Joshua Then and Now by Mordecai Richler Read Free Book Online

doors, and right into the bar? It wasn’t an MG , it was an Austin-Healey. It was an MG , I was there.
    At the mention of Kevin’s name, Joshua noticed that the women would peer into their drinks and the men grin sheepishly at him, as if he knew, he understood. What he did know was that Pauline, bristling, changed the subject whenever Kevin’s name came up. Her name and Kevin’s were entwined on a tennis trophy that was kept in a glass case in the clubhouse: Mixed Doubles Champions, Eastern Quebec Region, 1952. Kevin, whom Joshua had yet to meet, was her younger brother, the family black sheep. He had dropped out of McGill law school right in the middle of his final exams. For some years now he had been rooted in Bermuda, where he ran a fishing boat.
    Late one evening the following March, the kids looking pasty, Pauline also in need of some sun, Joshua suggested a holiday. “What about Bermuda?”
    No, she said, looking directly at him. “My father used to take us there every winter. I’m not going back.”
    On a blowy afternoon only two weeks later, drinking in the Maritime Bar at the Ritz-Carlton, he looked up to see a portly man in a beaver coat standing at his table, smiling tentatively down at him, as if he expected to be dismissed. The face was not one of those slack, disappointed, boozy faces he immediately associated with the golf and country club. It was jowly, the small eyes hard, the mouth surprisingly sensual. A cupid’s mouth. Jack Trimble.
    By this time Joshua knew that Trimble, a good ten years older than the others in the country club set, had served in World War II – not in the RCN or the RCAF , as the others would have, but in the army ordnance corps, a captain when he was demobilized in England. He went on from there to become something in the City, first with Warburg’s and then with Lloyd’s, before he appeared in Montreal in the early fifties, fond of saying, “I’ve seen the future, and it doesn’t work.” He didn’t fancy Attlee’s welfare state and he particularly disliked Sir Stafford Cripps, whom he pronounced absolutely bonkers. On the other hand, Trimble made no attempt to conceal what he described as his own humble but genteel origins, striking just the right note. “We weren’t exactly tinkers over there, you know. Or on the dole. My father was with the L.C.C. A building inspector.”
    To begin with, Trimble settled into a modest basement flat on Tupper Street, joining the brokerage firm of McKay, Pitman & Routledge, where he complained loudly about the unhealthiness of central heating and turned up at the office in shirts with detachable collars and, of course, with a furled umbrella. He was not liked. He was considered calculating. A striver. He had bad breath. He suffered from dandruff. Nobody invited him to lunch at the Café Martin or took him to a hockey game. But he was soon taken very seriously indeed. Trimble turned out to be most astute, his rise to a junior partnership breathtakingly swift. He had only been in Montreal for seven years when he acquired his own seat on the stock exchange, as well as a reputation for having the Midas touch. He was also, in principle, a most desirable bachelor, with what he called a “flat” in theChâteau, then the most exclusive apartment building in town. But his appeal was largely confined to Westmount’s matrons, never their most glittering progeny. He was not an amusing man, jowly even then, his brown hair thin, his flesh pink and flaky. Then he met the dashing Jane Mitchell at a cocktail party at the British Trade Commissioner’s residence and, to everyone’s amazement, they were married six months later. Trimble’s associates were surprised because Jane Mitchell had no money, not any more, and Pauline, when she heard about the marriage, was taken aback because the Trimble she dimly remembered had seemed such a stodgy man, middle-aged before his time, certainly too dull for a girl as sassy as Jane.
    Jane and Pauline had