The commuters on the Montreal train never spoke much to each other. The mystifying and meaningless “Hot enough for you?” was about the extent of it. If I noticed one man more than the anonymous others it was only because he looked so hopelessly English, so unable or unwilling to concede to anything, even the climate. Once, walking a few steps behind him, I saw him turn into the drive of a stone house, one of the few old French-Canadian houses in that particular town. The choice of houses seemed to me peculiarly English too — though not, of course, what French Canadians call “English,” for that includes plain Canadians, Irish, Swedes, anything you like not natively French. I looked again at the house and at the straight back going along the drive. His wife was on her knees holding a pair of edging shears. He stopped to greet her. She glanced up and said something in a carrying British voice so wild and miserable, so resentful, so intensely disagreeable that it could not have been the tag end of a morning quarrel; no, it was the thunderclap of some new engagement. After a second he went on up the walk, and in another I was out of earshot. I was persuaded that he had seen me; I don’t know why. I also thought it must have been humiliating for him to have had a witness.
Which of us spoke first? It could not have been him and it most certainly could not have been me. There must have been a collision, for there we are, speaking, on a station platform. It is early morning, already hot. I see once again, without surprise, that he is not dressed for the climate.
He said he had often wondered what I was reading. I said I was reading “all the Russians.” He said I really ought to read Arthur Waley. I had never heard of Arthur Waley. Similar signalling takes place between galaxies rushing apart in the outer heavens. He said he would bring me a book by Arthur Waley the next day.
“Please don’t. I’m careless with books. Look at the shape this one’s in.” It was the truth. “All the Russians” were being published in a uniform edition with flag-red covers, on grayish paper, with microscopic print. The words were jammed together; you could not have put a pin between the lines. It was one of those cheap editions I think we were supposed to be sending the troops in order to cheer them up. Left in the grass beside a tennis court The Possessed now curved like a shell. A white streak ran down the middle of the shell. The rest of the cover had turned pink. That was nothing, he said. All I needed to do was dampen the cover with a sponge and put a weight on the book. The Wallet of Kai Lung had been to Ceylon with him and had survived. Whatever bait “Ceylon” may have been caught nothing. Army? Civil Service? I did not take it up. Anyway I thought I could guess.
“You’d better not bring a book for nothing. I don’t always take this train.”
He had probably noticed me every morning. The mixture of reserve and obstinacy that next crossed his face I see still. He smiled, oh, not too much: I’d have turned my back on a grin. He said, “I forgot to … Frank Cairns.”
“Muir. Linnet Muir.” Reluctantly.
The thing is, I knew all about him. He was, one, married and, two, too old. But there was also three: Frank Cairns was stamped, labelled, ticketed by his tie (club? regiment? school?); by his voice, manner, haircut, suit; by the impression he gave of being stranded in a jungle, waiting for a rescue party — from England, of course. He belonged to a species of British immigrant known as remittance men. Their obsolescence began on 3 September 1939 and by 8 May 1945 they were extinct. I knew about them from having had one in the family. Frank Cairns worked in a brokerage house — he told me later — but he probably did not need a job, at least not for a living. It must have been a way of ordering time, a flight from idleness, perhaps a means of getting out of the house.
The institution of the remittance man was British, its genesis a chemical structure of family pride, class insanity, and imperial holdings that seemed impervious to fission but in the end turned out to be more fragile than anyone thought. Like all superfluous and marginal persons, remittance men were characters in a plot. The plot began with a fixed scene, an immutable first chapter, which described a powerful father’s taking umbrage at his son’s misconduct and ordering him out of the country. The pound was then one to five dollars, and there were vast British territories everywhere you looked. Hordes of young men who had somehow offended their parents were shipped out, golden deportees, to Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Singapore. They were reluctant pioneers, totally lacking any sense of adventure or desire to see that particular world. An income — the remittance — was provided on a standing banker’s order, with one string attached: “Keep out of England.” For the second chapter the plot allowed a choice of six crimes as reasons for banishment: Conflict over the choice of a profession — the son wants to be a tap-dancer. Gambling and debts — he has been barred from Monte Carlo. Dud checks — “I won’t press a charge, sir, but see that the young rascal is kept out of harm’s way.” Marriage with a girl from the wrong walk of life — “Young man, you have made your bed!” Fathering an illegitimate child: “… and broken your mother’s heart.” Homosexuality, if discovered: too grave for even a lecture — it was a criminal offense.
This is the plot of the romance: this is what everyone repeated and what the remittance man believed of himself. Obviously, it is a load of codswallop. A man legally of age could marry the tattooed woman in a circus, be arrested for check-bouncing or for soliciting boys in Green Park, be obliged to recognize his by-blow and even to wed its mother, become a ponce or a professional wrestler, and still remain where he was born. All he needed to do was eschew the remittance and tell his papa to go to hell. Even at nineteen the plot was a story I wouldn’t buy. The truth came down to something just as dramatic but boring to telclass="underline" a classic struggle for dominance with two protagonists — strong father, pliant son. It was also a male battle. No son was ever sent into exile by his mother, and no one has ever heard of a remittance woman. Yet daughters got into scrapes nearly as often as their brothers. Having no idea what money was, they ran up debts easily. Sometimes, out of ignorance of another sort, they dared to dispose of their own virginity, thus wrecking their value on the marriage market and becoming family charges for life. Accoucheurs had to be bribed to perform abortions; or else the daughters were dispatched to Austria and Switzerland to have babies they would never hear of again. A daughter’s disgrace was long, expensive, and hard to conceal, yet no one dreamed of sending her thousands of miles away and forever: on the contrary, she became her father’s unpaid servant, social secretary, dog walker, companion, sick nurse. Holding on to a daughter, dismissing a son were relatively easy: it depended on having tamely delinquent children, or a thunderous personality no child would dare to challenge, and on the weapon of money — bait or weapon, as you like.