Ann had rolled her eyes, like every time she heard her mother bad-mouth her father’s wife. Then Laureen turned towards me, suspicious. “Did you know her intimately, Dana Feldman? You seem a bit young.…”
Embarrassed, I’d turned red to the ears.
Yes, Dana and I had our secrets.
8
It was almost noon by the time I woke up from a dreamless sleep, only to be greeted by a terrible headache. It was impossible to make out my surroundings in the thick darkness. My hand searched for the flashlight I’d turned off before falling asleep on the living room couch. The embers were still warm in the hearth, but not enough to heat the room. Shivering, my hands and feet icy, I got up, groggy, unsure of my step, goddamn this headache. I was about to put on my coat and go out to warm up in the Jeep when, suddenly, I heard pounding on the door and a furious man’s voice shouting, “Who’s in there?” Even before reaching the vestibule, I heard the door open and slam against the wall. I stopped cold.
“Hey!” I shouted, “Who’s there?” No answer. Indistinct grumbling and heavy breathing. “Who is it?” I repeated, my heart racing. Then a powerful white light began dancing along the walls, moving closer, before pointing straight in my face.
“Romain? What are you doing here?”
“Fluke? Harry Fluke? Is that you?”
We faced each other, both of us surprised. Watching each other like two boxers on opposite sides of the ring. An old man, his mouth permanently twisted with scorn, curved like a bishop’s staff. God, he was old! In one of his hands, a baseball bat, in the other his flashlight.
“For God’s sake, get that light out of my eyes!”
He obeyed, trembling, wobbly on his legs. He murmured something about a wave of thefts in the past few weeks.
That bastard Fluke, still sticking his nose everywhere. Like that time when I was a kid and he accosted me on Beach Street, his head poking out of his Plymouth’s window, a derisive smile on his face, “Where are you going, like that?” Of course, Fluke knew. The books under my shirt weren’t particularly subtle. But he never told my parents.
Seeing him now, I couldn’t help myself, “This is my house. Please get out now!”
But Fluke didn’t move. His eyes scanned the living room, as if he was looking for something, something forgotten.
“You came back to vote, right? To vote yes in the referendum?”
“I told you to get out!”
“All the same, you Separanazis!”
“Out!”
Fluke grimaced, then smiled, as if there was an old joke between us. “Or what,” he jeered. “Or you’ll call the police? Don’t you think they’d be happy to pull up an old file?”
Seeing the rage in my eyes, he changed his tone, “Fine, fine. Okay. I’m going.”
He turned around, wobbled towards the open door. An old beat-up Lincoln waited for him, with a bumper sticker on its back, proclaiming, “WE’RE RIGHT TO SAY NO.”
Get lost, Fluke.
A grey November sky, opaque. I’d been gone from L.A. for two days, and I was thinking about Ann worrying herself sick over me.
My head felt like it was splitting open, and there was no Aspirin in the bathroom. Before shuttering the house for winter, Tommy emptied it of anything that might not tolerate changes in temperature or might be destroyed by rodents, like bedding and towels. He kept all of it at his home in Pointe-Leggatt. He also emptied the kitchen cupboards, taking the sugar, salt, spices, condiments — not even leaving the shadow of a jar of instant coffee. Tommy took care of the house well. Perhaps I didn’t pay him enough. I promised myself I’d look into it; I was lucky to have him.
I needed a cup of coffee and some food. I splashed water on my face and walked out into Métis Beach’s foggy cold, before deciding that with the welcome I’d received from that idiot Fluke, the anonymity of a snackbar in Mont-Joli would be preferable. I’d come back later to inspect the place.
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” old Leo said in The Go-Between, that magnificent film based on the L.P. Hartley novel.
Warming up in the Jeep parked on Beach Street, I watched the Egans’ home in the pale light of autumn, a grand cedar-shingled mansion, three stories high, with six bedrooms and a tennis court. I felt like Leo, his memory fading, working to remember the summer of his thirteenth year spent at a classmate’s family manor. Called upon to be the messenger between a young lady and a simple farmer, witness to a clandestine and tragic love story, he would be marked for the rest of his days.
Yes, the past is a foreign country.
The Egans’ home had lost some of its splendour, with its boarded-up windows, its shingles blackened by the elements, and the driveway and tennis court needing serious work.
I saw myself thirty-five years earlier on that doorstep, perfectly terrorized, a bouquet of carnations in my hands — flowers I hated, but my mother had insisted, “You can’t go empty-handed, Romain! You should be grateful to be invited!” I was in my Sunday best like a ridiculous choir boy, hair slicked back, parted on the side. My mother had driven me there in our Chevrolet, and before I got out, she flattened a rebellious lock of hair using two fingers wet with saliva. “You’ll be polite, eh? Don’t forget — it’s an honour.”
In the half-moon gravel driveway, Mr. Egan’s Bentley, Mrs. Egan’s Alfa Romeo, and another car, more ordinary, a white Studebaker I’d never seen — it would end up being Reverend Barnewall’s, a man I would meet for the first time that evening.
I had received an invitation for supper at the Egans; I, Romain Carrier, son of a carpenter and handyman for the very same Egan home. I was so terrified I’d vomited my breakfast, though I hadn’t told my mother.
Gail flashed a nervous smile when she opened the door, followed immediately by a puppy, shaking with excitement, appearing out of nowhere and jumping on me. “No, Locki, no!” His paws on my clean pants, a moist nose between my legs. Gail, embarrassed, looked up and told me, “He’s a Labrador. A great swimmer. My father bought him to take care of us. Just in case there was ever another accident.”
That was the only reference to her father’s misadventure, without which I would never have been invited there.
“He saved Robert’s life,” Mrs. Egan, still in shock, had told my mother. “Without your courageous boy — an angel, Mrs. Carrier, a guardian angel — Robert would no longer be with us, you understand? He’d no longer be here.…”
My mother hung up the phone, turned towards me, her tone accusatory, “Is that true? And you didn’t even tell me?”
July 1960, a Saturday evening, the night Robert Egan humiliated me.
“How about that, Reverend Barnewall? John Winthrop introduced the fork to America more than three hundred years ago. Looks like they still haven’t learned to use it correctly.”
Of course, the comment was directed at me. Snide, hurtful words, whose only intention could be to injure. It had been said in French, too, so that there could be no confusion. Red with shame, I put down my fork on the tablecloth, staining it with brown sauce. I had learned how to hold a fork from my father. You held it like you grabbed a handful of sand. I saw Mrs. Egan and Gail wince, as if not knowing which was worse — the stain on the white tablecloth or Robert Egan’s cruelty. No one had spoken over the course of the meal except for Robert Egan and Ralph Barnewall. They talked about how to fund the Métis Beach church, and golf, and cars, and I don’t know what else — two satisfied men not actually listening to one another.
I sat stiff-backed on my chair, my appetite gone. I was praying I