JOE WAS dreaming, and in his dream his wife and he were having an argument. She had chosen a bad time to start this one. There Joe was, rubbers buckled, overcoat buttoned to his chin, gloves pulled on – all ready to set out for school. He stood with his hand impatiently gripping the doorknob, prickly with heat and wool and anger, feeling the sweat begin to crawl down his sides, waiting for her to finish with her damn nonsense. He suspected she was going to make him late for class, and at this thought he felt very anxious indeed. In thirty-five years of teaching he had never been late more than once or twice that he could remember.
“Of course I’m pregnant,” she said. “And you’re the dirty old man who slipped the bun in my oven. At your age. Imagine.”
“Don’t be silly,” he replied, doing his best to disguise his exasperation with her. “You’re fifty-seven years old and women fifty-seven years old don’t have babies.”
“Well, if I don’t have a bun in the oven, what do I have?” she inquired with a schoolgirlish petulance that made him feel slightly queasy, a trifle faint with disgust. This wasn’t at all like Marie. And why did she keep using that idiotic euphemism?
“You know what you have,” he said, angry with her for having it, and angry too that she refused to admit it. “You have a tumour on your uterus, and it’s no good pretending it’s a baby. Old women don’t have babies. It’s a goddamn law of nature. It’s a fact.”
It was the steep descent of the plane that woke him. The sense of imbalance, of disorientation, of falling, snapped him abruptly out of the dream. Almost immediately he was conscious of where he was, of his surroundings. He seldom stumbled and groped his way out of sleep any more, but was often jarred out of his dreams in this way, catapulted into reality.
He sat absolutely still and upright, acknowledging the insistent pressure of the seat-belt on his bladder, uncomfortably aware of his damp, sticky shirt tucked up his back.
I never think of her when I’m awake, he thought. Is that why I dream? Is there a law of psychological compensation which I must pay?
The woman sitting beside him, realizing he was no longer asleep, said: “We’re beginning our landing approach now.”
Joe smiled and nodded to her while he took final stock of how she had fared on the flight. She had certainly boarded pert and powdered enough, but in the course of eight hours her make-up had been ravaged and she had undergone some changes for the worse. Everyone over forty had. At that age the body forgets how to forgive, thought Joe. Here we sit, swollen with gas, eyes raw from lack of sleep, legs cramped and toes afire with pins and needles, smiling amiably and socking back the charter-flight booze, prepared to cheerfully suffer the consequences and pay the penalties.
Joe turned and looked out his window. Rags of vapour tore past, luminous with a feeble, watery sunshine. He couldn’t see land below, only a thick, undulating surface of cloud. Nor could he make out what the pilot was saying. His ears had blocked with the change in altitude.
“What’s that? What’s he saying?” he inquired of the woman beside him. He cocked his head to indicate deafness.
“The temperature is fifty-four degrees,” she said, mouthing the words carefully. “Sweater weather.”
“Good,” he replied, acting as if it genuinely mattered to him.
“We’ll be there in minutes,” she commented, smoothing a plaid skirt down on her heavy thighs. “I can hardly wait to take a bath and crawl between clean sheets.” The woman laughed uncomfortably and inexplicably. Was it the word sheets? “I’m staying at the Penta.” She paused. “What about you? Where are you staying?”
Good God, woman, Joe thought.
“I’m staying with my son and daughter-in-law,” he lied.
“In London?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s lovely, isn’t it? You’ll have a full schedule with them taking you around to see the sights, won’t you?”
“Sure will.” Hungry, hunting widow. At least she had said her husband was dead, explaining her ring. But how did you know? Nowadays women were liable to lie about that sort of thing.
The plane suddenly dropped out of the bank of clouds. They were much lower than Joe had suspected. Below him he saw a rush of hummocked, rank turf of such a startling green, a green so unprecedented in his experience, that it struck him as false, a tourist’s hopeful, unrealistic vision. A tiny man toiled in his garden allotment, unconcerned as the plane bellied over him, sweeping him in its dark shadow, surrounding him in a shimmering bath of sound waves.
Joe’s ears popped, clearing, and simultaneously he heard the pilot announce, seconds before the tires touched the tarmac – a fine display of a sense of the dramatic: “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to England in Jubilee Year.”
There was a ragged cheer of approval and a smattering of hand-clapping. Relief at journey’s end, at escaping this aluminum tube, at being safe.
Joe smacked his hands together too. And old English teacher that he was, though out of harness, he muttered a line of Blake’s that ran through his mind as swiftly and verdantly as the ground, only seconds before, had sped beneath him.
“In England’s green and pleasant land.”
He was, wasn’t he? In England’s green and pleasant land?
His son, Mark, was waiting to meet him at Gatwick as he had promised, but Joe had difficulty in recognizing him at first. It had been two years since he had seen his son. Now he appeared sporting a fine fan of feathery beard, wearing a flat tweed cap and carrying a furled umbrella under his arm.
Like a bloody convert to Catholicism, Joe thought, more Catholic than the Pope. It appeared the boy had gone ersatz English on him. Joe felt a little embarrassed for his son, particularly when they hesitantly and clumsily shook hands. There was a first time for everything, Joe mused, even shaking hands with your father. You had to acquire the method.
Mark was obviously on edge. He kept fidgeting with his umbrella, stabbing the point at the toe of his shoe and saying, “You look great, Dad. Really fit. Just fine.” His stay in England had clipped his speech and truncated his vowels.
“Fit for an old duffer, you mean,” his father said, pinching up a roll of fat above his waistband.
They collected Joe’s baggage and then, luggage banging their legs, sidled up to a wicket and bought tickets for Victoria Station from a black man. He felt cheated. He had expected his first Englishman to be more like Stanley Holloway. After boarding a third-class coach they stowed Joe’s bags and seated themselves just as the train pulled out. It slid away so quietly and serenely from the platform that Joe wondered for a minute if he were hallucinating. Where were the jerks, bangs and metallic clangs he remembered from the CNR milk runs of his boyhood?
The train gathered speed, and through a window pane smudged with grease Joe watched, without apparent interest, the row houses and villas shudder past, while waiting for Mark to have his say. To get all that off his chest. It wasn’t long in coming. After pointing out a few sights and architectural oddities, Mark said: “I’m sorry we didn’t make it, Dad. It wasn’t right that you had to go through that yourself. But we were broke and it was a hell of a long way to go. I hope you see our point.”
The train swayed past a school. A group of boys were huddling bleakly on a playing-field. What was it that Wellington had claimed? The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton. Joe pitied those kids their grey flannel shorts and muddy knees. It must be damn cold standing there. On the platform he had felt a raw, wet wind that had cut to the bone.
He turned away from the window to his son. “I didn’t expect you and Joan to come, Mark,” he said softly. “I told you that on the phone. I don’t want you to worry about that any longer. You know I never set much store on the formalities.” Having said that, he reached inside his jacket and took out an envelope which he passed to his son. “I brought these pictures for you,” he said. “I don’t know if that was wise or not. I took them with the Polaroid and they didn’t turn out all the best.”
Joe wasn’t sure why he had taken the snapshots. Funeral photographs had never been a family tradition, although some of the old-country Germans, Marie’s people, had always taken coffin portraits. Perhaps that was where he had got the idea. Still, it wasn’t like him. But then lately he had been acting in surprising ways that he could hardly credit. The world had changed since his wife had died.
Mark was tearing open the flap when Joe warned him. “I wouldn’t look at those now,” he said quietly. “Not here. Wait until you get home. She’s in the coffin and I’ll warn you – she doesn’t look herself.”
That was an understatement. The mortician’s creation, that’s what she was. A frenzy of grey Little Orphan Annie curls, hectic blotches of rouge on the cheeks, a pathetic, vain attempt at lending colour to a corpse. So thin, so thin. Eaten hollow by cancer, a fragile husk consumed by the worm within.
“What?”
“They are pictures of your mother in the coffin, of your mother’s funeral,” said Joe deliberately.
“Jesus Christ,” Mark said, stuffing the envelope in his pocket and giving his father a strange, searching look. Or was it only his imagination? Joe had trouble reading his boy’s bearded face. The strong, regular planes had been lost in the thick, curling hair, and only the mild eyes were familiar.
“And you’re really making out all right on your own?” his son asked a little doubtfully. “Tell me the truth, Dad.”
“Fine,” said Joe.
“And the pension? It’s okay, no problems there?”
“Full pension,” said Joe.
“And the charges were dropped?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus,” said Mark, “you’re a real tiger. What the hell got into you?”
Joe looked at his hand. What had gotten into him? He had broken that kid’s jaw as easily as if he were snapping kindling.
“Too long in the trenches,” he said, trying to smile. “Shell-shock.”
“On to other topics,” said Mark with feigned heartiness. “That’s the past. It’s dead, isn’t it? Forgotten. And you’re in England. You made it, Pop. After thirty years of talking about it, you made it.”
“I made it,” said Joe. He reflected that Mark would see this trip in a different light. He would remember the brochures read at the breakfast table, the magazines and travel books piled on the end table that slithered down in a cascade of shiny, slick paper at the slightest touch. All of them illustrated with quaint prospects, thatched cottages, the dark, mellow interior of old pubs with great adze-hewn beams.
But that wasn’t what he had necessarily come looking for. Joe had never explained to anyone what this place meant to him. If he had had to, he would have said: water mostly, tame rivers, soft rain, mist, coolness, greenery and arbours, shady oaks. Things of refreshment and ease. Poetry, too. Yes. Things that cut the deepest thirst. Peace.
Of course, these notions had grown slowly over the years. They began in his first school in a small country place in southwestern Saskatchewan in 1937. He started in May as a replacement for a Scot who had shot himself in the teacher-age. Nobody knew exactly why.
It wasn’t a happy place he had come to. The kids sat hunched in their desks and bit their dried lips and cast anxious glances out the window at dust devils that spun tortuously across the fields. They all looked tired and old and worried. The ceaseless wind rattled grit against the windows. Dust seeped in under the doors, crept under the sills, powdered them all with greyness and desperation. Their pinched faces and smudged eyes, irritated and bleary, watched him closely.
It was an accident his giving them what country folk wanted: a vision of water, of fecundity, of transparent plenty. He would never have planned it; he would have considered the idea cruel.
How still they had gone when he read:
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the field the road runs by
To many-towered Camelot.
Even the littlest ones had seemed momentarily transported. Towers, sweet water, heavy crops. He had begun to comb his anthologies of British poetry and mark certain passages with little slips of paper. When they became restless or edgy as the wind scored the siding of the school or the stove-pipes began to hum and vibrate, Joe would read to them. He was a good reader. He knew that.
How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below,
Where wild in the woodlands the primroses blow;
There oft as mild evening weeps over the lea,
The sweet scented birk shades my Mary and me.
Looking back, he considered it a miracle. But then, you tempt people with the impossible.
O sound to rout the brood of cares,
The sweep of scythe in morning dew,
The gust that round the garden flew,
And tumbled half the mellowing pears!
Those kids were lucky to get a goddamn orange in their stockings at Christmas. Few ever did. Tumbling pears.
And brushing ankle-deep in flowers,
We heard behind the woodbine veil
The milk that bubbled in the pail,
And buzzings of the honeyed hours.
And gradually, with each of the succeeding thirty-odd years of small towns and stifling classrooms, these visions of refreshment sustained him, although the poetry stopped working for the students. He came to the conclusion that they no longer needed it or wanted it. With prosperity, their dreams became more elaborate, more opulent, less dictated by peculiar circumstances. Their desires were the conventional lusts of a consumer society.
But Joe needed the old visions during those sweltering June days as he prepared class after class, row after row, face after face, for the Department of Education final examinations. Every year his head pounded and ached from the stunning sunlight, the smell of hot paper and dirty hair.
“I heard the water lapping on the crag / And the long ripple washing in the reeds.” It had always helped to imagine the cool sinuosity of moving water, the liquid coiling between green, lavish banks, the silken run so silent and so deep.
Perhaps, Joe thought, that is why I have come. For the healing waters. Like a nineteenth-century gentleman in search of a cure for what ails him. I have come to take the waters. I have come to be made whole.
Mark was speaking to him. “I made a reservation at the Bloomsbury Centre,” he said. “We’ll go there now so you can catch up on missed sleep. That jet-lag is a killer. I was a zombie for a week.”
Joe nodded. It was a good idea. Already jet-lag was making it difficult for him to concentrate. He felt stretched on the rack of two continents. Physically here; in time, located some place back there.
“It’s a good location,” his son said. “It’s within walking distance of the University of London and the British Museum, so we’ll be able to meet easily. I can slip out of the Reading Room at noon and we can have lunch together in a pub or at your hotel.”
“That’s fine,” said Joe equably. “I don’t want to take you away from your work. Just go about your usual business.” He was proud to have a son who was a scholar.
“You know,” Mark said, shrugging apologetically, “we only have a bed-sitter. Not even our own bathroom. We’d put you up if we could, but there’s no room. Joan’s mortified. She’s afraid you’ll think she doesn’t want you.”
“Christ,” said Joe, hurrying to interrupt him, “as if I didn’t know? The shack your mother and I lived in when we were first married – a crackerbox…” He trailed off, uncertain if the boy had flinched at mention of his mother. The beard was a mask he couldn’t penetrate, the face couldn’t be read.
“Look at that!” said Mark, suddenly fierce, diverting the conversation. “Bastards! The National Front thugs are at it again.”
The train was slowing for a station. Brakes binding, it slid by a carious warehouse with skirts of broken-brick rubble, windows painted blind. A message several feet high was painted on the building in white letters. “No Wogs Here.”
“It seems,” said Joe, “that the sun has finally set on the British Empire.”
“No,” said Mark, his face intent, “the Empire’s come home to roost.”
Joe woke to hunger and the sound of voices speaking German in the hall outside his doorway. The glowing numerals of the clock on the dresser announced that it was two o’clock in the morning, but his belly informed him that if he were back in North America he would be sitting down to a meal. What meal – breakfast, dinner, supper – he couldn’t say. He wasn’t sure how to compute the time change.
The woman outside his door was drunk. There was an alcoholic, forced gaiety to her voice that couldn’t be mistaken. And although Joe barely knew three words of German, he could guess that the man’s guttural purr was directed towards convincing her to go to bed with him.
Joe got out of bed and flicked on the TV. The screen was empty. He ran quickly through the channel selections. BBC 1 and 2, ITV, all blank. Bathed in the aquatic, wavering blue light and kept company by the hum of the box, he sat on the foot of the bed and lit a cigarette.
Odd the often simple source of our most complex imaginings, our most disturbing dreams. The sounds of an attempted seduction heard in indistinct German and he had dreamed that his wife and her mother (dead these twenty years past) had been sitting talking the Deutsch in his living-room, just as they had in the first years of his marriage when the old girl was still alive.
He had always resented that. He had felt left out not being able to follow the conversation. He was suspicious that his mother-in-law asked questions and pried into their private life. He hadn’t liked her much. Frieda was what his own father would have called a creeping christer. A woman of a narrow, fundamental piety and sour views who hadn’t liked her daughter marrying outside the charmed circle of the Kirche.
But a dream has its own rules and logic and Joe had understood this conversation perfectly well. He knew that Frieda was trying to take Marie away with her. She was trying to persuade her to leave Joe and go away some place with her. Silly old bitch. The only thing was that Marie seemed half inclined to follow her mother’s suggestions.
And while all this had been going on Joe had found himself unable to move out of his chair. He was paralysed, and no matter how he struggled to unlock his rigid limbs he could not do it. He was unable to stir a muscle, not even to speak.
He saw at last that they were in agreement. Marie got up and put on her coat. She went around the house turning out the lights as if he weren’t there. Then she followed her mother out the door. But she forgot to close the door. That was strange.
And there Joe sat in an empty house, rooted in a chair, blinded with tears. Not even a decent goodbye.
The sounds outside intruded. Joe was sure that the man’s voice seemed to be growing more insistent and demanding, and the woman’s more encouraging in a sad, passive sort of way. The bargains struck, the diplomacy and language of love.
Joe made the rounds. He began as a proper tourist. He wound through the Jubilee-jammed streets of London on a tour bus. The banners were out, the buildings were being cleansed of a century of dirt and grime. The workmen exposed clean stone in patches; it shone through like white bone in an incinerated corpse. The windows in Oxford Street were stuffed with regal souvenirs; the crowds surged on the sidewalks.
Everything was done with haste. They disembarked for a thirty-minute gawk at St. Paul’s, a stampede through the Tower, a whirl around Piccadilly Circus. Their female guide was disconcertingly brazen. She browbeat outlandishly large tips out of them. She claimed intimacy with famous people. Described a night out on the town with Lord Snowdon. She drove her charges relentlessly through the sacred places, hectoring, scolding, full of dire warnings not to be late, not to dawdle. Joe put up with the woman and his fellow tourists for two days; then he gave it up as a bad business, likely only to get worse.
It didn’t take him long to realize that something was wrong. He was filled with anxiety. The long English faces with their bad teeth made him shift his shoulders uneasily when he looked at them. The streets were too full. The lure of royalty and the weak pound was a powerful attraction.
Joe was surprised to find that nothing much pleased him. Most things he saw made him feel sad, or lost, or lonely, or guilty. He was sorry to see the English look like the landlords of boarding-houses, possessors of a testy dignity, forced by straitened circumstances into a touchy hospitality.
Where were the healing waters? He might have said that he never expected to find them in London. They were in the Cotswolds. Or Kent. Or Norfolk. Or Yorkshire. But he knew that wasn’t true. He knew that now. The great trees in Hyde Park should have been enough, but weren’t.
He left off sightseeing and began to aimlessly wander the streets. Following his nose, he found himself drawn down narrow alleys daubed with graffiti and slogans. The messages disturbed him. He could see nothing suggestive of the vigour with which they were executed in the tired people he saw in the streets. “No Boks Here!” they said. “CFC Rule OK!” “David Essex Is King!” “Mick Is King!” “Arsenal Rule!” He was not sure why they made him angry, why they upset him. Most of them he couldn’t even understand. Later he had to ask Mark to explain to him what they signified.
At first Joe had imagined them the work of senile, angry old men – they gave off the crazy intensity he associated with an old man’s rage. But in time he came to believe them the handiwork of the bizarre creatures he sometimes came across lounging in subway stations like lizards, bathing themselves in the noise, smells and smuts. Horrible, self-mutilated young people. They flaunted safety-pins driven through their bottom lips, earlobes, nostrils. Bristling porcupine haircuts quivered on their heads, radiating electric rage and venom. They were clad in intricately torn T-shirts and dresses made of shiny green garbage-bags. Joe felt like the discoverer of a whole subterranean culture down in the tube, a whole crazed tribe intent on festooning itself with refuse and offal.
Staring bewildered at them for the first time in the harsh light of the station, he had been frightened, suspicious they might attack him. And then he found himself laughing when he thought of Dryden’s lines:
These Adam-wits, too fortunately free,
Began to dream they wanted liberty:
And when no rule, no precedent was found,
Of men by laws less circumscrib’d and bound
They led their wild desires to woods and caves,
And thought that all but savages were slaves.
His edginess grew. He seemed drawn to the train stations with their dirt and noise and pigeons and stink and movement. He wandered the Embankment and stared at the sullen Thames filled with commerce. It seemed that this stretch of river bank was dotted with old men and old women bundled in unravelling sweaters and shapeless coats, some drunk, some crazy.
Joe began to drink. He sought out pubs seldom frequented by tourists. This was resented. But nevertheless he sat stubbornly in the midst of strangers who talked past him at the bar, who even occasionally made jokes about him while he drank his whiskeys and got falling-down drunk. At afternoon-closing the proprietors turned him out and he took to the streets again. He walked mile after mile, often losing himself entirely in the city. He tramped past the British Museum and its imposing portico with barely a glance. Inside, his son was reading documents. He ignored the blandishments of Madame Tussaud’s, of the Victoria and Albert, of the National Gallery.
He felt he was on the verge of losing control as he had back home. When he was jostled and elbowed and pushed outside Harrods he had sworn viciously and even taken a kick at a man who had stepped on his foot. Yet his behaviour didn’t particularly worry him. He decided that he didn’t give a damn.
In the first week of his visit Joe spent two evenings at his son’s. He climbed three flights of stairs past strange sounds and Asiatic smells to a bed-sitter you couldn’t swing a cat in. His daughter-in-law cooked them pork pies in a tiny range and they drank whiskey that Joe brought with him. Mark and Joe sat at the table on the only chairs, and Joan, his daughter-in-law, sat on the couch with her plate on her knee. Conversation never ran the way it should have. Mark kept asking questions that Joe didn’t consider any of his goddamn business and tried to avoid answering.
“So that thing with the kid is finished now, all cleared up?”
Joe splashed some whiskey in his glass. “Yes,” he said. “It’s finished and I prefer to leave it that way.”
“Why did they decide to drop the charges?”
Joan coughed and gave Mark a warning look. It was funny, she seemed able to read him better than his own son could.
“They settled out of court for a thousand bucks. They said they felt sorry for me, my wife having just died. They talked about the poor kid walking around with wire-cutters in his back pocket, living on soup and milkshakes.”
Mark’s eyes had that squinty, harried look they got when he was worried. He had had that look even as a child. He hated trouble. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t imagine you doing that.”
“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do,” said Joe.
He had surprised a lot of people: his principal, himself, the kid most of all. A lot was forgiven because it happened two weeks after the funeral. Everybody thought he had come back to work too soon. But Joe wasn’t sure that he hadn’t understood that would be the reaction before he did what he did. Maybe he had calculated the consequences. He couldn’t remember now.
That particular kid, Wesjik, had been giving him trouble all year. Not that he was especially bad. He was representative of a type becoming more and more common. He did the usual insolent, stupid things: farting noises out of the side of his mouth while Joe read a poem, backchat, bothering people, arriving late for class, destruction of books and school property.
That day Joe had had to tell him at the beginning of class (as he had every day for the past four months) to sit at his desk and get his text out. The boy had given him a witheringly contemptuous smile and, slouching to his place, said: “You got it. Sure thing.”
Joe had ignored him. “Open your books to page 130, Grade Twelve,” he said, “and we’ll begin the class with Tennyson’s ‘The Splendor Falls’.” After the books had all thumped open and the banging and foot-shuffling had subsided, Joe gave a little hitch to his voice and read, “The splendor falls -”
And there he was interrupted by a voice from the back of the room, brazen and sullen, “on shit-house walls.” There was laughter. Most of it nervous. Some encouraging.
Joe looked up from his book. He knew who had said that. “Mr. Wesjik,” he said, “get your carcass out of this room.”
“I didn’t say nothing,” the kid shot back, his face set in a mockery of innocence. “How could you know who said anything? You were reading.” A courtroom lawyer.
Joe closed the book and carefully put it down. “You come along with me, Wesjik,” he said. There were titters when the kid, grinning, followed him out of the room. A trip to the office. It didn’t mean anything any more.
And that was where Joe had intended to take him when they set out. But there was something about the way the kid slouched along, lazily and indifferently swivelling his hips, that grated. Joe changed his mind on the way. He led Wesjik into the vestibule where the student union soft-drink machine was kept, and pulled the doors closed behind him.
“What’s this?” said Wesjik. “How come I’m not going to the office?”
“You like talking to Mr. Cooper, don’t you?” asked Joe, adopting an artificially pleasant tone. Cooper was a smooth-cheeked character with a master’s degree in educational administration. Joe thought he was a dink, although he never mouthed off about Cooper in the staff-room the way some others did.
“Sure,” said Wesjik sarcastically, “he’s one honey of a guy. He understands me.”
“Is that right?” said Joe.
“Hey,” the kid said, “give me the Dutch-uncle treatment and let’s get out of here. There’s a draft. I’m getting cold.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Wesjik,” said Joe. “What is it? Is it your hands that are cold?”
“Yeah,” said the kid, smiling, “my hands are terribly cold. I think I got chilblains maybe.”
“Put them in your pockets.”
“What?”
“Put your goddamn hands in your pockets if they’re cold,” said Joe calmly. To himself he said, I don’t give a shit any more. About anything. Let it ride.
“You swore,” said Wesjik surprised. “You swore at me.”
“Put your goddamn hands in your pockets, Wesjik,” said Joe. Get them in there, Wesjik, he thought. I’m an old man. Get them in there.
He could see he was beginning to scare the kid. He didn’t mind. Maybe the kid thought he was crazy. Wesjik put his hands slowly into his pockets, licked his lips and tried to freeze his smart-ass smile on his lips.
“How old are you, Wesjik?” he asked.
“What?”
“How fucking old are you, Wesjik? And the word is pardon.”
“Eighteen.”
“Is that right? Eighteen? Is that your correct age, eighteen?”
“Yes.”
Joe could barely hear his answer. “I didn’t hear that, Wesjik. How old?”
Wesjik cleared his throat. “Eighteen,” he said a little more loudly.
“My brother was dead at your age,” said Joe. “He died in Italy during the Second World War. Ever hear of the Second World War, Wesjik? Any knowledge of that little incident?”
“Yes.” A whisper.
“Do you want to know something, Wesjik?” said Joe, his voice rising dangerously. “I’m so tired. I’m so goddamn tired. I wish I had had that fucking chance,” he said. “I wish I could have died when I was eighteen.” He looked around the vestibule, surprised by what he had said, as if searching for the source of that idea. But it was true. His saying it had made it true. “That’s what I wish now, looking back. You know why?”
“Let me out of here,” the kid said, whining. “You’ve got no business keeping me here, swearing at me!”
“Because I didn’t know life was shit,” said Joe, ignoring him. “I didn’t know it was taking shit, year after year. I didn’t know life was putting up with punks who crap on everything they can’t understand, who piss on everything they can’t eat or fuck – just to ruin it for someone else. To make it unusable.”
“I’m sorry,” said Wesjik. But Joe knew he wasn’t. He was just afraid. Most of these kids thought they were the same thing. You were never sorry unless you were scared. Only when it paid.
“I want you to say this after me,” said Joe. “So listen carefully, Wesjik. Here goes:
“The splendor falls on castle walls,
And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
“Now you say it, Mr. Wesjik – with feeling. Like I did.”
“I can’t,” said Wesjik. “I don’t remember. Let me out of here.”
“You can’t?” said Joe. “Why? Because you don’t choose to, or because you’re stupid?”
“I ain’t stupid,” said Wesjik sullenly. “You guys aren’t allowed to call us stupid.”
“Yes, you are,” said Joe, doubling his hand behind his back into a fist. “You’re stupid, Wesjik. Otherwise you wouldn’t stand around somebody who is as pissed off at you as I am with your hands in your pockets.” And that said, Joe hit the kid before he could drag his hands out of his pockets and cover up.
Of course he had been forced to resign. But that was no hardship. He was eligible for a pension. There was talk of a court case and that frightened him, but his lawyer smoothed it out. In a meeting with the parents and their lawyer, Joe had calmly said he had hit the kid because the kid had spat on him. He could see that Mr. and Mrs. Wesjik weren’t sure how far they could trust their kid, and that was an advantage. Their lawyer quite correctly pointed out that being spat on didn’t justify a broken jaw. Joe was glad to see they had swallowed the lie. He consoled himself by convincing himself it was metaphorically true.
Joe didn’t bother filling Mark in on any of the details. He could see his son didn’t know what to make of the way he was acting. And the boy was particularly disturbed by the way he went at the bottle. He had never really seen his father drunk before and it set his teeth on edge.
“Jesus,” he said, noting the level of liquid in the bottle of Scotch, “there isn’t a prize at the bottom of that, Dad. It isn’t Crackerjack. Slow down.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, my boy,” said Joe. “There’s a prize. Oh yes, there certainly is.” He poured himself another tumbler.
“Well, just remember you have to find your way home tonight,” Mark said, trying to maintain a light tone and avoid sounding preachy.
“If worse comes to worst,” said Joe, “I shall rely on the good offices of London’s finest.”
“Maybe you should just ease up a bit. Joan’ll make some coffee.”
“Joan is English,” said Joe, suddenly belligerent. “What the hell does she know about making coffee?”
“And who the hell taught me my manners?” said Mark sharply.
The party held in Joe’s honour was Mark’s way of asking to be forgiven for the quarrel that had resulted. Joe’s way of apologizing was to arrive in a taxi laden with gifts: several bottles of booze, roses for Joan, a canned ham, cheeses, pickles. He was careful to arrive sober.
The two tiny rooms were filled with Mark’s and Joan’s student friends. They were expatriates. There was an American couple and an Aussie studying to be an engineer, and the rest were Canadian graduate students mining the English libraries.
The atmosphere was a happy one. They greeted the arrival of the extra bottles with cheers. It was obvious that they were all a little hard-up and this wealth of liquor was unexpected and entirely appreciated.
But Joe knew it was a place where he didn’t belong. They were polite. They asked his impressions of England. Gave him names of inexpensive restaurants. Made suggestions for day excursions outside of London. Reviewed the latest stage offerings. But he had really nothing in common with these young people. They were full of their work and anxious to regale friends with tales of the idiosyncrasies of thesis advisors or the smarminess of English students. More than ever before, Joe felt as if he were disconnected and out of touch with his surroundings. After introductions he willingly disengaged himself from their conversations and leaned against a wall with a drink in his hand, watching.
There was something that bothered him about his son and his friends. They didn’t much like England. But they could leave it at that. Home was what bothered them, seemed to nag at them like a sore tooth. It seemed that as expatriates they were afraid the country they left behind was going to embarrass them, pull down its pants on the world stage. The American was the most afraid of this.
“Ford,” he said. “Gerald Ford. I mean, there’s a limit to it. Nixon was an unshaved weasel – but Ford! He hit somebody with a golf ball again the other day.”
The girl from Edmonton who was studying at the Royal Academy said, “I heard it was a tennis ball. The BBC announcer said tennis ball. And then he gave that little knowing smile – the one that means only in America, folks.”
They were allies here apparently.
“I don’t know why the English press can’t leave Margaret Trudeau alone,” said a blocky girl who had a settled air of grievance about her. “They certainly kept their mouths shut about Mrs. Simpson and Edward, didn’t they? A fine sense of honour there. When it comes to their own precious royal family.”
“Jesus, Anne,” said the doctoral candidate in eighteenth-century English history, “show a little perspective. That was forty years ago. They don’t let Charles off the hook, do they? Lots of speculation about this Prince of Wales.”
“This Jubilee business is getting under my skin,” said the wife of the American. “It’s medieval.”
“Interesting word, medieval,” said Mark. “That dismisses it all neatly. The Queen of England is worth millions upon millions of tourist dollars a year. The republicans come from all over the world to yearn.”
“You wouldn’t think it was so goddamn funny,” she said, “if you came with me on my rounds.” She was a volunteer social worker. “West Indian families I visit have spent milk money to buy commemorative teacups and saucers. Ghastly bloody things with the Queen’s face painted on them. Those black kids meanwhile don’t know anything about their heritage, do they? I mean what the hell does the Queen of England mean to them? The Great White Mother?”
A fellow with dirty blond hair said, laughing: “The House of Windsor is the opiate of the working class.”
“Even back home,” said the young man standing beside him. “My mother will actually cry if you say anything against the Queen. I don’t know what the hell it is. A different generation, I guess.”
“Ah, bullshit,” said a tall, thin man who had been introduced to Joe as Daniel. Joe thought he had been told Daniel came from Trois Rivières but decided he must have got it wrong. His English was unaccented and perfectly idiomatic. “All Anglo-Saxons are monarchists. You just have to scratch deep enough.” He laughed to show it was all a joke. That he was only being charmingly provocative.
He’s French all right, thought Joe. He’s got one of those goddamn aristocratic noses that looks like it could slice butter. The kind that makes mine look like a peasant’s potato.
“Well, they’re trying to do their best to turn the niggers in Deptford into honest liegemen,” said the American sourly.
“What the hell do you want?” said Joe, suddenly angry. “Those niggers in Deptford are English, aren’t they? They were born in this country, weren’t they? It’s their damn queen, isn’t it?”
The American girl looked at him steadily. She took a sip out of her glass and casually tucked her hair behind her ears. “They’re black,” she said calmly. “There is a difference. I can see the same thing happening here that happened back home. They’ll grow up without a base, without their own values and traditions.”
“They’re Englishmen,” said Joe stubbornly. He knew that in a way that wasn’t quite right, but he knew it wasn’t quite wrong either. And he felt better for saying it.
The room was quiet. No one agreed with him but they weren’t about to contradict him. He realized that they thought arguing with him would be a waste of time. That he was too out of touch with things. Well, he supposed he was.
“I understand that a little better than some people,” said the American girl. “My family came to Maine from Quebec ninety years ago. We were wiped out. I can’t speak French. I don’t know where I’m from. It’s like we never were.”
Jesus Christ, thought Joe. What he said was, “That guy who wrote that book Roots ought to be held personally responsible for filling people’s heads with this bullshit.”
“It may be bullshit to you,” said the girl. “But it hurts, you know?” She pressed the heel of her hand under her ribcage. Joe realized that she was very drunk, even though her speech didn’t show a trace of slurring. “Hey, Daniel,” she said. “You’ll teach me to speak French, won’t you?”
He smiled and nodded. “Sure.”
“Daniel,” said the girl earnestly, “knows who the hell he is. Nobody else here does. But Daniel does. He’s a Québécois.”
“Daniel, our péquiste,” said Mark affectionately. “But I shouldn’t say that around Dad or he’ll have a bone to pick with you.”
“I don’t have a bone to pick with anyone,” said Joe.
“Vive Québec libre,” said the bearded boy from Chatham drunkenly.
Daniel smiled. Joe saw that he was embarrassed for the rest of them. But they couldn’t see it. They continued.
“To what do you owe your success?” said the Chathamite. “Why are you, as Rose suggests, so together? So Québécois?”
It isn’t funny, Joe thought. They think it is, but it isn’t. He is serious. It seemed to Joe that Daniel was speaking directly to him.
“What is the secret of our success?” said Daniel. “We’re like the Irish, or the Jews, or the South of the Confederacy. We don’t forget. Anything. The good or the bad.” He laughed. “You can see it in our faces.” He pointed to Joe. “We all have mouths like that.”
“And that’s the secret?”
“Yeah,” said Daniel, suddenly becoming irritable with the game, “that’s it. Je me souviens. It’s the motto of Québec. I remember. Je me souviens.”
“Well, that seems simple enough,” said the bearded boy. “That’s easy.”
No it isn’t, thought Joe. He felt a little panicky. It isn’t easy at all. He finished his drink, picked up his coat and spoke to Mark.
“I think I’ll be going now,” he said. He felt he had to get out of there.
Mark was alarmed. “Jesus, Dad,” he said, “is there something the matter? Are you feeling okay?”
“Fine,” said Joe. “I feel fine. I’m just tired. I’m too old for this party.” He smiled. “Everybody here is too quick for me. I’m out of step.”
“No you’re not,” said Mark, holding on to his coat sleeve. “Don’t go.”
“I’d better.”
He left Mark at the doorway. In the hall Joe pushed the timed light switch that would illuminate the stairwell for a minute so that he could get down to street level. As he moved downward through the thick smells of curry and cabbage, something caught his eye. On the wall of the stairwell, scribbled in felt pen, was written, “Punk Rule OK!”
What a long way I came for this, Joe thought.
He took a pen out of his breast pocket and, directly beneath the slogan, wrote in his neat, schoolmasterish script Blake’s line: “Albion’s coast is sick, silent; the American meadows faint!”
The light in the stairwell clicked off and he was left in darkness. The penalty for tardiness and vandalism. But at last, hidden in the dusty, narrow tomb of the hallway, hidden in utter night, he found himself whispering it. I remember. I remember. Now I do.
She was a long time dying. Two years. But neither of them had admitted the possibility. That was foolish. In the early days after she had been diagnosed they would load the car and drive down to the ferry to fish for goldeye. They would drive their rods into the soft sand strewn with flood refuse and sit huddled together watching the bright floats riding the oily dark water. That might have been the time to say something. But the sun polished the heavy water, sluggish with silt, and the breeze tugged at their pant-legs and they were full of expectation, certain of a strike, eager to mark a plunging float. The magpies dragged their tail feathers along the beach and the earliest geese rode far out in the river along the flank of a sandbar. Nothing could touch them, and they pressed their shoulders together hard as they leaned into a sharp breeze that came off the face of the water.
At the end, of course, it was different. He spent every night in the armchair in her hospital room. Instead of watching a bright float, he stared at the intravenous bottle slowly drain, and when it emptied he called the little blonde nurse who wore too much make-up.
By then Marie was out of her head, wingy as hell. The things she said, accused him of. Poisoning her food, stealing her slippers, lying to her, sleeping with her friends now that she was sick – even of sleeping with her sister. The doctor explained it by saying that the cancer had spread to her brain. That was true. But why did she think of him in that way? Had she drawn on some silent, subterranean stream of ill will he had never sensed for those crazy notions? How had she really seen him all those years they had spent together? Had she read in his smoothly shaved face some malignancy?
And that of course was his difficulty. Who was he? Everything had changed since her death. His son didn’t recognize him. He hardly recognized himself. Had he been lost for thirty years, in expatriate wandering? Had all those hot classrooms been exile? Was he a harder man than anyone had imagined? And had his wife known that? Was he a breaker of jaws? A drunkard who kicked at strangers in the streets, a man who punished his son by giving him pictures of his dead mother?
Or was he the man who had dreamed of water, who had sat quietly on a stretch of ashy-grey sand and watched a gently tugging line, huddled with his wife?
He began to cry in that dark passage, his first tears. He felt his way down the walls with shaking hands. Why had the light been so brief? And why was the trick so hard, the trick every expatriate and every conquered people had to learn to survive.
Je me souviens, he said. Je me souviens.