Wilderness Tips (24 page)

“Did you have a nice read?” says Portia. “I hope you didn’t get sunburned. Is there any news?”

“If you can call it news,” says Pamela. “That paper’s a week old. Why is ‘news’ plural? Why don’t we say ‘olds’?”

“George likes old stuff,” says Prue, coming in with a platter of food. She’s put on a man’s white shirt over her kerchief arrangement but hasn’t done it up. “Lucky for us ladies, eh? Gobble up, everyone. It’s yummy cheese-and-chutney sandwiches and yummy sardines. George? Beer or acid rain?”

George drinks a beer, and eats and smiles, eats and smiles, while the family talks around him – all but Roland, who absorbs his nutriments in silence, gazing out at the lake through the trees, his eyes immobile. George sometimes thinks Roland can change colour slightly to blend in with his backgrounds; unlike George himself, who is doomed to stand out.

Pamela is complaining again about the stuffed birds. There are three of them, kept under glass bells in the living room: a duck, a loon, a grouse. These were the bright ideas of the grandfather, meant to go with the generally lodge-like décor: the mangy bearskin rug, complete with claws and head; the miniature birchbark canoe on the mantelpiece; the snowshoes, cracked and drying, crossed above the fireplace; the Hudson’s Bay blanket nailed to the wall and beset by moths. Pamela is sure the stuffed birds will get moths too.

“They’re probably a sea of maggots, inside,” she says, and George tries to picture what a sea of maggots would look like. It’s her metaphoric leaps, her tangled verbal stringworks, that confuse him.

“They’re hermetically sealed,” says Prue. “You know: nothing goes in, nothing comes out. Like nuns.”

“Don’t be revolting,” says Pamela. “We should check them for frass.”

“Who, the nuns?” says Prue.

“What is frass?” says George.

“Maggot excrement,” says Pamela, not looking at him. “We could have them freeze-dried.”

“Would it work?” says Prue.

Prue, who in the city is the first with trends – the first white kitchen, the first set of giant shoulder pads, the first leather pants suit have been hers over the years – is here as resistant to change as the rest of them. She wants everything on this peninsula to stay exactly the way it always has been. And it does, though with a gradual decline into shabbiness. George doesn’t mind the shabbiness, however. Wacousta Lodge is a little slice of the past, an alien past. He feels privileged.

A motorboat goes by, one of the plastic-hulled, high-speed kind, far too close. Even Roland flinches. The wake jostles the dock.

“I hate those,” says Portia, who hasn’t shown much interest in the stuffed-bird question. “Another sandwich, dear?”

“It was so lovely and quiet here during the war,” says Pamela. “You should have been here, George.” She says this accusingly, as if it’s his fault he wasn’t. “Hardly any motorboats, because of the gas rationing. More canoes. Of course, the road wasn’t built then, there was only the train. I wonder why we say ‘train of thought’ but never ‘car of thought’?”

“And rowboats,” says Prue. “I think all those motorboat people should be taken out and shot. At least the ones who go too fast.” Prue herself drives like a maniac, but only on land.

George, who has seen many people taken out and shot, though not for driving motorboats, smiles, and helps himself to a sardine. He once shot three men himself, though only two of them were strictly necessary. The third was a precaution. He still feels uneasy about that, about the possibly harmless one with his too-innocent informer’s eyes, his shirtfront dappled with blood. But there would
be little point in mentioning that, at lunch or at any other time. George has no desire to be startling.

It was Prue who brought him north, brought him here, during their affair, the first one. (How many affairs have there been? Can they be separated, or are they really one long affair, with interruptions, like a string of sausages? The interruptions were Prue’s marriages, which never lasted long, possibly because she was monogamous during them. He would know when a marriage was nearing its end: the phone at his office would ring and it would be Prue, saying, “George. I can’t do it. I’ve been so good, but I just can’t go on. He comes into the bathroom when I’m flossing my teeth. I long to be in an elevator with you, stuck between floors. Tell me something
filthy
. I hate love, don’t you?”)

His first time here he was led in chains, trailed in Prue’s wake, like a barbarian in a Roman triumph. A definite capture, also a deliberate outrage. He was supposed to alarm Prue’s family, and he did, though not on purpose. His English was not good, his hair was too glossy, his shoes too pointed, his clothes too sharply pressed. He wore dark glasses, kissed hands. The mother was alive then, though not the father; so there were four women ranged against him, with no help at all from the impenetrable Roland.

“Mother, this is George,” said Prue, on the dock where they were all sitting in their ancestral deck-chairs, the daughters in bathing suits with shirts over them, the mother in striped pastels. “It’s not his real name, but it’s easier to pronounce. He’s come up here to see wild animals.”

George leaned over to kiss the mother’s sun-freckled hand, and his dark glasses fell off into the lake. The mother made cooing sounds of distress, Prue laughed at him, Roland ignored him, Pamela turned away in irritation. But Portia – lovely, small-boned Portia,
with her velvet eyes – took off her shirt without a word and dove into the lake. She retrieved his dark glasses for him, smiling diffidently, handing them up to him out of the water, her wet hair dripping down over her small breasts like a water nymph’s on an Art Nouveau fountain, and he knew then that she was the one he would marry. A woman of courtesy and tact and few words, who would be kind to him, who would cover up for him; who would pick up the things he had dropped.

In the afternoon, Prue took him for a paddle in one of the leaking canvas-covered canoes from the boathouse. He sat in the front, jabbing ineptly at the water with his paddle, thinking about how he would get Portia to marry him. Prue landed them on a rocky point, led him up among the trees. She wanted him to make his usual rakish, violent, outlandish brand of love to her on the reindeer moss and pine needles; she wanted to break some family taboo. Sacrilege was what she had in mind: that was as clear to him as if he’d read it. But George already had his plan of attack worked out, so he put her off. He didn’t want to desecrate Wacousta Lodge: he wanted to marry it.

That evening at dinner he neglected all three of the daughters in favour of the mother: the mother was the guardian; the mother was the key. Despite his limping vocabulary he could be devastatingly charming, as Prue had announced to everyone while they ate their chicken-noodle soup.

“Wacousta Lodge,” he said to the mother, bending his scar and his glinting marauder’s eyes toward her in the light from the kerosene lamp. “That is so romantic. It is the name of an Indian tribe?”

Prue laughed. “It’s named after some stupid book,” she said. “Great-grandfather liked it because it was written by a general.”

“A major,” said Pamela severely. “In the nineteenth century. Major Richardson.”

“Ah?” said George, adding this item to his already growing cache
of local traditions. So there were books here, and houses named after them! Most people were touchy on the subject of their books; it would be as well to show some interest. Anyway, he
was
interested. But when he asked about the subject of this book it turned out that none of the women had read it.

“I’ve read it,” said Roland, unexpectedly.

“Ah?” said George.

“It’s about war.”

“It’s on the bookshelf in the living room,” the mother said indifferently. “After dinner you can have a look, if you’re all that fascinated.”

It was the mother (Prue explained) who had been guilty of the daughters’ alliterative names. She was a whimsical woman, though not sadistic; it was simply an age when parents did that – named their children to match, as if they’d come out of an alphabet book. The bear, the bumblebee, the bunny. Mary and Marjorie Murchison. David and Darlene Daly. Nobody did that any more. Of course, the mother hadn’t stopped at the names themselves but had converted them into nicknames: Pam, Prue, Porsh. Prue’s is the only nickname that has stuck. Pamela is now too dignified for hers, and Portia says it’s already bad enough, being confused with a car, and why can’t she be just an initial?

Roland had been left out of the set, at the insistence of the father. It was Prue’s opinion that he had always resented it. “How can you tell?” George asked her, running his tongue around her navel as she lay in her half-slip on the Chinese carpet in his office, smoking a cigarette and surrounded by sheets of paper that had been knocked off the desk during the initial skirmish. She’d made sure the door was unlocked: she liked to run the risk of intrusion, preferably by George’s secretary, whom she suspected of being the competition. Which secretary, and when was that? The spilled papers were part of a take-over plan – the Adams group. This is how George keeps track of the various episodes with Prue: by remembering what other
skulduggery he was up to at the time. He’d made his money quickly, and then he’d made more. It had been much easier than he’d thought; it had been like spearing fish by lamplight. These people were lax and trusting, and easily embarrassed by a hint of their own intolerance or lack of hospitality to strangers. They weren’t ready for him. He’d been as happy as a missionary among the Hawaiians. A hint of opposition and he’d thicken his accent and refer darkly to Communist atrocities. Seize the moral high ground, then grab what you can get.

After that first dinner, they’d all gone into the living room, carrying their cups of coffee. There were kerosene lamps in there, too – old ones, with globe shades. Prue took George flagrantly by the hand and led him over to the bookcase, which was topped with a collection of clam shells and pieces of driftwood from the girls’ childhoods. “Here it is,” she said. “Read it and weep.” She went to refill his coffee. George opened the book, an old edition that had, as he’d hoped, a frontispiece of an angry-looking warrior with tomahawk and paint. Then he scanned the shelves.
From Sea to Sea. Wild Animals I Have Known. The Collected Poems of Robert Service. Our Empire Story. Wilderness Tips
.

“Wilderness Tips” puzzled him. “Wilderness” he knew, but “tips”? He was not immediately sure whether this word was a verb or a noun. There were asparagus tips, as he knew from menus, and when he was getting into the canoe that afternoon in his slippery leather-soled city shoes Prue had said, “Be careful, it tips.” Perhaps it was another sort of tip, as in the “Handy Tips for Happy Home-makers” columns in the women’s magazines he had taken to reading in order to improve his English – the vocabularies were fairly simple and there were pictures, which was a big help.

When he opened the book he saw he’d guessed right.
Wilderness Tips
was dated 1905. There was a photo of the author in a plaid wool
jacket and a felt hat, smoking a pipe and paddling a canoe, against a backdrop that was more or less what you could see out the window: water, islands, rocks, trees. The book itself told how to do useful things, like snaring small animals and eating them – something George himself had done, though not in forests – or lighting a fire in a rainstorm. These instructions were interspersed with lyrical passages about the joys of independence and the open air, and descriptions of fish-catching and sunsets. George took the book over to a chair near one of the globed lamps; he wanted to read about skinning knives, but Prue came back with his coffee, and Portia offered him a chocolate, and he did not want to run the risk of displeasing either of them, not at this early stage. That could come later.

Now George again walks into the living room, again carrying a cup of coffee. By this time he’s read all of the books in the great-grandfather’s collection. He’s the only one who has.

Prue follows him in. The women take it in turns to clear and do the dishes, and it isn’t her turn. Roland’s job is the wood-splitting. There was an attempt once to press George into service with a tea towel, but he jovially broke three wineglasses, exclaiming over his own clumsiness, and since then he has been left in peace.

“You want more coffee?” Prue says. She stands close to him, proffering the open shirt, the two bandannas. George isn’t sure he wants to start anything again, but he sets his coffee down on the top of the bookcase and puts his hand on her hip. He wants to check out his options, make sure he’s still welcome. Prue sighs – a long sigh of desire or exasperation, or both.

“Oh, George,” she says. “What should I do with you?”

“Whatever you like,” says George, moving his mouth close to her ear. “I am merely a lump of clay in your hands.” Her earlobe holds a tiny silver earring in the form of a shell. He represses an impulse to nibble.

“Curious George,” she says, using one of her old nicknames for him. “You used to have the eyes of a young goat. Lecher eyes.”

And now I’m an old goat, thinks George. He can’t resist, he wants to be young again; he runs his hand up under her shirt.

“Later,” Prue says triumphantly. She steps back from him and aims her wavering smile, and George upsets his cup of coffee with his elbow.

“Fene egye meg,”
he says, and Prue laughs. She knows the meaning of these swear-words, and worse ones, too.

“Clumsy bugger,” she says. “I’ll get a sponge.”

George lights a cigarette and awaits her return. But it is Pamela who appears, frowning, in the doorway, with a deteriorating scrub cloth and a metal bowl. Trust Prue to have found some other urgent thing to do. She is probably in the outhouse, leafing through a magazine and plotting, deciding when and where she will next entice him.

“So, George, you’ve made a mess,” says Pamela, as if he were a puppy. If she had a rolled-up newspaper, thinks George, she’d give me a swat on the nose.

“It’s true, I’m an oaf,” says George amiably. “But you’ve always known that.”

Pamela gets down on her knees and begins to wipe. “If the plural of ‘loaf’ is ‘loaves,’ what’s the plural of ‘oaf’?” she says. “Why isn’t it ‘oaves’?” George realizes that a good deal of what she says is directed not to him or to any other listener but simply to herself. Is that because she thinks no one can hear her? He finds the sight of her down on her knees suggestive – stirring, even. He catches a whiff of her: soap flakes, a tinge of something sweet. Hand lotion? She has a graceful neck and throat. He wonders if she’s ever had a lover, and, if so, what he was like. An insensitive man, lacking in skill. An oaf.