Duet. Carol Shields

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СКАЧАТЬ other two. Most people have at least heard of her, and thus her name brings forth the sweet jangle of familiarity. Furthermore Susanna has the appeal of fragility for, unlike Morris Cardiff, she was not the first anything and, unlike Josephine, she was not aflame with conviction. She has, in fact, just enough neuroses to make her interesting and just the right degree of weakness to make me feel friendly toward her. Whereas I had occasionally found my other subjects terrifying in their single-mindedness, there is a pleasing schizoid side to Susanna; she could never make up her mind what she was or where she stood.

      The fact is, I am enamoured of her, and have felt from the beginning of my research, the pleasant shock of meeting a kindred spirit. Her indecisiveness wears well after the rough, peremptory temper of Josephine. Also, she has one of the qualities which I totally lack and, therefore, admire, that of reticence. Quaint Victorian restraint. Violet-tinted reserve, stemming as much from courtesy as from decorum.

      Decency shimmers beneath her prose, and one sense that here is a woman who hesitates to bore her reader with the idle slopover of her soul. No one, she doubtless argued in her midnight heart, could possibly be interested in the detailing of her rancid sex life or the nasty discomfort of pregnancy in the backwoods. Thus she is genteel enough not to dangle her shredded placenta before her public, and what a lot she resisted, for it must have been a temptation to whine over her misfortunes. Or to blurt out her rage against the husband who brought her to the Ontario wilderness, gave her a rough shanty to live in, and then proceeded into debt; what wonders of scorn she might have heaped on him. One winter they lived on nothing but potatoes; what lyrical sorrowing she might have summoned on that subject. And how admirable of her not to crow when her royalty cheques came in, proclaiming herself the household saviour, which indeed she was in the end. But of all this, there is not one word.

      Instead she presents a stout and rubbery persona, that of a generous, humorous woman who feeds on anecdotes and random philosophical devotions, sucking what she can out of daily events, the whole of her life glazed over with a neat edge-to-edge surface. It is the cracks in the surface I look for; for if her reticence is attractive, it also makes her a difficult subject to possess. But who, after all, could sustain such a portrait over so many pages without leaving a few chinks in the varnish? Already I’ve found, with even the most casual sleuthing, small passages in her novels and backwoods recollections of unconscious self-betrayal, isolated words and phrases, almost lost in the lyrical brush-work. I am gluing them together, here at my card table, into a delicate design which may just possibly be the real Susanna.

      What a difference from my former subject Josephine Macclesfield who, shameless, showed every filling in her teeth. Ah, she had an opinion on every bush and shrub! Her introspection was wide open, a field of potatoes; all I had to do was wander over it at will and select the choice produce. Poor Josephine, candid to a fault; I had not respected her in the end. Just as I had had reservations when reading the autobiography of Bertrand Russell who, in passages of obsessive self-abasement, confessed to boyhood masturbation and later to bad breath. For though I forgive him his sour breath and his childhood excesses, it is harder to forgive the impulse which makes it public. Holding back, that is the brave thing.

      My research, begun last winter, is going well, and already I have a lovely stack of five-by-seven cards covered with notations. It is almost enough. My old portable is ready with fresh ribbon, newly conditioned at Simpson-Sears. It is ten o’clock; half the morning is gone. Richard will be home from school at noon. I must straighten my shoulders, take a deep breath and begin.

      

      Far away downstairs the back door slammed. ‘Where are you?’ Richard called from the kitchen.

      ‘Upstairs,’ I answered. ‘I’ll be right down.’

      At noon Martin eats at the university faculty club, and Meredith takes her lunch to school, so it is only Richard and I for lunch, a usually silent twosome huddled over sandwiches in the kitchen. Today I heated soup and made cheese sandwiches while Richard stood silently watching me. ‘Any mail?’ he asked at last.

      ‘In the hall.’

      ‘Anything for me?’

      ‘Isn’t there always something for you on Mondays?’

      ‘Not always,’ he countered nervously.

      ‘Almost always.’

      Richard dived into the hall and came back with his air-letter. He opened it with a table knife, taking enormous care, for he knows from experience that an English airletter is a puzzle of folds and glued edges.

      While we ate, sitting close to the brotherly flank of the refrigerator, he read his letter, cupping it toward him cautiously so I couldn’t see.

      ‘Don’t worry,’ I chided him. ‘I’m not going to peek.’

      ‘You might,’ he said, reading on.

      ‘Do you think I’ve nothing to do but read my son’s mail?’ I asked, forcing my voice into feathery lightness.

      He looked up in surprise. I believe he thinks that is exactly the case: that I have great vacant hours with nothing to do but satisfy my curiosity about his affairs.

      In appearance Richard is somewhat like Martin, the same bran-coloured hair, lots of it, tidy shoulders, slender. He will be of medium height, I think, like Martin; and like his father, too, he speaks slowly and with deliberation. For most of his twelve years he has been an easy child to live with; we absorb him unthinking into ourselves, for he is so willingly one of us, so generally unprotesting. At school in England, when Meredith raged about having to wear school uniforms, he silently accepted shirt, tie, blazer, even the unspeakable short pants, and was transformed before our eyes into a boy who looked like someone else’s son. And where Meredith despised most of her English schoolmates for being uppity and affected, he scarcely seemed to notice the difference between the boys he played soccer with in Birmingham and those he skated with at home. He is so healthy. The day he was born, watching his lean little arms struggle against the blanket, I gave up smoking forever. Nothing must hurt him.

      Absorbed, he chewed a corner of his sandwich and read his weekly letter from Anita Spalding, whom he has never met.

      She is twelve years old too, and it was her parents, John and Isabel Spalding, who sublet their Birmingham flat to us when we were in England. The arrangements had been made by the university, and the Spaldings, spending the year at the English School in Nicosia, far far away in sunny Cyprus, left us their rambling, freezing and inconvenient flat for which we paid, we later found out, far too much.

      To begin with our feelings toward them were neutral, but we began to dislike them the day after we moved in, interpreting our various disasters as the work of their deliberate hands. The rusted taps, the burnt-out lights, the skin of mildew on the kitchen ceiling, a dead mouse in the pantry, the terrible iciness of their lumpy beds; all were linked in a plot to undermine us. Where was the refrigerator, we suddenly asked. How is it possible that there is no heat at all in the bathroom? Fleas in the armchairs as well as the beds?

      Isabel we imagined as a slattern in a greasy apron, and John we pictured as a very small man with a tiny brain pickled in purest white vinegar. Its sour workings curdled in his many tidy lists and in the exclamatory pitch of his notes to us. ‘May I trust you to look after my rubber plant? It’s been with me since I took my degree.’ ‘You’ll find the stuck blind a deuced bother.’ ‘The draught from the lavatory window can be wretched, I fear, but we take comfort that the air is fresh.’ Even Martin took to cursing him. (These days I find it harder to hate him. I try not to think of John Spalding at all, but when I do it is with uneasiness. And regret.)

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