Swann (20 page)

Rose is a happy woman; her routines make her happy. When in the early morning she pulls the sheets and blankets smooth and fluffs the pillow on her bed, she feels hopeful about the day ahead. A parade of minor pleasures—like the lucky coin today—reassure her, let her know she’s part of the world. And on Friday nights she gets into her pyjamas early and crawls into bed to read. It’s only seven-thirty and still fairly light outside. She cleans her face with cold cream and brushes her teeth and creeps under the covers. Her bare feet stretch out contentedly. She might read until midnight or later. Tomorrow is Saturday; she can sleep as late as she likes.

This is the bed her mother and father slept in, though Rose can’t recall anything about her father who was a soldier—his mother was a Nadeau, a descendant of Martin Nadeau—who died at Dieppe. It’s a comfortable double bed with a walnut-veneer headboard and has a good firm mattress that Rose bought after her mother’s last illness and death; and smooth fitted sheets, cotton and Fortrel, a cheerful checked pattern. When Rose reads in bed she props herself up in the middle so that the pillows on each side embrace and warm her.

Only once has she shared this bed with another. That was two years ago, on a Friday night like this. She was reading as usual. It must have been eleven or later when she heard someone tapping or scratching lightly on her door. Then there was a hoarse whisper. “Rose? It’s me, Jean. Can you let me in?”

Big bony Jean with her muscular shoulders and arms protruding absurdly from the lacy sleeves of a pale blue nylon nightgown. Her large feet were bare and her hair was pulled back as always by a heavy wooden barrette. That night her wide mouth gleamed in the dim hall light, a rectangle of anguish. “Oh, Rose. Oh, Rose,” she was whimpering.

Sitting in Rose’s kitchen she wept helplessly, and while she wept she beat her fist softly and rhythmically on the kitchen table.

Rose made her drink some rye, a good inch, straight, out of a nice juice glass.

“I hate him, I hate him.” Jean made a wailing sound and put her head on the table. Rose, sitting beside her, stroked Jean’s heavy hair, awkwardly at first, tentatively, and then she got up and made some tea.

“Oh, he’s such a fucking bastard, oh Rose, he’s a bastard, a first-class bastard, if you knew what he was really like. You don’t know how lucky you are. Oh, my God, oh, my God.”

Rose herself drank some tea, but poured another inch of rye for Jean. She wanted to say, “Can you tell me what happened?” or “Do you want to talk about it?” This was what people said in such situations. But a lump of stone had lodged itself in the centre of her chest and kept her from speaking. The pain was terrible. What a ninny she was.

Jean’s nose burned bright red, and large paisley-shaped
blotches formed on the sides of her face. Rose supposed—hoped—they were caused by the weeping and the rye whisky, and not by the force of Howie Elton’s fist. With both hands she passed Jean a box of Kleenex. “Here,” she said.

After a minute Jean blew her nose. The light from the fluorescent fixture sharpened her somewhat vulpine checks and lips. She drew herself up and said “What am I going to do?” Then she said, “He doesn’t know I’m up here. He thinks I ran out the back door.”

“You can stay here,” Rose said, “as long you want.” She felt heroic at that moment.

“Oh Rose, can I? Really? Are you sure you don’t mind?” Jean began sobbing again. The sobs sounded like water bubbling up from a deep lake, and Rose put her arms around her. It seemed to her that Jean was like a daughter or a sister.

Neither of them mentioned Rose’s living-room couch. They slept together—it seemed perfectly natural—in the big double bed; or at least Jean slept, her copious kinky hair, wild and perfumy, loosened from the barette and spread out wide on the pillow. Rose lay awake most of the night, staring at the dark softenings in the corners of the ceiling and feeling herself in a daze of happiness. Her nose twitched with tears. She had no desire to touch the heavy, humming, sleeping body beside her. A narrow, exquisitely proportioned channel of space separated them and seemed to Rose to be a breathing organism. When Jean turned, Rose turned. When Jean murmured something from the depths of a dream, Rose heard herself murmuring too, a wordless, shapeless burr of pleasure. The wonder of it. The bewildering surprise. So this was what it was like to feel another human being so close. Inches away, so close she could feel
the minute vibrations that were the sounds of Jean’s inhaling and exhaling. Dear God. At almost fifty years old she at last divined that a body was more than a hinged apparatus for getting around, for ingesting and processing food, for sustaining queasy cyclical assaults. The same body that needed to be washed and trimmed and tended, and sometimes put to sleep with the help of a wet finger, also yearned to be close to another. How could she have failed to know something as simple as this? There was nothing to be wary of, there was nothing dangerous at all about this, lying here in bed with Jean Elton beside her.

In the morning Jean was gone. A note on the kitchen table said: “Thanks.”

Nothing was ever said. Howie and Jean disappeared to Cornwall for the weekend and came home late on Sunday night; Rose heard them in the kitchen downstairs making coffee, Jean’s familiar heavy voice, always on the verge of swelling into horsy laughter.

What had happened? What was it that Howie had done? Rose didn’t know, or, more accurately, she
did
know, or at least suspected. Women, other women, opened their bodies trustingly. Howie must have done something unspeakable, something that appalled Jean, something vicious and sexual, something less than human; he must have climbed on top of her and taken some dark animal presumption. What that violation might be, Rose didn’t know, didn’t need to know. She regarded Howie after that with a certain awe. Jean, she loved.

It didn’t happen again, but even now, after two years, Rose spends her Friday nights reading and waiting. She turns the pages of her book slowly, one ear tipped for the sound of Jean Elton scratching on her door. She feels it important to be there if Jean needs her.

Oh, she loves her Friday nights. During the week she’s too tired to read, and it’s all she can do to keep her attention on the television. But Friday nights: a pot of tea by her bedside, the satin binding of the blanket at her chin, the clean cotton-and-Fortrel-blend sheets moving across her legs, her book propped up in front of her. Amid this comfort she speaks harshly to herself. “Well, Rose kiddo, you’re getting to be a real old maid, tucking in here like a hermit Friday after Friday. You should get out, go to a movie in Elgin now and then, the bingo even. What about the Little Theatre in Kingston, you used to go along with the Harts to all the shows. You’re getting downright anti-social. Set in your ways and that’s a bad sign.”

It has crossed Rose’s mind that someone should do a survey of what the librarians of small villages read in their spare time. Librarians are, after all, the ones who order new books and the ones who are always recommending such and such to someone else. “You’ll love this,” they cry, trying to remember who likes thrillers and who goes in for war stories and who opts for heavier things—though only Homer Hart in Nadeau reads books that might be called heavy.

It can’t be said that Rose Hindmarch is a narrow reader. At the library, whenever she has a minute, she’s dipping into this and that, a little local history, a Hollywood biography, the new mysteries, the new romances, the latest bestsellers, two inches thick—though these are getting so expensive Rose orders only one or two a month—and even the occasional volume of modern poetry

Poetry, though, poses a problem for Rose. Except for Mary Swann’s book, she has trouble understanding what it’s about, and even with Mrs. Swann she’s not always sure. “The rooms in my head are bare/Thunder brushes my hair.” Now what’s she trying to say in that poem? Of course
rooms are a symbol of something, but thunder? “The mirror on the other side/Opens the place where I hide.” Who can make heads or tails of that? Mr. Jimroy maybe. Morton.

Poetry, biography, romance, travel—Rose will read anything. But what she craves, and what she saves up for her Friday-night reading binges, are stories of espionage.

She tells herself she should sit down some day and make a list of all the spy stories she’s read. There must be five hundred at least. Intrigue, escape, foghorns in the harbour, duty and patriotism. She knocks one back every week or so depending on the number of pages. Ian Fleming—but she scorns him now, his bag of tricks—Ken Follet, John le Carré, Robert Ludlum, these are her favourites. The delicious titles, the midnight blueness of them, and the heroes with their hair curling over their ears, their intricate disguises and quick thinking, the cipher clerks labouring away by night in the back of an electrical supply store, the plump Munich prostitute with the radio receiver strapped to her thigh.

What Rose Hindmarch appreciates in most tales of espionage is the fine clean absence of extenuating circumstances—not that she would put it in those words—and the way the universe falls so sparely into two equal parts, good on one side, evil on the other. There’s nothing random about the world of espionage. Evil is never the accidental eruption it is in real life, far from it. Evil, well, evil is part of an efficiently executed plot set into motion by those unnamed ones who possess a portion of dark power. And death? Death is never for a minute left in the hands of capricious gods (the morose, easily offended Ontario God included). Death is a clean errand dispatched by a hired gun. A slender man enters a brilliantly lit room, his wide velvet collar spilling charm, but his right hand moving meaningfully toward an inner pocket.

And Rose is drawn, too, toward that black confusion that pulsates behind the Iron Curtain—the tricky, well-guarded borders, the deep Danube, the cyanide pellets concealed in Polish fountain pens and lipstick cases, the rendezvous in shabby Warsaw bars or under flickering Slavic streetlamps. The swift-running trains that cross Germany and Hungary, always at night, transport her too, her chugging heart, her dry hands, carrying along a carload of ideological passion, none of which matters in the least to Rose, and the obsession to get to the heart of evil, to follow orders, to risk all. Mr. X (greenish skin beneath a greenish suit), a man of no fixed profession but protected nevertheless by hooded guards and German shepherds with open mouths. Why? Rose reads on. Because he is part of a gigantic plot to take over the Western world, that’s why. The linkages glow like jewellery below a mirrored surface. Solutions arrive in the final chapters, cleansing as iodine, though Rose has read so many spy stories by now that she sees, halfway through, how it will go for her special envoy. This doesn’t prevent her from reading on.

Another chapter, another poisoned gin rickey (“She had only taken a swallow when she realized …”), another undelivered message—and an hour has been subtracted from Rose’s life. Her eyes intensify and shine. There’s no turning back now. “My name is Smith,” she reads. “I have been sent to warn you.”

Rose’s bedside clock says 2:00 A.M. The hour and the grey chill of the room augment the airlessness that enters her throat. Just one more chapter, she promises herself, but she can’t stop. Through a crack in her curtains she can see the moon, shaved down to a chip. The tea in her cup has been cold for hours, but she sips a little anyway to relieve her terrible thirst. “You aren’t the real Smith, my friend. I
happen to know that you are really —” Rose postpones a trip to the bathroom, though her bladder is burning. “Here is an envelope. You will find plane tickets and a small map —”

Then the last page. It’s 4:00 A.M. Jacob Smith is really Count Ramouski, as Rose suspected all along, and his double agentry has placed him on the side of good, as Rose hoped it would. He receives a commendation at a small private ceremony, and his nights are only slightly troubled by the number of assassinations the case necessitated. But part of his cover has been blown. A new code name will be assigned. This he accepts with a shrug.
C’est la vie
. Rose turns out the light, expecting to fall asleep immediately.

But for some reason she doesn’t, not tonight. Something is nagging at her, making her restless. Then she remembers: the invitation to the symposium. The thought of it flicks on in her head like the burst of a cigarette lighter. (For Rose, who was a smoker before signing up last year for the Elgin Non-smokers Buzz Group, this is an appropriate image.) Click, click, the obedient flame leaps up.

It burns a small bright orange hole in the future.
Symposium. Symposium
. Her blind, sealed bedroom is set floatingly adrift by the single word, and her long night ends with a rush of joy.

In Nadeau, Ontario, as in other towns and villages on the continent of North America, and indeed around the world, there is a social structure that determines more or less how people will spend their disposable time. A social historian would be able to plot this leisure factor on a graph. Certain
activities seem suited for certain people, while others seem inappropriate, even unthinkable. Rose Hindmarch, for instance, would feel—almost as ill at ease having a drink at the Nadeau Legion as you would on arriving in town for the first time and stopping in there for a few relaxing beers. (Even so, you would not be turned away. You would be able to find yourself a chair in the damp beery coolness, and Susan Marland Jones, aged nineteen and sleeping with young Dick Strayer from Elgin, would bring you a drink and favour you with one of her vague, loopy smiles.) But unlike Rose Hindmarch, you will be unable in a single visit to take in the
sense
of the Nadeau Legion. The faces floating before you and the brief scraps of conversation you overhear will be dissociated from any meaningful context, just as though you were observing a single scene plucked at random from an extremely long and complex play. For every ounce of recognition provoked, there would be an answering tax of bafflement; a glimpse of “Life in Nadeau on a Saturday Night” conceals more than it reveals. Although you listen intently (and perhaps take notes), the scene before you never rounds itself out into the fullness of meaning. Too much is taken for granted by the speakers—Hy Crombie, Sel Ross, the Switzer twins, and their large smiling wives—and the allusions tossed up are patchy and fleeting and are embedded in long, shared histories. True they are careless of strangers down at the legion, and besotted by beer, but there is no thought of unkindness and no wish to suppress information. The same thing would happen if you stopped off at the Buffalo Bingo in the basement of the Nadeau Hotel or dropped in at one of the gracious old houses on Second Street where people (two or three or four, the number varies) have gathered to spend a Saturday evening.