or pure white. As a matter of
fact all of us are tattletale grey.
— Gordon Lightfoot
It is not in the storm nor in the strife
We feel benumb’d, and wish to be no more,
But in the after-silence on the shore,
When all is lost, except a little life.
— Lord Byron
CHAPTER ONE
While Walter Fowler waited for the taxi driver to place his bags on the sidewalk, he stared at the house across the May-green grass of its narrow lawn. It was a detached three-storey brick building, its Victorian gingerbread gone from its wooden porch, but its age and former social position still apparent in its stringy lace curtains, old-fashioned looking on a street that had long ago embraced the genteel drape. The large front window on the lower floor held a geometrically centred geranium, a bedroom flower moved by the exigencies of time and social change to what had once been a middle-class family’s parlour.
The house was like its neighbours, a tall austere old family dwelling, probably with steep staircases for skivvies to climb. It was a house that had grown too big for the families of the present, and too private in its shouldered intimacy with those beside it for the modern suburbanite. With a few eccentric exceptions all the houses on Adford Road and nearby streets had become the living quarters of semi-transient roomers, whose familial connections were as ephemeral as their connections one with the other.
The houses were now the habitations of bachelors, aging spinsters, working married couples, and men and women of indeterminate age who had a once-married look about them. Together, these tenants formed that amorphous group of urban dwellers which might be termed the lumpen middle class.
Adford Road, north of the university and south of the industrial fringe that bordered the crosstown railroad line, was a tree-ordered segment of the past, largely ignored by the boundary-bursting city. It was a social way station, devoid of nostalgia for those who had lived in it on their way up, and without sentiment for those who tried to remain on it on their way down.
As he prepared to pay the driver, Walter glanced above the roof of the porch to the twin second-floor windows, framed in a mascara of blackened paint. A woman’s face peered down from one of them, a handsome middle-aged face topped with tight straight black hair. Its stare was haughty yet softened into womanliness by its show of female curiosity. A fraction of a second before their eyes met, the face was withdrawn, and he idly completed his casual inspection of the house. From a cramped attic window beneath the peak of the acutely slanting roof a wide-eyed child gazed down at him. The child looked out of place in the house and on the street.
After the taxi had gone, Walter shifted his topcoat from one arm to the other, picked up his bags, and made his way up to the porch. He twisted the useless bell-ring until he was convinced it did not work. Then he knocked on the door beneath its stained-glass window.
He heard an inside door open and close, and knew he was being inspected by somebody standing in the vestibule. The door was finally opened by a woman between fifty and sixty, her short broad figure hidden beneath a nondescript dress over which she had thrown an unbuttoned cardigan. Her face was puffed and shapeless but well complexioned, set off by a twin set of badly fitting false teeth. Her grey-brown hair was loose and held in position by several careless hairpins that threatened to fall out with every movement of her head. She fixed him with a pair of cold suspicious blue eyes.
“I’m Walter Fowler,” he said. “The one who phoned about the room this afternoon.”
“Sure,” she replied, making no move to invite him in.
She looked him over carefully, satisfying herself that he was what he had claimed to be over the phone. He was fatter than she had pictured him, but younger, maybe forty-five. He looked like an early riser but not much of a water user. If he was a late arriver it would be caused by liquor rather than women. He still had most of his hair, and good white teeth which he didn’t try to show off by smiling. As a matter of fact he hadn’t smiled at all yet, which was a good sign.
While she had been looking him over he had been thinking how typical she looked. A neighbourhood drab who had switched her hatred of men from a departed spouse to the male roomers who had drifted into her trap. A sign hanger and raucous caller of names from the downstairs hallway. A landlady whose sex life was probably secondhand, whose tastes were vulgar, and whose aim in life was to fight to the death to protect her personal status quo.
“Come in,” she said, backing away from the doorway, while protecting herself from any untoward move on his part with the open door. Her voice was shrill even when modulated, with the shrillness of inferiority and insecurity.
He picked up his bags and entered the house, smelling for the first time in twelve years the pervasive odour of all rooming houses — the smell of age, dusty carpets, and vaguely food-scented air. Despite the smell the house was remarkably clean, the polished floor gleaming like glass.
“Upstairs,” she said as she shut the vestibule door behind her. He felt his way along the darkened floor to the flight of equally darkened stairs, trying not to scuff his heavy bags along the wall. As he climbed the stairs he heard her following him, and before he reached the top he could hear her presence, marked by the uneven noisy expulsions of her laboured breath.
On the landing he stepped aside and she led the way to a bedroom at the rear of the hall. In passing he looked through the open door of a bathroom, clean but with a claw-footed enamel-chipped bath and wood-enclosed wash basin.
He followed the landlady into the shiningly clean bedroom, giving a cursory glance at the cheap, fairly new bed and dresser. As he lowered his suitcases to the floor the woman walked over to the side of the bed and with a quick little jump sat on its edge, bouncing up and down to demonstrate its springiness. This almost girlish caper on her part astonished him, transforming her in a moment from a dour rooming-house chatelaine to an overweight and over-age sprite. There is lots of life in the old girl yet, he thought, unable to suppress a smile.
“The bed’s good,” she said. “I only bought last winter, when Mr. Cartwright had the room.”
He knew by the respectful way she mentioned the man’s name that he was expected to ask about him. “Mr. Cartwright?” he asked.
“Yes. He was with me for fourteen years, since 1945. He passed on in February. He was my longest roomer.”
Walter wasn’t overjoyed at the prospect of taking over a dead man’s bed, and she noticed the frown of distaste that passed over his face and the quick glance he gave to his unpacked bags.
“He passed away in the hospital,” she said hurriedly. “Heart trouble. It could happen to anybody.” Jumping up quickly from the bed as if to illustrate her exception to the mass prognosis, she stepped across the floor and flung open a closet door. “There’s plenty of room here for your clothes,” she said. “Mr. Cartwright used the closet for a kitchenette” — turning to give him a smile — “but of course I don’t allow kitchen privileges to anybody in the house but my regular apartment tenants.”
Aware that he had been shown his place in the house’s pecking order, Walter asked with suitable awe, “Apartment tenants, did you say?”
“Yes. There’s the Laramées upstairs — two small children but you never hear them; their apartment doesn’t reach this far back.
