Larry’s Party. Carol Shields

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СКАЧАТЬ school teacher’s patient explaining manner. “Late fifteenth century. Possibly earlier.”

      Dorrie copied this information into a little travel diary she pulled from her purse – “Late 15th century.”

      Larry found his wife’s note-taking touching and also surprising. Where had that diary come from? Its cover was red leather. The narrow ruled pages were edged in gold. One of her girlfriends at Manitoba Motors must have given it to her, a going-away present, something she wouldn’t have thought of herself, not in a million years. It moved him to see his Dorrie in a pose of studentlike concentration, pausing over her choice of words, and keeping her writing neat and small. That she would busy herself recording this chip of historical information – late fifteenth century – record it for him, for their life together, stirred a lever of love in his heart.

      But he remembered from school that fifteenth century really meant the fourteen-hundreds, how confusing that could be, and he wondered if Dorrie knew the difference and whether he should clarify the point for her. But no. She had already closed the diary and recapped her pen. Looking up at him, catching his eyes on her, she sent a kiss through the air, her small coral lips pushing out.

      The first night the tour group was installed in a hotel in Norwich (sixteenth century, more beams) which was said to have been visited on at least one occasion by Edward VII and a “lady friend.” There were snowdrops blooming in the hotel’s front garden. Flowers in March. This took Larry a moment to register, the impossibility of flowers – but here they were. Back home in Canada it was twenty below zero. “Snowdrops,” Dorrie wrote in her diary when she was told what the flowers were called.

      “Snowdrops are only the beginning,” Arthur told Larry and Dorrie. “You’ll be seeing daffodils before we’re done.”

      The tour, it turned out, was only half booked. The other travelers were mostly retired New Zealanders and Australians, and an ancient deaf Romanian couple who never let go of each other’s hands. “Everyone’s so old,” Dorrie whispered to Larry. She had a gift for disappointment, and now she was wrinkling up her face. “Everyone’s old and fat except for us.”

      It was true. Or close to being true. The eighteen passengers, men as well as women, shared the spongy carelessness of flesh that accompanies late middle age. The white permed heads of the wives, their husbands’ rosy baldness, framed faces that were, to Larry’s eyes at least, remarkably similar, softened, and blurred in outline, with their features melted to a kind of putty.

      “I’ll bet we’re the only ones who screw all night,” Dorrie said, looking around. “Or screw at all.”

      “Probably.” He smiled down at her.

      “Notice I said screw and not fuck.”

      “Congratulations.”

      “I’m a married woman now. Respectable.”

      “Ha.” Still smiling.

      “Ha yourself.”

      A white-haired husband and wife from Arizona had signed on to the tour. They were in England on their sabbatical leave. She, the wife, pronounced the word “sabbatical” as though the syllables were beads on a string. She explained to Dorrie, who had never heard of a sabbatical, that she and Dr. Edwards, her husband, had been to Thailand “last time” and before that to Berkeley in California. “We see these occasions as opportunities to replenish ourselves every seven years,” she said, “and take stock.”

      The members of the tour group were wakened early each morning in their various freezing hotel rooms by a knock on the door, then Arthur calling out an upbeat “Morning!”

      “Oh, God!” Dorrie came up from under the blankets.

      Larry, shaving, washing, attempted to avoid his father’s eyes in the mirror, that ghostly presence floating beneath the steamed-over surface. He tried, through the lather, to blink the face away, and by the time he was fully dressed, two sweaters plus a jacket, he had mostly succeeded.

      Invariably he and Dorrie were the last ones down to the hotel dining room, and every morning they were greeted by the same teasing cries of welcome. “Here come the honeymooners.” “Late again.” “Hail to the bride and groom!” Dorrie, ducking her head, her mouth puckering up with happiness and embarrassment, slid into a chair, while Larry accepted pats on the back or thumbs-up signs from the men.

      There were hot plates of bacon and sausages and egg – although Dorrie, who was feeling “off,” made do with tea and toast. After that the tour members took their places on the coach and set off for the day’s destination. The New Zealanders and Australians – Heather and Gregory, Joan and Douglas, Marjorie and Brian, Larry never did get all their names straight – preferred to sit near the front of the bus where they bantered genially back and forth, observing silence only when Arthur drew their attention to points of interest. The Romanians sat at the back, the same seat every day. Larry and Dorrie found themselves in the middle of the coach – Dorrie next to the window, taking it as her rightful place since she was shorter than Larry, and because the window seat made her feel less queasy.

      Dr. and Mrs. Edwards sat across the aisle from them, their maps and guidebooks spread out on their laps. “We don’t want to miss a thing,” Mrs. Edwards told them. She had her suspicions about Arthur. He was lazy, she said. He “recited” instead of “interpreting.” And he left items off the itinerary, a certain twelfth-century abbey that was definitely starred in their guidebook. She planned to write to Sunbrite’s head office about it when she got home.

      “Now, now, Sweetheart,” Dr. Edwards said, patting her hand.

      Dr. Edwards told Larry to call him Robin. He asked Larry what he did professionally, what his “field of endeavor” was. Larry told him about the Flowerfolks chain of florists back in Winnipeg, about how he’d got started in the business by taking a floral arts course at a local college. “Ah, botany!” Dr. Edwards said. “Or would that be horticulture?” He turned his body stiffly toward Larry, awaiting his reply. “A little of each,” Larry said, thinking. “But not quite.”

      Dr. Edwards was a sociologist; population, urban patterns. A perfect dunce in the garden, he told Larry. Didn’t know a primrose from a lily. He’d never developed an interest. He hadn’t had the leisure. He and Mrs. Edwards lived in an apartment in Tucson, always had, so there wasn’t the need. But someday, when he retired, he might look into it. A hobby kind of thing. A person had to keep learning.

      “Maybe I should take up sociology as a hobby,” Larry said. He meant it as a joke, but Dr. Edwards drew back, startled.

      One afternoon the coach came to a halt beside a rutted field, the site of an old Roman town, its houses and temples and public spaces outlined on the grass with flat red bricks. Dorrie sat down on a corner of a house foundation and wrote in her diary: “Second Century.” She underlined the entry twice, and looked up at Larry, blankly. He could see it was hard for her to believe that this ruined site had once been a real town bursting with men and women.

      She was cold, she told Larry. She’d had enough for one day. More than enough. Later Larry thought of that moment of exhaustion, Dorrie huddled on the foundations of an ancient Roman dwelling, how it seemed to split their honeymoon in two.

      They were ushered as the days went by through castles, churches, through stately homes and crumbling tithe barns, and they tramped one morning, in a soft gray rain, along the top of the medieval walls of the city of York. That day, in a vast museum, they looked at coins and furniture and agricultural implements and, spread СКАЧАТЬ