A Fairly Good Time Read online

  Again, love, who’s to account for it?

  —PETER ORNER

  A FAIRLY GOOD TIME

  “There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.”

  —EDITH WHARTON, The Last Asset

  TO DOYLE

  1

  Montreal, May 26th, 1963

  DEAREST GIRL:

  The sadly macerated and decomposed specimen you sent me for identification is without doubt Endymion nutans or Endymion nonscriptus, or Scilla nutans or non-scriptus. Also called wood hyacinth, wood bell, wild hyacinth.

  It is, in short, the common European bluebell.

  In French it is called Scille Penchée, Jacinthe-des-Bois, Petite Jacinthe, Jacinthe sauvage. I am wondering why you couldn’t have pried this much information out of Philippe, though I know the French know nothing whatever about Nature and do their best to turn gardens into parlors. It was your father’s opinion that they do not distinguish between trees and statues, and are completely taken aback every Spring to see all these statues putting out leaves. I know that they have only one word for currants and gooseberries, and as for birds!

  In German, it is Hasenblaustern, also Englische Hyacinthe. In Flemish, though this won’t be useful to you unless you get married for a third time, and this time to a Belgian heaven forbid, it is Bosch Hyacinth!!!

  Your father always thought Bosch Hyacinth very funny, it completely fitted in with his sense of humor which it was not given to everyone to grasp. He picked up the phrase when he was an M.O. in the last war (and please do not write back asking “Which war?” because you know perfectly well the war I mean). Your father thought less than nothing of the Flemish. The other lot of Belgians were “given over to being entirely French-minded” but on the whole a cut above. It is surprising to remember he was in uniform, considering the age he was at that time.

  Of course you had never seen Endymion non-scriptus in Canada! I am assuming this is what your nine-page letter was about. I could not decipher what seemed to me to be an early Teutonic alphabet. Neither of your marriages ever improved your writing. You may retort that legibility is not the purpose of marriage. I am not sure it has any purpose at all. Your father and I often discussed this. We felt that marriage would have been more tolerable had we been more alike—for example, had both of us been men. But no Church or Govt that I know would approve. The idea has been interestingly taken up in “. . . And Again the Cosmos” by B. P. Danzer. A disgusting photograph ornaments the dust jacket. “Courts fail to prove obscenity” was, you may remember, the upshot of a long case involving the jacket (not the book). I am one of the few persons to have read the book all the way through. I recommend it. You can remove the jacket, or turn it back to front.

  Endymion non-scriptus does not occur wild over here. Nor does any similar plant. A competent authority will bear me out but when I say competent I mean that, and not just some Pole. It has a southern cousin, Endymion hispanica or Scilla campanulata, which is larger and stronger but has NO SCENT. It grows wild in Spain, Portugal, possibly southwest France. Don’t know about Morocco. You could look it up, or ask Philippe. They hybridize when planted in gardens. The true wild bluebell always has a delicious SCENT. It also occurs white, and sometimes pink. It loves woods. It almost never grows in the open.

  The Campanulata—synonym for the Spanish form—is merely descriptive and means “like a Campanula.” But it is in fact NO RELATION. It is of the Lily family, of which, of course, the lily-of-the-valley (Convallaria) is too! I finally had a letter from Cat Castle. She has an unfavorable impression of Europe. Some young man has made “a bad translation” of a movie in Rome. Some person she met mentioned this to her. Some conductor she heard about in London was “disgracefully bad.” She hears that none of our embassy people “can spell.” She herself saw two films about Eskimo fisheries whilst in Titograd that were “a shame on the country.” Our image is hopelessly blackened in Montenegro, “perhaps forever.”

  Hope all this is not so, as her trip is costing her children a lot of money.

  Your bluebell is found wild only in the British Isles and Northern France and in Northern Belgium. Holland? Look it up. When your father was over there he saw woods full in South Belgium.

  I can see you from here making a long face at all these old memories and at any reminder of the War. Well, nothing can alter the memory I have of the gloriously sunny day when Canada rallied to the Mother Country. I held you on my lap, near the radio, so you could hear the news, and even though you were not three years of age, I was sure your inner mind would retain the impact. I was, am, and always shall be a pacifist, but that War was different. It came along when a lot of people were down and out, especially out West, and it saved countless others from futility and boredom. Your father said that if he had been younger it would have changed his outlook. I exclude it from colonial wars, crusades, wars for gain, and wars fought out of nervousness. The men in particular enjoyed it, and many of them felt it ended all too soon.

  In England, on our wedding trip, your father and I picked blue-bells one morning and tied them to our bicycles. But they died within the hour.

  You did not say where you had found your specimen, but as it seldom grows in the open—I should say never that I know of, though there will always be some Pole ready to quibble—I take it you must have found it in beech woods. Next time you send a specimen press it between two sheets of clean paper and please don’t forget the leaf.

  I hope my letter tells all you need to know. I counted a dozen question marks and took them to indicate anxious queries re Endymion non-scriptus. As far as I can remember, you never asked me a question about anything until now, not even the innocent questions children usually put about their origins—whether they are truly the children of their parents or have been adopted; whether they are not really of noble or aristocratic descent and have been brought into this dreadful family by mistake, as part of the process of reincarnation; and so on. You never once asked why time exists, and when time began, and if it is necessary. Or, if the Creator is only an Idea, then in Whose mind did the Idea originate? I could have answered any of these questions easily.

  Your letter was stained and blotted. The envelope was unlined, and the paper a dirty tone of gray, where it had not turned slime-green because of the rotting stem. The pages did not fit neatly in the envelope. The writing was a model of cacography and I think that unless you learn patience and penmanship you had best forget your manners and use the machine, as I am doing now. I want to know if you have or have not seen Cat Castle in Paris. Please answer this. She ought to be there this week some time. Make an effort. She has known you since before you were born. Do not encourage her to have streptomycin shots. Daughter Phyllis says they “enervate Mum.”

  The North American bluebell is botanically Mertensia. No relation to Endymion. Don’t cry whilst writing letters. The person receiving the letter is apt to take it as a reproach. Undefined misery is no use to anyone. Be clear, or, better still, be silent. If you must tell the world about your personal affairs, give examples. Don’t just sob in the pillow hoping someone will overhear.

  Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room,

  And hermits are contented with their cells . . .

  I made you learn this by heart, but you never had much of a memory.

  I was able to make out the odd phrase here and there. Of course I don’t “understand” you. Have I ever invited anyone to “understand” me? You can’t “understand” anyone without interfering with that person’s privacy. I hope you are not forever after poor Philippe and torturing and prying to get at his inmost thoughts. The more a man has to conceal the more he is likely to proclaim himself “a very private person” and you had best settle for whatever knowledge of him this affords you. You always had a key to your room, the first diary I ever
gave you had a key, and I never bothered you. To think that when you were on the way I believed you were a tumour! But you were you—oh, very much so.

  Your affectionate

  Mother

  P.S. Re flowers, wedding trip, bicycles mentioned above—that was the year of the death of George the Fifth, who was notoriously stingy, mean, a stranger to culture, and hard on his children, but who otherwise resembled my own father in every way.

  2

  THE BUILDING across the courtyard must have been removed by someone playing with bricks, for the light of morning, which had been suppressed until now, blazed through a gap in the bedroom curtains, shot along a wall, set on fire a mirror framed in snapshots, notes, post-cards, out-of-date reminders to and from Philippe, and revealed a small scarlet translucent spider hanging on a rope of the stoutest silk. A milder luminosity—of imagination this time—surrounded two middle-aged persons cycling steadily up an English hill. In homage to morning and to the splendor of new beginnings they carried an offering of blue, but the blue was perishable. It turned to indigo. The petals rotted. The flower fragrance altered and resembled the scent of the aging lovers, of soap and of death. The cyclists were dressed like each other in Fair Isle sweaters and breeches. The woman’s hair, reddish in sunlight, fine and silky to the touch (although scarcely anyone knew that), was short as the man’s. That had been in the year of the funeral of George the Fifth. Who was he? He was crown, beard and profile on twenty-five Canadian cents—at one time, Shirley’s allowance. Once she found George the Fifth on a beach and brushed the sand away, saying, “What can I buy with this? Can I keep it?”

  “You can’t buy what you could have bought ten years ago,” was her father’s answer, as though Shirley knew what “ten years ago” meant.

  Her parents, a lost pair, cycled off into the dark. They became smaller than a small living spider. What she required this morning was not a reminder of the past but a harmless substitute for it. When Philippe came in he would address her with a breezy cordiality that was, at its worst, his way of showing indifference: “Well—where have you been? Where did you spend the night? Did you sleep at Renata’s?” Or he would cross the room and pull the curtains open as if Shirley did not exist, which would mean that in his heart he wished she had never existed. Anticipation of a vague calamity drove her to invent, “Look, I know this is quite the worst thing I have ever done . . .” No. Wait. Facts were essential: they were the ground, the basis for flight. This was the morning of Whitsunday, the second of June. She sat in the bedroom with a letter in her hand, still dressed for a Saturday party in black chiffon that some ill-intentioned woman friend had urged her to buy. Over the dress was a Burberry with a button gone and a long thread dangling. A handbag, green velvet, a present from her husband’s sister, lay on the counterpane spilling cigarettes. Wrenching it open just now to hunt for her glasses she had broken the clasp. The house was perfectly quiet, as though the other tenants, Philippe included, were all away attending the same funeral. A summing up, or a preliminary? It seemed to her at once military and lame, precise and hobbling: for where was Philippe? No use accusing me, she said, with the kind of nonchalance she could assume in his absence. Where did you spend the night? A light left burning, a scorched brown stain on the lamp-shade, meant that he had either dressed and departed before dawn (an assignment? a summons from his mother?) or had never been to bed at all.

  The room was neat, the bathroom looked as if no one had ever used it, but none of that signified: rushing, say, to his dying mother’s side Philippe would have stopped to cover his tracks. The immediate past was eliminated; it had something to do with picking up one object, one feeling, one idea, at a time and finding another place for it. If a place does not exist then you must invent one. Before her marriage Shirley had never bothered to make a bed: Why make what you were bound to unmake in a few hours? She had worn the same clothes until her women friends decreed them unwearable, and then she simply gave them away. Clean sheets, towels and pillow cases were piled on a chair in the living room and the used linen thrown in a convenient recess between the end of the bathtub and the wall. When one hillock became greater than the other she would pack all the dirty clothes in a large suitcase and have herself driven by taxi to a laundry on the far side of Paris. Her experience of Parisian taxi drivers had taught her to dread rudeness or a sharp refusal, both of which were eliminated by the promise of a long and costly journey. She could not understand why this system, which worked successfully and required only an occasional effort, seemed irrational to Philippe. At any rate he had put a stop to it. Now a boy trundling a sort of trunk on wheels came to fetch the washing every Saturday morning and brought it back torn, worn, stiff as the kitchen table and reeking of chloride bleach. Every face cloth and potholder had to be counted, examined and checked against a list. She was never prepared, never on time, never had the right inventory or the change needed for tipping; and the clean linen, corseted in hard brown paper, held with murderous pins, had to be undone, sorted, placed on shelves she could barely reach only to be taken down again; a repetition of gestures that seemed to her lunatic but that Philippe assured her were almost the evidence of life.

  Be sensible, she said to herself. One step at a time, like unwrapping the laundry. Ring his office—no, for God’s sake, don’t. He’d never forgive it. No switchboard on Sundays, I’d hit one of his friends, and later it would be said . . . he probably did explain where he would be, and I must have forgotten. He has left a note. Look for it. No, that isn’t it—the blue envelope is from our neighbor James Chichalides, whom Philippe hates. It probably contains an invitation to a party, which is the last thing either one of us needs just now. Look on the pad beside the telephone, in the frame of the hall mirror (Renata’s wedding present), on the blackboard in the kitchen. Look on his desk in the box-room—look in the desk. If he catches you just say, I was only . . . After you find the note telling you whose funeral he’s at run a bath and change. Get out of your Saturday clothes. Put them away so he won’t see them and be reminded. Don’t leave your dress on the floor—he will walk on it on purpose. The kitchen: There’s a question needing an answer. He must have eaten his breakfast standing up—you can’t sit on either of the chairs. Since when have I left dirty plates on chairs? Since yesterday. Bundles of newspapers the Salvation Army was supposed to call for. Bread, a cup half empty, a carton of powdered milk. He hates that but I forget to get the other. A salad bowl and two yellowed slivers of chicory pasted to a wooden fork—an ugly bit of evidence about my housekeeping; but I was comfortable in chaos, and he knew it, whereas that unwashed cup left by Philippe seems like a moral slip.

  •

  A windowless recess off the living room, probably once intended to be a child’s sleeping quarters, had become Philippe’s office. They had named it the box-room because the term, a hangover from English novels about little boys growing up and going to Cambridge, sounded comic to Shirley; and Philippe, who was grave mostly, unconscious of the origins of all that she could hate and yet think laughable, accepted it as one more of the Anglo-Saxon mysteries. Accepted only, which was not what she had intended; for it was like saying “We are sharing an apple because I have cut it in half.” When visitors looked in the box-room Philippe said, “This is my desk and my wife works at that one,” without explaining even to Shirley what her work was or ever could be. Between the two desks shelves climbed to the ceiling. A pair of neon strips hummed, flickered and spread their bilious light on stacks of Le Miroir, the fortnightly review that employed him, on coffee mugs filled with pens and pencils, over twin typewriters tucked up in plastic blankets made by Philippe’s mother, upon a temperance poster Shirley had stolen out of the Métro. The poster was a dead weight in the room; it sagged like a laboriously translated anecdote impeding a dinner party. For what was so humorous about a fragile child and his plea of FATHER DO NOT DRINK! THINK OF ME! when you considered that France had the highest number of alcoholics in western Europe and the greatest number of
deaths resulting from drink? Philippe had written a series of three articles on infantile drunkenness in Normandy called “The Children of Calvados: A Silent Cry,” the first of which began, “It was a silent cry torn from the heart, rending the heavens, searing the universe, and ignored by the middle-classes,” before going on to say what took place when a baby’s formula was half applejack, half watered milk.

  “Would you tell me what is humorous about cirrhosis, diabetes, congenital heart disease and feeble-mindedness?” he had asked, unrolling the poster.

  “Funny? Nothing. I don’t know.”

  “Then why are you laughing?”

  “I’m not laughing. Am I? I’m sorry, I’ll throw it out.”

  “No, leave it. I don’t mind. How did you remove it from the Métro?”

  “With Renata’s nail file. We were together.”

  “You were drunk?”

  “Philippe! No. It was in the middle of the afternoon.”

  “Did none of the passengers try and stop you?”

  “They pretended not to see. We were very serious and Renata gave me serious instructions in French. It was terribly f . . . I was going to say funny.”

  “Two women of voting age,” said Philippe.