The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (34 page)

I sat on one of the chairs and Fielding sat on her bed, leaned back, her arms supporting her, her legs stretched out, feet crossed. She was wearing buttoned boots, the sole of the left boot built up several inches higher than the other. Not an inch of her withered left leg was showing.

I accused her of disloyalty, of hypocrisy, of being an intellectual whore. She smiled, lips tilted, puffing on a cigarette. She was wearing a tweed skirt with a zipper at the hip that was open, broken probably, and through which the end of her white blouse protruded like a pocket turned inside out.

“You knew I never meant a word I wrote,” she said, after I told her she was fired, “but as long as you thought I was furthering your cause, you didn’t care. You shouldn’t expect fidelity from someone you know is prostituting her talents.” I was so accustomed to her irony, it was a few seconds before I realized that she had said exactly what she meant.

“Do you believe in anything, Fielding?” I said. “Why are you writing a book if you don’t believe in anything?”

“I believe you still owe me three dollars,” Fielding said. “And you know where to send it.”

I had the money with me. It had taken some doing to scrape it together. It was in coins, in an envelope that I removed from my pocket and threw with a loud clunk on the table.

“So how is married life?” she said, sitting up straight and lighting a cigarette.

“Better than it would have been with you,” I said, instantly aware of how foolish, how churlish, it sounded.

“Never know, will you?” she said. “Besides, you were only joking when you asked me, remember?”

“I remember,” I said. “So what about you, Fielding? Any prospects?”

As if to emphasize the shabbiness of the question, she got up and limped to the table, where, standing, she poured herself a glass of Scotch.

“I’m never proposed to,” she said, “but I’m often propositioned. Mostly by men whose proposals have already been accepted and whose children have already started school. Sometimes even by men whose children have children. I seem to have acquired some sort of reputation.”

“I can’t imagine how,” I said.

“No,” she said, “I’m quite certain that you can’t. Most men tell me that because I’ve been ‘left on the shelf,’ the sort of thing they have in mind is the most I can hope for. So there you are. I’ve been left on the shelf.”

I felt my face go red. I’d thought at first that she was joking. Fielding with other men.

“You can’t be embarrassed,” she said. “You first spoke to me about such things when we were children. I believe you said your father ‘lives with his wife, who is the mother of his children.’ ”

“I’ve got to go,” I said.

“Then go,” she said, and looked at the window as I got up to leave.

Once outside, I hurried home, wondering along the way if she was really propositioned by married men or if she had just been trying to make me jealous or to shock me. It was news to me that she had a “reputation.” But then it would be. I knew I was looked upon as being something of a prude. The sort of sexual bantering that went on between men often stopped when I appeared, as if my distaste for it was evident, though I tried not to let it show. Often, upon departing from a group of men, I would hear a raucous laugh behind me when I was just far enough away that we could all pretend it was not me they were laughing at.

Fielding’s scam did not discredit her in the newspaper business. On the contrary, all the other publishers took great delight in our being hoodwinked and printed stories about it in their papers.

She was hired by the
Evening Telegram
to write a column a day, under her own name, a column called Field Day, which appeared in the first panel on page three of the
Telegram
.

She began writing satirical columns, so irony-laden you could not pin down her politics. They would eventually become quite popular, but reaction to them was not good at first. To St. John’s readers, a newspaper was a platform from which to make a speech, to defend or promote one’s party or one’s cause, and to attack
other causes, other parties. But here was Fielding, finding fault with everyone and everything. And she was a woman, and women columnists were rare enough that many people believed, or professed to believe, that Fielding’s style was typical of women.

She was called a fence-sitter and was challenged to defend herself, which she did by saying the accusation might or might not be true.

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Sixteen:

THE CASE OF JAMES LUNDRIGAN

The end of the reign of the naval governors is unfairly brought about, or at least hastened, by all the fuss made over the case of one James Lundrigan, a fisherman.

Here are the facts: In 1820, Mr. Lundrigan, who twice brazenly ignored a court summons to answer to a debt that he had irresponsibly incurred, was rightly found to be in contempt of court, was sentenced and, after serving barely one-third of his sentence, was released.

Here is the interpretation that was arbitrarily imposed upon these facts by the reform agitators Dr. William Carson and Patrick Morris: Mr. Lundrigan borrowed money from a merchant to buy supplies and did not pay it back in time. His fishing property was seized, but he refused to surrender his home. He did not answer the court summons, instead sending to court a note that read: “I am busy catching fish for my family, who have nothing besides to eat.” Found to be in contempt of court, he was sentenced to receive thirty-six lashes of the whip. He fainted after the fourteenth.

As a result of the outrage stirred up by Carson and Morris, the power of the Newfoundland courts is strengthened and the first civilian governor, the aforementioned Sir Thomas Cochrane, is appointed.

We can say only that those who seek justice must content themselves with the promise of a better life to come.

Sir Richard

I
FINALLY MADE UP
my mind that socialism in any form could not prevail in Newfoundland. The next best thing, it seemed to me, or at any rate the closest thing to socialism that Newfoundlanders would accept, was Liberalism. So in 1928, I joined the Liberal Party. I wrote its newly re-elected leader, Sir Richard Squires, outlined my credentials, highlighting my time in New York and my walk across the island, and pledged him my full support, saying I would be willing to do anything he wanted to help him win the next election. The next thing I knew, Sir Richard was inviting me to dinner at his house.

Sir Richard had been prime minister from 1919 to 1923, when four of his own cabinet ministers resigned in protest over his corruption-ridden record, to which he responded by resigning the prime ministership to sit as an independent. Shortly afterwards, two years after his knighthood, he was arrested for bribery, patronage, embezzlement of public funds and a host of other charges.

“I appeared in front of a judge, but I did not spend one second in confinement,” said Sir Richard. “I was instantly released on bail
and the grand jury dismissed the charges for lack of evidence. I was exonerated, completely exonerated.”

The next year he was again arrested, and this time convicted, for tax evasion, for which he was fined and placed on probation. He was still on probation when he won back the Liberal leadership in 1927.

I was uncharacteristically nervous as the day of my meeting with Sir Richard drew near. The prospect of meeting the quality, as my father called them, had never bothered me before. No longer armed, however, with my contempt for affluence, no longer the aloof, sceptical, ironical spectator of an elitist class-ridden society whose overthrow and replacement by socialism was inevitable, I now realized that it was important that I make a good impression with the mainstream, that it mattered what people like Sir Richard thought of me. My bedragglement, which among socialists had been a badge of honour, a kind of sartorial credential, was now an embarrassment to me. I still fancied that I would, from now on, be using Liberal means to accomplish socialist ends, but I was more than ever keenly self-conscious, aware of how ridiculous I looked to others, wearing day after day the same suit of Harris tweed, the same patched and re-patched Norfolk jacket I had worn in New York. Courtesy of cousin Walter, I was sporting an incongruously new pair of shoes, and I had recently bought, second-hand, a hat, into the lining of which I had to stuff old socks to make it fit.

There was a stone wall around Sir Richard’s house on Rennie’s Mill Road and, at the front, a massive iron gate that closed in the middle to form the letters
SRS
, the
R
split in half when the gates were open. The grounds, which had been hidden by the wall, were a descending tier of impeccably kept, if modestly sized, greenways flanked by statues, incongruous fawns and cherubs. The cobbled driveway went round a large fountain, in the centre of which loomed a sword-wielding marble angel with a warring, belligerent expression, its back to the house and its wings protectively outspread.

I walked awe-struck up the steps between the pillars and, after turning round on the portico several times to gawk at the angel, was about to knock on the front door when it was opened by a fellow in full livery — ruffled breeches to the knees, below that silk stockings, buckled shoes. Above the waist he wore a scarlet doublet with a row of bright brass buttons down the front. If he was taken aback at the shabbiness of my appearance, he did not let it show. He seemed aware that a generic someone was at the door, but that was all.

“I’m hear to see Sir Richard Squires,” I said, uncertain if that was how I should refer to him. The fellow did not so much look at me as slightly away from me, as though the better to hear what I was saying.

“Who may I say is calling?” he said, as if this were a mere courtesy he was obliged to perform before sending me away. His English accent sounded put on, though perhaps he had merely been so long away from home that he was losing it.

“Mr. Joseph Smallwood,” I said.

“Please wait here,” he said. Seconds later, from somewhere inside the house, I heard him repeat my message word for word, drawing out the “all” in Smallwood as though for comic effect, as if he were telling his listener they would not want to miss seeing what the man who bore the grand-sounding title of Mr. Joseph Smallwood looked like. Then he returned and asked me to step into the front porch, which I did, whereupon he left me without a word of explanation.

Seconds later, two people I recognized from newspaper photos to be Sir Richard and Lady Squires leaned out over the banister of the winding staircase I was facing and looked down at me.

“Forgive us, Mr. Smallwood,” Sir Richard said, while Lady Squires whispered something to him, “but you look like someone just escaped from, or soon to be admitted to, the San. You can’t be too careful these days, you know.”

“I’m in perfect health, sir,” I said, shouting down the voice inside me that was urging me to reply in kind.

“Indeed,” said Lady Squires. “In that case, it must be the rest of mankind that is sorely afflicted, for I have never in all my days seen anyone still drawing breath who looked like you.”

“I’ve always been skinny, Lady Squires,” I said.

“My husband is skinny, Mr. Smallwood,” Lady Squires said. “There is, to the best of my knowledge, no word for what you are.”

“Contagion free, are you?” Sir Richard said. “Consumption free? We have your word as a gentleman on that?” Lady Squires looked at him as if it were about as plausible to ask for my word as a gentleman as to presume me to be a member of the royal family.

“Yes, sir,” I said, feeling myself turning crimson red from shame, as though my father, along with every socialist I had ever known, was listening.

“Very well then, Cantwell, show him in,” Sir Richard said. Cantwell reappeared from inside the nearest room.

And so I had dinner with Sir Richard and Lady Squires. Lady Squires, who like Sir Richard was nearing fifty, was unusually dressed, in a full-length, robe-like, maroon-coloured garment, and wore around her neck a variety of charms and amulets, half a dozen of them, medallions, stones, badge-like leather ovals and circles that she fingered while she ate. The weight of them flattened her dress and brought out the rounded contours of her shoulders and her breasts. She was quite plump, with light blue darting eyes that belied her affected mannerisms, such as every few seconds putting down her knife and fork to rest her chin on her folded hands.

Sir Richard was angular-faced, hawk-nosed, somewhat like me, I fancied, and sported a modest moustache. He was, as his wife had said, somewhat skinny, and he ate as though he did not see the point of food, pushing a lamb chop about on his plate and stirring his peas and carrots and potatoes as if he were searching for something among them. It occurred to me that about now, Clara would have put Ramsay to bed and be sitting down to her customarily solitary supper of damper dogs and baked beans.

“Where did you go to school, Mr. Smallwood?” Sir Richard said.