I’d been reading Lowry’s Labyrinth for days before I realized that its author taught locally at UBC. It was a good book, lean and confident, a contagious smile in the prose. I rang the English department and arranged lunch with Professor Bob.
The manly figure on the back cover was now slumping, as if muscle had melted and slid down. He was wearing a brown belt with black shoes (or vice versa) and a comfy old blue sweatshirt inside out. (How can you not want to hug a man who wears his shirt inside out?) Months later, when we knew each other well enough to hand out free advice, I got Bob exercising and taught him some rudiments of style. He’s still an inch shorter than me and balding in the same places as Prince Charles. His brain is the prime erotic organ.
He’s also kind to animals, considerate with women (except possibly his wife, but I understand she was the first to stray), funny, and has a bottomless fund of stories and wry wisdom.
We arranged to meet with a cameraman at Burrard Inlet, the site of Lowry’s hideaway. “Dress bright and casual,” I said, “and you’ll look great on air.”
The beach was a rough one of shingle and oyster shells. The sun had come out after a wet morning, strands of mist were snagged in the trees. Even the flaming stacks of an oil refinery across the reach seemed calm below the wooded hills. That was there in Lowry’s day, its sign short a letter: HELL would blaze all night outside his window, which the writer, depending on his state of mind, found either amusing or terrifying.
A man appeared in red-and-green check shirt, scarlet cardigan and grey slacks, picking his way between tidal pools in a pair of white golfing shoes. Professor Bob, attired for television.
He pointed to a black stump. “One of the old piles. Not Lowry’s. His place was round the point. Of course there were three of them, three Lowry cabins. The first two burned down, along with drafts of his book. Careless drinking, so they say.”
“I’ve read Volcano twice,” I said, detecting booze upwind, though Bob wasn’t visibly pissed. “The first time I never finished it. The second time I thought it was brilliant. But I was drinking. Now I’ve got to where the consuls low on funds and what he has left will buy him one bottle of Johnny Walker or nine bottles of mescal. Of course he goes for the nine.”
Bob laughed, a laugh that fitted naturally into his face, its magnetic field of lines. Theres nothing like laughter for seduction.
“Friends used to call him ‘the Malcohol’,” Bob said to camera. “Many an aspiring novelist has drunk himself to death at the Lowry school of writing. But no ones ever written another Under the Volcano. And that includes the man himself. It was his one great work.”
I remember Bob finding a broken bottle in the water. “Looks almost old enough.…” In handing it to me he cut himself slightly. The fumble seemed characteristic, a man at odds with physical things. I hoped this didn’t extend to things of the flesh.
After the shoot we had coffee at a nearby Starbucks. Bob regarded with disdain the green tile and black metal chairs. “By their cafés shall ye know them, said Lowry, of Canadians.”
“Starbucks is American.”
“I wonder,” he asked the ceiling dourly, “if they named these places for the mate in Moby Dick”
Months later, when I was back from that summer at Tilehouse Street, I rang Bob at the English department with a new project.
“It’s Liv Wyvern. You were kind enough to let me interview you about Lowry last spring. …” Noises I was hoping for came down the line: snorts of warm and instant recognition.
“Is Herman Melville one of your Pacific writers?”
“Of course. The greatest novelist ever produced by our neighbouring republic. And one of the most uneven.”
“Hang on! I’m not taking notes. Can you let me have it again, later? Can we meet? Lunch this week? I can offer somewhere nice. TV’s paying.”
The film was about whaling, beginning when the Nootka sallied out with stone-tipped lances in canoes carved from giant cedars, and ending in a less heroic age of factory ships and explosive harpoons. There was, in truth, little room for Melville in the film. It was political, a hard-hitting plea for conservation. The Whaling Commission was about to allow Norway and Japan to slaughter hundreds a year for “research.” I’d borrowed a fine edition of Moby Dick for its old engravings of the hunt.
A day or two later my back went out. This trouble started at Hitchin, soon after you were born, when I tried to move Jon’s bike and it fell on me. I can go years without any bother, then one day when I’m off guard, tense, I’ll bend down to pluck lint from the floor and find I can’t stand up. Codeine, heating pad, and days in bed are the cure. That and a good big book.
There could hardly have been a better way to read Moby Dick, sailing across high seas of pain, pierced by shafts of agony, Melville’s prose breaking over me, the heating pad rendering my flesh.
I suppose every age gets the Moby Dick it deserves. The greatest tragedy, it seemed to me then, was not the death of the Pequod, or her crew, or even the agony of the white whale; but the passing of a world in which such things were possible. Only two human lifespans since Melville went to sea—and in the distance gone they might be a thousand years.
“You’re right,” Bob said. (He often says that as if he means it, and I love him for it.) “You’re right, Liv. Melville saw what was coming. ‘Humped herds of buffalo, not forty years ago, shook their iron manes where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch.’ Buffalo, whales, Indians, everything—he foresaw that it won’t stop, can’t stop, until the ship goes down. That’s what I think Moby Dick’s about. But that’s a reading for our time. Like saying Othello’s about race relations.”
We finished lunch—a rather liquid one—and he came back to my flat before an evening class. I kicked the door shut, reached both arms behind his neck, and kissed him fiercely.
I needn’t have worried. He couldn’t tie a shoelace but he didn’t fumble love.
We agreed that I would never call him, even at work. I wondered what she was like, his wife, and whether I’d hear from Bob again. A fortnight later the phone rang: “Wanna come to Yoho, a bottle of rum and an old man’s chest?”
“Where?”
“Yoho Lake, next week. High in the Rockies, remote, romantic. Sorry for the short notice. Wasn’t sure I’d be alone until just now.”
Bob slipped away from a literary conference in Banff.
We threw down our bags in the still cabin. He lifted the coat off my shoulders, brushed my hair aside and kissed the small of my neck.
“I don’t know you,” I whispered.
“That’s the point, isn’t it?”
Afterwards, I drifted on a silence rippled by his snores. He was like a dear old dog asleep by the fire. Probably what they call dead wood at university. Was it disloyal to think this? Did I owe him tender fibs?
He woke and regarded our bodies in the half-light, a light of contrast. “Look at us, Liv. I’m white as a cod’s belly and you’re golden. Either you go to a tanning parlour or you’re not entirely Anglo-Saxon.”
An innocent remark but it touched a childhood wound. On one of our brittle, three-bottle days after Mother’s death, Lottie had picked at that particular scar for the first time in years. We were standing under the spear, staring at it vacantly, and our eyes strayed down into the glass.
“Didn’t you ever wonder, Liv, about Mum?”
“How do you mean?”
“You know. The milkman, the dustman. Jon was away a lot. Even before.”
“Lottie!”
She took a swig, unabashed. “Or maybe that pedlar chappie who used to come round door to door when we were little. Remember? Ribbons and buttons. From India, wasn’t he? I mean, just look at us, Liv. Do we look like we share a lot of genes?”
“We all share ninety-nine per cent with chimpanzees. Even you, Charlotte. So I imagine you and I have some in common.”
Bob tipped the maître d’ for the best table in the old log building at the heart of th
e lodge. He took it upon himself to choose the wine, locking eyes with me over the list. There were no prices on my menu. He suggested raw Arctic char, followed by grilled caribou. “All the meat and fish are wild. It’s the only truly Canadian restaurant I know.” He was such a nationalist. The wind had to be let out of him, or this getaway would be disastrous.
“I’ve had Canadian food before,” I said. “There’s this great little place in Medicine Hat. Did a shoot there once. The PDQ Lounge, Chinese and Canadian Cuisine.”
“I bet they don’t serve caribou.”
“He. An old Cantonese in a sailors hat folded from a sheet of newspaper. He does soggy chips, burgers mixed with breadcrumbs, and gravy like carpenters glue. I’m not a kept woman, you know. You get the room. Dinners are on me.”
Back at the cabin we sat on the balcony in our coats. I hadn’t seen a night so clear since Mother took us to the Scottish highlands. I was eleven, and I thought then that no matter how sad life might be, I could always look into those endless deeps of light and see how small my worries were.
In the morning, wet snow was sticking to the windows, melting and sliding down. We spent the day in bed, except for a lunchtime foray to the lodge, where Bob procured two bottles of “the Widow,” his favourite bubbly.
“I can see why you like Lowry,” I said. “You drink about as much.”
“I like Melville, but I don’t hunt whales.”
“I’ve been thinking about what you said. The only truly universal American writer. Isn’t that a bit heretical? I’ve read that the whaling ship is meant to be America. All its nationalities forged into a common purpose.”
“That’s what American critics often say. Even if they’re right, it’s hardly good news. The Pequod sinks like a stone.”
And so it went on: I objecting, he parrying hyperbolically.
“Henry James. Just as universal, just as great.”
“If you think the parlour’s as interesting as the world. Who remembers a title of his unless they’ve seen it televised?”
“How about… Twain?”
“Twain’s funny, and funny goes a long way. But sentimental as a made-for-TV movie.”
“I give you Faulkner. Local yet universal. Incontestably major.”
“Faulkner did more harm than General Sherman. The South has never recovered from his prose.”
“Bob.”
“Huh?”
“You’re pissed.”
“You think I’m mad at you?”
“I don’t think you’re angry. I think you’re drunk. And you’ve just given yourself away. In this country, if we mean angry, we say pissed off. Where are you from, really? Come on. A straight answer.” He bowed his head and looked up sheepishly, as if peering over spectacles. Caught out. Also an obscure pride.
“A little place you wouldn’t have heard of.”
“Try me.”
“Vandalia, Connecticut. It’s not on any map. True places never are.”
“Aha! A self-hating Yankee. Draft dodger, were we?”
“War resister, please. I was never actually drafted. Past the shelf date for prime grunt.”
“So why leave?”
Bob’s smile drained away, its lines of force like arid gullies. He went quiet, staring at the mountain that filled our window: a castle of layered rock, snow massing on the battlements.
“I will tell you, Liv. But not right now. People think it’s easy, attractive even, leaving home and country. Maybe it was for you. Maybe you’re the slash-and-burn type. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Can you wait?”
“Of course.” I was wondering where his wife was from.
“Will you ever go back?” I said. “Now things have changed?”
“Doubt it. Will you?”
“I’ve been thinking about it lately. Since my mother died. There’s nothing stopping me. Except me. You need to be a very urban person, and I’m not. England feels so … spoken for. Nothing unclaimed. Nothing unsaid. The whole place seems to say: never mind what you think, this is what you need to know, and you’d better get it absolutely right. It’s part of that British arrogance—the way they always think they know what matters. And that what they don’t know is so far off the map it doesn’t count.”
“Americans do it too. It goes with being an empire.”
“I remember thinking, If I stay in this country I’ll be arguing with everyone for the rest of my life. But I miss it. God, I miss it! I watch Masterpiece Theatre—you know, ‘The Morris Minor Murders’—and I think I could go back to those riverbanks and sunny afternoons at the drop of a hat. I have to remind myself of things. Crowds. Crowds of shoppers with push-chairs. The smell of the Underground. Country footpaths ankle-deep in lager tins and dogshit. Did you know most of the dust in the Tube is flakes of human skin?”
Bob got up, went to the bar fridge, came back with flutes of champagne.
“Maybe when I’m old,” I added. “A Wisteria Cottage with my sister and some cats. But you get used to all this! Places like this change you forever. Unfold you so you can never get back inside the box you came in.”
The glacial crest of the mountain was shedding tiny avalanches caught by the afternoon light, puffs of mauve confetti falling to the lake. He kissed me on my shoulder, on my ear. He touched a cold glass to my nipple.
“God!” he said. “You’ve no idea how good it is to talk. People talk best in bed, don’t they? Even about books.”
“Haven’t you been talking books all week?”
“Don’t imagine, Liv, that we do anything so passé at literary conferences as talk about books. Nobody’s done that in twenty years. We talk about ways of talking about talking about books.… I need a smoke! Trossil was in Cuba. He has theories about Hemingway, but he knows tobacco. Do you mind?”
“I like it. It’s part of your smell.”
He knuckle-walked off the bed like a great ape and fossicked in his jacket. “What I mean about Melville is that he’s a writer of and for the world. After Moby Dick we had the Civil War. Then the huddled masses. Americans became obsessed with what the heck an American is, and precious little else. Melville was writing about what it means to be a human being at large in this … this mystery. …” Bob summoned infinity with a circular wave of his Havana. “Melville wanted all of culture and nature. All the piled centuries.”
He lit up, drew the smoke in a blue stream from mouth to nose; sent a dragon-breath forking from his nostrils. “If we don’t look out the window, or up at the sky, or down at our monkey hands and ask ourselves unanswerable questions now and again, were not half alive. What’s an American is pretty small potatoes. But its gotten worse. Now its lifestyle stuff. The cultural Balkans. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea! That’s what I tell my creative writing class churning out watered-down Updike.”
He halted to catch a breath and scratch his balls, which had rolled onto his thigh like a pair of onions in a string bag. “In my experience, Liv, people who think their gender identity’ is the most important thing about them are usually right.” He butted the Havana. “Sorry! This isn’t what you came for. I guess I’m still not decompressed.”
He stroked under my chin, as if caressing a cat. I bit him on the shoulder.
“The ear, Liv, please—the ear. For some reason you can bite the earlobe all you like and it never shows.”
He bent and kissed the nipple stiffened by the icy glass. His lips lingered there just long enough, and wandered south. A finger brushed a haiku down my back. A hand found an ankle, clapped me in irons. I lit up like a switchboard.
Does this embarrass you? Well, you’re a grown woman by now, and if you can’t imagine your batty old ma as a sexual animal that’s your problem. If I were not, you wouldn’t be here with these pages in your hand. A word in your ear: There are things to be said for older blokes. They take their time. They know what they’re about. And they’re so grateful.
Six
ENGLAND
Riverhil
l. September, 1899. Notebook No. 3
THE RECOLLECTION, DURING MY MISFORTUNES in West Africa, of that sordid fellow and his Whitehall confederates raised certain chimerical thoughts that ever since have caused me profound distress. Who were they really? Who the devil was he working for? Why such an air of menace and intrigue? The more I’ve thought over that afternoon, the likelier it has seemed that the motorcar, the interrogation, and so forth were mere props in a charade designed to further the very treachery they pretended to be uprooting.
It is not given to a member of Her Majesty’s Services, except perhaps at the highest rank, to be privy to the source of orders and the policy behind them. To question an order is tantamount to mutiny, and I have never done so. But it appeared to me, as the men trundled me towards Ashanti, my mind racing hither and yon over our failed expedition, that to have gone where I had gone, with a few dozen Hausas against well-armed forces in their thousands, was nothing short of suicidal.
Yet how can one apply the word suicide to events one hasn’t invited and over which one has little control? It is true that the advance to Dawkita was entirely my decision, but I now believe that even had we stayed at Wa, we should still have been attacked and overwhelmed. If the Hinterland catastrophe stood alone in my life, I could not construe any link between it and earlier events. But my extreme condition after the loss of my eye brought vividly to mind that voyage with the Princes many years before, and the illness that threatened me soon afterwards—an illness never explained or identified but which ended my naval career and very nearly my life.
Although the more lurid rumours about Prince Eddy raised in that Whitehall room were, to my knowledge, without foundation, there was no denying they were nourished by certain flaws in his character. Flaws so worrying in an eventual heir to the throne that (once one allowed oneself to entertain speculations such as those purveyed by The New York Times) Eddy’s sudden and fatal illness could indeed be seen as suspiciously convenient. From this it was only a short step, in my agitated state, to conclude that I myself—being one of a mere handful privy to a fiasco with the Prince in the South Seas—might be seen as a weak stitch in the cloak of secrecy that had descended over those events of 1881. In short, that certain people might view my own removal as convenient, even necessary.
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