Part 8 (1/2)

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 scholars.h.i.+ps, 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 unders.h.i.+rt.

”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 s.h.i.+rt 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 publis.h.i.+ng 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 cus.h.i.+on 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 s.h.i.+mmer 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.”