Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  She looked as if she’d been struck, then lifted a hand and let it fall back to her side. “You are truly — what a hateful . . . Tell me where the money for that is coming from?”

  “The committee.”

  The bells at St. James’s began to toll eleven. As if echoing them, St. Andrew’s and the Apostolic Church on Bay Street rang out, and then behind them St. George the Martyr, like a call rolling out across the city. Church was out and the streets would begin to fill again. He approached the camera, but she put her palm flat against the lens and held it, as if silencing a child. “So they’re going to use our profits to send you home?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m going in place of Mr. Gough. They thought I might make a better impression.”

  She laughed sourly. “A traitor in their midst.”

  “I’m not charged with making the decision, Mrs. Rowe. Only with showing the evidence.”

  She was shaking her head at him slowly, in disbelief, and he began to turn the camera to the right, pushing against her hand, which she released after a moment. His face against the camera, he waited for further opposition, but there came none, and he directed his eye toward the world below King Street, and saw, off the corner of the roof, the Royal Lyceum. His hands were shaking. Yes, the Royal Lyceum, he forced himself to think. A strange place for an opera house, squatting between two main roads, but he knew it to be successful, with the Americans booking it and even the occasional French or German company. He’d seen An Invalid of Britain there, and thought it a little long. And yet, what would it tell the adjudicants in London, to see this giant brick shed set within a rookery of half-built, half-demolished buildings? It would tell them it was a city forever no longer what it had been, but not quite what it was turning into. What kind of place was that to anoint a capital? A place always in the process of being erased?

  Claudia hadn’t moved and he put her farther to his back after taking the southeast view, forcing the sound of her breathing out of his mind, and pointing the lens over Wellington Street in the back of the hotel. Here were the pretty estates of Boulton and Baldwin — fine estates, four-chimneyed mansions sitting on neat squares of now-dead grass and surrounded by a babble of filthy buildings. Had these houses tumbled from the stars and landed there at random? Their inhabitants looked out toward the lake and the railway, their faces turned away from the squalor. What they must think about, when they see that lake. Not what he thought. It was just a pretty waterway filled with trout and pickerel and bass to them, and there were nuthatches squeaking and clambering down the trunks of the silver maples at its edge. The people in those houses had no idea, no idea at all, did they? No, they did not see this tabula rasa lake that he saw in the ground-glass viewfinder, the lake flat-on, waiting to be named by action: something to be crossed, to be tamed, to be survived. He waited a moment, hearing a train coming from the west, and with the light on his side at last, made a fast exposure of the train crossing in the background, with Tinning’s Wharf, mills, and houses directly behind it.

  He heard horses on King Street conveying people back from Mass to the hotel or their homes, and the soft sound of the distant hooves on dirt became sharp as they got closer and crossed onto the macadam at Bay Street. Her silence was becoming unbearable now, and although he pressed on and turned the camera to its final view, he could not keep himself from looking at her, and then could not — if he were still human — go back to his work. She stood riven to her spot, staring insensate at him, her face greased with tears. His hands dropped to his sides. “When were you going to tell me?” she said.

  “Mrs. Rowe . . .”

  “And I’ll go to Potter’s Field, will I?”

  “That is a faithless thing to say.”

  “Of course you won’t know if I do, will you? So you can tell yourself anything over your toast points and newspaper. Which newspaper will you be reading then, I wonder? Not one with the notice of my passing, I’ll wager.” She began for the door that led back down to the fifth floor of the hotel.

  “Mrs. Rowe, you will be taken care of,” he said, but she held a hand up, her back to him, and he was silenced. The door closed behind her. He could hear, within, her footfalls diminishing.

  All around him, in the streets below the hotel, people were returning to their houses. Bishop Strachan’s stable gate was open, his man waiting within to welcome his carriage home. Gradually the streets were filling. It was a day of rest, but people would be visiting each other; cooks in the town houses below prepared the Sunday hams. When some doors closed, a good English life unfolded behind them. Much of the rest of the city felt the cold. He pulled the cap off the lens, counted to fifteen, and replaced it.

  HALLAM WALKED BACK through the streets toward the store, his overloaded cart in front of him. A fine mist-like snow had started to fall and it seemed to make the equipment and the glass plates heavier than they had been before, less willing to travel over the uneven road. It had taken ninety minutes to get all the equipment down to the street by himself, and his back was drenched with sweat that had begun to freeze. He was still upset with himself for having let slip in a moment of anger that he was going to England. He had not meant to punish her with this information. He’d already made arrangements for her, having paid the outstanding amount on her husband’s insurance at the Bank of Toronto out of his savings. Now that the policy was paid up, it would take another year before Claudia could engage the coroner to open an investigation into her husband’s disappearance and perhaps six months to reasonably conclude he was dead. After which the policy would be paid in full, a total of six hundred pounds. He found himself admiring Mr. Rowe for having had the sense to buy such a good policy.

  Ennis was wrapped in his blankets on his front-room bed when Hallam got back, but Claudia was not home. He checked to see if Ennis was sleeping and saw the pupils behind his thin lids shuddering. The cold had sapped his own strength and he decided he would take a nap. He lit a small fire in the little grate by the door, not caring that the smoke issuing from the front of the store and drifting over the sidewalk could alert people to the fact that there were human beings within: he was too tired and too unhappy to care.

  He fell immediately to sleep and he was back on the roof of the Rossin House, his camera pointing south toward the lake. The little train that had passed on the rails in front of the wharves came from the right and passed behind the houses on the left. Immediately as it vanished, it reappeared on the right again. He watched it with quiet interest and noticed that on each passing it had one less car, and before long it was down to nothing but an engine and a single car, and then the engine, and after that he could hear it passing, but it was gone.

  It seemed a reasonable idea to walk from the roof down to the ground and visit the lake, and this he did, stepping from the parapet onto the air and then down a foot and then another, following the shape of a stairway through the space between roof and ground. Reaching the bottom, he continued south, pausing to let the invisible train pass, and then on to Tinning’s Wharf. The lake was as still as glass; he walked out onto it. He moved across it, staring down into the gleaming surface. There was something below, but the sun was too bright on the water and all he could see was himself and the sky above him. He would have to lower himself to his belly to annul the shadows, and once he did he saw that he was in the sky of another city. He was looking down on Toronto. It was Toronto, but it was not the place he was living in, not the place he was dreaming. It was full of marvelous conveyances — train cars that moved on macadam all by themselves and towering buildings clad in glass. And people, a shocking number of people. He drifted down from this sky, and he saw in the windows of the buildings the very pictures he had made of the city, and they were the windows the people of this city looked through! He saw people he knew in the streets, he watched them. Presently, he was among them, and he tried to speak to them. Do you not remember me? he tried to say to one woman, but in his head all he could hear was twittering. He went down closer to the groun
d, past people’s legs and feet, and then he hit the ground and shattered it and he was in water; cold, dark water.

  He woke without startling, his eyes snapping open, and he saw the shadow of the room beside him against the wall. There was the sound of paper shuffling. He sat up and Claudia was beside him in a chair, wrapped in one of the blankets he’d covered himself with when he lay down. She was reading a letter, one of a number that lay in her lap. His feeling of remorse flooded back. He wondered for a moment if he was still asleep, but just as soon as he thought this, he realized he could smell her, her scent mixed with the warm wool smell of the blanket.

  He knew she was aware of him, his wakefulness, but she continued reading silently, and neatly moved a sheet from the front of a small sheaf of paper to the back. After a moment, she laid the paper down in her lap and covered it with her hand. “They don’t know where you are,” she said. “They don’t know what’s become of you.” She flipped a couple of sheets and he threw his blankets off. “This one is dated September 14. Two months ago and already sick with worry.”

  He grabbed the letter out of her lap and took the envelopes as well, swinging his feet down hard to the cold floor. He glanced at them quickly, the sight of Alice’s handwriting a reproach that made his stomach coil.

  “How could you not have written to them?”

  He shook the letters at her. “This is none of your business at all!”

  “But beautiful Christ, you’re alive and they don’t even know it! Why let them think you’re dead?”

  He stood up, his frame looming over her, and he hurled the bundle of letters toward the grate. “Because I am,” he said. Blood buzzed behind his eyes and he swayed. “These are not letters to me.”

  She looked at them, the shadows of the grate’s black bars moving over them wavelike, like the shape of sand underwater. She wondered if a spark could jump from behind the grille and ignite the paper and then the shop. If Alice Hallam’s unconsolable handwriting would be the agent of their deaths. “I agree,” she said. “The man they write to is gone. So will you not let them think differently then? When you are there? You will permit them to move on with their lives?”

  “I would like to see my children.”

  The invocation of Cecile and Jane silenced them both. But she could not stop herself from recognizing that he had not mentioned Alice. Something traveled across her scalp. She got up and collected the letters off the floor, squared them neatly, and went into the studio to put them somewhere safe, then stood in the darkened room by herself. When she returned he was still staring at the space the letters had lain in, as if they were still there. “You love me,” she said. “You can say as much. It doesn’t have to change anything, but it would help us both.”

  “I cannot.”

  “You have not said what you plan to do once you have said your piece to the London committee. I have been afraid to ask you. But you seem not to know, so I will say to you now: I want you to come back, Jem Hallam. Do what you need to do, see whomever you must see, but then come home. Return to me.”

  He went and sat on Ennis’s bed, pausing a moment to feel the man’s hand. It was freezing cold. “You will have the shop,” he said to her. “And I’ve paid your annuity. I don’t intend for you to suffer because of my choices.”

  “No, that would be unlike you.” His consistency had stopped surprising her. It was a quality she shared, but it didn’t seem to serve her the way it did him. He sat before her, bed-rumpled, his hair sticking up, and at a loss for what to do with his limbs. He took her blanket off the chair and laid it over Ennis. “If you want your letters back, ask me. I’ve put them beyond reach for now.”

  “His hand is cold,” said Hallam quietly. “But his body is burning up.”

  “It requires fuel to die,” she said.

  IN THE NIGHT, Ennis worsened, and the two of them hovered over him, applying alcohol to his chest and trying to get him awake long enough to drink water. His eyes were rheumy, swollen red, and his face was thick with edema. They asked him if he had pain, and he nodded or whispered that he did. Hallam mixed morphia into hot water and they put as much into him as they could. Hallam had begun to fear that Ennis would die in the night. Sleep is a leaf on death’s tree. He didn’t like being in the dark now — the cold without, but waves of heat pouring off Ennis and the candlelight spreading its black-and-yellow tail on the wall. He felt as if he were in a tomb. They sat on either side of him, each holding a hand, trying not to make eye contact over the man’s gleaming body. His eyes opened and closed, unseeing, the eyes of an ancient tortoise, and one of the last times he spoke, he said to Hallam, “Take care of my children.”

  Around three in the morning, Ennis began to thrash, a wet rattling sound coming from his chest. “Do something for him,” Claudia importuned, but Hallam, ex-apothecary, didn’t know what could be done. His old supplies were gone, the morphia was useless, and the city was sleeping. She rushed back into her room and returned with the last of Charter and Lovell’s supply. She told Hallam to sit him up and she prepared a pipe, inhaling the smoke but holding it in her mouth and passing it into Ennis’s through his sweat-dank lips. His chest swelled and the smoke came out of his nose. She handed the pipe to Hallam and her eyes were on him and he understood that no one who had loved Ennis could not be a part of this sacrament. A sweet clovey taste in his mouth — it brought back to him the flavor of his laudanum waters — and he opened Ennis’s mouth and pushed the smoke into him. They both saw his body subside. Hallam put his hand on the pipe and would not let Claudia take it again. He blew a second dose into the man, and again Ennis’s body settled, like something drifting under the surface of water, darkening, and suddenly Hallam could feel the water from his dream, its cold against him, and the weight of his own body being taken down. When he tried to breathe, every pore in his body took in a watery air. He was porous, open. He saw Claudia and his skin leapt: she was smoke, he saw that she was moving through him. He put his hands on his rib cage to feel the air and saw her slip between his fingers. She emerged out of his back as if he were a needle threaded with her. Some distant sense told him that Ennis had died and he saw the man’s mouth was blue and slack. He trailed his fingertips down Ennis’s forehead and closed his eyes, the skin cold. “I need to lie down,” he said, and he backed himself up to find his mattress. He looked at Ennis lying there, face pointing upward, Claudia beside the dead man, her body fitted to his side, her arm over Ennis’s chest, and he looked down at himself and saw her thin arm draped over him as well, her fingers trailing against his side. Had she said to him that all her men were ghosts, or had she only thought it and he’d heard it nonetheless? Where was he? Sleep overtook him.

  SIX

  SAMUEL ENNIS WAS buried in the necropolis three days before the end of November, before the ground would seize up for winter. They were surprised to see how many people came: word had gone around. It was a relief to Hallam to know that Ennis would be remembered, at least as long as those who knew him could speak of him. And then, like all people, his memory would drift down time and become smooth before it broke apart. The gravediggers made a clean, deep hole partway down a hill overlooking the Don River. Hallam held Claudia’s hand as the men lowered the plain pine box into the grave.

  Over the next weeks, he settled his accounts and brought Claudia to a solicitor on Toronto Street. The man prepared a document that would come into force the day after Claudia’s husband was declared dead. On that date, the deed in the store would pass to her. Until then, Hallam gave her power of attorney over all aspects of the business. They agreed on a dividend of five percent of net sales in the store to be sent to Ennis’s family. The first installment was three pounds eight, which they sent as a bill of exchange in sterling to the family in Kenmare, Ireland, with a letter explaining their connection to the late Samuel Ennis.

  Claudia accompanied Hallam dumbly on his rounds, saying little except to comment on the mildness of the winter or to remind him of something he needed to do.
He believed that she had accepted what was about to happen, but he worried also at her quietness, and he braced himself for a collapse. That he thought her brave embarrassed him — he had no right to imagine her as courageous to lessen his own guilt and grief. She was stricken: it only seemed to be bravery.

  At the store, he began to pack what few things he had. The original plates for the panorama would come with him — the committee insisted on this, saying the queen’s survey had paid for all materials. But the more he thought about it, the more he approved, and he asked Claudia to wrap all the plates associated with their views of Toronto, the detailed registry, his own images, all of it. There were institutions in England that would care to have this catalog of pictures; they would not be misused in a country where history obtained. She wrapped them all individually in muslin, and when muslin ran out, in newspaper, which in two layers was nearly as cushioning as cloth. His own belongings fit into a sack and a valise. She used his original steamer trunk to pack the glass plates. The trunk would have to go down to the harbor in a hack; it was too heavy for them to lift even together.

  December came, and with it the holy season. He took her to Sword’s for supper and afterwards he danced with her. He remembered himself walking outside, as he had done almost a year ago, coming back from Ennis’s cottage, and seeing the people within behind mullioned windows, talking and raising their glasses. He’d imagined he was within their company and he was struck by an instinct to go outside and find the man who had just arrived, thinking the place closed and foreign, and tell him he would soon be inside as well, full of dinner and with friends.

  There are people around, he would tell the man, who will find they need you and they will fold you into their lives. You will become necessary. But thinking this, he wondered if he had actually made others necessary to himself. He certainly had become indispensable, and yet he knew he had withheld himself. From Ennis because he feared the man’s appetites. And from Claudia . . .