Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
I was writing a good essay. I would probably get an A. I would go on writing essays and getting A"s because that was what I could do. The people who awarded scholarships, who built universities and libraries, would continue to dribble out money so that I could do it.
But that was not what mattered. That was not going to keep you from damage.
Nina did not stay with Ernie even for one week. One day very soon he would come home and find her gone. Gone her coat and boots, her lovely clothes and the kimono that I had brought over. Gone her taffy hair and her tickling habits and the extra warmth of her skin and the little un-unhs un-unhs as she moved. All gone with no explanation, not a word on paper. Not a word. as she moved. All gone with no explanation, not a word on paper. Not a word.
Ernie was not one, however, to shut himself up and mourn. He said so, when he phoned to tell me the news and check on my availability for Sunday dinner. We climbed the stairs to the Old Chelsea and he commented on the fact that this was our last dinner before the Christmas holidays. He helped me off with my coat and I smelled Nina"s smell. Could it still be on his skin?
No. The source was revealed when he pa.s.sed something to me. Something like a large handkerchief.
"Just put it in your coat pocket," he said.
Not a handkerchief. The texture was st.u.r.dier, with a slight ribbing. An undershirt.
"I don"t want it around," he said, and by his voice you might have thought that it was just underwear itself he did not want around, never mind that it was Nina"s and smelled of Nina.
He ordered the roast beef, and cut and chewed it with his normal efficiency and polite appet.i.te. I gave him the news from home, which as usual at this time of year consisted of the size of snowdrifts, the number of blocked roads, the winter havoc which gave us distinction.
After some time Ernie said, "I went round to his house. There was n.o.body in it."
Whose house?
Her uncle"s, he said. He knew which house because he and Nina had driven past it, after dark. There was n.o.body there now, he said, they had packed up and gone. Her choice, after all.
"It"s a woman"s privilege," he said. "Like they say, it"s a woman"s privilege to change her mind."
His eyes, now that I looked into them, had a dry famished look, and the skin around them was dark and wrinkled. He pursed his mouth, controlling a tremor, then talked on, with an air of trying to see all sides, trying to understand.
"She couldn"t leave her old uncle," he said. "She didn"t have the heart to run out on him. I said we could take him in with us, because I was used to old people, but she said she would sooner make a break. Then I guess she didn"t have the heart to after all."
"Better not to expect too much. Some things I guess you"re just not meant to have."
When I went past the coats on my way to the washroom I got the shirt out of my pocket. I stuffed it in with the used towels.
That day in the library I had been unable to go on with Sir Gawain. I had torn a page from my notebook and picked up my pen and walked out. On the landing outside the library doors there was a pay phone, and beside that hung a phone book. I looked through the phone book and on the piece of paper I had brought I wrote two numbers. They were not phone numbers but addresses.
1648 Henfryn Street.
The other number, which I needed only to check, having seen it both recently and on Christmas card envelopes, was 363 Carlisle.
I walked back through the tunnel to the Arts Building and entered the little shop across from the Common Room. I had enough change in my pocket to buy an envelope and a stamp. I tore off the paper with the Carlisle Street address on it and put that sc.r.a.p into the envelope. I sealed the envelope and on the front of it I wrote the other, longer number with the name of Mr. Purvis and the address on Henfryn Street. All in block capitals. Then I licked and fixed the stamp. I think that in those days it would have been a four-cent stamp.
Just outside the shop was a mail chute. I slipped the envelope into it, there in the wide lower corridor of the Arts Building with people pa.s.sing me on the way to cla.s.ses, on the way to have a smoke and maybe a game of bridge in the Common Room. On their way to deeds they didn"t know they had in them.
Deep-Holes
Sally packed devilled eggs-something she hated to take on a picnic, because they were so messy. Ham sandwiches, crab salad, lemon tarts-also a packing problem. Kool-Aid for the children, a half-size Mumm"s for herself and Alex. She would have just a sip, because she was still nursing. She had bought plastic champagne gla.s.ses for this occasion, but when Alex spotted her handling them he got the real ones-a wedding present-out of the china cabinet. She protested, but he insisted, and took charge of them himself, the wrapping and packing.
"Dad is really a sort of bourgeois gentilhomme," gentilhomme," Kent was to say to Sally some years later when he was in his teens and acing everything at school. So sure of becoming some sort of scientist that he could get away with spouting French around the house. Kent was to say to Sally some years later when he was in his teens and acing everything at school. So sure of becoming some sort of scientist that he could get away with spouting French around the house.
"Don"t make fun of your father," said Sally mechanically.
"I"m not. It"s just that most geologists seem so grubby."
The picnic was in honor of Alex"s publishing his first solo article in Zeitschrift fur Geomorphology Zeitschrift fur Geomorphology. They were going to Osler Bluff because it figured largely in the article, and because Sally and the children had never been there.
They drove a couple of miles down a rough country road-having turned off a decent unpaved country road-and there was a place for cars to park, with no cars in it at present. The sign was roughly painted on a board and needed retouching.
CAUTION. DEEP-HOLES.
Why the hyphen? Sally thought. But who cares?
The entrance to the woods looked quite ordinary and unthreatening. Sally understood, of course, that these woods were on top of a high bluff, and she expected a daunting lookout somewhere. She did not expect to find what had to be skirted almost immediately in front of them.
Deep chambers, really, some as big as a coffin, some much bigger than that, like rooms cut out of the rocks. Corridors zigzagging between them and ferns and mosses growing out of their sides. Not enough greenery, however, to make any sort of cushion over the rubble that seemed so far below. The path went meandering amongst them, over hard earth or shelves of not-quite-level rock.
"Ooee," came the call of the boys, Kent and Peter, nine and six years old, running ahead.
"No tearing around in here," called Alex. "No stupid showing off, you hear me? You understand? Answer me."
They called okay, and he proceeded, carrying the picnic basket and apparently believing that no further fatherly warning was necessary. Sally stumbled along faster than was easy for her, with the diaper bag and the baby Savanna. She couldn"t slow down till she had her sons in sight, saw them trotting along taking sidelong looks into the black chambers, still making exaggerated but discreet noises of horror. She was nearly crying with exhaustion and alarm and some familiar sort of seeping rage.
The outlook did not appear until they had gone along these dirt and rock paths for what seemed to her like half a mile, and was probably a quarter mile. Then there was a brightening, an intrusion of sky, and a halt of her husband ahead. He gave a cry of arrival and display, and the boys hooted with true astonishment. Sally, emerging from the woods, found them lined up on an outcrop above the treetops-above several levels of treetops, as it turned out-with the summer fields spread far below in a shimmer of green and yellow.
As soon as she was put down on her blanket Savanna began to cry.
"Hungry," said Sally.
Alex said, "I thought she got her lunch in the car."
"She did. But she"s hungry again."
She got Savanna latched onto one side and with her free hand unfastened the picnic basket. This was not of course how Alex had planned things. But he gave a good-humored sigh and retrieved the champagne gla.s.ses from their wrappings in his pockets, placing them on their sides on a patch of gra.s.s.
"Glug-glug I"m thirsty too," said Kent, and Peter immediately imitated him.
"Glug-glug me too glug-glug."
"Shut up," said Alex.
Kent said, "Shut up, Peter."
Alex said to Sally, "What did you bring for them to drink?"
"Kool-Aid in the blue jug. And the plastic gla.s.ses in a napkin underneath."
Of course Alex believed that Kent had started that nonsense not because he was really thirsty but because he was crudely excited by the sight of Sally"s breast. He thought it was high time Savanna was transferred to the bottle-she was nearly six months old. And he thought Sally was far too casual about the whole procedure, sometimes going around the kitchen doing things with one hand while the infant guzzled. With Kent sneaking peeks and Peter referring to Mommy"s milk jugs. That came from Kent, Alex said. Kent was a sneak and a troublemaker and the possessor of a dirty mind.
"Well, I have to keep doing those things," said Sally.
"Nursing"s not one of the things you have to do. You could have her on the bottle tomorrow."
"I will soon. Not quite tomorrow, but soon."
But here she is, still letting Savanna and the milk jugs dominate the picnic.
The Kool-Aid is poured, then the champagne. Sally and Alex touch gla.s.ses, with Savanna in their way. Sally has her sip and wishes she could have more. She smiles at Alex to communicate this wish, and maybe the wish that it would be nice to be alone with him. He drinks his champagne, and as if her sip and smile had been enough to soothe him, he starts in on the picnic. She instructs him as to which sandwiches have the mustard he likes and which have the mustard she and Peter like and which are for Kent who likes no mustard at all.
While this is going on, Kent manages to slip in behind her and finish up her champagne. Peter must have seen him do this, but for some peculiar reason he does not tell on him. Sally discovers what has happened sometime later and Alex never knows about it at all, because he soon forgets there was anything left in her gla.s.s and packs it neatly away with his own, while telling the boys about dolomite. They listen, presumably, while they gobble up the sandwiches and ignore the devilled eggs and crab salad and grab the tarts.
Dolomite, Alex says. That is the thick caprock they see. Underneath it is shale, clay turned into rock, very fine, fine grained. Water works through the dolomite and when it gets to the shale it just lies there, it can"t get through the thin layers, the fine grain. So the erosion-that"s the destruction of the dolomite-works and works its way back to the source, eats a channel back, and the caprock develops vertical joints; do they know what vertical means?
"Up and down," says Kent lackadaisically.
"Weak vertical joints, and they get to lean out and then they leave creva.s.ses behind them and after millions of years they break off altogether and go tumbling down the slope."
"I have to go," says Kent.
"Go where?"
"I have to go pee."
"Oh for G.o.d"s sake, go."
"Me too," says Peter.
Sally clamps her mouth down on the automatic injunction to be careful. Alex looks at her and approves of the clamping down. They smile faintly at each other.
Savanna has fallen asleep, her lips slack around the nipple. With the boys out of the way, it"s easier to detach her. Sally can burp her, settle her on her blanket, without worrying about an exposed breast. If Alex finds the sight distasteful-she knows he does, he dislikes the whole conjunction of s.e.x and nourishment, his wife"s breast turned into udders-he can look away, and he does.
As she b.u.t.tons herself up there comes a cry, not sharp but lost, diminishing, and Alex is on his feet before she is, running along the path. Then a louder cry getting closer. It"s Peter.
"Kent falled in. Kent falled in."
His father yells, "I"m coming."
Sally will always believe that she knew at once, even before she heard Peter"s voice she knew what had happened. If any accident happened it would not be to her six-year-old who was brave but not inventive, not a show-off. It would be to Kent. She could see exactly how. Peeing into the hole, balancing on the rim, teasing Peter, teasing himself.
He was alive. He was lying far down in the rubble at the bottom of the creva.s.se, but he was moving his arms, struggling to push himself up. Struggling so feebly. One leg caught under him, the other oddly bent.
"Can you carry the baby?" she said to Peter. "Go back to the picnic and put her down and watch her. That"s my good boy. My good strong boy."
Alex was getting down into the hole, scrambling down, telling Kent to stay still. Getting down in one piece was just possible. It would be getting Kent out that was hard.
Should she run to the car and see if there was a rope? Tie the rope around a tree trunk. Maybe tie it around Kent"s body so she could lift him when Alex raised him up to her.
There wouldn"t be a rope. Why should there be a rope?
Alex had reached him. He bent and lifted him. Kent gave a beseeching scream of pain. Alex draped him around his shoulders, head hanging down on one side and useless legs-one so oddly protruding-on the other. He rose, stumbled a couple of steps, and while still hanging on to Kent dropped onto his knees. He had decided to crawl, and was making his way-Sally could understand this now-to the rubble which partly filled the far end of the creva.s.se. He shouted some order to her without raising his head, and though she could not make out a single word she understood. She got up off her knees-why was she on her knees?-and pushed through some saplings to the rim where the rubble came to within perhaps three feet of the surface. Alex was crawling along with Kent dangling from him like a shot deer.
She called, "I"m here. I"m here."
Kent would have to be raised up by his father, pulled to the solid shelf of rock by his mother. He was a skinny boy who had not yet reached his first spurt of growth, but he seemed heavy as a bag of cement. Sally"s arms could not do it on the first try. She shifted her position, crouching instead of lying flat on her stomach, and with the whole power of her shoulders and chest and with Alex supporting and shoving Kent"s body from behind they heaved him over. Sally fell back with him in her arms and saw his eyes open, roll back in his head as he fainted again.
When Alex had clawed and heaved his way out they collected the other children and drove to the Collingwood Hospital. There seemed to be no internal injury. Both legs were broken. One break was clean, as the doctor put it; the other leg was shattered.
"Kids have to be watched every minute in there," he said to Sally, who had gone in with Kent while Alex managed the other children. "Haven"t they got any warning signs up?"
With Alex, she thought, he would have spoken differently. That"s the way boys are. Turn your back and they"re tearing around where they shouldn"t be. "Boys will be boys."
Her grat.i.tude-to G.o.d, whom she did not believe in, and Alex, whom she did-was so immense that she resented nothing.
It was necessary for Kent to spend the next half year out of school, strung up for the first while in a rented hospital bed. Sally picked up and took back his school a.s.signments, which he completed in no time. Then he was encouraged to go ahead with Extra Projects. One of these was Travels and Explorations-Choose Your Country.
"I want to pick what n.o.body else would pick," he said.
Now Sally told him something she had not told to another soul. She told him how she was attracted to remote islands. Not to the Hawaiian Islands or the Canaries or the Hebrides or the Isles of Greece, where everybody wanted to go, but to small or obscure islands n.o.body talked about and which were seldom if ever visited. Ascension, Tristan da Cunha, Chatham Islands, and Christmas Island and Desolation Island and the Faeroes. She and Kent began to collect every sc.r.a.p of information they could find about these places, not allowing themselves to make anything up. And never telling Alex what they were doing.
"He would think we were off our heads," said Sally.
Desolation Island"s main boast was of a vegetable of great antiquity, a unique cabbage. They imagined worship ceremonies for it, costumes, cabbage parades in its honor.
And before he was born, Sally told her son, she had seen on television the inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha disembarking at Heathrow Airport, having all been evacuated due to a great earthquake on their island. How strange they looked, docile and dignified, like human creatures from another century. They must have adjusted to London, more or less, but when the volcano quieted down they wanted to go home.
When Kent could go back to school things changed, of course, but he still seemed old for his age, patient with Savanna who had grown venturesome and stubborn, and with Peter who always burst into the house as if on a gale of calamity. And he was especially courteous to his father, bringing him the paper that had been rescued from Savanna and carefully refolded, pulling out his chair at dinnertime.
"Honor to the man who saved my life," he might say, or, "Home is the hero."
He said this rather dramatically though not at all sarcastically. Yet it got on Alex"s nerves. Kent got on his nerves, had done so even before the deep-hole drama happened.
"Cut that out," he said, and complained privately to Sally.
"He"s saying you must have loved him, because you rescued him."
"Christ, I"d have rescued anybody."
"Don"t say that in front of him. Please."
When Kent got to high school things improved with his father. He chose to study science. He picked the hard sciences, not the soft earth sciences, and even this roused no opposition in Alex. The harder the better.
But after six months at college Kent disappeared. People who knew him a little-there did not seem to be anyone claiming to be a friend-said that he had talked of going to the West Coast. And a letter came, just as his parents were deciding to go to the police. He was working in a Canadian Tire store in a suburb just north of Toronto. Alex went to see him there, to order him back to his education. But Kent refused, said he was very happy with the job he had now, and was making good money, or soon would be, as he got promoted. Then Sally went to see him, without telling Alex, and found him jolly and ten pounds heavier. He said it was the beer. He had friends now.