Monday, 21 July 2014

Thirteen Crucifixions 20

I still don't have anything nice to say so I'm not saying anything at all.  Here is the latest from my novel:


The cocoa steamed seductively into Pamela’s nostrils as she poured the near-boiling mixture into a large white mug.  Sarah no longer did this for her, but then, Sarah now only worked for her two days a week, as did Monica.  Theresa alone remained full-time, but even she no longer lived in the house.  Lawrence, in the last decade before his stroke, had become extremely parsimonious.  Pamela had never understood why.  They hadn’t lost money, they remained fabulously wealthy.  Still, he insisted on cutting costs.  In the twilight, she sat in the breakfast room, reading the paper beneath the green Tiffany table lamp.  The epsom salt bath had done her a world of good.  She had been quite a mess from crab walking through the underbrush down that steep hill.  She looked at the three bright red scratches on her left forearm.  On the front page of the newspaper was a huge picture of the Prince and Princess of Wales cutting the ribbon for Expo.  She was pretty, the young princess, very pretty.  But gaunt.  She would have liked to have met her.  Her husband she had already been introduced to a number of times.  Not exactly charming she found him to be, but such was the case with those Windsors.  She had no interest in attending Expo.  She didn’t even want to read about it.  She was shocked by the extreme to which she had already repudiated her husband.  He had been on the planning committee. Before his stroke he lived and breathed Expo.  He was eighty when he began participating in the planning sessions.  It had rejuvenated him.  He looked and felt twenty years younger.  For the first time in—years?—he wanted sex again, and Pamela couldn’t rise to the occasion.  She suspected that he’d taken a mistress.  Suddenly, within six months, he could not get out of bed.  Then his cancer was diagnosed, then a second stroke put him in a wheelchair, and Pamela had faithfully stood by.  She had offered and participated in the best care possible.  She was free from him now.

            Just when she turned to Ann Landers, Martha came into the breakfast room.  She hadn’t heard her come in.  “How long have you been in?” she asked.

            “I just got here.  You didn’t hear me?”

            “This is a big house.”

            “When are you getting an alarm installed.”

            “One day, I suppose.”

            “You never know who might come walking in.”

            “It could even be my daughter. Oh mercy!”

            She sat next to her mother.  “Anyone home?”

            “Not as far as I know.”

            “What did you do to your arm.”

            “I was having an adventure this evening.”  She would be forty, already?  Her daughter still was beautiful.  She had inherited the best of her father’s good looks.  “And how was your adventure?”

            “It wasn’t really.”

            “He wasn’t quite what you expected?”

            “He’s a man.  Are they ever?”

            Pamela knew better than to answer, and she and Martha both knew what her reply would be.  Still, she didn’t want to further erode the fragile tranquility she had acquired since her bath.

            “Well, I think I’m going to have a nice hot bath.”  She was getting up.  Just when she was almost out of the room she paused and said, “By the way, did you read any of it?”

            “Ten pages.”

            “And.”

            “Please, Martha, might we leave it till the morning?”

            “What time?”

            “Ten?”

            “Meet me in the solarium.”

 

            She didn’t realize she’d been sitting in the dark, neither for how long.  Had she been dozing?  She didn’t recall turning off the lamp.  Perhaps the bulb had burnt-out while she was asleep in the chair. Hadn’t a fresh bulb just been installed?  She had no way of knowing. Pamela couldn’t remember when last she’d changed a light bulb, having long had servants to do this for her.  She flicked the switch and the lamp came on in its stain glass green and gold luminosity.  This had been a wedding gift, by whom she had long forgotten.  She heard the sounds of snacks being obtained in the kitchen nearby.  In walked Stephen, shoveling chocolate cake and ice cream into his mouth.  He sat down across from her. 

            “I’m not disturbing you?” His words were muffled through a mouthful of food.  He had become deferential of late, almost well mannered.

            “No.  No, Stephen.  I’m just going up to bed in a minute.”

            “You’re not usually up this late.”

            “What time is it?”

            “One.”

            “Goodness.  I have been sleeping.”

            He contemplatively continued shoveling cake and ice cream into his mouth.  “If I knew you were here I’d’ve offered you some.”

            “Oh, heavens, not this late at night, but thank you.  That is very kind of you.  I say, where are the other two?”

            “Pierre and Matthew?  I dunno.  They might be upstairs.”

            “Did you come in together?” She couldn’t suppress the alarm in her voice.”

            “Yeah, about an hour ago.”

            “Where were you.”

            “Benjamin’s.”

            “Where is that?”

            “Granville and Davie.”

            “You took my grandson THERE.”

            “Get over it Mummy.  It isn’t a bar.”

            “What kind of establishment?”

            “Café.  It’s open twenty-four hours.  They just opened around Christmas.”

            “What kind of café?”

            “A funky café.  I should take you there sometime.”

            “I apologize for sounding suspicious.  Martha, you know.”

            “She doesn’t like having a fag for a brother, I see.”

            “I’m sure there’s more to it than that.”

            “Well, she wants us to go.  Well, maybe we should.”

            “It is up to you, Stephen.  You know I’m not forcing you to stay here.”

            “Good luck trying to force me to do anything.”

            “But as far as I’m concerned you are more than welcome to stay.”

            “Well, it isn’t that you need the rent, I’m sure.”

            She glared at him like a cobra ready to strike.

            “I know, it was Martha’s idea.  What would we do without your daughter to scapegoat?  You don’t have to dignify that with an answer, you know.”

            “You could both at least try.”

            “I try.  All the time.  I can’t make her like me.”

            “All right, all right.”

            “She thinks that Pierre and I are out to corrupt her precious son.  Fact of the matter is, her darling Matthew beat us to it a long time ago.”

            “You don’t mean—“

            “From me you needn’t worry, Pamela.  Your lovechild does not do incest.  Now as for Pierre, well, you might keep an eye on him.

            “Couldn’t you?”

            “I’m not going to watch over him twenty-four hours a day.  And even if I could I still wouldn’t want to try.  Our relationship is based on trust, and we are not the possessive types, Senor Valdez and I.”

            “Well, in any event, I’m sure that I wouldn’t want to know.”

            “So what did you do this evening?”

            “I got lost inside the holly maze.”

            “You actually went in there?”

            “For the first time, ever.”

            “How long have you had this house?”

            “The thing always repelled me.  That and that, that hideous monstrosity of a fountain.  Now that Lawrence is gone I’m going to see if I can have it removed.”

            “I like that fountain.  It’s so old world.”

            “Which is precisely where it belongs.”  She yawned and feebly tried to cover her mouth.  Oh, dear, I must get up to bed.  Are they both in?”

            “Yes they are.”

            “Upstairs?”

            “Last time I saw them.”

            “What have they gotten up to, I wonder.”

            “I promise not to tell you if I find out.”

            “Good night, Stephen”, she said getting up from the table.”

            “Good night Pamela.  Hey, could you do me a favour, please?

            “Yes, dear?”

            “Wake me before nine if Pierre hasn’t already.  I have a job interview tomorrow.”

 

            She lay in the dark, unable to sleep.  Pamela knew that she should have gone up to bed sooner, instead of dozing at the table like that.  She couldn’t help it.  And this was happening too often, ever since her husband’s death.  Either she could not sleep, or she was doing nothing but.  What had come to her as a surprise was the lack of emotion following her husband’s death.  She supposed this to be only natural, given how prepared she had been during the length of his illness.  She was, perhaps, glad that he was gone?  She didn’t want to think of this.  But she knew that she was glad.  Pamela had long resented the marriage, and her lack of resolve to get out.  She had everything and more, more than enough of everything.  Her life with Lawrence had been carefully scripted, ever since their courtship in England, even after she’d first seen him basking naked like a sea lion on the rocks at Cornwall.  The war hadn’t yet begun.  Hitler’s army’s had already overrun Czechoslovakia, just after the appeasement from Anthony Eden.  All of Europe was expecting war.  A boy she liked who lived up the lane from her family’s cottage had just been blown to bits by Franco’s Falangists in Spain.  Some people thought that the end of the world would be just around the corner.  Pamela was fifteen, and somewhat precociously developed.  She had the body, and the bearing of an elegant young woman, though she was a greengrocer’s daughter.  They had rented a cottage near the seaside, by the cliffs, and Pamela and her sister had been in the habit of climbing down to the rocky beach in the mornings. She lived now in Chiswick, Pamela’s sister, long-divorced with hungry young artists eating out of her hand.  They still wrote nearly every week, having long survived the vicious competition of their teenage years.  Nora was less than two years older.  In Cornwall, they had been quarreling over one of the local boys, whom Nora had gone off with by herself, leaving Pamela alone for the morning.  Assuming that the boy was really quite nasty underneath, like so many of the locals, with nasty breath and probably pimples all over his backside, she tried to forget them both.  She scrambled down the rough stone path to the beach.  As always it seemed deserted, though for once she wasn’t really sure.  There he lay, at the distance of less than half a rugby field.  She couldn’t tell at first that he was naked.  A handsome thoroughly tanned and fair-haired man in this thirties, he raised his head briefly to acknowledge Pamela, while neither lifting his leg, nor positioning his hand, nor making any other effort to cover himself.  She had never seen male genitalia before.  Stupidly she stood there gawking, when she suddenly realized the inappropriateness, the sheer ridiculousness of the situation.  Pamela turned and ran up the hill, where she fell down panting for breath in a tussock of grass.  Two days later, she saw in the local pub her father sharing a pint with the same man, now fully clothed.  Back at home he began paying courtesy calls, in the pretense of subscribing her father’s grocery services for keeping his larder provided.  The Newtonbrook-Jones account became quite the windfall for Pamela’s father, who soon was sending her to one of the best girl’s schools in Switzerland.  The war came, and Lawrence soon declared, not to Pamela but to her father her hand in marriage.  Everything happened most appropriately with every nicety of circumspection and propriety being fully and faithfully observed.  At St. Paul’s Cathedral, while the German Luftwaffe rained the fuhrer’s wrath down upon London Pamela, barely nineteen and still every bit a virgin was married off to one of the wealthiest men in England.  In 1944 they immigrated to Canada.

           

 

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