The Silence on the Shore. Hugh Garner

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      She hurried into the kitchenette, her fear for the browning veal making her ignore the noise, and pulled the pan from the hot plate. Then over the meat she poured a mixture of flour, soup stock, sour cream, salt and pepper, mixing it with the meat, onions, and mushrooms. She turned the heat low beneath it, covered it with a plate, and left it to simmer. From the other side of the wallboard she heard the sound of a heavy bag being scraped along the floor, then dropped upon the bed. She poured a glass of tea and carried it back with her into the larger room.

      Lotta was getting married in August. Yes, Lotta who was six or seven years older than she was. To a Yugoslav contractor, a widower whose daughter had been a pupil of hers for the past three years. Sophia walked over to the dressing table mirror and stared at herself critically. What was wrong with her?

      She saw the long straight black hair that was still pulled into a ballerina’s bun; the bright blue eyes now edged with delicate wrinkles; the straight-set mouth that needed to be crushed or laughed into softness, and the stern chin and cheeks still smooth and youthful looking. Once she had been pretty, with a prettiness that would have flowered into beauty in her twenties, if her twentieth birthday had not come in 1939. In a few more years — this she was sure of — she would have been Tamara Karlova, a name known far beyond the city of Lodz, or even the province, or even Poland itself. Tamara Karlova, the nom-de-danse she had chosen when still a little girl at the convent school. The mere repeating of it brought a mist to her eyes, which she blinked away impatiently.

      Once more back in the kitchenette she could hear the whistling again, muted now by a closed closet door. He must have heard her cooking and realized that their noisy intimacy was a two-way street. She was torn between the hope that he would let her hear him at times and the fervent wish that he would keep the door shut as a barrier between them. Later, after she had eaten her dinner and washed the dishes, she dressed carefully for her visit to the amateur ballet presentation. From upstairs came the sound of Paul Laramée playing on the floor with his children. Then she heard the door to the next room open, close, and the sound of a key being turned in the lock. Still whistling, its new tenant ran down the stairs.

      Walking along the upper hall Sophia noticed that the light was still on in the room next door, but the room at the rear and the bathroom were in darkness in subservience to Grace Hill’s hand-printed orders. The whistler, whoever he was, had chosen to ignore the orders of the landlady, unless by some inexplicable chance he had not been given them yet.

      The street was in the midst of the spring calm that came every evening between the rush hour and the switching on of the street lights. The cars on Bloor were no longer travelling in packs, or in convoy, but singly, as if they had lost their way and with it their rush-hour arrogance and haste. A small boy ran up the opposite sidewalk yowling his greeting to the approaching night, his small quick feet jumping the sidewalk cracks and carrying him up and down the steep fronts of the raised lawns. The lights in the upper floors of the houses gave them away to the passers-by as light housekeeping rooms, some hung with lines of wash, some revealing an ironing cord hanging down from a ceiling fixture, others merely stark with the light from unshaded bulbs.

      A short stocky man was walking up the sidewalk towards her, carrying a folded newspaper under his left arm. He was well dressed but wore no hat, his thinning hair parted at the side. He had seen her coming, and he stared at her for a moment before letting his eyes wander from her face. She knew who he was, the man who had moved into the back room a couple of weeks before, and had spoken to her that time in the hallway.

      It was too late to cross the street and avoid a meeting so she walked on, tense, hoping he would pass by without speaking. She pretended there was something that had caught her interest in an upstairs window farther down the street, but conscious of his approach through the corner of her eye. Suddenly they were only a step or two apart, and she glanced at him without giving a sign of recognition.

      As he moved aside to let her pass he smiled and said, “Good evening.”

      Once again he had caught her unawares. She realized she couldn’t ignore him a second time, and make every consequent meeting an embarrassing clash of wills or wits. She paused, turned her head, and said, “Oh, hello. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you.”

      “It’s all right. I live at one-twenty. I didn’t expect you to recognize me; it was pretty dark in the hallway that other time.”

      “Yes,” she answered, afraid he might try to lengthen their greetings into a conversation.

      “It’s going to be a swell night,” he said, turning to walk on.

      “Yes, isn’t it? Good night.”

      At the corner of the cross street north of Bloor she looked around. He was just turning up the front walk of the rooming house.

      When Walter had seen the woman from the front room coaling towards him he had been of two minds whether to speak to her or not. One of the things he hated most was to have a greeting ignored, especially when it meant little or nothing to him. It was the one way in which a mental or social inferior could best a person more polite than himself, and it always left him angry and critical of his own politeness.

      As they had drawn closer together, however, he had decided to speak, for a second snub would have left him able to ignore her completely from then on. Her answering his greeting had been as unexpected as it had been welcome. Suddenly he had felt a boyish urge to escape, to give himself time to think, to arrange his new feelings about her. He had murmured, “It’s going to be a swell night,” the sort of trite thing he would say. He could always rely on himself to end up the loser when it came to a good-looking woman.

      When he reached his room he opened the window, took off his jacket and necktie, put on a pair of battered slippers, and sat down to read the paper. Later on he would do some work on his novel, writing in longhand on the paper he had brought home from the office.

      He had read his favourite columnists while having supper, so he concentrated on the “human interest” stories about a woman having a baby in a taxi, a bridegroom in London who wished to share his wife with his brother, a man who was crossing the continent on horseback, and a list of the various coins, washers, and slugs that had turned up in the local parking metres.

      He put down the paper and thought of the woman in the front room. Her presence in the house excited him, and for a moment or two he gave in to a lascivious fantasy involving them both. Meeting such a woman in the intimate purlieus of a rooming house was one of the dreams he had entertained since breaking up with his wife. Such a possibility, approximating those of his younger days, had been one of his reasons for moving into a rooming house again.

      There was a loud knocking on the door of the room next to his. After a short pause it came again, even louder and more insistent this time. Walter got up and stuck his head into the hallway. Mrs. Hill was standing there, her fat face working with anger and indignation.

      “Is there anything wrong, Mrs. Hill?”

      “Only this guy who has gone out with his light on,” she said.

      Walter kept from smiling. “Maybe he’s asleep,” he said.

      “If he can’t hear me knocking he must be dead,” she answered, attacking the door once again. “He’s gone out, I’m sure.”

      She hunted for a key on the ring she wore attached to her belt, found it СКАЧАТЬ