The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

  “Why bother?” she said. “You did your whole apartment over last autumn and you'll do it again six months from now.”

  Bratian gave her an intimate smile. “It's nice to see you again.”

  Lucy laughed.

  “I mean it.” He moved nearer but made no attempt to touch her. “You're the only reason I come out here. You know that, don't you?”

  Stephen came downstairs and Lucy sent John up to wash and change his clothes. Bratian decided he would do the same and on his way upstairs turned to announce that he would be down shortly to inspect the garden.

  When they were alone together Stephen put his arm about Lucy's waist, his hand found the curve of her hip, and he turned her slowly until her face was under his. He kissed her, found her lips warm but passive, and kissed her again, holding her with sudden fierceness as if trying to prove something to himself. Her eyes half closed, slowly her fingers began to tense into his shoulders as her body yielded against his, but his quick lift of relief disappeared when she broke from him and turned away.

  “I'm awfully sorry about last night,” he said.

  “Never mind. It's all right.”

  “Honestly,” he said, watching her closely, trying to read her mind. “I had to work last night. It was one of those god-awful days. On Wednesday I shoved everything aside when Myron Harper phoned he'd be in town and then when he didn't show up it was time out and I had to work overtime to catch up. When you called Wednesday I thought I could make it. I'm sorry I forgot to phone yesterday to tell you I'd changed my mind. It was one of those things. I did mean to.” He went into the dining room and opened a cupboard, there was the clink of a bottle against a glass, a short pause, and then he came back into the hall. “I only remembered when I was in bed last night that I'd forgotten to tell Miss O'Neill to call you.”

  Lucy was busy putting toys into a cupboard underneath the stairs. “Never mind, Stephen. You don't have to explain every detail to me, you know.”

  “I'm not trying to explain.” His voice was growing irritable. He felt in his pockets for cigarettes, found only an empty package, went into the living room and took one from a silver box and lit it. By the time it was burning and the smoke had reached his lungs the intimacy between them was fractured and a state almost of formality had taken its place.

  “How's Sally?” he said. “I haven't seen her anywhere.”

  “She's gone to a birthday party. Shirley's getting her now.”

  “Shirley?” His eyebrows raised with the question. “Oh, yes – the latest. How's she working out?”

  “Not too bad. I'm glad to have anyone at all. She comes in every day after school, and she seems willing to do anything I ask. What's more, she's quite agreeable to giving me all day Saturday – so far.”

  He turned and started upstairs, turned again and went back to the dining room where he poured himself another drink. He came out to the hall with the glass of neat rye in his hand. Lucy was no longer there.

  “Lucy!” he called. “I'm going to take a bath before dinner. I'm tired as hell.”

  She answered from the kitchen. “Will you be ready for dinner by seven-thirty?”

  He went upstairs holding the glass in his hand and emptied it in the process of taking off his clothes. Then he went into the bathroom off their bedroom and stretched out in a tubful of water so hot it turned his skin pink. The lines relaxed about his eyes and the whiskey sent warm waves of comfort along his nerves. A great and omnipresent weight seemed to lift a little, lift but hang over him as if at any moment it would snap back again like the lid of a mummy case. The bathroom was at the back of the house, the window was open a few inches to let out steam, and through the blur of his thoughts he heard Bratian talking to Lucy in the garden. Some day, he thought, that little bastard is going to wear down, too.

  AT FOUR in the morning the house was still. In the guest room Bratian opened the window to let out his cigarette smoke and then he dropped a trayful of butts into the darkness. He got into bed, turned out the light, and in five minutes he was sound asleep. His lithe little body was relaxed as his soul greyed off into innocence. The file of papers on which he had been working lay in a neat pile on the bedside table, unruffled by the faint breath of air which seeped into the room.

  Faintly into all the windows came the sound of a train whistle as a long freight carrying field guns from Pittsburgh to Hoboken neared Princeton Junction. All the loneliness of America was in its call.

  The noise of the distant rolling cars rumbled heavily across Lucy's consciousness and she stirred and woke. Then in the following silence she heard a murmur from Stephen's bed and her eyes opened in the darkness. He was groaning in his sleep. She listened in intent agony to the sounds, thought he was repeating a name, but could not recognize it. She lay there almost willing herself into his half-sleeping mind, trying to discover what troubled it. She remembered reading, years ago in Grenville, that the night can be a bad time for solitary people. Was there any loneliness in the world comparable to the kind that can exist between two who love one another?

  Stephen's murmurs died out but Lucy remained awake with the whole night around her. In New York they had shared the same bed until Stephen's increasing restlessness, his tendency to wake and require a cigarette to relax him for sleep again, had sent him out to buy twin beds. She wished there were only one bed in the room now so she might touch him, even wake him out of his dream, and lie close in his arms. She thought how strange and ironical it was that someone like herself should have been able to reach Stephen more easily through her body than through her mind. He was afraid of her mind; she felt it between them like a barrier, but there had been moments when she knew her physical response had given him a kind of glory. Wishing first not to disappoint him, then longing to make him happy, then loving him sufficiently to obliterate herself and all her background, she had learned to respect his capacity for losing himself in physical love, as she had learned to do the same.

  And now she was conscious of this growing barrier between them, aware of vague resentments in the deep of his nature; now there were moments like this when each was isolated in the same room, their separate lives lying apart.

  He murmured again and made a sobbing sound.

  “Stephen,” she cried softly. “Stephen, wake up!”

  She heard him surge in the darkness. “What is it?”

  “Darling – you were having a nightmare.”

  His voice blew her miles away as he answered, “Oh, for Christ's sake, let me sleep!”

  Silence again and a great weight of darkness, and presently a resumption of his heavy breathing. But Lucy lay awake wondering what to do, feeling the load of his inner unhappiness and disappointment in himself and in her as she asked herself how she had failed him.

  The long minutes ticked off, heard but unseen in the clock that lay on the table between them, while all of America seemed to be closing in around her, thousands of cold eyes watching a stranger in the dark.

  WHEN Lucy got up at seven-thirty Stephen was motionless on his back and she let him sleep. She bathed and dressed, heard the children in the nursery, went in and greeted them, helped Sally with her clothes, and then went downstairs to begin a series of breakfasts. John came down and laid the table, arranging the silverware precisely. When he finished he went out to the kitchen to help his mother; it was his job to put the bread in the toaster after she had sliced it and told him when to begin. Sally came down and tried to help John, and by the time the coffee had bubbled into the top of the Silex a discreet odour of Green Ranger shaving lotion announced the presence of Bratian on the ground floor. He came in wearing a tweed jacket, brown whipcord slacks, suede shoes, a dark blue woollen shirt, and a flaring silk tie splashed with orange.

  “I've had four hours’ sleep and I've done an hour's work already this morning. How's Steve?”

  “He's still asleep. He was awfully tired last night.”

  “What's he got to be tired about? The only way a man gets tired is
worrying.” He gave her a sharp look. “You're as handsome as ever. What's he worried about?”

  Lucy made no answer as she turned out the gas under a frying pan and filled a platter with scrambled eggs. John followed her into the dining room holding a plate of toast in both hands, walking carefully with his eye on the toast, and finally sliding the plate onto the table and then looking up to make sure his mother had noticed that he had done it without disturbing any of the knives and forks or spilling any of the slices on the cloth. Lucy served Bratian, John, and Sally, but took only toast and coffee for herself.

  “What's the matter?” Bratian said. “Don't you like your own cooking?”

  “Not much this morning.”

  “You worried too?”

  “I never eat much for breakfast.”

  “Foolish of you. It's the best meal of the day.”

  She forced herself to listen while he excluded the children by talking politics throughout the meal. Occasionally Sally paused with her spoon halfway to her mouth and stared at him, but Bratian no more noticed the children than he noticed the furniture, and it occurred to Lucy that he had become less sensitive to atmosphere than he once had been. For years she had tried to keep him from realizing that John resented him the way a family dog resents an interloper.

  “When the war's over,” Carl was saying, “I'm going down to Washington, just about the time all the boys down there now get tired and start for home.” He pushed his coffee cup aside and produced a cigar which dwarfed his face when he lit it. “The old stock in the State Department did all right so long as they made the rules and kept their eye on the ball, but they're slipping fast. How much public opinion do they control now? Public opinion grows out of taste, and who gives them their taste? Hollywood and the networks. I give them some of it myself.” He flipped his orange tie outside his jacket. “Where did this fashion come from? Savile Row? They used to sell ties with patterns like this in pushcarts on the streets where I grew up.”

  Lucy got up from the table. “Will you excuse me, Carl? There are so many things to do around the house in the morning.”

  “Where's that farm girl you had helping last time I was here?”

  “She's working in Trenton. I have another one but I don't know where she is this morning.”

  He glanced at the children as though he wished they were somewhere else and John stared back. Then he slid off his chair, excused himself, and went to the kitchen and Sally followed him. Lucy watched them go with a faint smile playing at the corners of her mouth. As Bratian got up from the table she left the room and started upstairs, hoping he had not seen the smile, for had he guessed her thoughts he would not have been flattered. In spite of the fact that he was Stephen's employer and one of his oldest friends, she found him a pitiless bore. Since her marriage she had met many men in New York and Princeton whom she liked, some who let her know they were attracted to her physically and some who did not. Bratian seemed to her obtrusively sexless.

  She reached the upstairs hall and paused outside the closed door of their large bedroom, listening for sounds, but there were none. Stephen had slept like this weekend after weekend with a fatigue she knew was unnatural. If only they could be alone together for two or three consecutive days perhaps she could discover what it was that was exhausting him, but it had been months since they had talked about anything that mattered.

  Going into Bratian's room she opened another window to let out the stale smell and began putting the room in order. The papers on which he had been working before breakfast were spread on the desk and one of them blew onto the floor with a gust of spring air. She picked it up and replaced it, noticing that it was some kind of financial report. A contemptuous anger for his whole business struck through her as she recalled the fantastic private office where he presided in his agency on Madison Avenue. In Bratian's phrase, even his tooled leather chairs were designed to flatter the backsides of prospective customers. She remembered the graphs and charts on the walls, all so impressive to owl-faced practical men who had to be shown. She remembered the windows of the conference room so carefully planned to frame a view of the R.C.A. Building – another study in flattery. She remembered the puffy look about the eyes of the account executives, the hopped-up enthusiasms and periodic frenzies that swept the place whenever one of them thought he had a new idea, the false optimism of those who believed their own build-up and the equally false cynicism of those who didn't. It was a business, she thought, that could have been devised only by men; the women who worked in it had always seemed to her – no matter what records some of them set in hopping from bed to bed – as basically passionless as Bratian.

  She went back to the hall; still no sound from their room. She thought of dishes in the kitchen, grocery orders to be given, laundry to sort, lunch to be started. But she had no intention of going downstairs and talking to Bratian before Stephen got up. Nothing had become more unpleasant to her lately than the subtle way in which Carl contrived to let her know that he, too, was observing Stephen closely, that he, too, was aware that her husband was deteriorating. Her mind had framed the phrase involuntarily; her whole body winced as she shuddered to realize that she could have thought such a thing.

  She heard Sally call from the landing and presently saw her face emerge as she came up the stairs, right foot first on each step. There was a smudge of dirt on the child's face and Lucy led her into the nursery bathroom to wash it off.

  “Daddy's still asleep,” she said as she brushed the golden curls. “He's tired this morning and we must be careful not to wake him up. So run downstairs and play quietly with John and when Daddy gets up we'll all have fun together.”

  Sally went off toward the stairs and Lucy watched the small fat legs disappear down the first step. Then the pudgy face turned about and smiled for no reason except that she was contented. As Lucy turned back to clean up the nursery she felt a surge of warmth run through her veins. Sally was Stephen's favourite, perhaps because she was more tranquil than John, perhaps because she was more helpless, perhaps because she was a girl who had been named for his mother.

  She began to look over the children's summer clothes, and as she closed one drawer in the chest where they were kept and opened another she heard the back door slam and knew that John was on his way over to Sam Hunter's farm. Sam was a wonderful neighbour. Only three mornings ago she had been wakened by strange sounds outside her window and there was Sam with his horse, harrowing her vegetable garden. His own son was in Germany and he always liked to have John around the farm, watching him at work through the seasons, learning to milk his two cows, discussing matters of great import between men.

  Then she heard sounds from the bedroom across the hall. When she opened the door she found Stephen sitting on the side of his bed rubbing his forehead.

  “Poor darling,” she said. “You breathed so hard all night and talked so much in your sleep you can't have rested at all.”

  “What did I talk about?”

  She smiled at him, knowing a smile was necessary at that moment. “I listened carefully, but I couldn't catch a word.”

  “Sorry I woke you.”

  She stood beside him and put her hand behind his head, gently stroking the back of his neck.

  “I suppose you think I've got a hangover,” he said with sudden sharpness.

  She took her hand away and walked across the room to the window. Red peony shoots were standing six inches high among the daffodils and narcissus. This was the season she had always loved best in Grenville, the time when the daffodils made splashes of gold among brown shrubs at a moment when winter seemed endless, when she mixed bordeaux in the greenhouse and found plants she had forgotten over the winter coming through the dark ground, when her garden had seemed the most important thing in the world. But peonies were peonies everywhere, even if her sense of their importance had altered, and the ones down below would have to be sprayed at once if she expected a full blooming in early June. She wished again that Carl would stay in Ne
w York for a weekend now and then and leave her alone with Stephen. If Carl weren't here Stephen might help her all morning in the garden, and it was always easier to talk to him while they were doing some kind of work together.

  Behind her Stephen said, “Is Carl up yet? I suppose he is.”

  “We've all had breakfast.”

  She came back to the bed and sat down beside him, longing to slip in beside him and feel his arms about her. There, at least, he could be sure he was stronger than she was. There, holding her close, he could forget how observant she was, could stop wondering how much she guessed, how much she knew, how much she thought, how much she feared, how much she worried about him.

  “Don't get up if you'd rather not,” she said. “I'll bring you some orange juice or a glass of milk, and you can sleep till afternoon if you like. This is your day.”

  In the ensuing silence she could feel the strain in him, and she knew his mind was trying to ward her off. Why, she asked herself. Why must he? His face looked so naked and hungry when he first woke up, not buoyant the way she liked to remember it, but tortured by conflicting emotions, all of them strong.

  “How's Sally?” he asked.

  “She's fine. She seems to have survived her first party beautifully. She's playing downstairs, waiting for you to get up.”

  He rubbed both hands over the blond stubble on his face, and with a pang Lucy wondered how often he woke up alone in the city feeling as he did now. He had not been drunk last night. He was drinking far too much, but he was never drunk. It was something else that had grown slowly and at first imperceptibly like a wall between them. Why won't he let me try to help him, she thought. No matter what it is, why won't he let me talk to him?

  “It makes no sense, the way I feel this morning,” he said. “It wasn't so late when we got to bed.”

  She avoided his eyes, knowing he wished to avoid hers. Sure now that he was awake for the day, and that as soon as he began to move around she would be unable to talk to him about anything, she said, “Last Tuesday evening – no, it was Wednesday – a man called to see you. Drove out in a car. He said you'd know who he was. His name was Carson.”