SIGNIFICANT THINGS
For Ian and Nancy
and
David, William, and Simon
SIGNIFICANT THINGS
a novel
HELEN MCLEAN
Copyright © Helen McLean, 2003
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
Editor: Barry Jowett
Copy-Editor: Jennifer Bergeron
Design: Jennifer Scott
Printer: Transcontinental
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
McLean, Helen
Significant things / Helen McLean.
ISBN 1-55002-441-8
I.Title.
PS8575.L393S54 2003 C813’.54 C2003-900347-7
PR9199.3.M42444S54 2003
1 2 3 4 5 07 06 05 04 03
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Inititative.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
Printed and bound in Canada.
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My sincere thanks to Cynthia Holz, wise friend and mentor, who has given so generously of her time to read many drafts of this book.
I am grateful for the unfailing support and encouragement of The Admiral Road Gang: Abby Pope, Louisa Varalta, Catherine Gildiner, Anne Koven, Barbara Bruce, and Colleen Mathieu.
My thanks as always to Ross.
1
Toronto, 1976
Edward glanced at the eighteenth-century Boulle clock on the mantelpiece and then checked its none-too-reliable time against his watch, just to be sure. Five-thirty, half past eleven in Italy. The restaurant tables would long since have been cleared away, the family would have finished the late dinner at the big table in the kitchen. Edward could almost smell the aromas that filled the air of that kitchen, just thinking about it. Paulo would be out in his studio among the cypresses, putting in an hour or two at his easel before he went up to the loft and stretched out on that big bed under the skylight. Edward hadn’t felt such a yearning to see and touch another human being since they’d sent him away to boarding school as a small boy and his loneliness for his mother had been a constant anguish, a sickness. He went into the hall and picked up the telephone, started to dial, put it down again. Not yet. He would prolong the anticipation of pleasure a little longer, do a last check around the place and then call and spring his surprise. Paulo was going to be over the moon.
His Burberry raincoat lay neatly folded over the back of the hall chair, ready to go. When had he put that there? Was there a pair of gloves in the pocket? Probably wouldn’t need gloves anyway; the weather would be mild, almost spring in London. He looked at his watch again. Half an hour before the airport limo would be here. His suitcase was packed and standing in the middle of the hall with his plane ticket and passport lying on top. He reached into his trouser pocket to make sure the little silver penknife was attached to his key ring; he wouldn’t step out the door without that, the plane might go down, God knows what would happen. He patted the breast pocket of his jacket — probably for the third or fourth time — to feel the reassuring bulge of his billfold stuffed with credit cards and twenty-pound notes. He’d already crossed off every detail on the list he’d made the day before. He knew he was dithering, but to hell with it, it didn’t matter as long as he didn’t end up at the customs desk slapping himself all over in blind panic and suddenly remembering he’d left his wallet on the dresser in his bedroom. Some remnant of the man he used to be sat in a corner of his mind watching these antics, arms folded across his chest, eyebrows raised in amusement. What had happened to the meticulous unflappable fellow who couldn’t have lost track of the time or forgotten his passport if he’d tried?
He began a tour of his second-storey living quarters in the tall, narrow house that was both his place of business and his home, making sure all the window latches were caught, checking the bolt on the door to the balcony off the kitchen. These rooms were becoming more and more of an obstacle course with all the furniture and objets d’art he’d managed to cram into them, to say nothing of the overflow of framed drawings and prints propped in stacks against door jambs and baseboards. He’d long since used up all the wall space; if he could have found a way to hang pictures on the ceiling he probably would have done it. He walked through the ever-narrowing channels between settees and armoires and breakfronts, tables and commodes, wondering wryly if the stuff was surreptitiously increasing and multiplying while he slept. Never mind, he was in the process of buying another house a few streets away, one built on simple Georgian lines some fifteen years before the turn of the century — old, by this city’s reckoning. The new place had large rooms and high ceilings and tall windows, French doors that opened onto a paved terrace and a walled garden at the back, even a small east-facing solarium where he and Paulo would eat breakfast on winter mornings.
When he moved into the new house the stock-in-trade of the gallery could spread itself all over this place — large paintings and sculpture downstairs, smaller ones and works on paper on the second floor, and he’d fit what had been a little makeshift attic studio for Paulo with racks and shelves for storage. Living upstairs over his business had been fine while he was getting the gallery underway, but his life had changed. It could be a year or more before Paulo would be able to leave his family for good; the transition might even be gradual, a few months back in Sicily, a few in Toronto. However long it took, Edward would be waiting.
Before Paulo came into his life all these possessions of his — the works of art, the antique furniture, the silver and crystal, the various small collections — had been everything to him, his world. He would have run into a burning building to rescue any of them — and maybe he still would — but he no