Going Ashore (53 page)

WALKING DIAGONALLY
over the sacred grass on his way up from the parking lot, Malcolm Armitage hears first the
gardien
’s whistle, then children shooting. To oblige the children, he doubles over his bent arm, wounded. Death, in children’s wars, arrives by way of the stomach. Malcolm does not have to turn to know the children are Americans, just as the
gardien
, though he may not place Malcolm accurately, can tell he is not French. He can tell because Malcolm is walking on the grass between the apartment blocks, and because he is in his shirtsleeves, carrying his jacket. This is the only warm day in a cold spring.
NATO
is leaving, and by the time school has ended Malcolm and the embattled children will have disappeared. The children, talked of as rough, destructive, loud, laughed at for the boys’ cropped heads and girls’ strange clothes, are identifiable because they play. They play without admonitions and good advice. They tear over the grass shooting and killing. They shoot their mothers dead through picture windows, and each of them has died over and over, a hundred times. The
gardien
is not a real policeman, just a bad-tempered old man in a dirty collar, with a whistle and a caved-in cap. In the late warm afternoon the thinned army retreats in the direction of the wading pool, which is full of last year’s leaves and fenced in, but this particular army knows how to get over a fence. The new children gradually replacing them do not mix and do not play. White net curtains cover their windows, and at night double curtains are drawn. The new children attend school on Saturdays, and when they come home they go indoors at once. They do their lessons; then the blue light of television flashes in the chink of the curtains. When they walk, it is in a reasonable manner, keeping to the paths. They seem foreign, but of course they are not: they are French, and Résidence Diane, six miles west of Versailles, is part of France.

As he reaches the brick path edged with ornamental willows and one spared lime tree, Malcolm, unseen, comes upon his family. Bea has her back to him. Her bright-yellow dress is splashed with light. She carries the folding stool she takes to the playground and, tucked high under one arm, “Montcalm and Wolfe,” which she has been reading for weeks and weeks. When Malcolm asks how far along she is, she says, “Up to where it says Canada was the prey of jackals.” Then she looks as if
he
were the jackal, because he was born in England. She looks as if she had access to historical information Malcolm will never understand. Only once he said, “Who do you hate most, Bea? The English, the French, or the Americans?” He has had to learn not to tease.

Behind her, for the moment abandoned, is the old blue stroller they bought after some other international baby had grown out of it. Ruth, Malcolm’s child, is asleep in it, slumped to one side. Roy, astride his tricycle, faces Bea. Malcolm imagines himself as two miniatures – two perspiring stepfathers – on the child’s eyes. Roy’s eyes are mirrors. He never looks at you: there is no you. “Look at me,” you say, and Roy looks over there.

The family scene set up and waiting for Malcolm consists of a fight for life. Roy, who is afraid of mosquitoes, has refused to ride his tricycle through a swarm of gnats. He is at a dead stop, with a foot on the path. His dark curls stick to his forehead. His resistance to Bea lies in his silence and stubbornness, or in sudden vandalism. Last weekend he snapped the head off every spaced, prized, counted, daffodil in reach of the playground. Malcolm heard Bea say, “I’ll kill you!” He walked up to them – as he is doing now – trying to show the neighbors nothing was wrong. Bea is moved by an audience; Malcolm would like to be invisible. He drew Bea’s arms back and Roy fell like a sack. She was crying. “Ah, he’s not mine,” she said. “He can’t be. They made a mistake in the hospital.” Only then did she notice Roy had been biting. She showed Malcolm her arm, mutely. He looked at the small oval, her stigmata. “He can’t be mine,” she said. “I had a lovely boy but some other mother got him. They gave me Roy by mistake.”

“Listen,” said Malcolm. “Never say that again.”

Bea, suddenly cheerful, said, “But Roy’s said worse than that to
me!
”

“Say right now, so he can hear you, that he’s yours and there was no mistake.”

Of course Roy was hers! She said so, laughing. He was hers like the crickets she kept in plastic cages and fed on scraps of lettuce the size of Ruth’s fingernails; like the hedgehog she raised and trained to drink milk out of a wineglass; like the birds she buys on the Quai de la Corse in Paris and turns out to freeze or starve or be pecked to death. It is always after she has said something harebrained, on the very limit of reason, that she seems most appealing. Her outrageousness is part of the coloration of their marriage, their substitute for a plot. “Poor kid,” Malcolm will suddenly say, not about the wronged child but of Bea. It is easy for Bea to crave this pity of his, to feel unloved, bullied, to turn to him, though she thinks he is a bully too.

A rotary sprinkler now pivots on its stem. Roy is protected from Bea by rainbows. Bea, waiting for Roy to surrender, heaves her slight weight onto one foot. Her dress follows the line of her spine. “Honestly, Roy, you’re just a coward, you know,” she says. Accustomed to making animals trust her, she advances now almost without seeming to move. “Afraid of some old bugs! When I was your age I wasn’t scared of anything.” Bea has passed the lime tree. Her dress is in full sun. She will drop the stool and the book and shoot through rainbows. She will suddenly shove Roy off his tricycle and slap him twice, coming and going. She will drag the tricycle away and leave him there to mull over his defeat. No, none of it happens: Roy suddenly comes to life, pushes forward to meet her. When she turns back with him, she sees Malcolm. His whole family comes toward him now, and Bea is smiling.

A grievance overtakes her welcoming look. Something has come up. What now? On the way indoors she tells him: Leonard and Verna Baum, their closest friends, the only Canadians they know here, are not going to Belgium. Leonard is going to Germany, with the Army. Her interest in having Canadian friends, like her interest in history, is new. She does not always recognize a Canadian when she hears one.

“What’s your father?” she said to a stray little boy who, like a puppy, followed Roy home one day. Just like that: not even “What’s your name?”

“He’s an Ayer Force Mayn,” said the innocent, in syllables that should have rung like gongs to Bea.

“Well, Roy happens to be Canadian,” said Bea haughtily, demonstrating how you put down any American aged about five.

By mistake, Bea has packed and shipped to Belgium pots and pans that belong to their landlord. She forgot to send their trunk of winter clothes. Ruth is back to baby food, and Roy (when he will eat) lives on marmalade sandwiches. Malcolm and Bea will have their dinner at the local bric-a-brac snack bar called Drug Diane. He knows, because she seems so comfortable in this ramshackle way of living, that she must have had something like it when she was a child. As if he had never seen her house, never known her father, she sometimes describes a house and a garden and a set of parents. “I liked it when we first came over to France and lived right in Versailles,” she will say. “It was more like home.”

THE DESIRE TO BE RID
of Bea overtakes Malcolm at hopeless times, when he can do nothing about it. If she left him now, this second, it would settle every problem he ever has had in his life – even the problem of the winter clothes left behind. Bea, questioned about it, says she has never wanted to leave
him
. Sometimes she says, “All right, you take Roy, I’ll keep Ruth.” She forgets Roy isn’t his. She thinks her difficulties would be resolved if she just knew something more about men. All she knows is Malcolm. The father of Roy hardly counted. She slept with him “only the once,” as she puts it, and hated it. She warned Malcolm the other day: she would have an affair. If she waits too long, no one will want her. When Malcolm said, “With Leonard?” she burst out laughing. A few seconds later, evidently thinking of herself in bed with Leonard, she laughed again. “
Him
,” she said. “It’s too easy. Anybody can have him. They say any girl that ever worked in his office …” But her interest dies quickly. Malcolm has seldom heard her gossiping. Gossip implies at least a theory about behavior, and Bea has none. “Anyway, Leonard’s losing his hair and all,” she said, seriously.

So, she has an idea about a lover, Malcolm can see that, but it is still someone unreal.

BEA HASN’T ASKED
what Malcolm and Leonard were doing in Paris today, Saturday. She knows that Leonard rang just after lunch and said, “Can you come in and get me? I can’t drive my car.” He gave the address of a hospital.

“I think Leonard’s had a heart attack,” he said to Bea. “Don’t say anything to Verna yet.”

But when Malcolm found Leonard he discovered that Leonard’s Danish girl, Karin, had cut her wrists with a fruit knife – one of those shallow cuts, with the knife held the wrong way. She isn’t dead, but her stomach has been pumped out for good measure, and she is tied to her hospital bed. The police have Leonard’s name.

Bea hasn’t even said, “What was wrong with Leonard?” or “What did he want?” – which means she knows. If she knows, then Verna knows. Leonard is at this moment telling a carefully invented story to Verna, who may pretend to be taken in.

Bea sits very calmly on the balcony of the apartment, with Ruth in a pen at her feet, and waits for Malcolm to bring her a drink.

“Leonard’s done a lot of lying to Verna,” she says, out of the blue. “But I’m the sort of person no man would ever lie to.”

She sits in a deck chair, serene, hair pulled into a dark ponytail so tense her black eyes look Asian. She means raw lying, such as a man’s saying he is going out to buy cigarettes when he really wants to send a telegram. She would never think of a more subtle form, and might not consider it lying. She truly thinks that her face, her way of being invite the truth.

Malcolm is convinced he will never have an idea about Bea until he understands her idea of herself. Of course Bea has an idea; what woman hasn’t? In her mind’s eye she is always advancing, she is walking between lanes of trees on a June day. She is small and slight in her dreams, as she is in life. She advances toward herself, as if half of her were a mirror. In the vision she carries Ruth, her prettiest baby, newly born, or a glass goblet, or a bunch of roses. Whatever she holds must be untouched, fresh, scarcely breathed on.

What is her destination in this dream? Is it Malcolm?

She looks taken aback. It is herself. She
is
final. She can’t go farther than herself, and Malcolm can’t go any farther than Bea.

Malcolm, pouring straight gin, thinks “infantile” and then “conceited.” Having her entire attention, he sits on the balcony railing and tries to tell her that no one is a destination, and no marriage simply endures: it is difficult to begin, and difficult to end. (Her dark eyes are full of love. She takes this for a declaration.) The only question, the correct question, about any marriage – the Baums’, for instance – would be “What is it about?” Every marriage is about something. It must have a plot. Sometimes it has a puzzling or incoherent plot. If you saw it acted out, it would bore you. “Turn it off,” you would say. “No one
I
know lives that way.” It has a mood, a setting, a vocabulary, bone structure, a climate.

All Bea says to that is “Well, no man would ever lie to me.”

IT IS NOT TRUE
that Bea put pressure on me to marry her, Malcolm decides. In her cloudiest rages she says, “You were maneuvered! I lied to you from the beginning! If that’s what you think, why don’t you come out with it?” But I have never thought it. There was no beginning. There were springs, and sources, but miles apart, uncharted. It would be like crossing a continent on foot to find them all. I would find some of them long before I knew she existed. The beginning, to her, would need a date to it – the day we met. I had been in Canada four months then, and was still without friends or money, waiting for a job I had been promised in London. Friends and money – I thought I was coming to a place where it would be easy to find both. One afternoon – a Saturday? – I was picked up in a movie by two giggling girls. Outside, I saw they were dumpy, narrow-eyed. They were twins, they told me, named Pattie and Claire. In that Western city every face bore a racial stamp, and because this was new to me I kept asking people what they were. The girls shrugged. They were called Griffith, whatever that was worth. Their father had come out here from Cape Breton Island after their mother died. I understood they might be blueberry blondes – Indians. I was still so ignorant then that I thought you could say this. The poisonous hate in their eyes lasted two or three seconds. My accent saved me. My English accent, so loathed, so resented out here, seemed hilarious to Pattie and Claire. I was hardly a generation away from signs reading, “Men Wanted. No British Need Apply,” but the
girls didn’t know that. They must have been fifteen, sixteen. They wanted me to take them somewhere, but on a Saturday afternoon there was nowhere to go, nowhere I could take them, except my one-room flat (“suite,” the girls called it). They drank rye and tap water, and told dirty stories, and laughed, and opened all the drawers and cupboards. They weren’t tarts. They didn’t want money. It was their idea of a normal afternoon. They wanted me to ring up some bachelor friend, but I didn’t know anyone well enough. The upshot of the day was that they took me home with them. It was about eight o’clock; the sun was still high and hot.

“When you meet our Dad, just say you’ve always known us,” said Pattie.

“No, say we went to see you for a summer job,” said Claire. “Anyway, he won’t ask.”

They lived in a dark-green painted house behind a dried-up garden. Nearly blocking the entrance was a pram with a sleeping baby in it. His lips were slightly parted, his face flushed and mosquito-bitten. The baby’s rasped thighs, his dark damp curls, the curdled-milk stain on the pillow had the print of that moment, as if I had already left Canada (I was, already, trying to do just that) and was getting ready to remember Bea, whom I hadn’t met. I memorized the bright hot summer night, the stunning season that was new to me, a kind of endless afternoon, the street that seemed neither town nor country, the curtain at the window perfectly still behind a screen. The pram, the baby, and, once we were indoors, even the Seven Dwarfs on the fake chimneypiece, displayed like offerings in a museum, seemed reality, something important, from which my upbringing had protected me. I understood I had met the right people too late, for Canada had been a mistake, and it was already part of the past in my mind. The living room was spotless and cool; the linoleum on the floor gleamed pink and green. Upon it two dark-red carpets lay at pointless but evidently carefully chosen angles. Plants – dark furry begonias and a number of climbers – grew on the windowsill. A cat lay curled before the logs of the fire, exactly as if there were a real blaze. We did not stop here; the girls led me down a passage and into the kitchen. I remember a television set with the sound turned off. On the screen a man wearing a Stetson leaned against a fence, telling us to fly, fly, because the skies were falling – if the sound had been on, he would merely have been singing a song. On one
wall was a row of cages with canaries, and there were still more green plants. We had walked into a quarrel. When two people are at right angles to each other they can only be quarrelling. I saw for the first time Bea’s profile, and then heard her voice. The voices of most Canadian girls grated on me; they talked from a space between the teeth and the lips, as if breath had no part in speech. But the voices of all three Griffith girls were low-pitched and warm. The girls’ father sat at the table drinking beer, leaning on a spread-out newspaper. Behind him was the photograph of a good-looking young man in Army uniform. At first I thought it must be his son.