What the hell was going on? ‘They move diagonally, but the pacers move one side at a time—or is it the other way round? I couldn’t really see the difference, even when I knew. Anyway, it’s quite a sight when the lights go up and there they go.’
‘Did you bet on every race?’
‘Yes. Onree explained it to me . . .’
‘Onree?’
‘This Frenchman whose case I’m on. I picked out my own horses, though. I chose ones with names I liked, although the trouble was, half of them seemed to have similar names like Armbro or Hanover or something. Anyway, to make the story short, I won on seven races and picked up a hundred and twenty dollars. Onree lost fifty, betting on form. Ha, ha, ha. It was terrific. I would have won on eight but my horse stopped running properly—they had a name for what it did wrong.’
‘Broke stride.’
‘What?’
‘It’s called breaking stride.’
‘How do you know?’
‘They use the same term on the Island.’
Salter was dumbfounded. ‘You mean those races in Charlottetown are the same as these?’
‘That’s right, Charlie. The races we’ve been trying to get you to come to for the last fifteen years. The trots, we call them. Daddy used to own a standardbred—that’s what the horses are called. You have refused to have anything to do with them all this time and now some Montreal policeman comes to town and you come home to tell the world about this new thing you’ve discovered. Charlie, you are the bloody limit.’ She walked past him up to bed.
After a while Salter had found enough justification to stop feeling horrible. Surely no one had mentioned horses around the Montagu home for years? (Right, but only out of politeness to him.) Certainly no one had taken the trouble to explain the sport to him lately. (No, not in the face of his “I-don’t-want-to-know” attitude.) The truth was that harness-racing was only one, if the most outrageous, example of Salter’s attitude to the whole Montagu world when he was there. From the beginning, he had defended himself against feeling like the poor cousin by refusing to get involved in activities such as sailing, playing bridge, tennis, trout-fishing with flies, and constructing bonfires suitable for baking clams. Apart from the skills involved, he was sure he would get the costume wrong, and appear in sandals for some activity that required hiking boots or bare feet. So when he was on the Island he played golf, a game he had been introduced to by some police pals; he swam; and he watched the other activities from a distance, or ignored them altogether. Over the years his bloody-mindedness and their consideration for his feelings had created two worlds, one which involved him, and the other one which they talked about and enjoyed among themselves. It was an arrangement that suited him, preserved his independence, as he put it to himself, and he took the same attitude in Toronto to his wife’s interest in and understanding of art, horticulture, and science fiction. Salter came by his attitudes honestly enough; his father had tried no new foods, at home or in restaurants, for thirty years, on the grounds that it was all foreign muck and you couldn’t tell what you were eating. The truth was that the old man was afraid he would make a fool of himself by not knowing how to eat it.
Salter’s attitude had its dangers, and the chief one was just being demonstrated to him. He could never be sure, when he did entertain a new enthusiasm, that his wife hadn’t tried to interest him in it ten years before. Science fiction was forbidden to him because she had been recommending it for so long that he had no idea who were her favourite authors. He once knew that science fiction would bore him, and now that he was not so sure, it was too late.
But harness-racing. Jesus Christ! Gradually Salter recalled bits and pieces of things he had seen or heard and ignored over the years until he became fairly sure of the truth: that harness-racing was the major maritime pastime, and that the Montagus figured prominently in the sport. Oh shit, he thought. For another half an hour he swung between justification and guilt, until he went to bed in a mood of truculent misery.
CHAPTER 2
The following morning Salter phoned the chairman of the English Department at Douglas College and arranged for some interviews. He had often seen the college as he walked downtown from his office, and he had a vague impression of two or three converted warehouses, several shiny glass buildings, and a fountain. He established that the English Department was in one of the glass boxes, and set off from his office with plenty of time to walk. He wanted to have a look at the sleazy section of Yonge Street (his favourite stretch) to see what might be ‘cleaned up’ for the visiting Mayor of Amsterdam. What am I supposed to do, he wondered, as he viewed the morning sprinkling of bums, homeless adolescents and strained-looking gays who called this strip home. Should I get a couple of hundred off-duty cops to walk their wives up and down, like good Toronto burghers? What the hell does ‘clean up’ mean? It would be easy enough to avoid the issue and drive the Mayor round the Yorkville area where, he had read in the paper, Toronto’s beautiful people gathered to be looked at, but the Mayor had specifically asked to see Yonge Street because it was the only street he had heard of. Salter made a mental note to recommend that the Mayor be taken through at the lunch-hour when the street would be crowded with office workers.
The buildings of Douglas College appeared earlier than he had expected, now that he was looking for them, and Salter became aware that the College was much larger than he had thought. It was a quiet time of the academic year, between examinations and convocation, and there was only a handful of students about. The first three he asked had no idea where the English Department was, but finally he stopped one who directed him to the right building. Salter struggled through a pair of glass doors apparently designed to guard the entrance to a tomb, and found himself in the typical lobby of an academic building at the end of term. Every wall was covered with posters advertising last week’s concerts, lectures, dances and the monthly meetings of the Tae Kwon Do club. It looked like the day after the Boxing Day sale.
At one side of the lobby a security guard was talking to a small plastic box held up to his mouth. Salter had to wait for him to finish his chat, evidently with a colleague at another desk somewhere, about the need to make sure someone called Wong did his share of the work. ‘I said to Teperman last week, how come Wong’s always on days, and me and Eddie do nights? He said, Wong’s wife is up the spout, he said. He’s gotta stay home nights. I said, How do you know my old lady ain’t up the spout, too? Or Eddie’s. You know what he said? He said, You ain’t married, he said. I said, You don’t have to be married, not to get someone up the spout, I said. It’s all right to live common-law these days. He said, Are’ you? I said, No, but I could be couldn’t I? You never asked me, but you believe anything that fucking Wong tells you. He does, Eddie. Sure. Anything Wong wants, and there’s you and me left sucking the hind tit. You know?’ Listening to this, Salter wondered again at the thousands of security guards that had sprung up in Toronto in the last ten years. Was there a job for him in the business if he ever got totally fed up with errand work? Eventually the guard noticed him, and broke off from Eddie long enough to direct him to an elevator. He rode up to the fourth floor and stepped out into an empty corridor. More notice-boards, but this time most of the announcements were about literary events and plays that had taken place during the term. One small typed-notice advertised a ‘complete set of texts for English 022 for sale, never been opened’. Another huge poster, printed black on a grey background said, without explanation, ‘THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN CHANGED. IT IS NOW THE 28TH.’ Underneath, in pencil, someone had written, ‘Somehow, I still feel uneasy.’
Salter looked along the corridors which led away from the elevator at right-angles, one to the left and one straight ahead, wondering which route to take. Both looked as though they had been trashed
