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    The Silence on the Shore
    The Silence on the Shore
    The Silence on the Shore
    Ebook539 pages10 hours

    The Silence on the Shore

    By Hugh Garner and George Fetherling

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    About this ebook

    Originally published in 1962, The Silence on the Shore is considered by many critics to be Hugh Garners best, most ambitious novel. Truly, in the person of Grace Hill, the landlady of the Toronto rooming house where most of the books events take place, Garner has created a fictional character never to be forgotten. Grace is a middle-aged snoop and an overweight nudist whose sexual release comes from watching wrestling matches at a hockey arena that is a thinly disguised Maple Leaf Gardens.

    Around Grace orbit her various boarders: alcoholic Gordon Lightfoot; Walter Fowler, an aspiring writer whose marriage has just broken up; Aline Garfield, a fundamentalist Christian grappling with various urges and torments; a Polish refugee woman; and a colourful cast of others whose lives intersect in drama that arises from arbitrary or coincidental encounters.

    According to scholar John Moss, the book is the best realistic novel of Canadian city life yet to be written.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDundurn
    Release dateFeb 14, 2011
    ISBN9781554888511
    The Silence on the Shore
    Author

    Hugh Garner

    Hugh Garner (1913-1979) immigrated to Canada in 1919, settling in Toronto. His most famous novel is Cabbagetown, released in its entirety in 1968. In 1963 he won the Governor General's Award for Hugh Garner's Best Stories.

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      Book preview

      The Silence on the Shore - Hugh Garner

      Byron

      CHAPTER ONE

      While Walter Fowler waited for the taxi driver to place his bags on the sidewalk, he stared at the house across the May-green grass of its narrow lawn. It was a detached three-storey brick building, its Victorian gingerbread gone from its wooden porch, but its age and former social position still apparent in its stringy lace curtains, old-fashioned looking on a street that had long ago embraced the genteel drape. The large front window on the lower floor held a geometrically centred geranium, a bedroom flower moved by the exigencies of time and social change to what had once been a middle-class family’s parlour.

      The house was like its neighbours, a tall austere old family dwelling, probably with steep staircases for skivvies to climb. It was a house that had grown too big for the families of the present, and too private in its shouldered intimacy with those beside it for the modern suburbanite. With a few eccentric exceptions all the houses on Adford Road and nearby streets had become the living quarters of semi-transient roomers, whose familial connections were as ephemeral as their connections one with the other.

      The houses were now the habitations of bachelors, aging spinsters, working married couples, and men and women of indeterminate age who had a once-married look about them. Together, these tenants formed that amorphous group of urban dwellers which might be termed the lumpen middle class.

      Adford Road, north of the university and south of the industrial fringe that bordered the crosstown railroad line, was a tree-ordered segment of the past, largely ignored by the boundary-bursting city. It was a social way station, devoid of nostalgia for those who had lived in it on their way up, and without sentiment for those who tried to remain on it on their way down.

      As he prepared to pay the driver, Walter glanced above the roof of the porch to the twin second-floor windows, framed in a mascara of blackened paint. A woman’s face peered down from one of them, a handsome middle-aged face topped with tight straight black hair. Its stare was haughty yet softened into womanliness by its show of female curiosity. A fraction of a second before their eyes met, the face was withdrawn, and he idly completed his casual inspection of the house. From a cramped attic window beneath the peak of the acutely slanting roof a wide-eyed child gazed down at him. The child looked out of place in the house and on the street.

      After the taxi had gone, Walter shifted his topcoat from one arm to the other, picked up his bags, and made his way up to the porch. He twisted the useless bell-ring until he was convinced it did not work. Then he knocked on the door beneath its stained-glass window.

      He heard an inside door open and close, and knew he was being inspected by somebody standing in the vestibule. The door was finally opened by a woman between fifty and sixty, her short broad figure hidden beneath a nondescript dress over which she had thrown an unbuttoned cardigan. Her face was puffed and shapeless but well complexioned, set off by a twin set of badly fitting false teeth. Her grey-brown hair was loose and held in position by several careless hairpins that threatened to fall out with every movement of her head. She fixed him with a pair of cold suspicious blue eyes.

      I’m Walter Fowler, he said. The one who phoned about the room this afternoon.

      Sure, she replied, making no move to invite him in.

      She looked him over carefully, satisfying herself that he was what he had claimed to be over the phone. He was fatter than she had pictured him, but younger, maybe forty-five. He looked like an early riser but not much of a water user. If he was a late arriver it would be caused by liquor rather than women. He still had most of his hair, and good white teeth which he didn’t try to show off by smiling. As a matter of fact he hadn’t smiled at all yet, which was a good sign.

      While she had been looking him over he had been thinking how typical she looked. A neighbourhood drab who had switched her hatred of men from a departed spouse to the male roomers who had drifted into her trap. A sign hanger and raucous caller of names from the downstairs hallway. A landlady whose sex life was probably secondhand, whose tastes were vulgar, and whose aim in life was to fight to the death to protect her personal status quo.

      Come in, she said, backing away from the doorway, while protecting herself from any untoward move on his part with the open door. Her voice was shrill even when modulated, with the shrillness of inferiority and insecurity.

      He picked up his bags and entered the house, smelling for the first time in twelve years the pervasive odour of all rooming houses — the smell of age, dusty carpets, and vaguely food-scented air. Despite the smell the house was remarkably clean, the polished floor gleaming like glass.

      Upstairs, she said as she shut the vestibule door behind her. He felt his way along the darkened floor to the flight of equally darkened stairs, trying not to scuff his heavy bags along the wall. As he climbed the stairs he heard her following him, and before he reached the top he could hear her presence, marked by the uneven noisy expulsions of her laboured breath.

      On the landing he stepped aside and she led the way to a bedroom at the rear of the hall. In passing he looked through the open door of a bathroom, clean but with a claw-footed enamel-chipped bath and wood-enclosed wash basin.

      He followed the landlady into the shiningly clean bedroom, giving a cursory glance at the cheap, fairly new bed and dresser. As he lowered his suitcases to the floor the woman walked over to the side of the bed and with a quick little jump sat on its edge, bouncing up and down to demonstrate its springiness. This almost girlish caper on her part astonished him, transforming her in a moment from a dour rooming-house chatelaine to an overweight and over-age sprite. There is lots of life in the old girl yet, he thought, unable to suppress a smile.

      The bed’s good, she said. I only bought last winter, when Mr. Cartwright had the room.

      He knew by the respectful way she mentioned the man’s name that he was expected to ask about him. Mr. Cartwright? he asked.

      Yes. He was with me for fourteen years, since 1945. He passed on in February. He was my longest roomer.

      Walter wasn’t overjoyed at the prospect of taking over a dead man’s bed, and she noticed the frown of distaste that passed over his face and the quick glance he gave to his unpacked bags.

      He passed away in the hospital, she said hurriedly. Heart trouble. It could happen to anybody. Jumping up quickly from the bed as if to illustrate her exception to the mass prognosis, she stepped across the floor and flung open a closet door. There’s plenty of room here for your clothes, she said. Mr. Cartwright used the closet for a kitchenette — turning to give him a smile — but of course I don’t allow kitchen privileges to anybody in the house but my regular apartment tenants.

      Aware that he had been shown his place in the house’s pecking order, Walter asked with suitable awe, Apartment tenants, did you say?

      Yes. There’s the Laramées upstairs — two small children but you never hear them; their apartment doesn’t reach this far back. There’s Mr. Martin who has the basement apartment, and Miss Karpluk who has the bed-sitting room and kitchenette at the front on this floor.

      The place began to seem a veritable anthill. How many more people live in the house? he asked.

      Well, there’s Mr. Lightfoot in the front room downstairs, and another downstairs room that’s rented but the young lady hasn’t moved in yet. She’s a quiet girl who’s gone to visit her family up north for a few days. She should be back soon. The three empty rooms, counting this, is because my university students have left. The middle room next door to this is empty too.

      Both of them stood in uneasy pre-contractual silence, Walter moving his eyes from the interior of the closet to the window and back again, and the landlady moving hers at a lower level, from his suitcases to his shoes and finally bringing them to rest against the modern sloping legs of the dresser. Neither made an effort to break the conversational impasse until a loud rasping voice from downstairs shouted, Grace, I found your goddam cat in my room again!

      With a gasp the landlady threw herself through the door and disappeared down the stairs as though into a well. Walter, after the slight shock had worn off, walked to the window and gazed down into a backyard that was strangely beautiful.

      It was as if the yard had been spared the deterioration of the house, and had remained a semi-rustic symbol of a day long past. Most of the other yards he could see were well freed and spacious also, kept neat and green and flower-planted by their present owners, an enclave of shaded quiet unknown and undreamed of by those in the steady stream of traffic on the street outside,

      He heard a movement behind him, and swung around to find the landlady standing in the doorway holding a large yellow cat. She tried to smile but her face still bore traces of the sudden fear and concern she had shown when she rushed downstairs. She closed the door gently behind her and advanced into the room, gently placing the cat on the floor.

      That was Lightfoot you heard hollering, she said. Peanuts sometimes wanders into his room, and he hates cats. She placed a hand against her mouth, drawing him into a whispered intimacy. Mr. Lightfoot drinks, she finished.

      He watched Peanuts conducting a tour of inspection of the floor, with particular emphasis on his suitcases. Then the big cat approached him and rubbed against his legs. He’s a fine cat, he said.

      "She’s a lady cat, ain’t you, Peanuts? Old man Martin in the basement says ginger cats are nearly always boys, but I don’t believe him. Anyway, she’s not. As the cat continued to rub against him the landlady said, She likes you." He knew then, without particular enjoyment, that he had passed muster as a prospective roomer.

      It’s nine dollars a week, you said on the phone — ? he began.

      Yes, Mr. Fowler. I run a clean and decent house here. This room has a good view of the garden, and you have garden privileges of course. As I already said I can’t allow cooking in here, but if you stay here next winter I might be able to fix you up with a hot plate and things for making a cup of coffee. I’m Mrs. Hill.

      How do you do, he said, proffering a ten-dollar bill.

      Since meeting her he had been trying to pin down her slight accent. It was Germanic, and didn’t go with her name.

      Excuse me, Mrs. Hill, he asked, Are you German?

      She hesitated a second too long before she answered, No, I’m Swiss.

      She extracted a receipt pad from a pocket of her cardigan and pulled an unseen pencil stub from the nest of her hair. As she wrote out the receipt she said, Guests have to be out of your room by eleven o’clock, and I don’t like my men roomers bringing in too many women. Clicking her teeth in a conspiratorial grin, I know what men are, you know. She pulled a crumpled dollar bill from the same pocket that had held the receipt pad and handed it to him along with his receipt, taking the ten dollars with the practised ease of a craps table croupier. Then with a flourish she handed him a pair of keys she had been palming all along.

      How long do you think you’ll be staying with us, Mr. Fowler?

      I really don’t know.

      You said on the phone you were an editor, I believe?

      Yes.

      What do you edit?

      "A small magazine. Just a trade paper. Real Estate News."

      It sounds like a pretty important job. Glancing around the room with an apologetic air. This isn’t much of a place for a magazine editor to move into.

      It’ll do. I’ve lived in worse places than this. Seeing her bridle slightly, he hurried on. I prefer to live in a furnished room — for now anyway. This one’s fine.

      She searched the floor for the cat as she said, This isn’t much but it’s quiet here, I don’t believe in bothering my roomers.

      After she had gone he sat on the edge of the bed and contemplated the present. He wondered how Brenda and the boys were doing. Everything had happened so suddenly that he was still numbed from the shock of finding himself alone. For the past month he had tried to bring cohesion to his thoughts, to reconstruct piece by piece the march of events that had separated him from his wife and children. There was nothing when taken alone that was responsible, but a number of little things, insignificant in themselves but adding up to something that could be called incompatibility or even outright enmity between himself and Brenda.

      Of course, there had been another woman. He smiled grimly as he thought of it. The woman was a proofreader employed in his office, a middle-aged spinster called Ivy Frobisher, a woman who meant less than nothing to him but who had served as the focal point of his wife’s irrational jealousy and hate. Once, when half drunk, he had mentioned an incident with Ivy which his wife had seized upon and used as an admission of things much worse between them.

      Since then he had wondered why he had sacrificed a position of moral and ethical strength on the altar of his wife’s silly suspicions. At the time, he had wanted to show her that he was not a captive of marriage, that he was still a man whom some other women found attractive. Somehow, in his drunken state, this had seemed an opportunity he could not forego. Brenda had seized on it as a profession of guilt, and for the next six months had not let up on her insistence that what she knew was only part of the whole.

      The whole story was much less than she believed, and was of such small consequence that now, long after it had contributed its venom to her hatred, he could scarcely credit it with breaking them up. The incident was this.

      It was a cold autumn evening, and he had returned to his office to finish an editorial he was writing. He had been surprised to find Ivy still in the office, and had walked across to her desk.

      What are you doing here, Ivy? he had asked.

      I’ve got some copy to go over, Mr. Fowler, she said. That piece about suburban school costs.

      Somehow as he looked down into her upturned face he saw her for a split second as she really was. Behind her heavy glasses and plainly handsome features she was a woman, and he had just discovered it. She saw his look, and taking off her glasses let her eyes pay naked thanks to him. He pulled her head against his chest and they remained like this for several seconds. Then, with a shudder, she rose to her feet and pulled him to her. Their mouths met in a long and trembling kiss, and her body curved itself against him.

      When they drew apart and stared into each other’s eyes he knew she would do anything he asked. But then he felt the little cautionary twinge that warned him it would probably end as all attempts at lovemaking with other women had ended over the past few years. They drew apart and faced each other from a distance that was heightened by their recent kiss.

      If things were different, if I wasn’t married … he said lamely as they drew apart.

      You don’t have to say anything, Walter, she said, turning away. It was the first time she had ever addressed him by his first name.

      He had returned to his own small office and sat there twirling a pencil in a hand that soon began to shake with feeling. Through his doorway came the sound of Ivy turning over the sheets of galley proofs. He could not rid himself of the knowledge that for one brief moment she had been his if he had wanted her, and he derided himself for his cowardice.

      The fidelity that Brenda had been unable to procure with love and affection she had succeeded in bringing about, he believed, through inducing in him a psychological block that one woman had called his misplaced moral standards. It wasn’t that; he wished it were.

      After a few minutes Ivy passed his doorway, walking as far from it as the outer office allowed.

      Good night, Mr. Fowler, she said. See you Monday.

      Good night, Ivy, he answered.

      It had been a mistake to mention it to Brenda, of course, for she had twisted it into a sordid excuse for her decision to leave him.

      The real breakup of their marriage, however, began with a visit from Brenda’s mother in the late winter. Lillian Hornsby was the kind of woman who thought that the filial devotion of children for their female parent was a one-way street, a divine right of mothers who could grandly ignore all but the ostentations of reciprocity.

      She was a short woman, shrunk in size by seventy years and by a natural inclination to camouflage herself against her background. Her voice, like everything else about her, was quiet, not through reticence or politeness but through guile. She had been taught early in life that a soft answer turneth away wrath, and since then had pitched her poisoned darts disguised as little jokes, accompanied by a short cackle of weary resignation.

      During the weeks she stayed at Walter’s house they had observed an armed truce, greeting each other with tooth-hidden scowls, generally managing to keep as far apart as the size of the bungalow would allow. Mealtimes had brought them into uneasy proximity, and Walter had choked down his food while listening to the old woman jokingly criticize the boys’ eating habits, his wife’s newfangled cooking, and his smoking at the table. From the boys he had discovered that his mother-in-law turned off their television cowboy shows and substituted children’s programs that were aimed at toddlers half their age. He had remonstrated with Brenda about this, but had been met with a half-angry Mother means well. Just don’t say anything about it.

      One afternoon, after returning home early from the office, he had sat in the living room with his sons and their grandmother and had watched a series of children’s cartoons and some nonsense involving a pair of animal-like hand puppets. Instead of concentrating on the screen he had watched the face of his mother-in-law become transformed with idiotic delight at the silliness of the cartoons. It was a sobering revelation: Lillian Hornsby was not a quiet, dignified old lady, but a simpleton to whom such television fare was high entertainment. From then on he could scarcely stand the sight of her, and he parried her purported jokes with a biting sarcasm that brought a meek lowering of her head, and shrill angry remarks from his wife.

      During supper one evening he remarked that the boys needed haircuts, and said that he would take them to the barbershop the following day.

      Brenda turned from the stove and said, Why tomorrow? You’ll have to pay adult prices on Saturday. I’ll take them down after school on Monday.

      Normally this was as far as the incident would have gone, but Mrs. Hornsby had to say, I don’t know why you don’t buy a pair of clippers and cut their hair yourself. Then with her self-satisfied little giggle she added, "My husband always cut my boys’ hair himself. You know, Walter, a penny saved is a penny earned."

      The sudden anger he felt for her was out of all proportion to what she had said, but he felt it hot the muscles on his jaws and fill the backs of his eyeballs. I don’t give a damn what Fred did! he shouted. "This is my house and these are my kids. When I was a boy I didn’t like going out with an amateur haircut, and by God these boys aren’t going to either! And don’t give me any of your moronic pap about saving pennies!"

      Walter! Brenda had cried, jumping away from the stove, her face ugly with pent-up hate and sudden anger.

      It’s all right, dear, her mother whispered, in those tones of phony forgiveness and resignation he loathed. I was only trying to help. She covered her eyes with her hand as if crying, her mouth still working on her unswallowed food.

      I’m taking you two down to the barbershop in the morning! he had shouted at the boys, who were pressed back against their chairs in fear. Then turning to his mother-in-law he said, I make a fairly good living at my job. I can afford to squander an extra couple of dollars now and then, on haircuts or anything else. What did poor Fred get from saving his pennies while he was alive? His voice rising to a shout. He got nothing! Not a godammed thing but the knowledge that he had pissed away his manhood saving his money so that you — leaning towards her — so that you could outlive your usefulness, if you ever had any, and make life miserable for everybody else!

      Brenda was also shouting, Shut up, shut up, shut up! in a long tearful monotone, but he wasn’t finished yet.

      You are everything I hate and despise in an old woman, he said calmly, his voice strangely flat and even now. "You and your dried-up kind are responsible for half the divorces and nearly all of the fears and hatreds of my generation. Under the guise of mother love, or some other high-sounding piece of platitudinous crap, your kind have corrupted all your children. Well, you’re not going to corrupt my kids. From now on they watch their cowboy programs if they want to, and not the silly baby shows which are the only ones you understand."

      When he looked around him the children had run out of the kitchen, and Brenda rushed over and placed her arm around her mother’s shoulders. Both of them were crying.

      Come on, Mother, his wife said, lifting the old woman to her feet and leading her from the room. He sat staring at his half-eaten plateful of food, still too choked with the things he hadn’t said to worry yet about the things he had.

      That night and for the week following, his wife and mother-in-law slept together in one of the boys’ bedrooms. He ate his meals near the office and did not arrive home until late in the evening when all were in bed. The drinks he had had in downtown bars raised his spirits temporarily, but soured on his awakened anger as soon as he entered his house.

      The following Friday he arrived home to find the house empty of occupants and in darkness. A curt note on the telephone table informed him that Brenda and the boys had gone West with Mrs. Hornsby. He picked it up and laughed; Brenda left more personal notes for the milkman. About three o’clock the next morning he awoke with a heavy feeling of loss and remorse, and it was only then that he began to see the emptiness that stretched before him.

      Brenda had taken the TV set, her wedding gifts, and most of the kitchen gadgets, and even a new set of drapes from the picture window. He had laughed bitterly at her instinctive choice of these symbolic possessions.

      Now, as he sat in his room in the rooming house, he recalled these things. His life with Brenda had not ended with one swift determined action, but slowly over a period of a month. He had been impatient to finish it, to escape from the bungalow, to get rid of his possessions along with his memories. But that, apparently, was not the way of such things. There had been endless negotiations about the sale of the house, furniture, and car which kept him imprisoned in the bungalow long after his use for it had ended.

      He had discovered a trait in himself that had gone unrealized up to then: that there were usable objects and possessions he would sooner destroy than give to others. There had been evenings when he had sat before the living-room fireplace and had carried on a solitary burning of books, photographs and even a few cheap paintings, in a lonely auto-da-fé of his heretical dreams for the future. When the house was finally free of all his possessions but his clothes, he had felt free himself at last, free to go back to where he had begun more than eleven years ago. It was this search for his former freedom that had sent him back into a furnished room rather than into the apartment he could well afford.

      Now he could write the novel he had been putting off for years, the autobiographical book about his youthful struggle for recognition, with his disguised self as its protagonist. Up to now he only had its title, Lead Them Through the Deep.

      Tomorrow he would bring home some paper from the office and begin the writing of it. What was the name he had thought up for the main character? Jason. Jason Simon. No, Simon was the fictional name for too many villains, and it wasn’t Anglo-Saxon enough. Jason Bancroft? No. Jason Bourne. That was a good name, Jason Bourne. He rolled it around on his tongue.

      He mentally wrote the title at the top of a fresh sheet of paper; beneath it, carefully centred, by; and, beneath that, Walter Fowler. It was a good name for a novelist — twelve letters and almost phonetic.

      Glancing at his watch he saw that it was after six. He pulled on his topcoat and left the room.

      As he crossed towards the stairs in the half darkness he became aware of a human presence, and caught a whiff of a pervasive perfume. He looked behind him just as the figure of a woman glided past and disappeared into the bathroom

      I’m sorry, he said before she disappeared. I didn’t see you.

      Without a word the woman pushed the door shut behind her, plunging the hallway into darkness. He had recognized her as the dark woman who had stared at him from the front window when he alighted from the taxi. With careful steps he felt his way down the stairs until he reached the area of light thrown by a small bulb in the downstairs hall.

      As he headed for the front door a familiar voice from behind him shouted, Going to supper, Mr. Fowler?

      He turned his head and found a doorway at the rear of the hall half-filled with the stocky figure of Mrs. Hill.

      Yes, he said. I’m going to supper.

      The early spring evening bore the smell of upturned earth and of growing things and the cars passed him with their windows open, so that he could hear brief snatches of conversation from inside them. From Bloor Street, the main east-west street two blocks to the south, came the brake-gasps of buses, the clang of streetcar bells, and the raucous noise of speeding traffic. He thought of the woman who had glided past him in the upstairs hallway and tried to revive the odour of her perfume in his mind.

      The landlady had told him the woman’s name, but he had forgotten it. It was something foreign, something Slavic. He turned the corner onto Bloor and walked in the direction of a cafeteria he remembered from his rooming-house days of a dozen years before.

      CHAPTER TWO

      After she watched the new roomer close the front doors behind him, Grace Hill returned to her kitchen and sat down at the table. Peanuts lay on the inside sill of the back window absent-mindedly washing one of her shoulders but keeping a green eye focused on the movements of some sparrows that were chasing each other through the budding leaves of a pair of lilac bushes against the fence.

      Grace watched her for a moment before she said, Peanuts, you red devil, what are you doing?

      The cat gave her an insolent glance over her shoulder and went back to her toilet, first stifling a bored yawn.

      Grace planted her slippered feet more firmly on the patterned linoleum of the kitchen floor, cupped her chin in her hands, and gave herself up to thoughts of the coming summer. This year, she decided, she would go to the Sun Lovers’ Club every weekend. Not like the year before when she had missed too many trips because of her fear of leaving the roomers alone from Saturday morning to Sunday night.

      She was going to enjoy the coming season, with its long days in the sun and the beautiful nude young men strolling above her on the grass of the sunny hillsides. It would be wonderful! Which reminded her that she hadn’t yet mailed in her application and membership fee. Here it was the second of May, with the club opening up on the first of June.

      She crossed the narrow kitchen to an old-fashioned kitchen cabinet and rummaged in a top drawer until she found a pen, a half-used package of envelopes, and the skinny remains of a writing pad. With these in her hand she once more took her chair at the table and began to write, in German, to the secretary of the club. When the application was written she pushed herself to her feet with a sigh and shuffled over to the large pantry that she had converted into her bedroom. She returned to the table and made out a cheque to the club, signing it with her maiden name, Gretchen Stauffer.

      Peanuts was now standing on the windowsill, her back slightly arched and her tail twitching, intent on something below her in the yard. Grace walked over to the window, as the cat gave her a quick nervous glance, and looked down at the lawn. A big tom tabby stared up at her with unblinking eyes. Even from that distance she could almost count his gaunt ribs which ran back from a pair of heavily muscled shoulders. She stared in fascination at his flat head with its scars from a hundred fights. The tom took his eyes from the window and moved his head slowly from side to side, taking in the lawn on both sides of him and the bushes that lined the fences.

      Grace picked up Peanuts and whispered in her ear, Is that your lover, you red devil? Eh, is that your lover? Eh?

      She trembled as she carried the cat to the kitchen door, opened it, and placed Peanuts on the floor of the back porch. The big red female tried to squeeze herself back into the house but Grace blocked her with her legs. The tomcat didn’t move but stared intently at the frantic female as she tried to regain the safety of the kitchen. Grace, with a series of gasping giggles, said, Here she is, cat. Here’s your sweetheart for the night. With a quick jump she got back inside the door, closing it behind her.

      She ran to the window and looked out. She could not see Peanuts, who was hidden from view as she pressed herself against the door, but she stared in breath-holding fascination at the tomcat who had pulled himself up to full height, his eyes on the porch and his tail slowly flicking from side to side. As he stared at Peanuts he shoved out his tongue and licked his dry lips, before glancing over his shoulder to reconnoitre the garden behind him. Then, his eyes on the female again, he took a stiff-legged forward step, then another, bringing himself closer to the steps that led up to the porch. Grace heard Peanuts backing her haunches against the door, and she laughed quietly, her eyes still on the tom. Though he had not returned her glance since his first insolent stare, Grace knew that he was aware of her presence at the window.

      She heard Peanuts give a warning mew, and the tom stopped momentarily and glanced about him carelessly before moving slowly ahead as before. The door rattled slightly as Peanuts backed herself against it, and Grace gripped the sill with both hands as she urged the tom on under her breath. He placed one scarred paw on the bottom step and his head rose like a cobra’s as he tried to stare into the eyes of the ginger female. Slowly he began his upward climb, each step a calculated movement, each movement a flowing forward of lithe rippling muscle and taut shivering ganglions, the head seeming separated from the crouching flowing body beneath.

      Peanuts gave a strange cry and hissed at him, but as if knowing that it was only female coquetry and invitation the big tom let his body flow on to the floor of the porch, where he stood in momentary indecision, showing his independence by glancing over the garden once again. Peanuts began a series of guttural cries, far different than any noises she had ever made in the house.

      Grace stared at the gaunt tomcat with a fascination that was almost mesmeric in its intensity, her fingers digging into the wood of the windowsill and her mouth hanging open. Now that she could see the tom from a distance of a few feet she was aware of the strength and maleness of him, of the sexual concentration that was apparent in his unblinking eyes and quivering haunches. As she watched he mewed piteously, making the sound of a woman in pain. He was answered by a cry from Peanuts that started deep down in her throat and rose to a hysterical pitch of quavering trills.

      Hurry up, hurry up! Grace pleaded with him. He advanced across the porch towards the female, moving himself a section at a time. His head disappeared from view behind a corner of the window, and she stared at his shivering hindquarters and his fiercely lashing tail. Both cats were now crying to each other, their voices sometimes raised in thin feline screams and at other times muted as they talked in tones of unbearable sadness. Suddenly, almost too quick to see, the tom disappeared completely in the direction of the doorway, and the door rattled on its lock as they met against it.

      Grace heard her cat give one long-drawn-out cry and then they tumbled into view, the tom gripping Peanuts around her belly with his forepaws while he searched for a tooth-hold on the back of her neck. The yellow cat was trying to drag herself toward the steps, but the full weight of the tom pressed her hindquarters to the floor. She strained with her front legs as her back legs dragged behind her elongated body, and the back legs of the tom tried to find a grip on the smooth board floor. Neither cat was crying now, their full efforts being concentrated on their straining purpose. Grace pushed herself against the windowsill until it bit into her middle through her girdle, and she clenched her teeth on her tongue.

      Suddenly from upstairs came the sound of running water, then with a swoosh and clatter the ancient toilet flushed and gurgled as it emptied noisily down the pipe that lay hidden in the wall behind the kitchen sink. The tomcat loosed his precarious grip upon the ginger female and swung his eyes toward the house, crouched now for a hasty spring away from the startling noise. Peanuts in a few quick bounds reached the fence at the north side of the garden and clawed her way to the top of it, where she stood poised for a moment surveying the yard beyond.

      With a lithe bound the tomcat reached the grass and threw himself upon the fence a split second after Peanuts had left it. In a moment both cats had disappeared into the maze of gardens, backyards, and laneways that stretched a full block between the rear of the houses on Adford and the next street, Bemiral Road.

      Grace Hill let her hands relax from the windowsill, wiped her mouth with the back of one hand, and glanced up at the ceiling.

      You crazy Russian! she shouted, knowing that it was Sophia Karpluk who had flushed the toilet. "You dirty Russian schlampe!"

      Then she collapsed on a chair, staring with unseeing eyes at the pattern of the linoleum at her feet.

      Later on she hurried into her bedroom and pulled an old shoebox from beneath her bed. She carried it into the kitchen, took a pair of scissors, a bottle of India ink, and a lettering pen from a cabinet drawer. Cutting one end off the shoebox, and using the pen and ink that had belonged to a former roomer, she began lettering a new sign for the bathroom. With tongue between teeth she wrote, dont flush toilet exept is neccesery. g. gill.

      She sat back and surveyed her handiwork. That should fix that stuck-up Russian.

      After a few minutes she heard the front door open and the creak of the stairs leading to the upper floors. It was almost seven. That would be Paul Laramée coming home from his job with the city parks department. She gazed up at the cuckoo clock above the table, waiting for the bright-painted little bird to spring through the door and make its double-voiced iteration to the movement of the earth in relation to the sun. Though she was expecting it, the sudden appearance of the bird and its noise startled her momentarily, as it always did.

      She had brought the clock with her to Canada in 1929, and through the depression and the years of her subsequent unhappy marriage to Clarence Hill she had cherished it as a tie with her family and childhood in Bad Kissingen. In 1942 she had run away from Clarence, a Montreal tool-and-die maker, and had come to this city where she had lived ever since.

      There had been rumours in the neighbourhood that a syndicate was going to buy all the houses in the block on the west side of Adford, from Berther to Lownard Avenues, and replace them with a high-rise apartment project. Her house, number 120, was spang in the middle of the block, and she had already made up her mind to sell. With the money she would take a trip to Germany to see her aging mother, then return and open a nature farm.

      There was a heavy authoritative knock on the door leading to the downstairs hall, and she recognized it as Gordon Lightfoot’s. She pushed herself to her feet, feeling a twinge of the lumbago that had been bothering her for several months. She mustn’t forget to get herself another bottle of pills on her way home tonight.

      She opened the door and faced Gordon, her longest current tenant and certainly the most drunken of any roomer in the neighbourhood. Gordon was fully dressed, a condition that had become a rarity over the past two weeks. His sparse grey hair was carefully combed, his shoes shined, and his expensive suit cleaned and pressed.

      Guten Tag, Liebchen, he said, raising a hand that held a bottle of Rhine wine. I have brought you a drink from your native country. May I come in?

      She opened the door and he walked in with the exaggerated steadiness of the very drunk. Placing the bottle on the table he sat down in her usual chair, being very careful to hitch the press of his trousers over his knees.

      Haven’t you bought a corkscrew yet? she asked him. She knew that his visit had not come about because he wanted to share his wine with her, but because he had no means of removing the cork. For a person whose alcoholic tastes were as constant and catholic as his were, the non-ownership of a corkscrew was a foolish oversight.

      You may not believe this, sweetheart, he said, but I have never owned a corkscrew.

      Though his flushed face was in repose and he seemed in a good humour, she had learned to be wary of his quick drunken changes of mood. He had frightened her half to death one time when he had first moved into the house.

      He had owed her two weeks’ rent, and she hadn’t been able to catch him out of his room for several days. He had insisted on doing his own housekeeping when he took the room, and she had not found any legitimate excuse to enter his room. However, one afternoon she had walked along the hall and knocked on his door. There was no answer, so she had repeated her knock again and again, growing angrier by the minute. Finally she had heard the bedspring grumble, his drunken fumblings for the catch on the door, and then the door was flung open and he faced her.

      Except for his necktie and shoes he was fully dressed, his coat and trousers wrinkled and stained, his shirt collar unbelievably dirty and bent, and his lint-covered socks hanging over the ends of his toes, He stared at her angrily from a face that hadn’t been shaved in days, from beneath hair that stuck up in sweat-sticky disarray. His teeth were yellow from neglect and there were salty crusts around his eyes. A big vein on each of his temples was pounding, and his face was bloated and red except for yellow-white patches on both his cheeks.

      Mr. Lightfoot! she had exclaimed in horror, stepping back from the open door.

      What do you want? he asked, his voice catching as if forced through a windpipe too small to contain it.

      I wondered — I came to see if you were all right, she said, trying to smile reassuringly but only managing a frightened grin.

      "All I

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