Road Ends (39 page)

I told him what Reverend Thomas had said. How he had fixed the trial, how he felt he was to blame for Robert’s suicide.

Tom put his head in his hands. “Oh God,” he said when I’d finished. “Oh God.”

I said, “He asked me to apologize to you on his behalf, Tom, for what you’ve been through. He was afraid you might have been thinking you could have prevented Robert’s suicide. He asked me to tell you that no one could have.”

He didn’t reply. I got up and went out to the entrance hall and brought back a coat and draped it over him—he was wearing only pyjamas. I risked putting a hand on his shoulder, just briefly. Then I sat down again. Outside the wind had picked up and snowflakes were splattering against the window, melting and trickling down.

When he seemed to have collected himself I said, “You and I have to talk, Tom. But not tonight. You should go back to bed.”

He nodded and after a moment he straightened up and left without looking at me so that I wouldn’t see that he’d been crying. I sat on for a while and then went upstairs myself. I was afraid I might dream about Reverend Thomas, but when it came to it I didn’t dream at all.

I am glad Betty is a librarian. It means I have a reason to see her frequently, and there is something about her that gladdens the heart. She has ditched her sleeping bag. When I went to the library at lunchtime she was wearing only her coat (with three layers underneath, so she informed me), hat, scarf, boots and gloves with the fingers missing.

“Reborn, like a butterfly!” she announced, wafting her arms. “Emerging from my chrysalis. Summer’s coming.”

I was enjoying the idea of Betty as a butterfly—she is on the hefty side—but I urged caution. Another blizzard is forecast for this evening.

“Nonsense,” Betty said. “What do they know?”

I told her that I had not had time to do justice to the books on Rome, which are due back at the library in Toronto next week, and she said she would try to get an extension for me. I hadn’t known that was possible. Apparently, if someone else is waiting for them I’ll be out of luck, but otherwise I can hold on to them for a while longer.

She asked how things were at home and I said better, which isn’t strictly true. I considered telling her about Peter and Corey’s little forays into arson but decided against it. She would suggest that I talk to them. I’ve got as far as imagining knocking on their bedroom door but I can’t imagine what comes next.

I also thought of telling her about Reverend Thomas’s visit but decided that would be breaking a confidence.

When I got back to the bank I saw in my desk diary that Luke Morrison had made an appointment to see me. I can guess what it’s about: Sam Waller of the building firm Waller and Sons has
been up here recruiting for the new hunting lodge/hotel, and my guess is that Luke Morrison has won the contract to make the furniture for them. I hope very much that is so. It’s good to see talent and hard work rewarded.

Luke Morrison and I have a connection he is probably not aware of. His father was the senior accountant at the bank when I joined it after the war and was therefore my first boss. He was an exceedingly nice man. It was he who encouraged me to study accountancy by correspondence course and saw to it that I had time off to get the qualifications. He and his wife were killed in a collision with a logging truck about fifteen years ago. A terrible thing. Several of us from the bank went to the funeral out in Crow Lake. I remember thinking the children—there were four of them—behaved with great dignity.

But as a result of that accident, the job of senior accountant at the bank became vacant and I was given it. And then a few years later, when Craig Stewart retired, I became manager. You could say I benefitted directly from that family’s tragedy, and I confess I’ve never been entirely comfortable with that.

So a few years later when his eldest son—Luke—came into the bank wanting to borrow money to set up a furniture-making business, I dealt with his request myself and gave him as much help and support as I could. He has done very well and when Sam Waller dropped in last week and asked what I knew about Luke, I was able to give him a very good reference. If he does get this new contract, it will set him up nicely.

In contrast to last night this has been a remarkably pleasant day. Reverend Gordon came into the bank this afternoon. I believe I said before that he has been hauled out of retirement by the church until a replacement for Reverend Thomas can be found. It seems to me unreasonable, given his age—he must be in his
seventies; he was at least fifty when we were in Italy during the war—but he claims to be enjoying it.

He came in to discuss his finances. His pension is very small but so are his outgoings, and I was able to reassure him there was no cause for concern. When the business side of things was out of the way we sat on for a few minutes (his was my last appointment of the day) and talked about this and that, mostly about the new hotel and what it will mean for the town. There will be more tourists—always a mixed blessing—but it will bring money into the area and create a good number of jobs and we agreed that on balance it would be a good thing.

We didn’t talk about the war. We never do. We shared what you could call an intense experience in the course of it but it wasn’t the sort of thing you talk about afterwards. He sat with me during what was unquestionably the worst night of my life. About a dozen of us, myself and another badly wounded man, had taken shelter from a bombardment in a deserted villa on the outskirts of Motta in southern Italy. In the end, after a day and a night of bloody battle, our forces did take the town, but that was no thanks to me; I was out of it by then.

I have several very clear memories from that day, one of which I have tried unsuccessfully to wipe from my mind ever since. I was on a stretcher—this was shortly after I was wounded—being carried to the villa. Pain had set in, and a desperate thirst, and no one had any water. I lifted my head, looking for someone to appeal to for a drink, and what I saw instead was a flame-thrower in action, simultaneously coating its target—and inevitably the men who were manning that target—in fuel and setting fire to it. And therefore to them.

Both sides had flame-throwers, I know that. But all I knew then was that this one was being used by us. By our side—the side that God was on. I remember hearing screaming and realizing it was coming from me.

Then I remember nothing until I came around in the villa and found myself lying on a heap of blankets beside the other injured man, with a padre sitting on his rucksack on the floor between us. The padre was Reverend Gordon. I didn’t know him at that stage and had no idea he was also from the North. He was the minister of the church in Struan, and Emily and I didn’t move here until 1948, when I got the job at the bank, so our paths had never crossed. He was just a man in a padre’s uniform, sitting on a rucksack.

We were in a large, imposing room with grand furniture and several magnificent paintings hanging on the walls. From outside I could hear the bombardment still going on. Inside, my fellow soldiers, who had discovered a wine cellar in the basement and were in exceedingly high spirits, were breaking up the furniture and throwing it on the fire. As I watched, two of them climbed onto a table, wrenched a painting off the wall and started hacking it up for the fire as well.

I guess I went a little mad. I remember shouting at them, struggling to get up and fighting savagely with Reverend Gordon, who was trying to restrain me, until eventually I was too exhausted to continue and fell back on the blankets.

Sometime after that the injured man next to me started calling for his mother and I heard Reverend Gordon say that his mother was here, right here beside him, and then he prayed with him and in the course of the praying the man died. I remember thinking that his death didn’t matter, that no man’s death mattered because the entire human race deserved to be wiped from the face of the earth.

My final memory from that day is of an exchange I had with Reverend Gordon in the middle of the night when the men had drunk themselves into a stupor and there was silence apart from the never-ending hammer of the guns. I was in terrible pain and certain that I was about to die. If I’d had any religious faith before
that day, the flame-thrower had put an end to it, and I just wanted to depart this world as swiftly as possible. Reverend Gordon was still beside me—he never moved from my side all that night—and I remember saying to him, “Just don’t talk to me about God,” (though he hadn’t been) and him saying, “All right.”

“And don’t pray for me. I don’t want to be prayed for.”

“All right,” he said. “Have some water. It’s very good—there’s a well in the garden.”

And then later still, feeling the warmth of his hand on my arm, I opened my eyes and saw that although he was still sitting upright, his eyes were closed, which made me suspicious, so I said, “You promised not to pray for me.”

He smiled and opened his eyes and said, “I’m doing my best not to, Edward. But I’m praying a kind of general prayer and you’ll have to forgive me if sometimes you slip in. Not often, though. I’m trying to keep it to a minimum.”

As I say, not the sort of thing you talk about sitting in a bank thirty years later. But not the sort of thing you forget either. I hope he knows I am grateful. I have no doubt he would say there is nothing to be grateful for.

The events of that day—in particular the flame-thrower—coming as they did hard on the heels of the forest fire and my father’s death, pretty much finished me off, mentally speaking. I had what they now call a mental breakdown and for several years I was not in good shape.

Physically I recovered almost in spite of myself. I spent six months in a hospital in England and it was while I was there that I received a letter from my sister Margaret telling me that my mother had died. Her lungs had been affected by smoke inhalation during the fire and she died of pneumonia. I remember the gaping chasm that opened within me when I read that
letter. It—the chasm—is there still, though I am not aware of it so often.

A matter of days later I received a letter from Emily—it had been written before Margaret’s but it had spent some time in Italy and was two months old by the time I got it—in which she told me I was going to be a father.

I read and reread that letter, trying to make it say something other than what it said. While I was still in Italy I’d realized that if I had ever been in love with Emily I no longer was. I’d worked out that as soon as I got home I would tell her that the war had changed me, which was certainly true, and that I no longer wished to be married and wanted a divorce. Her pregnancy made that impossible. Abandoning her with a child was not something I could bring myself to do even in the state I was in. With hindsight, of course, it might have been better for Emily if I had.

Very little account was taken of your emotional or mental health back then. When I was considered physically well enough to be moved I was transferred to a hospital ship and sent to Toronto, and after a spell in hospital there I was sent home. By the time I got there Tom had arrived. I remember Emily, delightedly, ecstatically, holding out to me this small bundle that was our son, and the way her expression changed when I made no move to take him, merely looked at him and said, “This is him, then.” Hardly knowing what I was looking at.

Her parents had rented a very small house for us so that we could be on our own and I could “get back on my feet”—very kind of them, of course. We were there for two years. It felt to me like being in a steel box barely big enough to stand in, containing scarcely enough air to breathe. I circled around and around inside that box. Around and around. It’s a wonder I didn’t wear a groove in the floor.

It’s also a wonder Emily didn’t get out the rifle and shoot me, now that I think of it. It must have been very hard for her.

At one stage I thought the endless babies were Emily’s way of punishing me for not loving her, but I don’t think that anymore. Emily isn’t vindictive. More likely she’s never quite got over Henry’s death. Or maybe it’s simply that I don’t make her happy and babies do. The problem is, they refuse to stay babies. She tries to hold on to them but one after another they slip away.