Seth pleaded, in a whine, ‘O - come - on - Dad - let’s - go - to - the - Island, - please ‘Dad - please,’ and so on. Angus said, ‘Uncle Duncan said I could crew for him this year in the regatta.’
‘Did he?’ Salter responded to this last. ‘Well, maybe you two could go, and your mother and I will take a trip.’
Annie looked concerned, and seeing this, Salter became further irritated. ‘I’d like to see something other than the bloody Island while I still have a few teeth left,’ he said, shaking out his paper. ‘We’ve been to the Island for four years in a row, and most years before that, too.’
Annie said, ‘Dad’s had a bad winter. He isn’t very well.’
‘All right, all right. Could we talk about it tonight?’ He glared at the boys who were waiting for him to concede.
The Island was Prince Edward Island, Annie’s birthplace and for generations the home of her family, the Montagus, a family that was prominent, ancient, and soaked in Island tradition. Two of her brothers were lawyers, her uncle was a judge, and her father a doctor who had given up medicine to devote himself to his real estate interests. He owned two gas stations, a street of houses in Charlottetown, a small lumber-mill, a fish-canning plant, and a resort hotel, one of the oldest in the Maritimes. It was in this hotel that Salter had met Annie one summer as he passed through on the run from the wreckage of his first marriage. Annie was helping to manage the hotel in an undefined but concerned capacity; she had registered him, taken his order for dinner, chatted to him on the hotel porch after dinner, walked with him along the beach at sunset, and, after three days, refused to join him in bed, but made it clear that there were other places, and other times. He-felt himself blessed that the Island princess had fallen for him, and persuaded her, after the season was over, to move to Toronto to be near him.
In Annie’s family there was a tradition that the girls spend a year away from the Island before they settled down, rather like a year of finishing school—in Toronto or Montreal, or even London. Before they left the Island for this last, safe fling, the girls usually got engaged to apprentice lawyers or doctors, often their childhood sweethearts, and they returned, on time, when the internship or the articling period was up, to set up house and cottage. Annie shook her family by not making any arrangements for her return, and appalled them by wanting to marry a Toronto police sergeant, but they were full of goodwill, and when Annie brought Salter home to the family church the following spring, they welcomed him and made him an honorary member of the clan.
Each year after that the Salter family made the trip to the Island for the vacation. Sometimes they drove, though it took three days; more often they went by train and were met by Annie’s brother with one of the cars that the family lent them for the holiday, along with the keys to the family guest cottage.
Salter had married a tradition, a tradition that Annie guarded with the resolution of a Colonial among the natives. They used some of the family silver on Sundays (old Great-grandmother Montagu having apparently had place-settings for about three hundred, a collection that was broken up when she died), and about their Toronto house were a number of pieces of dark, polished furniture that Annie had inherited from the family homes (there were no harvest tables or other pine pieces, for such peasant artifacts had not formed part of the Montagu world for the last century and a half). Annie ritualized their lives slightly, too. Once a week, on Saturday, she made the porridge she ate as a child, although no one liked it much. She cooked fish chowders a lot and baked her own bread, but since the Island has no cuisine except salt cod and potatoes, their meals, except for one or two dishes which she had borrowed from the other maritime provinces, were otherwise the same as if she had been born in Calgary.
Annie’s family were well-bred, tactful, and keen to include Annie’s choice in the clan. They absorbed Salter’s family into their world of fishing, sailing, riding and perpetual lobster suppers as if he had paid dues. Most of the time Salter was happy to enjoy their world. Occasionally, impatient and constricted by it, he felt like the lone Christian in-law in a family of Jews, conscious of his uncircumcised state, his slightly albino look, and of the determination of his relatives never to let him feel like an outsider.
‘We have to let Duncan know soon if we aren’t coming,’ Annie said, as Salter rose from the table. The guest cottage was free to them whenever they liked, but it was much in demand during the season.
Salter felt himself on the brink of going too far. Clearly his words had upset everybody slightly. That was enough.
‘Tell him we’ll come,’ he said. ‘But entertain the possibility that you and I might take off for a week, would you? We could have a mad fling in Moncton.’
‘You’ll be late,’ she said. ‘Don’t work too hard.’
‘Didn’t I tell you?’
‘Yes, I know Charles, but couldn’t we talk about that soon, too?’
‘About quitting? Go to work for brother Duncan? I’m a policeman.’ He cut off any reply by walking out of the door.
Salter’s household was in an Anglo-Saxon ghetto off Oriole Parkway in an area that not so long ago had been North Toronto. But with the expansion of the city after the war, accompanied more recently by the building of the subway to the perimeter, his neighbourhood found itself at the heart of the city. When they first moved to the area, Salter had driven to work like everybody else; now he left his car at home for Annie and took the subway. Once, for a month, he had tried cycling to work long before it became fashionable, but the city sloped the wrong way for him, so that while the ride to work was easy, the sweating uphill return came at the end of a long day.
This morning the train was crowded as usual, but he managed to get the connecting door at the end of the car to lean against, a desirable spot because it let him read the paper with both hands. As usual, there were far more young girls on the train than any other single group—the roads to downtown were still packed with automobiles occupied by lone males—and when the car filled up, Salter found himself agreeably wedged between a tiny, pretty, Japanese girl who smiled at him to show she saw no danger in him, and, on the other side, an equally small Caucasian girl with a clean-smelling, frizzy head that came to just below his nose. He put down his paper to avoid mussing either of the heads beneath him and concentrated on looking fatherly. As the train arrived at his station he looked down to make sure he didn’t crunch any little feet as he shuffled forward. Both girls looked up and smiled at him. The English are right, he thought. They are birds.
He arrived at the headquarters building, and was greeted, as he was every morning, by Sergeant Frank Gatenby, The Oldest Sergeant on the Force. Gatenby was not really that; there were a number of sergeants older than he, but he had earned the title by his white hair and avuncular manner, which he had acquired before he was forty. For a long time he had been The Oldest Constable on the Force, then someone in a burst of sentimentality recommended his promotion, and he had been given to Salter as an assistant.
‘Quite a lot on your plate this morning, sir,’ he said. ‘You’ll be quite the busy boy today, all right.’ He smiled like a butler addressing the young master.
Salter took his mail: arrangements to be made for the tidying up of Yonge Street for a visit by the Mayor of Amsterdam (I’ll put a tart in an armchair in all the shop windows, he thought; that’ll make his worship feel at home); report requested on the value of police horses in suburban plaza patrols; an inspection of gunshops to make sure they weren’t selling machine-guns to minors; a committee to be formed to investigate complaints about the police cafeteria; a request for information from the Montreal police. A typical pile of rubbish.
For Salter had been put out to pasture. In one year he had gone from being a power in the internal structure of the Force to the status of a non-person, simply because he had backed the wrong man for Deputy Chief too enthusiastically and without regard for the consequences. Too young to retire, as his mentor had done, he was too old to shift careers. His future had been with the Force; now he had no future.
Salter looked at the last item. ‘What’s this, Frank? What information do they want in Montreal?’
‘Who can say,