Brochwel knows for a certainty that he will be nothing of the kind. Two governments will contend and at length make some sort of agreement about how much “the grim wolf with privy paw” – the unappeasably covetous tax-gatherers – will demand, and how much will be left over for Rhodri Gilmartin’s heir. They will probably not despoil him utterly. They will leave him a few thousands, but not many. If only Rhodri could have contrived to die in Canada, some sort of case against the highest British taxes might have been made. But he did not. He died at Belem, and Trallwm gave him a splendid funeral, at which the Mayor spoke eloquently of this native son who had after so many years come back to the place of his birth. Rhodri, if he were aware of that (and I, the looker-on, think it very likely that he was aware of it), would have liked his funeral very much. Everybody who was anybody in the county was present, and the Earl, though too old and unable now to venture out on a wet day, had sent a handsome tribute of flowers; had he not, during the past few years, been on excellent terms with the dead man? The boy who had run to open the gate for the Earl’s Countess had quite disappeared in the prosperous man who restored Belem Manor to something very like its Victorian splendour.
Brochwel was not greedy for money, but how many people are utterly indifferent to it? He needed nothing, and if he had inherited all his father’s wealth he would undoubtedly have continued to be a professor of Eng-Lang-and-Lit because that was what he knew, what he liked best, and what afforded him refuge from aspects of life he did not want to face. That was indeed the land of which he was a countryman. Not for him the struggle, the hero-journey of old Rhodri’s life, in which so many external enemies had been met and defeated. His struggles were within, and it was Rhodri and Malvina who had chosen the battleground. The Old World, or the New? Was it utterly imperative that there should be a final decision? Was Eng-Lang-and-Lit really a solution?
Brochwel leaves the inn, and in the dusk he rambles through the Trallwm streets, and although he does not know it, they are not greatly changed from the days when Rhodri ran, and revelled and rollicked in them as a boy. The dreadful “shuts” have been somewhat improved, though they are still not desirable residences. Automobiles now spread their pervasive stench through the streets where, in Rhodri’s time, the stench of horse dung was just as pervasive. At the Town Cross the old, battered stone pillar, part monument and part pump, still marks the heart, though not the centre, of the town. The Mansion House, where Samuel Gilmartin had lorded it among his prosperous companions, is now the premises of a county office, but its pillared entrance has not changed. Brochwel walks down the Salop Road – so called because it comes from Shropshire and is thus Salopian – and looks at the humble shop where, a lifetime ago, Walter Gilmartin and Janet and their children, and as many Jenkinses and other Gilmartins as could thrust themselves through the easy door, had played out their domestic tragedy, or melodrama, or farce, or whatever you choose to call it.
Nobody appears to live “over the shop,” for the windows are lightless and uncurtained. Probably the stationer who now rents the premises keeps extra stock up there. It was behind those windows that Janet Gilmartin – she who had been Janet Jenkins – read Ossian to her scarcely comprehending children. And yet, when Rhodri was a crusading political writer, had not some tropes and rhythms of Ossian given substance to his prose? Who ever knows what children hear and make their own forever? Did not Brochwel himself sometimes hear his voice urging his students not to leave completion of their work “till the last dog is hung”? A phrase of Malvina’s, that was, coming from who knows what Vermuelen past, when it referred to the Mohawk Feast of the White Dog, about which the white man knew nothing, but where they suspected that dogs met a harsh, ritual quietus. Well, well; he must not walk the streets of Trallwm till the last dog was hung; he must get back to the Green Man, and try to rest before setting out tomorrow on his return journey to Canada.
To Canada. To familiarity and his own sort of ease in life. To Nuala whom he loved with all his heart, and now and then told her so. To Nuala who had healed the wound left by Julia, though nobody could erase the scar. How painful it had been! During one of their many wretched scenes of parting (for he never had the resolution or the good sense to break the thing off abruptly) he had so far sunk as to complain of the way she had used him. “Surely in things of this sort it’s the man’s job to look out for himself?” she had said. It was only one of many observations of hers that made it plain how impossible it would be for him to confide the best of his life to such a person. But he must not begin that old story now, or he would get no sleep. And if he was to sleep, he must first read. Must. It was a lifelong habit, not to be broken now.
The Green Man, like virtually all inns, hotels, motels, lodging-houses and places of their kind, has no idea that anybody reads in bed. Bed, to the innkeeping trade, is a place for fornication or for sleep. This is why people like Brochwel develop a contortionist’s talent that enables them to read in extraordinary positions, in light which, by the time it reaches the page, is not more than twenty-five watts in strength. With his head where his feet should be, with his book held high and askew, Brochwel settles himself to read Browning, his professional companion, his enthusiasm, his philosophy and, in the lingo of professors of Eng-Lang-and-Lit, his “field.” He reads Shop.
Because a man has shop to mind
In time and place, since flesh must live,
Needs spirit lack all life behind,
All stray thoughts, fancies fugitive,
All loves except what trade can give?
Browning was right, as he usually was. A life spent in “trade” like that of Walter, or a life spent in journalism, which was half-trade half-profession, like Rhodri, need not be mired in trade alone. Brave thoughts and high aspirations can rise above almost anything. Had not the wretches in the Nazi prison camps kept hearts and souls above their torment by clinging to their philosophy or their religion?
He had taken leave of Rose, good old soul, in the empty Servants’ Hall at Belem. It was a room he never entered if he could help it, because of a story old Rhodri had told him on one of his visits to the Manor.
“I was a boy of twelve, I suppose, and I was here in the Servants’ Hall with my father, who had come to measure the menservants for their annual livery outfit. I remember I was eating a big slice of bread and jam the cook had given me, and my father was kneeling on the floor, measuring the inside leg of a groom, a miserable bandy-legged fellow with a boozer’s nose. He pushed the Pater with his foot – not hard, not a kick, but a nasty nudge – and said, ‘Make haste, tailor, I haven’t got all day.’ And the Pater looked abashed, but said nothing. I put down my bread and jam and swore in my heart that some day I would be somebody important, and never – never – would I speak like that to anybody. Never be insolent to a man who had to serve me. And I never have.”
No indeed. Stray thoughts, fancies fugitive, had illuminated his life. As indeed stray thoughts, fancies fugitive, had illuminated the life of his wife, though he had never understood her any better than she had understood him. They were held together by a loyalty which was more than love – which may, in fact, be the distillation of love. He had taken the light way because, as a man of his time and place, it lay within his grasp. She had taken the dark way because, as a woman of her time and place, there was no other way for a woman of her imagination, her intuition, her witch-like sensibility and vision of life. Between them they had made Brochwel the queasy but resolute creature that he was.
He thought he was reading, but he was musing – not thinking, not deciding anything, not seeing anything afresh but just bobbing up and down in the dark tarn of his feelings. Of course he fell asleep and Browning fell forward on his face and woke him up sufficiently for him to extinguish the feeble interference with darkness that the inn called electric light, and sleep again.
The last thing I see in the film is Belem Manor, its Victorian Gothic turrets and vaulted windows picked out in dim moonlight. It sleeps, too, and when
it wakes again it will not be a Gilmartin who kisses it back into life.
(16)
ON THE SCREEN in the usual white print, appears the formal closure
T H E E N D ?
And then, suddenly a message –
NOTHING IS FINISHED TILL ALL IS FINISHED
VII
… To the Wind’s Twelve Quarters I Take My Endless Way
THE FESTIVAL IS OVER. Not just the wondrous festival of rediscovered films that Allard Going has been gloating over in the pages of The Colonial Advocate, but my personal festival that ran beside it, visible to me alone, and significant to me alone. But is my festival over? What of that gnomic conclusion – “Nothing is finished till all is finished”? What am I to make of that?
More film? I dread it. My festival has taken me into the past, though not really very far into the past, of my own forebears. Taken me into the eighteenth century, which is no distance in the procession of human history, but far enough to tell me more about the American strand and the Old Country strand which, in me, were woven into what is now indisputably a Canadian weftage. Given substance to people, many of whom were strangers to me, or at best names to which no special character attached, but whose courage and resource, loyalty even to the point of self-destruction, crankiness and meanness, despair and endurance are now known to me, and arouse my admiration, my pity and – I must say it, strange as it seems to me – my love. Yes, love, for I know more about them than I suppose they had ever known about themselves, just as I now see I have known so little about myself, have so scantly loved myself.
Love myself? I have never thought of such a thing. It seems indecent. My parents, kind and indulgent as they were to me, would never have proposed love of self as a possible or desirable state of mind. They were both – are both, I should say, for they live and I am dead as the world thinks of death – of Puritan strain. My father, a highly educated man and, like so many highly educated men of our time, still an undeveloped child in matters of the spirit, is nevertheless unswervingly honourable and the Methodist strain in him persists as a strong, if desiccated and almost wizened, morality; he is a man with a powerful sense of what he calls “the decent thing,” and he can always be depended on to do it, even when it costs him dear. My mother, brought up a Catholic in the harsh Irish tradition, is at root much the same sort of creature. They abandoned religion, the comfort and joys of religion as well as its night-terrors and absurdities, but its morality lives on without any emollient faith. It is a morality into which no thought of self-love ever intrudes, and even self-approval is looked upon with humorous suspicion. Self-respect – ah yes, that is another thing, a cooler thing.
From them, from the atmosphere of my home, I took on this condition of mind without ever giving it much serious thought. Not love, but a sort of amused tolerance, has been my conscious attitude toward myself. By love, of course, I mean charity and forgiveness, not a foolish egotism. In my life I suppose I was not a bad fellow. Of course I had my lapses, rooted in stupidity rather than evil, but on the whole I tried to do the decent thing. But now it is as if my heart has been painfully enlarged, and in this swollen heart I must find a place for all that I have seen of my forebears, their vanities, their cruelties, their follies, which were, at least in part, explained and made to seem inevitable because of their circumstances. And, in addition to these, something splendid – the stuff of life, indeed. Will the world that I no longer share think of me with love?
Is it all gone, this love and understanding of those who are no more? I don’t hope for primitive or bygone things. I don’t want anybody to light candles on my grave on All Souls’ Day, or sob for me on a midnight pillow. But will they include me in their charity? In the light of what I now see, the chances are slim.
(2)
WHAT DO I now see? My wife, sitting opposite her agent in his office. The room is meant to look like business premises, but there are too many piles of dusty typescripts on a side table, too many unsightly photographs of authors (men scruffy and dishevelled, in turtle-necks and jeans, women, many of decidedly unattractive mien, wearing huge spectacles, some holding cats), too much literary mess and too powerful a stench of good, but pungent, cigars.
“I have to be careful, Rache. If we rush this book onto the stands, isn’t it going to look too calculating, as if I hadn’t really undergone a terrible experience, and was just out for money?”
“Esme, you’ve got to understand, this is why an agent is your best friend. An agent can see things you can’t. An agent can see ahead to the paperback, the lecture tour, maybe – if things are handled right – a really big TV series, enlarging the book, making it even more personal, grabbing an audience of millions. It’s a very fluid picture.”
“Well – do you think I could handle that?”
“Esme, you don’t need me to tell you that you can, and you will. Look at yourself objectively. I know it’s hard, but you’re an intelligent woman and you can hack it. What are you? First of all, I don’t need to tell you, you’re a looker – ”
“Oh Rache, that’s nonsense – ”
“Baby, listen to Old Rache. He knows what a looker is in modern-day terms, and you’re it. Those pictures in the fashion magazines, those models – grouchy-looking girls, some with crazy squints, some that look as if they’d poison you if they bit you – but hair! Jesus, the hair! And the bones! This is the day of the Anorexic Look, but with a big bazoom. A really great pair of maracas – and you’ve got ’em – ”
“Oh, Rache, business is business – ”
“You don’t have to tell me! I’m being completely objective. You’ve got everything it takes, and if you’ll just let me handle it, Christ knows where it will end.”
“Well – if you say so.”
“I do say so. I can see the thing in a way you can’t. Don’t imagine I’ve forgotten your bereavement, under those terrible circumstances. Jesus – Gil lying there, covered with blood, and you shrinking back against your pillow as the murderer makes good his escape! Do you think I’ve forgotten that? Maybe in the TV series they might even have a re-enacted scene of the murder – not you acting, of course, because that would be in the worst possible taste and would alienate the over-thirties – but enough actualization to hammer home the immensity of your tragedy.”
“It would be powerful, as you say. But of course I’d just do the talking. Right? Wearing a dark ensemble. Not black. That would be coming on too strong as a widow for modern viewers.”
“And your hair down. You’d better start growing it right now. The longer the better.”
“It’s fairly long now.”
“Get it longer. There’s time, if you’re a quick grower. But the first thing is to get the book out. I’ve put out feelers – ”
“So soon?”
“Not a bit too soon. You forget how long it takes to get a book out nowadays. Even on a rush job, it’ll be months. So get busy on the script and don’t waste a minute. The thing could go cold on the plate if we don’t move fast. This outline you’ve given me – it’s okay but it lacks something. I want another two or three days to decide what, but I’ll find out, and I’ll be in touch with you at once. It doesn’t have to be a long book, you know. You’re not writing War and Peace. A hundred and twenty-five pages, well spaced out, with a socko cover, and a really great picture of you on the back. So go home now, Esme. Take a deep breath, and then get going on the word-processor. We have no time to lose.”
“Well Rache, if you say so – ”
“I do say so. And don’t think I’m rough. I bleed for you, baby. But getting down to the writing will comfort you like nothing else could. Writing is the best therapy when your heart’s broken.”
“My heart’s all right. It’s my digestion, really.”
“Of course. Shock. Bereavement goes right to the gut. So write! That’s the therapy for you.”
“I suppose really – maybe it’s presumptuous to say it – I suppose really I’m doing it for others.”
&
nbsp; “For other broken hearts. For other bereaved people. Exactly. That’s the way you’ve got to look at it. I’ll get through to you early next week.”
(3)
“CALL IT A WHIM, if you wish. But I’m sure you understand how imperious a whim can be. I don’t know that I could face it, otherwise.” The Sniffer has assumed an air of gravity.
“You mean that if you have to move into Gil’s office you refuse to take over Gil’s job?”
“Not refuse. No, no Chief – I didn’t mean refuse. It’s a remarkable opportunity to shape the Entertainment Department into a coherent whole. Poor Gil hadn’t much idea of coherence.”
“I wouldn’t go too far with that, if I were you. The Department is pretty well received just as it stands.”
“Oh, quite. Quite. Gil had a touch; I don’t deny it. But there are things that could be done. So you see – ”
“What I see, Al, is that you want Gil’s job, but you make it a condition that you won’t occupy his office – ”
“It’s full of his stuff. He was a terrible magpie, you know.”
“Maintenance can clear it out in half a day.”
“Yes, certainly. But his ambience will remain.”
“I don’t understand. What ambience?”