The Beggar Maid

by Alice Munro

  Simon said that when he realized they were safe he suddenly felt that they would get through, that nothing could happen to them now, that they were particularly blessed and lucky. He took what happened for a lucky sign.

  Rose asked him, had he ever seen his friend and his sister again?

  “No. Never. Not after Lyons.”

  “So, it was lucky only for you.”

  Simon laughed. They were in bed, in Rose’s bed in an old house, on the outskirts of a crossroads village; they had driven there straight from the party. It was April, the wind was cold, and Rose’s house was chilly. The furnace was inadequate. Simon put a hand to the wallpaper behind the bed, made her feel the draft.

  “What it needs is some insulation.”

  “I know. It’s awful. And you should see my fuel bills.”

  Simon said she should get a wood stove. He told her about various kinds of firewood. Maple, he said, was a lovely wood to burn. Then he held forth on different kinds of insulation. Styrofoam, Micafil, fiberglass. He got out of bed and padded around naked, looking at the walls of her house. Rose shouted after him.

  “Now I remember. It was a grant.”

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  She got out of bed and wrapped herself in a blanket. Standing at the top of the stairs, she said, “That boy came to me with an application for a grant. He wanted to be a playwright. I just this minute remembered.”

  “What boy?” said Simon. “Oh.”

  “But I recommended him. I know I did.” The truth was she recommended everybody. If she could not see their merits, she believed it might just be a case of their having merits she was unable to see.

  “He must not have got it. So he thought I shafted him.”

  “Well, suppose you had,” said Simon, peering down the cellarway. “That would be your right.”

  “I know. I’m a coward about that lot. I hate their disapproval. They are so virtuous.”

  “They are not virtuous at all,” said Simon. “I’m going to put my shoes on and look at your furnace. You probably need the filters cleaned. That is just their style. They are not much to be feared, they are just as stupid as anybody. They want a chunk of the power. Naturally.”

  “But would you get such venomous”—Rose had to stop and start the word again—“such venomousness, simply from ambition?”

  “What else?” said Simon, climbing the stairs. He made a grab for the blanket, wrapped himself up with her, pecked her nose. “Enough of that Rose. Have you no shame? I’m a poor fellow come to look at your furnace. Your basement furnace. Sorry to bump into you like this, ma’am.” She already knew a few of his characters. This was The Humble Workman. Some others were The Old Philosopher, who bowed low to her, Japanese style, as he came out of the bathroom, murmuring memento mori, memento mori; and, when appropriate, The Mad Satyr, nuzzling and leaping, making triumphant smacking noises against her navel.

  At the crossroads store she bought real coffee instead of instant, real cream, bacon, frozen broccoli, a hunk of local cheese, canned crabmeat, the best-looking tomatoes they had, mushrooms, long-grained rice. Cigarettes as well. She was in that state of happiness which seems perfectly natural and unthreatened. If asked, she would have said it was because of the weather—the day was bright, in spite of the harsh wind—as much as because of Simon.

  “You must’ve brought home company,” said the woman who kept the store. She spoke with no surprise or malice or censure, just a comradely sort of envy.

  “When I wasn’t expecting it.” Rose dumped more groceries on the counter. “What a lot of bother they are. Not to mention expense. Look at that bacon. And cream.”

  “I could stand a bit of it,” the woman said.

  Simon cooked a remarkable supper from the resources provided, while Rose did nothing much but stand around watching, and change the sheets.

  “Country life,” she said. “It’s changed, or I’d forgotten. I came here with some ideas about how I would live. I thought I would go for long walks on deserted country roads. And the first time I did, I heard a car coming tearing along on the gravel behind me. I got well off. Then I heard shots. I was terrified. I hid in the bushes and a car came roaring past, weaving all over the road—and they were shooting out of the windows. I cut back through the fields and told the woman at the store I thought we should call the police. She said oh, yes, weekends the boys get a case of beer in the car and they go out shooting groundhogs. Then she said, what were you doing up that road anyway? I could see she thought going for walks by yourself was a lot more suspicious than shooting groundhogs. There were lots of things like that. I don’t think I’d stay, but the job’s here and the rent’s cheap. Not that she isn’t nice, the woman in the store. She tells fortunes. Cards and teacups.”

  Simon said that he had been sent from Lyons to work on a farm in the mountains of Provence. The people there lived and farmed very much as in the Middle Ages. They could not read or write or speak French. When they got sick they waited either to die or to get better. They had never seen a doctor, though a veterinarian came once a year to inspect the cows. Simon ran a pitchfork into his foot, the wound became infected, he was feverish and had the greatest difficulty in persuading them to send for the veterinarian, who was then in the next village. At last they did, and the veterinarian came and gave Simon a shot with a great horse needle, and he got better. The household was bewildered and amused to see such measures taken on behalf of human life.

  He said that while he was getting better he taught them to play cards. He taught the mother and the children; the father and the grandfather were too slow and unwilling, and the grandmother was kept shut up in a cage in the barn, fed scraps twice a day.

  “Is that true? Is it possible?”

  They were at the stage of spreading things out for each other: pleasures, stories, jokes, confessions.

  “Country life!” said Simon. “But here it is not so bad. This house could be made very comfortable. You should have a garden.”

  “That was another idea I had, I tried to have a garden. Nothing did very well. I was looking forward to the cabbages, I think cabbages are beautiful, but some worm got into them. It ate up the leaves till they looked like lace, and then they all turned yellow and lay on the ground.”

  “Cabbages are a very hard thing to grow. You should start with something easier.” Simon left the table and went to the window. “Point me out where you had your garden.”

  “Along the fence. That’s where they had it before.”

  “That is no good, it’s too close to the walnut tree. Walnut trees are bad for the soil.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, it’s true. You should have it nearer the house. Tomorrow I will dig up a garden for you. You’ll need a lot of fertilizer. Now. Sheep manure is the very best fertilizer. Do you know anyone around here who has sheep? We will get several sacks of sheep manure and draw up a plan of what to plant, though it’s too early yet, there could still be frost. You can start some things indoors, from seed. Tomatoes.”

  “I thought you had to go back on the morning bus,” Rose said. They had driven up in her car.

  “Monday is a light day. I will phone up and cancel. I’ll tell the girls in the office to say I have a sore throat.”

  “Sore throat?”

  “Something like that.”

  “It’s good that you’re here,” said Rose truthfully. “Otherwise I’d be spending my time thinking about that boy. I’d be trying not to, but it would keep coming at me. In unprotected moments. I would have been in a state of humiliation.”

  “That’s a pretty small thing to get into a state of humiliation about.”

  “So I see. It doesn’t take much with me.”

  “Learn not to be so thin-skinned,” said Simon, as if he were taking her over, in a sensible way, along with the house and garden. “Radishes. Leaf lettuce. Onions. Potatoes. Do you eat potatoes?”

  Before he left they drew up a plan of the garden. H
e dug and worked the soil for her, though he had to content himself with cow manure. Rose had to go to work, on Monday, but kept him in her mind all day. She saw him digging in the garden. She saw him naked peering down the cellarway. A short, thick man, hairy, warm, with a crumpled comedian’s face. She knew what he would say when she got home. He would say, “I hope I done it to your satisfaction, mum,” and yank a forelock.

  That was what he did, and she was so delighted she cried out, “Oh Simon, you idiot, you’re the man for my life!” Such was the privilege, the widespread sunlight of the moment, that she did not reflect that saying this might be unwise.

  In the middle of the week she went to the store, not to buy anything, but to get her fortune told. The woman looked in her cup and said, “Oh, you! You’ve met the man who will change everything.”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “He will change your life. Oh, Lord. You won’t stay here. I see fame. I see water.”

  “I don’t know about that. I think he wants to insulate my house.”

  “The change has begun already.”

  “Yes. I know it has. Yes.”

  She could not remember what they had said about Simon coming again. She thought that he was coming on the weekend. She expected him, and she went out and bought groceries, not at the local store this time but at a supermarket several miles away. She hoped the woman at the store wouldn’t see her carrying the grocery bags into the house. She had wanted fresh vegetables and steak and imported black cherries, and Camembert and pears. She had bought wine, too, and a pair of sheets covered with stylish garlands of blue and yellow flowers. She was thinking her pale haunches would show up well against them.

  On Friday night she put the sheets on the bed and the cherries in a blue bowl. The wine was chilling, the cheese was getting soft. Around nine o’clock came the loud knock, the expected joking knock on the door. She was surprised that she hadn’t heard his car.

  “Felt lonesome,” said the woman from the store. “So I just thought I’d drop in and—oh-oh. You’re expecting your company.”

  “Not really,” Rose said. Her heart had started thumping joyfully when she heard the knock and was thumping still. “I don’t know when he’s arriving here,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Bugger of a rain.”

  The woman’s voice sounded hearty and practical, as if Rose might need distracting or consoling.

  “I just hope he isn’t driving in it, then,” Rose said.

  “No sir, you wouldn’t want him driving in it.”

  The woman ran her fingers through her short gray hair, shaking the rain out, and Rose knew she ought to offer her something. A glass of wine? She might become mellow and talkative, wanting to stay and finish the bottle. Here was a person Rose had talked to, plenty of times, a friend of sorts, somebody she would have claimed to like, and she could hardly be bothered to acknowledge her. It would have been the same at that moment with anyone who was not Simon. Anyone else seemed accidental and irritating.

  Rose could see what was coming. All the ordinary delights, consolations, diversions, of life would be rolled up and packed away; the pleasure found in food, lilacs, music, thunder in the night, would vanish. Nothing would do anymore but to lie under Simon, nothing would do but to give way to pangs and convulsions.

  She decided on tea. She thought she might as well put the time to use by having another go at her future.

  “It’s not clear,” the woman said.

  “What’s not?”

  “I’m not able to get anything in focus tonight. That happens. No, to be honest, I can’t locate him.”

  “Can’t locate him?”

  “In your future. I’m beat.”

  Rose thought she was saying this out of ill-will, out of jealousy.

  “Well, I’m not just concerned about him.”

  “Maybe I could do better if you had a possession of his, just let me have it to hang on to. Anything he had his hands on, do you have that?”

  “Me,” said Rose. A cheap boast, at which the fortune-teller was obliged to laugh.

  “No, seriously.”

  “I don’t think so. I threw his cigarette butts out.”

  After the woman had gone, Rose sat up waiting. Soon it was midnight. The rain came down hard. The next time she looked it was twenty to two. How could time so empty pass so quickly? She put out the lights because she didn’t want to be caught sitting up. She undressed, but couldn’t lie down on the fresh sheets. She sat on in the kitchen, in the dark. From time to time she made fresh tea. Some light from the street light at the corner came into the room. The village had bright new mercury vapor lights. She could see that light, a bit of the store, the church steps across the road. The church no longer served the discreet and respectable Protestant sect that had built it, but proclaimed itself a Temple of Nazareth, also a Holiness Center, whatever that might be. Things were more askew here than Rose had noticed before. No retired farmers lived in these houses; in fact there were no farms to retire from, just the poor fields covered with juniper. People worked thirty or forty miles away, in factories, in the Provincial Mental Hospital, or they didn’t work at all, they lived a mysterious life on the borders of criminality or a life of orderly craziness in the shade of the Holiness Center. People’s lives were surely more desperate than they used to be, and what could be more desperate than a woman of Rose’s age, sitting up all night in her dark kitchen waiting for her lover? And this was a situation she had created, she had done it all herself, it seemed she never learned any lessons at all. She had turned Simon into the peg on which her hopes were hung and she could never manage now to turn him back into himself.

  The mistake was in buying the wine, she thought, and the sheets and the cheese and the cherries. Preparations court disaster. She hadn’t realized that till she opened the door and the commotion of her heart turned from merriment to dismay, like the sound of a tower full of bells turned comically (but not for Rose) into a rusty foghorn.

  Hour after hour in the dark and the rain she foresaw what could happen. She could wait through the weekend, fortifying herself with excuses and sickening with doubt, never leaving the house in case the phone might ring. Back at work on Monday, dazed but slightly comforted by the real world, she would get up the courage to write him a note, in care of the classics department.

  “I was thinking we might plant the garden next weekend. I have bought a great array of seeds (a lie, but she would buy them, if she heard from him). Do let me know if you’re coming, but don’t worry if you’ve made other plans.”

  Then she would worry: did it sound too offhand, with that mention of other plans? Wouldn’t it be too pushy, if she didn’t tack that on? All her confidence, her lightness of heart, would have leaked away, but she would try to counterfeit it.

  “If it’s too wet to work in the garden we could always go for a drive. Maybe we could shoot some groundhogs. Best, Rose.”

  Then a further time of waiting, for which the weekend would have been only a casual trial run, a haphazard introduction to the serious, commonplace, miserable ritual. Putting her hand into the mailbox and drawing the mail out without looking at it, refusing to leave the college until five o’clock, putting a cushion against the telephone to block her view of it; pretending inattention. Watch-pot thinking. Sitting up late at night, drinking, never getting quite sick enough of this foolishness to give up on it because the waiting would be interspersed with such green and springlike reveries, such convincing arguments as to his intentions. These would be enough, at some point, to make her decide that he must have been taken ill, he would never have deserted her otherwise. She would phone the Kingston Hospital, ask about his condition, be told that he was not a patient. After that would come the day she went into the college library, picked up back copies of the Kingston paper, searched the obituaries to discover if he had by any chance dropped dead. Then, giving in utterly, cold and shaking, she would call him at the university. The girl in his office would say he was g
one. Gone to Europe, gone to California; he had only been teaching there for a single term. Gone on a camping trip, gone to get married.

  Or she might say, “Just a minute, please,” and turn Rose over to him, just like that.

  “Yes?”

  “Simon?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Rose.”

  “Rose?”

  It wouldn’t be as drastic as that. It would be worse.

  “I’ve been meaning to call you,” he would say, or, “Rose, how are you?” or even, “How is that garden?”

  Better lose him now. But going by the phone she put her hand on it, to see if it was warm, maybe, or to encourage it.

  Before it began to get light Monday morning she packed what she thought she would need into the back of the car, and locked the house, with the Camembert still weeping on the kitchen counter; she drove off in a westerly direction. She meant to be gone a couple of days, until she came to her senses and could face the sheets and the patch of readied earth and the place behind the bed where she had put her hand to feel the draft. (Why did she bring her boots and her winter coat, if this was the case?) She wrote a letter to the college—she could lie beautifully in letters, though not on the phone—in which she said that she had been called to Toronto by the terminal illness of a dear friend. (Perhaps she didn’t lie so beautifully after all, perhaps she overdid it.) She had been awake almost the whole weekend, drinking, not so very much, but steadily. I’m not having any of it, she said out loud, very seriously and emphatically, as she loaded the car. And as she crouched in the front seat, writing the letter, which she could more comfortably have written in the house, she thought how many crazy letters she had written, how many overblown excuses she had found, having to leave a place, or being afraid to leave a place, on account of some man. Nobody knew the extent of her foolishness, friends who had known her twenty years didn’t know half of the flights she had been on, the money she had spent, and the risks she had taken.