Rest and Be Thankful (47 page)

“Sure,” he said at last. “That was where I met my wife.”

“Was it?”

“You knew I was married?”

“Mimi told me,” Sally’s even voice said. There were so many gaps in our lives, in his and in mine, she thought, that we don’t know about. Once I didn’t think they mattered. But they do. They belong to the past, and the past is over, and yet their shadow falls coldly over the present. She pretended to look behind the car at the trailer. Now that they had climbed the hill out of Sweetwater they were starting to twist and turn up to Stoneyway Valley. Margaret, she noted, was asleep or pretending to be asleep.

“He’s all right,” Jim said, looking at the trailer too for a moment, and then concentrating on the road. “He’s travelled to California with me in that contraption. He seems to enjoy it.”

“You get around,” Sally said. Shadows, she was thinking, were never so cold and terrifying once she knew what caused them; but would she ever know, or would he? We come so near to explaining them, and then we don’t; and we can’t ignore them either. What was part of our past is still part of us now.

“Used to.”

“You sound settled now,” she said, trying to keep her voice as casual as his.

“I am.” He was wondering when Mimi had told Sally about his wife. Probably only in these last few days. And that explained something that had worried him; it seemed recently as if Sally were farther away from him. Instead of getting to know her better he had got to know her less. He had thought that was perhaps the way she had wanted it. Perhaps. A wife hadn’t seemed to make much difference to Mimi. But to Sally? That proved something about Sally, and he liked what it proved.

The silence embarrassed Sally. “Robb,” she said suddenly, “Robb wasn’t at the parade or at the rodeo.”

“He stayed in charge of the ranch. Said he had some work to do. I’ll take over when we get back, and he can get into Sweetwater for the dance.”

“Oh.” So that was why Jim hadn’t waited for the dance. You hope too much, she told herself; that’s why you always get disappointed. She said, “Then come over and have dinner with us, if you’ll trust my cooking. Mrs. Gunn is staying overnight with her friends in Sweetwater. You know, I think she is beginning to approve of Earl Grubbock. At least, there were plenty of other pretty girls around today, and he didn’t bother about them at all. I’m glad, for Margaret and I were aiding and abetting him, you know.”

“Can’t he make up his own mind?”

“He is beginning to, I think. I suppose he suddenly realised he was never going to meet Norah again unless he did make up his mind. As long as she was at Rest and be Thankful—well, it was a nice luxury not to make up his mind, wasn’t it?”

Jim looked at her sharply. “I suppose so,” he said. “You sound as if you believed that Earl and Norah will never meet anyone else they’d—well, fall in love with.”

“But they
are
in love. Have you seen them when they are anywhere near each other? It would be a waste, wouldn’t it, to throw it all away because they didn’t realise in time how much they—” She stopped, pretending to laugh at her romanticism, but she averted her head and looked out at the hills and studied the evening sky. This conversation, this was so unlike Jim. He was waiting for her now to go on. As if he wanted to hear what she believed. But she couldn’t go on. “Is that rain over that mountain?” she asked.

He burst out laughing.

“What’s funny about that, Jim?”

“Everything.”

She smiled too. She felt her cheeks were on fire. “This is getting to be a difficult conversation,” she said, keeping a joke in her voice.

“I never was good at—” He didn’t finish the sentence except in his own mind. At making polite conversation when there’s something else to be decided. “By the way, Mimi hasn’t got all the details quite straight. I haven’t been married for a number of years.”

Then, as Sally said nothing, he went on: “We separated before we each ruined the other’s life. I met her in New York, just after I had gone there from Chicago. I was going to be an illustrator, I thought. She was on the stage. She had to be in New York. She didn’t want to leave it. I liked New York too. But after a bit I found I wasn’t any good as an illustrator. I suppose when I set out for Chicago to learn to be an artist I was having a kind of revolt against being a rancher. I had three years in Chicago, and then I went to New York with a job there. And I had nearly two years in New York before I got wise to myself. I wanted to come back here. My revolt was over. Ranching was a job I could do well. This was where I was happy, where I was needed. I wasn’t much needed in New York. I wasn’t going to stay there and be a kind of hanger-on. So I came back to Wyoming. At the end of the second year.”

“She wouldn’t come?”

“No.”

“Not even to see it?”

“She took one look at the map and screamed.” He was smiling. “Didn’t seem so funny to me at the time, though.”

“Is she famous now?”

His voice became cold and emotionless. “She had one or two parts—just enough to keep her convinced she was good. She married an agent. And she was just getting into star parts when—well, they were driving out for a week-end in Pennsylvania and they had a bad smash. She was killed.”

Sally said nothing more. She suddenly realised she knew more about Jim and his wife than anyone else did. He had really been in love, had gone on hoping that she would come out here after all. Until she married the other man. And he had killed her.

“That was just before the War started,” Jim said. And after that, he thought, he hadn’t had so much time to think about himself and what might have been and what hadn’t. When you got caught up in a war personal pride and admissions of defeat in your private life didn’t seem so damned important.

He brought the car carefully over the bridge and stopped it before the house.

Mrs. Peel opened her eyes. “Rest and be Thankful,” she said gratefully.

“You’ll be able to do that once your guests clear out,” Jim said, with a smile. “They’ve given you a busy month.” Too damned busy, he thought, as he looked at Sally.

“Except that Sally is talking of leaving.”

“What?” For once the tightly controlled face was completely caught off guard.

“To take a job in Chicago as a publisher’s reader,” Mrs. Peel said.

“Margaret,” Sally said quickly, “you know we agreed not to talk about—”

“Jim isn’t just one of the others. He’s our friend. He may as well know now.”

“I’m going to start dinner,” Sally said. “I’m hungry. And Robb will be waiting for you, Jim. See you later.” She walked quickly into the house.

Mrs. Peel still sat in the car.

“You’ve been a long time together, haven’t you?” Jim asked unexpectedly.

“Yes. Ever since 1932. I was alone, she was alone. It seemed a good idea to travel together. Of course, I had known Sally for two years before that—ever since she arrived in Paris. She was going to write poetry. And she was very much in love with a man, and he seemed to be in love with her.”

Jim turned to look at her. There was a question in his eyes.

“He was a writer—one of our little group. She had followed him from America to Paris. He had asked her to come. Her family and all her friends in Boston were absolutely against him. You know, I’ve often thought that was the reason why she stayed in Europe for so long. She waited, although she never admitted it, until most people who had known him had forgotten about her. When she left here, you see, they all thought he was going to marry her.”

“Where is he now?”

“In Italy, I hear. Quite a famous dramatist nowadays. He’s had two wives and a brood of children. Didn’t seem to worry him at all, seemingly.” Mrs. Peel disentangled herself from the back of the car. “I like your choice in lampshades, Jim. And may I borrow this novel? I began it before I feel asleep.”

And did you fall asleep, he wondered. Then he gave her a smile, and she looked less nervous. “Sure,” he said. “And what time is supper?”

“Give us an hour. Or will that be too late?”

“Fine. I’ve some things to see to.” Principally a lot of ideas to be rearranged, a lot of thinking to be done. That had always been his failing—his unwillingness to face a situation that really affected him deeply. Like the two years of his life wasted in New York, when one year, or six months, should have been enough to tell him. Yet he could act quickly enough—sometimes too damned thoughtlessly—in other matters. It was only in things that he wanted to hide, deep-down reasons, that he postponed the problems. Pride, he told himself, was always your trouble; and it’s a bad one.

He gave Mrs. Peel a wave of his hand and drove towards the ranch, sounding the horn with three short blasts so that Robb would be ready to leave.

* * *

Sally cooked dinner, borrowing from Mrs. Gunn’s well-prepared larder, while Margaret attended to making the dining-room as attractive as possible with flowers and candles and a roaring log fire. Then, with all the clutter of cooking cleared away, Sally dashed upstairs to dress. She had exactly eight minutes. As she threw off her blue linen suit, and slipped into a white wool dress with a long, sweeping skirt (“so suitable for dining at home in the winter evenings,” the New York catalogue had said—which made it just about right for six thousand feet high in Wyoming at the end of August), she wondered, along with forty million other women, just how anyone ever had the time to lie down for an hour with cream on her face, and pads over her eyes, and relax before dinner. She folded a green silk scarf into the neckline of her dress, clasped a gold bracelet on its tight, narrow cuff, and slipped her feet into her gold slippers. Why not? She hadn’t been as happy as this for a long time. She hadn’t been as happy as this since she was eighteen; perhaps she hadn’t been as happy then as she was now. The difference between feeling happy at eighteen and feeling happy at thirty-seven was that you appreciated it when you were thirty-seven. She looked in the mirror on her dressing-table and laughed. Then, to see if the hem on her dress looked right, she climbed up on a chair.

“Sally,” Mrs. Peel said, in amazement, looking into the room to see if she were ready. Why, Mrs. Peel thought, Sally is getting prettier and prettier: some women are lucky that way; while others, as lovely as Mimi when they were young, either faded or coarsened. “You could have used the long mirror in Prender’s room, or have you forgotten he has gone?”

Sally had. She had forgotten almost everything.

“Well, I’ll serve dinner,” Mrs. Peel said philosophically. “That dress was made for nothing more arduous than tossing a salad.”

“I’ll put my trust in one of Mrs. Gunn’s enormous aprons,” Sally said. “Now let’s go downstairs. Do I look all right?”

“Very much all right. You know, it must be an awful gamble to be a man and marry a young girl for her looks. You’ll never know what you’ll get by the time she’s forty.” Sally wasn’t really listening, though, so she wasn’t as baffled by Margaret’s way of speaking only half her thoughts as she might have been. Sally had heard Jim come into the house. She hurried Mrs. Peel by the arm towards the staircase.

Jim was waiting in the hall. He turned to look up at her as she came downstairs. He smiled, and there was a mixture of admiration and pleasure in his eyes. Then he noticed her dress and the gold slippers. She is half-way to Chicago, he thought, and the happiness left his eyes. And Sally felt it. What had gone wrong? Everything had been right. When he waited for her at the foot of the stairs everything had been all right. Then suddenly, without warning, it had gone wrong. She could have wept.

* * *

After dinner they went into the sitting-room, where Mrs. Peel had arranged another cheerful fire. She left them there, with some pretext that sounded almost reasonable. It didn’t matter, anyway, Sally thought. Everything was so wrong since that moment in the hall when Jim looked at her and then stopped looking at her that Margaret’s subterfuge didn’t embarrass her in the least.

It was all so matter-of-fact to sit here and make conversation and be a polite hostess. She wasn’t happy any more. She was back to normal. And angry, angry with herself. It’s my fate, she thought, to be romantic and silly, and then to be angry. Angry and ashamed. Women have too many false hopes, too many bitter disappointments. If men could only see into our hearts, how pitying and amused they’d be. For women, right from the day they went to their first party, always hoped too much: how many dances, seemingly successful, had been grim failures covered over with a smile; how many invitations accepted became invitations regretted; how many plans and dreams had become stupidities; how much pretence that all was well when it wasn’t? We are too personal, she thought, in the way we interpret a look, a tone of voice, a smile. How lucky to be a man and never pay attention to the little things: how fortunate to take people as they are, and not to suffer from taking them as you would like them to be. How terrible it is to be a woman, to feel the difference between the dream and the reality, and yet to keep on dreaming in spite of reality.

She was looking at the flames leaping gaily round the neat pine logs. She was talking about Robb. “We didn’t tell anyone about his poem,” she was saying, as if she had no other thoughts. “Ideas like Robb’s are best left alone, not talked over, until they come alive on paper. Our guests might have killed his idea with their enthusiasm and interest. And the cowboys might have killed it with good-natured amusement. Prender Atherton Jones, of course, was quite useless to approach; he only likes folk epic when it belongs to certain languages, certain centuries. But we have a problem, Jim. Robb ought to stay here this winter, when there isn’t much outside work to take up his time. But how can we help him without seeming to help? He’s so independent.”

She lifted her head and looked at Jim. Why didn’t he answer? He was sitting opposite her, watching her, silent.

“What’s wrong?” she asked quickly. “Do you think Margaret and I are being just—just silly? But you know there’s a real poet in Robb. Don’t you, Jim?” Why didn’t he speak? He wasn’t the kind of man to laugh at poetry. When she had gone riding out with him, in those far-off pleasant evenings before Mimi ever arrived on the scene, he had a way of describing a mountain or a trail or a fragment of history so simply, so vividly, that she had been amazed and delighted.