A Good House (25 page)

Coming back to Toronto in the car with Murray after the last time she'd made one of her efforts, and she would have called her efforts gallant, anyone would, she had finally let her thoughts be known. She'd told Murray that while she could see they were nice people, they were just not particularly interesting to her. None of them. She had asked him to please explain to her why on earth he believed they were exceptional. Could he name anything at all? When they weren't breeding, the women worked, sure, but at only the expected jobs. The jobs you'd guess. And the men. Right, the men. They risked nothing. The biggest risk in all their lives was setting a place at the table for the minefield that was Meg, waiting to see what outrage she'd put them through, or Paul and Andy planting the damned corn, watching the futures market to see if in the fall they'd be simply rich or stinking rich. And the worst of it, the inescapable worst of it, was their perpetual, mind-boggling awareness of each other, their constant gatherings, their relentless, tedious assumption that they could rescue each other. That rescue was possible.

She had truly expected Murray to put up some defence. She assumed she'd hurt him. But he just shrugged his sloping shoulders, which she had loved then, oh, she had loved pretty much every inch of his bony body then, and kept driving.

His parents weren't that bad. Mr. McFarlane was a kind of slow-moving, old-school gentleman and his mother, stuck in little old Stonebrook with no hope of release, had made a valiant effort to create a quiet, civilized life for herself. And Patrick wasn't bad. She had been fond of Patrick. But there was no way to get near him without tripping over the rest of them. They were a mob, a tight little pack of yelping, nondescript, self-satisfied, what? Yokels? That was likely a bit cruel. Anyway. Anyway. All of it was ancient history and having Mike would soon make it dead history.

She had known Mike at work. He was a writer on her news team and they had been working almost side by side, slamming stories together, for nearly twelve years, had looked at each other perhaps a million times before that one-more-night-among-many when they'd all gone down to unwind in the bar. They were discussing Peter Finch's performance in
Network
when they looked at each other differently. Mike was very, very bright and fun, tons of fun. He was a terrific gossip, had delicious, nasty stuff on lots of people and he loved to get down and dirty. But his primary attribute was that he did not automatically assume that beautiful women were dim and from her perspective this was a substantial attribute. He wasn't any better looking than Murray but he was blond with a grey-blond beard and great clothes, great style. And he was absolutely comfortable with himself, which made bed just so much better.

All the best people she had ever known, even or maybe especially the people who were not particularly good looking, had style and none of it was accidental. Contrary to most assumptions, style didn't require a lot of time or even a lot of money. You didn't have to look like Warren Beatty or Diane Keaton. You just had to decide to look like bloody someone, to behave like someone who counted in a world that counted.

When she'd poured Murray his drink and told him that she had been sleeping with Mike for a year, give or take, he'd had nothing to say except, “I've met him. He's the one with the good teeth.” He had no accusations to heave. There was no yelling, no hard breathing that might dissolve into gloomy sobs and, thank heaven, no massive melodramatic pain rising up between them on the sofa, which was a very good thing because she really, really hated melodrama. Despised it. She could have got quite worked up if Murray had taken the thing in that direction, tried to make a production out of it. But he just set his drink on the table and stood up and left the townhouse. Like a man, she'd thought. He believes he's walking out like a man. All she could think to say to his back was, “Thanks, Murray.”

She supposed he would get himself to Patrick right smartly to begin his defence of the great McFarlane fortune. He would soon discover that she'd already been to a lawyer herself. He would soon be learning how to divide by two. Mike had almost nothing left because he'd had to split what she'd guessed was a substantially smaller amount of money when he left his wife, and since then, of course, every year, month after month after month, he was required to hand over child support. For most of the years of his marriage his wife had not worked “outside the home.” She had chosen the domestic life, home with the kids, home with the cookies. She had chosen to spend his money as if it were her own and seven years later she was still at it. “The bottomless pit” Mike called them when he was pissed off, when he once again found himself wanting something he couldn't afford.

But that first wife had taken care of Mike's paternal needs, so there wouldn't be any difficulty there, there wouldn't be any unexpected hope there. Anyway, she was almost past it. In two quick months she would be forty years old and people would soon stop asking the dreaded, dreadful question. People would soon stop looking at her like some apparently vigorous houseplant in a pretty pot that refused to flower.

Mike's children, whose nicely framed photographs sat on every flat surface in his apartment, lived year round with their mother and her new husband, really a fine guy, Mike said, usually, out in Victoria. The children would continue to come to visit of course. She had already met them several times. Not bad little people, quiet, polite, perhaps a bit terrified of her. But this was natural given the circumstances. The last time they'd seen them, in March when she and Mike had flown out to Whistler on a quick, impulsive ski trip, both girls were in desperate need of a good haircut but one of the boys seemed quite bright, which could be interesting.

*   *   *

DAPHNE WASN'T SURPRISED
to get the phone call, although she had never once indicated any interest in the particulars and the few times Murray had seemed eager to talk about Charlotte, about his ridiculous marriage, she had stopped him cold. She expected him to stay married.

This wasn't decency or anything close to it. It was because she was a grown-up, because she guessed, albeit without the benefit of direct experience, that the long-term investment of time and energy and of what she had always assumed to be good sex, although Murray was careful to deny it, would be very hard to cash in. Hard for both parties. Even in a ridiculous marriage.

She had heard lots of married people use the phrase
work it out,
and other, workmanlike phrases too:
wait it out, ride it through. It
being the thing that was never quite touched on. She'd been at enough weddings, although now that she was thirty-seven the regularity of these was diminishing, to be familiar with the childlike, skipping rhyme rhythms of the vows: in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer, for better for worse.

At least they had no kids. People used that phrase a lot too.

At least she did. Have a kid.

She was back to work full-time at the hospital now that Maggie had started grade one and she was glad to be weaning herself from Murray's help a bit, finally. Although she had been pleased to cash the cheques when she needed the money. A woman with a child gets it both ways in several respects, more expenses and less income, more demands and less energy, more sorrow and more joy. More heart-wrenching sorrow and more inexplicable joy. Sorrow always when Maggie was hurt, not physically, that was pretty straightforward, a scraped knee, stitches here and there, but hurt in her trusting eyes, in her small trusting heart. And inexplicable, absolutely indescribable joy in her resolute accomplishments: walking, going to the bathroom alone for the first time, saying as she careened down the hall that it was private, setting the breakfast table for two, accumulating secret, treasured, junky things around her in her bedroom, drawing detailed pictures of three-storey houses and horses running wild on cloud farms, telling jokes to Grandpa Bill, saving them up to make him laugh and slap his knee.

Once when Maggie was small, just beginning to talk, to make herself understood, she had climbed up onto Margaret's lap for a restful cuddle, and settling herself in, she'd turned and used her capable little hands to lift and fluff Margaret's breast, like a pillow. Sally was there, she'd been about fifteen, and standing close behind them she had blushed with embarrassment for her mother. But Margaret allowed it, easily. She'd only laughed and said, “This kid's going to do all right for herself.”

Still, even with all this, there had been days, many, when Daphne was what her own Grandma Ferguson would have called wearied, when a kind of lonely, godforsaken fatigue left her slumped in a chair, drinking cold tea, stunned. When she had to ask herself what she'd done. And why.

When Maggie first started talking, first started giving people names, without any prompting and maybe because she had been told that
uncle
was the word for the other men who sat for a long time and comfortably at Grandma's table, she'd pointed to Murray and named him uncle. As soon as she had it out, Daphne spoke to stop her. “Just Murray,” she told her.

“Because I'm not your uncle, honey,” Murray said. “Because I'm way better than an uncle.”

Patrick had kicked in immediately, claimed there was nothing in the universe better than an uncle. This made everyone and then Maggie laugh, which had been his determined intention. He was still the only one who knew. He had never told even Mary, who assumed the father was some married guy who had lied his way into Daphne's affections or some other nondescript, irresponsible, shiftless jerk, same difference. Patrick didn't argue with Mary and keeping it to himself eventually became like any other discipline. Once firmly decided, you just kept on.

He had made up his mind that if Maggie ever started to resemble Murray, as she some day might, he would go along with whatever Daphne said she wanted. If she decided then that the others could be told, fine. If not, equally fine. You didn't invest your time bothering Daphne with rational argument or an appeal to common sense, not productively.

*   *   *

MURRAY WAS JUST
back from Jordan. He was very brown and thin or at least more wiry, more angular than usual. And tired. But forty wasn't old, how could it be? He had continued to aggressively speak up for overseas postings, particularly to the countries that were just beginning to be called Third World and which were crawling with creatures like himself, men excited and sometimes even amazed by climate and topography and architecture and the massive stench, the stupefying force of poverty and disease released by war. Men who were close to impotence, struck dumb by the relentless confusions of barbaric sensibilities, impaired by a limited tongue and stranded in their useless, indulgent assumptions. Once, hungry himself and filthy dirty and slightly wounded by a grapefruit-sized chunk of concrete that had glanced off his shoulder when he was running with a television cameraman from Spain out into the safety of an empty, bombed-out street, he caught himself believing for one quick second that war was the least of it. Why would these people tolerate war, he wondered, these of all people? Of course such a question marked a man to be about as naive as a man could get. The people in these countries didn't vote for what they had any more than they watched their children thrive in comfort or drank good water or sought proper medical attention for their own undeserved wounds. And what they endured in country after country was nothing more complicated than a few ruthless animals at the top who were not the pasty-white desk generals you'd get in a declared war but hard, fit, middle-aged men who were so silky smooth you'd think they'd been to charm school. Men who had found a dependable, foreign source of arms and who worked their charm, their magic, prompting the chaotic, anxious rage of thousands of younger men. And no resource anywhere was as renewable or as ready to be tapped as the rage of young men.

Since Watergate, which at the end of the day had been understood most usefully to be a signal, it seemed to Murray that journalists had split into two distinct camps, those in the muckraking camp who positioned themselves right up against privileged power and dug around there for the dirty truth like private dicks, like archaeologists, and those in the other camp, his own, who roamed the almost beaten world like sometimes bombastic but nearly always terrified, appalled explorers. Although that was the one word you never heard.
Appalled.

He had taken the train down to London to talk to Daphne because for a long time he and Charlotte had owned only the one car, the old Volvo, which as far as he knew would be sitting unused in the parking stall under the townhouse in Toronto. For years Charlotte had wanted to get rid of it because she always took cabs and she said he could more cheaply rent a car to get himself home, but now she said they'd better wait to see how things shook down, by which he assumed she meant that she wanted the option of saying, You can have the Volvo and I'll take the prints. There were prints he wanted, that he'd found and bought, but he doubted he had the strength to get them. He wasn't going to waste his time and energy going after any of the furniture, the beloved neutrals that Charlotte and the decorator had chosen, the decorator an enthusiastic, courtly young man looking for referrals who had promised that they themselves would give colour to their rooms.

He hadn't been on a Canadian train in years and he wasn't liking it. Flying, you had no control but at least you got there fast, and while driving soaked up time, at least it was your foot on the gas. The train was both slow and tedious, and where in other circumstances he might have chatted up the shy but friendly, hefty, middle-aged woman sitting beside him, who looked exactly like Andy might look in fifteen years if she stopped taking care of herself, while he might have taken the trouble to learn all about her town and her no-doubt-gifted grandchildren, it wasn't going to happen today. He might have killed the time working but he was empty-handed because he had nothing back at the hotel except a new shaving kit and one new change of clothes.