Trial of Passion Page 3

  I’m actually a fairly regular bloke for a rapist. I shoot pool, better at billiards. Still play a little old boys’ rugby. I drink beer with the students.

  And I go out with single women. This, of course, will be painted as the crime of the century when I’m on the witness stand. There must be something abnormal about a chap who’s been a bachelor all his thirty-eight years. The jury will be thinking:This character can’t form lasting relationships. Let’s see, he’s not gay, so he must be some other kind of pervert.

  Let me get under way. I’ll go straight to the bone. Pardon the expression. Gowan, I was so drunk I couldn’t have got it up with a tow truck. Can you call expert evidence about that? She was drunk. And how does that play out? Now, witness, you say she was passed out on your couch. Yes, she was. And do you deny you gave into your animal instincts and became a lusting beast and had your will of this innocent young creature?

  Why had she painted herself red? The colour of blood — some pagan ritual while I slept?

  I taught Kimberley Martin for a time this year, as you know. She’s twenty-three, middle-class, but rising: about to be married into excessive wealth. She’s in second year, and a rather — please don’t think I’d ever be unkind to Kimberley — less than brilliant student. She scrimped by first year. She’s by no means dull-witted, but she seems to have a lot of different things on the go. The Drama Society, for one. Watch out for the stage tears.

  I’m not going to pretend she was just one of that sea of shining faces sitting in the lecture hall. She is not cosmetically disadvantaged. She’s a traffic-stopper, and you’d have to have a terminal case of myopia not to notice. Long ringlets of crimped russet hair, always brushing it away from those big, green, innocent eyes. Wide, pouty lips. Tall. Graceful. Self-assured. Hip. And engaged. To a handsome tycoon.

  You know how students will try to avoid catching your eye for fear they will be asked to discuss, say, the rule against perpetuities. Not Kimberley. She always gave me the full frontal look. She didn’t know an answer one time, so she told a joke instead. It was funny, we laughed. I liked her then.

  I started getting the impression she was coming on to me. It may be she uses her looks as a tool — perhaps she thought she could charm her way to a passing grade in Property 11. She started hanging about after lectures, wanting me to explain some obscure rule or other. The kind of woman who touches as she talks — delicately, always with two fingertips. Heavy eye contact and lots of come-hither erotic nuances. In the meantime, I was trying to appear hopelessly professorial.

  Then, with odd regularity, I started to bump into her on the campus. Between classes. On the grounds. In the cafeteria. Oh, would you mind if I brought my coffee over? Not at all, said the fly to the spider. There was also a visit to my office in mid-November. She wanted some career advice; she was interested in family law. She carried on about how her betrothed wanted babies; she wanted a career.

  And I’m about to lose mine. I love my work. I’m popular with the students. I’m a good teacher, Gowan. I was.

  And here I am spending New Year’s Eve by my fucking self in my fucking den. I didn’t accept any invitations, to everyone’s vast relief. It spoils the party when someone’s pinging off the walls.

  Gowan, can’t anyone talk to Arthur Beauchamp again? I mean, no reflection upon you, you understand that. Can I talk to him? Where is he being hidden?

  The pillared courts of the Roman magistrates become an arena where the Emperor looks down upon my nakedness, and Annabelle is the queen beside him, crying shame. Guilty, I repeat. I am guilty. A loud rapping snaps me awake from this recurring eunuch’s dream, and I struggle to my feet and bump into a wall where there should be a door. And I realize I am not at home. Where am I? Are those birds I hear, and the lapping of waves? And this brilliant beam that pours through these dusty second-floor windows, could that be sunlight?

  I am at home.

  The rapping again, urgent, a shivaree of noise coming not from downstairs but from above. As I shamble to the window, I see the perpetrator, a flicker that takes flight from my shingled roof. The view outside makes me dizzy. Rosy-fingered Aurora has flung wide the gates of morn. Mists float above the pasture where three mule deer graze, like society matrons at a buffet table, daintily sampling a little of everything, grass and bush, and tree leaf. To better view this Turneresque scene, I throw apart the French windows, but in the fury of my rapture they bang against the wall, and the deer prick up their ears and look this way and that, then all three bound on springy legs into the forest.

  I breathe deeply the sweet-smelling air of the country, then turn to my bathroom for my morning ablutions. The fellow who greets me in the mirror has tousled silver hair of a fullness that belies his years. Hazel, heavy-lidded eyes, glazed with sleep — one of them occasionally chooses a slightly different route from its brother. A nose too straight, too patrician (let us not bandy words: a beak). Hiding in its shadow, and not hiding well, an unwanted corpulence of form. I will immediately begin a diet.

  Stoney does not show up this morning as promised, and I tire of waiting. A slave to habit, I cannot sit down for the first coffee of the day without a newspaper, so I walk the two miles to the general store, arriving there distressingly short of breath. The store is a dowdy establishment run by a laconic older gentleman with rheumy eyes: Abraham Makepeace, who informs me he is also the island postmaster.

  “Mr. Beauchamp, eh? You’re the one bought the old Ashcroft place. Postcard here from your real estate lady thanking you for your business and hoping you’ll enjoy living here.”

  He reaches into a drawer and hands the card to me so that I may read it for myself.

  “Do you have this morning’s Globe?”

  “We don’t get that here”

  “I see. Do you have any newspapers?”

  “Didn’t come in today. This here’s the Island Echo. Comes out twice a month.”

  Tribulations must be borne on Garibaldi Island, but I shall survive them with equanimity. Back home in my club chair, instant coffee instantly at hand, I fold open the Island Echo and read about the recent lovely tea at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Rosekeeper of East Shore Road. Aha — cream puffs were served. And many compliments were “handed around” about the tasty mulled wine punch. An anomalous concluding sentence: “George Rimbold, returning from the function, skidded off the road, and is recuperating at home.”

  I note elsewhere the confusing news of another signal event: “Badly missed by all islanders will be the Ashcroft family. Having recently moved off the island, their farm has been bought by a prominent and well-known lawyer from Vancouver, Mr. A. Beauchamp.”

  Ah, yes, not merely prominent but well-known, this impotent pillar of the community: the right clubs, the right people, the right wing. How exhilarating was the social and political whirl. It will be unbearably taxing to adjust to life outside a crowded elevator I spend my first week on Garibaldi learning such skills as were failed to be taught in the abysmal private schools of my youth — the hewing of wood, the drawing of water, the turning of soil for my garden, the setting of traps for the mice that have generously allowed me to share their abode.

  As I settle in to my angulus terrarum, my quiet, gentle corner of the world, I still feel a sense of displacement, of being a stranger in a strange land. It will take a time to adapt from the comforting sounds of night I am used to: the haunting, lonely wail of sirens, jet engines in the sky, the distant screech of brakes, the city’s ceaseless, hungry hum. Instead I must endure an annoying swish of waves upon my beach, the incessant gossiping of the little green frogs that inhabit my pond, the cold-hearted inquiries of the distant hunter owl. I awake not to the alarums of a garbage truck in an alley but to the impolite nagging of song sparrows trilling their tunes of the unfolding spring. Ah, but I will overcome these frowns of fortune. Nil desperandum. I will prevail.

  The weather remains inconstant. Though close to Vancouver — a thirty-minute flight by float plane — I am in a d
rier climate zone: the clouds shun us, preferring to huddle against the mountain ranges that guard Vancouver to the north. Often I see clouds forming the rim of a great hat above the Gulf Islands, but the hat is topless, the scalp bare to the radiance of that busy old fool Donne complained of: unruly Sun. Why dost thou thus, through windows and through curtains call on us?

  But of late he cometh not. Today I have deserted my muddy garden and I remain indoors while murky clouds from the Pacific Ocean send wet warnings about the state of disrepair of my house, tiny puddles that collect upon my floor. I may wish to recruit Stoney to do some roof repairs as well, but, alas, Stoney continues not to show up, as regular as clockwork, on each succeeding morning. I am beginning to despair not only for him but for the two hundred dollars I advanced for materials.

  More businesslike are the two young women from a firm known as Mop’n’Chop, which advertises in the Island Echo. Janey Rose-keeper and her partner, Ginger Jones, announce on arrival that they clean houses, cut wood, do yardwork, and, “like, you name it.”

  “Ah, yes,” I tell Janey, “you must be of the Rosekeepers of East Shore Road. I heard you had a splendid tea.”

  “My parents did, yeah. Turned into a major drunkathon, actually.”

  Doubtless this is the cause of hapless Mr. Rimbold driving off the road.

  The two lasses, buxom both and glowing with country health, spend two days spring cleaning my house whilst gossiping about who is “doing it” with whom on the island. To hear them, this community would seem a snakepit of sin. Not only does everyone know each other, everyone apparently copulates with each other. Each spring, I am told, after a hard winter of increasingly cheerless fidelity, there occurs a mass migration to new beds. Most active in that regard is the manager of the marina, a woman of apparently insatiable sexual thirst. I am warned to stay away from her.

  As the days pass I develop routines. I walk each morning to the general store where I pick up my mail and pretend to buy a newspaper, then return to sip my coffee over a back issue of the Echo.(Mop ‘n’Chop has found a box of these in the basement crawl space.) I develop a curious fondness for the prose of one Nelson Forbish, publisher, editor, and, it would seem from the bylines, sole reporter for this worthy gazette. “Recuperating at home is George Rimbold, who tried to jump through a plate window at The Brig dressed as a frog.” Sadly, that tantalizing item is not developed to its potential. Who is this frogman Rimbold?

  Militant Margaret Blake seems to be in every issue, a news item here, a letter to the editor there, mostly about that intrusion of the corrupting city, the Evergreen Estates subdivision. Aloof, distrusting, she has yet to pay a visit, though her house is only a hundred yards away. Often I glimpse her near it, busy as a whirlwind with her many chores.

  I have given up on that fellow Stoney, who has been most visibly absent of late. One would expect to bump into him at one of the various centres of commerce on this island, but no.

  My daughter telephones me on alternate evenings, surprised to find me still alive, chatting with the strained merriment of someone seeking to uplift the weary and the downtrodden. Why must she assume I am so unhappy?

  Annabelle phones, too, full of spirited gossip about the city, her work, her current production of that weepy potboiler La Bohème. She is much in demand, it appears, and has contracted to be artistic director of a summer production of Götterdämmerung in Seattle. She has not visited yet because, she explains, she wants me to develop my “space,” a concept I find confusing. I enjoy these calls, but afterwards feel unsettled, my mind too full of her.

  She says she will try to get over soon, but I worry that her visit will be awkward — she is of a certain refined taste, and I will be embarrassed for my island, lacking as it does in art galleries, concert halls, and Shakespeare festivals.

  Dear Annabelle, how I miss you, love you, fear you. Be strong, Beauchamp. Be of metal.

  Boy, I feel a little worn today. How much wine did we have to drink? Hello there, Patricia Blueman, it’s me, the victim — oops, alleged victim of the alleged sexual assault. I hope this is what you want: a full, unblemished account of the perils of Kimberley, dictated onto cassette during a few quiet moments of reflection.

  So where I’m at right now is my parents’ cabin on Grouse Mountain. They’ve owned it for years, from back when there was only one mostly broken-down old chairlift up here. Now Grouse is a full-blown destination resort, all skyrides, bright lights, and Japanese tourists. Still lots of white stuff, even though it’s the middle of March, and I have my skis and my season’s pass. Some advice for the lovelorn: You should take up skiing, Patricia, as there are lots of single men here. Brainless jocks, but what the hell.

  Am I ever glad you’re on the case. Until we met, I’d been wondering, like, what’s going on, is anybody out there in charge? I mean, God, I had a couple of interviews with some grinning jackals in plain-clothes who drove away in tears. They were laughing so hard. They never even took a written statement. Couple of morons who couldn’t investigate their own flat feet. And then nothing, until out of the blue you called me last week. Now I have a prosecutor. Things are looking up.

  Frankly, Patricia, when I first came to your office, I thought you were sort of, um, you know, formal. I thought, okay, Patricia Blueman, barrister, here’s a real stiff lady, no sense of humour. But you really loosened up over lunch, and then last night . . . gee, you were funny. I still laugh when I think of your imitations of all those old-fart lawyers.

  Anyway, I think we sort of bonded — are women still allowed to do that, or is it reserved only for men? — and I feel I can finally purge myself of the whole mess.

  Though it will be hard to talk about. . . .

  This joint is heated by a funky old pot-bellied stove, which I have roaring pretty good — it’s a clear, brittle night, and icicles hang from my eaves like Christmas ornaments. Vancouver looks so majestic, spread like a magic carpet below me, its lights like stars, a galaxy.

  Puts me in a sort of mood . . . I hope I can study here. Six days of hell coming up: final exams. Why, oh, why did they set the preliminary hearing so close to exam time? I’m going to be frazzled when I take the stand.

  Sorry, I’m all over the lot here. You wanted some background. Okay, I’m in my second year studying to be a lawyer, and otherwise I’m normal — a happy, healthy, wholesome twenty-three-year-old Canadian woman who loves her father and mother and kid sister, and happens to be seeing a shrink. I told you about that. Dr. Kropinski — he’s helping me work through the awful nightmares I’ve been having. Our secret, okay? That smarmy defence lawyer — what’s his name, Hatchet, Cleaver — he’ll use it in court. Claim I dreamed it all. Religion: Catholic, though I’m sort of lapsed. I wear that cross-on-a-pendant to keep the folks happy. My dad’s a mining engineer with the Goose Bay Copper Corp. — that’s a division of the Brown Group — and they live away out in Labrador now.

  It’s through Dad I met my fiancé, who is actually his boss, full name Clarence de Remy Brown, and I call him Remy — he’s a brawny, brusque businessman, a sort of constantly on-the-go kind of guy. I like him because he’s not spoiled, he’s his own man. No, I am not marrying him for his money, though I know somehow that’s going to come up in the trial. I’m sort of living with him, but not full time — you saw my hovel in Kitsilano. This is partly because his parents are strictly from the seventeenth century, but also because I need my own space. Remy isn’t exactly on the cutting edge of contemporary thought, either. But he’s, you know, secure. And he loves me. And I love him.

  So what else? I like skiing, sailing, Chinese food, and going to the movies. Yikes, this is starting to sound like a high-school yearbook. Or maybe an ad in the personals column. Wishes to meet movie star with sense of humour. My extracurricular thing: amateur stage. Played Saint Joan this year. Yes, deah, it’s Sarah Bernhardt here. Otherwise, I go to classes five mornings a week. I’m not one of the wonks — I don’t spend all my afternoons in the library. I get my passin
g grades. Most of the time.

  All right, which brings us to the subject of a certain, um, fringe-oid representative of the opposite gender, Professor Jonathan O’Donnell. He was — past tense — teaching me advanced property this year. Because of what everyone calls The Incident, he had to turn the class over to a loutish woman who picks her nose when she thinks we’re not looking. I’d rather have O’Donnell. Stare at him. Make him uncomfortable.

  Did you know his father is some kind of British noble? Baron or duke, or some big deal like that. Pal of Margaret Thatcher, so you can see where Jonathan gets his right-winginess. He’s an incredible teacher, I give him that. He could get you interested in the most awfully boring things. Brilliant, I guess. You see him on the tube on the après-news shows, reaming the Supreme Court for being too liberal. And I’m not going to pretend he’s some ugly-looking troll. He’s not, you know, what you’d call pretty— sort of ravaged-looking. He has this dark, moody thing — sort of like Remy, actually. Something vaguely dissolute about him — those deep lines on his face? Anyway, he started giving me the eye in the lecture room. I was a little flattered, I guess. I’m human.

  The downside of all this was he always seemed to be picking on me, you know, like, Ms. Martin, please give me the ratio of Engelbert versus Humperdinck. I felt like some kind of special-needs kid. Give that poor girl extra attention.

  And then he got so he would ask me to stay a few minutes after class on the pretext of talking about my work. I’d be all prim and proper, giving him the message as bluntly as I could, but I don’t know — was he getting it?

  Then once he asked me into his office to advise me on quote career paths unquote. Which he hardly talked about at all. Personal stuff, instead, what I liked to do in my spare time and that sort of thing. Oh, gee, let’s see, I like skiing, sailing, and going to the movies. Kimberley Martin is this year’s Miss Conviviality and she wants to be a lawyer when she grows up. I have something awful to admit. I was a cheerleader in high school. Hope that doesn’t come out.