The war went on and on, a relentless motor. It wore people down-the constant, dreary tension. It was like listening to someone grinding his teeth, in the dusk before dawn, while you lie sleepless night after night after night.
There were some benefits to be had, however. Mr. Murgatroyd left us, to join the army. It was then I learned to drive. I took over one of the cars, the Bentley I think it was, and Richard had it registered to me-that gave us more gasoline. (Gasoline was rationed, of course, though less so for people like Richard.) It also gave me more freedom, although it was not a freedom that had much use for me any more.
I caught a cold, which turned to bronchitis-everyone had a cold that winter. It took me months to get rid of it. I spent a lot of time in bed, feeling sad. I coughed and coughed. I no longer went to the newsreels-the speeches, the battles, the bombings and the devastation, the victories, even the invasions. Stirring times, or so we were told, but I'd lost interest.
The end of the war approached. It got nearer and nearer. Then it occurred. I remembered the silence after the last war had ended, and then the ringing of the bells. It had been November, then, with ice on the puddles, and now it was spring. There were parades. There were proclamations. Trumpets were blown.
It wasn't so easy, though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.
Diana Sweets
Today I walked as far as the Jubilee Bridge, then along to the doughnut shop, where I ate almost a third of an orange cruller. A great wodge of flour and fat, spreading out through my arteries like silt.
Then I went off to the washroom. Someone was in the middle cubicle, so I waited, avoiding the mirror. Age thins your skin; you can see the veins, the tendons. Also it thickens you. It's hard to get back to what you were before, when you were skinless.
At last the door opened and a girl came out-a darkish girl, in sullen clothing, her eyes ringed with soot. She gave a little shriek, then a laugh. "Sorry," she said, "I didn't see you there, you creeped me out." Her accent was foreign, but she belonged here: she was of the nationality of the young. It's I who am the stranger now.
The newest message was in gold marker: You can't get to Heaven without Jesus. Already the annotators had been at work: Jesus had been crossed out, and Death written above it, in black.
And below that, in green: Heaven is in a grain of sand. Blake.
And below that, in orange: Heaven is on the Planet Xenor. Laura Chase.
Another misquote.
The war ended officially in the first week of May-the war in Europe, that is. Which was the only part of it that would have concerned Laura.
A week later she telephoned. She placed the call in the morning, an hour after breakfast, when she must have known Richard would not be at home. I didn't recognise her voice, I'd given up expecting her. I thought at first that she was the woman from my dressmaker's.
"It's me," she said.
"Where are you?" I said carefully. You must recall that she was by this time an unknown quantity to me -perhaps of questionable stability.
"I'm here," she said. "In the city." She wouldn't tell me where she was staying, but she named a street corner where I could pick her up, later that afternoon. In that case we could have tea, I said. Diana Sweets was where I intended to take her. It was safe, it was secluded, it catered mostly to women; they knew me there. I said I would bring my car.
"Oh, do you have a car now?"
"More or less." I described it.
"It sounds like quite a chariot," she said lightly.
Laura was standing on the corner of King and Spadina, right where she said she'd be. It wasn't the most savoury district, but she didn't seem perturbed by that. I honked, and she waved and then came over and climbed in. I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. Immediately I felt treacherous.
"I can't believe you're really here," I said to her.
"But here I am."
I was close to tears all of a sudden; she seemed unconcerned. Her cheek had been very cool, though. Cool and thin.
"I hope you didn't mention anything to Richard, though," she said. "About me being here. Or Winifred," she added, "because it's the same thing."
"I wouldn't do that," I said. She said nothing.
Because I was driving, I could not look at her directly. For that I had to wait until I'd parked the car, then until we'd walked to Diana Sweets, and then until we were seated across from each other. At last I could see all of her, full on.
She was and was not the Laura I remembered. Older, of course-we both were-but more than that. She was neatly, even austerely dressed, in a dull-blue shirtwaist dress with a pleated bodice and small buttons down the front; her hair was pulled back into a severe chignon. She appeared shrunken, fallen in on herself, leached of colour, but at the same time translucent-as if little spikes of light were being nailed out through her skin from the inside, as if thorns of light were shooting out from her in a prickly haze, like a thistle held up to the sun. It's a hard effect to describe. (Nor should you set much store by it: my eyes were already warping, I already needed glasses, though I didn't yet know it. The fuzzy light around Laura may have been simply an optical flaw.)
We ordered. She wanted coffee rather than tea. It would be bad coffee, I warned her-you couldn't get good coffee in a place like this, because of the war. But she said, "I'm used to bad coffee."
There was a silence. I hardly knew where to begin. I wasn't yet ready to ask her what she was doing back in Toronto. Where had she been all this time? I asked. What had she been doing?
"I was in Avilion, at first," she said.
"But it was all closed up!" It had been, all through the war. We hadn't been back for years. "How did you get in?"
"Oh, you know," she said. "We could always get in when we wanted to."
I remembered the coal chute, the dubious lock on one of the cellar doors. But that had been repaired, long ago. "Did you break a window?"
"I didn't have to. Reenie kept a key," she said. "But don't tell."
"The furnace can't have been on. There couldn't have been any heat," I said.
"There wasn't," she said. "But there were a lot of mice."
Our coffee arrived. It tasted of burned toast crumbs and roasted chicory, not surprising since that's what they put into it. "Do you want some cake or something?" I said. "It's not bad cake here." She was so thin, I felt she could use some cake.
"No, thanks."
"Then what did you do?"
"Then I turned twenty-one, so I had a little money, from Father. So I went to Halifax."
" Halifax? Why Halifax?"
"It was where the ships came in."
I didn't pursue this. There was a reason behind it, there always was with Laura; it was a reason I shied away from hearing. "But what were youdoing?"
"This and that," she said. "I made myself useful." Which was all she would say on that score. I supposed it would have been a soup kitchen of some kind, or the equivalent. Cleaning toilets in a hospital, that sort of thing. "Didn't you get my letters? From Bella Vista? Reenie said you didn't."
"No," I said. "I never got any letters."
"I expect they stole them. And they wouldn't let you call, or come to see me?"
"They said it would be bad for you."
She laughed a little. "It would have been bad foryou," she said. "You really shouldn't stay there, in that house. You shouldn't stay withhim. He's very evil."
"I know you've always felt that, but what else can I do?" I said. "He'd never give me a divorce. And I don't have any money."
"That's no excuse."
"Maybe not for you. You've got your trust fund, from Father, but I have no such thing. And what about Aimee?"
"You could take her with you."