The Beggar Maid (26 page)

“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. He 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.

I
n 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.”

S
he 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.”

A
fter 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 gone. 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.

Here she was, she thought a bit later, driving a car, shutting down the windshield wipers as the rain finally let up on a Monday morning at ten o’clock, stopping for gas, stopping to get a transfer of money, now that the banks were open; she was competent and cheery, she remembered what to do, who would guess what mortifications, memories of mortification, predictions, were beating in her head? The most mortifying thing of all was simply hope, which burrows so deceitfully at first, masks itself cunningly, but not for long. In a week’s time it can be out trilling and twittering and singing hymns at heaven’s gate. And it was busy even now, telling her that Simon might be turning into her driveway at this very moment, might be standing at her door with his hands together, praying, mocking, apologizing.
Memento mori.

Even so, even if that were true, what would happen some day, some morning? Some morning she could wake up and she would know by his breathing that he was awake beside her and not touching her, and that she was not supposed to touch him. So much female touching is asking (this is what she would have learned, or learned again, from him); women’s tenderness is greedy, their sensuality is dishonest. She would lie there wishing she had some plain defect, something her shame could curl around and protect. As it was, she would have to be ashamed of, burdened by, the whole physical fact of herself, the whole outspread naked digesting putrefying fact. Her flesh could seem disastrous; thick and porous, gray and spotty. His body would not be in question, it never would be; he would be the one who condemned and forgave and how could she ever know if he would forgive her again?
Come here
, he could tell her, or
go away.
Never since Patrick had she been the free person, the one with that power; maybe she had used it all up, all that was coming to her.

Or she might hear him at a party, saying, “And then I knew I’d be
all right, I knew it was a lucky sign.” Telling his story to some tarty unworthy girl in a leopard-spotted silk, or—far worse—to a gentle long-haired girl in an embroidered smock, who would lead him by the hand, sooner or later, through a doorway into a room or landscape where Rose couldn’t follow.

Yes, but wasn’t it possible nothing like that would happen, wasn’t it possible there’d be nothing but kindness, and sheep manure, and deep spring nights with the frogs singing? A failure to appear, on the first weekend, or to telephone, might have meant nothing but a different timetable; no ominous sign at all. Thinking like this, every twenty miles or so, she slowed, even looked for a place to turn around. Then she did not do it, she speeded up, thinking she would drive a little further to make sure her head was clear. Thoughts of herself sitting in the kitchen, images of loss, poured over her again. And so it was, back and forth, as if the rear end of the car was held by a magnetic force, which ebbed and strengthened, ebbed and strengthened again, but the strength was never quite enough to make her turn, and after a while she became almost impersonally curious, seeing it as a real physical force and wondering if it was getting weaker, as she drove, if at some point far ahead the car and she would leap free of it, and she would recognize the moment when she left its field.