The Mountain and the Valley (38 page)

“Why, certainly,” she said; but she yawned again, this time without smiling.

He looked baffled. And then she felt the hurting power she too had. She didn’t feel any more like the smile-when-they-smile-at-you girl at the party, with the home look clinging to her as plain as a garment.

“I ran into Jack Newlin yesterday,” she said. “What do you suppose he was doing? Getting a Christmas present for Sophie! Already, mind you. He made me try out all these fancy lipsticks and stuff. We had a barrel of fun. I wish you could have seen the make-up kit he got for her.”

“I bet it was a honey,” he said. He wanted to go along with her, but his false eagerness dried up abruptly into a funny little doldrum.

“Maybe we could ask Jack and Sophie over for some bridge tonight,” she said. “Jack’s such good fun. You don’t like bridge much though, do you?”

“Not much,” he said.

He was pacing about the room now. All the smiling had gone out of his face.

“I don’t know what Jack sees in Sophie, do you?” she said. “There’s so much
to
Jack.”

“I never thought Jack was anything wonderful,” he said. There was a touch of irritation in his voice.

“I know,” she said earnestly. “Nobody does, if they don’t really know him.”

She had met Jack through a girl at the office. It was everyone’s knowledge that he was crazy over her. It was chiefly from Jack that she’d picked up the city way of talking: the way she tried
not
to talk when she went home.

They were quiet again. Then she said, “Didn’t you want to go to a show, really?”

“No.” The syllable was quite flat this time.

“There’s a Spike Jones show at the Capitol,” she said, as if she were teasing
him
.

“I don’t want to go to the Capitol,” he said. “What’s wrong with staying home once in a while?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Only it seems kind of silly just sitting here and looking at each other.”

He gave his head a sudden impatient shake.

“What’s wrong with you, Anna?” he said. “Half the time lately … every time I … 
I
don’t know …”

“I’m afraid I don’t either,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Maybe I’d better go live on ship,” he said. “Then you wouldn’t have to look at me at all.”

He glanced at her, waiting for her to kid him. He doesn’t mean a word of that, she thought. He’d forget in a minute, if you kidded him. But the taste of her own hurting power was in her like a drunkenness.

“That’s up to you,” she said.

“All right,” he said, suddenly really angry. “All right … I will …”

Don’t, she thought, don’t let him go …

“All right,” she said. “All
right.”

He was gone all right. The room cried it: that still accusing cry of table and chair and curtain and door and bed when someone goes and someone stays. His face struck her. She turned away a little, physically, but it followed her. She closed her eyes, but it struck her again, three or four times.

You won’t strike
me
like that, she thought. (“They don’t have to ask me if they don’t want to,” she’d said to David. “I don’t care, I don’t care …”) She went to the mirror, trying to block out his face with the sight of her own.

And then that part of it went, while she was standing there; like drinks taken to defocus and astigmatize unhappiness wearing suddenly thin, and the peaks of this unhappiness showing with more intolerable clarity than ever through the lifting fog. The party was over. When the party was over you went around and cleaned the dregs out of the glasses and put them away. It was morning, they’d gone home, and it was too late for any but that grey daytime sleep.

You’d start with his clothes first. He hadn’t taken anything but the uniform he was wearing. Maybe he’d come back for the others. Maybe he’d just get new ones. You could start with that shirt on the chair.

Her hand touched his shirt, and his face struck her from every direction. She pressed both hands against her face and began to cry. (She’d known it
would
, but, but … the sleigh had really gone without her. David … David …)

That was Tuesday. The worst thing about Wednesday was the silly tunes on the radio he was always humming.
Thursday it was better. But Friday night she dreamed of the day they had taken the car up the mountain road. His face was nearer in the dream than it had been that day in the flesh. She awoke before it was quite light. She was afraid of staying awake, and afraid of going back to sleep.

That night she called Jack Newlin.

“Jack,” she said, “I have news for you. ‘My husband has left my bed and board and I will be no longer responsible for any debts contracted by him in my name.’ ” It was an old expression she remembered from the Newbridge weekly paper.

She felt a burning gaiety. But she wasn’t really talking to Jack. It was for Toby’s benefit. (“I couldn’t have gone on their old sleighing party anyway. Hi, Freda? Oh, Freda—let’s do that tonight:
You
know, what we
said.”)

Jack suggested that they go dancing somewhere and talk it over. Sophie wouldn’t mind. Hell, what if she did?

In the car Anna talked with the hectic brightness of a recording with its revolutions speeded up almost to racing.

“Where’ll it be?” Jack said.

“How about the Grotto?”

That’s where Toby always went dancing. He might be there himself. (Just once to let him see her free of him …) Toby
would
be there. There was that constant obbligato of his face, watching and listening. It was easy to laugh, really laugh. (“What are you laughing at, Anna?” Freda said when the sleigh passed them. “I didn’t say anything funny.”)

But Toby wasn’t there. And after a while the face was turned away and she thought: he isn’t coming at all. Her laughter echoed like laughter in an unfurnished room.

“Do you want to dance this one?” Jack asked.

“No, thanks, Jack,” she said. “But you go get someone else … go on. I don’t mind.”

“Oh,
I
don’t care whether I dance or not.”

Why couldn’t it have been Jack? she thought for a second. I wouldn’t dare sit here with Toby like this, with my face giving me away …

“Jack,” she began, “you’re the best darn—”

But she never finished, because just then Toby actually came through the door.

He was with a good-looking girl she didn’t know. He looked awkward with her. That wonderful unconscious awkwardness of his was the first thing that struck her, and then the look on his face. He didn’t look as if he were having a good time. (Cover it up, for heaven’s sake, if you’re not having a good time, you crazy …)

“All right, Jack,” she said quickly, “let’s dance.”

She glanced at Toby and the girl dancing. They’re just dancing around together, she thought. They’re not laughing and talking like Jack and me, and the dancing following along beside it. He can’t do it my way at all.

The very first time Jack left her she looked up and saw Toby coming towards their table. She felt her sureness panic. (Toby, don’t you know you can’t come right
over
here and …?)

“Hello,” he said.

His eyes were throwing out feelers for fun, but the rest of his face held back a little to see how it was going to go.

“Hello,” she said.

“How about a dance?”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said, “Jack … Oh, I guess it’s all right.”

She smiled. She noticed a tiny crestfallen tic in his face when he saw that her smile had no negotiation in it.

They danced silently for a minute. He’s a crazy dancer, she thought. He’s not quite on the tune, ever. He bumps into
half the people in the room and he thinks they’re bumping into him. He’s the most wonderful crazy darn dancer … The silly dance tune seemed to flood her like some really important articulation. She felt the way she’d seen David
look
sometimes, when the essence of any small thing would strike him exactly, if it were only that of a smooth stone.

“You seem to be having a good time,” Toby said.

(Oh, Toby! Don’t you know you’re not supposed to let on you think I’m having a good time?)

“I
am,”
she said. “Aren’t you?”

“Oh, I guess,” he said.

“Who’s the handsome girl?” she said.

“Aw, you wouldn’t know if I told you,” he said. “She’s kind of a dope.”

(But you’re supposed to say she’s wonderful, you crazy … Her mind threw up its hands.)

All of a sudden she felt hurtingly ashamed of what she’d been trying to do. It was like the time she’d tried to make Effie feel it didn’t make any difference to
her
if Effie left her birthday party before the presents were opened … and then she’d found Effie’s present for her tucked away on the clothes rack, because it didn’t have any tissue paper on it like the others.

For suddenly she knew the truth: She was the only bright thing in his life that was
steady
. She was the one he’d always want to go home with, if the party was slow, or when the party was over. That was enough.

She smiled at him then, really smiled. The sort of smile that passes between two people in a railway coach when something happens which only they two, of all the others, see to have been funny in exactly the way it was. The unwithholding look came back into his face instantly.

“Do you want to go home?” he said.

“Now?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Toby,” she said, “you’re crazy. What about the girl?”

“Oh, I can get someone to take
her
home,” he said. “She won’t mind.”

“But Jack …” she said. “All right … after this dance.”

“You’re not sore, are you?” he said. That was something that had to be asked sooner or later—so just say “no” quickly, and have it over with.

“No,” she said. “Oh Toby, you’re so darn …”

“What?” he said. “What are you trying to get through you?”

“You wouldn’t know,” she said, “you wouldn’t have the least idea.” She beat his arm with one small fist, with laughter and tears about equally close. (“Didn’t you have a good time, Dave, honest? Did you sit by yourself half the time? Oh, Dave, Dave …”)

“All set?” Toby said.

“Just wait till I get my things,” she said.

She turned away from him, to go across the dance floor to get her coat and to tell Jack. Quickly, almost running, before he might say something about some other place or some other time.

It was three years before Anna went home to Entremont again. Even when Toby’s ship was away for months, she wouldn’t leave Halifax for a day, lest that should be the day he came back into port.

D
avid was counting on two whole weeks to himself. It was the morning Ellen went to Annapolis for her annual visit with Mrs. Burchell. Their husbands had made the first trip out from England together.

“You’ll be careful with the fires, now won’t you, Dave?” she said.

“Yes.”

“And now don’t forget and leave the cover off the bread box.”

“No … No …” And then more gently, “Sure you got lots of money?”

It wasn’t exactly that he was glad to see her go. When the bus went out of sight, he wondered, angrily, if the woman in the seat with her would glance smugly at the old-fashioned clasp on her purse, and when she opened it to get out her handkerchief, at the few bills folded carefully inside. He was suddenly assaulted by the thought of all the things she did for him beyond her strength. Now she was gone, they put her in a minor light.

But he felt a heightened identity, an expansive relaxation, in being absolutely alone. He thought of all the things he
could
do (whether he did do them or not, actually, didn’t matter) without explanation to a single soul.

Maybe it would rain. He’d take the new book up to the attic and read it there.

Years ago, unknown to anyone, he’d traced some relatives of theirs in England from the signature and postmark on an old letter of grandmother’s. Now, one of them sent him these books regularly. He was a don at Oxford, about David’s own age.

At first he hadn’t liked the books. They had more to do with the shadow of thought and feeling which actions cast than with the actions themselves. They seemed blurry. Reading them was like study. But now he found them more rapturously adventurous than any odyssey of action. This one was a novel by someone called Forster. It gave him such a lyric feeling to recognize the absolute truth of what the author said about whatever people he dealt with (though he himself had never known anyone like them, actually) that sometimes he’d have to look away from the page.

He’d put the light out in the kitchen, so there would be no one to bother him. It gave him a curious satisfaction to think of hearing them try the door and then go away. He’d read in the attic, with the rain against the roof and the windows. He’d feel himself radiate into and possess every corner of the empty house.

There were no friends at all now. The leitmotiv of the headache had become constant; and the hearts of those who are young and free and those who are young and not free never quite touch. But a limiting illness, if chronic, brings its own anaesthesia: simply because the single day’s freedom from it which would be enough to invalidate utterly the dull cumulative lustre of resignation never comes.