Joshua Then and Now by Mordecai Richler Read Free Book Online Page A

been to McGill together. If Pauline was a senator’s daughter, Jane, though her profligate father had squandered the family fortune, was not without her own cherished connections. A great-uncle had been a premier of New Brunswick. The two girls were inseparable on campus. Jane, in those days, had been the reckless leader, provoking the more naturally timorous Pauline, a loyal though resentful follower, into what passed for outrageous behavior in their set. Competition between them became fierce. So if it was Pauline who got to date Oscar Peterson, it was Jane who captivated Dylan Thomas, after he had floated on campus to read, and got to take him to Rockhead’s and, she allowed, into her bed as well. Then, if it was Pauline who absconded to Europe after the family scandal – Europe, where she was to marry a decidedly well-born but avowed Communist – it was Jane who really shook everybody up four years later. Marrying Jack Trimble, of all people. Two children, a boy and a girl, came out of their marriage: Charles and Margaret Rose. Jane remained stunningly slender, her darkly ruined air heightened, if anything, by the startling streak of gray that now ran through her raven-black hair and the casual, frankly sexy manner in which she wore her expensive clothes. In 1972, she still filled the defiant and attention-getting office of the set’s shocker. She had been the first one on the lake to read Kate Millett, subscribe to
Rolling Stone
, andsee
Deep Throat
. She was something else, the men said. But, after all, she was married to a broker. A bore. And now Pauline, her one-time acolyte, was back on the lake, and in her annoyingly quiet manner had finally outstripped her. She was married to a Jew. A prizefighter’s son. Jane didn’t care for it, not one bit.
    Ostensibly, Pauline was touched by what she understood to be her old mentor’s submission to a marriage of convenience, but her concern was tainted by satisfaction. Jane, on her side, infuriated Pauline by making it a point to be flutteringly attentive to Joshua, popping up unannounced on their lawn, inviting herself for drinks, engaging him with her sometimes malicious wit or by borrowing books that had shaped him, like Isaac Babel’s collected short stories. A book she had never returned – mislaying it somewhere, she said. Jack Trimble muddied the two women’s relationship even further. His manner with Pauline was courtly, although she shrank to see him bearing down on her, his cloying smile made all the more hideous by his recently capped teeth. Trimble’s flirting would have been tolerated by Jane, a more-than-acceptable convention – but not his deference.
    From the beginning, Jack Trimble had eschewed the less fashionable, book-reading crowd on the lake, largely academics, a retiring lot ensconced in modest cabins, and had elected to run with the country club set. He didn’t water-ski or sail, leaving that to Jane and the children, but he was an adequate golfer, and for his sake the club subscribed to
Punch
, even as he did to
Country Life
, and kept a tin of Earl Grey tea on a kitchen shelf. But Trimble didn’t understand Westmount’s progeny at play. He failed to grasp that if the Hornby cottage had perhaps the most cachet on the lake, it was precisely because its dilapidated boathouse tilted further than the others, its wraparound porch sank lower, and what was laughingly known as its powerboat was actually a leaky wooden tub, its outboard unreliable at best. Trimble, seemingly British to the core, surprisingly enjoyed display. He had torn down the drafty old Mitchell cottage with its haphazard additions, slapped on over the years as children had madethem necessary, and now presided over a mansion of his own – an architect-designed, ranch-style house, commanding more than a thousand feet of choice lake frontage, its picture windows enormous and its teak deck larger than anybody else’s, just as his tennis court was in a state of better repair, his