Somewhere in the middle of all those adventuresome weeks before Toby left town, also, he'd lost some of his habitual sense of humour. And that had made Jelena ponder the possibility of guilt in herself. Had she pushed him into becoming a Catholic too quickly? Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was a Roman. It would be terrible if he stopped being the joker he'd always been. And his ability to laugh at everything, including himself most of the time, was such a necessary counter to his capacity for getting angry. She remembered that someone had once told her that Martin Luther's real problem was that somehow he lost his sense of humour, and took his own mind too seriously.
No. It could not be her fault. He was too strong minded. Frighteningly so. That's why she had insisted she wasn't going to marry him as he was. He even frightened her mother. She hadn't admitted it, but it was true, and her mother was simply a woman not ordinarily frightened by anybody. No, Toby needed the Church to smarten him up, to take the edge, and maybe more than the edge, off his bloody ego. He simply did not see how much he owed to his Maker in his original creation, nor was he grateful enough for how much grace he had been given through others. She'd done the right thing; of that she was certain, and now she would just have to ride out the rough patches.
And there did seem to be something entirely right about this separation. She was enjoying her job with the railway, and enjoying the time to herself. She was also away from home, in a sense, because her high school friend had come from Hastings to Vancouver for the summer to work, and then UBC for the academic year, and taken an apartment in a big house in Kitsilano and then left town for a week or so and told her she could have her space just for a change. This meant she was out from under her mother's questioning over the latest with Toby, and this was good because she was certain that while Toby might be puzzling to her, his girlfriend, he was utterly beyond her mother's comprehension. He was simply beyond all her previous categories of young men. It was very nice to be free of both of them! So many books, so little time.
And then she had run into an old boy friend, the last before Toby, not as a threat to the romance of the moment - was it possible to call a relationship with Toby a romance, when it had seemed so much of a warfare? - but simply because Leonard was interested in how she was doing with Toby away. They had so plainly been inseparable companions for the last five months - sometimes in his company as well - so what was this change all about? Why had he gone away?
"Money," Jelena said. "And the offer just fell into his lap. Some old family friend from his Dad's past and present in the army. With a ride to the job thrown in. It all seemed foreordained, and Toby jumped at it."
"You didn't object?"
"The only thing I really knew is that I wouldn't mind a rest. Some time to myself so I could just think, without having to think about what I was going to say next. There's been a lot of pressure. I wouldn't have missed it for the world, of course. It's been really interesting. But it's also been like an extra university course, or maybe two. That mind of his never quits. Well, not for very long. He can be enormously peaceful and quiet for a while, and then he goes off again."
"How's his writing been going?"
"Good, he says. He's been hammering away at it. And probably still is. He took his typewriter with him."
"And his banjo?"
"Yes."
"It's odd that he should pick this summer of all summers to leave town. He's missing the festival."
"I mentioned it as often as he'd let me. But he always talked about other priorities. He's got a bee in his bonnet, I suppose, and he just has to see it through for what it's worth. Maybe he can feel so independent because he's such an artist in two fields and thinks he doesn't need anyone else's input."
"But he was really happy to get back to the campus in the fall. We talked a lot about that. He had loved the bush - nobody could have loved it more - but having another year at the university meant an enormous amount to him. Even before he met you. He was in constant flight, as far as I could see, just over academia. And being back in Vancouver, after all that talk of going to Toronto and becoming a journalist. So it's a big surprise that he can't get that excited over the festival. The line up of artists and events is bound to be more interesting than a series of university lectures."
"He was not back in law school for the sake of the lectures, and he had resolved not to go on in Arts because he didn't want any supposed authority figure interfering with his writing mind."
Leonard had chuckled. "Until he met you. He accepted you as an authority figure. He knew you were his editor almost immediately, he told me. Editor for life. If that's not an authority figure, what is?"
"Maybe he'll find someone in the North."
"Yeah, sure. The publisher of the Hog and Wheat Board Gazette. Very funny. And no way. You're the perfect editor for him. You're critical without being a cynic, like me. You'll get the best out of him. And he can write. I know he can. He does it, when he does it, because he has to. But he's not obsessed by it. He can leave it alone when he has to as well. You'll respect that in him. When his first book comes out I don't want it signed by him. It's your signature I'll want on my copy. Has he talked to you about what he's writing now?"
"Something about students and something about existential dropping out, as far as I can see. I think he's trying to prove he can do Albert Camus without having the same belief system, or lack thereof. Very funny, because I think his real heroes are his grandfathers, only he hasn't figured out how to get them into print yet. He tells such beautiful stories about his childhood. He was really very lucky in his growing up, and I know that when he gets around to it that will be a very big part of his work. But he's hugely fierce about the time and place of getting all that just right. Very, very, protective. In fact, that was the subject of our first row, I finally figured out. I was trying to make a case for literary symbols, at a time when we were talking about something from his boyhood on a Gulf Island, and he blew up! I'd never seen, or heard, I should say, anything like it! No bloody Freudian or any other kind of symbol system, etcetera, etcetera, was going to muck up his memories. And so on and so forth. We were having lunch, out of brown bags, overlooking the estuary of the Fraser. I went off to my class in Nineteenth Century literature feeling awfully bruised about the head and ears, and he went back to the Brock basement to write. Or so he thought." Jelena chuckled. "Or so he thought. Apparently, the words wouldn't come - and this was crucial because he had been doing very well at the typewriter from the Christmas season onward - so he went up to the Brock coffee shop to cool his heels and then marched across to the huts where I was just getting out from class and said I was going for coffee with him. We went to the Cafe, and it turned out that Willow and Gabriel were there, so we sat with them, and that's when he said, right in front of them, that one of these days I was going to marry him. And I said I probably would."
"And now he's decided to become a Catholic, which I couldn't do, and therefore you couldn't marry me. That's an interesting piece of history for an aspiring philosopher like myself to have in his curriculum vitae. I actually feel quite proud of having been your last serious boy friend before Tobias Skinner. I also feel he's not going to last too long in the North. You two are simply too happy together. Everybody can see that. And the summer festival is simply too important for him to miss. If he doesn't show up pretty damn quick I just might take Daddy's car and drive up there and get him."
"That's awfully good of you, I suspect, but not before I've had some time to myself. It's not you he's determined to marry."
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