“Why did you set him up?” Joshua asked.
“I most certainly did not,” Trimble protested.
Joshua had already spoken to Dickie Abbott.
“As far as I can make out,” Abbott had said wearily, “and I’m telling you this ‘without prejudice,’ as I’m bound to say, they were screwing each other. In my opinion, they were both lying. But now Jack will come out of it clean, if not exactly smelling clean. It will take years to unravel.”
Watching Trimble closely, Joshua said, “I’ll tell you what happened. You were in deep trouble on the market last summer, and then you found out about Jane taking up with Kevin again in Bermuda. So you decided to have your cake and eat it too. You would cover your ass and make Kevin the patsy. Right?”
“You’re out of your mind, you crazy fool!”
“Possibly it didn’t occur to you until you drove back early from Montreal that day and saw them going at it together in the boathouse.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t entirely blame you, all things considered. But neither do I believe you.”
“Jane may fool around. O.K., everybody’s after her, she’s so gorgeous, and she’s a bit of a flirt. But she always comes back to me, because I’m the only one who can satisfy her. Dickie Abbott is a premature ejaculator, did you know that?”
“For God’s sake, Jack, why don’t you leave her? She’s such a bitch.”
“Now you watch it there. You watch what you’re saying. I’m not leaving her, she’s not leaving me. We’re going to open the house for the summer. We’re going to have our regular Sunday barbecues. Everybody will come, you’ll see. And we’re going to have dinner parties again. I’ve made Jane the leading hostess on this lake. We were in the Gazette, the social pages. You must have seen the story. And I’m more of a man than anybody here, including you. She told me that night at your house that she found out you were thirty seconds of action and an hour of apology. We have nothing to be ashamed of. Kevin ran it. The whole show.”
Leaning on his cane, Joshua walked to the window, his back to the raging Trimble.
“I gave him a chance when none of his so-called friends would touch him with a barge-pole. And let me tell you something. If he had had to serve a year or two in the pokey, you are looking at the man who would have hired him again, no matter what.”
But Joshua wasn’t listening any more. His heart was soaring. He felt himself quivering all over. My God, but she was out there, at the bottom of the hill. Pauline was in the vegetable garden. A fork in her hand.
“Coral will be wound up by the receivers and I will do my bloody best to minimize everybody’s losses. Kevin wouldn’t have wanted his friends to suffer financially.”
“Go now. Please go, Jack.”
He could see the children approaching her. Tentatively.
“What?”
“Will you please get the hell out of here, Jack. Right now.” And he slipped out the side door, starting for the garden.
Joshua, leaning on his cane, met his father halfway down the hill to the vegetable garden. Joshua was descending, his step cautious; his father was coming up, the senator trailing a little behind.
“I once flinched from your kiss,” Joshua said.
“Did you?” Reuben asked, startled.
“Don’t you remember?”
“I guess I do. Josh, there’s something you got to know.”
“Isn’t she here to stay?” he demanded.
“Hold it. Don’t get excited. It wasn’t the morphine, Josh. You didn’t dream it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She came to the hospital more than once when you were there. I brought her.”
“You mean to say you knew where she was all this time?”
“Yeah, well, right.”
“Son of a bitch.”
Reuben took off his straw boater and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “I promised her not to say anything. She needed time to work things out. Well, now you know.”
“How could you do such a thing to me?”
“Well, you’re no longer all I’ve got. There are the kids now. There’s also Pauline. I was doing what I thought was best for everybody. What did Trimble have to say?”
“He had a stone in his shoe and he took it out himself.”
“Now, look here, she’s still rocky on the subject of Kevin. I want you to go careful. I want you to lie if necessary.”
“Don’t worry.”
The senator smiled shyly. “Everything is going to be fine,” he said.
Reuben was already whistling for the kids, collecting them under the cedar tree. “Well now,” he said, “the senator and I are going to take you to Magog for ice creams. How about that?”
The two old men continued down the road, the kids trailing after, and everybody piled into the Jeep. Reuben could see Joshua and Pauline in the vegetable garden. They weren’t embracing. He was touching her hair. Then, watching from the rear window of the moving Jeep, Reuben saw them start back for the house. Joshua wasn’t leaning on his cane. Pauline was supporting him. Well, yeah, right, he thought.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
An excerpt from this novel originally appeared in Playboy magazine.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permssion to reprint previously published material:
New Directions: Four lines in Spanish from “Balada de la Placeta” (“Ballad of the Little Square”) from The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca. Copyright © 1955 by New Directions. Reprinted by permission.
New Statesman: Excerpt from article by Paul Johnson. Copyright © 1967 by New Statesman.
Random House, Inc.: Excerpts from W.H. Auden: Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson. Copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith, and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
Mordecai Richler was born in Montreal in 1931. The author of ten successful novels, numerous screenplays, and several books of nonfiction, his most recent novel, Barney’s Version, was an acclaimed bestseller and the winner of The Giller Prize, the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, the QSpell Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Novel in the Caribbean and Canada region. Richler also won two Governor General’s Awards and was shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize.
Mordecai Richler died in Montreal in July 2001.
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