a mistake. He never thought of Grey Cup. So don’t worry, Martin. It’s been postponed. Way off in the future. Sometime in December.’
‘We might even be snowed in with luck,’ he said going back to his paper. ‘Anyway, that’s the end of that story.’
Story, he had called it. He was right, it was a story, a fragment of one anyway. A human error causing human outcry and subdued by a human retraction. A comedy miniaturized.
It’s the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It’s throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it. Breathing, waking and sleeping; our lives are steamed and shaped into stories. Knowing that is what keeps me from going insane, and though I don’t like to admit it, sometimes it’s the only thing.
Names are funny things, I tell Richard. We are having lunch one day, and he has asked me how I happened to name him Richard.
‘I liked the “r” sound,’ I tell him. ‘It’s a sort of repetition of the “r” in your father’s name.’
‘And Meredith?’ he asks. ‘Where did you get that?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I tell him, for the naming of our babies is a blur to me. Each time I was caught unprepared; each time I felt a compulsion amidst the confusion of birth, to pin a label, any label, on fast before the prize disappeared.
Meredith. It is, of course, an echo of my own name, the same thistle brush of ‘th’ at the end, just as Richard’s name is a shadow of Martin’s. Unconscious at the time; I have only noticed it since.
‘I’m not sure,’ I tell Richard. ‘Names are funny things. They don’t really mean anything until you enlist them.’
Now he confides a rare fact about Anita Spalding, introducing her name with elaborate formality.
‘You know Anita Spalding? In Birmingham?’
‘Yes,’ I say, equally formal.
‘Do you know what she does? She calls her parents by their first names.’
‘Really?’
‘Like she calls her father John. That’s his first name. And she calls her mother Isabel.’
‘Hmmmm.’ I am deliberately offhand, anxious to prolong this moment of confidence.
But he breaks off with, ‘But like you say, names are funny things.’
‘Richard,’ I say. ‘Do you know what Susanna Moodie called her husband?’
There is no need to explain who Susanna Moodie is. After all these months she is one of us, one of the family. Every day someone refers to her. She hovers over the house, a friendly ghost.
‘What did she call her husband?’ Richard asks.
‘Moodie,’ I tell him.
‘What’s wrong with that? That was his name wasn’t it?’
‘His last name. Don’t you get it, Richard? It would be like me calling Daddy, Gill. Would you like a cup of tea, Gill? Well, Gill, how’s the old flu coming along? Hi ya, Gill.’
‘Yeah,’ Richard agrees. ‘That would be kind of strange.’
‘Strange is the word.’
‘Why’d she do it then? Why didn’t she call him by his first name?’
‘I don’t know,’ I tell him. ‘It was the custom in certain levels of society in those days. And there’s her sister, Catherine Parr Traill. She called her husband Mr Traill. All his life. Imagine that. Moodie is almost casual when you think of Mr Traill.’
‘I guess so,’ he says doubtfully.
‘I like to think of it as a sort of nickname. Like Smitty or Jonesy. Maybe it was like that.’
‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘I suppose it depends on how she said it. Like the expression she used when she said it. Do you know what I mean?’
I did know what he meant, and it was a common problem in biography. Could anyone love a man she called by his surname? Was such a thing possible? I would have to hear whether it was said coldly or with tenderness. One minute of eavesdropping and I could have travelled light-years in understanding her.
It was Leon Edel, who should know about the problems of biography if anyone does, who said that biography is the least exact of the sciences. So much of a man’s life is lived inside his own head, that it is impossible to encompass a personality. There is never never enough material. Sometimes I read in the newspaper that some university or library has bought hundreds and hundreds of boxes of letters and papers connected with some famous deceased person, and I know every time that it’s never going to be enough. It’s hopeless, so why even try?
That was the question I found myself asking during the year we spent in England. My two biographies, although they had been somewhat successful, had left me dissatisfied. In the end, the personalities had eluded me. The expression in the voice, the concern in the eyes, the unspoken anxieties; none of these things could be gleaned from library research, no matter how patient and painstaking. Characters from the past, heroic as they may have been, lie coldly on the page. They are inert, having no details of person to make them fidget or scratch; they are toneless, simplified, stylized, myths distilled from letters; they are bloodless.
There is nothing to do but rely on available data, on diaries, bills, clippings, always something on paper. Even the rare photograph or drawing is single-dimensional and self-conscious.
And if one does enlarge on data, there is the danger of trespassing into that whorish field of biographical fiction, an arena already asplash with the purple blood of the queens of England or the lace-clutched tartish bosoms of French courtesans. Tasteless. Cheap. Tawdry.
That year in England I was restless. I started one or two research projects and abandoned them. I couldn’t settle down. Everything was out of phase. My body seemed disproportionately large for the trim English landscape. I sensed that I alarmed people in shops by the wild nasal rock of my voice, and at parties I overheard myself suddenly raucous and bluff. It was better to fade back, hide out for a while. I became a full-time voyeur.
On trains I watched people, lusting to know their destinations, their middle names, their marital status and always and especially whether or not they were happy. I stared to see the titles of the books they were reading or the brand of cigarette they smoked. I strained to hear snatches of conversations and was occasionally rewarded, as when I actually heard an old gentleman alighting from his Rolls Royce saying to someone or other, ‘Oh yes, yes. I did know Lord MacDonald. We were contemporaries at Cambridge.’ And a pretty girl on a bus who turned to her friend and said, ‘So I said to him, all right, but you have to buy the birth control pills.’ And then, of course, I had the Spalding family artifacts around me twenty-four hours a day, and on that curious family trio I could speculate endlessly.
It occurred to me that famous people may be the real dullards of life. Perhaps shopgirls coming home from work on the buses are the breath and body of literature. Fiction just might be the answer to my restlessness.
‘I think I might write a novel,’ I said to Martin on a grey Birmingham morning as he was about to leave for the library.
‘What for?’ he asked, genuinely surprised.
‘I’m tired of being boxed in by facts all the time,’ I told him. ‘Fiction might be an out for me. And it might be entertaining too.’
‘You’re too organized for full-time fantasy,’ he said, and later I remembered those words and gave him credit for prophecy. Martin is astute, although sometimes, as on this particular morning, he looks overly affable and half-daft.
‘You sound like a real academic,’ I told him. ‘All footnotes and sources.’
‘I