Selected Stories (27 page)

They made two trips.

They went to British Columbia, on the train, during the Easter holidays. His parents sent Patrick money for his ticket. He paid for Rose, using up what he had in the bank and borrowing from one of his roommates. He told her not to reveal to his parents that she had not paid for her own ticket. She saw that he meant to conceal that she was poor. He knew nothing about women’s clothes, or he would not have thought that possible. Though she had done the best she could.
She had borrowed Dr. Henshawe’s raincoat for the coastal weather. It was a bit long, but otherwise all right, due to Dr. Henshawe’s classically youthful tastes. She had sold more blood and bought a fuzzy angora sweater, peach-colored, which was extremely messy and looked like a small-town girl’s idea of dressing up. She always realized things like that as soon as a purchase was made, not before.

Patrick’s parents lived on Vancouver Island, near Sidney. About half an acre of clipped green lawn—green in the middle of winter; March seemed like the middle of winter to Rose—sloped down to a stone wall and a narrow pebbly beach and salt water. The house was half stone, half stucco-and-timber. It was built in the Tudor style, and others. The windows of the living room, the dining room, the den, all faced the sea, and because of the strong winds that sometimes blew onshore, they were made of thick glass, plate glass Rose supposed, like the windows of the automobile showroom in Hanratty. The seaward wall of the dining room was all windows, curving out in a gentle bay; you looked through the thick curved glass as through the bottom of a bottle. The sideboard too had a curving, gleaming belly, and seemed as big as a boat. Size was noticeable everywhere and particularly thickness. Thickness of towels and rugs and handles of knives and forks, and silences. There was a terrible amount of luxury and unease. After a day or so there Rose became so discouraged that her wrists and ankles felt weak. Picking up her knife and fork was a chore; cutting and chewing the perfect roast beef was almost beyond her; she got short of breath climbing the stairs. She had never known before how some places could choke you off, choke off your very life. She had not known this in spite of a number of very unfriendly places she had been in.

The first morning, Patrick’s mother took her for a walk on the grounds, pointing out the greenhouse, the cottage where “the couple” lived: a charming, ivied, shuttered cottage, bigger than Dr. Henshawe’s house. The couple, the servants, were more gentle-spoken, more discreet and dignified, than anyone Rose could think of in Hanratty, and indeed they were superior in these ways to Patrick’s family.

Patrick’s mother showed her the rose garden, the kitchen garden. There were many low stone walls.

“Patrick built them,” said his mother. She explained anything with an indifference that bordered on distaste. “He built all these walls.”

Rose’s voice came out full of false assurance, eager and inappropriately enthusiastic.

“He must be a true Scot,” she said. Patrick was a Scot, in spite of his name. The Blatchfords had come from Glasgow. “Weren’t the best stonemasons always Scotsmen?” (She had learned quite recently not to say “Scotch.”) “Maybe he had stonemason ancestors.”

She cringed afterward, thinking of these efforts, the pretense of ease and gaiety, as cheap and imitative as her clothes.

“No,” said Patrick’s mother. “No. I don’t think they were stonemasons.” Something like fog went out from her: affront, disapproval, dismay. Rose thought that perhaps she had been offended by the suggestion that her husband’s family might have worked with their hands. When she got to know her better—or had observed her longer; it was impossible to get to know her—she understood that Patrick’s mother disliked anything fanciful, speculative, abstract, in conversation. She would also, of course, dislike Rose’s chatty tone. Any interest beyond the factual consideration of the matter at hand—food, weather, invitations, furniture, servants—seemed to her sloppy, ill-bred, and dangerous. It was all right to say, “This is a warm day,” but not, “This day reminds me of when we used to—” She hated people being
reminded
.

She was the only child of one of the early lumber barons of Vancouver Island. She had been born in a vanished northern settlement. But whenever Patrick tried to get her to talk about the past, whenever he asked her for the simplest sort of information—what steamers went up the coast, what year was the settlement abandoned, what was the route of the first logging railway—she would say irritably, “I don’t know. How would I know about that?” This irritation was the strongest note that ever got into her words.

Neither did Patrick’s father care for this concern about the past. Many things, most things, about Patrick seemed to strike him as bad signs.

“What do you want to know all that for?” he shouted down the table. He was a short square-shouldered man, red-faced, astonishingly belligerent. Patrick looked like his mother, who was tall, fair,
and elegant in the most muted way possible, as if her clothes, her makeup, her style, were chosen with an ideal neutrality in mind.

“Because I am interested in history,” said Patrick in an angry, pompous, but nervously breaking voice.

“Because-I-am-interested-in-history,” said his sister Marion in an immediate parody, break and all. “History!”

The sisters Joan and Marion were younger than Patrick, older than Rose. Unlike Patrick they showed no nervousness, no cracks in self-satisfaction. At an earlier meal they had questioned Rose.

“Do you ride?”

“No.”

“Do you sail?”

“No.”

“Play tennis? Play golf? Play badminton?”

No. No. No.

“Perhaps she is an intellectual genius, like Patrick,” the father said. And Patrick, to Rose’s horror and embarrassment, began to shout at the table in general an account of her scholarships and prizes. What did he hope for? Was he so witless as to think such bragging would subdue them, would bring out anything but further scorn? Against Patrick, against his shouted boasts, his contempt for sports and television, his so-called intellectual interests, the family seemed united. But this alliance was only temporary. The father’s dislike of his daughters was minor only in comparison with his dislike of Patrick. He railed at them too, when he could spare a moment; he jeered at the amount of time they spent at their games, complained about the cost of their equipment, their boats, their horses. And they wrangled with each other on obscure questions of scores and borrowings and damages. All complained to the mother about the food, which was plentiful and delicious. The mother spoke as little as possible to anyone and to tell the truth Rose did not blame her. She had never imagined so much true malevolence collected in one place. Billy Pope was a bigot and a grumbler, Flo was capricious, unjust, and gossipy, her father, when he was alive, had been capable of cold judgments and unremitting disapproval; but compared to Patrick’s family, all Rose’s people seemed jovial and content.

“Are they always like this?” she said to Patrick. “Is it me? They don’t like me.”

“They don’t like you because I chose you,” said Patrick with some satisfaction.

They lay on the stony beach after dark, in their raincoats, hugged and kissed and uncomfortably, unsuccessfully, attempted more. Rose got seaweed stains on Dr. Henshawe’s coat. Patrick said, “You see why I need you? I need you so much!”

S
HE TOOK
him to Hanratty. It was just as bad as she had thought it would be. Flo had gone to great trouble, and cooked a meal of scalloped potatoes, turnips, big country sausages which were a special present from Billy Pope, from the butcher shop. Patrick detested coarse-textured food, and made no pretense of eating it. The table was spread with a plastic cloth, they ate under the tube of fluorescent light. The centerpiece was new and especially for the occasion. A plastic swan, lime green in color, with slits in the wings, in which were stuck folded, colored paper napkins. Billy Pope, reminded to take one, grunted, refused. Otherwise he was on dismally good behavior. Word had reached him, word had reached both Flo and Billy, of Rose’s triumph. It had come from their superiors in Hanratty; otherwise they could not have believed it. Customers in the butcher shop—formidable ladies, the dentist’s wife, the veterinarian’s wife—had said to Billy Pope that they heard Rose had picked herself up a millionaire. Rose knew Billy Pope would go back to work tomorrow with stories of the millionaire, or millionaire’s son, and that all these stories would focus on his—Billy Pope’s—forthright and unintimidated behavior in the situation.

“We just set him down and give him some sausages, don’t make no difference to us what he comes from!”

She knew Flo would have her comments too, that Patrick’s nervousness would not escape her, that she would be able to mimic his voice and his flapping hands that had knocked over the ketchup bottle. But at present they both sat hunched over the table in miserable eclipse. Rose tried to start some conversation, talking brightly,
unnaturally, rather as if she was an interviewer trying to draw out a couple of simple local people. She felt ashamed on more levels than she could count. She was ashamed of the food and the swan and the plastic tablecloth; ashamed for Patrick, the gloomy snob, who made a startled grimace when Flo passed him the toothpick-holder; ashamed for Flo with her timidity and hypocrisy and pretensions; most of all ashamed for herself. She didn’t even have any way that she could talk, and sound natural. With Patrick there, she couldn’t slip back into an accent closer to Flo’s, Billy Pope’s, and Hanratty’s. That accent jarred on her ears now, anyway. It seemed to involve not just a different pronunciation but a whole different approach to talking. Talking was shouting; the words were separated and emphasized so that people could bombard each other with them. And the things people said were like lines from the most hackneyed rural comedy.
Wal, if a feller took a notion to
, they said. They really said that. Seeing them through Patrick’s eyes, hearing them through his ears, Rose too had to be amazed.

She was trying to get them to talk about local history, some things she thought Patrick might be interested in. Presently, Flo did begin to talk; she could only be held in so long, whatever her misgivings. The conversation took another line from anything Rose had intended.

“The line I lived on when I was just young,” Flo said, “it was the worst place ever created for suiciding.”

“A line is a concession road. In the township,” Rose said to Patrick. She had doubts about what was coming, and rightly so, for then Patrick got to hear about a man who cut his own throat,
his own throat
, from ear to ear; a man who shot himself the first time and didn’t do enough damage, so he loaded up and fired again and managed it; another man who hanged himself using a chain, the kind of chain you hook on a tractor with, so it was a wonder his head was not torn off.

Tore off
, Flo said.

She went on to a woman who, though not a suicide, had been dead in her house a week before she was found, and that was in the summer. She asked Patrick to imagine it. All this happened, said Flo, within five miles of where she herself was born. She was presenting credentials, not trying to horrify Patrick, at least not more than was
acceptable in a social way; she did not mean to disconcert him. How could he understand that?

“You were right,” said Patrick as they left Hanratty on the bus. “It is a dump. You must be glad to get away.”

Rose felt immediately that he should not have said that.

“Of course that’s not your real mother,” Patrick said. “Your real parents can’t have been like that.” Rose did not like his saying that either, though it was what she believed herself. She saw that he was trying to provide for her a more genteel background, perhaps something like the homes of his poor friends: a few books about, a tea tray, and mended linen, worn good taste; proud, tired, educated people. What a coward he was, she thought angrily, but she knew that she herself was the coward, not knowing any way to be comfortable with her own people or the kitchen or any of it. Years later she would learn how to use it, she would be able to amuse or intimidate right-thinking people at dinner parties with glimpses of her early home. At the moment she felt confusion, misery.

Nevertheless her loyalty was starting. Now that she was sure of getting away, a layer of loyalty and protectiveness was hardening around every memory she had, around the store and the town, the flat, somewhat scrubby, unremarkable countryside. She would oppose this secretly to Patrick’s views of mountains and ocean, his stone-and-timbered mansion. Her allegiances were far more proud and stubborn than his.

But it turned out he was not leaving anything behind.

P
ATRICK
gave her a diamond ring and announced that he was giving up being a historian for her sake. He was going into his father’s business.

She said she thought he hated his father’s business. He said that he could not afford to take such an attitude now that he would have a wife to support.

It seemed that Patrick’s desire to marry, even to marry Rose, had been taken by his father as a sign of sanity. Great streaks of bounty were mixed in with all the ill will in that family. His father at once offered a job in one of the stores, offered to buy them a house. Patrick
was as incapable of turning down this offer as Rose was of turning down Patrick’s, and his reasons were as little mercenary as hers.

“Will we have a house like your parents’?” Rose said. She really thought it might be necessary to start off in that style.

“Well, maybe not at first. Not quite so—”

“I don’t want a house like that! I don’t want to live like that!”

“We’ll live however you like. We’ll have whatever kind of house you like.”

Provided it’s not a dump, she thought nastily.

Girls she hardly knew stopped and asked to see her ring, admired it, wished her happiness. When she went back to Hanratty for a weekend, alone this time, thank God, she met the dentist’s wife on the main street.

“Oh, Rose, isn’t it wonderful! When are you coming back again? We’re going to give a tea for you, the ladies in town all want to give a tea for you!”