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 might somehow become invisible, and not reappear until the end of the meal. What torture!
In the grand living room, before moving to the table, Mr. Egan, a glass of whisky in his hand, had introduced me to Reverend Barnewall of the Anglican Church, a fat, soft man with a turkey neck. I’d been invited to sit, then promptly forgotten. Impossible not to think of Françoise working in the kitchen. Françoise was my neighbour whom my mother loved dearly. She was always singing her praises. To me, no one could be as boring! Always cackling, or prattling on tediously, speaking of marriage and the house she dreamed of having, how fantastic her choux pastry was, how she was the youngest cook to be hired in Métis Beach. With all the excitement of being invited to such a meal, I hadn’t even considered how awkward it would be to see her appear and begin serving the meal, “Does monsieur want his roast beef well done? Would monsieur desire more potatoes?” I imitated the others and answered her coolly, not looking at her in the eye. She was furious, and hadn’t tried to hide it. This is my place here, not yours. Don’t play at being the pretentious little boy, understand?
She was sixteen, and I was still fifteen. Sometimes her eyes seemed to fill with what I thought was warm concern when she looked at me. Her conversation made strange detours, like when she insisted on how glad she would be to own a business with her future husband, “a business just like the one your mother has.”
It was indeed in the order of things that one day I would take over my mother’s clothing store, now that I wouldn’t be returning to the Rimouski Seminary.
At the table, I wondered whether Robert Egan was replaying the scene of his rescue in his head, the way I was. It had happened the previous Tuesday. Louis and I had been walking on the beach, when we’d seen him suddenly sink into the waters of the St. Lawrence, where he’d been swimming. I threw myself into the water and dragged him out. All I could grab was one of his legs — all covered in hair, I remembered — before hooking my arms under his. I pulled him to the surface. When we
