Duet. Carol Shields

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СКАЧАТЬ hands pulling together beneath his beard. ‘You may be interested to know that it is soon to become a film.’

      Her eyes widened. ‘Graven Images is to be made into a film?’

      ‘We have only just signed the contract,’ he said serenely, ‘this afternoon.’

      ‘Well, I must say, congratulations are in order, Mr Eberhardt. I suppose this film will be made in Canada?’

      ‘Ah. I regret to say it will not. The offer was made by an American company, and I am afraid I can’t release any details at this time. I’m sure your viewers will understand.’

      Her eyes glittered as she leaned meaningfully into the camera. ‘Wouldn’t you say, Mr Eberhardt, that it is enormously ironical that you, a Canadian writer who has done so much to bring Canadian literature to the average reader, must turn to an American producer to have your novel filmed?’

      He was rattled. ‘Look here, I didn’t go to them. They came. They approached me. And I can only say that of course I would have preferred a Canadian offer but–’ an expression of helplessness transformed his face – ‘what can one do?’

      ‘I’m sure we’ll all look forward eagerly to it, Mr Eberhardt. American or Canadian. And it has been a great pleasure to talk to you tonight.’

      The camera grazed his face one last time before the fadeout. ‘An even greater pleasure for me,’ he said with just a touch too much chivalry.

      Meredith sitting beside me looked flushed and excited, and Martin was muttering with unaccustomed malice, ‘He’s got it made now.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘Your friend Furlong has just struck it rich.’

      I shrugged. ‘He’s never been exactly wanting.’

      ‘Ah, Judith, you miss the point. A movie. This is no mere trickle of royalties. This is big rich.’

      ‘Well, maybe,’ I said, not really seeing the point.

      ‘The old bugger,’ Martin said. ‘He’s going to be really unbearable now.’

      ‘Tell me, Martin. Have you read it yet? Graven Images?’

      ‘No,’ he said. ‘I keep putting it off.’

      ‘His party is next week. Sunday.’

      ‘I know. I know,’ he said despairingly.

      ‘It may not be too bad.’

      ‘It’ll be bad.’

      ‘Do you really despise him, Martin?’

      ‘Despise him. God, no. It’s just that he’s such a perfect asshole. Worse than that, he’s a phoney asshole.’

      ‘For example?’ I asked smiling.

      ‘Well, remember that sign he had in his office a few years ago? On his desk?’

      ‘No. I never saw a sign.’

      ‘It was a framed motto. You Shall Pass Through This Life but Once.’

      ‘Really? He had one of those? I can’t imagine it. It seems so sort of Dale Carnegie for Furlong.’

      ‘He had it. I swear.’

      ‘And that’s why he’s an asshole?’

      ‘No. Not that.’

      ‘Well, why then?’

      ‘Because, after he got the Canadian Fiction Prize, and that big write-up in Maclean’s and the New York Times, both in the same month –’

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘Well, right after that happened, he took down his sign. Just took it away one day. And it’s never been seen since.’

      ‘He’d never own up to it now,’ I said.

      ‘When I think of that sign and the way he stealthily disposed of it, another notch of sophistication – I don’t know. That just seems to be Furlong Eberhardt in a nutshell. That one act, as far as I’m concerned, encapsulates his whole personality.’

      Meredith leapt from the sofa, startling us both. ‘I think you’re both being horrible. Just horrible. So middle-class, so smug. Sitting here. It’s character assassination, that’s what. And you’re enjoying it.’ She flew from the room with her breath coming out in jagged gasps.

      For a moment Martin and I froze. Then he very slowly picked up the newspaper from the floor, reached for the sports page, and gave me a brief but hurting glance. ‘I don’t understand her sometimes,’ was all he said.

      It was then that I noticed Richard sitting quietly in a corner of the room, unobtrusive in his neat maroon sweater. He was watching us closely.

      ‘What are you doing, Richard?’ I asked.

      ‘Nothing,’ he said.

      

      Frantically, neurotically, harried and beleaguered, I am addressing Christmas cards. Richard, home with a cold, sits at the dining table with me; he is checking addresses, licking stamps, stacking envelopes in their individual white pillars; the overseas stack that will now have to be sent expensively by airmail, the unsealed ones with nothing but a rude ‘Judith and Martin Gill’ scrawled inside them, the letters to old friends where I’ve crammed a year’s outline into two or three inches – ‘A good year for us, Martin busy teaching, the children are getting ENORMOUS, am working on a new book, not much news, wish you were closer, happy holidays.’ And Martin’s stack, the envelopes which Richard and I will leave unsealed so that tonight, after he gets home from the university, he can sit down and quickly, offhandedly write the funny, intense little messages he is so good at.

      The afternoon wears on, and outside the window snow is falling and falling. Since noon we have had the overhead light on. Richard in striped pajamas looks pale.

      This is a long, tedious task, and it irritates me to separate and put in order the constellations of our friends and to send them each these feeble scratched messages. But for the sake of the return, for the crash of creamy envelopes blazing with seals that will soon spill down upon us, I push on. For I want to hear from the O’Malleys who lived across the hall from us in our first apartment. I want to know if the Gorkys are still together and where the best man at our wedding, Kurt Weisman, has moved. Dr Lawrence who supervised Martin’s graduate work and his wife Bettina always write us from Florida and so do the Grahams, the Lords, the Reillys, the Jensens. What matter that they were often dull and that we might have drifted apart eventually? What matter that they were sometimes stingy or overly frank or forgetful? They want to wish us a merry Christmas. They want to wish us all the best in the New Year. I can’t help but take the printed card literally; these are our friends; they love us. We love them.

      Richard is studying the airmail stamp which goes on the letters to Britain. It is a special issue with a portrait of the Queen, an enormous stamp, the largest we have ever seen. The image is handsome and the background is filled СКАЧАТЬ