“Do you think perhaps Gil hangs around his murderer?”
“That would be very disagreeable for the murderer, wouldn’t it?”
“And how!”
“Well, Esme, shall I take you on to your next engagement? With your fiancé, I presume? You’ve told me your wonderful news and I’ve told you a little bit about Pythagoras, which seems a reasonable exchange.”
“More than just reasonable. You’re a darling, Uncle Jon.”
“I do my best.”
(28)
An autumn evening and about nine o’clock as, with Esme delivered to Henry Healy’s hotel, I return to my upstairs living-room in my clinic. Autumn in my heart, too; I must not sink into easy sentimentality. But what else can I feel when I look back over the fairly recent past, during which I have lost my godson (and the only hope of a son I ever had) and what I suppose I must call my illusion about the great love of my life, Nuala, now a self-defined wiry gynaecologist, and Charlie, whom I continue to think of as the most remarkable man I have ever known (though by no means the wisest), and The Ladies, who gave so much interest to my life and whose salon was, all things considered, the most life-enhancing assembly I have ever encountered. I have lost St. Aidan’s—now a thoroughly modern church, the incumbent of which does not hesitate to describe the holy edifice as “the plant.”
And, this very night, this dinner on which I pinned such high hopes, but at which I had no opportunity to declare my love—so eager was Esme with her great news.
But—no gains? Has it all been loss and downhill journey? Certainly not. To have known these people was a rich experience for me. To have been the presiding genius of my own clinic and to have watched my procession of patients, some of them aporetics for a certainty, but many others who improved under my care and gave weight to my Paracelsian notion of the healing art, that was anything but trivial. To have watched my city change from a colonial outpost of a great Empire to a great city in what looks decidedly like a new empire; to have watched the British connection wither as the Brits grew weary under Imperial greatness, and the American connection grow under the caress of the iron hand beneath the buckskin glove—that was to have taken part in a great movement of history. And to have watched the paling of a Chekovian colonial social order, as new values and new heroes supplanted old manners and outworn ideals of heroism.
Was all this nothing to one who had always thought of himself as an intelligent observer of, if not a very active participator in, the life of his time? Decidedly not. Gain, every moment of it. But what remains, for autumn and winter?
The Anatomy of Fiction, of course. Ample occupation for a man now well up in years, but still in command of his wits. A commentary, a sort of footnote, to that part of the Divine Drama in which Fiction has a place. Eminently worth doing, and I’m just the man to do it.
I take down a volume of Burton, who is my exemplar in the work. It falls open at a page often read: “He that will avoid trouble must avoid the world,” I read; certainly I have not done that. But I have had luck, in that I have not always gained my heart’s desire. Esme, so lovely, so charming—but not meant for me. May she be happy with her Henry Healy, her tycoon. What does he want with her? Beauty, I suppose. But here is Burton: “He that marries a wife that is snout-fair alone, let him look, saith Barbarus, for no better success than Vulcan had with Venus, or Claudius with Messalina.” What brutes those Jacobeans could be! Snout-fair, indeed! Was Esme “snout-fair alone”? Not alone, certainly, but—
The telephone rings. My intuition suggests a wrong number. Not that great intuition is needed; a nearby new cinema has been granted a number that is only one digit away from mine, and wrong numbers are common. This is one.
“Can you tell me the time of the last complete show?”
“You have the wrong number.”
“Eh? Isn’t that the Odeon?”
I decide to give a Burtonian answer.
“No, this is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Good-night.”
Robertson Davies, The Cunning Man
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