Montreal Stories (39 page)

A string orchestra filed onstage, to grateful applause (the musicians were half an hour late), and an eerie hush settled over the square. For the next hour or so, both Lapwings held still.

At intermission Mr. Chadwick tried to persuade us to remain in our seats; he seemed afraid of losing us—or perhaps just of losing David—in the shuffling crowd. Some people were making for a bar across the square, others struggled in the opposite direction, toward the church. I imagined Christian Ferras and the other musicians at bay in the vestry, their hands cramped from signing programs. David was already in the aisle, next to Lily.

“The intermission lasts a whole hour,” said Lapwing, lifting his glasses and bringing the program close to his face. “Why don’t we just say we’ll meet at the bar?”

“And I’ll look after Mr. Chadwick,” said Edie, taking him by the arm. But it was not Edie he wanted.

Lily turned to David, smiling. She loved being carried along by this crowd of players from old black-and-white movies, hearing the different languages mingling and overlapping.

“Glorious, isn’t he?” said David, about Ferras.

Lily answered something I could not hear but took to be more enthusiastic small talk, and slipped a hand under her collar, fingering the gold chain. As we edged past the cheaper seats, she said, “This is where Steve and I usually sit. It’s so far back that you don’t see the musicians. We’re very grateful to Mr. Chadwick for tonight.” No one could say she had undermined David’s sense of thankfulness; he had been given a spring and summer in the South, and it hadn’t cost him a centime. I thought we should not discuss Mr. Chadwick with David at all, but my reasons were confused and obscure. I believed David liked Lily because she took him seriously as a musician and not as someone’s gardener. I thought the constant company of an older, nervous man must be stifling, even though I could not imagine him with a young one: he wanted to be looked after and to be rebellious, all at once. The natural companion for David was someone like Lily—attractive, and charming, and married to another man. I knew he was restless and had talked to her about London. That was all I thought I knew.

At the grocery store that served as theater bar, wine and French gin and whiskey and soft drinks were being dispensed, at triple price. The wine was sour and undrinkable. David asked for tonic; Lily and I usually had Cokes. The French she had learned in her Catholic boarding school allowed her to negotiate this, timidly. She liked ordering, enjoyed taking over sometimes, but Mr. Chadwick had corrected her Canadian accent and made her shy. David, merely impressed, asked if she had been educated in Switzerland.

The possibility of becoming a different person must have occurred to her. She picked up the bottle of tonic, as if she had never heard of Coca-Cola, still less ordered it, and demanded
a glass. No more straws; no more drinking from bottles. She then handed David a tepid Coke, and he was too struck by love to do anything but swallow it down.

Lapwing in only a few minutes had managed to summon and consume large quantities of wine. His private reasoning had Mr. Chadwick paying for everything: after all, he had brought Lapwing up here to be belabored by Mozart. Edie, who had somehow lost Mr. Chadwick, was drinking wine, too. I noticed that Lily wanted me to foot the bill: the small wave of her hand was an imperial gesture. Distancing herself from me, the graduate of a Swiss finishing school forgot we had no money, or nearly none. I fished a wad of francs out of my pocket and dropped them on the counter. Lapwing punched me twice on the shoulder, perhaps his way of showing thanks.

“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m one of those people for whom music is wave after wave of disjointed noise.” He made “those people” sound like a superior selection.

Mr. Chadwick, last to arrive, looked crumpled and mortified, as if he had been put through some indignity. All I could do was offer him a drink. He looked silently and rather desperately at the grocery shelves, the cans of green peas, the cartons leaking sugar, the French gin with the false label.

“It’s very kind of you,” he said.

Lily and Edie linked arms and started back toward the church. They wanted to see the musicians at close quarters. Mr. Chadwick had recaptured David, which left me saddled with Lapwing.

“I don’t have primitive anti-Catholic feelings,” said Lapwing. “Edie was a Catholic, of course, being a Pole. A middle-class Pole. I encouraged her to keep it up. A woman should have a moral basis, especially if she doesn’t have an intellectual one. Is Lily still Catholic?”

“It’s her business.” We had been over this ground before.

“And you?”

“I’m not anything.”

“You must have started out as something. We all do.”

“My parents are Anglican missionaries,” I said. “I’m nothing in particular.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Lapwing said.

“Why?”

I hoped he would say he didn’t know, which would have raised him a notch. Instead he drank the wine left in Edie’s glass and hurried after the two women.

In the bright church, where every light had been turned on and banks of votive candles blazed, our wives wandered from saint to saint. Edie had tied a bolero jacket around her head. The two were behaving like little girls, laughing and giggling, displaying ex-Catholic behavior of a particular kind, making it known that they took nothing in this place seriously but that they were perfectly at home. Lapwing responded with Protestant prudence and gravity, making the remark that Lily should cover her hair. I looked around and saw no red glow, no Presence. For the sake of the concert the church had been turned into a public hall; in any case, what Lily chose to do was her business. Either God existed and was not offended by women and their hair or He did not; it came to the same thing.

Mr. Chadwick was telling David about design and decoration. He pointed to the ceiling and to the floor. I heard him say some interesting things about the original pagan site, the Roman shrine, the early Christian chapel, and the present rickety Baroque—a piece of nonsense, he said. Lapwing and I, stranded under a nineteenth-century portrayal of St. Paul, given the face of a hanging judge, kept up an exchange that to an outsider might have resembled conversation. I was so hard up for something to say that I translated the inscription under the picture: “St. Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles, put to death as a martyr in Rome, A.D. 67.”

“I’ve been working on him,” Lapwing said. “I’ve written
a lot of stuff.” He tipped his head to look at the portrait, frowning. “Saul is the name, of course. The whole thing is a fake. The whole story.”

“What do you mean? He never existed?”

“Oh, he existed, all right. Saul existed. But that seizure on the road to Damascus can be explained in medical terms of our time.” Lapwing paused, and then said rather formally, “I’ve got doctors in the family. I’ve read the books. There’s a condition called eclampsia. Toxemia of pregnancy, in other words. Say Lily was pregnant—say she was carrying the bacteria of diphtheria, or typhoid, or even tetanus.…”

“Why couldn’t it be Edie?”

“O.K., then, Edie. I’m not superstitious. I don’t imagine the gods are up there listening, waiting for me to make a slip. Say it’s Edie. Well, she could have these seizures, she could hallucinate. I’m not saying it’s a common condition. I’m not saying it often happens in the civilized world. I’m saying it could have happened in very early A.D.”

“Only if Paul was a pregnant woman.”

“Men show female symptoms. It’s been known to happen—the male equivalent of hysterical pregnancy. Oh, not deliberately. I’m not saying it’s common behavior. I don’t want you to misquote me, if you decide to research my topic. I’m only saying that Saul, Paul, was on his way to Damascus, probably to be treated by a renowned physician, and he had this convulsion. He heard a voice. You know the voice I mean.” Lapwing dropped his tone, as though nothing to do with Christianity should ever be mentioned in a church. “He hallucinated. It was a mystical hallucination. In other words, he did a Joan of Arc.”

It was impossible to say if Lapwing was trying to be funny. I thought it safer to follow along: “If it’s true, it could account for his hostility to women. He had to share a condition he wasn’t born to.”

“I’ve gone into that. If you ever research my premise,
remember I’ve gone into everything. I think I may drop it, actually. It won’t get me far. There’s no demand.”

“I don’t see the complete field,” I said. That sounded all right—inoffensive.

“Well, literature. But I may have strayed. I may be over the line.” He dropped his gaze from the portrait to me, but still had to look up. “I don’t really want to say more.”

I think he was afraid I might encroach on his idea, try to pick his brain. I assured him that I was committed to French history and politics, but even that may have seemed too close, and he turned away to look for Edie, to find out for certain what she was doing, and ask her to stop.

Mr. Chadwick had found the evening so successful that he decided on a bolder social move: David must give a piano recital in the villa, with a distinguished audience in attendance. A reception would follow—white-wine cup, petits fours—after which some of us would be taken to a restaurant, as Mr. Chadwick’s guests, for a dinner in David’s honor. The event was meant to be a long jump in his progress from gardener to favored house guest.

He was let off gardening duty and spent much of his time now at the Biesels’, where they offered him a cool room with a piano in it and left him in peace. Meanwhile the winter salon was torn apart and cleaned, dustcovers were removed from the sofas, the windows and shutters opened and washed and sealed tight again. The expert brought in from Nice to restore the Pleyel had a hard time putting it to rights, and asked for an extra fee. Mr. Chadwick would not give it, and for a time it looked as if there would be no recital at all. Mrs. Biesel quietly intervened and paid the difference. Mr. Chadwick never knew. One result of the conflict and its solution, apart from the piano’s having been fixed, was that Mr. Chadwick began to tell stories about how he had, in the past,
showed great firmness with workmen and tradesmen. They were boring stories, but, as Lily said, it was better than hearing the stories about his mother.

It seemed to me that the recital could end in nothing but disgrace and ridicule. I wondered why David went along with the idea.

“Amateurs have a lot of self-confidence,” said Mrs. Biesel, when I asked what she thought. “A professional would be scared.” I had come round to her house to call for Lily: she was spending a lot of time there, too, encouraging David.

Mrs. Biesel had a soft Southern voice and was not always easy to understand. (I was amazed when I discovered that to Mr. Chadwick all North Americans sounded alike.) I recall Mrs. Biesel with her head to one side, poised to listen, and her curved way of sitting, as if she were too tall and too thin for most chairs. I could say she was like a Modigliani, but it’s too easy, and I am not sure I had heard of Modigliani then. The Biesels were rich, by which I mean that they had always lived with money, and when they spent any they always gave themselves a moral excuse. The day Lily decided she wanted to go to London without me, the Biesels paid her way. They saw morality on that occasion as a matter of happiness, Lily’s in particular. Any suggestion that they might have conspired to harm and deceive was below their view of human nature. Conversation on the subject soon became like a long talk in a dream, with no words remembered, just an impression of things intended.

Mr. Chadwick pored over stacks of yellowed sheet music his mother had kept in a rosewood Canterbury. He wanted David to play short pieces with frequent changes in mood. “None of your all-Schubert,” he said. “It just puts people to sleep.”

Mrs. Biesel supplied printed programs on thick ivory paper. We were supposed to keep them as souvenirs, but the printer had left off the date. She apologized to Mr. Chadwick, as
though it were her own fault. (It is curious how David was overlooked; the recital seemed to have become a social arrangement between Mrs. Biesel and Mr. Chadwick.) Mr. Chadwick ran his eye down the page and said, “But he’s not doing the Debussy. He’s doing the Ravel.”

“It’s a long, hard program,” said Mrs. Biesel, in just above a whisper. “It might have been easier if he had simply worked up some Bach.”

At three o’clock on one of the hottest afternoons since the start of recorded temperatures, David sat down to the restored Pleyel. On the end wall behind him was a large Helleu drawing of Mr. Chadwick’s mother playing the piano, with her head thrown back and a bunch of violets tied to her wrist. The winter carpets, rolled up and stacked next to the fireplace, smelled of old dust and moth repellent. Still Mr. Chadwick would not let the room be aired. To open the windows meant letting in heat. “You must all sit very still,” he announced, as David got ready to start. “It’s moving about, stirring up the atmosphere, that makes one feel warm.”

Who was there? Mr. Chadwick’s friends and neighbors, and a number of people I suspect he brought in on short acquaintance. I remember his doctor, a dour Alsatian who had the complete confidence of the British colony; he had acquired a few reassuring expressions in English, such as “It’s just a little chill on the liver” and “Port’s the thing.” People liked that. When I think of the Canadians in the winter salon—the Lapwings, and Lily and me, and Fergus Bray, and an acquaintance of Lapwing’s called Michael Hagen-Beck—it occurs to me that abroad, outside embassy premises or official functions, I never saw that many in one room again. Hagen-Beck was an elderly-looking undergraduate of nineteen or twenty, dressed in scant European-style shorts, a khaki shirt, knee socks, and gym shoes. Near the end of the recital, he walked out of the house and did not come back.

Lily mooned at David, as she had at Christian Ferras. I
supposed it must be her way of contemplating musicians. There was nothing wrong with it; I had just never thought of her as a mooner of any kind. Once she sprang from her chair and pushed open a shutter: the room was so dim that David had to strain to read the music. Mr. Chadwick left the shutter ajar, but latched the window once more, murmuring again his objection to stirring up the atmosphere.