Earth and High Heaven (5 page)

“Do you like your job?”

Erica paused, and said finally, “Yes, I like working on a newspaper because I like people, particularly newspaper people, but I'm not a career woman, if that's what you mean.”

She broke off as René appeared, sauntering toward them with a glass in either hand. He asked, “Is there room for me to sit down?” and then remarked, glancing from one to the other, “I see you've met each other. Do I have to give him my drink?” he asked Erica as he lowered himself to the window seat beside her.

“It's about time you did something for him besides leave him alone. I thought you were drinking martinis, René ...”

“I was,” said René.

“Then stick to them,” advised Erica, removing the glasses and handing one to Marc. “How do you like Mrs. Oppenheim?”

“I would like her considerably more if she didn't insist on speaking French. She has the most atrocious accent — ça vient du ventre,” he explained, gesturing. “She told me I was the first French Canadian she'd met who didn't speak a kind of patois, and with that graceful compliment she passed on to politics. She's a Monarchist.”

“My God,” said Marc, “another one.”

“Well, why not?” said René.

Marc regarded him, evidently amused, and finally inquired: “Just what has Otto of Hapsburg got that the King of England hasn't got?”

“I think he has you there, René,” murmured Erica, smiling into her glass, and answered, “The right religion.”

“I have nothing against the King of England,” protested René.

“No?” said Marc. “But you don't see any reason why our Liberal Government at Ottawa shouldn't go on issuing official pamphlets and placards with ‘For King and Country' in the English version and simply ‘Pour la Patrie' in the French.”

“I haven't your English Canadian passion for England,” said René.

“I don't give a damn about England,” said Marc impatiently. “It hasn't anything to do with England, as such. It's the British Commonwealth of Nations. We're living in a period where the tendency is toward greater international units, and for us as a country to resign from the Commonwealth is to move in the opposite direction, backwards toward a pure nationalism that's already out of date. I don't see why our Liberal politicians should make such an effort to avoid reminding the people of Quebec that they
are
a part of an organization which, whatever its faults, is still the only concrete example of the kind of international federation which we want to see existing all over the world. What's the use of talking about ‘federating Europe' in one breath and unfederating Canada in the next? It doesn't make any sense.”

“One of them is a geographical and economic unit and the other isn't,” said René mildly. He turned to Erica and said, “And the Hapsburg question hasn't anything to do with religion either. Mrs. Oppenheim appears to be Jewish.”

“That just makes it worse,” said Marc. He took a drink and added, “Much worse.”

“I didn't say that it had anything to do with religion so far as Mrs. Oppenheim is concerned,” said Erica.

René smiled back at her, remarking, “I don't know why I put up with you. Speaking of ventres, where's your father?”

“You're about the tenth person that's asked me that. If we ever give another party, which,” said Erica, “I must say is unlikely, I'm going to hang a sign in the front hall saying ‘Mr. Drake welcomes you all and hopes you will have a good time, but wishes to be left strictly alone.' He's upstairs in the study,” she told René.

“Your mother seems to be waving at you,” said Marc.

She got up with a sigh, saying, “I'll probably be back sooner or later,” and went over to the doorway where her mother was talking to two young Army officers and their wives. Erica smiled at them but kept in the background. As soon as they were on their way down the hall to the front door, her mother said, “I was wondering if you could persuade Charles to come down, at least for long enough to say goodbye to Scotty and the others. I know they're more my friends than his but I don't think Charles realizes that they're on draft and he probably won't have a chance to see them again.”

“I'll try,” said Erica. “And do talk to Marc Reiser if you get a chance.”

“Which one is he?”

“René's refugee friend I was suppose to rescue, only he isn't a refugee, he comes from Ontario. He's over there by the window with René now, and he's awfully nice. You'll like him.”

Upstairs, she found her father sitting in the corner of the study with the evening newspaper on the floor at his feet and the ashtray beside him heaped with dead matches. He was very tall and heavily built with dark eyes and black hair streaked with grey, an unusually warm and pleasant voice, and a personality which was both magnetic and charming, so that quite involuntarily he fooled most of the people he met into thinking that he was far more interested in them than he actually was.

The air was full of pipe smoke and the scent of blossoms from the garden next door; her father had his head against the back of the leather-covered chair and his long legs stretched straight out in front of him. He was listening to the short-wave English-language broadcast from Berlin. His custom-built radio-phonograph — with two loudspeakers — was a miracle of construction; the announcer's voice sounded as though it were coming from the next room.

“Hello, Charles.”

“Oh, it's you, Erica — come in,” he said, beckoning with one hand. He changed his position so that he was sitting instead of half lying in his chair; he was glad it was she, he was always glad it was she, and usually managed to show it in some way.

He never realized that he made more of an effort for his daughter, more of an occasion of her arrivals and departures, than he ever did for anyone else. He knew that Erica was the only human being who really understood him and with whom he did not have to put up a false front of consistency, but that was as far as he got. To go any further would have involved some disloyalty to his wife, and in all the years of his marriage Charles Drake had never been disloyal to her, even in thought.

The growing difference between one side of his character and the other, made Margaret Drake uncomfortable; she was baffled by the way he contradicted himself and was always trying to fuse the two opposing aspects of his nature by sheer force of logic. Since she was more at ease with his conservative side than she was with the other increasingly skeptical and unpredictable part of him, and since he realized that he could not be consistent to both at once and that consistency was what she wanted, with his wife he was tending more and more to be the complete conservative, emotional, prejudiced, and intolerant. In this way Margaret Drake got the worst of him and she knew it, but she had made her choice and did not know how to go back on it. Often when she came into the room where her husband and daughter were talking, there would be a pause, and she would have the very odd feeling that they were both waiting, hoping that she would say the right thing and that she would come in on their level. And sometimes for the first few minutes it was all right, but she could not keep it up. Sooner or later she always returned to her own level of pure logic where the matter of greatest importance was not whether Charles was being consistent in what he was saying now, but whether he was being consistent with what he had said yesterday. From then on, the argument fell into the meaningless pattern of most arguments between Charles Drake and his wife in which she struggled fruitlessly against a rising current of irritation and unreason from her husband, and Erica gradually became silent.

She had accepted the duality of her father's nature; unlike her mother, it seemed to Erica quite possible that an individual could have two opposing opinions on economic, political, and even moral questions and yet be equally sincere in both. It was primarily a conflict between the theories and beliefs on which he had been brought up and which were an integral part of his background and tradition, on the one hand, and the facts, as they presented themselves to him from day to day, on the other. He wanted to go on believing in the continued existence of a world which, although he admitted it only to Erica, he knew had gone for good.

Almost everyone needs at least one person to whom he can talk off the record, and in the case of Charles Drake, that person was his daughter Erica. He had a great many friends, but they were all cut from the same economic and social pattern as himself, and if he sometimes deviated from that pattern, he did not care to have them know it. He neither wanted, nor could he afford to have people going about saying that C. S. Drake had got some rather advanced and unconventional ideas and, worse still, possibly classing him as a “radical.” That sort of thing doesn't go down well with your fellow members on the Board of Directors. Erica, however, was safe; he could trust her not to quote him afterwards. He could talk like a Tory one day and like a Socialist the next, without — as often happened with his wife — being informed that he was “hopelessly illogical” and without running the risk of having anything he might say used against him the next time he chose to contradict himself.

As for Erica, her father had fascinated her ever since she could remember. Because she knew when, and still more important, how to disagree with him, he rarely tried to override her opinions and never tried to override her personality. She was the only one of his three children with whom his relationship had so far been entirely successful.

Gesturing toward the radio he said, “Listen to him, Eric. It's too good to miss. He's trying to explain how the r.a.f. got through their ‘impregnable' anti-aircraft defences.”

Erica lit a cigarette and sat down on the arm of a chair. The broadcast seemed to be almost over, and after making an effort to keep her mind on what the announcer was saying, she gave up and went on thinking about Marc, letting the voice from Berlin drop away from her out of hearing. She was wondering what people meant when they talked about love at first sight, and whether she was already in love with Marc Reiser or simply knew beyond doubt that she was going to fall in love with him.

Her father got to his feet to switch off the radio with the observation, “There don't seem to be any limits to the amount of bilge they think we can swallow.”

“Speaking of bilge,” said Erica. “That reminds me of our lunch. What happened to it?”

“I had to meet some men at the Club.” He sat down heavily, yawned, and changing his tone he stated, “‘The only way to guarantee full employment after the war is by a return to prewar freedom of enterprise.' What in hell are we supposed to have been doing during the Depression — firing our employees for fun?”

“It must have been a nice lunch.”

“Yeah,” said her father moodily, then, asserting himself, he said, “Damn it, I don't like the idea of living under a bureaucracy any more than they do. I believe in capitalism,” he added firmly, and then remarked with a faintly amused expression in his fine dark eyes, “when it works.”

“Yes,” said Erica. “Well, in the meantime, Mother thinks you would like to come downstairs and say goodbye to Scotty and the rest of them.”

“Does she? Why?”

“They're going overseas, Charles ...”

“Oh, are they? All right,” he said resignedly, but without moving an inch.

Erica wanted to tell him about Marc and was trying to make up her mind how much to tell him and where to begin, when she realized that her father was looking at her intently, as though he also was trying to make up his mind about something.

Finally, he said, “Eric ...”

“Yes?”

He took up his pipe and began to repack it, asking, “Do you like your job at the
Post
?”

“Yes, why?”

“I was just wondering. Do you really like it or is it just a job?”

“No, I really like it.” She waited for him to go on and then asked, “What were you wondering, Charles?”

“About you. You can't go on being a newspaperwoman all your life. It doesn't get you anywhere — you've already gone about as far as you're likely to go, from now on you'll probably just mark time until they fire you because they want a younger woman, or pension you off.”

“My, you make it sound attractive,” said Erica admiringly.

He grinned, and then, leaning forward and punching the air with his pipe for emphasis, he said, “The same thing would happen to you anywhere else — as a woman you can just go so far, and then you're stuck in a job where you spend your life taking orders from some fathead with half your brains, whose only advantage over you is the fact that he happens to wear trousers. What you need is a job where you can get away from all this sex prejudice and be given a chance to work your way right up to the top if you want to.”

“Yes, but ...”

“I don't know why I didn't see it long ago ...”

“See what?”

“The answer to the whole thing,” said her father impatiently. “Evidently I'm just as narrow-minded as everybody else.”

As Erica still did not seem to have a very clear idea of what he was talking about, he said, “Look, I start out with a business, a son, and a daughter ...”

“Two daughters.”

“Miriam doesn't count. She's the kind of girl who gets married ...”

“Ouch!” said Erica, wincing.

“Well, damn it,” Charles exPostulated, “she's already been married once and she's only — how old is Miriam?

“Twenty-four.”

“And how old are you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Besides, Miriam hasn't half your brains,” said her father, dismissing Miriam, and asked, “Where was I?”

“Starting a business with a son and a daughter,” said Erica. “Though why you have to pick a time when your wife's in the middle of giving a cocktail party ...”