Duet for Three (8 page)

He credits her, and also June, it seems, with the quality of forgetting.

And now June pops glinting through the door, all hope and excitement. How depressing, that giving life is not just a matter of giving birth. Later comes this liveliness of June's, emerging from Aggie's decay.

But Aggie is no saint, to die on behalf of someone else. She tells June later, when George is gone, “You'll have to save yourself, you know.”

June looks at her blankly. “What?”

“Never mind.” Stupid, speaking thoughts randomly like that. Maybe she really is losing her marbles. To redeem herself, she launches an argument about nursing homes, throwing in death as a bonus, and feels she acquits herself reasonably well.

“Concentrate,” George said, and so tonight in bed she tries. But her body, her comfort and her friend, has turned treacherous and mysterious, rebellious and strange. She saw her own blood today. If more tests are needed, she will go to hospital, where her insides will show up in pictures. She is used to thinking of her body from the outside. Inside, the parts are just supposed to work; or, if they're not working, to make themselves known with pains or little aches. Muscles tighten and weaken with age, and bones become brittle, but what happens to organs? She pictures them losing their healthy pinkness, turning grey like liver left out in the sun. Or a brown heart, like the ones she used to stuff with breadcrumbs and onions and spices for supper.

Events are turned inside out. Her body is not quite listening to her any more. Even June may not be listening to her any more. It would be nice to still have the gift of crying. She hasn't cried for years: the day Frances left for university, and she had to turn back inside alone. And before that, when? Funerals of family, the grief of missing particular people. Now, when she should cry for herself, she lacks the required tenderness.

Self-pity, she thinks impatiently. Nothing is more irritating than self-pity. Irritation, although lacking the high healthy calibre of anger, is something. Some passion, keeping the heart beating.

And after all, isn't it amusing that she, the advocate of change, is now suffering from an overdose? Not just the accidents, bad enough; but also the alteration in the power balance here. And heaven knows it's dangerous. Someone like June, unused to power, is likely to mishandle it. Dictatorships result. Well, you see it all the time on the news, in countries where revolutions occur. New leaders may come to power with the purest motives, the greatest will for the greatest good, and turn into murderers and torturers. The cruelty of the righteous is quite a thing. At least Aggie recognizes her own corruptions: greed, pride, and maybe, at one time, lust; she feels she understands them reasonably well. And she enjoys her greed, is proud of her pride, and can still be furious that her desire was dismissed. But June — June fails to see the dangers of her righteousness. In the classroom, Aggie has heard, she can be arbitrary, harsh. That's unfortunate enough for the children, but now Aggie also seems to be in the position of a pupil, in danger of being sent to the principal's office to be punished for a transgression.

There was a time when Aggie had in mind a daughter with gumption. Should she be pleased that June is showing some, although perhaps in a somewhat sly and underhanded form?

Maybe, like a disgruntled old sow, Aggie should have rolled over on her unsatisfactory offspring at birth.

Frances had an abortion six years ago, telling Aggie about it, although not, of course, June. “There's no way I could raise a baby on my own,” she said. “Maybe someday, but not now. And it isn't as if I'd marry the guy the way people used to. He's nice enough, I like him all right, but we'd have been terrible, married.”

She said it was a hard decision and no doubt it was, but Aggie is sometimes amazed at Frances's confidence in her choices. But it is also her willingness to experience, and her confidence, that Aggie is so proud of.

Frances felt stupid, she said, for having gotten caught, especially at her age. Stupid! In Aggie's day, girls were banished, they did not get off just being stupid.

“If only” is a foolish game, and regrets are obviously futile. But Aggie caught herself wondering at the time: if she'd known, would she have had June?

What if she hadn't?

What a monstrous confession of failure that must be, to wonder what other life there might have been without her.

But of course she would have had her. Even after all these decades of disunity, it appears they still have continuing desires for transformations. Also it is always interesting, if puzzling, trying to track June's emotions, which jerk about like wound-up toy soldiers, little stick figures making their abrupt and rigid turns.

If it is true that June would miss her, Aggie must admit that the reverse is also the case. Who else, when it comes down to it, is there to care about, if not care for?

Frances, of course, but she's three hundred miles away, writing for a magazine, travelling here and there, and doesn't often get home. Only June is actually on hand.

And surely if Aggie can say it was her own time and place that withheld possibilities, the same can be said for June? She may only have been too close to Aggie's time, the twenty-one years between them not long enough. Although it also seems that in any time, June would close choices around her; that it would make no difference when she had been born: she would be determined to make her world small.

The kind of daughter Aggie had in mind would not be sneaking around making doctor's appointments and buying plastic sheets. She certainly wouldn't have been the sort of daughter to try to pray away her rage. The kind of daughter Aggie had in mind would have turned on her long ago, hands on sturdy hips, and said, “Oh, for God's sake, Mother, pull yourself together.” She would have said, “Look, I'm grateful to you for raising me but I'm on my own now, and so are you.” She would have said, “Oh, go to hell with your complaints and your greed and your dying.”

Aggie has to laugh: such a strange wish for a mother to have, a daughter who could say, “Oh, go to hell.” Other dying mothers must wish to hear quite different words from sad-eyed daughters.

Her failures seem to have been the crucial domestic ones. It's with those closest that there has been this distance. Not just June, but the teacher, too.

Not her fault with either of them. But maybe after all this time she could say not his either. And certainly not June's, locked between them. How was he, after all, to know that Aggie had looked curiously at his shoulders and his lips, and that at night before they married, she pictured him coming to her bed? That she might have been capable of lust, that old-fashioned word, forbidden wantonness?

Just as she had no way to know that when he asked her to be his wife, his vision was not of companionable evenings in the kitchen and rosy children sleeping upstairs and poems shared and learned and embraces of some tenderness. What he must have had in mind was someone tractable and pretty, who could be taught to speak correctly and pour tea and smile at people graciously. He wanted a wife for the teacher, not necessarily for himself. He talked about rules of behavior, but in connection with appearances in public. He never told her the rules he thought should apply between the two of them.

It's not such a tragedy, as tragedies go. To spend unhappily a decade of what has turned out to be quite a long life is nothing compared with starvation and war, or having a child grow up to be a murderer, a thief, a rapist. Her heart has never actually been broken, even if such a thing is possible.

The pictures he brought with him showed a chubby little boy. There was something else, maybe nothing to do with her, that caused him to dry and shrivel.

Although he loved June, there's no denying that. There's no telling, Aggie supposes, where love may pop out unexpectedly, like a random tulip from a misplaced bulb.

It seemed to her that something peculiar began to come over him as soon as they were married. That being married was something like a suit he put on, with a certain attention to cut and appearance, but without thought to how it fit. He knew how he wanted them to look together, but had no knack for being with her with no one watching.

They spent their wedding night at an inn along the road to their new home. She has been pleased to see, travelling back in later years, that it has been demolished for a road-widening project, and their room has made way for the gravelled eastbound shoulder. They lay for a few minutes in darkness and silence. She heard him sigh, once quietly, a second time with something like determination, and then he was fumbling about, doing things with his body and with hers, and instead of the warmth she might have expected there was, first, a quite sharp pain, and then a surprising sense of foolishness. In the darkness, he felt like a silly stranger awkwardly doing a peculiar thing. His breathing changed, and there seemed to be a frog in his throat, and drops of his sweat fell onto her body. She felt him tense and shudder, and that was that.

“There,” he said, as if he'd finished marking a set of examinations. And, “Are you all right then?”

Was that what the fuss was all about, what her mother had tried to tell her? “Is that it?” she asked, which of course was a mistake, but she said it without thinking.

He was, naturally enough, offended. “What did you expect?”

“I don't know. It's just, it doesn't take very long, does it?”

“You'd hardly expect it to, would you?”

So much for a communion of silence. “I don't know. I don't know anything about it.”

“I know.” He patted her hand. “You're a good girl.” The idea seemed to please him. He turned away and a few minutes later his breathing was deepening into a snore.

She, however, lay feeling the drops of his perspiration drying on her body, confused and a little offended herself. Heat was one thing, but warmth might have been nice. And of course she was good — how could she have been otherwise? — but what did he think that meant? That she was just another mattress lying there?

But no doubt she had it all wrong. Probably also she was overtired and tense, and that always made her cranky. She only needed a good night's sleep. And perhaps a child. Had her mother not promised her happiness in a child? But how did something so significant result from a small, quick, and inexplicable event in the darkness? Surely there ought to be more, something flashing in the night.

She could feel dampness seeping out onto the sheets. Would this be blood, or what? It was unfair to be annoyed that he slept so easily. Naturally he would be worn out after such a long day and then all that up and down, not easy for a man who wasn't strong. Compared with him, she hadn't been expected to do much today, really, except be in certain places at certain times.

When she woke in the morning he was already out of bed and dressed. In the light, he was a familiar figure once more, although the circumstances were awkwardly intimate and she was at somewhat of a disadvantage, still lying there in bed. Maybe next time, she thought, they could leave a light on, so that it wouldn't feel like a stranger.

“I'll go down and get the horse hitched,” he said. It seemed tactful of him to let her get up in private. “You should hurry, we have a long way to go today.”

They planned to be in their new home by nightfall. Here was the first day of being married, and the sun was shining and who knew what would happen? Here was her new life. Last night was dim, although she was a little sore down there.

There was evidence on the sheet: a little blood, and something else as well, dried and stiff. Embarrassing, that someone cleaning up after them would know. But he was in a hurry, waiting, and she had to wash and dress and get a move on, although there was a kind of gumminess about her body that she wanted to clean away. The best she could do was pull the top sheet and a blanket over the marks. Whoever cleaned the room would trace them to her, but she would be long gone by then.

At breakfast when he spoke, he didn't seem exactly to be looking at her — more at her shoulder, or her chin, or off to one side. Also, his face had taken on an unusual redness. Did last night have some significance for him that she had missed, an exposure that in daylight embarrassed him? In that case, he wouldn't be wanting lights left on.

“Are you ready?” he asked, standing. “Be sure and wear a hat, we'll be out in the sun all day. I'll get the cases loaded.”

It was a scorcher, heavy with humidity, not even a breeze, and the sun beating down. The horse could not be hurried on a day like this. Having to just sit, nowhere to move, felt odd and inactive.

His knuckles, as he held the reins, seemed particularly tight, and he didn't speak. But maybe he was only worried about the horse, not that it was spirited at the best of times. She, more accustomed to animals, might have been better to do the driving.

“Is something the matter?” she asked finally, timidly, after nothing had been said for really an uncomfortable length of time.

“No, of course not.” He glanced sideways at her. “Only we have to get so far today.”

There were birds, occasionally dogs barking, and the sounds of the horse's hooves on the dry dirt road. She grew more restless. If words used precisely meant precise understanding, what did silence signify? Precise disinterest? Nothing to say? But they had years together.