Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel(19)
“Fair enough, but Jennie is a land-claims lawyer. I can recommend one or two good Ottawa defamation lawyers who might acquaint you with, ah, certain risks.”
“Oh, please, darling. I’m married to a man thrice voted by his peers to be the nation’s top counsel, so forget —”
Her room phone rang from the nearby desk.
“Sorry, Arthur, can we talk about this more tomorrow? I’m exhausted and desperate for a shower. Is everything okay out there? How are the Woofers? Never mind. Tomorrow, before evening. Love you.”
She disconnected, but the phone on the desk continued to ring. She stared at it.
UNTESTED FAITHS
“I love you too,” Arthur said into his dead receiver, wondering at that abrupt ending. Another phone had been sounding in the background — maybe she was expecting an important call. He wiggled in his hammock, trying to get comfortable again, to regain the strange serenity he’d been enjoying.
It wasn’t easy to assimilate all Margaret had told him — the rara (but prominent) avis, his ritual scourgings, the secretly copied video, the apparent buying off of a double-dealing dominatrix. The sordidness of it all. The serious implications. The rights and wrongs of exposing a cabinet minister as a practitioner of peculiar sexual practices. If it wasn’t all just some weird joke.
Arthur was eternally fretting over Margaret’s political missteps — she was, to put it gently, somewhat accident-prone, so it concerned him that she’d closed her ears to his distress signals.
It was all too imponderable to ponder right now. The curious psyche of Emil Farquist had to be put aside, grappled with in the morning with brain cells quickened by a mug of strong coffee.
He tried to regain the pleasant state of mind that had unaccountably settled over him in recent days. A fine sunset was being wasted — still at least an eight point four: a scatter of clouds pilfering the afterglow, rose-petal pink turning a blander mauve. Musical accompaniment: the mellifluous song of a Swainson’s thrush.
Arthur was amazed by his swift turnaround from old grouch to a state verging on Pollyannaism. A transformation — dare he actually use that word? Just do it. Love all things. He’d got too close to them, he’d been infected by their fairy dust. He tried to laugh at this terrible notion.
He sat up, packed his Peterson bent with his favourite mix, a mellow burley. He had taken up a pipe on quitting alcohol, and it helped to quell that old, crueller addiction. Which was nagging at him now, eroding his serene mood.
Margaret was the source of this discomfort. Her loathing for Farquist. Her access to a weapon that could either drive the Minister ignobly from politics or explode in her face. Her proneness to let fly, to throw caution to the wind, to . . . just do it.
§
Arthur had been attending Sunday service regularly of late, to bolster the crowd — out of duty more to Reverend Al than God. Today, as always, he’d taken care to dress appropriately: black oxfords, dark suit, white shirt, muted blue tie. Locals, many of whom didn’t own suits, thought him a curiosity in such attire, or at best a tourist attraction, especially when he was at the wheel of his fender-bent, dirt-streaked 1969 Fargo pickup.
He was a little late, the Fargo’s loose muffler wheezing as he chugged around the final bend to Mary’s Landing, a tiny community snuggled into a mist-thick nook with a public dock, a pebble beach, and a low-tide islet commandeered by nesting Canada geese. Its central feature was St. Mary’s Anglican, which squatted on a gentle rise, the Salish Sea to the east, the parking area to the west, and the island’s cemetery beyond it, hidden from view by big-leaf maples and weeping willows.
Arthur stepped inside, taking a back pew and noting that Al was already sermonizing but was off his game, riled and loud. Oblivious to the imperative to love thy neighbour, he was firing another bombardment against the occupiers of Starkers Cove, decrying their “brightly tinselled offerings of untested faiths” and scorning “followers of the fast-food road to enlightenment.”
Arthur picked up the sound of desperation. He counted barely twenty-five in the congregation, where on a normal Sunday there might be forty. Regulars like the Jespersons, and Brad and Barb from the gas station, had been seduced away, spending their weekends, and often evenings, receiving the communion of fast-food enlightenment. But, oddly, a woman Arthur recognized as a Transformer was also in the back row, a video camera on her lap.
Al’s florid rhetoric was causing discomfort, and many parishioners were staring out the windows at a gentler place, the placid waters off Mary’s Landing. Even Al’s ever-supportive wife, Zo?, looked ill at ease at her upright piano.
Arthur found himself distracted by riding whips and a bad boy’s buttocks, a volcanic scandal waiting to erupt, his impulsive partner unable to resist leaking this juicy scoop. He wondered if he ought to jump on a plane to Ottawa. He redoubled his effort to put it out of mind, at least until Margaret’s promised call.
Occasionally he sneaked rueful looks out the window at his Fargo with its ailing muffler. He dreaded the thought of leaving it with Bob Stonewell, self-proclaimed master mechanic. “Your off-road vehicle,” Stoney merrily called it. Because it was off the road at least four months of the year, in his repair shop.
Al finally switched themes from the scary and airy-fairy to the tried and true, the venerable Christian teachings. But he’d lost his audience, was aware of that, and was running out of steam. He finally gave up, and he and Zo? led the congregation in “Peace, Perfect Peace, in This Dark World of Sin.”