The Devil's Making (37 page)

‘It's of course about Dr McCrory,' I said. ‘I do understand that under the circumstances, anyone who knew him well must tend to deny it. His medical approach was so original that it must be hidden from prying eyes, so that anyone who became his patient must do so in strict confidence. And why should such confidence not be preserved after his death?'

‘Are you implying I was a patient of his?' Mrs Somerville asked, with a sharpness similar to Aemilia's.

‘I'm certain of it.'

‘
Certain
of it? Well, I must say, young man, both your information and your judgment are wrong. I was never his patient.'

I felt stumped. I had indeed been certain that, like her friend Mrs Larose, Mrs Somerville had been the alienist's patient. She had then, I thought, become more intimate with him. But now she seemed too righteous to be lying.

‘In that case,' I said, ‘I am wrong for having misinterpreted the facts. Your relationship with him must have been of another kind.'

‘Mrs Somerville's breast began to heave, and she clutched her smelling salts. ‘What an
unspeakable
accusation. Are you saying I had an
improper
relationship with the Doctor?'

‘I don't know what your relationship was.' I felt too clumsy to be able ever to get at the truth. ‘But that it was a close and intimate one I have no doubt.'

‘
Intimate?
' Mrs Somerville suddenly put aside her nervousness and became angry. She leaned forward and thumped me on the knee with her bottle of smelling salts. ‘Listen to me, Mr Hobbes. You're using a variety of words – “relationship of
another
kind”, “intimate” – in a quite disgusting “double-entendre”. I will
not
allow you to talk to me like this.' Like Aemilia she tended to stress certain words heavily when agitated. ‘About a
dear
friend of this family!' She reverted suddenly to her usual sentimental upset. Now she took a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed her eyes, although I could see no tears.

‘I don't mean to be offensive,' I said. ‘But Mrs Somerville, do make an attempt to understand me. Dr McCrory was foully murdered. It's thought by many to have been by the Indian who has been charged with the crime. But our investigations have revealed a world – a whole world – of bizarre and even vicious entanglements of the Doctor. It's more than possible that it was the hand of someone from this other world – or of a patient in an excess of nervous derangement – that struck the Doctor down. Anyone who knew the Doctor well may be in a position to enlighten us about this other world in which he lived. If you knew him well, you may know the names and circumstances of others who wished him ill. Do you not see that?'

‘These are wild words, Mr Hobbes. “Bizarre. Vicious”. You're too carried away by your zeal in this case. And you do not stop short of slandering the dead! I'm appalled at you. Of course the poor man will have had deranged patients. He was an
alienist.
He was not afraid of the deranged, the obscure, the hidden in people's lives. But it seems you know very little about them. Who
were
these patients? I'll wager, from your manifest confusion, that in almost all cases you don't know. All you can do, to feed your conjectures, is to come and ask a lady who received the doctor into her house, on quiet Sunday afternoons, what
she
knew about him. It's disgraceful, Mr Hobbes. I must ask you to leave.'

She sat looking at me haughtily, and I realized I was no match for her. For one thing, she was more intelligent than she normally allowed to appear. For another, if she had in fact been McCrory's patient she must be fortified by her knowledge that he did not keep records. But perhaps she had not been the patient. It must have been Aemilia! Why had I not asked Aemilia these questions? Because I had even less information to go on than in the case of Mrs Somerville. Perhaps Mrs Somerville could be so adamant because she was protecting her daughter's reputation. Yet as I looked at her, I still suspected her. When revealed in all her strength, she was a dominant woman. I found myself thinking, sordidly, that if any woman in the family was to have McCrory to herself, Mrs Somerville would make sure it was she.

‘You must leave, Mr Hobbes,' she said. ‘You are no longer welcome in this house.'

Beaten, and angry at myself, I rose to my feet, restrained the instinctive urge to apologize, and left.

*   *   *

On my long walk home I stopped at St Mark's to see if Firbanks was there. He was, fussing around the empty church in his vestments, preparing for Evensong.

‘I thought I'd see you at the farm this afternoon,' I said.

‘I thought I'd give it a miss. Not sure I like some of the company they receive.'

I resolved not to be drawn into the nastiness of our previous conversation. ‘Just a small question,' I said. ‘Or rather a confirmation you can help me with. I know I asked you about this before and you denied it, but,' I shrugged my shoulders, ‘I thought I'd ask anyway. I have reason to believe McCrory supplied you with contraceptic sheaths. I assume this was to prevent transmission of disease to any young lady you might be with. Am I right?'

‘You insolent…'

‘Wait!' I interrupted, with a gesture to remind Firbanks that we were in church. ‘Give the dead their due, at any rate. It was a very decent thing of him to do.'

‘'All right, all right. Yes, you're correct. He was most concerned about such matters of hygiene. Now does that satisfy you?'

‘One more thing. Did he ever subject you to a “criticism”?'

Firbanks' waxen cheeks flared red. ‘None of your business.'

‘Thank you.'

On the long walk into Victoria, I reflected that it had indeed been decent of McCrory to want to protect prostitutes and ‘squaws' against the curate. It had served no use to my investigation of the murder, to establish with Firbanks the truth about sheaths. But it had served some use for myself. It was part of getting into McCrory's skin – no pun on lambskin intended. What an odd man McCrory had been. I could not understand him. Who
had
understood him? Perhaps no one. His whole life seemed to have been devoted to the understanding of others, although not, as I saw it, from the best of motives. He knew so many people's secrets, yet they must not have known his. The end result must have been a sort of delusion in McCrory. He could not possibly have understood
himself.

*   *   *

But did anybody I had interviewed? With the exception of the morbidly joking pharmacist, everybody else had been so sure of themselves, so certain of their positions. Even the snivelling schoolmaster Hadley, or Frederick when confronted with the locket, or Quattrini who had slept with his servant girl. Each fully justified themselves. Even Sylvie had her story, her excuse for what must be really a soiled and dirty life. She was the proverbial whore with the heart of gold – really! Her warmth was real. She was true to type. But weren't they all? Or rather, each was a type containing a sort of opposite other type. Hadley was the timid and fussy schoolmaster – but he drank. Frederick was the jovial young man about town – but he was an opportunist. Quattrini was the busy and pious merchant – who bought and sold people. Beaumont was the clock-work soldier, the man of power – who had a secretly humiliating life with women. Firbanks – the whited sepulchre. Mrs Somerville, the silly and pretentious widow – who was hard as nails when it came to a confrontation.

Who was it said ‘character is destiny'? Heraclitus? A cliché. But it seems to be true. I feel these people are all acting out themselves. What they are is what they do. What they do is what they are. They all seem so unshakable. I can extract information out of them, or they can spill it out to me because I am a good listener, but all they are giving is themselves. It comes easily.

I am a good listener from listening to my mother. I too am what I do, do what I am. But I cannot see myself from outside. Am I as rigidly bound in the system of my character as these others? My character, like theirs, is my history – extending from the past through the present and perhaps even into the future. Do we have free will at all?

Shut up, Chad. This is an introspection, if anything is. But I am now leaving it in the story. After all I am part of the story.

Some characters I have not mentioned. Aemeilia. I don't understand her. She is quite fluid, less stamped out from a mould. Or rather, her mould is unique. Are some characters unique while others are not? Or is that uniqueness just coming from my interest in them? But one thing that is different about Aemilia is that she confides her own thoughts and feelings – as about her father at Comox. She is not pretending. No, that's not true. She is pretending, I know she is. But I am not sure when she is and when she is not.

And McCrory? I am beginning to understand him. But I am putting a picture together of him piece by piece. He is already in the past tense, he is part of history. He can be defined – eventually. But he must have been complex when alive. Perhaps, as with Aemilia, there were moments where genuine light shone through the veil of the character as presented to the world.

Wiladzap? At first he was to me the type of ‘the Indian Chief', as if from a novel. And yes, I suppose the Noble Savage. I think he has spoken to me from the heart. Actually he speaks rather often from the heart – and seemingly listens from the heart too. But he too is hiding something, I know it.

And last of all: Lukswaas. I tremble with adoration for Lukswaas. She is to me, of all the people in my list, the most
true.
Yet she is betraying her husband! And I am too!

23

The following afternoon I walked out Cedar Hill Road to what I was determined – again – would be my final meeting with Lukswaas. I knew however, that we would make love one more time. Only afterwards could I have the resolution to break with her. I hated myself for calculating this, but called it necessity.

The previous night I had visited Wiladzap in his cell. Wiladzap had been eating some of the smoked salmon which had been brought to him, of a sort so hard and dry that it preserved well. He would not speak, but smiled slightly at me, as if he knew there was a special relationship between us – which there was, in the sense that I was working to try and exonerate him, but also in the sense that Wiladzap did not know about: that while he lay on his paliasse in his bare brick-walled cage, his wife had been giving herself to me, out in the wild forest.

When I arrived at the usual meeting place, I stopped and looked around. There was a rustle in the bushes near the path, and Lukswaas stood up. I went toward her, and her tawny cheeks blushed. She looked confused. She reached out and stroked my light grey frock-coat. I realized it was the first time she had seen me in civilian clothes. She would understand nothing of these clothes – that they were in English taste rather than American, or as I saw it, in good taste rather than bad. She was only curious. I felt the gulf between us: me, used to living in layers of civilized concealment, she living with that nakedness which came most naturally to her and which now I desired. But first I held her by the shoulders and looked at her handsome chilcat of light blue and black patterns, clasped over her breasts with a carved wooden pin; her arms with their silver bracelets; her hair with its central parting and neat braids hanging behind her ears with their abalone earrings; at her face, brown but flushed, wide-cheekboned but refined in its length and the firmly cut mouth; her teeth scrubbed whiter than those of most white girls I had seen; her nose fine and straight; her black almond eyes quick and sensitive. ‘I love you', I could not help saying in English as I stooped and kissed her and held her to me, feeling her hand stroking my back.

We moved apart and she told me we could go down through the forest to a place she had found by the sea. Instead of following her, as I usually did in the dark, I held her hand and we made our way side by side down through the trees. The firs began to be interspersed with arbutus and oak as the land became rockier and better drained by gullies and ravines, then the forest ended at the edge of a bluff, almost a clifftop, though only fifty feet or so high, the sea azure below. Lukswaas pointed out a path descending a gully, and we followed it down over rocks and an almost dried-up stream and into a mass of brambles, with berries like flattened raspberries but yellow and unripe. Pushing carefully through these on the almost invisible path we emerged suddenly onto a beach of soft white sand, in a tiny cove hemmed in by rocky bluffs out of which arbutus trees stuck at crazy angles. The sea splashed gently in white lines along the beach, which was only a hundred feet or so across, half of it blinding white in the sun, the other half, where we stood, in the shade.

Without a word we abandoned ourselves to our usual feverish embrace, taking off clothes, throwing ourselves onto Lukswaas's chilcat on the sand, giving ourselves to each other, and ending with a convulsive sigh. Then we lay dreamily as usual, although this time there was the glow of multicoloured light through my eyelids. I opened them and looked up through a net of weird red arbutus branches and their dark green leaves to the sky. Lukswaas stirred. She smiled and ran her fingers through my hair. ‘Boo woo', she said imitating our last shuddering breath. Then she pointed to the sea and explained in her halting Chinook that ‘Boo woo' was the noise of the whale as it spouted, and it was the word the Tsimshian used for the moment at the end of loving, when the man and woman blew out the breath of life like whales …

I could have, I should have, allowed myself to enjoy this innocently pleasurable remark. But how many other times had she experienced this ‘boo woo'? It hurt me to think of how naively I gave myself to her – to her sweetness, her ‘cleanly wantonness' as I remembered from some old poem. She gave herself too, but for her it was an episode among many.