Significance (5 page)

The water was lukewarm as she had added a little from the hot tap. She remembered peeling potatoes for her mother back home in Canada, her hands bright red in the icy water. Never questioning why they had to be peeled in that way in particular and what was wrong with a little warm water, a bit of comfort?

Not ‘quicksand's kiss' then, but more like muddy water. Maybe it was the grit she sensed on the pads of her fingers that had made her think of sand, that and the fact that they had spent that day at the beach. And she was weary; her mind could not entirely focus on any one thing.

‘Do you need any help here?' Scott was standing in the doorway of the kitchen; despite his words he looked as if he didn't really want to help, though she was certain that if asked, he would.

‘No, it's fine. Won't be long now, thirty
-
five minutes at most.'

‘Okay, I'll get Aaron to have a wash.'

She smiled. The smile acknowledged the difficulty of his task. It was far easier, she knew, to deal with supper – the mashed potatoes, meatloaf, carrots and gravy – than to get Aaron to do even the simplest thing like washing his face and hands.

For the last four years they had been coming here with Aaron. Two weeks every year dealing with Aaron was completely exhausting. How his aging parents coped for the other fifty weeks of the year she didn't know. Maybe back home in more familiar surroundings he was easier to cope with. And, crucially, his parents loved him, he was their child after all. That had to make a difference. Except that when she imagined having a child like Aaron, she could not picture love at all, only a devastating disappointment, a terrible burden of pain and guilt and regret. And she felt bad for even allowing this thought to enter her head. It didn't matter that there was honesty in recognising it, she should not, she was certain, even think it. Especially now that she herself was pregnant.

She hadn't told anyone yet. She calculated the pregnancy to be eleven weeks, and she'd taken two pregnancy tests, one the week before they left for France, and one after they'd arrived, which she'd done in the ladies loo at the airport after they'd landed. She'd been nervous about flying, had some strange notion that the air pressure in the cabin or the altitude or stress would make her lose the baby.

Losing the baby that early on in the pregnancy wasn't always referred to as a miscarriage, sometimes it was described as a spontaneous abortion – a term which made her shudder.

She planned to do a third test when they got back to Canada. Only then would she tell Scott. Only then could she begin to believe it herself, which at this moment she didn't entirely.

So she stood at the sink peeling potatoes, dreamily letting her mind range freely, while in the hallway she heard Scott chiding and chivying Aaron towards the downstairs bathroom. Threatening no supper, no ‘nice meatloaf', no ‘buttery mash' if he didn't wash his face and hands, then switching tactics and promising ice cream tomorrow if he was good tonight.

And in opposition to the sounds of Scott's voice, there was Aaron's wall of words ‘No, no, no, no, no' which altered in pitch and tempo, rising and falling and sounding to the uninformed outsider like the cries of someone being tortured. And maybe to Aaron it was torture. Did it really matter if he washed his face and hands or not? Sometimes it didn't seem worth the effort, but then as Scott said, you start letting one thing go and the next thing you know you've got him tied to a leash in a dirty basement, and you hose him down once a month and only then because the smell is floating up the stairs.

The phone started to ring.

‘Marilyn! Mar! Sorry, can you get that? We've got a situation here…'

She dropped the potato and the peeler into the tepid brown water, grabbed a clean tea
-
towel and hurried into the sitting room wiping her hands dry. It was seven
-
fifteen. She knew who was calling, Momma and Poppa Clement, to say ‘night
-
night' to their best boy,
Aaron. Though so far he'd never been persuaded to come to the phone. Telephones with their disembodied voices, even the familiar voices of his parents, seemed to scare Aaron. But every evening Scott and Aaron's parents rang up and asked to talk to him.

In the hallway she saw that Aaron was holding onto the newel post at the foot of the stairs with two hands. His body was rigid and his head was bent low at the neck, a sure sign that he was in a defiant mood. Scott was standing next to him with a lavender
-
coloured bath towel in his hands.

She didn't really need to hurry to get to the phone, her in
-
laws would let the phone ring for minute after minute after minute until someone finally picked up, and in the event that no one picked up the first time, they would ring every half hour after. They were persistent and vigilant, would seemingly never give up anything once they had started, which might explain their untiring devotion to Aaron.

‘Hello?'

‘Is that you, Marilyn?' It was, as she'd expected, Scott and Aaron's mother. Her voice was full of warm enthusiasm, like that of a kindergarten teacher talking to a five year old, yet it always made Marilyn think of disappointment.

‘Yes, it's me.'

‘How's our boy?'

‘Oh, he's fine,' Marilyn said out of habit, aware as she said it that Aaron's voice, the angry ‘No, no, no, no, no' must be carried, along with her own voice, over the wires, up to the satellite, to be beamed down into Audrey Clement's ears as she stood in the overheated kitchen of their scrupulously clean Ontario home.

‘Has he had his supper?'

‘No, not yet, I'm just in the middle of it.'

‘Oh, what are you having?'

‘Meatloaf, mash, veg.'

‘Oh, he loves his meatloaf! She says they're having meatloaf, Dave.'

Dave was Marilyn's father
-
in
-
law, a man who was tall and stooped, with a white beard and a full head of white hair that made him look like an underfed Santa Claus, especially in the red sweater Audrey had knitted him last fall.

‘Will Baby come to the phone?' Audrey said in a needy voice. Baby was the affectionate nickname Audrey and Dave had for Aaron.

‘No, Audrey, I don't think so, but I'll just ask. Hold on.' Dutifully, knowing it was a charade, she went to the doorway and said in a loud clear voice, ‘Scott, your mom's on the phone, does Aaron want to say hello?'

And Scott, in an equally loud voice said, ‘Aaron? You wanna talk to Momma? Momma's on the phone.'

Unsurprisingly, Aaron's answer was no. Though whether it was a particular no pertaining to the specific question or a generalised no to everything except clinging to the newel post was hard to discern.

‘No. Scott's just getting him washed. Did you want to talk to Scott?'

‘Oh no, not if it's inconvenient.'

‘How are you, Audrey?' Marilyn remembered to ask, ‘and how's Dave?'

‘Oh, fine, fine. It's very quiet here. We went to the mall this morning. I got Aaron some new sports shoes and a winter fleece.'

‘Lovely.'

Audrey was forever buying new clothes for Aaron. She paid a lot of attention to what she saw boys and young men wearing and sought the advice of sales assistants in fashionable downtown shops. ‘My son's about your age,' she'd say. ‘Now which of these jeans are in fashion, which would he like?' So Aaron wore designer label sports shirts, Timberland boots, even his underwear and socks were JM or Sean John or Calvin Klein.

‘Well, we'll leave you to it then, Marilyn. Love to all. See you soon.'

‘Yes, see you soon.'

Marilyn replaced the receiver and stood for a moment gazing out of the window. The house they stayed in each year was owned by relatives of the Clements, a distant part of the family that hadn't left France for the New World. It was at the edge of the small town opposite a restaurant called La Coquille Bleue, which she and Scott hadn't yet had a chance to visit. Aaron's fussiness about food and his other fears and phobias severely limited what they did, hence the good old Canadian meatloaf, the familiar mash and carrots. Scott had suggested she go out alone some evenings, as he himself did, but it seemed a pointless exercise and one she was happy to forego, preferring, once Aaron had taken his medication and was asleep, to read or, if she wasn't too tired, to write.

They let Aaron go out for a little time most evenings. Scott referred to this as ‘going out to play' and while it only consisted of Aaron standing outside holding onto a lamppost while one or the other of them kept an eye on him from the house, it did seem to give Aaron some kind of pleasure or satisfaction and calmed him before supper and bedtime.

Scott went out for a drink or two every second or third night – once they were sure Aaron was asleep – Marilyn would have liked to go with him, but that was impossible, besides which they had all the time in the world to be alone together once they got back to Canada. Time for just the two of them. Except that soon they'd be three.

The phone call had momentarily thrown Marilyn off her train of thought. Partly it was jetlag, partly Aaron; the annoyance at making meatloaf of all things. So she stood there for a moment by the small side table looking at the narrow turquoise glass vase which held a single white artificial rose, trying to remember the words that had danced through her mind just minutes before.

She sighed, then looked at the restaurant opposite. As Marilyn watched a young woman crossed the road towards it. The woman seemed to illustrate the very freedom Marilyn was yearning for at that moment – it was almost as if she had sprung from Marilyn's mind purely for this purpose and was thus dressed for the part. She was wearing a sleeveless summer dress with a full skirt that stopped just above the knee.

A green hatchback travelling at speed appeared out of nowhere as the young woman neared the pavement. For a moment Marilyn was convinced that she was about to witness a terrible accident, such as that she had seen one summer in England when she was fifteen. Then the victims had been a man and a child whom she assumed was his son. They had been in the middle of one of those zebra crossings that lacked traffic lights and relied on the drivers travelling in both directions to notice pedestrians. It had just started raining heavily and the man was pulling the boy along at a jog. Marilyn had been walking towards the oncoming traffic. She was less than twelve paces from the crossing when she saw a yellow cement mixer pull up for the man and boy. The driver was jolly and red
-
faced with an almost comical bushy black moustache. He gesticulated to the pedestrians by sweeping one hand elegantly through the air, inviting their safe passage. Perhaps because of this, because of the truck driver's smile and the reassuring size of the vehicle, because of the resolute hiss of the air brakes and the torrential rain, the father, his head craned upward as he nodded thanks at the driver, stepped onto the part of the crossing that spanned the opposite lane without really looking to see if it was safe. One minute the man was there, the next he was gone – replaced by the wildly sashaying rear end of the car that had hit him. By some miracle (Marilyn had always been convinced it wasn't by design) the man had loosened his grip on the boy's hand and the child was left standing in the shadow of the truck's huge black wheels, his hand still raised to meet his father's.

This memory had embedded itself deeply in Marilyn's mind – morbidly, Scott said – and now in those seconds as she watched the young woman crossing the road and saw the car approaching at speed she held her breath and felt her stomach grow hollow as she steeled herself for the worst. But the young woman, seeing the vehicle, lengthened her stride and skipped gracefully onto the pavement.

Marilyn breathed out through pursed lips and felt her body deflate. Now she studied the young woman even more closely than before – with her platinum blonde bobbed hair and slender limbs she looked like a character from a 1950s or 60s French film –
Jules et Jim
or one of those Eric Rohmer movies or even (if the girl was to come to a bad end) a Claude Chabrol. She carried a small stylish bag that looked like a basket and she'd draped a white scarf or cardigan over it. She had an air of self
-
consciousness about her – which was manifested as a kind of awkwardness in the seeming naturalness of her movements that somehow made one want to stare at her.

Obviously she was French, but from one of the larger cities, Paris probably. And she was perhaps a film or fashion student, or so Marilyn imagined, and she was on her way to meet her lover, who was a much older man. No one would think anything of that in France – not if the man was good
-
looking, rich and powerful, and if the girl was beautiful and over the age of consent.

Marilyn watched the young woman pause at the entrance to the restaurant and stare directly at their house. Marilyn automatically ducked behind the curtain, afraid of being caught staring. When she looked again the girl had gone.

Marilyn sighed. She heard Scott say crossly, ‘Hey, no meatloaf for people who can't behave,' and remembered immediately what it was she had been doing before the phone call.