My refuge was Charlie. I did my best to coach him in the things that were so repugnant to him, and the following autumn I had my reward, for he scraped through in all the necessary tests, and miraculously a letter came from Colborne saying that he had won the school’s top history prize. That was something to dangle before any university to which he applied.
When mid-August came I had to return to Sioux Lookout. My parents had been very patient, and I knew they wanted some time with me before I returned to Toronto to enter the university. The day before I went, Charlie gave me his copy of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici.
“You’ve got to read it,” he said. “And you’ve got to reread it. It’s absolutely your thing, and you’ve got to be a doctor like old Browne. What I want for you—what I pray for as your experience of God’s blessing—is that like Browne you may ‘assume the honourable style of Christian.’ Do try.”
In the emotion of parting, what could I say? “I’ll try, Charlie.”
I said “I really will.” And at that time I meant it, as one means so many things when one is young which take on a very different colour as one grows old.
So—off I went, back to Sioux Lookout, and during the succeeding six years I saw Brocky infrequently, and Charlie not at all, for it is thus that the intensities of youth are reshaped and defused by the press of circumstances.
II
My intention was merely to write a few notes, to separate what I thought it prudent to tell Esme from what I know about Charlie and the affair at St. Aidan’s, but I seem to be writing an extended memoir. Shall I go on? Yes, for a while, at least, because Esme promises to return to the attack as soon as she has completed some work she has in hand that calls for more immediate completion.
Why do I say “the attack”? Esme is not attacking me. She is discreet in so far as the work of a newspaper interviewer permits. What do I feel, in my innermost heart, she is attacking? Charlie, of course, but why should I defend Charlie? Loyalty to friendship that was intimate in the beginning, but which lost that kindly intimacy as our lives progressed?
In my work I often have to deal with patients who are compulsively retentive; they protect what needs no protection, withhold information which is of no importance, and delight in saying “No.” Am I becoming one of those? What is it about Esme that makes me defensive? Her youth? Her undeniable attraction? The fact that she has now married my godson, Conor Gilmartin, and, however absurd it seems, I feel that she is an intruder into the life of the Gilmartins, in which I have a clear and also a shadowy part? Am I becoming constipated, like my other retentives? I believe I am. Should I take the advice I give them and, instead of resorting to cathartics and blasters of one sort and another, search my mind for the origin of my undue retention? That is what I would advise them to do. Physician, heal thyself.
I am writing in my Case Book, a handsome leather-bound volume I bought a long time ago, when I first went into private practice, thinking to fill it with a record of my work. Fool! I soon learned that the modern physician must keep a card index and, nowadays, a computer, if he can cope with one, or afford a secretary who understands the latest technology. My secretary and nurse, Mrs. Christofferson, would have nothing to do with a hand-written record. So my handsome Case Book has only two or three old entries, and the pages beyond are virgin. But it shall not be wasted. I shall become my own Case. Physician, etc. Take your own medicine.
(1)
Five years at Colborne had done much to make me superficially a city person and, in my own estimation, a sophisticate. But Sioux Lookout continued to be my Eden, my place of origin in the spirit as well as in the flesh. As I made the journey from Salterton after that revealing and enlarging summer I may have felt patronizing toward Sioux Lookout, as a place that had nothing more to teach me. I felt myself to be an adult.
It seems to me that one matures by fits and starts, not by gradual process. At Colborne I had begun as a New Boy, as green as every New Boy was, and at the end of five years I was a Steward—the highest level of prefect—and editor of the college magazine, a hardened smoker (five and six cigarettes a day, when the pressure of editorial work was intense), a member of the Curfew Club, and altogether a swell and a notable, held in awe by New Boys. An exemplary fag-master: helped with homework, repressed cheek. Within the confines of the school I was a person to be reckoned with.
The Salterton summer reduced me, in some respects, to being a New Boy again. In the estimation of parents, for instance.
I was astonished by the coolness of the Iredale household. Coolness, let me insist; there was nothing cold about it. But Charlie and his parents seemed almost to be equals. His mother was polite to him. Polite to me, too. She always called me “Hullah,” in the school way. My mother was polite toward me, of course, but in quite a different way; she called me Jon, and it would never have occurred to her to defer to my opinion about anything; she tended to order me about, not in an overtly bossy way, but as if I were still ten years old. I do not think I was ever more than fourteen, in my mother’s reckoning. Charlie’s allowance was paid by his father into a bank, where Charlie had an account, and he could spend it as he pleased. It was a much bigger allowance than mine, although I am sure my parents were far more affluent than Charlie’s. Charlie bought his own clothes, and was never questioned about the style or the cut, whereas my clothes were still supposedly bought under the eye of my father, but in fact chosen by my mother, so that I tended to look as if my clothes did not quite belong to me; they were not allowed to say what I felt about myself, but to reflect the opinion of my elders and betters. Charlie already looked like a man, and I was sometimes aware that I looked like that awful creature “a growing boy,” though I had done most of my growing. When Charlie had to have his important operation, it was his decision, although of course he talked to his parents about it. This was all puzzling to me; Charlie was off the chain in a way that I was not, but I know now that there was a warmth of concern in my home which was lacking at the Iredales.
I assumed that this was the English manner of upbringing. Maturity and individual judgement were expected and encouraged. It was not the Canadian way. Certainly not as I knew it.
Nor did the household at St. Helen’s, so very different from the Iredale house, show me anything that I found familiar. Dominated by the mercurial spirit of the father, and revolving around him, it was continually surprising and sometimes embarrassing, when the parents quarrelled at the table, or when Aunt Minnie went off into one of her “spells” and scrabbled in the pickle dish with a groping, uncontrolled hand.
Brocky seemed to have as much freedom as Charlie, but he had to make a stand now and then to secure it. He had no money of his own, and had to ask for it; sometimes Rhodri forked over generously, with a laugh, but sometimes he made a fuss, and reminded everyone within earshot that money did not grow on trees, and that he had known times when he had to look at both sides of a five-cent piece. There was a furious row at dinner one night during my stay.
“You don’t seem to do anything but loaf around and go to parties,” said Rhodri. He was in one of his looking-at-both-sides-of-a-five-cent-piece moods. “I don’t know why you don’t look for a job.”
“But Dad,” said Brocky, “what kind of job could I do? I would have to find a labouring job.”
“Well, I don’t suppose it would kill you,” said Rhodri; “some experience of that kind would give you a different outlook on life. Bring you up against some realities.”
“You, the publisher of a newspaper, talking like that!” said Brocky, with exaggerated dismay. “Haven’t you heard that we are in the middle of the worst depression of the century? Suppose I took a job? Suppose that I could find one? I would be taking it from some poor fellow with a wife and children who needs it desperately. What would my fellow-workers think of me? Indeed, what would they think of you? ‘Young Gilmartin, who doesn’t need a job, grabs one in the face of the thousands of unemployed who have no resource but the labour of their hands
. Just look at Young Gilmartin, in his brand-new overalls, going home after work, with his dinner-pail to St. Helen’s, for God’s sake, to eat a huge meal. The gall of it! Isn’t that the way the rich have always behaved? Not content with what they’ve got they must snatch the crust from the mouth of the worker’s child.’ You know, it wouldn’t surprise me if they ganged up and beat me to a pulp. And I wouldn’t blame them! No, I couldn’t find it in my heart to blame them! I would bow to their justifiable wrath! I would kiss the rod!”
Old Rhodri—he wasn’t very old, but he had the authority which is suggested by the adjective “old”—was furious. This kind of high-coloured Welsh rhetoric was his own preserve, his accustomed art form, and he could not bear to have it turned against him by his long-tongued son. He roared. The word is not chosen carelessly. He roared. Beginning with his immigration to Canada, long ago, he rehearsed the ignominies and burdens of his youth, his determination not to knuckle under to Fate, his daring and high resolve in raising himself above the artisan class in which he had begun, and the Herculean labours, which he had undertaken in order to—to what? It appeared that all of this had been undertaken in order that Brocky should never know the bitterness of poverty, the grinding necessity of acquiring a competence (Rhodri hated the word “rich” when applied to himself), and have the inestimable advantage of a first-class education, a boon denied to his father, who had had to struggle all his life under the dark shadow of ignorance. (This, from a man whose dripping-with-blood political articles, framed in fiery but grammatically impeccable rhetoric, were the delight of the Liberal Party, was coming it strong, but Rhodri did not deny himself anything; it was his delight, in the old phrase dear to Brocky, to “be somewhat at large, and have ornature.”) With my eyes fixed on my plate, I listened to his ornature for at least ten minutes, which is a long time for a speech at a domestic table.
Then, suddenly, it was over.
“All right, you’ve made your point,” said Rhodri. “Do you want the car tonight?”
“I don’t think your mother enjoyed that very much,” I said, as we drove off in the car to meet Julia and some friends of hers, with whom I was supposed to make airy chat while Brocky pursued his ill-starred wooing.
“No, she didn’t. You know why, of course? Those rows are evidence of how close my father and I are. And she hates that?”
“Doesn’t want you to be on good terms with your father?”
“It isn’t a case of ‘good terms.’ You know what Freud says: falling in love with one parent and hating the other forms part of the permanent stock of the psychic influences which arise early in childhood. But Freud seems to mean that you fall in love with your mother and hate your father; I’ve done it the other way round. I think lots of people do.”
“You don’t hate your mother. Do you?”
“Certainly not. I’m very sorry for her and try to be as nice to her as circumstances will allow. But circumstances don’t allow very much in that line. The way she thinks, not to be wholly on her side is to be a traitor. Don’t you follow? Probably not. I suspect you of having a nice, happy uncomplicated home. A terrible start in life, let me tell you. The more rough-and-tumble you experience early in life, the better armed you are against what’s to follow.”
Brocky was full of that sort of easy wisdom. But nothing of his Freudian stoicism showed in his affair with Julia. As a bystander it seemed to me that Julia treated him like a dog. A dog she quite liked. A dog who could be petted when she felt blue, and who would lick her hand and gaze with doggy admiration as she pitied herself. A dog she would never beat, but whom she would readily board out at the vet’s for any length of time when its presence was inconvenient. I was never on anything better than ordinary good terms with her, but nevertheless I learned a lot from Julia.
She was quite a pretty girl, though not the Venus Brocky thought her. What made her popular and drew enough admirers to make Brocky’s life a burden was that she had a very good “line,” for it was a time when girls had “lines.” Her line was not remarkable or particularly original; it was composed of catch-phrases and scraps from popular songs, but she “put it across” with great vivacity and an air of being always about to burst into laughter, so that the small change of her conversation had an air of wit, though she never said anything funny. Brocky did, of course; he shone in the circle in which he and Julia moved, and she laughed with him, and at him, and made him feel that she particularly understood and appreciated what he said. She was a girl who seemed always to be in movement; she snapped her fingers, cut little dance steps when others were standing still, and I would say that she wiggled her hips if that were not to suggest a vulgarity of motion; she was a graceful wiggler. She seemed always to be moved by a breeze not palpable to others. She was like a girl in a musical comedy who seems forever about to burst into song—though she never did so.
Brocky’s approach was to play up to her, and I found that embarrassing, because he was too intelligent to be doing all the wiggling and finger-snapping he attempted, without ever making it seem quite spontaneous. He now wore spectacles, great horn-rimmed things, and as he jigged and pranced their owlishness rebuked his levity. That was not all, however; he contrived, whenever he could, to get Julia alone and to talk to her seriously, and declare his love, as poetically as he could manage. Julia liked that, in moderation. Though I was never present at one of these “serious” times—of course I wasn’t, for intimacy was the soul of the thing—I know Julia enjoyed them, moderately, because Brocky’s admiration was worth having. But she was forever entreating him not to “get too serious,” and he was set on being as serious as lay in his power. In love, he was a whole-hogger. What he thought would come of it, I don’t know and I never asked. He greatly liked talking to me about his love, but I understood very well that he would resent it if I tried, however gently, to put it under the microscope.
Oh, how he liked to talk about Julia! And what a bore it could be, for an outsider! One of his follies was to see her in terms of the literature to which he was determined to devote his life, and he never seemed to see that this was loving at second-hand. He raved about her magnificent carriage—and indeed she did carry herself well—quoting Chaucer’s description of Alison, the merry young wife in “The Miller’s Tale”:
Wincing she was, and like a jolly colt,
Long as a mast, and upright as a bolt.
This did not seem to me to be the happiest comparisons, because Alison, was rather a twister, and the way she treated her learned lover Absolon was funny, though not for Absolon. When, in the darkness, the poor scholarly boob begged her to lean down from her window and give him a kiss, she amused her handsomer lover, who had been enjoying her, by sticking her arse out of the window and letting Absolon kiss that.
Tee hee, quoth she, and clapped the window to.
Absolon, poor gull, was left marvelling that a woman should have what he took for a beard.
Coarse old ruffian that he was, Chaucer knew a thing or two, and I was reminded of it this very night. For when Brocky and I arrived at the Yacht Club, where she was supposed to meet us, she did not appear, and we hung about, Brocky dwindling by the quarter-hour, until just after nine o’clock when a canoe swept gracefully past the dock, with a Lieutenant Dorrington paddling, and Julia lying gracefully on some cushions. She spied Brock and waved and kissed her hand. Dorrington leered, as it seemed to me, in triumph.
Tee hee, quoth she, and clapped the window to.
She phoned the following day, and explained that Dorrington had asked her to go along while he picked up some of his traps at the barracks dock, and it had all taken much longer than she expected, but I don’t imagine she hoped to be believed. It was simply the well-understood female privilege of changing her mind. The miracle was that Brocky believed her. Any self-deception rather than face the fact that Julia was a flirt, and half wanted to shake him, and half wanted to have as her slave the most amusing young man in Salterton.
It was sad, but educative, for
me to see Brocky, whom I regarded as so far superior to myself, made the buffoon of such a silly piece of work as Julia. As friends will in such circumstances, I became self-righteous.
“You really ought to read less poetry and more Shaw,” I said. I was very strong on Shaw at that time.
“Why?” said he, suspecting that a sermon was coming.
“Well—Man and Superman, for a starter. It’s marvellous about sex. Goes right to the nub of the thing.”
“So?”
“About how women are really looking for their best biological fulfilment. And that governs who they’ll fall in love with. Or, more frankly, who they mark down as their destined prey. If that’s not your role, you don’t stand a chance.”
“You’re talking about me and Julia, aren’t you?”
“I suppose so.”
“Oh, you suppose so, do you? Listen, my friend; you’re talking about something you know nothing whatever about. You’ve never been in love. Nor, I suspect, has your gabby old friend Shaw. In its highest form it’s a mystical thing, and until you’ve experienced it, no amount of talk about it makes any sense.”
“Like eating oysters, do you mean?”
“Don’t be funny. I mean that it’s something quite out of your ken, and I don’t want to hear your opinions about it. Until you’ve been through it, don’t twaddle about it.”
“But you haven’t been through it. You’re bang in the middle of it, so far as I can see.”
“And may be so forever.”
Useless to talk to him. He even believed that if he loved Julia strongly enough, some magic would compel her to love him in return. Oaf from Sioux Lookout though I was, I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that.
Looking back, I see how callowly I judged the affair. Julia was not a heartless flirt, as I supposed; she was just a girl testing her powers, which were not inconsiderable, and she was not burdened with any unusual understanding of other people’s feelings. As for Brocky, he had perhaps read too much, drunk too much poetry, and was unable to bring his protective cynicism, which served him so well in other matters, to bear on his obsession with Julia. Fortune, who dearly loves such tricks, was having a little sport with them both, and Fortune may show a Chaucerian roughness when she cracks jokes.