at the discovery that the world held anything but kindness and love for her.
Grant remembered thinking more than once, while watching that scene, that Lee was destined for a few more shocks in her life.
The decision to move to the Gatineau Hills of Quebec shortly after Grant and Carol were married had been easy. House prices were about a third less than on the Ontario side of the Ottawa River and the spectacularly rugged mountain terrain entranced them both; but it was the house, from the moment they saw it, that convinced them this was where they wanted to live.
Built originally as a large and ornate summer cottage, bits and pieces had been tacked on over the years, until now it sprawled and rambled so much neighbours began calling it Chateau Henri as a local joke.
That first winter they almost froze to death, the oil furnace and huge fireplace no match for the arctic winds which whistled merrily through the walls and floor. Residents of the tiny nearby village of Poisson Blanc were obviously more than a little amused at the crazy Anglais who dared spend a Gatineau winter in a summer cottage, chateau or not.
A local wit suggested to his buddies one day that his wife was so upset with him over a weekend drunk, she had become frois comme le Chateau Henri, as cold as the Chateau Henry. And so was born a bit of local folklore.
Separatism was not an issue most Canadians gave much thought to when Grant and Carol first moved to Quebec.
For Grant, the first inkling of what lay ahead occurred one evening in that bastion of the ruling Westmount class at the time, the Ritz Café, on the lower floor of Montreal’s Ritz Carlton Hotel. They were there to celebrate the launch of his talk show in Ottawa.
As was the custom at the Ritz, seating was in concentric circles, according to power and wealth. The richest and most powerful were carefully placed in the booths circling the outer edges of the dining room. Everyone else was pretty well relegated to the centre of the room. “Just a little,” Grant told Carol as they were seated, “like the good old days, when all we sinners had to sit in the back rows of my grandfather’s church, except here at the Ritz it’s not the back rows for those of us not among the chosen few, it’s the middle of the room!”
The evening was about half over when the tempo of the Café suddenly changed; a quickening of its pulse, a subtle shift to a higher gear. Voices switched from English to French, a decibel louder, then up another notch. Waiters, almost torpid with servitude and acquiescence, began bustling with excitement and purpose. All eyes, including those which otherwise would have been focused on the outer circle to detect the slightest arched eyebrow, or raised finger, snapped to the front entrance where a beautiful ash blonde woman, dressed entirely in black leather, swept in. Amazingly, she was virtually ignored. The excitement was generated, not by her, but by the little wizened bantam rooster of a guy, hair carelessly thrown over to one side, stained fingers clutching a cigarette, strutting cockily behind her.
René Levesque, recently elected leader of the separatist Parti Quebecois, was greeted and escorted across the room with great ceremony by the headwaiter, then immediately surrounded by a small bubbling army of waiters and bus boys at the table furthest from the centre.
Thick black clouds of hostility, precursors of the gathering storm, drifted up from the English power booths of the outer circle.
The reaction in the dining room was so fascinating, Grant discussed it the following Monday on his show, and issued what was probably English Canada’s first warning of what lay smouldering on the horizon. Most of the diners were Anglophone, the majority old Montreal money from upper Westmount, with a sparkling of the nouveau riche here and there, also English speaking. The waiters and bus boys were all working class French Canadians.
“What you have to remember,” Grant told his listeners, “is that for every English speaking Quebecker, there are about eight whose mother tongue is French.” And judging from what he had seen, there was absolutely no question of where French Canada stood concerning René Levesque and the Parti Quebecois!
The P.Q. victory at the polls less than a year later, which shocked most Canadians, and scared the hell out of English speaking residents of the province, came as no surprise to Grant. Unlike thousands of other Quebec Anglos who fled Quebec, frightened or frustrated, or both, the Henry’s decided to stay. At no time did they feel anything but total acceptance by their neighbours, the majority of whom were Francophone.
Grant was surprised to learn how much common experience he shared with the hard-working farmers who scraped a bare existence from the thin, mean soil of the Gatineau Hills. Growing up poor in Ontario in English he decided was pretty much like growing up poor in Quebec in French. One day, not long before his thirty-first birthday, he found himself rolling around in the dirt, flailing away at an Irish tough who’d been heckling a couple of the younger members of his Poisson Blanc softball team.
“Hey,” whined the tough, through bloodied lips, “you’re English, what in hell ya doin’ cuddlin’ wit da frogs?”
Grant belted him again, having learned very early in life that when something important had to be done he’d best get on with it himself.
But as the years progressed, Grant became more and more disenchanted with what he was seeing and hearing. The election of the Bloc Quebecois to official opposition status in the House of Commons several years ago disturbed him deeply but he had no intention of leaving. Quebec was his home.
The decision to stay became extremely difficult for him during the divorce two years ago. It was Lee, actually, who made up Grant’s mind for him. He was helping her feed her chickens one evening not long after the final split with Carol, when his daughter very solemnly announced that since they wouldn’t be able to live together as a family anymore, she had decided she wanted to live with him here in the “chateau”, where she could keep her friends and her chickens.
Afraid she might try legal action to remove Lee, Grant had not told Carol about the telephone threats which had begun about three months ago. Not until he found one of Lee’s chickens nailed to the garage door with a note scrawled in English saying, “fuck off Anglais,” had he even bothered to tell Jake.
“I have no idea who’s doing this,” he told a very concerned Jake, “but it’s really starting to worry me. These days you really don’t know what’s happening. From what I understand, half the Quebec police force has turned separatist and I don’t imagine they’re exactly too crazy about me, with what I’ve had to say about their speed traps for Anglos.”
Jake had made no bones about what he thought of it.
“Lay off the Quebec stuff for awhile,” he warned Grant. “Some of the kooks out there today will shoot you for a dollar, let alone an insult. And you’re right about the Quebec coppers. They hate your guts.”
But, with only the slightest twinge of worry, Grant continued with a series of broadcasts exposing discriminatory practices against the English-speaking minority in Quebec by government officials and the Quebec bureaucracy. Most of the recent information came from an anonymous source who obviously had access to government files. The material, which had begun arriving about six weeks before, was well researched and documented, always arriving by mail postmarked Quebec City. Thus far the information had been accurate.
Two days ago he had received a tape recording apparently from the same source. It was accompanied by a scrawled note that claimed it had been recorded during a meeting of the Quebec cabinet the previous day. If it was authentic, and Grant would soon know, the recording provided him with his best ammunition yet. It was a piece of dynamite, which, if made public, would cause tremendous embarrassment
