“Yes?”
“Rowena, dear, you’ve been so sweet to me.”
“That’s not what you want to tell me, is it?”
“Well, not exactly, but it’s part of it.” He takes both my hands in a rather feverish grip and looks at me helplessly.
“It’s about you and Elaine, isn’t it?” I ask, since there seems no other way out of this verbal impasse.
“How on earth did you guess?”
“Ah, well. It was not really difficult, dear.”
Relief makes his round face shine like a happy child’s. “Yes, Elaine and I are engaged. Isn’t it wonderful? I’ll be husband and father in one fell swoop. It happened last night, and I’m just in some kind of daze. I can hardly believe my luck – a beautiful girl like that accepting me … it’s like a dream or something.”
I smile, repressing at the same time a faint reminiscent pang as I picture the engagement ceremony.
“Wonderful. I told you something like this would happen, didn’t I?”
“Actually you did. And you were right. About that and lots of other things. You’ve been wise and wonderful about everything, Rowena dear, and I’ll never forget it.”
“Yes, you will, and that’s just as it should be, Cuthbert. I wish you both all the happiness in the world.”
We embrace and he trots off down the path, his short legs twinkling so exuberantly he might almost be dancing. When I turn back to the kitchen, a rich smell of roast chicken drifts out to meet me. The cat is curled on Seb’s bony knees and he is reading The Innocent Traveller, glasses perched on the end of his long nose. Without glancing up he says, “How come I never heard of Ethel Wilson before? Listen to this for a nutshell description of progress: ‘Down came the forests. Chop. Chop. Chop.’ Marvellous.”
“Yes, isn’t she?”
The second week of Seb’s residency has begun, and we are playing Scrabble over a nightcap. The game is new to me, but I liked it immediately after discovering it is not at all like chess, Edwin’s game, whose strategies and aggressions I always found so disconcerting. As for bridge, its intricacies are such that Tom and Marion long ago gave up trying to teach them to me. Scrabble seems to me, in fact, too verbal, amusing and civilized to be a game in that sense at all, which is perhaps why I enjoy it so much. Now I wait impatiently for my turn to add ed to the word exist.
Breathing loudly down his long nose, Seb studies the board, then fumbles his squares into a vertical line to form existence.
“Darn you, Seb.”
While I brood over my collection of letters, the phone rings. “Ignore it,” he advises me. “It’s sure to be someone far keener to speak to us than we are to hear them.” But the old moral compulsion to answer every call makes me put down my drink and go to the phone.
“John Wright here.”
“Oh, John, I’m so glad you’re back! I’ve tried and tried to –”
“Seb there, is he?”
“Yes, he’s –”
“Right. Worried. Naturally. All right, is he?”
“Oh, yes, perfectly –”
“Pop in then, if we may.”
I find his telegraphic style contagious. “Do.”
He rings off without further ceremony. An uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach warns me that the coming encounter is not going to be a pleasant social call. When I go back to the sitting-room it is clear that Sebastian shares this feeling. Throwing an apprehensive glance at me, he dumps the Scrabble back into its box with so unsteady a hand that half the letters spill to the floor, where the cat jovially rolls on them. We are both glad that Seb is shaved and fully dressed, even to an ascot. He smooths both hands over his white hair while I brush a few crumbs of after-dinner cheese off his front. The bell then rings in a peremptory way.
I open the door to find Pam there, her tumbled hair pearled with rain and a sweater slung haphazardly round her shoulders. She looks very pale. John stands behind her, his expression austere. He is wearing a dark suit and a black tie which gives him such an air of official solemnity that he looks quite unfamiliar.
“Come on in,” I urge them. They do this in silence. Seb has laboriously risen to greet them and now stands leaning on his cane, holding himself as upright as he can. John shakes his hand. Pam offers him her cheek. Her unnaturally wordless state is ominous.
“Do sit down,” I urge them, trying to sound natural. “Can I offer you a drink?”
They both look without enthusiasm from our nearly empty glasses to the Scrabble tiles on the floor, and murmur, “No thanks.” Together they sit with stiff decorum on the sofa, but Seb remains standing.
“Well, from the doom-laden look of you, I imagine Mrs. Blot has been in touch,” he begins.
“In touch!” Pam bursts out. “If you mean mid-Europe hysterics, missing-person reports, police, et cetera, you couldn’t be more accurate, and coming on the heels of a funeral, then driving home with one’s mother-in-law in a vase in the glove compartment, the whole thing’s enough to put one in the psychiatric ward. What on earth possessed you, Dad, to rush off like that without a word to a soul, not even a note?”
“There was a note,” puts in Sebastian. “I wrote, ‘Visiting a friend,’ and propped it on the bureau in the best tradition. There was no pincushion, but I did my best.”
“Anyway, nothing Mrs. B. could make head or tail of. I do call it totally inconsiderate and heartless of you just to nip off like that, after all we’ve done for you, do you realize the police have your name, I mean how shaming, and as for Mrs. Blot, she is under a doctor’s care and threatening to sue absolutely everybody, and how can anyone blame her, left in charge like that, she’s been screeching at us innocent victims for the past hour on the phone, with her daughters taking turns in the background, I honestly think your arteries must have hardened to absolute wires to do a thing like this the minute our backs are turned, and I really think you owe us some kind of explanation for this whole business, Rowena.”
This abrupt switch to me as target makes my heart jerk in alarm. With as much calm as I can muster, I say, “Sebastian wasn’t doing well in that woman’s care. I invited him here, and he accepted. You weren’t here to be consulted and we –”
“If you’d let me know you were going to be out of town, it would have been considerate,” Sebastian puts in. “Then you could have avoided this unpleasant surprise.”
“Yes, well, there simply wasn’t time, we had to leave in such a rush and poor Ma hung on longer than anyone – then there was the funeral to organize, the point is this whole thing appears to have been done to give Blot, and consequently us, the maximum aggro, and when I think of all the bother and exhaustion I went through to find a decent nursing home it really does seem like total ingratitude.”
John here clears his throat in a corroborative sort of way, though he says nothing.
“Have you quite finished?” Seb asks her politely.
“Not at all, I’m just getting warmed up, but by all means go ahead, I wonder what earthly excuse you can make for doing this to us.”
“But I make no excuse at all, my dear. Nor do I apologize to anyone, including your mother-in-law, simply for exercising freedom of choice. Mrs. Blot was your idea, not mine. I did my best to get rid of her, but you insisted. The nursing home was your idea, too; not mine. I do not need a nursing home.”
“That’s a matter of opinion. It’s not what your doctor thinks. Or what we think, who know you better than anybody.” Here she casts me an unfriendly glance.
“The point is,” says Seb, “that my opinion hasn’t been taken into account by anybody except Rowena, not for a long time. Why should it be assumed that a man of eighty is no longer a man but a sort of deformed or deficient child? Why should I submit to be hustled into an institution – not for my comfort or convenience, but for yours?”
“There you are, you see.” And Pam makes an ample gesture as if appealing to some invisible jury. “You are utterly unreasonable. Paranoid, even. If I haven’t got your b
est interests at heart, who has?”
A pause follows: the kind that follows formalized questions like those asked in church – for example, Wilt thou have this man. Then, to my considerable surprise, I hear my own voice say, “I do.”
She stares at me. “How can you possibly say a thing like that, Rowena? I thought you were a friend, and yet here you are –”
“Pam, he was neglected over there. Bored. Regressing, if you like. But not mentally incompetent, or even physically … There’s a difference between senility and plain misery. What the two of us did was get him out of there, and it seems to me we had a perfect right, both of us. It’s unfortunate it all happened while you were away, that’s all.”
“Unfortunate my foot!” she says angrily. “You never would have dared influence him to do such a thing if –”
“Steady, girl,” murmurs John.
“Me influence anybody?” I say, charmed by the idea. “Influence Sebastian? It’s the other way round, if anything.”
Seb smiles with a certain complacence, which is not lost on Pam. She takes a deep, outraged breath to continue; but John now intervenes. He stands up, taking her arm and pulling her up firmly with him.
“Well, all I’ve got to say is it’s a damn pity I didn’t get that power of attorney arranged before we were called away,” says Pam, becoming tearful, “because it’s obvious, Seb, you no longer have a full set of marbles, otherwise you never would have tumbled into this infatuation or whatever it is.”
“Take her home, John,” says Sebastian grimly. “She can apologize to Rowena and me some other time.”
“Upset,” mutters John, looking uncomfortable. “Home, Pam. Be in touch later.”
He puts his arm around her and leads her away. We are left to eye each other ruefully over the Scrabble pieces.
“I suppose they’ll get over it – all of them – in time,” I say, hoping this will turn out to be true. Pam might; but in Marion’s case, I doubt it.
“They don’t, in fact, have a lot of choice, you know.” He lowers himself with caution and a faint groan into the easy chair. “Why don’t you get us another drink, Rowena?” he adds. “I think we’ve earned it.”
I pick up our glasses in silent agreement. The now quiet room has the disorderly, depleted look common to domestic battlefields. But insofar as there can be any victory in such wars, we both feel, with all due modesty, it rests with us.
The sun swings in and out, blown by a spring wind that dances with the clothes on the line, and glazes the red twigs of the old maple tree. In the narrow strip of our back garden a few intrepid crocus plants lift yellow and purple faces to the sun. High in a nearby tree a cardinal plays over his rocking sequence of notes. Our patch of grass is half obliterated by builders’ lumber and a pile of cement blocks on which Wittgenstein crouches, warming his black coat.
“Marion’s coming for tea, and I must say I dread it,” I confide to Mrs. Wilson. “Seb is sure to be rude to her, for one thing.”
“That might do her a power of good.”
“And she’s sure to object to these renovations. Don’t ask me why or how, but she’ll find a way.”
“Relatives,” she says, “are no exception to the general rule. Some are agreeable and some are not. Marion is your daughter, but she is not agreeable. I never had a daughter, except for dream children like Lilly and Topaz, but if I had, quite possibly she would have been difficult, or even actively unpleasant. There are a lot worse fates than being childless.”
“True. But it’s only lately – I think – that her attitude, which I used to accept quite easily, now just seems unacceptable.”
“Then don’t try,” she suggests, half-closing her eyes in the sun rather as Wittgenstein does when he feels particularly comfortable. “Absurd to try. And few people, I think I can truly say, know more about absurdity than I do. The fact is, you haven’t realized yet that you’re not obliged to love Marion. Not at all.”
“But I do love her,” I say feebly. “That’s what’s so painful about it.”
“Attempting to love anybody a hundred per cent of the time is never advisable.” She pulls the end of her nose thoughtfully. “Ten per cent, in this case, I would call generous.”
Across the yard young Colin Wright scrambles from a fence post to the sloping roof of his parents’ garage. On this elevated perch he often sits, chin on knees, contemplating his world in solitude and peace. Turning his curly head towards me now, he says briefly, “Hi, Rowena,” before biting into a banana.
“Well, she really shouldn’t treat me like something substandard that ought to be sent back to the factory. I’ve always found it discouraging, but now it annoys me intensely.”
“Only carrying on the good work begun by her father, isn’t she? Loyal to him, as ever.”
“Oh, yes. Completely loyal.”
“And it’s one way of keeping him alive, isn’t it?”
“But actually, you know, he’s dead at last. She hasn’t realized that yet, though. Maybe she never will.”
“Well, as I say you’re under no obligation to love that, or even like it. Do look at that cloud, it’s shaped exactly like a bird.”
Pulling in the line I briskly begin to unpeg Sebastian’s shirts and drop them into the basket at my feet. Through the kitchen window I can see him at the table having a beer with the contractor, who studied Kant at McGill. Given the time they spend discussing pure reason, I wonder whether this extension will ever get off the ground.
“Isn’t it curious,” says Ethel dreamily, “how much of life is international? I mean, here we are, two natives, sitting in the middle of Canada, talking about Marion and Edwin – and yet their humanness has no boundary, any more than a horse or a blade of grass is particular to any special place or time. I find this extraordinary and very reassuring somehow.”
“Oh, Lord, there’s the doorbell. It must be Marion. Why on earth doesn’t she use her key?”
“Think about it,” advises Ethel with a smile.
“Don’t ever leave me, will you, Ethel.”
“Oh,” she says serenely, “I’ll be around.”
A Serious Widow Page 26