The Marriage Bed (7 page)

I stared into my half-empty cup. Then I wiped Hugh’s nose. “Do have some more cake, Mother.”

“No, thank you, dear. I’m glad to hear the practice is thriving. But what about that girl Larine?”

By a superhuman effort I kept astonishment off my face, and resentment. It’s cheating when predictable people say something totally unpredictable.

“Why, she’s all right, I guess.” But my voice was high with surprise. Was it possible that good old Mother had resources of insight, or sheer, blind guts, that in these four years I hadn’t yet recognized?

“I did so feel,” she went on, smoothing a hand over her large bosom in the complacent, preening way she had, “and I still do, that Ross was taking a quite unnecessary risk, hiring a girl with that kind of … 
background.
I mean drugs – a police record – in a law office? With all the … 
decent
girls looking for work, I really can’t understand it.”

“Yes. Well,” I mumbled.

“After all, Ross is just at the beginning of his career. It’s not as if he could afford to take risks at this point, do you think?”

“Maybe not.”

“But perhaps he hasn’t asked what you think.”

My heart was pushing up into my throat. Did the bloody old trout know about the whole thing after all? If so, why was she sidling around the point like this? And if she didn’t know, what hell-sent hunch had made her start discussing Larine? My palms were damp with sweat and the table seemed to swing loosely under my elbow. But I kept my voice calm and level. Nothing like rage, terror, and hate, aimed like ray-guns in several different directions at once, to produce the old fighting spirit.

“Well, I think Ross felt a bit protective after he got her off that pushing charge. The drug laws are pretty silly, as you know. And the poor kid has a lurid history … did Ross ever tell you the story? Her mum was a lush and her dad a religious nut. Or was it the other way round? Anyhow, one of her uncles when she was twelve – um, I guess you get the picture. So Ross thought it was time somebody gave her a break. And so far she’s done the routine typing and filing at the office quite well, so he’s probably right.”

There was a brief silence. Then she said, “Ross’s father was a
very
difficult man, you know.”

I looked at her. “Was he?”

“Yes. He’d make a decision like that, on impulse, and then, right or wrong, he’d stick to it, stubborn as –” She shook her blue-rinsed
head. “He insisted my mother must come and live with us, when my father … Passed On. Before six months were over, he knew as well as I did that it was a
mistake.
She didn’t mean to interfere, but – well, he died at sixty-one, while she lived to be ninety. You see, he never would admit … never. Yes. A really … 
difficult
man.”

I waited, hoping for more, but she only smoothed her bosom again as if to placate it. Then, after a long pause, she muttered, “Better say no more. I tend to say … 
the wrong thing
so often.”

For the first time in our acquaintance, I caught sight of a life’s disappointment, frustration, bewilderment, in the pale blue of her foolish eyes. It amazed me to find she knew herself so well. Poor woman. What a fate, to be trapped like that for all those years, between two egos. It was a surprise – almost a shock – to find myself feeling real pity for her; even a flicker of genuine loving-kindness. But what a rathole life is, I thought angrily, if it can actually make you love an ass like Edwina Graham.

But like most moments of its kind, in our house at least, this one was promptly attacked by the forces of chaos. Our Siamese cat, who loved Ross, liked me, and tolerated the kids, had little or no use for the rest of the human race. He now decided that Mother had stayed quite long enough. With a lightning dart, he pounced out of ambush and bit her in the calf. She gave a thin little shriek. The children, who had been quietly stuffing down cake, shrieked too, wildly excited. I got up and flapped a napkin at Chairman Mao, who fled, pretending to be terrified. Then I inspected the wound. Only one small, restrained drop of blood, like her confession.

“I’m so sorry, Mother. He’s terrible, that cat. It’s a warped sense of humour or something. Let me get you a Band-Aid.”

With my head bowed over her stout leg, I fiercely ordered myself not to cry. Or laugh. But Edwina victimized was once more comfortably armoured in her invincible rightness – the perfect guest, grandmother, mother-in-law; the Christian soldier marching as
to war. She said, “It’s nothing, Anne; nothing at all – it barely … 
penetrated.
Now I really must be going or I’ll miss the ten after six. Just let me call a taxi. You sit down, my dear, you look a little tired. Thank you so much for the … 
tea.
I do hope Hugh’s cold improves. You’ll be sure to give Ross my love, won’t you. Ask him to ring me up some time, if he ever has a minute to spare. And by the way, I have a little something here for you both … I’m sure you could use it.”

“Thanks, Mother,” I said meekly. And I thought almost with relief how much more comfortable it would be if we could just keep on wearing our old attitudes.

E
nergetically I cleared up the tea débris and settled the kids with paper and crayons before going upstairs for a peaceful bowel movement, an event harder to fit in than people without small children would ever believe. Behind the blessed privacy of the bathroom door I managed to read several pages of Oscar Browning’s
Life of George Eliot,
savouring particularly the words, “She talked to me solemnly about the duties of life, about the shallow immorality of believing that all things would turn out for the best.…” Ah, the wonderful toughness of women. What a comfortable inheritance. Nothing else could possibly have kept me in one piece (more or less) in the disaster area of today. The girl I was when Ross and I first met was a stranger I could view from this distance with compassion and forgiveness. She was somebody not yet initiated. Somebody who hoped for the best, and believed in happiness as a real commodity.

He was asleep on my bed when I first saw him – flaked totally out. Lying on his back, arms tossed out recklessly, but legs pressed almost primly together. He was snoring softly. Down the hall in the sitting-room, my roommates Karen and Bonnie with various
boys were sort of listening to Janis Joplin while they laughed and popped open beer cans and argued about their karmas. Ross must have adjourned to my room to get away from all that; but I needed my bed. I’d just come home from a long session at the library, because I had a final exam coming up in zoology, and I intended to get the provincial gold medal.

I leaned over him, my mouth opened to say “Hey,” and then it happened. In books I’d often read about this emotion without ever feeling it myself, or even believing it really existed. Now here it was, like a punch under the heart. I mean, I’d seen Ross before, plenty of times. For some time now he’d been Karen’s steady. She was even beginning to talk about getting engaged after he graduated. Now I looked at him while a westerly wind blew the light rain of a March thaw against the window. His black eyelashes made stiff crescents on his thin cheeks. The inside of his lower lip was a bright coral colour. His head was big, but the neck looked childishly frail. Something made his hands twitch as I watched him, and maybe the same something made me sit down on the edge of the bed, pushing him over slightly to make room.

“Wake up,” I said.

He did, instantly. His blue eyes snapped open; he drew in his long arms and folded them defensively across his chest.

“You’ve been sleeping in my bed.”

“Sorry. Just goofed completely off.”

“It’s this thaw. And exams looming up.” A breeze smelling of wet earth and lake water stirred the curtains. After the winter’s long austerity, there was something disturbing and delicious about this mild, moist air. It made the blood slow and the sex organs heavy. Doubtless that was one reason why I couldn’t take my eyes off his bearded face, and also why he didn’t move away from contact with my hip.

We said nothing for a minute. Beyond the door, Joplin’s meandering, sorrowful, self-pitying ballad went on, and we listened, loving it. Then I leaned down and kissed him on the mouth. He co-operated with a warm, trusting friendliness that made my whole body ache with tenderness. I leaned on him and traced the line of his bearded jaw with my fingertips.

“What the hell’s your other name, Anne?”

“Forrest.”

“Honours Botany. The literary mag and all that.”

“Right.”

“How come you hardly ever hang around with Karen and Bonnie? Where’s your guy?”

“Oh, I mostly mooch around on my own. Got nobody special. If it interests you, I’m known around as ‘The Ice Cube.’ ”

“No kidding,” he said with interest. We looked at each other thoughtfully. Then he said, “Care to try that again?” and we did that. Several times. Nobody out there seemed to miss him. I forgot all about the gold medal. Sleep no longer seemed in the least important. Eventually we took our shoes off and lay back together on the pillows.

“This is nice,” he remarked. “You are nice.”

“You are Karen’s. That we’d better remember.”

But my hand, which had no ethics, was smoothing the shirt over his warm chest.

“I’m nobody’s. Don’t you believe rumours.”

“What’s this ring you’re wearing, then?”

“It’s a seal ring – used to be my grandfather’s.”

“No kidding. What’s that on it, an eagle or something?”

“To be exact, it’s an eagle displayed, in his dexter talon a sword erect, proper.”

“How bloodthirsty.”

“My clan ancestors were a pretty fierce bunch. But the blood’s got very thin by now. They’d be ashamed of me. I came in here, actually, because we were trying some Mexican pot earlier on, and it made me feel sick. See what I mean? And you’re pretty straight too, right? I like your Rapunzel hair, it feels like a big silk rope.”

At this point, Karen opened the door. What happened then – what we all did and said – is blank now. All I can remember is laughing. And then came those spring weeks of new green in parks under the cool, cloudy sky, and in his narrow student bed.… One brilliant afternoon in particular, I remember, we lay on the young vegetable grass and watched a child in a red dress play in the sunlight with a white cat, and joy distilled itself in those shapes and colours like a real and lasting thing.…

Sitting on my ignoble throne, I stared down at the chipped tiles of the bathroom floor. We never had got round to remodelling this room, which still had a chain-pull toilet. Without warning my head dropped forward in a short doze, even while one ear kept awake for the kids. Very shortly Hugh’s cough jerked me upright, and I rose heavily, flushed the apparatus, and washed my hands, gripping the basin midway to ride out a cramp. While it lasted, I studied the blistered green paint of the cracked wall as an alternative to any encounter in the mirror with my own blotched and pallid face. What a vision, the eyes sunk in dark pits, the big lips cracked, a pregnancy mask over the cheekbones giving the whole thing a crude, animal solidity. Incredible to recall that people once used to call it beautiful. That was indeed in another country, in the cool, sterile latitudes of virginity.

Martha’s feet stumped up the stairs and she pushed open the door with a peremptory “Hey!”

“We knock, please. But come in here if you need to, for God’s sake. Don’t let me find any more poop in the dining-room,
ever again.
”

She stared at me, all injured dignity. “That was not me,” she said severely. “Granny did it.”

A great grin split my mouth. “Nonsense. Do you want to go now?”

“What?”

“I said do you need to go now?”

“Go where?”

“Oh Christ, Martha.”

“I’m hungry. I want some strangled eggs.”

“All right. Come on, then. You can stir them up.”

One of her rare smiles spread across Martha’s fat face. She cast short arms around my thighs and pushed her head hard against the low-slung drum of my abdomen, creating a warm patch there with her flesh. I smoothed the thick silk of her hair. Here at last was something of value salvaged from the trivial chaos of the day – something beautiful, perfect, and undeserved. I was humbly grateful for it.

Because it was not moral purity or any lofty sense of values that made me stubbornly adhere to my children once they were so fecklessly conceived. It was just some kind of blind, irrational instinct that appalled me as much as anybody else.

“But Anne,” Ross said in a voice slow with shock, “that’s impossible. You’re on the
pill,
for God’s sake. You’ve got to be wrong.”

“No, I’m not. The test was positive. The doctor says I haven’t been on the pill long enough. Before you, I wasn’t – you know that. So there hasn’t been enough time.”

“Jesus, Anne. Jesus.”

“I’m horribly sorry. Not that it helps much.”

“Well, but look. Hospitals look after this kind of accident all the time. I mean, it’s perfectly legal. And done by experts and all that. So –”

“No, Ross.”

“But –”

“No.”

He looked at me in blank dismay. “You don’t mean you’re actually going to go through with it? But that’s
crazy.
”

“I know it is. I
know
that. I can’t help it. For one thing, I know something about genetics and embryology, so the thought – but it’s not just that … I don’t know what it is.”

“But where does that leave me? Tell me that.”

“Look, it leaves you just wherever you want to be. This isn’t a trap. You’re free to do whatever the hell you want. And so am I.”

He put his head in his hands. “For God’s sake, Anne, how can I get married and start a family right now? You know damn well I’ve got years to put in before I can earn enough to –”

“I know that. Try to get it through your head, I’m not asking you for anything. I’ve done a stupid thing; it’s my fault entirely. It’s also my responsibility. That’s all there is to it.”

“Oh, don’t be such a fool. You know it’s mine too, even though – oh Christ. Look, you’ve got to be reasonable. You’re not
thinking.
What about your demonstrator’s job? – you said yourself it could be a toehold in the department – for three years you’ve worked your brains out for the chance. Now for God’s sake, go to the doctor and get yourself fixed up. It’s the only sane thing to do.”