Small Ceremonies (8 page)

“I think I might write a novel,” I said to Martin on a grey Birmingham morning as he was about to leave for the library.

“What for?” he asked, genuinely surprised.

“I'm tired of being boxed in by facts all the time,” I told him. “Fiction might be an out for me. And it might be entertaining too.”

“You're too organized for full-time fantasy,” he said, and later I remembered those words and gave him credit for prophecy. Martin is astute, although sometimes, as on this particular morning, he looks overly affable and half-daft.

“You sound like a real academic,” I told him. “All footnotes and sources.”

“I
know
you, Judith,” he said smiling.

“Well, I'm going to start today,” I told him. “I've been making a few notes, and today I'm going to sit down and see what I can do.”

“Good luck,” was all he said, which disappointed me, for he had been interested in my biographies and, in a subdued way, proud of my successes.

 

NOTES FOR NOVEL

Tweedy man on bus, no change, leaps off
beautiful girl at concert, husband observes her legs, keeps dropping program
children in park, sailboat, mother yells (warbles) “Damn you David. You're getting your knees dirty."
letter to editor about how to carry cello case in a minicar. Reply from base player
West Indians queue for mail. Fat white woman (rollers) cigarette in mouth says, “what they need is ticket home."
story in paper about woman who has baby and doesn't know she's preg. Husband comes home from work to find himself a father. Dramatize.
leader of labor party dies tragically, scramble for power. wife publishes memoirs.
hotel bath. each person rationed to one inch of hot water. Hilarious landlady.
Lord renounces title so he can run for House of Commons, boyhood dream and all that.

 

My random jottings made no sense to me at all. When I wrote them down I must have felt something; I must have thought there was yeast there, but whatever it was that had struck me at the time had faded away. There was no center, no point to begin from.

I paced up and down in the flat thinking. A theme? A starting point? A central character or situation? I looked around the room and saw John Spalding's notebooks. That was the day I took them down and began to read them; my novel was abandoned.

After that I was too dispirited to do any writing at all. I spent the spring shopping and visiting art galleries and teashops and waiting for the end to come. I counted the days and it finally came. We packed our things, sold the Austin, gave the school uniforms away and, just as summer was getting big as a ball, we returned home.

 

Martin is better. Still on medication, but looking something like his real self. Today he went back to the university, and the house is quiet. For some reason I open his desk drawer, the one where the wool is.

It's gone. Nothing there but the wood slats of the drawer bottom and a paper clip or two. I look in the other drawers. Nothing.

I hadn't thought much about the wool while it was still there. I'd wondered about it, of course, but it was easy to forget, to push to the back of my thoughts. But now it has gone.

It has come and gone. I have been offered no explanations. Was it real, I wonder.

My hands feel cold and my heart pounds. I am afraid of something and don't know what it is.

 

 

The first snow
has come, lush and feather-falling.

As a child I hated the snow, thinking it was both cruel and everlasting, but that was the hurting enemy snow of Scarborough that got down our necks, soaked through our mittens, fell into our boots and rubbed raw, red rings around our legs. It is one of the good surprises of life to find that snow can be so lovely.

Nancy Krantz and I skied all one day, and afterwards, driving home in her little Volkswagen with our skis forked gaily on its round back, we talked about childhood.

“The worst part for me,” Nancy said, “was thinking all the time that I was crazy.”

“You? Crazy?”

“It wasn't until I hit university that I heard the expression
déjà vu
for the first time. I had always thought I was the only being in the universe who had experienced anything as eerie as that. Imagine, discovering at twenty that it is a universal phenomenon, all spelled out and recognized. And normal. What a cheat! Why hadn't someone told me about it? Taken me aside and said, look, don't you ever feel all this has happened before?”

“Hadn't you ever mentioned it to anyone?”

“What? And have them know I was crazy. Never.”

“You surprise me, Nancy,” I said. “I would have thought you were very open as a child.”

“Not on your life. I was a regular clam,” she said, shifting gears at a hill. “And scared of my own shadow. Especially at night. At one point I actually thought my mother, my dear, gentle, plump, little mother with her fox furs and little felt hats was trying to put poison in my food. Imagine! Well, thank God for second-year psychology, even though it was ten years too late. Because that's normal too, a child's fear that his parents will murder him. And if they didn't, someone else would. Hitler maybe. Or some terrible maniac hiding out in my clothes cupboard. Or lying under my bed with a bayonet. Right through the mattress. Oh God. It was so terrible. And so real. I could almost feel the cold, steely tip coming through the sheet. But I never told anyone. Never.”

“I wonder if children are that stoic today? Not to tell anyone their worse fears.”

“Mine are pretty brave. I can't tell if they're bluffing or not, though. Weren't you ever afraid like that, Judith?”

“Of course,” I said, “I was a real coward. But it's funny looking back. Do you know what it was that frightened me most about childhood?”

“What?”

“That it would never end.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was frightened, but it wasn't so much the shadows in the cupboard that scared me. It was the terrible, terrible suffocating sameness of it all. It's true. I remember lying in bed trembling, but what I heard was the awful and relentless monotony. The furnace switching off and on in the basement. Amos and Andy. Or the kettle steaming in the kitchen. Even the sound of my parents turning the pages of the newspaper in the living room while we were supposed to be going to sleep. My mother's little cough, so genteel. The flush of the toilet through the wall before they went to bed. And other things. The way my mother always hung the pillowcases on the clothesline with the open end up, leaving just a little gap so the air could blow inside them. With a clothes peg in her mouth when she did it, always the same. It frightened me.”

“I always thought there was something to be said for stability in childhood.”

“I suppose there is,” I agreed. “But I always hoped, or rather I think I actually knew, that there was another world out there and that someday I would walk away and live in it. But the long, long childhood nearly unhinged me. Take the floor tiles in our kitchen at home. I can tell you exactly the pattern of our floor in Scarborough, and it was a complicated pattern too. Blue squares with a yellow fleck, alternating in diagonal stairsteps with yellow squares with brown flecks. And I can tell you exactly the type of flowers on my bedspread when I was six and exactly what my dotted swiss curtains looked like when I was twelve. And the royal blue velvet tiebacks. It was so vivid, so present. That's what I was afraid of. All those details. And their claim on me.”

“And when you finally did get away from it into the other life, Judith – was it all you thought it would be?” She was driving carefully, concentrating on the road which was getting slippery under the new snow.

I tried to shape an answer, a real answer, but I couldn't. “Oh, I don't know,” I said with a hint of dismissal. “The trouble is that when you're a child you can sense something beyond the details. Or at least you hope there's something.”

“And now?” she prompted me.

“And now,” I said, “I hardly ever think about the kind of life I want to live.”

“Why not?”

“I suppose I'm just too preoccupied with living it. Much less introspective. And one thing about writing biography is that you tend to focus less on your own life. But I think of Richard and Meredith sometimes, and wonder if they're taking it all in.”

“The pattern on the kitchen floor?”

“Yes. All of it. And I wonder if they're waiting for it to be over.”

“Maybe it's all a big gyp,” Nancy said. “Maybe the whole thing is a big gyp the way Simone de Beauvoir says at the end of her autobiography. Life is a gyp.”

I nodded. It was warm in the car and I felt agreeable and sleepy. My legs and back ached pleasantly, and I thought that the snow blowing across the highway looked lovely in the last of the afternoon light. The motor hummed and the windshield wipers made gay little grabs at the snow.

“It can't all be a gyp,” I told her. “It's too big. It can't be.”

And we left it at that.

 

“Judith.” Martin called to me one evening after dinner. “Come quick. See who's being interviewed on television.”

I dropped the saucepan I was scraping and peeled off my rubber gloves. Probably Eric Kieran, I thought. He is my favorite politician with his sluggish good sense so exquisitely smothered in rare and perfect modesty. Or it might be Malcolm Muggeridge who, nimble-tongued, year after year, poured out a black oil stream of delicious hauteur.

But it was neither; it was Furlong Eberhardt being interviewed about his new book.

I sank down on the sofa between Martin and Meredith and stared at Furlong. We were tuned to a local channel, and this was a relaxed and informal chat. The young woman who was interviewing him was elegantly low-key in a soft shirtdress and possessed of a chuckly throatiness such as I had always desired for myself.

“Mr. Eberhardt –" she began.

“My friends always call me by my first name,” he beamed at her, but she scurried past him with her next question.

“Perhaps you could tell our viewers who haven't yet read
Graven Images
a little about how you came upon the idea for it.”

Furlong leaned back, his face open with amusement, and spread his arms hopelessly. “You know,” he said, “that's a perfectly impossible question to ask a writer. How and where he gets his ideas.”

Smiling even harder than before, she refused to be put down. “Of course, I know every writer has his own private source of imagination, but
Graven Images,
of all your books, tells such an extraordinary story that we thought you might want to tell us a little about how the idea for the book came to you.”

Furlong laughed. He drew back his head and laughed aloud, though not without kindness.

The interviewer waited patiently, leaning forward slightly, her hands in a hard knot.

“All I can tell you,” he said, composing himself and assuming his academic posture, “is that a writer's sources are never simple. Always composite. The idea for
Graven Images
came to me in pieces. True, I may have had one generous burst of inspiration, for which I can only thank whichever deity it is who presides over creative imagination. But the rest came with less ease, torn daily out of the flesh as it were.”

“I see,” the interviewer said somewhat coldly, for plainly she felt he was toying with her. “But Mr. Eberhardt, this new novel seems to have an increased vigor. A new immediacy.” She had recaptured her lead and was pinning him down.

Furlong turned directly into the camera and was caught in a flattering close-up, the model of furrowed thoughtfulness. “You may be right,” he nodded in response. “You just may be right. But on the other hand, I wouldn't have thought I was exactly washed up as a writer before
Graven Images."

“If I may quote one of the critics, Mr. Eberhardt –"

“Furlong. Please,” he pleaded.

“Furlong. One of the critics,” she rattled through her notes, cleared her throat and read, “Eberhardt's new book is brisk and original, as fast moving and exciting as a movie.”

“Ah,” he said his hands pulling together beneath his beard. “You may be interested to know that it is soon to become a film.”

Her eyes widened. “
Graven Images
is to be made into a film?”

“We have only just signed the contract,” he said serenely, “this afternoon.”

“Well, I must say, congratulations are in order, Mr. Eberhardt. I suppose this film will be made in Canada?”

“Ah. I regret to say it will not. The offer was made by an American company, and I am afraid I can't release any details at this time. I'm sure your viewers will understand.”

Her eyes glittered as she leaned meaningfully into the camera. “Wouldn't you say, Mr. Eberhardt, that it is enormously ironical that you, a Canadian writer who has done so much to bring Canadian literature to the average reader, must turn to an American producer to have your novel filmed?”

He was rattled. “Look here, I didn't go to them. They came. They approached me. And I can only say that of course I would have preferred a Canadian offer but – ” an expression of helplessness transformed his face – “what can one do?”         

“I'm sure we'll all look forward eagerly to it, Mr. Eberhardt. American or Canadian. And it has been a great pleasure to talk to you tonight.”

The camera grazed his face one last time before the fadeout. “An even greater pleasure for me,” he said with just a touch too much chivalry.

Meredith sitting beside me looked flushed and excited, and Martin was muttering with unaccustomed malice, “He's got it made now.”

“What do you mean?

“Your friend Furlong has just struck it rich.”

I shrugged. “He's never been exactly wanting.”