The Paradise Engine

by Rebecca Campbell

  “Friends!” she said. “Children! It is a great privilege you do me coming here tonight to share with me the most innocent pleasure of song. But still, I must remind you that all true pleasures are of God, and lead to Him. So as you listen tonight, allow your hearts to open to the mystery and the beauty and the goodness of music.” There were a few tentative claps. “First I shall sing,” she turned to the music stand, “first I shall sing ‘Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonnie Doon,’ a song of our own homeland, so far far away.”

  The quintet began its wet arpeggios. For a moment Liam relaxed. The pressure of an audience sometimes made a difference, she might—

  No. He tried not to fidget. He watched the crowd for a distraction. There was a suspicious silence out there, a rapt, confused quiet that he felt sure would crack at any moment. Then what would happen?

  The song ended, followed by sparse applause.

  She launched into Bellini’s “Ah! non giunge uman pensiero” from La sonambula, whose flourishes, properly executed, ought to have had the texture of a meringue. Mrs. Kilgour, however, attacked them with a lugubrious sincerity that rendered them almost suetty. Liam watched a bearded man smile, and thought he must be deaf. A young woman held her husband’s hand, both their faces transfigured by horror. A girl cowered in her chair, as though someone had been just about to hit her. Three boys in Sunday suits laughed silently and slid low in their seats. Liam wondered if Mrs. Kilgour could see them, but when he looked, her eyes were closed.

  She was turning to him then, and he stood and took his place beside her for a duet from Werther. He did his job manfully.

  He endured. He sang “A Wandr’ing Minstrel I” when she surrendered the stage. He had just reached the last line about his rags and patches when he noticed a familiar face near the exit. Simon Reid in another pale suit, far too pale for January, Liam thought critically when he had discharged his duty to The Mikado; he can’t really be a gentleman with a suit like that. All the same, when he left the stage, he felt a blush creep up his throat, as he wondered what Reid thought of the whole business. But no—he would not care.

  Reid met him on the steps as they left the hall.

  Liam nodded. “Mr. Simon Reid,” he said.

  “Mr. Manley, our visiting Orpheus. I very much enjoyed the performance. Perhaps you could introduce me to Mrs. Kilgour? Her voice is impressive. Divine, one could almost say.”

  “Perhaps. I will consider it,” he said, and slid into the car waiting to take them four blocks to their hotel. He hoped he wouldn’t see Reid again. He would warn Leticia against the man, if Reid ever pursued her.

  In his room the next morning Liam opened a heavy white envelope with the Castle Dunsinane souvenir letter opener and pen knife Mrs. Kilgour had given him at Christmas. The letter was written in an elegant black hand, leaning hard right as though subject to some irresistible westward momentum. Liam’s eye ran past the greeting and date, straight into the body of the letter:

  What you must understand, Mr. Manley, is that humanity is not divided by sex or wealth or religion. Humanity is divided by consciousness. This consciousness is inherent; it cannot be learned, but was earned many millions of years ago, among the Hyperboreans, the Beringians and the Atlanteans. Those who survive—Those Who Are—chose to take up the burden and evolve, sacrificing themselves out of love for Man, and desire for his continued evolution. Now, we are in the Age of Cronos, in the realm of the Kali Yuga, Mr. Manley, and only the strong and brave recognize the cost of survival.

  Of course, for them it is no cost, it is only the obliteration of flesh, and what is flesh? The unsubtle body to which we were chained at birth, inveigled into possessing, a prison house shut down around our souls. You and I, a handful of others, we will pass on to the west, and there occupy the subtle realm where time and death shall be no more. If anything the accelerating destruction of the material world is the final grasp at transformation—in destruction is freedom from material.

  I know I shock you with the starkness of my words, but the hour is late. I have a message concerning your eminent Patrona, Mrs Leticia Kilgour. It is imperative that I deliver it at once. I ask that you arrange a meeting. There is one—a young man—from the Other Side who would contact her, and who thinks she is in grave danger. I am compelled by the knowledge I have of her fate to help her. Parach!

  Liam shredded the letter carefully, then disordered the scraps and scattered them in the wastepaper basket beneath his desk.

  CLIVE

  During ten recitals up the coast, Liam heard three variations on Mrs. Kilgour’s speech regarding the Virtue of Music, and saw ten evening gowns in shades of pink, mauve, and red. During her performances, he grew used to the rapt and/or horrified audience, just as he had grown used to the unquestioned truth that Mrs. Kilgour was an exceptional woman. He simply complied (perhaps it was inevitable when one was in her orbit), and by the end of the tour, he contented his mind with thoughts of the recordings that would follow in the first week of February. February, he thought, when the weather would be brighter, and he would begin his real work. He amused himself in train carriages and in Mrs. Kilgour’s Rolls-Royce (which travelled with them, like an enormous lap cat, even when the rain-gutted streets were too rough for city tires and it stuck axle-deep in the mud of a northern coal town), imagining and re-imagining his eight sides, and ignoring the duets. He had begun ignoring them when Mrs. Kilgour decided to expand the duets to a quarter of the catalogue, the other quarter being Liam’s solo work.

  Though duets horrified him, they were preferable to really thinking about the ten recitals or the little towns through which they had travelled. The largest and pleasantest had also been the first: Duncan’s Crossing, where much of the audience hadn’t belonged to the Kilgour Industries. After that the towns were smaller and grimmer, the audiences in the tiny halls and churches silent, and whether mistrustful or horrified, Liam did not know. Once, as they picked their way through the mud toward the manager’s house where they stayed, a rock flicked past Mrs. Kilgour’s head, and Liam had looked sharply around at the loafers and children and housewives on the street. None of them looked any guiltier than the others, but they all looked interested. She might be an old harpy, incapable of carrying a tune in a bucket, and intent on punishing everyone with her voice, but surely she did not deserve rocks.

  Mrs. Kilgour had scheduled a long weekend midway through their tour, to give the artists and their party the opportunity to recover from the exhausting demands of the stage. They stopped at the Kilgour Country Estate, the Hunting Lodge, she called it, in the mountains north of Duncan’s Crossing. Mrs. Kilgour retired to her rooms with Nora and Euphemia, and left Liam and Goshawk to their own devices: they spent their days reading or smoking outside.

  Occasionally Liam thought about writing letters at the desk in the drawing room, or sat at the piano, or wondered how difficult it was to ride a horse (he hadn’t brought the clothes, so he did not try). It would be a nice country place in summer, he guessed, but the rain and the hills foreshortened the views, and it was awkward to demand entertainment when he was meant to be resting.

  It was on the third and second-to-last night that Mrs. Kilgour called Liam to her upstairs parlour. It had been raining for three days, and Liam entered the room on a gust of fresh, damp air from outside, though when the door closed behind him, he felt the close atmosphere of her fireside overtake him. Mrs. Kilgour sat at the window, with a bit of gauzy stitchery in her lap. He never saw her work on any of these projects, only saw her lay them aside when company arrived. Once he wondered if Nora was instructed to begin embroidering scarves and tea-cloths so that Mrs. Kilgour might look as though she were in progress on some delicate bit of work. His mother had never been without sewing at hand, but when she was expecting friends on some ladylike occasion, she made a point to Ella about the kind of fancy work that should lie around the front room, or beside her rocking chair on the porch. He had not understood at the time, but looking at Mrs. Kilgour, he wondered if
she had learned the same esoteric principles.

  Mrs. Kilgour set the bit of white aside and smiled at him. “My dear Liam. I have something about which I must speak to you.”

  She gestured to a low chair set conveniently at her side, and Liam sat, knees above elbows until he rearranged himself. “What is it, Mrs. Kilgour?” he asked, looking up at her. The angle was not kind to his neck, but he knew better than to find another seat.

  “I haven’t told you much of my son Clive, have I?”

  Liam had heard of Clive. Mrs. Kilgour had spoken of him quite early in their relationship, and initially Liam had thought he was just away, and had not asked further. The Kilgours were clannish, and their family consisted of a huge extended network, so large Liam was not bothered with remembering all their names. He knew that Clive had seen service and that he did not live in the city; beyond that he did not care.

  “Very little, Mrs. Kilgour.” Without thinking, he added, “But I have often wondered.”

  “I’m not surprised. You remind me of him. He volunteered and went overseas at the beginning of the war. He was such a handsome, brave laddie.”

  Liam smiled, but sadly and sweetly now.

  “We don’t know what became of him. He fought bravely for two years, and he fell in early 1918. Three years gone now, I know, but sometimes I can’t find it in me to believe he won’t come back. Perhaps he will return, when time and death shall be no more.”

  Liam’s smile remained fixed on his face, in a way he hoped was still sad and sweet, because he found he did not feel sad nor sweet. He would prefer not to think about Clive, and about what might have happened to him. He imagined Mrs. Kilgour at home, waiting for letters from him. Clive was a young man; he wouldn’t write often. He would be too busy. He was a rich man, too, and there were many distractions for young, rich men in England and France. In light of all those entertainments and diversions, he would neglect his letters.

  Mrs. Kilgour was still speaking: “I intended to join him over there. He was such a brave, headstrong laddie, he needed someone to look after him and see that his officers appreciated him. He was too gallant, often, for the Canadians. He told me often how much better he would have suited one of the Highland regiments. But he was a Canadian laddie, and he saw his duty. It was only that he needed his mother to see to his career.”

  Liam said nothing. His smile was gone. He turned his face to the fire.

  “But he was gone before I reached England. It is one of my great sorrows that I did not join him sooner. I was distracted by my responsibilities here.”

  Liam thought he should say something, but had to think a moment. “I’m sure, Mrs. Kilgour, I’m sure it was important work you did here, raising spirits at home and doing good work with the poor and deserving and—” But he could not think what else Mrs. Kilgour did, with her unending parade of garden parties and concerts and meetings and teas. Did she raise money? Had she headed a chapter of the IODE? He remembered his mother’s knitting, and something about bandages. She had filled whole letters enumerating the quantity of socks and bandages produced in their little front room during Thursday night IODE meetings. Did Mrs. Kilgour knit in addition to working those gauzy bits of white?

  She said, “Yes, Liam, but I am a mother first, and Clive is gone.”

  Liam framed sentences in his mind, about how she had obligations to her nation, or to the family she still had at home, and how the home fires were a woman’s sacred duty, and how every man on the front line had an army of women with him, in spirit. How she was just as brave as her son was, and how she must live on with his memory, and how she had taken the torch from Clive’s failing hands and would remember him at the going down of the sun, and in the morning. Though he collected a good little store of useful phrases and sentiments, he found them difficult to utter with the other thing that was now swelling in his breast, the tightness behind his ribs that grew and strained toward his throat, his tongue and lips. He was not sure whether it was some hard lump of scar tissue he would disgorge onto the front-room carpet, or something he would shout, or both. While the strangulation was familiar from other bad days, like that evening in Duncan’s Crossing, it took him a moment to recognize what he felt was not the usual expression of his bad lungs, but anger.

  The truth was, he hated hearing about socks and scarves and bandages. Further, he hated hearing about teas, and nice ladies who met up on the second Wednesday of the month to plan concerts. He hated, as well, the bits of patriotic verse they half-remembered from their school readers, the ugly, lumpy platitudes so enjoyed by women like Mrs. Kilgour. Like his mother. Like Ella, even, though she was so young he did not mind as much. She might learn and know better, sometime, and would understand what he meant when he did not answer the letters, and sent only the pre-printed postcards from the commissary, his signature across the bottom, and everything but “I am well” crossed out with black ink. His mother, however, would always be what she was: a foolish, limited woman living on a cornfield outside of London. And not the right London, even, but the other one.

  But he should reassure his Patrona. “I’m sure you did right, Mrs. Kilgour,” he said. It didn’t seem very reassuring.

  “Yes, I am content that I have always done my duty, though it is so hard. But still, I wonder what would have become of Clive if I had been there to look after him.”

  Liam wondered what she wanted, and how quickly he could end their tête-à-tête. He could do what he knew best, and go to the piano, and provoke her to pleasurable tears with “Flowers of the Forest.” He worried though, that if he did sit down he would sing something less suited to Mrs. Kilgour’s mood: at best, “Never Mind the Food Controller, We’ll Live on Love.” At worst, he might walk over to the piano and play the bittersweet opening bars of “Auld Lang Syne,” and then he might choose a song he had often heard in 1915, beginning in his best manner, clear and deceptively tender: we’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here we’re here because we’re here—

  It would not do to offend Mrs. Kilgour just then: she might forget his dependence. Instead of taking those five steps to the piano and singing “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” or “If You Want to Find the Sergeant Major,” Liam sat and smiled sadly, with the mechanical gestures and painted lips of the ventriloquist’s dummy. Mrs. Kilgour smiled in a melancholy way as well, and together they sat in the darkening parlour, and Liam did not know at all what she felt, looking at him with such soft eyes, and he did not care.

  As the afternoon advanced, she finally explained why any of this should matter to him: “What I want you to know, Liam, is that I feel Clive with me, even now. He is guiding our work. I think you should know that we are doing more than just good work for the poor Indians and coal miners. It’s for Clive as well!”

  “Yes, for Clive,” he said.

  “And not only for Clive, but for all the poor laddies. So we must do our best, Liam, not only for the living, but for the dead.”

  A STROH VIOLIN FOR MRS. KILGOUR

  The night before he met with his accompanist for the recording, Liam dreamed that he and Reid stood on the beach, watching a fleet of cedar long ships with high prows, carved and painted to look like forest creatures and birds and fish. They sailed under green and yellow and brick-coloured sheets. It was evening and there were no lights on the opposite shore.

  The next morning he rose early and drank tea with lemon in it. He sat a long time at the open window, breathing deeply and carefully, sometimes hissing, then trilling arpeggios and moaning until he felt himself ready. He climbed two flights to the suite Goshawk had booked for the recordings. It was a damp day. He was out of breath when he arrived, but ten minutes standing in the hallway put him right.

  He knocked and entered. The hotel furniture had been removed, and it was warm and dark with shut windows and blankets on the walls and extra carpet underfoot. There were two men, one attending to the machine at the far end of the long room, the other sitting at the piano, readin
g a six-months-old copy of The Illustrated London News.

  “You’re early,” said the one managing the equipment, before he disappeared through another door.

  “My name is Manley,” he said to the remaining man, “Liam Manley.”

  The man at the piano glanced up at him and nodded. Then he said, “Drysdale. The other one is Penney.”

  Liam waited. When Drysdale didn’t speak again, he said, “We’ll begin with ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ I think that was first on the list.”

  “Alright, then,” the man said through his pipe. He turned on the piano stool and dropped the Illustrated News to the floor.

  He began at a brisk tempo, and Liam stumbled to catch up, all the while examining the huge fabric horn. By the second refrain he had reached his stride, but then the other man rejoined them, this time carrying a chamois. For a moment he listened, and Liam flattered himself that the man had a sensitive ear, that he knew good music when he heard it, that he might even discern something Parisian in Liam’s manner and voice, from his six months with M. Girard. It would be a relief to them, dealing with a professional. For all Drysdale’s bad manners and lazy posture, they were building a fine crescendo in the third chorus. He thought of how a thousand copies of that crescendo would soon be all over the city, and the country even, and how after dinner a woman might say, “Oh, play Manley’s ‘Auld Lang Syne’ again! I like it best!”

  “You might reconsider the C, Mr. Manley,” said Penney.

  Drysdale stopped. “Yes, I think he might,” he said.