Paul stood in the window of Heather’s studio and looked across the street. The brick walls of the buildings opposite were a dull red. They looked very old and European with their painted doors flush with the pavement. The storm which had lasted for nearly thirty-six hours had cleared the air. Now sunlight sparkled on the roofs, made the leaves bright green and dappled the pavement with mauve shadows.
He turned back into the room to take the cup of tea Heather was offering him. She had a single electric plate in one corner, a small table, a few chairs, a couch covered with gay chintz against one wall, and a work table covered with painting paraphernalia. He liked the smell of oil and turpentine, the look of paint stains on the floor, the composition of the canvases stacked against another wall.
Heather curled up on the couch, her feet tucked against her hips, and Paul sat rather stiffly on one of the chairs. She drew his attention to the canvas resting on an easel. “Now tell me the truth about that one,” she said.
Paul looked at it again, as he had been doing off and on ever since he had arrived. He hardly knew what to say, for he knew nothing about the technique of painting. He did know there was a lack in it. He glanced from the picture to the girl on the sofa. There was no lack in her. He saw the curved outlines of her thighs and the mounds of her breasts rising and falling beneath the plain linen frock. Her small nose gave her face a frank openness, and the frown she wore at the moment made her seem very young. Perhaps she was too much like Yardley to be an artist? He could imagine Yardley building a ship, but never painting a picture.
He got up and set his tea-cup on the table. “I’m not very good at this sort of thing,” he said. “I know why I like it better than why I don’t.”
It was a pleasant scene, an oil landscape of a Laurentian road, and it was well drawn. It showed a sweep of country beyond Piedmont, and it indicated that she had enjoyed being there. But she had missed the vastness of such a scene, the sense of the cold wind stretching so many hundreds of miles to the north of it, through ice and tundra and desolation.
“Maybe it would have been better if I’d finished it with a rougher surface,” she said, still frowning. “I used composition board on purpose. I was afraid it would look like an imitation of A.Y. Jackson if I made it too rugged. That’s the whole trouble. The Laurentians have been painted too much and too well already. It would take a really great person to say anything new about them, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I’ve not seen many Canadian paintings. Or any other kind, for that matter.”
“But Paul, you ought to! There’s some really wonderful Canadian painting. It’s the best expression in the arts that we have.”
“I’m full of gaps,” he said.
She uncurled herself from the couch and removed the canvas, replacing it with another. In this one, figures climbed the flight of wooden steps that led up to Pine Avenue from the head of Drummond Street on the face of the mountain. It also had a mat surface, and the design showed a smooth rhythm of hips and shoulders as the figures mounted the steps. Paul stood away from it, trying to estimate how much originality it contained, but he lacked the frame of reference to judge properly. Because it responded to an idea of his own, he liked the picture, and still he felt there was something wrong with it. It was intended to be grim. The women were poorly dressed, almost in uniform like convicts, and their individual features were removed.
He swung around and looked at her. “Did you believe it, when you did it?” he said.
She waited a moment before she answered, then she said, “I think so. It’s meant to be stylized. I wanted it to be a particular study.” She indicated certain parts of the composition. “I wanted those lines to compensate for these…. It was the uniformity of their movement I was after.”
“You certainly got that.”
She was disappointed. “But I’ve missed something else?”
He pointed to a splash of colour in one corner. “That’s the only part of yourself I see in it. That’s joyful. It’s good.”
She removed the canvas and went back to the couch. Suddenly her laughter bubbled. “Huntly McQueen said something to me the other night that sounded just the same. He said I thought it was my duty to be miserable on account of the unemployed.”
Paul sat down on the chair again and looked at her intently. “From what I’ve heard of McQueen, I’d hate to agree with him, but he’s got something all the same. You haven’t lived a rotten life. People haven’t been rotten to you. Why feel guilty about it?”
“I don’t. You don’t understand at all. People have been altogether too nice to me.”
He laughed shortly and she tossed her head. “Don’t despise me, Paul. It’s not my fault if I’ve never had to worry where my next meal was coming from.”
He picked up the two tea-cups and refilled them, handed her one and sat down again. “You know as well as I do there’s no meaning in that kind of niceness,” she went on. “It doesn’t cost anything.”
Paul gave his attention to the tea in his cup, though he didn’t drink it, and Heather pushed the hair back from her temples. Silence grew between them and a sense of disappointment weighed on her. After a while she said, “Do you suppose anything ever comes off the way you really want it?”
“I’m stubborn. I think sometimes it can.”
“If you really believe that, it’s wonderful.”
He felt the tension rising inside. “But it takes time. That’s the trouble. God, it takes time!” He was sitting quite still, and his stillness was giving more force to his words than he realized. “An artist’s brain is like a distillery. A distillery takes years to produce anything but hooch.”
“And I don’t take the time?”
“Nobody does any more.”
Her eyes twinkled at his seriousness. “In other words, I should go through hell and suffer first, and then try to paint?”
Paul paid no attention to her amusement. “Forget the suffering,” he said. “There’s nothing romantic about it.” He leaned forward. “You’re a happy person. You’ve got joy inside you. For God’s sake don’t be ashamed of it. The world is dying for the lack of it.”
Heather was surprised by the turn of his mind. All the students she had liked in college had been socialists, and she had accepted their point of view easily. She had never known anyone who was poor or worked with his hands, but she had taken it for granted that Paul would be bitter and even resent her because she had money. She wondered if he had never read Marx because he had been brought up a Catholic. She watched him as he pulled more of her pictures from the stack against the wall and studied them one by one. Some he dismissed with a glance, others he set on the easel and looked at from a distance. When he had gone through the lot he put them back and began to talk again. Heather listened quietly without interrupting him. If she wanted to paint, he said, she must look inside herself. If the mess of the world had crawled inside, paint it, because then it was hers. But never pretend it was there when she knew damn well it wasn’t. Did Mozart look out his window at the slums of Vienna when he wrote the E-Flat Symphony? She had one source to draw from, herself. An artist had nothing worth offering the world, absolutely nothing, except distilled parts of himself. If what she had was joyful, offer it, and to hell with the class struggle. No politician could be moved by art; all they were interested in was power.
He looked down at her. “But it takes time,” he added. “It’s got to grow inside first.”
Heather felt abashed. She also felt somewhat annoyed because he dismissed so easily the ideas she had worked hard to acquire. But her annoyance disappeared in the face of her natural good humour, and she turned her thoughts to the personal problems he represented, problems she had never considered before. “Thank you, Paul,” she said, and her face broke into a smile again. “I could believe you’ve thought that out long before this afternoon. What have you tried to do–and found it took time?”
This was touching his privacy. Instead of answering he looked at her curled up on the sofa and he thought how much he’d like to stop talking and sit beside her and relax. He looked at his shoes instead. “I want to write,” he said. “I hate admitting it. Everyone wants to get into print these days.”
Heather knew he had exposed his vulnerability, and suddenly she knew how he felt about many things. The simple statement had removed a subtle barrier between them. He no longer baffled her and she no longer felt that he was making her an outsider. A wave of gratitude warmed her. When she spoke again her voice had an intimate naturalness like the child he remembered in Saint-Marc. “How long do you think it will take you, Paul?”
“They don’t let a surgeon loose on the public until he’s been trained seven years and certified. A writer’s job is just as difficult, technically.”
He felt he could sit still no longer, but he forced himself to do so. He knew hardly anyone with whom he could discuss written books, much less writing. Sometimes it seemed just as well. There was so much self-flattery in the idea of writing books; it made him superstitiously afraid of telling anyone that this was what he wanted to do. His own voice had surprised him as he made the admission to a girl who was almost a stranger.
“It’s not just that I want to be a writer,” he said. “I told you the other night I wanted to be a physicist. I’d like to be an architect, too. Every time I really look at a building in Montreal it makes me cringe. The only buildings in this whole country that suit it are the barns. On the whole, I’d rather be an architect than anything else.”
“Why don’t you, then?”
“I told you–I’m no good in maths. My mind doesn’t work that way.”
The tension rose to his throat and he got up and began pacing the room. It was impossible to sit still any longer and watch her. She made him want to talk about himself, for a few minutes to break the solitude. To change the subject, he told her that he’d been given a berth on a ship that was sailing in a week from Halifax. He stood looking down at her, and then it overwhelmed him like a bursting wave, the quality he had always found in Yardley, the quality that had permitted his nature to unfold without being struck back, without spilling. She met his glance and held it, and after an appreciable moment she said, “It seems such a waste. With your degree you could teach.”
He shook his head. “I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to see something else. Besides, there aren’t even teaching jobs now.”
“Are you very bitter?”
He began pacing again. “Sometimes,” he said from the other end of the room. “But bitterness has stopped making sense.”
“It ought to be easy for everyone to have a job and plenty of everything, but people like Huntly McQueen just sit on their tails and do nothing.”
He gave a short, derisive laugh, and then he turned and grinned at her.
“You think I’m childish, don’t you?” she said.
“No. Only optimistic.”
“But I’m not at all!”
He continued to laugh at her. “You’re probably a socialist,” he said. “Or think you are.”
“But Paul!” She flushed with anger. “Why should you be against socialism? Why should a man like you agree with McQueen?”
“I’m not against it. And so far as I know, I don’t agree with McQueen, either.”
“But you said…”
“I’m sorry, Heather. I don’t want to argue with you.”
She looked away, baffled and hurt. Then she picked up the tea-cups and carried them to the paint-splashed sink and let water run into them.
“You make me want to talk about myself,” he said, still from the other end of the room. “Like your grandfather. It’s simply that…” He hesitated. “I don’t seem able to look at politics as if it were a science. I look at people instead.”
She kept her back turned to him. “But doesn’t the system produce the people?”
“It would be pleasant to think so. At least you could change a system.”
“But you don’t think so?”
When he made no answer she turned around to look at him. His face was in shadow, his back to the window, and his hands were clenched in his pockets. She returned to the sofa and curled up on one end again, and when she motioned him back he dropped down onto the other end, his knees spread and his hands clenched between them.
“Maybe it’s just the way I’ve lived,” he said. “Maybe I’m wrong.”
“I asked you the other night what you’d been doing. Will you tell me now?”
Their eyes met. He looked away and back again. For a time he said nothing, then keeping his eyes on the floor he began talking, almost as though to himself. Ever since the family had moved from Saint-Marc, he told her, he had had no real home. Everything seemed to come back to that. He’d no place to go. At Frobisher it was all right, but then his father died and they were very poor. Gradually he found out what had ruined his father, mainly the fact that even when he had his land and was a member of parliament, he’d never found out how to get out of the strait-jacket of his own nature. No one deliberately trapped him. Whatever it was, it was inside himself.
He paused and Heather felt a warmth spreading within her, entering softly like a visitor afraid of being noticed. Paul needed her, and the knowledge was new and rewarding. But she sensed a peculiar dominance in him, and an increased awareness of his strangeness, and she wanted to hold her breath, to say nothing that would cause him to with draw again.
“I can barely remember your father,” she said quietly.
He seemed not to hear her. But he added that his father was a remarkable man. He would have been completely at home in nineteenth-century Europe, and that made him about fifty years ahead of his time in Canada. Paul had found some of his papers, and only then was he able to appreciate the quality of his father’s mind. But the set-up had been too much for him.
“I must be stupid,” Heather said, “but I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
“You aren’t French. You aren’t in a minority. You English have always been on top of the world. You don’t know the feeling of the strait-jacket.”
“Do you feel in a strait-jacket?”
“In a couple of them. If you have no money you’re always in one. But a French-Canadian is born in one. We’re three million people against a whole continent.” He looked around at her, smiling to take the drama from his words. “I don’t intend to stay this way.”
His voice became low and slow as he picked his words carefully. He had found one of her pencils on the couch beside him and he began to twist it in his fingers, end for end, end for end.
“When I was a kid, in the old library in Saint-Marc, I used to read stories from the Odyssey in a book of my father’s. I realized a long while later that the Odyssey is a universal story. It applies on all sorts of levels. Science and war–and God knows what else–have uprooted us and the whole world is roaming. Its mind is roaming, Heather. Its mind is going mad trying to find a new place to live.” He got up suddenly and went back to walking the floor. “It sounds melodramatic. But it’s true. I feel it–right here in myself. I’ve been living in the waiting room of a railway station.”
In the sunlit air outside the window a hawker was calling fish for sale. The man’s voice, roaring an atrocious French, reverberated along the street from house to house. Paul returned to the sofa, and when he sat down he looked into her grey eyes. Had he intruded himself on her? Had he lost anything? Searching her face, he knew it was all right. When she asked if he wanted to go back to Saint-Marc he smiled and said that not even Marius thought he could go home by going back to Saint-Marc.
He told her a little about Marius, not because she asked but because he wanted to tell her. Marius was married, with more children than he could afford to support. When the Tallard land was lost he was old enough to understand what he was losing, but his idea of going home was to be a successful politician. He’d nursed his hatred of the English so carefully it was now a pretty fine flower. He could speak perfect English, but if anyone addressed him in English he affected not to understand a word of it. What he really wanted, of course, was vengeance. The only thing he really loved was a crowd. He always believed they were with him, and for a few minutes they generally were, but ninety per cent of them would go off and vote Liberal no matter what he said. “If Marius were a European he might get somewhere,” Paul said. “But not here. There are others like him. They’re the safety valves for the minority. That’s all they are, and God help them, they never know it. When one fizzles out another comes to take his place.”
Suddenly talk seemed stupid. He turned and took her in his arms and his lips found hers. Desire broke within him like an explosion. He felt the firmness of her back against the palms of his hands, her breasts yielding against his chest, her hips with an involuntary movement surging in to him, and for a second their thighs and shoulders were almost one. Then she pushed him away and swung back out of reach.
“Please, no,” she said. But her face was filled with wonder. “Not now. It’s…it’s not…”
He looked about the room as though it were a cage, then he crossed once more to the window and Heather watched the line of his head and back as he leaned out. She wondered at the queer, sudden sense of fear he had given her. She felt as if she had never been touched before.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “There’s still a fine lot of day left outside.”
As he turned he saw her sitting upright smoothing her frock. Then she looked up and smiled, her wide lips making her whole face generous and open, bringing back to it a young gaiety without a trace of smouldering emotion. He felt overcome with gratitude because that was how she was.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s. My car’s downstairs. Let’s drive. Let’s even go for a swim, if you’d like.”
“Where?”
“Well, I know a place in Dorval. It’s the house of a friend of mine. They’re away for a month. It’s got a beach.”
“All right. You’ll have to stop at my place to pick up my suit.”
They went hand in hand down to the car. On the way to Dorval they decided to get sandwiches and beer at a roadside stand, and by the time they reached Lac Saint-Louis the sun was moving low, but it was still warm. Heather parked her car in the driveway of a large house on the lake front and led Paul through a garden to a private beach. At one end of the beach stood a boathouse. Beside the door Heather lifted a stone and found a key under it, unlocked a padlock and led the way in. She pointed to a pair of canoes upturned on the floor. “You undress here,” she said. “I’ll go upstairs.”
“This is communism,” he said, “the way you use your friends’ property. Didn’t they even leave a dog here?”
“No dog,” she said, her voice coming through the floor above.
Paul removed his clothes and laid them over one of the canoes. He was in his swimming trunks and on the beach before Heather came down. They swam for a bit, but the water was uninvitingly muddy and it smelled flatly of reeds, so they went back to the beach and lay and watched the sun ruddy-gold over the lake. From where they were it was difficult to realize that Lac Saint-Louis was part of the Saint Lawrence. Relaxed by the swim and the sun, Paul lay with his eyes half-closed as he watched a red-and-white lake boat ploughing upstream. She was ugly like all of them; the propeller foamed as she passed slowly up the channel marked by red cone-buoys; soon she would be in the Soulanges, passing up through a narrow canal with fields flush with her decks. Half a mile away her upper works would seem to be sliding miraculously over the surface of farms.
One summer he had worked on a lake boat and he knew the route. It was strange recalling it now. He could remember only a few moments out of the general routine, but they were so vivid he would never forget them. One was his first trip to the lakehead. A sunset burned through Fort William and Port Arthur and hurled gigantic shadows of the grain elevators forward on to the trembling waters of Thunder Bay. After the grain had been hosed into the ship, they moved away, and as he looked back another grain-ship was caught in the flaming corona of the sunset like a black speck in a huge eye, the waters of the lake extending from the sun in a nervous, desolate plain, radiating into the darker east. As night closed over the ship the colour had died, and nothing was left but the sounds of millions of shallow waves turning over in the darkness, an astringent wind keening blindly out of the empty forest to the north, the quick spatterings of lifeless fresh water whipped by the wind over the waist of the ship and wetting the deck. It was only a few days later, away from this sense of desolation in the heart of a continent, that they were passing so close to shore in eastern Ontario he could look into the windows of houses when the lights were on after dark. He had seen men reading in armchairs and children going to bed, and once a naked woman had thoughtfully combed her hair before a window, her lips open as though she were singing to herself. The ship passed and left her there with a peculiar immortality in his mind, strangely transfigured.
Paul’s thoughts came back to the present. Next week he would step aboard another ship in Halifax, quite different from the lake boats. He had no idea where she was bound. It might be Europe or South America, maybe only Newfoundland or New York. All he knew for certain was the fact that she was a four-thousand-ton freighter of British registry called Liverpool Battalion.
Yardley had said the Limeys were all right to ship with. He had added there would most likely be a Nova Scotian aboard, and if he turned out to be the cook, all Paul would have to do would be to show his appreciation of the old province and the cook would be with him, hair and shoulders against any son-of-a-bitch of a squarehead that shaped up to him.
Paul smiled to himself. It was eighteen years since Yardley had been at sea. He wondered if the pictures he gave of it would turn out to be true, or merely a part of Yardley himself. Only once, in all the countless stories Yardley had told him, had there been anything like tragedy or grimness. So apparently things were what a man’s mind made them. You had to find out for yourself.
“What are you thinking about?” Heather’s voice came to him softly, floating into the red mist the sun made on his closed lids, floating in among the moving nets of darkness that crossed and recrossed the redness.
“Your grandfather. I was wondering if he was a liar.”
She chuckled softly and Paul added, “The kind of a liar I am myself.”
Leaning on her elbow beside him, Heather bent and looked close at his face. His eyes were closed and his lips slightly parted. She wanted to touch his hair and find out how it felt, particularly where it was a shade lighter and softer on the top of his head. Already faint lines showed at the corners of his eyes. It was strange to have him so quiet now, after all the talking he had done in her studio. She guessed it was more natural for him to be silent than otherwise. All his strength seemed to be held in leash. There was a scar on his left thigh, another on his chest; when he rolled over on to his stomach another appeared on the lower part of his back. She traced it with her finger.
“How did you get that?”
“Hockey.”
“All of them?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a good thing you stopped playing.”
“Why did you?”
“It took too much out of me.” He rolled over onto his back again. “After every game I was like a limp rag. And before every game I’d have to tighten myself up. You’re useless unless you start nervous.”
“You love hockey, don’t you, Paul?”
“I used to.” He shaded his eyes with his hands, his face wrinkling from the low-hanging sun. “Some winters I felt as if I lived in the Forum. I knew every scratch on the paint along the boards. There was one long gash near the south penalty box I used to touch before every game, and remember how it was made.”
“How was it?”
“Eddie Shore kicked his skate into it once when he was sore.”
“Were you superstitious?”
He looked at her from under nearly closed eyelids. “I was about hockey.”
She touched the scar on his chest and then took her finger away quickly. “How did you happen to do it–play hockey like that, I mean?”
“Because I needed the money.”
“No–I mean, why hockey and not something else?”
He thought a moment. “I guess it was the first professional game I ever saw. I was sixteen. Joliat, Morenz and Boucher were playing. After that I was willing to slave eight hours a day training just on the chance of being half as good as they were.” He reached up and stroked her hair. “But now I’m an old man, and at the best I was never even a quarter as good.”
“Now you’re very, very serious.”
“I know. Much too much so.”
She grinned down at him, liking the rhythm of his moving fingers on her head, warm with the sense of him. Some men who seemed gentle enough were clumsy with their hands, but Paul, whose body looked hard, was tender even through his finger-tips.
“I wonder if you’d like Daffy now,” she said. “She’s a natural blonde.”
“What makes you think I like blondes?”
“She’s tall and willowy, and she has skin like honey in the sun.” When he made no reply she added, “And her figure is luscious. It looks as if it would melt in a man’s arms.”
“It must be a full-time job, being Daffy.”
Heather laughed. “And she has a perfectly dreadful husband. I’m rather sorry for him, but not very much. Daphne says he rapes her.”
“Is that possible?”
“Don’t be horrid!”
“I meant, is it a physically possible thing to do? I’ve often wondered.”
He sat up and they crouched on the sand looking at each other, the moment poised between them like a bubble, and then he jumped up and ran into the water, charging it so hard he tripped and went down with a splash. Heather watched him stroking out to deep water. He dove once and came up blowing, cruised a little, then crawled back and ran up the beach and dropped down on the warm earth beside her. She sat and looked at the rise and fall of his chest.
“I wish I knew more about hockey,” she said. “Mother’s never thought it quite proper for me to go to the Forum. Alan used to take me sometimes. I’ve never seen anything more beautiful; not a single ugly movement on the ice.”
“Morenz, Joliat, Gagnon, Jackson, Smith–the whole lot of them are about the best artists this country ever turned out.”
“Hooley Smith sent a man into the boards almost on top of me once. Without thinking what I was doing I booed him for it.”
“That shows you didn’t appreciate him. He did it beautifully and you never noticed.”
She got up and walked to the car and he watched her as she returned with the sandwiches and beer. She put the bottles at the edge of the water, making them secure with small stones. Then she came back and stood over him. “Did you get into fights and get penalties?”
“Not if I could help it.”
“I wish I’d seen you play.”
“Too late now. My hockey days are definitely over.”
They ate the sandwiches and drank the beer while the long daylight of a northern summer evening moved almost imperceptibly to dusk. Heather changed, and when she came back dressed Paul went to put on his clothes. “The thing about Montreal I’ve always disliked most,” Heather said when he reappeared, “is the way you have to drive for hours to get into real country. I’d like to walk through an orchard on a night like this. I’d like to go up to that ridge behind Saint-Marc and look at the river. I’d like to go down to a seashore and listen to the waves break in the dark. I’d like most of all to stand on top of a real mountain, and look at farmhouses lying scattered in the valley below.”
Paul put the empty bottles back in the car and then he followed her into the boathouse to make sure they had left it as they found it. “Come up here,” she called from the upper floor. When he joined her on the small porch that ran across the front, she said, “It isn’t very high, but it’s better than nothing.”
They stood looking out over the lake, silent as a dark steel mirror before them. It smelled flat and reedy, but the lawn that ran back to the house was full of mysterious shadows in the half-light, and the smells could almost be forgotten. Land heat brooded over the water’s edge. In the west across the lake the coloured light still lingered and splashed a few tired clouds as the day forgot itself.
“Not bad at all,” he said. He dropped on to a canvas swing and pulled her down beside him. “It’s a funny thing. Three days ago I didn’t think there was a thing in Canada I’d miss when I went to sea, except your grandfather. Now there’s something else. I believe I’m going to miss you.”
She touched the hand that held her against his shoulder. “I wouldn’t be surprised but what I’d miss you, too.”
After a moment he said, “Do you think we know anything about each other, really? I feel as though I’d known you a long time.”
“Well, you have. You know I’m not afraid to put a worm on a fish-hook, for instance.”
But he wouldn’t be teased. “When two people are alone, matter-of-fact things aren’t important.” He thought about his words. “That doesn’t make much sense. If I went home with you and met your family and your friends–all sorts of in-consequential things would matter then, and the important things about us would almost disappear.”
“Would they? I don’t think so. But I do know what you mean.”
He ruffled her hair over one ear. “Have you ever been in love?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve thought I was several times. First when I was fifteen, in Lausanne. But I always managed to get over it. So it probably wasn’t what other people mean when they talk about love.”
He looked into the darkness that was gathering like a visible cloud over the lake. Frogs croaked in the distance, and the beat of crickets and katydids in the foliage around the house was rhythmical and persistent.
“Don’t be in love with anyone, Heather.”
She stirred against him, but he held her still. “Never?”
“They’ll only spoil it for you. It makes you helpless, and then they get you every time.”
“Who’s they?”
“Sorry. That’s a habit. In my street we grew up talking about ‘they.’”
She sat so still she seemed hardly to breathe, looking into the dark nothingness over the lake. Far out on Dorval Island a few lights winked through the trees. She was twenty-three and only one man she had ever met had been able to touch her, to reach through her mind to the person within herself. It took only a moment to happen; after that it was a fact; there it was, and nothing he could say now would change it.
A mosquito settled on the soft skin of her lower arm and she brushed it off. Paul felt one on his left ear. He loosened his arm from about her shoulder, took a package of cigarettes from the pocket of his jacket where it was thrown over a chair, and lit one for her, then one for himself. As the match flared in the darkness she saw his eyes large and brown; then it was dark again, with two small glowing points of light rising and falling on the ends of the cigarettes.
“Have you known a lot of girls, Paul?”
He waited before he spoke. “I’ve known one woman,” he said quietly. “Though she never really grew up at all. She was so natural with all men she made it hard for me to be natural with any other woman.”
“Do you know her still?”
“She’s my mother.”
As the cigarettes burned out, more mosquitoes came at them, attacking out of the darkness loud and sudden in their ears. Paul made batting motions with his hands, and Heather got to her feet. “Perhaps we’d better go,” she said. “They’ve got an army on their side.”
He followed her into the boathouse, closing and barring the door behind them, and then they stood still in profound darkness. “Where are you?” he said. “Wait until I light a match.”
“I’m right here.”
He stepped forward and came against her. Then she was in his arms, her face straining up to his, her lips soft under his own. Everything else was blotted out. He had never known this before, this sense of life in a girl, the essence of life stirring under him in a darkness so deep there was nothing else there, except her rich, generous self a part of him.
His mind groped out of the darkness like a diver struggling to the surface. She moved away and he began to hunt through his pockets for a packet of matches. When he found it he struck one, and her face leaped out of the darkness, blurred in the half light. She was leaning against the wall, her hands behind her, wonder in her eyes. The match burned his fingers and he dropped it, set his heel on the glowing coal and the place was black again.
“Heather–don’t! I…it’s the one thing I’m afraid of.”
“Why, Paul?”
“Why? My God–don’t underrate yourself.”
Her voice seemed far away. “I’m not afraid. Not now.”
He tore off another match, but he didn’t light it. “Next week I’m going away. We may never see each other again. Let’s remember that.”
Silence filled the darkness, and then she said softly, “You’ve known other girls, haven’t you?”
“Not many.” He sounded absurdly annoyed. “Not as many as you think, probably.”
“When you kissed me–I knew.”
“Did you mind?”
“No. No, of course not.”
He lit another match and held it high and she went ahead of him down the stairs. He lit another, and the dim outline of the canoes sprawled like mammal-fish in the damp, stuffy air. When they opened the door and stepped on to the lawn the night air seemed almost bright compared to the nothingness inside the boathouse. They stood still, side by side, looking up to a sky swimming with stars.
“I’ll hate it when you go away,” she said.
He took her hand. It seemed small and soft in his own, but she pulled it loose and stepped away from him.
“You’re the only person in the world who doesn’t make me feel alone,” she said. Her senses seemed to bruise themselves against his silence. “You don’t have to be a French-Canadian to be born in a strait-jacket. Every girl’s born in one, unless you’re a girl like Daffy.”
She started walking over the turf toward the car. Though he made no sound, she knew he was close behind. “I’m such a damned little fool!” she said.
His hand was on her waist and he drew her to him gently. “We don’t have to pretend with each other, Heather. I’ve worn out a lot of shoes looking for jobs in the past year. I don’t have to remind you of that.”
“It’s not fair. It’s not fair!”
“Facts and fairness have nothing to do with each other. If it weren’t for all the doors that have closed in my face, I’d be able to say a lot of things to you now…that I can’t.”
Impatience dropped from her as she felt the strength and the support of his arms. The dark was a wall between them. What was love anyway, but a knowledge that you were not alone, with desire added? And there was no doubt about the desire. Paul knew he would wake up for months thinking about her, remembering her fresh resiliency.
They walked on to the car, gravel crunching under their feet as they turned into the drive.
“How long will you be at sea?” she said.
“A year. Perhaps two or three. I don’t know.”
“Anything could happen in that time.”
“Anything–to both of us.” He looked up and saw the long arm of the Dipper overhead, reaching toward the city. There was a flaring haze on the sky in the direction it pointed, city lights shining into moist air.
On the road back to town she drove as fast as the curves would allow. Trees lurched past with long swishing sighs, and beyond them starlight was reflected feebly in the water. When they turned from the lakeshore into Montreal West the road was straighter, and when they passed through Westmount they could see a bowling green soft and glowing under spotlights, its lawn as smooth as a billiard cloth. The lights gleamed on the bald heads of elderly, flanneled men and the bowls rolled slumbrously forward over the grass. It was quaint and dignified and very English.
In a moment it was behind them and the gigantic Sulpician seminary was on their left, with hundreds of incipient priests locked behind its elm trees and stone walls. Then Guy Street, rich Protestant churches, McGill campus, and the great electric cross blazing on the butt of Mount Royal. Finally they reached the shabby, rundown street where he lived. On the entire run from Dorval they had spoken not a word.
Paul got out of the car when it stopped and closed the door. Then he walked around to stand at the door on her side. He took one small hand from the wheel and held it in both his own. “Will you write to me sometimes? I’ll want to know how you are, and what you’re doing.”
“There won’t be much to tell.”
“Don’t say things like that. It’s you–not the things you do.” He looked at her hand a moment, then he kissed it. “You can always reach me through the shipping company in Halifax.”
She put her hand back on the wheel and released the clutch. “Have fun, darling,” she said. “And take care of yourself.”
As the car moved off she could see him in the rear-view mirror, standing there in the street looking after her. She turned the corner and lost sight of him. Her mind was suddenly blank with exhaustion, and she was conscious of nothing but her lips. They felt tired as her mind was tired, almost bruised from his, but exultantly alive.
When she had put the car in the garage and entered the house she saw Daphne reading under a lamp in the library. She stopped at the door and looked in.
“Well!” her sister said. “Mummy’s been worried to death. She’s been calling everybody in town to find out where you were.” She stared at Heather and then she smiled broadly. “Who was he?”
Heather looked at her sister as though she had never seen her before and went upstairs.