Fifth Business tdt-1

by Robertson Davies

  He was busy and he was adventurous. When he first went into the bread business, because a large company was in difficulties and could be bought at a rock-bottom price, I asked him why he did not try beer as well.

  “I may do that when the economy is steadier,” he said, “but at present I feel I should do everything I can to see that people have necessities.” And we both took reflective pulls at the excellent whiskies-and-soda he had provided.

  Boy’s new bread company made quite a public stir with their advertisements declaring that they would hold the price of bread steady And they did so, though the loaves seemed to be a bit puflier and gassier than they had been before We ate them at school so I was able to judge.

  There was filial piety, as well as altruism in Boy’s decision. Old Doc Staunton’s annoyance at being outsmarted by his son had given way to his cupidity, and the old man was a large holder in Alpha. To have associated him with beer would have made trouble, and Boy never looked for trouble.

  “Alpha concentrates on necessities,” Boy liked to say. “In times like these people need cheap nourishing food. If a family can’t buy meat, our vitammized biscuits are still within their reach.” So much so indeed, that Boy was fast becoming one of the truly rich, by which I mean one of those men whose personal income, though large, is a trifling part of the huge, mystical ho of wealth that stands behind them and cannot be counted, only estimated.

  A few cranky politicians of the most radical party tried to estimate it in order to show that, in some way, the very existence of Boy was intolerable in a country where people were in want. But like so many idealists they did not understand money, and after a meeting where they had lambasted Boy and others like him and threatened to confiscate their wealth at the first opportunity, they would adjourn to cheap restaurants, where they drank his sugar and ate his sugar, and smoked cigarettes which had they known it, benefited some other monster they sought to destroy.

  I used to hear him abused by some of the junior masters at the school. They were Englishmen or Canadians who had studied in England and they were full of the wisdom of the London School of Economics and the doctrine of The New Statesman, copies of which used to limp into the Common Room about a month after publication. I have never been sure of my own political opinions (historical studies and my fondness for myth and legend have always blunted my political partisanship), but it amused me to hear these poor fellows, working for terrible salaries, denouncing Boy and a handful of others as “ca-pittle-ists”; they always stressed the middle syllables, this being a fashionable pronunciation of the period, and one that seemed to make rich men especially contemptible. I never raised my voice in protest, and none of my colleagues ever knew that I was personally acquainted with the ca-pittle-ist whose good looks, elegant style of life, and somewhat gross success made their own hard fortune and their leather-elbowed jackets and world weary flannel trousers seem pitiful. This was not disloyalty, rather, it seemed to me that the Boy they hated and did not know was unrelated to the Boy I saw about once a fortnight and often more frequently.

  I owed this position to the fact that I was the only person to whom he could talk frankly about Leola. She was trying hard, but she could not keep pace with Boy’s social advancement. He was a genius—that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities. He was a genius at making money, and that is as uncommon as great achievement in the arts. The simplicity of his concepts and the masterly way in which they were carried through made jealous people say he was lucky and people like my schoolmaster colleagues say he was a crook; but he made his own luck, and no breath of financial scandal ever came near him.

  His ambitions did not rest in finance alone: he had built firmly on his association with the Prince of Wales, and though in hard fact it did not amount to more than the reception of a monogrammed Christmas card once a year, it bulked substantially, though never quite to the point of absurdity, in his conversation. “He isn’t joining them at Sandringham this year,” he would say as Christmas drew near, “pretty stuffy, I suppose.” And somehow this suggested that he had some inside information—perhaps a personal letter—though everybody who read the newspapers knew as much. All Boy’s friends had to be pretty spry at knowing who “he” was, or they ceased to be friends. In a less glossily successful young man this would have been laughable, but the people Boy knew were not the kind of people who laughed at several million dollars. It was after David’s birth it became clear that Leola was lagging in the upward climb.

  A woman can go just so far on the capital of being a pretty girl Leola, like Boy and myself, was now past youth; he was two months younger than I, though I looked older than thirty-two and he somewhat less. Leola was not a full year younger han we, and her girlishness was not well suited to her age or her position. She had toiled at the lessons in bridge, mah-jongg, golf, and tennis; she had plodded through the Books-of-the-Month, breaking down badly in Kristin Lavransdatter; she had listened with mystification to gramophone records of Le Sacre du Printemps and with the wrong kind of enjoyment to Ravel’s Bolero; but nothing made any impression on her, and bewilderment and a sense of failure had begun to possess her. She had lost heart in the fight to become the sort of sophisticated, cultivated, fashionably alert woman Boy wanted for a wife. She loved shopping, but her clothes were wrong; she had a passion for pretty things and leaned towards the frilly at a time when fashion demanded clean lines and a general air of knowingness in women”s clothes. If Boy let her shop alone she always came back with what he called “another god-damned Mary Pickford rig-out,” and if he took her shopping in Paris the sessions often ended in tears, because he sided with the clever shopwomen against his indecisive wife, who always forgot her painfully acquired French as soon as she was confronted with a living French creature. Nor did she speak English as became the wife of one who had once hobnobbed with a Prince and might do so again. If she positively had to use hick expressions, I once heard Boy tell her, she might at least say “For Heaven’s sake,” and not “For Heaven sakes.” And “supper” was a meal one ate after the theatre, not the meal they ate every night at half-past seven. Nor could she learn when to refer to herself as “one”, or remember not to say “between you and I.”

  In the early years of their marriage Leola sometimes resented this sort of talk and made spirited replies; she did not see why she should become stuck-up, and talk as she had never talked before, and behave in ways that were unnatural to her. When this happened Boy would give her what he called “the silent treatment”; he said nothing, but Leola’s inner ear was so tuned to the silence that she was aware of the answers to all her impertinences and blasphemies: it was not stuck-up to behave in a way that accorded with your position in the world, and the speech of Deptford was not the speech of the world to which they now belonged; as for unnatural behaviour, natural behavior was the sort of thing they hired a nurse to root out of young David—eating with both hands and peeing on the floor; let us have no silly talk about being natural. Of course Boy was right, and of course Leola gave in and tried to be the woman he wanted.

  It was so easy for him! He never forgot anything that was of use to him, and his own manners and speech became more polished all the time. Not that he lost a hint of his virility or youthfulness, but they sat on him as if he were one of those marvellous English actors—Clive Brook, for instance—who was manly and gentlemanly at once, in a way Canadians as a whole could never manage.

  This situation did not come about suddenly; it was a growth of six years of their marriage, during which Boy had changed a great deal and Leola hardly at all. Even being a mother did nothing for her; she seemed to relax when she had performed her biological trick instead of taking a firmer hold on life.

  I never intervened when Leola was having a rough time; rows between them seemed to be single affairs, and it was only when I looked backward that I could see that they were sharp outbreaks in a continuous c
ampaign. To be honest, I must say also that I did not want to shoulder the burdens of a peacemaker; Boy never let it be forgotten that he had, as he supposed, taken Leola from me; he was very jocose about it, and sometimes allowed himself a tiny, roguish hint that it might have been better for us all if things had gone the other way. The fact was that I no longer had any feeling for Leola save pity. If I spoke up for her I might find myself her champion, and a man who champions any woman against her husband had better be sure he means business.

  I did not mean business, or anything at all. I went to the Stauntons’ often, because they asked me and because Boy’s brilliant operations fascinated me. I enjoyed my role as Friend of the Family, though I was unlike the smart, rich, determinediy youthful people who were their “set.” It was some time before I tumbled to the fact that Boy needed me as someone in whose presence he could think aloud, and that a lot of his thinking was about the inadequacy of the wife he had chosen to share his high destiny.

  Personally I never thought Leola did badly; she offset some of the too glossy perfection of Boy. But his idea of a wife for himself would have had the beauty and demeanour of Lady Diana Manners coupled with the wit of Margot Asquith. He let me know that he had been led into his marriage by love, and love alone; though he did not say so it was clear he owed Cupid a grudge.

  Only twice did I get into any sort of wrangle with them about their own affairs. The first was early in their marriage, about 1926 I think, when Boy discovered Dr. Emile Coue; the doctor had been very much in the public eye since 1920, but Canada caught up with him just about the time his vogue was expiring.

  You remember Dr. Coue and his great success with autosuggestion? It had the simplicity and answer-to-everything quality that Boy, for all his shrewdness, could never resist. If you fell asleep murmuring, “Every day in every way, I am getting better and better,” wondrous things came of it. The plugged colon ceased to trouble, the fretful womb to ache; indigestion yielded to inner peace; twitches and trembles disappeared; skin irritations vanished overnight; stutterers became fluent; the failing memory improved; stinking breath became as the zephyr of May; and dandruff but a hateful memory. Best of all it provided “moral energy”, and Boy Staunton was a great believer in energy of all kinds.

  He wanted Leola to acquire moral energy, after which social grace, wit, and an air of easy breeding would surely follow. She obediently repeated the formula as often as she could, every night for six weeks, but nothing much seemed to be happening.

  “You’re just not trying, Leo,” he said one night when I was dining with them. “You’ve simply got to try harder.”

  “Perhaps she’s trying too hard,” I said.

  “Don’t be absurd, Dunny. There’s no such thing as trying too hard, whatever you’re doing.”

  “Yes there is. Have you never heard of the Law of Reversed Effort? The harder you try, the more likely you are to miss the mark.”

  “I never heard such nonsense. Who says that?”

  “A lot of wise people have said it, and the latest is your Dr. Coue. Don’t clench your teeth and push for success, he says, or everything will work against you. Psychological fact.”

  “Bunk! He doesn’t say it in my book.”

  “But, Boy, you never study anything properly. That miserable little pamphlet you have just gives you a farcical smattering of Coueism. You should read Baudouin’s Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion and get things right.”

  “How many pages?”

  “I don’t count pages. It’s a good-sized book.”

  “I haven’t got time for big books. I have to have the nub of things. If effort is all wrong, why does Coue work for me? I put lots of effort into it.”

  “I don’t suppose it does work for you. You don’t need it. Every day in every way you do get better and better, in whatever sense you understand the word ‘better’, because that’s the kind of person you are. You’ve got ingrained success.”

  “Well, bring your book over and explain it to Leo. Make her read it, and you help her to understand it.”

  Which I did, but it was of no use. Poor Leola did not get better and better because she had no idea of what betterness was. She couldn’t conceive what Boy wanted her to be. I don’t think I have ever met such a stupid, nice woman. So Dr. Coue failed for her, as he did for many others, for which I lay no blame on him. His system was really a form of secularized, self-seeking prayer, without the human dignity that even the most modest prayer evokes. And like all attempts to command success for the chronically unsuccessful, it petered out.

  The second time I came between Boy and Leola was much more serious. It happened late in 1927, after the famous Royal Tour. Boy gave me a number of reels of film and asked me to develop them for him. This was reasonable enough, because in my saint-hunting expeditions I used a camera often and had gained some skill; at the school, as I could not supervise sports, I was in charge of the Camera Club and taught boys how to use the dark room. I was always ready to do a favour for Boy, to whose advice I owed my solvency, and when he said that he did not want to confide these films to a commercial developer, I assumed they were pictures of the Tour and probably some of them were of the Prince.

  So it was, except for two reels that were amateurish but pretentious “art studies” of Leola, lying on cushions, peeping through veils, sitting at her make-up table, kneeling in front of an open fire, wagging her finger at a Teddy Bear, choosing a chocolate from a large ribboned box—every sentimental posture approved by the taste of the day for “cutie” photographs, and in every one of them she was stark naked. If she had been an experienced model and Boy a clever photographer, they would have been the kind of thing that appeared in the more daring magazines. But their combined inexperience had produced embarrassing snapshots of the sort hundreds of couples take but have the sense to keep to themselves.

  I do not know why this made me so angry. Was I so inconsiderable, so much the palace eunuch, that I did not matter? Or was this a way of letting me know what I had missed when Boy won Leola? Or was it a signal that if I wanted to take Leola off his hands, Boy would make no objection? He had let me know that Leola had conventional ideas and that his own adventurous appetite was growing tired of her meat-and-potatoes approach to sex. Whatever it was, I was very angry and considered destroying the film. But—I must be honest—I examined the pictures with care, and I suppose with some measure of gloating, and this made me angrier still.

  My solution was typical of me. I developed all the pictures as carefully as I could, enlarged the best ones (all those of Leola), returned them without a word, and waited to see what would happen.

  Next time I dined with them all the pictures were brought out, and Boy went through them slowly, telling me exactly what H.R.H. had said as each one was taken. At last we came to the ones of Leola.

  “Oh, don”t show those!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  “Dunny’s seen them before, you know. He developed them, I expect he kept a set for himself.”

  “No,” I said, “as a matter of fact I didn’t.”

  “The more fool you. You’ll never see pictures of a prettier girl—”

  “Boy, please put them away or I’ll have to go upstairs. I don’t want Dunny to see them while I’m here.”

  “Leo, I never thought you were such a little prude.”

  “Boy, it isn’t nice.”

  “Nice, nice, nice! Of course it isn’t nice! Only fools worry about what’s nice. Now sit here by me, and Dunny on the other side, and be proud of what a stunner you are.”

  So Leola, sensing a row from the edge in his voice, sat between us while Boy showed the pictures, telling me what lens apertures he had used, and how he had arranged the lights, and how he had achieved certain “values” which, in fact, made Leola’s rose-leaf bottom look like sharkskin and her nipples glare when they should have blushed. He seemed to enjoy Leola’s discomfiture thoroughly; it was educational for her to learn that her beauty had
public as well as private significance. He recalled Margot Asquith’s account of receiving callers in her bath though—he was always a careless reader—he did not remember the circumstances correctly.

  As we drew near the end of the show he turned to me and said with a grin, “I hope you don’t find it too hot in here, old man.”

  As a matter of fact I did find it hot. All the anger I had felt when developing the pictures had returned. But I said I was quite comfortable.

  “Oh. I just thought you might find the situation a bit unusual, as Leo does.”

  “Unusual but not unprecedented. Call it historical—even mythological.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s happened before, you know. Do you remember the story of Gyges and King Candaules?”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “I thought not. Well, Candaules was a king of Lydia a long time ago, and he was so proud of his wife’s beauty that he insisted his friend Cyges should see her naked.”

  “Generous chap. What happened?”

  “There are two versions. One is that the Queen took a fancy to Gyges and together they pushed Candaules off his throne.”

  “Really? Not much chance of that here, is there, Leo? You’d find my throne a bit too big, Dunny.”

  “The other is that Gyges killed Candaules.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ll do that, Dunny.”

  I didn’t suppose so myself. But I think I stirred some uxorious fire in Boy, for nine months later I did some careful counting, and I am virtually certain that it was on that night little David was begotten. Boy was certainly a complex creature, and I am sure he loved Leola. What he thought of me I still do not know. That Leola loved him with all her unreflecting heart there would be no possible doubt. Nothing he could do would change that.

  2

  Every fortnight during the school term I made the journey to Weston on Saturday morning and had lunch with Miss Bertha Shanklin and Mrs. Dempster. It took less than half an hour on a local train, so I could leave after the Saturday morning study period for boarders, which I supervised, and be back in town by three o’clock. To have stayed longer, Miss Shanklin let me know, would have been fatiguing for poor Mary. She really meant, for herself; like many people who have charge of an invalid, she projected her own feelings on her patient, speaking for Mrs. Dempster as a priest might interpret a dull-witted god. But she was gentle and kind, and I particularly liked the way she provided her niece with pretty, fresh dresses and kept her hair clean and neat; in the Deptford days I had become used to seeing her in dirty disorder as she paced her room on the restraining rope.