An Audience of Chairs Read online

  “What about your stage career?”

  “It’s not going anywhere right now, but later on, I’m sure it will.”

  “We’ll marry here,” Duncan said decisively, not wanting to risk a change of mind. Then, unable to hold back his news a second longer, he added, “before we go to Scotland.”

  Moranna shrieked. “Scotland! We’re going to Scotland?”

  “We are.” Using his father’s connection with the editor-in-chief of The Scotsman, Duncan had landed a job working as a stringer for the newspaper. He had received the good news the previous day. “We leave next week.”

  Deciding not to tell their families until just before they boarded the plane for Heathrow, they were married in the United Church in Huntsville and afterwards took a five-day camping honeymoon in Algonquin Park. Although she wasn’t a virgin when she married, Moranna’s first orgasm took place inside Duncan’s tent and was accompanied by the pervasive smell of mosquito repellant. The smell reminded her of the cleaner the Paines had instructed her to use when she swept the stage.

  After her husband fell asleep, Moranna lay wide awake congratulating herself on her exit from the Big Barn. What superb timing, she mused, to leave the theatre during intermission and walk away, into her future. Relishing the thought that she had left Kingsley Paine to do the gopher work, she smiled and hugged herself with delicious satisfaction convinced that by executing a perfect exit, she had embraced her destiny and was about to begin the following act.

  FIVE

  IN EDINBURGH, THE NEWLYWEDS rented a furnished flat on the third floor of a soot-stained tenement in the oldest part of the city, Auld Reekie, a name Moranna enjoyed rolling around her tongue. In addition to a bedroom and bathroom, the flat had a sitting room and a small kitchen with a view of a walled garden and beyond, the brooding Salisbury Crags. Duncan would have preferred a flat in the newer part of the city, which was cleaner and closer to The Scotsman’s office, but Moranna wanted to live in the old city where, she said, she felt close to Robert Burns.

  Soon after their arrival, she revived her schoolgirl interest in the Poet and, while Duncan was at the office, spent her time drifting through the labyrinthine lanes of Auld Reekie seeking places Burns had either visited or stayed when he became the toast of the city after the publication of the Kilmarnock poems. Moranna preferred spending her time this way rather than joining an amateur theatre group as Duncan encouraged her to do. She told him that after the ignominy of the Big Barn, she wasn’t interested in starting at the bottom of a theatrical group in which the most she could hope for was a walk-on part—with her Canadian accent she couldn’t expect a major role.

  The fact was that in Edinburgh she didn’t miss the theatre, having created a role for herself in Burns’s life that was unfolding like a play. She enjoyed acting the part of Agnes McLehose, the estranged wife of a monstrous husband, who invited herself to a tea party with the intention of meeting the Poet. Moranna imagined what she would do and say when she met the charismatic, dark-eyed Burns at the party and fell in love. Agnes was a demanding role, and as both actor and playwright, Moranna was fully occupied keeping up with the script in which she played the female lead.

  Duncan’s job was going well, and within weeks of arriving in Edinburgh, he was given a column of his own. Although most of his pieces were written in the context of a Canadian’s view on local issues, he occasionally wrote a column about international events. It was 1963, the year before Harold Wilson became prime minister, when the London papers buzzed with the scandal that forced John Profumo to resign his government post after admitting he had a sexual liaison with Christine Keeler, who was suspected of passing on state secrets to the Russians. The Cuban Missile Crisis was underway and Khrushchev and Kennedy were teetering on the edge of nuclear war. When the Cuban crisis passed, Duncan wrote a column about the arrogance of superpower leaders who were prepared to risk a Third World War. Impressed by the column, Kenneth Morrison, The Scotsman’s editor-in-chief, dispatched Duncan to London to interview Yevgeny Ivanov, the Russian assistant naval attaché who was thought to be in the thick of the Profumo–Keeler espionage affair.

  A month after Duncan and Moranna arrived in Scotland, Kenneth, whose friendship with Jim Fraser went back to their student years at St. Andrews, invited the newlyweds to a dinner party at the Waverley Hotel. Moranna had been briefly introduced to Ken, as he insisted she call him, but she had not met anyone else with whom Duncan worked. Excited by the prospect of dressing up, Moranna thought about what she would wear. The only garment she owned that came close to party attire was the white cotton dress she’d been married in, and after modelling it in front of the mirror, she decided that it was hopelessly countrified for a formal dinner party. Throwing the dress on the unmade bed, her attention was drawn to the pink satin bedspread beneath the toss of blankets. It occurred to her that a strip of pink satin cut from the bottom of the bedspread could be used as a sash for the dress. Yanking the bedspread free, she examined it closely and noticed that not only was the satin of good quality, there was enough of it to make a dress. It came to her suddenly, as all her rash ideas did, that she could make a dress from the bedspread, a dress like the one Agnes McLehose would have worn to the tea party.

  Wrapping herself in the bedspread, Moranna looked in the mirror and visualized herself wearing a low-cut pink satin dress with three-quarter sleeves and a slight bustle at the back. The satin was much too good to be used on a bed, and she had no qualms whatsoever about pinning a pattern to the bedspread and cutting it up. She made no effort to conceal the dress she was sewing by hand, but Duncan didn’t notice it, or the missing bedspread. He didn’t pay much attention to his physical surroundings and once went three days without commenting on the dreary pictures of stags and crags Moranna had turned upside down on the sitting-room walls, to see if he would notice.

  On the night of the dinner party, Duncan came home from work and catching sight of his wife resplendent in the floor-length dress, hair swept to the back of her head with pink glass combs, he kissed her at once and told her she looked ravishing. Then he held her at arm’s length and asked if she had rented the gown—he assumed it had come from a costume shop.

  “I made it especially to wear tonight.”

  “You’ve done a first-rate job,” he said admiringly. “Obviously, sewing is another of my bride’s talents.”

  She laughed, delighted as always to be called his bride because it revealed his appreciation for the fact that she had chosen to become his wife—he must never forget, even for a second, that instead of marrying him she could have pursued a successful stage career.

  “It’s the kind of dress Agnes McLehose would wear.”

  Duncan had never heard of Agnes, and when his wife explained that she had been one of Burns’s women, he was about to remind her that the evening wasn’t a masquerade but thought the better of it. The gown was smashing and showed off Moranna’s figure to perfection. Who cared if she was overdressed?

  When they arrived at the Waverley, the seven other dinner guests—all of them considerably older and conservatively dressed—greeted them cordially and although the men stared at Moranna’s décolletage, they said not a word. Ken had seated her on his right, opposite Duncan, and when the meal was underway he invited her to tell him about herself. She rattled on about her father’s grocery store, her stage career at Acadia and how Duncan and she met. Each time she emptied her wine glass, Ken filled it, and encouraged by his interest, she told him that her mother had died in Scotland.

  “Where did she die?” the woman at the end of the table inquired. Stocky and white-haired, she had been introduced as Ken’s wife, Shonagh.

  “She drowned in the Minch,” Moranna said. Her father had provided this information in his last letter, which may have been why it came so easily to mind.

  “Dear me,” Shonagh said, “How awful.” There was a murmur of sympathy around the table.

  “She wasn’t a strong swimmer,” Moranna volunteered, “whi
ch is why my father gave me swimming lessons at an early age.”

  She might have continued if Shonagh hadn’t begun talking about the weather. Beneath the table Duncan nudged Moranna’s foot, and assuming it was in his way, she obligingly moved hers. She was enjoying herself so much that it didn’t occur to her that the nudge meant something else, and it wasn’t until they were walking home through the chilly night and Moranna told Duncan he was holding her arm too tightly that he became unpleasant. “That’s so you won’t fall flat on your face,” he said. “The next time we’re invited out, drink less and don’t take over the conversation. I didn’t think you’d ever shut up.”

  That was unfair. Hadn’t she spent days making a dress to wear at the dinner? Hadn’t she made conversation with his editor-in-chief? Had Duncan expected her to sit at the table in silence? As soon as they were in the flat he poured himself a glass of whisky and carried it into the bedroom. Soon he was back, standing in the sitting-room doorway.

  “Where is the bedspread?”

  “I’m wearing it.”

  “Holy Christ, Moranna,” he said. “Have you completely lost your mind? Did it occur to you that the bedspread didn’t belong to you?”

  “I’ll buy another,” Moranna said dismissively. “The satin was entirely unsuitable for the bed.”

  Duncan withdrew, shaking his head in exasperation. “I’ll buy another,” she’d said as if they had money to throw around. Tomorrow night they would have to talk about money and he would remind Moranna once again that they had to live within their means. Mindful of his meagre salary, his parents had offered to help out, and although he didn’t mind accepting their gifts, he refused to accept a penny of their money.

  Flushed from the party and the wine, Moranna was too excited and agitated to go to bed and stayed up late pacing the floor, stopping to rearrange the pillows on the settee before suddenly deciding that she would write a letter. Not an ordinary letter to her father and Edwina—she avoided writing ordinary letters—but an extraordinary letter in which she could truly express herself. She first thought of writing Agnes McLehose since she was wearing Agnes’s dress and had lately been pretending to be her, but then she realized she didn’t want to pour her heart out to a Calvinist who was forever haranguing Burns for trying to move their lovemaking below the waist. What was the point of writing to a prudish coquette who insisted that she and Burns correspond using the pastoral pseudonyms Clarinda and Sylvester. No, the person she wanted to write to wasn’t Agnes but the Poet himself. It was he she wanted for a confidante and friend. It didn’t matter that the letter to him couldn’t be posted, for it was not so much a letter as it was a true meeting of minds that crossed the years. Dipping the nibbed pen into the bottle of ink she’d found inside the rosewood writing table, Moranna began her first letter to Burns.

  Dear Robert,

  You may think I’m drunk and I probably am. I haven’t had much experience drinking. I never had a glass of wine until I met my husband. I don’t know how many glasses of wine I drank tonight. Quite a few, and now I am drinking whisky. My husband is furious with me and has gone to bed alone.

  I know you weren’t the drinker people thought you were and that you were often misunderstood. My husband has seriously misunderstood me tonight and I know you will understand how I feel. I went to a lot of trouble making a gown like your friend, Agnes, alias Clarinda, would have worn. It must have been hard for you to maintain a platonic relationship with a woman as fair as Agnes—sonsie is the word I believe you would use to describe her. By the way, although Agnes is shorter than me and her hair is reddish blond, I am equally as fair. You are a handsome man, Rob, your blazing eyes especially draw me in. If you were here with me now, I would make love with you in a flash. I am sure that if we had become acquainted, you would have written Ae Fond Kiss for me rather than Agnes.

  Did you ever go to bed angry at your wife? Did she ever go to bed angry at you when you came home after being intimate with the women I’ve been reading about: Agnes, May, Jenny, etc.?

  I’m not angry at you, Robert, but then you’re not my husband. It’s a pity you aren’t here now because if you were, you could lick my wounds.

  Admiringly yours, Moranna

  In November, Duncan was dispatched to Tutzing in southern Germany to cover a week-long conference of economists who would be discussing the impact of various partnerships, political and otherwise, on the future of Europe. It was the longest stretch of time he and Moranna would be apart since they married, and after he left for the airport, she went to bed. The weather was a dank, smudgy grey and the wind blowing off the Firth brought wintery rain and sleet. The flat was cold, and as she lay in bed trying to stay warm, she saw no reason why she should get up. Moranna often mistook self-absorption for independence and was unaware that without her husband she had lost her sense of direction. Without Duncan close by to remind her why she had put her career plans aside, she felt her talent and ambition leaking away until she was nothing more than an empty vessel.

  For two days her mind was hidden behind a curtain of stagnant mist that hung all the way down to the ground, blanking out the paltry amount of light eking through the window. As with many of her early depressions, she didn’t know how to shake off the darkness and lay in limbo until the third morning when she emerged from the fog into a sunlit clearing and saw Robert Burns standing at the foot of her bed with one leg slightly in front of the other, arms akimbo, as if he were waiting for her. Dressed in a brown vest and leggings and knee-high boots, he cut a dashing and romantic figure and Moranna lay for some time admiring him before she realized that he was expecting her to write him another letter. Throwing back the covers and putting on her bathrobe and slippers, she padded into the sitting room and sat at the writing table.

  Dear Rob, (Now that I have broken the ice, I hope I may call you Rob.)

  I want to thank you for coming into my bedroom just now and leading me out of an oppressive fog. I know that like me you suffer from inexplicable bouts of melancholia that appear without warning and for days drain you of vital energy. Although severe bouts don’t happen to me every day, it is discouraging when one occurs and I drop out of life, so to speak.

  On reflection, I think the bouts are the price we pay for being so fully engaged in living. We have a huge appetite for life, Rob, and want more of it than we can digest. Do you ever feel, as I do, that you have swallowed the world and that it beats inside you like an enormous round heart? We are so finely tuned to being alive, Rob, that our hearts sometimes cannot bear the weight. Wouldn’t you agree that this is often the case with talented, clever people? I want you to know that I appreciate your understanding and support.

  Gratefully yours, Moranna

  P. S. Another thing we have in common is our musical genius and perfect pitch.

  Writing Burns revived Moranna’s spirit of adventure and she decided to go on a pilgrimage and visit both the place where Burns was born and where he died. If Duncan could go off on assignment, then so could she, using her father’s gift—she still hadn’t cashed the bank draft he had sent as a wedding present.

  Her first stop after Glasgow, where she spent two days poring over Burns memorabilia, was Alloway. By the time she reached the auld clay biggin, she was dismayed to find that it was locked for the night and she had to content herself with peering through the cottage window to see the corner box bed where Burns was born. From here, she made her way to the churchyard and sat on a fallen headstone to read Tam O’Shanter. While she was reciting the poem, a middle-aged woman trudged past muttering to the Almighty to spare her from any more tourists bent on crucifying the poetry of Burns.

  By late Thursday afternoon, Moranna was on her way to the house where Burns died, a rectangular sandstone house in Dumfries. At that time of day she knew there would be other admirers of the Poet inside who would distract the custodian, allowing her to make a careful examination of the house without interference. Burns had died at five o’clock in the morning and she was d
etermined to be lying on his bed at that hour. While the custodian, a silver-haired, military-looking man, guided a clutch of visitors upstairs, she hovered inside the room to one side of the entryway where Burns died, checking the windows, which were tightly secured, foiling her plan to climb through one of them later on. On impulse she lifted the counterpane and noticed that the bed, which was against the wall, was several inches above the floor, and that if she squeezed beneath it and wriggled to the middle, she would be hidden by the counterpane. While the custodian was still upstairs, she eased herself beneath the bed and waited, listening to the footfall of people walking past. After what seemed a long time but was less than an hour, the custodian closed up the house and left. Worming her way from beneath the bed, Moranna crawled across the floor and leaned against the wall to eat a sandwich. When it was dark enough for her to stand and move about without being seen through the windows, she prowled through the house, stroking the table, the mantle, the bedpost, wanting to touch every surface Burns had touched. Afterwards she sat in Burns’s writing chair until she became sleepy and moved to the bed.

  When she woke in the morning, the caretaker was standing over her like a grumpy bear. “Are ye sae daft ye dinna knaw ye canna lie here? Awae wi ye!” The woman’s Scots was so broad that Moranna couldn’t understand what she said, but she understood when the woman flapped her hands and screeched, “Oot! Oot!” Moranna leapt off the bed and was out of the house and running up the street before the caretaker poked her head outside to see which direction Goldilocks had taken. Returning to her bed and breakfast, she packed her few belongings and took the bus to Glasgow, where she caught the Edinburgh train, arriving at the flat that evening about nine o’clock. To her surprise, Duncan was already there. Thrilled that they had both returned from their assignments and were again together, she approached him for a kiss and was rebuffed.