The Silence on the Shore. Hugh Garner
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that things were over between him and Brenda he’d probably discover that the psychological block to casual lovemaking was broken too. Maybe it had only been his moralistic conscience after all.
CHAPTER FOUR
Late in May, Grace Hill placed an ad in the evening newspapers for the room next to Walter’s. It was a bad time of year to rent a furnished room in the neighbourhood, for the university students were on vacation and many transient workers were making their annual exit from the city to jobs in the summer resorts and out-of-town construction projects.
The first day the ad ran there were no applicants for the room, and on the second day there were only two phone calls and one personal application, an old man who found the rent too expensive. On the third day a girl in her late teens and a woman about thirty came to the house together, and asked to see the room.
“You mean you want to rent the room for both of you?” Grace asked the oldest one.
“Yes.”
“But it’s only a single room.”
“If it’s big enough we don’t mind paying more for it.”
Though Grace had no intention of renting them the room, she was reluctant to let them go without trying to ferret from them a hint about their relationship. “But there’s only one bed,” she said.
The girl, who had the mean pinched face of a slum adolescent, asked, “Is it a single?”
“Yes, it’s a single.”
The girl turned to her older companion and asked, “What do you say, Jackie?”
“I don’t know, Bunny.”
Both of them wore tartan slacks and light jackets over pullover sweaters. The oldest one had high heels but the youngest wore loafers. The youngest also had her hair cut short and parted like a man’s.
Grace, with a knowledge born of experience, knew they wouldn’t rent the room. She determined however to get the answers to several questions that were gnawing her.
“Are you related?” she asked.
“You could call it that,” the oldest one said.
“Sisters?”
Neither answered her.
“Cousins maybe?”
“Naw,” said the young one. “Come on, Jackie.”
The older one turned away from the door.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t help you out this time,” Grace said.
“It’s all right,” Bunny said.
As they started down the steps Grace closed the door and spied on them through the stained-glass window. They were talking together as they went down the walk. The youngest one said something funny and both laughed and clung to each other. They turned south when they reached the sidewalk and the younger one circled the other’s waist with her arm. Grace stared after them until they were out of sight, her feelings about them a mixture of distaste and erotic curiosity.
She heard a movement in the hallway behind her, and swung around to find Lightfoot emerging from his room. He had been sober now for a week, and he was dressed for the street.
She opened the door for him. “Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning, Grace.”
“I just had two girls looking at the empty room upstairs,” she said.
“I don’t want things like that living in the same house I do,” he said.
“They looked clean enough,” she offered lamely.
“Bull-dikers or hustlers, maybe both together,” he said, crowding past her. He hurried down the steps.
He often used words she didn’t understand, but she always got their meaning.
Towards noon it began to rain, and Grace stood at the kitchen window stroking Peanuts who lay full length on the windowsill. A few days before she had heard that representatives of the building syndicate had been sounding out the householders farther up the street. It might be just another rumour or, as she was inclined to believe, it may have been some outfit wanting to buy up the properties cheap for resale to the developers. Her mind was made up in any case; she was going to hold out as long as possible.
She had only paid $10,500 for the house in 1944, but from the syndicate she would ask $25,000, maybe more. It would be exciting to have a running battle with them, and she was in no hurry to sell.
There was a knock at the hall door, and she found old man Martin from the basement standing in the hallway. Martin was a longtime English immigrant who still hadn’t lost his accent after fifty years. He was a small, neat man, no taller than she was in her slippers. He kept his basement room spotless, but his neatness was just precise and military enough to irk her. He worked out part of his rent by tending the furnace in winter, carrying out the garbage, and looking after the grass and garden in the summer. She knew he disliked her, even though he was always polite to her face, with a mechanical and ingrained subservience.
His few possessions, which she had investigated early in his tenancy, had told her nothing except that he was a First World War veteran and a widower. On occasion he received letters from a woman in Vancouver, and about a month before there had been a postcard, written by the same person, from Kamloops, B.C. It had been addressed to “Dad” and signed, “Peggy, George and the children.”
As she opened the door he said, “I was wonderin’ if I could move the garbage out to the front of the house tonight like, on account I’m workin’ all night down at a watchman’s job, an’ won’t be home first thing in the morin’.”
“Is tomorrow garbage day?”
“Yes.”
“What time will you take them out?”
“Before I go to work. Around eleven or so.”
“All right.”
“It’s just a temp’ry job, a friend’s off sick, Mrs. Hill, an’ —”
“It’ll be all right,” she said, shutting the door in his face. She despised old men.
When she heard him feeling his way down the cellar stairs she opened her door again and shouted after him, “Make sure you put the lids on tight. I don’t want them damn dogs scattering it all over the lawn!”
“Right,” he answered from the bottom of the stairs.
Grace sat down against the table, and Peanuts jumped down from the window and by an indirect route reached the side of her chair. She picked the big cat from the floor and placed it on her lap. Her hand stroked its belly, trying to feel the beginnings of gestation. There was no swelling yet but the cat’s teats were hard beneath her fingers.
“Are we going to be mama again, baby?” she asked it, speaking as if to a child. “Did nasty Gracie make you act bad with that big grey tomcat, eh? We be a mama again pretty quick, eh, lover?
She pulled the cat up to her face and kissed it on the head. When she lowered it to her lap again Peanuts stared up at her with a look that was mysterious and inscrutable.
The rain stopped later in the afternoon, and Grace opened the back door, letting in the clean washed smell of the grass and trees. There was the sound of cars swishing by on the wet streets, and from somewhere nearby the sound of jackhammers digging up the pavement. A small unseen bird challenged the clearing skies with song, and from a backyard down the street a dog gave a single lonely bark.
There was a slight commotion in the front hallway, and Grace opened the hall door and saw Monique Laramée carrying out a folded baby buggy. Her two-year-old son, Gaston, was with her, and when he heard Grace’s door open he looked around at her, his wide face and button nose wrinkling in a smile.
Grace ran forward