Duet. Carol Shields

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      ‘Predictable. That’s it, if you really want to know, Meredith.’

      ‘I don’t know how you can say that.’

      ‘Easy.’ I tell her. ‘This is his tenth novel, you know, and I’ve read them all. Every one. So I’ve a pretty good idea what’s in this one. The formula, you might say, is familiar.’

      ‘What’s it about then?’ her voice pleads, and I don’t dare look at her.

      I shake a blouse vigorously out of the basket. ‘First there’s the waving wheat. He opens, Chapter One, to waving wheat. Admit it, Meredith, Saskatchewan in powder form. Mix with honest rain water for native genre.’

      ‘He grew up there.’

      ‘I know, Meredith, I know. But he doesn’t live there now, does he? He lives here in the east. For twenty years he’s lived in the east. And he isn’t a farmer. He’s a writer. And when he’s not being a writer, he’s being a professor. Don’t forget about that.’

      ‘Roots matter to some people,’ she says in a tone which accuses me of forgetting my own. Nurtured on the jointed avenues of Scarborough, did that count?

      ‘All right,’ I say. ‘Then you move into his storm chapter. Rain, snow, hail, locusts maybe. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s devastating. Echoes of Moses. A punishing storm. To remind them they’re reaching too high or sinning too low. A holocaust and, I grant you this, very well done. Furlong is exceptional on storms.’

      ‘This book really is different. There’s another plot altogether.’

      I rip into a shirt of Richard’s. ‘Then the characters. Three I can be sure of. The Presbyterian Grandmother. And sometimes Grandfather too, staring out from his little chimney corner, all-knowing, all-seeing, but, alas, unheeded. Right, Meredith?’

      Stop, I tell myself. You’re enjoying this. You’re a cruel, cynical woman piercing the pink valentine heart of your own daughter, shut up, shut up.

      She mumbles something I don’t catch.

      ‘Then,’ I say, ‘we’re into the wife. She endures. There’s nothing more to say about her except that she endures. But her husband, rampant with lust, keep your eye on him.’

      ‘You haven’t even read it.’

      ‘Watch the husband, Meredith. Lust will undo him. Furlong will get him for sure with a horde of locusts. Or a limb frozen in the storm and requiring a tense kitchen-table amputation.’

      ‘Influenza,’ Meredith murmurs. ‘But the rest really is different.’

      ‘And we close with more waving wheat. Vibrations from the hearthside saying, if only you’d listened.’

      ‘It’s not supposed to be real life. It’s not biography,’ she says, giving that last word a nasty snap. ‘It’s sort of a symbol of the country. You have to look at it as a kind of extended image. Like in Shakespeare.’

      ‘I’m going to read it,’ I tell her as I fold the ironing board, contrite now. ‘I might even settle down with it tonight.’

      We’ve had the book since August. Furlong brought me one, right off the press one steaming afternoon. Inscribed ‘To Martin and Judith Who Care.’ Beautiful thought, but I cringed reading it, hoping Martin wouldn’t notice. Furlong seems unable to resist going the quarter-inch too far.

      Furlong’s picture on the back of the book is distressingly authorly. One can see evidence of a tally taken, a check list fulfilled. Beard and moustache, of course. White turtleneck exposed at the collar of an overcoat. Tweed and cablestitch juxtaposed, a generation-straddling costume testifying to eclectic respectability.

      A pipe angles from the corner of his mouth! It’s bowl is missing, the outlines lost in the dark shadow of the overcoat, so that for a moment I thought it was a cigarillo or maybe just a fountain pen he was sucking on. But no, on close examination I could see the shine of the bowl. Everything in place.

      The picture is two-colour, white and a sort of olive tone, bleeding off the edges, Time-Life style. Behind him a microcosm of Canada – a fretwork of bare branches and a blur of olive snow, man against nature.

      His eyes are mere slits. Snow glare? The whole expression is nicely in place, a costly membrane, bemused but kindly, academic but gutsy. The photographer has clearly demanded detachment.

      The jacket blurb admits he teaches creative writing in a university, but couched within this apology is the information that he has also swept floors, reported news, herded sheep, a man for all seasons, our friend Furlong.

      Those slit eyes stick with me as I put away the ironing; shirts on hangers, handkerchiefs in drawers, pillowcases in the cupboard. They burn twin candles in my brain, and their nonchalance fails to convince me; I feel the muscular twitch of effort, the attempt to hold, to brave it out.

      Poor Furlong, christened, legend has it, by the first reviewer of his first book who judged him a furlong ahead of all other current novelists. Before that he was known as Red, but I know the guilty secret of his real name: it is Rudyard. His mother let it slip one night at a department sherry party, then covered herself with a flustered apology. We grappled, she and I, in a polite but clumsy exchange, confused and feverish, but I am not a biographer for nothing; I filed it away; I remember the name Rudyard. Rudyard. Rudyard. I think of it quite often, and in a way I love him, Rudyard Eberhardt. More than I could ever love Furlong.

      Meredith slips past me on the stairs. She is on her way to her room and she doesn’t speak; she doesn’t even look at me. What have I done now?

      

      ‘Martin.’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘What are you doing?’

      ‘Just going over some notes.’

      ‘Lecture notes?’

      ‘Yes.’

      It is midnight, the children are sleeping, and we are in bed. Martin is leaning into the circle of light given off by our tiny and feeble bedside lamp, milkglass, a nobbly imitation with a scorched shade.

      ‘Do you know I’ve never heard you give a lecture?’

      ‘You hate Milton.’ He says this gently, absently.

      ‘I know. I know. But I’d like to hear you anyway.’

      ‘You’d be bored stiff.’

      ‘Probably. But I’d like to see what your style is like.’

      ‘Style?’

      ‘You know. Your lecturing style.’

      ‘What do you think it’s like?’ He doesn’t raise his eyes from his pile of papers.

      But I reply thoughtfully. ‘Orderly, I’m sure you’re orderly. Not too theatrical, but here and there a flourish. An understated flourish though.’

      ‘Hummm.’

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