A Good House (23 page)

“What if we make love right now?” she asked. “What if I have us a baby? We could go that far.”

He had not wanted to hear this. He had not once imagined this. “An illegitimate baby?” he asked.

“The baby would be fine,” she said. “Later on maybe you could come back and see how you liked the looks of me.”

If she was going to start talking about her face, he was prepared to stop her in her tracks. He'd had the words ready for a while, from the time his guilt had finally, and almost without his noticing, transmogrified into the lesser sin of profound regret. And he did not see it as a self-serving act, this ridding himself of guilt. He would never have hurt her deliberately, not in ten thousand years, and having seen in his travels mountains of deliberate, murderous harm, he now believed that guilt could not exist without intention. That guilt was starved without the nourishment of intention. This conviction freed the young man he'd been and it freed Patrick too, although Murray had never made the offer. He wasn't a priest. Of course Daphne had never accused either of them, not then when she was a kid and not since. What she'd said when Bill ran under the water tower to gather and comfort her was what innocent people always said: “I've hurt myself.” This was wrong, of course. Worse than wrong.

“Not just small breasts but small slightly sagging breasts,” Daphne said. “Does that sound appealing?”

“I don't understand,” he said.

“What I want is a child,” she said. “I'm lonely at the core and while some people would say this is the worst reason to have a child, a despicable, selfish reason, it must be the very best reason, or so it seems to me. I've seen women hold their babies as if they've been lonely for them all their lives. No one ever speaks up to say that's suspect.”

He watched her small body, watched her cross her arms to protect it. The light from the window behind her framed her sandy hair, which she had lifted and pulled back from her forehead to expose the widow's peak, Sylvia's widow's peak. “I'd make it as easy for you as I could,” he said. “I would give you money.”

“That sounds to me like a good deal,” she said. “I like money. It's one of my favourite things.”

“So you're saying now would be the right time?” he asked. “We're going to go upstairs now?”

“When I was driving out from London,” she said, “I was thinking about this house. I was thinking in particular about the wraparound porch, about the lilac bushes and the low branches of the spruce trees along the side.”

“It's the middle of the day,” he said. “There will be people on the street.” He waited for her to come around, to be sensible, but she wasn't going to give an inch. “We will have to be quiet,” he said.

“This time quiet in the quiet.” She moved toward him, reached down to his lap, and urged him to his feet.

They went out the kitchen door and followed the porch where it turned at the corner of the house. When they came to the place where the lowest branches of the spruce trees were almost as dense as a man-made wall, Murray stopped.

Daphne stood very still. She was facing him, staring at the creamy surface of his shirt, at the still-hidden chest and shoulders. She was making for herself a sharp, reliable memory of the time before she saw him exposed to the light of day, before she knew every part of his daylight body.

Almost always, until now, when she was with a man, trying like a child to guess exactly what was wanted and, more exactly, what was not wanted and, more crucially, what the final cost of all of it might turn out to be, she recognized in herself and quickly tried to blunt a nearly irrepressible and surely hurtful impulse to cringe when the hands reached out for her. Standing quietly on the porch protected by the spruce trees, she was thoroughly enjoying the absence of that impulse. And she believed that she understood the reason for its absence. This understanding was a release, a fine, small release. “I'm thinking it might be important, it might be best if we try to keep some space between us,” she said. “Quiet should help.”

Let her get this said, Murray told himself. It's only what she believes now. He took for his own memory the top of her small, beautiful head which was almost ready to lift itself up. Her face is going to be calm, he thought.

It was not absolutely quiet on the porch. There was a bird of some kind hidden among the boughs of the spruce. The bird was agitated, likely fearful for the safety of a nearby, recently constructed nest. They couldn't see it but they heard its loud defence.

*   *   *

MARY AND ANDY
were out by the garage deadheading end-of-July roses when Daphne came into the backyard to tell them that she, too, was pregnant. The boys were busy with their trucks in the sandbox and “Midnight Cowboy,” a song Andy especially liked, a song she was humming along with, was playing on the stereo in the screened porch.

Mary and Andy didn't know each other well. When Mary and Patrick were first married, Andy had had her hands full with her kids and lately Mary had been equally busy with her own two and now she was going to have a third, a last baby. Paul was the one who had encouraged Andy to start coming into London, to make the effort to get to know Mary a bit. What he really meant, what almost everyone meant, was, Get away, take some time for yourself. Get your mind off Meg, at least for a few hours. You're entitled.

Andy's first response to Daphne's news was a loud yelp. Then she reached out to embrace her husband's slightly older sister, moving aside when she was finished to give Mary a chance. When Mary didn't take the chance, Andy quickly began to talk nonsense, starting with the first thing that came into her head. “But all this time I've been hoping for one more bridesmaid's dress,” she said. She looked over at Mary, who was about to speak, and carried right on. “Mary and I decked out in matching peau-de-soie, and with pretty little pumps dyed to match. I was thinking baby blue. You're saying there won't be any baby blue peau-de-soie in our future?” She was trying to give Mary some time, to fill up the air between them so Mary could take a minute to think, so she wouldn't speak any of the words that looked to be banging around in her angry head. It didn't do any good.

“Did I hear you right?” Mary asked. She had taken a step back, an actual step back, from Daphne and Andy beside her.

Daphne said it again, just the one word. “Pregnant.”

Mary looked at Andy to see if this might have been a set-up, prearranged, to see if Andy had been already told and won over. But Andy's face was blank. She looked back to Daphne. “Is there a man connected with this?” she asked, her voice scraping like fine steel wool across the word
this.
“You don't have anyone…”

Mary's tone of voice was brand new to Andy, but hearing it, Daphne recognized the stilted cadence and the quick drop to a lower, deadly serious pitch. Knowing without a doubt that she had heard hints of this tone of voice before she wondered at her own foolhardiness, at her own casual assumptions. If it had been even slightly appropriate, if there had been any room back there beside the roses for a quick acknowledgement of absurdity, she would have smacked her own forehead hard with the heel of her hand. If they'd been alone, Andy would have laughed. Margaret certainly would have laughed, hearing it.

“Yes, there is a man,” Daphne said. “Likely the difficulty is not going to be with the word ‘man' but with the word ‘connection.'”

Andy felt exactly as she did when she was trying to drive the loaded half-ton up an incline through greasy spring mud. She geared down, hoping for traction. “Okay now,” she said.

“Kids need a father,” Mary said, gearing up. “And so will you. You'll need help. It's a hell of a lot harder than it looks. About a thousand times harder. Childbirth is nothing. Childbirth is a bloody piece of cake.”

Aware that this could get very bad very fast, Andy decided that she was not going to get sucked in any further. She would do whatever Daphne wanted, whatever she needed, anything at all short of turning on Mary. Because the only future she could actually see had all of them in it. As far as she knew none of them were going anywhere. Mary would just have to stretch her mind to accommodate this little bit of reality. But in her own time. Because how else did people do this kind of thing? She could not credit herself with a tolerance greater than Mary's or a heart that was bigger or more yielding. She just didn't care, she just truly didn't give a damn, not as long as Daphne was all right with it. Whatever it was.

Daphne was turning to go, not in anger, not crying but turning firmly, ready to head for the gate and down the driveway to her car.

Mary reached to put a hand on her shoulder. “I'm sorry,” she said. “But you're not some hippie freak, you are a nurse, for God's sake. You're a grown-up.”

Daphne had anticipated this from Patrick, maybe. Patrick, probably. Although she would not have claimed to know her well, she had thought Mary was a bit like Margaret, perhaps because they had always got along so well. She had expected Mary to offer some variation on what Margaret had said that morning.

Margaret had taken time for one of the deep breaths she always took in the instant before she reconciled herself to something and then she'd said a mere “I see.” Such fine words. And by the time Daphne had finished her tea and muffin and was ready to come back into the city, to Patrick and Mary's, Margaret already had her strategy prepared. “Leave me to get your father through this,” she'd said. “There are far worse things and he is one of the people who knows what some of them are. If he thinks he's forgotten, I can remind him.”

“I'm thirty,” Daphne said to Mary. “I have thought this through. I can work until I start to show and I've got a bit of money and I'll be getting some help.”

“From…?” Mary said.

“From the person who wants to help this baby.” Daphne could hear her own tone of voice adapt itself to the circumstances, a ready weapon, automatic. “If you can't take my news in the spirit in which it is offered, then don't take it at all.”

“But this isn't just your problem,” Mary said.

Andy flinched, not at the tone of voice but at the word. This was not a problem. She was the one who got to define the meaning of the word
problem,
thanks anyway, and these two lucky, lucky women were the last people in the world who should have to be told that. Meg not walking quite when she should have, not talking when she should have, and then talking strangely, slamming her fists, hitting out all the time now when she was frustrated, which was practically every waking minute of the day. Meg changing everything, changing even breakfast into tension. That was what you could call a problem.

In her head she already had Daphne's baby safely born. She couldn't stop herself. The baby was perfect, as her own first two had been. She already had it dressed in some of the things she'd kept, against this time, she realized now. She let it grow up quickly in her mind because that's what kids do, had it visiting them at the farm with Daphne, who would be a good mother, an easygoing mother, had it sitting on Paul's knee on the tractor for a picture with Neil and Krissy perched on the wheel wells and Meg standing behind Paul on the hitch, Meg happy about all of it, jumping and squealing with excitement.

She threw her garden gloves down on the grass and told them she had to go home. She walked along the path and out the gate without a sound, the muscles in her shoulders braced so they would heave only slightly, almost imperceptibly.

Mary was the one who broke down.

Daphne watched her, unmoved. She didn't reach across to touch her and she was not for a New York minute prompted to offer the consolation usual to such circumstances: I know you didn't mean to be hurtful. And Andy knows it too. I'm sure she does.

She looked at this pregnant Jackie Kennedy lookalike, this small, dark, bony-shouldered, thick-haired woman who would remain connected to her as long as Patrick was alive and likely long after, and thought, Mary, you've pulled yourself away. Nobody did it for you. And how do you like being away? Is it better out there?

And then she left, stopping for a minute at the sandbox to tousle John's hair and smile down at Stephen, who was just old enough to have been listening, to have noticed his mother crying into her hands back beside the roses.

*   *   *

WHEN MURRAY PHONED
, Patrick had asked him to come up to the office. He'd started a file, made some notes. He didn't have much information yet, only October 1962, Toronto, which was the date and place of their marriage, and a sketched-out offer of settlement that he had deliberately lowballed. He had no idea how much money Murray made, or how much Charlotte made. He didn't know if they had saved any money themselves because from what he'd gathered they had been living a fairly extravagant life, but he assumed Murray's inheritance would constitute the bulk of the assets. He was sure Charlotte's parents were both alive and well, so her probable future security would not be up for discussion, not in front of any judge that he knew. He wondered what the late Mr. McFarlane would have made of this, Murray allowing his carefully husbanded money to dissipate to this god-awful woman.

Murray had said on the phone that he would rather they meet for dinner downtown some place, so Patrick booked a table at the Iroquois. He deliberately arrived one drink early and after his drink was served he took the file out of his briefcase and placed it squarely in front of him. He wasn't happy, he had even considered passing this thing off to one of his colleagues, but he wanted it done as fast as it could be done. Just to look at her, you wouldn't know Daphne was pregnant, but walking to the restaurant in the muggy August heat he had thought about late February, how fast late February could come. Normally he could not truly remember winter in summer or summer in winter. Normally he found it impossible to bring to mind the opposite season, its pleasures and drawbacks.