Late Nights on Air (39 page)

“What a kind and strange thing to do,” said Gwen, adjusting herself to the kindness, the strangeness.
From a secret admirer
. Why those words, she wanted to ask. But she knew why. He wasn’t being literal. His grandmother’s coat, after all. A grandmother’s coat isn’t romantic.

“I’m spilling the beans,” said Eleanor. “He didn’t intend for you to know.”

“I’m
glad
to know. It’s been such a puzzle, wondering where it came from. Harry,” she said, and laughed. “He didn’t want the coat to go to waste. Or something.”

“Or something,” smiled Eleanor.

Gwen was remembering when they’d all been together a year ago, travelling into a second spring and a second winter. Last year’s June had slid backwards into May and they’d heard all the sounds of breakup and renewal all over again. Lifting
the needle, putting it back at the beginning instead of forward to the next song.

“You’ve changed,” she said to Eleanor. Lifting the needle off herself. “When I first met you, you were biding your time. Not any more.”

“We’ve come a long way together. But I think we’re still recognizable.”

Somewhere between three and four in the morning, as they were paddling back, they saw a world that Ralph might have photographed had he seen it, and that Gwen would later try to paint. But it wasn’t possible to duplicate the colours except by closing her eyes. Then the islands in the distance became the right shade of jet black, and the sky and the water were an identical, intense, unblemished peach.

TOWARDS THE END OF A WARM SEPTEMBER
, a full eight years later, Gwen heard Harry’s voice again. She was in her kitchen with the radio on and she stopped what she was doing and stood transfixed. His relaxed, gravelly, conversational voice was so familiar that a decade of time dropped away and she was back in a place more vivid than the present. How rare it was, she thought, to hear someone on the radio who wasn’t glib or pushy or out to impress you. Harry was talking to another man about the direction his life had taken, questioning him about the key turning point. They must be in a studio in Toronto, thought Gwen. The other man had been just thirteen, he told Harry, when he and his mother went to visit some elderly neighbours in a cottage and the couple brought out bread and beer. How can the boy grow if he doesn’t drink beer? said the persuasive old neighbour, an amateur musician, it turned out, who then went to the piano and played a selection of musical warhorses—Beethoven’s
Moonlight Sonata
, a waltz by Brahms, Mozart’s
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
—and the effect on the boy drinking his first glass of beer was electric. This is what he wanted to do with his life, he knew instantly. He wanted to study music. More than that, he wanted to arrange, rearrange, move around the notes.

The radio went from the man’s voice to his music and it was Harry Somers, realized Gwen. The boy had grown up to be the composer Harry Somers.

Harry asked Somers about the Newfoundland folk songs he’d arranged that every child in a Canadian choir has at some time or another sung, and Somers answered that he was very drawn to them, that now, of course, they represented the memory of something rather than the thing itself, since that sort of life, the outport life, had disappeared or was disappearing. Then a choir began to sing “She’s Like a Swallow” and Gwen’s eyes filled with tears.

The phrase that came to her mind was “the long and sudden of it.” We go on and on through the long months of our lives until we hit a sudden moment that stuns us. This was one such moment and soon there would be another. When the program ended, an announcer informed listeners that it had been recorded years ago; she’d been listening to a tape. Harry wasn’t back in Canada, after all.

Gwen sat at her kitchen table, flooded less with memory than with feeling, as you sit flooded with feeling after a phone call tells you sad news about someone you love. Hearing Harry’s voice had been like slipping on the soft tan glove of the past.

After a while, she stood up and switched off the radio, then went to the window. Autumn crocuses splayed wide in the garden below like mauve, over-the-hill mushrooms. Or birthday candles melted down into a soft, crazy tilt. From here she could see how candle-white the stems were. Autumn crocuses were something she’d never known about until she moved into this old house in Ottawa. The small, leggy flowers
expired almost as soon as they appeared. At the window she became aware of unhappy crows, their racket outside. Then she saw somebody in what looked like a uniform at the foot of the garden, and somebody else, in the same kind of beige shirt and pants, run across the lawn and disappear around the side of the fence where the mint grew.

She went outside and her neighbour called over the high hedge, “There’s a fox!”

“A fox?”

“With one leg missing. It was asleep in our yard and the crows went crazy. It’s in your yard now.”

Gwen went to the foot of the garden and saw the fugitive, its right back leg missing at the hip, trot leisurely from her garden into the alley. An extraordinary sight—a gaunt, grey veteran of the wild, moving at its own otherworldly pace.

The uniformed strangers were animal control officers and Gwen watched them corner the fox behind a neighbour’s gas barbecue, then hook it around the neck with a wire noose on the end of a long pole, and hoist it into the air to hang limp, skinny, twisted, its eyes flat and expressionless, either too weak or too wise to struggle, before they dropped it into a cage. They carried the cage to their van and then drove away. For a few minutes, she remained outside. The crows had dispersed. The street was quiet. The fox had been too mangy, the control officers had said to her, potentially too dangerous to be allowed to continue on his way. By the battle-scarred look of him, he’d been fighting against the odds for a long while. There was a time when she would have brought out her tape recorder and taped the whole incident. Not any more. But sometimes she still thought about her lost tapes, imagined how
another traveller might stumble over them, and listen to them later, only to be transported as she would have been back to that remote, animal-filled wilderness.

The fox had seemed magical to her. A creature from one world passing through another. But he didn’t make it.

Saddened, she went back inside, and phoned Eleanor at the bookstore. She told her about the fox, told her he’d been minding his own business. And she got the sympathetic reaction she’d counted on. But was that really what prompted the call? “Another amazing thing happened today,” she said. “I heard Harry on the radio.”

“It must have been something he did for the BBC,” Eleanor said. “He’s still over there, I know. Holding the radio fort, tending the broadcasting fires, as he likes to say. You know Harry.”

“No, it was a tape recorded years ago.” Then she said, “I’m sorry. I should have asked if you were busy.”

“It’s all right. Things are quiet. How’s David?”

“David’s great. I’ve put another one of his masterpieces in the mail to you. We splash colour around when he gets home from daycare.”

Eleanor said she was going to bring him some books on her next visit. She’d be flying down from Yellowknife in the week following Christmas to spend more time with her mother.

Good, said Gwen, she couldn’t wait to see her, she missed her. “I didn’t realize how much I missed Harry,” Gwen said.

Early the next morning, having spent much of the night talking to Harry in her head, she phoned the BBC in London
and they put her through. “Harry,” she said when she reached him, “I spent an hour with you yesterday under the strangest circumstances.”

“Gwen? Where are you?”

He sounded as pleased to hear from her as she’d hoped he would.

“Still in Ottawa. They replayed your interview with Harry Somers.”

“It’s so great to hear your voice,” he said. Then, “You’re up awfully early.”

She was. It was six in the morning. She was the only one awake in her house. “Tell me about your life over there,” she said. “Are you well?”

“No complaints. They’ve got me producing audio books now.”

“They have you reading them on tape, you mean.”

“No, no. We have actors do that. Proper professionals, not old radio hacks. This is Britain.”

“But you would be great at it.”

Harry chuckled. “I’ll pass that on to them.” Then he said, “I’ve been keeping track of you through Eleanor.”

“What has she told you?”

“She tells me everything.”

“Then she tells you more than she tells me.”

Harry laughed. “I should be calling you a traitor for defecting from radio.”

“Sometime over a drink, we’ll talk. Do you ever come to Canada?”

“I do. Now and again, when I’ve got a good reason. I’ve been toying with the idea of showing up at Abe Lamont’s
retirement party just to give the old grump a surprise. It’s in November,” he said. “In Toronto, though.”

And Gwen gathered from his tone that Ottawa wasn’t in the cards. “When I heard your voice yesterday, I actually thought you were
in
Toronto. I thought you’d moved back.”

There was no reply. Then, “Sorry, Gwen. Just had to hand something to a colleague. You’re asking if I plan to move back to Toronto. Not really. I have things to keep me here.”

His personal life, she thought. She’d been wondering about it. “Things besides work.”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Mind you, I’m not as tied down as you are.”

“No wife,” she said. She heard him reach for an answer and assumed there was someone, but no one official, and intercepted slyly by asking, “Harry, you’re not still relying on self-service, are you?”

There was a moment’s silence. Then she heard a huge guffaw.

“You’re very
forward,”
he said.

They were both laughing, and Gwen felt more relaxed than she had in a long time.

He said, “So let’s say I do go to Abe’s party. Would it make any sense for me to take a side trip to Ottawa?”

She felt the smile broaden on her face. “It’s only an hour’s flight. We could have dinner together and catch up.”

“Then I’ll see what I can manage and keep you posted,” he said. “I’m tremendously glad you called.”

“I love your voice, Harry. It isn’t like anyone else’s.”

Five weeks later, in the lobby of the Lord Elgin Hotel in Ottawa, Harry removed his glasses and looked at Gwen.

“I like the blue on blue,” he said.

She glanced down at herself and recalled in the same moment her turquoise earrings. She touched her ears.

He said, “The blue blouse, the blue necklace, the blue earrings, and your blue eyes.”

“Ah,” with a smile.

She surveyed his face, adjusting to the changes of the intervening years. His eyes seemed smaller because his jaw was wider. His skin was ruddier, the cauliflower ear its fat, lumpy self. He was more solid yet more vulnerable. But aging made everyone that way, she thought, not that Harry was so old. By her calculation he was fifty-one or -two, and only somewhat better groomed than he used to be. A comfortable tweed jacket, decent trousers, scuffed brogues.

“What happened to your wrist?” he asked.

She glanced at the cast that encased her lower arm and extended beyond her sleeve. “I was making my way through the dark bedroom and I fell over my husband’s shoes.” She raised her eyebrows, smiled, then looked away. “I used to know that room by heart.”

Harry had stepped into terra incognita, the state of a troubled marriage. He wasn’t sure how to proceed. “You were going to tell me how you and radio parted ways,” he said, slipping on his overcoat. “According to Eleanor, you got tired of asking people about things that were none of your business.”

“Eleanor told you that? Well, that’s certainly part of it.”

“And the rest?”

“Let me show you where it happened,” she said, buttoning up her coat. “It’s on the way to the restaurant.”

They walked over to Wellington Street, then made their way across the small bridge that spanned the canal and led to the Château Laurier Hotel.

One day about six years ago, she told him, when she was at work right up there, and she pointed to the top floor of the old hotel where
CBC
Radio had its studios, she looked out the window and saw that it was snowing, the first snowfall of the year. Around her everybody had their noses to the grindstone while outside huge, lazy flakes drifted down. One or two others noticed the weather and grunted and looked away. For a few minutes she stood by herself at the window watching the snow fall from the sky, and in those few minutes the light flurry of flakes, suspended in the air yet moving in all directions, became a thick squall, blotting out the buildings across the street, and then the snow was over. A big blue swath opened up in the sky. She thought how changeable and infinitely various the air is, and how she was being paid to cram it to the gills with talk, to bury it under endless information, and she couldn’t do it any more. “Has that ever happened to you, Harry? Whatever you were doing you couldn’t do it for another second, and you quit?”

“Getting fired was more my line.” His tone and manner so wry that impulsively she put her arm around him, openly, easily fond. “Go on with the story of your life,” he said to her, his voice a little gruff. “Eleanor told me you married a professor. How did you meet him?”