The Marriage Bed (11 page)

The children lolled happily one at each end of the pram, gazing out with a sort of vacant approval at the skeleton trees, the shop fronts, the passing cars hissing over salted roads. They even sat contentedly outside while I rushed into the library to change my pile of books. One of my happiest recent discoveries was that Trollope wrote forty-seven novels, most of them good. In minutes I emerged with about five pounds of fiction, enough to see me
through quite a few white nights to come. Hugh and Martha were still in a benign mood. Instead of being bored, which I well remembered as the chronic childhood disease, they seemed to be diverted by everything. Martha beamed broadly and called “Hi!” to a passing postman with bow legs, and Hugh raised a wondering face to the remote silver toy of a transatlantic plane and murmured “Bird.”

“Plane,” I corrected him. One of the sharpest disillusions of my young life was discovering how unlike a bird a jumbo jet is. I thought before I tried it that air travel would truly be like flying, and when Billie and I boarded the plane for our first trip to Canada, I was all aflutter with anticipation and a little tremor of fear. For her part, Billie was so sharp and cross I knew she was simply frightened.

“You sit by the window,” she said. “I have no intention of looking out at any time.”

Throughout the take-off procedures she kept her eyes firmly on a copy of
Vogue
and didn’t look up till a stewardess pushing a drinks trolley bent over to ask what she’d like.

“Oh but Bill,” I said, peering down as the horizon tilted under us and we began to climb. “Look at the little fields down there and the river – look, there’s the Thames, that sort of snake.” But she refused even a glance through the little porthole across which drops of moisture climbed upside-down but never fell. “A vodka martini,” she said to the stewardess. “A large one.”

Seconds later we were enveloped in billows of cloud; then we emerged into a bright blue, limitless sky in which from then on we seemed to hang perfectly motionless. The only movement to be felt was a slight vibration. Billie’s drink on its little tray stood without a tremor. Occasionally there was a slight bump, but the muffled thunder of the engines never changed volume or pitch.
Before we’d been airborne an hour, my legs felt restless and the seat too small. “What a swiz flying is, after all,” I thought, deflated. “It’s not half as exciting as riding a bike downhill.”

“Great, isn’t it,” remarked the bald man in the aisle seat beside Billie. “Cruising at 32,000 feet. Gives me a thrill every time. This your first flight, young lady?”

“Yes,” I said, politely concealing my boredom.

“First trip to Canada too, maybe?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Got relatives there, I suppose. Everybody has.”

“No, we’re – just visiting.” Remembering that Max would meet us at the airport, I tried to cheer up; but it was hard to imagine this ponderous robot was actually taking us anywhere. I pushed my lunch about fretfully in its divided plastic container and suppressed a sigh.

“Well, you’re in for a great experience, then, I can tell you that, even if it does sound like bragging. Canada’s just plain the best damn place on earth anybody can be in
A
.
D
. ’70, and I’m not afraid to stand up and say it.”

He didn’t look as if he knew how to be afraid of anything, this big man with his broad, fresh-coloured face and the easy, confident smile all North Americans seemed to have, as if they trusted everybody and liked everything. Billie was pretending to doze in order to avoid being drawn into the conversation, but I said. “Do you live in Toronto, sir? What’s it like?”

“Well, I’ll tell you something, young lady. It’s a place we bought off the Indians in Mississauga a couple of hundred years ago. The price included a bunch of brass kettles and a few carrots. Now there’s upwards of three million people living there in one of the handsomest cities going. I mean it. The place is huge, booming, runs like some big, clean machine – but somehow it’s a town that’s managed to stay human. You get trees growing downtown. Right
in the middle of the city you can go fishing in High Park. You can take the subway even late at night without any real serious risk of getting mugged. In other words, Toronto’s still a neighbourhood. Sure, people out west and in Quebec like to make fun of good old TO, but I figure they’re just jealous. Or they haven’t looked lately. You just wait till you see it.”

“It sounds marvellous,” I said, trying to sound convinced. Surely no city could be that impressive, or need that much salesmanship. Besides, it didn’t exist. Nothing did. We weren’t going to Toronto, or any other destination. The plane droned on like a mechanical bird caught forever in the monotony of space, while people tried to doze in their cramped chairs or pacify whining children.

After a vacuum of time, some quite dreadful tea was served. I clambered over Billie’s magazine and the bald man’s knees to visit the tiny loo, all its conveniences trembling slightly as we hung there in limbo. But when I flopped back into my seat, the bald man leaned over to the window with a smile and said, “Look.”

I looked down and at an acutely tilted angle saw, scattered in casual gaiety over the bright blue expanse of Lake Ontario, a sprinkle of tiny red and yellow sailboats, and several green islands. Then the horizon tipped and our porthole framed a vast sweep of level land bound by multiple threads of roads on which coloured beads of traffic hung. Under a blazing sun the flat factory roofs, the needle spires and silver pencils of skyscrapers, winked like mint coins. Excitement buzzed through me like an electric charge. Out of nowhere the phrase New World jumped into my head, as if I’d invented it. “You’ve
got
to look, Bill,” I said.

Cautiously she leaned forward and took a quick glance. Then she said, “Oh. Good heavens.”

A little later, after a bunch of pink roses flourished at the Customs window revealed Max, wearing a new suit and a nervous smile, Billie took his arm and chattered away about how marvellous
flying was, and how gorgeous Toronto looked from the air. I said nothing, because no words seemed really adequate. I looked around for the bald man, to wave a special goodbye to him, but he had disappeared.

W
hen I parked the pram outside the Liquor Board store, the children were so fascinated by a micturating dog at a nearby lamppost that they hardly noticed me go. As the dog moved round, repeatedly lifting its leg, Martha gazed at the spectacle, enraptured as the witness to a miracle, while Hugh strained so far out for a better view that only the harness kept him from falling out on his head. This reminded me of Billie’s favourite story about how, trundling me along one day in my push-chair, she’d absent-mindedly not only tipped me out, but run over me. This was so typical of both of us that I had to smile, forgetting for a moment that stepping into the Liquor Control Board of Ontario premises was no laughing matter.

There was no Muzak here. Indeed, the general aim seemed to be to discourage buying, as far as possible. If you insisted on spending your money on alcohol, of course the provincial government would let you do it; but they made sure that pleasure played no part in the transaction. No shelves of glowing wines or bottles of spirits colourfully labelled were on display to encourage impulse buying; all the merchandise was hidden away at the back. You had to write down your choice by coded number on a grim little form to which a pencil was tethered, and present this to a civil servant behind the counter, who consequently never had to speak to you. This functionary, buttoned into a grey dust-jacket, was only a shade less dour than his colleague in a glass cage across the room, who took your money through a grill and returned change down a small metal chute, as if customers were carriers of some dread disease. It always
surprised me how forbidding the atmosphere was in these places, in view of the indecently huge profits made annually by the province in its monopoly of liquor sales. Perhaps they wanted to spread the guilt around, and if this was the aim, they were highly successful. No matter how cheerful you might feel on going in, you were sure to emerge rather depressed.

There was a long queue at the counter which I meekly joined, clutching my little order form. An electric clock on the wall jerked past the minutes like a
memento mori.
Notices here and there informed us that smoking was forbidden, persons under eighteen would not be served, dogs were banned, and cheques were not accepted. The only advertisements were posters promoting Canadian wines, and these were so small as to be almost furtive.

At the head of the line was a man engaged in buying the booze for some unimaginably huge party. Our queue shifted patiently from foot to foot while two grey clerks paced to and from the nether regions carrying bottles, and packed cartons with his purchases, while a third glumly ticked off the items. The customer kept glancing around at us as if embarrassed. From time to time he coughed behind his hand, and the cough spread down the line.

It was not consoling to look along that queue and find that everyone in it was, as it were, single – a sort of discard. The fat woman, the little man in the baseball cap, the thin lady in fuchsia trousers – old and young, they all had the stamp of the loner. Even the austere tall man with the fur coat, and the dyed woman with the sapphire ring, were somehow recognizable as exiles from the cosy, nuclear family. And there I was with all the rest of the sad, defeated ones – widowers, divorcées, bachelors, survivors. When they coughed, I coughed too.

At last the big buyer seized his purchases and scuttled off with them in instalments. From his pessimistic look, one could tell the party was going to be a failure. His place was taken by a diminutive
old lady in a black hat with ear-flaps. She had no order form, and the clerk frowned at her.

“I wonder if you’d be good enough to tell me the name of a really nice wine,” she asked in a clear little thready voice.

The clerk looked at her briefly. “List over there, lady,” he said. “Hundreds of ’em. Take your choice.”

“But that’s just it, there are so many. You see, I don’t know which one to … it’s for my son’s birthday,” she added helpfully.

The clerk sighed.

“My husband’s dead now, and even when he was alive we never – but Bob went to France last summer, and he – since then – well, of course I never have anything in the house now except maybe a bottle of sherry at Christmastime, so I really don’t know what kind of wine would be nice for him, you see.”

The clerk shrugged. A little stir went down the line. “He’s coming for dinner,” she went on. “I don’t see very much of him – he’s a busy man – but I’d like him to have a nice wine. I’m making his favourite –”

“List is over there, lady,” repeated the clerk. His dead eyes were already looking over her shoulder, but nobody stepped forward to take her place.

“You want red or white, dear?” spoke up the fat lady two places ahead of me. Her coat was held together in front by an inadequate safety-pin, and her vast legs overflowed a pair of unzipped, flopping men’s boots. She was probably spending her welfare cheque on liquor, and I warmly approved of her. She had a hoarse, fruity voice, and eyes of a jovial blue shone in the fat red expanse of her face.

“It rather depends on how much you want to spend,” remarked the tall man, looking down at the little lady through the bottoms of his bifocals.

“Yes, but don’t you muck around with any of that Hungarian or Chilean stuff; go for a nice clean claret, or maybe a good
Liebfraumilch.” This was contributed by the sapphire woman behind me with the frizzed purple hair. She looked like a semi-retired call-girl.

“Look, there’s a South American burgundy I picked up here on sale last week – ask Laughing Boy there if he’s got any of it left.” The little chap in the baseball cap fixed us with the cheeky, cheerful eye of a town sparrow and added, winking, “It went a treat with my baked beans.”

“Why don’t you try some Australian –” contributed someone else.

“No, no,” protested the fur man. “That stuff takes the enamel right off your teeth.”

The little lady in the ear-flaps looked hopefully from one face to another, and we all felt protective of her. Thinking of my mother coming for the Happy Hour, and my children parked out there in their pram, I suddenly felt rich, powerful, and generous.

“Look, if you’d like to come over here with me,” I said to her, “we could look at the list. I’ll show you some of the good ones that don’t cost too much. There’s quite a good range of –”

“The price doesn’t matter,” she said rather stiffly. “I don’t mind paying as much as three-fifty or even four dollars. After all, it’s his birthday, isn’t it?” She looked at me severely, and I hastily said, “Of course. Right. Now let’s see what they’ve got here.…”

The tall man and the fat lady both tagged along as advisers. After a lively discussion that soon got nowhere, it was clear that the old dear was going to be dead long before she found the ability to choose between red and white. Finally, after some argument, the committee chose a Portuguese rosé, and I filled out the form for her.

“That won’t be too strong, now, will it?” she asked, frowning doubtfully. “The Portuguese, after all, they’re like the Spanish aren’t they, such violent people?”

“No, no; it will be mild as milk,” we assured her, and sent her off to the counter with smiles and encouraging pats. We fell into line again behind her with an obscure sense of accomplishment. We had defeated, for the moment anyway, the forces of indifference, so much more deadly than the forces of evil. I hoped the old lady’s busy son would appreciate his wine.

W
histling, I packed my bottles in among the kids’ legs and pushed them off at a brisk pace to the greengrocer’s. There the pyramids of bright fruit and scrubbed vegetables, and the fresh, green smell, were so alluring that I bought a number of things we didn’t really need. As I manoeuvred myself and my purchases out of the doorway, I all but collided with Margaret Neilson coming in with her two big girls.

“Why Margaret – hi, kids – I thought you were still in Boston.”