Duet. Carol Shields

right after that happened, he took down his sign. Just took it away one day. And it’s never been seen since.’

      ‘He’d never own up to it now,’ I said.

      ‘When I think of that sign and the way he stealthily disposed of it, another notch of sophistication – I don’t know. That just seems to be Furlong Eberhardt in a nutshell. That one act, as far as I’m concerned, encapsulates his whole personality.’

      Meredith leapt from the sofa, startling us both. ‘I think you’re both being horrible. Just horrible. So middle-class, so smug. Sitting here. It’s character assassination, that’s what. And you’re enjoying it.’ She flew from the room with her breath coming out in jagged gasps.

      For a moment Martin and I froze. Then he very slowly picked up the newspaper from the floor, reached for the sports page, and gave me a brief but hurting glance. ‘I don’t understand her sometimes,’ was all he said.

      It was then that I noticed Richard sitting quietly in a corner of the room, unobtrusive in his neat maroon sweater. He was watching us closely.

      ‘What are you doing, Richard?’ I asked.

      ‘Nothing,’ he said.

      

      Frantically, neurotically, harried and beleaguered, I am addressing Christmas cards. Richard, home with a cold, sits at the dining table with me; he is checking addresses, licking stamps, stacking envelopes in their individual white pillars; the overseas stack that will now have to be sent expensively by airmail, the unsealed ones with nothing but a rude ‘Judith and Martin Gill’ scrawled inside them, the letters to old friends where I’ve crammed a year’s outline into two or three inches – ‘A good year for us, Martin busy teaching, the children are getting ENORMOUS, am working on a new book, not much news, wish you were closer, happy holidays.’ And Martin’s stack, the envelopes which Richard and I will leave unsealed so that tonight, after he gets home from the university, he can sit down and quickly, offhandedly write the funny, intense little messages he is so good at.

      The afternoon wears on, and outside the window snow is falling and falling. Since noon we have had the overhead light on. Richard in striped pajamas looks pale.

      This is a long, tedious task, and it irritates me to separate and put in order the constellations of our friends and to send them each these feeble scratched messages. But for the sake of the return, for the crash of creamy envelopes blazing with seals that will soon spill down upon us, I push on. For I want to hear from the O’Malleys who lived across the hall from us in our first apartment. I want to know if the Gorkys are still together and where the best man at our wedding, Kurt Weisman, has moved. Dr Lawrence who supervised Martin’s graduate work and his wife Bettina always write us from Florida and so do the Grahams, the Lords, the Reillys, the Jensens. What matter that they were often dull and that we might have drifted apart eventually? What matter that they were sometimes stingy or overly frank or forgetful? They want to wish us a merry Christmas. They want to wish us all the best in the New Year. I can’t help but take the printed card literally; these are our friends; they love us. We love them.

      Richard is studying the airmail stamp which goes on the letters to Britain. It is a special issue with a portrait of the Queen, an enormous stamp, the largest we have ever seen. The image is handsome and the background is filled in with pale gold. On the comers of the tiny Rustcraft envelopes, all I could find at this late date, it gleams like a gem.

      I write a brief note to the Spaldings, a spray of ritual phrases. ‘We often remember the wonderful year we spent in Birmingham. The children have such happy memories. Hope your family is well and that you are having a mild winter, best wishes from the Gills.’

      Richard seals it and affixes the great golden stamp. ‘He’s writing a book,’ he says.

      ‘Who?’ I ask absently.

      ‘Mr Spalding. He’s writing a novel.’ Richard seldom mentions the Spaldings, but when he does, it is abruptly, as though the words lay perpetually spring-loaded on the tip of his tongue.

      ‘I suppose Anita wrote you about it?’ I say inanely.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘And is it going well? The novel?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘But she says that sometimes he stays up all night typing.’

      ‘Well, I wish him luck,’ I say, thinking of his row of rejected manuscripts.

      Richard makes no reply, and after a minute I ask him, ‘What’s it about? The novel Anita’s father is writing?’

      ‘How should I know?’ he says, suddenly querulous.

      I snap back. ‘I only asked.’

      But I really would like to know what John Spalding is writing about. Maybe he’s incorporating some new material from the year in Cyprus. Or perhaps reworking one of his old plots. He might even have resurrected his one good one.

      I think of him typing through the night in the chilly, gas-smelling flat while the frowsy Isabel snores in a distant bedroom. I imagine his small frame, tense, gnatlike, concentrating on the impossible mass of a novel, and for a moment I see him as almost touchingly valiant.

      Then guilt attacks me; a pain familiar by now, a spurt of heat between my eyes, damn.

      

      The Magic Rocking Horse was the name of the novel I wrote the year we came back from England. I intended, and for a while even believed, that the title would convey a subtle, layered irony – a childlike innocence underlying a theme of enormous worldliness.

      But the novel never materialized on either level. Instead it simply stretched and strained along, scene after scene pitiably stitched together and collapsing in the end for want of flesh. For, unlike biography, where a profusion of material makes it possible and even necessary to be selective, novel writing requires a complex mesh of details which has to be spun out of simple air. No running to the public library for facts, no sleuthing through bibliographies, no borrowing from the neat manila folders at the Archives. That year the most obvious fact about fiction struck me afresh: it all had to be made up.

      And where to begin? For two or three months I did nothing at all but think about how to begin. Dialogue or description? Or a cold plunge into action? Once or twice I actually produced a page or two, but later, reading over what I had written, I found the essential silliness of make-believe disturbing, and I began to wonder whether I really wanted to write a novel at all.

      I discussed it with everyone I knew and got very little support. Roger and Ruthie told me, flatteringly, that it was a waste of my biographical skills. Nancy Krantz, sipping coffee, pursed her lips and pronounced, in a way which was not exactly condemning but almost, that she seldom read novels. Martin said little, but it was obvious that he viewed the whole project as somewhat dilettantish, and the children thought it might be a good idea if I wrote something along the line of Agatha Christie but transferred to a Canadian setting.

      Furlong Eberhardt was the only one who volunteered a halfway friendly ear, and when he suggested one day that I might want to sit in on his creative writing seminar, it seemed like a good idea; a chance to sit down with a circle of other struggling fiction writers, sympathetic listeners upon whom I might test my material and who, in turn, might provide wanted stimulation or, as Furlong put it, might ‘prime the old pump.’

      Looking back, I believe the idea of again being a student appealed to me too. I bought a notebook and a clutch of yellow pencils, and each Wednesday afternoon I dressed carefully for the class which met in an airless little room at the top of the Arts Building; my fawn slacks or my bronze corduroy skirt, a turtleneck, something youthful but never going too far, for what was the point of being grotesque for the sake often undergraduates ranging from eighteen-year-old Arleen whose black paintbrush hair fell to her hips, all the way to Ludwig, aged about twenty-four, horribly pimpled, who stared at me with hatred because I was married (and to a professor at that), because I lived in a house, because I was a friend of Furlong’s, and possibly because my fingernails were clean.