CONTENTS
COVER
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY ALICE MUNRO
DEDICATION
TITLE PAGE
SOMETHING I’VE BEEN MEANING TO TELL YOU
MATERIAL
HOW I MET MY HUSBAND
WALKING ON WATER
FORGIVENESS IN FAMILIES
TELL ME YES OR NO
THE FOUND BOAT
EXECUTIONERS
MARRAKESH
THE SPANISH LADY
WINTER WIND
MEMORIAL
THE OTTAWA VALLEY
COPYRIGHT
Lying Under the Apple Tree
Dear Life
Too Much Happiness
The View from Castle Rock
Runaway
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
The Love of a Good Woman
Selected Stories
Open Secrets
Friend of My Youth
The Progress of Love
The Moons of Jupiter
The Beggar Maid
Lives of Girls and Women
Dance of the Happy Shades
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781473521476
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Published by Vintage 2014
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Copyright © Alice Munro 1974
Alice Munro has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in 1974 by
McGraw-Hill Ryerson
First published in Great Britain in 1985 by
Penguin Books
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
A Penguin Random House Company
www.vintage-books.co.uk
global.penguinrandomhouse.com
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781784700898
FOR SHEILA, JENNY, ANDREA
‘ANYWAY HE KNOWS how to fascinate the women,’ said Et to Char. She could not tell if Char went paler, hearing this, because Char was pale in the first place as anybody could get. She was like a ghost now, with her hair gone white. But still beautiful, she couldn’t lose it.
‘No matter to him the age or the size,’ Et pressed on. ‘It’s natural to him as breathing, I guess. I only hope the poor things aren’t taken in by it.’
‘I wouldn’t worry,’ Char said.
The day before, Et had taken Blaikie Noble up on his invitation to go along on one of his tours and listen to his spiel. Char was asked too, but of course she didn’t go. Blaikie Noble ran a bus. The bottom part of it was painted red and the top part was striped, to give the effect of an awning. On the side was painted: LAKESHORE TOURS, INDIAN GRAVES, LIMESTONE GARDENS, MILLIONAIRE’S MANSION, BLAIKIE NOBLE, DRIVER, GUIDE. Blaikie had a room at the hotel, and he also worked on the grounds, with one helper, cutting grass and clipping hedges and digging the borders. What a comedown, Et had said at the beginning of the summer when they first found out he was back. She and Char had known him in the old days.
So Et found herself squeezed into his bus with a lot of strangers, though before the afternoon was over she had made friends with a number of them and had a couple of promises of jackets needing letting out, as if she didn’t have enough to do already. That was beside the point, the thing on her mind was watching Blaikie.
And what did he have to show? A few mounds with grass growing on them, covering dead Indians, a plot full of odd-shaped, greyish-white, dismal-looking limestone things – far-fetched imitations of plants (there could be the cemetery, if that was what you wanted) – and an old monstrosity of a house built with liquor money. He made the most of it. A historical discourse on the Indians, then a scientific discourse on the Limestone. Et had no way of knowing how much of it was true. Arthur would know. But Arthur wasn’t there; there was nobody there but silly women, hoping to walk beside Blaikie to and from the sights, chat with him over their tea in the Limestone Pavilion, looking forward to having his strong hand under their elbows, the other hand brushing somewhere around the waist, when he helped them down off the bus (‘I’m not a tourist,’ Et whispered sharply when he tried it on her).
He told them the house was haunted. The first Et had ever heard of it, living ten miles away all her life. A woman had killed her husband, the son of the millionaire, at least it was believed she had killed him.
‘How?’ cried some lady, thrilled out of her wits.
‘Ah, the ladies are always anxious to know the means,’ said Blaikie, in a voice like cream, scornful and loving. ‘It was a slow – poison. Or that’s what they said. This is all hearsay, all local gossip.’ (Local my foot, said Et to herself.) ‘She didn’t appreciate his lady friends. The wife didn’t. No.’
He told them the ghost walked up and down in the garden, between two rows of blue spruce. It was not the murdered man who walked, but the wife, regretting. Blaikie smiled ruefully at the busload. At first Et had thought his attentions were all false, an ordinary commercial flirtation, to give them their money’s worth. But gradually she was getting a different notion. He bent to each woman he talked to – it didn’t matter how fat or scrawny or silly she was – as if there was one thing in her he would like to find. He had a gentle and laughing but ultimately serious, narrowing look (was that the look men finally had when they made love, that Et would never see?) that made him seem to want to be a deep-sea diver diving down, down through all the emptiness and cold and wreckage to discover the one thing he had set his heart on, something small and precious, hard to locate, as a ruby maybe on the ocean floor. That was a look she would like to have described to Char. No doubt Char had seen it. But did she know how freely it was being distributed?
Char and Arthur had been planning a trip that summer to see Yellowstone Park and the Grand Canyon, but they did not go. Arthur suffered a series of dizzy spells just at the end of school, and the doctor put him to bed. Several things were the matter with him. He was anaemic, he had an irregular heartbeat, there was trouble with his kidneys. Et worried about leukaemia. She woke at night, worrying.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Char serenely. ‘He’s overtired.’
Arthur got up in the evenings and sat in his dressing gown. Blaikie Noble came to visit. He said his room at the hotel was a hole above the kitchen, they were trying to steam-cook him. It made him appreciate the cool of the porch. They played the games that Arthur loved, schoolteacher’s games. They played a geography game, and they tried to see who could make the most words out of the name Beethoven. Arthur won. He got thirty-four. He was immensely delighted.
‘You’d think you’d found the Holy Grail,’ Char said.
They played ‘Who Am I?’ Each of them had to choose somebody to be – real or imaginary, living or dead, human or animal – and the others had to try to guess it in twenty questions. Et got who Arthur was on the thirteenth question, Sir Galahad.
‘I never thought you’d get it so soon.’
‘I thought back to Char saying about the Holy Grail.’
‘My strength is as the strength of ten,’ said Blaikie Noble, ‘Because my heart is pure. I didn’t know I remembered that.’
‘You should have been King Arthur,’ Et said. ‘King Arthur is your namesake.’
‘I should have. King Arthur was married to the most beautiful woman in the world.’
‘Ha,’ said Et. ‘We all know the end of that story.’
Char went into the living room and played the piano in the dark.
The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la,
Have nothing to do with the case …
When Et arrived, out of breath, that past June, and said, ‘Guess who I saw downtown on the street?’ Char, who was on her knees picking strawberries, said, ‘Blaikie Noble.’
‘You’ve seen him.’
‘No,’ said Char. ‘I just knew. I think I knew by your voice.’
A name that had not been mentioned between them for thirty years. Et was too amazed then to think of the explanation that came to her later. Why did it need to be a surprise to Char? There was a postal service in this country, there had been all along.
‘I asked him about his wife,’ she said. ‘The one with the dolls.’ (As if Char wouldn’t remember.) ‘He says she died a long time ago. Not only that. He married another one and she’s dead. Neither could have been rich. And where is all the Nobles’ money, from the hotel?’
‘We’ll never know,’ said Char, and ate a strawberry.
The hotel had just recently been opened up again. The Nobles had given it up in the twenties and the town had operated it for a while as a hospital. Now some people from Toronto had bought it, renovated the dining room, put in a cocktail lounge, reclaimed the lawns and garden, though the tennis court seemed to be beyond repair. There was a croquet set put out again. People came to stay in the summers, but they were not the sort of people who used to come. Retired couples. Many widows and single ladies. Nobody would have walked a block to see them get off the boat, Et thought. Not that there was a boat any more.
That first time she met Blaikie Noble on the street she had made a point of not being taken aback. He was wearing a creamy suit and his hair, that had always been bleached by the sun, was bleached for good now, white.
‘Blaikie. I knew either it was you or a vanilla ice-cream cone. I bet you don’t know who I am.’
‘You’re Et Desmond and the only thing different about you is you cut off your braids.’ He kissed her forehead, nervy as always.
‘So you’re back visiting old haunts,’ said Et, wondering who had seen that.
‘Not visiting. Haunting.’ He told her then how he had got wind of the hotel opening up again, and how he had been doing this sort of thing, driving tour buses, in various places, in Florida and Banff. And when she asked he told her about his two wives. He never asked was she married, taking for granted she wasn’t. He never asked if Char was, till she told him.
Et remembered the first time she understood that Char was beautiful. She was looking at a picture taken of them, of Char and herself and their brother who was drowned. Et was ten in the picture, Char fourteen and Sandy seven, just a couple of weeks short of all he would ever be. Et was sitting in an armless chair and Char was behind her, arms folded on the chair-back, with Sandy in his sailor suit cross-legged on the floor – or marble terrace, you would think, with the effect made by what had been nothing but a dusty, yellowing screen, but came out in the picture a pillar and draped curtain, a scene of receding poplars and fountains. Char had pinned her front hair up for the picture and was wearing a bright blue, ankle-length silk dress – of course the colour did not show – with complicated black velvet piping. She was smiling slightly, with great composure. She could have been eighteen, she could have been twenty-two. Her beauty was not of the fresh timid sort most often featured on calendars and cigar boxes of the period, but was sharp and delicate, intolerant, challenging.
Et took a long look at this picture and then went and looked at Char, who was in the kitchen. It was washday. The woman who came to help was pulling clothes through the wringer, and their mother was sitting down resting and staring through the screen door (she never got over Sandy, nobody expected her to). Char was starching their father’s collars. He had a tobacco and candy store on the Square and wore a fresh collar every day. Et was prepared to find that some metamorphosis had taken place, as in the background, but it was not so. Char, bending over the starch basin, silent and bad-humoured (she hated washday, the heat and steam and flapping sheets and chugging commotion of the machine – in fact, she was not fond of any kind of housework), showed in her real face the same almost disdainful harmony as in the photograph. This made Et understand, in some not entirely welcome way, that the qualities of legend were real, that they surfaced where and when you least expected. She had almost thought beautiful women were a fictional invention. She and Char would go down to watch the people get off the excursion boat, on Sundays, walking up to the Hotel. So much white it hurt your eyes, the ladies’ dresses and parasols and the men’s summer suits and Panama hats, not to speak of the sun dazzling on the water and the band playing. But looking closely at those ladies, Et found fault. Coarse skin or fat behind or chicken necks or dull nests of hair, probably ratted. Et did not let anything get by her, young as she was. At school she was respected for her self-possession and her sharp tongue. She was the one to tell you if you had been at the blackboard with a hole in your stocking or a ripped hem. She was the one who imitated (but in a safe corner of the schoolyard, out of earshot, always) the teacher reading ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’.
All the same it would have suited her better to have found one of those ladies beautiful, not Char. It would have been more appropriate. More suitable than Char in her wet apron with her cross expression, bent over the starch basin. Et was a person who didn’t like mysteries or extremes.
She didn’t like the bleak notoriety of having Sandy’s drowning attached to her, didn’t like the memory people kept of her father carrying the body up from the beach. She could be seen at twilight, in her gym bloomers, turning cartwheels on the lawn of the stricken house. She made a wry mouth, which nobody saw, one day in the park when Char said, ‘That was my little brother who was drowned.’
The park overlooked the beach. They were standing there with Blaikie Noble, the hotel owner’s son, who said, ‘Those waves can be dangerous. Three or four years ago there was a kid drowned.’
And Char said – to give her credit, she didn’t say it tragically, but almost with amusement, that he should know so little about Mock Hill people – ‘That was my little brother who was drowned.’
Blaikie Noble was not any older than Char – if he had been, he would have been fighting in France – but he had not had to live all his life in Mock Hill. He did not know the real people there as well as he knew the regular guests at his father’s hotel. Every winter he went with his parents to California, on the train. He had seen the Pacific surf. He had pledged allegiance to their flag. His manners were democratic, his skin was tanned. This was at a time when people were not usually tanned as a result of leisure, only work. His hair was bleached by the sun. His good looks were almost as notable as Char’s but his were corrupted by charm, as hers were not.
It was the heyday of Mock Hill and all the other towns around the lakes, of all the hotels which in later years would become Sunshine Camps for city children, T.B. sanatoriums, barracks, for R.A.F. training pilots in World War II. The white paint on the hotel was renewed every spring, hollowed-out logs filled with flowers were set on the railings, pots and flowers swung on chains above them. Croquet sets and wooden swings were set out on the lawns, the tennis court rolled. People who could not afford the hotel, young workingmen, shop clerks and factory girls from the city, stayed in a row of tiny cottages, joined by latticework that hid their garbage pails and communal outhouses, stretching far up the beach. Girls from Mock Hill, if they had mothers to tell them what to do, were told not to walk out there. Nobody told Char what to do, so she walked along the boardwalk in front of them in the glaring afternoon, taking Et with her for company. The cottages had no glass in their windows, they had only propped-up wooden shutters that were closed at night. From the dark holes came one or two indistinct, sad or drunk invitations, that was all. Char’s looks and style did not attract men, perhaps intimidated them. All through high school in Mock Hill she had not one boy friend. Blaikie Noble was her first, if that was what he was.
What did this affair of Char’s and Blaikie Noble’s amount to, in the summer of 1918? Et was never sure. He did not call at the house, at least not more than once or twice. He was kept busy, working at the hotel. Every afternoon he drove an open excursion wagon, with an awning on top of it, up the lakeshore road, taking people to look at the Indian graves and the limestone garden and to glimpse through the trees the Gothic stone mansion, built by a Toronto distiller and known locally as Grog Castle. He was also in charge of the variety show the hotel put on once a week, with a mixture of local talent, recruited guests, and singers and comedians brought in especially for the performance.
Late mornings seemed to be the time he and Char had. ‘Come on,’ Char would say, ‘I have to go downtown,’ and she would in fact pick up the mail and walk part way round the Square before veering off into the park. Soon Blaikie Noble would appear from the side door of the hotel and come bounding up the steep path. Sometimes he would not even bother with the path but jump over the back fence, to amaze them. None of this, the bounding or jumping, was done the way some boy from Mock Hill High School might have done it, awkwardly yet naturally. Blaikie Noble behaved like a man imitating a boy; he mocked himself but was graceful, like an actor.
‘Isn’t he stuck on himself?’ said Et to Char, watching. The position she had taken up right away on Blaikie was that she didn’t like him.
‘Of course he is,’ said Char.
She told Blaikie. ‘Et says you’re stuck on yourself.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I told her you had to be, nobody else is.’
Blaikie didn’t mind. He had taken the position that he liked Et. He would with a quick tug loosen and destroy the arrangement of looped-up braids she wore. He told them things about the concert artists. He told them the Scottish ballad singer was a drunk and wore corsets, that the female impersonator even in his hotel room donned a blue nightgown with feathers, that the lady ventriloquist talked to her dolls – they were named Alphonse and Alicia – as if they were real people, and had them sitting up in bed one on each side of her.
‘How would you know that?’ Char said.
‘I took her up her breakfast.’
‘I thought you had maids to do that.’
‘The morning after the show I do it. That’s when I hand them their pay envelope and give them their walking papers. Some of them would stay all week if you didn’t inform them. She sits up in bed trying to feed them bits of bacon and talking to them and doing them answering back, you’d have a fit if you could see.’
‘She’s cracked I guess,’ Char said peacefully.
One night that summer Et woke up and remembered she had left her pink organdy dress on the line, after handwashing it. She thought she heard rain, just the first few drops. She didn’t, it was just leaves rustling, but she was confused, waking up like that. She thought it was far on in the night, too, but thinking about it later she decided it might have been only around midnight. She got up and went downstairs, turned on the back kitchen light, and let herself out the back door, and standing on the stoop pulled the clothesline towards her. Then almost under her feet, from the grass right beside the stoop, where there was a big lilac bush that had grown and spread, untended, to the size of a tree, two figures lifted themselves, didn’t stand or even sit up, just roused their heads as if from bed, still tangled together some way. The back kitchen light didn’t shine directly out but lit the yard enough to her to see their faces. Blaikie and Char.
She never did get a look at what state their clothes were in, to see how far they had gone or were going. She wouldn’t have wanted to. To see their faces was enough for her. Their mouths were big and swollen, their cheeks flattened, coarsened, their eyes holes. Et left her dress, she fled into the house and into her bed where she surprised herself by falling asleep. Char never said a word about it to her next day. All she said was, ‘I brought your dress in, Et. I thought it might rain.’ As if she had never seen Et out there pulling on the clothesline. Et wondered. She knew if she said, ‘You saw me,’ Char would probably tell her it had been a dream. She let Char think she had been fooled into believing that, if that was what Char was thinking. That way, Et was left knowing more; she was left knowing what Char looked like when she lost her powers, abdicated. Sandy drowned, with green stuff clogging his nostrils, couldn’t look more lost than that.
Before Christmas the news came to Mock Hill that Blaikie Noble was married. He had married the lady ventriloquist, the one with Alphonse and Alicia. Those dolls, who wore evening dress and had sleek hairdos in the style of Vernon and Irene Castle, were more clearly remembered than the lady herself. The only thing people recalled for sure about her was that she could not have been under forty. A nineteen-year-old boy. It was because he had not been brought up like other boys, had been allowed the run of the hotel, taken to California, let mix with all sorts of people. The result was depravity, and could have been predicted.
Char swallowed poison. Or what she thought was poison. It was laundry blueing. The first thing she could reach down from the shelf in the back kitchen. Et came home after school – she had heard the news at noon, from Char herself in fact, who had laughed and said, ‘Wouldn’t that kill you?’ – and she found Char vomiting into the toilet. ‘Go get the Medical Book,’ Char said to her. A terrible involuntary groan came out of her. ‘Read what it says about poison.’ Et went instead to phone the doctor. Char came staggering out of the bathroom holding the bottle of bleach they kept behind the tub. ‘If you don’t put up the phone I’ll drink the whole bottle,’ she said in a harsh whisper. Their mother was presumably asleep behind her closed door.
Et had to hang up the phone and look in the ugly old book where she had read long ago about childbirth and signs of death, and had learned about holding a mirror to the mouth. She was under the mistaken impression that Char had been drinking from the bleach bottle already, so she read all about that. Then she found it was the blueing. Blueing was not in the book, but it seemed the best thing to do would be to induce vomiting, as the book advised for most poisons – Char was at it already, didn’t need to have it induced – and then drink a quart of milk. When Char got the milk down she was sick again.
‘I didn’t do this on account of Blaikie Noble,’ she said between spasms. ‘Don’t you ever think that. I wouldn’t be such a fool. A pervert like him. I did it because I’m sick of living.’
‘What are you sick of about living?’ said Et sensibly when Char had wiped her face.
‘I’m sick of this town and all the stupid people in it and Mother and her dropsy and keeping house and washing sheets every day. I don’t think I’m going to vomit any more. I think I could drink some coffee. It says coffee.’
Et made a pot and Char got out two of the best cups. They began to giggle as they drank.
‘I’m sick of Latin,’ Et said. ‘I’m sick of Algebra. I think I’ll take blueing.’
‘Life is a burden,’ Char said. ‘O Life, where is thy sting?’
‘O Death. O Death, where is thy sting?’
‘Did I say Life? I meant Death. O Death, where is thy sting? Pardon me.’
One afternoon Et was staying with Arthur while Char shopped and changed books at the Library. She wanted to make him an eggnog, and she went searching in Char’s cupboard for the nutmeg. In with the vanilla and the almond extract and the artificial rum she found a small bottle of a strange liquid. Zinc phosphide. She read the label and turned it around in her hands. A rodenticide. Rat poison, that must mean. She had not known Char and Arthur were troubled with rats. They kept a cat, old Tom, asleep now around Arthur’s feet. She unscrewed the top and sniffed at it, to know what it smelled like. Like nothing. Of course. It must taste like nothing too, or it wouldn’t fool the rats.
She put it back where she had found it. She made Arthur his eggnog and took it in and watched him drink it. A slow poison. She remembered that from Blaikie’s foolish story. Arthur drank with an eager noise, like a child, more to please her, she thought, than because he was so pleased himself. He would drink anything you handed him. Naturally.
‘How are you these days, Arthur?’
‘Oh, Et. Some days a bit stronger, and then I seem to slip back. It takes time.’
But there was none gone, the bottle seemed full. What awful nonsense. Like something you read about, Agatha Christie. She would mention it to Char and Char would tell her the reason.
‘Do you want me to read to you?’ she asked Arthur, and he said yes. She sat by the bed and read to him from a book about the Duke of Wellington. He had been reading it by himself but his arms got tired holding it. All those battles, and wars, and terrible things, what did Arthur know about such affairs, why was he so interested? He knew nothing. He did not know why things happened, why people could not behave sensibly. He was too good. He knew about history but not about what went on, in front of his eyes, in his house, anywhere. Et differed from Arthur in knowing that something went on, even if she could not understand why; she differed from him in knowing there were those you could not trust.
She did not say anything to Char after all. Every time she was in the house she tried to make some excuse to be alone in the kitchen, so that she could open the cupboard and stand on tiptoe and look in, to see it over the tops of the other bottles, to see that the level had not gone down. She did think maybe she was going a little strange, as old maids did; this fear of hers was like the absurd and harmless fears young girls sometimes have, that they will jump out a window, or strangle a baby, sitting in its buggy. Though it was not her own acts she was frightened of.
Et looked at Char and Blaikie and Arthur, sitting on the porch, trying to decide if they wanted to go in and put the light on and play cards. She wanted to convince herself of her silliness. Char’s hair, and Blaikie’s too, shone in the dark. Arthur was almost bald now and Et’s own hair was thin and dark. Char and Blaikie seemed to her the same kind of animal – tall, light, powerful, with a dangerous luxuriance. They sat apart but shone out together. Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing. There was Arthur in the rocker with a quilt over his knees, foolish as something that hasn’t grown its final, most necessary, skin. Yet in a way the people like Arthur were the most trouble-making of all.
‘I love my love with an R, because he is ruthless. His name is Rex, and he lives in a – restaurant.’
‘I love my love with an A, because he is absent-minded. His name is Arthur, and he lives in an ashcan.’
‘Why Et,’ Arthur said. ‘I never suspected. But I don’t know if I like about the ashcan.’
‘You would think we were all twelve years old,’ said Char.
After the blueing episode Char became popular. She became involved in the productions of the Amateur Dramatic Society and the Oratorio Society, although she was never much of an actress or a singer. She was always the cold and beautiful heroine in the plays, or the brittle exquisite young society woman. She learned to smoke, because of having to do it on stage. In one play Et never forgot, she was a statue. Or rather, she played a girl who had to pretend to be a statue, so that a young man fell in love with her and later discovered, to his confusion and perhaps disappointment, that she was only human. Char had to stand for eight minutes perfectly still on stage, draped in white crepe and showing the audience her fine indifferent profile. Everybody marvelled at how she did it.
The moving spirit behind the Amateur Dramatic Society and the Oratorio Society was a high school teacher new to Mock Hill, Arthur Comber. He taught Et history in her last year. Everybody said he gave her A’s because he was in love with her sister, but Et knew it was because she worked harder than she ever had before; she learned the History of North America as she had never learned anything in her life. Missouri Compromise. Mackenzie to the Pacific, 1793. She never forgot.
Arthur Comber was thirty or so, with a high bald forehead, a red face in spite of not drinking (that later paled) and a clumsy, excited manner. He knocked a bottle of ink off his desk and permanently stained the History Room floor. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he said, crouching down to the spreading ink, flapping at it with his handkerchief. Et imitated that. ‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ ‘Oh good heavens!’ All his flustery exclamations and miscalculated gestures. Then, when he took her essay at the door, his red face shining with eagerness, giving her work and herself such a welcome, she felt sorry. That was why she worked so hard, she thought, to make up for mocking him.
He had a black scholar’s gown he wore over his suit, to teach in. Even when he wasn’t wearing it, Et could see it on him. Hurrying along the street to one of his innumerable, joyfully undertaken obligations, flapping away at the Oratorio singers, jumping on stage – so the whole floor trembled – to demonstrate something to the actors in a play, he seemed to her to have those long ridiculous crow’s wings flapping after him, to be as different from other men, as absurd yet intriguing, as the priest from Holy Cross. Char made him give up the gown altogether, after they were married. She had heard that he tripped in it, running up the steps of the school. He had gone sprawling. That finished it, she ripped it up.
‘I was afraid one of these days you’d really get hurt.’
But Arthur said, ‘Ah. You thought I looked like a fool.’
Char didn’t deny it, though his eyes on her, his wide smile, were begging her to. Her mouth twitched at the corners, in spite of herself. Contempt. Fury. Et saw, they both saw, a great wave of that go over her before she could smile at him and say, ‘Don’t be silly.’ Then her smile and her eyes were trying to hold on to him, trying to clutch into his goodness (which she saw, as much as anybody else did, but which finally only enraged her, Et believed, like everything else about him, like his sweaty forehead and his galloping optimism), before that boiling wave could come back again, altogether carry her away.
Char had a miscarriage during the first year of her marriage and was sick for a long time afterwards. She was never pregnant again. Et by this time was not living in the house; she had her own place on the Square, but she was there one time on washday, helping Char haul the sheets off the line. Their parents were both dead by that time – their mother had died before and their father after the wedding – but it looked to Et like sheets for two beds.
‘It gives you plenty of wash.’
‘What does?’
‘Changing sheets like you do.’
Et was often there in the evening, playing rummy with Arthur while Char, in the other room, picked at the piano in the dark. Or talking and reading library books with Char, while Arthur marked his papers. Arthur walked her home. ‘Why do you have to go off and live by yourself anyway?’ he scolded her. ‘You ought to come back and live with us.’
‘Three’s a crowd.’
‘It wouldn’t be for long. Some man is going to come along some day and fall hard.’
‘If he was such a fool as to do that I’d never fall for him, we’d be back where we started.’
‘I was a fool that fell for Char, and she ended up having me.’
Just the way he said her name indicated that Char was above, outside, all ordinary considerations – a marvel, a mystery. No one could hope to solve her, they were lucky just being allowed to contemplate her. Et was on the verge of saying, ‘She swallowed blueing once over a man that wouldn’t have her,’ but she thought what would be the good of it, Char would only seem more splendid to him, like a heroine out of Shakespeare. He squeezed Et’s waist as if to stress their companionable puzzlement, involuntary obeisance, before her sister. She felt afterwards the bumpy pressure of his fingers as if they had left dents just above where her skirt fastened. It had felt like somebody absent-mindedly trying out the keys of a piano.
Et had set up in the dressmaking business. She had a long narrow room on the Square, once a shop, where she did all her fitting, sewing, cutting, pressing and, behind a curtain, her sleeping and cooking. She could lie in bed and look at the squares of pressed tin on her ceiling, their flower pattern, all her own. Arthur had not liked her taking up dressmaking because he thought she was too smart for it. All the hard work she had done in History had given him an exaggerated idea of her brains. ‘Besides,’ she told him, ‘it takes more brains to cut and fit, if you do it right, than to teach people about the War of 1812. Because, once you learn that, it’s learned and isn’t going to change you. Whereas every article of clothing you make is an entirely new proposition.’
‘Still it’s a surprise,’ said Arthur, ‘to see the way you settle down.’
It surprised everybody, but not Et herself. She made the change easily, from a girl turning cartwheels to a town fixture. She drove the other dressmakers out of business. They had been meek, unimportant creatures anyway, going around to people’s houses, sewing in back rooms and being grateful for meals. Only one serious rival appeared in all Et’s years, and that was a Finnish woman who called herself a designer. Some people gave her a try, because people are never satisfied, but it soon came out she was all style and no fit. Et never mentioned her, she let people find out for themselves; but afterwards, when this woman had left town and gone to Toronto – where, from what Et had seen on the streets, nobody knew a good fit from a bad – Et did not restrain herself. She would say to a customer she was fitting, ‘I see you’re still wearing that herringbone my foreigner friend tacked together for you. I saw you on the street.’
‘Oh, I know,’ the woman would say. ‘But I do have to wear it out.’
‘You can’t see yourself from behind anyway, what’s the difference.’
Customers took this kind of thing from Et, came to expect it, even. She’s a terror, they said about her, Et’s a terror. She had them at a disadvantage, she had them in their slips and corsets. Ladies who looked quite firm and powerful, outside, were here immobilized, apologetic, exposing such trembly, meek-looking thighs squeezed together by corsets, such long sad breast creases, bellies blown up and torn by children and operations.
Et always closed her front curtains tight, pinning the crack.
‘That’s to keep the men from peeking.’
Ladies laughed nervously.
‘That’s to keep Jimmy Saunders from stumping over to get an eyeful.’
Jimmy Saunders was a World War I veteran who had a little shop next to Et’s, harness and leather goods.
‘Oh, Et. Jimmy Saunders has a wooden leg.’
‘He hasn’t got wooden eyes. Or anything else that I know of.’
‘Et you’re terrible.’
Et kept Char beautifully dressed. The two steadiest criticisms of Char, in Mock Hill, were that she dressed too elegantly, and that she smoked. It was because she was a teacher’s wife that she should have refrained from doing either of these things, but Arthur of course let her do anything she liked, even buying her a cigarette holder so she could look like a lady in a magazine. She smoked at a high school dance, and wore a backless satin evening dress, and danced with a boy who had got a high school girl pregnant, and it was all the same to Arthur. He did not get to be Principal. Twice the school board passed him over and brought in somebody from outside, and when they finally gave him the job, in 1942, it was only temporarily and because so many teachers were away at war.
Char fought hard all these years to keep her figure. Nobody but Et and Arthur knew what effort that cost her. Nobody but Et knew it all. Both of their parents had been heavy, and Char had inherited the tendency, though Et was always as thin as a stick. Char did exercises and drank a glass of warm water before every meal. But sometimes she went on eating binges. Et had known her to eat a dozen cream puffs one after the other, a pound of peanut brittle, or a whole lemon meringue pie. Then pale and horrified she took down Epsom salts, three or four or five times the prescribed amount. For two or three days she would be sick, dehydrated, purging her sins, as Et said. During these periods she could not look at food. Et would have to come and cook Arthur’s supper. Arthur did not know about the pie or the peanut brittle or whatever it was, or about the Epsom salts. He thought she had gained a pound or two and was going through a fanatical phase of dieting. He worried about her.
‘What is the difference, what does it matter?’ he would say to Et. ‘She would still be beautiful.’
‘She won’t do herself any harm,’ said Et, enjoying her food, and glad to see that worry hadn’t put him off his. She always made him good suppers.
It was the week before the Labour Day weekend. Blaikie had gone to Toronto, for a day or two he said.
‘It’s quiet without him,’ said Arthur.
‘I never noticed he was such a conversationalist,’ Et said.
‘I only mean in the way that you get used to somebody.’
‘Maybe we ought to get unused to him,’ said Et.
Arthur was unhappy. He was not going back to the school; he had obtained a leave of absence until after Christmas. Nobody believed he would go back then.
‘I suppose he has his own plans for the winter,’ he said.
‘He may have his own plans for right now. You know I have my customers from the hotel. I have my friends. Ever since I went on that excursion, I hear things.’
She never knew where she got the inspiration to say what she said, where it came from. She had not planned it at all, yet it came so easily, believably.
‘I hear he’s taken up with a well-to-do woman down at the hotel.’
Arthur was the one to take an interest, not Char.
‘A widow?’
‘Twice, I believe. The same as he is. And she has the money from both. It’s been suspected for some time and she was talking about it openly. He never said anything, though. He never said anything to you, did he, Char?’
‘No,’ said Char.
‘I heard this afternoon that now he’s gone, and she’s gone. It wouldn’t be the first time he pulled something like this. Char and I remember.’
Then Arthur wanted to know what she meant and she told him the story of the lady ventriloquist, remembering even the names of the dolls, though of course she left out all about Char. Char sat through this, even contributing a bit.
‘They might come back but my guess is they’d be embarrassed. He’d be embarrassed. He’d be embarrassed to come here, anyway.’
‘Why?’ said Arthur, who had cheered up a little through the ventriloquist story. ‘We never set down any rule against a man getting married.’
Char got up and went into the house. After a while they heard the sound of the piano.
The question often crossed Et’s mind in later years – what did she mean to do about this story when Blaikie got back? For she had no reason to believe he would not come back. The answer was that she had not made any plans at all. She had not planned anything. She supposed she might have wanted to make trouble between him and Char – make Char pick a fight with him, her suspicions roused even if rumours had not been borne out, make Char read what he might do again in the light of what he had done before. She did not know what she wanted. Only to throw things into confusion, for she believed then that somebody had to, before it was too late.
Arthur made as good a recovery as could be expected at his age, he went back to teaching History to the senior classes, working half-days until it was time for him to retire. Et kept up her own place on the Square and tried to get up and do some cooking and cleaning for Arthur, as well. Finally, after he retired, she moved back into the house, keeping the other place only for business purposes. ‘Let people jaw all they like,’ she said. ‘At our age.’
Arthur lived on and on, though he was frail and slow. He walked down to the Square once a day, dropped in on Et, went and sat in the park. The hotel closed down and was sold again. There was a story that it was going to be opened up and used as a rehabilitation centre for drug addicts, but the town got up a petition and that fell through. Eventually it was torn down.
Et’s eyesight was not as good as it used to be, she had to slow down. She had to turn people away. Still she worked, every day. In the evenings Arthur watched television or read, but she sat out on the porch, in the warm weather, or in the dining room in winter, rocking and resting her eyes. She came and watched the news with him, and made him his hot drink, cocoa or tea.
There was no trace of the bottle. Et went and looked in the cupboard as soon as she could – having run to the house in response to Arthur’s early morning call, and found the doctor, old McClain, coming in at the same time. She ran out and looked in the garbage, but she never found it. Could Char have found the time to bury it? She was lying on the bed, fully and nicely dressed, her hair piled up. There was no fuss about the cause of death as there is in stories. She had complained of weakness to Arthur the night before, after Et had gone, she had said she thought she was getting the flu. So the old doctor said heart, and let it go. Nor could Et ever know. Would what was in that bottle leave a body undisfigured, as Char’s was? Perhaps what was in the bottle was not what it said. She was not even sure that it had been there that last evening, she had been too carried away with what she was saying to go and look, as she usually did. Perhaps it had been thrown out earlier and Char had taken something else, pills maybe. Perhaps it really was her heart. All that purging would have weakened anybody’s heart.
Her funeral was on Labour Day and Blaikie Noble came, cutting out his bus tour. Arthur in his grief had forgotten about Et’s story, was not surprised to see Blaikie there. He had come back to Mock Hill on the same day Char was found. A few hours too late, like some story. Et in her natural confusion could not remember what it was. Romeo and Juliet, she thought later. But Blaikie of course did not do away with himself afterwards, he went back to Toronto. For a year or two he sent Christmas cards, then was not heard of any more. Et would not be surprised if her story of his marrying had not come true in the end. Only her timing was mistaken.