The Progress of Love (17 page)

“No,” Robert said. “I think she’s all right.”

This conversation was taking place at the back of the store in the afternoon, when Peg had gone out to get a sandwich.

“She had not said one word to me. Nothing. I said, ‘How come you never said a word about this, Peg,’ and she said, ‘I knew you’d find out pretty soon.’ I said yes, but she could’ve told me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’ Just like she’s apologizing for some little thing like using my coffee mug. Only, Peg would never do that.”

Robert had finished what he was doing at the Keneally store around noon, and decided to drive back to Gilmore before getting anything to eat. There was a highway diner just outside of town, on the way in from Keneally, and he thought that he would stop there. A few truckers and travellers were usually eating in the diner, but most of the trade was local—farmers on the way home, business and working men who had driven out from town. Robert liked this
place, and he had entered it today with a feeling of buoyant expectation. He was hungry from his work in the cold air, and aware of the brilliance of the day, with the snow on the fields looking sculpted, dazzling, as permanent as marble. He had the sense he had fairly often in Gilmore, the sense of walking onto an informal stage, where a rambling, agreeable play was in progress. And he knew his lines—or knew, at least, that his improvisations would not fail. His whole life in Gilmore sometimes seemed to have this quality, but if he ever tried to describe it that way, it would sound as if it was an artificial life, something contrived, not entirely serious. And the very opposite was true. So when he met somebody from his old life, as he sometimes did when he went to Toronto, and was asked how he liked living in Gilmore, he would say, “I can’t tell you how much I like it!” which was exactly the truth.

“Why didn’t you get in touch with me?”

“You were up on the roof.”

“You could have called the store and told Ellie. She would have told me.”

“What good would that have done?”

“I could at least have come home.”

He had come straight from the diner to the store, without eating what he had ordered. He did not think he would find Peg in any state of collapse—he knew her well enough for that—but he did think she would want to go home, let him fix her a drink, spend some time telling him about it.

She didn’t want that. She wanted to go up the street to the bakery to get her usual lunch—a roll with ham and cheese.

“I let Karen go out to eat, but I haven’t had time. Should I bring one back for you? If you didn’t eat at the diner, I might as well.”

When she brought him the sandwich, he sat and ate it at the desk where she had been doing invoices. She put fresh coffee and water into the coffee maker.

“I can’t imagine how we got along without this thing.”

He looked at Peg’s lilac-colored coat hanging beside Karen’s
red coat on the washroom door. On the lilac coat there was a long crusty smear of reddish-brown paint, down to the hemline.

Of course that wasn’t paint. But on her coat? How did she get blood on her coat? She must have brushed up against them in that room. She must have got close.

Then he remembered the talk in the diner, and realized she wouldn’t have needed to get that close. She could have got blood from the door frame. The constable had been in the diner, and he said there was blood everywhere, and not just blood.

“He shouldn’t ever have used a shotgun for that kind of business,” one of the men at the diner said.

Somebody else said, “Maybe a shotgun was all he had.”

It was busy in the store most of the afternoon. People on the street, in the bakery and the cafe and the bank and the post office, talking. People wanted to talk face to face. They had to get out and do it, in spite of the cold. Talking on the phone was not enough.

What had gone on at first, Robert gathered, was that people had got on the phone, just phoned anybody they could think of who might not have heard. Karen had phoned her friend Shirley, who was at home in bed with the flu, and her mother, who was in the hospital with a broken hip. It turned out her mother knew already—the whole hospital knew. And Shirley said, “My sister beat you to it.”

It was true that people valued and looked forward to the moment of breaking the news—Karen was annoyed at Shirley’s sister, who didn’t work and could get to the phone whenever she wanted to—but there was real kindness and consideration behind this impulse, as well. Robert thought so. “I knew she wouldn’t want not to know,” Karen said, and that was true. Nobody would want not to know. To go out into the street, not knowing. To go around doing all the usual daily things, not knowing. He himself felt troubled, even slightly humiliated, to think that he hadn’t known; Peg hadn’t let him know.

Talk ran backward from the events of the morning. Where were the Weebles seen, and in what harmlessness and innocence, and how close to the moment when everything was changed?

She had stood in line at the Bank of Montreal on Friday afternoon.

He had got a haircut on Saturday morning.

They were together, buying groceries, in the I.G.A. on Friday evening at about eight o’clock.

What did they buy? A good supply? Specials, advertised bargains, more than enough to last for a couple of days?

More than enough. A bag of potatoes, for one thing.

Then reasons. The talk turned to reasons. Naturally. There had been no theories put forward in the diner. Nobody knew the reason, nobody could imagine. But by the end of the afternoon there were too many explanations to choose from.

Financial problems. He had been mixed up in some bad investment scheme in Hamilton. Some wild money-making deal that had fallen through. All their money was gone and they would have to live out the rest of their lives on the old-age pension.

They had owed money on their income taxes. Being an accountant, he thought he know how to fix things, but he had been found out. He would be exposed, perhaps charged, shamed publicly, left poor. Even if it was only cheating the government, it would still be a disgrace when that kind of thing came out.

Was it a lot of money?

Certainly. A lot.

It was not money at all. They were ill. One of them or both of them. Cancer. Crippling arthritis. Alzheimer’s disease. Recurrent mental problems. It was health, not money. It was suffering and helplessness they feared, not poverty.

A division of opinion became evident between men and women. It was nearly always the men who believed and insisted that the trouble had been money, and it was the women who talked of illness. Who would kill themselves just because they were poor, said some women scornfully. Or even because they might go to jail? It was always a woman, too, who suggested unhappiness in the marriage, who hinted at the drama of a discovered infidelity or the memory of an old one.

Robert listened to all these explanations but did not believe any of them. Loss of money, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease. Equally
plausible, these seemed to him, equally hollow and useless. What happened was that he believed each of them for about five minutes, no longer. If he could have believed one of them, hung on to it, it would have been as if something had taken its claws out of his chest and permitted him to breathe.

(“They weren’t Gilmore people, not really,” a woman said to him in the bank. Then she looked embarrassed. “I don’t mean like you.”)

Peg kept busy getting some children’s sweaters, mitts, snow-suits ready for the January sale. People came up to her when she was marking the tags, and she said, “Can I help you,” so that they were placed right away in the position of being customers, and had to say that there was something they were looking for. The Arcade carried ladies’ and children’s clothes, sheets, towels, knitting wool, kitchenware, bulk candy, magazines, mugs, artificial flowers, and plenty of other things besides, so it was not hard to think of something.

What was it they were really looking for? Surely not much in the way of details, description. Very few people actually want that, or will admit they do, in a greedy and straightforward way. They want it, they don’t want it. They start asking, they stop themselves. They listen and they back away. Perhaps they wanted from Peg just some kind of acknowledgment, some word or look that would send them away, saying, “Peg Kuiper is absolutely shattered.” “I saw Peg Kuiper. She didn’t say much but you could tell she was absolutely shattered.”

Some people tried to talk to her, anyway.

“Wasn’t that terrible what happened down by you?”

“Yes, it was.”

“You must have known them a little bit, living next door.”

“Not really. We hardly knew them at all.”

“You never noticed anything that would’ve led you to think this could’ve happened?”

“We never noticed anything at all.”

Robert pictured the Weebles getting into and out of their car in the driveway. That was where he had most often seen them. He
recalled their Boxing Day visit. Her gray legs made him think of a nun. Her mention of virginity had embarrassed Peg and the boys. She reminded Robert a little of the kind of women he used to know. Her husband was less talkative, though not shy. They talked about Mexican food, which it seemed the husband had not liked. He did not like eating in restaurants.

Peg had said, “Oh, men never do!”

That surprised Robert, who asked her afterward did that mean she wanted to eat out more often?

“I just said that to take her side. I thought he was glaring at her a bit.”

Was he glaring? Robert had not noticed. The man seemed too self-controlled to glare at his wife in public. Too well disposed, on the whole, perhaps in some way too indolent, to glare at anybody anywhere.

But it wasn’t like Peg to exaggerate.

Bits of information kept arriving. The maiden name of Nora Weeble. Driscoll. Nora Driscoll. Someone knew a woman who had taught at the same school with her in Hamilton. Well-liked as a teacher, a fashionable dresser, she had some trouble keeping order. She had taken a French Conversation course, and a course in French cooking.

Some women here had asked her if she’d be interested in starting a book club, and she had said yes.

He had been more of a joiner in Hamilton than he was here. The Rotary Club. The Lions Club. Perhaps it had been for business reasons.

They were not churchgoers, as far as anybody knew, not in either place.

(Robert was right about the reasons. In Gilmore everything becomes known, sooner or later. Secrecy and confidentiality are seen to be against the public interest. There is a network of people who are married to or related to the people who work in the offices where all the records are kept.

There was no investment scheme, in Hamilton or anywhere else. No income-tax investigation. No problem about money. No
cancer, tricky heart, high blood pressure. She had consulted the doctor about headaches, but the doctor did not think they were migraines, or anything serious.

At the funeral on Thursday, the United church minister, who usually took up the slack in the cases of no known affiliation, spoke about the pressures and tensions of modern life but gave no more specific clues. Some people were disappointed, as if they expected him to do that—or thought that he might at least mention the dangers of falling away from faith and church membership, the sin of despair. Other people thought that saying anything more than he did say would have been in bad taste.)

Another person who thought Peg should have let him know was Kevin. He was waiting for them when they got home. He was still wearing his pajamas.

Why hadn’t she come back to the house instead of driving to the police station? Why hadn’t she called to him? She could have come back and phoned. Kevin could have phoned. At the very least, she could have called him from the store.

He had been down in the basement all morning, watching television. He hadn’t heard the police come; he hadn’t seen them go in or out. He had not known anything about what was going on until his girlfriend, Shanna, phoned him from school at lunch hour.

“She said they took the bodies out in garbage bags.”

“How would she know?” said Clayton. “I thought she was at school.”

“Somebody told her.”

“She got that from television.”

“She
said
they took them out in garbage bags.”

“Shanna is a cretin. She is only good for one thing.”

“Some people aren’t good for anything.”

Clayton was sixteen, Kevin fourteen. Two years apart in age but three years apart at school, because Clayton was accelerated and Kevin was not.

“Cut it out,” Peg said. She had brought up some spaghetti
sauce from the freezer and was thawing it in the double boiler. “Clayton. Kevin. Get busy and make me some salad.”

Kevin said, “I’m sick. I might contaminate it.”

He picked up the tablecloth and wrapped it around his shoulders like a shawl.

“Do we have to eat off that?” Clayton said. “Now he’s got his crud on it?”

Peg said to Robert, “Are we having wine?”

Saturday and Sunday nights they usually had wine, but tonight Robert had not thought about it. He went down to the basement to get it. When he came back, Peg was sliding spaghetti into the cooker and Kevin had discarded the tablecloth. Clayton was making the salad. Clayton was small-boned, like his mother, and fiercely driven. A star runner, a demon examination writer.

Kevin was prowling around the kitchen, getting in the way, talking to Peg. Kevin was taller already than Clayton or Peg, perhaps taller than Robert. He had large shoulders and skinny legs and black hair that he wore in the nearest thing he dared to a Mohawk cut—Shanna cut it for him. His pale skin often broke out in pimples. Girls didn’t seem to mind.

“So was there?” Kevin said. “Was there blood and guck all over?”

“Ghoul,” said Clayton.

“Those were human beings, Kevin,” Robert said.

“Were,” said Kevin. “I know they
were
human beings. I mixed their drinks on Boxing Day. She drank gin and he drank rye. They were human beings then, but all they are now is chemicals. Mom? What did you see first? Shanna said there was blood and guck even out in the hallway.”