Earth and High Heaven (16 page)

If only Marc had known her father — if only her father had known Marc. But neither of them did, and all she could do was to go on playing for time, trying to keep Marc from finding out what her family really thought of him, until, after a while, they thought a little better.

She said, “They don't ‘go on' about you, darling; you're hardly ever mentioned.”

After dinner they drove through the grey streets lined with trees, every shade and depth of green in the evening light, out of the city, through a village and across the canal, then on the straight new highway for a while and finally off to the left down a series of narrow country roads until they came to the river, and the primitive cable ferry which sailed back and forth on the current between Ile de Montreal and Ile Bizard. They found the old ferryman sitting as usual on a kitchen chair at one end of his barge, puffing on his pipe. There was no sound but the movement of the water in the long grasses by the bank, and some bells ringing in the monastery across the river. The old man stood up, beckoning them to drive onto the barge, then he cast off, and barge, car, and kitchen chair started for Ile Bizard. Of all the islands near the island of Montreal, Bizard was the one Erica loved best.

“How can anyone make a living out of ferrying people across here?” asked Erica. “Nobody ever goes to Ile Bizard but us, I mean not on this thing. Everybody else uses the bridge. Which river is this anyhow?”

“The Back River.”

Erica sighed. “I'm always hoping it will turn out to be the Ottawa or the St. Lawrence but it never does.”

The top of the car was down and looking up at the sky she remarked, “By the way, Vic and Barbara Wells are having a cocktail party on Friday. Do you want to go?”

“Was I invited?”

“Yes, Barbie asked if I'd bring you. She's going to phone you herself tomorrow.”

“I don't have to be brought.”

It sounded more like an observation than an objection.

So far so good, thought Erica, and said, “May I have a cigarette, please?”

He lit one for her and then one for himself and said at last, “I've known Vic ever since my first year at law school; he was a year ahead of me and he went into his father's firm as soon as he graduated. I've had lunch with him a couple of times since but that's about all — strictly business. So why the sudden interest?”

Farther up, the river was dotted with heavily wooded islands and there were a few villages hidden among the trees along the shore, although all you could see of them was an occasional roof or a church spire. Erica had been born and brought up in Montreal but she had never managed to get the geography of the region completely straightened out; it remained a green and watery tangle of islands, rivers, lakes, and villages all named after saints, the more obscure and improbable, the better. Just who, for example, was St. Polycarp de Crabtree Mills?

The sudden interest was due to the fact that she had had lunch with Barbara Wells the day before and since she knew Barbara very well, she had asked, “You wouldn't like to invite a friend of mine too, would you? His name is Marc Reiser, he's a Jewish lawyer and Charles won't have him in the house.”

“Good Lord,” said Barbara. After a moment she remarked, “If he's a lawyer, Vic probably knows him.”

“That's more than can be said for Charles,” said Erica. “He's one of those people who can judge the quality of the contents by the label on the can.”

“Your father's not the only one. Vic can be pretty stuffy when he wants to be, particularly about the Jewish legal fraternity — he was well away on some frightful story about a firm of Jewish lawyers last night before he remembered that the Oppenheims are Jews and they were sitting on the opposite side of the table. Of course they're Austrians and you'd never guess ...”

“Yes, dear,” Erica interrupted patiently. “Well, Marc's parents are Austrian too, if that's any help.” She could not imagine anyone who knew Marc not liking him and she said, “Anyhow, ask Vic what he thinks.”

Later in the afternoon Barbara had phoned to say that Vic had said by all means, bring him along, and that was that, except for the fact that there was something in the tone in which Marc had asked about the sudden interest which made Erica suspect that he had no intention of going.

She did not care particularly whether he went or not, but she knew that this business of always being alone together was bad for them both and sooner or later, something would definitely have to be done about it. As things were, they were simply playing the parts Charles Drake had assigned them — the parts of a couple of outcasts. With the exception of one or two friends of Marc's who, like himself, were waiting to go overseas, most of his other friends having gone long since, and an occasional friend of Erica's, they had kept to themselves. The longer they went on keeping to themselves, without even trying to behave like ordinary people with a place in the society which surrounded them, the easier it was for Charles. If, on the other hand, enough people outside the family got to the point where they took Marc and herself for granted, the situation would begin to be thoroughly awkward for her parents. The Drakes could not go on indefinitely refusing to meet someone whom a steadily increasing number of other people they knew had met and accepted, without appearing rather silly. Vic and Barbara Wells combined an unassailable social position — which meant that their approval would automatically carry some weight with her father and mother, since the social aspect of the problem seemed to be one of their chief worries — with intelligence and, in spite of Vic's temporary lapse in the presence of the Oppenheims, a general lack of stuffiness, so their cocktail party looked to Erica like a good place to start.

The ringing of the monastery bells had died away. They heard the long whistle of a distant railway train, then a faint shout from somewhere on the shore behind them, and then there was silence again except for the splashing of the swift current, driving at an angle against the barge, and the noise the pulleys made as they creaked along the cable up in the air.

“I think I'd rather not go,” said Marc.

“Why?” Before he could answer Erica said, “You know what cocktail parties are like, Marc — a lot of people bring their friends without even asking.”

“Did
you
ask, Eric?”

“No.”

His right arm was lying on the back of the seat behind her, and all he had to do was let it down to her shoulders in order to bring her around so that she was facing him. “Say it again.”

“All right then,” said Erica defiantly, “I did ask her. Good heavens, I've asked dozens of people if I could bring someone to their parties. Look at the one we gave in June — we started out with thirty people and ended up with over fifty.”

“I know, I was one of them,” said Marc noncommittally.

He took his arm away from her shoulders and turned so that he was sitting under the wheel again, looking past the bent figure of the old ferryman who was standing on the bow staring upriver, to the tumbledown landing stage on the green shore in front of him.

“You said that once ...”

“Go on.”

“You said it was important not to start imagining things.”

“I'm not imagining anything, darling. You don't realize what the legal profession is like. It isn't the same as being a Jewish doctor, or professor, or even a Jewish businessman. You've got Vic on the spot, and the only thing for me to do is not to turn up. He knows he's never made any effort to see me outside of business hours since we were at law school — I tried once or twice after we graduated but he was always busy or something — and I know it, and he knows I know it. So now when you come along and finally get me invited to his house after twelve years — what does it all add up to?”

“It adds up to everybody going on forever playing this idiotic game according to the rules and never getting anywhere!” She said miserably, “You're just helping to make it work.”

“Well, if I didn't, I'd only be accusing of pushing in where I'm not wanted.”

The barge slid into place against the beach and with her eyes on the old French Canadian who was adjusting the two planks which served as runways, she asked after a pause, “Are you going to feel like this about everyone?”

“No, of course not. You just happened to pick the wrong people.” They drove past the monastery, then into a village by a steepled church, around one side of the green square where a few old men were playing bowls, and out the other side among the fields and scattered farmhouses painted white and with the softly curving bell-cast roofs of Quebec, and the great barns of faded yellow and blue and red. There was a shrine by the side of the road and a few people grouped around it, old men and women and children and the village curé, and later on they came to a herd of cows and had to follow along behind with the car in low gear until the cows turned in at a gate.

This is Quebec, where you were born and brought up, and these are some of the things you would remember if you had to go away and live somewhere else — wayside shrines and fields of cornflowers, the view from the top of Mount Oka where you can look down on the roofs of the great Trappist monastery and out over the valleys of the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence, green islands and green shores, blue water with a white sail here and there and the blue mountains in the distance. You would remember a village with a white church steeple at the end of a Laurentian valley, a farmer driving a high-wheeled buggy down a dark country road at night, singing on his way home; seagulls flying over the rocky coast of Gaspé, sailing-boats and villages and the long narrow farms running down to the St. Lawrence, and everywhere over cities, towns, villages, and the green countryside, over mountains and valleys, rivers and lakes, the sound of bells tolling for mass and the dark, anonymous figures of priests, nuns, and monks. You would remember the jangle of sleighbells in winter, the sharp, pointed outlines of pine trees black against the snow, the flat white expanse of frozen lakes crossed and recrossed with ski tracks, and the skiers themselves pouring down the cold mountainside at dusk, toward the train waiting down below in the valley.

And you would remember Montreal, the incredible tropical green of this northern city in summer, the old grey squares, the Serpentine at Lafontaine Park with little overhanging casinos and packed with little boats; the harbour, the river; the formalized black-and-white figures of the nuns taking the air just at dusk among the trees around the Mother House of the Congregation de Notre Dame, the narrow grey streets of downtown Montreal like the streets of an old French provincial town, the figure of the Blessed Virgin keeping watch over the harbour from her place high up on Bonsecours, the sailors' church; the steep terraced gardens of Westmount, and the endless narrow balconies of endless walled convents and monasteries, where nobody ever walks.

Erica said reflectively as they passed an old stone farmhouse on one side of the road with a grove of pines on the other, “When they go on about preserving the French-Canadian way of life, sometimes I think I know what they're talking about.”

“Yes,” said Marc, adding after a pause, “Only their way of life is rather a luxury at the moment and somebody has to pay for it. I don't feel the way you do about Quebec. I feel that way about Ontario.”

He slowed down, looking warily at a dog which was standing undecidedly in the middle of the narrow, winding dirt road just ahead of them, and then finally came to a dead stop. “Well, make up your mind,” he said patiently. “We're not in a hurry, just take your time about it.” The dog regarded him without interest, and eventually started toward a nearby gate, waving his tail in the air.

“It doesn't matter so much where it is, though, provided it's Canada. I'm hopelessly provincial, Eric. I've been in Europe and the States of course, but though I had a marvellous time, it was always a relief to come home again. I just belong here, that's all. I couldn't imagine living anywhere else. How long can you see the shore after you leave Halifax?”

“Only for a short while.”

“That's good. The shorter the better. I don't want to stand around for hours watching Canada fade into the distance.”

He drove on in silence for a while, looking straight ahead of him, and then said suddenly, “Gosh, it will be great to come back again, though, won't it, Eric?”

“Yes, darling.”

“How about something on the radio?” He turned past several dance orchestras and an announcer saying, “Ainsi se termine, chers auditeurs, un autre concert symphonique ...” and another one beginning, “Nous vous presentons maintenant quelques bulletins de guerre ...” and finally he left it at a symphony orchestra playing a Strauss waltz.

A hay wagon was lumbering toward them and as he slowed down again in order to go off the road and give it room to pass, he said, “They told me at Headquarters today that it probably wouldn't be much more than a month now.”

“And then what?”

“Petawawa or Borden for a while, and then overseas.”

“I hope it's Petawawa,” said Erica under her breath. Camp Borden was four hundred miles away.

He stopped the car in an open space under some evergreens at the edge of a small wood and turned off the radio which had changed from Strauss to advertising, so that they were caught up in the silence all around them. The moon was rising over an orchard, and the lamps were already lit in the small farmhouse up the road. Nearer at hand there was a wayside cross partly outlined against the dying light of the west.

Marc took the cigarette from her hand and threw it out on the road and then his arm was around her, drawing them together. He kissed her throat and then her mouth and she had no will at all until at last memory came back. She slipped one arm up behind his head and clung to him, trying to forget the time when she would have to let him go, probably not much more than a month from now.