Duet. Carol Shields

been making a few notes, and today I’m going to sit down and see what I can do.’

      ‘Good luck,’ was all he said, which disappointed me, for he had been interested in my biographies and, in a subdued way, proud of my successes.

      Notes for Novel

      

      Tweedy man on bus, no change, leaps off

      

      beautiful girl at concert, husband observes her legs, keeps dropping program

      

      children in park, sailboat, mother yells (warbles) ‘Damn you David. You’re getting your knees dirty.’

      

      letter to editor about how to carry cello case in a mini-car. Reply from bass player

      

      West Indians queue for mail. Fat white woman (rollers) cigarette in mouth says, ‘what they need is ticket home.’

      

      story in paper about woman who has baby and doesn’t know she’s preg. Husband comes home from work to find himself a father. Dramatize.

      

      leader of labour party dies tragically, scramble for power. wife publishes memoirs.

      

      hotel bath. each person rationed to one inch of hot water. Hilarious landlady.

      

      Lord renounces title so he can run for House of Commons, boyhood dream and all that.

      My random jottings made no sense to me at all. When I wrote them down I must have felt something; I must have thought there was yeast there, but whatever it was that had struck me at the time had faded away. There was no centre, no point to begin from.

      I paced up and down in the flat thinking. A theme? A starting point? A central character or situation? I looked around the room and saw John Spalding’s notebooks. That was the day I took them down and began to read them; my novel was abandoned.

      After that I was too dispirited to do any writing at all. I spent the spring shopping and visiting art galleries and teashops and waiting for the end to come. I counted the days and it finally came. We packed our things, sold the Austin, gave the school uniforms away and, just as summer was getting big as a ball, we returned home.

      

      Martin is better. Still on medication, but looking something like his real self. Today he went back to the university, and the house is quiet. For some reason I open his desk drawer, the one where the wool is.

      It’s gone. Nothing there but the wood slats of the drawer bottom and a paper clip or two. I look in the other drawers. Nothing.

      I hadn’t thought much about the wool while it was still there. I’d wondered about it, of course, but it was easy to forget, to push to the back of my thoughts. But now it has gone.

      It has come and gone. I have been offered no explanations. Was it real, I wonder.

      My hands feel cold and my heart pounds. I am afraid of something and don’t know what it is.

       December

      The first snow has come, lush and feather-falling.

      As a child I hated the snow, thinking it was both cruel and everlasting, but that was the hurting enemy snow of Scarborough that got down our necks, soaked through our mittens, fell into our boots and rubbed raw, red rings around our legs. It is one of the good surprises of life to find that snow can be so lovely.

      Nancy Krantz and I skied all one day, and afterwards, driving home in her little Volkswagen with our skis forked gaily on its round back, we talked about childhood.

      ‘The worst part for me,’ Nancy said, ‘was thinking all the time that I was crazy.’

      ‘You? Crazy?’

      ‘It wasn’t until I hit university that I heard the expression déjà vu for the first time. I had always thought I was the only being in the universe who had experienced anything as eerie as that. Imagine, discovering at twenty that it is a universal phenomenon, all spelled out and recognized. And normal. What a cheat! Why hadn’t someone told me about it? Taken me aside and said, look, don’t you ever feel all this has happened before?’

      ‘Hadn’t you ever mentioned it to anyone?’

      ‘What? And have them know I was crazy. Never.’

      ‘You surprise me, Nancy,’ I said. ’I would have thought you were very open as a child.’

      ‘Not on your life. I was a regular clam,’ she said, shifting gears at a hill. ‘And scared of my own shadow. Especially at night. At one point I actually thought my mother, my dear, gentle, plump, little mother with her fox furs and little felt hats was trying to put poison in my food. Imagine! Well, thank God for second-year psychology, even though it was ten years too late. Because that’s normal too, a child’s fear that his parents will murder him. And if they didn’t, someone else would. Hitler maybe. Or some terrible maniac hiding out in my clothes cupboard. Or lying under my bed with a bayonet. Right through the mattress. Oh God. It was so terrible. And so real. I could almost feel the cold, steely tip coming through the sheet. But I never told anyone. Never.’

      ‘I wonder if children are that stoic today? Not to tell anyone their worse fears.’

      ‘Mine are pretty brave. I can’t tell if they’re bluffing or not, though. Weren’t you ever afraid like that, Judith?’

      ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘I was a real coward. But it’s funny looking back. Do you know what it was that frightened me most about childhood?’

      ‘What?’

      ‘That it would never end.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘I was frightened, but it wasn’t so much the shadows in the cupboard that scared me. It was the terrible, terrible suffocating sameness of it all. It’s true. I remember lying in bed trembling, but what I heard was the awful and relentless monotony. The furnace switching off and on in the basement. Amos and Andy. Or the kettle steaming in the kitchen. Even the sound of my parents turning the pages of the newspaper in the living room while we were supposed to be going to sleep. My mother’s little cough, so genteel. The flush of the toilet through the wall before they went to bed. And other things. The way my mother always hung the pillowcases on the clothesline with the open end up, leaving just a little gap so the air could blow inside them. With a clothes peg in her mouth when she did it, always the same. It frightened me.’

      ‘I always thought there was something to be said for stability in childhood.’

      ‘I suppose there is,’ I agreed. ‘But I always hoped, or rather I think I actually knew, that there was another world out there and that someday I would walk away and live in it. But the long, long childhood nearly unhinged me. Take the floor tiles in our kitchen at home. I can tell you exactly the pattern of our floor in Scarborough, and it was a complicated pattern too. Blue squares with a yellow fleck, alternating in diagonal stair-steps with yellow squares with brown flecks. And I can tell you exactly the type of flowers on my bedspread when I was six and exactly what my dotted swiss curtains looked like when I was twelve. And the royal blue velvet tiebacks. It was so vivid, so present. That’s what I was afraid of. All those details. And their claim on me.’

      ‘And when you finally did get away from it into the other life, Judith – was it all you thought it would be?’ She was driving carefully, concentrating on the road which was getting slippery under the new snow.

      I tried to shape an answer, a real answer, but I couldn’t. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said with a hint of dismissal. ‘The trouble is that when you’re a child you can sense something beyond the details. Or at