Trial of Passion (2 page)
“My dear, I am simply retiring from the wicked practices of the law.”
Seeking safety, I burrow between the sheltering arms of my favourite club chair, a padded refuge that over the years has moulded to my sylphlike shape until the chair and I are one, whole, indivisible. To part with this chair would be to part with an old and valued friend. The chair will go with me to Garibaldi Island. My wife, suddenly in the springtime of her life, will not.
From the enfolding warm prison of my chair, I can hear young Nick, Jr., restless, prowling about the house, an eight-year-old addict of the multichannel universe. Annabelle and I have forbidden television here, the pabulum upon which he feeds at home. Nicholas
Braid, Deborah's husband, who is “into”
(his
preposition) mutual funds, is playing golf on the carpet, practising his putting. He finally speaks:
“Arthur, do you have the foggiest idea what it's like to live on one of those Gulf Islands? Been to Garibaldi. Full of yokels. Potheads.” Nicholas tends to burp his sentences.
“Is there even a telephone in that godforsaken place?” Deborah asks. “A doctor? What if you have a
major
stroke this time?”
“I am retiring to the country so I may
avoid
another stroke. It was just a gentle warning, my dear.”
“A gentle warning you're about twenty pounds overweight.”
“I intend to shape up and chill out, if that's the
au courant
expression. I am on the cusp of sixty-three. A richness of poetry has been written that I have not had the time and comfort to enjoy. I intend to hone my skills with rake and hoe.” Gardening has been my one great delectation, my solace, my escape. Yes, the trials of Arthur Beauchamp are at an end. He is retiring
in corpore sano.
“I don't suppose your wife is objecting.” Deborah says this in the manner of someone who knows such person only casually. The wife, my darling Annabelle, gave her suck.
“She's in accord with my wishes.”
“I
can't
imagine why.”
“Deborah,” warns her husband.
Out of habit, I leap to Annabelle's defence. “She has her career. I can't ask her to abandon it.” Annabelle has only recently become artistic director of the Vancouver Opera Society.
“Oh, yes, mother is busy, busy, busy. That
ridiculous
facelift.”
“Let's change the subject,” says Nicholas, as he aims a three-foot putt at a plastic cup.
The subject, Annabelle Beauchamp, my dear wife, is in the kitchen making canapés. These two warring foes, daughter and mother, have begun to resemble each other ever more closely as one grows older, the other younger. How complimented I feel that
Annabelle has shed her carapace of older skin to be a wife who looks not fifty-three but half my age. Ah, but Annabelle has ever been a seeker of that legendary fountain that washes clean the waning years, the waters of eternal wrinklessness.
“I think a time apart will be good for both of us.” As I utter this hearty banality, I realize it will only reinvigorate the debate.
“So you're ⦠another separation. That's really it, isn't it? Or she's kicking you out. And you just
sit
there. You
take
it.”
“Nonsense. She intends to come every few weekends after the opera season. You and the two Nicks will visit, too, I hope. Young Nick will love it. On a clear day you can stand on the bluffs and actually make out Vancouver behind the polluting haze.”
A silence follows as Annabelle sweeps into view bearing a tray of canapés.
“Arthur wants to try something different for a while,” Annabelle says. “I can't see the harm in it, nor can I see it lasting. He'll miss his grungy old robes and his place on centre stage.” She kisses my forehead with lips soft and dry. I tremble from her touch, and light a cigarette.
Deborah leans down to me. “Is this going to make you happy, Dad?”
“We shall see.”
“You're okay?”
“Fine.”
We nibble, we chat, we pretend, as this cheerless April day grinds to its zenith, and the hour of departure nears. My chariot is out front, filled with books and music tapes, its boot yawning open ready to receive this, my favourite chair.
But why is my throat so thick with rue, why does my chest feel raw and hollow?
CROSS-EXAMINATION BY MR. GOWAN CLEAVER
Q | Dr. Hawthorne, I won't take much of your time. I know this isn't a comfortable way to spend a Monday morning. |
A | Please don't worry. |
Q | You've known Professor O'Donnell here for what â seven or eight years? |
A | As a neighbour, yes. |
Q | Always pleasant, easy to get along with? |
A | A most courteous gentleman. We visit from time to time. |
Q | No wild parties? (Witness laughs.) |
A | He's been over for a brandy occasionally. That's about as wild as it gets, I'm afraid. |
Q | And he is known to you to be a man of integrity? |
A | I've never heard a word against him. |
Q | Now, on this night of November twenty-seventh when Miss Martin arrived at your doorstep, I take it there was something else you observed aside from her unusual physical appearance. |
A | She was in great distress, it would seem. |
Q | Yes, it would seem. Notice anything on her breath? |
A | I would have to say her breath smelled of alcohol. |
Q | Strongly? |
A | It was quite apparent. She, ah, she seemed to have a little trouble navigating. |
Q | Stumbled a little? Had difficulty standing? |
A | I wouldn't have let her drive a vehicle. |
Q | She was drunk. |
A | Fairly intoxicated, yes. It seemed to me. |
Q | Babbling incoherently. |
MS. BLUEMAN: | I object. That's a â |
THE COURT: | That's a what, Miss Blueman? |
MS. BLUEMAN: | The innuendo is unfair. Her words should speak for themselves. |
THEÂ COURT: | Objection overruled. |
A | I would say her speech was excited. She kept repeating the same thing over again. |
Q | That someone was coming after her. Did she say who? |
A | No, she didn't. |
Q | Did she say she'd been raped? |
A | Not in my presence. |
Q | She didn't have much to add to her initial complaint? |
A | No, she quieted down. We settled her on the couch, the blanket around her. She turned quite . . . almost composed. |
Q | I understand you offered to call the police. |
A | Yes. |
Q | And? |
A | She asked me not to. She wanted me to phone a friend of hers, a Mr. Clarence de Remy Brown. |
Q | Her fiancé. |
A | I wouldn't have known that, but I do now. |
Q | Mr. Brown came over? |
A | Very quickly â he lives not far away, in the British Properties. He seemed quite calm and in control, considering the situation, and I left it in his hands whether to involve the police. Upon their departure, Mrs. McIntosh urged me to return to my bed, and I'm afraid I was too exhausted to argue. |
MR. CLEAVER: | No more questions. |
THEÂ COURT: | Thank you, Dr. Hawthorne, you've been of great assistance to this court. |
Standing at the aft rail of the gender-confused vessel known as the
Queen of Prince George,
I can see forested clumps of land approach-ing. These comprise the islands beyond the great inland waterway of the Strait of Georgia, the cold salt moat behind which I shall find refuge from the city's grasping fingers.
Below me, on the car deck, my elderly Rolls Phantom
V
looks quite out of place amid the clutter of rust-patched pickup trucks. In my three-piece suit, I suppose I look no less exotic to the several gentle folk of Garibaldi Island who are out here in the no-smokeless zone. With my puffing fellow travellers, I am enjoying the silent communion of nicotine, consumption of which has become the great capital sin of this baleful age of health and purity.
Some of the smoke â that wafting from the tractor-capped young gentlemen near the lifeboats â lightly offends the nostrils with a distinctively illegal sweetness. These then must be the pot-heads Nicholas spoke of.
Passengers glance at me from time to time, shy, curious. Who is this stuffed shirt from the city staring foolishly at the gulls riding motionless in the slipstream? Why is he leaving the world behind? Why does he seek to abandon career, fame, life, wife, the buzzing, febrile city of his birth? Why does he seek to maroon himself among the alleged yokels of Garibaldi Island?
Dire were the warnings of my fellow inmates of Tragger, Inglis, Bullingham, that vast sweatshop of writs and wills wherein I toiled for thirty years. Take time off, rest the ticker, but stay in the city and take the odd trial: one needs stimulus to survive this world, they insisted â my mind would rot through boredom. But no member of this fickle crowd of city sophists, this
mobile vulgus,
has ever ventured closer to nature than the backyard barbecue.
I dared not tell my partners I was going to the country to seek communion with our bountiful mother, Earth. Who could bear to
gaze upon their uncomprehending faces? So spiritless, so dead in look, these timid men and women prefer to be locked within the walls of their sterile, sullen city.
I might have told them this, had I the courage: that I plan to watch the flowers of spring unfurl, petal by petal. To listen to the songs of uncaged birds. To press upon a spade and feel it gently sigh into the loam. In short, I am going to ground.
And perhaps I will also recover from the pain of loving Annabelle. So beautiful, so flamboyant. So perfectly preserved. Ah, but if truth be known, the pain comes from the knife of my own impotence. I have long been unable to perform manfully for her, and as punishment for my crime have been sentenced to the lash of her infidelity.
Her last lover was a hairy-chested heldentenor, Tristan to her Isolde. But who is the latest random paramour?
What slender youth, bedewed with liquid odours, courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave?
(I lack a lyric tongue, and steal these words, of course, from Milton's translation of the
Epodes.)
But I accept cuckoldom as my lot. Unlike Iago's victim, I am not in thrall to the green-eyed monster that mocks the meat it feeds on. I am the other kind of cuckold the Bard spoke of, who lives in bliss, certain of his fate.
(Oh, noble Beauchamp, how naked and hollow are such self-pitying denials.)
Now approach the bosky valleys and rocky hummocks of the island of Garibaldi, population 539. We purr into a long bay towards a distant ferry slip. Along the shore are clearings with scattered houses and barns, giving way to tangles of willows and cedars at the tide lines. Near the ferry dock is a marina in sad repair: crumbling outbuildings and cabins.
But my attention is diverted to an energetic woman doing the rounds with what appears to be a petition. Circling me warily like a hawk, she catches my eye and finally descends. “You're the new owner of the Ashcroft place.” A brisk, matter-of-fact voice, though
not wanting in music. “I'm Margaret Blake. I live up the road from you”
Though she looks older than the current version of Annabelle, she is probably much younger; she does not appear to have had a facelift. Obviously she spends much time outdoors, as her skin is biscuit brown from the sun. Although stern of aspect she is rather comely, lithe, and lean with close-cropped nut-brown hair and wide-set, piercing eyes, the colour of smooth-rubbed silver. She is attired in country clothes, denim jacket, jeans, sturdy boots.
She gestures below to a half-ton truck laden with bales of hay. “I have a working farm.” Do I hear a note of defiance in her voice, a challenge of some kind?
“Arthur Beauchamp.” I extend my hand. Hers is dry and strong and sinewy, crescents of grime beneath the fingernails.
She extends the petition. “I don't suppose you'd care to sign this.”
“A pessimist makes a poor salesman. And why would I not sign it?” I observe it calls for a moratorium on a housing development known as Evergreen Estates.