regular goods has to roll over to re-stock for next Christmas. Where am I supposed to find this extra money? I don’t see how I can do it. There’s just no cream to be skimmed.”

“That egg operation, that’s your cream. Now listen, Bea, this’s just between you and me and the bedpost, but I’ve been doin’ some thinkin’ about the grocery business. Had my eye on those supermarket operations that’re cleanin’ up down south. It’s what we need up here. You buy your meat and potatoes and your bread and your canned goods and whatever all in one place. Bought myself a piece of the dairy when old Crawford dropped dead last year, just a piece, they can keep the headaches in the family, and I’ve been thinkin’ I need an egg operation. I could take that gradin’ business off Bateman’s and be doin’ you a favour, can’t be worth the trouble and it stinks up the store somethin’ awful. Tell you what, you get the old bat to sell me off that operation, I’d guess it might be worth a bit more than what that asshole stole, and there’s her replacement money and you still got your purchase margin. And if she’s lettin’ you have the extra like you say, I’ll make sure it’s sweet enough to make it worth your while to do the persuadin’. What d’ you say? I’ll move ‘er out of there to a place I’ve got and you can hose down that shed and use ‘er for storage. Come next year, you get that big summer stock in, you’ll need the room. I’ll go you one better, you don’t blow your bonus on high livin’, I’ll show you how to multiply it a few times, no risk to speak of. What do you say? You know, Bea, me and you’d make a pretty good team, eh. You oughta think about that.”

Bea knew that if she had any real sense she should serve McAlpine with papers and marry Ted. He was only four years her juniour, not too shocking even for Strawbridge, and he certainly could out-glare any disapproval from the likes of the Letties, but she’d known him too long and sensed that his glad-handing charm masked an overweening ambition that in time would forget to be kind. So she accepted the advice and his generosity as evidence of friendship and suspected that the whole business was very much to his advantage.

In the course of a long wet spring of weekly lunches, Bea didn’t so much convince Miss Bateman that selling off the egg operation was a practical move, nor even that a new focus on Tourism was the wave of the future, but rather herself was persuaded that women unfortunate enough to be alone in the world had every right to think for themselves, no matter what any man said. “And if this village idiot of yours wants to pay out good money for that stinking egg business, well hell, Honey, lets you and me take him to the cleaners. You ring him up and tell him how much and I’ll go mix us up another manhatten.”

Bea had kept the manager’s job and did very well by Ted’s advice. The tourists came and even he was astonished by the success of his supermarket and found it no burden to offer quick cash to any small merchant who suddenly discovered himself without custom, saving many a one from the humiliation of bankruptcy. The Saturday farmers’ market dwindled and finally died, affording McGee Inc. enough depleted cropland to go into housing in an upscale way, and recognizing the futility of platform politics, Ted satisfied his hunger with maximizing profits and bullying in the backrooms. Miss Bateman’s liver eventually quit in the course of a protracted lunch and the trustees dispersed the residue of her properties, the still solvent Strawbridge store finding a buyer, recently landed, who had the good sense to change nothing while Bea still managed a profit. And when she’d decided she’d had enough, Bateman’s burnt to the ground, liberally insured.

Opening her tackle box, Bea stared at the stack of paper inside, ran a meditative finger over from end to end, less a stroke than a measure, sighed with a deep mixture of relief and boredom and closed the box. She was in no sense wealthy, did not consider herself a rich woman, though she knew herself to be a frugal one, at first of necessity, then out of habit, perhaps by nature, and she had saved carefully in her working years. Even so, it had been Ted McGee’s initial lesson in the investment of what she always thought of as her egg money that had directed her to some very fortunate share purchases which had grown and split and pupped and mutated into sums that never failed to shock her. There was really such a lot on her plate that she could live without fear of hunger on the drippings.

But Bea was possessed too of a moral inheritance, the great sad black dog of responsibility for having, that was perhaps as much kin-memory of pinched highlands, as it was the expected behaviour among a people who believed that they earned what they deserved. Stewart, her father, had told her that pride needed two reins, responsibility and guilt, to keep it out of the ditch, and she had loved her father without question. Her responsibility was her mother and her daughter, her guilt was for having more than she needed, her pride had never bolted. If she wanted the ditch, she’d have to let go, and she couldn’t even allow herself the luxury of a little powder-room under the stairs.

Once inside the house, George approached the cold cookstove with ritual prayer and patience until he got a healthy fire up, then promethean elation subsiding into an old scout knowing how to put a match to kindling, he sat a bottle of scotch to warm on the open oven door and got on with his chores. He switched on the hydro, but having no intention of re-priming the pump, he walked down to dip a pail in the lake. He filled the kettle and set it over the fire. Up the backstairs in the zinc room, he chose a feather tick, blankets and a pillow, carried them down to the kitchen and propped them to warm by the stove. He moved the kettle, filled the firebox with tough dry chunks, knees and elbows of wild cherry, and switched draughts. Fetching a tin mug from the pantry, he filled it with warm scotch and hot water and went up to his bedroom to change.

In his childhood and youth, George had spent whole summers at this house set high above the water on a finger of rock hooking out into the lake. And every year of his adult life, except for the time of the war, even during the years of high career, he had contrived to spend some days of every summer in this place he loved. For the better part of his married life he’d spent the time alone, for Elizabeth preferred cocktails in cabañas at five-star hotels and grew bored in a weekend ‘on the rocks’, as she said, though she took pride in possession and didn’t hesitate to mention their summer house in Muskoka when necessary.

It was not the oldest summer house on the lake, nor the quaintest, certainly not the biggest or costliest. George’s grandfather had spied the hook from a boat in his own youth and bought it, cheap at the back end of the channel. But then he’d gotten busy making money and the fashion in those days was for Town, so that it wasn’t until he’d grown comfortable, owing only gratitude, that he felt the need for a summer house in the peace of the lake and felt no necessity to build more than a reflection of his own satisfaction. The cedar gables, porches, planking and platerails, coloured with light, looked on the outside like a tailored morel and the inside was as smooth and dry as a wooden cigar box.

Digging to the bottom of a cedar cupboard, sucking the dry cat smell of the wood into his body, rubbing his forehead along the smooth beveled edge of a drawer, George found his airforce uniform pants, the folds had become creases, the hot wet smell of the war had become cold and feline. He found longjohns and a soft flannel shirt, navy, to go with the airforce blue. He smoothed two pair of thick socks onto his feet so that he could walk without shoes, and tucked the pant cuffs to make plus-fours. Standing to a long mirror to button his braces, he frowned at his own colours fading before the strength of the cloth and in the slim drawer of a dresser he found a white handkerchief, a snowy square of bishop’s lawn to knot at his throat. Better, that brings back the colour. He raised his hands flat, tip to tip in a shelf beneath his chin, “Vraiment! Certainly, certainly it is a Monseigneur! A white collar can get anything it needs from a believer.”

In the passage behind the stairs, a row of pegs and a wall of shelves had collected things in passing: hats of grayed canvas and brittle straw, a hammock without ropes, a dirty long cloth bag sporting drivers and irons with wooden shafts, a rack of mis-matched mallets and chipped balls enough for doubles at croquet, thin green badminton nets and tough old birds of india rubber with balding quills, sprung rackets, warped presses and a cricket bat. It was the bat that caught George’s eye and startled a memory. He emptied the tin mug in a thirsty panic, dribbling on his chin, and brushing at it his fingers stroked his cheeks, pulling down dewlaps, remembering.

He remembered the pained yellow grass and the maple green light of the schoolyard and a small George with too much bat swinging, swinging at a ball, swinging at the expectation of a ball, in the general direction of a ball, somewhere in the vicinity of… The ball approaching, swing, passing, swing, scoring. He had supposed that it was the fear of ridicule that blinded him to the path of a ball he was expected to hit, slap, slug, swat from the air. The fear was obvious, wet and cold on his shoulders, the ridicule as frequent as the game.

Pushing the swing door into the kitchen, George was startled by the rush of heat, and crossing to the stove, he tightened the draught, turned the mattress and pillows, and pulling up a wooden stepstool, refilled his mug and sat himself carefully down before the oven door. Just when you think you’re safe, think you’ve softened up the past, whipped old agonies into memory lite… WHAM! a whole new episode of Past flashes up and there you are again looking at snapshots you never knew your eye had shuttered on: the grass, its colour and the height of it, how light fell that day, the shadow of a cloud, of fear, of moments of anguish caught in a lens of perception, blinked upon, developed and filed in the welter of juice and fibrous brain. Memory showing something not forgotten, but something that you never knew you knew.

But when at puberty his vision cleared, he had learned to judge the timing of the pitch, to make a lucky estimate of velocity and wind, spread his shoulders against the sun and swing with his long arms and cut the ball hard and far. The sudden pleasure of his potency forgave his old humiliations and it was his pride, that when he did connect, that ball traveled. To swing out and feel the jar and shudder of connection in his clubbed hands… Oh, that was savage!

He balanced his tin cup on the rim of the oven door, stood, folded the stool and retired it, topped up the kettle from his pail and leaving it to simmer, shoved a thigh of old apple into the embers and reset the draughts. He prodded the tick into a soft heap on the ragrug before the stove, spread blankets, bombed them with the pillow, swallowed a quick nip from the neck of the bottle to guard against chill, and walked a reconnaissance through the ground floor rooms watching for Stukas and latching the doors. Back in camp, he doused the lights, filled his mug, slipped his braces and settled into his tick with the intention of sitting watch to the end of the bottle if necessary, to take thought for Elizabeth, and fell asleep.