Eden Burning (53 page)

The words hung heavily in the air. So, then, it would be the same as having Nicholas back, or worse, Francis thought. Is there no end to it? And he answered himself, No, none, without eternal vigilance.

Then, as if he had had an afterthought so deeply painful that he had tried to suppress it, Patrick said, “They are already subverting our young.”

“Oh, Will,” Désirée protested. “Will! How he makes you suffer! I wish—”

“We all know what you wish,” Patrick told her. “That we had never taken him in.”

“Well,” she responded, quietly enough, “don’t you wish it, too? Tell the truth!”

“I couldn’t have done otherwise. If I were to see him again as he was that day I would have to do it all over again.” He looked away for a moment, then back at the picture. “But let’s talk of happier things…. That is a wonderful work of art. I don’t think Da Cunha could ever have done anything better.” He turned to Francis. “So you are really leaving?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Next month. They’ve got the papers ready to sign next week, so we can leave in June.” Francis caught Patrick’s eyes and held them with his own. “I’m terribly ashamed. I haven’t said it before, but it’s something you must surely have been thinking. The way in which I’m leaving, I mean. These people, this casino and all it entails—I hate it all. I hate what it does to the country and I’ll tell you one thing: I’m glad that under your aegis there will be no more of it.” Francis threw his hands out as if he were pleading to be understood. “But given the situation, with no other buyer in sight—And I have to leave. I have to.”

“I know,” Patrick said. He paused. “Excuse me. Do I—do we—know you well enough to ask, What about Kate?”

He felt a stinging behind his eyes, a warning of tears, and was painfully embarrassed.

“She understands,” was all he could say.

It had grown quite dark. The night life in the scrap of jungle which remained in back of the street rose loud and shrill, a whirring and peeping, a rhythmical buzz and chirp. Désirée, with a gentle tact for which Francis was grateful, moved to the subject of her daughters’ weddings: quite possibly it would be a double wedding, because although Maisie was only seventeen and young to be married, he was such a marvelous boy…. So she prattled until, in a little while, she and Patrick left.

When they had gone, he sat on with Kate. She had taken out her embroidery and now, with a frown on her forehead, sat working at it, not speaking. Francis said suddenly, “You
know if it weren’t for Megan—you do know that, don’t you?”

“Darling Francis, I do.”

“I’m so guilty. I brought her into the world, when I should have known better. I gave Marjorie that burden. Gave Megan that burden, too.” His voice trembled.

“But I’ve told you again and again,” Kate said patiently, “you mustn’t think like that. It won’t help anyone for you to walk around with all that guilt.”

“I can’t leave Megan,” he said for the thousandth time and, as he had also done before, went on. “Ah, what a pity! You’re the one who should have children, Kate.”

“If I had, I would probably never have left Lionel. Poor old Lionel! I don’t know why I always say ‘old,’ because he isn’t.”

“He was old when he was born, I expect. Like me,” Francis said glumly.

Kate put down the embroidery. “Like you! I’ve never heard anything sillier!” She reflected. “You know, I sometimes think Lionel’s never really felt anything much in his whole life. But maybe people like him are better off. When I left him, it was only the humiliation that upset him, no pain, while I—” She did not finish.

And Francis, watching her with her head bent again over the needle and the fine white cloth, thought of how she would be when she grew old, thought of it for no reason that he could have explained except for a cruel awareness that he would not know her when she was old.

Suddenly he asked, “What will you do now with your life?”

“Oh, go on living here and working on the paper. This time around I’ll expose the leftists—”

He interrupted. “For God’s sake, don’t do anything crazy again! Take care of yourself. I couldn’t bear it if—”

He got up and sat on the floor beside her chair with his head against her knees. She stroked his hair. From her body,
as she leaned to him, came an aura of warmth and the sweetness of vétiver, that fragrance of grass and morning that seemed always to go with her.

“I’ve been thinking—it’s better, after all, that you’re leaving. I couldn’t just live here like this, sharing you with Marjorie and your child. It’s done, it’s always been done as long as men and women have lived on earth, but it’s not for me. And yet if you were here, I’d want to do it. So I’d be cutting myself in two, you see.”

He kissed her fingers and her wrists where the blue veins crossed, then her arms and her neck.

“Come upstairs,” she said.

This was their time of day. Always a stripe of light lay over the place where, naked, she came toward the bed: a light from the hall, or sometimes from the window when the moon was right. A creamy ghost, she materialized out of the darkness, then unghostlike, firm and desiring, lay down beside him….

The old clock on the landing banged ten metallic strokes. He sat up and switched the lamp on.

“I’d better start.”

Kate rose and took a robe from the closet. In flowered cotton and with bare feet she followed him downstairs. When, at the front door, he bent to kiss her, she put her arms around his neck.

“No, wait! Francis, wait. I have to tell you—I didn’t want to tell you before.”

Something in her face alarmed him. “What is it?”

“This was our last time. That’s what I want to say.”

“What do you mean?” he cried.

“Our last time to be together.” Her eyes were wet and brilliant.

“Oh, no!”

“It has to be. Francis, listen, it has to be. Marjorie will be back the day after tomorrow. In another month you’ll be gone. What’s the use of prolonging things? Another month
together won’t matter. It’ll only be that much harder for us both.”

“It couldn’t be any harder for us than it is right now.”

“It could. Oh, my dear, make it now! How many times can people be expected to go through this—” She did not finish.

He held her close. “Brave Kate. So brave.”

“I don’t know whether I am. You like to think you’d be stalwart and have dignity and all the rest of that stuff if you were told you were dying of cancer. I hope I could be if I had to—”

“God forbid!”

“Maybe that would be easier than this.”

“I’ll come back,” he said desperately. “I’ll come back every year for a while—”

“No. It wouldn’t be any good that way. It has to be finished, like an amputation, and then one has to teach oneself to live with it.”

He could only hold her more closely.

“Oh, it’s worse now, isn’t it? Far worse than when we fought and were so angry at each other. Besides, I’m five years older now. Five years have made changes. In you, too.”

“I love you, oh I love you, Kate,” he said. Scraps of thought passed through his head, scraps of bright paper torn in a breeze: I love the quilt with the birds and the dishes with the scalloped border, even your two sleeping puppies and the creaking gate; I love your pink slippers under the bed and your tortoise-shell brush on the dresser, the way you sing in the kitchen and your temper and your two separated teeth; I love you playing Brahms, you dancing, your hair blowing in the wind, you, you—He was crying.

She pulled away and wiped his eyes with her sleeve. She opened the door. Before them the night sky hung white over the black, serrated outline of the trees.

“Listen, I told you once about the Inca priests and how
they used to kiss the rising sun. Remember to kiss it in the morning, Francis. And wherever you go, wherever you are, I’ll know you’re alive and in the morning when I see the sun I’ll think of you.”

He never knew afterwards how he got to the car or how he drove home and reached his room where, still in his suit and shoes, he threw himself on the bed and lay there, face down, until day.

Through the day’s last light Will made his way downhill toward the Trenches. Below him, the glint of tin rooftops and jumbled derelict cars dazzled the eyes; the silvery shimmer would have been beautiful if one had not known what caused it. Above and to the left across the bay, the settlement at Cap Molyneux, in its wreath of dark and luscious leafage, crowned the mountain. To give Patrick credit, Will mused, he had not succumbed to any such lures. Even if he could have afforded them, he wouldn’t have, of that one was certain. When his term was over, Patrick would simply go back to the old house, now rented out for the duration, on Library Hill.

Will had refused to move into Government House, refusing also Clarence’s invitation to come stay with him. He just “lived around,” with friends, whenever he could. Anyway, he was often out of the country these days.

Tonight he was on his way to an important meeting. Walking lightly in sneakers, he had a wonderful sensation of flowing, flowing with time in a purposeful direction. So absorbed was he with this pleasant sensation that he almost failed to notice the man who hailed him now from the cross
street. Then he recognized the dark shiny suit and reversed collar of the old priest, Father Baker.

“Walking my way, Will?”

“I turn off at the Bay Road.” He was not in a mood to talk, or to listen, either, to any pious liberal mournings.

“I’ve just been visiting my old cook on Merrick Road. She’s been ill.”

Will glanced at him sidewise. “Not afraid to walk alone down there?”

“No. Should I be?”

“I wouldn’t think it the safest place in the world for you.”

“One can’t walk in fear all one’s days. And faith is my substitute for fear.”

“Faith in God?”

“Of course,” Father Baker said simply.

The exchange began now to interest Will. It was like a game.

“You think God hears your prayers and answers your needs?”

“He hears, but He does not always heed, for reasons of His own.”

“Tell me then, why should He have bothered to create us if He was going to be indifferent to us?”

“I didn’t say He was indifferent. If He were indifferent, He wouldn’t have created the earth at all, or us to live on it.”

“But I reach a different conclusion. I say no God worthy of the name could have created this mess we’re in. That’s why I’m sure He didn’t create it, that He doesn’t even exist.”

The old man was silent for a minute. It was probably cruel to bait him this way. And Will was opening his mouth to say something softer, to blunt his jab, when Father Baker spoke.

“Very well, let me ask, Do you believe in man?”

“Certainly I believe in man. I see him. He exists.”

“In the power of man, then, to reason and struggle and achieve?”

“Sometimes, yes. Very often, yes.”

“That means you believe in yourself, in your own will to do good. So in the end you will come to faith. For good is God, and God is good.”

Not choosing to argue further, Will shrugged. The gesture, he knew, conveyed irony and dismissal.

They walked on. The old man’s tired, panting breath was audible above the sounds of their steps.

“How is your father, Will? I don’t see much of him these busy days.”

“All right, I guess. I don’t see much of him, either.”

“Salt of the earth,” Father Baker said. “We’re lucky to have him. Well, I leave you here. Take care, Will.”

Recrossing the road, Will took one look back at the old man, who was walking on with his face turned toward the sky, as if he were following a flight of birds or simply inhaling the soft air. Easy meaningless words, he thought, with a certain contempt and yet not without understanding. The priest meant well, but he was totally without knowledge of the world. Spouting his kindly generalizations—Will had heard them often enough—about brotherhood and God and loving! While all the time he’d been sheltered away behind the protective walls of the school and the church, respected and unchallenged because of the cloth he wore. A man of words, a theorizer, an onlooker, not, Will reflected, really very different, except in degree, from Patrick. Well, no, that wasn’t exactly true, for surely Patrick had gone down into the fight, that you couldn’t deny; but even so, there was something too innocent about Patrick, too innocent and therefore, in the last analysis, stupid. Stupid.

Now in the falling day the last busses from Covetown were passing out to the country, rattling by with people hanging out of the windows and bundles tied to the roofs. In bold orange and pink and blue they announced their names: Pleasant Dreams, Grateful Shores, Golden Joy. Now, what in heaven’s name did their occupants have to be grateful or joyous about?

Halfway down a short lane Will stopped to pick up his friend Clifford, calling in at the door, “Clifford home?”

“No, he say he be back in a minute. Come in and wait.”

Will climbed into a house built on stilts and made of corrugated iron. From the front room, furnished with a table, chairs, and a small oil stove, one could see into the only other room, which had a large bed and blankets on the floor where the children slept. The walls were decorated with magazine photographs of movie stars, both black and white, along with Christmas cards of jolly horse-drawn sleighs and snow-covered pines, these last the greetings from various children and grandchildren who had gone north.

“Sit down,” the grandfather said. “He be back in a minute. He went to get some canned milk for the kids.”

There were, Will knew, some six or seven “kids” in the house, nieces, nephews, brothers and sisters of Clifford. The grandmother, whose hair was just beginning to go gray, was still vigorous enough to do cleaning at the Lunabelle.

“You going to a meeting?” and without waiting for Will’s answer, “I go to prayer meeting every week. And Credit Union meeting twice a month. You going to a prayer meeting? Clifford never tells me anything.”

“Well, sort of, you might call it that.”

The woman looked at him closely. “I hope you don’t get in no trouble. Don’t pull Clifford into none. We never had no trouble in our family. A good name, Drummond. Came from Drummond Hall, way back.”