Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel(8)

Skirting by his sheep pasture, Arthur could make out the lights from Blunder Bay’s two sturdy gingerbread houses. The larger one was home. The smaller, older one was where Niko and Yoki slept, ate, and played incessant computer games. It used to be Margaret’s, but their two farms were now consolidated into forty waterfront acres.

There’d been nibbles enough at the birthday extravaganza, so they skipped dinner, took turns in the shower, prepped for bed. This would be his last night with Margaret for the unforeseeable future, and a last desperate chance to make up for his tepid efforts at love-making — there had been bouts of impotence. “Let’s just cuddle,” she would say, letting him off the hook. But even as they cuddled, he was tormented by thoughts of her similarly entwined with Lloyd Chalmers.

Three times, she’d said. Only three times. It was over. Finito. A fling, no more. She’d been in a weak state, overburdened. She’d just needed a reprieve, a moment or two with, as she put it, “somebody with a sunny outlook.” An outlook sunnier than Arthur’s, she meant.





THE CHIEF WHIP

The daily order of business droned on: routine proceedings and government bills. The House barely had a quorum, but Margaret Blake was there, at her front-row desk, polishing her shot at the environment minister, Emil Farquist. She had fled the turmoil of her staff room for the somnolence of the Commons to rework it. It was a rare day that she got a turn during Question Period, and she intended to aim her bullet at where the minister’s heart would be if he had one.

The Coast Mountains Pipeline, that was the issue that vexed Farquist the most. He didn’t have the numbers. A poorly funded consortium was behind the project, its directors chummy with the government, and it would be a rush job, cutting an ugly scar across forest and park land and causing predictable spills. The pipeline had recently been given the blessing of the National Energy Board, composed of Conservative puppets. But several Western Tories were opposed, apparently unwhippable, and if they abstained, the pipeline bill would fail.

Here he was now, her bête noire, Emil Farquist, wandering into the Chamber, stopping to confer with several of his backbench vassals. As Government Whip, he was the shepherd to his flock, summoning them for crucial votes, assigning them slots for questions and speeches. This hatchet man for the Prime Minister was former head of a supposed think tank, the Bow River Institute. He was was nearly fifty years old, still unmarried, robust, quick-witted, conniving, on TV a lot.

A right-wing economist as environment minister!

To top it off, Farquist was a quasi-denier, a member of the jury-is-still-out school. If climate change is real, he’d said, let’s regard it not as a crisis but a challenge. Free enterprise will find a way.

He was also often the go-to guy when Winthrop Fowler — Win, as the cold, soulless, secrecy-obsessed PM preferred to be called — was away from the House, as he would be today. Win was in Washington, selling out more bits of Canada, breaking bread with the nutbars in Congress.

Margaret returned to her task, altered a few words, but remained uncertain how to best frame her question. She was not good at staying on script. Maybe she should just play it by ear. Over-prepared challenges from party leaders lacked zip, intensity.

She was bothered by an unease that had stayed with her after last evening’s board meeting of the Climate Action Network, where she’d sat across a table from Lloyd Chalmers. Had she known he was on the board, she would have found an excuse not to show up. She’d barely been able to look at him, found herself repelled by his crinkly, knowing grin. But he’d played along with her pretence that they were . . . what? Casual friends, nodding acquaintances? Ottawa was a cauldron of gossip but somehow, miraculously, no one seemed to know they’d had a fling, as she preferred to call it. No one but her husband.

Why, oh, why, had she told Arthur about it? What had got into her? Some kind of ghastly, guilt-induced purging. Fed by her belief that a marriage with secrets might not survive.

Only three times, she’d told him, as if that would make him feel better. Actually, there’d been five.

And Arthur was so hurt. She feared his love had died a little.

Margaret had no easy explanation for her misbehaviour. Yes, Arthur was better at cuddling than consummation — and there were the long separations, the loneliness, a physical yearning that in the end she couldn’t suppress. Add to that a mild resentment that his distaste for politics, and for Ottawa, meant he was rarely at her side when the going got rough. But also she’d felt a little smothered by him, all his worrying and fussing and, lately, the cynicism, the crankiness. But she still loved him; she shouldn’t have to convince herself of that.

That love hadn’t happened instantly — the death of her first husband in his prime had still been fresh when Arthur first intimated his feelings, and she had gently put him off. But he was attractive, as older men can be, with his craggy, handsome face, his lanky frame. However, it was not just that, and not his celebrity as a lawyer, that finally impelled her toward him, but his humanity, his kindness, civility — and his awkwardness, his realness. She still warmed at the memory of the night he pronounced his love, so clumsily, with his ragged bouquet of garden flowers.

Then she’d betrayed him by sleeping with Lloyd Chalmers. She’d been disgusted with herself when, as the meeting broke up last evening, Chalmers took her hand in both of his. Her left hand, with the wedding ring. The ring she’d slipped off, sleazily, before their trysts.