The Beggar Maid

by Alice Munro

  The party was on a Friday night. The phone rang the next morning, when Patrick and Anna were at the table eating eggs.

  “How are you?” said Clifford.

  “Fine.”

  “I wanted to phone you. I thought you might think I was just drunk or something. I wasn’t.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “I’ve thought about you all night. I thought about you before, too.”

  “Yes.” The kitchen was dazzling. The whole scene in front of her, of Patrick and Anna at the table, the coffee pot with dribbles down the side, the jar of marmalade, was exploding with joy and possibility and danger. Rose’s mouth was so dry she could hardly talk.

  “It’s a lovely day,” she said. “Patrick and Anna and I might go up the mountain.”

  “Patrick’s home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh God. That was dumb of me. I forgot nobody else works Saturdays. I’m over here at a rehearsal.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you pretend it’s somebody else? Pretend it’s Jocelyn.”

  “Sure.”

  “I love you, Rose,” said Clifford, and hung up.

  “Who was that?” said Patrick.

  “Jocelyn.”

  “Does she have to call when I’m home?”

  “She forgot. Clifford’s at a rehearsal so she forgot other people aren’t working.” Rose delighted in saying Clifford’s name. Deceitfulness, concealment, seemed to come marvelously easy to her; that might almost be a pleasure in itself.

  “I didn’t realize they’d have to work Saturdays,” she said, to keep on the subject. “They must work terribly long hours.”

  “They don’t work any longer hours than normal people, it’s just strung out differently. He doesn’t look capable of much work.”

  “He’s supposed to be quite good. As a violinist.”

  “He looks like a jerk.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I guess I never considered him, really.”

  Jocelyn phoned on Monday and said she didn’t know why she gave parties, she was still wading through the mess.

  “Didn’t Clifford help clean it up?”

  “You are joking. I hardly saw him all weekend. He rehearsed Saturday and played yesterday. He says parties are my idea, I can deal with the aftermath. It’s true. I get these fits of gregariousness, a party is the only cure. Patrick was interesting.”

  “Very.”

  “He’s a stunning type, really, isn’t he?”

  “There are lots and lots like him. You just don’t get to meet them.”

  “Woe is me.”

  This was just like any other conversation with Jocelyn. Their conversations, their friendship, could go on in the same way. Rose did not feel bound by any loyalty to Jocelyn because she had divided Clifford. There was the Clifford Jocelyn knew, the same one she had always presented to Rose; there was also the Clifford Rose knew, now. She thought Jocelyn could be mistaken about him. For instance, when she said his childhood had left him bitter. What Jocelyn called bitterness seemed to Rose something more complex and more ordinary; just the weariness, suppleness, deviousness, meanness, common to a class. Common to Clifford’s class, and Rose’s. Jocelyn had been insulated in some ways, left stern and innocent. In some ways she was like Patrick.

  From now on Rose did see Clifford and herself as being one sort of people, and Jocelyn and Patrick, though they seemed so different, and so disliked each other, as being another. They were whole and predictable. They took the lives they were leading absolutely seriously. Compared to them, both Clifford and Rose were shifty pieces of business.

  If Jocelyn fell in love with a married man, what would she do? Before she even touched his hand, she would probably call a conference. Clifford would be invited, and the man himself, and the man’s wife, and very likely Jocelyn’s psychiatrist. (In spite of her rejection of her family Jocelyn believed that going to a psychiatrist was something everybody should do at developing or adjusting stages of life and she went herself, once a week.) Jocelyn would consider the implications; she would look things in the face. Never try to sneak her pleasure. She had never learned to sneak things. That was why it was unlikely that she would ever fall in love with another man. She was not greedy. And Patrick was not greedy either now, at least not for love.

  If loving Patrick was recognizing something good, and guileless, at the bottom of him, being in love with Clifford was something else altogether. Rose did not have to believe that Clifford was good, and certainly she knew he was not guileless. No revelation of his duplicity or heartlessness, toward people other than herself, could have mattered to her. What was she in love with, then, what did she want of him? She wanted tricks, a glittering secret, tender celebrations of lust, a regular conflagration of adultery. All this after five minutes in the rain.

  Six months or so after that party Rose lay awake all night. Patrick slept beside her in their stone and cedar house in a suburb called Capilano Heights, on the side of Grouse Mountain. The next night it was arranged that Clifford would sleep beside her, in Powell River, where he was playing with the touring orchestra. She could not believe that this would really happen. That is, she placed all her faith in the event, but could not fit it into the order of things that she knew.

  During all these months Clifford and Rose had never gone to bed together. They had not made love anywhere else, either. This was the situation: Jocelyn and Clifford did not own a car. Patrick and Rose owned a car, but Rose did not drive it. Clifford’s work did have the advantage of irregular hours, but how was he to get to see Rose? Could he ride the bus across the Lions Gate Bridge, then walk up her suburban street in broad daylight, past the neighbors’ picture windows? Could Rose hire a baby-sitter, pretend she was going to see the dentist, take the bus over to town, meet Clifford in a restaurant, go with him to a hotel room? But they didn’t know which hotel to go to; they were afraid that without luggage they would be turned out on the street, or reported to the Vice Squad, made to sit in the Police Station while Jocelyn and Patrick were summoned to come and get them. Also, they didn’t have enough money.

  Rose had gone over to Vancouver, though, using the dentist excuse, and they had sat in a café, side by side in a back booth, kissing and fondling, right out in public in a place frequented by Clifford’s students and fellow musicians; what a risk to take. On the bus going home Rose looked down her dress at the sweat blooming between her breasts and could have fainted at the splendor of herself, as well as at the thought of the risk undertaken. Another time, a very hot August afternoon, she waited in an alley behind the theater where Clifford was rehearsing, lurked in the shadows then grappled with him deliriously, unsatisfactorily. They saw a door open, and slipped inside. There were boxes stacked all around. They were looking for some nesting spot when a man spoke to them.

  “Can I do anything for you?”

  They had entered the back storeroom of a shoe store. The man’s voice was icy, terrifying. The Vice Squad. The Police Station. Rose’s dress was undone to the waist.

  Once they met in a park, where Rose often took Anna, and pushed her on the swings. They held hands on a bench, under cover of Rose’s wide cotton skirt. They laced their fingers together and squeezed painfully. Then Anna surprised them, coming up behind the bench and shouting, “Boo! I caught you!” Clifford turned disastrously pale. On the way home Rose said to Anna, “That was funny when you jumped out behind the bench. I thought you were still on the swing.”

  “I know,” said Anna.

  “What did you mean, you’d caught us?”

  “I caught you,” said Anna, and giggled, in what seemed to Rose a disturbingly pert and knowledgeable way.

  “Would you like a Fudgsicle? I would!” Rose said gaily, with thoughts of blackmail and bargains, Anna dredging this up for her psychiatrist in twenty years’ time. The episode made her feel shaky and sick and she wondered if it had given Clifford a distaste for her. It had, but only tempo
rarily.

  As soon as it was light she got out of bed and went to look at the day, to see if it would be good for flying. The sky was clear; no sign of the fog that often grounded planes at this time of year. Nobody but Clifford knew she was going to Powell River. They had been planning this for six weeks, ever since they knew he was going on tour. Patrick thought she was going to Victoria, where she had a friend whom she had known at college. She had pretended, during the past few weeks, to have been in touch with this friend again. She had said she would be back tomorrow night. Today was Saturday. Patrick was at home to look after Anna.

  She went into the dining room to check the money she had saved from Family Allowance checks. It was in the bottom of the silver muffin dish. Thirteen dollars. She meant to add that to what Patrick gave her to get to Victoria. Patrick always gave her money when she asked, but he wanted to know how much and what for. Once when they were out walking she wanted to go into a drugstore; she asked him for money and he said, with no more than customary sternness, “What for?” and Rose began to cry, because she had been going to buy vaginal jelly. She might just as well have laughed, and would have, now. Since she had fallen in love with Clifford, she never quarreled with Patrick.

  She figured out again the money she would need. The plane ticket, the money for the airport bus, from Vancouver, and for the bus or maybe it would have to be a taxi into Powell River, something left over for food and coffee. Clifford would pay for the hotel. The thought filled her with sexual comfort, submissiveness, though she knew Jerome needed new glasses, Adam needed rubber boots. She thought of that neutral, smooth, generous bed, which already existed, was waiting for them. Long ago when she was a young girl (she was now twenty-three) she had often thought of bland rented beds and locked doors, with such luxuriant hopes, and now she did again, though for a time in between, before and after she was married, the thought of anything connected with sex irritated her, rather in the way Modern Art irritated Patrick.

  She walked around the house softly, planning her day as a series of actions. Take a bath, oil and powder herself, put her diaphragm and jelly in her purse. Remember the money. Mascara, face cream, lipstick. She stood at the top of the two steps leading down into the living room. The walls of the living room were moss green, the fireplace was white, the curtains and slipcovers had a silky pattern of gray and green and yellow leaves on a white background. On the mantel were two Wedgwood vases, white with a circlet of green leaves. Patrick was very fond of these vases. Sometimes when he came home from work he went straight into the living room and shifted them around a bit on the mantel, thinking their symmetrical position had been disturbed.

  “Has anybody been fooling around with these vases?”

  “Well of course. As soon as you leave for work I rush in and juggle them around.”

  “I meant Anna. You don’t let her touch them, do you?”

  Patrick didn’t like to hear her refer to the vases in any joking way. He thought she didn’t appreciate the house. He didn’t know, but maybe could guess what she had said to Jocelyn, the first time Jocelyn came here, and they were standing where Rose stood now, looking down at the living room.

  “The department store heir’s dream of elegance.”

  At this treachery even Jocelyn looked abashed. It was not exactly true. Patrick dreamed of getting much more elegant. And it was not true in the implication that it had all been Patrick’s choice, and that Rose had always held aloof from it. It had been Patrick’s choice, but there were a lot of things she had liked at one time. She used to climb up and polish the glass drops of the dining-room chandelier, using a cloth dipped in water and baking soda. She liked the chandelier; its drops had a blue or lilac cast. But people she admired would not have chandeliers in their dining rooms. It was unlikely that they would have dining rooms. If they did, they would have thin white candles stuck into the branches of a black metal candleholder, made in Scandinavia. Or else they would have heavy candles in wine bottles, loaded with drippings of colored wax. The people she admired were inevitably poorer than she was. It seemed a bad joke on her, after being poor all her life in a place where poverty was never anything to be proud of, that now she had to feel apologetic and embarrassed about the opposite condition—with someone like Jocelyn, for instance, who could say middle-class prosperity so viciously and despisingly.

  But if she hadn’t been exposed to other people, if she hadn’t learned from Jocelyn, would she still have liked the house? No. She must have been souring on it, anyway. When people came to visit for the first time Patrick always took them on a tour, pointing out the chandelier, the powder room with concealed lighting, by the front door, the walk-in closets and the louvered doors opening on to the patio. He was as proud of this house, as eager to call attention to its small distinctions, as if he, not Rose, had grown up poor. Rose had been uneasy about these tours from the start, and tagged along in silence, or made deprecating remarks which Patrick did not like. After a while she stayed in the kitchen, but she could still hear Patrick’s voice and she knew beforehand everything he would say. She knew that he would pull the dining-room curtains and point to the small illuminated fountain—Neptune with a fig leaf—he had put in the garden, and then he would say, “Now there is our answer to the suburban swimming-pool mania!”

  After she bathed she reached for a bottle of what she thought was baby oil, to pour over her body. The clear liquid ran down over her breasts and belly, stinging and burning. She looked at the label and saw that this was not baby oil at all, it was nail polish remover. She scrubbed it off, splashed herself with cold water, towelled desperately, thinking of ruined skin, the hospital; grafts, scars, punishment.

  Anna was scratching sleepily but urgently at the bathroom door. Rose had locked it, for this preparation, though she didn’t usually lock it when she took a bath. She let Anna in.

  “Your front is all red,” Anna said, as she hoisted herself on to the toilet. Rose found the baby oil and tried to cool herself with it. She used too much, and got oily spots on her new brassiere.

  She had thought Clifford might write to her while he was touring, but he did not. He called her from Prince George, and was businesslike.

  “When do you get into Powell River?”

  “Four o’clock.”

  “Okay, take the bus or whatever they have into town. Have you ever been there?”

  “No.”

  “Neither have I. I only know the name of our hotel. You can’t wait there.”

  “How about the bus depot? Every town has a bus depot.”

  “Okay, the bus depot. I’ll pick you up there probably about five o’clock, and we can get you into some other hotel. I hope to God there’s more than one. Okay then.”

  He was pretending to the other members of the orchestra that he was spending the night with friends in Powell River.

  “I could go and hear you play,” Rose said. “Couldn’t I?”

  “Well. Sure.”

  “I’d be very inconspicuous. I’d sit at the back. I’ll disguise myself as an old lady. I love to hear you play.”

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “No.”

  “Clifford?”

  “Yes?”

  “You still want me to come?”

  “Oh, Rose.”

  “I know. It’s just the way you sound.”

  “I’m in the hotel lobby. They’re waiting for me. I’m supposed to be talking to Jocelyn.”

  “Okay. I know. I’ll come.”

  “Powell River. The bus depot. Five o’clock.”

  This was different from their usual telephone conversations. Usually they were plaintive and silly; or else they worked each other up so that they could not talk at all.

  “Heavy breathing there.”

  “I know.”

  “We’ll have to talk about something else.”

  “What else is there?”

  “Is it foggy where you are too?”

  “Yes. Is it fogg
y where you are too?”

  “Yes. Can you hear the foghorn?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t it a horrible sound?”

  “I don’t mind it, really. I sort of like it.”

  “Jocelyn doesn’t. You know how she describes it? She says it’s the sound of a cosmic boredom.”

  They had at first avoided speaking of Jocelyn and Patrick at all. Then they spoke of them in a crisp practical way, as if they were adults, parents, to be outwitted. Now they could mention them almost tenderly, admiringly, as if they were their children.

  There was no bus depot in Powell River. Rose got into the airport limousine with four other passengers, all men, and told the driver she wanted to go to the bus depot.

  “You know where that is?”

  “No,” she said. Already she felt them all watching her.

  “Did you want to catch a bus?”

  “No.”

  “Just wanted to go to the bus depot?”

  “I planned to meet somebody there.”

  “I didn’t even know there was a bus depot here,” said one of the passengers.

  “There isn’t, that I know of,” said the driver. “Now there is a bus, it goes down to Vancouver in the morning and it comes back at night, and it stops at the old men’s home. The old loggers’ home. That’s where it stops. All I can do is take you there. Is that all right?”

  Rose said it would be fine. Then she felt she had to go on explaining.

  “My friend and I just arranged to meet there because we couldn’t think where else. We don’t know Powell River at all and we just thought, every town has a bus depot!”

  She was thinking that she shouldn’t have said my friend, she should have said my husband. They were going to ask her what she and her friend were doing here if neither of them knew the town.

  “My friend is playing in the orchestra that’s giving a concert here tonight. She plays the violin.”