The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (47 page)

“Better sit down,” he said sympathetically, and led me to a chair against the wall. “Haven’t exactly got a hollow leg, have you? When did you last eat?”

Not that day or the day before; the day before that perhaps, I wasn’t sure. I remembered that while recruiting in the Bay of Islands, I had walked over five miles of hills to a place called Tickle Cove, where I was invited in for a meal by a fisherman who lived alone in a makeshift shack. Everything in the place was makeshift. His table was a door laid across two sawhorses, his two chairs were lobster crates, his cups tin cans. He boiled tea in an empty biscuit tin, rendered a thin slab of fat-back pork on the damper of his woodstove, then smeared a slab of dole bread in the melted fatback, laid it on the lid of the biscuit tin and handed it to me. It was not until I was nearly finished that I realized that what I was eating was to have been his dinner, that he was not eating, though he seemed to be getting great satisfaction out of watching me. Whether it was this poor fellow or myself I felt sorry for now, I was not sure, but I suddenly felt myself on the verge of tears.

“What do you think, Smallwood? Will you go over with me and shake their hands?” my acquaintance said. Across the floor, the reporters were queuing up to a receiving line that consisted of Governor Anderson; commissioners Hope Simpson, Lodge and Trentham and their wives; our three commissioners, Alderdice, Howley and Puddister, and their wives, one Anglican, one Catholic and one non-conformist, as if it mattered that all three factions be represented, since our commissioners had no power anyway. I looked at the wives, wearily, perfunctorily shaking hands with men they hoped they would never see again.

“We live in an occupied country,” I said, “and that it has been occupied at our request only makes it that much worse. All these Newfoundlanders, putting on airs to impress the British who laugh at them behind their backs, trying to pretend it’s because of other Newfoundlanders the British had to bail us out, not them, as if the British are just reinforcements who will help them do away with laziness and ignorance, then leave.”

The commission had been convening now for more than a year. Though Governor Anderson was the titular head, “chairing” the commission the way he “governed” Newfoundland, it was common knowledge, and clear from the way the others, Anderson included, deferred to him, that Hope Simpson ran the show.

I walked unsteadily across the floor and joined the queue. Prowse was now standing at Hope Simpson’s side, introducing him as each member of the press corps stepped forward.

Hope Simpson wore, aside from an unwavering, stern, hypervigilant expression, round-rimmed spectacles, a knee-length coat with turned-up cuffs and a line of large silver buttons down the right-hand side and a waistcoat buttoned tightly to his neck. He wore some sort of pantaloons, with stockings over those, and on his feet a pair of low-cut, square-buckled glistening black shoes. At his left side, he wore an ornamental sabre, the handle of which he held against his body with his arm. In his left hand he held, for no reason I could think of, a small green book and a pair of white gloves. He had spent most of his life in far-flung, exotic postings — India, China, Greece — heading commissions made necessary by the slow dismantlement of the British Empire, overseeing the abandonment of colonies no longer worth colonizing or the withdrawal from those no longer willing to put up with being colonized.

He was sixty-five years old and his stockings brought out the shape of his old man’s legs up to his knees, a fact that, in my drunken state, seemed especially affronting. He had strong-looking calves and a pair of finely turned ankles, which only made it seem
all the more ridiculous that an old man should be so vain as to show his legs in public.

While waiting my turn, I drank another glass of champagne. Prowse whispered something to Hope Simpson when I was next in line to shake his hand.

“Lord Hope Simpson,” Prowse said, “this is Joe Smallwood.”

Hope Simpson extended his hand, and giving Prowse a withering look in the face of which he did not flinch, I shook it, trying to affect mock admiration, bowing so low I almost fell over.

“It is a pleasure to at last meet the man whom I have for so long admired at a distance,” I said.

“I would thank you for saying so, Mr. Smallwood,” Hope Simpson said, “and would be more than willing to return the compliment if I believed it was sincere. You’re the Bolshie fellow who’s been trying to unionize the fishermen, are you not?”

I looked again at Prowse.

“Are you aware,” I shouted, adopting my stump-speaking voice, “that some people believe you insulted the Newfoundland people when you divided their legislative chamber into offices? But then, you must be, or you would not have been overheard saying, ‘What need do a people without a legislature have for a legislative chamber?’ ”

“Mr. Smallwood, as you seem to be the only person in the room who is unaware that you are drunk, I am willing to ignore that remark.”

“You dismantled the Newfoundland Museum,” I shouted, “to make way for more offices, and so scattered its exhibits that they will never be recovered. ‘And so I have,’ you tell people, ‘but what of it? What did that museum commemorate but three hundred years of misery and failure?’ ”

“Good night, Mr. Smallwood.”

“You have been quoted as saying, ‘St. John’s is a squalid town —’ ”

“There is a man behind you, Mr. Smallwood, who would like to shake my hand.”

“There is a man in front of you, Sir John, who would like to wring your neck.”

At this, Prowse and another man moved forward and took hold of me by the arms and began to drag me towards the lobby.

“Let him go,” Hope Simpson said. Lodge stepped up to him and whispered something in his ear, his head bobbing emphatically.

“Let him go,” Hope Simpson said again, dismissing me with a flick of his gloves and turning away. Prowse and the other man released me but watched me closely. My glasses had fallen off and as I bent to retrieve them I staggered.

A group of men, Prowse included, surrounded me and walked with me towards the door.

Outside, it was snowing. We stood in shelter on the steps of Government House. No one said a word. Prowse stared at me, but I pretended not to notice. The snow, driven by the northeast wind, was thickening and beginning to gather on the ground. Despite the lateness of the hour, it was brighter now than when I had arrived, the snow reflecting what little light there was. That in any other context the sight would have been a cheerful one made it all the more depressing.

“Here,” Prowse said, thrusting some bills at me, “take a cab home.” Again I ignored him. “You’re ruined in this town, Smallwood,” Prowse said. “You’re ruined in this country.”

I looked at the horse-drawn cabs and motor cabs that lined the driveway, the horses stamping and blowing. The drivers had taken the sudden appearance of a dozen men on the steps as a general exodus and were watching us expectantly.

The man who had greeted me at the door came running from inside with my overcoat. I put it under my arm and stepped out into the snow.

“Like father, like son,” Prowse shouted when I was halfway to the gate. I did not stop.

The next day I longed to talk to Fielding, though I had no idea what I would say to her, nor any reason to think I would be cheered by what she said to me. I went to her boarding-house on Cochrane Street, knocked on her door but got no answer. I began to leave when the door across the hall opened a crack. I could barely make out a stubble-bearded old man in a grimy undershirt.

“Lookin’ for her what writes the columns, are ya?” he said. I nodded. “She’s at the Harbour Light,” he said. “Went in yesterday. Says she’s gonna quit the booze. When I heard ya comin’ down the hall, I thought ya might be her. ‘I knew ya wouldn’t last,’ I was gonna say.” He chuckled and closed the door as if my coming to look for her somehow bore out his prediction.

The Harbour Light was operated by the Salvation Army. It was on Harbour Drive and bore the painting of a lighthouse on its exterior, a lighthouse from which a beacon blared out the words Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit.

A small set of marble steps led to the lobby and a desk, behind which sat a Salvation Army nurse, a middle-aged woman all dressed in black with the initials S. A. sewn onto her collars and lapels. I asked her if I could see Miss Fielding. She brightened immediately. “You’re the first visitor she’s had,” she said. “It will lift her spirits a great deal to see that someone still cares about her. It’s a good thing you came when you did. She won’t be in any shape for visitors much longer.”

She escorted me to a small empty room in which there were a table and two facing chairs, not what I thought the visitors’ room would look like. I sat down and minutes later Fielding came in, wearing not a hospital gown but her own clothes; she even had her cane.

“Look at you,” I said.

She sniffed and raised her eyebrows, then sat down sideways to the table, stretching her long mismatched legs, her button-booted
feet crossed, the thick-soled boot on top. She tapped her cane repeatedly on the floor.

“The nurse says you’re not getting many visitors,” I said.

“Not true. There’s been a steady stream of aunts, uncles, cousins,” she said. “The Fieldings have always been famous for pulling together when one of their own winds up in the drink tank. My aunts have been baking non-stop —” She sighed, weary of her own irony, it seemed.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I said. “You haven’t gone a day without a bottle in fifteen years, let alone without a drink.”

“I’ve had my last drink,” she said. “I had it two days ago, April 16, 1936.”

Her whole body was shaking already.

“What made you decide?” I said. “Why now?”

“It seems to be a time in Newfoundland when people do strange things.” She smiled. She had heard about my run-in with Hope Simpson. Why shouldn’t she have, since word of it was all over town?

“Did you know,” she said, “that our first legislators met in an inn, a tavern from which they were evicted because they couldn’t pay the rent? Their landlady sold their mace and their Speaker’s chair. Put an ad for them in the papers. For Sale: One mace and one Speaker’s chair. And sundry regalia, including the sergeant-at-arms’ ornamental sword. It all wound up in England. We had to buy it back at an auction. ‘What am I bid for these articles from the Parliament of Newfoundland?’ Apparently, the bidding was quite brisk.”

“I’ll come to see you every day if you like,” I said.

“Really, Smallwood,” Fielding said, “I wish you wouldn’t —”

“You’ll need someone to help you pass the time,” I said. “I know what drinkers get like when they’re not drinking.”

When I went to see her two days later, she was much worse. Her head quivered uncontrollably as if she were in the advanced stage
of some sort of palsy. Every so often a jolting tremor passed through her whole body as if she had awoken suddenly from sleep.

“You looked better when you were drinking,” I said.

“I’m trying to quit drinking, Smallwood,” Fielding said. “And there’s something about the sight of you that counteracts that impulse.”

“Everything counteracts that impulse,” I said.

“Why are you … here, Smallwood?” Fielding said, trying to stifle a tremor that passed through her when she was in mid-sentence. “You must think there’s something to be gained from it, is that it? I heard about your run-in with Hope Simpson. Perhaps you’d like me to write a column about it, make up a lot of witty things you wish you’d thought of at the time, and let you pass it off as yours.”

“You’re the most cynical woman I’ve ever met, Fielding,” I said, standing up. “You — you helped save Sir Richard’s life. I’m just returning the favour, that’s all.” I still could not bring myself to mention that she had saved my life, or to thank her for it.

I swore I would not go again, but the next day I changed my mind. The nurse at the desk told me that Fielding was very sick. “She really is,” she said. “Sometimes visitors think the patients just don’t want to see them. They had the doctor in last night. They had to put her in a straitjacket. He gave her some sedation, but we may have to send her to the hospital.”

I was not able to see her until ten days later. We met in the same room as before, but I doubt that it seemed the same to her. She hobbled into the room on her cane, still tremulous but not looking quite so wild-eyed as before.

“Two weeks,” she said. “The doctor said I’m passed the worst of it, the withdrawal part of it. I hope to God he’s right. This is the only place I’ve ever been that makes me miss the San. I can’t say I’m any happier to see you, though.”

Before I could react, Fielding held up her hand. “Sit down,
Smallwood, sit down,” she said. “I take that last one back. It must be sobriety talking.”

I sat down.

“You know what I’m afraid of most?” she said. “I’m afraid that now that I’ve quit drinking, I’ll quit writing, too. Or I’ll keep writing, but it won’t be any good. And I might not even know it.”

“Maybe you’ll be a better writer,” I said. “Maybe you’ll get more work done than before.”