Significance (43 page)

The woman once more took up the conversation on the pleasant topic of holidaying in France.

‘So you managed to get out and about to dine and drink and enjoy all there is in our little town?'

‘Well, yes, of course. Except that my wife has, well, because she didn't feel so great, and because she is a writer, she has preferred quiet evenings at home.'

‘Oh, your wife is a writer?'

‘Yes, a poet really and ah…' Scott ran out of steam here, he had no idea why he'd mentioned that Marilyn wrote – did he think this would mark them out as a family with a particular sort of sensibility, a grace or gravitas that allowed or explained any odd behaviour in the eyes of the law.

Jesus, he should have just stuck to the truth. Who could not be sympathetic to Aaron's plight, to their essential charity and love in bringing him here, even if they had for one unfortunate moment failed him?

‘So you all stay in the house? Eat at home? What a pity! You might as well have stayed in…' the woman looked at her notes, ‘…Ottawa.'

‘Well, yes, but, we hadn't planned it this way. We didn't know that my wife would…'

‘…be unhappy?'

‘Unwell. Though, of course, she was unhappy that she was unwell.'

‘So you nursed her?'

‘Nursed her? No, she wasn't that unwell.'

‘But she was unhappy.'

‘Yes, but…'

Suddenly out of this tangle of words, the insistent litany of ‘unhappy' and ‘unwell', the older man at last spoke. His voice was deep and slightly husky, but there was intelligence and warmth in his delivery. It was the voice of a man you could trust and also respect.

Scott looked at him, noticing for the first time that although his hair was very dark, almost raven black; his eyes were blue
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grey, like wet slate in a certain light.

‘So, did you stay in last night, for example?'

Scott remembered the nightmare of the day before, losing, then finding Aaron, the blood, the worry, then sedating him – not because he'd particularly seemed to need it – by the time they'd cleaned and bandaged his wounds Aaron was moderately calm, but because they'd needed it. He and Marilyn were exhausted, but not only that, they'd needed some kind of comfort, some reassurance about who they were as a couple and that was why, quite naturally (though it could be viewed otherwise) they had made love. Last night then, Scott knew exactly where he had been.

‘Yes, we stayed in.'

The policeman shrugged and made the corners of his mouth quirk downwards in a seemingly typical Gallic dismissal of these foreigners' bizarre choice of lifestyle – non
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smoking, non
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drinking, non
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meat eating, desexualized ‘good' living which was no life at all.

‘And the night before?'

‘I went out,' Scott said, glad to show he wasn't quite the wife
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nursing freak he was being painted as. ‘Marilyn stayed in with my brother; there was a film on TV. Woody Allen, I think she said.'

‘Ah, ha ha ha, Woody Allen, yes – who would not stay in to watch a Woody Allen film?'

Stumped by this remark, Scott merely shook his head and attempted a weak smile as if to show that here, finally, in Woody Allen they had found some common ground.

‘So you went out?'

‘Yes, just for a couple of beers, just, you know, to enjoy the evening air.'

‘And to escape your unhappy wife?'

There it was again, the unhappy, unwell business which he thoroughly regretted bringing up. He shook his head, dismissing the question.

‘And where did you go?'

The question was put so pleasantly, in such a tone of innocent enquiry, that for a moment it seemed to Scott that he and the older man had just struck up a conversation in a bar.

‘Oh, to a couple of cafés on the waterfront. I've got to know a few people there. We've been coming for so many years.'

‘Ah, so you met up with friends – lady friends I suppose?' A wink here from the detective. An unsettling and surely unusual signal from this quiet but hawkish man.

‘No. Not in the way you're implying. My friends are both men and women. And besides all that, what has this to do with the car, with what happened this morning?'

‘We're just trying to get a picture of the background to this morning,' the woman cooed as if all of it were perfectly natural and reasonable.

‘But I don't see…'

‘This matter will be cleared up with more haste if you would just allow us to do things our way, sir. A little cooperation is all we ask.'

Scott nodded, defeated.

‘So you met your old friends. Did you meet anyone new?'

Scott searched his memory of the night before last. There had been Suzette, the waitress, and that guy Florian. Also Therese, but she'd left early, and the bar owner and some regulars he was only on nodding terms with. But there had also been the English tourist, the bottle blonde.

‘Uh, not really. Oh, there was an English girl, we chatted for a while.'

‘An English girl? Oh, that must have been nice – to talk in your native tongue?'

‘Canada has two languages – English and French.'

‘Ah, but earlier you apologised for your difficulty with French. To confuse unhappy for unwell is not easy for someone who is fluent in French, is it?'

‘Look, I didn't need to talk to her or whatever it is you're implying. She came on to me. I guess she was lonely or whatever.'

‘Or unhappy?' the woman officer said.

‘Or unwell?' the man added.

They made quite a double act; the two of them in their funereal black with their quick
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fire word games and grim irony all of which they mixed in with moments of beguiling friendliness.

Scott glared at them. He didn't know what their game was, but he'd had enough.

‘You seem angry, sir,' the woman said, and tilted her head a little at the neck in a spirit of sympathetic enquiry. ‘Would you like a drink, a coffee perhaps?'

Scott took a deep breath, nodded.

The plain
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clothed man and woman left the room and he was left with the young policeman again and his shiny pink
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faced supercilious silence.

The Quickening

She had never been left alone with Aaron at this time of day before. Her duties had always been nocturnal, taking over sole guardianship only when her husband's younger brother was safely in the land of Nod, usually assisted by a mild sedative.

Aaron tended to pick up on people's bad moods and other emotionally tense situations. It distressed him, which would in turn distress those who were trying to cope with him and so a vicious and self
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perpetuating cycle was formed.

Physically Marilyn could not do anything to control Aaron. Her only way of dealing with any situation was to sedate him.

She had watched unbelieving as the police car drove off with Scott in the back seat. She did not understand why the man in the Renault had blocked their driveway that morning. It had seemed calculated, and then Scott had got so angry. It was almost as if the Renault driver knew Scott. As if their paths had crossed before and there was a score to settle. There was something in the air, she thought, something he was hiding from her. It had been so unlike Scott to forget to lock the door and remove the key the night before last. He must have been distracted. And then to be so desperate to return to Canada immediately, no matter the cost. Almost as if he was running away from something. But what? An affair? With the Renault driver's wife? Or his daughter? Or sister? Or (terrible thought, but it had to be considered) with the man in the Renault himself?

Aaron was standing in the open archway that led into the kitchen, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and rocking from side to side in a stiff movement as if he were a mechanical tin soldier. His head was tilted back at the neck and his eyes were fixed on the white painted cornice.

Looking at him, Marilyn suddenly felt a cold wave of immense and seemingly endless loneliness.

If she had been entirely alone, she might have gone for a walk. She would stroll or even march through the streets. She could explore, daydream, find words in rhythmic patterns that matched each footfall.

But, she reminded herself, Scott would be back soon. It was all a terrible mistake.

Without thinking about it too much she filled a tumbler with water, opened the plastic bottle that contained Aaron's medicine, slid one onto the palm of her hand and went to him.

He snatched the pill greedily and threw it into his mouth. She saw the hard lump of his Adam's apple leap as he swallowed the dry white pill.

‘Water,' she said making her tone deliberately firm.

Shaking his head to mean ‘no', he nonetheless took the glass and swallowed all of it.

In twenty minutes he would begin to feel tired; she might succeed in getting him upstairs and into bed, but there was no way she could wrestle him into his pyjamas. Not that it mattered.

She checked her watch, just fifteen minutes had passed since Scott had gone and in another forty or so minutes their flight would begin its juddering acceleration along the runway before (and it was always, always a miracle to Marilyn) rising into the air and staying up there as it flew over fields and rivers and houses and seas until it landed in Toronto.

Twelve hours from now she and Scott should have been falling exhausted into their own double bed. Aaron would be back home with his parents. It would be over.

Out of the corner of her eye she noticed that the pace of Aaron's rocking had slowed and its arc had narrowed. Now he was not so much shifting his weight from foot to foot as just swaying his upper body.

Marilyn knew that she was also prone to rocking movements; she had a tendency to do it while she was writing poetry, and Scott had teased her about it numerous times. But she was almost completely unaware of it. As unaware as a sleeper is of their snores. As unaware as a pregnant woman is of the life growing within her. Until there is movement – a quickening – and as yet there had been none.

In the midst of this fearful loneliness, a question came into Marilyn's mind. The question was couched in a tone of wonderful simplicity and rationalisation. Why had she not told Scott that she was pregnant?

Superstition and some weird almost pagan sort of magical thinking. As if somehow by not speaking of it; by essentially sealing the news of it inside her mouth, she kept the baby safe. To speak of the growing foetus was to tempt fate.

She half remembered something she had read of superstitions among a certain African tribe. It was to do with the need to always claim that your child was the ugliest and most unappealing of babies, lest bragging about their beauty attracted the spite of gods and devils.

But why had she not told him?

And why was he so blind to the truth about her changing body?

Only once had he ever mentioned darkly that Aaron's problems might be due to a dysfunctional genetic code. Dormant for generations, then springing into life because Aaron's parents each carried the complementary distorting chromosomes. Scott had been lucky, but that did not mean he didn't carry the gene.

That was all he said, then before she had a chance to ask questions, he had rapidly changed the subject. And as this had happened fairly early on in the relationship she was afraid that talk of Scott's possible reproductive future was not a topic she should raise; talk of babies could scare a man off. And it was not only that; dwelling too much on Aaron's problems might seem insensitive and cruel, and Scott often seemed so weighed down by Aaron, so burdened by a shared responsibility and guilt, that she did not talk about it, but waited for the time when he felt able to unburden himself. That time had not come, so a silence hovered between them, shielding and distorting their wishes, desires and fears.

But there again he had agreed when she said she was going to stop taking the pill. This had been in January, a few days after New Year. They had been lying in bed together early one morning; both of them were feeling particularly affectionate. He had said he was glad he'd found her, that he loved her optimism, her spirit, her seriousness and passion for poetry. He loved her wild red hair, her sexy ass, the way she smiled. She had paid him back in kind, telling him how he made her feel safe; that because he was so tall and she was so small it was as if they were different breeds of human, something like dogs and so she was a King Charles spaniel and he was an Afghan hound.

‘Hound?' he'd said. ‘No, you're wrong. I'm a wolf and I'm gonna eat you up. But first I'm going to see how ticklish you are…'

And he'd tickled her until tears were pouring down her face and after they grew quiet and lay staring at one another.

Then she'd said that she was going to stop taking the pill.