Duet. Carol Shields

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СКАЧАТЬ is notoriously unquotable, you know.’ He looks up. I am in my yellow tulip nightgown, a birthday present from my sister Charleen.

      I ask, ‘What do you mean he’s unquotable. The greatest master of the English language unquotable?’

      ‘Can you think of anything he ever said?’

      ‘No. I can’t. Not a thing. Not at this hour anyway.’

      ‘There you are.’

      ‘Wasn’t there something like tripping the light fantastic?’

      ‘Uh huh.’

      ‘It’s hard to see why they bother teaching him then. If you can’t even remember anything he wrote.’

      ‘Memorable phrases aren’t everything.’

      ‘Maybe Milton should just be phased out.’

      ‘Could be.’ I have lost him again.

      ‘Actually, Martin, I did hear you lecture once.’

      ‘You did? When was that?’

      ‘Remember last year. No, the year before last, the year after England. When I was taking Furlong’s course in creative writing.’

      ‘Oh yes.’ He is scribbling in the margin.

      ‘Well, on my way to the seminar room one day I was walking past a blank door on the third floor of the Arts Building.’

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘Through the door there was a sound coming. A familiar sound, all muffled through the wood. You know how thick those doors are. If it had been anyone else I wouldn’t even have heard it.’

      ‘And it was me.’

      ‘It was you. And it’s a funny thing, I couldn’t hear a word you were saying. It was all too muffled. Just the rise and fall of your voice. And I suppose some sort of recognizable tonal quality. But it was mainly the rise and fall, the rise and fall. It was your voice, Martin. There wasn’t a notice on the door saying it was you in there teaching Milton, but I was sure.’

      ‘You should have come in.’

      ‘I was on my way to Furlong’s class. And besides I wouldn’t have. I don’t know why, but I never would have come in.’

      ‘I’d better just check these notes over once more.’

      ‘Actually, Martin, it was eerie. Your voice coming through the wood like that, rising and falling, rising and falling.’

      ‘My God, Judith, you make me sound like some kind of drone.’

      ‘It’s something like handwriting.’ I propped myself up on one elbow. ‘Did you know that it’s almost impossible to fake your handwriting? You can slant it backhand or straight up and down and put in endless curlicues, but the giveaway is the proportion of the tall letters to the size of the small ones. It’s individual like fingerprints. Like your voice. The rhythm is personal, rising and falling. It was you.’

      ‘Christ, Judith, let me get this done so I can get some sleep.’

      ‘The funny thing is, Martin, that even when I was absolutely certain, I had the oddest sensation that I didn’t know you at all. As though you were a stranger, someone I’d never met before.’

      ‘Really?’ He reaches for my breasts under the yellow nylon.

      ‘You were a stranger. Of course, I realized it was just the novelty of the viewpoint. Coming across you unexpectedly. In a different role, really. It was just seeing you from another perspective.’

      ‘Why don’t we just make love?’

      But I am still in a contemplative frame of mind. ‘Did you ever think of what that expression means? Making love?’

      ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’

      ‘Milton, eh?’

      ‘Uh huh.’

      ‘Well, that’s quotable.’

      ‘Fairly.’

      ‘Martin. Before you turn out the light, there’s a question I’ve been wanting to ask you for weeks.’

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘I don’t want you to think I’m prying or anything.

      ‘Who would ever suspect you of a thing like that?’ His tone is only slightly mocking.

      ‘But I notice things and sometimes I wonder.’

      His hand rests on the lamp switch. Judith, just shoot.’

      ‘I was wondering, I was just wondering if you were really happy teaching Milton year after year?’

      The light goes out, and we fall into our familiar private geometry, the friendly grazing of skin, the circling, circling. The walls tilt in; the darkness presses, but far away I am remembering two things. First, that Martin hasn’t answered my question. And second – the question I have asked him – it wasn’t the question I had meant to ask at all.

      

      I spend one wet fall afternoon at the library researching Susanna Moodie, making notes, filling in the gaps.

      This place is a scholarly retreat, high up overlooking the river, and the reading room is large and handsome. Even on a dark day it is fairly bright. There are rows of evenly spaced oak tables, and here and there groupings of leather armchairs where no one ever sits. The people around me are bent over enormous books, books so heavy that a library assistant delivers them on wheeled trolleys. They turn the pages slowly, and sometimes I see their heads bobbing in silent confirmation to the print. Unlike me, they have the appearance of serious scholars; distanced from their crisp stacks of notes, they are purposeful, industrious, admirable.

      What I am doing is common, snoopy, vulgar; reading the junky old novelettes and serialized articles of Susanna Moodie; catlike I wait for her to lose her grip. And though she is careful, artfully careful, I am finding gold. The bridal bed she mentions in her story ‘The Miss Greens,’ a hint of sexuality, hurray. Her democratic posture slipping in a book review in the Victoria Magazine, get it down, get it down. Her fear of ugliness. And today I find something altogether unsavoury – the way in which she dwells on the mutilated body of a young pioneer mother who is killed by a panther. She skirts the dreadful sight, but she is really circling in, moving around and around it, horrified, but hoping for one more view. Yes, Susanna, it must be true, you are crazy, crazy.

      Susanna Strickland Moodie 1803-1885. Gentle English upbringing, gracious country house, large and literary family, privately tutored at home, an early scribbler of stories. Later to emerge in a small way in London reform circles, a meeting with a Lieutenant Moodie in a friend’s drawing-room, marriage, pregnancy, birth, emigration, all in rapid order. Then more children, poverty, struggle, writing, writing by lamplight, a rag dipped into lard for a wick, writing to pay off debts and buy flour. Then burying her husband and going senile, little wonder, СКАЧАТЬ