Duet. Carol Shields

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      On trains I watched people, lusting to know their destinations, their middle names, their marital status and always and especially whether or not they were happy. I stared to see the titles of the books they were reading or the brand of cigarette they smoked. I strained to hear snatches of conversations and was occasionally rewarded, as when I actually heard an old gentleman alighting from his Rolls Royce saying to someone or other, ‘Oh yes, yes. I did know Lord MacDonald. We were contemporaries at Cambridge.’ And a pretty girl on a bus who turned to her friend and said, ‘So I said to him, all right, but you have to buy the birth control pills.’ And then, of course, I had the Spalding family artifacts around me twenty-four hours a day, and on that curious family trio I could speculate endlessly.

      It occurred to me that famous people may be the real dullards of life. Perhaps shopgirls coming home from work on the buses are the breath and body of literature. Fiction just might be the answer to my restlessness.

      ‘I think I might write a novel,’ I said to Martin on a grey Birmingham morning as he was about to leave for the library.

      ‘What for?’ he asked, genuinely surprised.

      ‘I’m tired of being boxed in by facts all the time,’ I told him. ‘Fiction might be an out for me. And it might be entertaining too.’

      ‘You’re too organized for full-time fantasy,’ he said, and later I remembered those words and gave him credit for prophecy. Martin is astute, although sometimes, as on this particular morning, he looks overly affable and half-daft.

      ‘You sound like a real academic,’ I told him. ‘All footnotes and sources.’

      ‘I know you, Judith,’ he said smiling.

      ‘Well, I’m going to start today,’ I told him. ‘I’ve been making a few notes, and today I’m going to sit down and see what I can do.’

      ‘Good luck,’ was all he said, which disappointed me, for he had been interested in my biographies and, in a subdued way, proud of my successes.

      Notes for Novel

      

      Tweedy man on bus, no change, leaps off

      

      beautiful girl at concert, husband observes her legs, keeps dropping program

      

      children in park, sailboat, mother yells (warbles) ‘Damn you David. You’re getting your knees dirty.’

      

      letter to editor about how to carry cello case in a mini-car. Reply from bass player

      

      West Indians queue for mail. Fat white woman (rollers) cigarette in mouth says, ‘what they need is ticket home.’

      

      story in paper about woman who has baby and doesn’t know she’s preg. Husband comes home from work to find himself a father. Dramatize.

      

      leader of labour party dies tragically, scramble for power. wife publishes memoirs.

      

      hotel bath. each person rationed to one inch of hot water. Hilarious landlady.

      

      Lord renounces title so he can run for House of Commons, boyhood dream and all that.

      My random jottings made no sense to me at all. When I wrote them down I must have felt something; I must have thought there was yeast there, but whatever it was that had struck me at the time had faded away. There was no centre, no point to begin from.

      I paced up and down in the flat thinking. A theme? A starting point? A central character or situation? I looked around the room and saw John Spalding’s notebooks. That was the day I took them down and began to read them; my novel was abandoned.

      After that I was too dispirited to do any writing at all. I spent the spring shopping and visiting art galleries and teashops and waiting for the end to come. I counted the days and it finally came. We packed our things, sold the Austin, gave the school uniforms away and, just as summer was getting big as a ball, we returned home.

      

      Martin is better. Still on medication, but looking something like his real self. Today he went back to the university, and the house is quiet. For some reason I open his desk drawer, the one where the wool is.

      It’s gone. Nothing there but the wood slats of the drawer bottom and a paper clip or two. I look in the other drawers. Nothing.

      I hadn’t thought much about the wool while it was still there. I’d wondered about it, of course, but it was easy to forget, to push to the back of my thoughts. But now it has gone.

      It has come and gone. I have been offered no explanations. Was it real, I wonder.

      My hands feel cold and my heart pounds. I am afraid of something and don’t know what it is.

       December

      The first snow has come, lush and feather-falling.

      As a child I hated the snow, thinking it was both cruel and everlasting, but that was the hurting enemy snow of Scarborough that got down our necks, soaked through our mittens, fell into our boots and rubbed raw, red rings around our legs. It is one of the good surprises of life to find that snow can be so lovely.

      Nancy Krantz and I skied all one day, and afterwards, driving home in her little Volkswagen with our skis forked gaily on its round back, we talked about childhood.

      ‘The worst part for me,’ Nancy said, ‘was thinking all the time that I was crazy.’

      ‘You? Crazy?’

      ‘It wasn’t until I hit university that I heard the expression déjà vu for the first time. I had always thought I was the only being in the universe who had experienced anything as eerie as that. Imagine, discovering at twenty that it is a universal phenomenon, all spelled out and recognized. And normal. What a cheat! Why hadn’t someone told me about it? Taken me aside and said, look, don’t you ever feel all this has happened before?’

      ‘Hadn’t you ever mentioned it to anyone?’

      ‘What? And have them know I was crazy. Never.’

      ‘You surprise me, Nancy,’ I said. ’I would have thought you were very open as a child.’

      ‘Not on your life. I was a regular clam,’ she said, shifting gears at a hill. ‘And scared of my own shadow. Especially at night. At one point СКАЧАТЬ