Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  Her face went the color of chalk and she trembled.

  “I haven’t seen him,” I hurried on, and wondered why I felt so guilty. “He phoned me at the university and I talked to him there.”

  She neither spoke nor moved, but her face stayed the color of chalk.

  “I haven’t seen him,” I hurried on. “He phoned me at the university and I talked to him over the phone. That’s why I was late for dinner.”

  Out of a huge silence came her voice in a whisper: “How is he?”

  “He tells me he’s all right.”

  But a door had swung open in her mind and the expression on her face said: “This is too much. I’m not equal to this. Please, God, why don’t You leave me alone?”

  Yet her expression softened and her eyes blurred with tears and she looked younger. She had loved Jerome with all her heart and with all her soul and with all her mind, had relied on his enormous vitality, had been the mother of his daughter and the center of his home. He had loved her, too; I believe he had loved her equally. And then something had happened to this marriage so many of their friends had thought perfect. Of course they all had blamed Jerome and called Catherine a saint, but she was not a saint nor … it is so easy for an unimaginative man to say that all Jerome need have done was his duty. “What is my duty?” I had remembered him crying out. So he had gone to Spain and become involved, and for years Catherine had lived with the recurrent vision of his splendid male body being lashed, twisted, torn and broken. In the silence of her mind she had heard his screams. In the secret places of herself she had wondered if she had failed him, and by failing him had driven him abroad to this end.

  “Is he alone?” she asked me.

  I knew it was another way of asking if there was a woman with him, and I told her yes, so far as I knew he was alone.

  “Has he any money?”

  “I think so, but he’s staying at the King Edward Hotel.”

  She gave a little laugh of anguish: “Let me have some of your whisky, George.”

  “Do you think whisky’s a good idea?”

  “No. Get me some of that red liquid, though.”

  It was a sedative and I brought it to her from her bedroom and she made a little girl’s face as she swallowed it. Tears came after that and relieved her and she whispered through them.

  “I can’t talk now. I can’t think now. I’d better go to bed.”

  I saw that small, graceful figure in the housecoat rise, sway slightly as it moved down the hall and a few minutes later I knew from the sounds that she was in bed. I sat down in my long chair and tried to read a political magazine but could not even see the print. Then like a dentist’s drill the telephone snarled at me and I rose and answered it.

  “André? André?” called an angry female voice.

  “Vous avez le mauvais numero, Madame,” I said.

  I flopped back in the chair and looked around and saw Jerome’s face staring at me from a photograph on top of the corner bookshelf. We always kept it there for the sake of greater naturalness, but I seldom looked at it, or really saw it if I did. I looked at it now and it conveyed little of my sense of its original: it was simply a correct photograph of a surgeon in a white jacket. I got up and joined Catherine in the bedroom, where I found her propped against a pile of pillows with a book on her lap.

  “Thank you, George,” she said.

  “What for?”

  “Just for being yourself.”

  I shook my head, sat on the edge of the bed, stared at the floor and felt her fingers in my hair.

  I heard her say very quietly: “It’s all come back to me.”

  I looked at her enquiringly and she looked away.

  “Not the things that happened,” she said, “but how I felt at the time they happened.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Bless you for understanding that.”

  Meanwhile my fingers, lightly holding her wrist, had found the pulse and I did not like the feel of it at all.

  “Don’t you think I’d better call Jack Christopher?”

  She shook her head: “What can he do but tell me to do what I’ve done already – take a sedative and rest? But I wish so much he hadn’t come back.”

  I sat helplessly holding her hand in mine.

  “I used to see him sometimes in the cellars with those Nazis.”

  “I did, too.”

  “But you thought he was stronger than he really was. He was so frightened inside. Just like me.”

  “Just like everyone.”

  “I love you,” she said simply. “Most of all I’ve loved you because you never tried to take those old days away from me. And at the same time because you gave me so many new, good days.”

  “I didn’t give them to you. They just came.”

  “Time heals everything, doesn’t it? So long as you don’t have to go back and discover it’s healed nothing.”

  “You may go back and discover it’s healed more than you think.”

  “Yes, perhaps I will.”

  I saw a wry smile cross her face masking the strength I also saw there. I felt her pitying: pitying Jerome, me, herself, pitying all of us whom life presses in middle age. Personal she was as only a woman can be, yet at the same time she had acquired in recent years a capacity to feel with almost everyone she met, a capacity so catholic it was almost impersonal. Jerome would find her different from the eager woman he remembered. Sometimes this impersonality of her feeling for others, for life itself, made me resentful because I felt myself excluded. She understood what it is like to die and I didn’t, and that made the difference.

  I looked at her and said: “Dear, I must tell you this. I’m glad he’s back. I’m glad he’s alive.”

  She gave me a strange glance in reply: “I’m not sure that I am.”

  What did that mean? Certainly not something obvious. Silence came over us as we companioned one another, two people still wanting to feel young at heart but unable to.

  “You see,” she said, “I’m still responsible for him. And he feels he’s still responsible for me. We’re both right. I don’t want to feel responsible, but I do and I must. I wonder if he looks old? I almost hope he does. I could never think of him as growing old.”

  Then, so amazingly fast were the changes in her, she gave a sudden smile that was entirely personal and as female as it could be.

  “Tell me something – did he ask if he could see me tonight?”

  “He did.”

  “Oh Jerome!”

  Crossing to the window I peered through the slats of the Venetian blind and saw moonlight on the glass roof of a conservatory whose owner was an old lady wintering in the Bahamas. I saw squirrel tracks and the humped shapes of dormant rose bushes wrapped in sacking and drifted over with snow. The snow shrouded everything from here to the pole and the moon shone on it. All the way down the frozen St. Lawrence the moon gleamed on the steeples of the parishes, it threw the shadows of horses pulling farmers’ sleighs home from bingo parties in church basements, it brought down into the valleys the huge shadows of hills.

  “Dear,” she said, “do you know what I’m going to do now? I’m going to try to go to sleep.”

  “Bless you.”

  I kissed her forehead, tucked her in and turned out her light.

  CHAPTER VI

  Like most people who have lived through the last twenty years, I had become a reasonably successful schizophrene so far as my work was concerned. I had acquired the ability to concentrate on a job no matter where my thoughts were. On half a dozen occasions when the world seemed to be falling apart, I had managed to summon up enough concentration to do a job. But tonight it was hard.

  For the truth was that I was sick of politics, that I had come to the conclusion that however important politics might have been a decade ago, they had ceased to be fundamental now. In the Thirties I had thought most politicians were scoundrels and in the Forties I had taken a few of them at their own face value as genuine makers of histo
ry, but now I believed that nearly all the real history was being made by the scientists and that the politicians merely held posts and inherited situations. So far from being scoundrels or geniuses, most of the ones I knew were depressingly normal: indeed they seemed the best adjusted men I had ever met, for they were at ease in situations which any clear-eyed neurotic would instantly recognize as insane. They must have realized that the control was out of their hands, yet somehow they contrived to give the necessary illusion that it was not. They had a marvellous capacity, at least so I thought, for recognizing the importance of whatever seems obvious to the voters, and for neglecting the importance of almost everything else. If it was obvious to the voters that they were in control, it was equally obvious to them.

  But I knew that few of them were. The capital cities where they worked had become colossal Univac machines grinding out more statistically-based information in a month than any trained mind could comprehend in a lifetime. The statesmen went to their desk in the morning and the papers were there. They cleared their desks for more. The harder they worked the less time they had to think, and now that they travelled to see each other in aircraft their lives had turned into a rat race. Every election since 1945 had convinced me that it made little difference who was prime minister or president so long as he was sane and could make the public believe he was leading instead of following. Elections would be held and new faces would appear, but they would soon look just like the old ones and their owners would soon be doing precisely what their predecessors had done. They would over-work and under-think, they would travel too much by air, they would see the importance of the immediately obvious and after a while they would disappear.

  But it was no part of my job to philosophize about the effect of modern communications on politics. I was fairly good at my work and had a sixth sense I trusted, and this sixth sense had told me all along that this Korean War would not blow up into the big one everyone feared. My problem was purely technical: how could I reinforce this hunch with evidence? But a trained journalist can reinforce any idea with evidence, so I set to work and around midnight I had finished a job I knew would be adequate in terms of the assignment.

  I went to the kitchen, poured myself a glass of milk and tried to relax and think. But instead of thinking I felt, and felt scared and unnatural and became very lonely. I was still feeling lonely when a key scratched and Sally came in on tip-toe.

  “What are you doing awake? Is Mummy all right?”

  “She’s asleep.”

  While I blew up the fire, Sally went out to the kitchen for milk for herself, and when she came back and sat down she said: “If I don’t talk, I’ll burst.”

  CHAPTER VII

  Never had I seen Sally look as she did then. Her whole presence shone and she was encased in such a brightness that neither Jerome’s return nor my own present mood could dim it. Her cheeks were pink from the cold, her curls were glossy and tight and all about her was this radiance. She set down the milk and came over and kissed my forehead and rubbed her smooth cheek against the back of my hand.

  “George!” she whispered. “Comfortable old George!” And then she said: “It’s happened at last and if you laugh I’ll throw this milk into your face, for it’s just as wonderful as all the bad novels say it is.”

  She dropped onto the sofa so hard she bounced, and she sat there with her legs curled up, shining and glowing at me.

  “You’re sure about this?” I said.

  “But absolutely and positively and completely.”

  “You’ve compared your somatotypes? You’ve gone through the checklist on your neuroses? You’ve discovered that they fit each other?”

  She picked up her milk and held it threateningly, then she gave a gurgle of joy and swigged down half the glass. Even her jaw, which was going to be formidable when she was my age, was soft and gentle tonight.

  “In case you’d like to know,” she said, “it happened on the top of Mount Royal.”

  “At eighteen below? Yours is a hardier generation than Alan’s father thinks.”

  “It’s only sixteen below as a matter of fact. But to fall in love at sixteen below ought to prove pretty clearly to certain oafs in the Engineering Faculty that I’m not a frigid woman. It was so lovely.” A luxurious sigh. “We walked up the mountain through the trees above Pine Avenue and when we got to the top – have you ever been on the top of Mount Royal on a winter night?”

  “When I was your age the top of Mount Royal had genuine prestige. Once I was there with a girl and she asked if this meant we ought to get married.”

  “Don’t boast, George. Let me do the boasting tonight.” She leaned back and clasped her hands behind her head. “It really was unbelievable, if you’d like to know.”

  “It always is.”

  “I’m sure it always isn’t. But it was so lovely just the same.”

  “Have a cigarette?” I suggested.

  She shook her head so strongly that her curls trembled.

  “It was just as if the whole sky had turned upside down and fallen flat all around the mountain without putting the stars out. Millions and millions of kilowatts lying there all quivering like an electric jelly. At the very moment when it got so beautiful I couldn’t stand it, do you know what the idiot boy said? He said I was beautiful, too.”

  “You told me he’s the most intelligent man of his time.”

  “He’s an oaf, of course, but such a sweet one!” She gave me a quick frown. “I happen to know it’s nonsense, him thinking me beautiful, and it worries me because pretty soon he’s sure to take another look. I think it’s much safter to have a marriage rest on a solid basis of sex-attraction and compatibility than on some youth’s idea that a girl is beautiful, don’t you?” Then the raptured smile came back. “But it was lovely just for once. All my life I’ve wanted to be beautiful, or at least to believe that some man thought I was, and all my life I’ve known I wasn’t, and I’ve taken it for granted that no man would ever think I was. If any man mentioned I was even pretty, I just took it for granted he had designs for a lost weekend. Men are such awful crystallizers. The nicest of them are the worst of the lot. Look at those sweet neurotics who go up to the Arctic every summer and grow beards and dream about women until they crystallize some little mouse they met at a dance the winter before into a goddess.” A sigh. “Well, at least Alan’s not one of them. It’s not as if he’s without experience.”

  There was a crack from the fire and another ember shot out. I rose and extinguished it, then drew the wire guard in front of the flames.

  “One thing puzzles me, Sally. Just what gave you the idea you aren’t a pretty girl?”

  “Oh, Mummy, of course.”

  “Now don’t be silly.”

  “I don’t mean anything she said. I mean just her. What man could possibly waste a look on me with her in the room?”

  I was amazed and said: “I think you really mean that.”

  “Mummy’s passionate and I don’t think I am.”

  “Give yourself time, darling.”

  “You don’t know this but quite a few youths of my acquaintance have informed me pretty bluntly that I’m cold. Did you have affairs when you were Alan’s age?”

  “When I was his age there was a depression and I was broke and anyway my appearance was against me.”

  “But you must have had some. How many would you call a lot?”

  “There’s probably an American sociologist with statistics on that. Why don’t you look him up the next time you’re in the library?”

  “I’m being serious, George. You see –” The frown-line struck between her eyes and I hoped that somebody, maybe Alan Royce, would cure her of this habit. Inside another ten years the line would be permanent and it would not help her at all. “You see,” she went on, “Alan has built up quite a reputation for himself around the campus and around the town. He started cavorting at a pretty tender age, in my opinion. Now don’t misunderstand me, George – I’m not judging him. Growi
ng up in that family what else could have been expected? But I’ve made a few enquiries about Alan, and I’m not exactly enchanted to learn that for his age he’s supposed to be one of our most accomplished swordsmen.”

  “You persist in giving this lad a terrific build-up.”

  Then she smiled softly. “But isn’t it a fact that a swordsman like Allan is the safest type for a little bunny like me to marry?”

  She was so serious, she was so much in love, and underneath her facade she was so moral.

  “You mean you got engaged tonight?”

  “Well no, and anyway ‘engaged’ isn’t a word we use much any more, and I rather think Alan intends to scout around a little bit, but maybe inside another week or two things will settle themselves, if you know what I mean. But I am a bunny, George. In case you’re interested, I’m still a virgin.”

  “That really shocks me, Sally.”

  “I wish you’d stop laughing at me when I’m being serious for a change. But isn’t it true? I mean, isn’t it better for somebody like me to marry a man who knows his way around instead of some pure boy who’ll want to look around later on? Aren’t the pure ones the worst later?”

  “I was a pure boy. Faute de mieux, but on the whole a pure boy.”

  “But you wouldn’t have had Alan’s temptations.”

  “Why Sally, you insult me.”

  “I’m not insulting you. I’m just stating a fact. Some men look permanently available and some don’t, and you don’t, and besides you’ve been in love with Mummy from the Year One.”

  Part of the log had collapsed and the fire had ceased flaming. Its glow was sleepy and the apartment so still I could hear her breathing.

  “Yes,” she said dreamily, “I think we ought to get married as soon as we graduate. We’ll both be getting jobs, and the sooner Alan settles down the better. I wouldn’t change him for worlds, but I do think he ought to settle down.” A look of exquisite, tender pleasure suffused her determined little face. “Who was it wrote, ‘Come live with me and be my love and we will all the pleasures prove’? It must be wonderful to be able to prove pleasures.”