A perk of running a business like mine is you can take a different car home every night if you want. I do like to road test each car we work on, if time permits, before it’s picked up by its owner, especially if the work involved anything more than a minor tune-up.
The MGA is a delightfully shaped car, long and low, snug and sporty-sounding, slightly underpowered in its earliest incarnations with only 1500 cc’s, but spirited enough and fun to shift through the gears. By the end of the model’s run in 1962, disc brakes were standard for the front wheels. But the earliest models, and this was one of them, came with only drum brakes all around.
After the Triumph club members left, I was feeling a bit tired but decided to drive this valuable little car home anyway. I wanted to ensure that Reg’s work was up to the mark on the brakes. I’d just have to plan ahead for stopping the car, especially on the April-showered roads.
I snicked the MGA through the gears for the short hop down murky Cambridge Street to Carling Avenue, briefly heading west along it trying to avoid this road’s notorious potholes which showed as darker patches under the streetlights. A quick left down Preston and I joined the Queen Elizabeth Parkway skirting the western edge of Dow’s Lake, originally a swamp flooded and dammed as part of Colonel By’s brilliant, if costly, one-hundred-and-eighty-year-old canal system.
Past the gracefully domed Agriculture Canada buildings, I carried on straight through one of the few traffic roundabouts in the city, and finally built up some speed along Prince of Wales Drive before squeaking through the traffic lights at Hog’s Back.
From there, Prince of Wales, the old Prescott Highway, runs south out of the city following the west side of the Rideau River, both banks visibly crowded with ever more housing development. Traffic was light, and while the roads were wet, they weren’t slippery. There had been plenty of opportunity to test the brakes at traffic lights and stops, and the little car pulled up with no shuddering or grabbing to one side, even with a hard stab or two of my foot. A slight squeal gradually diminished as the new pads bedded in. Reg knew his stuff.
By 10 p.m. I was pulling into the maple-lined laneway of Isabelle’s rural property off the highway about twenty-five kilometers out of town. I pulled the remote garage door opener out of my jacket pocket, hit the button, and maneuvered the ’A into the empty slot kept clear for customers’ cars brought home, killed the lights, and shut off the motor. I sat in the car for a short while, the engine ticking as it cooled down. The shapes of my own cars loomed in the shadows formed by the outside light. I got out of the ’A, closed the garage door with the remote, and then looked over to the main house. The lights were on, so Isabelle was still up.
The drive in the ’A, augmented by the April drafts that came through the loose-fitting convertible top, had revived me, so I headed up Isabelle’s walkway for a visit. She would have heard the car, and a nightcap wouldn’t be amiss anyway.
Isabelle McCloud, Order of Canada, was eighty-nine, very Scottish, and confined mostly to a large reclining chair in the living room of her century-old red-bricked Victorian farmhouse. She was also my landlady. I lived above the separate three-bay garage in a poky flat with a shower stall and a galley kitchen. She called it a “mews” or “carriage house.” I called it a garage with auxiliary living space.
My wife Liz’s cancer had taken only six weeks from diagnosis to the day I watched the colour finally fade from her face in the General Hospital. I suppose you could say I went out of my head for a while. Although she hadn’t died at home, I was restlessly morbid in the country bungalow we’d lovingly renovated and redecorated.
I had thrown myself into work at the department, working on my car on weekends, seeing people, doing all the chores over and over, but was still spending too much time staring into space or pacing from room to room in the house. I eventually managed to sell the bungalow, and the money I made was the final impetus to leave the department and buy Britfit from Dougald.
Renting a flat above a garage may have seemed a comedown to some – and certainly the place would never be featured in Country Life magazine – but I didn’t care. It suited me, and I was even happy there.
Isabelle wasn’t happy, though, at least not this night.
I knocked on the front door, called out, “Hi, it’s Conn,” and advanced through the gloom into her living room. Advancing took some time. The room was packed to the gunwales with old nests of tables, elegantly threadbare couches, and Queen Anne chairs, plus urns, stacks of dishes, china figurines, and gimcracks and gewgaws of every description, not to mention boxes and boxes of who knew what. She could have held a major auction of antiques with the stuff in this room alone. I’d never seen what she kept in the rooms upstairs and didn’t want to.
Isabelle herself was half covered up with a blanket in her large recliner, a tray with the detritus of her evening meal on the card table beside her. She was spitting mad.
“That fool, Angela. She must have left the back door open. There’s a draft.”
“I’ll get it. The usual?”
“Aye, Conn. Thank you.”
I picked up her tray, pushed through to the kitchen, put the kettle on, and looked at the back door, which was already well and truly closed. I opened it, slammed it shut, and locked it again anyway.
By the time I returned with the tea things and two shots of single malt on a tray, Isabelle looked slightly less like a seriously cheesed off bald eagle with a head of wet white feathers.
We sipped our drinks, and I half listened as she ran through Angela’s faults in her rasping Edinburgh brogue. I’d heard these complaints many times and said nothing beyond a murmured “hmm.”
In my books, Angela, a petite Filipina with a million-dollar smile and deep oceans of patience, deserved her own medal. She “did” for Isabelle every day, starting at 7 a.m., leaving after lunch and returning around 5 p.m. most days to prepare the evening meal. Aside from preparing Isabelle’s food, Angela helped her wash and change, and “catalogued” Isabelle’s family belongings that she’d inherited over the years from relatives she’d outlived. For this never-ending project alone, Angela deserved more than to be called a fool at the drop of every hat. I would have said so, except that we all knew Isabelle didn’t really mean it. She’d helped put Angela’s daughter through university, for one thing.
There are many old folks around, mostly women, who insist on living to the bitter end in somewhat squalid conditions in their own homes rather than be subjected to the indignities of organized games, sing-songs, and insufferably perky staff in residences. Isabelle was lucky to be able to stay in her own home, and she knew it.
“Well, Conn, you’re quiet tonight.”
“Yes, sorry. I heard today about someone who died.”
“A friend?”
“No. A former colleague from the Minister’s Office.”
“What happened?”
I explained what I knew about Morrison’s death, but didn’t mention the anomaly of his being found dead in a car that he theoretically couldn’t drive.
“So, if he wasn’t a particular friend, is there something else about all this?”
Isabelle got her Order of Canada for tireless and extensive volunteer organizing work for the Red Cross after emigrating from the UK in the fifties. A scholarship student at Oxford University, she’d been among a group of very clever people handpicked for code-breaking work night and day at a ramshackle collection of huts on an estate in the Buckinghamshire countryside in the 1940s. It took me awhile to draw this out of her. Like many people of her generation and abilities, she wasn’t the self-aggrandizing type. But I’d witnessed the occasional exchange with a tradesman or salesperson who had spoken to Isabelle in a patronizing manner, assuming her to be a senile little old lady. Big mistake. Her body may have been breaking down on her, but there was nothing wrong with her powers of perception.
“Not really. Just a bit of a surprise, I guess.”
Morrison had been one of a large number of colleagues and characters I’d had to deal with on a daily basis while in the department. We weren’t friends, and moved in different circles outside of work hours. I was sorry to hear about his death nonetheless.
I finished off the scotch, and stood to go.
“Oh, Conn, I meant to say, my stepdaughter’s niece is coming this weekend. You must meet her. She’s moving back to Canada and will be staying with me for a wee while. We’ll have tea on Sunday. She’s a lovely wee gel.”
The way she said this, it was clear Isabelle was firing another ranging shot in her battle to get me involved with a “nice gel.” That she wanted me to meet even such a convolutedly distant relative as a stepdaughter’s niece was a high compliment.
“Well, I’d be happy to meet her.”
“Conn … never mind. Will I see you tomorrow?”
“No, Isabelle, it’s Friday, so I’ll be staying overnight at the shop. But I’ll be here by midday Saturday.”
I picked up the tray from her table, accidentally bumping her collection of canes and walking sticks, some looking quite ancient, which were stuffed into a three-foot-high ceramic pot beside her chair.
“No harm done. Off ye go.”
Once in my flat, I checked my phone messages – all hang-ups by automated telemarketing machines – looked at the bill envelopes and left them on my desk for dealing with on the weekend. There wasn’t much in the fridge, as usual. I opened a tin of sardines in tomato sauce, put the contents on buttered toast, and gobbled it all down. I poured a shot of Islay malt from my own supply, put a Boccherini CD in the player – volume three of the Guitar Quintets – sat in my armchair, stared at the curtained windows, and thought about “gels.” Or the lack of them.
After Liz died, I got involved with a single friend of hers, Sylvia, who insisted on helping me get rid of Liz’s clothes almost immediately. At the time, I was grateful to Sylvia for packing things up, taking them to used clothing stores, and just dealing with it all. Gradually, we went from occasionally eating dinner at her Westboro apartment to making it a regular Friday night event. In about three months we went from talking about Liz – or more correctly my talking about Liz – to having a full-blown affair. I felt smitten, guilty, and grateful all at the same time.
Finally, we stopped. Sylvia had arrived at the bungalow on a Saturday afternoon for what was going to be a romantic weekend. Along with wine, flowers, and sexy underclothing, she’d brought her own musical accompaniment discs. I have catholic tastes in music – classical, jazz, pop, old time country, you name it – but stuff known as elevator music I can’t abide. She’d made a nice dinner, and then she wanted to dance. She put on one of her CDs. “Feelings” was the name of the first track, a horrible schmaltzy thing from the seventies by some crooner best forgotten, in my view.
My misgivings about the direction the relationship seemed to be going, and my sense of guilt in encouraging it, came to a head. I said I refused to listen to “this garbage.” It escalated from there, with some hard words back and forth, and she started to cry. I felt like a complete jerk, but was relieved when she stormed out and drove away.
The bungalow was sold not long after that. I bumped into Sylvia every now and then, and we asked ‘how are you?’– all very polite.
No real sparks had flown on either side during subsequent dates with other women. I got a kick out of Marjorie at the shop and felt extremely lustful on occasion toward her, but any kind of dalliance with an employee would have been a disaster. Still, it had been three years since Liz had died, and I had the same urges as any other healthy forty-five-year-old male.
The Boccherini CD finished. I sighed and put out the lights and went to bed. Tomorrow, Friday, I had a lot on my plate.