Death of a Sunday Writer (6 page)

Afterwards, the last of the wine drunk in front of a little log fire, he asked for her. It was the first time anyone had propositioned her for fifteen years, and even then it had been only the occasional colleague of Geoffrey's. The whole situation being presented now was so close to that of the travelling salesman and the farmer's wife that she immediately rejected the idea as absurd. She laughed and sipped her wine, and thus allowed second thoughts to come. For although she was out of practice at even the most rudimentary flirting, and although Tranter was not the sort of man she was familiar with, she had known he was going to ask and she had made no attempt to keep her distance. Setting aside the farmer's wife, she felt also that their situation was very similar to one that a Longborough friend had confessed had happened to her in Oslo when she had been on a tour of Scandinavia: she had been propositioned by a shopkeeper who contrived to find out her hotel and room on the pretext of promising to deliver a catalogue of his leather goods. “I decided then and there that if he asked me I would, because no one would possibly know about it. I've never heard of anyone from Longborough going to Oslo for a visit. So he did and I did, and I had a great time, knowing I would never see him again. I've never regretted doing it with my Norwegian. I expect he has two or three Canadian ladies a week in the high season, but that's all right with me.”

And then, between sips of wine, Lucy was reminded of something that had happened to her the year after high school, the only time she had ever been in love, and she had said no and he went away to college and she had never seen him again, and she had regretted saying no ever since.

So now, as she became aware that she was about to be propositioned, she found herself, without having suddenly fallen in love or become weakened by desire, wanting to say ‘yes' rather than ‘no'. She needed to prove to herself that she was free to say either, and the only way to be sure of that was to say ‘yes'. She was also curious. Geoffrey was her only experience so far, and in these circumstances she felt like a virgin. It was possible that it would be completely different with someone else.

She was vindicated by feeling no regrets whatever. Her husband had always preferred not to see what he was doing, but Ben left the lights on and made himself at home in bed, giving the lie to Circe's legend by being completely unvulnerable in his nakedness. Lucy found the experience exhilarating.

He disappeared in the morning before she was awake (although breakfast was included), leaving the rent on the kitchen table, and she did not expect to see him again. (If she had thought he might return, she would probably have said ‘no' that first night.) He had been a manifestation, a sign, arriving at exactly the right moment when her new freedom needed a test. Saying ‘yes' was a risk, but saying ‘no' would have been a defeat. He had done his job, then; there was no need for him to appear again. But when he returned a month later after calling a day ahead, she put up a ‘No Vacancy' sign on the morning of his arrival. This time he came with champagne and lingonberries and reassured her that on that first night nothing was farther from his mind until after he met her. Again he left in the morning before she was awake, and now she was embarked on an affair.

A dozen times in the next six months he came back, and in the course of that time shifted from the fabulous
to the real. The first story he told her about himself was almost certainly untrue, but instinct told her not to press him. At some point, she was sure, he would fade into the light of common day, but in the meantime she hugged the idea of him to herself as the secret that distinguished her from what the world saw, as evidence that she was not a part-time librarian by nature. She named him, The Trog, her trog, her huge secret that sometimes, when she was with her ladies' book group, made her slightly giddy, wondering what they would say if she announced in the middle of a discussion of the believability of a relationship some novelist was portraying, that she had a lover, too. “Our relationship is entirely sexual,” she would say. “But we like each other, of course.” Occasionally she woke up out of a dream: she had been discovered, she had failed to pull the blinds quite closed, fire was sweeping through the house making it necesary for her and a naked, bald, brown-headed lover to leap for safety into the neighbours' arms. It was a nightmare even in these times, for Longborough was too small not to notice what its librarians were up to.

He was a mining engineer, he told her, separated from his wife, who refused to divorce him. During his early visits he told her about his travels. On his first visit, he had been looking for bauxite formations in Northern Quebec. The survey party had flown back to Montreal after two weeks in the bush, and he had detoured to Longborough on his way back to Toronto to let off a couple of hitch-hikers, two German teen-agers he had picked up outside Kingston.

The second time was planned. Having found Lucy, he came to her as soon as he landed from an assignment in North Africa where he had been looking for oil. The later
stories followed the same pattern — he had been in Northern Scandinavia, or Australia, or Venezuela, where his company had been prospecting for silver or uranium or gold, and his first destination, once he was free, was Longborough.

Lucy was naive and intensely romantic, but she was not a fool, and it was obvious to her early that Ben's accounts of his travels were pure invention. His stories were full of holes (what was he doing just arrived from Greenland with a three-day-old
Globe and Mail
in his car?), but he put up a wall against the slightest questioning, seeming to admit even as he denied it that he was a man whose mission was not his to share, sticking to the patchwork of lies that developed ever more holes as she compared the stories he told on different visits. Somehow he contrived to project a curious integrity under the lies. Caught out in a contradiction, he simply backtracked until he found some kind of explanation. If, as occasionally happened, Lucy immediately pointed out to him the incongruities in the new story, he made adjustments until the story worked. It was as if he was saying, “We both know I'm lying. One day I'll say why, tell you the truth, but right now I can't share it with you.”

When she had time to think about it, Lucy was not put off by the fact that her lover was a liar. The point was that he was a lover, not a potential husband or mate of any kind, and knowing he was a liar enabled her to enjoy the connection, and profit by it emotionally, without having to worry about the future. There could be no future with such an unknown quantity, but he was very good for her in the present. There was no hint of the sinister in him.

By the time the truth came out, Lucy was more than halfway towards guessing. The key to it was that he lied
to her like an adult deflecting a child's curiosity away from areas the child wouldn't understand, like sex and death. She was sure that The Trog's mystery had nothing to do with a wife, or another woman — the obvious reasons — he had never hinted at either, though she gave him plenty of openings. No, what he really was or did was either illegal or dangerous.

Then, one day, he arrived late at night and asked if he could stay for a couple of days. He needed to be out of sight, he told her, and now, finally, she learned the truth. Ben, it turned out, was an intelligence agent, a spy. Each time he visited her he had just returned from a mission (in the same place he had said before that he had been prospecting), and as soon as he was debriefed he headed for Lucy. The story about Northern Quebec and the hitch-hikers was true, but he had gone up there on the trail of a terrorist who was hiding out in Canada after a failed assassination attempt in South Africa.

For someone of Lucy's literary tastes, it was the only thing that made sense of him (although the three-day-old
Globe
was still a puzzle). The day he told her he had blown his cover and needed somewhere to hide, she took his keys and parked his car out of sight behind the library and watched the street for two days while Ben made phone calls. On the third day Ben pronounced himself in the clear — his opponents had been identified and picked up by his own side, he said — and he drove off.

The Trog came back two weeks later with two bottles of white burgundy and a stone jar of Gentleman's Relish, which he said he had picked up in Harrod's on his way through London.

Lucy's belief in Ben, the secret service agent, lasted for about a month; then, gradually she began to know that this story, too, was as fabricated as the story of the mining engineer. There was something about the openness with which Ben discussed his missions when he came to her after each one. In her novels, the women had never known anything that they could betray the hero with, and even though she was unlikely to meet Ben's enemies, he told her far too much. And the three-day-old
Globe
insisted on an explanation. From this and other signs, she knew he was still lying — how had he put five thousand kilometers on his car in the week he was supposed to be in Prague? — but she decided not to do anything about it. Although she was intrigued to know the truth, she was afraid now that it would turn out to be fairly humdrum, involving a wife after all, and perhaps a
job that embarrassed him — rodent extermination perhaps — and if she pressed him he would simply go away. She enjoyed his visits too much to want that. On the human level, the level that worried about murderers, she trusted her instincts and felt utterly safe with him. Occasionally she wondered if the truth wasn't that Ben was having the first major experience of his mature years, too, but his ease in bed suggested otherwise.

They never discussed what for want of a better word she thought of as their relationship, and much of her pleasure lay in the way he assumed that this sort of thing was as natural to her as it was to him. After six months, it was. Lucy discovered that you could assume a vice as well as a virtue and pretty soon grow into it. Occasionally, she contemplated how she would explain Ben to Geoffrey, and thus remained sharply aware of the distance she had travelled with Ben. For Geoffrey was still around. After a year, “the experiment”, as he called it to their acquaintances in Kingston, was still going on. He telephoned, and even appeared occasionally, staying long enough to fix a broken step or a tap washer (but never overnight), and always asking her when she was coming home. It would be as easy to tell him about Ben as to admit she had joined a coven.

And yet now, after two years in Longborough, her life, even though it included having the great imposter for a lover, was beginning again to leave her unfulfilled. There was more to come, she felt sure, and although she was too modest to put it into clear words, her successful adventure with Ben was surely proof that she was ready to move on from Longborough when she got the chance.
Now, back in Longborough for the night, she was listening to one of Ben's most elaborate tales, the story of his last job. “He was a guy I'd seen once in Helsinki. No one else had ever seen him, but they knew he was in the States and they tracked him to upper New York State.”

“How did they do that if they didn't know what he looked like?”

“The computer boys got a fix on him. They analysed his patterns, and then they sent me down the hole to identify him. It was him all right. It took me a week.”

As usual, she had no difficulty pretending to believe him. “You do look a bit tired. Have some more whiskey.” There was no need to challenge him yet, or perhaps ever.

The Moveable Feast had outdone itself. Tortiere with chili sauce, tabouli salad, and butter tarts. As usual, Ben had brought the wine, a bottle of Australian burgundy and a bottle of Macallan malt whiskey, which he said he had picked up at Charles de Gaulle airport and claimed was the best in the world. They were drinking in the second floor sitting room where they could not be seen from the street. Summer was the awkward time for entertaining Ben. Now they were slightly drunk and soon they would go to bed, and it would have been nice to sit out in the garden first, but she wouldn't risk it, believing that anyone passing in the street would be able to tell the way they were, as she could spot adulterers at a party.

She stood up and put her glass on the mantelpiece. Tentatively, she said, “I may be moving, at least during the week. To Toronto.”

“Why? You got a job there?”

“Sort of.”

“Will you have a phone? And a place I can come to?”

“I'll find somewhere without any neighbours.”

“Good.” Ben stayed where he was for a few seconds, then hauled himself out of his chair, sliding his hand over her bottom as he rose, making her jump slightly. “In the meantime...” he said.

Afterwards, in bed, when she was straightening the duvet and shaking out the pillows again, she told him the whole story.

He said, “When did you say your cousin died?”

She told him.

He looked at his watch to check the date, and nodded, saying, apparently to himself, “I've been away for a few days.”

“You wouldn't have heard, anyway. He wasn't famous.”

He sat up and arranged the duvet over his legs. “How do you plan to find out about him, did you say? From his friends? Who are they? Where do they hang out?”

“I'm not sure. Wherever betting people go.”

“And you'll be staying in Toronto while you write this article?”

“I'm staying for good. I'm going to keep the agency open, too.”

“You won't get any customers.”

“I've already got one.” She described the assignment offered by James Lindberg.

“Do you know what you're getting into?”

“I can get out of it if I don't like it.”

“You're just a girl who can't say no, aren't you? How will I let you know I'm coming?”

“Phone the agency?”

He grunted and slid down under the duvet. “I've got a big job coming up,” he said. “I may be away for a long
time. I'll tell you what. I should know in a couple of days, then I'll call you. I may have to go away for a few months. Don't worry if you don't hear for a while. I'll be back when it's over. But I'll call before I go.”