A Jest of God Page 14

  I must not let myself think this way. It’s not as though I ever expected anything to come of it. He was here, and there wasn’t anyone else around, much, and I was here, and that’s all. Of course I know that. There’s never been any doubt in my mind about that.

  The last time, we were sitting in the kitchen afterwards, and Jago came in. I said “Oh heavens, look what time it is – I must be going”. I couldn’t sit still and talk for half an hour with Jago there. Oh no. I had to look startled, as though there had been anything to look startled about – I mean, it wasn’t Jago’s business, was it, and what did he care? Jago, grey-haired, solid, did not say a word. He only looked puzzled. I thought it must be my presence that made him look that way, but now I see it was my departure. How angry Nick must have been, to have me act so. No wonder he hasn’t seen me since. I could have handled the situation differently. It would have been easy. I see that now.

  – They are sitting in the kitchen, the two of them, drinking coffee with rum. They don’t need to talk. They are quite happy, just like this. The boots outside the back door make a scuffling noise – someone wiping his feet before coming in the house. “Jago is home early tonight. He usually goes to the beer parlour after the movie’s over.” “Never mind,” she says, “it doesn’t matter now.” He is smiling – “No, not now.” Jago enters, makes remarks about the weather – “Due for a thunderstorm – not a breath of air anywhere tonight.” “Too hot for coffee?” – her voice is friendly, casual, unperturbed. Jago says he guesses not, if she’ll just add a slug of rum to his as well.

  For a moment it really is soothing, and I can almost believe it happened that way. But the moment evaporates, and I am left with the cold knowledge of how I actually saw it happen, myself rearing up at the door sound, rising gawkily like a tame goose trying to fly. Jago saying nothing, and Nick shrugging. How could I? If only I could say to him, so he would know – look, I didn’t mean to act that way. Did he see it the same way I did, or how? If only I could explain. But I can’t. I tried last night. No – I will not think of that.

  My hand is still on the doorbell, and now I realize it must have been ringing for some time. I’d almost forgotten where I was.

  “Rachel! This is a surprise. Come on in.”

  Calla is wearing lemon-coloured denim slacks and a violet blouse. She looks about ten feet broad. The lead-coloured fringe of her hair is standing up spikily all over her forehead. Her right wrist clanks with a brace of bangles, and her feet, which are grimy, slap with the rubbery sound of her royal-blue toe-thong sandals. She puts a hand out to my shoulder, as anyone might, guiding in a visitor, but immediately she withdraws it, making us both conscious of this half-gesture which probably wasn’t intended as anything at all.

  “I thought I’d drop in for a minute, if you’re not busy.”

  “I was just taking a break,” she says. “The pause that refreshes. Coke or iced tea for you?”

  “Iced tea, please. Do you really keep it on hand?”

  “I put what’s left in the teapot at night into the fridge,” she says, “so as not to waste it. Then it’s always there. Here – sit down, if you can clear a space somewhere.”

  Everything in her livingroom seems to be piled in the middle of the room. The turquoise chesterfield; the glass-topped coffee table; a confusion of books and letters; two unthriving potted pink geraniums; pictures done by her class last year on huge sheets of newsprint with poster paints – clumsily intricate castles and ocean liners; innumerable unemptied ashtrays; a brown pottery bowl of coffee sugar with a brass spoon bearing a gargoyle’s leering face and the words The Imp of Lincoln Cathedral; a square cushion with a yellow fringe and an ivory satin cover painted with a towered church and the lettering The Turrets Twain – St. Boniface, Manitoba.

  “It’s slightly a shambles,” Calla says without apology. “I’m painting the walls. Like them?”

  They are a deep mauve-blue.

  “It’s an unusual colour.”

  “I never knew it would turn out quite so strong a shade,” Calla says, “but it’s still wet. Maybe it’ll lighten when it dries. How have you been, Rachel?”

  “Oh, fine, thanks.”

  I’m not afraid when I am with him, but when I’m not with him, it seems to return. I didn’t intend to do what I did last night. Women shouldn’t phone men. Anybody knows that. But it had been a week, nearly. If only I hadn’t phoned him. Or if he’d been out, away, not available. I had to wait until Mother was asleep, and even then I wasn’t certain, and sat in the hall beside the phone, guarding it, guarding myself, listening towards her door. I thought (why, I don’t know) that he would be the one to answer. But he wasn’t. His mother said “Who is speaking, please?” I wanted to say ex-Queen Soraya or None-of-your-business, but I’m not very composed over these things, so I said my name. He came to the phone. He said “Yes?” Just like that. A business reply. Don’t phone me – I’ll phone you. I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awaken love, until it please. I had to go on and explain, didn’t I? You must have thought I left rather suddenly the other evening – I’m sorry if I gave the impression – etcetera, etcetera. And then he said, laughingly, as though trying to figure out what I was talking about, “Why no, darling, I didn’t think that at all.” His voice was so present that I believed him, but now I don’t know again. It might have been the easiest way of dealing with me, for him. “I’ll give you a ring, eh?” he said.

  Calla is sitting opposite me, spread brawnily on to her one armchair while I insist on perching at the chesterfield’s edge as though to make certain that I’m looking so temporary she won’t be surprised if I take off at any moment.

  “The summer’s more than half over,” she is saying. “It doesn’t seem possible that it’s August already. I’ve been terrifically busy.”

  August. That’s what bothers me the most. At the end of the month he will have to return to his work, and go away, and how is it that we can waste this time now? If I could be with him all the time, all the remaining time, it would be –

  “Have you? That’s good. What with?”

  “Painting, mostly,” Calla says, holding out her blunt hands and examining them. “I’ve become a real interior decorator. You wouldn’t believe it. I’ve hardly had a moment to spare, all summer. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it, though, I must say.”

  I find such difficulty in focusing on what she is saying, but something of her voice’s belligerence cuts through to me.

  “That’s good.” How can I say it convincingly enough? “That’s – I’m awfully glad.”

  “Yes. We finished painting the Tabernacle a week ago. It turned out a great success.”

  “Oh – fine.”

  “Yes. We did the walls in eggshell. Teams of four. Any more don’t get things done, you know, they just gab. Trimming and woodwork in moss-green. It’s a real improvement, I must say. I got so good with a roller that I’ll never use brushes again for walls. Or ceilings. I did most of the ceilings, because I’ve got a head for heights, not that you might think it, to look at me.”

  Now there is something so unassuming about her that I wish I could talk to her. But I can’t talk about him to anyone.

  I got the curse this week. I was – of course – relieved. Who wouldn’t be? Anyone would naturally be relieved, under the circumstances. It stands to reason. You hear of women waiting for it, and worrying incessantly, and then when it comes, they’re released and everything is all right again and that anxiety is over for the moment and for a while one need not think What would I do? What would become of me? I was terribly relieved. It was a release, a reprieve.

  That is a lie, Rachel. That is really a lie, in the deepest way possible for anyone to lie.

  No. Yes. Both are true. Does one have to choose between two realities? If you think you love two men, the heart-throb column in the daily paper used to say when I was still consulting it daily, then neither one is for you. If you
think you contain two realities, perhaps you contain none.

  If I had to choose between feelings, I know which it would be. But that would be a disaster, from every point of view except the most inner one, and if you chose that side, you would really be on your own, now and forever, and that couldn’t, I think, be borne, not by me.

  What are we talking about, Calla and I? Where did I leave her? Painting the Tabernacle. It’s all right. Only an instant has elapsed, I guess.

  “I’d like to go and see it some time.”

  “Would you,” she says, “really?”

  “Why, yes. Yes, of course. It sounds very nice.”

  Nice. The most useful word in the language, the most evasive. Calla isn’t taken in. She’s brusque, sometimes, and her taste in furnishings seems so horrible to me that it creates a kind of horrible snobbishness in me and I go to the opposite extreme to admire her larkspur walls. But she’s not stupid. She knows.

  “You don’t have to,” she is saying, quite kindly.

  “No – I’d like to. I mean it.” I have to say this, now, have to go on protesting my sincerity. Yet I can’t think of that place without dread. The abandoned voices, abandoned in both ways – their owners bereft and because of it needing to utter with that looseness. And the one voice which can’t be forgotten. But it was a momentary thing, a lapse, an accident. It couldn’t happen again. I don’t think that sort of thing could ever happen again, could it?

  “After it happened – I mean, at the Tabernacle that night when you were there,” Calla says, “I didn’t go again for weeks.”

  “Didn’t you? Why not?”

  “Because of how you felt. It was contagious. No, don’t say anything. I know you didn’t mean it to be. But I felt the same. As though it must be awful, in some way, the place and everything there. It was then that I re-read St. Paul.”

  “Really?” I cannot take her earnestness seriously. What is she talking about?

  “Yes. I suppose you knew all along. That was what I kept thinking about. You’d known all along.”

  “Known what?”

  “Just exactly how much he’d warned against speaking in tongues. I’d only known bits of his sayings, here and there, the parts our preacher put into the mimeographed information sheets he passed around on the subject. Then I went and read it all. You knew all the time, eh?”

  “No. I didn’t, Calla. Honestly.” But she doesn’t believe me. She has been worrying about this, utterly unknown to me. It has never crossed my mind. God’s irony – that we should for so long believe it is only the few who speak in tongues. “What did he say?”

  Calla takes a mouthful of iced tea and leans back, deciding to masquerade nonchalance, but doing it so clumsily that all at once I know she’ll painfully and unnecessarily review it later when it’s too late to change how it has been spoken.

  “There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification. Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me.”

  “Maybe he didn’t mean –”

  What am I doing, for heaven’s sake? Apologizing for the apostle’s appallingly accurate sight? I don’t ever remember having heard the words before, much as I was supposed to have been reared on the black leather book. What he says isn’t what should be. It’s merely what is.

  Calla smiles, and offers me a cigarette, her thonged feet outsplayed on the floor, her bulk now leaning forward, her spiky grey hair wavering stiffly as though her head were paradoxically covered with sprigs of dried lavender.

  “Yeh, he meant it, all right, Rachel. But you have to see it in context.”

  “Oh yes, I’m sure.”

  The falseness of this does not escape her, and she smiles again, as though she now were protected against everything, including me, by a thousand mysteries.

  “He says, as well, among a lot of other yakkity-yak, If any man among you thinketh himself to be wise, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. I mean, there you are. I thought to myself – Calla, you old cow, there you are.”

  “Where?”

  “Home-free,” she says, having apparently settled it, but still, I think, waiting for my reaction. “So I went back to the Tabernacle, see, bold as brass and twice as loud. My old usual self, you might say. I thought, well, there’s your clue, kiddo, and if the word that comes to mind is Hallelujah, then it’s Hallelujah, so what can you do about it? You didn’t destroy me, Rachel. Not that you meant to. But, I mean, you didn’t. It’s only right you should know.”

  “I’m –” I don’t know what on earth to say. “I’m glad.”

  “You’re not glad,” Calla says curtly. “How could you be? You don’t know what I’m talking about. Well, pardon me all to blazes, and for heaven’s sake don’t put your elbow any farther back or you’ll touch the wet paint. I spoke, by the way – that’s what I set out to tell you.”

  “You mean –?”

  “Yeh. Amazing, eh? It was given to me. To me, already. Not in the Tabernacle, I must say. Maybe just as well. I mean, who would have been able to interpret? St. Paul says there should be somebody there to interpret.”

  She has left me behind. I’m not following her. And yet I’m not so much frightened, not any more. It won’t happen to me. I won’t become eccentric, moving in some private pattern only, speaking oddities which seem quite usual to me and other wise to others – hilarious to the cruel, terrifying to the slightly more observant. Not now. Not any more. She could be mad as any April fool and it wouldn’t infect me.

  Perhaps he will phone me tonight. Nick? Listen –

  “Where did it happen, then?”

  “Here,” she says. “When I was alone.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeh. It just began, and – I don’t guess I could describe it, Rachel. It was peace. Like some very gentle falling of rain. Sounds funny, eh?”

  “No – no, not at all.” It sounds insane.

  “Well, enough of that,” Calla says, briskly clearing the glasses with the slices of lemon tea – logged and limp at the bottom. “Listen, you never saw Jacob, eh?”

  “Who?”

  “My canary. He doesn’t like all this painting deal, so I’ve put him in the bedroom for the time being.”

  She leads me into the room which contains a single bed, cherry chenille-covered, and a dresser in whitewood which she has stained silver-grey, unlike any wood known to man. The cage is on the dresser, a large gilt cage, free-swinging on its stand so that the bird can rock and roll as it pleases. Inside it, there is a small porcelain bath, a tray of seed and a miniature step-ladder.

  “Hello, Jacob,” Calla says. Then, to me, in a quiet aside, as though the bird might hear and take offence, “So-named because he climbs the ladder all the time. He won’t sing. No ear for music. All he does is march up and down that blasted ladder.”

  “I wonder why?” I have to say something.

  “Search me,” she shrugs. “Maybe the angel at the top can’t be seen by me.”

  She whistles and beckons the bird. It remains sitting on the lowest rung, full of disdain or simply not noticing her.

  “Dead loss,” Calla says. “I’d have done better with a budgie, like I had before.”

  “Why keep it, then?”

  “Well, it can’t help moving about from time to time, phlegmatic though it is, and then I can hear it. I’ve got kind of used to it, stupidly enough.”

  I want to get away. I don’t want to stay here any longer. Calla listening in the early morning or in the darkness for some sound.

  “Calla – Mother’s expecting me home – I must go.”

  “Sure,” she says. “Okay, then. Drop in again, eh? When you’ve got the time.”

  “Yes. Yes, I will.”

  She smiles at me, lightly, politely, as though trying not to notice that I’ve no intention of coming again until some stereotyped conscience forces me to it.

  Ou
r tub is a very elderly one, exceptionally deep and long, mounted on claw feet taloned and grasping like a griffin’s, and pebbled on the outside with years of Mother’s enamelling. Despite its size, it is only just long enough for me to stretch out full length.

  Once we discussed new plumbing. Mother kept saying she was sick to death of painting this dilapidated old tub and trying to make it look halfway decent, and as for the toilet, it was a disgrace because who had a wooden seat any more? We got as far as deciding on colour – she favoured apricot – and then she decided it wouldn’t be practical because the new tubs in the range we could afford were all short and would have been fine for her but wouldn’t have done for me. I said I didn’t mind paying more for a longer one, but she said no, she was certain even those wouldn’t do, and we might have to have one custom-built. That’s what she said. She was annoyed at me that evening over something else, I suppose. When I said she was exaggerating, she said, “I don’t see any cause to be rude to me, just because I was trying to be practical, dear.” All such words cling to the mind like burrs to hair, and I can never seem to brush them away, as I know I should do.

  Yet I remember, too, the words I’ve picked and flung like nettles – “How can we go to the movies this week? You know what Doctor Raven advised. You don’t want to have another attack, do you?” And she looked at me with eyes as wide and shadowed with troublement as though she’d been a child told to fetch something from an unlighted cellar. Only last night I said that, when she whined a little with boredom. It wouldn’t have hurt her to go out, or even if it had, better than waiting within the walls, probably. I wouldn’t go out because I thought he might phone.

  Listen, Nick –

  I talk to him, when he is not here, and tell him everything I can think of, everything that has ever happened, and how I feel and for a while it seems to me that I am completely known to him, and then I remember I’ve only talked to him like that when I’m alone. He hasn’t heard and doesn’t know.

  – The house is not large, but that is all right. They do not need a large house, both of them working and she not able to spend much time in housework. The house is not in a city – very far from that sharpness and coldness. Galloping Mountain, perhaps, with the spruce trees fantastically high and closely set but when you look at night you can see through the black branches a sky warmly black and a white profusion of stars. He loves this place. He half apologizes for loving it – “Crazy, but I’ve always wanted – and maybe it’s a better investment, here, if the one inevitable hysterical moron yields to the seduction of knobs and dials or whatever in hell they are, and the cities are scorched to perdition. Maybe a few kids in scattered places like this will be the only ones who have ever heard of The Tempest or Moby Dick.”