The Silence on the Shore. Hugh Garner

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СКАЧАТЬ fixed the place up nice, Sophy.”

      Sophia shrugged.

      “A friend of mine is in your hospital,” Grace said. “Mrs. Lillian O’Brien. She goes to the wrasslin’ every Thursday night.”

      “Oh,” said Sophia noncommittally.

      “She was taken there yesterday. Gall bladder,” Grace said. “You must have admitted her if you work in the admitting office.”

      “I’m not the only one in the office,” Sophia said. “I may have booked her in and I may not.”

      “She’s a little Irish woman lives in the west end. Always wears a blue suit and flowered hat this weather.”

      “I don’t remember her,” Sophia said impatiently. She glanced towards the kitchenette. “My dinner will be burning, Mrs. Hill. I’ll have to go now.”

      “I just wanted to see how you were getting along,” Grace said as the door was closed gently in her face.

      She cursed the younger woman under her breath. She’d lived there six months and hadn’t yet invited Grace into her room, the lying Russian slut. Pretending she was better than other people, her and her friend Lotta going to the ballet and concerts and stuff. Making out she was the artistic type and worked in the office of the West End Hospital, when Grace had phoned there and found out she worked in the hospital laundry. Grace had kept this bit of intelligence to herself to be used when it was needed. Sophia said she was a Polack too, though Grace was sure she was a Russian. But who’d want to claim to be a Polack if they weren’t? Anyways, she had lied about her job so there was no reason to believe she wouldn’t lie about her nationality. You couldn’t trust either a Polack or a Russian anyhow.

      Grace returned to her own quarters, took a dime from her purse, and returned to the pay telephone in the hall outside her door. She dialed the number of her girl friend, a German widow named Martha Greber.

      “Hello, Mart’?” she asked.

      “Yes.... Yes it will be good.... King Koenig will kill that dirty American bum.... I just have to put on my coat.... Make sure they’re near the dressing-room ramp.... Was?… Ja …” As she lapsed into German, Grace lowered her voice through habit. Because the call cost money she was reluctant to hang up too soon, and she talked for fifteen minutes about the uninteresting events that had bridged the ennui of her day.

      When Walter Fowler entered the house Grace gave him a quick nod from her position at the top of the cellar stairs. He had fallen considerably in her estimation since Lightfoot had dismissed him so quickly. Apparently he wasn’t as important as she had first believed him to be.

      CHAPTER THREE

      When Walter entered his office the next morning he was almost surprised to find that his old mahogany desk, piled lightly with unanswered mail and unsolicited brochures, retained its familiarity. His small office, crowded as it was with the paper debris of five years of editorship, seemed to reflect more of himself than either the rooming house or the house in suburbia had.

      The tall old-fashioned French windows looked out over the part of the city in which he had spent his boyhood, its compact neighbourliness destroyed by its explosive post-war growth. Though it was only a quarter to ten the government liquor store across the street had thee or four customers lounging outside, waiting out the fifteen minutes before it would open. The insurance company’s weather beacon, a couple of blocks to the west on University Avenue, showed fair weather and a rising temperature.

      Miss Everleigh, his secretary, entered the office with a musical “Good morning!” and placed a small pile of mail on his desk.

      He turned from the window and smiled at her. “Good morning, Jane. You’re in a good humour today.”

      “Who wouldn’t be except the grouches? Don’t you feel spring in the air, Mr. Fowler?”

      “Yes, I do. You’re right, I moved into a downtown apartment yesterday and this morning I walked to work, through the university campus and down University Avenue to the office. It felt great to be able to walk to work again.”

      A small sympathetic frown had crossed her face when he mentioned moving, but when he finished she had replaced it with a smile. Jane knew more about his breakup with his wife and family than he thought, but she had always refrained from mentioning it to him. She sensed that it was not the completely happy event he tried to make out, even to himself. And she had noticed his hesitation when he mentioned his new apartment. What street had he told her yesterday? Adford Road? She knew there were no apartment buildings on it yet.

      “Perhaps you’d better give me your new phone number.”

      “Yes. Sure.” He gave an embarrassed laugh. “I forgot to jot it down,” he said. He paused. “As a matter of fact, Jane, I’ve moved into a small place” — still unable to say “furnished room” — “and I share the phone with the other tenants of the house. I’ll jot the number down tonight and give it to you in the morning.”

      “Fine, Mr. Fowler,” she answered smiling, rejoicing in his victory over his pride. “I’ll send your new address and phone number down to Personnel tomorrow.”

      When she had left he suddenly thought of a couple of wonderful sentences for his novel. Jason, remembering that dignity was a defence, reassessed his relationship with the older man. He saw now that Major Pawley’s dignity was not innate, but was a cloak donned by his superior to hide his abject terror.

      He should put that down somewhere. But even as he reached for a sheet of blank paper he changed his mind. To hell with it; it was crappy writing. Ph.D writing. What was he going to write — a novel or an esoteric criticism for the little magazines? He’d work on Lead Them Through the Deep as soon as he got back to his room tonight.

      He picked up an interdepartmental bulletin Jane had left on his desk and glanced at the usual bumf about staff changes, retirement and illnesses among those employed by Matheson-Corbett’s ten or twelve trade magazines. He was about to throw it in his wastebasket when his eye was arrested by an item at the bottom of the page. It said that G. G. MacFarlane, associate editor of Living, was retiring at the end of the month for reasons of health, after thirty-one years with the company. His successor would be Robert Clauser, currently editor of the trade magazine Motel and Motor Court Monthly.

      Clauser! How could they promote that ex-bookkeeper to a job on the company’s biggest magazine? That was the unfairness of all large corporations, the promotion of people whose names came up through the sleazy machinations of office politics, with no regard for the brushing aside of others more fitted for the job. Why, Clauser couldn’t write a decent English paragraph, and now he had been promoted to a job that was largely a writing one.

      Moving on to Living, the company’s prestige consumer magazine, had been Walter’s ambition since he joined the company. His newspaper background and the articles he had sold to magazines during a brief fling at freelance writing had shown him that the writing end of the magazine business was his particular forte.

      Apparently the top brass didn’t agree with him. For five years he had been forgotten in this little corporate cul-de-sac as editor of Real Estate News, a stodgy little sheet read only by builders, housing contractors, and mortgage houses. His only “public” consisted of these people and a handful of new house owners and prospective house buyers who had been inveigled into buying a subscription.

      Walter СКАЧАТЬ