Sussex Drive: A Novel (6 page)

She knew Greg would be incensed at what Lise had so softly threatened. So she approached it carefully. She offered her personal assessment and deeply held beliefs about Lise’s psyche. African female: economic migrant heiress in a racist province. Married down: Cree terrorist. Then widow: grief, guilt, single mother of a biracial boy. Married up: Québécois Caucasian Liberal blood. And simultaneously down: lapsed Catholic, aging thespian, black sheep. Overcompensatory grandiosity. Mercurial decision making.

“Cut to the chase,” Greg said. “Will she or won’t she?”

“She’s surrounded with the best advisers.”

“I know, I put them there. Will she or won’t she?”

“She will. Eventually.”

“What did she say, exactly?”

“She said you would have to have her permission.”

Greg rose up. She rose as well. He paced back and forth, breathing heavily, on the porch.

“Greg?” she ventured.

He whirled in the dark, picked up the fig-scented candle in the glass vase from Indigo and threw it off the porch. Then he raised his chair and booted it, and kept after it, down the stairs and out across the grass. She saw the boys, in the midst of shining flashlights in each other’s mouths, cease and desist and scramble after their extremely upset father to illuminate him sending the battered wicker into the lake with an anticlimactic splash.

“Dad?” Peter asked. “Dad? What happened?”

Shymanski, crossing the grass on his one bare foot, a bag of marshmallows and graham wafers in hand, paused.

“What are you all looking at?” Greg said.

Shymanski was stunned. The boys too.

She removed herself immediately. Let him deflect. She fled, praying that none of Greg’s display was on the security cameras, and that nobody else had seen, not even some rogue Soviet satellite in space. While she brushed her teeth, her cellphone pinged. A text message from her dad. Up late again. Or up early for golf. He sometimes teed off at midnight in the summer. She couldn’t read it right now. Couldn’t deal with him too.

About two in the morning, Greg woke her. An excruciating band of pain stretched down his left side and a cluster of pus-filled blisters was hiking up toward his face.

“Shingles,” she said.

This had happened before, on his first day of service as Leader of the Official Opposition, another time of unanticipated and gargantuan stress in his life, mostly caused by the grassroots and Tory diehards. She had prevailed in keeping the media away from him, although they soon learned that no media was very interested in what the Leader of the Official Opposition did anyway. They had to hustle for coverage.

“We have to go to the ER,” she said.

“Oh, fuck that,” he said.

After she’d alerted Corporal Robard, they had sped through the winding and cruelly dark roads of the National Commission Park, past a quartet of raccoon eyes, blazing like those of combative Tamil illegals stashed in the wilderness. Greg was now at this older Quebec hospital, in the hands of the young Pakistani emergency doctor along with an exhausted fourth-year female resident whom Greg refused to look at or answer. It was herpes zoster; they might have to boost the acyclovir because of the attack on Greg’s face, which in a worst-case scenario could affect his eyesight, leaving him blind as Tiresias or Andrea Bocelli. The resident referenced both.

While Becky stayed away, full fathom five, soothing herself with a bottle of water, hugging the hall of the Emergency exit, she couldn’t help remembering what Greg had said as he kicked the chair into Harrington Lake.

“That woman’s going to learn her place,” he said.

septembre 2008
 

5
 

“A
RE YOU GRANTING THE DISSOLUTION?”

“I haven’t been asked yet.”

“
Mais
—when you are?”

“I can’t discuss it,” she said.

René was hunting and gathering—toothbrush, razor, dental tape, and pomegranate moisturizer for alpha males—in their master bathroom. His leather toiletries kit was swollen. “The Toronto
Blob
says you will.”

Lise perched on the edge of the tub. “Good for them.”

“But are you going to say yes?”

“Tune in tomorrow.” Lise pinched his closest buttock. He’d gained weight for the role of Father Benedict and his jeans were no longer lifting and separating.

“I am disgusting,” he said.

“Nobody will see when you’re lost in your cassock.”

“Ah, but when it’s off—” He zipped his kit and flew from there to the master closet.

She followed and watched as he flipped through a stack of soft Easter-pastel cardigans.

“On Can Vox breakfast radio—”

“Oui.”

“—the Chief of Staff said it was a done deal.”

“Amen.”

“The Director of Communications also said your approval is a formality—”

“Fini.”

“—like the Throne Speech. The PM puts the words in your mouth—”

“C’est tout.”

René lifted the entire stack of sweaters and placed them beside a mound of professionally rolled yoga pants and trousers in the suitcase resting open on the Duxiana bed.

“René,” she said patiently, “the GG usually
does
act upon the advice of the Prime Minister and Privy Council. It’s in the Letters Patent.”

He looked her in the eyes. “She is also called upon to consult, encourage and warn.”

She stared right back.
“Bien entendu.”

“So are you going to grant his request? To dissolve this Parliament?”

“That is my executive privilege, René.” She’d had it. “You’re being a big fat viceregal bore.” She knew he’d be upset at
fat
.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, Lise. My hope,
mon vrai espoir
, is that permission for an unnecessary election wasn’t bought.”

“What are you talking about? How
bought
?”

“By making them grant me a leave. For my film.”

Lise walked out of the bedroom and slammed the door.
Vice-reine
-style.

Ten minutes later, they bade their farewells in the Rideau Hall foyer.

Niko was with them. Becky had expedited the Shymanski transfer, true to her word, and he already seemed to be fitting in. Niko had screened
In Bruges
with him the night before and they were quoting lines. Niko didn’t seem affected by René’s impending absence at all.

Lise and René embraced in front of the portrait of Her Excellency Adrienne Clarkson. He held on to Lise tightly even though she was still pissed at him.
Complètement
.

“
Va t’en,”
she whispered.

He nudged his hip bone against her in a way that made her want to press hard back. Then he hummed a few bars of “La Vie en Rose.”

She melted. “Phone me,” Lise coaxed.

“Tous les jours, ma chère.”

“Every day.”

“No missions to Kandahar.”

“Non.”

“Promise?”

“Oui.”

“I’ll be back in November. For the hiatus.”

“Oui.”

“I’ll mail you my absentee ballot.”

She shot him a look.

René had the habit of kissing her as if they were completely alone even when they were in a crowded formal reception or a Loblaws. Particularly in a Loblaws. He could make their contact singularly urgent. He did so then. Niko broke in between them, with his body odour and acne and endearing adolescent bravado, and Lise thought,
Toute ma vie est là
.

She caught a glimpse of Shymanski watching them, resting his back against a wall. She had the feeling he would have happily embraced them all too. He looked like a man who unfailingly called his mother; this perhaps explained his connection with Lieutenant-Colonel Aisha K., his older Afghan police partner, who had disappeared. Or died.

Margaret Lee appeared and shook René’s hand. “Goodbye, Your Excellency,” she said. “Do break a leg.”

“Ah, Margaret Lee,” René said, “I will miss you most of all.”

He disappeared, pretending to flee his aides-de-camp, out the door. Lise put her arm around Niko.

“You’ll be okay,
Maman
,” he said, then turned to Shymanski and shadow-boxed him to the Long Gallery. She suddenly heard Niko hammering “Chopsticks” on Glenn Gould’s practice Steinway, accompanied by Shymanski’s steady chords.

In the afternoon, Lise accompanied Niko to his therapist. Dr. Pelletier’s modern home office, in the Glebe, faced out on the Rideau Canal. The interior light was beautiful,
calming, even on dark days, and when Lise joined Niko in his sessions, it felt as if her son could fully accept losing
son cher papa
, handle being a half–First Nations boy with his famous African mother representing Charles, the King of England, and deal with a hip French-Canadian-Caucasian stepfather who sometimes sucked the aforementioned mother’s complete attention. In the winter, while Dr. Pelletier calmly reframed their thinking errors, she heard the ice-skate blades whisking by on the Canal and, outside, walking back to the car, she inhaled the scent of roasting chestnuts in the cold air. Small things that gave order and clarity and major hope. She kept her faith: he was a lonely teenager in a tough hierarchical milieu. She understood why Niko was drawn to the slightly older Martha, who was unspoiled, grounded, and didn’t play social games. Lise thought she would have been a wonderful friend for Niko if she hadn’t been so Christian.

Today, though, Dr. Pelletier had run interference at his door and asked if she minded if he and Niko met alone to set goals for the school year. Lise did not.

“À plus,”
she said, and eased back to the car. Corporal Shymanski waited behind the wheel; he was an excellent defensive driver. “I’ve been kicked out,” she said.

“Do you want to return to Rideau Hall?”

“We’ll just have to turn around and come back.”

In the end, she decided she wanted to sit on a bench in the shade by the Canal; it was so hot, and too humid for joggers, and they were basically on their own. Lise asked him about
his prosthesis, if he was happy with his lighter carbon-fibre composite leg, was the suction suspension comfortable? She’d had experience talking to other transfemoral amputees, who were also veterans, and was able to engage in the details without exhibiting either horror or pity.

Shymanski provided a few updates about muscle atrophy and the physio he was undertaking.

“It was a tough thing that happened,” she said. “For sure.”

“It was,” he agreed.

She noticed steps to the water near the boat tie-up, not too far from them. “Why don’t we go over there?” she suggested. “We can put our feet in the water and cool off.”

Shymanski smiled. “Foot.”

“Oh, mon Dieu,”
she said. “How stupid of me.”

“No worries. Let’s do it.”

They headed over; she had to, at that point, having been completely insensitive after referencing his prosthetic leg. She slipped out of her sandals and sat down at the edge, lowering her feet. It was lovely and cool. She didn’t want to check and see what Shymanski was doing—it was taking him a while to remove his New Balance sneaker. She played with her feet, skimming the surface, rotating her ankles, and suddenly his big white foot loomed beside hers. He stood and kept the prosthetic with the other New Balance shoe dry on shore. She had to give it to him—he was game.