First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (28 page)

Just then, Doctor Burns saw me, and cleared his throat. Gordon Cacktail turned and saw me too.

“Ah, Mr Halfnight,” he said. “I was just talking about you.”

He was completely unashamed of being overheard. What a frightening man he seemed to me—a man with no secrets, who’d never say anything in private he wouldn’t want the world to hear. Doctor Burns looked a little less comfortable and excused himself.

“Mr Halfnight,” said Gordon Cacktail, “if only I could convince you to see me again.” He had put on his most persuasive voice. “Now, look. I go down to the Camberloo Mental Health Centre once a month. I’d be only too happy to set up a schedule of sessions.”

I said I wasn’t interested and he saw I meant it.

“Well,” he said, “if that’s the way you feel. But if you do change your mind, you know where to get in touch with me. Believe me, putting experiences like yours into words is very therapeutic. Even if you don’t want to talk to me, or anyone else, for that matter. You really should consider writing them down. That can be such a healthy exercise.”

I was walking away in disgust when Gordon Cacktail said something that made me stop just a moment more.

“You mentioned ‘The Monstrous Regiment of Women’ when we spoke. I just thought you might like to know it’s part of the title of an old book. The full title was
First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
. Maybe you already knew that? I looked it up in the encyclopedia. It has nothing to do with an army of ugly women,
though. ‘Regiment’ used to mean rule by a king. The book was opposed to women being rulers. So that’s all it means—‘a warning against the dreadful government by women’—or something like that. Though it seems the author wasn’t too fond of women generally. He probably wouldn’t have objected to your notion of a regiment of them marching around, terrorizing the world.”

I was back in Camberloo that evening. The superintendent of my apartment block welcomed me. He’d seen the note pinned to my door and said he’d taken good care of Minnie while I was gone.

I thanked him. I didn’t take the elevator, but climbed the stairs to my apartment with a certain dread. Perhaps I was afraid the mote might still be there, waiting for me. I opened the door cautiously and a black shape came rushing at me. I flinched—but it was only Minnie, her tail in the air, her purr louder than I remembered.

I closed the door behind me and made a quick check of the apartment. Everything in the living-room seemed normal. In the bedroom, the candles I’d arrayed round the bed were now wax blobs. The black pill still lay on the bedside table. I put it back in the bathroom.

I poured myself a scotch and sat in the armchair with Minnie on my knee. I stroked her, and for the first time in such a long time, I prepared to let myself relax.

But not yet. I moved Minnie aside and brought the photograph from the bedroom. I laid it on the living-room table and examined it with a magnifying glass: my mother and father were standing in a snowy parking lot with a building behind them and a car parked nearby. The car was one of those old-fashioned cars that don’t exist any more, all humps and fins.

The sight of that car made my heart beat faster. I turned
the photograph over, loosened the little holders with a penknife, took off the backing and lifted the photograph out. I turned it over. About an inch along the top had been covered by the matt. I could make out, faintly, an old-fashioned neon sign above the door of the building.

My hand, holding the magnifying glass, trembled as I held it over the sign and tried to read it. I squinted, I tried every way to decipher it. Did it say The Highlander? The photograph was very old and the focus wasn’t that good. The entire picture dissolved into dots the closer I examined it. The more I looked, the more I realized I’d never be certain—and the steadier my hand became. At last, I gave up. I went back to the armchair, Minnie settled again on my knee, I settled again with my scotch. And this time I did relax.

T
WO YEARS PASSED
. At least once a day, every day, I tried to remember that accident in the car. I just couldn’t.

As for my left hand, I would squeeze a tennis ball in it every day for a few minutes, but the muscles and flesh of the arm began to atrophy. My hand took on the appearance of a large claw. Some nights I’d wake, terrified, feeling something crawl over my body. It was the hand, which seemed to have a mind of its own. It was a nuisance in another way too: I’d got myself into a work routine again, and went to the agency for a few hours each day. I couldn’t help noticing that clients were a little put off by the sight of the hand.

I took to wearing a leather glove on it.

I was now living a very disciplined life and sleeping well. If there was any benefit from the accident, it was that since then my nightmares had completely vanished. So far as those other pleasures were concerned: I didn’t miss them at all. In fact, I took a perverse sensual pleasure in my self-denial. I came to enjoy my abstinence as much as I’d enjoyed my over-indulgence. I was so sure of myself, I’d flushed the cyanide pills down the toilet.

In June of that second year, two items in
The Camberloo Record
caught my attention. The first was the death of
Amber Tristesse—or, as the report called her, Gladys Brown. The warehouse she lived in had burned down, and her body and the body of an unknown man were found inside. The fire seemed to have been deliberately set in her upstairs apartment, and investigators suspected arson, though it might possibly have been suicide.

The other item was the approach of the Comet Zabrinski. The papers were full of it. It had been spotted first by an amateur astronomer, and experts forecast it would be a great spectacle as it passed close to the earth.

I first read about the comet one Tuesday, at lunch-time. I’d taken the newspaper to the Park to eat my sandwich and was sitting on a bench under a big maple. There was no wind, flowers were in bloom everywhere, the trees were heavy with growth, children were playing, wading through shallow lakes of white butterflies. As I read about the comet, I was remembering Uncle Norman, and his hopes of spotting a meteor from his garden on St Jude.

Just then, I became aware of a woman sitting on the next bench along the path. She was wearing a headscarf that partly covered her face. She had taken out a thick paperback, and was reading. As I looked, she glanced up. I put on my sunglasses, and pretended to carry on with the
Record
; now I was able to examine her without her being aware of it.

She was of medium build, and seemed to be in her mid-thirties. She wore a white blouse and a red skirt. Her skirt was knee length, and on her bare feet she wore leather sandals with intricate bindings.

I had a feeling I ought to know her. Did she live in my apartment block? Was she one of those women I’d been involved with during my drug stupors? That possibility always made me apprehensive.

After a while, I gave up speculating and went back to the
Record
. When I’d finished reading, I folded it and got to my feet.

As I was passing her bench, she looked up at me and the sun shone directly on her face. It was bracketed by wisps of longish fair hair that protruded from under the scarf. The features were very regular, with high cheek-bones. The dark eyes were darkened even more with mascara, and the corners of them were little sad birds. All in all, it was an interesting face. But the skin was pitted with pock-marks.

She kept looking at me, so I spoke.

“Isn’t this a lovely summer’s …”

I didn’t finish the sentence. For all at once, I recognized her.

“Maria!” I said. “Maria!” This grown woman was, astoundingly, Maria Hebblethwaite!

“Andrew Halfnight!” She was on her feet now too. “I thought I knew your face. How extraordinary!”

We didn’t hug; we didn’t even shake hands. We just stood, speechless with surprise. When we’d enough presence of mind to sit down again, we exchanged awkward platitudes. But when we relaxed and really began to talk, I asked her about her life since I’d last seen her, all those years before, scurrying into a taxi at the dock in Southaven.

“How long ago was that?” she said.

“Almost twenty years,” I said.

“I remember it so well,” she said. “I was so sad. I’d have given anything for you to have come with us that day, Andrew. My father wouldn’t have minded. But my mother said she’d sooner bring a viper along with us. After the storm, I think she was never quite the same.” Maria spoke softly with no trace of the St Jude lilt. She wore some kind of lemony perfume that smelt good.

“Ah well,” I said. “It was all so long ago.” As Maria talked on I tried my best not to look like a viper.

The Hebblethwaites had gone to live with relatives in the village of Abbot’s Chase, where many of the houses had been built in the Middle Ages. For Maria, born on St Jude, it was a novel experience to live in a landlocked, stable place where the walls were not made of plywood, where old things really were old.

But stability consists of more than geography and architecture. After only a few weeks in Abbot’s Chase, just as she was about to enter the local school, Maria developed a high fever and collapsed. It was the smallpox, which she’d never been exposed to on St Jude. She recovered quickly enough, and was able to go to school; but she discovered that her newly pock-marked face and her Island accent were enough to keep her from making friends.

Fortunately (from Maria’s standpoint, if not her mother’s), the family didn’t stay long at Abbot’s Chase. The Doctor was appointed to various short-term positions as interim Medical Officer in remote and dangerous parts of the world. For a time, they had to live on a coral atoll that barely held its head above the ocean: that was in the Kuvalu Archipelago; for another period, they were on the main island of the Birikati group; there, the daily rumbling of the volcanic Mount Tula would shake the Medical Residence, and pictures, books, even pots on the stove, could become dangerous to anyone near.

Maria was eighteen when her father was posted to one of the oil emirates. There she met an attaché at the Embassy, a man who was ten years older. He took her on as his research assistant, and was kind to her. When he received an appointment at the Embassy in Ottawa, he asked her to come with him as his wife and she accepted. She was twenty. They lived together happily; they had no children. Then, just three years ago, returning from government
business in the High Arctic, his plane went down in a blizzard. There were no survivors.

Since then Maria had been on her own. She had given up her job in the government archives and was free to go anywhere. She liked Canada as much as anything for the absence of the bullying nationalism and flag-waving she’d seen too much of in other countries. She decided this was where she would stay.

As I listened to Maria talk, I realized how I’d always tended to assume, whenever I thought of her, that she was somewhere in the world, pining for me, when in fact she was getting on with her life quite nicely. As she talked, I paid as much attention to her face as to what she said. I kept seeing glimpses of the old Maria: the little curl of the lips, the delicate ears, the serious eyes. I kept remembering our adventures together on the beach and wondered if she remembered them too.

“But why are you here? Why are you in Camberloo?” I asked. “Are you visiting someone?”

“I live here,” she said. “I had a house built here last year.” She told me her husband had always wanted to retire here. He loved this area of the province with its farmlands, and settledness, and more moderate climate.

“And what about your parents? How are they?” I didn’t really care much about Mrs Hebblethwaite, but I was interested in the Doctor, who’d always been kind to me.

“They’re both dead, eight years now,” she said. “They were posted to the Lesser Malukus. My father was really getting too old for those tropical postings. They both picked up an intestinal parasite and died very quickly.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“But what about you, Andrew?” She’d glanced several times at my gloved left hand. “What have you been doing all these years? How do you come to be in Camberloo?”

If her account of her own life had been short, I gave her an even more brief, more selective summary of my own. And when I’d finished, we just sat there together in the shady, tangled world beneath the trees, not wanting to part and go out into the bright sun.

M
ARIA AND
I
PARTED
reluctantly after that first meeting in the Park. We arranged to meet at the Wagner for dinner that night, and I was early arriving. It was a Tuesday and the restaurant was quiet. I sipped a glass of wine while I waited for her.

When she appeared, she was wearing a black dress with some pearls and looked marvellous. She seemed happy to see me, too. We held hands across the table and sipped wine for a while, filling out some more of the details of our lives.