Duet. Carol Shields
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to write back, although I reminded him once or twice. He hates writing letters, and was busy with other things; I did not press him.
But one dark chilly Sunday afternoon he asked me for some paper, and for an hour he sat at the kitchen table scratching away, asking me once whether there was an ‘e’ in homesick; his or hers, we never knew, for he didn’t offer to show us what he’d written. He sealed it shyly, and the next day took it to the post office and sent it on its way to Cyprus.
Anita’s reply was almost instantaneous. ‘It’s from her,’ he explained, showing us the envelope. ‘From that Cyprus girl.’ That evening he asked for more paper.
Once a week, sometimes twice, a thick letter with the little grey Cyprus stamp shot through our mail slot. At least as often Richard wrote back, walking to the post office next to MacFisheries at the end of our road in time for the evening pickup.
We never did meet the Spaldings. We left England a month before they returned. We thought Richard would be heartbroken that he would not see Anita, but he seemed not to care much, and I had the idea that the correspondence might drop off when he got home to Canada. But their letters came and went as frequently as ever and seemed to grow even thicker. Postage mounted up, draining off Richard’s pocket money, so they switched occasionally to air-letters. Always when Richard opens them, he smiles secretly to himself.
‘What on earth do you write about?’ I asked him.
‘Just the same stuff everyone writes in letters,’ he dodged.
‘You mean just news? Like what you’ve been doing in school?’
‘Sort of, yeah. Sometimes she sends cartoons from Punch. And I send her the best ones out of your old New Yorkers.’
I find it curious. I don’t write to my own sister in Vancouver more than four times a year. To my mother in Scarborough I write a dutiful weekly letter, but sometimes I have to sit for half an hour thinking up items to fill one page. Martin’s parents write weekly from Montreal, his mother using one side of the page, his father the other, but even they haven’t the stamina of these two mysterious children. Richard’s constancy in this correspondence seems oddly serious and out of proportion to childhood, causing me to wonder sometimes whether this little witch in England hasn’t got hold of a corner of his soul and somehow transformed it. He is bewitched. I can see it by the way he is sitting here in the kitchen folding her letter. He has read it twice and now he is folding it. Creasing its edges. With tenderness.
‘Well, how is Anita these days?’ My light voice again.
‘Fine.’ Noncommittal.
‘Has she ever sent a picture of herself?’
‘No,’ he says, and my heart leaps. She is ugly.
‘Why not?’ I ask foxily. ‘I thought pen-pals always exchanged pictures.’
‘We decided not to,’ he says morosely, wincing, or so I believe, at the word pen-pal. Then he adds, ‘It was an agreement we made. Not to send pictures.’
Of course. Their correspondence, I perceive, is a formalized structure, no snapshots, no gifts at Christmas, no postcards ever. Rules in acid, immovable, a pact bound on two sides, a covenant. I can’t resist one more question.
‘Does she still sign her letters “your obedient servant?”’
‘No,’ Richard says, and he sighs. The heaviness of that sound tells me that he sighs with love. My heart twists for him. I know the signs, or at least I used to. Absurd it may be, but I believe it; Richard is as deeply in love at twelve as many people are in a lifetime.
The house we live in – Martin, the children and I – is not really my house. That is, it is not the kind of house I once imagined I might be the mistress of. We live in the suburbs of a small city; our particular division is called Greenhills, and it is neither a town nor a community, not a neighbourhood, not even a postal zone. It is really nothing but the extension of a developer’s pencil, the place on the map where he planned to plunk down his clutch of houses and make his million. I suppose he had to call it something, and perhaps he thought Greenhills was catchy and good for sales; or perhaps, who knows, it evoked happy rural images inside his head.
We are reached in the usual way by a main arterial route which we leave and enter by numbered exits and entrances. Greenhills is the seventh exit from the city centre which means we are within a mile or two of open countryside, although it might just as well be ten.
Where we live there are no streets, only crescents, drives, circles and one self-conscious boulevard. It is leafy green and safe for children; our lawns stretch luscious as flesh to the streets; our shrubs and borders are watered.
As soon as the sewers were installed nine years ago, we moved in. The house itself has all the bone-cracking cliches of Sixties domestic architecture: there is a family room, a dining ell, a utility room, a master bedroom with bath en suite. A Spanish step-saving kitchen with pass-through, colonial door, attached garage, sliding patio window, split-level grace, spacious garden. The only item we lack is a set of Westminster chimes; the week we moved in, Martin disconnected the mechanism with a screw-driver and installed a doorknocker instead, proving what I have always known, that despite his socialism, he is 90 per cent an aristocrat.
It is a beige and uninteresting house. Curtains join rugs, rugs join furniture; nubby sofa sits between matching lamps on twin tables, direct from Eaton’s show room. Utilitarian at the comfort level, there is nothing unexpected. This is a shell to live in without thought.
And in a way it is deliberate, this minimal approach to decorating. My sister Charleen and I, now that we are safely grown up, agree on one thing, and that is that as children we were cruelly overburdened with interior decoration. The house in which we grew up in Scarborough – the old Scarborough that is, before television, before shopping centres, the Scarborough of neat and faintly rural streets – that tiny house was in a constant state of revitalization. All our young lives, or so it seemed, we dodged stepladders, stepped carefully around the wet paint, shared the lunch table with wallpaper samples. Our little living room broke out with staggered garlands one year, with French stripes the next, and our girlish bedroom at the back of the house was gutted almost annually. Shaking his head, our father used to say that the rooms would grow gradually smaller under their layers and layers of paint and paper. We would be pushed out on to the street one day, he predicted. It was his little joke, almost his only joke, but straining to recall his voice, do I now hear or imagine the desperate edge? Better Homes and Gardens was centred on our coffee table, cheerful with new storage ideas or instructions for gluing bold fabric to attic ceilings. The dining table was in the basement being refinished, or the chesterfield was being fitted for slipcovers. The pictures were changed with the seasons. ‘My house is my hobby,’ Mother used to say to the few visitors we ever had; and even as she spoke, her eyes turned inward, tuned to the next colour scheme, to the ultimate arrangement, just out of reach, beamed in from House and Garden, a world the rest of us never entered. Nor wished to.
Still we have put our mark on this place, Martin and I. The floor tiles rise periodically, reminding us they are now nine years old. The utility room is so filled with ski equipment that we call it the ski room. The dining ell has been partitioned off with a plywood planter which looks tacky and hellish, though we thought it a good idea at the time. Hosiery drips from the shower rail in the en suite bathroom. In the cool dry basement our first married furniture glooms around the furnace, its Lurex threads as luminous and accusing as the day we bought it; Richard’s electric train tunnels between the brass-tipped legs. The spacious garden is the same flat rectangle it always was except for a row of tomato plants and a band of marigolds by the fence.
The house that I once held half-shaped in my head was old, a nook-and-cranny house with turrets and lovely sensuous lips of gingerbread, a night-before-Christmas house, bought for a song and priceless on todays market. Hung with the work of Quebec weavers, an electic composition of Swedish and Canadiana. Tasteful but offhand. A study, beamed, for Martin and a workroom, sunny, for me. Studious corners where children might sit and sip their souls in pools of filtered light. A garden drunk with roses,