His mother's smile hid her disappointment as she returned to the living room. Bruce took a bottle from the ice box, removed the cap, and went out the back door with the bottle in one hand and a glass in the other. The stars were visible as he rested in a garden chair, but he closed his eyelids and did not see them. The bottle was three-quarters empty when he heard a movement on the other side of the hedge. Someone besides himself was sitting in the dark tonight.
He got up silently. And for how many nights before this? He waited for several minutes but there was no further sound. Then he walked across the lawn and paused at the gap in the hedge.
“Lucy?” he said half under his breath.
“Yes?”
“May I come over?”
“Please. I've been waiting for you.”
Then she was in his arms and he felt her lips soft under his own. For just a fraction of a second he felt her body come in against his with instinctual hunger, then she had broken away.
He saw a group of chairs under the apple tree and when she returned to one of them he sat down beside her, partly facing her at an angle. Deliberately he lit a cigarette and watched her face in the flare of the match. When the match went out their outlines were still visible to each other, and he remembered that on a clear night it never became totally dark so close to the lake.
“It's good to see you again,” Lucy said a trifle breathlessly.
Half an hour later they were still sitting quietly under the apple tree, each separate, and though neither had mentioned anything of importance, there was less restraint between them than there had ever been.
“One thing I can't understand,” Bruce was saying. “If Jane never wrote to you, if she'd never really relented from that day you left here years ago, how could you bring yourself to come back here?”
“I didn't bring myself,” she said. “I just went crazy one day in Princeton and left with the children and began driving north. I didn't even telephone to Jane until we'd crossed the river and reached Gananoque and I knew we could reach home that day. Then I was scared to death and I chattered like a half-wit to the children to prevent them from seeing it.”
“And then?”
He could hear her take a deep breath in the darkness. “We came into Grenville in the late afternoon and when we passed that idiotic sign on the edge of town about Grenville loving its children, John leaned out the window – he can read quite well, you know – and said, ‘Mummy, does that mean they'll love us too?’ I couldn't answer that one, but we were already through King Street and passing the Ceramic Company and coming to Matilda Lane. When I turned the car this way John looked ahead and caught a glimpse of the water. I said we were going to live at the end of the street and he said, ‘Mummy, is this going to our lake, the one you told us about?’ And then I stopped the car in front of the house.”
She paused and he heard her laugh quietly, almost ruefully. “There's no sense in ever planning anything, Bruce. If I didn't know it before, I learned it that day.”
He waited and presently she went on. He noticed then that her voice sounded a little older than the way he remembered it, and her use of words more confident.
“Jane opened the door before we could get out of the station wagon. She must have been waiting, all ready with something to say, for hours before we came. As I went up the walk she just stood there staring at me with no expression on her face, taking in every line of my face and clothes. There was a child on either side, but for ten seconds I honestly don't think she even saw them. Then John piped up and said, ‘Hullo, Aunt Jane!’ and she looked down and saw him standing there in his best clothes with his hand held out.”
She paused again and Bruce lit another cigarette, watching Lucy's face emerge in the temporary light of it.
“I'll never know what went through Jane's mind in that moment and I don't suppose she ever will, either. Suddenly she smiled – at John, not at me – and told us to come in. And the next thing I knew her back was to me and she was doing something with a handkerchief. When she turned around she said quite briskly, as though she'd seen me only last week, ‘You can have your own room, Lucy. The children can share Nina's room until she comes back. I've put a cot in there beside her bed. You'll find the sheets and blankets in their usual place.’”
Lucy stopped and Bruce blew a stream of smoke toward the stars.
“Grenville!” he said softly. “This is quite a place!”
Silence fell between them without separating them. Over the top of the hedge Bruce could see that the light in his parents’ bedroom had gone out.
“That was in May,” he murmured as if to himself. “And you've been here ever since! How does it feel to be back – for day after day?”
“It feels different ways – day after day. June was a cold, long, wet month, and I hated every minute of it.”
He waited before his next question. “What about now?”
And it took her some time to answer. “The children love it,” she said at last. “Lake Ontario delights them, as though it were a private swimming pool, and John seems to have discovered all the queer characters in town, including Uncle Matt. Children are wonderful at changing and adjusting themselves. The only thing I can't do anything about is the way they miss their father.”
For Bruce, the mood which lay between them was broken. “I was thinking about you, Lucy.”
“I know you were, Bruce dear. And I know you weren't really asking if I liked Grenville, either.”
He thought about her own capacity for change, in the sense that she had never, since he first became aware of her, ceased to grow. His mind began to grope for the significant point in her otherwise commonplace experience. Failing to find it, he felt a sudden bitter indignation that Lucy should have become involved in this routine sequel to the modern American love story.
“Forgive a straight question,” he said. “What's going to happen now?”
“I don't know.”
“What about Stephen?”
She made no answer.
“Are you still in touch with him?”
He saw her hands move in the dark. “It took him about two weeks to guess where I was and then he telephoned. He called four successive nights. Then the calls stopped.”
“Asking you to go back?”
“Yes.”
Bruce waited, then went on. “And you told him?”
“Simply that I had to have time to think things out. My mind seems to be made of cotton wool and I haven't yet been able to work my way through it.”
Bruce got to his feet, his thoughts at war with his feelings. “Why doesn't he come up here? Why doesn't he come to you instead of asking you to go back to him?” His voice took on a note of unconscious malice. “One doesn't settle things like that by telephone.”
He saw her face turned up to him, a pale blur in the dark. “Bruce, if I could talk to anybody about Stephen I could talk to you, but I can't.”
“I know, Lucy. I know.” And suddenly recalling Lassiter's face, his powerful, good-natured self-confidence, Bruce burst into an angry generalization. “What's the matter with Americans of our age? They usen't to be this way. What gives them this damnable new mixture of hardness and softness?”
“Please, Bruce –” Her voice was firm, almost warning. “Thinking and talking like that gets none of us anywhere.”
He stood poised on the dew-wet grass, trying hopelessly to discover her face in the darkness. It occurred to him that there was no use staying with her any longer feeling as he did, for suddenly there was nothing more to say. He reached down and took her hand and she came to her feet. For an instant they stood face to face in the darkness, and then he murmured something unintelligible and went back through the gap in the hedge. His toe hit the bottle of beer he had left beside his chair and knocked it over, but he passed into the house without stopping to pick it up.
He was a fool, he told himself; a fool to believe that because both of them had come back to Grenville, they had also both come home
.
AS JULY advanced in a long procession of lovely days – hours on the sandy beach with the children, picnics and canoeing at Granite Mere, the first peas out of the garden, the King's Highway alive with hitch-hiking veterans, evenings of talk and gramophone music with Bruce, Jane's piano marking out the hours of the day just as it had always done – it seemed to Lucy that her spirit, like the climate itself, was taking a holiday.
And then a morning came when she woke up looking forward to the day. After weeks of feeling more solitary than she had ever felt in her life, she realized that she was no longer quite alone, nor washed back on precisely the same beach from which she had once escaped. Bruce's admiration, his desire for her which he so painfully tried to conceal, conspired with Jane's renewed fondness to restore some of her battered pride. The children were happy, Jane was satisfied, even Grenville seemed more lighthearted than she had remembered it. She discovered that happiness, like misery, is infectious.
In the third week of July, Nina returned from Halifax and Jane and Lucy met her at the station. She got off the train looking official and impersonal in her Wren's uniform, and after supper she announced that she could get her discharge almost as soon as she wished. Jane watched her steadily as she talked, asked questions about Halifax and her work there, and seemed eager to know what she planned to do. As Lucy watched them both she felt sad to hear the lifelessness and lack of interest in Nina's voice. Nina said she supposed she could get another secretarial job in Toronto, at all events she wouldn't stay in Grenville, and almost anything would be better than Halifax. At twenty-six, she spoke as if all her growth lay behind her. But she came down to breakfast next morning looking very pretty in one of her old summer dresses, and the moment she discovered that Bruce Fraser was back in town her face lightened and became vivacious.
“Well, at least I can have some fun this summer,” she said.
THE days following her return seemed to Bruce the most irritatingly unreal he had ever spent. He wanted only to be with Lucy, but Nina was now between them. He would lie on the sand watching Nina, golden in the sunshine, splashing up from the water and tossing her hair back from her eyes in her old defiant gesture. He would glance at Lucy's calm profile, wonder what thoughts lay behind it, and wish to God her younger sister had been transferred to Australia, even while he admitted to himself that he liked her better than he had ever liked her before.
Yet the most unreal thing about this summer was Grenville itself. Calm, sure of its point of view, it had already contrived to reach the middle of the twentieth century without losing the smallest part of its innocence. On warm days he would lie on the beach with the town behind him, hearing the clack of McCunn's lawn mower moving over the surface of the common and occasionally the scream of a cicada. And always coming to the surface of his mind were scenes he had witnessed over the past years, throbbing, exploding, and obliterating the present. The night missions, the day the infantry finally cracked the Germans at Caen, the dead bodies floating in Dutch canals, the look on the faces of the first German civilians in Emmerich, the double-breasted jackets of statesmen at San Francisco – what could one man's brain do with them? Then he would look at Lucy and ask himself what significance a woman's personal unhappiness could possibly have compared to the misery he had seen in a single half-hour in the Bremen railroad station? Once Europe had been as peaceful as the shore of Lake Ontario, he would tell himself. Only a few years ago the problems of Europeans were individual problems, too. And surely it was out of their refusal or incapacity to solve their individual problems that they had robbed themselves of the right to be considered as individuals, letting themselves become DPs of history itself, cannon fodder for Nazis, raw material for Communists, columns of statistics for the mushrooming bureaus. He knew now why he had been so eager to get out of Europe; had he stayed even a month longer he might well have lost forever the one priceless thing his own experience of war had given him – a tempered confidence in the ability of plain human beings to make the most of themselves if they were given a chance.
Even with such thoughts in his mind he would jump up from the sand and go out into the water with John, laugh with him and support him under the chest while he taught him the rudiments of a flutter kick. And then he would become aware, with an added sense of unreality, of the microscopic tensions newly rising between Lucy, himself, and Nina.
Once he heard Nina say to her sister, “Well I notice that even when he's pretending to play with John he keeps looking up to make sure you're noticing him!”
A moment later he left John and came up the beach to join them.
“Bruce,” Nina said. “What are you going to do when the war's over?”
He glanced from one to the other. “Write a book about food and win the Nobel prize.”
Lucy gave him a mocking smile but Nina had no idea what he was talking about.
“Everybody's become so terribly old!” she said. “Nobody's fun any more. What good does it do you to worry about politics all the time?”
“None whatever, so far as I can see.”
“Do you think it will be any better in Toronto after the war than it was before?”
The question opened still another door in Bruce's mind. That was how it worked now: open one door and you saw the corpses of Belsen, open another and you met a lovely girl laughing in the sun, enter one country and you saw a perverted mass of humanity living in a hell they had made for themselves, enter another and you found a people just discovering a life of its own and eager to live it.
Lucy, he could see, had quietly withdrawn herself, as she was doing now whenever the three of them were together. The tart remarks Nina made to her no longer bothered either of them, but Bruce continued to be uncomfortable as one of the trio they made. He wanted to talk to Lucy, to bring her forth again from her mood of inner absorption, to see her return to the transitory mood of lightness which had supported her through the first weeks of July. Today for the first time since his return she seemed much older than himself; older in the sense that she had become impregnable in her own inner reserve and more capable of weighing and balancing the pros and cons of any situation in which she might find herself. He knew intuitively that this was exactly what she was doing now. She was thinking about her life with Stephen Lassiter in the United States and balancing it off against the life she might expect to lead if she divorced him and lived with the children in Canada.
“It's going to be better all over Canada after the war,” he said, trying to answer her thoughts, though his words might sound like a direct answer to Nina's last question. “When the San Francisco Conference was over I went up the coast to Vancouver and came back on the Transcontinental. God, what a land to live in! When the train was crawling up that colossal grade under Cathedral Mountain an American in the observation car said to anyone who would listen to him, ‘How the hell did Canadians manage to break a country like this without anybody shooting his mouth off about it?’”
“What did you tell him?” Nina said rather archly.
“I said I'd no more known what Canada was really like than he did. For years before the war this whole country –” He looked at Lucy, then back at Nina. “Well, you know what it was like. We seemed to think it was shameful to be pleased with ourselves.”
Lucy broke in. “Maybe we were preparing ourselves for the future without knowing it.”
“Maybe,” he replied. “But talk to people on the roads everywhere in Canada today and listen to what they say. We're just beginning to discover ourselves. Americans had that excitement fifty to a hundred years ago. Ours is beginning now. Have you ever stopped to think what it means that this is the only country on the face of the earth where people are happier – happier inside themselves – than they were twenty years ago?”
Looking down at Nina's blue eyes, fixed so attentively on his own, he realized that she had stopped listening. His own fault, he thought. She must have sensed that he was talking to Lucy all the time.
“I don't k
now whether you're merely healthy-minded,” he said to her, “or –”
“Or what?”
“Don't make me say it.”
Only a few years ago her boredom would have annoyed him, but now he felt he had come to understand her. At some point during the war he had ceased to judge people by their intelligence. Nina seemed neither cheap nor ludicrous to him now because her only interest lay in getting married. As he looked at her figure, at once slimmer and more mature than he remembered it, he told himself that all she needed was a man to love her, and realized with something of a start that if Lucy were not here he might easily choose the part for himself.
After that day on the beach a full week went by without his seeing Lucy, for now she was withdrawing herself from him as she had already done from the others. She hadn't deliberately refused to see him; she simply wasn't around where he and Nina and the children were. And the procession of fine days continued. A few spindly phlox, last survivors of Lucy's original garden, bloomed among the weeds she had made no attempt this summer to remove. But the beans and beets matured in Jane's Victory Garden in such profusion that three-quarters of them had to be given away.
Finally a rainy evening came when Bruce, restless and thinking it was about time to end his holiday and begin work again, troubled by his inability to do anything about the situation in which he found himself with Lucy, went over to the Cameron house simply to see her, although he knew that with Nina and Jane in the room no conversation would be possible. As an excuse, he took some flowers from his mother's garden and Jane went to the kitchen to find a vase for them. Lucy was making a frilly dress for Sally, and though she kept on with her work, he felt she was glad to see him again. Nina had been reading, but now she turned on the radio and began twisting the dial as she searched for dance music. She picked up a Toronto station, heard a man announcing the news, and was about to dial off when Bruce jumped from his chair and caught her hand.
The Precipice Page 40
