Earth and High Heaven (11 page)

“Which one is he?” asked Erica.

“The fat man with the briefcase and the cigar, just in front of those two sailors. Do you see your sister anywhere?”

“It's much too early for Miriam to put in an appearance. She's always the last one off.” She drew back a little as Mr. Aaronson came through the gate and said, “You'd better go, hadn't you?”

“Yes, I guess so. Goodbye, Eric, see you Wednesday.”

“Goodbye, Marc.”

The long concrete platform was empty except for a few straggling passengers, some porters and a noisy little motor pulling half a dozen clattering freight wagons toward the baggage room when she caught sight of Miriam at last, stepping down from a car near the other end.

She was wearing a black suit with a foam of white at her throat, carrying her hat in her hand and walking rapidly with that extraordinary grace which characterized all her movements. She was perfectly proportioned, tall, slender and yet fully developed, what the French call
fausse mince
, with her father's dark eyes and dark hair, and her own almost flawless features, the only really beautiful woman Erica had ever known who seemed to take her own beauty for granted. She seldom made use of it and when she did, it was always with her tongue in her cheek and usually in order to manoeuvre her way out of a ticket for speeding, or past a gateman. People in general did not interest her, and she could rarely be bothered to go out of her way for anyone. Most of the men who fell in love with her bored her; she would put up with their efforts to make an impression for just so long and then, because they always turned out to want just one thing, and worse still, were apparently incapable of believing that she herself could really be interested in anything else, still wholly unimpressed, Miriam would proceed to get rid of them. In spite of her appearance, she had a pronounced intellectual streak which was generally ignored by all unattached men under sixty, and she had grown thoroughly tired of always discussing the same subject. She had told Erica when they had been together in Paris three years before, that it was like being expected to subsist entirely on a diet of cake, adding with an abrupt change of expression that it was not as though cake had ever agreed with her very well either.

She had always been uncommunicative, and that remark in Paris was one of the most revealing that Erica had ever heard from Miriam.

As soon as she saw Erica standing by the barrier, Miriam began to run, lifting her shoulders and half turning her body like a dancer to get past the few remaining people at the gate.

“Eric!”

“Hello, darling,” said Erica with a catch in her throat. She kissed her sister somewhere near her ear, then drew back and looked up into the glowing dark eyes a little above her own. “How are you? Is everything all right? We've been scared to death ever since we got your letter about coming back. What kind of crossing did you have?”

“Just a minute,” said Miriam. “Where are Mother and Dad?”

“They're up in the mountains for the weekend, I couldn't reach them. If you'd only had enough sense to wire from Halifax ...”

“When will they be back?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“How are they?”

“Oh, fine, although Mother still doesn't know how to say ‘No' when people ask her to take on still more war-work. Three years are too long if you're that conscientious, and not so young as you once were; she's practically worn out and so are most of her friends.”

“And how about you?” asked Miriam as they started after the porter who was trundling Miriam's luggage toward the station entrance.

“I'm still on the Post,” said Erica.

“My God.”

Erica did not know what she meant by that exactly. She asked, “How's Tony?”

“Having the time of his life. You knew he'd been promoted, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

In the cab Erica said, “You'll have to go and see Madeleine tonight, or sometime tomorrow anyhow ...”

“Why the rush?”

“Because she'll be dying to hear about Tony, of course. How long is it since you've seen him?”

“About three weeks.”

“Well, it's almost six months since Madeleine's seen him.” There was evidently still a lot about people which Miriam didn't grasp until it was explained to her. “How's Peter?” asked Erica idly.

“He's been missing since Hong Kong,” said Miriam in the same tone in which she would have said that her ex-husband was lunching at his club. They had gone three blocks when she suddenly added, “I spent his last leave with him in London. It was the one thing he seemed to want and I ...” She broke off and then observed, “I guess there are times when it means a lot less to you to do something than not doing it means to someone else. There must be quite a few women in the world who have gone to bed with motives which, in almost any other form of human conduct, would be regarded as thoroughly unselfish,” she remarked in the quizzical tone which characterized most of Miriam's more serious utterances. “Still, we'd been divorced for over a year by that time, so perhaps you'd better not mention it to the family.”

“I wasn't thinking of mentioning it,” said Erica absently, suddenly struck by the change in her sister's face. Something had happened to her sister since Erica had last seen her; she had lost the rather guarded and slightly inscrutable expression she had had as long as Erica could remember. She was leaning forward, looking out the open windows of the cab on first one side and then the other; her dark hair was blown back and along with her eagerness to see everything that there was to be seen along the way from the station to the home which she had left six years before, there was another quality, an inner light reflected softly in her face which made her more beautiful than ever.

They were winding their way up through Westmount, past the big houses set in their own gardens which sloped steeply down to the retaining wall running along the inner edge of the pavement. A little more of Montreal became visible with each hairpin turn in the road until at last they reached the street where the Drakes lived and the whole city lay spread out in the sunlight.

Erica had forgotten her key and had to ring the doorbell. “Hello, Mary,” she said, when their plump, grey-haired cook appeared. “This is my sister, Miss Miriam.”

As the taxi driver carried Miriam's luggage into the hall, Erica saw Mary glance at Miriam from time to time, as though, like so many people, she would not believe at first that Miriam was quite real. Or that she could be my sister, though Erica, feeling discouraged. Nobody had ever looked at her like that.

When the three of them had carried the bags up from the hall and into Miriam's pale-green and beige bedroom, Mary paused in the doorway, still plainly beglamoured, and asked, “Is there anything you'd like, Miss Miriam?”

“Yes,” said Miriam, throwing her hat on the bed. “I want some oranges, lots and lots of oranges.”

She went over to the windows which faced the mountain and said whistling, “My gosh, look at that garden,” her eyes traveling slowly up from the retaining wall across the street, past flowering shrubs, a fountain, some dwarf cedars, and innumerable flower beds to the summer house at the top. “If it was England, it would be full of carrots.”

“Come on,” said Erica, “let's unpack and get it over with.”

Sometime later, as she was on her way to the cupboard with an armful of shoes, Erica asked, “Mimi, why did you come back? You wouldn't leave during the Blitz ...”

“I know, but we weren't being blitzed any more.” She paused and said with her back to Erica, “I came because someone else did.”

“Did he come with you?”

“No. He's been over here for about a month.”

“Whereabouts?”

“I don't know exactly — Washington and Ottawa, I guess. He's on the Purchasing Commission.”

“English?”

Miriam straightened up, having put the last of her underwear into the chest of drawers, and glancing at her three suitcases lying open and now almost empty in a row on the window seat, she said, “No, one of those Americans who has lived all over the place and might be almost anything. Sit down, Eric, I'll finish up. There isn't much left.”

“Are you going to marry him?” asked Erica after a brief silence.

“Not at the moment anyhow. He's already got a wife somewhere in California. They've been separated for five years.”

“Do you think ...”

“I don't think,” said Miriam with her back to Erica again. “I just hope.”

“How old is he?”

“Forty-two.”

“Here are your oranges, Miss Miriam,” said Mary from the door.

“Put them over there by the bed, will you, please?”

On her way out again Mary said, “I'll take your bags up to the storeroom if you're ready with them, Miss Miriam.”

“Thanks, Mary.”

Erica helped her move the bags as far as the hall, closed the door again and went over to the chaise longue in the corner. She lit a cigarette and smoked in silence while Miriam changed into a flowered housecoat, and sitting cross-legged in the center of her bed, began peeling an orange. Finally Erica asked, “Why are you so much in love with him, Mimi?” thinking that anyone who had known Miriam before had only to look at her now to realize how much that was.

It was a silly question to ask anyone, particularly Miriam, who had always disliked personal questions even when she knew the answer, and Erica was startled to hear her say rather slowly a moment later, “You don't know how much he's done for me, Eric. He's given me something that I've never had before. I didn't think I ever would have it. Some women manage to be philosophical about it — they even manage to go on being married and make up for what they're missing by raising a family and having ‘outside interests.' I don't know how they do it. I couldn't.”

She ate two slices of orange and said, “The worst of it was that I didn't look the part, and I got so sick of having men make passes at me that by the time I met Max, I'd reacted so violently against the whole business that what I really needed was a psychiatrist.”

“Or Max,” said Erica.

“Yes,” said Miriam, half smiling to herself. “Or Max. Are you shocked?”

“What about?” asked Erica, bewildered. “What kind of person do you think I am?”

“You?” Miriam scrutinized her in silence and said finally, “You're the best of the three of us, you're the one everybody depends on. Tony and I just do what we want, but you spend your life doing what other people want. You're the sucker. They say there's one in every family,” she added.

“Thanks,” said Erica.

There was a bird singing in the tree outside the bedroom windows and they could hear the fountain splashing in the garden across the street. Downstairs the telephone began to ring and Miriam turned her head toward the door to listen, then as Mary's footsteps retreated into the kitchen again she said, relaxing, “I guess it must have been for Mother or Dad.”

“Do you think he'll call you today?”

“I don't know. I sent him a wire to the Mount Royal because he expected to be in Ottawa this week and said he'd be here for the weekend but he may not have been able to make it.”

“Why don't you phone and find out?”

“If he's here he'll call me.”

“What's his last name?”

“Eliot.”

“Throw me an orange, will you?” asked Erica. She caught it and began peeling. “What did you mean when you said I was a sucker?”

“I don't know. You've never even thought of getting out and living somewhere else, have you?”

“Why should I?”

“Because you're the sort of person who ought to be married, not staying home and keeping your parents company year after year.”

Miriam lit a cigarette, looked about for an ashtray and failing to see any but the one Erica was using on the other side of the room, she rolled over and reached out for the wastebasket. The wastebasket was some distance away and anyone else, thought Erica, watching her fascinated, would have fallen off the bed. But not Miriam. She stretched out, half her body apparently supported by nothing, picked up the basket and deposited it beside her, then rolled over and back all in one movement until she was lying down with her head against the pillows again.

“I suppose you realize that there's never going to be anyone Charles will let you marry.”

“Why not?”

“You're too important to him. Sometimes I think he could get along without Mother better than he could without you, at least in some ways. It isn't just that he adores you. It's more complicated than that.”

Miriam paused, frowning at the wall above Erica's head. Finally she went on, “I remember when he and Mother were in London last time he was always saying how interested you would have been in some speech or other and cutting things out of the papers to send to you. More or less radical ideas that should have shocked him, didn't seem to shock him at all ...”

“Charles is a lot more radical than most people think,” interrupted Erica. “He just doesn't want to be labeled, that's all. I don't know exactly where he stands, but it's certainly somewhere to the left of center ...”

“Because of you,” said Miriam.

“It's not because of me,” Erica said impatiently. “He's too much aware of things and has too much heart to belong to the Right.”

“Maybe, but he's pretty deeply rooted in the past too.” Miriam paused again, watching the smoke from her cigarette drifting toward the window, and finally she remarked, “I don't think you or I can begin to realize how completely cockeyed everything must seem to people who are so aware of events and at the same time so conditioned by pre-Depression ideas on almost every subject as Charles. If he could fool himself like his friends he'd be all right, but he can't. He knows he'll never be rich again ...”