Finding no one downstairs, I timidly mount the creaking stairs. This part of the house, too, is in darkness, but I turn on a hall light, and after a moment find the right bedroom. There, propped on crumpled pillows, the owner of the house lies snoring lightly. The instant I approach the bed he opens his eyes and says, “How the hell did you get in?”
“Pamela’s busy, so I offered to come over and get your supper.”
“Typical of her. Be off. I don’t know you from Adam.”
“Yes, you do. We met just a few weeks ago, at her party. My name’s Rowena. Remember – you told me who Wittgenstein was.”
His frown eases off slightly. “Ah. So I did. You’re the reader of fiction.”
“Except for really heavy stuff like The Brothers Karamazov, say.”
“Well, the Russians. Always going on about their souls. Not that we haven’t all got one. Bothersome bloody things. But souls just aren’t something that can be discussed. One of those things language is no good for. Wittgenstein had it, as usual. ‘Unsayable things do exist,’ is how he put it. He also said, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ How right he was.” He stares at me as I switch on a bedside lamp and draw up a chair beside him. “Yes, that’s right – we met at Pamela’s. At first, though, I didn’t remember you at all: there’s old age for you.”
“That’s all right. People rarely do remember me. And I don’t mind. Just to get by without bothering or offending anybody – that’s my aim.”
He heaves himself higher on the pillows. “It’s a hell of an aim to have, if you ask me. Oh, damn and blast this toe.”
“What would you like for supper?”
“The hell with supper.”
“Some nice hot soup and a scrambled egg, maybe?”
“Cat food. Get out,” he adds abruptly. “Got to go to the bathroom.” He flounces about, groping for a pair of crutches by the bed, and then struggles to extricate his bony legs from the tangled bedclothes. I turn away tactfully while he slowly levers his tall frame upright. As soon as I am sure he can manage, I go downstairs to the kitchen.
This room has not been renovated in any way since about 1940, to judge by its worn linoleum and faded wooden cupboards. Mrs. Blot, whoever she is, evidently keeps it more or less clean, but there is a faint, suspicious smell of mice about, none the less. A calendar for the year 1979 hangs on the wall beside a framed diploma from the University of Heidelberg, and a yellowing photo of Sebastian in a wing collar with his bride. Even on his wedding day all those years ago, his long face had a melancholy cast. With an effort I tear myself away from these relics and go to the fridge for eggs. Soon after that I carry a steaming tray upstairs, feeling competent.
He is back in bed now, but still breathing hard, and sunk in a kind of brooding gloom that seems to intensify with my arrival. His knotted throat rises, bristling with white hair, out of his pyjama jacket, which has been dragged crooked by the exertion of getting back into bed.
“Take that stuff away,” he says. “Told you I didn’t want it. You and your aim. It’s failed. You’re annoying me.”
I set the tray aside on the dresser. “Well, forget the food if you like. But there’s a drink here for you – malt whisky, isn’t it? I found the bottle in the kitchen cupboard beside a trap, meant either for you or a mouse.”
“Ah,” he says, and reaches out a shaking hand for the glass. “Now, that’s different. Why Pamela should think alcohol is bad for a broken toe – but it’s all part of her quite lunatic mental processes.” He takes a long swig of the drink and says “Ah” again. Knowing as I do nothing about whisky, I have poured him a small wineglass-full, and it now occurs to me this might have been over-generous. But after all, I think, does it really matter at this point? The parchment skin of his cheeks has flushed up, his hand is steady, and his blank, glaucous stare has gone. He glances at me with life in his faded eyes.
“What did you say your name was? Mrs. Something?”
“Call me Mrs. Nobody, if you like.”
“No, that would not be at all appropriate.”
“Glad you think so.”
“Fancy thinking of yourself as nobody,” he says crossly.
“Even if it’s true?”
“It’s never true.”
“Well, names don’t help much anyway. Take yours – are you a saint stuck full of arrows then?”
“The goddamned arrows are true enough,” he mutters, with a relapse into gloom.
“Now how about just a nip of this soup.”
“Certainly not. Don’t you try your female tactics on me.”
“Philosophical Investigations,” I say, settling comfortably into the bedside chair. “I looked up Wittgenstein today in the library. What an interesting life he had. Imagine giving away a big legacy because you don’t like luxury. It’s not the sort of moral problem that would bother most of us, is it?”
He gives a loud sniff of amusement. “Did you know he loathed being an academic all those years at Cambridge? Talk about most of us – he wasn’t like most of us. Professor of Philosophy with all that pomp and deference – he called it ‘a kind of living death.’ Wise man. No, not like me. I liked the gown … too much. He quit, too, before they threw him out. Had cancer at the end but it didn’t bother him, dying; not a bit.”
“Why was that, I wonder.”
“More than I can tell you. Scares me, that’s all I know. Standing here looking at midnight.” Without warning he begins to sing in a cracked voice:
Standing on the bridge at midnight
Throwing snowballs at the moon –
But he breaks off here, clearing his throat. “The rest,” he says, “is not decent.”
“Maybe Wittgenstein was serene at the end because he’d given up looking for absolute answers to everything.”
“No, no; he never gave up looking for das erlösende Wort – the solvent, the clarification of all our stupid human confusion …” His voice trails away and for a minute he seems to drop into a light doze. Then his eyes snap open and he says testily, “Well, where’s my supper, then?”
Trying not to smile, I put the tray across his knees. He tips down the last of his drink and begins untidily to fork up the scrambled egg. When every dish is clean he says, “There – take it away. I remember your name now; it’s Rowena. Nice old name. Got to go to the loo again, damn it. Hand me those crutches, will you? Oh, a hideous curse on this bloody toe.”
Laboriously he creaks off down the hall and I take the opportunity to make up the tumbled bed. His return is slow and evidently painful. He drops back onto the pillows, his breath rasping. Eyes closed, once more he appears to pay no attention while I set his water carafe and the telephone within reach and pick up the tray. But just as I turn to go, a bony hand shoots out to pluck at my sleeve. “Come back tomorrow, Mrs. Something,” he says. “You’re not bad company. I’ll educate you about Wittgenstein.”
“All right,” I say cheerfully. “See you tomorrow then.”
I walk home briskly under a sky festive with millions of twinkling stars. I’m glad I’ve left his curtains open so he can see them, too. Poor old boy, the nights must be very long for him. I hope quite earnestly that Mrs. Blot may refuse to come back, because in that case … Now what would he like to eat tomorrow that could not be called cat food? A nice little steak, maybe; though spending Cuthbert’s money on meat for a man he’s never met seems vaguely immoral. However, it’s probably too late now for me to qualify as a good woman, so I decide not to worry about it.
When I walk into my bedroom a few minutes later, whom should I find curled in the very centre of my bed but black Wittgenstein, who must have slipped into the house somehow when I left. He stretches luxuriously and curls his pink tongue up at me in a yawn that says he has come to stay.
On impulse, I look up the recipe for béarnaise sauce and make some to go with the steak. Then I have the satisfaction of watching Seb polish off the last of it with a bit of bread. For the past ten minutes the
conversation (one-sided, about Bertrand Russell) has been totally suspended. Finally he lays down his cutlery and remarks, “Quite eatable. You have hidden depths, Mrs. Who. Somebody’s obviously taught you the psychic satisfaction of a good meal. Your husband, presumably.”
I think of Edwin’s tall aluminum steam pot and smile faintly.
“Do you know, my earliest memory is of a bowl of warm bread and milk with brown sugar, fed me by my mother in some infant illness. She died when I was just over four.”
“That’s too bad.”
“My father had popped off a few years before that, so from then on I was handed from one relative to another like an awkward parcel nobody wanted. I can’t remember my mother’s face or voice or anything specific about her at all – just a general kind of softness and warmth, and a smell of sandalwood from the scent she used. Not much, is it, to create this enormous sense of deprivation I’ve had ever since? Russell’s biographer, you know, makes a big point of his orphanhood – even links it to his insatiable appetite for women. Four marriages and any number of affairs, as you probably know. I never went quite that far myself, though far enough to support the theory.”
He fumbles among the bedclothes for the book he tossed aside earlier to make room for the tray. “Here’s a letter Russell wrote to one of his mistresses: ‘The centre of me is always and eternally a pain – a searching for something beyond what the world contains – something transfigured and infinite – I do not think it is to be found – but it’s like a passionate love for a ghost.’ ” Here I think grimly: and what about a ghost you hate? But he is still talking. “Ben-Ami Scharfstein actually finds orphanhood a common factor among many philosophers; he says it’s to compensate for that loss that we grope for truths others wouldn’t look for.” He glances up at me with a mischievous grin. “And now I’ve given you the key to me, Rowena, what are you going to do with it?”
“I’m going to wash your hands and face and tuck you in.”
“Touché, damn you.”
Next night when I get home I find Marion on the sofa with a cup of tea.
“Hello, dear,” I say, surprised. Surely she hasn’t come over to tell me more about Babs and the area commissioners. “What brings you here so late?”
She tosses aside her copy of Canadian Guider and looks at me with disapproval. “Late! I should think it is. Where on earth have you been, Mother? It’s nearly eleven!”
“Oh, is it? Any tea left? Give me the pot, then – I’ll make some fresh.” But Marion follows me out to the kitchen to demand, “Well? Where were you, then?”
I bite my tongue and say mildly, “I’ve been sitting with a neighbour – Pam Wright’s father. He’s laid up with a broken toe and I’ve been getting supper for him the last few nights.”
“Oh.” She immediately appears to lose all interest in my evening. Studiously she begins to realign the canisters on the counter, ranging them in a precise row.
“And come to that,” I say, “what brings you out at this time of night?”
“Well, I thought I’d better tell you. I’ve just come back from Ottawa.”
“Ottawa!” I echo foolishly, as if I’ve never heard of the place before. “Whatever took you there?”
“I wanted to talk to that man John Hill.”
Suddenly my legs feel weak. I am devoured with curiosity, but Marion does not seem at all eager to tell me more. It touches me to see that she looks strained and overtired. “Let’s go in and sit down,” I suggest, and to fortify myself I swig down a gulp of strong tea.
“Well, there were several things I wanted to know,” she begins, tucking her skirt neatly round her knees. “By the way, Mother, I didn’t tell Cuthbert I was going, and there’s no need for you to mention it, either.”
“Why – did it have something to do with our case, then?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then why not tell Cuthbert about it?”
“Because he would have advised me not to go.”
I look at her, surprised by this admission of human weakness. “Then what did you actually go for, dear?”
There is a brief pause. Marion recrosses her ankles and looks down, frowning, at her squarish, capable hands. “I just felt I needed to talk to him – that man Hill. There was no chance, was there, at the funeral, to do anything more than digest the facts. There was so much more I wanted to – So I just looked up his address in the Ottawa phone book and took the afternoon train.”
Today is Friday – Edwin’s regular day for that journey. I wonder if she has thought of that, or whether she realizes it is her father she is really looking for.
“I wanted to talk to him,” she repeats. And I think, Yes, poor thing, maybe you do realize it.
There is another small silence while I form a mental picture of Marion in her neat navy coat standing at her brother’s door like Nemesis. The more I think about this confrontation with her father’s double, the more like something out of Maupassant it seems. No practical purpose could have been served by this meeting, and it is so unlike Marion to have any other aim. “Talk about what?” I ask warily. It is strange and disturbing to see her suddenly as a woman just as confused and vulnerable as myself.
“Things I wanted to know,” she says curtly.
“Such as?”
“Trying to get a handle on what made him do it. I mean, bigamy! Dad, of all people.”
“Isn’t it better not to know the answer to questions like that?”
“No doubt you’d think so. But you were always sort of … aloof with Dad. As if you weren’t really with him. Off somewhere in your own world, in books or wherever. But he was my father. He mattered to me. I had questions to ask John Hill, and I’m glad I went after them.”
My heart has begun to beat very hard. The answers I’ve been finding for myself, without ever leaving Don Mills, are disquieting. I hope hers are less so.
“Tell me what you asked him.”
“For facts, of course. Like when did this commuting of his between here and Ottawa begin? It turns out it started the year I was born. In other words, Dad was separated from – that man’s mother – for at least two years, though it wasn’t a legal separation. That’s when he came and settled here, and met you, and all that. Then she had to have some kind of major operation, and he went up to see her. There was apparently some kind of reconciliation. After that he went up regularly. So you see it wasn’t what it looked like at first. In fact what took him up there was kindness – even decency – that’s what made him spend time with her every month. And that was exactly like Dad. He always had a terrific sense of duty.”
And did that legalize our marriage – legitimize you? I want to shout. Did it justify humiliating me – keeping us both in the dark about the whole thing, all those years?
As if these questions have jumped out of my mouth like the toads in the fairy tale, Marion says quickly, “It was kinder not to tell us. He was doing his best to do the right thing by everybody, that’s the point.”
After a long pause I find my voice.
“Marion, do you remember telling me – it was just after you began Grade One with a literal-minded teacher called Miss Watson – you said to me at bedtime one day, ‘I don’t want those dumb fairy stories any more, Mum. Dragons and witches – there are no such things. Miss Watson says they’re silly.’ Well, I think it’s high time you changed your mind about that. There are dragons. And spells, and witches who practise white and black magic. Tell me why else your father would have lived such a life? And then tell me whether you met Mrs. Hill the First. That’s where to look for answers; surely you know that.”
She shifts a little uneasily in her chair.
“Well, I just saw her for a minute. She has heart trouble, you know, so he sort of hustled me away. Very protective, he was, of both of them. But he did introduce me.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“What was she like?”
“Oh, just an old woman. White hair and all t
hat.”
“What was she like, Marion?”
“She was just ordinary.”
Marion’s face is studiously blank. It’s evident that she will not tell me what I want to know, either because she is incapable of it or because she doesn’t know herself. Then suddenly, she turns to look at me with the half-shamed glance of someone who cannot resist the forbidden pleasure of giving pain after receiving it. “Actually,” she says, “the mother’s a good-looking old lady. She had – a sort of odd smile. Almost mischievous. She must have been … a bit of a beauty once.”
I get up from my chair abruptly and take my empty cup to the kitchen. My jaw is trembling and I feel cold all over. I have the liveliest reluctance to go back and continue talking to Marion. I now want to know less, not more, about this visit of hers. I am not enjoying this confirmation of an old suspicion – that Marion was more married to Edwin than I was. It explains many things – among them her attitude towards me from childhood on. But there is little satisfaction in perceiving that there have been two witches, not just one, involved in all this. It means, for a start, that there may be real dragons in the path of any further conversations we may have about Edwin. Nevertheless, I go back slowly to my place in the sitting room, where the clock is now chiming twelve. I am suddenly, overwhelmingly tired, and see with relief that Marion is getting into her coat.
“Anyhow,” she says briskly, “that’s over with. I’m glad I went. It’s sort of settled my mind. He was sorry for her, and doing his best. That’s what it all boils down to.”
“You think so, do you?”
“That’s right. Well, see you soon. You’ll be going to Tom’s church bazaar next week, I suppose? I’ll pick you up around three.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t forget to lock up after me.”
“I won’t.”
“Good night, Mother.”
“Good night, Marion.”
The door closes behind her. I stand there looking at it for some time.
After a while I wander to the kitchen and stand at the counter for another indefinite interval. I stare blankly at the canisters and the teapot, thinking about the potency of spells and seeing in the air before me, detached from any specific presence, a mischievous smile. Then I pick up one of the empty cups and throw it with all my strength at the wall. It breaks with a crash, and shards of china rattle to the floor. A thin trickle of tea rolls down after them like an anticlimax. Feeling slightly better, I leave it all there, turn off the light and go up to bed.
A Serious Widow Page 10