The Love of a Good Woman (23 page)

Such things happen. But not as regularly as on television or in the movies. Such things don’t often happen.

Eve turned onto the county road, which was fairly busy. Why did that make her feel better? Safety there was an illusion. She could be driving along the highway in the midst of the day’s traffic taking herself and the children to their deaths.

The girl said, “Where’s this road go?”

“It goes out to the main highway.”

“Let’s drive out there.”

“That’s where I am driving,” Eve said.

“Which way’s the highway go?”

“It goes north to Owen Sound or up to Tobermory where you get the boat. Or south to—I don’t know. But it joins another highway, you can get to Sarnia. Or London. Or Detroit or Toronto if you keep going.”

Nothing more was said until they reached the highway. Eve turned onto it and said, “This is it.”

“Which way you heading now?”

“I’m heading north,” Eve said.

“That the way you live then?”

“I’m going to the village. I’m going to stop for gas.”

“You got gas,” the girl said. “You got over half a tank.”

That was stupid. Eve should have said groceries.

Beside her the girl let out a long groan of decision, maybe of relinquishment.

“You know,” she said, “you know. I might as well get out here if I’m going to hitch a ride. I could get a ride here as easy as anyplace.”

Eve pulled over onto the gravel. Relief was turning into something like shame. It was probably true that the girl had run away without collecting any money, that she had nothing. What was it like to be drunk, wasted, with no money, at the side of the road?

“Which way you said we’re going?”

“North,” Eve told her again.

“Which way you said to Sarnia?”

“South. Just cross the road, the cars’ll be headed south. Watch out for the traffic.”

“Sure,” the girl said. Her voice was already distant; she was calculating new chances. She was half out of the car as she said, “See you.” And into the backseat, “See you guys. Be good.”

“Wait,” said Eve. She leaned over and felt in her purse for her wallet, got out a twenty-dollar bill. She got out of the car and came round to where the girl was waiting. “Here,” she said. “This’ll help you.”

“Yeah. Thanks,” the girl said, stuffing the bill in her pocket, her eyes on the road.

“Listen,” said Eve. “If you’re stranded I’ll tell you where my house is. It’s about two miles north of the village and the village is about half a mile north of here. North. This way. My family’s there now, but they should be gone by evening, if that bothers
you. It’s got the name Ford on the mailbox. That’s not my name, I don’t know why it’s there. It’s all by itself in the middle of a field. It’s got one ordinary window on one side of the front door and a funny-looking little window on the other. That’s where they put in the bathroom.”

“Yeah,” the girl said.

“It’s just that I thought, if you don’t get a ride—”

“Okay,” the girl said. “Sure.”

When they had started driving again, Philip said, “Yuck. She smelled like vomit.”

A little farther on he said, “She didn’t even know you should look at the sun to tell directions. She was stupid. Wasn’t she?”

“I guess so,” Eve said.

“Yuck. I never ever saw anybody so stupid.”

As they went through the village he asked if they could stop for ice-cream cones. Eve said no.

“There’s so many people stopping for ice cream it’s hard to find a place to park,” she said. “We’ve got enough ice cream at home.”

“You shouldn’t say ‘home,’” said Philip. “It’s just where we’re staying. You should say ‘the house.’”

The big hay rolls in a field to the east of the highway were facing ends-on into the sun, so tightly packed they looked like shields or gongs or faces of Aztec metal. Past that was a field of pale soft gold tails or feathers.

“That’s called barley, that gold stuff with the tails on it,” she said to Philip.

He said, “I know.”

“The tails are called beards sometimes.” She began to recite, “‘But the reapers, reaping early, in among the bearded barley—’”

Daisy said, “What does mean ‘pearly’?”

Philip said, “Bar-ley.”

“‘Only reapers, reaping early,’” Eve said. She tried to remember. “‘Save the reapers, reaping early—’” “Save” was what sounded best. Save the reapers.

S
OPHIE
and Ian had bought corn at a roadside stand. It was for dinner. Plans had changed—they weren’t leaving till morning. And they had bought a bottle of gin and some tonic and limes. Ian made the drinks while Eve and Sophie sat husking the corn. Eve said, “Two dozen. That’s crazy.”

“Wait and see,” said Sophie. “Ian loves corn.”

Ian bowed when he presented Eve with her drink, and after she had tasted it she said, “This is most heavenly.”

Ian wasn’t much as she had remembered or pictured him. He was not tall, Teutonic, humorless. He was a slim fair-haired man of medium height, quick moving, companionable. Sophie was less assured, more tentative in all she said and did, than she had seemed since she’d been here. But happier, too.

Eve told her story. She began with the checkerboard on the beach, the vanished hotel, the drives into the country. It included her mother’s city-lady outfits, her sheer dresses and matching slips, but not the young Eve’s feelings of repugnance. Then the things they went to see—the dwarf orchard, the shelf of old dolls, the marvellous pictures made of colored glass.

“They were a little like Chagall?” Eve said.

Ian said, “Yep. Even us urban geographers know about Chagall.”

Eve said, “Sor-ry.” Both laughed.

Now the gateposts, the sudden memory, the dark lane and ruined barn and rusted machinery, the house a shambles.

“The owner was in there playing cards with his friends,” Eve said. “He didn’t know anything about it. Didn’t know or didn’t
care. And my God, it could have been nearly sixty years ago I was there—think of that.”

Sophie said, “Oh, Mom. What a shame.” She was glowing with relief to see Ian and Eve getting on so well together.

“Are you sure it was even the right place?” she said.

“Maybe not,” said Eve. “Maybe not.”

She would not mention the fragment of wall she had seen beyond the bushes. Why bother, when there were so many things she thought best not to mention? First, the game that she had got Philip playing, overexciting him. And nearly everything about Harold and his companions. Everything, every single thing about the girl who had jumped into the car.

There are people who carry decency and optimism around with them, who seem to cleanse every atmosphere they settle in, and you can’t tell such people things, it is too disruptive. Ian struck Eve as being one of those people, in spite of his present graciousness, and Sophie as being someone who thanked her lucky stars that she had found him. It used to be older people who claimed this protection from you, but now it seemed more and more to be younger people, and someone like Eve had to try not to reveal how she was stranded in between. Her whole life liable to be seen as some sort of unseemly thrashing around, a radical mistake.

She could say that the house smelled vile, and that the owner and his friends looked altogether boozy and disreputable, but not that Harold was naked and never that she herself was afraid. And never what she was afraid of.

Philip was in charge of gathering up the corn husks and carrying them outside to throw them along the edge of the field. Occasionally Daisy picked up a few on her own, and took them off to be distributed around the house. Philip had added nothing to Eve’s story and had not seemed to be concerned with the telling of it. But once it was told, and Ian (interested in bringing this local
anecdote into line with his professional studies) was asking Eve what she knew about the breakup of older patterns of village and rural life, about the spread of what was called agribusiness, Philip did look up from his stooping and crawling work around the adults’ feet. He looked at Eve. A flat look, a moment of conspiratorial blankness, a buried smile, that passed before there could be any need for recognition of it.

What did this mean? Only that he had begun the private work of storing and secreting, deciding on his own what should be preserved and how, and what these things were going to mean to him, in his unknown future.

I
F
the girl came looking for her, they would all still be here. Then Eve’s carefulness would go for nothing.

The girl wouldn’t come. Much better offers would turn up before she’d stood ten minutes by the highway. More dangerous offers perhaps, but more interesting, likely to be more profitable.

The girl wouldn’t come. Unless she found some homeless, heartless wastrel of her own age. (I
know where there’s a place we can stay, if we can get rid of the old lady.)

Not tonight but tomorrow night Eve would lie down in this hollowed-out house, its board walls like a paper shell around her, willing herself to grow light, relieved of consequence, with nothing in her head but the rustle of the deep tall corn which might have stopped growing now but still made its live noise after dark.

T
HIRTY
years ago, a family was spending a holiday together on the east coast of Vancouver Island. A young father and mother, their two small daughters, and an older couple, the husband’s parents.

What perfect weather. Every morning, every morning it’s like this, the first pure sunlight falling through the high branches, burning away the mist over the still water of Georgia Strait. The tide out, a great empty stretch of sand still damp but easy to walk on, like cement in its very last stage of drying. The tide is actually less far out; every morning, the pavilion of sand is shrinking, but it still seems ample enough. The changes in the tide are a matter of great interest to the grandfather, not so much to anyone else.

Pauline, the young mother, doesn’t really like the beach as well as she likes the road that runs behind the cottages for a mile or so north till it stops at the bank of the little river that runs into the sea.

If it wasn’t for the tide, it would be hard to remember that this
is the sea. You look across the water to the mountains on the mainland, the ranges that are the western wall of the continent of North America. These humps and peaks coming clear now through the mist and glimpsed here and there through the trees, by Pauline as she pushes her daughter’s stroller along the road, are also of interest to the grandfather. And to his son Brian, who is Pauline’s husband. The two men are continually trying to decide which is what. Which of these shapes are actual continental mountains and which are improbable heights of the islands that ride in front of the shore? It’s hard to sort things out when the array is so complicated and parts of it shift their distance in the day’s changing light.

But there is a map, set up under glass, between the cottages and the beach. You can stand there looking at the map, then looking at what’s in front of you, looking back at the map again, until you get things sorted out. The grandfather and Brian do this every day, usually getting into an argument—though you’d think there would not be much room for disagreement with the map right there. Brian chooses to see the map as inexact. But his father will not hear a word of criticism about any aspect of this place, which was his choice for the holiday. The map, like the accommodation and the weather, is perfect.

Brian’s mother won’t look at the map. She says it boggles her mind. The men laugh at her, they accept that her mind is boggled. Her husband believes that this is because she is a female. Brian believes that it’s because she’s his mother. Her concern is always about whether anybody is hungry yet, or thirsty, whether the children have their sun hats on and have been rubbed with protective lotion. And what is the strange bite on Caitlin’s arm that doesn’t look like the bite of a mosquito? She makes her husband wear a floppy cotton hat and thinks that Brian should wear one too—she reminds him of how sick he got from the sun, that summer they went to the Okanagan, when he was a child. Sometimes Brian says
to her, “Oh, dry up, Mother.” His tone is mostly affectionate, but his father may ask him if that’s the way he thinks he can talk to his mother nowadays.

“She doesn’t mind,” says Brian.

“How do you know?” says his father.

“Oh for Pete’s sake,” says his mother.

P
AULINE
slides out of bed as soon as she’s awake every morning, slides out of reach of Brian’s long, sleepily searching arms and legs. What wakes her are the first squeaks and mutters of the baby, Mara, in the children’s room, then the creak of the crib as Mara—sixteen months old now, getting to the end of babyhood—pulls herself up to stand hanging on to the railing. She continues her soft amiable talk as Pauline lifts her out—Caitlin, nearly five, shifting about but not waking, in her nearby bed—and as she is carried into the kitchen to be changed, on the floor. Then she is settled into her stroller, with a biscuit and a bottle of apple juice, while Pauline gets into her sundress and sandals, goes to the bathroom, combs out her hair—all as quickly and quietly as possible. They leave the cottage; they head past some other cottages for the bumpy unpaved road that is still mostly in deep morning shadow, the floor of a tunnel under fir and cedar trees.